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Richard Feynman has included Social Psychology in his list of Cargo Cult sciences and according to Bohannon and Klein et al. not much has changed since. The blame of persecution is of course utter nonsense. If the data were reported and evaluated honestly and correctly, all but one in twenty studies would be successfully replicated (more…)
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If the trace element concentration in grain is reduced, as Myers et al. find under elevated CO2 conditions, then just eat more of it. This may sound glib, but people having to cope with malnutrition at all, typically don’t just get too little zinc or something, they get too little to eat in total. Of course Myers et al. fail to give any numbers, but (more…)
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If, as Couzin-Frankel seems to imply, feminists want to insist on untried pharmaceuticals with unknown risks and yet to be found side effects being tested on women, preferable pregnant, so be it, just don’t blame me for the outcomes. But feminists really ought to decide which it is to be: Are women so different, that trans-sex inferences are even less secure than trans-species ones, or are they so indistinguishably identical, that each and every slight difference in career choices has to be culturally imposed by suppressive male chauvinists? (more…)
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Although Verd et al. do note the possibility of their result being purely cultural, they strongly play it down. To me it’s obvious that what they see here is a group more prone to letting themselves be browbeaten into publicly approved correct behaviour than (more…)
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Aagaard et al. still don’t answer the question how fetuses and newborns acquire their gut biomes, except that it’s not from the vagina during birth, but they do clear up, what bacteria are acquired. How they get from a woman’s mouth to her placenta (more…)
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The discussion about significance and the prevention of publishing nonsense is continuing in PNAS, and a very good thing too. How much this discussion of arcana by specialists is helping all those authors, who have yet to grasp the basics, is an open question, though.
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The recent announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics is a typical and most blatant example of both Cargo cult Science and “Never trust the experts”. When my daughter was born, rather a short time before 1994, my wife and me kept being admonished in the strongest and least ambiguous terms possible, never ever to let her sleep on her back because (more…)
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PNAS has come out with a big special section on aspects of the Neolithisation process.
There is one huge internal contradiction in the otherwise convincing article by Villa & Roebroeks. If there really was no cognitive or social advantage for AMHs, (more…)
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While there certainly are isolated cases of the kind of problem Macilwain highlights, I fail to agree they are the norm. What he calls environmentalists advocat[ing] caution is all too often just the opposite, like the wholesale demolition of a secure energy supply in favour of unproven, unreliable and expensive alternatives, the kind of thing best represented by Lysenko, the great leap forward, and (more…)
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There is nothing I can see to fault the results by Campbell et al. as they are. But then the area and the families those children came from were cherry picked for best results and what they got is hardly representative of normal state-run childcare. If this is going to be taken as a pretext for more enforced social engineering (more…)
