Denialism Blog

Author: MarkH

  • Autism and Mitochondria

    Prometheus brings us the best article I’ve seen to date on why the new push for a mitochondrial basis for autism is total nonsense.

    Once I saw this push from denialists like David Kirby towards a link between mitochondria and autism I knew we were in for a world of trouble. If only because mitochondrial diseases are a relatively new area of study and there are enough unknowns that they’ll be able to milk this nonsense for a decade at least.

    Prometheus, however, does an excellent job showing how the likelihood of a mitochondrial explanation for autism is prima facie absurd. This is not surprising given the clear absence of evidence for a maternal pattern of inheritance and the non-progressive nature of autism which is usually described as a “static encephalopathy”.

    Keep the link handy for when you start hearing mito-woo from the DAN quacks.

  • Bill Nelson Wins the Internet

    I agree with our buddy Ben Goldacre when he says Bill Nelson wins the internet. I can not begin to describe the hilarity of this video but first a bit of background.

    Bill Nelson is a quack who’s been running a Rife-machine scam. That is, for many thousands of dollars you can purchase and use his quantum-mechanical machine (read box with blinking lights) to destroy whatever ails you. Fortunately, the FDA has banned its sale in the US, and made this guy:

    Bill Nelson (yes that’s him) a fugitive who has since fled our country. Unfortunately, other countries, including poor Ben’s, have been less successful in prosecuting this guy for the fraud that he is.

    This bizarre conflation of a total egomaniac, governmental “persecution” and an excess of ill-begotten funds has resulted in what I agree might be the most bizarre video on the internets. You’re welcome to suggest alternatives but I might be partial since it’s made by this crank. Check it, it’s his story, narrated himself sung to the tune of “Simple Gifts”.

    Thank you Ben for bringing this to our attention, and thank your deity of choice for the FDA for keeping this guy’s nonsense out of our country.

  • To NY City

    This is meetup weekend for the sciencebloggers and remember, we’re planning to hang out with readers at 2:00 pm on Saturday, August 9, at Social (795 8th Ave).

    Drop by, say hello, and meet the scibs!

  • New OTA site

    The archived reports of the OTA are on a new site hosted by the Federation of American Scientists.

    You may remember that we’re big fans of the OTA as we feel that scientific assessment of government policy and guidance of legislation is key to having an efficacious, informed congress. In our initial post on the OTA we said:

    It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science (RWOS at Amazon).

    The fact of the matter is that our government is currently operating without any real scientific analysis of policy. Any member can introduce whatever set of facts they want, by employing some crank think tank to cherry-pick the scientific literature to suit any ideological agenda. This is truly should be a non-partisan issue. Everybody should want the government to be operating from one set of facts, ideally facts investigated by an independent body within the congress that is fiercely non-partisan, to set the bounds of legitimate debate. Everybody should want policy and policy debates to be based upon sound scientific ground. Everybody should want evidence-based government.

    One of the leading advocates of restoring the OTA, Rush Holt, has a video up explaining why he thinks the OTA is important:

    I’m glad to see that within the government there are those who still think this is an important issue, and the possibility of bringing science back within the halls of government is still a very real possibility.

  • A blog recommendation

    Everyone this morning should check out a new favorite website of mine the International Journal of Inactivism. Frank Bi has created a wonderful little catalog of global warming conspiracy theories that nicely illustrate the fundamental defects of reasoning used by the denialists. In particular, I enjoyed his genealogy of climate conspiracy theories.

    When we first started here, our first post after the introduction was on the non-parsimonious conspiracy as one of the primary indicators of pseudoscientific argument. Frank Bi has done a wonderful job showing just how dependent the global warming denialist arguments are on these absurd premises. Here’s to hoping he keeps it up.

  • Why am I hearing this nonsense from a scienceblogger?

    Who wrote this?

    As someone who spends a substantial portion of his professional time teaching medical students, I can tell you that this kind of attitude-that physicians are gods, not mere mortals, and wield power over other human beings that no one dare question-is inculcated in them from the very beginning of medical training. It is an ugly secret of our medical training system. And the more prestigious the institutions where physicians receive their training, the more overweening is this attitude.

    Anything that a physician calls a “joke” or “for the patient’s benefit” simply is that, and how dare anyone question that judgment!

    Surgeons are the worst, they cut people’s fucking asses open with sharp knives, and they are basically used to functioning as dictators in the operating room. These leads to the development of attitudes which makes perfect sense in light of the practical demands of surgery. But they do not work well in other areas of life. Put a surgeon in charge of any enterprise that requires leadership through persuasion or consensus, and you are totally fucking fucked.

    I know, you guys are saying, Gary Null, or Joe Mercola, or maybe the Health Ranger Mike Adams. But you would be wrong, actually this snarling little piece of anti-doctor slander came from someone within our own community. Not only that, it came from someone who teaches medical students at a major academic university. This is, of course, PhysioProf. Now, if anyone knows me, and what I write about, what I really care about is standards for arguments. As a member of the scienceblogs community, it is understandably upsetting to see a evidence-free rant, based on bigotry, from a scibling that tars a group of people that I know to be some of the most caring, the most thoughtful, intellectual, careful and conscientious people I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

    What to do about this I wonder? What solution is there to this problem of such a fool in our midst, spouting such hate and nonsense at others? What can we do about someone who holds medical students and doctors in such contempt, when he himself teaches them daily?
    (more…)

  • NY meetup

    Any native New Yorkers out there that read denialism blog? If so, I’ll be in town for the Sb meetup in NYC on August 9th. If anyone would like to meet me or the other sciencebloggers, let us know. And if you have a good idea where a bunch of people could find an air-conditioned space to do it, feel free to suggest away.

  • The APS should have known better

    Those reading Deltoid’s coverage of the APS fiasco are probably up to date on this issue, but I feel like we need to discuss the APS failure in more detail. For those unaware of the latest in global warming denialist nonsense, the American Physical Society made the foolish mistake of entertaining global warming denialists by giving Christopher Monckton space in their newsletter to “challenge” global warming. As Lambert demonstrates in his post, the factual and calculation errors are a joke, but the strategy error is demonstrated by the fact that every global warming crank from tobacco apologist Steven Milloy to creationist William Dembski at UD is now celebrating the supposed end of a consensus on climate.

    Milloy leads with a story that “APS ENDS CONSENSUS MYTH!” and all the other cranks with no regard for disreputable sources have happily followed suit. Creationists like Dembski, happy to promote any conspiracy theory about “mainstream” science that they think oppresses cranks like him cheerfully joins in. This is despite the fact that the APS has not changed it’s position on global warming, the article itself is a joke, and it is not even in the peer-reviewed literature. Monckton is crying foul because he thinks that a piece in a newsletter represents peer review. How embarrassing is it for them that because the piece was subjected by a review by an editor that he thinks this is peer review? Do we really have to explain what peer-review actually is to these people? Are they so ignorant? Clearly the answer is yes.

    Peer review means that your paper is shared with experts in the field and they are allowed to challenge statements made in the paper and the author has to rebut or provide more data to address their concerns. Peer review is not having a single editor look over the paper for egregious errors; if this were actually a peer-reviewed publication, such a review would represent a massive failure of the review system to have a publication with only an editor reading over the paper. For those that haven’t been through the process, peer-review is usually grueling, must involve more than just an editor looking over the paper – often several leading researchers in a field – and usually requires an author to address substantive challenges to their argument. Monckton’s stunning ignorance of the process is telling.

    That being said the bigger failure here is that of the APS not realizing they were dealing with a den of snakes when they opened up any publication to the likes of Monckton. Never mind that Monckton’s paper is about as big a challenge to the theory of anthropomorphic climate change as a poodle wearing boxing gloves is to Mike Tyson; as has been said before, denialists aren’t interested in debate, they are only interested in the appearance of debate. This non-peer-reviewed publication in a newsletter is being touted by cranks all over the internet as proof that global warming is being debated in the halls of academia because it is under the auspices of the APS. When the APS clarifies, correctly, that this is not an example of peer-reviewed publication, they get attacked by Milloy and others as stifling debate and caving to the global warming conspiracy.

    To sum up. Monckton has published tripe that is clearly nonsense, is not peer-reviewed, and in no way has APS changed it’s position on global warming. The lesson is that when dealing with crooks, the truth doesn’t matter, and they will twist the truth to serve their purposes if you give them an opening. The APS has failed to realize that these people are not honest brokers in a debate. There are few clearer examples of this phenomenon than this blatant prevarication by the likes of Monckton, Milloy and others promoting this “end to consensus” or cover-up by the APS. This is not debate, this is denialism, and APS has learned the difference the hard way.

  • Feministe on Gardasil

    Complementing Pal’s essay on Gardasil yesterday is our buddy la Pobre Habladora guest blogging on Feministe.

    Which, I think, brings us to a new angle on anti-vax denialism because as Pal mentions, the motivations behind harping on Gardasil are different than the usual nonsense. Gardasil, to everyone’s dismay, has become intertwined with sexual politics in this country. As the only vaccine that has been identified as preventing a sexually-transmitted disease (the HepB vaccine managed to avoid this, not to mention an association with IV-drug use) there has been a clear impetus among the anti-sex crowd to malign this treatment for girls.

    Two things which I think are disgusting and idiotic about this practice. One, I’m willing to bet if it were for boys and not girls, we wouldn’t have this problem. Second, it suggests there is a subset of parents that feels that if their children somehow violate the rules of sex that disease and death should be the wages of their sin.

    Is there nothing not disgusting about these attitudes? While the CNN article doesn’t get into this nonsense, let’s not forget the main obstacle to the acceptance of this highly-effective vaccine is not safety issues (it’s a very safe vaccine and the incidents cited in the article are likely coincidence) but rather the amoral bigotries of idiots who are desperate to control women’s sexuality – even to the detriment of women’s health.

  • What good is scienceblogging?

    What Chad said.

    Fastest post ever.