Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Chimps have souls!

    Take that Egnor!

    Altruism — helping another with no expectation of personal reward — was once thought to be a uniquely human trait, The Times of London reported. However, in recent experiments, chimpanzees repeatedly helped humans who appeared to be struggling to reach a stick within the animal’s enclosure.

    The chimps, which were interacting with humans who had not given them food, spontaneously helped the humans by reaching across and helping them get the stick.

    The experiments were carried out among 36 chimpanzees at a sanctuary for the animals in Uganda.

    Anthropologists cite altruism as a key to developing civilized and complex societies. Although altruism has been observed in many species, this recent experiment is special because it shows ability for one species to be altruistic with another species, the Times said.

    Also see Synapostasy’s coverage of Egnor’s latest goalpost move. In the meantime I’ll await Egnor’s proof that chimps don’t have a soul that is receiving signals from Deepak Chopra’s mind-field.

  • Friday Cat Blogging

    Name this cat.

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    She appears to be a a Russian blue with silver coat, green eyes and mauve footpads. Although being a shelter cat, this could be pure accident. Her first google search was RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. And so far names in the running go from the simple Gray to Lucia.

    It’s kitten season, and many more are looking for homes at the Charlottesville-Albermarle ASPCA. You can find all sorts of pets to adopt in your area from Petfinder or just look at pictures of kittens. While I was there they had piles of kittens. It was pretty unbelievable. I should have taken pictures for Cute Overload.

    Also, I’ll take entries for banners for one more day. here’s the requirements basically, 756 x 93 and based on what comes to mind when you think of cranks or denialism. We’ve had some killer entries, and after the winner gets a week I’ll put all of them into rotation.

  • Sicko

    Anyone want to go see sicko with me? It’s playing in Charlottesville tomorrow night and I plan on catching a 7:30 showing on the downtown mall.

  • How many studies does it take to satisfy a crank?

    David Kirby asks us to move the goalposts one more time on the vaccines-cause-autism question.

    Epidemiologic studies have shown no link. The Institute of Medicine has looked at the evidence for the link between mercury and autism and found it to be specious. Thimerosal has been removed, to no effect. Throughout the Autism Omnibus proceedings we’ve seen the best case for a link and it’s a joke. The measles PCRs linking gut samples from autistic kids to “chronic measles infection” from the MMR jab were false positives. At every single point when this problem has been studied it’s been found to be a specious link. But are the anti-vax cranks like David Kirby ever satisfied? Of course not. It will always be one more study. And there will always be specious evidence for the anti-vax denialists to grasp desperately to so this issue will never die. They will propose things like “mercury efflux disorder” without any proof of its existence. They will switch from thimerosal, to other parts of the adjuvants like aluminum, to blaming environmental mercury (as Kirby did in his last post). Or they’ll generate more bogus correlations, for instance, Kirby loves this new Survey USA poll:

    It certainly wasn’t hard for the respected polling company, Survey USA, to find nearly 1,000 unvaccinated children living in nine counties in California and Oregon. All they had to do was pick up the phone.

    Survey USA, commissioned by the anti-thimerosal group Generation Rescue, completed telephone interviews in 11,817 households with one or more children age 4 to 17. Of the 17,674 children inventoried, 991 were described as being completely unvaccinated.

    Interestingly, the survey found that, among boys (who have neurodevelopmental disorders at a 4-to-1 ratio over girls) vaccinated children were 155 percent more likely to have a neurological disorder, 224 percent more likely to have ADHD, and 61 percent more likely to have autism. Among boys aged 11-18, the increased autism risk was 112 percent.

    Is that so? I wonder what would happen if someone actually took a close look at the survey results…

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  • More on Doctors & Payola

    Another interesting article in the Times discusses shining the light on pharmaceutical industry gifts to doctors. What’s interesting about it is that shows another example of how industry self-regulatory principles often have holes (here, a lack of “detail”) that leave the problem to be addressed unaddressed.

    In the privacy field, the most notable example of this was the IRSG Principles, which allowed databrokers to sell personal information to anyone they deemed “qualified,” and surprise, surprise, even criminals were “qualified” to buy Social Security Numbers. But back to doctors:

    In the midst of a Senate hearing about the money and gifts that drug makers routinely provide to doctors, Senator Claire McCaskill mentioned that she had a brother who runs a restaurant.

    “And he said that the most lucrative part of his business was the private room that is used mostly by drug companies” to entertain doctors, said Ms. McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “He said that you wouldn’t believe how much expensive wine these guys buy.” The tab often totals thousands of dollars, she said later.

    Marjorie Powell, senior assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, assured Ms. McCaskill that major drug makers no longer offer doctors expensive dinners. The industry’s code of ethics mandates that free meals be modest — pizza, for instance, Ms. Powell said.

    “I would, with all due respect, suggest that there has been a change in your brother’s restaurant in recent years,” she said.

    Ms. McCaskill pressed, “Are they allowed to buy alcohol?”

    Ms. Powell responded, “Our code does not go into that level of detail.”

    The senator said, “So they can.”

    […]

    After the hearing, Ms. Powell’s trade association released a statement criticizing the state registries, saying they “disarm doctors by inhibiting access to critical scientific information about the benefits and risks of treatment options that help patients win their battle against disease.”

    The laws have led to some embarrassing disclosures: that some doctors earn hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug makers, that doctors who are paid by drug makers tend to prescribe more of their drugs, and that some doctors who have been hired to perform clinical trials have serious medical disciplinary records.

  • Crank Magnetism

    Back when we wrote the Unified Theory of the Crank one of the main things we discussed related to crankery is their inability to recognize competence in others. As a result, cranks tend not to mind the crankery of others, since they see themselves as opposed to a scientific orthodoxy. Consistency be damned, they just want to see science with egg on its face so they can prove that they are being persecuted.

    Well lately, Uncommon Descent has been doing a pretty incredible job of sticking to this script. First we have Dembski, insisting upon the persecution of ID abroad, because the Germans jailed a holocaust denier who happened to be a creationist. Dembski, not being the sharpest tool in the drawer, didn’t think to look to closely at the story and, well, played the persecution card a little too soon.

    Now Uncommon Descent, aiming for a trifecta of denialism, is using HIV/AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg to attack the orthodoxy. It really is true, cranks are so incompetent at reason and logic they simply can’t see that they’re making a terrible case. In this instance, they’re using Duesberg’s Chromosomal Chaos hypothesis to suggest that science is so addicted to Darwinism we’ve been getting not just cancer research, but bacterial resistance wrong for decades.

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  • I just have a thing for privacy. Is it dirty?

    So, Apple releases Itunes 7.2, complete with the ability to download DRM-free, high-quality MP3s. However, these MP3s contain all sorts of personal information in the metadata, thus allowing tracking of who possesses the files. The solution? Privatunes, a program provided by a French company that erases the personal information from the metadata.

    The best part? How the French justify the protection of privacy. I love it:

    5 reasons to erase private information from my legally acquired iTunes Plus library:

    1. Am I still a child who needs his pencilcase and schoolbag tagged with my name?

    2. I bought the damn tune, but someday I may want to sell it (hey, how is it more stupid that selling old CDs ?).

    3. I just have a thing for privacy. Is it dirty?

    4. How the heck do I know it’s not gonna be shared on P2P networks by my 6 year old step sister???

    5. I thought good customer-seller relationship ment something like… how do they say, “trust’ ?

  • Doctor Payola

    An article in today’s New York Times shines some light on drug industry gifts to doctors. Pretty interesting stuff:

    Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug company payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an average of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among the largest expenses for the state’s Medicaid program.

    Over all last year, drug makers spent $2.25 million on marketing payments, fees and travel expenses to Vermont doctors, hospitals and universities, a 2.3 percent increase over the prior year, the state said.

    The number most likely represents a small fraction of drug makers’ total marketing expenditures to doctors since it does not include the costs of free drug samples or the salaries of sales representatives and their staff members. According to their income statements, drug makers generally spend twice as much to market drugs as they do to research them.

    […]

    Still, a similar pattern was evident in a Minnesota database that was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times this year. As in Vermont, psychiatrists earned on aggregate the most in Minnesota, with payments ranging from $51 to $689,000. The Times found that psychiatrists who took the most money from makers of antipsychotic drugs tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often.

  • Want to hear a dirty little secret?

    The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals.

    Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when perhaps they deserve better (we can’t tell), and no doubt many other hospitals deserve a lesser ranking. In the next round of evaluations, the Medicare program ought to make public every institution’s mortality rates along with any caveats needed to help patients understand them.

    I’ll tell you a dirty little secret if you like. It explains why all this data is essentially going to be bunk.
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  • CNN covers "the Secret"

    And actually doesn’t make a hash of it. If CNN actually dedicated this much effort to all their journalism, people might actually emerge from their site more informed than when they showed up – a rare occurrence.

    For those of you who haven’t heard of “the Secret”, it’s the latest woo-laden self-help nonsense that proposes powerful new physical laws about the universe. In this case, the Law of Attraction. That is, that “like attracts like”. Translated into self-help, it means that positive thinking makes things happen, always, every time. It is a law after all.

    Now, people like me who think most self-help books, theories and advocates are scams, nonsense, and charlatans respectively, are immediately skeptical of new physical laws that are dreamed up by Australian TV producers like Rhonda Byrne and promoted by people like Oprah. CNN was good enough to actually get some skeptics’ opinions – and they nail it pretty well.
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