Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Victory over a parasite – the global eradication of Guinea Worm

    Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm.

    For those who haven’t heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the GI tract, copulate, work their way to the skin, and the adult worms then cause a painful, burning blister as they emerge. The human host, seeking relief, will often seek to immerse the blister in water – and when it bursts the cycle continues as the larvae are released.

    i-251231ffc9bb4369e422eb32f47bdbd5-Drac_life_cycle.gif

    Humanity can thank the Carter Center, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the CDC, and World Health Organization for the following graph:
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  • Update on the Bees from PloS

    Those who are interested in the Colony-Collapse Disorder phenomenon will probably enjoy this paper from PLoS entitled “What’s Killing American Honey Bees?” It lays out the history of mass bee die-offs – which have been recorded extensively by apiarists, and discusses whether or not major concern needs to be paid to the problem.

    I still suspect that rather than this being a new problem it’s likely part of a normal pattern of fluctuation that has been observed in the record. While this swing is extreme, it’s early to suggest that this is an impending or prolonged disaster based on the history of such die-offs.

    Some winter losses are normal, and because the proportion of colonies dying varies enormously from year to year, it is difficult to say when a crisis is occurring and when losses are part of the normal continuum. What is clear is that about one year in ten, apiarists suffer unusually heavy colony losses. This has been going on for a long time. In Ireland, there was a “great mortality of bees” in 950, and again in 992 and 1443 [3]. One of the most famous events was in the spring of 1906, when most beekeepers on the Isle of Wight (United Kingdom) lost all of their colonies [4]. American beekeepers also suffer heavy losses periodically. In 1903, in the Cache valley of Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to a mysterious “disappearing disease” following a “hard winter and cold spring” [5]. More recently, there was an incident in 1995 in which Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53% of colonies [6].

    Often terms such as “disappearing disease” or “spring dwindling” are used to describe the syndrome in which large numbers of colonies die in spring due to a lack of adult bees [7,8,9]. However in 2007, some beekeepers experienced 80-100% losses. This is certainly the extreme end of a continuum, so perhaps there is indeed some new factor in play.

    It’s a very good summary and because it’s PLoS, it’s free for all.

  • Tangled bank #82

    Greg Laden writes a very nice tangled bank. It’s a model for what a good carnival post should look like I think. And he was kind enough to link our discussion of Uncommon Descent’s remarkable ability to predict the past.

    Definitely worth a click.

  • How long before Sal Cordova quote mines this one?

    Nature reports on this new paper that shows a major conflict resolving the fossil and molecular records of mammalian evolution. It’s entitled, “Cretaceous eutherians and Laurasian origin for placental mammals near the K/T boundary” and the major finding is that mammals seem to have evolved largely after this boundary based on their discovery of fossil evidence of a new mammal. This isn’t a new finding for the fossil record, but this study represents the largest fossil-based evolutionary tree to date.

    However, this conflicts with the molecular record (the editorial gets the lead author’s name incorrect – it’s Beninda-Emonds – nature news coverage here) which constructs a evolutionary tree of 99% of mammals suggesting more than 40 mammals survived the Cretaceous period – ended by the mass extinction of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary 65 million years ago . Their finding suggested that the end-cretaceous extinction event may not have provided the impetus for the expansion of mammalian species implied by the fossil record.

    It’s an interesting debate as the molecular and fossil records tend to conflict when it comes to the dates of branching along the evolutionary tree. And, because it’s a debate, it’s just a matter of time before it’s quote-mined by the evolution denialists at Uncommon Descent. In particular, I would be concerned with passages such as these from the nature editorial.

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  • Only the best 5 second internet video ever

    It lives up to it’s title.

    H/T boingboing

  • Autism Crankery at Huffpo – Again

    RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it’s like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on.

    Let’s see, it’s a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let’s see how RFK Jr. does.
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  • Seed Schwag – and Banner design time

    I don’t know how many people knew about this – the sciencebloggers were informed a little bit late, but Seed had a competition on threadless to design a t-shirt in honor of our benevolent overlords, Seed publishing.

    Here’s the winner

    i-c1a14daac45fc10f1b65156c49d2973a-threadless.jpg

    Also, you guys may have noticed our rotating masthead. Well, I’m announcing our own little competition, to design more banners for the denialism blog!

    The banner submissions must be 756 width by 93 height. You can make a completely revolutionary new design or keep the basic format and add new fun symbols of cranks. Here’s our basic banner (pops) – click for the full size to save.

    Email me your entries or host them yourselves and link in the comments. I’ll put up a gallery – or in the likely event that only one person participates – the submission after about a week. We’ll decide a winner and their banner will run for a full week – and then we may rotate in some of our other favorites.

    So, go nuts! Make a banner that reflects what you think of when you think of cranks.

  • Speak of the devil

    David Kirby seems to be planning his escape from the autism debate. At Huffington post, he demands that science perform epidemiological studies that compare the healthiness or autism rates of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children.

    Most people (save for a handful of fringe parents who believe that autism is some altered state of being, worthy of celebration) are probably just plain tired of autism and the fight over its cause. They really want to settle this debate and move on.

    I know I do.

    The irony is that the multi-million-dollar court battles, the melodramatic headlines and the alarm over parents retreating from vaccinations are all so terribly unnecessary.

    All we need do is conduct a thorough study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and see if there is any difference in their rates of autism spectrum disorders.

    …

    Critics of the study idea, who insist that vaccines have been 100 percent exonerated, ridicule the Maloney bill as a redundant, monumental waste of time and money.

    Even so, their position is a bit hard to understand. No matter what happens in Vaccine Court, (which many say is the wrong venue for such a fight, anyway), this tired old debate will drag on for years, God help us.

    …

    If the results showed that vaccinated children were, all around, more healthy and robust than unvaccinated kids — that would pretty much kill all lawsuits right there, send waves of reassurance to billions of parents around the world, and make people like me shut up and go away.

    I would, blissfully, not write about autism and vaccines again. (I have a new book deal to occupy me, about corporate vs. environmental health, which my publisher St. Martin’s Press will announce shortly. I am not an autism activist, and this is not my crusade).

    Wow, that offer of Kirby going away would almost make it worth it. However, it’s interesting that the denialists will assert that mercury is the culprit despite no credible evidence for this hypothesis, and then demand that more studies be performed.

    While I wouldn’t object to the idea of more study on principle, I really don’t think that this would actually make people like Kirby and the anti-vax denialists go away. After all, they don’t believe the existing science exonerates thimerosal, they have moved the goalposts again now that thimerosal has been removed from vaccines. Why should we believe any more studies will satisfy them?

    People like Kirby have no credibility here. They’ve never accepted scientific findings, they have rejected them in the past as conspiracies and cover-ups of the truth. You have to pry their discredited findings they’ve cherry-picked from their cold dead hands. Why should we think such a study won’t lead to another move of the goalposts?

    Anti-vaccination sentiments have existed for hundreds of years. They’re not going to go away with just one more study. They’re not the type of people that are convinced by science, if they were, Kirby would have shut up and gone away long ago.

    By all means, do the study, but don’t expect an end to the anti-vax denialism. Just expect another goalpost-move.
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  • Who are the denialists? (Part IV)

    It’s time to talk about the anti-vaccine (or anti-vax) denialists. Considering the Autism Omnibus trial is underway to decide whether or not parents of autistic children can benefit from the vaccine-compensation program, a fund designed to compensate those who have had reactions to vaccines and shield vaccine makers from the civil suits which drove them out of the country in the early 1980s. I think it’s topical and necessary to set the record straight about vaccines, their risks, and many benefits. To do this though, we’ll have to talk about the history of and resistance to vaccination, the history of autism and the current alleged epidemic of autism, and the denialist arguments used by the anti-vaxxers to suggest that vaccines are linked to the disorder.

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  • A confluence of idiocy

    You know how dumb Egnor sounds with his mind outside the brain cell-phone silliness? He sounds as dumb as Deepak Chopra writing more brain-dead new agey nonsense for the Huffington Post.

    To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn’t register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as images, sensations, and an infinite array of experiences.

    The brain is like a cell phone receiving signals from above. Wait no! It’s like a TV!

    This is how pathetic the proponents of intelligent design are, and for that matter, the crystal-clutching hippies that fall for Chopra woo. Without even meaning to, their arguments reflect each other, because they’re both based on magical thinking.

    So far, the phenomenon of mirror neurons hasn’t been isolated to single neurons in the human brain. Due to the complexity of the laboratory work, it hasn’t traveled very far into the general public. This means that mirror neurons will be held captive for the time being by the belief system of neurology, which is overwhelmingly materialistic. That is, the brain being a solid object comes first while mind, if it exists at all, comes second. Yet I would argue that most of the things we most cherish about the mind, including empathy, language, and learning, depend on mind coming first, and the mirror neuron serves its purposes.

    Maybe the brain really is like a TV set. Sadly, Deepak Chopra and Michael Egnor are both stuck on the same stupid channel.