Categories
Bioethics Evolution History Holocaust Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Eugenicist quotes

Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century: “It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children.” “[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Cranks against peer review

One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it’s the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. […]

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Pseudoscience Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

When woo masquerades as reason and science

A while back, I coined a term for woo so irrational, woo so desperate to masquerade as reason and science, that it could be spewed forth into books, the Internet, and the blogosophere by only one man. The man is Deepak Chopra, and the term is Chopra-woo, examples of which can be found here and […]

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Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Neo-Homeopathic Magneto Geometric boners

I really love Life Technology™. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there’s so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

If randomized clinical trials don’t show that your woo works, try anthropology!

A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of […]