Category: News

March is the cruelest month…

March 21, 2010 • 2:48 pm

by Greg Mayer

…breeding mulleins out of the dead land.

Mullein along railroad track, Arlington, Virginia, March 12, 2010.

During a visit to the Washington, DC, area last weekend I made a point of looking at how advanced the spring greening was. Despite  the east coast’s hard winter, and the mild winter in the midwest (and 2010 in general is starting off quite warm), things are much more alive (as I expected) in the east, but still pretty gray-brown. In addition to the mulleins above (the greenish ground rosettes, with last year’s meter high flowering stalks still standing in many), a number of flowers (all in cultivation) had also emerged.

Washington, DC, March 17, 2010.
Washington, DC, March 17, 2010.

Suitland, Maryland, March 16, 2010.

Early emergence is a key adaptation for many plants, especially those of the forest understory. Later in the season, the forest floor will be in deep shade from the trees, so many herbaceous and small woody plants take advantage of the photosynthetic opportunities provided by the early spring. The animals were also active– fish crows and mockingbirds on the Mall in DC–, but most noticeably large and loud choruses of spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer, a tree frog) in many places in Prince William and northern Stafford Counties, Virginia. I attempted to record a chorus in Dumfries, Virginia, and thought I had, but the file came up blank, so you’ll just have to imagine hundreds of little frogs, all saying “peep” at the same time (or listen here). When I lived in the DC area, peepers began calling around the same time redwinged blackbirds did, February 15, so they’ve probably been calling for around a month already. No frog calls yet in Wisconsin.

Pseudoscientist reprimanded, pseudoscience retracted

February 4, 2010 • 1:20 pm

by Greg Mayer

Following up on a comment by Glen Davidson to my latest dowsing post, in which he noted that the UK’s General Medical Council had ruled against anti-vaccination activist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, finding him callous, unethical and dishonest, I note that The Lancet (registration required) has retracted Wakefield and coauthors’ 1998 paper that set off the autism/vaccination controversy. The editors of The Lancet now accept that not only should the paper not have been published, but that its conclusions are false.

The NY Times also covered the story, in a manner I found refreshing. Too often, perhaps due to some distorted sense of objectivity, news reporting consists of a “he said, she said” style, in which opposing viewpoints are given equal status, regardless of the plausibility or support for the claims made.  You’ve all read the kind of story that will have a line like, “Dr. Smith, a paleontologist at the natural history museum, said Triceratops had been extinct for more than 60 million years before the origin of man, while Dr. Jones from the institute said Triceratops had been ridden by men like horses until the recent worldwide flood drowned them all”. The Times reporter, Gardiner Harris, however is familiar with the evidence.

After Dr. Wakefield’s study, vaccination rates plunged in Britain and the number of measles cases soared.

In the United States, anti-vaccine groups have advanced other theories since then to explain why they think vaccines cause autism. For years, they blamed thimerosal, a vaccine preservative containing mercury. Because of concerns over the preservative, vaccine makers in 2001 largely eliminated thimerosal from routinely administered childhood vaccines.

But this change has had no apparent impact on childhood autism rates. Anti-vaccine groups now suggest that a significant number of children have a cellular disorder whose effects are set off by vaccinations.

With each new theory, parents’ groups have called for research to explore possible links between vaccination and autism. Study after study has failed to show any link, and prominent scientific agencies have concluded that scarce research dollars should be spent investigating other possible causes of autism.

(I’ll add parenthetically that I find the notion of “retracting” a paper silly.  Once it’s published, it can’t be unpublished. But it is proper for editors and/or authors to later publish to say that a paper’s data or conclusions were flawed, unwarranted, or false.)

Giant squid!! (Sort of!!)

February 1, 2010 • 11:25 pm

by Greg Mayer

A real giant squid, Architeuthis (from the Tree of Life).

According to the AP, giant squid have invaded California! Except that, according to the article, they’re not actually giant squid, but Humboldt squid, which don’t get nearly as large (up to about 2 meters) as real giant squid (up to about 14 meters). Fishermen in California have been reeling in the large Humboldt squid by the hundreds. Historically, their distribution was centered on the equator in the eastern Pacific, but recently they have been moving both north into California and as far as British Columbia, and south to central Chile. Despite being on the equator, the waters in their range are actually ordinarily quite cool.

We don’t normally do squid here at WEIT, but PZ occasionally does a cat, so we occasionally do a cephalopod, just to keep him on his toes. And besides, he’s in Ireland, and might miss this one.

Dosidicus gigas
Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), base of arm (from the Tree of Life)

The NY Times on the Iraqi dowsing rods

February 1, 2010 • 8:36 pm

by Greg Mayer

The totally bogus dowsing rods sold to Iraqi security forces by an unscrupulous (and now arrested) British manufacturer (noted at WEIT here, here, and recently here) were the subject of an editorial, “Shock, Awe and Abracadabra“, in today’s New York Times. Money quote:

The junk science should have been obvious: the slender wand is topped by what looks like a radio antenna on a swivel that the manufacturer guaranteed to point to weapons or bombs hidden up to a half-mile away, underwater or in planes three miles high. “We are working on a new model that has flashing lights,” the manufacturer told The Times of London last year, when first challenged about ADE 651.

Any satisfaction that United States forces avoided this particular sting should be tempered by the fact that American blood and treasure have underpinned the Iraq government across the war’s many expensive follies.

The reason I post occasionally here on these high-profile pseudoscience cases is that being alert to the tactics and activities of pseudoscientists of all stripes is useful, even if particular schools of pseudoscience are an area of focus. I teach a popular general education course at my university entitled “Science and Pseudoscience”, in which we discuss things such as Velikovskianism, UFOs, alien abductions, astrology, palm reading, and many, many other things; and of course, creationism. There is an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army. Creationism is pseudoscience with a powerful political lobby.

Update (Feb. 5): Here’s Randi’s take on the recent developments.

Pseudoscience– banned in Britain

January 22, 2010 • 3:24 pm

by Greg Mayer

A while back, I posted on the shocking use of high priced, English-made dowsing rods by Iraqi security services to detect explosives, dowsing rods being a notorious and well-debunked form of pseudoscience. Use of these devices not only wastes tens of millions of dollars, but costs lives (see the original NY Times article). Well, I’m happy to report that the BBC has reported that the UK government is banning the export of these devices.

Sidney Alford, a leading explosives expert who advises all branches of the military, told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 [what the company calls the dowsing rod] was “absolutely immoral”.

“It could result in people being killed in the dozens, if not hundreds,” he said. [Sadly, it already has.]

The BBC went on to report not only the the government action (spurred in part by recent successful bombings in Iraq), but also some analyses of the devices.

Claims of such almost magical technical abilities would almost be comic, if the potential consequences were not so serious.

Newsnight obtained a set of cards [the part alleged by the manufacturer to be sensitive to various substances] for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT.

It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.

Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT”.

Do go to the BBC site to see the video of Dr. Kuhn analyzing the card.

How old are mammalian pheromones?

November 13, 2009 • 12:40 am

by Matthew Cobb

Sex pheromones are widely used by mammals to communicate and detect the sexual status of a potential mate. This is particularly the case with female mammals, whose pheromones are primarily detected by a structure known as the vomeronasal organ (VNO), which is in the base of the nose/roof of the mouth. (And no, humans don’t have a functional VNO, although it does appear briefly during embryogenesis).

There are two kinds of smell receptor molecules in the VNO –  V1Rs look pretty much like an ordinary smell receptor, and the neurons that house them send their axons into the part of the brain that deals with food and so on. But the other kind of receptor – V2Rs – look very different and project to a different part of the brain. The assumption is that key parts of mammalian pheromones are detected by the V2Rs, but that pheromones often contain a blend of compounds, some of which may be detected by V1Rs and by a specialised receptors called TAARs in the main part of the nose.

The really interesting thing is quite how far back these receptors go. The recent sequencing of the Platypus genome showed that there were V1R and V2R genes, strongly suggesting that this form of communication goes back at least 165 MY:

Mammal evolutionMammalian evolution – Nature 453, 175-183 (8 May 2008)

So what does a male mammal do when he detects a pheromone? Anyone with a horse – or a cat! – will know. He produces what is known as “Flehmen”, a characteristic curling back of the lip, with the mouth held open. Cats do this when they smell the urine sprayed by a male, and get a faraway, stoned look in the eyes while they’re about it. Here’s a picture of a tapir showing Flehmen:

So do marsurpials show Flehmen? You betcha! Here’s a  video of a male kangaroo testing the reproductive status of a female, by tasting her urine. Note the “flehmen” response he makes with his mouth, just like a placental mammal. Note the way he shakes his head afterwards… Who can blame him? DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

“Faith in science is a belief”

November 6, 2009 • 5:10 pm

by Greg Mayer

There’s an article up on New Statesman, by Sholto Byrnes, announcing “It’s official: faith in science is a belief“. The sub heading says “New legal ruling places it in the same category as religion”.   It sounds like some sort of legal victory for creationists, of the kind feared by Michael Ruse: to have science in general, and evolution in particular, regarded as a faith-based enterprise on a par with creationism is a traditional goal of creationists.  As Duane Gish put it “Evolution theory is no less religious nor more scientific than creation.” But is this what has happened? In a word, no. The wording of the headline may be just clever enough to exonerate Byrnes of the charge of inaccuracy, but it’s surely misleading.

What a UK court said is

A man has been told he can take his employer to tribunal on the grounds he was unfairly dismissed because of his views on climate change….

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

So, what’s been ruled a “belief” is the “moral imperative” arising from climate change, and this is the “it” that’s been placed in the same category as religion. (Under, I might add, the rather odd-sounding, to a non-Britisher, “2003 religion or belief regulations.”  As an American, whose school lessons in British history tended to center on Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, and whose political forefathers rebelled to protect their rights as Englishmen, it is curious to me how few rights Englishmen seem to have these days when it comes to speaking their minds about matters scientific and religious.)

Byrnes exacerbates the misleading nature of his headline by asking

But I wonder if this ruling is quite so useful to those who look to science and rationality as guides to their lives as it might on the surface appear.

Why would he think that anyone interested in science and rationality would support such a ruling, let alone find it useful?  The underlying dispute is not about the epistemological status of science, but the sacking of an executive who objected to his employer’s environmental policies: the court ruling, as the much more accurate Independent headline had it, was about “green beliefs”. While I sympathize with the employee’s views on global warming, it seems distinctly odd to me that a court should find these views religious in nature. But in any case, the ruling is not about what the New Statesman headline suggests.

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Gish, D. 1985. Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record. Creation- Life Publishers, El Cajon, CA. p. 23.