Category: Science

Avi Loeb Should Stop Opining Beyond His Expertise

11/3/2022

Avi Loeb’s newest blog post shows how little the cosmologist-turned-ufologist really knows about the subjects he opines about. His piece claims that humans are genetically programmed to care about “local” issues and thus only a few rare geniuses have the courage to think beyond the local. “In fact, such global aspirations are often regarded as a distraction from local politics and the comfort brought about by the immediate environment of a loving partner, a loving family or the local tribe.” Loeb claims that evolution favors cultural myopia, an idea that finds little support in the historical record.

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New Study Suggests Polynesians and South Americans Met around 1200 CE

7/10/2020

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A new study published in Nature used DNA analysis to determine that South Americans and Polynesians made contact around 1200 CE and had children together. Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford led a team analyzing DNA from French Polynesia and South America, and they found indigenous South American DNA in Polynesia. Although Ioannidis believes that first contact likely happened when Polynesians reached South America, the evidence of Colombian DNA in Polynesia implies that the Americans sailed westward and landed in Polynesia, perhaps getting stranded there. According to Ioannidis, the evidence suggests a single contact event, since all of the Colombian DNA seems to derive from the same source (the Zenu people) at the same time.

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New Journal Article Claims Younger Dryas Comet Destroyed Ancient Syrian Village

3/20/2020

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This week, my 70-something aunt said that she and my uncle weren’t concerned about coronavirus or the precautions in place to prevent its spread because she believes it is a Democratic Party hoax to take down Donald Trump after impeachment failed. She thinks the whole world is conspiring to fake the disease to hurt Trump. My father told me that a friend of his said his ex-wife has the same belief. As my aunt and uncle aged, they moved steadily to the right, going from blue collar Democrats who proudly framed photos of themselves with Clintons in the 1990s to staunch Republicans after 9/11 and becoming die-hard Trump supporters in 2016 thanks to a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and cultural anxieties. So that’s where we are as a country. Regular Fox News consumers have developed bizarre ideas about what the network had called the “Virus Impeachment Scam” until late last week, and now there’s no good way to undo it.

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Ken Ham Complains PBS Documentary Focuses Too Much on Stupid Parts of Ark Encounter and Creationism

2/20/2020

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This week, creationist Ken Ham threw a fit over a 2019 documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs, which aired this month on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. He accused the documentary of being biased against creationism because it depicted, accurately, the appearance of dinosaurs in Ham’s “Ark Encounter” recreation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. “It turned out to be an agenda-driven propaganda piece focusing on dinosaurs and the Ark Encounter, where dinosaurs represent only a tiny fraction of the exhibits at the Ark,” Ham wrote. That’s a bit like complaining that histories of Germany always mention that Hitler fellow even though he was only in power for 12 years.

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Steven Pinker Says Historians "Historicize Everything" and Hate Science

10/16/2019

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For a few minutes, I thought I would write a lengthy analysis of Steven Pinker’s recent Twitter rant in which the Harvard psychologist and popular writer alleges that historians of science are biased against science and are actively working to destroy science’s claim to objectivity by forcing people to read about the history of science rather than its conclusions.

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Do We Need a New Academic Field of "Progress Studies"?

8/1/2019

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Before we begin today, let’s briefly discuss the ratings for the final episode of America Unearthed. The season finale pulled in 454,000 viewers, about on par with the season’s average, but losing 80,000 viewers from the rerun of Expedition Unknown that served as its lead-in. As of this writing, the Travel Channel had not announced whether it would cancel or renew the series. I’d have a hard time justifying renewing a show that brings in fewer viewers than a rerun, but the show does well on streaming services, which might make it a more attractive purchase. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Andrew Collins Suggests Denisovans Built "Monuments" Associated with Atlantis

4/6/2019

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At the American Association of Physical Anthropology Conference in Cleveland last week, a team of researchers presented evidence that humans in Papua New Guinea may have interbred with a population of Denisovans as recently as 15,000 years ago, citing genetic evidence that genomes they tested contained evidence of two separate infusions of Denisovan DNA. The first came around 50,000 years ago. The second occurred sometime after, and the researchers suspect it occurred around 15,000 years ago. The scientists, led by Murray Cox of the Massey University in New Zealand, also said that the Denisovans living on the mainland in southeast Asia were as genetically different from the better-known Siberian Denisovans as they were from Neanderthals.

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Study: Flat Earthers Believe Because of YouTube Conspiracy Videos

2/20/2019

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Due to prior commitments this week, some of my blog posts are going to be a bit on the short side. Today I want to discuss a recent presentation discussing the results of interviews with Flat Earth believers at two conferences in 2017 and 2018. Speaking Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, researchers who spoke with more thirty attendees placed the blame squarely on YouTube for creating a community of Flat Earth believers and providing the means for Flat Earth leaders to propagandize a credulous audience. An article in the Guardian summarized their findings:

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Micah Hanks Asks If American Science Is Uniquely Hostile to Anomalies

1/31/2019

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I spent a big chunk of my writing time yesterday at the doctor’s office waiting to be diagnosed with a viral sinus infection, presumably the same one my son picked up at his toddler play group a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, the congestion and coughing had gotten quite bad and I had to try to do something about it. Unfortunately, the doctor said that there is almost nothing that can be done other than the usual treatments for cold-like symptoms. It has made it hard to focus and concentrate, which has made me something less than enthusiastic about writing.

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Review of "Our Cosmic Ancestry" by Chandra Wickramasinghe et al.

1/15/2019

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The idea that life on Earth originated in the stars is an old one, dating back in some sense to the Greeks, and pursued in earnest by a number of twentieth century scientists. It is a distinct possibility, although one for which evidence is currently lacking. In recent years, Chandra Wickramasinghe has pursued this line of thought in extreme and absurd directions, writing a number of books making very broad claims that panspermia isn’t just real but that viruses from space continue to infect and direct the development of Earth life even today. He has taken these claims to Ancient Aliens, where he recently appeared. In reading the new book he cowrote with Kamala Wickramasinghe and Gensuke Tokoro, Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars, I expected to read about these things, but I did not expect to read what was basically a New Age manifesto about how capitalism is the fault of evil demon viruses from space or a call to adopt a Buddhist-inflected form of communism as the one true scientific lifestyle.

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