Book Review: The Surpisingly Imprecise History of Measurement
Why measurement is hard!
Read more...Category Archives: Science and the scientific method
Knowledge Overconfidence: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”
Some studies seek to understand why some dogs won’t eat the dogfood, as in accept what is considered to be scietific knowledge.
Read more...Limits to Growth: Inconvenient Truth of Our Times
Before the first UN environmental summit, The Limits to Growth showed Earth’s finite resources cannot support ever-growing human consumption.
Read more...Scientist GM Is Not Impressed by Latest Preprint on Covid Lab Leak Hypothesis
Another dodgy Covid preprint gets way too much attention.
Read more...Book Excerpt: It’s Not Just Humans at Risk From Covid-19
To believe Covid-19 was engineered to target humans is to ignore its broad capacity for infecting other animals.
Read more...Human Prehistory—Why New Discoveries About Human Origins Open Up Revolutionary Possibilities
How the proto-technology of toolmaking during human prehistory may have influenced brain development and social structures.
Read more...What if Medicine Were Taught Like a Science, Part 2: The Diet-Heart Hypothesis and Cholesterol
How medical research walked back the strong claims for the role of cholesterol in heart disease, which in turn supported the use of statins.
Read more...KLG: What if Medicine Were Taught Like a Science?
An unsparing look at some glaring deficiencies in reserach and training in medicine.
Read more...The Scientific Response to COVID-19: What Does the Biomedical Literature Say?
A look at what passes for research on Covid, and how we got there.
Read more...Alzheimer’s Disease and Modern Biomedical Research: A Cautionary Tale in Several Parts
How foundational work on Alzheimers’s disease was based on fradulent, um, manipulated data, yet not much rethinking has been done.
Read more...Book Review: A Psychologist Plumbs the Cultural Roots of Emotion
In “Between Us,” psychologist Batja Mesquita argues that emotion isn’t universal, but inherited from social groups.
Read more...Yet More Medically Bogus Covid Vaccine Profiteering: Requiring “Primary” Covid Shots to Get Omicron “Booster”
More botched Covid vaccine policy, lending support to suspicion that the real aim is lining the pockets of drug companies, not public health.
Read more...Scientific Research and the Unforeseen World: Why Basic Research is Essential
How the current process of funding science discourages basic research and makes fundamenal breakthroughs less likely.
Read more...Failing CDC Chief Rochelle Walensky Makes Confession, Announces “Shake Up” via Committee When She Should Resign
Rochelle Walenksy makes an all-too-obvious gambit to save her spot at the CDC. But the very initiative proves she should resign.
Read more...The Opioid Crisis Isn’t Just the Sacklers’ Fault – and Making Purdue Pharma Pay Isn’t Enough on Its Own to Fix the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Deeper Problems
Focusing on the Sacklers as villains obscures the problems that permeate the entire pharmaceutical industry.
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