Archive for the 'skeptic' Category

Pope Ratzi on evolution

Published by ugo on April 20, 2005 in skeptic. 4 Comments

Yesterday we chided Pope Ratzi for being a homophobic reactionary. Now it’s time, thanks to PZ Myers, to see how he stands on matters of science, especially in fields where science seems to be perfectly able to explain things like the evolution of living beings, without needing to resort to a lot of hand-waving about a “creator” or some kind of “intelligent design”:

It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error…(They) point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed.

This is the same old pro-design argument that was first brought forward by William Paley more than two centuries ago and that has since been utterly refuted numerous times (see Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, for instance). You’d think Ratzi would know better than that.

Indeed, his predecessor JPII sounded a bit more informed than him:

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

A missing link found … wait, there’s two!

Published by ugo on April 8, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

Just found two interesting pieces of news on our origins. Here’s to those creationists who are still babbling about the so-called missing link and how it supposedly reveals a hole in the theory of evolution. Not that I would expect any of them to be so smart as to change their minds when confronted with evidence. They have faith and wouldn’t care about evidence even if it hit them right on the head.

dmanisi.jpgPharyngula::Old Man of Georgia: “A fabulously interesting hominin skull has been found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia. It’s old in two different and significant ways: the individual lived 1.77 million years ago, and he was ancient at death, almost completely toothless. He’d also been toothless for several years before death, judging by the complete resorption of the tooth sockets.”

Science News Article | Reuters.com: “New evidence shows a 7 million year-old skull unearthed in Chad is the earliest member of the human family, scientists said Wednesday.

Controversy has surrounded the skull, dubbed ‘Toumai,’ since its discovery was first reported in 2002 by a team led by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France.

It was hailed as arguably the most important fossil discovery in living memory because it was thought to be an ancient ancestor of modern humans, although some scientists argued it was a fossil of a female ape.

But newly found remains of tooth and jaw fragments and a computer reconstruction of the skull, reported in the science journal Nature, suggest Toumai was more human than ape.”

Terroir Doesn't Exist

Published by ugo on March 23, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

Vinography: a wine blog: Terroir Doesn't Exist and Parker Is Pricey: “This will be dismissed, perhaps rightly, as highly contentious and flawed research. Anyone who has drunk enough wine, and in particular, tasted barrel samples from different regions of a vineyard will know that different soils and microclimates, even within a vineyard, will produce wines that can taste wildly different, even given identical winemaking techniques.”

Just like everybody knows that children raised in the same environment will have wildly different personalities, according to their birth sign, right? Well, wrong!

To be clear, I'm not saying that terroir does not exist. I'm not competent enough to tell. What I'm saying is that assertions like the above look very much like a case of communal reinforcement:


Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people. Often, the mass media contribute to the process by uncritically supporting the claims. More often, however, the mass media provide tacit support for untested and unsupported claims by saying nothing skeptical about even the most outlandish of claims.


Communal reinforcement explains how entire nations can pass on ineffable gibberish from generation to generation. It also explains how testimonials reinforced by other testimonials within the community of therapists, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, politicians, talk show hosts, etc., can supplant and be more powerful than scientific studies or accurate gathering of data by disinterested parties.

So, I'd advise more caution before dismissing the results of a scientific study. It takes more than “anyone will know”.

Is Feng Shui bullshit?

Published by ugo on March 19, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

Just found this great skeptic blog: Skeptico. One of the posts there talks about debunking Feng Shui:

Skeptico: Featured DVD – Penn & Teller: “They certainly get their message across. For example, in the segment on feng shui, they call in three feng shui experts to rearrange furniture in the same Californian house. No one who sees this program will forget how each of the three feng shui experts comes up with completely different arrangements of furniture - each expert supposedly using the same feng shui ‘science’. Especially telling was how the first feng shui expert said that the red sofa was bad for the family – she mentioned several health problems that would result. Then the second one said the red color was ‘absolutely perfect’. What a hoot. Does this prove that feng shui is bullshit? Well no, of course not. To do that you would need a much bigger experiment. But it’s not the job of Penn & Teller or anyone else to prove that feng shui is nonsense; if feng shui experts want us to believe in it, it is up to them to provide evidence that it does work. What P&T do is demonstrate the general idea of how things should be tested. And they make it pretty clear that they think feng shui failed the test.”

Sigh, I was starting to convince myself that an iMac G5 in my office room would have raised its Feng Shui quotient … I'll have to think again ;)

(Via Seth.)

Global Consciousness or what?

Published by ugo on February 16, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

I inaugurate the newly added Skepticism category of this weblog with a post about the Global Consciousness Project and its Black Box:


According to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

Those who know me well would undoubtedly characterize me as a rationalist skeptic and a die-hard reductionist. And as such, I should probably conclude that the Global Consciousness Project only reveals human foolishness.

Nonetheless, I have a nagging feeling that this Black Box merits more thourough investigation that a simple shrug-off. If — and it's a big if — there's something real here, it has probably to do with some sort of quantum effect.

Since I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, I have been convinced that the human mind cannot be reduced to a mechanical process, to say nothing of a Turing machine — and so much for AI. So, if quantum mechanics are at work in the black box's random number generator, which is certainly possible, we might have established a connection, if not an explanation.

It's a tenuous connection, at best, and more experiments will need to be carried out to ascertain whether there's even a phenomenon to be studied, or if it's only self-deception at work. But, for once, I am keeping an open mind.

Catastrophism? Bah!

Published by ugo on January 24, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

I'm sure many people will be scared to death reading this:


Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages. […]


The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached. […]


“There is an ecological timebomb ticking away,” said Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Centre for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute.The group's chief scientific adviser is Dr Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Well, bullshit! Since when do “politicians, business leaders” have any clue regarding climate change? As for “academics”, sorry but a UN bureaucrat, even if he/she has a Ph.D, does not qualify as a reliable source in my book.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be worried about global warming, but before you start making plans for a new air conditioner, some words of wisdom are in order:


We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. […]


And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. […]


I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong. [Emphasis mine]

See? The UN was wrong. And it's not just the UN, but most self-appointed futurologists are wrong, most of the time.

Now, I'm not saying that we should be totally oblivious and irrespectful of the environment. After all, I wouldn't shit on my carpet. What I'm saying, together with Crichton, is that public policy decisions shouldn't be based on unfounded, dogmatic catastrophism.