Update from Hobbiton
I have been following the story of Homo florensiensis, dubbed the Hobbit by the media because of its short stature. In 2003 scientists discovered a fairly complete skeleton (skull, jaw, pelvis, arms, legs, hands and feet) on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The skeleton is 18,000 years old and is probably an adult female about 3 feet 6 inches in height and with a brain capacity of 417 c

Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation
The following was cross-posted at ScienceBasedMedicine. There are two general approaches to subverting science-based medicine (SBM): anti-science and pseudoscience. Anti-scientific approaches are any that seek to undermine science as the determinant of the standard of care, often overtly advocating for spiritual or subjectively-based standards. Some attack the validity of science itself, usually with post-modernist philosophy. Pseudoscientific proponents, on the other hand, praise science, they just do it wrong. In reality there is a continuum a

Some Muddled Thinking from Bill Maher
Bill Maher has been getting a lot of heat lately and seems to be getting a bit defensive. He was particularly stung by Michael Shermer’s open letter in which Dr. Shermer thought it necessary to give Maher a basic lesson in germ theory. Unfortunately, Maher has responded not by thoughtfully engaging his critics, but with a rambling defensive diatribe in which he simultaneously protests the criticism pointed his way while repeating and amplifying the pseudoscientific nonsense that garner

Chopra Mangles Quantum Mechanics – Again
Deepak Chopra has made a career out of misunderstanding quantum mechanics (QM) – and through his popularity, confusing the public. Like many others, he has found a superficial way in which to interpret quantum mechanics to make is seem as if it is congruent with Eastern metaphysics. And now he has done it again, in that anti-science rag the Huffington Post. Chopra goes beyond the typical New Age distortion of QM, which is basically the claim that QM is really weird, therefore magic is real. Chopra assumes some very specific, and common, misinterpretations of QM. He writes:

Tracking Down Consciousness
The holy grail of modern neuroscience, and perhaps one of the toughest scientific problems we face, is understanding at a fundamental level the nature of consciousness. What is it about our brain function that makes us aware of our own existence? It is not simply an emergent property of having enough neurons wired together. A popular notion in science fiction is that artificial intelligence may unexpectedly emerge out of a sufficiently powerful computer – such as Vger or SkyNet. But this scenario is highly unlikely. Consciousness appears to be a specific function of thinking systems, not just a consequence of complexity. For example, the cerebellum is a specialized pa