John Hawks

John Hawks

I’m a paleoanthropologist, studying fossil hominins and genetics.

All posts tagged with pseudoscience

Conspiracy theories in pseudoarchaeology

1 minute read

Science magazine has a recent online article by journalist Lizzie Wade looking at the growing influence of ancient aliens and other pseudoarchaeological nons...

An exotic intestinal infusion

2 minute read

Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I ...

Pseudoscience and TED

2 minute read

Phil Plait discusses (“TEDx Talks: Some Ideas Are Not Worth Spreading”) a public letter from the TED organizers to their derivative TEDx community: “A letter...

Don't sound like a kook

less than 1 minute read

Larry Moran describes a lecture by Michael Behe, an advocate of intelligent design arguments: “Michael Behe in Toronto, Part 1”. Moran didn’t care for the le...

Mailbag: New Age wackos

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While looking for something else on youtube I stumbled on a video by a New Age wacko named [name redacted]. Part of his schtick is the claim that human DNA i...

Houdini and Doyle

less than 1 minute read

John Rennie wrote last week on the occasion of Houdini’s birthday about the great magician’s efforts to disabuse the spiritualist beliefs of Sir Arthur Conan...

Kaku cockup

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I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...

"Ancient satnav"

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Ben Goldacre’s “Bad science” column in The Guardian features an example of coincidence and the overactive imagination run loose on a map of prehistoric Briti...

Videos of the week

1 minute read

I’ve been sent two videos this week by several readers. I post them here together – I’ve never embedded video before, and after some experimentation I didn’t...

"Historians Gone Wild" on Oprahbulations

2 minute read

I think that this NY Times story by Noam Cohen, titled “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide,” is just fascinating. It’s an old story (from e...

James Randi on deception

less than 1 minute read

From Randi, J. 1988. “The detection of fraud and fakery.” Cell Mol Life Sci 44:287-288:

Beneath the Bigfoot hoax

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Newsweek is running a long story with the details behind the latest Bigfoot hoax:

Quote: High Priests of Anthropology

less than 1 minute read

Reading through the introduction to Archaeology and Language, by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (1998), I thought this quote was great:

Hawks' First Axiom of Science

less than 1 minute read

OK, I never thought I would start a list like this, but I have been irritated enough, already! So here it is:

"The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design"

2 minute read

There is very nice article at Kuro5hin with that title. The article covers Paley's Argument from Design, Behe's work, the Avida computer simulations, and Po...