Musgrave on vaccine denialism 4 Sep 2009 Ian Musgrave has a smackdown of the false claims and, let’s face it, criminal lies by the antivaxxers in Australia here. Since Ian always knows whereof he speaks, it is a useful and educational post. About a decade ago, a medical researcher at the place I worked, who also practised as a general practitioner, said to me that he was seeing babies die painfully from pertussis (whooping cough) for the first time in thirty years, because of the antivaccine movement. They are murderers in my opinion. Australian stuff General Science
Epistemology What should evolutionary psychology comprise? 25 Jul 201125 Jul 2011 Recently there have been a number of posts and comments on evolutionary psychology. A new paper in PLoS Biology argues that human brain evolution since the “stone age” (really?) has been rapid and multifaceted. And there are renewed calls for evolutionary psychology to change. As usual, John Hawks has a… Read More
Evolution Genesis 2 rewritten 5 Jun 200724 Nov 2022 It is also likely that if God re-issued Genesis 2, he’d do it as a comic strip like this. Oops I forgot to link it… fixed now. Read More
Evolution The World According to Genesis: Moral Knowledge 6 Jun 200724 Nov 2022 Like any middle eastern deity, YHWHW Elohim is a fairly petty individual. He doesn’t want competition from his creations, so he blocks access to the “Tree of Life”, which is a magical tree whose fruit can make you live forever. We have two magical trees, a corporeal deity of limited knowledge and good will, a snake that talks and has intentions like any trickster god to thwart the designs of the deity, and a justification for wearing clothes, which is not a matter just of shame, but of intended purpose. Read More
I had whooping cough when I was a kid, and I was old enough to remember what that was like. Pretty grim. But it was nothing compared to the measles, which very nearly killed me and permanently weakened my eyesight. There wasn’t an effective vaccine for these diseases then, so one simply had to try to survive. Just because some of these childhood illnesses sound quaint now, doesn’t mean they aren’t a real threat or can’t come back.
It’s very unfortunate that these nuts have gained so much traction in some parts of the world. It’s hard to imagine that one of the great advances in public health is under such assault, but a combination of quacks, crooked lawyers, and yes, a supposed scientist or two, has done some real harm. Jim Harrison makes a good point. All these people live in the post-vaccine world. Their ignorance of just how terrible and destructive these so-called “childhood” diseases can be is at least part of the problem, though as usual, the real enemy is psuedo-scientific and anti-scientific quackery.