Look out for these key words in scientific claims that make it almost certain that what you are reading about don't describe reality, or has been misunderstood by a science journalist:
* Tachyons.
* Traversable wormholes.
* Anything that could make faster than light communication technologies possible (key point: quantum entanglement cannot be used to send faster than light messages).
* String theory.
* Supersymmetry.
* WIMPs (or even claims that WIMPs are well-motivated).
* Models with sterile dark matter of MeV particle mass or more.
* Claims that dark matter distributions in galaxies usually or typically have an NFW distribution.
* Negative mass or mass-energy.
* Claims that antimatter gravitates differently than matter.
* Claims that the Lambda CDM cosmology model is fully consistent with astronomy observations.
* Claims that understanding CP violation in the Standard Model could explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe (i.e. why matter is so much more common than antimatter).
* Tired light.
* Claims that scientists have created black holes on Earth.
* Perpetual motion machines.
* Claims that any widely used vaccine does more harm than good.
* Claims that vaccines cause autism.
* Homeopathy.
* Claims that autism doesn't have a large genetic component.
* Chem trails.
* Claims that human activity has not caused significant global warming.
* Young Earth creationism.
* Claims that a global flood really happened.
* Intelligent design.
* Gender ideology.
* Intelligent extraterrestrial life on Earth.
* Claims that people in pre-modern societies were less violent than modern societies.
* Claims that genocide didn't happen prior to the modern era.
* An Anatolian origin for the Indo-European languages.
* A South Asian origin for the Indo-European languages.
* A Neolithic origin for the Indo-European languages.
* Technologically advanced civilizations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 20,000 years ago).
* The Solutrean Hypothesis.
* Claims that modern humans evolved outside Africa (although modern humans did experience admixture with other hominin species in small amounts outside of Africa).
* Claims that hominins as a clade evolved outside of Africa.
* Claims that ancient artisans were "impossibly advanced."
There are other claims that, while not impossible or more or less definitively disproven should be viewed with great skepticism:
* Explanations for phenomena that rely on new, beyond the Standard Model particles or forces (except gravity).
* Sterile neutrino theories.
* Claims that discrepancies between inclusive and exclusive measurements of something point to new physics.
* Any claim motivated by the muon g-2 anomaly (which does not exist).
* Claims of any baryon number violating process, or any lepton number violating process (other than sphalerons).
* Claims of Lorentz symmetry violations.
* Claims of charged leptons have any properties that differ from each other, other than mass (sometimes called "lepton universality violations").
* Claims that someone has seen dark matter annihilation signatures.
* Claims of CP violation or time-symmetry violation that don't involve W boson mediated phenomena.
* Claims of CPT symmetry violation.
22 comments:
My thoughts:
* Homeopathy.
Too broad, much is fake or placebo, but not all.
Ancient Chinese medicine -> malaria cured via wormwood distilled cold
* Claims that a global flood really happened.
Nuance, post-ice age melt sea rise 130m
* An Anatolian origin for the Indo-European languages.
The entire Pontic region was a trade network, IE was a trade lingo
* Technologically advanced civilizations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 20ka).
Deep sea fishing boats & fish hooks SEAsia 21ka
* Claims that modern humans evolved outside Africa (although modern humans did experience admixture with other hominin species in small amounts outside of Africa).
East-West route Morocco < > Caspian, North-South route Israel < > So. Africa, so not just 1 continent.
* Claims that hominins as a clade evolved outside of Africa.
I'd consider Miocene ape danuvius a primitive hominin, Bavaria 11ma, and that during the 6ma MSC the Black Sea region was a refugium, and possibly continued onto H georgicus at Dmanisi 1.8ma. (speculation)
https://www.facebook.com/share/1FtoVmfYRN/
Interesting story of how malaria cure was rediscovered
* Claims that modern humans evolved outside Africa (although modern humans did experience admixture with other hominin species in small amounts outside of Africa).
The Yunxian skulls (Yunxian 1, 2, 3) from China, dating to about a million years ago, challenge the traditional "Out of Africa" narrative by suggesting that significant steps in human evolution, like the emergence of large-brained hominins closely related to Denisovans and Neanderthals, might have happened in Asia, not just Africa. Reclassified by some as Homo longi (Dragon Man), these fossils suggest an earlier, more complex branching of human lineages across Eurasia, pushing back timelines and highlighting Asia's crucial role, potentially indicating that the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans might have originated outside Africa, possibly in Western Asia.
Key Points about the Yunxian Fossils & "Out of Africa"
Challenging Africa-Centric View: The fossils suggest large-brained humans diversified in Eurasia much earlier than previously thought, complicating the idea that Homo sapiens evolved solely in Africa and then migrated out.
Homo longi Connection: Yunxian 2, in particular, is now linked to Homo longi, a lineage closely related to Denisovans, suggesting these groups diverged earlier and spread across Asia.
Origin of "Ancestor X": The Yunxian findings support theories that the deeper human ancestor (Ancestor X) of H. sapiens, Denisovans, and Neanderthals might have emerged in Western Asia (like the Middle East) rather than Africa.
Complex Ancestry: This points to a more tangled evolutionary tree, with multiple human populations coexisting and interacting in Eurasia, not just Africa, over a million years ago.
"Muddle in the Middle": Yunxian helps clarify the confusing fossils from 1 million to 300,000 years ago, showing rapid divergence and diversification outside Africa.
* Not sure that a wormwood tea counts as homeopathy. More like herbal medicine.
* Global flood claims aren't nuanced. There have absolutely been big catastrophic floods that killed lots of people, and the Biblical global flood story probably derived from a specific Mesopotamian flood that happened not long after Sumerian writing developed.
* IE probably not a trade language, more likely developed on the Steppe and was probably, IMHO a fairly equal merger of a herder language not very different from a source hunter-gatherer language and an LBK farmer derived language in one specific community, creole adjacent, but more like the process of the transition from Old English to Middle English in which a lot of French and Latin lexical content and a little grammar were infused. It was probably truly sourced from one or the other with influenced from its counterpart, based on whichever was socio-economically dominant, but both are dead now so that information is probably irretrievably lost.
* By "technologically advanced" I'm thinking the kind of theories you sometimes see attributed to the lost city of Atlantis in their more outlandish versions: structures and material culture of at least Bronze age or better class that are lost completely.
* Modern humans evolved in Africa first, then spread, and probably not initially with trade. The oldest signs of modern humans in Africa are probably 150K years older than the oldest in the Levant and Arabia, 200K years older than the oldest in India, and 230K older than the oldest in Europe.
* By hominin, I mean genus *Homo* and maybe *Australopithecus*. Definitely not 6-11Mya Miocene apes. *H georgicus* is just a subspecies of *H. erectus* that appears in Africa before it does in the Caucuses.
Indeed. It's a good story.
@neo The claim is more driven by Chinese politics than science. No one is denying that there is Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture in modern humans. And, while Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans are sister clades, the modern human clade was African sourced.
FWIW, I'm pleased about some of the other items in the list that didn't receive any pushback. Save us all if I start getting YEC and Flat Earther comments.
Gender ideology.
do you mean trans?
@neo The claim is more driven by Chinese politics than science.
Chris Stringer British anthropologist He is currently Research Leader in Human Origins.
He is published Yunxian skulls dating 1 million years ago is Ancestor X
Not to be too picky, but your claims are so broad that context and definition are important. If you had itemised homeopathic treatments, separated out herbalists, etc... You didn't say 'Biblical global flood' so... (I agree with Irving Finkel that that epic was derived from a Sumerian farmer making a big coracle...).
I'll stick with IE being a trade lingo, used in pre-coin bartering between pastoralists, farmers, urbs, (not only by specialized traders), because it benefitted anyone who learned it, and it wasn't forced on by hierarchical militant foreigners.
Re. Homo sapiens, I meant group travel, not trade, routes. Re. hominins, just my opinion.
It's a Trump 2.0 phrase. It's mostly anti-trans, but maybe it's broader.
I had to lookup the term "Gender Ideology" and I might have not dug very deep. IIRC if is the idea that some kids are born with or develop the feeling that their body is 'wrong' for them. And eventually they decide that they (and it's mainly XY types) really should have been born the opposite sex. And if you consider the complexity of the embryo development is seem reasonable this is failure mode of that process. Because the XX body type is the default that Y modifies. So objecting to sex change operations for these kids is something like tell the kid with a cleft palate that they can't have it fixed and their doomed to go through childhood as that kid with the lisp. On the other-hand this is not a condition that can be objectively diagnosed. So it might be that not all those that are currently getting the diagnosis 'need' it (and surely all that need it are not getting it). Since the subject (what is the best criteria for performing sex change operation on a minor, whom all has a stake, etc.) has become weaponized I'd doubt the evenhandness of any recent research. I do know that I would strongly disfavor XY-trans competing in sports in against vanilla XX folks. When I asked my daughters and granddaughters whether they would mind a manish looking person coming into the girls bathroom it was a three to two in favor of 'no'.
The earth is flat on a small enough scale.
And using an exponentially decaying year length I can squeeze all of cosmology into 4004 years. Young Earthers for the win!
Back on "Gender Ideology", if we could diagnose this syndrome by age six to eight then born XYs might develop very close to born as XXs. Then I would be compelled to drop my objections to trans in women's sports and other spaces.
Global flood: no.
Global icemelt: yes. This caused local floods for almost every shore-dwelling human population, which was most human populations (they couldn't farm but they could sure fish, and gather oysters, and hunt near water).
Those local floods are worthy of study, including for mythology. So says the "Ancient European Culture" blog anyway.
Anything that makes the brain insist on something contrary to biology or reason is to be classed as a mental illness, so to be cured or at least vaccinated against.
This means homosexuality, of which dysphoria is a subset.
Disagreement with this clear truth is to be classed as an ideology.
so a man claims to be a woman is realities
What scale? Nanometers? Angstroms?
Are we including the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans in the "can't be in Eurasia" category?
I suspect the peri-Tethys was their backyard pool. Although just conceptual, Caspian Sea - Denisovan,
Black Sea - Neanderthal,
Mediterranean Sea & Red Sea - Sapiens.
@Darayvus, it's pretty obvious that there is enough slop at the cellular level that each person is unique. So arguments need to be statistical based on variance from some arbitrary standard. In the millionish locations that folks might vary from their breeding pool how many are required to say that this person is far enough from the average to justify taking medical action? (Assuming the variations are not life threatening.)
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