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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.

Evolutionary biology sounds exciting - there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok - but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in mid-sneeze before you get to create an epidemic or a giant monster.

Sneezing sponges? Isn't that a little far-fetched, even for the network that brought us "Arachnoquake"? No, actually the sponge thing is real, and a new paper points to Porifera sneezing as evidence for a sensory organ in one of the most basic multicellular organisms on Earth, even though it doesn't even have a nervous system to interpret sensory information.

Yet another government science report has found that the Keystone XL pipeline is not going to be risky to the environment. 
If you listen to political pundits in Virginia and nationwide, House Bill 207 is a covert effort to hinder evolution education. (1) 

The bill never mentions evolution, it instead "encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about scientific controversies in science classes" which sounds lovely. Who is against critical thinking and respect for diverse opinions?

The bill sponsored by Richard "Dickie" Bell got a lot of attention from science media, who believe it is aimed at evolution.
When President Obama took office in 2009, among his first priorities was to cancel the Constellation program, mostly because it had George Bush's name on it, though that was behind a veneer of 'too expensive' and would take too long. 
Sociologists and psychologists know how to get attention - make a crazy claim based on correlations in population data or surveys of college students, use terms like factor analysis and p-value and statistical significance, and it will get into a journal. Since mainstream media love weak observational studies over science, it will be in the New York Times post-haste.

So we have been treated to "just so" science-y claims like: