Author Archives: Fallacy Man

The genetic fallacy: When is it okay to criticize a source?

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Fallacy Man

Last week, I wrote a post on the hierarchy of scientific evidence which included the figure to the right. In that post, I explained why some types of scientific papers produced more robust results than others. Some people, however, took … Continue reading →

Posted in Rules of Logic | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

The hierarchy of evidence: Is the study’s design robust?

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Fallacy Man

People are extraordinarily prone to confirmation biases. We have a strong tendency to latch onto anything that supports our position and blindly ignore anything that doesn’t. This is especially true when it comes to scientific topics. People love to think … Continue reading →

Posted in Nature of Science | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Evolutionary mechanisms part 4: Natural selection

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Fallacy Man

Natural selection is probably the most well known of the evolutionary mechanisms, and it is the one that most people think of when someone says, “evolution.” It is, however, often misunderstood, and people frequently fail to appreciate its complexity. Therefore, … Continue reading →

Posted in Science of Evolution | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Evolutionary mechanisms part 4: Natural selection

Basic statistics part 4: understanding P values

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Fallacy Man

If you’ve ever read a scientific paper, you’ve probably seen a statement like, “There was a significant difference between the groups (P = 0.002)” or “there was not a significant correlation between the variables (P = 0.1138),” but you may … Continue reading →

Posted in Nature of Science | Tagged , | 3 Comments

5 bad arguments against the influenza vaccine

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Fallacy Man

I spend a lot of time on this blog debunking bad anti-vaccine arguments (for example here and here). Nevertheless, logically invalid anti-vaxxer nonsense continues to rear its ugly head. Therefore, in this post I am going to focus specifically on … Continue reading →

Posted in Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , | 5 Comments