Skeptophilia

There's a fallacy out there that is a little on the tricky side, even more so because it appears so straightforward at first.  It's ...

Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi  once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing w...

Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."...

When you think about it, it's unsurprising that our ancestors invented "the gods" as an explanation for anything they didn...

There's a reason skeptics have a problem with anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony. It's not that that it's impossible th...

In yesterday's post we looked at one bizarre human obsession, which is drawing lines all over the place and pretending they represent so...

One of the reasons science is so useful is that our intuition about how things work is so often wrong. A good example is the classic physics...

I find it fascinating how many important discoveries were made more or less by accident -- either because a researcher was looking for somet...

Today's post asks a question not because I'm trying to lead you toward a particular answer, but because I honestly don't know th...