Pharyngula Probably not. But the New York Times reports: A review of studies has found that the health benefits of infant male circumcision vastly outweigh the risks involved in the procedure. Actually, it doesn’t. Prevalence of adult circumcision in the United States during the past 6 decades (1948-2010). It does toss in a table purporting to show the tremendous risks of not circumcising baby boys, but this is not new — these are the same sloppy data that the author has been peddling for over a decade. The author is Brian Morris, better known as the Man Who Hates Foreskins. I suppose it could be because glorious Scandinavian penises are perfect and universally wholesome — that’s what I’ve been told, anyway — but that would be baseless speculation and unwarranted extrapolation of anecdotes into unsupportable evidence, of the sort that Brian Morris does. Take that first condition, the likelihood of urinary tract infections. Or look at his claim of much greater rates of HIV infection.
Skeptic » Home » The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine | The Odds Must Be Crazy The Skeptic's Dictionary Bad Science Welcome - The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science Skepticblog Science, croyance et idées reçues Main Page Post-Modern Science: The Illusion of Consciousness Sees Through Itself We have always struggled with the limits to how human language can express our thoughts about reality. But post-modern science dismisses the struggle as futile: We did not evolve to perceive reality. That conviction is changing cosmology dramatically. We know almost nothing about the human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for deciding among them. Essentially you have a positive feedback loop with language, culture, social interaction, and intellectual sophistication. Novella’s assertions do not offer any demonstrable cause. Neuroscientist Michael Graziano similarly claims that “A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved” (Atlantic, 2016): Notice, his theory’s correctness has yet to be determined, yet it “explains” how consciousness evolved. Evolutionary cognitive science makes short work of traditional notions of ethics as well.
The NESS