> (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia o

> (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al. You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".) Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit". As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted. Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11247.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1... [2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.short http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...