Was Paradise Lost?

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is one of the most symbolically important in the Bible. Coming right at the beginning of the pentateuch, it acts as a necessary set-up to much of the rest of the Old and New Testaments and the religions they have inspired. The story holds [...]

The Story of Christmas

The following is from an advertising campaign which recently ran in the UK. This campaign uses what is known as User Generated Content. By getting people to film and send in testimonies on webcams, the company not only saves time and money, but more importantly, it co-opts the apparently genuine, grass-roots nature of the amateur [...]

He Works in Magisterious Ways

One area in which the so-called “new atheists” differ from what I can only assume are called “old atheists” is in their views on the possibility of harmonious co-existence between religion and science. Dawkins, Hitchens and Myers, while acknowledging that religious people can understand science and scientists can believe in God, see religious faith as [...]

Astrology – A Test

A little while ago I wrote this piece about astrology, or more specifically about horoscopes. I explained that I believe any apparent correct predictions arrived at through the practice of astrology are due to a combination of vagueness the Barnum effect,  and wishful thinking on behalf of the reader, among other things. Michelle Gregg, a consulting [...]

How to Read the Stars

Today I got into a conversation about astrology with a work colleague after she told me that she found one paper’s horoscopes so much better than another’s (thelondonpaper’s are apparently better than the London Lite’s if you’re interested). Although I registered my disbelief in astrology, it was only later that I worked out what I [...]

The Spinal Trap

In April 2008, Simon Singh, author of the excellent Big Bang and Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial, wrote an article in the Guardian demonstrating the lack of evidence for the claims made by chiropractors. He pointed out that true chiropractic did not limit itself to helping back pain, but was in fact originally created as something of a panacea [...]

God Hates Us All

One of the most contraversial and widely hated groups in America is the Westboro Baptist Church. Following wide-spread media attention, and features by journalists such as Louis Theroux, their methods of picketing the funerals of victims of anti-gay hate crime, as well as service men, with slogans such as “God hates fags” and “Thank God for 9/11″ have [...]

Complementary and Alternative Regulation

The University of Central Lancashire, one of the numerous universities in David Colquhoun’sfiring line for their disregard of science in offering BScs in homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, has held a review of issues associated with teaching alternative medicine subjects. The report from this review has been published online here (pdf). The review came to a pleasing conclusion, [...]

Welcome

Welcome to Tycho’s Elk, a new blog about politics, science, scepticism, rationalism and anything else that interests us. My areas of interest include religion, pseudoscience and superstition – the types of thinking that encourage them and the injustices done in their names. I also work in the media and am therefore interested in how related ideas are portrayed on [...]