Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
February 22, 2006
The Salem hypothesis is an old chestnut from talk.origins. It was proposed by a fellow named Bruce Salem who noticed that, in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering…
February 21, 2006
Atheists will not be mocked, and I expect much fury in response to this disrespectful joke.
February 21, 2006
Maybe it's Minnesota, or maybe it's me, but this situation with professors complaining about student email doesn't really affect me. It's been my experience here that UMM students are usually friendly and trouble-free with email (haven't you heard? We're all nice up here!), and I even welcome the…
February 21, 2006
I can't say that I'm surprised by anything in this except for the length of time it has taken: Summers has stepped down from the presidency of Harvard. I suspect he still doesn't know what hit him, but I think stupidly belittling the intrinsic capabilities of a significant number of successful,…
February 21, 2006
Some of the scienceblogs have been experiencing difficulties (unresponsiveness, sluggish commenting, and some of us can't even post), and part of the problem can be traced to spammers turning their attention to us and pounding at the door. We've been asked to increase the level of security in…
February 21, 2006
Some Pennsylvania private schools have a new advertising campaign:
The billboard ads say "Intelligence … by Design" and show a Bible Baptist teacher and students.
The Harrisburg Christian radio ad features the voice of science teacher Stephanie Morris. She describes weaknesses in the theory of…
February 21, 2006
Say, would the nice person who sent me the Roy Zimmerman CDs care to 'fess up in the comments?
I need to turn you in for sedition. There might be a reward.
February 21, 2006
Whoa. This is amazing. A NY Times reporter got a Discovery Institute press release, and he didn't just accept it on their say-so—he actually went digging to find out how accurate it was. I have to give Kenneth Chang his due for going below the surface and investigating a claim.
The Discovery…
February 21, 2006
Olduvai George shows how to illustrate evolution , with pictures of Eusthenopteron, Pachyaena, and a thylacine.
February 20, 2006
Cool. The Definitive Frink. This is going to be so useful for the researching and the webulating and the hu-uumm-hey, glayvin.
(via Recursivity)
February 20, 2006
This article by Catherine Tsai on ghastly creationist museum tours is getting syndicated all over the place, so I'm getting lots of mail from people complaining about this dreck appearing in the local paper. Basically, there is a group, Biblically Correct Tours, that is parasitizing museums,…
February 20, 2006
Matthew Nisbet has a good list of things we ought to be doing. Number one on the list is what I also think is the biggest thing we have to do:
SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT.
And I have to admit that educating you, the readers of this weblog, is actually a small part of the task.…
February 20, 2006
You'd think they'd freeze solid or something, and not really be a threat until the spring thaw. Now there's video footage of zombies rampaging across a frozen lake, so I guess maybe we should be concerned.
February 20, 2006
As part of the ongoing migration to the new site, I've brought over some strangely popular articles: Tentacle sex, Tentacle sex, part deux, Squid nuptial dances, and Octopus sex. All across the world, people are wondering what the etiquette is if they should find themselves in a romantic situation…
February 20, 2006
I rather like this illustration I ran across in some reading. It's a bit risqué, and reminded me of some ukiyo-e…the kind of thing you don't usually expect to find in a biology journal.
This line drawing was made from a photograph of a male H. lunulata (shaded) copulating with a female. The arrow…
February 20, 2006
When male squid get together with their female friends, they have a couple of nuptial options: they can go ahead and use their charm to court the female, or they can just start poking her with tentacles full of sperm in mating frenzy. Now some of you guys might be thinking the latter option sounds…
February 20, 2006
Yesterday's [21 November 2005] post about squid had a most unsatisfying conclusion, so I feel compelled to mention two things: squidblog has a brief explanation of squid jet propulsion, and I've dug up another older paper on squid movement. Even better, it's about squid nuptial dances and mating.…
February 20, 2006
Doesn't everyone just love cephalopods? I find them to be a fascinating example of a body plan radically different from our own, the closest thing to a truly alien large metazoan on our planet. I try to keep my eyes open for new papers on cephalopod development, but unfortunately, they are rather…
February 19, 2006
You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there's a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn't have to actually think about the issues. That's the case with Leon…
February 19, 2006
While we're threading openly, I'll also bring to your attention these fine collections of interesting bloggery:
I and the Bird
Skeptics' Circle
Carnival of the Godless
Oooh, look! I also made some tweaks to the CSS, in an effort to distinguish myself from all those other scienceblogs out there.
February 19, 2006
It's an amusing clip from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra…I'm going to have to see that movie someday.
February 19, 2006
Here's the difference between me and Michael Bérubé: he gets labeled a dangerous radical and profiled in David Horowitz's new book, while all I get is amild squeak in our weekly campus newspaper and our local conservative rag.
While perusing the UMM main page, I happened upon the website http://…
February 18, 2006
Once upon a time, I was one of those nerds who hung around Radio Shack and played about with LEDs and resistors and capacitors; I know how to solder and I took my first old 8-bit computer apart and put it back together again with "improvements." In grad school I was in a neuroscience department,…
February 18, 2006
It's just a photo set of pictures of quail, but I noticed that my right forefinger reflexively twitched at the photo of the Republican lawyer in the middle of them. There may be a neurological explanation for Cheney's shotgun error, after all.
February 18, 2006
Dr Beckinsale visits the Discovery Institute
I saw the movie Underworld: Evolution last night. Stop looking at me like that—it was research. It has the word "evolution" in the title, doesn't it? Besides, I have this idea to improve the promotion of science by having all of our spokespeople be…
February 17, 2006
I've always wanted to be on The Simpsons, and I think my head is probably potato-shaped enough to fit in perfectly, but the Simpsomaker doesn't have quite enough options. More facial hair! I need a full beard with a Flanders-like mustache for this to work.
At least it's easy to look like a…
February 17, 2006
I'm going to back up John Lynch on this one. The Flock of Dodos guy, Randy Olson, has a list of "TEN THINGS EVOLUTIONISTS CAN DO TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATION", and I have to say I'm not excited about them. While they're well-intentioned and would be good things to do, it's too glib and unrealistic. I'…
February 17, 2006
I must immediately urge the Social Affairs Unit to consider confining their essays to social matters, or affairs, or units, because dang, when they start chattering about science, it's like watching monkeys do philosopy—they really aren't suited to it, and it all boils down to a comic-opera poop-…
February 17, 2006
Argonauta nodosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.