pharyngula

Mooney and Kirshenbaum are still crying over the bad reviews their book received. Move on, Chris and Sheril. Obsessing over your reviews and hashing over them endlessly is yet another sign that the book isn't very good. Let it stand on its own (that is, shakily, ready to topple at a sneeze) and…

As you all know, it was predicted that the world would end on 21 October. I understand many of you are puzzled to note that you are still here. The purpose of this post is to inform any of you who have been engaged in wild, drunken orgies all night and are now blearily and confusedly turning on…

Join me in feeling some taxonomic loyalty to our class in defiance of our ancient enemy, those feathered reptiles, the birds. The BBC has footage of eagles hunting and killing young reindeer — they swoop down and stab their talons into their lungs, and then wait for them to die. Ouch. Poor Bambi…

It's very nice of Obama to have occasionally acknowledged the existence of freethinkers in his speeches, but it doesn't mean much when his administration endorses blasphemy laws. The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the…

Those rascals at the Coalition of Reason are stirring up mischief again — people are sending me all these news stories about ads going up in the NY subways, Boston, Chicago, and so forth. They are making trouble for atheists! Didn't they get the word that we're supposed to be as quiet as mice,…

Greg Laden reports that Oprah actually had positive things to say about the quality of life in Denmark, and may even have been non-condemning in a brief comment about their godlessness. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Greg spends his afternoons watching Oprah. But after that, I'm mildly and…

Scienceblogs grows a little more, with the addition of two new blogs. We now have Pamela Ronald talking about food and farm science at Tomorrow's Table. That should fill a gap in the coverage here! The other entry might be of more interest to readers here, because of the topics covered. We've drawn…

It's cruel, but he is such a tempting target, so full of himself and so, so crazy. It seems The Simpsons tossed out some mild one-liner making fun of communion ("What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?"), and Bill Donohue has fired off another angry fax ("mocking the…

I already sent you off to vote on this German poll that would have awarded homeopaths a prize…and you all did good, giving the good guys, SOZIALHELDEN (Social Heroes), a solid lead over the dangerous crackpots, Homöopathen ohne Grenzen (Homeopaths without borders). Unfortunately, the poll didn't…

Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn't know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars. It's a fairly long interview, and you…

I guess we have somebody worried. Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention Websites Attacked The Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack yesterday, which caused the websites to be taken…

Apparently, twitter tracks hot trends in the tiny little conversations flying about, and the #1 hot topic today was "No God". The amusing reason why is that someone posted that boring and fallacious cliche, "Know God…Know Peace. No God…No Peace", a lot of Christians retweeted it, and a few atheists…

In this case, it's unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin's Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It's not there honestly, though: it's because Amazon's indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn't seem to actually track which edition is the most…

Since I posted that open letter to Seed, it's only fair to post the reply I received the other day. We've just signed off with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, to begin Phase I of our registration program. You won't actually see too many changes with this phase - we're essentially just…

I'm on the cover of this month's Humanist magazine, and they're running the text of my humanist of the year acceptance speech. So, if I wave this around, will it get me to the front of the line at all the hot, trendy, New York nightclubs?

Yesterday, I got a brief mention of a botch of a radio show on NPR that nattered on about a "deep rift" in atheism, but this morning on MPR you could have heard Richard Dawkins talking about evolution. He got the better gig. This interview does make clear one difference in strategy between Dawkins…

You've got a whole 66 shopping days until Christmas, but as you all know, the War on Christmas is fought all year 'round. I'm already getting email from people who have started their Christmas shopping (I hate you all) and who toys and games to educate and introduce kids to science and learning (OK…

Bill Donohue, the vitriolic cranky grandpa of the Catholic League, has a guest column in the Washington Post. It's not very interesting — it's more of Donohue's tedious yapping about communists, godless libertines (that is, those wicked gays), and how the ACLU is out to smash Judeo-Christian…

All it takes is an autotuner and a few well-known science popularizers.

There was a debate yesterday, on the motion "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world". On the affirmative side, the Catholics had Anne Widdecombe, a conservative British politician, and Archbishop Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria. On the godless side…Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens.…

A couple of Republican district chairmen took it upon themselves to defend Senator Jim DeMint (R, Crazytown). Uh, maybe. There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not…

I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains. A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four…

There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It's concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It's not good for marine life. One of the…

And I'm not even a teenaged girl.

The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out, called Superfreakonomics. It doesn't look promising: a couple of reports have it promoting climate change denialism, which is unfortunate. There are risks in having skepticism with the status quo (which is a good thing all around) when people lurch…

The story Barbara Bradley Hagerty cobbled together from interviews with atheists is now up. It's called "A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists", and it's very strange. Her emphasis is on the differences within the atheist community, and she makes it sound like atheism is about to blow apart into a…

This thread is useless. I must have another. And it must be sound…and young. If only I can keep it going until… (Hey, does anyone else think Colin Clive was drunk as a skunk when he did this scene? Listen to him slur "simulacrum".)

Last month, we were told that the Rapture was coming on 21 September. It didn't happen. You know that there must have been some little mistake in their calculations. The prophets have double-checked their numbers and found the error, and fixed it. We now know without error the date of the end. THE…