pharyngula

There's nothing I detest more than intellectual dishonesty, and the Discovery Institute is a world leader in that. They have a ghastly little article up on their website, "Is origin of life in hot water?", which cites a recent paper in PNAS to argue that life couldn't have evolved without the…

Down in Texas, they had a holiday parade, and the atheists showed up — not to be mean, not to beat up Christians, not to stink up the event with doom and gloom and cynicism, but to celebrate the Christmas season. 18 people made up the Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band which paraded down Texas Avenue…

According to their sacred literature, anyway. Would you believe this collection of angry ignorant kooks whining about their taxes in local American politics is actually written up in the Bible? Yeah, this is the fourth Tea Party movement: the first was after the death of Solomon, the second was led…

We've all been sitting around wondering what big questions would ever completely stymie science — we've been just knocking 'em down right and left, and scientists have been completely baffled about what good question they could possibly ask next. We've all had serious concerns that maybe we were…

This is fabulous news: the Louisiana school system has been wrestling with a proposal from the Louisiana Family Forum (you know the rule: the word "family" in their title means they're anything but) which would have had the schools using science textbooks with absurd warning labels and watered down…

Some people just don't get it. Christopher Maloney wants to silence a message he doesn't like on the internet by serving a cease & desist order. The last time I mentioned Maloney was eight months ago, and even then it was to point and laugh at his page throwing crazy paranoid accusations at me…

I got a surprising amount of criticism of my review of the arsenic-eating bacteria paper — some people thought I was too harsh and too skeptical and too cynical. Haven't those people ever sat through a grad school journal club? We're trained to eviscerate even the best papers, and I actually had to…

I told you people I'm eyeballs-deep in work, and what do you do? You go ahead and fill up the chore that never ends. Just for that, I'm going to reply by giving you the bird. (Current totals: 11,475 entries with 1,205,928 comments.)

It's another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They're now the proud parents of a corpse. The media doesn't help. They give a…

Maned wolf

…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I've seen on the American future. Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world…

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting. We were notified late this morning that AiG's latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV's evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the…

I just finished off one big chunk of grading, and on this exam, as is my custom, I give students a few bonus points with an easy question at the end. It is also my custom every year to have one of those easy questions be, "Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman," just to…

Bigtime cognitive dissonance here. This is a promotional video for an organization opposing the current predatory banking system, and what do they use to represent the evil banks? "A great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnell into anything that…

The latest xkcd is an odd one. I know some people freak out a teeny tiny bit at the thought, but it never bothers me. I'm a first child, and I calculated back when I was conceived, and estimate that it was almost exactly the day of my parents' wedding — which was an elopement. The two of them ran…

This will be an anxious week. It's the last week of classes, I have piles of stuff to finish grading and get back to the students, and the students themselves are looking more than a little stressed. The last labs in my development course are falling apart thanks to animal intransigence and the…

I'm not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They've got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of…

How about that? Someone compiled a list of 30 Reasons TO use Comic Sans, and quoting creationists isn't one of them. I guess that means there are actually at least 31.

This is genuinely screwed up. Supporting separation of church and state can get you beat up in Hawaii. When Senate President Colleen Hanabusa introduced a reverend to say the invocation, Mitch Kahle stood from his seat in the gallery of the Senate chambers and said, "I object. My name is Mitch…

Gah, this is an awful and credulously reported story: Child's Nightmares and Memories Prove Reincarnation. There is no proof there. The story is simple: ordinary child plays video games, draws lots of pictures of airplanes in dogfights and dropping bombs, and has a few night terrors, so the parents…

The Harry Potter series came to an end, but it looks like our own serial thread never will. I Am Harry Potter from Daniel Radcliffe (Current totals: 11,462 entries with 1,203,875 comments.)

It's still going on. Jerry Coyne repeated our common criticism that the NCSE spends too much effort promoting Christianity; then Richard Hoppe fires back, complaining that his comment was held in moderation (Coyne has been sick for a while, you know…I wish people would have more patience), and then…

They might be stirring in their graves and preparing to rise to do battle. A medical researcher named Tai has published a method that he has called "Tai's Model", which is "a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies". I think — now I am a…

Hey, if you aren't listening to atheists talk radio, watch this 1946 film for schools from Encyclopedia Britannica. It's practically a cliche: black & white, dreadfully wooden 'acting', the serious narrator, but it's also describing how to tell a democracy from a despotism, and the warning…

As you all should know, the inimitable Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He's writing about it as long as he can, and so far he's remarkably lucid and open…and also, you can tell, a bit angry at the sheer arbitrariness of the disease and the difficulty in finding…

Minnesota Atheists went back on the air a while back, and I think I'll tune in tomorrow at 9am central time (and it will also be streaming live on the web. Lynn Fellman and Glendon Mellow will be talking about art and science. It should be good!

What do you get when you cross Ken Ham and Twitter? You probably shouldn't look — it's terrifyingly inane. Besides, it's mostly just links to Ken Ham on Facebook, where he puts his whiniest complaints about atheists persecuting him, and where he has a few thousand people agreeing with him and Jesus…

Bad news out of Germany: they've been investigating cases of priestly child abuse, and found lots (159 priests, 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees implicated so far), but they also found evidence of a systematic cover-up by the Catholic church. Germany's Catholic Church…

Ken Ham commissioned a company named "America's Research Group" to produce a feasibility study for the construction of his theme park for biblical literalists — I'm sure its conclusion that the park would bring in 1.5 million visitors and $200 million in revenue was a factor in convincing the…