Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
Here's an interesting video overview of Jack Szostak's work. Set to the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th? OK, if the science bores you, just listen to the music.
My father is gone. He died in 1993; I vividly remember how I felt when I got that phone call, the desperate search through my memory of every last moment I'd spent with him, the anguish over the missing details and lost days and years, the despair that there would be no more memories, ever. It's…
Don't forget to tune in to Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central! Today Mark Borrello will be talking about the grand Evolution 2008 conference that will be taking place this coming week in Minneapolis (I'll be there — I'm even giving a talk in the education session on Sunday). You may recall Mark as…
I can't believe people are actually going to see Shyamalamadingdong's new movie, The Happening. Just as George Lucas ought to be hogtied and gagged anytime he tries to write a single line of dialog, Shyamalan needs to be slapped silly next time he tries to invent a plot. The man has some artistic…
Would you like to host a TV series?
Leading cable television network is casting for female scientists (professionals or grad students) to host a reality/documentary series. Smart, energetic, charismatic candidates wanted. No previous media experience required.
"Reality series" always means "…
Somebody must have mistaken us for the local insane asylum, because my mailbox this afternoon is full of weird stuff. Could it be…could it be…Friday the 13th?
A suggestion for Vox Day: he should debate Jesus' General!
This one is kind of sad. A loon who thinks 9/11 was an American conspiracy…
Over the years, I've developed a rough classification system for creationist screeds. One of the most common is the 'deluded parrot', in which the writer just repeats the same tiresome old canards we've heard a thousand times before: "If man evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?"…
Carl Zimmer has this lovely post on the Lenski lab work on E. coli evolution, and look! The first author on that paper, Zachary Blount, showed up with an offer to answer any questions!
But sadly, you should also look at who the first person to take him up on the offer is: Larry Fafarman. If you don…
You may have heard that the midwest, my little corner of the universe, has been hit hard by storms. My specific little area has avoided the worst, and we've been watching the major storms fly by on the television, just clipping us as they rip past, but we have been inundated — on Wednesday, in…
Nautilus pompilius
(from Nature 453, 826 (12 June 2008) — doi:10.1038/453826a; Published online 11 June 2008)
Yisrayl Hawkins predicted that the world will end on 12 June. He's in Texas, so I presume he was using Central Time…and since it is now the early hours of 13 June here, I guess we can safely say that we dodged a bullet. Whew. I was getting worried. Hawkins, after all, is an expert prophet, well…
People have been asking me what's up with that potentially interesting television series called Evolve that is supposed to be shown next week — it's not showing up on anyone's schedules. I wrote to the executive producer, and she said the History Channel has delayed it to sometime in July. She'll…
They aren't all deluded gomers, only their politicians are. You should check out the Louisiana Coalition for Science, a smart group of Louisianans fighting for better science education.
Many people have been sending me this article about how high IQ turns academics into atheists. I'm afraid I don't trust it at all: the author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ…
Minnesota pastor Gus Booth is using his pulpit to promote candidates for political office, claiming that "God wants me to address the great moral issues of the day". Which is fine with me, even though I disagree with him on just about everything. He clearly wants to commit himself to crusading for…
The Louisiana house of representatives has approved a bill that would allow science teachers to "supplement" classes with wackaloonery. Remember that crazy teacher with the weird ideas you had back in 8th grade? Now he would be encouraged to bring in bible tracts, anti-abortion screeds, and puff-…
Gosh. I sure hope the creationist extremists never get any substantial political power, because guess what some of them would like to do: they want to violently expel use crazy evolutionists. Ask Tom Willis, an utterly insane creationist (who is also, scarily, active in Kansas politics):
The…
I keep telling people there is a deep dangerous strain of insanity running through this country, and here's a perfect example: Bobby Jindal.
We've discovered that in an essay Jindal wrote in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, a serious right-wing Catholic journal, Jindal narrated a bizarre story of a…
This is a special edition of the Tangled Bank: you get to choose your own adventure!
I'm going to give you a choice today.
If you've only got a moment and want to click a button and be done with something fairly trivial, vote on whether to impeach Bush.
For a change, if you've got a half hour or so and would like to contribute data to serious research, take Elisabeth Cornwell's…
Something is wrong on the internet.
It should be "complexity", not "purity", and the arrow should point to the left. And obviously it should be arranged so that the biologist is on top — the others don't have a cephalopod.
While I was traveling last week, an important paper came out on evolution in E. coli, describing the work of Blount, Borland, and Lenski on the appearance of novel traits in an experimental population of bacteria. I thought everyone would have covered this story by the time I got back, but there…
Minnesota is a pretty darn good state, usually fairly progressive, but sometimes…sometimes it can plunge off the deep end into the credulous muck of woo. My state has just approved the title of doctor for naturopaths. I imagine the MDs are a bit aghast, and even us Ph.D.s are feeling a bit…
At last, military forces around the world have coordinated to take out a tyrannical dictator: we've invaded heaven. The dishonest leader of that country, with his scourges and plagues and cataclysms and arbitrary executions, has been deposed.
The denouement was a bit predictable, however.
It's awfully easy to forget Ken Ham's monument to malevolent ignorance, the Creation Museum, but while we're not visiting it, it's apparently doing a bang-up business, and they're even planning a major expansion. Stupidity sells, especially in America.
So it's a good thing that some people are…
I think this is his June 2006 speech — does anyone know if he has expressed similar sentiments now?
(via Atheist Media Blog)