Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
The Tangled Bank has been frinked: the latest irreverent edition is up at FrinkTank.
Zimmer has a summary of the latest discoveries in the evolution of the baleen whales. It's beautiful stuff, with the lineage showing their origin from toothed whales, through a phase where they had both teeth and baleen, to their current condition lacking teeth and having only baleen.
Trust me on this, I'm no fan of D. James Kennedy, the pompous airhead who runs Coral Ridge Ministries, so I'm happy to report that Kevin Beck also thinks he is a "lying asshat".
I feel a little bit sorry for Joel Borofsky, Dembski's 'research' assistant. Over at Inoculated Mind, Karl Mogel has excavated Borofsky's tawdry history on them thar IntarWubs. I'd forgive him some of the earlier illiterate, whiny stuff—he started at a very young age, at about the same age as my…
Neddie Jingo has an appalling example of the kind of presentation used to promote our strategic plan in Iraq. Go take a look and weep—it's one of those meaningless godawful PowerPoint-style assemblages of boxes and arrows. You know what I mean: a nightmare of chartjunk that distracts everyone into…
It's almost official now: Pluto really is a planet. As Phil points out, though, this means there are now 12 planets, with maybe many more to come.
Awww, it's a charming little story about the intelligence of the octopus:
Ah, the creepy-crawly creature, the swarming arms, that deep-sea demeanor. This is the bearer of intelligence?
"That was my attitude, too," confesses science writer Eugene Linden, who has written about animal intelligence…
Southern Illinois University Carbondale is raising money for their Darwin Day celebration by selling something a little bit cheesy, but I may have to get one for my office anyway: a Darwin bobblehead. Cute, eh? Don't you need one, too?
A reader sent in a question asking me to explain this: a swallowtail wings with different color patterns. Has anybody seen anything like this before? Got any explanations?
My first thought was that it was a genetic mosaic. A mitotic error in early development can lead to one wing primordium…
According to Red State Rabble, the Kansas Citizens for Science group has just turned 7. They're an example to us all—local activism on behalf of science is exactly how we can win this war against ignorance.
I'd point at England and give a Nelson Muntz laugh if it weren't so depressing. A survey of UK students on evolution is showing large numbers falling for the creationism/ID scam.
In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism — the idea God created us within the past 10,000…
Some people seem to be outraged at the idea of people stopping the killing in the Middle East. Those people are, curiously enough, some very prominent Christians.
A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle
East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I…
Creationists often bring up Piltdown Man* as an example of an evolutionary fraud, and claim that it was the foundation of huge volumes of research. It was a fraud, and it did linger unpleasantly in the scientific literature for far too long, but you'd be hard pressed to find a serious work of…
As long as we're dealing with rebuttals to criticism, Joe Carter has reacted to my previous rejection of his incoherent complaints. Don't bother reading Carter, though, who is babbling and whining as usual…instead, just read this rebuttal to the rebuttal of my criticisms. Even if it is from a…
My complaints about that post-modernist screed against evidence-based medicine have elicited some responses.
First up is a Calvinist post-modernist who defends the work by mischaracterizing the criticisms of various bloggers, including me, as:
"Chuckle, chuckle... stupid postmodernists... Sokal...…
Less than two weeks until classes begin again, and it's time to juggle syllabi, attend meetings and workshops, and scoot the kids off to school. I'm making another airport run tomorrow to pick up Skatje, whose vacation is ending. Next week, I get to deposit Connlann back in Madison (I didn't do…
Although I do think Lawrence Krauss's op-ed in today's NY Times, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate, is a good, strong piece of work, it doesn't go quite far enough. He's specifically targeting a couple of the Kansas state school board members for ridicule. First he slams Steve…
This is absolutely no surprise: a newspaper article reports that church-based scams are costing the country big bucks.
Between 1984 and 1989, about $450 million was stolen in religion-related scams, the association says. In its latest count — from 1998 to 2001 — the toll had risen to $2 billion.…
Kung Fu Monkey has a great Daily Show clip—the last few lines from the foreign correspondent are especially biting.
Here's an interesting leak, if true. Someone ("Yellow Rose", or YR) is a mole within a religious group trying to subvert the Wikipedia:
YR gathered intell on a baker's dozen fundamentalist techno-geeks, resembling a cult within a cult, who have become Wikipedians. Lacking a Y chromosome and being…
I don't know who this guy Evil Bobby is, but he has distracted me a couple of times these last few days with collections of weird Russian pop videos. Isn't that what the internets are all about, stumbling into strange things you'd never look up yourself?
On this day 172 years ago, Richard Dana set sail. About 35 years ago, I discovered Two Years Before the Mast in my local library, and it turned me into a sea story junkie. I read Forester and Sabatini and Melville (of course!)—fortunately, Melville got me more interested in the biology of those…
Tanystylum bealensis male, ventral view, showing eggs and instar 1 (protonymphon) on
ovigerous legs. in. 1, instar 1 (protonymphon); pa, palp; pr, proboscis; 1, first walking leg; 2, second
walking leg; 3, third walking leg; 4, fourth walking leg.
Surely, you haven't had enough information about…
Maybe you've never heard of the Duggar family, but you may have run across their portrait: it's a fundamentalist family with 15 going on 16 kids. Prof. Bleen has put together a hypothetical picture of the family, if they were living under the creationist theocracy they like so much. It's not a…
Pycnogonids really are fascinating animals and they deserve more attention. There's a short news article on sea spiders that mentions their odd life style and their taxonomic awkwardness.
For over 100 years, scientists have been puzzling over how exactly to classify sea spiders or pycnogonids.…
Martin Rundkvist has discovered a peculiar little paper. It's titled "Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism", and here's part of the abstract:
Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari, the objective of…
It's really not that hard to understand, but what's blocking acceptance are the amazing lies people say about Plan B emergency contraception. Ema found a ghastly op-ed that got everything wrong; try reading my summary of Plan B, then the op-ed by Abby Wisse Schachter, and see if you can spot all…
She's full of advice for terrrarists on how to circumvent our administration's restrictions on an entire state of matter. Now in addition to confiscating our toothpaste, the security people at the airport are going to make us pee into a chromatograph before they let us on the plane.
Let's just end…
Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban…