pharyngula

Falwell's funeral was yesterday, and apparently there were demonstrations — which seems highly inappropriate to me, now matter which side they were arguing — and a Liberty University student was arrested for bringing homemade bombs to the funeral. Bombs. To a funeral. There's just something…

We're up to a round two dozen submissions for the Ham Roast or Creation Museum Carnival or whatever we're going to call it — keep 'em coming in, I'm planning on posting it early Sunday morning. At this rate, it's going to be big, and it's going to be good.

Leave it to Susie Bright to connect a review of a spectacular book about deep sea organisms to sex toys. I'm going to get the book myself, but now I'm going to have a whole 'nother view of its contents. Oh, wait…actually, maybe not.

Sad news: Stanley Miller died on Sunday. If you don't know who he was, go read this interview. (via Evolucionarios)

Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to…

Here are three animals. If you had to classify them on the basis of this superficial glimpse, which two would you guess were most closely related to each other, and which one would be most distant from the others? On the left is a urochordate, an ascidian, a sessile, filter-feeding blob that is…

I wish I could have been there—Kristine Harley was in the Galapagos and got to break the news to Richard Dawkins that Jerry Falwell had died. It's hilarious. It's also true that Kristine is not a very nice girl. She's probably a witch.

As if you need any more motivation to contribute to the Creation Museum carnival, it turns out that these kinds of criticisms rankle Ken Ham. DefCon blog issued a press release accusing them of peddling lies, and Ham fired back with an indignant "Well! I never!" response. The funniest bit is where…

Hey, gang…it seems that highlighting that pointless petition to Free Kent Hovind has stirred up some enmity. The organizer of the petition has noticed us. Apparently, Satan's clever scheme to destroy goodness in the world involves getting a bunch of internet nerds to wiggle their fingers and type…

That simple and charming organization, The Friends of Charles Darwin, has just signed their thousandth member. Good for them, but still, that's pathetic — I hope it takes less than a decade to sign up another thousand. Go ahead and join if you haven't already, it's painless, I promise.

In California, the state's spending on prisons is about to exceed their spending on universities. They're about to spend $7.4 billion on new facilities, with an operating budget over $10 billion. I wonder how much of that budget is consumed in ridiculous efforts to punish non-violent drug users, or…

So there I am, reading an amusing couple of local comics mocking the conservative media, and my name comes up. And my picture. I must protest, it's totally inaccurate. I would never get such a soul-satisfying introduction, and if I were on TV, I'd be sure to wear my best eyepatch, the one with the…

John McKay of archy has noted that Ken Ham's fabulously low-rent sideshow attraction of pseudoscience (AKA his Creation "Science" "Museum") opens next week, and has asked if there is going to be any coordinated response in the blogosphere — some kind of mini-carnival or something. I say, why not?…

Now this is a situation about which I have mixed feelings: fans of creationism are lobbying to free a certain convicted felon and dishonest sleazebag with a petition to Free Kent Hovind. To counter that, another group has started a petition to Keep Kent Hovind in Jail. Since the "Free Kent Hovind"…

David Hone, the mastermind behind the Ask a Biologist site, forwarded this cute cartoon from Fritz at b3ta. I think I could be persuaded to jump on the "Teach the Controversy" bandwagon in this one specific respect. Let's also see sermons on the lack of teleology, the cruelty and waste of nature,…

I was interviewed on a website over a month ago, and unfortunately John A. Davison and his infected polyp, VMartin, took over the comments there and went on and on in their ridiculous way. They're still going at it. Even more absurdly, the droning duo are bragging on ISCID, in an awesome example of…

Hey, maybe we're making more progress than we ever imagined, if this poll from Christianity Today is any measure: As a somewhat cynical realist, though, I'm more inclined to believe in badly designed polls and cunning rascals with a script than I am that subscribers to a Christian magazine…

He wanted to be a preacher. He was a good Christian. His wife was a true believer, too. Their baby, though, was a godless heathen who never read the bible. So I'm sure it was perfectly reasonable to put the baby in the microwave and cook her. And their excuse that Satan made him do it? Quite…

A number of you wrote in to me to let me know that Hong Kong was considering labeling the Christian bible as indecent—it is full of violence and kinky-freaky sexual behavior, after all. It was also amusing how some people rationalized it. "If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn't mean…

That weird guy Dave Ng put out a call for bloggers to flaunt their drinking containers. That's easy, at least. 1. Can you show us your coffee cup? As if there were just one… 2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality? From left to right: I wrote some imaging and lab…

I know everyone is talking about this demented blog supporting Brownback's candidacy that, among other things, denounces heliocentrism. I honestly can't decide whether it's satire or genuine—I've met a few people who sincerely believe ideas that stupid. It's just that they usually lack the…

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on their opinion page (yeah, boo, crap so runny and putrid you can't even get rid of it with a shovel, I know) that claims biologists have been actively inflating species numbers as a cheap ploy to gain better support for conservation efforts. I really…

That's not news, I know—you can find Mark Twain complaining about them, too. One of the big problems is that any idiot who may well lack any experience in education, or even any interest in education beyond destroying it, can run for school board and actually get elected. Case in point: Ken Willard…

South Dakota: very conservative, very Republican, very concerned with women's reproduction, and none of it in a good way. This story just personifies the worst of South Dakota's repressive residents perfectly. A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and…

The Alliance for Science sponsored an essay contest—students were asked to submit an essay on the theme, "Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?" The winners have been announced, and first prize has gone to Gregory Simonian. Read the whole collection, including the entries from Merve…

Now that they're quite irate about Guillermo Gonzalez failing to get tenure, the gang at the Discovery Institute seems to have forgotten Bill Dembski's radical plan for dealing with biologists. If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department…

Among the multitudes who have now seen Flock of Dodos was a woman who recognized one of the faces on the screen, and she wrote Randy Olson with a little anecdote that you might find amusing, and a little bit sweet and charming. Just watched the film, congratulations to Randy Olson for a well…

Have you Floridians been pining away for a museum like Ken Ham's? OK, no, you haven't, not in the slightest, but you're getting one anyway. The Gospel Fossil man is coming to lie to your children! "To find a fossil, I'm finding, often times, especially if it's a dinosaur fossil, a victim of God's…

Here are a few new carnivals: Oekologie #5 Friday Ark #139 I and the Bird #49 The next Tangled Bank will be at geek counterpoint on Wednesday, 23 May — send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.

Ralph Reed is a sleazy con artist who hides his predatory nature behind a mask of piety; Hannity is a slow-witted thug with a simple-minded view of the world that he takes straight from the religious. It was therefore rather delightful to see Christopher Hitchens plainly reject their ridiculous…