pharyngula

If you've got a reasonably robust gut, you might be able to handle following this link to a movie showing the intimate relationship between a man and his botfly larvae. If you can't appreciate the beauty of large maggots, well, no, you might not want to click. Really. I am not to blame if you…

I am so pleased to learn that Focus on the Family is freaking out a little bit. The trend is known as the "Great Evacuation," and the statistics are startling to youth ministers. Studies have shown at least 50 percent — and possibly as much as 85 percent — of kids involved in church groups will…

Richard Dawkins has stirred up a new nest of critics, and they're actually getting space in the media. This time, it's an astrologer complaining about those damned skeptics. Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins' interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy…

I'm in St Paul, about to give a talk on evolution, and in these few minutes before I get behind the lectern I thought I'd throw together a few links to entertain you all. Have fun, I have to babble! Share your stories of abandoning faith at Coming Out Godless. Revere's Sunday Sermonette is on Fred…

Christian charity and love has clear limits. A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay. Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service,…

Hey, Carl Zimmer and I share one thing in common: it's the hair. You can even see him on video if you've been wondering what he's like. I may be meeting Carl next weekend in New York. What do you think — after a few beers, do you think he and I should head out to the Village and get tattoos?

Bleh…it's been a too-busy day, and I've got very early morning travel to do, so here's something easy and mindless before I go to bed: make a lego version of yourself! Man, I really gotta get a haircut soon.

The next edition of the Tangled Bank will be at Fish Feet on Wednesday, 15 August. Send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net. Until Wednesday, you'll need to make do with these other carnivals, or engage in undirected and unspecified web-based social intercourse in the comment thread below…

Richard Dawkins has a new television series, The Enemies of Reason, that will be broadcast in the UK. I have not heard if it will make it to the US; if it's anything like our experience with his last program, Root of all evil?, it will be buried in post-midnight showings on scattered PBS stations,…

Graphic-intensive collection of pretty pictures below the fold: beware. Cephalopod poetry also counts as art. Octopus By Algernon Charles Sin-Burn Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,     Whence camest to dazzle our eyes? With thy bosom bespangled and banded     With the hues…

While it's nearly impossible to get a group of atheists to do anything together (the reaction to the Out campaign demonstrates that!), you've all got to agree* that at least the Secular Student Alliance is a good idea. Maybe you don't know what it's like for new students entering a university, but…

The wingnuts are still outraged that there is a Muslim in congress and that a Hindu delivered an opening prayer (which was pretty dang lame, anyway). Now look at this silly little man (R-Idaho) ranting about the death of America: Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a…

It's a busy weekend coming up. On Sunday, 12 August, I'll be speaking at the St. Paul Critical Thinking Club, at The Kelly Inn (off I-94 at the Marion St exit) from 10:00 AM to noon. Well, it's scheduled for two hours, but I promise not to babble on for that length of time. There is a $10 fee to…

I know the summer is coming to an end when the Stevens County Fair opens. I'm going to be spending a good chunk of my afternoon and evening there tonight — I'll be holding down the Stevens Community Humane Society booth from 6-8pm, and the Stevens County DFL booth from 8:30-10:30pm. I'll have a…

I'm being prayed for. A prayer for the soul of PZ Meyers Dear God of Enduring Love, The atheist evilutionist and liberal elite college professor PZ Meyers has lost The Way and says some of the MOST hateful things about Your Work on this Earth and Republic that it is easy to understand why good…

Here is an excellent article on the biology of sexual orientation. We all know this is a contentious issue — are we born with an orientation, or is it a 'choice' that people make? — and the article just lays the facts out for us and points out some of the lacunae in our knowledge. First, I'll…

Histioteuthis heteropsis Figure from The Deep(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Claire Nouvian.

First Luskin, now Vox Day rushes to say something incredibly stupid (so what else is new?) about the new hominin fossils. It doesn't matter what the evidence is, evolutionary biologists are happy to change their story to suit. Errm, what? There's a problem in principle with his objection: yes,…

Amateurs. The Discovery Institute has already weighed in on the recently discovered hominin fossils, and wouldn't you know it … Casey Luskin squeaks that we must simply disown Homo habilis, and of course he claims that Jonathan Wells has been vindicated in his 'refutation' of a straight line of…

Somebody else has visited Darwin's house and taken a stroll on the sandwalk. I can testify that it is surprisingly difficult to get to the place, unless you have a trusty native guide — but once you get to the village, it really ought to be easier than that to find the place.

Two new Homo fossils are described in this week's Nature, and here they are. This is KNM-ER 42700. It's a very well preserved brain case, it has been dated to 1.55 million years ago, and it has been positively identified as belonging to Homo erectus. It's a little unusual in being particularly…

Pat Condell wants to know why faith deserves respect. Jesus and Mo explain why.

Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I've heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is…

I mentioned the growing entanglement of fundamentalist religion in the military the other day, and here's another example: proselytization in the military by evangelical freaks like Stephen Baldwin. Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of…

Don McLeroy is the new head of the Texas State Board of Education, and if you want to get an idea of what we face, there's a transcript and recording of a talk by McLeroy on the web. It's awful. It's mostly incoherent babble. He quotes a lot of odd irrelevancies, declares naturalism to be the enemy…

Baptists for Brownback are accusing me of satanic lies now, but I still haven't made their list of the hellbound. I'm wondering if it's my trophy wife who is keeping me from the brink of damnation. She was brought up as a Baptist, after all, and the fact that she's still with me at least implies…

How unfair that The Unicorn Museum would be compared to Ken Ham's "Museum" — everyone knows creationism is fake, but unicorns, because they are so lovely and sweet and happy and phallic, must be real. This is very serious. The proprietors want to put up a billboard to compete with the Creation "…

Some two-bit publicity hound can die, and that's all you can find on any of the television channels … a whole grand species can go extinct, and there's almost nothing. Say goodbye to the Yangtze River dolphin. It is officially extinct. The funeral will be poorly attended, and it will be forgotten,…

Chris Clarke has won the blogwars by being the first to deploy an auto blog-bot with an aggressive attitude. We are doomed. I wonder if I can steal a copy and put it to work writing my blog entries?

This has been the week that the whiny little twits have risen up to complain about atheism. The latest entry is from Camille Paglia, and many have written to me about it. I'm not going to bother. I've never cared much for Paglia, and Salon's infatuation with her as a columnist is incomprehensible…