pharyngula

Mary was pretty insistent that I had to show you this video — it's what the Monday Metazoan is all about. You might also want to see the higher quality video at NatGeo. (Also on FtB)

Could be trouble: the other apes are learning how to make fire, and you know where that ended up with us. (via sci-ence) (Also on FtB)

The news a few weeks ago was that hybrid sharks had been found off the coast of Australia. They looked like tropical Australian black-tip sharks, but genetic testing revealed that they'd hybridized with the common black-tip, which has a wider range; these hybrid black-tips were similarly extending…

It took me a moment to figure out what the heck Answers in Genesis was banging on about. In this bizarre article, AiG says the Galileo wondered why pumps could only move water upwards about 32 feet in 1630, meanders through random technological innovations, and ends up with Alexander Graham Bell…

Or maybe it's just guilty of bad journalism. Look at this story they ran: it's about a creationist who claims that Arizona sandstones are proof of Noah's flood. It's a remarkable piece of crap. The creationist, Greg Morgan, is a nuclear safety engineer, not a geologist, and his argument consists…

Poor Andy. Once upon a time, he had the power to kill children just by doing some very bad science and writing a few very bad papers, and now he's reduced to living in Texas and being supported by mobs of New Age cranks. He's powerless and bored, but his ego is still being inflated by sycophants…so…

(via Wired) (Also on FtB)

You won't be able to help yourselves. (Also on FtB)

There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense. First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls,…

(via NatGeo) (Also on FtB)

Hey! Remember that seven year old blogger who writes about paleozoic creatures? He's going to be eight, and he knows what he wants for his birthday: A trip to the Field Museum at the University of Chicago. Friends and family are trying to raise money so he can go. Wait a minute…I haven't been to…

You found an odd-shaped rock? You think it looks like a fossilized organ? Don't send a picture to me: go get some basic education in biology and geology, because I think you look like an idiot. Yeah, some demented guy just sent me a bunch of photos of a "mineralized brain". Judge for yourself.…

That most excellent blog on plant genetics and scientific agriculture, Biofortified, is having a fundraiser to maintain their eucational and reporting efforts (there's a full breakdown of where the money goes on the site). They're not asking much and they produce so much more — help 'em out if you…

Review the unpleasant nature of the cat's penis. Now contemplate this: "12 feet long and highly mobile" and "gigantic testes that weigh a ton". Although, I do confess, when a pod of these big boys go into rut in your back yard, you'll probably get even less sleep than when the neighborhood cats…

Weep for the poor creatures. But note the steely glint of vengeance in the eye of their living compatriots. (Also on FtB)

It's a question from Israel, so it was right-aligned. Too bad it wasn't written from right to left or it would have been more interesting. sorry for my bad english. someone gave me a strong evidence for a design a)we know that all robots need a designer b)from a material prespective, the human is…

Geoffrey Pearce sent me this argument he uses with creationists, and I thought others might find it useful, too. I am regularly approached by young Earth creationists (yes, even in the bedlam of sin that is Montreal...) both on the street and at home. If I have the time I try to engage them on the…

I hope some of the New Hampshire readers are paying attention: you have two creationist bills working through the legislature, and some real dingbats backing them. Bergevin told the Monitor, "I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It's a…

I've written about the spectacular phospatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation before. It's a collection of exceptionally well preserved small multicellular organisms, so well preserved that we can even look at cellular organelles. And they're pre-Cambrian, as much as 630 million years old.…

(via Loire Nature) (Also on FtB)

He's a delusional kook, but Collins is also a competent administrator, and I have to give him credit when he does the right thing. The NIH, led by Dr. Collins, has recently accepted a recommendation from the National Institute of Medicine that future chimpanzee research funding shall be suspended,…

Teo is an Australian surgeon who has a brilliant scheme for anyone with a bit of surgical skill and a complete lack of conscience. He performs surgery on inoperable brain tumors in kids dying of cancer, and then ships them off to the Burzynski clinic in Texas to get injected with urine and die. You…

(via Aquaviews) One of the bonuses of having lots of legs is that you can go bipedal whenever you feel like it. (via TONMO) A fun suggestion: do a google image search for "Wonderpus". Be prepared to go blind. (Also on FtB)

You've probably heard this story many times before: there's some kind of glass ceiling in the world of science and math that hinders women's ability to progress. The latest data confirms that something is going wrong. The United States ranks 31st on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and…

Usually, first thing in the morning, I'm feeding you some fresh new outrage or foolishness. How about something to awe and inspire for once? Here, watch the gorillas, and think about your place in the universe. (Also on FtB)

Ken Ham has been planning to build this colossal boondoogle in Kentucky, a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark. Except they've hit one little snag. Their groundbreaking was pushed back from spring, to summer, to fall, and the most recent media report was to next spring. Meanwhile, their fundraising…

Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it's not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It's wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue. It seems hazardous; ancestrally, in a world full…

How appropriate that one of the symbols of the season should be a parasite. (Also on FtB)

Look with your puny camera eyes! Some new specimens of Anomalocaris, the spectacular Cambrian predator, have been discovered in South Australia. These fossils exhibit well-preserved eyes, allowing us to see that the bulbous stalked balls on their heads were actually fairly typical compound eyes,…

I've been guilty of teaching bean-bag genetics this semester. Bean-bag genetics treats individuals as a bag of irrelevant shape containing a collection of alleles (the "beans") that are sorted and disseminated by the rules of Mendel, and at its worst, assigns one trait to one allele; it's highly…