pharyngula

Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion. I'm not talking about creationism, although it's exactly the same story. It's the anti-vax…

Yet again, another defender of Islam hangs the truth of his holy book on the scientific accuracy of the text. It's amazing how defensive these fundies get over the possibility that the author was merely transmitting the guesswork of the time, and like any scientific hypothesis, stands a risk of…

CIAC Unfortunately, this event is not on my calendar: the Cephalopod International Advisory Council (CIAC) is meeting 8-14 November in Hakodate, Japan, to discuss recent advances in cephalopod science (pdf). It looks delightful. I've always wanted to visit Japan. But alas, all I can do is tell…

How would you feel if NOAA sent a camera to snoop around your most intimate moments, huh?

We're hiring! If you have skill in teaching, and want to hone those skills at a school with a reputation for excellence in teaching, apply! Full-Time One-Year Position in Biology University of Minnesota, Morris The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in…

Dan Graur has suggested some changes to the classification of DNA. It's one more pile of terminology to keep straight, but the distinctions are conceptually useful -- I particularly appreciate literal vs. indifferent DNA as subdivisions of functional DNA. The pronouncements of the ENCODE Project…

Darwin's Slipper

This is the head of a tapeworm that takes up residence in people's skulls. You aren't trying to eat dinner right now, are you?

Financial information has to be reduced to the simplest possible form for me to follow. Fortunately, a reader, Brian, has been extracting the data from Answers in Genesis's Form 990 tax information, and this chart tells me what I need to know. The key thing is the lowest, gray line: that's the…

Hint for science journalists: if the hook to get readers to pay attention to your story is to warn them to sit down because a 19th century "law" of evolution has been shown to be wrong, you're going to irritate scientists, who will then write rude blog posts sneering at your writing. That's the…

Just yesterday, Japanese fishermen caught a 6m long giant squid, and it lived for a few hours before expiring. Here's a video of the rare beastie swimming about, with shots of the tragic corpse afterwards.

flowersvg They absolutely refuse to touch themselves.

TONMO

The The Crafoord Prize in Biosciences has been announced. For those who don't know, this is a very prestigious award, comparable to the Nobel prize, only not as well known. The categories are specifically designed to complement the Nobel. This year's winners are Richard Lewontin and Tomoko Ohta,…

I found this picture on a site called "Wedding Flowers", which is kind of interesting, since 30% of yellow evening primroses reproduce asexually. I think that means it's the best wedding flower for marriages in which the partners intend to clone themselves. Wedding Flowers

Perhaps you've heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo's challenge of $10,000 to "prove evolution"; Ray Comfort's challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money,…

I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina's Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God. It's good! This book is the sort of thing atheism needs more of: an acknowledgment that the phenomena most important to human beings can be addressed effectively without imagining…

Scott Gietler

Michael Land was one of those people who totally warped my brain. I've been interested in science since I was a kid, but I'm embarrassed to say that I never heard a whisper about evolution in the public schools I attended. Although I read about it avidly, I came out of high school and charged off…

His latest column chides the climate Cassandras, and makes a really bizarre argument. Did you know that there have been severe disruptions of human activity by non-anthropogenic climate change in the past? And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence,…

Dan Graur has written a good summary of genetic load. It's an important concept in population genetics, and everyone should be familiar with it…and this is a nice 2½ page summary with only a little math in it. I'll try to summarize the summary in two paragraphs and even less math … but you should…

(via HMMI)

That paper that proposed that most cancers were due to bad luck, that is, that they were a consequence of biological factors that could not be controlled, has been surprisingly controversial. I thought it was a fairly unsurprising paper that confirmed what we already suspected, but wow, the furious…

Oh, look. The creationists have been routed, and the problem of the origin of life has been solved. Would you like to learn about the brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified? The Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could…

If there is one cause of cancer, it would be genetic damage to somatic cells. So all we have to do to cure cancer is prevent all genetic damage! That's not a very useful prescription, unfortunately; it's rather like saying that all we have to do to prevent accidental deaths is prohibit all…

All right, I definitely want to go there. It also looks as though MBARI has a multi-barrel squid-sucker, according to this video. I want one!

Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for…

Australian Nature

Maki Naro has put together a must-read primer on the basics of vaccination, in cartoon form, of course. Send it to all of your denialist friends and family!

I Love Octopuses