pharyngula

Oh, wait — I got the headline backwards. The real story is that a mentally disturbed, fanatical Christian/creationist and misogynist, went nuts, killed a young woman on a community college campus, and then killed himself. It's a tragedy, but not at all exceptional, I'm afraid — the man was…

It's an article about yet another Christian who was once an atheist, telling us how awful and unfulfilling life was until he found Jebus. The guy is a fool, and just to spice it up, they threw in…a poll! A poll that needs fixing! Should creationism have a place in the curriculum? 54% are saying yes…

My first column in the Guardian science blog will be coming out soon, and it's about a recent discovery that I found very exciting…but that some people may find strange and uninteresting. It's all about the identification of nodal in snails. Why should we care? Well, nodal is a rather important…

That is the kind of important question we ponder all the time, and in a demonstration of the superiority of empirical data over philosophizing, here is a video to show the answer.

I hated doing this, but it has become necessary. You now have to register with an off-site authentication service in order to leave a comment here. It's not hard; just follow the links at the Typekey page, and it should sail through and let you comment freely afterwards. (In theory, you should also…

Spike-cheek anemonefish

I'm sad to report that John Maddox, former editor of Nature, has died. He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his…

As many of you know, Alan Clarke is a fundamentalist/creationist kook who has been babbling in the comments for a while now. A reader alerted me to how Clarke found his way here: he was posting his silliness on a powerbasic support forum, and was warned that we would "kick his butt" if he came here…

This will put a smile on your face — James Dobson is in despair. The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the…

Your Sunday morning hour with the radio at 9am Central time will feature anthropologist David Eller on Atheist Talk radio. Learn about Atheist Advanced!

What can we expect of a theocracy? One thing is for sure: you won't be able to criticize the church or church leadership. Here's an example from Florida. Mac Brunson is the pastor of one of those awful megachurches, an organization that has been growing fast and sucking up lots of money for…

I have encountered this pathetic rhetorical game so often…it's one of Ray Comfort's favorite tools. Christian goes up to a stranger, and says he'd like to play a "what if" game with you. What if there was a god, and the ten commandments were his rules? Do you agree that if they're real, you'd…

I have just spent over an hour of my day cleaning up the spam from the insane asshole, David Markuze/Mabus. I'm still not done; I've got various tools cranking away in the background purging his recent eruption of hate-filled, lunatic rants. 160 comments, all saying the same thing. It's too much,…

While Ben Goldacre was writing his book, Bad Science, he was also being sued by the crank, Matthias Rath…which meant he was under a lawyer-mandated gag order and couldn't include his debunking of Rath in the book. Now that the suit is ended (Goldacre won), he is making the chapter on mega-vitamin…

Someone at the Discovery Institute received a vaguely threatening email. If the writer is someone who reads this, you've done something disgraceful, and you should send an apology immediately; we do not threaten to silence or cause harm to the clowns of creationism. Laugh at them, dissect their…

I'm on the Reasonable Doubts podcast this week, if you'd care to tune in. This was recorded when I was in Michigan, near the end of my visit, and you can tell…my voice gets huskier after a couple of days of non-stop talking. Or maybe those rascals snuck in a ringer to dub over me, in order to get…

I might just appear behind you and…LINK. I'm horrible that way.

I just got my very own I [squid] NY shirt, which prompts a few questions. When are we going to get a squid html entity, like ♥? I'm sure it would be used heavily. How would New Yorkers interpret this shirt, anyway (I know, New Yorkers see enough weirdness that they don't care)? I'm going to be in…

You have to watch this weird and engrossing video about Robert White, the neurosurgeon whose goal was to achieve a total body transplant. He's the guy who was doing the monkey head transplants: cutting the head off one monkey, and sewing it onto the body of another…and it's hard to get more Herbert…

I have a t-shirt with those words on it; it's from the Museum of Jurassic Technology exhibit of letters to Mount Wilson Observatory, a fascinating collection of crackpot letters written to astronomers between 1915 and 1935, containing the astounding theories created by people around the world, who…

Let's smash this silly poll about the status of the US. President Obama said, 'We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of a values. How do you feel about those comments?…

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died.

The CFI World Congress had Michael Ruse speak on science education and religion, which I could have told anyone would be a ghastly mistake. The guy has got some very peculiar notions that, if more widely accepted, would destroy science education in this country. Larry Moran was annoyed to find that…

Abralia veranyi Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

The races aren't quite over, but the good news is that the four non-creationists running for the Lincoln board of education have successfully advanced to the general election. Don't forget to vote on 5 May!

Sad news: I was not able to make it to Miller's talk at St. Catherine's last night. We're down to one car right now, and the choice was between me indulging myself with a long drive and a Ken Miller talk at the end of it, or my wife could have the vehicle so she could do the responsible thing and…

This looks like fun, but it's a bit of drive for me: Steven Schlozman will be giving a talk on the neuropsychology of zombies. He's talking about levels of activity in the brain and modeling of behavior, which could be interesting — fantasy and horror can be useful tools to get people interested in…

TED talks are rather mixed in quality, but this is a good one: Bonnie Bassler talking about bacteria, bacterial communication, and even squid. Of course, even the squid are vehicles for culturing bacteria…

Get ready, West coast: in two weeks I'll be in Ashland, Oregon, speaking in the Meese Room, Hannon Library, at Southern Oregon University, at 7:00pm on 23 April. If you aren't a student, you'll have to pay a whole $10 to hear me — that's more than I'd pay to see a Michael Bay movie, and I won't…