pharyngula

I sniped at Jim Drummond for his odd demotion of evolutionary biology the other day — his colleague at the University of Toronto, Larry Moran, tried to get to the bottom of it. I contacted Drummond by email to see if he really was an IDiot. Prof. Drummond claims he can't remember exactly what he…

Broad generalizations about people of certain political views are always good for an entertaining wrangle…so here's a provocative article on The Ideological Animal: Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color. Conservatives' rooms are better organized, more…

Check out The Happy Tortoise. An undergraduate at a liberal arts college writing about science…what's not to like?

¡Hola, amigos! I'm posting this from sunny, tropical…Michigan??!? Wait a minute, I thought January trips were supposed to be to some place with warm beaches and drinks with umbrellas and bikinis, not Detroit. This is more of a lateral shift, a change in longitude, rather than latitude. There must…

The vulva is one of my favorite organs. Not only is it pretty and fun to manipulate, but how it responds tells us so much about its owner. And it is just amazing how much we're learning about it now. Don't worry about clicking to read more…this article is full of pictures, but it is entirely work…

I thought this sad case of a woman dying of water intoxication was the result of mere ignorance, but it turns out it was an act of willful, criminal stupidity. In an online recording of the show, the DJs can be heard making comments joking about people dying from water intoxication, even discussing…

Steven Weinberg reviews The God Delusion. It's almost entirely positive—one exception is that he takes Dawkins to task for being too even-handed and well-intentioned towards Islam. I particularly enjoyed his criticisms of the critics. Here's a familiar argument: The reviews of The God Delusion in…

Steve Reuland follows up on that strangely repeated claim that Ken Ham's creationist museum is within 6 hours of 2/3 of the population of the US. Short answer: NO WAY, DUDE. He did make an interesting suggestion, though. If you wanted the museum to be close to a lot of people, shifting it to the…

Lord J-Bar is much, much more optimistic than I am. Even considering how clever ID advocates have been, all it takes is knowledge to defeat ID. Once a person understands science, it’s easy to see ID for what it is: theology. Plus, the public needs to know why ID came to be. It doesn’t come any…

Scott Aaronson has a revelation: it's OK for a "disbelieving atheist infidel heretic" to refer to a god. What I'm trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history — Einstein, Erdös, Twain — could refer to a being of dubious…

This is cool: a team using distributed computing to solve the protein folding problem has put out a promotional video asking for your unused computing cycles…and along the way they explain exactly what it is they are doing.

I am committed to more brevity, so I must resist the temptation to draw out my greatsword, chop this into bloody chunks, and stomp the gobbets into gooey red smears while howling, "There are nooooo gods!!!", but I will take exception to one small piece of Francis Collins' interview in Christianity…

The latest edition, Tangled Bank #71, is set in 1771, so if you want your biology with an Enlightenment flavor, you know where to go.

If you're interested in the DVD that that the creationist Truth in Science group sent out to every teacher in Britain, someone has accidentally made it available as a bittorrent file.

I've hinted before that I've been puttering away at a book, and the latest hint is that there is a possibility of some very serious interest in it—no promises yet, merely the whisper of potential, but still…this could be a big step. At the same time, that potential comes with things like serious…

This odd duck, discovered by Phil, has an amazing theory, which is his: Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people's blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which…

On Saturday and Sunday, 17-18 February, it's the Twin Cities Creation "Science" Association's Science Fair…held that week in honor of Charles Darwin's birthday, I'm sure. Unfortunately, I'm making the drive to Minneapolis twice that week already, so I'm going to have to pass on making a third trip…

Last week, the Star Tribune published an article on global warming that included this foolish statement: "If we compare the debate over the theory of evolution with the debate over the theory of global warming — global warming's a whole lot more certain at the moment," said Jim Drummond, a…

Darren Naish doesn't like Darwin's beard. Why? Because it perpetuates stereotypes of scientists as old men. Maybe someone needs to tell babyface over there that men can grow beards in their 20s, and having a beard doesn't necessarily mean you're a wizened old fuddy-duddy.

So Obama is running for president. I'm not a fan (too pious and too unaccomplished), but what hurt most about the article is this: Mr. Obama, 45, was elected to the Senate two years ago. He becomes the fifth Democrat to enter the race, joining Senators Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and Christopher J…

I mulled over some of the suggestions in my request for basic topics to cover, and I realized that there is no such thing as a simple concept in biology. Some of the ideas required a lot of background in molecular biology, others demand understanding of the philosophy of science, and what I am…

Coturnix has assembled the Science Blogging Anthology using a self-publishing service. It seems like a bit of a cheat: skim the cream off a bunch of blogs, stick 'em together, and presto, you've got a 336 page book. Technology is just like magic, isn't it?

AND I'M NOT READY! Can we have a couple more weeks of vacation, please? Last day of classes: May 2nd. 30 lectures, 45 lab sections away.

A strange map—it gives an equivalent nation in GNP for each state in the US: Some are weirdly appropriate: Minnesota compares with Norway, France and California are mates, and Dick Cheney's home state shares something else in common with Uzbekistan. Texas and Canada, though…hey, do you think if we…

Oh, yeah, baby…that's what I need: a most macho suit of armor. I'm not sure that I believe that a 40 pound shell can stop an elephant gun, though, but it sure looks fierce.

The Bell Museum in Minneapolis is pulling out all the stops in the month of February, celebrating Darwin's birth month with an orgy of science and sex. I'm going to be there for the events on the 13th and 15th, and I'm really tempted by the talk on the 20th—I'll have to see if I can get away for…

You may recall a ferociously hardfought battle between myself and the Bad Astronomer over the Weblog Awards a while back—a battle I won easily, of course, by the overwhelming majority of approximately 1%—and that we had bet each other various horrendous penalties if the other was the victor. Phil…

This one snuck up on me: a new carnival dedicated to ecology and the environment, called Oekologie. The first edition is up at the Infinite Sphere—this was a niche that needed filling!

Ken Ham is in the news again, and he knows exactly what he's doing, the cunning little rat. While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah's Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-…

He's singing about theistic evolution, so he must be one of those appeasers…but since he's funny, I'll forgive him.