Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
We've had a creationist named "biasevolution" babbling away in the comments. He's not very bright and he's longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I'm indefatigable, I can hammer at these…
Recently, Carl Zimmer made a criticism of the computer animations of molecular events (it's the same criticism I made 8 years ago): they're beautiful and they're informative, but they leave out the critical aspect of stochastic behavior that is important in understanding the biochemistry. He's…
You know what is really impressing me about Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos? That he doesn't hesitate to draw connections between science and how we live our lives — there is an implicit understanding that science has become fundamental to how we see the universe. Last night's episode was no exception…
He hates Tiktaalik. He hates it so much he even has a hard time spelling its name correctly.
Tikaalik is again being popularized through the new PBS series "Your Inner Fish.'' it's really a desperate con job on the part of evolutionists who can't defend their evolutionary fictional story.
He…
Virginia Hughes tells us about techniques to look inside the zebrafish brain. The gang at HHMI are using two photon imaging and clever image analysis to get very clear, sharp images of fluorescent neurons.
Oy, that's pretty. This old codger did some of that stuff, many years ago, but you know…
That photo is from a lovely new documentary, with this trailer.
However, I have to call attention to one troubling fact.
“All these lemurs have one thing in common – from the little one to the very largest one – they all have female dominance. The females are the leaders. The females are the…
Salon sometimes, and with increasing frequency lately, publishes some genuinely pernicious crap. I notice they've been experimenting with click-baity titles and more lists (I am growing to hate lists on the internet), there is more and more gullible religious pandering, and some days I think they'…
There's a common tactic used by creationists, and I've encountered it over and over again. It's a form of the Gish Gallop: present the wicked evolutionist with a long list of assertions, questions, and non sequiturs, and if they answer with "I don't know" to any of them, declare victory. It's easy…
Say goodbye to another mammal being sacrificed on the altar of 'traditional medicine' -- pangolin scales are consumed as medicine, their blood is used in tonics, their embryos are swallowed as aphrodisiacs, and they're just generally eaten up. They're also incredibly fragile, and cannot be farmed…
Yes, it surely does. It reeks.
I completely missed this article -- no surprise, it seems everyone did -- titled "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory," by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can't read it because…
The featured speaker at this year's National Science Teacher Association conference in Boston is…Mayim Bialik.
The lucky ones among you are saying right now, "who?". Others may know her from her television work, but maybe don't know the full story behind her 'science' activism.
She's an actor who…
The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they've also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the…
Perth Scuba
In case you're wondering how anything could be this gaudy and survive, it couples the color to a nasty toxin saturating its flesh. "Eat me and die," it's saying.
Here's another twist on the problematic trend to hire more temporary/part-time/adjunct faculty at universities. It's a disgraceful abuse of skilled academics and good teachers — would you believe that some schools hire adjuncts to teach four courses a semester (a brutal load, let me tell you) and…
I told you that the Discovery Institute really hates Cosmos. On Sunday night, Jay Richards, Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, Ph.D. in philosophy and theology, former instructor in apoletics at Biola, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, watched the show and occasionally curled his lip…
All the biologists out there know about the heath hen: it's probably the number one most common example of a recent extinction discussed in considerable detail, because it illustrates so well that extinction is a product of so many factors, from habitat loss to inbreeding to predation to…
I was looking over the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views site, prior to forgetting about it. I mentioned that I am forced to revamp my email handling and was going to be blocking a lot of noise from my work address, and as I was reviewing what domains I needed to allow through, I…
I was talking about sex and nothing but sex all last week in genetics, which is far less titillating than it sounds. My focus was entirely on operational genetics, that is, how autosomal inheritance vs inheritance of factors on sex chromosomes differ, and I only hinted at how sex is not inherited…
HHMI
The image shows approximately 16 choanocyte chambers, each about 30 micrometers in diameter—about the size of a pollen grain. The green color marks the flagella—hair-like structures that pump the water. The red color marks the cytoskeleton, which includes a structure called the collar (not…
Sometimes those are good descriptors. I read a happy story for a change this morning: it's about Arunachalam Muruganantham, an Indian man who embarked on a long crusade to make…sanitary napkins. Perhaps you laugh. Perhaps you get a little cranky at a guy who rushes in to meddle in women's concerns…