pharyngula

One of the serious shortcomings of Intelligent Design is that it does nothing to provide any new or productive insights into the workings of biology. ID proponents seem to be at least vaguely aware of this failure, in that they do frequently claim to be thinking about working on a preliminary,…

[Since I had to fly away early this morning and missed all these talks, I had to rely on regular commenter DanioPhD to fill in the gaps … so here's her summary:] This morning's final series of talks each focused on a different phylum, but the unifying theme was one of bridging the processes of…

You know, I caught a plane at 5:20am this morning, had a long flight across the country followed by a 3 hour drive to get home, so I'm not exactly feeling pleasantly conducive to continuing the latest sanctimonious whine-fests from some of the people who share a server with me. I have been avoiding…

(via My Confined Space)

It was nothing but gray skies and intermittent rain while I was there. It was so beautiful … it felt like home. It was also good seeing my old mentors from grad school days, Chuck Kimmel and John Postlethwait. Patrick Phillips played this video on the big screen. In my presence. I thought about…

Tune in to Atheist Talk radio at 9am Central this morning. This week, Peter McGrath and Karen James of The Beagle Project will discuss their attempts to rebuild the HMS Beagle and retrace the voyage to the Galapagos taken by Charles Darwin. I'm afraid I'll be airborne during the show this week, so…

I'm going to get off a quick summary of this afternoon's talks, then I have to run down to the poster session to find out what the grad students have been doing. Are we having fun yet? I'm going to collapse in bed tonight, and then unfortunately I have to catch an early flight back home, so I'm…

My brain is most wonderfully agitated, which is the good thing about going to these meetings. Scientists are perverse information junkies who love to get jarred by new ideas and strong arguments, and meetings like this are intense and challenging. I've only got a little time here before the next…

Oh, but I do rankle Mark Armitage. He has taken to cc'ing me his email to others, all in this bluff, indignant, "me am too a scientist" pose, and it is hilarious. This is probably the last one I'll post here, but I do hope he keeps sending me this stuff — it provides a moment of levity. Hello…

While I'm not much of a fan of country western music, I might warm to it more if the AM radio back home were this interesting in its choice of subjects. (Warning! Working man's language and rural sexism ahead!)

So here I am at the IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics, having a grand time, even if I did get called out in the very first talk. There were two keynote talks delivered this evening, both of which I was anticipating very much, and which represented the really good side of…

The Sykes family has my sympathy — they have an autistic child, and that has to be difficult. My sympathy is limited, however, by the fact that are lashing out seeking to blame someone, have bought into the thimerosal hysteria, have hired a bottom-feeding shyster to sue various pharmaceutical…

Nautilus pompilious and some chordate Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

Look at this: the Expellers are lying again. In this case, they're screening people who've asked to attend showings, and then, instead of just telling them that they are not invited, they're being cowardly and telling them that the screening has been cancelled. It's so pointless — they could just…

When the top of your web page is a scattershot series of all-caps links to crazy town. - Life After Death - -WHY THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ENRAGES US!. WHY ALL EVOLUTIONISTS ARE CRIMINALLY INSANE FOR GAYS: HOW TO STOP YOUR HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVITY FOR THE GENTLEMEN: HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE A STUPID MAN FOR…

I'm going to head out the door shortly for my drive down Minnesota back roads to Little House on the Prairie country — if I get there early, is there any place in town that's good for coffee and wifi? I was planning to find a cheap hotel for the night, too, and leave from there to catch a plane in…

I try to stay away from Dinesh D'Souza's ravings, but when you've got SIWOTI syndrome, the man is like a magnet of wrong. His one saving grace now is that his columns are so bad, I usually can't get through the first paragraph without having to close the window. This one is no exception. One…

All right, people, I give up. Everyone has been sending me links to this story about a recent publication — it made the CBC, ScienceDaily, CNN, the Telegraph, and who knows what else — but I haven't been able to get my hands on the original science article: Huffard CL, Caldwell RL, Boneka F (2008…

Did you know that it is assumed that if you are a Christian and a teacher, that you oppose the teaching of evolution and want to introduce creationism into the classroom? Did you know that people purporting to represent you will be going before state legislatures and telling your representatives…

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is now available at Further Thoughts. Sarah Silverman? How'd she get in there?

It's my afternoon for getting lots of whiny right-wing Christianist email, I guess. This one is notable, not for its content (which is predictable, humorless, and indignant, and just like most of the complaints I get), but for the fact that it was also sent to my chancellor and every member of the…

My criticism of Mark Armitage's "research" published in the ICR "journal" seems to have struck a nerve — he just sent me (and his colleagues at the ICR) an angry letter in which I think he is attempting sarcasm, he just isn't very good at at it. Poor baby. Here it is: I am SO THANKFUL and indebted…

Mike Dunford has a series of articles on a recent California court decision — in brief, Christian homeschoolers tried to sue California universities to force them to accept courses taught with Christianist literalist creationist textbooks as legitimate, college-level science credit, and they lost.…

I endorse this message. Enough said, right?

To my students and advisees: I've emailed a few of you, but just in case, I'm also putting this here. You've been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I'm not in class I'm flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last…

But do I really have to share equal billing with Ben Stein?

The Institute for Creation Research is a treasure trove of sloppy pseudoscience. I mentioned one "research" article that they put out that was nothing but a flurry of bible verses wrapped around an argument from incredulity; now a reader has pointed me to another article that tries very hard to ape…

Watch the pretty squid.

They're so far ahead, it's almost April 2nd there right now. And they have taken an important next step: they have passed regulations requiring the reading of disclaimers at church services: Congregants should be aware of the gaps and/or problems in the Catholic theory of transubstantiation,…

The Institute for Creation Research has just published a fairly typical article for them: it's the usual laundry list of amazing biological structures that cry out "Jaaayzuusss!" to the faithful. In this case, they pick on squid. You see, squid have wonderfully complex specializations to control…