pharyngula

Don't forget to read the Carnival of the Godless before you go to bed…it's as effective as prayer!

Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into "faith-based" programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and…

They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what's coming next in creationism—these seem like quite probable strategies to me. As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger…

In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I'm going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I'm going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize: Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in…

What I really want to know is what Shelley was looking for when she stumbled across this: an art project to collect 1000 liters of human sperm and display it in a transparent cube. The Sperm Cube does not look like it was well thought out, I'm afraid. One problem is the collection method. They…

Look at this...Phil is sneaking around my back, recruiting people at the JREF to vote for him, as if he is the only skeptic in the running. He's also tried to win people over on talk.origins. I'll have you know I've been fighting for the forces of rationality for years now. I've debunked astrology…

Can you stand one more Gene-Ray-level internet crackpot? A reader sent me a link to this guy, Neal Adams, who has this insane "Growing Earth" idea. Forget all the physics and geology you think you knew—this animator and comic book publisher has invented his own solution, and it involves reworking…

How evil are you? Lauren wishes she had my score.

Phil is still playing the speciesist card, and now he wants to invoke the so-called superiority of bony internal skeletons. There's nothing wrong with a good hydrostatic skeleton, you know, it's one of those useful innovations that allows a soft tissue to extend and become rigid. I'm sure Phil's…

A reader sent me a link to this very strange site, and I've been trying to determine whether it's a satire or not. It seems the answer is…not. There's a huge amount of kook screed here. We get to learn that we Americans are actually living in Cabotia, named after the one true discoverer of North…

This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra's endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I'm sure, though, that he'll find other things to babble about. In this one, he claims he's going to deal with objections…

I finally saw Borat last night, and I'm afraid I was unimpressed. There were a few funny moments, there were a few horrifying moments where he raised a mirror to our culture to make us squirm (the cheerfully eliminationist cowboy at the rodeo, for instance, or those appallingly stupid frat boys),…

Now Phil has gone too far. In a Rovian scheme to pander to bigotry, he has confessed to cultivating my love of cephalopods to discredit me, and he has also stated that liking invertebrates is "unhealthy". And now he has called us cephalapodufascist! This is what he sent me in his sneaky, long-…

An absolutely awesome game.

We have a splendid double feature weekend of liberal extremism here at the Morris Theater: Borat and Happy Feet. This is going to be one of those events where I'll see all these people I know from the university lining up for the show, and the only community people will be the fervent DFL…

Read! Carnival of Education #96 Carnival of the Liberals #27 Skeptics' Circle #49 Friday Ark #116 Circus of the Spineless #15 Comment! On anything you want!

Via Byzantium's Shores, I have learned that there will be a Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon on 20 December, the anniversary of his death. I notice there's also a Skeptics' Circle scheduled for the 21st at Humbug! Online…there are opportunities for some synergy here!

Phil is pleased that water has been discovered on Mars, and thinks this is a good reason to send spaceships there…and back. As a biologist, I wonder what alien life forms could be flourishing in that damp opportunity, and would urge careful disinfection. Who knows what weird parasitic…

Good news for Olduvai George—he's got new commissions that are keeping him busy—but that means he might be a little tied up for a while. Still, he's nice enough to give us an eclectic mix of interesting creatures.

I'm going to rudely hijack one political issue to make a point about another. I think you'll quickly figure out what it is. NARAL has been undermining their own relevance by failing to support pro-choice positions in a misguided attempt to court moderates—basically, as Ezra Klein points out, they'…

Another week, another collection of tentacular oddities from the mailbag. Keep sending 'em in!

Clutch of Argonauta nodosa eggs and hatchlings Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

This is a lovely song. (via Mixing Memory)

Really, I wasn't going to make a big deal of this award, but then Phil had to go and mock the noble name of Pharyngula, and make it all a challenge. Now as a matter of honor I have to try and defeat the Bad Astronomy blog. I have to do this. If you read that post, it is revealed that Phil has…

Behold the spectacularly long-tongued glossophagine nectar bat, Anoura fistulata: Anoura fistulata feeding from a test tube filled with sugared water; its tongue (pink) can extend to 150% of body length. This length of tongue is unusual for the genus, and there is an explanation for how it can fit…

That's a baby gorilla holding hands with a worker at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. It's a touching picture (and there's a much larger version available if you click on the image), but there's an ugly story behind it. The gorilla is a "bush-meat orphan". "Bush-meat orphan." That's a phrase of…

Gaaa...stop chattering on the Sean Henry thread! I set that up as a finely focused exercise in politely discussing his criticism of evolution, not for all that ongoing discussion about whether this is good or bad or complaining at each other about whether your answer is appropriate or chatting…

You may recall that a while back Nature published a letter from a Polish creationist, Maciej Giertych. This week, they published some of the replies. It's entertaining stuff: I've put all the letters below the fold. A timely wake-up call as anti-evolutionists publicize their views from U.…

Medgadget had a Sci Fi contest, and they've just posted the winning entries. The results are your usual mixed bag of amateur SF, but since it is a medical gadget site, one of the interesting outcomes is that all of them are focused on science and engineering and medicine, and not so much that other…

The UK Education Minister has the right idea. After the pseudoscientific group "'Truth' in Science" mailed out teaching plans for creationism to schools in England, it took them a while, but the government has now spoken out loudly and clearly against their nonsense. The government has already…