pharyngula

We learn something about the designer below the fold… Read the whole thing, though, for the sad conclusion—the "big tent" of Intelligent Design has some limits.

I just received a little present in the mail… [note autograph]

Ah, so that's what this scienceblogs.com thing is all about: we're a Vehicle for Upscale Ads. It feels a bit strange to be viewed as a "vehicle". I see this as more of a virus, with the corporate world as the host vehicle, and I'm exploiting them in order to get fast free network hosting. So that…

I was challenged to address a moral dilemma brought up by Kevin Drum. For the sake of argument, let's assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let's also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major…

Nematostella, the starlet anemone, is a nifty new model system for evo-devo work that I've mentioned a few times before—in articles on "Bilateral symmetry in a sea anemone" and "A complex regulatory network in a diploblast"—and now I see that there is a website dedicated to the starlet anemone and…

Maybe the right wingers will be interested in expanding this UCLA program to pay student Quislings. A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are "abusive, one-sided or off-…

Variation is common, and often lingers in places where it is unexpected. The drawing to the left is from West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and illustrates six common variations in the branching pattern of the aortic arch in humans. These are…

There's a lovely article in this week's Nature documenting a transitional stage in tetrapod evolution (you know, those forms the creationists like to say don't exist), and a) Nature provides a publicly accessible review of the finding, and b) the primary author is already a weblogger! Perhaps…

The Skeptics' Circle this week is a little mysterious. Follow the secret message to find the answers. I was a little disappointed, though, that no grues were involved.

Hey! I'm supposed to host the Circus of the Spineless next week (I think on 29 January), and I've only received one submission so far! Someone must have written something somewhere about invertebrates, right? There is a set of rules for submissions, but it's going to be simple: I'll accept anything…

Open Thread I'm doing some traveling and touristy things with grrlscientist today, on top of somehow coping with the first week of classes (physiology and our freshman seminar in biological principles), and attending Drinking Liberally at the 331 Club tonight. I also have to get tickets to the…

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is online at Greythumb.blog. We are looking for volunteers to host future editions later this spring—drop a note to me if you're interested in spreading the word about science blogging.

At least he didn't reveal my secret identity as mild-mannered biologist, Dr PZ Myers.

Nah, I don't believe it. (via feministing)

You wouldn't know it to see it, but we aim to make Morris, Minnesota the Mecca of science blogging. How else to explain how we could draw Grrlscientist away from that boring dump of a town, New York, to visit our lovely prairie village for a week? It's true: a whole two of us ScienceBlogs people…

That school in California that tried to teach a creationist "philosophy" course was chewed out by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute. Luskin's statement consisted of the usual folderol, but the outright fraud of several statements leapt out at me. My name is Casey Luskin and I am an attorney…

Jonathon The Impaler (our Minnesota vampire running for governor) is interviewed on the City Pages Blotter. I'm still not voting for him. It's interesting that his source of income is selling cloaks to covens. It's also distressing that he needs that income because his wife got fired from her job…

A while back, a reader mentioned that my name (or some permutation thereof) was being taken in vain in the letters pages of the Durango Herald. Nothing new there, it's just the usual half-truths of the Discovery Institute being disseminated. Challenges to evolution met with scorn I find that some…

If you want to start off your day with a heartwarming story, read about the rescue of a nest of Ozark Big-Eared Bats, Plecotus townsendii ingens. Isn't that little guy cute? Me, I'm going to run off and spend my morning getting the first day of classes off the ground. It's going to be a busy…

This is a post originally made on the old Pharyngula website; I'll be reposting some of these now and then to bring them aboard the new site. There are a number of reasons why the current theory of evolution should be regarded as incomplete. The central one is that while "nothing in biology makes…

Hey, Norbizness is supposed to be a funny guy. So what's he doing posting an excellent excerpt from a Martin Luther King letter? I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's…

Chris Clarke sees that we're Abandoning NOLA in Orion: "[W]hile encouraging city residents to return home and declaring for the media audience that "we will do whatever it takes" to save the city, the President... formally refused the one thing New Orleans simply cannot live without: A restored…

Give Up Blog posts a fascinating map of charitable giving by state, to shoot down a fatuous WSJ op-ed that tries to claim greater charity as a Red State virtue. I certainly don't see a positive correlation there, do you? That claim brings to mind another common misconception, that religion is the…

This is the place to bring up any old thing that strikes your fancy. I'm also asking some of the commenters from The Panda's Thumb to bring their gripes about the ludicrous management of Uncommon Descent, that bastion of Intelligent Design close-mindedness, over here, just because the outrage is…

The Hwang Woo Suk stem cell research scandal has triggered quite a bit of concerned introspection in the scientific community. Orac has some useful comments on a good article in the NY Times that makes the distinction between "frontier science" and "textbook science", where much of the current stem…

Since I was criticizing King Kong, it's appropriate that the deranged photoshoppers at Something Awful decided to do a series on novel giant monsters. I thought grrlscientist might appreciate this one. (via The Nonist)

Lya Kahlo carried out an informal atheistical survey of Christian forums—she visited 35 online religious forums as an openly atheist but friendly visitor, to sample their attitudes. The results aren't pretty. Her summary: The entire experience can be summed up fairly easily. Generally speaking,…

In Peter Jackson's Return of the King, there was a spectacular scene in which the elf Legolas single-handedly takes out a giant war elephant, first dispatching the entire crew riding its back, then firing a couple of arrows into its skull. Finally, with cool aplomb, he slides down the dying beast's…

Bredocaris admirabilis Ooooh, there's a gorgeous gallery of Orsten fossils online. These are some very pretty SEMs of tiny Cambrian animals, preserved in a kind of rock called Orsten, or stinkstone (apparently, the high sulfur content of the rock makes it smell awful). What are Orsten fossils?…

Isn't that adorable? It's a knitted crocheted Ninja Squid, complete with backstory…that includes pirate squid.