pharyngula

The core value of creation science is dishonesty. I was reminded of this yet again by an account by Todd Feeley of a RATE conference. RATE means "Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth", and they are an excuse for creationist frauds to get together and spout off misleading pseudoscientific babble…

Their engagement is on youtube, if you prefer your video streaming. It's more like one round of a ping-pong match than the full bare-knuckle fist fight we'd like to see, but it's not bad. Keep your expectations reasonable, and Dawkins did very well.

Commercials baffle me, but this one for Tostitos more than others. It's a little trite, using the scenario of the little kid who asks "why?" to every explanation as a transparent excuse to drive exposition about why you should try their product, but it has an odd conclusion. We're all made from…

Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He's still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we've seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren't slides that make me very happy. The slide I…

Jessica Valenti of Feministing has an excellent interview in Salon, and has also written a book on contemporary feminism. I hope it does well! It's probably very polite — I'll let you know after I finish reading it.

George Shollenberger is not happy with scienceblogs. He sent an email to the scienceblogs website (whatever that means) with a complaint: I started to inform 'the people' on my website that our mathematicians are practicing atheism. Then, after I investigated the website, ScienceBlogs, I concluded…

It's not what I would have picked if I had a choice, but it seems that my amazing mutant superpower is the ability to effortlessly drive people insane. I guess it's not surprising that my talent would be both sinister and Lovecraftian, but I'd rather be able to fly or fire lasers out of my eyes —…

I'm back! I had a long, busy day at a teaching conference, and got persuaded about a few things — I'm designing a new course for freshmen biology majors for the fall term ("Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development", or FunGenEvoDevo for short), and I've been following the pedagogical…

Remember: tonight, 8 PM EST, it's Richard Dawkins vs. Bill O'Reilly. It could be a disaster, it could be a triumph, it could be a comedy. I'm hoping I'll be back at home in time to catch it.

The author of The Lifelong Activist, Hillary Rettig, sent me a lovely quote and a recommendation. First, the quote: Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean…

Near as I can judge, Pharyngula is the third most popular blog in the entire state of Minnesota, as measured by traffic and inbound links. This is a good and distinguished place to be, and I'm both pleased and surprised that this obscure little collection of rants has ranked so highly. Except… It'…

We're coming into the home stretch for the semester here—this will be the second to the last week of classes, and just as I'm panicking about everything I have to cram into the last few lectures, what do I do? Disappear! Flit about from place to place! It would be a great way to dodge assassins if…

Here are some useful, general suggestions for giving an academic talk. Most of them are fairly obvious and I already know them, but as usual, the hard part is actually following them. (via Entertaining Research)

Larry Moran listened to Nisbet's podcast on Point of Inquiry. No surprise—he didn't like it at all. I finally listened to it last night, too, and I have to crown Larry the King of the Curmudgeons, because I disagreed with fundamental pieces of his story, but I'll at least grant Nisbet that there…

David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It's not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what's been published lately. Breaking the…

Wow, but this is awful. Don't watch it unless you're feeling masochistic. It's a snotty, arrogant punk kid filmed in annoying style claiming that he has disproven atheism and that all science is based on theology. I think he might be something like a freshman philosophy major who has just…

Heh…I knew it wouldn't be at all difficult to get a feminist to back me up on my wild and crazy claim that feminists didn't mind getting rude. There's a nice photo of a long-skirted lady in a big hat teaching a British bobby the delicate ways of politesse, too. Maybe the critics can wait until we…

Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden's place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism 'hurts the cause', he brought up a historical parallel: Here's just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that…

To my surprise, I opened this week's edition of the university newspaper, and there was an article about me (it's near the end, on page 18). It's complimentary, if you think words like "scathing" and "godless" are high compliments, as I do, and it's also good to see what some of the students think…

Darksyde has just announced a few details about the science panels that will be held at the YearlyKos Convention. One relevant piece of information is that I'm the guy in charge of the science caucus, and I have to organize something. If Darksyde had ever seen my office, organization is not a word…

Animals and education await you at these fine carnivals: Friday Ark #135 Carnival of Education #115 I and the Bird #47 It's time for the Tangled Bank next week, at About Archaeology — send your tired, your poor…wait, no, send those links to science articles to me or host@tangledbank.net by…

Has anyone heard from Dinesh D'Souza lately? He ought to be offering a humble apology now that the atheists he thought were invisible are turning up on the faculty and in the student body. Oh, wait … he admits that there were "undoubtedly atheists among the mourners", but considers his point that…

I met the fellow who was doing this animated short at the Bell Museum a while back, and now he's let me know the work was done … so here it is for everyone to enjoy.

Awww, Kent Hovind's appeal has been denied. I feel a bit sorry for his wife, the poor dupe, but Kent will just have more time to convert "lost souls" in jail, so he can't complain. Well, except for the fact that Satan is in bunk #22. That must be awkward. (via The Austringer)

Sepiadarium austrinum By the way, did you know that creationists hate cephalopods because they can't stuff them in a sack and throw them in the water to drown? Also because they're cute and lovable and beautiful. Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

In addition to being a contemptible ghoul who uses a tragedy to attack an unrelated concept, evolutionary biology (we are all on the same page, right? The evidence so far is that the Virginia Tech killer was a mentally ill young man with a confused Christ complex, not a ruthless atheist proponent…

I speak of Dinesh D'Souza, who seems to have noticed that his creepy and dishonest tirade against atheists won him some attention, so now he has upped the ante, and gotten even creepier and more dishonest. Start with the title: "Dawkins' Message to Mourners--Get Over It!". That sounds as if he is…

There is considerable interest in a recent paper in PNAS that purports to have found some rather substantial homologies in the proteins that make up the bacterial flagellum. That would be extremely interesting if it were true, but it looks like there are massive methodological problems in the work…

It's that time again … time to nominate your favorite commenters for the Order of the Molly. Leave a comment saying whose name you like to see popping up in the comments threads, a few words about why you think they're molly-worthy would be nice, too, and on Sunday I'll tally them up and bestow the…