pharyngula

It's a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God. The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall. His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to…

This is a video by an apostate: an atheist who has left the flock and become a believer. I was all ready to point a gnarled bony finger at him and screech to my minions that he must be rent limb from limb, but then I made the mistake of listening further…and he actually makes a good case. I'm…

Lose all faith in Catholicism, please. If you haven't already, this story should help you on your way. If that's not enough, perhaps Cuttlefish's poem will persuade you. To summarize: A Franciscan priest uses his office to seduce multiple women. He lives with at least one of them as husband in all…

Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it's got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and…

Sorry, there's another piece there that really irritated me. Maher reads the data selectively: he quotes the CDC's list of possible contaminants of vaccines, like aluminum, insect repellant, formaldehyde, etc. But that is simple honesty in advertising! Everything you put in your body contains at…

Once again, Maher sticks his foot in his mouth and gnaws on it for a while. The most telling moment for me was when he compares vaccination to global warming and evolution; global warming and evolution, he says, are settled science (which is correct), but vaccination is not. That is not correct.…

I have to give the Baptist Standard some credit — they actually have a good article that debunks common stereotypes and myths about atheists, and chides people for falling for patently bogus rumors. At the same time, though, they ask a question that made me laugh: From the old Procter & Gamble…

Lying in the wheelbarrow is the body of Dorothy, a chimpanzee who died suddenly of natural causes; the people in the scene are preparing to bury her. Behind the fence is a quiet gathering of her friends. It makes me wish I could have a conversation with a chimpanzee. I wonder what they are…

The commenting issues here are seriously driving me nuts. I've just written another letter of complaint on the Seed backchannel, which always seems to mean that it will sink into neglect once again, so I've decided to also post it here, publicly. I hate to air dirty laundry like this because I…

Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I'm committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I'm going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I'…

I really hate the buggy comment registration system here, and I know you do, too. However, it's also been a huge help to me — the thousands of spam comments that were flooding in every day were throttled way back. So I'm going to try something. The registration requirement is off, temporarily, just…

One of my favorite examples of the step-by-step evolution of molecules has been the work coming out of Joe Thornton's lab on glucocorticoid receptors. It's marvelous stuff that nails down the changes, nucleotide by nucleotide. It's also work that Michael Behe called "piddling", despite the fact…

I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells' visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells' version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea. The next person--apparently a professor of developmental biology--objected that the film…

I do have to agree that kids can say the darndest things, and they are more perceptive than your average Christian.

Way back in July, I proposed that an appropriate response to the inane creationist ads that were appearing on scienceblogs was for people to take advantage of one, an offer of a free booklet on creationism, and then we'd all tear it apart mercilessly. I ordered mine, a lot of you did likewise, and…

The atheism conference in Australia is going to be huge (note the logo in the left sidebar here), with attendance in the thousands, a swarm of speakers, etc. It's fairly typical for regions to support that kind of influx of tourist dollars into their economies; they want to encourage more visitors…

Lately, all the polls people have been sending me are already going in the right direction — have I become superfluous? Are atheists everywhere already gleefully clicking buttons in polls without my prompting? Oh, well, here's another one. An ambitious priest gets assigned to Brighton, which he…

Octopus dierythraeus Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

I think the best thing to do with this video by Jon Rawlinson is let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes. You know, the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan could have a real money-maker video here: just aim a camera at that tank for hours, fill up a…

But this judge won't marry interracial couples. A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most…

Comments are superfluous on this one.

It's yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet? Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes in development, although this work is not a…

I think I like this band, NOFX.

We've all seen the stories about Jesus in a cinnamon roll, or the Virgin Mary in a stain on a window, and they're all getting a bit old. That fervent religious mindset will impose a Christian interpretation on just about any random blob. So here we go again, another unbelievable hallucination. The…

All right, England, enough is enough. Every Christmas, those people over there get some fabulous secular midwinter celebration, and what do we godless Americans get? Another war on Christmas waged by an indignant Bill O'Reilly, and maybe some pathetic civic spectacle as some state capitol has…

Remember that ridiculous pro-faith Alpha Course that had the transit ads that looked like a poll? Now they've actually put up an online poll. Best thing about it: look at the results already. Does God exist? Yes 20%No 74%Probably 6% Heh. How about making it look even worse? Hey, they locked out…

I suppose it's nice to know I'm not forgotten, but it's still a little weird that I occasionally get email from Bill Donohue, just out of the blue. Like today. secular sabotage PZ, Just to let you know, I did not forget you when I wrote "Secular Sabotage." You made the cut the old fashioned way--…

The Smithsonian Institution is opening a new Hall of Human Origins in mid-March. It's crazy — they've spent $20 million on exhibits describing events that occurred before the universe even existed 6,000 years ago!

OK, I confess: I completely lack the tools and background to evaluate this claim: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple…