pharyngula

Ed Brayton and Mike Gene have gone over the top in accusing Richard Dawkins of wanting to coerce the religious into giving up their beliefs; as is usual for Ed, he has no problem immediately comparing an atheist to R.J. Rushdooney and calling him a totalitarian, on the basis of a rather poorly…

Saddam Hussein has been killed. He was a venal little monster, but I don't see that we've gained anything by stooping to the level of a third-world thug, and the unseemly haste with which an irreversible act was committed makes it even more sordid and sleazy. He said that celebrations broke out…

At this point, it's safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in…

Quacks have no shame, but once reputable science and engineering magazines should have some vestiges of it. Popular Science magazine will take money from anyone for the ad revenue, as Cyde Weys demonstrates with a scan of an ad for energized water. It will cure cancer and diabetes, and kills…

Crap. Lippard misread the report: it was a 6 month form. There has been no net decline in revenues to that creationist junk organization, and I was wrong. There have been no promising developments in a decline in grassroots support for creationism. I've always had a low regard for settling…

Hey, everyone, you're being asked for some help. A certain someone is going to be giving a talk to Hugh Ross's group, Reasons to Believe, and he wants a list of common creations fallacies and good rebuttals. Remember, RtB is an old earth creationist group, so stuff about a 6000 year old earth is…

Salto Sobrius has become Aardvarchaeology — raise a cup of cephalopod noodle soup and say hello to Martin!

Cal Thomas.

I was just asked to confirm something. A reader, TheFallibleFiend, noticed that DaveScot at Uncommon Descent had claimed that he had heard the "Tree of Life Exploding" because an examination of an ultraconserved genetic element in humans had found that "the closest match was to DNA from the…

Carnival of Education #99 I and the Bird #39 Friday Ark #119 And remember—the Tangled Bank will be at ¡Viva La Evolución! next Wednesday, so send links to vivalaevolucion at hotmail dot com, me, or host@tangledbank.net.

You can find several loving closeups of Davy Jones at this site—there's also some text, but it's all High Geek as near as I can tell.

Attention, Phoenixians (Phoenicians? Phoenotypes? What do they call residents of Phoenix, anyway?). (John Lynch, GrrlScientist, and I are going to be in your area next week for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meetings, and we are all unanimous in our expectation that this…

Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a…

Euprymna tasmanica, camouflaged with mucus and sand Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

Before there was The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation, there was another excellent book on atheism: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Susan Jacoby. I can't recommend that book highly enough: it takes a purely historical perspective on American…

Wheee! Look at this slick new game. Doesn't it look fun to play? It's even educational! "Intelligent Design vs Evolution" is unique in that the playing pieces are small rubber brains and each team plays for "brain" cards. Each player uses his or her brains to get more brains, and the team with the…

Everyone should go say "Howdy" to Developing Intelligence, the latest addition to the Seed stable.

I am actually completely done with all of my grading, at last. Fall term 2006 is officially finished for me, and I got everything submitted a whole 9 hours before the deadline. Now I need to party. Fortunately, my copy of The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Jennifer Ouellette…

Getting married, that is. It's a good thing.

Hank Fox, who assures me that he is ALL MAN (just look at that beard), told me to take this test…and I seem to have a woman's brain. It's my result from my BBC sex test. I think I confused them, though: I did well on all the spatial reasoning tests and kind of bombed on the empathy stuff (male!),…

Jason brings to my attention an eye-opening article on the bible-publishing business: The popularization of the Bible entered a new phase in 2003, when Thomas Nelson created the BibleZine. Wayne Hastings described a meeting in which a young editor, who had conducted numerous focus groups and online…

The madmen of the WAAGNFNP have gone too far—now they've put out a warrant for my arrest (scroll down through the comments). Chris Clarke wasn't enough to slake their bloodlust, I guess, so now they've just picked out a random, innocent target. Watch out, or you'll be next.

Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I've mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief…

They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett: "Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the…

I come from good lower middle class family with a healthy respect for education. Most of my relatives from the generation prior to mine had rarely finished high school, let alone gone on to college, but they weren't stupid people, oh, no — we were regularly told that a good education was a path to…

Admit it—you were curious to know what those ninnies who write B.C. and Mallard Fillmore would do in their Christmas comic strips, weren't you? They were whining about the War on Christmas, of course. Do they even notice when a brutally godless blog like mine guiltlessly says "Merry Christmas!",…

I'm not the praying kind, but this example I found on Greg Laden's blog strikes me as rather familiar. I do believe I've heard the sentiments from a great many apologetic quarters before. A Prayer to the Faith Based I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to offend you, And you didn’t even ask for this but I’m…

Oh, man, we're in trouble now—they're catching on. Casey Luskin wags his finger at the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you know that when the sharpest tool (a phrase intending a variety of meanings) in the ID creationist toolbox notices the obvious, we can expect…we can expect…well, we can't expect…

Greg Laden has the story. It's really not much of a story, but it's local, so we care—basically, a crazy Jesus lady is buying prime billboard space around the area to flaunt her opinion that evolution is bunk, and newspapers are writing about it. It's content-free noise, and we can only hope that…

Wesley Elsberry is taking a sabbatical from the creo-evo wars to do research…real stuff having nothing to do with the foolishness of the IDists, and learning something new about science. Good idea! (Creationists shouldn't rest too easy, though, lots of us will be taking up the slack.)