pharyngula

Tonight, at 10pm ET/9pm CT, Futurama features Evolution Under Attack. It looks promising… Futurama Thursdays 10pm / 9c Preview - Evolution Under Attack www.comedycentral.com Futurama New Episodes Roast of David Hasselhoff It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The recordings of the Copenhagen conference are appearing on YouTube now — here's my talk, but you should also like AC Grayling's and Gregory Paul's. I think they're just in the process of being uploaded, since I don't see Peter Singer's on the list…you'll eventually have hours and hours of stuff…

One of the subjects developmental biologists are interested in is the development of pattern. There are the obvious externally visible patterns — the stripes of a zebra, leopard spots, the ordered ranks of your teeth, etc., etc., etc. — and in fact, just about everything about most multicellular…

Once again, some hick town has a few redneck ignoramuses thinking civic law is defined by a few Old Testament commandments. It isn't. Should a Southern Illinois town put the Ten Commandments in its town square? Yes. It's good to remind people of God's laws governing our behavior. 72% No. It…

I think I'm beginning to figure David B. Hart out. I've been totally mystified about why anyone would consider him a credible or interesting thinker since reading his essay belittling the New Atheists, which was dreary and wearying — I compared his prose style to that of Eeyore. But note: one of…

Charlie Stross examines the economics and physics of colonizing other planets, and he isn't at all optimistic. Forget going to planets around other stars — the distances are absurdly excessive. But also forget about colonizing planets in our solar system: not only is it ridiculously expensive just…

I'd be tempted to open a cracker stand right next to him.

Hemant recruited a couple of members of the Homosexual Conspiracy to infiltrate an anti-gay seminar near where he lives, and I was shocked when I got to the part where the organizers noticed one of them was taking notes and asked her if she was against their agenda, she said yes! And then she got…

The Austrians are fleeing the church in droves: A record 100,000 Austrians are expected to leave the Roman Catholic Church this year after abuse scandals which have badly damaged its image, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. Some 57,000 quit the church in the first six months of the year, Austrian…

The peripatetic thread needs a dose of surreal insanity. Watch this video if you're sober and sane. This might be something. I don't know. Maybe I'm nuts. I don't know. Let me know. (Current totals: 10,815 entries with 1,086,411 comments.)

An Australian travel writer catalogs a few of the world's most craptastical tourist attractions, and one of them, naturally, is Ken Ham's Creation "Museum". Here, true believers can learn about how the Earth was formed by the big man upstairs, who manages to explain away such potential roadblocks…

No, everyone who is sending me this photo, that is not a picture of my home life. I'll have you know that the arrangement my wife and I have is that I do the cooking, she does the dishes. However, I will concede that this picture might count as TrophyWife™ porn.

I don't know why we should; he's a delusional old man who uses fear to demand obedience to archaic dogmas. But Carla Powell tries to make the case for the Pope, and fails. Here's her reason why we should be nice to the guy. Though he has none of John Paul's film-star charisma [Wait, what?],…

Newt Gingrich, the man who told his wife he was leaving her as she lay in a hospital bed sick with cancer, has declared that "overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife…

If you're more bored than I am (and I'm not bored at all — I'm neck deep in work), try out these evolution games on the web. Any good? Useful for the kiddies? I don't know. Somebody else review them for me.

Muslims in Saudi Arabia are building a giant clock that resembles Big Ben, but is over six times larger. They want to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Time as the world standard. As Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, put it: "Putting Mecca time in the face of…

Ceropegia distincta

Come on, journals. What kind of garbage are you stooping to publish now? This paper in Virology Journal has to be seen to be believed. The entire data set for the "study" is a few brief lines in the Bible, where Jesus heals a sick woman with a fever. From this, the authors conclude that she had…

It's $20,000. St John's is a very nice, private Catholic college not too far down the road from us. They also have a program named after our celebrated liberal Minnesota politician and alumnus, Eugene McCarthy, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement, which has a…

Some Catholic site is giving advice on how to field questions from Leftists about homosexuality. After all, those danged lefties keep bringing up issues of equality and civil rights when gay marriage comes up, and it's awfully hard to talk about restricting gay rights without sounding like a bigot…

I think we need to move along from the thready thread to a new subject near and dear to all: spankings. First in line for a fearsome thrashing is the always obligingly easy Casey Luskin. By the way, that goofy Luskin business of comparing Darwin imagery to Jesus iconography gets lampooned here,…

How to get from atheism to the complete extinction of the human race: (via somewhere on here)

…then Jeffrey Goldberg and the staff of The Atlantic have a personal message for you. Oh, my. The tone!

That darn English language that makes words with different meanings sometimes sound similar — it always ends up confusing Christian conservatives of very little brain, whose depth of understanding can only be measured in micrometers. The latest from Conservapædia is that they are on a crusade…

Nope, sorry, take your Hubble Space Telescope and aim it where the sun don't shine. Biology rules. (via Deep Sea News)

I have sad news to report. John A. Davison has gone insane. No, I know, he's been nuts for a long, long time, but I was just purging the ol' trashed mail folder today and discovered that he has been writing to me two or three times a day, usually just by dumping his latest comment on his poor dead…

Envy no more! There is a way you too can possess a luxurious full beard. The big soiree is this weekend, so start practicing.

I just can't keep up — I turn away from the blog for most of the day, and the perseverant thread just keeps dribbling on. Perhaps this little video is a metaphor. (Current totals: 10,797 entries with 1,082,903 comments.)

The latest Chick tract is a wonderful summary of modern fundamentalism. It's got all the totally non-Biblical dogma: the anti-christ will be appointed pope, the Rapture, the weirdly fabulous Wedding of Jesus with his Church (everyone gets crowns!), Armageddon, the mark of the beast…it's all in this…

Josh Rosenau has happy news: he got married and by now is locked into the connubial borg. Be nice for a brief moment and wish him well.