pharyngula

I'd planned to have that Creation Museum carnival done early this morning, but the response has been huge—I've culled it down to about 65 entries, and I'm busily trying to sort them out in some semblance of order, so it'll be a little longer. Have patience. Boy, you guys really hate Ken Ham's…

He told on me! That wicked rat-fink has reported me to the provost of my university, and now I'm a-tremblin' in my pajamas. Here's the text of the letter he claims to have sent in, revealing my perfidy to the administration. Dear Tom Sullivan, Provost, University of Minnesota, My name is John A.…

(via 3quarksdaily)

A reader sent in a request that I post a reply to an old article. How old? From June 2005. I'd almost forgotten this old quack, but Cindy Lee had to remind me. Yes, the email she sent was all set in Comic Sans. It seems most of these posting are rather old so in reading them I am going to comment…

Fresh off his earthshaking debunking of the whole of evolutionary biology with his classic "banana" and "coke can" arguments, Ray Comfort has a compelling new argument against atheism: the electricity argument. It's a little story about "three wise fools" who are exposed to electricity for the…

It's a friend with a face full of necrotizing venom, which just makes him a little more special, I think. Anyway, it's a good story about a responsible, rational reaction to finding a brown recluse spider in the house, and the little guy is so darned cute, too.

We've often heard this claim from creationists: "there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!". A recent example has been Michael Egnor's obtuse caterwauling about it. We, including myself, usually respond in the same way: of course it can. And then we list…

I have just been informed that those sneaky Europeans at AFOE are having a poll, and I'm on it in the category of "Best Non-European Weblog", and I'm losing badly. This wouldn't be so bad if losing meant I got the title of "Best European Weblog", but apparently trivial geographic and cultural…

Even the webcomics are making fun of him. Click on the panel to read the rest—it's pretty good. It also points out why we shouldn't be displeased that he's been imprisoned: one of his 'accomplishments' has always been to make the scientific and rational thinkers of all ages feel ostracized by an…

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

I got about 5 times my usual traffic yesterday, which explains why there were some occasional slow-downs all across scienceblogs. I think the server held up fairly well, though, and I know the big guys here are planning some server upgrades to handle future growth. Don't worry, it'll ease up. You…

What are you doing this evening? Two big events: Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is opening at the Morris Theater tonight at 8! I was thinking of going, but Skatje works there, and she's got the inside scoop: people are already lining up. In Morris. I might wait a few days for the mob to fade away.…

There are new epistles from convicted swindler and evangelical Christian — but I repeat myself — Kent Hovind. The first is an account of his transfers within the prison system, and although I don't feel even a twinge of sympathy for Hovind, I do feel for the other prisoners who experience the…

The creationist science fair article got picked up by both Digg and Reddit, so we're experiencing a bit of a traffic spike. Watch out for slowdowns and more of those pesky "internal server errors" while we undergo a kind of stress test. Also watch out for the brand spankin' new, virginal…

Don't forget, after you've congratulated him, to remind him to finish his dissertation. Yeah, my appointed role at the triumph is to play the guy who whispers "Respice post te, hominem te memento" into the conqueror's ear.

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people…

I completely missed it — Chuck Norris made a couple of roundhouse face kicks at godless evolutionists last week, and I didn't even notice. Apparently, we've been trying to outlaw Christianity, and Norris has scuttled that plan by exposing our devious strategy of being sufficiently literate to write…

Guess who's building an Ark on top of Mt Ararat in Turkey now? Greenpeace. Normally, I like the goals of Greenpeace, but I have to wonder what blissed-out ditz thought that the appeal to fairy tales from an overrated book was a good tactic.

Hector Avalos himself, the target of a Discovery Institute smear campaign, left a comment here, replying to some of the DI's many falsehoods. It's worth promoting up top. The Discovery Institute has mounted the latest in a long string of creationist smear campaigns against me in Iowa. While I have…

In an exercise that will tempt photoshoppers world wide, but makes alteration superfluous, an Italian magazine has run a photogallery of the Pope in various strange costumes. I rather liked cowboy Ratzi and the grim leprechaun, but my favorite has to be evil santa. When I get to be old and sunken…

It's becoming a trend: Evangelical Christian institutions that try to do science inevitably demonstrate breathtaking inanity of their own. The latest victim is the Pawleys Island Christian Academy. Take a gander at the first place winner in biology. Brian Benson, an eighth-grade student who won…

(via Phil)

This week's Nature has a short report on the Gonzalez tenure affair. It has an interesting admission from Gonzalez. Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not the quality of…

I'll take a leaf from Chris Ho-Stuart's book and urge you to read this post on Positive Liberty before I tackle his post. Jonathan Rowe is making the useful point that we have an interest in shaping religions, even religions with which we do not agree, to make them compatible with a civil,…

Sheril Kirshenbaum is guest-blogging at The Intersection while Chris Mooney is away, and she is bravely planning on discussing…dare I say it…framing. It's a subject that gives me the heebie-jeebies, the flibbertigibbits, and a bad case of the surly snarls, but let's see if maybe Sheril can give it…

Well, "we" meaning my fellow residents of rural communities. I suspect most of the people reading this are members of the urban elite, so you won't really care that today is the day when urban populations were predicted to exceed rural populations. That is, for the first time in the history of the…

An article titled "Darwin misconceptions in textbooks slammed in biology journal" sure sounds like it ought to be a hard-hitting criticism—we ought to look into that. Larry Moran did, and wow, what a bust. It's pathetic. It's a list of seven "errors" made in discussions of Darwin's biography in…

Add hammerhead sharks to your list of animals that don't need males. A captive bonnethead female in Nebraska gave birth in 2001, and genetic testing has revealed that it was produced by parthenogenesis. In a way, this isn't a surprise: I could have told her that Nebraska is no place for a self-…

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is at geek counterpoint. Lotsa linky, have fun!