pharyngula

Several months ago, we witnessed a tragic spectacle in the news: a nine-year old Brazilian girl was raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion…and the Brazilian Catholic church responded by excommunicating all the participants. One cleric in Rome, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, said the church had…

An Oxford research fellow, Andrew Parker, has written a bizarre little book claiming that the book of Genesis is entirely compatible with science and evolution…by simply redefining most of the terms in the Bible after the fact to fit. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: "Let there be…

Oh, I believe! What else could this be? It's the one on the left. The medium: bird poop on a pickup truck. This is even better than Piss Christ!

It's sad to see that we've lost Brian Goodwin, one of the genuinely original (but not always right!) thinkers of our time. There aren't many left of the old structuralist tradition in biology, the kind of non-genetic purists who tried to analyze development in terms of the fundamental physical and…

I laughed. I laughed loudly.

All right, I've got a Horde: a vicious mob of savages slavering over the prospect of conquest and booty. I've got to start using you more. Here are some people who have been asking for it: No Jesus, no peas A Pile of Blog Mors Dei The Pile System Why Evolution is True Fly, my pretties, fly!…

Two things about my daughter: she's always been a finicky eater, particularly hating seafood, and she is currently living far from home, in Arizona. I just about fell off my chair, therefore, when I read that Skatje is actually trying sushi. And she likes it! Well, sort of, and only some of it, but…

I feel obligated to reply to Mooney and Kirshenbaum's latest complaint, but I can't really get motivated. Their argument has become so absurd and so petty that it seems a waste of time anymore. All they've done is confessed that they are on a personal vendetta: they are very upset with me, they…

The new word is faitheists.

These are all the same species, even the same individual, from photographs taken within a short time as it was jetting away. Abdopus abaculus You can find a larger image on TONMO.

Some polls you know are just set up to try and get affirmations of what the pollster believes. Others are more inscrutable. Why would CNN even bother to ask this? Do you believe the Apollo moon landings were faked? Yes 14% No 86% It's meta-meaninglessness. I was tempted to vote yes, not because I…

I swear, there's a moment in this video where the octopus looks like it's trying to get intimate with Steve Leonard.

Some epidemiologist ought to investigate this. There is a building on C Street in Washington DC which houses the offices of a fervent evangelical Christian contingent of conservative politicians, who are all, of course, paragons of probity. Except…something funny has been going on. Three of them…

It's a regular event nowadays that the Humboldt squid move up the coast of California, stirring up a little hysteria as they go. These are big squid and they can be aggressive, but San Diego is probably safe. Probably. Although you might wonder why a cephalopod enthusiast lives in Minnesota, about…

Octopus (via National Geographic)

A certain professor of midwifery thinks labor pain is good for women: it's a "purposeful, useful thing which has a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby." Here's the best reply ever to that.

One nice thing about being the most evil blogger on the interwebs is that I can occasionally trick my kids into thinking I might be just a little bit cool. My son Connlann introduced me to the black humor of Mr Wiggles (my kids have inherited a weird sense of humor!), and the author, Neil Swaab,…

Francis Collins will be stepping down from his role at the BioLogos Foundation, as part of the process of becoming the head of the NIH. This is only a minimal step, however, and it really doesn't address any of my objections to the guy. The foundation and its web site will still be going on, and…

Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site: Yep, Ben Stein is hawking "free" credit reports on my site. Only…they aren't free. They aren't useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag. A few points are worth noting here. First, the score…

Two things: the first is Sean Carroll's discussion of what kinds of questions science can answer, and what the answers tell us about the universe. And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe. That's what's…

Polls are bad enough, but the editorial that went with this one is something else. A group is lobbying to slap a bunch of religious phrases on the US Capitol Visitor's Center, and their rationale is inane. The engravings will cost less than $100,000 of the center's total $621 million price tag.…

I've got a franchise, I guess. The Thread That Will Not DIE is going to go on and on. I've once again closed the old thread, and here you go, more fresh virgin database entries to despoil. Go ahead and fill it up!

I must thank the reader known to me only as CAC for sending me DVDs of the Inside Nature's Giants programs. I've been enjoying the dissections of an elephant and a whale in the evening — most of the organisms I cut into are millimeters long and require very sharp, thin instruments, so it's…

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting…

No, not really — my title is a bit of a sensationalistic exploitation of the thesis of a paper by Peterson, Dietrich, and McPeek, but I can buy into their idea that microRNAs (miRNAs) may have contributed to the pattern of metazoan phylogenies we see now. It's actually a thought-provoking concept…

I've just seen Mooney and Kirshenbaum's latest eruption of petulance, and I also see that people are commenting away in various threads here. I really can't get to it until later, and I can't say that I'm enthusiastic about addressing such a flaccid blubbery bit of self-pity anyway, so let this…

(via io9)

And following the lead of all past hires by that eminent institute of advanced ideology, Ann Gauger doesn't understand biology or logic. She does have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, but it just goes to show that having a degree doesn't mean you necessarily understand science. I will look forward to…

Someday, someone will be able to tell me what distinguishes the theology of Wiley Drake from the theology of any random con man.

Here's an interesting use of tweening: take 5 fossil skulls, use the computer to interpolate between them, and animate the results. 3.5 million years just fly by in 5 minutes. (The sound track is a bit superfluous though—turn the sound down if you're at work)