pharyngula

I must speak up in favor of religion. It's not fair that it should be discriminated against and oppressed. I am disturbed by a case in which our federal government is impeding an individual's right to worship as he pleases. An inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections for denying him his…

Here's a cool animation of the progress of the Civil War — it's like the Confederacy is a giant gelatinous red blob spread over the South, punctuated with explosions as it occasionally makes amoeboid protrusions into the North, only to eventually succumb as it is driven back and chopped into bits…

You've turned your back on him. Racine, Wisconsin has joined the heathen ranks of communities that have erected godless holiday displays in the public square. It's cute and simple, a pyramid with atheist/secular quotations written on it. The blog entry describing it is amusing in its feeble…

You've hurt little Billy Dembski's feelings! You keep promoting negative reviews of his book! The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give evidence of the reviewer having read the book. Yet the three reviews placed front and center by Amazon…

There's this new service, Wikio, that is trying to rank various blogs. It's very pretty, but I have to say that ranking is entirely the wrong approach — it simply perpetuates a falsely hierarchical view of the web and acts as a positive feedback system to reinforce popularity; blogs are promoted as…

Amadan wrote this amusing Gilbert and Sullivan parody, I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist. Now you can actually hear it sung by Karl Mogel! (by the way, Karl, you know you're a science nerd when you think the best way to tell people what the tune is is to mention that it's the same as…

It's a strange thing to read another review of Behe's Edge of Evolution. This one is by David Levin, and it strongly highlights the compromises and the irrelevancy of the book. In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe's selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific…

We've got a splendid new analysis of a southeast Asian artiodactyl from the Thewissen lab that reveals that these little deer-like animals are a sister taxon to whales — so this pushes our understanding of the ancestry of whales yet further back. Carl Zimmer has already described the essentials — I…

Roy has this nice inclusive Christma-Hanu-Rama-Ka-Dona-Kwanzaa song for the season, but notice: no mention of squidmas. Time to riot in the streets! Tear down some embassies! Defenestrate folkies! I think you all need to go to RoyZimmerman.com and sign up for his mailing list so you can track his…

You know how I mentioned the other day that a snowblower was a romantic gift? Don't look if you're squeamish, but here's an x-ray of a snow-blower related injury. Actually, the x-ray isn't so bad, but the picture below it, in which the fingertip was yanked off, pulling the whole tendon with it like…

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is at Ouroboros. And if that isn't enough science blogging for you, this has also been a good week for these other excellent carnivals: Oekologie #12 Encephalon #38 Gene Genie #22

The man who wrote the email that got Chris Comer fired spills his guts on the issue. He seems curiously proud of the fact that he's pro-science and that he thinks the Texas Education Agency's position of "neutrality" on evolution is ignorant humbuggery.

All good fanboys and girls will now clap their hands and squeal with joy: Peter Jackson has signed on to make The Hobbit.

He's my favorite kind of Santa.

Here's an interesting question: "if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you?" Shelley says yes. Janet says no. I say it depends on that qualifier, "few or no side effects" — if that were true, I'd say "Yes! Gimme more!" This is no dilemma…

Textbook selection by the South Carolina State Board of Education has been held up because of baseless objections by creationist reviewers. Does this sound familiar? It's what triggered the Dover trial — clueless school board members rejecting standard biology textbooks because they wanted…

I was looking forward to the movie, I Am Legend, that is coming to Morris in the next month or so, but the first review I've seen is not promising. I've read the book and the previous film adaptations; the original I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic with an excellent twist, raising the…

I've been selected, along with the Clintons, as the personification of evil. It's too bad this spectrum is flawed. Evil should be on the left, as everyone knows, and red (as in "red state") has become the new, good, patriotic color.

I did not bite the head off that chicken. Popular Mechanics has sorted through the various presidential candidates web sites for information on their stance on various science-relevant issues (and on gun control…how that ended up in their matrix is a mystery, and I presume there is just some gun…

Does this count as child abuse yet? Some Muslims are distributing children's DVDs with this wholesome message: The first video shows an Arab woman playing with her two children before leaving her home with dynamite tucked into her dress. She is approached by uniformed soldiers and the camera pauses…

Someday, I'm going to have to get John Wilkins to explain to me why we still have universities with theology departments, and haven't razed them to the ground and sent the few remaining rational people in them off to sociology and anthropology departments where their work might actually have some…

Those are the four incompetents the residents of Pinellas County, Florida need to vote against in the next school board election: they favor corrupting science education with creationist nonsense. They all claim that students should be taught multiple "theories" in science classes, where they…

Everyone should congratulate the Scientific Indian and spouse on the birth of their daughter — and on their excellent taste in names!

Damon Linker doesn't like the New Atheism because it is "illiberal", and so he writes a screed in the New Republic — one that is poorly thought out and guilty of the crimes he accuses atheists of, while exercising his distaste for the godless, and nothing more. The problems begin with his opening…

'Tis the season for ridiculous commercialism: I've been seeing these unbelievable commercials that feature some smug guy surprising his wife by giving her a luxury car (with a bow on top) as a present, or popping open a box with a big honkin' diamond in it. The women always clap their hands with…

I have to wonder if Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, Chaplain, was considered a man of good character—he just received a two year prison sentence after using his office for years as a base for preying on young Navy men…and he was also HIV-positive. He had his sentence reduced for his…

What the heck is a zebibah? The zebibah, Arabic for raisin, is a dark circle of callused skin, or in some cases a protruding bump, between the hairline and the eyebrows. It emerges on the spot where worshipers press their foreheads into the ground during their daily prayers. I didn't really want…

Hey! Dan Whipple got to see a preliminary screening of Ben Stein's silly movie, Expelled! Read the review — it makes the point that the movie doesn't even bother to explain what ID and evolution are before taking sides, and it defends its position incompetently. The movie is "so intellectually…

Texas Citizens for Science has come up with the site visit report for the ICR. It's funky stuff: it seems they had creationist-sympathizers review the program, and they issued a pile of fluff and let them slide on their content. The PDF file contains (1) the Report of Evaluation of the ICR by the…