pharyngula

It was commencement day here at UMM, and it was a special one for us because Child #3 is now officially Bachelor of Arts #3. Here she tolerates her father and mother for a few more moments before she abandons us forevermore. And there she is in the midst of all the faculty and 2010 graduates of…

Like last time, I expect this news will set off another fusillade of dissenting opinions, but too bad. Extremists have vandalized Lars Vilks home, trying to set it on fire (original article in Swedish here). In an undoubtably futile attempt to forestall what I expect will be common objections to…

Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex? Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat…

Once upon a time, there was a bill moving through congress that was a good bill. It increased funding for research, and for science and math education. It had bipartisan support and was sailing through. There is a villain to this story, though. Some congresscreatures — Republicans, led by a fool…

That insane tea-baggin’ Maine GOP convention did something else of interest. Some of the Republican caucuses were held in a local school, including the 8th grade classroom of teacher Paul Clifford. He returned to the classroom after the weekend to discover that the Republicans had indulged…

Only ours are methodologically valid. It's a common creationist tactic to fling around big numbers to 'disprove' evolution: for instance, I've had this mysterious Borel's Law (that anything with odds worse than 1 in 1050 can never happen) thrown in my face many times, followed by the declaration…

Last year, I mocked this extraordinarily stupid joke and the radio host who told it. I guess the radio personality was still feeling the sting — either that, or he wanted the traffic — since he brought it up again today, and also complained about the way I ridiculed the Maine Republican party…

Yesterday, I mentioned this silly fellow Damon Linker, who complains that the New Atheists aren't sad enough about their godlessness. This seems to be the new gripe du jour; you can't be a serious atheist unless you're all broken up about the absence of god, and unless you tell all the believers…

Oh, yes, I know whenever Boing Boing posts something with cephalopods in it — I get a tsunami of email telling me to post it right now. All right, since I'll get no work done until this is purged…here's an octopus killing a shark.

(via WA Today)

If you've been following the climate change 'debate' at all, you should be aware of the excellent YouTube channel, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, which always has excellent take-downs of the denialists, professionally made and always devastating. Here's one example: The author is in a…

We've taking a little tour through Europe lately, and you know what that means: grab your rentboy and sing along. Keep on chatting. Long strokes, please. (Current tally: 10,212 entries with 992,807 comments.)

Some of you know one of our regular commenters here…and she has some good news to share. Hail the happy Happy Beltane season! Naughty Marvin & Patricia, OM Are pleased to announce their engagement. A Lughnasadh Wedding is planned at Trout Lake Abbey, Trout Lake, Washington. I even know where…

Look who's coming to the Royal Ontario Museum: Deepak Chopra. What were they thinking when they invited that pompous fraud to speak? World renowned teacher, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra presents his latest concepts in the field of mind-body medicine bridging the technological miracles of…

Please, please, all you critics of the "New Atheism": get some new arguments, or at least avoid the ones that are trivially ridiculed. Damon Linker is complaining about those darned New Atheists, prompted by the criticisms of Kevin Drum of a pretentious essay by David Hart (I also wrote a criticism…

That Indian yogi who claims to never eat has a page on EsoWatch, the wiki of irrational belief systems, and it has some interesting content. Some of the actual medical data from observations of crazy yogi have been published — nothing as blatant as catching him in the act of eating, but the signs…

This essay on the accommodationists vs. the 'new atheists' gets off to a bad start, I'm afraid, and I had some concern it was going to be another of those fuzzy articles. There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-…

You don't have to tell me, I know I'm late to the party: the news about the draft Neandertal genome sequence was announced last week, and here I am getting around to it just now. In my defense, I did hastily rewrite one of my presentation to include a long section on the new genome information, so…

If any one person is responsible for the current anti-vaccination hysteria, it's Andrew Wakefield, the surgeon who cobbled up a very bad study of vaccination and autism. For a good overview, read this summary of a talk by Brian Deer, a reporter who also has a very thorough summary of the Wakefield…

The other day, I posted about the smear campaign in Alabama against Bradley Byrne, which tried to impugn the man by saying, "Byrne supported teaching evolution…said the Bible was only partially true". Byrne won a speck of sympathy from me, despite the fact that he's a Republican, for at least…

The wingnuts had a party in DC! It was called May Day: A Cry to God for a Nation in Distress, and consisted of a small mob of prayerful crazies listening to people at the microphone beg God to force Hollywood to make more movies like Gibson's Passion, and by the way, make sure that hussy Dakota…

Rafflesia arnoldii

Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, has been attacked while lecturing on free speech. He was not seriously harmed. There is a video clip showing the attack, the chanting spectators, and the police quelling the mob. That's ugly. Muslims everywhere should be embarrassed, and…

A colleague and fellow freethinker at Bemidji State University, Dann Siems, has been diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma. This is not good. This is damned scary stuff. He's still blogging away occasionally, discussing the experimental treatments being tried on him, but this is all expensive, and…

Roger Ebert has roused the ire of the teabaggers, which is actually pretty easy to do. The occasion was a news story about a group of five privileged white kids who decided to flaunt American flags on their apparel on Cinco de Mayo, and who were sent home from school. Ebert made this comment: Kids…

It's a bit late for Mother's Day, but here are some biological truths about maternal and paternal inheritance. Warning: this is major nerd overload. Wear goggles. The goggles! They do nothing!

I almost agree with some pieces of what these guys at onehumanrace.com say. Except for the fact that they are insane. What is the only answer to racism? Before we can solve the problem of racism, we must first ask the question: "Where did the different 'races' come from?" Explore this site for the…

We shouldn't pick on the South all the time, so here is a tale out of the eminently Yankee state of Maine. The Maine Republican party recently met to establis their official platform, and ended up getting hijacked by the tea-baggers. Their new platform contains all kinds of nutty demands. The…

I was given a proposal for a new word by a fellow named Francois Choquette. It's a tough game trying to get a new coinage accepted, and I doubt that it'll take off…but it's actually a useful word to replace that abomination, "spirituality". So I'll toss Choquette's description out there for the…