pharyngula

This is the day the Canvassing Board will announce their decision in the Minnesota senate race, and since he is ahead by 225 votes, that means Al Franken will be declared the victor. Expect 5-alarm histrionics from the right wing, howls of outrage on talk radio, and the wing nut blogs to go…

A certain astronomer was impressed with this video: Cool animation for sure (and even better in hd), but Bad Evolution. Once again, we get the portrayal of evolution as a progressive process, driven by lots of bloody (oily?) battles between individuals. This is the kind of thing that perpetuates…

A newspaper editor sent me this bizarre little letter. Apparently, the writer, a Mr Nick Lally, was spamming it all over the place, and his copy was also sent to addresses at these domains (actual email addresses stripped to protect the already put-upon): @ncnnow.com, @krcb.org, @krcb.org, @…

The Countess has been nominated for various awards for her writing, and she'd like our help in getting the word out. I warned her that you people aren't a flock of sheep who will just follow the beckoning, nubile arm of any horror/fantasy author who cocks an enticing eyebrow at them, so I twisted…

As Wilkins notes, they've admitted it now: the producers of Expelled lied to make their movie. The documentary links such scientists to Nazis. The reaction was what one would expect. "We wanted to generate anger," Ruloff said. "We always knew we'd get extreme anger on the one side and extreme…

We had a new addition recently: check out Culture Dish. It's a biology blog! We need more of those around here.

Spiders are amazingly sophisticated animals, and probably the premiere complex adaptation of modern spiders is the ability to spin silk. They have multiple internal glands that can produce multiple kinds of silk — webs contain different kinds, from structural strands to adhesive strands, and other…

The latest news from those militant atheists is that Michael Newdow, and many others, are suing to block the religious element of the presidential swearing-in ceremony. And guess who will be interviewed on Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central time? Michael Newdow! Call in and egg him on, or moan…

This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing.…

Everyone and their mother is sending me a link to this flickr set, via Boing Boing, of something called "cephalerotica". I just don't know…there are all these clumsy mammals inserted into the art that distract from the erotic part.

This is just sad. Lately, Casey Luskin has been quaveringly protesting that poor Michael Behe got a bad shake in the Dover trial, and that Ken Miller misrepresented him in his testimony. Alas, this little mouse didn't just get caught in a mousetrap — he got blown away by an elephant gun. Ken Miller…

Charlie Daniels has chimed in with a little squeak of outrage at Newdow's lawsuit. His post is titled "He Must Be a Miserable Man", and I think it must be self-referential since it is an astonishing collection of stupidities. Foremost, here's one that I can't believe anyone would say: If we deny…

This is a rough situation: a graduate student from New Zealand, working here in the US, got that sorrowful phone call telling her that her father had died. You know how graduate students are — poor. So she needs some help, and is asking for donations. There are a lot of us, you know, so if we each…

I have just returned from my last long drive of the season, finally and regretfully shuttling the last beloved member of the Myers clan off to the distant Minneapolis transportation hub. Now, at last, I can relax, shed of my patriarchal obligations (speaking of which, the hair is getting a bit long…

Octo-Dancing from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo (via Reza Dolatabadi)

This year's Edge question was What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? As usual, a lot of interesting people offered diverse answers, and you can read them all there. You've probably got better answers. Feel free to leave them…

Somebody else is being denied the right to marry. A woman who worked at a Catholic high school was fired because her fiance was divorced. Doesn't that just make you feel all warm inside? Our wanna-be overlords of the high priesthood promise us a future of arbitrary regulation of our private lives.

It's like waving a red cape in front of a bull…a poll that asks, Will PZ crash this poll? I refuse to be baited. The correct answer, of course, is no.

I won the Moore Award, as if there were any doubt.

Raise a toast to Kent Hovind, whose appeal has been denied. By the way, another of his dialogs with God has been posted…he wrote it in August, so there seems to be a rather substantial lag in putting them on the web. That's a shame, since God has such a strong personal interest in Kent.

And if you want to hear New Year's greetings from a collection of godless geeks and weirdos, listen to the Two Smokin' Hot Freethinkers Podcast. Here at the Pharyngula Phortress, we'll be ringing in the New Year with delicious root beer floats before toddling off to a good night's sleep.

Casey Luskin once again complains about the fact that the propagators of intelligent design creationism are not regarded kindly, and in fact, are frequently disparaged. He takes it very personally, even. On a personal note, I am familiar with these kinds of attacks. In one single forum at…

Get out there and vote on this recommendation to Obama to create nationally required science standards. This is your last chance; it needs to be bumped up to 3rd place to make it into the next round. All it needs is a few hundred more votes!

Get ready for the War on New Year. Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year's Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior…

The Molly Award for the month of November goes to Emmet Caulfield. Buy him a beer, someone. Now we have to pick one for December — leave your nomination in the comments!

When last I mentioned Terry Pratchett, it was unfortunate news: he's been afflicted with embuggerance. Now, though, there is cause for some jubilation, since a certain godless humorist and fantasy author has been awarded a knighthood for his services to literature. Three cheers for an honor well…

They have a vision. They have a dream. They know what shape they want America to take. And they have formed an "organization inspired by the principles of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Evangelical and Christian Reconstruction movements". And completely oblivious to the irony, with no hint…

I had a gentle and uncontroversial deconversion from a fairly liberal church, so I've never suffered for atheism — which is as it should be for everyone. Not all Christians are tolerant enough to let people have their own beliefs, though, as you can discover in these stories of ostracization (add…

He declares a bicycle to be irreducibly complex because it can't function if you remove one wheel. You can guess where this is going. Queue up the redefinition calliope, Casey! ‘But it's not a bicycle anymore, now is it?’

See—there's an official list and everything. But wait…what's this? Tied with the Bad Astronomer? What has he done, besides write a book and become president of the JREF and pose naked? I ought to win for keeping my clothes on!