pharyngula

The essay starts off stupidly enough. In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin. Actually, no, he didn't. It's a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story. Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D.…

That long-winded charlatan, Deepak Chopra, has scribbled up a whiny criticism of Hitchens' address in absentia to the American Atheists. Hitchens wrote a wonderful, brave, and inspiring exposition on his mortality, and urged everyone to keep up the gallant fight; Chopra carps and squirms, trying to…

GRADES ARE DONE AND TURNED IN! I've got a nice bottle of wine and a wild woman on the way. Or I might just pass out and sleep.

I've added another engagement in London on 9 June: An evening with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. There will be a steel cage. Two enter, one leaves. We'll settle who will be Emperor of the Atheists, finally. Well, actually, it will just be a pleasant conversation, hosted by the British Humanist…

You can't get riper nerd schadenfreude from anywhere but a bad powerpoint competition. There are some real horrors at that link, but they unfortunately miss a trick: the greatest suffering is not inflicted by the single slide, but by the endless flood of one bad slide after another. I have…

It's a trap! Someone is trying to make Richard Dawkins' head explode! Harper's Magazine (June 2011, last page), or so I have just been informed, reports that "Existential anxiety was found to make people dislike Richard Dawkins." Should I feel flattered, hurt, or existentially anxious? If the…

You will be entertained by this strange collection of cephalart. (Warning: there are a few bare breasts in the collection. Wait…molluscs? Breasts? Why do mammals always muddle things up with their mammary obsessions?)

Oooh, the miracle of childbirth: watch a clutch of octopus eggs hatch. O. vulgaris hatchlings hatching from Richard Ross on Vimeo.

The Endless Thread is showing signs of stress and fatigue. I know, it wants to keep working, and it would probably willingly continue to sit there at its desk, scribbling madly, until it had a heart attack and keeled over, but as a kindly taskmasker hoping to wring a few more years of cheap labor…

You've probably already heard the latest blunt comment from Stephen Hawking: I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. I like it. Very clear. Now…

Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa. He has a blog on Psychology Today called The Scientific Fundamentalist, and earlier he published this charming article: Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?. Don't…

No matter what kind of dump you live in, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you don't live in an echinoderm cloaca. Although…it really does look quite nice on the outside.

Oy, this will make your head hurt…mainly because you won't be able to handle the degree of stupidity involved in this argument. This is a video from Focus on the Patriarchy that makes an analogy: gay marriage is as unnatural and impossible as gravity pushing objects upward, and trying to claim that…

JackC has posted images from the Friggatriskaidekaphobia event this past weekend…and also from our tour of the Penn Museum. Guess who the people in this photo are:

Since there is so much noise about the predicted Rapture, everyone seems to be planning to riff on it this weekend. Wichita State University is have a Rapture Day, just for the shenanigans. Ah, another opportunity to laugh at religion. As if there's a shortage of such opportunities.

I cannot allow this to stand. Look here at the state of our progress in raising money for Camp Quest: The craven horde — I've lost track of how many little goblins they've now recruited to combat my awesome and singular majesty — has narrowed my lead to a mere $1890. This is intolerable. It means…

So many people have sent me this sensationalistic article, "Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice", that I guess I have to respond. I sure wish it were true, but you should be able to tell from how poorly it is written and the ridiculous inaccuracies (mitochondria are cells that fight…

Hi, this is MG Myers. A few readers mentioned that Pharyngula is three months behind in awarding Mollies. Shame on PZ. Since PZ doesn't have the job done, I thought maybe we should fire him help him out. Anyway, I'll be taking over the Molly administration. If you have any community building ideas…

You may recall the furious debate among philosophers about a philosophy journal, Synthese, that made a tacit rebuke of critics of Intelligent Design creationism in an editorial added after acceptance of a number of papers on ID; it's not just that they caved to creationist pressure, but that the…

I can tell it's going to be even worse than usual. They're going to have another Global Atheist Convention, which I predict will be even bigger and more successful than the first one, and now I'm getting requests to plug other skeptical events in Melbourne, as if the kangaroos and drop-bears who…

Since I previously expressed my disappointment in the "squid in space" experiment that will be going up on the space shuttle, I've received a rebuttal from the lead investigator of the project. Fair's fair; here it is. Dear Dr. Myers, I am the lead investigator on the Squid in Space project and…

I'm about to head off to that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Philadelphia airport, to make the Morris run (we'll do it in less than 12 parsecs!) I just wish TSA would lighten up now that that horrible terrorist is dead.

It's even spelled correctly. Amy Myers, high school student, has challenged Michele Bachmann "to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics". There's no way Bachmann will take the challenge, unfortunately. There's…

You're all going, right? They've just announced the next Global Atheist Convention for 13-15 April, in Melbourne, Australia, with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens committing to attending. There are a few other noisy rude arrogant atheists that I've heard will be showing up, but they're going…

I understand some of you might recognize the tune. (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,358 entries with 1,371,670 comments.)

I'll be back in online action in a while, but I thought I'd just mention that we had a grand time at the anti-superstition party, and today we had an equally lovely time touring the U Penn Museum with a few of the regular commenters (I hope they'll link to some of the photos they took: Jack C was…

Everyone go say Happy Birthday to Larry Moran!

Awww, my presence in Philadelphia today is acknowledged in Faye Flam's blog with a poll. I'm sure you'll all be able to give the correct answer to this one. What is a pharyngula? The structure in the back of your throat that hangs between your tonsils. A retractable "penis bone" that supports…

(via National Geographic)

I knew it would come to this. There's been long-running contention over the government-sponsored chaplaincy programs in Australia — those crazy mad independent godless Aussies actually pay good money to have these goofy Christian wankers sit in their public schools and provide…heck, I don't know…