pharyngula

Oh, sure, Ken Ham wants to build a life-sized Noah's Ark…but he's trying to get tens of millions of dollars of tax breaks to build a giant ark that won't even float. Johan Huibers is building his own version, and even plans to sail it around the world. Sorry, but the video is entirely in Dutch, but…

A recent issue of the philosophy journal, Synthese, focused on creationism and intelligent design; the articles I've read from it have so far all been anti-creationist, or at least recognize that creationism is in deep conflict with science. It's all interesting stuff, anyway. But there's a problem…

I gave a talk at the Global Atheist Convention in Australia, and now the videos are trickling out. I watched a bit of it and marveled…I've lost some weight since 2010. By the way, there will be another GAC in 2012. Shall we meet again in Melbourne?

Stalkers in two languages, English and Portuguese. I don't count the French Canadian one.

The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have…

Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He's got some new excuses, I will give him that. Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he's not a mass murderer. On the scale of immoral behavior, where…

I have just now arrived at home after a very long day of travel from Hawaii, so all I'm going to do is serve up some cheese and vegetate for a while. Enjoy the Octaman for a bit until I've recovered. (Latest edition of TET; 12,226 entries with 1,344,028 comments.)

Mary likes the lovely images at the Kahi Kai site, so maybe we'll see more marine invertebrates appearing here.

Because when you're exposed, you look like an even more gargantuan idiot and pathetic narcissist. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has been discovered to have tried to pad his reputation with a fake ID … he's used the pseudonym "PlannedChaos" to go around the web praising Scott Adams as a "…

I'm not home yet. I'm still in Hawaii, relaxing for a bit after the Society for Developmental Biology conference. After this, though, it's a storm of events every weekend for quite some time. Here's my schedule: 21-24 April: Des Moines, IA, the American Atheists national convention. 29 April:…

The American Journal of Surgery has published a transcript of a presidential address titled, "Can prayer help surgery?", and my first thought was that that was absolutely brilliant — some guy was roped into giving a big speech at a convention, and he picked a topic where he could stand up, say "NO…

Those of you who've been to a poster session at a science meeting know that they're noisy and chaotic and entirely reliant on interaction to work…so I'm not even going to try and describe it. Instead, I strong-armed Eric Röttinger into describing his poster on video for me, and here it is. He's…

This one is nice and short, and for a change, I'm willing to be…accommodating. Please respect ALL religions equally. You are being prejudiced if you continue this disrespect of the Catholic religion. My correspondent has persuaded me. I will respect ALL religions equally from now on. To poop on!

What makes a plenary session different from the other sessions here? I don't know. 10:00-11:30 Session 6: Plenary Session (Chair: Marian Waterman [UC Irvine])   10:00-10:30 Wei Yan (Univ. of Nevada) "The control of cytoplasm removal during late spermiogenesis" I produced 100,000…

Hey, it's all about evolution. This is the session labeled as being about evo-devo, but I've been thinking about evolution in all of the talks, so I guess here we're just making it more explicit. 08:00-09:30 Session 5: Evolution of Development (Chair: Elaine Seaver [Univ. Hawaii])  …

Incoming! Here's another dump of my notes from yesterday afternoon. I'll be hitting you with more later today. Disease is the pretext here, but it's really all about development. 15:30-17:00 Session 4: Development and Disease (Chair: Jack Somponpun [Univ. Hawaii]; co-Chair: Jacqueline Ho [UPMC…

The Digital Cuttlefish remarks on a certain expulsion…with a poem, of course. I hate to carp at actually having the saga commemorated, but shouldn't it have a more martial beat and an alliterative clang to it? And where's the swordfight? The naked damsel? The villain's bloody demise? Man, I guess…

OK, gang, you know I'm at a meeting, and when I'm not attending talks, I'm strolling all over Waikiki (did you know you simply cannot get a table for 9 on short notice on a Friday night?), and when I'm not hangin' with the devo homies, I'm on a totally scrambled sleep schedule…so what are you doing…

I want you to know that I have a very nice office back home. It has a big window with a view. The view is of a tree and a parking lot, but still…it's a nice office. Then yesterday I got to tour the Kewalo Marine Laboratory just outside of Honolulu, where the SDB meeting is being held. We stopped by…

Well, a whole room full of them, actually, but also the proud nerd and meeting crasher Christie Wilcox, who, I now learn, has a darned good set of pipes.

Tennessee legislators are debating the addition of creationism to their science curriculum, and apparently they've run out of reasonable excuses, so Redumblican Frank Nicely dragged in the corpse of Albert Einstein, stuck his hand up his bony thorax, and rattled his jawbone to make a speech. I…

This session is all about pattern formation, focusing on those earliest, simplest decisions. How doe a mass of identical cells distinguish themselves inti regions with different patterns of gene expression. You might recall that this is the question that so baffles the creationist Paul Nelson.…

Here we go, I'm attending the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology, and I'll be intermittently dumping my notes onto the web, so that's what you'll be getting today -- my sometimes cryptic impressions of a series of developmental biology talks. This is the early…

I'm on a small island in the middle of a great big ocean full of exotic and beautiful invertebrates. It feels good.

I can tell. It's coming. A royal heir has gotten engaged to some young woman, and there will be one of those royal weddings, and the sentimental argle-bargle in the British media will soar to new heights of fatuousness. I'll miss most of it, fortunately, but I pity everyone in the United Kingdom…

Once upon a time, there was a man who thought rather highly of humanity's potential. Sure, there were things humans did that were awful -- they could be violent, and careless, and short-sighted -- but they also did amazing things like science and art that other species didn't. Overall, he thought…

We Gnu Atheists, and atheists of all kinds, are often accused of following "just another religion."  I'm not particularly fond of the usual riposte -- something along the lines of sarcastically pointing out that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby -- because I think we…

I've got some flyin' to do — you'll be hearing from me after I arrive in Honolulu, with reports on sun, sand, and science from the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology all this coming weekend — but for now you can enjoy this fine article by Paula Kirby. If there were…

I know a lot of you skip the silly videos at the top of each edition of The Thread, but this one has a Rabid Lesbian Atheist of DOOM! How can you possibly skip it? (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,204 entries with 1,339,658 comments.)

The man certainly has an ego. His new commercial features…Ken Ham himself. Speaking as a non-photogenic and not particularly heroically-voiced fellow myself, it's a big mistake from a purely commercial perspective for creeeepy, neck-bearded, thin-voiced weirdos with a foreign accent to be doing ads…