pharyngula

It's a sad story. Amreen was Muslim, and Lokesh was Hindu, but these two young people loved each other and got married anyway. Isn't that the way it should be, that religion is something that shouldn't dictate the important matters in your lives? Unfortunately, the other people in their small town…

(via Revere)

Brown has posted a reply to my angry criticisms, and as is increasingly common among the accommodationists, he gets everything backwards, upside down, and inside out. Let's start with the first paragraph. PZ posted a tremendous rant about me and Michael Ruse last week, which concluded with a…

And now for something completely different…science fiction author James Morrow will be the guest on Atheists Talk radio, at 9am Central this morning. Morrow wrote the story Towing Jehovah, about a strange sea voyage with the purpose of towing the corpse of God to its arctic tomb. This could be…

At last, we have a president who can give a Vulcan salutation.

This is big news, a first in the history of that institution! The student who led the LU College Democrats, the student club that was shut down by the administration because apparently, anything other than Republican Wingnuttia is the antithesis of the conservative Christian ideals they hope to…

Apologies for the short notice, but today at noon, there will be a march to show solidarity with the people of Iran. Meet at Hennepin and West Lake in Uptown for a peaceful gathering and march.

He's going to be lecturing in Phoenix at the end of August on "Why Ben Stein is wrong about science and history", which really should win some sort of prize for one of the one of the most obvious titles ever. He's going to have to talk for days to cover the topic adequately, so pack a lunch. Wish I…

It's a pleasant Friday afternoon, so you've got nothing better to do than listen to some tedious apologetic drivel, right? Terry Eagleton is interviewed on Canadian radio, and he repeats the same boring noise he droned out in his book. For all the times the atheists are accused of sneering at the…

The simple summary: As the video says, the country is shutting down the flow of information, clamping down on the internet — that alone would tell me that something nasty has been going down in the government there. Information should flow freely, and I've run across one set of instructions for…

A reader wrote in to say his mother was being victimized by a putative religious organization called Elite Activity Resurrected. It has to be seen to be believed. It's all dressed up in egalitarian pieties about ending world poverty, but when you look at the actual operation, it's a remarkably…

Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis male (top), Benthoctopus female (bottom) Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

The latest issue of Zebrafish, a specialty journal to which my university does not subscribe, is dedicated entirely to using zebrafish in education. I want it. I want the whole issue. Unfortunately, the publisher wants to charge me $29 per article to get the PDFs, which is not going to happen.…

How can anyone resist an article titled "Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode"? You can't, I tell you. It's like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there's that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything…

Barbara Bradley Hagerty has lately been polluting NPR with a series of superficial fluff pieces on religion — I've just groaned and turned the radio off when she comes on. She also has a book out, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and just the title is sufficient to…

I know that most of the kooks can't abide the theory of evolution, and I can understand their motives a little bit — it directly contradicts common beliefs about who they are. But why all the hatin' on the Big Bang and on relativity (and on the other hand, why do the crazies love quanta so)? Here's…

Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description. The old…

If you missed Richard Dawkins Spring tour, now you can catch his Purpose of Purpose lecture on the interwebs!

It's been a rough few weeks for the accommodationists — they keep raising the same tired old complaints, poorly, and with little flair or reason or persuasive rhetoric, and they keep getting swatted down by those rascally loud "New Atheists. Excuse me if I'm starting to feel a bit cocky, but I'm…

My previous repost was made to give the background on a recent discovery of Jurassic ceratosaur, Limusaurus inextricabilis, and what it tells us about digit evolution. Here's Limusaurus—beautiful little beastie, isn't it? (Click for larger image)Photograph (a) and line drawing (b) of IVPP V 15923…

Answers in Genesis has evolutionary biology on the run now. In an article from 2002, Ostrich eggs break dino-to-bird theory, they explain that development shows that evolution is all wrong, since developmental pathways in different animals are completely different, and can't possibly be the…

As we all know to our great shame, Ken Ham has this Creation "Museum" in Kentucky. As has been reported before, it's a thoroughly bogus bit of bunco, with dinosaurs wearing saddles and all the ills of the world laid at the feet of Charles Darwin. There are a few things you might not know. Like that…

The murder of George Tiller has brought some vile people creeping out from under the woodwork…especially the kinds of nasty minds that like to dress up in clerical collars. Looking for a good emetic? Look no further than this sermon by a Presbyterian minister for a great example of deploring a…

I was recently sent a strange article for comment…well, not that recently. It's 51 pages long, so I've kind of dragged my heels over it all. I have finally finished it, though, and it is weird. There is a significant tradition in developmental biology that is currently a bit out of fashion: some…

On my very own planet of the hats, I would have to wear this lovely pink number. That is a hat that the Squid Pope would wear with pride. It's not quite as terrifying as my cthulhu mask, though, which is what the Squid Inquisitor would wear…but then, I can wear many hats.

That's the title of the site, anyway, Proof That God Exists. It ain't. It's a dreary exercise in the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are lead through a series of binary choices, in which you are asked to choose one alternative or the other, with the goal of shunting you to the desired…

The Republicans are asking the party faithful to fill out a biased poll. The purpose is not to get a snapshot of public opinion, but to mislead people by presenting leading questions. Or, as Mike Haubrich explains it: The point of push-polling in politics is not to gather opinion, it is to "push"…

So right away, you know not to trust it. No details are given, we are simply told that "a major study he commissioned by a respected researcher unveils for the first time in a scientific fashion the startling reasons behind statistics that show two-thirds of young people in evangelical churches…

If you've been building a site for science education, you'll want to looking into this: The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE). The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) has been established to encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to…

It's called Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal gel. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a thing for colds…all it can do is destroy your sense of smell. It wasn't caught before it was put on the market, because, get this: The FDA said Zicam Cold Remedy was never formally approved because it is part of a small group…