pharyngula

Sepia latimanus Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

I've got a better idea of what my schedule is like, and even have a recommendation for a hangout tonight — would anyone care to join me at the Arbor Brewing Company tonight (Thursday) around 7 or 8pm? I'm going whether anyone shows up or not, and if nobody joins me, I'll be drinking alone…and how…

While I'm off at this meeting, you all can nominate your favorite commenter for the Order of the Molly. I'll tally up the votes on Sunday, when I get back home.

Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online. (And I've just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)

Man, what a beautiful burn. And he doesn't just take on Falwell, it's the whole rotten edifice of religion.

This is a fascinating diagram from a zoology text of the 1930s—it's an illustration of the effects of reproduction rate on the frequency of subsets of the population, and the author was using it to justify eugenics. Up into the 1960s, he was advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded to improve…

Oh, no — DaveScot can't find Gonzalez's article that he published in 2001 on the Scientific American website! It's a CONSPIRACY! The Darwinist Establishment is suppressing his publications and rewriting history! Uh, wait … no, it was a "technical glitch" that also made a couple of other articles…

Lewis Wolpert has a pleasant interview in Salon today — I find most of what he says copacetic. I very much like his developmental biology textbook, but I'm afraid I found his recent popular book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), far too scattered and unfocused to be…

While I am sorry for the pain that his family now feels, we can all take solace in the fact that the extinction of the televangelist was all part of god's loving plan.

Didn't I just say "Woo hoo" yesterday? False alarm. Scarcely do I clear one set of major tasks away than another set rise up. I already mentioned that I was going to be the speaker at the Humanists of Minnesota banquet on Saturday evening. I neglected to tell you all that I'm leaving for the…

A Christian game company has started a promotion for one of their games, and one gimmick is that they are offering a $10,000 prize to any atheist or agnostic who can replicate the unique literary style of the bible, which they purport is evidence of its divine origin. Mankind has been debating the…

For only $399, you can send your kids away to spend a few days this summer with Ollie North, professional traitor, frolicking about on a military base and pretending to be brave warriors with absolutely no risk. It's the perfect activity for young Republican chickenhawks-in-training. It's an…

Alistair McGrath came out with a book called The Dawkins Delusion? a while back, in response to The God Delusion, obviously. It seems to have sank without much of a trace, and what I've read of McGrath on the net has been tediously unimpressive — he's another believer who mistakes criticizing…

I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I'm all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I've gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I'm still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you…

Avidor has a video of an exchange between a defender of science (DFL) and creationist coward (R). It's amusing. Kate Knuth (DFL) asks a simple question—whether Tom Emmer (R) believes the earth is thousands of years old, or billions of years old—and Emmer runs away from the question. First he…

I just finished grading all the genetics final exams, and submitted final grades to the registrar! I've just got two independent study papers that need to be turned in and graded, and then I will be completely done.

He turned 70 on Saturday—I hope he partied well! (via Crooks and Liars)

You might not want to look at this story about the televangelist fraud, Peter Popoff around lunchtime — it contains graphic visuals of a known con artist cheerfully defrauding the sick and elderly, and it might leave you a little squeamish. Popoff was discredited by James Randi 20 years ago, as is…

Seed is doing a Good Thing and hosting a site and forum for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (when I was growing up, this was better known as the Westinghouse science fair, and it is very prestigious). Some of the projects that come out of that science fair are just plain…

John Horgan and George Johnson are going at it again on Bloggingheads. The most interesting part, I thought, was the discussion of EO Wilson's turn towards group selection; one of the themes of Gould's last book was the existence of levels of selection above the individual and the gene. Gould and…

Les Lane has a summary of Gonzalez's unfortunate tenure situation. To nudge your memory, Guillermo Gonzalez is the Discovery Institute fellow who was working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University; he was recently denied tenure there and is protesting the decision. It's an…

As the buggy summer looms, I have to confess to a sadistic enjoyment of this splatter film. I think the insects are real animals filmed with high speed cameras, but the actual impacts are faked with CGI — the physics weren't quite right, and the flying insects should have bounced out of the…

On 28 May, there will be a protest demonstration at Ken Ham's folly, the creationist exhibition near Cincinnati. This is not about shutting down the foolish building, but using its own PR focus on itself, turning media attention to the fact that a lot of people consider it backward, insane, and…

Jason Rennie interviewed me for the Sci Phi podcast, and now you can listen to me babble about religion and science. I have got to do something about my office phone, though — the sound quality is terrible, and I've gotten the same complaint from others. Or maybe that's what I actually sound like,…

On the old site, I had a little tradition of occasionally showing off embarrassing baby pictures of the kids (here's Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje, for instance). Today is Mother's Day, and it would be cool to show off old pictures of Mom, but wouldn't you know it — mothers are much too clever for…

Uh-oh. I'm being chastised by Jason, and by more than a few commenters in the thread about Mitt Romney's views on evolution. You're all going to have to crack the whip harder, though, because I am still unpersuaded, and I'm still mildly disgusted with all the people praising Romney for his anti-…

Looking for some ungodly inspiration? Here are some possibilities: Revere optimistically sees atheism as becoming mainstream. I think this is the virtue of the open and aggressive discussions about atheism going on — there are more freethinkers out there than polls reveal, and they are silent…

Quick, listen to this realaudio talk by Mark Steel on Thomas Paine while it's still available on the BBC site. It's both hysterically funny and informative. One revelation for me was that America's early fervently godless rabble-rouser began his career by signing on to a ship called the Terrible,…