pharyngula

I've just read the article on the parthenogenetic Komodo dragons in Nature, and it's very cool. They've analyzed the genetics of the eggs that have failed to develop (the remainder are expected to hatch in January) and determined that they were definitely produced without the aid of a male. We…

What are the key ingredients for making a multicellular animal, or metazoan? A couple of the fundamental elements are: A mechanism to allow informative interactions between cells. You don't want all the cells to be the same, you want them to communicate with one another and set up different…

Thanks to Hilzoy, I've learned that our dearly beloved president has enunciated an important principle. Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God. "'Terrorists' can't be God-believing people,'" Richard Joel…

Why, you might wonder, after taking Mike S. Adams apart in a burst of posts a while back, have I neglected my fellow academic? There's a good reason for that, which you can discover by reading S.Z.'s recitation of his latest column. This is one where he responds to a students poor excuses for…

Let me tell you a story. Depending on the point of view, it's either a bit of daily routine, or a tragedy. (via My Confined Space)

He died for your sins so you can get presents. He is Jesus the Christ, he's got a list and he's checking it twice.

Could anyone have possibly predicted this? Larry Moran has been banned from Uncommon Descent by DaveScot. Stunning surprise, eh? We should have set up a betting pool.

The latest panty-twisting at Uncommon Descent is over the Blasphemy Challenge. The poor dears are so concerned about all the heretics damning themselves that DaveScot is moved to weep and pray over them, and William Dembski writes a letter to Richard Dawkins asking him why he doesn't expand the…

Encephalon 13 Carnival of Education #98 In other news, Atheism Online is back in version 2.0. All heathens should report for registration at once. I'll mention again that there's a new Tangled Bank at Salto Sobrious. Any volunteers for future hosting duties? We have slots open starting in…

I'm joining in on the Carl Sagan Memorial blog-a-thon, but I can't offer unstinting praise. Sagan wrote about biology now and then, and every time he irritated me; I always felt like arguing with him about some detail that bugged me, and I think that was actually among his virtues—he was a…

This one you've heard of, and maybe more of you subscribe to: the Dec/Jan issue of Seed. In addition to an article on Dark Energy, a review of the Year in Science, stories about Angela Merkel and Stephen Colbert and James Hansen, there's the infamous feature on us sciencebloggers, and the very…

Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on 'em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness. So contraception is the source of single-…

A Tangled Bank is a good spot from which to launch an ambush—so Salto Sobrius is on the attack! P.S. Scienceblogs had a server upgrade last night that went awry. If you were unable to make comments for a while, sorry about that—I think it is all better now.

We've been warned that there will be some server improvements made this evening, for the next few hours. You should still be able to see everything, but there may be commenting glitches while the upgrade is going on. Have no fear, we're supposed to bounce back smoother and faster tomorrow.

Say it isn't so — Ouroboros has an article on cephalopod senescence.

Once upon a time, in Paris in 1830, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire debated Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier on the subject of the unity of organismal form. Geoffroy favored the idea of a deep homology, that all animals shared a common archetype: invertebrates with their…

That crazy pseudoscientific hack, Michael Crichton, has screwed up big time. In a teeny-tiny tantrum against a critic, he made up a character in his latest book with a similar name and background who also happens to be a depraved rapist of infants. Now the obliquely defamed critic makes a measured…

Creationism gets another defeat: the Cobb County case about the textbook stickers has been settled, and the bad guys have surrendered. In an agreement announced today, Cobb County school officials state that they will not order the placement of "any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other…

Phil has conceded, and I've received official verification that Pharyngula is indeed the winner of the Best Science Blog award. I have no illusions, though: this really isn't a recognition that I have the best science blog, it's evidence that I can put together a really good PR campaign that will…

How about leaving a message of support for Matthew LaClair on the Kearny web board, everyone? Matt is the student who exposed his history teacher's classroom preaching, and he certainly is isolated in that backwards little town…so let him know the whole world appreciates him!

We know that spammers cobble up chunks of text by skimming various sources, such as religious tracts, but a reader has discovered that they also pull random text from newspapers. My name has appeared in spam! That's from a Star Tribune article that quoted me—now I'm wondering what the spammer was…

Despite the fact that the scientific evidence supports their innocence, the kangaroo court in Libya has found the six medical workers guilty of intentionally infecting children with AIDS. The mob, at least, is happy. "For the second time, justice has spoken out with a ruling against those criminals…

There's just no way around it any more. IF: If you're from Colorado, and if you're a fundamentalist Christian, then you must be gay. There's nothing at all wrong with that, of course, and you should just stop living a lie and come out with it. We should have known, I think. The bright lights, the…

After Dembski sent out that request for more contributions to his petty flash animation, Ken Miller offers him more than he asked for: a nice assortment of the most embarrasssing moments for the creationists at the Dover trial. No response from Dembski yet; aren't you all looking forward to it?

Gosh, but it looks exciting. (It really did arrive in my mailbox … inside the pages of Mad magazine.)

Brian Flemming posts an interesting quote from Sam Harris: I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it…

The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I've already answered, so I thought I'd just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question: What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?…

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the Left Behind series, have made disparaging comments about violent video games. Now that they've got a violent video game based on their novels, though, they're saying "It's not more violent than the Old Testament." Set the bar low, will ya? (A "…

I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she…

David Paszkiewicz, the history teacher recorded while proselytizing to his students, has made the NY Times. Here's the familiar part: Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that…