pharyngula

Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn't teach them, and gave them a reading list for the…

I think BAHFest — the festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses — has been made entirely redundant. It's an event to mock the absurdly adaptationist hypotheses put forward by some scientists, and it's intended to be extravagantly ridiculous. But then, you look at some ideas that are inexplicably popular…

Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn't the…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

(via TONMO)

My wife tells me I ought to feature a fish that's actually called the Sarcastic Fringehead on the blog — it's a natural. I wonder if she was being sarcastic, but she looked so innocent when she told me.

The coelacanth genome has been sequenced, which is good news all around…except that I found a few of the comments in the article announcing it disconcerting. They keep calling it a "living fossil" — and you know what I think of that term — and they keep referring to it as evolving slowly The slowly…

It's a big image, so it's going below the fold. (via)

Graaarh, physicists I thought physics was the most hubristic scientific discipline of them all, but I may have to revise that assessment. Last week I was sent another of those papers published in archiv, the physics repository, making grand pronouncements about evolution, and I made the mistake of…

A few weeks ago I gave a talk in Seattle in which I pointed out that science is not sufficient to define moral behavior. A substantial part of that talk was a catalog of atrocities, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I said that in purely scientific terms, that was a good experiment; if the…

At least, that's what I keep telling myself as yet another snowstorm bears down on us. (source)

Every time I despair at the dreadful nonsense from the Discovery Institute, I can reliably turn to Answers in Genesis and despair harder. They've just announced that "after two centuries of research", they've finally determined the dates of the Ice Age. They've even announced that they're going to…

It's a frog tadpole with an eye surgically grafted to its trunk! Wait, this is an old story — similar experiments were done at least 20 years ago. You can transplant developing eyes to the tadpole, but the cool thing is that the donor optic nerves will grow into the sensory tracts of the dorsal…

(from the TONMO page on Cephalopod Ethics)

Sorry, I was looking at this Akebia flower, and for some reason I felt a compulsion to count the number of carpels, and I did it out loud in the voice of Sesame Street's Count. It's been a long day of proofreading and I'm home all alone, and I think I'm getting punchy. I should probably just go to…

This is a cool video from a textbook publisher (Molecular Biology of the Cell, a very good text) illustrating how Spemann/Mangold's famous organizer experiment was done. Also cool: those are apparently Edward De Robertis' hands doing the experiment.

The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing…

This is a very special bird from Arkansas that will become much more common with more oil pipelines running through the middle of the country. Won't it be great to be able to readily make an entry in your birding book, soon enough?

Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I'd hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on. Yeah, they're working on building a replica of Noah's Ark. It's all part of their plan for defrauding the…

It's a dying holiday, I'm sorry to say -- I completely forgot it last year. But I was reminded this year, so I'll mention it again. I think the proper way to celebrate it is simply to laugh at a creationist today. The source of the holiday is a remarkable exhibition from Paul Nelson, who like…

(via the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Hey, I just realized that it's been about 25 years since I've been to Monterey Bay…I should go again.)

You know those deep icy fields of methane hydrates Japan wants to tap for natural gas? (One of the worst ideas ever, by the way.) They're inhabited, by polychaetes like Hesiocaeca methanicola. (via NatGeo, which is a bit too uncritical of the idea for my taste.)

I am sad to say I missed the American Atheists 2013 National Convention — it sounds like it was a blast, but I was booked up with a series of talks out in lovely warm sunny Seattle. Here's what I've been up to. On Wednesday, I talked to Seattle Atheists on "Moving Atheism Beyond Science". I argued…

Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet: I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988 It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…

This pretty pink photo that accompanied the article has nothing at all to do with the contents; this can't be the species involved. But that's appropriate to the devious nature of the story. A squid was caught in China that had swallowed a three pound bomb — a live explosive that was later…

So you can stop sending me email about it now. Also, dear gob, but I despise the Huffington Post. They've started this recent flurry of publicity for deranged loon Mastropaolo with an awful article on his tired old stunt of announcing a $10,000 prize for a debate — an article in which they blithely…

I'm queuing this up ahead of time, and I presume I'm in Washington state today, for this talk. You residents of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California will recognize this familiar flower. (via NatGeo)

This is a new one for me. Earlier today I was summoned on Twitter to address an assertion by a creationist, @jarrydtrokis. I was slightly boggled. He was baffled by eyelid development. It seems he thinks it requires…intelligent design!. ... Here's one for you to ponder :) Eye lids in the womb...…

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of…