pharyngula

A reader sent in this photo of a captured pelagic octopus and observer. I know…most of you are going to be interested in the mundane mammal here. I don't think the beast has any kind of scientific interest in that lovely cephalopod.

I see that Aron Ra is wrestling with a presuppositionalist. Presuppositionalists are incredibly obnoxious debaters, and right now, it's the most common tactic creationists use to defend their nonsense, thanks to Answers in Genesis, which has been pushing it hard. We agree that presuppositional…

It's sad that NOAA even had to issue this statement. But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found Are there any government agencies that would like to take a stand on elves, leprechauns, pixies, and Bigfoot?

Yeah, it's true: the most phallic fruit of them all is pretty much sexless, and is an abomination produced by cruel human manipulation. Sorry, Ray.

Harun Yahya has a youtube channel, and it is surreal. He sponsors these panels of attractive young women with grossly overdone makeup — is he catering to his interpretation of how Western women are supposed to look? I don't know, it's just weird — and they talk about science in stilted, broken…

How can you possibly play video games with 14 minutes worth of lag? There's some awesome engineering behind landing a rover on Mars.

Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island Tortoises, died on Sunday. He left no survivors that are known. His death marks the extinction of Chelonidis nigra abingdoni.

Red hair. Freckles. Pale skin. Soulless. What good are they? Seriously — I have a red-haired son and brother and cousins, and you've got to wonder why evolution has spawned all these strange color variants — there's no known advantage to ginger-ness, and plenty of disadvantages. The biochemical…

That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he's convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry. The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction…

(via TONMO)

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It's a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept. Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks,…

I've been working up a science talk for the fall — I am going to do a basic review of many the mechanisms other than selection that contribute to evolution for lay audiences. And then I discover that T. Ryan Gregory has already done some of the work for me. Maybe I should just plagiarize it? (No…

Given the catastrophic flooding in Minnesota right now, I thought everyone would appreciate a summary of good flowers for the Minnesota floodplain, and a nice picture of a columbine.

Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal's new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education.…

I've noticed this before, and I'm sure many of you have, too: you can often take creationist comments, especially when they're lengthy, run them through a google search, and discover that the were lifted wholly from some other source. If you read the creationist literature for any length of time,…

I found this very satisfying: Steven Pinker summarizes all the problems with group selection. It's a substantial essay, but if you just want the gist of it, here's the conclusion. The idea of Group Selection has a superficial appeal because humans are indisputably adapted to group living and…

All I want to know is…who instigated this unholy coupling? Was it the dolphin getting kinky? Was it the octopus feeling amorous? Or was it possibly a mutually agreed-upon exploration of new sexual frontiers?

(via NatGeo)

And they know it. Ken Ham has started a new billboard campaign for the creation "museum", with a variety of different designs, all featuring prehistoric* creatures as draws to get kids and family to attend. Here are some examples: Notice what's smart about them? They're focused, featuring an…

(via the Johnsen Lab)

Just the title was enough to make me squeamish: Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman. It seems the woman thought she was getting dinner; the squid saw a last chance to reproduce. As is common with these kinds of misunderstandings,…

Jerry Gretzinger has a project, one that never ends. What started as a little doodle has grown into a sprawling, detailed map that is maintained and expanded by following rules — rules that increase complexity organically, using chance. It's cool and strange at the same time. Jerry's Map from…

Exciting news! Scientists are working on identifying the biochemical pathways that produce a miniscule component of this plant's chemical defenses!

The Best Science Writing Online 2012 can be read online right now — but don't you want to order your very own precious hard copy, too?

Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong. They're arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan…

In honor of a recently banned creationist pest, I give you…Chaetopterus pugaporcinus. It seems appropriate, somehow. (via The Featured Creature)

I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down. It's genuinely awful. Total…

This is a rather chilling story of academic freedom getting trampled. A whole pile of documentation is available at that link, I'll try to simplify it down a lot. UC Davis was sponsoring a public seminar on prostate cancer; specifically, they were actively promoting the prostate specific antigen (…

(via NatGeo)