Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
June 30, 2010
I'm very, very sorry. You know that little malware incident the other day? We've discovered what the nasty thing did: it's infected us here at scienceblogs, and there's an epidemic sweeping through the team. Symptoms are cold-heartedness, decay, lack of affect, deadness, corruption, sudden surges…
June 30, 2010
He's tweaked the noses of those 'New Atheists', for sure! One of Gee's roles is as the editor of the Futures science fiction section in Nature, and he's proud to have published a story by Shelly Li, which actually is a well-written short dystopian fantasy, titled The End of God. Gee really detests…
June 30, 2010
Unless they're imprecatory, and from the other side. Christopher Hitchens has made an announcement.
I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short…
June 30, 2010
Important clarification: CAH is a real and serious disease. There are no objections to pediatricians treating the physiological disorders in utero. However, lesbianism, traditionally masculine career choices, and disinterest in having children are not diseases…and the problem in this work is that…
June 30, 2010
At first, it was a distressing slithery whisper, like a krait loosed in the room; then a sensation, an itch, as if an assassin were trickling arsenic into my ear; and then apparently the assassin decided to get sadistic and switch to sulfuric acid. I woke up and blinked at the alarm clock; the…
June 30, 2010
You've all been wondering, I'm sure, what a vampire penis looks like. We don't have a picture of one, since Twilight is still the domain of yearningly sexless (we hope!) tweens who are infatuated with the idea of love and sex, just not the reality, but one exploiter has come out with a Twilight…
June 30, 2010
Who remembers Robert Ardrey? I must shamefully confess that I was a fan back in the 1970s, when the 'killer ape' hypothesis was in the air. This was the idea that one of the things that made humans different and drove the evolution of the human brain was aggression and competition, specifically…
June 30, 2010
The thread is dead, long live the thread! Now party on, dudes.
(Current totals: 10,514 entries with 1,038,711 comments.)
June 30, 2010
Ah, the funny cartoon yesterday rankled the libertarian contingent again. I'll explain a few things that will get them fired up even more.
Get over yourselves. Mocking libertarians does not bring me a swarm of traffic -- you're like a tiny swarm of self-important rodents who will natter on…
June 29, 2010
You knew it was too good to be true. Julia Gillard has just announced that she is against gay marriage. The honeymoon is over, no more plaudits. At least we still have Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir to admire.
And because it's Gillard, there's a poll. Are Australians always this internet-poll crazy?
Do you…
June 29, 2010
Which one are you?
(Link to malware at leftycartoons.com deleted)
Just joking. We know libertarians aren't so simple: they are all a combination of two or more of the archetypes above.
(And the hate mail will come rollin' in…)
June 29, 2010
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do…
June 29, 2010
The godless Australian PM, Julia Gillard, has sure riled up the pollsters. Here's three polls at once to slam. Start clicking!
Do you care at all about Julia Gillard's lack of religious faith?
* Yes 33.71%
* No 66.29%
Hey, what's the difference between "No" and "Don't care" in this poll?…
June 29, 2010
It's an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I'd rather not go down that road. So here's…
June 29, 2010
One of the outcomes of the Copenhagen gathering of atheists was the formulation of a set of principles. It has now been posted on the web, so it's time for everyone to discuss, comment, and criticize…have at it!
The recent Gods and Politics conference in Copenhagen adopted the following Declaration…
June 29, 2010
Hold onto your hats, don't be too shocked, but a creationist has lied about science. I'm constantly getting email from fundagelical groups insisting that I must obey and join their One True Faith, and I got one from the Worldwide Church of God aka Radio Church of God aka Grace Communion…
June 28, 2010
Julia Gillard, the new Prime Minister of Australia, is unmarried…but she has a boyfriend, a partner, a…a…paramour, which brings up the horrific possibility of a leader of the country living in sin in official accommodations. Oh, lord, I'm getting the vapors just thinking about it.
And now the…
June 28, 2010
It's an origins story!
There's also a plug for the season 3 DVD, which will be coming out in a few weeks. I've already pre-ordered mine, but now I'm thinking I should order a second one for my mom. Maybe a third, for my mother-in-law? No, that would be pushing it, I think.
June 28, 2010
Paul was at a Christian homeschooling conference, and was asked outright how old he thought the earth was. He refused to answer.
Silly man. These were Christian homeschoolers in Kentucky. Everyone knows that on that planet, the correct answer is "6000 years".
Libertarians, you aren't really going…
June 28, 2010
This makes me so happy. I've long wanted to join those lovely conservative Christian groups on campus that have until now restricted membership to heterosexual believers, and now I can. The Supreme Court has ruled that universities may refuse to recognize campus groups that violate non-…
June 28, 2010
My brain has been blasted by the confident inanity of Ron Rosenbaum. He's a chipper flibbertigibbet who is proudly agnostic (no problem with that) and as dumb as they come (which is a problem). He has written an essay on Slate titled "The Rise of the New Agnostics" which has a few little quirks. No…
June 28, 2010
But I can't. I am quite possibly the worst dancer in our galaxy (notice the nod to my self-esteem: I can acknowledge that there might be an entity worse at dancing somewhere in the universe). But still, this announcement spoke to my inner Balanchine.
Who said scientists can't dance? The American…
June 28, 2010
Chris Mooney has another vacuous op-ed in the Washington Post. It's aggravating because he actually starts out well, saying stuff that I agree with entirely, and then suffers a massive failure of either nerve or logic to offer meaningless noise as a solution.
The part I agree with is that he points…
June 28, 2010
It's a tiny little island nation in the Indian Ocean, and it sounds like an interesting place. Unfortunately, the people there make it a hellhole.
In the Muslim-majority nation of Maldives, a man stunned an audience during questions and answers period in a lecture given by an Islamic cleric, by…
June 27, 2010
A strange little blog has been carping at various atheists blogs for a while now. Called "You're Not Helping", it pretended to have the goal of keeping internet atheists honest and holding them to a higher standard. It wasn't very interesting — it's main claim to fame was a tone that combined self-…
June 27, 2010
We have achieved victory in the great beard debate, reaching the goal of £1500, and also the votes for beards have a dominating lead over no beard. The Trophy Wife™ is relieved.
We aren't quite finished, though — the poll will remain open for another week, and those sneaky bare-faced people might…
June 27, 2010
I actually listened to a little bit of that Chopraesque blithering about the Gulf from "Evolutionary Leaders" — I really, really despise them for taking that name — and you can, too, at this link. I don't recommend it: the incompetent boobs who set it up had created a two-way conference call with…