Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
June 20, 2014
What? You only play in two dimensions? You're doomed, pathetic human.
TONMO
June 17, 2014
Poor Ken Ham is heartbroken by the latest polling data.
Look at that! More people regard the Bible as a book of fables than ever before. This hurts the Hamster, who declares that they must keep doing more of what has discredited the book.
In this day and age, I consider Genesis, out of all the…
June 17, 2014
Jonathan Chait makes an interesting observation.
Asked by reporters yesterday if he accepts the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming, John Boehner demurred on the curious but increasingly familiar grounds that he is not a scientist. “Listen, I’m not…
June 16, 2014
Oh, that's right -- that's what philosophers are good for. They're really good at questioning models. John Wilkins has been busily dismantling the cheap and easy metaphors we use to describe molecular biological concepts in a series of posts, taking on genes as language, other popular gene myths…
June 13, 2014
I was watching this, and thinking, "Man, octopus can dance." If I could have moved like that, I might not have sullenly sat out the disco era.
June 13, 2014
I don't even…
I have roused the furious slap-fighting anger of the HBD crowd, that's for sure. They have now come up with a priceless argument to refute everything I've said, and are accusing me of being a creationist.
This image is priceless. Yes, @pzmyers, by definition, is a creationist. Why…
June 10, 2014
I'm having a light dinner while traveling off to a visit with Humanists of Minnesota, and I thought I'd deal with a little email. I got a request to address a fairly common creationist argument--here's the relevant part of the claim.
As a member of the Greater Manchester Humanists I was recently…
June 6, 2014
The Vancouver Aquarium brought two octopuses together, and they didn't delay at all -- within minutes, it was…boom chicka wow wow. Totally not safe for work. Not the video, but if you watch this, you might well end up gnawing on your fist and moaning and whimpering right where you are.
May 29, 2014
A correspondent asked me an interesting and difficult question about the sponsorship of science. I've been talking a bit lately about the allosaur affair at the Creation "Museum", which can be summarized this way:
Michael Peroutka, an odious neo-Confederate nut, donates a valuable allosaur fossil…
May 28, 2014
You might have wondered, like I did, how Ken Ham was going to deal with the revelation that his prize Allosaurus specimen was the gift of a freaky neo-Confederate crank. We now know: he's going to ignore it indignantly.
Rachel Maddow had a segment on the allosaur, the creationists, and the neo-…
May 26, 2014
In case you're wondering how they get that way…
May 26, 2014
Yesterday, I attended a discussion led by a philosophy professor after a matinee showing of God's Not Dead. It was a strangely skewed group: about half the attendees were local pastors or wives of pastors. Also, not to my surprise, most of them didn't care for the movie. It was too over the top, it…
May 22, 2014
I've been getting lots of email and twitter remarks from the HBD mafia -- they don't seem to realize that I don't have any respect for a gang of pseudonymous incompetents, and that they're in a clique of self-deluded racist twits. You want to see real tribalism in action, there's a group that…
May 22, 2014
Two more meaty reviews of his li'l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by Jennifer Raff, yet another anthropologist with expertise in genetics.
I’ve focused a lot of this review on numerous technical details because I think that it’s very…
May 17, 2014
We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac's regular deconstruction of his nonsense.
Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the…
May 16, 2014
Frauke Gebusche
May 14, 2014
This is the paper to read: Palazzo & Gregory's The Case for Junk DNA. It clearly and logically lays out the complete argument from evidence and theory for the thesis that most of the genome is junk. It's not revolutionary or radical, though: the whole story is based on very fundamental…
May 11, 2014
A confession: I have long disliked Nicholas Wade's science journalism. He has often written about biology in the NY Times, and every time he seems to make a botch of the reporting, because he actually doesn't understand biology very well. For example, in his very last article for the NYT, he…
May 5, 2014
Acanthaspis petax, a type of assassin bug, stacks dead ant bodies on its back to confuse predators. Photo by Mohd Rizal Ismail
April 28, 2014
You know, fear of holes…it doesn't bother me at all, but about 20 seconds into this video, you'll see a pocked surface suddenly erupt into mouths on wormlike stalks, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for any trypophobia induced heart attacks. Oh, and everything after 1:50 — you might die.
(…