Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
August 6, 2009
I tried to watch this new video from Edward Current, but it turns out my Faith-Vision is legally blind.
August 6, 2009
Sam Harris wrote a recent op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the nomination of Francis Collins to head the NIH. As you all know, newspapers limit the amount of space you can have, so that was the very limited version — he has now posted a lengthy critique of Collins on the Reason Project.
August 5, 2009
The big field trip to Ken Ham's amusement park is on Friday morning — we'll be meeting at 10am at the parking lot, just look for the mob.
Be ready. This is exactly what you can expect if any of the creationists engage with you.
Expect them to be smug in their ignorance, and recite the same old…
August 5, 2009
We uppity obnoxious "New Atheists" often get called "militant" or "rabid" or even "fundamentalist", and unless you're doing it as a joke, it's highly inappropriate. Real rabid radicals do things like these animal rights lunatics, who have targeted the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, setting fire…
August 5, 2009
I was recently interviewed for the Young Australian Skeptics podcast, and it's now available for download.
August 5, 2009
As I'm sure you've all heard by now, a deranged gunman went on a shooting spree in a fitness club in LA, killing 3 women and injuring 10 before blowing his own scabrous, rotting brains out. The guy was just plain nuts (in a fairly common sort of way, unfortunately), but he also left behind an…
August 5, 2009
One of the many disgraceful acts of brigandage our country committed in Iraq was the hiring of mercenary thugs through a company called Blackwater. Unwilling to risk the political fallout from openly discussing and recruiting the number of soldiers necessary to actually carry out their grand plans…
August 4, 2009
We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed sequence, with patterns of activity in the living cell that are not readily…
August 4, 2009
The birthers are getting even more insane. They've trotted out a faked Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, which was predictable and stupid; their media representative, Orly Taitz, had a public meltdown (and seriously, you know you've got credibility problems when your media face is a lunatic like…
August 4, 2009
I'm getting a lot of email asking me to talk about the aquatic ape theory, the idea that humans went through a semi-aquatic stage in their evolutionary history. It's complete nonsense; its proponents spew out a lot of inconsistent and mutually contradictory noise to 'support' their claims, and…
August 4, 2009
Once again, we've got an anti-atheist claiming that the opposition to the nomination of Francis Collins to head the NIH is built entirely on the fact that he is a Christian. It's nuts. We spell it out clearly, over and over again, and these people seem incapable of comprehending a basic fact.
Every…
August 3, 2009
If you've been following the comment threads lately, you already know that we've had a new arrival who has been inspiring much hilarity, Pastor Tom Estes. He seems to be much dismayed at us atheists, and is promising to meet us at the Creation "Museum" on Friday, to discuss matters. He also has a…
August 3, 2009
Spare me the obsessed. Vincent Fleury is still haranguing me over my review of his bad paper. He argues for a simplistic mechanical view of development, saying "Tetrapods are formed by a flow of cells which has a hyperbolic (saddle) point around the navel.
it is not tautological. They form from the…
August 3, 2009
Israel has no oil, but some people wish it did, for the worst of reasons. This is an amazing story of a con artist and his willing victims…and nothing is better at leading the sheep to slaughter than religion.
When James Cojanis heard the first rumblings of Armageddon, he was sitting in his San…
August 3, 2009
You can listen to it online. It's not bad — I should load it onto my iPod Touch.
August 2, 2009
I have to wait for these Chaser videos to migrate to YouTube — people keep sending me links to the Australian broadcasters site, but they don't let us Americans see them. Here, though, is one in which they journeyed to Texas to see if we Americans take the bible as literally as some claim. We…
August 2, 2009
Last year, Kara Neumann died of juvenile diabetes. Her death was slow and painful, and entirely unnecessary — her parents believed in the power of prayer and allowed her obvious symptoms to go untreated except for entreaties to an invisible and inert god. They weren't opposed to technology in…
August 1, 2009
I think I'm going to have to order this book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Jeff Sharlet, on the basis of this interview. I know, it's Bill Maher, who drives us frothing mad with his inconsistencies, but ignore Maher and just pay…
August 1, 2009
It's a very charitable review of a creationist movie, the latest bit of dishonest propaganda since Expelled. It is apparently very professionally made, which means less and less nowadays as digital video gear gets cheaper and easier to get, but I was surprised at one thing: it's not really a movie…
August 1, 2009
The American education is a hellish mess, run by the ghastly, inefficient school board system that is too often dominated by anti-education hacks (Texas comes to mind as the preeminent example, but really, the problem is everywhere in the country). The system is so bad that Mark Twain was making…
July 31, 2009
Various bits of red tape have been cleared, and the feds are about to seize the bulk of Dino Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida, so that it can be sold off to cover the Hovind's pending debts and penalties. You might just be able to pick up some plywood dinosaurs for cheap!
July 31, 2009
That crank pseudoscience site, Watt's Up With That, got thoroughly reamed out with the video below (just the fact that the chief crackpot, Anthony Watts, would show up on Glenn Beck's show is indictment enough, though). Watt was not too happy with his public evisceration, however, and scurried off…
July 31, 2009
Dosidicus gigas, left, Homo sapiens, right
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
July 31, 2009
We are often told that religion is a different way of knowing, that it can provide us with a different perspective and different information. I have not believed this at all, because no one has ever been able to give me an example of actual, useful information obtained from a religion, that could…
July 31, 2009
A much-abused study showed that in poor neighborhoods with low academic opportunities, better scholastic performance was correlated with church attendance. This slim thread has been seized upon by religious apologists to justify claims that church attendance improves kids' grades, and is usually…
July 31, 2009
Here is a piece of text from a textbook used by fundamentalist Christians in a biology class.
Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie,' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a…
July 31, 2009
Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we're building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.
Brace…
July 31, 2009
Cobb County, Georgia is infamous for its efforts a few years ago to slap a warning sticker on biology textbooks, which might have given the impression that it's full of southern yahoos. However, intelligent people and godless people are everywhere, including Cobb County, and they now have another…