pharyngula

Mooney is at it again, scrabbling madly to refute my criticisms. It's another ho-hum effort. He claims he did spend some effort criticizing the overt anti-science forces in our country — only it was in his previous book, not this one. No, that doesn't rebut me at all: in a book that purports to be…

The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. It's kind of sweet, in a morbid way.…

Then you need to turn to the non-scientists for some refreshing expressions of unity. Or not. A New Age magazine in Minnesota is under new management, and the editor wants to exercise some "quality control": astrology, fairies, life-force energy, and spiritual quests are OK. Channeling and paganism…

An important tip to book authors who want to decry the ability of others to engage a consensus: don't alienate the literate, thinking part of your readership yourself. Mooney and Kirshenbaum make much of the fact that those wicked "New Atheists" are going to drive away support for science, a fact…

It's happening again. The Republicans are tilting at one of their favorite windmills, the mad scientists' dream of creating an unholy union between beast and human to produce a slave race of soulless monsters. They have introduced legislation to ban human-animal hybrids. And it's even bipartisan!…

Since there has been so much talk about Carl Sagan lately, let's hear it from the man himself, in his last interview with Charlie Rose. He's interestingly complicated.

There are rumors whispering about on the scienceblogs grapevine that there may — I emphasize may — be some brief downtime of the site on Wednesday, while the techies do some magic and switch us to some better performing hardware. We hope. If I were a man of faith, I'd be praying, but as it is, I'm…

Robert Wright has an article that you can stop reading as soon as you've seen the title: Why the "New Atheists" are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy. Uh, we aren't. Well, that one was easy.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have been so stung by my criticisms of their book that they have launched a multi-part rebuttal to my review. Here's my reply to their reply. We didn't get personal, and we didn't attack atheism in general! Hmmm. Here's a sampling of what they do say: "Myers' actions were…

First, California is hit with a small earthquake (that never happens, does it?) and then…the squid appear. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! It's sweet how the Californians try to throw them back in the sea. Have they no knives, no garlic, no pans with hot oil? Because if the squid did, we know what they'd…

We're in big trouble on our trip to the Creation "Museum", people. We're going on 7 August, and on that very same day, they are planning to present… THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATION!!! What is the Ultimate Proof of Creation, you might ask? There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive…

And it's a strange thing. It's a law that slaps anyone who offends "a substantial number of the adherents of a religion" with a €25,000 fine — which is equal to most of my yearly salary, and also means I'm one of the few people that one could make a good case for having committed blasphemy. I guess…

It's rather familiar, I'm afraid. But funny.

I'm feeling a bit uplifted at the word from the other side of the Atlantic: some doom and gloom from the Anglican church. A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right…

How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek. The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It's common, it's harmless, and it's rather sweet — and we normally approve of…

Eric Jayne has put together a list of his top 30 atheist songs. It seems like it ought to be longer — to my mind, if it isn't praising Jesus or any other supernatural entity, it's an atheist song…which means just about every decent piece of music there is. (That is not to say, of course, that there…

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are discussing their book on Daily Kos. The subject of my review has come up a few times, and one commenter cited this sentence from me: Following this, he proceeds to damn the "New Atheists" for "collapsing the distinction" between methodological and…

She sounds like a nice person: a zoology student (I was one of those, once! Zoology departments are disappearing everywhere, though), with the hobby of making cuddly, squishy plush beasties of all sorts, especially of lots of invertebrates. I think it's time that the teddy bear hegemony in the…

I've got to stop being so longwinded. Here's a very clear summary of the entire "New Atheist"/accommodationist debate. I'll put it below the fold because it does have a few naughty words in it, and unfortunately the children will use that as an excuse to ignore the message. There are two main…

Hang on; Klinghoffer is bad, but you haven't read the clever reasonings of Nancy Greenwood of Red Deer, Alberta yet. She doesn't like those atheists one bit — she's got a list of 5 horrible facts about atheists (although it could be longer, if she hadn't kindly left off the bits about baby-eating…

There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you're…

I've been wrestling with how to respond to the imminent appointment of Francis Collins to the NIH, and it's tough. The problem is that he has excellent qualifications for the position of chief paper-pusher and technician-wrangler, but that his position on religion is just plain weird. He's a…

The good news: Cynthia Dunbar will not be heading the state board of education. The bad news: the governor picked Gail Lowe, a Christianist sheep, who will probably do whatever Dunbar tells her to do, anyway. Don't bother cheering, a few faint moans and groans before you Texans buckle up and head…

You all recall Ray's amusing video in which he praises the 'design' of the banana, with it's pop-top for easy opening. Well, somebody watched how banana-opening experts, monkeys, peel bananas, and we've been doing it all wrong. I just tried it, and it works. It's a revelation, and my life is…

I get called fairly often for quick fact checks by science journalists, which is a good thing. I've also written a fair number of science pieces for publication, which get improved by good editors, which is also a good thing. But there are also ugly tales of bad editing and the difficult realities…

William Saletan highlights an interesting study in reproductive biology. In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm…

Sepiadarium austrinum Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

I recently argued that to scientists, accuracy is the most important element of a story (surprising, no?) in response to a journalist trying to claim that character and plot were more important. I also tried to make the case that accuracy and an interesting narrative aren't mutually incompatible —…