Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
May 1, 2009
Ray Comfort has made a post on the swine flu. You know already what kind of idiotic tripe he's going to trot out.
The spread of the so-called 'swine flu' demonstrates yet again how useless and sometimes deadly a mutation can be. Furthermore, as the infection spreads around the world, the search for…
May 1, 2009
Can you bear yet another poll today? The initial results of this one, before all of you readers get to work and use your magic clicky fingers, is mildly interesting. The readership of Christianity Today consists primarily of scientific illiterates and wishful dreamers, split between people who…
May 1, 2009
I'm stuck in an airport in Cleveland waiting for some flight delays to clear up, but I am feeling cheerful. Don McLeroy is in trouble, and the Texas legislature is considering some revamping of their peculiar system.
The legislative session so far has not been kind to the State Board of Education…
May 1, 2009
WHY DO PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE IN THIS HOMEOPATHY CRAP?
Do you think homeopathy can help in the current swine flu pandemic?
Yes (71.4 %)1484 votes
No (13.3 %)276 votes
Can't say (2.3 %)47 votes
Yes, but won't be allowed to! (13.0 %)271 votes
The only way homeopathy could possibly help is by…
April 30, 2009
Octopus kaurna(That's one female at the center of a mass of males)
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
April 30, 2009
A Pew poll finds that church attendance is correlated with willingness to torture.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or…
April 30, 2009
The province of Alberta has decided to make education optional. If there's something in the real world that you don't like, such as that you evolved from other apes, or that gay people exist, or perhaps that understanding the motion of bodies requires some of that difficult math stuff, students…
April 30, 2009
My heart skipped a beat, I pressed a knuckle to my mouth, my eyelashes fluttered wildly as I tried to hold back my tears as I read this cutting review:
Mr Geoffrey Deene of Fashion Wire Daily, I still think you'd look sodding STUPID if you wore this anywhere:
NOOOOOOoooooooOOOOoooo!!! But I…
April 30, 2009
I know it hurts, it hurts so bad, but I have to ask you again to keep clicking to help me win that iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. It's only a little pain, after a few clicks you'll be numb.
But that reminder also reminds me that I'll be judging a video contest after 1 June — you only have one more…
April 30, 2009
The Huffington Post has been getting a lot of grief around scienceblogs lately, since they've been letting some astounding woo slip through under the guise of medicine and science. Now it is partly explained: their "wellness" editor is Patricia Fitzgerald. Here are her qualifications:
Patricia…
April 30, 2009
Wow. I thought it was amazing that Paul Nelson had taken 5 years and counting to get around to explaining ontogenetic depth, but that's nothing: he has been promising a monograph on common descent for eleven years. If his wife sends him out to the store for a gallon of milk, does he come back a…
April 30, 2009
Melanie Phillips is irate. Why? Because Ken Miller says Intelligent Design is nothing but creationism relabeled. Miller is right, Phillips is once again raving in ignorance.
In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown…
April 30, 2009
There's a funny Cat and Girl comic that makes fun of our success as atheists, saying that we've gone mainstream. Read it, I got a chuckle…but one of the panels listing factors in our loss of indie cred says, "We have our own Jonas Brothers." Now I'm stuck. I can't figure out who our equivalent…
April 30, 2009
What do Louis Pasteur, Robert Boyle, Charles Bell, William Kirby, James Clerk Maxwell, and George Washington Carver all have in common? They all have facebook fan pages…created by the Institute for Creation Research!
Carver is representative: here's the kind of thing the ICR writes about each one,…
April 30, 2009
It looks like trouble, and some ministers are defending the proposed blasphemy law — you people aren't going to let this violation of civil rights pass, are you?
We have some more details on the law, too: it authorizes fines up to €100,000, and gives the police the right to seize blasphemous…
April 29, 2009
I could hardly believe it when I saw it, but the BioLogos site uses the familiar creationist second law of thermodynamics argument.
Francis Collins has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, and he should know very well what the meaning of entropy is (he should be far more familiar with the concept than a…
April 29, 2009
Good news for me! I get to spend a week in Germany, attending the Nobel Laureate meetings at Lindau on 28 June-3 July. I get to have all the fun, but at least you'll benefit indirectly, since I'll be regularly blogging the talks here. In English. You wouldn't want to see the butchery I would do to…
April 29, 2009
I need details of this law against blasphemy. If "Begorrah!" and "Saints preserve us!" are outlawed, then Irish stereotypes will be utterly demolished. On the other hand, one Irish fellow I knew used the peculiar expression "fewkin'" as every other word…I presume charming references to sexual acts…
April 29, 2009
Oh, no…it's an irresistible magnet. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, with funding from the Templeton Foundation (who else?), have put together a whole website full of fluffy bunnies and pious weasels to reconcile science and faith. It's a rich vein of the worst of pseudo-scientific apologetics,…
April 29, 2009
You've all seen the hideous Florida license plates, right? Well, the Orlando Sentinel has a poll to see whether people think it's reasonable for a secular state government to be punching out plates endorsing a weird sectarian faith. So far, the kind of people who read the Sentinel think it is. I…
April 29, 2009
In a promising sign of the decline of some forms of Christianity, a major Christian book show has been cancelled.
The show won't go on in Dallas. The Christian Book Expo, an innovative consumer-focused book show, won't be repeated next year. The board of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association…
April 29, 2009
In February of next year, the odious Ken Ham will be hosting a so-called science fair at his awful little "museum". That's fine, Christians can do science, but of course it has a little caveat that means it will not be science.
It's open to homeschoolers, Christian school students, and public…
April 28, 2009
The crazy lady of Minnesota politics has done it again.
In case you don't actually want to see and hear this lunatic, here's what she says:
I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter, and I'm not blaming this…
April 28, 2009
Whenever the Huffington Post brings up a science-related issue, I just cringe. It's Jim Carrey or Deepak Chopra or some other celebrity incompetent babbling out some nonsense — it's like the site editors have no B.S. detectors at all. Well, now they've really done it: they've got some quack named…
April 28, 2009
In an act of political expediency, Arlen Specter has switched parties. This is good, in that it gives the Democrats more clout (especially when Minnesota's senator is finally seated). It's bad in that we don't want ex-Republicans to have more voice in the party. We'll take it, anyway.
The best part…
April 28, 2009
You all remember that I'm trying to win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind, right? You're supposed to click on this link every day!
(The way it works is that every click through to the silly creationist site gets counted as coming from me, and that click adds a vote to my tally. The top referrers get a…
April 28, 2009
Allow me to recap. Jerry Coyne set a few people on fire with a post arguing that national science organizations have gone to far in blithely conceding the compatibility of science and religion. He strongly suggests that they stick to complete neutrality on the topic, something they all promise to…
April 28, 2009
I have to take back some of the mean things I've said about Intelligent Design creationism. They have finally made a significant contribution to a science…in this case, computer science. Behold the awesome power of the Intelligent Design Sort!
Intelligent Design Sort
Introduction
Intelligent design…
April 28, 2009
The lawsuits between Carl Wieland and Ken Ham have been settled out of court. In case you hadn't been following it, both were originally members of the same creationist organization in Australia; Ham emigrated and set up the American branch; they drifted apart and for years have been sniping…