pharyngula

I have a horrendous series of connections to get home — Bloomington → Atlanta → Detroit → Minneapolis — and I'm getting these annoying email alerts from the airline every 20 minutes warning me of problems and delays in my various connections. Apparently, there's some storm in Atlanta that is…

It's another long travel day for me, I'm afraid, and this after a long night of trying to keep up with a lively mob of 20 and 30 year olds at a bar in Champaign-Urbana (and giving a talk yesterday that I think went over fairly well — I even had protesters outside! For a talk on the history and…

I am sometimes accused of having a sense of humor. This base canard is completely unfounded; I merely have great material sent to me. For example, this is an actual abstract for a paper given at the 2004 Baramin Study Group conference. Just try to read it without laughing out loud. The Origins of…

The hyper Japanese narration somehow made me think of The Calamari Wrestler.

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

The animals have had about enough of us, I guess. The latest weird story of animals attacking: An Indonesian villager had to be rushed to hospital after a horse bit off one of his testicles during a freak attack. The 35-year-old man was unloading sand from a horse-drawn cart at a construction…

A young man is languishing in an Islamic prison right now, for a terrible crime. Look at this travesty of justice, this product of primitive morality. Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail…

Todd Wood teaches a creationism course at a bible college, and he has a creationism blog. He has one of the most promising introductions to his way of thinking ever. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into four main components: design, natural evil, systematics,…

The Open University is having an open lecture on 17 March, and you're all invited! The topic sounds historically, philosophically, and scientifically interesting: Richard Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the…

First it was Santino the chimpanzee flinging rocks at his captors, and now a monkey kills his slave-driving owner with a coconut. You all better be nice to your fellow primates, you hear, or you'll be up against the wall in the imminent revolution.

This is a cool talk: Bill Gross talks about his efforts to tap into solar power. It's a little bit over-optimistic — how much of the desert Southwest would we have to pave over to collect enough energy for the country? — but the really fun part is where he talks about using unguided evolutionary…

As part of his deplorable legacy, one of the last things George W. Bush rushed through in his last days of power was a set of changes in environmental policy that basically gutted protections for endangered organisms. Our new president has been given the power to undo those changes in a recent…

The case of the Brazilian child who was raped, impregnated, and then had an abortion has taken a predictable turn. Sensible, rational people saw this as a tragedy, but one with a simple partial solution: the abortion was necessary to save the life of a young girl who could not possibly bear the…

Tune in to KPFT for some stem cell talk sometime in the next few minutes!

Thomsen is the Republican representative in Oklahoma who proposed several resolutions that would censure the OU zoology department and Richard Dawkins for not being nice to creationism. You really must see his justification for condemning views he finds religiously disagreeable. I am trying to…

There's a common joke that claiming to have knowledge of the existence of god is like claiming that you know you've got fairies living in your garden — both are equally ridiculous, and both require that the definition of the subject and of evidence for the subject be equally nebulous. The only…

I hope these guys win a Grammy, because this rap is the bomb. It's even better than that Narwhal song.

It's the obligatory annual newspaper article on creationists confronted with evidence. In this case, young ignoramuses from Liberty University are filed through the Smithsonian Institution to practice closing their minds, while a newspaper reporter echoes their rationalizations. I hate these…

It's true — I'm going to be speaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana on Friday, 13 March, at 6:00 in Gregory Hall. Well, nominally at 6:00 — my flight schedule is cutting it awfully close, giving me only an hour of leeway, so we'll see if I make it in time. If I don't, start the…

One of the evolutionary peculiarities of my favorite lab animal, the zebrafish, and of cypriniform fishes in general, is that they lack teeth. They lost them over 50 million years ago, and don't even form a dental lamina in development. So this photo of a cypriniform, Danionella dracula, gave me a…

How do you think the Rabid Right is reacting to Obama's enlightened stem cell policies? This comic isn't far from the truth. Here's Glenn Beck, always the representative of Idiot America. So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some,…

My university has closed the campus, and we're supposed to shoo everyone off towards home, all because of a little blizzard. It's like a Snow Day! Unfortunately, getting kicked out of work just means I have to go home to Morris. In a blizzard. With everything shut down and locked up tight. Well, I…

Adding to my joy of late is a remarkable article predicting the demise of evangelical Christianity in our lifetimes. Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th…

The Phelps gang is picketing in Chicago with their "god hates fags" sign. Hate meets hate: there was a counter-demonstration. Which side to take? I'm a firm believer in Myers' Wager — who would you rather piss off, the little guy with the beard preaching peace and love, or the pitiless tentacled…

Schools in Hampshire, England are receiving information on how to incorporate creationism into the classroom. It's hard to judge whether this is good or bad without seeing the actual materials, but I'm inclined to say it's probably a bad idea, since it's supported by people claiming the point is to…

Collectable card games are evil: if they get you hooked, you find yourself throwing money at little foil packets of randomized bits of cardboard, feeding the variable reinforcement schedule. The New Humanist has stumbled onto compounded evil, combining collectable card games with religion.…

Santino is my hero. He was kept imprisoned in a cage, and his response was to throw rocks at his obnoxious captors. He'd scavenge the prison yard at night for whatever loose stones he could find, and he'd cache them for the morning. When there weren't enough rocks, he'd pound the concrete retaining…

There's a sense of glee in the American atheist community over the results of a recent survey: religion is in decline. As the site summarizes, "Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while…

Today, President Obama signed a bill lifting the Bush restrictions on stem cell research. You really must go listen to his speech on the occasion — he seems to get what scientific research is all about. Man, it's been a long eight years, and oh is it wonderfully good to hear an eloquent defense of…

Uh-oh: this guy is everywhere.