Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
June 26, 2008
Eric Hovind is continuing his father's tradition of utterly inane arguments against evolution. In this case, it's a video of Hovind and two of his bland buddies sitting around talking about…cephalopods. Oh, it is painful to witness.
They show excerpts of some perfectly lovely videos of cuttlefish…
June 26, 2008
This is an amphioxus, a cephalochordate or lancelet. It's been stained to increase contrast; in life, they are pale, almost transparent.
It looks rather fish-like, or rather, much like a larval fish, with it's repeated blocks of muscle arranged along a stream-lined form, and a notochord, or…
June 26, 2008
In Washington state, politicians can apparently freely decide what label they want to use for their party affiliation on ballots — you know, like "Democrat" or "Republican". Only the Republicans are all running away from the label "Republican". I wonder why?
June 26, 2008
You have got to love cephalopod researchers. A rotting carcass, possibly of Architeuthis, is found in California — shredded by sharks, missing its eyes and most of its arms, torn by shrieking seagulls, described as bruised, battered, and chewed up — and the scientists are all "Helloooo, Nurse!",…
June 26, 2008
Mark Isaak has put together a list of Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature — all those strange names people have given to species and molecules.
June 25, 2008
Around 5 on 3 July, we're meeting up in Denver … but we've changed the location! We will be meeting at the Wynkoop Brewing Company, where we have a room of our own reserved for 50 people. That should be enough, right?
June 25, 2008
Wacky Michael Egnor is complaining that the data showing progress in treatment of some cancers should be credited to the culture of Christianity instead of science, and further claims that "The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and…
June 25, 2008
Uh-oh. The president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, is descending into the den of idiocy that is our local evangelical radio station, KKMS. Listen if you can bear it. Personally, I don't know that I can — it's too repellent to listen to people who stress the importance of mindless faith,…
June 25, 2008
But you should still watch this retelling of the ID saga, as it would be written by Dr Seuss.
June 25, 2008
Let's play the most boring card game in the universe!
Here are the rules. We start with a fully sorted deck of 52 cards, and we deal out four hands. We don't deal in the ordinary way, either: we give the top 13 cards to the first player, then the next 13 to the second, and so forth. (We could also…
June 25, 2008
The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is now available at Wheatdogg.
June 25, 2008
I had no idea Ray Comfort was running an Agony Aunt column, but here you go. He got a rather snarky question:
There've been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven't checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest…
June 24, 2008
It was pretty much a given anyway, but now that James Dobson has given his screeching purple anti-endorsement, I cannot fail to punch that chad for Obama.
Another interesting bit in that article: Dobson also will not vote for McCain. It would be wonderful if the fundagelical right would simply…
June 24, 2008
It really is Greg's birthday, and I think he's going to celebrate it by posting as many blog entries today as he is years old. So he's going to be taking a little break.
June 24, 2008
Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapædia, and boy, does he ever outclass them. For a quick outline of the saga, read this summary at A Candid World; basically, Andy Schlafly has been demanding every bit of data from Richard Lenski's work on the evolution of E.…
June 24, 2008
Yesterday, I ripped into Gordy Slack and the NY Times for bad articles on creationism. Now Slack has responded, and in the interest of fairness, I urge you to look at that comment and browse down to several others he has also made.
He's still wrong, and I still find his article incredibly bad.…
June 24, 2008
I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It's garbage from the first page, I'm afraid, in…
June 23, 2008
It's time to send your links in to me for the next edition of the Tangled Bank, to be held at Wheat-dogg's World on Wednesday.
June 23, 2008
I'm never this organized, so I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm going to be in Denver on 3-4 July, and we're actually getting it together to plan a meetup at the RockBottom Restaurant on 16th and Curtis in downtown Denver. I'll be there around 5ish on Thursday, 3 July, and I'll leave when you…
June 23, 2008
We've got a couple of appalling examples of awful journalism to scowl at today. The first is this credulous piece by Gordy Slack in The Scientist. I've been unhappy with Slack before — he sometimes seems to want to let creationist absurdity slide — and I got yelled at by some readers for my…
June 23, 2008
I don't understand this. The LA Times reports on a Pew Survey that reports that 92% of Americans have been deluded into believing in a god or universal spirit, and what do they do? They tag a poll onto it!
It looks like a bunch of Aberrant Americans have already found the poll, because it is…
June 23, 2008
So, what do you think? Do you agree with the Genocide Awareness Project's stance that abortion is genocide?
June 23, 2008
That smart guy, Carl Zimmer, has written an article on those smart molluscs, the octopus. I like that his conclusion is that we can't really judge their intelligence, because it is different than our own.
That's the same answer I give to questions about the existence of intelligent life in the…
June 23, 2008
Sad news in the war against reverence: one of our heroes, George Carlin, has died of heart failure at the age of 71. This was a man to whom nothing was sacred, and that was how he inspired us.
June 22, 2008
I'm at the Evolution 2008 conference, but I'm too tired to appreciate it — the only sleep I got was a few fitful hours on the redeye from Las Vegas, so I'm seriously concerned that I may fall asleep in my session this afternoon. Greg Laden has been instructed to use a cattle prod on me if I slow…
June 22, 2008
Café Philos has a very good summary of the John Freshwater affair — he's the bad science teacher who thought the captive audience in his classroom was a fine target for proselytization for his cult. He's also the lunatic who burned a cross into a student's arm.
June 22, 2008
…there was What the Bleep Do We Know?, another crackpot movie made with interviews obtained under false pretenses and pushing a bogus ideological twist on science. Sean Carroll and David Albert talk about it on Bloggingheads.tv.
Man, that was a bad movie.
June 21, 2008
Don't forget to tune in to Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central. This week, it's a celebration of Juneteenth and a discussion of African American freethinkers and civil rights.
June 21, 2008
Sastra, OM is organizing a meetup for all the Pharynguloids here at TAM6, or just in the general area. We're meeting at 6:00 in the buffet restaurant here at the Flamingo — come on by, talk with us all, watch me shuffle out the door to catch a late-night flight to Minneapolis.