Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
June 3, 2008
It's true — we're going to be promoting (or dissecting) select titles in the The ScienceBlogs Book Club, a new feature here. For our first effort, a few of us have read and are discussing Carl Zimmer's Microcosm — you should head over there and contribute. A book club session without any arguments…
June 3, 2008
So all these people are coming to my talks, and they're reporting on me! Scott Hatfield caught my talk at the Berkeley IEDG meeting, and even has video of my conclusion. Geoff Arnold has a discussion of my talk at the Pacific Science Center last night.
One odd (or not so odd) thing. Both of those…
June 3, 2008
I read these lame exercises in making excuses by theologians, and I don't understand how anyone can be foolish enough to fall for them. The latest example is by Edward Tingley, who babbles on painfully about how believers are the true skeptics, the true scientists, while claiming that the believers…
June 2, 2008
I had mixed feelings about Yoko Ono's lawsuit against Expelled — fair use is a desirable goal, but I don't think Premise Media was exercising fair use, since their movie wasn't about Lennon's music or ideas — so I can't say that I'm at all surprised or upset that the lawsuit is likely to go down in…
June 2, 2008
There are 7 more parts to this — follow the related videos at youtube.
June 2, 2008
Sometimes, the politics of science can get ugly, and they don't get much uglier than this ghastly mess going on among paleontologists. I've read a couple of accounts of this story so far, and it sounds to this outsider like a few senior scientists riding roughshod over their junior colleagues and…
June 2, 2008
We're all familiar with Pavlov's conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the…
June 2, 2008
I wondered, incorrectly, if Leila Hussein was a reluctant accomplice in the death of her daughter, Rand Abdel-Qader, the young girl who was murdered by her monstrous father for speaking to a British soldier. Now I feel particularly awful about that; Leila Hussein was devastated by the killing,…
June 1, 2008
I've always wanted a handy translation guide for Christian cliches.
June 1, 2008
This is a carnival after my own heart: the first Carnival of the Elitist Bastards. They're mean, cranky, and wonderfully charming.
June 1, 2008
Brian Greene has an excellent op-ed in the NYTimes — read it!
June 1, 2008
Those bastards — the Anglicans are trying to appropriate Dr Who.
A conference of Church of England vicars watched a handful of episodes from the sci-fi series to study its religious parallels, particularly its themes of evil, resurrection and redemption.
Similarities between the Doctor and Christ,…
June 1, 2008
…and you deserve to burn in hell for eternity. It really doesn't matter what you've done — you're damned. Take The Good Person Test and find out! It's standard evangelical Christian nonsense in which they hammer on any niggling divergence from absolute perfection, followed by quotes from the Bible…
June 1, 2008
I've made the journey to Seattle (actually, Auburn, where many of my family members live), and have discovered that access to the internet is spotty in the west coast suburbs — there are wireless servers everywhere, but at the same time, everyone has gotten savvy and protects them with a password.…
May 31, 2008
It's amazing how powerfully predictive that little law is. I mentioned some similar activity a while back, but it's still going on: kooks praying for lower gas prices.
For the past several weeks, Twyman has assembled a group at a soup kitchen in the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest Washington…
May 31, 2008
Is it biological or physical? It's a little unfair, you ought to be able to just click "physics" for everything and get a perfect score, but I managed to get 12 out of 12 by the simple strategy of calling anything interesting biological.
May 31, 2008
Well, almost. My flight is delayed a bit, so I'm stuck in the San Francisco airport for a few hours. I will get there, though, and I will nap the whole way. It's been a long couple of days.
So, yesterday for lunch I was able to visit the giant gleaming temple to rampant Darwinism, the NCSE. I got…
May 30, 2008
Thanks to T. Ryan Gregory, I have just discovered Todd Oakley's new blog, Evolutionary Novelties. It's only a few months old and only has a few entries, but go on, encourage him to write more.
May 30, 2008
… is now available online. It's a brief introduction to some interesting observations about the pufferfish genome.
May 30, 2008
Alex Palazzo is talking about open questions in cell biology — in this case, control of organelle shape. Any of us who have poked around in cells know that it is not an amorphous blob of goo, but has characteristic, recognizable elements that we can see from cell to cell. What confers these…
May 30, 2008
This is my last day in Berkeley, and the last day of the IEDG meeting, and I'm giving the very last talk of the meeting…which means, unfortunately, that the time I've been able to give to local readers has been minimal and is disappearing fast. Here's one last chance. I'm talking at the Art Museum…
May 30, 2008
Recall the car dealership ad that suggested that non-Christians sit down and shut up? A poll by a television station asks, Does the Kieffe and Sons Ford ad make you want to buy a car from the dealership? The only choices are "yes" and "no" — they don't even include "no, it convinces me to never buy…
May 29, 2008
Jerry Coyne recently gave a talk at Rockefeller University, which is now available on video. It's a good talk, making points familiar to most readers here about the absurdity of creationism/intelligent design, with clean examples to rebut their major arguments. The real treat comes at the very end…
May 29, 2008
It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.
(Click for larger image)
This is cool: it…
May 29, 2008
So, 9% of the respondents at this Genome Technology poll think creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science class, and another 3% think it should be left up to the school. I think someone else must be making an effort to crash a poll — let's counter their feeble efforts, shall we?
(…
May 29, 2008
I've discovered a couple of important things at this meeting.
One, late night sessions at west coast meetings are deadly for any of us coming from more eastern time zones. At least the morning sessions are low stress.
Two, I haven't heard one Drosophila talk yet, and the message is clear: we're now…
May 29, 2008
Let's not ever turn into Michelle Malkin, mmm-kay? She got Dunkin' Donuts to pull an ad…because she didn't like the scarf the model was wearing, and decided it was pro-Islamic.
It was paisley.
Typical dhimmi traitor in jihadist-appeasing garb
It's not like the model was saying "Death to America" or…
May 29, 2008
I'm impressed: the car dealership has backed down on their offensive ad. Their apology is a bit disingenuous — they claim they really don't remember approving the ad, and they intended it to be humorous, which I don't really believe — but the letter writing was effective. The minority who phoned in…