Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
May 18, 2008
Tune in at 9am for Atheists Talk radio — this week, there will be discussions of genetics and ethics, and just in time for your summer planning, you'll learn more about Camp Quest.
May 17, 2008
…but God has a blog in which he lists the stuff he hates. He's definitely a bit petty and vindictive, so be careful commenting over there — he might just pick on you.
May 17, 2008
One century, you've got Bach, another century, you've got Li'l Markie. Christianity has really gone downhill from its prior status as the font of funding for culture and art and intellectual endeavor to being the being the bottom of the barrel source for kitsch and crap. Case in point: Denyse O'…
May 16, 2008
It's the end of our semester, and there's another transition here: one of our colleagues, Dave Hoppe, is retiring, to our regret but to his happy progress. We all got together for a retirement dinner yesterday, so here's the happy crew, the entire UMM biology discipline.
From left to right: Chris…
May 16, 2008
You people all need to get on over to Sciencewomen — she's been blogging the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This is the stuff of the next generation of scientists!
May 16, 2008
Is your lunch hour safely over? If not, wait a while before watching another interview with Ben Stein. I can't believe what an idiot this man is; it's not just that he's ignorant, but that he has these bizarrely inappropriate notions about biology. He complains about "Darwinism" because it doesn't…
May 16, 2008
We're all caught up on the new Molly inductees: for March, it's Glen Davidson, and for April, brokenSoldier. Give them your attention when they comment!
Of course, now we have to gather nominations for May. Who are the commenters who make you perk up and think? Name them in the comments to this…
May 16, 2008
Loligo forbesi
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
May 16, 2008
California may inspire a whole series of legislative actions. Minnesota has introduced a bill similar to California's.
The Marriage and Family Protection Act was introduced by Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, and Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, on Friday. The bill would make marriage a gender-…
May 16, 2008
You've got another of those wretched "academic (non)-freedom" bills in your state. They're like lice, crawling out everywhere.
Senate Bill 1386, introduced in the South Carolina Senate on May 15, 2008, and referred to the Senate Committee on Education, is the newest so-called "academic freedom"…
May 16, 2008
I wish I hadn't missed this when it come out a few years ago. A professor of sociology and comparative religion asked why women were more religious than men, and he ruled out socialization and cultural differences somehow, to come to a surprising conclusion.
"We looked for an obvious simple…
May 15, 2008
Good news for fairness, justice and equality: California has made gay marriage legal. It's a small triumph for civil rights.
Now to celebrate, I don't expect you all to run out and marry a same-sex partner — I think my wife would object, and I'm really not in the market — but wouldn't you know it?…
May 15, 2008
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out…
May 15, 2008
If you should ever find yourself in my neighborhood, and were to walk up to my door, I have to warn you: the welcome mat is splattered with blood stains. I didn't do it! No Jehovah's Witnesses are missing from the region! (They never come to my door anymore, anyway.)
We got an unpleasant surprise…
May 15, 2008
Today is this semester's last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I'm going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I've got some new squid science to share. Until then, you'll just have to chew over some of the usual American…
May 15, 2008
I just got a copy of the promotional flyer for my Seattle visit, so here it is.
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Paul "PZ" Myers is persona non grata at the Discovery Institute. He was recently booted out of a screening of the film "Expelled"--an irony certainly not lost on him…
May 14, 2008
Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn't notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved's latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants,…
May 14, 2008
A major court decision in Vermont slammed the Catholic church there.
A Burlington jury issued a landmark verdict against the state's Roman Catholic diocese Tuesday, ordering it to pay $8.7 million in damages to a former Burlington altar boy fondled multiple times by a priest the church knew was a…
May 14, 2008
That guy, Mike Norman, with the t-shirts implying Obama is a monkey is selling them for $15 apiece. Doron Braunshtein is also selling an anti-Obama t-shirt…for $250. This one isn't as overtly racist — it just says "JEWS AGAINST OBAMA" — but it's also not worth the money, and Braunshtein's attitudes…
May 14, 2008
There was a brief flurry of surprise a while back that Richard Dawkins acknowledged the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and that it was even possible that aliens might have visited Earth — for some reason, creationists thought this was hilarious, although it's actually a very clear element of…
May 14, 2008
I was interviewed for mindcore — I seem to recall that I might have said some harsh things about Francis Collins in this one, but the are all kind of blurring together in my mind now.
May 13, 2008
I am stunned that this t-shirt could be proudly displayed anywhere anymore.
Now get this: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is running an online poll that is asking, "What do you think of the Obama t-shirt?", with two choices: "It's racist" and "it's fine". You might be wondering why the newspaper…
May 13, 2008
Just what we need — another evangelical Christian theme park, this one in the planning stages in Tennessee. This one has one particular instance of blinkered blindness, though, that I thought was rather funny.
The Park is planned as an "edutainment" experience, combining education and entertainment…
May 13, 2008
I'm getting there — I just gave my second final exam for this semester, will get them all graded up tomorrow, and then have one last exam to give on Thursday…then I'm free! Free!
May 13, 2008
The fundagelicals were all up in arms over the human papilloma vaccine — it was recommended for all girls to prevent the sexual transmission of a virus that can lead to cancers of the female reproductive tract. They were agin' it; it might give their womenfolk the idea that sex is not a punishment…
May 13, 2008
In the wake of the recent efforts of a School Administrative District in Maine to expel evolution from the curriculum, we now have a pointless poll seeking the vox populi on this badly worded question: "A school board member in SAD 59 wants the topic of evolution dropped from high school science…
May 13, 2008
Remember Sally Kern, the Oklahoma legislator who loves God and hates homosexuals? She had earlier sponsored something called the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act, a ghastly piece of legislation that would require teachers to pass any old crap a student turned in, as long as the student…