Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
October 1, 2007
Dawkins does know how to tweak the fluffy little wankers, that's for sure. He is suggesting that universities ought to dismantle their theology departments!
We who doubt that "theology" is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of…
October 1, 2007
Before everyone goes nuts with the queries, here's the official word on the now closed commenting contest.
It will take a day for us to determine the winners of the contest. We have to make sure our data is correct before making the draw happen. We will email the winners directly. If you don't hear…
October 1, 2007
Hemant has a summary of the Atheist Alliance International Convention 2007. I should have been there! Maybe next year I'll be invited to speak — it sounds like maybe some people would like me to speak…
As soon as the picture of PZ was up, there were cheers from the crowd. (PZ, you had fans at the…
October 1, 2007
All of us mammals have pretty much the same set of genes, yet obviously there have to be some significant differences to differentiate a man from a mouse. What we currently think is a major source of morphological diversity is in the cis regulatory regions; that is, stretches of DNA outside the…
October 1, 2007
Here's a strategy to make money from your expertise!
There is some bad news, though.
It's been done many times already, so there is "competition". There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, though, and the market for this kind of "science" seems insatiable.
Wrong answers and bad answers seem…
October 1, 2007
Here's a website of mutating pictures, a collection of images made with a splatter of scattered triangles. Your job is to browse through them and score them for how much they resemble a face — which isn't easy. If I stare at any random pile of symmetrical shadings, they all start to look like…
October 1, 2007
Casey Luskin has to be a bit of an embarrassment to the IDists…at least, he would be, if the IDists had anyone competent with whom to compare him. I tore down a previous example of Luskin's incompetence at genetics, and now he's gone and done it again. He complains about an article by Richard…
September 30, 2007
Cosma has to go and show off with a magisterial demonstration of why he is the smartest man on the internet: he's written an exceptionally thorough description of heritability and IQ. It's not a light read (statistics and genetics!), but it's probably the most informative thing I've read in a month…
September 30, 2007
Chris Clarke callously infected me with a meme. I'm supposed to answer these five questions.
An interesting animal I had
An interesting animal I ate
An interesting animal in the Museum
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
An interesting animal in its natural habitat
My first thought was…
September 30, 2007
My sermon-skit was too clever by half and the point seems to have been missed by some — so maybe you'd prefer the simpler clarity of Revere's Sunday Sermonette or the straight-ahead, full-throttle atheism of the latest Carnival of the Godless.
But be careful. Concentrated strident atheism might…
September 30, 2007
Now Matt Nisbet weighs in, and Mike Haubrich gives an amazing summary of not just what I said, but what I meant to say.
One thing I referred to I called the "science education extinction vortex", and referred to this hastily drawn diagram:
My point was that we have all these forces working…
September 30, 2007
THE SCENE: A circular room cut deep into stone; magma pits bubble left and right, all is lit by roaring torches that cast dark, flickering shadows. In the center, the Cephalopod Throne.
THE CAST: PZ Myers broods on his throne, chin on fist. He glowers at a horde of SUPPLICANTS, bowing and scraping…
September 29, 2007
I forgot to tell you all the most important gossip I heard at the Bell last night. I had a scant few minutes to talk to Jim Kakalios, who has gone all Hollywood on us, doing consulting work for the next big superhero blockbuster … Watchmen. Ooooh, all you geeks are saying, tell us more! I can't.…
September 29, 2007
My crank mail can be categorized into several categories. There are the short, barely literate splutterings of abuse; the weird rants and threats; the reiteration of long-dead creationist talking points (yeah, I get email where the writer thinks he's trumped me by saying "If evolution is true, why…
September 29, 2007
Chris Mooney has his summary post up, in which he predictably and incorrectly declares victory for the forces of empty rhetoric, and Greg Laden correctly declares victory for the puppies and small children, which, of course, was our side.
No word from Matt Nisbet yet. He's probably having a late…
September 29, 2007
If you've been curious to know more about Carl Zimmer, he's having a conversation with John Horgan on Bloggingheads.tv.
September 29, 2007
As expected, the Laden/Myers tag team utterly crushed the Nisbet/Mooney team. The decision was unanimous. Only a few crazy people might have found the framers at all persuasive. (It helps, too, that Nisbet/Mooney are on a plane flying away and won't be able to get out their side of the story until…
September 28, 2007
All right, homies, I hope some of you are planning to show for the big rumble at the Bell Museum tonight. I've arrived, and I'm flexing and stretching on the home turf, getting ready … in other words, I'm hanging out at the Espresso Royale stoking up on caffeine. Here's the deal:
Speaking Science…
September 28, 2007
Andrew Brown is so kind: he calls me one of America's most notorious atheists in an opinion piece on the wretched Archbishop Chimoio. He also makes an interesting game theoretic argument that, in purely pragmatic terms, the Catholic Church in Africa is simply following a winning strategy that…
September 28, 2007
Oh, to be young again and brave: I'm impressed with these high school students who protested the American loyalty oath to a god:
About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting "one…
September 28, 2007
Helicocranchia sp.
Figure from The Deep(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Claire Nouvian.
September 28, 2007
Neal gets no respect. He's been trying and trying to comment over at the Panda's Thumb, and his rants keep getting shut down. Well, I'm going to let one of his comments through right here — as far as I'm concerned, they're a kind of twisted, insane poetry. You can almost picture his brain arcing…
September 28, 2007
So now the tale of the lying creationists of Expelled has made the Grauniad. Somebody let me know when my name is mentioned in Le Monde.
Mark Mathis must be happy about this. He is, after all, the "The No-Spin Doctor" who "demonstrates that most of what you need to understand about attracting great…
September 27, 2007
I never cared much for this LOLcats craze, but LOLthulhu almost won me over…and now, at last, we have a truly appropriate subject for stupid captions on random pictures.
LOLtheist.
We are so going to burn in hell.
September 27, 2007
Since Katie is trying to turn this into a football blog (don't mock it! Have you seen the kinds of traffic numbers the big sports blogs bring in?), here's another football story with a neuro link: a player who credits his recovery from a concussion to a "miracle". It sounds like there is a whole…
September 27, 2007
When I saw Chris Mooney in NY this week, the first thing he did was throw a blow — he punched me in the shoulder. Oh, he said stuff like "hello" and "good to see you," but I think that was just to throw me off my guard. And then we threatened to buy each other beer — in Mooney's case, bad beer — so…
September 27, 2007
What a charming representative for Christianity! A Catholic archbishop is claiming that condoms and retroviral drugs have been intentionally spiked with HIV. That's getting down and dirty with best evangelical strategy: lie, smear, and promote evil ignorance.
Archbishop Chimoio told our reporter…
September 27, 2007
Read all about the latest science-related blogging in the latest edition at Aardvarchaeology.
September 27, 2007
Tikistitch reports that certain billboards are popping up in Oregon — yeah, the same signs our crazy billboard lady has been putting up around Minnesota. Try reading her forum — the stupid will burn, and you will wonder how anyone that ignorant is getting her message spread across the country.