Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
September 6, 2007
It's early, you're sipping your coffee, you want something odd to pique your interest and make you realize that maybe your boss isn't the biggest screwball on the planet. I'm happy to oblige with a few words of wisdom from a sagacious UK writer.
I would like to suggest that recent arguments from…
September 5, 2007
Everyone go say howdy to The Society of Non-Theists at Purdue University, a brand new student freethought group. They're popping up everywhere!
September 5, 2007
It could have been a much bigger story. A reporter came out to talk to me about that lawsuit a while back, and he had talked with Pivar and many of those involved, and he said he was preparing a fairly substantial write-up … and then after he got back to the Twin Cities, he got a call from Pivar…
September 5, 2007
You've got to read this account of the intelligence that led to the Iraq war.
On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's…
September 5, 2007
This is appalling. How dare a mere blogger do the research, write up a detailed account, and break an important health story before the NY Times writes it up without recognition of the source? Some will demand that the NY Times retroactively acknowledge the work and expertise of the blogger, but…
September 5, 2007
The managing editor of a small town newspaper in Wisconsin, Rose Eddy, is very upset with certain vicious hate groups, so she made up a list for her staff and announced that they will not be accepting ads or information from them, ever. And then she publicized it, declaring her unimpeachable moral…
September 5, 2007
Reality is highly offensive to the godly. Bill Nye has alienated Texas by pointing out a simple fact:
Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy…
September 5, 2007
People really don't like me very much.
Huh? What did you really mean to say?
Mr Myers
I must say you are certainly a living testimony why we should have an official second language in the United States. Your 1 Sep 07 article "Sometimes, conflict is the only answer" makes about as much sense as…
September 5, 2007
I guess now he'll be able to sit down and have a little chat with Hitler and find out if he really was a godless atheist who got all his ideas from Darwin. I doubt that he'll be able to ask Darwin directly, though — I'm pretty sure they're in very different places.
At least, that would be the case…
September 5, 2007
Want to see Freeman Dyson and Richard Dawkins butt heads? It begins with a talk Dyson gave to an Edge conference in which Dyson (watch the whole talk) made these comments:
"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of…
September 5, 2007
Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:
Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a…
September 5, 2007
This is a photo of a Mr Potatohead stuffed with fish, and an octopus gnawing the tasty treat out of its head.
I just want to know who has been leaking our training and conditioning procedures from the submarine labs. Do we have a mole in the organization?
September 5, 2007
If I were a passenger, I don't think I would find Nepal Airlines' maintenance procedures at all reassuring.
Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier…
September 5, 2007
My dream:
Someday, you will all bow to me.
September 4, 2007
Perhaps you thought the Poor Man Institute was making up the stereotype, but here it is made manifest: a man living in his parents' basement attacks father with a bag of Cheetos. One nice touch in the police report is that his shirt was covered with orange Cheeto dust.
What's missing? No word if…
September 4, 2007
Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused "theory" for "brain fart". The latest example: Zygote Theory!
From the first sentence, you can tell the theory is crap. Anything that makes it's accommodation to the bible a selling point is instantly recognizable as…
September 4, 2007
Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary have come out with a new book, The Spiritual Brain, that Ms O'Leary has announced on her blog. I asked if she'd send me a review copy, and oh, boy, she's going to. This could be interesting.
It's received accolades from such stellar reviewers as Andrew…
September 4, 2007
Gather 'round, children, and dear old Unca Jack will explain to you how the dinosaurs went extinct. It's not how you think. There were no meteors or comets, no egg-eating mammals, no saurian pandemics. It's because so many plants died in the great flood.
And then, you see, since only the dinosaurs…
September 4, 2007
For a blogger, it's like winning a contest by breathing. All you have to do is link to THE TRUTH, and some lucky linker will win a 30G iPod in a drawing.
Read the rules. SCQ also has a new monthly writing contest, you can enter that too.
September 4, 2007
The story of the Robert Marks debacle has now made the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. If the account is accurate, I'm going to do something you'll only rarely see: I'll take the side of the creationist.
The problem is that Baylor was more than a little ham-fisted in intruding on Marks…
September 4, 2007
Uncommon Descent must have noticed ERV's comment that no one reads their site, because now they seem to be frantically chumming the waters with bizarre bait. I'll bite; like a shark, I'm a mindless eating machine, exquisitely sensitive to the thrashing of victims and the scent of blood. And it…
September 4, 2007
The Rational Response Squad has a "competitor": a group calling itself the Righteous Response Squad. I think we can already see a problem—we can expect a dearth of originality and imagination from this new gang. And to fulfill that prediction, this collection of fundies decided to declare the Bible…
September 4, 2007
Some local godless heathens got mentioned in the Mankato Free Press, in an article titled "Becoming atheist akin to finding religion". It highlights August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists and an attorney, Jim Manahan, who say pretty much the exact opposite of what the title suggests. The article…
September 3, 2007
This Canadian Cynic tells me I have to recommend this new blog, Progressive and Cynical. I think it's because they're Canadian and cynical too … I'll go along with it since they bear the mark of the scarlet A.
September 3, 2007
I knew this was going to happen, but I'm no prophet — it's just what the creationists always do. Frank Pastore follows the lead of our national news media and declares evolution debunked because of recent discoveries in paleontology. You can probably guess which ones.
The first is Chororapithecus,…
September 3, 2007
John Allen Paulos, in an interesting essay on the co-option of mathematics into religious apologia, makes a useful explanation. To counter the idea that the elegance of mathematics is a reflection of the divine, he suggests otherwise — it is a reflection of the natural world.
The universe acts on…
September 3, 2007
A new poll seems to be showing that the efforts of those ferocious agitating atheists are working — either that, or the corruption of the theocratic right is driving more people into our arms. Daylight Atheism reports that atheists are at 25% of the American population, which isn't quite right: the…