Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
July 20, 2007
This is excellent, but I have a request that I hope Roy grants someday — my personal favorite is "America" from his "Faulty Intelligence" CD. Trust me, it's awesome.
Aww, heck, they're all good. I also want to see him on The Daily Show, and playing on the White House lawn outside GW Bush's window.
July 20, 2007
Of course it would be Phil who would remind me: today is the 38th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor with my chin in my hands, watching TV in the way only 12 year olds can and which would nowadays leave me wondering if I'll be able to…
July 20, 2007
John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn't want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as…
July 20, 2007
It's a Submissive Jesus figure — torture him by twisting his crown of thorns, and he'll promise you anything. At last, a godhead that actually responds!
(via the J-Walk Blog)
July 20, 2007
I guess Mark A. R. Kleiman has won our little debate. His prize is that his position wins a starring role in a Jesus and Mo comic.
I just can't compete with that. Case closed.
July 20, 2007
The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They're well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you'll find is…
July 20, 2007
After all, he got to have dinner with both Dawkins and Hitchens, at the same time. Simultaneously. Like they were in the same room having a conversation. That would have been an interesting table.
Cowan also has video of Dawkins' talk at Kepler's Bookstore—and yeah, P-Zed is mentioned, inducing a…
July 20, 2007
I'd just like some reassurance that there are other targets out there, since
Korn is on the run.
An anti-evolutionary Christian extremist suspected of sending threatening letters to biology professors at the University of Colorado has gone on the lam, according to a staff member familiar with a…
July 20, 2007
Look at this: now the Intelligent Design creationists are branching out into pirate fashion. They're everywhere!
July 20, 2007
It's like TMBG wrote this song just for me.
(via Laughing Squid)
July 19, 2007
Some guy in Virginia didn't like this op-ed by David Barash, and didn't like being characterised as an "illiterate troglodyte," so he set out to demonstrate that he was an illiterate troglodyte. He wrote a letter that's simply non-stop bogosity.
While it is a fact that Gregor Mendel proved a…
July 19, 2007
OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they've come out with a popular magazine.
I'd complain some more but I'm afraid they'd kick sand in…
July 19, 2007
Back when I was a youngling, I read a very exciting series of science-fiction novels called The Deathworld Trilogy, by Harry Harrison. The premise was that there was this horrifically fierce planet in the galaxy, with gravity twice Earth-normal, constantly erupting volcanoes, and savage, ravenous…
July 19, 2007
Tim Lambert shows that you can't even eat at your daughter's wedding rehearsal dinner without being accused of raping the planet. Although it turns out that the meal was from sustainable stocks, and the loudest complainers are always the ones who are busiest doing the boom-boom-chicka-wow-wow with…
July 19, 2007
So Nick Anthis also has a copy of the Atlas of Creation, and I don't. I am beginning to suspect that the Muslim creationists are only sending copies to people who are smooth-cheeked and lovely in their online portraits.
Oh, well. From the descriptions of the contents, it sounds like the pictures…
July 19, 2007
Now Kleiman digs his hole a little deeper; normally, this would warrant a reply in the comments, but I'm afraid his site doesn't allow commenting. Basically, all he has done is make an invalid analogy and make a gross error in interpreting my thinking.
Take the atomic theory of matter, for example…
July 19, 2007
This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.
These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection "…
July 18, 2007
I may have just used the old 2+2=5 analogy, but I also like this example from the Primate Diaries:
Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.
"Moderate" believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to…
July 18, 2007
Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we'd all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they…
July 18, 2007
Of course Denyse O'Leary defends Pivar — any crackpot in denial about evolution is a friend of the IDists. They do point out a bizarre flaw in Wikipedia, though, and a common mangling of a concept.
There is an idea that's been around for almost a century, the morphogenetic field. This is a concept…
July 18, 2007
Sorry. I just couldn't resist. This week's Tangled Bank has an ancient Greek theme, so I think it's entirely appropriate to have King Leonidas summon you to Tangled Bank #84. Don't worry, there isn't much carnage involved.
July 18, 2007
One other thing about Stuart Pivar's book: he has collected a few endorsements. They are a little strange. One is by Robert Hazen, a chemist, and if you read it, it's more like a review of a paper in which the reviewer is trying to state some things he finds plausible about the work. In this case,…
July 18, 2007
Everyone say hello to the Angry Toxicologist. Do so calmly, with no sudden moves — he's angry.
(I like angry.)
July 18, 2007
I've mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn't like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event.
The town had a classic movie theater, the Vale. As a kid, I loved…
July 18, 2007
Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself "Concerned American-Christian" <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it's Krazy Korn himself, since he's so obsessed with the subject.
And of course Korn is…
July 18, 2007
A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.
"He's a perfectly normal person," he said. "He's not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests…
July 18, 2007
Speaking of looney, unbelievable opponents of the Evo-Atheist Hegemony, Jeffrey Shallit knocks the stuffing out of a blithering apologist for superstition, Peter Berkowitz. When an anti-atheist claims that people like Richard Dawkins are arguing that "we can now know, with finality and certainty,…
July 17, 2007
I don't think creationists are necessarily stupid (just ignorant, misinformed, wicked, or … but let's not start that again), but I do make exceptions for individuals. There are some that say things I find incredibly stupid. Here's an example.
In WWII, there was an advisor to Churchill who…
July 17, 2007
It's not as good as we might have hoped — it was commuted to a life sentence, rather than expulsion from Libya — but at least they aren't going to be executed. Effect Measure has the story.