Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
March 28, 2007
It's a b i g picture, slowly scrolling by, of a full-sized blue whale. Load it up and just let the whale swim past your window…it'll take a while.
(via inkycircus)
March 28, 2007
Only the religious could turn a disaster into a mark in the plus column for God. Jim Downey has found an amazing series of books with some impressive titles, all with the point of giving credit to God for personal catastrophe:
Thank God For Accidents
Thank God For Mistakes
Thank God I Adopted…
March 28, 2007
Oh, no! What will happen to our intrepid commenter?
You'll have to read My Confined Space to find out!
March 28, 2007
There's a very good reason I reposted an old reply to a creationist today. It's from 2004, way back shortly after I'd started this blog, and it addresses in simple terms the question of how ordinary biological mechanisms can produce an increase in information. I brought it up because Casey Luskin…
March 28, 2007
Aww, I'm flattered; Richard Dawkins read aloud part of my Courtier's Reply in his recent debate with Alister McGrath. You can listen to it online—I think I'm going to have to have Dawkins read all of my posts aloud, since he makes them sound so much better.
If you want to listen to just the…
March 28, 2007
A creationist, Rob McEwen, left me a little comment here which lists a number of his objections to evolution. It’s a classic example of the genre, and well illustrates the problem we have. The poor fellow has been grossly misinformed, but is utterly convinced that he has the truth. I’m not going…
March 28, 2007
The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is online at Balancing Life. I hope you like mangos.
March 27, 2007
And it's a right embarrassing spotlight to be caught under, I imagine. A couple of years ago, The New Republic polled various well-known conservatives about their position on evolutionary biology; Digby reviews their responses, and they're a mess (I also summarized their views diagrammatically way…
March 27, 2007
I've heard rumors that there are some of those pharma shills hanging out around here…so this one is for you.
March 27, 2007
Ken Ham's fabulous fake museum is going to open soon, on May 28. There are grounds for concern here.
But Eugenie Scott, a former University of Kentucky anthropologist who is director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, said the information provided in the museum "is not…
March 27, 2007
They need every scrap of brainpower they can get, and the two videos at this link will suck out your brain with the awesome power of their stupidity.
Most of you are probably already familiar with the banana video, which tries to conclude that God exists from the perfection of the video. What you…
March 27, 2007
Iain is looking for photos in a particular pose.
So maybe you didn't like the Blasphemy Challenge; this is a much more restrained exercise in which the fellow is going to collect photos of people holding an apple if they accept the evidence for biological evolution, or holding a light bulb if…
March 27, 2007
Try the God Simulator. Hint: if you always pick the least logical, most insane action, you'll get a pretty good simulacrum of Christianity.
March 26, 2007
You may recall my earlier complaint about the corruption and waste and profligacy of the head of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small. A non-scientist, he spent the last few years padding his own nest by drawing on the resources of the Smithsonian, and was basically a typical Republican appointee.
The…
March 26, 2007
The oppression begins at home, and we can't just blame the men.
I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl…
March 26, 2007
The LA Times has a cool story about the growing population of Humboldt squid off the Southern California coast — tens of millions of the big beasts, and they aren't shy.
The frenzy built and Kerstitch, as the lone diver shooting still photographs and with no bright movie lights to deter the…
March 26, 2007
Richard Dawkins has a huge list of well-wishers, but William Dembski is unhappy — he sent a birthday greeting, and rushed to complain on Uncommon Descent that it wasn't posted. Alas, it was, and we can all see what an insincere and sarcastic and snide comment he sent. Richard Hughes gets a gold…
March 26, 2007
Nigeria is experiencing an unimaginable horror for this academic: widespread sexual harassment of women students. It's injust, it's a corruption of the student-teacher relationship, and it harms their country, that half their potential leaders are abused and blocked from progress.
For years, sexual…
March 26, 2007
Juicy stuff from AC Grayling, who writes on the futility of faith and why we're all getting a bit peevish:
Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others…
March 26, 2007
One sure way to get your Important Message to me is to use the good old US Mail (although my email is much snappier now, thanks to previous suggestions), and sometimes I do get the strangest stuff. This time, it was a formal looking letter from an organization called "Campaign for the Children."…
March 26, 2007
Chuck Norris convinced me before that the bruised and jellied blob bobbing about in his cranium isn't working so well anymore, but this video of Norris advocating a bible-based public school curriculum is the final kicker.
He's fronting for an organization that's trying to smuggle bogus history and…
March 26, 2007
There are a couple of events going on here in Morris this week that I'll be participating in, and that any of you in the region might find worth seeing. First, tonight:
Everyone is cordially invited to the last session of
THE 31st
MIDWEST PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
Personal Identity
Eric T. Olson
(…
March 26, 2007
Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn't serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion…
March 26, 2007
Go on over to his place and leave a birthday greeting, and be sure to check out the multimedia collection of good wishes.
We wondered what we could do to express our appreciation, and had a hard time figuring out what would be appropriate … until a student asked to borrow one of my copies of The…
March 25, 2007
This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn't bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing…
March 25, 2007
I just had to say that I stepped outside the door a few minutes ago, and it is 60°F! And almost all the snow is gone! And the sky is blue! And there are birds chirping in the trees!
I think aliens kidnapped me while I wasn't looking and have transported me to a strange and distant world. But the…
March 25, 2007
That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he's going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt…
March 25, 2007
This week in our regular collection of reader-submitted cephaloweirdness, the theme is "domesticity".
Maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't have ordinary garden gnomes…
…and the iron work around your house has a theme…
…and you see this and think "AwwOOOOOOO!!! Hubba hubba!"
You know what'…
March 25, 2007
My opinion of Wired magazine just dropped a couple of notches. They've got Gregg Easterbrook pontificating on a science issue, the origin of life. Easterbrook is a sports writer with absolutely no clue about science—I've commented on his incompetence a few times before (OK, more than a few times).…