pharyngula

The NYT has a nice article on Carl Sagan's new posthumous book—it was put together by his widow, Ann Druyan, and she makes a few good points: In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed…

And there's a whole page of delectable fantasies where that came from!

Lynch finds a strange argument against climate change. My biggest argument against putting the primary blame on humans for climate change is that it completely takes God out of the picture. It must have slipped these people's minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over…

Take a look at the newly introduced California Bill AB 165. This bill would establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives within the office of the Governor and would require the office to serve as a clearinghouse of information on federal, state, and local funding for charitable…

The Myers household is going to celebrate the day in half an hour — we've got the cake, we've got the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, we've got the hot chocolate — and we figure we'll party by watching CNN at 8ET to see if Dawkins and Hitchens are going to go on a rampage. I hope they do,…

The competition doesn't like us. Especially me. It might sting more if the complainer wasn't a fan of Steven Milloy and hadn't dissed the delightful Britney Spears—that automatically makes him a fundamentalist asshat.

Charming. Good Christian Vox Day argues that murdering toddlers in the name of Jesus is defensible. (I'm hoping ol' Vox will make another post calling me "Pharyngurl". It's pathetic that he thinks femininity is an insult, isn't it?)

Minnesota has its own Christian ministry scandal, but it probably won't get that much national attention, since there's no sex and it's just the usual "minister fleeces flock" story. Mac Hammond runs one of those mega-scam mega-churches in a Minneapolis suburb, where he preaches and practices his…

What's the matter with New Scientist? Check out Ian Musgrave's smackdown of Douglas Axe and the Biologic Institute is good stuff. If Douglas Axe and his co-signers are so badly misinformed about something as basic and well known as the relations between engineers, computer designers and biologists…

You may notice a few of us SciBloggers sporting a few new badges today. Here's my collection. You'll have to read all about the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique to figure out what they all mean. This isn't an exclusive club, of…

Extortion just won't work, especially when the threat is so tantalizing. Greg Laden tries to get me to join in this thinking blog meme by telling me I'll get a basement full of snakes if I don't participate. Bring 'em on, I say. Gimme my snakes!

I've never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She's one of those people who makes extravagant…

This is a sad story of compartmentalization carried to an extreme: a Ph.D. student in the geosciences who is also young earth creationist. This is a tricky subject: religion is not a litmus test for awarding a degree, but supposedly depth and breadth of knowledge is. I say that you cannot…

Lots of people have been emailing me about this: YouTube is getting weird about censoring accounts by atheists. This one fellow, Nick Gisburne, with a long history on the service had his account abruptly deleted due to its "inappropriate nature"—he'd read some excerpts of violent passages from the…

Here's a site full of interesting noises: freesound. You can search for anything, and it will return Creative Commons licensed sound samples; if you want the sound of a phone ringing, or wind chimes, or throatsinging, or thunderstorms, or someone being tortured, or a good laser death ray, there it…

That's a line in this video describing the scene when the South African police tow a beached whale carcass offshore—you can guess what it all looks like, if you'd rather not watch. It just gets better, though. After the great white sharks have gorged themselves and are lolling about, the…

Today is Evolution Sunday. It's that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid…

In the comments, Art Hunt passes along a short analysis from Patrick Frank of the instances of Haeckel's work in a number of biology texts from 1923 to 1997. Even the oldest was critical of Haeckelian recapitulation, and only a minority used Haeckel's figure at all. I looked at 15 books in total…

A few recent carnivals to keep you busy: Friday Ark #125 I and the Bird #42 Mendel's Garden #11 The next Tangled Bank will be at Lab Cat on Wednesday. Send links to me or host@tangledbank.net. I'm still collecting submissions for the Circus of the Spineless at the end of February— send me…

The DI certainly is obsessed. They recorded Olson at a screening of Flock of Dodos, and are now claiming that he backtracked on Haeckel's use in textbooks. It's only backtracking if you accept the DI's false premise that he claimed in the movie that there was absolutely no sign of Haeckel's diagram…

The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel's biogenetic law. They've put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold…

Since so many call me a bad guy, let's see where I fall on the Super Villain scale. Your results:You are Mr. Freeze Mr. Freeze 71% Dr. Doom 54% The Joker 51% Magneto 51% Apocalypse 47% Lex Luthor 46% Venom 42% Poison Ivy 41% Mystique 32% Green Goblin 28…

Via GrrlScientist, here's a fun little demo of what drugs do to your brain. Drag the stoned mice to the special chair, and you get to peek in at what marijuana and ecstasy and cocaine and etc. do to the synapses.

Uh-oh. Those evil scientists are up to no good again, blindly making discoveries and creating inventions without any thought to the long-term consequences. Dynamite, nerve gas, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb…what's next? What new horror will they unleash on humanity? Scientists are close to…

I presume everyone has already had their lunch here in the Americas, so it's safe to mention this: a delectable collection of 10 tasty snacks. Go ahead — you know you want to click on that link.

This is absolutely brilliant. MnCSE has taken advantage of Google's ability to set up custom search filters to create special purpose search engines. MnCSE Real Science Search Engine: This one explicitly excludes over 300 creationist sites from its results—if you want to search for a general…

Belated blogiversary greetings to Norwegianity!

I am deeply amused. I'm no fan of "faith & religion" sections of newspapers—axe them and expand the funny pages, I say—but here's one editor with smarts who gets the thumbs up from me. He gets lots of complaints that those dang non-Christians are being over-represented on the religion page;…

I have mixed feelings about EO Wilson's book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It's wonderfully well written, it's on a subject I care about and that Wilson is clearly passionate about, and it's trying to straighten out religious people on an important matter, but it's also written directly to…