pharyngula

There's an offshore show I'd like to catch.

Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He's trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he's made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We're all…

Forget those visions of holy virgins or Mother Teresa in a bun or Jesus in a chalupa—guess who appeared in a smoky cloud over the Atlantic?

So, I'm working the DFL booth at the fair. Anyone who has done this kind of thing before knows you spend a lot of time just sitting there, trying to look open and inviting and friendly, and you end up staring across the aisle at the booths on the other side. The two directly across from me were…

Aye, this is a CD I shall be purchasin'. Leering, full of menace and the threat of pain, "15 Men on a Dead Man's Chest" is arguably the most famous pirate song ever committed to tape (and thanks to its refrain, "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum," it also ranks among the more pro-booze sing-alongs in…

Hold it. In the recent terrorist arrests, the British were able to do their job while supporting the rule of law, and the US pressured them to rush the arrests for political gain? It's amazing how this administration is so good at turning even great successes into spotlights into their own…

Hey, Wilkins! I know you were a lucky dog who got to visit Darwin's home a while back, but did you know who else had been there? Ken Ham. He seems to have had a different reaction than you did. It was a book that attacked the foundations of the Christian faith, with an impact that was felt…

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America's standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum's fossil collection. This includes…

A columnist in the Cincinnati Post, Kevin Eigelbach, has a few words for Answers in Genesis. He got a letter from them asking for money to protect the Bible from the wicked secularists who want people to think critically about its contents. Ham fears that one day we'll find stickers inside our…

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of…

Tangled Bank is coming up, to be hosted at the FrinkTank. This could be interesting; we usually don't have any guidelines beyond that the topic of the submitted articles relate to science, but the frinksters will be giving special preference to "submissions that contain curse words, gratuitous…

At last, it all makes sense. (via ExChristian.net)

This could be a new feature here, rather like RaptureReady's Rapture Index. I'm collecting omens and portents of the coming of our imminent doom at the hands suckers of the Tentacled Great Old Ones. It's a race: will the cephalopods beat Jesus? A distinct edge goes to the squiddies—at least they're…

An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we've come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place. "Thank God nobody was hurt," Pastor Jeff Carroll said. "He chose to let it…

This is what living in the rural midwest is all about: the county fair! The place was packed yesterday with amazing numbers of people having a good time. I've put a few photos below the fold. Animal: We've got barns full of beasts. That horse wanted to eat my camera. Most of the animals cowed,…

Octopus ornatus Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

We are so screwed. That's the result of a new survey of people's attitudes toward evolution. Notice where the United States lies: nearly dead last. We beat Turkey. There was more to this study than just asking whether a person agreed with the statement that "Human beings, as we know them,…

Our local chapter of Drinking Liberally will be meeting at a special place and time tonight: it will start at 7:00, at the American Legion Beer Garden at the Stevens County Fair. After everyone has had enough beer, we will adjourn to the Tilt-A-Whirl to relive those sensations we all experienced in…

archy warns us of an invasion of giant commie crabs. Invasive species are no joke, but in this case, I can think of some solutions: they all revolve around lunch and dinner, though.

Dang. The Onion rebuts my prior comments.

Phosphatized pre-Cambrian embryos are cool. It's amazing that they've been preserved at all, and they are spectacularly gorgeous. We can learn about the evolution of development from their superficial appearance, but what we really want to do is poke around their interiors and analyze them cell…

In regional news, the Catholic church is getting sued. Two hundred bishops have been named in a lawsuit filed by a Wisconsin family. I suspect you won't even need to read the article to guess what it's about. That's right: a conspiracy by the church hierarchy to protect a pedophile priest. This…

That Moonie creationist with a degree in developmental biology, Jonathan Wells, floated an actual hypothesis a while back: he postulated that the centrioles were little turbines that generated a force with their rotation. I never saw it as much of a support for Intelligent Design; it was an idea…

Uh-oh. This is something I never want to meet in a dark alley.

Slacktivist reminds us that today is the 61st anniversary of an atrocity: I think that real patriotism, and the first step to making your country better, is the recognition of evil done in its name.

Jake Young has a good discussion of gender differences and performance in the sciences. His conclusion is one I agree with: there are real differences between men's and women's brains, but they are not of a sort to account for the differences in representation in scientific fields. For that, we…

I'd better go home and put on my "Welcome Squid Overlords" t-shirt—someone has caught an octopus…in the Ohio River. Unfortunately, this is almost certainly a case of some bastard bringing a cephalopod home, allowing it to die, and throwing it out like a piece of garbage. When the cephalopod…

Since there was a comment asking about that strange "PYGMIES + DWARFS" exclamation we sometimes get in these parts, I thought I'd bring over all the articles from the old site, just to have them here and explain some of the inside baseball lingo. So here's the collection: Pinkoski explains the…

It's been a little while since I last brought up Pinkoski, so maybe you can handle another dollop. When I got his creationism comic book, I also picked up another, titled "Christian SF", which promised to be the first in a series of comics containing science fiction stories with Christian themes.…

John Price sent me some scans from another Pinkoski masterpiece, titled Discovered: The True! Genesis Story of Creation. A Presentation of Ron Wyatt's Material. It's clear that Pinkoski has completely swallowed all of Ron Wyatt's pseudo-archaeological hokum—Wyatt was an outrageous fraud, and even…