pharyngula

I'm heading in to Minneapolis for my morning at Camp Quest tomorrow—comments awaiting authorization may be held up for a while, so don't panic. I may just pop in to the Minneapolis Drinking Liberally event tonight—we'll find out who actually reads the blog by who is surprised. There's also a Morris…

I am going mildly nuts right now—somehow, I managed to arrange things so multiple deadlines hit me on one day: tomorrow. I've got a new lecture to polish up for our introductory biology course, a small grant proposal due, and of course, tomorrow evening is our second Café Scientifique. Let's not…

Yikes—it's like some kind of horror movie: Inhofe meets Robertson. Look, Pat, I don't have to tell you about reading the Scriptures, but one of mine that I've always enjoyed is Romans 1, 22 and 23. You quit worshipping God and start worshipping the creation -- the creeping things, the four-legged…

Read the whole thing.

I keep waiting for the padded ambulance to roll up and men in white coats to leap out, shoot these bozos with a trank gun, wrap them up in a straight jacket, and go howling off to the nearest sanitarium, but no…instead, they get invitations to appear on cable news and babble about the apocalypse.…

Forgive me, but I find it hard to take Casey Luskin seriously. He's a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute who always reminds me of a voluble squirrel: he chatters away frenetically, but the brain behind his words is tiny and ill-prepared to cope with any substance. I always feel this urge to…

Peter Doran published a paper several years ago showing that parts of Antarctica were actually cooling, rather than warming—that there were local variations in temperature trends. This is not surprising. It's also not surprising that he was quote-mined like mad by the global warming denialists. He…

I got a request to help identify this bizarre creature. I'm guessing it's a slug caterpillar, from the family Limacodidae, although I couldn't possibly narrow it down further, and could be completely wrong. Whoever was filming it can be heard telling someone not to touch it—which is a good idea.…

John Wilkins has been off visiting the ghosts of Owen, Darwin, Buffon, and Saint Hilaire, while I'm sitting in Morris. Ah, if only I had an excuse (and the means!) to escape…

Smilin' Norm has a reputation as a bit of a horndog, and now we learn where he got it from. Honestly, I really didn't need to know. (via Minnesota Politics)

I just watched the Francis Collins/Charlie Rose interview (it starts at about 35 minutes on that clip), and although I struggled manfully to appreciate the fellow's accomplishments and status in science, I failed. All I could see is that he was illogical, irrational, and downright goofy—all the…

He only has a few radio and television programs, his own university, tens of millions of dollars to throw at his political causes, and a few million voters in his pocket, so Jerry Falwell* is just a marginal nut, right? We can just ignore him when he says things like this: It is apparent, in light…

The Wege is back, and he fires off a riff on Minnesota politics. I like Tild's take on this rebirth.

People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of…

Yunnanozoans and Xidazoon…there are some very pretty early Cambrian critters on display at Sinanthropus.

Alright, Orac, I'm trying to get some work done here this morning…so why'd you have to send me this clip of an atheist church to distract me with unseemly giggling?

One of the things you get in blogs that you don't get so much of in science journals is the raving insane obsessed kook—can you believe Tara has to deal with wackos who disbelieve the germ theory of disease? Of course you do. The people who argue against evolution are just as nutty.

…because Pam Spaulding at Pandagon had a kind word to say about James Lileks. Not his Bleat or Screed blog, fortunately, or for his regular column in the Strib which I find tediously twee, but for his masterful book, Interior Desecrations. You have to have lived through the 1970s to be able to…

The Minneapolis police are getting a little too serious—they've started arresting zombies (those are some really good mugshots.) I think the fact that there was a zombie dance party at the mall might have tipped them off that there isn't a real threat here. The reason they were arrested is…

As Shelley says, if we aim to make this place the place for the biggest conversation about science, we can't be shy. Scienceblogs has cracked the Technorati Top 100, and we're aiming higher, so it would be nice to get more links to that page. Pharyngula isn't on the Top 100, but I figure all the…

So Hank Fox sent along a couple of videos: one's funny, and the other is "funny." An atheist goes to heaven—it's Robot Chicken. You know what to expect. "It's so…it's so…uh, what's the word?" "Ironic?" "Yeah, ironic." An atheist goest to hell—this one is not ironic. It's so earnest, it's painful to…

This is an excellent short article by Janet Browne (the Janet Browne who wrote the best biography of Darwin I've read, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Power of Place(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), both well worth reading) that discusses the reception of the theory of evolution by his…

Don't be surprised—it's just another couple of clueless creationists bumbling into science they don't understand, extracting single sentences out of context, and coming to faulty conclusions that contradict the actual results of the paper. Orac gets to have a little fun ripping up an easy…

Who would have thought Wonder Woman sprang from such an unusual source? Well, actually, I guess in retrospect that it was obvious.

I usually like Cornelia Dean's science reporting, but this recent collection of book reviews put me off from the opening paragraph. She begins with the tired old claim that "scientists have to be brave" to embrace religion. Malarkey. I've never heard a scientist bring up the subject of religion,…

That army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids idea? It looks like it might be old hat. Owlmirror found an old and rather cryptic Japanese print of armored warrior cephalopods…and there's a much, much higher resolution image of the same at that link. I can't quite make out what they're fighting,…

Ricky Santorum has us scientists down cold. Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It's a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired…

Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it's a very badly done gimmick that doesn't say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred…

Mark Chu-Carroll has a post up that does two admirable things: it deflates yet another creationist and his grandly fallacious claims, and it gives me a new toy to play with. The first part is a debunking of Granville Sewell, a mathematician and darling of the Intelligent Design creationists.…

Since I was just griping about the false claim that the political left is as anti-scientific as the right, I will mention one exception where I think the argument has some merit: alternative medicine. I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which…