Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
April 10, 2006
Imagine your childhood haunts turned to dust and ash.
April 10, 2006
Ian Musgrave does a wonderful job explaining the recent Science paper on the evolution of hormone binding sites. This is the work that Behe has called "piddling", and claims that it has no relevance to the evolvability of complex biochemical systems. Ian takes this idea apart with a quick tour of…
April 10, 2006
After I summarized how Plan B contraception works, I'm still getting letters confusing it with RU486. RU486 induces abortions. Plan B does not. RU486 is the opposite of Plan B.
Remember that what Plan B is is an artificially high dose of progesterone (it actually uses a progesterone analog, but it'…
April 10, 2006
Creationists are always carping about that darned methodological naturalism and how we don't make room for supernatural explanations. How about if we make a deal: we'll reserve the boring ol' natural explanations for things like Tiktaalik, and the creationists can move on to bring their deep…
April 10, 2006
There will be a webcast by Steven Jones tomorrow at 1730 GMT, titled "Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right" (ooo, nice sharp title), for anyone interested. I think that means it's going to be on at 11:30AM CST, unfortunately…I'll be in class. Even though I'm going to have to miss it,…
April 10, 2006
A proscription on all transitional forms would make it far easier to load the Ark—it would have been empty!
P.S. If you're completely baffled by the title, it refers to Woodmorappe's infamous statistical error: calculating the feasibility of Noah's Ark by estimating average animal size using the…
April 9, 2006
It's been a long day for me—I made yet another of those long drives into Minneapolis and back. It was worth it, though. We had the first meeting of a new group, Minnesota Citizens for Science Education; I think it's going to be a useful resource for the state. It consists of several of us college…
April 9, 2006
Man, I step away from the ol' blog for a day, and what do I get? A rash of the right-wing dingleberries. Come on, everyone, ignore them, they're nuts.
I do notice a few things, though. My post was about the concern that we would use nuclear weapons against Iran in an unprovoked attack. Read the…
April 9, 2006
Now he's moving again, from the prestigious Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville to the eminent Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
If you ask me, they've both got "theological" and "seminary" in their name, so who cares? He's moved from one dunghill to…
April 9, 2006
Everyone has read Seymour Hersh's exposé of our government's plan for Iran by now, I'm sure, and today there is an article in the Washington Post backing it up. Our leader is pushing for a fast strike to cripple Iranian military capabilities.
The rationale is that the Iranians are followers of an "…
April 8, 2006
A few months ago, I saw the movie, What the bleep do we know? at the library. I checked it out. I thought it might be worth dissecting for a blog post. I watched it. I wanted to lie down afterwards and pour lye in my ear until it dribbled out my eye sockets, just to scour the stupidity out of my…
April 8, 2006
Don't watch it if you'd rather not hear how nonsensical that book is.
By the way, the biblical scholar they've got on there, Paul Meyer, is no relation, and he's so darned wrong he doesn't even know how to spell his name correctly.
April 8, 2006
More details are dribbling out about the decision to deny Francis Beckwith tenure. It's a little bit odd, because these things are supposed to be confidential, and I will note that Beckwith, to his credit, is not commenting on the decision while trying to appeal it. I hope his appeal does not…
April 8, 2006
Poor Dr Dino, AKA Kent Hovind, AKA batshit crazy fundy guy, is a notorious tax cheat, and now the law has finally caught up with him. "Dinosaur Adventure Land" has been shut down, and he risks fines and the possibility of buildings being razed.
You know, Al Capone was taken down for tax evasion,…
April 8, 2006
(Since Kent Hovind is in the news for tax evasion again, I thought it would be nice to bring this article over here to the shiny new site.)
Ah, the continuing saga of Kent Hovind's criminal industries…Hovind is an inexplicably popular creationist who, in addition to his dedication to creationist…
April 7, 2006
The Discovery Institute flailed about hopelessly trying to deny the value of Tiktaalik (which, as commenters pointed out, is kind of weird in itself—I thought ID didn't deny the facts of evolution, just the mechanisms), but what about those forthright creationists at Answers in Genesis? They also…
April 7, 2006
The tetrapod isn't surprising…you know you're a science nerd when the first thing you wonder is what the flowering plants are doing in the Devonian. It also makes me wonder just how old Bob the Angry Flower is.
April 7, 2006
The poor babies in Seattle are in a state of denial.
These fish are not intermediates, explain Discovery Institute scientists I queried about the find. Tiktaalik roseae is one of a set of lobe-finned fishes that include very curious mosaics--these fishes have advanced characteristics of several…
April 7, 2006
Sean Carroll (the physicist, not the developmental biologist) is moving on up to CalTech.
April 7, 2006
I teach at the university level, which means I've got classes of self-selected, relatively well-prepared, mostly motivated students. That isn't real teaching. This is real teaching.
April 7, 2006
Opisthoteuthis depressa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
April 7, 2006
Eric Pianka is eccentric, opinionated, and outspoken; many people might disagree with specific bits and pieces of his position. But I don't think that he is a eugenicist, a hate-filled fan of the Third Reich, an advocate of planned genocide, anti-human, or a crazed scientist planning the death of…
April 6, 2006
My eye is on a lovely little MacBook Pro for myself someday, but I have to say the news about Boot Camp, which allows the Mac to boot into Windows, wasn't at all interesting to me. Now John Gruber explains why it's good news.
I doubt that I'll ever use it, though. Why would anyone want to swap Unix…
April 6, 2006
Two carnivals under my purview are coming up next week, both on Wednesday, 12 April, so let's get rolling on bringing in exciting links.
The Tangled Bank will be held at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, under the care of Sandra Porter. Send links to interesting science writing to her, to me…
April 6, 2006
I'm a Bill Nye fan, so it was good to learn that he's not reluctant to point out the foolishness of creationists.
The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the…
April 6, 2006
There has been an oddly evasive struggle going on in Washington DC for the last several years. We have a safe, easy method of emergency contraception that has been turned into a political football, with Republicans playing their usual role of criminally stupid thugs, trying to crush a simple idea:…
April 6, 2006
The Second Edition of the Darwin is Dead carnival is up. I think we can declare that the "Darwin is Dead carnival" is dead now. Orac seems to have had a little problem tallying up the entries, but out of 7 links:
Three are satires of ID and creationism.
One is a press release from the Discovery…
April 6, 2006
I just put of copy of "Embrace your inner fish" outside my office door. I want it on a T-shirt now.
(via The Austringer)
April 6, 2006
Christian corruption at its finest: here's a Florida Republican working to give a money-making park a tax exemption.
A biblical theme park in Orlando where guests pay $30 admission to munch on "Goliath" burgers and explore reproductions of 2000-year-old tombs and temples could get a property tax…
April 5, 2006
My wife thought this story about left-handed snails having a competitive advantage, in that they seem to be better able to escape predation by right-handed crabs, was pretty cool. She also recalled that I'd scribbled up something about snail handedness before, so to jump on the bandwagon, I've…