pharyngula

Those are two subjects that leave me queasily nauseated, so this time I'll let John Lynch have the honor of poking about in the puke.

I'm going to have to visit the American Museum of Natural History and see the new permanent exhibit on human origins. It sounds very good; they've done something I try to do in some of my talks on evolution, splitting it between the more easily comprehended, sexy stuff of fossils and…

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

The big, important news is, of course, the death of a gold-digging addlepated model (I'm sorry that she's dead, but really…it's not something worth flogging over and over on the news), so the feature on atheism that CNN was going to show has been bumped to Friday. Unless somebody in programming…

They invariably get it wrong. This time they've noticed it's cold outside, and they see an news report about colder temperatures in the Antarctic, so they leap to the conclusion that global warming is bunk. Or rather, they always held that conclusion (on faith, no doubt), and are overjoyed to see…

OK, here's the latest word on tonight's show on atheists with Paula Zahn: there will be a different version of the previous report on ostracized atheists. Dawkins' interview will be four minutes long. There will also be a panel with Niger Innis (a conservative Republican), Roland Martin (a…

Carel Brest van Kempen is going to be at the Hogle Zoo on Friday evening, showing off his artwork. We have fond memories of the zoo; our apartment was just down the road from it in Salt Lake City when we lived there, and when the kids were at that perfect age to be enthusiastic about it all. (Salt…

Really, I don't read Debbie Schlussel's blog—a reader sent me a link, so I put on the waders and gas mask and climbed down into the sewer. I'm now completely baffled; why is this insane and deeply stupid person ever put on television? Her response to the CNN complaints is illustrative, and even if…

One sign that the fading Bush administration knows that they've been on the wrong side of reality is that they're now busy scrubbing the archives, trying to change what was said in the past. Chris Mooney catches a blatant attempt to rewrite the administration's history on global warming. Man, the…

Got a jar you can't get open? Tired of straining just to get a dab of peanut butter? You need Violet, the incredible jar-opener*, complete with suction cups. Act now, and perhaps you can train her to use a can opener, too! *Offer void where prohibited. Violet not responsible for damp, salty flavor…

That wretched excuse to bash atheists on the Paula Zahn program that I criticized must have generated some intense and voluminous correspondence, because right now they're scrambling to do damage control. I just got word from Richard Dawkins that they are going to repeat the lead segment (the part…

Remember that grotty problem of getting dead bat stains off of furniture? Nic McPhee repays all you helpful people with a flickr photo set of a bat corpse. He knows how to win the hearts of the Pharynguloids, doesn't he?

And it's a dud. They've got two complaints against Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos posted, neither of which are particularly stunning. They repeat the claim that Haeckel's embryos and all that silly recapitulation theory are still endemic in biology textbooks. It's not true, no matter how much they…

The other day, I shredded Pat Boone for mindlessly parroting the Lady Hope story. You'll have to take a look at the Pat Boone evolution article now, though: mysteriously, that entire paragraph has vanished without acknowledgment. Aren't computers wonderful? Alas, the rest of the article is still…

If this is true—that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing—he has lost my vote. The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps -- John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned. The bloggers,…

Correcting Jonathan Wells' misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He's been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he's just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he's trying to argue for his abuse of the…

I really need the raptor suit. People would stop calling me a mild-mannered professor if I showed up at speaking engagements wearing one of those. There is no need to speculate about exactly what they would call me…

Carl Zimmer tells us that there are going to be showings of Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos all across the country next week—do you know where your nearest exhibition will be going on? Here it is for us Minnesota people, along with a little rebuttal of a Discovery Institute hissy fit: SCIENCE ON…

So Scott Adams shouldn't be too irritated at this amusing depiction of his mental state.

Here's a peek at a work in progress: it's got two kinds of cephalopods, Stethacanthus, and crinoids front and center. Delicious.

Take a look at this promising poll at Daily Kos. This informal and unscientific survey of the netroots seems to be showing that a third of the readers are utterly godless, and that if you toss in the agnostics, freethinkers have got a clear majority. I anxiously await the hysterics from the…

Smarmy Sal Cordova, the Eddie Haskell of the Intelligent Design movement, is at it again, with a post in which he pretends to be competent at information theory. It is with great delight that I watch Tyler DiPietro and Mark Chu-Carroll hand his ass back to him. I know full well the creationist…

Man, this Keith Henson character is a fearsome dude. He was convicted of a crime, fled the state, has been on the lam for 6 years, and was finally caught and thrown in jail, with bail initially set at half a million dollars. What heinous act won him such a nefarious reputation? He posted a joke on…

…that someday Michelle Malkin does a dramatic reading of some of my blog articles. Amanda Marcotte has really pushed their buttons, hasn't she?

Since I was wondering whether WingNutDaily was a satire site, Kevin Beck graces me with an explanation. No, it's not—the unhinged are merely going through a phase of very public meltdown. What's happening his that huge groups of ignorant or just plain stupid "conservatives" who were already…

I mentioned that ghastly CNN hit piece on atheists the other day; I just saw it myself, and it's far, far worse than I had imagined. You can see the whole thing with a transcript, too, and you should be appalled. It starts off reasonably enough with a segment on a family of atheists who were…

Sometimes I do get strange requests in email. For instance, I was asked if the claim in this article was true: When an orgasm has been achieved through sex, you can measure theta waves. These are also said to cause the "running high" feeling of euphoria experienced sometimes by marathon runners. If…

Some people have taken blogroll amnesty day the wrong way—or perhaps it has been used in the wrong way. Jon Swift registers the impression that this was an undemocratic purge that simply re-enthroned the same old elites and tossed the little guys on the scrapheap. But the more I learned about this…

It isn't just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of "stellar evolution". She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics…