Kooks
pharyngula | June 26, 2009There are science crackpots, and then there are journalist crackpots. Suzan Mazur is a strange writer who runs about trying to convince the world that there is going to be a revolution in evolutionary biology…but her sources tend to be fringe figures like Stuart Pivar, or she relies on mangling quotes from people like Massimo Pigliucci or Richard Dawkins. Her theme, as you might guess from her fondness for Pivar, is that structuralist tropes are going to replace genetic/molecular explanations for development.
That is complete nonsense.
Apparently, she reads Pharyngula (hi, Suzan!), where, to…
pharyngula | June 25, 2009Last week, I received an ominous email from Stuart Pivar.
Dear PZ,
The work of my lab has been subject to questions and harsh criticisms, some reasonable, some not. The scientific ones are dealt with in a new book On The Origin Of Form, Evolution by Self-Organization, an alternative to the natural selection paradigm, This is a substantially expanded presentation of the self-organization model previously published.
I welcome your assessment. If you are convinced now of its plausibility, as are many others, I solicit your participation in the dissemination of the idea for further…
pharyngula | June 24, 2009It's a novel argument, at least. This evangelist has a weird justification for the priority of Christianity: because we say "Jesus Christ!" when we wack our thumb with a hammer, instead of "Buddha!", he must be the one true god.
Alas for that line of reasoning, I've noticed that more people are more likely to shout out a certain four-letter word when surprised or hurt or angry, which must mean that sex is god.
pharyngula | June 23, 2009In more ways than one. You know I mocked his weird decision to sell an edited version of Darwin's Origin with a long-winded creationist introduction just this morning…and he's already edited the ad to include a quote from me.
"It's like a book with multiple personality disorder -- two parts that absolutely hate each other; an intro that is the inane product of one of the most stupid minds of our century, and a science text that is the product of one of the greatest minds of the author's century." PZ Myers, biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris
Now he has…
pharyngula | June 19, 2009It's a pleasant Friday afternoon, so you've got nothing better to do than listen to some tedious apologetic drivel, right? Terry Eagleton is interviewed on Canadian radio, and he repeats the same boring noise he droned out in his book. For all the times the atheists are accused of sneering at the stupidity of their opponents, it's galling that pretentious defenders of the faith like Eagleton get a free pass: his entire interview consists of smug gibes at the smugness of Dawkins and Hitchens, dismissals of their ideas as ignorant and dishonest.
And of course he doesn't say one clear thing…
pharyngula | June 18, 2009I know that most of the kooks can't abide the theory of evolution, and I can understand their motives a little bit — it directly contradicts common beliefs about who they are. But why all the hatin' on the Big Bang and on relativity (and on the other hand, why do the crazies love quanta so)? Here's another example of a book that continues the refrain.
UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: New Science of GRAVITY, LIGHT, the Origin of LIFE, and the MIND of Man
This book builds on the works of Arp, Bauval, Childress, Collins, Cremo and Thompson, Dunn, Felix, Hancock, Hapgood, Joseph, LaViolette, McTaggart, Pye,…
pharyngula | June 16, 2009Ah, poor Wisconsin…our neighboring state to the east, where the people are frail and frightened, and unable to cope with the rigors of reality. (That ought to get a few of them fired up, don't you think?)
There is a little dustup going on in the town of West Bend, Wisconsin. The local bluenoses noticed that there are books that discuss human sexuality in the library — and some of them are even written for teenagers! Teenagers, of course, never think about sex and have no interest in the subject unless some vile prurient publication stirs them up, so the crusaders for purity are stridently…
pharyngula | June 15, 2009I thought I knew of all the institutions of higher learning in my neighborhood, but I seem to have missed one: The University Of Metaphysical Sciences, located in the small town of Kandiyohi, Minnesota. I even know exactly where that is — it's just outside of Willmar, where my wife works every day.
You might be wondering what, exactly, you would learn at a University Of Metaphysical Sciences. Well, that isn't clear. You get to learn about Colors and Symbols, and Chakras, and how to connect with Angels (if I were younger, I'd be tempted to get a degree in that, just so I could use it as a…
pharyngula | June 11, 2009Once again, Texas leads the way in absurdities. One kook has decided he doesn't like to say hello, and has convinced the whole county to go along with him. Can you guess why?
In this friendly little ranching town, "hello" is wearing out its welcome. And Leonso Canales Jr. is happy as heck.
At his urging, the Kleberg County commissioners on Monday unanimously designated "heaven-o" as the county's official greeting. The reason: "hello" contains the word "hell."
For some reason, I now really want Michelle Obama to visit the Hellespont to collect seashells and read Percy Shelley, just so it…
pharyngula | June 10, 2009They're doing it again. The raving mad wackaloons are oiling up the hearing rooms for the Sotomayor confirmation. This is called "anointing", where some true believer thinks it will make a god pay special attention to an event if it is greased up first…which makes me wonder if there can be any point to church services if god is spending all of his time hanging out at the McDonald's down the road.
Anyway, the sanctimonious twit Rev. Rob Schenck has put up another video of himself wandering through the rooms, slopping oil on doors. He will pray and anointy-nointy, while we will laugh and pointy…
pharyngula | June 9, 2009The US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that display of ten commandments monuments violates the establishment clause. Well, yeah. When the first commandment is basically "No way but JHWH!", it should be basically impossible to argue otherwise. Although it is fun to watch the crazy people twist themselves to argue that Moses was a secular dude.
Speaking of twisted, ex-Judge Ray Moore is running for Alabama governor in 2010. If you enjoy the occasional video of squirrelly wingnuts denouncing all that is evil in the world, he's got several there. I like the one where he announces that he…
pharyngula | June 8, 2009Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's…
pharyngula | May 28, 2009I have heard that he is absolutely furious about that Newsweek article on him — he's harrassing the editors and staff, is demanding that they print his full rebuttal, and is particularly upset that they would question his amazing powers of prognostication. He has put a letter online, in which he claims that all his wrong predictions were actually correct. Near as I can tell, he likes to make vague claims of the inevitable, and doesn't like it when it's pointed out that the details (which are the only testable parts of his predictions) turn out to be false.
pharyngula | May 28, 2009I am informed by Joshua Zelinsky that two new Chick tracts are available. They are, as expected, completely insane. Here are my summaries.
You can sell your soul to Satan for wealth, women, and fame, and if you accept Jesus in your last minutes on your deathbed, you still get to go to heaven!
Catholicism and voodoo are pretty much the same thing, and any good Protestant boy can beat up demons.
Now you don't need to bother reading them.
But you're going to anyway, aren't you?
pharyngula | May 28, 2009He will be gay.
But will the Antichrist be a homosexual? Having seen what the Bible says of sodomy, we have no further to look than the book of Daniel, chapter 11 to find our answer. It says, "Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard... the desire of women...." As I said at the onset, I am not the first to draw attention to this, but the verbiage is clear.
…
But consider this: The time is ripe for such a leader. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the one who is against everything Biblical and Christian should be a partaker of so great a sin; there is no greater way to reject the Creator…
pharyngula | May 27, 2009In all the news about Obama's choice of an appointment to the Supreme Court, there's another possibility looming:
Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to areport by Bloomberg News.
Collins, who was the director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source told Bloomberg.
Elias Zerhouni, Collins' would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for…
pharyngula | May 27, 2009The gullibility of the religious is amazing…but they always seem to be rewarded with the fawning affirmations of other believers, and more publishing opportunities. Yet again, the Huffington Post flaunts its absurdl woo side with a piece of tripe from Therese Borchard claiming that angels exist.
As you sit there reading this--whether you believe it or not--there is an angel by your side: it is your guardian angel, and it never leaves you. Each one of us have been given a gift, a shield made from the energy of light. It is a part of the guardian angel's task to put this shield around us.
To…
pharyngula | May 24, 2009Timothy Birdnow is one of those common wingnuts: he worships GW Bush, thinks global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is evil, evolution is a lie, and history is all about the triumphant ascent of Judeo-Christian America. I've laughed at him a few times before; now he's venting his diseased, shriveled spleen at atheism. It's funny stuff.
A lot of it is the usual ahistorical tripe which can be summed up in this cliche:
This prohibition was clearly intended to restrain governmental interference with the right of the individual to believe and worship as he sees fit. The "Wall of Separation" was…
pharyngula | May 22, 2009I was pleasantly surprised by this Newsweek article on Ray Kurzweil: it's critical of him! Usually, and especially from the technopress magazines, there's this kind of fawning attitude towards him, because he really is a smart guy — they overlook the fact that he is also a bit of a kook. You know what I think of him, and the reporter interviewed me for a short comment, too.
Still, a lot of people think Kurzweil is completely bonkers and/or full of a certain messy byproduct of ordinary biological functions. They include P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has…
pharyngula | May 19, 2009I never sign up for these things, but apparently many people think it's hilarious to give crazy right wing sites my email address, so part of my daily flood of email is crap from places like WorldNetDaily. Most of it just gets a filter entry and I never see it again, but I have a soft spot for WND — it's barking mad, full of the craziest deluded wackos with this strange sense that, since the Bush years, they represent the mainstream. I learn the wildest stuff from their mail.
Did you know that the Girl Scouts are out to turn your daughters into lesbians? It must be true, since WND says it is…