They’re feminizing dinosaurs now!
So much of the nonsense about the gender binary is projection, and imposition of cultural biases on top of biology. Case in point: this very silly post that claims that putting feathers on dinosaur…| Pharyngula
Tomorrow at 2pm Pacific Time, the crew here at Freethoughtblogs are going to talk about some of the books we’ve read, with a focus on what we can learn for our own societies from them.| Planet Skeptic
They’re coming to take away the guns!| Planet Skeptic
It’s another anatomical atrocity from the bowels of the internet. Be amazed at the magnitude of the physical differences between men and women (although I hope this was exaggerated by some online comedian.)| Planet Skeptic
I’d heard a few rumors about this program, Chorus, in which pro-Democrat ‘influencers’ formed a bloc to coordinate their support for liberal policies, which superficially sounded like a good idea, except for how it is implemented. Members had to swear secrecy, promise to never criticize their fellow Chorus members, and get their opinions vetted by their paymasters. This sounds an awful lot like the secret deal Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson made with Russians, except that the p...| Planet Skeptic
So much of the nonsense about the gender binary is projection, and imposition of cultural biases on top of biology. Case in point: this very silly post that claims that putting feathers on dinosaur…| Pharyngula
When capitalism trumps science…this is Donald Morisky. He developed a useful tool called the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale, a questionnaire you can use to determine the likelihood someone will stick to a regimen of medication. It’s only 8 questions long, but I can see how it would be valuable.| Planet Skeptic
Welcome to Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.| Planet Skeptic
Now you too can take the Oklahoma teacher test without giving your name to PragerU. The list of 34 questions has been revealed! These guys are obsessed with religion and sex, the stuff teachers don’t usually deal with, and there’s very little that is content-appropriate.| Planet Skeptic
Nathan Robinson explains why the pundits and far-right apologists are not funny — they’re horrifying. The breaking point for him was how these horrible people, like Bret Stephens and Ba…| Pharyngula
I gotta tell you, though: it’s not much of a test. It’s a test on rails. If you get a question “wrong” (“wrong” as defined by PragerU often means “correct” by reasonable, rational people) it tells you, and gives you the opportunity to change your answer. You can just randomly guess, and it will guide you to the answer Dennis Prager wants. So I actually answered the questions honestly, which was often scored as incorrect, but there is no record of that. Basically all you have t...| Planet Skeptic
Andrea Pitzer examines our prospects — what is likely to happen when Trump drops dead (the sooner the better), and how we’ll have to struggle to overcome his legacy. I don’t know …| Pharyngula
This afternoon, I tried to sort out the newly emerged Bold Jumper spiderlings, with limited success. Unfortunately, they were faster and more eager to flee than I expected. I got most of them, but …| Pharyngula
Quakers are just one step removed from humanists, but with an even greater commitment to social justice. I like that, although I could never join a group with any vestige of god-belief. Still, I ap…| Pharyngula
Within a month, we’ll know definitively what causes some forms of autism. RFK jr says so. We’re finding certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism, Kennedy sa…| Pharyngula
My favourite aunt in law married a card carrying conservative guy. He is, like many of them, a wonderfully nice person when you’re a member of the in group and I actually do like him as a person.But his politics… Now, I have decided that I will not discuss politics with him until he’s back in the workforce. You see, the current conservative motto here is that people unjustifiably have a life and don’t work enough. There are plans to abolish the 8 hour work day for more “flexibility...| freethoughtblogs.com
One of the aphorisms guiding tech companies is to ‘move fast and break things’. Rewards accrue to those companies that are first out of the gate with something new and so products are rushed out without being fully tested, the assumption being that any faults can be corrected based on feedback from consumers. In other […]| Freethought Blogs
A shooter killed two people and injured 17 others while they were at church on the opening day of a Catholic school in Minneapolis. In reading the news report, I was stuck by this towards the end. There have been more than 140 shootings reported in elementary and secondary schools in 2025 thus far, according […]| Freethought Blogs
The Tesla company is very secretive about the cars it produces. In particular, it is very reluctant to release information about their safety records. While the company blocks attempts to release records on its crash records, a whistleblower has released what is being called The Tesla files based on internal records. The Guardian has released […]| Freethought Blogs
My favourite aunt in law married a card carrying conservative guy. He is, like many of them, a wonderfully nice person when you’re a member of the in group and I actually do like him as a per…| Affinity
Another mass killing, this time at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. It was horrifying: the killer opened fire at a group of kids in the school, killing two and injuring 17 before th…| Pharyngula
Someone named Dewey took exception to my article about a prison being reopened, and quickly fired off a “rebuttal”. Aw, cry more. Criminals belong in prisons. People who illegally enter…| Pharyngula
I thought all we were getting for sacrificing science was a paint job for the border wall, but no! We’re getting more prisons! Overall, crime is down significantly, but we’re expanding the prison system.| Planet Skeptic
Finally, the black widow egg sacs have released their hordes! Here’s a close-up of one of the spiderlings. Black widows start off with more spectacular patterns — as they mature, they&#…| Pharyngula
I’m the executor for my late mother’s estate. Last week I thought I had completed all of my duties. I had liquidated all of my mother’s assets over the course of the past year, an…| Pharyngula
Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the problem clearly in the 1940s. It’s the stupidity, stupid, and stupidity is more subtle and complex than you might think. Keep the MAGA movement in mind while readi…| Pharyngula
The peak season for Argiope is late summer, and I’ve been physically wrecked for all of August, so I’d resigned myself to not seeing any of these big beautiful spiders this year. Then M…| Pharyngula
On an episode of “CNN NewsNight with Abby Philip,” the topic being discussed was a serious one: the Trump administration’s current program to purge the Smithsonian, and other museums, of exhi…| Pharyngula
Tragic. Avi Loeb lost the annual soccer match at his institution! Last night, we held the annual soccer cup match between the faculty and the students at Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Comput…| Pharyngula
I’m stewing in my own juices here — crippled, homebound, going stir crazy — and one of the things driving me nuts is the state of American media, since I’m stuck watching so…| Pharyngula
I told you that Brian Lauer is an ignorant buffoon, but you shouldn’t trust my opinion alone. Last night, Mark Reid and Dr. Dan worked over the same presentation and came to the same conclusi…| Pharyngula
Just so know, my wife gave me a present: a wheelchair. It turns out that I was capable of hobbling about with one non-functional knee, but us bipeds are SOL with two blown out knees. I’ve see…| Pharyngula
Brian Lauer of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association debated Mark Reid on the topic of creation vs. evolution and Reid slapped him down hard. I came on for a second round and tore up Lauer&#…| Pharyngula
Yesterday, I was looking forward to visiting a local airshow. I made it. I was disappointed. It was not the fault of the airshow organizers, or the collection of planes they had on view. The proble…| Pharyngula
I’m driving to Granite Falls, MN this morning. It’s only about an hour SSE of Morris, so I’ll still be in the middle of nowhere in west central Minnesota. A while back, though, I …| Pharyngula
And deciding to try starting at one end and eating the whole thing. This is the bold jumper, Phidippus audax, that I’m raising in the lab (I’ve got 6 different species of spider thrivin…| Pharyngula
And they’re no better than creationists elsewhere. I felt compelled to critique a bad creationist debate sponsored by the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. Sorry, no transcript, I was…| Pharyngula
I am relieved that I am not a gay or trans person, since this country is getting worse and worse at dealing with its raging homophobia/transphobia. Even in Minnesota we’ve got self-righteous …| Pharyngula
Fall semester begins next week. That means that we’re having all kinds of meetings this week. I just got back from a morning of meetings. Tomorrow will be worse: I’ll be in meetings all…| Pharyngula
Has anyone staged an intervention for Tracie Harris? [12:29] THEO: Uh, yeah. Let’s talk about it. First off, for your listeners, hi, I’m Theo. I’m not a persona. This isn’t …| Reprobate Spreadsheet
My impression of the ex-CNN news announcer, Jim Acosta, was that he at least had some principles. He quit cable news, after all, and that’s a positive mark in my estimation. Unfortunately, he…| Pharyngula
If you follow RetractionWatch, you know that there a lot of bad papers published in the scientific literature. But there you just see the steady drip, drip, drip of bad research getting exposed, a …| Pharyngula
I’d begun to forget that Jordan Peterson exists — does anyone still find him credible? — when potholer54 comes out with a new video demonstrating that he’s a pretentious foo…| Pharyngula
The Steatoda borealis spiderlings have finally emerged from their egg sac! They are slow, plump, and numerous. I spent a good chunk of the morning plucking them out one by one and putting them in s…| Pharyngula
I ran across this ridiculous comment, and it struck me that the interesting thing isn’t that Joseph Martin is outright wrong, but that he presents his stupid ideas with such absolute confiden…| Pharyngula
It’s time for a FtB podcast tomorrow! We asked what would be good to discuss, and the response was a visceral cri de coeur, so that’s the topic. There is a lot of pain in the world, and…| Pharyngula
Speaking of incompetent clowns running major federal institutions, Linda McMahon was speaking at the National Conservative Student Conference. She was being interviewed by Scott Walker, the former …| Pharyngula
Don’t you know? RFK jr is not anti-vax. He supports safe vaccines. News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety, Kennedy said in his openin…| Pharyngula
Agustín Fuentes has published a new book, Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. I just started reading it last night — and it’s very good so far — so don’t…| Pharyngula
By luck, my mother and my aunts gave birth to three boys of roughly the same age: me and my cousins, Kelly and Don. Furthermore, they had second children who were all boys, my brother Jim to run wi…| Pharyngula
Everybody and their mother has been sending me links to this story, Spider divination. In Cameroon, they have a practice of cluttering up a spider’s burrow with leaves and sticks and stones, …| Pharyngula
Perfect! Arachno-communist, that’s me!| Pharyngula
The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to brighten our mornings by posting their vision of America: small towns full of white people, with a church across the street from a little one ro…| Pharyngula
Growing up, did any of you hear some variation of the line, “You have to eat all your [broccoli][peas][lutefisk], there are children starving in [China][India][Africa]!” We were suppose…| Pharyngula
We’ve got another chittering weasel of a creationist raving in the comments, a fellow going by the name YesYouNeedJesus. He’s also sending me email. PZ, I first heard about you on Bob E…| Pharyngula
A while back, I mentioned that the Twin Cities Creation Science Association was doing an online creation/evolution debate on the 26th and that maybe I’d tune in and see what they had to say. …| Pharyngula
Gregory Paul makes an interesting point — atheist perspectives are underrepresented in the media. If there’s a disaster, they immediately go to someone who will babble some reassuring p…| Pharyngula
OK, that settles it. If I can’t get my relatively minor health problems fixed soon, my backup plan is a lots of alcohol and all kinds of drugs. It worked for Ozzy! I’m drawing the line …| Pharyngula
I just learned that Jimmy Swaggart died earlier this month. He was a terrible human being, a televangelist, an occupation that is an automatic red flag for a sleazy parasite, without question. I da…| Pharyngula
I’m going mad here. I’ve got limited mobility — I’m supposed to take it easy, but I can limp around, and I’m able to drive, but I have limited access to a car (my wife…| Pharyngula
In a world with so much cause for doom and gloom, one of the persistent bright spots is the steady growth of the nonreligious, atheists and agnostics. Year by year and decade by decade, organized religion keeps losing strength, while nonbelievers are gaining. Where white Christians once commanded an absolute majority of the U.S. population, with political power to match, they’re now an aging, shrinking minority hanging on by their fingernails. It’s only America’s undemocratic system tha...| Daylight Atheism
Here’s some news to give you the heebie-jeebies. There is a vulnerability in trains where someone can remotely lock the brakes with a radio link. The railroad companies have known about this …| Pharyngula
One of the landmark legal decisions in the history of American science education is Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 Supreme Court decision that ruled that creationism could not be taught in the classr…| Pharyngula
I said I was burned out on superhero movies and wasn’t going to watch them anymore. But then I saw that Fox News declared that Superman was superwoke and Kellyanne Conway came out against it …| Pharyngula
I’ve long wondered how any woman can bear to stay with the selfish scum of the right. There’s no accounting for taste, and some of those women are probably sleazy themselves, but someti…| Pharyngula
The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them! he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months cl…| Pharyngula
Department of Homeland Security agents are proud of their mission, which is to carry out mass deportations. They might as well start wearing death’s heads on their belt buckles, except that w…| Pharyngula
Elon Musk has a pet chatbot called Grok. He recently gave it some personal attention and updated it. Yes. People noticed the difference immediately. The posts ranged from alleging “patterns&#…| Pharyngula
Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any warnings.| freethoughtblogs.com
Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any wa…| Pharyngula
This was fun. I found a paper about developing an arachnophobia scale, a questionnaire that someone could use to evaluate a person for arachnophobic tendencies, title Questionnaire Dimensions of Sp…| Pharyngula
Let’s try a livestream on Sunday. Sunday at 3pm Central I’ll be answering questions…and if nobody has any questions, I’ll just talk about neurodevelopment.| Pharyngula
After all, one of the virtues of bird is that they can be used to motivate research into insects. That’s nice. We couldn’t possibly get the general public interested in arthropods when …| Pharyngula
Hey, y’all remember when Game of Thrones was a hot show? It had dragons, and zombies, and bloody destructive wars, and gratuitous nudity, and engaging characters, and multiple plot lines that…| Pharyngula
I have been confined to my bed or a chair for the past week. I have consumed a lot of media. The media of choice has been a science-fiction serial called Murderbot. The story is set in the distant …| Pharyngula
Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects o…| Pharyngula
A new video! This one is just science, a cool paper I read way back when I was doing my post-doc. It left a strong impression on me, so I thought it would be worthwhile introducing it to all of you…| Pharyngula
I have seen a doctor. I was x-rayed. I was informed that I have lovely knees, with no signs of arthritic degeneration. I got a blood test for my uric acid levels — they’re normal. I got…| Pharyngula
A person named Elise has compiled a spreadsheet of responses from neurodivergent people about their jobs and careers. I learned something from browsing through it. Most of the respondents seen to f…| Pharyngula
Late last night, I got an alert with the good news that Iran and Israel were going to stop shooting missiles at each other. US president Donald Trump has announced in a social media post that Iran …| Pharyngula
Last year, I gave a lukewarm review of Heartstopper, including the first season of the TV series, and the webcomic up to that point. Today, I will offer a few comments on season 2. Because despite …| A Trivial Knot
After finishing and reviewing the first season of Heartstopper (TV series), we were looking for another show to watch, and landed on Love, Victor, available on Disney+. This is a very different kin…| A Trivial Knot
Coming out isn’t what it used to be. Literally, “coming out” has a rich history of different meanings. Originally it referred to young women coming of age into high society. It had a derivative mea…| A Trivial Knot
Two days ago, Donald Trump was whining that he wasn’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that he had been so great at negotiating peace in the world. He really, really wants a…| Pharyngula
China has a space station named Tiangong that we don’t hear much about in US media, which is a shame. The station was launched in part because “Congress passed a law prohibiting NASA fr…| Pharyngula
Would anyone be surprised by this observation? Wealth and privilege mess up your head. In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the w…| Pharyngula
The bad news: another SpaceX Starship exploded spectactularly. The good news: it blew up on the ground, so it’s not raining fiery debris down on the Caribbean. Other good news: that’s E…| Pharyngula
Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products. Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the…| Pharyngula
I wonder what RFK Jr and the MAHA gang think of this: This topic is all coming to a head right now because the great state of Texas has just passed legislation that allows recycled fracking wastewa…| Pharyngula
RJ May, a state representative in South Carolina, voted for anti-trans legislation, and then piously declared that We as legislators have an obligation to insure that our children have no harm done…| Pharyngula
The police caught Vance Boelter. Good. Now we can all forget him forever. Except for the people whose lives he harmed. Two of them are dead, two were incredibly lucky. On Sunday evening, US Senator…| Pharyngula
The pursuit of Vance Boelter, the assassin of Melissa Hortman, continues. The rats are scattering. His wife, Jenny Lynn Boelter, was stopped in Onamia, a town well north of Minneapolis. She was not…| Pharyngula
