Always Read Pharyngula

Pharyngula makes you smarter. For instance, because I read Pharyngula today, I have managed to store in my tidbittial lobe a couple of esoteric factoids about the chimp genome that go beyond the predictable "Yay Men!" Y-chromosome fetish exhibited by all the papers.

PZ Myers also comments on a sanity-affirming essay by Richard Dawkins (da man!) and Jerry Coyne on the loopiness of the Intelligent Design fluffernuts who want to redefine science as baloney.

One thing that especially cracks me up about the creationist "argument," and Dawkins and Coyne touch on it, is the loony idea that just because a thing is "too complex" for the born-again Xian brain to grasp, the immediate default explanation is that it has to be the work of a mysterious and vengeful male ghost who dislikes Louisiana abortion clinics and uses fetus-shaped hurricanes to make his point.

Dawkins and Coyne reiterate one of my favorite arguments: "…[A] moment’s thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself – even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created."

Thanks, Pharyngula!

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