I was planning to go into phased retirement at the end of the next school year. I’d told the chair of my division, and had warned all my faculty colleagues, but now…I’m not so sure. Thi…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

21.11.2024

It’s snowing!

You know what that means: I am welcoming all the spiders to come in from the cold and find a cozy place to stay in my house, like this Pholcus in my shower.

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

21.11.2024

It really did snow

You can see a bit of it in this photo. Mainly, though, this is a picture of my wife’s swarm of bird feeders, which were also swarmed with birds this morning, which all fled the instant I step…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

21.11.2024

Our cars have cancer

I made a quick grocery run during the lunch hour, and, as usual, noticed that my car was made invisible when I parked it. My little Honda Fit was surrounded monstrous huge pickup trucks — tru…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

21.11.2024

Excellent images of a few things

Would you like some free biological illustrations that aren’t the products of an AI’s unrestrained imagination? NIH BioArt is such a source. These are bold, simple illustrations with li…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

20.11.2024

Reminder for all us guys

Today is International Men’s Day. Finally! I’m so tired of being ignored all the other days of the year. I do wish to complain, though. Most of the logos I can find on Google are all ab…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

20.11.2024

Biblical authority as a justification for misogyny

I greatly appreciate Dan McLellan’s work — he’s a serious scholar of the Bible and he often addresses the shallow assumptions some people make about their religion, and delves int…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

20.11.2024

The president is a troll

He’s leaking the idea that he might appoint Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, to be the Secretary of Education, a department that he has also threatened to eliminate. This is p…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

19.11.2024

Goodbye, NIH

The National Institutes of Health is a hugely successful organization behind modern biomedical research in the USA — among their many goals was establishing policy for dealing with infectious…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

19.11.2024

Have an uncanny Christmas!

For better or worse, Coca Cola has driven the iconography of Christmas — that jolly bearded fat man in a red suit is a corporate construct. Every year, Coca Cola proudly trots out some new he…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

19.11.2024

Sale of InfoWars halted

It sure must be handy to be able to lead a billionaire around by his dick. Elon Musk is using his wealth to stop a result Trump doesn’t like. Last week, satirical news website The Onion annou…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

18.11.2024

Another day of probate paperwork

You will either be amused or horrified by my discovery of the documents leading to the original sale of my mother’s house. My mom & dad bought this place in 1976, the first and only home …

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

18.11.2024

Et tu, NPR?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this — NPR has always been a news source for comfortable liberals who want soft voices and current events delivered gently, without any trace of al…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

18.11.2024

What do you call an innumerate hebephile?

Matt Gaetz. I think that’s a fake tweet — it comes off Twitter, which is a pretty unreliable source. But still, it’s a funny jab at the horrible Gaetz, who, if he actually used th…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

16.11.2024

That’s beautiful, man

I might have to become a fan of the boxer, Mike Tyson. He has an ugly history, and now he’s going to be in a match with that jumped-up YouTube influencer, Jake Paul (it’s a fake match, …

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

16.11.2024

BIRDIE!

Time to dig up another fossil. It’s a bird, but it has no connection to the sabre-toothed kitty cat I posted yesterday — this is a 80 million year old bird, Navaornis hestiae, written u…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

16.11.2024

Too late, I think!

If you were dreaming of buying my mother’s house in Auburn, WA, you may have missed your chance: we had two offers this week at roughly the asking price, and we’re accepting one. There …

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

16.11.2024

Time for other news organizations to abandon Twitter

The Guardian has announced that they will no longer cite Twitter. We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (f…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

15.11.2024

Government by spite

I see a tiny bit of hope for the future. Donald Trump is making all kinds of wild appointments right now, giving us a peek at the United States government for the next four years. Tulsi Gabbard, di…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

15.11.2024

Alex Jones’ legacy is in good hands

You may recall that InfoWars’ stuff was going to be auctioned off. The auction is over! Guess who won? The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’s Infowars…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

15.11.2024

They just gravitate to me, I guess

I stepped out of my house and started walking to work, when I noticed a dot moving out of the corner of my eye. There was a tiny spider dangling from my eyebrow! This is a bit surprising, since it&…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

15.11.2024

KITTY!

I understand that the internet likes cats, so here’s one, a 30,000 year old mummified sabre-toothed kitten. It has a distinctively large mouth and massive neck muscles, but the canine teeth h…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

15.11.2024

At least, some of the phenomena trying to kill us are beautiful

What a beautiful photo! What a disaster! Nature is contemplating the consequences of a major volcanic eruption. Geological evidence from volcanic deposits over the past 60,000 years suggests a 1-in…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

14.11.2024

Waiting for my eyes to adapt to the darkness

I have changed my routine lately. I no longer read the news. There were a few blogs I read regularly, a couple of political YouTube channels I frequented, a podcast or two I’d listen to on wa…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

13.11.2024

“a VEWY fwightened widdew man”

A liberal feminist, Marla Rose, knocked on Nick Fuentes’ door. He reacted by immediately pepper-spraying her, knocking her down, and and stealing her phone. All she did was knock! In a Facebo…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

13.11.2024

Coincidentally…

In that treasure trove of old documents from my mother, I found this little surprise: she’d also saved one of my extra figures from my research at the University of Oregon, the stuff that led…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

13.11.2024

One of my role models, recognized

My experiences in grad school were mostly happy ones, and I credit that to the fact that I was lucky to work with good people. I entered the lab of Charles Kimmel, working on zebrafish neuroscience…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

13.11.2024

Nice

Visit the post for more.

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

12.11.2024

Science needs specific, informed, productive criticism

Professor Dave demolishes Sabine Hossenfelder. I feel that. The topic of my history class last week and this week is about bias in late 19th/early 20th century evolutionary biology, and how we have…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

12.11.2024

Elevatorgate yet lives?

I knew it. It’s all Rebecca Watson’s fault that Trump got elected. Who would have thought that a woman asking, “Guys, don’t do that” would trigger a decades-long meltd…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

12.11.2024

Can we demand an ethical standard for government?

A common sense act has been introduced in congress, HR 926, asking for basic ethical requirements for the Supreme Court. It sounds like something that ought to be in place. This bill makes various …

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

12.11.2024

Mothers have a sneaky way of getting to you

The last time I was in Washington, we had cleaned out a lot of my parent’s old stuff, and I was leaving after having booked a real estate agent to sell off the property. There were boxes and …

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

11.11.2024

You have to admire their cunning

Every year, around this time, as the weather gets colder, we get an influx of mice moving into our house to find refuge. Our cat is useless — she makes a lot of noise, usually in the middle o…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

11.11.2024

So that’s how they missed me

The rich have a well-funded network that has been poisoning the collective mind of the country, yet somehow they have failed to penetrate my soft, permeable, liberal skull. How could that be? There…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

11.11.2024

Another step in the evolution of multicellularity

I’m not a fan of phys.org — they summarize interesting articles, but it’s too often clear that their writers don’t have a particularly deep understanding of biology. I wonde…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

11.11.2024

A theological dilemma

A silly speculation: what if you die, go to heaven, and discover that a god had a set of fundamental rules that it didn’t tell anyone about? I was initially sympathetic to the idea that a god…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

10.11.2024

My unpleasant Christmas memory

I’m in the mood for some self-abasement, and also to nod in the general direction of the Xmas season. I’m going to tell you about the most horrible, embarrassing moment of my life so fa…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

09.11.2024

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

It was hard to get motivated this morning — Fridays are typically low attendance days in the classroom, and I had worked hard to get today’s topic condensed down into a lot of digestibl…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

09.11.2024

Witness them

There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports. The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into…

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula

08.11.2024

Life goes on

Freethoughtblogs has a podcast coming up on Saturday, at 4pm Central time. Get your injection of liberal tears then! (Actually, we’ll try to talk about productive directions, like how to help…

home›Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula›Science

Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula - Science

I may have to put my retirement plans on hold

It’s snowing!

It really did snow

Our cars have cancer

Excellent images of a few things

Reminder for all us guys

Biblical authority as a justification for misogyny

The president is a troll

Goodbye, NIH

Have an uncanny Christmas!

Sale of InfoWars halted

Another day of probate paperwork

Et tu, NPR?

What do you call an innumerate hebephile?

That’s beautiful, man

BIRDIE!

Too late, I think!

Time for other news organizations to abandon Twitter

Government by spite

Alex Jones’ legacy is in good hands

They just gravitate to me, I guess

KITTY!

At least, some of the phenomena trying to kill us are beautiful

Waiting for my eyes to adapt to the darkness

“a VEWY fwightened widdew man”

Coincidentally…

One of my role models, recognized

Nice

Science needs specific, informed, productive criticism

Elevatorgate yet lives?

Can we demand an ethical standard for government?

Mothers have a sneaky way of getting to you

You have to admire their cunning

So that’s how they missed me

Another step in the evolution of multicellularity

A theological dilemma

My unpleasant Christmas memory

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

Witness them

Life goes on

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