Man-Made Black Holes Temporarily Postponed

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland suffered some sort of electrical malfunction yesterday and is out of commission for two months as repairs are effected. The first beams had been successfully sent round the Collider ring about ten days ago but protons have yet to be smashed together.

Re: Busting the Palin Caricature

In addition to the areas that Marc mentioned, members of the Projo editorial board (and some other organs of the MSM) are playing fast-and-loose also with their description of Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's position on stem cell research. Here's the the unsigned editorial from Saturday…

Governor Palin didn’t mention…that she opposes stem-cell research.

…and the Froma Harrop op-ed from Sunday…

It’s four more years of national humiliation as our leadership undermines the teaching of evolutionary science, and if something happens to John McCain, opposes stem-cell research.

But the statement that Governor Palin "opposes stem cell research" is not accurate and leaves the reader in the dark about the important developments into non-embryonic stem-cell research that have occurred over the past year.

The most promising research into stem cell medical treatments is coming from the use of "induced pluripotent stem-cells", using cells taken from adults and not human embryos. Time Magazine described the most recent breakthrough in July…

After nearly a decade of setbacks and false starts, stem-cell science finally seems to be hitting its stride. Just a year after Japanese scientists first reported that they had generated stem cells by reprogramming adult skin cells — without using embryos — American researchers have managed to use that groundbreaking technique to achieve another scientific milestone. They created the first nerve cells from reprogrammed stem cells — an important demonstration of the potential power of stem-cell-based treatments to cure disease.

Led by Kevin Eggan at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Christopher Henderson at Columbia University, the 13-person team reported online today in Science Express that they had generated motor neurons from the skin cells of two elderly patients with a rare form of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition. The new study marks an important first step on the road toward real stem-cell-based therapies, and also answers several plaguing questions about the pioneering stem-cell technique known as induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS, generation.

IPS was first described by Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka, who, in 2007, showed that the introduction of four genes into an adult human skin cell could reprogram it back to an embryonic state (Yamanaka had reported the same achievement in mice the previous year). Like embryonic stem cells, these reprogrammed adult cells could be coaxed into becoming any other type of cell — from skin to nerve to muscle. But researchers questioned whether the new stem cells would behave as predictably or as safely as embryonic stem cells, or whether iPS would consistently yield usable cells. "Our work shows that the original method developed by Yamanaka works great," says Eggan.

Is anyone opposed to this line of research? If not, than the Projo op-ed page should stop running claims that someone is.

The idea the Governor Palin opposes all stem cell research traces back, as best as I can determine, to statements made in her 2006 campaign for Governor of Alaska, before the major 2007 breakthrough in creating stem-cells from adult tissues had occurred, but some MSM writers don’t seem interested in this critical distinction, nor in helping the public keep pace with the science.

Is that a rational position for those who fancy themselves as pro-science?

There Is a Right Path

Just a pause to affirm that one doesn't have to push the boundaries of ethics to extend the boundaries of medical science:

The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.

It's the second advance in about a year that suggests that doctors might be able to use a patient's own cells to treat disease or injury without turning to stem cells taken from embryos.

Of course, some folks give the impression that, deep down, they believe that ethical absolutes are the greatest disease facing humanity, with all mere ailments as subsequent considerations.

Irrelevant by Association

It occurs to me, while reading through the comments to last week's post on religion and evolution, that a bit of common, subconscious legerdemain infects those making the secularist argument. By way of context, here is my lone statement of intentions with respect to my own voting intentions:

I'll vote every time for children to have at least the sense that such a reality is plausible, and I submit that a society that insists that children receive only the cold, hard lessons of the skeptics would be doomed.

That statement bears on my own community. Elsewhere, I hold that, down to the community level, regions ought to have a wide degree of latitude to shape the education that their children receive. Yes, the United States needs well educated scientists, but who am I, as an overeducated New England carpenter to judge for a town in rural Mississippi that the utility of scientific knowledge outweighs the utility of religious faith — even if we exclude spiritual well-being from the judgment. A person who believes that there is no child in the country who would not be better served by an accurate, if rudimentary, understanding of evolution than by an affirmation of some particular religious worldview is a prima facie zealot and, unless claiming to know every American child, ought to cede stronger authority to those closer to them.

Beyond those civic principles, my writing on this topic presents merely my own view of God, offered with the intention of honestly conveying the personal intellectual foundations on which I construct my specific policy suggestions and illustrating what I feel to be at stake. I'm not, in other words, presenting Bible passages to be included in public policy or in classroom instruction.

Unfortunately, discussion of religion has worn deep ruts into our society's intellectual habits. For example, the statement is commonly made (often with strains of condescension) that humanity has manifold understandings of God, creating a necessity to exclude Him from public discourse. It is inappropriate — the case in point argument goes — to mention God in the context of evolution because various religions have offered various competitive explanations for the development of the universe, which, being of a religious nature, are beyond our ability to judge.

This is a clear non sequitur — one directly related to a process whereby many people wrongly conclude that God does not exist. Having once labeled something as "religion," which requires some degree of faith, the person asserts the assumption that all such thinking must be wholly based on relativistic "myths" and therefore tainted by indecipherable criteria. One needn't possess much faculty for reason to spot the faith-based taint in such a conclusion: namely, the underlying belief that there is no God and, therefore, no more or less accurate understanding of Him.

Ported to discussion of public school curricula, it can seem as if the secularists are arguing that government schools cannot suggest the compatibility of God with evolution for the reason that some religions are clearly not compatible with it, thus triggering a violation of church/state separation. The consequence becomes that the lessons develop a decidedly atheistic tone, given the impression that no theology can account for the mechanical process. It becomes science versus religion because we lack the cultural confidence to stand our religious traditions beside our scientific accomplishments.

The only constitutionally reasonable way to address this sort of conundrum is to allow maximum freedom across the nation. As may be inferred from my willingness to make suggestions about societal doom, I'm of the opinion that a society that allows intellectual progress fully in a reciprocal relationship with theological development is most likely to prove successful in every way about which we should be concerned. Allow people to hone their local societies according to their beliefs and some will thrive while others languish, providing valuable lessons for our broader collective as we move forward.

Re: No Scientific Theory

Andrew's disagreement with John West, it seems to me, comes down to a single word: "directs." In essence, West presents two opposing possibilities:

1. "God... intentionally directs the development of life toward a specific end."
2. "God himself cannot know how evolution will turn out."

Andrew's hypothetical of God's experimenting with "multi-creation," picking "the one He likes best and [making] it permanent" would fit within possibility #1, with God's method of "directing" being, essentially, a series of model runs. I'd argue that such a possibility would have, in West's words, "consequences for how we view life" that are more similar to the tweaking God than the ball-rolling God, because the critical difference is the belief that God has a preference that may be understood (admittedly to a limited extent) by observing that which he has made, as St. Paul put it.

My own view is that all realities that could exist do exist in the only way that it makes sense to call "real." (In religious terms, one might say that God's imagination is reality.) What we experience as the linear progression of time is actually the movement of our souls across a playing field of options, and God acts mainly by drawing our souls toward a particular range of those possibilities.

Moving more than a clarification or two beyond that stage in the discussion requires many, many more paragraphs than I intend to pile on, here, but the salient point is that there remains an indication of "intelligent design." If there is a distinction worth making between West's statements and Andrew's, I wouldn't characterize it as one of West limiting God's rules, but one of Andrew limiting God's definition of "directing."

Skipping Past the "Helicopter in Every Garage" Phase

Jay Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald reports on a long-shot but interesting economic development project for Rhode Island…

Woburn’s Terrafugia Inc. hopes its futuristic car-plane business takes off in Massachusetts.

The maker of the hybrid car-plane contraption - which theoretically will both drive on roads and soar through the sky - plans to meet with officials from Gov. Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts Office of Business Development next month to try to work out an economic-incentives package to keep the company in the state.

But Massachusetts may face stiff competition in its attempt to retain Terrafugia’s future production operations.

A number of states - eager to attract a cutting-edge manufacturer requiring potentially hundreds of highly skilled assembly and mechanical workers - are actively wooing the young aviation company, founded by an MIT grad and his colleagues.

"I’d rather stay right here in Massachusetts," said Carl Dietrich, co-founder and chief executive of Terrafugia, which hopes to start production of its two-seat car-planes sometime in 2009.
But "economics are economics," said Dietrich, who adds he’s listening closely to economic-incentives pitches being made by such states as Rhode Island and Maine.

The two states, both long known for their boat-making sectors, see aviation as a logical way to attract and keep highly trained mechanics jobs, he said.

The name of Terrafugia's intended first car-plane is the "Transition". According to Terrafugia's FAQ, car-plane means exactly what it sounds like, i.e. something that might exist in a Sean Connery era James Bond movie…

Q: Will the Transition fit in my garage?

A: The Transition was designed to fit into a standard household garage. At 6.75 ft (2.1 m) high, 6.5 ft (2.0 m) wide, and 18.75’ (5.7 m) long, the Transition will fit anywhere that you could park a larger SUV such as a Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator, and will fit inside a 7’ garage and a standard parking space.

Q: How fast will the Transition drive on the ground?

A: The Transition will be fully highway capable and able to easily reach the speed limit. A 100hp engine in a vehicle as light as the Transition will provide ample power on the ground.

Q: How fast will the Transition fly?

A: At 75% power, the anticipated cruising speed of the Transition is 100 kts (115 mph, 185 km/hr).

OK, well, maybe it's not exactly like a James Bond car-plane…

Q: Can I take off from the highway?

A: No. In addition to power lines, billboards, overpasses, and other obstructions that make this idea unsafe, the Transition will have to be parked with the engine off in order to deploy the wings and engage the propeller. It is also illegal in most states (emergency landings excluded).

I'm curious; does the possibility of luring this company to Rhode Island make any of the if- it's-not-being-taxed-right-now-then-it-needs-to-be crowd mellow their position on whether Rhode Island should help balance the state budget by ending its sales-tax exemption on aircraft?

A Difference of Ballast

Yes, unless Ben Stein didn't simply neglect to enunciate a qualifier (such as the one that I've inserted in the following quotation) in which he actually believes, then he may, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, have "completely lost it":

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed ... that was horrifying beyond words, and that's where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that's where science [as an ideological locus of meaning and moral guidance] leads you.

The added phrase would certainly be a legitimate response to biologist P.Z. Myers's explanation, in the clip that Stein was referencing, that it was scientific learning that led him away from religious faith, and his hope that science would become the "main course" to the religious "side dish." A more accurate culinary metaphor, from my point of view, would present religion as the set of beliefs and understanding of the world that sets the whys and hows of eating, while science helps one determine what to ingest toward those ends.

Automatically hearing or not hearing such important intellectual foundations as that which Stein conspicuously omitted lays, I believe, the central barrier of this particular dispute. Consider Reynolds:

The Holocaust was not a scientific endeavor, but had its roots in the Nazis' unscientific loathing of the Jews. The Nazis did try to dress up that loathing in scientific dress, but that was a propaganda move, not science. (Indeed, Nazi science, for the most part, was dreadful science, made up by people to suit their preexisting beliefs without actual resort to the scientific method.)

And (via him), Ed Morrissey:

Science does not lead to Dachau; ideology perverting science led to Dachau. The Holocaust occurred when raving anti-Semites and materialists latched onto scientific theory as a philosophy, making it into a rationalization for what they would have done regardless.

Reynolds elides the reality that the trappings of science make for effective propaganda, and Morrissey is too quick to treat science as a passive body of knowledge, as opposed to a mode of thought that can have an effect on the thinker. It is an error to suppose that science can define, explain, and qualify everything that is important in life — or even just important in intellectual inquiry — but the implications, when once that error has been made, do lend themselves to dangerous conclusions. The lack of an anchor against tides of explicability and direction facilitates rationalization of ghastly experimentation and application.

Something similar can be said in general of religion, of course, and science is among the anchors to prevent that particular drift. The danger of current polemics is that the distance between us will grow as we pick and choose which types of ballast we may permissibly jettison. And we do well to grant a benefit of the doubt to those of the other side when — in one-take broadcast conversation — they appear to have left some disclaimers unsaid.

The Projo's Technical Difficulties with Digital TV

An unsigned editorial in Saturday's Projo had this to say about the coming transition to digitial television…

The government is taking away the analog spectrum to boost wireless services (which are becoming ever more important) and for public-safety needs. That’s why the Feds (i.e., taxpayers) are even offering to help pay for those converter boxes.

So those rooftop antennae that were such important images in so many Christmas cards and magazine illustrations (will magazines disappear too?) will leave the scene, increasingly dominated by cell-phone towers.

…but I don't think that's correct.

Digital TV signals are broadcast over the airwaves on standard UHF frequencies, so cable or satellite TV is not required for receiving digital or high-definition broadcasts. All that's needed is a) a digital converter and b) a good UHF antenna for acquiring signals to convert. (Channels that were originally VHF; 6, 10, and 12 in the Rhode Island market, have each been assigned some portion of the UHF spectrum, which the converters are programmed to find whenever the "old" VHF channel numbers are selected).

In anticipation of the change-over to digital, most televisions being manufactured now have converters built directly into them. External converters will only be required for older sets. WJAR-TV (NBC 10) has more detail available here; WPRI-TV's (CBS 12) digital information is available here.

Thus, contrary to the Projo editorial, UHF antennas will be more important than ever for receiving over-the-air broadcasts after the conversion to digital.

Clarity for Safety's Sake

I missed last night's Tiverton Town Council meeting because, on top of dealing with some essential technology problems with my arsenal, we had a bit of toxic contamination in the home. Well, that's probably exaggerating: we broke one of those energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs and, realizing that they contain mercury, the obsessive in me had to research the danger.

One hopes that even a hypochondriac would find significance in the fact that just about every panic-laced missive on the topic refers to the exact same story, about a Maine mother who shattered a bulb in her daughter's room and wound up two grand in the hole because the uncleaned spot on the shag carpet registered a too-high mercury level. But even a merely cautious parent might find cause for confused concern in the fact that the EPA's clean-up guidelines for mercury spills state both:

Never use a vacuum cleaner to clean up mercury

And:

If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken, remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister) and put the bag or vacuum debris in two sealed plastic bags in the outdoor trash or protected outdoor location for normal disposal.

The bottom line is that the bulbs contain very little mercury (less than 5mg in gaseous form), and the average break-and-clean will diminish the risk with each step, even if done all wrong:

• Some particles stay in the bulb.
• Some particles drift off into the air.
• Some particles stick to the shards.
• Some particles get caught in the vacuum bag.
• Some particles get caught by the body's natural defenses.
• And some particles get absorbed with no deleterious effect.

Still, as I do with every quotidian danger, I wish some group or agency were given exemption from lawsuits in order to offer candid statements of risk and effect for the growing number of substances that we know to be harmful. So what if the safety threshold for mercury is 300 nanograms per cubic meter. What happens to the human body if that doubles, triples, quadruples? What would be the likely intake breaking the bulb right under one's nose? A foot away? Ten feet away?

The variables are manifold, of course, but for citizen laypeople, it'd be enough to know whether we're lighting campfires in the jungle or shooting blowtorches in the hay barn. And then I can get to wondering if my blue-state conservatism is somehow related to a periodic childhood practice of smashing fluorescent bulbs in the dumpster garages of my apartment complex, right after picking at the asbestos pipe insulation in the laundry room...

Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Roberts on the Stem Cell Breakthrough

Rhode Island Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Roberts has issued a statement on the stem cell breakthrough that was reported last week in two major scientific journals…

As a strong advocate for all forms of stem cell research, I am excited to learn that scientists are able to manipulate skin cells into embryonic cells that could lead to the development of treatments, and hopefully cures, for the most debilitating and life threatening diseases of our time. This is a wonderful discovery that opens the door to a new avenue of stem cell research. I encourage our Congressional delegation to push for greater federal research dollars for every type of stem cell research.

We must continue to pursue each and every scientific opportunity in this sector to save lives, prevent suffering and create research opportunities in our highly skilled biotech economy here in Rhode Island.

The Lieutenant Governor’s statement also made mention of her current efforts regarding adult stem cells…

Lt. Gov. Roberts is currently working with leaders in the General Assembly to submit legislation that will ensure expanded banking of cord blood, a different type of adult stem cell. Roberts hopes to implement a system in hospitals across the state for public cord blood banking which increases research opportunities and can save lives in Rhode Island.

Lt. Gov. Roberts assembled a report on stem cell research possibilities earlier this year that can be read at her official website.

Equal Like a Dream Versus a Song and a Dream

It would have been too much, I suppose, to hope that the New York Times would take the opportunity of the recent stem-cell breakthrough to correct a longstanding falsehood in its analysis spin of the issue to date. It is, nonetheless, disappointing that it persists:

Early in the controversy, opponents, including Mr. Bush, often said they supported studies using so-called adult stem cells that involve cells extracted from blood and bone marrow. But those cells have more limited potential than embryonic stem cells, and proponents of embryo experiments said it was like comparing apples to oranges. The reprogrammed skin cells, by contrast, appear to hold the same properties as embryonic stem cells, more an apples-to-apples comparison.

Perhaps one can say that there's nothing factually incorrect in the quoted paragraph, provided one limits "potential" to meaning "theoretical potential." As I've noted before (for two), "so-called adult stem cells" have already produced cures and treatments. One cannot say, however, that the recent "findings have put people on both sides of the stem cell divide on nearly equal political footing." One side is willing to dive into an ethical morass on the oversold promise of any-day-now medical miracles, as long as we plow through objections to killing embryos and cloning. The other side now has not only a slate of present-day accomplishments, but a very high likelihood of entering the very same miracle race.

A Primer on the Stem Cell Breakthrough

1. Remind me what all the hubbub surrounding stem cells is again.

Theoretically, illnesses caused by damaged or destroyed cells can be cured, if replacement cells can be created. Stem cells are a promising source of replacement cells.

2. So why don’t we use already cell therapies, wherever new cells would help?

Finding replacements is not easy. You can’t just drop any ol’ cell into a damaged area of the human body and expect it to take up the required function. Using the right cell for the right problem is necessary.

3. And stem cells are the answer, because…

They can be used to create any specialized type of cell.

Every cell in the body, literally within its DNA, contains all of the information necessary to produce every kind of tissue; heart, brain, nerve, bone, etc. that makes the body up. Given that we humans start out as a small set of cells (ultimately just a single cell), our cells at earliest stage of life must be flexible enough to use DNA information to produce any kind of tissue.

If doctors and scientists can find a source of these flexible cells -- stem cells -- and learn how to manipulate their growth, they may be able to create specialized cells useful in many therapies.

4. So let me rephrase question 2. Why don’t we already use cell therapies, wherever new cells created from stem cells would help?

Let me rephrase answer 2. Finding stem cells to make into replacements is not easy.

Until now, the primary source of stem cells fully capable of becoming any kind of tissue has been embryos, but acquiring embryonic stem cells requires destroying an embryo. This raises obvious ethical concerns.

And even if embryonic stem cells can be turned in to the appropriate cells for a cure, they cannot be readily transplanted into a sick patient, because of the body’s natural rejection of tissues that come from a foreign body.

5. What's the big breakthrough everyone is talking about?

Scientists announced a truly amazing discovery last week: the process of a stem cell turning into a specific tissue cell is apparently not as one-way as had been widely assumed. It is possible to take regular cells from an adult human and turn them back into stem cells. The Washington Post has provided a pretty good summary…

[Dr. Shinya Yamanaka’s team at Kyoto University] identified four genes in mouse skin cells that, when operating at high levels together, can turn countless other genes on and off in just the right pattern to make skin cells almost indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells….

Because the rejuvenated cells did not come from embryos and behave slightly differently from embryonic stem cells, Yamanaka named them "induced pluripotent stem cells," or "ips" cells (pluripotent means "able to become virtually every kind of").

He immediately tried the same technique on human skin cells….He coaxed the ips cells to become nerve cells, heart cells that beat in the dish, and other major cell types. And he showed that they were exact genetic matches to the skin cells they came from, suggesting that tissues or organs grown from them could be transplanted into the donor of the skin cells and not be rejected.

Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered a similar process around the same time.

6. How is the transformation done?

Literally, by reprogramming DNA….

Yamanaka put copies of [the] four genes into retroviruses, Trojan-horse-like viruses that insert their genetic payloads into the DNA of cells they infect. Once infected, the skin cells took on virtually all the characteristics of embryonic ones….

At the same time, Thomson, Junying Yu and colleagues were racing ahead. Working from an initial list of 14 genes that seemed to make human cells embryonic, they gradually narrowed their recipe to just four genes, too….

His cells passed the same tests as Yamanaka's, though in his final recipe, two of the genes he used were different.

"Apparently there are various ways to get to Rome," said Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. "We don't have to do it like the egg. We can do it differently."

7. In politically charged science debates, the claims sometimes get ahead of the reality. Any reason to be skeptical here?

Well, James Thomson is the same scientist who discovered embryonic stem cells about a decade ago, so if he thinks this is for real, there is obviously something to that.

Dr. Yamanaka and Dr. Thomson haven’t quite made the claim that they've produced stem cells, but cells that are very close to stem cells. Some more observation and experimentation is needed before it can be claimed that they are 100% true stem cells.

The process of creating the stem cells involves certain cancer risks, but because there are mulitple ways to induce the transformation into a stem cell, the researchers in the field seem confident that this problem will be worked around. But I'll repeat the warning in the question -- in politically charged science debates, the claims sometimes get ahead of the reality

With certain diseases that originate at the genetic level, generating your own stem cells will not be a solution, because the stem cells will contain the same defects causing the illness, so solving the rejection problem and allowing cells from another person to be transplanted will continue to be investigated.

8. For the more technically minded, can you be any more specific about any of this?

Well, I suppose I could re-print the abstract from Dr. Thomson et. al’s article appearing in the journal Science…

Somatic cell nuclear transfer allows trans-acting factors present in the mammalian oocyte to reprogram somatic cell nuclei to an undifferentiated state. Here we show that four factors (OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28) are sufficient to reprogram human somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells that exhibit the essential characteristics of embryonic stem cells. These human induced pluripotent stem cells have normal karyotypes, express telomerase activity, express cell surface markers and genes that characterize human ES cells, and maintain the developmental potential to differentiate into advanced derivatives of all three primary germ layers. Such human induced pluripotent cell lines should be useful in the production of new disease models and in drug development as well as application in transplantation medicine once technical limitations (for example, mutation through viral integration) are eliminated.

Er, that makes it all clear, right?

Thanksgiving Meal Prep Work

In preparation for Thanksgiving (I'm in training right now...), here is some reassurance for those of you (well, me) who tend to over-indulge: Eat as much as you want:

Katherine Flegal and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute...used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is a representative sample of the US population, to find the connections between being underweight, overweight and obese and cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer and many other causes of death. The results are startling since they confound much of the received wisdom about being fat in America.

Flegal discovered that being overweight (BMI's of 25-30) was not responsible for increased mortality. In fact for CVD, cancer and all other causes, being overweight actually increased one's chance of living longer. In total, overweight was associated with a total of 138, 281 fewer deaths. Being overweight is not likely to kill you.

She found that being obese increased the risk of premature death for the most part in only the most obese, that is those with BMI's over 35. In other words, even modest obesity is not a death sentence. For example, those with BMI's of 30-35 aged 25-69 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Indeed, for cancer the results are even more startling since even those with BMI's in excess of 35 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying. And for all other diseases other than CVD and cancer, obesity up to a BMI of 35 was modestly protective -- that is, likely to result in a longer rather than a shorter life.

See, a little cushion is good for you! Now eat more pie, it's for your health, after all!

Evolution or Devolution?

Upon reading some British scientist's prediction of two species of humans thousands of years hence — a genetically solidified separation of the haves and have-nots — commenters have seemed to overlook the possibility that the haves are rapidly divesting themselves of the only thing that is actually worth having as they rend themselves from the sometimes inconvenient and often painful embrace of nature. As a cultural matter, it perhaps comes down to aesthetic preference, but such marches in the presumed direction of evolution must incsusceptibility to unforeseen pitfalls. Consider:

These humans will be between 6ft and 7ft tall and they will live up to 120 years.

"Physical features will be driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility that men and women have evolved to look for in potential mates," says the report, which suggests that advances in cosmetic surgery and other body modifying techniques will effectively homogenise our appearance.

Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.

Racial differences will be a thing of the past as interbreeding produces a single coffee-coloured skin tone.

What if our clear and visible distinctions have been a key ingredient of our species' success? On an individual level, it allows us to recognize each other — to identify (if we're to be reductive) others whom we know to possess particular information. On a regional level, it has improved our odds at predicting others' beliefs, associations, and previous experiences.

Me, I'll throw my lot in with those who revel in the grubby difficulties of organic life. Cultural evolution requires improvement of our handling of nature and its differences, not our self-extrication from them.

Stem Cells Even a Catholic Can Love

The following blurb (from page 12 of this PDF of the 10/11 Rhode Island Catholic) reminds us that stem-cell research can be moral and miraculous:

Three year-old Andrew Mueting of Dodge City is a bright, happy-golucky, energetic little boy. But when he was four months old, doctors gave him a bleak prognosis. Born with malignant infantile osteopetrosis, an exceedingly rare blood disorder that affects approximately 20 U.S. babies a year, Andrew was expected to spend his few years of life fighting anemia and infections, struggling with weak bones and eventual blindness and deafness. Now Andrew is expected to live a long, healthy life with few ill effects. In treatments at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., "Andrew had to go through eight days of chemotherapy to completely wipe out his immune system," said his father, Nick Mueting. "During the last five days of his treatment, I took a medicine that helped my body produce a lot of stem cells in my blood. At the end of that period ... I was hooked up to a machine for five hours as it extracted the stem cells from my blood." After that, 50 cubic centimeters of the father's stem cells were injected into his son's blood.

I'd note that embryonic stem cells have still not produced any actual cures, although of controversy, ill will, and (in my opinion) unhealthy worldviews they've produced much.

Consensus Cascade: Fear the "Experts"

The New York Times piece, "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus" explains how a scientific "consensus" came into being that a low-fat diet was best (despite evidence to the contrary) (via Dale Light). How'd it happen?

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

Hm. Sound familiar? As Dale Light notes:

We should remember that "science" is conducted by human beings with all the weakness and fallibility that entails, and that credentialed "experts" are often disastrously wrong. With that in mind we should recognize that expert opinion is a weak and shifting base on which to construct public policy.

While this is true in the hard sciences, it is especially true in the social sciences, which are less empirical no matter what anyone says. Usually the prescription written to solve a societal ill is more test run than cure. The reality is that it usually takes years, decades or even centuries for good ideas to percolate and solidify into something that works.

Not Slaves to the Synapses

So conditioned have we become to the materialist construction that we find it surprising when somebody suggests that our bodies — even our brains — are something more than time bombs waiting to betray our spirits:

A surprising study of elderly people suggests that those who see themselves as self-disciplined, organized achievers have a lower risk for developing Alzheimer's disease than people who are less conscientious.

A purposeful personality may somehow protect the brain, perhaps by increasing neural connections that can act as a reserve against mental decline, said study co-author Robert Wilson of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.

Astoundingly, the brains of some of the conscientious people in the study were examined after their deaths and were found to have lesions that would meet accepted criteria for Alzheimer's — even though these people had shown no signs of dementia.

"This adds to our knowledge that lifestyle, personality, how we think, feel and behave are very importantly tied up with risk for this terrible illness," Wilson said. "It may suggest new ideas for trying to delay the onset of this illness."

Previous studies have linked social connections and stimulating activities like working puzzles with a lower risk of Alzheimer's. The same researchers reported previously that people who experience more distress and worry about their lives are at a higher risk.

It's almost as if our brains are interactive material vessels for minds (some might say "souls") that aren't merely a byproduct of biological development.

Artificial Life

The Guardian (United Kingdom) is reporting that

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

Supposedly, Mr. Venter has yet to take the final step of transplanting the artificial genome into a living bacterial cell.

The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell's species. Mr Venter said he was "100% confident" the same technique would work for the artificially created chromosome.

The new life form will depend for its ability to replicate itself and metabolise on the molecular machinery of the cell into which it has been injected, and in that sense it will not be a wholly synthetic life form. However, its DNA will be artificial, and it is the DNA that controls the cell and is credited with being the building block of life.

It would be interesting to learn the composition of his "ethics committee":

Mr Venter said he had carried out an ethical review before completing the experiment. "We feel that this is good science," he said.

Possibly the "we" includes a larger circle than Mr. Venter realizes.

The Human Race: Safe for the Next 62,000,000 Minus 12,900 Years?

You've probably heard the theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs tens of millions years ago, but did you know that a similar impact may have caused the extinction of the woolly mammoths, just 12,900 years ago? According to Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, a Brown University geologist is a leading researcher into this event…

Researchers studying a dark layer of dirt at 10 sites around North America say they have found evidence that an asteroid or a comet may have killed the woolly mammoths, giant sloths, camels and other huge creatures that once roamed the continent.

The international team of researchers looked under what is known as "black mat" sediment, which dates back to 12,900 years ago. It coincides with a period of abrupt global cooling known as the "Big Freeze," or the Younger Dryas....

"We don't have a smoking gun for our theory, but we sure have a lot of shell casings," said Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island.

"Taken together, the markers found in the samples offer intriguing evidence that North America had a major impact event about 12,900 years ago."

This news actually makes me feel a little better about the immediate future of humanity.

Scientific evidence has been found in the fossil record indicating a cycle of major worldwide extinction events occurring about every 62 million years or so. Here's a description of the theory from National Geographic…

Robert Rohde and Richard Muller are vexed. For the past 542 million years the number of animal species living in the world's oceans has risen and fallen in a repeating pattern, and the scientists haven't the foggiest idea why....

The pattern includes a rise and fall of marine animal diversity every 62 million years and a weaker cycle of rising and falling marine diversity, which repeats every 140 million years. The researchers think that expanding and retreating glaciers may explain the 140-million-year cycle, but they are stumped over what drives the 62-million-year cycle.

The declines in the 62-million-year cycle correspond with some of the best known mass extinctions on Earth.

Among them are the die-off caused by the asteroid or comet widely believed to have doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and the "Great Dying" of 250 million years ago. During the Great Dying, some unknown cause wiped out most life on Earth.

The extinction of dinosaurs has generally been taken to have been the last event in the 62-million year cycle, meaning another catastrophic extinction may be overdue and ready to begin any day now. Unless, of course, the "scheduled" extinction event (assuming the theories to be true) already happened, 12,900 years ago.

Biologists have generally proposed various one-off explanations, e.g. the rise of humanity, for the set of extinctions that claimed the woolly mammoth. If, however, the extinctions 12,900 years ago were part of the 62-million year cycle that's connected to various astronomical and climatic factors, we may be safe going forward from today for at least the next 61.99 million years!

The Human Race: Safe for the Next 62,000,000 Minus 12,900 Years?

You've probably heard the theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs tens of millions years ago, but did you know that a similar impact may have caused the extinction of the woolly mammoths, just 12,900 years ago? According to Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, a Brown University geologist is a leading researcher into this event…

Researchers studying a dark layer of dirt at 10 sites around North America say they have found evidence that an asteroid or a comet may have killed the woolly mammoths, giant sloths, camels and other huge creatures that once roamed the continent.

The international team of researchers looked under what is known as "black mat" sediment, which dates back to 12,900 years ago. It coincides with a period of abrupt global cooling known as the "Big Freeze," or the Younger Dryas....

"We don't have a smoking gun for our theory, but we sure have a lot of shell casings," said Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island.

"Taken together, the markers found in the samples offer intriguing evidence that North America had a major impact event about 12,900 years ago."

This news actually makes me feel a little better about the immediate future of humanity.

Scientific evidence has been found in the fossil record indicating a cycle of major worldwide extinction events occurring about every 62 million years or so. Here's a description of the theory from National Geographic…

Robert Rohde and Richard Muller are vexed. For the past 542 million years the number of animal species living in the world's oceans has risen and fallen in a repeating pattern, and the scientists haven't the foggiest idea why....

The pattern includes a rise and fall of marine animal diversity every 62 million years and a weaker cycle of rising and falling marine diversity, which repeats every 140 million years. The researchers think that expanding and retreating glaciers may explain the 140-million-year cycle, but they are stumped over what drives the 62-million-year cycle.

The declines in the 62-million-year cycle correspond with some of the best known mass extinctions on Earth.

Among them are the die-off caused by the asteroid or comet widely believed to have doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and the "Great Dying" of 250 million years ago. During the Great Dying, some unknown cause wiped out most life on Earth.

The extinction of dinosaurs has generally been taken to have been the last event in the 62-million year cycle, meaning another catastrophic extinction may be overdue and ready to begin any day now. Unless, of course, the "scheduled" extinction event (assuming the theories to be true) already happened, 12,900 years ago.

Biologists have generally proposed various one-off explanations, e.g. the rise of humanity, for the set of extinctions that claimed the woolly mammoth. If, however, the extinctions 12,900 years ago were part of the 62-million year cycle that's connected to various astronomical and climatic factors, we may be safe going forward from today for at least the next 61.99 million years!

The Reductiveness of Science

A July 30th L.A. Times piece that held the dominant spot in this Sunday's Providence Journal Lifebeat section is a fine specimen of science's reductive power in the hand of a secularist:

The forces of attraction are in many ways mysterious, but scientists know certain things. Studies have shown that women prefer men with symmetrical faces and that men like a certain waist-to-hip ratio in their mates. One study even found that women, when they sniffed men's T-shirts, were attracted to certain kinds of body odors.

That initial spark can flash and fade. Or it can become a flame and then a fire, a rush of exhilaration, yearning, hunger and sense of complete union that scientists know as passionate love.

Key to this state of seeing a person as a soul mate instead of a one-night stand is the limbic system, nestled deep within the brain between the neocortex (the region responsible for reason and intellect) and the reptilian brain (responsible for primitive instincts). Altered levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin -- neurotransmitters also associated with arousal -- wield their influence.

But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. "It's a drive to win life's greatest prize, the right mating partner," Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction.

People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.

Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.

Love, you see, in all of its stages is traceable through various chemical changes and is, ostensibly, the predictable consequence of a collection of complex factors, from appearance to personal history to the circumstances under which a couple meets. Writer Susan Brink refers to it as a "trick" multiple times. One wonders what scientists could have discovered that would make Brink think love sincere or "real."

It's only natural to feel as if some of the magic has disappeared from something when it has become understood. Natural, but incorrect and deleterious. The emotion is just as real whether or not we know what the brain is doing to create it, just as understanding the physics of a sunrise makes it no less magnificent.

The trickery comes in when mankind presumes to manipulate that which has been defined, and it is the reduction of life's magic to mere mechanics that begets the moral error that manipulation is acceptable. Consider:

Experiments in other mammals add to the human chemical findings. Female prairie voles, for example, develop a distinct preference for a specific male after mating, and the preference is associated with a 50% increase in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.

But when the monogamous vole is injected with a dopamine antagonist, blocking the activity of the chemical, she'll readily dump her partner for another.

The imaginable applications of a love antidote, or a love enhancer, range from the cute to the tyrannical. Looking at the love of your life and pondering the chemical "trick" of your emotions is socially corrosive, but it's nowhere near as frightening as considering the use toward which such chemical tricks would have been put by 1984's Big Brother.

Skeptical, Cynical, Sarcastic, or Just Saying "Heh"

During a perusal of Instapundit, I came across two (seemingly) unrelated items. The first reports that British skulls appear to have grown 20% above the eyes since the times of the plague:

The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but their cranial vault -- the distance measured from the eyes to the top of the skull -- was smaller.

Dr Peter Rock, lead author of the study and director of orthodontistry at Birmingham University, told the BBC News website: "The astonishing finding is the increased cranial vault heights.

"The increase is very considerable. For example, the vault height of the plague skulls were 80mm, and the modern ones were 95mm -- that's in the order of 20% bigger, which is really rather a lot."

Then, by sheer happenstance, no doubt, I clicked over to a tongue-in-cheek quip about this picture:

Bushitler "Shrub" types should feel welcome to flock to my serious question (not mentioned in the BBC skull article) whether the size of British skulls might have more to do with the long-term effects of interbreeding with large-skulled, small-featured foreigners than with blossoming brain function on the isle.

Dictating the World to the Rest of Us

This represents less of a movement than the Jackass movies — albeit mildly less adolescent and significantly less influential — but it is somewhat emblematic of a certain way of thinking: As noted by Bobbie Johnson's Guardian-related blog, some blogger in California (I think) has taken it upon himself to recategorize books that stores have placed in the science section:

Four copies of (Michael Behe's) The Edge of Evolution were discovered once more in the science section.

I flip a copy and read the back. Here's the beginning of the first quote from the back cover: "Until the past decade and the genomics revolution, Darwin's theory rested on indirect evidence and reasonable speculation..." (Dr. Philip Skell, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences). That's not true! I am emboldened by this bare-faced lie from this well-respected elderly chemist, pick up all four copies, and stroll upstairs.

Now, I aim for accuracy in my recategorization, and I was still slightly mad at the lies on the back cover (read the "Editorial Reviews" at Amazon for a sampling), so I sought out the most appropriate section of the store:

Behe's lie-covered volume now rightly resides in the Religious Fiction section (click on the image to see the label). A job well done.

The act itself is little more than a prank, causing mild difficulties to the stores and customers who might seek to find these books, and it's only fair to note that the blogger also moved Chris Hitchens's latest anti-religious screed, so embarking on a counter-crusade would be a bit of an overreaction. But a slice of the discussion on Johnson's blog brings out a bit of a scent that permeates the science/religion battle. Writes one commenter:

That´s the suppression of free speech, and not rationalisation.

Replies another:

I disagree. To burn or ban the book is against free speech. To move it to a section more appropriate to its contents is librarianship.

I suppose the latter commenter might have a point if the librarian-vandal had informed the employees of the store about the books' new locations. In unilaterally removing them from the shelf on which others will expect to find them, however, he is, indeed, suppressing free speech in a way not unlike unplugging the microphone of somebody speaking at a legitimate rally.

Improving Power Dynamics by Flipping the Bird to the Birds

Apologies. I know we’re discussing some serious stuff in the posts below. But I just can’t resist using Justin’s most recent title as a hook to introduce this Boston Globe item about research being conducted at Brown University to improve aircraft design through the study of pregnant female bats…

Since the Wright brothers took to the skies a century ago, aerospace engineers have studied bird flight as the baseline for designing aircraft.

But a special Pentagon research project underway in Providence could change that.

A team of engineers and biologists at Brown University has discovered that bats, the mysterious nocturnal mammals that are guided by sound and helped inspire Dracula and Batman, may hold the secret to more efficient flying machines.

The Air Force has taken notice of Brown's work. It will invest $6 million in the project over the next 5 years, in the hope of using the research to design future military aircraft.

Research so far has found that bats can carry up to 50 percent of their weight and execute airborne maneuvers that would make a bird or plane fall out of the sky. Moreover, scientists believe the hundreds of tiny sensors covering bat wings could be the key to their most impressive airborne maneuvers, a discovery that engineers could replicate with networks of sensors and computers on military aircraft.

If researchers can unlock the secrets of bat flight, it could have wide-reaching implications, according to Air Force and Brown officials. They say the project has the potential to revolutionize aircraft design and could lead to the creation of smaller, more efficient military air vehicles that can maneuver in tight spaces as well as gather intelligence and airlift supplies through forbidding terrain.

See, Here's the Thing About Evolutionary Argumentation

It is not my intention, herewith, to offer a supporting addendum to Sam Brownback's New York Times piece about evolution, although I think his gist is surpassingly reasonable. Rather, in reading the discussion of that piece in the Corner — which I'm sure is, or might as well be, playing out in various venues across the country — it seems to me that an important point is being missed.

To begin, John Derbyshire (amidst a collection of phrases that followers of the debate will recognize as puffed feathers) offers the following explanation of his scientist response to Brownback's scientific understanding (all emphases in original):

The problem with this position is, that you need to observe — or at least, darn it, hypothesize — some mechanism that stops the micro before it goes macro. (Not to mention that you have to posit some mechanism, other than macro-evolution, for the origin of species... But leave that aside for the moment.)

Take, for example, allopatric ("different homeland") speciation. You have a population of living, sexually-reproducing organisms, all belonging to the same species (i.e. able to mate with each other). You observe variations within the population. You further observe, watching across several generations, that some variations (red hair, schizophrenia) are heritable in whole or part, some (appendectomy scars) are not heritable at all.

Now you divide your population in two: Population A and Population B. You separate them geographically. (Hence "diferent homelands.") You observe that A and B have different "menus" of heritable variation (A has more redheads, B more schizophrenics). You further observe that A's and B's environments are different — A's is hot and dry, B's cool and wet.

You sit back and observe for a few thousand generations. Yep, microevolution goes on. A changes, B changes. Because they started out with different menus of heritable variations, and because environmental pressures in the two places are different, they change differently. They diverge. A thousand generations on, the two populations look and behave differently from each other. Ten thousand generations on, they look and behave way differently. Orthodox biology ("Darwinism") says that eventually they will be so different, they can no longer interbreed. Speciation will have occurred. A and B are now two species.

Under Brownbackian evolution — micro yes, macro no — this can't happen. They can't go on diverging. They can only get so different, no more. The divergence must slow down and stop. But... what stops it? What's the mechanism?

The accumulating Corner posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here) get all the way to a philosopher's suggestion that "unless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter," but at no point does anybody address what the average person will find objectionable (even if unarticulatedly so) in Derbyshire's explanation. How is it — why is it — that hot/dry versus cool/wet conditions ought to be expected to transform hair color and psychosis into biological differences so vast that sperm and egg will no longer function together? An equatorial African human being can still, as far as I know, mate with an Eskimo, and yet chimpanzees would be schtupped to no avail.

Now, I'm absolutely positive that there's a very clever and ever ready response that I haven't the time, just now, to read with the merited attention, but my experience leads me to predict that the back and forth would — not unlike the hypothesis of "micro yes, macro no" — merely change the terms of the debate, without substantially altering the beliefs of those involved. I'm not saying that those beliefs are stubbornly unreachable, but taking the discussion to the boundaries of my comprehension, I've always found the assumption (e.g.) that it's just so darn logical for environmental factors to change organisms in more and more dramatic ways to dominate the details. Meaning that the details appear proposed mainly to illustrate how the assumption could be true.

To some degree, this is just how science must function. "So far, x has provided predictive information with respect to question y, and if we were able to prove that it functions also as X, then we could explain Y, or even Z." Perhaps what's so frustrating about the whole dispute is that rational religion functions in much the same way, just with a broader class of considerations. "Yes, but the way in which I understand 7 has a certain relevance to question y, and given millennia of compelling thought about numbers (and your certainty that X proves the whole effort to have been misdirected), I'm going to insist that there is something of 2 in Z, regardless of the alphabet." I'm not one to disclaim science's ability to explain the world in which we live, but to the extent that it smuggles in a philosophical materialism, one must risk accusations of creationism to state with certainty, as Brownback does, that "man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order." Simply put, there is a form of comprehension distinct from scientific thought without which no understanding of the world is complete.

Julian Baggini, the aforementioned philosopher, writes the following in the piece to which Derbyshire and Jonah Goldberg tread in their conversation:

Richard Rorty, for example, argues against Truth brilliantly, and it is far from clear that he is simply wrong. The problem is that he does not concede as unequivocally as he should that in practice his theories usually leave the world more or less as it is. Rorty believes as much as anyone else that the Holocaust happened more or less as described in history books, he just refuses to use an allegedly outmoded vocabulary of truth to say so. It is not quite fair to call his refusal in such contexts a pose, but it is certainly not quite what it seems.

Ironically, like many left-leaning intellectuals, Rorty thinks that denying objectivity and truth is politically important, as a way of liberating people from the ways of seeing the world promoted as the Truth by the powerful. However, it turns out that Rorty and his ilk seriously misjudged what happens if intellectuals deny truth stridently and frequently enough. Far from making liberal openness more attractive, such denials actually make it appear empty, repugnant and weak compared to the crystalline clarity and certainty of dogma.

Stepping back from the glint of ivory, one can see that the masses do not, in their ignorance, cling to dogma because the academics have left them no middle ground. Those academics aren't making liberal openness seem "empty, repugnant and weak" — language that inherently buys into the academics' elevation of power as the driving force of all human behavior — but that they make it seem wrong, or at least so unbelievable that those who profess it don't actually behave as if it is true.

Such declarations, for all their dogmatic certainty, merely resonate all the more loudly as the bunk that they are. The more monolithic the proclamation, the more apparent it is that the intellectuals, at some point en route to their PhDs, underwent an amputation of the intrinsic human sense that that which has been created likely has a creator, that the miraculous appearance of deliberateness, joined with a longing for and feeling of purpose, is at least suggestive of deliberate purposefulness.

Too often, the purpose of denying truth appears to be the otherwise unjustified allowance of preferences that "the world promoted as the Truth by the powerful" would treat as suspect. Too often the attacks on certainty give the impression of a strategy to promote the power of those who specialize in obscurity. "You're deluded," they say, "in thinking that there's any objective truth, so you should indulge my various urges and subscribe to my political solution to the world's ills, all perpetuating a system that allows me to make a comfortable living explaining why boogers are actually lint when removed from my naval, while you toil in the fields." They are clever enough to prance around any old Truth that might be mentioned, and they insist that the rest of us must be able to reassert those Truths in a way acceptable to them. Otherwise, we are merely retreating to the comfort of certainty, and if we begin to think that a society that devotes its resources to meaningless nonsense could use some reworking, we're reactionary barbarians lashing out at our own insecurities.

Without drawing too close of a comparison between academics defending a philosophy and scientists defending a theory, this leads us back to suspicion of evolution. I don't think it necessarily indicates a "new position" to which "creationists have retreated" to wonder why the burden is on believers (who often would scoff at being called creationists) to explain why humidity wouldn't eventually make a sperm and an egg incompatible. Derbyshire does a bit of weaseling of his own when he assumes that the unlimited capacity of heritable tendencies and "environmental pressures" to change a species is so obvious that it cannot be questioned without the development of an alternative mechanism that is science-like in its exclusion of anything that is not materialistic.

Layer on enough environmental pressures, and the environment begins to look more like an oven that a wildfire, and heritable tendencies more like ingredients than random minerals. Indeed, mutations and unique natural events begin to give the impression of stirring. Thus we arrive at Brownback's bottom line:

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

Even Goldberg argues that this sets up a "strawman... saying that if you believe in anything more than 'microevolution' you're buying into a cold, godless, materialistic universe," but that attributes more weight to Brownback's positive argument than appears to be intended. The question that he's answering is why he would raise his hand when asked whether he did not "believe in evolution." His explanation is that he believes in evolution as a natural process of relatively minor differentiation, but not (as the question is often meant to imply) as a way for all life to have developed under the indifferent eye of randomness. Anything between must be specified — although the discussion is not likely to fit in an opinion column, much less a debate — so that the believer has the opportunity to specify where the proposed pressures do not appear sufficient to change the very character of the creature and where the mechanisms have begun to give the impression of design.

Literal Signs of Rhode Island’s Apocalypse?

Here’s one you probably didn’t expect. According to a study by A.M. Best, Rhode Island is a top-10 State in terms of projected damage per square mile caused by tornadoes and “related weather events”…

Most people associate tornado activity with the "Tornado Alley" of the Great Plains states. While this is true in terms of the sheer numbers of tornadoes and losses, surprisingly, catastrophe modeling shows that New Jersey tops the list of the states with the highest average expected, or modeled, insured losses per 1,000 square miles from tornado and related weather events, followed by Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio and Rhode Island. Tornadoes have occurred in all 50 states; however, the high average loss rates in the above-mentioned five states are affected heavily by insured property values in addition to the frequency of the storms, according to a special report issued by A.M. Best Co.

However, according to the National Climatic Data Center, there hasn’t been any property damage caused by a tornado in Rhode Island since 1990. I would hazard a guess that the A.M. Best model doesn't have a high enough resolution to produce accurate results for Rhode Island alone, so we're getting lumped in with Western Massachusetts and its substantially higher tornado rate.

The Confluence of Homosexuality and Abortion

Ian Donnis rather wryle points out that "one of the country's top evangelicals, Kentucky-based Albert Mohler, has suggested that pre-natal treatment to change homosexuality in the womb would be biblically justified." Donnis also directs us to a recent piece by Mary Ann Sorrentino on the same topic. Writes Sorrentino:

The same gang that for decades has warred against any invasion of the womb in which a developing fetus (which they call an “unborn child)” resides now hopes to put a fetus on a sure road to heterosexuality.

As interesting as the concept of a gay fetus may seem, the image of hordes of so-called Christians fretting about the sexual orientation of the not-yet-born boggles the mind. Yet the Reverend R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, claims that in utero gays can find salvation through hormonal interventions that might make them straight from the moment when the obstetrician whacks their newly born bottom.

Mohler belongs to the same faction that has opposed pre-birth medical tampering in the past. Gender selection, in vitro fertilizations, even some pre-birth surgical procedures have all been deemed wrongful interference in divine territory. Now that these people see a way to diddle with the sexuality of the unborn, however, many of them are all over that possibility.

Indeed, it's apparently the hypocrisy of it all that is bothering people:

''What bothers me is the hypocrisy,'' [Jennifer Chrisler of Family Pride, a group that supports gay and lesbian families] said. ''In one breath, they say the sanctity of an unborn life is unconditional, and in the next breath, it's OK to perform medical treatments on them because of their own moral convictions, not because there's anything wrong with the child.''

Rev. Mohler is clearly making a distinction between pre-natal hormonal treatment and genetic manipulation (maybe it's too fine a point, I don't know). And Chrisler seems to be willingly conflating the meaning of "sanctity of life" to serve her own rhetorical purpose. There can be little doubt that Mohler is being consistent in his stance against abortion, as he also said "he would strongly oppose any move to encourage abortion or genetic manipulation of fetuses on grounds of sexual orientation."

This is part of a deeper debate, as outlined in this article:

Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy....Pro-choice activists won't be spared, either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?

I think Rev. Mohler's stated belief is representative of a majority of Evangelicals (I'm not one, by the way) and thus answers the first question: having any child--gay or not--is preferable to aborting one. On the other hand, Sorrentino has consistently framed the abortion issue as a matter of "choice." So, if she doesn't want to be, you know, "hypocritical," does that mean that we can assume she also endorses a woman's right to choose to abort a fetus because it may be gay?

And that takes me to an even wider discussion. A couple years ago, I came across this touching piece by Patricia Bauer, the mother of a child with Down Syndrome. The parallel to the above discussion is obvious:

Margaret is a person and a member of our family. She has my husband's eyes, my hair and my mother-in-law's sense of humor. We love and admire her because of who she is -- feisty and zesty and full of life -- not in spite of it. She enriches our lives. If we might not have chosen to welcome her into our family, given the choice, then that is a statement more about our ignorance than about her inherent worth.

What I don't understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no