Science (Or Not) – Page 7

All Your Genitalia Are Belong to Us.*

Hello again, everybody! I’m flea. I post primarily at One Good Thing, but I also blog about sex at Neal Pollack’s Offsprung and write book reviews for my own site, Books Are Pretty, and at Dawn Price’s Sure Woman.

But that’s not enough, I don’t think, so here I am again, prepared to gross you out first thing on a Monday morning, before anybody’s had their coffee yet. Consider yourself warned.

Here we go: Many years ago I had a coworker that used to shrug off the pressure of the work week by spending her weekends blowing the reggae bands that booked gigs at a local Rastafarian bar. Me, I prefer weekend activities that don’t require as much effort, but I’m lazy like that.

A few months after she let this little nugget of information drop, (to everyone at work. During lunch.) she came to work on a Monday morning looking slightly under the weather, her face a bit puffy, her eyes red. As the week progressed, she got worse and worse. It was strenuously suggested by more than one person that she see a doctor, because her eyes had swollen almost totally shut and were starting to ooze. After the typical round-and-round discussion of the impossibility of a doctor’s appointment because health care is neither universal or provided by the company we worked for**, I finally begged her to make an appointment with the Chicago Women’s Health Center, a women’s reproductive health care clinic with a sliding pay scale, because I just had a feeling. And sure enough, the verdict came back swiftly and mercilessly: Gonorrhea. In her eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, is there a more compelling reason to use condoms during oral sex? No. There is not.

You would think that because of horrifying situations like this, we would be knocking ourselves out to prevent today’s youth from having similar anecdotes to tell, but no. In fact, there’s a certain amount of buzz going around in the scientific world that biologists are thisclose to creating the first synthetic life form, a replica of a bacteria called Mycoplasma genitalium. This little bacterium has 517 genes, the shortest gene sequence in the entire animal kingdom.

Mycoplamsa genitalium

How they are doing this, I think, is by stripping the bacterium of what they have determined to be non-essential genes, reducing it down to the simplest gene-sequence possible. Then a miracle occurs***, and then they’ll have built a completely synthetic organism using the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. Which is fascinating enough on its own, but is made even more so when you learn what the scientists are dealing with.

Do you know what Mycoplasma genitalium is? IT’S AN STD.

Yes. After all our efforts to eradicate the scourge of chronic itching and misery of various strains of the clap, not to mention the anguish of people everywhere who had to stand two feet away from someone when they confess that they’re suffering the ramifications of getting poked in the eye with an infected penis, we’re going to throw it all away and build robot VD.

I’m convinced this is a plot by the scientific community to get back at the football players that gave them ballbreaking wedgies in the locker room after P.E. Or cramping the style of those sexy motherfuckers that play the guitar and sing about smoking pot on the beach.
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*Title provided by Linneaus.

**Next time your Republican comrades start going on about welfare reform and subsidized childcare and the free market and privatization of health care or whatever it is that they go on about, and how it’s okay because the poor choose to be poor (or stupid), remember this anecdote of a woman who ignored gonorrhea in her eyes because she couldn’t afford to get it treated. It’s all connected.

***I didn’t exactly understand the process here.

When Adam and Eve roamed among the dinosaurs

How I wish I was joking.

For natural history museums, the awesome dinosaur is a star attraction for drawing wide-eyed children and their families. It’s surprising, though, to be welcomed at the gate of the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky by two stegosauruses. After all, this brand-new museum is designed to disprove evolution, including the millions of years that science says dinosaurs walked the earth.

For Bible-defending “creationists,” God created Earth and all its creatures between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. But they know a drawing card when they see one, and this museum has more than its share of animatronic (moving, teeth-baring, roaring) specimens. In fact, dinosaurs play a big role in this “biblical history”: They live not 65 million years ago, but with humans — in the Garden of Eden and on Noah’s Ark.

“Dinosaurs are one of the icons of evolution, but we believe they lived at the same time as people,” says Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis (AiG), the fundamentalist Christian ministry that built the facility. “The Bible talks about dragons. We believe dragon legends had a basis in truth.”

The $27 million museum set on 50 acres opens on Memorial Day, and AiG hopes for 250,000 visitors a year. Mr. Ham, a former science teacher in Australia, is direct about the museum’s purpose: to restore the Bible to its “rightful authority” in society.

For many scientists, however, it’s distressing. Some 700 scientists at educational institutions in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana have signed a statement deploring the “scientifically inaccurate” exhibits and warning that students who accept them are “unlikely to succeed in science courses.”

The whole article is fascinating. But this is my favorite part:

In a bid to clarify this, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has published “The Evolution Dialogues,” which explores evolution and Christianity’s response. It discusses those who see science and religion as compatible but dealing with different spheres, and others working out a theology that takes evolution into account.

The museum scorns such an approach. One exhibit shows a pastor preaching it’s OK not to believe in a literal Genesis. Then it depicts “the consequences” in one family: A young boy looks at porn on the Internet while his sister calls Planned Parenthood.

Are you there, God? MSNBC has some questions.

This is quite the article. Our hapless male friend Brian is totally confused about those crazy lady-bits, and has decided to speak with some evolutionary biologists to figure out what the heck is going on down there.

Men just don’t seem to have the same number of unanswered questions about our biology. Male primates — male mammals in general — all have penises and testicles and sperm. We use them whenever we can. Unless we are sick or injured, we can make babies. And if anybody wants to know if we’re interested, all they have to do is look to see if we’re at attention.

The mysterious inner workings of a female duck

Belle Waring has the tale of a fascinating new discovery about the reasons that certain male ducks have such extravagant penises.

Let’s just say that it involves certain blind spots of male researchers.

Incidentally, is anyone else uncomfortable with the term “forced mating?” Sounds like ducks get raped on a fairly regular basis, even though theoretically the females choose their mates.

By all means, let’s use the fear of fat to justify feeding (patented!) hormones to infants

Yet another example of the fear of fat leading to ridiculous outcomes: Catherine Price of Broadsheet has a piece from the Guardian about British scientists working on an infant formula designed to prevent obesity later in life:

British scientists are working on a baby formula which would chemically restructure the metabolic system of children to ensure they never became obese.

Studies in mice have found that large doses of the appetite-controlling hormone leptin during infancy permanently prevent excess weight gain and reduce the chances of type 2 diabetes.

Now researchers at the University of Buckingham say a leptin-enriched baby milk which does exactly the same is less than 10 years away, raising a plethora of medical, legal and ethical questions.

To say the least.

For one thing, as Price points out, who’s going to offer up their infants for experimental research? And then, how do control for the diets these kids will eat later in life, or for factors that have nothing to do with appetite, like stress eating and the fucked-up relationship a lot of us have with food?

Leptin turns off appetite throughout life, but the scientists last year proved that high doses in mice through pregnancy and early life permanently reduced weight. They now believe it plays a role in hard-wiring the brain’s appetite response in infancy.

Mike Cawthorne, who led the researchers, said: “The supplemented milks are simply adding back something that was originally present: breast milk contains leptin and formula feeds don’t.

So, um, why not, say, make it much easier for women to breast-feed if it’s so vitally important to deal with the “obesity epidemic”?

Well, I guess that would be because nobody profits from breast milk. But a leptin-based formula would probably be patentable, and certainly profitable if you could convince people that it will keep their kids from getting fat in adulthood, no matter what they eat after being weaned.

Which of course is bullshit. People are fat for a variety of reasons, many of which are difficult to change because of structural issues like lack of funding for physical education, more busing to school and less walking, ginormous portion sizes at restaurants, godawful food served at school, food programs like WIC being geared more toward the needs of the dairy industry rather than good nutrition, the simple lack of availability of fresh, affordable foods in many neighborhoods and the time to cook them, and a car culture that encourages a sedentary existence.

Science keeps offering magic bullets for weight loss that promise to help us with our weight problems without us having to do anything else to change either our individual lifestyles or take a hard look at changing the way society is set up and doing the hard work to make lasting changes that will benefit everyone. And what do we get for all these breakthroughs? Heart damage and oily anal leakage — and not a whole lot of pounds lost to show for it.

And now they want people to put all kinds of hormones into their infants — hormones which will have lord-knows-what kinds of effects in the long term. And there will be people who will break down and give this stuff to their kids, because the cost of being fat is so great in terms of social disapproval and blame and shame. They’ll put down the money and hope that the formula won’t have any weird effects, all the while hoping that this will be just the thing to keep their kids from being the objects of disgust and ridicule. And they probably won’t do anything else to change their habits, and if the kid winds up fat anyhow, they’ll blame the kid.

UPDATE: Just to nip any mommy drive-bys in the bud here, this is not about breast vs. bottle and what’s better for kids and whether good mothers use formula.

Because I’m still sick…

Read my article in Alternet today!

It’s about the HPV vaccine, and the fact that it’s prohibitively expensive for college students (and not covered by university insurance). I wish I had more space in the article to write about the controversies around Gardasil, especially from the perspective of the Big Pharma skeptics, but it just didn’t fit with the flow of the story. And, while I could go on for 50,000 words, no one wants to read that much. Check it out, and I look forward to your thoughts…

Who are the extremists?

Amanda is a bigot and an extremist because she uses coarse language to criticize the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion, birth control and condom use — a stance which kills and injures hundreds of thousands of women every year.

Glenn Reynolds, the most popular conservative blogger on the internets, promotes assassinating scientists and religious leaders, and he’s backed up by other popular right-wingers. And there’s nary a peep from the religious right about the religious bigotry of assassinating religious leaders.

Reynolds writes:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.

Basically, stepping on the Iranians’ toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we’ve done nothing along these lines.

I know the word “mullah” is really scary and all, and there are certainly some mullahs — like some Christian leaders — who have thoroughly fucked up views. But I’m pretty sure that government-sponsored assassinations are not the answer.

Mullahs are, after all, simply Muslims who are seen by their communities as religious leaders. They are not on par with priests of rabbis or religious leaders from other Abrahamic traditions. There isn’t a formal institutional structure to Islam the way that there is in Catholicism or the Anglican church or just about any other comparable religion. A major tenet of Islam is that all people have equal access to religious knowledge, and that no practicing Muslim is holier than another. So assassinating mullahs just won’t have the same institutional effect as assassinating, say, a Cardinal. Except that it will really, really piss people off.

As for assassinating nuclear scientists, there’s another brilliant idea. Scientists and religious leaders are not politicians. Not that political assassinations are justified, but at least they’re targeting the people who are behind the policies that we dislike. Scientists and religious leaders are civilians — some of them may have radical views, or be working on projects that we don’t want their government to gain access to, but they are civilians nonetheless. While the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons is terrifying, those of us with halfway decent reasoning skills can understand why Iran wants nuclear weapons, and why it looks a wee bit hypocritical for us to block their efforts (not saying we shouldn’t block their efforts — just that, to an Iranian, we look like assholes). Killing scientists is probably not the best way to win hearts and minds, and will send the message that the U.S. is indeed a direct and active threat against the safety of the Iranian people — another reason, Iranian politicians will say, that Iran needs the bomb.

There’s also all the war crime/international treaties/executive order business that Glenn Greenwald covers. In other words, this is the worst idea ever.

What the hell is going on when people in the mainstream right are suggesting civilian assassinations in a country we aren’t even at war with, and their putrid arguments aren’t being challenged — and are even being backed up by other conservatives?

Now, the genius plan to murder anyone who ideologically opposes you isn’t exactly a new concept for the American right, so I shouldn’t be surprised. And yet even I can’t believe that conservatives — mainstream, well-connected, popular conservatives, not the cherry-picked fanatics — have become this depraved.

Embryonic Personhood – Blogging for Choice Part 5

Pro-lifers argue that life begins at conception and ends at natural death. They argue that a fertilized egg is just as human as a three-year-old child. They argue that embryonic stem cell research, which could cure all kinds of diseases and save million of lives, is immoral because embryos are just as human as you or I. Embryos, they argue are different from other clumps of cells, because embryos are a human being. One professor takes these folks to task:

Thank you for responding to my letter, which took issue with points raised in your earlier NRO review of my book Challenging Nature. In your response, you continue to insist absolutely — as you have in numerous articles published on this topic — that a human embryo is a human being, while other clumps of human cells are something entirely different. Rather than continuing to debate this claim in prose, it is useful to take a more visual approach, as illustrated by comparing the two pictures below. Both show color-enhanced scanning electron micrographs of clumps of human cells. But before they were frozen for microscopy, one clump was a normal embryo, while the other was a bunch of embryonic stem cells. According to your logic, one clump was a human being, while the other was just a confined group of proteins, DNA, and other molecules. So tell me, Which one is which?

stem cells

stem cells 2

Can you tell?

Newsflash: Americans Fuck

95 percent of them before marriage.

NEW YORK (AP) — More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

And what about those wholesome 1950s?

Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

Even your mom fucked before marriage:

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

Oh, and marijuana is the biggest cash crop in the US. That’s right: bigger than soybeans, bigger than alfalfa, bigger than corn. And with no subsidies.

Unfortunately, all this fucking goes unacknowledged, so that the pearl-clutchers can purse their lips and wag their fingers at girls who dare get caught fucking and toking:

Donald Trump gave Miss USA a reprieve Tuesday, allowing the boozing beauty queen to retain her title after she agreed to enter rehab and undergo drug testing.

In a moment of television drama filled with redemptive tears and longing looks, a tough-talking Trump, co-owner of the pageant, turned soft and decided to forgive Tara Conner for her debauched behavior. . .

Conner won the title in April and moved to New York. Since then, she has partied hard, admitting she frequented clubs, where she threw drinks back — despite being underage. She turned 21 on Monday.

Miss USA is considered a role model, and her conduct must reflect that, and behavior such as underage drinking is prohibited, a Miss Universe Organization spokeswoman said.

At the news conference, in a tear-choked voice, Conner said, “In no way did I think it would be possible for a second chance to be given to me.”

Turning to Trump, she said, “You’ll never know what this means to me, and I swear I will not let you down.” . . .

Trump said Conner would be able to move back into her swank pad at the Trump Palace. But he also cautioned that if she screwed up again she would be jettisoned.

“She knows that if she even makes the slightest mistake from here on she will be immediately replaced,” he said.

Awwww, isn’t that sweet? She got to keep her crown (you know, the one that she got because she paraded around in a bikini so she could display her wholesomeness and purity), but she had to grovel at the feet of Donald Trump to do it, and promise to go to rehab, and tell some sob story about how it was The Big City that had corrupted her. I suppose the pearl-clutchers back home in Kentucky get to keep their illusions that way: New Yorkers may fuck before marriage, and drink when they’re just shy of 21, but that’s Not What Good People In The Heartland Do.

Except for the part where it is, in fact, What Good People In The Heartland Do. Frequently.

Yes, despite abstinence-only sex education, despite hellfire-and-brimstone from their preachers, despite True Love Waits and the Silver Ring Thing, despite Purity Balls and Purity Pledges and creepy covering by daddy, 95% of Americans — male and female — will fuck before their wedding day.

Not that everyone can believe it, or wants to (there’s no federal funding to be had for your abstinence-only program if you admit, despite overwhelming evidence, that it just doesn’t work). And, without the specter of those naughty, nasty girls having sex when they shouldn’t, what would the Concerned Women of America have to be Concerned about?

However, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which strongly supports abstinence-only education, said she was skeptical of the findings.

“Any time I see numbers that high, I’m a little suspicious,” she said. “The numbers are too pat.”

Yes, I trust the “suspicions” that the numbers are “too pat” from a woman whose entire livelihood is wrapped up in being a panty-sniffing moral scold. What’s that quote — the one that says that a person whose job depends on not understanding something will never understand it?

There’s big money to be had in the War on Sex, just as there is in the War on Drugs. Not just federal funds for abstinence and drug-prevention programs, but cushy think-tank gigs, political funds, propaganda funds a la Maggie Gallagher, grants for studies, honoraria for presenting bullshit theories to eager audiences, consultant fees, slush funds, wingnut-welfare publishing deals, all manner of Scaife-funded initiatives, pundit jobs, ministries, pamphlets, and government jobs. And that’s just money — there’s power and influence to be had as well, as the old “family values” and “restoring morality” and “tough on crime” stances win elections. (And it always makes for a great sex=death narrative on teevee.))

But none of that stuff works. And I don’t think they really want it to, either. But they don’t want what does work to take hold here — stuff like comprehensive, nonjudgmental sex education and birth control, abortion on demand, comprehensive social support networks, the medicalization of drug addiction, working on reducing demand rather than supply, education and opportunity for all.

They don’t want that not just because there’s no percentage in treating people like sane adults, but also because doing so would mean that their particular obsessions with Everyone Else’s Behavior (and concomitant failure to Look In A Damn Mirror Occasionally) would be pushed to the margin and returned to the domain of tinfoil-hatted cranks, where they belong.

Magical drug turns women into chatterboxes, walking virgin/whore dichotomies

Oxytocin — you know, that fabulous substance that sluts use up, leaving them unable to bond with long-term partners — is also the reason that chicks gossip and go to the bathroom in pairs. And here I thought it was only to escape that mouth-breathing dude who won’t leave you alone, or borrow a tampon.

At the very least, the good doctor appears to take back her initial assertion that women use 20,000 words a day compared to men’s 7,000 — no, as it turns out, women just use more “communication events”:

Your book cites a study claiming that women use about 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000.

The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.

But my favorite part of the interview is this:

Are you concerned that you are rehabilitating outdated gender stereotypes that portray women as chatterboxes ruled by female hormones?

A stereotype always has an aspect of truth to it, or it wouldn’t be a stereotype. I am talking about the biological basis behind behaviors that we all know about.

Good to know that there’s an aspect of truth to the idea that blacks are lazy, blondes are dumb, foreigners are incompetent, men are insensitive and Jews are stingy.

Language Log has a great take-down. via Ann.