David Prentice’s shoddy stem cell scholarship

A reader sent me copy of a letter that will be published in Science this week, criticizing the dishonest tactics of the anti-scientific adult stem cell “advocates” (in quotes because they aren’t really science advocates of any kind—they’re only using it as an issue to limit stem cell research.) Anyway, it raises the interesting question of who you’re going to believe: scientists with expertise in the issues under discussion, or a flunky for Sam Brownback and shill for the religious right?

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Stem cell bait-and-switch

I’m taking it easy here in the fabulous Van Dusen mansion, a bed and breakfast where I’m staying tonight, and I thought I’d browse through the stem cell legislation that’s being considered in the senate right now. It’s strange: one substantive bill has come up from the House, and all of a sudden two more bills have been proposed on the floor of the Senate.

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Mosquito love songs

It’s July in Minnesota, and you know what that means: bugs. Clouds of bugs. Some people complain, but I generally rationalize a large population of fecund invertebrates as simply a sign of a healthy ecosystem, so yeah, we’ve got bugs, but it’s good for us.

Except for those mosquitoes. It’s hard to think charitably of some invertebrates when you’re lying in bed at night and you hear…that…high-pitched whine rising as the nearly invisible little blood-sucker buzzes by your exposed flesh. Now, in a discovery calculated to increase my irritation, I learn that the little bastards are singing a love song as they hover about, looking for an opportunity to stab me and suck my blood. “Come to me, come to me, mon chéri,” they sing, “after I gorge myself on ze fat, torpid hu-man (and daintily spit up a little backwash into his capillaries), we shall make sweet, sweet love in the moonlight and zen I shall lay a thousand eggs, and our progeny shall feast on his children!” (Sorry, but now whenever I hear them they’ve also got a silly Pepe LePew French accent.)

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Schadenfreude, coming through

Hard to believe, but check out the source this anti-choicer uses to back up his essay on the callous horror of abortion.

The Onion.

Satire and irony are now officially dead.

The author has a new post up—he still doesn’t get it. He’s still babbling about the fictional author of the Onion piece getting all those abortions.

It’s a marvel. There really are people that stupid out there.

(via Curly Tales of War Pigs)

Stem cells, cloning, and the theological opponents of science

If you’ve read this outrageous WaPo op-ed that basically says you can’t expect moral behavior from scientists who are glorified baby-killers, you might appreciate this rebuttal at the Give Up Blog. The foundation of the fundiecrat anti-science article is that 1) Hwang Woo Suk was bad, therefore all stem cell/cloning research is tainted, and 2) alternative techniques (most of which they don’t seem to understand) and adult stem cells will give us all the answers we need.

Which actually leads into this week’s “ask a science blogger” question:

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Look at it as another reason to encourage embryonic stem cell research

I suppose this is a kind of threat—an archaic and quaint threat, but I’m sure some people take it seriously—but the Catholic church has made a strong statement against embryonic stem cell research.

The Vatican stepped up its fight against embryonic stem cell research on Wednesday, saying that scientists involved in such work would be excommunicated.

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Vatican department dealing with family affairs, said in a magazine interview that “destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion… it’s the same thing”.

“Excommunication applies to all women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos,” the cardinal told Catholic publication Famiglia Cristiana.

To which I can only weakly reply, “no, no, don’t drive scientists away from your religion, Catholics!” Bwahahahaha!

Anyway, do read the article. I thought that, while short, it was very informative about the political debate on stem cells in Italy, and actually summarized the situation fairly accurately and pithily.

Embryonic stem-cell research techniques involve destroying human embryos to extract their stem cells. Stem cells are ‘blank’ cells which have the ability to grow into any tissue of the body. Scientists think they could eventually be used to treat a host of ailments including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

The stem cells of very early embryos are preferred because they can become any kind of cell whereas adult stem cells are less flexible. Despite popular support, embryonic stem cell research is opposed by pro-life groups and many conservative lawmakers because the human embryo must be destroyed before its stem cells can be removed.

I’ve gotten so used to the way American journalists so readily fall for the false claim of the anti-choicers that adult stem cells are better than embryonic stem cells in all ways that I was surprised to see that more accurate short description in there.

The burden of bearing a massive penis

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Maybe half of my audience here will be familiar with this problem. You’re a man, and you’re hauling this massive, ummm, package around in your pants everywhere you go. Other men fear you, while the women worship you…yet at the same time, your e-mail is stuffed to bursting with strange people making friendly offers to help you make it even bigger. It’s a dilemma; you think you would be even more godlike if only it were larger, but could there possibly be any downside to it? (There is a bit of folk wisdom that inflating it drains all the blood from the brain, but this is clearly false. Men who are stupid when erect are also just as stupid when limp.)

A couple of recent studies in fish and spiders have shown that penis size is a matter of competing tradeoffs, and that these compromises have evolutionary consequences. Guys, trash that e-mail for penis enlargement services—they can make you less nimble in pursuit of the ladies, or worse, can get you killed.

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Proof that God exists!

Here it is, the proof from breast ironing. Simple selectionist models can’t explain why human beings would mutilate secondary sexual characteristics and genitalia, therefore god exists. We also know the Christian right is exactly correct: God really does obsess over people’s sex lives, and he is a kind of sick pervert who likes to hurt children.

We can also suspect that he’s probably male, since testicle flattening, penis knotting, and scrotum binding don’t seem to come up often in his prescribed lists of genital abuses.

Bye bye, RA

I suspect that soon there will be at least one religious person who will claim he converted from atheism who I will believe. The Raving Atheist is getting ripe: he’s been ramping up the irrationality for some time now, precessing like a top slowing down, and I expect that soon enough he’ll flop over for Jesus. I’m not questioning his sincerity—he is an atheist, all right, and there is no doubt about it—but his sympathies are getting weirder and weirder.

This is not a new development. I’ve discussed his radical pro-life position before, and now Punkassblog and Amanda bring to my attention his latest post, in which he foreswears saying an unkind word about Christianity ever again, and in which I learn that he’s been actively working with one of those ghastly dishonest “crisis pregnancy centers” that offer no services other than propaganda (and, apparently, free teddy bears) and exist only to mislead women worried about pregnancy.

You know, I think I’d forgive an open conversion to Christianity far more easily than I can his irresponsible affiliation with those charlatans and fanatics.

His rationalizations for pro-life extremism simply don’t make sense: he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being. Diploidy is not the scientific term for ensoulment. Genetic specification is not sufficient to specify an individual. Potential is not a synonym for actuality. Fertilization is not a switch that triggers an ineluctable program towards individuality. The combinatorial uniqueness of an individual’s genome is inadequate to define the individual. Amanda notes that most opposition to abortion comes from either religious convictions, a commitment to a sexist social order, or I’d add, a rather primitive and unthinking desire to tightly control reproduction in potential mates and kin. I don’t know which of these apply to RA, but his weak excuses clearly rule out that it might have been an intellectual decision on his part.

He’s welcome to his convictions about abortion, but he needs to face it: they aren’t reasonable, and they’re as batty as Dawn Eden.