The evolution of rape?

There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it’s so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It’s just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.

I’ve just finished reading an article titled “Darwin’s Rape Whistle: Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?“, and it’s everything I despise about evolutionary psychology. It’s nothing but sloppy thinking and poor science propped up by a conviction that plausibility is sufficient support for certainty.

I could fulminate for a few hours over this crap, but fortunately Jerry Coyne has calmly criticized the mess, so I’ll just make a few points.

The story is that women have evolved specific adaptive responses to the threat of rape. In support of this conclusion, the author cites various studies that claim to show that ovulating women show stronger handgrip strength (the better to fight off men who want to assault their eggs with sperm), that ovulating women are more suspicious of men, that ovulating women are more likely to avoid risky behaviors, and that ovulating white women become more fearful of black men. I’m unimpressed. All of the studies involve small numbers, typically of college students at American universities (and even more narrowly, of psychology students), and all involve responses to highly subjective stimuli. When you examine the literature cited in these papers, you discover that different investigators get different results — the handgrip study even admits up front that there are conflicting results, with other papers finding no differences in performance across the menstrual cycle. None test anything to do with inheritance, none try (or even can) look at the genetic basis of the behaviors they are studying. Yet somehow evolutionary psychologists conclude that “women may have been selected during human evolution to behave in ways that reduce the likelihood of conception as a consequence of rape.”

Another way to look at it is that they are hypothesizing that women are more likely to behave in ways that invite physical attack and brutal abuse when they aren’t ovulating. That is a remarkable assertion. It also carries the strange implication that the consequences of rape can be measured by the likelihood of immediate fertilization, rather than by the toll of physical injury and emotional trauma, a peculiar thing for psychologists to neglect. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a general hypothesis that people, men and women, who can avoid violence at any time in their life, are more likely to be reproductively successful and thereby pass on their genes to subsequent generations? That’s all they’re saying, essentially, and the straining to sex it up by tying globally useful behaviors to reproductive cycles is unconvincing.

And of course they’re looking at culturally conditioned behaviors and responses in a narrow subset of the modern human population. How likely is it that a close-knit tribe of 30 hunter-gatherers has a serious problem with rape? Wouldn’t the nature of the culture be of far greater effect in determining the frequency of pregnancy due to rape than variations in handgrip strength or variations in fearfulness in women?

Then many of the studies that are described with such enthusiastic certainty as having definitive results turn out to be subjective, pointless messes. For instance, Jesse Bering concludes that sperm competition had to have been a very significant factor in our profligately promiscuous ancestors, and that the shape of the human penis has been selected specifically for a function in extracting competitor’s sperm from the vaginal canal. Unfortunately, when you look at the actual research cited for this semen-scooping function, it’s underwhelming.

To test this hypothesis, Gallup, Burch, Zappieri, Parvez, Stockwell, and Davis (2003) simulated sexual encounters using artificial models and measured the magnitude of artificial semen displacement as a function of phallus configuration, depth of thrusting, and semen viscosity. The displacement of simulated semen was robust across different prosthetic phalluses, different artificial vaginas, different semen recipes, and different semen viscosities. The magnitude of semen displacement was directly proportional to the depth of thrusting and inversely proportional to semen viscosity. By manipulating different characteristics of artificial phalluses, the coronal ridge and frenulum were identified as key
morphological features involved in mediating the semen displacement effect.

Under conditions that raise the possibility of females engaging in extra-pair copulations (i.e., periods of separation from their partner, allegations of female infidelity), Gallup et al. (2003) also found that males appear to modify the use of their penis in ways that are consistent with the displacement hypothesis. Based on anonymous surveys of over 600 college students, many sexually active males and females reported deeper and more vigorous thrusting when in-pair sex occurred
under conditions related to an increased likelihood of female infidelity.

Got that? They have studies that show that a piston displaces fluids more effectively in proportion to the depth of movement, and that college students report that when they suspect their partner of infidelity, they screw harder. They don’t have any evidence that this behavior actually affects the fertilization rate of one partner’s sperm over another, they don’t have any indication of morphological differences in human populations that make some individuals better semen-scoopers, they don’t have any evidence that this behavior has had a differential effect in human history. It’s all a teetering pyramid of stacked “couldas” and guesses that it woulda had an influence on evolution, if there were any variation and heritable factors involved in this function.

Whenever I see this kind of tripe from evolutionary psychologists, I reflexively reach for a counter-example, and recommend that everyone read one excellent book: The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, by Elisabeth Lloyd. It’s a wonderful example of solid, rigorous, scientific thinking about an evolutionary phenomenon. Lloyd analyzes a score of adaptive just-so stories about the female orgasm, carefully scrutinizing the evidence for each, and discovers that the substance is wanting. Too often investigators start with the assumption that a feature absolutely must have been selected for, or it wouldn’t be there, and then contrive elaborate rationalizations for processes that could have favored its preservation in our ancestry…and the aura of plausibility is then sufficient to conclude that it must be so, even in the absence of any supporting evidence, and sometimes even in the face of contradictory evidence.

I should reread it now — if nothing else, to wash that nasty tincture of evolutionary psychology out of my brain.

PRUUUUUUDES!

Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract.

“She stood in front of the students,” district spokesman Jeff Puma said. “If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it’s a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students’ heads. I’ll be teaching human physiology this term, and I’ll just project photos and diagrams of the various ladybits and manbits on a giant screen in front of the auditorium — I don’t know if a public school could handle the level of detail I’ll be going into. Levin’s approach sounds like a good compromise.

But wouldn’t you know it…some parents in the school district freaked out.

King said his son objected to participating, and both he and his son objected to him being “forced” to participate.

“I’m all for scholastically based sex education,” King said. “But this dance is meant to take away modesty and is disrespectful to women.”

Oh, the poor widdle boy! Forced to pretend his manly muscled arms are womanly fallopian tubes! And oh, those poor little girls! Immodestly made aware of the existence of ovaries, ovaries that their mommies have told them to keep covered and hidden away!

This has become a cause for the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, who have taken a brief moment from their usually obsession with homosexuality to decry elementary sex education.

A couple of months ago Crystal Lake’s Prairie Ridge High School Health teacher Jacqulyn Levin decided that the best way to teach her co-ed class of sophomore students the parts of the female reproductive anatomy was to use something she called the “Vagina Dance.” To the tune of the Hokey Pokey, Levin led her class in a puerile dance that involved pointing to and singing about reproductive body parts while prancing about the classroom.

Her selection of this inappropriate instructional activity demonstrated a lack of empathy for those who may have a degree of modesty and self-respect that Levin does not possess. Did she consider that some students might feel uncomfortable participating in or even watching this dance and that they might fear being ridiculed if they chose to opt-out?

Her decision to use this dance as a teaching tool also reveals that she has no commitment to fostering modesty (please don’t be deceived by the attempt of “progressives” to conflate essential modesty with some kind of priggish, neurotic prudery). The very fact that a teacher would consider such an activity reflects how debased and immodest a culture we have. And it reveals that she has no regard for the values of all the families who have entrusted their children to her tutelage.

“Priggish, neurotic prudery”…why, they snatched the words right out of my mouth.

There is nothing immodest about the demonstration (which, by the way, the IFI portrays dishonestly and inaccurately). There is nothing titillating or arousing about fallopian tubes, any more than there is about the common bile duct or the duct of Wirsung or the epididymus, and if you’re getting aroused by hearing about any of those, or blushing in embarrassment at a generic discussion of guts, there’s something deeply wrong with you. I’d suspect the lunatic who wrote the above words of having some morbid paraphilia, actually.

Wanting to pretend that your insides have all the uniformity of a potato is not self-respect, it’s ignorance and denial. Those are things a school is supposed to correct, and I don’t think a school or the teacher should feel any remorse about politely instructing kids in the nature of reality.

Conservative self-identifies with single-celled brainless organism

Among my usual flood of daily email, I frequently get tossed onto mailing lists for conservative think tanks. Why? I don’t know. I suspect that it’s for the same reason I also get a lot of gay porn in my email: not because I follow it or asked to be added, but because some tired d-bag with no imagination thinks its funny to dun me with more junk. The joke’s on them, though: I might keep it around and skim the stuff now and then to get inspiration for a blog post, and then click-click — a few presses of a button and I add the source to my junk mail filter, and never see it again.

No, I didn’t get inspired by gay porn today, but by drivel from some freakish conservative think tank called the Witherspoon Institute, about which I know next to nothing except that they’re another of those organizations that cloak themselves in the Holy Founding Fathers of America to promote illiberal non-freethinking anti-government BS. This latest is by a philosopher criticizing a book about modern reproductive biotechnologies. He doesn’t like ’em. Not one bit, no sir.

But you know an essay from a philosopher is going to be pretty much worthless when it opens and closes with references to… C.S. Lewis. I don’t know why that man gets so much happy clappy press from believers. I suspect he must have sold his soul to the devil.

Anyway, the bizarre part is in the middle, where Justin Barnard is poleaxed by the author’s, Steven Potter’s, willingness to destroy human embryos. Potter apparently considers several of the sides of the debate, but fails to come down on the side of the Religious Right, that is, that embryos are absolutely and undeniably full human beings from the instant of fertilization, instead espousing the dreadful notion that the definition of personhood falls into a huge gray area.

Potter’s own attempt to wrestle with the morality of destroying human embryos is philosophically, if not biologically, confused from the start. He begins by claiming that “each egg and sperm has the potential to make a person.” Biologically, this is simply false. Gametes, by themselves, have no intrinsic developmental potential for human personhood. Of course, Potter knows this. So his use of “potential” is likely more latitudinarian. Still, three pages later, Potter describes the zygote as having “remarkable potential.” “It can,” he explains, “turn itself into a person.” Ironically, Potter fails to recognize that this potentialist understanding of human personhood is at odds with his rather surprising admission of the embryological facts. Potter writes, “Of course we all began as a zygote. Everyone does.” What is shocking about this concession is what it so obviously entails–an entailment that seems lost on Potter. If I, the human being I am today, “began as a zygote,” then the zygote that began the-human-being-I-am-today was me–i.e., it was a human person. It was not merely a cell with “remarkable potential” to become me. It was me.

If anyone is confused here, it’s Barnard. Of course each egg and sperm has the potential to form a person, especially when we throw biotechnology into the equation, as the book he’s reviewing explicitly does. We already have techniques to revert and differentiate a sperm cell into an egg. For that matter, given time and research, we’ll be able to reprogram just about any cell into a totipotent state, and clone someone from a cheek swab. Does Mr Barnard regard every cell he sheds as a potential person?

Perhaps he wants to argue that a sperm or egg cell doesn’t have the potential for personhood without a human assist. But then by that limitation the zygote has to be excluded as well — no human zygote can develop to term without the extreme cooperation of another individual. Try it; extract a fertilized egg and set it in a beaker by your nightstand, and wait for a baby to crawl out. Won’t happen. A uterus and attendant physiological and behavioral meat construct, i.e., woman, is also an amazing piece of biotechnology that is a necessary component of the developmental process.

But the real blow to this whole “potential” argument is damaged irreparably by Barnard’s last few sentences — was he going for a reductio here? Is the entire essay an exercise in irony? ‘Cause that dope was dumb.

Yes, Mr Barnard began as a zygote. That does not mean the zygote was Mr Barnard. My car began as a stack of metal ingots and barrels of plastics; that does not imply that an ingot of iron is a car. My house began as a set of blueprints and an idea in an architect’s mind; nobody is going to pay the architect rent for living in his cranium or on a stack of paper in a cabinet. The zygote was not Justin Barnard, unless Justin Barnard is still a vegetating single-celled blob, in which case I’d like to know how he typed his essay.

Since Barnard claims to be a philosopher, I’ll cite another, a guy named Aristotle. This is a quote I use in the classroom when I try to explain to them how epigenesis works, in contrast to preformation. Aristotle did some basic poking around in chicken eggs and in semen, and he noticed something rather obvious—there were no bones in there, nor blood, nor anything meatlike or gristly or brainy. So he made the simple suggestion that they weren’t there.

Why not admit straight away that the semen…is such that out of it blood and flesh can be formed, instead of maintaining that semen is both blood and flesh?

Barnard is making the classic preformationist error of assuming that everything had to be there in the beginning: I am made of bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity, therefore the zygote must have contained bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity.

It didn’t.

Why not admit straight away that the zygote is such that out of it selfhood may arise, rather than maintaining that the zygote is the self?

In that case we have to recognize that the person is not present instantaneously at one discrete moment, but emerges gradually over months to years of time, that there were moments when self was not present and other moments when self clearly was present, and moments in between where there is ambiguity or partial identity or otherwise blurry gray boundaries. This is a conclusion that makes conservative ideologues wince and shy away — I think it’s too complicated for their brains, which may in some ways be equivalent to the gormless reflexive metabolic state of the zygote — but it is how science understands the process of development.

My mouse has two daddies

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This is awesome news. Biologists have figured out how to enable two male mice to have babies together, with no genetic contribution from a female mouse. I, for one, look forward to our future gay rodent overlords.

It was a clever piece of work. Getting progeny from two male parents has a couple of difficulties. One is that you need an oocyte, which is a large, specialized, complex cell type, and males don’t make them. Not at all. You can tear a boy mouse to pieces looking for one, and you won’t find a single example—they’re a cell found exclusively in female ovaries.

Now you might think that all we’d have to do is grab one from a female mouse, throw out its nuclear contents, and inject a male nucleus into it, but that doesn’t work, either. The second problem is that during the maturation of the oocyte, the DNA has to be imprinted, that is, given a female-specific pattern of activation and inactivation of genes. If that isn’t done, there will be a genetic imbalance at fertilization, and development will be abnormal. What we need to be able to do is grow an oocyte progenitor with male DNA in a female ovary.

So that’s what was done, and here’s how.

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Start with Father #1, whose cells all contain an X and a Y chromosome. Connective tissue cells were extracted from the mouse (in this case, an embryo), and then reprogrammed by viral transduction with modified copies of the genes Pou5f1, Sox2, Klf4, and Myc. This step produces induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), or cells that have the ability to develop into all (probably) of the tissues of the body. These cells are then grown in a dish.

The next step is to give Father #1’s cells a sex change operation. This turns out to be trivial: in culture, cells can spontaneously lose a chromosome by non-disjunction, and 1-3% of the cells will lose their Y chromosome, and convert to X0. No Y chromosome means it is now a functionally female cell.

There is a significant difference between humans and mice here. Sometimes (about 1 in 5,000 births) humans are born with only one X chromosome, a condition called Turner syndrome. These individuals appear to be entirely normal females, except for some minor cosmetic differences, an unfortunate predisposition to a few problems like heart disease, and of particular relevance here, are also sterile. Mice are different: Turner syndrome mice are fertile. Apparently, mice have a god-given edge in the gay reproduction race.

Once a population of Father #1’s cells that are X0 are identified, they are then injected into a female mouse blastocyst to produce a chimera, an embryo with a mix of host cells (which are genetically XX) and donor cells (which are X0). That they’re mixed together in the resulting offspring doesn’t matter; it may be a callous way of looking at it, but the only purpose of the host XX cells is to provide a female mouse environment to house Father #1’s X0 cells that end up in the ovaries.

That’s the result of all this tinkering: a female mouse is born with a subset of Father #1’s reprogrammed cells nestled in her ovaries, where they mature in a female body and differentiate into oocytes. The oocytes divide by meiosis, producing egg cells that contain either one X chromosome, or no sex chromosome at all (0).

Finally, Father #2 comes into the picture. Father #2 is an ordinary male, with testes containing cells that go through meiosis and mature into ordinary sperm containing either one X chromosome or one Y chromosome. These sperm are used to fertilize eggs from the chimeric female, which, by all the shenanigans describe above, are derived from Father #1. Both male (XY) and female (X0) progeny ensue. That this actually occurred was thoroughly confirmed by testing the progeny for genetic markers from both fathers…and it’s true. The only genetic contributions were from the dads, and nothing from the host mother.

Now you may be sitting at home with your dearly beloved gay partner and wondering whether you will be able to have babies together someday. Or perhaps you’re a narcissistic man sitting at home alone, thinking you’d like to have babies with yourself, if only you could convince a few of your cells to make eggs (this is another possibility: there is no barrier to this technique being applied in cases where Father #1 is also Father #2, except that it is incestuous to the max). I expect it will be possible someday, but it isn’t right now. There are a few obstacles to doing this in humans.

  1. We haven’t worked out that genetic reprogramming trick for humans yet, so we don’t have a technique for producing pluripotent stem cells from your somatic cells. Give it time, though, and keep funding adult stem cell research, and it’ll happen.

    Also note the rule of unintended consequences. The fundy fanatics have been anti-embryonic stem cell research for years, and one of their tactics has been to insist that adult stem cell research is far more important. In the long run, it is…and oh, look what we’ll be able to do!

  2. The reprogramming trick involves viral transfection, the insertion of mutant copies of a few specific genes. This is probably not desirable. All kids are mutant anyway, but this is adding a specific, constant kind of mutation to all of the individuals produced by this method.

  3. It still requires a woman, and a woman who has been embryonically modified as a blastocyst at that. Did you know women have rights, including the right to not be a vessel for a scientific experiment? It’s true. They also take years and years to grow to sexual maturity, so even if you got started right now it would be a dozen years before she started making oocytes for you, and by the way, she’d inform you that she only produces eggs for herself, not you.

    There may be ways around this, but the techniques aren’t here yet. To produce eggs, we really don’t need the whole woman, just the ovary: another goal of stem cell research is to regrow organs from cells in a dish, for instance to build a new heart or pancreas for transplantation. Consider ovaries on the list of organs.

  4. That difference between mice and humans, that X0 mice are fertile while X0 women are not, seems like a serious problem. We apparently need the pair of X chromosomes working together to provide the correct gene dosage for normal maturation of the egg. It just means that we need to add an extra step to the procedure for people, though: transfer by injection an extra X chromosome from a donor cell from Father #1 to the X0 cells, producing a composite XX cell derived entirely from a male.

  5. The fundies will go raving apeshit bonkers. So what else is new?

  6. OK, there are also some serious ethical concerns that would need to be worked out, independent of the Bible-thumping theocratic sex police. As you can see from the recipe above, this is a procedure that involves extensive manipulation of embryos, almost all of it experimental, and the end result is…a baby. We should be conscientious in our care in any procedure that can produce human beings, especially if there is risk of producing damaged human beings. This can also only be categorized as a kind of expensive luxury treatment, and it’s difficult to justify such elaborate work for solely egotistical gratification. Especially for you, nerd-boy masturbating alone at home. (But learning more about the mechanisms of reproduction is more than enough to justify this work in mice, at least).

Wait…all this is just for male gay couples. What about nurturing lesbians who want to have children together? That has another tricky problem: you need a Y chromosome to induce normal sperm differentiation, and lesbian couples don’t have any of those. At all. They’re going to have to go to a male donor for a genetic contribution, diluting the purity of the genetic side of the procedure. However, that has a technology in the works to help out already: see obstacle #4 above. We’ll have to isolate iPS cells from Mother #1, inject a donor Y chromosome into them, cultivate chimeric male (or chimeric testis in a dish) to produce sperm, and then fertilize eggs from Mother #2 with the Mother #1-derived sperm. Any sons produced by this procedure would have three parents, Mother #1, Mother #2, and the Male Donor who provided the Y chromosome, and only the Y chromosome. Any daughters, though, would only have two parents: Mother #1 and Mother #2.

Isn’t reproductive biology fun? It’s the combination of exciting science with terrifyingly deep social implications.

Deng JM, Satoh K, Chang H, Zhang Z, Stewart MD, Wang H, Cooney AJ, Behringer RR (2010) Generation of viable male and female mice from two fathers. Biology of Reproduction DOI:10.1095/biolreprod.110.088831.

Rebuked by Michael Egnor!

It’s kind of like having my fashion sense chastised by the Insane Clown Posse…I’m not going to lose sleep over it. He’s upset that I don’t think a blastocyst deserves the same consideration we give to a child or an adult human being — that I have baldly stated that I’m pro-abortion. Unfortunately, his argument against my position doesn’t hold up at all well.

Women have a right to control their bodies — the right to self-determination. Yet the right to self-determination is contingent. One does not have a right to kill another person. The right to life supersedes the right to self-determination. When a woman is pregnant, the rights of two human beings must be weighed — that of the woman, and that of the child. While decent people agree on the rights of the woman, what about the rights of the child? What is the moral status of a child (or an embryo or a zygote) before birth? Is the unborn child a person?

My answers:

Biology 101: Human life — the existence of a discreet individual human being — begins at conception and ends at natural death.

Morality 101: All human beings are persons, and all human beings (from conception to natural death) are entitled to the fundamental right of personhood: the right to life.

Denial of personhood to some human beings — to Jews, to blacks, to women, to unborn children — is profound evil, and is the same evil.

So, according to Egnor, this is a “discreet [sic, I presume] individual human being”:

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So is this:

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And they have exactly the same right to live as these:

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Huh. I don’t know about you, but to me, that doesn’t exalt human life at all — it seems to do the opposite, and devalue the life of women.

Maybe when Egnor graduates to something beyond the 101 level, he’ll learn that human cells are not equivalent to a full human life. An “unborn child” (what a silly euphemism!) is not suddenly a person at conception: development is a gradual process of epigenesis, in which information and complexity expand over time, and the person does not form in an instant. There is no black-and-white boundary between non-personhood and personhood — it’s an arbitrary line drawn in a continuum.

An online abortion poll — for real

I’m about as pro-choice as you can get; I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I’m also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way to trivialize a significant life decision, Pete and Alisha!

They have an online poll, and you can go vote right now.

Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?

Give Birth 77.3% (118,301 votes)

Have an Abortion 22.7% (34,741 votes)

Clearly, looking at those numbers, the ‘bots have been at work, trivializing the poll even more. I don’t care how you vote; what’s at stake is a mere embryo, so it’s no big loss if it’s flushed and incinerated, and I don’t have any illusions about whether this is deciding the fate of a human life — it’s not. There’s no person in Alisha’s belly yet.

I have deep reservations about voting on this at all, because it is not and should not be my decision. But I had to vote to abort, not because of any consideration about the embryo, but because I’m looking at Pete and Alisha, the full-grown, conscious, decision-making human beings who are considering whether to take on the responsibilities of a child. And no, they are not. I’d say the same thing to someone who decided whether to have a baby or not by a flip of the coin. If that’s how you make decisions about whether to commit a significant part of your life to a lot of hard work and the emotional roller coaster of child-rearing, then NO, you do not want to do it.

They’re already lousy parents, and they haven’t even created a child yet.

As several have already pointed out, this poll is not “for real”. It’s the work of a couple of libertarian anti-choice frauds. So go ahead, vote however you want, it doesn’t matter and the perpetrators are a pair of morons.

Heavens! Confrontation!

Imagine you’re pregnant. Imagine that you discover the fetus is doomed by serious birth defects, and is going to be stillborn no matter what. Imagine that you weepily go to the local reproductive services to have the futile pregnancy terminated. Imagine (and this is probably the easiest part) that you get there and discover a fervent group of fanatical, close-minded Christians waving signs with aborted fetuses on them, telling you that you’re damned for going into that clinic.

What would you do?

Well, obviously, you should find common cause with the protestors and tell them that you respect their opinions and really appreciate their input into your personal, and in this case tragically necessary, decisions. Maybe you should go to church with them and discover the richness of their spiritual life, and watch them bloom into awareness of your beliefs and values. Yeah, maybe.

Or you could march right up to them and let them know exactly how despicable their behavior is.

I don’t know. I kind of like the second option. It seems a little more realistic and honest. It also has the bonus of revealing how cowardly your opposition actually is — they’re not used to people standing up for their rights.

I had no idea this was even a question

Sometimes…sometimes you just want to kick some ass. And the only thing holding you back is the unpleasant task afterward of having to scrub your boots.

This is an actual article from USA Today’s “Faith and Reason” section, which doesn’t seem to have much reason behind it. It’s by Cathy Lynn Grossman, who claims to love talking about “visions and values, faith and ethics”, and yet, manages to provide the most nauseating commentary on the recent Nobel for in vitro fertilization yet, even worse than anything I’ve seen from the Catholics. Consider these repugnant questions from Ms Grossman.

Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes — or mind or hands, depending on your theology/philosophy — of God? Does the science behind this merit the Nobel Prize for Medicine or condemnation in the realm of faith and ethics?

Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God? Does the science behind this merit a Nobel Prize, or ethical condemnation? And what about the parents? Is their IVF choice selfish or loving? Are they creators — or merely shoppers?

I read the whole column. There’s not much there. I was looking for some indication that these were rhetorical questions that would be quickly dismissed, but there’s nothing…there’s a quote from the bioethicist Arthur Caplan about the impact of IVF, and there’s a bunch of standard Catholic nonsense deploring the commodification of embryos, but Grossman just raises this vile and ignorant question without a single remark about the obvious fact that the 4 million people who are here because of IVF are…people.

So what are these children? Soulless zombies? Or are they just damned?

The title alone is remarkably off. “‘Test tube babies’: God’s work or human error?”: those are our choices? These kids are mistakes?

I find it disturbing that some people consider the circumstances of a child’s conception to be serious grounds for contemplating their status as members of the human race. This is where magical thinking about undetectable spiritual entities leads you — to a different kind of dualism, where I am privileged because I’ve imagined that I’m granted a soul, while you are lesser because I’ve imagined that you have not…and by the way, you have no means to challenge my claims, which are entirely ethereal and supernatural and also accepted by the majority of the law makers and enforcers in my country.

And it’s incredibly offensive to go further and suggest that the parents of these children, who have gone to extraordinary expense and trouble to conceive, are mere “shoppers”, as if people who get pregnant in a casual evening’s rut are somehow necessarily conscientious ethical philosophers and serious about their children, while someone who sinks $10,000+ dollars into invasive medical procedures and subjects their body to a few months of stressful hormonal treatments must be getting pregnant on impulse.

There really are stupid questions. Grossman just asked a few, and is entirely oblivious to what they imply about her and her attitudes towards children born by methods of which she disapproves. What next? Shall we consider ostracizing a few bastards, too?

Of course they were quick to respond

The head of the Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, the specifically crazy anti-choice arm of the Catholic Church, has already issued a statement about the Nobel Prize awarded to an IVF pioneer. He’s against it, of course.

Among his peculiar complaints is the objection that it “didn’t treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it”, which is rather odd. This:

Couples can’t have children
↓
Couples use IVF
↓
Couples now have children

Looks to me like a rather direct way to treat infertility. Where they once could have no children, now they have children.

They also don’t like the fact that the procedure produces excess embryos which are then discarded, stored, or used in further research in reproduction. They prefer the natural method of intercourse, which produces excess embryos which are then flushed down the toilet to rot in the sewers.

The church is also deeply concerned that the technology has produced a market for women to sell a few cells from their ovaries, when everyone knows that women are supposed to be sold whole and intact and dedicate every aspect of their lives to their owners.

As yet, there is no word from Bill Donohue.

Never trust the anti-woman brigade to be honest

They are as bad as creationists. They often are creationists. Their anti-abortion ideology is so overwhelming that they will make up ‘facts’ and call them science. Here’s a recent example:

“I think it’s important to note with the term fertilized egg, that’s the same thing as using the N word for an African American,” said Mason. “Because it’s a dehumanizing term and it’s not based in science. The term would be a zygote, or an embryo, speaking of a unique individual.” Mason is hoping the passage of the amendment will lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“It’s a bad law,” said Mason, referring to Roe v. Wade. “It was not based in reason. They ignored the concept of the pre-born child being a person.”

That’s simply insane. You aren’t insulting a fertilized egg by referring to its status, and there is no one there to be insulted by your terminology. This Keith Mason wanker has no qualifications as a scientist — he seems to be little more than a self-appointed minister…which explains his propensity for lying.

We use the term “fertilized egg” all the time — so do farmers and grocers. I could show it to you in developmental biology textbooks.

While we use the term “fertilized egg” routinely, there is another term you won’t find in any of the texts or on the lips of developmental biologists: “pre-born child”. What a crock.