Good for the Godless Party

The Secular Coalition for America has put together a Secular Scorecard for our representatives in both houses of congress, evaluating them for how they voted on issues of importance (separation of church and state, science, funding religious organizations, that sort of thing) in the past year. It’s interesting in a sad way in how it’s split along party lines: the lesson is that the godless should never, ever vote Republican, but that Democrats are only mostly safe. There are a few screwballs like Salazar and Nelson of Nebraska that throw off the general rule that you can divide them neatly by party, but generally you see disparities like this, for Minnesota.

MINNESOTA Party RC130 RC131 RC132 RC133 RC1 RC2 RC158 RC159 RC163 RC206 Score

Coleman, N

 R – – – – – – – – – – 0

Dayton, M

 D + + + + + + + + + + 100

Even if Democrats aren’t godless themselves, they’re mostly on our side on the issues that count.

Sadly, I suspect that rather than being proud of their voting record, this is one endorsement they’ll struggle to hide.

Stem cell soundbite

While browsing through the UW Alumni magazine (yes, I read it; no, please don’t ask me for money, I’m poor), I ran across a nice quote I thought I’d share:

Imagine it like the software in a computer that is five years old…these [stem] cell lines are inherently inferior. We’re forced to focus our efforts on lines that are inherently less innovative.

Dr Anthony Blau, commenting on Bush’s veto of a bill that would open up new cell lines for research

Write letters!

One after the other, I got two requests to promote some worthy causes which need letter-writers to help out. Here they are:

Save wilderness:

Over the strong objections of Native people, wildlife biologists, sportsmen’s groups, and the general public, the Bureau of Land Management remains intent on leasing one of the most remarkable wetlands complexes on the planet. The place is the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the largest single block of wild public land left in the United States.

Save minds:

On Monday, the Ohio Board of Education will hold its first fall meeting. Creationists on the board are hoping to introduce a Controversial Issues Template, which would not only allow for the teaching of intelligent design in science classrooms, but demand that teachers question global warming and highlight the religious right’s opposition to stem cell research.

Don’t just sit there! Do something!

Save the Gay Sheep!

Since we biologists were just bizarrely accused of being like a bunch of animal rights activists, I am surprised that when I read that PETA opposes experiments on gay sheep, I find myself opposing PETA and thinking that the experiments sound cool and interesting and informative. I’m also a little disgusted with the way PETA finds it necessary to lie in their criticisms.

The Next Hurrah has a thorough take-down of PETA. Particularly amusing is the statistic that the research involves 18 sheep a year, while meat-packers butcher 4 million per year…so which one do the kooky extremists of the animal rights movement go after? There is an entirely appropriate quote from Mark Twain that applies here: “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Research that studies cute little lambs and can be tied to homosexual shibboleths of both the right and the left sounds like the perfect scapegoat to lead more people to contribute to their cause; damning lamb chops and mutton just doesn’t push the right buttons.

Dobzhansky on eugenics

John Wilkins is fighting the philosophical and historical fight against the Darwin’s Deadly Legacy nonsense with an excellent summary of the course of the eugenics movement. I especially liked this quote from Dobzhansky:

The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has not come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in human populations have more to do with political beliefs than with scientific findings.

If you don’t know who Theodosius Dobzhansky was, he was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and was far, far more influential on evolutionary thinking than either Haeckel or Hitler. Scientific leaders were calling this stuff nonsense before Hitler tried to invoke his Final Solution.

Michael Gerson and the new Republican alibi for crippling stem cell research

This Newsweek article on the latest innovation in stem cell research is infuriating. The author, Michael Gerson, is a Republican hack with no competence in biology, which seems to qualify him to be a serious judge of science to this administration.

The issue of stem cells was the first test of the infant Bush administration, pitting the promise of medical discovery against the protection of developing life and prompting the president’s first speech to the nation. His solution–funding research on existing stem-cell lines, but not the destruction of embryos to create new ones–was seen as a smart political compromise. In fact, the president was drawing a bright ethical line. He argued that no human life should be risked or destroyed for the medical benefit of another. This was an intentional rejection of the chilly creed of utilitarianism–the greatest good for the greatest number–because the greatest number would gain the unrestricted right to extend their lives by ending or exploiting the lives of the weak.

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