Look who was just inducted: David Kingsley, stickleback development and genetics, and Neil Shubin, another devo guy you may have heard of for Tiktaalik and Your Inner Fish. Congratulations!
Another tawdry semi-biblical cesspit has opened, the Creation Museum of the Ozarks. Of course it gets horrible reviews.
Then I looked it up. It’s located in Strafford, Missouri, which is a town 20 minutes away from Springfield.
Springfield. What do we think of when we hear Springfield, Missouri? No, not the Assemblies of God. We think…Skepticon. Hey, you know what that means…
ROAD TRIP. Make it so, Skepticon organizers. Set aside some time for a godless invasion of your local creation “museum”.
It really is that clear and simple. Republican policies lead to women dying of neglect and abuse, and they don’t care. Tom Levenson does the estimates, just using their recent opposition to Planned Parenthood as an example — and that’s a legislative jihad that has a body count.
Planned Parenthood does lots more than screen for gynecological cancers, of course. This is just one example of the real commitment to saving lives, to life, that marks that organization. But this story makes the point well enough: when you cut poor and vulnerable people’s access to health care real harm results.
Which means that Mitch Daniels is presenting his bonafides to the Republican electorate with an action that will lead directly to the deaths of women whom he doesn’t know – whom he and we cannot know. That anonymity, the statistical nature of the crime, means that Daniels will almost certainly never pay any price, let alone a criminal one, for his role in their deaths. But they will be on his hands, and should be on his conscience.
And to go larger than just one politician whose ambition has swamped his capacity for moral reasoning, this is why we must work for more than just an individual electoral defeat for today’s Republican party. Mitch Daniels may indeed by the best they’ve got over there. That’s as damning an indictment as I can imagine.
I know there are reasonable, rational conservatives; I also appreciate that progressive policies are not all certified guarantees of success, so there should be a check on government action. But the current Republican party is a nightmare of stupidity and thuggish vileness, and they must be defeated at the ballot box, even at the cost of some sensible politician’s careers. Shut them down. Do not vote for any Republican, ever. The party has to be demolished, or the adults in the group have to rise up and slap down the idiots, the teabaggers, the Breitbarts and Palins and Bachmanns.
Eggers and Calegari have an excellent op-ed on the problem of American education: in short, it’s the money, stupid.
When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
I’ve been getting a bit annoyed lately at the deference paid to the military. I keep seeing special acknowledgments paid to servicemen — on a recent shuttle ride to the airport parking lot, for instance, a fellow shouted out to the driver that he should drop off the guy in uniform first, to thank him for his service to the country…and then the driver had to take an awkward route through the lot, passing by other passenger’s cars, to drop this one fellow off first. It was extremely annoying — and to the credit of the fellow in uniform, he was also clearly uncomfortable with this pointless special treatment — but the guy who shouted out the demand sure looked smug and pleased with himself the whole way.
I do not lack appreciation for our soldiers, but seriously — they are not an elite caste. They are working class people like many of us. Why doesn’t someone shout out for special attention to cooks, or park rangers, or high school teachers? They all do great work for us, and the teachers in particular do an invaluable service at budget rates. But for some antiquated reason, we still think it more important to give Gomer Pyle a gun than to give a teacher the tools to do her job.
Also, you’d be financially deranged to go into teaching.
At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.
Isn’t this absurd? It’s also not just a matter of averages: teachers in prosperous suburban schools get paid more than teachers in poor inner city schools. Those who need education the most get it the least. There ought to be a greater commitment to public education and more respect given to those who deliver it.
I know what you’re thinking, and so do the authors.
For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
It’s going to take a great deal of political will to accomplish this sort of change. Right now, the biggest obstacle to a better school system is a creaking, useless mechanism for funding schools that comes right out of the 18th century, and simply doesn’t work: the local tax levy. Schools should all be funded at the state level, at least (preferably at the federal level) and the game of bi-yearly begging for pennies on a property tax should end. Instead, though, our government is full of awful, anti-common-sense ninnies who prattle about vouchers and private schools instead, who want to reduce investment in education.
They never seem to understand why priests get singled out. If I claimed to have special privileges and attention from a super-being, shouldn’t I also accept some greater responsibilities? Unless I were just lying about being best friends with Superman, that is.
A metaphor for the conversations in the Endless Thread, that is.
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It’s the meta-argument that’s especially hilarious: here’s a facebook argument over who would win in a fight, Batman or Jesus. The Christians are taking it quite seriously, insisting that Jesus would win. The magic moment is when one declares, “And you’re neglecting the fact that bruce wayne is FICTIONAL!!!”
Yes? And?
Besides, everyone knows the Batman would so kick Jesus’ ass.
I’m a major fan of kidneys — they’re fascinating organs for discussion of both development and evolution. Today I lectured about them in my human physiology course, but I could only briefly touch on their development, and instead had to talk on and on about countercurrent multipliers and juxtamedulary nephrons and transport membranes and all that functional physiology stuff. So I thought I’d get the evo-devo out of my system with a few words about them here.
Our kidneys go through an elaborate series of three major developmental stages — we essentially build three pairs of kidneys as embryos, and jettison two pairs as we go along. It actually looks like something out of Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, as we progressively assemble and then discard ‘primitive’ kidneys.
The first stage is the formation of the pronephric kidney. In the embryo, the circulatory system forms glomeruli, or tangled capillary beds, adjacent to the membrane that surrounds the body cavity, or coelom. Filtered plasma oozes into the coelom, and the pronephric kidney has ciliated openings into the coelom called nephrostomes, and the fluid is drawn into the tubules, where membrane pumps recover nutrients and salts and return them to the circulatory system. Whatever is left behind — wastes and water — trickles into the pronephric duct, which terminates in the cloaca.
It’s a simple, low pressure system that is adequate for collecting waste products from the early embryo. It relies on an existing cavity for collecting filtered fluids, and you can tell that it doesn’t use a high-pressure filtration scheme since it can get by with simple ciliary beating to cause fluid flow. It’s a primitive system that is retained for functional reasons: metabolizing embryonic cells are producing chemical waste products, and some kind of waste disposal system is essential for even this early stage.
The second stage is the mesonephric kidney. New tubules bud off the pronephric duct, but unlike the pronephric tubules, these are directly invested with capillary glomeruli and form spherical filtrate collectors called Bowman’s capsules. This is the big functional difference from the pronephros: filtered fluids are no longer collected indirectly from the coelom, but straight from the circulatory system. Some of the mesonephric tubules may retain a connection with the coelom, but this is no longer the sole way to collect filtrate.
The pronephros degenerates completely as the mesonephros takes over its job. As it withers away, the mesonephric tubules continue to use the pronephric duct, which gets renamed: it’s now called either the mesonephric duct, or if you prefer the old school names, the Wolffian duct. Even the mesonephros is doomed, though; it’s an intermediate stage that can cope with the light loads of waste produced by the embryo at this point, but an even more elaborate, more efficient kidney, the metanephros, is also beginning to grow, and it’s going to make the mesonephros superfluous.
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The metanephric kidney, the third and final stage of development (the metanephric kidney is the familiar adult kidney we all possess), buds from the mesonephric duct and forms a unique structure with familiar elements. The new kidney makes branching ducts from a central collecting point, like a spray of flowers; these new ducts look just like mesonephric tubules, with a Bowman’s capsule on the outer, or cortical side of the kidney, and loops descending down into the medulla to generate a concentration gradient of salts used in generating hyperosmotic urine (which is what I talked about in class today, and won’t say anything further here). The subunits are similar to the mesonephric tubules, just arrayed in a different and specific organization for even more effective mechanisms for maintaining salt balance.
This metanephric stage is also complicated by the co-development of the reproductive system. The gonads are differentiating and forming alongside the degenerating mesonephric kidney. In addition, another duct, the Müllerian duct forms in parallel to the Wolffian duct, so now, briefly, we have two pairs of kidneys and two pairs of longitudinal ducts. This is going to be followed by consolidation and change, though, and it’s going to be a sex dependent pattern.
In females, the Wolffian duct is mostly going to degenerate and be lost, along with the mesonephros. The Müllerian duct is going to develop into the fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and upper vagina. The only part of the mesonephric duct retained will be the branch connecting the metanephros to the cloaca.
In males, the M&uum;llerian duct degenerates. Yes, it seems incredibly wasteful and pointless: we guys built this parallel duct as embryos, and then promptly threw it away, unused. Instead, the Wolffian/mesonephric duct is retained and becomes the ductus deferens, that useful tube for transporting sperm from the testis to the penis.
I think you can see what’s cool about the kidneys — they follow a sequential pattern of development that also happens to reflect the evolutionary history of kidneys. You might be tempted to speculate that it follows a Haeckelian model, where development necessarily follows an evolutionary trajectory because change can only come by addition of new features, but don’t be fooled. There are a couple of reasons why this peculiar pattern of retaining ancient kidney types is maintained.
One is existence of developmental linkages: disrupting any of these earlier kidneys leads to serious developmental anomalies in subsequent kidneys. Each kidney is built on the foundations of the previous one; mutations that would excise that old less efficient, less sophisticated form would also prevent the normal development of the metanephros. Even if they were totally non-functional, we would still need the patterning aspect of the primitive kidneys to be present.
The other reason is functional. The metanephric kidney is complex and intricate, and takes more time to develop — but cellular metabolism isn’t going to just stop everywhere else in the embryo and wait for the kidneys to be put in place. It’s like the situation when construction workers are building a house, and they still occasionally need to empty their bladders, even if the elaborate bathroom faced with Grecian marble and equipped with the latest German plumbing fixtures isn’t done yet … so a porta-potty is wheeled onto the site.
And that’s what I like about kidneys: all the funky relics of the construction process are still there, hanging out and seeming to contribute to an excessively complex tangle of complicated relationships.
Kalthoff K (2001) Analysis of biological development. McGraw-Hill, NY.
Here’s a pair of brave women.
Twenty years after a horrific rape, Liz Seccuro pressed charges on her creepy, oblivious rapist. It was a horrible situation, and she could have run away from the conflict…but she faced her fears and got the rotten guy locked away after he tried to resume a friendly conversation, as if nothing had happened.
Amina A. is a gay woman living in Syria — and she and her father faced down a pair of thugs who threatened to rape the lesbian out of her. These were the local ‘security services’ who try to enforce a religious propriety on every one; just living in the day-to-day situation there has to be an example of great courage.
The villains here are, unfortunately, all men — men who think they can use and abuse women. It makes me embarrassed for my sex … and it embarrasses me further that there will no doubt be whiny little half-men complaining in the comments of this article. Could you all try to make that prediction false?
