A stem cell veto prediction

Despite Brownback’s snowflake stunt and Santorum’s insistence that zygotes are persons, the House stem cell bill, HR810, has passed, as have the two inconsequential smokescreen bills that Santorum tossed up. It’s going to be interesting to hear Bush’s stammered excuses when he vetos it; I’d figure he’d be reluctant to do the veto because it would mean taking undeniable responsibility for an action, something he doesn’t like to do, but then I realized he has another out. He’s going to blame God for telling him to kill the bill.

I predict that he will make some pious excuse like that when he vetoes it. That’s our George: he didn’t do it, it’s not his fault, the buck stops somewhere else, he’s a delegater, not a responsibility-taker.

Department of obviousness

Well. I don’t see the point of this study, but I suppose there are people who need to be clubbed about the head with the obvious who would be well-served by reading it. It’s a study to determine whether clones would have separate identities.

Umm, yeah?

They determined this by interviewing twins, who are clones of one another.

OK, yes?

From these findings the scientists said they could assume a clone would probably not feel their individuality was compromised by sharing genes with someone else; that their relationship with their co-clone was a blessing; and their uniqueness was not a negative thing.

That’s a relief. We can stop worrying about the clone armies full of self-loathing bodies with a single mind between them, I guess. I wonder if they also pursued the question of why, in any pair of twins, one individual gets all the good qualities, and the other is always pure evil?

Never mind. Try googling “soul” and “clone”—there are way too many people in the world who take that worry seriously. Maybe this was a necessary study after all.

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?

[Read more…]

Hmmm…maybe we should form a vocal voting bloc…

From the insightful Digby comes this insightly insight:

Why do the vast majority secularists vote for the Democrats? Could it possibly be for the same reason that African Americans do? Could it be that the Republican Party is so implicitly or explicitly religiously intolerant that they have no place in it?

They don’t even need to be intolerant, though…just being implicitly and explicitly religious, period, full stop, is sufficiently off-putting. The intolerance is the creamy rich arsenic-laced frosting layered thickly on top of the putrefying fruitcake of superstitious dogma—excuse me if I’d rather not have a taste. I think our interests diverge from those of the religious African Americans because, if Obama is any example, they reject the intolerance but savor the religion.

By the way, take a look at this map of the state-by-state distribution of unbelievers, also from Digby’s post. Typically, “no religion” is the third most popular choice in most states, with a few exceptions (I’m very proud of my home state of Washington.) So why do politicians so studiously avoid courting that common demographic?*

*Rhetorical question…in a winner-take-all game, third place is no place, and it’s not as if the godless form a coherent bloc anyway.

Diploblasts and triploblasts

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

Carl Zimmer wrote on evolution in jellyfish, with the fascinating conclusion that they bear greater molecular complexity than was previously thought. He cited a recent challenging review by Seipel and Schmid that discusses the evolution of triploblasty in the metazoa—it made me rethink some of my assumptions about germ layer phylogeny, anyway, so I thought I’d try to summarize it here. The story is clear, but I realized as I started to put it together that jeez, but we developmental biologists use a lot of jargon. If this is going to make any sense to anyone else, I’m going to have to step way back and explain a collection of concepts that we’ve been using since Lankester in the 19th century.

[Read more…]