Tag: science

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Ridiculous…

Yeah, so I woke up from my nap to this article in Newsweek that polled Americans about a variety of things, one of which was evolution. 91% of Americans believe in God, which isn’t terribly surprising, however 34% of college graduates believe in the Biblical account of creation. When asked “‘Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?”, 48% of Americans said no.

As I’m sure my views on this are pretty clear, I won’t go into an extended rant. Let me just say, however, that this is very disturbing. It’s disturbing primarily because 48% of people believe in a lie (yes, the vast majority of credible scientists believe in natural selection) and also that 34% of college graduates believe that women were created when a rib was taken from Adam, and that it’s more likely that we came from mud rather than monkeys. I’ll quote a comment off Slashdot, because I think he said it pretty well:

“America continues to worry about losing its edge in the high-tech industry. But that couldn’t possibly be related to poor science education, could it?

“Note: I’m referring specifically to the 48% who believe that evolution is not well-supported by scientific evidence and that it is not widely accepted within the scientific community. Well, and the people who think the universe is less than 10,000 years old, despite all the evidence to the contrary. You can believe in God and have an understanding of science, just like you can have morals without being religious. But thinking that evolution isn’t supported by evidence, or isn’t widely accepted by scientists, is just plain ignorance.”

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A learning experience…

So, last week was a bit busy trying to work with my first poster presentation of my research.  The way conferences work, you typically make a 4′ x 5′ poster that summarizes the background behind what you’re doing, and then presents data that you can then describe to passers-by.  This is a way at conferences to get your data out there without having to have everyone do a 15 min presentation (although, that’s an option, too).  Tends to be very informal and is an excellent way to get started.

Anyway, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) at SLU holds a Graduate Research Symposium once a year where they have everyone submit posters and abstracts to you can present your data to your fellow classmates, and also get them judged by professors at the school.  From my perspective, this is an excellent opportunity to get experience before the Neuroscience meeting in November (in San Diego!), which will be my first real meeting.  The cool thing about that experience, as compared with the GSA symposium, is that those people will be quite familiar with the basics of the research field, while some of the judges at the symposium yesterday were from the social sciences department, requiring you to define “neuron” or “oxidative stress” to them.  60 students presented posters yesterday for a good three hours and most of the people coming by were professors, rather than students, but that’s to be expected, I guess.

Anyway, I think I did a decent job, overall…certainly for a first-timer.  The data I had wasn’t terribly involved compared with other students there, and I’m not even sure I explained it all in the best way either, but regardless, I felt it helped me out in the long-run.

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The Extent of Education

I’m not really sure what made me think about it today, but my head was spinning around the idea of education and the process of learning. You start out in primary school learning the absolute basics, and things get a bit more complicated in high school. At the end of high school, you decide what interests you and what you want for a career. Let’s say you want to learn about cancer…

Well, then you go to the Harvard of the Midwest and you get a biology degree, taking classes that will teach you about general science, but also a little bit about cancer. Assuming you still love cancer (well, learning about it…), then you go to graduate school to concentrate only on cancer…

…here’s the dicey part… Eventually, you reach the end of education…as in…all education as you’ve known it for the previous 20 years… Because now, you realize that, hey, this stuff I’m learning isn’t in textbooks. The answers to a given question aren’t so easy to look up and find anymore… You can’t ask your parents or teacher a question and have them reply: “why don’t you go look it up?”

Why is this? Because no one knows… By the time you hit graduate school, you’re really hitting the “nitty gritty” of the extent of all human knowledge in that specific subject that you were interested in back in late-high school. There is no more that you can learn from a person, a textbook, or even a primary research article… That’s it.

I dunno…it’s just kinda weird knowing that you could be asked a question and it isn’t simply a issue of not knowing the answer: it’s not knowing the answer because the answer hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone on Earth. Once in graduate school, you’re really at the “final frontier” (insert Star Trek reference here…) of human knowledge on a given subject. So when you’re called an “expert on cancer,” it’s really true because you’ve learned just about 95-99% of everything that can be learned about it.

These are the thoughts I have when studying for exams… 😛

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Evil more fundamental?

So, an intriguing perspective, as pointed out by “ST: Voyager” in an episode titled “The Darkling“… The episode basically centers around a malfunction in The Doctor such that he goes all Jekyll and Hyde on the crew and attacks people…

…anyway, here’s the important part… The Doctor goes on this rant about evil, essentially describing evil as more “fundamental” than good. The argument went from a physics perspective such that light involves photons, which is made up of particles (yes, light has mass…weird, eh?), yet there is no corresponding particle for dark. So, if there were no particles of light, there would only be dark. There is no corresponding force to go against light, at least as far as particle physics goes.

I guess it’s just an interesting idea, ’cause I’d always heard the argument that you can’t have good without evil, and vice versa, because our notion of “right” and “wrong” requires that opposing force. How can one define “evil” without a “good” to counterbalance it? Our notion of “evil” requires that you know what is bad and what isn’t, and to know what isn’t, you have to have a sense of “good”…confused, much?

Well, using the argument from physics, actually, light (i.e. “good”) is the force encroaching upon what would be there otherwise (i.e. “evil”). If there were no light, there would only be dark. You can’t not have dark (w00t!, double-negative). But you can not have light.

So, thusly I ask: is evil more fundamental than good?

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Disturbing-ness…

“Has any human being always been there? As any scientist always been there? Who’s always been there? God! Who should you always trust first, God or the scientist? God!”

The quote above came from a guy speaking to a stadium full of young children, asking the kids questions and having them yell responses back. And yes, they were the responses you expect.

So, Crooks and Liars, an admittedly left-wing blog, highlighted a documentary on HBO called “Friends of God.” Sadly, as I don’t get HBO, I haven’t seen the documentary, but Crooks and Liars linked to a downloadable video (“right-click” and choose “Save Link As…”) of a 7 min section of it that is a bit disturbing to me. I mean, these are things that I knew were going on, but to actually hear and see it is…well…”disturbing” is the only word…

The scary part is, and as this video highlights, what the kids are being taught, and how they’re being taught to think. One kid says he wants to get a Nobel Prize becoming a Biochemist and working for the Institute for Creation Science. Sure, a noble pursuit (hah! so “punny”…), but at the same time, the blindness that I see in the next generation is frightening. Another teenager referred to how “one-sided” public education is, and there is some definite truth to that…but at the same time, if the sides were reversed, would it be any different? Shouldn’t the separation of church and state be protected?

I guess I’ve tried telling myself that “things will change” once the current generation in power ages on, and once my generation and later ones take over…but things like this make me think it’ll be more of the same. And it’s not something I look forward to…

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The Varieties of Scientific Experience

So, I know it’s crazy, but I’m reading a book: The Varieties of Scientific Experience, by Carl Sagan. The book is edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, who ran across the transcripts of some lectures he gave in 1985 in Scotland (he passed away in December, 1996). The subtitle to the book is “A personal view of the search for God,” which is what drew me to reading it… There have been plenty of books out there trying to reconcile or compare “science” and “God,” but I figured that Carl Sagan, of all people, would yield an interesting take on the ideas.

I’m already half-way through and I wanted to quote a few excerpts from the book here.

On the origins of life on Earth:

“They say it is no more likely that the origin of life could occur spontaneously by molecular interaction in the primitive ocean than that a Boeing 747 would be spontaneously assembled when a whirlwind passed over a junkyard. That’s a vivid image. It’s also a very useful image, because, of course, the Boeing 747 did not spring full-blown into the world of aviation; it is the end product of a long evolutionary sequence, which, as you know, goes back to the DC-3 and so on until you get to the Wright bi-plane. Now, the Wright biplane does look as if it were spontaneously assembled by a whirlwind in a junkyard. And while I don’t mean to criticize the brilliant achievement of the Wright brothers, as long as you remember that there is this evolutionary history, it’s a lot easier to understand the origin of the first example.”

On science in general:

“My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.”

Indeed…

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Skip the turkey, have a dinosaur!

For those of us that figured all the true nut-jobs are found in Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and, yes, even Missouri…let’s not forget Kentucky!

According to this blurb at Slashdot, there’s a new museum opening next year in Kentucky, close to the Ohio border. It’s going to be devoted to Creationism. The article at The Guardian describing the “venture” states:

The Creation Museum – motto: “Prepare to Believe!” – will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake.

And perhaps more amusing:

As you stand in the museum’s lobby – the only part of the building approaching completion – you are surrounded by life-size dinosaur models, some moving and occasionally grunting as they chew the cud.Beside the turtle pool, two animatronic, brown-complexioned children, demurely dressed in Hiawatha-like buckskin, gravely flutter with movement. Behind them lurk two small Tyrannosaurus Rexes. This scene is meant to date from before the Fall of Man and, apparently, dinosaurs.

The museum has a web site, of course…feel free to browse…they have a lovely walk-through of the proposed plans… The thing will cost $25 million, and all but $3 million has been donated. (personally, I think I could find plenty of other things to do with $25 million, like, oh, feed all the poor people in New York City for the next decade?) Apparently, the museum gift shop is done up like a medieval castle…’cause knights used to fight dinosaurs (read: dragons) all the time!

These shenanigans remind me of a show I watched at Brooke’s parent’s house a few weeks ago…I was flipping through the TV channels on a Saturday morning and ran across a show discounting evolution on one of the religious channels…using “real scientists”! Of particular note, one of the historians they had on the show was recounting the story of Beowulf, referring specifically to the description of the monster in the story. This shrub said that the existence of a dinosaur in Beowulf was proof that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time, thus the Bible must be correct. So now, not only should the Bible be sacred, but so should Beowulf and accounts of sea merchants sighting monsters in the oceans…and how knights of the Middle Ages fought dinosaurs daily…I mean…dragons… (which the historian also referred to…this is a trend, apparently).

So, this Thanksgiving, you should go find a dinosaur and eat it instead of a turkey… Turkeys have too much tryptophan (the amino acid that makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner) and you certainly get more meat out of a Velociraptor…

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Coolest ever!!!

Slashdot ran a blurb about an article in Science magazine titled “Viral Fossil Brought Back to Life.” So yeah, I just had to read it…

So, in the blurb (very easy to read…don’t be put off by science-i-ness…), the researchers in France essentially took DNA common to humans that they knew to be viral in origin. For those that don’t know, some viruses act by “implanting” themselves in our genome so they can get their proteins produced by our own cells. So, it stands to reason that over the years, we’ve picked up a few fragments in our own genome from a variety of viruses.

Well, this group found a viral section of our genome, “repaired” it by comparing the same sequence amongst many people to compare them and see which parts are most common, and then generated the genome. How cool is that!??! Not only are there ancient viruses in our DNA, but we can re-activate them!!!

For anyone that still had doubts on evolution…I trust they are dashed aside… 😛

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Let's get this straight…

So, I noticed today on Facebook that there are a few groups with titles like: “Missourians Against Human Cloning (Vote NO on Amendment 2)” and “Say “No” to the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative.” For those that don’t know, here’s the actual wording from the Amendment regarding cloning:

2(1) No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being.

38(d).6.(2) ‘Clone or attempt to clone a human being’ means to implant in a uterus or attempt to implant in a uterus anything other than the product of fertilization of an egg of a human female by a sperm of a human male for the purpose of initiating a pregnancy that could result in the creation of a human fetus, or the birth of a human being.

For some reason beyond my comprehension, there are actually people in the state that somehow thinks this provides a constitutional means of protecting human cloning. No, really…you read it correctly…it completely abolishes the idea of human cloning. Why? Because in order for you to clone a person, you need to implant the embryo into a uterus for development. Does that also disallow somatic transfer (i.e. transfer of DNA from one cell to another). Yes. Because you have to implant it in a uterus. You cannot “grow” a human (or any other mammal) outside of a uterus.

So, if someone could please explain to me how people are seeing this as “constitutional protection” for human cloning, I’d be very happy to hear it…’cause it makes no sense to me. There are over 900 members in these two groups on Facebook, and it’s beyond me as to why this is so confusing. And they keep re-quoting the wording from the Amendment…like that’s some kind of defense. They only re-quote it because they don’t understand what it says and hope you won’t either.

One of the other arguments against it is that, with passing Amendment 2, you’ll target “underpriviledged women” so that they can sell their eggs for research purposes. Hmmm…let’s see…is that mentioned and outlawed?

2(4) No person may, for valuable consideration, purchase or sell human blastocysts or eggs for stem cell research or stem cell therapies and cures.

Yes, yes it’s outlawed! Oh, and even the following:

2(2) No human blastocyst may be produced by fertilization solely for the purpose of stem cell research.

So, let’s review: Missouri Constitutional Amendment 2 strictly outlaws cloning. Amendment 2 does not allow cloning. If you say that Amendment 2 allows human cloning, or provides a market for the sale of human embryos, you are lying.

It’s that simple.

Here’s more information on all the ballot measures we’ll be faced with on November 7th.

Posted on

Let’s get this straight…

So, I noticed today on Facebook that there are a few groups with titles like: “Missourians Against Human Cloning (Vote NO on Amendment 2)” and “Say “No” to the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative.” For those that don’t know, here’s the actual wording from the Amendment regarding cloning:

2(1) No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being.

38(d).6.(2) ‘Clone or attempt to clone a human being’ means to implant in a uterus or attempt to implant in a uterus anything other than the product of fertilization of an egg of a human female by a sperm of a human male for the purpose of initiating a pregnancy that could result in the creation of a human fetus, or the birth of a human being.

For some reason beyond my comprehension, there are actually people in the state that somehow thinks this provides a constitutional means of protecting human cloning. No, really…you read it correctly…it completely abolishes the idea of human cloning. Why? Because in order for you to clone a person, you need to implant the embryo into a uterus for development. Does that also disallow somatic transfer (i.e. transfer of DNA from one cell to another). Yes. Because you have to implant it in a uterus. You cannot “grow” a human (or any other mammal) outside of a uterus.

So, if someone could please explain to me how people are seeing this as “constitutional protection” for human cloning, I’d be very happy to hear it…’cause it makes no sense to me. There are over 900 members in these two groups on Facebook, and it’s beyond me as to why this is so confusing. And they keep re-quoting the wording from the Amendment…like that’s some kind of defense. They only re-quote it because they don’t understand what it says and hope you won’t either.

One of the other arguments against it is that, with passing Amendment 2, you’ll target “underpriviledged women” so that they can sell their eggs for research purposes. Hmmm…let’s see…is that mentioned and outlawed?

2(4) No person may, for valuable consideration, purchase or sell human blastocysts or eggs for stem cell research or stem cell therapies and cures.

Yes, yes it’s outlawed! Oh, and even the following:

2(2) No human blastocyst may be produced by fertilization solely for the purpose of stem cell research.

So, let’s review: Missouri Constitutional Amendment 2 strictly outlaws cloning. Amendment 2 does not allow cloning. If you say that Amendment 2 allows human cloning, or provides a market for the sale of human embryos, you are lying.

It’s that simple.

Here’s more information on all the ballot measures we’ll be faced with on November 7th.