The Rabbit Hole

Good article for those not up on their taxonomy.

I love disabusing human prejudice in the sciences. We're prone to giving so much attention to animals, and, within all of Animalia, mammals. The truth is that animals are so ridiculously outnumbered, species-wise, compared to bacteria. Hell, they can hardly compete in numbers with archaeobacteria.

I once saw this truly awesome graphic in a class where the phylums under the sub-domain Animalia were represented in size. There was a tiny kangaroo for the mammals and a beetle about thirty times the size of all the rest combined. One in five species of animal is a beetle, folks--not in terms of numbers of animals, but in terms of numbers of species. For every five animal species, one is a beetle. It just lets you know, then, how many out of five are insects. Now imagine how many orders of magnitude more bacteria species there are. Aiyah. Awesome.

Watch what you take away from this Tierney article.

The wrong impression to walk away with is to think that this in some way proves that whatever scientific consensus you take issue with might be the result of this false "cascade" theory. The cascade phenomenom preys upon human opinion. As you will read in the article, anyone who applied science to the low-fat diet thinking found it was full of shit.

Pay close attention to this line in particular:
[Dr. Ahrens] pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.

That is how you get your faulty, cascading popular theory masquerading as fact. When you turn to physicists and psychologists and other people who've somehow thrown a "Dr." before their name instead of relying on the experts working in the field being questioned, you open the door to bias. So congratulate yourselves, creationists: it's not your fault; you're just aping what smarter people would admit are only their own ignorant opinions (they don't actually have hard evidence to back it up, so it remains the biological equivalent of an objection of heresay).

If it weren't for these people lending their credentials to the opposite conclusion of evidence, we'd be having a very different conversation about a lot of biology today in this friggin' country.

No, I'm not actually mad. I'm just enjoying my right to be profane. I feel like that stick figure in "Rejected" who watches the weird alien grow out of the other guy's face all calmly with a smile on his face and then just goes, "F---!" Only I can actually say "FUCK!"

Because the President can.

I've been meaning to post about this ruling for a while, not even regarding what joy I find in seeing Bush and Cheney held to the same standards as the rest of us plebes, just about the fact that the FCC totally got smacked down for being a bunch of hypocritical, fascist cocksuckers. Next up for similar disembowling (I would hope): the MPAA.

I've said it before--network TV could actually compete with cable and pay channels if there was an agreed upon watershed hour. Before that, you could have the all the revamped game shows and sitcoms that weren't too raunchy or whatever. After that, bring on the cusswords and nudity! If, as I've always said, we need to leave the TV-internet-movie-morality policing to parents, we can help them out a bit by giving them a time boundary. I am not at all opposed to that. And, if after that parents still complain, they'll look like even whinier babies for not meeting halfway. Genius!

Amanda's got a good riff on this, too.

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Dear God, New York Times, why do I even have to explain this to you?

THIS IS SCIENCE REPORTING. As in, "Hi! This is what science guys are doing with their brains...right now! Isn't it neat?"

THIS IS... I don't even know what that is. Okay, wait, now I've taken another look--do you know what that is? It's the caption to a graphic that went with the SCIENCE part of this article. I am still a tad staggered as to why this was published as an article in its own right. I didn't see it as part of the actual SCIENCE article and I was like, "What? That's it? Where's the rest of this? Why doesn't it go anywhere? Why is it only like 'Hur hur people write about invisibility a lot!'?"

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And can I pick another beef with the "Science" Times? I know it might just sound like I've no appreciation for form and function or at least that I am lacking a sense of humor, but tell me it's not a little "Okay, how much do you want babies, lady?" to have the author describe sperm as "fast and as cute as tadpoles"? Why my life, why?

"They have chubby teardrop heads and stylish, tapering tails, and they glide, slither, bumble and do figure-eights."

Someone shoot this person, please? Personification of sperm = the ick. This is like those birth-starts-at-conception idiots times three thousand--life, individuality and personality, apparently begin with those gosh-darn precocious little sperms. I might also point out that wow, sperms really have it tough and all, but what about the fucking uterus that has to host that goddamned kamikaze, drive-by impregnating force? You want a goddamned miracle of an "isn't it amazing we get a baby at all" nature? Look what the female body has to do to keep the stupid fucking thing alive! Compare attrition rates of zygotes to those of sperm, and you'll find them not too disimilar. God. Like the egg doesn't do shit make pregnancy happen. I know it's Father's Day coming up and all, but where was my article on ova at the beginning of May, fuckers?

::grumbles:: This is like that article about duck vaginas all over again. "Ducks have vaginas? You mean they don't just poop out eggs? This is worth studying? Are you sure we can't just focus on ducks and their regrowing phalli some more? Aren't those more important?"

Okay, live-blogging Heroes is way too much fun, but it's time to get serious. Because this shit won't stand. No matter how the damned show tries to distract me with the Sylar-pretty. And the everyone else pretty, too.

To Tim Kring and anyone else responsible for writing this show, I would like to show you something. It's called a textbook. They have many of these things at bookstores. You can order them online or go in person to retrieve one. One of the many subjects textbooks cover: biology. It's the study of life (another textbook to find would be a Latin 101 text), meaning you could make a habit of educating yourself about all sorts of things that the remarkable realm of all creation can and cannot be or do. If you read the occasional textbook, it would inform you that while some ridiculous fraction of DNA codes for nothing whatsoever (thus giving you a basis to extrapolate a theory that superpowers might be contained within), all parts of the human brain are used. Maybe not all at once, but there is not a bunch of dead space up there that you could safely knock out and still have a person. M'kay?

Now, if you're still with me, you might remember I used the term "DNA." It is what makes you you. To put it into terms you'll understand: DNA is the typewriter (computer, whatever); proteins are the script; cells are the actors using the script (proteins); many actors using many scripts from the same typewriter make a scene; and a scene is the whole organism that was printed out from that typewriter. You cannot fix the typewriter. The typewriter is not broken. The typewriter was lovingly crafted down from the Gutenberg press of old into a more efficient device. In fact, the typewriter is now the word processor. The typewriter can evolve, for good or bad, and you can change it, but you cannot "fix" it. There is no "fixed" state of typewriter. In the same way, you cannot "cure" DNA. You can treat it; you can alter it; you can mutate it; but it is not a disease. It is you. DNA IS PEOPLE. People, at least in the literal sense, are not a disease (no matter what Agent Smith and certain other philosophers might think about people metaphorically).

Last, people are not born with antibodies if their mothers don't have them. You do not have a baby so it will be born with antibodies to cure another baby of the same parental lineage. You can get genetically similar bone marrow, but not antibodies. Antibodies are formed by random couplings of light and heavy chains at birth and through antigen exposure. There are some similarities between siblings, but it's not perfect (hell, bone marrow isn't even perfectly matched most of the time and you have to have a lot fewer things matched there to be compatible than you would to have antibodies match). If you expose a baby in the womb to antigens for the sake of producing antibodies for its full sibling, you are a monster. Also, I'm not even sure that would work.

There. Science lesson over. Now, I scream. AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!