Cloning is a Silly Issue

As with Prohibition and Abortion, the Stem Cells and Cloning issues are handy distractions from real issues of national import, like infrastructure, economy, and war. The War on Drugs is every bit as successful now as was Prohibition in the 1920's. Abortion is a medical procedure that blatantly favors the rights of the host over the cluster of human cells growing within. Although abortion is periodically effectively outlawed, its incidence is never significantly reduced. Oddly, to mention stem cells brings a knee-jerk retort of "Cloning!" from some quarters. Cloning is only a dangerous issue to those who don't actually know what it is. Let's suppose that the technology were developed to create a healthy baby genetically identical to an existing adult. It would be an expensive procedure, and necessarily take as long as a normal gestation. But mutations occur with every cell division, so the original cloned blastocyst would be subtly different than the donor's original blastocyst, however perfect the methodology. The clone would also be raised in a different family, so we are now slightly farther apart then identical twins raised apart. Much more significantly, the gestation would be in a different environment (womb, timing, nutrition) creating many significant physical developmental differences between donor and clone. I laugh when movie clones have all the same freckles, scars and other developmental marks as the donor. A perfect clone would resemble the donor much like a normal sibling raised separately. Why would anyone bother? Even with livestock. The genetic and health dangers of monoculture tree and vegetable farming are bad enough as a cautionary tale. Most people well enough educated to develop cloning know enough about the principles of evolution to know that duplication of a genome (however ideal it may be) in bulk is a Very Bad Idea. But cloning research is a different issue. The research has very high potential for serendipitous results. As with the accidental discoveries of antibiotics and Teflon, one can only find things by looking for something in the same area, but rarely for the thing itself. Some of the possibilities include: * Growing cloned organs in vitro or in a host. Crichton wrote Congo based on the idea of cloned organs raised in host animals. * Learning enough about gestation to create artificial wombs would be of enormous benefit to premies and other medical problems. * Knowing how to start and stop cell and organ development could well lead to regrowing limbs and teeth and other organs directly in the host. Some legislators are moving to block such research, in case it may lead to the possibility of someday making a clone. But why? Soul? Find me two theologians who completely agree on when and where a soul is created and when it enters a body. Now find me as many who agree as scientists who agree that the soul is a product of biological structure and heuristic experience, a quickly growing number.

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Population: Quiver or Quake

The writers on this blog are generally aware of the problems caused by population growth, for example here and here. But there is a movement in modern American Fundamentalist culture that puts the Catholic baby mill mentality to shame. They call it the Quiverfull Movement. The idea is basically that a woman is a quiver full of potential babies, and therefore must produce as many babies as possible. Only when she runs out of eggs may she consider another career. I first read about it at FreindlyAtheist a few days ago, with typically scathing commentary. Then another friend sent me a link to this report on Salon.com. It began a generation ago:

Since 1985, Quiverfull has been thriving in the Southern and Sunbelt states. Although the conviction of "letting God plan your family" is not an official doctrine in many churches, there are signs of its acceptance in high places; the Rev. Albert Mohler, Theological Seminary president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, argued, for example, that deliberate childlessness was "moral rebellion" against God.
It is mainly a propaganda campaign,
Quiverfull has gained exposure through cable TV's fascination with extraordinarily large families, including the 18-child Duggar family. The Duggars, an Arkansas couple whose husband Jim Bob was a former Arkansas state representative, have appeared on several Discovery Health Channel specials about their immense brood and currently have a TLC reality show, "18 Kids and Counting," that focuses on the saccharine details of large family life.
So the principle of outbreeding your opponents is now a conscious tack of the American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. Thoughtful citizens of this world intentionally breed less. Therefore we are bound to be ever more seriously outnumbered with a couple of generations of this nonsense.

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MrTitanium with a Lead Pipe on the Patio

If the title didn't give you a Clue, then I just have to tell you that I like metals. I like melting metals. And I finally did a video of metal melting. Why? People are always asking me about how light titanium metal is. I was inspired by Theodore Gray and his Periodic Table Table to collect a set of samples of representative metal bars so as to show people. To let them feel for themselves. I started with Tungsten, because it is as heavy as gold and the hardest one to shape. I then collected and shaped matching bars of aluminum, titanium, bronze (95% copper), steel (97% iron), and magnesium (lighter than carbon). But absent the lead, I can't illustrate how much heavier tungsten (gold and platinum) are than lead. Pity I don't dare use silver, gold, or platinum bars. They would be funexemplars, but I fear short lived. But lead (Pb from the Latin Plumbum, as in plumbing, plumb-bob, etc) is now harder to get. This useful material has been in household use for almost 6,000 years. Children who likely drank from lead vessels gave us every advance in our civilization. But about a generation ago, it was declared toxic. So now it is getting hard to find outside of radiation labs, and expensive there. So, I decided to cast my own piece of fresh lead plate from some crusty and oxidized 19th century lead pipe. To feel the pipe is to understand its utility as a weapon; heavy and rigid, yet soft. Unfortunately, I didn't set up my camera to show me chopping up the lead pipe. I used a hammer and chisel to get through the crustiest parts (hundred year old drain pipe, eww). But tin snips work well on 1/4" thick lead. It cuts like cold butter. But shiny. And the piece I ended up with evoked a geological feature I'd visited: Shiprock in New Mexico. Magma oozed up through a crack in the Earth's crust forming a vane much like you see on my cast plate. An accidental demonstration in practical geology.

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Obama Backlash Growing Quickly

For the last eight years, the fear and doubt crowd have had one of their own in the head office. Comforted that science will be suppressed and church programs will be federally funded, the vocal conservatives fell into relative complacency. Or did I miss it? But now, the flood gates are opening. The "gun nuts" are buying up weapons and ammunition creating a price spike never before seen. Why? Because they are convinced that Obama is a communist who will outlaw their guns and tax their ammo. The anti-family-planning crowd is staging bigger sit-ins at health clinics. They are also submitting bills to local, state, and federal government to restrain the feared upsurge in availability of contraception and related information. He overturned the stem cell funding ban. Now discarded blastocysts are again eligible research subjects rather than just trash. The humanity! After all, they quail, if we don't respect trashed cell clusters as people, how can we possibly value adult citizens? Anti-science groups are pushing ever more vocally for science in schools to be properly tempered by religious counterpoints. Bills appear in state after state calling for "Academic Freedom," meaning to give the Bible equal weight as proven science in schools. Yes, this started long ago, but now they have greater urgency. The conservative media is calling Obama's initial tax cuts a hike, and his pushing through of the stimulus package (that had been in the works for months under his predecessor) as typical unrestrained Democrat unilateral spending. They can get away with it because they knew that the necessary spending will pass whether or not they approve it. Looking tough with no teeth is all they have, at present. Recall the political fury during the 1930's depression. A Democrat prevailed over strong Republican objections and turned the country around doing basically what Obama is now doing. He kept getting re-elected because he got results. Results directly opposite of all the dire predictions of the Republicans. Basically, the same arguments being made now against Obama.

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Inoculation for Atheism

In the shadow of all the antivax buzz lately, I'd like to recommend a process of intellectual inoculation for children. This post is based on Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy from The Meming of Life. It illustrates the benefit of teaching your children about religion, to protect them from its excesses. McGowan argues that parents who want their kids to follow in their secular (agnostic/atheist/ignostic/etc) footsteps should not obsessively protect them from all exposure to the churchy crowd. Rather one needs to gradually expose them to doses of gentle strains of all the relevant faith memes. If not, they will be vulnerable to the first virulent strain to come along when they begin independent thought, and have a "teen epiphany". (Excerpt)

Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: "Don't you know about Jesus?" If your child says, "No," the peer will come back incredulously with, "YOU don't know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!" Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don't end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.

A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, "Yeah, I know about Jesus"-and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.

It is best to start early. Bedtime stories should have consistency for the comfort of the child, and variety to hold the interest of the child. Maybe do a month of "how we got here" stories from various cultures. Kipling, Torah, Norse, Navajo, Hindu, and so on. Show the richness of cultures and the similarities of ideas that underlie all the world religions. But parents need to be prepared. Learn about oral traditions and the power of mythos. Read Joseph Campbell , Homer , and The Arabian Nights . Know of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and Odin , the Ring of the Nibelungen and the Bhagavad Gita , and certainly know the current local favorite, the Torah .

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