Avram's journal

Technically I’ve missed Blog for Choice day, but it isn’t really tomorrow till after I’ve slept, and there’s something that’s been bugging me.

Why do people, even those who support abortion rights, talk about conception? It’s a pre-scientific concept. The Feast of the Conception dates back to the 7th century, long before anybody had any notion of how the mechanics of reproduction worked at a cellular level. It was clearly just a word that meant something like when life begins, so people who say “life begins at conception” aren’t actually saying anything meaningful.

People who try to nail conception to a particular stage of cellular reproductive development can’t even agree on which stage it is. Same say it’s fertilization, some say implantation, some say the whole period from fertilization to implantation.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to use actual scientific terminology when discussing matters of science? Personally, I think anyone who places the point of individual life beginning prior to gastrulation just hasn’t given the matter any serious thought.

I’ve got links about all of them in my Del.icio.us account:

• Stephen Kilnisan, jeweler and techie, is also the unofficial historian of New York’s diamond district, the stretch of 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues through which most of the diamonds sold in the US first pass:

  His eye is caught by two gentlemen huddled in conversation outside 11 W. 47th St. “You see that?” he says. “They’re making a deal.” He narrates the transaction as it unfolds. “One of them pulls out a pouch containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. They haggle for a while, then the handshake. Deals are still made on handshakes here.” In fact, according to the Diamond Dealers Club bylaws, “Any oral offer is binding among dealers, when agreement is expressed by the accepted words ‘Mazel and Broche’ [‘good luck and a blessing’] or any other words expressing the words of accord.” Even more remarkably, since the Talmud prohibits resolving conflicts in non-Jewish courts, disputes on 47th Street are not handled by civil courts but upstairs at the Diamond Dealers Club, where a board of arbiters presides over oral hearings (notes are never taken and the hearings are never recorded) and deliver judgments based on common sense, trade customs, and principles of Jewish law. For generations, this is how diamond dealers throughout the world have conducted business, and it continues to be the principal mode of operation on 47th Street.

• The Monkey Chow Diaries — can a human being subsist on nothing but monkey chow? Probably not.

• The Mini-Microsoft blog’s FAQ on Microsoft’s review, promotion, and job-change process.

• The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant — Walter Tschinkel of Florida State U’s Dep’t of Biological Science made casts of the structure of ant’s nests by pouring orthodontal plaster into them. He also tried using metals, thus learning on all our behalf the valuable lesson: “Pouring red-hot aluminum in the bottom of a 2-meter pit runs the risk of having ones socks catch on fire from the radiant heat.” There are photos! Of the ant’s nest models, not the burning socks.

Wow. So, that Kitzmiller v Dover School District decision (that’s a PDF), great reading, eh? What, you haven’t been reading the 139-page decision on the Pennsylvania Intelligent Design suit? Here, some highlights:

Pages 24, 25:

Dr. Haught testified that this argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley and defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich admitted that their argument for ID based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is the same one that Paley made for design. […] The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is God.

Page 28:

Moreover, in turning to Defendants’ lead expert, Professor Behe, his testimony at trial indicated that ID is only a scientific, as opposed to a religious, project for him; however, considerable evidence was introduced to refute this claim. Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. […] As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.

Page 137:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

And here’s a great bit. Michael Behe, expert witness for the defense and author of ID book Darwin’s Black Box (in which he claims that the immune system is irreducibly complex and therefore cannot possibly be explained by evolution) posted in an ID blog about his testimony:

The cross examination was fun too, and showed that the other side really does have only rhetoric and bluster. At one point the lawyer for the other side who was cross examining me ostentatiously piled a bunch of papers on the witness stand that putatively had to do with the evolution of the immune system. But it was obvious from a cursory examination that they were more examples of hand waving speculations, which I had earlier discussed in my direct testimony. So I was able to smile and say that they had nothing more to say than the other papers. I then thought to myself, that here the NCSE, ACLU, and everyone in the world who is against ID had their shot to show where we were wrong, and just trotted out more speculation. It actually made me feel real good about things.

Here’s how the judge saw things (page 78):

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.” (23:19 (Behe)).

We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution.

All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2% of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative — the chimpanzee.

New developments in the neurology of love:

When you first fall in love, you are not experiencing an emotion, but a motivation or drive, new brain scanning studies have shown.

I wasn’t aware that motivations and drives weren’t considered emotions. I guess they’re lower on Manslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Early on in a relationship, the images showed that the brain seems to be very focused on planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward, says Fisher, mediated by regions called the right caudate nucleus and right ventral tegmentum. The same regions become active when a person enjoys the pleasure of eating chocolate, she adds.

There are also patterns that resemble aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder. [...]

Color me surprised. Then erase that color, ’cause I’m not surprised at all!

The team has since moved on to examining the final phase of romance. "We are now looking at people who have just been rejected," says Fisher.

Contact Helen Fisher, Anthropology Department, Rutgers University, all fifty or so of you.