reproduction
pharyngula | June 13, 2007Why is the reality-based community ignored? Because the other side, the Jesus-loving wingnut loons, is committed to defending idiocy, while the Democrats have a complete lack of any guiding principle, other than to get elected. Nick Coleman has another perfect example, not that there's any shortage of them, in the defeat of a sensible bill here in Minnesota.
In a last-minute piece of strong-arming that went almost unnoticed, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty forced DFL leaders of the Legislature to drop a comprehensive and moderate sex-education proposal from the $14 billion education bill that…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007The only thing you need to read today: the first hand account of an doctor, explaining why he does abortions: it's because someone has to give those oppressed by circumstance a choice.
By 1967 I was a third year medical student, still with no visible means of support, and we were pregnant with our third child. It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007Add hammerhead sharks to your list of animals that don't need males. A captive bonnethead female in Nebraska gave birth in 2001, and genetic testing has revealed that it was produced by parthenogenesis. In a way, this isn't a surprise: I could have told her that Nebraska is no place for a self-respecting shark to look for a boyfriend.
Parthenogenesis had been suspected, because the shark had been isolated from males for at least 3 years, and because she lacked the obvious bite marks that result from shark sex (which is another reason a lady shark might not want to have anything to do with…
pharyngula | May 19, 2007South Dakota: very conservative, very Republican, very concerned with women's reproduction, and none of it in a good way. This story just personifies the worst of South Dakota's repressive residents perfectly.
A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.
Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking.
Court documents mention five possible victims. Three…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007One of my favorite blogs around is The Well-Timed Period, and it's unfortunate that it doesn't get more attention: it's greatest strength also militates against it achieving widespread popularity (which is more a flaw in how the internet and blogs work than with the blog itself). It's so beautifully focused — it's all reproductive health all the time.
For example, Ema mentions that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has been playing legalistic games to hold up the use of RU-486. He makes claims like this:
The reported risk of death associated with RU-486 is ten times greater the risk associated with…
pharyngula | April 24, 2007Even if you personally feel that you could never support abortion, here's a powerful personal argument for abortion rights — it's pretty much today's essential read.
(via Majikthise)
pharyngula | March 14, 2007That article I wrote on the Albert Mohler's bizarre endorsement of gene therapy for gay fetuses got quoted in an AP article on the subject. Unfortunately, they don't provide enough info for readers to find their way back here, but it does give a good range of perspectives anyway.
pharyngula | March 10, 2007Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, now thinks that high-tech, fetal research is OK — if it leads to a cure for homosexuality.
If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
Note that this is not your old-school, naive eugenics he is proposing; developing a prenatal test for…
pharyngula | March 6, 2007The indecency in public schools is out of control:
"...during school hours in a classroom with an experienced teacher present, two sixth graders completed the act of intercourse...at least ten students were witnesses. No disciplinary actions were taken against the teacher... All teachers were told to keep quiet."
The class that incited these students to publicly engage in illicit sex acts? Shop. Those mortise and tenon joints sure are provocative, and I guess the shop teacher wasn't named Mr Adler.
(Yes, I know this is a serious issue, but I think the school was right to avoid addressing it…
pharyngula | February 28, 2007Well, not really—but the UK government will tolerate and support research into human-animal hybrids. No one is interested in raising a half-pig/half-man creature to adulthood, but instead this work is all about understanding basic mechanisms of development and human disease.
Scientists want to create the hybrid embryos to study the subtle molecular glitches that give rise to intractable diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis. The researchers would take a cell from a patient and insert it into a hollowed out animal egg to make an embryo, which would be 99.9% human and 0.…
pharyngula | February 20, 2007It's not looking good for the authors of a study that evaluated the efficacy of prayer. The authors were Rogerio A. Lobo, Daniel P. Wirth, and Kwang Y. Cha, and now look at what has happened to them (link may not work if you don't have a subscription to the CHE).
Doctors were flummoxed in 2001, when Columbia University researchers published a study in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine that found that strangers' prayers could double the chances that a woman would get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization. In the years that followed, however, the lead author removed his name from the paper…
pharyngula | January 23, 2007When I was a wee young lad, I remember making crystal radios and small-scale explosives for fun. The new generation can do something even cooler now, though: how about isolating your very own stem cells, using relatively simple equipment. It's fun, easy, and educational!
Step 3, "get a placenta", does rather gloss over some of the practical difficulties, though, and does require planning about 9 months ahead.
pharyngula | January 19, 2007Bioethics is an important subject—it's too bad it gets sidetracked with nonsense driven by religious dogma and ignorance. One issue is the use of human-animal chimerae in research, which was enough to get our flibbertigibbet idiot of a president incensed, but I don't see the problem. It's not as if having weirdly modified experimental mammalian embryos in a dish is a danger to people—some devout Christian woman does not have to worry that she might bump into a lab cart and have a swine-man zygote splash into her vagina and crawl into her womb, but that's exactly what the hysterics seem to…
pharyngula | January 19, 2007
Oh, sure…one moment it's all long throbbing organs pumping slickly in and out of orifices, and then the next thing you know, you've got a whole faceful of babies and little larvae giving you that evil demonic look. This is what happens after the squid orgies.
While most squid seem to lay their eggs in masses on the sea floor, Gonatus onyx is a deep sea squid that hangs on to its clutch of several thousand eggs, swimming along with them dangling in filmy sheets, occasionally pumping its tentacles to aerate them. The movies filmed from a submersible are spectacular (some are available here).…
pharyngula | January 14, 2007I couldn't resist. Shakespeare's Sister has a satirical post on the female reproductive tract as a source of gay rays, and evolgen chimes in, noting the similarity of her diagram to the nematode vulva (it's true—if mammalian vulvas are radiating gayness, nematodes are even more common; Ben Shapiro is probably crawling with hermaphroditic nematodes, all oozing sexual ambiguity all over him). So I had to repost my summary of the evolution of the mammalian vagina, and I want you to look at the diagram of Hox gene expression in the female reproductive tract. It's like a rainbow! Admittedly, there…
pharyngula | January 10, 2007
There's an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here's a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.
It's a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in…
pharyngula | December 31, 2006The daughter has put up a post with her thoughts on abortion—I swear I have not given her any instruction or even talked about the subject with her, but somehow she has developed roughly the same opinion on it that I have…which means, of course, that the kooks will whine at her. I can't even imagine what her former peers at high school will say, but it might be explosively fun. There's a little bit of Mell in that girl.
(Speaking of Mell, you all know that this is the last day of one of my favorite webcomics, Narbonicon, right?)
pharyngula | December 21, 2006
I've just read the article on the parthenogenetic Komodo dragons in Nature, and it's very cool. They've analyzed the genetics of the eggs that have failed to develop (the remainder are expected to hatch in January) and determined that they were definitely produced without the aid of a male.
We analysed the parentage of the eggs and offspring by genetic fingerprinting. In the clutches of both females, we found that all offspring produced in the absence of males were parthenogens: the overall combined clutch genotype reconstructed that of their mother exactly. Although all offspring were…
pharyngula | December 20, 2006Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on 'em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of…