reproduction
pharyngula | December 21, 2011Menstruation is a peculiar phenomenon that women go through on a roughly monthly cycle, and it's not immediately obvious from an evolutionary standpoint why they do it. It's wasteful — they are throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue. It seems hazardous; ancestrally, in a world full of predators and disease, leaving a blood trail or filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea. And as many women can tell you, it's uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating. So why, evolution, why?
One assumption some people might make is that that is just the way…
pharyngula | July 16, 2011I guess the Catholic church is concerned about the rights of breast cancer tumors: they probably identify too much with a deadly metastatic disease, and don't want to seem them hindered. At least, that's the only way I can interpret the decision of the Toledo, Ohio diocese to ban all support for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Or maybe it's just because breast cancer primarily affects women, so letting them die is of minimal consequence to them.
Their published reasoning is almost as ludicrous as that. Church officials say they won't support Komen because 1) some of the money might go to…
pharyngula | June 27, 2011It's been a rough weekend. It was a rough night, with little sleep. This morning I had the double whammy of a doctor's appointment and a dentist's appointment. So I'm feeling a little cranky, and my teeth are all coated with this gummy gritty cherry-flavored fluoride goop. You don't want to cross me today.
And then some idiot going by the name 'eident9' charges into a year-old thread and first demands an audience with me, and then demands an apology. WTF? This is a blog. Just post your comment and be done with it. And what bug has crawled up his butt suddenly? He says, "Recent matters have…
pharyngula | May 28, 2011Read this horror story of a failed pregnancy.
I was taking an afternoon nap when the hemorrhaging started while my toddler napped in his room when I woke up to find blood gushing upward from my body. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was experiencing a placental abruption, a complication my doctor had told me was a possibility. My husband was at work, so I had to do my best to take care of me and my toddler on my own. I managed to get to the phone and make arrangements for both of my children before going to a Chicago hospital.
Everyone knew the pregnancy wasn't viable, that it couldn'…
pharyngula | May 27, 2011It's amazing what religion can do. In this case, it motivated some dim old fart who ought to have been loafing about watching Glenn Beck and drowning his anger with a six-pack of Bud to go out and try to murder gynecologists. He didn't actually succeed, fortunately: he was playing with his gun in his cheap room at the Motel 6 when it went off and sent a bullet flying into the room next door…so bad-ass that he is, he called up the front desk to mention that he was worried he might have hit someone else.
Then the police came and found out what he was really up to. He didn't want to accidentally…
pharyngula | April 21, 2011We have a weekend of reason and lunacy coming up. On the reason side, atheists will be gathering in Iowa to discuss science and a sensible interpretation of the universe, taking advantage of a holiday none of us find particularly interesting. On the other side, that holiday celebrating the magical 'death' and imaginary resurrection of a weird Jewish mystic is regarded as also a good time to come out and oppress people. As is traditional, mobs of fanatics will turn out on Good Friday to surround local women's clinics and harass and threaten the patients. Good Friday is not a good day to get a…
pharyngula | April 9, 2011Brace yourselves for a new onslaught of ridiculous Republican anti-woman bills. Alabama is working on bills to declare fetuses 'persons' by fiat — they'll just legally redefine humanity to be a fertilized ovum and all derivatives thereof. They'll probably get it passed, too.
I suppose if we could get enough dumbass legislators together to declare that vegetables are persons, we'd have to start treating carrots as if they were real people, like laborers and single mothers and college students and Mexicans and all those others the Republicans hold sacred. It won't make them so, though, not that…
pharyngula | April 1, 2011This is how to handle a depressed person:
On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.
On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide.
Don't get pregnant, ladies! It means that every risk you might take becomes a criminal offense! I always thought it was a joke to…
pharyngula | March 31, 2011I don't think I do — her history of policies in the state just screams racist. But she has suddenly become a concerned egalitarian, signing a law to protect minorities and women. She says. The law is actually designed to increase control of the reproductive rights of women and minorities — it criminalizes abortion if it is done for certain reasons.
Under the new Arizona statute, doctors and other medical professionals would face felony charges if they could be shown to have performed abortions for the purposes of helping parents select their offspring on the basis of gender or race.
First,…
pharyngula | March 23, 2011I was not kind in my assessment of Jesse Bering's story about the evolutionary psychology of homophobia. He was quite irate with me and several other people who pointed out the tattered fabric of his evidence. Now he has gone scurrying back to the author of the study he described, Gordon Gallup, and gotten his take in a rather tendentious interview. Between the two of them, unfortunately, they still can't manage to address anyou of our criticisms. It's a very weird conversation: here's how he handles me.
One common complaint lodged against evolutionary psychology is that its methods, which…
pharyngula | March 11, 2011For a party that campaigns on small government and reducing interference in private lives, the Rethuglicans sure are ready to heap more restrictions on women. Look at the consequences of Nebraska's anti-choice law.
In Nebraska, one law already in existence heaped needless trauma on a mother's tragedy. Thirty-four-year-old Danielle Deaver was 23 weeks pregnant when she faced a fate "worse than your own death"— her baby would not make it. Her water broke early and, without amniotic fluid, the fetus would not develop lungs to survive outside the womb. Deaver and her husband decided they wanted…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011There is a virtue to Christian prudes. They make me aware of ideas I might otherwise have missed. Conservative evangelical groups in the UK are whining about sex ed books that are too 'explicit' for their taste.
Children as young as five are being shown "explicit" images to teach them about sex, an evangelical Christian pressure group has claimed.
The Christian Institute has complained that at least 10 books or teaching packs used in English primary schools for lessons on sex and relationships, contain images or descriptions that are "obviously unsuitable".
Its report, Too Much, Too Young…
pharyngula | March 2, 2011The fetal test has come and gone with a quiet flop. They didn't actually have a 5-week pregnant woman to test, and it failed to work for a 9 week fetus.
Two young mothers were given ultrasounds in a packed room at the Statehouse as part of a House committee meeting Wednesday. The heartbeat of a fetus at 15 weeks gestation was easily detected. The heartbeat in a fetus of nine weeks gestation was difficult to detect.
But have no fear! The technology will inevitably improve, and they'll be able to detect heartbeats earlier and earlier. And then they'll figure out how to test for expression of…
pharyngula | March 2, 2011This is a 5-week-old human fetus.
It's an awesomely cool period of development. Organogenesis is well under way, segmentation is completely, limb buds are forming. The heart is beating, which is neat, but then you have to keep in mind that you can tease a heart apart into individual cells in a dish and the cells will throb, so it's not exactly a magical indicator of sentience. Also, the embryo is only 2-3 millimeters long, which I find to be a highly evocative size: that's exactly how big my zebrafish embryos are when they have the same level of organization, with segments and organ…
pharyngula | February 24, 2011The economy sucks, so why are Republicans making such obnoxious noises over abortion and birth control lately? (That was an entirely rhetorical question, and it's obvious why: they've got no solutions other than feeding the rich some more, so they're carrying out a massive campaign of distraction.) Look what Nebraska is poised to do!
Last week, South Dakota's legislature shelved a bill, introduced by Republican state Rep. Phil Jensen, which would have allowed the use of the "justifiable homicide" defense for killings intended to prevent harm to a fetus. Now a nearly identical bill is being…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011We have an informal request here at scienceblogs that everyone avoid putting profanity in our article titles, since those may appear on everyone's site, and some people find it objectionable. Fair enough; unfortunately, in this case, all I could think of to put up there was a paragraph's worth of obscenities. So I left it blank.
House Rethuglicans have just voted to deny all funding to Planned Parenthood.
As part of their stated mission to focus on jobs (specifically, the job of preventing women from getting healthcare), House Republicans this afternoon voted 240-185 to bar federal funding…
pharyngula | February 15, 2011I'm only a few miles away from the Dakotas — if HB1171 passes, I could put on some hospital scrubs (camouflage, you know), lurk quietly in a hospital, and when some ob-gyn pokes his or her head out, BAM, justifiable homicide.
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 22-16-34 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such…
sastyk | February 1, 2011There's a great scene in the book _Cheaper By the Dozen_ (which had almost nothing to do with the recent movie Steve Martin was in, although there's a fairly good old one) in which Lillian Moller Gilbraith, mother of 12 (11 surviving) is offered by a joking friend as the ideal host for a Planned Parenthood organizational meeting. The PP representative, who has been told that Gilbraith is a model organizer, a professional woman and a leader in her community - but not that she has 11 kids. "Within 15 Miles of Organizational Headquarters!" announces the representative of Planned Parenthood in…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.
I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:
Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully,…
pharyngula | January 17, 2011There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it's so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It's just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.
I've just finished reading an article titled "Darwin's Rape Whistle: Have women evolved…