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Science to the Rescue |
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Who Loves Designer Vaginas?
Science and nature are mocking America's fickle God. Please,
no screaming.
Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
Wed June 20, 2007
What are you gonna do about it?
What are you gonna do about the fact that Mother Nature once again appears
to be thwarting and mocking and then grinning like a wicked divine trickster
at every cute rigid godly idea of how humans and animals are supposed to
move and hump and lick and behave, as loosely and, yes, rather bitterly
delineated in the Bible and by the Bush administration and Focus on the
Family and every other uptight sexually confounded person you have ever
known, et al. and ad nauseam?
What, furthermore, are you gonna do about human knowledge? About how science
insists on marching hell-bent forward with such astonishing speed and with
such incredible dexterity toward some glorious otherworldly nightmare
dreamscape of anima manipulation, a land where we can effortlessly
rescramble our genetic code and reconfigure this none-too-solid flesh as we
"play God" in so many bewildering ways the Christian right can't even figure
out where to aim its hollow, horrified indignation?
Here is the thing you must know: It is all changing with incredible,
butt-tingling speed. It is all fast becoming more than we ever imagined,
with ramifications we are only beginning to fully taste. There is no
stopping it. There is little that can slow it down. There is only the
single, looming question: How will you respond? Will you recoil and gag and
spit, or will you gurgle and swallow and smile?
Example: We are on the cusp of being able choose, should you so desire, the
exact size and length and speed and eye color and specific pleasing fur
markings of ... your dog. And your cat. And your baby (well, minus the fur).
And by the way, we have also invented new drugs to eliminate menstruation
and we can now grow designer vaginas in the lab and plastic surgery is more
common than bad sacrum tattoos and it's becoming increasingly obvious that
males of many species -- including our own -- are largely unnecessary for
procreation (but not, say, parallel parking, the lifting of heavy things or
buying you a nice postcoital breakfast).
Fascinating, that last thing. Have you heard? Scientists are discovering
more and more creatures, from sharks to bees to ants to turkeys to Komodo
dragons to turtles to sea bass, that can reproduce via parthenogenesis
(i.e., virgin birth; i.e., no father) either by actually switching sexes so
as to fertilize themselves, or via storing sperm for years for later use, or
because they're hermaphrodites, or by way of undertaking all manner of
clever unholy gender trickery so as to circumvent their own extinction and
confound creationists and ensure that all humans everywhere will continue to
look around and blink furiously and go, Wait wait wait, didn't we have some
of this figured out already? What the hell happened?
Wait, did I say designer vaginas? Indeed I did. Doctors can now grow new
vaginal tissue in a lab, from the original stem cells, for eventual
replanting (not to be confused with the hot trend in cosmetic vaginoplasty,
by the way, which is an entirely different fascination and has to do with
reshaping the labia for improved aesthetics and, you know, functionality.
God bless America).
Fabulous news for victims of birth defects and cancer and rare vaginal
disorders? You bet. Intriguing implications for all sorts of cosmetic
applications, not to mention what it might mean for transsexuals, not to
mention how close we are to doing the same thing with other organs -- and
even, eventually, entire limbs? One guess.
It is, we can all agree, a lot to take in. It is a great deal to attempt to
process in one tiny and oh-so-fleeting lifetime. The notion of human
eugenics alone is, for many, overwhelming enough, the idea that new parents
will soon have some sort of checklist at the gynecologist's office wherein,
when docs go in to tweak your fetus' DNA to eliminate diseases, you can also
easily choose not only its sex, but also the skin tone and hair color and
eye tint and muscle dexterity and 0-60 acceleration and number of cupholders
and overall genetic propensity toward an IQ that may or may not lead to
voting for aw-shucks warmongering neocon imbecile politicians. Neat! Or, you
know, not.
They are, quite obviously, the sort of advances that open so many cans of
ethical and spiritual worms it shakes us to the very core of what we
believe, of who we think we are and where we fit in and What It All Means.
You know, the good questions.
At the same time, it's really nothing new. It's little different than
previous periods of explosive growth in human knowledge that both titillated
and terrified the populace, such as, say, when Galileo pointed out (much to
the church's quivering rage) that not only is man's little spinning blue
spaceship not at the center of the universe, but we're actually so far out
on the fringes, so minute and insignificant in our Copernican swirlings that
we're really nothing more than a wisp of belly-button lint in the giant
laundry hamper of the gods. Talk about your existential angst.
Hence, religion. This (at least partially) explains why so many are so eager
to cling to religious dogma, to some sort of immovable, reliable framework
of understanding, something that can help make sense of it all, even if
making sense of it all involves shutting off your brain and killing your
divine intuition and soaking up giant gobs of blind faith so you don't have
to actually swim in those bloody murky confusing pools of ethics and meaning
and actually thinking for yourself. Mmm, numb groupthink. It's what's for
dinner.
There are only two real options. One is to hold tight to the leaky life raft
of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and
codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in
constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical
rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or
hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and
trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable
and just a little dangerous.
There is another option. You can choose nimbleness, lightness, a sly and
knowing grin to go with your wine and your vibrator and your never-ending
thirst for more and deeper information. It's possible.
You can refuse to let your brain, your soul lock down into one way of
looking at the world as you see all the science and genetic manipulation and
designer vaginas, all the insane, incredible possibility as merely more
evidence that we are, in the end, just one big karmic science experiment.
Is this latter choice frustrating and brutally difficult and will it
challenge every notion of self you hold dear? Hell yes. Is it the only way
to enjoy this bizarre circus of a planet without grabbing a gun and cowering
in the corner with your homophobia and your flag and your Army of Christ
brochure, dead certain the terrorists and gays and hippies are coming to eat
your soul for breakfast? Well, probably.
Because, baby, the changes are coming, harder and faster than ever, with all
sorts of juicy, terrifying, delightful implications. Really now, what are
you gonna do about it?
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Count Dracula not in the numbers,
physicist says
It may be the season for vampires, ghosts and zombies. Just
remember, they're not real, warns physicist Costas Efthimiou.
CNN Online
29 Oct 2006
Obviously, you might say.
But Efthimiou, a professor at the University of Central Florida, points to
surveys that show American gullibility for the supernatural.
Using science and math, Efthimiou explains why it is ghosts can't walk among
us while also gliding through walls, like Patrick Swayze in the movie
"Ghost." That violates Newton's law of action and reaction. If ghosts walk,
their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are
without substance, the professor says.
"So which is it? Are ghosts material or material-less?" he asks.
Zombies and vampires fare even worse under Efthimiou's skeptical microscope.
Efthimiou looked at the most prominent child-turned-zombie case that zombie
aficionados cite: the 1989 case of a Haitian 17-year-old who was declared
dead and then rose from the grave a day after the funeral and was considered
a zombie. The boy, who never died but was paralyzed and could not
communicate, had been poisoned with toxins from a relative of the deadly
Japanese pufferfish, later research showed.
Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one
person's blood each month -- turning each victim into an equally hungry
vampire -- after a couple of years there would be no people left, just
vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million
humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down
to zero by July 1602.
Take that Casper, Dracula and creepy friends.
All this may seem obvious, but to Efthimiou and other scientists, the public
often isn't as skeptical as you might think. Efthimiou points to National
Science Foundation reports showing widespread belief in pseudosciences --
such as vampires, astrology and ESP.
More than 1 in 3 Americans believe houses can be haunted, a 2005 Gallup poll
showed. More than 20 percent of Americans believe in witches and that people
can communicate with the dead. TV shows such as "Medium" and "Ghost
Whisperer" are popular.
"We're talking about a large fraction of the public that believes in
subjects that scientists believe are out of the question," said Efthimiou.
His paper is in an archive awaiting publication either in the journal
Physics Education or the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, he said.
University of Maryland physics professor Bob Park, author of the book
"Voodoo Science," said scientists have to keep telling the public what seems
all-too-obvious.
"There are things that we need to point out that are crap," Park said.
It's gotten so bad, Park has a hard time watching movies these days. Not
Efthimiou, who liked the horror movie "The Ring."
"I have nothing against movies," he said. "I have nothing against people who
like them, as long as they don't mix reality with fiction."
And Halloween? Both physicists will suspend disbelief when vampires, ghosts
and zombies come to their doors.
"I give them candy and I feign fright," Park said. "They enjoy it, what the
hell. The problem is the ones that never get over it."
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