Evolutionary Prospects Look Good In The Short Term; Weird In The Long Term

Ken AshfordScience & TechnologyLeave a Comment

_42207552_evolution4Most of us realize that evolution got us to where we are.  But where will evolution take us?

According to Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics, mankind will split into two sub-species.  Basically, there will be two forms of "man" —

a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass …The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

They’ll be called, respectively, "humans" and "hasterts".

But that’s a long time off — about 100,000 years.  What can we expect in the nearer future — say, in the next 1000 years?

In the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds.

Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

Read the whole thing.

Animal Sex

Ken AshfordEducation, Sex/Morality/Family ValuesLeave a Comment

Locally-located, politically syndicated, two-time public office loser Nathan Tabor is mad at "the gay" again.  Even when it is gay animals.

Another Liberal Fairy Tale

By Nathan Tabor

The nation of Norway has now given us the first museum exhibition that claims that the birds, the bees, and other animals may be homosexuals.

The Oslo Natural History Museum exhibit is just one more example of propaganda invading the scientific world. Based on its assessment of same-sex attraction in the animal kingdom, the museum draws the conclusion that homosexuality cannot be considered “unnatural.”

Please, Nathan.  Have the balls to take a stand.  The curator of the exhibit, Geir Soeli, told Reuters: "Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them."

Now, is this "propaganda" or is it science, Nathan?  If you have evidence to suggest that homosexuality has never occured in the animal species, come right out and say so.

The exhibit’s project leader, Geir Soeli, was quoted as saying, “The sexual urge is strong in all animals…It’s a part of life, it’s fun to have sex,” Soeli made this statement in trying to explain the bizarre conclusion that homosexuality is rampant among animals.

Well, actually, all Geir was saying was that it exists among animals — not that it is "rampant".  Nice strawman, though.

In one exhibit, two stuffed female swans are depicted on a nest—a clear effort to promote the “Heather Has Two Mommies” school of thought.

Well, I doubt they have "Heather Has Two Mommies" in Norway, but that’s beside the point.

But let’s get real.  Is it totally outsidew the realm of possibility that two females might tend to an egg?

Meanwhile, a photograph shows a male giraffe mounting another giraffe—supposedly in expectation of sex.

Um.  Why else would a male giraffe mount another male giraffe?  I mean, think about it, Nathan.  Is there any other explanation for why it happens …or are you suggesting that it doesn’t happen?

There would seem to be a clear political reason for this kind of exhibition. In some countries, laws are on the books which call homosexuality a “crime against nature.” One Reuters report conceded that researchers haven’t paid much attention to animal homosexuality. The Reuters report concludes the disinterest might be the result of
“distaste, lack of interest or fear or ridicule.”

I imagine that’s probably why.

But perhaps the real reason for the disinterest is because it doesn’t pass the laugh test. If homosexuality were truly strong in the animal kingdom, there would be no animals left, since they would be unable and unwilling to reproduce.

Ha hah ha ha!  By that logic, Nathan, you must conceed that homosexuality doesn’t exist in the human kingdom, for just the same reasons.

As the Reuters report points out, homosexuality would seem to be a genetic dead-end.

Yes — the operative word being "seem".  The Reuters report goes on to say (and Nathan omits):

Among theories, males can sometimes win greater acceptance in a pack by having homosexual contact. That in turn can help their chances of later mating with females, he said.

And a study of homosexual men in Italy suggested that their mothers and sisters had more offspring. "The same genes that give homosexuality in men could give higher fertility among women," he said.

Forgot to write about that, huh, Nathan?

Soeli claims that bonobos, a type of chimpanzee, are all bisexuals. This is significant, because those who believe in evolution rather than in intelligent design can then make the case that we humans must all have bisexual tendencies too, since, in their view, we’re all descended from apes.

No, Nathan.  Nobody is making that case, because it’s shitty logic.  After all, all chimpanzees love bananas, but all humans don’t.  You’re a moron.

For years, homosexual activists have tried to make the case that there’s a special homosexual gene hiding in the gene pool.

No, they haven’t.  Name one homosexual activist who made that case.

Yet, that simply doesn’t explain why one human twin might pursue a homosexual lifestyle and another would not.

Wow.  You killed the strawman.

The trouble with museum exhibits like this one is that they try to sell children on the idea that homosexual sex is not an aberration—a claim that can lead to justification of same sex marriage.

And the Holocaust museum teaches us that there is such a thing as Jews, and that can lead to a justification of interreligious marriage.

With liberals such as these running scientific exhibits and some schools, we can fully expect a version of the beloved storybook “The Three Little Pigs” to give rise to “The Three Gay Pigs.”

You can?  You’re paranoid, dude.

It’s the natural progression, after all.

Hi, I’m Nathan Tabor.  And I can make a pun.

Brave New World

Ken AshfordScience & TechnologyLeave a Comment

A computer that can play (and win) at Tic-Tac-Toe?

Hardly seems newsworthy.  EVERY computer can do that, right?

But this computer is different.  It performs the calculations — not with computer chips — but through strands of DNA. 

It’s an important step on the way to artificial intelligence.  Bio-computers is a new area of science which attempts to blend the fields of computer science with biology, taking one step closer to cyborg territory.

BREAKING NEWS: EARTHQUAKE SHOCK HORROR!

Ken AshfordDisasters1 Comment

Siren_1 SEISMIC EVENT ROCKS WINSTON-SALEM AT 4:56 A.M.!!!

TRIAD RESIDENTS FLEE TO THEIR WORKPLACES AND SCHOOLS TO DISCUSS "THE GREAT ’06 EARTHQUAKE"!!!

Early Reports Suggest That Literally Dozens Of People Have Been Stricken With Mildly Interesting Albeit Somewhat Predictable Anecdotes

"Kinda Like When A Leper Fell Into My Arms" Says One Community Member (see below)

AREA MAN Wonders If Shaking Was Due To Giant Squirrels On His Roof (see below)

UP CLOSE: "Will The Light Drizzle Of Rain Make Matters WORSE?!?"

ANALYSIS:  "Could It Happen HERE?"  Fuck, it just did!!

The W-S Journal:

10094156_240x180A 2.6 earthquake classified as "micro" rattled the Triad area this morning, though there were no immediate reports of structure damage or injuries, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

One resident said the 4:56 a.m. quake felt like a large boom that lasted just a second or two. The epicenter was estimated at 3 miles east-northeast of Winston-Salem.

"We haven’t heard of there being any damage or anything, and typically you’re not going to experience that" with a quake this small, said Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the USGS in Golden, Colo.

She said though unusual for North Carolina, a quake of this magnitude would not be noticed in earthquake-prone California.

Winston-Salem police reported getting around 150 calls from locals wondering what happened.

UPDATE:  WXII says there were "reports of damage at Hanes Mall, but mall officials said the damage was minimal and released no further details."  Why the news blackout?  What are they trying to cover up at Hanes Mall?!?

[UPDATE UPDATE:  Emily says the street lights are out on Hanes Mall Blvd., so — all kidding aside — this is potentially dangerous]

Area residents relive the horror:

"Yes, I felt the quake — thought it was my husband or dog falling. Didn’t know until just now that there was a quake. We live in the Lewisville-Clemmons area off of Styers Ferry Rd." — Martha Robbins

"I felt it but thought it was thunder or that I was dreaming. My husband never moved…kept on snoring!" — Cecilia Hughett

"I woke up around 4:45 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I felt this general rumbling that grew and became a dull, but persistent shake. It was very disorienting; almost made you dizzy. It had a low rumble. The house appeared to sway slightly, and vibrate. I don’t know how long it really lasted but it seemed like about 10 seconds. Talk about scary." — W. Taylor Campbell III

"I’m sleep deprived. I, and my daughter, slept thru the whole thing." — Cangell

My favorite "eyewitness accounts" come from WXII viewers:

"well, i was sleeping soundly before a loud rumbling so rudely woke me. i didnt know what to do, so i got all 8 of my cats, and held them oh so gently. i called all my basketball players to see if they were doing swell. they said they were just fine, and asked how i was doing. i said i was fine. i also made sure they got my letter concerning my basketball class. and since i was up, i woke my darling wife and made her pick out my outfit for the day ahead. she did.. j crew, autumn edition."

"it felt like someone had bumped the house with a car."

"I thought for a second maybe it was squirrels jumping on the roof, but realized the squirrels here don’t weigh 1,000 lbs. which is what it felt like."

"I originally thought it was North Korea testing nuclear bombs again."

"It’s kida [sic] like my days in paraguay playing soccer and an earthquake hit and a lepper [sic] fell into my arms."

And while it did not invoke images of lepers falling into her arms, Emily experienced it, too:

I was actually awake when it happened.  As my normal paranoia of laryngitis has officially set in, I’ve been drinking water and tea nonstop during the day, and last night, I happened to get up for one of my five trips to the restroom, and after I had returned and gotten back into bed, I felt/heard the earthquake.  I actually saw my bedroom doorframe rattle and I heard the boom, making me think one of two things.  My first thought was that someone was bombing us, and I came to the hasty conclusion that if I was going to die, I’d rather die in my own bed.  My second thought was that a semi truck had overturned on 1-40, as Business 40 is ten feet from my back door.  I decided then that I’d probably imagined the whole thing, until NPR told me this morning that there had been a 2.6 earthquake in the Triad.  Anyway, it scared me.

The US Geological Survey has all the data.

And reports are flooding in from all over!

Community name Zip code Ave. dist. (km) Ave. intensity Reports
SMITHFIELD (VA) 23430 332 I 1
ADVANCE (NC) 27006 27 III 6
CLEMMONS (NC) 27012 19 III 30
LEWISVILLE (NC) 27023 21 III 12
MOCKSVILLE (NC) 27028 38 III 1
PFAFFTOWN (NC) 27040 16 II 1
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27101 1 III 12
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27103 11 III 121
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27104 9 III 75
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27105 5 III 4
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27106 9 III 35
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27107 11 II 8
WINSTON SALEM (NC) 27127 12 III 47
HIGH POINT (NC) 27262 23 I 1
HIGH POINT (NC) 27265 20 II 1
JAMESTOWN (NC) 27282 29 II 1
KERNERSVILLE (NC) 27284 12 II 4
GREENSBORO (NC) 27407 32 I 2
GREENSBORO (NC) 27410 29 II 2
GREENSBORO (NC) 27455 37 II 1
DENVER (NC) 28037 99 II 1

All around the town, there are literally dozens of area residents standing around water coolers at their workplaces, talking about the earthquake, and NO WORK IS GETTING DONE!!  Where the HELL is FEMA?!?

Using Google Earth — here was the epicenter, in relation to my house (click to enlarge).  They are 9.1 miles apart.

Wsearthquake_2

In all seriousness, it was nothing.  I felt nothing.  Neither did my dogs.  These things happen all the time, even in the Central U.S.

This Is Just Sad

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

NY Times:

TOPEKA, Kan., Oct. 12 — Grace Mosier lives with her mom and dad, goes to birthday parties, takes ballet classes and is just like a lot of other 6-year-old girls. Except that she happens to be obsessed with Dick Cheney.

“I really, really like him,” says Grace, who can tell you what state the vice president was born in (Nebraska), where he went to grade school (College View, in Lincoln) and the names of his dogs (Dave and Jackson). She gets her fix of Cheney fun-facts by visiting the White House Web site for children. It says there that his favorite teacher was Miss Duffield and that he used to run a company called Halliburton.

So when Mr. Cheney came to town Thursday, Grace was at Forbes Field, holding a little American flag and a sign that said, “Welcome, Mr. Vice President, pet Dave and Jackson for me.” She watched him get off Air Force Two, step into a car and speed off to a fund-raiser.

“Like a rock star coming to town,” says Dene Mosier, Grace’s mother. And while Mr. Cheney might be an unusual object for a 6-year-old’s fixation, it is probably less unusual here, in the heart of Cheney Country.

Milestones

Ken AshfordBush & Co., Iraq, North KoreaLeave a Comment

U.S. Population hit 300,000,000 at 6:58 a.m. today.

Coalition forces death toll hit 3,000.

Bush’s disapproval rating at an all-time high for CNN polling.

UPDATE:  More tidbits from the CNN poll:

64 percent disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq.

70 percent of women and 58 percent of men now oppose the war in Iraq.

60 percent of Americans believe the situation with North Korea can be resolved using only economic and diplomatic measures.

More than 70 percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq is making it harder for the United States to deal with North Korea.

The Unreal Perception Of Beauty

Ken AshfordSex/Morality/Family ValuesLeave a Comment

Heather pointed it last week.

Today, A-list bloggers Matt Yglesius and Ezra Klein are talking about it, the latter writing:

You’ve got to click the link — it’s an extraordinary clip. Weirdly, though, this video — where a plain model is heavily made-up, lighted, and digitally altered to become a stunningly beautiful billboard creature — almost democratizes the standards of beauty by showing how anyone could become a superstar in print, and how false and superficial the ending "product" is. More pernicious, at least to my eyes, are movies and television, which rely on some of the same trickery, but mainly "cheat" by hiring outliers on the beauty scale and then placing them in shows and scenes that retain the atmospherics of normality. By skimming actresses from the 99.999th percentile of attractiveness and then using them in apparent representations of reality, they create an ideal and expectation that, while theoretically more achievable than the photoshopped model from the video, is actually far less realizable.

See what they’re talking about: here or here.

Through photo manipulation and other modern techniques, we’re creating a society where the standard of beauty is so high that it is unobtainable.  What’s the effect?  From the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty:

Girls can grow up feeling inadequate, fret about their bodies and their looks and feel bad if they don’t conform to the pictures of beauty they see projected on them from TV screens, billboards and ads. They can feel they need to change themselves, to diet away their natural shape, exercise compulsively and have cosmetic surgery to feel acceptable. Every girl and woman recognises that beauty is important. But often they do not see themselves as attractive because their uniqueness has not been reflected back to them. What they see in their mirror is someone who is unlike the models.

Of course, the models themselves don’t even look like the models (as this before/after demonstrates — click to enlarge):

Ba

Time to get real.

Local Arts News

Ken AshfordLocal Interest2 Comments

  1. Zombieprom_1Eve Ensler was is in town.  I’ll be unable to see her.
  2. Changes at the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem.
  3. Hey.  There’s a current production of On Golden Pond the people seem to like.  Be nice if more people could come to see it.  Audience reaction has been good.  (See ad in right sidebar)
  4. Old people in Maine not your cup of tea?  How about "living dead" high school students?  Theatre Alliance’s production of Zombie Prom opens this week.  Info here.

Not-so-local arts news:  Newsweek has an article on My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a show I blogged about over a year ago, and which I might see in its very limited NY run.

Bush And The Religious Right

Ken AshfordBush & Co., GodstuffLeave a Comment

CBS:

David Kuo is an evangelical Christian and card-carrying member of the religious right, who got a job in the White House in the president’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He thought it was a dream-come-true: a chance to work for a president whose vision about compassionate conservatism would be matched with sweeping legislation to help the poor.

But Kuo says the so-called compassion agenda has fallen short of its promise and he blames President Bush for that in his new book. As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, he also says the White House was a place that cynically used religion for political ends and that White House aides ridiculed the very Christian leaders who helped bring Mr. Bush to office.

Yup, the White House ridicules the religious right.  That’s gotta hurt.

Married Couples Now A Minority

Ken AshfordSex/Morality/Family ValuesLeave a Comment

Interesting:

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.

***

The census survey estimated that 5.2 million couples, a little more than 5 percent of households, were unmarried opposite-sex partners. An additional 413,000 households were male couples, and 363,000 were female couples. In all, nearly one in 10 couples were unmarried. (One in 20 households consisted of people living alone).

And the numbers of unmarried couples are growing. Since 2000, those identifying themselves as unmarried opposite-sex couples rose by about 14 percent, male couples by 24 percent and female couples by 12 percent.