Saturday, October 25, 2008

Palin again - (sorry) but this needs to be said

So I know I have bashed on Palin and I have tried not to recently (she is doing it for me on her own!) but here is something I cannot ignore (see video below) and felt I needed to rant and share information that I know many won't know or look up. Palin suggests that fruit fly research is wasted "earmarked money". Pharyngula provides a great summary of fruit fly research and how instrumental fruit flies are for all sorts of research including autism which is incredibly ignorant of her not to know that without such research we cannot find cures for diseases like autism, which she and McCain have committed us to doing; fruit fly research has actually aided us already in understanding a genetic component or predisposition towards autism (Dawkins.net) Truly imbecilic! (and yes the actual project she is referring to is for fruit flies on California olive plants but that doesn't mean we don't find out lots of new information that is transferable to humans and advances scientific knowledge - we have lots of research on significant cash crops (especially for California crops) and this type of research is extremely beneficial for humans. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense to rip on spending lots of government money to help (mostly conservative) farmers but you know thats not gonna happen.



To Quote Pharynglua "Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies....we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important." But my personal favorite of his is "In this next election, we've got to choose between the 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice."

McCain and Palin have no idea how science works, how funding is used and what is actually required to accomplish goals that they so easily throw out as just assuming we will accomplish is enough to make it happen (like clean energy, energy independence, cure autsim, just to name a few); yet they constantly spout off numbers of money wasted on science and people believe them!

For more on this see (thanks to Tree of Life):

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