Of the Culture of Life and Cognitive Dissonance

On Schaivo, Bush asserted that in such tricky ethical questions, we should err on the side of life. The House has voted in favor of stem-cell research (write your Reps and thank them – support is as important as dissent), and Bush promises to veto this act. How he reconciles this cognitive dissonance I do not know, but let's play Biology 101 and talk about stem cells.

First, stem cells are not derived from forced abortions of Christian babies. Scientists get them as necessary by-products of in vitro fertilization. Were they not used for bioresearch, they would be discarded (or frozen and unused for anything). So, no harm, no foul. This throwing away of stem cells, however, is overlooked by the theocrats – an important point raised by Ira Flatow on yesterday's TOTN Science Friday on NPR. Why the unjustifiable distinction here? Is it because, perhaps, a Manichean, Christian worldview can't account for grey areas and ethical subtlety?

If we follow the "all life is sacred and predetermined by god" argument of Bush et al to its logical conclusion, though, even a sperm or egg is sacred. This means that every woman of menstruating age commits spontaneous murder every month. While this fits well into the misogynist nonsense of Abrahamic religions, it causes the argument against stem cell research to crumble on its own warrant, and has no place whatsoever in our modern political discourse.

The Bush admin. claims a compromise in alloting for preexisting stem cell lines, as of Aug. 2001, to be used. But this ignores that the lines available are contaminated, as Carl Zimmer explains here. Compromise, my ass.

Meanwhile, Korean scientists (and let's acknowledge the prevalence of Xianity in South Korea), are pushing the stem cell envelope. Bush came to my college awhile back to talk about jobs. Responding to the shift of manufacturing jobs overseas, he spoke, in trademark hyperbole and bad grammar, of the potential of high-paying, highly skilled jobs in biotechnology. Why, then, does he oppose the foundation of these jobs? The community college system, I suppose, better start increasing their foreign language curriculum, since us future biologists will have to move overseas to do our life-saving, ethically based research.

It should come as no surprise that the radical faction of the Republican party in power is drawing its support from people who do, in fact, hate science, methodological naturalism, empiricism, and basically every advance in human thought in the last three centuries. From KS to PA to GA, we have the lying cancer of reformed creationism – Intelligent Design Creationism – making headway into our public school curriculum. The strategy of ID is to take a few examples of biochemical processes which evolutionary theory has yet to explain and build a supposed alternative "theory" to it, namely the idea that since we haven't figured it out, god did it. This is intellectual suicide, and in the global economy, the students subjected to this anti-intellectualism will suffer. Biological research is built around seeking the missing pieces of life's puzzle. The ID movement and the opponents of stem cell research – from which the theocrats draw support – seek to build ideas on, by definition, the missing pieces of the puzzle. This, as any freshman should be able to argue, is an argumentative fallacy - argument from incredulity. It should come as no surprise, then, that their ideas are complete, useless bullshit.