CDarwin

I feel like a I need to point out that it's a pretty safe statement that most people are ill-informed, period (which is a little redundant with the period that's going to be right after this parenthesis, but shush). A lot of "evolutionists" don't really understand what evolution is, either.

Quite to the contrary, race-based drugs threaten to lead to "one-size fits all" medicine. "Here Mrs. Okigawa, have some Asiasprin. You need Scotsocil Mr. Smith!" There is more variation among members of a 'race' than between 'races.' By looking at race as a defining factor you just pigeon-hole people to a physiological stereotype that's potentially much more harmful than the general assumptions doctors make on the basis of health, sex, etc. We're not talking about morality, we're talking about efficacy. I don't know why everyone seems so bent on painting this as "PC vs good science." "Race" is bad science. That's not what I'm talking about. Obviously, sickle-cell drugs are going to benefit mostly "black" people. What I'm talking about is using resources to make one heart drug for "black" people and one heart drug for "white" people when it's extremely unlikely that either drug would be very much more effective in either group than it would in the other and that by tagging the drug with a race you potentially deny it to the people who might need it. Again, not what I'm talking about. You also wouldn't say that small-pox drugs only work on Native Americans so we're not going to give them to the stray African who gets smallpox, either, and that's more analogous to associating drugs with race. That's a nice idea, but I've yet to see a single example of where that's been the case, and from what I know about "race" and how flimsy of a concept it is I doubt it ever will be. There's just so much more individual variation than "racial" variation, and "race" is just so tied to non-biological factors. That's my thesis, I suppose. I'm not saying that racial drugs are impossible, and if they'd work, fine; I'm just exceedingly skeptical.

Well if you're going to be unreasonable.

How would we pay for our stamps?

Pretty much. No one ever gets outraged about "bringing the contractors home." Obviously your first proposal could be important, but by the very nature of back room deals of that sort, it would be hard for any of us to evaluate how important the military-industrial factor is. Some of these are foreign firms too, aren't they?

Maybe here's another way to approach the question: If assuming a person's genetics based on what your society calls their "race" and prescribing them certain drugs accordingly helps 50% of your patients but hurts 30%, is it worth it? Since we've already established that "race" is imperfect, might relying on it do almost as much harm as good due to how complex the relationship between ethnicity and genetics is?

Well, you do. That was the point of all my parentheses. I'm just asking how important a politician's science stances are to whether or not you'd vote for them versus their economic or foreign policy stances.

I can see the validity of that argument, although there are certainly problems there too. What works frequently in people from Nigeria might be completely different than what works most commonly in people from Ethiopia. Again, the cultural construct of "race" is an impotent proxy for the truly useful information, and by focusing on it we risk missing what's really important. I guess that's what I'm getting at. Where?

I doubt that a drug could really be made that would help only one "race" but not any other. The "race" we decided to call "black" isn't so genetically homogeneous that a drug can be tailored to suit only "blacks" and not work for many "whites" and "Asians" as well. BiDil is a good example of that. When you make a "race-specific" drug, you're just excluding people who the drug could potentially help. But I doubt that's possible, because you're working with a concept that's basically biological fictional. And it would be just as much a waste of time. Humans have interbred like crazy. The average "African-American", for example is 1/5 "European." How "African" would you have to be for an "African" drug to work for you? See "Racing around, getting nowhere" from the October 2005 issue of Evolutionary Anthropology. Erm.. no. They're both pretty much made up. Variation exists, absolutely, but it exists in a continuum. Cultures arbitrarily decide where to draw lines through this continuum and make "races." Now we're trying to take those arbitrary lines and make medicines with them, and it's counter-productive because it's the variation that matters.

I just played Candy Land.

Or if you want a field that's a little more legitimate, there's always ethnobotany or medical anthropology (both disciplines of anthropology). Really look into an anthropology major. A lot of people don't think of it unless they want do forensics or Margaret Mead sorts of things but it's a really a very broad field. There are plenty of chances to fuse all sorts of diverse interests within an anthropological context.

Are these different "kinds" of selection or different results of selection? It seems like the mechanisms would be the same, the differences come from the environment and the like. I'm not really making a point, just observing that.

There was an article about BiDil, the "race-based" drug for congestive heart failure in in August's Scientific American. What are some opinions on the concept of race-based medicines? Personally, I think it's a terrible idea. It's supposed to be part of pharmacogenetics, medicines tailored to a person's specific genome, which is fine, but race is a horrid proxy for genetics. Race is a concept with genetic factors, but more importantly cultural and historical ones. If 20th century anthropology has produced anything, that realization is it. The story behind BiDil isn't encouraging either, but that's anecdotal. We should be highly skeptical of drugs of this sort even with more legitimate origins.

Phil: I'm afraid I'm not quite literate enough to delve understandably into those articles. Are we talking about "mutation pressure" here, where a number of mutations will on their own drive "progressive" evolution? I suppose that would take only with neutral mutations? Enough neutral mutations accumulate so that the organism is mostly defined by them? But selection acts on whole individuals, not just individual traits or genes. Wouldn't a single mutation of selective value or detriment mess the whole "neutral" thing up, because some "neutral" traits would end up getting preferred over others because of the selective value of some of the organisms other traits? It seems like mutation pressure's role in evolution should be reduced because of that. I realize that's a lot of reasoning based on a whole lot of supposition and half-understanding.

After the second Republican presidential debate in which the candidates were asked if they believe in evolution, Mike Huckabee expressed surprise that the question would even be asked. "[i'm] not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book." Does he have a point? In politicians running for high public office (like say, President of the United States), how important are their science stances to how you're likely to vote? Do they trump other issues? Would you elect a President who agreed exactly with your economic beliefs and your stance on the Iraq War and illegal immigration, but didn't (or did, I suppose, if you go that way) believe in global warming? What about one who was a Creationist? What about a President who wanted to cut NASA (or not; you get my point)? Can a scientifically illiterate leader still be a good leader? I realized we've had conversations that danced around this before, but I don't think the question has ever been directly posed; at least not recently. I think that in the world we live in today, and with the challenges that face us today, science illiteracy, especially life and earth science illiteracy, may be more dangerous that foreign policy illiteracy. We need a President who's going to push emissions controls, push biodiversity, push agricultural sustainability, and push evolution education because it's the single greatest tool out there for understanding why the previous three initiatives are important and making them happen. Saving our golden society from terrorists and brown skinned manual laborers isn't going to be worth much if New York is under water, and it may not even be possible if the root causes of poverty aren't addressed around the world, and that's what science promises.

I'm not so sure about that analogy. Most "backwards hill-people" of the type you describe took a more pragmatic approach to religion. There are volumes of literature in Appalachian studies on that subject (that was a about a third of my English III class), and you can see a lot of it in James Still's River of Earth. Hill folks might have tacitly assumed that God created the earth in its present form etc, etc, but most never would have kept their children from school because the school master was teaching them Darwin. Militant Creationism seems to come not from the isolated and backwards, but from people fully emersed in wider society who are threatened by what they see. The modern Creationist movement gained the most traction only after evolution started being taught more forcefully in public schools in the late 50's for example. Members of mainstream society were threatened by a trend in mainstream society. Or take Tennesee's Butler Act, which banned teaching "evolution" (really just the idea that humans might be descended from lower forms) in public schools. The impetus to pass it didn't come from the hill folks (like most Tennesseans at the time the law was passed, most probably didn't even know it existed), it came from urban progressives. I don't know if there's much to that interpretation and I realize I'm not quite addressing your point that misinformation tends to propagate itself, which is certainly true. The "ignorant hillbilly" stereotype of Creationists just doesn't seem to match the reality of the movement, though.

That's what Gazprom does to bring Europe practically its entire supply of natural gas from the Caspian. The joke in the title. It's a reference to a commercial.

I hope someone gets that joke. Anyway, natural gas was featured rather favorably in an interview by Fareed Zakaria in this week's Newsweek, as some of you may have read. According to Robert A. Hefner III, a natural gas tycoon, natural gas promises to be the bridge between oil-based energy and the hydrogen future. He refers to some rather shocking facts, such as the fact that in the US natural gas can't be used for power production, apparently as a result of lobbying by the oil industry, despite being cleaner than coal and oil and supposedly still abundant, with "1,500 to 2000 trillion cubic feet" or "70 to 100 years." Does anyone have any opinions on the potential of natural gas? It seems promising, if anything Hefner said was true. Too bad it doesn't have a lobby.

You know how you tell if someone is lying? It's not "looking them square in the eye." It's looking at their record. You know how you can tell someone is corrupt? Its not seeing that they use the right body language. It's their record. That's what I'm at least talking about. I say that's a bad basis for electing a politician because you can't possibly know from what you see on the television and what you read in the papers if a person is qualified to baby sit a child, and childcare skills aren't at issue for leaders anyway. No, we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where people don't wear their 'characters' on their sleeves, even if they want you to think they do. The sub-perfect nature of our world means that relying on our emotional response to a candidate makes for bad decision making. Because she's bad at relating to people. Big whoop. So am I. This little digression has gotten so off-topic and acrimonious... If anyone has anything to say vis-a-vis the original topic don't let us stop you.

You've got a talent for non sequiturs. Ban all media? Who said that? All we're saying is it's unwise to base who you're going to vote for on your emotional responses to "how blue Hillary's suit was in that debate", when there are such things as issues and records on issues floating around. You don't need to have been elected to have a record on an issue. I think you know we've got a point and you're just weaseling around because you don't want to lose.

Variables can be qualitative. Colors are examples. When the quantitative independent variable "amount of chemical X" is put into a solution it turns dependent variable "what color." Someone more adept in chemistry could give you a more competent example along those lines, but I think you get the idea.

No, a record is something quantifiable. Again, this is just my opinion. If you think your gut is more reliable than my brain (definitely a possibility) then more power to you. I just don't have much of an intuitive gift myself.

And it's a poor basis for decision making.

Of course not. Scientists don't make policy; that's what we elect politicians for. But politicians need the best science to make good policy.

Is there a petition about? Saying things on a forum is nice but it doesn't really do anything.