Liz's Bloglet - Sunday 17 June 2007

We don't need universal health insurance. We need universal single payer health care. We need it to be where you get sick or injured and you get taken care of and that's it. Making money by refusing to pay for people's healthcare is not an industry, it's a crime. _
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09:58:43 PM, Sunday 17 June 2007

Loving for all Mildred Loving's statement on the 40th Anniversary of Loving v Virginia.
I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about. _
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09:51:52 AM, Friday 15 June 2007

It was illegal for loving couples of mixed races to marry in much of the United States for most of American history, and 16 states still banned interracial marriage until June 12, 1967. Such discrimination was justified with bigotry disguised as religious truth.

And it was a bunch of goddamn liberals who did it. _
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10:41:32 AM, Thursday 14 June 2007

In the spring of my junior year of high school (lo those many, many years ago) I was preparing for AP tests in US History and Spanish, running track, playing flute and piccolo in regular band and piano in jazz band, taking piano lessons, and to some extent doing all of my other homework and pursuing a social life. One day I realized it was not working. I evaluated all of the above, realized I would be taking the same Spanish class the next year regardless of the outcome of the test (we only had one 4th/5th year combined Spanish class) and decided to stop going to the Spanish cram sessions and not bother paying for the test.

That discovery of how to assess my obligations and let go of something may well have been the most important thing I learned in high school. Many of my fellow grad students (lo these many, many years later) have no idea whatsoever how to do it intentionally, and so they frequently end up doing it accidentally, which is rarely a good thing. _
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09:09:35 PM, Wednesday 13 June 2007

An American reporter writes about working in Saudi Arabia

The rules are different here. The same U.S. government that heightened public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women prizes the oil-slicked Saudi friendship and even offers wan praise for Saudi elections in which women are banned from voting. All U.S. fast-food franchises operating here, not just Starbucks, make women stand in separate lines. U.S.-owned hotels don't let women check in without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone have long been regarded as prostitutes. _
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11:43:55 AM, Monday 11 June 2007

We can use it as a weapon when we're not getting our own way... _
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01:29:41 PM, Friday 8 June 2007

Girlyman is playing at the Festival for the Eno. My life is pretty much awesome.

I have been at a conference in Columbia, SC. And that's all I'm going to say about that. _
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06:56:15 PM, Thursday 7 June 2007

If you ever find yourself tempted in an internet conversation to use the rhetorical tricks "we all agree", "everybody knows", or "objectively true" to try to get around the actual substance of a debate, resist the temptation. _
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07:00:10 AM, Wednesday 30 May 2007

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart. _
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08:39:30 AM, Monday 28 May 2007

I'm not into YouTube pretty much at all but this protest is an amazing thing. _
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01:16:38 PM, Sunday 27 May 2007

Come visit us so we can take you to Cook Out. Seriously. _
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12:48:14 PM, Friday 25 May 2007

Between having rights and not having periods, how will you ever know you�re a woman? If only there was some other way to tell, perhaps different organs than men or something.

I admit that I don't quite get gender identity. "But wait, Liz," you say, "you spend all of your time blogging about feminist crap." But you see I blog about feminist crap because the rest of the world is obsessed with hitting me over the head with gender identity. Not because I have the slightest idea what it means to "feel like a woman" or "be a man" or be "feminine" or "masculine". But I certainly don't think that menstruation has anything to do with pink flowers and pedicures (or whatever it is I'm supposed to like because I have ovaries) and if this pill works for me then good riddance. _
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08:47:27 PM, Thursday 24 May 2007

In March of 2006, some good folks in Missouri tried to reinstate state funding for contraception for poor women. They didn't succeed.

But I've come to see that the people who decide how major "right to life" organizations operate have goals far less noble than the protection of innocent life. For all their lofty rhetoric, they're trying to create a world where being a sexually active single woman is punished by forced childbirth, or by cancer. There may be more destructive people in American politics, but there are none I hate more. _
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09:37:59 AM, Tuesday 22 May 2007

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Lyme disease is a recent import to NC. When I was a kid at Girl Scout camp, the big fear was RMSF. Just a reminder to myself that there are many beasties waiting for me. _
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04:12:20 PM, Monday 21 May 2007

A blog that I like to check in on from time to time is Writing as Jo(e). She teaches English at a small science college and has four teenage kids. Most of her writing is about nature, teaching, and stories of life at her house. I like her stories and her family but mostly she's just an amazing writer. In some ways she reminds me of a Garrison Keillor--it's hard to believe that all of the children are above average as they are portrayed--but I think the goodness of the people around her comes from the love with which she tells the stories as much as from the people themselves. _
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09:48:20 PM, Sunday 20 May 2007

"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."

Robert Park (physicist and skeptic) _
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12:03:08 PM, Saturday 19 May 2007

This is impressive. US legislators who support increasing food stamp benefits try living off of $1/meal (a typical benefit) for a week _
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11:31:33 AM, Saturday 19 May 2007

I frequently link to newspaper articles from various sites all over the world. The way to do this without having to fill out surveys and lie is to use bugmenot. They also have a Firefox plugin. Trying to put this in the comments of my last post appears to have broken the comments. _
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08:07:17 AM, Friday 18 May 2007

Duke University's resident Nobel Laureate is considering running for Paul Wellstone's Senate seat (currently occupied by some idiot Republican) _
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03:06:09 PM, Thursday 17 May 2007

I would just like to assure America that the study of biology really isn't a threat to your freedoms.

The text of Leon Kass's speech. I have to admit, my concerns were completely with his attacking my having a career--I never thought he would attack my choice of career. _
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07:17:34 AM, Wednesday 16 May 2007

Newt Gingrich got pissed off at difficult questions and left the Diane Rehm show 20 minutes early today. Diane was very angry. When a caller said something to the effect of "what can you expect from a guy who would tell his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital with cancer" and Diane said "everything the caller said is true". It was pretty awesome to hear Diane pretty much lose it. _
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11:58:49 AM, Tuesday 15 May 2007

They make a bike for people like me. _
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07:49:46 PM, Saturday 12 May 2007

I thought I had seen everything, but I just saw an Episcopalian who is unhappy with the direction of his church refer to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as "the devil's ho". Wow. And I thought the PCUSA had problems. _
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08:07:33 AM, Saturday 12 May 2007

My infinitely thoughtful Remi has acquired for us tickets to tonight's long-ago sold out Cowboy Junkies show. I've only wanted to see them since I was 13 or so and never got to. Did I mention Remi is awesome? _
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12:40:51 PM, Friday 11 May 2007

Biology cannot be simplified to chemistry and physics

Every living (non-viral or prion) creature on earth has unique DNA that distinguishes it from every other. Every single organism is different. There is no one true dog. There is no perfect form of a dog to which all dogs aspire. Every single dog is just different. What CSI doesn�t tell you is that every cell in your body is different from every other cell, too. DNA is constantly being changed in tiny ways by things like radiation and by errors in copying. An example many people have seen is a person with one blue eye and one brown eye. That person is heterozygous for eye color. Ordinarily, a heterozygous person would have brown eyes, but early on in cell division something happened to the gene for brown in what would eventually become their right eye, so that eye only has genes for blue.

Not all genes are activated all the time. You may have heard of �junk DNA�, but it is becoming increasingly clear that genes that are not active currently still have a role to play. Some are critical in early development and then are turned off. Others may become triggered at some point later in life, leading to some horrible disease. But not everybody who carries that gene necessarily gets the horrible disease, because sometimes the triggering never happens. Some may lie dormant in an organism for generations, only to be activated by a radical environmental change in temperature or in moisture.

For a biologist, I know very little about genetics. It is far outside of my area of expertise. But one thing it has in common with the world that I study is the concept of emergence. Emergence is the idea that the union of two or more things can have properties that could not be predicted from the things themselves. The obvious, non-biological example is water. There is nothing about hydrogen or oxygen that could predict what they form when combined into the peculiar molecule that is water. Hydrogen and oxygen tell you nothing about its unusual trait of becoming less dense as a solid than it is as a liquid. Waterness is an emergent property.

Similarly, simply by looking at the carbons, oxygens, hydrogens, nitrogens, and phosphoruses and little bits of other things that go into DNA you would not be able to predict that they could form a self-replicating molecule that could continuously alter itself, gaining new information all the time, until it covered an entire planet.

Finally, just by looking at water and rocks, fish and algae, bacteria and insects, you could never predict that they could come together into a self-sustaining system that maintains predictable levels of different chemical elements. Nor could you predict that the removal of one type of one fish could dramatically change that entire system, pushing it first out of equilibrium, and then into an entirely different one.

More to come... _
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09:30:51 AM, Monday 7 May 2007

CBS decided to no longer allow people to comment on stories about Congressman Obama, so disgusting was the racism in the comments. Orcinus describes it well:
This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner ... well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse. _
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04:17:14 PM, Saturday 5 May 2007

This is the letter I sent to the Dean (michael.dink@sjca.edu) and the President (Presidents.Office@sjca.edu):

Mr. Dink and Mr. Nelson,

I am a 1999 graduate of St. John's in Annapolis. While a student at St. John's, I was active and involved, enthusiastically participated in all of my classes, wrote a pretty good senior essay on Bacon's thoughts on using the scientific method to improve society, and in particular I contributed a lot to the Music program. Since graduating I have completed a master's degree in Ecology and I am now working on a PhD in Ecology. I intend to be a professor at a small teaching college. I also regularly contribute financially to the college. I say all this so you will understand my perspective in writing to you.

I am writing because I am quite disturbed to hear that Leon Kass will be speaking at the Annapolis Commencement. While I was a student, Mr. Kass gave a Friday night lecture, and it is with great horror that I have followed his writing since then, always worried whenever I heard him associated with my college and its way of approaching the world. To put it simply, Mr. Kass does not believe that women like me should exist. He doesn't think we should be working at the careers we love. He questions our abilities to do the things that we do.

I am not protesting his being invited to give a lecture. His choice as a Friday Night Lecturer allowed us to question him on this and his other surprising beliefs, and my recollection is he came off quite badly in the question period, and was fairly unable to support his beliefs on gender. I am very disturbed that he will be speaking at Commencement, because the things he says will go unquestioned. He will be speaking to a diverse class of amazing young men and women, but he may well say those women shouldn't be there.

I find this doubly disturbing, because St. John's commencement speakers in the past have gotten quite a lot of press coverage. Many of us were delighted to hear Mr. Pastille's speech broadcast on NPR a few years ago. Other years, excerpts have been mentioned in national press stories. I do not like what having Mr. Kass is our commencement speaker says about our college. We still have fewer female faculty than we should. We still have young high school applicants who are not white and male who choose to go elsewhere because they are not convinced that St. John's is a place they will be comfortable. Inviting a prominent speaker who endorses that viewpoint is not a good way to fix that problem.

As a successful, happy woman who loves the college, I ask you to reconsider your invitation to Mr. Kass, and that these decisions be more thoughtfully made in the future. St. John's deserves better.

Thanks for your consideration,
_
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08:54:31 AM, Saturday 5 May 2007

If I were a SJC senior right now, and I had not yet done my senior oral when it was announced that Kass was the graduation speaker, I might have done worse in my oral than I would have otherwise. Kass's invitation would have reminded me of his stereotypes about my abilities, stereotypes that many people hold but which my college is now implicitly endorsing.

Doing badly after being reminded of other people's stereotypical expectations is called stereotype threat. It has been confirmed by countless studies as affecting people both based on gender and ethnicity. It is why having to fill out a long form about your ethnic background right before you take a test is a bad idea. And it's one of the many reasons that my college celebrating such a person as Kass is a huge mistake. _
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08:28:20 AM, Saturday 5 May 2007

More more more!
The rejection of vitalism was made possible by the simultaneous rejection of a crude "animals are nothing but machines" conceptualization. Like Kant in his later years, most biologists realized that organisms are different from inanimate matter and that the difference had to be explained not by postulating a vital force but by modifying rather drastically the mechanistic theory. Such a theory begins by granting that there is nothing in the processes, functions, and activities of living organisms that is in conflict with or outside of any of the laws of physics and chemistry. All biologists are thorough-going "materialists" in the sense that they are physico-chemical. But they do not accept the naive mechanistic explanation of the seventeenth century and disagree with the statement that animals are "nothing but" machines. Organismic biologists stress the fact that organisms have many characteristics that are without parallel in the world of inanimate objects. The explanatory equipment of the physical sciences is insufficient to explain complex living systems, and, in particular, the interplay between historically acquired information and the responses of these genetic programs to the physical world. The phenomena of life have a much broader scope than the relatively simple phenomena dealt with by physics and chemistry. This is why it is just as impossible to include biology in physics as it is to include physics in geometry.

Attempts have been made again and again to define "life". These endeavors are rather futile since it is now quite clear that there is no special substance, object, or force that can be identified with life. The process of living, however, can be defined. There is no doubt that living organisms posses certain attributes that are not or not in the same manner found in inanimate objects.

He goes on to name them, including complexity and organization, chemical uniqueness, quality, uniqueness and variability, possession of a genetic program, historical nature, natural selection, and indeterminacy. _
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07:22:54 AM, Friday 4 May 2007

As part of the preparation for my prelims, I had to read quite a bit of history and philosophy of biology and ecology. Hence, the Ph in PhD. This actually turned out to be excellent, thanks mostly to Ernst Mayr.

Population thinkers stress the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is important to them is the individual, not the type. They emphasize that every individual in a sexually reproducing species is uniquely different from all others, with much individuality even existing in uniparentally reproducing ones. There is no "typical" individual, and mean values are abstractions...

The statistics of the essentialist are quite different from that of the populationist. When we measure a physical constant--for instance, the speed of light--we know that under equivalent circumstances it is constant and that any variation in the observational results is due to inaccuracy of measurement, the statistics simply indicating the degree of reliability of our results...

Differences in height among a group of people are real and not the result of inaccuracies of measurement. The most interesting parameter in the statistics of natural populations is the actual variation, its amount, and its nature. The amount of variation is different from character to character and from species to species. Darwin could not have arrived at a theory of natural selection if he had not adopted populational thinking. The sweeping statements in the racist literature, on the other hand, are almost invariably based on essentialistic (typological) thinking.

Ernst Mayr The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance _
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07:05:32 AM, Friday 4 May 2007

The thing to remember is that claims of fundamentalism or orthodoxy are positioning statements for brands. We often treat claims of religious orthodoxy as if they were statements of fact rather than rhetorical devices.

Positioning your doctrine as the orthodoxy is a way to marginalize your competition. If we uncritically allow the most reactionary sects to claim the mantle of orthodoxy, we do the work of fundamentalists for them.

Jesus went out of his way to love those who were rejected by society. He said that all of the rules of his upbringing should be thrown aside if they got in the way of feeding a hungry person. He said we should visit folks in prison and stand up for prostitutes and ignore the voices of the powerful who tell us not to. That is the religion that I follow. I am an orthodox Christian. I'm taking that label back. _
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04:53:58 PM, Wednesday 2 May 2007

Our schools are resegregating. I have made this argument many times on this blog, but I reiterate now: Kids can learn reading and math anywhere. The best thing we can do for kids is send them to school with people not like them. That is real education. _
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02:35:04 PM, Wednesday 2 May 2007

Someone sad about the loss of landmarks has started an Endangered Durham blog--mostly a collection of photos of buildings that have been demolished and the ugly things/parking lots that have been put in their place. _
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05:54:04 PM, Tuesday 1 May 2007

I have some serious vomiting to do:
Noted bioethicist and scholar Leon R. Kass, who was a tutor at St. John�s from 1972-1976, will address graduates at the Annapolis Commencement ceremony on May 13

Wow, if the senior class chose him, just, wow. _
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01:46:57 PM, Tuesday 1 May 2007

Liz is taking the day off.

I have one more paper to write for class. I'm going in the field tomorrow, resuming my regular duties that others have been covering for me for the past couple of months. I have an undergrad who's supposed to be finishing independent study, who probably won't without being forced to. I have a publication that must get out this month.

But, today, Liz is taking the day off. _
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08:37:32 AM, Monday 30 April 2007

So, maybe everybody's heard about it already, but this guy whose job it was to require that foreign governments preach abstinence not condoms and don't reach out to help prostitutes as the way to fight AIDS in Africa had been hiring "escorts" to give him "massages".

Do you still not get how your "scandals" are different from Clinton, who didn't waste all of his time trying to pass laws about other people's sex?

Do you still not get why we hate you all? Really? _
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08:15:05 AM, Monday 30 April 2007

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