Neanderthal Clones (NOT!) Syllabi (FAKE), Obama and Republicans

First, a bit of academic humor. Here is a “fake, snarky syllabus” that a certain professor would like to write. The summary:

As your professor, I plan to take your money, never read your essays and pretend you’re not checking Facebook
BY ADAM MANSBACH

Check it out at Salon.

Next a bit of science. You may have heard about some rogue scientist asking for women volunteers to have a Neanderthal baby. Well…no…this Harvard professor was talking “science fiction”. Yes, living animals can be “cloned” (though the clones are not perfect duplicates; for example there are variances in gene expression, and mutations sometimes occur within an individual.

But as far as cloning dead things, well there are some problems (as Jerry Coyne points out):

Genes occur on chromosomes.

Human DNA, for example is arrayed on 23 pairs of chromosomes, and those chromosomes are unique bodies, each carrying their own subset of genes arrayed in a particular linear order. Chromosomes are complicated structures (read about them here), for they contain not just DNA, but specific DNA-associated proteins (“histones”), a “centromere,” a special part of the chromosome which helps it move to a daughter cell when cells divide, and “telomeres,” repeated bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes that protect the chromosome from degrading.

To produce an organism, its genome must be sitting on chromosomes, and on the proper number of chromosomes. You can’t just take a whole genome and stick it into a recipient cell, expecting that cell to behave normally. The genome first has to be assembled in proper order—and that means the perfectly proper order (no room for error here), with all the bits in the right sequence. Then it has to be packaged into those chromosomes, for without chromosomes cells can’t divide properly and you can’t produce a whole organism from that single cloned cell. To get an organism from one cell, there has to be millions of cell divisions.

Not only do we lack the ability to assemble bits of DNA (what we have from Neanderthals) into a complete genome, but we are nowhere close to putting that DNA onto chromosomes in the proper order. Until we do that, we won’t be able to bring back any species from fossil DNA. I doubt that we’ll have this ability within the next 50 years, if that.

But the problems go beyond that. DNA degrades with age, and some types of degradation (like changes of one DNA “base” to another) cannot be detected by sequencing, but would still render the reconstructed clone inviable because those mutations would be lethal in the re-created organism.

So if you are worried about little Neanderthals running around, you can stop worrying.

Republicans: Perhaps they are getting tone-deaf by going after…disability?

If you want to understand the trouble Republicans are in, one good place to start is with the obsession the right has lately developed with the rising disability rolls. The growing number of Americans receiving disability payments has, for many on the right, become a symbol of our economic and moral decay; we’re becoming a nation of malingerers.

As Jared Bernstein points out, there’s a factual problem here: a large part of the rise in the disability rolls reflects simple demographics, because aging baby boomers are a lot more likely to have real ailments than those same workers did when they were in their 20s and 30s. [...]

What strikes me, however, isn’t just the way the right is trying to turn a reasonable development into some kind of outrage; it’s the political tone-deafness.

I mean, when Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated with angry white voters, who understood perfectly well who Reagan was targeting. But Americans on disability as moochers? That isn’t, as far as I can tell, an especially nonwhite group — and it’s a group that is surely as likely to elicit sympathy as disdain. There’s just no way it can serve the kind of political purpose the old welfare-kicking rhetoric used to perform.

Paul Kruguman has a point, I think. I see lots of “Republican demographic-like” (read: “old white people”) with canes, wheelchairs, walkers, etc.
It would be great if all of us could be hikers/walkers/runners/swimmers until the end of our days, but unfortunately, statistics and increasing entropy don’t work that way.

President Obama: Whether you are a supporter or a political opponent of his, this New Republic interview is worth reading.
Here is a part of it:

Franklin Foer: Let’s talk about that in terms of guns. How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn’t make them feel as if you’re impinging upon their liberty?
President Obama:

Well, in our comments today, I was very explicit about believing that the Second Amendment was important, that we respect the rights of responsible gun owners. In formulating our plans, Joe Biden met with a wide range of constituencies, including sportsmen and hunters.
So much of the challenge that we have in our politics right now is that people feel as if the game here in Washington is completely detached from their day-to-day realities. And that’s not an unjustifiable view. So everything we do combines both a legislative strategy with a broad-based communications and outreach strategy to get people engaged and involved, so that it’s not Washington over here and the rest of America over there.

That does not mean that you don’t have some real big differences. The House Republican majority is made up mostly of members who are in sharply gerrymandered districts that are very safely Republican and may not feel compelled to pay attention to broad-based public opinion, because what they’re really concerned about is the opinions of their specific Republican constituencies.

There are going to be a whole bunch of initiatives where I can get more than fifty percent support of the country, but I can’t get enough votes out of the House of Representatives to actually get something passed.

Emphasis mine: members of the House are sensitive to their own constituents and NOT to national polls. That is why ideas that are popular with the public at large don’t stand a chance in the House and Senate (with its filibuster rules).

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