It only took 34,428 words...

It only took 34,428 words, but I finally (finally!) got Rhia and Polly into bed. Jeez, I only had to kill one of them and court martial the other.

Evolution In Action

Scientists in Korea have managed to create stem cell lines seeded with the genetics of people other than the stem cell donors. This is a massive step forward in the engineering of customized replacement hearts, kidneys, livers, and brain cells leading to the cure of all manner of diseases.

This should have happened in the United States. But no, for twenty years the Christian Right has hobbled the biotech industry, held it at bay out of "moral" objections. So the centers of biological science will be in Shanghai and Bangladesh, and that's where the next big wave of research miracles will happen. This moment is absolutely the Sputnik moment, all over again, but I bet this time the Intelligent Design cult isn't going to apologize for their vicious error.

I'm reminded of Jared Diamond's "Collapse," in which he documents that the English colony in Greenland starved to death in the midst of gigacalories of food they wouldn't eat, because fish was something the pagans eat. They were English and Christian, dammit, and they ate sheep and cows.

Well, we're American and Christian, or at the very least in their thrall, and we won't starve to death-- no, we'll just age into decrepitude while those pagan nations with fewer compunctions about blobs of cells in a petri dish proceed to engineer healthy, powerful, intellectually charged populations that outperform and outcompete us.

Think of it as evolution in action.