Day: December 12, 2000

Scientists Busy Decoding the Fugu Genome

Animal rights activists like to claim that non-humans are simply too different to serve as models for human beings, but scientists at the Energy Department’s Joint Genome Institute hope that decoding the genome of the fugu, a poisonous fish considered a delicacy in Japan, will yield important clues about how human genes work.

The JGI hopes to have the a preliminary version of the fugu genome finished by spring of 2001. Why the fugu?

“The fugu has a small and compact genome, on the order of a tenth the size of the human genome, and yet whenever researchers have gone into the fugu and looked for human genes, by and large they’ve found them,” Trever Hawkins, director of JGI, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

While the human genome consists of about 3.4 billion different chemical building blocks, the fugu’s genome only has about 400 million different chemical building blocks. Since both fugu and human beings must have had a common ancestor, the working hypothesis is that any genes that the fugu and human beings share in common are likely to be extremely important ones. JGI scientist Paul Predki told the Chronicle, “The intent is to use the fugu sequence as a comparison. We believe it contains essentially the same complement of genes as human DNA.”

Over the next couple decades, medical research is likely to be revolutionized by a knowledge gained by comparing human and non-human genomes combined with the increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate and modify genes.

Source:

Fishing for clues: the genetic map of the lowly fugu could help scientists decipher the human blueprint. Tom Abate, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 2000.

NOW and the Voting Gender Gap

The National Organization for Women keeps making a claim in its press releases about the recently concluded election that while technicaly true completely glosses over the reality of the election. Here’s a random sample by Tanya Melich,

Unlike Florida, the proof of our power is not sullied with statistical probabilities. Nationally, women gave Gore their vote by an 11-percent margin while Bush won men by 11 percent. In Florida, the margins mirror this national vote with women backing Gore and men Bush. Whether by age, education or economic status, the pattern holds.

This paragraph is disingenous. Yes the pattern holds by age, education or economic status — unfortunately it does not hold by race and by marital status.

The so-called gender gap is in fact largely a racial gap. Black and Hispanic women broke overwhelmingly toward Gore, while depending on which polling data you rely on, Bush barely won or barely lost the white female vote. If, in fact, NOW had been able to deliver its core constituency of white women to “fight the right,” Gore would have won in a landslide.

Bush also beat Gore among married women (as well as men). NOW activists may indeed “have begun outreach in their communities to tell the cold, hard truth about the threat that George W. Bush, if elected, poses to the nation” early in the campaign, as one of their press releases claimed, but if they did a lot of women simply weren’t buying what they were selling.

Source:

Anti-Women Backlash Strategy Dwindling. Tanya Melich, WomensENews, No date given.

New York City to Allow Civil Suits for Gender-Biased Crimes

Feminist Daily News Wire recently reported that the New York City Council approved a new law on November 30, 2000, that will “allow victims of rape, domestic violence, and other crimes motivated by gender bias to sue the perpetrators in civil cases.” According to The New York Times, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is expected to sign the bill.

This is basically a rehash of the federal Violence Against Women Act provisions that were thrown out as unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court a few months ago. The goal here is to codify into law the radical feminist construct that there men as a class oppress women as a class.

As an example, the Feminist Daily News wire notes that for a civil suit to be allowed under this law, it must be accompanied by evidence of gender bias such as the act “perpetuated stereotypes of women’s submissive role.” Under this law, then, a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a woman could find himself in civil court, while a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a man would not have to worry about a suit under this statute because the criminal act couldn’t be construed as an example of “gender bias.”

The ultimate message such laws send is that crimes of violence committed by men against women are much more serious than crimes of violence committed by women against men or by men against men, since only the crimes in the first category are part of a society-wide conspiracy against women.

At one time, feminists might have saw such unequal protection before the law for men and women as a sign of overarching paternalism, but today it’s just business as usual.

Source:

NYC Establishes Civil Rights Remedy for Victims of Gender-Biased Crime. Feminist Daily News Wire, December 1, 2000.