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Red Brains vs. Blue Brains?
eLoco writes "From the NYTimes (reg. req.): The Political Brain -- "Why do Republicans and Democrats differ so emphatically? Perhaps it's all in the head." Researchers from UCLA have seem to have found that liberals have, on average, a more active amygdala than conservatives. According to the article, studies of stroke victims "have persuasively shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy." So is this scientific "proof" that liberals tend to be more compassionate but also more cowardly? [DISCLAIMER: this is not a troll; I am a liberal]. Regardless, this seems to have implications for more than just politics. Favorite quote: "Perhaps we form political affiliations by semiconsciously detecting commonalities with other people, commonalities that ultimately reflect a shared pattern of brain function.""
...is like internal medicine several hundred years ago. We have some things figured out, we know how to check the pulse and we've learned how to amputate, but we're also on the level of leeches, cauterization, and bloodletting. There are smart men advancing the field, and they are outnumbered by phrenologists, patent medicine salesmen and outright quacks.
To pass this study off as if it can suggest conclusions, of any kind, about the way one kind of party member thinks versus another is exactly the kind of grandstanding, irresponsible and basically incoherent brain science I am sadly used to hearing about.
We don't really understand the role of the amygdala in our consciousness - in fact, we don't understand consciousness even slightly. Even if we don't hear an apologetic revolution in a year or two stemming from one of the many competing theories about other parts of our brain anatomy that may be equally important to our "limbic system," the methodology of the study itself may easily be flawed, if for instance those operating the survey (interviewing and handlnig subjects) or the survey materials (questionaries, etc) caused subjects from one party to feel differently than the other during examinations...
Were it not for the matte gloss of UCLA science, this article would be a much more obvious fit in the New York Post or the National Enquirer than the New York Times.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Actually, there's plenty of federal funding for research that uses adult stem cells. There's even funding for research that uses several preexisting lines of embryonic stem cells; the law only prohibits federal funding of research involving new lines of embryonic stem cells.
Who was the president who signed the bill that provides this funding? George W. Bush.
While adult stem cells hold promise for such things as generation of transplantable organs and tissues that won't be rejected (in a sense, you would become your own donor), the outlook for embryonic stem-cell research has been nowhere near as promising. Nasty cancers known as teratomas have often formed where embryonic stem cells are injected...in one experiment involving rats, they formed in one out of five test subjects.
That said, there's no law that prohibits use of private funding toward any sort of stem-cell research, whether using adult or embryonic stem cells from either preexisting or new cell lines. Some people, unfortunately, have found it easier to engage in demagoguery and impute malicious intent to those with whom they disagree than to follow a more rational course. Since it's easy for the nightly news to get soundbites from them, they're paid far more attention than they deserve, and before long, their distortions of the true state of affairs get accepted as truth.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
This isn't as simple as believing in God or not, as many democrats are religious (opposed to what you might hear on TV).
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
Wrong. Between 1973 and 2002, the US accounted for less than 1% of all Iraqi arms imports. And the WMD that he did use wasn't from us, either. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute concluded that the weapons used were either from Japan or Germany:
The UN report provides only negative evidence of the origin of the mustard gas sample. The absence in the sample analysed in Sweden and Switzerland of polysulphides and of more than a trace of sulphur indicates that it is not of past US-government manufacture, for all US mustard was made by the Levinstein process from ethylene and mixed sulphur chlorides. That process is also said to have been the one used by the USSR. From similar reasoning, British-made mustard, too, can probably be ruled out, even though substantial stocks were once held at British depots in the Middle East. For more positive evidence other sources of information must be used. Over the years since the mid-1960s quite a lot of information has been published purporting to describe Iraqi chemical weapons, but much of it is contradictory and all of it is of a reliability which SIPRI is in no position to judge. A major caveat must be entered: chemical warfare is such an emotive subject that it lends itself very readily to campaigns of disinformation and black propaganda, campaigns which the politics both of the Gulf War and of the current chemical-weapons negotiations have unquestionably stimulated to no small degree.
I believe you have it backwards. Bill Cosby was accussed of acting white because he encouraged young blacks to get an education.
I'm a graduate student in neuroscience. After reading your post, I performed several searches on PubMed, which is a search engine for all peer-reviewed medical and biomedical research journals. I found that nothing has been published on activation of the amygdala in Democrats vs. Republicans, conservatives vs. liberals, or any number of other searches. The New York Times article you referred to also did not quote any published papers or show any data. Before you start arguing about the significance of fundamental brain differences between liberals and conservatives, you should consider that there is no scientifically vaildated data on this. The New York Times certainly isn't a bastion of scientific criticism or a valid scientific source for that matter. Maybe UCLA researchers have gotten some prelimiary data that people are excited about, but unless the research has been peer-reviewed, published and hopefully confirmed by multiple groups, it's just an unverified claim. 9 times out of 10 these unpublished (but sometimes highly publicized) data turn out to be bogus.