Category Archives: politics

Unfamiliar sperm, Tibetans, and cheese: Why evolutionary biology doesn’t excuse Todd Akin

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Be advised: rape, Republicans, and evolutionary psychology will be discussed herein. Also there is math.

So I didn’t think I’d be posting anything about that idiot who’s running for Senator from Missouri, Todd Akin, who said that it’s not necessary to ensure that abortion remain a safe and legal option for victims of rape because women’s bodies somehow kill or eject sperm from people they didn’t want to have sex with, or something. Which is just so obviously, stupidly, dangerously wrong that what could I possibly have to say about it that hasn’t already been said better elsewhere?

Then, on Monday, this happened:


Original tweet here.

That’s the immediate follow-up to a tweet linking to an article Bering wrote a couple weeks ago, in which he explains the reasoning behind an evolutionary psychology hypothesis that women’s bodies can, in some cases, do something very like what Todd Aikin thinks they can. In 2006, Jennifer Davis and Gordon Gallup (yes, that’s Gordon “adaptive homophobia” Gallup) noted in a book chapter [PDF] that there’s an interesting pattern associated with preeclampsia, a common, generally late-term complication of preganancy: pregnant women seem to be less likely to experience preeclampsia if they’ve been living with the father of the fetus for a longer time before becoming pregnant [$a]. The idea being, that if a woman is inseminated with “unfamiliar” sperm, her body is more likely to reject the resulting pregnancy.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, well, it did to me, too. I reacted right off the bat with Tweeted snark, and had some back-and-forth with Bering in which, I have to say, I didn’t acquit myself especially well. I try to do better than engaging in scientific debate while steam is coming out of my collar, and, once I’d cooled down a bit I attempted an apology (which recieved a perfectly polite response), and I then resolved to sit down and actually figure out the merit of Davis and Gallup’s hypothesis.

Spoiler alert: Further study did not make D&G’s hypothesis any more plausible. But my reasons for disbelieving it after doing the background reading aren’t what you might expect.

Preeclampsia and semen familiarity

First, a little more detail about preeclampsia. It’s a condition linked to pregnancy-induced hypertension—not so much a single complication as a cluster of symptoms that seem to be connected to an immune reaction against the “foreign” tissue of a fetus. As the name implies, it can escalate to eclampsia, which involves seizures and a coma, and can seriously endanger both the woman and her fetus; but preeclampsia can create dangerous complications [$a] even if it doesn’t get to that stage, causing premature delivery, restricted fetal growth, and loss of the pregnancy.

One of the first things I found out, following up on papers cited in Bering’s post and D&G’s original description of the hypothesis, is that the “semen familiarity” idea is actually quite widespread in the medical literature and, as far as I can tell, reasonably well supported. Various studies have found that preeclampsia is more common in first pregnancies; more common in women who have switch sexual partners between pregnancies [PDF]; and more common in women who become pregnant via artificial insemination from an unknown donor [$a] than in those who are artificially inseminated with their current partner’s sperm. That last study has a rather small sample size, but it’s about as close as you could get to an outright experimental test of the “semen familiarity” effect, I think.

However, if sperm familiarity is one factor contributing to the risk of preeclampsia, it’s not the only thing, and its role isn’t quite universally accepted. It’s a risk factor in the epidemiological sense, not a direct, clear-cut cause. Women who are overweight, who are diabetic, who smoke, or who have hypertension when they become pregnant have an elevated risk of preeclampsia independent of any effect of sperm familiarity. A relatively recent review article notes that there’s some support for an alternative hypothesis that longer waits between pregnancies is a stronger determinant; women who change partners often also tend to wait longer between pregnancies because, well, it can take a while to make that kind of switch. Studies that account for time between pregnancies have found that, in fact, switching partners can be associated with a somewhat reduced risk of preeclampsia.

Rolling the die against rape

But so if preeclampsia is indeed made more likely by unfamiliar semen, how much of a selective advantage could this tendency incur? (Assume, for the moment, that there’s a genetic underpinning to the tendency to respond to unfamiliar sperm by developing preeclampsia; natural selection can’t act on any trait that isn’t passed from parent to offspring with reasonable reliability, no matter how useful or detrimental that trait might be.) As I’ve noted in other contexts, a very basic result in population genetics is that, for natural selection to over come the effects of genetic drift and mutation [$a], it has to have some minimumn strength; any selective advantage at all isn’t enough for a gene variant to spread via natural selection.

To determine whether selection favoring preeclampsia as a response to unfamiliar sperm might be strong enough to overcome drift and mutation, we’ll have to do some back-of-the envelope calculations. Here, I can draw on some data from the medical literature, but this is all pretty crude, so grab your salt-cellar.

First, how much more likely does unfamiliar semen make preeclampsia? In that above-mentioned comparison of artificial insemination by unknown donors versus familiar partners, which was published in 1997, women recieiving donor sperm were about 1.85 times more likely to develop preeclampsia than those who recieved sperm from their partners; a much larger study from 1999 [PDF] reports that preganancies resulting from sperm donation had about 1.4 times the risk of preeclampsia seen in comparable natural pregnancies.

That baseline risk is about anywhere from 2 to 7 percent of pregnancies. So if we take the higher end of both estimates (the baseline probability of preeclampsia, and the factor by which unfamiliar sperm increases it), we’re talking about an effect that elevates the probability of developing preeclampsia up to about 13 percent. That’s not zero, but (to take Trisha Greenhalgh’s advice to heart) let’s try to think about that in concrete terms: it’s less than the probability of rolling a six with one toss of a die.

Then, consider that not all preeclampsia cases result in loss of the pregnancy. The current risk of fetal death associated with preeclampsia is about 1 to 2 percent of cases; so now figure that you have to toss that die more than enough times to roll six 100 times—more than six hundred tosses—to be reasonably sure of ending just two rape-related pregnancies this way. Put it another way: a (purely hypothetical) gene variant responsible for making a woman likely to develop preeclampsia when she encounters unfamiliar sperm would help her avoid carrying a rapist’s baby to term with something less than one chance in 300.

(One caveat: of course, I’m working from present-day risks of pregnancy loss due to preeclampsia, and of course preeclampsia would’ve been more likely to result in pregnancy loss—and also maternal death—before the advent of modern medicine. But I wasn’t able to find similarly precise estimates of those risks predating modern medicine, and in any event Davis and Gallup, and Bering, discuss the hypothesis in terms of its implications for modern society.)

Strong enough for selection?

Now, let’s compare that educated guess to the estimated strength of natural selection acting on two adaptations biologists have studied much more closely in humans: the capacity to survive in high-altitude, low-oxygen conditions, and the ability to digest milk sugars as adults. These are each cases where a useful genetic variant has spread through a population, which means selection overcame drift and mutation; although I don’t believe that either adaptive variant has “fixed,” or spread to the entire population.

In the first case, a gene variant found in people living on the high Tibetan plateau is associated with reduced risk of death for the children of women carrying the variant. A 2004 study of Tibetan women found that those without the variant gave birth to about 4.5 children, and an average of 2.5 of those children died before the age of 15; women carrying the beneficial gene variant had about the same number of live births, but only an average of 0.5 children who died. In other words, carrying the high-altitude gene variant meant they had twice as many children surivive to age 15.

In the second case, a 2009 study used population genetic data to estimate the strength of selection on the gene variant responsible for lactase persistance, the ability to digest milk sugars as an adult, in European populations that have historically raised cattle for milk. The estimated selective benefit of being able to digest milk was about 1.8 percent. That is, people in those European populations who couldn’t digest milk had about 98.2 children for every 100 children born to people who could digest milk.

Stack those selective effects alongside that proposed for preeclampsia as a response to rape: less than a one-in-six chance for a two percent chance of losing an unwanted pregnancy, or somewhat less than three out of a thousand rape-related pregnancies ended prematurely. And, as Kate Clancy notes in her excellent discussion of the Akins fiasco, preeclampsia characteristically occurs late in pregnancy—so, in the rare cases when it does end an unwanted pregnancy, it does so after a mother has already invested months of resources in supporting the fetus.

As Clancy points out, an adaptation to prevent pregnancy by rape would be much more effective if it caused miscarriage well before preeclampsia could even come into play—and, indeed, Davis and Gallup proposed, at the end of their book chapter, that earlier miscarriages might also be related to semen familiarity. They cite no data to test that hypothesis, and I haven’t found any published since their book chapter. But as Clancy describes quite clearly, we have reaonable evidence that rates of pregnancy from rape are similar to rates of pregnancy from consensual sex, and that would seem to close the book on the question of anti-rape defenses in early pregnancy.

In other words, if women have evolved some sort of physiological adaptation to avoid getting pregnant as a result of rape—whether via elevated risk of preeclampsia or another means—the actual benefits conferred by such an adaptation are so miniscule as to stretch the definition of “adaptive” to meaninglessness. But I can think of another well-known adaptation that does allow women to end unwanted pregnancies with a high degree of reliability: human intelligence. Women have been using abortifacients and other means to end pregnancies, sometimes well before preeclampsia typically occurs, since the dawn of recorded history, and modern medical technology from hormonal birth control to emergency contraception to, yes, abortion itself makes this simpler and safer than it’s ever been.

Contrary to Jesse Bering’s quippy title, Darwin’s morning after pill isn’t some mysterious power of a woman’s reproductive tract; it’s the big brain that millions of generations of evolutionary history gave her.◼

As noted in the main text, all calculations herein are back-of-the-envelope estimates, and subject to the foibles of my limited numerical skills; if you see something wrong with them, let me know in the comments!

References

Beall, C. M., K. Song, R. C. Elston, and M. C. Goldstein. 2004. “Higher offspring survival among Tibetan women with high oxygen saturation genotypes residing at 4,000 m.” Proc. Nat. Academy Sci. U.S.A. 101:14300. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0405949101.

Davis J.A., and G.G. Gallup Jr. 2006. “Preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen.” in Female Infidelity and Paternal Uncertainty: Evolutionary Perspectives on Male Anti-Cuckolding Tactics. SM Platek and TK Shackleford, eds. Pages 191-204. Full text PDF.

Dekker, G., and P.-Y. Robillard. 2007. “Pre-eclampsia: Is the immune maladaptation hypothesis still standing?: An epidemiological update.” Journal of Reproductive Immunology 76:8-16. DOI: 10.1016/j.jri.2007.03.015.

Gerbault, P., C. l. Moret, M. Currat, and A. Sanchez-Mazas. 2009. “Impact of selection and demography on the diffusion of lactase persistence.” PLoS ONE 4:e6369. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006369.

Haldane, J. B. S. 1927. “A mathematical theory of natural and artificial selection. Part V: Selection and mutation.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 23:838-844. DOI: 10.1017/S0305004100015644.

Hoy, J., A. Venn, J. Halliday, G. Kovacs, and K. Waalwyk. 1999. “Perinatal and obstetric outcomes of donor insemination using cryopreserved semen in Victoria, Australia.” Human Reproduction 14:1760-1764. DOI: 10.1093/humrep/14.7.1760.

Li, D.-K., and S. Wi. 2000. “Changing paternity and the risk of preeclampsia/eclampsia in the subsequent pregnancy.” American Journal of Epidemiology 151:57-62. Full text PDF.

MacKay, A. P., C. J. Berg, and H. K. Atrash. 2001. “Pregnancy-related mortality from preeclampsia and eclampsia.” Obstetrics & Gynecology 97:533. Full text PDF.

Robillard, P.-Y., and T. Hulsey. 1996. “Association of pregnancy-induced-hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia with duration of sexual cohabitation before conception.” The Lancet 347:619 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(94)91638-1.

Sibai, B., G. Dekker, and M. Kupferminc. 2005. “Pre-eclampsia.” The Lancet 365:785-799. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)17987-2.

Skjaerven, R., A. J. Wilcox, and R. T. Lie. 2002. “The interval between pregnancies and the risk of preeclampsia.” New England Journal of Medicine 346:33-38. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa011379.

Smith, G. N., M. Walker, J. L. Tessier, and K. G. Millar. 1997. “Increased incidence of preeclampsia in women conceiving by intrauterine insemination with donor versus partner sperm for treatment of primary infertility.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 177:455-458. DOI: 10.1016/S0002-9378(97)70215-1.

No joke!

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A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an ad by Minnesotans United for All Families …

One of the things that’s impressed me about MNUnited’s campaign is the effort it’s made, from the beginning, to include progressive religious voices and make them a prominent part of the conversation. If nothing else, it puts the lie to the bigots’ claim that voting to put a ban on same-sex marriage into the state constitution is the only “Christian” choice.

Via MinnPost.◼

Rainbow flags over the ‘burbs

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Rainbow Flag Photo by Mktp.

Over at The Atlantic, there’s a nice piece about how the conversation-centric campaign against the proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment to Minnesota’s state constitution is playing out in communities outside the famously queer-friendly Twin Cities. It comes across as pretty hopeful, I’d say.

[Wendy] Ivins recalls a discussion she had one night with a neighbor who argued, “There are more important issues to deal with, like the economy.”

Ivins’ husband, Gary, stepped in. “I’m not an economist,” he said. “I can’t solve the economy. I’m not a military strategist, so I can’t do that. I’m a doctor — and this I do know: Every human being deserves the right to be treated the same as everybody else, and the ability to marry and spend your life with someone is a fundamental right. This is on our ballot right now; it’s important to us right now that we do something about this.”

“The person backed down a bit,” Ivins says. “It’s all about civil rights, injustice. But it’s simpler than that. It’s about individual families—what does it mean personally to you?”

That’s right out of the Minnesotans United for All Families playbook, that is. For more detail (and, yes, the inevitable references to Lake Wobegone), go read the whole thing.◼

Legalize Love

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And although I mentioned it in the previous post, this is a nice reminder of how much President Obama has got better, as they say.

Apparently Legalize Love is part of an new effort to rally queer folks in support of the obvious better choice, officially independent of the Obama campaign. Which is … interesting. But effective. I just bought a tee-shirt.◼

Mitt Gets Worse

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You could pretty much replace the entirety of Mitt Gets Worse, a punnily-named campaign to get out the word about the Republican presidential nominee’s attitudes and record on queer rights, with a webpage reading “Christ, what an asshole.” Because what other response is there to this sort of thing:

Oh, that’s right. The other response is to go give a few bucks toward reelecting President Barack “DADT repeal” Obama.

(Hat tip to Queerty.)◼

Pride

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2011.06.26 - Gay 90's closeup Performers on a float at the 2011 Twin Cities Pride parade. Photo by jby.

Hi! Have you signed our pledge to vote “no” on the amendment?

The actual Pride festival is, in my opinion, the least appealing part of any Pride weekend.

Imagine a small county fair stripped of its rides and livestock shows, the agricultural implements replaced with booths full of rainbow-flag keychains and questionably tasteful erotic art, and with lip-synching drag queens instead of country musicians in the all-day stage shows, all dropped into a city park without enough drinking fountains. The people-watching is, admittedly, pretty great, but I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time in a Pride festival than it takes to walk the circuit of the booths.

This Pride Saturday, however, I spent seven hours among the tents and food trucks in Loring Park—mostly standing within reach of one of the Minnesotans United for All Families canvassing booths, handing clipboarded sign-up sheets to passers-by, reminding them to vote “no” on a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as “only a union between one man and one woman.”

I’ve been putting in an evening a week with MN United for nearly six months, now—first making calls to Minnesota voters, but now mostly helping to train and assist other volunteer phone-callers. Since I started back in January, prospects for voting down the anti-marriage amendment are looking better: a new statewide poll shows “no” votes outnumbering “yes”, MNUnited has raised quite a bit more funding than the pro-amendment campaign in the first half of 2012, and President Obama finally stated his support for marriage equality.

And then this weekend, hundreds of thousands of potential MN United supporters converged on downtown Minneapolis. With Pride as an official kickoff, the campaign against the amendment is off to a strong (and fabulous) start.

But.

Public polling has burned us before—in California, prior to the vote on Proposition 8, and in Maine, on Question 1, it looked like things were reasonably secure, until they weren’t. Pro-equality campaigns have outspent anti-equality campaigns in other states—most recently in North Carolina—without success.

All things considered, I’d say I’m optimistic that Minnesota could be the first state to turn down an attempt to restrict the rights of queer people via popular vote—but I still wouldn’t say the odds are in our favor.

So what am I doing spending my Pride Saturday in Loring Park, thrusting clipboards at strangers? Or working the phone bank every Tuesday till November?

* * *

Gerty-Z’s announcement that this year’s Pride edition of the Diversity in Science carnival would focus on advocacy was a good prompt for me to sit back and think about my involvement with the campaign against the amendment, and, yes, advocacy in general.

Whenever MN United comes up in conversation, queer friends have taken to calling me a “good gay”—in a tone that’s simultaneously needling and (usually) admitting they feel a bit guilty about not doing similarly. At the same time, I’ve been pretty firm about keeping my volunteering commitment limited—it’s not exactly cramping my day-to-day schedule. Regardless of how the vote comes out in November, I wouldn’t feel quite right if I hadn’t put in some actual effort to help defeat the amendment, but I don’t particularly want the campaign to dominate my life.

And, really, I’d say that the volunteering doesn’t, of itself, make me a “good gay.” Advocacy of the sort that happens in organized political campaigns, even the rather different kind of advocacy that happens in MN United’s campaign, is important—but I strongly believe that, as with revenge, the best kind of advocacy is a life well lived.

I say that in large part because of the way I came out of the closet. I took a (relatively) long time figuring out my orienation, and by the time I came out I was well aware of, and in agreement with, the political arguments in favor of gay rights. All of that kind of advocacy didn’t, frankly, do me a lot of good.

What did end up making a big difference was when I met my first openly gay friend, a collaborator on my dissertation research, who provided a daily example in matter-of-factness about his orientation. I knew him as a smart scientist and a fun drinking buddy, and the occasional presence of his boyfriend at social events was, really, no more remarkable than the occasional presence of anyone else’s significant other. And he turned out to be entirely the right person to phone up, one night, for one of the most important conversations of my life.

* * *

And but so now, years after that conversation, my sexuality is a mostly unremarkable feature of my life. Day to day, I commute to campus and do the quotidian work of science—check ongoing analyses, start new ones, write up results, read papers, think about the next project. I go to the gym or for a run. Sometimes I go on a date or out for a night with friends; sometimes I stay at home and work in front of the T.V. I cook. I write about deeply metafictional Star Trek parodies.

And yet of course my orientation flavors almost everything I do, just as it would if I were straight. When I go on a date, it’s with another guy, of course; but it also influences which bars I go to when I’m out with friends, what kind of books I read (A Single Man, anyone?) and T.V. I watch (poor Renly), and, yes, even how I think about science (well, how prone I am to take issue with evolutionary psychology, anyway). I don’t immediately identify myself as gay to everyone I meet, but I don’t make any effort to hide it; when I’ve taught, I wore my rainbow wristband and “Legalize Gay” t-shirt to class (ignorant as I was of the biases I was courting—but I have every intention of continuing to do so). I’d like to think my experience of life in the closet and out makes me a little more naturally skeptical about recieved wisdom and existing power structures, and I tend to think that kind of suspicion is a good thing.

If I had to pick a professional model for integrating my sexual identity into my professional identity, I’d lean more towards Douglas Futuyma than Joan Roughgarden; not so much a crusader for equality via science, but someone identifiable as a gay man who does good scientific work. My favorite example of this, I think, is a snippet from a perspective article Futuyma wrote for The American Naturalist back in 1999, lamenting the loss of old-fashioned natural historical specilization in evolutionary ecology:

… I could not begin to estimate the number of students I have met who, in explaining their work on some aspects of the biology of birds, plants, insects, frogs, have hastened to say that they are not interested in birds or insects as such but, instead, as models for studying principles—as if “ornithologist” or “botanist” were a scarlet letter, a badge of shame. I cannot cast the first stone, for I have often done the same. But in parallel with my other experiences of life, I have come to feel that as a closet entomologist, I should come out and stand proud.

I love that final line because Futuyma’s drawing on his sexuality to make a point in pretty much the same way Stephen Jay Gould would quote Gilbert and Sullivan. (But, you know, much less pompously.) It’s simultaneously an identfiable facet of his personality and no big fracking deal.

(See also that previous link on Futuyma for his own statement about a career as a gay biologist, much of it in an era when it wasn’t as easy as it is today.)

* * *

In the end, I think that the point of advocacy is to try and leave the world a little bit better place for the next generation of queer kids, the ones who are just realizing they have to figure out how their orientation fits into the lives they’ve only just begun to build. In the spirit of It Gets Better, if good examples of how to be gay are what helped me come out, how can I not do my best to be a good example of how to be gay now that I’m out?

But, you know, I want to get married someday, too. So come tomorrow night, I’ll be back at the phone bank.◼

Awkward!

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Via Bora Zivkovic: Today over a thousand people gathered in Newton, North Carolina, to protest reprehensible anti-gay remarks made by a local pastor. Which, good for them! But when you stage a protest against proposing to basically put gay people in concentration camps (or, let’s be fair: dude actually proposed just one big concentration camp), you’ve got to expect that there will be some counter-protesters. And you never know who you’ll meet counter-protesting a protest against a proposed homocaust:

Earlier in the day, one counter protester was caught off guard when a peacekeeper working with protest organizers to keep participants separated from counter protesters saw someone he recognized. The peacekeeper told [this reporter] that one of the counter protesters, a man in his mid-20s or early-30s, once hit on him at a local adult bookstore. The counter protester denied the accusation while holding a sign that condemned gays. The counter protester left the protest early. [Emphasis added.]

Way to break free of the stereotypes, counter protester dude! How does that line go? … Then they came for the lesbians and the queers, and I enthusiastically endorsed that idea, because no way am I into that sort of thing regardless of what you heard and anyway even if I was, speaking hypothetically, it was just some sinful experimentation in college and then many, many times again after college.◼

Carlos DeLuna

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Carlos DeLuna, wrongfully executed by the State of Texas in 1989. Photo via Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

I’ve been trying to come up with something profound to say about this ever since I first saw it on Slog, but I don’t know what more to add to the statement: in 1989, the State of Texas executed Carlos DeLuna for a murder he very clearly didn’t commit.

The Columbia Human Rights Law Review has devoted an entire issue—available online, in completion, with exhaustively detailed supporting information—to an investigative report on DeLuna’s case. At the Guardian, Ed Pilkington picks out the most important details.

Carlos DeLuna was arrested, aged 20, on 4 February 1983 for the brutal murder of a young woman, Wanda Lopez. She had been stabbed once through the left breast with an 8in lock-blade buck knife which had cut an artery causing her to bleed to death.

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn’t committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez’s lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna’s sister Rose.

What happened was: Carlos DeLuna was unfortunate enough to witness Carlos Hernandez attacking Wanda Lopez, and ran off. The police found him near the crime scene, hiding under a truck, and almost immediately confirmed that he matched witness descriptions of Hernandez. Having a suspect, the police barely conducted any further investigation into the murder. More from Pilkington:

Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit’s blood type.

Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock – a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans – were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

There was no scraping of the victim’s fingernails for traces of the attacker’s skin. When Liebman and his students [the authors of the investigative report] studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man’s shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez’s blood on the floor – yet no effort was made to measure it.

People interviewed for the investigation even confirmed that Hernandez repeatedly confessed to the murder. But it was Carlos DeLuna who was executed by lethal injection on the 8th of December, 1989.

The U.S. legal system is, at the most fundamental level, people. People can get things wrong. When the legal system is able to punish people by killing them, that means that the legal system can kill the wrong person. And now, if you need an example of someone who was wrongfully put to death in our country, you have a name: Carlos DeLuna, sacrificed to our society’s insistence that we should be able to punish death with death.◼

Tell the White House: Make government-funded research open-access

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As J.B.S. Haldane put it, “I think … that the public has a right to know what is going on inside the laboratories, for some of which it pays.” He was referring to the need for scientists to explain their work in popular media—which, amen, brother Jack!—but the point holds with regard to access to original scientific articles, too.

It doesn’t make much sense that U.S. citizens, whose taxes fund most of the basic science in this country, are then expected to pay upwards of $50 for a single PDF copy of a journal article presenting government-funded research results. The National Institutes of Health already requires that research it funds be archived online and accessible to the general public free of charge—why not expand that to all government-funded research? And hey, there’s a way to suggest exactly that out to the man in charge: a petition on WhiteHouse.gov.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

It needs 25,000 virtual signatures within 30 days before it’ll get any meaningful attention, so sign this thing and then start badgering all your online “friends” about it, why don’t you? Especially the jerks who keep filling your update stream with branded product promotions and/or time-sucking adorable cat videos and/or news about how they’ve just spent real money for a virtual cow—post this directly on their “walls,” if those are even still a thing, with or without a witty and/or pleading comment appended.

I mean, it’s Monday morning; it’s not like you’re going to get do anything else for the benefit of humanity in the next minute or two, you slacker.◼

Required listening: Armistead Maupin on the President’s marriage statement

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Woke up to this on NPR this morning: Writer and activist Armistead Maupin, discussing President Obama’s big statement on marriage equality with “Weekend Edition Saturday” host Scott Simon.

Well, we talk about bullying a lot in this country as if it’s something that’s generated in schoolyards, but in fact it’s generated in churches, and by politicians—by parents, even, who don’t even consider the fact that their own children might be gay. So when something like this comes from the top, from the very top, it’s gonna filter down. It can’t help but filter down.

We can certainly hope it will. Maupin also touches on his relationship with a conservative, Republican-voting brother in North Carolina.◼