Giving The Finger

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My recent viewing of Ben Stein's movie, Expelled, coupled with my lighthearted post on nanotechnology this past Tuesday had already put me in a science-y kind of mood when I fell upon the above story that I found in London's Daily Mail.

When looking at the photos it looks impressive but, as is often the case in stories like these which seem too incredible to be true it probably is. (Also any story in which Pixie dust is major factor should probably bring out the skeptic in you pretty quickly.) The problems with pulling off the kind of regrowth seen above are many:

According to Dr Minger, while it could be theoretically possible that a man has regrown his finger by sprinkling it with powdered pig bladder, it seems unlikely.

The problem is that a fingertip, while appearing simple, is actually a very complex structure. It consists of skin, fat, connective tissue, bone, tendon, nerves and blood vessels as well as the quite complex apparatus which grows the fingernail.

All these complex tissues would have to grow in the right order and in the right proportions and positions in relation to each other.

Somehow, the collagen dust would have to persuade the healing stump tissue not to simply form a scar but to trick it into behaving as it would have done when Mr Spievack's fingers were growing in his mother's womb.

While this story and the accompanying pictures are interesting, the truth is that real clinical tests will be needed to determine what exactly is going on here. Hopefully they'll be done and there will be some follow-up to this story at some time in the not-too-distant future.

Stories like this one, the nanotech and Intelligent Design stories raise a host of interesting issues that have implications in all sorts of areas, the political, the social, the economic, the religious, etc. If fingers can be regenerated, what about hands, arms, hearts, eyes, whole bodies? And if your body can be regenerated, what does that mean for the average human life expectancy? What if we can live for 100 years? 1,000? Longer? How would that affect society? Our relationships? The fact is that while the above may be mere speculation that never materializes in the real world, other big changes are coming and if they're going to be changes that are beneficial for humanity we need to have some sort of ethical framework in which to deal with them.

I think these are pretty interesting issues and every now and again I'd like to return to them. If they're interesting to you too, let me know. Could be fun.

I'd like to thank Aurora from The Midnight Sun, whose comments on the nanotech post got me to thinking about these issues as much as the stories themselves did. Thanks!

Barking Moonbat howls at this story, too.

Expelled Gets An "A"

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Well you've got to give Ben Stein credit; he doesn't kick sand in the face of weaklings. He goes right up to the biggest, most muscle-bound, meanest SOB on the beach, kicks sand in his face and then insults his girlfriend for good measure. Stein's new movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed examines the intolerance of those in academia and science who have excluded all who dare question any of the many flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution.

The reaction to the film represents The Left's second full-blown fit in month. (Their first fit was, of course, after the last Dem debate in which Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos showed Obama to be a lightweight when presented with a couple tough questions.) The grounds for reviling Stein's work have been many and varied. Some, like Time Magazine's Jeffrey Kluger have attacked it for saying that Darwinism was a necessary condition for the growth of Nazism.

It's in the film's final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and--wait for it--Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it's claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler's killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We've always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

I doubt that Kluger is stupid so can only assume that he is only playing stupid in his review. Hitler could certainly not have used Christianity (which he loathed) as a philosophical underpinning for extermination of the Jews but Darwinism fit the bill just fine. When you talk about the survival of the fittest it doesn't take much effort to frame certain groups as intrinsically unfit, therefor making their removal necessary to advance the species. This is what Hitler did. Yes, people will always do terrible things but Darwinism allowed Hitler to do them while saying that it was a necessary good.

Other critics have tried to say that those academics who Stein says lost their jobs for their support of Intelligent Design (ID) did so for other reasons. Michael Shermer (who Stein interviews in the film, making him appear somewhat clueless) attempts a "gotcha" on this point and tries to prove that,

In other words, from the get-go this was much ado about nothing.

But his proof is weak. Of course anyone who tries to prove that academia is free of petty, little fiefdoms and intolerance and is instead a paragon of free-thought is bound to come off as unserious to anyone who has been anywhere near a University in...well, probably since the first one was built.

The really stupid critiques of the film come from such as Valeria Tarico (no, I've never heard of her either but she has apparently written something called The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth. and writes for exChristian.net so you can pretty much see where she's coming from right off the bat) at the very "rational" Huffington Post who attempts to say that Stein is using his movie as a stalking horse to get Creationism into the schools and the minds of all those little children Hillary would like to protect from their parents and dangerous ideas like that of God. In fact Stein is very clear on numerous occasions throughout the movie in stating that ID and Creationism are very different things indeed and Stein gives absolutely no indication that he has any use for Creationism at all.

The film is a very smartly produced, interesting, thought-provoking and entertainingly crafted call for academic freedom. It is understandable why academics are less than thrilled with it as they frequently come off as petulant and small-minded. The legendary Richard Dawkins, author of the The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion comes off especially poorly, at one point suggesting that life on Earth may have been designed but if so it would have to have been by aliens. Then he amusingly and obliviously journeys into the land of the absurd with Stein about what he thinks the chances are that God might exist. 99%? 98%? 49%? His principled scientific rigour disappears like morning fog, much to his irritation.

If Expelled was not a joy to watch in the first place, and it is, watching the sputtering image of Dawkins would alone be worth the price of admission.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air thinks Ben Stein misses the point.