Um, can I change my order, please? I choose eggs with a side of civil rights.OK, OK, in the full argument, she relies on some pretty "typical" arguments about choosing to be gay or not... but, seriously, that's pretty advanced for the deep south. Seriously.
Maybe all of this choice stuff comes from the choice to come out. And that, I'll give you, is a conscious choice.
But it's not a choice about liking girls better than boys. Or being a Carolina fan as opposed to a Clemson fan. It's a choice to tell the truth about who you love and who you are, to live honestly, openly, and authentically and continue evolving into the best you possible.
How about this frightening choice? A Kentucky Senate committee has unanimously chosen to approve a bill that would prohibit unmarried couples from adopting children or being foster parents. If you're keeping track, that doesn't just affect the GLBT community, it affects unmarried straight couples too. Meaning, even Angelina and Brad couldn't adopt in Kentucky if this hateful little bill passes.
Most of my GLBT friends have, out of sheer necessity, delved into law, financial planning, and HIPAA regulations in an attempt to protect themselves, their partners, and families. If you're GLBT or a GLBT supporter in this generation, you better be ready to study, make phone calls, write letters, and march.
If I sound frustrated, I am. The California Supreme Court is pondering Proposition 8, so I'm feeling a bit edgy. On the other hand, I have people who care enough about my rights and life to study, make phone calls, write letters, and march.
And when my alarm sounds, I will sit up, swing my legs over the side of the bed in the early morning light, take a deep breath, and say, "Universe, I'm SALLY ALBRIGHT, and I choose me." (It's more invigorating than coffee.)
Guest blogger Nick Shalosky is Secretary of the South Carolina Stonewall Democrats. He is the first openly-gay elected official in South Carolina. At the age of 21, Shalosky was elected with 22 votes to the Charleston County District 20 Constituent School Board with a write-in campaign primarily organized through Facebook. He is a junior at the College of Charleston.WOW. An openly gay elected official in my homestate and in my hometown. You know, there was an open lesbian running in that same district for the US House that lost by very little. I will say this: AFFA and the SCEC are great organizations, though a little out of touch with the rest of the world (when I offered to help with future organizing, they said "no, we can do it on our own"). I think this is kind of a major blow to them because they, no doubt, did not realize this was happening. But that is besides the point...
One Facebook, I was invited to join the group Islanders for Responsible Expansion (Facebook group here).
ISLANDERS FOR RESPONSIBLE EXPANSION (IRE) is a grassroots organization dedicated to raising awareness of the impact development has on the natural beauty and resources of James Island and Folly Beach.
Our goal is to provide Islanders with the tools we need to protect ourselves against irresponsbile development. Together we can take action and stand up for our way of life and the home we love.
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Really smart people don't overestimate the value of being smart. Or, as an enlightening question of uncertain origin puts it: "If you're so smart, whyFirst of all, it seems to be saying two different things. At the first, it seems like it's making an argument for intelligence, but then it closes off saying that smart people die quickly -- but then seems to call everyone dumb. Second off, is it seriously making an argument that learning, and the capability to do so, is bad? Or, are you just being completely asinine and implying that ignorance truly is bliss.
aren't you rich?"
Just as being "smart" doesn't guarantee wealth for homo sapiens, it doesn't guarantee longevity for other creatures. Tuesday's New York Times reported that a group of scientists at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) have discovered that "being smart can be bad for an animal's health," and that forming the neuron connections needed to learn — a fundamental task to becoming smart — "may cause harmful side effects."
Consider the case of fruit flies clever enough to catch on more quickly than most of their kind. The offspring of those that learn how to avoid quinine samples injected into particular fruits in an experiment "pay a price for fast learning," according to biologist Tadeusz Kawecki, one of the project's leaders. When the offspring of the smart flies and the offspring of the non-smart flies had to compete for a "meager supply of yeast" in a follow-up experiment, only half of the smart flies survived while four-fifths of the "ordinary" flies did.
Evidently, to borrow another maxim, slow and steady still often wins the race. The research documented a 15 percent shorter life span for the more intelligent flies,
leading Prof. Kawecki to ask this leading question: "If it's so great to be
smart, why have most animals remained dumb?"That same question could be applied to our species.
We have shown that genetically-based improvement in learning ability can readily evolve under an ecologically relevant selection regime. Under the selection regime flies that learned to associate a potential oviposition medium with an aversive chemical (quinine), remembered this association, and continued to avoid this medium after the chemical has been removed, contributed more genes to the next generation. Within 20 generations these flies became able to learn substantially faster and remember much longer than their ancestors (Mery and Kawecki 2002, PNAS 99:14274-14279). This response generalizes to other stimuli and other olfactory aversive learning tasks, suggesting that evolution has acted on a "general" learning ability. However, the "smart" flies paid for their improved learning ability with reduced survival when food is scarce, presumably due to pleiotropic side-effects of genes that improve learning (Mery and Kawecki 2003, Proc. R. Soc. B 270:2465-2469, see also a comment by New Scientist). This indicates an evolutionary trade-off between learning ability and other aspects of performance. We have also shown that learning has operational costs: flies repeatedly forced to learn within their lifetime show a decline in fecundity (Mery and Kawecki 2004, Anim. Behav. 68:589-598). Finally, we have shown that long-term memory formation makes flies more vulnerable to environmental stress (Mery and Kawecki 2005, Science 308 p.1148).
In another set of experiments we tested the old idea that the ability to learn may facilitate genetically-based evolutionary change (known as the Baldwin effect). We could show that populations selected to prefer to oviposit on a pineapple substrate evolved a stronger genetically-based preference for pinapple if they were also given an opportunity to learn which medium should be preferred. However, the opposite effect of observed in populations selected for oviposition on another substrate (orange). These results indicate that the fact that a species learns can substantially affect its evolutionary change in a novel environment (Mery and Kawecki 2004, Evolution 58:757-767.). In collaboration with Honda Research Institute we are orking on mathematical and computer models of this effect.
