I apologize for these anti-religious posts on Christmas Eve, but this is really too good to pass up. Blame the Pope for choosing the festive season to make an announcement like this. From the report by Reuters:
Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.
“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.
“The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”
That’s an awesome display of insensitivity and being out of touch with the general population right there.
Wow, I haven’t done one of these in a while since my Economist subscription lapsed. I only renewed it fairly recently. Anyway, here are the three most interesting science related news items that I’ve seen in October, with one of them from The Economist. Let’s start with that one first.
The biological causes and effects of homosexuality is one of the perennial questions when you try to explain human nature in scientific terms. The most obvious of these questions is why homosexuality, since it can in large part be attributed to genetic causes, persists when common sense dictates that homosexuals shouldn’t be in a good position to pass along their genes to the next generation? A recent article highlights one possible answer: genes that make men more feminine and genes that make women more masculine confer a reproductive advantage to the person who possesses them, so long as they do not actually push them into homosexuality.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct ’08) →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living