Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Beauty Queen and The Fruit Fly

"ummm aaah US Americans are ummmmah...." remember the Miss South Carolina beauty queen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww who gave us that eloquent answer when asked what could we do about the fact that Americans couldnt find the United States on the map...well I think Ms Palin made an equivalent science gaffe this past week when she criticized the allocation of funds to fruit fly research in her usual derisive and dismissive "Roseanne Barr" voice.

Any 11th grade Science student would know that the humble fruit fly (Latin: Drosophila Melanogaster) is the entity of choice for basic experimentation in the genetics area because it has unusually large chromosomes which are easily manipulable and detectable under even a simple light microscope.

I certainly knew that based on my 11th grade Biology experiments in Mr Hutton's science class back in 1983 in a humble publicly funded school in an Ottawa suburb, when we bred fruit flies and experimented with theories of dominant genes and recessive genes and such......

.....and even if you assume a former sportscaster / beauty queen should not know basic science (because Lord knows the dumbass believes humans shared the earth with dinosaurs since she does not believe in evolution and reads Genesis literally) you would think that her speech writers and her "science advisor" would keep her out of this pitfall....but alas and alack...the McCain campaign once again shows they are a bunch of amateurs....from the Hagee endorsement onwards they have showed incredibly bad judgement and it just continues.

Makes one long for the days of Senator Danforth Quayle....and the "potatoe"

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