Yostivanich

One of my per­sonal biggest pet peeves with regards to the cur­rent polit­i­cal sys­tem in Amer­ica, and for that mat­ter a large and vast num­ber of soci­ety is how few peo­ple actu­ally use evi­dence to back up their posi­tion. Rather than pre­sent­ing facts we are pre­sented with ad homein attacks, per­sonal sto­ries and told what peo­ple feel rather than what research shows and demon­strates is true. Today the Con­gres­sional Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Randy Neuge­bauer for the dis­trict I live in sent out one of his email newslet­ters.

In the newslet­ter Rep. Neuge­baur talks about Pres. Obama’s recent deci­sion to reverse a Pres. GW Bush era pol­icy of restrict­ing gov­ern­ment fund­ing on any new human embry­onic stem cell lines cre­ated after Aug. 9^th 2001. Quot­ing from the newslet­ter (empha­sis mine):

Today, Pres­i­dent Obama reversed the Bush Administration’s pol­icy of ban­ning fed­eral funds from going to research that involves the destruc­tion of human embryos.

I am dis­ap­pointed in Pres­i­dent Obama’s exec­u­tive order. I strongly believe the rights of the unborn need to be pro­tected from the point of con­cep­tion, which is why I can­not sup­port the use of tax dol­lars to fund research that mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, includ­ing myself, believe destroys human life.

The major advances in stem cell research have come from adult stem cells, not embry­onic ones.  Sev­eral find­ings have recently been made that show stem cells found in umbil­i­cal cord blood, amni­otic fluid, and bone mar­row tis­sue have the same flex­i­bil­ity as embry­onic stem cells.  Research using adult stem cells is being used to treat dis­eases, and tax­payer research dol­lars should go toward advances that are pro­duc­ing results.

Let’s dis­cuss some of Rep. Neugebauer’s points, most impor­tantly the “believe destroys human life”. Not that it does destroy human life, because well there is no evi­dence of such, just people’s belief that it does. There is no evi­dence of any such destruc­tion of human life in those blog posts, arti­cles or links pre­sented by Google, in fact most of them talk about just the oppo­site, about how sci­en­tific research is mak­ing it less and less nec­es­sary for stem cells to be grown in the labs from human embryo’s.

Update: I made a mis­take, but it actu­ally works out favor­ably. Accord­ing to Sci­en­tist and Engi­neers for Amer­ica: “The Exec­u­tive Order does not affect the pro­hi­bi­tion on using fed­eral fund­ing for cre­at­ing destroy­ing, or dis­card­ing human embryos. This pro­hi­bi­tion first became law in 1996 and is known as the Dickey-Wicker amend­ment. Sub­se­quent laws appro­pri­at­ing money for the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices all carry this pro­hi­bi­tion (shown here in H.$. 3043, the 2008 appro­pri­a­tions for HHS). After today, fed­eral dol­lars can go toward research on hun­dreds of cell lines in exis­tence, but not to cre­at­ing new lines.” So Rep. Neuge­bauer can’t even claim that fed­eral dol­lars are going towards destroy­ing human embryos. Sorry about the mistake.

Which might make you ask, so what’s the big deal about the exec­u­tive order then if it really isn’t needed? Two points here, first of all that sci­ence has yet to find a fully reli­able source for stem cells as embryos grown in the lab. Sec­ond to quote PZ Myers: “You don’t get to hob­ble the horse and then com­plain that it hasn’t won any races!” So first of all to fully find a reli­able source of stem cells that doesn’t involve grow­ing embryos sci­en­tist need to study actual embry­onic stem cells (embry­onic stem cells have the unique char­ac­ter­is­tic of being the most adapt­able and thus the best avenue for areas of stem cell research). Also Rep. Neuge­bauer wants to say that the research hasn’t pre­sented any­thing of any value while at the same say­ing that sci­ence should some­how mag­i­cally pro­duce results with the main source of sci­ence fund­ing cut off. Okay I have a busi­ness and decide to cut off 90% of their fund­ing, let’s see the com­pany pro­duce some­thing won­der­ful, sure.

My final point along this topic is that Rep. Neuge­bauer or more likely one of his staffers hasn’t linked to a sin­gle news arti­cle or sci­en­tific paper in any of his newslet­ters describ­ing his actions or providng a more thought out rea­son­ing for why he thinks the way he does. Though what’s to be expected when Obama is the first pres­i­dent “to speak about data in his inau­gural address, and only the sec­ond to men­tion statistics.”

That to me is the absolute sad­dest state in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics that our pres­i­dents aren’t more will­ing to use data and sta­tis­tics to back up why they make deci­sions that they do.

My hope is that we can change this chart around at some point.

Chart Belief in Out­ra­geous Statements