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The Nanosecond Scientist

A BolesBlogs.com reader forwarded me a transcript and asked whether any of it holds up. A man is talking about human origins. He says Homo sapiens appeared out of nowhere. He says a missing link sits at the base of our species, and that the link is easy to find: hand any person’s DNA to a scientist who works with CRISPR, ask whether the sample has been edited, and the answer arrives in a nanosecond. Yes. Edited. From there he moves to the identity of the editor, God or a visiting intelligence with advanced technology, and he closes by asking why Britain colonized America. Here is the short answer before the long one. Three of the speaker’s sentences are accurate. One sentence is invented, and that invented sentence carries the entire argument. Everything downstream of it, the aliens, Dr. Moreau, the colony, the closing questions, rests on a laboratory result that has never happened and cannot happen. The combination deserves slow handling, because the arrangement recurs everywhere now, and the arrangement does more damage than the content.

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Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.

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Burning Your Brown Eyes Blue

My eyes change from hazel to blue to green depending on the amount of sunlight shining in them and the reflective color of the shirt I am wearing.  My lovely and beautiful wife has constant caramel eyes that I would eat like toffee if I were allowed.  Imagine my dismay when I learned yesterday that a doctor in California has a new laser procedure to permanently remove the brown from brown eyes:

Dr. Gregg Homer at Stroma Medical in California announced on KTLA-TV that he had come up with a laser procedure that removes the brown pigment, known as melanin, in the iris. Once removed, the blue color underneath is revealed, giving the person blue eyes. Homer said the procedure takes about 20 seconds.

“We use a laser that’s tuned to a specific frequency to remove the pigment from the surface of the iris,” he told KTLA.
The change is irreversible because, once removed, the melanin cannot grow back.

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