What will the political consequences be if a) Saddam is captured and b) we get real new intelligence and data on the Iraqi WMD program? I think that’s when president Bush gets out his saw and cuts off that big, high branch his Democrat opponents are now sitting on.
THE DIFFERENCE: I’ve long believed that science will at some point render many of our current policy arguments moot. I think we’ll find that genes play far more of a role in our lives than most of us would ever want to believe. But the news yesterday about gender difference in our genes dwarves the debate about the role of testosterone in gender difference. Here are the money grafs:
The finding of 78 active genes on the Y contradicts an earlier impression of the chromosome as being a genetic wasteland apart from its male-determining gene. But if the Y is not a wasteland, important consequences ensue for the differences between men and women. As often noted, the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical, when each of their three billion DNA units are compared. But what of men and women, who have different chromosomes? Until now, biologists have said that makes no difference, because there are almost no genes on the Y, and in women one of the two X chromosomes is inactivated, so that both men and women have one working X chromosome.
But researchers have recently found that several hundred genes on the X escape inactivation. Taking those genes into account along with the new tally of Y genes gives this result: Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee …
“We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it,” Dr. Page said. “But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.”
By far the biggest difference in the human genome is gender. Blank Slaters take another hit.
The Dish 