biology

It's been a while since I've posted here, and for my recent lack of desire to do much blogging, I must apologize. I've been feeling the urge creeping up, however. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen, I suppose. :)

Anyway,

As long as the subject of zoophilia is currently in the spotlight at UDoJ, let me bring up something that I've been pondering for several weeks. In France there is an AIDS awareness campaign out that plays on our societal aversion to the "Ickyness" (to borrow a phrase) of sexual contact with animals to make the point that sex can be dangerous.

Obviously the ads would never fly here in the United States. The modern fundamentalist religion movement has forcibly dragged the societal acceptance of rational discourse about sex and sexuality far enough into the closet to prevent the ads from ever seeing the light of day on billboards and bus stops. Visual depictions of sexuality on this level are verboten in public due to the appeasement by both our society in general and our government in particular of the medieval false-prudery of a group of people with no connection to reality.

Discussion continues, below the fold.

A newly-published article on the neurological manipulation of fruit flies has hit the presses. University of Illinois research David Featherstone mutated a gene on fruit fly DNA that basically created bisexual fruit flies. Oddly, most of the press tag these "homosexual" fruit flies, but that isn't the case at all.

In med-speak:

"Here, we show that the glial amino-acid transporter genderblind controls whether Drosophila melanogaster males will attempt to mate with other males. Genderblind (gb) mutant males showed no alteration in heterosexual courtship or copulation, but were attracted to normally unappealing male species-specific chemosensory cues. As a result, genderblind mutant males courted and attempted to copulate with other Drosophila males."

Translation:

Altering a specific gene so that fruit flies don't really care if it's male or female pheremones they react to, male fruit flies will attempt to mate with, to borrow a tongue-in-cheek phrase, any fruit fly that moves.