Fruit Flies? Again? Really?

[pokerfan]

Someone tell that senile old fool that the election's over.

Posted on: January 9, 2009 11:20 AM, by PZ Myers

I was startled to see that John McCain hasn't been retired to the WaxWorks Museum of Irrelevant Political Figures yet — he's still making speeches.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/hasnt_he_gone_away_yet.php">Hasn't he gone away yet?

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. What McCain and Palin don't understand

that fruit fly research, namely on Drosophila melanogaster, is the basis of human genetic research; that Thomas Hunt Morgan won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for demonstrating with fruit flies how inherited traits are passed to the offspring via the chromosomes; and that the latest Drosophila research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered a protein likely related to autism, the same disorder for which Palin wants more government-funded research.

[pokerfan]

2. They don't understand evolution

so they quite honestly don't see how spending time and money studying something as insignificant as a fruit fly can help cure human diseases. They literally don't see the connection.

You know, it's one thing to be indifferent to science but these guys are openly hostile.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/12/mccain-creationism

[WheelWalker]

3. Every fruitcake has a fear of fruit flies. n/t