The Devil is Busy

#LiarLiar. 

She loved you still. 

Literally.

Specifically.

Captured your demons and buried them in a box beneath your maple tree. 

Lightened the dark road ahead, buried many pains beneath many dreams.

Believed the words, It's not you; it's me. 

And when he could finally see in himself, what she saw in thee: I'm sorry, Sweets - I can stand on my own two and I'd rather be free.

Fly away, fly away home.

Nettie Stevens...Because Science.

Nettie Stevens discovered XY sex chromosomes. She didn't get credit because she had two X’s.

Updated by Brian Resnick on July 7, 2016, 6:30 a.m. ET     

At the turn of the 20th century, biologist Nettie Stevens was driven to solve a scientific mystery that had perplexed humanity for millennia. The mystery was so simple but daunting: Why do boys become boys and girls become girls? In her pioneering work at Bryn Mawr College, Stevens discovered the sex chromosomes that make the difference.

Today would be her 155th birthday. Google is celebrating her accomplishments today — she’s featured in the Google Doodle — and so should we.

Before Stevens, we were utterly clueless about how embryos become boys or girls

Thanks to Stevens’s work — and the work that built upon it — we now know that sex is hereditary, and that dads’ sperm in particular determine the sex of offspring.

But for most of human history, this question was an absolute mystery — and it yielded some interesting theories.

Aristotle believed a child’s sex was determined by the body temperature of the father during sex. “Aristotle counseled elderly men to conceive in the summer if they wished to have male heirs,” the textbook Developmental Biology explains.

In 19th-century Europe, it was widely believed that nutrition was the key to sex determinant. Poor nutrition led to males, good nutrition to females.

And throughout the centuries, other gonzo theories abounded.

The 18th-century French anatomist Michel Procope-Couteau (the author of The Art of Having Boys) believed that testicles and ovaries were either male or female.

Procope-Couteau “suggested the best way to control a child’s sex would be to remove the testes or ovary connected with the unwanted sex; though a less drastic mean for ladies would be to lie on the correct side, and let gravity do the rest,” according to The Evolution of Sex Determination, a book by biologists Leo W. Beukeboom and Nicolas Perrin.

All of that was nonsense, we’ve learned, thanks to Stevens.

Microscopes haven't changed much...

Wikimedia Commons

Nettie Stevens’s microscope.

The mealworms that held the secret of sex determination

Stevens was born in Vermont in 1861 and got her start in science at the relatively late age of 35, when she had saved up enough to enroll in a small startup university in California. It was Stanford, and she thrived there, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree by 1900.

After Stanford, Stevens pursued a PhD — a level of education very rare for women of her time — at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. It was there that she turned her attention to solving the problem of sex determinism.

In the early 1900s, the idea that chromosomes contained hereditary information was still a brash new theory. The works of Gregor Mendel himself were only rediscovered in 1900 (Mendel had no audience for his ideas while he was alive), and the scientific community was trying to work out the mechanisms of how traits — including sex determination — were passed between generations.

Stevens wanted to know how (and if) sex was passed on through genetic inheritance. She was making observations with a microscope of the chromosomes in Tenebrio molitor — the mealworm beetle — when she discovered something that had eluded humanity for millennia.

Stevens observed that the female mealworm’s cells had 20 large chromosomes. The male had 20 chromosomes as well, but the 20th was notably smaller than the other 19.

“This seems to be a clear case of sex determination,” Stevens wrote in, a report summarizing her findings.

She concluded (correctly) that this difference could be traced back to differences in the mealworm sperm. The sperm had either the small version of the 20th chromosome or the large one. “The spermatozoa which contain the small chromosome [determine] the male sex,” she wrote, “while those that contain 10 chromosomes of equal size determine the female sex.”

(She didn’t call these chromosomes X or Y. That naming convention would come later.)

Her sex chromosome discovery in 1905 “was the culmination of more than two thousand years of speculation and experiment on how an animal, plant, or human becomes male or female,” historian Stephen Brush explains in The History of Science Society. “At the same time it provided an important confirmation for the recently revived Mendelian genetics that was to become a central part of modern biology.”

Studies in Spermatogenesis.

Stevens’s depictions of cellular division in Studies in Spermatogenesis.

Stevens didn’t get credit for her revelatory work — at first

Stevens’s colleague and mentor E.B. Wilson — a legendary biologist in his own right — is more commonly cited as the discoverer of sex chromosomes.

The reason is simple: sexism.

Wilson was working on the same questions as Stevens, and he published a similar result around the same time. Wilson had worked on a species where the male actually has one less chromosome than the female, which is less common in nature. Stevens’s model of an X and Y chromosome is the basis for human sex determination. Plus, Stevens’s model better supports Mendel’s theory on genetics — that some genes take on dominant roles and override the instructions of their gene pairs.

“It is generally stated that E. B. Wilson obtained the same results as Stevens, at the same time,” Brush writes. But “Wilson probably did not arrive at his conclusion on sex determination until after he had seen Stevens' results. ... Because of Wilson's more substantial contributions in other areas, he tends to be given most of the credit for this discovery.”

Wilson’s paper published before Stevens’s, and as the man with the higher reputation it’s he who has been credited with the discovery. But even though their papers were similar, it was Stevens who presented a stronger — and ultimately more correct — conclusion.

Wilson still believed environmental factors played a role in determining sex. Stevens said it was purely the chromosomes. Neither view could be confirmed absolutely at the time of the discovery.

But though time proved Stevens correct, it’s Wilson who got the credit. At they very least, they should be considered co-discoverers.

It’s a classic case of the “Matilda effect,” a term named after the abolitionist Matilda Gage. The effect is the phenomenon that women’s accomplishments tend to be co-opted, outright stolen, or overshadowed by those of male peers. Stevens is far from the only woman scientist to have this happen to her: Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to the discovery of DNA, got similarly sidelined later in the 20th century.

The New York Times wrote an obituary about Stevens when she died in 1912 from breast cancer. Here’s how it summed up her accomplishments: “She was one of the very few women really eminent in science, and took a foremost rank among the biologists of the day.”

An understatement indeed.

(As published on http://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12105830/nettie-stevens-genetics-gender-sex-chromosomes)

Sineca Tsai, 2016 Graduate!

So. Proud. Of. Him.

Why is Nyla like his biggest fan...? Maybe because they share a birthday (along with my first BFF Felicia and My Auntie Charlene, lol, all on February 13! - both Ingrid & Therese are in April.)

My beautiful oldest and youngest, 9 years, 2 months, and 1 day apart...Jazzi-Phae had to work ;(, but she was there in spirit!

#Him

And nothing was ever the same...

Because Truth and Justice.

First of all, I am not a BET supporter, let's just make that clear...I do not support the music they shove among the masses and I just choose not to view their channel.


Second, how many of us need to die before there is change in our community...?


Third, I am personally on a mission.


Fourth, This. Speech.

Jesse Williams of Black and Swedish heritage.

Aryn and Jesse Williams. Her hair though...!

There is a petition - (https://www.change.org/p/boycott-abc-network-and-sign-petition-to-fire-jesse-williams-from-grey-s-anatomy-for-racist-rant) - to have him fired from his acting position on Grey's Anatomy (I haven't seen the show since 3rd-year of law school) because a number of people feel that his speech was somehow, racist. Racist?

I mean, whaaaa di raaaas? Metaphorically speaking, think of the difference between a killing caused by a murder and a death caused by self-defense. It's one thing to dislike a person for your own personal beliefs and reasons, it's a completely separate issue to hate a whole group of individuals and that hate spills over from your personal thoughts to your very public, tax paid position to serve and protect.

Below you will find his speech that played during the awards show and on a number of networks.

I send he and his wife beautiful vibes, and to be clear, I would send those same beautiful vibes whether she was beautifully black and bronzed or a cute cotton-candied Caucasian, love who you love. Stop the anger and hate mongering; it only begets more hate.

Jesse Williams, Activist/Actor

"Peace peace.

Thank you, Debra. Thank you, BET. Thank you Nate Parker, Harry and Debbie Allen for participating in that.

Before we get into it, I just want to say I brought my parents out tonight. I just want to thank them for being here, for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career, and that they make sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also thank my amazing wife for changing my life.

Now, this award – this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country – the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do.

It’s kind of basic mathematics – the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize.

Now, this is also in particular for the black women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves (Author's note: not all women, those that have spent their lifetimes nurturing. I shouldn't have to explain that to people who grew up being nurtured). We can and will do better for you.

Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now… I got more y’all – yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12 year old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better than it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.

Now the thing is, though, all of us in here getting money – that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright, now dedicating our lives, dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies.

There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t leveed against us – and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she (Author's note: Sandra Bland) would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.

Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.

 

And let’s get a couple things straight, just a little side note – the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit (Author's note: Billy Holiday's Strange Fruit). The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.

 

Thank you."

 

Where was the racist statement in this speech? I don't understand the petition, at all, and neither does Shonda Rhimes.

RIP Alton Sterling

Leviticus 19:17-18: You must not hate your fellow man in your heart. You must surely reprove your fellow citizen so that you do not incur sin on account of your hatred of him. You must not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the children of your people, but you must love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.