Michelangelo was a conscientious student of human anatomy and enthusiastically dissected corpses throughout his life, but few of his anatomical drawings survive. This one, a depiction of the human brain and brain stem, appears to be drawn on the neck of God, but not all art historians can see it there.

This is not the first picture of a human organ someone has found, or at least imagined, in Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes. In 1990, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a physician described what he saw as a rendering of the human brain in the Creation of Adam, the panel showing God touching Adam’s finger. And one physician, a professor of medicine at Baylor University, published an article in a medical journal in 2000 suggesting that Michelangelo had included a drawing of a kidney in another ceiling panel. The author was, perhaps not coincidentally, a kidney specialist.

The latest find, described in a study in the May issue of the journal Neurosurgery, appears directly above the altar in ‘The Separation of Light From Darkness,

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In our culture right now we have several ‘denier’ movements actively engaged in trying to impede the free development of science: the creationists, the climate change deniers, and the consciousness deniers-those who cannot, or will not, consider consciousness as anything other than materialist processes. For all their lack of substance, these movements are powerful forces in the culture, with substantial detrimental effects.

Creationism, on its face, seems medieval and absurd, but The Pew Research organization, which has tracked the creationist question for many years, reports that 55% of Americans believe the world was created within the last 10,000 years, with all the species pretty much as they are today.1 As appalling as that is, I want to point out, in the context of this essay, that it is getting worse. Creationists are winning the hearts and minds of the American public. Consider the 2005 poll by the Harris organization, shown in Table 1.2
Table 1.

Do You Believe Apes and Man Have a Common Ancestry or Not?

[…]

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Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project may have broken new First Amendment ground by upholding a restriction on speech even after applying ‘strict scrutiny’ – the highest level of judicial review – to the law at issue.

Strict scrutiny is usually fatal to government regulation of speech, but it wasn’t this time, as the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, upheld a federal law that criminalizes ‘material support’ – including training and ‘expert advice’ – to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations. Human rights groups had claimed the law’s vague language would chill and punish benign education projects and speech aimed at defusing the conflicts that lead to terrorism.

‘This is the first time that the Supreme Court has applied strict scrutiny and found a statute to satisfy that strict standard,’ lamented Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole, who argued against the law before the high court. ‘The Court came to this conclusion without the kind of demanding scrutiny the doctrine requires.’

First Amendment law expert and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Eugene Volokh at first appeared to agree with that analysis yesterday afternoon. But by last night, Volokh had returned to his blog to revise his […]

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People who buy their own health insurance have been hit lately with premium hikes that far exceed increases in premiums for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The nonprofit foundation, which is separate from health insurer Kaiser Permanente, said recent premium hikes requested by insurers for individual coverage averaged 20 percent. Some customers were able to switch plans and pay less, so people paying on their own actually wound up paying 13 percent more on average.

That tops last year’s average 5 percent annual increase for employer-sponsored family coverage and almost unchanged premiums for employer-sponsored single coverage, though foundation Vice President Gary Claxton said the comparisons come with qualifications.

The individual insurance survey asked respondents for their most recent premium increases, and those can happen more or less frequently than the annual increases mostly seen in the group market, he noted.

In the online poll, Kaiser queried 1,038 randomly selected people who pay for their own coverage.

Individual health insurance premiums generally rise faster than group coverage rates. They can be affected by variables like a person’s age. They also can be affected by rising medical and drug costs and are more vulnerable when a bad economy makes […]

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WASHINGTON — In a landmark first ruling on genetically modified crops, the US Supreme Court overturned Monday a four-year ban on alfalfa seeds engineered by biotech giant Monsanto to resist weed killer.

A California district judge voided in 2007 the Department of Agriculture’s authorization of the seeds, finding that a proper environmental review had not been conducted. The decision was upheld on appeal in 2009.

But justices voted 7-1 Monday to reverse the ruling, saying the injunction overstepped the mark and prevented the agency from carrying out a ‘partial deregulation’ of the crop, known as Roundup Resistant Alfalfa (RRA).

‘We agree that the district court’s injunction against planting went too far,’ Justice Samuel Alito wrote. ‘In sum, the District Court abused its discretion.’

Opponents of RRA claim it could cross pollinate with conventional alfalfa seeds and other neighboring crops, promoting ‘super-weeds’ with a tolerance to the Roundup herbicide.

‘Until APHIS (the DoA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) seeks to effect a partial deregulation, any judicial review of such a decision is premature,’ the Supreme Court said.

‘The district court barred the agency from pursuing any deregulation, no matter how limited the geographic area in which planting of RRA would be allowed.’

Justices ordered APHIS to carry […]

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