Flatworms unite.

My friend Scott Fay passed his orals for his PHD candidacy the other day. For him this now means he can research symbiotic tropical animals and plants to his hearts content. Eventually having figured out something substantial about tropical symbiots he’ll write a thesis and get a PHD from U.C. Berkeley and become a preeminent professor of corals. Though if the world doesn’t hurry up and figure out what’s up with the coral forests Scott may be a paleobotanist/biologist instead. But so much for Scott’s future. For me, Friday meant I got to go drink beer at a local pub or two (Jupiter and Albatross to be specific) and celebrate with Scott than local evolutionary biology types. While I was drinking said beer, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Scott what the most difficult question the candidacy board had posed was. He replied, “Why don’t Planarians get cancer?”

If you are going to hang around a group of PHD candidates in Evolutionary Biology you should be prepared to not know what they are talking about a lot of the time, or you better be better than average at biology. Planarians (genus Dugesia -- I put this genus crap in to show hip on biology I am) flat worms? I thought, those things I’d learned about in like 6th grade science? You know the little dugesia’s that you can cut the head off of and they will grow a new one. Well actually the head will grow an new tail and the tail will grow a new head, and you end up with two planaria. Why don’t they grow cancerous tumors? Scott never said. We got distracted by a beer order. Once having become a PHD candidate we keep our priorities straight. Beer on Friday.

In reality I don’t really care why little flatworms don’t get cancer. It probably has something to do with the fact the way they reproduce is to bud off a new planaria from their body and pull themselves apart. Is that sex? Who knows? It certainly isn’t a union between a male and female planaria. But it’s a little weird I’ll give you that. However they do seem to reproduce. In fact, they are so busy procreating they don’t have any extra cells to devote to tumors. But that’s a deduction. I’ll research it sometime when I have time. Scott said it would be too difficult to explain quickly when I followed up with him in church on Sunday.

Yeah, we were in church on Sunday. Dan Paul was preaching as part of a pulpit exchange in the city on Sunday. So, we (Scott Fay, Heather Kelly, David Wagner, John Liston, Meredith, her husband, and daughter) showed up to see what the Rev had to say. What Dan said may be a later entry. We’ll sum it up by saying, somehow we went to church and then ended up in a restaurant in the Castro. Its somewhat ironic how seven people who were either ex-boy scouts, a Christian minister or current professional boy scouts could end up in the center of the center of the gayest part of town and the country. I’m sure George Bush could feel a disturbance in the force or something.

But that has nothing to do with flatworms. –Or maybe it does. I mean, I was sitting in the restaurant and ran into a acquaintance, Jose. He’s the director of urban planning for San Francisco. He has various opinions about my poetry, at least that’s how I know him, through my poetry. He also happens to be gay. He asked what I was doing down in that part of town. I told him about the Rev and the Boy Scouts. He didn’t hesitate, “I hope they are open and affirming?” I said, “Sure. Why else would we be there.” Jose, just said, “Oh ok”, and took off as our restaurant was too crowded for him to wait. So, that left me sitting there looking at everyone else in the restaurant with my flatworm question unanswered. Then I started to realize that flatworms were the basic problem in the Castro. I mean, say what you will about the progress liberation movements, most people still think of people in the Castro as slightly above flatworms on the evolutionary scale. Though most who have this opinion deny evolution.

Gavin Newsom (Mayor of SF) was talking last week about the one year anniversary of the gay marriage in SF. He said the marriage issue isn’t over, it will be back. I guess the issue just regenerates a new body part like the planaria. Its kind of funny, I was watching Nova last night on the restoration of the Declaration of Independence. The show spent a great deal of time talking about how the phrases “That all me are created equal. That they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, etc.” had morphed since the writing of the declaration. The declaration was really a list of contractual grievances the colonies had against the king and it explained why the ties were being severed. It wasn’t till Abraham Lincoln came along during the Civil War and recast the meaning of the Preamble to the Declaration that everyone got all excited about “All men are create equal and they have right to life, liberty an the pursuit of stuff.” I guess a lot of people are pretty excited in this country that our morals are going to Hell or something. They think making a bunch of laws against going to Hell will somehow stop everyone from going. But I think this effort to outlaw Hell and cut off the heads of the little flatworms amble towards it is doomed Sure, in the process a lot of little flatworms are going to loose their head and this is going to be messy, but it will fail. Mainly cause these little efforts kill off an idea never work. Eventually someone is going to figure out how to recast this discussion. Those who want to keep flatworms flat will look silly in the end. Even flatworms have the right to happiness, and they are really hard to kill. The worlds been trying to exterminate and control them for all of human history, and they are still around.