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http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/cbs_news_resident_anti-vaccine_propagand.php#comments

This sums it up

I can't believe that any sentient being would take the Hannah Poling case as an indication that vaccines cuase autism.

To begin with, Ms. Poling has a mitochondrial abnormality - which preceded any vaccination, not to mention her birth - which makes her inordinately sensitive to - among other things - fever. In this case, the government has conceded that the vaccine(s) she received caused a fever (which is a common side effect of vaccines) which more likely than not (50% plus a feather) was the proximal cause of a neurological injury.

Secondly, Ms. Poling - while she may have many aspects of autism - is not similar to the vast majority of autistic children (and adults). She is acknowledged to have an atypical case of autism. Also, technically, it can't be "autism" if there is a known neurological injury.

Finally, vaccines are not unique in their ability to cause Ms. Poling's neurological injury. Any febrile illness (including, I must add, all vaccine-preventable illnesses) could have done the same. This is analogous to a person struck while crossing a busy freeway - there are numerous vehicles which could have done the injury, but the unlucky chap who hits the pedestrian gets the blame.

If Ms. Poling had come down with influenza or even a nasty adenovirus prior to getting her vaccinations, she would be just as "autistic" as she is now, but she wouldn't be exploited by the anti-vaccination movement. I suppose I can't blame her parents for using the established legal process to get money for her care, but I do find opportunists like Mr. Doherty highly offensive./blockquote>

I'm a christian and an American, yet I don't get offended when I see people burning bibles or American flags; I look at them like they're idiots. Sure, the symbolism of their action is bad, but it's still just a book - it's nothing I'm going to lose sleep over.

Well there was the case of much hullaballoo and threats some time ago when PZ Mysers was threatening to desecrate a consecrated wafer. A large number of people really did get very offended even by the suggestion that he might do such a thing. Now, of course, I expect you're not Catholic and so wouldn't care. The fact remains that there are things can cause some Christians to lose a lot of sleep. I expect there are plenty of muslims (I'm betting the vast majority) that will have a similar reaction to yours over the book burning, but there will be some who will indeed be offended. This is how religion works: sacred things are sacred and threats to do bad things to them are deemed offensive by whoever takes the dogma very seriously.

It's certainly easier than, you know, actually acknowledging and dealing with their ideas...

What ideas? You mean ideas like somehow thinking that Patrick Henry was a supporter of the US Constitution http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/09/patrick_henry_and_the_tea_part_1.php. Or maybe you mean Glenn Beck's pseudoscientific ideas about how the Smithsonian is involved in a massive conspiracy to cover up 19th century archaelogical facts?http://anthroslug.blogspot.com/2010/08/glenn-becks-pseudo-archaeology-part-1.html. Or maybe you mean the idea that Obama is going to put Republicans into concentration camps http://boingboing.net/2009/03/17/foxs-glenn-beck-says.html? You know, what? I'm sick of the notion that there is anything resembling worthwhile ideas coming from this man. At a certain point, it is a waste of time to actually respond to this paranoid nonsense in any other way than ridicule. And to the people who believe him or listen to him? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of them for being too lazy or too stupid or too tribalistic to exercise their brains at all.

Now, if you just we're talking about the saner end of the Tea Partiers then there might be some argument that they have actual ideas, mainly resembling the form "I like government policies that make life better for me but not for other people." Do I need to address what's wrong with that also or are we done?

It's racist apologia projected on /. as a troll-tag.

I'll just say it, with a little help from a link:

Darwin wasn't racist.

You may want to read a bit about denialism so you can recognize it when you see it.

That's actually kinda what they were doing beforehand - here's how P.Z. Myers summed it up:

The Dickey-Wicker amendment is a relic of Gingrich-era scientific obstructionism. It prohibits the funding of research in which human embryos are created or destroyed; the Clinton administration developed a rather dodgy line of reasoning to get around it by arguing that human stem cells were not human embryos, therefore research on cells could be funded. Which is entirely true, but it's shaky because the intent of the legislators was to kill human embryonic stem cell research entirely, and taking advantage of the inability of Republican congressman to draft a scientifically complete description of the work they were prohibiting isn't exactly fair.

The judge has just ruled that no, the intent of the law is to prohibit stem cell research, so you can't get around it just because the Republicans who crafted the legislation didn't know what the heck they were talking about. If only domain knowledge were an actual requirement.

Rarely has the geek factor at Slashdot been so painfully evident. No matter how relevant the topic, a superficial stupidity in the summary text reduces this place to a tribe of impulse-challenged baboons trading shallow bon mots like a feces fight.

Quoted at Stress : The Frontal Cortex:

"One of the first things I discovered was that I didn't like baboons very much," he says. "They're quite awful to one another, constantly scheming and backstabbing. They're like chimps but without the self-control."

Troglodytes in the high art of back-stabbing, as Sapolsky humorously demonstrates with his own poison pen:

[Old Testament nicknames] was a way of rebelling against his childhood Hebrew school teachers, who rejected the blasphemy of Darwinian evolution. "I couldn't wait for the day that I could record in my notebook that Nebuchanezzar and Naomi were off screwing in the bushes," Sapolsky wrote in A Primate's Memoir. "It felt like a pleasing revenge."

Bezos' grandfather had something useful to say about cleverness at the expense of what matters:
Bezos at Princeton

Almost every society mentioned in Buettner's study of longevity move around a lot:
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+

Here we are hunched over our keyboards having a feces fight about the semantics of immortality rather than thinking about major life choices. If a computer programmer's office chair was a protein complex, there would be a conjugate protein that binds the chair and expired occupant into a handy burial pod that can be rolled (rather than wheeled) out of the room.

With rare exceptions, you don't see death sitting down on the job all that often. Here's another obligatory Ted link:
Challenging Death

I had completely forgotten the cape wipe. Nice touch in the editing room.

This sad display leaves me contemplating an update to the video tombstone memorial from Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts" with the text of "last post" and "last tweet" added automatically to the rolling feed by the web-scrapers of omniscience. Even St Peter has an iPad these days to assist in the great summing up.

How many humans ask that question on their own without first hearing some varient from someone else or from a book?

I would suspect a lot. I remember as a child pondering my existence, certainly before I read any philosophy books, and I don't recall hearing it from somebody else. Consider that, as far as I know, every culture has some sort of religion or mythology that tries to explain existence. It seems a natural question that falls out of "why?", applied to self.

If an expert system is fed a load of philosophy books and come out with that as a request for additional information when you pose it a problem does that count?

No, because existential angst is one of the backbones of philosophy. Let's say the machine intelligence evolved from a primitive state in a simulated environment, without being fed human ideas. Examples would be robots learning to play soccer on their own, or robots eating "food" and avoiding "poison".

HIV mutates fast. For more discussion of HIV (and a lot of rude comments by an HIV researcher [1]) check out Abbie Smith's blog.

[1] Yes, she's young and (very) good looking. And has a dog that you could saddle for rodeo.

Taste is subjective. Period. This means there are no "experts", only people known for their opinions.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/11/the_subjectivity_of_wine.php

I'm not entirely certain what strawman construction PZ Myers responded to. Ray Kurtzweil said, and yes this is from the article, but presumably he actually said something like this:

Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

And that is complete bullshit. As other people pointed out, this is like saying that the design of an x86 computer down to the motherboard schematics and the equations for quantum interactions between electrons is contained in the Windows source code.

If you read PZ's response, you'd see that even that is not an accurate analogy. What DNA does, in a sense, is contain the information needed to create an automated construction crew - Caterpillars, forklifts, jackhammers, etc. That construction crew then goes out and builds the brain, based on interactions with the rest of the body.

So yes, maybe with a couple million lines of code we could replicate the DNA that codes for your brain. We would then need several billion more lines of code to replicate the processes used to create the brain, many of which we still don't understand at all.

No, I don't think Ray Kurzweil will ever have an artifical cyborg body, nor do I think I will ever have one (and I'm much younger than he is). Maybe in two or three generations, when we've figured out how to do large-scale, brute force factory science efficiently.

Moore's law, the base of his argument that technology is evolving exponentially is pretty much on schedule. We are now on the Petaflop (10^15) range, with the transistor count following the predicted exponential.

Cost of DNA sequencing, another of his examples, is today at 0.000008(USD) per base pair. Fits the curve.

RAM cost is now at 28000kB/USD, also fitting the curve

GDP per capita also is within schedule (note that the scale is logarithmic), even with the wealth transfer east (which is bound to be limited in time to ten more years give or take)

And, lastly, the core of all atacks on Kurzweil, so is life expectancy on track.

You may still believe these exponentials will hit some kind of ceiling somehow. That might be true. The numbers, however, support Kurzweil's theory. And predicting from the number of times Moore's law depletion was announced in the last twenty years, I'd wager my bets on Kurzweil.

You also lack an understanding of what is involved in the functioning brain.

Biochemistry is incredibly important. The brain is not just a neural network; it is an electrochemical organ and the chemicals floating around in there greatly affect the operation of neurons. There is no distinction between "hardware" and "software" in the brain--every new thought or stimulus causes the physical structure to change: neurons form new pathways, areas get flooded with neurotransmitters, etc. This shit is way more complex than you believe, and not in a way that is friendly to computation.

Computer people like to think that if we just throw enough cores at the idea it will magically come to fruition. In reality there are many important differences between brains and computers, enough that I don't think digital computers are going to be more than a dead end. I could maybe see implants that let us control real-world stuff with concentrated thought, but that's about the limit of digital interfaces.

I like this review of that movie.

Since you mention that,you would be surprised at the amazing similarities between the vaccine denialists (and the AIDS denialists, for that matter) and the GMO denialists. Course, when you think about it, they're not that amazing. Most forms of crankery are the same thing, with just a few words switched here and there. But it is, make no mistake, the exact same line of thought that produces both groups.

Since you mention that,you would be surprised at the amazing similarities between the vaccine denialists (and the AIDS denialists, for that matter) and the GMO denialists. Course, when you think about it, they're not that amazing. Most forms of crankery are the same thing, with just a few words switched here and there. But it is, make no mistake, the exact same line of thought that produces both groups.

But it is likely the medieval warm period was warmer, and the Roman warm period, and most of the early Holocene. Planet and people somehow managed to survive those cataclysms.

The MWP was local. The global climate was not warmer overall. The Roman Warm Period is a lie. Humanity may have survived, but we have been on the brink of extinction before. Furthermore, changes didn't happen as rapidly as they do now, and the population was only a fraction of today's over-populated world.

You don't understand how evolution works. Read this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/its_more_than_genes_its_networ.php

It's a lot more complex than "monkeys turned into people."

"How do you measure qualification in any field of literature analysis"

Answer: we don't.

There are no objective criteria to judge the quality of literary analysis, philosophy and theology, they are entirely subjective. Once a text in philosophy/theology passes the basic test of self-consistency and coherency, one can't really judge if it's 'bad' or 'good'.

So PZ Myers text of "The Courtier's Reply" ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php ) isn't really better or worse than "Summa Theologica" (yes, I read it - still can't scrub my mind clean).

PS: I've studied hermeneutics as a part of the course on mathematical logic. I suspect, mostly to show that hermeneutics isn't really related to any form of formal logic.

His arguments are laughably bad when he strays outside the area he knows (evolutionary biology) and into a region he knows nothing about (theology).

You, sir, need to read The Courtier's Reply :

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

Science is not a fucking democracy.

True. Some people get fucked more than others.

That is what you get when academic institutions encourage intellectual relativism under the guise of pluralism. Students are encouraged not to be too polemical and professors are encouraged to publish papers in other fields for synergy. Science is not a fucking democracy.

Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. ... Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing. ... "Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages," [Pike] said

Shorter Rob Pike: all those other languages suck, but the one I invented rocks. It's elegant and simple just like Lisp was back in the sixties!

I'm reminded of this blog post I read, where the author described it as "The Hurricane Lantern Effect". You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!".

Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.

I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".

What were the people involved in this story thinking?

Source is ok ... but can you trust your compiler?

Yes, that's what we're talking about. Thanks for being the retard who points out the obvious.

Source is ok ... but can you trust your compiler?

This is mostly irrelevant. A "Chicken" is just a point in time of a particular leaf point in the tree of life. Whatever creatures that were part of that tree that laid the first "chicken" egg was still able to mate with the first "chicken". The point at which you call them "Chickens" is when they're no longer able to successfully mate (as a population) with other offshoots from the tree, or the original, larger, body.

There's no hard point at which one species changes into another (which will confound your average creationist, who are constantly asking for there to be a sharp division between ancestors and child species), it's a gradual process involving thousands of mutations over many generations. Whatever laid the first Chicken egg was still a chicken, and if you go back far enough, it wasn't a chicken, so much as it was the ancestral node in the tree of life's species.
See http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/chickens_eggs_this_is_no_way_t.php

Ask and ye shall receive, from an Evolutionary Biologist, no less: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/chickens_eggs_this_is_no_way_t.php

(PS, the research says not what the article promotes)

No, it didn't. The Mainstream Media sucks at reporting science :\

Do you have any trustworthy sources? (Seriously? About.com?)

Well, I already showed the NewScientist one, so I'm guessing you missed that one, how about these? 1 2 3 4 Or are these not good enough for you? I'm of course assured you have many trust worthy sources that can show that a gay couple raise horrible children? You have yet to show one granted, but I'm sure its just because your saving the best for last.

Sure, you can find edge cases where a true marriage might not result in building a family.

There are absolutely no gay marriages that can build a proper family.

If you can't see the difference between a few fractions of a percent and 100% - well, it's not worth talking to you.

Many edge cases? Ignoring that oxymoron, its not as uncommon as you seem to want to insist on. The issue with abuse and bad parenting is not many people speak up about it but it happens more then enough that its a well know issue that these things happen in heterosexual couples (and is well documented from MANY cases, not 'edge cases' like you wish to dismiss them as). Granted I don't see many, if any, issues of home abuse by gay/lesbian couples, so it kinda shows that the more toxic homes are the heterosexual ones :)

Also, what is your definition of a 'proper family'? What the bible tells you? Bible tells many things, with many of them contradicting itself, like Exodus 20:13 "Thou shalt not kill.", only to have Jesus himself command you in Luke 19:27 to "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me". So much for don't kill. When you put your morals in a religion, you need to question what it says and not blindly follow. This happened in the Dark Ages and is now forever known as the worst times in history.

On top of that, Steve McIntyre has never claimed that his requests should be seen as a statement on climate change

Then why did he make requests for data he already had,

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/mcintyre_had_the_data_all_alon.php

What analysis has he made of the data now he has it?

What papers has he written using the data?

Indeed, either they now have it wrong, or they did less than a century ago, when they concluded that the trend was towards "cooling".

Myth: In the '70s, the best scientific knowledge indicated that the Earth's climate was headed for a trend of long-term cooling, rather than warming.

Fact: The 1970s global cooling scare was little more than a runaway media circle jerk.

The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus (PDF)

A more TL;DR-friendly article on the topic

Carl Zimmer has a more detailed breakdown of what happened with a list of what bloggers are moving- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/. Major bloggers leaving include Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math, and Rebecca Skloot (who may be known to many more for her excellent book on HeLa cells and their namesake than for blogging). This wasn't a single isolated instance that is causing these people to leave, but for many the final straw in what they saw as very problematic and difficult to work with people at Seed Magazine (which runs Scienceblogs). Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority discusses some of these issues here- http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2010/07/pepsico_scienceblogs_and_the_f.php (he's uncertain if he is leaving or not and so may be a moderate voice). Meanwhile Abbie Smith of ERV thinks that much of the reaction is hysterics and hypocrisy http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php.

Carl Zimmer has a more detailed breakdown of what happened with a list of what bloggers are moving- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/. Major bloggers leaving include Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math, and Rebecca Skloot (who may be known to many more for her excellent book on HeLa cells and their namesake than for blogging). This wasn't a single isolated instance that is causing these people to leave, but for many the final straw in what they saw as very problematic and difficult to work with people at Seed Magazine (which runs Scienceblogs). Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority discusses some of these issues here- http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2010/07/pepsico_scienceblogs_and_the_f.php (he's uncertain if he is leaving or not and so may be a moderate voice). Meanwhile Abbie Smith of ERV thinks that much of the reaction is hysterics and hypocrisy http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php.

As for the Brazil nut soybean, it should go without saying that you can use genetic engineering to make things like that. A known allergen in something else, it's not too surprising that it turned out that way. You might as well point out that you can put anthrax in an apple if you wanted. You can put arsenic in a cake, doesn't make baking bad. A better way to put that would be no commercially approved GMOs have been shown to be spontaneously harmful. The only example I know of where GMOs were potentially harmful was detected and discontinued long before it was put into use. I've seen the 'smoking gun' studies, they come and go every now and again, but no one has ever been able to find a reason for the alleged harm, no causative agent, no chemical pathways producing that agent, no genetic reasoning for it.

And yeah, the principles of genetic engineering are a lot like breeding. I didn't say it's the same thing, nor should they always be treated the same, but in both cases, you're still changing the genes. One is just a lot more precise with a wider range of options, and it doesn't really matter that it is less natural, what matters is the end result. Does it matter if you insert a gene from a fish or breed it for a million years for the plant to produce it itself?

And Monsanto, they're not your friends, that's fair to say, but saying that because they're bad GMOs are bad is like saying that because the RIAA are pricks you shouldn't listen to music. What the Monsanto does says nothing of the worth of the product, and it certainty says nothing about unrelated people, just like what the RIAA does says nothing of the actual pieces of music, and absolutely nothing about, say, indie bands.

Do we need GMOs? Do we really need agricultural improvements? We could get by without a lot of things, but that's no reason not to use them, and no small amount of people in relevant fields seem to think biotech will be pretty significant.

An HIV researcher's take on the news.

Not at all, and you admit it yourself. The reason we don't see tomato varieties like Cherokee Purple or German Striped in supermarkets is because they don't all look or taste the same. Large scale growers want their products to have a uniform look and taste.

And the reason growers want them is because consumers want them. I don't see how that issue relates to genetic engineering, that's something altogether different. Getting people to think of new or diverse crops as a true part of their diet, just like the foods they're accustomed to, it a task in and of itself. I follow exotic pomology too, and it took decades for mangos and kiwis to get to where they are now, and still, people don't see them on the same level as apples and bananas. I think genetic engineering could be an enabler to get more things to consumers, but getting them to step out of their cullinary comfort zone and actually accept a bumpy green, orange, yellow, and red tomato or whatever as more than a novelty is a challenge in and of itself.

Finally, there is no need for GE crops. All they do is enrich the pockets of big agribusinesses.

Tell that to the farmers who's crops were wiped out by papaya ringspot virus before GMO papayas arrived on the scene. Heck, there are even organic farmers who use the herd immunity provided by the GMO ones to keep their crop safe. If plumpox rears its ugly head, you might see the benefits of the GMO Honeysweet plum real fast. And to think that genetic engineering is nothing but some sort of corporate science, that's absolutely false. Monsanto doesn't own genetic engineering any more than Merck or Pfizer own the idea of administering a measured dose of active ingredient (pharmacology). And by 2015, it is estimated that half of GMOs will be non-corporate. To say there's no need for them, I don't get that either. That's like saying there is no need for plant breeding. Genetic engineering isn't a way of life, it's just a tool for changing plants, whether for drought resistance, pest resistance, nitrogen use efficiency, herbicide resistance, increased nutrients, or whatever. We know it works, no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to suggest they're dangerous (and considering horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species happens all the time, it be pretty surprising if they were), so I don't see any legitimate reason not to have GE crops.

Not at all, and you admit it yourself. The reason we don't see tomato varieties like Cherokee Purple or German Striped in supermarkets is because they don't all look or taste the same. Large scale growers want their products to have a uniform look and taste.

And the reason growers want them is because consumers want them. I don't see how that issue relates to genetic engineering, that's something altogether different. Getting people to think of new or diverse crops as a true part of their diet, just like the foods they're accustomed to, it a task in and of itself. I follow exotic pomology too, and it took decades for mangos and kiwis to get to where they are now, and still, people don't see them on the same level as apples and bananas. I think genetic engineering could be an enabler to get more things to consumers, but getting them to step out of their cullinary comfort zone and actually accept a bumpy green, orange, yellow, and red tomato or whatever as more than a novelty is a challenge in and of itself.

Finally, there is no need for GE crops. All they do is enrich the pockets of big agribusinesses.

Tell that to the farmers who's crops were wiped out by papaya ringspot virus before GMO papayas arrived on the scene. Heck, there are even organic farmers who use the herd immunity provided by the GMO ones to keep their crop safe. If plumpox rears its ugly head, you might see the benefits of the GMO Honeysweet plum real fast. And to think that genetic engineering is nothing but some sort of corporate science, that's absolutely false. Monsanto doesn't own genetic engineering any more than Merck or Pfizer own the idea of administering a measured dose of active ingredient (pharmacology). And by 2015, it is estimated that half of GMOs will be non-corporate. To say there's no need for them, I don't get that either. That's like saying there is no need for plant breeding. Genetic engineering isn't a way of life, it's just a tool for changing plants, whether for drought resistance, pest resistance, nitrogen use efficiency, herbicide resistance, increased nutrients, or whatever. We know it works, no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to suggest they're dangerous (and considering horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species happens all the time, it be pretty surprising if they were), so I don't see any legitimate reason not to have GE crops.

Not at all, and you admit it yourself. The reason we don't see tomato varieties like Cherokee Purple or German Striped in supermarkets is because they don't all look or taste the same. Large scale growers want their products to have a uniform look and taste.

And the reason growers want them is because consumers want them. I don't see how that issue relates to genetic engineering, that's something altogether different. Getting people to think of new or diverse crops as a true part of their diet, just like the foods they're accustomed to, it a task in and of itself. I follow exotic pomology too, and it took decades for mangos and kiwis to get to where they are now, and still, people don't see them on the same level as apples and bananas. I think genetic engineering could be an enabler to get more things to consumers, but getting them to step out of their cullinary comfort zone and actually accept a bumpy green, orange, yellow, and red tomato or whatever as more than a novelty is a challenge in and of itself.

Finally, there is no need for GE crops. All they do is enrich the pockets of big agribusinesses.

Tell that to the farmers who's crops were wiped out by papaya ringspot virus before GMO papayas arrived on the scene. Heck, there are even organic farmers who use the herd immunity provided by the GMO ones to keep their crop safe. If plumpox rears its ugly head, you might see the benefits of the GMO Honeysweet plum real fast. And to think that genetic engineering is nothing but some sort of corporate science, that's absolutely false. Monsanto doesn't own genetic engineering any more than Merck or Pfizer own the idea of administering a measured dose of active ingredient (pharmacology). And by 2015, it is estimated that half of GMOs will be non-corporate. To say there's no need for them, I don't get that either. That's like saying there is no need for plant breeding. Genetic engineering isn't a way of life, it's just a tool for changing plants, whether for drought resistance, pest resistance, nitrogen use efficiency, herbicide resistance, increased nutrients, or whatever. We know it works, no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to suggest they're dangerous (and considering horizontal gene transfer between unrelated species happens all the time, it be pretty surprising if they were), so I don't see any legitimate reason not to have GE crops.

Academics Review is a great site. Have you ever been to Biofortified or Tomorrow's Table? I like this one too. I guess you've been to GMO Pundit, since he's one of the guys who wrote Academics Review. They're some great sites for science based info on genetic engineering.

Wonder if that last bit is in the 3rd edition.

Dude, by definition, if there is a conspiracy going on among "peers", then there will not be any dissenting papers that are "legitimatized" by accepting them in peer reviewed journals.

If there is a conspiracy, how come skeptical scientists like Richard Lindzen are actively getting their research published in these peer-reviewed journal?

The answer is of course that there is no conspiracy. But those whose political ideology is threatened by the facts will stop at nothing to hide those facts.

One minor flaw? Try this one http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/11/years-global-cooling-coming-leading-scientist-says/

He said no such thing. Latif was quote-mined. It's a well-known creationist tactic. How predictable. In fact, he predicted exactly that in the exact same speech. Yes, the denialists quote-mined the very speech where he pointed out that what he just said would most likely be quote-mined! Amazing, isn't it? The sheer dishonesty of the denialist crowd is just getting worse and worse.

Also, how would you like this: http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/record_high_and_low_temps_an_i.php while we're on the matter of temperature records?

You've obviously thought more about this than I gave you credit for. I'm now wandering off-topic into a pet subject of mine, which is in general the viability of AI and specifically the viability of accurate brain simulation, but it seems like you're into that too and you have a different opinion than I do. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to elaborate on a few things you wrote that appear problematic to me.

(In fact, I'm also going to suggest that this is a requirement for "convergent evolution" - that you can't even have parallel implementations if the underlying engines are fundamentally different.)

Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by "underlying engines," but aren't analog meat and digital silicon more significantly different than two versions of analog meat? I realize you were still talking about convergent evolution here, but aren't the properties of brains and CPUs different enough to make you wonder about the feasibility of emulating the former on the latter?

Again, if I an correct, then only a tiny subset of that brain will be... necessary for high-level intelligence to function...This is not the same as a "seat of intelligence/empathy" or a "seat of consciousness"...It's merely a device that provides the key primitives. The actual "program" lies elsewhere.

Yet the brain has no concept of a separate "program" and "data." Yes, we can stick inputs into one end of a neural network and get outputs on the other, but in a brain every "computation" is accompanied by a physical change. From the first article I linked:

Unfortunately, this appealing hardware/software distinction obscures an important fact: the mind emerges directly from the brain, and changes in the mind are always accompanied by changes in the brain. Any abstract information processing account of cognition will always need to specify how neuronal architecture can implement those processes - otherwise, cognitive modeling is grossly underconstrained. Some blame this misunderstanding for the infamous failure of "symbolic AI."

Doesn't that present some problems for creating an intelligence-complete system? Namely, (a) figuring out what form a "mental task performable by humans" would take, (b) making sense of the output, and (c) accounting for the fact that every "computation" changes the layout of the system, meaning that there is no universal problem-solving configuration, as the neural layout of every brain, or section of brain, is totally unique.

I think (c) represents the biggest challenge to your particular theory (with (a) and (b) being more problematic for AI in general). In the first article I linked, which lists 11 key differences between brains and computers, the relevant ones are #3 (the brain is parallel while computers are serial and modular), #6 (from which I quoted above), #7 (synapses are far more complex than electrical logic gates, into which the second article delves further), and #9 (the brain is a self-organizing system). I won't copypasta the content at you, but if you're interested that's where the distinctions are made; the headings are naturally simplistic.

Back on-topic, I suspect that empathy in particular is a learned behavior. There was a study done on baboons, I think, who had begun foraging in a hotel resort's garbage for their food instead of foraging elsewhere, and they had more than they could ever want. As the old ones died out, their social order began to change: no longer was there an alpha male who beat up on everyone under him and so on down the chain. Instead, the females gained more leverage and the hierarchy became more of an anarchy, and everybody got along better. I think they all got hit with some disease and died out, preventing long-term research, but such a dras

Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google, Yahoo and Amazon, for sacrilegious content

The Pope Song, by Tim Minchin.

Oh, wait, Pakistan's only monitoring for certain kinds of blasphemy, like cartoons of that other religious leader :) Carry on, Tim!

You're like a small child who insists that with a long enough ladder he can climb to the Moon, completely unaware of the myriad complexities of reality that make such an assertion hopelessly naive.

See 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers.

The brain's self-construction is immensely important to how it functions. Any attempt to simulate a brain (let's forget about real-time) must take this into account. There are no algorithms acting upon data--there is only the brain physically rearranging itself. Neurons are connected to axons and other neurons in many different ways, and there are dozens of different neurotransmitters floating around affecting things.

Even saying "each part of the brain" is very inaccurate--while certain activities (such as decoding speech) are more closely associated with activity in a specific area, the rest of the brain is still involved. In fact there is increasing evidence that the brain has more in common with holograms than any metaphor used previously. Even if this turns out to be untrue, those in the field are much more wary of discussing brains and bodies as separate things than the layman.

Not that I expect this post to make any difference in the trend here to put absolute faith in the god Technology. If more smart people here would get off of the misinformed brain-in-a-jar bandwagon, we might make some real headway in understanding human consciousness.

No kidding! All blogs are worthless. AMIRITE??

Oh, no. Gravity's caused by heat!

But, ok, if it is caused by heat, it may be due to eletricity, you have a point... Or entropy, of all weard things, entropy is the worst ofender, so it MUST be entropy.

as per: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php - evolution has been seen to occur, and we even have every-500th-generation snapshots. This made a wava about a year ago, then went kinda quiet. In brief, a bateria was exposed to a mild poison (a citrate), and over 44,000 generations, mutated into a form able to metabolize it. Evolution in action.

...frankly uncompletely unworkable ...

My head asplode!

Fixed that for you.