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Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2004
TarrVetus writes "Science Magazine's The Top Ten Science Breakthroughs of 2004 have been announced. The winner: The NASA Rovers and their evidence of water on Mars. The runner up was the Hobbit species found in Indonesia. Other breakthroughs include cloned human embryos and the first discovered pulsar pair."
I consider that a pretty awesome feat as i assume many others do
We have the first actual picture of a planet orbiting another star... not inferential data, not radio info, but optical (not sure about wavelength, but that's irrelevant).
And it's not even on the list? The still questionable "discovery" of a wet Martian past makes the top of the list, but a deffinitive leap of scientific discovery (ie a fuzzy and blurred but very real picture of an extrasolar planet) doesn't even receive mention on the list (even if the article was kind enough to mention it)?
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
I don't happen to believe in the soul as it appears in most religions, but I fail to see how a successful cloning experiment completely disproves the idea that helps countless millions cope with their lives. Statements like these hurt the image of the scientific community in the eyes of the public, i.e. the people the science is supposedly trying to improve the lives of.
If he had really disproven the soul or God (which is impossible to to the vague nature of their descriptions) then he should by all means spread this proof, but since he hasn't, then he should just STFU.
He is making scientific conclusions based on his faith that the soul is not real. That's just stupid.
_____
Thank you.
As a biologist, I have to say that I'm incredibly disappointed by the inclusion of "junk" DNA in the list. I don't know what specific research results they're referring to when they say there's a breakthrough there, but the entire concept of "junk" DNA is absurd. I've never met a single molecular biologist who believed that non-coding regions were unimportant, and in fact it's been known for at least forty years that non-coding regions are important in regulation of gene expression. Maybe what bothers me most is the term "junk" DNA, which I've never actually heard another scientist use. It's a fictitious concept perpetuated by science writers so that they can feign surprise every time someone can attribute a function to a non-coding piece of DNA (and claim that the scientific community was surprised as well).
All that aside, I'm sure there are big breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of non-coding regions, and it probably deserves to be mentioned. However, one important point to make is that in spite of all this, there ARE parts of the genome that are unquestionably useless evolutionary vestiges. This is not necessarily mysterious, but it is interesting (for example, providing what is in my mind the most convincing evidence of evolution).
But Professor Higgins also sees philosophical implications in the work... Science is about trying to understand where we come from, what our purpose is.
;)
Religion is about trying to understand what our purpose is. Anyone claiming science is for said purpose has merely made a religion for themselves out of science. Science is the accumulation of information using the scientific method. Repeat after me, science is in no way meant to be a search for our purpose as humans. Class dismissed.
Your implication driving a point for justice is flimsy. Justice maintains peace, any other meaning will not hold up to slight examination, much less to a thorough examination. The murder of a functioning human against his or her will is not regulated against on that concept of will, if it were killing birds would be illegal. It is regulated against because the human is capable of work or has uniformly accepted capacity for future work. An embryo is a parasite, a zygote is a chemical reaction. Abortion is human right for females as otherwise is to infringe on their humanity. Cloning an embryo is not necessary equivalent to cloning a human, it is simply that at the same point both are the same structure-but the embryo has the rights of a clump of nail clippings, and even that is undeserved.
The second sentence doesn't imply the first. It's as if you said: "There is no music. There are only density waves in the air."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
- C. S. Lewis
Cloning a human embryo doesn't invalidate millennia of ponderance on the existence of a soul, any more than any other technical breakthrough does. That's a little like claiming we can safely ignore gravity because we have airplanes.
I would suggest to even the most empirical thinker that the soul is a useful construct, allowing for abstract discussion of the difference between the sentient and the non-sentient, and to distinguish the status of living and non-living things.
I'm not sure which is cause for greater confusion, theologians pretending to be scientists or scientists pretending to be theologians.
Or perhaps it's me, neither one and trying to be both at once :-).
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
However, as our scientific understanding of a phenomenon grows, it naturally replaces the earlier, superstitious myths that sought to explain it. This is not to say that those myths are completely without value. They may indeed "help countless millions cope with their lives", but that does not give them scientific merit, nor elevate them above the status of "imagination".
That sort of logic doesn't scale very well...if having sex with a 30 year old person is legal, why isn't having sex with a 30 month old person legal?
Right up there with the comment about souls, is this doozie:
Jenet and Scott Ransom of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, have developed a theoretical model to explain the behavior of this one-of-a-kind set of pulsars.
"One of a kind"? Just because we haven't seen any others, means there are no others?
For shame. Feynman would totally kick these people's asses.
>>I fail to see how a successful cloning experiment completely disproves the idea (of the soul).
The reason that successful cloning sheds light on the idea of the soul is that the soul is supposedly the thing that makes us specially human - it (the soul) derives from the concept of the animus, or "spark of life". The church teaches that a soul can only be created by god, not humans. So, the successful cloning of a human, resulting in a living, thinking person, created by people by human ingenuity instead of the usual way - fscking - means that either people don't need a soul to live and think (which completely undermines the basis for positing a soul in the first place), or the lab techs whipped up a soul in the closet and didn't put it in the report (in which case a soul has been created by other than god, which opens up a whole other can of worms for the church to explain away... eg, whence consciousness, and whence animus)
>>If he had really disproven the soul or God (which is impossible to to the vague nature of their descriptions) then he should by all means spread this proof, but since he hasn't, then he should just STFU.
Ahem. He didn't mention god. And as far as it being impossible to disprove such things, it is equally impossible to PROVE them. =) Also, the reason for that is not that they are "vaguely defined", but instead, exactly because of their descriptions. When you posit something which has infinite capabilities and unknowable motives, anything can be explained as caprice.
The soul is a cultural construct. It has weight as long as people believe in it. When people stop believing, it's over.
As far as STFU goes, he has as much right to speak his mind as anyone else. Including you. Hey, here's an idea, how about YOU STFU? No? Then let him speak.
>>He is making scientific conclusions based on his faith that the soul is not real.
I'm working hard to restrain myself from flaming you. Read it again without your blinders, grandma. He didn't say "I have concluded on the basis of my observations that the soul is not real". What he said was "the existence of a soul[...] frankly is pure imagination". He gave his frank opinion. There is a difference. If you don't know what science is then (redacted) yourself.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
On a more serious note, do you ever stop and think that 500 years from now our ancestors are going to be making fun of us and our backwards notions of the world?
Seriously, no, I don't -- because, just about 500 years ago, something fundamental changed in our worldview: science, in the modern sense, was born. The scientists of the Renaissance (Galileo, Kepler, Newton come to mind) were wrong about many things, but they were right about many more, and they established the methods we still use today to understand our world. And we don't make fun of them; instead, we make fun of the backwards ideas which their new understanding displaced.
Now, I'll grant for the sake of argument that it's possible that the scientific worldview is, itself, just as much fundamentally in error as the theological worldview of the Middle Ages, and that something will happen between now and 2504 A.D. that will make our current understanding of The Way Things Are see as silly as epicycles and the music of the spheres do today. But I really wouldn't bet on it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Your comment "open your mind" means you wish for a reprieve from logical thought to the exclusion of illusory constructs made before even electricity was known formally? Your point is reminiscent of the very force holding back social progress in the US. There is a level at which it is permitted for a rational person to say: "That is irrational, inapplicable, and overtly detrimental so I should do all that I can to reduce its influence and power" (where it is an institution, nation, or other power). The elimination of regressive or detrimental ideology is integral to the advancement of the human species, after all the civilised world no longer drills holes into the skulls of epileptics to let out the "evil spirits," why should the modern world tolerate any remnants of regressive ideology?
Nope, we have creationists and astrologers and all kinds of people to ridicule right now :p
- Medicines for the World's Poor. "Public-private partnerships" emerged as a force in 2004, according to Science magazine, affecting the way medicines are developed and delivered to emerging nations.
Sounds like applied science to me.Personally though if I were Science I wouldn't give SpaceShipOne a prize this year, since getting someone into space isn't technically by itself a new development in even applied science. I'd give it to them in a year or two-- once they manage to successfully begin operating their spaceliner business, since that IS going to be a dramatic change in how science is applied...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts