You joke but really undergrads are cheaper than graduate students... At least from my experience working in a biology lab in college. It was/is common practice to recruit undergrads to do free work for the labs. The undergrad gets some experience in the field and the lab gets free labor in exchange for dealing with the inexperience of the average undergrad.
I think that among the knowedgeable on the subject the problem isn't whether or not to address the issue, it is how to address the issue. There are several methods which have been proposed to deal with global warming and curbing CO2 emissions and unfortunately most of these rely on the extensive use of governmental power and international cooperation. This is unfortunate because at least from my viewpoint, to rely so much on government which ahs shown its self to be quite fallible and generally inefficient seems not to be the way to go in order to well and truely fix the problem. Internationally, the first/second largest CO2 emitting countries have a history of opposition to any treaties/international agreements on the matter for fear of weakening their economic position, namely the United States and China. That is the problem. What we really need is to learn from biology and use CO2 as a resource rather than just punishing those who emit it outright because China isn't going to play along otherwise and frankly our fossil fuel reserves are going into the ground eventually and we'll still need a carbon source to make all of those consumables that the world wants.
Tell me that is the case the next time you talk to an ID'er and all of their friends and contrast what you hear with that of several scientists. One end of the scale uses the listener's ignorance of the subject at hand to good advantage and the other has little sympathy for such fraud.
You are taking their analogy far too literally. The chimps (apparently) appear to use at the least a coordinate like system of navigation. The GPS analogy works here as we humans use a coordinate system (via GPS) to navigate on occasion. It probably doesn't work globally for the chimps as their coordinate system would be localized to their territory.
To what "problems" or "holes" are you referring? Can you name one?
the proponents of evolution prove themselves no different than the people they claim the creationists are.
No. Intelligent design creationism allows for no falsification; evolutionary theory on the other hand most certainly does. That is indeed a part of the point; ID is not science because it makes no testable predictions and is for a lack of a better term: worthless. Evolutionary theory by contrast is as has been described by many others to be the very foundation on which one can understand biology.
biological weapons are banned regardless as their use most certainly will extend outside of your property once you leave it and i know of no one who has enough land as to contain the explosion and the fallout of nuclear weapons so... not an issue here. but yes, a large piece of land can hold a larger eapon stockpile safely than a small piece of land could. guns on the other hand do indeed require at least a little aim o your part in the majority of cases. it also puts a limit on the stockpile of ammo as an undue amount of it stored un-afely could detonate s well acting like a sheet of deadly metal exploding outwards.
hand enough people the right knives and you could very well kill more people if you really tried and that is the reason nukes were invented- laziness. it is easier to kill with a nuke than it is with a cluster bomb, a gun or a knife. incidentally we have 30,000 active nuclear weapons we haven't banned and yet we're so concerned over the peasants having guns and knives. there's something wrong with that.
I draw the line at the point where the use of said device *will* kill someone outside of your property in its current placement. In other words, no biological weapons, no nukes and no explosives powerful enough to kill someone off of your property if it is detonated. Anything below that requires some level of cognition to *reliably* kill someone. Anything on your property that can not endanger anyone but yourself is your business.
The problem is that video games and environments do not affect everyone the same way. The vast majority of people do not play C.S. and then decide to machine gun people in their immediate area. Nor do people who watch violence in the news do violence to their fellow human being. Murder is already illegal but rather than addressing the problem [people feeling like they need to kill someone] we focus on the games they played using shoddy reasoning to justify doing so.
I think that's the reasoning the UK used to ban guns. If no one has a gun, then there isn't going to be any more killing right? except that now people are killing with knives. some people are even calling for certain knives to be banned to stop the killing. The thing is that they are completely missing the point. If a human being really wants to kill another human being, it is going to happen regardless of what weapons or anything else is banned. The real problem here is that there are murderous individuals not the tools that they could potentially use nor what media they watched.
yes I know about muon catalyzed fusion; it works because the muon is able to form a "molecule" which tightly binds two deuterium or whatever you are fusing together. the molecular interactions occur on a scale that is roughly 200x shorter than any interactions in solid materials. To allow any fusion reaction to occur in such a material you would need to negate/overcome the repulsive force between the two nuclei all the way down to the scale of atomic nuclei. If we found a particle which was stable and could do the same thing that muons do then we could discuss cold fusion seriously but right now I don't see much evidence in favor of the phenomenon.
think a lot of people made a false logical step from "these guys haven't proven their case for cold fusion" to "cold fusion can't work".
First, that may be the case but the fact remains that all claims, whether it be that cold fusion exists or anything else requires evidence to be taken seriously. Second, to the best of our knowledge, the physics simply isn't supportive of such a phenomenon under these conditions. That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen but it would require conditions not known to exist in these circumstances. There has to be a mechanism to bring two nuclei close enough to interact in such a way to fuse and to my knowledge, no such mechanism has been shown to exist. For fusion reactions to occur under such "normal" conditions any fusion catalyst would have to be fantastically efficient, far more so than even the most tuned chemical reaction catalyst could ever hope to be. The fusion of a deuterium and tritium nucleus requires that the 56 kev barrier be overcome. Imagine how good you'd have to be to cause these nuclei to bypass that barrier entirely at very low energy conditions. It's equivalent to claiming that you can ignite paper in cryogenic temperatures using a suitable catalyst. I just don't think it is very likely given what needs to be overcome.
yes indeed and the most likely excuse that is used by said people to rationalize their ignorance is: "It doesn't affect my life so why should I know that?" The sad part is that our entire civilization depends on what science has done and its real contributions are essentially unknown to the majority.
they are not "distributing a worm", it's a tool for disinfection and I suspect that they'll need to take a page out of biology's book on dealing with dangerous microbes and evolve along with the worm. In other words, constantly update their tool as the worm adapts. So it's likely going to be quite dynamic.
I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it to come here if the blurbs misrepresent the articles so badly.
well yeah, the summeries on slashdot can be pretty bad but there's two redeeming features about all of this: the article [when it is relevant] and the discussion about said article and potentially about said summery. And the mod points...
of course there are actual biologists who read slashdot that don't think highly of evolution being thought of in terms of a ladder but rather fitness and genetic change over time in order to maximize the chances that organisms can and do reproduce. the summery did a poor job of phrasing what the researchers actually said on the matter calling it "bad for their evolution" in contrast to being "undesirable [from humanity's perspective] evolution" for which the latter is far more accurate and the former.
throw the little 'uns back â" may have hurt their evolution, but we can reverse that
*cringe* evolution is not a step ladder! If the fish are adapting genetically with the result being more offspring than they would otherwise then it is evolution regardless of humanity's shallow view of what it means to "evolve in a positive direction" or that just because those fish didn't evolve the way we would have liked that it somehow means that it "hurt their evolution."
the government needs to stop artificially lowering the cost of credit, it subsidizes failing businesses... and they need to stop bailing out said businesses "for the greater good" as obama put it. they're not in business to help you or anyone else and saving these idiots from their failing business practices doesn't help anyone but them. Oh and spending money you don't have is not the way to fix the economy. stealing money from one class of citizens to give to another will not fix the economy. People will spend at least what they really need, there is no good reason to encourage consumption over savings... except maybe to over-use resources, raise prices and benefit otherwise inefficient industries... oh and FDR's policies during the great depression? didn't actually work all that well. Turns out that paying farmers to burn crops and ranchers to slaughter livestock doesn't help the economy. who would have dreamed...? You sir have little understanding of economics nor any understanding of the sheer incompetence and self servitude that exists in government. They are not your friends. They only do what they do because there is a benefit to the politician advocating said vote/position/law.
It is ultimately up to the patient being treated to make the decision about their own health. Not "big pharma" nor the federal government, it's your decision. I can not for the life of me understand why people are so intent on putting the responsibility for their health on to others when it is their life in danger... you would think that their own life would mean enough to do at least some basic research on the matter...
indeed, that "clue stick" is high medical costs, sickness and death. The feds can suggest the best course of treatment sure, but do you really want them making your medical decisions rather than yourself and your doctor? What could possibly go wrong?
What do I care if we as a species die out? We wouldn't die immediatly...
going by that logic you'd expect that no atheist would ever follow any preventative care, after all they won't "die immediately" and yet oddly enough, people do just fine on this matter. Why? How does your understanding of human behavior explain this?
life would slowly become harder and harder, and more than likely people would have fewer children than is necessary to maintain the population
Knowing that to be the case, why would anyone regardless of their religion or lack therof, want that to be their inevitable fate?
Secondly your argument that humanitarianism is a result of evolution breaks down because being a humanitarian is often not to your advantage.
You've given me an excellent opportunity to bring game theory into this:) Why on Earth would evolutionary selection favour individuals who were at least somewhat altruistic? Good question and the answer is fascinating. selective forces not only exist at the individual level but also at the level of small groups [maternal behavior for example], group behavior [tribes] etc. groups in competition with one another have an advantage if members within that group are altruistic toward one another. Groups containing altruistic individuals out-compete pure selfish groups so why would such individuals assist "unproductive" members? Why would that give an advantage? Well, here's why: as an example, the tribe hunter breaks a leg making him unable to contribute however, individuals in the group take care of the wounded hunter who eventually recovers thus saving the tribe from needing to train another hunter. enlightened selfishness underlies group behavior and explains why selection favours groups with altruistic individuals.
If you look at moral reletavism, which is the logical conclusion for the absense of God, you can see that a society that is truely based on these concepts will ultimately break down.
No. I think there is more evidence to the idea that your implied support for state intervention in regard to economics and social issues often causes more harm than good. One only needs to look at societies that are in line with that bit of philosophy to understand. Alcohol prohibition resulted in an increase in crime, the current drug war resulted in a large proportion of the current jail population. Planned economic systems result in a less affluent populace [soviet union, cuba, most of the world outside hong kong and the USA] There is a lot of reason to believe that leaving people alone and allowing to form their own cooperative groups rather than micromanaging their lives is a great way to improve the situation of the poor and disadvantaged. I think that you need to go take a look at the consequences of an ethical system based on controlling victimless crimes before you conclude that no society that ever deviates from that ultra controlled ideal can not exist. The fact is that it most certainly can and is better off to boot. The point is this, your defence of the position that cooperative behavior couldn't possibly be in the individual's interest seems to be rather short sighted as individuals do indeed benefit from forming groups and it rather doesn't matter what the individual themselves believe about the matter, the ones that don't help one another and don't care about anything outside of their immediate selves are going to kill themselves off. let me repeat: individuals who do not form cooperative groups are going to be completely out-competed by those who can both in biology and in economics! it is simple really, cooperation is an advantageous trait which is selected for at various levels and those who aren't participating are the ones who are not as likely to reproduce and spread those broad traits in their genes now are they? Selection at the group level is a
those who don't find the need to protect themselves, their descendants or their environment are going to kill themselves off.
I actually don't see any real obligation, if I were an atheistic evolutionist, to do anything about the earth. Or, for that matter, to do anything for humanity. Unless I see a distinct benefit in it for me AND I have a desire to reap said benefit.
From my point of view as an atheist and a scientist [I am an evolutionist but also a gravityist, relativityist etc...] the answer as to why someone suc has myself would bother helping anyone other than myself is that I feel good doing so. Just as any other normal, rational human being would. Part of the reason why this is the case is because of all of that natural selection combined with genetic change that has been going on for billions of years.. those species that had a tendency to cooperate of their own free will no doubt had an advantage than those who exercised their primitive ignorant self interest instead. This is likely a point you would agree with yes? That voluntary cooperation is better than pure ignorant selfishness? The point is this: cooperative behavior is not dependant on the belief of your subservience to a deity of some sort. It is a rather useful set of adaptive behaviors that assist our species to exist and function normally in society. It is normal for human beings to cooperate because they know that doing so makes them feel good about their actions.
the probe has a spool of the cable inside of the main body, it doesn't need to drag the cable along with it, just hold it taught moving on down. there is however obviously a limited amount of that cable so if the ocean is farther down than we think or it hits the rock equivalent of an iceberg then its doomed.
An orbiter is nice but getting down to the surface and exploring on Europa its self is I believe, infinitely more informative than setting up shop in orbit. After all, the data we have on the moon suggests that it has an extensive conductive salty ocean underneath its surface that may have life swimming around vents that could exist in that ocean's floor like Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
You joke but really undergrads are cheaper than graduate students... At least from my experience working in a biology lab in college. It was/is common practice to recruit undergrads to do free work for the labs. The undergrad gets some experience in the field and the lab gets free labor in exchange for dealing with the inexperience of the average undergrad.
I think that among the knowedgeable on the subject the problem isn't whether or not to address the issue, it is how to address the issue. There are several methods which have been proposed to deal with global warming and curbing CO2 emissions and unfortunately most of these rely on the extensive use of governmental power and international cooperation. This is unfortunate because at least from my viewpoint, to rely so much on government which ahs shown its self to be quite fallible and generally inefficient seems not to be the way to go in order to well and truely fix the problem. Internationally, the first/second largest CO2 emitting countries have a history of opposition to any treaties/international agreements on the matter for fear of weakening their economic position, namely the United States and China. That is the problem. What we really need is to learn from biology and use CO2 as a resource rather than just punishing those who emit it outright because China isn't going to play along otherwise and frankly our fossil fuel reserves are going into the ground eventually and we'll still need a carbon source to make all of those consumables that the world wants.
Tell me that is the case the next time you talk to an ID'er and all of their friends and contrast what you hear with that of several scientists. One end of the scale uses the listener's ignorance of the subject at hand to good advantage and the other has little sympathy for such fraud.
You are taking their analogy far too literally. The chimps (apparently) appear to use at the least a coordinate like system of navigation. The GPS analogy works here as we humans use a coordinate system (via GPS) to navigate on occasion. It probably doesn't work globally for the chimps as their coordinate system would be localized to their territory.
To what "problems" or "holes" are you referring? Can you name one?
No. Intelligent design creationism allows for no falsification; evolutionary theory on the other hand most certainly does. That is indeed a part of the point; ID is not science because it makes no testable predictions and is for a lack of a better term: worthless. Evolutionary theory by contrast is as has been described by many others to be the very foundation on which one can understand biology.
biological weapons are banned regardless as their use most certainly will extend outside of your property once you leave it and i know of no one who has enough land as to contain the explosion and the fallout of nuclear weapons so... not an issue here. but yes, a large piece of land can hold a larger eapon stockpile safely than a small piece of land could. guns on the other hand do indeed require at least a little aim o your part in the majority of cases. it also puts a limit on the stockpile of ammo as an undue amount of it stored un-afely could detonate s well acting like a sheet of deadly metal exploding outwards.
hand enough people the right knives and you could very well kill more people if you really tried and that is the reason nukes were invented- laziness. it is easier to kill with a nuke than it is with a cluster bomb, a gun or a knife. incidentally we have 30,000 active nuclear weapons we haven't banned and yet we're so concerned over the peasants having guns and knives. there's something wrong with that.
tell that to the poor smucks who have been murdered in the UK.
I draw the line at the point where the use of said device *will* kill someone outside of your property in its current placement. In other words, no biological weapons, no nukes and no explosives powerful enough to kill someone off of your property if it is detonated. Anything below that requires some level of cognition to *reliably* kill someone. Anything on your property that can not endanger anyone but yourself is your business.
The problem is that video games and environments do not affect everyone the same way. The vast majority of people do not play C.S. and then decide to machine gun people in their immediate area. Nor do people who watch violence in the news do violence to their fellow human being. Murder is already illegal but rather than addressing the problem [people feeling like they need to kill someone] we focus on the games they played using shoddy reasoning to justify doing so.
I think that's the reasoning the UK used to ban guns. If no one has a gun, then there isn't going to be any more killing right? except that now people are killing with knives. some people are even calling for certain knives to be banned to stop the killing. The thing is that they are completely missing the point. If a human being really wants to kill another human being, it is going to happen regardless of what weapons or anything else is banned. The real problem here is that there are murderous individuals not the tools that they could potentially use nor what media they watched.
yes I know about muon catalyzed fusion; it works because the muon is able to form a "molecule" which tightly binds two deuterium or whatever you are fusing together. the molecular interactions occur on a scale that is roughly 200x shorter than any interactions in solid materials. To allow any fusion reaction to occur in such a material you would need to negate/overcome the repulsive force between the two nuclei all the way down to the scale of atomic nuclei. If we found a particle which was stable and could do the same thing that muons do then we could discuss cold fusion seriously but right now I don't see much evidence in favor of the phenomenon.
First, that may be the case but the fact remains that all claims, whether it be that cold fusion exists or anything else requires evidence to be taken seriously. Second, to the best of our knowledge, the physics simply isn't supportive of such a phenomenon under these conditions. That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen but it would require conditions not known to exist in these circumstances. There has to be a mechanism to bring two nuclei close enough to interact in such a way to fuse and to my knowledge, no such mechanism has been shown to exist. For fusion reactions to occur under such "normal" conditions any fusion catalyst would have to be fantastically efficient, far more so than even the most tuned chemical reaction catalyst could ever hope to be. The fusion of a deuterium and tritium nucleus requires that the 56 kev barrier be overcome. Imagine how good you'd have to be to cause these nuclei to bypass that barrier entirely at very low energy conditions. It's equivalent to claiming that you can ignite paper in cryogenic temperatures using a suitable catalyst. I just don't think it is very likely given what needs to be overcome.
yes indeed and the most likely excuse that is used by said people to rationalize their ignorance is: "It doesn't affect my life so why should I know that?" The sad part is that our entire civilization depends on what science has done and its real contributions are essentially unknown to the majority.
they are not "distributing a worm", it's a tool for disinfection and I suspect that they'll need to take a page out of biology's book on dealing with dangerous microbes and evolve along with the worm. In other words, constantly update their tool as the worm adapts. So it's likely going to be quite dynamic.
well yeah, the summeries on slashdot can be pretty bad but there's two redeeming features about all of this: the article [when it is relevant] and the discussion about said article and potentially about said summery. And the mod points...
of course there are actual biologists who read slashdot that don't think highly of evolution being thought of in terms of a ladder but rather fitness and genetic change over time in order to maximize the chances that organisms can and do reproduce. the summery did a poor job of phrasing what the researchers actually said on the matter calling it "bad for their evolution" in contrast to being "undesirable [from humanity's perspective] evolution" for which the latter is far more accurate and the former.
how about this bit from the summery?
*cringe* evolution is not a step ladder! If the fish are adapting genetically with the result being more offspring than they would otherwise then it is evolution regardless of humanity's shallow view of what it means to "evolve in a positive direction" or that just because those fish didn't evolve the way we would have liked that it somehow means that it "hurt their evolution."
the government needs to stop artificially lowering the cost of credit, it subsidizes failing businesses... and they need to stop bailing out said businesses "for the greater good" as obama put it. they're not in business to help you or anyone else and saving these idiots from their failing business practices doesn't help anyone but them. Oh and spending money you don't have is not the way to fix the economy. stealing money from one class of citizens to give to another will not fix the economy. People will spend at least what they really need, there is no good reason to encourage consumption over savings... except maybe to over-use resources, raise prices and benefit otherwise inefficient industries... oh and FDR's policies during the great depression? didn't actually work all that well. Turns out that paying farmers to burn crops and ranchers to slaughter livestock doesn't help the economy. who would have dreamed...? You sir have little understanding of economics nor any understanding of the sheer incompetence and self servitude that exists in government. They are not your friends. They only do what they do because there is a benefit to the politician advocating said vote/position/law.
It is ultimately up to the patient being treated to make the decision about their own health. Not "big pharma" nor the federal government, it's your decision. I can not for the life of me understand why people are so intent on putting the responsibility for their health on to others when it is their life in danger... you would think that their own life would mean enough to do at least some basic research on the matter...
indeed, that "clue stick" is high medical costs, sickness and death. The feds can suggest the best course of treatment sure, but do you really want them making your medical decisions rather than yourself and your doctor? What could possibly go wrong?
going by that logic you'd expect that no atheist would ever follow any preventative care, after all they won't "die immediately" and yet oddly enough, people do just fine on this matter. Why? How does your understanding of human behavior explain this?
Knowing that to be the case, why would anyone regardless of their religion or lack therof, want that to be their inevitable fate?
You've given me an excellent opportunity to bring game theory into this :) Why on Earth would evolutionary selection favour individuals who were at least somewhat altruistic?
Good question and the answer is fascinating. selective forces not only exist at the individual level but also at the level of small groups [maternal behavior for example], group behavior [tribes] etc. groups in competition with one another have an advantage if members within that group are altruistic toward one another. Groups containing altruistic individuals out-compete pure selfish groups so why would such individuals assist "unproductive" members? Why would that give an advantage? Well, here's why: as an example, the tribe hunter breaks a leg making him unable to contribute however, individuals in the group take care of the wounded hunter who eventually recovers thus saving the tribe from needing to train another hunter. enlightened selfishness underlies group behavior and explains why selection favours groups with altruistic individuals.
No. I think there is more evidence to the idea that your implied support for state intervention in regard to economics and social issues often causes more harm than good. One only needs to look at societies that are in line with that bit of philosophy to understand. Alcohol prohibition resulted in an increase in crime, the current drug war resulted in a large proportion of the current jail population. Planned economic systems
result in a less affluent populace [soviet union, cuba, most of the world outside hong kong and the USA] There is a lot of reason to believe that leaving people alone and allowing to form their own cooperative groups rather than micromanaging their lives is a great way to improve the situation of the poor and disadvantaged. I think that you need to go take a look at the consequences of an ethical system based on controlling victimless crimes before you conclude that no society that ever deviates from that ultra controlled ideal can not exist. The fact is that it most certainly can and is better off to boot. The point is this, your defence of the position that cooperative behavior couldn't possibly be in the individual's interest seems to be rather short sighted as individuals do indeed benefit from forming groups and it rather doesn't matter what the individual themselves believe about the matter, the ones that don't help one another and don't care about anything outside of their immediate selves are going to kill themselves off. let me repeat: individuals who do not form cooperative groups are going to be completely out-competed by those who can both in biology and in economics! it is simple really, cooperation is an advantageous trait which is selected for at various levels and those who aren't participating are the ones who are not as likely to reproduce and spread those broad traits in their genes now are they? Selection at the group level is a
those who don't find the need to protect themselves, their descendants or their environment are going to kill themselves off.
From my point of view as an atheist and a scientist [I am an evolutionist but also a gravityist, relativityist etc...] the answer as to why someone suc has myself would bother helping anyone other than myself is that I feel good doing so. Just as any other normal, rational human being would. Part of the reason why this is the case is because of all of that natural selection combined with genetic change that has been going on for billions of years.. those species that had a tendency to cooperate of their own free will no doubt had an advantage than those who exercised their primitive ignorant self interest instead. This is likely a point you would agree with yes? That voluntary cooperation is better than pure ignorant selfishness? The point is this: cooperative behavior is not dependant on the belief of your subservience to a deity of some sort. It is a rather useful set of adaptive behaviors that assist our species to exist and function normally in society. It is normal for human beings to cooperate because they know that doing so makes them feel good about their actions.
the probe has a spool of the cable inside of the main body, it doesn't need to drag the cable along with it, just hold it taught moving on down. there is however obviously a limited amount of that cable so if the ocean is farther down than we think or it hits the rock equivalent of an iceberg then its doomed.
An orbiter is nice but getting down to the surface and exploring on Europa its self is I believe, infinitely more informative than setting up shop in orbit. After all, the data we have on the moon suggests that it has an extensive conductive salty ocean underneath its surface that may have life swimming around vents that could exist in that ocean's floor like Earth.