the conundrum here is that by protesting his appearance before he said anything, he was given the opportunity to walk away, and the excuse to call foul later. although i agree that there is frequently nothing to gain in trying to rationally discuss issues with someone relying on a system other than rationality, there was most likely a way to save more face. sadly, it probably including letting him spout off a pile of nonsense.
i don't think i'm reading very far into your statements at all.
you said, and i quote "I still to this day believe people should govern themselves, but in the end most people are not educated enough or ethically capable of doing this. So we must have a set of laws for these people to live by so that we can live together in some form of peace." this seems to me to be saying that people on the whole are not competant to make ethical choices. i disagree, for reasons outlined already.
you said "I thought that I could find life's answers through science and education. But in the end it is a limited cause that really only spirituality and prayers to a higher power "God" gave me." this means to me that you do not think that science, education, and rational thought are legitimate paths to living a good life. i disagree. strongly.
your continued supposition that i have had some bad experiance with religion just makes clear the basic assumption that you make, yet want to deny: that only through religion can one lead a moral life. and i repeat, again and again, that even though we seem to agree on the basics of what constitutes morality, i think your choice is flawed, since it has no room for improvement and makes some depressing assumptions about human beings, namely that they can't be good people without being TOLD how.
let me be as clear as possible. i have had no bad experiences with religion personally. one of my parents is an atheist, one is agnostic. they both came from religious families. i was baptized eastern orthodox. i asked to attend church sometimes as a kid, and we always went. i learned as much as i could about not only the orthodox faith, but lots of others. i'm an extremely curious person. it's why i love science so much. i looked at all of the evidence i could see, and found NOTHING to suggest that there was some divine power, some supernatural force, governing anything. i have come to the conclusion that religion in human society has evolved to keep people functioning cohesively, provide some behavior codes to follow, and give people a general idea on how not to be crappy to one another. and now, thousands of years later, it's not necessary. i think that once you take away the ignorance, people will choose to be good. and so we, as a society, have tried to do that: educate everyone.
you will notice, if you bother to look, that no correlation exists between religion and violent crime. religious people are not less violent than non-religious people. there ARE correlations between education and violent crime. educated people are less violent. i'm not saying that education is the sole reason that makes people more docile. maybe it gets them better jobs, and, not being impoverished, they commit less crime. but education will NEVER be worse than nothing. it can only help. when you combine these two patterns, it's very clear that education lessens the need for religion, without sacrificing good behavior. when you educate people, they stop shooting each other, and not because they found god.
as you asked, "Does our earthly understanding of biology really matter in the end?". and my answer remains a resounding YES. it's not about biology specifically. we can get into the REASONS that religion as an institution does not want to be put out of business some other time. the end of the story is that the educational system should be made to do just that: educate. and it is NOT ok to sweep certain concepts under the carpet because they are too threatening to religion, which one day we as a species will evolve beyond the need for.
if the ultimate goal is to live in a peaceful, happy, non-violent, crystal-gripping hippy society (which i think ought to be the goal), then we basically have two options:
1.) tell people that this is the right way to act. then hope for the best. 2.) show people how to think and learn. let them decide the right way to act. then hope for the best.
you opt for door number one. i opt for door number two.
there are a lot of factors in how well either option works. in terms of the first option, it has some clear drawbacks. firstly, we have yet to come up with one "rightway to act" that everyone can agree on. also, it is difficult to come up with rules of behavior that have no exceptions. i think killing people is wrong, overall. but i can think of PLENTY of reasons why someone might kill a person that i would find completely acceptable (like self defense). when it comes to the second option, clearly one major problem is that people might make bad choices. i might decide that if i want something, it is perfectly acceptable to take it from someone else. no one told me it wasn't. that could be very problematic.
you seem to think that people CAN'T make good choices though. that most people, without being told what the right answer is, will never find it. i have more faith in humanity than that. you also seem to believe that divine inspiration is the only thing that makes life wonderful. i find that to be creepy and generally depressing. i'm sorry your life sucks without your religion. but i think it's a sign of weak character. life should be awesome on its own account. and if it isn't, you're usually doing it wrong.
as a society, we have agreed to disagree, pretty much. we came up with a middle ground. we have decided to have some laws, mostly pertaining to things which everyone can, with very few exceptions, consistantly agree on, or that drastically affect another person. murder, rape, theft. you get the idea. everything else, we get to decide on our own what is right.
we are not discussing whether or not ID is a valid claim, or whether evolution is solid enough, scientifically, to be accepted as absolute truth. what you suggest, using the cover of spirituality, is restricting that second option, and expanding the first. you propose that it doesn't really matter if we learn about evolution, because finding a higher calling in spirituality is more important. i have to call bullshit. i think that in the face of ignorance, YES, sometimes people need to be told what the right answer is. but the solution WILL NOT be to refuse them the tools needed to step out of ignorance.
what can be lost by teaching people how to think critically? and when compared with what we stand to gain, don;t you think it's worth it? do you actually think that people are so terrible, or so incapably stupid that they can't be good people? or are you afraid that if they learn how to think, they might get some ideas that are different than yours? would it be so bad? so what if they don't believe in god. how can that matter to you? no one is stopping you from doing what you think is right. if you think that the best life possible for your children is based in religion, then take them to church. if you think that rational thought will hurt them and make them morally loose, then homeschool (also please keep your kids away from me, if this is the case). DO NOT take away the right of every other kid to learn the way the world works.
my utopia would have no need for laws. people would learn how to think critically, and would choose a path in life that doesn't include hatred, crime, violence, because they could clearly see the reasons why that life is a good one. i feel a little like Tyler Durden right now:) until then, let's just work on making the kids SMARTER, not more obedient.
because i'll be damned if i sit by and smile as you strip the rationality out of my educational system because it doesn't play nice wit
being as honest as i possibly can be, i am proud as hell that i am a morally upstanding person without the crutch of spirituality. and yes. i think it's important.
i am honest, don't cheat, steal or hurt people intentionally. i am as mindful as i am capable of being of the world around me. i strive to be self-sufficient. i try to be kind. i think that my ultimate goal in life is to do more good than harm, and i have to say that i'm certainly on what seems to be the right path.
and i don't do ANY of these things because someone told me i should. i certainly don't accept that this is the right way to live my life because of some supernatural source of knowledge said so. *I* decided that this was the right way for me. and i think i deserve a little credit for not needing a guilt trip to decide that it was wrong to kill people. i didn't need to go to church to realize that being nice to people is a good thing, and being unkind was bad.
maybe if we stopped teaching kids that there is one right way to live and that anyone who did it differently than you was bad, we'd be on the right track. maybe if we didn't force a set of laws that almost universally include hatred of difference. but PLEASE don't argue that spirituality is the only answer, or that it would make better people out of us. your argument seems to imply that an understanding of the real and physical world we live in is unimportant and can't make you a better person. i never met someone who couldn't find something of value HERE and NOW, in this life, something worth being a good person for, if they would only open their eyes and walk out of ignorance. promoting ignorance begets evil. fear and hate almost always have that common stem.
it's frustrating to watch people chisel away at something as valuable to us as a society as knowledge and reason in the name of religion and "the right thing to do"
first, i don't think you understand how people get sickle cell anemia. everyone has two copies of a gene. they don't have to be identical. if you have two normal copies, you have no malaria resistance, and normal oxygen carrying capacity. if you have one normal copy and one abnormal copy, you have malaria resistance and normal oxygen carrying capacity. if you have two abnormal copies, you might have malaria resistance, but it doesn't matter, because you have low oxygen carrying capacity and are probably not healthy to begin with. if you die and don't have kids, your genes will not get passed on. people with sickle cell anemia would be less likely to have tons of babies. people with ONE abnormal gene might have lots of babies, since they don't get malaria as frequently. the gene is not lost. someone who has sickle cell anemia does not LACK any genetic information. they lack a trait (normal blood cells), and that makes them less likely to survive and make babies. thankfully, their brothers with only one copy of the gene have an advantage in the survival department (not getting malaria) that will make sure the gene stays in the general population.
evolution does not concern itself with where new genes come from. there is a very clear source: genetic mutation. evolution only deals with what causes some genes to endure and some to die out. our imperfect replication enzymes supply a steady stream of new information, in the form of new versions of genes. some of those new versions will make you less likely to have babies, and logically, over time there will be fewer individuals with that version. some mutations turn out to be helpful, and become common, and may eventualy become the normal" version.
helpful tip: just because science doesn't think of evolution as a dead issue does not make its truth controversial. someone proposing a new model to explain a small detail of evolutionary doctrine doesn't mean that the existence of evolution is being debated by scientists.
just to be a nitpicker, finding a person with chloroplasts would indeed be monumental, but not enough to disprove evolution. you would also have to prove that they spontaneously generated in way that could not be reconciled with evolutional theory. and maybe i'm tired, but i can't think of a way that that could happen. it would be one HELL of a random mutation... but it is POSSIBLE.
Since we understand the mechanisms by which traits are passed on, and we have observed changes both less than and resulting in speciation and understand the processes which lead to these changes, the only excuse for people having this problem honestly is ignorance, which is correctable.
ignorance isn't going to STAY correctable if this crap keeps up.:)
that isn't really true. the difficulty isn't in applying scientific rules to supernatural phenomena. it is in finding phenomena that are actually supernatural. if it cannot be observed, it can never be scientific. period. please note i use the word observation in the broadest possible sense. i do not mean that you have to see it with your eyes. i mean it has to have some actual, real component that is measurable. manyn things were thought to be "supernatural". turns out there was a perfectly natural explanation that we didn't understand at the time. if you want to HAVE a system for knowledge, there has to be some rules. that's sort of the definition of a system. and this system is defined by things being natural. as in real.
it isn't my fault that people want to use scientific premises on imaginary things and are cranky that it doesn't work.
sure. if that makes perfect sense to you, you SHOULD believe it. but if you were to compare that idea with everything else they covered in high school biology, can you honestly say that it is in the same vein? same family? same sorta gist? not really. no one should tell you that your spirituality is wrong. i WILL however, ask you to keep your spirituality out of my science. i have NO issue with people wanting to believe that there is a higher power directing the observable phenomena of the universe. it's not really appropriate to deny the existance of the observable phenomena though, especially based only on the nice idea that gives you warm fuzzies.
your examples are not very good ones. sickle cell anemia is a disease caused by a double recessive genetic trait that helps you survive (malaria resistance) in a person who has one copy of the recessive and one copy of the dominant. most mutations do NOT involve losing information. those sorts of mutations do occur, but the vast majority of non-lethal mutations are minor changes in an existing gene. any gene exists in many "versions", and most mutations are just one more version of a gene. they are called alleles.
the article you post actually has little to do with your argument. the author is proposing a hypothesis to explain the non-constant rates of documented change in a genetic pool over time. his model proposes that a species goes through a rapid proliferation phase, where many new forms show up, then a slow phase, where those forms slowly diverge more and more over time. this is not new, nor is it a case of debate over whether evolution happens in the sense we thought it did.
this is the FIRST study showing that faith has no impact on one type of serious disease that comes up in a pubmed search. it is MORE recent than the one i had read.
actually, i did read a study, which i am too lazy to source, about the influence of prayer on disease recovery. the recovery rates were lower for those who had prayer helping them along, but not enough lower to be statistically signifigant.
it would seem that all evidence points to religion being psychosomatic. and that's really all the attention it need be given IN A SCIENCE CLASS.
i have never understood why there should be a gap between science and religion in the first place, as they address completely separate things. if you can muster the faith to believe that there is a god, why is it difficult to muster the faith to think that maybe the evolution we can see in action was god's way of creating man. he's a deity. he gets the BIG powertools.
Isn't gravity demonstrable? If I understand correctly, there's still a lot of uncertainty in the scientific community about how gravity works exactly, but it's clearly an observable and demonstrable fact that it does.
Isn't biology something we can study that's in front of our faces? We can actually watch plants growing, babies forming in a womb, organs working, cells replicating etc...
Maybe I'm living under a rock here, but I've never really seen evolution demonstrated.
i don't know how long it's been since you've been in biology, but yes, you are sort of out of it. just like gravity, evolution is just a name we give to the system of observable facts that demonstrate how there are more than one kind of living thing. it can be demonstrated to be true, again and again, just like gravity. it is NOT a hypothesis, which is the word that most people mean when they say theory.
for the most part, i think that people simply do not know what the tenets of evolution are. in most basic terms, the theory of evolution states that over time, the genetic composition of a species as a whole will shift due to the environmental pressures placed on that species.
evolution goes on to explain the ways in which a species can change, be it through selective breeding (girl dogs think short tailed boy dogs are ugly... short tail dogs get less nookie...next generation contains fewer short tailed dogs), selective predation (white bunnies are easier to see in the woods than brown bunnies... white bunnies get eaten more...next generation there are less white bunnies), environmental adaptations (goats with larger lungs can get to good food way up on the mountain...big-lung goats eat better... next generation there are more big-lung goats).
it isn't magic. it's very simple math. so simple that when it is explained, it is so self-evident that the most fundamental crazy can't honestly refute it, in my experience. but we have this growing population of people who are so intolerant to changing their minds that they refuse to learn. anything. and they refuse to risk allowing their children to learn. and they vote. WTF.
that has always been my favorite fallback argument when someone explains to me that they don't believe in evolution. i ask them if they believe in gravity. after all, it's "only" a theory.
sadly, this article points out evolution in progress. i have long held that intelligence is no longer a trait that the modern world is selecting for. the evidence is piling up all around us.
this sort of hits a nerve with me. this is not a study, although they do use that term once in the article. it is a CASE REPORT. based on ONE PATIENT. this is the very beginnings of something important. don't get me wrong, it IS important. but i think it's a bit cruel to get people's hopes up acting as though a cure has been found and all they have to do is test it.
1. that's not a bad idea, although grampa did say all the dinosaurs were girls and all that. a safer option would probably be to place genetic safeguards, like a gene set that keeps them from hybridizing with non-liver pigs, or surviving without a dedicated lab staff (like a genetic deformity that can easily be cured with minor surgery... maybe all the liver pigs also get umbilical hernias). once you've gotten to that stage, it shouldn't be that difficult. the whole idea was to have a source of organs that didn't require genetic mods for each one produced... one that could reproduce true on it's own.
2. i find it hard to believe that an animal with that severe of modifications would have great survivability. they would probably be dropping like flies already. i suspect that the chances of one surviving outside a controlled environment would be low. and the chances that they would make it to another breeding population of pigs, low. and the chances that they would successfully pass on genes, low. and the chances that a gene set for an extra human liver would be selected for in the natural pig population, instead of dying out rapidly like most mutations, low. it is a concern though, and it should be addressed. but it really isn't the doom scenario most people think.
OH WAIT. you meant the animal rights terrorists? never mind. sterilizing them is a GREAT idea.
it's a big leap, but that is where they want to head.
if you can get a pig to pass to its offspring ONE gene that you put there, then you might be able to breed one that has a whole set. like a set that causes it to grow an extra human liver inside. then you can just have a colony of liver pigs that breed and eat and are eventually sacrificed for some person who needs a new liver. and most likely, you could do in vivo liver studies on pigs with human livers that would be MUCH more likely to translate well to humans down the road.
it would be revolutionize medical research.
my intention is not at all to troll. rather, i'd like people to actually understand the impossibility of the scenario they present. a gene cannot spontaneously "transfer" from one individual to another, much less from one species to another. in the lab, we can take advantage of certain organisms to make that happen. it isn't easy. it fails more often than it succeeds. once the gene has been moved, it does not retain the ability to move again. the worst case scenario is the random mutation that would somehow allow the gene set to retain that movement ability, coupled with the random mutation that would allow it a place to move to other than the place the researchers intended, coupled with the introduction of these two individuals with these two particular random mutations. in addition, they would have to be in the small percentage of gene introductions that succeeds. this constellation of chance is possible.
but the chances that your child will have a spontaneous, inheritable mutation to be fluorescent green in the first place is just as likely as any ONE of those other random mutations. as you can tell by the HUGE quantity of glowing green people in the general population, it's a pretty slim chance. once you add in each other factor, and the chance of that factor happening, the possibility becomes ridiculous. and the benefits of the technology are quite difficult to ignore. even if it were an actual risk, it might be worth it.
besides, the world is not actually going to end even if you DO catch fluorescent green genes from your ham. i promise.
it does make sense. the thing is that the techniques used to change the genes in the first place are not always perfect, nor are the imperfections easy to observe. so you didn't know for sure that every cell was being changed. or that the change wouldn't affect the animal's ability to reproduce. the big thing this serves to show is that the introduced genes ARE indeed getting added to EVERY cell in the parent pig, including the reproductive cells. it's not that hard to add genes to SOME cells. this happens all of the time. getting it to ALL the cells is harder. looking at the offspring is really just an elegant way to detect something in the parent that is hard to observe. "yeah, i'm gonna need you to check the DNA in every cell in the pig. yeah. i'm also gonna need you to some in saturday. yeah, that'd be great."
so, gene-modding will cause a gene to transfer from one organism to another? really? how do you think that will happen? if you could make that spontaneously occur, the universe would like to have some words.
as far as it is possible to see, reproductive cycles are the ONLY way to move genes in out out of an organism. recently, the scientific community has learned how to adapt the normal reproductive cycles of certain virus strains to introduce genes from any source they like to an organism. this bypasses the thousands of hybrid stages it would have taken to successfully move a gene from one species to another even if the two were very closely related. more importantly, it restricts the transfer to only the gene you want to insert, as opposed to the 50% transfer you'd have to accept to cross them manually. they are doing the same thing humans have been doing since we started moving away from the hunt/gather plan. they are far more specific than any previous method, which could ONLY serve to make the process more exact, less prone to non-specific changes, and therefore safer. by a few orders of magnitude, at least. oh, also faster. and therefore more rapidly adaptable to being useful. but certainly not less safe.
even the most basic grasp of HOW modern genetic manipulation is done should alleviate any fears about "franken-food" or other such nonsense.
it's not QUITE that bad, but archaeology has always been more in the eye of the beholder than some science branches. the things they are looking at are so easy to miss, that you'd never see them if you weren't thinking to look. very carefully. whereas before we assumed that funky swirl pattern was nothing , once the idea of it being the imprint of a feather is proposed, it becomes easier to notice the things that were probably there all along and missed.
it's important to remember that fossils are RARE. there are lots of them, but the percentage of things that are fossilized rather than decaying completely is incredably small. it isn't as if we have loads of footprints from lots of dinosaurs that pop up everywhere. it's more like, everyonce in a while, in one spot, the conditions will be right to make that happen. so the dinosaur stepped in mud on a riverbank that was mostly clay. they there was a dry spell and it dried out fairly well. then there was a flash flood, and murky plant matter was dumped en masse on top of the clay. now you have a sediment layer with a clear border between the upper and lower layers. and since it got covered quickly, the upper surface of the lower layer is a relatively clear snapshot of that riverbank right before the second silt deposit. this is also why a specific type of fossil (like footprints) will be found profusely in one area. you rarely find one isolated print. you get a large area (say the size of a riverbank) covered in that type of fossil. once they have a few million years to actually become rock, the archaeologist gets to try to carefully pry apart the two layers, and interpret the image in between.
since the difference between the two types of rock are subtle at best, they are open to misinterpretation. knowing this, they will try to use what knowledge they have to help determine where the actual border is based on what they can see. when that knowledge base is discovered to be flawed, changes have to be made in everything that came after that.
i'd like to think that it isn't so much that the scientists are just making stuff up. more that they are trying to honestly use a very mutable system to interpret their data. as in any field, there are people who will abuse it to serve their own purpose. i just like to think that they are in the small minority.
i'm really interested to hear some reasoning line that supports how THIS type of genetic modification will lead to a crisis. as opposed to the type we've been doing since the first fertile crescent humans learned to domesticate crops.
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the conundrum here is that by protesting his appearance before he said anything, he was given the opportunity to walk away, and the excuse to call foul later. although i agree that there is frequently nothing to gain in trying to rationally discuss issues with someone relying on a system other than rationality, there was most likely a way to save more face. sadly, it probably including letting him spout off a pile of nonsense.
i don't think i'm reading very far into your statements at all.
you said, and i quote "I still to this day believe people should govern themselves, but in the end most people are not educated enough or ethically capable of doing this. So we must have a set of laws for these people to live by so that we can live together in some form of peace." this seems to me to be saying that people on the whole are not competant to make ethical choices. i disagree, for reasons outlined already.
you said "I thought that I could find life's answers through science and education. But in the end it is a limited cause that really only spirituality and prayers to a higher power "God" gave me." this means to me that you do not think that science, education, and rational thought are legitimate paths to living a good life. i disagree. strongly.
your continued supposition that i have had some bad experiance with religion just makes clear the basic assumption that you make, yet want to deny: that only through religion can one lead a moral life. and i repeat, again and again, that even though we seem to agree on the basics of what constitutes morality, i think your choice is flawed, since it has no room for improvement and makes some depressing assumptions about human beings, namely that they can't be good people without being TOLD how.
let me be as clear as possible. i have had no bad experiences with religion personally. one of my parents is an atheist, one is agnostic. they both came from religious families. i was baptized eastern orthodox. i asked to attend church sometimes as a kid, and we always went. i learned as much as i could about not only the orthodox faith, but lots of others. i'm an extremely curious person. it's why i love science so much. i looked at all of the evidence i could see, and found NOTHING to suggest that there was some divine power, some supernatural force, governing anything. i have come to the conclusion that religion in human society has evolved to keep people functioning cohesively, provide some behavior codes to follow, and give people a general idea on how not to be crappy to one another. and now, thousands of years later, it's not necessary. i think that once you take away the ignorance, people will choose to be good. and so we, as a society, have tried to do that: educate everyone.
you will notice, if you bother to look, that no correlation exists between religion and violent crime. religious people are not less violent than non-religious people. there ARE correlations between education and violent crime. educated people are less violent. i'm not saying that education is the sole reason that makes people more docile. maybe it gets them better jobs, and, not being impoverished, they commit less crime. but education will NEVER be worse than nothing. it can only help. when you combine these two patterns, it's very clear that education lessens the need for religion, without sacrificing good behavior. when you educate people, they stop shooting each other, and not because they found god.
as you asked, "Does our earthly understanding of biology really matter in the end?". and my answer remains a resounding YES. it's not about biology specifically. we can get into the REASONS that religion as an institution does not want to be put out of business some other time. the end of the story is that the educational system should be made to do just that: educate. and it is NOT ok to sweep certain concepts under the carpet because they are too threatening to religion, which one day we as a species will evolve beyond the need for.
um, let me rephrase.
:) until then, let's just work on making the kids SMARTER, not more obedient.
if the ultimate goal is to live in a peaceful, happy, non-violent, crystal-gripping hippy society (which i think ought to be the goal), then we basically have two options:
1.) tell people that this is the right way to act. then hope for the best.
2.) show people how to think and learn. let them decide the right way to act. then hope for the best.
you opt for door number one. i opt for door number two.
there are a lot of factors in how well either option works. in terms of the first option, it has some clear drawbacks. firstly, we have yet to come up with one "rightway to act" that everyone can agree on. also, it is difficult to come up with rules of behavior that have no exceptions. i think killing people is wrong, overall. but i can think of PLENTY of reasons why someone might kill a person that i would find completely acceptable (like self defense). when it comes to the second option, clearly one major problem is that people might make bad choices. i might decide that if i want something, it is perfectly acceptable to take it from someone else. no one told me it wasn't. that could be very problematic.
you seem to think that people CAN'T make good choices though. that most people, without being told what the right answer is, will never find it. i have more faith in humanity than that. you also seem to believe that divine inspiration is the only thing that makes life wonderful. i find that to be creepy and generally depressing. i'm sorry your life sucks without your religion. but i think it's a sign of weak character. life should be awesome on its own account. and if it isn't, you're usually doing it wrong.
as a society, we have agreed to disagree, pretty much. we came up with a middle ground. we have decided to have some laws, mostly pertaining to things which everyone can, with very few exceptions, consistantly agree on, or that drastically affect another person. murder, rape, theft. you get the idea. everything else, we get to decide on our own what is right.
we are not discussing whether or not ID is a valid claim, or whether evolution is solid enough, scientifically, to be accepted as absolute truth. what you suggest, using the cover of spirituality, is restricting that second option, and expanding the first. you propose that it doesn't really matter if we learn about evolution, because finding a higher calling in spirituality is more important. i have to call bullshit. i think that in the face of ignorance, YES, sometimes people need to be told what the right answer is. but the solution WILL NOT be to refuse them the tools needed to step out of ignorance.
what can be lost by teaching people how to think critically? and when compared with what we stand to gain, don;t you think it's worth it? do you actually think that people are so terrible, or so incapably stupid that they can't be good people? or are you afraid that if they learn how to think, they might get some ideas that are different than yours? would it be so bad? so what if they don't believe in god. how can that matter to you? no one is stopping you from doing what you think is right. if you think that the best life possible for your children is based in religion, then take them to church. if you think that rational thought will hurt them and make them morally loose, then homeschool (also please keep your kids away from me, if this is the case). DO NOT take away the right of every other kid to learn the way the world works.
my utopia would have no need for laws. people would learn how to think critically, and would choose a path in life that doesn't include hatred, crime, violence, because they could clearly see the reasons why that life is a good one. i feel a little like Tyler Durden right now
because i'll be damned if i sit by and smile as you strip the rationality out of my educational system because it doesn't play nice wit
they considered that, but the school board decided the pirate costumes would eat up too much of their precious budget.
being as honest as i possibly can be, i am proud as hell that i am a morally upstanding person without the crutch of spirituality. and yes. i think it's important.
i am honest, don't cheat, steal or hurt people intentionally. i am as mindful as i am capable of being of the world around me. i strive to be self-sufficient. i try to be kind. i think that my ultimate goal in life is to do more good than harm, and i have to say that i'm certainly on what seems to be the right path.
and i don't do ANY of these things because someone told me i should. i certainly don't accept that this is the right way to live my life because of some supernatural source of knowledge said so. *I* decided that this was the right way for me. and i think i deserve a little credit for not needing a guilt trip to decide that it was wrong to kill people. i didn't need to go to church to realize that being nice to people is a good thing, and being unkind was bad.
maybe if we stopped teaching kids that there is one right way to live and that anyone who did it differently than you was bad, we'd be on the right track. maybe if we didn't force a set of laws that almost universally include hatred of difference. but PLEASE don't argue that spirituality is the only answer, or that it would make better people out of us. your argument seems to imply that an understanding of the real and physical world we live in is unimportant and can't make you a better person. i never met someone who couldn't find something of value HERE and NOW, in this life, something worth being a good person for, if they would only open their eyes and walk out of ignorance. promoting ignorance begets evil. fear and hate almost always have that common stem.
it's frustrating to watch people chisel away at something as valuable to us as a society as knowledge and reason in the name of religion and "the right thing to do"
and i think THAT really matters.
first, i don't think you understand how people get sickle cell anemia. everyone has two copies of a gene. they don't have to be identical. if you have two normal copies, you have no malaria resistance, and normal oxygen carrying capacity. if you have one normal copy and one abnormal copy, you have malaria resistance and normal oxygen carrying capacity. if you have two abnormal copies, you might have malaria resistance, but it doesn't matter, because you have low oxygen carrying capacity and are probably not healthy to begin with. if you die and don't have kids, your genes will not get passed on. people with sickle cell anemia would be less likely to have tons of babies. people with ONE abnormal gene might have lots of babies, since they don't get malaria as frequently. the gene is not lost. someone who has sickle cell anemia does not LACK any genetic information. they lack a trait (normal blood cells), and that makes them less likely to survive and make babies. thankfully, their brothers with only one copy of the gene have an advantage in the survival department (not getting malaria) that will make sure the gene stays in the general population. evolution does not concern itself with where new genes come from. there is a very clear source: genetic mutation. evolution only deals with what causes some genes to endure and some to die out. our imperfect replication enzymes supply a steady stream of new information, in the form of new versions of genes. some of those new versions will make you less likely to have babies, and logically, over time there will be fewer individuals with that version. some mutations turn out to be helpful, and become common, and may eventualy become the normal" version. helpful tip: just because science doesn't think of evolution as a dead issue does not make its truth controversial. someone proposing a new model to explain a small detail of evolutionary doctrine doesn't mean that the existence of evolution is being debated by scientists.
just to be a nitpicker, finding a person with chloroplasts would indeed be monumental, but not enough to disprove evolution. you would also have to prove that they spontaneously generated in way that could not be reconciled with evolutional theory. and maybe i'm tired, but i can't think of a way that that could happen. it would be one HELL of a random mutation... but it is POSSIBLE.
ignorance isn't going to STAY correctable if this crap keeps up.
that isn't really true. the difficulty isn't in applying scientific rules to supernatural phenomena. it is in finding phenomena that are actually supernatural. if it cannot be observed, it can never be scientific. period. please note i use the word observation in the broadest possible sense. i do not mean that you have to see it with your eyes. i mean it has to have some actual, real component that is measurable. manyn things were thought to be "supernatural". turns out there was a perfectly natural explanation that we didn't understand at the time. if you want to HAVE a system for knowledge, there has to be some rules. that's sort of the definition of a system. and this system is defined by things being natural. as in real.
it isn't my fault that people want to use scientific premises on imaginary things and are cranky that it doesn't work.
*deep breath*
sure. if that makes perfect sense to you, you SHOULD believe it. but if you were to compare that idea with everything else they covered in high school biology, can you honestly say that it is in the same vein? same family? same sorta gist? not really. no one should tell you that your spirituality is wrong. i WILL however, ask you to keep your spirituality out of my science. i have NO issue with people wanting to believe that there is a higher power directing the observable phenomena of the universe. it's not really appropriate to deny the existance of the observable phenomena though, especially based only on the nice idea that gives you warm fuzzies.
your examples are not very good ones. sickle cell anemia is a disease caused by a double recessive genetic trait that helps you survive (malaria resistance) in a person who has one copy of the recessive and one copy of the dominant. most mutations do NOT involve losing information. those sorts of mutations do occur, but the vast majority of non-lethal mutations are minor changes in an existing gene. any gene exists in many "versions", and most mutations are just one more version of a gene. they are called alleles. the article you post actually has little to do with your argument. the author is proposing a hypothesis to explain the non-constant rates of documented change in a genetic pool over time. his model proposes that a species goes through a rapid proliferation phase, where many new forms show up, then a slow phase, where those forms slowly diverge more and more over time. this is not new, nor is it a case of debate over whether evolution happens in the sense we thought it did.
fine. i'll stop being lazy, a little.
this is the FIRST study showing that faith has no impact on one type of serious disease that comes up in a pubmed search. it is MORE recent than the one i had read.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17636153?ordinalpos=12&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
actually, i did read a study, which i am too lazy to source, about the influence of prayer on disease recovery. the recovery rates were lower for those who had prayer helping them along, but not enough lower to be statistically signifigant. it would seem that all evidence points to religion being psychosomatic. and that's really all the attention it need be given IN A SCIENCE CLASS. i have never understood why there should be a gap between science and religion in the first place, as they address completely separate things. if you can muster the faith to believe that there is a god, why is it difficult to muster the faith to think that maybe the evolution we can see in action was god's way of creating man. he's a deity. he gets the BIG powertools.
Isn't biology something we can study that's in front of our faces? We can actually watch plants growing, babies forming in a womb, organs working, cells replicating etc...
Maybe I'm living under a rock here, but I've never really seen evolution demonstrated.
i don't know how long it's been since you've been in biology, but yes, you are sort of out of it. just like gravity, evolution is just a name we give to the system of observable facts that demonstrate how there are more than one kind of living thing. it can be demonstrated to be true, again and again, just like gravity. it is NOT a hypothesis, which is the word that most people mean when they say theory.
for the most part, i think that people simply do not know what the tenets of evolution are. in most basic terms, the theory of evolution states that over time, the genetic composition of a species as a whole will shift due to the environmental pressures placed on that species.
evolution goes on to explain the ways in which a species can change, be it through selective breeding (girl dogs think short tailed boy dogs are ugly... short tail dogs get less nookie...next generation contains fewer short tailed dogs), selective predation (white bunnies are easier to see in the woods than brown bunnies... white bunnies get eaten more...next generation there are less white bunnies), environmental adaptations (goats with larger lungs can get to good food way up on the mountain...big-lung goats eat better... next generation there are more big-lung goats).
it isn't magic. it's very simple math. so simple that when it is explained, it is so self-evident that the most fundamental crazy can't honestly refute it, in my experience. but we have this growing population of people who are so intolerant to changing their minds that they refuse to learn. anything. and they refuse to risk allowing their children to learn. and they vote. WTF.
that has always been my favorite fallback argument when someone explains to me that they don't believe in evolution. i ask them if they believe in gravity. after all, it's "only" a theory. sadly, this article points out evolution in progress. i have long held that intelligence is no longer a trait that the modern world is selecting for. the evidence is piling up all around us.
this sort of hits a nerve with me. this is not a study, although they do use that term once in the article. it is a CASE REPORT. based on ONE PATIENT. this is the very beginnings of something important. don't get me wrong, it IS important. but i think it's a bit cruel to get people's hopes up acting as though a cure has been found and all they have to do is test it.
unless your doctor is injecting it into your CSF, it's not likely to be much of a comparison.
range voting is better.
1. that's not a bad idea, although grampa did say all the dinosaurs were girls and all that. a safer option would probably be to place genetic safeguards, like a gene set that keeps them from hybridizing with non-liver pigs, or surviving without a dedicated lab staff (like a genetic deformity that can easily be cured with minor surgery... maybe all the liver pigs also get umbilical hernias). once you've gotten to that stage, it shouldn't be that difficult. the whole idea was to have a source of organs that didn't require genetic mods for each one produced... one that could reproduce true on it's own. 2. i find it hard to believe that an animal with that severe of modifications would have great survivability. they would probably be dropping like flies already. i suspect that the chances of one surviving outside a controlled environment would be low. and the chances that they would make it to another breeding population of pigs, low. and the chances that they would successfully pass on genes, low. and the chances that a gene set for an extra human liver would be selected for in the natural pig population, instead of dying out rapidly like most mutations, low. it is a concern though, and it should be addressed. but it really isn't the doom scenario most people think. OH WAIT. you meant the animal rights terrorists? never mind. sterilizing them is a GREAT idea.
it's a big leap, but that is where they want to head. if you can get a pig to pass to its offspring ONE gene that you put there, then you might be able to breed one that has a whole set. like a set that causes it to grow an extra human liver inside. then you can just have a colony of liver pigs that breed and eat and are eventually sacrificed for some person who needs a new liver. and most likely, you could do in vivo liver studies on pigs with human livers that would be MUCH more likely to translate well to humans down the road. it would be revolutionize medical research.
my intention is not at all to troll. rather, i'd like people to actually understand the impossibility of the scenario they present. a gene cannot spontaneously "transfer" from one individual to another, much less from one species to another. in the lab, we can take advantage of certain organisms to make that happen. it isn't easy. it fails more often than it succeeds. once the gene has been moved, it does not retain the ability to move again. the worst case scenario is the random mutation that would somehow allow the gene set to retain that movement ability, coupled with the random mutation that would allow it a place to move to other than the place the researchers intended, coupled with the introduction of these two individuals with these two particular random mutations. in addition, they would have to be in the small percentage of gene introductions that succeeds. this constellation of chance is possible. but the chances that your child will have a spontaneous, inheritable mutation to be fluorescent green in the first place is just as likely as any ONE of those other random mutations. as you can tell by the HUGE quantity of glowing green people in the general population, it's a pretty slim chance. once you add in each other factor, and the chance of that factor happening, the possibility becomes ridiculous. and the benefits of the technology are quite difficult to ignore. even if it were an actual risk, it might be worth it. besides, the world is not actually going to end even if you DO catch fluorescent green genes from your ham. i promise.
it does make sense. the thing is that the techniques used to change the genes in the first place are not always perfect, nor are the imperfections easy to observe. so you didn't know for sure that every cell was being changed. or that the change wouldn't affect the animal's ability to reproduce. the big thing this serves to show is that the introduced genes ARE indeed getting added to EVERY cell in the parent pig, including the reproductive cells. it's not that hard to add genes to SOME cells. this happens all of the time. getting it to ALL the cells is harder. looking at the offspring is really just an elegant way to detect something in the parent that is hard to observe. "yeah, i'm gonna need you to check the DNA in every cell in the pig. yeah. i'm also gonna need you to some in saturday. yeah, that'd be great."
so, gene-modding will cause a gene to transfer from one organism to another? really? how do you think that will happen? if you could make that spontaneously occur, the universe would like to have some words. as far as it is possible to see, reproductive cycles are the ONLY way to move genes in out out of an organism. recently, the scientific community has learned how to adapt the normal reproductive cycles of certain virus strains to introduce genes from any source they like to an organism. this bypasses the thousands of hybrid stages it would have taken to successfully move a gene from one species to another even if the two were very closely related. more importantly, it restricts the transfer to only the gene you want to insert, as opposed to the 50% transfer you'd have to accept to cross them manually. they are doing the same thing humans have been doing since we started moving away from the hunt/gather plan. they are far more specific than any previous method, which could ONLY serve to make the process more exact, less prone to non-specific changes, and therefore safer. by a few orders of magnitude, at least. oh, also faster. and therefore more rapidly adaptable to being useful. but certainly not less safe. even the most basic grasp of HOW modern genetic manipulation is done should alleviate any fears about "franken-food" or other such nonsense.
it's not QUITE that bad, but archaeology has always been more in the eye of the beholder than some science branches. the things they are looking at are so easy to miss, that you'd never see them if you weren't thinking to look. very carefully. whereas before we assumed that funky swirl pattern was nothing , once the idea of it being the imprint of a feather is proposed, it becomes easier to notice the things that were probably there all along and missed.
it's important to remember that fossils are RARE. there are lots of them, but the percentage of things that are fossilized rather than decaying completely is incredably small. it isn't as if we have loads of footprints from lots of dinosaurs that pop up everywhere. it's more like, everyonce in a while, in one spot, the conditions will be right to make that happen. so the dinosaur stepped in mud on a riverbank that was mostly clay. they there was a dry spell and it dried out fairly well. then there was a flash flood, and murky plant matter was dumped en masse on top of the clay. now you have a sediment layer with a clear border between the upper and lower layers. and since it got covered quickly, the upper surface of the lower layer is a relatively clear snapshot of that riverbank right before the second silt deposit. this is also why a specific type of fossil (like footprints) will be found profusely in one area. you rarely find one isolated print. you get a large area (say the size of a riverbank) covered in that type of fossil. once they have a few million years to actually become rock, the archaeologist gets to try to carefully pry apart the two layers, and interpret the image in between.
since the difference between the two types of rock are subtle at best, they are open to misinterpretation. knowing this, they will try to use what knowledge they have to help determine where the actual border is based on what they can see. when that knowledge base is discovered to be flawed, changes have to be made in everything that came after that.
i'd like to think that it isn't so much that the scientists are just making stuff up. more that they are trying to honestly use a very mutable system to interpret their data. as in any field, there are people who will abuse it to serve their own purpose. i just like to think that they are in the small minority.
i'm really interested to hear some reasoning line that supports how THIS type of genetic modification will lead to a crisis. as opposed to the type we've been doing since the first fertile crescent humans learned to domesticate crops.