A scientist's career may hang in the balance, but wouldn't a Christian's soul hang in the balance?
Yes, but there are two important reasons why this doesn't matter:
By definition, faith is beyond the observable world, so one's faith cannot be challenged by the observable world (dogma is another story;-)
When one's soul is in the balance, it does not matter what other's think, only what you think. Thus there is no point arguing once you know you are wrong. The same is not true when one's career is in the balance.
Both a person of science and a person of faith should welcome challenges to their understanding of the world around them. Untested theory and untested faith is essentially valueless. However, sometimes you just need to take home a paycheck.;-)
You will find that your statements are quite offensive to many folks born with deformities or whose parents lack the will or ability to take care of them. You assume that given the choice they'd rather not live and that they cannot contribute to society.
You should check the numbers on some fertility techniques. They are a lot closer to cloning than you think, and they were probably worse when the techniques were first tried. You'll also find that some fertility techniques are essentially the same as cloning but for the source of the genetic material. There is a reason why fertility doctors are leading some of the research into human cloning.
Regardless, am I right in interpreting your statements while you think cloning of humans is wrong, it'd be a bad idea to make it illegal?
Sorry, I meant research in Newtonian mechanics as opposed to Relativity and/or Quantum mechanics. Sure, in lots of cases they are for all attempts and purposes the same thing and you can get grants for research for those cases.
I'd argue poor scientific thinking/process is a risk independent of of the secular/non-secular issue.
However, starting with a conclusion (also known as a theory) is actually a good way to come up with a testable hypothesis. You observe things around you (folks using illegal drugs don't look so healthy to you), and you draw various conclusions about what you've observed (illegal drugs are bad for you). Then you come up with testable hypothesis drawn from those conclusions (if you take illegal drugs your teeth will fall out). Then you come up with various tests for that hypothesis (give folks lots of illegal drugs. see if their teeth fall out as compared to a control group;-). Research that is worth doing should always have a chance of either disproving or not disproving a hypothesis (and therefore potentially the theory it was drawn from). Note that no matter what it can't prove your theory.
The statement "you can only get a permit to research illegal drugs to prove they are BAD for you." is misleading propaganda. Think it through before you swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Research doesn't prove anything. At best it increases one's confidence in a hypothises by failing to disprove it. For that to be the case it must have been possible for the research to disprove the hypothesis.
All research into illegal drugs can either stengthen or weaken the argument that illegal drugs are bad for you. The government may think the odds favor support of some conclusion when it funds something, but that doesn't change the fact that it could go either way.
Would you consider "normal" reproduction unethical if for whatever reason a certain couple had 200 to 1 odds of having a "healthy" (whatever that means) birth?
Do you realize that many forms of medically assisted reproduction done today use essentially the same methods and have essentially the same risks as the kind of cloning you are talking about (the key difference being that they don't use solely your own genetic data)?
BTW, folks don't tend to clone stem cells. They tend to want to clone from stem cells.;-)
Yes scientists are often wrong, and it is expected. In the scientific field, it should be perfectly okay to be wrong most of the time.
In either a religious or scientific context, your beliefs should be challenged regularly, and so having to rethink your ideas should not be threatening.
However, a successful scientific career (in terms of wealth) can hinge quite significantly on whether or not your peers (and therefore the world at large) think that you are right, or that your thinking is not antiquated. Einstein would still be repairing watches if others hadn't become convinced he was on to something. Worse still what if new facts suggest your data is wrong (suggesting what? fabrication? shoddy work?)? Get any good grants lately for cold fusion research? How about perpetual motion machine research? How about for Newtonian mechanics?
Faith, by definition, is something that cannot be threatened by facts, because it exists regardless of the facts. Sure, church dogma can be proven wrong; even holy texts could be proven to be wrong; but this should not effect faith.
Regardless, unless you are employed by the church itself, chances are facts which contradict various religious matters, while they might keep you up at night, aren't likely to cost you your job. In that context, once you know you are wrong, there isn't much point defending your position. Indeed, for many folks doing so would be a sin.
But in the civilised world (Western Europe, Japan) the birth rate is at or below replacement levels.
That's currently. Imagine if the death rate went to 0. You think the birth rate would also go to 0? Even if it did, this would effectively kill the evolutionary process, either way you weaken humanity as a whole.
If we can create life, therefore, we will be like God. This is flawed, for God is so much more than just something that creates life.
Here here. Not to mention the fact that cloning is embarassingly similar to the process God gave us in the first place to perpetuate the species (although without all the fun parts;-).
I think though, that the battle lines on cloning are more closely drawn on the other side of the equation: getting the stem cells. It's tough to say where to draw the line, I think most people would be uneasy with the most extreme cloning scenario: paying folks for killing newborns to harvest their stem cells for cloning research. The trick is: where do you draw the line between the extremes? This is the kind of thing that draws upon all kinds of issues (even the hippocratic oath), including religious ones. Since we're dealing with life and death here folks get pretty upset even when they disagree only slightly on where to draw the line.
I have to point out that the order in which he phrased his question has no bearing on if he is a bigot.
No, but his assigning the zealot modifier to "christian" but not "scientist" does.
If you take a reasonable person from either group and compare them to a zealot from the other, the zealot will always look like more of a bigot. The statement also suggests that there is no intersection of the two groups, which is kind of ludicrous.
Certainly, things have been thrown out of equilibrium at various points, but for the most part we actually do have a decent balance. We currently easily have the capability to feed the whole world, despite being long since past the point where Malthus' reasoning should have brought about our end.
While each individual would rather have a longer lifespan and birth control, this actually slows the evolutionary process, weakening the herd as a whole. Birth and death are key processes needed to keep the herd strong.
Keep that in mind the next time you are contemplating issues like capital punishment, war, or eating.;-)
Seriously though, did you just completely fail to grasp the context of Bruce's statement? He's talking about a scenario where he's potentially saving life without destroying life.
The issues with regard to cloning cannot be brought down to a single yes/no answer, they are legion and complex.
The religious issues around cloning are for the most part also moral and ethical issues which would be of interest even to an atheist.
Your suggestion that facts are somehow independant of ethical, moral and religous matters is ludicrous. Facts alone, without some kind of value context, cannot lead to a decision.
The fact that there is an issue that is encouraging a debate about ethics, morals, and religion is actually an increadibly healthy thing for society. Science is a tool, and they [ethics, morals, and religion] are the hand that guides the tool. The more powerful the tool is, the more important that it be handled with skill.
Honestly, I'd argue that the problem in the USA is that most of the ethical, moral and religious thinking that guides our policy is not driven by very thorough thinking. If the populace as a whole spends more time grappling with these issues, perhaps they'll get past the rather shallow analysis that tends to drive policy.
Exactly. Good Christians can also be neutral observers. They just have to avoid letting the facts threaten their faith (and therefore their judgement). Sadly, many scientists feel (correctly or otherwise) their careers can be threatened if word gets out their ideas are inviable. Something that is far less likely a risk for a Christian.
The real problem is that frequently the leaders of any given "interest group" having a stake in maintaining the party line. Ultimately, you need a disinterested third party to make a call after hearing the arguments from both sides. In theory, that's where politicians and judges come in. In practice....
Depending on your view of Malthus' theories, you absolutely do. Much as we do today. Better to let the weak and sick die, then have the herd consume all resources and wipe itself out. Any advance that skews things one way or the other (resources vs. population) can be an item of concern.
I don't support the notion, but it is perhaps the most rational reason to limit stem cell research.
You're assuming mass-cloning is the problem he's concerned with. Assuming you are right, and we make significant progress in the field of medecine. The mortality rate goes down, and suddenly we have even more of a population problem than we started with.
I'm not saying the main article isn't citing damning evidence. I'm just saying that finding a quote about SCO making contributions like lxrun and OpenSAR means nothing. That company is now called Tarantella, not SCO, and those contributions were not to the Linux kernel.
Okay, let's point out the ways that the Athlon scenario is different from the 386/286 scenario (it's worth pointing out that a 1991 386sx would have been equally useless at running Win3.11, you really needed a new box whether it was acknowledged or not).
The 386 actually provided distinctive new capabilities beyond just widening the address space.
The 386sx was priced below all the 386dx processors.
The cost of a 386sx processor in 1991 was not equivalent to buying a 286 + a motherboard.
Check the details on the Athlon64 and Opteron lines. You'll be shocked to discover that the non-FX Athlon64 is actually more expensive than many Opterons. The mobile one is presumably even more expensive. Buying that CPU as a way of "future proofing" yourself is rediculous. It's far more cost effective to get a cheaper machine today and buy a new one when you are ready for the 64-bit world. If you really were concerned about future proofing your system, then you'd think you'd want a motherboard that could actually support adding on more memory (because I tell you, once you start running a 64-bit OS, and a 64-bit app that actually wants a 64-bit address space, 1GB is going to be rediculously cramped).
More importantly though, because 64-bit processors don't have any significant new features beyond the larger address space (address space that most folks don't even need yet), you aren't going to find software manufacturer's releases 64-bit only general purpose software out there for ages. The only folks who are going to want the 64-bit address space are folks who actually need the memory.
I totally understand your analogy. However, the differences between the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX are relatively minor (basically the FX has the dual-channel memory interface), whereas the differences between the 386SX and 386DX were substancial. Indeed, following your analogy the whole Athlon64 line is the 386SX.
What I'm complaining about though has nothing to do with the CPU. It has to do with the motherboards. You're selling point is that you have a 64-bit CPU, presumably for heavy duty computing, but you hook it up to a motherboard that limits you to less memory than a "heavy duty" 32-bit system. So, your customer pays a premium in order to get a system that is actually crippled compared to the alternatives. This same retailer that is selling the 1GB Athlon64 system is also selling very nice Intel system which can have 2GB of RAM. There aren't that many scenarios where it'd be wise to get the AMD system.
It makes absolutely no sense beyond misleading the end user to make an extra buck.
The analogy is not entirely correct though. The non-FX Athlon64's are fully capable of addressing more than 4GB's of memory. The limitation is coming from the motherbaord/memory design. While I agree that for some folks that is an okay way to go, I don't think this is the target market for these laptops. Heck, given how nice the Pentium-M's are these days, the only reason I'd go for an Althon64 laptop would be for the extra memory.
Well, you can get >2GB virtual address space with Intel already (you can get up to 4GB with the right kernel options). Heck, with x86 you can already get >4GB physical memory. That being said, if you are in it for the virtual memory, than you probably don't want to be using a laptop anyway, as the disc performance will be brutal.
The large virtual memory address space is nice, but your code will likely actualy perform worse than 32-bit code that cleverly uses smart pointers to manage your IO.
Still, you are right. As I said, there are some minor benefits to having a 64-bit CPU even if you are limited to 1GB of memory. However, I suspect for most folks the extra memory consumption of 64-bit code (and the resulting swapping and cache misses) will likely outweigh the benefits substancialy. It's like having a 1000hp engine hooked up to a drive train that can only handle 200hp.
I have to bitch about the low memory limits on these AMD64-based laptops. All the ones I've seen so far max out at 1GB (actually, many of the desktops also max out in the 1-2GB range, but at least a few are cluefull). This pretty much kills the point of having a 64-bit processor (I guess you still might get a boost with properly tuned integer code).
Word to the wise: 64-bit apps actually take up more memory, if for no other reason than all the pointers are now 64-bit instead of 32-bit. So your 1GB laptop is going to feel a lot more memory constrained than if it were running 32-bit code. The Intel systems have better power management, and they typically will let you go to 2GB, so for most folks they will actually perform significantly better.
Methinks this first generation of laptops is essentially for folks who want the bragging rights of saying they have a 64-bit CPU, without really understanding the implications.
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Yes, but there are two important reasons why this doesn't matter:
Both a person of science and a person of faith should welcome challenges to their understanding of the world around them. Untested theory and untested faith is essentially valueless. However, sometimes you just need to take home a paycheck.
You will find that your statements are quite offensive to many folks born with deformities or whose parents lack the will or ability to take care of them. You assume that given the choice they'd rather not live and that they cannot contribute to society.
You should check the numbers on some fertility techniques. They are a lot closer to cloning than you think, and they were probably worse when the techniques were first tried. You'll also find that some fertility techniques are essentially the same as cloning but for the source of the genetic material. There is a reason why fertility doctors are leading some of the research into human cloning.
Regardless, am I right in interpreting your statements while you think cloning of humans is wrong, it'd be a bad idea to make it illegal?
Sorry, I meant research in Newtonian mechanics as opposed to Relativity and/or Quantum mechanics. Sure, in lots of cases they are for all attempts and purposes the same thing and you can get grants for research for those cases.
I'd argue poor scientific thinking/process is a risk independent of of the secular/non-secular issue.
;-). Research that is worth doing should always have a chance of either disproving or not disproving a hypothesis (and therefore potentially the theory it was drawn from). Note that no matter what it can't prove your theory.
However, starting with a conclusion (also known as a theory) is actually a good way to come up with a testable hypothesis. You observe things around you (folks using illegal drugs don't look so healthy to you), and you draw various conclusions about what you've observed (illegal drugs are bad for you). Then you come up with testable hypothesis drawn from those conclusions (if you take illegal drugs your teeth will fall out). Then you come up with various tests for that hypothesis (give folks lots of illegal drugs. see if their teeth fall out as compared to a control group
The statement "you can only get a permit to research illegal drugs to prove they are BAD for you." is misleading propaganda. Think it through before you swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Research doesn't prove anything. At best it increases one's confidence in a hypothises by failing to disprove it. For that to be the case it must have been possible for the research to disprove the hypothesis.
All research into illegal drugs can either stengthen or weaken the argument that illegal drugs are bad for you. The government may think the odds favor support of some conclusion when it funds something, but that doesn't change the fact that it could go either way.
Would you consider "normal" reproduction unethical if for whatever reason a certain couple had 200 to 1 odds of having a "healthy" (whatever that means) birth?
;-)
Do you realize that many forms of medically assisted reproduction done today use essentially the same methods and have essentially the same risks as the kind of cloning you are talking about (the key difference being that they don't use solely your own genetic data)?
BTW, folks don't tend to clone stem cells. They tend to want to clone from stem cells.
Yes scientists are often wrong, and it is expected. In the scientific field, it should be perfectly okay to be wrong most of the time.
In either a religious or scientific context, your beliefs should be challenged regularly, and so having to rethink your ideas should not be threatening.
However, a successful scientific career (in terms of wealth) can hinge quite significantly on whether or not your peers (and therefore the world at large) think that you are right, or that your thinking is not antiquated. Einstein would still be repairing watches if others hadn't become convinced he was on to something. Worse still what if new facts suggest your data is wrong (suggesting what? fabrication? shoddy work?)? Get any good grants lately for cold fusion research? How about perpetual motion machine research? How about for Newtonian mechanics?
Faith, by definition, is something that cannot be threatened by facts, because it exists regardless of the facts. Sure, church dogma can be proven wrong; even holy texts could be proven to be wrong; but this should not effect faith.
Regardless, unless you are employed by the church itself, chances are facts which contradict various religious matters, while they might keep you up at night, aren't likely to cost you your job. In that context, once you know you are wrong, there isn't much point defending your position. Indeed, for many folks doing so would be a sin.
But in the civilised world (Western Europe, Japan) the birth rate is at or below replacement levels.
That's currently. Imagine if the death rate went to 0. You think the birth rate would also go to 0? Even if it did, this would effectively kill the evolutionary process, either way you weaken humanity as a whole.
If we can create life, therefore, we will be like God. This is flawed, for God is so much more than just something that creates life.
;-).
Here here. Not to mention the fact that cloning is embarassingly similar to the process God gave us in the first place to perpetuate the species (although without all the fun parts
I think though, that the battle lines on cloning are more closely drawn on the other side of the equation: getting the stem cells. It's tough to say where to draw the line, I think most people would be uneasy with the most extreme cloning scenario: paying folks for killing newborns to harvest their stem cells for cloning research. The trick is: where do you draw the line between the extremes? This is the kind of thing that draws upon all kinds of issues (even the hippocratic oath), including religious ones. Since we're dealing with life and death here folks get pretty upset even when they disagree only slightly on where to draw the line.
I have to point out that the order in which he phrased his question has no bearing on if he is a bigot.
No, but his assigning the zealot modifier to "christian" but not "scientist" does.
If you take a reasonable person from either group and compare them to a zealot from the other, the zealot will always look like more of a bigot. The statement also suggests that there is no intersection of the two groups, which is kind of ludicrous.
This is an issue that can be debated to death.
Certainly, things have been thrown out of equilibrium at various points, but for the most part we actually do have a decent balance. We currently easily have the capability to feed the whole world, despite being long since past the point where Malthus' reasoning should have brought about our end.
While each individual would rather have a longer lifespan and birth control, this actually slows the evolutionary process, weakening the herd as a whole. Birth and death are key processes needed to keep the herd strong.
Destroying life to save life is sin
;-)
Keep that in mind the next time you are contemplating issues like capital punishment, war, or eating.
Seriously though, did you just completely fail to grasp the context of Bruce's statement? He's talking about a scenario where he's potentially saving life without destroying life.
- The issues with regard to cloning cannot be brought down to a single yes/no answer, they are legion and complex.
- The religious issues around cloning are for the most part also moral and ethical issues which would be of interest even to an atheist.
- Your suggestion that facts are somehow independant of ethical, moral and religous matters is ludicrous. Facts alone, without some kind of value context, cannot lead to a decision.
- The fact that there is an issue that is encouraging a debate about ethics, morals, and religion is actually an increadibly healthy thing for society. Science is a tool, and they [ethics, morals, and religion] are the hand that guides the tool. The more powerful the tool is, the more important that it be handled with skill.
Honestly, I'd argue that the problem in the USA is that most of the ethical, moral and religious thinking that guides our policy is not driven by very thorough thinking. If the populace as a whole spends more time grappling with these issues, perhaps they'll get past the rather shallow analysis that tends to drive policy.Hey, that sounds like a fantastic idea! Are these facilities available to anyone? I'd love to do that for my future children.
Exactly. Good Christians can also be neutral observers. They just have to avoid letting the facts threaten their faith (and therefore their judgement). Sadly, many scientists feel (correctly or otherwise) their careers can be threatened if word gets out their ideas are inviable. Something that is far less likely a risk for a Christian.
The real problem is that frequently the leaders of any given "interest group" having a stake in maintaining the party line. Ultimately, you need a disinterested third party to make a call after hearing the arguments from both sides. In theory, that's where politicians and judges come in. In practice....
But then what do we do, let people die?
Depending on your view of Malthus' theories, you absolutely do. Much as we do today. Better to let the weak and sick die, then have the herd consume all resources and wipe itself out. Any advance that skews things one way or the other (resources vs. population) can be an item of concern.
I don't support the notion, but it is perhaps the most rational reason to limit stem cell research.
who is more bigotted, the scientist or the Christian zelot?
;-)
who is more bigotted, the Christian or the scientific zealot?
You are phrasing your questions, and your thinking in a very bigotted fashion. Kind of an existence proof of my point.
You're assuming mass-cloning is the problem he's concerned with. Assuming you are right, and we make significant progress in the field of medecine. The mortality rate goes down, and suddenly we have even more of a population problem than we started with.
Surely you jest?
It's pretty tough to find any group that is impartial (theoretically the closest would be judges, but I doubt that would be reflected in reality).
I'm not saying the main article isn't citing damning evidence. I'm just saying that finding a quote about SCO making contributions like lxrun and OpenSAR means nothing. That company is now called Tarantella, not SCO, and those contributions were not to the Linux kernel.
That of course was a different company. The name is the same, but it is otherwise not the same corporate entity.
Okay, let's point out the ways that the Athlon scenario is different from the 386/286 scenario (it's worth pointing out that a 1991 386sx would have been equally useless at running Win3.11, you really needed a new box whether it was acknowledged or not).
Check the details on the Athlon64 and Opteron lines. You'll be shocked to discover that the non-FX Athlon64 is actually more expensive than many Opterons. The mobile one is presumably even more expensive. Buying that CPU as a way of "future proofing" yourself is rediculous. It's far more cost effective to get a cheaper machine today and buy a new one when you are ready for the 64-bit world. If you really were concerned about future proofing your system, then you'd think you'd want a motherboard that could actually support adding on more memory (because I tell you, once you start running a 64-bit OS, and a 64-bit app that actually wants a 64-bit address space, 1GB is going to be rediculously cramped).
More importantly though, because 64-bit processors don't have any significant new features beyond the larger address space (address space that most folks don't even need yet), you aren't going to find software manufacturer's releases 64-bit only general purpose software out there for ages. The only folks who are going to want the 64-bit address space are folks who actually need the memory.
I totally understand your analogy. However, the differences between the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX are relatively minor (basically the FX has the dual-channel memory interface), whereas the differences between the 386SX and 386DX were substancial. Indeed, following your analogy the whole Athlon64 line is the 386SX.
What I'm complaining about though has nothing to do with the CPU. It has to do with the motherboards. You're selling point is that you have a 64-bit CPU, presumably for heavy duty computing, but you hook it up to a motherboard that limits you to less memory than a "heavy duty" 32-bit system. So, your customer pays a premium in order to get a system that is actually crippled compared to the alternatives. This same retailer that is selling the 1GB Athlon64 system is also selling very nice Intel system which can have 2GB of RAM. There aren't that many scenarios where it'd be wise to get the AMD system.
It makes absolutely no sense beyond misleading the end user to make an extra buck.
The analogy is not entirely correct though. The non-FX Athlon64's are fully capable of addressing more than 4GB's of memory. The limitation is coming from the motherbaord/memory design. While I agree that for some folks that is an okay way to go, I don't think this is the target market for these laptops. Heck, given how nice the Pentium-M's are these days, the only reason I'd go for an Althon64 laptop would be for the extra memory.
Well, you can get >2GB virtual address space with Intel already (you can get up to 4GB with the right kernel options). Heck, with x86 you can already get >4GB physical memory. That being said, if you are in it for the virtual memory, than you probably don't want to be using a laptop anyway, as the disc performance will be brutal.
The large virtual memory address space is nice, but your code will likely actualy perform worse than 32-bit code that cleverly uses smart pointers to manage your IO.
Still, you are right. As I said, there are some minor benefits to having a 64-bit CPU even if you are limited to 1GB of memory. However, I suspect for most folks the extra memory consumption of 64-bit code (and the resulting swapping and cache misses) will likely outweigh the benefits substancialy. It's like having a 1000hp engine hooked up to a drive train that can only handle 200hp.
I have to bitch about the low memory limits on these AMD64-based laptops. All the ones I've seen so far max out at 1GB (actually, many of the desktops also max out in the 1-2GB range, but at least a few are cluefull). This pretty much kills the point of having a 64-bit processor (I guess you still might get a boost with properly tuned integer code).
Word to the wise: 64-bit apps actually take up more memory, if for no other reason than all the pointers are now 64-bit instead of 32-bit. So your 1GB laptop is going to feel a lot more memory constrained than if it were running 32-bit code. The Intel systems have better power management, and they typically will let you go to 2GB, so for most folks they will actually perform significantly better.
Methinks this first generation of laptops is essentially for folks who want the bragging rights of saying they have a 64-bit CPU, without really understanding the implications.