The point is, evolution in schools has become much more a political thing than a scientific thing, and by the time kids get to high school, it doesn't matter what the schools teach, because the kids have mostly made up their mind already, and have heard both sides of the issue, and will most likely end up thinking, "that's it?"
That's a good point that is lost by both sides all too often. It is important what is taught in schools, but it's also important to keep some perspective. If a kid grows up in a crazy fundamentalist household, you can make him read the entire works of Stephen Jay Gould and it will bounce right off or just give him more quotes to take out of context as ammo against "them devil-lovin scientists." Similarly, if I had been informed as to the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory in high school by a heavily creationist biased teacher, I would have lost even more respect for secondary education as a whole, and that would have really been it.
It is important to oppose ignorance, lies, and superstition wherever they go masquerading as truth, be they in Texan schools or at a PETA protest, but we're not actually battling for the minds of high school kids. If instructing them "evolution true" or "evolution not true" gets written down in any student's mind as truth by a teacher, they accept it and never question it, we've failed them independently of the evolution question.
Even the most moronic creationist admits that evolution has been proven to work at the microscopic level.
Bit of an overestimation of the "highly moronic creationist" crowd unfortunately. Some of the more moronic creationists likely don't believe microbes exist. The -most- moronic creationist probably doesn't believe microSCOPES exist.
Forget about hips or knees (which are amazingly well suited for walking upright, by the way). Look at male nipples. There is nothing intelligent or "by design" about it. Unless we are talking about a very incompetent designer.
They're there because of development. Embryos develop in similar ways, nipples form early on before masculinization of the embryo, so they're started in both male and female embryos. The evolutionary standpoint is that there is no advantage to getting rid of them at that point. The same could be said for intelligent design I guess. If there is a designer, she seems like a fan of efficiency in biological design, that there is no reason to design a method to get rid of them since it's so trivial, or maybe they just say it's a mystery, or the designer wanted it that way for mysterious reasons.
Anyway, it's time for a car analogy. Look at the dashboard of many cars. There are often things that look like buttons next to real buttons. Like next to the emergency light button, there's just a dummy button. More luxury versions of that car, with that dashboard, have functional buttons there. It's more efficient to design one dashboard model and put dummy buttons in the cars that don't have those features than it is to design two, or design one that doesn't have holes in the faceplate there and then just cut out holes for the luxury versions. Car design is clearly more akin to "intelligent design" but you have vestigial features with it.
Note that this is not saying intelligent design is a valid idea. It's not, it's an idiotic idea put forth by confused people. Just constructive criticism: in defending evolution, male nipples are not a valid critique of creationism... oops, I mean intelligent design.
You know how I know they are lying? They are posting complaints online. We designed this patch -specifically- to stop online complaints about updates. They clearly haven't actually updated.
Won't someone puhlEEZE think of the businesses! They're so deprived! They see their employees walking around with fancy iphones and they want one too! Not fair!
Yes, not outright offering Syrians and Iranians their browser, while leaving plenty ways they can still get chrome, and citing sanctions against those countries as the reason is CLEARLY a "propaganda partnership." I mean google has so much to gain by playing along with this massive international conspiracy. So very much. After all, if a resident of Syria were able to use google chrome, the Combine would be unable to stop Gordon Freeman, which is also Google's sworn enemy.
Matter of fact, -I- haven't offered Syrians OR Iranians anything free lately. I guess I'm part of the propaganda machine...
Just a guess: trolling about say, Mormons would have been off-topic in addition to trolling, and AC has higher standards. If he's going to troll, it's going to be on-topic trolling.
Also around here you CAN'T troll scientologists, any more than you can troll sane people on scientology boards: you just get modded up for it.
well how would you feel if you were a country that was just trying to provide the most wholesome kind of social system possible (as laid out by God himself!), and all your people were using the internet for was bad-mouthing your attempts to fight the righteous battle against the vile corruption from the West that was threatening to engulf your poor country?
I tried to put myself into the shoes of an Iranian fundamentalist, to get perspective on the issue, and for a minute it made sense. I was going to share the insight I gained, and explain why this was needed... but just then a woman walked past and I lost control of my bowels in fear, preventing me from enlightening you all.
For viral infections I've heard that too, but my understanding is that macrophages and other immune system cells will attack bacteria they haven't seen before. If you get a cut on your finger, you don't need to get septicemia once before your immune system starts fighting that bacteria. I also understand that the immune system helps to kill cells which are damaged, preventing you from getting cancer, and they do this from day one, without requiring you to recover from cancer.
Anyway, I'd argue that "keep us from getting sick again" falls within "keep us from getting sick" as the second statement doesn't exactly imply keeping us healthy without -ever- getting sick.
Derya Unutmaz is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. His current research is focused on understanding the function of human immune system.
I can tell him right now what the function of the human immune system is: to keep us from getting sick.
It's more news for people who aren't really nerds. If you're not really a nerd, stop reading news for nerds or going to nerdy seminars because if you're not a nerd, you'll be bored, and it will kill you.
Games of chance and the lottery are a tax on people who are poor at math, and I wholeheartedly support it.
Thank you for proving that while many laws are passed for absolutely terrible reasons, there are always -worse- motivations that our lawmakers didn't go with.
Taxes go to the government, where they're at least supposed to be spent on social welfare programs, defense, infrastructure, etc. Online casino revenue will go either to more annoying ads and spam for online casinos or directly into the pockets of it's shareholders. If your motivation is to punish people who are bad at math, at least we could do something useful with that money if it were an -actual- tax.
And why abuse people who are bad at math? If you gamble away all that you have, that hurts your family. You lose your house, that hurts your neighbors. It's really just elitism that makes you say that isn't it? That's pretty sad.
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature.
If it's a -constant- pressure applied to the population but not enough to drive it extinct, then yes, it is probable that the synthetic life would become resistant. If the killswitch is not used until it is suddenly used with full force, then that decreases the chances. If there is no advantage to evolving around the killswitch, as there wouldn't be if the killswitch signal is not constantly used, then the chances of that happening are decreased.
Had we not used antibiotics except when strictly needed, and then with overwhelming force until the infection is completely irradicated, then we wouldn't be seeing antibiotic resistance: bugs wouldn't go to the trouble to adapt to an evolutionary pressure they're not faced with. In fact, they'd be at a disadvantage with the energy they would be wasting to be immune to it.
Of course that's just probabilities. It's entirely possible that the synthetic life would spontaneously evolve resistance. And if DARPA is dumb enough to make the killswitch something that the organism would have to actively maintain, that could be an issue. For instance, if you put a plasmid in bacteria with a suicide gene in, something that would make the cell uniquely susceptible to a drug, but give the bacterium no advantage to maintain that plasmid, that plasmid is going to be dropped, along with the suicide gene, and the drug won't do anything to it.
I wish we had more people like that in government in the US.
I think we have plenty of whores willing to ignore scientific advice and general interest to cater to powerful economic interests in the US government.
Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.
There were also some advances in medicine in the meanwhile that raised the price independent of government involvement. Chemotherapy back in the day may have been cheap enough to afford out of pocket, but that's because it was booze.
I guess you could still claim that since the government funded much of the research that led to these advances, they were still responsible though.
I didn't really enjoy was anchoridge simply because it was a "simulation" and a game for me is a simulation,
I think that what was wrong with Anchorage wasn't how they framed it in the game, it was the lack of plot, characters, sidequests, or creativity in that DLC. Mothership Zeta wasn't a game-in-game "simulation" but still sucked worse than Anchorage for the same reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, evolution in schools has become much more a political thing than a scientific thing, and by the time kids get to high school, it doesn't matter what the schools teach, because the kids have mostly made up their mind already, and have heard both sides of the issue, and will most likely end up thinking, "that's it?"
That's a good point that is lost by both sides all too often. It is important what is taught in schools, but it's also important to keep some perspective. If a kid grows up in a crazy fundamentalist household, you can make him read the entire works of Stephen Jay Gould and it will bounce right off or just give him more quotes to take out of context as ammo against "them devil-lovin scientists." Similarly, if I had been informed as to the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory in high school by a heavily creationist biased teacher, I would have lost even more respect for secondary education as a whole, and that would have really been it.
It is important to oppose ignorance, lies, and superstition wherever they go masquerading as truth, be they in Texan schools or at a PETA protest, but we're not actually battling for the minds of high school kids. If instructing them "evolution true" or "evolution not true" gets written down in any student's mind as truth by a teacher, they accept it and never question it, we've failed them independently of the evolution question.
Even the most moronic creationist admits that evolution has been proven to work at the microscopic level.
Bit of an overestimation of the "highly moronic creationist" crowd unfortunately. Some of the more moronic creationists likely don't believe microbes exist. The -most- moronic creationist probably doesn't believe microSCOPES exist.
doesn't explain order or complexity, nothing cannot come nothing, chaos does not create order, etc.
If it's going to be that type of discussion, where ability to fit on a twitter post beats proof, then here's my rebuttal.
Yes it can.
Forget about hips or knees (which are amazingly well suited for walking upright, by the way). Look at male nipples. There is nothing intelligent or "by design" about it. Unless we are talking about a very incompetent designer.
They're there because of development. Embryos develop in similar ways, nipples form early on before masculinization of the embryo, so they're started in both male and female embryos. The evolutionary standpoint is that there is no advantage to getting rid of them at that point. The same could be said for intelligent design I guess. If there is a designer, she seems like a fan of efficiency in biological design, that there is no reason to design a method to get rid of them since it's so trivial, or maybe they just say it's a mystery, or the designer wanted it that way for mysterious reasons.
Anyway, it's time for a car analogy. Look at the dashboard of many cars. There are often things that look like buttons next to real buttons. Like next to the emergency light button, there's just a dummy button. More luxury versions of that car, with that dashboard, have functional buttons there. It's more efficient to design one dashboard model and put dummy buttons in the cars that don't have those features than it is to design two, or design one that doesn't have holes in the faceplate there and then just cut out holes for the luxury versions. Car design is clearly more akin to "intelligent design" but you have vestigial features with it.
Note that this is not saying intelligent design is a valid idea. It's not, it's an idiotic idea put forth by confused people. Just constructive criticism: in defending evolution, male nipples are not a valid critique of creationism... oops, I mean intelligent design.
Getting killed in a car accident, by contrast, is 4,300 times more likely.
That is probably very close to the same odds as being on a plane targeted by terrorists; look how calmly we are responding to that threat.
Furthermore, we've banned terrorists from getting onto planes, but have we banned people from driving cars on the plane???
You updated your updates?
Its a real mark of how comitted MS is to security that they update their updates to their updates, and all require restarts.
You're pretty dumb for someone getting a PhD
I'm not sure if I should laugh at how wrong this is, or cry because of how wrong this is.
You know how I know they are lying? They are posting complaints online. We designed this patch -specifically- to stop online complaints about updates. They clearly haven't actually updated.
-Bill Gates
Won't someone puhlEEZE think of the businesses! They're so deprived! They see their employees walking around with fancy iphones and they want one too! Not fair!
China has a tendancy to execute criminals who cause international incidents.
You mean the Chinese government kills the people it gets to do it's dirty work? Man, communism really IS inefficient!
I failed to do enough research. Is there a way I can delete the parent post?
Perhaps you should have done some more research on that second subject before you posted it as a question. If we answer now, you'll never learn.
Yes, not outright offering Syrians and Iranians their browser, while leaving plenty ways they can still get chrome, and citing sanctions against those countries as the reason is CLEARLY a "propaganda partnership." I mean google has so much to gain by playing along with this massive international conspiracy. So very much. After all, if a resident of Syria were able to use google chrome, the Combine would be unable to stop Gordon Freeman, which is also Google's sworn enemy.
Matter of fact, -I- haven't offered Syrians OR Iranians anything free lately. I guess I'm part of the propaganda machine...
Tell me, why single out Islam?
Just a guess: trolling about say, Mormons would have been off-topic in addition to trolling, and AC has higher standards. If he's going to troll, it's going to be on-topic trolling.
Also around here you CAN'T troll scientologists, any more than you can troll sane people on scientology boards: you just get modded up for it.
well how would you feel if you were a country that was just trying to provide the most wholesome kind of social system possible (as laid out by God himself!), and all your people were using the internet for was bad-mouthing your attempts to fight the righteous battle against the vile corruption from the West that was threatening to engulf your poor country?
I tried to put myself into the shoes of an Iranian fundamentalist, to get perspective on the issue, and for a minute it made sense. I was going to share the insight I gained, and explain why this was needed... but just then a woman walked past and I lost control of my bowels in fear, preventing me from enlightening you all.
3) Said individuals are arrested, extradited to California, tried, convicted, sentenced, and begin their prison sentences.
Pat Robertson can breathe easy: we have no money and our jails are full.
I'd be in favor of releasing some violent offenders to make room for him though.
For viral infections I've heard that too, but my understanding is that macrophages and other immune system cells will attack bacteria they haven't seen before. If you get a cut on your finger, you don't need to get septicemia once before your immune system starts fighting that bacteria. I also understand that the immune system helps to kill cells which are damaged, preventing you from getting cancer, and they do this from day one, without requiring you to recover from cancer.
Anyway, I'd argue that "keep us from getting sick again" falls within "keep us from getting sick" as the second statement doesn't exactly imply keeping us healthy without -ever- getting sick.
100 pages? Well that's no fair, Nature usually doesn't take articles longer than 5 pages.
Derya Unutmaz is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. His current research is focused on understanding the function of human immune system.
I can tell him right now what the function of the human immune system is: to keep us from getting sick.
I'll take his grant money now.
NEWS for nerds, anyone?
It's more news for people who aren't really nerds. If you're not really a nerd, stop reading news for nerds or going to nerdy seminars because if you're not a nerd, you'll be bored, and it will kill you.
Games of chance and the lottery are a tax on people who are poor at math, and I wholeheartedly support it.
Thank you for proving that while many laws are passed for absolutely terrible reasons, there are always -worse- motivations that our lawmakers didn't go with.
Taxes go to the government, where they're at least supposed to be spent on social welfare programs, defense, infrastructure, etc. Online casino revenue will go either to more annoying ads and spam for online casinos or directly into the pockets of it's shareholders. If your motivation is to punish people who are bad at math, at least we could do something useful with that money if it were an -actual- tax.
And why abuse people who are bad at math? If you gamble away all that you have, that hurts your family. You lose your house, that hurts your neighbors. It's really just elitism that makes you say that isn't it? That's pretty sad.
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature.
If it's a -constant- pressure applied to the population but not enough to drive it extinct, then yes, it is probable that the synthetic life would become resistant. If the killswitch is not used until it is suddenly used with full force, then that decreases the chances. If there is no advantage to evolving around the killswitch, as there wouldn't be if the killswitch signal is not constantly used, then the chances of that happening are decreased.
Had we not used antibiotics except when strictly needed, and then with overwhelming force until the infection is completely irradicated, then we wouldn't be seeing antibiotic resistance: bugs wouldn't go to the trouble to adapt to an evolutionary pressure they're not faced with. In fact, they'd be at a disadvantage with the energy they would be wasting to be immune to it.
Of course that's just probabilities. It's entirely possible that the synthetic life would spontaneously evolve resistance. And if DARPA is dumb enough to make the killswitch something that the organism would have to actively maintain, that could be an issue. For instance, if you put a plasmid in bacteria with a suicide gene in, something that would make the cell uniquely susceptible to a drug, but give the bacterium no advantage to maintain that plasmid, that plasmid is going to be dropped, along with the suicide gene, and the drug won't do anything to it.
I wish we had more people like that in government in the US.
I think we have plenty of whores willing to ignore scientific advice and general interest to cater to powerful economic interests in the US government.
In fact, we have a name for them: politicians.
...that was an exaggeration about the chemotherapy being booze, BTW. Sorry for the confusion that may have caused.
Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.
There were also some advances in medicine in the meanwhile that raised the price independent of government involvement. Chemotherapy back in the day may have been cheap enough to afford out of pocket, but that's because it was booze.
I guess you could still claim that since the government funded much of the research that led to these advances, they were still responsible though.
I didn't really enjoy was anchoridge simply because it was a "simulation" and a game for me is a simulation,
I think that what was wrong with Anchorage wasn't how they framed it in the game, it was the lack of plot, characters, sidequests, or creativity in that DLC. Mothership Zeta wasn't a game-in-game "simulation" but still sucked worse than Anchorage for the same reasons.