The "radical" anti-abortionists (ones who picket abortion clinics) that I've known are unlikely to reverse their stance just because of that.
It's a position based on the belief that the soul joins with the body at conception. To them, it would be just as much murder as any other abortion. A newborn or a fetus has committed no "sin".
Any prior justification for aborting wouldn't be applicable to anything they could object to.
A newborn baby may be potentially homosexual based on genetics, but how could homosexuality even be defined in an infant? It's based on sexual feelings and activity that develop later. Until someone has had those feelings, or taken those actions, it isn't meaningfully defined.
Yes, the idea of creating anencephalics for that purpose has been thought of.
However it has complications. For many parts of the body to develop normally they have to be used. A digestive tract that has never processed food or muscles that have never moved are not going to be normal. You would have to have enough brain function to run those processes during growth. Or, alternatively, you would have to be able to interface a control system to the brain stem to take over that function.
The Evil Overlord way to do it is just raise the kid normally, let them play and grow and then kill them for the organs or whole body. Much simpler that way, but your neighbors may say bad things about you.
Go ahead and admit it, Green Reaper. You can hardly wait to write it up for Flayrah whichever way it goes!;)
It's just old stuck in the muds like Kage standing in your way.
Oh, what the heck. I'd probably end up helping you out by locking Kage in a box.;)
Really, though, that has no more or less intrinsic moral problem than any major elective germ line modification does. If you can resolve the moral questions for one, you can do it for the other. But even in the less radical case, they are formidable ethical problems.
The results of any such are likely to be much more boring and mundane than the above scenarios.
They could be quite a boon. They could give more women with reproductive problems the chance to have a genetic descendant child. You might even be able to correct dominant genetic problems (Huntington's Disease comes to mind) before implantation.
They could also be terribly abused.
Before, you had to convince/coerce a woman to get pregnant and carry a child to term. This put at least some practical limits (physical ones in the case of coercing, moral and persuasive ones in the case of convincing) on creating children for bad purposes.
Now you can create babies without even that small oversight. And you can create them as quickly as you can field more artificial wombs.
It's not instantly destructive the way that some of the ones mentioned are, but it could be terribly misused.
Imagine creating fully aware normal children genetically identical to aging adults to be dissected for transplant organs. Save for the sucessful human cloning, you could do this already if you were repressive enough, but this would make it much easier. No wrath of the parents to deal with. You might even be able to keep the source of the organs a closely guarded secret.
In truth though, nearly any powerful technology can be used for horrible things. It's up to us how we use it.
I can assure you that some of the "deniers" I know understand the concept of a second derivative. Perhaps even better than many who call them that. At least one of them is a mathematician specializing in analysis.
First rule of talking about someone who you don't agree with and disapprove of: Paint them as too stupid to know the truth. Failing that paint them as also being deviously clever and hiding the truth.
Don't feel bad. Those on the denial side would do the same to you. Both sides are human after all. And neither side seems to be able to see their own biases.
I wish we could get back to arguments deserving of the level of flames. Like emacs vs VI.;)
This just means that more of the work will go to Luzon where they have more english speakers and better infrastructure.
Creating jobs in Mindanao to help with many of the endemic problems there is a good thing (tm).
It's unlikely that any jobs that would have been outsourced to Mindanao would have stayed in the US anyway. They would have ended up in other places in the Philipines or in Bangalore India or $english_capable_low_cost_location.
(Engage rant mode:)
Bishop is a Democrat and Jones is a Republican, so this is a bipartisan shortsightedness. But it'll get them votes in the short run and that's the truly important thing.
Hey, I'm sure the Moro Islamic Liberation Front approves. Poverty and ignorance is great for maintaining low level wars.
Better not teach them any other skills either. They might do something that would compete with the US in areas that wouldn't be outsourced. We could just make the spreading of ignorance the cornerstone of our foreign policy. What a concept.
Slashdotters are great at talking about how little others know about world politics and how the problems facing other societies end up on your own doorstep. Maybe some of them should take their own advice.
"Would the Prime Minister admit that he opted in for adult content on the internet connection at Number 10? And would the Prime Minister further agree that he's as much a hoary old stoat as any of those involved in the Profumo Affair?"
Only to yourself, as I only have what you say about your own thinking rather than access to how you actually think.
And, if you were successfully deceiving yourself about how you think, how would you know?
The role of magical thinking and self deception in our reasoning methods is quite an interesting one. It has to be studied very carefully and skeptically as most people will say they don't deceive themselves (when they demonstrably do) and will say they don't engage in magical thinking (even those who agree that one or more of their beliefs is based on faith).
We live in a mental world which is heavily selected to giving us answers that are useful, but not ones that are true if that is at the expense of usefulness.
Scientists sometimes get this shoved in their face when, despite taking steps to avoid it, they have to retract a paper that was based too much on wishful thinking or bias confirmation.
Someone points out a flaw in an argument against $person or $political_position, and some immediately assume they therefore must support that person or position. The person who pointed out the flaw is then attacked.
Current events example: Someone says George Zimmerman is a murderer since he has been arrested and charged. A second person says "Well, he's only accused as he's not been convicted yet."
This is a simple statement of fact regardless of what the second person thinks of Zimmerman, but it might well be seen as defending Zimmerman and bring a lot of misdirected criticism on the person pointing it out.
This sort of reasoning is not very rational, but is very human, and widely practiced on slashdot.
Not all of it. Just the part near the state legislature and governors mansion. And a goodly portion of them are imported from that disneyland up north of I-80.
(I watch from a safe distance over near Champaign-Urbana.:)
"(My snarky private thought was, wow, a new way of ignoring areas of intelligence that don't correspond to standardized tests.)"
*grin* There's a whole laundry list of things that aren't verbal in nature but are even more important.
I think they were consciously restricting it to one specific area for now (if you try to study everything at once, you often end up not studying anything well).
If you look at the web page I linked above, one of the research themes is the role of emotion in executive function. They've only been up and running at this new institute since this past fall , so they've not had much time to do any follow on work.
That was another question that came up in the QA section of a talk by the lead researcher, Aron Barbey a couple weeks ago.
Obviously, it's doing things that just weren't measured by these particular tests. You don't waste that much blood flow and energy use on "nothing". These tests were aimed at specific types of verbal and executive reasoning.
Barbey also mentioned that the majority of the participants in the study were right handed, and they needed follow up research to deal with the questions of whether that effects the results of the study.
It's interesting work, but I think Barbey would agree with you that it's just a beginning. Some of the same questions came up in the question and answer section of a talk by him I went to a couple weeks ago.
He just recently got here to the U of Illinois and is the head of a new neuroscience laboratory dealing with decision making, executive function and reasoning.
While I was an undergrad and then pursuing a PhD (Which I didn't finish. Sysadmin work paid so much more.), I'd get into a research group based on my physics skills, and then end up being most appreciated for my blue collar skills.
At least in experimental physics, having experience in electronic construction, machine shop work, prototyping and troubleshooting can be a great edge. While the other grad students are trying to get that experience, you're already able to build and maintain lab equipment.
And if, like me, you end up doing other things than tenure track academia for a living, those abilities will nearly always let you get a job. Maybe not something glamorous, but definitely good enough to put food on the table.
I currently repair lab equipment (and vacuum pumps that are as grimey and nasty as any car engine) for a chemistry department. I enjoy it greatly.
Is it glamorous? No. Am I going to change the world? No.
Do I get to help grad students with the technical problems that come up in building and using experimental gear? Yes. Do I save groups huge amounts of money by repairing and adapting gear they couldn't afford to buy new? Yes.
Do I get to go to occasional symposia and keep up with what research is being done? Oh hell yes!
And I contribute to science in a ways I didn't expect. Perhaps even more than if I'd ended up some aging nameless postdoc/scientist endlessly running samples in a surface science facility.
Nicotine sulfate has been used for a long time as an insecticide (Black Leaf 40 was a well known trade name.). Tobacco plant parts contain nicotine, but not the honey and pollen.
The neonicotinoids are a bit different. The arrangement of atoms in nicotine is used widely in living things for some of the chemicals that make them run. That's why putting something similar, like nicotine sulfate or the neonicotinoids into them messes them up. It takes the place of nicotinic chemicals and screws up the systems in the cell based on them.
Insects tend to be more sensitive to some of these nicotinic poisons than mammals and such. This was one of the reasons for adopting neonicotinoids. They are much less toxic to humans and some other animals than many of the other things used as seed coating insecticides. (Remember dieldrin and aldrin?)
The die off in bee populations started earlier than 2005. The specific problem of CCD may have started in that time frame, but there were articles on dropping bee populations going back much earlier.
Anecdotally, one of the things I noticed when I moved back to Illinois in 1999, was the near lack of wild honeybees, and how bumblebees had increased in number to fill that niche (where they could). At the time it was speculated to be due to the varoa mite.
There is also a nosema (common bee disease) variant, nosema ceranae that is much more virulent that has been showing up in various places worldwide.
It would be nice if this was all due to one easy problem of a single substance. But, this has been a tough puzzle to work out as it appears to be the combined effect of a number of stresses on bees.
It's been long standing practice to supplement food in hives in late winter as it leads to a faster build up of bees before the spring honey flow. It doesn't mean they were stripping out too much.
(Full, disclosure: Yes, I'm "that" Hartree. And I used to help my dad keep bees. Good to run into you on Slashdot!)
I've been to a couple of talks on TIs and read very briefly on them. It's at the bare edge of my admittedly atrophied knowledge (20 years of doing things other than physics makes for a lot of forgetting).
Whenever an article on TIs comes up on slashdot, it gets few replies. I suspect that even those with some idea of what all the excitement is about find it hard to explain on a level that even some fairly cluefull slashdotters can understand. I've got some ideas of what it's about, (New electronic states to explore that are different in some ways than normal ones found in more common materials.) but don't understand it well enough to explain it well.
The applications are as you say, a ways off. But there seems to be a whole academic industry in characterizing them at the moment.
Even if they don't work out to give us the "magical topologically protected states that can be used for quantum computing" (tm) it's still some very interesting physics.
Slashdot Mirror
The "radical" anti-abortionists (ones who picket abortion clinics) that I've known are unlikely to reverse their stance just because of that.
It's a position based on the belief that the soul joins with the body at conception. To them, it would be just as much murder as any other abortion. A newborn or a fetus has committed no "sin".
Any prior justification for aborting wouldn't be applicable to anything they could object to.
A newborn baby may be potentially homosexual based on genetics, but how could homosexuality even be defined in an infant? It's based on sexual feelings and activity that develop later. Until someone has had those feelings, or taken those actions, it isn't meaningfully defined.
Yes, the idea of creating anencephalics for that purpose has been thought of.
However it has complications. For many parts of the body to develop normally they have to be used. A digestive tract that has never processed food or muscles that have never moved are not going to be normal. You would have to have enough brain function to run those processes during growth. Or, alternatively, you would have to be able to interface a control system to the brain stem to take over that function.
The Evil Overlord way to do it is just raise the kid normally, let them play and grow and then kill them for the organs or whole body. Much simpler that way, but your neighbors may say bad things about you.
Go ahead and admit it, Green Reaper. You can hardly wait to write it up for Flayrah whichever way it goes! ;)
It's just old stuck in the muds like Kage standing in your way.
Oh, what the heck. I'd probably end up helping you out by locking Kage in a box. ;)
Really, though, that has no more or less intrinsic moral problem than any major elective germ line modification does. If you can resolve the moral questions for one, you can do it for the other. But even in the less radical case, they are formidable ethical problems.
The results of any such are likely to be much more boring and mundane than the above scenarios.
They could be quite a boon. They could give more women with reproductive problems the chance to have a genetic descendant child. You might even be able to correct dominant genetic problems (Huntington's Disease comes to mind) before implantation.
They could also be terribly abused.
Before, you had to convince/coerce a woman to get pregnant and carry a child to term. This put at least some practical limits (physical ones in the case of coercing, moral and persuasive ones in the case of convincing) on creating children for bad purposes.
Now you can create babies without even that small oversight. And you can create them as quickly as you can field more artificial wombs.
It's not instantly destructive the way that some of the ones mentioned are, but it could be terribly misused.
Imagine creating fully aware normal children genetically identical to aging adults to be dissected for transplant organs. Save for the sucessful human cloning, you could do this already if you were repressive enough, but this would make it much easier. No wrath of the parents to deal with. You might even be able to keep the source of the organs a closely guarded secret.
In truth though, nearly any powerful technology can be used for horrible things. It's up to us how we use it.
EMACS, a wonderful OS/programming environment that's still in search of a good editor.
Good. Leaves more meat for the rest of us.
"So... your neighbor?"
Nah. It's why all his kids look like either the mailman or the plumber.
"Your country, and your children's future, is being destroyed by mass immigration of non-whites."
No. I'm not from Tibet.
I can assure you that some of the "deniers" I know understand the concept of a second derivative. Perhaps even better than many who call them that. At least one of them is a mathematician specializing in analysis.
First rule of talking about someone who you don't agree with and disapprove of: Paint them as too stupid to know the truth. Failing that paint them as also being deviously clever and hiding the truth.
Don't feel bad. Those on the denial side would do the same to you. Both sides are human after all. And neither side seems to be able to see their own biases.
I wish we could get back to arguments deserving of the level of flames. Like emacs vs VI. ;)
This just means that more of the work will go to Luzon where they have more english speakers and better infrastructure.
Creating jobs in Mindanao to help with many of the endemic problems there is a good thing (tm).
It's unlikely that any jobs that would have been outsourced to Mindanao would have stayed in the US anyway. They would have ended up in other places in the Philipines or in Bangalore India or $english_capable_low_cost_location.
(Engage rant mode:)
Bishop is a Democrat and Jones is a Republican, so this is a bipartisan shortsightedness. But it'll get them votes in the short run and that's the truly important thing.
Hey, I'm sure the Moro Islamic Liberation Front approves. Poverty and ignorance is great for maintaining low level wars.
Better not teach them any other skills either. They might do something that would compete with the US in areas that wouldn't be outsourced. We could just make the spreading of ignorance the cornerstone of our foreign policy. What a concept.
Slashdotters are great at talking about how little others know about world politics and how the problems facing other societies end up on your own doorstep. Maybe some of them should take their own advice.
"Would the Prime Minister admit that he opted in for adult content on the internet connection at Number 10? And would the Prime Minister further agree that he's as much a hoary old stoat as any of those involved in the Profumo Affair?"
"I can conclusively disprove this assertion"
Only to yourself, as I only have what you say about your own thinking rather than access to how you actually think.
And, if you were successfully deceiving yourself about how you think, how would you know?
The role of magical thinking and self deception in our reasoning methods is quite an interesting one. It has to be studied very carefully and skeptically as most people will say they don't deceive themselves (when they demonstrably do) and will say they don't engage in magical thinking (even those who agree that one or more of their beliefs is based on faith).
We live in a mental world which is heavily selected to giving us answers that are useful, but not ones that are true if that is at the expense of usefulness.
Scientists sometimes get this shoved in their face when, despite taking steps to avoid it, they have to retract a paper that was based too much on wishful thinking or bias confirmation.
This is a common problem in discussions.
Someone points out a flaw in an argument against $person or $political_position, and some immediately assume they therefore must support that person or position. The person who pointed out the flaw is then attacked.
Current events example: Someone says George Zimmerman is a murderer since he has been arrested and charged. A second person says "Well, he's only accused as he's not been convicted yet."
This is a simple statement of fact regardless of what the second person thinks of Zimmerman, but it might well be seen as defending Zimmerman and bring a lot of misdirected criticism on the person pointing it out.
This sort of reasoning is not very rational, but is very human, and widely practiced on slashdot.
"And the town is full of cartoon characters"
Not all of it. Just the part near the state legislature and governors mansion. And a goodly portion of them are imported from that disneyland up north of I-80.
(I watch from a safe distance over near Champaign-Urbana. :)
I always thought it was inside my television.
"(My snarky private thought was, wow, a new way of ignoring areas of intelligence that don't correspond to standardized tests.)"
*grin* There's a whole laundry list of things that aren't verbal in nature but are even more important.
I think they were consciously restricting it to one specific area for now (if you try to study everything at once, you often end up not studying anything well).
If you look at the web page I linked above, one of the research themes is the role of emotion in executive function. They've only been up and running at this new institute since this past fall , so they've not had much time to do any follow on work.
That was another question that came up in the QA section of a talk by the lead researcher, Aron Barbey a couple weeks ago.
Obviously, it's doing things that just weren't measured by these particular tests. You don't waste that much blood flow and energy use on "nothing". These tests were aimed at specific types of verbal and executive reasoning.
Barbey also mentioned that the majority of the participants in the study were right handed, and they needed follow up research to deal with the questions of whether that effects the results of the study.
It's interesting work, but I think Barbey would agree with you that it's just a beginning. Some of the same questions came up in the question and answer section of a talk by him I went to a couple weeks ago.
He just recently got here to the U of Illinois and is the head of a new neuroscience laboratory dealing with decision making, executive function and reasoning.
http://www.decisionneurosciencelab.org/
They have some interesting ideas for looking at the role of self deception in how we reason that hopefully will lead to some quite interesting work.
Surprisingly accurate. ;)
While I was an undergrad and then pursuing a PhD (Which I didn't finish. Sysadmin work paid so much more.), I'd get into a research group based on my physics skills, and then end up being most appreciated for my blue collar skills.
At least in experimental physics, having experience in electronic construction, machine shop work, prototyping and troubleshooting can be a great edge. While the other grad students are trying to get that experience, you're already able to build and maintain lab equipment.
And if, like me, you end up doing other things than tenure track academia for a living, those abilities will nearly always let you get a job. Maybe not something glamorous, but definitely good enough to put food on the table.
I currently repair lab equipment (and vacuum pumps that are as grimey and nasty as any car engine) for a chemistry department. I enjoy it greatly.
Is it glamorous? No. Am I going to change the world? No.
Do I get to help grad students with the technical problems that come up in building and using experimental gear? Yes. Do I save groups huge amounts of money by repairing and adapting gear they couldn't afford to buy new? Yes.
Do I get to go to occasional symposia and keep up with what research is being done? Oh hell yes!
And I contribute to science in a ways I didn't expect. Perhaps even more than if I'd ended up some aging nameless postdoc/scientist endlessly running samples in a surface science facility.
Not "that" Hartree. But one that IonOtter has met.
Nicotine sulfate has been used for a long time as an insecticide (Black Leaf 40 was a well known trade name.). Tobacco plant parts contain nicotine, but not the honey and pollen.
The neonicotinoids are a bit different. The arrangement of atoms in nicotine is used widely in living things for some of the chemicals that make them run. That's why putting something similar, like nicotine sulfate or the neonicotinoids into them messes them up. It takes the place of nicotinic chemicals and screws up the systems in the cell based on them.
Insects tend to be more sensitive to some of these nicotinic poisons than mammals and such. This was one of the reasons for adopting neonicotinoids. They are much less toxic to humans and some other animals than many of the other things used as seed coating insecticides. (Remember dieldrin and aldrin?)
The die off in bee populations started earlier than 2005. The specific problem of CCD may have started in that time frame, but there were articles on dropping bee populations going back much earlier.
Anecdotally, one of the things I noticed when I moved back to Illinois in 1999, was the near lack of wild honeybees, and how bumblebees had increased in number to fill that niche (where they could). At the time it was speculated to be due to the varoa mite.
There is also a nosema (common bee disease) variant, nosema ceranae that is much more virulent that has been showing up in various places worldwide.
It would be nice if this was all due to one easy problem of a single substance. But, this has been a tough puzzle to work out as it appears to be the combined effect of a number of stresses on bees.
So when did you become a beekeeper, Ion? ;)
It's been long standing practice to supplement food in hives in late winter as it leads to a faster build up of bees before the spring honey flow. It doesn't mean they were stripping out too much.
(Full, disclosure: Yes, I'm "that" Hartree. And I used to help my dad keep bees. Good to run into you on Slashdot!)
I've been to a couple of talks on TIs and read very briefly on them. It's at the bare edge of my admittedly atrophied knowledge (20 years of doing things other than physics makes for a lot of forgetting).
Whenever an article on TIs comes up on slashdot, it gets few replies. I suspect that even those with some idea of what all the excitement is about find it hard to explain on a level that even some fairly cluefull slashdotters can understand. I've got some ideas of what it's about, (New electronic states to explore that are different in some ways than normal ones found in more common materials.) but don't understand it well enough to explain it well.
The applications are as you say, a ways off. But there seems to be a whole academic industry in characterizing them at the moment.
Even if they don't work out to give us the "magical topologically protected states that can be used for quantum computing" (tm) it's still some very interesting physics.
"I would sit with my back to the cave's opening and watch the shadows cast upon the inside wall."
And then that bastard Socrates stole the idea, and Plato wrote it up.
And I bet you didn't even get royalties.