Re:For those interested in a modern intro to the m
on
Charles Darwin Online
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· Score: 1
Bite your tongue:
"As for Armageddon, I just note with interest that's what the Bible says. That it's on the Plains of Megiddo. Right there in Israel. And it makes you wonder where this conflict's all going to ultimately lead. And I happen to believe it will ultimately lead to what the Bible says." -John Doolittle, Deputy Majority Whip, Secretary of the House Republican Conference
In other words: he is excited by the prospect that the Iraq war may lead to the end of the world. That's definately the sort of guy we need keeping us safe! What great motives he has!
(this is the same guy who is under Abramoff scandal investigation, thinks all gay people should be barred from being around children, etc.)
Not only is it old, but it's STILL GROSSLY MISLEADING. What was found is not itself the soft tissue. It's material that has filled in the soft tissue to leave a record of the original tissue in very high detail.
Somehow, I don't think "Crikey" is a brilliant joke. I understand the lame posters motivation: laziness. But how can one explain the mods that got it up to 5+. That's not good.
17 people. One got remission, another got partial remission and the rest are either dead or dying with no remission. AND this is only after a short while (meaning the cancer could come back later, as it often does, coming and going). AND they have not established a direct mechanism that their treatment actually got into the cancer cells in the first place, let alone any evidence that it was actually the cause.
Interests to not feel pain, for instance. Interests in an ongoing experience of life (even if they cannot conceptualize it as a long term thing.
"An adult chimp is about as smart as a 2-3 year old. Which do you prefer? Citizen Bobo or allowing post-birth abortions up until age three? What about Fido? He is smarter than infants out to a year or so. Great. Now your dog can sue and collect Social Security! "
No, because they don't have capacities relevant to any of that.
But it's quite interesting that you would object to the idea of having moral concerns for other feeling beings with such contempt merely because the idea seems strange to you or might complicate your life. That strongly suggests that to you, morality is not about consistent principles even when the things they suggest are tough, but rather about mere convienince.
Personally, I think it's quite obvious that intelligent life should have some limited protection from abuse and harm and killing, as befits their status. That's not the same thing as making them citizens, anymore than we give infants the right to drive or vote.
"As you can see, drawing the line for "personhood" at the moment that something actually achieves 'sentience' winds up being absurd."
Not really. You've demonstrated that you find it absurd, because it sounds like a hassle to you. And you still haven't explained an alternative that doesn't rely on a pathetically amoral juggling of semantics. "All genetic humans should be protected just cus" is not a moral argument.
"Clearly, we have rights BEFORE we are actually smart enough to earn them."
How is that clear? Rights are things we grant other beings as a society because we think they help protect something important, something of value to all of us. What is that for a zygote? A zygote has no opinions or thoughts or feelings or concerns or ANY of the qualities which we've come to value.
"Another problem with the 'must be sentient to earn rights' logic is that it does not explain why people have rights when asleep, unconcious, in comas, etc. By no means is a guy passed out drunk in the gutter "sentient". He still has rights."
Two obvious reasons apply. One is that the person has ALREADY been sentient: and as such has all sorts of expectations and desires and so forth that are ongoing even if they are temporarily out of commission. All of us realize that we could reach such a state, and so we all realize and recognize each other's desires not to be harmed while in it. Otherwise the fear of going to sleep would be overwhelming. By zygotes have no such expectations, no hopes, no fears of anything happening to them.
Another reason is that even people in comas seem to have some experience of pain and even existence. A third is that regardless of their current state, these people have the ongoing functional capacity for sentience: it just happens to be off for a bit. But look at what happens when someone dies: this is when they CEASE to have that capacity: the functionality is broken irreperably. Corpses are human. Yet we don't consider them morally important (though often we DO respect the wishes expressed by the person prior to their death, in part in deference to the idea that we would want others to treat our bodies in the same way after death). That is because they have lost that functional capacity to be the SORT of being we grant rights to. Well, zygotes have never been such a being, and they hve no functional capacities at all.
I am presuming it because it's obvious: embryos have absolutely NONE of the substantive qualities of persons relevant to any sort of moral consideration. To promote them as deserving of any more protection than bacteria is to completely miss the point of morality in the first place. Morality is not about following rules as litteralistically as possible without any idea at all what the rules are supposed to do. Protecting the sanctity of life of something without a nervous system is an outrageous error.
"I see nothing insane about banning the intential killing of living human beings, at any stage of their life. "
That's because you likely don't have any clue why its bad to kill people: you just know there is a rule not to do so, and when you realized that there is a way to define person (genetically human) that happens to include zygotes and so you interpret the rule without any sense of the purpose of the rule (i.e. to protect the interests of a very special sort of being that can actually have interests, feelings, concerns, etc).
"But it's not a science, it's a theory based on faith."
Wow, so you can insult scientists and allege vast conspiracies. Whoop-de-do.
"If you can show me the way to test and prove evolution, (I don't even care if they come back with a false answer, even just a simple _test_ would suffice) then I will seriously review my statements for retraction."
I'd say that the chances of that are very, very low. Evolution is already as well established as as any reasonable person would need. The burden has been met, and the skeptics are now the ones stretching all credulity. In my experience, most people who say what you do can't even define or explain what evolution is and aren't particularly interested in learning either... but for some reason that doesn't prevent them from making ridiculous sweeping conclusions about it.
"Take this breakthrough, for example. Religious truth aside, we managed to preserve the embryo without permanently damaging it or destroying it."
The problem was that there were actually some nutcases who think that's important in the first place.
"Now, this probably won't matter when it comes to the ones that are frozen and slated for destruction anyhow, as people have noted -- they'll still be gone at the end of the day. But what, I might ask, if even one embryo (in the future) is implanted and grows into something? We came up with something better."
How so? There are the same number of available wombs in the world, ready to bring people to term. Generally, what is good is when this happens to loving expectant parents. The fact that we stuffed all these spare embryos in some of them is not any more "good" than if they had sex the normal way. The same number of people are born. So what?
It's ETHICS and MORALITY which need to check our behavior. But they should not be twisted by one particular popular fantastical imaginary scenarios over all the other possible crazy scenarios for which their is no proof. Using faith in ethical judgements is not only dishonest, it's dangerous. Choosing to point a gun at you and pulling the trigger because I have a strong faith that nothing bad can happen is not laudable: it's irresponsible and negligent.
This is one of the goofier realms of the debate. Claiming that an zygote or an early embryo is a "human person" is nutty for other reasons, but it especially nutty in the sense that under various conditions, that embryo could ultimately develop into two, three, or theoretically thousands or millions of different people.
The reality is that human biology was not built with the beliefs of a bunch of camel herders and new agers in mind. It neither fits nor even tries to make sense with their beliefs. Humans, like all sexually reproducing life, are really not that different from asexual splitting: it's just that the splitting happens to have an artificial barrier requiring two sexes. But there's nothing fundamental about that. Parthogensis is not theoretically impossible, and clonging basically demonstrates our asexual roots.
The reality is that nearly every cell in your body is another potential human... or twenty. The zygote just so happens to have the right chemical signals turned on, but there's nothing particular special or magical about it.
I'll be happy if we can discover other means around the problem so that everyone can be happy, but that isn't going to change the perverseness of treating an embryo as if it were akin to a person. I'm perfectly willing to agree that fetal development is a legitimate point where no obvious line can be drawn. But at the embryonic stage, we are so far over that line as to be promoting insanity is we claim that it must have the same rights as persons.
Lol. The embryos harmed? That's about as ridiculous as it can get: something with no nervous system, no functional organization, and which is about as far distant from any sort of feeling life as it is possible to get and still be alive "harmed."
The irony is that even if this research is successful, what you will actually have is essentially yet another potential "life." Or two of them, or potentially thousands: but hey, who is counting? That precious, precious embryo is a human individual, right? Or five million of them. But again, who is counting?
What the heck difference does it make though? It's not like science is a democracy. No one is going to get voted out of anything because of bunch of second graders are angry that their favorite planet has been demoted: they can't even vote in the first place even if there was some sort of planet election!
The new system is a confusing and hacknyed way to avoid a completely non-threatening threat. What are people going to do: boycott the universe?
Well, that pretty much IS the theory about what prions are and what they do. The scary thing is that they can survive in conditions that normal pathogens (agents of disease) will not. For instance, cooking meat will kill many sorts of bacteria, but unless the temperature is enough to break down proteins, it won't destroy the prions.
And the diseases that prions cause are particularly nasty. One suspected prion disease is shared by a single extended family, and as it slowly destroys their brains, they find it less and less possible to fall sleep. This leads to waking demntia and they essentially die of a horrendous waking demented insomnia.
Well, things like this are basically just a reminder that mutlicellular creatures are just that: a very peculiar case of cells acting in concert, unlike most cells. In the end, it's not surprising that cells who are in some ways messed up could revert back to the more standard behavior of not working with the group.
Simple multicellular life is often pretty interesting in this way. Sponges, for instance, can be separated up into individual cells, and those cells will then later reassemble into a sponge again when given a chance (they even have four distinct cell types that all seem to vaguely be able to reassemble in the right way to work in concert).
The bottom line is that evolution fucks up any nice neat concept of species. We can mate llamas with camels. We can mate dolphins with false killer whales. Heck, we don't even know for sure that humans cannot breed with chimps: it's just that we haven't really tried as hard as we did with other species and aren't likely to try. There is no nice neat continuum of when or how one species stops being able to produce fertile hybrid offspring, nor is there any one easy definition of species as a result.
Actually, this is incomplete. The advnatage of sickle cell isn't JUST the fully expressed form. Some immunity also exists in people who have only one copy of the gene, and without anywhere near the same sorts of horrible side-effects. So the tradeoff may not be "full blown sickle cell helps prevent malaria" but "the price for many many people having an immunity to malaria is that a smaller subset of people will get both copies of the immunity and hence experience terrible side-effects."
You are correct, at least insofar as this is one speculation. There are any number of such sub-cellular "thingies." Prions are another example: according to our theory of how they work, they are botched proteins that make other proteins get botched in the same way (leading to things like mad cow disease and the horrible deadly insomnia that one family evolved).
However, these cancers aren't really like viruses: where a bit of code branches out on its own. These cells really are in a sense, dog cells that have acquired the new ability to act like a pathogen. It's evolution on a new scale, where heredity in terms of genetics is similar (a mutation, but in this case a non-germ-line mutation) that is preserved, but the heredity in terms of morphology is radically different (first these cells were parts of a "dog" and now they are individual agents that live IN dogs, despite being genetically dog!)
Are you sure this is because of the cancer, or the treatment? I may be 100% wrong, but I think this is in part because of the lasting effects of things like chemo on the blood, not just the cancer.
From the observation that animals are not very successful in terms of numbers compared to bacteria. There are more bacteria in more places than any other living thing anywhere.
This was solved a long time ago, and apparently not enough people got the memo. The cat IS either dead or alive. There is no "observational effect" in the sense of eyeballs changing anything. It's the interaction of a quantum event with many many other particles that basically washes out the quantum weirdness via a phenomenon known as decoherence. As son as the radioactive particle's decaying or not decaying has to interact with something like the vial of deadly gas, it's indeterminancy decoheres.
A world of non-believers would almost by definition be LESS unified under any one belief. Not believing in particular things doesn't guarantee that you believe in some similar alternative.
You know, I hear this alot, but most of the time, when asked to cite specific cases, people cite things that are special priveleges FOR religion being taken away, or the government not allowing people to push their religion on others on the government dime.
Aside from the overhyped cases that never amount to much other than manufactured outrage, where is the government really supporting an abscence of religion?
Personally, I think the founders were right. Separate religion and government entirely, and BOTH will be better off. The US has one of the strongest separations in the world, and yet religion here flourishes: in stark contrast to those countries with either anti-religious bents (France) and official state religions (most of the rest of Europe).
The current combination of religion and right-wing politics has done nothing but corrupt both sides of that equation.
Slashdot Mirror
Bite your tongue:
"As for Armageddon, I just note with interest that's what the Bible says. That it's on the Plains of Megiddo. Right there in Israel. And it makes you wonder where this conflict's all going to ultimately lead. And I happen to believe it will ultimately lead to what the Bible says." -John Doolittle, Deputy Majority Whip, Secretary of the House Republican Conference
In other words: he is excited by the prospect that the Iraq war may lead to the end of the world. That's definately the sort of guy we need keeping us safe! What great motives he has!
(this is the same guy who is under Abramoff scandal investigation, thinks all gay people should be barred from being around children, etc.)
Not only is it old, but it's STILL GROSSLY MISLEADING. What was found is not itself the soft tissue. It's material that has filled in the soft tissue to leave a record of the original tissue in very high detail.
Somehow, I don't think "Crikey" is a brilliant joke. I understand the lame posters motivation: laziness. But how can one explain the mods that got it up to 5+. That's not good.
17 people. One got remission, another got partial remission and the rest are either dead or dying with no remission. AND this is only after a short while (meaning the cancer could come back later, as it often does, coming and going). AND they have not established a direct mechanism that their treatment actually got into the cancer cells in the first place, let alone any evidence that it was actually the cause.
This article screams premature science hype.
"What 'concerns' do infants have?"
Interests to not feel pain, for instance. Interests in an ongoing experience of life (even if they cannot conceptualize it as a long term thing.
"An adult chimp is about as smart as a 2-3 year old. Which do you prefer? Citizen Bobo or allowing post-birth abortions up until age three? What about Fido? He is smarter than infants out to a year or so. Great. Now your dog can sue and collect Social Security! "
No, because they don't have capacities relevant to any of that.
But it's quite interesting that you would object to the idea of having moral concerns for other feeling beings with such contempt merely because the idea seems strange to you or might complicate your life. That strongly suggests that to you, morality is not about consistent principles even when the things they suggest are tough, but rather about mere convienince.
Personally, I think it's quite obvious that intelligent life should have some limited protection from abuse and harm and killing, as befits their status. That's not the same thing as making them citizens, anymore than we give infants the right to drive or vote.
"As you can see, drawing the line for "personhood" at the moment that something actually achieves 'sentience' winds up being absurd."
Not really. You've demonstrated that you find it absurd, because it sounds like a hassle to you. And you still haven't explained an alternative that doesn't rely on a pathetically amoral juggling of semantics. "All genetic humans should be protected just cus" is not a moral argument.
"Clearly, we have rights BEFORE we are actually smart enough to earn them."
How is that clear? Rights are things we grant other beings as a society because we think they help protect something important, something of value to all of us. What is that for a zygote? A zygote has no opinions or thoughts or feelings or concerns or ANY of the qualities which we've come to value.
"Another problem with the 'must be sentient to earn rights' logic is that it does not explain why people have rights when asleep, unconcious, in comas, etc. By no means is a guy passed out drunk in the gutter "sentient". He still has rights."
Two obvious reasons apply. One is that the person has ALREADY been sentient: and as such has all sorts of expectations and desires and so forth that are ongoing even if they are temporarily out of commission. All of us realize that we could reach such a state, and so we all realize and recognize each other's desires not to be harmed while in it. Otherwise the fear of going to sleep would be overwhelming. By zygotes have no such expectations, no hopes, no fears of anything happening to them.
Another reason is that even people in comas seem to have some experience of pain and even existence. A third is that regardless of their current state, these people have the ongoing functional capacity for sentience: it just happens to be off for a bit. But look at what happens when someone dies: this is when they CEASE to have that capacity: the functionality is broken irreperably. Corpses are human. Yet we don't consider them morally important (though often we DO respect the wishes expressed by the person prior to their death, in part in deference to the idea that we would want others to treat our bodies in the same way after death). That is because they have lost that functional capacity to be the SORT of being we grant rights to. Well, zygotes have never been such a being, and they hve no functional capacities at all.
I am presuming it because it's obvious: embryos have absolutely NONE of the substantive qualities of persons relevant to any sort of moral consideration. To promote them as deserving of any more protection than bacteria is to completely miss the point of morality in the first place. Morality is not about following rules as litteralistically as possible without any idea at all what the rules are supposed to do. Protecting the sanctity of life of something without a nervous system is an outrageous error.
"I see nothing insane about banning the intential killing of living human beings, at any stage of their life. "
That's because you likely don't have any clue why its bad to kill people: you just know there is a rule not to do so, and when you realized that there is a way to define person (genetically human) that happens to include zygotes and so you interpret the rule without any sense of the purpose of the rule (i.e. to protect the interests of a very special sort of being that can actually have interests, feelings, concerns, etc).
You're simply using a silly definition of "observe" though perhaps that's the fault of the OP. A better word is generally "detect."
They accept it for humans, but place a caveat on the idea: you must still believe that humans were specially "ensouled" and intended at some point.
"But it's not a science, it's a theory based on faith."
Wow, so you can insult scientists and allege vast conspiracies. Whoop-de-do.
"If you can show me the way to test and prove evolution, (I don't even care if they come back with a false answer, even just a simple _test_ would suffice) then I will seriously review my statements for retraction."
I'd say that the chances of that are very, very low. Evolution is already as well established as as any reasonable person would need. The burden has been met, and the skeptics are now the ones stretching all credulity. In my experience, most people who say what you do can't even define or explain what evolution is and aren't particularly interested in learning either... but for some reason that doesn't prevent them from making ridiculous sweeping conclusions about it.
"Take this breakthrough, for example. Religious truth aside, we managed to preserve the embryo without permanently damaging it or destroying it."
The problem was that there were actually some nutcases who think that's important in the first place.
"Now, this probably won't matter when it comes to the ones that are frozen and slated for destruction anyhow, as people have noted -- they'll still be gone at the end of the day. But what, I might ask, if even one embryo (in the future) is implanted and grows into something? We came up with something better."
How so? There are the same number of available wombs in the world, ready to bring people to term. Generally, what is good is when this happens to loving expectant parents. The fact that we stuffed all these spare embryos in some of them is not any more "good" than if they had sex the normal way. The same number of people are born. So what?
It's ETHICS and MORALITY which need to check our behavior. But they should not be twisted by one particular popular fantastical imaginary scenarios over all the other possible crazy scenarios for which their is no proof. Using faith in ethical judgements is not only dishonest, it's dangerous. Choosing to point a gun at you and pulling the trigger because I have a strong faith that nothing bad can happen is not laudable: it's irresponsible and negligent.
This is one of the goofier realms of the debate. Claiming that an zygote or an early embryo is a "human person" is nutty for other reasons, but it especially nutty in the sense that under various conditions, that embryo could ultimately develop into two, three, or theoretically thousands or millions of different people.
The reality is that human biology was not built with the beliefs of a bunch of camel herders and new agers in mind. It neither fits nor even tries to make sense with their beliefs. Humans, like all sexually reproducing life, are really not that different from asexual splitting: it's just that the splitting happens to have an artificial barrier requiring two sexes. But there's nothing fundamental about that. Parthogensis is not theoretically impossible, and clonging basically demonstrates our asexual roots.
The reality is that nearly every cell in your body is another potential human... or twenty. The zygote just so happens to have the right chemical signals turned on, but there's nothing particular special or magical about it.
I'll be happy if we can discover other means around the problem so that everyone can be happy, but that isn't going to change the perverseness of treating an embryo as if it were akin to a person. I'm perfectly willing to agree that fetal development is a legitimate point where no obvious line can be drawn. But at the embryonic stage, we are so far over that line as to be promoting insanity is we claim that it must have the same rights as persons.
Lol. The embryos harmed? That's about as ridiculous as it can get: something with no nervous system, no functional organization, and which is about as far distant from any sort of feeling life as it is possible to get and still be alive "harmed."
The irony is that even if this research is successful, what you will actually have is essentially yet another potential "life." Or two of them, or potentially thousands: but hey, who is counting? That precious, precious embryo is a human individual, right? Or five million of them. But again, who is counting?
What the heck difference does it make though? It's not like science is a democracy. No one is going to get voted out of anything because of bunch of second graders are angry that their favorite planet has been demoted: they can't even vote in the first place even if there was some sort of planet election!
The new system is a confusing and hacknyed way to avoid a completely non-threatening threat. What are people going to do: boycott the universe?
Well, that pretty much IS the theory about what prions are and what they do. The scary thing is that they can survive in conditions that normal pathogens (agents of disease) will not. For instance, cooking meat will kill many sorts of bacteria, but unless the temperature is enough to break down proteins, it won't destroy the prions.
And the diseases that prions cause are particularly nasty. One suspected prion disease is shared by a single extended family, and as it slowly destroys their brains, they find it less and less possible to fall sleep. This leads to waking demntia and they essentially die of a horrendous waking demented insomnia.
Pleasant dreams!
Well, things like this are basically just a reminder that mutlicellular creatures are just that: a very peculiar case of cells acting in concert, unlike most cells. In the end, it's not surprising that cells who are in some ways messed up could revert back to the more standard behavior of not working with the group.
Simple multicellular life is often pretty interesting in this way. Sponges, for instance, can be separated up into individual cells, and those cells will then later reassemble into a sponge again when given a chance (they even have four distinct cell types that all seem to vaguely be able to reassemble in the right way to work in concert).
The bottom line is that evolution fucks up any nice neat concept of species. We can mate llamas with camels. We can mate dolphins with false killer whales. Heck, we don't even know for sure that humans cannot breed with chimps: it's just that we haven't really tried as hard as we did with other species and aren't likely to try. There is no nice neat continuum of when or how one species stops being able to produce fertile hybrid offspring, nor is there any one easy definition of species as a result.
Actually, this is incomplete. The advnatage of sickle cell isn't JUST the fully expressed form. Some immunity also exists in people who have only one copy of the gene, and without anywhere near the same sorts of horrible side-effects. So the tradeoff may not be "full blown sickle cell helps prevent malaria" but "the price for many many people having an immunity to malaria is that a smaller subset of people will get both copies of the immunity and hence experience terrible side-effects."
You are correct, at least insofar as this is one speculation. There are any number of such sub-cellular "thingies." Prions are another example: according to our theory of how they work, they are botched proteins that make other proteins get botched in the same way (leading to things like mad cow disease and the horrible deadly insomnia that one family evolved).
However, these cancers aren't really like viruses: where a bit of code branches out on its own. These cells really are in a sense, dog cells that have acquired the new ability to act like a pathogen. It's evolution on a new scale, where heredity in terms of genetics is similar (a mutation, but in this case a non-germ-line mutation) that is preserved, but the heredity in terms of morphology is radically different (first these cells were parts of a "dog" and now they are individual agents that live IN dogs, despite being genetically dog!)
Are you sure this is because of the cancer, or the treatment? I may be 100% wrong, but I think this is in part because of the lasting effects of things like chemo on the blood, not just the cancer.
From the observation that animals are not very successful in terms of numbers compared to bacteria. There are more bacteria in more places than any other living thing anywhere.
This was solved a long time ago, and apparently not enough people got the memo. The cat IS either dead or alive. There is no "observational effect" in the sense of eyeballs changing anything. It's the interaction of a quantum event with many many other particles that basically washes out the quantum weirdness via a phenomenon known as decoherence. As son as the radioactive particle's decaying or not decaying has to interact with something like the vial of deadly gas, it's indeterminancy decoheres.
I wonder where he got the 500AD date anyway: nothing of real note happened to the Bible in 500AD, and it had already existed for centuries.
A world of non-believers would almost by definition be LESS unified under any one belief. Not believing in particular things doesn't guarantee that you believe in some similar alternative.
You know, I hear this alot, but most of the time, when asked to cite specific cases, people cite things that are special priveleges FOR religion being taken away, or the government not allowing people to push their religion on others on the government dime.
Aside from the overhyped cases that never amount to much other than manufactured outrage, where is the government really supporting an abscence of religion?
Personally, I think the founders were right. Separate religion and government entirely, and BOTH will be better off. The US has one of the strongest separations in the world, and yet religion here flourishes: in stark contrast to those countries with either anti-religious bents (France) and official state religions (most of the rest of Europe).
The current combination of religion and right-wing politics has done nothing but corrupt both sides of that equation.