"My point is that science has NOT observed major evolutionary change - from a fish to a bird, or a dog to a cat or whatever the theory is these days. It has not been observed in the lab, we have not seen punctuated equilibrium, or any other major change. We have seen minor changes in the form of adaptation."
We also haven't seen the continents together in a supercontinent Pangea. That doesn't mean that we don't have clear and unequivocal evidence that they were once that way. We have large vein patterns of mineral deposits that match up on Africa and South America like jigsaw puzzles for goodness sakes.
What you are basically asking for is that we MUST see, with eyeballs, something that takes millions of years, even though it leaves tons and tons of physical evidence. But this is silly: there is no "eyeball" rule in science. What matters in science is evidence, period. Strong physical evidence is in many respects superior to eyewitness.
The fact that you aren't even familiar with what evolution describes as major transitions (and has described, not just "these days") certainly doesn't make you sound like you are informed enough to say that you've seen the evidence and aren't convinced. If you haven't even bothered to find out what a theory says, how can you possibly claim to find it implausible?
"The fossil record contains the cambrian explosion, which in my view is evidence for a large number of kinds/species/types/diverse life/etc which appear suddenly as if they were created simultaneously."
Again, this isn't the same evidence viewed differently, it's basically a caricature of the evidence, ignoring most of it.
I don't want to insult you because you seem like a nice guy, but do you even understand what a clade is or how it factors into the descriptive system of "kinds/species/phyla" etc.? If you don't understand these concepts, then it is very easy to be fooled by sloppy arguments about terminology, such as thinking it significant that higher level groups appear all around the same time (though very far from "simultaneously"). If you understand how taxonomy works though, you then realize that this is an artifact of definition, not a significant element in and of itself about reality (simply put, it's a factor the way that clades work: new groups are _always_ defined as subsets of old groups, and we built our system based first on the classification of modern animals)
"Regardless of the terminology used to describe the different kinds of animals we see, we DO see different types."
So then why are all these "types" just morphological nested subsets of each other? Evolution PREDICTS isolated types, and not just any pattern of them either: a pattern in which every gene, trait, and so on in each individual all matches the same overall nested hierarchy. This pattern then for some reason is reflected in the fossil record. Which in turn paints a picture constrained by geography in a way that makes no sense for an all powerful creator: why would a creator respect, say, the influence of a mountain range or an ocean when determining what traits appear where and when? All of this is the evolutionary pattern, which is one of very specific kind, and just keeps turning up everywhere we look.
"As I explained in my posting above, if you are an adherent to Christianity, it's not logical to make the Eden story an allegory. You have to torture the text and twist the logic to make it work."
That's assuming that you are of the minority of Christians in the world and in history who believe that the text must be read literally.
"If Genesis was allegory, why would He appeal to the creation account as if it was fact? Sure, he spoke in parables sometimes, but other times He spoke in a direct way. The marriage response is NOT in the form of a parable."
That's a pretty weak argument. Jesus was often cryptic and poetic. Furthermore, if you aren't a literalist in the first place, then why would you demand the recorded words of Jesus be taken literally in every respect as well?
"Secondly, carbon dating is based on three things: a) the amount of C14 present today in the sample b) the rate of decay of C14 being constant, and c) the original amount of C14 in the sample"
No, it's based on a heck of a lot more than that. The accuracy of carbon dating isn't just something we assume: we calibrate it based on a whole host of other independently derived timelines, ALL of which must match up in fine detail. I mean, what you describe is a creationist caricature of the field of radiocarbon dating. People spend their whole careers becoming experts in it. Do you REALLY think they spend all their time just repeating those three points over and over to themselves?
I never understand these sorts of creationist arguments. They don't "get" how science works. It's NEVER just "oh, here's this set of assumptions that give us a result, la de da." There are always more and more ways to test something, over and over, from every angle, and that is EXACTLY what scientists do, constantly.
Carbon dating is of course, not what is used for dinosaurs since carbon dating only works on recent things (this is the previous poster's mistake, not yours). With other forms of radio-isotope dating there are all sorts of neat tricks like isochron analysis that actually show, straight out, whether the assumptions you note are broken or not for a particular sample. And again, there isn't just one way of dating things: there are MANY ways. The evidence from plate movement HAS to match all the different radio-dating methods, which HAVE to match the record of magnetosphere switches which HAVE to match the record from matching rings on modern and petrified trees which HAVE to match ice-core samples, and so on and so on. All of these different independent methods have to match up with each other. And the fact that they give the SAME answer is a very powerful form of evidence. Is it possible to be in error to some degree or even a fundamental degree when using a dating method? Sure, it's possible, though very unlikely given how rigorously these things are tested for plausibility in almost every respect. But for dinos to have lived with humans, for instance, you'd have to explain not only why each and every dating method and piece of evidence points to an old earth, but why they all give the SAME ages and timelines in fine detail. Truth coordinates things in a way that error simply cannot. If you used seven different methods to calculate something, and got them all wrong, what is the likihood that all the different errors (each of which is for a totally different reason) came out with the SAME erroneous answer?
"Carbon dating is not infallible. Many times radically different dates are estimated for samples from the same thing. Dates that are too close to now are thrown out as error, because of the preconceived notion that the earth is REALLY old."
Again, while we've come to trust carbon dating enough that we CAN treat it that way, we've come to that trust based not on "notions" but on constant and ongoing evidence of its reliability. There are any number of known reasons for various dates to be regularly in error or for one "thing" to have carbon samples from several different times (m
"I have also heard of fossils found (I believe in Texas, but I'm digging deep in my memory now) with human footprints inside of dinosaur footprints."
Scientists just do not find those claims to be credible. If this is the low bar for your standard of evidence, then I guess one could argue that anything is possible. I vaguely remember hearing that Alex Chiu's amazing magnet wristbands can make you immortal. I'd better buy a pair!
"The Bible mentions a "behemoth" like a dinosaur and "leviathan" perhaps a great monster of the sea - in Job 40 and 41. Many people feel that these are descriptions of dinosaurs. I'm not saying that I consider that to be strong evidence, but it is a possible occurrence of dinosaurs in biblical literature."
Both of these would be far more reasonably explained by other large mammals that are, in fact, alive today. And it's not like we should assume that dragons or griffins exist just because tales were once told of them.
"Isn't it *possible* that man and dinosaurs were on the planet at the same time? Perhaps they were not in the same place much, and that's why literature seems to have little evidence?"
No. The evidence is clear where the dinosaurs were (pretty much all over the planet, which at the time had a very different continental composure than now in a way that would be impossible to move within a few thousand years without literally ripping the upper crust of the earth apart) and that they dominated their ecosystem: one which lasted for millions and millions of years. The evidence for this is confirmed by so many different converging lines of evidence so as to be one of the most certain things we can know about anything.
"Science teaches us that once the sperm penetrates the egg, all that is necessary for the birth of a human baby is food and shelter."
That's a pretty silly way to put it. Science also teaches us that before a man and a woman even have sex, everything that is necessary for the birth of the baby is some sex. You're still talking about potentials all the way down and there's no particular reason to pick one particular potential over another.
Science also teaches that there is no moment of conception. Sperm and eggs do not magically and instantly fuse into anything. Even after the first cell division, their genetic material is still distinguishable. Like most things in life, we have a gradual process, not any from which unlife becomes life. As science also teaches us, a single egg is ALONE enough to simply divide and start developing into a new creature. Likewise, a single skin cell contains all the genetic information necessary to simply divide into a new being.
It's also false to say that an embryo merely needs "food and shelter" to grow. Implantation is a complex hormonal and chemical signaling process that MAKES the zygote continue to develop in a particular way that it wouldn't without these elements. And when the vast vast majority of the raw materials for something come externally, we are talking a heck of a different realm than mere sustenance of a current being: that's a very inapt analogy. The idea that the genes are everything that a person is is a very modern and very odd idea: why not note instead that the vast majority of the elements that make up a human being are simply missing? What we know as human beings are an immensely complex set of functionalities that are constructed via a long recipe-like process. Even well-developed embryos lack this functionality: they are part of the process of building it, but they are NOT themselves it, any more than a hole in the ground with some building plans on a desk is a skyscraper.
"All of the genetic information is present at conception, and there is no scientifically identifiable magic moment when a fetus "becomes" a person."
While true, the fact that there is a gradient _somewhere_ does not prevent us from identifying solid white or black on either end of a spectrum before the gradient begins. Genetic information is clearly not itself either a person nor of moral value. One complete genome can split and divide and eventually develop into many people, or two genomes can fuse and develop into a single person.
Again: genetic information is like a recipe, a series of instructions on what steps to carry out in order to, given the right conditions and all sorts of other environmental factors, construct something that we recognize as a person. But that information is not itself the completed item, nor are the early stages of construction. Once you have a nervous system at least you can make an argument that there is something of potential moral value worth protecting present, but certainly not before, and even so, what's there is clearly about as UNLIKE the human beings we give rights as something can get and still be an mammal.
"Legally the standard is birth, but that's a legal distinction, not a scientific one. As far as I am concerned, there is no moral difference between ending the life of a fetus and me killing my six year old son."
I hear this a lot, but I think it is too extreme to be justified. You basically imply that the equivalent of the holocaust is going on all around you, and yet all you do is complain about it? That's not how I or even I think you would react if someone systematically starting taking, say, all left-handed children in our neighborhood to be executed. Something is deeply wrong with this logic: I think you want to use the most extreme and emotionalized claim you can regardless of whether it makes sense.
"Right, the *potential* for evil was there, but as far as I can tell Adam and Even were the ones to bring it into actuality."
So if I hire someone to murder a bus driver, I'm not actually a murderer?
There is no way to formulate the concept of choice and responsibility for choice that doesn't include causality from nature, and hence also chain the responsibility back to whatever determined the nature.
"According the Genesis, God created the world... and it was "good.""
According to Genesis, birds existed before lizards. Shrug.
"Actually, traditional orthodox Christian teaching would be that God created people flawless, but with the power of choice. They were given instruction and were fully capable of obedience up until the time they chose not to. Their nature was changed through sin."
You are aware that this is completely incoherent, aren't you? Perfection implies that one WOULD choose obedience, unless obedience was imperfect. There is no way to formulate the concept of choice that does not rule out an either obedient or non-obedient nature. There has to be SOME reason why one person would choose this over that, and unless you simply dodge explaining what that some element is and where it came from, the idea of perfecting sinning is nonsense.
"The bible specifically states that to follow God requires the suspension of your own understanding."
This is, then, why it is immoral. Acting with certainty when certainty is not only not possible, but actually undermined, is as immoral as handing someone a gun and telling them to point it at their face and pull the trigger without knowing whether or not it is loaded. The more one strives to make a doctrine beyond human understanding, the more it simply goes beyond any reason to trust it. The degree to which God cannot be understood is the degree to which the possibility that what we know as God is, say, really just Satan tricking us becomes equally and irrefutably possible.
Perhaps the Bible was advanced for its time in some things, though clearly not in everything, and much of this is subjective. But that doesn't make it much different than any other set of thoughts and poetry from folks all throughout human history. The proverbs contain much that is wise, but also much that is foolish, culturally contingent, or even wrong. In that sense they are interesting, but hardly necessary or sacred above all other human works.
"First response: then do it. Illuminate the world with your shining light. "
Ok: cruelty is wrong, we should tolerate the views of those whom we disagree, we should never wish endless pain on anyone. We should not infringe on the liberties of others to speak and believe and think. Slavery is wrong. Racism is wrong. Treating women as property is wrong no matter how much we claim to respect them while we do it. Equality isn't just a matter of things in God's sight, but in political treatment as well. And so on.
These statements are far superior to anything in the mind of Christ, and yet they are to most people today mere trivialities. More importantly, they are far CLEARER than anything Christ said, instead of being cryptic and vague, able and in fact many times interpreted in many different ways. (In fact, the ONE clear and unique teaching that Christ had was the idea of eternal torment: an idea probably more monstrous than anything ever before imagined.)
Your defense of the OT isn't particularly credible either. There is nothing in it that suggests anacronistic insight, and much that is utterly barbaric. The bible doesn't merely condone slavery, for instance, it stipulates the degree to which an owner can rend the flesh of a servant. It calls for the death penalty for all sorts of absurd supersitutions. Half of the Ten Commandments would be unconstitutional today, and the rest are so obvious to ANY workable human society as to render the claimed insight irrelevant and old news by the time they were written.
My point is not that the bible isn't interesting, or even that it contains nothing of value at all, but rather that the idea that is is the culmination of wisdom and morality is, simply put, utterly absurd. The sermon on the mount is a pretty sentiment, but it is not a particularly useful guide to anything, and never proved such. It was, after based on the completely false belief that Jesus was the messiah and would soon herald in the messianic age/end of the world, none of which ever happened (which at least in terms of Judiasm was why virtually no educated Jew ever found his claims anything more than ridiculous).
And good grief: would you really trade the relatively minor "troubles" of the modern world for the barbarism and squalor of the ancient?
"How can the statement "humans evolved (through many, many generations) from single-celled organisms" be falsifiable and the statement "humans were created by a supernatural being" not be falsifiable? How would you disprove either without a time machine to go back and see what happened?"
Uh.... by looking at the evidence. When things happen in the natural world, they have all sorts of predictable consequences. We figure out what those are, and we test to see if we can piece together what happened.
Are you asserting that in a murder trial, we shouldn't deal with forensic evidence because we can't prove or disprove anything without a time machine?
The idea that the only standard that matters is seeing things with eyeballs is just nonsense: it's not an idea that scientists treat seriously, and with good reason. Eyeballs aren't even all that reliable compared to convergence of evidence. Give me a good DNA sample and several convergent chains of custody over an eyewitness any day.
Supernatural events, on the other hand, do not necessarily provide anything predictable or discoverable at all. If God commits a murder, he could make it look like just about anything happened. Heck, he could even make it look like the person is still alive! Especially if a supernatural claim is vague enough that it could be consistent with anything, we can't possibly test or distinguish it from anything else.
"but proving it is possible that humans came into existence by (theory of your choice) does not prove that that is what actually happened."
That's something of a caricature, but really, that's what proof IS: showing that something CANNOT be ruled out despite all the other alternatives can be. Totally consistent with all the evidence is the HIGHEST standard of proof, not the lowest. But, like I said, it's pretty much a caricature to simply say that all we can do is show it's "merely" possible in the colloquial sense. The sheer amount, consistency, quality, and convergence of the evidence we can amass not only for how, but for a very particular set of events and their cascading effects (all of which much match up exactly right... and do!) is not something one can brush aside as "merely possible."
"How do you make predictions based on the theory "an organism can evolve (over several generations)""
If you really think that is all evolutionary theory says, then you really need to learn a heck of a lot more about it. Evolution requires a very specific set of circumstances that work in a very particular way to get a very particular result.
"And, for the record, Intelligent Design is a theory that states that humans (and all other living things) were designed by a supernatural being. It does not specify how those designs were implemented (creation, evolution, or something else"
That's exactly the problem! The whole point of a SCIENTIFIC theory is that it DOES specify a how. In the case of biological evolution, it's a very specific, almost absurdly specific (compared to the number of possible other options) pattern and set of events. Intelligent design claims basically say "something that we can't explain did it in a way we can't explain." In terms of logical meaning, however, that statement is pretty much exactly identical to "we don't have any idea how it was done."
It's worse than that though. Because you can get specific about the ways in which known intelligences, like us, operate. And when you consider those, it fact becomes clear that biological life constantly defies everything we would expect to see from designers like us: traits aren't treated as "good ideas" that are reused and jump lineages, muck isn't cleared out, design problems aren't so much solved as they are compensated for, and so on. The only real escape from these obvious problems is to jump back to the idea that the designer ISN'T like us at all, which is to say that we have no idea at all what it is like, what it's motives are, or how it works. Which is to say, we jump out of science and basically say nothing much at all.
Um, the poster you were replying to is seriously downplaying the amount an quality of the evidence for evolution. It isn't simply a matter of fossils happening to create an apparent pattern. It's a matter of countless different independent lines of evidence all converging on the one very particular pattern that evolution requires. Simple layperson observance of fossil morphology when placed in sequence is barely even scratching the surface (despite many people for some reason thinking that this is all evolution has going for it).
In science, we don't speak of certain Truth or Facts, but talking about evolution as true and a fact in a colloquial sense is perfectly appropriate if talking about ANYTHING as a fact is. That people get upset at evolution and only evolution when referred to that way, despite the reality that the evidence for evolution is far far stronger than virtually anything else to which they DON'T object being called a fact, I think we have a right to question their sincerity or fairness.
" I'd like to see some standards that acknowledge there are several theories (evolution, creation, intellegent design) that currently have some level of support within the scientific community and society."
This claim would be a falsehood. Even intelligent design, which is a PR movement devoted to trying to "create" the circumstances for this claim, has virtually no support amongst biologists. That many Americans believe in creationism has no bearing on whether it is sound science. Science is about the evidence, not about people's beliefs. The evidence says that creationism is ridiculous, and that intelligent design is not even a coherent or scientific theory. Neither is a scientific alternative.
"Is it too much to ask that we try to take a neutral point of view with education standards?"
Should we also take a neutral point of view on the holocaust, astrology, numerology and 2+2=4? Should we simply stop teaching science altogether? Isn't that basically what you are asking for, in the end?
Science ISN'T neutral. Science is about what the evidence shows, not about surveying everyone's opinions and beliefs.
"The bible contains wisdom that is unparalled in both ancient and modern times."
Like the similar claim that the Koran is so perfect that not one line could be improved upon, I beg to differ.
Virtually any human being today, no matter how mundane or lousy a writer, could sit down to write a book on morality, wisdom, and insight that would be in virtually every respect superior to the Bible. Just the ability to outright condemn pointless cruelty, slavery as an institution, explain the ideas of tolerance, the concept of classical enlightenment liberalism (democracy, capitalism, liberal science, and liberty) blow any insight in the Bible out of the water. Human thought on morality and culture neither began nor ended with the Bible, and most certainly did not find anything even approaching perfection there.
Um: that's one of the basic characteristics for something not being science. To be science, it must make a specific claim that specifies and limits itself to a particular set of data that we can then check on. If ID is consistent with anything, then it is almost by definition not science.
The problem you are both having is that Free Will is an incoherent concept. No one can define what it really is or it does. No one can even sketch out the fundamental functional difference between a chooser that has free will and one that doesn't. It's a concept like a square circle that makes no sense, but gets dumped into arguments to throw them off track.
We make choices. We make those choices in SOME way, and a way that is characteristic and causally related to who we are. That's what makes them OUR choices, and not just some random things we do based on chance. Where does "Free Will" fit in to any of that? Not even the cleverest of theologians has been able to explain, utterly regardless of what other concepts like souls or supernatural realms they invoke: none of them help in the slightest. In fact, if you think about it, even trying to offer an explanation of HOW "choosing" happens makes Free Will into conceptual nonsense, no matter what set of rules you use. Only by avoiding the question can we avoid this realization.
You really need to stop reading ID claptrap and start reading people that actually know how genetics and evolution work. The trope about "brand new genetic information" is pure nonsense. ANY mutational change at all changes informational content: whether or not it is an increase depends almost entirely on how you define information (there are many different levels and definitions, some of which are very different): under the most basic definition it is increase no matter what simply by virtue OF being random. Furthermore, evolution is not about pure mutational change: it is mutational change plus natural selection: i.e. adaptation, and ANY selection of one genome over another is almost by definition an increase in information in a genome in a very obvious and important sense: it is an imprint onto a genome of information about the environment.
"I think it's interesting how crazy people get when the slighest criticism of evolution is discussed."
The problem isn't criticism: mainstream biology is a screaming torrent of scientists criticizing each other's work! It's when the "criticisms" are a bunch of oft-repeated falsehoods and misleading, misinformative nonsense that people get annoyed. "No increase in information" is one of those. It is like a red flag announcing that the person using it understands neither what information is nor how evolution works.
Hey they can go ahead and try I guess. But there's no reason to think it'll be especially more effective than homeopathy. Cancer patients looking for cures have often taken lots of different potential cures in the hopes that they would help. That doesn't make the jury be any less out on whether they have any effective use to fight cancer.
Actually, the idea that the Bible is be all and end all of Christianity is and always has been a minority view, and only a very recently developed one at that. Fundamentalists Christians don't seem to understand that, but that's the case.
Just to be clear... there is a big difference between tolerating people and their right to express their ideas, and tolerating them in the sense that we don't criticize their bad ideas. The former IS laudable, the latter is not.
So then why would you get the order of creation wrong, sometimes laughably wrong?
And why NOT just tell us the stuff we don't know. If we're smart and will figure it out, isn't it better that we start out with correct stuff we just can't understand yet rather than incorrect vague stuff that we base all sorts of bizarre rituals around? I mean, people were litterally PUT TO DEATH for working on the Sabbath (and God says to do this right in the Bible). That's a pretty high punishment for violating the logic of what's supposedly just a nice neat story about how God loves us and all.
Good grief, being an MD is not even remotely the same thing as being a real research scientist, let alone a credible climatologist. I love my wife, and she is an MD, but she doesn't know anything at all about the philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, climatology, and so forth.
Crichton is not only not qualified, but demonstrably incompetent when it comes to his evaluations of the evidence in climate science.
Consensus in science is a reliable way for a layperson to get a sense of what the best science is at the moment, because science IS about the evidence, and the bulk of scientists stick to what the evidence establishes and then branch out from there. Most of the accusations that Critchton makes about misconduct are document bullplop and little different from the misrepresentations of biology the ID school engages in.
"But we'll never know because the research to really test it in clinical trials won't get done."
Complete BS. It will get done. But no one is jumping on it because it hasn't proven any preliminary effect at all on fighting cancer in humans. In the normal process, what happens now is that some smaller studies to see if it shows any promise. The people hyping this are trying to drum up millions for huge studies that just aren't warranted at this point.
DCA used in this would be chemo, technically. Many modern chemo treatments are already far less devastating in terms of side-effects and health benefits.
But the fact remains, DCA is unproven. Sure, because it is relatively safe, many people would be willing to try some. But the same could be said about zillions of other substances which also lack any proven ability to fight cancer in humans.
Killing cancer cells in rats and petri dishes is not the same thing as killing cancers in humans. There have been HORDES of drugs that appeared very promising in this way, and then turned out to be worthless. The fact that pharma companies are not jumping on this particular one whole hog is nothing odd. It will get tested, it will get clinical trials, and if it works that's awesome. But there's no cause to just drop everything else and rush to test this.
The reasons given for the conspiracy explanation are likewise just uninformed. There are plenty of ways to make money off generic drugs. For fucks sake, look at how many different name brand headache medications are on the market and get millions in advertising dollars thrown at them, despite cheaper generics! There are also things like use patents that are, while weaker, still leave lots of room for profit. Suffice to say, if this drug continues to show promise, pharma will pick it up. But it's just not there yet.
The funny part is that they cannot all agree on which species are full humans and which are full apes... thus proving the point that we already have a pretty definitive gradient transition.
"I never mentioned genetics being the determining factor in this debate. That was a straw man you set up."
Nonsense: genetics is the only characteristic that makes a stem cell like a human being. In nearly every other respect, a stem cell is like, well, a small clump of cells. They happen to have certain chemical pathways activated. That isn't a basis for morality.
"And you're still avoiding the question. You said that you were "using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.". What is this concept (or definition) of humanity, and when was it developed?"
Human rights? The enlightenment? The idea that, you know, geez: that person over there has feelings, and maybe horribly killing them isn't such a nice thing to do? And wait: black people and women and children: they all have feelings like myself too!
"You say that our inclusion of people in the category of "human" has grown and expanded over history. That's arguably true, but show me a time when people didn't consider their developing children human."
For most of human history, people believed that life began at the "quickening." They didn't know about any moment of conception. Many people believed that men's sperm basically grew inside women: the moment of "conception" didn't mean anything and so people looked to a point when the fetus seemed to "come alive."
When they were enemies of the Judiac god, dashing their little fetus heads out on the rocks was commanded. The OT also does not seem to clearly treat the death of a fetus as an eye for an eye situation, much less the simple termination of implantation.
"No, they might not have known that the fetus ever existed as a single cell generated through the fusion of sperm and egg, but they had a vague idea of it being there."
Indeed, but no idea that there was a special moment in which a new individual supposedly was created where before there had not been one.
"My dog has concerns, cares and desires not to be killed; the only thing lacking to make killing him murder then is "rights", which are nothing but legal definitions, or, as you put it, "amoral rules"."
No, I put that the the rules are being treated as if they were amoral when a person seems to have no idea what the rules are meant to accomplish in the first place. This leads to all sorts of bizarre errors like thinking that an embryo is more morally important than, say, your dog. Morality is supposed to be ABOUT something. We're supposed to respect human life not "just because" but for REASONS relevant to the being in question.
"What you're essentially saying then is that it's only wrong to murder someone who has "rights", and that we as a group get to decide who has those rights. So killing someone is only murder if everyone else agrees that they had a right to live."
No, I didn't say that. I said that moral rules are supposed to be about something rather than just being aimless, pointless rules.
"Historically, many societies have included the fetus in that category (in Jewish law, for example, the death of the fetus of a pregnant woman was treated as murder)."
Not so. Read the passage again.
"They didn't have any real way to determine whether a zygote, or very young embryo was present, so we can't really look to their laws for precedent in the matter of dealing with the issue. The only difference between a zygote and a fetus is that of time - one will eventually grow into the other. A zygote is not like a fingernail cell, which will never grow into a human, nor like a sperm or egg, which, by itself, will never grow into a human."
Again, you are quite wrong. Eggs can be induced to simply double their chromosome numbers and develop just as they would have if fertilized. All that's missing are some chemical components they would normally recieve from the sperm cell, which can be added. A fingernail cell contains the SAME DNA that's in a stem cell. There's no reason why it cannot be implanted in
"I didn't claim his ideas were toxic, simply they, through a chain of events, resulted in some degree of influence over the Holocaust."
And a much stronger chain connects Christ to the Holocaust. So?
"Sigh... are you still confusing me with the other guy?"
It doesn't matter who you are: where is your point? I can connect the works of Shakespeare, through a chain of events, to result in some influence over Charles Manson. So?
"Huh? Point me to some record of these historical ethics, as I'm not aware of anyone taking your stance on these issues until the twentieth century."
A history textbook will probably help then. The development of civilization has been one long history of extending moral rights to wider categories of persons based on being more honest about their capacities, based on them standing up and defending their dignity, based on long experience DEALING with other people and their interests: it isn't some amoral rule "anything genetically human is for no reason forbidden from being killed." If we discovered a sentient race of aliens, murder wouldn't be permissible simply because they don't technically fit the description. The point of morality is that it's supposed to be ABOUT something, not just random rules no one has any clue the purpose of.
"Of course they knew it existed. They didn't know its particular makeup like we do today, but they knew where babies came from. They just didn't place any distinction between 1-hour old fetus, and 6-month old fetus. "
False. No one knew anything about when anything began. The "moment" of conception didn't exist until people knew of the existence of sperm and eggs. Not that it makes much difference regardless. Sexual reproduction is a subset of asexual reproduction: there is no point at which something unalive becomes alive. There is no bright line at conception either. In fact, there is no real reason other than technical barriers why a skin call cannot simply be made to develop and end up as a fetus.
Simply put, stem cells are basically instructions on how to go about building a human being and tiny but incomplete amount of the right raw materials. At their stage, the process has barely even begun. Stopping construction at that stage isn't in any way akin to destroying even a fetus.
"So what you're saying is it'd be ok for me to kill the old guy down the street who lives alone and doesn't have any friends or relatives, as long as I do it painlessly? None of those things are what makes murder horrible, what makes murder horrible is the act itself."
Lol. The act itself? Why? For no reason, just because that's what the amoral rules happen to say? WHY is the act wrong?
The reason is that all of those things DO make murder horrible, because they are all things that beings with values value in themselves, and appreciate in others. In the case of your old man, it's horrible because the old man has concerns, cares, rights, and desires not to be killed, whether painlessly or no, and we can appreciate these things ourselves. Zygotes not only have none of these things, but no more capacity to have them than my fingernail. They are not a tiny person. Depending on contingency, they could eventually develop into a fetus (which at least then bares SOME relation to a human person), or two, or ten, or none at all with the original cells dying, or even none at all with all the original cells being kept alive. Heck, allowing the development of the fetus ENSURES THE EARLY DEATH of every single cell in the zygote. In short, the reality of what is going on bears almost nothing in common with the idea that a stem cell is a tiny human being in every relevant moral respect. Forget an old man no one loves: a PRAWN has more moral interests than that.
Slashdot Mirror
"My point is that science has NOT observed major evolutionary change - from a fish to a bird, or a dog to a cat or whatever the theory is these days. It has not been observed in the lab, we have not seen punctuated equilibrium, or any other major change. We have seen minor changes in the form of adaptation."
We also haven't seen the continents together in a supercontinent Pangea. That doesn't mean that we don't have clear and unequivocal evidence that they were once that way. We have large vein patterns of mineral deposits that match up on Africa and South America like jigsaw puzzles for goodness sakes.
What you are basically asking for is that we MUST see, with eyeballs, something that takes millions of years, even though it leaves tons and tons of physical evidence. But this is silly: there is no "eyeball" rule in science. What matters in science is evidence, period. Strong physical evidence is in many respects superior to eyewitness.
The fact that you aren't even familiar with what evolution describes as major transitions (and has described, not just "these days") certainly doesn't make you sound like you are informed enough to say that you've seen the evidence and aren't convinced. If you haven't even bothered to find out what a theory says, how can you possibly claim to find it implausible?
"The fossil record contains the cambrian explosion, which in my view is evidence for a large number of kinds/species/types/diverse life/etc which appear suddenly as if they were created simultaneously."
Again, this isn't the same evidence viewed differently, it's basically a caricature of the evidence, ignoring most of it.
I don't want to insult you because you seem like a nice guy, but do you even understand what a clade is or how it factors into the descriptive system of "kinds/species/phyla" etc.? If you don't understand these concepts, then it is very easy to be fooled by sloppy arguments about terminology, such as thinking it significant that higher level groups appear all around the same time (though very far from "simultaneously"). If you understand how taxonomy works though, you then realize that this is an artifact of definition, not a significant element in and of itself about reality (simply put, it's a factor the way that clades work: new groups are _always_ defined as subsets of old groups, and we built our system based first on the classification of modern animals)
"Regardless of the terminology used to describe the different kinds of animals we see, we DO see different types."
So then why are all these "types" just morphological nested subsets of each other? Evolution PREDICTS isolated types, and not just any pattern of them either: a pattern in which every gene, trait, and so on in each individual all matches the same overall nested hierarchy. This pattern then for some reason is reflected in the fossil record. Which in turn paints a picture constrained by geography in a way that makes no sense for an all powerful creator: why would a creator respect, say, the influence of a mountain range or an ocean when determining what traits appear where and when? All of this is the evolutionary pattern, which is one of very specific kind, and just keeps turning up everywhere we look.
"As I explained in my posting above, if you are an adherent to Christianity, it's not logical to make the Eden story an allegory. You have to torture the text and twist the logic to make it work."
That's assuming that you are of the minority of Christians in the world and in history who believe that the text must be read literally.
"If Genesis was allegory, why would He appeal to the creation account as if it was fact? Sure, he spoke in parables sometimes, but other times He spoke in a direct way. The marriage response is NOT in the form of a parable."
That's a pretty weak argument. Jesus was often cryptic and poetic. Furthermore, if you aren't a literalist in the first place, then why would you demand the recorded words of Jesus be taken literally in every respect as well?
"Secondly, carbon dating is based on three things:
a) the amount of C14 present today in the sample
b) the rate of decay of C14 being constant, and
c) the original amount of C14 in the sample"
No, it's based on a heck of a lot more than that. The accuracy of carbon dating isn't just something we assume: we calibrate it based on a whole host of other independently derived timelines, ALL of which must match up in fine detail. I mean, what you describe is a creationist caricature of the field of radiocarbon dating. People spend their whole careers becoming experts in it. Do you REALLY think they spend all their time just repeating those three points over and over to themselves?
I never understand these sorts of creationist arguments. They don't "get" how science works. It's NEVER just "oh, here's this set of assumptions that give us a result, la de da." There are always more and more ways to test something, over and over, from every angle, and that is EXACTLY what scientists do, constantly.
Carbon dating is of course, not what is used for dinosaurs since carbon dating only works on recent things (this is the previous poster's mistake, not yours). With other forms of radio-isotope dating there are all sorts of neat tricks like isochron analysis that actually show, straight out, whether the assumptions you note are broken or not for a particular sample. And again, there isn't just one way of dating things: there are MANY ways. The evidence from plate movement HAS to match all the different radio-dating methods, which HAVE to match the record of magnetosphere switches which HAVE to match the record from matching rings on modern and petrified trees which HAVE to match ice-core samples, and so on and so on. All of these different independent methods have to match up with each other. And the fact that they give the SAME answer is a very powerful form of evidence. Is it possible to be in error to some degree or even a fundamental degree when using a dating method? Sure, it's possible, though very unlikely given how rigorously these things are tested for plausibility in almost every respect. But for dinos to have lived with humans, for instance, you'd have to explain not only why each and every dating method and piece of evidence points to an old earth, but why they all give the SAME ages and timelines in fine detail. Truth coordinates things in a way that error simply cannot. If you used seven different methods to calculate something, and got them all wrong, what is the likihood that all the different errors (each of which is for a totally different reason) came out with the SAME erroneous answer?
"Carbon dating is not infallible. Many times radically different dates are estimated for samples from the same thing. Dates that are too close to now are thrown out as error, because of the preconceived notion that the earth is REALLY old."
Again, while we've come to trust carbon dating enough that we CAN treat it that way, we've come to that trust based not on "notions" but on constant and ongoing evidence of its reliability. There are any number of known reasons for various dates to be regularly in error or for one "thing" to have carbon samples from several different times (m
"I have also heard of fossils found (I believe in Texas, but I'm digging deep in my memory now) with human footprints inside of dinosaur footprints."
Scientists just do not find those claims to be credible. If this is the low bar for your standard of evidence, then I guess one could argue that anything is possible. I vaguely remember hearing that Alex Chiu's amazing magnet wristbands can make you immortal. I'd better buy a pair!
"The Bible mentions a "behemoth" like a dinosaur and "leviathan" perhaps a great monster of the sea - in Job 40 and 41. Many people feel that these are descriptions of dinosaurs. I'm not saying that I consider that to be strong evidence, but it is a possible occurrence of dinosaurs in biblical literature."
Both of these would be far more reasonably explained by other large mammals that are, in fact, alive today. And it's not like we should assume that dragons or griffins exist just because tales were once told of them.
"Isn't it *possible* that man and dinosaurs were on the planet at the same time? Perhaps they were not in the same place much, and that's why literature seems to have little evidence?"
No. The evidence is clear where the dinosaurs were (pretty much all over the planet, which at the time had a very different continental composure than now in a way that would be impossible to move within a few thousand years without literally ripping the upper crust of the earth apart) and that they dominated their ecosystem: one which lasted for millions and millions of years. The evidence for this is confirmed by so many different converging lines of evidence so as to be one of the most certain things we can know about anything.
"Science teaches us that once the sperm penetrates the egg, all that is necessary for the birth of a human baby is food and shelter."
That's a pretty silly way to put it. Science also teaches us that before a man and a woman even have sex, everything that is necessary for the birth of the baby is some sex. You're still talking about potentials all the way down and there's no particular reason to pick one particular potential over another.
Science also teaches that there is no moment of conception. Sperm and eggs do not magically and instantly fuse into anything. Even after the first cell division, their genetic material is still distinguishable. Like most things in life, we have a gradual process, not any from which unlife becomes life. As science also teaches us, a single egg is ALONE enough to simply divide and start developing into a new creature. Likewise, a single skin cell contains all the genetic information necessary to simply divide into a new being.
It's also false to say that an embryo merely needs "food and shelter" to grow. Implantation is a complex hormonal and chemical signaling process that MAKES the zygote continue to develop in a particular way that it wouldn't without these elements. And when the vast vast majority of the raw materials for something come externally, we are talking a heck of a different realm than mere sustenance of a current being: that's a very inapt analogy. The idea that the genes are everything that a person is is a very modern and very odd idea: why not note instead that the vast majority of the elements that make up a human being are simply missing? What we know as human beings are an immensely complex set of functionalities that are constructed via a long recipe-like process. Even well-developed embryos lack this functionality: they are part of the process of building it, but they are NOT themselves it, any more than a hole in the ground with some building plans on a desk is a skyscraper.
"All of the genetic information is present at conception, and there is no scientifically identifiable magic moment when a fetus "becomes" a person."
While true, the fact that there is a gradient _somewhere_ does not prevent us from identifying solid white or black on either end of a spectrum before the gradient begins. Genetic information is clearly not itself either a person nor of moral value. One complete genome can split and divide and eventually develop into many people, or two genomes can fuse and develop into a single person.
Again: genetic information is like a recipe, a series of instructions on what steps to carry out in order to, given the right conditions and all sorts of other environmental factors, construct something that we recognize as a person. But that information is not itself the completed item, nor are the early stages of construction. Once you have a nervous system at least you can make an argument that there is something of potential moral value worth protecting present, but certainly not before, and even so, what's there is clearly about as UNLIKE the human beings we give rights as something can get and still be an mammal.
"Legally the standard is birth, but that's a legal distinction, not a scientific one. As far as I am concerned, there is no moral difference between ending the life of a fetus and me killing my six year old son."
I hear this a lot, but I think it is too extreme to be justified. You basically imply that the equivalent of the holocaust is going on all around you, and yet all you do is complain about it? That's not how I or even I think you would react if someone systematically starting taking, say, all left-handed children in our neighborhood to be executed. Something is deeply wrong with this logic: I think you want to use the most extreme and emotionalized claim you can regardless of whether it makes sense.
"Right, the *potential* for evil was there, but as far as I can tell Adam and Even were the ones to bring it into actuality."
So if I hire someone to murder a bus driver, I'm not actually a murderer?
There is no way to formulate the concept of choice and responsibility for choice that doesn't include causality from nature, and hence also chain the responsibility back to whatever determined the nature.
"According the Genesis, God created the world... and it was "good.""
According to Genesis, birds existed before lizards. Shrug.
"Actually, traditional orthodox Christian teaching would be that God created people flawless, but with the power of choice. They were given instruction and were fully capable of obedience up until the time they chose not to. Their nature was changed through sin."
You are aware that this is completely incoherent, aren't you? Perfection implies that one WOULD choose obedience, unless obedience was imperfect. There is no way to formulate the concept of choice that does not rule out an either obedient or non-obedient nature. There has to be SOME reason why one person would choose this over that, and unless you simply dodge explaining what that some element is and where it came from, the idea of perfecting sinning is nonsense.
"The bible specifically states that to follow God requires the suspension of your own understanding."
This is, then, why it is immoral. Acting with certainty when certainty is not only not possible, but actually undermined, is as immoral as handing someone a gun and telling them to point it at their face and pull the trigger without knowing whether or not it is loaded. The more one strives to make a doctrine beyond human understanding, the more it simply goes beyond any reason to trust it. The degree to which God cannot be understood is the degree to which the possibility that what we know as God is, say, really just Satan tricking us becomes equally and irrefutably possible.
I think I understand it pretty darn well.
Perhaps the Bible was advanced for its time in some things, though clearly not in everything, and much of this is subjective. But that doesn't make it much different than any other set of thoughts and poetry from folks all throughout human history. The proverbs contain much that is wise, but also much that is foolish, culturally contingent, or even wrong. In that sense they are interesting, but hardly necessary or sacred above all other human works.
"First response: then do it. Illuminate the world with your shining light. "
Ok: cruelty is wrong, we should tolerate the views of those whom we disagree, we should never wish endless pain on anyone. We should not infringe on the liberties of others to speak and believe and think. Slavery is wrong. Racism is wrong. Treating women as property is wrong no matter how much we claim to respect them while we do it. Equality isn't just a matter of things in God's sight, but in political treatment as well. And so on.
These statements are far superior to anything in the mind of Christ, and yet they are to most people today mere trivialities. More importantly, they are far CLEARER than anything Christ said, instead of being cryptic and vague, able and in fact many times interpreted in many different ways. (In fact, the ONE clear and unique teaching that Christ had was the idea of eternal torment: an idea probably more monstrous than anything ever before imagined.)
Your defense of the OT isn't particularly credible either. There is nothing in it that suggests anacronistic insight, and much that is utterly barbaric. The bible doesn't merely condone slavery, for instance, it stipulates the degree to which an owner can rend the flesh of a servant. It calls for the death penalty for all sorts of absurd supersitutions. Half of the Ten Commandments would be unconstitutional today, and the rest are so obvious to ANY workable human society as to render the claimed insight irrelevant and old news by the time they were written.
My point is not that the bible isn't interesting, or even that it contains nothing of value at all, but rather that the idea that is is the culmination of wisdom and morality is, simply put, utterly absurd. The sermon on the mount is a pretty sentiment, but it is not a particularly useful guide to anything, and never proved such. It was, after based on the completely false belief that Jesus was the messiah and would soon herald in the messianic age/end of the world, none of which ever happened (which at least in terms of Judiasm was why virtually no educated Jew ever found his claims anything more than ridiculous).
And good grief: would you really trade the relatively minor "troubles" of the modern world for the barbarism and squalor of the ancient?
"How can the statement "humans evolved (through many, many generations) from single-celled organisms" be falsifiable and the statement "humans were created by a supernatural being" not be falsifiable? How would you disprove either without a time machine to go back and see what happened?"
Uh.... by looking at the evidence. When things happen in the natural world, they have all sorts of predictable consequences. We figure out what those are, and we test to see if we can piece together what happened.
Are you asserting that in a murder trial, we shouldn't deal with forensic evidence because we can't prove or disprove anything without a time machine?
The idea that the only standard that matters is seeing things with eyeballs is just nonsense: it's not an idea that scientists treat seriously, and with good reason. Eyeballs aren't even all that reliable compared to convergence of evidence. Give me a good DNA sample and several convergent chains of custody over an eyewitness any day.
Supernatural events, on the other hand, do not necessarily provide anything predictable or discoverable at all. If God commits a murder, he could make it look like just about anything happened. Heck, he could even make it look like the person is still alive! Especially if a supernatural claim is vague enough that it could be consistent with anything, we can't possibly test or distinguish it from anything else.
"but proving it is possible that humans came into existence by (theory of your choice) does not prove that that is what actually happened."
That's something of a caricature, but really, that's what proof IS: showing that something CANNOT be ruled out despite all the other alternatives can be. Totally consistent with all the evidence is the HIGHEST standard of proof, not the lowest. But, like I said, it's pretty much a caricature to simply say that all we can do is show it's "merely" possible in the colloquial sense. The sheer amount, consistency, quality, and convergence of the evidence we can amass not only for how, but for a very particular set of events and their cascading effects (all of which much match up exactly right... and do!) is not something one can brush aside as "merely possible."
"How do you make predictions based on the theory "an organism can evolve (over several generations)""
If you really think that is all evolutionary theory says, then you really need to learn a heck of a lot more about it. Evolution requires a very specific set of circumstances that work in a very particular way to get a very particular result.
"And, for the record, Intelligent Design is a theory that states that humans (and all other living things) were designed by a supernatural being. It does not specify how those designs were implemented (creation, evolution, or something else"
That's exactly the problem! The whole point of a SCIENTIFIC theory is that it DOES specify a how. In the case of biological evolution, it's a very specific, almost absurdly specific (compared to the number of possible other options) pattern and set of events. Intelligent design claims basically say "something that we can't explain did it in a way we can't explain." In terms of logical meaning, however, that statement is pretty much exactly identical to "we don't have any idea how it was done."
It's worse than that though. Because you can get specific about the ways in which known intelligences, like us, operate. And when you consider those, it fact becomes clear that biological life constantly defies everything we would expect to see from designers like us: traits aren't treated as "good ideas" that are reused and jump lineages, muck isn't cleared out, design problems aren't so much solved as they are compensated for, and so on. The only real escape from these obvious problems is to jump back to the idea that the designer ISN'T like us at all, which is to say that we have no idea at all what it is like, what it's motives are, or how it works. Which is to say, we jump out of science and basically say nothing much at all.
Um, the poster you were replying to is seriously downplaying the amount an quality of the evidence for evolution. It isn't simply a matter of fossils happening to create an apparent pattern. It's a matter of countless different independent lines of evidence all converging on the one very particular pattern that evolution requires. Simple layperson observance of fossil morphology when placed in sequence is barely even scratching the surface (despite many people for some reason thinking that this is all evolution has going for it).
In science, we don't speak of certain Truth or Facts, but talking about evolution as true and a fact in a colloquial sense is perfectly appropriate if talking about ANYTHING as a fact is. That people get upset at evolution and only evolution when referred to that way, despite the reality that the evidence for evolution is far far stronger than virtually anything else to which they DON'T object being called a fact, I think we have a right to question their sincerity or fairness.
" I'd like to see some standards that acknowledge there are several theories (evolution, creation, intellegent design) that currently have some level of support within the scientific community and society."
This claim would be a falsehood. Even intelligent design, which is a PR movement devoted to trying to "create" the circumstances for this claim, has virtually no support amongst biologists. That many Americans believe in creationism has no bearing on whether it is sound science. Science is about the evidence, not about people's beliefs. The evidence says that creationism is ridiculous, and that intelligent design is not even a coherent or scientific theory. Neither is a scientific alternative.
"Is it too much to ask that we try to take a neutral point of view with education standards?"
Should we also take a neutral point of view on the holocaust, astrology, numerology and 2+2=4? Should we simply stop teaching science altogether? Isn't that basically what you are asking for, in the end?
Science ISN'T neutral. Science is about what the evidence shows, not about surveying everyone's opinions and beliefs.
"The bible contains wisdom that is unparalled in both ancient and modern times."
Like the similar claim that the Koran is so perfect that not one line could be improved upon, I beg to differ.
Virtually any human being today, no matter how mundane or lousy a writer, could sit down to write a book on morality, wisdom, and insight that would be in virtually every respect superior to the Bible. Just the ability to outright condemn pointless cruelty, slavery as an institution, explain the ideas of tolerance, the concept of classical enlightenment liberalism (democracy, capitalism, liberal science, and liberty) blow any insight in the Bible out of the water. Human thought on morality and culture neither began nor ended with the Bible, and most certainly did not find anything even approaching perfection there.
"The problem is that it explains any data."
Um: that's one of the basic characteristics for something not being science. To be science, it must make a specific claim that specifies and limits itself to a particular set of data that we can then check on. If ID is consistent with anything, then it is almost by definition not science.
The problem you are both having is that Free Will is an incoherent concept. No one can define what it really is or it does. No one can even sketch out the fundamental functional difference between a chooser that has free will and one that doesn't. It's a concept like a square circle that makes no sense, but gets dumped into arguments to throw them off track.
We make choices. We make those choices in SOME way, and a way that is characteristic and causally related to who we are. That's what makes them OUR choices, and not just some random things we do based on chance. Where does "Free Will" fit in to any of that? Not even the cleverest of theologians has been able to explain, utterly regardless of what other concepts like souls or supernatural realms they invoke: none of them help in the slightest. In fact, if you think about it, even trying to offer an explanation of HOW "choosing" happens makes Free Will into conceptual nonsense, no matter what set of rules you use. Only by avoiding the question can we avoid this realization.
You really need to stop reading ID claptrap and start reading people that actually know how genetics and evolution work. The trope about "brand new genetic information" is pure nonsense. ANY mutational change at all changes informational content: whether or not it is an increase depends almost entirely on how you define information (there are many different levels and definitions, some of which are very different): under the most basic definition it is increase no matter what simply by virtue OF being random. Furthermore, evolution is not about pure mutational change: it is mutational change plus natural selection: i.e. adaptation, and ANY selection of one genome over another is almost by definition an increase in information in a genome in a very obvious and important sense: it is an imprint onto a genome of information about the environment.
"I think it's interesting how crazy people get when the slighest criticism of evolution is discussed."
The problem isn't criticism: mainstream biology is a screaming torrent of scientists criticizing each other's work! It's when the "criticisms" are a bunch of oft-repeated falsehoods and misleading, misinformative nonsense that people get annoyed. "No increase in information" is one of those. It is like a red flag announcing that the person using it understands neither what information is nor how evolution works.
Hey they can go ahead and try I guess. But there's no reason to think it'll be especially more effective than homeopathy. Cancer patients looking for cures have often taken lots of different potential cures in the hopes that they would help. That doesn't make the jury be any less out on whether they have any effective use to fight cancer.
Actually, the idea that the Bible is be all and end all of Christianity is and always has been a minority view, and only a very recently developed one at that. Fundamentalists Christians don't seem to understand that, but that's the case.
Just to be clear... there is a big difference between tolerating people and their right to express their ideas, and tolerating them in the sense that we don't criticize their bad ideas. The former IS laudable, the latter is not.
So then why would you get the order of creation wrong, sometimes laughably wrong?
And why NOT just tell us the stuff we don't know. If we're smart and will figure it out, isn't it better that we start out with correct stuff we just can't understand yet rather than incorrect vague stuff that we base all sorts of bizarre rituals around? I mean, people were litterally PUT TO DEATH for working on the Sabbath (and God says to do this right in the Bible). That's a pretty high punishment for violating the logic of what's supposedly just a nice neat story about how God loves us and all.
Good grief, being an MD is not even remotely the same thing as being a real research scientist, let alone a credible climatologist. I love my wife, and she is an MD, but she doesn't know anything at all about the philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, climatology, and so forth.
Crichton is not only not qualified, but demonstrably incompetent when it comes to his evaluations of the evidence in climate science.
Consensus in science is a reliable way for a layperson to get a sense of what the best science is at the moment, because science IS about the evidence, and the bulk of scientists stick to what the evidence establishes and then branch out from there. Most of the accusations that Critchton makes about misconduct are document bullplop and little different from the misrepresentations of biology the ID school engages in.
"But we'll never know because the research to really test it in clinical trials won't get done."
Complete BS. It will get done. But no one is jumping on it because it hasn't proven any preliminary effect at all on fighting cancer in humans. In the normal process, what happens now is that some smaller studies to see if it shows any promise. The people hyping this are trying to drum up millions for huge studies that just aren't warranted at this point.
DCA used in this would be chemo, technically. Many modern chemo treatments are already far less devastating in terms of side-effects and health benefits.
But the fact remains, DCA is unproven. Sure, because it is relatively safe, many people would be willing to try some. But the same could be said about zillions of other substances which also lack any proven ability to fight cancer in humans.
Killing cancer cells in rats and petri dishes is not the same thing as killing cancers in humans. There have been HORDES of drugs that appeared very promising in this way, and then turned out to be worthless. The fact that pharma companies are not jumping on this particular one whole hog is nothing odd. It will get tested, it will get clinical trials, and if it works that's awesome. But there's no cause to just drop everything else and rush to test this.
The reasons given for the conspiracy explanation are likewise just uninformed. There are plenty of ways to make money off generic drugs. For fucks sake, look at how many different name brand headache medications are on the market and get millions in advertising dollars thrown at them, despite cheaper generics! There are also things like use patents that are, while weaker, still leave lots of room for profit. Suffice to say, if this drug continues to show promise, pharma will pick it up. But it's just not there yet.
Hmmmm. Maybe it was homo florensis that wrote the OT, and they were talking about us .
The funny part is that they cannot all agree on which species are full humans and which are full apes... thus proving the point that we already have a pretty definitive gradient transition.
"I never mentioned genetics being the determining factor in this debate. That was a straw man you set up."
Nonsense: genetics is the only characteristic that makes a stem cell like a human being. In nearly every other respect, a stem cell is like, well, a small clump of cells. They happen to have certain chemical pathways activated. That isn't a basis for morality.
"And you're still avoiding the question. You said that you were "using the actual concept developed in ethics over centuries of development of human society.". What is this concept (or definition) of humanity, and when was it developed?"
Human rights? The enlightenment? The idea that, you know, geez: that person over there has feelings, and maybe horribly killing them isn't such a nice thing to do? And wait: black people and women and children: they all have feelings like myself too!
"You say that our inclusion of people in the category of "human" has grown and expanded over history. That's arguably true, but show me a time when people didn't consider their developing children human."
For most of human history, people believed that life began at the "quickening." They didn't know about any moment of conception. Many people believed that men's sperm basically grew inside women: the moment of "conception" didn't mean anything and so people looked to a point when the fetus seemed to "come alive."
When they were enemies of the Judiac god, dashing their little fetus heads out on the rocks was commanded. The OT also does not seem to clearly treat the death of a fetus as an eye for an eye situation, much less the simple termination of implantation.
"No, they might not have known that the fetus ever existed as a single cell generated through the fusion of sperm and egg, but they had a vague idea of it being there."
Indeed, but no idea that there was a special moment in which a new individual supposedly was created where before there had not been one.
"My dog has concerns, cares and desires not to be killed; the only thing lacking to make killing him murder then is "rights", which are nothing but legal definitions, or, as you put it, "amoral rules"."
No, I put that the the rules are being treated as if they were amoral when a person seems to have no idea what the rules are meant to accomplish in the first place. This leads to all sorts of bizarre errors like thinking that an embryo is more morally important than, say, your dog. Morality is supposed to be ABOUT something. We're supposed to respect human life not "just because" but for REASONS relevant to the being in question.
"What you're essentially saying then is that it's only wrong to murder someone who has "rights", and that we as a group get to decide who has those rights. So killing someone is only murder if everyone else agrees that they had a right to live."
No, I didn't say that. I said that moral rules are supposed to be about something rather than just being aimless, pointless rules.
"Historically, many societies have included the fetus in that category (in Jewish law, for example, the death of the fetus of a pregnant woman was treated as murder)."
Not so. Read the passage again.
"They didn't have any real way to determine whether a zygote, or very young embryo was present, so we can't really look to their laws for precedent in the matter of dealing with the issue. The only difference between a zygote and a fetus is that of time - one will eventually grow into the other. A zygote is not like a fingernail cell, which will never grow into a human, nor like a sperm or egg, which, by itself, will never grow into a human."
Again, you are quite wrong. Eggs can be induced to simply double their chromosome numbers and develop just as they would have if fertilized. All that's missing are some chemical components they would normally recieve from the sperm cell, which can be added. A fingernail cell contains the SAME DNA that's in a stem cell. There's no reason why it cannot be implanted in
"Welcome to the field of history."
History is rarely so scatterbrained.
"I didn't claim his ideas were toxic, simply they, through a chain of events, resulted in some degree of influence over the Holocaust."
And a much stronger chain connects Christ to the Holocaust. So?
"Sigh... are you still confusing me with the other guy?"
It doesn't matter who you are: where is your point? I can connect the works of Shakespeare, through a chain of events, to result in some influence over Charles Manson. So?
"Huh? Point me to some record of these historical ethics, as I'm not aware of anyone taking your stance on these issues until the twentieth century."
A history textbook will probably help then. The development of civilization has been one long history of extending moral rights to wider categories of persons based on being more honest about their capacities, based on them standing up and defending their dignity, based on long experience DEALING with other people and their interests: it isn't some amoral rule "anything genetically human is for no reason forbidden from being killed." If we discovered a sentient race of aliens, murder wouldn't be permissible simply because they don't technically fit the description. The point of morality is that it's supposed to be ABOUT something, not just random rules no one has any clue the purpose of.
"Of course they knew it existed. They didn't know its particular makeup like we do today, but they knew where babies came from. They just didn't place any distinction between 1-hour old fetus, and 6-month old fetus. "
False. No one knew anything about when anything began. The "moment" of conception didn't exist until people knew of the existence of sperm and eggs. Not that it makes much difference regardless. Sexual reproduction is a subset of asexual reproduction: there is no point at which something unalive becomes alive. There is no bright line at conception either. In fact, there is no real reason other than technical barriers why a skin call cannot simply be made to develop and end up as a fetus.
Simply put, stem cells are basically instructions on how to go about building a human being and tiny but incomplete amount of the right raw materials. At their stage, the process has barely even begun. Stopping construction at that stage isn't in any way akin to destroying even a fetus.
"So what you're saying is it'd be ok for me to kill the old guy down the street who lives alone and doesn't have any friends or relatives, as long as I do it painlessly? None of those things are what makes murder horrible, what makes murder horrible is the act itself."
Lol. The act itself? Why? For no reason, just because that's what the amoral rules happen to say? WHY is the act wrong?
The reason is that all of those things DO make murder horrible, because they are all things that beings with values value in themselves, and appreciate in others. In the case of your old man, it's horrible because the old man has concerns, cares, rights, and desires not to be killed, whether painlessly or no, and we can appreciate these things ourselves. Zygotes not only have none of these things, but no more capacity to have them than my fingernail. They are not a tiny person. Depending on contingency, they could eventually develop into a fetus (which at least then bares SOME relation to a human person), or two, or ten, or none at all with the original cells dying, or even none at all with all the original cells being kept alive. Heck, allowing the development of the fetus ENSURES THE EARLY DEATH of every single cell in the zygote. In short, the reality of what is going on bears almost nothing in common with the idea that a stem cell is a tiny human being in every relevant moral respect. Forget an old man no one loves: a PRAWN has more moral interests than that.