I think my problem arose from not separating the statement encapsulated by the fifth postulate from the idea of a postulate. Maybe I should have written that many mathematicians suspected that the statement expressed in the fifth posulate was a theorem provable using the other four postulates. Let me call the statement X. There were many failed attempts at proving X using the first four postulates. Some of them are very convincing because their flaws are subtle and difficult to spot.
Some mathematicians took the reductio ad absurdum (RAA) approach to X. They made assumptions contrary to X and tried to reach ridiculous conclusions, proof that X must be a true theorem given only the first four postulates because going against it leads to absurd conclusions inconsistent with the first four postulates. They never came to conclusions contrary to the first four postulates. The results were some of the early non-Euclidean geometries.
It is not that people were trying to prove a postulate. I am sorry to imply that idea. They thought that the statement X was actually provable in terms of the first four postulates, a theorem, and not a postulate. Historically, the controversy and work surrounding the fifth postulate and whether it is really a postulate or actually a theorem gave rise to ideas about logical systems and consistency that led to Gödel Incompleteness Theorem.
In a logical system, it is possible to write down statements. The internal angles of a triangle sum to pi. It is possible to write down such statements that cannot be proved or disproved even though the statement totally uses the terms and relationships of the logical system.
If you could create a proof, the statement is true. If you can create a counter, the statement is false. Gödel's work addresses statements that have neither proofs nor refutations.
I think (not sure) that the fifth posulate of Euclid is a good example. It involves the angles when a line crosses two parallel lines. For centuries, people tried to prove the fifth posulate in terms of the other four. It is possible to assume something completely contrary to the usual fifth postulate, though, and come up with a perfectly fine mathematical system. In the logical system with only the first four postulates, the fifth postulate constitutes a statement that cannot be proven or disproven even though the terms come from the first four.
You're reading too much into it, possibly a joke gesture on your part. I do not watch Star Trek. His name was Lincoln.
I meant the idea that freedom is an experiment and that it may be impossible along with the alternative being authoritarianism.
Some tend to see the past as gloriously important and hallowed compared to an encyclopedia written by cybernerds. I am averse to the abridgement of liberty, whether the conflict is decided on a battlefield or at a keyboard.
The parent with its ideas of experiment and failure in the pursuit of an ideal reminds me of the Gettysburg Address.
--
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863 Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States of America
http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/ Join the ivtv-devel mailing list if you want to follow the project and learn about its current status. The project page itself is too far out of date to be very helpful.
http://ivtv.no-ip.com/ The ivtv driver is under heavy development. This site by a developer named Chris Kennedy has newer releases of the driver. 0.2.0-rc works well for me.
I bought my PVR-350 in October, I think. It works fine. I had to take a few poorly documented steps.
Get a newer ivtv driver. As you know, the stable drivers are way out of date. The official ivtv site is worthless for new hardware. I use one of the 0.2.0-rc drivers.
Get a newer kernel for its tuner.c because the newer PVR-350 cards have a new tuner, the LG TAPE iirc. I did not want to recompile the whole kernel. I grabbed tuner.c from 2.6.9, stuck it in my kernel source tree and compiled the modules.
I suggest joining the ivtv-devel mailing list because these drivers are very new and you may benefit from advice if you decide to make your card work under Linux.
The PVR-150 does not work with the ivtv driver or Myth. It is close to working. According to the mailing list, the audio does not work yet. One developer reported a solution. He has not rolled his code back into the main driver yet.
I hope the PVR-500 becomes supported by ivtv. It has two tuners on a single card, a great gain for people building compact MythTV systems.
Be very careful when purchasing hardware for MythTV. It is a fantastic package, but only with the right hardware.
Serious nerds want the ability to host their own sites and customize everything. This flickr site seems cool, but because the tinfoil blocks the waves of complacency, I know better than to trust others with my photographs unless I have TC (total control). I am considering the options. I really want advice instead of a flame war. What are the relative merits of Gallery and Coppermine?
I have read a little. It seems that the 1.4 branch of Gallery has many kludges, and the next big update might be a while yet. Coppermine looks good, but maybe it's development and use are somewhat less. What are the big issues? Are there other good alternatives besides these two?
"A revolution requires that people leave their house."
I am certain that these people possess houses, not just one house.
This mistake is trivial, but it points to a larger problem of the blogosphere. The emphasis on direct, clear communication is lacking, and good editors are few. Witness/. introductions. Then look at the results. Bad comments follow. Bloggers are not drilled on clarity. Consequently, it is uncommon.
The light sensing cells are not under blood vessels. They are under several cell layers, including the cells that send the signals from the eye to the brain. Please check it out.
Along with the channels argument, I think it's worth mentioning that many invertebrate eyes have the photoreceptors nearest the light instead of hiding them behind several layers of cells. The retinas do not necessarily have blind spots; ours do. They are much less likely to detach, too.
You question my examples by saying we cannot tell the future and that I might be wrong. Yet the same applies to you. The one thing it seems you did not respond to was directly realted to that fact. I intended "Unless we really know that we are doing some harm by letting certain people survive, individual liberty, continuation of life and lessening of suffering ought to rule." to be a reply.
Theories are theories. Some are good; some are quite bad. Essentially I was arguing that an increased genetic manipulation capacity would lead to a more ressiliant population. I was taking issue. Look at agriculture. Monoculture, often of genetically identical plants, is now the rule. Many animals, too, are carefully bred and very genetically similar. For now, they are incredibly productive by past standards. If they are susceptible to anything bad based on their genetic makeup, however, the chance that they all are is quite high. Genetic manipulation leads to resiliency sometimes. It also can lead to terrible weakness since everything else is evolving, too.
Obviously you cannot predict the future but are you saying it is blue sky thinking to consider past events when making decisions about the future? that is all I suggested. Of course I am not. When you brought in suggestions that strong people might better survive harsh events, such as dark ages, you were just using your imagination. It's fine. I only want to point out that we can wipe ourselves out by preparing for a future that does not happen, especially if our predictions are not made carefully and we miss the boat on what will constitute strength. I think that there is a common conception of certain genes and traits as bad and an accompanying desire to eliminate them without enough thought paid to why the genes remain and what consequences might follow their elimination.
Out of curiosity what is your take on the idea of not just trying to right defficiencies but going the next step to self determined mutation. Super vision, higher percentage of fast twitch musculature for certain athelets, slow twtich for others. Etc ??? Rich people will do it. It cannot be stopped, much like drug use in athletics now. Some of the results will be horrible. If nothing too bad happens, we probably will find some beneficial approaches, too.
My statements about survival and fitness are simple and true. The current environment selects based on the traits of currently living organisms. What was successful in the past may or may not be beneficial. Success is defined in terms of successful propagation. Life giving technologies constitute changes in the environment. The future is hard to predict.
There are no sweeping generalizations in them to anyone who understands evolution. There is just stuff that happens. Some organisms live; some die. Classifying a given trait as advantageous is only possible after the fact when we look back and see what the environment was like and which organisms lived. Of course, the repertoire of traits and the likely pressures have some relation to the past. Much of biology is a very different thought process than one might imagine. Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology provides some insight into how much of biology is a very different scientific enterprise. Much of it tends to be retrospective and narrative, evolutionary biology being the main example I have in mind.
Did the dinosaurs most able to survive the K-T boundary die because they stopped to help their weaker dinosaur friends? Did the tough dinosaurs make it because they abandoned their weak? Nope, they all died. Weak little mousy mammals, hardly the leading candidates for world domination at the time, lived and later prospered. Who would have thought?
You need to stop being so short sighted. What hurts one may benefit another. You're more right than you seem to realize. You do not know what traits will be necessary to survive the future. If you do not know, how can you select for the right ones? Your ideas about good genes and bad genes are tied to your imagination about the rough and tumble periods of the last few millenia were. Which traits and genes were selected by the dark ages? Outside some vague notion about plague and one of those cell surface molecules I forgot (CXCR4? CCR5?), I do not know. Do you know? Even if the plague example holds, would you have predicted it? Would you have preserved the defective gene?
Simply that the medical technology which can suppress genetic flaws to the point that it does not interfere with reproduction creats an evolutionary environment where in time it can cause a problem. You are wrong about this point. Please try to understand why in semi-mathematical terms or provide an argument about how these terrible genes are going to blaze out of control. People who require major interventions to live will constitute a tiny fraction of the population. Do the math. Think about deleterious autosomal recessive alleles. The numbers of affected people depend on the square of the allelic frequency if mating is random. The square of a number much less than one is much, much less than one. With multifactorial traits, the numbers are even smaller because their frequency depends on more coincidences. When I ask you for a real argument, I want you to cite some reason that the numbers of people requiring major interventions to live will balloon. Even without significant pressure killing off the homozygotes, population gene frequency of the deleterious allele will not increase much. Do you understand the argument? I can explain it in other terms if you want.
I know about some historical catastrophes and extinctions. Hannibal rode elephants over the Alps. Goths sacked Rome. K-T was devastating. I have seen fossils of trilobites. I can imagine what photosynthesis did. I know why, generally, all cheetahs look so much alike. Can you stop questioning my knowledge and vision and provide arguments against some of my points? Your ideas are goofy because you have some notions about strong people having babies after a disaster. We do not know what the disaster will be. We do not know what will constitute strength. You aren't gleening clues about the future. You're just making stuff up. It fine to make stuff up. It's wrong to call it a well reasoned argument.
I agree that prevention is better than cure and that cures are better than treatments for symptoms as long as the benefits outweigh the risks. Move on.
Many genetic diseases are autosomal recessive. Everybody is a carrier of several deleterious alleles. For many of them, we only think of them as negative based on homozygotes who constitute a tiny, tiny number of people and who can never, never constitute more than a tiny, tiny number of people. We do not understand the implications of heterozygosity except in a very few cases. Even then, we do not know how they mattered in the past or who they might matter in the future.
I mean by fittness that one would be able to survive and reproduce without technological and medical assistance. It is that very idea that I reject. It is wrong. We do not live in a world without technology and medicine. We live in a world with technology and medicine. At least in the major industrialized world where I live, nobody starts tribes.
Any catastrophic event that kills many people is going to be terrible and bloody. How is keeping alive a few people who could not survive without major interventions going to matter in that case?
You labor under the false belief that helping some people live somehow lessens our ability to survive. Survival is success. If more people are surviving, it's success, yet you manage to come up with fantastic ideas about how it might not be. Fantasy is not evolution.
The genes of your fantasies that allow survival under very harsh conditions are unlikely to disappear unless they really, really don't matter for many, many generations or they really, really get selected against. We struggle to predict the future. Your ideas about which genes will be allow survival in the post apocalyptic future are silly. You haven't seen that future. You can't predict the future. You don't know what genes do what. You don't know what genes will be advantageous in the post apocalyptic future. Fantasizing about a stone age world provides absolutely no information about the future, neither what the environment nor the traits it will favor. Deciding what genes need eliminating based on your imagination is dangerous, stupid and wrong unless you have predictions based on a model with evidence. Your prediction is a harsh future following the collapse of civilization. Your model is science fiction books. Your evidence is analysis after watching Mad Max movies too many times. I want numbers. I want confidence intervals. Imagination is good when it helps us make predictions. Imagination is bad when it leads us to act harmfully based on wrong ideas.
I get what your saying but you seem to be missing a rather key element here. If survival is based on technologically advanced medical practices then any survival event as regards the human race is then likely to wipe out a diproportionate portion of the poulation becasue much of it will be sustained by what will be an unvailable mechanisim in the event of a collapse of the civil structure that has evolved.
Wrong. The number of individuals who depend on these measures will always be small. Why? Because the majority of people who do not need them will continue to reproduce. The proportion of people with some condition will increase, but it will not take over the population unless some catastrophe preferentially kills off the great majority of people who do not need major medical interventions to live.
Further, you argument is a tautology. "[I]n the event of a collapse of the civil structure," many, many people die. If there were not catastrophe, everybody would be o.k. The definining features of collapse are chaos, destruction and woe. All your argument states is that if something terrible happens, something terrible will have happened.
You need to look into what fraction of the population is a carrier of one or another of the many deleterious alleles. One study I found quoted estimates that a person carries 6 to 10 deleterious alleles on average. http://www.mlo-online.com/ce/pdfs/aug04.pdf The fact that nearly everyone carries some deleterious genes is why consanguinous mating is a problem. The number of homozygotes for any particular problem is not going to explode as a fraction of the population unless some very strange events happen. The overall frequency of these genes is not going to change much based on the survival of a few people with the expression of severe problems tied to them. Any notion otherwise must show how they possibly could.
I see people arguing about vaccines. Why is it that people are not vaccinated for polio or smallpox? Should we be? Smallpox vaccination has been a hot topic for the past few years. Why do so many people think that vaccines are linked to developmental problems such as autism? (They most likely are wrong, but I understand their concerns.) Why don't Americans receive vaccinations against TB?
If you are arguing that we should employ genetic treatments when they are safe and effective, I agree. Few people would disagree. The real argument, however, concerns real treatments that always, always carry the possibilities of risk and benefit. Any argument that fails to address these cases is a waste of our time.
A pie in the sky essay about health and freedom is nice and happy, but silly and worthless. I, too, would like to reduce suffering in the world. I, too, believe that cures and better than treatments that lessen symptoms. I, too, favor prevention before a problem starts over treatment after a problem has developed. Please stop making these arguments. They have no end and fail to advance the discussion. Bring some facts. Bring some numbers. Bring anything that constiutes a real argument. Blathering on about how great it would be to cure diseases has begun to wear thin with me. I never argued otherwise.
I did argue that these ideas of "weakness" are wrong because they are based on the world of 100 years ago. That's not evolution. Real organisms are selected based on the environments in which they live. Your ideas about fitness are nothing unless they actually describe reality. Arguments about catastrophes are no good. All catastrophes will be catastrophic. Arguments about increased numbers of people with problems are no good unless you show me how these numbers will significantly increase. Address the questions of population genetics. I'm not missing any key element. I'm thinking about the real world, not fantastic ideas of catastrophes, utopias and miracle cures, and I have a real understanding of evolution.
I don't think that human activity is outside that sphere. "Natural selection" simply means that some organisms live and reproduce more than others. The reasons why come after the facts.
Brothers and sisters. Considering that all parents are cousins, genetically unrelated siblings are impossible.
You state that ".. having the ability to do something is worthless if it does not lead to increased reproductive success"... my reply is so what? This does not stop it from happening. Providing it does not hinder reproductive success then it will not change.
Genes without much selection pressure on them tend to drift and change, possibly even disappear. That's so what.
Your sickle cell examples argues that evolution only builds on existing material and that it relies on randomness. I agree.
I am aware of many genetic diseases. What is your point? If we have treatments that allow people with them to survive and reproduce, what is the problem? Sure, there are many people alive today who would not have survived 100 years ago or 1000 years ago. To point out the obvious, we do not live then.
We need "eradication" to remain at the same level. What are these levels? I am not aware of any levels. If they exist, is there any reason that a particular level is better or worse? From a population genetics standpoint, having a more diverse gene pool can allow survival of at least a few individuals through a tough time.
Your main argument is wrong. If we can treat what you consider ailments, how are they such terrible hindrances? If somebody can have babies who grow up and reproduce who then have babies who grow up and reproduce... the person must have been good enough. We live in the stage that we are just being kept alive by food, food that very few of us actually produce, already. Being as self sustaining as possible is a bad goal, and all organisms need to do things to avoid death.
I, too, hope we can learn to treat genetically based diseases. Genetics does seem like the most promising approach for many of them. It is wrong, however, to believe whatever treatments we devise, genetic or not, will come without costs. Maybe genetic manipulation is good in some cases. In others, maybe not. Nobody knows.
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Is it possible to use multiple tuners with eyetv? MythTV's ability to use multiple tuners is excellent for not having to choose which show to record.
In an better world, Apple would release a real PVR product, possibly using MythTV.
The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 and 350 are not DVB cards. The company cited has a list of supported hardware.
I think my problem arose from not separating the statement encapsulated by the fifth postulate from the idea of a postulate. Maybe I should have written that many mathematicians suspected that the statement expressed in the fifth posulate was a theorem provable using the other four postulates. Let me call the statement X. There were many failed attempts at proving X using the first four postulates. Some of them are very convincing because their flaws are subtle and difficult to spot.
Some mathematicians took the reductio ad absurdum (RAA) approach to X. They made assumptions contrary to X and tried to reach ridiculous conclusions, proof that X must be a true theorem given only the first four postulates because going against it leads to absurd conclusions inconsistent with the first four postulates. They never came to conclusions contrary to the first four postulates. The results were some of the early non-Euclidean geometries.
It is not that people were trying to prove a postulate. I am sorry to imply that idea. They thought that the statement X was actually provable in terms of the first four postulates, a theorem, and not a postulate. Historically, the controversy and work surrounding the fifth postulate and whether it is really a postulate or actually a theorem gave rise to ideas about logical systems and consistency that led to Gödel Incompleteness Theorem.
You are very wrong about Gödel.
In a logical system, it is possible to write down statements. The internal angles of a triangle sum to pi. It is possible to write down such statements that cannot be proved or disproved even though the statement totally uses the terms and relationships of the logical system.
If you could create a proof, the statement is true. If you can create a counter, the statement is false. Gödel's work addresses statements that have neither proofs nor refutations.
I think (not sure) that the fifth posulate of Euclid is a good example. It involves the angles when a line crosses two parallel lines. For centuries, people tried to prove the fifth posulate in terms of the other four. It is possible to assume something completely contrary to the usual fifth postulate, though, and come up with a perfectly fine mathematical system. In the logical system with only the first four postulates, the fifth postulate constitutes a statement that cannot be proven or disproven even though the terms come from the first four.
You're reading too much into it, possibly a joke gesture on your part. I do not watch Star Trek. His name was Lincoln.
I meant the idea that freedom is an experiment and that it may be impossible along with the alternative being authoritarianism.
Some tend to see the past as gloriously important and hallowed compared to an encyclopedia written by cybernerds. I am averse to the abridgement of liberty, whether the conflict is decided on a battlefield or at a keyboard.
The parent with its ideas of experiment and failure in the pursuit of an ideal reminds me of the Gettysburg Address.
--
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States of America
http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/ Join the ivtv-devel mailing list if you want to follow the project and learn about its current status. The project page itself is too far out of date to be very helpful.
http://ivtv.no-ip.com/ The ivtv driver is under heavy development. This site by a developer named Chris Kennedy has newer releases of the driver. 0.2.0-rc works well for me.
I bought my PVR-350 in October, I think. It works fine. I had to take a few poorly documented steps.
Get a newer ivtv driver. As you know, the stable drivers are way out of date. The official ivtv site is worthless for new hardware. I use one of the 0.2.0-rc drivers.
Get a newer kernel for its tuner.c because the newer PVR-350 cards have a new tuner, the LG TAPE iirc. I did not want to recompile the whole kernel. I grabbed tuner.c from 2.6.9, stuck it in my kernel source tree and compiled the modules.
I suggest joining the ivtv-devel mailing list because these drivers are very new and you may benefit from advice if you decide to make your card work under Linux.
Here is the best chance. If any company makes such a product, El Gato is the one.
I am unaware of any USB tuner supported by Linux.
Get a Hauppauge PVR-250 or PVR-350.
The Hauppauge PVR-150 and PVR-500 do not work now under Linux. They may work within several months..
The PVR-150 does not work with the ivtv driver or Myth. It is close to working. According to the mailing list, the audio does not work yet. One developer reported a solution. He has not rolled his code back into the main driver yet.
I hope the PVR-500 becomes supported by ivtv. It has two tuners on a single card, a great gain for people building compact MythTV systems.
Be very careful when purchasing hardware for MythTV. It is a fantastic package, but only with the right hardware.
You are wrong. I submitted a story with a link to the NY Times, and Taco added a snarky comment.
This accomplishment fulfills an important Cibo Matto mandate. You got to "Know Your Chicken."
110% untrue. 2 to 1 that it's wrong, and 50% isn't bad odds.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." Ralph Wiggum
Serious nerds want the ability to host their own sites and customize everything. This flickr site seems cool, but because the tinfoil blocks the waves of complacency, I know better than to trust others with my photographs unless I have TC (total control). I am considering the options. I really want advice instead of a flame war. What are the relative merits of Gallery and Coppermine?
I have read a little. It seems that the 1.4 branch of Gallery has many kludges, and the next big update might be a while yet. Coppermine looks good, but maybe it's development and use are somewhat less. What are the big issues? Are there other good alternatives besides these two?
"A revolution requires that people leave their house."
/. introductions. Then look at the results. Bad comments follow. Bloggers are not drilled on clarity. Consequently, it is uncommon.
I am certain that these people possess houses, not just one house.
This mistake is trivial, but it points to a larger problem of the blogosphere. The emphasis on direct, clear communication is lacking, and good editors are few. Witness
It knows when the commercials are, and you have to watch them.
The light sensing cells are not under blood vessels. They are under several cell layers, including the cells that send the signals from the eye to the brain. Please check it out.
Along with the channels argument, I think it's worth mentioning that many invertebrate eyes have the photoreceptors nearest the light instead of hiding them behind several layers of cells. The retinas do not necessarily have blind spots; ours do. They are much less likely to detach, too.
Sorting the roles that the right approach (right attitude, careful thought, hard work) and dumb luck play in any single success is often difficult.
You question my examples by saying we cannot tell the future and that I might be wrong. Yet the same applies to you. The one thing it seems you did not respond to was directly realted to that fact. I intended "Unless we really know that we are doing some harm by letting certain people survive, individual liberty, continuation of life and lessening of suffering ought to rule." to be a reply.
Theories are theories. Some are good; some are quite bad. Essentially I was arguing that an increased genetic manipulation capacity would lead to a more ressiliant population. I was taking issue. Look at agriculture. Monoculture, often of genetically identical plants, is now the rule. Many animals, too, are carefully bred and very genetically similar. For now, they are incredibly productive by past standards. If they are susceptible to anything bad based on their genetic makeup, however, the chance that they all are is quite high. Genetic manipulation leads to resiliency sometimes. It also can lead to terrible weakness since everything else is evolving, too.
Obviously you cannot predict the future but are you saying it is blue sky thinking to consider past events when making decisions about the future? that is all I suggested. Of course I am not. When you brought in suggestions that strong people might better survive harsh events, such as dark ages, you were just using your imagination. It's fine. I only want to point out that we can wipe ourselves out by preparing for a future that does not happen, especially if our predictions are not made carefully and we miss the boat on what will constitute strength. I think that there is a common conception of certain genes and traits as bad and an accompanying desire to eliminate them without enough thought paid to why the genes remain and what consequences might follow their elimination.
Out of curiosity what is your take on the idea of not just trying to right defficiencies but going the next step to self determined mutation. Super vision, higher percentage of fast twitch musculature for certain athelets, slow twtich for others. Etc ??? Rich people will do it. It cannot be stopped, much like drug use in athletics now. Some of the results will be horrible. If nothing too bad happens, we probably will find some beneficial approaches, too.
My statements about survival and fitness are simple and true. The current environment selects based on the traits of currently living organisms. What was successful in the past may or may not be beneficial. Success is defined in terms of successful propagation. Life giving technologies constitute changes in the environment. The future is hard to predict.
There are no sweeping generalizations in them to anyone who understands evolution. There is just stuff that happens. Some organisms live; some die. Classifying a given trait as advantageous is only possible after the fact when we look back and see what the environment was like and which organisms lived. Of course, the repertoire of traits and the likely pressures have some relation to the past. Much of biology is a very different thought process than one might imagine. Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology provides some insight into how much of biology is a very different scientific enterprise. Much of it tends to be retrospective and narrative, evolutionary biology being the main example I have in mind.
Did the dinosaurs most able to survive the K-T boundary die because they stopped to help their weaker dinosaur friends? Did the tough dinosaurs make it because they abandoned their weak? Nope, they all died. Weak little mousy mammals, hardly the leading candidates for world domination at the time, lived and later prospered. Who would have thought?
You need to stop being so short sighted. What hurts one may benefit another. You're more right than you seem to realize. You do not know what traits will be necessary to survive the future. If you do not know, how can you select for the right ones? Your ideas about good genes and bad genes are tied to your imagination about the rough and tumble periods of the last few millenia were. Which traits and genes were selected by the dark ages? Outside some vague notion about plague and one of those cell surface molecules I forgot (CXCR4? CCR5?), I do not know. Do you know? Even if the plague example holds, would you have predicted it? Would you have preserved the defective gene?
Simply that the medical technology which can suppress genetic flaws to the point that it does not interfere with reproduction creats an evolutionary environment where in time it can cause a problem. You are wrong about this point. Please try to understand why in semi-mathematical terms or provide an argument about how these terrible genes are going to blaze out of control. People who require major interventions to live will constitute a tiny fraction of the population. Do the math. Think about deleterious autosomal recessive alleles. The numbers of affected people depend on the square of the allelic frequency if mating is random. The square of a number much less than one is much, much less than one. With multifactorial traits, the numbers are even smaller because their frequency depends on more coincidences. When I ask you for a real argument, I want you to cite some reason that the numbers of people requiring major interventions to live will balloon. Even without significant pressure killing off the homozygotes, population gene frequency of the deleterious allele will not increase much. Do you understand the argument? I can explain it in other terms if you want.
I know about some historical catastrophes and extinctions. Hannibal rode elephants over the Alps. Goths sacked Rome. K-T was devastating. I have seen fossils of trilobites. I can imagine what photosynthesis did. I know why, generally, all cheetahs look so much alike. Can you stop questioning my knowledge and vision and provide arguments against some of my points? Your ideas are goofy because you have some notions about strong people having babies after a disaster. We do not know what the disaster will be. We do not know what will constitute strength. You aren't gleening clues about the future. You're just making stuff up. It fine to make stuff up. It's wrong to call it a well reasoned argument.
My arguments are simple. Helping people with ge
I agree that prevention is better than cure and that cures are better than treatments for symptoms as long as the benefits outweigh the risks. Move on.
Many genetic diseases are autosomal recessive. Everybody is a carrier of several deleterious alleles. For many of them, we only think of them as negative based on homozygotes who constitute a tiny, tiny number of people and who can never, never constitute more than a tiny, tiny number of people. We do not understand the implications of heterozygosity except in a very few cases. Even then, we do not know how they mattered in the past or who they might matter in the future.
I mean by fittness that one would be able to survive and reproduce without technological and medical assistance. It is that very idea that I reject. It is wrong. We do not live in a world without technology and medicine. We live in a world with technology and medicine. At least in the major industrialized world where I live, nobody starts tribes.
Any catastrophic event that kills many people is going to be terrible and bloody. How is keeping alive a few people who could not survive without major interventions going to matter in that case?
You labor under the false belief that helping some people live somehow lessens our ability to survive. Survival is success. If more people are surviving, it's success, yet you manage to come up with fantastic ideas about how it might not be. Fantasy is not evolution.
The genes of your fantasies that allow survival under very harsh conditions are unlikely to disappear unless they really, really don't matter for many, many generations or they really, really get selected against. We struggle to predict the future. Your ideas about which genes will be allow survival in the post apocalyptic future are silly. You haven't seen that future. You can't predict the future. You don't know what genes do what. You don't know what genes will be advantageous in the post apocalyptic future. Fantasizing about a stone age world provides absolutely no information about the future, neither what the environment nor the traits it will favor. Deciding what genes need eliminating based on your imagination is dangerous, stupid and wrong unless you have predictions based on a model with evidence. Your prediction is a harsh future following the collapse of civilization. Your model is science fiction books. Your evidence is analysis after watching Mad Max movies too many times. I want numbers. I want confidence intervals. Imagination is good when it helps us make predictions. Imagination is bad when it leads us to act harmfully based on wrong ideas.
I get what your saying but you seem to be missing a rather key element here. If survival is based on technologically advanced medical practices then any survival event as regards the human race is then likely to wipe out a diproportionate portion of the poulation becasue much of it will be sustained by what will be an unvailable mechanisim in the event of a collapse of the civil structure that has evolved.
Wrong. The number of individuals who depend on these measures will always be small. Why? Because the majority of people who do not need them will continue to reproduce. The proportion of people with some condition will increase, but it will not take over the population unless some catastrophe preferentially kills off the great majority of people who do not need major medical interventions to live.
Further, you argument is a tautology. "[I]n the event of a collapse of the civil structure," many, many people die. If there were not catastrophe, everybody would be o.k. The definining features of collapse are chaos, destruction and woe. All your argument states is that if something terrible happens, something terrible will have happened.
You need to look into what fraction of the population is a carrier of one or another of the many deleterious alleles. One study I found quoted estimates that a person carries 6 to 10 deleterious alleles on average. http://www.mlo-online.com/ce/pdfs/aug04.pdf The fact that nearly everyone carries some deleterious genes is why consanguinous mating is a problem. The number of homozygotes for any particular problem is not going to explode as a fraction of the population unless some very strange events happen. The overall frequency of these genes is not going to change much based on the survival of a few people with the expression of severe problems tied to them. Any notion otherwise must show how they possibly could.
I see people arguing about vaccines. Why is it that people are not vaccinated for polio or smallpox? Should we be? Smallpox vaccination has been a hot topic for the past few years. Why do so many people think that vaccines are linked to developmental problems such as autism? (They most likely are wrong, but I understand their concerns.) Why don't Americans receive vaccinations against TB?
If you are arguing that we should employ genetic treatments when they are safe and effective, I agree. Few people would disagree. The real argument, however, concerns real treatments that always, always carry the possibilities of risk and benefit. Any argument that fails to address these cases is a waste of our time.
A pie in the sky essay about health and freedom is nice and happy, but silly and worthless. I, too, would like to reduce suffering in the world. I, too, believe that cures and better than treatments that lessen symptoms. I, too, favor prevention before a problem starts over treatment after a problem has developed. Please stop making these arguments. They have no end and fail to advance the discussion. Bring some facts. Bring some numbers. Bring anything that constiutes a real argument. Blathering on about how great it would be to cure diseases has begun to wear thin with me. I never argued otherwise.
I did argue that these ideas of "weakness" are wrong because they are based on the world of 100 years ago. That's not evolution. Real organisms are selected based on the environments in which they live. Your ideas about fitness are nothing unless they actually describe reality. Arguments about catastrophes are no good. All catastrophes will be catastrophic. Arguments about increased numbers of people with problems are no good unless you show me how these numbers will significantly increase. Address the questions of population genetics. I'm not missing any key element. I'm thinking about the real world, not fantastic ideas of catastrophes, utopias and miracle cures, and I have a real understanding of evolution.
I don't think that human activity is outside that sphere. "Natural selection" simply means that some organisms live and reproduce more than others. The reasons why come after the facts.
Brothers and sisters. Considering that all parents are cousins, genetically unrelated siblings are impossible.
You state that
".. having the ability to do something is worthless if it does not lead to increased reproductive success"... my reply is so what? This does not stop it from happening. Providing it does not hinder reproductive success then it will not change.
Genes without much selection pressure on them tend to drift and change, possibly even disappear. That's so what.
Your sickle cell examples argues that evolution only builds on existing material and that it relies on randomness. I agree.
I am aware of many genetic diseases. What is your point? If we have treatments that allow people with them to survive and reproduce, what is the problem? Sure, there are many people alive today who would not have survived 100 years ago or 1000 years ago. To point out the obvious, we do not live then.
We need "eradication" to remain at the same level. What are these levels? I am not aware of any levels. If they exist, is there any reason that a particular level is better or worse? From a population genetics standpoint, having a more diverse gene pool can allow survival of at least a few individuals through a tough time.
Your main argument is wrong. If we can treat what you consider ailments, how are they such terrible hindrances? If somebody can have babies who grow up and reproduce who then have babies who grow up and reproduce... the person must have been good enough. We live in the stage that we are just being kept alive by food, food that very few of us actually produce, already. Being as self sustaining as possible is a bad goal, and all organisms need to do things to avoid death.
I, too, hope we can learn to treat genetically based diseases. Genetics does seem like the most promising approach for many of them. It is wrong, however, to believe whatever treatments we devise, genetic or not, will come without costs. Maybe genetic manipulation is good in some cases. In others, maybe not. Nobody knows.