You don't think people would want to watch videos of people having sex? I used to masturbate while looking at underwear catalogs. The problem with the plan is that 'degrading porn' is a red herring. Why don't we ban non-erotic media that are violent or degrading? I have a hunch that many of the anti-porn crusaders just don't like it when people masturbate.
That is an interesting assumption on your part. On the other hand, from people I know who work at schools, there is an increasing problem of boys who don't seem to realize that girlfriends don't like being treated like porn starts and girls who think it's normal for sex to be all about the man's sexual gratification and not the woman's.
At the very least, we have a problem with porn being the only sexual education some of these kids are getting.
Doesn't that suggest that we should produce ideal porn that sends the messages that we want to send? Perhaps there could be government sponsered healthy porn.
So what you're saying is that it's better to play genetic roulette than it is to intervene or direct? Do we dare to disturb the universe in its natural state? That argument could be used against any endeavour. If humanity's hubris is so risky and/or counterproductive, then shouldn't we abandon the discipline of engineering and medicine as well? (Cf. Caveman Science Fiction)
Given that any intelligent god that wasn't born on earth would be (by definition) an extraterrestrial intelligence, do any religious people expect SETI to one day contact one of the gods or find evidence for their existence?
Allocating personal responsibility is just another way of saying that we assign rewards and punishments to various actions. We use punishments and reward to control people's behavior.
Responsibility is a somewhat less morally neutral term than terms such as reward and punish given that responsibility typically implies a set of obligations and proscriptions that are subject to moral censure or legal consequence.
Doesn't the resurrection explanation lack plausibility? Almost any explanation is more credible than the resurrection story. How do we know that anyone really saw a genuine post-crucifixion Jesus? Jesus could have had a twin or Doppelganger. What if zombie Jesus wasn't even human. It could have been a jesus-shaped cloud of robotic nano-ants that the martyrs saw. Maybe someone was influencing the martyrs testimony with a behavior modification device.
If Jesus had the ability to return from the grave then surely he would have the power to time travel. Time traveling powers are no more far-fetched than resurrection powers. All of the above explanations are slightly more credible than the resurrection story.
Just as copyright law restricts people's right to copy, performance rights restrict people's right to perform.
Re:Dogs follow the same rules of genetics
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Examining a dog's eyes or hips will not tell you which unexpressed genes the dog is carrying. Sequencing a dog's DNA, though expensive, can yield information about the dog's health. The problem is that the genes associated with many diseases are still undiscovered.
Breeders may have been able to reduce the number of puppies born with specific conditions, but the risks associated with the founder effect are still there.
Re:Dogs follow the same rules of genetics
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
When you breed animals free from genetic issues, you have a much better chance for offspring that are free from genetic issues.
How would you find dogs that are "free of genetic issues"? It's too expensive to routinely sequence the DNA of pets, and we haven't yet identified the genes that code for many rare genetic disorders. If you could find dogs that were free of deleterious alleles, then feel free to mate them with their immediate families.
A healthy individual, be it dog or human, is likely to have several recessive genes that code for rare genetic disorders. Those genes seldom pose a problem unless we mate with someone who happens to carry the same gene. This is one of the reasons why breeding within a small gene pool often leeds to the expression of rare birth defects. I understand why dog breeders are defensive about the problems associated with the founder effect. Nevertheless, it is possible to address a non-scolarly audience without spreading misinformation and abusing terms like hybrid vigor.
Jennie Chen's essay made the point that outbreeding does not guarantee the health of the progeny. She also discussed the issue that dogs do not always carry the same number of genes that code for diseases. She shouldn't have polluted the essay with misleading and false statements.
For all intensive purposes of dog breeding, you assume that the parents are passing on their genes.
For all intensive purposes, huh? I know it's rude to point out spelling, grammatical, an typographical errors, but I think I'm doing you a favor.
Dogs follow the same rules of genetics
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
This is more of a semantic issue, but I don't think that many biologists would claim that dogs are exempt from basic products of sexual reproduction such as hybrid vigor.
The Backcross Project link that you provided in one of your previous posts shows how the principle of hybrid vigor was applied by Robert Schaible to improve the health of his Dalmatians. If hybrid vigor did not exist in dogs (i.e. a diverse pedigree conferred no advantage), then it would be perfectly acceptable to sire many puppies with the same stud. Hybrid vigor is merely the converse of inbreeding depression. True, heterosis is no panacea. Biologist have observed hybrid depression as well as more neutral products of heterozygosity and outbreeding. The fact that outbreeding is not a surefire way to insure genetic health shouldn't lead us to conclude that hybrid vigor is non-existant (or non-existant in dogs).
The person who wrote the last link in your post has some strange ideas about genetics.
e.g. Puppies cannot have genes that the parents DON'T have. It isn't possible.
Hasn't Jennie Chen heard of mutation?
Another error:
What happens when you mix 2 bad sets of genes? You get puppies with bad genes! Duh! 2 unhealthy parents don't make 1 healthy puppy, unless it was a miracle.
I don't see why thick ankles should indicate future weight problems. If anything, I would expect the opposite. It seems that a group of 60 kg women whose ankles measured 24 cm in circumference (and who measured 172 cm in height) would have a lower average body fat percentage than a group of 60 kg women (height: 172 cm) with 19 cm ankles. This would suggest that the thick ankled women from the first group have a higher basal metabolic rate, making it harder for them to become obese.
Maybe you and your doctor friend are are making an erroneous association between older women who suffer from edema, and a younger subset of women who happen to have sturdy frames.
If the mutation that characterizes a race or breed is both rare and recessive (e.g. the mutation that codes for the white tiger phenotype), the early stages of the breeding program will involve mating very close relatives with each other. Close is a relative term. I don't think inbreeding is the exclusive domain of brother-sister mating. Is "line breeding" a euphemism for inbreeding?
According to Mendel's principles of inheritance, if breeding group A and breeding group B share more homologous alleles with each other than they do with breeding group C, we should expect the resultant progeny of pairings between group A and B to express more recessive traits than the progeny of A and C pairings.
The genes that code for a dog's fur coloration do not necessarily influence the dog's hearing ability. Purebred dogs are more likely to express deleterious recessive genes because they are inbred.
Re:So then you argue in favor
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Why does one need to be perfect before having a preference for a particular ankle circumference? I prefer partners with thick ankles, perhaps as a way to balance out my thin ankles.
In vitro fertilization could be a means of breeding without sex.
Re:So then you argue in favor
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
Whenever you see a young lady with a good body...but has thick ankles, you know that in a few years, she will put on the pounds. Maybe it is the same gene for being overweight and the thick ankles.
You know the answer to that... Because even if every guy in the room was a "bad guy", some liberal out there (a lot of them actually) would be crying because we didn't give them a chance to surrender.
You have to understand when you're on the ground in the middle of a war there are good guys, bad guys, and unknowns. We're talking about a wartime invention which militaries might be using in actual battle. Don't tell me you don't understand what a "bad guy" is.
I get it now. There are good guys and bad guys. Bad guys are the people who deserve to die. Only a liberal cry-baby would mourn the loss of a bad guy. It's as simple as that really. Why didn't I figure that out earlier.
To the fighter on the ground, the target is a bad guy. Why sit here and worry about terminology? If I had said insurgent, someone would have said freedom fighter. If I had said enemy militant, someone would have said terrorist. If I had said target, someone would say that's sugar coating the situation.
Target is more objective. Targets sometimes end up dead from friendly fire.
The term enemy has a multi-directional connotation. It's understood that I am the enemy of my enemy. We're both enemies. Bad guy is a value laden term. It could lead simple people to believe that the violent acts committed against the bad people are automatically justifiable.
They do not want lefty intellectual types who are going to sit there in the middle of fire fight and agonize over whether or not to pull the trigger...
You don't have to be a lefty to consider whether or not your target is a threat before pulling the trigger.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think people would want to watch videos of people having sex? I used to masturbate while looking at underwear catalogs. The problem with the plan is that 'degrading porn' is a red herring. Why don't we ban non-erotic media that are violent or degrading? I have a hunch that many of the anti-porn crusaders just don't like it when people masturbate.
That is an interesting assumption on your part. On the other hand, from people I know who work at schools, there is an increasing problem of boys who don't seem to realize that girlfriends don't like being treated like porn starts and girls who think it's normal for sex to be all about the man's sexual gratification and not the woman's.
At the very least, we have a problem with porn being the only sexual education some of these kids are getting.
Doesn't that suggest that we should produce ideal porn that sends the messages that we want to send? Perhaps there could be government sponsered healthy porn.
So what you're saying is that it's better to play genetic roulette than it is to intervene or direct? Do we dare to disturb the universe in its natural state? That argument could be used against any endeavour. If humanity's hubris is so risky and/or counterproductive, then shouldn't we abandon the discipline of engineering and medicine as well? (Cf. Caveman Science Fiction)
Transfer your keys to a Keyport Slide.
Yes, thats why I added the "...wasn't born on Earth clause".
Given that any intelligent god that wasn't born on earth would be (by definition) an extraterrestrial intelligence, do any religious people expect SETI to one day contact one of the gods or find evidence for their existence?
Allocating personal responsibility is just another way of saying that we assign rewards and punishments to various actions. We use punishments and reward to control people's behavior.
Responsibility is a somewhat less morally neutral term than terms such as reward and punish given that responsibility typically implies a set of obligations and proscriptions that are subject to moral censure or legal consequence.
I accidentally rated your comment 'redundant'
posting to undo.
I was sexually active at age 15, and masturbated much more than I do now.
Doesn't the resurrection explanation lack plausibility? Almost any explanation is more credible than the resurrection story. How do we know that anyone really saw a genuine post-crucifixion Jesus? Jesus could have had a twin or Doppelganger. What if zombie Jesus wasn't even human. It could have been a jesus-shaped cloud of robotic nano-ants that the martyrs saw. Maybe someone was influencing the martyrs testimony with a behavior modification device.
If Jesus had the ability to return from the grave then surely he would have the power to time travel. Time traveling powers are no more far-fetched than resurrection powers. All of the above explanations are slightly more credible than the resurrection story.
Just as copyright law restricts people's right to copy, performance rights restrict people's right to perform.
Examining a dog's eyes or hips will not tell you which unexpressed genes the dog is carrying. Sequencing a dog's DNA, though expensive, can yield information about the dog's health. The problem is that the genes associated with many diseases are still undiscovered.
Breeders may have been able to reduce the number of puppies born with specific conditions, but the risks associated with the founder effect are still there.
When you breed animals free from genetic issues, you have a much better chance for offspring that are free from genetic issues.
How would you find dogs that are "free of genetic issues"? It's too expensive to routinely sequence the DNA of pets, and we haven't yet identified the genes that code for many rare genetic disorders. If you could find dogs that were free of deleterious alleles, then feel free to mate them with their immediate families.
A healthy individual, be it dog or human, is likely to have several recessive genes that code for rare genetic disorders. Those genes seldom pose a problem unless we mate with someone who happens to carry the same gene. This is one of the reasons why breeding within a small gene pool often leeds to the expression of rare birth defects. I understand why dog breeders are defensive about the problems associated with the founder effect. Nevertheless, it is possible to address a non-scolarly audience without spreading misinformation and abusing terms like hybrid vigor.
Jennie Chen's essay made the point that outbreeding does not guarantee the health of the progeny. She also discussed the issue that dogs do not always carry the same number of genes that code for diseases. She shouldn't have polluted the essay with misleading and false statements.
For all intensive purposes of dog breeding, you assume that the parents are passing on their genes.
For all intensive purposes, huh? I know it's rude to point out spelling, grammatical, an typographical errors, but I think I'm doing you a favor.
Please read the following pages:
Link
Link
This is more of a semantic issue, but I don't think that many biologists would claim that dogs are exempt from basic products of sexual reproduction such as hybrid vigor.
The Backcross Project link that you provided in one of your previous posts shows how the principle of hybrid vigor was applied by Robert Schaible to improve the health of his Dalmatians. If hybrid vigor did not exist in dogs (i.e. a diverse pedigree conferred no advantage), then it would be perfectly acceptable to sire many puppies with the same stud. Hybrid vigor is merely the converse of inbreeding depression. True, heterosis is no panacea. Biologist have observed hybrid depression as well as more neutral products of heterozygosity and outbreeding. The fact that outbreeding is not a surefire way to insure genetic health shouldn't lead us to conclude that hybrid vigor is non-existant (or non-existant in dogs).
The person who wrote the last link in your post has some strange ideas about genetics.
e.g. Puppies cannot have genes that the parents DON'T have. It isn't possible.
Hasn't Jennie Chen heard of mutation?
Another error:
What happens when you mix 2 bad sets of genes? You get puppies with bad genes! Duh! 2 unhealthy parents don't make 1 healthy puppy, unless it was a miracle.
Someone needs to tell Jennie Chen about epistasis, regression towards the mean, and heterozygosity.
I don't see why thick ankles should indicate future weight problems. If anything, I would expect the opposite. It seems that a group of 60 kg women whose ankles measured 24 cm in circumference (and who measured 172 cm in height) would have a lower average body fat percentage than a group of 60 kg women (height: 172 cm) with 19 cm ankles. This would suggest that the thick ankled women from the first group have a higher basal metabolic rate, making it harder for them to become obese.
Maybe you and your doctor friend are are making an erroneous association between older women who suffer from edema, and a younger subset of women who happen to have sturdy frames.
There you go. Outbreeding is used to dilute the abundance of deleterious homozygous alleles. Biologists sometimes call this hybrid vigor or heterosis.
I don't know much about Dalmation pedigrees.
If the mutation that characterizes a race or breed is both rare and recessive (e.g. the mutation that codes for the white tiger phenotype), the early stages of the breeding program will involve mating very close relatives with each other. Close is a relative term. I don't think inbreeding is the exclusive domain of brother-sister mating. Is "line breeding" a euphemism for inbreeding?
According to Mendel's principles of inheritance, if breeding group A and breeding group B share more homologous alleles with each other than they do with breeding group C, we should expect the resultant progeny of pairings between group A and B to express more recessive traits than the progeny of A and C pairings.
The genes that code for a dog's fur coloration do not necessarily influence the dog's hearing ability. Purebred dogs are more likely to express deleterious recessive genes because they are inbred.
"If we don't play God, who will?" - James Watson
Why does one need to be perfect before having a preference for a particular ankle circumference? I prefer partners with thick ankles, perhaps as a way to balance out my thin ankles.
In vitro fertilization could be a means of breeding without sex.
Whenever you see a young lady with a good body...but has thick ankles, you know that in a few years, she will put on the pounds. Maybe it is the same gene for being overweight and the thick ankles.
I've heard that before. Where did you read this?
You know the answer to that... Because even if every guy in the room was a "bad guy", some liberal out there (a lot of them actually) would be crying because we didn't give them a chance to surrender.
You have to understand when you're on the ground in the middle of a war there are good guys, bad guys, and unknowns. We're talking about a wartime invention which militaries might be using in actual battle. Don't tell me you don't understand what a "bad guy" is.
I get it now. There are good guys and bad guys. Bad guys are the people who deserve to die. Only a liberal cry-baby would mourn the loss of a bad guy. It's as simple as that really. Why didn't I figure that out earlier.
To the fighter on the ground, the target is a bad guy. Why sit here and worry about terminology? If I had said insurgent, someone would have said freedom fighter. If I had said enemy militant, someone would have said terrorist. If I had said target, someone would say that's sugar coating the situation.
Target is more objective. Targets sometimes end up dead from friendly fire.
The term enemy has a multi-directional connotation. It's understood that I am the enemy of my enemy. We're both enemies. Bad guy is a value laden term. It could lead simple people to believe that the violent acts committed against the bad people are automatically justifiable.
They do not want lefty intellectual types who are going to sit there in the middle of fire fight and agonize over whether or not to pull the trigger...
You don't have to be a lefty to consider whether or not your target is a threat before pulling the trigger.