Fear of competition shouldn't justify laws that require parents to risk the heath of their offspring by passing defective DNA on to the next generation.
The odds favor the younger generation whether their genes are compiled by blind chance, or precision engineering. Our fate is to grow old and die, while the next generation becomes stronger and more educated.
Can you name any proponents of this "crude behaviorism" that you speak of?
Regarding the philosophical origins of behaviorism, I'd argue that the early behaviorists such as John Watson and B. F. Skinner were influenced by Empiricism, Pragmatism, and Logical Positivism.
I don't consider the terms mind or mental state to be meaningless, it's just that I haven't encountered evidence to suggest that they have an independent existence without reference to an animals environment, physiology, or overt behavior. I consider mentalistic models less necessary as we improve our models of nervous systems, endocrine systems, and their interaction with the world.
So you're both right.
I still contend that zeitgeist_chaser is misinformed.
Still, unless Apple gave a substantial incentive, it seem extravagant to purchase 1100 G5s and the tower accommodating racks to house them, only to upgrade them a few months later.
Also, a savvy Slashdot reader, leaked the plans some time before the upgrade was officially announced.
Does anyone know what the university got in return for allowing Apple to film the installation and staff for the Xserve promotional videos? A reduced price upgrade may have been part of the initial agreement
Statements like "...behaviorism completely discounts the existence internal or "private" mental states." misinform others and expose your ignorance.
Some people look at the at the wealth of behaviorist research that shows how the environment influences the behavior of an organism and come to the erroneous conclusion that behaviorists must disbelieve in emotion or subjective experience. This may stem from the fact that behavioral science (like virtually all technical fields) has certain conventions regarding nomenclature. An ignorant person may come across unfamiliar terms in a behaviorist journal, and assume that they are meaningless.
The language used in research may seem strange or unnecessarily convoluted to those used to discussing behavior in colloquial terms using concepts inherited from various forms of folk wisdom.
Some researchers, for instance, find an unqualified use of a word like 'hunger' to lack the precision needed for professional discourse. When we speak of a hungry rat we mean that the rat has been deprived of food for a prolonged length of time, and/or that the rat is showing a marked tendency to pursue food. Some people jump to the conclusion that their subjective sensations resulting from food deprivation are identical or similar to that of rats. A behaviorist is more likely to be concerned by relevant data such as: the duration that the rat been deprived of food, the activity level of the rat, the satiating effects of previous meals, etc.
If you are curious about the field, you should read Science and Human Behavior particularly, chapter 10: Emotion, Chapter 16: Thinking, and chapter 17:Private Events in a Natural Science. It was written by B. F. Skinner, and is widely considered to be an important part of the behaviorist cannon.
The dismissive tone of your previous posts makes me believe that you probably won't read any of Skinners work, but I nonetheless urge others to get their information from an authoritative source before they echo hollow criticisms.
Yes, but the entire measurable universe is physical. All phenomena are either physical or fanciful.
Given the limited nature of our perceptions, we may suppose that there are phenomena that we have not perceived, do not perceive, and cannot perceive. The problem is that there is not much to be said about the undetectable. It is unlikely that we could arbitrarily create an accurate model of something we know nothing about.
I'm curious about what the alternate philosophical points are.
If we consider that the onus is placed upon the party making claims, then the physical/nonphysical self question is answered to my satisfaction. I have no reason to suspect that I have any more nonphysical components than a transistor radio does.
Just out of curiosity, how could an occurrence be neither lawfully governed nor random?
I really don't know what kind of words sell products these days.
If we copy current naming conventions for portable electronics, it should probably start with a lowercase 'i', 'c' or 'x' and maybe incorporate the term 'eXtreme'.
It might be best if we can get the advice of the group that decided to rebrand 'jungle' as 'rain forest', 'swamp' as 'wetlands' and 'copy restriction license violation' as 'theft'.
If open source developers are ever going to shake their image of being zealots, they need more of the kind of self aware pragmatism that this article provides.
Defensively crying "troll" in response to criticism isn't going to help matters any.
Even if the amount methanol in these AA size cells poses no risk, I still think manufactures should consider changing the changing the name of the devices to something other than "fuel cell"; If, for no other reason, than to quell the paranoia of the litigation prone public and the sensationalist press.
It's a sad state of affairs, but PR and marketing can make all the difference to the acceptance of a nascent technologh.
We all know that they should have initially done what any self-respecting programmer would have done- given the software a name with a recursive acronym.
Yes, of course embryos produced by human mothers are human. Just like my skin cells are human. Yet I feel no remorse when I slaughter my HUMAN skin cells by the thousands by taking a bath.
Why do I feel no sympathy for the billions of embryos and skin cells that are being murdered as I type this?
It's not because they are inhuman. Hell, my skin cells have my DNA. They're part of my family. They're part of me.
I have no sympathy for them because they lack a cerebral cortex, and there is no reason to belive that anything can suffer unless it has a cerebral cortex. If you don't believe me, you can try a little experiment: First anaesthetize your cerebral cortex then have your lab partner make an incision or insert a hot needle into your flesh (preferably somewhere with an abundance of nerve endings). You'll feel the same thing that embryos feel: nothing.
Personally, if I truly believed that I was immortal (in the sense that I would be magically teleported to heaven at the point of my death) I would beg people to kill me, and I would refuse all lifesaving medical treatment.
I think you're missing the point. Your argument would make sense if i23098's religion was lobbying to ban the development of software or transistor research, but s/he's not. So, posting on slashdot isn't hypocritical. The problem with so many of today's technophobes, is that they want all of the benefits of past research but refuse to accept the risk incurred by current research.
If you are being honest about refusing to be helped by the tech yielded from stemcell research, then I respect your consistency. Just I respect the Amish more than SUV driving Cassandras.
Weaken humanity? How so? I don't think that the advancement of medical technology will prove to be a liability for our species.
Somatically, we're not that impressive compared to other animals. It's our technologies that allowed our population to blossom to its current level. With the power of written and spoken communication, humans can harness the power of memetic evolution to adapt. This make the survival of our particular breed of primates less dependent on natural genetic selection.
I was originally going to post: "How would psychotropic drugs work if consciousness were not chemically based?", but I didn't expect a response this far down an off topic thread.
What does "chemically based" mean?
You're familiar with the periodic table of elements, right? Anything that's made up of those elements on the table is "chemically based". Or, to put it in simpler terms, anything that has mass is made of chemicals.
Now I concur that some explanatory fictions involving human perception and behavior have been around long before Mendeleev wrote the periodic table. And because of a terribly potent mixture of willful ignorance, wishful optimism, and lack of education, some of these fictions still exist.
There are things about chemicals and animals which we don't understand properly and may never.
Yes, there are limits to our knowledge, but that is no reason to give up the process of discovery. We shouldn't assume that, because we are fallible, that all explanations are equally invalid.
Open up any neuroscience textbook and you'll find that we know a great deal about how the brain works. You will learn that consciousness can be shut on and off like a light switch with the correct application of chemical or electrical stimulation. You may even come up with a more nuanced definition of the term "consciousness".
What you won't find in the book are chapters on ghosts, homeopathy, chakras, or chi. Why is that? It's not because neuroscientists have a personal grudge against venerable cultures. It's because those concepts add nothing to a functional analysis of the brain and its behavior. They don't help the surgeon, the pharmacist or the medical researcher.
Drugs are [made of] chemicals.
[Some]Drugs alter consciousness
Therefore... Consciousness must be a chemical? Consciousness must be a property of chemicals? Consciousness is an energy emitted by chemicals?
Consciousness is more of a subjective interpretation of a particular set of biochemical events. Consciousness is certainly not a single chemical. I wouldn't call it a chemical property. It's more of a side effect. Anyway, the term "chemical property" is more closely associated with inorganic chemistry than biochemistry. There is no reason to believe that consciousness is a type of energy either.
Why not just: Consciousness interacts with the chemicals of the brain.
I don't support that statement because it implies that consciousness has a non-chemical or non-brain existence. Consciousness has never been verifiably found to exist outside the brain, and I've found no evidence to suggest that it's even possible.
You may still want evidence for the chemical conception of the brain. I suggest you look in any neuroscience journal. Consult with a brain surgeon. Look in the thousands of neurology, anatomy, or physiology texts that have been published. What you'll unearth are literally millions of experiments that demonstrate that virtually every emotion, every perception, or every motive, can be altered or controlled through the correct application of electrodes, drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.... or just read this post
Well, outside of a very limited context, it becomes increasingly less feasible to prove a negative statement unless there is some kind of internal contradiction.
I can say with a high degree of certainty that there are no pterodactyls in my refrigerator, but it is more difficult to prove that there are no pterodactyls in the Milky Way galaxy. Because of our limited field of perception, it can be difficult to effectively disprove some of the more ridiculously unfounded assumptions. Science deals with this by placing the burden of proof on the party making claims.
If there is no evidence (or can be no evidence) that can either strengthen or weaken the above claims, would a scientific mind simply conclude that more research (or more grants, if you're a professional) needs to be done?
While we may not have sufficient evidence to come to a conclusion for these three hypotheses I'll try to explain why they are tenable.
1. life has no meaning
Only tools and symbols have meaning. The entity that the English word "life" refers to is neither a tool nor is it a symbol and as such it has no meaning. I would further argue that symbols are a particular type of tool and words are a type of symbol.
2. there does not exist fundamental right/wrong
I don't know what fundamental right or wrong you, or the previous poster, are discussing. You'll find that there are varying opinions about what is right and what is wrong. Some claim that extraterrestrial codes regarding what is right or wrong exist, but to support those claims, one would first need to prove that the prescriptions were truly extraterrestrial in origin. This proof hasn't yet been convincingly presented, so we are left with human institutions to tell us what is right and wrong (unless we are discussing logic or mathematics).
3. consciousness does not survive beyond death
The process of death involves undergoing specific physiological changes. For instance the hydrocarbon chains that make up the eye decompose. If you'd like to see what that looks like, you should first find a fresh eye, remove it's blood supply, then watch it rot. If you'd like to get the first person perspective, you can perform a simple experiment. Take a clean scalpel or melonballer, and remove both your eyes.
If you would like to hear what a corpse hears, simply sever your auditory nerves.
When we measure the neural activity of a cadaver, we find that it is inactive, so to feel what a dead person feels you should excise your somatosensory cortex. Better yet, remove your whole Cerebral cortex.
We can anaesthetize or experimentally ablate your visual association cortex and induce prosopagnosia. Patients with prosopagnosia may pass standard visual tests, but lose the ability to recognize faces.
Damaging, anaesthetizing or excising the left temporal lobe can cause pure word deafness. Patients with this condition may be able to hear, read, speak and write, but no longer understand spoken language.
A skilled surgeon can slice away your brain, section by section, gradually removing each and every one of your perceptions and abilities until there are none left. Where does the soul hide then? What happened to the soul of a lobotomized subject? When a woman loses 30% of her brain tissue in a motorcycle accident did thirty percent of her essence go to Elysium? If a soldier has a severe, but non-fatal, stroke in battle, what part of his consciousness goes to Valhalla and what part of him does not? What does LSD do to the soul?
I never found the soul to be a satisfying explanatory fiction in the first place. If it was invented to explain why we are animated, it doesn't do it very well. It answers the question: "why do we do what we do?" by positing that there is a little man inside us that act as a puppet master. The Greeks argued for ceturies over whether the little man lived in the head or the heart. Descartes postulated that our behavior was controlled by th
You are just expressing disapproval, and not supporting your statements. I think children should be "protected" from Barney and Lamb Chop's sing-along, but that doesn't give me the right to ban or restrict people's access to it.
Your scenario only demonstrates the need to teach people better research skills and insulate ourselves so we may deal with information that makes us uncomfortable.
And yes, the COPA does indeed restrict depictions of conventional sex.
I don't know why your perfectly legitimate question was down modded. I suspect you hit a nerve.
What I want to know is where these rules about what is and isn't pornographic came from. For instance, you can view bare buttocks in movies, and sometimes on television, but if the cheeks are spread, then the depiction is given an age restricted rating. I've seen many R rated films that show women's pubic hair, but none that show the labia minora.
Where does it say that people of any age shouldn't see the anus or labia? I notice a trend in the rating system, but I must have missed the memo that forbids photos of labia. I don't think the bible says anything about labia. I honestly want to know where this taboo comes from.
Slashdot Mirror
So the repugnance is motivated by sour grapes.
Fear of competition shouldn't justify laws that require parents to risk the heath of their offspring by passing defective DNA on to the next generation.
The odds favor the younger generation whether their genes are compiled by blind chance, or precision engineering. Our fate is to grow old and die, while the next generation becomes stronger and more educated.
Regarding the philosophical origins of behaviorism, I'd argue that the early behaviorists such as John Watson and B. F. Skinner were influenced by Empiricism, Pragmatism, and Logical Positivism.
I don't consider the terms mind or mental state to be meaningless, it's just that I haven't encountered evidence to suggest that they have an independent existence without reference to an animals environment, physiology, or overt behavior. I consider mentalistic models less necessary as we improve our models of nervous systems, endocrine systems, and their interaction with the world.
I still contend that zeitgeist_chaser is misinformed.
Still, unless Apple gave a substantial incentive, it seem extravagant to purchase 1100 G5s and the tower accommodating racks to house them, only to upgrade them a few months later.
Also, a savvy Slashdot reader, leaked the plans some time before the upgrade was officially announced.
Does anyone know what the university got in return for allowing Apple to film the installation and staff for the Xserve promotional videos? A reduced price upgrade may have been part of the initial agreement
A model by model Apple history can be found here.
Statements like "...behaviorism completely discounts the existence internal or "private" mental states." misinform others and expose your ignorance.
Some people look at the at the wealth of behaviorist research that shows how the environment influences the behavior of an organism and come to the erroneous conclusion that behaviorists must disbelieve in emotion or subjective experience. This may stem from the fact that behavioral science (like virtually all technical fields) has certain conventions regarding nomenclature. An ignorant person may come across unfamiliar terms in a behaviorist journal, and assume that they are meaningless.
The language used in research may seem strange or unnecessarily convoluted to those used to discussing behavior in colloquial terms using concepts inherited from various forms of folk wisdom.
Some researchers, for instance, find an unqualified use of a word like 'hunger' to lack the precision needed for professional discourse. When we speak of a hungry rat we mean that the rat has been deprived of food for a prolonged length of time, and/or that the rat is showing a marked tendency to pursue food. Some people jump to the conclusion that their subjective sensations resulting from food deprivation are identical or similar to that of rats. A behaviorist is more likely to be concerned by relevant data such as: the duration that the rat been deprived of food, the activity level of the rat, the satiating effects of previous meals, etc.
If you are curious about the field, you should read Science and Human Behavior particularly, chapter 10: Emotion, Chapter 16: Thinking, and chapter 17:Private Events in a Natural Science. It was written by B. F. Skinner, and is widely considered to be an important part of the behaviorist cannon.
The dismissive tone of your previous posts makes me believe that you probably won't read any of Skinners work, but I nonetheless urge others to get their information from an authoritative source before they echo hollow criticisms.
Yes, but the entire measurable universe is physical. All phenomena are either physical or fanciful.
Given the limited nature of our perceptions, we may suppose that there are phenomena that we have not perceived, do not perceive, and cannot perceive. The problem is that there is not much to be said about the undetectable. It is unlikely that we could arbitrarily create an accurate model of something we know nothing about.
I'm curious about what the alternate philosophical points are.
If we consider that the onus is placed upon the party making claims, then the physical/nonphysical self question is answered to my satisfaction. I have no reason to suspect that I have any more nonphysical components than a transistor radio does.
Just out of curiosity, how could an occurrence be neither lawfully governed nor random?
To what should they change it?
I really don't know what kind of words sell products these days.
If we copy current naming conventions for portable electronics, it should probably start with a lowercase 'i', 'c' or 'x' and maybe incorporate the term 'eXtreme'.
It might be best if we can get the advice of the group that decided to rebrand 'jungle' as 'rain forest', 'swamp' as 'wetlands' and 'copy restriction license violation' as 'theft'.
If open source developers are ever going to shake their image of being zealots, they need more of the kind of self aware pragmatism that this article provides.
Defensively crying "troll" in response to criticism isn't going to help matters any.
Theft, murder, rape, war, etc. are all unstoppable too. So what's your point?
The point is that the US and EU may find it easier prevent misuse by regulating rather than banning cloning.
Even if the amount methanol in these AA size cells poses no risk, I still think manufactures should consider changing the changing the name of the devices to something other than "fuel cell"; If, for no other reason, than to quell the paranoia of the litigation prone public and the sensationalist press.
It's a sad state of affairs, but PR and marketing can make all the difference to the acceptance of a nascent technologh.
Yeah, what poseurs! I was a geek before it was kewl.
What is the default level on the geek hierarchy that the new trendy nerds enter at?
We all know that they should have initially done what any self-respecting programmer would have done- given the software a name with a recursive acronym.
Does this deity that you speak to say anything back to you?
If so, Cool!
I'd sure like to have conversations with gods.
Yes, of course embryos produced by human mothers are human. Just like my skin cells are human. Yet I feel no remorse when I slaughter my HUMAN skin cells by the thousands by taking a bath.
Why do I feel no sympathy for the billions of embryos and skin cells that are being murdered as I type this?
It's not because they are inhuman. Hell, my skin cells have my DNA. They're part of my family. They're part of me.
I have no sympathy for them because they lack a cerebral cortex, and there is no reason to belive that anything can suffer unless it has a cerebral cortex. If you don't believe me, you can try a little experiment: First anaesthetize your cerebral cortex then have your lab partner make an incision or insert a hot needle into your flesh (preferably somewhere with an abundance of nerve endings). You'll feel the same thing that embryos feel: nothing.
Personally, if I truly believed that I was immortal (in the sense that I would be magically teleported to heaven at the point of my death) I would beg people to kill me, and I would refuse all lifesaving medical treatment.
I think you're missing the point. Your argument would make sense if i23098's religion was lobbying to ban the development of software or transistor research, but s/he's not. So, posting on slashdot isn't hypocritical. The problem with so many of today's technophobes, is that they want all of the benefits of past research but refuse to accept the risk incurred by current research.
If you are being honest about refusing to be helped by the tech yielded from stemcell research, then I respect your consistency. Just I respect the Amish more than SUV driving Cassandras.
Weaken humanity? How so? I don't think that the advancement of medical technology will prove to be a liability for our species.
Somatically, we're not that impressive compared to other animals. It's our technologies that allowed our population to blossom to its current level. With the power of written and spoken communication, humans can harness the power of memetic evolution to adapt. This make the survival of our particular breed of primates less dependent on natural genetic selection.
I was originally going to post: "How would psychotropic drugs work if consciousness were not chemically based?", but I didn't expect a response this far down an off topic thread.
... or just read this post
What does "chemically based" mean?
You're familiar with the periodic table of elements, right? Anything that's made up of those elements on the table is "chemically based". Or, to put it in simpler terms, anything that has mass is made of chemicals.
Now I concur that some explanatory fictions involving human perception and behavior have been around long before Mendeleev wrote the periodic table. And because of a terribly potent mixture of willful ignorance, wishful optimism, and lack of education, some of these fictions still exist.
There are things about chemicals and animals which we don't understand properly and may never.
Yes, there are limits to our knowledge, but that is no reason to give up the process of discovery. We shouldn't assume that, because we are fallible, that all explanations are equally invalid.
Open up any neuroscience textbook and you'll find that we know a great deal about how the brain works. You will learn that consciousness can be shut on and off like a light switch with the correct application of chemical or electrical stimulation. You may even come up with a more nuanced definition of the term "consciousness".
What you won't find in the book are chapters on ghosts, homeopathy, chakras, or chi. Why is that? It's not because neuroscientists have a personal grudge against venerable cultures. It's because those concepts add nothing to a functional analysis of the brain and its behavior. They don't help the surgeon, the pharmacist or the medical researcher.
Drugs are [made of] chemicals.
[Some]Drugs alter consciousness
Therefore...
Consciousness must be a chemical?
Consciousness must be a property of chemicals?
Consciousness is an energy emitted by chemicals?
Consciousness is more of a subjective interpretation of a particular set of biochemical events. Consciousness is certainly not a single chemical. I wouldn't call it a chemical property. It's more of a side effect. Anyway, the term "chemical property" is more closely associated with inorganic chemistry than biochemistry. There is no reason to believe that consciousness is a type of energy either.
Why not just:
Consciousness interacts with the chemicals of the brain.
I don't support that statement because it implies that consciousness has a non-chemical or non-brain existence. Consciousness has never been verifiably found to exist outside the brain, and I've found no evidence to suggest that it's even possible.
You may still want evidence for the chemical conception of the brain. I suggest you look in any neuroscience journal. Consult with a brain surgeon. Look in the thousands of neurology, anatomy, or physiology texts that have been published. What you'll unearth are literally millions of experiments that demonstrate that virtually every emotion, every perception, or every motive, can be altered or controlled through the correct application of electrodes, drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Psychotropic drugs would not work if consciousness was not chemically based.
Well, outside of a very limited context, it becomes increasingly less feasible to prove a negative statement unless there is some kind of internal contradiction.
I can say with a high degree of certainty that there are no pterodactyls in my refrigerator, but it is more difficult to prove that there are no pterodactyls in the Milky Way galaxy. Because of our limited field of perception, it can be difficult to effectively disprove some of the more ridiculously unfounded assumptions. Science deals with this by placing the burden of proof on the party making claims.
If there is no evidence (or can be no evidence) that can either strengthen or weaken the above claims, would a scientific mind simply conclude that more research (or more grants, if you're a professional) needs to be done?
While we may not have sufficient evidence to come to a conclusion for these three hypotheses I'll try to explain why they are tenable.
1. life has no meaning
Only tools and symbols have meaning. The entity that the English word "life" refers to is neither a tool nor is it a symbol and as such it has no meaning. I would further argue that symbols are a particular type of tool and words are a type of symbol.
2. there does not exist fundamental right/wrong
I don't know what fundamental right or wrong you, or the previous poster, are discussing. You'll find that there are varying opinions about what is right and what is wrong. Some claim that extraterrestrial codes regarding what is right or wrong exist, but to support those claims, one would first need to prove that the prescriptions were truly extraterrestrial in origin. This proof hasn't yet been convincingly presented, so we are left with human institutions to tell us what is right and wrong (unless we are discussing logic or mathematics).
3. consciousness does not survive beyond death
The process of death involves undergoing specific physiological changes. For instance the hydrocarbon chains that make up the eye decompose. If you'd like to see what that looks like, you should first find a fresh eye, remove it's blood supply, then watch it rot. If you'd like to get the first person perspective, you can perform a simple experiment. Take a clean scalpel or melonballer, and remove both your eyes.
If you would like to hear what a corpse hears, simply sever your auditory nerves.
When we measure the neural activity of a cadaver, we find that it is inactive, so to feel what a dead person feels you should excise your somatosensory cortex. Better yet, remove your whole Cerebral cortex.
We can anaesthetize or experimentally ablate your visual association cortex and induce prosopagnosia. Patients with prosopagnosia may pass standard visual tests, but lose the ability to recognize faces.
Damaging, anaesthetizing or excising the left temporal lobe can cause pure word deafness. Patients with this condition may be able to hear, read, speak and write, but no longer understand spoken language.
A skilled surgeon can slice away your brain, section by section, gradually removing each and every one of your perceptions and abilities until there are none left. Where does the soul hide then? What happened to the soul of a lobotomized subject? When a woman loses 30% of her brain tissue in a motorcycle accident did thirty percent of her essence go to Elysium? If a soldier has a severe, but non-fatal, stroke in battle, what part of his consciousness goes to Valhalla and what part of him does not? What does LSD do to the soul?
I never found the soul to be a satisfying explanatory fiction in the first place. If it was invented to explain why we are animated, it doesn't do it very well. It answers the question: "why do we do what we do?" by positing that there is a little man inside us that act as a puppet master. The Greeks argued for ceturies over whether the little man lived in the head or the heart. Descartes postulated that our behavior was controlled by th
You are just expressing disapproval, and not supporting your statements. I think children should be "protected" from Barney and Lamb Chop's sing-along, but that doesn't give me the right to ban or restrict people's access to it.
Your scenario only demonstrates the need to teach people better research skills and insulate ourselves so we may deal with information that makes us uncomfortable.
And yes, the COPA does indeed restrict depictions of conventional sex.
I don't know why your perfectly legitimate question was down modded. I suspect you hit a nerve.
What I want to know is where these rules about what is and isn't pornographic came from. For instance, you can view bare buttocks in movies, and sometimes on television, but if the cheeks are spread, then the depiction is given an age restricted rating. I've seen many R rated films that show women's pubic hair, but none that show the labia minora.
Where does it say that people of any age shouldn't see the anus or labia? I notice a trend in the rating system, but I must have missed the memo that forbids photos of labia. I don't think the bible says anything about labia. I honestly want to know where this taboo comes from.
Can anyone help?