To echo what the others have said, solving the structure isn't the end-all be-all. For instance in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) a protein called superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) has been implicated as playing a role in the disease. Exactly how is unkown, but 10% of patients with the familial type of ALS have mutations to the gene. However, there are (last I looked a couple of years ago--I don't study the disease) about 80 or so different SOD1 mutations so linked. We have x-ray crystallographic structures of many of the SOD1 mutants, but despite the years of effort and tens of millions of dollars in obtaining and studying the structures they tell us very little. The mutations map all over the structure and there are no obvious reasons why the majority of them would do anything--the best guesses are they slightly destabilize the structure leading to formation of amyloid plaques and/or they alter the metal binding affinity potentially leading to different enzymatic functionality--which was suggested before we had hardly any SOD1 structures.
One area I've been reading on a lot lately is bacterial pathogens and how they interact with the host. The guys leading us to potential targets are usually the geneticists, with the molbio and cell bio guys teasing out a number more and really cluing us into the molecular interactions. Protein structure's kind of the bottom feeder. Not bashing structural biology--that's my area of expertise. Everybody likes having the structures and an important structure will feed back into experiments for the molbio and cell bio guys. But a structure by itself doesn't necessarily mean anything. The structural genomics groups crank out crystal structures by the dozen but often don't know anything about their protein's physiological function. So it's data on a shelf waiting to be interpreted.
"I think you have a rather overestimated opinion of people's political awareness."
Not really. I'm just remembering the time I spent living in the midwest and comparing that with the views of friends and family living there and in the south. Many viscerally hate Sen. Clinton, yet about nobody could tell you a position she's got except on abortion, and a few might recall the health care fiasco. They just remember really not liking her when she was the first lady. I picked her to win only the states that voted for Kerry and Gore since she won't be able to break into new areas, and also subtracted a few marginal states that mainly border or are in the south or midwest. I don't think any of this boils down to issues at all-just the person.
No worries about that. The Democrats might infact be dumb enough to nominate Senator Clinton for president, we all know her name is often bandied about as a strong possibility, and she's done some activities that look like someone building a warchest. However, she has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected against any remotely reasonable Republican candidate. She'd take most of the northeast, and probably three of Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California, but in the rest of the country she'd win Illinois and maybe one or two others. It'd be an electoral vote blowout. Lots of people in the interior and south still hate her from back in the Clinton administration, and a presidential campaign is unlikely to change that. Unfortunately, the stronger the likelihood of Senator Clinton being nominated, the less likely the Republicans will have a moderate nominee.
Nothing required him to put his synthesis in the public domain. For taking the synthesis of a drug like Tamilflu from a small batch process with expensive starting materials to mass production with cheap bulk commodity chemicals a drug manufacturer would be willing to shell out millions.
Electoconvulsive therapy's been used for a long time for treating a variety of mental problems, including depression. This shouldn't have some of the negatives--a friend of mine had ECT done about 15 years back as a last-ditch treatment for severe depression and as a result has a six-month gap in her memory. Plus, the aim of ECT (according to almighty wikipedia) is to induce a grand mal seizure for about a minute. This is definitely not what deep brain stimulation's doing!
What happened when the lab I worked in got a paper in PNAS was the university contacted the prof to get a press release worked up after the paper was accepted for publication (disclaimer: I had nothing to do with any of it, other than coming up with the press release title). The press release was, um, released, and a day or two later he was contacted by the local paper who published a nice little article. So all that happened was a solid science paper got peer-reviewed and published in a very high-profile journal and a nice little bit of public education happened with the aid of the local paper. On the next grant application, I imagine the boss will have a sentence in there saying the lab got local media coverage, ain't that nifty, which will very slightly improve the chances of the grant being accepted. That's it.
Thornton's at the same university (U. Oregon GO DUCKS!), so it went along the same lines. Thornton did some really cool research, got it through peer review and published in Science (which is really, really hard. Most scientists will never get an article in Science), and then this media stuff happened. Whether he approached the university for a press release or vice versa I couldn't tell you, but he most certainly did not approach the NY Times. I imagine no one is more surprised than Thornton about all the hoopla. Pleased, sure. It'll serve him well in a couple years when he's up for tenure, but the tenure committee will care a lot more about the paper being published in Science than it being mentioned in the NY Times. They'll care even more about the science his lab's been doing over the last five years. Sure there are some that skip peer review and just sensationalize whatever they've got directly to the media, but that's not what's going on here.
While I agree with some of your post but your statement "In response to the ID debate, scientists have been motivated to clean up their acts. First, they have targeted specific areas of research that the ID proponents have harped on." is way off. The principle job of a scientist is to do research and you directly state we're not doing our jobs. That's pretty offensive especially since research in molecular evolution started back in the 60's when ID was still called creationism. Thornton's research is just (like I'll ever get a Science article!) the latest in a long chain of research. Thornton's study just didn't pop out of thin air either, since his first publication in that area goes back to 1998. Like any good scientist he did the study because it was something that interested him and could yield some new insights. That it punches yet another hole in the swiss cheese that is ID is just a side effect.
"...can any older Slashdotters explain what it was like when there were even worse government abuses than this, and what the catalyst was that finally got the people to act?"
Blood running in the streets is a pretty good catalyst, albeit with an obvious downside. However it requires citizens willing to put themselves on the line for their beliefs, and we're all too fat and happy with bread and circuses these days like another poster wrote. It also requires a free and independent media to report the news, otherwise you've just got a bunch of arrests for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in tiny type in the police blotter page F17. Today's media is dominated by a handful of colluding major corporations, the number shrinking each year with the aid of their friends in the FCC. It's much more important for them to turn a profit than to report the news, and properly reporting a riot about government policy X might not be in the best interests of the media conglomerates, especially if a major buyer of advertising is going to profit from policy X. This is why investigative journalism's been dead for decades, unless you want to count a 20/20 or 60 Minutes investigative story on some crap like laundry balls (Buy Tide!).
One of the things I'd do if I woke up tomorrow a billionaire would be to start up an endowment for a nonprofit media group, kinda sorta like BBC News, except free from direct government tampering. This would be right after I purchase a US Senator, requiring him/her to wear a rainbow wig and floppy clown shoes whenever they're on C-SPAN. The latter'd probably only cost a couple mill I bet.
People are welcome to believe whatever they want about religion and I don't care. They just can't call it science, and that's where your post goes horribly wrong. Intelligent Design's most recent reincarnation began in 1987. This was the year that teaching "scientific creationism" in public schools was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional in Edwards v. Aguilard. Also in this year, early drafts of the book Of Pandas and People started swapping out references of "creationism" and replacing it with "intelligent design" and "creationist" with "design propent," so at the beginning intelligent design == creationism, using little more than a word processor's search and replace function. This is exemplified by the instance of "cdesign proponentists" in place of "creationist," being found out in the the recent intelligent design lawsuit in Dover.
The Pandas wordswap was not the only piece of evidence in the Dover trial showing that Intelligent Design is just warmed over creationism, or even the most significant. Probably the most damning evidence came from the statements of the defense (Dover school board IDers). Classic bits from the trial transcript include moments where a member of the school board is shown to lie under oath to conceal the role of his church in procuring the alledgedly scientific and entirely non-religious Pandas book. Another is where Michael Behe admits under oath that calling Intelligent Design science requires revising the very definition of science, with the new definition making astrology science as well. Behe also admits that there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred. Fellow witnesses for the defense also provided ammunition in Jones' decision against ID. Wikipedia has writeups on both Of Pandas and People as well as on the Kitmiller v. Dover decision, together with links to the trial transcripts, Judge Jones' decision, and other relevant material.
So if ID isn't science, than what is it? It seems clear that it's religion. Besides the Dover trial, here's some supporting evidence ripped from a post I made a while back: 1. The Wedge Document, 2. the Discovery Institute is funded largely by Howard Ahmanson, a person who also funds relgious extremists such as the Chalcedon Foundation, which has the express aim of turning the US into a theocracy, 3. Prominent proponents of ID frequently speak in churches, just like proponents of creation science, 4. the Dover school board was defended by the Thomas Moore Law Center, which is "...a not-for-profit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. Our purpose is to be the sword and shield for people of faith, providing legal representation without charge to defend and protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square." (from their own website, 5. "Of Pandas and People" despite being an ID textbook was written by creationists, 6. Bill Dembski says "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory" (quoted from wikipedia, refering to Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4. July/August, 1999, the entire issue being devoted to supporting ID).
So again if someone wants to believe in god or not, that's fine by me. They can even believe that periodically God stops by to bring a flagella or something into existance in a "puff of smoke," to use Behe's view of Intelligent Design. They just can't call it science.
If this is not quashed in court, then it will become routine. Anytime a political party has the presidency and a stronger grip in the House or Senate, it will make the "mistake" of having two versions put up for a vote and have the president "fix" it all with a signing statement. The tools are in place for the power grab too. I originally looked at Alito as a right wing but respectable jurist, but then I read about his "unitary executive" views. Just imagine if Bush gets the line-item veto as well.
"Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives."
Got a link or bill number or something explicitly stating the president signed a bill before it was finalized by the House and Senate? I followed your links and I didn't see it. If this were true, it would represent a seismic shift in how bills become laws in the US. If it isn't, well, signing statements have been used by presidents since James Monroe. However Bush has issued 505 signing statements, which is more than all previous presidents combined by a large margin. Besides the sheer number of signing statements is that some have brashly said that the president disagrees with the law and reserves the "right" to ignore it, although since at least Reagan this has been done, IIRC, albeit very rarely. Most disturbing and new with Bush is the view that a signing statement not only signals how the signing president intends to execute the law, but that it has legal weight to be considered by the courts. This view of course is a legal fiction (in the horror genre!), but through the current makeup of the Supreme Court the Bush administration may have the necessary tools in place to change that.
I'd hope that it's only a minority of liberals that are anti-second amendment, but they're vocal about it and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. However Democrats would vastly improve their chances of election if they dropped the issue because precious few liberals are single-issue voters on the second amendment while the 3 million NRA members feel very strongly about it. Regarding your second point, the militia is defined under the United States Code Title 10 Chapter 13 Section 311 as being of two types: organized (National Guard and Naval Militia) and unorganized (members who aren't of the first two groups). Since members of the militia are defined as "...all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States..." Applying equal rights and age descrimination laws that really means every able-bodied person who isn't a felon is a member of the unorganized militia and as such has the right to keep and bear arms. Regarding the third point, "well-regulated" in this specific context means like a well-regulated clock: the firearm is clean, working, well oiled, etc. Lastly, laws violating the second amendment are disturbingly common. For instance in New Jersey you have to fill out an application form, pay $56, and be fingerprinted like a common criminal at the police station just to "legally" own so much as an air rifle. Even though this is a flagrant violation of both the second and the fourth amendments neither the NRA nor the ACLU has mounted a serious legal challege, despite the slam-dunk case it would be and the magnitude of the civil rights abuse.
Hey thanks man. While I'm guessing we might not agree on the whole left/right thing I'm going to go out on a limb and guess we wouldn't disagree for the most part on authoritarianism. But then I've also voted for Libertarians and Socialists during the same election so I'm probably not representative for American liberals!
An online message doesn't really convey tone. I haven't got in so much as a shoving match with somebody in 15 years--and at that point my brother deserved it and he'd agree. While I freely and proudly admit that I have absolutely no respect for my opponents on the issue of euthanasia, to put myself down I suppose, the violence is pretty clearly posturing. I also include the statement that you quoted "And then drag them bound and gagged to visit the terminally ill." Sure it's violent, to understate, but it is exaggerated and primarily concerned with educating. I do not think a semi-rational person would not be swayed by viewing the plight of those terminally ill with horrible, debilitating, and painful illnesses. I'm just frustrated by the lack of response from those of us who are opposed to fascism in all its forms to stand up for ourselves when some totalitarian bastard goosesteps all over our civil liberties. A position, not to put words in your mouth, is I hope not remote from your own.
I own multiple firearms and a favorite way to waste a Saturday afternoon is to punch holes in paper from 100 yards away. I'm also too far to the left to ever consider joining the Democratic party, especially as they've managed to drift from a more or less centrist position to solid Reaganite Republican territory in the last ten years or so. I see being pro-second amendment fully in line with liberal views, and although I'm in the minority I know I'm not the only one. I see anti-second amendment views being more in-line with the Republicans. But I guess that just really gets at the heart of the matter and at one of the things that is so horribly wrong with the country: The Republican party's been overrun by authoritarians from both fundamentalists (who want to control my private life regarding sex, religion, drugs, abortion, suicide*) and neocons (destroy the unions and anyone who isn't a multimillionaire, control the media, and be Big Brother), while the Democrats, besides being terminally clueless**, have a wide authoritarian streak showing in their visceral hatred of my right to bear arms, neocon appeasement, and to a lesser extent their positions on a few minor issues. I'd join the ACLU, but that would only cover 90% of the Bill of Rights, so then I'd have to join the NRA to get the other 10%. Unfortunately, they're both highly political and would largely cancel each other out--leaving me with nothing except the cost of membership dues.
<br> *The correct response to anyone opposed to physician-assisted suicide is to kick them in the balls as hard as you can. Twice. And then drag them bound and gagged to visit the terminally ill. I've been in cancer wards and seen the terminally ill wasting away, I've seen my grandpa's bright mind destroyed by senile dementia, and I've seen my next door neighbor literally strangled to death by the cancer in her neck. If you don't have the right to end your own life as you see fit under those circumstances, you have no rights at all.<br> <br> **A competant opposition party/coalition in any other free country would have shamed the Republicans into impeaching and convicting President Bush a long time ago, and would be preparing to shove a red hot poker up the Republican party's asshole in the upcomming elections. Instead, the Democrats couldn't even bring support to censor the president, and are talking about the possibility of gaining a seat or three in '06, and will be dumb enough to nominate Hillary Clinton for president in '08, who will lose to any semi-reasonable Republican by at least 50 electoral votes. Arg./end rant.
"Unlike many other forms of entertainment they offer players the opportunity to explore, be creative, learn through interaction and express themselves to others."
So instead of fragging somebody with a rocket launcher I'm expressing myself by painting with giblets?
The only group of people that I can think of that I'd classify as both liberal and anti-intellectual would be the Postmodernists. Fortunately I think they're largely dying off withing liberal groups, which is good because PoMo was intellectually bankrupt (big surprise there: an intellectually bankrupt anti-intellectual movement!) to begin with. Unfortunately PoMo's popularity is surging within the neoconservatism movement. But if it's postmodernists that you'd like to see gone from our colleges, that'd be fine with me.
IMO, the term "postmodernist" can be replaced with "wanker" with no loss of descriptive information, no matter what the context is. Hell since PoMo's just mental masturbation "wanker" is the superior term!
I had a friend who used to work for Microsoft and he told me that their biggest competition was older versions of their own products--I imagine that's common knowledge to the/. crowd. I upgraded about two years ago to Office 2003, not because of anything that product gave me in and of itself, but because I needed to use Endnote and the current version wasn't compatible with Office 97. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in Office 2003 that I use that wasn't available in Office 97 (or for that matter 95), but it took about a half an hour to turn off all the useless shit and have it set up to my liking. I'd still be running Office 97 if I could. The next time I upgrade my MS Office software, probably like many people, will be the next time I buy a new computer. For me that'll probably around about 2008, except that'll likely be a Mac laptop after the Intel teething problems are done, and I might just go with a less expensive MS Office alternative if I can maintain my Endnote library. By 2008 MS Office will likely cost over half the price of a new mid-level laptop.
You know, I was mid-way through a nice, thoughtful post, when I realized holy crap! This guy actually thinks the second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution! I could point out why this is bogus myself or provide you with links, but what's the point? You obviously didn't bother to read the first link I posted and so probably won't bother reading a second. So instead I'll just leave with a challenge: read that link. You've nothing to lose but a little time.
Members of the jury, you cannot convict my client of murder. Not one of you was there to witness the alleged event, and the prosecution has perversely refused to revive Mr. Body and restore him and my client to conditions identical to those of the day in question, and reproduce the alleged murder for the benefit of your observation. Sure there are eye witness accounts, but those are notoriously unreliable. The video of my client allegedly murdering Mr. Body could have been fabricated. My client's blood that was found on the scene of the crime could have been planted there, and my client's torn and bloody clothing with Mr. Body's blood on it could similarly been part of an elaborate frame-up. Ditto for the knife with my client's fingerprints. My client's violent tendencies and record of death threats to Mr. Body are mere circumstantial evidence. The fact of the matter is that until the prosecution invents a time machine to take us back to the day of the murder so we can see these alleged events unfold ourselves, it cannot be said without a doubt that my client murdered that man.
What you wouldn't demand of that prosecutor is what you're demanding evolutionary biology to do. Actually, it's even worse: E. coli is not the progenitor of the Mycobacterium genus or vice versa--they share a common ancestor that existed many millions of years ago. Even if we knew the precise DNA sequence of this organism, it would be impossible to replicate the exact series of events that resulted in E. coli and Mycobacteria. To do that, we would not only need the exact morphological and genetic makeup of the progenitor bacteria, we also have to know all the details of that population's environment, exact selective pressures, genetic drift, random mutations and their exact order of all of these events, what other bacteria were present for any horizontal gene transfer, etc. We don't have a time machine. It is impossible to do what you're demanding without knowing these details. So the phrase "may have arisen" is not a problem at all--it represents our present state of knowledge based on the evidence from the known characteristics of bacteria and how they are interrelated and our understanding of evolutionionary mechanisms. What we can do is test different parts of evolutionary theory on specific systems, and Pubmed lists thousands of papers dealing with such.
Regarding the rest of your post, well, there's some mistaken assumptions about what evolution is. First off, populations evolve, not individuals, and saying a population has an urge to evolve is a little peculiar. Second, evolution is not a ladder with bacteria on the bottom and us on top. Evolution's more like a bush, with modern species at the tips of the branches. We've observed speciation happening in the wild and in the lab, including multiple fruit fly speciations. We also would never expect the result of fruit fly speciation to be anything other than something similar. Dogs giving birth to kittens is a creationist strawman--if you want to call that your "genetic barrier" be my guest. We've only just recently begun to have insight as to how different or more complex body plans may have arisen. Our limited understanding of how this occurs of course in no way invalidates that evolution occured--we have ample evidence from the fossil record and other sources. We are also beginning to understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms responsible for body plan, such as some insight as to how an organism develops radial or bilateral symmetry, or none at all, how segmentation occurs, how limbs form during development. Now is a very exciting time to be a biologist!
One would never expect an E. coli to transmute into a Mycobacterium all in one go, that's just not how evolution works. A single environmental change would most likely alter the prevalance of a few genes in a bacterial population, and might also cause an influx of mutations. Speciation is a known event in bacteria, and we are able to construct phylogenies of bacteria showing how they are interrelated and providing insight as to how species may have arisen, especially since the genomes of multiple bacterial species have been sequenced and more are on the way. The ability of bacteria to adapt to their environment, genetic alterations up to and including speciation (although "species" in bacteria is wonderfully squishy), is particularily important in understanding host:pathogen interactions, for example. There a genetic modification might result in a bacteria infecting new species, or unleash a pandemic, which is great from V. cholera's point of view but sucks for us. The study of host:pathogen interactions is really a study of an evolutionary arms race going back several hundred million years--it looks so cool I'm trying find a postdoc position in that area.
The tone set by the reporter just made me discount all the quotes, nevermind how idiotic they were. Ever since I was interviewed back in college and my statements butchered I've put little stock in reporter's ability or desire to accurately portray their source, and other events have only reaffirmed this. However, I've now skimmed the article and the reporter didn't do most of the hype. It's a theoretical paper of sorts, but seems more like a review for a wide audience or even the general public, and seems out of place in the journal. The article also made me doubt Schwartz's understanding of evolution, presents no new data, no experiments, no applicable mathematical modeling, no anything, which makes the "Darwin refuted" claim pathetic.
"In the evolutionary theory debates, the battle between the gradual change camp and the punctuated equilibrium camp has been going on for a long long time. As an antro major, we discussed both ideas in class, but really never talked about 'what if it's both'."
Gould and Eldredge explicitly stated that punctuated equilibrium and gradualism are not mutually exclusive. It's actually a little bit funnier than that. When Gould and Eldredge came out with punctuated equilibrium, those that they pegged as gradualists felt like they had been caricatured as slavishly holding to uniformitarianism and disallowing any role to great environmental change. Punk Eek is however a great way of describing things. Read more about it at talk.origins.
The actual article is available from The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist" volume 289B, Issue 1 , Pages 38 - 46. The abstract's free, although the article itself may require a subscription or university account. The flareup seems to be with this sentence in the abstract (I haven't read more yet): "In evolutionary terms, extreme spikes in environmental stress make possible the emergence of new genetic and consequent developmental and epigenetic networks, and thus also the emergence of potentially new morphological traits, without invoking geographic or other isolating mechanisms." In other words, a change in the environment puts organisms under extreme stress, overloading the ability of various DNA repair mechanisms to counteract DNA damage and mutation, occasionally resulting in novel, beneficial mutations. Several other posters have already said this really isn't anything new, for instance it's known that some bacteria actively mutate their DNA in response to extreme environmental stress. The author (Schwartz) may be hyping his claims some, but really it looks like a case of the reporter going gonzo, and might be a creationist yahoo to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
To echo what the others have said, solving the structure isn't the end-all be-all. For instance in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) a protein called superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) has been implicated as playing a role in the disease. Exactly how is unkown, but 10% of patients with the familial type of ALS have mutations to the gene. However, there are (last I looked a couple of years ago--I don't study the disease) about 80 or so different SOD1 mutations so linked. We have x-ray crystallographic structures of many of the SOD1 mutants, but despite the years of effort and tens of millions of dollars in obtaining and studying the structures they tell us very little. The mutations map all over the structure and there are no obvious reasons why the majority of them would do anything--the best guesses are they slightly destabilize the structure leading to formation of amyloid plaques and/or they alter the metal binding affinity potentially leading to different enzymatic functionality--which was suggested before we had hardly any SOD1 structures.
One area I've been reading on a lot lately is bacterial pathogens and how they interact with the host. The guys leading us to potential targets are usually the geneticists, with the molbio and cell bio guys teasing out a number more and really cluing us into the molecular interactions. Protein structure's kind of the bottom feeder. Not bashing structural biology--that's my area of expertise. Everybody likes having the structures and an important structure will feed back into experiments for the molbio and cell bio guys. But a structure by itself doesn't necessarily mean anything. The structural genomics groups crank out crystal structures by the dozen but often don't know anything about their protein's physiological function. So it's data on a shelf waiting to be interpreted.
"I think you have a rather overestimated opinion of people's political awareness."
Not really. I'm just remembering the time I spent living in the midwest and comparing that with the views of friends and family living there and in the south. Many viscerally hate Sen. Clinton, yet about nobody could tell you a position she's got except on abortion, and a few might recall the health care fiasco. They just remember really not liking her when she was the first lady. I picked her to win only the states that voted for Kerry and Gore since she won't be able to break into new areas, and also subtracted a few marginal states that mainly border or are in the south or midwest. I don't think any of this boils down to issues at all-just the person.
"I would hate to see Hillary as a president."
No worries about that. The Democrats might infact be dumb enough to nominate Senator Clinton for president, we all know her name is often bandied about as a strong possibility, and she's done some activities that look like someone building a warchest. However, she has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected against any remotely reasonable Republican candidate. She'd take most of the northeast, and probably three of Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California, but in the rest of the country she'd win Illinois and maybe one or two others. It'd be an electoral vote blowout. Lots of people in the interior and south still hate her from back in the Clinton administration, and a presidential campaign is unlikely to change that. Unfortunately, the stronger the likelihood of Senator Clinton being nominated, the less likely the Republicans will have a moderate nominee.
Nothing required him to put his synthesis in the public domain. For taking the synthesis of a drug like Tamilflu from a small batch process with expensive starting materials to mass production with cheap bulk commodity chemicals a drug manufacturer would be willing to shell out millions.
Electoconvulsive therapy's been used for a long time for treating a variety of mental problems, including depression. This shouldn't have some of the negatives--a friend of mine had ECT done about 15 years back as a last-ditch treatment for severe depression and as a result has a six-month gap in her memory. Plus, the aim of ECT (according to almighty wikipedia) is to induce a grand mal seizure for about a minute. This is definitely not what deep brain stimulation's doing!
What happened when the lab I worked in got a paper in PNAS was the university contacted the prof to get a press release worked up after the paper was accepted for publication (disclaimer: I had nothing to do with any of it, other than coming up with the press release title). The press release was, um, released, and a day or two later he was contacted by the local paper who published a nice little article. So all that happened was a solid science paper got peer-reviewed and published in a very high-profile journal and a nice little bit of public education happened with the aid of the local paper. On the next grant application, I imagine the boss will have a sentence in there saying the lab got local media coverage, ain't that nifty, which will very slightly improve the chances of the grant being accepted. That's it.
Thornton's at the same university (U. Oregon GO DUCKS!), so it went along the same lines. Thornton did some really cool research, got it through peer review and published in Science (which is really, really hard. Most scientists will never get an article in Science), and then this media stuff happened. Whether he approached the university for a press release or vice versa I couldn't tell you, but he most certainly did not approach the NY Times. I imagine no one is more surprised than Thornton about all the hoopla. Pleased, sure. It'll serve him well in a couple years when he's up for tenure, but the tenure committee will care a lot more about the paper being published in Science than it being mentioned in the NY Times. They'll care even more about the science his lab's been doing over the last five years. Sure there are some that skip peer review and just sensationalize whatever they've got directly to the media, but that's not what's going on here.
While I agree with some of your post but your statement "In response to the ID debate, scientists have been motivated to clean up their acts. First, they have targeted specific areas of research that the ID proponents have harped on." is way off. The principle job of a scientist is to do research and you directly state we're not doing our jobs. That's pretty offensive especially since research in molecular evolution started back in the 60's when ID was still called creationism. Thornton's research is just (like I'll ever get a Science article!) the latest in a long chain of research. Thornton's study just didn't pop out of thin air either, since his first publication in that area goes back to 1998. Like any good scientist he did the study because it was something that interested him and could yield some new insights. That it punches yet another hole in the swiss cheese that is ID is just a side effect.
"...can any older Slashdotters explain what it was like when there were even worse government abuses than this, and what the catalyst was that finally got the people to act?"
Blood running in the streets is a pretty good catalyst, albeit with an obvious downside. However it requires citizens willing to put themselves on the line for their beliefs, and we're all too fat and happy with bread and circuses these days like another poster wrote. It also requires a free and independent media to report the news, otherwise you've just got a bunch of arrests for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in tiny type in the police blotter page F17. Today's media is dominated by a handful of colluding major corporations, the number shrinking each year with the aid of their friends in the FCC. It's much more important for them to turn a profit than to report the news, and properly reporting a riot about government policy X might not be in the best interests of the media conglomerates, especially if a major buyer of advertising is going to profit from policy X. This is why investigative journalism's been dead for decades, unless you want to count a 20/20 or 60 Minutes investigative story on some crap like laundry balls (Buy Tide!).
One of the things I'd do if I woke up tomorrow a billionaire would be to start up an endowment for a nonprofit media group, kinda sorta like BBC News, except free from direct government tampering. This would be right after I purchase a US Senator, requiring him/her to wear a rainbow wig and floppy clown shoes whenever they're on C-SPAN. The latter'd probably only cost a couple mill I bet.
Looks like the perfect accessory for the P-P-P-Powerbook.
People are welcome to believe whatever they want about religion and I don't care. They just can't call it science, and that's where your post goes horribly wrong. Intelligent Design's most recent reincarnation began in 1987. This was the year that teaching "scientific creationism" in public schools was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional in Edwards v. Aguilard. Also in this year, early drafts of the book Of Pandas and People started swapping out references of "creationism" and replacing it with "intelligent design" and "creationist" with "design propent," so at the beginning intelligent design == creationism, using little more than a word processor's search and replace function. This is exemplified by the instance of "cdesign proponentists" in place of "creationist," being found out in the the recent intelligent design lawsuit in Dover.
The Pandas wordswap was not the only piece of evidence in the Dover trial showing that Intelligent Design is just warmed over creationism, or even the most significant. Probably the most damning evidence came from the statements of the defense (Dover school board IDers). Classic bits from the trial transcript include moments where a member of the school board is shown to lie under oath to conceal the role of his church in procuring the alledgedly scientific and entirely non-religious Pandas book. Another is where Michael Behe admits under oath that calling Intelligent Design science requires revising the very definition of science, with the new definition making astrology science as well. Behe also admits that there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred. Fellow witnesses for the defense also provided ammunition in Jones' decision against ID. Wikipedia has writeups on both Of Pandas and People as well as on the Kitmiller v. Dover decision, together with links to the trial transcripts, Judge Jones' decision, and other relevant material.
So if ID isn't science, than what is it? It seems clear that it's religion. Besides the Dover trial, here's some supporting evidence ripped from a post I made a while back: 1. The Wedge Document, 2. the Discovery Institute is funded largely by Howard Ahmanson, a person who also funds relgious extremists such as the Chalcedon Foundation, which has the express aim of turning the US into a theocracy, 3. Prominent proponents of ID frequently speak in churches, just like proponents of creation science, 4. the Dover school board was defended by the Thomas Moore Law Center, which is "...a not-for-profit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. Our purpose is to be the sword and shield for people of faith, providing legal representation without charge to defend and protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square." (from their own website, 5. "Of Pandas and People" despite being an ID textbook was written by creationists, 6. Bill Dembski says "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory" (quoted from wikipedia, refering to Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4. July/August, 1999, the entire issue being devoted to supporting ID).
So again if someone wants to believe in god or not, that's fine by me. They can even believe that periodically God stops by to bring a flagella or something into existance in a "puff of smoke," to use Behe's view of Intelligent Design. They just can't call it science.
If this is not quashed in court, then it will become routine. Anytime a political party has the presidency and a stronger grip in the House or Senate, it will make the "mistake" of having two versions put up for a vote and have the president "fix" it all with a signing statement. The tools are in place for the power grab too. I originally looked at Alito as a right wing but respectable jurist, but then I read about his "unitary executive" views. Just imagine if Bush gets the line-item veto as well.
"Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives."
Got a link or bill number or something explicitly stating the president signed a bill before it was finalized by the House and Senate? I followed your links and I didn't see it. If this were true, it would represent a seismic shift in how bills become laws in the US. If it isn't, well, signing statements have been used by presidents since James Monroe. However Bush has issued 505 signing statements, which is more than all previous presidents combined by a large margin. Besides the sheer number of signing statements is that some have brashly said that the president disagrees with the law and reserves the "right" to ignore it, although since at least Reagan this has been done, IIRC, albeit very rarely. Most disturbing and new with Bush is the view that a signing statement not only signals how the signing president intends to execute the law, but that it has legal weight to be considered by the courts. This view of course is a legal fiction (in the horror genre!), but through the current makeup of the Supreme Court the Bush administration may have the necessary tools in place to change that.
I'd hope that it's only a minority of liberals that are anti-second amendment, but they're vocal about it and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. However Democrats would vastly improve their chances of election if they dropped the issue because precious few liberals are single-issue voters on the second amendment while the 3 million NRA members feel very strongly about it. Regarding your second point, the militia is defined under the United States Code Title 10 Chapter 13 Section 311 as being of two types: organized (National Guard and Naval Militia) and unorganized (members who aren't of the first two groups). Since members of the militia are defined as "...all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States..." Applying equal rights and age descrimination laws that really means every able-bodied person who isn't a felon is a member of the unorganized militia and as such has the right to keep and bear arms. Regarding the third point, "well-regulated" in this specific context means like a well-regulated clock: the firearm is clean, working, well oiled, etc. Lastly, laws violating the second amendment are disturbingly common. For instance in New Jersey you have to fill out an application form, pay $56, and be fingerprinted like a common criminal at the police station just to "legally" own so much as an air rifle. Even though this is a flagrant violation of both the second and the fourth amendments neither the NRA nor the ACLU has mounted a serious legal challege, despite the slam-dunk case it would be and the magnitude of the civil rights abuse.
Hey thanks man. While I'm guessing we might not agree on the whole left/right thing I'm going to go out on a limb and guess we wouldn't disagree for the most part on authoritarianism. But then I've also voted for Libertarians and Socialists during the same election so I'm probably not representative for American liberals!
An online message doesn't really convey tone. I haven't got in so much as a shoving match with somebody in 15 years--and at that point my brother deserved it and he'd agree. While I freely and proudly admit that I have absolutely no respect for my opponents on the issue of euthanasia, to put myself down I suppose, the violence is pretty clearly posturing. I also include the statement that you quoted "And then drag them bound and gagged to visit the terminally ill." Sure it's violent, to understate, but it is exaggerated and primarily concerned with educating. I do not think a semi-rational person would not be swayed by viewing the plight of those terminally ill with horrible, debilitating, and painful illnesses. I'm just frustrated by the lack of response from those of us who are opposed to fascism in all its forms to stand up for ourselves when some totalitarian bastard goosesteps all over our civil liberties. A position, not to put words in your mouth, is I hope not remote from your own.
I own multiple firearms and a favorite way to waste a Saturday afternoon is to punch holes in paper from 100 yards away. I'm also too far to the left to ever consider joining the Democratic party, especially as they've managed to drift from a more or less centrist position to solid Reaganite Republican territory in the last ten years or so. I see being pro-second amendment fully in line with liberal views, and although I'm in the minority I know I'm not the only one. I see anti-second amendment views being more in-line with the Republicans. But I guess that just really gets at the heart of the matter and at one of the things that is so horribly wrong with the country: The Republican party's been overrun by authoritarians from both fundamentalists (who want to control my private life regarding sex, religion, drugs, abortion, suicide*) and neocons (destroy the unions and anyone who isn't a multimillionaire, control the media, and be Big Brother), while the Democrats, besides being terminally clueless**, have a wide authoritarian streak showing in their visceral hatred of my right to bear arms, neocon appeasement, and to a lesser extent their positions on a few minor issues. I'd join the ACLU, but that would only cover 90% of the Bill of Rights, so then I'd have to join the NRA to get the other 10%. Unfortunately, they're both highly political and would largely cancel each other out--leaving me with nothing except the cost of membership dues.
/end rant.
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*The correct response to anyone opposed to physician-assisted suicide is to kick them in the balls as hard as you can. Twice. And then drag them bound and gagged to visit the terminally ill. I've been in cancer wards and seen the terminally ill wasting away, I've seen my grandpa's bright mind destroyed by senile dementia, and I've seen my next door neighbor literally strangled to death by the cancer in her neck. If you don't have the right to end your own life as you see fit under those circumstances, you have no rights at all.<br>
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**A competant opposition party/coalition in any other free country would have shamed the Republicans into impeaching and convicting President Bush a long time ago, and would be preparing to shove a red hot poker up the Republican party's asshole in the upcomming elections. Instead, the Democrats couldn't even bring support to censor the president, and are talking about the possibility of gaining a seat or three in '06, and will be dumb enough to nominate Hillary Clinton for president in '08, who will lose to any semi-reasonable Republican by at least 50 electoral votes. Arg.
"Unlike many other forms of entertainment they offer players the opportunity to explore, be creative, learn through interaction and express themselves to others."
So instead of fragging somebody with a rocket launcher I'm expressing myself by painting with giblets?
The only group of people that I can think of that I'd classify as both liberal and anti-intellectual would be the Postmodernists. Fortunately I think they're largely dying off withing liberal groups, which is good because PoMo was intellectually bankrupt (big surprise there: an intellectually bankrupt anti-intellectual movement!) to begin with. Unfortunately PoMo's popularity is surging within the neoconservatism movement. But if it's postmodernists that you'd like to see gone from our colleges, that'd be fine with me.
IMO, the term "postmodernist" can be replaced with "wanker" with no loss of descriptive information, no matter what the context is. Hell since PoMo's just mental masturbation "wanker" is the superior term!
I had a friend who used to work for Microsoft and he told me that their biggest competition was older versions of their own products--I imagine that's common knowledge to the /. crowd. I upgraded about two years ago to Office 2003, not because of anything that product gave me in and of itself, but because I needed to use Endnote and the current version wasn't compatible with Office 97. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in Office 2003 that I use that wasn't available in Office 97 (or for that matter 95), but it took about a half an hour to turn off all the useless shit and have it set up to my liking. I'd still be running Office 97 if I could. The next time I upgrade my MS Office software, probably like many people, will be the next time I buy a new computer. For me that'll probably around about 2008, except that'll likely be a Mac laptop after the Intel teething problems are done, and I might just go with a less expensive MS Office alternative if I can maintain my Endnote library. By 2008 MS Office will likely cost over half the price of a new mid-level laptop.
You know, I was mid-way through a nice, thoughtful post, when I realized holy crap! This guy actually thinks the second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution! I could point out why this is bogus myself or provide you with links, but what's the point? You obviously didn't bother to read the first link I posted and so probably won't bother reading a second. So instead I'll just leave with a challenge: read that link. You've nothing to lose but a little time.
Members of the jury, you cannot convict my client of murder. Not one of you was there to witness the alleged event, and the prosecution has perversely refused to revive Mr. Body and restore him and my client to conditions identical to those of the day in question, and reproduce the alleged murder for the benefit of your observation. Sure there are eye witness accounts, but those are notoriously unreliable. The video of my client allegedly murdering Mr. Body could have been fabricated. My client's blood that was found on the scene of the crime could have been planted there, and my client's torn and bloody clothing with Mr. Body's blood on it could similarly been part of an elaborate frame-up. Ditto for the knife with my client's fingerprints. My client's violent tendencies and record of death threats to Mr. Body are mere circumstantial evidence. The fact of the matter is that until the prosecution invents a time machine to take us back to the day of the murder so we can see these alleged events unfold ourselves, it cannot be said without a doubt that my client murdered that man.
What you wouldn't demand of that prosecutor is what you're demanding evolutionary biology to do. Actually, it's even worse: E. coli is not the progenitor of the Mycobacterium genus or vice versa--they share a common ancestor that existed many millions of years ago. Even if we knew the precise DNA sequence of this organism, it would be impossible to replicate the exact series of events that resulted in E. coli and Mycobacteria. To do that, we would not only need the exact morphological and genetic makeup of the progenitor bacteria, we also have to know all the details of that population's environment, exact selective pressures, genetic drift, random mutations and their exact order of all of these events, what other bacteria were present for any horizontal gene transfer, etc. We don't have a time machine. It is impossible to do what you're demanding without knowing these details. So the phrase "may have arisen" is not a problem at all--it represents our present state of knowledge based on the evidence from the known characteristics of bacteria and how they are interrelated and our understanding of evolutionionary mechanisms. What we can do is test different parts of evolutionary theory on specific systems, and Pubmed lists thousands of papers dealing with such.
Regarding the rest of your post, well, there's some mistaken assumptions about what evolution is. First off, populations evolve, not individuals, and saying a population has an urge to evolve is a little peculiar. Second, evolution is not a ladder with bacteria on the bottom and us on top. Evolution's more like a bush, with modern species at the tips of the branches. We've observed speciation happening in the wild and in the lab, including multiple fruit fly speciations. We also would never expect the result of fruit fly speciation to be anything other than something similar. Dogs giving birth to kittens is a creationist strawman--if you want to call that your "genetic barrier" be my guest. We've only just recently begun to have insight as to how different or more complex body plans may have arisen. Our limited understanding of how this occurs of course in no way invalidates that evolution occured--we have ample evidence from the fossil record and other sources. We are also beginning to understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms responsible for body plan, such as some insight as to how an organism develops radial or bilateral symmetry, or none at all, how segmentation occurs, how limbs form during development. Now is a very exciting time to be a biologist!
One would never expect an E. coli to transmute into a Mycobacterium all in one go, that's just not how evolution works. A single environmental change would most likely alter the prevalance of a few genes in a bacterial population, and might also cause an influx of mutations. Speciation is a known event in bacteria, and we are able to construct phylogenies of bacteria showing how they are interrelated and providing insight as to how species may have arisen, especially since the genomes of multiple bacterial species have been sequenced and more are on the way. The ability of bacteria to adapt to their environment, genetic alterations up to and including speciation (although "species" in bacteria is wonderfully squishy), is particularily important in understanding host:pathogen interactions, for example. There a genetic modification might result in a bacteria infecting new species, or unleash a pandemic, which is great from V. cholera's point of view but sucks for us. The study of host:pathogen interactions is really a study of an evolutionary arms race going back several hundred million years--it looks so cool I'm trying find a postdoc position in that area.
The tone set by the reporter just made me discount all the quotes, nevermind how idiotic they were. Ever since I was interviewed back in college and my statements butchered I've put little stock in reporter's ability or desire to accurately portray their source, and other events have only reaffirmed this. However, I've now skimmed the article and the reporter didn't do most of the hype. It's a theoretical paper of sorts, but seems more like a review for a wide audience or even the general public, and seems out of place in the journal. The article also made me doubt Schwartz's understanding of evolution, presents no new data, no experiments, no applicable mathematical modeling, no anything, which makes the "Darwin refuted" claim pathetic.
"In the evolutionary theory debates, the battle between the gradual change camp and the punctuated equilibrium camp has been going on for a long long time. As an antro major, we discussed both ideas in class, but really never talked about 'what if it's both'."
Gould and Eldredge explicitly stated that punctuated equilibrium and gradualism are not mutually exclusive. It's actually a little bit funnier than that. When Gould and Eldredge came out with punctuated equilibrium, those that they pegged as gradualists felt like they had been caricatured as slavishly holding to uniformitarianism and disallowing any role to great environmental change. Punk Eek is however a great way of describing things. Read more about it at talk.origins.
The actual article is available from The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist" volume 289B, Issue 1 , Pages 38 - 46. The abstract's free, although the article itself may require a subscription or university account. The flareup seems to be with this sentence in the abstract (I haven't read more yet): "In evolutionary terms, extreme spikes in environmental stress make possible the emergence of new genetic and consequent developmental and epigenetic networks, and thus also the emergence of potentially new morphological traits, without invoking geographic or other isolating mechanisms." In other words, a change in the environment puts organisms under extreme stress, overloading the ability of various DNA repair mechanisms to counteract DNA damage and mutation, occasionally resulting in novel, beneficial mutations. Several other posters have already said this really isn't anything new, for instance it's known that some bacteria actively mutate their DNA in response to extreme environmental stress. The author (Schwartz) may be hyping his claims some, but really it looks like a case of the reporter going gonzo, and might be a creationist yahoo to boot.