I remember reading about Lomborg's work, and I was disappointed that his opinions weren't taken seriously on account that he is a statistician rather than a climatologist. Well, the fact remains that most of the processing on the climate data is honest statistical work, and a statistician should be allowed to criticize others on handling of statistics.
Lomborg agrees that global warming has been shown to be real and the result of human activity. However, he questions whether the remediation approach exemplified by the Kyoto Accords is economically cost-effective. He argues that investment of the same amount of money in refining non-CO2 producing energy sources would yield better returns.
So back to global warming... The human affected climate change and non-human affected climate change theories both have problems. Because we are putting this in an "either/or" discussion (either we affect climate change, or we don't), one will have to win out, but we won't know which until the theories behind whether humans affect change or not are more predictive in nature and secure both scientific and popular support.
Actually, current models consider non-human climate trends. so they do not treat it as an either-or proposition. It is successful predictions like the one that is the subject of this article that have won over most scientists. At this point, it is not really possible for the theory to secure much more scientific support--there simply aren't that many people in the scientific community who remain unconvinced. The scientific debate has moved on to details and consequences--exactly how much will the temperature increase, and what will be the effects?--and what to do about it. At this stage, the skepticism about global warming is mainly political, and seems mainly emanating from those who stand to lose financially from the measures that are being proposed to limit global warming.
But one thing virtually never happens: After acceptance of B, scientists virtually never decide that theory B was wrong and go back to A. Indeed, theory C is almost always an elaboration of B, and even further from A. But always remain a few die-hards, typically people who are advocates rather than practicing scientists, who insist that theory A was right all along.
So we have proceeded from Darwinian gradualism to post-Darwinian theories of evolution, but we have a few people (considered scientists by nobody other than those who agree with them) still insisting that Creationism was right. And now that science has gradually moved to the view that human activities are influencing climate, we are hearing from the die-hards, further and further from the scientific mainstream, who are insisting that the older notion that climate is dominated by natural processes outside the control of humans was correct
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Yet, we're supposed to believe that the climate can be accurately simulated for millions or billions of years by having a few hundred years of data and some simulations?
I agree that it is hard to make accurate predictions 48 h in advance. So given your assumption that forecasting on the long-term must be even harder, how much would you care to wager against my prediction that the weather in Boston will be warmer 5 months from now than it is today?
I find it hard to believe that computer models can't tell me whether or not it will rain on Thursday, but can suddenly "absolutely nail" the predictions for temperature patterns of oceans.
I can't tell you whether it will rain tomorrow in Boston, either, but I'd be willing to place a very large bet that it will be warmer in Boston on August 19th than on February 19th.
I've enjoyed some of Crichton's fiction, but he has said some strikingly dumb things. For example:
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had
Of course, we can all think of occasions when the scientific consensus has been dramatically wrong, but they stand out in our minds precisely because it is unusual. Most of the time, the scientific consensus is pretty much on track. And it is instructive to look at why it was wrong when it was wrong. Almost always, it has been an excess of conservatism. Science is not particularly prone to fads. Rather than rushing to embrace new ideas, scientists tend to be reluctant to abandon of concepts and intellectual tools that have served them well in the past. The great errors of scientific consensus are almost all errors of excess skepticism of new ideas.
So let us look at the history of global warming. Is this scientific dogma based on some classic theory or the pronouncements of some revered scientific authority? Is it a long-accepted model that the old guard has been reluctant to let go of despite steadily accumulating evidence that it is in error? Quite the contrary. It is a relatively new idea, and one that was initially met with considerable skepticism. Scientists have been gradually won over, one-by-one, by steadily accumulating evidence--both more and more accurate current measurements, and clever methods of obtaining information about historical climate trends. Combined with that has been the steady refinement of theoretical models. Over the years, as the once divergent climate models have been refined, their predictions have converged, until at this point almost everybody agrees that global warming is real and to a substantial extent a consequence of human activities. It is notable that even the noted environmental skeptic Bjorn Lomborg accepts the validity of Global Warming (although remaining skeptical of value of the Kyoto approach)
Clunky next to iTunes? I have an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of DDR333 memory, and with nothing else running the iTunes interface is less than responsive. Tivo actually works, and responds rapidly. I'd be a lot more impressed with the iTunes interface if the whole program weren't so needlessly slow. Winamp does everything iTunes does, but the interface layout is inconvenient (I will grant Apple that one, no problem) so I use iTunes now. But, iTunes is about a tenth as responsive as Winamp.
By "clunky," I was referring to interface design, not speed.
But since you brought it up, a notable characteristic of my two TiVos is their extreme slowness. Very often, I find myself staring at the TiVo wait icon for seconds to minutes while the TiVo is completely unresponsive. I've never had that happen with iTunes. For example, I can be adding a long list of songs, and I can still browse through my library and play other songs. TiVos are much slower to respond than iTunes running on any Mac, even the slowest G3's (I can't comment on Windows machines). TiVos are also slow relative to some other DVRs that I have seen. Any Apple DVR/Media Center would need to be far more responsive than a TiVo.
It's not a "small minority of TiVo owners" - it's almost everybody who has a DVR, whether it is a TiVo or not.
I've talked to dozens of people who don't use TiVos but refer to their DVR as a TiVo anyway, and who refer to "TiVoing" TV shows.
TiVo brand name strength is a reality, and it is something companies will pay for, if TiVo gets acquired.
"All DVR owners" is still a tiny fraction of the market that Apple would hope to capture. If Apple announced a DVR product, it would attract the attention of people who never even heard of a DVR and who have at best only a vague notion of what a "TiVo" is. This is not to deny TiVo's brand name strength, which would be of considerable value to a company that was not already the world's top brand . As for Apple, if they wanted to buy DVR company (and don't already have a DVR well along in development, which strikes me as more likely), they'd probably be more likely to be interested in somebody like Elgato, makers of EyeTV.
No one says, "I am going to PVR that show tonight."
Yes, the small minority of TiVo owners say "I'm going to Tivo it." (although TiVo tries to stop them from doing it publicly, since if they let people get away with it, TiVo will lose control of their trademark and anybody will be able to sell a "tivo" without paying Tivo a cent).
But all Apple would need to say is, "Apple announces the exciting new iTView, from the company that brought you the iPod," and they'd get the attention of people who don't even know what a TiVo is.
The idea of Tivo saving itself by taking measures--such as allowing unlimited exports and import--that would lead it to drain its limited resources in endless legal battles with deep-pocket content producers is ridiculous. Like Apple, TiVo seems to have done a pretty good job of protecting content well enough that content producers don't freak out, without terribly inconveniencing the typical user, while unavoidably leaving the door open a crack to the dedicated hacker.
As indicated by their deal with NetFlix, TiVo is trying to get into the content distribution business. Antagonizing content producers will not help them to get distribution rights.
Officially supporting HD expansion is a good idea, although not the sort of thing that will "save" TiVo. In fact expansion of current TiVos is easy to do (I've done two), and there are 3rd party vendors that will do it for you and give you a warranty to boot (or sell you an already-expanded TiVo). Future models should accomodate standard external hard drives.
Tivo has somehow managed to pick up almost 5bil in debt. NO ONE is going to buy them. Everyone is waiting for Tivo to go under and then buy up everyone's support contract after the fact and take over from there.
I don't know where you get this. There's no $5bil of debt on TiVo's balance sheet. In fact, they seem to be in OK shape, if you don't count the fact they are losing money. Their last balance sheet indicated something like $143M in cash, so they should be able to survive for quite a while, certainly until the CableCard 2.0 standard becomes final next year. This will make it possible for the first time for Tivo to market boxes that completely substitute for a cable box, saving Tivo owners the cable box rental fee. This will go a long way to making Tivo's user fees more palatable.
I'm a loyal TiVo customer, and I simply don't get what this company is trying to do. They've basically blown it with the cable providers, so their only real hope in making some serious cash just hit the shitter.
I think going with the cable companies would have been slow strangulation for TiVo. The cable companies are interested in low-end commodity DVRs; reportedly, the "deal" Comcast offered TiVo was less than a buck per month per DVR.
TiVo's best shot is the CableCard 2.0 standard due next year. This will let TiVo offer a DVR that will replace the cable box altogether, saving customers rental fees (which will make TiVo's fees more palatable). Let the CableCard supply the low-end boxes for the customers who just want to pause live TV and the like. TiVo should go after the high end of the market.
All TiVo really needs to do is hold on until the CableCard standard is final. Fortunately, the company isn't really hurting for money, and these initiatives and the new TiVo equipped DVD recorders should help.
I think that Apple should get into the media center market, once the CableCard 2.0 standard is available, but I see no point in Apple buying TiVo. What would TiVo bring to the deal?
Name recognition? If anything, Apple's is even better.
Profits? TiVo is losing money.
User interface? Apple doesn't really need TiVo's help in user interface design, and the once-innovative TiVo interface is starting to seem a bit clunky next to things like iTunes. Apple would be better advised to come up with their own from scratch.
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had
Michael Crichton is a pretty decent novelist, but this is a strikingly dumb remark. No, the consensus is not always right. It's easy to think of occasions when the scientific consensus was dramatically wrong--easy because it is unusual enough that it stands out in memory. Most of the time, the consensus is generally pretty much on track. And usually, when the consensus has turned out to be way off, it was because the consensus was not based upon evidence, but upon an unchallenged assumption propounded by some scientific eminence or derived from religious dogma.
If one looks at the history current consensus on global warming, on the other hand, it is not something that scientists were predisposed to believe. Rather, it is a view that scientists were once skeptical of, but to which they have been slowly won over, one by one, by the steady accumulation of more and more convincing observational and historical data, as well as the convergence of theoretical predictions of climatic models based often on quite different assumptions.
Whether or not we have more to gain, we certainly have more to lose from global warming than most. The US has a particularly favorable climate for agriculture. Some countries may actually benefit from a climate change, but rolling the climatic dice again is unlikely to be in America's interest.
I'm pretty far removed from science in any practical setting, but what are the procedures for this kind of research? I've seen too many movies like 28 Days Later to not imagine some accident or oversight to cause some sort of mutant airborne HIV.
HIV is already widely spread in human populations all over the world, mutating rapidly, and under strong selective pressure from antiviral drugs. If it could easily mutate into an airborne strain, it probably would already have done so. The likelihood that modifying it for therapeutic purposes would accidentally turn it into an airborne strain is probably about the same as the risk that kid down the street customizing his car will accidentally turn it into an attack helicopter.
HIV has many properties that might be desirable for gene delivery. And by the time we cure HIV, we'll probably know more about it than almost any virus. So it is fairly inevitable that it will eventually be engineered into a therapeutic agent.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
Not necessarily. "Selfishness" may lead to altruistic behavior if altruism is rewarding (i.e. activates brain reward systems). Because there are selective benefits to altruism in many circumstances (reciprocal altruism, nepotism) there are likely genes that cause individuals to enjoy being altruistic, quite independently of their religious beliefs.
I think this built-in inefficiency is to control the population, no?
Nope. It doesn't work. Consider a mutant that reproduces asexually. Since all of its offspring (instead of only half or so) will be able give birth, they will reproduce at twice the rate of non-mutants, and will therefore become more abundant with each generation than their sexual cousins.
This may in fact result in overpopulation, causing resource depletion and starvation, but those affect mutants and non-mutants equally, so the mutants continue to increase in numbers.
It is actually rather hard to come up with plausible natural selection scenarios in which population-limiting mechanisms evolve spontaneously and are not eliminated by mutation. Basically, it requires group selection mechanisms that clearly are not applicable to most species. So there must be a more immediate benefit to sex than population benefit.
GM doesn't mean changing one protein and seeing what happens. You can change a lot of them at a time. It is that with current techniques, scientists know little what they are doing. In time, you will be able to grow 10 arms, or have "GM viagra". It might happen in the next decade or two.
Sure, in time. In time, you could almost certainly do it with selection. Changing a bunch of genes doesn't really help you, because genes interact in complex and unpredicatable ways. So yes, you can get an animal to secrete a protein in its urine or milk, but making any kind of complex change like growing 10 arms is essentially impossible for the foreseeable future.
GM opens the doors to making profound changes to life on this planet. It also opens the same door to possible (intentional?) mistakes (weapons?).
Not really. The only changes that can be practically made with GM are fairly minor ones, tweaking a gene here or there, or taking a protein that's naturally produced by one species and getting a different species to make it. There's nothing terribly profound--or particularly dangerous--about that.
As for weapons, the older techniques of selection turn out to be more than adequate for creating dangerous bioweapons.
In practice, engineered organisms are unlikely to be as dangerous as natural wild-type ones, because wild-type organisms are already well adapted by millennia of evolution to survive in the wild. In contrast, the kinds of crude changes we can make by GM are likely to reduce fitness.
Bullshit. You can selectively breed humans to be stronger, or whatever. You cannot selectively breed humans to grow 10 arms and be green.
Selective breeding is "natural". In many ways that's what nature does as well with natural selection. In many species only the most suited do breed.
Sticking spider genes in people so they piss cobwebs is not natural and only attainable by GM.
Actually, it is probably at least as hard to do the things you describe by GM as by selective breeding. Genes don't exist in isolation, they interact. So you can tweak things in minor ways by adding a protein here and deleting one there, but that won't give you 10 arms, because the way an arm and its musculature works is complicated and depends upon a whole bunch of genes.
I mean, could rumanants like cows eat the grass, and would it cross pollenate with normal grass, to create another weed? Would it invade gardens?
Perhaps. But it is probably much less likely to do so than a wild-type plant simply transported from one part of the planet to another.
People who worry about engineered plants taking over and displacing natural varieties have an exaggerated notion of the prowess of engineering. The likelihood that some plant that a human engineer has mucked with for some specialized human purpose will just happen to also have a selective advantage over wild-type plants that has been evolutionarily optimized over millenia of generations to grow in the wild is very small. It probably makes more sense to worry about cosmic rays mutating some ubiquitous wildflower into an uberweed that will take over your gardens.
I think another thing this demonstrates is that closed source browsers (Safari on OS X and IE on Windows) are still head and shoulders above their open source counterparts. The hype behind Open Source just never seems to let up, so it gets a lot of press but when it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road, closed source software is pretty much always better.
If anything, the results suggest the opposite. After all, Safari is based on KDE, and Safari certainly does not seem to be "head and shoulders" above Konqeror KDE
Slashdot Mirror
Last week black box project (or global conscientious), now the "six sense", shouldn't a PSEUDOSCIENCIE icon needed in Slashdot?
Nothing "pseudo" about the article. Just some evidence that activity in a certain part of the brain might be involved with intuition.
I remember reading about Lomborg's work, and I was disappointed that his opinions weren't taken seriously on account that he is a statistician rather than a climatologist. Well, the fact remains that most of the processing on the climate data is honest statistical work, and a statistician should be allowed to criticize others on handling of statistics.
Lomborg agrees that global warming has been shown to be real and the result of human activity. However, he questions whether the remediation approach exemplified by the Kyoto Accords is economically cost-effective. He argues that investment of the same amount of money in refining non-CO2 producing energy sources would yield better returns.
So back to global warming... The human affected climate change and non-human affected climate change theories both have problems. Because we are putting this in an "either/or" discussion (either we affect climate change, or we don't), one will have to win out, but we won't know which until the theories behind whether humans affect change or not are more predictive in nature and secure both scientific and popular support.
Actually, current models consider non-human climate trends. so they do not treat it as an either-or proposition. It is successful predictions like the one that is the subject of this article that have won over most scientists. At this point, it is not really possible for the theory to secure much more scientific support--there simply aren't that many people in the scientific community who remain unconvinced. The scientific debate has moved on to details and consequences--exactly how much will the temperature increase, and what will be the effects?--and what to do about it. At this stage, the skepticism about global warming is mainly political, and seems mainly emanating from those who stand to lose financially from the measures that are being proposed to limit global warming.
But one thing virtually never happens: After acceptance of B, scientists virtually never decide that theory B was wrong and go back to A. Indeed, theory C is almost always an elaboration of B, and even further from A. But always remain a few die-hards, typically people who are advocates rather than practicing scientists, who insist that theory A was right all along.
So we have proceeded from Darwinian gradualism to post-Darwinian theories of evolution, but we have a few people (considered scientists by nobody other than those who agree with them) still insisting that Creationism was right. And now that science has gradually moved to the view that human activities are influencing climate, we are hearing from the die-hards, further and further from the scientific mainstream, who are insisting that the older notion that climate is dominated by natural processes outside the control of humans was correct
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Yet, we're supposed to believe that the climate can be accurately simulated for millions or billions of years by having a few hundred years of data and some simulations?
I agree that it is hard to make accurate predictions 48 h in advance. So given your assumption that forecasting on the long-term must be even harder, how much would you care to wager against my prediction that the weather in Boston will be warmer 5 months from now than it is today?
I find it hard to believe that computer models can't tell me whether or not it will rain on Thursday, but can suddenly "absolutely nail" the predictions for temperature patterns of oceans.
I can't tell you whether it will rain tomorrow in Boston, either, but I'd be willing to place a very large bet that it will be warmer in Boston on August 19th than on February 19th.
Of course, we can all think of occasions when the scientific consensus has been dramatically wrong, but they stand out in our minds precisely because it is unusual. Most of the time, the scientific consensus is pretty much on track. And it is instructive to look at why it was wrong when it was wrong. Almost always, it has been an excess of conservatism. Science is not particularly prone to fads. Rather than rushing to embrace new ideas, scientists tend to be reluctant to abandon of concepts and intellectual tools that have served them well in the past. The great errors of scientific consensus are almost all errors of excess skepticism of new ideas.
So let us look at the history of global warming. Is this scientific dogma based on some classic theory or the pronouncements of some revered scientific authority? Is it a long-accepted model that the old guard has been reluctant to let go of despite steadily accumulating evidence that it is in error? Quite the contrary. It is a relatively new idea, and one that was initially met with considerable skepticism. Scientists have been gradually won over, one-by-one, by steadily accumulating evidence--both more and more accurate current measurements, and clever methods of obtaining information about historical climate trends. Combined with that has been the steady refinement of theoretical models. Over the years, as the once divergent climate models have been refined, their predictions have converged, until at this point almost everybody agrees that global warming is real and to a substantial extent a consequence of human activities. It is notable that even the noted environmental skeptic Bjorn Lomborg accepts the validity of Global Warming (although remaining skeptical of value of the Kyoto approach)
Clunky next to iTunes? I have an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of DDR333 memory, and with nothing else running the iTunes interface is less than responsive. Tivo actually works, and responds rapidly. I'd be a lot more impressed with the iTunes interface if the whole program weren't so needlessly slow. Winamp does everything iTunes does, but the interface layout is inconvenient (I will grant Apple that one, no problem) so I use iTunes now. But, iTunes is about a tenth as responsive as Winamp.
By "clunky," I was referring to interface design, not speed.
But since you brought it up, a notable characteristic of my two TiVos is their extreme slowness. Very often, I find myself staring at the TiVo wait icon for seconds to minutes while the TiVo is completely unresponsive. I've never had that happen with iTunes. For example, I can be adding a long list of songs, and I can still browse through my library and play other songs. TiVos are much slower to respond than iTunes running on any Mac, even the slowest G3's (I can't comment on Windows machines). TiVos are also slow relative to some other DVRs that I have seen. Any Apple DVR/Media Center would need to be far more responsive than a TiVo.
burglarize (bûrgl-rz)
1. To enter and steal from (a building or other premises).
2. To commit burglary against: The second-floor tenants have been burglarized twice.
Odd. Seems like a more logical meaning would be, "to turn somebody into a burglar."
Newsflash, dude.
It's not a "small minority of TiVo owners" - it's almost everybody who has a DVR, whether it is a TiVo or not.
I've talked to dozens of people who don't use TiVos but refer to their DVR as a TiVo anyway, and who refer to "TiVoing" TV shows.
TiVo brand name strength is a reality, and it is something companies will pay for, if TiVo gets acquired.
"All DVR owners" is still a tiny fraction of the market that Apple would hope to capture. If Apple announced a DVR product, it would attract the attention of people who never even heard of a DVR and who have at best only a vague notion of what a "TiVo" is. This is not to deny TiVo's brand name strength, which would be of considerable value to a company that was not already the world's top brand . As for Apple, if they wanted to buy DVR company (and don't already have a DVR well along in development, which strikes me as more likely), they'd probably be more likely to be interested in somebody like Elgato, makers of EyeTV.
No one says, "I am going to PVR that show tonight."
Yes, the small minority of TiVo owners say "I'm going to Tivo it." (although TiVo tries to stop them from doing it publicly, since if they let people get away with it, TiVo will lose control of their trademark and anybody will be able to sell a "tivo" without paying Tivo a cent).
But all Apple would need to say is, "Apple announces the exciting new iTView, from the company that brought you the iPod," and they'd get the attention of people who don't even know what a TiVo is.
The idea of Tivo saving itself by taking measures--such as allowing unlimited exports and import--that would lead it to drain its limited resources in endless legal battles with deep-pocket content producers is ridiculous. Like Apple, TiVo seems to have done a pretty good job of protecting content well enough that content producers don't freak out, without terribly inconveniencing the typical user, while unavoidably leaving the door open a crack to the dedicated hacker.
As indicated by their deal with NetFlix, TiVo is trying to get into the content distribution business. Antagonizing content producers will not help them to get distribution rights.
Officially supporting HD expansion is a good idea, although not the sort of thing that will "save" TiVo. In fact expansion of current TiVos is easy to do (I've done two), and there are 3rd party vendors that will do it for you and give you a warranty to boot (or sell you an already-expanded TiVo). Future models should accomodate standard external hard drives.
Tivo has somehow managed to pick up almost 5bil in debt. NO ONE is going to buy them. Everyone is waiting for Tivo to go under and then buy up everyone's support contract after the fact and take over from there.
I don't know where you get this. There's no $5bil of debt on TiVo's balance sheet. In fact, they seem to be in OK shape, if you don't count the fact they are losing money. Their last balance sheet indicated something like $143M in cash, so they should be able to survive for quite a while, certainly until the CableCard 2.0 standard becomes final next year. This will make it possible for the first time for Tivo to market boxes that completely substitute for a cable box, saving Tivo owners the cable box rental fee. This will go a long way to making Tivo's user fees more palatable.
I'm a loyal TiVo customer, and I simply don't get what this company is trying to do. They've basically blown it with the cable providers, so their only real hope in making some serious cash just hit the shitter.
I think going with the cable companies would have been slow strangulation for TiVo. The cable companies are interested in low-end commodity DVRs; reportedly, the "deal" Comcast offered TiVo was less than a buck per month per DVR.
TiVo's best shot is the CableCard 2.0 standard due next year. This will let TiVo offer a DVR that will replace the cable box altogether, saving customers rental fees (which will make TiVo's fees more palatable). Let the CableCard supply the low-end boxes for the customers who just want to pause live TV and the like. TiVo should go after the high end of the market.
All TiVo really needs to do is hold on until the CableCard standard is final. Fortunately, the company isn't really hurting for money, and these initiatives and the new TiVo equipped DVD recorders should help.
I think that Apple should get into the media center market, once the CableCard 2.0 standard is available, but I see no point in Apple buying TiVo. What would TiVo bring to the deal?
Name recognition? If anything, Apple's is even better.
Profits? TiVo is losing money.
User interface? Apple doesn't really need TiVo's help in user interface design, and the once-innovative TiVo interface is starting to seem a bit clunky next to things like iTunes. Apple would be better advised to come up with their own from scratch.
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had
Michael Crichton is a pretty decent novelist, but this is a strikingly dumb remark. No, the consensus is not always right. It's easy to think of occasions when the scientific consensus was dramatically wrong--easy because it is unusual enough that it stands out in memory. Most of the time, the consensus is generally pretty much on track. And usually, when the consensus has turned out to be way off, it was because the consensus was not based upon evidence, but upon an unchallenged assumption propounded by some scientific eminence or derived from religious dogma.
If one looks at the history current consensus on global warming, on the other hand, it is not something that scientists were predisposed to believe. Rather, it is a view that scientists were once skeptical of, but to which they have been slowly won over, one by one, by the steady accumulation of more and more convincing observational and historical data, as well as the convergence of theoretical predictions of climatic models based often on quite different assumptions.
Whether or not we have more to gain, we certainly have more to lose from global warming than most. The US has a particularly favorable climate for agriculture. Some countries may actually benefit from a climate change, but rolling the climatic dice again is unlikely to be in America's interest.
I'm pretty far removed from science in any practical setting, but what are the procedures for this kind of research? I've seen too many movies like 28 Days Later to not imagine some accident or oversight to cause some sort of mutant airborne HIV.
HIV is already widely spread in human populations all over the world, mutating rapidly, and under strong selective pressure from antiviral drugs. If it could easily mutate into an airborne strain, it probably would already have done so. The likelihood that modifying it for therapeutic purposes would accidentally turn it into an airborne strain is probably about the same as the risk that kid down the street customizing his car will accidentally turn it into an attack helicopter.
HIV has many properties that might be desirable for gene delivery. And by the time we cure HIV, we'll probably know more about it than almost any virus. So it is fairly inevitable that it will eventually be engineered into a therapeutic agent.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
Not necessarily. "Selfishness" may lead to altruistic behavior if altruism is rewarding (i.e. activates brain reward systems). Because there are selective benefits to altruism in many circumstances (reciprocal altruism, nepotism) there are likely genes that cause individuals to enjoy being altruistic, quite independently of their religious beliefs.
I think this built-in inefficiency is to control the population, no?
Nope. It doesn't work. Consider a mutant that reproduces asexually. Since all of its offspring (instead of only half or so) will be able give birth, they will reproduce at twice the rate of non-mutants, and will therefore become more abundant with each generation than their sexual cousins.
This may in fact result in overpopulation, causing resource depletion and starvation, but those affect mutants and non-mutants equally, so the mutants continue to increase in numbers.
It is actually rather hard to come up with plausible natural selection scenarios in which population-limiting mechanisms evolve spontaneously and are not eliminated by mutation. Basically, it requires group selection mechanisms that clearly are not applicable to most species. So there must be a more immediate benefit to sex than population benefit.
GM doesn't mean changing one protein and seeing what happens. You can change a lot of them at a time. It is that with current techniques, scientists know little what they are doing. In time, you will be able to grow 10 arms, or have "GM viagra". It might happen in the next decade or two.
Sure, in time. In time, you could almost certainly do it with selection. Changing a bunch of genes doesn't really help you, because genes interact in complex and unpredicatable ways. So yes, you can get an animal to secrete a protein in its urine or milk, but making any kind of complex change like growing 10 arms is essentially impossible for the foreseeable future.
GM opens the doors to making profound changes to life on this planet. It also opens the same door to possible (intentional?) mistakes (weapons?).
Not really. The only changes that can be practically made with GM are fairly minor ones, tweaking a gene here or there, or taking a protein that's naturally produced by one species and getting a different species to make it. There's nothing terribly profound--or particularly dangerous--about that.
As for weapons, the older techniques of selection turn out to be more than adequate for creating dangerous bioweapons.
In practice, engineered organisms are unlikely to be as dangerous as natural wild-type ones, because wild-type organisms are already well adapted by millennia of evolution to survive in the wild. In contrast, the kinds of crude changes we can make by GM are likely to reduce fitness.
Bullshit. You can selectively breed humans to be stronger, or whatever. You cannot selectively breed humans to grow 10 arms and be green.
Selective breeding is "natural". In many ways that's what nature does as well with natural selection. In many species only the most suited do breed.
Sticking spider genes in people so they piss cobwebs is not natural and only attainable by GM.
Actually, it is probably at least as hard to do the things you describe by GM as by selective breeding. Genes don't exist in isolation, they interact. So you can tweak things in minor ways by adding a protein here and deleting one there, but that won't give you 10 arms, because the way an arm and its musculature works is complicated and depends upon a whole bunch of genes.
I mean, could rumanants like cows eat the grass, and would it cross pollenate with normal grass, to create another weed? Would it invade gardens?
Perhaps. But it is probably much less likely to do so than a wild-type plant simply transported from one part of the planet to another.
People who worry about engineered plants taking over and displacing natural varieties have an exaggerated notion of the prowess of engineering. The likelihood that some plant that a human engineer has mucked with for some specialized human purpose will just happen to also have a selective advantage over wild-type plants that has been evolutionarily optimized over millenia of generations to grow in the wild is very small. It probably makes more sense to worry about cosmic rays mutating some ubiquitous wildflower into an uberweed that will take over your gardens.
I think another thing this demonstrates is that closed source browsers (Safari on OS X and IE on Windows) are still head and shoulders above their open source counterparts. The hype behind Open Source just never seems to let up, so it gets a lot of press but when it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road, closed source software is pretty much always better.
If anything, the results suggest the opposite. After all, Safari is based on KDE, and Safari certainly does not seem to be "head and shoulders" above Konqeror KDE