Umm, breeding plants to create useful hybrids is one thing, but genetically modifying plants is something very different. Those genes they are putting in your food don't always come from other plants you know.
That's OK. I eat animals, too. There's nothing inherently safe about plants or plant genes. Plants produce many kinds of toxic substances. Perhaps if the genetic engineers try really hard, they could produce a food as dangerously immunogenic as a peanut.
Secondly, just because humans don't eat a particular plant, doesn't mean that we should contaminate it at will. What about all the other species that might need it to survive.
Chances are that they'll adapt. I'm particularly not worried about short-generation species like butterflies. Those guys evolve fast.
I don't have any problem at all with genetically modified foods. We've been genetically modifying food crops for thousands of years; we've just gotten better at it lately.
But these aren't genetically modified foods--they are food crops modified to produce drugs. Granted, they seem like fairly benign substances, but I don't understand why they need to use food crops. Surely there are plants that could be used for drug manufacture that are not normally cultivated for human consumption, obviating concerns that pharmaceutical crop seeds will get mistakenly mixed in with food crop seeds, or that pharmaceutical crops with cross-pollinate food crops.
Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets.
The fundamental problem here is that correlation is not causality. Showing that downloaders buy less music is not the same as showing that they'd buy more music if they couldn't download. Perhaps they're cheapskates who would would rather do without than pay retail. In which case, it may be unfair that they're getting the benefit of all that free music, but it isn't impacting sales at all.
In a society where trash like Stephen King is treated as great literature, even bad sci fi is pretty damned good.
It is fashionable to sneer at King, but I think that he tends to be underrated as a writer. Strong characterization, vivid and original description, convincing dialog. I think he tends to be underrated by "literary" types because his writing seems to draw more from an oral tradition of storytelling than from a literary one, and because so much of his work is genre fiction.
Part of my job involves science policy research. When I talk to scientists, they say just the opposite. They don't want more science fiction. In fact, they blame science fiction for getting inaccurate ideas out to the public.
That's certainly not my impression as a scientist. Very often, the fiction has led the science. I can remember when physicists sneered at ray guns in science fiction, and now lasers are nearly universal. I can't help wondering if many things would have been even attempted if they'd not first been postulated in fiction. And when it comes to examining the ethical implications of scientific advances, the science fiction writers have done a better job than the ethicists and science policy wonks (and usually with a better grasp of the science).
(You might say that good science fiction doesn't do this, but how much science fiction is good?)
Good science fiction is about as common as good science. Sturgeon's Law is universal.
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point?
Actually, it is probably about as effective as your front door is in protecting your house. Anybody who is really determined to rip you off can kick it in or break a window, but it deters the most casual thieves, and puts people on notice that they aren't entitled to just walk in.
If you own an ipod and you are going to rip music, why would you waste your time with mp3, and leave it with itunes AAC default?
With mp3, you give up a little bit of storage efficiency in trade for greater compatibility. Personally, I stick with mp3 because I can stream it from my Mac to my TiVo.
The error is quite clear. Most people around here seem to see the iPod as basically a hard disk. So their reaction was, "A smaller capacity hard disk that's nearly as expensive as a large one? Who would want that?"
But what Apple knew that the pundits did not is that the iPod is only incidentally a hard disk--it's a music player. So to the average consumer, the reaction was, "A smaller, more convenient iPod, and cheaper to boot? Where do I sign up?" Lower capacity was for most a minor concern, because even the mini holds more than enough music for most activities.
As for support other formats, why bother? Just think of the support headache. When instead they could invest the same amount of effort into improving and promoting the iTunes store. Besides, once people start buying their tunes elsewhere, they might start thinking that they could just as well have one of those clone players. Apple already supports the most common open format, so if people don't want to go with Apple's store and format, they can always order the CDs used from Amazon and rip them to mp3.
The display technology may be here, but it doesn't look like they've really thought seriously about the ergonomics of an ebook. The thing is laid out like a giant PDA. An ebook should need very few buttons, and should be more along the lines of a TV remote, or better yet, an iPod. The main things I want are page forward/back, and some sort of proportional "page flip" dial or bar, all positioned for comfortable access by the hand holding the book.
Actually... should the universe eventually be saturated with entropy how could time flow?
This is a bit like one of those "tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it questions." At maximum entropy, no meaningful macroscopic change takes place, but in principle time could presumably be defined by the interactions of individual particles. However, since there would not be any kind of consciousness around to observe it, time becomes sort of irrelevant.
BTW, time ends when the universe stops expanding. Closely following the stoppage, the kinetic energy of the universe (so-called 'dark energy' which prevents the matter from collapsing back upon itself) will no longer be able to hold gravity in check and then comes the Big Crunch, though that is much more highly accelerated than the expansion phase.
However, current evidence indicates that, instead of slowing down as predicted by "Big Crunch" models, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. So no end of time after all.
The reason most (or all) AIDS infections happen through unprotected sex is because that's where the virus will do the most damage, since most people have unprotected sex.
If everyone switches to wearing condoms or practicing abstinence then you'll start to see AIDS mutations that jump through the air or something.
That is nonsense. A HIV strain that propagates through the air will be strongly favored whether people practice safe sex or not, because people breathe more than they have sex. Taking precautions against venereal spread of HIV will do nothing to increase the mutation rate of the virus.
Probably. Who is to say they weren't right? Is out society better/safer than it was 30 years ago?
One thing is quite clear...violence by the age demographic that most plays videogames has steadily decreased as games have gotten increasingly bloodier, more violent, and more realistic.
I get the feeling that anyone who grew up playing early video games gets a real sense of disgust at seeing the level of depravity present in today's titles.
Not me......but then, I liked "Death Race 2000" and "People Pong"
The preservation argument only gets you so far, and it doesn't address the concept that the game's owners might and should have control over how their stuff is "preserved." Nintendo certainly speaks loudly on this issue, since they "preserve" all their old games by continually re-releasing them. If a game company declares that Game X is public domain, then by all means, preserve away. Until that time, it's still stealing.
Perhaps, but as breaking the law goes, it seems to fall into the same class as driving 10 mph over the speed limit at 3 am when there's nobody else on the road. The financial loss to the copyright owner is negligible--the availability on MAME is not going to significantly deter people from buying the game if the company re-releases it on console. "Williams Arcade Classics" was a big seller on console this last Xmas, even though every one of those games is readily available for MAME (I bought a copy myself; I just wish Capcom would do the same). And as the Jarvis interview makes clear, many of the actual creators are more than happy to see their creations still being played.
You call that boiling it down? I consider this idiotic, how the hell do they from first principles come up with a statistical distribution of the starting "set of parameters" for human coin flipping that in any way is defensible?
The claimed conclusion is that, based on both a mathematical analysis and an experimental test is that most values favor the face that is up to begin with. As to the details of the statistical distributions they assumed, you aren't going to find that in a general report in the popular media--you'll probably need to delve into the details of their mathematical and experimental models. But it is certainly a plausible claim. Simply from the fact that people commonly flip coins to make randomized decisions, one already knows that parameters that result in "heads" vs. "tails" outcome have to densely interleaved. This means that the result is very likely to be independent of the details of the statistical distribution that you assume for things like the magnitude, angle, and timing of the initial vector of force applied to the coin.
First - the experiment they used to "prove" this involves creating a mechanical device that will flip a coin for you. After some tweaking, they got it to flip and land consistently with heads up. Of course you can flip a coin (or any other object) and get it to land the same way every time.
No, you simply failed to understand the study. It wasn't a test of whether a coin could be flipped reproducibly. Yes, they came up with a device to flip a coin reproducibly, but then they looked at the effect of varying the flip parameters like force and angle. The question of whether the coin is biased then boils down to whether the set of values that cause the coin to land same side up is greater than the set that cause it to land same side down.
There is an old tradition in which people donate some portion of their time to work that improves the general welfare. In some professions, such as law and medicine, a certain amount of pro bono work is considered almost part of the job.
So I question the assumption that one must choose between creating open-source work and profiting from the fruits of you labor. Even for companies, it may make sense to devote a certain amount of resources to open source development of generally useful operating systems or utilities, thereby "buying into" a body of open source software which adds value to the company's proprietary products.
Once upon a time the people demanding freedom were the christians wanting to support christian morals. They wrote a constitution based upon their freedom. It worked fine until recently, when being free and being christian were different ideas.
Given that the framers of the Constitution, for the most part, clearly subscribed to the predominant religious beliefs of their time, perhaps the most amazing thing is how utterly secular a document it is. There are not even the usual vague platitudes about God. The words "God" and "Christ" do not occur anywhere in the document. And just in case the point is not absolutely clear, the very first words of the first Amendment of the Bill of Rights flatly prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. Whatever their personal religious convictions, they were at great pains to create a document that defined a rule of law, rather than "morality," and constrained by basic principles of liberty.
The courts regularly overturn the constitution. Where in the world did they find the "right" for a woman to have an abortion? Did they totally ignore the 10th amendment?
The the greatest genius of the framers of the Constitution is that they founded our country upon powerful general principles of freedom and equality. In many cases they themselves were not ready to face the full implications of those principles, yet in a truly subversive act, they gave those principles the ultimate power of law.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, although clearly recognizing the evil of slavery, was unable to give up his own slaves. Yet he helped to found our country general principles that would ultimately make slavery untenable.
These powerful principles were like time bombs in our Constitution, and it was left to the logicians of our society--the judges--to work out the full implications of those principles. It has taken over two hundred years to do so, and we are not done yet.
There is a danger that we will turn away from those deep principles. There have been attempts in the past, such as the effort to amend the Constitution to make burning the flag an exception to the protection of free speech. We are seeing this again, with the effort to amend the Constitution to prohibit states from allowing gay marriage.
If we ever do start to amend the Constitution so as to limit people's rights instead of expanding them, I believe that our nation will have turned a corner from which there is no returning, and will have begun a repudiation of those principles of freedom and equality which our founders fought so hard to establish.
But we've approached that brink and turned back before. I can only hope that we will continue to do so.
How is it a stupid idea? It has worked wonders everywhere it has been tried. The best example is the American Negro. They are by far the strongest humans on the planet. Their physical superiority is a direct result of selective breeding over just a few hundred years.
The strongest? American Negroes are not particularly highly represented among champion weightlifters. And many of the great runners are from African countries where they clearly have not enjoyed the doubtful benefits of selective breeding. Fortunately, the period of slavery in this country was only a few generations, far to short to produce significant genetic change, as any competent geneticist or dog breeder will tell you. Where do you get such racist nonsense?
The ancient Spartans produced the best fighting force the world had ever seen, their women were considered the most beautiful... all Spartans were selectively bred.
What is the evidence of that, or that their supposed prowess was due to their breeding and not their training?
That is highly optomistic. Me thinks you are simply infatuated with the post modern ideal of technological progress at any cost. Further, you are missing the point... skin color isn't the issue. It is the continued reproduction and invasion by non-white races who are mentally inferior and incapable of civilized living.
Spoken like somebody who has had little contact with people from different parts of the world or knowledge of history. High levels of civilization have existed in many parts of the world where pigmentation is dark. As a scientist, I routinely encounter brilliant people with dark skin. And genetically, there no reason for their to be any correlation between skin color, which is merely a trivial adaption to enable the body to make adequate vitamin D at northern latitudes, and intelligence.
Our understanding of what differentiates a human brain from an ape's brain is completely inadequate.
Have you ever actually looked at an ape brain and a human brain side-by-side? The difference in the amount of cortex is dramatic. On the other hand, human brains of people from different parts of the world are anatomically indistinguishable.
What about same-sex incestuous marriages? No risk of birth defects there. Also, if one partner is documented to be sterile or past menopause, then your objection is gone.
As noted elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be much demand for same-sex incestuous marriages, so this seems to be an academic rather than practical concern. Perhaps if you are dying to marry your brother, you could make the case for it. But this seems to me to fall into the category of, "Why should people have to obey the traffic laws when there is no other traffic on the road?" There is a certain value to having a law stated broadly, without a lot of complicated exceptions, that offsets possible injustices that affect small numbers of people or only arise in rare situations.
Two-way unions (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) are not very stable either.
Yes, it's hard enough to maintain an intimate relationship with one other person. Unions involving larger numbers are a lot more complex. I am not saying that a case could not be made for this, but it would clearly be very different from the case for allowing same-sex marriages. The point is that each case has to be considered separately, and many of the arguments in support of homosexual unions--a large number of people affected, numerous examples of stable, long-term relationships, strong evidence that it creates a favorable environment for raising children--simply do not apply to these other cases.
The survival of the white race depends upon government persuading the people to reproduce. Ideally eugenics programs should be implemented so that the best characteristics are furthered and the inferior characteristics are suppressed.
There is no such thing as a "white race." Pale skin pigment is just a genetic trait, like hair or eye color, is widely distributed among people of different genetic backgrounds. Especially in the US, most people have ancestors with the entire range of skin pigmentation. Eugenics was always a stupid idea, and seems even stupider when we stand upon the brink of genetic therapy. Very soon, if a trait is not beneficial (such as white skin in lower latitudes) it will be possible to alter it to taste.
So what you're saying is that we should ignore the definition of a word, simply because it will change in the future. Generalizing that, the meaning of any word is indeterminate, because future usage will change the meaning.
I am suggesting that a dictionary definition does not and should not have the force of law. Especially since there are lots of different dictionaries and they don't necessarily all agree. For example, it is quite easy to find dictionary definitions of "marriage" that do not specify "a man and a woman."
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Umm, breeding plants to create useful hybrids is one thing, but genetically modifying plants is something very different. Those genes they are putting in your food don't always come from other plants you know.
That's OK. I eat animals, too. There's nothing inherently safe about plants or plant genes. Plants produce many kinds of toxic substances. Perhaps if the genetic engineers try really hard, they could produce a food as dangerously immunogenic as a peanut.
Secondly, just because humans don't eat a particular plant, doesn't mean that we should contaminate it at will. What about all the other species that might need it to survive.
Chances are that they'll adapt. I'm particularly not worried about short-generation species like butterflies. Those guys evolve fast.
I don't have any problem at all with genetically modified foods. We've been genetically modifying food crops for thousands of years; we've just gotten better at it lately.
But these aren't genetically modified foods--they are food crops modified to produce drugs. Granted, they seem like fairly benign substances, but I don't understand why they need to use food crops. Surely there are plants that could be used for drug manufacture that are not normally cultivated for human consumption, obviating concerns that pharmaceutical crop seeds will get mistakenly mixed in with food crop seeds, or that pharmaceutical crops with cross-pollinate food crops.
Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets.
The fundamental problem here is that correlation is not causality. Showing that downloaders buy less music is not the same as showing that they'd buy more music if they couldn't download. Perhaps they're cheapskates who would would rather do without than pay retail. In which case, it may be unfair that they're getting the benefit of all that free music, but it isn't impacting sales at all.
In a society where trash like Stephen King is treated as great literature, even bad sci fi is pretty damned good.
It is fashionable to sneer at King, but I think that he tends to be underrated as a writer. Strong characterization, vivid and original description, convincing dialog. I think he tends to be underrated by "literary" types because his writing seems to draw more from an oral tradition of storytelling than from a literary one, and because so much of his work is genre fiction.
Part of my job involves science policy research. When I talk to scientists, they say just the opposite. They don't want more science fiction. In fact, they blame science fiction for getting inaccurate ideas out to the public.
That's certainly not my impression as a scientist. Very often, the fiction has led the science. I can remember when physicists sneered at ray guns in science fiction, and now lasers are nearly universal. I can't help wondering if many things would have been even attempted if they'd not first been postulated in fiction. And when it comes to examining the ethical implications of scientific advances, the science fiction writers have done a better job than the ethicists and science policy wonks (and usually with a better grasp of the science).
(You might say that good science fiction doesn't do this, but how much science fiction is good?)
Good science fiction is about as common as good science. Sturgeon's Law is universal.
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point?
Actually, it is probably about as effective as your front door is in protecting your house. Anybody who is really determined to rip you off can kick it in or break a window, but it deters the most casual thieves, and puts people on notice that they aren't entitled to just walk in.
If you own an ipod and you are going to rip music, why would you waste your time with mp3, and leave it with itunes AAC default?
With mp3, you give up a little bit of storage efficiency in trade for greater compatibility. Personally, I stick with mp3 because I can stream it from my Mac to my TiVo.
The error is quite clear. Most people around here seem to see the iPod as basically a hard disk. So their reaction was, "A smaller capacity hard disk that's nearly as expensive as a large one? Who would want that?"
But what Apple knew that the pundits did not is that the iPod is only incidentally a hard disk--it's a music player. So to the average consumer, the reaction was, "A smaller, more convenient iPod, and cheaper to boot? Where do I sign up?" Lower capacity was for most a minor concern, because even the mini holds more than enough music for most activities.
As for support other formats, why bother? Just think of the support headache. When instead they could invest the same amount of effort into improving and promoting the iTunes store. Besides, once people start buying their tunes elsewhere, they might start thinking that they could just as well have one of those clone players. Apple already supports the most common open format, so if people don't want to go with Apple's store and format, they can always order the CDs used from Amazon and rip them to mp3.
The display technology may be here, but it doesn't look like they've really thought seriously about the ergonomics of an ebook. The thing is laid out like a giant PDA. An ebook should need very few buttons, and should be more along the lines of a TV remote, or better yet, an iPod. The main things I want are page forward/back, and some sort of proportional "page flip" dial or bar, all positioned for comfortable access by the hand holding the book.
So, the end of time will occur when all of mass-energy is reduced to a state where it can no longer perform work
However, since this is an asymptotic process, that places the end of time infinitely far in the future--which is a bit like having no end of time.
Actually... should the universe eventually be saturated with entropy how could time flow?
This is a bit like one of those "tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it questions." At maximum entropy, no meaningful macroscopic change takes place, but in principle time could presumably be defined by the interactions of individual particles. However, since there would not be any kind of consciousness around to observe it, time becomes sort of irrelevant.
BTW, time ends when the universe stops expanding. Closely following the stoppage, the kinetic energy of the universe (so-called 'dark energy' which prevents the matter from collapsing back upon itself) will no longer be able to hold gravity in check and then comes the Big Crunch, though that is much more highly accelerated than the expansion phase.
However, current evidence indicates that, instead of slowing down as predicted by "Big Crunch" models, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. So no end of time after all.
The reason most (or all) AIDS infections happen through unprotected sex is because that's where the virus will do the most damage, since most people have unprotected sex.
If everyone switches to wearing condoms or practicing abstinence then you'll start to see AIDS mutations that jump through the air or something.
That is nonsense. A HIV strain that propagates through the air will be strongly favored whether people practice safe sex or not, because people breathe more than they have sex. Taking precautions against venereal spread of HIV will do nothing to increase the mutation rate of the virus.
Probably. Who is to say they weren't right? Is out society better/safer than it was 30 years ago?
One thing is quite clear...violence by the age demographic that most plays videogames has steadily decreased as games have gotten increasingly bloodier, more violent, and more realistic.
I get the feeling that anyone who grew up playing early video games gets a real sense of disgust at seeing the level of depravity present in today's titles.
...but then, I liked "Death Race 2000" and "People Pong"
Not me...
The preservation argument only gets you so far, and it doesn't address the concept that the game's owners might and should have control over how their stuff is "preserved." Nintendo certainly speaks loudly on this issue, since they "preserve" all their old games by continually re-releasing them. If a game company declares that Game X is public domain, then by all means, preserve away. Until that time, it's still stealing.
Perhaps, but as breaking the law goes, it seems to fall into the same class as driving 10 mph over the speed limit at 3 am when there's nobody else on the road. The financial loss to the copyright owner is negligible--the availability on MAME is not going to significantly deter people from buying the game if the company re-releases it on console. "Williams Arcade Classics" was a big seller on console this last Xmas, even though every one of those games is readily available for MAME (I bought a copy myself; I just wish Capcom would do the same). And as the Jarvis interview makes clear, many of the actual creators are more than happy to see their creations still being played.
You call that boiling it down? I consider this idiotic, how the hell do they from first principles come up with a statistical distribution of the starting "set of parameters" for human coin flipping that in any way is defensible?
The claimed conclusion is that, based on both a mathematical analysis and an experimental test is that most values favor the face that is up to begin with. As to the details of the statistical distributions they assumed, you aren't going to find that in a general report in the popular media--you'll probably need to delve into the details of their mathematical and experimental models. But it is certainly a plausible claim. Simply from the fact that people commonly flip coins to make randomized decisions, one already knows that parameters that result in "heads" vs. "tails" outcome have to densely interleaved. This means that the result is very likely to be independent of the details of the statistical distribution that you assume for things like the magnitude, angle, and timing of the initial vector of force applied to the coin.
First - the experiment they used to "prove" this involves creating a mechanical device that will flip a coin for you. After some tweaking, they got it to flip and land consistently with heads up. Of course you can flip a coin (or any other object) and get it to land the same way every time.
No, you simply failed to understand the study. It wasn't a test of whether a coin could be flipped reproducibly. Yes, they came up with a device to flip a coin reproducibly, but then they looked at the effect of varying the flip parameters like force and angle. The question of whether the coin is biased then boils down to whether the set of values that cause the coin to land same side up is greater than the set that cause it to land same side down.
There is an old tradition in which people donate some portion of their time to work that improves the general welfare. In some professions, such as law and medicine, a certain amount of pro bono work is considered almost part of the job.
So I question the assumption that one must choose between creating open-source work and profiting from the fruits of you labor. Even for companies, it may make sense to devote a certain amount of resources to open source development of generally useful operating systems or utilities, thereby "buying into" a body of open source software which adds value to the company's proprietary products.
Once upon a time the people demanding freedom were the christians wanting to support christian morals. They wrote a constitution based upon their freedom. It worked fine until recently, when being free and being christian were different ideas.
Given that the framers of the Constitution, for the most part, clearly subscribed to the predominant religious beliefs of their time, perhaps the most amazing thing is how utterly secular a document it is. There are not even the usual vague platitudes about God. The words "God" and "Christ" do not occur anywhere in the document. And just in case the point is not absolutely clear, the very first words of the first Amendment of the Bill of Rights flatly prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. Whatever their personal religious convictions, they were at great pains to create a document that defined a rule of law, rather than "morality," and constrained by basic principles of liberty.
The courts regularly overturn the constitution. Where in the world did they find the "right" for a woman to have an abortion? Did they totally ignore the 10th amendment?
The the greatest genius of the framers of the Constitution is that they founded our country upon powerful general principles of freedom and equality. In many cases they themselves were not ready to face the full implications of those principles, yet in a truly subversive act, they gave those principles the ultimate power of law.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, although clearly recognizing the evil of slavery, was unable to give up his own slaves. Yet he helped to found our country general principles that would ultimately make slavery untenable.
These powerful principles were like time bombs in our Constitution, and it was left to the logicians of our society--the judges--to work out the full implications of those principles. It has taken over two hundred years to do so, and we are not done yet.
There is a danger that we will turn away from those deep principles. There have been attempts in the past, such as the effort to amend the Constitution to make burning the flag an exception to the protection of free speech. We are seeing this again, with the effort to amend the Constitution to prohibit states from allowing gay marriage.
If we ever do start to amend the Constitution so as to limit people's rights instead of expanding them, I believe that our nation will have turned a corner from which there is no returning, and will have begun a repudiation of those principles of freedom and equality which our founders fought so hard to establish.
But we've approached that brink and turned back before. I can only hope that we will continue to do so.
How is it a stupid idea? It has worked wonders everywhere it has been tried. The best example is the American Negro. They are by far the strongest humans on the planet. Their physical superiority is a direct result of selective breeding over just a few hundred years.
The strongest? American Negroes are not particularly highly represented among champion weightlifters. And many of the great runners are from African countries where they clearly have not enjoyed the doubtful benefits of selective breeding. Fortunately, the period of slavery in this country was only a few generations, far to short to produce significant genetic change, as any competent geneticist or dog breeder will tell you. Where do you get such racist nonsense?
The ancient Spartans produced the best fighting force the world had ever seen, their women were considered the most beautiful... all Spartans were selectively bred.
What is the evidence of that, or that their supposed prowess was due to their breeding and not their training?
That is highly optomistic. Me thinks you are simply infatuated with the post modern ideal of technological progress at any cost. Further, you are missing the point... skin color isn't the issue. It is the continued reproduction and invasion by non-white races who are mentally inferior and incapable of civilized living.
Spoken like somebody who has had little contact with people from different parts of the world or knowledge of history. High levels of civilization have existed in many parts of the world where pigmentation is dark. As a scientist, I routinely encounter brilliant people with dark skin. And genetically, there no reason for their to be any correlation between skin color, which is merely a trivial adaption to enable the body to make adequate vitamin D at northern latitudes, and intelligence.
Our understanding of what differentiates a human brain from an ape's brain is completely inadequate.
Have you ever actually looked at an ape brain and a human brain side-by-side? The difference in the amount of cortex is dramatic. On the other hand, human brains of people from different parts of the world are anatomically indistinguishable.
What about same-sex incestuous marriages? No risk of birth defects there. Also, if one partner is documented to be sterile or past menopause, then your objection is gone.
As noted elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be much demand for same-sex incestuous marriages, so this seems to be an academic rather than practical concern. Perhaps if you are dying to marry your brother, you could make the case for it. But this seems to me to fall into the category of, "Why should people have to obey the traffic laws when there is no other traffic on the road?" There is a certain value to having a law stated broadly, without a lot of complicated exceptions, that offsets possible injustices that affect small numbers of people or only arise in rare situations.
Two-way unions (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) are not very stable either.
Yes, it's hard enough to maintain an intimate relationship with one other person. Unions involving larger numbers are a lot more complex. I am not saying that a case could not be made for this, but it would clearly be very different from the case for allowing same-sex marriages. The point is that each case has to be considered separately, and many of the arguments in support of homosexual unions--a large number of people affected, numerous examples of stable, long-term relationships, strong evidence that it creates a favorable environment for raising children--simply do not apply to these other cases.
The survival of the white race depends upon government persuading the people to reproduce. Ideally eugenics programs should be implemented so that the best characteristics are furthered and the inferior characteristics are suppressed.
There is no such thing as a "white race." Pale skin pigment is just a genetic trait, like hair or eye color, is widely distributed among people of different genetic backgrounds. Especially in the US, most people have ancestors with the entire range of skin pigmentation. Eugenics was always a stupid idea, and seems even stupider when we stand upon the brink of genetic therapy. Very soon, if a trait is not beneficial (such as white skin in lower latitudes) it will be possible to alter it to taste.
So what you're saying is that we should ignore the definition of a word, simply because it will change in the future. Generalizing that, the meaning of any word is indeterminate, because future usage will change the meaning.
I am suggesting that a dictionary definition does not and should not have the force of law. Especially since there are lots of different dictionaries and they don't necessarily all agree. For example, it is quite easy to find dictionary definitions of "marriage" that do not specify "a man and a woman."