Why should these scientists be any less prone to political bias than anyone else?
They aren't. Of course, scientists are educated people, and educated people tend to be a bit more liberal on the average. But scientists are mainly concerned with science, and the Bush administration and the Republican Party have actually been relatively generous in supporting scientific research. So normally, scientists would tend to be supportive, or at least not rock the boat. However, nothing enrages scientists more than having their findings distorted and misstated, and it is clear from the scientific press that the Bush Administration has done this repeatedly, meddling far more than previous administrations.
Basically, it looks like the Bush administration has taken about the same approach to interpreting scientific data that they took to interpreting the pre-war intelligence reports about Iraq. They already think they know the answer, so they simply discard anything that doesn't fit their preconceived notions. This is the sort of thing that really pisses off scientists.
The best remote I've ever seen was for VideoGuide, an early predecessor to the DVR (it got its program info by radio and controlled a VCR). But the TiVo remote is very nicely designed.
That being said, I never use it. It won't control the volume on my receiver, so it's useless to me. I generally find only "learning" remotes are useful. Code programming for other components never seems to work--either there isn't the right code, or else some critical button is missing.
So what I actually use is an MX-500 learning remote. It's a bit big, and not quite as elegant as the TiVo remote, but well designed, with plenty of buttons and a thumbstick, and able to learn on every button.
whats to stop people continuously subscribing to your list and then refusing to refund you the money (or even worse, simply forgetting, you expect everyone to remember to click the "refund this mailing list message" button?)
Make refund the default. The money is only deducted if the recipient clicks a "this is spam" button. The list can charge a nominal price to join using one of the available micropayment systems--say 25 cents. This will defray the deposit cost for the list, and also act as the subscriber's deposit against mistaken or malicious spam accusations. If a subscribe "uses up" his deposit, he is automatically unsubscribed.
Arcades need to get together to set up a consortium to develop arcade games. Not the fancy driving games with a car you sit in, but straightforward standup quarter munchers and fighting games. All must run on a common platform, like the old SNK systems, but with a few sets of controls (which can be plugged into the console as needed). Major upgrades to be issued every 5 years or so.
And the absolute rule: No ports to PC or console ever! You want to play these games, you go to an arcade. For titles not developed by the consortium, the manufacturer must agree to supply a "Special Arcade Edition" with levels or characters that will remain exclusive to the arcade.
i'm not in favor of forced sterilization, but i think knowingly transmitting genetic disorders should be frowned upon. as far as Stephen Hawking, i think the utility of Hawking the utility of not having to deal with known genetic disorders after a generation or two. i'd make that trade-off.
But there's no need to make any such tradeoff. There is little doubt that within "a generation or two" we'll have gene therapy for most genetic disorders.
That step's not small enough. Anyone with a debilitating genetic disease should be sterilized. Sorry, I put the rights of the unborn children over the vanity and selfishness of the parent poster of this thread. He wants to have kids who will also be disabled.
Actually, he didn't say anything about actually wanting kids; he spoke in a theoretical sense of "potential" children. And even if he wants kids, he probably doesn't want them to be disabled. There are plenty of alternatives to avoid this. Prenatal diagnosis and, if necessary, abortion is one possibility. And chances are that there will be a gene therapy treatment available in a few years. The notion of forced sterilization to deal with genetic disease is obsolete. Indeed, one has to wonder about the mental health of somebody who advocates it in this day and age.
Note also that the treatment appears to be irreversible. So if it goes bad, the only way to fix it would be more gene therapy (antisense or something of the sort).
Throw in an infinite amount of strange physics and you have a pointless excersice, and unsuprising. Much better to find the examples where physics was well understood, and promote that.
I don't agree. There is nothing particularly interesting about physics that is correct ("Oh, look, here's a guy walking around without flying through the air. That's correct physics.) Trying to figure out what the physics would have to be to make the comic book feats work can also be instructive as well as fun. Of course, to make it challenging, and avoid the "infinite amount of strange physics" syndrome, you have to apply Occam's Razor: "Let's suppose that you actually observed somebody doing this. Come up with a the simplest hypothesis about how it could happen that is not inconsistent with known physics."
Just because it doesn't occur in future releases, doesn't mean its been fixed
Then nothing can ever be fixed, unless Microsoft invents a time machine. Until then, the next best thing is to supply a free upgrade that lacks the bug, and that has already been done.
If I remember correctly it was Krypton's sun that exploded and destroyed the planet, or at least in one version it did. A red sun that went super nova.
It was certainly the planet exploding in some versions. Don't know if there was ever a supernova explanation advanced.
Does Physics provide an answer why pieces of Krypton can harm Superman yet pieces of Earth do not harm Earthlings?;)
Actually, in more recent storylines, it is harmful to earthlings, but not so rapidly. But Superman isn't human, so differential sensitivity to radiation hardly seems surprising. Still, the fact that he is sensitive to fragments of his own planet seems more like sympathetic magic than science. I've heard it suggested that the laws of physics were actually different in the part of the universe where Krypton is, in which case it might make more sense, but I don't know if this was ever an "official" explanation.
lso if Krypton had neutron star matter in its core, how come Kryptonite which came from Krypton's core is not super heavy?
Maybe it's from the shell, not the core.
Also if Superman is unable to be harmed and bullets bounce off of his chest, how come there are no holes in his clothes? Current storyline on Superman had him arrive in a pod with no blankets, so they did not use them to create his costume. Kal-El was a test tube baby and sent to Earth in the ship inside of a pod.
In the current explanation, Superman has a force field that protects his skin-tight suit (but not his cape). Originally, he did have blankets, and Ma Kent unravelled the indestructible threat and rewove them into his suit.
Also how does Superman lose his strength when exposed to Kryptonite or Red Solar Radiation, if he was exposed to high gravity he still should have his muscles unless they wore out over the years of growing up in a lower gravity environment.
I get weak when I'm sick, even though I still have all my muscles.
lso how can Clark Kent pass physicals when they cannot even draw blood for blood tests from his arm as it is super hard?
This sort of thing was commonly dealt with in the old stories. Short answer: trickery.
Clark Kent is also an illegal alien having not been born on Earth, and obviously any papers saying so must have been forged or are false.
Obviously. But Ma Kent claimed him as hers, and in rural Kansas who's to know she was lying?
Time travel by spinning the Earth backwards, I do not think that this will work and should only cause major earthquakes and other problems.
I don't recall the earth spinning backwards, I recall Superman flying around the earth. The "faster than light" part makes a certain amount of sense under relativity (once you get past the impossibility of going faster than light in the first place).
Also they had Superman in space without the need for air. How is this possible? Just how long can he hold his breath and avoid the effects of decompression?
Whether Superman really needs to breathe seems to have varied over the years. With superstrong integument, explosive decompression is hardly a problem
With muscles that powerful, he should weigh a ton or more.
Strength is not necessarily related to weight
People would be able to notice this as he walks on weak surfaces like wood floors.
We don't actually know what he weighs, but since he is immune to gravity, this will hardly be a problem.
Also how is it possible to disguise yourself by combing out that s-curl, putting on glasses, and changing clothes? Someone with the intellect that Lex Luthor claims to have should be able to see through that transparent disguise, but apparently not.
The original notion was that Clark is such a good actor, that nobody even thinks to make the connection. Although I seem to recall a revisionist explanation in which Superman vibrates his face really fast so that nobody ever sees him clearly. Although it seems like a guy whose face was always a blur would spook people out...
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 1
That reminds me, I read somewhere that Superman has the power of telekenesis, but only with things he is touching. Sounds useless but that allows him to pick up things like ships and buses without ripping them apart.
This comes from John Byrne's revisionist retelling to the Superman story. He did a pretty good job of coming up with psuedoscientific explanations for the ridiculous things that Superman had been doing for years.
That explanation always sounded fishy to me. The material won't get ruined by extreme heat/bullets/corrosive chemicals but it can be cut with scissors and tailored with a needle? Hmm...
Needles aren't a problem--a needle goes between the threads, which if memory serves she got from unraveling the blankets. I believe the young superman cut the threads with his heat vision.
The most common comic physics error...
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...is the failure to understand weight, gravity, and balance. Very often, one sees a "superstrong" character lifting, say a truck, by grabbing it at one end and picking it up. But no matter how strong you are, if you are going to lift something, the combined center of gravity of the object plus you has to be be between your legs, or you will fall over. So you might be strong enough to carry a truck if you were underneath it, but no matter how strong you were, you couldn't pick it up from one end unless you were considerably heavier than the truck itself. Superman, by the way, is presumably an exception to this, since he is apparently immune to gravity--so he could probably lift a big weight from one end by "flying downward". A classic older cover drawing of Superman, back when he couldn't fly, but only "leap tall buildings," showed him lifting a car "realistically"--over his head like a weight lifter.
A related error is an unrealistic notion of the strength of materials. You can't pick a car up by the bumper; it will just break off.
If I buy a new TV this year, it will be a CRT. Possible exception: for the living room, where we don't really want a large TV, we may just put a 20" iMac with a small external video tuner.
Good idea. Seems like a 20" iMac would make a great media server for a small room. You could make it a music server as well (I have an old beige G3 serving that function) and even add EyeTV for PVR capability.
If this criteria is used as a minimum, why not take the next logical step and judge the relative value of a person based on their IQ? I'm not saying that you personally do this, just that it seems to me that is the next step if one uses brain activity as the only litmus test for personhood.
Again, I'm talking about absence or presence of brain activity, not quantity, and quantity has no relationship to IQ, so this has no relationship whatsoever to the issue at hand.
I'm not sure why you would want to judge the relative value of people from their IQ. Just off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why it is a very bad idea:
1. Because IQ is actually not a very good predictor of a person's value to society.
2. Because historical experience has shown that society benefits more from treating people equally than from attempting to rank them according to value.
I should also point out that most people who share your view do not apply it fully. I have yet to hear anybody advocate testing the embryo for brain activity before abortion.
It becomes less relevant when you consider abortion, as opposed to human blastocysts created in a dish (which is the case at hand). With pregnancy, in addition to the issue of the personhood of the embryo, there is also the issue of a person's sovereignty over their own body, and whether anybody or anything, human or not, is ever entitled to the intimate use of somebody else's body without their consent. However, the maturity of the fetus's nervous system is certainly one piece of information that many people do take into account in considering the ethical implications of abortion.
It is not so obvious to me that an embryo is distinct from a human child, since it is not the same entity as either parent, and defining the " "line" anywhere else has illogical conclusions if applied consistantly. Like many others, you've taken the "brain waves = life" line, which if applied consistantly means that smarter people are superior to less educated.
That is nonsense. You can't judge intelligence based upon quantity of brain waves or neural activity. Educated people do not have more brain waves than uneducated people. Neural activity obviously is not a sufficient criterion for something to be a person--goldfish have neural activity. But it is a useful minimum criterion. If you don't have neural activity, then you are either not a person, or you are dead.
Having gone through the process recently, we know much less than you'd think. Know why pregnant women can't have many drugs? Because we don't know how most drugs affect the fetus. There are some drugs we know are bad, there are some we're pretty sure are ok, and there's the vast majority that we don't have a clue on.
Now if you'd said that there are a lot of things that we don't know about drugs, as a pharmacologist I would have had to agree. The reality is that we have only a vague understanding of how many drugs work on people in general, and the only way to know with confidence what effects they will have on a particular group of people is to try them and see.
Actually we don't, which was one of the points I made in my first post on this thread. Do some Googling for fetal brain development or activity.
By "brain activity," I am speaking at the most basic level--the existence of neurons with electrical activity. This is basic embryology and well established. In the abortion debate, you'll run across arguments about when high-level brain activity or consciousness begins (difficult, since we don't really understand either). But when it comes to something like a blastocyst, there is no room for debate. No neurons, no brain activity.
Are you suggesting that if you are knowlegable in CPR and a man starts choking in the room and you're the only person around that you have no moral obligation to help him?
No, I am suggesting that I have no legal obligation to do so. Fortunately, there are still some areas in which the law permits people to make their own moral choices without coercion.
Precisely... my entire point was that you can't draw such a line, even scientifically, because we just don't know enough about the entire process yet.
However, a line must be drawn, because every sperm and egg has some probability of producing a human being, and protecting all sperm and egg cells would be a bit awkward. I think that we know quite a bit about human reproduction. We certainly know when brain activity begins, which is certainly one thing that distinguishes a human being from all of the living human tissue that we routinely discard without a thought.
Here, the core issue is when life begins. If it begins at the zygote stage, then this technology is murdering for scientific gain. The trouble is, there is no clear-cut way of drawing that line- is it when the organism is self aware? Then abortion should be acceptable several months- even years- after birth. Is it when heart activity starts? The problem with this is that we know a person may be alive and recussitated for several minutes after his heart has stopped. Brain activity? Then maybe those with less brain activity- Alzheimer's patients, mentally ill etc.- should be killed as well, since their life is of less value by that criteria.
There is no issue as to "when life begins." There is no point in human reproduction where life begins. Life began a long, long, time ago. Every day, you shed millions of cells that are human and alive, and cloning teaches us that every one of these, under appropriate conditions, could become a walking breathing, person.
It may be difficult to draw a line as to how much brain activity is enough for something to be considered a human being, but there is one thing is absolutely clear: wherever that line is, it is somewhere above "none".
The ethical questions are bigger than that. Making babies without the usual mother and father will allow people who shouldn't have babies (think Massacuhusts here) to have them.
Not sure what you are getting at here. Huge numbers of people who shouldn't have babies are having them already by the old fashioned method. Cloning would make an insignificant contribution to this. Gay and lesbian couples already have kids by a variety of methods, and numerous studies show that those kids turn out just fine.
The obvious difference is that someone already alive goes from a state of thinking to a state of being brain dead. In the case of an embryo the thinking may not have occurred yet, but -- unless there's a problem with the fetus -- it will.
Not necessarily. A large fraction of embryos--probably a bit under half--will spontaneously abort due to defects, and will never develop consciousness. So it is a matter of probability. Of course, exactly the same thing can be said regarding the sperm and egg before they merge. So what probability of producing a mature human does something have to have before it is worthy of protection? 50%, 1%, 0.1%. What basis is there to draw such a line?
An interesting point, my friend. I believe that most unborn babies begin developing brain activity at a very, very early stage. This would certainly contradict the current notion of women's rights over those of her...hmm...fetus.
While it is obvious that an embryo that lacks a working brain is not yet a human being, brain activity alone is probably not sufficient. Some level of maturity of the brain beyond basic activity should probably also be required. However, the right of the potential mother is based on her ownership of her body, not the humanity of the fetus. You cannot be forced to give me any organ of your body, not even blood. This is true even if my need for that organ is the result of an injury caused by your negligence, and if you will die without it. So regardless of whether or not the embryo is human, the mother is under no obligation to carry it to term.
It may be scientific, but it sure is arbitrary. We can also determine if someone is human or not based on their skin color. Why not?
Because people have different skin color. But all people have working brains. We have a word for somebody whose brain has permanently ceased to function. The word is "dead." Brain function is the one thing that distinguishes a person from the millions of human cells that we all shed every day, each of which, under the appropriate conditions probably has the potential to produce a complete human being.
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Why should these scientists be any less prone to political bias than anyone else?
They aren't. Of course, scientists are educated people, and educated people tend to be a bit more liberal on the average. But scientists are mainly concerned with science, and the Bush administration and the Republican Party have actually been relatively generous in supporting scientific research. So normally, scientists would tend to be supportive, or at least not rock the boat. However, nothing enrages scientists more than having their findings distorted and misstated, and it is clear from the scientific press that the Bush Administration has done this repeatedly, meddling far more than previous administrations.
Basically, it looks like the Bush administration has taken about the same approach to interpreting scientific data that they took to interpreting the pre-war intelligence reports about Iraq. They already think they know the answer, so they simply discard anything that doesn't fit their preconceived notions. This is the sort of thing that really pisses off scientists.
That being said, I never use it. It won't control the volume on my receiver, so it's useless to me. I generally find only "learning" remotes are useful. Code programming for other components never seems to work--either there isn't the right code, or else some critical button is missing.
So what I actually use is an MX-500 learning remote. It's a bit big, and not quite as elegant as the TiVo remote, but well designed, with plenty of buttons and a thumbstick, and able to learn on every button.
whats to stop people continuously subscribing to your list and then refusing to refund you the money (or even worse, simply forgetting, you expect everyone to remember to click the "refund this mailing list message" button?)
Make refund the default. The money is only deducted if the recipient clicks a "this is spam" button. The list can charge a nominal price to join using one of the available micropayment systems--say 25 cents. This will defray the deposit cost for the list, and also act as the subscriber's deposit against mistaken or malicious spam accusations. If a subscribe "uses up" his deposit, he is automatically unsubscribed.
Arcades need to get together to set up a consortium to develop arcade games. Not the fancy driving games with a car you sit in, but straightforward standup quarter munchers and fighting games. All must run on a common platform, like the old SNK systems, but with a few sets of controls (which can be plugged into the console as needed). Major upgrades to be issued every 5 years or so.
And the absolute rule: No ports to PC or console ever! You want to play these games, you go to an arcade. For titles not developed by the consortium, the manufacturer must agree to supply a "Special Arcade Edition" with levels or characters that will remain exclusive to the arcade.
i'm not in favor of forced sterilization, but i think knowingly transmitting genetic disorders should be frowned upon. as far as Stephen Hawking, i think the utility of Hawking the utility of not having to deal with known genetic disorders after a generation or two. i'd make that trade-off.
But there's no need to make any such tradeoff. There is little doubt that within "a generation or two" we'll have gene therapy for most genetic disorders.
That step's not small enough. Anyone with a debilitating genetic disease should be sterilized. Sorry, I put the rights of the unborn children over the vanity and selfishness of the parent poster of this thread. He wants to have kids who will also be disabled.
Actually, he didn't say anything about actually wanting kids; he spoke in a theoretical sense of "potential" children. And even if he wants kids, he probably doesn't want them to be disabled. There are plenty of alternatives to avoid this. Prenatal diagnosis and, if necessary, abortion is one possibility. And chances are that there will be a gene therapy treatment available in a few years. The notion of forced sterilization to deal with genetic disease is obsolete. Indeed, one has to wonder about the mental health of somebody who advocates it in this day and age.
Note also that the treatment appears to be irreversible. So if it goes bad, the only way to fix it would be more gene therapy (antisense or something of the sort).
Throw in an infinite amount of strange physics and you have a pointless excersice, and unsuprising. Much better to find the examples where physics was well understood, and promote that.
I don't agree. There is nothing particularly interesting about physics that is correct ("Oh, look, here's a guy walking around without flying through the air. That's correct physics.) Trying to figure out what the physics would have to be to make the comic book feats work can also be instructive as well as fun. Of course, to make it challenging, and avoid the "infinite amount of strange physics" syndrome, you have to apply Occam's Razor: "Let's suppose that you actually observed somebody doing this. Come up with a the simplest hypothesis about how it could happen that is not inconsistent with known physics."
Just because it doesn't occur in future releases, doesn't mean its been fixed
Then nothing can ever be fixed, unless Microsoft invents a time machine. Until then, the next best thing is to supply a free upgrade that lacks the bug, and that has already been done.
If I remember correctly it was Krypton's sun that exploded and destroyed the planet, or at least in one version it did. A red sun that went super nova.
;)
It was certainly the planet exploding in some versions. Don't know if there was ever a supernova explanation advanced.
Does Physics provide an answer why pieces of Krypton can harm Superman yet pieces of Earth do not harm Earthlings?
Actually, in more recent storylines, it is harmful to earthlings, but not so rapidly. But Superman isn't human, so differential sensitivity to radiation hardly seems surprising. Still, the fact that he is sensitive to fragments of his own planet seems more like sympathetic magic than science. I've heard it suggested that the laws of physics were actually different in the part of the universe where Krypton is, in which case it might make more sense, but I don't know if this was ever an "official" explanation.
lso if Krypton had neutron star matter in its core, how come Kryptonite which came from Krypton's core is not super heavy?
Maybe it's from the shell, not the core.
Also if Superman is unable to be harmed and bullets bounce off of his chest, how come there are no holes in his clothes? Current storyline on Superman had him arrive in a pod with no blankets, so they did not use them to create his costume. Kal-El was a test tube baby and sent to Earth in the ship inside of a pod.
In the current explanation, Superman has a force field that protects his skin-tight suit (but not his cape). Originally, he did have blankets, and Ma Kent unravelled the indestructible threat and rewove them into his suit.
Also how does Superman lose his strength when exposed to Kryptonite or Red Solar Radiation, if he was exposed to high gravity he still should have his muscles unless they wore out over the years of growing up in a lower gravity environment.
I get weak when I'm sick, even though I still have all my muscles.
lso how can Clark Kent pass physicals when they cannot even draw blood for blood tests from his arm as it is super hard?
This sort of thing was commonly dealt with in the old stories. Short answer: trickery.
Clark Kent is also an illegal alien having not been born on Earth, and obviously any papers saying so must have been forged or are false.
Obviously. But Ma Kent claimed him as hers, and in rural Kansas who's to know she was lying?
Time travel by spinning the Earth backwards, I do not think that this will work and should only cause major earthquakes and other problems.
I don't recall the earth spinning backwards, I recall Superman flying around the earth. The "faster than light" part makes a certain amount of sense under relativity (once you get past the impossibility of going faster than light in the first place).
Also they had Superman in space without the need for air. How is this possible? Just how long can he hold his breath and avoid the effects of decompression?
Whether Superman really needs to breathe seems to have varied over the years. With superstrong integument, explosive decompression is hardly a problem
With muscles that powerful, he should weigh a ton or more.
Strength is not necessarily related to weight
People would be able to notice this as he walks on weak surfaces like wood floors.
We don't actually know what he weighs, but since he is immune to gravity, this will hardly be a problem.
Also how is it possible to disguise yourself by combing out that s-curl, putting on glasses, and changing clothes? Someone with the intellect that Lex Luthor claims to have should be able to see through that transparent disguise, but apparently not.
The original notion was that Clark is such a good actor, that nobody even thinks to make the connection. Although I seem to recall a revisionist explanation in which Superman vibrates his face really fast so that nobody ever sees him clearly. Although it seems like a guy whose face was always a blur would spook people out...
That reminds me, I read somewhere that Superman has the power of telekenesis, but only with things he is touching. Sounds useless but that allows him to pick up things like ships and buses without ripping them apart.
This comes from John Byrne's revisionist retelling to the Superman story. He did a pretty good job of coming up with psuedoscientific explanations for the ridiculous things that Superman had been doing for years.
That explanation always sounded fishy to me. The material won't get ruined by extreme heat/bullets/corrosive chemicals but it can be cut with scissors and tailored with a needle? Hmm...
Needles aren't a problem--a needle goes between the threads, which if memory serves she got from unraveling the blankets. I believe the young superman cut the threads with his heat vision.
...is the failure to understand weight, gravity, and balance. Very often, one sees a "superstrong" character lifting, say a truck, by grabbing it at one end and picking it up. But no matter how strong you are, if you are going to lift something, the combined center of gravity of the object plus you has to be be between your legs, or you will fall over. So you might be strong enough to carry a truck if you were underneath it, but no matter how strong you were, you couldn't pick it up from one end unless you were considerably heavier than the truck itself. Superman, by the way, is presumably an exception to this, since he is apparently immune to gravity--so he could probably lift a big weight from one end by "flying downward". A classic older cover drawing of Superman, back when he couldn't fly, but only "leap tall buildings," showed him lifting a car "realistically"--over his head like a weight lifter.
A related error is an unrealistic notion of the strength of materials. You can't pick a car up by the bumper; it will just break off.
If I buy a new TV this year, it will be a CRT. Possible exception: for the living room, where we don't really want a large TV, we may just put a 20" iMac with a small external video tuner.
Good idea. Seems like a 20" iMac would make a great media server for a small room. You could make it a music server as well (I have an old beige G3 serving that function) and even add EyeTV for PVR capability.
If this criteria is used as a minimum, why not take the next logical step and judge the relative value of a person based on their IQ? I'm not saying that you personally do this, just that it seems to me that is the next step if one uses brain activity as the only litmus test for personhood.
Again, I'm talking about absence or presence of brain activity, not quantity, and quantity has no relationship to IQ, so this has no relationship whatsoever to the issue at hand.
I'm not sure why you would want to judge the relative value of people from their IQ. Just off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why it is a very bad idea:
1. Because IQ is actually not a very good predictor of a person's value to society.
2. Because historical experience has shown that society benefits more from treating people equally than from attempting to rank them according to value.
I should also point out that most people who share your view do not apply it fully. I have yet to hear anybody advocate testing the embryo for brain activity before abortion.
It becomes less relevant when you consider abortion, as opposed to human blastocysts created in a dish (which is the case at hand). With pregnancy, in addition to the issue of the personhood of the embryo, there is also the issue of a person's sovereignty over their own body, and whether anybody or anything, human or not, is ever entitled to the intimate use of somebody else's body without their consent. However, the maturity of the fetus's nervous system is certainly one piece of information that many people do take into account in considering the ethical implications of abortion.
It is not so obvious to me that an embryo is distinct from a human child, since it is not the same entity as either parent, and defining the " "line" anywhere else has illogical conclusions if applied consistantly. Like many others, you've taken the "brain waves = life" line, which if applied consistantly means that smarter people are superior to less educated.
That is nonsense. You can't judge intelligence based upon quantity of brain waves or neural activity. Educated people do not have more brain waves than uneducated people. Neural activity obviously is not a sufficient criterion for something to be a person--goldfish have neural activity. But it is a useful minimum criterion. If you don't have neural activity, then you are either not a person, or you are dead.
Having gone through the process recently, we know much less than you'd think. Know why pregnant women can't have many drugs? Because we don't know how most drugs affect the fetus. There are some drugs we know are bad, there are some we're pretty sure are ok, and there's the vast majority that we don't have a clue on.
Now if you'd said that there are a lot of things that we don't know about drugs, as a pharmacologist I would have had to agree. The reality is that we have only a vague understanding of how many drugs work on people in general, and the only way to know with confidence what effects they will have on a particular group of people is to try them and see.
Actually we don't, which was one of the points I made in my first post on this thread. Do some Googling for fetal brain development or activity.
By "brain activity," I am speaking at the most basic level--the existence of neurons with electrical activity. This is basic embryology and well established. In the abortion debate, you'll run across arguments about when high-level brain activity or consciousness begins (difficult, since we don't really understand either). But when it comes to something like a blastocyst, there is no room for debate. No neurons, no brain activity.
Are you suggesting that if you are knowlegable in CPR and a man starts choking in the room and you're the only person around that you have no moral obligation to help him?
No, I am suggesting that I have no legal obligation to do so. Fortunately, there are still some areas in which the law permits people to make their own moral choices without coercion.
Precisely... my entire point was that you can't draw such a line, even scientifically, because we just don't know enough about the entire process yet.
However, a line must be drawn, because every sperm and egg has some probability of producing a human being, and protecting all sperm and egg cells would be a bit awkward. I think that we know quite a bit about human reproduction. We certainly know when brain activity begins, which is certainly one thing that distinguishes a human being from all of the living human tissue that we routinely discard without a thought.
Here, the core issue is when life begins. If it begins at the zygote stage, then this technology is murdering for scientific gain. The trouble is, there is no clear-cut way of drawing that line- is it when the organism is self aware? Then abortion should be acceptable several months- even years- after birth. Is it when heart activity starts? The problem with this is that we know a person may be alive and recussitated for several minutes after his heart has stopped. Brain activity? Then maybe those with less brain activity- Alzheimer's patients, mentally ill etc.- should be killed as well, since their life is of less value by that criteria.
There is no issue as to "when life begins." There is no point in human reproduction where life begins. Life began a long, long, time ago. Every day, you shed millions of cells that are human and alive, and cloning teaches us that every one of these, under appropriate conditions, could become a walking breathing, person.
It may be difficult to draw a line as to how much brain activity is enough for something to be considered a human being, but there is one thing is absolutely clear: wherever that line is, it is somewhere above "none".
The ethical questions are bigger than that. Making babies without the usual mother and father will allow people who shouldn't have babies (think Massacuhusts here) to have them.
Not sure what you are getting at here. Huge numbers of people who shouldn't have babies are having them already by the old fashioned method. Cloning would make an insignificant contribution to this. Gay and lesbian couples already have kids by a variety of methods, and numerous studies show that those kids turn out just fine.
The obvious difference is that someone already alive goes from a state of thinking to a state of being brain dead. In the case of an embryo the thinking may not have occurred yet, but -- unless there's a problem with the fetus -- it will.
Not necessarily. A large fraction of embryos--probably a bit under half--will spontaneously abort due to defects, and will never develop consciousness. So it is a matter of probability. Of course, exactly the same thing can be said regarding the sperm and egg before they merge. So what probability of producing a mature human does something have to have before it is worthy of protection? 50%, 1%, 0.1%. What basis is there to draw such a line?
An interesting point, my friend. I believe that most unborn babies begin developing brain activity at a very, very early stage. This would certainly contradict the current notion of women's rights over those of her...hmm...fetus.
While it is obvious that an embryo that lacks a working brain is not yet a human being, brain activity alone is probably not sufficient. Some level of maturity of the brain beyond basic activity should probably also be required. However, the right of the potential mother is based on her ownership of her body, not the humanity of the fetus. You cannot be forced to give me any organ of your body, not even blood. This is true even if my need for that organ is the result of an injury caused by your negligence, and if you will die without it. So regardless of whether or not the embryo is human, the mother is under no obligation to carry it to term.
It may be scientific, but it sure is arbitrary. We can also determine if someone is human or not based on their skin color. Why not?
Because people have different skin color. But all people have working brains. We have a word for somebody whose brain has permanently ceased to function. The word is "dead." Brain function is the one thing that distinguishes a person from the millions of human cells that we all shed every day, each of which, under the appropriate conditions probably has the potential to produce a complete human being.
You'll find useful statistics in this article