since society benefits the individual evolution ought to favor traits that help form and maintain societies. For instance: faith and altruism.
The problem with that idea is that as soon as a selfish person comes along, he immediately has an advantage over the rest of the altruistic "suckers" and has a selective advantage. His "selfishness" genes get passed onto his children while yours are less likely. Eventually altruism will get out-competed. There has to be additional factors for it to work, such as kin-selection in small populations.
The idea of selection for religious faith is an interesting one as well. It often makes me wonder if it's not a case of the "tail wagging the dog". For the last thousands of years there has been huge selective pressure to conform to various religious beliefs...think of the the Dark ages, the Inquisition, countless slaughters of godless heathens. Back in the day you'd better be in church on Sundays or you'd find yourself over a pile of kindling or at the bottom of the river tied to a large rock.
What's wrong with spinning tales of great cities destroyed time and again in a steady march back into antiquity? The two are equivalent.
Not really. There actually is plenty of archaeological evidence that humans lived in small bands. That's really not that hard to imagine as large populations need to have agriculture to sustain themselves. So hunter-gatherers need to live in small tribes limited by the carrying capacity of the land around them (as they still do today in remote parts of the world). An ancient "great city" would have needed to vaporize *all* traces of it's existence, down to every last kernel of grain or piece of pottery.
His idea of altruism being selected based to mutual benefit of those who are related isn't some idea cooked up out of nowhere, it actually comes from game theory. The problem is once you get into larger populations, those around you less and less related, so you're less likely to help "your" genes. Personally I'm more of a "Red-Queen" believer, where altruism is selected for by sexual-selection (i.e. being a kind, sharing person makes you attractive to potential mates who are looking for someone to stick around a help raise children).
Yeah, except in Africa they don't have a 7-11 on every corner where you can walk to and buy jimmy hats. Plus it's been shown to reduce urinary tract infections in infants. So if you want to choose not to have your child circumcised based on your own moral objections, that's your choice, but to try and say that it doesn't have any health benefits is false.
Ummm yes we do know that it has a function. The foreskin protects the head of the penis.
Which is extremely important for those who walk around naked all the time. For those of us who wear clothing, it's a non-issue.
Imagine we were talking about the wholesale and unnecessary surgical alteration of infant female genitalia that would result in women having decreased sexual pleasure later in life... would there be even the slightest doubt that it was wrong?
The reason they aren't equivalent is because male circumcision is done for proven health benefits, while female circumcision is not. There is a reason why thousands of years ago people cut off the foreskin and did other wacky things like not eat pork or shellfish. They didn't do it for shits and giggles, they had legitimate health concerns which in most cases turned out to be correct. Here is another example where science has clearly shown that to be true.
1) THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFITS TO CIRCUMCISION
Wrong. There have been a number of studies showing that it can significantly reduce the risk of contracting sexual transmitted diseases, including HIV. The WHO is now recommending it in Africa and projecting that if it was implemented, over 3 million people could avoid dying of AIDS.
The foreskin is the only part of the human body with estrogen sensors. ("sensor" meaning that you can feel it)
That's total bullshit, there is no such thing as an "estrogen sensor". There are estrogen receptors, but they're expressed throughout the body in a wide variety of tissues, from the prostate to the vasculature.
Sex may be "great", but you have no knowledge of how much better it might be with a foreskin.
Isn't the reverse true as well? How do you know it's not the same unless you've had yours removed?
There is some truth to that, but the reason that the US didn't overthrow Saddam in Gulf War I was because the UN and members of the coalition threatened to pull support if it became about toppling Saddam instead of liberating Kuwait.
The challenge is that the current generation of college students and recent graduates has been led to believe that they are entitled to a life filled with stuff and with little self-sacrifice required.
As part of the current generation of college students who has put himself through undergrad and graduate school, let me just say Fuck you!
Granted there are people who have had everything handed to them and expect to be rich after college, but most people who go to college do sacrifice. Pretty much everyone I know has a story about barely scraping by and eating Ramen noodles for weeks/months on end. People who take an entry level job out of high school are making a decent wage that those in college miss out on. Multiply that 20-30k by four and the average college student is already in the hole 80-120k, add on student loans for tuition plus all the hard work spent studying. So I don't think it's unreasonable for college graduates to expect a decent wage.
The problem (as the OP is alluding to) is that a number of fields are significantly underpaid. Most areas of science are one of them. Someone with a bachelors in biology (molecular, cell, ecology) who works as a technician in a lab is lucky if they start at 25k (so that person made it through O-chem only to make less than a Starbucks manager). The only way to make decent money is by getting a PhD (another 6+ years) or by going into private industry which is still only marginally better. Even with a PhD, you are still looking at making 50k a year in certain areas of biology (such as ecology).
So people going into areas of science should really educate themselves about their earning potential before investing significant time in that area. A good place to start is the lists put out by The Scientist and the journal Science.
Regardless of the legality of the issue, there is a serious issue of the Attorney General of the United States lying to Congress. The man is supposed to be upholding the laws of this country, if he is lying to Congress it certainly puts his integrity into question and I think it absolutely is an issue that Congress should be investigating, especially since this was the person signing off on warrantless wiretaps. If he's willing to lie to coverup the political nature of these firings, what else is he willing to lie about?
Yea right, thing of the past. I just took my wife to the Martina McBride concert this past weekend as a Mother's day present and the main 10ftx10ft display directly behind her BSOD'd for about 10 seconds in the middle of a song before they could cut the feed to it. Don't kid yourself and pretend that current Microsoft products don't BSOD. They may not do it as much.
I agree. As much as I enjoyed the original Terminator movies, the background plot of John Connor always seemed more interesting to me and I always felt a bit disappointed that it wasn't developed further. The part in T1 when Michael Biehn's character (Reese) falls asleep under the bridge and has a flashback dream was an incredibly cool sequence.
Re:Tag this article deathofcreationism
on
The Human Mutation
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· Score: 1
As it stands, the fact that multiple species share genes doesn't mean anything other than they share genes.
Why then do you have such striking contradictions to that concept? For example a dolphin should be more closely related to a shark based on its anatomy and function (fins, body-shape, diet), but is more genetically related to a kangaroo than a fish. The only way that makes sense is with common descent and evolution.
Evolution is only a theory and doesn't even make predictions about the world;
It makes many predictions about the world, from predicting the existence of a genetic-basis for heredity to the comparative genomics of today. Many of the theoretical predictions of the 1950-70s are just being shown to be correct within the last few years (such as signatures of positive/negative selection in regions of the human genome). The fact that you are ignorant of the predictions doesn't negate their existence.
They're doing splicing analysis, so presumably it is at least in chimp cells. Regardless, would you like to wager on what the result would be in a chimp?
The fact that they put this genes into chimps and they didn't magically become humans clearly shows that the summary is flat out wrong. I think it's pretty obvious that there is no *one* thing that makes you human, so the concept of a single gene that is responsible for "being human" is absurd. Is this one of many? Likely. A few years back FOXP2 was the big "human gene" and I'm sure there will be more.
Plus you are talking about very limited pieces of software, not an entire operating system and *all* the software that it includes. Look at OpenBSD, they've made security a major focus and have done extensive code auditing and still vulnerabilities slip through the cracks occasionally. The problem is that you are talking about huge, complex pieces of software and are trying to institute a zero tolerance for bugs. It's just not a reality.
Portsentry (an IDS) version Beta 0.61 was released at least prior to May 8 1999 (according to wayback) and although ipchains wasn't yet released, ipfw was still the linux firewall. So any one who ran PortSentry on Linux (or BSD) was running a "a single device that combined a firewall and IDS". I would bet there were prior IDS's that predate that as well.
My understanding is that there was an internal conflict with the Japanese civilian leadership wanting to surrender and the military leaders want to fight to the death. In fact after the Hiroshima bombing, the military had plans to instate martial law to prevent the civilian leaders from trying to surrender.
That doesn't really make sense. They could have easily set one off on some uninhabited pacific atoll and say "hey we can do this all day", they didn't need to drop it on a second city to make that point. The fact that the Japanese didn't unconditionally surrender after the first one is pretty telling that they weren't simply "trying to save face".
It says he was release on bail about 1/2 way down the article:
He was released on $2,500 bond, but not before an Internet plea went out for help in raising money to post bond
That was a direct quote to me from an agent in US customs at Atlanta, GA. Seeing as it's illegal to travel there, I haven't tried to. So I can't vouch for the veracity of whether they stamp or not (I've heard both). Regardless, my point still stands as does the quote from the State Department website.
I'm not disagreeing with you. There are plenty of Caribbean countries that you can fly to and then make the hop to Cuba. The point was whether it is legal or not for US citizens to travel there. You can still get into legal trouble for traveling to Cuba without approval regardless of whether you fly direct or travel through 30 countries beforehand.
No it's not. Tourist travel to Cuba is prohibited and business travel is restricted. Even then you must be approved by the State Dept. You'd be wise not to get your Passport stamped by Cuban customs. Quote from the US state Dept:
Tourist travel is not possible under U.S. law. Business-related travel is restricted to persons engaging in or arranging for permitted export sales, such as the sale of medicines or medical equipment, or for food or agricultural goods to non-governmental entities.
If they find vunerabilities in the lowest layer of code then Linux is in trouble too because there's an awful lot of shared code there.
What are you talking about? There really shouldn't be any code overlap between Linux and OSX in terms of the operating system itself. Linux is complete rewrite of Minix and isn't derived from any of the Pre-OSX Mach kernels. In fact I don't think OSX could legally incorporate any of Linux code as it would violate the GPL license.
The only time you see exploits common to both OSes is in userland applications that are common to both OSes (like openSSH).
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since society benefits the individual evolution ought to favor traits that help form and maintain societies. For instance: faith and altruism.
The problem with that idea is that as soon as a selfish person comes along, he immediately has an advantage over the rest of the altruistic "suckers" and has a selective advantage. His "selfishness" genes get passed onto his children while yours are less likely. Eventually altruism will get out-competed. There has to be additional factors for it to work, such as kin-selection in small populations.
The idea of selection for religious faith is an interesting one as well. It often makes me wonder if it's not a case of the "tail wagging the dog". For the last thousands of years there has been huge selective pressure to conform to various religious beliefs...think of the the Dark ages, the Inquisition, countless slaughters of godless heathens. Back in the day you'd better be in church on Sundays or you'd find yourself over a pile of kindling or at the bottom of the river tied to a large rock.
What's wrong with spinning tales of great cities destroyed time and again in a steady march back into antiquity? The two are equivalent.
Not really. There actually is plenty of archaeological evidence that humans lived in small bands. That's really not that hard to imagine as large populations need to have agriculture to sustain themselves. So hunter-gatherers need to live in small tribes limited by the carrying capacity of the land around them (as they still do today in remote parts of the world). An ancient "great city" would have needed to vaporize *all* traces of it's existence, down to every last kernel of grain or piece of pottery.
His idea of altruism being selected based to mutual benefit of those who are related isn't some idea cooked up out of nowhere, it actually comes from game theory. The problem is once you get into larger populations, those around you less and less related, so you're less likely to help "your" genes. Personally I'm more of a "Red-Queen" believer, where altruism is selected for by sexual-selection (i.e. being a kind, sharing person makes you attractive to potential mates who are looking for someone to stick around a help raise children).
Yeah, except in Africa they don't have a 7-11 on every corner where you can walk to and buy jimmy hats. Plus it's been shown to reduce urinary tract infections in infants. So if you want to choose not to have your child circumcised based on your own moral objections, that's your choice, but to try and say that it doesn't have any health benefits is false.
Ummm yes we do know that it has a function. The foreskin protects the head of the penis.
Which is extremely important for those who walk around naked all the time. For those of us who wear clothing, it's a non-issue.
Imagine we were talking about the wholesale and unnecessary surgical alteration of infant female genitalia that would result in women having decreased sexual pleasure later in life... would there be even the slightest doubt that it was wrong?
The reason they aren't equivalent is because male circumcision is done for proven health benefits, while female circumcision is not. There is a reason why thousands of years ago people cut off the foreskin and did other wacky things like not eat pork or shellfish. They didn't do it for shits and giggles, they had legitimate health concerns which in most cases turned out to be correct. Here is another example where science has clearly shown that to be true.
1) THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO HEALTH BENEFITS TO CIRCUMCISION
t ext&pid=S0042-96862004000500023
Wrong. There have been a number of studies showing that it can significantly reduce the risk of contracting sexual transmitted diseases, including HIV. The WHO is now recommending it in Africa and projecting that if it was implemented, over 3 million people could avoid dying of AIDS.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6502855.stm
http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?script=sci_art
The foreskin is the only part of the human body with estrogen sensors. ("sensor" meaning that you can feel it)
That's total bullshit, there is no such thing as an "estrogen sensor". There are estrogen receptors, but they're expressed throughout the body in a wide variety of tissues, from the prostate to the vasculature.
Sex may be "great", but you have no knowledge of how much better it might be with a foreskin.
Isn't the reverse true as well? How do you know it's not the same unless you've had yours removed?
There is some truth to that, but the reason that the US didn't overthrow Saddam in Gulf War I was because the UN and members of the coalition threatened to pull support if it became about toppling Saddam instead of liberating Kuwait.
The challenge is that the current generation of college students and recent graduates has been led to believe that they are entitled to a life filled with stuff and with little self-sacrifice required.
As part of the current generation of college students who has put himself through undergrad and graduate school, let me just say Fuck you!
Granted there are people who have had everything handed to them and expect to be rich after college, but most people who go to college do sacrifice. Pretty much everyone I know has a story about barely scraping by and eating Ramen noodles for weeks/months on end. People who take an entry level job out of high school are making a decent wage that those in college miss out on. Multiply that 20-30k by four and the average college student is already in the hole 80-120k, add on student loans for tuition plus all the hard work spent studying. So I don't think it's unreasonable for college graduates to expect a decent wage.
The problem (as the OP is alluding to) is that a number of fields are significantly underpaid. Most areas of science are one of them. Someone with a bachelors in biology (molecular, cell, ecology) who works as a technician in a lab is lucky if they start at 25k (so that person made it through O-chem only to make less than a Starbucks manager). The only way to make decent money is by getting a PhD (another 6+ years) or by going into private industry which is still only marginally better. Even with a PhD, you are still looking at making 50k a year in certain areas of biology (such as ecology).
So people going into areas of science should really educate themselves about their earning potential before investing significant time in that area. A good place to start is the lists put out by The Scientist and the journal Science.
Regardless of the legality of the issue, there is a serious issue of the Attorney General of the United States lying to Congress. The man is supposed to be upholding the laws of this country, if he is lying to Congress it certainly puts his integrity into question and I think it absolutely is an issue that Congress should be investigating, especially since this was the person signing off on warrantless wiretaps. If he's willing to lie to coverup the political nature of these firings, what else is he willing to lie about?
Yea right, thing of the past. I just took my wife to the Martina McBride concert this past weekend as a Mother's day present and the main 10ftx10ft display directly behind her BSOD'd for about 10 seconds in the middle of a song before they could cut the feed to it. Don't kid yourself and pretend that current Microsoft products don't BSOD. They may not do it as much.
I agree. As much as I enjoyed the original Terminator movies, the background plot of John Connor always seemed more interesting to me and I always felt a bit disappointed that it wasn't developed further. The part in T1 when Michael Biehn's character (Reese) falls asleep under the bridge and has a flashback dream was an incredibly cool sequence.
As it stands, the fact that multiple species share genes doesn't mean anything other than they share genes.
Why then do you have such striking contradictions to that concept? For example a dolphin should be more closely related to a shark based on its anatomy and function (fins, body-shape, diet), but is more genetically related to a kangaroo than a fish. The only way that makes sense is with common descent and evolution.
Evolution is only a theory and doesn't even make predictions about the world;
It makes many predictions about the world, from predicting the existence of a genetic-basis for heredity to the comparative genomics of today. Many of the theoretical predictions of the 1950-70s are just being shown to be correct within the last few years (such as signatures of positive/negative selection in regions of the human genome). The fact that you are ignorant of the predictions doesn't negate their existence.
They're doing splicing analysis, so presumably it is at least in chimp cells. Regardless, would you like to wager on what the result would be in a chimp?
The fact that they put this genes into chimps and they didn't magically become humans clearly shows that the summary is flat out wrong. I think it's pretty obvious that there is no *one* thing that makes you human, so the concept of a single gene that is responsible for "being human" is absurd. Is this one of many? Likely. A few years back FOXP2 was the big "human gene" and I'm sure there will be more.
Do you really think the type of people who use AOL would use a password longer than eight characters anyway?
You've obviously never used AOL, have you? OMGWTFBBQ is clearly 9 characters and is assuredly the most frequently used password.
There have been vulnerabilities in SELinux, see:
http://secunia.com/product/5997/?task=advisories
Plus you are talking about very limited pieces of software, not an entire operating system and *all* the software that it includes. Look at OpenBSD, they've made security a major focus and have done extensive code auditing and still vulnerabilities slip through the cracks occasionally. The problem is that you are talking about huge, complex pieces of software and are trying to institute a zero tolerance for bugs. It's just not a reality.
I've never used it, but I believe the NetRanger device (now owned Cisco) did IDS monitoring and had firewall capability as well.
? ls=NCJS_1023bt
Here is a review dated 1999 talking a 2nd gen version and mentions both firewall and IDS capability and is truly a dedicated device:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1023/1023f14.html
Portsentry (an IDS) version Beta 0.61 was released at least prior to May 8 1999 (according to wayback) and although ipchains wasn't yet released, ipfw was still the linux firewall. So any one who ran PortSentry on Linux (or BSD) was running a "a single device that combined a firewall and IDS". I would bet there were prior IDS's that predate that as well.
Wouldn't the first one have shown that though?
My understanding is that there was an internal conflict with the Japanese civilian leadership wanting to surrender and the military leaders want to fight to the death. In fact after the Hiroshima bombing, the military had plans to instate martial law to prevent the civilian leaders from trying to surrender.
That doesn't really make sense. They could have easily set one off on some uninhabited pacific atoll and say "hey we can do this all day", they didn't need to drop it on a second city to make that point. The fact that the Japanese didn't unconditionally surrender after the first one is pretty telling that they weren't simply "trying to save face".
He was released on $2,500 bond, but not before an Internet plea went out for help in raising money to post bond
That was a direct quote to me from an agent in US customs at Atlanta, GA. Seeing as it's illegal to travel there, I haven't tried to. So I can't vouch for the veracity of whether they stamp or not (I've heard both). Regardless, my point still stands as does the quote from the State Department website.
I'm not disagreeing with you. There are plenty of Caribbean countries that you can fly to and then make the hop to Cuba. The point was whether it is legal or not for US citizens to travel there. You can still get into legal trouble for traveling to Cuba without approval regardless of whether you fly direct or travel through 30 countries beforehand.
Tourist travel is not possible under U.S. law. Business-related travel is restricted to persons engaging in or arranging for permitted export sales, such as the sale of medicines or medical equipment, or for food or agricultural goods to non-governmental entities.
http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/fs/2001/fsjulydec/
What are you talking about? There really shouldn't be any code overlap between Linux and OSX in terms of the operating system itself. Linux is complete rewrite of Minix and isn't derived from any of the Pre-OSX Mach kernels. In fact I don't think OSX could legally incorporate any of Linux code as it would violate the GPL license.
The only time you see exploits common to both OSes is in userland applications that are common to both OSes (like openSSH).