Wait, you mean in a nation where whole chunks of the population teach their kids that the world was created by an invisible sky daddy in six days isn't leading the pack in science education? We'd better pray harder!
First, to answer your question, there's no reason to think that evolution invariably 'drives' toward greater complexity. If you took a population of humans and put them in an environment where food (particularly complex protein) was extremely scarce, then over time the high metabolic costs of advanced brains might well cause selection for simpler creatures more akin to our ancestors.
How did religion arise? Good question, and I don't propose to know the answer. Presumably a certain level of cognitive capacity is necessary for the idea to exist, so maybe human beings are the first creatures capable of holding religious beliefs. If all known human societies have some form of religion (I think they do, but I'm not positive) then that would suggest that something about our nature causes us to come up with religious ideas. Maybe it's nothing more than the fact that we're visually oriented apes with enough brainpower to ponder cause and effect living in a world where we can't always explain what we see (lightning, plagues, etc.). But, like appendices, or tonsils, the fact that it evolved in us at one point doesn't necessarily make it useful or desirable now.
If you're claiming that failure to explain the origin of life is a failure of evolutionary theory, then yes, you have lumped the question of biogenesis in with evolution. Admittedly, naturalistic science doesn't have a good answer yet to how life first arose: there are a number of theories, but one guess is as good as another.
This doesn't validate intelligent design as a useful paradigm of thinking, for a number of reasons. First, what is your criterion for invoking the supernatural? Is it everything we don't understand today the work of a capital-C Creator? What happens, then, when we learn something new tomorrow? There's no way to divide the unknown from the unknowable, which means that you inevitably confine god to a marginal role as more is learned (the 'god of the gaps' argument). Second, ask yourself where science would be today if, say, Watson and Crick decided that the shape of DNA was a divinely ordained mystery, and not to be understood by humans, or if Ben Franklin believed lightning to be the wrathful finger of god. You don't learn more by willfully choosing ignorance.
The fact that you refer to Behe in your response to lgw explains a great deal. You might want to take a look at the number of papers published since 'Darwin's Black Box' which explicitly detail evolutionary explanations for the systems he erroneously labeled 'irreducibly complex;' he was quite embarassed during the Dover school district trial when the opoosing attorney plunked down stacks and stacks of work published on the immune system and flagellar motors. And his recommendation for experimentally proving ID is a joke--how exactly does one prove that a particular biological system could NOT have arisen under evolutionary arguments? These things, wholly independent of the religious angle, make ID worthless, and your arguments specious.
Personally, I would argue that we're both human beings who can trace our origins (ultimately) back to star stuff--the basic matter of the cosmos, assembled an atom at a time inside the hearts of stars, before eventually condensing into a planet and arising into a living thing. If you find this less satisfying than the idea that some magic invisible creator made us both, then I would argue that it's simply a matter of your personal preference, and not any inherent superiority in your worldview.
Let's clarify here the difference between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution. If you accept Darwin's definition of 'descent with modification,' then it is a FACT that evolution takes place: we can look at fossils and see how living things have changed forms over time. In this sense, saying that evolution is a fact is no different than saying that the rotation of the earth is a fact--in both cases, we directly observe the evidence with our own eyes.
The theory of evolution (the modern syntheis) basically clarifies Darwin's definition by positing natural selection as the agent of modification. This is also observable to some degree, as my original post pointed out; in other cases, we infer it based on substantial evidence.
Now, is it possible that we're really mistaken, and we've totally misconstrued all the evidence? Well, sure, but the odds are pretty tiny. We may be off on a number of small details, but the big picture is very convincing. Not 100% (nothing is) but about as close as you'd want. This isn't faith. It's fact.
And do yourself a favor: like most people who don't have a damn clue what they're talking about, you lump BIOGENESIS in with evolution. Nothing about the theory of evolution is meant to address how nonliving chemicals came to comprise living cells; it merely explains how a faithful self-replicator, once it arose, could differentiate into all the things we see alive today.
Don't misunderstand me: I very much want to inflict my beliefs on people who I think are wrong, when the beliefs they currently hold have the potential to drive the world in a direction I see as undesirable. When I see religious nuts closing their eyes to basic science (to our detriment as a society and as a rational species) then hell yes, I want to convert them to my side. Every religion I know urges its followers to go convert nonbelievers, so I'm just trying to do my part for the rationals.
And yes, religion is very, very silly. It amuses me to tears that some people read ancient myths and dismiss them as the storytelling of ignorant primitives, and then go to church to listen to a 2000 year old book about God making the world out of mud and telling us not to eat shellfish or worship cows.
Very rarely is antibiotic resistance conveyed by the loss of some 'vulnerability gene' in the bacterium. Most often there's some accessory genetic element, like a plasmid, that helps the bacterium produce something (whether a different kind of cell surface molecule, or something to degrade the antibody before it can work) and because that plasmid is valuable (at least, in an environment where the bacteria is being attacked) the bugs that pick it up tend to do better even though they have the burden of having more DNA to copy.
And I mean evolution, which is defined as the change of allele frequencies over time. The modern synthesis, more specifically, refers to changes in allele frequencies over time due to differential survival. Neither of these by definition must include BIOGENESIS, which is the origin of life from nonlife. Admittedly, there are a lot of very different theories about how that might have happened, and we might never know precisely how life on earth arose. But once you had faithful self-replicators, Darwin's idea was off and running.
Oh man, I had Behe as a professor when I was in college (physical biochemistry, so there wasn't much room for the hand of god to reach in and disturb things) and he was a nice guy, and I actually felt kind of bad reading the court transcripts and seeing Ken Miller do a dance on his face. I mean, it was just such a decisive beating at all levels that it made me feel woozy.
Incidentally, if you go to the Lehigh University bio department's homepage, there used to be (and likely still is) a big link right in front that takes you to a disclaimer wherein the entire bio faculty disavows him. It makes me wonder why he doesn't just go work at the Discovery Institute or someplace a bit less hostile.
Actually, you have seen evolution in action. You've seen evidence of it every time you hear a news story about bacteria developing resistance to new antibiotics, every time you hear about somebody who has cancer. You can go to a museum and see how living things have changed over time, or notice the fact that whales have arm bone structure that's not all that different from land-dwelling mammals.
In short, there is no question--none whatsoever--that evolution takes place. The modern synthesis of evolutionary theory says that it happens because mutations provide a source of variation which natural forces can select for or against. This is observable as well: if you consider the gene for sickle cell anemia (which provides protection against malaria), it tends to be much more common in regions of the world that are rife with malaria, because those are the places where that gene can convey some benefit. This is pretty much as close as you get to bulletproof science. Now, admittedly, there are some areas of the theory which aren't as certain as others, but on the whole, you're talking about a very damn solid theory that's supported by interlocking scientific evidence from dozens of disciplines. Some of the best minds in science have been poking and prodding at this theory for over 150 years and it's still going strong--hell, Darwin's theory predicted some things that we've only recently found with molecular biology. How much better does a theory get?
Personally, I'd be happy to let the religious folks gather round their altars and sing Hosannahs to their invisbile sky daddy, but unfortunately, that's not enough for them. They need to inflict their beliefs, whether on abortion, or stem cell research, or contraception use, or whatever, on all of us. Why should I trust somebody who closes their eyes to basic scientific fact to make decisions rooted in science that might affect me?
The world will be a better place when we grow up enough, as a species, to put away childish things like religion.
Don't be so sure about the generics at this point. Etanercept is a biological (conjugated soluble TNF-alpha receptors, if I'm not mistaken) and the high costs of getting into biotech, as well as the lack of any clear regulatory pathway for 'biosimilars' has acted as a barrier to generic entry in the past. On the other hand, if this relatively simple drug is shown to be active against Alzheimer's, I'm sure it would create a market incentive sufficient to drawn SOMEBODY new into the market.
Here's the problem with your reasoning: for every soccer mom who comes forward to say that her child developed autistic symptoms the day he was vaccinated, there is some greater number who can come forward and say that their kids were vaccinated and turned out fine--after all, development of autism is still pretty rare compared to the alternative. We'd have no way to decide if the autism was just a sad fluke (after all, even if the vaccines are harmless, some kids will develop autism the same day anyway by sheer chance) or whether there is a risk, albeit a small one, that vaccination can trigger autism. This is why scientists use statistics to deal with problems like this. And while I haven't specifically reviewed any of the major studies for or against thimerosal in vaccines, I'm sure they all set out to answer the same question: once you've eliminated all the other known autism risk factors, are kids who get the shots more likely to become autistic than those who don't? And if so, is the difference sufficiently great that we can be confident it's not just a coincidence?
600 years ago the wisdom of crowds would have told you that we live on a flat planet at the center of a perfect clockwork universe. Give me some experts with a validated, logical process over the wisdom of crowds any day.
It seems unreasonable of you to demand empathy for these parents while at the same time stating that I probably can't understand their experience without having had it myself. I absolutely do sympathize with anyone who is coping with this, and I can only imagine the complex blend of anger, guilt, and confusion that they must feel. But at the same time, the fear and confusion caused by their protests don't serve the public good, and I have to wonder if it's really psychologically healthy in the long run. Which would be the more horrible scenario to have to accept: that your child's future was stolen by some rich, evil drug company that will never be held accountable for its crimes, or that your child has suffered for reasons that medical science doesn't yet comprehend? I can understand why having a well-defined villain to blame can be cathartic, but given the lack of any real evidence, it just seems self-delusional and ultimately fruitless.
"Looking for the cause is a good thing, reacting out of fear and panic is a bad thing."
And this is EXACTLY what any parent championing against thimerosal is doing. This is hardly the first study to have found no connection between vaccination and autism: there were several large European studies, and the U.S. Institute of Medicine conducted a massive meta-analysis, none of which found any support for the hypothesis. And yet these online communities continue to thrive and beat the drum, and although some of that is certainly fed by the snake oil merchants, much of it is from scared, ignorant parents. This new study is unlikely to persuade them, so they'll go on promoting their erroneous message and potentially doing more damage, either by scaring people off vaccinations, or by distracting people from other directions of study. And the sad thing is, in the end, the only thing they're likely to get for their efforts is the feeling that they 'made a difference.'
I do sympathize with these parents, profoundly. But the fact is that very few of them have the expertise or the knowledge to make valid judgments about this issue, and yet they continue to spread unsupported claims about vaccination as though they were facts. This is potentially harmful to others and should be curtailed, regardless of how noble or humane their motivations might be.
If you ever want a sick laugh, look at the history of lethal injection protocols in America. If I remember correctly it was originally proposed by a coroner (not exactly the foremost authority on anesthesia) and once it entered into use, most other states adopted it without ever really scrutinizing it. It's very ad hoc, which is part of the reason for the problem.
The main objection raised against the use of barbiturates is that individual tolerance is highly variable and difficult to predict. Some patients will go under fairly easily, while others might linger for hours or days. They've even had cases of people waking up (though I'm not sure if they really woke up, given that some degree of brain damage would almost certainly have taken place during the time they were under).
Suffocation with gasses such as nitrogen or carbon monoxide has been proposed, but I suspect that death penalty advocates would rather not risk upsetting the status quo by bringing a new technique to the table.
You might want to think twice about lethal injection as a 'humane' way to end someone's life. In 2005 Koniaris et al. published a paper in The Lancet looking at postmortem toxicology studies conducted in 49 executions conducted by lethal injection, and based on the levels of thiopental they found, they concluded that "most of the executed inmates had concentrations that would not be expected to produce a surgical plane of anaesthesia, and 21 (43%) had concentrations consistent with consciousness...we certainly cannot conclude that these inmates were unconscious and insensate." They also state "without anaesthesia, the condemned person would experience asphyxiation, a severe burning sensation, massive muscle cramping, and finally cardiac arrest." None of which is visible, of course, because the pancuronium bromide leaves the prisoner totally paralyzed. I can't recall the source, but one legally-focused paper I read made the claim that the execution protcols used on condemned prisoners would be completely illegal if you proposed using them on an ailing pet.
Now, whether this affects your opinion on the death penalty is your own business, but make sure you know all the facts before you make up your mind about whether or not this is something you want your society to be doing.
Again, who says that a human concept of right and wrong would have any meaning to an omniscient, omnipotent deity? You point out one possible contradiction yourself: you or I would see torture or child murder as a bad thing, but if God "figured all the havoc that humans would wreak upon one another would be worth it in the long run" then why wouldn't he consider those things good, at least conditionally?
I dunno, I don't pretend to be an expert, and to me it's no different than asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Amusing to quibble over, maybe, but ultimately unimportant.
Ah gee, so all those folks in ancient Jerusalem got to see lepers cured, and demons cast out, and multitudes fed on fish and loaves, and all we get is a crummy old book? You've got to admit, that's sort of a downer. I mean, it wouldn't take much to convince folks: maybe a few burning bushes here or there. But then, I guess it wouldn't be religion if it didn't ask for blind belief in the complete absence of any verifiable claims.
Of course, in two thousand years, the literature of Scientology will probably be regarded as key religious texts, and those folks will imagine us lucky few who really lived in the days of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, while the Bible (and Koran, and Torah) will hold about as much significance to them as Greek mythology does to us today. The funny thing about charlatanism is that if your followers hang on long enough, eventually they can make whatever amazing claims they want, and people will believe it just because it's been written down for a few thousand years.
I can't prove a negative claim, i.e., the universe exists for no reason, because science is not about proving negative claims, but disproving positive ones. So if you believe that the universe DOES exist for a reason, then how could you prove it, other than by appealing to some kind of faith-based evidence?
I'm not talking about persuading anyone. My point is that the 'why questions' are meaningless, and to continue to cling to ancient superstitions because they give us cozy answers seems like a sign of intellectual immaturity. If you can come up with a way to speed this maturation along, I'd be interested to hear it: maybe then we could live in a world where teachers aren't threatened with execution for giving a teddy bear the wrong name, or where a national leader doesn't wage war on another nation based on his belief in the God-given righteousness of his cause.
I read an interesting article a while back that would take exception to your statement; the concept is often refered to as 'God in the gaps'.
Put it this way: we don't understand natural process X, so the philosophers says "well, science cannot explain X, so X must be the work of God." Then, a year or two later, scientists figure X out. God has been shoved back by science, and the more we know, the further back he retreats. Theologically speaking, a philosophy that relegates God to more and more marginal roles in the universe is hardly desirable. It's good to think about these things, though. Cheers!
Do you recognize that the concept of evolution existed for years on the basis of observational studies and fossil evidence? And all this time, scientists were recognizing that it sure does look like living things have changed form over time. Then, fairly recently, the advent of molecular genetics has given us the ability to examine life at it's most basic level, and what did we find? We found the same sorts of patterns of descent and gradual change that the previous evidence had suggested in a way that evolution's early proponents couldn't possible have imagined. Are there gaps in our understanding? Of course, but why you assume that just because we don't know it now means that it can't be known?
So yes, evolution is a theory, but it's also a theory that explains the observed facts damn well, and that has made successful predictions. People have been trying to poke holes in the theory for 150 years, and it's still standing--that's a damn good theory no matter how you look at it.
Oh, I see, so God really DOES come down and work miracles, but we have the bad luck to have been born in an off period. That's such a coincidence; I mean, I was just saying the other day that I haven't seen any unicorns lately, but I'm sure they'll be back sooner or later.
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Wait, you mean in a nation where whole chunks of the population teach their kids that the world was created by an invisible sky daddy in six days isn't leading the pack in science education? We'd better pray harder!
First, to answer your question, there's no reason to think that evolution invariably 'drives' toward greater complexity. If you took a population of humans and put them in an environment where food (particularly complex protein) was extremely scarce, then over time the high metabolic costs of advanced brains might well cause selection for simpler creatures more akin to our ancestors.
How did religion arise? Good question, and I don't propose to know the answer. Presumably a certain level of cognitive capacity is necessary for the idea to exist, so maybe human beings are the first creatures capable of holding religious beliefs. If all known human societies have some form of religion (I think they do, but I'm not positive) then that would suggest that something about our nature causes us to come up with religious ideas. Maybe it's nothing more than the fact that we're visually oriented apes with enough brainpower to ponder cause and effect living in a world where we can't always explain what we see (lightning, plagues, etc.). But, like appendices, or tonsils, the fact that it evolved in us at one point doesn't necessarily make it useful or desirable now.
If you're claiming that failure to explain the origin of life is a failure of evolutionary theory, then yes, you have lumped the question of biogenesis in with evolution. Admittedly, naturalistic science doesn't have a good answer yet to how life first arose: there are a number of theories, but one guess is as good as another.
This doesn't validate intelligent design as a useful paradigm of thinking, for a number of reasons. First, what is your criterion for invoking the supernatural? Is it everything we don't understand today the work of a capital-C Creator? What happens, then, when we learn something new tomorrow? There's no way to divide the unknown from the unknowable, which means that you inevitably confine god to a marginal role as more is learned (the 'god of the gaps' argument). Second, ask yourself where science would be today if, say, Watson and Crick decided that the shape of DNA was a divinely ordained mystery, and not to be understood by humans, or if Ben Franklin believed lightning to be the wrathful finger of god. You don't learn more by willfully choosing ignorance.
The fact that you refer to Behe in your response to lgw explains a great deal. You might want to take a look at the number of papers published since 'Darwin's Black Box' which explicitly detail evolutionary explanations for the systems he erroneously labeled 'irreducibly complex;' he was quite embarassed during the Dover school district trial when the opoosing attorney plunked down stacks and stacks of work published on the immune system and flagellar motors. And his recommendation for experimentally proving ID is a joke--how exactly does one prove that a particular biological system could NOT have arisen under evolutionary arguments? These things, wholly independent of the religious angle, make ID worthless, and your arguments specious.
Personally, I would argue that we're both human beings who can trace our origins (ultimately) back to star stuff--the basic matter of the cosmos, assembled an atom at a time inside the hearts of stars, before eventually condensing into a planet and arising into a living thing. If you find this less satisfying than the idea that some magic invisible creator made us both, then I would argue that it's simply a matter of your personal preference, and not any inherent superiority in your worldview.
Let's clarify here the difference between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution. If you accept Darwin's definition of 'descent with modification,' then it is a FACT that evolution takes place: we can look at fossils and see how living things have changed forms over time. In this sense, saying that evolution is a fact is no different than saying that the rotation of the earth is a fact--in both cases, we directly observe the evidence with our own eyes.
The theory of evolution (the modern syntheis) basically clarifies Darwin's definition by positing natural selection as the agent of modification. This is also observable to some degree, as my original post pointed out; in other cases, we infer it based on substantial evidence.
Now, is it possible that we're really mistaken, and we've totally misconstrued all the evidence? Well, sure, but the odds are pretty tiny. We may be off on a number of small details, but the big picture is very convincing. Not 100% (nothing is) but about as close as you'd want. This isn't faith. It's fact.
And do yourself a favor: like most people who don't have a damn clue what they're talking about, you lump BIOGENESIS in with evolution. Nothing about the theory of evolution is meant to address how nonliving chemicals came to comprise living cells; it merely explains how a faithful self-replicator, once it arose, could differentiate into all the things we see alive today.
Don't misunderstand me: I very much want to inflict my beliefs on people who I think are wrong, when the beliefs they currently hold have the potential to drive the world in a direction I see as undesirable. When I see religious nuts closing their eyes to basic science (to our detriment as a society and as a rational species) then hell yes, I want to convert them to my side. Every religion I know urges its followers to go convert nonbelievers, so I'm just trying to do my part for the rationals.
And yes, religion is very, very silly. It amuses me to tears that some people read ancient myths and dismiss them as the storytelling of ignorant primitives, and then go to church to listen to a 2000 year old book about God making the world out of mud and telling us not to eat shellfish or worship cows.
Very rarely is antibiotic resistance conveyed by the loss of some 'vulnerability gene' in the bacterium. Most often there's some accessory genetic element, like a plasmid, that helps the bacterium produce something (whether a different kind of cell surface molecule, or something to degrade the antibody before it can work) and because that plasmid is valuable (at least, in an environment where the bacteria is being attacked) the bugs that pick it up tend to do better even though they have the burden of having more DNA to copy.
And I mean evolution, which is defined as the change of allele frequencies over time. The modern synthesis, more specifically, refers to changes in allele frequencies over time due to differential survival. Neither of these by definition must include BIOGENESIS, which is the origin of life from nonlife. Admittedly, there are a lot of very different theories about how that might have happened, and we might never know precisely how life on earth arose. But once you had faithful self-replicators, Darwin's idea was off and running.
Oh man, I had Behe as a professor when I was in college (physical biochemistry, so there wasn't much room for the hand of god to reach in and disturb things) and he was a nice guy, and I actually felt kind of bad reading the court transcripts and seeing Ken Miller do a dance on his face. I mean, it was just such a decisive beating at all levels that it made me feel woozy.
Incidentally, if you go to the Lehigh University bio department's homepage, there used to be (and likely still is) a big link right in front that takes you to a disclaimer wherein the entire bio faculty disavows him. It makes me wonder why he doesn't just go work at the Discovery Institute or someplace a bit less hostile.
Actually, you have seen evolution in action. You've seen evidence of it every time you hear a news story about bacteria developing resistance to new antibiotics, every time you hear about somebody who has cancer. You can go to a museum and see how living things have changed over time, or notice the fact that whales have arm bone structure that's not all that different from land-dwelling mammals.
In short, there is no question--none whatsoever--that evolution takes place. The modern synthesis of evolutionary theory says that it happens because mutations provide a source of variation which natural forces can select for or against. This is observable as well: if you consider the gene for sickle cell anemia (which provides protection against malaria), it tends to be much more common in regions of the world that are rife with malaria, because those are the places where that gene can convey some benefit. This is pretty much as close as you get to bulletproof science. Now, admittedly, there are some areas of the theory which aren't as certain as others, but on the whole, you're talking about a very damn solid theory that's supported by interlocking scientific evidence from dozens of disciplines. Some of the best minds in science have been poking and prodding at this theory for over 150 years and it's still going strong--hell, Darwin's theory predicted some things that we've only recently found with molecular biology. How much better does a theory get?
Personally, I'd be happy to let the religious folks gather round their altars and sing Hosannahs to their invisbile sky daddy, but unfortunately, that's not enough for them. They need to inflict their beliefs, whether on abortion, or stem cell research, or contraception use, or whatever, on all of us. Why should I trust somebody who closes their eyes to basic scientific fact to make decisions rooted in science that might affect me?
The world will be a better place when we grow up enough, as a species, to put away childish things like religion.
Don't be so sure about the generics at this point. Etanercept is a biological (conjugated soluble TNF-alpha receptors, if I'm not mistaken) and the high costs of getting into biotech, as well as the lack of any clear regulatory pathway for 'biosimilars' has acted as a barrier to generic entry in the past. On the other hand, if this relatively simple drug is shown to be active against Alzheimer's, I'm sure it would create a market incentive sufficient to drawn SOMEBODY new into the market.
Here's the problem with your reasoning: for every soccer mom who comes forward to say that her child developed autistic symptoms the day he was vaccinated, there is some greater number who can come forward and say that their kids were vaccinated and turned out fine--after all, development of autism is still pretty rare compared to the alternative. We'd have no way to decide if the autism was just a sad fluke (after all, even if the vaccines are harmless, some kids will develop autism the same day anyway by sheer chance) or whether there is a risk, albeit a small one, that vaccination can trigger autism. This is why scientists use statistics to deal with problems like this. And while I haven't specifically reviewed any of the major studies for or against thimerosal in vaccines, I'm sure they all set out to answer the same question: once you've eliminated all the other known autism risk factors, are kids who get the shots more likely to become autistic than those who don't? And if so, is the difference sufficiently great that we can be confident it's not just a coincidence?
600 years ago the wisdom of crowds would have told you that we live on a flat planet at the center of a perfect clockwork universe. Give me some experts with a validated, logical process over the wisdom of crowds any day.
It seems unreasonable of you to demand empathy for these parents while at the same time stating that I probably can't understand their experience without having had it myself. I absolutely do sympathize with anyone who is coping with this, and I can only imagine the complex blend of anger, guilt, and confusion that they must feel. But at the same time, the fear and confusion caused by their protests don't serve the public good, and I have to wonder if it's really psychologically healthy in the long run. Which would be the more horrible scenario to have to accept: that your child's future was stolen by some rich, evil drug company that will never be held accountable for its crimes, or that your child has suffered for reasons that medical science doesn't yet comprehend? I can understand why having a well-defined villain to blame can be cathartic, but given the lack of any real evidence, it just seems self-delusional and ultimately fruitless.
"Looking for the cause is a good thing, reacting out of fear and panic is a bad thing."
And this is EXACTLY what any parent championing against thimerosal is doing. This is hardly the first study to have found no connection between vaccination and autism: there were several large European studies, and the U.S. Institute of Medicine conducted a massive meta-analysis, none of which found any support for the hypothesis. And yet these online communities continue to thrive and beat the drum, and although some of that is certainly fed by the snake oil merchants, much of it is from scared, ignorant parents. This new study is unlikely to persuade them, so they'll go on promoting their erroneous message and potentially doing more damage, either by scaring people off vaccinations, or by distracting people from other directions of study. And the sad thing is, in the end, the only thing they're likely to get for their efforts is the feeling that they 'made a difference.'
I do sympathize with these parents, profoundly. But the fact is that very few of them have the expertise or the knowledge to make valid judgments about this issue, and yet they continue to spread unsupported claims about vaccination as though they were facts. This is potentially harmful to others and should be curtailed, regardless of how noble or humane their motivations might be.
Not to mention one of the best endings ever:
"What do you want to do now?"
"Why don't we just wait here for a little while? See what happens."
watch Clark. And watch him close.
If you ever want a sick laugh, look at the history of lethal injection protocols in America. If I remember correctly it was originally proposed by a coroner (not exactly the foremost authority on anesthesia) and once it entered into use, most other states adopted it without ever really scrutinizing it. It's very ad hoc, which is part of the reason for the problem.
The main objection raised against the use of barbiturates is that individual tolerance is highly variable and difficult to predict. Some patients will go under fairly easily, while others might linger for hours or days. They've even had cases of people waking up (though I'm not sure if they really woke up, given that some degree of brain damage would almost certainly have taken place during the time they were under).
Suffocation with gasses such as nitrogen or carbon monoxide has been proposed, but I suspect that death penalty advocates would rather not risk upsetting the status quo by bringing a new technique to the table.
You might want to think twice about lethal injection as a 'humane' way to end someone's life. In 2005 Koniaris et al. published a paper in The Lancet looking at postmortem toxicology studies conducted in 49 executions conducted by lethal injection, and based on the levels of thiopental they found, they concluded that "most of the executed inmates had concentrations that would not be expected to produce a surgical plane of anaesthesia, and 21 (43%) had concentrations consistent with consciousness...we certainly cannot conclude that these inmates were unconscious and insensate." They also state "without anaesthesia, the condemned person would experience asphyxiation, a severe burning sensation, massive muscle cramping, and finally cardiac arrest." None of which is visible, of course, because the pancuronium bromide leaves the prisoner totally paralyzed. I can't recall the source, but one legally-focused paper I read made the claim that the execution protcols used on condemned prisoners would be completely illegal if you proposed using them on an ailing pet.
Now, whether this affects your opinion on the death penalty is your own business, but make sure you know all the facts before you make up your mind about whether or not this is something you want your society to be doing.
It looks like a pretty butterfly. Or maybe some nice flowers. Or a dog with a cleaved brain, either way.
Again, who says that a human concept of right and wrong would have any meaning to an omniscient, omnipotent deity? You point out one possible contradiction yourself: you or I would see torture or child murder as a bad thing, but if God "figured all the havoc that humans would wreak upon one another would be worth it in the long run" then why wouldn't he consider those things good, at least conditionally?
I dunno, I don't pretend to be an expert, and to me it's no different than asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Amusing to quibble over, maybe, but ultimately unimportant.
Ah gee, so all those folks in ancient Jerusalem got to see lepers cured, and demons cast out, and multitudes fed on fish and loaves, and all we get is a crummy old book? You've got to admit, that's sort of a downer. I mean, it wouldn't take much to convince folks: maybe a few burning bushes here or there. But then, I guess it wouldn't be religion if it didn't ask for blind belief in the complete absence of any verifiable claims.
Of course, in two thousand years, the literature of Scientology will probably be regarded as key religious texts, and those folks will imagine us lucky few who really lived in the days of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, while the Bible (and Koran, and Torah) will hold about as much significance to them as Greek mythology does to us today. The funny thing about charlatanism is that if your followers hang on long enough, eventually they can make whatever amazing claims they want, and people will believe it just because it's been written down for a few thousand years.
I can't prove a negative claim, i.e., the universe exists for no reason, because science is not about proving negative claims, but disproving positive ones. So if you believe that the universe DOES exist for a reason, then how could you prove it, other than by appealing to some kind of faith-based evidence?
I'm not talking about persuading anyone. My point is that the 'why questions' are meaningless, and to continue to cling to ancient superstitions because they give us cozy answers seems like a sign of intellectual immaturity. If you can come up with a way to speed this maturation along, I'd be interested to hear it: maybe then we could live in a world where teachers aren't threatened with execution for giving a teddy bear the wrong name, or where a national leader doesn't wage war on another nation based on his belief in the God-given righteousness of his cause.
" It's would be a valid philosophy, I suppose,"
I read an interesting article a while back that would take exception to your statement; the concept is often refered to as 'God in the gaps'.
Put it this way: we don't understand natural process X, so the philosophers says "well, science cannot explain X, so X must be the work of God." Then, a year or two later, scientists figure X out. God has been shoved back by science, and the more we know, the further back he retreats. Theologically speaking, a philosophy that relegates God to more and more marginal roles in the universe is hardly desirable. It's good to think about these things, though. Cheers!
Do you recognize that the concept of evolution existed for years on the basis of observational studies and fossil evidence? And all this time, scientists were recognizing that it sure does look like living things have changed form over time. Then, fairly recently, the advent of molecular genetics has given us the ability to examine life at it's most basic level, and what did we find? We found the same sorts of patterns of descent and gradual change that the previous evidence had suggested in a way that evolution's early proponents couldn't possible have imagined. Are there gaps in our understanding? Of course, but why you assume that just because we don't know it now means that it can't be known?
So yes, evolution is a theory, but it's also a theory that explains the observed facts damn well, and that has made successful predictions. People have been trying to poke holes in the theory for 150 years, and it's still standing--that's a damn good theory no matter how you look at it.
Oh, I see, so God really DOES come down and work miracles, but we have the bad luck to have been born in an off period. That's such a coincidence; I mean, I was just saying the other day that I haven't seen any unicorns lately, but I'm sure they'll be back sooner or later.