scrappy

There's probably a certain amount of brain rot that goes along with homosexuality. I know that's true for heterosexuality.

Immorality is the most desired commodity in the world. Religions mine it, process it, and sell it to the masses, gaining both huge profits and preponderant power in world affairs. The Christian religion, for example, promises an afterlife in heaven with Jesus and his celebrated Father. Islam promises about the same thing: Mohammed will be up there, too, along and a bunch of dancing virgins. But that kind of immortality is not for everyone. What constitutes immortality? How would you know if you’re immortal or not. Woody Allen said once that immortality is a hard sell because it will take forever to prove its worth. But wait. Is flesh and blood immortality really what we’re after? Or is it another kind? It’s true that some of us are more immortal than others, if we count durability of the human memory as a measure of immortality. I would venture say that as long as human memory exists people like Socrates and Hitler will live immortally, at least in terms of being remembered. John Updike died yesterday, after achieving literary immortality with his Rabbit novels. If that kind of immortality is a measure of anything then I’m absolutely sure that Updike got more of it than I ever will. As long as we remain alive as biological creatures, believing that immortality must be a biological thing, we are bound to be disappointed. The same thing can be said about spiritual immortality: it’s taking more and more clapping to keep Tinker Bell alive, and someday we’ll run out of claps. The answer to immortality in the twenty-first century is not going to be found in the biological sciences or chemistry, because it will not be an extension of molecular biology. It will be an extension of Facebook or YouTube—computerized downloads of digital information about humans and life on this planet. And the uploading has already. Today, for all practical purposes, you are immortal if you are Googleable. As long as humans and computers are around, which will be forever in human terms, your cyber immortality is assured. In the long term it’s the only immortality that will ever have any real meaning. This is why we need to write a User’s Manual for immortality. So, I’m out fishing for chapter titles. Any suggestions?

Is zero nothing? Proving the non-existence of zero could be tricky. (Computers would be nothing without zeros.) And proving that nothing exists is proof of the existence of nothing. Nothing more can be said about nothing, except for the words used to express it. True nothing is hard to find in nature, because it will always require something to compare it with.

I hope this post is not too far OT, but I think it is relevant to mention here that bacteria of the Streptococcus genus managed to survive unprotected on the moon for 30+ years. Astronaut Pete Conrad made this cogent observation: Intuitively, I would expect viruses to survive almost indefinitely in such a harsh environment.

Why not? From the article: My prediction: Choice of sexuality (mate choice) will ultimately be seen to be as genetic in origin, and quite reversible as such. However, western humans are not very interested in kin selection; otherwise we’d be having bigger families and not kill off the women who disgrace the family name (like the Islamniacs do). We need more grannies around for better kin selection, instead of sending them off to squat and die uselessly in the old folks homes. Hey, maybe the absence of care-giving grannies turns on the genderblind gene and makes up for that loss in homosexuals.

I was born 70 years ago (on March 19) and I can tell you that watching the evolution of computers has been quite interesting. I entered college in that Sputnik year of 1957, and not a single course I took in science, history, mathematics or philosophy ever mentioned or discussed the significance of that beeping ball in space, or of computers. The evolution and meaning of computers is so huge and happening so fast that I don't think we understand yet what's going on—an aggravated case of the Sputnik malaise. Thus I hold open the possibility that humans are here to serve the needs of computers and make them better and better as that ultra-species of life evolves before eyes. We may have been invaded by digital aliens and we don't even know it yet.

To iNow and Sisyphus: Doesn't kin selection provide an natural excuse for non-heterosexual behavior? No, I really don't think we choose are sexualities; nature does it for us. But let me ask you this one hypothetical question: What if nanotechnology and/or genetic engineering someday (probably sooner than later) discover what causes of sexuality and find ways to change it. I suspect this will be possible within 20 years. When that happens choice will be the rule of the day and nature will take a back seat. (I can visualize a sex-change business operating like a laser eye-surgery clinic: in and out in a jiffy.)

So you think the elephant in the video did not love the dog in the way a human would love a dog?

Do animals emote like humans? Do they experience love, joy, jealousy, heartbreak, etc. like humans? Or are they just being plain old animals, while we humans like to be anthropomorphic about them? This video from youtube— —brings such questions to mind. I have had plenty of good reasons over the years to think that we underestimate the raw intelligence and perception of many animals. (I had a Black Lab once who was so intelligent and perceptive that I sometimes had to resort to spelled-out conversations with other people so he couldn't understand me, and he still knew what was going on.)

You mean to say I don't have a choice in what I find attractive? I think I do. Don't you? You have free will, don't you?

Well, I don't know about that. I usually choose women with shapely rear ends because they're more attractive to me.

Speaking about what is natural or not, what about polygamy, pedophilia, incest, and baby eating? Those are all well represented in the animal kingdom, too. And the female Black Widow spider eats her mate after mating, which is also natural. Do you think at some point we should differentiate what other animals do from what we do as humans? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged So there are no choices at all involved in attraction?

Check out the "Kin Selection and Homosexuality" thread. Kin selection is not an attack on homosexuality, instead it provides a natural excuse for it. Please take a closer look at the opening post of that thread.

If I ever had any doubts about my heterosexuality they were crushed like grapes when I saw Brigitte Bardot in “The French Bikini.” (But, on this issue of choice, would you say a bisexual person makes such choices? Tonight it’s Ralph and tomorrow Susie? I think choice is part of the equation for some people.) Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Exactly!

Your thread on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is interesting. I especially liked the homosexual penguins with their rocks. Yes, it does seem like a natural function to me—homosexuality could carry on in a species if it provides kin benefits. I'm on the side of the argument that says homosexuality can be seen naturally as form of kin selection. (But does this have any meaning in the context of gay rights, since most scientists already agree that choice alone does not make a person gay? It would be interesting for the gay community to pick up on Hamilton and Dawkins and adopt a neo-Darwinian perspective...you know, from gay power to kin power.) Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Thank you for the chuckle.

I'm confused about your claim that homosexuality runs rampant through the animal kingdom. Does it really? I saw an Animal Planet video once of a male baboon who tired to hump another male baboon, but he was rejected. Then he went over and tried to hump a tree stump. Does this mean then he went from homosexuality to herbal sexuality?

I would say that without having any scientific appreciation for the enabling principles of abiogenesis we wouldn't know what chances life has for any kind of spontaneously emergence on a planet. I'd be very reluctant to say that something has a 100% probability of occurring if I didn't know anything about the principles upon which the event in question occures.

Look at it another way: There are important principles enabling abiogenesis that we do not yet understand. It is as if we were trying to understand the Milky Way before we knew anything about galaxies. Some very huge parts to the puzzle of life are still missing. Otherwise, we'd be making it from scratch in the laboratory by now.

On what known principles do you base your judgement? You are using the same argument that Isaac Asimov used in his Extraterrestrial Civilizations (he says the chance of there being a extraterrestrial civilization out there is 1.0), which is totally unsupported by any known principles I know of. Are you willing to settle for the "billion and billions and billions principle" (i.e., chances are that chances are that chances are...)? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged What "vast scope of potential" are you talking about? Is it the one you feel in your gut? Are you saying that vastness alone will solve this probability argument? If so, don't you need to know something about the principles behind abiogenesis to make that claim? Without any known principles all there is is belief, with which science does a lousy job. As a scientist, I require more than: "It was bound to happen because there were so many molecules sloshing around in the primordial soup."

I accept that possibility, of course, but only as an extremely remote occurrence. What kind of probability would you care to attach to it? P = 1/1 x 10^1,000,000? I think you give too much credit to this spontaneous magic, but you’re not the only one. Take Stuart Kauffman, for instance, in his At Home In The Universe (1995, p. 45): “There are compelling reasons to believe that whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth. If this argument is correct, metabolic networks need not be built one component at a time; they can spring up full-grown from a primordial soup. Order for free, I call it. If I am right, the motto of life is not We the improbable, but We the expected.” Kauffman might be delivering a sermon to The Church of Life, but he’s not saying anything defensible in a scientific context. I think the Miller-Urey experiment went to his head. His assumptions are baseless. Are you one of those who believes in such primordial miracles? I’d like to, but I’m not that religious.

The so-called "theory of abiogenesis," as portrayed by your wiki author, begins with a precarious assumption: abiogenesis happened on Earth, either uniquely here or multi-regionally. I don't see how anyone can defend that assumption; it seems awfully geocentric to me. In any case, your theory of abiogenesis (more like an hypothesis) has to address the origin of digital genetic code...and "spontaneous" doesn't quite get us anywhere. Because my girl friend left me and there's no else around to do it to me? I don't use the word "spontaneous" in a scientific context; it has a large big woo-woo factor. Pasteur pretty much put an end to it.

You mean to say that life emerged BEFORE a genetic code appeared? You and I may not share the same definition of life. To me, life must have heritability, and that's not possible without genes or protogenes.

Please explain what you mean by this mumbo jumbo. It seems like something a creationist would spew. By your reasoning the invention of the automobile had nothing to do with the evolution of the auto industry.

If protein synthesis was purely sterochemical with the codons on DNA there would be no need for transcription and translation by RNA molecules. In such a case, which does not occur in nature, the DNA itself would produce proteins straight off its coded template of nucleotides. As such, there would be no the central dogma. My curiosity asks: Why not a straight shot from code to polypeptide formation? Why the need for intermediary steps of code translation? So far, the best answer I’ve come up with is that without the central dogma there could be direct feedback from the polypeptide to DNA—a corruptive informational feedback that would make havoc out of biological evolution and probably prevent it.

What fascinates me most about the genetic code and the codons that carry the structural information is the fact that genes are, for the most part, non-stereochemical, meaning that the bonding sites of a codon on DNA do not usually match up with the bonding sites of the amino acid it's coded for. So, instead of a tinker-toy schema (purely sterochemical) for building proteins out of AAs from coded instructions (genes), there is a language or sorts that needs to be translated. I could see nature building a sterochemical code and keeping things simple that way, but it strikes me as a curious mystery that the code should evolve non-stereochemically. (The fact that it evolved at all is of course a bigger mystery.)