zyncod

Actually, they did a study where the acupuncture showed a higher level of pain relief than a placebo-type drug. But one of the controls was to stick needles randomly into the body, which had an effect equivalent to the acupuncture. So the chakra thing apparently doesn't matter, but ironically, your body appears to be predisposed to sticking sharp objects in it for pain relief.

Well, at least you're consistent. I find the position that abortion should only be legal in cases of rape or incest indefensible. If it's murder, it's murder, and if it's not, it's not. To add murder to rape does not mollify the situation. But, of course, abortion is not murder.

What about post-heart attack or post-lung cancer therapy? Should those be paid for by the government? After all, the patients brought it on themselves. On a related note - you as a taxpayer have no intrinsic right not to have your money go to things that you find morally repugnant. My tax dollars (and far more of them than abortion-related tax dollars) are going to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You vote how you believe and the majority decides how the money is spent.

Nobody that's not in a mental institution rejects parsimony as a philosophy even if they reject philisophical naturalism. If you put your hand on a stove ten times and you get burned ten times, the simplest possible explanation is that putting your hand on a stove causes you to get burned. You haven't ruled out supernatural causes; God could have picked those times randomly to burn you, but irregardless, you're not going to keep putting your hand on the stove. The only valid counter to naturalism that I have ever seen is postmodernism and that is pretty incompatible with a faith-based lifestyle. And even the postmodern thinkers go and get the medical treatments based upon the admittedly discounted naturalism. Naturalism and parsimony might not truly explain the workings of the universe, but we all live as if they do and so far, our lifestyle has been more useful than the alternative. Just like intelligent design might actually be correct but it is not at all useful as a hypothesis, whereas evolution might be incorrect but is useful as it actually makes predictions that tend to be borne out (ie, dinosaurs are similar to birds; I predict a birdlike dinosaur; I find Archaeopteryx skeletons). And the fact that fewer people of faith are found in the upper reaches of science is probably due to the fact that, as they become more educated, they find the workings of the universe inconsistent with its creation at the hands of an intelligent, let alone omnipotent, being. Of course, the lack of people of faith at the top [/b]could be due to a vast conspiracy, but really, which explanation is simpler? Oopsy me, I forgot, we only reject Occam's Razor when it's convenient for us. You're probably right: God exists, it's all just a conspiracy, and the reason people get fat is not eating too much, it's the Cupcake Elves blessing them with extra padding so they bounce right back up when they fall down. BTW - revprez, you are the worst example of an agnostic ever.

I don't know that there are actually any self-replicating proteins. The reason the "RNA world" hypothesis is so attractive is that each unit (nucleotide) of a self-replicating RNA can pair with its cogent partner (A<->U, C<->G). Therefore, as long as the RNA was palindromic, it would be very easy to self replicate. An example of this is: 5'-AAACGGCUUU-3' <--- The self-replicator 3'-UUUGCCGAAA-5' <--- Its offspring However, amino acids have no such intrinsic ability to pair with one another, making a self-replicating protein very difficult. All the RNA would need to do was catalyze the bonds between the phosphates and hydroxyls on the nucleotides that paired with it. Given that ribozymes (catalytic RNAs) are already known, along with this intrinsic pairing ability in RNA, the formation of a self-replicating RNA seems almost inevitable given a ready supply of nucleotides. DNA also has this pairing ability, but the lack of a 2' hydroxyl on the sugar ring makes it less catalytic and thus less likely to self-replicate. So what probably happened was: 1. The self-replicating RNA formed 2. The self-replicating RNA at some point started to associate with proteins for stability (RNA is a little volatile on its own). 3. The RNA acquired the ability to make proteins, maybe through a proto-ribosome 4. The RNA-protein complexes became enclosed in lipid membranes or micelles 5. The transition from RNA to DNA as the genetic material occurred (DNA is much more stable than RNA and thus better as a genetic storage medium). 6. Voila - a cell! Steps 3 and 4 might have been reversed, but given the complexity of the DNA-->RNA-->protein mechanism, it is almost certain that by the time DNA came around, the self-replicator was surrounded by some sort of membrane in order to concentrate these various nucleotides and amino acids.

Not only are unvaccinated children endangering others, they're relying on the "herd immunity" from all the other vaccinated children in order not to get sick themselves. I doubt that vegan beliefs stretch so far in most cases as to want to go back to 19th century child mortality rates, so not vaccinating your children is at best hypocritical. Regarding the thimerosal-autism "link" and the remote chance of immune-related complications, I can understand the desire to protect your children, but it is not fair to others (even if it is not that dangerous for your children themselves) not to get your children vaccinated if they are coming in contact with other children on a regular basis. I don't think that vaccinations should be required, per se, but I definitely think that vaccinations should be a prerequisite for children attending public school. After all, like driving, going to school is a privilege, not a right, and it is within the government's rights to require certain things of children attending public schools. And I speak as somebody who has to get these vaccinations every year.

Venus flytrap is a member of the sundew family - all these (carnivorous) plants have tenticles on their leaves that secrete a gluelike substance. Insects get trapped and then digested. So imagine that a sundew evolved the ability to close one of their leaves on their prey (let's say that moving one of the tentacles caused a thigmotropism-like reaction). It wouldn't need to close the leaf lightning-quick because the insect was already stuck. But it would provide a selective advantage in that the insect couldn't really struggle away any more once the leaf was closed. And evolution provided for a quicker and quicker mechanism until the flytrap no longer needed to use the glue to capture the organism but could simply clap shut on the insect. As far as point 3 goes, I'm not sure what the ancestors of sundews are, but if you looked it up, you could probably imagine a fairly convincing mechanism for how the glue/digestive capabilities evolved (perhaps the leaves' tentacles were used to secure the plants to surfaces, like ivy, and the plant may have evolved the capacity to digest insects that kept getting stuck on their leaves anyway - probably not right, but just a thought).

There are so many problems with that paper. To begin, why was an ID article printed in a (small, almost irrelevant) journal largely devoted to publishing monographs (which nobody reads)? It, had it really presented any unique/valid points, considering the impact of such a paper, should have been published in Nature or PNAS or at least MPE. Why does the journal itself have a link in essence disavowing the paper? (for those of you not acquainted with scientific journals, it's the equivalent of the NY Times putting a permanent link on its website disavowing one specific article) My lab is publishing a paper on what the processing determnants are of an enzyme cut site in a specific chloroplast mRNA in algae (although it is publishing it through the traditional peer-reviewed mechanism and in a relevant journal). Should that be taught to high school students? After all, the apparent prerequisite for inclusion in a high school curriculum according to IDists is just a handful of papers. So of course we must also include matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization - time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF), which is mentioned in nearly 3000 papers according to Pubmed (BTW- "intelligent design" is mentioned in 22 Pubmed papers - none of which are supportive of or relevant to ID). And many hundreds of thousands of other topics - so our high school students will be 4000 years old when they graduate.

I can babble but cannot talk, I can run but cannot walk; I cannot sleep but have a bed, I have no house but have a shed.

You know, you don't actually have to prove them wrong. Because all that matters is that they sound intelligent; they don't have to use the terminology correctly or even have the slightest understanding of the theory behind what they're saying. And that's really all the IDists and creationists want - to be debated on a level beyond the understanding of the typical (Protestant) public. Then it becomes a "scientific" debate between equals in the eyes of that public. Edit: all evolutionists, i think youll find Actually, Lynn Margulis has for the most part rejected the neo-Darwinian synthesis for the natural-selection based mechanisms of speciation and organogenesis.

Hi. I'm sorry - I'm really not trying to be insulting at all here. But if you, buzsaw, can tell me why B vitamins and magnesium are good for you, without googling it, I will give you so many props (well, maybe not the B vitamins but at least the magnesium). It just always has puzzled me why people say "such-and-such a vitamin is good for you" or "trans fats are horrible for you" without understanding even what the vitamins or trans fats are, let alone what they do to your body. For the computer people out there, it's on the level of saying, "Well, Firefox runs php scripts better than IE" (or something along those lines - I don't pretend to be computer literate in more than the slightest degree) without understanding what a program is. Because almost nobody even knows what a vitamin is.

Most bacteria in your body are not actually in your body. See, the basic structure of vertebrate (to be totally technical, coelemate) anatomy is like a pipe; the world on the outside of the pipe and food/fluid on the inside, with the fleshy parts being the pipe itself. The immune system proper only attacks the bacteria that live in the "pipe itself" part, which is normally fairly clear of bacteria/viruses/fungi/algae/etc.

This question of yours is worthless without knowing what the other choices are. It's like saying the answer is "Smacking a dog in the face." That would also not be an effective added control.

Aspirin is dilatory for blood vessels, but that's a side effect. It blocks enzymes involved in neurotransmission much the same way that most NSAIDS do, although not all NSAIDS are dilatory. Man, ps2, you have a lot of weird questions about human biology. You ever thought about buying a basic textbook?

You know, if 45% of Americans believe in creationism in some form or another (shocking but probably true), the 60 minutes of evolution that they were taught in high school, then the 60 minutes of intelligent design almost certainly will not make a dent in the other 55%'s beliefs. And, to tell the truth, the only people that it matters whether or not they believe in evolution are biologists. Everybody else can be as shockingly ignorant as they want (as someone pursuing a career in virology, 90% of people have no idea what that word means, and one person - a college graduate- has actually asked "biology is science, right?"). Because you cannot be a biologist and believe in ID or creationism; nothing in biology makes any sense at all except in light of evolution. That's why, if you look at the Discovery Institute website, almost none of their "research fellows" are (or were, more accurately) actually scientists. Then again, I'm one of those America-hating liberals. I don't think it would be such a bad thing if America was brought down a few notches, and the best way to do this is to allow conservatives to achieve some of their goals: deny entry of foreign grad students in the name of "security," further ruin the already abysmal state of public science education by introducing pseudoscience, and continue to cut the budgets of the NIH/NSF. Because the only reason that America is the sole superpower is it's science/technology capabilities. Really, the funny thing is, all us America-hating liberals want to do is stop America from killing people. It's the America-loving liberals that want to stop everything else that conservatives want to do.

I'd like to point out that "Social Darwinism" was big among Christians in the early part of last century, because it gave them an outlet for their pre-existing racist beliefs. If evolutionists have to be accountable for Hitler's (flawed) view of evolution/eugenics being responsible for the Holocaust, then Christians everywhere must be responsible for the millenium of wars and definitely over 200 million dead based on (flawed) views of God's will. So the score is now 6 million to 200 million. Which do you think we should get rid of first? Oh, and speaking of "scientific" views providing an outlet for pre-existing beliefs, we had "Social Darwinism" and now we have "Intelligent Design." Them Christians love their science, don't they?

No, the prophylatic dose would not be useless, but it would, in theory, make you more likely to contract an antibiotic-resistant strain of endocarditis. To go back to the petri dish, taking a prophylactic dose is the equivalent of spreading an antibiotic across a plate with a few very small colonies, trying to kill only a few million bacteria. Even a very small amount of antibiotic would suffice, and there would likely be no remaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Similarly, because you are not trying to clear an infection, but only prevent one, for prophylaxis, you don't need an entire course of antibiotic. But, in stressing the bacteria, the antibiotic might increase the chances of an antibiotic-resistant strain appearing, but very slightly. But if you were to take a plate containing a lawn of bacteria (trillions), spreading the same amount of antibiotic would not kill all the bacteria and there would likely be a few antibiotic-resistant bacteria that would result. This would be equivalent to trying to clear an infection with a single antibiotic dose.

Yes. Yes it can work. I remember the time I was really drunk and fell into a woodchipper (well, I don't really *remember*, per se). I lost my right arm, and I was pretty bummed, but then I started believing in God and I grew a new arm. But I made the mistake of believing in God a little too long and I started to grow wings. But then I just believed in the Devil and the anti-stem cells ate the wings.

Well, some recent studies have actually shown that a short dose of antibiotics can increase the number of bacteria resistant to that antibiotic, regardless of confounding factors like the immune system. The stress presented by the antibiotic triggers the bacterial SOS response, which ups the mutation rate. Therefore, if you were to add an antibiotic to a petri dish with bacteria, then wash it away, there could be more antibiotic-resistant bacteria than in an untreated plate.

Plants are mostly water and cellulose. They don't need to move, so their protein content is pretty minimal. And they make their own amino acids, like most organisms do.

MBOC is NOT a general bio book.

Ok, Metafrizzics. If you are like most people that I know that think that AIDS cocktails are lethal and that Hitler was a Rothschild (and I know a lot of people like that, living in Manhattan as I do), would you not agree that there are more pressing issues than outing the government's involvement in a plague that cannot at this point be stopped? These kind of ideas threaten the entire idea of progress in this country by painting all such semi-revolutionaries as paranoid idiots. If the Pentagon was indeed capable of keeping the deliberate spread of AIDS under wraps (and I am no longer arguing whether or not this is plausible), what chance do you have of raising the consciousness of the people on an online forum? You should instead be out there with your AK and plastique if you truly believe this to be the case. As a person working in the sciences and also somebody who believes that the Democrats are more detrimental to our country than the Republicans (that is, somebody who understands why AIDS cocktails are beneficial and the value of a spine in the face of fascism), I beg of you, please stop espousing conspiracy theories and get to work on what matters.

Nobody ever said that the Pentagon's plan had to make sense. In fact, when homosexuality was still a 'disease' in the DSM, the Pentagon paid for some research to see if homosexuality could be transmitted by a bacterium or a virus - the thought being that enemy troops would be too busy humping each other to fight (I kid you not). Now, I will admit that a simian virus showing up suddenly in the US is a little suspicious. And I don't think that too many people in the Pentagon would have shed a bitter tear for people dying of a "gay cancer" (at least when HIV would have been in the planning stages in the 60s or 70s). And Tuskegee and the syphilis studies show that the US government was at one point not too discriminate about infecting its own citizens. But even after the last 40 years of US government, I still can't believe that they could be that evil. More importantly, nothing the Pentagon/CIA/etc has ever done has shown signs of being that intelligent. To start the HIV pandemic, they would have had to recognize the potential of the HIV virus, of which few to one cases were reported prior to the 1980s. They would have had to study it clandestinely, and they would have had to infect people in order to do so (a simian/murine model for the disease was not available for a decade even after much extremely public research). And, in order for it to be the "gay plague," they would have had to somehow recognize that this unknown virus was very effectively transmitted anally. The Pentagon being behind HIV/AIDS is not utterly impossible, and I'm sure that somebody somewhere would have thought that this was a good idea in the 70s. It just strains credulity a little bit to think that our idiotic government could slip something like this under the radar for a quarter century.

Probably the easiest example of muscle memory is to start doing something repetitive, like walking or tapping a pen against a desk. If you do it for about 30 seconds, you'll realize you have to make an active decision to stop, even though you're doing something that burns energy. It feels very weird once you start thinking about it - like your body is something that you are not really attached to - and the longer you keep thinking about it, the more difficult it is to stop. And "muscle memory" is supposedly why elderly people have more difficulty standing or walking without stumbling. Your brain is integrative on many levels - you can tell your body 'stand' without consciously realizing all that goes into standing. You receive balance signals from your inner ear and thousands of signals from your feet, legs, and buttocks that are used to contract or release many, many different muscles. Elderly people, while still adept at integrating all these signals and providing the automatic outputs, have lost much of the sensation in limb extremeties. So they don't have as clear a picture of what their balance situation is at any given point. Which is why some doctors have recommended that elderly people use shoes with many small bumps in the soles - to increase the sensations in their feet and make standing and walking less of a conscious (and slower) decision.

My point was just that intelligence is one of those things that's only interesting to itself. And to take your example of cats, metabolic expenditures aside, would they really benefit from an increase of 25% in intelligence? For most animals, life consists of "Hey look, there's something to eat!" and "Hey look, there's something to have sex with!" Until they evolve intelligence to the point where they can start building traps for mice, I don't think that moderate increases in intelligence would benefit cats. A 25% in eyesight would probably be much more beneficial. And, Mokele, it is true that evolution acts in the short term. If, to go back to cats, a group of cats on an island evolved lightning-quick speed, all other cats on the island would have to evolve in the same direction in order to keep being able to find something to eat. But if this speed meant that the cats ate everything on the island, this would, in the end, be a self-destructive tendency for the species as a whole. The very fact that sentience has only evolved once whereas other complex structures such as wings have evolved multiple times indicates to me that this is another self-destructive tendency, on the order of a too-successful supervirus. And my point about "suicide" and "nuclear weapons" was that one of the horrible, and wonderful, things about sentience is the ability to contemplate abstract concepts. And, to take human history as a guide, any abstract concept that sentient beings consider will eventually be put into action, or at least attempted. And having the ability to contemplate suicide I would think cannot be a good thing for any species. And self-destructive tendencies, like 100% fatality rates for viruses or, presumably, sentience, do not tend to evolve very often.