jeskill

Great find!

You thought what was a biological fact? Interesting idea. I agree that personhood is a moral and social construct. To me this suggests a definition of personhood can not be made using scientific evidence alone. But you've touched on an important issue, which is, what is the most ethical way to define personhood? I don't feel like I've come to a conclusion on this one yet, and I think that there are probably multiple criteria that should be taken into consideration.

When you hand in essays, do you just hand in the bibliography with a one word sentence?

Darryl8, instead of attacking with ad hominim fallacies, why not respond to Arete's question? I think this is a great question, as it's the main reason why most people aren't agreeing with you here.

Are you looking at other methods of measuring population density besides quadrats? What size are your quadrats and what size are the clumps?

Mooeypoo, I have to disagree with you. You keep on saying that a fetus isn't "alive". From a biological perspective, it is alive. So are, for that matter, sperm and eggs. The abortion issue really has nothing to do with whether or not a fetus is alive. The question has to do with when the fetus should be considered a person. But I do agree with you that these emotional fallacies aren't contributing anything. From his posts, it seems that Anders is assuming that once fertilization occurs, a blastocyst should be given personhood. Plainly, you or I don't agree with that. Maybe we should ask him why he believes this to be so, and how he feels about miscarriages then.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL QUESTION: Is abortion an advance towards freedom? Here's an interesting article that suggests the answer is yes. This article is a summary of a scientific study on what happens to women who are denied abortions. Some interesting results: 1) The main reason these women wanted abortions is they lacked money. 2) 76% of these women, a year later, were on welfare. Also this: The take-away I get from this is that women who weren't denied abortions were more likely to get/keep a job, and more likely to get out of an abusive relationship. Being dependent on welfare restricts economic freedom, and being in an abusive relationship can is detrimental to your freedom from violence. Hence, in these cases, abortion does seem like an advance towards freedom for women. [EDIT] link was missing [/EDIT]

I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, and then lost it. So I'll just ask this: On talkorigins, they say this about the Modern Synthesis: My question to you: How do endosymbiosis, HGT, and phenotypic plasticity (to use a few examples) NOT fall into this definition of the Modern Synthesis? As a suggestion, you may want to consider responding specifically to queries, and using your citations to BACK UP your arguments. Randomly posting a whole bunch of links that lack context is not useful on the internet, or when you hand in a scientific paper, for that matter.

Very sad.

hmmmm. "loons" "old farts" "what you are doing is no different than what creationists do". That sounds pretty troll-ish to me, darryl88. Hint: if you want to be taken seriously, you should consider not calling people names, or making assumptions about the other forum members. After all, we all know what happens when we assume .... This whole hubabaloo you're trying to create kind of reminds me of a story a former prof told about the "classification wars" taxonomists used to get into. It was basically all over how best to create clades. Apparently it devolved into fisticuffs at one conference, I kid you not. People always get so riled up about semantics/taxonomy/general word definitions in science. Probably because it's hard to debate a p-value, but easy to debate whether or not we should allow paraphyly in a tree (or HGT into the modern synthesis, as it may be.)

Professor Spencer Barrett? Awesome. He co-taught the first year evo/eco course I took waaaay back when I was an undergrad. I'm beginning to think darryl88 is a troll.

If sex-education is well-done, and both men and women are taught the legal definition of consent, then there is no difficulty in defining consent. This often has more to do with the unwillingness to police sex-crimes than the logistics of doing so. Intolerant attitudes towards sex can also make it difficult to police sex crimes. Don't forget: in most cultures that have strict norms for sex, women are expected to be the gatekeepers of their chastity. Women who are raped are often afraid to speak out, making it difficult to police sex crimes. http://www.wisemusli...tizationofrape/ I disagree. If a woman has a good understanding of her rights, and a good understanding of the legal definition of consent, then she will be more likely to speak out. Your white paper is not an example of a "sex-positive" culture. It's an example of an exploitative culture. BIG difference. Given what he has written before in previous threads concerning "race", my instinct is that Zapatos' explanation is correct.

As an aside, since when does "I can't afford to have a child" equal "a woman feels it's inconvenient to have a child"? Do you have any idea how much it costs to raise a kid?

72 % of women not using condoms is not the same as "46% of women did not use contraception the month they conceived". By-the-by, why is it that you write about women not using condoms, (those harlots!!!) when the man is the partner who actually wears them? And we've dissected this data in depth in the "Ethics of Abortion" thread quite recently ( I think it starts up on the 3rd or 4th page) ... you may want to read it, as I sure as hell don't want to spend my time regurgitating past arguments.

So the way to "fix" women is to create a totalitarian state that enforces its worldview on all via brainwashing/coercion? Yeah, that'll work.

First, interesting link, thanks for sharing. To address the comment above, I don't think that the exploitation of women is caused by the "sex-positive movement". A definition of sex-positive I found on the internets: According to this definition, the exploitation of young girls and boys is the antithesis of sex-positive, because exploitation, is, by its very nature, coercive.

The age of consent in your town is 16? Wow. I grew up in a very sex-positive atmosphere, but myself and my peers were also taught the ramifications of sex very early. As well, the schools went to great lengths to hammer in the "no means no" meme. My adult mentors stressed that I should wait to have sex with someone I truly cared for, and someone who would respect me -- I think that was a good rule, and I followed it. The end result was that I never felt pressured to have sex as a teenager, and when I finally did meet someone who pressured me (in my 20s), I was able to fend it off without any emotional or physical harm. I guess what I'm saying is, yes, sex comes with consequences and as a result, any sex-positive "movement" has to reflect that. IMO, Sex education is not just about teaching kids the physical ramifications, but also the emotional ramifications of sexual activity.

I agree with your answer, Phi, but am curious: Why would you say that the more conservative a person is, the less they trust the motives of others?

I wholeheartedly agree with #2. I would also add that if you had a burning desire to talk about mechanisms such as HGT, all you have to do is start up a thread.

So you're saying that it's people on internet forums that are anti-HGT, not peer-reviewed authors? I must admit your argument is confusing me. For the record, I love horizontal gene transfer.

Why don't you search for these concepts in Web of Science? That way you'll find peer reviewed papers on the subject that are actually useful.

Just out of curiosity, this "neo-darwinist" who said that horizontal gene transfer wasn't that important -- what kind of organisms doe he/she study? Is he or she a student or professor or other?

Thank you.J Would you like me to discuss why I think the anti-contraception lobby wants to control women? (Subjugation is a fancy word for control, so I'm using the simpler word, if you don't mind.) Are you implying that a 12 week old fetus displays cognitive function? There are four aspects to cognitive function: The ability to perceive (using the senses) The ability to recognize (using neural memory structures) The ability to think/plan before acting and process thoughts (i.e. executive function) The ability to consciously focus your attention on a task (attention) A fetus at 12 weeks is probably just starting to have #1,and I know there's evidence that a 30 week old fetus has #2, (although I haven't seen data on when # 2 starts to develop) but I've not seen evidence that a fetus has #3 or #4. I just don't think that would be a good litmus test of personhood. My second concern with the 12 week-limit is practical: In a functional world, everyone would get comprehensive sex education, everyone would have access to contraception, abortions would be the rare result of a contraceptive failure (or done to protect the health of the mother), and women would have easy access to abortion and thus be able to get it done before the 12 week cut-off. The US is not so functional. A comparison of US with Sweden (where abortion is limited after 18th week, but there is comprehensive sex education and access to contraception /abortion providers) might be helpful: What's the percent of abortions that occur after week 12? Sweden: 4.8% US: 11.9% Why? I linked to an article previously that discussed how socio-economically disadvantaged women in the US would like to have abortions sooner, but were stymied by the cost and travel logistics. The cost and travel logistics issue is caused by the anti-abortion lobby, who focus on making it as difficult as possible for women to have abortions by reducing the number of abortion providers. Women often have to travel to different states to have abortions. The time it takes to set that up can delay the abortion. Some insurance providers (assuming the women have insurance) also won't cover abortions, so disadvantaged women have to spend time raising the money for the abortion. It becomes a women's issue because a woman's right to choose to have an early abortion is constrained in many parts of the US. We'll have to agree to disagree. The goal of a woman's rights activist is not to "privilege" women, it's to even the playing field so that women and men have an equal opportunity to succeed. When a fetus has the same rights as a woman to survive, it actually decreases that woman's opportunity to succeed. It's impossible to have equal opportunity between men and women if a fetus also has rights, because the economic potential of a woman is fundamentally affected by said fetus.

DO YOU DISAGREE WITH THE ARGUMENT THAT THE PRO-LIFE ORGANIZATIONS ARE ANTI-CONTRACEPTION? Hala hala! I don't usually yell, but you're moving the goalposts and that's quite annoying. Yes, these links do not explicitly discuss how the anti-contraception movement subjugates women. They show that the pro-life organizations are anti-contraception. There is evidence supporting the argument that the anti-contraception movement is really about controlling women (subjugate means "to bring someone under control"), but it's in other literature. I'd love to get into that, but first, I would implore you to respond to the question at hand, which is, for the 20th time, Do you disagree with the argument that the pro-life organizations are anti-contraception? I need to think about this some more. I mean, yes, the concept of personhood is important to the abortion debate. I would argue it's more important than the concept of when life began, because from a biological perspective, life does not begin at conception, life just changes from haploid to diploid. (When I say "just", I am in no means trying to diminish the amazing dance of fertilization.) However, when you have multiple groups of people who can't agree about when personhood begins, and you have a situation where a female, who is currently a legal person, can be physically or economically harmed by designating a foetus as a person, then it becomes a women's rights issue.

Evidence to support the argument that the major pro-life organizations in the US are also anti-contraception: From this article here. There are examples in the above article of leaders in the christian right advocating for pro-life and anti-contraception laws. The Pro-Life America is anti-contraception Students for life: While they don't actually come out and say they're anti-contraception, this article clearly advocates for NOT using contraception. Susan B Anthony List : anti-contraception propaganda on website An article detailing how the National Right To Life lobbied against a bill that would reduce the rate of abortions by increasing funding for contraception and sex-education. Also, check out this article which basically describes how a bunch of pro-life organizations (other than NARL) wouldn't sign a bill to reduce abortion via contraception and sex-education. Perhaps women's rights are only peripheral if you happen to be a man. But if you're a woman who has to face negative economic or physical consequences due to carrying a pregnancy to term, the concerns become far more pragmatic than philosophical. This is why people who swear up and down that they're pro-life get abortions. One point: I don't really think you can argue that a baby or child has full and rightful ownership of itself. They are beholden to the (hopefully benevolent) dictatorship of their parents or caretakers. So why would you say that a foetus has the "full and rightful ownership" of itself? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that?