Ringer

This thing 'I' in you is neuronal activity made of matter and not your mysticism.

Since I said earlier that I do not believe that you read the papers you cite I will ask something simple and in return I will read every single link and explain, in detail, why it's not the huge thing you believe it to be. The link I left is one I read, please thoroughly explain what in this paper makes the accepted evolutionary void, and that there is a fight within the evolutionary biologists to try to keep the current models from changing. If you can successfully do this I will, point by point, go through the papers. The reason I ask this is what I said before about you reading the papers yourself as well as it seems like you don't understand the papers if you are reading them.

Hey now, he still got ~63,000,000 to Romney's ~59,000,000 so the USA does seem to favor him as well. [edit] ParanoiA, thinking about the demographics it's unsurprising a science forum tends to lean to the (US) left. Scientists in general tend to be more democratic, and since the forum has a good amount of fairly young people, the overall left leanings are correlated more with age and interest than any sort of 'abuse' towards other members.[/edit]

As I have seen, though I don't have the statistics, the majority of those who believe a fetus is a person do so out of a religious belief. If this is so then abortion would be an advance toward freedom in that the laws are not constrained by religious doctrine. If there is stronger secular reasoning toward granting an embryo 'personhood' then abortion should be outlawed. The problem is that there does not seem to be strong evidence that it should be given that status without invoking religion, or some other appeal to emotion.

Entertaining maybe, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it would be educational.

I'm OK with that distinction (I'm American )

I honestly don't think he even reads the articles he cites because if he think this: from his last link calls for a paradigm shift I could say he is sadly mistaken. Especially when Figure 3 of that paper has Natural Selection directly in it, not much of Darwinian Theory being thrown out since that was his only thing. Let's look at the closing paragraph of this paper It's neither a paradigm shift, an overthrow, or anything of the sort. It's just a bunch of different things that work together. You know, like what science does when new information comes out.

I made no other argument than your analogy was lacking because violent crimes and well planned out crimes tend to happen at very different rates. What, exactly, are the rates for electoral fraud in other developed nations with well established democracies? I can't find them on a cursory search, but since you are making this argument I assume you have supplied/will supply them if you have them to make statements from. If it's already posted I must have missed it. Not to mention the laws that people are discussing do nothing to stop the kinds of fraud that happen on the large scale, which is the registration of non-eligible voters. If you're registered you would be able to get an ID that would be passable. Even if ID laws went into effect it would do next to nothing because fake IDs are not that difficult to find or make.

I'll fix this for you. Demands for secure evidence - Scientific & just. Evidence Scientific Everything else mentioned Meaningless

Couldn't be. Uranians are venomous, he would be dead by now. It has to be from the Kuiper Belt.

Well, considering those crimes are completely different I would not only say that it's not a valid comparison, but completely irrelevant. For one, those crimes tend to be heat of the moment and not well planned out. Since voter fraud takes a lot of planning ahead and time, I would say with utmost confidence that yes they happen at a much smaller scale. Also, if you want to compare crime rates do it for the actual crime. Otherwise it's completely meaningless.

Have you ever heard any surgery explained in detail? It's not abortion that has things that would seem terrible to people, but surgery in general.

How is saying 'the negro', instead of black people (I hate the term African American because not everyone is from f*#@ing America), not racist? I tend to think if someone uses a blatantly racist term they are being pretty racist. I think the argument of non-racism is pretty weak. Not to mention equating the forced servitude, torture, genocide of millions, etc to the removal of a parasitic group of cells is blatantly ridiculous. [edit] spelling mistake [/edit]

I'm not really sure if you are agreeing with my sarcasm or being sarcastic yourself. Partly because I'm not to sure what you are talking about. Is the woman the state who has the 'right and responsibility to raise her child', and does the man not have just as much right and responsibility? If not then how is it solely the states responsibility to train responsible adults when that is what goes in to raising them?

Yes, because men bear no responsibility to take care of what they were half responsible for.

Yeah, but he's pretty fat. He may have spent a few on heart attacks already

And I wholeheartedly agree. I know why people say there is no grey area, and I say it myself at times, when speaking to people who use people abusing the system as an excuse to be apathetic or worse in these situations. Both sides , those who abuse the system and those who ignore the crimes, are equally disgusting, for lack of a better word. Because both of those groups undermine the seriousness of what happens in these situations and continue to make proper discussion of the topic impossible. I am in no way advocating that there isn't a difference in sex and criminal, and apologize if it read that way. The vast majority of these crimes are no question black and white. Hell there are times when I get angry that certain things are technically legal, but again that's abusing the system. I figured someone may bring out one of those super specific examles to undermine your point, so I brought it up to avoid a page of discussion of back and forth of whether it was black and white or not. [edit] Also, who do you think would win between our avatars? Badass blowtorch lady Vs. Gatling Kitty![/edit]

It really depends on what your professor likes to focus on and what they tend to ignore. I know that may sound dumb, but that has been my experience most of the time. If the professor wants you to think about the entire interaction between the effects on ATPases, voltage gated proteins, etc you could go with something like the ATPases would not be able to regulate voltage properly to keep up with the influx of K+ to maintain resting potential. This influx through the leaky channels would cause the membrane potential to most likely reach threshold and cause a single action potential, if looking at a single neuron. After that action potential the K+ gradient would not allow the membrane potential to reach the point where the K+ channels close and the Na+ channels would not be able to return to their resting conformation. If you have the Nernst equation (I think that's the right one) you can figure out what the potentials would become and what the effect would be. The permeability of Na+ is about 2.5% that of K+ so if you think about the leaky channels the influx should be more negligible, but its effect of bringing the membrane potential so far below threshold would cause a large problem in actually getting an action potential. but if the threshold is reached it would have a similar effect of not allowing RMP to be restored.

I know and agree with what you are getting at, but I think think there is some grey area in some very specific circumstances. For example, I use to be of the mindset that while having sex if you wanted to try something do a kind of 'test run' of beginning to do it and gauge the reaction of your partner. If they said to stop or seemed not to enjoy it stop, if they seemed to enjoy it keep going. Once when this happened I was told that I did something that they did not want and they were thinking about getting police involved. I never thought when doing that I was being coercive or doing something non-consensual, but I was unknowingly. Most sexual crimes are completely non-grey, but sometimes things like this could be considered somewhat grey (pretty dark grey, but grey nonetheless). You may very well disagree, and I could see why one would, but I do think there are some specific times when it's slightly grey.

I'd say it's poor form to have q.e.d. on a proof that begs the question. In my experience the time when people who are now atheists were religious was because they never gave much thought to any of it. When I was a child I was often kicked out of Sunday school because I questioned too much, I once got in trouble for asking what a cubit was, though in my mind I still was a Christian because that's what people were. After a while, i.e. when I took the time to realize everyone isn't Christian, I realized that religious distinctions were pointless. Though I don't consider myself atheistic necessarily, I like the term apatheistic, I never really sustained a true belief any more than I held the true belief that if I went into my dad's basement a creature would eat me. Both of these things were just what a parent told me and I assumed it was true until I actually regarded it critically. There was no real choice, it was more of a realization, and it seems like this is what happens with a lot of atheists I know. As for the elephant in the garden, I could get the prize if all you have to do is pass a lie detector test. Though I wouldn't truly believe it, those things just suck.

I can't quite say why, but this story fills me with something analogous to dread.

Who will get caught doing what? What does sovereignty have to do with anything?

Is this a homework question? Think about what the membrane is there for. Although there is some leaking with small ions, the membrane is meant to keep a stable environment by not letting things in and out, that's why channels and transports are needed. If that's so what would that change by putting high levels of positive charge outside with low levels of positive charge inside. With that change how would that affect the neurons ability to reach threshold potential?

I thought I did. It's about the mindset of being consistently critical that you have when doing scientific investigation must be left at the door when partaking in a faith based meeting. It's not that you can't be religious and scientific, but the thought processes of are different when actively pursuing on or the other. I can't submit a paper to a journal with the results section just reading, "trust me," and be expected to be taken seriously just because I know the field. Likewise I couldn't expect to walk into a church and require the preacher to give me the methodology he used to connect with god to see if I could replicate his results.