CDarwin

It's not an analogous scenario. Kosavo declaring independence is more like, say, Puerto Rico trying to break away from the United States. It's an autonomous territory.

Eh, not really. You only have to point out that there's really no such thing as "form A" or "form B," only species of variable populations containing variable individuals.

Oh, he's not. He's the US Representative from the Tennessee 1st Congressional District (mine). I was being a bit facetious vis-a-vis your interest in local congressional elections.

Well, I'm glad you haven't chosen illegal immigration as your issue. Otherwise you'd be railing at me about how bad David Davis has been for the Tennessee 1st right now.

Uhm... is this really your fight ecoli? I don't just bring that up to be persnickety. The fact that a long island college student is campaigning for a Texan congressional representative speaks to the messianic following this man has acquired. It's interesting, at least.

I guess that should have been "*by now." Neither Nader nor Bloomberg are particular darlings of any of those, though.

It hurts Ralph Nader more. He's spent all his relevancy now.

Right. And that works with the metaphor too, because the more fossil we find the better our understanding of evolution.

Well, that wasn't just the media. Nebraska Man was a product of the scientific politics of the age and the ego of Henry Fairfield Osborn, but that's a separate discussion.

I like to use this example to demonstrate what the fossil record can tell us: Rip up a piece of paper with writing on it, and then discard 90% of all the fragments, but keep the ones you leave behind in order (in reality geological process mess with the order in the fossil record but that can be spotted). From that, chances are that you could tell that there was a piece of paper and that it did have writing on it which seems to have flowed in some way or another. That's analogous to seeing that evolution has occured. The tricky part will be in reconstructing individual words or sentances, and that's what the entire field of paleontology seeks to do with fossils.

In fairness, it wasn't like this independence move was engineered by the West. It was a declaration by the Albanian majority in a territory which has already been defined as autonomous within Serbia. The only think the UN, US, and EU have control over is their response.

Is this really necessary at all? There is a "fact" of evolution. Evolution happens. It's an observable fact. The theory is something different entirely. It is the set of explanations for various facets of the observable world based around the fact of evolution. Why can't we just say that? But hypotheses, theories, and laws are qualitatively different things. They aren't levels on a sliding scale.

doG was using an argument based on logical reasoning, not one based on science. Logic holds that the burden of proof in on the party making the positive claim, but that doesn't necessarily mean that from a scientific standpoint the positive claim can be said to be false without evidence as to the validity of that positive claim. I know that's more-or-less already been said, but I'm just making it explicit because there seems to be some common confusion on that point.

In physics perhaps, but there is plenty of qualitative science. In many cases quantitative data is a means to a qualitative conclusion. For example, you normally don't measure population densities of frogs around a pond for the measurement's own sake. You measure them so you can make some sort of conclusion about the ecology of the pond or the social structure of frogs that can only be described in a qualitative category. I'm not trying to argue that history is a science. I'm just asking where we should draw the line between what is science and what isn't, with the assumption that history would normally be placed outside of that category.

Well, history as in the, usually considered to be, humanistic field of study which goes by that name.

Nice, broad topic here. Where do you draw the line and say "this is a science" and "this isn't"? I suppose at one extreme you could say that anything that ends in "science" or "-ology" qualifies, on the other you could take a Rutherfordian position and say that physics is the only science and all else is stamp collecting. So what is science? The easy answer is "any study that applies scientific methods," but in respects about every field does to certain degrees of emphasis. Historians will formulate hypotheses and test these from the historical record with various degrees of "scientific" robusticity, but does that make history a science? Or, if you want to go really out there, you could say there are no fields of study that can truly be called "sciences." Science exists as an entity unto itself, and is only called upon by practitioners in these fields with varying degrees of frequency. Thus, physics is not a science, but physicists usually do science. History is not science either, but historians too may do science occasionally. Maybe it's a bit of a semantic question but I think its interesting. It has real implications, too. In anthropology, for example, there's a debate on whether or not the socio-cultural field should be more properly approached like a science or like a humanity. Is cultural anthropology a science?

Monkeys have some more going on that we like to give them credit for. Rhesus macaques have demonstrated the rudiments of 'theory of the mind,' baboons navigate extremely complex social environments, etc. A lot of the traditional IQ tests are "speciesist," if that's a valid concept, and apes, which think and act more like us, tend to score more highly on them unfairly. I could definitely see a capuchin or even a macaque being trained to do the tasked required to box something, for example. The trick would be in keeping them interested for 8 hour shifts. A capuchin's not just going to sit there and do the same thing over and over again. If you wanted to genetically engineer something, it would probably have to be to encourage longer attention spans.

Don't forget the organ-grinder capuchins. Even with genetic engineering, I think the the same standard would apply. As long as the monkeys are doing the tasks willingly because they're interesting and they have ample incentives, then who's to say that's unethical? If that's so, than pretty much our entire lives are lived being subjected to the unethical machinations of the bourgeoisie state.

And in this case snubbing our noses in the face of a reformist Serbian government is a legitimate drawback to US and European support of Kosavo's independence. Whether-or-not that outweighs the other merits is a separate issue. And, it may be a somewhat oblique historical point, but America has taken the position that Serbia is taking now. That's why we had a civil war.

What I find really interesting about Pakistan is how it sort of messes with Western conceptions of government. We tend to associate "democracy" with everything good. Democrats must be better than everyone else. The thing is in Pakistan (and a lot of other places) is that that's not necessarily the case. Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were both good democrats, but they ran lousy governments. The fact is this is an election by a dedicated minority of the population, a population which feels generally dis-served and by politics generally. So, I'm skeptical as to how much it really means. Is it a step in the right direction to getting Pakistanis serious about the dangers their country faces? Certainly. Is it the whole marathon? I don't think so.

I contest that somewhat. Serbia opening to the West can be a powerful agent for good in Serbia and Kosavo: economic growth and increased incentives to protect human rights, for example. Genuine home-grown liberalism germinates much more easily in such an environment, and it's not totally self-serving to consider whether-or-not the West's support of Kosavo is compromising that. I'm not wholly convinced that's the case here. Serbia has powerful economic incentives to continue courting the EU, just like Turkey does despite whatever the US Congress declares genocide. But the point stands.

Not until every last Communist cigar maker has retired too. I wonder if Raul has the charisma to keep the government together without Fidel. He's still around for now, but when he dies I have a hunch that Cuban Communistm will too.

I'm skeptical as to whether or not this will solve (or change) the real problems Kosavo faces, but I don't think that anyone's going to be invading anyone else over it.

There are two levels here: A) Would it be practicable? and B) Would it be unethical? A) Probably not. The robots would be much better, but B) Not necessarily. If you could make the tasks interesting enough and with sufficient incentives so that the monkeys will do them willingly, then they'd probably be better off than a lot of factory workers.We encourage primates to do tasks of various sorts all the time.

Now you've just got to work on that 40% unemployment and all the angry Serbs you've got in your territory.