lucaspa

I would say the purpose is to show that people who don't like what the scienfific data is saying are forced to use similar arguments to deny that data. Please stop projecting. This is what anti-GW people do. For instance, there is a famous story on the internet by anti-GW people comparing the energy efficiency of Bush's and Gore's houses. The idea is that, since Gore does not have an energy-efficient house and is not a "good environmentalist", then the data on GW presented in An Inconvenient Truth is not valid. Compare that to the creationist attacks on Darwin. One of my favorites is the charge that Darwin stole the idea of natural selection from Blythe. Since Darwin is a thief, then somehow all the data supporting evolution and falsifying special creation must be wrong! Again, similarity in arguments/tactics.

And there are anti-evolutionists who supposedly "rely purely on research". Micheal Behe and William Dembski are two. Again, the tactics are the same. When you look in detail at the "research" for either the anti-evolutionists or GW deniers, you find the methodology obviously flawed, conclusions not backed by the actual data, and sometimes out and out fraudulent.

Sigh. I really hate to see you bringing science down like this. All you have done is make science another Authority for the fallacious Argument from Authority. The point about science is that you CAN get knowledge on the subject. Science only works with knowledge that is the same to everyone under approximately the same circumstances. Therefore, you CAN look up the articles, you CAN go make the same measurements of temperature or ice thickness in glaciers, etc. You choose not to, but you could. OTOH, if a person tells you that he has a personal experience of God, you can't necessarily have the same experience. Of course not. Over 99.999+% of all hypotheses have been shown to be WRONG! That's what science does: shows hypotheses/theories to be wrong. What advocates of global warming state is not that anthropogenic global warming is correct because it's science, but it is correct because that is what the data shows. And you too can look at the data if you take a little time and effort. This isn't "authority", it's DATA. The problem is that when you do try to show an anti-evolutionist or GW denier the experiments, then they won't read them! I've just had this experience with a GW denier. Demanded to see some data to back up my claim that GW was real. So I sent him 5 PDF's of articles from Science. He admits he won't read them. He has a plethora of excuses from too busy to the bizarre one that the articles are "biased"! Yes, you heard me correctly. He asked for scientific studies, I provided them, and then he says the scientific studies are "biased". Talkorigins has the data, but anti-evolutionists don't want to look at it. They want to deny the data. Same with GW deniers.

They are very similar things. Science falsified creationism. YEC was falsified by 1832. Science has falsified the hypotheses 1) the earth's temperature is constant and 2) human activity has no effect on global temperatures. Remember, ecoli, ALL the people who urge acceptance of GW (including me) started out as accepting the 2 hypotheses above. The data convinced all of us that those hypotheses were false. What you are doing is using another argument also used by creationists -- sometime science will know the truth about origins (meaning that creationism is right). You think sometime science will know the truth about GW, meaning that GW deniers are right. Unwittingly, you just strongly supported Bascule's hypothesis: anti-evolutionists and GW deniers use the same arguments.

When trying to deny data and avoid falsification of a theory, there are only a finite number of general approaches that can be tried. So, since both anti-evolutionists and GW deniers are faced with the same challenge -- their theory is falsified and they need to deny data -- of course they use similar arguments. DUH! You needed to go to U-tube to figure this out?

We aren't doing "artificial selection". Instead, the thread is about "designing" babies. Picking the alleles that children will have. Artificial selection is picking among several individuals and doing the selecting -- you still have underlying variation due to the combination of alleles in polygenic traits. This is more making a baby from scratch and picking exactly which alleles are used. The idea that natural selection is better at designing than we are is based on the fact that humans turn to natural selection when the design problem is beyond them. Natural selection can design things that we can't or don't know how. Moreover, once natural selection does the design, humans are often not bright enough to figure out how it works! See end of post for some examples. We can't be "careful" because we simply don't have ANY information about future environments or what variations will be needed for those environments. Does it have to be "fundamentally different" to still be such a stupid thing we shouldn't do it? I'm not arguing that it isn't part of the "natural process" or an extension of technology, but that it is a stupid thing to do! Please read carefully: my argument was NEVER based on designer babies being "not natural". I'm not "equivocating". I'm saying there is a difference between those 2. I'm also saying that, in terms of evolution, there is no absolutely good trait that is good in every environment. Yet, when we discuss designing humans, it is in the background that increased intelligence is always a "good" trait. Not because it is "natural", but because it is survival of the species! Yes, I might personally miss sentience and civilization, but my wants have nothing to do with the reality of evolution. The species would survive. Again, you seem to have made a strawman out of what I am saying. It seems to be convenient for you to portray my argument as based in anti-technology. It's not. It's just that we should recognize the limits of our intelligence. And that is stupid! Again, you are saying that our desires should be put ahead of reality. That goes against everything I have learned as a scientist: the universe is what it IS, not what we want it to be. So, that we value intelligence does not mean that it IS valuable all the time. Nonsense. The study of genetics and traits is going to happen anyway. Lots of people, including me, want to know which genes and which alleles of those genes determine intelligence, immunity, aging, formation of wrinkles, atherosclerosis, bone remodeling, and anthing else you can think of. And we are going to do those studies, no matter the stupidity of doing designer babies. You missed the point entirely. Traits are polygenic and genes are pleiotrophic. So, by eliminated an allele that contributes to Lou Gehrig's disease, that same gene may also contribute to inheritance, and it is that allele that helped Hawking be as smart as he is. By eliminating that allele, you have made it impossible for any human to have the combination of alleles that Hawking had and, thus, impossible to get that level of intelligence. "I'm really exploring what evo-lution can do that humans can't," he explains. "There are properties that humans have great trouble designing into a system, like being very efficient, using small amounts of power, or being fault tolerant. Evolution can cope with them all." Evolving A Conscious Machine BY Gary Taubes Discover 19: 72-79, July 1998 Archive: 15 November1997] http://www.newscientist.com/ns/971115/features.html http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/ai/primordial.html CREATURES FROM PRIMORDIAL SILICON "Let Darwinism loose in an electronics lab and just watch what it creates. A lean, mean machine that nobody understands. ... It is unremarkable that a microprocessor can perform such a task--except in this case. Even though the circuit consists of only a small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson, does not know how it works. He can't ask the designer because there wasn't one. Instead, the circuit evolved from a "primordial soup" of silicon components guided by the principles of genetic variation and survival of the fittest." 1. MJ Plunkett and JA Ellman, Combinatorial chemistry and new drugs. Scientific American, 276: 68-73, April 1997. Summary of article: "By harnessing the creative power of Darwinian selection inside a test tube, chemists can now discover compounds they would not have known how to make. " 3. AI Samuel, Some studies on machine learning using the game of checkers. IBM Journal of Research Development, 3: 211-219, 1964. Reprinted in EA Feigenbaum and J Feldman, Computers and Thought, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964 pp 71-105. Samuels has a program designed by natural selection that can beat the human checkers champ, but can't figure out how it works. 11. Ronald R Breaker, Gerald FA Joyce DNA enzyme with Mg2+-dependent RNA phosphoesterase activity Chemistry & Biology 1995, 2:655-660. No naturally occurring DNA enzyme in nature. Joyce had NO idea how to make one. Used natural selection to do it. 9. FS Santiago, HC Lowe, MM Kavurma, CN Chesterman, A Baker, DG Atkins,LM Khachigian, New DNA enzyme targeting Egr-1 mRNA inhibits vascular smooth muscle proliferation and regrowth after injury. Nature Medicine 5:1264-1269, 1999. Used Darwinian selection to design a DNA enzyme (not found in nature) that degrades mRNA for use in treating hyperplasia after balloon arthroplasty. Humans have no idea what the nucleotide sequence of the DNA enzyme is because they didn't make it --Darwinian selection did.

Not morals, but behavior and moral decisions. Morals are something that is outside us and independent of us. However, the decisions we make about our behavior -- whether they conform to morals or go against them -- are influenced by genetics. Depends on what is "fittest". For every example in nature where "fittest" involves cutthroat competition between individuals of a species, there is an example where "fittest" involves cooperation and compassion between individuals of a species. No, genetically we are quite diverse in what we consider as the best strategy to survive. Some of us are more prone to cooperation in order to survive. Others are more prone to complete selfishness. You also need to separate out culture: That's culture. The problem is that, in terms of evolution, the best way to "compete" is NOT to do designer babies. Keep your future options open so that, when the environment changes, there is a lot of genetic variation within the population. That way a few of the individuals will be lucky enough to have the traits to at least survive, maybe even thrive, in the new environment. Let me try to give an example. Intelligence is a multi-gene (polygenic) trait. So, among those genes that take part in deciding intelligence is a gene that also takes part in detoxifying chemicals (and most genes also take part in more than 1 trait--pleiotrophy). The allele (call it A) that really helps intelligence is really bad at detoxifying chemical X. The allele (call it B) that is really good at detoxifying chemical X makes people "dumber". So ... in designing babies everyone opts for allele A and no one has a baby with allele B. Now, all these intelligent people, in order to solve world hunger, come up with an agricultural process that produces chemical X. Now there is a lot of chemical X around but it is very toxic and no one has the allele B to detox it, because they were all designed with allele A. So now, everyone dies and H. sapiens designus goes extinct. However, the old H. sapiens would not have gone extinct. Yes, the few really intelligent people would have made the agricultural process that produced chemical X, but there would still be people with allele B. All those with allele A would have died, but the species would not have died. H. sapiens would still be here, even if it has a lower mean intelligence than before.

I remember being told once (when my wife was pregnant): "It's not a question of whether you will screw up your kids, but how." This was psychological "screw up". As you noted, in designer babies we are talking about screwing up their genome. But you are talking about immediate, individual mistakes. I am talking about collective mistakes that screw up the genome of the entire human species. This happens if every parent designs their babies to the same parameters. We don't know enough about the present environment, much less future ones, to know which traits are going to be evolutionarily advantageous. Better to keep a lot of variation in the human population.

You have used "self-aware" as = "sentience". However, as I was using "sentience", perhaps a better synonym would have been "conscious", as in "consciousness". Biologist (London). 2000 Sep;47(4):207-10. Animal consciousness. O'Connell S. "Dr Miriam Rothschild had an owl who became so jealous when Rothschild's daughter was born, the bird would try to attack both her and the child. Animals can often appear to have emotions, to be highly intelligent, motivated and sentient but are they conscious?" Self-aware is " characterized by an awareness of one's own personality or individuality" And that describes what is happening in your test: the animal is aware of its individuality. Sentience is "having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge" As generally used it is synonymous with "sapience" or "consciousness", basically, having intelligence, perception, knowledge comparable to H. sapiens. Consciousness is "perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation ... capable of or marked by thought, will, design, or perception" The standard test of sentience is the Turing test, which we can't do with the species you mention because we can't communicate with them. Another test of sentience is manipulating technology. The species you are talking about don't. This doesn't mean that the species are not sentient, just that the current (inadequate) tests can't be done or show negative. But no, looking in a mirror and recognizing "self" is NOT a recognized test for sentience or consciousness. It is only a test of awareness of the individuality. You can argue that such an awareness is a necessary component of sentience or consciousness, but it is not a sufficient component.

No. Because this is only a webpage advertisement for Greenpeace. It's not the type of grassroots organizing and education that is needed. Also, it glorifies the confrontational tactics that are the problem. And that is the problem! The goal isn't to raise awareness of Greenpeace or to raise funds for Greenpeace: the mission is to stop whaling! What SkepticLance and I are saying is that Greenpeace has placed the welfare of Greenpeace above the welfare of the whales.

That's the faulty reasoning! If Greenpeace stops the confrontation, there are powerful factors that will cause the Japanese to stop. The Japanese are ignoring those factors -- economic -- and are whaling BECAUSE "greenpeace don't stop". It is Greenpeace's activities that are causing the Japanese to keep whaling. So, if Greenpeace stops its confrontational tactics, the Japanese will stop whaling. We've been telling you what Greenpeace should do! Haven't you been paying attention! Stop the confrontation and let economics work. Also, SkepticLance has suggested starting an education/political movement in Japan to educate the Japanese on 1) how much whaling is costing them in taxes and 2) the harm whaling is doing to the whales. Then let the pressure at the ballot box prevail. I don't really think you mean "greenpeace should ease up the pressure". That goes against everything else you've been saying. The territorial waters of a country only extend 12 miles from the coast -- at most (the USA only recognizes a 3 mile limit). So banning whaling "in their waters" isn't going to do a bit of good. All of whaling done by the Japanese happens in international waters and no country can stop it. The oceans are free. Note: subsistence whaling by Inuits and Laplanders happens in territorial waters, but that whaling is minor and necessary for those people to eat.

I suggest you do a Google search on "plant, protein, content" and another on "meat, protein, content" and compare the two. Are there any plants with a comparable protein content to animal muscle? Offhand, I speculate that some nuts may have a protein:carbohydrate ratio comparable to animal muscle. http://www.ourcivilisation.com/fat/appb.htm has amounts of protein and carbohydrate or protein:fat in meats. Essentially, meats have no carbohydrate. This should let you make your own conclusion.

Better. Those two are different, of course. BTW, do you mean the majority of living individuals or the majority of species? Again, those are different things.

It has already made quite a few good science fiction stories. See Larry Niven's A World Out of Time as just one example of moving the earth. James Blish's Cities in Flight novels also involve moving cities and eventually moving a planet.

No, not at all. The crunch has been shown to be false. It has consequences that are contradicted by the data: such as a slowing expansion.

Do a PubMed and Google search on "neural nets". Inputs and outputs are not binary in a biological system. No. I think you have a misconception of what an "algorithm" is. An algorithm is a series of instructions that, followed by a servile dunce, always yields a result. Long division is an algorithm. So is natural selection. We know both algorithms but the variables vary from example to example. No, we don't. Just like understanding how natural selection works does not require us to account for all the possibilities. You do realize that there has been work done in this area, don't you? It's called neuroscience and the literature is quite extensive. You need to do a bit of readig on it. 2. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/294/5544/1030 Review of memory and learning as chemical processes. 4. JG Nicholls, AR Martin, BG Wallace, PA Fuchs From Neuron to Brain, 2002 See paper referenced above. Also add" 3. Genes involved in memory formation: http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=106076 See references posted above. No. Freewill is the concept that choices are made that are not determined solely by previous events. Infinity is a mathematical concept. So, yes, infinity can be divided. But not "oppressed". "Oppressed" is a political concept applied to sentient beings and, thus, does not apply to a mathematical concept. Infinity can no more be oppressed than zero can be.

Can you post the New Scientist article? It was last week and I can only see the introduction. It doesn't address what you talk about but the title hints at it. It sounds like we may have 2 different sources of information and they contradict. Or they may be talking about similar sounding, but different, things. You did mention not knowing the position until we look, while the other posts were talking about Schroedinger's Cat. We need to check. My references about decoherence and coherence are: 5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996. 6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence. 7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

But once they are the results of the chemical reactions, you have to decide whether those results are accurate. That decision about accuracy is independent of the chemical reactions. IOW, whether murder is ethical is independent of the chemical reactions. It is either ethical or not. So, how do you scientifically decide what is ethical? You don't. Science is not a system of ethics. There is ethical behavior associated with science; behavior that someone doing science should or should not do. The classic case showing the difference between what we know by science and ethics is the atomic bomb. Science tells us what happens when an uranium or plutonium atom fissions. But nothing in the explanation of fission tells us that we should (ethics) build a bomb and explode it on Hiroshima. How God asks people to behave is part of an explanation of God. Just like parents teaching their children how to behave is part of an explanation of "parent". We explain entities mostly by listing what the entity does. For instance, originally atoms were explained as entities that "said" how gasses behave. Religion can be viewed as a hypothesis to explain personal experiences that people have. For instance, Yahweh is a hypothesis to explain the experiences of Moses and the Hebrews in the Exodus. Allah is an explanation for the experiences Mohammed had -- where Mohammed claims an entity told him the things that eventually Mohammed wrote down in the Quran. Millions (at least) of people have had personal experiences that, by testing to eliminate other possibilities, they have settled on the hypothesis "God" to explain them. That's not what evolutionary psychologists are saying. I was just reading an interview with Mark Hauser in Discover. What evolutionary psychologists are saying the moral decisions are hardwired by natural selection. That is, we decide to do the moral action. But they avoid saying that what constitutes a moral action is a product of evolution. IOW, what is "moral" is separate from evolution and natural selection. Natural selection just causes us to do, at a genetic level, what is moral . You are using "prediction" in the common usage, not the scientific one. In common usage, "prediction" is "predicting what will happen in the future". In science "predict" means "predict knowledge you should find if the hypothesis is true". Both ethics and philosophy do this to an extent. That is what the books said. However, recent data shows the books to be wrong. Sorry, science marches on. It turns out that there is a period of time where Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive at the same time, but without anyone looking that period ends and only one reality exists. If you want, I can provide references so you can get caught up. BTW, Paul Davies and others did propose deity as the "observer" that continually defined reality.

But doesn't a garden adversely affect the natural plants and invertebrates that feed on them? After all, even an organic garden is weeded! Also, don't organic farmers artificially introduce some predators to eliminate "pests"? So, you say "tread more gently". Now you are making a value judgement of what constitutes more. Basically, what you have done is concede that the original claim is wrong: vegan means no killing of animals. Now we are discussing the extent. What we have now is the old joke by George Bernhard Shaw. At a fancy dinner party he asked the woman next to him: "Madame, would you have sex with me for a million dollars?" She replied "Well, yes." "Would you have sex with me for a dollar?" "Sir, what kind of woman do you think I am?" "We've already established that, now we are haggling over price." So, you've acknowledged that vegans are killers and that a vegan lifestyle results in the deaths of animals. Vegans have lost the "moral high ground" and are also killers. We are now discussing how much killing is acceptable in order to feed humans. This becomes more a personal choice and is no longer an absolute moral issue. If you wish to be vegan, then be vegan. I don't care. But please don't get on an imaginary moral high horse and tell those who are omnivores that eating meat is ethically wrong. BTW, don't vegans allow the use of animal products, such as dairy products? How do you square that with the lifestyle of the cows "confined" to farms? Aren't they held in just as much confinement as cows who are killed for their meat?

This gets us back to projecting human emotions onto animals. What you are doing is projecting the human idea of "freedom" onto animals. It's invalid. Since we can't communicate with the animals, how do you know the wild animal has a "better" life? Just for starters, it goes hungry more often. It is more susceptible to weather -- being cold and wet when it rains or snows. As we did in the thread "vetinary drugs", do we also project natural animal behavior onto humans -- such as rat males eating their own offspring? If animals are supposed to live how we do, shouldn't we live the way they do?

You don't seriously expect me to take that as evidence, do you? They talk a lot about "scientific evidence" but nowhere do they cite a scientific study! I know for a fact that the "40% of cancers are preventable" includes lung cancer, which, of course, is due to smoking, not eating meat. So I know that the data is being misrepresented. Try again.

Humans have 2 adaptations that lead to our technology: 1. The ability to make tools to make tools. 2. The ability to verbalize abstract ideas. So? That's how a society works! People do their own particular jobs and, together, all those jobs make a society bigger than the sum of the parts. And "money" is just a convenient way counting the necessities of life. What people are trying to obtain are food, clothing, shelter. I don't see anything wrong with that objective, do you? A society needs social interactions. Scientists are really good understanding technology but historically they have been very poor understanding social interactions and how to do politics: the art of getting people to live peacefully with one another and cooperate toward a common goal. All species can always get out of hand! Remember, EVERY species produces more offspring than the environment can support. So every species has the means of destroying itself. I doubt humanity can destroy itself. What it can do is destroy its civilization. In that case, then having designer babies with just a few alleles in a world without technology is going to be detrimental. Change the environment, and you change what is "good".

You seem to have defined "smart" as "preserving humans". That's not how I said natural selection was "smart". Natural selection is better at designing than people are. That's why people use natural selection when the design problem is too tough for them: they get natural selection to design the entity. Natural selection can keep track of the very large number of (often contradictory) design parameters. By doing designer babies, humans are pretending to know which design parameters are important and assign them absolute value. For instance, you seem to have decided that "intelligence" is absolutely good and will solve the world's ills. That may not be true. After a certain point, IQ may be detrimental. More importantly, you are associating intelligence with social responsibility and a desire to help other people, not just help yourself at the expense of other people. Intelligence doesn't work that way. History is full of very intelligent people who were sociopaths. Smart is not always good. That's what I'm getting at. You have a false premise that some qualities are ALWAYS "good". Qualities/traits are only "good" in certain environments. In other environments, the same trait is bad. For instance, to get "smart" requires a large brain that uses a lot of food. That large brain stresses birth and can end up killing the mother. Not good. Or the glucose requirements of that large brain would cause the person to overeat sweets and become obese -- causing other problems. Absolutely not! Intelligence does not = wise. Scientists have never been good political leaders. Look at Senator Frisk. Very intelligent and an MD, but wrong as wrong can be about the mental status of Terry Schiabo. Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were all very intelligent. How did they do at governing? No, we haven't messed up our genetic code. We are allowing genomes to survive that, in less technically advanced conditions, would die. But in doing that we are preserving good traits, too. For instance, technology allowed Stephen Hawking to live much longer than he would have 200 years ago. He even has kids. Now, in your opinion, did humanity gain or lose by keeping Hawking's alleles in the gene pool? You are making the premise that "abnormally intelligent people" are also morally "superior" and not greedy. What evidence do you have of that? All the self-made billionaires are abnormally intelligent, but their very wealth argues for greed. Who does the "charging" and making them responsible? And then who controls the power that you are proposing to give to these people? Haven't you ever heard the saying "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"? Being intelligent does not mean social responsibility. Most sociopaths score very high in IQ, many in the genius range. Yet they have none of the social responsibility your scheme requires. So, while designing babies for intelligence, do we know enough to design them to be morally responsible? This is one place I say natural selection is smarter than we are. We have no idea what the alleles are that make up social responsibility. Neither does natural selection, but it doesn't need to. Those without those alleles are less likely to be able to stay in a tribe and find mates.

This gets back to my point: whether you agree or disagree with Bascule's categorization of whales as "sentient". It's not about farming with pigs, but that we have all decided that pigs don't qualify as "sentient" and therefore killing and eating them (in the wild as boars or on farms) is morally OK. And yes, parrots have shown cognitive abilities. So have ravens. Is it enough to qualify as "sentient"? Since there are no objective, quantitative measurements, there's no scientific way to answer the question. In all the science fiction stories, the issue is whether the species has technology and culture that we can recognize as such.

What do you mean by "reset the gene pool completely"? If you mean literally what you said, you are wrong. Instead, we have seen massive extinctions from strikes -- particularly the K-T boundary. But none of them have come close to wiping out even phyla, much less resetting the gene pool Yes, the universe will continue to expand until there is "heat death" -- no energy available to do work (second law of thermodynamics). There won't be a crunch. However, what is or is not "pointless" is a philosophical problem. It's called the Problem of Meaning. I would argue that our lives have meaning irregardless of what happens to the universe (or life on earth) in the far future. Nihilism is not justified.