Arete

This is a copypasta from another climate change thread where you asked a question along the same lines. Ignoring the predicted and observed changes due to climate change doesn't make them go away: Here's some examples of a significant impact: 1) The largest watershed in California (the San Francisco Bay Delta) is predicted to have 20% less spring thaw runoff by 2090, and the remaining runoff is predicted to be more saline - with significant impacts to the state's environment, agriculture, industry and municipal water supplies. http://onlinelibrary...014339/abstract 2) Doubling atmospheric CO2 is predicted to lead to a 10% increase in the average intensity of hurricanes. http://journals.amet...5/BAMS-87-5-617 3) An increase in duration and frequency of severe drought conditions is predicted in Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Southeast Asia and the Americas. http://onlinelibrary...002/wcc.81/full 4) Significant coral bleaching events are already being observed and predicted to get worse. http://www.sciencema...3/6041/418.full 5) Significant changes is the distributions of infectious disease are already being observed (e.g. malaria at a 40 year high in the US http://www.cdc.gov/features/malaria/) , and expected toincrease. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0188440905001517 etc.

Given human health and longevity are directly linked to functional ecosystems, e.g. ecological links to - floods, heatwaves, water shortages, landslides, uv exposure, exposure to pollutants, infectious disease prevalence, access to food, access to natural medicines, mental health, cultural and aesthetic impacts, livelihood loss, population displacement and human conflict http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/ecosys.pdf I'd say your viewpoint was fundamentally flawed from the get go.

Here's some examples of a significant impact: 1) The largest watershed in California (the San Francisco Bay Delta) is predicted to have 20% less spring thaw runoff by 2090, and the remaining runoff is predicted to be more saline - with significant impacts to the state's environment, agriculture, industry and municipal water supplies. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2001GL014339/abstract 2) Doubling atmospheric CO2 is predicted to lead to a 10% increase in the average intensity of hurricanes. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-87-5-617 3) An increase in duration and frequency of severe drought conditions is predicted in Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Southeast Asia and the Americas. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/full 4) Significant coral bleaching events are already being observed and predicted to get worse. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/418.full 5) Significant changes is the distributions of infectious disease are already being observed (e.g. malaria at a 40 year high in the US http://www.cdc.gov/features/malaria/) , and expected to increase. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0188440905001517 etc.

You'd still be wrong. NATO has not bombed Syria. "NATO has not moved forward so far, because of the absence of a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing action against Syria" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/opinion/nato-must-help-obama-on-syria.html?_r=0 A) Sure, it's likely that they did. It's reasonable to assume they probably did. But you don't KNOW that they did. It's possible that they did not. Therefore the extrapolation that they are rich/puppets of the rich because of their mode of travel is plausibly incorrect. B) I'm not an American.

This post is simply a series of goalpost shifts and strawman arguments. I.e. when it is pointed out that the cost to travel from Moscow to Sochi by car is reasonable, you shift the goalposts to discuss travel to the US, and then introduce the strawman argument of US human rights in Syria/Libya. This includes a simple fallacy - that the US has bombed Syria - which it hasn't. Israel conducted airstrikes against Syria, not the US http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/19/israel-syria-airstrikes-army/6598085/ Please refrain from fallacious arguments, they don't add to discussion.

That's not what you stated earlier, i.e.: So which is it? You can express any opinion you like, so long as it's done appropriately, or you can't express some opinions in public?

And the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not evidence. Over a quarter of Russians say that they have had to pay a bribe in the last year. "Of surveyed citizens, 26% report having paid a bribe in the past 12 months." http://country-corruption.findthedata.org/l/138/Russia "Reports by media, academic, governmental and non-governmental organizations portray corruption in Russia as a serious and pervasive problem... Russian bureaucrats take in approximately 125 billion British pounds (GBP) ... in bribes every year: "the scale of graft was close to equalling the state's entire annual revenues" " http://www.refworld.org/docid/46c403811e.html So, it seems fairly unequivocal that Russia has a significant, systemic problem with bribery and corruption (albeit likely to be strongly correlated with socioeconomic indicators) which would suggest that your implication that Russians are intrinsically less greedy than westerners is untrue. I personally imagine that the variation of individual attitudes towards material wealth in both western countries and Russia would swamp out the majority of any general trends.

I think you misunderstand. You have the freedom to express any viewpoint, however not the freedom to express it in any way you want. For example, say I think that people with blue eyes are genetically inferior to those with brown eyes. I could, within the forum rules say that I think that there is a correlation between low IQ and blue eyes. The forum would then likely shout me down with calls of "evidence or GTFO" - rightly so. I could not, however say "People with blue eyes are stupid freaks." As that would be a breach of forum rule 1.1 Similarly, in general, in a western democracy you'd be allowed to walk down the street proudly proclaiming that you loved being a gay person and you thought it was a fantastic lifestyle under freedom of speech laws. However, you wouldn't be allowed to actually practice homosexual intercourse in public, under offensive behavior laws. So, freedom of speech is not freedom to do whatever the hell you want in public, it's the freedom to hold whatever view you want and express it without the fear of being oppressed for it.

You brought it up: In a more general sense, why does someone else expressing their views publicly, be it Pussy Riot, homosexuals, etc affect your freedom? Do you understand the contradiction that ensues when you say that group A (i.e. "normal" people) get to express their views in public, but group B (i.e. "freaks") have to keep theirs private?

How does someone having a gay pride parade affect your freedom?

You mean like a general science major?

I don't think biology could ever really be studied in isolation of actual biological systems, and as such, there will always be organisms and manipulation of organisms involved in research. All that can really be done is to minimize the use of live models where possible, and conduct research in ways that minimize the suffering of individual animals - which we already do. Most of the lab mice which are euthanized are never actually used in research - but are surplus individuals associated with maintaining breeding colonies of lab animals. Also, I do most of my research on bacterial/viral systems. No one has ever bothered us about the fact that we massacre billion/trillions of bacteria in every experiment - just like you do every time you wash your hands.

Nope, I'm OK with using mice.

You keep posting this strawman that the use of animals in scientific research is somehow equatable to "needless" or malicious violence. Scientific research has a very explicit purpose - animals are not used in research unless they have to be. In some of my research, we use transgenic mice with their T cell production knocked out. In the absence of immune system function, these mice express endogenous retroviruses contained in their own genomes, and suffer leukogenic viremia as a result. We do it to study the role of ERVs in acquired immunity and cancer formation, and also to examine the evolutionary processes affecting retroviruses. This type of research requires the mice to be bred with genes knocked out - you could not take a wild type mouse and conduct the same research. If we were to use human subjects, we would need to modify an embryo in IVF, have it brought to term, raise it in a completely sterile enviroment and then conduct a series of tests on it before it ultimately developed cancer and died. You could never use prisoners for this type of research - you'd need to "breed" a population of humans specifically for the research program.

Previously you said: "From my own personal belief I do not think we should test on animals ... I also do not regard one life as more valuable for simply being a different species." Which is a pretty unequivocal contradiction to your present statement - which accepts animal testing when there is no viable alternative. Are you saying you've changed your stance? In addition, the use of animal models comes with a rather strong implicit value judgement when it comes to the intrinsic "worth" of a species. Developing a transgenic, immunodeficient line of people would be a pretty heinous crime against humanity (not to mention take an inordinately long time), so we use mice instead. We make a value judgement that the life of a lab mouse is worth less than the life of a person when we develop lab strains used in research - if we considered them to be the same, cancer researchers would be regularly committing genocide when culling transgenic mouse lines.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the use of animals in scientific research - as it has a rather explicit utilitarian purpose. When using animals for research, you generally have to justify explicitly and precisely why you are using animals and why you can't use an alternative to your ethics committee.

At the moment, I'm working on a genomic dataset, where we have approximately 1.5 billion nucleotides of data. The sequencer has an approximately 0.5 - 1% error rate in nucleotide calling. This means, that when I align this 1.5 billion base pair dataset to a reference genome, approximately 7.5 to 15 million mutations will actually be false positives due base calling error. Therefore we calculate summary statistics, like read coverage depth and quality score and use them to determine the likelihood that a mutation is genuine, and not a false positive - and thus reduce the number of false positives in the final dataset. However, because of the very existence of sequencing error, there's always the possibility that a mutation will be a false positive due to sequencing error - and when you're talking about a dataset with millions/billions of individual data points, it's almost a certainty that some false positives slip through. As such, with this type of data, we will never have certainty, and statistical summation and analysis is integral to it being useful. By the OP's logic it would seems that the answer is to abandon the entire field as lacking absolute certainty - which I would strongly disagree is a reasonable position, given the practical outcomes and discoveries which genomics has led to.

Certainty is bad science. All hypothesis tests should accept the possibility of the observations recorded being potential anomalies. Therefore, any scientific study worth reporting will be reported with measurements of possible error.

Ultimately, this comes down to something that I learned very early on in fundamental population genetics - tests of selection can return false positive results if the assumptions of neutrality are violated. There is a large suite of demographic parameters - migration, deviation from HWE, fluctuations in population size, trait auto-correlation, recombination, linkage disequilibrium, founder effects, etc etc which can generate a seemingly significant signal of selection. What this means is that, even if you pulled a bunch of e.g. melanocortin gene sequences from Genbank and tested for selection using Tajima's D, MacDonald-Kreitman, etc, you could wind up with a statistically significant result, even if selection is not present. Meeting the assumptions of such a test is fundamental - which is why a summary statistic like Tajima's D would generally be reported with a suite of other parameter tests (e.g. tests of recombination, LD, theta, Ne estimates, migration estimates, etc) to rule out the influence of demography. In the current case, we don't even have any statistical results, simply speculation about the role of selection on a trait. As such, it is highly relevant to suggest the role of demographic parameters, as they absolutely have not been ruled out and in fact are likely to be influential in generating any speculated signal of selection that is present - if indeed it even is. Again, it's pretty basic pop gen that the role of selection can only be interpreted in the context of demography, and that even if you have a statistically significant result in a test of selection, additional analyses are required to correctly interpret the result.

Well, first off there's strawman - I've never heard a climate scientist claim that humans CONTROL the climate. The claim is emissions of certain gases by human activities INFLUENCE the climate. Which is supported by an overwhelming quantity of empirical evidence. http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence Which leads to this: Being a false equivalence. And then we have a second strawman: a) The role of saturated fat in coronary disease is still under investigation by the scientific community. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/93/4/684.short b) The link between modern dietary intakes and "human evolution" is spurious - early homonids predominately ate plant matter, and were not pre-adapted to eating meat. The major characteristic of early homonids in relation to diet is generalization and adaptability allowing for the exploitation of a wide range of food resources. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/283/5400/368.short http://www.pnas.org/content/97/25/13506.short c) The USDA claims that : "Fats and oils are part of a healthy diet and play many important roles in the body" and "Eating too much saturated fat, the type of fat that is solid at room temperature, may increase risk of heart disease. Similarly, eating too much trans fat, which is made when liquid vegetable oil is processed to become solid, also may increase risk of heart disease." http://www.csrees.usda.gov/nea/food/pdfs/hhs_facts_fats.pdf NB the use of the word may. You may want to represent what the scientific community accepts accurately before critiquing it.

My anecdotal experience in the Australian system may not be representative, but I saw a number of students either drop out or downgrade to a Masters. My experience in the US differs in that I've seen students pull out early at the prelims stage, or finish (even if they stretch it out the eight years). The difference being that in Australia, you have a hard deadline on your stipend, where as in the US (in my limited experience) the duration for which you can be paid as a grad student is more squishy. That said, there's still a huge range in the quality of work that's considered acceptable to make up a PhD dissertation, even among students with different committees at the same university, and plenty of people out there with a bit of paper and a title who don't necessarily know what they're talking about (and people without them who do).

If you can't make a point without leaving personal jabs out of it, either you need to work a bit on separating attacking ideas rather than people, or perhaps try coming up with something other than ad hom arguments to support your position.

It's not about what I think. It's about what extensive research has shown to be fact. Is it possible for you to drop the personal accusations, please? They are against the rules after all.

I'll happily "jump down the throat" of anyone suggesting someone undertakes a course of pseudo-medical therapy demonstrated to be harmful and ineffective.

I don't know of a facility quite like what you are describing. I believe the best approach would be to find a lab that conducts similar research to what you are proposing and see if they are interested in collaborating with you. Search University faculty lists and check out lab webpages. My lab has undertaken a project with an individual who approached us with an idea that matched our research, and funding. However, be aware that the amount of funding required might be significant - six or even seven figures depending on what you want to investigate and how involved the study would need to be.