Mokele

This is a *SCIENCE* forum....

::Squints and peers into the distance:: Hey, what's that over there? Hey, look, it's the original topic!

Treating things with respect does not mean treating them with equal levels of respect. I treat my animals and my friends with respect, but not equal levels. I don't even treat all people with equal levels of respect (or any respect, depending on the person). Mokele

But where else will we get people with an education? Surely not from US educational system. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Nothing about dealing with the INS is easy. But I'll be getting a chance to check this for people with less-useful degrees soon, when I attempt to get my theoloogy-major fiancee over to the US from the UK. Agreed, but it's a matter of scale. It's hard to assimilate and train huge numbers of people, and can the economy handle even an influx of trained workers? That's happening in a virtual sense with the outsourcing of computer tech support to India, another sore issue here. Mokele

Do you donate to charity? How much? Sorry, that's not enough. You need to donate 95% of your salary and all of your savings to the underpriveldged in places such as Somali. Sound unrealistic? That's because it is. If you did the above, you'd be unable to support yourself and even go to work to make more money; it's better to help a little bit over and over for a long time than to help once and never be able to again. Reality dictates that it isn't always possible to do the most humane thing, and that instead we must choose the lesser of two evils. The *systtem* here is the economy. If you think you can improve the economy to such a degree that it can support your proposition, please do so. But you won't be able to, given that nobody in the past several milenia has been able to figure out a better system. Mokele

I don't see many Picts running around the UK anymore, do you? Seriously, you've been corrected for this strawman multiple times. There's a big difference between closing the borders and simply restricting the numbers we allow in. Mokele

Calli's right, and uses a good analogy. There is a limit how much the economy of the country can take, so we should take a safe amount, no more. Anything more ruins it for everyone. And to be clear, I wasn't born on this boat. I came over when my folks emigrated *legally*. If we have to suffer through that nightmare of paperwork, so should everyone else. Mokele

True, but it highlights that he's drawing conclusions in the opposite direction from his political inclinations, reducing the chance of partisan hackery. I'm saying it's suspicious that the actual results deviated to such an extreme degree from the exit poll results. In science, we say results are significant if there's only a 1 in 20 chance that they were the product of random variation. Here, we have a level over 100,000 times that, yet some don't want to consider it significant? Mokele

Yeah, it was the statistics that caught my eye the most, in large part because I'm actually just finishing up my grad-level biostatistics course. A few months ago, a well-known scientists in my field published a new differentiation locomotor mode ("lumbering": walking dominated by potential energy fluctuations) based on less statistical support than the statistical support that something's wrong with what happened (and this was a solid paper). The rest, as Pangloss said, is often annecdotal and highly partisan. But the statistics are what caught my attention. I've been stuck at the computer indoors all day doing sample-size power analyses, so when I see this... ...I suspect something's seriously off. I'll be publishing data with nowhere near that confidence level. Shit, I can technically publish with 100,000 times less confidence and have it called scientifically sound. All I need to do is show that there's a less than 1 in 20 chance that my results are due to random error. Even if we ignore the misdeeds around the election, legitimate and alleged, something's still seriously wrong. Mokele

Something that seems to have been neglected: the odor of a smelly shirt isn't just bacteria, it's body chemicals and a good dose of pheremones. For those, airing out will simply mean they evaporate into the air sooner. Whether this is good or bad depends on if you have any cute co-workers you plan on hooking up with. Nothing like a phermone dispenser in your office to help things along. Mokele

Ok, I'll be the first to acknolwedge that the Rolling Stone isn't exactly a bastion of respectable journalism. However, this article, while very long, makes some quite convincing points about serious voting and election irregularities in the 2004 US elections. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/1 So, thoughts? Flaws, merits, etc? I'm particularly curious about the reliability of election polls, something dealt with at great length in the article, not to mention that some of the other alleged misdeeds are no longer alleged, but matters of public record. A second, and more important point: What can be done in the future to prevent this or the potential for this? I had two ideas: allow voting for an entire week (so individuals can get stuff sorted out) and allow a month to process the results (to deal with irregularities). It's a national election, not a damn Hot Pocket, you can wait more than 2 minutes for the results. Mokele

First, nociception isn't pain. If you expose a bacteria to a chemical that's toxic to it, it will display aversive behaviors and stress responses. However, one cannot claim a bacteria feels pain; it's a single-celled organism, governed solely by chemical processes to the level that it's essentially an automaton. Additionally, experiments various painkillers at various dosages have shown that detection of harmful stimuli (nociception) does not correspond to 'pain' (this is both inferred from animal studies and directly reported from human studies). Based on further experimental evidence, we know that nociception is possible without the brain (if the spine-brain connection is severed), but not pain. It's also possible, of course, to feel pain without nociception (phantom pain in amputees). As for animal response to painkillers, what level are these painkillers working at, and can we be sure they're working in the same way? Are they interfering with pain, or just nociception? I'm not saying you're wrong; I intuitively think there's something very close to pain in most multicellular organisms. However, inutition and guesswork is not good enough, and I'm pointing out some of the very real and important issues that must be addressed before we have actual knowledge to work from. Sorry for the confusion. I was attempting to use morphological terms to illustrate my point. Homologous portions of anatomy as related by evolutionary origin and embryonic development (the fin of whale and the hand of a human are homologous, as they arrise from the same structure even if they look different), while analagous portions look similar but evolved and develop independently (the wing of a bird vs the wing of an insect). Applied to pain, we can be reasonably sure a chimp's pain in homologous to ours; we're closely related, have all the same structures, and so we can presume their perception of pain is close to ours. Now, as I learned in a prior debate with Glider, mammal pain is handled by the limbic system, which is unique to mammals. However, reptiles, which lack the limbic system, appear to feel pain (appropriate behavior responses and such), meaning they must do it with a different portion of their brain. Since a different portion of the brain is being used, can we effectively compare mammal pain to reptile pain, even if they have similar outputs? Think of a bird and insect wing; both have the same function and gross output (flight), but the underlying mechanisms are quite different, and result in different aerodynamic capabilities and limitations and different modes of flight. How much of what we're concerned with in terms of pain is output versus internal mechanisms? How do we *know* the experience of an animal with a different internal mechanism is like ours? What if they feel pain the same way we feel hunger or pressure in our bladder, as a phsiological need with associated compulsions but not strictly painful? Again, I'm not saying this *is* the case, only that you seem to have made the assumption that pain is pain across all taxa. Since pain is processed by the brain, and animal brains can be *amazingly* different (compare our brain to the circumesophogeal brain of an octopus), this isn't an assumption you can get away with making. Trouble is, I don't have the foggiest idea of how to actually *determine* if the experiential aspect of pain is similar across taxa.... Within the confine of a logical ethical system, yes, though I still have doubts about the necessity of a logical system. Very wrong, but for a nit-picky reason: the vast majority of animals have so little brain function that if you cut their heads off, they only die from hunger or thirst or suchlike. Remember, beetles alone are over 50% of all species, and arthropods as a whole are over 70%. In terms of numbers, just about everything is bugs and worms. However, yes, there are a wide array of species with superior mental capacity to infants. (Cynicism: there's a wide array of species with superior mental capacity to most adults, too.) But that's based on emotive reasoning; we recoil at those analogies not because there's anything wrong with killing babies (Try New Soylent Veal!!), but because we're programmed to be revulsed at killing babies. Is killing babies really inherently wrong? What's wrong with the way the ancients did it, leaving unwanted or unviable kids for the wolves, other than our instinctual response against it? This is what I mean by our morality arising from our evolution; your arguement is convincing to a human, but if you told it to a sentient monitor lizard, it'd laugh (and probably eat a baby lizard for lunch). So, weird as it sounds, what's wrong with killing babies? Mokele

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to read through the thread, but I can offer some obervations: First, intelligence isn't always useful. Brains are expensive, and if you don't reap enough reward, big brains will be selected against. It's useful to humans and we value it, but we're also biased towards thinking of big brains as 'absolutely good', rather than just another survival strategy. Second, "intelligence" is a meaningless term. It's nothing but a weighted average of things like memory, spatial reasoning, logical reasoning, social perceptions, etc, with the weighting determined by social (or species) preferences. The individual components, like memory, can vary without an increase of general intelligence; a dinosaur species may have had poor reasoning but great memory for finding ambush sites, for instance, or good problem-solving skills but low social intelligence on account of being solitary. Third, dinos were a high-diversity group. We see major variation just in mammals, so generalizing across a group that has everything from raptors to sauropods and more is probably a very bad idea. Fourth, while cranial endocasts give us a clue, it can be difficult to figure out the actual intelligence of an animal without observing its behavior. Based on sheer brain size, lizards would be expected to be pretty dumb, yet I've personally witnessed problem-solving, rapid operant conditioning responses, even training (I potty-trained my tegu). So the punchline is that each dinosaur species or family would have had specifically tailored brain functions that were relevant to their ecology, were independent from other such functions to an appreciable degree, and are hard to infer from fossils. Chances are we'd see the same range we see in mammals, with a wide range of mental abilities between species, and accurately assessing their intelligence requires nothing less than a time machine. Mokele

PRICC Primates Rodentia Insectivora Carnivora Chiroptera Pretty handy dirty mnemonic for it. Mokele

Odd tangent: what about the confounding effect of phylogeny? Octopi are quite smart, but they evolved this intelligence completely independently of ours, and while some of the outputs are similar, the internal mechanisms are likely very different. How does pain work in an animal that can regenerate limbs easily, and has more nerve mass in the limbs than in the brain? Is their pain homologous, or even analagous, to ours? For vertebrates, it's likely a matter of quantitative differences, but when you're talking about invertebrates, there's the risk you're comparing apples and oranges. Well, doing that *would* guarantee a favorable outcome next election... Why not? Race and sex characteristics are minor and insubstantial, but the same cannot be said for differences between species or across even greater taxonomic divides. For instance, what about eating a sponge, which has no neurons, or a jellyfish, which has only a rudimentary nerve net? Furthermore, I can argue that race and sex *can* be used in morally relevant decisions that have to do with known physical aspects (resistance to skin cancer or strength, for instance) that differ. I'd argue that the 'women and children first' rescue mentality is an example of moral differences: when the population as a whole is at stake, males are essentially disposable compared to females. While such examples are rare and hard to come up with, due to the afforementioned similarities, I'd argue that the differences between species must be taken into account before equating them morally. And what if personhood *is* a factor? Just because you don't think it's a person doesn't mean you won't keep them around for sentimental reasons; I'm quite doting on my plants. I think what Skye was saying was rather that differences in the basic assumptions cannot be reconciled because they are all, in the end, just assumptions. Why? Why assume an ethical system must be logically consistent? If it were the real world, sure, but it's not, it's just a guide for behavior. Just because my computer throws an error now and then doesn't mean it's useless, or that I can't trust any of the data. Can they be dismissed, though? While I'm keeny aware of the diversity of life, humans *are* exceptional; we've achieved a level of mental development never seen before on this world. Even if the difference is merely quantitative, we're still an outlier; enough quantitative difference is a qualitative difference itself, if it's unusual. Not actually; species membership *determines* various other capacities (senses, complexity of nervous system, etc) in a way that race or sex do not. While the *actual* moral difference may be something such as the ability to see UV light (to use a random variable), *species* becomes an effective proxy, and a useful one. If we know that members of species X can see UV, while members of Y cannot, we don't need to concern ourselves with testing an individual's UV sensation when we can easily determine it from species. Species (or other taxonomic levels) *is* morally relevant, not on it's own, but because it correlates so highly with numerous relevant traits. To switch tracks, if species is irrelevant, so are all other taxonomic levels, including Kingdom. Do you run comprehensive checks to make sure *every* plant you eat doesn't have a nervous system? No, of course not, you know they don't because they're plants. Same thing with species: if we know what species has what traits, we can use species as a quick and easy proxy for the presence or absence of traits. I'm afriad this is a bad analogy: better and worse are quantifiable aspects of code. If both do the same thing, which has less errors, takes less runtime, takes less resources, and will be easiest to modify if/when necessary. Which, if any of these, take precedence, determines "better" or "worse", thus the evaluation is soley situational and not really relevant to the discussion. In what sense erroneous? That we cannot look to nature for moral guidance, sure, otherwise we'd all be advocating parasitism, rather than just the lawyers, politicians and middle managers living that way. However, our species *has* been shaped by evolution, including our minds, and it's naive to think that our moral system is not influenced by this. Would we have the same attitude towards property if our species didn't need tools to hunt? Would we have the same attitudes towards sexual morality if our species were seasonal breeders? Would we have the same attitude towards kids if we laid eggs and left them? All of this leads into the question: how much of our values are valued just because of our heritage? Answering this with a tool that is the product of the same heritage is like trying to calibrate a tape measure by checking it against a different portion of the same tape measure. Easy. Is it better to kill and oodle or a luddle? If we know that oodles are substantially more intellectually advanced (and that's our criteria), then we kill the luddle. The fallacy is that you're ignoring all the correlates of species. Yes, breeding group alone means nothing, but in reality, breeding group can indicate different traits, and thus you can use it as a proxy. Think of it like evolutionary field studies. Fitness is *damn* hard to measure, but if we can ascertain that it correlates to fat reserves, we can evaluate that instead and have a much easier time of it. Species is a useful correlate/proxy for the traits of interest. Mokele

I don't even want to know how that's going to work....

Yes, it's all about the tradition of mindless middle-class materialism and obsession with making sure their kids never have anything less than perfect memories of their childhood. I never even went to prom. Total waste of time and money. Plus I refuse to wear a tux for anything less than my wedding. Mokele

So, wait, let me get this straight: In order to be 'acceptable', she had to take her pants off? Part of me likes where that could lead...

We actually had a seminar speaker on the subject of animal pain a while back. One of the key points was to distinguish between nociception (detection of noxious or damaging stimuli) and pain. Essentially, even decapitated animals can respond automatically to noxious stimuli, as to humans (touching a hot stove). He then noted that apparently there's a special dose level of morphine that, for humans and mammals, results in the patient not feeling pain, but being concious and aware of damaging stimuli. They know it *should* hurt, and know what's happening, but it doesn't hurt. When mice are dosed at this level, they respond to classical conditioning, but not operant conditioning via painful reinforcement. So essentially, his theory goes that pain exists so our brain can learn from it. It's therefore likely (not proven, but likely) that an animal which can learn operantly from negative stimuli can feel pain, or something analagous to pain. Of course, that's just his perspective, but it's actually got some experimental data to back it up, which puts it far ahead of most opinions on the matter. Mokele

IIRC, there've been several publicized incidents when TSA people tested the system by trying to sneak stuff on board, and almost all got through, to the embarassment of the local TSA. I say we all just fly naked. Mokele

The human brain is the most elaborate device for wasting time ever, to the point where it generates means of wasting time (golf, the internet) while wasting time.

So it's OK to discriminate against minorities so long as they're unpopular? Great, thanks for clearing that up! I'm gonna go do some lynchin, yehaw! Fashion changes; Women would never have buzzed heads 20 years ago, now I know 5 who do (and, incidentally, all look really hot with buzzed heads). So if they don't care, why cause problems by barring the individual? Who, discriminatory assholes? Sorry, nope, the only useful role they'll ever play is when they're turned into nice, crisp Soylent Green. Mokele

I think many people in this thread overestimate the ease of working with animal behavior, especially when trying to infer underlying mental processes. The reason experiment such as these are important is that they demonstrate *solid* evidence of long-term planning. Anyone can say "oh, of course they plan" but without any actual *evidence*, and real science relies on evidence. The problem is that the more complex the behavior or presumed mental state, the more you have to rule out. For instance, gcol brought up squirrels burying nuts, yet this is clearly instinct, and likely not the product of actual planning. So in order to test for planning you have to present a novel situation, one to which the animals cannot be already adapted to deal with. On top of this, you have to be able to rule out learning or routine; are they keeping a stick for planning purposes, or because they've just classically or operantly conditioned to associate the stick with food? On top of *that* you have to rule out factors such as the stick being used as a toy, weapon, toothpick, or anything else that would mean it would be kept for other reasons. *That* is what makes this so difficult; not what you have to do, but what you have to rule out. You have to create a situation in which you can rule out a huge array of complicating variables. The fact that it can be done is almost as amazing as the results. Mokele

I strongly disagree. Ethics are totally arbitrary; my ethics are not necessarily yours. Frankly, is pure, non-applied knowledge worth some death? In my view, yes. It's a systems problem. You can test a drug on in-vitro stomachs and find that it cures indigestion without any side-effects, but without organism-scale testing, your company won't know that it also causes birth defects until the lawsuits start rolling in and thousands of lives have been ruined. Mokele

Actually, that's not strictly true; gorillas are almost entirely vegetarian, yet have *huge* canines. In apes, canines have been taken over as a secondary sexual characteristic. In situations where the sexual competition between males is intense and high-payoff (such as a gorilla's harem), you see much more sexual dimorphism, and the canines are an aspect of this. Apes with big canines have harem-based structures where one male has exclusive control of all females, those with moderate canines live like chimps, where the alpha still has it best, but subordinates still have a chance. From this, we can infer that humans have been at least roughly monogamous for quite a while. Part of me wonders if differences in human canine length might have to do with testosterone levels during childhood or even pre-natally. Mokele