jeskill

Great find!

I thought that was a biological fact, but it would be believable that I was misinformed.

You thought what was a biological fact?

I think it is the wants that are relevant. If a fetus cannot want yet, the fetus has no more right to life than a sperm swimming up a fallopian tube.

Interesting idea.

I agree that personhood is a moral and social construct. To me this suggests a definition of personhood can not be made using scientific evidence alone. But you've touched on an important issue, which is, what is the most ethical way to define personhood?

I don't feel like I've come to a conclusion on this one yet, and I think that there are probably multiple criteria that should be taken into consideration.

It is utter nonsense to deny there are no plans for an extended or new synthesis.

 

Publications calling for an extended synthesis / revised synthesis etc:

.....

Shall we go through these publications one by one

When you hand in essays, do you just hand in the bibliography with a one word sentence?

Darryl8, instead of attacking with ad hominim fallacies, why not respond to Arete's question?

... [H]ow about you tell us how your paradigm shift will aid scientific progress and accelerate scientific discovery beyond the current regime: how will the "new synthesis" bring about understanding and investigation which isn't currently being investigated? As (assumedly) a research student, how will your thesis add to scientific understanding? What hypotheses are to be tested?

I think this is a great question, as it's the main reason why most people aren't agreeing with you here.

Are you looking at other methods of measuring population density besides quadrats? What size are your quadrats and what size are the clumps?

Mooeypoo, I have to disagree with you. You keep on saying that a fetus isn't "alive". From a biological perspective, it is alive. So are, for that matter, sperm and eggs.

The abortion issue really has nothing to do with whether or not a fetus is alive. The question has to do with when the fetus should be considered a person.

But I do agree with you that these emotional fallacies aren't contributing anything. From his posts, it seems that Anders is assuming that once fertilization occurs, a blastocyst should be given personhood. Plainly, you or I don't agree with that. Maybe we should ask him why he believes this to be so, and how he feels about miscarriages then.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL QUESTION: Is abortion an advance towards freedom?

Here's an interesting article that suggests the answer is yes. This article is a summary of a scientific study on what happens to women who are denied abortions.

Some interesting results:

1) The main reason these women wanted abortions is they lacked money.

2) 76% of these women, a year later, were on welfare.

Also this:

Unfortunately, when it comes to domestic violence, being denied an abortion makes a really big difference. Turnaways were more likely to stay in a relationship with an abusive partner than women who got abortions. A year after being denied an abortion, 7% reported an incident of domestic violence in the last six months. 3% of women who received abortions reported domestic violence in the same time period. Foster emphasized that this wasn't because the turnaways were more likely to get into abusive relationships. It was simply that getting abortions allowed women to get out of such relationships more easily. So it's likely that these numbers actually reflect a dropoff in domestic violence for women who get abortions, rather than a rise among turnaways.

The take-away I get from this is that women who weren't denied abortions were more likely to get/keep a job, and more likely to get out of an abusive relationship. Being dependent on welfare restricts economic freedom, and being in an abusive relationship can is detrimental to your freedom from violence. Hence, in these cases, abortion does seem like an advance towards freedom for women.

[EDIT] link was missing [/EDIT]

I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, and then lost it. So I'll just ask this:

On talkorigins, they say this about the Modern Synthesis:

In other words, the Modern Synthesis is a theory about how evolution works at the level of genes, phenotypes, and populations whereas Darwinism was concerned mainly with organisms, speciation and individuals. This is a major paradigm shift and those who fail to appreciate it find themselves out of step with the thinking of evolutionary biologists. Many instances of such confusion can be seen here in the newsgroups, in the popular press, and in the writings of anti-evolutionists.

My question to you: How do endosymbiosis, HGT, and phenotypic plasticity (to use a few examples) NOT fall into this definition of the Modern Synthesis?

As a suggestion, you may want to consider responding specifically to queries, and using your citations to BACK UP your arguments. Randomly posting a whole bunch of links that lack context is not useful on the internet, or when you hand in a scientific paper, for that matter.

Savita is dead.

Very sad.

hmmmm.

"loons"

"old farts"

"what you are doing is no different than what creationists do".

That sounds pretty troll-ish to me, darryl88.

Hint: if you want to be taken seriously, you should consider not calling people names, or making assumptions about the other forum members. After all, we all know what happens when we assume ....

This whole hubabaloo you're trying to create kind of reminds me of a story a former prof told about the "classification wars" taxonomists used to get into. It was basically all over how best to create clades. Apparently it devolved into fisticuffs at one conference, I kid you not. People always get so riled up about semantics/taxonomy/general word definitions in science. Probably because it's hard to debate a p-value, but easy to debate whether or not we should allow paraphyly in a tree (or HGT into the modern synthesis, as it may be.)

Professor Spencer Barrett? Awesome. He co-taught the first year evo/eco course I took waaaay back when I was an undergrad.

I'm beginning to think darryl88 is a troll.

I have to acknowledge that you (and Ringer) are clearly right in saying that difficulties in defining consent don't allow the conclusion that the difference between sex and sex-crime is a grey area. The difference is almost always stark in law.

If sex-education is well-done, and both men and women are taught the legal definition of consent, then there is no difficulty in defining consent.

But...the policing of sex-crime is logistically difficult, as can be seen in the ratio of reported crimes to successful prosecutions across many countries.

This often has more to do with the unwillingness to police sex-crimes than the logistics of doing so.

My point was that very tolerant normative attitudes to sex can (need not, but can) lead to the logistics of policing sex crime becoming even more difficult.

Intolerant attitudes towards sex can also make it difficult to police sex crimes. Don't forget: in most cultures that have strict norms for sex, women are expected to be the gatekeepers of their chastity. Women who are raped are often afraid to speak out, making it difficult to police sex crimes. http://www.wisemusli...tizationofrape/

Almost 50 percent of women in a study of female deaths in Alexandria, Egypt were killed by a relative after being raped

Why? If the normative attitude to sex takes the null position that there isn't any harm, it becomes still more difficult for victims to speak out. Sexual sophistication is a fairly universal indicator of status, in fact we can take an example from this very thread - you identify me as a sexually unsophisticated person in your subtly ridiculing statement...

I disagree. If a woman has a good understanding of her rights, and a good understanding of the legal definition of consent, then she will be more likely to speak out.

i would suggest a prevalence of such sentiments in a community would act as a disincentive to victims of sex crimes to speak out. In cases such as those in the ceop white paper i linked, the victims may not even feel that they are victims until many years later.

Your white paper is not an example of a "sex-positive" culture. It's an example of an exploitative culture. BIG difference.

Anders will have to specify I guess, which still means that assumptions of pro-slavery are convenient for hostile treatment of dissent.

 

Civil Rights has always been associated to the 1964-65 legal movement. Slavery is overwhelmingly a civil rights violation, which makes "civil rights" a grossly underrated phrase which is why it is rarely associated with abolition of slavery. It's like using the term "reproductive rights" to refer to rape. Well yes, that's a violation of reproductive rights, to be sure, however since we have a dictionary full of better terms to use, we don't use that phrase.

 

Anders is correct, slavery is the same as abortion in terms of consistency with his own belief. The existence of slavery required one person to lose their rights to another. That was his point. I'll bet you thought he meant that the *abolition* of slavery created the disparity. But that is not consistent with anything he has said on slavery in above posts.

 

I'm reading what he is writing.

Given what he has written before in previous threads concerning "race", my instinct is that Zapatos' explanation is correct.

As an aside, since when does "I can't afford to have a child" equal "a woman feels it's inconvenient to have a child"? Do you have any idea how much it costs to raise a kid?

72 % of women not using condoms is not the same as "46% of women did not use contraception the month they conceived".

By-the-by, why is it that you write about women not using condoms, (those harlots!!!) when the man is the partner who actually wears them?

And we've dissected this data in depth in the "Ethics of Abortion" thread quite recently ( I think it starts up on the 3rd or 4th page) ... you may want to read it, as I sure as hell don't want to spend my time regurgitating past arguments.

So the way to "fix" women is to create a totalitarian state that enforces its worldview on all via brainwashing/coercion?

Yeah, that'll work.

I think it's reasonable to take issue with the sex-positive movement. My position is that some regulation of sex through societal norms and beyond law is necessary, because the difference between sex and sex crime is a grey area even in principle. In practice, it's impossible for police forces to deal with; it's very often a third rail issue; they can't win whatever they do. The incentive is to brush it under the carpet or look the other way.

First, interesting link, thanks for sharing. To address the comment above, I don't think that the exploitation of women is caused by the "sex-positive movement".

A definition of sex-positive I found on the internets:

Perhaps the most common definition I have seen states that sex positivity “regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.” Proponents of this view typically emphasize the importance of consent and safe-sex, but no single sexual activity is elevated above others or is considered more or less valid. The only universally agreed upon limit in the sex-positive movement centers around the issue of consent, which means that being sex-positive does not constitute an endorsement of sexual assault, sex crimes, or non-consensual paraphilias (e.g., exhibitionism, voyeurism, beastiality).

According to this definition, the exploitation of young girls and boys is the antithesis of sex-positive, because exploitation, is, by its very nature, coercive.

I think it's reasonable to take issue with the sex-positive movement. My position is that some regulation of sex through societal norms and beyond law is necessary, because the difference between sex and sex crime is a grey area even in principle. In practice, it's impossible for police forces to deal with; it's very often a third rail issue; they can't win whatever they do. The incentive is to brush it under the carpet or look the other way.

 

For example, in my town, there is group of middle aged men who control a group of 16 year old girls for the purposes of sex. It's all entirely legal, the girls are willing participants. What's unusual about it other than the age of the guys is that they are a very loosely formed group. They have little in common but that they fuck these girls.

The police keep an eye on it, but don't/can't intervene.

 

As i say, all completely legal, but i have to admit to losing a couple of nights sleep over it.

 

Denying people contraception and sex education is a truly moronic reaction, but so is jumping on the sex-positive bandwagon, as you seem to do.

The age of consent in your town is 16? Wow.

I grew up in a very sex-positive atmosphere, but myself and my peers were also taught the ramifications of sex very early. As well, the schools went to great lengths to hammer in the "no means no" meme. My adult mentors stressed that I should wait to have sex with someone I truly cared for, and someone who would respect me -- I think that was a good rule, and I followed it. The end result was that I never felt pressured to have sex as a teenager, and when I finally did meet someone who pressured me (in my 20s), I was able to fend it off without any emotional or physical harm.

I guess what I'm saying is, yes, sex comes with consequences and as a result, any sex-positive "movement" has to reflect that. IMO, Sex education is not just about teaching kids the physical ramifications, but also the emotional ramifications of sexual activity.

I agree with your answer, Phi, but am curious: Why would you say that the more conservative a person is, the less they trust the motives of others?

I wholeheartedly agree with #2. I would also add that if you had a burning desire to talk about mechanisms such as HGT, all you have to do is start up a thread.

So you're saying that it's people on internet forums that are anti-HGT, not peer-reviewed authors? I must admit your argument is confusing me. For the record, I love horizontal gene transfer.

Why don't you search for these concepts in Web of Science? That way you'll find peer reviewed papers on the subject that are actually useful.

Just out of curiosity, this "neo-darwinist" who said that horizontal gene transfer wasn't that important -- what kind of organisms doe he/she study? Is he or she a student or professor or other?

No.

Thank you.J Would you like me to discuss why I think the anti-contraception lobby wants to control women? (Subjugation is a fancy word for control, so I'm using the simpler word, if you don't mind.)

I suppose a legal defintion would be better if consistent with end-of-life issues as well. Afaik, cognitive function is the determinant in terminal illness and since there seems to be consensus that cognitive function is absent in the first 12 weeks of development, that would be a consistent time-frame. I think i'm right to say that the vast majority of abortions occur in that time frame anyway, so it's not impracticle.

Are you implying that a 12 week old fetus displays cognitive function? There are four aspects to cognitive function:

1. The ability to perceive (using the senses)
2. The ability to recognize (using neural memory structures)
3. The ability to think/plan before acting and process thoughts (i.e. executive function)
4. The ability to consciously focus your attention on a task (attention)

A fetus at 12 weeks is probably just starting to have #1,and I know there's evidence that a 30 week old fetus has #2, (although I haven't seen data on when # 2 starts to develop) but I've not seen evidence that a fetus has #3 or #4. I just don't think that would be a good litmus test of personhood.

My second concern with the 12 week-limit is practical:

In a functional world, everyone would get comprehensive sex education, everyone would have access to contraception, abortions would be the rare result of a contraceptive failure (or done to protect the health of the mother), and women would have easy access to abortion and thus be able to get it done before the 12 week cut-off.

The US is not so functional. A comparison of US with Sweden (where abortion is limited after 18^th week, but there is comprehensive sex education and access to contraception /abortion providers) might be helpful:

What's the percent of abortions that occur after week 12?

• Sweden: 4.8%
• US: 11.9%

Why?

I linked to an article previously that discussed how socio-economically disadvantaged women in the US would like to have abortions sooner, but were stymied by the cost and travel logistics. The cost and travel logistics issue is caused by the anti-abortion lobby, who focus on making it as difficult as possible for women to have abortions by reducing the number of abortion providers. Women often have to travel to different states to have abortions. The time it takes to set that up can delay the abortion.

Some insurance providers (assuming the women have insurance) also won't cover abortions, so disadvantaged women have to spend time raising the money for the abortion. It becomes a women's issue because a woman's right to choose to have an early abortion is constrained in many parts of the US.

I suppose my point is that framing it in terms of women's rights rather than more general civil rights is not necessary in making a sound argument for abortion, and therefore to do so is nothing but political manoeuvering. Special rights for particular groups is the essence of privelege and so worth avoiding if possible.

We'll have to agree to disagree. The goal of a woman's rights activist is not to "privilege" women, it's to even the playing field so that women and men have an equal opportunity to succeed. When a fetus has the same rights as a woman to survive, it actually decreases that woman's opportunity to succeed. It's impossible to have equal opportunity between men and women if a fetus also has rights, because the economic potential of a woman is fundamentally affected by said fetus.

None of the articles make the suggestion that it's all about subjugating women, not even the slate one.

 

Rather, the underlying theme, if any, seems to be an aversion to promiscuity and the promotion of "a culture of life".

 

So the inference remains unjustified, and without justification, there is reason to suspect an agenda from those who assert it.

DO YOU DISAGREE WITH THE ARGUMENT THAT THE PRO-LIFE ORGANIZATIONS ARE ANTI-CONTRACEPTION? Hala hala! I don't usually yell, but you're moving the goalposts and that's quite annoying.

Yes, these links do not explicitly discuss how the anti-contraception movement subjugates women. They show that the pro-life organizations are anti-contraception. There is evidence supporting the argument that the anti-contraception movement is really about controlling women (subjugate means "to bring someone under control"), but it's in other literature. I'd love to get into that, but first, I would implore you to respond to the question at hand, which is, for the 20th time,

Do you disagree with the argument that the pro-life organizations are anti-contraception?

Whether the decision is pragmatic is the concern of the individual making it - the point remains that the definition of personhood should be the deciding factor in law.

 

If dependency reduces the legal and moral status of someone's life, it follows that the elderly, disabled, or just temporarily ill have lesser value.

 

I don't think self-ownership can exist on a spectrum, rather, it's a dichotomy.

I need to think about this some more. I mean, yes, the concept of personhood is important to the abortion debate. I would argue it's more important than the concept of when life began, because from a biological perspective, life does not begin at conception, life just changes from haploid to diploid. (When I say "just", I am in no means trying to diminish the amazing dance of fertilization.)

However, when you have multiple groups of people who can't agree about when personhood begins, and you have a situation where a female, who is currently a legal person, can be physically or economically harmed by designating a foetus as a person, then it becomes a women's rights issue.

You are making the positive claim that the conspiracy exists, so the burden of proof is yours, and all you have provided in evidence is an anecdotal blog post.

Evidence to support the argument that the major pro-life organizations in the US are also anti-contraception:

From this article here.

"We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. ... We oppose all forms of contraception."

Edward R. Martin Jr., a lawyer for the public-interest law firm Americans United for Life, whose work includes seeking to restrict abortion at the state level and representing pharmacists who have refused to prescribe emergency contraception, told me: "We see contraception and abortion as part of a mind-set that's worrisome in terms of respecting life. If you're trying to build a culture of life, then you have to start from the very beginning of life, from conception, and you have to include how we think and act with regard to sexuality and contraception."

There are examples in the above article of leaders in the christian right advocating for pro-life and anti-contraception laws.

The Pro-Life America is anti-contraception

Students for life: While they don't actually come out and say they're anti-contraception, this article clearly advocates for NOT using contraception.

Susan B Anthony List : anti-contraception propaganda on website

An article detailing how the National Right To Life lobbied against a bill that would reduce the rate of abortions by increasing funding for contraception and sex-education.

Also, check out this article which basically describes how a bunch of pro-life organizations (other than NARL) wouldn't sign a bill to reduce abortion via contraception and sex-education.

So it's impossible to talk meaningfully about abortion without talking about women's rights? Why so specific? A basic ethical principle is that individuals are full and rightful owners of themselves, so the pro-choice position can be arrived at without special consideration of the particular group it affects.

 

In fact, the pro-life position is best supported by the same argument; at the point at which a foetus can be defined as a person, it has full and rightful ownership of itself, no less than does the women carrying it.

 

It's on the definition of personhood that the entire issue depends, the specific issue of women's rights is peripheral.

Perhaps women's rights are only peripheral if you happen to be a man. But if you're a woman who has to face negative economic or physical consequences due to carrying a pregnancy to term, the concerns become far more pragmatic than philosophical. This is why people who swear up and down that they're pro-life get abortions.

One point: I don't really think you can argue that a baby or child has full and rightful ownership of itself. They are beholden to the (hopefully benevolent) dictatorship of their parents or caretakers. So why would you say that a foetus has the "full and rightful ownership" of itself? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that?