Arete

So, as an evolutionary biologist working at the juncture of evolutionary biology and epidemiology, from this assertion you'd believe we are doing the "devil's work" so to speak - and rather than any positive, practical outcome of our lab's work being a result of dedication, hard work and good science, it would be an inexplicable, miraculous gift from God? By the same token, the reason we need a new flu vaccine each season wouldn't be due to evolutionary change and biologists working hard to develop new vaccines, but because the devil makes it so and God miraculously grants the researchers a magic elixir to boost herd immunity each year? If that's the type of assertion you're making, it would seem a rather extreme example of intellectually offensive mental midgetry worthy of extraordinary ridicule.

The Promise - the issue with using the bible as evidence of God is circularity. The authority of the bible comes from God. Proof of God comes from the bible. Without God, the bible is just another book, without the bible, there's no proof of God. Due to their co-dependence, you can't use one as an independent source of information on the other and attempting to do so results in a circular proof. Yet a number of biblical claims are in direct conflict with not only other parts of the bible e.g. http://www.infidels....radictions.html but with observed reality. E.g. with a likely less than 10% of the diversity of earth described and ~10 million species known to science, there's no way that Noah fit the entirety of animalia on a boat the size of which is described in the bible. This gives us 4 options: 1) Reject observed reality and accept the literal interpretation of the bible despite evidence to the contrary. Noah literally fit a pair of every species on earth on the ark and is thus a better taxonomist, field biologist and biological tetris player than every scientist who has ever existed put together, or a brutally ignorant misinterpretation of evolutionary theory to suggest that all of life's diversity evolved in a few thousand years from a pair of individuals from a genus without leaving any bottleneck signatures, or simply goddidit/miracle. Hopefully, one's presence on a science forum would suggest that rationality prevails and we can all see the absurdity literal interpretations of not just the bible, but antiquated religious texts in general - Landover Baptist do a wittier and more thorough job of demonstrating how ridiculous literal biblical interpretation is than I could ever want to. 2) Partake in Christian apologetics: reinterpret the bible in light of new evidence to suggest what the passages might have really meant had they known about string theory, IVF and evolution 2000 odd years ago: E.g. The flood was actually regional to the Euphrates and they meant the whole known world to Noah at the time, or they meant all the domestic animals important to Noah at the time. Again, this should be difficult to swallow for a rational person, as it smacks of "ad hockery" and "after the facting". Starting with a premise and reverse engineering the observations is fairly trite intellectual masturbation at best - and for that reason vehemently opposed and avoided by science. I would personally think it difficult for anyone of genuinely inquiring nature to really find apologetics satisfying. 3) Maintain a faith based belief in God, and accept the bible as literally incorrect, but divinely influenced rough guide to life: Noah didn't build a massive structurally implausible boat and fill it with an immense diversity of organisms - but the story and the morality conveyed within serve a useful purpose which guides my life and my belief in God. Not my personal position, but not one I find confronting. 4) Reject the bible as fallible and thus not the divine word of a perfect deity - the position of most of the scientific community, as evidenced by surveys of scientific fellowships.

I could get a burger, fries and coke for lunch at work for $3.99 (5x4= $12). What I actually do is my lovely wife bakes our bread (about $1 per loaf. Say we were buying rye sourdough it would be around $5), we spend around $5 on lunchmeat a week, around $3-4 on salad items, around $3-4 on a block of lite cheese. (total: $12-18). Even when you bake your own bread from scratch, it's hard to beat fast food in terms of dollars per meal. Dollars per nutritional unit is a different kettle of fish of course.

I grew up in Aus and now live in the US. It is not the case here. You can't make food as cheap as you can buy prepared fast food. It's anecdotal - but I put it down to Australia's much higher minimum wage. While in theory a user pays health system is a fantastic idea: calculate the estimated financial burden say, cigarettes and alcohol consumption creates for the public health system, add that cost to the products in the form of a tax, channel it back into the health system. That way - smokers and drinkers (and fattys and whoever else) aren't left in the cold when they need medical treatment - people who don't indulge in whatever the product in question aren't being fleeced to pay for preventable lifestyle disease in others. There's a number of problems, however: 1) most places already tax liquor and tobacco products. The money doesn't directly find its way to the health sector. Just try to snatch a lucrative teat like that from your average government. 2) A user pays system of health care needs a functioning health care system. I came from Australia, where we have a big, "evil" government controlled healthcare system i paid for as an income tax levy. Now I live in the US and have my private health insurance garnished from my salary. My personal health coverage here is better than Australia, however it costs 10x as much as the Medicare levy used to cost me and the average person's cover is both probably lower and the flow-on effects of litigation in place of adequate coverage affects all sorts of aspects of my life. Given the way the US healthcare system works, user pays isn't going to be effective without substantial restructuring. You could be McDonalds biggest customer (and thus contribute vastly to the user pays health tax scheme), but with no insurance it comes to naught in the current system. So you'd need whole system restructuring before it would function.

The PacBio super long runs seem to be highly prone to incorrect base calling (like 15% error rate). So for SNP calling, they're no good. What we're using them for is to try and get at something short read referenced alignments can't get at - complete loss of functional genes and variation due to indels. It's no silver bullet but it's another tool in my exponentially growing and bewildering toolkit

Yours is the positive assertion. There's plenty of evidence of Christians who do believe that you must accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior to enter Heaven. I quite honestly find it absurd that you're claiming the contrary. "Classical evangelical doctrine holds that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ, and that those without such faith will be condemned to hell. A number of texts are typically cited in support of this position." http://www.bethinkin...o-to-heaven.htm "Historically Rome taught that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church; therefore Muslims, like other non-Catholics, could not be saved unless they convert to the Catholic religion." http://www.justforca...cs.org/a135.htm "With all respect due, what a Muslim believes is insufficient to take them to Heaven. This is Bible truth." http://forums.ourchu...topic.php?p=740 "Christ is the author of eternal salvation to all them that obeys him (Hebrews 5:8-9), but those folks do not obey him, hence they will not be saved in their present station. If, however, they should learn of Christ, believe and obey him then they too could be saved." http://www.firstcenturychristian.com/answers/answers_041.htm "So it is those who believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior who join God in heaven." http://www.missiontoamerica.org/letters/other-religions/muslims-01.html etc ad infinitum

In your own words. You claim most Christians believe something - evidence it. Showing a supposed basis for a claim is not evidence of the claim.

I remain incredulous to the claim that most Christians believe that you can achieve heaven through a religion other than Christianity. It is the central claim that it can be only achieved through belief in the divinity of Jesus of every single evangelist and piece of evangelistic propaganda I've ever encountered. I'm happy to be proven wrong by evidence to the contrary.

Wait, you're suggesting, for example, that most Christians believe there is a righteous path to salvation without accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior (i.e. being of another religion such as Judaism, Mormonism, Islam, etc)? Although anecdotal, my experience with Christianity and Christians strongly suggests the exact opposite as does the bible: John 3:36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. Acts 4:12 And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

I work on human african trypanosomiasis (HAT). Sanofi Aventis donate eflornithine for the treatment of the disease to the WHO www.who.int/neglected_diseases/WHO_sanofi_partnership_2011/en/index.html I have no idea what sort of in-kind benefits SA receive for the donation (nor have I ever seen it publicly reported), but I don't necessarily have an issue with them benefiting in kind - they aren't a charity, production of eflornithine is cost intensive and the recipients are ill-equipped to pay for it.

Evidence would suggest that this is not true - 97% of Royal society members and 93% of National academy of sciences members answer "No" to the question "Do you believe in a personal god?" http://www.humanreli...telligence.html www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

Use of the word Darwinist is a litmus test to detect those who haven't actually read anything written by Darwin. I study evolution, but would define my profession as an evolutionary biologist, rather than an evolutionist. In same sense I haven't heard physicists call themselves thermodyamicists, chemists call themselves covalenticisits or geologists call themselves extrusionists, etc. Why the exception for one particular theory?

The point I was making is that the statement "CO2 is not a pollutant" is disingenuous because the characterization of any substance as a pollutant/not a pollutant is relative to number of factors (location, concentration, form etc) and I was surprised/skeptical that a team of renowned scientists would have missed that and signed off on the article.

This section of the article raises alarm bells: H20 is not *normally considered* a pollutant. H20 is a colorless, odorless liquid, contained in high concentrations in all of us and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. You still don't want too much of it in your lungs and when there's an excess of it in the wrong place we call it a flood - which are generally considered bad. I'm surprised anyone with a scientific background would sign off on a statement like this, whether or not you're a "warmer" or a "skeptic"- to clarify no substance is ubiquitously a pollutant. The term is relative to proximate location and concentration and almost any substance has the propensity to become a pollutant. For example, Nitrates in your garden are fertiliser and generally considered beneficial. Low relative levels of nitrates in your local river are a natural and important part of the water chemistry. Artificially elevated nitrates in the river if the fertilizer from your garden washes into it are pollutants with a detrimental environmental impact.

In the thread in question, you took an observed phenomenon (altruism) , rejected all posed naturalistic explanations of it and asserted that the God explanation was the only plausible one. Regardless of whether or not you subscribe to the scientific method, the assertion that the phenomenon could not be plausibly explained by anything other than a benevolent God is logically fallacious. If you had of said "God is a possible explanation for altruism, and the one I personally accept" as opposed to "God is the ONLY possible explanation" there'd be no logical disconnect. In the same way I stated "Kin selection and inclusive fitness are plausible explanations for altruistic behavior - it doesn't necessarily have to be God" and not "Kin selection and inclusive fitness are the ONLY explanations for ALL altruistic behavior - God does not exist" [to paraphrase]. It's about being honest with claims of supernatural causation, not necessarily forcing them to ascribe the rules of science.

So without positive evidence to support it - you've made the positive assertion that a portion of altruistic behavior is explained ONLY by environmental factors (as opposed to genetic or an interaction between genetic and environmental factors). You've then made the assertion that the ONLY explanation for such behavior is a benevolent God. The argument doesn't follow logically. The fact the Catholic Church controls its own autonomous nation state and is the richest organization in the world strongly evidences the political and material gains that can be made by such organizations. As does the advent of prosperity theology. http://en.wikipedia....perity_theology On a local scale; have you ever preferentially supported business due to the owner sharing your faith? Or cooked a meal for someone from your church? If you look at history the selective advantages of belonging to a religion are even more obvious - re crusades, summarial execution of nonbelievers, invasion of "heathen" territory etc. Aside from the fact its very existence of "Real Altruism" is based on an unsupported positive assertion, species/population level inclusive fitness accounts for altrusistic behavior outside of ones immediate relations. Why must a benevolent God be the ONLY plausible explanation? Why can't there be one we both may not have thought of yet? This is where the fallacy lies.

A) No one who accepts the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection would be describable as an "evolutionist" any more than someone who accepts the scientific theory of gravity as "gravitationist" or the theory of the spherical earth as a "sphericist". Using the term already implies misrepresentation. B) All of your questions are highly loaded in their wording to imply that a scientific position is held on faith. The acceptance of a scientific theory is held as indefinately pending one the allowance that additional evidence could justify the modification or rejection of a currently held answer in favor of a more encompassing answer. As such, answering the questions, as currently worded leads to direct misrepresentation of the mainstream scientific position on the majority of raised issues. B) Almost all of the answers to your questions are very involved. Understanding the answers would require considerable research on your behalf to understand. Re abiogenesis, big bang theory, evolutionary theory. You're not going to get single sentence answers that honestly represent the scientific position on the above issues. That said: 1a) Do you believe in God in the Abrahamic sense? No. 1b) Do you believe in a Spinoza type pantheistic God? No, but I accept that there is probabilistically small possibility of its existence. 2. What is the explanation for the inception of the currently observed universe as we observationally know it you currently accept? The big bang theory: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang 3. What theories regarding abiogenesis you think are currently plausible? The true answer regarding the detailed events leading to abiogenesis is "We don't know and may never know precisely". However a number of plausible explanations for spontaneous abiogenesis exist. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html 4. What theory regarding the diversification of biological organisms do you currently accept? The theory of evolution via the interaction of natural selection and random mutation is overwhelmingly supported by empirical observation and experimentation. 5. What evidence do you accept as suggestive of the age of the Earth and how old does it suggest the Earth is? Radioactive decay and isochron dating of meteorites suggests the age of the Earth is 4.55 billion years old +/- 1%. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html As an aside - a biblical young earth (approx 6000 yrs) is refuted by observation of a vast array of geological, biological, atmospheric, astronomical, oceanographic, geomorphological, atmospheric, etc data types. 6. Do you believe in extraterrestrial life? The straightforward answer is that given current evidence it is not possible to know. There is no positive evidence for extraterrestrial life so I currently accept the null hypothesis that we have no evidence to support such an assertion. I accept the possibility it may exist and would change my position based on new evidence - and thus accept the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. 7. Do you accept evolution is ongoing and what is the end result of evolution? Evolution is a continuous, directly observable phenomenon. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html Asking "Do you believe evolution is still happening" is like asking "Do you believe the color red is still happening?" As it is is continuous there is no end point unless life itself ceases to exist. 8. Do you believe in an afterlife? Not in the biblical sense. By passing our genetic information to our offspring we can gain a semblance of immortality, but not in the continuation of the soul in some form of supernatural sentient form our former selves sense the bible describes. 9. How do your beliefs in origins and evolution affect your sense of purpose for your own life? Acceptance of evidence based scientific theories, I am able to produce practical, observable outcomes from my research. This research results in applications which cure human disease, and help conserve biodiversity - which in turn gives me immense personal satisfaction.

Kin selection and inclusive fitness invoke game theory and selfish gene theory in describing how an action detrimental to the individual but beneficial on the gene/population/species level can be heritable. To make the positive assertion that such behavior is solely as a result of enviromental factors and has no genetic basis, you'd need some sort of evidence supporting the non-inheritance of altruistic behavior to counter the evidence in the above links suggesting that it is. Being a member of a powerful, influential and wealthy organization is selectively advantageous regardless of the beliefs of the group. Being a member of a religion is selectively advantageous for humans for a host of reasons (financial support, defensive allies, kin group associations, etc to name a few) regardless of whether or not the teachings of the religion are true/correct/moral/etc. You're shifting the goalposts and strawmanning kin selection/inclusive fitness. It's not attempting to explain the advent of religion at all - it explains biologically altruistic behavior - a clearly defined, observed phenomenon. See previous post. This seems to be simply an appeal to personal incredulity. You personally don't accept naturalistic explanations for altruistic behavior and invoke the Abrahamic version of God as the only plausible explanation - which is logically fallacious. Observation clearly supports an evolutionary basis for biologically altruistic behavior. The assertion that altrusim requires one to "overcome" evolution and thus the subsequent appeal to higher authority is erroneous.

The question as posed is nonsensical. Read up on Sanger sequencing and once you understand the process, come back with a sensible question we can provide a sensible answer to - otherwise expect disappointment. CharonY - I freely admit to being an end product user and not as clued in to the tech as I should often be- thanks for the clarification. We just sent out some samples for PacBio RS SMRT™ (Single Molecule Real Time) *take a breath* sequencing. The strobe sequencing method offered by our core offers some pretty amazing read lengths from our typically crappy template - 6kb average reads and 35mb coverage from one lane. http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/products

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sanger+sequencing For those reading along - Invitrogen Ion Torrent technology is looking promising for benchtop next gen sequencing, but isn't PCR. I'd be considering it if I wasn't using crappy fta card samples and trying to pull parasite DNA out of vertebrate blood samples. http://find.lifetechnologies.com/ionrnaseq/fl

The OP: so to boil it down - you acted in a way which you thought was morally correct, but in breach of your lease/ rental agreement... I'm not really seeing how this results in an appeal to a higher authority and it seems like an appeal to the "two wrongs make a right" logical fallacy http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/two-wrongs-make-a-right.html. If I knew a child was being abused by its carers, the morally correct thing to do would be to remove the child from that situation, however it would be logically fallacious to use that reason to justify kidnapping the child. Did you pre-emptively try to make arrangements with the landlord, or did you just go ahead without informing them? Actually - this describes the opposite of biological altruism (i.e. evolutionary altruism) in which an organism performs an action which reduces its own fecundity to increase the fecundity of other individuals. Altruistic behavior as described above is common in animals - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/ So if altruistic behavior is prevalent in animals and not solely a human endeavor doesn't it erode the appeal to a higher power/authority? Kin selection/ inclusive fitness models offer a naturalistic explanation for altruistic behavior supported by experimental and observational field data. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness

During my PhD studies (papers currently in review) we described four new species of geckos using a combination of multilocus genetic, multivariate morphometric and meristic and coalescent estimation of migration rates. We dated the divergence of these species between 3 and 10 million years ago using fossil calibrated phylogenetic methods. So either Noah knew more about Australian herpeteofauna and was a better taxonomist than us, all of our data is inexplicably wrong (despite multiple replicates, mulitfacted data types and highly significant P values) or the literal interpretation of the flood story doesn't gel with reality.

My wife and I emigrated from Australia to the USA. The USA does not recognize de-facto relationships of any kind for the purposes of dependent visas. If we were a gay couple rather than a straight couple, we would be unable to marry in Australia and thus my partner would have been barred from emigrating with me.

absolute ethanol (100%) is fine for most mtDNA, nuclear extraction and PCR - RNAlater is better http://www.invitrogen.com/site/us/en/home/brands/Product-Brand/rnalater.html, directly into a LN2 dewar is better again, especially if you want to do allozyme work

The thing that ruins Queensland is the fact it's full of Queenslanders - I mean, you people can't even spell 'beer'