Skye

Thanks for the link Pogo, if I weren't moving a thousand miles tomorrow I'd read into it more lol... I think the biggest ethical problem is from an ecological standpoint. The thylacine still has fairly untouched habitat it could be located in with minimal ecological impact, part of the reason it is a viable project. Many species that existed long ago no longer have any place in the world though, dinosaurs biology might make survival hard enough, but they certainly don't have a remaining ecological niche. Many species that have gone extinct would be hard to bring back unless we recreate an environment they can live in. This includes many species that have become extinct recently, by our hand.

Well the main problem is getting a full genome in working order. The DNA in samples taken from skin or fur in a museum are all broken up into little fragments, so piecing it all together will take a long time and you really need a close living relative to compare it to. After you have the nuclear DNA you can insert it into an egg like dolly was cloned...but dinosaur and extinct bird eggs don't spring out of nowhere, and mammals will need to be carried by a similar sized close relative, which will have all kinds of immune system problems. In the distant future these problems will probably be solved by research in other areas. I read a magazine article a while ago on a team here that was trying to recreate a Thylacine, a dog sized marsupial carnivore wiped out early this century. They were still in the very early stages of contructing the genome.

Well I think CGI are another tool for film makers to bring a good story to life but you still need a good story, and good people making it.

Well it's not entirely bleak for rebels, Morpheus and others have survived for a while. I don't see people fighting for their artificial world, if you choose it you will want to live it up in the Matrix, not fight in the real world. Knowing that (another) reality exists would probably spoil the Matrix for alot of people. How enjoyable would science be if you knew it was all made up by robots? Fighting the robots would be fun in a heroic sort of way, it's the appeal of the movie. Just get bacteria to build a new atmosphere, it can't take that long can it?

It's a good point. The ethic of Morpheus though is to win or die trying, it's not 'well we have a nice kind of symbiosis going on here let's not rock the boat.' This a matter of the plot, which you can't argue with really. But being speculative...If people found out that they were being used like this then the natural reaction would be to fight against it, no one likes being used or being subserviant (excluding members of the English parliament). Some might go with it though: the idea of E. coli living in my gut isn't appealing but I don't think of it much, and I'm happy they are helping me out. Of course then you have the prophesising of 'The One', which has no rational explanation, unless I missed something. It is just a story...

Whats stopping there just being more nothing out there, like the nothing between all the matter of the universe. The edge of the universe seems to be defined by matter at this point, what about electromagnetic waves and gravitational fields? Do they extend out past the edge of the matter?

I think therefore... Theres nothing else you can prove and you can only prove it to yourself, whatever that is. But because I am thinking there is some reality, even if it just my thoughts.

The advantage of being more competitive than others is that if you are successful than you are at an advantage. The disadvantage is that if you aren't successful than you have wasted a whole lot of time and energy. If stupid people continue to produce more offspring they will bring the mean down to their level and wont be the stupid anymore. Clever bastards.

Even your idea isn't original, someone has already said "there's nothing new under the sun." But assuming that giant purple space meatballs haven't been thought of before it is an original idea. A location doesn't have to be defined by the route taken to get there. If only it were marketable then it might be worth patenting.

Is like a movie review and you have to give it a score out of *****?

Could suicide be part of being smart? If I do something bad I feel bad about it, this presumably makes me learn from my mistake and work harder. A higher sensitivity to negative psychological stimuli could lead to faster learning but at the cost of occasional suicides, which might be worth it at the population level. Modern societies have much more variation between the winners and losers, and can communicate this to everyone. Amplifying the negative stimuli in this way could lead to people overestimating how bad they are. In a closed tribal society I might have been good at science compared to those around me. Unfortunately we have the net now and from reading this forum I know I have far, far to go:rolleyes: But thankfully theres always the off switch...

Well the US has weapons of mass destruction and has indicated it could invade Iraq soon. Does this justify a pre-pre-emptive strike by Iraq? Course then the US would be allowed a pre-pre-pre-emptive strike. And then Iraq would have the option of..

Identical twins don't get their name for nothing. This might be aided by the parents insanely common habit of dressing them the same but still they do look very similar. Looking the same as my theorectical identical brother would be a pain, I would get stared at in public, people might mistake us. Looking like my identical father would not have this problem assuming he were a generation older. I wouldn't think the similarities between a clone and it's parent would be particularly noticeable. Maybe compare photos of identical twins that have 20+ year age differences. Don't have any on me at the moment though sorry. From my point of view the problem isn't so much individuality so much as the deliberateness of creating this child. If somehow a child was born as a clone of it's parent (not even going to try to figure out how) then it would maybe considered a oddity but not at a disadvantage. The deliberate nature of cloning yourself has the danger of people trying to live their life over and reach their 'full potential', people who don't want to create themselves. They want to create a super-me, which most people here agree is wrong.

Copy the way it's been done in a reputable journal like Nature and then if they mark you down on it you can say 'well thats the way THEY did it'. Just state all the main points of your paper, with any caveats, and don't bring up any new points. Don't give the figures that support your points. The summary is the answer to the question you asked.

A guy I know came back from the States and brought some bills with him, doesn't it say 'In God We Trust' on them?

Well I personally think that the right to death should logically follow the right to life. It may seem brutal to allow people to kill themselves, but most countries allow you to kill in order preserve your life (in self defence). The problem comes in assisted suicide and making the decision for someone unable to make it themselves. Making a living out of helping people die has dangerous pitfalls, especially if the bills start building up.

I think that a parent would love their clone as much as a sexually produced child. There maybe some differences in the way the parent treats the child and also the child would only have one parent which might be a disadvantage. The main concern for the cloned child in terms of the way it is treated would be with the outside world. I just don't see potentially good parents treating a clone worse. A clone would have quite a few differences in appearance. Things like posture, musculature, fat%, voice and hair would probably differ. I'm really just playing the Devil's advocate, I wouldn't have a clone because I'd rather my child be genetically individual, theres the imperfections in the cloning process and the delights in the sexual process, including sharing parenting with someone you love.

Having a child is much the same, and no one likes their parents telling them what to do. I imagine my clone would get into their teens and rebel hideously: grow a mullet, develop an appreciation for country music, wear sandals and socks, and set their sights on becoming the curling world champ:eek: But how do the decisions you make for your clone differ from your child?

Well if you count the psychological benefit it's hard to say any behaviour isn't selfish. Whatever drive that made me make the decision is sated by choosing to do it. I like sugar and it makes me feel good to eat it, so eating lots of sugar is selfish. If you mean in terms of some sort of self serving evolutionary advantage, then I'd say things like eating too much sugar are bad. It would probably lower the number of my particular genes in the gene pool in a million years time. My guess is that this is just a situation where my environment differs from that my behaviour evolved in so it doesn't quite match up. My strong desire for sugar was probably matched by low supply of it in the past. Kindness to others might have been matched by them being closer related to me. But suicide is amazingly frequent for any kind of perversion of self serving behaviour.

Could make it more controversial, if convergent evolution happened, how come we haven't all converged upon The Ultimate Lifeform? But moving right along... The main reason is that evolving to reach a certain form requires of random mutation an unbroken chain of advantageous forms to get there. Convergence leads to competition. If you take an ecological view of it two species can't occupy the same niche in the same area, so either one goes extinct through competition or they diverge. This affects the function of the organism as a whole not the individual parts though. A whale would be in competition with pretty much the same species it is now if it had gills, species that share it's nutrient sources. Mutations are a positive and negative force, in the sense of evolving to a certain fixed aim. The shape of the fin in both fish and whales is very efficient and deviations from mean are probably going to be less efficient. Despite this humpback whales have enough variation between individuals that they can be identified by their flukes (tail fins). So whales don't have perfectly shaped flukes, the nicely shaped flukes carved out by natural selection are constantly being bent out of shape by random mutations. Mutations that are beneficial don't always become fixed in a population or species. A whale might be born with a fully functioning set of lungs but, with tragic nobility, die in the name of (culinary) science. Sexual selection can also be a factor, mutations just might be unattractive. Attractive mates might be different from the convergent aim, creating a drive away from convergence. Since sexual selection applies more strongly to males you can also get an assymetry of forms between the sexes that could be seen as non-convergent... And.....gills would probably make sonar and communication impossible for whales so they might not be advantageous. By the way, can you really argue against the plausibily of something whilst admitting it exists?

At a housewarming I felt something that I thought was a small thorn catching on my calf, I looked down and saw that a dog had bitten me leaving a puncture and some scratches. Then it hurt, like an ache. I guess that our perception of pain is built on our past experiences of it to an extent. I felt the tooth pull back on my skin and my brain equated that to a small thorn. Looking down and seeing a hole, cuts, bruising made my perception change, not only did it hurt more, it hurt differently.

But really, what kind of half-arsed cover up involves a visitors centre?

Are the estrogen levels at this time largely controlled by genes?

Better add this... We can't survive with extra sets of chomosomes though like plants, I just thought it was interesting that we can make bigger people by adding chromosomes. Could auxins be added to the soil and taken up by the plant to increase the size of fruits?

People can survive with extra chromosomes. Men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY) are reproductively/mentally normal, though taller than average. I don't know if you could keep adding Y chomosomes to make all star basketball players though:-p