AL

Yeah, lot's of people have an agenda.....you gotta live with intolerance...........why not let people believe what they want to believe.

Why equate disagreement with intolerance? No one's saying let's hurt Creationists or persecute them, and everyone is well within their rights, including the Creationists who run publications and websites dedicated to defeating evolution.

I've found in quite amusing. I actually just read a court transcript from the witness testimony of Michael "Irreducible Complexity" Behe in which he explicitly admits that any definition of "science" which includes ID also includes *Astrology*.

Yes, that was pretty funny. Other highlights include his claim that the "peer review" his book supposedly underwent was more rigorous than that undergone by mainstream scientific literature. From the PA ACLU blog:

http://aclupa.blogspot.com/2005/10/all-part-of-scientific-process-part-1.html

It has been stated here before that Behe has not submitted his own work on intelligent design for peer review. At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous. There were more than twice standard the number of reviewers and "they read [the book'] more carefully... because this was a controversial topic."

Turns out though, that one of the "peer reviewers" Behe cited (Dr. Michael Atchison) never actually read the book.

Every proof used has a problem. You are treating 0.999... as a discrete number and comparing it to 1. 0.999... has no value in terms of discrete numbers such as 1. How much is 0.999...? Infinitely close to 1. It is not a discrete number and is not therefore comparable.

If by "discrete number" you meant "integer' date='" I fail to see how that makes your argument meaningful. All I see is question begging. "They're different, so they're not equal."

Intuition tells us that 0.999... is less than 1. Arithmetic tells us that 0.999... is equal to 1. However, logic tells us that 0.999... is not arithmetically related to 1 because it is infitecimal. The proofs apply discrete arithmetic to a non-discrete number.

 

Now you're goin to prove that 1.000.... = 0.999... with the same silly arithmetic. Stop dividing infinitely, stop adding infinitely. You can't make apple pie from florida oranges.

You and all the other proponents of 0.9_ not equaling 1 really need to get over this idea that if some expression is to be evaluated numerically in an infinite number of steps that it must therefore be some sort of phantom number. Consider that the square root of 2 has an infinite number of digits. If you multiplied it by itself, you'd be multiplying two infinitely long numbers, yet even a grade schooler can see that the product is 2 and wouldn't argue to "stop [multiplying] infinitely."

Likewise, the solutions to other infinite operations can be deduced without resorting to numerical/empirical methods that involve actually carrying out an infinite number of steps. As has already been shown a zillion times, 0.9_ is easily written as an infinite geometric series, with a sum that is rigorously deduced to be 1.

Clearly, similarity between genetic sequences does not prove common ancestry.

That's good to hear. Next time I get tickets to a "You're my Baby's Daddy" episode of Jerry Springer, I'll be sure to bring this up, nullify the DNA paternity tests, and free the oppressed deadbeats dads of the world from the iron tyranny of parental responsibility.

Edit: Oh wait, common ancestry. So when Maury Povich reunites long lost siblings by DNA, I'll spoil the joy by bringing this up and telling them to keep looking.

Hmm.. wonder how long that site will keep up. Usually people will ban people who share their accounts.

Bugmenot.com has been around quite a while now. No one has the power to shut them down, really, as they're not breaking any laws, as far as I'm aware. At worst, they may be violating some other website's Terms of Use and the offending account may be closed (or whatever punishment is stipulated in the ToU), but then bugmenot.com can easily acquire a new one.

Kind of like when Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered by a violent Islamic radical for making a film depicting the brutality of Islamic radicals?

So sad, I liked Theo van Gogh.

I am willing to believe others on the matter of ghosts.

I have a haunted bridge I want to sell you. It's a steal of a deal' date=' trust me.

I am open-minded about telekinesis.

Well I consider myself open-minded too, but probably not in the way you use the expression. Many people seem to think that being open-minded means entertaining weird, wacky beliefs and taking an agnostic, fence-straddling position. To me, open-mindedness is about giving weird and wacky ideas a fair hearing, but once the proponents of ideas like telekinesis have had their say and failed to make their case, there is no reason for me to continue straddling the fence instead of justifiably concluding that telekinetics is for loonies. This isn't closed-mindedness; to the contrary, it is effective use of one's mind.

The purpose of this thread is not to debate whether or not any woman should be president' date=' or whether or not a specific woman should be president.

 

I am aware that there is a percentage of American citizens who believe, whether for religious, sexist, biological, societal, or other reasons, that the position of the President of the United States should not be held by a woman. I am simply trying to get some idea of what that percentage is.

 

Don't bog down in extreme hypothetical what-if situations. In general, would you vote for a woman candidate? (If your response is something like, "Well, it depends..." then your answer is yes. I am looking for the percentage who, under normal circumstances, believe it is inherently unacceptable or unwise for a woman to be President.)

 

Results will be posted and analyzed on my blog in two weeks.

I have no problem with a woman being president, generally speaking. If it's someone I like, I'll vote her in. If Ann Coulter is running with Michelle Malkin as her running mate, I'd vote them both into office in a year ending in 0. Hopefully, it'll restart the trend broken by Reagan of presidents dying in office when elected in a year ending in 0, and maybe start a new one where the vice president goes with. [smiley devil emoticon goes here]

MIT receives thousands and thousands of appilication every year' date=' but do you know what's the percentage that get accpted? 14% in 2005, and 98% of people who apply there have a GPA of 4.0 and Sat score at least 1590 in each verbal and math section of the old version of SAT.

 

Do you think you can make it???????????

 

be realistic[/quote']

 

i've seen some of the smartest, most well rounded people rejected from there... a friend of mine was valedictorian, a professional-level pianist/violinist, 1600 SAT/36 ACT, in every club/service organization imaginable, and he was rejected. the applicant pool to MIT is ridiculous- if you get in, it's like winning the lottery- just about no one is guaranteed entry. there are a lot of other good schools out there that you should look into. good luck though.

 

I think you guys are really, grossly exaggerating the admissions standards to MIT. I knew people from high school with SAT scores in the high 1300s / low 1400s that got in. Weighted GPA was well over 4.0, but unweighted, they get in with about 3.6-3.8 GPA. As far as the claim that you need at least a 1590 to get in (unless you're the 2%), I doubt there are even enough students in the country with that kind of score to fill up MIT's incoming freshman class.

 

Regarding the 1600 SAT/ 36 ACT valedictorian that got rejected, I seriously, seriously doubt that story is true. Did this person have a criminal record? There's no way you'd be rejected with that kind of background unless there were bizarre extenuating circumstances.

 

Here are admissions stats for MIT (undergraduate):

http://admissions.mit.edu/AdmissionsWeb/appmanager/AdmissionsWeb/Main?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageWhosAtMIT#admissions

I'm sure you can have fun deriving simple relations between the two yourself. Pi is related to a circle (circumference/diameter). Phi is related to pentagons (diagonal/side) and pentagrams. So a good way to start is to inscribe a pentagon/pentagram in a circle and fool around with the trigonometry until you get a nifty relation, possibly involving sin and cos.

I don't get Medved's comparison of March of the Penguins to The Passion of the Christ. The article seems to suggest it has something to do with family values? Huh?

I agree that' date=' in conceptual terms, .999 repeat is 1. And who can say that .999 repeat exists in anything outside of conceptual terms, anyway? Of course, [i']if such a thing can exist, so too can an infinitely small number that is the difference between 1 and .9999[/i]. If infinity can exist, then so too can a difference, that is infinitly small, between .999 repeat and 1. And if there exists such a difference, then we can say that the two are not equal. In one sense, at least.

Evolution works when over-all good behaviour is rewarded.

 

But owning a big fancy car leads to over-all destructive behaviour.

Evolution is working when bad behavior is punished as well. If our own behavior causes our own demise, evolution is still working.

Hmm...interesting there's no mention in the article about sales performance of the hybrid SUVs, like the Ford Escape Hybrid, and the Toyota Highlander Hybrid. The Highlander in particular is an impressive piece of engineering. It's rated at 30 mpg (combined hwy/city) with room for 7. Of course, actual fuel efficiency is probably lower, but it's still as good as many compact cars, so the market can have its cake and eat it too.

The Escape has been out a while now, but I'm guessing the Highlander is too new a release to for us to get any good sales data on.

Everyone else' date='

 

Thank you for your comments, this thread has been informative and even fun. I think everything that needs to be said has been said, so until another thread is derailed to talk about veganism ...

 

Kindest regards,

In My Memory[/quote']

But I thought you'd be OK with beating dead horses, seeing as to how they can't feel pain and all....

(At the very least, I suppose it could be suggested that a severly retarded infant has experiences "greater" than that of any rat, but that is certainly contentious.)

This then, is our irreconciliable disagreement. I stated earlier that some of the "higher" animals should be given greater weight such that any proposal to experiment on them would be less likely to receive a green light. Although there really isn't any exact, quantitative way to measure or distinguish a "higher" or "lower" animal (and we can debate this 'til Hell reaches absolute zero and whether or not intelligence should be given greater weight in valuation than say, the ability to fly or use sonar), I do know which animals I'd save first from a fire at a zoo, and implicit in that subjective "measure" is this ranking of "higher" and "lower." As far as retarded infants go, given the greater capacity for the loved ones of the retarded infant to feel pain and suffering than the loved ones of a chimp, the retarded infant gets priority.

Lucasspa, you still haven't explained how ID is scientific. William Dembski makes the dubious argument all the time on his Uncommon Descent blog that ID is scientific because it claims certain levels of complexity cannot be produced by evolutionary processes, and that this is falsifiable if one can show these levels of complexity can arise by evolution. That is not building a positive scientific case for ID -- that is assuming a false dichotomy that if evolution is falsified, ID is defaulted to. If ID can be regarded as science for this reason, we may as well regard the existence of rain gods to be a scientific theory -- they can be falsified by meteorology, else regarded as a default position without ever building a positive case.

Also, you mentioned Behe's Darwin's Black Box as the evidence for ID. Have you read the book? No positive case for ID is made. It is a negative case against evolution, that there exists certain things Behe feels evolution will never be able to explain for philosophical reasons, and by the magic of false dichotomy, ID triumphs.

If you want to regard ID as "scientific" as part of a political/judicial strategy to get it thrown out, that's another thing, but clearly it is not science qua science.

"I agree most people are honest and careful' date=' but some are not. There are some people that are attracted to this lifestyle, and those are the ones I'm concerned about."

[/quote']

Great quote. Although I support the right to own a gun, I'm really disturbed by people who are gung-ho about owning one. I mean one hundred. I guess it's that sense of power put so eloquently by Homer Simpson: "Holding a gun makes me feel like God would feel....when He's holding a gun."

AL

 

 

You would be surprised how often I'm asked on what basis animal testing would be justified. I have a nearly canned response to this: because a retarded human infant possesses no characteristics fundamentally greater than any non-human animal' date=' then all I have to ask is whether the experimenter is willing to perform his experiment on a retarded human infant at a similar mental level of an animal. If the answer is no, then the experiment would obviously not be justified to perform on an animal. Presumably, based on your comment that you wouldnt approve of experimentation on apes and chimpanzees (perhaps because they have the relevant mental characteristics), you would find this to be a reasonable starting point.[/quote']

I don't generally oppose testing on humans either. Certainly if I were diagnosed with a terminal illness, I'd probably not be too concerned with the risks of trying out experimental treatment or pharmaceuticals (provided the known side effects aren't immediate death or agonizing pain), so I'd effectively be testing on myself. I'd probably encourage people I know in that situation to do likewise. In the case of a cognitively-impaired human, we might allow someone else to make that decision for them in the same way we allow a parent to make many decisions for their children.

 

Well, what constitutes acceptable decision by proxy is a topic for another debate altogether, but if we agree that the experience of a mouse is far beneath that of a human, I think we really ought to take that into consideration when deciding if the mouse can be used to relieve the suffering of the human, and compare it vis-à-vis the tradeoffs accordingly. With something much "higher" than a mouse, such as a primate, or a cetacean, or even a retarded human, more weight should be given to their lives when compared vis-à-vis the benefits experimenting on them may produce, such that we'd be less likely to want to use them in experimentation precisely because their experience is "greater" than that of some of the "lower" animals.

 

But an outright ban on animal testing would essentially equate the mouse's life experience with the human's life experience, and I think it cannot be consistent with any notion that we'd prefer to rescue a human over a mouse from a fire.

What use is the Gaia theory, really? It doesn't explain anything, nor does it predict anything. It's just renaming "biosphere" to "Gaia."

Lucaspa, if you insist that ID is testable, then propose a test. How do you test that some thing was manufactured by a "supernatural" entity?

IMM, what I originally wanted to know was why you don't feel it is justified to sacrifice lab animals for medical research (not testing on cosmetics and so forth). I then went slightly off on a tangent to discuss why I feel that in some respects we do, whether we acknowledge it or not, give priority to human lives. The article you posted here by Singer is all well and good, but in it, I see nothing that condemns the use of animals to appease the suffering of humans. He even acknowledges that human experience is greater than that of a mouse, and from this I think a reasonable case can be made for lab animal research. Well, further, if we agree that it is acceptable for a carnivore to eat because it would perish otherwise, why is it unacceptable for us to kill an animal if a human, suffering some ailment that could possibly be cured through animal testing, would perish otherwise?

Don't get me wrong -- of course I wouldn't approve killing chimpanzees to develop allergy medicine, but giving tumors to mice to learn more about how cancer works is something else entirely.

But since nobody has answered my original question to prove without doubt, evolution using the scientific method I will for now, until proved otherwise, assume that it can't be done. So since evolution cannot be proved to an absolute, that means that it also takes faith. Scientist may not want to call it that but regardless if evolution cannot be proved absolutely with evidence the only way to believe in it as strong as I feel some of you do, is with faith. Which I find somewhat ironic because most people I have talked to who are big evolutionist despise the idea of having faith in something instead of proving it.

There are few things that can be proven absolutely. Even a logically deduced conclusion is only as true as the premises it assumes. That said, if faith is defined as belief without evidence, then belief in evolution requires no faith. There is evidence for it. That this evidence falls short of absolute is irrelevant.

However, there is also some evidence for creation, mainly (Again this is my "untrained" mind) the fact that we are here, now this might now seem like much but I challenge anyone to give an example of something spontaneously coming into existence. The old example of if I see a clock there has to be a clock maker, the hundereds of carefully timed gears did not just spontaneous come into existence and then randomly fall into working order.

One of the things I think animal rights literature really lacks is information dealing with carnivorous animals (no, these arent related to the question "animals eat animals, why shouldnt I?"). Although I take pride in my veganism, I sometimes find some unusual philosophical dilemmas in veganism (if you follow the AR community, you should also be very aware of the philosophical differences between utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer and right-based philosopher Tom Regan). For instance, what are the moral implications of relocating a dangerous animal like a bear from a human community into an animal community? Should pet owner confine their pet cat indoors if it likes to eat birds and rabbits? And to the more absurd lengths, would it be ethical to elimate predators from the planet? (Peter Singer uses an ecological argument to deal with the last question on page 238 and 239 of his book "Animal Liberation", but I'm not convinced his response is as compelling as it ought to have been.)

I think if it is held that killing an animal in self-defense is justified, then it is as well justified that predators be eliminated, since they must, of necessity, harm another creature (or we can cage them where they can do no harm, but that's tantamount to a death sentence anyway, since they must do harm to survive unless they are also detritivorous). Not that I advocate wiping them out, as they serve a vital ecological function, but of course, I acknowledge that this ecological consideration is not moral in nature.

2) Until I have a better reply, I'll use Singer's ecological reasoning on pages 238 and 239 of Animal Liberation that, with the exception of preventing unnecessary suffering like I mentioned in the last post, once we give up the claim of "dominion" over other animals, then we have no right to interfere with them at all. This means we should not play Big Brother in trying to rescue deer from lions in the same way as we would rescue humans.

I'm not sure how giving up dominion over animals isn't fundamentally equivalent to moral neglect. Well, I'm not really sure what "dominion" means in this context. But acknowledging that we have finite resources to tackle these sorts of problems (as acknowledged by the child drowning scenario), we are forced to prioritize who and what to give moral protections to. Unless this prioritization is done indiscriminately such that one would be just as willing to (say) save a rat as a human from a burning apartment complex, implicit in any discriminating heirarchy of priorities is that things on top have more value (by some measure) than things below.

I will, of course, write and submit a short article on the problem to the academic community (i.e. a few of the nearby colleges) in the hopes that will generate some interest. (I would absolutely LOVE to write a book on the subject, but there are people with more expertise and time who could do a better job.)

If you get feedback, don't hesitate to post it here. It never hurts to have new ideas to discuss.

However' date=' when we talk about a lion killing a deer, we know the lion can make no choice about what it eats nor can it survive without killing other animals. I couldnt imagine that humans could play Big Brother and micromanage every aspect of carnivore killing without serious ecological disaster.

 

In general, there are only a few times when human interference is justified, such as flipping sea turtles and horseshoe crabs off their backs, rescuing a horse trapped in ice, cleaning animals after an oil spill, helping rabbits out of fences, etc. So, while human interference can improve the conditions of some animals some of the time, its generally a bad idea for humans to try to police all nature. If suffering is unncessary and can be avoided, then it should be prevented.[/quote']

Well, a mountain lion's dietary restrictions isn't really the issue. The issue is the differential treatment of deer and humans -- why is it acceptable to allow a deer to be predated for ecological reasons but the human (I hope you agree), should be rescued from such a fate. Unless you actually feel that no effort should be made to rescue the human from a mountain lion assault, implicit in that is that you do value human life above deer life, despite that "insofar as deer suffer, they are our moral equals."

 

This is a contradiction in terms. By the very meaning of the words' date=' non-moral factors (such as the color of your skin or whether your have a tail) can contribute nothing to the moral status of animals or humans.

[/quote']

Perhaps I worded it poorly, but what I meant was that non-moral factors need be given consideration when making decisions that may have moral consequences (among other non-moral consequences). Even you explicitly agreed above that ecology and pragmatism will affect your course of action with regard to what steps you'd take to alleviate animal suffering, so it boils down to how much weight you give to moral considerations vs. these non-moral ones.