I'm of the mindset that there are probably "homosexualities," groups of factors that combine and result in exclusive same-gender attraction in males. It's not much of a stretch to think that 10 years from now, we'll have a good idea what those etiologies are and what role, culturally, homosexuality plays in the Human Species as a whole.
The day is coming, sooner than any of us would like, that we'll not only understand what are the majority of the causes for male homosexuality, but also what can be done to prevent that from happening. And not too long after that, we'll have the technology to change sexual orientation, either after its been expressed or before it has a chance to manifest.
And that's when things will really get interesting.
Coming from a family of Republicans, having dated several Republicans, having friends who are Republicans and once having even been a Republican (it was high school; I was young) makes it no less upsetting reading that the majority of the Republican Party is populated by Flat Earthers. (Gallup Polls: Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution.)
The simple fact is that in this case a majority live in a dream world, picking a-la-cart the facts they wish to live by, rejecting those they don't, and filling in the painful gaps with a balm of putrid poppycock.
It is profoundly disquieting that a large group of people remain ignorant because they can. It's downright nauseating when they pass on that ignorance to a brand new generation with a multimillion dollar propaganda palace, screwing up the minds of a whole new generation.
Recently, the Guardian had an article about Genetic Sexual Attraction which describes the rather icky happenstance of long-lost brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers making whoopie together.
Incest, in otherwords.
What's interesting is that this "GSA" seems to only occur in genetic relations reared apart. The incest repulsion most of us feel -- porn fantasies aside -- for being intimate with a relation, from what little work has been done, is a behavioral by-product of being raised in close proximity to a close collection of genes.
Research wise, I'm curious to see how this plays out.
Here's to hoping life expands his vistas past the end of his ego, else in 20 years he'll be posting about blackhelicopters and subcutaneous tracking tags from that very same bedroom.
"What's the Harm?" I'm asked by people who see nothing wrong with majorities utilizing superstition as more than entertainment. "It doesn't really hurt for people to believe the outlandish, now does it?"
In styming the role of science in the public life, in making history a politically (and ego salving) alternative "intelligent" theory of origins, funding abstiaining boondoggles and parading an endless list of gotch-ya attacks, the reality of life is lost.
Slowly, but quite certainly, we loose the shared experience of struggle, adaptation, and success. Instead we become prisoners to political psychosies, delusions of convience, mutual manias that grow ever more elaborate, effusive, and finally vindictive inorder to provide an effective bulwark against a flood of inconvienient facts.
What's so sad is that we now have the technology to uncover the symptoms of clinical depression in Teens but have neither the long-term care structures in place to utilize that knowledge to treat the disease, nor the political will to create it.
Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man. To ensure that subjects did not consciously detect the invisible image, they were asked to press a specific key if they noticed any difference between the left and right images. Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman.
Warning: the effect doesn't hold in the reverse. If you subliminally flash an image that a subject wouldn't otherwise be attracted too, the effect disappears:
The heterosexual men, however, had a more difficult time detecting the same orientation when it was located where an invisible picture of a nude man had been; this was not the case for heterosexual women when viewing their own sex naked. And the homosexual men’s response was similar to that of the heterosexual women, as were the bisexual women’s and heterosexual men’s.
And if you show 'em too much skin, say just long enough for the conscious mind to note the beautiful image arrayed before them, again, you get nothing:
This focus benefit did not carry over, however, when the participants were allowed to consciously see the naked photos, the researchers report in the paper published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. It may have been that the erotic images were on display too long, they speculate; previous studies have shown that it is difficult to maintain attention in one spot. Or it could be that social or cultural norms take over. "Maybe you don't want to look at the nude pictures," he suggests. Regardless, it appears that our minds are exquisitely tuned to detect sexual opportunity--especially when it is invisible.
For someone who portrays herself as the paramount of child welfare and as a crusading advocate against sexual predators, Stacy is a rather despicable opportunist. The 14-year old in the article she links to didn't kill the 11-year old because the 14-year old was gay. He killed because he was severely emotionally disturbed, pathological, full of rage. In short, one sick fuck.
I've got far more experience as both a clinician and as a social worker. While I've never been involved in a case of child-on-child murder, I have seen and taken evidence for far too many child-on-child rapes. I know more about this subject than she does -- for that mater, so do my former interns.
In film production.
Sexual orientation isn't the issue here -- heterosexual 14 year olds rape and kill 11 year olds -- it's mental illness. Somewhere along the line, either organically, through rearing, through experience or some combination of all of the above, the 14 (now 16) year old wound up seriously unhinged. This attack and murder was the outgrowth of rage and frustration, not sexual orientation.
It's textbook, for Cthulhu's sake.
It's patently unethical for Stacy to use her position as a child advocate and a counselor to pin the psychodynamics for this rage killing on her personal bugaboo of homosexuality. There's no theoretical basis for her position. There's no clinical basis for her position. There's no forensic basis for her position. There's only her continual crusade against anything remotely "gay."
Her post is more than just wrong, it's disgustingly vile. In the furtherance of her career, her practice and her media profile, she shamelessly profits off the tragic death of a 11 year-old child who had the misfortune to encounter a seriously demented youth.
"Gregory Paul of Creighton University published a fascinating comparison of the rates of religious belief in developed democracies with the rates of various measures of societal health. As he notes, among all those nations, the US is "the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds." Japan, Scandinavian and France have the lowest rates of "belief in God, attendance of religious services and Bible literalism." Among other things, he finds:
Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developed democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more (National School Safety Center) than all the secular developed democracies combined. Other prosperous democracies do not significantly exceed the U.S. in rates of nonviolent and in non-lethal violent crime (Beeghley; Farrington and Langan; Neapoletan), and are often lower in this regard...
Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been curtailed in all prosperous democracies (Aral and Holmes; Panchaud et al.), rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developed democracies (Figure 6). At all ages levels are higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe's resistance increases (Figure 7). The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia. Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S. (Figure 8).
Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data. Early adolescent pregnancy and birth have dropped in the developed democracies (Abma et al.; Singh and Darroch), but rates are two to dozens of times higher in the U.S. where the decline has been more modest (Figure 9). Broad correlations between decreasing theism and increasing pregnancy and birth are present, with Austria and especially Ireland being partial exceptions. Darroch et al. found that age of first intercourse, number of sexual partners and similar issues among teens do not exhibit wide disparity or a consistent pattern among the prosperous democracies they sampled, including the U.S. A detailed comparison of sexual practices in France and the U.S. observed little difference except that the French tend - contrary to common impression - to be somewhat more conservative (Gagnon et al.)...
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly...If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life" that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted."But will anyone care? No. Expect more and more pleas to the gods during our next election cycle to fix our problems.
I remind myself that, statistically, abuse on par with a mother beating her boyfriend with their baby is a pretty rare. Given the numbers of mothers I've seen who've sold their kids for crack, step-father's who've sexually molested their step-daughters, and estranged boyfriends who've shot their exes on the doorstep of their child's home, it just isn't rare enough.
Anyway, what's really fascinating are the implications of this study. Jonah Lehrer, editor at large for Seed Magazine and, along with Chris Mooney, another candidate for the "Hottest Guys in Science Blogging" calendar that Seed needs to do, argues that this changes our understanding of how porn works.
At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching porn triggers an idea (we start thinking about sex), which then triggers a change in our behavior (we become sexually aroused). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Porn is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.
But this straightforward answer is entirely wrong. Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.
Since I'm running a high-brow site here (no snickering, please,) this also suggests that films, books, fiction in general, isn't pleasing because it creates a representational world but on some level creates a real one for the mind to in habit.
Boom. Interesting, huh?
No? Well, fancy this: if this finding and interpretation continues to play out, consider for a moment the argument that censors make, that seeing disconcerting images is damaging to people, causing them to engage in anti-social or illegal behaviors. Bad logic, right? Well, since mirror neurons are being triggered here, and since those same mirror neurons play a large role in allowing us to do things in the real world as well, are we not teaching/normalizing/encouraging anti-social or illegal behaviors the more people see such imagery? Since the mind can't differentiate between the real and virtual, aren't the censors then right, and we should greatly curtail what is experienced, in the interests of making a better world?
Boom-boom.
Now consider this. Obviously, when watching a movie, a play or even a porno, while we can get carried away with what is going on, we are still quite capable of differentiating between what's real and what is unreal. We may identify with Superman on the screen, but we are quite aware that we are watching a movie, that bullets won't bounce off our chests, and that leaping into the air will only send us crashing to the ground. What else is at work in our brains, what else keeps us grounded as it were? What makes even the most absorbing novel or movie "only a movie," with our sense of the Real still left in tact? Why is it that, much to the consternation of Censors, we pretty much are capable of reading "objectionable" material, and still remain unaffected by it?
As a reminder of the soul shattering effects mental illness has on people, Andrew Martinez, the famous "Naked Guy" of Berkley during the early 1990s, killed himself in jail earlier this week.
Chronic Mental Illness is a tough beast, a bitch to fight, and an adversary you can never quite beat. Reading about Andrew's death is saddening and increases my longing for a day when CMI is no more.
It's not just the SEED folks who are battling the Intelligent Design folks in the With all due respect to the folks at SEED, the battlefield of Intelligent Design isn't in the courts, or the labs, and the school boards. Now the fight has come to my house, the film festival.
At the Tribeca Film Festival, for example, a prominent plant evolutionist jumped into the origins-of-life fray, doing verbal battle with a leading proponent of intelligent design.
Tom Givnish, a botany professor at the University of Wisconsin, sat down with conservative author and intelligent design advocate Jack Cashill and others to discuss, sometimes heatedly, the origins of life and what seems to be a growing schism between faith and science.
Given how trivializing ID is, I suppose "discussion" is too kind a term, yet because of it's lingering prominence in the opinions of over half the American public, it's still fodder for film and ground for discussion afterwards. As most of us know, discussion means the opportunity for a smiling representative of the Simple Simon Story School to popularize their delusions with feel good, "just-so" stories. At Tribecca, the IDers accepted this calling with aplomb, sending Jack Cashill to sing, dance and deceive:
...at the panel, Cashill spoke clearly, using sound bites and a smooth rhetorical style.
His polished approach demonstrates how, despite 150 years of research and a near-universal scientific consensus behind them, evolutionists are losing the public relations battle to intelligent design advocates. Givnish acknowledges that scientists will have trouble mounting a TV-friendly charm offensive.
"(Intelligent design supporters) tell a simple story, one that a 6-year-old can understand," Givnish said. "Scientists have more complicated stories to tell. That doesn't make them wrong."
I'm glad Tom Givnish was there to counter empty rhetoric, and I'm really pleased that the film that served as the jumping off point for the discussion, Flock of Dodos, challenges the ID movement.
But with the dearth of science knowledge and education in the United States, and with the power of movies to tell stories so effectively, I'm concerned at how easy it is for pro-ID films, videos and movies to keep the silly idea alive. ID is about feeling over thought and, for the most part, movies are too. We still haven't had a film that does for the death of ID in media circles what the Dover Decision did for law. Someone really needs to write and shoot one.
Excuse me, I've got to get back to writing. My film shoot is in a little over two weeks and I'm behind schedule.
It's so moving... *TEAR* to find that the youth of today... *SOB* still believe that newspapers and news programs should report the news and not.. *CHOKED CRY* not do endless hype stories because they make for great sound bites and excellent Nielsen numbers. *MASSIVE SOBBING SNOT FLINGING CRY OF ANGUISH.*
After going to the recent TAM event, and listening to one of the presentations presented there about the lack of good data showing any link between heart disease and fat intake, and after reading up on the less than 1% change in cholesterol levels provided by the current statin drugs on the market, I decided I'd just pretty much say fuck it, and stop worrying about a pizza or General Tso's chicken killing me.
Most of the data I was able to find indicated that smoking and being sedentary were the chief statistical, repeatable culprits in increasing heart disease, cancer, and early death. Everything else, every other bit of health advice depending on what foods to eat, what diets to follow and what cholesterol levels to shoot for, just didn't hold up under analysis.
I told a few friends about my conclusions, pointed them towards the same stuff I'd been reading, and then sat down to eat some General Tso's. They said I was nutz, threw away their bread, and hurried outside for a drag on a cigarette before class.
And then in today's New York Times what do I find...
Look, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do drugs -- well, other than chocolate -- and I lift weights with a trainer 3x a week. Because I do lead a more sedentary life, by nature I like to write, read, watch movies and play video games, I'm doing my damnedest to make time for walks on those days I'm not at the gym. Outside of that, I don't think there's a hell of a lot else I can do. Well, I could have picked different parents, but we've all seen how well that works.
One of the clinicians involved in the study remarked ""We, in the scientific community, often give strong advice based on flimsy evidence. That's why we have to do experiments." Keep doing those experiments guys and let me know what you find. Until then, I'm kicking guilt to the curb.
...who seems to like censoring folks he doesn't understand, didn't graduate from college, Rhodes Scholar (and quite the cutie) Nick Anthis has learned.
Through my own investigations I have just discovered that George Deutsch, the Bush political appointee at the heart of administration efforts to censor NASA scientists (most notably to prevent James Hansen from speaking out about global warming), did not actually graduate from Texas A&M University....As an added twist, I have been informed that George Deutsch's resume explicitly states that he earned a B.A. in Journalism from A&M in 2003, so either I'm wrong, or he's lying.
What is it with these guys, anyway? They seem constitutionally inclined to be unthinking idiots.
Look, I don't know Mirecki. All I've read about the case is that he was going to teach the mentioned class, some comments of his to a closed, private listserv that denigrated religion were released publicly and in the hue and cry that resulted, his university cancelled the class.
I also read news excepts that after he was run off the road and beaten up, he drove himself to the hospital and reported things to the police. I don't know anything other than this.
My experience as a (former) Child Protection Social Worker, serving too many beautiful kids, beaten, battered and burned, by beautiful parents with "I could never!" expressions etched on their faces, stapled a B.S. Meter to my soul that, try as I might, I can neither pry off nor turn off. I just don't accept most incidents like this at face value any more. (And when I do, I get burned, burned burned.)
Given the timing of the incident, the remoteness of the encounter, and the fact that Professor Mirecki was fit enough to drive to an ER for care immediately afterwards, that meter, while not wailing a DEFCON IV-the-Missles-are-inbound-"Shall we play a game?" alert, is demanding that the convenient facts be checked before getting out my Monster Burning Torch&trade and marching on the local Kansas Spit & Spew Bait Shop and Flaming Cross Emporium.
Sadly, leaving my rational/skepticism aside, on a the selfish, personal level, I also find myself wanting the above bit of reasoning to be false because I can't stand it to be true: Mirecki's beatings have to have been caused by Fundamentalist dick-heads because if it wasn't, Fundamentalist dick-heads will use the fake claims to verbally beat the rest us.
In reading Dr. Myers post about scenic squid, I found a picture from a "Rick Brant Science Novel" cover. I was a little intrigued, as I'd never heard of the character "Rick Brant" before. Lo and behold, a little Googling led me to Spindrift Island -- the home of Rick Brant.
Seems that Rick Brant was one of those popular teen heroes from the late '50s, cousin to Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys. Brant's claim to fame though was that his tales were grounded in science, history and the geography of the day, designed to encourage the pursuit of knowledge and playing into the science mania of the Cold War 50's.
"The good old days," were never that. I was a kid in the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s, and as fondly as I remember those days, they were by no means perfect. There is though this element of wistfulness when thinking of the 1950s, not for its sexism, homophobia, conformity and fear, but rather for a national treasuring of the pursuit of Knowledge and Science. I know it was couched in Cold War jingoism, but in this day and age when public battles are over just how much superstition we can pour into kids heads, its good to remember that it wasn't always that way.
Once upon a time, we actually cared that kids learn about real things.
We have established scientifically some disquieting facts: (1) human beings have evolved from nonhuman life forms, meaning that (2) at one time we did not exist, and that (3) according to paleontological and astronomical evidence, at some time in the future we shall cease to exist.
Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint, there is no discernible reason that we had to evolve in the first place, and there is no guarantee that we shall continue to evolve successfully; more hominid species have become extinct than have survived. The price of such knowledge has been the gnawing question of whether human existence has genuine meaning if it was constructed with cranes rather than supported by skyhooks, as Daniel Dennett says.
The problem of meaning is easily resolved for those who embrace a preconstructed system of meaning such as religion. However, religion cannot help us find meaning in any honest sense unless it can assimilate the truth about where human beings have come from, and the only real knowledge we have about where we came from we have acquired through science.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that we'll find the courage to face up to the truth contained in that honesty. However, I won't hold my breath.
A spinning we will go/
A spinning we will go/
Hi-Ho the Derrio/
A spinning we will go.
Thank you, thank you. I be here all week. Remember to try the chicken.
*Ack. I messed up. I juggled Ed and Eric's name. Shame on me. I've been reading Ed's page for quite a while now and he'd never say anything as silly as what I first posted here. All apologies.
In the recent upgrade to MT 3.5, about 12 months of entries between 2004-2005 were corrupted. The back-up files still exist. It's just going to take me a while to enter them again. Until then, there are quite a few "gaps" on these archive pages.
In the recent upgrade to MT 3.5, about 12 months of entries between 2004-2005 were corrupted. The back-up files still exist. It's just going to take me a while to enter them again. Until then, there are quite a few "gaps" on these archive pages.
A U.S. spacecraft carrying a robotic rover designed to search for signs of life on Mars arrived safely on Saturday, capping an almost seven-month space journey and dangerous six-minute final plunge through the hostile Martian atmosphere.
I was kinda hoping the boys at NASA might pop the rover over the hill and check in on Beagle 2, but I hear since most of its creators weren't part of the Coalition of the Willing, the idea got nixed at the highest levels.
We know there's an inborn human urge to mate, after all. Love is a mystery, a promise, an arrow from Cupid's bow.Yet recent research suggests that romantic attraction is in fact a primitive, biologically based drive, like hunger or sex, some scientists argue. While lust makes our eye wander, they say, it's the drive for romance that allows us to focus on one particular person, though we often can't explain why. The biology of romance helps account for how we think about passionate love, and explain its insanity: why we might travel cross-country for a single kiss, and plunge into blackest despair if our beloved turns away.
This view of romantic attraction rests on observations of passionate behavior across cultures, studies of animals during courtship and, most recently, findings by scientists studying the human brain. Using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machines to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of early love -- that crazed, can't-think-of-anything-but stage of romance -- scientists have developed some of the first direct evidence that the neural mechanisms of romantic attraction are distinct from those of sexual attraction and arousal.
Our lives are our brains and our brains are our lives. Illuminating or humiliating? I guess that depends on your position regarding souls.
(Just for the record, those are in your head too.)
NEW YORK -- From Mozart to Miles Davis, the harmonies of Western music rewire the brain, creating patterns of neural activity at the confluence of emotion and memory that strengthen with each new melody, research made public Thursday shows.
By monitoring the brains of people listening to classical scales and key progressions, scientists at Dartmouth College glimpsed the biology of the hit-making machinery of popular song. Focusing on the structure of Western music, researchers show how the musical mind hears the flat notes in Flatt and Scruggs, the sharps of the Harmonicats and all five octaves in pop diva Mariah Carey's repertoire.
The flash-dance of these brain circuits, which process the harmonic relationship of musical notes, is shaped by a human craving for melody that drives people to spend more every year on music than on prescription drugs. The circuits center in a brain region that responds equally to the musical patterns of Eminem's hip-hop busta rhymes and Bach's baroque fugues.
"Music is not necessary for human survival, yet something inside us craves it," said Dartmouth music psychologist Petr Janata, who led the global research team. "Our minds have internalized the music."
Whatever the reason, the effect on the individual brain is measurable...
Ohio's Board of Education has adopted new science standards that approve "critical analysis" of evolution in the state's public schools, terminology critics say is code language for creationism.
"These new standards are dangerously vague," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "The Board needs to be on notice that any attempt to sneak creationism in through the backdoor of Ohio's public schools will be met with swift legal resistance."
Lynn noted that the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts have stated over and over again that public schools may not teach religious dogma. While the standards may sound innocuous at first glance, Lynn pointed out that terms like "evidence against evolution" and "critical analysis of evolution" are often used by creationist groups that seek to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools.
What amazes me is that the very people who could care less about the merits of inclusiveness suddenly become its most ardent defenders when that doctrine is applied to the scientific equivalent of sorcery.
Not to content until they too are considered in the League of Backward States, Louisiana moves into the same territory as well.
Update:Andy reports that the Louisiana measure has been defeated.
Homeopathy was pioneered over 200 years ago. Practitioners and patients are convinced it has the power to heal. Today, some of the most famous and influential people in the world, including pop stars, politicians, footballers and even Prince Charles, all use homeopathic remedies. Yet according to traditional science, they are wasting their money.
In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Democritus postulated the existence of atoms, indivisible particles of matter that formed the basis of all reality. Although none of his writings have survived, many of his views were taken up and refined by Epicurus and his followers. Ancient atomic theory reached its zenith in Rome shortly before the birth of Christ, when Lucretius published his magnum opus, "De rerum natura "("On the Nature of Things"), possibly the only epic poem about theoretical physics. Two millennia later, some of the 20th century's greatest scientific minds, including a young Albert Einstein, finally succeeded in conclusively establishing the existence of atoms. Of course, the particles turned out to be rather different from Democritus' conception, but the episode remains one of the most remarkable stories in the history of ideas.
Tom Siegfried would consider Democritus to be only among the first in a long and distinguished lineage: brilliant minds who foresaw discoveries well before they actually happened. These "prediscoveries" form the basis of his new book, "Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time." And although it only alludes briefly to Democritus, this frequently fascinating book is so crammed with information that the omission seems negligible.
In practice, calculating probabilities in quantum cosmology using the full path integral is formidably difficult and an approximation has to be used. This is known as the semiclassical approximation because its validity lies somewhere between that of classical and quantum physics. In the semiclassical approximation one argues that most of the four dimensional geometries occuring in the path integral will give very small contributions to the path integral and hence these can be neglected. The path integral can be calculated by just considering a few geometries that give a particularly large contribution. These are known as instantons. Instantons don't exist for all choices of boundary three geometry; however those three geometries that do admit the existence of instantons are more probable than those that don't. Therefore attention is usually restricted to three geometries close to these.
Remember that the path integral is a sum over geometries with four spatial dimensions. Therefore an instanton has four spatial dimensions and a boundary that matches the three geometry whose probability we wish to compute. Typical instantons resemble (four dimensional) surfaces of spheres with the three geometry slicing the sphere in half. They can be used to calculate the quantum process of universe creation, which cannot be described using classical general relativity. They only usually exist for small three geometries, corresponding to the creation of a small universe. Note that the concept of time does not arise in this process. Universe creation is not something that takes place inside some bigger spacetime arena - the instanton describes the spontaneous appearance of a universe from literally nothing. Once the universe exists, quantum cosmology can be approximated by general relativity so time appears.
People have found different types of instantons that can provide the initial conditions for realistic universes. The first attempt to find an instanton that describes the creation of a universe within the context of the `no boundary' proposal was made by Stephen Hawking and Ian Moss. The Hawking-Moss instanton describes the creation of an eternally inflating universe with `closed' spatial three-geometries....
Despite the seemingly ubiquitous admonition to "drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day" (with an accompanying reminder that beverages containing caffeine and alcohol do not count),rigorous proof for this counsel appears to be lacking....No scientific studies were found in support of 8 x 8. Rather, surveys of food and fluid intake on thousands of adults of both genders - analyses of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals - strongly suggest that such large amounts are not needed because the surveyed persons were presumably healthy and certainly not overtly ill. This conclusion is supported by published studies showing that caffeinated drinks (and, to a lesser extent, alcoholic beverages) may indeed be counted toward the daily total, as well as by the large body of published experiments that attest to the precision and effectiveness of the osmoregulatory system for maintaining water balance."
So my several Cokes a day habit is not only healthy, but scientifically sound. Yeah, buddy!
A particular type of nerve cell, known as a glial cell, has been fingered as a cause of schizophrenia. The theory could help explain an abundance of disparate evidence for what triggers the disease.
Genes linked to schizophrenia and glial cells
Glial cells play a crucial role in the early development of the brain, and in adults they help support neurons, as well as fight infection. That makes them a prime suspect for involvement in schizophrenia, which affects one in 100 people, says Irving Gottesman at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis...
For example, one possible trigger is the human herpes virus-6, which targets glial cells and infects almost every child before the age of two.
Schizophrenia is one of the worst diseases out there. It's not that it robs you of your life, but that it also destroys you. Little about yourself can be trusted as the negative symptoms causes voices, visions and disturbances of thought that make simple discernment of what is happening and what isn't impossible. It's a horrible thing to watch happen to people.
But can you imagine that a simple inoculation at 6 months of age could knock the bugger out forever? I know, there is no current ARV for Herpes-6 let alone a preventative vaccine, but our work with preventing HIV makes such a dream possible.
Lots of "ifs" but if this link between the virus, destroyed cells and schizophrenia hold true, damn. We might be able to kill that little nasty bit of RNA induced misery off, forever.
They are big, black, and triangular. In UFO folklore, they are proof-positive that planet Earth is a rest stop for joyriding, but road-weary, extraterrestrials. A just-released study by the National Institute for Discovery Science, based in Las Vegas, sheds new light on the dark and mysterious craft. They offer a more down-to-earth hypothesis.
In other words, despite the absence of fossil evidence that Darwin's "iron-clad logic" tells us should exist, there has to be an evolutionary explanation. There just has to be!
While recent experimentation -- detailed later in the article -- reveals that rapid evolutionary change may be theoretically possible, the actual fossil evidence that such rapid evolutionary change actually occurred is missing.
The logic seems to move as follows: i) macroevolution is a fact; ii) macroevolution happens gradually; iii) oops! some species suddenly appear on the fossil record, and (despite our best efforts) we've been unable to find fossil evidence of a gradual process; iv) consequently, macroevolution must sometimes happen suddenly.
Will a Curve reader who's an evolutionary biologist (or paleontologist) please tell me if I'm getting this reasoning wrong and if so, how? Is this presumptuous logical leap not, in fact, being made? Is there actual evidence -- aside from the fact that species appeared suddenly -- that macroevolution can occur suddenly?
I want to be educated. I truly do. But until I am, I will continue to point out the obvious logical fallacies in mainstream reporting on evolutionary processes.
While I'm not an expert, I have a general understanding of the subject. Plus, great resources like Talk Origins help to fill in the gaps!
CC is looking at evolution as a totally complete, no need for further investigation, all tied up in a bow solution -- which it is far from. We've been looking into the subject for a little over a hundred years. While we've turned up a wealth of information, we haven't answered all of the how's yet.
Darwin was the first (perhaps the second, depending on how you'd like to date) to propose the origin of species through natural selection. His argument, steeped heavily in observation and yes, through some iron clad logic, pointed out how spices in the aggregate and amongst individuals were locked into competition for resources and reproduction, and how, through that competition, species changed over time. He formed the general framework on which further exploration occurred.
While even he didn't get all the details right, he put forth the idea that species are not constant and that there are examples of their ongoing change as well as physical artifacts of other species that didn't survive this process.
As the years have gone on, and based in this model, an overwhelming amount of confirming evidence for both macro and micro evolution -- transitional fossils, morphological changes between apes and humans and genetic decoding -- have been uncovered and learned from.
Some opinions, based on available evidence, have had to be reconsidered (such as dinosaurs going from cold blooded lizards to warm blooded avian descendants) in light of new evidence that calls into question the assumptions behind the original, reasoned opinion. Generally though, Darwin's central thesis on common ancestors for all species now in existence, has continued to hold.
If you've ever read a good mystery story, often the detective gets close to the solution because the pieces of the puzzle she has on hand makes a pretty strong case as to the guilt or innocence of the suspect. However, when a new piece of information comes to light, it can radically alter the understanding of all of those pieces and how they fit together. Doesn't change the fact that the central mystery -- like a murder -- occurred, but it does change the notion of how exactly it happened.
In the case of the skull fragment discovered a few weeks back, it didn't throw out the fact that evolution has happened. It did change our understanding of how it occurred, pushing back many of our assumptions about the origins of human ancestors as well as filling in a missing piece of the story.
Punctuated Equilibrium, developed by Gould and Eldredge, was a way of pointing out that species seem to change suddenly and rapidly, much faster than the slow and gradual change that Darwin first proposed.
They pointed out that these changes seem to correlate quite strongly with natural disasters or other, cataclysmic changes in the environment of species. While it is sometimes true that some spices change slowly, it is this fast change that much better explains the fossil record uncovered since Darwin's time.
There is still some debate on the whole subject of punctuated equilibria vs. gradualism, that is a details question, one that will only be solved through further investigation and research. The broad strokes of evolution --actually not really that broad -- still hold.
Dr. James Whitworth and his associates attribute these results to "vigorous and continuous countrywide AIDS education and condom promotion activities." Previous reports have documented such changes as increase in age at first sex in boys, increased age at marriage for girls, a decline in the number of unmarried pregnant teenagers, and a three-fold increase in the ever use of condoms.
To read the rest of the story...
....you'll have to join MedScape. Generally though, it points out that those who claim condoms don't work, or that Uganda has solved their AIDS crisis by a return to "traditional morality" (whose tradition exactly?) are being deliberately misleading in order to further their own, narrow and sectarian view.
But wait, Gay-boy, aren't you doing the same thing? You are furthering your own view!
True. I am. Yet I'm fairly certain I'm not doing it dishonestly and by misleading people as to what data or other experience says. Lynn, who disagrees with my beliefs on many fronts:
I believe that, whatever consenting adults should legally be entitled to do, a Christian ideal of sexuality should involve a fuller connection with your partner than simple consent.
still points out that:
But Jody is dead right about the medical facts about condoms. They work. They make a difference. Not 100% difference, sure, but enough of a difference that, by any rational medical standard, people who aren't choosing a monogamous relationship with someone known to be HIV negative would be pretty darn well advised to use them. It does Christianity no service to pretend otherwise, and to talk as if condoms were thoroughly worthless.
Any case for chastity is better built on other arguments than the worthlessness of condoms.
We humans will never agree 100% on anything. That's part of our charm. (Except when trying to decide on a dinner restaurant.) When it comes to invisible sky gods, we do even worse ("No, no! Eight angels dancing! Eight angels dancing!")
But our own investigations into HIV and AIDS show pretty clearly that condoms, while not fool proof, are the best protection against STDs available. Claiming the contrary isn't just being mistaken but actually being malicious-- even for the "best of reasons."
One of the things I've taken to telling fundamentalists, is that teaching people how to use condoms keeps them alive longer. Keeping them alive longer gives them more time to listen to your religious views and thus a greater chance of being "saved." Getting them saved is what it's all about, right?
I mean, if you are going to make such a huge effort to get people saved, it would be nice if there were actually people there to save.
Of course, it's the idea that human beings themselves are products of evolution that provokes most of the attacks on evolution. Such rejections leave most scientists mystified."The scientific narrative of the history of life is as exciting and imbued with mystery as any other telling of that story," says Knoll. The evidence against evolution amounts to little more than "I can't imagine it," Ewald adds. "That's not evidence. That's just giving up."
