He might be getting senile. He is at the right age. However Jimmy Carter isn't by himself in his view. Several senators have said the same thing, and Maureen Dowd just wrote an editorial in the NYtimes saying the exact words practically. You might think these people are grossly wrong but senile doesn't follow.
You have to understand what logic is capable of, and I am perfectly aware of all the self-referential, defeatist and absurd sentences that arise in an imperfect, archaic grammar. This is why logic is often explored using symbols and algebra, but we have to make due with the tools we have. And that is precisely what logic is: a tool. Logic cannot prove anything, nor can is discover anything new. It can merely show that something is inconsistent or contradictory. It's therefore a desirable thing to understand in abstract in order to evaluate internal consistency, but there is a point when it becomes pedantic.
I concede (though I never explicitly claimed otherwise) that many sentences are logically impossible or paradoxical. It would be foolish to deny that. But, like in the law, there is a useful distinction between the letter and the intent -- that is to say, even though "The local bookstore sells all classes of books" is literally nonsensical, it's counter-productive not to recognize what the person who said that meant, in that perhaps the bookstore contains many genres and types of books.
The deconstructionists have been post-modern opportunists by taking up the literalist, purist position of the logic inherent in language. They have pointed out that language itself makes it impossible to be not self-referential to some extent, and thus circular. Similarly I could quite easily "deconstruct" virtually anything you have said so far -- no matter how axiomatic -- into a contradictory trail-mix. Luckily I am not so nihilistic, and recognize that the subjectivity and limits of language and logic arise because of human psychology, and not because reality is ineffable.
I hope that answer is satisfactory. If we are going to continue might I suggest creating a new debate or area to debate because right now our discussion is buried.
I completely agree that teachers who are excellent at teaching deserve to earn more than teachers who are incompetent. This doesn't in any way conflict with scarcity. Indeed, it is somewhat the whole point of scarcity, or "replace-ability." Construction workers get paid little compared to a plumber, because virtually anyone can competently hold up a stop sign, and the people who tend to hold up stop signs don't have better, higher paying alternatives. Thus there is no incentive to pay construction workers exorbitantly because if they turn the job down virtually any one else is an effective candidate for replacement, or, in other words: potential construction workers are not scarce. Plumbers on the other hand, are more scarce and harder to replace because it requires a substantial amount of training, experience, and expertise. Scarcity pricing can occasionally create some perverse outcomes, like in Hollywood where famous actors get paid tens of millions to do relatively little work precisely because that particular actor or actress is irreplaceable, or scarce. There is, after all, only one Angeline Jolie.
Teachers, as I've already pointed out, are not scarce. Often there are several for any single teaching position. What is arguably scarce are effective teachers, and a legitimate argument could be made that they deserve higher pay relative to their colleagues because they are harder to replace.
Often, however, people can get muddle up with the notion of just prices, or the "just price fallacy". They resent that lawyers and accountants can make hundreds of thousands for fairly simple, intellectual work, where as other workers make much less for often (literally) back breaking labour. It's fundamentally a misunderstanding of the very valuable and desirable function of markets to price and allocate goods, services, and labour.
There are many examples of what happens when the above isn't followed that should lead anyone to the same conclusion. The Fair Trade movements thought that the price of a cup of coffee was too low for the poor people in Columbia and Ecuador picking the beans so naturally they thought "we should just pay them more for their coffee!" In many cities around the world mayors noticed the discrepancy between the income of the poor and the cost of rent within the city, so naturally they thought "we should just cap how much you can charge for rent!" Farmers and Agricultural Firms in America were struggling so naturally lawmakers thought "we should just subsidize them!"
These initiatives respectively have created massive stockpiles of unwanted coffee, huge shortages in housing, and suicidal Mexican farmers who can't compete with cheap US crops. In every case they have tended to harm those who were supposed to be helped.
Show me where I claimed that bankers wages were determined by their scarcity (or more accurately, their replace-ablility). I am no expert on why bankers and CEOs make so much, but that's irrelevant because I never claimed that they were paid based on replace-ability. More often I suspect they are highly paid because the institutions they run a) allow them to set their own wages or b) let them tie their wages/bonuses to other things, like share-value or profitability, which don't necessarily reflect their own ingenuity.
As for teachers, it is my position that teachers are highly over paid, which creates negative social costs on several levels.
First, to establish that they are overpaid. http://www.youtube.com/
a) they make more, hourly, than many other important jobs including architecture and chemistry, and live quite comfortably
b) they have lengthy holidays which they could work during if they chose
c) they have great job security (it is virtually impossible to be fired as a teacher)
d) and most importantly, markets don't clear. There is a surplus of people looking for teaching jobs then jobs which are available. When the price of an object is based on scarcity (supply/demand) the market clears ie. 1 teacher for every 1 job. In Chicago, for ex., there are 12 for every 1 job. This is important for a variety of reasons. Not the least are all the prospective teachers who, after receiving their teaching degree, are in debt and can't find work. Now there is a group of people who are under paid.
Scarcity pricing is the only just and sustainable way to price things, including labor.
I'm baffled at how a sentence that barely contained two propositions could in anyway be logically inconsistent. At worst you could accuse me of tautology for the "to judge you need a fair trial" remark, but as useless as pointing that out would be, it even wouldn't be necessarily be true as trial is qualified, and at any rate the whole thing is self evident.
I will in-turn demonstrate your failure to reason.
I'm genuinely curious. If you so fancy yourself such an Aquinas, pray tell.
The methodology for inferring common descent has broken down. Proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution are forced into reasoning that similarity implies common ancestry...
You misunderstand the evidence. Similarities are important hints, but they aren't the whole of it. Consider ERVs. ERVs are dormant retroviruses that, like HIV, essentially locks itself in the DNA of its host. The difference with HIV is that ERVs by definition don't do anything. They're duds. However, once an animal gets an ERV the "marker" on its DNA will, along with the rest of its genes, get passed onto its offspring.
For example, suppose our common ancestor with chimps had, from its forebears, had within it 6 ERVs randomly placed along its DNA. ERVs can be removed by mutations but in general they don't because if they don't harm the species, removing it would not be favored or unfavored by natural selection. So after this ancestor splits off in its evolution, one branch becoming modern chimps, the other becoming modern humans, in theory both the chimps and the humans should retain these genetic markers, "ERVs" in the same spots along their DNA. Could it be a coincidence? Well, as we've all heard from our enthusiastic biology teachers, our genetic code is such that it could fill bookshelves with all the necessary volumes. There is, for anyone ERV, 3,000,000,000 (3 billion) bases it could integrate with -- and it does so randomly. The chances that there would even be ONE match up is extremely improbably, let alone a handful, let alone dozens, let alone hundreds.
This isn't just theory, nor is this just a potential. ERVs are very real, and humans and chimps share many more than 6. So do all related species, and it is just one irrefutable proof of common ancestry. There are many, some even more profound. Scientists aren't stupid.
What is 'Capitalism' to you? I think you're confusing it with classical liberalism, which is merely one mode of capitalism. Keynes was a capitalist, you know. Sweden is sometimes falsely labeled by American commentators as socialist, mainly because it's highly unionized, progressively taxed, and boasts higher income equality than the former Soviet Union. But that's false. Sweden is a high growth capitalist economy, that to the chagrin of the old liberals happens to have embraced the welfare state. That has no contradiction with capitalism. It's just a different way to do things than what is taught in the U.S.A.
The way you frame capitalism does yourself no good. It sets up capitalism as an all or nothing system of unfettered exuberance and economic free-for-alls, and trivializes any moral qualms that people may have about it. Moore, thus, isn't criticizing "Capitalism," per-se. He is criticizing the specific mode of capitalism that the U.S. uses and claims to be the only model that counts. The American model, Moore would point out, is one that bails out failing incompetent bankers who's bonuses exceed profits; that rewards consumption, debt, and speculation over even modest saving; that is irrationally anti-government, anti-tax, and anti-democratic; stagnates wages, and cultivates job insecurity; that doesn't recognize moral hazard when its staring it in its face; and tends toward asymmetry and coercive, 'to big to fail' monopoly. It only creates more leftists if you convince people that the above is the only way of doing capitalism! And that is the point. There are different ways of doing things.
To give one very clear example: US economic inequality has been tending toward the unequal for decades. This, some leftists argue, is the very nature of capitalism! Capitalism, in order to create wealth, also happens to create massive, self re-enforcing economic and thus social inequalities. The leftists, you should know, are wrong. All other major capitalist economies have greater or equal growth levels while still having a comparatively equal distribution of those gains, and some of them rank higher in economic freedom to boot. America is the exception. So America is, in consensus terms, the outlier in the history of capital! By making that clear will relieve the dis-ease felt by those unlearned in what markets can be if given the right structure, and create more friends to capital than enemies.
Moore doesn't hate capitalism. The whole point of the movie is not to suggest that communism is the proper system, but to show the limits of capitalism to self regulate and the extent of corporate welfare. From what I understand, at his most radical all Moore ever supported was larger social safety nets and more corporate accountability.
No. The premiere reviews weren't spectacular so I'll probably just end up waiting until it's online.
That is certainly no argument from which I would infer you have satisfactorily learned logic. Reading, studying, and being a big fan of any subject, are not the equivalent of knowing any given subject, competently.
That's self-evident. To point that out isn't to be making a profound point, it's simply a red-herring disguised as captain obvious. Can we please just actually talk about the subject instead of meander through this rhetoric and logically pomposity.
Which is it, either my replies are fallacious or they are not fallacious? Are you using the word seem to suggest your uncertainty of the qualities of my replies?
Would you prefer if I said, "it is demonstrably the case that you are being illogical" instead of "you seem to be the illogical one," or instead would you prefer that we quit these juvenile games of semantics.
TU QUOQUE
You strike me as someone who just read a pamphlet on logical fallacies and hasn't yet felt the pangs of their diminishing returns in evaluating discourse. What you quote is not a Tu Quoque, though it wouldn't matter greatly if it was. A proper example of Tu Quoque is best summarized in the maxim "two wrongs don't make a right." Its the point that, if someone criticizes you for say, planting pipe bombs, it doesn't negate the immorality of planting pipe bombs to say that the fellow accusing you is guilty as well. What you quoted, conversely, is me saying in short that I will engage with you in any debate on the condition that you are open to changing your mind. Any productive dialog, you would agree, requires an open mind -- if only a crack.
This is your first challenge: How can one explore unfamiliar ways of thinking? Please explain.
I was hoping your challenge would be related to biological evolution, but if we must play these troll games: Exploring unfamiliar ways of thinking simply means to consider new ideas with the necessity of an open mind -- because we can't judge a priori the validity of a dialectic, belief or piece of evidence without first giving it a fair trial.
Now here's your challenge: Drop the rhetoric and make a substantive argument, either positively, or disputing something related to evolution I've said in past posts.
You completely misunderstand what evolution is. There is not a single fossil that isn't transitional in some sense. However transitional fossils aren't like Kirk Cameron's infamous "craco-duck". They're all fully function, unique species that are adapted to their current environment. Early birds, which are descended from dinosaurs, evolved proto-feathers -- not as a "transition" to flight, but as a real time adaptation to the cold weather the ice age brought. It was only later that new circumstances adapted those insulating, hollow feathers to flight. Thus you won't find in the fossil record a half chicken, half t-rex. Instead you find a gradually changing morphology.
We have legged whales, for example, not because evolution had produced in the interim a half-cow-like creature and a half-orca-like creature, but because it was a uniquely adapted, fully functioning species, descended from a land mammal that had slowly adapted for water. As evolution further tailored it for water, legs grew less significant, however whales retail a pelvis and they even have deactivated genes for legs.
Similarly there are species of Salamander that blur the lines between salamander and snake. They are long and narrow, have defunct legs and so slither over the ground. Yet again they were fully functional, and represented gradual shift towards the serpentine, without any freakish hybrid.
Returning to birds, it is well known that chickens have deactivated genes for serrated teeth. Horses have deactivated genes for extra toes, and we know from the fossil record that early horses had more toes. The examples simply abound.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/
Follow this lineage for the evolution of birds, plus the changing description of each.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/
Follow this lineage for whales. It's fascinating.
You ask the question: What is the natural process that writes genetic code. The answer that we've known to be the case for well over 150 years is natural selection. Once you understand the chemical nature of genetics, and evolution of DNA itself from RNA, natural selection really is as easy as water flows down hill. That is: Once you have replication with variation (something that occurs with basic chemistry) natural selection end up saying the following: that when something replicates and is better suited for further replication it will tend to replicate better. It's really a no-brainer. You further assert that natural forces can do none of this. I beg to differ! It's been observed not only indirectly through our DNA and the fossil record, but also directly, in laboratory experiments -- from every kind of bacteria you can imagine to small animals and insects.
Why, just the other day I read an article on a long experiment with fruit flies to give them increased longevity to better understand the aging process. The hypothesis was that organisms die of old age because after they've mated there is no natural selection pressure against it. Therefore, by introducing an environment that rewards the organism that has mates later in life, you will slowly evolve a species with an extended longevity. That is just what they did, and now there are labs with fruit flies living to the human equivalent of say 500 years! (I don't know the exact equivalency but it is a very long time).
So it comes down to not just denying overwhelming indirect evidence (plus the irrefutable like ERVs), but also denying direct observation! Instead creationists invent terms like 'micro-evolution' vs 'macro-evolution', which in actual evolutionary biology don't exist. That's like believing in inches but not feet. Nevertheless, the so called 'micro-evolution' is still 'writing genetic code,' albeit the equivalence of new words and sentences, whereas I guess 'macro-evolution' would be a paragraph or a chapter. Look, there has been over a century of debate and questioning on evolution, and none of what you said wasn't already addressed in the first edition of The Origin of Species. There has also been over a century of profound and overwhelming research -- to the point where you can find detailed papers on the evolution of nearly any animal! -- that if you ignored it you would be doing a great disservice to yourself and mankind.
I've personally studied logic in school and in my spare time by reading Russel, Popper and just basic logic primers. I also am a big fan of Skeptic Magazine and debunking, both of which demand a keen understanding of fallacy.
On the contrary, it is your replies that seem to me to be fallacious. From false dichotomies to unsupported inferences, you worsen your hypocrisy by being incredibly condescending and dismissive.
I'll gladly accept any challenge you off me and without the highfalutin patronage -- on the one condition that you are actually open to expanding your knowledge and exploring unfamiliar ways of thinking. If you aren't then it will only me an exercise in pretense.
The female body. (It depends of course on the specs, but when it's a good one nothing can surpass it)
The argument that NOAA deserves the higher budget because its research is more practical and applicable to us earthlings is very appealing to me, however I see three problems with it.
1. NASA's projects are just far, far more expensive and capital intensive than anything NOAA does; and NOAA can live much easier on its smaller diet than NASA ever could.
2. NASA has a much wider scope of interests. While I'm sure NOAA has produced many fantastic things there is really only so much you can study about the ocean and atmosphere until you end up just refining what you already know. NASA on the other hand has a seemingly infinite horizon. In the one area of robotics, for example, NASA is no doubt substantially under budgeted compared to the enormity of potential robotics holds.
3. It may not be true that NOAA actually produces the most practical science. NASA's raison d'etre may be lofty but their innovations are not. From communication satellites to the cochlear implant, a lot of what we take for granted has been inspired by NASA.
We see it as an institution that spent billions of our dollars to send man to the moon for the only apparent reason to see if we could. Instead we should see it as a hub of innovation, exploring bottomless topics like physics and cosmology, synthetics and ergonomics. Hell, NOAA depends on NASA. Is NASA, after all, not responsible for much of the hurricane and climate data NOAA lives on? Did NASA not make huge contributions to ending ozone depletion; and are they not doing the brunt of the research on solving and measuring global climate change? The view that NASA is just some mars roving waste-of-resources is utterly false.
Excellent post andsoccer, in contraposition to lawncares babble. The only part I would nit pick at is the very first sentence. I don't think the existence of phenomena like horizontal gene transfer necessarily make the term Darwinism obsolete. While I would whole heartily agree that Evolutionary Biology would be a much better term, Darwinism is in its normal sense used to mean 'natural selection' -- and it is undeniably the case that whether the adaptation was an internal mutation or some sort of purloining from another organism, it ends up coming down to whether that amended organism will survive or parish.
Darwin only spoke of variation. The mechanism of variation was to him a matter incident to be determined by future generations with improved technologies, as you mentioned.
Again, it was hard to tell just to whom you were directing that at, but if it's me I'm frankly confused. I didn't say anything arrogant at all.
If it was for me, I'd still like to know what your objections to darwinism are so I can consider them, and maybe in the future have a formal debate.
who are you talking to? If it's me I'd love to debate you on virtually anything.
No. Michael was born black. An Albino has to be born white. MJ turned white because of a disorder that he developed later in life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitiligo
I saw the wink but I was just making sure ;)
Recentness is technically irrelevant. Your genetic make up is a basically random half of your fathers make up and a random half of your mothers. Which genes you are more likely to inherit has to do with how dominate that gene is. How dominate or recessive a gene is has to do with intrinsic factors with the alleles.
For example, it's not the case that an albino has inherited genes of a pale ancestor, as some mistakenly believe. It occurs when the two genes you get from your parents both happen to be the recessive one. If your mom and dad are both black, they actually each have two genes each for skin colour (one for each of their own parents) where the black gene is either the only option (their two possible genes happened to be the same) or their black gene is dominate (when paired again another gene for skin colour it tends to win out). Suppose they both have this latter kind. That means your dad has this pair for skin color: B+R (black plus recessive) and your mom has this pair: B+R
Out of those 4, you will get one from each parent. If you get B+B, you can only be black. If you get B+R, B dominates R so you can only be black. If you get R+R you might get unlucky and inherit a non-functional gene. What this means is that you won't be black. You won't be 'white' either. You literally lack a functioning gene for skin colour expressed as a lack of melanin pigment.
So you see how recentness is irrelevant. Those recessive genes may be incredibly old, or they be recent mutations. Furthermore, the fact that you have two parents with blue eyes doesn't make blue eyes more recent. Who knows? They may also both have the gene for green eyes too! Its unlikely for the child to have green eyes because out of these 4 out comes, B,G G,B B,B G,G only one produces green eyes. This isn't doing the odds justice because it's already very unlikely that both your parents recessive genes will be green. Dad's may be hazel. If that's the case, and hazel is dominate over green but not blue, it's impossible to get green eyes: B,B = blue. B,G = blue. B,H = Blue. H,G = Hazel! Regardless of how new or old that gene is.
I've already hinted at how simplified this is. It's actually why more complicated, especially with eye colour, where your eye colour may end up being determined by 6 or 7 unrelated genes, and all their possible combos.
The guy who wrote this article is falling prey to one of the most common misconceptions about Darwinian evolution: That it's optimizing.
Evolution is NOT optimizing. The examples about antler size are a text book illustration of this. In game theory it's called a "race to the bottom" and it is the cause of all the diversity you see around us. Take the example of trees. Have you ever wondered why trees are so damn large? It must be a huge drain on the system, and an incredibly tall order to fill. Why in the world would evolution make them so cumbersome?
The answer is the race to the bottom. Imagine a tree's hypothetical short ancestors in a field. They are all competing for sunlight. Suppose they are all 3 feet tall. If a mutant tree is born that makes it 4 feet tall it will tend to have more success than its cousins and eventually its 4 foot gene will proliferate and now all the trees are 4 feet tall. But look -- they're all on an even playing field again, and any advantage is lost. The years go by and another outlier emerges, pushing 5 feet tall. Once again that gene proliferates and now all the trees are 5 feet tall. This will continue until the species settles into what is known as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy. In the trees case it is when its current environment simply won't permit it to get any bigger. Now you have a field of 100 foot trees that are enormously inefficient, and no individual tree is better for it. Even if it is most economical for all the trees to be the same height, unfortunately evolution doesn't work this way. It isn't optimizing. Put simply, what is rational for the individual tree is collectively self defeating for the species. This is actually a fulfillment of Darwinian theory because it contradicts "group evolution". If the tree wanted to optimize as a species it would just be a thin organic ooze on the surface of the earth.
Take another classic example: Peacocks. Picture the following contest between two peacocks, one with a short tail and one with a longer one. If they both have the same tale they both end up having 2 offspring and living the same length of time. However, if one grows a tale that is slightly longer and more impressive, the balance shifts. Long Tail now has 4 offspring, but because he's slower he ends up dying younger than short tale. Evolution only cares about offspring, though, so Short Tale ends up going extinct and Long Tail takes over. Once long tail is the norm any advantage it gave the original long tail is lost, because they're all the same again. So it goes back to the 2 offspring each arrangement, only now they live much shorter lives. Woops! If only evolution had foresight.
His other arguments are a little stupider. First, no one serious these days thinks Africans are less intelligent. 99.999% of our brains evolution happened before anyone even left the continent, and modern genome research has shown that racial difference are superficial.
Furthermore, a common misconception is that all visible differences amongst people or other animals must have an adaptive use. This is false. Random mutation is, well, random, and variation that occurs which is neither useful nor bad will stay. It might proliferate simply because it coincided with an actually useful mutation, or it might just be white noise. Why do Native Americans have dark, straight hair? Because they do. There isn't necessarily a reason. This doesn't in anyway refute Darwinism, and in fact is perfectly consistent with it.
It might be more convincing if the arguments he was disputing weren't being made by a biology-illiterate "racial-realist".
No. Al-Qaeda would forge on without him, as they have already. And the Taliban wouldn't give it a second thought, as they're completely independent of bin Laden with completely different beliefs and MO.
What are you talking about? How could crippling the Taliban or Al-Qaeda ever not be the win? It's the whole point. Osama is a personality, he doesn't exert influence anymore, and truth be told is probably already dead. Muslim Totalitarianism, religious like Al-Qaeda or political like the Taliban, is the enemy.
Marriage isn't of ethical consideration. It's a fairly arbitrary and diverse custom that changes from culture to culture.
There is simply nothing immoral about two competent people having consensual sex. There are gray areas if the two people are very young but that falls under the criteria of competency.
Adultery, or more correctly, 'cheating' can be unethical in certain circumstances, however. Not because it breaks any sacred bond, but because it's a betrayal of trust and thus something like a lie. Adultery isn't necessarily immoral for the following reason: Suppose your marriage is forced or arranged, and neither partner is emotionally invested. Adultery might be acceptable in this case because there is no 'cheating' involved.
