Telling that you respond to my tiny, eight word comment, and not to the excellent, more verbose comments of BRM and GSF.

You compared/related two completely different things. While new influenza vaccines are required every year because of new strains constantly evolving, the influenza vaccine doesn't cause these new strains. Yes, science can indeed come back to bite us in the ass, but, so far, vaccines haven't, certainly not in the way antibiotics have. P&T never claimed vaccines were perfect (in fact, no one had claimed it when you raised this red herring). They are simply espousing the ridiculousness of the anti-vaccine movement when taken against the incredible amount of good vaccines have done for mankind, even if the claims of said movement were true. They weren't defending a thesis. They were simply, and succinctly, making a "big picture" comparison of universally known vaccine benefits and claimed vaccine detriments.

BTW, has anybody heard anything new as far as this research is concerned? I damn near cried when I watched this talk. It just blew me away. Then, recently, I read this, which seemed to be something similar. Is quorum sensing just smell?>> ^Yogi:

I never said it was a vaccine. Did you see how I started a new sentence...and I put an "even" there after the ellipsis because it's a different subject related to the vaccine subject. In other words sometimes our science tends to come back and bite us in the ass.

>> ^Fletch:

Penicillin is not a vaccine. It's an antibiotic.>> ^Yogi:
Soooo Vaccinations are perfect? I don't buy it....even penicillin is coming back to bite us in the ass.
EDIT: I should point out that I never got vaccinations and I'm healthy as a horse...a horse thats very healthy.



I never said it was a vaccine. Did you see how I started a new sentence...and I put an "even" there after the ellipsis because it's a different subject related to the vaccine subject. In other words sometimes our science tends to come back and bite us in the ass.

>> ^Yogi:

Soooo Vaccinations are perfect? I don't buy it....even penicillin is coming back to bite us in the ass.
EDIT: I should point out that I never got vaccinations and I'm healthy as a horse...a horse thats very healthy.


1. Penicillin is an antibiotic, not a vaccine. (Whoops, looks like I'm not the only one to point this out.) Are you against medical science and progress as a whole? Too fancy for ya?

2. Correlation is not causation... I thought everyone could grasp that concept by now. Seriously.

>> ^Yogi:

even penicillin is coming back to bite us in the ass.

How is it biting us in the ass?

At most, some strains of bacteria develop an immunity to antibiotics, so those particular antibiotics are less effective on those strains.

Resistant strains aren't stronger than normal strains, they're just harder to kill with antibiotics. How is that worse than not using antibiotics to begin with?

Penicillin is not a vaccine. It's an antibiotic.>> ^Yogi:

Soooo Vaccinations are perfect? I don't buy it....even penicillin is coming back to bite us in the ass.
EDIT: I should point out that I never got vaccinations and I'm healthy as a horse...a horse thats very healthy.

>> ^ghark:

there is some interesting and scary stuff on the website this links to:
e.g. raids on farmers for selling raw milk:
http://www.grist.org/article/food-five-tips-for-s
urviving-a-raid-on-your-farm-or-food-club/P1
America: You can do what you want here, but if you sell raw milk we will raid your property and hold your family at gun point while we look around.


Thanks for the link.

I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I really have to wonder sometimes what the hell is going on.

I used to work on a dairy farm, which is a polite way of saying a place where five thousand Holstein cows are crammed together in a five-acre lot, wallowing in their own shit day and night. They're pumped full of hormones (for production) and antibiotics (because they lay around in shit all day).

The "Got Milk?" people are...a pretty big thing. Lots of pull on the state and federal level.

And they don't like competition.

(side note: of course, nine out of ten dairy farmers are staunch Republicans, and yet, ten out of ten of those farmers receive hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in government subsidies thanks to the "Got Milk?" lobby)

Profit also allows this website to exist. It gives us food at a lower price, allows for people to travel the world at reasonable fairs, allows people to raise their standard of living, the widespread adoption of antibiotics, the information revolution, amazon.com, ebay, slashdot, google. All exist because of the profit motive. There is a difference between one who wants to provide a service that people want and are willing to pay for than people who conspire with governments to make sure their needs are met before all others. This isn't a problem with profits, but corruption.

Re: ^ Laura

Yes, it seems excessive and it would be criminal/malpractice in the USA.

However, "Most things they end up taking the tonsils out for can be cured with antibiotics" is entirely false (not to mention dangerous to claim)

That's the largest i think I've seen in one of these videos.

I'm kinda surprised they're just doing it at home getting drunk.

Dude, you have a huge infected hole in your arm - you need that wound properly cleaned, dressed and sanitized and then you need a course of antibiotics.

Sorry berticus, and dag, but based on the abstracts of those two studies, neither of them refute the points I was making. The second study does not discuss body hair. The first study discusses women's views of male body hair; but this thread was focused on men's views of female body hair, so that is what I addressed.

In my earlier post, I specifically said that evolution would drive people to favor the characteristics generally displayed by the opposite sex. Men generally have more body hair than women, women should therefore generally find attractiveness in levels of body hair higher than what women have. This idea is not in disagreement with the idea that human evolution in general disfavors body hair. "Disfavors" is relative, and feelings about body hair are not binary propositions.

If you have a species with a full coat of hair, like a gorilla, and a full coat has evolutionary advantage, then you would expect evolution to predispose the individuals to preferring the full coat. If circumstances then changed such that, for example a coat only 50% as thick provided the same benefits, and there was some disadvantage to the hair in general, then the net result is that evolution would favor the 50% coat over the full thickness coat. Given enough time, it would be natural for evolution to then predispose the individuals to prefer the 50% coat also. How this preference would manifest itself psychologically is another issue; It could be that individuals would find a 100% coat attractive but a 50% coat more attractive, or they could find the 100% coat unattractive. Repeat this process for a change to 25% coat, 10%, 5%, etc. Evolution would clearly be disfavoring body hair, even though at any point in time the individuals may prefer some amount of it.

Regardless of the specifics of how it happened, it is a fact that humans have significantly less hair than their ancestors. You must agree this is a result of evolution; the alternative is to claim it's magic. This change occurred early in human evolution, long before magazines or fashion or cosmetics industries. For our comparative hairlessness to be so universal, it had to have been a widespread issue in sexual and/or natural selection. For it to have been widespread, there would almost certainly had to have been a strong benefit.

With regards to the second study, just because one feature(body size) is influenced by culture does not mean others must be also. And even if a particular trait is influenced by culture, it does not mean that evolution's influence is smaller. You can't even use that study to say that those who prefer the thinner body type are shallow or vain or whatever. What would such a claim even mean? The only way to meaningfully argue against the preference for the thinner body type would be to show that that body type is unhealthy. You can argue that only in the most extreme cases, i.e. anorexia, but the study was not addressing extreme thinness. Nor can you make much of an argument that those who prefer thinness are being abnormally picky; a preference for larger bodies is every bit as much a preference as one for thin bodies. Due to the wording of the abstract, the best you could say is that those who prefer thin bodies are slightly more picky than those who prefer larger ones. Also, the fact that these two different cultures have different preferences could easily have a reasonable explanation behind it. Such as, it's an unfortunate fact that African Americans in general have had a lower socio-economic status than Anglo Americans throughout American history, with this problem having been much worse even in the relatively recent past. Peoples with poor access to resources tend to more favorably view displays of wealth, and a large body size is a sign of ready access to food. This dynamic can be seen in other cultures throughout history.

You accused me of confirmation bias, berticus. I could easily say the same of you. You were already in disagreement with my position, you found these two studies, at a quick glance they seemed to be ammunition against me, so you referenced them without bothering to spend time thinking about what the claims in the abstracts might mean. Indeed, you point out that it only took "2 seconds" to find them; taking two seconds to find them would be moot if it took 10 minutes figuring out what they meant. I could argue that your statement of a two second search time therefore indicates you did not take the time to carefully read or think about what you found. I don't know if this is the case or not, I'm merely pointing out that your claim of confirmation bias is unfounded and works both ways.

And in general, even if something is predominantly determined by culture, that does not mean there is something wrong with the preference. Nor does something being "natural" or set by evolution mean it must be right. Evolution could favor something that is 99% bad if what it is replacing is bad 99.9% of the time. This is the issue that started this conversation. Dag's comment stated that people who prefer hairlessness are in the wrong since having hair is "natural". But this is meaningless, because not only is it "natural" that our species is losing its hair, but "natural" has no bearing on whether something is good or bad. Our constantly increasing ability to do the unnatural is what, in part, sets us apart from the rest of the animals. Vaccines, antibiotics, computers, fortified foods, and space exploration are all examples of things that are both unnatural and good for society.

If a person wants to modify their body in an "unnatural" way, more power to them. As long as they are not harming others, you have no place to claim any moral objection. And if they are not even harming themselves, you have no means to mount any kind of meaningful objection whatsoever. In the case of piercings, you could, for example, argue that there is a possibility of infection or inadvertently being snagged and ripped out; but with modern clothing and shelter for temperature control and protection from the sun, no such argument can be made against body hair removal.

>> ^dag:

Yes, this. @sineral- it's an interesting idea- but I call BS that no hair is an indicator for biological fitness.>> ^berticus:
sineral, say hello to our friend confirmatory bias.
took 2 seconds to find this and this. don't ignore evidence that isn't what you want to hear.

While indiscriminate spraying of DDT is obviously stupid and dangerous, the rise in worldwide malaria rates in response to the restrictions on DDTs use have killed hundreds of thousands to millions of humans.

Now, unfortunately, it's too late. Like not using all of one's prescribed antibiotics, we allowed mosquitoes to develop a resistance to DDT when we stopped using it and it doesn't work anymore (at least not as well).

By the early 1960s we had malaria cases in India down to almost zero from 75 Million in 1947. Sri Lanka went from 2.8 million cases in 1946 to 17 cases in 1963. Malaria was on the verge of extinction in these places.

Then we lost DDT thanks to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". By 1976 there were 6.4 million cases in India. Today it sits between 2 and 3 million cases a year and India is one of the luckier ones. Throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa more than 50% of all children are infected. In Zambia, in 2005, there were 1353 cases for every 1000 children under 5 years old. That means a huge percent of the children are infected more than once a year.

Was DDT dangerous to spray indiscriminately? Absolutely. Was it saving millions of lives? Without a doubt.

Last month, my dog woke up abruptly, and confused my lower lip for a chew toy. I needed 12 stitches.

The ER doctors asked if I had any allergies, then Rx'd me an antibiotic I was allergic to. Thankfully, I asked my pharmacist some questions that might have saved my life. The dose they gave me at the ER caused me to itch violently (especially around my lymph nodes).

And I get to pay over a grand for the so-called "best medical care in the world." What a fucking joke.

This doctor is an asshole. Isn't this what the Republicans were threatening would happen? Except they thought that Obama supporters would be withholding care from registered Republicans...

Fucking stupid. You'd have to be to vote Republican or believe the lies that Fox spews.

Here is what happened according to Kurt:
(found on nirvanafreak.com)

"KURT: "I was in Dallas, I had the flu. A doctor came to my hotel room and gave me unnamed antibiotic shots in the ass. Drunk again, and feeling the results of the antibiotics and heavy booze, I stumbled onstage and played four songs. In the middle of the fourth song, I took my guitar to the monitor board, smashing it to bits as the crowd cheered 'bullshit, bullshit'.

"The bouncer, who was also the owner of the monitor board, didn't appreciate what I'd done. For the next five songs, he paced back and forth, punching me in the ribs. I jumped into the crowd with my guitar. He pretended to save me from the vicious crowd yet he grabbed my hair and punched me in the ribs a few times. I swung the butt end of my guitar into his face. He bled, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me. Once again, I was saved by my Scottish tour manager.

"After the show, Chris and I got into a cab in front of the club, only to be greeted by the bloody bouncer and 10 of his heavy metal vomit friends with Iron Maiden and Sammy Hagar tee-shirts. The bloody bouncer smashed his hand through the side of the cab and choked me senseless. We couldn't move because we were stuck in the traffic. After 20 minutes of cat and mouse, we fled away into the night." "


Oh and I think the song is "Love Buzz" from Bleach

I'm sorry I brought the spicy rolls. I didn't see this note before I left for work. I'll make sure to clean up the bathroom after we're done having lackadaisical missionary sex. And after I'm done crying. Lurv you, baby cakes.

In reply to this comment by peggedbea:
alright, but if you have to put it in my butt again, lets not get the spicy pizza rolls.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
I didn't give you the clap, that was brain. I gave you diarrhea and a prolapsed rectum, remember?

I was thinking we'd get some pizza rolls and watch Hot Shots: Part Deux.

In reply to this comment by peggedbea:
did you make enough sandwiches to afford a movie?
and have you finished your round of antibiotics? i dont want to catch the clap again like last time.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
So do you want dinner and a movie, or do you just want me to bone you tonight? XOXO

alright, but if you have to put it in my butt again, lets not get the spicy pizza rolls.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
I didn't give you the clap, that was brain. I gave you diarrhea and a prolapsed rectum, remember?

I was thinking we'd get some pizza rolls and watch Hot Shots: Part Deux.

In reply to this comment by peggedbea:
did you make enough sandwiches to afford a movie?
and have you finished your round of antibiotics? i dont want to catch the clap again like last time.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
So do you want dinner and a movie, or do you just want me to bone you tonight? XOXO