*dupeof http://videosift.com/video/Cool-Experiment-of-Embryo-Development-Without-The-Shell

My favourite bit in the film? Spoilers...
[spoiler]When Michael Caine admits there never really was a plan B. That felt real to me. That's how it might/would/probably will play out. The earth is fucked, physics aren't going to allow the entire population to evacuate the planet, so some kind of generation ship with embryos is a viable solution. [/spoiler]

And best of all? It wouldn't be a standard Hollywood happy ending.

"Look, here's the reality! We're fucked, and this is the best we can do under the circumstances"

But instead we get a bullshit deus ex machina.

"If it were done as a single nerve in a direct route, it would be subject to damage from a jerking head motion"

"That doesn't make much sense as all nerves start as large bundles and get smaller as they subdivide."

Correct. My point was only that a shorter route might not be beneficial, even though the right inferior laryngeal nerve goes directly to the larynx. After rethinking that statement, I retract [or redact] it. Either way would work.

Stress relief, however, is in place due to nerve bundling. I haven't done any dissections myself [yet], but from the video, it is apparent that the RLN in the giraffe's neck was well secured in its pathway to the larynx, requiring scalpel separation, rather than hanging loose, and thus well protected from damage due to shock.

I have read where descending aortal repairs in the upper section [arch] can cause damage to the RLN, resulting in subsequent hoarseness to the patient, and I can see why. This is just something that surgeons have to deal with.

But the argument that "no designer would ever make a mistake like that" makes an unfounded assumption, that IF there was a designer involved, that it could/would have been done differently. Dawkins' view of design implementation assumes a bottom up, de novo approach, which is not what ID proposes, at least from my perspective. I view ID as incremental gene tweaking to modify existent physiologies, at least subsequent to the Cambrian era.

"Imperfection is the norm but a lot of it won't cause disease. The idea that you can pick and choose which part of biology a designer intervenes baffles me."

Complex integrated designs like mammalian anatomy will always be subject to imperfections, failures, and can be improved upon. As far as how designs were implemented, the evidence is that they were incremental, and may have varied as to the source, and the methodologies.

Earlier complex designs may have been 'de novo', compound eyes for example, but in later eras, modifications appear to be modifications of what's there. Thus, it's entirely possible that design implementations may have been from various sources, and using various techniques.

But back to the question of 'bad design' as a refutation of design, I do not see the RLN as an indication of that, just a progression from earlier mammalian forms, as well as a necessary result of the descent of a functional heart as the embryo develops. Same for the male vas deferens.

...Yes, using a gun for violence is almost always illegal. Somehow you still seem to think having one prevents this violence more often than it creates it, even though your own statistics show it's 50 times more likely to be used illegally than in a legal, but violent way. What was your point?
Abortion doesn't kill a single child, blastocysts are not children, neither are embryos. As someone who usually sounds libertarian, how can you support forcing one person to support another 'person' (since you insist it's a person, I'm not conceding that it is) both financially and physically, completely against the first person's will and wishes?!? I say if the thing can survive on it's own, fine, let it. If not, it has no right to force someone else to incubate it, and neither does anyone else. (Thank you supreme court).
I do agree with your final statement however. Go figure.
EDIT: My issue is it gives no hint what it means by "Measures to prevent gun violence" (some people say arming everyone is the best measure) and also that it both tries to shame us for trying to solve the problem with politicians and instructs us to do our part by writing our politicians...WHAT?!?

Yes it does, which is why logic dictates in most modern law what is and is not a functioning "human" or "embryo" or what have you.

You seem to really not want to understand... have you made any effort on your own to understand the other position in this fence post argument??

I do not want to offend but it seems so. a collection of cells gather into a certain stage.. at earlier stages it is just that. which is why I brought up the soul issue..

Believer in euthanasia? Yes, as a basic human right. If someone has suffered through a terminal illness for so long, that they no longer have the will to live, and medical science has expended all treatment options available, is it morally correct to let that person to continue to suffer through the agonising pain until their body collapses? Or is it more moral to allow them to have control over when they leave this earth, and in what manner it is done?

Either case - this isnt about euthanasia.

An abortion can only be medically acheived safely up to the 2nd trimester, and it gets tricky in the third as the embryo is large enough and involved into the mothers own body that it has the potential to cause more harm than if it was done earlier.

'Abortion' (lets just call it what it is, murder..) after birth, at 10 months old...is infanticide, and you can be thrown in prison for a very long time for doing something like that. The child's brain has developed, they breathe, they love, they hear, see, smell, taste, comprehend, communicate....they do everything that a fetus does not do.

They have developed into a human being.

Thats murder.

Terminating an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy is not murder, because its just a couple of thousand cells, not yet developed.

The methylation turns off genes, so it alters the development of the embryo without altering the actual DNA.

I'm not arguing against Darwin, he was a careful and methodical researcher who did good work. It could easily have been called Wallaceism though, had things gone even slightly differently A lot of things which are now called darwinism should probably be more properly called "Spencerism" since they derive from Spencer's "survival of the fittest" and not Darwin (or, perhaps, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. - Nature, red in tooth and claw).

Oh my god, did you hear that some scientist wants to implant a neanderthal embryo in a human woman?

Imagine if the nano tech was advanced enough to carry DNA data, and once a nano factory was made, with enough raw material around, would build embryo chambers that would grow humans. A while back I had imagined instead of cryo sleep, you just launch frozen eggs and sperm, and robots incubate the lifeforms, and raise them when it is time.

The issue is when the cluster of cells inside a woman achieves the level of development to be called a viable human being. If the cluster of cells wouldn't be able to live on its own

And viability is under constant change thanks to medical advances. If we reach a point where science can viably support a fetus after only 2 weeks does that become a new starting point?

As for cells that can live on their own, do we then count that same exclusion on humans of all other ages after birth as well, by the same logic?

The question of abortion is not about when life begins, it's about weighing the costs and benefits of pursuing a pregnancy, taking into account both the woman and the embryo/foetus/future human being.

And how you weigh that will be radically changed based on if you define the fetus as an independent human being with it's own human rights, or if you simply class it part of the woman's reproductive system.

How you define the point when a fetus is classed a human being with human rights is a fundamental base assumption of all your points and concerns. Admitting that should NOT be damaging or a hindrance to the discussion, unless you are uninterested in really pursuing it.

@bcglorf

The question of abortion is not about when life begins, it's about weighing the costs and benefits of pursuing a pregnancy, taking into account both the woman and the embryo/foetus/future human being. In order to do this, of course, one must take into account the not only physical health factors, but also the effect each life will have on the other. A woman's life is forever changed by childbirth; often the responsibility for caring and raising said child falls entirely on her shoulders; she may not have the (economic/emotional) resources to care for it, causing there to be two victims. How much does a ball of cells, or an embryo, with no memories, no personality, no identity, ... how much does that weigh against the irretrievable changes its continued existence would make to the woman? Why are some forms of life valued over others? Why do we feel no remorse removing a tumor - a living organism - from a person/animal? It's a question of checks and balances.

And please don't talk about the "potential" human being that an embryo or foetus is. That argument applies for every permutation of fapped sperm and period-flushed eggs that are lost every day. The point @Jinx makes about the debate is completely valid: we can argue (with the help of scientific evidence) the details about the moment when an embryo/foetus becomes capable of suffering/cognition (my opinion is that it's at the moment when the brain is capable of treating and storing sensory input), but the "pro-life" crowd are not up for rational debate, nor are they particularly pro-life. Instead, they will disregard the (quality of the) life of the woman as well as those of the future child simply because of their superstitious beliefs. They are also usually the same ignorant people who will fight against sexual education and the use of contraception for the same reasons and, more generally, against the autonomy of women and their rights over their own bodies (since their belief systems usually stem from the patriarchal desert monotheisms).

"A third unknown factor which causes both the economic gap and the wide array of social "decay" in country after country."

Nobody alive knows how to bring white people's average test scores up to the scores of north-east Asians and Jews, or NAMs (non-Asian minorities) up to the scores of white people. Naturally, permanent gaps in test scores cause all manner of social decay, all deriving from population replacement.

This chart concisely explains every problem the US experiences (the need for income redistribution, high murder rate & prison population, low test scores, high unemployment. On every societal factor, if you break it down by region of ancestry, the US scores equal to or better than the countries its population came from, and it's the population replacement responsible for problems.



Before I leave the sift, we should place a bet.

You bet is OWS will help fix these problems by creating a shift to the political left. If the next president after Obama is Republican, as I expect, or if the economic decline continues in liberal states, that would seem to be counter to your prediction.

My bet is the US is in permanent economic decline that will correlate (just as it already correlates) with 1. how liberal a state is and 2. the proportion of the state population that's not White/Asian/Jewish. Next time you notice statistics suggesting that the global fiscal crisis only occurred because it was assumed NAMs would manage their finances in the same way Whites/Jews/Asians do, question whether it's really in society's interest to pretend reality isn't the way it is. If these achievement gaps close within the next 100 years without the help of reprogenetics (reprogramming genetics will probably start via embryo selection around 2040, and liberals will oppose it until they finally reverse their position in the latter half of the century), that would disprove my prediction.



Some sources that Cenk would be furious we're talking about without applying deception:
• NYT: Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools
• The Great Dumbing Down: California Skills Decay Due To Immigration



Anyway, I'm off. This should be my last substantive comment on videosift. Best of luck on your path, Messenger.

@dystopianfuturetoday

1a. Some of globalization might be improved, but a lot of it is inevitable. At most, we can hope to reduce the efficiency of humankind by blocking people in developing nations from fairly being employed where they're most needed (by 1st world companies). If we had to overpay for unskilled labor, automation in the US would just increase even more quickly, so transferring labor from humans in the developing world to machines in the US wouldn't be a big help overall.

1b. Yeah, the public sector is definitely good at a lot of things, like the areas you mentioned. But the point still stands that, in effect, I'm probably more prosocial than my collectivist friends because I pursue career like an individualist, and it's through our careers and our resulting personal development that we contribute to the world.

2. Ok.

3a. The cliff notes version of human bio-diversity is that most problems with society that liberals dislike are caused by neurogenetic inequality, not by policy. The current push by liberals to restore racist discrimination against Asian Americans at California universities is tacit admission of this.

3b. The problem with regulation is that liberals moved the goal post by replacing the population of our society with the population of a poorer society. The result is things like fabricated "failures of the market" like widespread unemployment, permanently lowered academic test scores and health outcomes (which increasingly correlate with cognitive complexity as personal health management becomes more complicated) and a workforce that's too unskilled for society to be able to afford things like infrastructure and cutting edge 21st century healthcare.

3c. The good news is that, by all appearances, reprogenetics (reprogramming genetics) will begin around the middle of this century to solve all the problems caused by natural neurogenetic inequality. Embryo selection has been in use in in-vitro fertilization clinics for several years to screen out embryos with disease genes, and its use will continue to grow as genetics knowledge continues to advance at an exponential rate.


Good chatting with you also, DFT

EMBRYOS

that's how you spell it.

Sheesh.

The gaps are fundemental..here are some more quotes:

"Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." (Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, What Evolution Is, 2001, p.14.)

"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record." (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 189.)

"What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types." (Carroll, Robert L., "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," in Trends in Evolution and Ecology 15(1):27-32, 2000, p. 27.)

"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ...it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ...Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational evolutionary intermediates between documented fossil species." (Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89.)

"He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search....It has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." (Eldridge, Niles, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1984, pp.45-46.)

"There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich, and discovery is out-pacing integration...The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps." (George, T. Neville, "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective," Science Progress, vol. 48 January 1960, pp. 1-3.)

"Despite the bright promise - that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record." (Kitts, David B., "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, vol. 28, 1974, p. 467.)

"It is interesting that all the cases of gradual evolution that we know about from the fossil record seem to involve smooth changes without the appearance of novel structures and functions." (Wills, C., Genetic Variability, 1989, p. 94-96.)

"So the creationist prediction of systematic gaps in the fossil record has no value in validating the creationist model, since the evolution theory makes precisely the same prediction." (Weinberg, S., Reviews of Thirty-one Creationist Books, 1984, p.

"We seem to have no choice but to invoke the rapid divergence of populations too small to leave legible fossil records." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 99.)

"For over a hundred years paleontologists have recognized the large number of gaps in the fossil record. Creationists make it seem like gaps are a deep, dark secret of paleontology..." (Cracraft, in Awbrey & Thwaites, Evolutionists Confront Creationists", 1984.)

"Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.)

Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of Chicago, "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creation evolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood (Raup, David, "Geology" New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981.)

"As we shall see when we take up the creationist position, there are all sorts of gaps: absence of graduationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups -- between say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals. In fact, the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be." (Eldredge, Niles, The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism, 1982, p. 65-66.)

"Transitions between major groups of organisms . . . are difficult to establish in the fossil record." (Padian, K., The Origin of Turtles: One Fewer Problem for Creationists, 1991, p. 18.)

"A persistent problem in evolutionary biology has been the absence of intermediate forms in the fossil record. Long term gradual transformations of single lineages are rare and generally involve simple size increase or trivial phenotypic effects. Typically, the record consists of successive ancestor-descendant lineages, morphologically invariant through time and unconnected by intermediates." (Williamson, P.G., Palaeontological Documentation of Speciation in Cenozoic Molluscs from Turkana Basin, 1982, p. 163.)

"What one actually found was nothing but discontinuities: All species are separated from each other by bridgeless gaps; intermediates between species are not observed . . . The problem was even more serious at the level of the higher categories." (Mayr, E., Animal Species and Evolution, 1982, p. 524.)

"The known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism. What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured . . . ‘The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin’s stress on minute, slow, and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.’ . . . their story has been suppressed." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, p. 71.)

"One must acknowledge that there are many, many gaps in the fossil record . . . There is no reason to think that all or most of these gaps will be bridged." (Ruse, "Is There a Limit to Our Knowledge of Evolution," 1984, p.101.)

"We are faced more with a great leap of faith . . . that gradual progressive adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks . . . than any hard evidence." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 57.)

"Gaps between families and taxa of even higher rank could not be so easily explained as the mere artifacts of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, Niles, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989, p.22.)

"To explain discontinuities, Simpson relied, in part, upon the classical argument of an imperfect fossil record, but concluded that such an outstanding regularity could not be entirely artificial." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis," 1983, p. 81.)

"The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 59.)

"The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 163.)

"Gaps in the fossil record - particularly those parts of it that are most needed for interpreting the course of evolution - are not surprising." (Stebbins, G. L., Darwin to DNA, Molecules to Humanity, 1982, p. 107.)

"The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity - of gradual transition from one animal or plant to another of quite different form." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 40.)

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?," 1982, p. 140.)

"The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 34.)

"Gaps between higher taxonomic levels are general and large." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 35.)

"We have so many gaps in the evolutionary history of life, gaps in such key areas as the origin of the multicellular organisms, the origin of the vertebrates, not to mention the origins of most invertebrate groups." (McGowan, C., In the Beginning . . . A Scientist Shows Why Creationists are Wrong, 1984, p. 95.)

"If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, Dr. Eldredge argues, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory." (The Guardian Weekly, 26 Nov 1978, vol. 119, no 22, p. 1.)

“People and advertising copywriters tend to see human evolution as a line stretching from apes to man, into which one can fit new-found fossils as easily as links in a chain. Even modern anthropologists fall into this trap . . .[W]e tend to look at those few tips of the bush we know about, connect them with lines, and make them into a linear sequence of ancestors and descendants that never was. But it should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable.” (Gee, Henry, "Face of Yesterday,” The Guardian, Thursday July 11, 2002.)

>> ^Drax:
Shiny, it's kind of like you're saying,
Ok, we have: . -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and O
Then we find . -> o -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and o
or o and O
Basically, the more evidence we find.. the stronger your argument gets! <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/oh.gif">
ok, that last part's just a joke.. but seriously.. the other parts ARE your stance.
It's either that, or you're looking at o and e and expecting to find æ, which just doesn't happen.