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Why we should accept genetically modified chickens

Why we should accept genetically modified chickens

Avian influenza, or ‘bird flu’ is a significant risk to many different wild bird species as well as to domesticated birds including chickens. The virus subtype H5NI has already killed millions of chickens especially in Asia. H5N1 has also resulted in the death of over three hundred humans who have made contact with infected birds. It has the potential to kill many millions of humans – perhaps even billions, according to an article in the American Scientist if the virus mutates to make it easier to transmit from human to human (http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=3158345715265).

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On Forgiveness

by Charles L. Griswold

(This piece was originally published in “The Stone” series of the New York Times (on-line), on Dec. 26, 2010, and is also available here along with responses by readers.   Thanks to Roger Crisp for inviting me to post it here, and to the NYT for permission. Copyright held by the NYT.)

We are in a season traditionally devoted to good will among people and to the renewal of hope in the face of hard times.  As we seek to realize these lofty ideals, one of our greatest challenges is overcoming bitterness and divisiveness.  We all struggle with the wrongs others have done to us as well as those we have done to others, and we recoil at the vast extent of injury humankind seems determined to inflict on itself.  How to keep hope alive?  Without a constructive answer to toxic anger, addictive cycles of revenge, and immobilizing guilt, we seem doomed to despair about chances for renewal.  One answer to this despair lies in forgiveness.

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On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy

By Charles Foster

In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answers in Genesis’ is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s an expensive business. The total bill will be $24.5 million, of which $845,910 has been raised to date. ‘Partner with us in this amazing outreach by sponsoring a peg, plank or beam…’, pleads the website. A peg will cost you $100, a plank $1000, and a beam $5000. But if you buy a beam, you’ll also get a model of the Ark personally signed by Ken Ham, the President of ‘Answers in Genesis’.Read More »On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy

Can Liberals Support a Ban on Sex Selection?

Australia essentially bans sex selection, except to prevent babies being born with serious sex-linked disorders. The National Health and Medical Research Councils also prohibits it in its guidelines.

A couple in the state of Victoria is currently appealing to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to allow them to access IVF and to deliberately have a girl. The couple have had three boys naturally and lost a daughter soon after birth. They recently had IVF which resulted in a twin pregnancy. The twins were boys. They aborted the pregnancy.

I argued over 10 years ago there are no good reasons to oppose sex selection in countries like Australia.

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Predictors of Alzheimer’s vs. the Hammer of Witches

Matthew L Baum

Round 1: Baltimore
I first heard of the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, last year when I visited Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, MD, USA. A doctor for whom I have great respect introduced me to the dark leather-bound tome, which he pulled off of his bookshelf. Apparently, this aptly named book was used back in the day (published mid-1400s) by witch-hunters as a diagnostic manual of sorts to identify witches. Because all the witch-hunters used the same criteria as outlined in The Hammer to tell who was a witch, they all –more or less- identified the same people as witches. Consequently the cities, towns, and villages all enjoyed a time of highly precise witch wrangling. This was fine and good until people realized that there was a staggering problem with the validity of these diagnoses. Textbook examples (or Hammer-book examples) these unfortunates may have been, but veritable wielders of the dark arts they were not. The markers of witchcraft these hunters agreed upon, though precise and reliable, simply were not valid.
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Neurotrash and Neurobabble

Colourful images of brain scans tend to dominate the science sections of the popular media, and it is now fashionable to affix ‘neuro’ to most words of English. But there is a predictable grumpy backlash. The philosopher Roger Scruton finds the recent wave of neuroscience rather distasteful. It is all merely (in a phrase he borrows from Raymond Tallis*) ‘neurotrash’–which wonderfully evokes lurid synthetic pop manufactured in some disco den in Berlin (is Neuropop–or God forbid, the Neurovision–the next step?). Although Scruton makes a cursory reference to some arguments against current neuroscience**, it seems clear enough that what provokes his outrage isn’t some philosophical disagreement. It is that this new wave of neuroscience–or if you prefer, neurotrash–is just so obnoxiously vulgar.

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Vegi-quette

A group of us often meet at our friend Mohammed’s place – and we normally order in a takeaway. Mohammed’s a devout Muslim, but I always get a pepperoni pizza. I did this again last night. We use Mohammed’s plates and cutlery, and he looks a little pained at having pork in his house, but I figure as I’m not forcing Mohammed to eat it himself, he’s just being silly and over-sensitive and there’s no reason for him to be offended.

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DIY enhancement: morphological freedom or self-harm?

by Anders Sandberg

Lepht Anonym is a DIY biohacker, extending her body and senses through implantation of home-made cybernetics in her own kitchen. (YouTube video of her lecture) Most of her work is about extending the sense of touch, using implanted magnets to acquire “magnetic vision” and (hopefully) an implanted version of the northpaw magnetic sense system besides the “usual stuff” of RFID implants.

She is critical of regular transhumanism, which she thinks is all talk. This is the real deal: “You just have to get deep enough to open a hole and put something in,” she says. “It’s that simple.” Of course, she has ended up in the hospital a few times. A new kind of self-harm all right-thinking people ought to save her from, or a valid form of self-expression that should be protected?
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Addiction by design

A new report released by the US Surgeon General last month reminds us that cigarettes are designed with addiction in mind. Tobacco companies infuse tobacco with ammonia so that the nicotine crosses the membranes in the lungs faster, reducing the delay between inhalation and pharmacological effect. They add flavourings like chocolate and vanilla to the blend, knowing that smokers will be more likely to smell something in their food that they associate with smoking, and to feel like lighting up. These tricks are a source of moral outrage for many of us; it seems as though the tobacco companies are exploiting weaknesses in our biology to make us buy things we would not otherwise have bought, and to do things we would not otherwise have done (or would not have done so much). And tobacco executives have often denied engaging in these kinds of tactics.

All this makes for an interesting contrast with the case of video games, in which addictiveness is universally held to be one of the hallmarks of an excellent game, in which games can win awards for being addictive, and in which a developer can unabashedly boast of putting the most addictive systems into their games.

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Trading Organs for Freedom

In Mississippi, sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott are to be let out of prison on the condition that Gladys donates a kidney to Jamie. (See also an article in the Guardian) They are both serving life sentences for being accessories to armed robbery, and would otherwise not be eligible for parole until 2014. Jamie Scott is severely ill with diabetes and high blood pressure, and requires frequent dialysis. She has been given parole on medical grounds, while Gladys has been granted parole on the condition that she give one of her kidneys to Jamie within a year. Receiving payment in exchange for organs is illegal in the US. But is there a relevant moral difference between trading one of your kidneys for money, and trading it for your freedom?

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