According to the Daily Mail yesterday scientists have found that giving cows individual names boosts milk yields. This extravagant and utterly unsubstantiated claim has been repeated in numerous places including the BBC and Scientific American (who should know better).
Read More »Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. Does it matter if I give a name to you?
There is a thriving market in fossils, much of which can be found on-line. Extinctions, Inc (www.extinctions.com) claim to have the ‘… largest, most complete, and most detailed fossil websites on the internet’ and claim to have been selling fossils for over thirty years. A visitor to their extensive website can purchase the fossil of the week (this week it is a mosasaurus anceps tooth and a shark tooth preserved in the same rock) for US$ 99-. The visitor can also purchase the ‘DinoStore item of the week’ (this week it is a dinosaur tooth from Morocco), also for US$99-. Fossils Direct (www.fossilsdirect.co.uk) advertise themselves as the ‘Premier supplier of high quality British fossils for sale.’ They advertise an impressive range of fossils at prices starting from under £10-. Two Guys Fossils (http://www.twoguysfossils.com/dino_jurassicbones.htm) claim to be the ‘world’s largest dealer of Jurassic age dinosaur bones’. They currently advertise an impressive range of dinosaur bones at prices up to US$1000- for a 19 inch long camptosaurus femur.
Read More »Sid Vicious, Julieraptor, and the Ownership of Fossils
Once a week I thrash around haplessly on the tennis court. This week, I’m also a tennis spectator. While the global economy implodes, at least one event appears to be untouched – the 2009 Australian Tennis Open. Andrew Murray’s defeat yesterday means he can’t now net the eye-watering AUD$2 million first prize for the men’s single title. The women’s champion will earn….well, exactly the same, AUD $2million.
After a long running campaign by various groups, all the Grand Slams tennis tournaments now offer equal prize money to both sexes: Wimbledon fell into line in 2007. The argument was that just as no distinction should be made between women and men in the office, so there should be no distinction drawn on the court.
Two out of three women fail at each IVF attempt, and a large part of this is believed to be due to abnormalities in the number of chromosomes in the egg. Up to half of the eggs in younger women (and up to 75% in women approaching 40) have abnormalities. In traditional reproduction these failures would not be problematic, since attempts at conception can easily be retried. But in the case of IVF each attempt will be expensive and time-consuming. The new method is a small step towards truly efficient IVF. But does it solve the ethical issues?
Read More »Polar exploration: small steps towards cheaper, safer, easier IVF?
Professor Savulescu comments:
Professor Julian Savulescu is Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics and Director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, and Director of the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences. He was also recently awarded a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant on Cognitive Science and Religious Conflict.
THE FDA has approved for the first time a clinical trial of embryonic stem cells to treat spinal injury patients. The trial will be conducted by Geron. A similar trial by Reneuron has been approved recently in the UK (The Scotsman, and the BBC). The research in the UK to treat stroke patients has already attracted stern criticism from “ethical campaigners.” The first wave predictably objected on the ground that it involved abortion "It involves cannibalising an unborn child.” But no child was aborted for the purposes of providing stem cells. These would have involved abortions that would anyway have occurred for a variety of reasons. Such opponents predictably object to anything involving destruction of embryos and fetuses – abortion, IVF, prenatal testing, contraception – so it is hardly surprising that they would object to this form of medical treatment.
The second wave of ethical campaigners, not clearly distinct from the first, claim now that the treatment is too risky. But is it too risky?
Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong will be giving two Leverhulme lectures and a special ethics seminar on Neuroscience and Neuroethics at the University of Oxford as part of his Leverhulme Visiting Professorship programme 2008 – 10. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies, at Dartmouth College, and is and Co-Director, MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project. See extended post for full details of these lectures
Read More »Announcement of Neuroethics Lectures: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Tuesday was a wonderful, exciting, day. But the job of the philosophical blogger is to look beyond the general euphoria, and seek out discussion points.
A commentator in the ChicagoTribune remarked that President Obama’s inaugural speech was ‘heavy on allusion, short on specifics’. That was probably not intended as a criticism, however, and it would have been unreasonable if it had been. If you are trying to engage everybody in a nation which has, as the President said, a ‘patchwork heritage’ of ‘Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers’ the only possible way to do it is to avoid specifics. Everyone can unite round ‘mutual interest and respect’, having things in their ‘rightful place’ and ‘a future of peace and dignity’, because these are terms that, as philosophers would say, have strong connotations but no particular denotation. We know they imply approval of whatever is being alluded to, but we may not know much about what that is.
A recent study at the University of Texas published in the "Royal Society Journal Biology Letters" suggests a connection in attractive and young women between high levels of oestradiol and some peculiar characteristics in mating behaviour.
Read More »What if oestradiol could really affect the relationships of highly attractive women?
In an opinion piece on the BBC website this week Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has questioned the wisdom of adopting pre-natal screening for autism, raising the possibility that it would prevent the existence of future great mathematicians. This is a variant of a common objection to pre-natal testing or to genetic enhancement.
Read More »The Lost Genius objection to pre-natal testing for autism
These days the Vatican’s statements sound a bit like a broken record, repeating continuously “Non possumus”. It started at the beginning of December when Benedict XVI refused to support President Sarkozy’s proposal that encourages the governments of the World to decriminalize homosexuality, proposal that should be added to the next UN Declaration of human rights.
It’s worth knowing that in the world more or less eighty countries have rules that punish sexual acts between homosexual people.
