Evolution, Christian Darwin's Theory, Now Proven Wrong

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faerwin wrote:

I didn't know about female mules being able to breed successfully, I thought they were all infertile.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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erdelyii wrote:

]We now have better methods to discriminate between people to separate friend from foe, and we've had them for quite a while now. Good is always relative to the array of choices one is presented with. Ethics evolves with technology, and thus will never be complete (until technology is, if such a thing ever occurs).
Bolding mine. Big statements.

What are these better methods, Scrotie? Who is "we"? And, ethics improving with technology, what makes you think this? I'm curious.

I define ethics as the art or science (I'm open to debate about which it is) of assigning value to choice. After assignment of value to choice, the economics is relatively straightforward; the hard part is ranking those choices from best to worst.

That said, it's obvious that certain technology greatly modifies the value of choices. Even different occupations under economic specialization greafmtly modify value: for example, consider the differences in whether it's good or bad to be a night owl or an early riser, depending on whether one is a baker or a barkeep.

If we do have a universal common morality, it only extends as far as that which provides the basis for economic specialization itself, because each job has different ethical values. Even then, everything beyond that common core (ignore the education reference) is highly variable and relativistic, such that tolerance of moralities other than one's own is itself part of said common core.

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The Obama Administration is adamant the 10,000 Syrian refugees it plans to resettle in the U.S. are subject to a tough vetting process. The process is tough and long, but a poll in 2014 found that 13 percent have positive feelings towards ISIS. An ideological vetting process that can separate Islamist from non-Islamist is needed to separate valuable friends from deadly foes.

The vetting process should not just rely on criminal records and databases used to detect terrorists and their associates. Because the threat is ideological in nature, it is very possible we could allow in someone with a radical outlook but has yet to establish the kind of operational connections that would show up in a database.

A new bipartisan congressional terrorism report found there isn't a global comprehensive database of foreign jihadists who have gone to Syria to fight. It says the U.S. doesn't even have a national strategy against terrorist travel and "information about foreign fighters is crossing borders less quickly than the extremists themselves." There's also the serious problem that there is a more general lack of intelligence about Syria.

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In my last post, I discussed how Dr. Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist, is using fMRI technology to detect brain abnormalities in people with psychopathy. His participants are prison inmates who score high on the PCL-R, a psychodiagnostic measure used to assess psychopathy. Once he determines that the participant is, in fact, a psychopath based on their PCL-R score, he takes scans of their brains using an fMRI to determine if there are brain differences between psychopathic participants and normal controls. He has found defects in the paralimbic system that he believes relate to psychopathy.

Interestingly, Dr. Kiehl’s research is being used by perpetrators to avoid prison or to reduce sentencing. One such case has plagued the Chicago area for over two decades. Brian Dugan, a 52-year-old man with a 13-year crime spree, including murders, rapes, arson, and burglaries, spanning the 1970s and 80s finally went to trial for his crimes in late 2009. For those interested in death penalty laws, this case has a lot of history, and contributed to the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois due to the wrongful conviction of three men for one of the murders (Jeanine Nicarico) that Dugan committed.

Fast forward to 2009; Dugan and his lawyers were preparing for his trial and stumbled upon the research of Dr. Kiehl who agreed to interview and complete an fMRI for Dugan. In September 2009, Dugan visited Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to meet with Dr. Kiehl. Dugan’s lawyers saw Dr. Kiehl’s research as opportunity that “could offer a persuasive argument that Dugan is a psychopath and could not control his killer impulses.”

Dugan’s case became the first known court case to use fMRI evidence. His lawyers hoped to use his brain scan images in an attempt to reduce sentencing from the death penalty to life in prison.

Use of fMRIs in criminal court cases for this purpose is controversial because the fMRI is not diagnostic by itself. It measures blood flow to the brain while a participant engages in a certain task (such as viewing a picture, or listening to words or phrases); however, it cannot tell how the person may have responded to these cues at the time of the crime. This is especially important, because it is the person’s mental state at the time of the crime that determines criminal responsibility, regardless of how the person may present at the time of the trial.

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鬼殺し wrote:

And since someone needs to pull this back on track, I think Jesus was an essentially ethical creature. He too saw the injustice of how the temples were operating, their obsequious behaviour towards Rome. The purely mercantile approach to worship. But as with most ethical creatures, his ideals really struggled when they came up against the real world, the reality of how things work. He was hardly the first martyr to die on Golgotha and I doubt he was the last, but he was certainly the most vocal in his march towards the hill of skulls. And he obviously made the most sense at a personal level -- on the other hand, his only real rivals there was a fast-dwindling pantheon of too-human-deities and Yahweh, who was at best a tribal deity leftover. Of all the things that fascinate me regarding Christ, *just where the fuck he got his ideas from* is pretty close to the top of the list.

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erdelyii wrote:

It's been a few days and this is me not reading the last bit and posting to where I was caught up to:

I guess I don't see how technology is improving our ability to detect friend from foe,

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vmt80 wrote:

So, what is your expertise? Any university degree?

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Upandatem wrote:

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vmt80 wrote:

So, what is your expertise? Any university degree?

He got this from amazon:

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Templar_G wrote:

Have any of you people who spend hours and hours every day playing video games evolved a new eyeball to help you see a second monitor better?

Have you evolved extra arms to type faster?

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Templar_G wrote:

So i come back to this thread after a few days

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Templar_G wrote:

Meanwhile, the most powerful man on Earth, a Christian named Trump, is off saying things that rattle the UK and are appreciated by all BREXIT'ers...

And no, he didn't evolve an extra mouth to talk extra.