How so? Because I'm not sure I understand what constitutes the "basic sanity test" here. At least not what you mean by the statement.
The guy broke one of the most fundamental rules of Magic for five rounds and went on to win an invite to the PT. The reason this incident has got the attention that it has is that most Magic players seem to be pretty shocked to find out that that's possible. I know I was.
You have to be more familiar with how Magic judging works than the average PTQ player to understand how the ruling the HJ made is even remotely possible. That's a pretty good indication that it fails on basic sanity.
Why do you assume judges just accept sorry, no one says that, in any comp tourney the judge is going to ask questions regarding what happened and make sure it was an honest mistake, instead of just being like oh you said that well play on.
I think you're overestimating the ability of Magic judges to tell whether or not someone is telling the truth.
Bluffing is a big part of Magic (and an even bigger part of Poker, which a lot of Magic players play). If you can bluff well to your opponents who's to say you can't lie well to a judge?
Just to agree with Valarin on one point: Being lenient on people who break rules by accident is a poor enforcement policy. Anything that one person can get away with doing accidentally, someone else can get away with doing on purpose.
Intent should have much less influence on Magic's rules enforcement at competitive+ REL than it evidently does.
Yeah, here's the problem. I really think he should have been given (at least) a match loss for that match and all previous matches. If people put as much care into making sure they have legal Magic decks as they do into actually playing Magic, these things wouldn't happen.
There seem to be a couple of common sense improvements that can be made to the way PTQs work:
Match losses should be able to be given retroactively, and match wins should be able to be given retroactively to those opponents. This should have happened here. Yes, this means that pairings aren't correct, but that's preferable to having people lose to illegal decks.
Using an illegal deck should be a different infraction to registering your (legal) deck incorrectly, with different penalties. This in particular seems like a no brainer.
The reaction of the judges in this thread is quite frankly worrying. This event damages the credibility of the Pro Tour and competitive Magic in general. Intentional or not, this sort of thing is an egregious rule violation and winning a PTQ off the back of it shouldn't be able to happen.
That judges here would rather dismiss players' concerns and repeat the rules as they exist, rather than consider that the rules might need changing, doesn't inspire confidence. Most posts by judges in this thread have seemed to imply that if Victor's rule breaking was a genuine accident then his PTQ win should stand, and I can't take that position seriously.
Just a suggestion - You can mitigate the effect of the square rats art by adding part of a border to the sig. So add a top and left and probably a bottom border, and have the horizontal ones fade out as they extend towards the right.
Also, if you're using a graphics program that supports it, it can really help to feather your cut-outs by ~1 pixel to avoid that jagged edge you're getting. I would also do the cut-out at larger image size (maybe 3 times the final size in each direction) before shrinking it to go in the sig, so that you can do a better job. You may also find this removes the need to feather.
Other than that, the sig looks nice. The cut-out is pretty accurate. I would cut off the arm of the middle rat, though; you don't need to be completely faithful to the image and it does look a bit silly.
He mulls to five, plays first, plays thoughtsieze turn one off an underground sea and then scoops. Fastest win I've ever had.
BadlandsYamane draws 7 cards
Centroid draws 7 cards BadlandsYamane takes a mulligan
<Centroid> kp BadlandsYamane takes a mulligan
<BadlandsYamane> kp
It is now turn 2 (BadlandsYamane)
It is now the Beginning Phase, Untap Step
It is now the Precombat Main Phase
BadlandsYamane plays Underground Sea from Hand
BadlandsYamane taps Underground Sea BadlandsYamane plays Thoughtseize from Hand
Centroid reveals a Mountain
Centroid reveals a Magma Jet
Centroid reveals a Sulfuric Vortex
Centroid reveals a Hellspark Elemental
Centroid reveals a Volcanic Fallout
Centroid reveals a Fireblast
Centroid reveals a Mountain <System> Player Lost
Read especially the fourth and fifth paragraphs. So maybe it isn't about avoiding overpopulation, but that doesn't mean evolution can't generate homosexuality. The concept of homosexuality being the result of homozygous recessivity for a gene or series of genes for which there is a notable heterozygous advantage of increased fertility seems like a very elegant hypothesis that is entirely consistent with the philosophical essence of natural selection.
Absolutely homosexuality could have been selected for for some other reason, or it could be linked with something positive.
I was arguing only against the simplistic assumption that homosexuality could have evolved in order to prevent overpopulation from occurring, which seems to be as common as it is misinformed.
In a world with a God things need to happen so that we become better people. So that when things feel out of control we turn to him for guidance not that we shouldn't when things are in control.
People need to learn from their experiences anyway even with a God.
No, it doesn't have to be that way at all. God can do anything. Perhaps it's that way because that's the best way it could be and we (or some of us) just don't realise it, which is a sort-of valid argument. But saying it had to be that way is like saying that rugby balls had to be oval-shaped.
this has been answered about 5000 times now. Orginially it was that way. Man's disobedience negated that act. People keep mis-using the terms omnipotent and omnibenevolent. it gets quite old.
Punishing people for doing stuff when you designed them to act that way seems pretty sick. As has been said 5000 times before. Punishment does not need to exist. Nor, in fact, does morality. We could instead have a giant happy forever icecream cake where no-one gets sad - but we don't. Perhaps because this crummy world is a better idea.
Pain is not always a bad thing, nor is it always a good thing. pain can lead to good things at times as well. they are not inherently associated with each other.
We clearly don't mean the same thing by pain at all. I guess that's the end of that conversation.
he did and at one point we were. a bad choice is trying to become more than what we were created to be ruined that choice. the consquences of man's disobediance to God results in an imperfect world.
Wait, so perfect people never sin, yet Adam and Eve were perfect, and they sinned? Bwuh?
I should have stopped this a while ago. This is a believer's problem, not an apologist's one, and I see no reason why God shouldn't have made human logic unable to comprehend Him. It would seem like the logical (haha :-/) thing to do.
Apparently, abstinence-based sex ed DOES work. You just have to do it the right way.
Rather than tell kids, "Hey, DON'T HAVE SEX BEFORE YOU'RE MARRIED OR GOD WILL SEND YOU TO HELL", what they did in this study was to logically explain the pros and cons of having sex vs. not having sex at an early age, and demonstrate that the list of cons is far longer than the list of pros.
The fact that the list is longer doesn't prove a whole lot. Face it, the pro still outweighs the cons. Yes, it's (maybe) possible to scare kids teenagers out of having fun - but it's a pretty stink thing to do. And if you have a 1/3 failure rate, the things on that cons list start to look real scary.
This is where your argument falls apart. The survival of a species depends not only on those things, but on protection from overpopulation. This is what homosexuality is a result of, and it has been shown time and time again all over the place in nature. If it occurs in nearly every sexually reproducing species, it cannot possibly be called a genetic disorder.
Once again (but hopefully more briefly):
Species do not need to be "protected from" overpopulation. Overpopulation is merely a symptom of the success of a species. It is the very thing a species tries to achieve, and it will happen eventually in any population with a constant supply of food and other resources. When it does, the population will fall a little before reaching equilibrium. Since natural selection always selects for those who have the most surviving offspring even in overcrowded environments, there is no mechanism by which natural selection could cause an individual to curtail their own reproductive success just to avoid overcrowding. That individual would be selected against, and that gene would die out.
Species do adapt to be better able to cope with overpopulation, but in other ways. If organisms have fewer offspring in crowded conditions (and they usually do) then it is because they are incapable of having as many due to malnourishment or something similar, or because each one is harder to care for. They may limit their gross number of offspring, but if so it is to maximise their number of surviving offspring.
Let me repeat: there is no evolutionary incentive on the individual level (which is the level at which natural selection is strongest) for any organism to avoid overpopulation by raising fewer offspring to adulthood.
Can God affect matter-energy-space-time? If not, then he would have had a hard time creating the universe and an even harder time performing miracles. If so, then He is part of a matter-energy-space-time-God observable universe (and is, at least in theory, scientifically testable - though if He doesn't want to be tested, then He's presumably smart and powerful enough to avoid any human attempts at doing it). He doesn't need to be made of matter to be observable, He simply has to be able to affect the universe as we currently know it.
It is possible to posit the existence of something "immaterial" that cannot be observed, but such a thing has to have no effect on the observable universe - and such a suggestion can never have any relevance. Certainly such a thing could never do any of the things God is supposed to have done.
Did your parents not correcting you as a child make you become a better person? was there pain involved? of course it doesn't feel good to have your parents yell at you or get mad.
is it not pain to hear your teacher tell you that you are wrong? did you not learn better?
pain can mean a lot of things not just physical. not all suffering and pain is bad.
Do you not look back on your life and see that it was the circumstances that happened to you that made you a better person?
I do. I find that the challenges that i have had in my life has made me a better person.
Yes, I am glad of the bad things that have happened to me in the past to make me better. They had to happen because in a world with no god, children need occasional punishment in order to become good adults, and because in a world with no god people need to learn from their experiences and some of those experiences are bad.
An omnipotent god, however, could have magicked me good and wise if he wanted to. Why didn't he? It would have been the kind thing to do.
The bone of our contention seems to be that think pain is always bad and pleasure is always good. In fact, I would define pain, in the broadest sense, as "bad experiences" and pleasure as "good experiences". However, you say that
pain can mean a lot of things not just physical. not all suffering and pain is bad.
While I agree that pain and suffering can be good in the long run - that is, they can be necessary means to an end - I don't agree that they can be good in and of themselves.
If they are bad then a benevolent god would want to avoid them, and an omnipotent one would be able to arrive at the same end through some other means.
Correction free will allows for choices. Those choices have consquences for good or for bad. Bad choices can lead to pain and or suffering when it could have been avoided. yet we are not perfect so we learn from the mistakes that we make.
actually there is no claim that free will exists in heaven. angels themselves do not have free will sort of speak. One did but he is no longer there. Even if free will does exist in heaven being a perfect being means that you would always make the correct choice therefore negate any evil choices that would exist.
Thanks, that clears things up a bit.
Would it be too much to ask for God to make us perfect too? And if he were benevolent, then wouldn't he have?
What is stopping a homosexual man from procreating? They just get no sexual thrill from it. Thus, they are still optimal for the survival of these species.
Homosexual people have fewer children. They therefore have less reproductive success, and are therefore less biologically fit. These statements carry no value judgments, but they are necessary in order to talk about homosexuality in an evolutionary sense. The term "reproductively inferior", by virtue of containing the word "inferior", was simply a poor choice of words.
But regarding kin selection, I am having trouble understanding the view that a crowded population would favour homosexuality. First, the human population has not been crowded for that long, so there's not much time to select for homosexuality. Second, why would homosexuality be especially desirable in a overcrowded population? Surely, the ability to out compete others for resources and so being able to reproduce more is a better trait. I don't see how reproducing less and consuming less resources will be a good trait considering how in a overcrowded population, if one does not consume available resources, others will consume it anyway. So it would be great if someone can clearly explain a plausible mechanism behind this.
Grey, you are right to be confused. Taylor, Pandas, you are oversimplifying the issue.
For a start, the "the human population has not been crowded for that long" thing. While it is true that the human population has never been as big as it is now, and it is also (probably) true that we have not yet reached the current carrying capacity of the Earth, that is only because the Earth's carrying capacity has been increasing very quickly ever since the agricultural revolution. Overpopulation is not new, but a carrying capacity of 10 billion very much is. Localised overpopulation has been happening throughout human history, at much lower population densities than we have now. So the issue of insufficient time to evolve responses to overpopulation is irrelevant.
Now on to whether homosexuality has any reason to be more adaptive in overcrowded conditions. First, a brief description of the ecology of overpopulation. Skip it if you know it already.
There are two main ways in which populations tend to grow - called k-type and r-type. r-type organisms (like cockroaches) reproduce rapidly whenever a food source is available, then die off quickly when it is used up. Their life cycle is optimised for a situation in which resources are plentiful, so they have many offspring and give them little or no postnatal care. k-type organisms (like elephants) exist in places where the availability of resources is more or less constant, and their populations tend to stay more or less at the level where any more individuals would cause the population to become overpopulated. This level is called carrying capacity, or k. The fact that there are usually only just enough resources to go around means that the offspring need quite a bit of help in order to survive to adulthood, so k-type organisms have few offspring, long gestation periods, and their offspring take a long time to reach adulthood. In general, when introduced to a new environment with constant availability of resources, populations of either type will tend to follow the pattern shown in this graph that Taylor linked to - they increase exponentially to start with, then level off and start to fluctuate around carrying capacity.
Now, it might seem sensible that k-type organisms have fewer offspring, "because there's less room" and to avoid the pointless death of what would otherwise be extra organisms. In fact, natural selection is a brutal mistress who gets off on death and couldn't care less how much collateral damage she causes (Remember, most of those baby cockroaches die). The real reason k-types have fewer offspring is because they do not need to be able to increase their populations quickly at short notice like r-types do. It is also because offspring in the resource-poor environments in which k-types live have less chance of surviving by themselves, and if you have to raise each young elephant for 15 years or so there's only so many baby elephants you can raise in an elephant lifetime.
It is important to realise that even in overpopulated environments, natural selection will still favour those who successfully raise the most offspring. Having offspring beyond carrying capacity will result in the death of somebody's offspring, but they won't necessarily be yours. If the carrying capacity allows for four elephant calves and elephants A and B have two each, they have the same reproductive success. However, if elephant A has six calves and elephant B has two, four will die. However, on average they will be three of A's and one of B's and A will be the more successful. So while overpopulation may make it harder to care for young, it does not provide any other incentive for an individual to have fewer.
This brings us to homosexuality. There is no way, least of all overpopulation, that a trait could be selected for on an individual basis that causes those who have it to not have children. That is the opposite of what natural selection does. Homosexuality is either an evolutionary accident or it is beneficial to the parent to have homosexual children. One theory is that homosexuals are more help in raising their siblings than heterosexuals, which could help the parents to successfully raise more heterosexual children than they could have had the children all been heterosexual. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it is even more true in overpopulated conditions, which could help explain any correlation between homosexuality and overpopulation. But it is far from the simple relationship that people often suggest.
A very intriguing idea about the origin of male homosexuality that gets around all its apparent problems is the mitochondrial DNA theory. Some more background stuff:
Human cells get their energy by breaking down ("burning") glucose to make carbon dioxide and water. This reaction is carried out in organelles (organelles are to cells as organs are to a body, essentially) called mitochondria. Mitochondria quite closely resemble bacteria, and indeed that is probably what they were before they started living inside the cells of eukaryotes. Like bacteria, they have a loop of DNA, tiny by chromosomal standards, which they use to divide. The relevant thing about mitochondria is that they exist in an egg before it is fertilised and no mitochondrial DNA is transferred by the sperm, so a person's mitochondrial DNA comes only from their mother.
The fact that only women can pass on mitochondrial DNA means that anything a mitochondrial gene does to a man, however maladaptive to his chromosomal (normal) DNA, has no bearing on the fitness of the mitochondrial gene. It wasn't getting passed on anyway. In fact, if a mitochondrial gene causing male homosexuality provided any advantage at all to the female offspring of the same mother, it would be selected for. There are several ways in which male homosexuality could provide some small reproductive advantage to female siblings - for example the helping-the-mother-raise-the-kids idea, or the prevention of incest. Even if it provided no advantage at all, it could still increase in frequency through genetic drift.
This does not explain female homosexuality, though, and it seems likely that homosexuality in both sexes has a common cause. So it is unlikely to be the whole story. However, it could be part of the reason why homosexuality is more common in men.
On the "magic pill" idea: While I'm sure that most people, myself perhaps included, would probably take the straight kid pill to help their child avoid a life of discrimination, I would love to have the opportunity to put a magic homosexualising pill in the world's drinking water. What better way would there be to painlessly solve the overpopulation problem?
As for whether homosexuality is genetic: there are two things that make us up, our genetics and the environment's interaction with our genetics. If the environment can make us homosexual, it's because our genetics say so. So while on an individual level there are always many environmental contributing factors to homosexuality, on a whole species level the existence of homosexuality (or at least the possibility thereof) must be purely genetic.
As for whether homosexuality is a disorder: The concept of a disorder has always been an ill-defined one. Since homosexuality is a mental thing, and the definitions of mental disorders always contain stipulations about an "inability to function in society", it definitely isn't a mental disorder and thus probably isn't a disorder. But it's a pretty meaningless question, because "disorder" is a pretty meaningless word.
As for whether homosexuality is a "genetic disorder": What we refer to as "genetic disorders" are diseases which show a 100% correlation with their genotype (for example trisomy 21/Down's syndrome). Many diseases - diabetes, cancer, you name it - have a genetic component, but aren't "genetic disorders". So the answer to this one is definitely no.
1. What is the strengths and weaknesses of the current social hierarchy?
It has plenty of strengths, but its main weakness is the extent to which it is who your parents were, and not who you are yourself, that determines how well you will do. It is arguably unethical to reward people for their own intelligence or charisma or attractiveness, since these things are no more in their control than their colour or their height, but rewarding them for that of their parents is definitely wrong.
2. What is the "ought or should" be with social hierarchy?
3. Should hierarchy even exist? Is it just?
In any economic system, rewards must exist. Everyone, ideally, should be made to be equal at first, then allowed to earn their inequalities on an individual basis, and not for their families.
One problem with this is, most of what people need to be rewarded for can be achieved either through natural ability or hard work, and it is only hard work which deserves to be rewarded. However, the two can look very much alike.
Another problem is that life's greatest incentive is the well-being of one's children. This creates an inconsistency in our thinking - we resent the discrepancies in how we and others were provided for by our respective parents, yet we want the potential for those discrepancies to remain so that we can earn a head start for our children.
That is the answer in terms of a hierarchy of affluence. As for a hierarchy of power, such a thing doesn't exist in an ideal democracy unless affluence provides power (which, ideally, it shouldn't). Those who are elected to govern are agents of the people, and their power doesn't belong to them because they will lose it as soon as they do anything other than what their electorate wants. Ideally, the longest possible interval between when an elected representative stops behaving according to the wishes of their constituents and when they are replaced - in reality, the period between elections - should be infinitesimal, reducing to nothing the amount of power that an elected representative can use for their own ends.
(The difference between invested and real power is illustrated in Schindler's List, when Ralph Fiennes' characther goes around telling Jews he should have executed that they have been pardoned just to prove that he has a choice).
@Thread title: philosophically, yes; scientifically, absolutely not; and politically, yes.
Philosophically, all arguments can be reduced to axioms (a+b = b+a, the laws of physics will always be what they have always been) and since axioms cannot be proven, no set of them can be demonstrably better than any other. If you refuse to accept the standard axioms of mathematics - and intuition is the only reason why you should - then you can make a new set under which 2 + 2 = 5 and I can't touch you.
Scientifically, all opinions must be sceptically tested and only if they survive the experiments should they be allowed any credibility. Newton's theories were inferior to Einstein's, and Lamarck's were inferior to Darwin's. That's exactly the way Newton and Lamarck would have wanted it. However, this can only happen because all scientists base their arguments on the same axioms.
Politically, and purely for pragmatic reasons, all opinions must be treated as equally valid and everyone must be able to hold whatever opinion they want - legislating against thought and speech undermines the foundations of the worst system except for all the rest.
Thus, when it comes to religion, the factual claims (praying makes sick people better, the universe was made in six days 6000 years ago) should be subject to the rigours of scientific investigation, while the political claims (God hates ☺☺☺☺, abortion is murder) must be given the same treatment as secular ones.
Are the parents at fault for birthing a child if he commits degenerate acts?
Sometimes, partly. There is a strong correlation between criminality and childhood abuse.
Our legal system doesn't blame the parents because it respects the free will of the individual, and because our society hasn't yet worked out what to do about the fact that who one's parents are determines far too accurately how successful one will be in life.
Is the farmer at fault for sowing seeds if the plants grow under natural conditions to dominate and choke out other fauna?
Flora. Plants are Flora.
And yes. Absolutely. This is why New Zealand, where I live, has such tough biosecurity laws - because half of its (mega)fauna has died out, mostly in the last 200 years, in more or less exactly this way.
just as God is a omnibenevolent God he is also equally just. No he doesn't want to see you suffer at the same time he knows that without strife and consquences of actions we would never learn to be better.
Why should God want us to learn to be better? And why should we want to? If becoming a better person has to be painful, then why is it good?
Since it's so very pertinent, I don't want to see this assumption go unchallenged.
***********
One last thing: you people seem to be claiming that human evil (as distinct from suffering) must exist on Earth because true free will exists, but also that free will exists in heaven, yet without evil. What gives?
the size limit for sig pictures is 600 x 100 pixels, so by stretching it you get a bigger (but more distorted) picture. I felt that this was the best balance.
You have to be more familiar with how Magic judging works than the average PTQ player to understand how the ruling the HJ made is even remotely possible. That's a pretty good indication that it fails on basic sanity.
Bluffing is a big part of Magic (and an even bigger part of Poker, which a lot of Magic players play). If you can bluff well to your opponents who's to say you can't lie well to a judge?
Intent should have much less influence on Magic's rules enforcement at competitive+ REL than it evidently does.
Yeah, here's the problem. I really think he should have been given (at least) a match loss for that match and all previous matches. If people put as much care into making sure they have legal Magic decks as they do into actually playing Magic, these things wouldn't happen.
There seem to be a couple of common sense improvements that can be made to the way PTQs work:
The reaction of the judges in this thread is quite frankly worrying. This event damages the credibility of the Pro Tour and competitive Magic in general. Intentional or not, this sort of thing is an egregious rule violation and winning a PTQ off the back of it shouldn't be able to happen.
That judges here would rather dismiss players' concerns and repeat the rules as they exist, rather than consider that the rules might need changing, doesn't inspire confidence. Most posts by judges in this thread have seemed to imply that if Victor's rule breaking was a genuine accident then his PTQ win should stand, and I can't take that position seriously.
Also, if you're using a graphics program that supports it, it can really help to feather your cut-outs by ~1 pixel to avoid that jagged edge you're getting. I would also do the cut-out at larger image size (maybe 3 times the final size in each direction) before shrinking it to go in the sig, so that you can do a better job. You may also find this removes the need to feather.
Other than that, the sig looks nice. The cut-out is pretty accurate. I would cut off the arm of the middle rat, though; you don't need to be completely faithful to the image and it does look a bit silly.
Centroid draws 7 cards
BadlandsYamane takes a mulligan
<Centroid> kp
BadlandsYamane takes a mulligan
<BadlandsYamane> kp
It is now turn 2 (BadlandsYamane)
It is now the Beginning Phase, Untap Step
It is now the Precombat Main Phase
BadlandsYamane plays Underground Sea from Hand
BadlandsYamane taps Underground Sea
BadlandsYamane plays Thoughtseize from Hand
Centroid reveals a Mountain
Centroid reveals a Magma Jet
Centroid reveals a Sulfuric Vortex
Centroid reveals a Hellspark Elemental
Centroid reveals a Volcanic Fallout
Centroid reveals a Fireblast
Centroid reveals a Mountain
<System> Player Lost
I was arguing only against the simplistic assumption that homosexuality could have evolved in order to prevent overpopulation from occurring, which seems to be as common as it is misinformed.
Punishing people for doing stuff when you designed them to act that way seems pretty sick. As has been said 5000 times before. Punishment does not need to exist. Nor, in fact, does morality. We could instead have a giant happy forever icecream cake where no-one gets sad - but we don't. Perhaps because this crummy world is a better idea.
Which God knew about in advance, and designed.
Also, "just God?"
We clearly don't mean the same thing by pain at all. I guess that's the end of that conversation.
Wait, so perfect people never sin, yet Adam and Eve were perfect, and they sinned? Bwuh?
I should have stopped this a while ago. This is a believer's problem, not an apologist's one, and I see no reason why God shouldn't have made human logic unable to comprehend Him. It would seem like the logical (haha :-/) thing to do.
Pros
- It's fun.
Cons
- Chlamydia
- Gonorrhea
- Syphilis
- Hell
- Hepatitis
- Herpes
- HIV
- HPV
- Crabs
- Social conservatives
- Scabies
- Pregnancy.
The fact that the list is longer doesn't prove a whole lot. Face it, the pro still outweighs the cons. Yes, it's (maybe) possible to scare
kidsteenagers out of having fun - but it's a pretty stink thing to do. And if you have a 1/3 failure rate, the things on that cons list start to look real scary.Species do not need to be "protected from" overpopulation. Overpopulation is merely a symptom of the success of a species. It is the very thing a species tries to achieve, and it will happen eventually in any population with a constant supply of food and other resources. When it does, the population will fall a little before reaching equilibrium. Since natural selection always selects for those who have the most surviving offspring even in overcrowded environments, there is no mechanism by which natural selection could cause an individual to curtail their own reproductive success just to avoid overcrowding. That individual would be selected against, and that gene would die out.
Species do adapt to be better able to cope with overpopulation, but in other ways. If organisms have fewer offspring in crowded conditions (and they usually do) then it is because they are incapable of having as many due to malnourishment or something similar, or because each one is harder to care for. They may limit their gross number of offspring, but if so it is to maximise their number of surviving offspring.
Let me repeat: there is no evolutionary incentive on the individual level (which is the level at which natural selection is strongest) for any organism to avoid overpopulation by raising fewer offspring to adulthood.
It is possible to posit the existence of something "immaterial" that cannot be observed, but such a thing has to have no effect on the observable universe - and such a suggestion can never have any relevance. Certainly such a thing could never do any of the things God is supposed to have done.
Yes, I am glad of the bad things that have happened to me in the past to make me better. They had to happen because in a world with no god, children need occasional punishment in order to become good adults, and because in a world with no god people need to learn from their experiences and some of those experiences are bad.
An omnipotent god, however, could have magicked me good and wise if he wanted to. Why didn't he? It would have been the kind thing to do.
The bone of our contention seems to be that think pain is always bad and pleasure is always good. In fact, I would define pain, in the broadest sense, as "bad experiences" and pleasure as "good experiences". However, you say that
While I agree that pain and suffering can be good in the long run - that is, they can be necessary means to an end - I don't agree that they can be good in and of themselves.
If they are bad then a benevolent god would want to avoid them, and an omnipotent one would be able to arrive at the same end through some other means.
Thanks, that clears things up a bit.
Would it be too much to ask for God to make us perfect too? And if he were benevolent, then wouldn't he have?
He meant positive effects on reproductive fitness, not on society.
Grey, you are right to be confused. Taylor, Pandas, you are oversimplifying the issue.
For a start, the "the human population has not been crowded for that long" thing. While it is true that the human population has never been as big as it is now, and it is also (probably) true that we have not yet reached the current carrying capacity of the Earth, that is only because the Earth's carrying capacity has been increasing very quickly ever since the agricultural revolution. Overpopulation is not new, but a carrying capacity of 10 billion very much is. Localised overpopulation has been happening throughout human history, at much lower population densities than we have now. So the issue of insufficient time to evolve responses to overpopulation is irrelevant.
Now on to whether homosexuality has any reason to be more adaptive in overcrowded conditions. First, a brief description of the ecology of overpopulation. Skip it if you know it already.
There are two main ways in which populations tend to grow - called k-type and r-type. r-type organisms (like cockroaches) reproduce rapidly whenever a food source is available, then die off quickly when it is used up. Their life cycle is optimised for a situation in which resources are plentiful, so they have many offspring and give them little or no postnatal care. k-type organisms (like elephants) exist in places where the availability of resources is more or less constant, and their populations tend to stay more or less at the level where any more individuals would cause the population to become overpopulated. This level is called carrying capacity, or k. The fact that there are usually only just enough resources to go around means that the offspring need quite a bit of help in order to survive to adulthood, so k-type organisms have few offspring, long gestation periods, and their offspring take a long time to reach adulthood. In general, when introduced to a new environment with constant availability of resources, populations of either type will tend to follow the pattern shown in this graph that Taylor linked to - they increase exponentially to start with, then level off and start to fluctuate around carrying capacity.
Now, it might seem sensible that k-type organisms have fewer offspring, "because there's less room" and to avoid the pointless death of what would otherwise be extra organisms. In fact, natural selection is a brutal mistress who gets off on death and couldn't care less how much collateral damage she causes (Remember, most of those baby cockroaches die). The real reason k-types have fewer offspring is because they do not need to be able to increase their populations quickly at short notice like r-types do. It is also because offspring in the resource-poor environments in which k-types live have less chance of surviving by themselves, and if you have to raise each young elephant for 15 years or so there's only so many baby elephants you can raise in an elephant lifetime.
It is important to realise that even in overpopulated environments, natural selection will still favour those who successfully raise the most offspring. Having offspring beyond carrying capacity will result in the death of somebody's offspring, but they won't necessarily be yours. If the carrying capacity allows for four elephant calves and elephants A and B have two each, they have the same reproductive success. However, if elephant A has six calves and elephant B has two, four will die. However, on average they will be three of A's and one of B's and A will be the more successful. So while overpopulation may make it harder to care for young, it does not provide any other incentive for an individual to have fewer.
This brings us to homosexuality. There is no way, least of all overpopulation, that a trait could be selected for on an individual basis that causes those who have it to not have children. That is the opposite of what natural selection does. Homosexuality is either an evolutionary accident or it is beneficial to the parent to have homosexual children. One theory is that homosexuals are more help in raising their siblings than heterosexuals, which could help the parents to successfully raise more heterosexual children than they could have had the children all been heterosexual. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it is even more true in overpopulated conditions, which could help explain any correlation between homosexuality and overpopulation. But it is far from the simple relationship that people often suggest.
A very intriguing idea about the origin of male homosexuality that gets around all its apparent problems is the mitochondrial DNA theory. Some more background stuff:
Human cells get their energy by breaking down ("burning") glucose to make carbon dioxide and water. This reaction is carried out in organelles (organelles are to cells as organs are to a body, essentially) called mitochondria. Mitochondria quite closely resemble bacteria, and indeed that is probably what they were before they started living inside the cells of eukaryotes. Like bacteria, they have a loop of DNA, tiny by chromosomal standards, which they use to divide. The relevant thing about mitochondria is that they exist in an egg before it is fertilised and no mitochondrial DNA is transferred by the sperm, so a person's mitochondrial DNA comes only from their mother.
The fact that only women can pass on mitochondrial DNA means that anything a mitochondrial gene does to a man, however maladaptive to his chromosomal (normal) DNA, has no bearing on the fitness of the mitochondrial gene. It wasn't getting passed on anyway. In fact, if a mitochondrial gene causing male homosexuality provided any advantage at all to the female offspring of the same mother, it would be selected for. There are several ways in which male homosexuality could provide some small reproductive advantage to female siblings - for example the helping-the-mother-raise-the-kids idea, or the prevention of incest. Even if it provided no advantage at all, it could still increase in frequency through genetic drift.
This does not explain female homosexuality, though, and it seems likely that homosexuality in both sexes has a common cause. So it is unlikely to be the whole story. However, it could be part of the reason why homosexuality is more common in men.
On the "magic pill" idea: While I'm sure that most people, myself perhaps included, would probably take the straight kid pill to help their child avoid a life of discrimination, I would love to have the opportunity to put a magic homosexualising pill in the world's drinking water. What better way would there be to painlessly solve the overpopulation problem?
As for whether homosexuality is genetic: there are two things that make us up, our genetics and the environment's interaction with our genetics. If the environment can make us homosexual, it's because our genetics say so. So while on an individual level there are always many environmental contributing factors to homosexuality, on a whole species level the existence of homosexuality (or at least the possibility thereof) must be purely genetic.
As for whether homosexuality is a disorder: The concept of a disorder has always been an ill-defined one. Since homosexuality is a mental thing, and the definitions of mental disorders always contain stipulations about an "inability to function in society", it definitely isn't a mental disorder and thus probably isn't a disorder. But it's a pretty meaningless question, because "disorder" is a pretty meaningless word.
As for whether homosexuality is a "genetic disorder": What we refer to as "genetic disorders" are diseases which show a 100% correlation with their genotype (for example trisomy 21/Down's syndrome). Many diseases - diabetes, cancer, you name it - have a genetic component, but aren't "genetic disorders". So the answer to this one is definitely no.
In any economic system, rewards must exist. Everyone, ideally, should be made to be equal at first, then allowed to earn their inequalities on an individual basis, and not for their families.
One problem with this is, most of what people need to be rewarded for can be achieved either through natural ability or hard work, and it is only hard work which deserves to be rewarded. However, the two can look very much alike.
Another problem is that life's greatest incentive is the well-being of one's children. This creates an inconsistency in our thinking - we resent the discrepancies in how we and others were provided for by our respective parents, yet we want the potential for those discrepancies to remain so that we can earn a head start for our children.
That is the answer in terms of a hierarchy of affluence. As for a hierarchy of power, such a thing doesn't exist in an ideal democracy unless affluence provides power (which, ideally, it shouldn't). Those who are elected to govern are agents of the people, and their power doesn't belong to them because they will lose it as soon as they do anything other than what their electorate wants. Ideally, the longest possible interval between when an elected representative stops behaving according to the wishes of their constituents and when they are replaced - in reality, the period between elections - should be infinitesimal, reducing to nothing the amount of power that an elected representative can use for their own ends.
(The difference between invested and real power is illustrated in Schindler's List, when Ralph Fiennes' characther goes around telling Jews he should have executed that they have been pardoned just to prove that he has a choice).
Economic, genetic, cultural and nepotistic inheritance. That and simply money.
Philosophically, all arguments can be reduced to axioms (a+b = b+a, the laws of physics will always be what they have always been) and since axioms cannot be proven, no set of them can be demonstrably better than any other. If you refuse to accept the standard axioms of mathematics - and intuition is the only reason why you should - then you can make a new set under which 2 + 2 = 5 and I can't touch you.
Scientifically, all opinions must be sceptically tested and only if they survive the experiments should they be allowed any credibility. Newton's theories were inferior to Einstein's, and Lamarck's were inferior to Darwin's. That's exactly the way Newton and Lamarck would have wanted it. However, this can only happen because all scientists base their arguments on the same axioms.
Politically, and purely for pragmatic reasons, all opinions must be treated as equally valid and everyone must be able to hold whatever opinion they want - legislating against thought and speech undermines the foundations of the worst system except for all the rest.
Thus, when it comes to religion, the factual claims (praying makes sick people better, the universe was made in six days 6000 years ago) should be subject to the rigours of scientific investigation, while the political claims (God hates ☺☺☺☺, abortion is murder) must be given the same treatment as secular ones.
It ought to have a hard answer by now. Christianity has had 2000 years to come up with one, and Judaism a few more thousand before that.
Sometimes, partly. There is a strong correlation between criminality and childhood abuse.
Our legal system doesn't blame the parents because it respects the free will of the individual, and because our society hasn't yet worked out what to do about the fact that who one's parents are determines far too accurately how successful one will be in life.
Flora. Plants are Flora.
And yes. Absolutely. This is why New Zealand, where I live, has such tough biosecurity laws - because half of its (mega)fauna has died out, mostly in the last 200 years, in more or less exactly this way.
Why should God want us to learn to be better? And why should we want to? If becoming a better person has to be painful, then why is it good?
Since it's so very pertinent, I don't want to see this assumption go unchallenged.
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One last thing: you people seem to be claiming that human evil (as distinct from suffering) must exist on Earth because true free will exists, but also that free will exists in heaven, yet without evil. What gives?