[Bill Sloman]

Cool!  I've been spending too much time around Democrat politicians.



Well, I didn't know you were a Democrat.  From our discussion on
Obamacare, it certainly *seems* you're not comfortable trusting people
to make their own choices.

In particular, you're arguing for a system whose organizing principle
is compulsion, optimized by intelligent design (by non-expert non-
participants), and whose compulsions are based on political gain for
those compelling.  Contrast this with a system organized by free
choice and optimized by the evolutionary pressure of the individuals
making those choices, a free market.  The gov't makes sure no one
cheats you, but you can choose as you please.

When I look to our medical care system I fully see how external
pressure after external pressure from Congress shaped it from what it
was into what it is today.  (People will jump through a lot of hoops
for tax free income.)  Evolution.

If doctors advertised prices and people actually had to pay, the cost
of ordinary care would plummet.  That would fix 2/3rds of what ails
us.  That's my faith in organic, self-organizing, self-optimizing
systems. (And in distributed intelligence, the common wisdom if you
will.)  It works in natural system after natural system.

Curiously, in every other advanced industrial country, health care is
organised in a way which James Arthur finds too centralised and
inflexible, and still manages to come out cheaper per head than the
bizarre and un-natural system in use in the US.

The UK model provides adequate health care for everybody at half the
US price per head, and the French and German systems care for
everybody at about the same level as the US system cares for the fully
insured at two thirds of the price per head.

If James Arthur stopped obseesing about ideological purity and
followed the evidence for a bit, he might post a little less nonsense.

<snip>

 

[John Devereux]

Engineered hybrids, huh? That means humans as the engineers right?

That was *your* phrase not mine! I don't know why you introduced it
really, but it was just another fact you got wrong.

So who engineered all the evolution before humans?

Natural selection; that was the key insight, the whole point really.

Besides, I was thinking of higher species, not mutation of some
bacteria or virae.

Well there is this; discusses speciation in plants and insects.

<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html>

If you want a lion to turn into a badger or something, you might have to
wait a bit longer.

Danger is more likely in the other way around. Consider those Nazi
experiments, for instance.

They believed in a "master race" didn't they? And that other races were
genetically inferior or some such thing? I gather that in modern biology
there is "no such thing as race"; the genetic variation within a race is
greater than that between them. Not that I am a geneticist, but sounds
like something that is good to know.

No kidding ... How profound!

Evolution? Or the science and the enlightenment in general?

In either case, yes, it is.

 

[josephkk]

You are the one not paying attention. I didn't argue about the existence
of evolution. I just asked what difference does it make to us now what
somebody believes about it if that happens over millions of years where
any generation of humans cannot even affect, witness or observe it. The
hybrids we "engineered" cannot reproduce themselves, so they are a
dead-end in the evolution. We could not even affect the mutation of
viruses or bacteria.

Really? How about BT hybrid corn strains which breed true? Check:

< http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/crops/00708.html >

?-)

 

[josephkk]

Yes, we have but we were not always around. So how did they evolve
without us then? Besides, what you list here did not result in new
species, just a variation of the same ones. Like the different dogs that
are still just dogs.

The point that enough extreme breeding can result in effectively zero
cross fertility. One of the better tests for different species. Do you
think that a Chihuahua female can bear the pups of a bull mastiff cross?
When is it a fox, when is it a coyote, and when is it a wolf; nominally
thought of as different species, are they cross fertile?

?-)