going4alob

I visit the USA about 1-2 times per month and get fingerprinted and photographed each time. I personally don't have a problem with it. The immigration officials can be quite rude sometimes despite the various pledges to be courteous etc... that are plastered on the walls of the immigration hall. Although this is the first point of contact when entering the USA I don't think that it would contribute much to anyone's overall opinion once they have spent some time in the country.

Oh, that's very arguable. You're wrong. Guns are very durable items: they last for hundreds of years, and are passed from generation to generation. And new ones are being sold too. So there are now more guns than ever in America, with about 50% of the population owning them. And at the same time, child accidental deaths from guns has dropped every year since such statistics have been recorded, and are at an all time low. There is no direct correlation between the number of guns and the number of child gun deaths. At the same time as more guns are being purchased, there is also gun safety education and product improvements taking place to reduce the number of accidents. Thus, the trends diverge in opposite directions. Sorry I don't follow you on this point. Are you saying for example, if you take two countries one that allows free gun ownership and one that doesn't, that accidental deaths due to guns will not be higher in the country that allows gun ownership?

I have travelled the world and I visit the USA (east and west coasts) about twice a month. I can honestly say that I think American's are generally very polite probably more so than Brits, and certainly other European countries I have been to. I don't believe there is any relationship between being able to carry a gun and a polite society, it's more likely to do with how you've been brought up. I don't believe that the gun culture that I see in the USA would ever work or be applicable in the UK, and would oppose the loosening of restrictions in the UK. Likewise I really don't think that UK restrictions would ever work in the USA. In terms of being armed and the effects on crime rates I think that there is way to much variation in the way crime is defined and data collated from country to country to make any good comparisons. There is one unarguable point about having less restricted gun laws, which is that the incidence of accidential deaths particularly with young children increases as more of the population are armed. Unfortunately not every gun holder the high sense of responsibility that is required to hold a gun, coupled with the fact that some children even though they are taught not to mess with guns will on occasion play with them. After all that has been said on SC I really doubt being able to have a gun compared to not having a gun would really affect crime rates in any country.

Pretty much all low level radioactive solid waste is incinerated at accredited sites in the UK. The Environment Agency is supposed to be very tough on the design and running of the designated incinerators. They even allow the disposal of very low level waste from weak beta emitters to be disposed of in normal waste.

I think we have a lot to learn from other organisms about mechanisms that regulate cell differentiation. Take the salamander for example, an organism that can re-grow new limbs by reactivating the embryonic regeneration response, a process that is lost by mammals in early embryogenesis. This regeneration is achieved by fibroblast dedifferentiation giving rise to blastema cells. The whole process of dedifferentiation is regulated by soluble growth factors as well as cell-cell interactions in the surrounding tissue. I personnally think that there are some good examples in the literature if progress being made in which adult somatic stem cells may be induced to dedifferentiate via a process of nuclear reprogramming. This can currently be achieved through cell fusion or by transplantation of endogenous bone marrow derived stem cells into defective tissues. At the end of the day, potential therapeutic effects of stem cell research does not just lie in our ability to manipulate embyonically derived stem cells.

Just out of interest does anyone know if the bill prevents funding of studies to convert adult stem cells back to an embryonic phenotype? This is not possible at the moment but could be in a few years time.

Well, you package them as gradually changing their message, so I'm interested if you've observed specific people doing this, or are they new sets of individuals with each change. No, it's not. I want the temperature readings from these specific monitoring stations in the Virgin Islands. If one third of the stations showed bleachings and subsequent die-offs in the last year, and the cause is attributed to warming waters, it seems like an appropriate place to say 'this die off was accompanied by an average increase in temperature at depth of 1.5 degree Centigrate.' Unless, of couse, the water temp didn't move in the last year. Then it would make you look stupid. I'm not looking for ways to dismiss reality. I'm asking for basic science. And I know many of the other factors at work here. I put pollution at the top for these island nations. You can't dump everything out to sea and expect good things to happen. As I understand it this effect has not just been observed in the Caribbean. There are corals dying off at an alarming rate across the globe. Am I correct in thinking that local changes such as bleaching are unlikely to cause this effect on a global scale?

I don't know anything about the ID findings. I've been explaining what the CONCEPT is because you (and others) seemed to be curious if it was more rigorous and scientific than "god says so". It IS more rigorous than that, at least in theory. Maybe somebody else has current findings. My guess is there isn't much. The scientific method, succinctly, is to form a hypothesis based on existing data, use it to make testable predictions, and test them. ID proponents made such predictions about the eye. Then new data turned up to prove them wrong. At this point a scientist would reject a hypothesis outright, or modify it to fix the incorrect parts. The ID proponents don't do that. They just say "bad choice of organ, try another". Science does not go looking for that one piece of data that confirms the hypothesis while rejecting all data to the contrary as not relevant. ID is not falsifiable as long as a single piece of biology remains unknown. ID is NOT science even if dressed up like it. After forming a hypothesis any good scientist should go about trying their best to disprove it by experimentation. If you cannot disprove your hypothesis then it has validity. This is the problem that I have with ID, in that one will never be able to prove ot disprove the argument, since the core of the ID belief is that God created everything - totally unprovable.

Look, I already showed that your eyeball example is not an argument against ID. Of course it is. Anti-evolutionists made a prediction ("evolution can't explain this, so a 'designer' must have been involved"). Prediction turned out wrong. If something as complex as an eye, which THEY chose as an example, can be shown to have evolved, it destroys the credibility of their argument that a 'designer' is needed. (Not that they had any in the first place). Tell me, what does ID predict about the possibility of mutation of A5N1 into a pandemic killer? There are lots of examples of viruses such as HIV, influenza (H5N1) that have mutate in response to environmental selection pressures. These organisms have genetic machinery that promote mutation events in specific genes often encoding products that are part of the infection process. In doing so many stains of virus can arise to which immunity has to be re-established in the host. This is part of the normal lifecycle of the virus I guess you could call it evolution.

I'm going out on a limb here but I'm going to assume that ID proponents are sophisticated in the issues you bring up. Even if the individuals involve are not sophisticated, that isn't evidence for or against the theory. It just means they should be doing better recruiting. Most scientist that I work with do not consider ID as an alternative to evolution, this may of course be due to the fact that there a few peer-review publications on ID topics. I personally find ID difficult to reconcile with discoveries made in gentics over the past 50 years. As it stands ID has no scientific merit although if supporters of ID were able to form a good arguement based on scientific fact then I would have to reconsider my understanding of evolutionary processes.

Mutation rates are difficult to determine. For any given organism the frequency of mutation in any given gene will depend on a number of factors including environmental selection pressure, funtion of protein and the location of gene in genome. In the same organism the frequency of mutations in a gene that encodes a vital protein conserved across species will be completely different from genes that for example encode biological receptors that bind a variety of ligands. I assume that the ID statement regarding mutation rates applies to human genes and not other organisms e.g. viruses?

Just got back from a great trip to southern California. I was undecided as to which DZ to visit but am very pleased that I ended up at Skydive San Diego. A very friendly DZ where regular jumpers can get coached by world class skydivers. The scenary is fantastic as is the weather. I understand that there are going to be some managment changes in the next month or so hopefully this will not affect the DZ operation. I can throughly recommend a visit.