We have been following the increasing crackdown on passengers wearing T-Shirts on airlines deemed offensive or threatening. These cases often raise free speech questions, but also raise serious questions of the increasing irrationality of airline staff and some passengers. The t-shirt of Wynand Mullins is a good example. Mullins wore a t-shirt on a Qantas flight from Sydney with the well-known quote from Princess Bride by character Montoya (played in the film by Mandy Patinkin): “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.” Some passengers became alarmed by the t-shirt, presumably convinced that a terrorist would not only advertise his intent but choose a fictional character from a children’s book to represent his deep homicidal beliefs. Flight staff insisted that he change his shirt. Presumably, there was a passenger with five fingers that felt personally threatened by the quotation.
After he boarded his flight home to Auckland, New Zealand, a flight attendant took on the role of Count Rugen who insisted he did not like the line and told Montoya “Stop saying that!”
In this case, however, the flight attendant told him that the t-shirt was unacceptable for travel. He was only allowed to continue after he established that he did not have a change in shirts. You can see Mullins and his t-shirt at this site. I simply do not get how some passengers are so fearful that a joke t-shirt triggers such alarm. These are the same people presumably favoring greater and greater limitations on passengers and citizens under anti-terror laws. Fear has been wiped up to such a frenzy that passengers believe Al Qaeda is going into suicide missions wearing quotes from Rob Reiner films.
I only wish that when he was asked to change his shirt, Mullins pulled out a shirt quoting the character Vizzini: “you are friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless!”
The alternative lines may not be much an improvement for general acceptance of the passengers:
Westley to Buttercup: “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
Westley: “DEATH FIRST!”
Westley: “We are men of action, lies do not become us.”
Vizzini: “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line”! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha… “
Of course, Montoya was warned that his “over-developed sense of vengeance is going to get you into trouble some day.”
Source: Daily Mail
Bron 1, January 27, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Dredd:
the suggestion that certain viruses might be responsible for evolution of a species is very interesting. Are mutations in dna large enough to induce changes in an animal spontaneous or are they caused by either environmental chemicals or a particular virus?
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It goes back to a time prior to the existence of DNA, back to pre-Cambrian, before the “Cambrian explosion” (a.k.a. Darwin’s Dilemma) of novel species and novel features:
(R. L. Carroll, “Towards a new evolutionary synthesis,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 15(1):27-32, 2000, emphasis added). That is exactly what evolutionary consideration of microbes in the evolutionary synthesis does.
Microbial (includes prions, phages, viruses, and bacteria) creation and proliferation of RNA etc. provides a quick way, in evolutionary time scales, for the proliferation of genetic material, the development of oxygen, and other issues.
I felt I needed to note and emphasize that the new viral theories I presented via quotes up-thread, which have scared some folks here and there, lean toward the hypothesis that viral evolution happened prior to single cell evolution.
As you know, that is a departure from much of current evolutionary theory.
Dredd:
the suggestion that certain viruses might be responsible for evolution of a species is very interesting. Are mutations in dna large enough to induce changes in an animal spontaneous or are they caused by either environmental chemicals or a particular virus?
id707,
Luis P. Villarreal is a microbiologist. Dredd is just compounding his ignorance by cherry picking sentences he thinks backs his contention. Fallacy piled upon top of poorly integrated knowledge and even worse understood science.
Ooo. Cherry picking.
“Such acquisitions of complexity have always been difficult to explain by a simple Darwinian process” . . . if you don’t understand the mathematics of complexity like Dredd apparently doesn’t. “Possible” does not mean “actual”, “difficult” does not mean “impossible”, and one mechanism that can explain punctuated equilibrium does not mean there is only one mechanism.
There.
That’s better.
Dredd,
The support, for example, for the development of complexities like the eye, has been in Darwinistic examples, the slow development from a light sensitive skin patch to the most complex development currently available.
This is the Darwinistic approach.
The sudden development of the brainpower of humans has not been explained in this fashion, some would declare.
Your quotation from the APS seems an interesting idea.
WTF do they know about microbiology, etc.?
Stuff written on T-Shirts is scary to Grandpa Oldie But Goodie.
An expert who teaches evolution, virology, and Darwinism got jiggy wid it by asking the question Can Viruses Make Us Human?:
(Proceedings of The American Philosophical Society, VOL. 148, NO. 3, Sept. 2004, by Luis P. Villarreal,
Dr. The Greatest Gene, p. 296). Dr. Villarreal is Director of the Center for Virus Research, University of California, at Irvine.All I have to face is that you still don’t know what you are talking about, Dredd.
Firstly, this statement is utter nonsense: “The microbes, which includes viruses, made the environment, and have consistently changed it through genetic creation and management, not the other way around”. A) microbes are not viruses. Microbes are a diverse lot but they have in common that they are cellular life, i.e. they are the smallest unit recognized by science as alive and they operate on or inside the cell wall membrane. Viruses are considered to be “on the edge” of life because they lack the complexity of a prokaryotic or eukaryotic cell. A virus only has three parts: 1) genetic material (either DNA or RNA), 2) a protein coat that protects these genes and 3) sometimes an envelope of lipids that surrounds the protein coat for protection when they are outside a cell. While viruses (which arose from both plasmids and evolved from bacteria) can share RNA and DNA, they do play a role in horizontal gene transfers which can effect evolution, but no more so than random mutation, differential reproduction and environmental considerations. They do not “manage” genetic creation. They are simply one of several influences on complex organisms and how their genes express.
As for the environment? Viruses and microbes didn’t create the environment. They arose in the environment created by liquid water and the energy introduced to that system by solar activity and volcanism. After they arose from the primordial abiotic soup, they – like all creatures – began to influence the environment. The most important influence being the introduction of oxygen to the atmosphere. However, they did not “create” the environment.
The abiotic chemical processes that led to biotic chemistry are a function of complexity built up over time – the random chemical combinations of an energetic system that eventually led to a chemistry upon which life could be built. In the case of life on Earth, life built upon a carbon base. Under different circumstances, alternate forms of that chemistry could have just as easily led to life, a specific example being silicon although it would be a lower energy system. None of what you’ve said makes abiotic chemistry into a god that creates and shepherds life. It’s just a condition in the environment required for complex organic life to develop. A condition that arose from a random process of chemical bonding until peptides arose and eventually peptides combined to make polypeptides and polypeptides eventually combined to make nucleotides and all of them formed complex macromolecules like RNA and DNA. That is the point where life becomes possible – when differential reproduction becomes possible and that becomes possible when inorganic chemistry becomes a nucleotide base for making RNA. That is what Bessier is saying: a complex chemical stew cooked through billions of permutations until something interesting happened. Namely that a complex abiotic chemistry took on the ability to reproduce itself in an organic differential manner. That it took a really long time to get there compared to the length of time complex life has existed on Earth is irrelevant.
Evolution applies to complex life, not inorganic chemistry. Inorganic chemistry permutates and combines randomly based upon how much energy is within the system and what raw basic elements are in the system. Physics still applies.
The only thing wrong with Darwin’s theory is you don’t understand it at all apparently, just like you don’t understand most of the microbiology that you read.
Gene H. 1, January 26, 2013 at 3:15 pm
“However this does and cannot account for what has happened in terms of survival over millions of years, which is not trivial.”
Actually, the theory of evolution does precisely that.
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It should be noted that “the theory” is akin to “the law” … which is both reductionist, retro, and overly imaginary, glossy, and general.
The microbes, which includes viruses, made the environment, and have consistently changed it through genetic creation and management, not the other way around:
(Book Review: Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, by Welkin Johnson). The environment did not drive evolution in the 3.5-3.8 bn years leading up to the time LUCA theoretically emerged, as did a fundamental piece of the environment:
(Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), emphasis added). Microbes in the form of viruses were around way long before mammalian environment or mammalian genes even existed, including human DNA, and so they produced them.
Yes, they were around before the current Earth’s atmosphere, and so they made the environment what it was and has become.
Resort to reductio ad absurdum does not a valid theory make:
(Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, Chapter Scratching The Surface of Biology’s Dark Matter, links up-thread). Never-the-less, bully pseudo-science has not felt the need to entertain reality:
(ibid, Book Review: Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, emphasis added). Abiotic evolution is even more important to define than viral evolution is, but likewise it has not been done in our bully science with anything near a coherent theory.
Environment did not drive abiotic evolution (during a vast span of time prior to biotic evolution) either:
(Putting A Face On Machine Mutation – 3). Machines did not need the kind of environment biological organisms need, so the microbes, which includes viruses, made an environment for future biological organisms which included oxygen and other goodies.
Viruses did not adapt to something that did not exist or that they needed, they made something that did not previously exist for something that would later exist.
As professor Bassler puts it, microbes made the rules for multi-cellular development and microbes invented the multi-cellular behavior inside us (Microbial Hermeneutics – 2). Let’s face it, Grandpa’s theories were and are infirm in terms of evolutionary reality.
And we haven’t even touched on the subject of environmental effects through epigenetics, nor placental environment. and I wonder if they have decided that reading good books and listening (foetus also) to Mozart is “good” while pregnant.
Is eating fermented foods, saying your prayers, or whatever………!?
“However this does and cannot account for what has happened in terms of survival over millions of years, which is not trivial.”
Actually, the theory of evolution does precisely that.
GeneH,
Apologies for not quoting you instead of paraphrasing you.
What you say is in accordance with my one year evening study at Stockholms University of Evolutional Biology. (which isn’t much)
However this does and cannot account for what has happened in terms of survival over millions of years, which is not trivial.
The forms of spreading, competition, sudden extinction due to climate change, depletion of nutrition are borne out by what we know now and is what we believe.
But over time we don’t know what weighed most at any given time, neither for a species nor the planet as a whole.
A small quibble, and it must remain so, as we can’t ever know the answer, and are not necessarily served well by an answer. Better to analyze the now.
“Your assertion that it all is a melange where all these factors each contributing equally is but a contention lacking proof.”
Actually that isn’t exactly what I said and the proof is in the theory of evolution, id707. Looking at evolution as a holistic system no one factor is more important than another. For any given organism, any one of those factors skewing can be the difference between selecting in or out. Example: plagues (viral or microbial) can mutate (skew) and cause a massive die out or possibly extinction of given species. In that example, symbiosis is the driver of evolution. Example: loss of a food source can cause a species to die out if it cannot adapt or the introduction of a new food source can cause a species to thrive. In this example, environment is the driver of evolution. Example: a genetic “disorder”, i.e. a non-beneficial mutation, can cause a species to die out or a beneficial mutation can cause a species to thrive. In this example, genetics are the driver of evolution. All of these factors create the probability matrix that is natural selection. Any one factor or, most usually, combination of factors shape the matrix but as a whole no one factor dominates holistically. That is simply how the system Darwin described works. This is what the extremists from both the symbiosis and the genetic determinism camps miss.
shano 1, January 26, 2013 at 12:38 pm
Dredd, this is the reason I think GMOs are so dangerous. Any given bacteria can take those fragments of code from GMO plants and replicate them. If it is the one that produces Bt toxin? Who knows, it needs to be studied.
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Indeed.
Not because of fear but because we don’t know enough. We have begun to scratch the surface of understanding genetics and microbial influence and manupulation of genetic components.
We have just begun to think of the good microbes (the vast, vast majority, including viruses) after we have tried to exterminate them for decades.
If we had succeeded we would be extinct.
Now we want to play with them after trying to exterminate them.
Jumping from one ditch into the other with insufficient thought in between.
We are afraid of stuff on T-Shirts but not of screwing with potential catastrophe.
Seems to be a bit rrational.
BTW All,
Do you have access to non-GMO seeds. Monsanto is attacking home farmers and others on that front here in Europe. Yes, I know I am crediting them to be persons, but they do do evil, IMHO.
Seedbanks forever. Established in the permafrosted island (?) and regenerated regularly. Screw Montsanto.
GeneH,
Let me console Dredd that he has not lost his groupie to you.
Will give short comment showing that your words are read carefully.
Your assertion that it all is a melange where all these factors each contributing equally is but a contention lacking proof. A study of a 2 million years might give some light as to what was most important at each stage, or even prove your contention right. But assertions are just that, opinions not facts.
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Dredd,
Building your life on someone’s motivated paper is not too good an idea.
The existence of these ideas is good, the mold rapidly encrusts old knowledge and fools may tend to revere them. Like Eddington did when commenting the work of a young Indian physicist. The Indian came to America, where colonies had had another effect.
And perhaps a very prescient word was said by a Jewish Nobel prize winner in Physics. “There is lots of room at the bottom”. Therewith launching the dawn of nanotech. Nanotech is of obvious importance, as you demonstrate well, in the biological world. To the bottom. Met a lab tech headed for Japan to study intra-cellular mysteries. Wonder how that worked out.
But a small peeve. Stop characterizing these microbes and DNA thingies with a penetration point for cell entry AS THOUGH THEY THINK OR HAVE INTENTIONS. Bad thinking.
Some say we do or do not have free will, but that is another discussion.
Shano,
When I awake completely. Just awakened by my Ethiopian helper, who left me with soup cooking now. He is another story, particularly for American Afros, ie former slaves descendants.
Ie later you’ll get a FDA microbiological study report defining detected dangers from standard FDA reports. Asked for more time to study. Nope, Obama signs the law removing guard zones around GMO alfalfa.
Dredd, this is the reason I think GMOs are so dangerous. Any given bacteria can take those fragments of code from GMO plants and replicate them. If it is the one that produces Bt toxin? Who knows, it needs to be studied.
idealist707 1, January 26, 2013 at 9:33 am
Just a word of caution—-to all.
Just anybody can claim a name, even nuts in all forms.
And just a “good” name doesn’t mean skit.
I have not researched this society named by Dredd and don’t intend to.
It is the similar technique primarily used by conservative pols and orgs.
The American Society for Microbiology
Maybe it is good, or maybe it is a nut fringe with a rant to drive.
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They are definitely scary because they are replicating like viruses:
(About ASM, emphasis added). I say it is time to get some pitchforks out and get rid of this innylekshool infection holy roller style.
““If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
It was Derek Bok who said that, not Leonardo da Vinci.
Well done, Dredd.
The irony is delicious.