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
“compared to prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells which do little if any horizontal gene transfer on their own.”
Except for the entire process of endosymbiosis.
“The microbes in the form of prions, phages, and viruses are uniquely capable of that”
Again, microbes are microrganisms. They are alive. One can argue that a virus is on the cusp of being a microrganism and abiotic chemistry, but prions and phages? Not even close to being alive. They are scraps of protein particles even simpler than a virus.
Really, it’s embarrassing how you blow the basics of biology. You also act as if horizontal gene transfers are something new when they are not. The idea of endosymbiosis has been around since the turn of the 20th Century, before even Crick and Watson laid out the basis for the modern genetic model.
And none – none – of what you say supports the idea of directed design in higher organisms. That, Dredd, is a fantasy about as far from reality as one can get.
Gene H. 1, January 30, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Horizontal gene transfers …
Unless, of course, you want to argue with the Oxford English Dictionary to make up your own meaning as you are wont to do.
====================================
No, it is reality I am dealing with, which you would do well to emulate.
Horizontal transfers of genes presupposes existing entities to which the genes can be transferred to and from.
Therein lies the problem.
The two GEO events as well as the two “life explosions” (e.g. Cambrian and the one prior to that) require an existing LUCA that is in very, very great abundance.
The virus first hypothesis is an attempt to explain first the explosion of quantities of entities that can thereafter horizontally move genes among themselves.
The microbes in the form of prions, phages, and viruses are uniquely capable of that, compared to prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells which do little if any horizontal gene transfer on their own.
Especially if they didn’t yet exist until much later.
Whether the prions, phages, and viruses can free oxygen so it ends up in the atmosphere too is being explored further.
shano,
Because that is the limit of our current technology in manipulating DNA. Some day, hopefully soon, direct editing of DNA using nanotechnology will become practical and we’ll be able to edit DNA like editing a magnetic tape using tools that have less chance of error or superfluous code. However, I do share your concerns with GMO crops.
Why does Monsanto need to use bits of virus dna and bacteria dna in order to insert genes into plant germ cells?
Because that is the concern in Europe, bits of a virus coding that may cause human health problems…..
http://permaculturenews.org/2013/01/23/regulators-discover-a-hidden-viral-gene-in-commercial-gmo-crops/
Horizontal gene transfers are nothing more than another input to natural selection, but still they provide no evidence of directed design (which is the heart of your contention). “Darwin’s explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.” A statement which comports with what I’ve been saying: Darwinian evolution applies to cellular life. What you are talking about before cellular life is chemistry, not biology. That is what the word abiotic means:
abiotic /ˌeɪbʌɪˈɒtɪk/, adj.,
physical rather than biological; not derived from living organisms:
Unless, of course, you want to argue with the Oxford English Dictionary to make up your own meaning as you are wont to do.
Natural selection, however, is another proposition. “[T[he most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn’t Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.” Which is where they – and you and everyone else in the extremist symbiosis camp – go wrong in understanding the full implications of natural selection. Even if you ignore the fact that viruses are not alive and look at simple or single celled organisms, in horizontal gene transfers the mutation that provides benefit will prevail over the mutation that does not and it is still not the only way of altering genes. In this way horizontal gene transfers are no different from any other input into natural selection.
You probably shouldn’t read cosmology you don’t understand either. It leads you to include quotes such as this in your reference: “Rose indicates that focus one only one molecule, the DNA molecule, the gene, leads down inaccurate pathways; the solution is to see the organism as an entire functioning entity with equal emphasis on the parts, not unequal emphasis on the genetics alone” . . . which is something anyone with a modern complex understanding of natural selection as a process will tell you. Because what Rose is saying is what I’ve been telling you all along:
No one input to natural selection is dominant and there are multiple inputs.
Scary T-Shirt: “I Can Fly”
The evolution of evolution:
(Archeology Daily). And we haven’t even considered abiotic evolution.