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> there is a sibling comment explaining the scientific reason for why he is wrong If you're referring to andrewla's comments, I don't agree, his 'scientific' a

• andrewla 6y ago
  I'm not going to touch the right/left stuff, just want to jump in on the variety/evolution thing. The "killing off parts of that variety" is a mechanic that is not universally accepted; genetic drift has been documented to happen for non-red-in-tooth-and-claw situations. That's not to say it's discredited or anything, but it's just one mechanism. The thing shared by all mechanics of evolution is that they need a population with enough internal variation to be able to move the needle at all. A population that needs to evolve itself out of a corner (say a dramatic change in environment) needs time in proportion to variety, not in proportion to mutation rate. And no population survives without producing almost entirely viable offspring. We did not practice eugenics on dogs for millenia -- we selectively bred dogs. We bred different breeds for different purposes, and the more narrow the breed is, the less robust it is (I don't think anyone would question this if they had ever read anything about pedigreed breeds). The reason why dogs are robust as a species is largely because we didn't focus on one particular trait across the entire species, so with cross-breeding (and even breeding with wild dog-like animals) we can retain some level of robustness.
  • Udik 6y ago
    > The thing shared by all mechanics of evolution is that they need a population with enough internal variation to be able to move the needle at all. A population that needs to evolve itself out of a corner... True. In a sense, your metaphor of variation as the fuel of evolution is very apt. Variation is indeed the fuel of evolution, in the sense that evolution consumes it. In order to make your car move, you need the fuel and you need to consume it. When "a population evolves itself out of a corner" it does so by consuming part of its variation. The population survives, the single individuals might be selected out (or single traits, through differential reproduction rates). > We did not practice eugenics on dogs for millenia -- we selectively bred dogs. It seems to me that any form of selective breeding when applied to human beings falls entirely into the definition of eugenics. The Merriam Webster defines eugenics as: "the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition". > the more narrow the breed is, the less robust it is Absolutely true, but dog breeds are (especially in recent times) are really extreme and cruel forms of selection. Commercial breeders (and their customers) are following absurdly strict appearance canons. On the other hand, the slightest form of imposed human breeding, however transversal to the bulk of human variation (say, for example, discouraging from reproducing people who are more than 2 standard deviations taller than the rest of their country average or reference ethnicity) is already an ethically unacceptable form of eugenics, independently from its practical impact on the genetic variation of humanity.
• runarberg 6y ago
  The climate disaster is full of ethical issues, pursuing the issue without it is lying by omission. The climate crisis disproportionately affects people in poorer areas, while a handful of rich people are doing all the polluting. It is both morally wrong and criminally ludicrous to allow these rich folks to continue with their polluting without being punished. See separating polluters from their means of pollution is both effective and the right thing to do. Regarding the nuclear plants: You claim that the left is out of touch with reality while you think that we can somehow build a few hundred new nuclear plants over the course of next ten years (which is probably an overextended estimate of how long we have), and that alone will fix the climate crisis. No that won’t happen in the world we live in. The climate disaster will have to mitigated by stopping polluters from polluting—which we can do by laws and enforcement; and has been proven to work effectively in the past—everything else is wishful thinking.
  • Udik 6y ago
    > You claim that the left is out of touch with reality while you think that we can somehow build a few hundred new nuclear plants ... and that alone will fix the climate crisis No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if I want to support my theory that a political side has appropriated a real scientific and technical issue to promote a worldview that had long pre-existed the issue itself, what I need to find is at least some cases in which technical solutions are ignored because they don't fit in that worldview. And I think nuclear energy is one such example. > The climate disaster will have to mitigated by stopping polluters from polluting Well, first of all it's not "polluters", it's emissions of CO2. Pollution is a wider issue than climate change which is what we are supposedly talking about. Also, you seem to divide the world in "a handful of rich people" and "people in poorer areas", in a way that resembles a lot the traditional division between "capitalists" and "workers", the ones profiting and the others suffering. But these rich people is us: we use cars, we eat food grown with fertilizers, we use tons of energy for all our daily lives. Separating us from our means of pollution means separating us from most of what we use and need in our daily lives. And you think that this is more realistic than building nuclear plants? I tried googling "climate crisis disproportionally affects" to find some scholarly articles about the third world impacts of climate change (but I was lazy so I didn't add the final 'poorest countries'). This is what I got, a bit surprisingly, as first results: - Why Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Women - Climate change disproportionately impacts those with disabilities - Climate change will hurt poor people the most So I got curious and added 'LGBTQ' to the search string, and there it goes: - Women, LGBT people 'invisible' victims of disasters – experts - Why Climate Change is an LGBTQ+ Issue This stuff makes me extremely suspicious. I'm used to think that reality is entirely indifferent to our justice issues, to our sense of fairness and opportunity: cancer develops in the body of the good and the evil ones; earthquakes don't care if the city above is rich or poor. And yet here we have an example of a physical phenomenon that perfectly confirms and adapts to a range of social and political issues that pre-exist it and that are the domain of a specific political side. But to be more specific, and to take upon the most serious claim, the one that climate change disproportionally affects the poorest countries: 1) it is trivially true that natural disasters affect most the poorest and those who are least organised and prepared to cope with them. It used to happen to us as well. What changed is that we got rich and organised: we made enormous modifications to our environments and societies; we deviated rivers, builts dams, drained swamps, built roads, removed most of the people from the country to highly infrastructured cities and provided them jobs in factories and offices; built schools and hospitals. Mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and genetic research brought us food security. Buildings follow expensive regulations to withstand fires and eartquakes. And on and on and on. What I want to stress here is that we didn't find safety thanks to a gentler climate. We actually consumed enormous amounts of resources to build it. If climate change were to be stopped and reversed now, disappearing as if it had never happened, the people in the poorest countries would only be slightly better off, but they would remain as poor and exposed to natural disasters as they are now. We are fixating on a detail and missing the bulk of the issue. 2) The idea that the poorest countries are paying the price of the development of the richest ones is also pre-existing the climate change issue and it's a very old political stance of the left. Again, it is suprising how a scientific issue exactly confirms a political side in their traditional views. 3) The fact that the "climate crisis" is always happening is some faraway place we have little or no understanding of makes me even more suspicious.