Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2017 March 1

= March 1 =

Why is the academic establishment worshipping materialism?
I've been reading about consciousness for a while and what surprised me was the number of biologists/neuroscientists assuming materialism like a religion. There's no evidence what so ever consciousness can arise out of inanimate matter, yet they worship it like a god, despite their own champions admitting the seemingly impossible problem with consciousness. Daniel Dennett said he'll suicide if materialism turned out to be false, if this is not worship I don't know what is. Of course you'd say "who cares what people think", the problem is any investigation of paranormal does not get funded. We might be on the verge of the biggest revolution in human history but it's severely delayed due to lack of funding. P.S. I know this isn't a forum, just wanna know why the fanatic worship of materialism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Money is tight (talk • contribs) 04:45, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Materialism is what made America great. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * BB's joke involves conflating ontological materialism with economic materialism. -- ToE 06:39, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Relevant: Occam's razor, falsifiability, scientific method... It's pretty clear that the physical exists (or real enough; "if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me" -- Robert E. Howard).  If there has been reproducible evidence for anything beyond that ("if"), it was of a limited and highly situational skill and so misunderstood that it's simpler to assume that such an anomaly is not the norm.  Add in that there is a lot of data to show an absence of the paranormal and that there's plenty of reproducible "materialist" (i.e. scientific) explanations for why less-scientifically-inclined persons might perceive a hypothetical paranormal, and little reason for science to assume there is anything paranormal (much less keep testing for it).
 * It isn't "worship" -- many legitimate scientists happen to be devout followers of religion. Theistic evolution is one way this manifests.  Viewing spiritual matters from the perspective of Idealism and even Fideism are other means by which one can be a devout believer in a "supernatural" religion while still accepting a scientific view of this world. Ian.thomson (talk) 05:56, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * You cannot be a believer in supernatural things and have a scientific view of the world. Those things are mutually incompatible. Fgf10 (talk) 07:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Hence scare quotes. If someone accepts the scientific world view and also believes that after they die they'll lose all their memories and be born in some other body, so long as they don't claim to remember what their past lives were, there's not really any rejection of science here. If someone accepts the scientific worldview and also believes that when they die their mind will go on to experience something besides this world, so long as they make no claims as to having gotten a preview visit, they're not really rejecting science. It's possible to accept claims in addition to science without contradicting science. Some New Atheist authors who would rather discourage religious folks from studying science than encourage everyone to study science might argue that atheism has a monopoly on science, but mainstream scientists (not just theologians but the scientists as well) favor the idea of Non-overlapping magisteria. Ian.thomson (talk) 08:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Science and religion are not inherently incompatible. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:57, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Have you read the constant debate on near death experience? I'm not talking about evolution vs creation, there's huge evidence for evolution and pretty much nothing for creation. But on the subject of consciousness, there's absolutely no evidence of the materialistic model, whereas so many veridical perceptions in near death experience suggests a paranormal model for consciousness. The problem I have is that the establishment does not fund NDE research of veridical perception, because of their materialism dogma. The reality of NDE is falsifiable, but all current research comes from private funding. I'm aware of the commonly cited reason as to why people believe in paranormal/afterlife. However after extensive research I think there's a little more to the usual "I don't want to die so I believe in afterlife" response by material scientists. Also I don't know why you and others keep on bringing in occam's razor, it's just a principle, and in fact it's much simpler to explain certain things (like consciousness) with paranormal than super complicated materialist theories which nearly impossible to test. Money is tight (talk) 07:43, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The near-death experience could be nothing more than the brain's natural way of trying to make dying easier to take. It's not evidence of anything paranormal. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:57, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I'll assume you think its caused by lack of oxygen. This is just another example of how dismissive materialists are of the paranormal. I've done extensive reading on NDEs, and the only possible materialist mechanism is some yet to be discovered chemical sharing some properties with DMT and ketamine, or a cocktail of chemicals, released by the brain during times of extreme stress. All other materialist explanations are easily debunked by cases that don't fit their criteria, only a currently unknown chemical can explain all the cases of NDE. Money is tight (talk) 08:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * You're assuming it's a single cause, and that there's some force behind NDEs that hasn't been documented yet. Ian.thomson (talk) 08:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Bingo. It could easily be a normal and natural phenomenon. Nothing supernatural required. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I was just looking over that article for other reasons, as a matter of fact. Particularly interesting was the line "Ketamine by intravenous injection can reproduce all the features of the NDE" as can DMT. The debate among real scientists is which of the different chemical-based ways our brain has to induce hallucinations is used to cause NDE hallucinations. The "spiritual" explanations generally fail to take into account that any elements not explained by chemistry are culturally specific and do not reveal any knowledge that the person could not have possibly accessed beforehand. Again, we have data that supports a physical explanation and we do not have data that necessitates a non-physical cause instead. Ian.thomson (talk) 08:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately the wikipedia article is not accurate. This is typical, since almost all wikipedia editors are materialists and wikipedia's articles are heavily biased. Not a single full blown NDE has been reproduced with DMT or ketamine, or with any other method. Read some NDE accounts and DMT/ketamine trips, a little kid can tell the vast difference. However those two chemicals induce certain features not present in dreams/usual hallucinations but present in NDEs, this is why you can't rule out some unknown chemical or a cocktail of chemicals. The biggest problem with NDE is the numerous veridical perceptions (gaining knowledge of something when they can't see or hear), skeptics and proponents are still arguing about whether the person could of received aural information and included it in their hallucination. This is why it's so important to fund research for veridical perception. This is what i meant when I said we could be on the verge of the biggest revolution in human history. If enough veridical perception by credible 3rd party teams get documented, it would prove consciousness can exist independently from the physical body. Money is tight (talk) 08:22, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Your statement "Unfortunately the wikipedia article is not accurate. This is typical, since almost all wikipedia editors are materialists and wikipedia's articles are heavily biased" has me tempted to close this under WP:NOTFORUM, because it sounds a lot like Fgf10's assessment "you're not asking a question, you're asking us to affirm your (incorrect) opinion" is not far off. As for your claims about veridical knowledge, what cases are there where the person acquired information that they simply should not have been able to access?  Like, someone who can't balance their checkbook "coming back" with a solution to one of the unsolved problems in mathematics, or someone demonstrably honest and computer illiterate coming back with the bank information of a total stranger.  Ian.thomson (talk) 08:39, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * About the wikipedia statement, I was just stating a fact. I apologize for Fgf10's assessment, but wikipedia IS biased and if you try to deny this and close this off then you're denying freedom of speech. You have a good point about not bringing back knowledge everyone wants to know. The veridical perception are things like hearing conversation during cardiac arrest, seeing what the nurses are doing etc. These are close proximity, but there are veridical perception of things in other rooms, which is impossible to obtain even for a fully consciousness person. What's being debated is whether these accounts are fraud, or possible for the person to hear and incorporate in their hallucination. During my reading of NDEs there was a time I changed to the hallucination explanation because no one bought back the cure cancer. But then carefully analyzing some of the well documented veridical perceptions (can't be fraud in these cases), I changed my mind again. And not to mention the seemingly problem of consciousness for materialism Money is tight (talk) 08:51, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It's not worship, it's knowing and acknowledging the laws of physics. If you're actually rejecting the principle of Occam's razor in this context, you're not asking a question, you're asking us to affirm your (incorrect) opinion. Fgf10 (talk) 07:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Occam's razor is just a principle to guide our line of thinking. Isn't vitalism much simpler than all the complicated bio processes in our bodies? And "laws of physics"? Physics is the most screwed up of the sciences right now, people have no idea what this universe is. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2007/apr/20/quantum-physics-says-goodbye-to-reality. Are you seriously going to use physics instead of evolutionary biology to defend materialism? Money is tight (talk) 08:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Vitalism assumes the existence of some force that hasn't been demonstrated to exist. The biomechanical processes have been shown to exist -- therefore that requires fewer assumptions even if it is more complex.  Occam's razor isn't "pick the simplest," it's "pick whatever requires the fewest unproven assumptions." Ian.thomson (talk) 08:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I suspect that the belief in materialism is tied in with the belief in a purely past-to-future causality (one sense of "arrow of time") an equally pseudo-religious concept. Believers think that some arbitrary or chance event at the unobservable and possibly nonexistent beginning of the universe is responsible for determining everything that came since --- or else that is purely determined by random events (i.e. events that are statistically predictable and not part of any larger pattern).  The reasonable insistence that observed natural law explains the world based on material causes is, I think, limited by the failure of past-to-future causality to control everything that happens.  If some kind of loop in time or any other exception to the presumed causal flow allows for events to happen simply because they happened, without any fair rolling of the dice to ensure they happen in equal and meaningless proportion, then non-materialist phenomena can have an important role. Wnt (talk) 08:50, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

A Tibetan highlander marries an Andean highlander and they get children
They are both genetically adapted to living at altitude, but in different ways. Does that mean that their children can become much better adapted to living at altitude than either one of their parents? Count Iblis (talk) 08:57, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Even assuming any genetic adaptations carry over, the answer is still not necessarily. The adaptations could conflict for example, or simply provide no added benefit over each other. Nil Einne (talk) 09:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Reading the link above, the known adaptations seem to be a barrel chest (more volume) and more red blood cells, in the case of Andeans, versus wider blood vessels and more frequent breaths, in the case of Himalayans. Those do seem complimentary.  Specifically, the additional red blood cells have the downside of thickening the blood and making it flow less well, and the wider blood vessels should fix that.  However, a more robust heart is required to pump more blood.  StuRat (talk) 13:58, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Or, if both happen to be heterozygous for their respective adaptations, there's a 25% chance that their child will inherit neither of their adaptations and will therefore be no better adapted to living at altitude than a normal person. 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:F88D:DE34:7772:8E5B (talk) 09:33, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * It can be a lot more complicated than that, but yes those complications are why I said "Even assuming any genetic adaptations carry over". Nil Einne (talk) 10:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * As a general principle, when you combine populations with different sets of adaptations, what you get initially is a high level of variability. Some of the offspring are substantially better adapted than the source populations, some worse, many more or less as well.  The advantage of combining populations comes if you perform selection on the offspring.  By doing that it is often possible within a few generations to get individuals who are a lot better adapted than the source populations. Looie496 (talk) 14:09, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, and historically that selection was accomplished by the early deaths of those who were poorly adapted. Another option, in this case, would be to have the children at low altitude, and only move those who are well adapted, to high altitude.  Or, better yet, use genetic engineering to only produce offspring with the desired traits. StuRat (talk) 14:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I'd expect much of this would have to do with dominance (genetics) - some traits will be phenotypically apparent in the F1 hybrid and others will not. The data might exist to look them up one by one and make a guess, though this involves some work.
 * Long-term, selection would seem highly relevant -- as StuRat says, some of the people would tend to dislike the high altitude and choose opportunities at lower elevation, while others would feel fine and perhaps excel in the local workplace. That said, it seems potentially faster to work out a means for continuous production, low-pressure storage and ergonomic consumption of oxygen, and perhaps easier to do this than to do safe genetic engineering of the human germline, and such a compensating mechanism also could be more effective than all known adaptations.  For example we might connive some kind of hydrophobic oxidizer that is avidly absorbed by some kind of active uptake mechanism at the skin and put into the bloodstream, which then safely releases free oxygen and degrades to a carrier compound; possibly we might even modify some keratinocytes to manufacture the carrier and apply energy to react with oxygen at the skin surface.  Such gene therapy need only be skin deep. Wnt (talk) 14:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Adaptation to elevation is likely not a simple trait with simple dominance, right? Here's a little example of how inheritance of complex traits is weird: Here is a white call duck. Here  is one that looks like a mallard. When you breed the two, you might expect to get something like this . But that is not what happens! You will likely get something like this, but you won't get the pied/dappled look, not in F1 generation (the mottled mallard look is called "snowy", and it breeds true). Here is a page that outlines some of coat/color dominance relationships.
 * The point is, we have no a priori knowledge on how the human traits OP asks about will combine (or not), not until we have some actual evidence from offspring. Perhaps an expert in these specific mutations could offer an educated guess, but I'm not optimistic of one showing up ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:02, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This is true - in biology you never really know what will happen until you do the experiment. The sort of phenomenon you're describing is described at epistasis (gene interaction also lands there) and epistasis and functional genomics.  That said, respiration and oxygen uptake seems like such a basic matter of physics that I'm thinking there might be lower-than-average creativity in the adaptations addressing it. Wnt (talk) 15:28, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks I forgot the term(s). Pleiotropy is also possible for the altitude adaptations, but maybe not super likely, in light of your reasoning based on a sort of essentialness. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:50, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Perhaps such complicated genetics are less likely but for most of the adaptations described, particularly the number of red blood cells, it's not hard to imagine there may be some degree of Additive genetic effects even with a single gene. So since the offspring is only ever going to inherit one allele of the better adapted genes, the F1 generation is going to be less well adapted in that area than their parent but at the same time still better than the second parent (except in that case you'll be the same as the second parent with non of the adaptation of the first parent). Of course there is going be something similar even with recessive traits in a classic dominance system anyway. And even if they aren't as complicated as some of the proposals by SemanticMantis, I'm not convinced the stuff mentioned are going to be single genes so there's a fair chance it will get complicated. As Looie496 mentioned, there may be a fair chance you can eventually get all adaptations for high altitude living, resonably well displayed after a few generations if you properly breed and select but the more loci involved and the more complicated the inheritance of the phenotype, the more complicated this gets. If for some reason the offspring are also interested in achieving this super high altitude adaptee then perhaps you can achieve this, but in practice.... In any case, as I said above even if you can get them perfectly into the phenotype, there's no guarantee these adaptations are going to actually work together to give offspring better adapted to higher altitude. The more assumptions you make about how something should probably work, the more likely you are to be wrong with at least one of them. Nil Einne (talk) 21:22, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Selling live genetically-modified food animals in UK
Can people have genetically-modified chickens (e.g. flu resistant egg layers) in the UK if they're for their own use/consumption without having to go through the UK FSA? Would someone be allowed to sell the chickens to people if they were layers laying eggs for consumption? Is this allowed anywhere else in the west? --129.215.47.59 (talk) 16:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
 * FSA issues aside, although I couldn't actually find the precise regulations* I'm fairly sure such chickens could not be sold or imported to random people anywhere in the EU which currently includes the UK, at least without some sort of rigorous authorisation. Consider GloFish which aren't intended for consumption but are generally accepted as not something which can be easily sold in the EU     . If you were a researcher, you could potentially produce or import such chickens under some circumstances but I'm not sure these would allow anyone to eat the eggs, again without going through a rigorous authorisation process. (* = Regulation of genetically modified organisms in the European Union seems to imply it doesn't cover GM animals. That said while  &  seem to only deal with food & feed issues and don't seem to mention GM animals and do mention crops at places, they also don't seem to specifically restrict the regulations to only dealing with food and feed from plants, at least not that I noticed. In fact one of the first sentences of the FAQ is "Food and feed generally originate from plants and animals grown and bred by humans for several thousands of years".) P.S. Yes I'm aware the PDF refers to copyright when it almost definitely isn't copyright that's involved, still it seems like a decent source at least to confirm GloFish can't be easily sold in the EU. Nil Einne (talk) 00:44, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
 * all animals artificially selected by humans for thousands of years are GMO's 64.170.21.194 (talk) 02:22, 4 March 2017 (UTC)