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“Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

nature.com

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Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#811

Post by WalterBright »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #785
WalterBright wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt slaves would have been profitable for the western railway. Blasting tunnels was very skilled work, and very dangerous. Would you want slaves, who hated your guts, handling nitroglycerin? You'd need as many armed guards as slaves.

Presumably the blasting itself could have been done by specialist free men. But the blasting itself is only a small part of the process. First you need to drill the holes by hand, that means beating a rock drill with a hammer for hours, just for a single hole, and you need dozens of holes for one blast, countless thousands if you're trying to go through a mountain. There were steam powered machines for drilling rock…

The nitroglycerin would be of necessity readily available. Do you really want your slaves around this stuff? Think they might steal a bit and put it in the overseer's tent at night? You'd have to spend more money on armed guards and manacles than just hiring free men. Slaves were also costly to buy.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#814

Post by perrygeo »

The dogmatic opposite view is that science need not respect anything but its' self-stated goal of maximizing the acquisition of knowledge.

Does anyone believe that there should be literally no boundaries to such an endeavor? Not saying that Nature's boundaries, as they've described them here, should be set in stone; they are certainly up for debate! But there's no debate that SOME legal/ethical boundaries to scientific research should exist.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#815

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

mike00632 wrote: post #732
dymk wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.

Sounds like you're trying to censor information by dismissing the left/right hand hypothesis as "unrealistically stretched". To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.

But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#816

Post by timr »

n4r9 wrote: post #797
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it". The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.

No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology. If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've re…

> No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.

And that is 100% false. It's obviously biological in basis. It has useful meaning outside of "culture". We just don't have a reductive definition that satisfies the people who aspire to police our thoughts and language...and science.

I'm not naïve about this. There's obviously this bad history where bigots tried to come up with "biological" arguments that some races were superior to others. It's ugly and wrong. But it's just as wrong to go to the opposite pole of the debate, and try to pretend that race is not a thing at all. Both positions are soft-minded extremism.

We can accept that race is a real, biological thing (however fuzzy), and still say that race isn't a value judgment.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#817

Post by timr »

wyager wrote: post #790
n4r9 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you agree that humans do not have biological races, but you disagree with guidelines that promote a more accurate terminology?

"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true. If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.

Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this:

> biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist.

Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#819

Post by dissent »

trasz wrote: post #692
dissent wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you not argue that religious teaching should be suppressed since it often stands in opposition to fact, therefore is responsible for misinformation leading to violence? (and let's face it, that's probably pretty hard to argue against)

What’s wrong with suppressing religious “teaching”? Let me remind you that freedom of religion was mostly about freedom from religion.

Don't mistake me for a religious person. I think it's the bane of mankind. My point is that despite this, trying to ban it is counter productive.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#820

Post by dissent »

willis936 wrote: post #682
dissent wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Orwellian bit comes once the quality gates are in place and get subverted for political means. But even if that doesn't happen, I disagree strongly. Extremism doesn't need scientific backing and never has. They'll take it if convenient, but they can quite easily justify their actions without it. Truth and critical thinking are the solution, not the cause.

Psychology has always been rife with political fanatics. Since its inception there have been loud cranks using pseudoscience for the express purpose of influencing social policy. It is still happening today. Just look at Joseph H. Manson.

My position is that the problem lies with the listener, not the speaker. I looked up Joseph H. Manson. At a glace that looks like exactly what OP was talking about.
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