Science is a product of choices about what to consider. Technology reflects choices made of how to apply our knowledge. A firearm, for example, may be used for good or evil, but its raison d’etre is to kill, and that reveals something about its makers’ attitudes toward the value of life.

Wow.

Science is a product of choices about what to consider. Technology reflects choices made of how to apply our knowledge. A firearm, for example, may be used for good or evil, but its raison d’etre is to kill, and that reveals something about its makers’ attitudes toward the value of life.

Yet the same knowledge that enables parents to know gender before birth also enables many medical benefits. You could perhaps argue that specific designs have a narrow function, but even that is tricky. A firearm is built to be able to kill or incapacitate. But where one person might use it to commit murder, another might use it to stop a murderer from wholesale slaughter, and still another might use it to feed a family off an ecologically deleterious excess game animal population. Regardless of whether you agree with the moral calculus of the person taking the action, it is your or their values, and not the tool itself, that determines how it is put to use. Knowledge of a technique or of how something works is not equivalent to utilizing it in a particular way. So while the path to knowledge reflects choices about what to study, those choices do not determine how the knowledge is ultimately used.

Well Jon that is your faith. It tells you that your god, The Truth, simply *must* exist.

That much willing incoherence hurts my brain. I’d love to debate the issues, but rigid noensense doesn’t bring the discussion forward. Sorry, to give up, but I’m going to find a more constructive forum. Best of luck.

There is a great book by Amin Maalouf titled The Last Century after Beatrice that imagines a world where this imbalance is spread worldwide, and the political, social, and economic implications of the imbalance. Great read and i highly recommend it.

Actually no, it’s this simple. Allow women to control their own bodies without coercion. Value and educate women, then trust them to make decisions about their own pregnancies.

I think Saltine meant that generally scientists have a moral responsibility to endeavor not to make it easy for their discoveries to be abused. I actually agree. But I do not think this can be accomplished by hoarding knowledge. It can only be accomplished by striving to make certain everyone has access to the knowledge and everyone is informed about the risks. Where I part company with Saltine is that I do not believe scientists should avoid discovering knowledge because not all possible uses and designs it could be put to are good. The same chemical that can become an addictive drug could cure a disease. We scientists and engineers are not the sentinels of knowledge, we are the teachers. Our job is to illuminate nature, not partition it off.

Note to self: buy stock in Fleshlightâ„¢.

With regard to the question raised about the neutrality or otherwise of science in allowing people to select against having daughters: I notice that Dawkins framed the questtion in a particular way. He asked us to consider the scientists who invented the technology. This draws our attention away from the many scientists who are implementing the technology and assistting parents to select against girls. When we think about the invention of a new tool, rather than it’s practical applicattion, we will tend to see the inventor as being neutral. When we think about the people applying the tool we will tend to think about the “mad scientist”. I was interested therefore that Dawkins framed the question in a way that already places the scientist in a more neutral position.

However, it is still invasive and has risk. This is compounded tremendously when women who do not want an abortion, or who are not even allowed to consider their own bodies are subjected to an abortion due to social pressure or outright force. The issue here is that these women need to be able to have control over their bodies which are more than baby factories…

it’s this idea of “reasonable solutions” that involve making decisions about the insides of other people’s bodies that is disgusting and chilling.

Science is only one small thing in that legacy though.

Allow women to control their own bodies without coercion. Value and educate women, then trust them to make decisions about their own pregnancies.

In China and India, the decision isn’t going to made by the woman; it’s going to be made by her in-laws, because they’re the ones that own her. Marriage, for women, is frequently a euphemism for indentured servitude to their new mother-in-law.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/15/marijuana-a-1968-gov.html

Quote: “HAHAHA! Addicts never change do they? ”

Marijauna addicts, are what Noen is referring to in that line.

Only the religious are so hung up about the concept of “truth”, while being utterly dismissive of evidence gathered by or in any particular investigation undertaken by science.

Noen retreats to generalities, if Noen is losing the particular point under discussion.

As I said, Noen is addicted to a religious way of thinking about things: for Noen, morality always and ever must precede, and sometimes must even forbid, science…why? “For the good of society’s soul”.

I suppose I’m committing the same sin (so to speak) which I accused Noen of – the use of the word “addict” as a perjorative , and thereby hiding a pre-existing value judgment within it; rather than using the word “addict” as the perfectly neutral descriptive word that it is, which denotes one who is devoted to, or given over to, something or other – it matters not what.

To be an addict is no shameful thing: whether or not being such is so, depends upon what precisely one is addicted to – be it virtuous, or be it perfidious?

And who gets to make that latter call? And why?

And is not that question at the heart of this “sex-selection” debate – who gets to make that call, now that it can be made? And why?

okay. Glad you cleared that up. Because the biggest issue in all of this was people talking about how bad scientists are for inventing ultrasound.

Dawkins: “I’ll refrain from gloating over the possibility of Taliban-inspired woman-hating societies going extinct for lack of women.”

This is puerile.
Not only is it not a guaranteed event, that’s like gloating over the fact that North Korea will socially implode in our lifetimes. That is, not something to gloat over at all, because human misery is involved in the meantime.

Laughing/crying so hard.”

Only as far as the truth is valued more highly than what that particular truth may be. I’d say it’s an extremely interested search for truth, with a built-in system for filtering out bias, even though the filter is not 100% reliable. But it’s still better than any other system for finding truth we’ve yet to find.

Yes, scientists should consider how technological advances affect society. The reason why is because science simply is not a neutral, passive observer who’s discoveries are then exploited by them evil religious folk for their nefarious evil doin’ deeds.

Perhaps before Hiroshima it was possible to live in Dawkins’ ivory tower and sneer at the dirty proles for misusing your “gift” to mankind. Today it takes massive amounts of arrogance to take so blinkered a view. Something Richard has in spades.

“the general question I want to raise is whether the evils of what Mara Hvistendahl calls the XY generation should be blamed on “western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences.” Or whether they should be blamed on the cultural and religious practices that despise and discriminate against women in the first place.”

Well I guess we know who the Whig Party as represented by Richard Dawkins seeks to blame. It should be obvious to everyone by now that inferior cultures are always to blame for whatever befalls them. It simply could not possibly be the case that western governments and businesses bear any responsibility at all. Shit just happens. No one could have predicted that introducing the ability to select a child’s gender would have any measurable affect on traditional cultures whatsoever.

I speak, of course, about the rise of the rather annoying phenomenon of “Headlines in the form of a question where the answer is ‘No’”

Then the galactic ruling council would immediately blame our clearly inferior culture for it’s inability to absorb their wondrous gifts. Galactic Dawkins could then cluck his tongue at the dirty apes and so reassure his own natural superiority.

I just love the Brits’ gift for slurs. Dwkns sn’t jst wnkr, h’s tssr.