[ale] [OT] Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent or Not.

[da Black Baron]

On Tuesday 26 August 2003 10:21 am, Chris Ricker scratched their ass, sniffed 
their finger and quoth:
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, da Black Baron wrote:
> > I assumed as much to be the case, I just wanted to make the point that
> > there were random factors in the makup of a human being at the most basic
> > level.
>
> Whether they're random is certainly debatable (and is debated -- that's one
> reason some of the philosophy of science guys are now interested in biology
> instead of physics)

I was under the impression that each sperm and egg held exactly 1/2 of the 
parent's genes.  Is this incorrect?  

> Even for physical characteristics, genes don't strictly determine them.
> Take height.  In higher mammals such as ourselves, quantitative genetics
> shows that it's determined by a combination of ~100 genes, plus your
> environment (where environment contributes about as much as the genes).
> That still doesn't say it's random, though. In fact, it says exactly the
> opposite....

That's if you take the posistion that your enviroment isn't random in many 
ways.  I've read that our height is greatly influenced by our nutrition, for 
example, which is why all those civil-war uniforms at the cyclorama look like 
they were made for children- but do you have absolute control over what 
nutrition your children get in all circumstances? 

> Maternal hormones have nothing to do with it, at least for all we know now.
> If they did, someone would have long since marketed a pill so that
> expectant moms could pick the gender of their babies ;-). It's determined
> by which sperm wins the great race to the egg (which can be controlled by
> flow sorting sperm to pick the desired X or Y, then doing artificial
> insemination, but not by manipulating maternal hormone levels)....

OK.  I stand corrected.  Like I said, I'm not a genticist, or even a doctor, 
for that matter...  :-)  Still, barring intervention such as you describe 
above, there's *at least* a 50/50 chance involved in producing the 
characteristics of your physical base make-up, wouldn't you agree?  


-- 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    "Here's my family tree.  As far as I can tell, my                      
         relatives were carnival folk who were touring this place called 
Hiroshima in 
             the summer of 1945.  Because they lost most of their hair, they 
                      mostly married each other.  And here I am"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------      
                                                        (,,oBo,,)            
 Wylde Bill                                               ||||          
______________________________________________________________          
http://lyst.org           
                
http://mrpooter.sytes.net                 wyldechylde at geocities.com           

       Disempowering government means empowering people.
        http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/nlm/nlm.html  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale