There will be plenty of "top ten" analyses of the various aspects of the previous year in other venues. I choose to highlight what I feel is the singular most brilliant set of accomplishments in a very long time: the developmental progress of Adult Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, or iPS cells.
The progress in iPS cells has been nothing less than spectacular, in my opinion. And this progress has essentially side-lined the entire field of embryonic stem cells, which has not only ethical issues, it has severe technical issues which are not shared by Adult iPS cells. Embryonic stem cells might never overcome the potential for creating tumors, for example. One advantage of Adult iPS cells is that they can be taken from the patient's own body, eliminating the need to deal with rejection of mismatched tissue.
Not only have iPS cells been created from a number of different tissues from skin to bone, they have been made more efficiently during the last year. One of the last reports shows that vitamin C eases the conversion of adult cells to stem cells. Linus Pauling would be proud! Other reports show that the conversion process can be done in as little as one single step.
The upside of Adult iPS cells is wide open at this point. There is no way to predict the range of future uses. And so far there is little if any downside, certainly not the need for killing embryos or trafficking in such tissues.
I have documented the iPS cell progress that has come to my attention in the sideline category "stem cells". My congratulations to the iPS cell researchers, and in the words of a different blogger, "faster please"!
10 comments:
Off topic (or maybe, on topic?), I've dumped atheism as a worldview. Turns out all my arguments were genetic fallacies and chronological snobbery.
I'm definitely hoping for a discussion on this... care to share more?
I did not believe in God because:
a) belief in God was born out of a primitive pre-scientific culture
b) the god/gods a person believes in is largely determined by the culture they were born in
c) people are desperate to not be alone in the universe, and desperate not to have to die
d) i did not feel any good arguments had been made for God's existence (Flew's "presumption of atheism")
As you can clearly see, a through b are genetic fallacies, and d is argument from fallacy.
So obviously, my atheism is based almost solely on nothing but fallacies. So I've officially dumped it. I guess I'm agnostic for the time being.
Interesting. As I've said before, my own Atheism was largely from "snobbery" as you put it, or as I put it usually, a desire for personal intellectual elitism, or the appearance of such at least to myself. And of course totally unexamined except by the superficiality of materialism.
As with quitting drinking, which I also did many decades back, some things require changing friends, at least those who won't tolerate the change.
Yeah, I made the announcement on Facebook and already some friends are playfully calling me a sissy.
This is not to say I'm now a theist, but I now realize that atheism requires arguments of its own and that when modern lay atheists attempt to divide it into "strong" and "weak," it's really a method of being agnostic but then claiming atheism without having to actually engage in any burden of proof.
I blame a lack of education in logic and philosophy, as well as terrible arguments from the Christian layman.
And that allows lay atheists to walk all over them quite easily, despite their own fallacious reasoning. Meanwhile in the professional philosophical sphere atheism and theism are both rigorous and quite plausible, with theism currently having a slight edge in plausibility, in my opinion.
Huh. Never thought I'd hear myself saying THAT. :)
"...professional philosophical sphere..."
By this do you mean debates among the pros? Or writings pro vs. con as in theodicies vs. atheodicies? Have you developed a standard for plausibility?
I thought I responded to this already. Is there a response waiting in the approval queue?
No, just your query, above. But the questions are just out of curiosity on my part, not any necessity.
Son of a witch.
I've been listening to a lot of William Lane Craig debates, and reading a lot of his articles on his site reasonablefaith.org. I finally had to admit that his reasoning is very tight. I've also read a bit of Plantinga, but he's more technical so it'll take a bit more brain power to dive into his stuff.
Essentially, I find the arguments for theism (is this what you're calling "theodicies?") to be slightly stronger than arguments for atheism. No particular standard; just a judgement as to which ones have the most convincing reasoning starting from as unbiased a position as possible. Not easy, but I think I have it now.
Interesting. And thanks for the reply.
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