The gay gene

The debate whether homosexuality is a personal choice, a biological makeup or a combination of both has been a hot button issue with many individuals, especially in religion. The study going on in this article says that someone by the name of Dean Hamer is doing a study and trying to find a gene that is passed from mother to males in the family that is responsible for having the gay trait.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/born-gay

In the homeless guy case, where you could kill him in order to save five others, maybe that homeless guy would become a doctor in the future and save many. But if you kill him then, then it wouldn't be as beneficial to society in the long run.

I was looking over Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett's comments on religion and science, and they kept bringing up the question of if one should believe faith or science? What do you believe in: something that you have a feeling but have no proof, or do you believe in science which may have hard proof but there is no deep feeling (that feeling of faith)?

Good based on what?

So instead of wondering if and how people become evil, I wanted to concentrate on how they become good. The guidelines for what is defined as good is usually determined by a sacred scripture. Here is a question though, who wrote or translated that scripture? They surely had some bias so even if the message was from a higher being, the scripture has been distorted and yet we base our perception of purpose, good, and evil on them.

The mind in control?

Look at the link and see if you think that this is frightening? People can understand how the mind works to an extent where they can connect a living thing to a nonliving thing and function as if it were a part of the living thing. This frightened me a bit at first. How do we know that certain people's understanding of how the mind controls the rest of the body are not already manipulating other things without the rest of the world knowing. This is to say that a few curious people fiddle around and results in a new discovery over complete authority over others, nonliving and living. Free will would be only a luxury that the authority possesses.

Identity and Conscious

In the case with "Genie, a modern-day wild child", I looked at Genie as any other creature. She did not know how to talk, interact with humans, nor understand how to use her senses as we do. In the reading, they described her as a stange-bunny and other animal like characteristics. Is Genie still not a living creature and has feelings and a conscience? Couldn't all creatures have a conscience then? Just because they do not understand how to act the way humans have been taught to act for generations. We tough to understand if something is soft, while Genie may lick the object to learn if it is soft. What is your stance on whether other creature have a sense of deeper feeling and conscience than some people may give them? Humans sure enough talk about other creatures as lower beings compared to humans.

Thinking lower of the mindless

Today's discussion of what had a mind made me question if the though that less complex animals and organisms are not viewed as equals as humans. They are neglected and tested on as an alternative of the superior human. There was an article that reveals that the FDA releases a guideline for genetically modified animals. This scared me because now the idea of genetically modifying becoming more common and slowly more accepted. The FDA has created a guideline and therefore the idea and possibilities of how to do such this are now more easily accessible. All you got to do is follow the guidelines. Are we neglecting other organisms due to our complexity and intervening into the lives of other organisms who just life off of instinct?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/36614/title/FDA_releases_guidelines_for_genetically_modified_animals