[extropy-chat] Thanks Damien (was Bioethics Essay- Revised)

[Mike Lorrey]

--- John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote: 
> >one way we might determine if a blastula has a
> >soul or not is to scientifically measure it somehow.
> >Interestingly enough somebody has already
> >scientifically weighed the soul. He was a medical
> >doctor named Duncan MacDougall and in the April 1907
> >issue of the journal American Medicine he reported the
> >results of experiments in which he determined the mass
> >of terminally ill patients before and after they died.
> >He observed that the patients he studied lost an
> >average of 21 grams of mass when they died.
> 
> I figure that any essay that seriously proposes that the above might
> be worthy of further investigation could not possibly contain
> anything of interest to me; it confirms my long held suspicion
> that anything a ethicist has to say, especially a biotechnology
> ethicist, is either blindingly obvious or wrong.

Is it that expressing your distain for JAMA, or for the fact that
nobody thought to refute the experiment scientifically, or that it was
the April 1, 1907 issue?

> 
> By the way, I have two soles, one on each foot.

Still can't dance...

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com