Will Torbald

Generosity is a secondary sympton of being moral. If you are immoral, even as defined objectively, you can't be generous at the same time. Only if you are moral can you be generous. Therefore, measuring the degree to which people are generous to others correlates to how comfortable they are with morality as a whole. I may also be reading between the lines in your comment, but how is saying "racism is immoral" wrong in any way? Can you justify the morality of racism? The full quote is “Secularity – like having your laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books – is better for everybody.” and in the context of the comment, it is true. While "statist law" is still rooted in the force of the state, the degree to which rational born laws are more moral than theocracy is evident. By simple matter of empiricism it is dishonest to equate a secular democracy with a totalitarian islamic or fundamentalist christian regime. It is better for everybody, just not the best that it can ever be.

On the second page of the article it explains why it has biological significance. Morality is not exclusive to humans. Systems of conduct, codes, regulated behaviors can be seen in other species. One example is capuchin monkeys, other apes, other social mammals. Understanding the relation between biology and morality, and the degree to which both are linked is crucial. Which is why studies in children are important since they reveal the innate and intuitive morality codes directly expressed as pure genetic phenotypes when no religious indoctrination has been imposed. While your criticisms of the study are valid from a statistical standpoint, it misses the larger picture. That religion affects the moral behavior of children when compared to secularly raised children. That means that children already have embedded reasons to be peaceful and generous, and that the intrusion of dogmatism and fundamentalism interferes negatively against the natural tendency when otherwise untouched. It opens up the road for further, deeper investigations. Since the researchers weren't directly looking for the difference they couldn't account for all the variables you suggest. But now they can have newer and much more precise studies that directly try to find the differences and trace causations.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2015/11/05/religion-morality/ The article also provides direct source to the paper here: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2901167-7 Although this isn't something unheard of for most here, it is interesting to see research like this going out to the public, and is useful to have in case you want to share it with people who make claims to the contrary.

Cool argument from incredulity.

And after verifying, what do you do? "Oh, I verified Pythagoras' theorem. Now I will believe in it" - do you do that? Or do you say "I have verified it, but I still won't believe it" because you just can't believe anything? The first one is simple empiricism. The second one is nihilism.

Short answer, no. Long answer, no. Marrying a person is also marrying their family, dealing with in laws, dealing with customs, churches, et al. I value intelectual integrity too much to settle for a "good enough christian girl" who is going to cry heaven when she hears me speak reason. If I can't be free in my thoughts around her, it's just worse than being alone.

All this says is that "You can't know anything" which dilutes into Epistemological Nihilism. If you say "Evolution hasn't been proven because you can't prove anything" you have not made any comment of value. It is simply to deny all empirical enterprise and crawl back into a burrow of rationalism. As far as science is concerned, evolution is a fact. It happens. Then, if you try to say "nothing is confirmed in science" you have not said anything against it.

We're not discussing physics, we're discussing biology. Of which you know nothing about if you insist it hasn't been proven.

Not so, Shirgall. Gravity and evolution are proven phenomena of nature. They are natural facts of the world with enough empirical evidence to support their reality. What people like Pelafina do is confuse the theory with the observation. We observe the power of gravity, we observe evolution happening - and then we device a theory to explain it. The theory of evolution by means of natural selection has been proven. The theory of gravitation by general relativity has been proven. To deny they haven't by means of "it's faith" is a crude projection of an ignorant mind. Literally go read a book. Go to a museum of natural history. Watch documentaries. You are ignorant and stubborn in your faith assertion. Get an education.

"I don't believe in anything, therefore I am right" "I'm agnostic so I can say that anything you believe in is faith" What a load of crud.

So far you have only stated that inside your head these things are wrong. Well, good for you. But outside your head what you think is irrelevant. It's called an opinion, not a statement of fact. Not a statement of ethics, but aesthetics. To use the language of morality in a matter of personal taste is dishonest.

What makes you think you deserve an argument?

It didn't. Birds don't care. It was a lucky coincidence.

People are monkeys. Get over it.

It matters to make the distinction when talking about mutations and evolution. The mutations described in the article are not the kinds of things people imagine when they hear the phrase "evolution happens faster than we thought". First, no, the article is making sensationalist claims. Mutation is happening faster than assumed, but mutation is not evolution per se. Second, it's in the mitochondria, so it's pretty much irrelevant to what a chicken will do, look like, or live like. As long as the mitochondria keeps making energy, no one will notice the mutation. Third, domesticated chickens are not a good sample for how evolution works in nature. The mutations are happening in artificially selected populations, not naturally selected. Fourth, I wasn't trying to translate it for a lay person, I was trying to reveal its misleading nature. Chickens are not evolving into a new species. There's just a faster rate of mutations in one of the cell organs that have their own separate DNA from the normal chicken DNA. Those mutations are relevant to detect lineages, but not in any way relevant to evolution into new species or new forms of a species.

At the cellular level a chicken really isn't that much more complex than a pea or a fly. How you arrange cells doesn't make the cells themselves more complex. That's why discrete cellular mutations aren't surprising. Also, the mutations here are of mithochondrial DNA which is separate from the DNA of the nucleus of regular cells, and they don't really affect the chicken that much.

Confirmation bias is the gift that keeps on giving: http://skepdic.com/confirmbias.html

It's not. You're uncomfortable watching it, and that's an honest thing to say, but to say "X is wrong" requires higher standards of proof than the ones used for regular judgements.

Progressives, in their quest for ultimate tolerance, become tolerant of intolerance. That's all there is to this rhetoric.

Because consequences are not arguments. Morality works from the bottom-up, not the top-down. We don't set an arbitrary goal and say that whatever reaches that goal is ethical. We set the initial conditions and let things play out within the moral boundaries, regardless of the outcome. Evolution is a consequence of selection of mutations, therefore it doesn't enter the field of ethics.

Most of the comments are agreeing with him though. Out of the 47 comments only 15 or so are against it. And even then, some of the reasons why they are against is not the bad parenting but because the kid was too young, which implies they would have done it if the kid had been older. On the flipside, I'm glad it went viral and people are reacting negatively, even if it's the minority. A picture of a suffering girl is more powerful than an excel graphic with statistics for people not used to number crunching.

Everybody has a threshold by which they would give up their integrity in order to surpass a desperate situation. You didn't cross that line, and you probably knew you were treading close to it even before the test since you know the nature of unions. This is, as I see it, a self imposed test on yourself like a selk knowledge experiment. Maybe you can ask yourself in concrete terms where your threshold is, where the point of "no morality just survival" is reached, and then you can know without doubt when you made the right decisions.

Idealism is the geocentrism of philosophy - completely outdated nonsense. I'm done talking about this.

This article is a goldmine of sophistry. Boy, that last one is a real killing joke. But I think this is the core of the statist myth. The real jugular vein that drives the molasses:

"More coherently explained" implies that idealism explains anything at all, which it doesn't. You cannot argue with a materialist without the contradiction that in fact you'd be arguing against yourself (since everything is inside your head) - while agreeing with yourself about that which you argue against the materialist.