X-Message-Number: 16565 Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 14:48:07 -0400 From: <> Subject: Evidence supporting beliefs (16552, 16546, 16524, 16533, 16551) Hi Louis, Many of us have conversations with our loved ones about cryonics which are similar to this whole discussion about whether homosexuality is `deplorable'. I will paraphrase `deplorable' as `unhealthy', which i think is a little more specific. If our loved one presents an anti-cryonics argument which we logically rebut, the rebuttal may be simply ignored. I'll bet everybody here has had that experience. Likewise, recently the argument has been made that homosexuality is unhealthy because if everybody was a gay or lesbian, the species as a whole wouldn't reproduce. [BTW, this has been the only argument offered on cryonet that homosexuality is unhealthy, i believe.] Kennita eloquently rebutted this in 16546, and Mike P elaborated. What Kennita and Mike P pointed out is known in economics as the fallacy of composition, and an example is `if all humans were men, the species would be doomed, therefore being a man is unhealthy'. (They also pointed out that even if this global aggregation weren't logically fallacious, the premise is still wrong, because sometimes gays and lesbians do have children.) Now you certainly do have a point that we don't want to stifle diversity of opinion---but i don't think Olaf was trying to do that in 16551. His statement was extremely neutral and not confined to homophobia. So regarding diversity of opinion, if you have any solid evidence that homosexuality is intrinsically unhealthy (i'm not sure `deplorableness' can be dealt with scientifically), i think you should feel free to bring it up. But it wouldn't hurt to do some reading first (e.g., see Wilson's Sociobiology), and bear in mind that people will scrutinize any scientific arguments you make. (I don't want to summarize Professor Wilson's arguments, but genetic fitness and propagation do not boil down to having as many direct descendents as you can. There are collateral effects, and the best strategy for some genes, for example, may be to propagate by increasing the survival rate of siblings' descendents. So it may be to the evolutionary advantage of some sets of genes to cause a certain fraction of the individuals in which they are present to engage in behavior which may seem counter-intuitive.) Likewise, anybody with arguments against cryonics itself should make them, but they'll be scrutinized. As a final observation: in the 1950s i believe nobody in the scientific establishment would point out that there was no scientific basis for the belief that homosexuality was unhealthy. In just 30 or 40 years this changed completely. I think the same will happen with cryonics---after all, how can one logically challenge the idea that some precious human life should be discarded because just at this moment we can't save it? dan Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16565