The methodology of a recent study was preposterous on its face.
.. the now-infamous new study from Lund University’s child-averse climate scientists, advising people to save the planet by giving up their cars, avoiding air travel, becoming vegetarians, and having fewer kids.
.. ultimately concluding that childbearing does far more damage to the planet than all the other actions they measured. Actually, it’s worse than all the rest combined. Parents, how do you live with yourselves?
.. Parenthood, of course, isn’t the sort of thing you can step into and out of on a per annum basis. That’s the excuse for blaming parents for the projected carbon emissions of their child’s entire life, and then adding still more to that total based on projected grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They’re leaning on this cool concept that another team of climatologists dreamed up, called a “carbon legacy.”
.. Each parent gets credited (or demerited) with half of every child’s projected lifetime emissions, a quarter of each projected grandchild’s projected emissions, and so forth down the generations. The cumulative total becomes your “legacy,”
.. It’s about visiting the emissions of the children on the fathers, ultimately convicting parents of the crime of perpetuating human civilization.
.. Is there a chance that studies like this play some role in widespread skepticism about scientific claims? Perhaps what we have on our hands is a “crisis of scientific authority.”
.. My own personal memories may be representative. As a kid in science class I was bombarded with Malthusian lifeboat scenarios. I recall one project that required us to generate “creative solutions” for fitting 8 gazillion people into a square mile. We sat drawing pictures of people standing in pyramid formations, passing shrink-wrapped meals up from conveyor belts, while our science teacher thundered on about how this was not science fiction, people, this was math. We heard endless dirges about the dying rainforest, and when I take my kids to science museums today I feel like I’ve walked into a time warp, because the appeals don’t seem to have changed a bit
.. People mistrust politicized science for reasons that any principled empiricist ought to respect: Personal experience suggests to them that it’s unreliable.
.. Wisely noting that “adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group” for environmentalists, Wynes and Nicholas want schools to attack the real problem: children having children, or planning to have them at some future time
How to Be a Buddhist in Today’s World
Tibetan youth now receive a modern education in which they are exposed to opinions not traditionally found in their community. It is now imperative that Tibetan Buddhists be able to explain clearly their tenets and beliefs to others using reason. Simply quoting from Buddhist scriptures does not convince people who did not grow up as Buddhists of the validity of the Buddha’s doctrine. If we try to prove points only by quoting scripture, these people may respond: “Everyone has a book to quote from!”
Religion faces three principal challenges today:
- communism,
- modern science and the
- combination of consumerism and materialism.
.. Modern science, up until now, has confined itself to studying phenomena that are material in nature. Scientists largely examine only what can be measured with scientific instruments, limiting the scope of their investigations and their understanding of the universe. Phenomena such as rebirth and the existence of the mind as separate from the brain are beyond the scope of scientific investigation. Some scientists, although they have no proof that these phenomena do not exist, consider them unworthy of consideration. But there is reason for optimism. In recent years, I have met with many open-minded scientists, and we have had mutually beneficial discussions that have highlighted our common points as well as our diverging ideas—expanding the world views of scientists and Buddhists in the process.
A timeline of the odds for survival for fertilized eggs and fetuses
- 266 days before birth, all we have is a fertilized egg. (~33% chance of living birth).
The odds are calculated using data from in-vitro fertilization, and the next stage is 66%.
In in-vitro, some 50% of the eggs cannot fix to the uterine wall- 262 days before birth, the egg has implanted (~66% chance of living birth)
After implantation, there is still a decent chance that the embryo will be aborted (and maybe the woman will not even know that she was pregnant).
Half of the embryos that die from here on will die because of chromosome abnormalities.- 241 days before birth (~88%)
- 178 days before birth, entering the second trimester (~97%) At this stage, problems are more likely to stem from the mother, not the fetus’ genome. Problems with the cervix, the uterus or the placenta are (some ?) likely causes of death.
- 89 days before birth, entering the third trimester (~99%) At this stage, doctors will consider the fetus a patient, and treat it if needed.
Which fertilized eggs will become healthy human fetuses? Researchers predict with 93% accuracy
Because the parameters measured by the researchers in this study occur before any embryonic genes are expressed, the results indicate that embryos are likely predestined for survival or death before even the first cell division.
.. Despite their best efforts, though, they have only about a 35 percent success rate. As a result, most women elect to transfer two or more embryos to increase the chance of a live birth.
.. the embryos at first express only genes from the maternally derived egg. By roughly the third day (the eight-cell stage) they begin to express genes specific to embryonic development
.. The researchers found embryos in which some cells were dividing on schedule while others were seemingly stuck, or paused.
.. embryos in which individual cells varied significantly in their cell-division schedules or gene-expression profiles were less likely to become successful blastocysts.
.. Cells that fail to execute some part of this delicate process get out of sync with their neighbors and jeopardize the life of the embryo.
.. “In mice, about 80 to 90 percent of embryos develop to the blastocyst stage. In humans, it’s about 30 percent,” said Reijo Pera.
.. “In addition, about one in 100 mouse embryos are chromosomally abnormal, versus about seven out of 10 human embryos.