Thursday, May 19, 2011

Aphorisms 14

God says, “If anyone is in Hell it will be over my dead body.” – Rico Tice

On Norman Vincent Peale Adlai Stevenson’s quipped: I find Paul appealing and Peale appalling.

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.” G. K. Chesterton

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." Henry Kissinger

Scepticism is integral to the scientific process, because most claims turn out to be false

“If today you can take a thing like xxxxxxxx and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the church. At the next session you can ban books and the newspapers. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy… After a while it is the setting of man against man, creed against creed, until the flying banners and beating drums are marching backwards to the glorious ages of the 16th century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the man who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” - Clarence Darrow

DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and proteins make us."

Francis Crick (1916-2004)

Nobody makes me; I take full responsibility.

I have always asked stupid questions and never been satisfied with easy answers. When I got to college I found this was called “Philosophy”. Keith Ward.

4 comments:

Burke said...

Doc,

As I understand it, the sequences of nucleotides in DNA determines the sequence of amino acids in polypeptides in proteins, which determine how the proteins act and do how we act.

What I've wondered about is how much of out bodies is composed of protein and what the other parts are composed of.

Also, I wonder what you have to say to deteeminists, to those who claim that we are physical entities responding to physical stimuli acoording to the deterministic laws of nature. And that we are therefore without free will.

justme said...

I always enjoy your aphorisms. Hope you are doing well!

Terry Hamblin said...

Our bodies are mostly protein, carbohydrates and lipids - all under genetic control. There is something in what determinists say, but they are way short of the mark in their assessment of how things work. Epigenetics is a process by which genetic effects are modified by the environment. The Human genome project demonstrated that we have far fewer genes than was estimated and that individual genes are not necessarily transcribed and translated in every circumstance. Furthermore determinism only works on a statistical level rather than an individual level. There are multiple influences on history including incivicual will. Even had you all the facts you could never predict the result of a football match.

john said...

There is a new study that shows RNA and DNA are not always complementary...

Chek this

http://aurmoth.blogspot.com/2011/05/dna-and-corresponding-rna-sequences.html