Author Archives: Editors

‘Overruling My Father’ By Baron Lerner

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Looking at the quality of life of elderly in the nursing homes, majority of us do not wish to live and suffer such a life and instruct our loved ones to not prolong life by un-necessary means. But when the actual time comes, despite this suffering many change their minds and want to continue to hold on to thread of life as long as possible. This worth reading article is about a physician who always advocated letting the nature take its course and not prolong the suffering of life by un-necessary means, but when his own time came, he refused to follow his own advice. Some excerpts from the article (f.sheikh). 

“When it came to offering medical interventions to severely ill patients with no hope of recovery, my father had a fiercely strong opinion: They were inappropriate. For decades as an infectious diseases specialist, he had been asked to treat infections in dying patients. Whenever possible, he said no.

But when I approached my dad, who had developed end-stage Parkinson’s disease, to ask what his end-of-life wishes were, he indicated a desire for aggressive measures.

Bioethicists have long debated the issue of “precommitment.” Which wishes are more valid — ones that someone indicates in advance or those expressed during serious illness? My father’s case provided a vivid case study of this issue.”

“My father knew that infections were often the final straw in the deterioration of so many of the body’s vital organs and functions. In other words, infections were what helped terminally ill patients die. To perpetually treat infections in such cases, he often said, was “inhuman and morally wrong” as well as “professionally bankrupt.” My dad tried, whenever possible, to encourage patients, family members and his physician colleagues to reconsider the reflexive tendency to treat.”

“Finally, in November 2011, my mother had no choice but to admit him to a nursing home. I will never forget when I first saw him there. He was sitting in a wheelchair with his head almost on his lap. He was completely dependent on others. This image of my dad was particularly poignant: The last time I had been in a nursing home with him was when he was the medical director of one, caring for the same type of sad souls he had now become.

The time had come to clarify what types of interventions my father wanted. I knew what I hoped to hear. Not only did I know his opinions about inappropriate treatment, but he had written some notes when he began to seriously deteriorate. He said that he was “taking steps to ease my passage.” Some with his condition, he added, “have taken drugs.” Regarding his wife — my mother — he wrote that she “doesn’t deserve to struggle with me anymore.”

But when I asked what he wanted, these notions had disappeared. He said he would be willing to go to the hospital if he got sicker and even go on a ventilator. “Sometimes they can really help,” he said. Full article click link below.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/overruling-my-father/?ref=international

‘How European Evolved White Skin’ By Ann Gibbons

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Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.

The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe about 4500 years ago.

Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.

First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.

When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

 posted by f. sheikh

Rise of Persian Empire

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(shared by Tahir Mahmood)

The Rise of the Iranian Empire – The Tower – The Tower

Despite their ongoing failure to reach an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, the White House seems to be satisfied with the current state of affairs in regard to the Islamic Republic. They appear to believe that all is well and getting progressively better. So much so that, in his latest State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama said, “Diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran. … We’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.” He then vowed to “veto any new sanctions bills” that supposedly threaten to undo that progress.

The Americans aren’t alone in this belief. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Frederica Mogherini recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post opposing new sanctions. They claimed that these sanctions would encourage Iranian opponents of a comprehensive nuclear deal. “For the first time,” they wrote, “we may have a real chance to resolve one of the world’s longest standing security threats—and the chance to do it peacefully

http://www.thetower.org/article/the-rise-of-the-iranian-empire/

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories?

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Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Polling evidence suggests that Oliver’s views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK. Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.

You realise, of course, that Oliver’s theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question ‘Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?’ is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn’t like asking why they believe it’s raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It’s obvious why people believe it’s raining when they have compelling evidence, but it’s far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn’t an inside job.

I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how theyinterpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character. click link below for full article

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theorists/

Posted by F. Sheikh