News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Was Gage's skull uses for educational purposes that couldn't be gotten from the information when he was still alive? And was that worth keeping it for well over a century?
Well, when he was alive, he was still using it. That does kinda put a damper on things, from an educational point of view.
Honestly, yes. At this point in time, Phineas Gage's skull and the knowledge gleaned from the study of it has been used to educate thousands upon thousands of people, and then each of those multitudes of educated people went on to improve the lives of thousands and thousands of people. That's pretty damn good for one single cadaver.
I still remember a conversation I had with a psyche major who had no idea who Phineas Gage was and thought it was an unimportant minor footnote in psych. What a twat.
What would they learn from the actual skull that they couldn't learn from a copy?
For one, veracity. There are lots of unsubstantiated claims similar to this one, just look at the National Enquirer if you'd like an example. This one is real, with verifiable proof, meaning we can use it as a foundation to build more knowledge on top of. Seeing as there is no moral or ethical way to remove someone's left frontal lobe as a science experiment, it is as close to a case study as we are ever likely to get.
It's already been verified. So it can be copied. What would the original achieve that a copy would not?
Lots of things were "verified" in 1860. Shit, washing your hands before surgery wasn't even a common medical practice until the 1870s. The whole point of keeping the original is so that it can stand up to the rigors of modern science and technology.
Technology and knowledge in 150 years will make today's science seem sincere but laughable, just like today's science makes 1860 seem sincere but laughable. That's why you must preserve scientific evidence whenever and wherever you can.
Then keep the book too. Who knows what we could learn about it 150 years from now?
The information of the book is encoded in the markings on its pages, not the molecular makeup of the binding holding the pages together. Meanwhile, it is the fact that this skull is made of bone that gives it its veracity.
Up until now you've been here making good faith arguments, it'd be cool if you could keep that up.
I'm not giving a bad faith argument. Both are historical artifacts. Both can be analyzed scientifically because of that. In 150 years, technology to examine that book might be able to, for example, simulate what that person looked like based on their DNA. I do not think historical artifacts should be disposed of solely because they are made from human remains.
That is a bad faith argument because the physical appearance of the person whose skin binds the cover of a book has absolutely no relevance to the information in the book. In fact, it wasn't even Arsene Houssaye who bound the book in skin-- it was the book's first owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, who did that.
Can you tell me what the color of a dead stranger's eyes whose skin was added to a book by a third party has to do with a nineteenth century French novelist's views on the soul and life after death?
You can't, because there is no relevance to be had. It's a bad faith argument.
It has to do with who the person who's skin was used as a book binding was. We have no idea. This would be no different from archaeologists today doing facial reconstructions of a skeleton in, for example, an excavation of a medieval Christian cemetery. Any information about the past could be important. Especially when it comes to humans. It's preserving it for the sake of basic scientific investigation into the person so that we can learn as much as there will ever be possible to learn about them.
My friend, did you even read the article before you typed up your comments? What you're describing is exactly why they're removing the binding. FTA:
Yes, and I am arguing that just doing the investigations now and getting rid of it robs future scientists with better technology of an opportunity to learn something that current scientists can't.
And also, you're contradicting yourself. Your original comment opens with "who the fuck cares, it's 200 years ago" and now you're saying any information about the past could important?
Bad.
Faith.