First, a disclaimer, I am not encouraging or agreeing with anything else that Keroack is saying, but I am asking what's so bad about offering pregnant women who are thinking of getting an abortion free ultrasounds (as long as it is not coupled with any lies or pseudo-science about the dangers of blah, blah blah).

Yes, it will make the decision to have an abortion harder, but isn't that part of the point? It should be a woman's choice, but she should also know what she is doing and why. Part of that is having the knowledge of what is going on inside of you.

Abortion shouldn't be chosen because it is the first choice, but because it is the best one after all others have been considered. It seems to me that getting an ultrasound might help clarify what exactly is being given up.

The unfortunate thing is that this little snafu is not getting much press. If the results from Sarasota County actually had more national significance (like determining who controls the White House, House, or Sentate), then it would be all over the place. This is unfortunate.

Democrats don't care because they won everywhere else. Repubs don't care because they won that race.

Do we have to wait for there to be a national crisis before we decide to fix the elections system?

(Oh wait...there *was* a national crisis 6 years ago and nothing happened.)

I haven't read all the comments here, but so far no one has brought up Occam's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor which states that "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or 'shaving off,' those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. In short, when given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation."

Wallace mentions that neuroscience makes an unverifiable claim that "mental states are nothing more than neural states". Yes, this is unverifiable, but scientists are rightly applying Occam's Razor here to shave off everything and make the simplest explanation possible. Wallace is being disingenuous when he doesn't recognize this heuristic in effect. Show us some reason *not* to believe that "mental states are nothing more than neural states" and scientists would change their minds.

That being said, it's valid to say that there is some amount of dogma in any scientific discipline, and this should not be forgotten. Perhaps an outsider like Wallace can change things. His questions are worth asking (and pondering), but are they scientific? Are they being posed in a way such that they can be verified (or negated)? It's possible, but I'm not yet convinced.

His questions are of a personal and subjective nature---exactly the stuff that scientists should avoid. However, this doesn't make them *bad* questions. We can and must understand the subjective nature of consciousness, and if he can pose them in a scientific manner, all the better.

I think Numbers makes a good point that, politically, it is important to put forth the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion.

But, it seems to me that fundamentally, there is. Accepting a Judeo-Christian god that controls the universe supernaturally goes against one of the major tenets of modern science (the rejection of supernatural explanations for events). However, rejecting such a god would be a fundamental rejection of what the vast majority of Americans believe in.

Politicians must and should compromise and pretend that there is no conflict in order to gain the trust of the majority of the country. They need to seem like the nice guys (like Numbers) who are not our to destroy cherished beliefs. But, scientists should never compromise on this. True scientists are not out to win the hearts and minds of lay people. They should be most concerned with applying the scientific method to learn about the world.

"I do think that atheism is a form of faith as well, given that the main argument I've heard from atheists is that there is no evidence for God. In science, you can't prove something doesn't exist through a lack of evidence, you can only disprove through evidence. They're welcome to their belief, but it ain't science, any more than the Old Testament is."

You're right in that any knowledgeable atheist (Richard Dawkins included) admits that the existance of a supernatural god cannot be disproven completely. However, the likelyhood of one actually existing can be shown to be exceedingly small because of all of the laws of physics that would need to be changed to accomodate this (in fact, Dawkins says that to him this likelihood is on par with the likelihood that fairies live under his garden). Is that 1 in a million, or 1 in a million, million, million? I don't know, but it's small.

So, I would argue that the faith required to believe in an atheistic worldview is different than that required to believe in a Judeo-Christian worldview. One, you believe because of scientific evidence, and the other you believe in despite the evidence.