Casual sex a bad idea

I think it’s a marvelous idea for Hillsdale’s young men to get more exercise. I applaud Jonathan Dunn for his kind concern for the health of Hillsdale’s male student population. Now all the boys have left to do is find some willing girls that can separate sexual involvement from emotional attachment.

Having trouble? Just borrow another page from our Greco-Roman forefathers and employ a boy-toy sex buddy. Good fun, good exercise, with no strings attached. Now, boys, go grab some other guys and get some exercise... but leave us girls alone!  

Anna K. Johnson, ‘09

Here are some alarming facts to consider from Avert.org’s Web site: The number of people with HIV living in America varies between 900,000 and 1 million according to different estimates—UNAIDS estimates it to be 950,000. One in four people infected with HIV do not know it and may unknowingly infect more people. Of the more than 40,000 new HIV infections in America each year, it has been estimated that at least half occur in people under 25 years old.

As these facts show, young people engaged in heterosexual sex are at a high risk of contracting HIV.

I am not condemning people who have casual sex or any type of pre-marital sex, I merely want to provide the facts.

Anna Pier, ‘07

Success doesn’t create worth

The concept of worth has absolutely nothing to do with whether one is successful or not.  Equality of worth is based on our humanity; Bill Gates and a drug addict are equally valuable.

Ideas of civility and humility flow from this recognition of equal worth. Civility, or the showing of respect to others, is the application of humility, which is merely the recognition of the equality of worth between oneself and every other human.

The concept of success is different from worth, and it does depend on one’s actions. Success is doing whatever task one has in life to the best of one’s ability.  Under the concept of success, then, one can say that the drug addict has not been a success in life because he has failed to manage his life and discipline himself to the best of his ability, while the successful businessman has. 

They are still worth the same, though, because they are both still equal in their humanity.

Charles New, ‘06

ID and irreducible complexity

In regards to the article on Intelligent Design (ID) last issue, I want to clarify the claim about “falsifiability.” If someone says, “An omnipotent being created the universe and all life forms,” then, yes, that claim is (probably) non-falsifiable. But if someone says, “A cell is irreducibly complex and could not possibly have arisen through mutation and natural selection,” then that claim is indeed falsifiable. In particular, biologists would simply have to give a fully satisfactory account of how a cell could arise step by step from inorganic compounds. (It is my non-expert understanding that such an explanation has yet to be given.)

In any event, I don’t understand why the claims of ID are considered “unscientific.” After all, it is theoretically possible that intelligent aliens (whose own cells were not irreducibly complex) came and seeded life on Earth with a complex cell that they had designed, from which all terrestrial organisms are now descended. If this (ridiculous) scenario were actually what happened, would “science” forever be incapable of discovering this fact? Or would the methods of science in fact be the surest way to learn the truth?

Robert P. Murphy
Visiting Assistant. Professor of Economics