Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"
Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr (Score:5, Interesting)
I previously challenged anyone to link to a wikipedia article which is provably wrong in a key fact presented and hasn't been corrected for more than a week. The best people came up with are spelling errors and questionable references. So as far as I am concerned, peer review system makes Wikipedia more reliable than an average printed manual or guidebook where any mistakes couldn't have been corrected since I bought it.
Yes, and ? (Score:3, Interesting)
We've already got a sky-high miscarriage rate, a fun fact nobody likes to talk about in public. Something like 1/3rd of all pregnancies in the US result in miscarriages.
Yes, miscariages seem to naturally occur often in humans [wikipedia.org], 40% according to the sources that wikipedia cites. (specially with older parents, where the gametes had accumulated more mutations).
Well, you know what ? Mutation DO happen. A child has NOT a carbon-copy of the same genetic material as the parents.
A mutation could be catastrophically bad, slightly bad, neutral, slightly good or miraculously good.
The slightly good/bad and the miraculously good is what make evolution work, no matter how much the Creationists want to believe in Intelligent Design.
The catastrophically bad usually doesn't survive. There's only a rather minuscule amount of them that is able to survive up to certain advance point (trisomy 21 is an exemple of a catastrophic mutation that can still nonetheless reach into adulthood).
Given how many things could go wrong, it's rather a surprise that so much of them can go on a least long enough to be noticed as a miscarriage. (Most of the mutations die rather quickly, do not go beyond a few division and are reject in the next menstruation. The rest dies as miscarriage. Only a tiny fraction of the mutations are delivered - there's research supporting this, I'm just to lazy to dig the sources).
It has nothing to do with 2-3 generations of parents born with medical assistance. In fact, genetic counselling can, on the contrary, help better understand the risk for the baby and better plan the parenting and the birth, thus lowering the medical risks associated with it.
I know it sounds cruel and insane, but part of me really thinks that we're fucking ourselves over long-term by providing such "excellent" health care. We're almost completely bypassing natural selection...
If you are afraid that modern medicine is, on the whole, working against natural selection, you can think of it as not selecting gene-based health any more, but selecting civilisation :
Civilisation which are more advanced live on the average better than those without medical technology. In a way, we're now selecting better memes instead of better genes (to use Dawkin's terminology), memes for advanced (medical) technology.
Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you could try wiggling out of this one on a technicality, insisting on an article that is provably wrong in key facts and has been for more than a week, rather than one where that exact situation occurred but the article was later corrected after more than a week. But I'm sure you wouldn't do that, since that would be an artificial limitation.
So perhaps you should look at this version of an article about Colin Pitchfork, a convicted child killer: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colin_Pitchfork&oldid=141669223 [wikipedia.org] . Among the other false key facts presented in the article for twenty-five days (over three weeks):
* the city and the county where the murders occurred;
* the years where they occurred;
* the existence of a third murder;
* the year of Pitchfork's confession;
* the date and year of Pitchfork's sentencing;
* the name of the initial incorrect suspect;
* the affiliation of the scientist who developed the technique that identified Pitchfork;
* how Pitchfork's ruse to defeat forensic testing failed.
That's a bit more than "spelling errors and questionable references."