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Trump is the leading Republican candidate for President and an ex-president himself. His name is being removed for (alleged) violation of the Constitution regarding insurrection. He has 90 something criminal charges outstanding. He is trying to win the presidency in part to shut down cases that may send him to jail. This is unprecedented. Even my young grandkids realize this is a big deal.

Logic takes us to the most likely explanation from the available information; when it meets a paradox, it doesn't mean the paradox is real, it means the information is unavailable. Therefore logically, to draw the conclusion that logic is therefore illogical, is illogical... Couldn't be bothered to read the rest.

What you say you have noticed is wrong. We simply do not know whether life occurs elsewhere, due to the difficulty of making the necessary observations.

When an allele changes its frequency of occurrence in a population, is it because of adaptive pressure or just chance? The mechanism is the same either way: individuals with that particular allele just happened to have a greater or lesser mortality/reproductive success than the population mean for some period. So to me it seems that genetic drift is not some fundamentally different 'process' to evolution by natural selection. Rather they are two sides of the same coin. Given that the thrust of the OP is specifically related to the overall behaviour of complex systems; systems where we typically expect emergent properties of the whole to dominate over action at the level of the individual; systems where we typically expect the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts; I think we should be more wary than usual of the reductionist splitting of pertinent parts. None of the parts exist in isolation. The OP is concerned with some apparent similarities in the development or 'evolution' of increasing diversity with time in a wide variety of disparate complex systems such as nucleosynthesis, earth's mineral composition and life. While I think the article over-eggs the pudding to a certain extent: two unifying features struck me as I read it. 1) The Arrow of Time is a major factor in all cases therefore the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a dominant factor. Nothing else in physics has this feature. 2) Pound for pound, systems with more types of 'thing' have significantly higher entropy than those with less so what is driving the diversity of these systems? Given a temperature gradient and a few basic building blocks to get the ball rolling the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will (eventually) build any new structures it is possible to build quite spontaneously, and use these as building blocks for constructing yet more. (Sorry, I've a bit of a thing about the 2nd Law) Anyway, that's the pattern that the authors are picking up on.

I like that one of the challenges was that TFG’s claim that he won the 2020 election means he’s ineligible under the 22nd amendment. It would be fun to watch him try and respond to that.

Please do because that thread introduced several utterly fundamental ideas in Mathematics, some of them so simple that people tend to pass over them too quickly. In the mathematical world we have abstract idealisations. These are often models of the material world. We can pretend that the material world follows our mathematical model for some limited extent of the mathematical model. (just like with the linear model of the curve) So in that thread I introduced 'the world of shapes' These are idealisations or perfect implementations of a mathematical idea for instance of a square. The material world cannot match squares (or any other shape) perfectly at all scales. If we make the square small enough the gaps between the atoms stop the square being complete. But we can get pretty good squares from a block of concrete. So nothing in the material world is truly scale invariant. It is a good match just for a range of scales. So we come to self similarity. Two figures in mathematics are called 'similar' if their shape are the same, except for a scale factor. For instance a triangle with angles 45, 45, 90 is similar to any other and all other triangles with these three angles. But when we look at squares there is a difficulty. For a square, not only do all the angles have to be 90, but all the sides have to be the same length for a figure to be a square ! We have just introduced a second parameter -- Length, which was not needed for the triangle. There is a no problem if we scale the side lengths by the same factor. So a square with all sides twice as long as another square is similar to the other square. But now the area of the figure is scaled by a different factor as the larger square has four times the area of the smaller. But since the two squares are still similar we observe that the similarity property can involve more than one scale factor being applied appropriately. So when we talk about self similarity between two shapes we need to specify what property is being scaled and therefore self similar. It gets yet more complicated as we could apply different scales along two or more of the coordinate axes. This will change the spae of the similarity so it is not called a similarity but an affinity. Fractals can also be made from self affinities. Fractals that have nothing to do with shape in the material world can also be made by Self organisation, though not all such organisation leads to fractal geometry. Self replication probabilistic trees, though not all such trees are fractal. Fractals are so named because their apparent 'dimension' is not a whole number. Our material world is firmly 3 dimensional plus time so nothing material can actually be fractal. So when we say that a coastline length is fractal, we are saying that there is a fractal abstract model which is self similar down to infinitesimal sizes that matches the given coastline to some finite limiting size. Coastlines are interesting because this limiting size of self similar is actually very large. Yes there are smaller and smaller bays and inlets and peninsulas, but the smaller ones are not an exact shape copy of the larger ones. This is the difference between a material world fractal and a mathematical world one like the Koch snowflake, where every reduction of scale brings an exact copy of shape.

Here's a Venn diagram explaining why Marjorie Taylor Greene's book isn't selling well:

Short answer is that it is not know specifically. Longer answer is a bit generic and encompasses arguments of weak natural selection, bottleneck in ancestral populations and sexual selection as Moon mentioned. There are a handful of more specific speculations but the genetics of pigmentation is somewhat complex. Some genetic variants influence pigmentation on different parts (i.e. not only the iris) and could for example be co-selected.

inow...as a self-seeking or superficial comment, your interjection about "living beneath it" was cute. Congratulations. Within this sentiment, you are quite brilliant. I am the bridge. Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius Let's see how Freud and Lewis fare...

Logic would supposedly take us to a consistent theory that can avoid contradictions altogether. However, in light that logic has been used as a mode of thinking for thousands of years, but scientists are still searching for a Grand Unified Theory, it is a responsible conclusion that logic inference consistently ends up with contradiction with no exception so far. Since, on the one hand, logic aims to avoid contradiction, and on the other hand, reality says that logic, on the contrary, always leads to contradiction, logic does not make sense and therefore is illogical. Science makes a name for itself by demonstrating its powerful capability of explaining various phenomena. In order to do so, any scientific conclusion must first conform to logic, so that it is comprehensible, and meanwhile can be verified by experiment, so that it is convincing enough. However, with the continuous scientific exploration, science finally sails into unchartered water that, on the one hand, conclusions like the Big Bang Theory and Superstring Theory, although logically sound, cannot be verified by experiment, and on the other hand, phenomena like wave-particle duality and Quantum entanglement, although having been verified by experiments, are illogical. Since science starts to defy its own principles, science is not scientific anymore. What happens to the two? In order to analyze the situation, we need a tool to do reasoning, of which logic usually plays the role. However, since logic is the object of our examination in this case, we cannot use logic to examine itself. We must introduce another tool that is more fundamental than logic to check the status of logic. It is just like, in order to calibrate a tape, we must use the master tape to do so. Unfortunately, logic is already the "master tape" we have. We do not have a reasoning tool that is more fundamental than logic at the moment. Not a problem. Let's create one together. Try to observe logic and science as generic phenomena and what is the common conclusion that we can draw from them? For logic, the ability to avoid contradiction is its defining feature. However, although logic aims to avoid contradictions, it constantly ends up with contradiction. For science, logic and experiment are the two defining features. However, logically sound theory cannot be verified by experiment and phenomena proved by experiment are illogical. From these observations, I guess one common conclusion we can make is that they are both failing themselves in the unique way they are defined, so let's introduce this hypothesis that "the ten thousand things are all neutralizing themselves". Let's give it a name for easy addressing and call it Dao. Before using Dao as a tool, we must test its efficacy. Even if we can use Dao to explain the phenomena of logic and science, if we cannot use Dao as a tool to explain the phenomenon of Dao, then it is apparent that there must be a rule that is more underlying than Dao and therefore Dao is no better than logic and science. To prevail, Dao must avoid the trap that science falls into. This is the trap that makes science tumble: in order to explain a phenomenon of A, we introduce a phenomenon of B, while when people ask why B is such, we have to introduce a phenomenon of C to explain B. Unfortunately, people will further ask why C is such, then we have to introduce a phenomenon of D to explain C. This chain of question and answer can go on endlessly, and science will finally reach a point that it runs out of answer. This is the dilemma that science is now facing. For example, if you ask what happens before the Big Bang, science is not supposedly going to offer an answer anymore. Science has never touched the essence of this world. It only repetitively uses one phenomenon to explain another phenomenon. Even if the Standard Model of particle physics were complete, it still cannot be used to explain why the Standard Model is such. Therefore, only when we are able to find a phenomenon that can explain itself can we bring this chain of question and answer to the end. Only a self-consistent and self-explanatory theory is trustworthy and can live up to the title of the Truth. Then, can we use Dao to explain the phenomenon of Dao? Since Dao asserts that the ten thousand things are all neutralizing themselves, does Dao, or the statement that "the ten thousand things are all neutralizing themselves", need to neutralize itself? If we choose no, then there is, at least, one thing, i.e. this statement, that will not neutralize itself, therefore "the ten thousand things are all neutralizing themselves" is neutralized by itself. In order not to be neutralized, it must accept that it needs to be neutralized, otherwise, it will be neutralized. You see: Dao is a paradox. No matter which way you choose, it will always lead you to a contradiction. However, Dao has already predicted that either option will neutralize itself because Dao states that "the ten thousand things are all neutralizing themselves". From this, we know that Dao is a paradox with self-consciousness. Dao is a paradox that is aware that it is a paradox. Dao reaches logical self-consistency! It has the ability to calibrate itself. It has proved its own innocence. It has successfully explained why it is such with its own rule. Then, the question is, if we can use Dao to explain more phenomena? Absolutely! Let's go Quantum Mechanics, for which there is no logical explanation so far. The reason that quantum phenomena are so bewildering is that all quantum phenomena are, in nature, paradox, no matter it is wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle or quantum entanglement. Therefore, as long as we are able to find a theory that can rationalize paradox, then we find an uniform explanation to all quantum phenomena while, from the previous analysis, we know that Dao is a paradox and we can use the rule of Dao to explain why Dao falls into paradox. Therefore, Dao is the uniform explanation to all quantum phenomena. All in all, a contradiction emerges as a result of logic neutralizing itself, or put it in another way, logic is the source of contradiction. In order to better understand how logic causes contradiction, let's restore Dao to its original form: Yin is the precondition of Yang while Yang is the precondition of Yin; the effect of Yin is to neutralize Yang while the effect of Yang is to neutralize Yin. This might be difficult to understand. Let's analogize it to what scientists are much familiar with: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Without an action, there will not be a reaction at all while, without a reaction, you cannot confirm that there is an action either. Action and reaction are each other's precondition. Since action and reaction are equal but opposite, they can neutralize each other. Therefore, action and reaction form the classic relationship of Yin and Yang. Imagine that logic is a form of action and contradiction is its reaction. An action will always have a corresponding reaction. When this reaction is detected, scientists try to apply a greater action to overcome the reaction. Unfortunately, a greater action will only incur a greater reaction, although, at the first glance, the greater action might have successfully suppressed the old reaction. However, it is just a matter of time that the greater reaction will be noticed. This process can go on endlessly until scientists are exhausted by their own actions. This is the reason why, when the logic that scientists employ becomes increasingly sophisticated, contradictions in science also become more and more acute. Therefore, logic is defeating itself. It is the same mechanism that science is defeating itself. When more and more phenomena are explained by science, an increasing number of inexplicable phenomena arise as a consequence, and it is the same mechanism that the ten thousand things are each defeating themselves. The ten thousand things will all inevitably wind up as a paradox, no matter which course they take, because Dao is where they come from and therefore finally report to. Dao is the origin of the universe and the ultimate Truth. Since Dao has already reached self-consistency, therefore, in order to guarantee that a proposition is true, the only thing we need to do is to make sure that it conforms to Dao. For a statement that reflects the rule of Dao, it only takes two steps to validate it. First, I can use Dao to back the statement. When you ask me how I can prove that Dao is true, I can use Dao to do that and, after that, there will be no further questions that can be asked anymore. This is the beauty of a self-consistent theory. As such, I can make the below statement with a peace of mind and do not need to worry about that it might be overturned some day in the future that: Logic is illogical and science is unscientific!