Dak

Aaaaaaaaaah... thats better. the dragon avitar is back. well, phi, sayo seems to have declined my request to change your user title to 'illegaly attracted to goats'; but i will get my revenge... somehow...

very briefly, as i dont want to drag this thread off topic (all quotes from buddah): plants sexually reproduce too females alone reprodusing:less genetic diversity and thus less ability to adapt. hermaphroites: the fact that we have two sexes is called 'sexual dimorphism', and allows a specialisation of the sexes, so that each may be desighned for different tasks (in a nut shel, women desighned for babies, men big) ditto yes, sex is hijacked and pressed into more roles than mere reproduction. the others: how do you define 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual'? i suspect that your not using the standard definitions of 'has sex exclusively with members of the same sex' and 'has sex exclusively with members of the opposite sex'

do you mean, like: a tail could arguably be advantageouse, but it would lower our sex appeal so how would we pass the advantageouse gene on?

one symptom of dehydration is a loss of thirst, so it could be that if you start drinking 8 glasses per day you will start to crave it again. also, it depends on what kind of food you eat, i would assume. if you eat lots of fruit, you will likely get lots of water from the fruit and need to drink less (maybe).

BLIMEY! 48! happey birthday, old geezer

hot air balloon?

strains of HIV that aquire resilience to three classes of antiretroviral drugs are not uncommon, but they usually evolve that way in patients that are actually taking antiretroviral drugs or have cought HIV off of someone who has been taking antiretroviral drugs: the odd thing about this strain is that it appears to have aquired the resilience without exposure to the antiretroviral drugs. being gay does not make you deserving of contracting HIV. may i also point out at this point that HIV is no longer a desease which is any where near being exclusive to homosexuals and intra-veinouse drug addicts. its common in non-IV-drug-using heterosexuals aswell, and a few strains of HIV seem to be adapted to transmit effectively across the vaginal walls and placenta (HIV-1ME is highly transmittable across the vagina, and HIV-1MC across the vagina and placenta, if i remember correctly).

buddah: what is your definition of 'gay'?

IgA antibodies dont elicit an immune responce, as they are desighned purely to stick bacteria together into a 'clump' which cannot cross the mucouse membrane. Also, IgM antibodies, whilst capable of initiating phagocytosis of the attached cell by a macrophage, are mainly focused on catalysing the initial reactions of the compliment system (which doesnt involve WBCs) and as heybeh said, killer-T-cells (AKA cytotoxic-T-cells) operate indipendantly of antibodies, as do natural killer cells.

umm, the bubonic plague took about 50,000,000 people with it! i sincerely hope that HIV doesnt go that way. The absolute worst thing that HIV could do is mutate in such a way that it could be transfered by biting insects, although that would probably require one heck of a collection of mutations -- malaria, for example, specifically infects and reproduces in the salival glands of the mosquito in order to infect another individual once the mosquito bites, and i cant see HIV picking up that modus operandi. It seems as if HIV will stick, broadly speaking, to its current desighn, with the odd adaptation here and there to allow it better protection against antiretroviral drugs, better ability to transfer across vaginal walls etc. lots of interesting things are being tried with gene therapy; hopefully, as genetic engeneering teqhniques improve, a cure for HIV will become a possibility. I'll look into how the NY3DCR-HIV outbreak is going and post it up, if anyones interested.

i'v only ever heard it sujjested that in some homosexuals there is a similarity in brain structure/activity, and that posessing a feminine brain could be a cause of homosexuality. in my personal experience, the scientific comunity is the most tolerant towards sexual differenses, so i cant envisage any 'conspiracy' against gays. as this is a non-standard hypothesys, i believe the burden of proof lies with you, ie you should provide some proof/citations/referenses to back up your claim. maybe what you saw of the 'gay' world was, infact, merely the 'obviously-gay' world. for every obviously gay mincer that youv seen, you may have seen a homosexual who was entirely like a strait person, but as he was entirely like a strait person you didnt know that he was gay, thus your oppinion of homosexuals could be based upon just the obviously-gay ones... which will unvarably lead to incorrect conclusions (such as 'all gay people are obviously gay', which is patently not true) gay does not nessesaraly equate to 'poofy', even if you read 'gay' as 'a man who is attracted to men'. no offence intended towards anyone who is 'poofy' (strait or otherwize)

can you back up your claim that every man has that quality. anyway, every man has the ability to transport oxygen around their blood, and that quality is certainly genetic, despite the fact that every man posesses it.

i agree. justlikecandi seems perfectly sane. willow, on the otherhand, was a patent loony. justlikecandi: some of your arguments are logically unsound, like the claim that niagra falls should be further back than it is and your use of extrapolation which is probably why tetra (erroniously) compared you to willow (who was also a creationist), however the differense between you and willow is that whereas some of your arguments are logically flawed, willow himself was logically flawed. we'd patiently explain something to him and hed come up with the most bizzare responses. -------------- WILLOW: there arent many fossils -- if we really evolved from monkeys, surely fossils would be comming out of our ears SOMEONEELSE: well, for something to become fossilised is quite rare -- and your argument could just as easaly be aplied to your own hypothesis: if humans have been around since a few days after the creation of the earth, why arent there more fossils? besides, the existance of even a few fossils of ancient and phisiologically different humans tends to add weight to the theory of evolution, dont you think. WILLOWTREE: strawman. failure to address my contention = failure to refute = attempt to change the subject to draw attention away from flaws in ToE = addmition that ToE is bull = god created the world. SOMEONEELSE: ??? ------------- but no, your arguments may be the of the common logically-flawed creationist stock, but i think a comparison to willow was a tad unjust. do you have any evidence to back up your claims by the way?

as nucleotides are read in triplets called codons, each genetic sequence has 6 ways of reading it: three forward, and three backward. For example, two of the reading frames for the genetic sequence atgccatagacttaa are shown below, and either reading frame can be read from left-to-right or from right-to-left. .........................<-- or --> .....................tgc...cat...aga...ctt ...................|----|----|-----|----| .................a t g c c a t a g a c t t a a .................|___|____|____|____|___| ..................atg...cca...tag...act...taa ...........................<-- or --> i'm pretty sure that 'open' denotes, out of the possible reading frames, the one that is actually used. for example 3'-atgccatagacttaa-5' has the following reading frames: (reading 3'-->5') atg cca tag act taa tgc cat aga ctt gcc ata gac tta (reading 5'-->3') aat tca gat acc gta ttc aga tac cgt caa cag ata ccg however, atg cca tag act taa is the only reading which results in a translatable genetic sequence, ie it starts with a start codon (atg) and ends with a stop codon (taa), therefore it is the 'open' reading frame, as it is the reading frame that will be to manufacture the protien. eukaryiotic genes generally only have one open reading frame per gene, however bacterial and viral genes can have more than one open reading frame, and the reading frames can overlap; for example: ..........3'-->5' ORF ....|-----------------| 3'-atgccataatggacttaacgtaaacgtatacggggactgta-5' ..............||_____________|..........................| ..............|.....3'-->5' ORF.............................| ..............|_______________________________| ............................5'-->3' ORF Note that all the ORFs start in atg and end in taa, despite the fact they are read in different directions, and also that the reading frames are staggered (ie, one of the 3'-->5' frames is a nucleotide behind a the other). In the above case, there would be two promoters off to the 3' direction, and one off to the 5' to activate the variouse ORFs. the reading frame used (ie, the open reading frame) is usually determined by the promoter: most promoters initiate transcription starting x nucleotides away, so if we imagine a promoter with the sequence CCCC which initiates transcription 7 nucleotides away, then CCCCccgtctgatgcagggggtcetc will result in this ORF (codons marked by | pipes) CCCCccgtctg|atg|cag|ggg|gtcetc whereas, if we shift the promoter along one by deleting the fist nucleotide after it (underlined above) we get a completely different ORF. CCCCcgtctga|tgc|agg|ggg|tcetc which is called a frame shift, and is how the deletion/insertion of a single nucleotide can have such a profound effect.

Oi, what have i ever done to deserve a permanent telly-tubbification? other than once give in to a strange urge to immitate a self-declared post-whore. on the other hand, i will never post in pink again, so its a relatively effective and light-hearted punishment. maybe it should be introduced as an actual punishment for spamming/trolling, with the option to change you avitar yourself disabled for a week or so? Is anyone else starting to find poo-poo a bit scary? the eyes... brrrr!

i think that when you add 'yu', 'yo' or 'ya' to a 'shi' or a 'ji', you drop the 'y'. so its 'kyo', 'nya', 'myu' etc, but 'sha', 'sho', 'ju', 'jo' etc as opposed to 'jyo' or 'jyu' (but its been a while since ive done japanese)

hmm, so sayo has been known to change stuff on request... interesting... do you have a link for the poll?

skirt? I dont get it... PS,

let the moral of the story be: if you ever feel the need to imitate brinnie, risist. i wonder if i can maintain what scientifical credibility i had with this avi?

Hoi! that is not a changed user title. if i knew i was in danger of loosing my dragon, i wouldnt have posted in pink again. annoyingly, im round my parents for a few days and my avitar is stored on my pc at home. i'll have to tolerate doo-doo, or whatever his name is, for now. i'll get you for this somehow phi!

I'm, liek, totally intregued as to what it could be. liek.

oooooooooooooooooooooooh, right. i knew that. ahem. --(tum te tum te tum)

then yes, we operate a first past the post system

we've already crossed sheep with goats to make geep. i have absolutely no idea what the point was, but there you go. its been done (although it was a chimeric cross in the histological sence, ie parts of its tissue were goat, parts were sheep, there were no cells which were half-goat half-sheep). it happens natuarally, too apparently (resulting in chimeras in the genetic sence, ie some genes from goats some from sheep, genome consistent across all cells)1 im not sure how that can be used to prove we come from bacteria.

is that the best you can do? id have expected a more enthusiastic application of your clever toung to 'my pole'