bascule

This guy is a right-wing extremist, but damn if I don't love what he's trying to do: http://junkscience.com/ When it comes down to it, in terms of the overall shift in the Earth's radiative imbalance CO2 just doesn't do all that much. And even with an immense international effort (which is trying for what are quickly proving to be unobtainable goals) the predicted outcome is almost negligable. Although Bush's motives for rejecting Kyoto are probably more related to cronyism than science, I consider it a good move. When he claims more research is needed he is telling the honest truth: the problem is not well understood, and won't be until we have reliable multi-decadal planetary climate models. The models are improving all the time, but we're not there yet. There are so many other forcings to consider, including the natural cycle, that the effect of Kyoto is almost negligable. It's a very expensive token gesture to fight a problem about which the alarmism is rampant but the science is still spotty at best. Personally, I think a much sounder approach would be to invest the money going towards Kyoto into climate science research. The alleged $120 billion spent on Kyoto so far would've gone a long way to advance the quality of planetary climate models.

A wing is a very complex structure. However, it's quite likely that feathers originally came about for entirely unrelated purposes, most likely insulation. However, through a process of repurposing they were found to be useful for gliding (which was advantageous for the therapods at the time for some reason), and after several generations of becoming better and better gliders the theropods started flapping and developed true flight. An alternative theory suggests that the ancestors of birds flapped their wings to help them run up hills more quickly, and eventually developed true flight from this behavior. Incremental adaptations, repurposing, incremental behavior modifications (mimiced throughout a population) triggering new and different selection events, changing environmental conditions, all leading to incremental change throughout time. That's really what it's about. And some stuff gets left by the wayside. Your appendix is really a caecum, which originally housed the bacteria you need to digest cellulose, or at least, that's what happens in prosimians and New World monkies. In us, it's vestigial. We don't do a whole lot of cellulose eating, so it shrank down into a little itty bitty nothing that can still kill you. Yay. If we have an intelligent designer, he can't be that intelligent becasue the appendix was a really stupid move. Or maybe it's just there to provide God with more ways to smite you. Not to mention our retinas being on backwards. Or hangnails...

Repurposing. For example, a bee's stinger is a modified egg tube. Your inner ear is made out of reptilian jawbones. A fish's swim bladder was originally a primitive lung (and became the lungs of tetrapods). The arms and legs of tetrapods were originally lobe fins for swimming. A mutation might transform something which originally served one particular purpose to be useful for a totally different unrelated purpose. It may be somewhat maladapted to this purpose, but if it affords the carriers with a benefit, then as this mutation spreads throughout the gene pool natural selection will refine it (mostly by finding what alleles already in the gene pool work best in conjunction with it; an important thing to remember with sexual reproduction is that natural selection is constantly pruning the gene pool to contain the most advantageous alleles so not all adaptation need rely upon mutation as its instegator) I'd once again like to recommend The Plausibility of Life which is full of literally hundreds of examples of such repurposing and some very well written explanations of exactly how complex structures can come to be from incremental adaptive stages.

A degausser. That doesn't use any energy, right?</sarcasm>

Behold the power of Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+%22you+don%27t+know+me+but+you%27d+like+to Google. Learn it. Use it. Love it.

I found this explanation in a list of fun facts about the brain, however I was unsatisfied with this explanation. http://articles.health.msn.com/id/100111308 The former explanation does not satisfy me at all, and the latter only partially. I believe our memory is associative and can generally be described in the form of an ontology. Our cerebral cortex is constantly sifting through our memories and looking for things to associate with present experiences. I'm not sure if we are born with an a priori ontology or if the brain simply builds one out of nowhere; however I would contend that the reason we cannot remember early childhood is that this structure was not yet developed to the point where these memories can be retrieved. Philosopher Daniel Dennett goes so far as to suggest that we are not truly conscious when born and consciousness (in the way we experience it) is something we learn by analyzing and mimicking the behavior of other humans. Essentially he's saying natural selection got about 90% of the way there at birth and it's up to our own innate mental plasticity to accomplish the remaining 10% through an autoprogramming process.

The behavior of anything can reduced to quantum processes... the behavior of a computer, for example. Does that mean we need to know quantum mechanics to understand the behavior of a computer program? Of course not. The same goes for the brain: the operation of neural networks can be explained without the need for quantum mechanics.

There's nothing metaphysical about extra dimensions, if they exist. I don't mean to mince definitions, but the way you're using "metaphysical" is flat out wrong. Something physical cannot be made out of something metaphysical: the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Atoms and molecules cannot, by definition, be a "metaphysical theory." That which is metaphysical is, by definition, immaterial. There may be other dimensions beyond the familiar 3+1. M-theory says there are 10+1. If they do exist they only affect things at the scale of a Planck length, and are thus very small compared to the 3+1 with which we are familiar. There's no need to drag anything "metaphysical" into such a discussion though. All these dimensions would do is provide additional "directions" in which strings can vibrate, beyond the familiar 3+1. Note that there are theories of quantum gravity which are able to explain things without the need for extra dimensions, e.g. Loop Quantum Gravity.

The swim bladder of fish used to be a primitive lung. It still is in certain fish such as the lungfish. There are fish which do come to the surface to breathe air when they are in poorly oxygenated water. That's one example of the usefulness of lungs. There's also fish that get trapped in shallow pools of water which slowly dry up. If they can move across the land and find water again they will survive. Otherwise they perish.

What can I say, I'm a skeptic. When someone makes absurd claims without evidence, I'm not going to be particularly receptive. When said unsubstantiated, absurd claims contradict perhaps the most beautiful theory in all of science to date, evolution by natural selection, supported by mountains of evidence and comprising the grand unified theory of biology, I will immediately reject your ideas. When someone making absurd claims without evidence likens me to a "fundamentalist" because of my skepticism, it's hard to keep from turning outright hostile. When I ask for evidence and am responded to with... I can only assume that you have nothing. You sir, are a purveyor of bullshit. Your ideas are wrong, and you're trying to spread them. You are trying to infect people with pathological memes. Why don't you go find a new age forum where people aren't quite so discerning in what kind of stupidity they're willing to believe. This is Science Forums and Debate. If you don't like a skeptical, scientific treatment of your ideas, why are you here?

Wrong. http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/10095 Of course, Kerry, Feinstein, and Boxer are a bunch of pinko commies and the only reason they're talking about it is because they hate conservatism. No sensible moderate Democrat has any reason to question the war.

I think it's the Sherlock Holmes Fallacy

Cryptographic random number generators in computers work by collecting "entropy data" which is usually some function of how often interrupts inside of the computer are tripped.

I'll assume you're talking about abiogenesis here. You should look into the work of Julius Rebek and his colleagues at the Scripps Institute in California, who demonstrated autocatalyzing reactions with variadic products, all of which continue to make copies of themselves. So right there you have the basic setup for evolution/natural selection: you have replicators which make copies of themselves but sometimes there are random variations in those copies. That's somewhat correct, however who says life was originally made out of proteins? You see, while proteins make an excellent catalyst, they certainly aren't the only catalyst that exists. RNA can act as both a keeper of heredity AND as a catalyst! Wrong! Any autocatalyst is inherently self-replicating, and an autocatalyst can be any kind of molecule which catalyzes the production of itself. And as I said above, Julius Rebek demonstrated an autocatalyst which sometimes produces different autocatalysts which continue to make copies of themselves in their varied form. Irreducible complexity really is just an excuse for ignorance. "We can't figure this out, therefore God did it?" Science has come up with some extremely plausible explanations for abiogenesis. The problem is we have no way of knowing the specific path life on earth took from an autocatalyzing reaction to where we are today, however I think: Autocatalysts -> "RNA world" -> DNA/RNA transcription/protein ...is a very reasonable hypothesis

It's also because it's logically consistent with everything you've ever experienced. Yay, Kantian Empiricism. I really hate Kant. You know, it's the associations you make that are important, not the sensory data itself. Logical inconsistencies in sensory data would serve as evidence that you are being deceived by your senses. If you haven't experienced any, I think any presupposition of deception is greatly outweighed by the logical consistency of the universe. Yes No, I just think you don't have a healthy respect for the logical consistency of the universe. Evidence? Evidence? Possibly, the string theorists say something to this effect. Have you actually read anything about string theory? Probably not. So this is all just bullshit. Yeah, early humans were pretty ****ing stupid. Your theory? Maybe in the Michael Behe definition which says that astrology is a theory. Your theory must be an explanation built around some kind of evidence. String theory, for example, explains why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces, something which you can verify experimentally by standing up and noting how powerless gravity is to pull you down against the massive strength of the electromagnetic and strong force connections within your body. Of course we've verified the same thing through countless scientific experiments which have been able to gauge the exact strengths of the four forces relative to each other. Obviously. Science has made the world more clear to our species than any other investigative approach. Uh huh. So you're saying that you think there's some metaphysical bullshit which can explain the universe more accurately than science, eh? That will show us that the entire universe is just an elaborate deception! No. Absolutely not. It smells like male bovie excriment. The only people you're going to find receptive to these ideas aren't going to be scientifically minded, I can tell you that much.

I was mildly against Alito until I saw this. Now I'm adamantly opposed. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/scotus/la-na-alito3dec03,1,1324912.story?page=2&coll=la-news-politics-supreme_court

I hate conspiracy theorists... except the ones that think that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. They kick ass...

Quick, let's invent a few dozen more letters and maybe ID will actually make sense

Sure, and consciousness is an "environmentally-stimulated analysis algorithm" (and hey, so is evolution!) "more accurately"? No, I don't think so at all...

Singularity

Because when you have a peer reviewed scientific study, it means that a group of experts in a field assert the validity of the study, the evidence it presents, and the methodology involved. Otherwise, you have the opinion of one person, and one person, regardless of their credentials, can say whatever the hell they want to say. Without peer review you have no idea if the information being presented to you is remotely valid. Well, I don't know about Britain, and from some cursory reading on this guy it sounds like the British have been sloppy about a number of things. But in America, GMO crops are the most regulated plants on the face of the earth. GMO crops have to meet three sets of independent guidelines from three different government organizations: The EPA (who ensures their safety as an environmental agent), the USDA (who ensures their safety as a crop), and the FDA (who ensures their safety as a food). What do you wish to argue regarding GMO crops? Do you wish to argue that it is impossible for GMO crops to be engineered, produced, and utilized safely? If so, why?

Are you saying it will give you cancer as opposed to just burning you?