bascule

Wow, that's the most trustworthy source since "It is said..."

Lawkin? Perhaps you're thinking of Jean Baptiste Lamarck...

Big Bang Cosmology predicted the Cosmic Microwave Background. Does he have any other explanation for it other than "God put it there (to confuse us and lead those evil demonic scientists down the wrong path)?" Have you tried explaning to him that the Catholic Church accepts the validity of the Big Bang Theory/Inflation and teaches it in their schools?

Haven't you realized how utterly ridiculous your "idea" is yet?

The ultracentrifuge designs they purchased from A.Q. Khan were designed for the express purpose of refining uranium to weapons grade. Furthermore, A.Q. Khan is known to have sold the design for an implosion lens (i.e. a nuclear bomb core) to at least Libya (who gave up on their nuclear ambitions) and most likely North Korea as well. Considering A.Q. Khan was a one stop shop for getting everything you need to make nuclear weapons, I sincerely doubt Iran's nuclear ambitions are peaceful.

One would hope that if nothing else, the proximity to large numbers of Palestinaians would make an effective deterrent. That as well as Islamic landmarks like the Dome of Rock in Jerusalem.

I'm linking the relevant section of Vernor Vinge's paper on technological singularity: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html Kurzweil doesn't even mention the possibility of improving intelligence medicinally. But obviously it would have the same ultimate effect; the smarter the pieces of the system are, the faster it evolves.

I plan on surviving until the technological singularity event, after which point I think we'll be, for all intents and purposes, immortal...

While I think it was a mistake to try to resurrect the state of Israel in the first place (which was pretty much the founding task of the UN) this is thoroughly despicable.

All politicians (and for that matter, pretty much all people) are hypocrites, just some more than others, which is why I pointed out a fairly obvious case instance of blatent hypocrisy rather than going for an all too easy composition fallacy and trying to expand it to a larger group.

Lots of interesting stuff here, Dawkins touched on exactly this issue... So a function of consciousness is to present the results of underlying computations - but to whom? The Queen? Crick and Koch do not go on to ask themselves the Hard Question: And then what happens? ("And then a miracle occurs"?) Once their theory has shepherded something into what they consider to be the charmed circle of consciousness, it stops. So yes, synchronous sensory presentation to a wholly asynchronous processing center. The Cartesian Theater, the "Projector", whatever you want to call it... our senses build a complete, correlated rerepresentation of reality inside our cerebral corex. But it's only there that consciousness actually begins; before that all you have is just mechanically processes sensory input. But the remarkable thing (this is taken from Dennett's multiple drafts model) is that conscious/subconscious processing occuring in the corex can also shape those perceptions; if you see something blurry in the distance, once you are able to identify correctly what it is your brain will try to fill in the detail from memory. If you mis-identify what you are looking at, the details may indeed be filled in incorrectly. But once you identify your mistake and the brain begins filling in the fuzziness with the correct details from memory, you will be unable to revert to the previous draft. Essentially you're composed of a "throng of idiots" which are in fact merely highly mechanical pattern analyzers each equipped with their own unique memory and each becoming "specialists" in certain areas. They're constantly exchanging a sort of "mind stuff" data format with each other (which Dennett calls "phenoms") and certain ones learn to "like" and propogate these phenoms to others (whilst tacking on their own revisions). The phenoms are passed around the brain and evolve with subsequent revisions (each of these centers holding onto its own working copy for comparison with a more "evolved" version). Thus ideas evolve by being passed back and forth by these pattern analyzers that propogate ideas they "like". You can think of this a lot like the memetic model, which is likely why we were so successful: we participate in a means of group idea processing which mimics our own internal idea processing, which in turn mimics the rules of natural selection and the evolutionary process itself (good ideas which are the most liked by the various components of your consciousness continue to replicate and variate within the cerebral cortex until they reach a "finalized" form and can be committed to either memory or action)

Dawkins had this to say on Neanderthal/Modern interbreeding: On the issue of Neanderthal speech:

Genetic engineering is memetic evolution turned genetic evolution

In The Ancestor's Tale Dawkins claimed that primates shared a common ancestors with rodents and glires before their common ancestor with all other placental mammals. Of course the breakdown on tolweb shows primates being closer to bats, tree shrews, and flying lemurs...

I don't forsee humans changing much with time. There just don't seem to be many selection pressures which affect you before you can reproduce driving our development in a direction radically different from our current form. If our bodies are going to evolve at all, it will be through technology.

Oh, I see what you were saying now... Yes, Freud created the field by infuriating a number of people with his bad ideas

What shows up on an EEG, duh!

He said the issue is still open to debate and that there is some very compelling evidence that they lacked the vocal development and brain structures required for (complex) speech, iirc. I can quote the relevant sections of the book later today if you'd like.

All hominids are going to be more closely related to each other than they are to chimps (i.e. they share a common ancestor with each other which chimps do not) Although obviously Lucy is more chimp-like than man-like...

Ugh, sickmusic, I don't exactly feel up to deconstructing your FUD filled post right now. Maybe one of the biologists here would care to... they're certainly more qualified than me. However... I'll take a few quickies to point out the most obvious flaws in your thinking. They are extremely helpful but not required. You can demonstrate evolution using changes in allele frequencies over time using only DNA evidence from modern lifeforms. What we see isn't exactly demonstrative of "code resuse," it's structures which served one function being dramatically and somewhat non-sensically retooled into an entirely different purpose. For example, three jawbones present in reptiles shrank dramatically in mammals and turned into the bones of the inner ear. Why would a "intelligent designer" try to repurpose bones into an entirely different, unrelated problem domain? From a programmer's perspective that would be like trying to write a word processor starting with the codebase of a spreadsheet, the problem domains are completely different so code reuse doesn't make sense, and you'll spend a lot of time frustrated trying to force code which was designed to do one thing to do something completely different and unrelated. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, unless the process doing the "designing" is mechanical, unintelligent, and has all the time in the world. He wrote an entire book dedicated to answering this question. Pick up a copy of The Blind Watchmaker...

Dawkins said otherwise in The Ancestor's Tale

A better thread on the subject

I've kind of always thought this with the way the Picts were described, but I could equally see it being that they were simply erradicated by Homo sapiens sapiens... especially since many doubt the Neanderthals could even talk...

Jung, Keirsey, Myers, and Briggs? That wasn't too particularly difficult...