mistermack

As far as humans go, fascism could be looked on as an evolutionary trait, in a similar way to religion. After all, fascism attempted to make Jews extinct, as well as a huge number of Russians and Slavs. If you aim your genocide at a racial group, then you are affecting the remaining genome. Religious wars will have a similar effect. You're not exterminating people at random, you are augmenting natural selection, with your own choices. Europeans massacring Arabs in crusades will have altered the remaining world genome in a specific direction. European immigrants to America tried to exterminate the resident "Indians", with no feelings of guilt whatsoever. They wouldn't have done that to Christians. Being of a different religion allows people to view people of other religions as less than human. These effects on human evolution were not huge, but they were significant, considering how slowly evolution normally happens.

I have a feeling Kavanaugh will get his revenge once he's confirmed. This process is bound to sway his decision on matters that he might have wavered on. On the subject of his accuser, I still can't believe the easy ride she got when being quizzed. She waited 36 years, saying nothing, and only said something when he looked like being nominated. She should have been vigorously tested on that. Not just to be fair to Kavanaugh, but to be fair to the PROCESS of selecting the judges, which she might very well be attempting to corrupt. To me, her tactics stink. She's a psychology professor, but she took a lie detector test. What that tells me, is that it's the public perception that was her motive, from the start. She would know perfectly well the zero value of the result, and how polygraphs "work", and how to beat them. The result either way is meaningless. And she's lied about them as well, when asked if she has ever given advice on them. (according to a former boyfriend).

The persistence hunt is a hypothesis about our past. It's a highly unlikely scenario. It can be done today, by a very few elite hunter-gatherers. But it needs more than just endurance. You need superb tracking skills, and intimate knowledge of your quarry, and locality. And you need to be efficiently bipedal. No Chimpanzee could hope to do it, as they are not evolved for running on two feet. So as an explanation for the evolution of bipedalism, it's a non starter. The early human ancestors, recently bipedal, couldn't hope to run down prey like a modern bushman can. On the other hand, persistence in running down a wounded quarry would definitely be something that happened. You wound a large animal with a spear from a hiding place, and then follow the tracks, hopefully to come across it, weakened by loss of blood, and finish it off.

Being fascinated by unknowns is hardly a religious trait. Even kittens share that. Personalising the explanation, that's religion. "Explaining" every mystery with a " X did it " , that's religion. And then indoctrinating kids in that belief, without any verification. Anyway, what else is an evolutionary trait? War with your neighbours. The strongest trampling all over the weakest. Rape. Murder. Even cannibalism. They have all played their part in getting us to where we are now.

The normal procedure of introducing something new, is to explain the scientific principles involved first. Not going straight to the materials used, and video of bubbling beakers.

Change the subject, why don't you? "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"

Yes, but there is such a thing as consequences to actions. If you put your hand in a fire, it gets burned. Jump off a building, and you will probably have a hard landing. Choose not to report it for thirty six years, and then do it just before he gets nominated for the supreme court, and the evidence will be gone, you motive will look suspicious, and it will be one person's word against another. Just saying "lots of people don't report it" doesn't make it one bit more deserving. If lots of people put their hands in fires, then lots of people get burned through their own fault. Numbers don't change it at all. Leaving it for 36 years is also incredibly unfair to the accused. How can someone CLEAR themselves 36 years later? 36 years ago, there might have been a witness who could easily clear him. You can't expect that to last 36 years. It's totally ludicrous.

The biggest example I can think of of this is the collapse of a star. As the fuel gets spent, the energy keeping the star from collapsing under gravity gets lower and lower. The star loses energy at a phenomenal rate, so the critical point wouldn't last long. But eventually, the loss of some photons pushes the star over the edge, and you get a Supernova explosion. In a way, it's quite similar to the bridge, because while the bridge might look stable and unchanging, just before collapse, in reality there would be a continuous process of weakening going on, due to wind, corrosion and traffic. So once it got close to collapse, it would be a non-reversible process, without massive intervention.

No it doesn't. If her purpose is to block his appointment till after the next election, then the FBI investigation she is proposing does just that. Donald Duck has proposed a quickie investigation that will defeat that objective. It's a game of chess. I heard her giving evidence, and I thought it was an act. I thought they gave her far too much respect. She's either lying or telling the truth. That needed testing out rather more vigorously than what I saw. What's changed over thirty years? He's been around all that time, not in hiding. The only thing that's changed is he's up for the job. Therefore, it's patently obvious that the only reason she's come out with it is to stop him getting the job. All of the rest of it is an act. She could have done it all years ago, but didn't. So in the tiny chance that she's telling the truth, I would say "tough, you left it too long. Thirty years too long". If I was a Democrat Senator I'd be voting for him now. Not just because I think she's lying, but because I think they are corrupting the system by using the tactic of last minute allegation. Trump won the election, like it or not. Having said all that, I don't feel sorry for Kavanaugh. I believe he worked for Ken Starr against Clinton, so if he loses the job, it's rough justice. In fact, I have a feeling there is some tit for tat stuff going on under the counter with this, so to me, it's amusing either way.

The OP makes it clear that the bridge is on the point of collapse. In that case it might well just take a tiny input to push it over the brink. It's the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's a hypothetical example. In real life, a gust of wind would contain far more energy than a tap with a hammer, so it's not likely that any bridge would reach such a finely-balanced state.

Siberian Tigers do meet Brown Bears in their range. And Siberian bears can be much the same size as Kodiaks, in some places around the coast. A big male Brown Bear would be more than a match for any Tiger, I would have thought. But a small female, or juvenile might well be on the menu. It's not so likely to work the other way. A Tiger could probably easily evade a big bear, unless it got caught sleeping.

On the subject of spears, ( and I hope this is not too much of a digression ) the throwing spear would have come far later than the very first spears. Throwing a spear is a good hunting tactic, but a terrible fighting tactic. The first spears would have been stabbing weapons, for self defence against hostile clans or predators. Throwing it would be the last thing you would do. Once it's gone, you're defenceless. It might even have been that stabbing spears evolved from fighting sticks. If you carry a fighting stick around long enough, eventually the end would wear into a point, and stabbing with it would be more deadly than clubbing with it. There's no way of proving it, but I think it must have happened that way. There's no way that someone sat down, and invented the javelin from scratch. It might even have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of years, just to progress from club stick to throwing spear. The progress of stone tool-making was equally slow. Unfortunately, sticks don't last the way stone does, so the evidence is lacking.

I just read Hebrews. I agree there's no claim of authorship. I don't think there's much chance that they were written by Paul. The intro and ending are a very different style, and the content seems to be a lot more rambling and less to the point, even than Paul's. It does come over as if someone is imitating Paul, but not trying to pass it off as his. Otherwise, they would have put something personal to Paul in the intro and/or ending. One thing that really hit me though, it the similar lack of reference to the life of Jesus. It reinforces the lack of it in Paul's writing. Now you have two people, writing about a recently executed son of god, who make virtually no reference to his life or family. I find that more than twice as remarkable. There has to be a reason. In Hebrews, he calls Jesus the son of God. But makes no mention of his other parent. Or family. Or sayings or teachings or events in his life. And yet he's writing to recently converted Jews, who are supposedly shaky in conviction, and thinking of reverting to ordinary Judaism. (according to wiki). You have to make a huge leap of faith not to find that remarkable or odd, or significant. I think these epistles were written in a period of transition, before all of the detail of the life of a real Jesus had been dreamed up. There's plenty about the human sacrifice angle. That seems to be what they were pushing. He goes on about sacrificing goats and bulls etc, and how the sacrifice of Jesus for human sin was significant in the same way. The details of the actual dying on the cross, at the behest of the Jewish authorities, are glaringly missing. Especially, in a letter to Jewish Christians.

Funnily enough, "One mans trash is another mans treasure." does actually sum up most of life on Earth. Virtually all of it is recycling what went before. And we are doing more of it than at any time in history, due to fossil fuels.

One surprising thing I've noticed is that animals with a venomous bite rarely (or maybe never) use the venom in fighting their own kind. Maybe the ones that DID in the past got bitten as well in retaliation, so neither fighter survived to breed, so they evolved a fighting process that didn't involve biting. I suppose people will now quote exceptions. One I can think of is the Black Widow Spider, I believe that the females sometimes kill and eat the male that is trying to mate with them, or that has just mated. It's not the same as male on male conflict though.

I was surprised to find that the smallest reactors are not the ones in submarines, or destroyers, but a few land-based ones. Smallest in terms of output anyway. The ships obviously would be keeping peak performance in reserve, to extend the working life, as they wouldn't need a huge output 24/7. There's a lot of nuclear powered ships about. It makes you wonder what sort of environmental damage would happen in a war, when presumably those ships would be targeted just like all the others. It's not a pleasant thought.

Just by way of clarification, when you look at something, such as this text, and focus on it, the part of the image that you are focusing on falls on the fovea. It's much richer in receptors. The rest of the image falls on lower concentrations of receptors, giving more peripheral vision. So no matter where you are looking, up down or side to side, the light from the bit you are focusing on is still falling on the fovea. If I look at this text, the limit is about one word in reasonably good focus. Without moving your eyes, if you look at one word, the words alongside it are a lot less clear. You read by moving your focus from word to word. In fact, if you look at the w in word, the rest of the word is not clear, unless you "zoom out" to take in the whole word. If all of what's in front of you is 180 degrees left to right, then the wo in word approximates to 1 or 2 degrees, and that's the sort of area that has maximum visual acuity.

Maybe clothing protected from the cold? A big penis might have been a liability till we began wearing something over it. Upright walking might have exposed it to a chilly wind. Selection could also happen with promiscuous females, where bigger penises might deposit semen ahead of the semen from a smaller one, or even pump out the semen from a previous partner. Chimpanzees have extremely big testicles, (from memory) which might compete with other males by producing large quantities of semen, and flushing out semen from a previous mating. Gorilla silverbacks, having more exclusive mating rights, don't need to compete in those ways, to the same degree.

Our closest relatives WALK on their knuckles, so it's almost certain that our ancestors did, before they started walking upright. So maybe our knuckles are still a bit more robust than they would otherwise be. Although the heel of the hand is less likely to fracture, if you want to hurt someone. Chimpanzees punch and kick, but stamping with the heel is the most devastating, and it's the same with us. Our bodies are a compromise, evolved for lots of things, and taking blows is sure to be one of them. Especially since our ancestors lived in trees, and were likely to fall on occasion.

The Gorilla is the normal one. It's we humans that have an unusually large one. Nobody knows for sure why. It might be that peeing standing upright is easier to control with an extra inch or two. Or it could be that in hand-to-hand fighting, a bigger penis is more vulnerable. Humans carrying weapons are less likely to bite or get bitten in a fight. Or it could be that Gorillas establish mating rights by being the dominant male of a harem, and females don't get much of a choice, so the big Silverback doesn't need to attract females, he basically acquires them by combat. We humans tend to pair off, and females get more say in the matter. Maybe the human female is built differently, due to having to give birth to babies with enormous heads, so human males need a few more inches. Or it could be something else entirely. Nobody knows.

Not a good phrase, "evolved to do" might be better. The answer is in the OP. Hunter gatherers is our most recent long period of stable lifestyle. But you can't ignore what came before. The hunter gatherers evolved from forest dwelling tree climbing fruit eating apes, quite like Chimps and Bonobos. Our "design" owes much to those ancestors. We have forward facing eyes and opposable thumbs which were adaptations to tree climbing, although we took the thumbs to a more specialised form, presumably for manipulating tools and weapons. So we're an upright, tool and weapon-using ape, evolved recently to survive as highly social hunter gatherers. And of course, the most important thing about humans is our big brains, and we don't know exactly why that evolved as it did, but it's almost certain to be to do with social interaction, including of course, language.

They are aggressive dogs though. One memory that always makes me smile, is when in my early twenties, I had a job selling stuff door-to-door. I was always nervous of dogs in gardens, and would skip those houses. My friend used to laugh at me, and march confidently through the gates, telling me I was a wimp. One day, I skipped a house that had a "beware of the dog" sign on the gate. My pal did his usual stunt, of mocking me and walking confidently in. A few seconds later, I heard this really savage barking, and his voice shouting, sounding genuinely panicked. He eventually came out of the garden, when the owner called the dog off, he wasn't hurt, but he was as white as a sheet. He had been pinned against a wall, with the dog barking and snarling in his face, and he had the dog's dinner all down his suit !! I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the day. That was a Rhodesian Ridgeback. The name always brings a smile to my face.

The Josephus quotes are blindingly obvious forgeries. The worst one is so bad, that in modern terms you would say that they were taking the piss. The more subtle one is not so obvious, but it's starkly out of place, and pretty obvious from that point of view. It's also tainted by the more obvious one. It would be special pleading to treat the two as having no link. The motive is clearly there to create history, where there was none. The safest thing, from an historical point of view, is to regard both as obvious forgeries, and note the practice of trying to change history to include a real Jesus. There was so much forging going on, including nearly half of Paul's Epistles, that the message comes over loud and clear. Regard everything with suspicion.

The world is full of such examples. As above, you are just releasing energy that is stored. Sometimes a huge amount of stored energy can be released by a tiny initial movement. A gun for example. The energy is stored chemically in the gunpowder in the shell. A tiny pull on the trigger releases stored energy in the cocked spring mechanism. That in turn sets off the charge in the ammunition, which propels the bullet. It's all about releasing stored energy. An extreme example would be an earthquake. The Earth's plate bends like a spring, across a vast area, storing up a gigantic amount of energy. Eventually, one tiny crack leads to the whole system snapping back like a spring, and the whole planet shakes. But like Sensei said, the bridge example is the release of potential energy, stored by the position of a very heavy mass in a gravitational field. It's a bit like a huge boulder finely balanced at the top of a mountain. A butterfly comes along, and lands on it, and as it's just on the point of rolling, that's all it takes. As it rolls down hill, the potential energy it possesses, due to it's position at the top of the mountain gets converted to kinetic energy and heat, as it rolls and bounces and speeds up.

This thread has reminded me of a story my brother-in-law told me years ago. He used to have a Whippet that was terrible for chasing cats. You couldn't let him off the lead unless you were sure that there were going to be none around. He went to the Cotswold Wildlife Park in Gloucestershire, and you are allowed to walk around with your dog on a lead. When he was approaching one of the enclosures, the dog started hanging back, and as they got closer, his head went right down, and he was shaking like a leaf. Eventually, he just wouldn't go any further. My brother-in-law handed the lead to my sister, and walked over to the enclosure. There was a Leopard the other side of the fence. Just the smell was enough to terrify the dog. He'd never come across a big cat in his life, or the scent of one, and had killed a few small ones. But he knew instinctively that what was in that enclosure was deadly.