zyncod

Eh, I guess I should come clean. That first post was just belligerence after going out to the bar last night, and the rest was not wanting to lose an argument. It's really tough playing devil's advocate for Greenpeace - they annoy the hell out of me, but probably for different reasons than they do you - and I did laugh, before I caught myself, when I saw the story earlier yesterday. Sorry and all that - no offense meant; I've got no problems with libertarians.

Oh, I'm labeling you, am I? The clues that I gave you as far as my environmental leanings were the statements that destroying a reef isn't funny and that Republicans pursue a scorched earth policy. Given the last 5 years of relentlessly lowering environmental standards, the latter statement is a (somewhat hyperbolic) version of the truth, and actual science will back that. I don't agree with Greenpeace; they focus with an inhuman zeal on insignificant points of the environmental movement (ie, destroying GMOs). Like Al Franken, Greenpeace's ego is so large that they don't see what damage they're doing to the movement they are trying to help; that's why they're both worthless. As far as I see it, the only way you can find this situation to be this funny: "BWahahashdAHAHsdahafda!!!11one!" is if you completely disagree with not only the tactics but also the motive of Greenpeace. Like how the only way I could find the Katrina/FEMA situation actually funny is if I disagreed with their goal of saving people from disasters. Since the motive of Greenpeace is saving the environment, that's why I said that you agreed with the scorched earth policy of the Republicans. I don't think this is a "strawman" argument, although it is a bit of a personal attack. I really don't care whether or not you find this reef situation to be funny, but don't get all huffy when somebody dares to point out that your sense of humor is a little perverted.

Ok, let's say that I have a problem with FEMA because they were utterly worthless when my house flooded 6 years ago during Hurrican Floyd (which they were). Now say that I post something that says "Ahhahhaa! They were directly responsible for people dying in Katrina and everybody knows it!!" I'm not laughing at people dying, I'm laughing at FEMA, but that's maybe not the slightest bit offensive? What I said was uncalled-for, but laughing in this type of situation is also mean-spirited. On an unrelated note, I used to be able to laugh at both sides, but the Republicans are becoming markedly less funny as time goes on. And Al Franken, at least, is one of the more worthless human beings walking around the planet. Jon Stewart... well, at least he doesn't take himself at all seriously.

You know, Pangloss, the more posts of yours I read, the more I come to the conclusion that you're in total agreement with the scorched earth philosophy of the Republicans, no matter how much you deny it. Destroying a reef is funny? It's not funny (at all) that national security was compromised in the Valerie Plame affair, no matter how "ironic" it might be.

That's actually not that unusual. In actual science, everybody that gets in the position of being able to review a manuscript is likely too busy to review a manuscript. Many, many papers that I've read have glaring errors that should have been caught in peer review but somehow weren't. I'm not saying that reviewers aren't reading the paper; they're just skimming through it. But I would think that any paper (or a book that presents no original research) that purports to turn a 150-year old scientific theory on its head should be at least fairly carefully reviewed.

You know, I've never actually believed in speed-reading as a way to synthesize new information. I can read very quickly under the right circumstances (I haven't ever taken a speed-reading course or anything, though), but that's usually novels. Reading papers or textbooks, I need at least 10x the amount of time per page; not to read the text, but to actually consciously integrate it. Speed reading, as I understand it, is used to gain a cursory familiarity with the terminology and subject matter. If that's the case, you might as well read an introductory textbook or a review - it will take just as much time and probably give you a better understanding of the subject. I think that for most people, they can read far faster than they can sythesize the data.

The hydrogen bonding potential is actually *lower* in condensed chromosomes than that in interphase chromosomes since the bonding to histones and a lot of the higher order condensation structures uses hydrogen bonds from the DNA phosphates or sugars.

Hey, Mokele (off-topic, I know) Can we make it a rule that you're not allowed to debate the merits of 'Darwinism' except in the Evolution or Pseudoscience forums, or unless you start a thread that specifically has to do with the forum category? It gets extremely annoying that every single biology thread that mentions the words 'evolution' or 'evolved' somehow seems to deteriorate into the exact same discussion.

Does it? Give us the +/- number for that level of uncertainty.

It depends on what you mean by "evolved"; if you mean more complex, yes they have (compare vaccinia to bacteriophages). If you mean capable of division on their own, no they haven't. Viruses are perhaps one of the most highly evolved creatures on this planet due to the incredibly high selection pressures. They need to evolve so quickly, in fact, that they have upped their mutation rate (pretty unique among "organisms") - HIV's nucleic acid replication is 1,000,000x more error-prone than our own. Another cool thing is that large stretches of the viral genome in simpler viruses are nested; it's equivalent to having a novel that you can read backward and forward (in terms of complexity).

Actually, since all viruses require host cells in order to survive, it is doubtful that they predate cellular lifeforms. In fact, most scientists now think that viruses are an outgrowth of such "lifeforms" as transposons. Transposons already have the replication and/or transcription machinery to assure their survival. All they would need to acquire would be a protein coat.

Ok, so you specifically want to kill yeast. You can use the eukaryotic equivalents of antibiotics, things like cycloheximide and colchicine. Of course, the resistance rate is going to be much lower than bacterial antibiotic resistance rates since eukaryotes are far more complex.

In your scenario, it sounds like you want to kill yeast without killing other organisms. Or you want to kill yeast in a particularly interesting way. I can recommend both; I just don't know what you want.

C'mon, you know that 'genetically perfect' does not apply to the characteristics we apply to races, such as skin, eye, and hair color. 'Genetically perfect' in this context would apply to no defects in necessary parts of the genome. My whole point in all this argument is that, with a little imagination, Christians could relate scientific with religious dogma, if they were willing to state that the Bible was not a wholly accurate document. I mean, we have a mitochondrial Eve(s) at or around the date at which culture is believed to have begun. Noah could represent the Y chromosome Adam if we discount Biblical chronology and substitute all extant species for domesticated species on the Ark (All the male members of the Ark were directly related to Adam). But obviously, everybody from IDers to creationists to 'creavolutionists' is less interested in their God's potential handiwork in Earth's history than in proving their own particular (wrong) religion's reading of Earth's life history.

QUOTE]That Eve was made from Adam's rib implies that she is a clone - genetically identical. Well, she obviously was not, two X chromosomes and all. Either God anticipated females, or he made Adam really oddly. Or Adam was Adamette. That's a bit of a strong statement, isn't it? Given that this breeding pair did not occur in the last 6000 years, that is. Additionally, transposons and replicational mistakes can influence evolution. Given two genetically perfect ancestors, you just need to have enough children to overcome inbreeding depression. If Adam and Eve were anything like their Catholic successors, this problem could probably be overcome in less than 10 generations. Not really, no. The Y chromosome and mitochondrial genome chronological rooting disparity may indicate simply that there was a bottleneck in terms of the male genome following that of the initial breeding pair, if indeed Mitochondrial Eve(s) was part of that breeding pair. Ok, now I'm interested. Not that I don't believe you, but could you provide documentation for this? It's just that I've never heard this before. On a more massive scale, brain size does correlate with intelligence (ie, mouse vs human). Neanderthal brains were somewhat larger (1200-1700 cc vs 1300-1500 cc for the respective male members), but examples from our own population (I've seen the massive brain of an 'idiot' in Cornell's collection) indicate that on a smaller scale, brain size does not correlate with intelligence. Additionally, if you assume that Adam and Eve were given the cultural gift of language, this could very well be responsible for their dominance over extant species. Aside: God is an obvious fiction, and there is no real evidence for an initial 'breeding pair.' In fact, Mokele, as you have set forth, the evidence is somewhat (but not even close to completely) to the contrary. Given that we are not likely ever to resolve this issue, what is the harm in letting people believe what they will, as long as it doesn't result in full-scale denial of empiricism (as does ID)?

Gangrene only happens when there is a loss of blood supply, which is obviously not the case for most wounds. An infected wound is just, well, an infected wound. It has a horrible smell; like ozone and bacteria put together. Trust me, I have done many stupid things that lead to infected wounds.

I'm sorry - no offense, but that's hilarious. I think that some researchers just came out with the wheel too.

No, plain water would lyse all the cells. You need a certain osmotic pressure to lyse the RBCs preferentially.

Who cares? You don't get a Nobel until 20 years after you've done your important stuff. Plus, foreign countries don't spend their every waking minute thinking about Bush. If you're really concerned about bias, look at NEA grants or the NBA or the Pulitzers or... And none of these make a difference anyway, since if Bush doesn't even read the newspapers, he sure as hell is not reading Nobel-level literature (if he's even capable).

Well, yes. I am of course not calling the Bible literally true. And Y-chromosome Adam doesn't work with their theory because he would have lived thousands of years after Mitochondrial Eve. Still, there could have been another man who could have filled the role of Adam. This would all be the finest grade of bullshit, but at least it's semi-plausible and does not rest wholly on a lack of imagination, as intelligent design does. If I was a Christian, I would find the correlation between the age of Mitochondrial Eve and the beginnings of culture far more interesting than, well, the utter lack of inference, speculation, or correlation of any kind we get from ID. It fits in with well-proven, existing theory rather than categorical denial of essentially everything we consider to be scientific. It may not be the simplest hypothesis, nor even a testable hypothesis, but it is a valid one.

Eve is actually not that scientifically impossible. Adam, yes, but Eve, no. 'Mitochondrial Eve' was a woman or a very small group of women that lived 150,000 years ago. This date incidentally correlates with the beginnings of what we would consider culture. The Christians could have a lot of support for their ideas - there was an article a year or two back in Natural History magazine by Neil Tyson about how cosmogeny could be correlated with the genesis myth in the Bible. But they'd rather be sticks in the mud about the whole thing.

Ok - Lucas - here's a question that I've never had answered to my satisfaction: why does the designer have to be intelligent? Life is too complex to have evolved on its own, there must be supernatural processes involved, fine, fine. Why does the supernatural process have to be the result of an intelligent designer? I mean, life could be the droppings of a pandimensional dragon. I see no 'scientific' reason for supposing that any of this is a result of intelligence.

We don't even need to look at savants that are capable of things like that to understand that the brain can hold well more than a few hundred megabytes. If you can hit a baseball or even just walk in a straight line, you're in possession of some pretty sophisticated physics knowledge. And then you have people like Beckham, where his "bending" the ball thing required physicists a few weeks to figure out how that might work via equations; Beckham did it in a fraction of a second. It just seems like a flawed experiment to begin with; you're not just memorizing the things on the sheet of paper, you're memorizing how the paper feels, what the font looks like, how the room is lit, how it smells, etc, etc. There is no real distinction between conscious and unconscious memory (notice how a particular smell can bring back a memory that's been buried for a decade or more); on this basis, I don't think that we are limited to just a few hundred megabytes.

Ok, my understanding from people's replies here is that the firebombing campaigns in WWII were a moral mistake that we've learned from. To that, I would say that we have not learned anything. As late as 1989, we had nuclear weapons actively targeted at single building radar installations in the USSR. Nuclear weapons! It's like using a shotgun to take out a fly in the middle of a crowded mall. If you hit somebody under those circumstances, it no longer qualifies as "collateral damage." In fact, we might as well have filled all of our nuclear warheads with candy for all the good they would do us. Under any and all circumstances in which thousands of nuclear weapons are used, the only objective is to kill massive numbers of civilians. And for no real political purpose - Pentagon simulations of an exchange with the Russians see countries like Argentina (!) stepping up to fill the power void. And we still have 11,000 of these weapons; why? When there is no conceivable circumstance under which we might actually need more than 10. The fact is, we haven't fought a real war since WWII. All of our latest wars have been situations where killing large numbers of civilians would be counterproductive politically due to the power differentials. The fact that we still have 11,000 nuclear weapons, though, indicates to me that we would not be averse to reverting to the moral logic of firebombing campaigns again. And the situation in Iraq right now is not that different from France in the 40s. Not many people complain about the French resistance killing Vichy collaborators. Ps - People in democracies are more liable for the actions of their governments as they have a direct say in the actions of said governments. Furthermore, the World Trade Center was the largest monument in the world to the Western notion of "free market capitalism." That building had been targeted for terrorism since the 70s, had a previous attack in 1993, and had armed guards in the lobby. The people that died were not working in a schoolhouse in Iowa.

You know, if you're just trying to detect exogenous cells, a dye would probably be more appropriate than a transgene. We use use CFSE and CMTMR for labeling cells for subQ injection into mice. The false positive rate by flow cytometry for these dyes is 0-5/300,000 cells. P.s.- For these amine-reactive dyes, you don't need to permeabilize the cells the way you might need to for a nucleic acid stain. Really, the stains are incredibly effective at very low concentrations as they are membrane-permeable and bind permanently to intracellular proteins.