Peterkin

According to the story told about him, Jesus ascended to heaven, leaving behind a promise to return in 1000 years - not to skulk around pretending to be other people. If he came back on schedule, he'd have been just in time to see the church of his sepulchre destroyed and Muslim empires spreading east, west and northward. Being an intelligent man, he kept a low profile, moved to the south of France, bought an olive grove, got married and raised a family; died at the age of 82, peacefully in his grape arbour, surrounded by great-grandchildren. And then Dan Brown blundered in, found a couple of old scrolls and ran off with the whole wrong end of the stick.

Admirable examples of modern westernized democracies! Some people, in various times and places, have sometimes been convicted of crimes (in we don't know what kinds of legal proceedings); therefore, a nameless, nationaless, unaccused casual example of death by firing squad must be guilty by association. Due process be shot full of holes!

Yes. Presumed guilty, on zero evidence.

That is your prerogative. To my hypothetical hapless guy facing a firing squad? You don't even know his time period, nationality or what he was accused of. Indeed! Thusly: You were talking about letting a guilty person off, even if he got the child and 5000 other people killed with all of his failed methods of detection. It may have come to that. I'm sorry!

I had never thought about that! Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I wonder, now, about the variation in juvenile hairiness. It depends on where the cutoff point is between juvenile and whatever comes next - adolescent or prepubescent? Because I've certainly noticed ethnic patterns of body hair in children as young as 8 or 9.

So do I. Repeatedly. If you don't like the answer, that's not my problem. Neither. I countered your non sequitur "Tell that to the victims of 9/11" with a reference to the hundreds times as many victims of American bombings and incursions in the Middle East over the preceding decades. Then I disagreed with your assertion that the US' melodramatically-named "War on Terror" started in 2001 with a guerilla attack on the symbols of American economic, military and political control of the world. (I didn't mention that it was exactly as effective as The War on Drugs and The War on Poverty.) Nothing started on September 11th - something very complicated that had been going on for a long time continued on that day. The victims on one side are no more guilty or innocent than the victims on the other side. (BTW There is no longer any such thing as "peacetime". There hasn't been since at least 1939.... probably closer to 6000 BCE) Perhaps.... Hapless, either way, whichever side he was on yesterday. (You seem a whole lot quicker to presume guilt than innocence in any case of which you know none of the facts. The legal system of these much-vaunted modern westernized democracies predicate their laws on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, not supposed or maybe guilty. ) If the prisoner was black and the cop was white, in a city where the majority wears red collars, probably. Yes, I did. It means you believe that such countries have no bad laws and no bad cops and no bad ideologies, no corruption or injustice. Again, we disagree. Though I have to wonder why that "left of the political spectrum" imagines itself different from the right wing, it's possible. In which case, the 25-50% of people who vote for the winning candidates in those countries can still be just as wrong as their ancestors were.

You have worked up some interpretation of "my" philosophy of life, but i don't know what-all you've included in that hypothetical philosophy. If supporting what one believes in is an "agenda", then I suppose everyone has their own agenda - even you. I can't see that as dishonest. Nor do I see how my advocating what I believe to be right costs anybody else anything, let alone innocent lives - not even imaginary ones. Is this not the right of every poster? An exhaustive history of the Middle East, South Asia and Europe, c. 661-2000 CE is more than a bit off topic. And available to you elsewhere. Plus, you told me you lost interest when Putin invaded Ukraine. 'Cos he's standing against a wall, wearing a blindfold, with 19 loaded and one blank rifle pointed at his chest. Most people wouldn't call that being fortunate. Not very likely. Firing squad is a more common form of execution for army deserters, insurgents in an occupied territory and suspected enemy collaborators. Sometimes, just any random citizen(s), rounded up to be made an example, if the locals are suspected of harbouring insurgents. Yes. We disagree on that. Also on torture by proxy: designating some other person, whether a fellow officer or a civilian, to carry out the decision made by the officer in charge. When it's successful. Condemned and prosecuted when it fails. Ignored or denied most of the time, because the public isn't told any details. There, too, we disagree. If 99% of the population is all gung-ho about burning heretics, or considers it necessary to break little girls' toes to make their feet dainty, or thinks albinos have no right to live, then 99% of the population is wrong. It wouldn't be a unique situation.

Legally, that may or may not be true; the lower ranks don't get always get away with the "just following orders" defence - though, of course, they may well have faced a firing squad themselves for refusing an order. Ultimately, it is every person's own responsibility. You're alone inside your own mind. The majority makes the laws, supports the official policy, condones black ops, espionage and torture by its own organs while condemning the same methods employed by other nations. The majority imposes its world-view on the minority. But it cannot suffuse every individual conscience. History is littered with conscientious objectors, deserters, heretics, activists, reformers, resisters, protesters, rebels and martyrs. It was an outline. Then Moses and Aaron had to labour at Leviticus, to elaborate the law. And the Israelites obviously didn't consistently obey those laws, or their prophets wouldn't have had to berate them so often over their sinful ways. Those same commandments have been elaborated by all Christian nations into quite different legal codes. It's a simple enough outline, that nevertheless has failed to gain consensus. I don't know what makes you so sure. None of us, AFAIK, is currently on such a team. I worked, a long time ago, in a forensic lab and met some of their members. They were not much like the television version. Ordinary men - all of them: not a female in sight, but that was 1980, practically the stone age - none exceptionally clever, certainly not disciplined in their habits of speech nor reverent toward the law and the citizenry. The protocol is nowhere near as strict (if the news is anything to go by, this is true of most jurisdictions) as we like to think. The tone is always established by the top ranks of each division: they hire and train according the policing style of the leadership. Dissent is not permitted. Some divisions work better than others; some teams are better than others; most work fairly well. Toronto homicide section clears 70+% of its cases. (Of course, they also have some wrongful convictions on their record.) Some kinds of crime are not handled by local police but specialized federal, state or provincial ones, who may be better trained, organized, equipped and disciplined, but most importantly, have a wider jurisdiction and discretionary powers ... which doesn't always prevent mistakes. You're not supposed to know that. It can't be official, as long as there is a law on the books forbidding it. How much leeway each precinct commander gives his troops becomes evident only after the fact, when an abuse of power comes to public notice. Most instances are not revealed. That's exactly what I have maintained. I don't rule out the possibility that I would resort to a wrong action if I were convinced that I could prevent a greater wrong. If I did that, it would still be just as wrong as if someone else did it. I trust neither you nor myself to determine with any certainty whether it is justified in the circumstances. In a crunch, I believe we do whatever we feel (not necessarily think) we have to do. That doesn't make it right or moral, in my book; it just pushes one guilt down a rung below some other anticipated guilt.

It's not my place to excuse or condemn. All I pointed out was that it, as well as every other event, was a consequence of past events, just as it, as well as every other action and decision, has consequences in the future. I wish you would either tell me what that "agenda" is supposed to be, or else stop referring to it. I don't expect either of those things to happen. I answer all the questions that seem relevant to the thread subject, as well as some marginal ones - at tedious length and tiresome number of reiterations. I do not answer, except with reference material you may consult at your leisure, any questions that would require several volumes to explain adequately. That seems to me both a derailment and a great waste of time. Sharing the responsibility lightens the burden. That's why a firing squad, instead of a single executioner: none of them knows which killed the hapless guy in front of the wall. For ethical purposes, however, it is the commander who must answer for the consequences. Besides, answering a question about ethics is not a committee assignment: it's specific and personal.

Neither. Stating a fact. All of history leads to the present. There is no moment, no single event, at which a chain of causation begins or ends. No new happening has one single cause; every new action causes more events. There are very few Y/N B/W answers in human affairs.

Bone, I think. You can use grafts, either from the patient or from a donor, as a framework for new growth, and new cells will fill in the gap to bind them. The titanium mesh and artificial, 3D printed bone serve the same purpose: provide a hard framework. They can be very precise. Amazing work is already being done. For the patient, though, it's still no cakewalk.

"Ever" goes back to the 7th century CE. That's a lot of history, all of it inappropriate to the present venue. No, I don't. As you wish.

No, it isn't. Shelve the Bible. Start here https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/mhccmajorsbio/chapter/introduction-to-genetics-mt-hood-community-college-biology-102/ and come back when you've completed the course. (Without the colour nonsense, please!)

Do you? That's standard practice in science. I suspect you want to discuss 'race' and I'm pretty sure that will be as airworthy as a balloon made of lead. But that's a different branch of science.

Did you know that nationality is not genetic? Absolutely! Just like Americans. What was you intention in putting this under Genetics? You'll be gratified to learn that it has no merit whatsoever in any field.

Why not? I hope somebody who actually knows tells us pretty soon.

How about on the bacterial scale? Mangrove trees live over 100 years each, while bacteria live o more than a day. The turnover, and thus mutation opportunity and thus evolution, is considerably faster on that scale.

For you. Not for me. And therein lies the unbridgeable rift.

Depends what you consider 'very long'. And just because they live in conjunction with mangroves now, we can't assume that they have not changed habitats and food sources sometime, or many times, during their history. Let's give the researchers a couple of days to study on it.

That would be very long and widely off-topic. If you were to compare size of empires and number of nations invaded, the Christians would win by a comfortable margin. Of course, it also depends on how far back in history you wanted to go and whether you were comparing military aggression by religion only, or other factors. I'm sure Wikipedia can supply whatever answer you want.

True. That was my assumption, from the little bit I've read on it. Of course, it's still a descendant of our common family tree, but on a twig very, very far from the one on which we're hanging. Okay. When? From what? There has to be some observed data to prompt a hypothesis, and I'm not aware of one that posits a recent origin for this species. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that I don't know enough (given I only learned of its existence this afternoon) about T. magnifica to speculate.

Of course. One branch went on to branch and branch and branch, until it became all kinds of organisms, many of which have since become extinct. This branch remained unchanged or changed very little, (like ants and hydras) I suppose because they found an ecological niche that still works for them. The "missing link" does not refer its evolution but to our knowledge. I would very much like to see a magnified cross section. Haven't had time to search.

There is a little more in the Science article, linked to this one. No enlarged microscopy pictures, unfortunately, so we have to rely on their description of the insides. But, wow! what a stash of DNA!

Why should scientists care about the appearance of some new species that far in the future? It won't be humans, you know; it will be one or more species nobody's ever seen before. If they're viable, they will look appropriate to their surroundings and food sources. I notice, though, that the artists depicting these imaginary future humans were just as concerned about the "human" identity as you are: they kept the same face. It's quite improbable that the shape of the nose, the size of the mouth and the placement of the eyes would stay the same, when everything else changes. It won't bother you on this one, either. If you're still here to see them, you will look like them and you will think it's the only possible way for your species to look, just as you were more than okay - you were very pleased - with this appearance : https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notharctus 50 millions years ago. If you're not here by then, whoever is here won't bother you. (Spacefaring cockroaches, probably.)

They don't need to. None of those projected models could possibly become real. Look at them! Can you imagine their habitat and mundane activities? They're simply not functional. Nature kills off the non-functional. How any species evolves depends on where and how it lives. Whether the human race survives that long, whether it mutates, how it evolves, all depend on what happens to the land it inhabits. How do you know? Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. Another one of them could find that giant prehensile anus irresistible.