Sayonara

Reigning monarchs don't count.

I'm not sure many journals would publish 150-page proofs, although you'd think they would make an exception for something as important as that.

S/he didn't. S/he typed it in block capitals (i.e. shouted it at us), and the forum dropped it down to capitalised text to protect our eyes.

Which one is the straight-up type in the royal family?

Well, this is a thread, so.... the preceding posts.

Depends on the model, customisations, the programming, what you have it doing, and what time-share protocols are being implemented at the time. They aren't structured like, and don't work the same way as, desktop PCs, so it's difficult to make a direct comparison.

You're right, it doesn't settle the question in the O/P. But don't ignore the fact that the question I was answering was "is it really true that the "damage" being done onto the environment at the current rate will eventually wipe out ALL bacteria life". I don't think "not enough time for humans to mutate" is really a significant problem. Mutations don't occur as a response to harsh conditions - they allow survival in those conditions for genotypes in which they already exist. I don't really see any good reason why the lower-order organisms should die off before the higher-order organisms, especially since they have shorter generational times and can adapt more readily to changing environmental conditions. Granted food webs would collapse, but you're implying generalised trophic prerequisites and dependencies that don't necessarily exist.

That's an entirely separate argument. It does, yes. But I think the general differentiation is that athletic training is operational within the existing capacities of the individual, whereas external intervention through the use of drugs isn't. Or something.

Call me Susan Gobblehat if it makes you happy. I don't care what you think of me.

People who just talk gibberish, no matter what you respond with.

Well, the name-calling is a bit unfair, seeing as you could actually be that thick. But I'm not embarrassed by the fact that I called you a troll so not in this case, no. FYI, you have not "reduced" me to anything. In case you didn't notice there was a response in there too.

That was the bit that was my point.

Have you tried the Wikipedia?

You are quite right - the atypical happens frequently (and usually when you are waiting for the bus, and already late). However that doesn't mean that a large-scale pattern does not exist, nor does it mean that the mechanisms in effect for the majority of the time are never in effect (which doesn't even make sense as a sentence, now I come to write it down). There is no requirement for absolutes when you are dealing with dynamic populations, and even a mere desire for absolutes is impractical (for instance many individuals in a population will die before reproducing - that doesn't mean that inheritance doesn't work). Imposing an artificial requirement for one is intellectually misleading. Hi troll! Notice how I was talking about a specific claim' date=' and not the population it belongs to? Know what Venn diagrams are? Good. Now change the record and stop embarrassing yourself. Because that's not its purpose. How come you can imagine attributes for such a complex set of unknown systems as me (such as "proudly"), yet your powers of reasoning fail you on something so simple as the scientific method, which has been documented in excruciating detail for centuries? Clades, probably, for the most part. However if we could find a pre-human husbandry cow I can absolutely guarantee it would be reproductively isolated from modern animals. It would be easier to demonstrate for plant than it is for animals, I suspect. I think you may be letting your imagination run riot all of a sudden. There's no requirement for such knowledge. Answering that question is not within evolutionary theory's remit.

Exobiology is for anything off-Earth ("the study of life outside", e.g. life on Mars). Xenobiology is for anything unknown ("the study of foreign life", e.g. weird newly-discovered bacterium made from iron that eats batteries). So exobiology is a more precise form of xenobiology. They're largely interchangeable, except that if it's on Earth, it's not exo-.

You should attempt to explain why that's a problem. It will be more interesting, and a lot funnier. If you're hoping to unnerve or surprise any scientists, you'll fail. This is somewhat old news. Have you never wondered what biostatistical analysis, confidence testing, margins of error, and so forth are used for? Someone who stands outside your house imagining you to be in one room because of prior knowledge rather than observation and testing will obviously fail to model your behaviour properly - because their method is shit, not because there's a fatal flaw in all of science.

Either you do not understand what I/Skye said, or you are deliberately misrepresenting it to make problems for my post. The key phrase here is "Evolution can be studied scientifically however" (Skye). When I say "Evolution deals with mechanisms of change", I mean that evolutionary theory is the scientific study of changes that are due to evolutionary mechanisms. Sorry it wasn't more clear to begin with. Firstly, I did not mean to say that. What I meant was we don't have to "be fair to the bible" (whatever that means). However, there actually isn't a need to map out the entire lineage. You only need to know the mechanism and conditions to extrapolate the full process. I really hate using analogies in evolution/religion discussions, but imagine you catch a bus every morning to go to work. You only see five stops, but you can be reasonably confident from the evidence that the bus completes the rest of its route when you aren't on it. I suspect you are simply trying to enforce conditions you know to be impossible on to evolution to make it feel less believable. However it's a group of real-world mechanisms, and will still be there whether we believe in it or not, so you could probably spend that time better elsewhere. What does that mean, and what does it have to do with anything? Not really. The information is there: take it or leave it. Biologists in general don't roam forums trying to convert the heathen god-worshippers to the cult of Evolutionism, because to be quite frank their interest in convincing people of their findings extends pretty much no further than their peers and whichever academic circles they have interests in. By all means contest findings that come from evolutionary theory, but at least try not to demean the hard work that has gone into in the process. The first would not be logically sustainable. The second could be logically sustainable, only nobody in their right mind makes that extraordinarily over-simplistic claim.

Such a pole is bound to attract all kinds of attention.

Please tell me that was a deliberate spelling mistake...

Here we go.

As some of you have already noticed, we've now introduced a new set of user groups on SFN. "Experts" are members who have contributed a lot to the forums, and have consistently demonstrated rational application of their academic qualifications and/or field experience. The groups that have been created so far are: - Maths Experts, - Chemistry Experts, - Biology Experts, - Physics Experts. The members of all of these groups combined appear on the forum leaders page under the collective heading of "Resident Experts". You will notice that experts have a user title that indicates which group they belong to (e.g. swansont's user title is "Physics Expert"), and a blue star beneath their name: To verify that members with blue stars are in fact resident experts, either go to their profile (the blue star will appear to the right of their name) or check the forum leaders page. Users hijacking the star image as an avatar will have their ability to use avatars removed. What do we get out of it? Experts basically mean the following: - While being an expert doesn't make people infallible, if they're involved in an intense debate the expert is more likely to be right, - The expert's interpretation of an [acr=Original Post]O/P[/acr] is likely to be the most relevant one, - Experts have some moderation abilities in forums within their area of expertise, meaning that they can bring discussions under control, - Experts can generally be trusted to provide good information and relevant citations. Who can be an Expert? Anyone with post-graduate qualifications, or equivalent experience, who we have observed making useful posts of consistent quality over the duration of their membership. As with moderator positions, please do not send us 329 messages asking to be a resident expert. Please bear in mind that most of the forum staff (moderators and administrators) are also qualified experts in at least one area. To avoid confusion and really ugly profiles, we are not currently adding staff to the various expert groups.

I think you'll find that's by no means unique to India. If the UK is anything to go by, it's highly prevalent in Western cultures too.

Unless she is really messed up, which I think is a given in such cases .

Sorry, I meant the "report this post" thingy. Early morning and et cetera.