Sayonara

Muah ha haa

lol So close!

lol I posted a picture of a hand sieve; of course it's a joke. Where would I get U235 from anyway?

Yeah, U235 goes straight through but U238 gets it's neutronies caught.

Reallllly fine mesh

I use a sieve. http://www.bigceramicstore.com/Supplies/sieves-scales/talisman_rotary_sieve.jpg

Some kind of open forum or public discussion software would be the ideal solution. Hey, maybe it could even go on the inter-network!

I'm trying to nail down a reason as to why you are using ephemeral terms of reference - your vague reply is not helping. The reason scientific discussion works at all is that everyone uses the same terms of reference as describers, from the current working models. That's why 'foreign' institutions like the media so frequently make a complete cock-up of descriptions for research or processes; because they don't understand that you can't just chuck about the latest buzz-word (like you can in advertising, as an example) and expect to get your message across with any accuracy. Anyway... I have a good idea about why you are separating out the "large" and "small" evolutionary effects, but I'd suggest it is a mistake to try to do this as they are largely interdependable. A problem we have here is that everything to do with evolution is easiest considered in hindsight and doesn't lend itself well to formulating accurate preditions about actual events (well, not without tightly controlled variables anyway. When you're talking about an entire planet it has long passed the point of impossibility.) See, we might very well disregard the adaptations of a population of 2000 humans living high up on the side of a mountain, in favour of considering the "larger" evolutionary forces at work on humanity as an entire species. But it wouldn't take much to make that 2000-strong population become the entire species, which (a) makes a mockery of the artificial ranking system, and (b) would most likely be caused by factors that are not possible to predict. I'll take advantage of your absence to go back over the thread and review your reasoning, because I forgot how all this started Later!

So you are suggesting we remove all students from the gene pool? OK.

I meant "Where are you getting this from?"

Then your logic eludes me, since the scenario you are describing is not entirely consistent with the effects of evolutionary theory. Which takes us back to posts #44, #45, #46. The long way round The root of this problem I think is the attempt to split evolutionary causes and group them under the banner of two different effects, those being the "General and Specific Evolution" categories you briefly outlined earlier. Where did that come from?

The problem with using PMs or e-mail for mentoring is that -- unless it goes through a time-consuming checking system -- the content being distributed is not open to peer review, and could be horribly wrong.

I'll assume you kept it in mind for humans as regards your "things staying the same" scenario, but did you take into account that other species will always be diverging too, which changes the pressures for everything in their ecology?

Migration is key to both adaptive and population radiation. That makes it key to survival for all species. I'm not saying it's more important than any other factors in particular; I just separated it out in the parenthesis above because I don't think that (as a function) it can really be grouped with the factors that make our species so unusual. I think you're completely disregarding the role of divergance, which is odd because you put the words 'adaptive radiation' in bold in an earlier post so you must realise the significance.

For a species like us, that kind of evolution is merely time-dependent (mainly because of all the factors that make us such a strange species, but also because of the fact that we can migrate more readily than most species.) I don't see though how you can objectify what the 'next level' is.

A quick search gave me this: http://architecture.about.com/cs/beginners/

lol, I've already got all of that except for amsn Is there a messenger analogue that supports M6's webcam protocols yet? I'm using Firefox rather than Moz because I prefer it's compliancy models and consistent use of the DOM. I'll have a look at the Archlinux site. I've heard good things about Gentoo (in fact TSA is run off a gentoo server), but mainly from people who like compiling... I'm not ready to half-build my operating system just yet

So what you're saying is "if evolution happens, it'll happen. If it doesn't, then it won't." ?

I'd leave HW dynamics to discussions on evolutionary genetics tbh. It's not that useful in predicting anything that involves ecology. Firstly you're still talking about evolution as a mechanism, which it's not. Let's take a freeze frame of the world as it is now, and assume it goes on the same for the next million years. That's time enough for thousands of plagues to force selection on humans, time enough for dozens of catastophic events like comet-strike, time enough for our intensive agriculture and animal husbandry to drive some of our staple foods extinct, time enough for Western civilisation to speciate along the rich/poor or intelligent/stupid axes, time enough for global population to speciate along the resource-hoggers/nomadic hunter-scavenger axis... I could go on. You can't rule out any form of selective pressure in the future even if you're setting the stage yourself; it's just not predictable. That's not how it works. Intraspecific competition forces ongoing selective pressure for individuals to become more efficient at (i) passing on genetic material and (ii) fixing biomass, in that order. Even in a population with stable growth and consumption rates, intraspecific ecology means that natural selection will still continue. It doesn't stop and start when 'something happens', it's always happening. Also bear in mind that selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change. Not really; sharks have been munching whatever passes in front of them for eons.

That's immaterial. Evolution is change to a species over time; its existence is not contingent on the cause of the changes.

Perhaps you're going about this the wrong way. If Phi is present in many systems that are part of something we say is "beautiful", then perhaps beauty is not as subjective as we thought.

It ought to be mandatory reading for creationists; then they might realise they have no idea what they've been arguing over.

That's nothing new as a process, it's just the information that is changing. People have been abusing English for centuries.

I didn't specify any direction of causality, I just said they were linked. What are you disagreeing with? I meant backwards with regards to the mechanism of selection; it's just I realised it was backwards after proof-reading it and was too lazy to do it again

HHGTTG is good (although as a comedy rather than as science fiction), but the other four volumes start off dire and just get steadily worse.