Sayonara

The question "how" means doing some hard work and actual study. "Why" on the other hand is a big invitation to people who like to make things up.

AIDS doesn't spread. HIV spreads, as all good viruses do. This is in no way useful as a comparison to our problem, unless you can show that genetic information spreads virally between sexual partners. I'm not sure what characteristics you imagine are being passed on via those 4.6%, but I don't think you're considering the full implications of even Mendelian genetics. 5% is nothing EVEN over 40 generations, if the part of the population having their births screened does not ever rise above 5%. In fact if there is interbreeding it will render the screening program useless wherever US citizens have children in other countries. And of course, don't forget that someone from the US who was born as a consequence of the breeding programme can go to another country and breed there, but they won't leach the genes responsible for carriage of these syndromes out of whoever they mate with. The reason it's difficult to even vaguely predict human evolution is because we mess with it socially AND scientifically at the same time - the two can't be separated out - and it's not possible to predict social change within or between cultures for the next 1000 years.

Rocket powered cars you say?

Hurrah! \o/ Someone who "gets it"! And there was much rejoicing, tra la la la laaaa :banana:

Even if that were applied rigorously to everyone in the US through some sort of NSA Birthing Programme, it would not change humanity at an evolutionary level. USA citizens make up 4.6% of the global population.

I'll try running Search & Destroy against it.

It's not a unit of measurement, it's a scale of measurement. The units are pico~ nano~ & milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, weeks, years, centuries, and millenia. Calling time a unit is the same as calling distance or volume a unit.

When I say "abortion" in that context, I mean any termination prior to birth. I'm referring to the fact of the conception being aborted, rather than the process itself. Anyhoo, my intention was to get you to think about what you'd said. Although in some cases Down's Syndrome sufferers have successfully produced offspring, most do not. Nor do most cystic fibrosis sufferers. The carriers do most of the reproduction. Manipulating the frequency of such conditions within the population does not lead to significant selective pressures, hence the conditions not 'dying out'. Using our technology to screen for carriers through the means you originally suggested would exert significant selective pressure, but would also require that intervention occurred in a very high percentage of conceptions.

Stephen Hawking has movies?

If it does, they did not install on my machine. Which "plug-ins" did you download?

Don't forget cameras, photographic paper, televisions and video tape.

The scientific method is all there is to science. That's it. It's not "a" scientific method, there aren't alternative methods that give as reliable results - there is just the one approach that works. If homeopathy cannot demonstrate results that support your hypothesis when tested using the scientific method (by anyone, I might add), then it's bunkum. End of story. There is no evil alliance of like-minded drone scientists who set out to disprove anything they can, there is no single-bodied "science" establishment that wants to keep out the riff-raff, and there are no extenuating circumstances that justify disregarding logic for one problem and not others. Most importantly - there is no problem so strange or unusual it cannot be broken down into smaller questions that are more easily investigated.

We've been through this before. Anybody can test anything scientifically. "Science" is just a method.

The history drop-downs are on the right of the back button and the right end of the address bar.

It pretty much is impossible. The biology is not rocket science (truism not intended). A fungal spore would be more likely to survive the trip (not to mention the local conditions) but I somehow doubt it would thrive in the Martian environment.

If we can easily screen for Down's Syndrome and Cystic Fibrosis while it is still possible to prevent a birth through abortion etc, why do those medical conditions still exist? I somehow doubt that it is solely due to those mothers who - as is their right - refuse to abort. I get what you're saying about evolution through a campaign of active interference by us, but this will only cause evolutionary responses if the changes made impose selective pressure significantly enough to cause speciation. What I was trying to illustrate with the hand example is that this is easier said than done for a species like us.

I am not kidding. Seriously - what difference does it make?

Why would it fall through the ground? Wouldn't the ground fall through it?

It's annoying but when I'm at work I can't use IRC, and when I'm at home I usually go AFK anyway because I'm so busy

Probably.

Oh. My. God. This browser is like all the best bits of IE6 and Opera 7. With a face-lift. \o/

Not going to happen.

Does it matter?

Drug legalization decreases reported use.

I would have said "twenty words or less" to avoid the possibility of getting an enormous block of text.