Cap'n Refsmmat

What I denied was that a human might, say, have a goat child. Evolution is all about gradual change over time, and all your comments about "making goats from humans" are totally invalid because of that. Gradual change is easy -- gradual changes can happen all the time. Giant leaps are indeed nearly impossible.

What? What's a "human gene"? Genes are just different sequences of DNA. One can mutate into another easily enough. An ape can have a mutation that produces a trait similar to a trait humans have. Because a) we haven't waited a few million years to see and b) there's no reason for natural selection to make descendants with sheep-like characteristics to survive. I ask you again to answer my questions and explain these:

No, the fit are immortal. No, seriously. It's all about how many offspring they have. Not necessarily. Perhaps "fit" means "has a mutation that makes it harder to spot by predators" or "has immune system better suited to defending against malaria". And clearly you haven't gotten anything out of it, because you can't even get the basics right. If you read up on the basics of evolution you might be better off.

Substantiate that claim. Why is natural selection a myth? Why should unfit animals not gradually die out? And when did I state otherwise? You don't seem to even have a basic knowledge of evolution. Go read about it. Here, read this.

And there's also something called genetic duplication, where duplicate genetic material is accidentally introduced into chromosomes and then mutates to serve different functions than the original material. In no point in the theory of evolution do animals not capable of breeding together have to mate. It's gradual change, mate. This is what's known as an argument from incredulity -- "it sounds ridiculous, so it's wrong". It's a logical fallacy. My version says nothing of a sort. My version says species gradually change. If you split up a species into two independent groups, they'll end up changing in different ways (gradually) and appearing different.

Do you not understand what speciation by natural selection and reproductive isolation is? Perhaps you should read up on evolution before getting into arguments about it. Evolution was based on an empirical argument that goes something like this. Traits can be inherited through genes. Genes can mutate, creating new phenotypes. Different phenotypes can give an organism either an advantage or disadvantage for survival. Those organisms with advantageous phenotypes survive to have more offspring than those with disadvantageous phenotypes. They pass their advantageous traits on through genes. Therefore, better-adapted organisms survive and random mutations that make an organism better-suited for survival stay, while those that don't are selected against and disappear from the population. Thus, a population can change over time. Can you point to any one step in that argument that is flawed? At no point does one species reproduce another animal. It simply reproduces a very slightly different version of itself, much the same way your parents produced you instead of a clone of themselves.

So you dispute the concept that DNA can, indeed, change over time. You know, mutations and duplication and that sort of stuff. That makes perfect sense. I'm sure you can explain how bacteria rapidly become resistant to antibiotics or suddenly develop the ability to digest new materials with your model. Or how SARS and HIV spontaneously appeared, after evolving from previous viruses. Or why people are worried about H5N1 bird flu suddenly developing the ability to spread among humans easily. Or dozens of other phenomena that have been observed and are explainable through the theory of evolution. Please do explain those phenomena. I'd be interested to hear your version of events.

Huh? You seem to have a misguided understanding of speciation. Let's suppose I find a group of apes living in Africa and steal half of them and dump them in Australia. Then I wait a good, say, ten million years, and come back and compare the apes. They'll be different. Why? Because tiny changes have accumulated over time. Could I look back through all the ancestor apes and say "this is where it became a new kind of ape"? No. Can I look back through human history and pick the one human where "this one's parents were not human"? No. The change between parent and child is almost always tiny. Infinitesimally small changes add up. Ask anyone who's done integral calculus.

Perhaps you'd care to elaborate? Apes and monkeys don't breed elephants, lions, tigers, bears, or humans as descendants, even under evolution. There is no lizard that spontaneously gave birth to a mammal. It's an incredibly gradual process, making the changes almost utterly unnoticeable unless you scale back and look over millions of years. Really. You look foolish when you don't even understand what the scientists are saying.

You'll want to check the Remember Me box. Otherwise vBulletin does weird things with your login.

It's ten days of membership and 30 posts. You'll have to wait a few days.

You can throw potassium chlorate into the mixture. It reacts with the sugar as well, making a flaming lump of carbon...

And it gyroscopically stabilizes the bullet, keeping it from tumbling. Mr. Spock would be ajb, I think. He's around here somewhere.

If you have problems that you need to discuss with staff, you can send a PM to me or one of the other moderators.

Actually, there is. vB 3.7 offers thread "prefixes", which can be chosen from an admin-defined list and show up in front of the thread title. So you'd have a thread that says "[Homework] combinatorics problem" or something.

Define main page. This page or the forum index? We're talking about adjusting the forum index, which should have a login form on the upper right. A login form on the home page would be a good idea, though.

There's already a login form to the upper right. Or did you mean something else? As for blog updates, I'm not sure how we'd do that. Just a list of latest blog posts like on the main page?

Electron motion usually refers to things like electricity. Plasmas, which I think YT was referring to, are so hot as to have some of their electrons just fly off...

Okay, so in summary: religion was brought up, people were offended, arguments started, fun happened, people were put on ignore lists. Sounds to me like the original problem has been solved. Unless there are any other important issues I've missed, let's just let this thread die.

Not electrons. Heat is the motion of the entire atom (to simplify a bit). So the atoms are vibrating, not the electrons.

If you'd like to know what titles (past "Lepton" and such) you can get, there's a handy list here.

Why should we make disorders of the brain any different from disorders of, say, the kidneys?

Portability is fun. Instead of having everyone gather around in the computer room you can just take the computer with to them.

Yeah, we decided to adjust the policy. Guests and newly registered viewers can view the Politics forums but not post in them until they accumulate 10 days of membership or 30 posts.

Interesting. I wonder if there's a pattern to these...