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I don't think you do understand my point. The populations differed at the instant the river cut them off, and that difference had nothing to do with fitness. So let's try something different. Suppose we wound the clock back by 600 million years (i.e., prior to the Cambrian explosion) and then let time go forward again. After letting that world run for 600 million years, would we see the same world that we do now? Stephen Gould, for one, didn't think so.

Hypothetical example: Suppose a population is spread over a relatively wide range, wide enough that some variations exist over the geographic area spanned by the population. There is nothing special in the environment that explains those variations. All that is needed to explain those variations is genetic drift. Now imagine that something happens that splits the population in half. A rising mountain range, an earthquake that diverts a wide river right through the middle of the population. Those two now-split populations will go there own way. The starting point of this deviation isn't "fitness"; it is just randomness. Darwin was a 19th century scientist. Clockwork universe. Attributing all to "fitness" ignores that our universe is not a clockwork universe. Chaos appears even in a deterministic systems. Add in quantum randomness in DNA copying, random mutations caused by cosmic rays, etc., and "fitness" becomes a just tendency rather than the sole driver in evolution.

In a sense, who cares what Darwin said? Darwin was the start, not the pinnacle, of modern biology. As a starter, his 19th century theory had no underlying mechanism. Using Darwin as a basis is kind of like analyzing atoms using the Rutherford model. We've progressed beyond that in the last hundred in physics; biology has had even more time to progress beyond Darwin's ideas. Biology has undergone at least two, maybe three major revolutions since Darwin's time, first with the modern synthesis in the 1930s and then again with molecular biology in the 1950s, maybe again in the 1970s when modern geology and biology started getting rid of gradualism as the sole descriptor for change.

Well it ain't called the third rail of politics for nothing. Europe is just a little ahead of the US here. Too many people are living well past retirement age nowadays. Sans passing a law to make it illegal to have an 80th birthday, the only options to sustain this Ponzi scheme are to defer payments, decrease payments, or increase taxes. We will soon be seeing the same phenomenon in the US. The numbers don't add up; the status quo is unsustainable over the long haul. Raising the retirement age is an inevitability, and ever more politicians are seeing that they will soon have to deal with this inevitability. I don't have the time to find concrete references, but I have heard several politicians on Sunday AM talk shows start to take meagre steps toward that third rail. They aren't stepping on it yet, but they soon will be.

It's not even that. Fittest is whatever maximizes the number of offspring that live to a breeding age and in turn have more offspring. Evolution is stupid, stupid, stupid. The fitness metric is local in time and in place. Evolution has no foresight, no global vision. The selection process can be particularly stupid when mate selection is the driver. Sex-driven evolution can result in some bizarre characteristics that otherwise would almost certainly have to be deemed "unfit". Evolution is a slow and inefficient process with zero intelligence. Fortunately (for us), evolution has had about 4 billion years in which to conduct its slow and inefficient experiments.

I can. What can possibly be more FUDdish than "He's going to start World War III and kill everyone?" That ploy worked so well against Goldwater that it has been the recurring campaign meme amongst Democrats since then. It was used against Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush (indirectly; Quayle was the target), GW Bush, and McCain (indirectly again, "What if he dies in office? Palin will start the Armageddon"). Both parties use fear, and particularly so when the other party's approval ratings are low. Heck, it's a lot easier to cast illogical aspersions on the other side than to do something bold like coming up with a plan. Even in the rare cases where some party does have a plan, it often still does use fear as a backup plan.

Not quite the same. Memory allocation, virtual memory, and disk I/O are typically verboten or limited to startup operations only. The OS is often rather minimal. Access to OS functionality is typically walled off. Programming is often done using a cross compiler.

The implication of these and other posts is that left-leaning organizations are somehow less detrimental compared with right-leaning hardball players. I thought the first two words spoke by themselves. Obviously not. The 1964 Daisy Ad was about as bad as fear-mongering can get. Essentially, "A vote for Goldwater is a vote for World War III." The Democrats have reused this ploy many times. The left is very good at scaring itself. Proclamations from this, that, or the other wacked celeb proclaiming that they will have to leave the country if Reagan/Buchanan/Bush/McCain wins the election have become very old hat. Prediction: That hat will be passed around again in 2012. Regarding the final word, the Truthers are in my mind the left-wing equivalent of the Obama is a Muslim / Obama is a Communist crowd. Both the Truthers and Obama is a ... crowd are preying on unfounded and irrational fear.

Two words: Daisy Ad. One more: Truthers.

As a starter, wikipedia is just an encyclopedia. Use of an encyclopedia as a reference is OK in elementary school reports, maybe in junior high reports. By high school one should be able to dig a tad bit deeper than an encyclopedia. Beyond high school, encyclopedias should never be used as a reference. Where I see wikipedia failing is on subjects of a controversial or advanced nature. The underlying model is flawed IMHO. It results in far too many incoherent articles and occasionally results in mistakes, errors, and even fallacious content.

What a piece of random nonsense. The world is full of crackpots and conspiracy theorists. You have found the home for many of them. The section on plagiarism levies three charges. The first is the ridiculous De Pretto charge. De Pretto happened to get the right answer by starting out with erroneous assumptions and then making a number of math errors on top of those assumptions. His derivation has nothing in common with Einstein's. The charge is ludicrous. Aside: Ask any physicist whether (1) E=mc2 is the most important equation in physics and (2) if it is Einstein's most important contribution to physics and the answer will be a resounding "No!" to both questions. The second and third charges are with regard to the relativity priority dispute. Looking at special relativity first, there were indeed several other people working on this problem at the start of the 20th century. For example, the Lorentz transformation is named after Hendrik Lorentz, not Albert Einstein. The other people working on the problem at that time were looking to whitewash away the non-results of the Michelson–Morley experiment. The Lorentz ether theory made time dilation and length contraction axiomatic and assumed a non-detectable, motionless aether as the medium by which light moved. Making time dilation and length contraction axiomatic makes for an incredibly ugly physical theory. The assumption of an undetectable aether makes things even worse. Nobody but Einstein thought along Einstein's line of reasoning. His axioms are simple. While Lorentz ether theory applies only to electromagnetic phenomena, special relativity applies to everything. Regarding general relativity: Einstein had been working on the concept for eight years before Hilbert may have given Einstein the necessary last step to complete the theorem. Regardless of whether Hilbert did indeed fill in that last piece of the puzzle, David Hilbert himself regarded general relativity as Einstein's work.

Note well: The poll that iNow cited queried scientists about their belief in god. Similarly, the article that I cited queried scientists about whether they were religious. Neither polled scientists about creationism, particularly young Earth creationism. There are plenty of biologists who reconcile their understanding of evolution with their religious beliefs. The same goes for religious geologists and their understanding of the Earth, religious cosmologists and their understanding of the origin of the universe, religious archeologists and their understanding of the ascent of man, and so on. Just because a scientist is religious does not mean they ascribe to the nonsense of young Earth creationism.

Citation needed. Here's one study that shows just the opposite: Ecklund, Elaine Howard, and Christopher P. Scheitle, “Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics,” Social Problems, 54(2): 289-307, 2007. Amongst the natural sciences, physicists are second only to biologists when it comes to disbelief or doubt about the existence of a god. It's chemists and engineers who tend to be the woo-woos.

Nobody would work once they reached the 100% marginal rate. No. Thus making everyone dirt poor. Your redistribution might work for a few months. That money would quickly be spent and then there would be no more. No more goods, no more internet to play on, no more food. No jobs.

You. Must. Be. Kidding. Given the choice of making $40,000 per year for sitting around and doing nothing versus $42,000 per year for working 60-80 hours a week or more (the typical work week of those do-nothing CEOs you so hate), what would most people choose? Given the choice of making $40,000 per year for sitting around and doing nothing versus $42,000 per year for a menial job such as collecting the garbage of those $40,000 per year loungers or a working middle class job such as repairing the plumbing of those $40,000 per year loungers, what would most people choose? The answer is simple of course: Almost everyone would choose to be a $40,000 per year lounger. Which of course would last all of a few minutes when there is no money coming back to the government to pay all those $40,000 per year loungers.

Moderation: Thread moved to Pseudoscience. You are starting off on a very bad footing, Accuser. Van Flandern, while rather well educated, was nonetheless a crackpot. His notions regarding gravitation were wrong from the start, he was proven wrong multiple times, yet he kept reiterating the same nonsense. In philosophy, mathematics, or science, when you start with a false premise such this very first one, everything conclusion that depends on that false premise is suspect.

A simple model: The amount of salt added by rivers is roughly constant; while erosion depletes the surface soil and rock of salt it also exposes new soil and rock to erosion. Vulcanism, uplift, earthquakes, etc. will also expose new soil and rock to rain and draining water. The amount of water removed from the oceans (and eventually recycled as new land) by plate tectonics is also roughly constant. This means the amount of salt removed from the oceans by plate tectonics is roughly proportional to the salinity of the ocean water. In math, [math]\frac{ds}{dt} = r - p[/math]. Here s is the salt content of the oceans, r is the rate at which rivers bring new salts into the oceans, and p is the rate at which plate tectonics removes salts from the oceans. That the tectonic removal rate is proportional to salinity suggest replacing p with ks, where k is the constant of proportionality for this removal process. Setting the rate to zero yields the equilibrium salt quantity, [math]s=r/k[/math].

That gravitational acceleration on the surface of the Earth is [math]g=0.980665\,\text{m}/{\text{s}^2[/math], is not a universal law of physics. Heck, it isn't even universally true on the Earth. Acceleration due to gravity is 9.779 m/s2 in Mexico City but 9.819 m/s2 in Oslo.

Right back at ya: The housing crisis did not affect Texas all that much. The impact of the crisis varied by quite a bit across the country. Florida, California, the east coast and parts of the industrial midwest were very hard hit. Other parts of the country much less so. Other parts, hardly at all. Where the crisis hit hardest was exactly where real estate prices had gone through the roof. Not just through the roof in some places, but well into the stratosphere. Puny little houses badly in need of repair went for 500K in California and some parts of the east coast. Those were unsustainable and very unrealistic prices. In Texas, puny little houses badly in need of repair went for 80K before the housing crisis hit, and that is still what such houses are going for now that things have settled down a bit.

That is not how the oceans formed. The first ocean formed somewhere between 400 to 800 million years after the Earth formed. Those first 400 to 800 million years represent a time when the Earth's surface was extremely hot. The oceans could not form until the surface had cooled to below the boiling point. The salt that is currently dissolved in the oceans almost certainly was not the result of solution of salt deposits. We see salt deposits in the Earth now because ancient seas that already contained salt dried up and were subsequently buried. We do not see salt deposits on the Moon. We instead see rocks that contain minerals such plagioclase. Sodium chloride, salt, dissolves readily in water. Those sodium bearing minerals in rocks do not. That would suggest that the initial oceans would have been fresh rather than salty. As to why the oceans have had a fairly uniform salinity for the last billion or two years: Because salts are continuously being transported into the oceans by river water, that means that some other process must exist by which salts leave the oceans. That other process is plate tectonics. Those two processes have reached an equilibrium. Not knowing about plate tectonics, scientists of time past used the fact that rivers are constantly bringing salts into the oceans as a way of estimating the age of the Earth. Assuming that salt never does leave the oceans, they came up with an answer of about 60 million years. That means the tectonic processes that withdraw salts from the ocean operate on a similar time scale. That suggests that it probably took no more than 100 million years for the first oceans to become about as salty as they are today.

It's not made of cheese, either.

Just curious, is that a "La la la, I can't hear you" I don't believe it, a "that's how god created things" I don't believe it, or just a "I don't see it" I don't believe it? Not just his opinion, mark you. From what I could tell with some searching is that the jury is still out on this. That the first oceans were fresh stands to reason given that rainfall is nearly pure water and river outflow has but a rather salinity. That the first oceans were saltier than today's oceans also stands to reason. If the oceans were dried out the resulting salt was spread evenly over the Earth the result would be a 500 foot thick layer of salt. The stuff of the early Earth probably saltier than it is today after 4 billion years of leaching. This would have made paleorivers a lot saltier than the rivers of today. Combine that with the high temperatures of the Hadeon (more evaporation) and a smaller ocean means the first oceans might well have been a lot saltier than those of today. You will find people, and people who study this stuff, espousing both views on the 'net. If I may hazard a guess, the salinity of the first oceans lay somewhere between 0 and 40% (saturation level at 100 C). From what I can see, anything else is pretty much speculation. Not a fact. That fact was once used as the basis for estimating the age of the Earth. The result: 62 million years. Something is awry here, and what is awry is the assumption that there isn't anywhere else for the salt to go. As mentioned earlier, plate tectonics gives an outlet for that salty water. With ocean water salinity about 200 times that of inflowing river water, the outflow rate due to subduction can be quite a bit less than the inflow rate and still maintain a more or less constant salinity.

The title of bascule's thread is vulgar and derogatory. The core of what bascule said was vulgar and derogatory. He is not taking it down a notch. I recommend this thread by closed.

It depends on how much libration the planet undergoes, and that in turn depends largely on the eccentricity of the orbit. Too much of that and those supposedly habitable zones are going to swing from too hot to too cold. We don't yet know. Claiming a 100% chance of the chance of life on that planet is 100% out of line (right now). Just a tad more research is needed. That said, this is a very good start in our hunt for another planet that can bear life.

Correct. "Two statisticians went duck hunting. A mallard flew by. The first statistician shot, missing 10 feet to the right. The second shot, missing 10 feet to the left. They gave each other a high five: 'Direct hit!'"