Ringer

There is so much wrong with this my head hurts.

Yeah natural, like potassium cyanide.

Not to mention an if an alien race regularly invades other planets there is virtually no way they wouldn't have some sort of plan for infectious diseases.

It is extremely justifiable and it is scientific practice. Nothing is correct without evidence. I can say pink elephants are running through my room. Why would you think it would be prudent/scientific/etc. to believe me until someone showed me to be incorrect based solely on the fact that I wrote it? I don't think you've had a lot of experience in this area. I have probably argued with hundreds of Creationists, I'm from the bible belt in the US so they're everywhere, and only once have I ever had any of them even say they may be wrong. It is just as bad with the people who post they're amazing discoveries in the speculations sub-forum and they're shown to be wrong, or not even wrong. It's virtually never that they actually accept any evidence or reasoning other than their own. I think you misunderstand their point. There are ways for people to explore their ideas, it is none of our jobs to help them. That being said it seems the majority of people on this forum use their free time to do exactly what you are complaining they do not do. They help people explore scientific questions and ideas. The problem is when people know nothing about the areas they are making "discoveries that will change the entire field". If there is an e-mail from an unknown source saying they are redefining an area of importance it is probably someone who is wasting time. No science is about evidence and predictions. We don't have truth, we have kinda-truth. We gain evidence and make predictions, the closer the predictions are to reality the better, but we will always have error. If I look at someone's idea and it starts with a false premise, incorrect data, logical fallacy, word salad, etc, etc, etc. I can make a pretty good assumption it is a crank idea without reading the rest. An example: I'm pretty sure Swansont made it clear it wasn't about not reading the idea at all, it was about accepting the idea. Which is why i didn't bother with the rest of your post. You started your argument with a straw-man. Since your premise begins with a logical fallacy I can be fairly comfortable in assuming the rest of it wouldn't be very compelling. _________________

Think if we didn't know anything about any other planets your logic could be used as follows: There are other planets All planets we know of have people on them other planets have people on them

It's TV universe so those don't apply. Though since Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a TV show he should be chastised for not having a galaxy far far away.

Some of the phrasings on the questions are odd. Are you sure you are writing them, or if they are not in English translating, correctly? Think about what a skull is supposed to do. It keeps the brain safe by being a solid barrier, solid barriers don't release pressure very well. You should be able to whittle the answers down to a couple by thinking about what the use of the thing in question is used for or its structure.

IIRC biochem you need some calc I and maybe calc II where I go. My advice is to go where you're interested. No matter what you do there will be day where you hate your decision, but at least if you're doing something interesting you can remember why you are there. I changed my major 3 times before I decided on what to study. The first couple majors were because I thought there would be more jobs in the field but I couldn't motivate myself to care about the classes. Now that I'm doing something I'm actually interested in I can get the motivation fairly easily, though sometimes I do wonder why I crush myself with so much work every semester .

Also note that many of the instances you hear of today of a person being ridiculed for a 'discovery' is not about the person or, at least necessarily, the discovery. It is usually about someone saying they have evidence to support an idea without ever publishing their methodology. Susan Greenfiel's spiel about technology damaging the youth comes to mind. Or when an idea is refuted many times and the originator of the idea still pushes it, especially if it is done through non-scientific channels. An example of this is the anti-vaccination movement. Besides that if a scientists can't handle criticism and don't want their ideas held up to sever scrutiny they probably shouldn't be in a scientific field anyway.

Apologies before hand on this wall of text. Source: http://www.talkorigi...speciation.html [edit] Also note that the page sourced hasn't been updated in a while. Meaning that there have been many more instances observed than this nice little list here.[/edit]

Finding a few examples of animal who commit suicide is only a quick wiki away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_suicide I don't think that Dawkins had much input on our design during our evolutionary history. What's the evidence to say we have broken away from our genes because if you can give some there are many inherited diseases that you could take care of. So I don't think you have bothered to read all the examples about how homosexuality isn't perverse nor is it against nature. So what you're saying is that it is genetically programmed, innate, for us to not be genetically programmed?

Before I start I will say that my explanation of his numbers could very well be mistaken because I can't find a explanation of his numbers and the paper cited is behind a paywall. But I think that it makes sense if my explanation is what he meant. It seems to me that his 1*10^-6M number was not used as an instantaneous measurement, though the wording makes it seem more probable he pulled it out of his ass, it may have used the rates organic molecules could be introduced, what the cited paper seems to be about, in a given amount of time. Or he could have mistakenly didn't write that it number is not the ocean as a whole. Prebiotic organic chemicals where more likely were held in areas close to shore. The some hypothesize that early organic molecules held in clay, or other things like crystals IIRC, combined to early amino acids. If he were referring to this or just an area were organic molecules would stay fairly static for a period of time allowing for reactions to take place, since organic molecules were fairly stable and easily made in a prebiotic atmosphere, his 1*10^-6M would make more sense to me. More likely is that he was just using that number as an example for how even at a fairly dilute concentration the probability of making amino acid chains is anything but impossible. IIRC you could use the factoral function for the combination of amino acids. So if I just use the 9 essential amino acids I get 9! or 3.6*10^5. Taking that with the number of molecules in his calculation, 1.1*10^42 I get 4.0*10^47 possible starting chains. My math for this is pretty rusty so I may have done it incorrectly but my numbers come out similar, though three orders of magnitude is pretty large. Then again I only used essential amino acids so the numbers could easily be increased. I also don't think I did the combination correctly since it says starting chains and factoral is probably not used for 1 to 1 combination. If my math is off feel free to correct it, though I doubt anyone would shy away from it if I didn't say feel free. tl;dr version: He probably just used that number as an example of how a dilute concentration of amino acids could produce peptide chains fairly easily in a large amount of time. The numbers may not have been factually accurate of the entirety of the ocean, but probably were in select areas.

If I were to do the same thing with different characters of the same shows I could equally say that FBI agents think that all lab workers are basically socially inept geeks and call them demeaning names like 'squints'. I could also say that all blondes are dumb and sleep around. See how that way of characterizing science doesn't work, if you do it with anything else on the show you just look ignorant. That's not to say when you do it to science it doesn't look ignorant. I've also always been annoyed that Bones calls Psychology a soft science. She's an anthropologist, a soft science.

Don't worry the vegan agenda would be in an unending loop: Person 1: No one will ever eat meat again because causes too much suffering. Person 2: We will need a lot of new farmland to feed everyone. Person 1: No problem, look at all those forests and plains areas. Person 2: Wait, don't other animals live there? Person 1: Why yes they do. Person 2: Wouldn't we be killing a large amount of animals and thus cause suffering? Person 1: But think of all the other animals we would save! Person 2: But think of all the animals we would kill! And repeat.

I would like to think that if a species was that advanced they would be more interested in observation of an unknown species due to being so scientifically advanced and science minded. But then there is the non-hopeful side of me that agrees they would just use as a comedy show. We should make a large sign on a satellite that reads, "I swear we aren't all dumb!".

No, I was referring to the fact that the measurement didn't even take into account the most abundant element in Earth's atmosphere. Given that those elements weren't taken into account the estimate of the amount of atoms are 'going to be off by a bit'. I also misspoke, I meant to say Earth's solid mass, not the crust alone. Since the link given as a source from your link doesn't work so I assumed that it only gave solid mass elements since it didn't use the major atmospheric elements. I figured it would be a fair assumption, since it said '(what about earth's atmosphere?)', that they didn't include those. I don't know why a I wasn't arguing for or against the paper seeing as I haven't read it.

And yet you support ID. [edit] Also, the number is potential starting chains, not potential chains. Meaning the amount of available options. It would equal out to 10^18 mol amino acids. It also seems your link only mentions the elemental makeup of the Earths crust and only uses the elements that are most abundant. If it doesn't use any of the trace elements or the atmospheric elements when considering pre-biotic Earth the number is going to be off by a bit. [/edit]

People with photosensitivity can have various negative reactions to direct light so they live fairly well without regular exposure to light.

So long as you get the Vitamins necessary for survival prolonged periods without light shouldn't cause much of a problem. Unless, of course, you are scared of the dark. If that were the case you would be screwed.

Well the polygraph in this case is pretty much useless. The types of things polygraphs look for in lies are stress signals, the problem is that someone questioning you about if you tried to murder your two children you are probably going to stress out. The baseline questions they ask wont give a true reading of if someone is telling the truth in that situation. The possibility of having no memory is possible. She may have had an episode where she underwent a fugue state, but who knows.

Me saying I was crazy was me saying why I edited my post. It was because I wrote the same thing at the beginning and end of my post and I removed the redundancy.

I don't think the curriculum is exactly hidden. This site is called science forums, we discuss science. [edit] Because I'm crazy [/edit]

I didn't as if you could copy and paste an article, this article to be exact, I asked if you knew why we were calling your arguments fallacious. [edit] Apologies, I accused you of plagiarizing the article, I didn't see that the link was in the middle. [/edit]

So what do you think the odds are of a distinguishable FOXP2 gene being in an alien, even an extraordinarily divergent one?

AFAIK the symptoms would be the same malnutrition in general.