SkepticLance

I have a problem with water too. It is unclean! Just think what fishes do in water.... No problem, though. All that is needed is to clean the water up by adding a suitable disinfectant. I find that scotch whiskey does an excellent job!

This thread is showing the danger signs of drifting off into politics. I would like to go back to the idea of the ape throwing arm. I suggest that this is just a subset of the basic principle I stated earlier - that the use of technology drove evolution, by selecting for those best able to use that technology. How this applies to throwing is clear. Whether throwing a spear (sharp length of wood) or a rock, it is a form of technology. Adapting to this technology by selecting those best able to achieve it is a clear example of the earlier principle.

Sexual selection vs natural selection We could get bogged down here in semantics. I could see valid arguments for separating the two, and other valid arguments for combining the two. Why don't we simply accept the scientific convention, and just regard them as two kinds, in spite of the valid arguments to the contrary?

To swansont and farsight Quantum teleportantion is NOT about simply transmitting information. I can do that with mirrors and morse code. Teleportation involves dematerialising something and rematerialising it at another point. It can be done. It has been done. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/08/0818_040818_teleportation.html Sure, at this stage, it is simply photons or an atom. However, the theory admits the probability of using exactly the same process to teleport larger objects. This is exceedingly difficult, and we are unlikely to be able to teleport anything larger than a virus for at least 100 years. But there is no theoretical reason why objects larger than photons or atoms cannot be teleported.

To alane I agree with your point, but for a different reason. As far as the human body is concerned, it does not matter a damn whether the niacin molecule it gets is from a plant or synthesized from elephant turds. The molecule will be identical. However, it is still better to get nutrients from a good balanced diet, instead of from pills, for the simple reason that there is a hell of a lot more essential material and a wider variety of such in good food than in a pill. If you eat fruit or vege, you get vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, vital fatty acids, dietary fibre, calories, protein, and possibly vital factor X which is still undiscovered, but stops you getting the dreaded lurgy. Add a little meat and you get zinc, iron, calcium, vitamin B12, and all 20 essential amino acids. Vitamin pills, mostly, are just a way of lining the pockets of the people who make them, and do you zero good, and may even cause harm.

To farsight Believe it or not, teleportation is not only possible, but has been achieved. It is a consequence of the quantum physics property of entanglement. So far, the only teleportation that has occurred has been a photon or two, or an atom or two. However, with advancing technology, there is no reason in theory why larger objects cannot be teleported. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2049048.stm The Earth's movement through space is not a perpetual motion machine. It continues because no energy is being removed from its movement. A machine, by definition, does work. This means that energy is extracted. If the Earth's movement was used as a machine (meaning that energy is removed), the movement would slow down, and eventually the Earth would spiral into the sun.

Reaper As far as I am concerned, you are not welcome. I enjoy debating with swansont and bascule, who are good with posting scientific data. You have a history of arguing against things I never said, and a habit of covering up your mistakes with ad hom attacks and plain emotional appeals. I do not want to get into a fight based on emotionalism.

To foodchain You are looking well into the future with some of the possibilities you just discussed. I am not happy trying to predict that far ahead. The whole of society will have changed, including many of our values, and the way we see the world. Perhaps the things you discuss will happen. Perhaps they won't. I see that as a problem for our descendents to sort out. We should be looking instead at the things that will happen in the nearer future, since that is our particular responsibility. I do not see it as our role to mould the future for generations to come. We can only set up the opportunities and allow posterity to choose which to utilise. Otherwise it is a bit like parents trying to control every facet of their childrens' lives, which we know is wrong.

I finished my degree 35 years ago. I was always disappointed with my marks, getting Bs and B+ marks, and never getting an A. Since I knew I was smarter than the guys who got As, I was puzzled. I didn't work it out till a couple years ago, when I went back to university to do more papers, and got A+s. It was simple - as a junior I had a wandering mind (girls, girls, girls) and had a problem concentrating. My lecture notes were incomplete. Even though I knew my stuff at exam time, since I never gained all the data in lectures due to lack of concentration, I did not have it to regurgitate at exam time. Back at university this time, I had the maturity to concentrate in lectures. The rest followed. Had I known this as a junior, I would have borrowed other people's lecture notes to fill mine out, and got those As.

To Mr Skeptic I was not insulted by the red giant prediction, but by the snide 'pull numbers from my ass' comment. And believe it or not, but long term trends do hint at the red giant outcome, since the sun is increasing its thermal output by a miniscule amount each decade, as shown by satellite studies. Of course, the time frame is too long for this to be accurate as a predictor, and astronomers fall back on analogy with other suns. Mr Skeptic said "But long term trends are unlikely to be much better, especially when the conditions are changing so rapidly." If you re-read my post, you will see that I beat you to the punch and already said this. Nor did I suggest that long term trends work every time. However, history shows that they work more often than models.

To vexer If population A does not breed with population B, and enough time passes, we end up with 2 separate species. Do not forget the time factor - of the order of hundreds or thousands of generations.

The best way to mimic gravity on the space station is to tether it to another space station - or object of equivalent mass. Then you move both masses so that they both move in a circle about a point approx halfway down the tether. Centrifugal 'force' gives the illusion of pulling outwards, which permits simulation of gravity.

To Mr Skeptic That is a frivolous and stupid, and insulting comment. My predictions, which I admit may well be wrong, were not 'pulled out of my ass'. They were projections based on the past 35 years of climate change. I have followed the teaching of the late, great Dr. Julian Simon. He was an economist, and a believer in progress. He used the tactic of projecting from existing long term trends, and proved himself to be more accurate than those who used models, on several different occasions. He won US$10,000 on a bet with the well known catastrophist Dr. Paul Ehrlich by using long term trends in mineral availability, where Ehrlich allowed himself to be convinced by alarmist rhetoric. While there is absolutely no certainty in predictions, no matter which tactic you use, my approach of projecting long term trends has a good track record.

To halogirl Controlling gender is not really genetic engineering. There are lots of ways of controlling gender, from selecting sperm to killing babies (common in China). However, it does not involve inserting or removing specific genes from the genome, and thus does not fit the thread topic.

I like what the mythbusters are doing. In my very humble opinion, the core of science is scepticism leading to the requirement to test everything. Human knowledge was based largely on very muddy thinking until the 17th Century, when luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon taught the need to obtain empirical evidence. That is, test everything by experiment or novel observation. The mythbusters are showing this process in being sceptical of widely held beliefs and then testing those beliefs with experiment. You might be scathing about the quality of their experiments, but they are dealing with the general public and are doing what every good educator does. Start with the basics.

Bascule said : "Well that's an entirely different opinion than you expressed before, not that it's unexpected as you tend to voice baseless FUD whenever it suits your antiscientific purposes..." Careful Bascule. That is verging on an ad hom attack. You misunderstood my earlier statement. I am sorry that happened, and perhaps I am partly to fault for not making my earlier comments clearer, but I have been consistent in my statements, and you should appreciate that. Computer models are NOT accurate and reliable. As I have stated repeatedly, there are just too many unknowns in climatology for it to be otherwise. Arctic warming was substantially underestimated because the modellers were not aware of a warm oceanic current. That is just one example. Bascule also said : "If you are a "skeptic" as your handle claims, what is the basis of your doubt regarding historical reconstructions?" I assume you are referring to the set of graphs you posted earlier on another thread. Most of them, the reconstruction was not too bad - not quite right, but getting there. However, there were several reconstructions that were well off the mark. You may choose to use selective vision and see only the best reconstructions, while ignoring the worst, which is a very human quality. I see it differently. We also need to look at the myriad interpretations of climatologists based on these models. They range from James Hansen's five metre sea level rise within 100 years, down to others who predict a 20 cm rise. Ditto for temperature predictions etc. The only thing we know for sure is that the world is warming, and sea level rising, albeit at a rate unlikely to cause too much hassle for the next few decades, unless something drastic happens. Lots of people predict 'tipping points' and disasters. But I cannot be too impressed bearing in mind the variations in predictions by difference climate scientists.

Bascule Those were not the words I used. In reconstructions, they were moderately close in some scenarios and substantially different in others. The accuracy left much to be desired overall.

To dichotomy Evolution to a simpler form to save energy is a common strategy. It is especially common among parasites. Because they live in a place surrounded by food, they do not need lots of the paraphenalia of life for those who are non parasites, and they lose the extra over time. There is a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium which has lost most of its genome since it is parasitic. Viruses may be bacteria-like organisms that have lost most of their genes. Tapeworms are simplified. Even humans have evolved to lose complexity in one way - our alimentary canal is the smallest for its size of any primate - probably a response to the lesser digestive demands of eating cooked food.

To coreview I agree with you. You may notice that I started a thread a little while back about the validity or otherwise of global climate models. I argue that the models were not accurate or reliable. However, I think that we should avoid the extreme views on climate change. It is real. It is happening. It is mainly due to human action. However, how harmful is it? Certainly not as stated by such luminaries as James Lovelock (It is already too late. We are doooomed!) or James Hansen (all coastal cities will be flooded). I think there will be harm and benefits in a strange kind of mix. Some places will experience a surge in plant growth with more warmth and water, and record crops. Other places will experience drought. It is appropriate that we try to manage carbon emissions, but not at enormous cost.

To Pioneer As I said before - your theory, whatever its merits, is actually not needed. There is no reason to think that humans before and after the inception of agriculture were different in any significant way genetically. A much simpler concept is that of slow social evolution. Since all societies evolve socially, this is not terribly radical. Our hunter/gatherer forebears start learning a few basic techniques of agriculture, such as replanting what they had just eaten. No tending, watering etc at this point. Just sticking a few seeds or a few cuttings in the ground to make sure that there will be more edible plants in the future. Imagine they are harvesting something like a cassava plant. This grows very easily from cuttings. So our hypothetical hunter/gatherer finds a cassava and pulls it out by the roots, and pulls off the edible tubers. He/she then idly plays with the stalk, and ends up by sticking it into the ground. On return a few weeks later, sees that the stalk has sprouted and there are new tubers to eat. Word spreads, and they adopt the practise of always sticking the stalk back in the ground. Very simple, but a practise that leads to an enormous increase in food supply. They do it more, and slowly learn how to do it better. If you break a single cassava stalk into a number of pieces, each piece stuck in the ground will grow into a new plant, with edible tubers. They learn to tend the plants, removing weeds. More food leads to higher population. That requires more agriculture and the positive feed-back leads to a change to a more intensive agriculture based society, and less of the hunter/gatherer activity. No change to the people genetically - but a slow change in society, till they are very populous and forced to stay in one place and till the soil.

Lucaspa I was talking potatoes. Lets not get mixed up between potatoes and bananas. As for bananas, there are large numbers of varieties there also - just one mutant that is seedless - the Cavendish variety. And even that is under threat from black Sigatoka disease. Sadly, because we cannot cross breed, lacking seeds, we are limited to GM as a means of solving this disease and saving the world banana crops. Otherwise, the only alternative is to drench the trees in fungicide. A resistant GM variety is under test in Uganda.

To lucaspa Re woman with chimp. Of course it may be wrong. Anything we read in books may be wrong. However, with human/chimp interactions going back several hundred years (for westerners) anyone who believes that inter-species sex has not happened, and many times, is very naive. With sex, basically there is always someone who will do it. I could tell some very lurid and fully documented cases of weird sex. Sometimes the utterly strange people involved will push the boundaries so far, it ends up killing them. Simply having sex with a chimp is almost normal by comparison. We had a guy here in NZ who was into being abused by a dominatrix. He ended up being tied into a chair by said dominatrix and thrown over a waterfall - at his own insistence as detailed by a number of witnesses. It killed him. But apparently he got sexual jollies out of it. Go figure!

To lucaspa I stand by my statement that most faith consists of believing what you are told. This is why the vast majority of religious people follow the faith of their fathers. A few people adopt other religions, sure. But most of them do it after listening to some evangelist or other. They change because someone has proselytised the change. For most people, though, religious learning comes from parents, priests and the people around them. They choose to believe what they have been told, and this is faith. There will be a minority who have some kind of religious experience that changes their faith, but most are the result of believing what they have been told.

To iNow On linear versus non linear. You are correct in suggesting that there is a misunderstanding. The relationship between CO2 and warming is non linear. This means that if CO2 increases in a linear fashion, the warming will slow down. For warming to be linear, as I suggested, it requires CO2 increase to accelerate. However, as I said earlier, please do not take my predictions too seriously. There is an element of irony in the fact that I posted them. They are there more for comparison than anything else. I do not believe any predictions. My own or anyone elses. I suggested that my own simplistic predictions were more likely to be accurate than the current supercomputer based models, and I think that is very likely. However, I could also be totally wrong. The irony lies in the comparison. I am sceptical of the whole bang lot! I know that you have not suggested silly bugger remedial actions, and I am sorry if you think that was a dig at you or anyone else on this forum. I mentioned that to explain why I am opposed to extreme interpretations of global warming. I am fully supportive of carefully researched and properly managed action to combat global warming. The extremists, though, (and I am not accusing you or anyone here of being such an extremist) will push humankind into precipitous action that can only be harmful.

World leaders mostly listen to themselves and act according to their own self interest. That is what politics is about. Oh, they pretend to listen to experts, and they are often charming enough to make the expert believe they have hung onto every word. But at the end of the day, they do what helps themselves and their quest for power and money.