foodchain

Multicellular can apply to more then just animals, plus I do not think 100% of animals are multicellular. Motility can apply to so much its not even funny, so its far not an specific animal trait. Heterotroph can apply to animal, and I think all animals are heterotrophs, though I am not fluent in all the trophs, I know they surely are not auto or photo at least. All animals are eukaryotic, but so again are so many other forms of life. Invertebrate to vertebrate surely speaks of animals though and of course again I think all animals do indeed feed on other organisms.

I would pick option b

ha! No I just wanted to here peoples views on evolution as a paradigm or not. My first learning’s of scientific paradigms actually came about in an English class if you can believe that, I never paid much attention to it until I started to notice people call various scientific studies paradigms, such as quantum mechanics. Yes but natural selection as in terms of then is different then it is now in terms of all the information content, yet the term itself still stands. I think for something to be a paradigm it would have to be proven to be primarily a work in progress as it relates to human understanding. Such as the big bang, I would not consider such to a paradigm, more or less just that its information content can change. With that being said I don’t ever see natural selection as it pertains to understanding in the life sciences to be defeated or to go away, therefore I don’t see it as a paradigm. I mean natural selection might pan out depending on variables, such as if you study a population of birds or fish, but the framework itself still stays.

A few points. In terms of biology evolution is used after the point of abiogenesis. If you want to learn more about abiogenesis well that implies knowing a lot about everything really, not just biology. We do not fully grasp scientifically the reality of matter, we do not know every possible chemical reaction, we cannot perfectly mimic yet every aspect of the earths atmosphere/geology all through the ages, there is a lot we don’t know. Here is a nifty thing to think about though, everything chemically speaking originate from hydrogen, so you also have a chemical evolution too. You also have evolution of solar systems, stars and other bodies in space. You have cultural and social evolution also, in fact the word evolution can be applied to many things if not just about everything. So how did life evolve from inanimate matter? Well what is inanimate matter? sounds like something incapable of change for one, but lets just say you mean life. Currently the closest thing we have is the ability to create various organic compounds thought necessary for life to form in connection with variables though to exist in the earths past, such as atmosphere composition, plus we can create protocells, or protobionts which are damn close to life and even exhibit primitive reproduction and metabolism not to mention the reality that is has a lipid bilayer. There are various hypothesis about how life started out though. It would also help to remove thinking about humans in connection with say abiogenesis. In reality the only thing you should think about really in the circumstance is microbes like bacteria which happen to have existed now for billions of years.

It seems science is loaded with paradigms, constantly in motion evolving in time all over the place via people working on it. Is evolution really a paradigm though? I mean of course evolution as it would apply to the realm of biologic inquiry mainly. I personally do not view it as a paradigm in any sense. I guess a better question may have been to ask if natural selection could be viewed as a paradigm, but I don’t really view it as one either. I think that some aspects of science mainly get shown to be paradigms as the sciences come to exist in hybrid states. Though I don’t know how much you can discern the simple reality of differences with what happens to be a paradigm at any specific point.

Its not remembering lots of facts and names. For instance with taxonomy the reason you need to know when a certain trait appears in a arthropod, which would relate to a molecular basis, an ecological basis, and many other aspects. So you need to know this stuff so you can look at life from the scientific point of view, which basically leads into evolution. I would agree that the terminology alone typically should be enough to make the ink fall through the paper but its not pointless by any means. I never liked math because they worked it from a memorization angle, I like to know exactly how things work and in many cases would have to do this by myself as I could ask to many questions. Physics and chemistry are both fun, simply because they can show you things. Like taking some chemical and mixing them and getting something radically different, such as state and color or other properties from the original, plus many times you can simple watch this occur. The physics aspect is cool because its so universal, you can study say why a rock happens to be a rock or why a solar system happens to be a solar system. Overall though I would have to say its pretty much an individual thing, and why you may not be good at something now, it does not mean you cant “learn” it and become good at it, in which case your entire appreciation of things could change.

Well here is an idea. You know how they have the concept of heat death? Well with BEC you cant obtain absolute zero due to QM. Also I don’t think QM allows for absolute zero to exist even in say some zero point of heat death if that’s what is occurring. So if per instance the universe is an environment of subsystems in a QM view what will happen when heat death is obtained? I think this has to do with superposition or properties of such but its all speculation. Basically I would imagine that the basic tenets of decoherence operate on superposition or why the universe is not a giant ball of quantum chaos and seemingly has a classical reality. I think if this current model of the environment via its subsystems is lost at a certain point of heat death that this would have a huge impact then on say superposition really.

Well that could apply to fire also. Fire will spread out and react to its environment to stay alive but I don’t look at fire as having a will, its more or less a natural process like a planetary orbit. Natural selection operates on two variables primarily, which in my opinion are simply reproduction and variation. Variation seems to occur naturally, as in I doubt for a genome if conscious and fully mutalistic to desire obtaining say some form of a disease? So if you have say variation and reproduction and in that you find difference that can be selected for or against via the environment. Lets look at sexual reproduction, or polyploidy. Why don’t humans have say six or more copies for a karyotype in each cell? It seems to benefit plants? Why does some life use sexual reproduction over binary fission? The environment basically produces a constant fitness landscape, in which via reproduction and variation traits, or genes or alleles become selected for or against. Its why you don’t see typically terrestrial mammals as dominant figures in say a aquatic ecosystem, you find fish. Even with say avian or mammal like organisms that have found niches in say aquatic ecosystems you can find how variation/reproduction combined with selection has lead to say seals and whales or penguins. Traits that express an increased fitness can come to become fixed in say a population, such as sight. Also from the reality of natural selection you have convergent evolution. In which similar traits can evolve independently of say a direct ancestral basis for the existence of such, like drip tips on leaves in the rain forest, or again the simple reality of penguins. Its just natural selection operating on variation/reproduction. If per say you had an environment in which multicellular life was selected against constantly it would not sustain any particular length of time, or for any specific traits this is true. So is say mutualism a evolutionary successful strategy? The only answer you could give to that would be dynamic, because it pertains to the environment. This is why natural selection became such a powerful descriptor for life, if you take it away nothing in biology makes any sense, and someone has already said that I just don’t remember the name. Not to mention the overwhelming support for such in terms of science stuff like evidence.

I think the thing with math is its just a formalism. For instance I doubt particles are actually squaring themselves or dividing on some interaction or what not, its just that any particular formalism of math can represent a pattern or a system, and if you can get an equation that allows you to repeat/demonstrate something like the math to relativity then that’s what is desired, simply put it works with modeling/predicting reality. Not that it provides some end all description of everything, for instance can relativity model why I like to drink soda? Should I think relativity bunk because it cant explain why I like to drink soda? Don’t get me wrong. I think its easy to see with say issues like string theory to start with that it can run away on you and become some horrible monster that cant be tested, but science or physics for instance also tests the math against reality, and it puts in the textbooks the stuff that currently works. Another example, according the classical physics atoms should not work as they do or for that matter even exist, does that mean classical mechanics is wrong? I think it simply means we don’t know everything yet, and then people made QM. Another example would be the standard model, which does not include gravity, what does that mean? It means we don’t know everything yet. With QM I think you have a fine example. You have some math and experiments that reveal aspects of reality, such as entanglement. Since then you have had more math and experiments, with variation of course. Some work in some situations others don’t. So its not so much some obscure issue primarily caused by math, though I don’t know how or to what extent currently you can test such, its just the current state of affairs things happen to be in. The person that teleported information for instance using BECs was told by a great deal of her peers that light cant do what it did and that the experiment would be impossible, so reality proved them all wrong. She did this though with math and experiment, just like the rest of physics. So if you have something to prove, you have to prove it. For instance I have a crackpot idea that decoherence and einselection or QM can help model the origin of life, I am learning currently more on the subject all on my own. I cant present anything but that’s all that means. The difference I think is that I call it an idea and I state that’s all it is, which is different then simply claiming this is reality and the rest is bunk, which is what you do sometimes, and why I think people get ticked off with you stuff. Personally it does not bother me as much as others.

Lots of things in America could be looked upon unfair if you just go from the money angle and overall thats not my point. Simply because someone can afford better healthcare or a better car is hardly the same as being genetically modified. The point is such already has huge costs and the related to make genetically modifying traits and people would cost a small fortune. Heck it would only be a percent of the rich that could probably afford it. The problem I see with such is that again its hardly like a car. If you could give a person a trait to have say a 50% better then anyone else ability to simply memorize anything really that’s a superior advantage in so many respects its not even funny. The person could become a great musician by simply that aspect alone. The problem comes in just that, you could modify people to have traits that would simply allow them to out perform normies in any giving task over time. The problem I see with that is not so much in the GE itself it would be the kickback culturally as I do not see how people in a competitive society would tolerate such, simply put it would remove by in large competition for people that were giving "superior" traits. Science does have to have a balance, for instance with cfc's. No one cared until cancer from holes in the ozone became apparent. It might be nice to think of making some kind of a genetic utopia but in reality its hardly feasible. I could easier see say a very small percent of the population using it to basically give themselves very unfair advantages over everyone else. Which on it own would create a vacuum effect of a arms race, its pretty much common sense to as it occurs with anything really.

There happen to many problems with ethanol which basically have come about from change in an interconnected environment in which no one was awake. Here is one thing, what is the average efficiency of ethanol in a modern car? If you get ten percent less power production vs. a gallon of gas how much more ethanol does that mean gets burnt in say fifty years? How much does it cost to change over automobiles to a ethanol efficient model, being you already have some of those? Does this put more strain on an auto market to produce a reliable alternative to pure fossil fuel hydrocarbon production vehicles? Plus its hard to find just pure ethanol everywhere even if you were to somehow get a vehicle made just to run on it, what the cost to change all modern infrastructure(gas stations) to just pure ethanol, what would really prompt this? Can America afford to completely change its automobile inventory? How soon? To me instead of a gas electric what about an ethanol electric hybrid? IS that next? Last time I checked the lowest grade of gas in the U.S goes for almost four dollars a gallon. The average efficiency of small trucks and cars, or suvs is around 20 mpg or less. So having a ethanol blend that lowers that mpg by say 2 mpg along with clogging your fuel filter(anyone notice this?) by in far is not a good thing. The other idea is to truly switch to having just ethanol would require what in production back in the states to actually reach that demand? I mean the regular production of fields just for that with regular harvesting alone I am sure is enough to mildly impact the global environment. For instance tomorrow if you woke up and there happened to be no more oil, and ethanol was the only option. How would you produce enough for everyone in America for the modern lifestyle and requirements. All ethanol points at is how much real change needs to be made by just about everyone. A serious shift in thinking or a paradigm shift needs to occur. Even with modern stress current infrastructure is still practically a ESS, which is sad considering the ramifications. Last time I checked that ppm of CO2 is only rising along with the prolonged change to global communities and overall ecology. I mean the soil of the rainforest overall can hardly support any agriculture and this does not matter as its still all being cut down and burnt away. It will as dark as it sounds take something terrifically horrible to happen before the people that can change things decide to do such, and currently the environment is not even mentioned politically past a few remarks here and there because the real real reality of it is hardly anything anyone wants to deal with, and currently they really don’t have face it.

Actually going from concepts like a molecular clock alone for one the GE aspect would have to be constant and incorporate itself into genetic material at a constant. Plus how do you gauge how something like that would spread out over a population density of millions and billions in the long run? Not to mention the idea that genetically modified substrates would provide a parallel environment for evolution outside of GE from the interaction with say bacteria alone. You would also start to have to get into chromatin modification such as what stays eu or hetero and not only that you would have to be able to control the entire phenome in relation to any particular genome, or epigenome and epigenetic, or the entire norm of reaction bit and phenotypic plasticity, which then even gets into enzyme pathways and all the other little amino acid or molecular/cellular components of any organism. Its not gene to trait in some simple blueprint like fashion, you have to account for the dynamics of organism/environment. After you do manage to beat all of this and come to be able to "program" the molecular basis of life for say a specific trait which would basically require ungodly amounts of understanding currently for say even a human subject you still have to deal with how do you even get that far, such as doing studies genetically on humans ultimately which I am sure would be guised in the beginning with "new" advances or "genes" on the market which would have all kinds of negative kickbacks as evolutionarily speaking people have died from reactions involving tooth fillings that would not kill other people. After again you somehow manage to control this non static reality to a point I imagine would rival the uncertainty principal in just the physical chemistry aspect alone you still deal with having to control the outside environment perfectly so it can try to stay fixed. That’s a lot of noise to beat more so on recombination, hey you might get a resurgence of almost inbreeding though to save on costs, which would then mean more GE opportunities for growth and cash flow. It would become a wholly unscientific endeavor primarily motivated for pure cash gain. I mean for the most part I think todays GE involves injecting stuff or cutting stuff out and just recording what happens really, then blasting the subject with all kinds of chemicals and recording what happens. Its hardly a perfect science.

That’s just the thing though. You have to cross over into very unscientific matters when it would come to regulating GE ultimately. Here is a question, say in America would the benefits of genetic engineering be simply for the rich? I think if you for instance could give a severe memory boost for people would that not make some people have permanently a natural advantage over everyone else? You lose all equality in that would you not? It does not sound like much but my money would be that money would try to make itself into some kind of superior race if it could, I don’t see how that would not lead to massive civil unrest, simply put a normie would never be able to really compete. The idea I am trying to pass off is that you would make available the ability for say people to try and work towards the "perfect" human being, if such a thing is not merely a joke overall but it would occur. You would have that occurring, simply put as you point out its already strived for massively everyday with billions and trillions of dollars, it would take seconds for GE to get sucked into that vacuum. Also its hardly like we understand exactly how the molecular basis of life works when it comes to issues like behavior. A lot of what we call perfect could simply be cultural conventions. I could hardly care less to give GE free reign in a culture that is in so many ways ripe with outright ignorance really. I think on a scale the cons are the majority by far over the pros currently.

I have my own crackpottery but I keep it in speculations for the most part(minor leaks). Personally I would have already permabanned you just for the simple fact people try to work with you then you walk all over them. You cant just say something is fact, this little thing is the cornerstone of science in you have to prove it. I mean I don’t want to insult you but personally are you some kind of an extremist perhaps? Have a nice day.

I have spent so much time learning about everything that when I decide to do something all of my brain cells create world war in competition and I never get anything done; aka I cant decide on a major to save my life. I just need to create my own hybrid field and recruit others like me so we can sit around and talk about such problems. I also agree that doing uninteresting things is absolutely painful.

Well that’s the thing. I have about two years of college or university done and really am perplexed severely about where to go. I do a lot of outside study on my own as I obviously have not taken any in depth college level courses on QM. That being said its just a question of course, one that keeps me up at night. ---------------------- Speaking of gravity you can make the speculative jump that constant monitoring is pretty constant like gravity, but what if the reality of whatever everything is happens to be so counterintuitive that the mere idea of thinking in some odd direction is just to much crack pottery for anyone including modern day crackpots. I mean when QM first appeared on the scene the modern day giants such as Einstein in particular just would not have any of it at all, to weird I think is what he keep insisting. Even then we still have modern day ideas that border on the line of such, like branes and strings or whatever. I think the point that gets missed is like you say it all takes some sort of formalism to be expressed in human thought, be it math or some other form of thinking. My interest in the subject though does not really take me into the rest of physics. I am interested in the cosmos of course but we really cant do much with it save record what hits earth or some observational device we post or a telescope of some kind. I mean to make it to the moon is incredibly complex to undertake even today, not to mention the bottoms of our oceans. The reason I like QM is because maybe physics did discover the elementary or basic level of reality, such as it does not go any farther down in a reductionist sense. My big questions hinge on that, and if the current form of anything via QM is the only possible form. Decoherence seems to imply in my eyes a hint that it might not always be just that. The more urging questions I have for QM and of course issues like einselection and decoherence is the possible role it could play in explaining the origin of life. Being I think a standard view is that chemical species/behavior can be explained in such or originate from such it would be of direct consequence on explaining the origin of life then. I also think that understanding that would allow for a base in which to be able to grasp the molecular basis of life up to the uncertainty principal in detail, which would answer so many questions.

I mostly study biology. I know more about QM then anything else in physics which is close to zero percent actually. Here is a link on wiki for einselection, you can also find various papers on the subject at arvix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einselection I got intersted in QM because I am intersted in molecular biology/natural selection.

I imagine genetic engineering if applied like any regular commodity would quickly change from being just something used to curb disease. In fact if you look at say any particular item in America for instance or the world really the envelope is always pushed, who knows where it would end really and I have serious doubts that such is appropriate overall when compared to our level of understanding at large. I do not think it would be long before the entire biosphere was "suffering" genetic engineering. Could you imagine that the pentagon would simply leave such alone, or other nations militaries? What if moral crusaders decide that certain traits are bad and start manipulating children with such? You can already see the possible downfall in regards to genetically engineered viruses. I just truly doubt that humanity really could open up genetic engineering on a common scale and not have it become a Pandora’s box is all. Human laws/thoughts are hardly absolute, there is no ability at all that you would be able to control it after the fact. What if like the modern pharmaceutical industry works towards you could be born with the forever happy gene? I am hard pressed to say humans understand at large evolution or ecology to any point in which I would feel comfortable with genetics becoming applied rather then just a research basis. Most the problems we face today can be dealt with without having to invoke the genetic engineering card. One of the big problems we as a specie face is simply overpopulation and resource consumption, but then again most the time it would seem if people hold themselves above the reality that the rest of life has and continues to deal with. In the end also I seriously doubt for genetic engineering to be able to solve any of these problems really. Genetics like nuclear energy is a great achievement with glorious possibilities, but the understanding or environment required to use such is something I do not think humans live in or posses really to achieve such.

I can understand certain aspects of the formalism behind QM such as what the Hamiltonian is but I am not capable of working with such yet. I have gone over various “interpretations” of QM which of course all use a little bit of variance in working with such. My question pertains basically to more modern applications of say decoherence and related topics such as einselection. I still have a lot of confusion over issues pertaining to such, like if potential or kinetic energy is somewhat related to position or momentum or superposition even. The question I was more or less asking is on the basis of decoherence operating on a quantum environment that produces classical reality, such as conservation laws. The message that I am getting is that such laws are just static and immutable in time, I am just wondering if such are more or less a progression or reality of einselection or environment as a witness, in which symmetries, or conservation laws are arrived at or produced. For instance can you have a decoherence time less then the smallest unit of Planck time? Why not, is this related to other Planck scale variables such as the smallest unit of quanta? It would seem that you can set up a quantum experiment to get the same results over and over again, but in such “weirdness” how is such possible, more so when in reality you do indeed have to consider the apparatus and all measurement involved. If classical reality did emerge from the quantum, then how did that “state of affairs” produce such a regular and predictable reality?

Right but if I throw a gram of mass at you not saying mass is the same as weight it be a bit different then if it came at you at say the speed of light, so if a photon has mass, it then cant have any weight, or turning on a light bulb would be very difficult right?

If a photon had mass would not the speed of light have already obliterated the earth? That would make our sun one mean machine right?

Another competitive hypothesis from such is that endosymbiosis primarily operated on horizontal gene transfer and when you reached having vertical gene transfer is when eukaryotes and sexual reproduction came about I think. In its that the endosymbiosis allowed for selection in the form of vertical gene transfer. My take follows. Simply put eukaryotic life all posses mitochondria as far as I know, if such major divisions of life existed how did mitochondria for instance come to exist at large in eukaryotes then? Did all eukaryotic life simply die out without such, how did they even make it to endosymbiosis in the first place then? Also as a somewhat obvious question, bacteria would have to develop mitochondria and chloroplasts after evolving past being like a eukaryote cell, which seems to be an incredibly fixed trait, not saying it cant happen, then they would have to engage in endosymbiosis with eukaryotes and pass such off. I just don’t see how so much structure as found in a common eukaryotic cell would simply die out in the form of something like becoming bacteria, I don’t see how selection could favor this. I could see however selection favoring vertical gene transfer in a form that would allow say for a cell to maintain fitness, such as its own enzymes or even genetic pathways for such along with regulatory mechanisms.

Could conservation laws possibly be a product of environment as a witness or constant monitoring by the environment? I am not asking for a direct yes or not as I don’t know if that exists just more or less why do universal conservation laws appear in any system that QM interacts with. Such as with the standard model, how could conservation laws come to exist universally within such? It would seem some mechanism has to exist that would define consistent relative "outcomes" such as angular momentum. This question hinges on if say classical reality emerged from the quantum. Why would any particular direction or an arrow of time even emerge, or a point like particle for that matter or massive amounts of them like hydrogen. I don’t see how this could come to be universal without some mechanism as a constant, not a constant as in absolute such as a decay time that can always be predicted, but more or less why decay times even exist and seem to be somewhat random.

Why does infinity have to be a metaphysical construct? Last time I checked anything outside of pure math used to explain physics is metaphysics, so you have to experience that regardless when someone puts formalism into another language like English right?

That sounds like a very broad question. It could be something of a cline with say some form of speciation occurring like one of the patrics or what not. It could be some new phenotype messing around with the chromatin or some other epigenetic factor. I guess for tests would be to see concentrations of the phenotype based on variables that may change in the population, such as what depth or temperature, or if it simply conveys some sort of benefit from predation or what not. If that all fails it might simply be just an aspect of drift that is existing currently on some neutral basis maybe? I mean you have to have the variation and reproduction before you can have the selection, but a selection event or even a continuous landscape of such does not have to be all at once a strong selection. So my big guess is if you cant find any particular variable that could constitute any form of selection against or for the phenotype in question that its more or less a product of drift. The only other option I could think of is maybe something pertaining to transposon behavior or some "mutagen" perhaps like pollution or a virus, or even HGT. I don’t know if by chance a single mutation can cause a cascade like effect of variation but I guess that would depend on where the mutation lands and again how well any mutants do.