CDarwin

Aha. Well I feel foolish, I actually posted there. It had functionally the same title too. Thank you.

The coccyx isn't totally useless. Muscles attach there. It's also good for livening up gross anatomy classes. Creationist/convict Kent Hovind actually hosted once a scathing and comically inept attack on evolutionists using the coccyx by a John Hinton: http://www.faceeternity.com/evolution_tailbone.htm

The second in my series of looking-forward-to-graduate-school-even-though-I-haven't-started-college-yet topics. I believe that there has already been a thread that addressed this issue, but I can't find it for one and I don't think there was ever a direct, general answer there in any event. Does having a double major mean anything to a graduate schools in, roughly speaking, the biological or social sciences? I'm looking to go into a program in biological anthropology (they have some of those) or anthropology failing that, and I'm beginning down the path of a double major in anthropology and biology with a concentration and ecology and evolutionary biology (the degree actually says that). Mean anything? I'd still like to take the extra classes for the sake of building my base of knowledge in dealing with primate evolution, which I want to study, but knowing that I would also be helping my grad school chances might motivate me a bit more to get through calculus or organic chemistry. Wisdom appreciated.

He might have to, although I'm sure Edwards is bucking for the job.

Good point, good point. My memory seemed to imagine it as longer, but it was just a little news update: Slow Movers Opt for a Single Sex. It apparently spurred me to some reverie on the selective value of permanent sexes, especially as there would seem to be one considering how widespread the phenomenon is in highly mobile taxa.

It would seem as though reproducing clones of yourself, though, would always be more evolutionarily advantageous than failing to find a mate and not reproducing at all. Hermaphroditism leaves that option open. This is something that has puzzled me, too (maybe for the same reason; did you read the New Scientist article, Luminal?).

I just read a set of advice on entering graduate school, and I must say it shook me a bit. Apparently, "Graduate work is arduous and often emotionally draining; you will make barely enough money to live on, and you will have very little private time." Fun, fun. I'm still planning on going eventually (not that I'd really have anything else I could do with a BA in anthropology), but in the name of advance preparation, anyone have any graduate school horror stories? What should the wide-eyed neophyte expect? This might be entertaining too, of course.

The responsible thing would be to plow all of that money into researching alternative fuels and mitigation tactics against global warming. In fact, we should really demand that. And by "we" I mean the constituents of legislators who actually stand a shot of voting for this bill (which isn't me).

Not the last time I checked... I think we've got some nuclei in our cells.

It would either need something to eat, too, and oxygen (or some stand-in) and water with which to metabolize it, or carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Those might be the biggest limiting factors. Calories are few and far between among the stars.

The better question is "why aren't we all bacteria" because they've done a lot better job of colonizing every conceivable niche on (and within) the earth than us multicellulars have.

Well, chimpanzees eat most of their meat raw, so they would have to have re-acquired it.

*giggle giggle*

The government in Europe set the price initially (too low) but then the market took over. The government doesn't continue to set the prices once the system is set up. In the US, the price won't be set by the government initially either, but in an auction, an improvement over the European system. The sulfur dioxide scheme under the Acid Rain Program affected all power producers, so you're right, the scale was different. I can't really think of any way in which scale would be a big problem other than enforcement, though. Again, look a Europe. They've had problems, but those haven't been scale-related, only the result of poor advance planning (and political pressure from the coal companies that killed the idea of auctioning credits). Here's an article I found on the Acid Rain Program and its relevance to this bill: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/03/MNMMTJUS1.DTL&hw=Cap+trade+Acid+Rain&sn=001&sc=1000

Europe's been doing this for years, you know. The US Congress didn't just make the concept up. The market decides the price of a pound of CO2. The biggest problem in Europe is that the credits were sold too cheaply and in too great a quantity and the price collapsed. They've partially fixed that now and CO2 as at about $30 a tonne, I believe. A carbon tax would be better, but cap and trade is hardly unworkable. The US has already used the system successfully to reduce sulfur emissions.

Well, its obviously hard to know, but they didn't have shaped tools and their teeth were broad and flat and seem to have been mainly for grinding and smashing tough foods like seeds and roots and tubers. There's a misconception that Australopithecus were just chimpanzees who could walk upright, but their teeth were pretty different and they were adapted to a different ecological role on the forest edge.

That's not how supply and demand works. You've got it backwards. That's how it works. And it isn't just American buying more. It's increased consumption from the BRIC countries that isn't going away any time soon.

Wait, whose bucks would those be? The greenback or the loonie?

You also don't have to chew cooked meat nearly as much as raw meat. Chimpanzees will spend hours just masticating the meat they catch. They couldn't subsist on it as a main party of their diet just because it would take so long to consume. Richard Wrangham, who's an anthropologist of some repute, makes a lot out of cooking meat to chew quickly in his notions of human evolution. It supposedly would have allowed Homo ergaster to have gathered enough calories to develop large brains. Cookings also breaks down toxins in plant materials, though, so it's really impossible to say whether meat or plants were the first foods to be put into fires. Austrolopithecus at least wouldn't have been able to process a lot of meat because it's teeth weren't up to the task. And even after them dedicated "hunting," which I would imagine would be the most conducive to preparation with fire, is a bit difficult to track down. Early Homo probably scavenged mostly for its big prey and just 'gathered' small animals like rabbits and squirrels as it was collecting vegetables. My guess is that those were the first animals to be cooked, probably around the time humans started roasting their plant fodder. If we want to get really imaginative, early humans almost certainly consumed a fair amount of insect protein (as many modern cultures do today). The first cooked meal might well have been an insect that flew into a fire and was subsequently eaten. Early firekeepers might have intentionally attracted and consumed insect this way for some time before someone thought to stick some of this other food they were eating into the firepit too. But that's totally speculative and unsubstantiable. The lightening-strike thing is a bit far-fetched, though, if you already have fires for for protection, warmth, and light. But of course, cooking probably originated in many different locations at different times and potentially with different causes.

So that whole neotenic myriopod thing is out? I don't know a whole lot about entomology, but that's always what I've encountered as the origins of the insects.

There are some who say they voted for Hillary as a reaction against some of the sexist jokes about her. So maybe her sex and sexism helped her. But that's just anecdotal.

Wow, this thread has gotten way away from me. I really shouldn't take days off. I don't think the response I was going to give to the response Pangloss gave me three days ago is even worth posting any more. I will say that we're not necessarily talking about appeasement in the Neville Chamberlain sense here. Germany was making territorial demands that the Allies gave into. Iran isn't really demanding anything of that sort. The only concession that we could make would be give up advocating for regime change in Iran. The situation with Nazi Germany in 1938 was leagues separate from the one with Iran today and comparisons between the two are troublesome at best. For one, the world is nuclear today, for another, Germany was a state more powerful or on par with the Allies, and for a third, the Allies had a reason to want a strong anti-Communist Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.

Pah. Hippie. [i was joking. I don't actually advocate breaking children.]

I feel like I should have some sort of deep insight into this being as I was a high school student as of a week ago. Really, I never got in trouble, though. I'm jsut that boring. And really I can't think of any horribly endemic insubordination by the standards that seem to have been put forward here. Kids chattered in class (until told to shut up), there were a handful of fights a year, and the occasionally little incident. I've never seen a food fight, for example, or had a kid curse a teacher in front of me or any such thing. Yes, they were stupid, uncontrollable little monkeys, but, aren't they always? I went to a rural (semi-suburban) high school, though, maybe its different. I've always subscribed to the notion that the best way to control a kid is just to break his spirit. You've got to get on that young too.

I know it wasn't; it was a joke. Hence the sticking-out-tongue-face. It wasn't my intent to say that, and in this thread I think you've just taken what I've said, emptied it of its intended content, and gone off key words to hammer a point you wanted to make about a backlash against Bush, but I don't want to get into one of those "I didn't say that! Yes you did!" fights that conversations here seem to devolve into periodically. The fact that we (and Israel and to a lesser extent the other nuclear states in the region) pose an existential threat to the Iranian regime is part the problem ('half' is a rhetorical device; you obviously can't quantify that). The fact that the Iranians perceive us as a threat is the other part. That's not just the right's fault; administrations stretching from Carter have established this belligerence. And you could certainly make the case that morally we should be a threat to the Iranian regime. But as long as that part of the problem is insolvable, the Iranian regime will continue to be at least partially justified in their paranoia. As long as Iran feels threatened and has the capability (which they might not fully have now), it will seek nuclear deterrence. Now maybe I've overstated the inevitability. Perhaps by integrating Iran into the world system and making it feel secure it would no longer feel the need to continue nuclear weapons development and you could prevent a nuclear Iran altogether (although making Iran feel that secure would require many more countries than just the US to be involved and internal factors within Iran to line up properly). But either way it would require the same opening up, the same abandonment of much of current policy, and turning a blind eye to the immoral things the Iranian regime is doing. Maybe a war is better; I don't know. In any event, I stand by my position that if the US continues along the trajectory set since the Iranian Revolution (which, among other factors has lead Iran to seek nuclear weapons) and also maintains its policy of "no nukes" for Iran, then there must be a war. Even if we can get Iran to back down in this crisis, the fundamental problems will still remain of a country fearful of the world. I ask you, why hasn't Saudi Arabia tried to develop nuclear weapons? What's different about its situation as opposed to Iran's? If you consider that question, you can see where I'm coming from in positing than Iran's nuclear ambitions have less to do with ideology or Ahmedinijad's rhetoric than with old-fashioned insecurity. What irritates me more, really, is that he (you, Pangloss) folded my McCain thread into here where it didn't really have anything to do with with conversation (and has been ignored accordingly). But, the forum is his (yours, Pangloss) ship.