CDarwin

I've got a Coke Zero here in front of me (I don't actually, but I did when I first thought of this question and its a good demonstration). Supposedly this contains zero calories. I suppose that means I could drink an infinite number of these things and never get fat. How on earth could that be? If you took some Splenda and burnt it will it really not raise a milliliter of water a single degree? How could this work and how can they say it?

I think we've debated climate change per se to death now, so how about the proper government response to climate change (or the lack there-of, or the lack there-of of it being human induced, stipulating the existence or non-existence of various uncertainties as to the two aforementioned.) I've previously stated that I prefer solutions that use the free market. It's a powerful tool and one that shouldn't be neglected. I've become pretty disillusioned with carbon markets, though. They fluctuate so much that it's difficult to for businesses to make long term plans based on the cost of carbon emissions, on the purely economic side. There is also now the much publicized problem of credits being generated in developing countries for "clean development" projects of spurious impact or that would have gone through anyway. These flood the market and depress the prices of credits. It's not an unworkable system, but it will require much more stricture and tinkering that it has been subjected to thus far. I prefer a carbon tax. It will never happen in the US, but it compensates for all the problems mentioned above and all that money could be plowed into R&D for reducing emissions and adaptation. But that's just me. What do you think government (or I should say governments, because few solutions will work unless applied internationally), should be doing about climate change? Obviously no one plan will do the whole job, but which do you think will be the most important?

Related question: What does "non-safely" removing a USB storage device do to it?

A bit too simplistic. For one thing, not every culture "progressed" through these steps. Many developed pastoral or horticulturals ways of life, and many continued to be hunter gatherers. There was also a time lag between the end of the last Ice Age (13 kya) and the origins of agriculture in the Near East (10 kya, much later some other places). But your basic suggestion that civilization had its origins in food surpluses is one I at least tend to support. Where the cause and effect lies is a bit more difficult to tease out. Humans might have unintentionally began to select various animal and plant species and then been forced to care for them more intensively as they ceased to be competitive with their wild counterparts. You might think of this as a domestication trap. Gradually, this process increased food supplies and lead to the ability to support specialists in settled communities near fields that could be harvested year after year. That's also simplistic but hopefully less so. I know it works well enough for the Near East and Central America, but I can't say that I've made an intense enough study of the subject to say that it applies universally to the causes of civilized life. I wish I could. In any event, no great mutation is necessary, and hunter gatherers weren't simply too stupid to think up building huge, disease infested cities and live on a monoculture until your teeth fall out from the cavities.

Perhaps a good demonstration is the enormous variety of dog breeds. Terriers and great Danes are probably more divergent physically than humans and chimpanzees, yet they can fully interbreed and are indeed members of the same true species. Then we'd have to chuck out the reptiles too. Lizards are more closely related to birds than they are to turtles. Who is 'we?' If scientists can't even agree on Homo/Australopithecus habilis I guarantee you Homo troglodytes is a long way off. Which is a sneaky way of pointing out a problem with putting humans and chimpanzees in the same genus. What do we do with all the fossil species that interceded between the last common ancestor and modern humans (and the ones between the common ancestor and chimpanzees too, presumably)?

Computers seem to foist on you some sort of vague impression of doom that must arise from simply switching off a computer without going through the shut down sequence. I believe I've encountered messages saying that I would "lose memory" or some such thing, and the machine always throws a tantrum when you turn it back on. What exactly happens when you shut down and why is it so important? Will it really damage my computer if I just hold that power button down to turn it off?

I was talking about the ability of science to inform policy without political interference. I did think up something of a solution (with obvious difficuties attached). If you set up IPCC-type advisory boards for every issue in which science is essential to policy making and barred politicians from considering any sources but those reports, it would stop practices like cherry picking. If you want to stray into speculative social engineering, if these institutions could be embued with such prestige that the public would trust them specifically instead of the "guy in the white coat," then it would have a similiar general effect. The problems swirling around the selection and political biases of those boards are too obvious to need mentioning. Costs might be prohibitive. There would also be the sort of problem that the IPCC has already encountered: time lags. It would be difficult to keep these sorts of reports up to date with the latest research. Perhaps a happy compromise was the old Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Maybe we should just bring that back. I think it would go a long way.

Separatist tensions are flaring in Georgia now. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7375736.stm Abkhazs in Abkhazia and ethnic Russians in South Ossetia are growing restless and seem eager (with no Russian objections) to call on the case of Kosovo as precedent for their cause. Do they have a point here? Is there a difference between the two situations or is this a bit of Western hypocrisy? Or is it instead Russian hypocrisy? So many questions.

So Phil Bredesen should vote for Clinton but Al Gore can go with whoever? I kind of like that solution.

Apparently there is some tension in the philosophy of science between Kuhn a Popper, as I've deduced largely from discussions here. I can't say I know much about either of them. I've got Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I haven't read it yet, and I've never come across anything of Popper's. I think I'll Wiki it and education myself a bit better. But in any event, I was curious, to which philosopher do you subscribe? Is this just a false dichotomy? How many other important camps am I missing? Respond away.

Who are "their voters?" The voters nationally or the voters in their states?

I've seen a couple of articles lately in New Scientist, as supposed bastion of GW orthodoxy, talking about how specific events once attributed to global warming are more likely to be due to other factors. That certainly shows that the skeptical approach is still alive.

We all have DNA/RNA, so that would seem to suggest that we all descended from a common ancestor with that particular method of information transmission.

Like I've said, just use an ex-living animal for that stuff. For most of the meat we eat things like that don't matter.

But look at how they're 'suppressed.' It's not by throwing rocks, but by social means, those means varying based on the importance that they be suppressed. In hunter-gathers, where free-riding isn't as big of an issue, ribbing and teasing is all the effort the group is willing to put forth. In agricultural societies, shame is utilized and only very occasionally are formal punitive measures (like imprisonment) resorted to. But those societies are the most elaborated and "unnatural" (though I cringe as I use the word) of human social arrangements. It just seems as if this theory is a bit divorced from the real world of human interactions. To people really go around throwing rocks at each other to keep free-loaders in line? Modern humans are the best analogues we have for ancient humans, so it seems as though this should be much better grounded in a cross-cultural examination modern human behavior, especially means of social control. I got kicked out the library before I could finish that explanation so I'm afraid I wasn't entirely clear. I was trying to point out the free-rider problem is sufficiently addressed in these populations by social factors, such as that loafs don't have as high a reproductive success as the good hunters. There's no need for violent action. Indeed, in these cultures the focus isn't on underachievers at all, but overachievers who threaten the social order by dominating the other group members. It's a generalization, but this is a pressure pretty common throughout hunter-gatherer societies (with the prominent exception of the Kwakiutl of the Northwestern US coast and British Columbia). So the freeloader problem doesn't seem to impede these societies' ability for non-kin cooperation. Will they build any pyramids? No, but neither would have Homo erectus. In ape societies, by the way, it seems to be the opposite. The best hunters are the leaders of the group because they control the meat resources that they can strategically redistribute. Craig Stanford made a lot out of that in his theories about the evolution of intelligence based around meat redistribution (and his book on the matter, The Hunting Apes, is where I'm getting a lot of this information if you want a citation). I won't say that his ideas are any more valid than Bingham's, though. I'm generally sympathetic to Tim White's response to Owen Lovejoy's theory of human evolution revolving around the concealment of female estrous: "I've never seen an estrous fossil." You could come up with aesthetic, internally consistent stories all day.

So what makes this hypothesis more than another "just-so" story? And another question: Have humans really solved the free-rider problem? The data you've shown has been pretty skimpy in terms of ethnography, but that may just be because no one has brought the sugject up yet. From what I know about it, though, there are still "free-loaders" in hunter-gatherer societies that are tolerated and fed (only ribbed occasionally). For most hunter-gatherer groups, there's much more attention given to keeping anyone from gaining status over others than there is to keeping people working (as in an agricultural society). Successful hunters are harassed and forced to give up most of their kills and if they are boastful they are chastized much more severely than any bums. So in these cultures (which must be taken as more similar to the 'ancestral' human condition than agricultural societies) the focus seems to be opposite to supressing freeriders.

In the Old Testament he tends to be portrayed as acting exclusively by the fiat of God. The story of Job is his most prominent appearence in the Old Testament. There he tested him with various travails after gaining God's permission.

But, if I might wade into theology again, God isn't supposed to mislead his followers. He is Truth. Satan is the author of confusion, so he would have had to have created the "flaws" to test human faith, but if I recall there is a provision in Genesis barring Satan from creating life.

You can also refer to dairying is also a cultural practice. The fact that there is so much overlap in the two categories is significant. Humans are not simply technological. We are culturally technological. I do have to question when you think human ancestors would have lived in such a "small, family-unit" society. Modern chimpanzees don't. Gorillas come closer, but not quite. It almost sounds like you're falling back on the old Western preconception of the "nuclear family" as the primitive arrangement for humans, but there's no evidence for that.

That's the Russian way. Make a product that might or might not fail catastrophically, but sturdy enough so that maybe no one will die.

The vast majority of beef that we consume is already poor quality cow-processed corn. I don't see it as a big step down to a test-tube hamburger. I doubt it would eliminate the demand for "real-meat" all together, but it would probably reduce it from an industrial scale operation to something more like an 'organic'-typed agriculture. It's the industrial farming that makes me uncomfortable ethically and environmentally, and I think that goes for a lot of people. That said, I'm a little uncertain as to the feasibility, and more than a little skeptical as to whether-or-not PETA would pay up when the time came. This seems like a cheap ad ploy to me.

I'm more than a tiny bit skeptical... Are they just getting all of this from the hyoid and the ribcage? I can't imagine what else they would have to go on.

But they still weren't all just little shrew-like insectivores as tends to be the stereotype.

ID has elements (like irreducible complexity) that can be falsified (and have been) and elements (like "God did it" to explain any discrepancy) that cannot and thus aren't science. So in that manner it could be said to be both non-falsifiable and invalid scientifically.

Uhm, it wasn't a New Scientist article that was linked to. It was Science Daily, which is a web-based science news service with no connection to the New Scientist, as far as I am aware.