CDarwin

Then it would probably be selected against. I'm not sure on any data covering fecundity in blind people, but I would hazard to guess it would be rather lower than the average.

Human evolution is actually pretty well covered, but as for ape evolution you're absolutely right. There is only one fossil (a chimpanzee) to represent any African ape after it split from humans, for example. There is a pretty good record in the early Miocene, however, so at least we have a good picture there of the flowering of homonoids that the modern apes and human originated from.

If primates were out of the picture than squirrels and birds would probably radiate, would be my guess. That certainly doesn't mean we'd have super smart squirrels or birds, though. Humans have brains as large as they do because of a long chain of specific circumstances in a unique history that is unlikely ever to be exactly replicated. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other evolutionary paths to human-like intelligence, of course.

Is it more likely that life per se should evolve or that "complex" life (plants and animals or their equivalent) would evolve (once life has) on any given planet? Don't try to add up the probabilities. We're comparing the chances of life evolving with the chances of complex life evolving on any planet where life is. This is a question posed by Carl Sagan in his Cosmos (sort of). He seems to take the position that complex life is more the more unlikely of two. I do as well. The mechanisms for the origin of the simplest 'life' seem fairly straightforward. It's just chemistry really. From there natural selection should take any primitive cell on a fairly automatic path of tightening up replication mechanisms and bolstering its abilities to survive and reproduce. Evolution of "higher" lifeforms seems like it would require a more specific set of circumstances that might be hypothesized to be rather rare in the universe. Of course this is speculation piled on speculation, but I think we can at least approach the question. EDIT: Ah, I meant to make the poll public. Oh well. I don't suppose it matters that much.

A common ancestor, quite possibly, but not the last common ancestor.

It wouldn't be Australopithecus unless both our DNA clocks and our understanding of chimpanzee evolution were seriously off. That genus was a particular human ancestor. But your response is quite right. Humans didn't descend from modern apes and monkeys; humans apes and monkeys all share a common ancestor, and apes and humans a more recent unique one still.

Actually since Geoguy stopped posting, I can think of any geologists proper that are regulars.

What does a bigfoot hair look like exactly? I'll bet it looks a lot like a bigfoot hair. (i.e. You might be reading into the hair what you want to see. Some of the best paleontologists of have done similarly with their pet prehistoric beasts; its far from unheard of). What does bigfoot DNA look like? Well like nothing else on record of course. Of course so does badly degraded DNA from practically any source. I even hunted down some bigfoot 'calls' on the internet and listened to them, and honestly bigfoot must have the repertoire of a virtuoso. Some of them sounded remarkably like gibbons, others like birds, others just a grunting sound that I'd imagine could be any number of mammals. So what does a bigfoot sound like? Like a bigfoot, of course. I'm certainly in concurrence with you and Watcher that it is possible that bigfoot might exist (I think its probably one of the more plausible cryptozoological creatures), but hair of fuzzy ownership and DNA of fuzzy ownership and videos and sightings of fuzzy quality don't amount to quite enough to overcome the incredulity of a giant, particularly intelligent, oddly inefficiently bipedal ape with no establishable origins wandering around North America. If I might descend into a little structuralism, I think I can offer an explanation for bigfoot on the whole much more plausible. Bigfoot represents a binary opposite for man. Men live in communities, in 'civilization' if you will. Bigfoot lives in the wild. He represents those wildest aspects of nature; the unknown, the unpredictable, the shadowing and a little frightening. He also represents those untamed aspects of human nature; its savagery and its opposition to the sociality that allows men to be civilized. Seen in this light it is no wonder that bigfoot-like legends appear in cultures all over the world. There aren't a whole lot of mysterious, giant, bipedal apes running around. There are just a whole lot of human cultures in close contact with nature and they have created giants apes as a metaphor, a counterpoint to their own experience.

If I'm not mistaken, the tongue doesn't actually do much 'sensing.' It only communicates the air back to the Jacobson's organ which does the actual chemoreception. I could be wrong.

The topic is rather self-explanatory. Post the YouTube videos you've come across that struck at your scientific soul with their wit, wisdom, or beauty. I'll start off with this scene from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, a pictorial representation of evolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYzx6C4irsI

It was just the way you said "tribal natives" that set my anthropological sensibilities on alert. Either way its a really inefficient walk. One wonders how that gait would evolve.

If it's civilized North Americans making sightings that's one thing, but them primitive tribal natives?

Actually, that's a tad bit insulting to chimpanzees. I apologize.

Right, ID promises to rid science of its precious uncertainty. Without that uncertainty there would be no science.

I think the left was pretty fond of John Paul II, too.

You don't need two nostrils to achieve bilateral symmetry, though. One big one would do. You might be on to something though, in that fetuses suffering from the most severe holoprosencephaly (cyclopia), which is a failure of the protein sonic hedgehog that divides the human head into to distinct, redundant parts at the midline (i.e. creates bilateral symmetry), have a single nostril. So, I suppose it could just be a collateral consequence of how our heads develop. As for articles on the actual evolution of this feature, the best I could do was one from 1924 that I can't find anywhere and one on the evolution of the internal nostril, or choana, from the external nostril. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=745272 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15525987?ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum Here's one interesting functional role: http://www.nature.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/nature/journal/v402/n6757/abs/402035a0.html Apparently your two nostrils are optimized to slightly different smells.

All mammals have them. In zoology they're usually referred to as turbinates, ethmoturbinates if they attach to the ethmoid, nasoturbinates if the connect to the nasal, etc. Humans actually have particularly puny turbinates for mammals.

But the reason these 'bad' genes are propagating is obviously because they are no longer 'bad' in some societies. That means that more or less they are the ones that we can handle. If we couldn't they wouldn't be there. The nastiest stuff (and stuff we might not necessarily think so nasty) that really hampers reproductive success will continue to be pruned. So what if we'll all need glasses? And remember that you never "lose your shot" with evolution. It's not "get rid of bad eye-sight now or it will become so prevalent you can never get rid of it." If needing eye-correction become seriously maladaptive in the future it will decrease in frequency quickly enough. As for genetic engineering. Who knows.

You're falling prey to the common misconception suggested by Herbert Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest." In actuality, survival isn't the primary subject of selection. It is reproductive success. In the common example, a woman who lives to thirty and gets hit by a bus but has two children is more evolutionarily successful than the woman who lives to be a hundred years old but has no children. All that is necessary for evolution to happen is differential reproductive success. As soon as you have that, you have natural selection, and in the rapidly changing cultural world of Homo sapiens differential reproductive success is rampant and the parameters that determine more or less successful individuals are almost constantly changing. That is why more genetic changes have accumulated in the past 50 thousand years than in the previous several million of human evolution since the divergence from chimpanzees. So, contrary to common assumption, evolution is actually speeding up. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071211-human-evolution_2.html

Those of you who embarked upon science degrees (or those that didn't for that matter), I put to you the question above. I ask not entirely out of pure curiosity. I find myself now a high school senior within but a lamb's breath of beginning university and my contact with science hitherto has been almost totally vicarious. I've tried on a few occasions to get a research project together but always got overwhelmed and gave up (I probably couldn't have handled the math they would have needed anyway) and my school doesn't offer any internship opportunities like many do apparently. I'm working under the assumption that my neophytism still isn't totally unheard of in our day and age. Your experience?

Well anthropology has been a recognized academic pursuit for going on, what, 200 years now? We don't get a ruddy check-box.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7336731.stm General Petraeus has told Congress that to keep the gains made by the surge, it is going to need to be maintained just a bit longer after the first withdrawals to be made in July. Is this reasonable? Perhaps predictably, Hillary and Obama don't think so, while McCain is probably more gung-ho than Petraeus. I'm really not sure of much of anything with Iraq. I've almost come to the point where I doubt I'm qualified even to have an opinion. I am quite sure of one point on which Petraeus and I seem to agree, however: leaving permanent bases in Iraq is a bad idea. Military bases aren't inherently bad, obviously, and if it turns out that our strategic interests are served by a base in Iraq, then there's no reason the US shouldn't try to strike a deal with the Iraqi government to host one. But that government has to come to that negotiation as an equal partner representative of the Iraqi people and after every single Coalition troop has left the country. Anything else is imperialism, and that is exactly how the Middle East would see it. But that's not really what the article was about.

I loved "I used to think, 'What are they thinking? Are they going to come out and correct me?'" He knows he's full of crap. I wonder if I was a museum curator how I would respond to something like that. "All the information here is wrong and was designed by atheist Nazi baby-killing idiots. We all know better *wink*wink*."

Yeah, I probably should have been clearer on that. It was late last night. When I say 'protecting scientific integrity from abuse' I mostly mean protecting the scientific input side of decision making from being tampered with for political or otherwise similar reasons. I.e. cherry picking data on the dangers of tobacco to make a report suggesting it isn't really harmful. For whatever reason, science seems particularly vulnerable to that sort of distortion. Take the number of people who don't believe humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor as indication of that. These people aren't all just stupid. They've been manipulated, and very effectively, and people who have done it were 'using' bits and pieces and the language of science to do it. But how many people know about it? Probably not enough to make a difference. That's where I see the problem. Things like this happen, and there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to stop them. Inform the public more? There doesn't seem to be any indication that they would care enough to take action, or indeed that there is much action that they could take. What is anyone going to do, vote against John McCain just because George Bush's administration messed with an EPA air quality report? That's all quite valid. This could have nothing to do with weaknesses in science and I could be wasting my typing. But, it's worth considering.

Oh, so many ways. Data-mining, experts-for-hire, concealing scientific results, spreading false information (ex. 'there are no transitional fossils'), restricting the activities of scientists (the US government has done this to its employees), etc. I don't mean to say that scientists are necessarily responsible for this. Much of it is, as you say, to do with the media. Need it be a few people? I'm not sure. But social structures exist that encompass most if not all of the society and rely on its public consensus. A poll might be one, though I'm not sure how workable that would be, nor am I clear what they would vote on. I hope the only solution isn't to completely fix politics. That would be a tall order.