CDarwin

That's basically what most anthropologists think. Humans consume lots of high-energy, high quality food like meat, fruits, and tubers, and their digestion only became easier once cooking was introduced. Animals with high proportions of animal matter in the diets tend to have smaller digestive tracts. When talking about proportions, though, you always have to consider scale. The relative size of most organs gets somewhat smaller as an animal gets larger. Small animal-eating primates like tarsiers probably have equivalent sized digestive tracts, even if the proportion is slightly larger because of the size of the animals. I suppose a perfect designer could make a world where every animal could have a tiny little efficient digestive tract like that? I guess I'm reaching a bit.

Mhm. Again, if memory serves.

Oh, certainly science should proceed as it will. My concern here is the ways in which the results of scientists are misused or scientific conclusions undermined for political or financial reasons. That's what I'm talking about if I didn't make that clear. Sorry. It's sort of hard to phrase these things. I fear I've been misunderstood. For one, I'm not referring to 'religion' here with any specificity. This isn't a Richard Dawkins manifesto. I see ID, for example, as a primarily political phenomenon, not a religious one. I'm also not talking about police states are enforcing the latest science on anyone or even on policy. What I am referring to is the protection of the integrity of science, which seems inherently vulnerable to abuse. You might disagree with that premise, which of course you are quite free to argue. I'm not married to the notion. Free societies are not exceptional among societies in lacking structures on which they are established. We have structures to protect order, private property, the democratic process, and even religion. It doesn't seem necessarily authoritarian, therefore, to envision similar structures designed to protect the integrity of the scientific process. Maybe I should should what precisely spurred me to post this. It was a little piece in New Scientist on how the Bush administration is trying to bury advice by researchers in the EPA that air quality standards should be raised higher than they are now by putting political appointees on the committees that draft the advisory reports. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Sorry, I probably should have done that. iNow posted a video on it, but just to summarize it's really inefficient. In order to break down foliage of any sort (blades of grass are just skinny, siliceous leaves), an animal needs a large fermenting chamber to culture bacteria. No animal can efficiently handle leaves without lots of bacteria. The 'best' way to do this is to have a large, sacculated stomach, like cows or colobus monkeys. Horses instead have an expanded pouch in their large intestine called a caecum. The problem with this is that the majority of the energy from any food is absorbed as it passes through the small intestine between the stomach and the large intestine. The horse only fully processes its food after it's missed the chance to get the most out of it in the small intestine. Gorillas actually do this too. Rabbits as well if memory serves, and most foliage eating mammals. The processing time is faster, but it is much less complete and more wasteful. I suppose in either case a 'perfect' designer could make an animal that could break down leaves without recourse to bacteria.

As I look at (particularly American) society today, I see science under siege. Abuse and manipulation are rampant. The Bush administration has been doing like crazy, and it goes back further. Tobacco companies did it, Gingrich did it, Creationists do it, whole segments of society seem to be systematically distorting and misusing science in myriad and insidious ways. And it works. Why? I would suggest primarily the nature of its complexity and its "ivory tower" reputation, as well as how how poorly most of the public understand it or its methods. There are certainly other factors that I'm missing. In any event, science seems particularly and perhaps fatally vulnerable to all number of abuses. And I would suggest that those movements which stand to benefit from the distortion of science are getting better at it and even more dangerous and time progresses. Is this an inevitable disintegration? I'd like to think not, so how do we fix it? It seems to me that we need to somehow fundamentally restructure the way science, politics, and the public interact in a way that protects science from it obvious vulnerabilities. Does that mean more transparency? Does that mean more education? Can we look to anything from 'other' (from an American perspective) nations that might have figured out a better system? Something more radical? I'm really not sure. Thus, I pose the question to you.

The horse's digestive tract is another common example, but I don't know how horribly effective that argument is. Its based upon an assumption about how a Creator would create that any Creationist can simply answer with "Well maybe God wanted to do it that way" or "Its all because of the Fall." The fact that the very inability to define Creation in such a way as it could be argued against using such reasoning based on knowledge of the Creator demonstrates precisely why Creationism can't be science seems to be lost on them. Human wisdom teeth are a relic of the 3rd molars in the mouths of all higher primates. The reason humans tend either not to grow them or to go grow them scrunched up against the 2nd molar is because the human jaw has been shortened dramatically during its evolution. The same thing happens in South American marmosets, because they have similarly reduced jaws. So, all other higher primates (except some marmosets) have the same teeth, and marmosets have done the same sort of things with theirs that we have with ours.

Was it now? I'd say Paley's Watchmaker was flawed from the start. If you see a watch lying on the heath, you don't know it was created because it is complex. What if you saw a lightbulb? That's just a globe of glass with a little metal filament and a metal cap on it. Some complexity. You'd know a watch was made by a watchmaker because you had previous experience with watches and watchmakers. You know broadly how watches are made, and you know what clues to look for to tell you that a human made the watch. No ID-type argument ever suggested any legitimate clues that an observer could look for in nature to see that a supernatural creator (especially the Christian God) was specifically involved.

Anthropology. The neglected step-child of academia. There are no earth sciences on your poll, either. That option might actually be relevant for some number of people.

I'm not sure you could expect anything else, though. Science is, after all, only human reasoning. It's bound to work in certain ways. Data is the basis of the new theory, right. So data is an essential part of all of this. The simple enumeration of data usually isn't enough, though.

Well, Gould was talking about Hackel's Biogenic Law, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' (that was part of it at least), which was a form of orthogenetic transformationism. Obviously there are instances when ontogeny demonstrably doesn't recapitulate phylogeny, and Haekel dealt with this by simply created a subclass of evolution in his theory called "palingenesis" where natural selection worked to "distort" the proper orthogenetic, progressive sequence. It took the modern theoretical approach brought by Mendelian genetics in the early 20th Century to unseat the Biogenic Law and usher in the more powerful theory of proper Darwinian evolution. There are certainly "exceptions" in the data set used to bolster Darwinian evolution; that is individual observations that don't themselves seem to support the theory. The many tortoises on different islands might be an example, as they give the some elements of the appearance of possessing common descent but obviously couldn't. The rest of the data is robust enough to allow even these such observations to be fit into the theoretical framework, however, such that it is difficult to imagine any theory that could do better. But then, I don't suppose anyone ever does before it's come up with.

Stephen Jay Gould addressed this in Ontogeny and Phylogeny. His premise is that although in theory a theory (haha) should fall when the data becomes arrayed too forcefully against it, often this doesn't happen. Theories simply change to incorporate the exceptions. What it seems to take to demolish a really well-entrenched theory is another theory that incorporates all the exceptions better and more elegantly than the old theory.

So what on earth do you think evolutionary biologists sit around doing all day? Twiddling their thumbs? Organizing inquisitions to burn Creationists? I'd like to know.

I guess it was al-Hanifiya.

Mahdi's not actually in al-Sadr's name, I don't believe. It's just an allusion. The original Mahdi was Hussein who led a Shia revolt against the Caliphate back in the Umayyad Dynasty because he thought it was too corrupt. If that's what you were talking about.

Does this mean I get to count the last month or so that I haven't happened to go to Wal-Mart as a boycott?

There's some chatter at The Panda's Thumb that apparently this was Creationist in origin. *shrugs* I suppose it's still funny, if a little more mean-spirited and less ironic in that light. As has been amply pointed out there, though, it seems unlikely that Creationists could really be this funny.

How is that? I've always really liked Russian but I think Chinese would probably be more useful to me.

I'm surprised somewhat by the number of French speakers. Is this from a Canadanian thing or do you just happen to know French?

Ok, I didn't know what they looked like. Thank you.

Oh wow... I forgot to put Spanish?

Al-Sadr's not precisely the problem as much as splinter groups off of Sadr's Madhi Army are (I know what Madhi means now, by the way. It means "chosen one" and refers to a figure in Shia mythology who is supposed to come and bring justice to the Dar-al-Islam. Yay Karen Armstrong.) Well, I suppose he might be a problem in the long term, but he's not principally responsible for the current violence.

Ha, that's true. Perhaps I should have added Southern to the list. That would give me two. If you wish to specify your "other" selection, by the way, feel most free to do so. Also, you may use this as a forum to discuss the superiority of one language over another, for example.

I'm putting off writing a scholarship essay, and this one was something that I've long (as in for the last 30 seconds) wondered about. So, poll ho!

I'd like to know who the guy smoking the cigarette and the young one with the hat are. I recognize PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, and Daniel Dennett.

Haha! I was just about to post this.