CDarwin

I would say that the conclusion was "Haditha was a bad thing to have happened but it's not the marines fault only the impossible situation they were put into by bad policy."

Ok, put it another way. How many people of groups in any number find themselves in the ocean where sharks are without being near a boat or populated beach? Maybe its more that I think. I doubt that it would be so many, though, as to make the statement that "shark attacks are rare" be untrue considering all of the people who we know come into contact with sharks and are heard from again. Perhaps I'm wrong there, too.

Well there are millions of receptors.

How else would someone eaten by a shark not be registered?

There aren't "five" external senses anyway, fundamentally. Taste and smell are both forms of chemoreception (as is use of the Jacobson's organ, which we don't have but New World Monkeys and prosimians do). Hearing and touch are both receptive to vibration as well as tactile contact (if you touch your eardrum, you will feel it). Sight is the only sense that is more-or-less unrelated to any other bodily function.

I'm not so sure about that. In what context would someone be completely alone and eaten by a shark? I'm sure those circumstances occur, but they can't be very common. Personally, I've always wondered why people aren't attacked by predators more too. We're pretty defenseless animals. There's a book, Man the Hunted that talks extensively about the role of predation in human evolution and if anyone wants a non-sensationalized sort of text on this subject that would be a good one, even if it more from the side of human evolution than predator evolution. It actually calls on anthropologists to study predators better.

I think you just want something like "how does that trick work," right? Here's what an Amazon search came up with: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-1465664-9459169?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=The+Science+of+Magic&x=0&y=0 One of those might be good; I don't know. I'd recommend the show Mythbusters, too, if you can get it.

No one is trying to tell you that every scientist is always right. No one is trying to tell you that every scientist always does good science. If you ask three random paleontologists how birds evolved you might well get three different answers, because A) reasonable people can disagree about some interpretations of the evidence, but B) some scientists are just stubborn and don't want to change their pet theories. But if you ask those three scientists if birds evolved at all, you'll get a resounding yes. Just because the fossil record can be a little fuzzy in the details doesn't mean that the scientific community has been systematically missing the big picture for the past 150 years. You can can claim that with the highest confidence of any scientific pronouncement. And just to address your apparent beleif that there is no testing in paleontology: Paleontologists test their hypotheses much like astronomers test their hypotheses, observation. Just as you can't recreate a astronomical event in a lab, you can't recreate vertebrate evolution, but that doesn't mean you can't make predictions which can then be tested by the discovery and analysis of fossils (as well as other things, but fossils mainly for our purposes here).

The methodology that compares DNA is the exact same as is used to compare binary anatomical characteristics on fossils.

Not my point, I think obviously. Indeed it is. And if I can imagine in even the vaguest terms something that might not require a membrane, think what nature could come up with. Recall Orgel's Second Rule, "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

Greece can actually veto Macedonia's entrance into NATO, though, since every member state has that power. It's not a permanent security council member in the UN. The importance isn't that Greece is about to invade Macedonia. It's that this could lead to internal disruption within Macedonia that might result in Albanians splitting off or any number of events. I just thought the article was interesting.

Maybe he's held together by electrostatic forces. Or something. We don't know what adaptations alien lifeforms might inherit.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7274205.stm Apparently, Greece is blocking the entrance of Macedonia (FYRM) into NATO because the name of the Republic makes them think that they have designs on the northern Greek province of Macedonia. Greece wants the official name changed. This might have bearings on Kosavo, as the western FYRM is majority Albanian and there has already been some chatter about a "greater Kosavo" incorporating majority Albanian regions outside of Serbia.

That seems a bit too specific and limiting criterion for such a general concept as "life." Could we not imagine something that lacked a cell membrane, but yet if we saw it we would still want to call it life? If ET walked up to you and shook your hand, but you learned that he didn't have any cell membranes, would you really reject him as a lifeform?

Every free-thinker I know makes a habit of denying wholesale scientific knowledge on the basis of the blind acceptance of unsubstantiated, ancient texts written for a different purpose. I don't think that's going to win our Creationist friend over. What he's more likely to say is that the transitional bird fossils are all genetically distinct and immutable "kinds." What I would like to ask him is to provide any evidence that such "kinds" genuinely exist in nature. Anyway, as to the topic of bird evolution, my gut says that Microraptor might turn out to be a collateral ancestor of birds outside the actual line of descent. Adaptive radiations tend to result in a proliferation of lineages. But now that's just a guess.

Is that possible?

Well that all depends on what you define as "Kosavo" and "Serbia" doesn't it? I will certainly concede that the majority of Albanians wanted independence.

Then why do we need to build a city for them? It sounds like we already have the sort of set-up that Braden is advocating.

Indeed, Akademgorodok. Khrushchev built it as a haven of intellectual freedom to bolster The Glorious Achievements of the Glorious Soviet Scientific Intelligentsia in the 50s. It's a middle-class suburb now. I don't know that much ever came out of it scientifically. I'm far from convinced that winning a Nobel prize should guarantee you a life-long sinecure at the expense of all the rest of the scientific endeavor. You'd just end up with a lot of senile old men (you know how long it takes to win a Nobel?) chasing their pet theories and wasting resources.

Is Braden's supposition that much more fundamental research was accomplished in this 70 year period of the past really true? We're about the build quantum computers and test string theory with the LHC at Cern, evolutionary biology is being remodeled by "evodevo," both new discoveries and new techniques of analysis are sweeping paleontologists in different directions every few years or so, and we can make stem cells out of skin. I'd say at least 80% of everything we know about human evolution has come to light since 1970. So what's this guy complaining about? Although, I personally would like to apply for future membership and this "Plank Club" that gives me unlimited money to do research which requires no verification as to it's legitimacy.

Hey, now, don't patronize. I know the US position; that was what I was alluding to. The US doesn't support self-determination for the Kurds, but does for Kosavo. Like you said, every situation has it's own merits, but I've yet to see any terribly strong reasons why an autonomous Kurdistan would be horrible for the Kurds. And not supporting the PKK's violent tactics doesn't mean you don't support autonomy. The main Kurdish parties in Iraq all do.

Oh, we don't need an Iraq debate in a discussion on Kosavo. Unless, of course, someone wants to bring up the fact the US hasn't said word one about demands for autonomy (not even independence) by the Kurds of northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey.

Mhm. And specific instances of change from one norm to another are what paleontologists do. If you consider the fossil record in the context of ecology, which tells us that organisms are variable and that the frequencies of variations can change through time, then you really have no problem with change from thecal geometry A to thecal geometry B. I don't see how that would make a terribly powerful Creationist argument.

The structure in question is know as a tapetum lucidum (it means bright carpet). The structure is primitive for vertebrates and reflects light to aid in nocturnal visions. Monkeys, apes, and humans (anthropoids) lack a tapetum, as do tarsiers interestingly.

You shouldn't necessarily think of the process as "re-evolution." That's just something we might say retrospectively. If a primate evolved claws, for example, it isn't "reversing" to it earlier state of clawedness, it is only evolving structures similar to claws for a functional purpose. That's what marmosets have done, by the way.