CDarwin

What value do you place on options in an insurance policy? That's what biodiversity is. It is a well of genetic potential. The more diversity the more robustity in a potential catastrophe.

The Republicans voted a week ago.

Some of you have probably heard about this. E.O. Wilson, one of the great reductionists, has abandoned his gene-based notions of kin selection and resurrected group selection theory to explain altruism and the evolution of insect colonies. Essentially, the notion holds that while individuals within a group may suffer relative to other members of the same group in being altruistic, the group itself does better than other groups without altruistic members. Thus the altruistic groups are selected for. Here is a recent article on it in the New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19726383.900-altruism-is-no-family-matter.html Here's Dawkins' criticism in the same issue: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19726385.700-comment-the-group-delusion.html You might only be able to read the Dawkins comment. For the life of me I could have sworn there was another one published earlier on the topic in New Scinetist by Wilson himself. I can't seem to find it, though. Bothersome. So what 'dya think? Is there anything to this?

Just so you know, what your talking about was basically suggested by Claude Levi-Struass, the 20th Century French originator of Structural Anthropology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology I tend to attribute this "tribalism," as Sisyphus terms it, less to biology and more to a particular trend in the Western cultural tradition. Westerners like to think of the world as divided into grand ideologies who oppose each other on a cosmic scale. It stretches back to the Zoroastrianism, the good/evil dichotomy from which was enshrined in the Hebraic belief systems that formed much of the core of Western thought for the next 3 millennia. You should always be cautious imposing grand intrinsic motivations to the entire sweep of humanity when cultural influences can run so deep and often be difficult to spot.

When I read the title I actually thought it would be about electoral reform... The weaknesses of "first-past-the-post" and all of that.

I don't know that you can even say that, because Wikipedia is edited by a lot of people that exist completely outside of the American political dichotomy. Wikipedia might tend to support some liberal causes (say, like, Global Warming) because of the truth of them more than proactive liberal manipulation. As we know, reality has a known liberal bias. I love the example of CNN. In the US it gets blasted for being "anti-American," while CNN International is in a distant second to the BBC around the world because of its perceived "pro-American" bias.

A fight started on Myspace is filmed with a cellphone and posted on YouTube. Isn't that the perfect metaphor for our age?

Ooh, I don't know if I would say that. The world view of the Western religions, which envisions a linear universe with beginning and end in which progressive change is possible which was created by a rational God whose Creation can be rationally understood, could certainly be argued to have had an impact on the Western conception of science. But perhaps I stray into forbidden territory. Everything else you said is spot on.

Right before saying that evolution has been falsified. Of course.

My joke was in reference to the electoral college, but I agree. Regional primaries with proportional voting where you can vote for multiple candidates would be a better system.

Ha, I completely forgot about this. SFN's preference for President is apparently Barack Obama. Now, how many electoral votes do we have?

I'm not a biophysicist. If I read it carefully and did some back research then I might be able to offer some feeble opinion, but your basic suggestion seems to be that the first flying birds were water-fowl, which is fine, but without any reference to the fossil record it is an untestable supposition. It is also fairly unnecessary considering the solid fossil-based alternatives that have already been proposed. There also seem to be some definite errors in your logic. Your three "drives" for natural selection are a bit problematic. For which of those reasons did the tetrapod limb evolve, for example? Ultimately all selection is for features that increase reproductive success, either by increasing survivorship or simply increasing the animal's sexiness. That's probably a better way to look at natural selection. You make a bit of a strawman of "ground-up" and "tree-down," too. You paint them as suggesting that the evolution of flight was a directed process, with every incremental step being for flight-related reasons. As Lucaspa pointed out, that is not the case. The fact that hard ground might be more "dangerous" to fall on is absolutely irrelevant. A) That's not necessarily the case, water can be very hard if approached with sufficient speed; B) There's no requirement that evolution happen somewhere "safe." If falling to the ground is fatal, then that's just a stronger selective agent; and C) The whole question is moot if birds were able to successfully keep airborne from the very inception of their flightedness.

It might have something to do with the different power structure in the United States. Road work is done by state governments usually at the behest of local governments, and there is no incentive for a local government to have its main artery closed down for three months to let asphalt cure. That would be a big hit to its economy. Perhaps the system in Germany is set up differently. I'm trying to propose a less cynical motivation, here. I haven't lost all my faith in humanity yet.

Without the fossil record any hypothesis for the origin of bird flight is hollow speculation.

I didn't say that, the opinion by Justice Wilkes did.

From p. 183 of What Evolution Is, by Ernst Mayr: The dilemma is moot to the question of "what is a human," however, because "human" mustn't necessarily refer to a single species, nor must it necessarily refer to any biologically defined species. Like "horse" or "beaver" or any other common name it is much more of a typological concept.

I just thought I would note, completely off topic to the current stream of discussion, that legal precedent in the State of Tennessee holds that a horse can commit suicide. In Lyons v. Stills, described by Justice Wilkes as "the case of a Texas pony that commited suicide," the Tennessee State Supreme Court ruled that a farmer who bought a pony from a Texas breeder was was released from his contract (and thus did not have to pay) when the pony strangled itself with a rope used to tie to a post the night it arrived. It's quite true.

I think even putting it down to pure vengeance is belittling. There's also a great amount of insecurity and legitimate feelings of injustice circulating around.

Sorry, that was me again. Like a said, I didn't say the argument should be accepted. I don't personally. It's just an example.

Well, one could make the case that science requires at least a working assumption of philosophical naturalism which is it odds with the supernaturalism that tends to define religious belief, and that it is hypocritical not to apply naturalism universally if you apply it practically. I'm not saying that's a good argument, but it's one that's not necessarily ignorant or close-minded. I don't want to start an illicit religious discussion, just demonstrate that a reasoned one is at least theoretically possible.

It's a Darwin Crossopterygian.

That's quite true. And most "independents" aren't really independents, they're just Democrats or Republicans who didn't check the box. McCain and Obama also appeal to pretty dramatically different age groups. Hmm. I think my argument just died.

The Darwin Fish thread didn't go so well... Sorry.

Oh, you Dinosaurian imperialists! Always trampling on the rightful soil of the trilobites!

I think it hurts Edwards more than it helps or hurts anyone else.