CDarwin

Different researchers have pointed that out. It goes beyond superficial appearance too. Old World fruit bats have eyes more like the primate eye than any other animal, as well as similar brain pathways associated with vision. http://www.batcon.org/batsmag/v3n2-1.html That work is a little old, and it has since been pretty well demonstrated that the Old and New World bats share a common ancestor quite distinct from the primates, but the convergence is still quite remarkable. Various primatologists have pointed to fruit bats in trying to make models for the evolution of the fairly unique primate sensory hardware. Of course, as I said, flying lemurs (they're also called Colugos, but I don't think that name is as much fun) aren't actually lemurs. They're in a separate order, the Dermoptera.

That's right, but it isn't the environment causing 'advantageous' mutations. The mutations just happen. Some individuals with some of the mutations do better than others without them in the environment into which they are born. The rapidly changing environment means that there are few generations of evolutionary stasis because optimality is so hard to come by and what is 'advantageous' is constantly changing. That means selection is acting more vigorously than usual. The environment is affecting selection, not mutation.

Aristotle didn't suffer from an inability to apply scientific reasoning; he simply didn't do it systematically. Neither did anyone else. Neither do most people today, either. Our culture today is simply more highly specialized, so it can encompass specialist scientists. I just put it out as a proposal, but could you not view the rise of Western science as less of a philosophical revolution, the philosophies had been there all along, but as a cultural and economic revolution? Finally society became specialized enough to support specialist "scientific thinkers," as opposed to intellectuals who were primarily mystics or philosophers and stumbled across scientific work only periodically. Either explanation is probably simplistic, but I think there's something to the social factors. Color is useful, though. Attracting mates and telling ripe fruit and all that fun stuff. Our primate ancestors fought very hard to evolve that color vision. You should appreciate it.* *It's very late, and my sense of humor become quite strange when I'm tired. So you know.

It's more to do with the idea that God gave you your life and its not yours to take away. This result doesn't surprise me at all. Religious doctrines offer a clear moral reason not to kill yourself that humanism doesn't as much. What ethical objection would an atheist have to suicide? I'm not saying that ethical objections don't exist, but I bet that they'd be a lot more obscure and less widely agreed upon than a simple revealed command like "Don't kill your self; God says so." Which is an interesting bit of theology considering that the Qur'an holds that those who commit suicide go to Hell. I had a debate over this with a crazy Neocon friend of mine today. If you look at the history of suicide bombing (it was invented by the Tamil Tigers), and the history of the conflicts in the Middle East (most of them were begun between Israelis and secular Arab nationalists, both Muslim and Christian), then religion is a pretty flaky prime cause. And in response to Mr. Skeptic: I believe your average Catholic is an evolutionist.

More accurately something like a flying lemur.

Without hypothetico-deductive reasoning and the basic outlines of the scientific method we wouldn't have the sacrificable animals or the means to sacrifice them either. Science didn't just emerge fully formed from the goo in 17th Century Europe.

I don't know if that's the best method of analysis. Is really hard to look an extended period of time and say "how many people died?" since everyone dies eventually, and the number of deaths has more to do with population levels than anything elsenore people died in AD 2000 than died in 2000 BC, simply because there were a lot more people to die in AD 2000 than in 2000 BC. I think it might be better to just take a specific slice of time and look at how conditions were at that moment.

Bats are in their own Order, the Chiroptera. Rodents are in the Super-Order Glires, which also includes rabbits, and is sometimes included with the Archontans in, if memory serves, a Subclass called the Superglires. Ain't mammalian macrotaxonomy fun?

"A truth which destroys human life is no truth at all. It is error." -Nietzche Is that your thrust?

There are also "flying lemurs" (which don't fly and aren't lemurs) and sugar gliders that use the same mode of locomotion, and its hypothesized that the Pleisiadapiforms, ancient proto-primates, had the same form of locomotion. Now, bats, Pleisiadapiforms, and flying lemurs are all members of the Super-Order Archonta, so you could definately be onto something. The common ancestor of all the Archonta could have been something like a primitive glider which then eleborated into different sorts of gliders in the Pleisiadapiforms and flying lemurs and full-out flight in the bats.

I think it got my a little too far over to the left. It asked weird questions about globalism. *pouts* EDIT: Well, that was the wrong link and I closed the window.

Obviously this is a huge issue with a lot of good proposals, but the single most effective solution that the US can implement is a carbon tax. It's better than cap-and-trade schemes because businesses can incorporate carbon taxes into thier long-term planning in ways they can't with the variable price of carbon credits. You get the most eco-bang for the economic slowdown. Complement that with subsidies for green techonologies. Ultimately, the only good approach to something like this is one that works with the free-market. A lot of people are proposing "make people do X" solutions, but just look at the state of environmental regulation in this country and you can see that those aren't the best options. You've got to make green technology less expensive than carbon-technology. That's the only way the market is going to respond.

Has anyone ever played Field Commander? That's a pretty fun one.

Dichotomy, I think you've just misunderstood Paralith. As far as I can tell, she (I think that's a she) was talking about genetic drift which is the 'random' (i.e. non-selective) process whereby alleles are removed from a population. The environment does not cause mutations (except in rare cases of exposure to mutagens), it only selects for them, and if an allele is rare enough, either because it is newly arisen or currently neutral or disadvantageous, then it can be wiped out by a single 'random' event. What you have to understand is that "advantageous" is not an absolute concept. What is neutral or disadvantageous today may be a god-send two generations down the line when the environment changes. That's a simplistic explanation but those concepts seem to be at the heart of your misunderstanding. Your link is interesting, but it doesn't change these basic facts.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/nature/q0201.shtml Apparently the Protodonata. The earliest winged insects known appear to have been full flyers, so these almost certainly weren't the real "first" to have gliding control. Basically nobody knows.

It doesn't do anything to plaque. I just bleaches the surface of the enamel. That's all any "whitener" does.

But the environment isn't always being selective. Sometimes, a rock just falls on your head. It doesn't matter how smart, or fast, or good a hunter you are. I don't understand what you mean by this "strengthening" the remaining population. There's no selection here. The rock would have to just randomly fall on someone with disadvantageous alleles. This seems like an obvious statement, but individuals have genes, not species. So if you wipe out an individual, then you wipe out that individuals genes. If an allele is sufficiently rare enough, then when you wipe out the individual the whole species looses the allele, advantageous or not. That's the only answer I know to give you. You're missing the point. Genetic drift is the "random" elimination of alleles without any selective environmental cause. The rock fall is just an example, and your exception is only valid in a limited number of circumstances: i.e. when a member of the same species is present as a witness and is capable of understanding and learning from the situation. If your just asking about neutral mutations... yeah. Most mutations are neutral. You were born with around 20 mutations, all but 5 of which were on non-coding regions. You seem to be thinking in terms of the environment "causing" mutations. The environment causes the selection of mutations, not the mutations themselves.

Yes he did. He could have said, "No, Mr. Hitler. We won't fight you." You're missing the constitutional point a bit. It's an interesting question. I'd say no, the Congress can't make war without the President on board. Really, neither the legislative nor judicial branches can do anything without the executive willing to enforce it. Recall Andrew Jackson's response to the Supreme Court decision to overturn the Indian Removal Act: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." And he couldn't.

As for Mormon literalism: The LDS Church takes no official position on evolution. Brigham Young has a strait-up evolutionary biology department, so the establishment isn't inherently in opposition to it.

But he does it all in such a darn nice way (I'm not being facetious, either). That's his edge. He's not a rhetorician, or at least he doesn't appear to be. He allows everyone to convince themselves that he's a moderate, even if he decidedly isn't. And it's "reborn," not "newborn." That's my Baptist upbringing, right there.

You had an arcade? Darwin, what's happened to all these cool extra things?

Which forest? I can hunt some citations on fruiting on Borneo in a book I read about treeshews...

I don't get how that's "positive." It would feed some fish, sure, but that's messing with the ocean ecosystem. It's like feeding squirrels. Do the squirrels like it? Sure. Is it good for the environment? Not so much. We would also be feeding jellyfish, which humans can't eat and which cause a lot of damage to fisheries every year.

He's charismatic, he's eloquent, and he's socially conservative enough to appeal to enough "value voters" without actively turning off moderates. Really, it's surprising that Huckabee hasn't gotten more buzz hitherto. That's probably his biggest disadvantage even now. Republican presidential races don't tend to feature surges from the lower tiers. Huckabee has a chance to poll in the top three in Iowa. If he does that, he's a contender. The onus is on him right now.

The process is called genetic drift, and it happens all the time. Consider a hunting party of Homo habilis that consists of the best hunters in the whole population. If they go out and a rock falls on them, those advantageous huting alleles are lost for no better reason than the fact that their skulls weren't rock-proof.