CDarwin

There is if we say there is. "Human" is just a word waiting to be assigned a meaning, and that assignment is something which can take place within a range of reasonably informed opinions. It's those opinions that I'm interested in. There's nothing inherent about the combination of the sounds "el+ec+tron" that would suggest a nature as a negatively charged lepton. The combination of sounds is arbitrarily assigned a meaning. I'm not totally sure how anyone would define a human in the field of chemistry (that would be an interesting discussion), but I was speaking in an anthropological sort of context. I'm not talking about ethics here or anything.

And of course you could say that about any word. That's all words are, combinations of sounds arbitrarily assigned meanings. The discussion can be good fun, though, and there seems to be a certain inevitability to it. It doesn't matter how much we talk about how meaningless it is to define what a human is, we all end up doing it.

A species itself is a real thing; it's a group of inter-reproducing individuals. The artificiality comes when we try to apply that real biological concept in a typological way to fossils. We have no idea if all the Homo erectus or Tyrannosaurus rex were really interbreeding. We just have to guess based on the the fact that all of these fossils fall into this certain range of variation that we think corresponds to the range in a biological species. We're putting those caveats aside for the sake of this discussion, though. So kangaroos are humans for you? Ok.

Here's a semantic question that 150 years of anthropology hasn't been able to agree on an answer to. Let's see if we can do it! For some reason, we feel the need to look back into the fossil record and point to some individual and say "why, there is the first human!" Obviously there are problems with doing that in a phyletic lineage and questions as to how meaningful any such "first human" could really be, but that's not what's at issue here. Obviously people are going to do it, so what distinguishing features do you look for before you pull out the "h" word? How far are you willing to extend it? Is any biped a human? Only members of the genus Homo? Personally I like the correspondence of "human" with Homo. I tend to think that equating the common English term with the genus is an elegant way to resolve the differences between common diction and the scientific nomenclature for mammals. Every Equus is a horse, every Papio a baboon, and so forth. For me then the question is "what makes you Homo?" I think manufacturing stone tools is as good a measure as any. That roughly approximates to a certain level of cognitive and social sophistication that indicates a real reliance on what we term "culture," and I think of that reliance as perhaps the most important thing about what it is to be "human." So Homo habilis is the "first human."

We know that industry funding can affect the outcome of scientific research in many subtle ways ranging from interpretation of results to research design, and this has been borne out by various studies (can we accept that as a premise, or am I going to have to hunt down a cite?). My question to you is, should funding from environmental or advocacy groups, or even governments, be similarly suspect? Could these organizations be subtly manipulating scientific output in the same manner industry does? How could we tell the difference?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7090901.stm Sound familiar to anyone?

Responses to the ebay and "drop the taxes on necessities" points from the Fair Tax Plan: Apparently the former case would be accounted for. Supposedly the latter would be unnecessarily complicated. Offering a necessities prebate would also provide an incentive for families to spend less by allowing them to keep what ever money they don't end up spending. That's the notion. Make your own thread.

Here's what it is, in case you don't know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Tax My father's been harping on this to me for a while, and I'm wondering what any of you might think about it. Is it a good idea? Personally, I'm skeptical. It seems like a good idea, but I'm afraid that government would lose the ability to use taxation as a social incentive, and if the 16th Amendment is repealed, might be tempted to raise tariffs if sales taxes come up short. I'm also not sure what effect it would have on the middle class. The system wouldn't be so dissimilar from what we have in Tennessee, except that we pay state estate and gift tax and there is a state corporate income tax. I'm not so sure if that tells anything.

That's quite a bit more than a species barrier. Aren't those two different sub-classes?

I have a feeling they won't need to do much of anything.

Uhm... Ever heard of a fellow named Huey Long? What about Tammany Hall? You can't seriously suggest that state and local government have been historically more immune to corruption than the federal government. Federal government is a bigger pond, so it's much harder for individual fish, like corporations or political machines or racist idiots, to control it. I can cite you example after example of corruption in Tennessee politics in the 20th Century. The Crump and Lea machines, the Bank of Tennessee scandal, the L&N Railroad monopoly and it's excesses, privately rented prison labor, et cetera. I'd also like to direct everyone to my very insightful comment on Ron Paul's role in New Hampshire in the other thread.

Tell all that to HIV. Obviously, a disease that kills every last member of species is pretty implausible, but once you got the this stage: Then the species is pretty much shot, since individuals aren't going be encountering potential mates, either.

Totally incidental note: Dams are pretty much an ecological nightmare. Do I turn on a light a little less guiltily because I know so much of my power in East Tennessee is coming from hydro? Sure. But we really don't need to be building any more of the things. Nuclear is a viable option. Solar and wind are too once the technology is really economical. Geothermal is pretty underexploited. Natural gas has a lot of promise too. Ultimately we can save a lot of the need for electricity if we can just build our buildings properly.

Comment on Paul: He could really affect the vote in New Hampshire. That's a libertarian state and it's an open primary. That means if he's pulling voters away from the Democratic primary to vote for him, he could single handedly affect the distribution of votes candidates from both parties receive, and by extension the rest of the campaign, without actually winning. Pretty nifty.

Hence the "left no trace" qualification. There isn't any evidence of pandemic infection in the bones of most dinosaurs that died around the K-T boundary. I think the comet is still pretty much the best explanation. It could have just struck particular families of dinosaurs and thus compromised ecosystems. Say it killed enough of the Ceratopids to disrupt reproduction and collapse the population, and that was a big enough effect to collapse whole dinosaur food chains. Again, not horribly likely and there's no real way to test it, though.

Like in Thailand.

Can people who have procreated win it?

I'm interpreting that as: The dinosaurs were killed by a super-disease that left no trace in their fossils. The question needs be: Is there any way to test this assertion?

A paradox!

Any fans here? I'm an ardent evangelist of the glorious Onion. Really brilliant satire.

What if it was a grad school whose program was a composite of different disciplines. Like biochemistry or say, biological anthropology? Would they be more likely to look at a double major fondly?

76% You guys must just not know our secret symbol. At least three quarters of them are displaying it.

Somalia too. This thread has gone farther south than the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

I always have to giggle a bit when Creationists talk about the reptile-mammal transition, becuse it's one instance where the fossil record is almost too good. We have such an almost continuous transition between the synapsid reptiles and mammals that it's impossible to define the "first mammal" in anything but an arbitrary way.

http://yannklimentidis.blogspot.com/2007/09/old-men-mate-with-young-women-as.html I do applaud your reference to non-human primates as a model. Too many people don't put human evolution in its proper primatological context and it leads to problems. However, these differences can also be explained by life history patterns: Great apes are highly (compared to humans and tamarins at least) sexually dimorphic. This dimorphism is achieved chiefly though a dramatic adolescent growth spurt in males. This growth spurt expends a lot of energy and effectively "accelerates" male maturation beyond that of their female peers, which means they likewise die earlier. It seems to be one of the trade-offs of mammalian life history: the faster you develop, the faster you die. "Monogamous" primates like humans and tamarins have, for various reasons, much less sexual dimorphism. This means the differences between the intensity of the male and female adolescent growth spurts is much less, and so the two sexes develop at a more similar pace. Now humans have slightly more dimorphism than tamarins, and thus there is more discrepancy in the ages at which the two sexes terminate. There are also many examples of primates where males offer direct "nurturing" to young and yet show a great discrepancy between male and female lifespans and who are polygynous like great apes. Baboons for example. Even in the (African at least) great apes, males will devote a certain amount of energy to looking after their offspring. If you have people who are only living to their 50s, then they aren't substantially outstripping their reproductive period, so the grandparent hypothesis is unnecessary. It doesn't matter if they're grandparents at that time or not. I'm not saying that the theory isn't sound, I just wonder how important those selective pressures really were compared to the pattern of generally slowed life history that humans show. Can you provide any explanation, for example, why the same selective pressures wouldn't apply to other social primates? Couldn't chimpanzee offspring benefit from care from their grandparents as much as humans would? But that won't be passed on to the next generation.