CDarwin

About 200 years, I'd say. You will note that the Catholic Church was a lot more effective in unifying Europe on religious grounds than the League of Nations was on idealistic grounds or the EU on economic grounds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm I wonder which one was Caesar? Seriously though, how do you think the government of Delhi and cities that face similar crises should respond? Is it slaughtering the monkeys worth it? As urban sprawl grows, these problems are just going to increase.

That would be an interesting idea to test. I'll get the grant application started. My gut says no. As I've said before, masturbation and sex are different animals. Masturbation occurs in the absence of the sexual signals that arouse an animal to reproduction and probably doesn't satisfy the basic reproductive urge. Animals who are perfectly sexually active masturbate; you'd have to explain that away. A male who's aroused whenever he sees a female might not necessarily be the most reproductively successful, either. In many mammalian, and especially primate, and especially especially human, societies females are selective. This means really wanting it might not necessarily result in getting it. This might be salient: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k7508l6033g17187/

Have you ever heard Margaret Mead's saying, "It takes a village to raise a boy"? Well, that's a approach most cultures take to child rearing, which mitigates the immaturity of the mother or father. Also, in most cultures an adolescent's first lover isn't another adolescent but someone much older and experienced who could be expected to help in raising a child. Your hypothesis also doesn't sync up with the ages at which males and females of most primates reach maturity. Males, who bear the least health risk from a pregnancy (logically) become sexually mature later than the females who bear the lion's share of the risk. Most cultures reinforce this by expecting females to begin reproducing at an earlier age than males. It is useful, as a stress-relieving device.

Eh... yes and no. Religion is a tool. To say that the Crusades would have happened without religion is ridiculous, not necessarily because they were religiously motivated, but because without the Catholic Church there would have been no instrument to organize them. I think it's much the same way with modern Islamicism. Islam is the tool that is used to organize and motivate people. Would 9/11 have happened if there had been no Islam? I doubt it, because secular nationalism doesn't really cut it when it come to motivating people to do extraordinary things like that. At the same time, how plausible is it that the idea of killing yourself for God really originated from teachings that forbid suicide? BTW: This is really in the wrong forum, and is probably skating a bit on the line of violating board rules...

You're thinking like a Lamarckian. With minimal exceptions, the actions you take in your lifetime don't effect what you pass on to your offspring, and it is that that is evolutionarily relevant. We're not even mentioning the fact that masturbation and sex are quite different things, behaviorally and physiologically, and animals that do them tend to do the two for different reasons. Masturbation is most commonly a stress-relief device, where-as sex is obviously geared toward reproduction, and it involves a host of chemical and behavioral signals from the female that affect the male physiologically. Nor are we mentioning the fact that females of most species masturbate too.

Different but not unique by any means. Examples: As is Bangladesh and the Netherlands How many funds do you think the Maldives is going to direct for levies? New Orleans is absolutely the only place in the world with ineffective local government. Flooding causes most of the damage in most hurricanes. Plenty of cities built near the ocean are also near other bodies of water, and in any bad hurricane, those are going to flood.

He said he wonders about the economic future of Africa because they aren't as smart as we are... Where's any evidence that's right? Africa's in the state it's in because European powers imposed their politics forcefully on cultures that had no way to cope with them; thus we get dictators and ethnic conflict in states whose boundaries have no more meaning than "this is as far as X European power was able to conquer 200 years ago." There's no substantial evidence that there's any link between race and intelligence; we've discussed that. What evidence did Watson even cite? Black people are hard to work with? There's a serious scientific claim. I feel sorry for the old guy, but you can't defend his statements on that basis at least. Maybe there's some context we don't know about.

You know what someone needs to do in about 6 months? Necromance this thread.

English is prettier.

That can't happen if there are other limiting factors, like iron. That was my first response.

I read that New Scientist article too. Remember that this isn't some government or disinterested research institution doing this. I don't think you need to get so interpretative as 'Al Gore hysteria' to explain why a company that stands to make lots of money off of carbon offsets for minimal costs might want to try something along these lines.

That might be hard since I don't believe our current understanding of physics allows for faster than light travel for ship-sized objects. I guess it could be very slow space-faring, like going to the International Space Station and back. I don't know how interesting a book that would be.

The idea is that if you change the way people talk you change the way they think. Look up the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, that's what it really says. No one's saying there aren't bigger problems. Political correctness just wasn't design to address those.

So for you politically correct just = correct? The phrase and the concept originally just referred to speech. Its supposed to come out of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If you change the way people speak, keep them from using the 'n-word' and what-not, then you change fundamentally the way they think and you change society. That was the idea.

1984?

Well, obviously. I was just wondering if sharing primitive features was one of the characters that could be used to build a phylogenetic tree.

*Cough*

Basically, carbon-offset companies want to pump tons of fertilizer into the oceans in to encourage algael blooms. The idea should be pretty familiar to anyone who's taken high school biology: In certain ocean environments there are limiting resources that keep algae populations from growing any larger. What this plan does is increase the amount of those limiting resources so you get more algae. Why you ask? So that the algae will sequester greenhouse gases. Great, you say. Well, besides the obviously treacherous ecological ground we're tramping about on here, much of the carbon that the algae sequester is just going to get eaten up by predators or release in shallow water as the algae decays. The only way to get it sequestered in the century range is to sink it to the bottom of the ocean, and only about 5% of the algae makes it there. Is it worth it? This is from the company that wants to do it: http://www.planktos.com/educational/news.htm This is from a website that doesn't like it: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/93106/2004/May10/seeding.html If you have access to the October Scientific American article I'd recommend reading that one. That's what I'm going off of.

Pangloss, do you take issue with the IPCC winning the Nobel?

Let's say you have two mammals who are the only two in their Order to share a primitive feature on their molar. Does that in and of itself suggest an affinity between them?

You could also try polygamy/polygany/polyandry and anthropological terms. *shrugs*

I don't think you're really Santa. Liar.

A. I think you mean James Watson and B. I hope not. Maybe we should go back to living, then...