CDarwin

No, I tried to specifically clear that up by asking for researchers that "contributed to evolutionary theory per se." I guess I wasn't very lucid on that.

But what about all the people he denied franchise too? You know, if we're going to go back to guys born in 1916, maybe it might be more valid to just ask the most influential evolutionary biologist of the 20th Century?

I remember that whole thing. I was in Johnson City when it happened but they were building up to it for a long time. I know where that is too! It's on Gay Street right across the bridge. Alright, that's my 'local' comment. See, Knoxville is important.

The second thread in the series. Who do you think is the most influential evolutionary biologist living today? We're defining that as who's had the greatest impact on the field in his or her lifetime... I think. If anyone wants to offer another definition and propose people to fit it, you're welcome. I suppose we also have to deal with "what is an evolutionary biologist?" I think it would be safe to include paleontologists and evolutionary anthropologists in on top of your typical population geneticists and proper 'biologists' as long as they've made contributions to evolutionary theory per se. Obviously most every biologists is an 'evolutionary' biologists in that they all work with evolution as a paradigm. I think you get what I mean. I'm also going to hazard a name here in that I think I'm at least casually familiar with this field: Niles Eldredge?

Population genetics?

Different people want to say that "Oh, a day was really a million years blah blah blah" and try to match up Genesis with earth's actual history, and it's when you do that that you get the problem with planets created before stars and plants before the sun. I'm personally more inclined to call the whole thing an allegory borrowed from the Creation myths of peoples that the Hebrews were in contact with. It's not supposed to mirror the real events at all; they're irrelevant.

Because over time governments lower the cap on carbon credits. What you're talking about is carbon-offset company schemes specifically, and I must say I share your skepticism a bit. It is better than nothing, though.

The point isn't allowing rich companies to get away with polluting more; it's rewarding the good companies. As opposed to your word that it is partisan? Anyway, I'm especially glad to see the IPCC won it. Al Gore... eh.

Are there individual scientists and individual religious who think there's a war and are fighting it? Sure. Are the fundamental philosophies of religion and science engaged in some sort of cosmic struggle? I don't think so. I'm going to take that as what you mean and vote "no there is no such war."

Oh, the day we live in when calling something "politically correct" is an argument against it in and of itself. You haven't established that the fact that helping people is "politically correct" was a more important reason that Yunus (and the others) won the prize than the fact that they were helping people.

Whose perceptions of what?

I've always been a bit skeptical of Roe v. Wade. I'm pro-choice personally, but I wonder at the legal basis for the Roe decision. Privacy? Where's that in the Constitution? And how is it the business of the federal courts to be standardizing what I at least believe is in the realm of family law?

I think that misses the point a bit. The problem is just that there are so many uninformed apathetic people who aren't voting.

No good for Turkey, but it's the right thing to do. In fact, it may well be a good thing for Turkey. It needs a kick in the pants to admit to its history before it can really move forward with becoming a member of Europe and generally as a nation.

The question in your post doesn't quite match the poll options. Are we talking about a conflict of philosophies or of individuals?

That's a much easier way to say everything I just did. Although it's not mutation or natural selection, and mutation/recombination and natural selection (and genetic drift and blah blah blah; stochastic things).

They seem to agree.

You're tapping into a field of evolutionary theory known as density dependent selection. It assumes that there are two factors controlling how big a population is: r, the natural reproductive capacity of a species, and K, the carrying capacity of the environment. In any given environment, one of these will be dominant over the other. In stable environments with enough resources but without a super-abundance, you get K-selective regimes; in unstable environments where there's a lot of change in a "boom or bust" sort of cycle, you get r-selective regimes. Now animals like small mammals (aphids provide a really good example of this, too) tend to have very high r values and are subject to r-selective regimes. They can breed rapidly to exploit temporary and super-abundant resources but then experience mass die-offs when the resources disappear. There isn't much competition for resources in an r-selective regime, it's either everyone lives or everyone dies, so offspring aren't given much of a competitive edge. In K-selective regimes competition for resources is very important, so it encourages more specialization and longer maturation, which in many cases means larger sizes. This and the fact that the K limits how many resources can productively be spent on making new offspring lowers the r of these species and makes them more vulnerable to big changes. That's a pretty bad muddling of r/K-selection theory but I hope that made sense. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution has a good article on it if you're a member of a library that has access to it. Elsewise, there's always the wiki.

Well my history textbook... The Wikipedia article gives a good accounting in the history section of it's article on presidential primaries, but it's not very well cited. A cursory Google couldn't seem to find much of anything anywhere else.

All the state primary laws (and the very idea of a primary itself) come from the reform legislation in the early 1900s that was aimed at making American politics more democratic. Legislation having a say in these things as opposed to parties just doing what they want is supposed to insure the common voters get a choice in who their parties nominate and support to ensure more democracy, not erode it. Obviously there are difficulties.

Just a supplement: It's not just "mutation" that brings about genetic changes but recombination during meiosis as well. Mutation gets a lot of credit, but it's really recombination that's responsible for most of the variation in a sexually reproducing species from generation to generation.

In relevance to the upcoming Nobel announcements, a UK judge ruled that Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth can be shown in British schools but only with a disclaimer pointing out nine "errors" in the film where it breaks with the scientific consensus. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7037671.stm Thoughts?

I don't mean in that specific year, I mean all the accomplishments as of that year.

I suppose I meant physicists alive today that have had the greatest impact on physics as a science as of the year of our Lord 2007, but any answer you want to give seems like it might be potentially interesting. Ulteriorly, I was curious if anyone would mention Stephen Hawking, as I've heard various places that he's not actually been as terribly influential as his public fame would suggest.