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CDarwin

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Everything posted by CDarwin

  1. No one would happen to know where I can find any, would they? I know about this by the way: http://www.steffenfoerster.com/research/ethogram.htm The problem is it's not extensive; it only has social behaviors.
  2. First: 'The left' is a stupidly general category. Second: Just because you don't support military action X doesn't mean you love or are even indifferent about Islamic extremism. Contrary to all that testosterone pumping through your body, more guns are not the solution to every problem. Third: You're relying on the old fallacy that bad ideas are better than no ideas. Do I wish Ted Kennedy had a workable plan for fixing Iraq? Sure. Does that mean he or I can't criticize other people's crappy plans? Of course not. Not to mention the fact that there are alternative strategies to the Bush administration's floating around out there. The Iraq Study Group Report, for example.
  3. Big theoretical approaches like AA (or recapitulation, for that matter) don't get unseated by simple enumeration of contrary evidence. They become untenable theoretically. The current push in human evolutionary thought is for mosaic evolution, different traits evolved at different times for different reasons, and the fossil record supports this. Opposable thumbs are 50 million years old, bipedalism 10 million, big brains maybe 2 million, language maybe a few 100,000. AA is a big umbrella hypothesis that tries to explain great numbers of traits with a single event. Current thinking (and what the evidence currently suggests) doesn't sync well with that.
  4. Mine for one. I think in about any school in the South, there are going to be enough Creationist kids so that just teaching evolution is going to be impossible without constant objections. My Biology II class glazed over it completely.
  5. The Ethics of Star Trek (of all books) layed down something I think was interesting. It gave three seperate definitions for 'person'. A. Biological - Any member of the genus Homo; B. Psychological- Anything with the ability to form long term hopes and aspirations and to feel loss at the dashing of these (as in death, for example); and C. Ethical- Whatever combination of the first two that should be considered the beings with the greatest rights as a species and as individuals. That perhaps doesn't answer the fundemental question of 'what is a person', but I think it lays down a good framework for a debate on the matter.
  6. Baha! I understand that statement now. I'm not sure why I didn't in the first place. In fact, I can provide supporting evidence. The smallest primates are the mouse lemurs who specifically fill the rodent niche on Madagascar.
  7. I guess I just can't read. Perhaps relevant: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325975.100&feedId=online-news_rss20
  8. The Twilight Zone
  9. I don't understand this statement. Are you putting Primates up as a particulary successful lineage, because other than humans they really aren't in either biomass or diversity. Primates have evolved quite a bit larger than the average rodent, as well. Not only are there some particularly big primates (200 kg gorillas, for example), but the average primate is at least a few kilograms, and the average rodent is in the below 1 kg range. I think you just said what you were trying to say incorrectly.
  10. There was probably a fair amount of dumb luck in the number of placental mammals that survived the end of the Cretaceous to radiate out and 'dominate the planet'. In addition to the dinosaur extinction, two out of three families of marsupials were wipped out, where the placentals lost none. The placentals weren't any better adapted to cold temperatures or massive planet-killing comets than the marsupials, it was just random chance.
  11. That is an excellent idea. Sorry.
  12. What format do you use in behavioral primatology? I'm guessing it's either APA or CSE, but I'm not sure. I want to submit a paper on guenon behavior to this: http://www.jshs.org/guidelines.html, but I'm not sure what format to use.
  13. I just saw that I could jump on this before I went to bed. The early Cenozoic actually saw a bird radiation that included many species similar to their dinosaur ancestors. The genus Gastornis provides a prominant example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastornis
  14. Some diseases that might seem 'maladaptive' are really evolutionarily neutral because they usually strike after an organism has ceased to reproduce. Evolutionary success isn't measured in lifespan, it's measured in number of reproducing offspring. If you have two women, one who lives to be 100 but has no children and another who dies at 50 of Alzheimer's but has 10 children, all of whom grow up to breed, then the latter woman is by far the more evolutionarily successful. Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants explores this idea more fully, postulating that much of what we see as normal aging may simply be the combined results of genetic disorders that are 'evolutionarily invisible' due to the fact that they strike after spawning is imposible or no longer likely.
  15. Conferred yes, I understand that. My question is whether selection is for genes that control skin color all over the body or on each melanocyte.
  16. That was the most intelligent-sounding name I could think of for something that's likely a fairly stupid question. Is skin color selected for all at once all over the body, or is each melanocyte individually subject to selection? I'm essentially just asking how the genes that determine mammalian skin color work. Feel free to patronize.
  17. In addition to what Phil said, there are outmoded ideas about evolution based on internal drives and laws of development that are non-Darwinian. I really think that contributes to your major point. Evolution ≠ Darwinism, so the Creationist use of the term not only to describe all ideas about biological evolution, but the various bits of geology, cosmology, and philosophy they don't like as well is abusive and misleading. Exactly. Why should we let Creationists rob of us of a perfectly useful term?
  18. I'm beginning to wonder if this is analogous. Perhaps it would be better to ask if chimpanzees consider animals with more limited cognitive abilities than themselves in their moral code, such as monkeys.
  19. There's a high and low part. The low part is around the Sahara and the high is through most of sub-Saharan Africa and averages about 1000m above sea-level.
  20. How do you define 'moral code'? Any social animal will have behaviors that are permitted and behaviors that are not permitted. In mammals and birds at least there will be more than purely instinctual components to how these 'codes' are enforced and adhered to. Is that what you mean? Is that all morality is? The question isn't rhetorical, nor is it quibbling. It goes to the very heart of the issue. If a morality is simply functional, than why shouldn’t it be extended only to members of the species that originated it? Do chimpanzees consider humans in their ‘moral code’? Again, not a rhetorical question.
  21. It took a while, but I have prepared my response. I get the feeling from what I read that bonobos are generally held to be neotenic derivations of chimpanzees. Brain Shea’s blurb on neoteny in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution indicates thusly, and so does Fleagle in Primate Adaptation and Evolution, citing another article by Brain Shae. I found this article too, which is a bit more conservative but broadly supports bonobos speciating from chimpanzees through neoteny. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJS-4MRN9P6-1&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F05%2F2007&_alid=546119161&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_orig=search&_cdi=6886&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=9&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4f41d7c509e1cb8a2526621e02072c08 It seems: “… two river systems that converge to define the extent of bonobo distribution: the Congo-Zaire-Walaba River and the Kwa-Kasai-Sankuru River (Kortlandt 1995). These rivers serve as an effective geographical barrier for the apes as they are not known to swim (though they have been seen wading into waist-deep water) (Kortlandt 1995; Myers Thompson 2002).” http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/entry/bonobo They seem to be more swamp species: “Bonobos exploit the swampy rainforest south of the Zaire River. They forage in swamp meadows on a thin underlying peat layer.” The answers seem to be 1) not particularly strong and 2) 10-12 million years according to this: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f6pnyhg0h3lg2acq/ Anecdotally? They were once called the ‘bald chimpanzee’ apparently (http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/image/21) and they do seem to appear less hairy. I don’t know if that’s ever been quantified. I know talapoins have some webbing between their fingers and toes, from Walker’s Primates of the World. They aren’t any more noticeably hairless than the other guenons, though. Interestingly enough, they too are thought to be neotenic. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJS-4G3KBHX-4&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F1992&_alid=546121717&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_orig=search&_cdi=6886&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=1&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1dec2b60697425fb42f0418fb79ea5e6 Proboscis monkeys and Allen’s Swamp monkey also show webbing on their feet, and macaques, baboons, mangabeys, and a plethora of New World Monkeys are known to swim. Macaques are especially accomplished and many species swim into the ocean. That all came from various books at the UT Library (Hershkovitz’s Living New World Monkeys, Ankel-Simons’s Primate Anatomy, and Schultz’s Primate Lives would cover all of them I believe), I don’t think I could find websites. I may not have spelled all those names correctly; I’m very tired.
  22. Hey, Oak Ridge National Labs, I live near there. Have you tried a supply company to get your bacteria? https://www2.carolina.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10101&storeId=10151&categoryId=1696&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=1285|83&catLevel=2&bottom=N&top=N&pageNum=1&count=24 They probably have some kits on there that would help you get an idea of how to do your experiment, too.
  23. What always bothered me was the way Sci-fi treats biology and especially evolution.
  24. Bonobos actually eat fish, or at least Fleagle's Primate Evolution and Adaptation says so, and there are monkeys that eat crabs and shellfish and swim extensively (the talapoin and proboscis monkeys come to mind immediately). I suppose what distiguishes humans is their use of ocean environments.
  25. The question is semantic and pointless. If you want to know "which animal makes the best little human" which is what is usually meant by these inquiries, it would probably be a member of the Pan genus, but I’m really not sure how useful that is ultimately.
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