CDarwin

All of them which we have decided culturally were important distinguishers as race. Basically, human variation exists on a continuum, and we decide arbitrarily where to draw lines on that continuum to define "races." There is invariably more variation within a race than between races. This is one of those things that gets anthropologists going. I guess it's collective guilt for having been the field at the forefront of scientific racism for quite a few years.

Of course we're not just talking about humans. All the animals of the earth would have to have multiplied to their present numbers and diversity from whatever time the Flood happed until now. And the time span from Flood to the first signs of global civilizations would have to be pretty narrow, too. Really none of the archaeological record works with a global flood. I don't think Creationists really realize how much of science their ideas really reject. Every scrap of evidence we have on the emergence of agriculture, of the state, of cities and the settlement of the continents has to be completely wrong. Basically all of prehistoric archeology is horse hockey, and all the major events in human history happened in ridiculously short spans of time. By the way, human 'races' are principally cultural constructs. They don't have much biological meaning as given. That Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, Australoid listing you give is more than a bit outdated and has some serious flaws. Not on topic, though.

It's set of law that governs how a country is run. That seems objective enough.

Ah, well Dewey is the one I know. Fareed Zakaria would get you on that. Usually they are democratic, they're just not constitutional. There's a difference between the two concepts. In the West we have mostly liberal democracies, so it's difficult for us to imagine the illiberal democracies and liberal autocracies that do often exist.

Oh yay, now we can stalk each other since we know people's real names.

Dewey, wasn't it? And all that's true, but for an American president he was certainly our demagogue. Congress was at his whim, he tried to neutralize the Supreme Court, and he profoundly changed the way the Federal government operates.

We called him FDR.

Germans I've noticed who speak English (well) as a second language tend to be much clearer with it than most Anglophones.

The Russians (and Czechs, incidentally) are not only angry over US plans to put ICMB defenses in the Czech Republic, but actually threatening a military response: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7496399.stm Specifically, that would probably mean targeting Russia's own weapons at the Eastern European sites. The US claims this is about Iran, but with that country's rather limited inter-continental missile capacity, that seems a bit of a flimsy justification for seriously alienating a country which, it so happens, is probably your best bet for preventing Iran from developing a dangerous nuclear weapons program in the first place. I think this is an excellent example of how bureaucratic inertia shapes national behavior in profound ways. This is Reagan stuff, does anyone even want a strategic defense shield in Eastern Europe any more? Someone might, but you'd certainly never hear about. It's a political non-issue, and yet it might be the most important issue in determining the future course of our relationship with one of the world's fastest rising powers. This is the stuff that people put in history books and no one is talking about it. Of course it cuts both ways. Why are the Russians so worried about their missiles being made inoperable by a strategic defense shield? Soviet paranoia about inevitable capitalist warmongering. Russia has the world's largest stockpile of missiles and rockets, and they fear if all that is made obsolete they'll be put at too great a disadvantage compared to the West. It's all inertia!

You don't have to teach complex theory. Just link things together in an evolutionary narrative. When you talk about mitosis, don't just make kids memorize "Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase," give them an idea of why this process is important to eukaryotic organisms. I think you're overestimated just how basic the misunderstanding of evolution by most high school graduates really is. It isn't just that they can't figure out a selection co-efficient (heaven knows I couldn't), but that they don't know what selection is. I've known people who have gotten confused and remembered the horrible example of Lamarkianism every biology text book gives (giraffes getting longer necks) as actually how biologists think evolution works.

I honestly always have thought we needed an earth science forum. I'd break "Ecology and Environment" and "Evolution etc" and reshuffle the relevant threads into it, and then combine "Evolution" with "Ecology" and the rest of "Environment" with "Politics." That is if this were my forum. But of course, I don't have a life and could probably sit around and actually go through re-arranging threads. It's kind of hard to change a forum once its settled, isn't it? You'd have to go around sticking threads different places or make archives or some such hassle. I'd be for a social science forum, perhaps with anthropology-sociology and psychology subsections, but I wonder if there would be much traffic. Psychology already has a forum, and I've seen a handful of sociology-themed posts, but I have a feeling people wouldn't realize that they're posting something sociological and just put new threads somewhere else. There have been even fewer cultural anthropology threads, and physical is already covered by "Evolution."

First off, I don't know if a bat would agree that it didn't see "properly." It would probably be quite offended at that. In any event, only some bats have poor vision (and even they can actually see, just not well). These are the microbats and use echo-location to navigate, as I'm sure you know. This is by no means typical of nocturnal mammals, however. Most nocturnal mammals are like the macrobats, or Old World fruit bats, who have very large eyes with a reflective layer known as the tapetum lucidum to concentrate sparse light. The earliest primates probably saw much like macrobats, and many living species still do today, so you're not far off in talking about humans having nocturnal ancestors. In fact one of the distinguishing features between living "primitive" primates of the group Strepsirhini and living "advanced" primates of the Haplorhini (which includes humans) is the presence of the tapetum lucidum. So really, if you want to look for sort of "link" between primitive, nocturnal mammals and animals with human-like vision, it would be best to point to the tarsier, a nocturnal animal who never-the-less lacks a tapetum lucidum. In reality the common Haplorhine ancestor was probably the inverse of a tarsier: a diurnal species with a tapetum lucidum who eventually lost it to permit greater visual acuity. As for any better information on bat evolution, that's not really my forte. There has been a group proposed called the Archonta which links bats, primates, flying lemurs, and treeshrews all together as fairly close relatives, and there are multiple variations on that theme where bats are seen as fairly close to one or some of those groups. They're not horribly primitive mammals, and they don't appear to occupy any crucial space in mammalian evolution, just an extrememly interesting ecological niche.

I'm assuming your referring to a standard American high school physics curriculum, in which case, I'd say yes. You'll be making and interpreting graphs and you need some things you learn in trigonometry for that. They'll probably review it for you but it would be easier just to take the class first. You'd probably need it as a math credit to graduate anyway, right? Not a very sciency answer, but I think it's what you're looking for.

I'm a bit late in this discussion, but I would like to note that a welcoming atmosphere as SFN does seem to have is definitely something worth fostering. I'm on a Star Trek/sci-fi forum where old, established members basically rule the roost and get away with extensive flaming and trolling and off topic blather while new members are ruthlessly culled. They don't get many trolls there (and they used to have a big problem with Star Wars fans coming and making stupid "the Deathstar could beat the Enterprise" topics), but then they don't get many new members either. Just something to put out there.

I rather get the feeling of yelling against the wind, but everyone realizes that there's no fossil or archaeological evidence for anything being said here, right?

Wait, no, never mind, I misread Pangloss so my snarky comment is unwarranted.

Apparently a time-traveling wormhole (since the LHC will let you do that), has already eaten up the bandwidth on that website's server.

Well there is a common theme, evolution. If biology classes could be taught with the information presented as a single, evolutionary narrative, it would seem that at least the class would give the students something to walk away with, if not specific help in any college classes.

Nice to know that meddling American imperialism can at least occasionally help along the spontaneous generation of a functioning democracy.

I think you were responding to Lucaspa there, not me, which might be why you answered none of my objections. The real problem with aquatic ape is that it's simply not necessary with respect to the fossil record. If an aquatic stage happened, it left no trace in any of our fossil ancestors. Basically, it's one giant "just so" story with questionable internal consistency that more importantly has absolutely not one shred of evidence from the period of human evolution it purports to explain supporting it. Uhm... a lot of other things have been posted here since I've been on a computer. Sorry if the discussion has moved totally beyond what I'm talking about. I'll catch up tomorrow when I'm not exhausted.

There are loads of scientific names which are awkward and insensible but we're stuck with just because it's a convention. Like Australopithecus afarensis. What we have there is "southern ape of Afar." Well afarensis isn't an ape and it isn't particularly from the south of the Afar Triangle. But Australopithecus is what Dart called the genus to describe his "southern ape of Africa" (which he actually thought might be an ape and was from southern Africa), so that's what we've got. There are lots of examples from anatomy too. "Mammillary bodies" don't have anything to do with milk production but are brain structures that happen to look like breasts, so they got that name. Human and zoological dental nomenclature is annoying inconsistent as well. In zoological terms, the first premolar that occurs in the human mouth is really the primitive mammalian third premolar, so it is called P3. But in dentistry it is normally referred to as the first premolar, P1. In disciplines that draw from both zoological and dental studies, such as physical anthropology, there is often confusion as to which standard to use. My favorite inappropriate species common name is probably flying lemur, which of course don't fly and aren't lemurs. There's a push to call them colugos lately, but that's just much less fun.

So I can judge from that that Brazilians are lazy and don't work much as a rule. Thank you for confirming my stereotypes.

I don't have to take biochemistry, thankfully. I do have to take organic chemistry and cell biology, though.

Klingons don't tolerate sarcasm.

No, it's based on biomechanics. Gorillas and chimps may put a lot of weight on their front limbs indeed. They're big animals. But they put the majority of their weight on their hind limbs. Totally circular argument, but as you said, not that important. You're point? I couldn't hold a ball on my nose. Does that mean sealions are better bipeds than I am? But they show no evidence of that. Well I'm sorry to hear that, because I like David Attenborough, but that's simply an appeal to authority.