Phi for All

Technically, while we are speculating, we're still trying to use accepted evolutionary principles to do it, so the thread could stay in the mainstream fora. However, geologically we went completely off the charts with the flood that covers all the land scenario. We'd never have enough water to do that. I said flyers tend to be lighter weight-wise, with hollow bones and muscles meant mainly for flight. And with your flood scenario, I meant that you removed much of our diet when you removed the land, so we'd most likely tend towards smaller bodies requiring less food to survive. Of course, being omnivores, we'd get hit pretty hard trying to live only on what we could find in the oceans. There were birdlike creatures among the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs and birds share a lot of physiology and behavior. Catastrophic events tend to change environments and cause some marked evolutionary changes, but I don't necessarily think a catastrophe was required in order to force the changes into the birds we see today.

How is it a "sound" business practice to charge more for women just because it's easy to make people think it's justified? If you remove the obstetric costs, women are still being charged more for health insurance for the same coverage. The reasons given by the insurance carriers have been proven to be bullshit (like pointing to cities with high instances of domestic violence and then applying that to women everywhere). That's why the Affordable Care Act is not allowing the exploitation to continue. Only if you as a consumer and a citizen allow it. And it looks like, even though you seemed to object to the higher costs before I commented, you are now convinced the insurance companies are justified in continuing the practice. I don't mean this as a personal attack, but it seems to me like on the one hand you defend the free market, and on the other you think it's acceptable to allow discrimination if standing up for your wife means paying more. Aren't you the guy who asked, "What gives?"

Even when you remove obstetric care from the equation, gender rating against women shows that women are charged more for medical insurance than their male counterparts across the board using some really stupid metrics, like increased likelihood of domestic violence. In many states, it's not uncommon for a non-smoking woman to pay significantly more than a man who smokes. No matter what we'd like to think, there doesn't seem to be any justifiable reasons other than greed. The Affordable Care Act has banned the practice of gender rating.

In that scenario, I think the first mutation that would gain from natural selection would be webbed fingers and toes. More successful swimmers would get more food, become stronger and reproduce more successfully. After that, perhaps some kind of webbing that stretches between arms and legs, like a flying squirrel, may give both added swimming control and a limited gliding ability. Again, we have no examples of a six-legged vertebrate, so growing an extra set of limbs that may get modified into wings is an unrealistic stretch. Remember, wings don't evolve by themselves, they're modified legs. We'd require a completely different skeletal and musculature model to warrant having six limbs. This would require extra growth and in your flood scenario you just reduced a huge portion of our food supply. I think the tendency would be towards smaller humans.

Wings, being modified legs, require a whole set of musculature all to themselves. And avian creatures are much lighter weight with lighter bone structure than humans. All that aside, there really isn't any selective pressure for us to evolve wings. We just don't need them, no matter how cool it would be to fly. There is nothing about our current ecology that would make wings desirable. We'd have to change everything about the way we live in order for wings to make us more successful at survival.

When you say "angel-like", do you mean arms turning into wings or do you mean wings sprouting up from somewhere towards the back, independent of the arms? Arms and wings are modified legs, essentially, so we'd somehow have to grow two new "legs" to be modified by selection into wings. Although I would imagine the selective pressures would be more likely to give us a second set of arms, given our current environments. I don't think there are any examples of a six-legged vertebrate.

Confrontation is inevitable. Violence is not.

I'm way too busy studying for my 32nd degree as a Mason to be an Illuminati.

! Moderator Note This is pure preaching, opinion stated as fact with no evidence to support it. Even in the Politics section this kind of post offers no basis for discussion, which is the point of this forum. You need to start observing the proper protocols for starting threads here. This is not Sciforums or The Student Room. Ask a question (one that you're not already answering yourself) or pose an argument or this thread gets closed. This is just hand-waving conspiracy preaching.

It couldn't have been a horned space traveler from Neptune. They only bite people who are in jail.

It's quite typical for conservative positions to overlook political platform considerations in the US. Small government, from a conservative perspective, usually means "stay out of my business but keep subsidizing it". Legalization will suddenly make perfect sense when there is less money in keeping it illegal. Conservatives always mention the drug, but never mention the competitive textile, paper source, oil alternative, or any of the other threats to established markets that hemp represents.

Illegal immigrants only make up about 3.5% of the population, according to the Center of Immigration Studies (11M out of 313M in 2008). And they do spend the majority of the money they make here, so "without contributing anything to the American economy" is not a true statement.

Like many so-called "conservative" positions, I think there is currently more money and more political capital to be made by keeping hemp illegal.

By "personal attachments" do you mean emotional attachments? What kind of "life" is there to organize without personal attachments? What "issues" are unnecessary in life? What kind of "stuff" is worth doing that can't possibly involve a personal attachment? Is trust a kind of personal attachment in your philosophy?

I think it's quite simply that prisoners represent a great deal of money to be made from tax revenues, which are easily justified to the taxpayers because of the threat criminals pose. It's always amazed me that it costs about as much to keep an inmate in a state prison as what the average citizen in that state earns in income. Contracts for food and such are extremely lucrative. I think this is an area where states should be buying directly and not involve private contract vendors. Free market models are at odds with the intent of correctional facilities.

Forgive me, but this makes no sense to me at all. No pulse means no heartbeat, so the person is dead, yes? Does "continuously speaking in his lying position" mean this dead person is in bed but speaking in a language that can be understood, or is the person not speaking the truth, he's lying? Are you asking this about someone you know? Why would psychology be the appropriate study for this phenomenon instead of biology?

I don't think there is an ideal age for all people. It's like most things, different for every person. Marriage is a blend of being your own person and learning to work well as a partner. I think a lot depends on if you plan on having children. Children teach you much about yourself, so it can be a great benefit to have them when you're younger and not too set in your ways. No matter what age you are, I think you need to be happy without needing anything or anyone. If you can be fascinated with just looking around at the world, learning and wondering about it, then everything else is just icing on the cake. If you can do that, then your life is enhanced by everything new you bring into it, including people with whom you want to share it.

Immigrants ARE citizens. Are you suggesting only native Americans deserve these tax resources?

It's my last night here in Paris. It's an amazing city, and I think it's a great example of a socialist environment where the citizens have made quite a lot of themselves. The French are extremely proud of their heritage, and I think a big part of that is taking more of an interest in their political and business processes. Let me start to answer your question this way, Justin. I'm seeing little things here that point to some flaws we have in the States, little things, but a LOT of them. Products are made really well here. Again, it's a small thing, but my blow dryer at home has twists in the cord that will lead to broken wires and shorts that will make me throw it away after about a year. the flat we're renting has a blow dryer that's 5 years old and the cord is perfectly straight. One example, but one less thing for a person to worry about, giving them time and resources to use elsewhere. Politically, the French seem to be going through a bit of their own Occupy movement. Many of them don't want their incumbent President to get re-elected and are willing to vote for the next best guy who is described as a pretty bland centrist (which apparently goes against the fiery French image). They have a voting system with multiple rounds that sounds very interesting, and few people in Paris that I've seen don't have an opinion or won't vote at all. Being Socialist and relying on their government seems to give them more time and a real reason to be involved in the process. Many things I wish we could adopt in the US, and some things I think we do better. Paris is expensive, but it's like New York City expensive. Cordial people, they do little things like always hold a door open if there's someone right behind them. They expect everyone to be responsible for their own actions, and take technical snags in stride better than most Americans (or at least this American, I hate it when amusement park rides break down and feel like the park owes me something when it happens). I'll post more when I get back to tie this into the concept of freedom and how government control of certain things can help us be freer. Vigilance seems to be the key to government control in a democracy.

I will ask some Parisians tomorrow and get back to you next week.

I think it would be more difficult to implement an effective tax on cheap goods. While I can appreciate the efficacy of pigovian taxes, I was hoping to make high-quality goods more affordable through mass-production of a superior design. I stop short of suggesting a mandate, however I personally think our love affair with unlimited choice has turned free market concepts against us. Some things just need to be made to serve us as long and as well as possible.

Science doesn't look for proof. Science is a tool for gaining reliable evidence. Evidence supports theories and theories are explanations, not guesses. Christianity only claims God created the universe, but doesn't say how. The Bible certainly couldn't have explained the Big Bang or Evolution to its first readers. Why couldn't God have used cosmic expansion and Evolution to develop the universe we see? The only thing that would make this true is if the Bible is inerrant, and this is obviously not true. There are many errors in it. So it must be that the Bible is subject to interpretation, and if that's true, then it can be interpreted that God could have used mechanisms that science recognizes as supported explanations. This seems more... unbroken.

I've read them all. I've been told something different by every religion. Why should I believe Christianity? Because of all the evidence you can't produce? An awareness of higher functions like mortality, individuality, wakefulness, overall control of our bodies within the framework of the universe we reside in. Then it's not evidence. Those things aren't evidence that God is real or that Christianity is the true religion. Seriously, we're here so God is real?! That's evidence? Big Bang and Evolution are both theories that use actual evidence and observation to describe the way things have developed over vast amounts of time. Evidence we've given you but was it was too lengthy for you to bother to read, so you take the easy way out and just say, "God did it". The link you gave did. But that's where the explanations are, where the evidence is. We have better things to do than to reprint them here, especially when we're pretty sure you'll say you have better things to do than read all that. Okay. You like wings so lets take a bird. A finch that somehow made it's way to Hawaii. We know from fossils that they didn't always live there, but at some point they got way out in the middle of the Pacific and found the island chain. Today, there are many varieties of finches, and they all feed on different things, they evolved this way. At some point in the past, one finch had a bill that was slightly curved and found it easier to sip nectar from a special flower with curved petals. That made this particular finch more successful and he mated and passed along his genes to the next generation. Each of the following generations had finches with beaks that were even more curved and they were even more successful at getting more nectar to eat. Now we have a finch called the Honeycreeper with an extremely curved beak that makes him very successful for his environment. Guess what? We even have evidence that the flower he likes evolved even more curved petals as the Honeycreeper's beak evolved. Co-evolution between plants and animals. Awesome! This is part of how evolution works, selective pressures from our environment cause small changes over time to accumulate into large changes over large amounts of time. We'd only grow wings if there was something pressuring us to grow them. This is observed in many different ways in every species. We can even see evolution working in our lifetimes by observing insects with short lifespans. This is also a very simplistic explanation for a very complex process. You can feel free to believe God used the Big Bang and Evolution for His own purposes. Science isn't concerned with that.

Only a raging nut job would want to smell like a dog!

An attitude that blinds you to the fact that I wasn't objecting to how much cash they had, I was objecting to their gripes that the restrictions were stifling their business, WHILE in reality they're sitting on more cash than ever before. It's a two-faced lie, just to make even more money by whining. You're the one who says business isn't about fair, but apparently businesses can whine about it and that's OK by you. But the regulations in question weren't designed to grow jobs, so it's not "the flip side" of anything. It was a broken promise that relaxed regs would create jobs, nothing more. Rather than put up with hunger and poverty of any kind in a nation as great as the USA, maybe we need to have an established minimum subsistence level, something that would feed, clothe and house the least of us. Along the lines of the Singapore public measures that iNow gave as an example for healthcare. Establish that and all the arguments about who deserves welfare and who doesn't just go away. Then we'll be free to concentrate on other things that should matter to our freedom.