Phi for All

Well, thanks for the acknowledgement, but please stay focused on the purpose of your thread. Was your question about the wasp/flower relationship answered adequately? If you really think about it, it makes perfect sense that the flower would continue to get more and more wasp-friendly if that was what made the flower the most successful.

According to this article, one year ago 35% of the incoming representatives had never held elective office before. This tells us that the current system can work with inexperienced legislators. What do you think would be necessary requirements for serving in this way? Desire or lack of it can't be a factor. I know many people who would be fantastic representatives but would never choose to go into politics voluntarily. Serving your government, like jury-duty, would be undeniably appealing for the kind of people I'd like to see in office. I'm not sure about the education level, but I feel I should be sure. Part of me acknowledges that there is a great deal of reading and writing required and a lot of civic knowledge that can benefit a legislator. But once we start placing educational restrictions, how far do we go? Not everyone who is smart enough for college can afford it. If this is to be a true random representation of the population, how can we restrict it safely? I hate slippery slope arguments but they are sometimes the most accurate, unfortunately. What about compensation? Glenn Beck suggests that Congress get paid the same as soldiers, but he neglects to mention that soldiers have their food, clothing, housing and entertainment paid by the government. The current rate of $174,000 is more than three times what the average citizen makes, but what about the business owner who gets "drafted" into Congress? The current rate seems high for a non-career position, but may seem low to this business owner. Is there something else that can be used as an incentive, like free medical insurance for life, or exemption from income tax (something that could be taken away if it's proven that the representative was corrupted)? Or should serving be reward enough?

Mainly because when you realize that some of what you test and study can be shown to evolve over time, the rest of what you see has the same chance. There is no need for anything to be controlling evolutionary pressure. You're simply talking about hundreds of trillions of organisms over billions of years. Your brief life so far isn't even the ticking of a clock compared to that, and that makes it hard to wrap your head around those kinds of numbers and time-frames. Don't you think, if there was any level of control, that there would be fewer flaws? If you absolutely have to have some awesome powerful "designer", have him set it in motion billions of years ago and then step away from it, confident his process will do its job. I guess that will let you see evolution for the incredible thing it really is.

If you're saying that evolution couldn't have produced the relationship between the tongue orchid and the orchid dupe wasp, think about this. The natural selection process that specialized the plant to attract that particular wasp is actually doing too good a job. The orchid has reached a peak in being able to attract the dupe wasp and is now causing problems because the male wasps are choosing the plant over their own females to mate with. If the orchid continues like this, it will actually cause population problems for the wasp it's trying to attract. And since the plant only attracts a certain type of wasp, if the wasp species dies out, the plant species is in jeopardy as well. The plant is killing its own species with this "lucky mutation". Evolution isn't perfect, and has led to many failures. This doesn't sound like an intelligently designed relationship, does it?

While some careers gain many benefits from experienced personnel, politics seems to have some extraneous problems with more experienced career members. Campaign financing, partisan politics, corruption and mounting compensation costs all suggest that alternatives might be warranted. A study done at Cornell University suggests that selecting representatives randomly can lead to an improvement in efficiency (links to the study are available within that article). This would eliminate campaigning costs for those representatives entirely, offset by whatever lottery system costs were incurred. It would cut compensation costs as well, since retirement benefits could be reduced or eliminated. Could the rank and file salary of $174,000 per year be reduced or is that better left as an inducement for Random Joe or Jane? Would a random selection system be less prone to corruption or manipulation? Is the time served a major factor? Obviously, you want an optimum time that doesn't take too many years away from the citizen's normal career, but gives him or her enough time to gain experience at the job without becoming corrupted. Can a system like this help US politics? What do you think it would take to have representatives chosen by lottery? Could our Congress be made up of politically inexperienced citizens who would dedicate X years of their lives to serving their country in the legislative branch?

! Moderator Note Please read the rules for this section. You must present a scientific idea with evidence that backs it up. The idea must be testable and make predictions. You must use terminology that we understand, or explain fully any terminology that is not part of accepted science. If you want to stay in this section, you must abide by the rules. Otherwise this thread will be moved elsewhere.

People who work night shifts do it all the time. ... and simply getting your entire school/work to change, which seems like a much harder task than changing your sleep time.

You can test this easily, without changing anything about your work/school. Instead of reversing your whole schedule, simply go to bed as soon as you get home from work/school. Sleep eight hours and wake up to free time. Try it for a week, keep a journal on the effects and let us know how it works out.

I doubt this. Please provide some evidence to back up your assertion about our DNA. Evidence against this is abundant, if merely that not everyone believes in the same things. This is a psychological phenomena, and thus it can be unlearned. Thinking about the way we think is a big step towards unraveling bad habits. It's true that repeating a lie often enough, even a really big, outrageous lie, will give it more legitimacy, but realizing why we believed it can lead us to better mental efficiency.

All of them?

! Moderator Note No personal attacks, please. The comment swansont made WAS based on a reply that used a strawman argument. No foul there. Your attempt to conflate his avatar with a non-existent, overly aggressive stance is ludicrous. No one on staff is more fair-minded than he is. And his involvement in this discussion precludes his making staff decisions regarding it. And swansont's stance, as long as I've know him, is not that mainstream theory mustn't be questioned, but rather that it must be accepted as having the most support and therefore provides the best explanation available at this time. This difference should be noteworthy.

I would think any benefits you gain in mobility and tax freedom would be completely offset by the extra maintenance costs of being at sea. Saltwater is hard on ships, and the bigger it is the more maintenance it will need. After that, there's everything Iggy mentioned. Even with their expectations of tourism, I would think the 40,000 residents would need to be extremely focused in their commercial efforts to make something like this work. I like the idea of setting the standard for the best K-12 education. There are some very interesting possibilities with a close-knit community that could be explored. I'm just leery about whether a humungous ship circumnavigating the globe is the best place for it.

It sounds like some self-indulgent desert gnomes dug up some bad caraway seeds and put them in your groceries, making you sick and clogging up your shower drain so you had to use your tooth brush to get it unclogged. Either that or you got your wisdom teeth out and made the mistake of sipping your tea too fast. I hate when that happens!

Does he have to if he's in love?

There is much evidence to support a conclusion that you can't use reason to overcome faith, in much the same way you can't use conventional military tactics to overcome terrorism. You can change a few minds to either way of thinking, but the foundational principles seem mutually exclusive. It's not even a question of who's wrong or right. Using science against religion, or vice versa, is like measuring the width of your driveway with a story, a story that is never told the same way twice and can change without notice. I don't think it will ever work.

Can we conclude that there is no "battle"? That science and religion use methods that won't allow for meaningful resolution of their differences? In hindsight, I really don't want to leave this thread open for future misinterpretations, due to its provocative title.

If it's opinion, I can ignore it or not if I don't agree. I have no problem with that. When it's demonstrably incorrect but stated as fact, however, I think we all have a duty to argue against it. Especially here, in print, because others will come along to read what was stated incorrectly. Passing along quickly-formed misinformation instead of digging deeper for more accurate detailed explanations is one of our modern society's greatest shortcomings, imo.

When asked if pebbles have rings inside if they were built up from accreted sandstone, you replied, "Yes, however, the symmetrical rings are broken rings because of the grinding of the waves between each layer." I find this answer inadequate. If the waves grind up the pebble between layers of accreted sandstone, how would pebbles get any bigger? Are you suggesting that the waves erode the pebbles enough to break up the rings but not enough to hinder their growth through sandstone attachment? Also, you failed to answer my last question. If your idea is true, why are pebbles not essentially made of sandstone? I hope you don't consider this question one of "the most stupid ones".

How would any piece of fiction answer the question of whether there is a pathological lying disorder? I know what you mean about the character in Catcher in the Rye, but I would think this is a matter for current clinical psychiatry. What about compulsive liars? From what I can see, they have gone beyond lying for gain and now do so purely out of habit. I guess that still would not constitute a disorder.

Sudden heavy snow turns the elm, the ash and oak to willows weeping. Atlas shrugging weights unimaginable for autumn trees keeping. Snow babies cradled, the breaking bough drops them off to slushy sleeping.

QFT. I had a friend once who said if we both agree on everything, one of us is unnecessary.

The cure for scarring is to regenerate like salamanders do. We have everything we need to do it, but scarring has been selected because we don't burrow to hide when wounded. Or at least we didn't when we were hunters. Now it would be great. We'd even get our teeth back, probably. I hate scar tissue, too.

My friend is very well off, but I wouldn't put him in the 1% financially. He owned his own business, and when he sold it he was retained as a consultant to oversee their IPO. His work was so good they promised him the CEO position after the transition. They later recanted and totally screwed him on a technicality, and while he won a suit against them, he refused to help them any further. I think there are lots of people like my friend who consider themselves conservative but agree that regulation of business matters is crucial to keeping the market viable. And no one really benefits from the psychological stress that mega-corporate employers use to marginalize their workers. Just having a job is not the same as job security, and if the prerequisite to employment is being happy with the feeling that you're just hanging on by your fingertips, then we need to re-examine the whole corporate structure. It will be interesting to see what their effect on the elections will be as we enter 2012.

It's unethical to say goodbye but then not leave.

This was a response coupled with some links who's headlines seemed to support the poster's argument. It's a clear example of lazy scholarship AND another crackpot tactic of shifting the burden of proof away from themselves. I've seen this many times. When the crackpot finally tries to back up his argument, he dumps whole articles on you without relevant quotes, forcing you to dig for information. And many times, the article doesn't even support his point, beyond a few comments which, when fully explained, actually refute it.