lucaspa

1. Eskimos migrated into their present habitat fairly recently: <12,000 years ago. 2. They eat lots of whale and seal livers. A great source of vitamin D. So they are getting sufficient vitamin D in their diet.

You might be interested in this calculation by Stebbins on evolution: "Take a hypothetical population of animals with the average weight of 40 grams about the size of a mouse. Then assume that generation by generation, the members of the population increase in size at a mean rate of 1/10th of 1 percent of the mean weight at any generation. This rate is so slow, relative to differences in weight between individuals belonging to any particular generation, that the difference between the means of two successive generations could not be calculated because of sampling errors and because slight differences in nutrition affect non-hereditary differences in weight. Indeed, this change would be almost unmeasurable over a human life span. Nevertheless, an increase at this almost imperceptible rate over 12000 generations would produce a population having a mean weight of 6,457,400 grams, which is about the size of a large elephant. If the mean duration of a single generation were about five years, which is much longer than that of a mouse, but shorter than that of the elephant, the elapsed time required for this tremendous increase in size would be 60,000 yrs." Look up "volvox", that will give you a good picture. What you are seeing is that evolution is cumulative. Small individual changes accumulate over generations and the result are huge changes.

Notice what I bolded. That is what is causing the disagreement. CDarwin and I are disputing the "had to have". 1. Australopithecus was no more "vulnerable" than modern chimps. We posted the data that Australopithecus was as strong as modern chimps. 2. Running and climbing the available trees would help, so would display by the tribe. Also, a species doesn't have to fend off every predator attack; just enough to keep the losses bearable. Because modern chimps have had 3 million more years of evolution than Australopithecus. I notice that using spears to hunt is only in ONE chimp community. I submit that it is a recent invention, not a trait of the species. Chimps too are evolving and we may have just seen a truly significant advance in chimp use of tools. Now you are starting to use the appropriate amount of tentativeness. You are hypothesizing that Australopithecus used weapons. OK, that's an acceptable hypothesis. I can't falsify it, so it stays on the table as a possibility. But because you lack overwhelming supporting evidence, you have to insert the appropriate tentativeness. Baboons and herd animals survive on the plains today. Also remember that Australopithecus is living in an environment where there are still a lot of trees; it's not a treeless plain like the savannah today. And Australopithecus, while able to be bipedal, still retains adaptations for climbing. So escape up trees is still possible. So I maintain that, as an alternative hypothesis, Australopithecus could survive without using weapons. Did they survive without weapons? Insufficient data. You should have. Notice what I bolded in your quote above. That is absolute certainty. You have backed away from that. And that despite all the data CDarwin and I have posted! sigh. Where was that claim made? Where is your data? No, they hunted at the forest's edge, which means they can run for trees. But thrown stones and yelling are also weapons. And they can be effective. Remember, predators are, by necessity, cowards. They can't take or risk damage while hunting; that's why most predators are so much larger than their prey. If hurt, they starve. So any individual with a genetic disposition to take risks is not going to survive. It appears that, despite our best efforts to show you an alternative hypothesis, you still can't grasp its possibility.

You still didn't provide a citation! Why not? If you did it, all you needed to do was copy the web address and paste it in your post, like I did. It was a polite request. What extremes? The extremes of age? Even so, the chronology of your source doesn't match what you said -- citing your source. I'm puzzled by the discrepancy. Why did you feel you could change your data? Yes, every theory accepted today was once disputed. But you need to ask: why did that dispute stop and the theory become accepted? The answer is simple: the data would no longer allow continued dispute! Scientists argue everything that can possibly be argued. Why do you think I come here for relaxation? When scientists stop arguing, it is because they no longer can. So, instead of "challenging", what you need to do is start looking at the scientific publications and find the data that stopped the dispute. When was this and in what context? College? High school? And, if you are not in school anymore, how do you know how it's done today? And my point is that it is a flawed method to keep current. Instead of doing that, you need to subscribe to the journals I suggested and look at PNAS each week. Don't rely on "attorneys and a few specialized Doctors", but go to the source. The news you get in Science is done by people who know science and how to report it. Again, I'm puzzled. Unless you can come up with good data, of course I'm going to stick with the data we have. If you do come up with good data, then I will change my mind. I think it is your mind I'm not going to change, because it doesn't matter what data I post, you ignore it.

LOL! So, no, it is NOT possible to model the cell in terms of hydrogen bonding, because you have to change hydrogen bonding to something else. I suggest you write your idea up and send it to Bioessays or Journal of Biological Chemistry and see if it can get past peer review. If you would like a taste of what the reviewers are likely to say, I am a biochemist and can give you some general comments -- all I can since your "modeling" doesn't really do anything in this post. Please tell us how you measured the "strength" of Cl- and OH- as a "base". I would think that Cl- is a stronger "base", since it will give off an H+ ion a lot better than HOH does. The same happens in HCl, only more so. In HCl the H has a much larger partial positive charge than HOH. I would say that this makes Cl- a stronger base, not a weak one. Basically, you are reinventing the wheel here in biochemistry, since polarity of water has long been known. See the first chapter in Lehninger's Biochemistry; it is devoted to the importance of polar water for life. All you have done is add some mumbo-jumbo about EM fields that are totally unnecessary to explain the polarity. It is well explained simply be noting that the electrons in the covalent bond spend more time around O or Cl than around H. Hydrogen bonding is well known. It is about 7 kcal/mole. Very weak. But useful. THe complementarity of bases in DNA is maintained by hydrogen bonding. Document this, please. Cite papers where this has been demonstrated. How many amino acids can develop hydrogen bonding? Do you know? No, it doesn't. You need to read some basic biochemistry since the chemical mechanisms for enzymes acting as catalysts are well known. You seem to be ignoring proteins that are not enzymes. This mechanism is very generic with enzymes developing lock-key specificity so the generic need of the H can lead to very specific results. Again, the electronegativity of C is not that close to H. C is very close to O in the periodic table. You need to look at electron orbitals, not "electronegativity". That isn't really what photosynthesis does. You forget the C-C and C-O bonds that have nothing to do with C-H bonds. There's way too much teleology here and way too little chemistry.

BUT, was the existence of the USA EVER threatened by the VC/NVA? NO! "Winning" for the VC/NVA was independence of Vietnam, NOT destruction of the USA. But "victory" for al-Qaeda is destruction of the government of the USA and our tolerant, secular society. Can al-Qaeda achieve those objectives? NO! But we are talking about apples and oranges about what we are being "convinced" about. Ho Chi Min and colleagues convinced us that Western control of South Viet Nam was not worth the casualities. However, al-Qaeda has to convince us that our representative form of government, the Constitution, freedom of religion, the futures for our daughters, etc, should be given up. I can't see that nor would I personally agree to that. Can you really see al-Qaeda convincing us to give up all of our ideals and way of living? In the context I was using, the distinction doesn't matter. I was pointing out that Carter didn't have a military option because, when he tried such an option, it didn't work. However, I understand and agree with the distinction you are trying to make: between the troops on the ground and the infrastructure/bureaucracy that set up the situation. I'm sure the troops on the ground did everything humanly possible to try to make the mission succeed. Yes, and here the military as a whole failed: to provide the required expertise in planning (Carter, after all, as a civilian, could not plan the operation but relied on military people to do it), inadequate maintenance, inadequate backup helicopters, etc. You separate the people on the ground from the "bureaucracy", but the S-3s who did the planning should have once have been shooters and just didn't do their jobs correctly. But, for Carter's options, it doesn't matter exactly why the mission failed, does it? Once it did fail, Carter couldn't use the military again because the hostages were separated and moved. His only military option was a full scale invasion and, even if the US military was large enough to do that (it wasn't), that would not have saved the hostages. Can what? Destroy America? Yes. We can allow fear for our lives such weight that we allow our government to take away our freedom in the name of "protecting us". Is this what you meant? No, we would never have let British planes bomb houses the IRA was using in the USA. Irrelevant. You are confusing tactics with the strategic idea. The strategic idea is that it is OK to stage a military action inside a sovereign nation in order to get at people who are plotting action against your nation. It doesn't matter what the borders are. As I noted, that the USA has pronounced borders didn't prevent IRA members from coming to the USA to raise money, recruit, train, and plan. Just what al-Qaeda is doing in Pakistan! In order for the British to get those IRA members, we required them to go thru our law enforcement agencies. We didn't let the British land SAS commandos and raid houses! And yet we are saying that we can send LURRPS or SEALS into Pakistan. Double standard. Apples and oranges. We are not talking about American citizens visiting Pakistan! Instead, we are talking about Pakistani citizens plotting attacks on Americans outside Pakistan. Yes, it does. Remember, this is the justification Japan used for starting WWII in the Pacific. We didn't agree, did we? Also remember Gulf War I. A justification Iraq used was that it was securing economic well-being by invading Kuwait. There are limits as to what we can do to secure our economic well-being. We are not allowed to invade another country that refuses to sell us what we want to buy. Tough shit for us. It's a double standard. What you call "military diplomacy" has been called, in the past, "gunboat diplomacy". It is used when one sovereign state is vastly more powerful militarily than the other. When the 2 states are approximately equal in military power, then military diplomacy as we are discussing it is out of the question. That's why we have a double standard going. Remember, the USA had granted "asylum" to people other sovereign states have said are dangerous to them. After all, the USA equipped and trained the people who invaded Cuba in 1962. We would never tolerate a government exercising its "right and responsibility" to launch a military attack on the USA to get at those people. Think about it: would you tolerate Cuba bombing Miami to get at the exile Cuban community that was planning the Bay of Pigs invasion? I am going back thru history to operations that are now declassified. I can't find one that didn't have collateral damage. If you can, please name them. But this vague reference to successes that "can't be named" doesn't help your case. Your own source doesn't list "military diplomacy" as a synomym. Oops. I thought we were using it in defense, but you say it is used by "the aggressor". Oops again. By the data, I dispute that "lots of time". Remember when we killed the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? How much of a pause was there? The very decentralization means that killing a few leaders doesn't stop the organization. Apparently, knowing the "entire organization" just isn't that important. I disagree. First, once the higher-up is captured, all the lower cells simply change operating patterns and the info the leader had is now obsolete. The very autonomy you cite makes one person less valuable. Think of even the US military. Say a Scud missile would have killed Gen Swartzkopf. Gens Horner, Frank, Yeosock, Johnston, etc. would have carried on. They knew the general goal and the general plan. bin Laden hasn't been very public and yet al-Qaeda goes on. I also can't remember the idea that, if we could just capture Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi insurgency would be "severely crippled". Didn't work out that way. There's lots of data against your idea and only wishful thinking for it. And how did that work with Hussein? How's the Iraqi insurgency doing? The only significance would be to make bin Laden a martyr. And that is best for whom? Do you really think their deaths would be secret from al-Qaeda? No, all this does is make us be them. Bombs and missiles leave fragments. So yes, everyone would know it was a bomb or missile: just look for the fragments. There is no such thing as "absolute deniability". You simply look for motive and capability. Explosions leave physical evidence. Evidence you don't even need an advanced forensics lab to work out. Tom Clancy tried to do "absolute deniability" in Clear and Present Danger but it failed. Even such a fan of the US military as Clancy realized that you can't get "absolute deniability". The best you can hope for is no "proof sufficient for a court of law". However, we aren't playing this out in a court of law. The downside comes in the court of public opinion. If enough Pakistanis and other Muslims are convinced and pissed off at us for this violation of Pakistani sovereignity, then whatever we gained in killing a few al-Qaeda is overwhelmed by the cost in alienating all those people. As to your saying "we captured them in Afghani caves" as a lie, what are the consequences when the lie is discovered? Have you ever thought of that? Consequences in the US citizenry losing faith in their own government and allowing such an operation -- no matter how necessary -- in the future AND the consequences in the world at trusting the USA ever again. I am dismayed that you can be so clear sighted to say "When any American voices support for security legislation that curbs his rights as a US citizen out of fear for an attack, terrorism wins." but can't see that "When an American government adopts the tactis of a totalitarian government -- kidnap, torture, death, lying to its own people -- terrorism wins". You are advocating that we as a people tolerate a government that acts like a totalitarian one. There are other things, IMO, that we need to change in our foreign policy in the MidEast. What bothers me about the "terrorists will follow us home" argument is that it implies that we are staking out our military men and women over there as sacrificial lambs and saying "attack them and leave us candy-ass scared civilians alone". It's one thing in a war to get lucky enough to have a strategic and tactical situation where all the fighting and casualties can occur on foreign soil. The USA has been terribly lucky so far. Far more luck than we deserve and that any other country has enjoyed. Now we are in a situation where the tactics are such that casualties can occur within the continental USA. Fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan really doesn't prevent them, by itself, from launching attacks within the USA. However, the idea seems to be that, as long as we have military in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the purposes these people serve is to provide American targets a whole lot closer and easier to get to than coming to the USA. It's one thing to have a volunteer military to defend me, and that they may be killed in that endeavor. However, as a citizen part of my responsibility is to be in danger if that is the situation. I have a moral objection if the major or only service the military persons are serving is to be targets so that I am not. From the article: "Tancredo may not have apologized but he tried to downplay his remarks by saying he was just trying to consider different possibilities of preventing such an attack. "And one of the ways we might think about - and I'm just presenting this as a possibility - is saying that if that happens, and if it's perpetrated by people who are in fact Islamic extremists, then we can take out their holy sites. I didn't say nuke anything. I just said take out... The prevention, the deterrent... We've got to think about something that may in fact be as catastrophic in their world as destroying 7 or 8 american cities would be in ours..." Oh, so that's all he meant." Tancredo is an idiot. Worse, if he really thinks bombing Mecca is a deterrent, he's a positive danger to the USA! Lock him up as a national security risk! This is how we lose! Bombing Mecca doesn't hurt al-Qaeda at all, but makes all Islam our enemy. And then we lose.

OK, I hear what you are saying. If the attack isn't covert and a surprise, then al-Qaeda simply either leaves or hides their guns and pretends to be peaceful villagers. I agree. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bush, etc. are all working on the idea that if you kill the leaders, the movement will end. You don't agree. And I agree with you. This is a battle of ideas, not military or even police. Basically, if we are to "win", then eventually people within Islam are going to have to adapt Islam to live in a diverse, tolerant, secular world and keep their religion private. This is what al-Qaeda is resisting: liberal, secular Western ideas. However, in the interim we can minimize the harm al-Qaeda can do by making it hazardous to be a follower of al-Qaeda. Exactly what strategy and tactics we think will do this the most effectively is what we are discussing.' IOW, is the benefit of a covert ops raid into Pakistan to kill some al-Qaeda leaders greater than the cost of violating the sovereign territory of a state most of whose people are Muslim? Oh no, I see that fear quite frequently. I see it in forums of people who think their loved ones are sure to die in a terrorist attack UNLESS the war in Iraq continues. I hear it in all the politicians who stated that we need to keep troops in Iraq otherwise the "terrorists will follow us home." I hear it in the first wild speculations that the collapse of the I35W bridge was a terrorist attack. I hear it in Bush's remarks that he is going to ask the Secretary for Homeland Security just ONE question about the eavesdropping bill: "Will it give you what you need to keep everyone safe?". If "no", then Bush would veto. I'll consider your other motive. There may be a partial motivation there, but I think it is very much the minority. I too wonder about "reality" TV and its popularity. However, I notice that no one suggested a war until we were attacked. All those years Clinton kept the No Fly Zones, I never heard anyone say "let's invade Iraq for something to do".

You need to give us a source for the data for these claims on how "ancient China" worked. I am finding data to the contrary. " In addition, although the civil service examination was reinstituted by T'ang T'ai-tsung, almost all bureaucratic positions went to aristocrats during the entirety of the T'ang dynasty and only a small handful went to individuals recruited on the basis of the examination." http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CHEMPIRE/TANG.HTM That isn't what you described. Are you going to claim it was entirely coincidence that the aristrocrats were the "most intelligent"? What society? Pre-Communist? Communist? There is ample data that communist China assigned worth based on party membership and family, not intelligence. So, if you are dealing with pre-Communist China, when exactly are you talking about? Which dynasty? What part of that dynasty? IOW, I'm asking you to post your sources. You are building your argument on premises you are presenting as "fact". I'm challenging those facts and you need to show that they are, indeed, accurate. I'm using your criteria. By your criteria, Washington was intelligent. By HIS labeling, he was a farmer. Those two facts contradict your argument of farmers being "less intelligent". You forgot the ability to make tools to make tools. Now, since "we have been adding over generations" to technology, it is obvious that technology itself can't be a criteria for how intelligent people are. Without realizing it, you contradicted your claim that our "cavemen" ancestors were not as intelligent as we are. Yes, they were, but had not had the time to add so much technology. In which case you are undermining any meaningful distinction of "intelligence". That's the point: testing your criteria of what is "intelligence". I did that by showing that animals that we consider are "less intelligent" than humans meet your criteria. If they meet the criteria, then it is your criteria that are flawed. You need to come up with new criteria to measure the level of "intelligence". Yes, they do. The only way you can reasonably conclude our H. sapiens ancestors were not as smart as we are is to look at their technology and say it is less than ours. But since knowledge and intelligence are not the same, you have no way to back your claim. So, on what basis do you say that our ancestors were not as smart as we are? No IQ tests. Brain size is identical. If you plop Einstein down in Europe 20,000 years ago, would he be able to survive? No. So how "smart" would Einstein be? In which case, The Bell Curve and its conclusions are fatally flawed and worthless. If the tests they rely on to measure intelligence don't, then any conclusions involving differences in intelligence between different human groups are garbage. You have said The Bell Curve is GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Which happens to be what I said in my first post in this thread. No, you don't. Go to the EPO website and look at all the inventors. As it did fail. However, I'm not sure such a system ever existed in China. You need to post your source for this "fact". I'm confused. Which of those is "really inventing"? If you apply what others have learned and written in books to a new task, don't you then get to write a new book including the invention? And did China "grow technologically very quickly"? NO! It was say behind the Europeans when they showed up in the 1700 -1800s. So, by the data you presented, the Chinese system really did NOT assign jobs according to intelligence! So there were probably a huge number of intelligent farmers who didn't get a chance, under the social system, to use their intelligence.

In science, there are often not "two sides" to an issue. Science uses data to falsify ideas, so some "sides" are simply not valid. Getting science from news presents several problems. First is that journalists -- like Fox News -- don't realize that data eliminates some "sides" and follows their rubric of presenting two valid "sides" when there aren't two. What you want to do with science is learn to test ideas to find out accuracy of hypotheses/theories, not "diverse understanding". Instead of subscribing to news services, I suggest you subscribe to Science, Nature, and Scientific American (all of which are online but you do have to pay to subscribe). You can also search the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org) each week. The lack of "diversity" is in the lack of different alleles (forms of genes). That translates to sequences of bases in the DNA. In particular, it is a lack of neutral mutations -- those that do not affect the phenotype (what you see). What you see as diversity on a visual level is not reflected in the DNA. A single chimpanzee population has more genetic diversity than the entire human species! Yes, sexual selection (mate preference) is active among humans. It has been proposed recently as a hypothesis to explain hairlessness among humans. However, humans have demonstrated that they freely mate across those lines -- pigment, size, weight, intelligence -- that you can "see". Even among ape societies where a single dominant male supposedly controls mating, the females sneak off into the bushes to mate with the beta males and, thus, less than half the offspring are actually those of the alpha male. So you can't use sexual selection to explain the lack of genetic diversity. The key is this phrase from the article "We are all descended from a small founding population" "Founding population" is a term in evolutionary biology that refers to the decrease in genetic diversity when the population gets very low. The extreme example of "founding population" is a single breeding pair (N=2), such as the founding of Drosophila in Hawaii. In order to lose 50% of genetic diversity, you need to be down to N =10 (Figure 11.6 on page 304 of Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology, 1999). So my figure of N = 50 is probably too high. So why don't you go back and give us the reference (if it is there)? If you had gone over the first paragraph, this talked about the entire Pleistocene Period, going back a million years. It didn't separate the individual glaciations within that time period. Ironically, the Wikipedia article has the Illinoian glaciation as the 2nd to last major glaciation period, from 200-130 kya. The Wurm/Wisconsin glaciation period extended from 100 -12 kya. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation So I'm puzzled why your claims are contradicted by your quoted source of information. This is often the complaint of people who want to challenge the accepted viewpoint. The idea is to cast ad hominem attacks on the accepted viewpoint instead of realizing HOW it got accepted. There are two general steps in scientific/scholarly thinking: 1. Propose an idea. This is imaginative and is not "set". 2. Test the idea against the real world in an attempt to show the idea to be wrong. If you can honestly say you tried your best to show the idea wrong and failed, then and only then can you say the idea has support. And yes, that does end up relying on what has already been learned, since that information becomes the first stop in our attempts to show an idea to be wrong. We test an idea against existing information first. Only if we fail to falsify it there do we go out and deliberately design experiments to test the idea. In graduate school you learn to do "literature searches" and this is the primary purpose of those searches. The reason we concentrate on "scholarly work" is because those are the people who carefully document their attempts to show an idea to be wrong and how they failed. People who just go out and try to find support for their idea are usually ignored because it has been shown that ANY idea, no matter how far-fetched and wrong, can have data that supports it: IF that is what you are looking for. So people looking only to find evidence in favor of their idea can, and usually do, delude themselves. So we, in the interest of time, limit ourselves to people who we know do the work correctly.

But they are REAL professors. It's a matter of naming positions, not deciding credibility. You have time to write all these posts. Surely you have time to include some specifics from the book. You don't have to put all of it up. Just a few examples to back your claims. I find it interesting that you won't even do ONE example.

What do you consider "scientific evidence"? Do you know what that phrase means? You've got 2 different things intertwined here: 1. How to evaluate a hypothesis/theory. 2. How you personally decide whether to believe something. The first is science, the second isn't. Absence of evidence cannot be used to evaluate a hypothesis/theory because it is not evidence of absence. Unless under the very special circumstances where you have searched the entire search space. Yes, they are. Look up "case reports" in the medical literature. They are anecdotes: what those particular doctors saw. In a sense, ALL scientific papers are anecdotes: they are reporting what that particular scientist saw and experienced. For instance, this paper: Lucas, P.A. Chemotactic response of osteoblast-like cells to TGF-beta. Bone, 10: 459-463, 1990. is my experience. Since I am sole author, isn't that an "anecdote". But, even if there are multiple authors, it's still anecdotal, isn't it? Warejcka, D.J., Young, H.E., Bok Y. Lee, and Lucas, P.A. Formation of abdominal adhesions is inhibited by antibodies to transforming growth factor-ß. J. Surg. Res., 65: 135-138, 1996. Is this esentially different than several people testifying to having seen a ghost? What you are saying is that anecdotes are often not reliable. That doesn't make them a logical fallacy. The fallacy is inductivism. Actually, you do have evidence falsifying unicorns and Zeus. You simply haven't thought the matter thru. Not in science. The onus is on everyone (you included) to falsify the existence. If you can't, then that entity stays on the table as a possibility. Think about tachyons. It is in science. What you are using is a falsified philosophy of science called Positivism. In Positivism, entities don't "exist" until you can "verify" them. Positivism fails due to 2 reasons: 1) the heart of your argument -- the idea of verification -- can't be "verified" and 2) the problem of induction means you can't "prove otherwise". I agree that the second and last are true. They have been falsified. The scientific answer to the others is "I don't know." You are attempting to falsely tell us that your personal beliefs are scientific conclusions. 1. The null hypothesis and the research hypothesis are different things. In considering research hypotheses, there is no "null" hypothesis. The null hypothesis is used only in statistics and is "the results are due to chance sampling error". 2. "there is no reasonable scientific evidence that they do" is Positivism. Again, that is a falsified philosophy of science and a falsified way to evaluate hypotheses. Once again I'll post how science works on the question of the existence of entities: "1. Tachyons: can we rule them out. The special theory of relativity has been tested to unprecedented accuracy, and appears unassailable. Yet tachyons are a problem. Though they are allowed by the theory, they bring with them all sorts of unpalatable properties. Physicists would like to rule them out once and for all, but lack a convincing nonexistence proof. Until they construct one, we cannot be sure that a tachyon won't suddenly be discovered. 3. Time travel: just a fanstasy? The investigation of exotic spacetimes that seem to permit travel into the past will remain an active field of research. So far, the loophole in the known laws of physics that permits time travel is very small indeed. Realistic time-travel scenarios are not known at the time of writing. But as with tachyons, in the absence of a no-go proof, the possibility has to stay on the agenda. So long as it does, paradoxes will haunt us.'' Paul Davies, About Time, 1994. I'll ask you: do you believe in tachyons? What's your evidence that tachyons exist? Has a tachyon ever been observed? CAN a tachyon ever be observed? Wouldn't you agree that since "there is no reasonable scientific evidence that they [tachyons] do, proponents of [tachyons] have not met the burden." So why don't physicists absolutely say tachyons don't exist the way you are saying ghosts don't exist? Could it be because physicists are doing science while you are misusing science?

The book was published in 2001. You need some history. Huxley introduced the idea that birds were descended from dinos. Then in the 1920-1980 the idea went out of favor and most paleontologists argued that dinos and birds had a common archosaurian ancestor and the two lineages independently evolved the pelvis and legs that are so similar. The general idea is parallelophyly. In 1982 Ostrom revived the dino-bird lineage. Cladistically, this is the lineage that works. On page 227 Mayr states "the dinosaur origin [of birds] has been proclaimed by the cladists with such vigor that at present it seems to be the most widely accepted explanation of the origin of birds." The alternative archosaurian common ancestor -- and the arguments -- has been most promoted vigorously by Alan Fedducia and colleagues. Mayr is just putting this out as an example of controversy within evolution and the concept of parallelophyly. I'll go down the list. 1. Compsagnathus is very similar to Archie. So similar, in fact, that many fossils of Archie without feather impressions were mistakenly identified as Comsagnathus -- which was a contemporary of Archie. The similarities are not just in the pelvis and legs. http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/archie/dinoarch.htm New fossils have pushed the theropods with feathers back in time: http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html 130 mya theropod with feathers. and this gives a skeleton similar to Archie. Microraptor is also about that age: http://www.dinohunters.com/History/Microraptor.htm Then there are the feathered dinos. Parallelophyly might be able to account for bones, but bones AND feathers? http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/archie/protocaud.html What's worse, there are later birds with the theropod sickle claw. http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/archie/sickle.htm So now parallelophyly has to produce 3 common features with theropod dinos. 2. This is from Feduccia. It was countered here: Science, Volume 280: 355, 17 April 1998. Counting the Fingers of Birds and Dinosaurs 3. Confusciornis -- a contemporary of Archie -- has no teeth at all! Microraptor has the teeth of a theropod: http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/archie/sickle.htm 4. This one seems to just be untrue. 5. A new article by Dial shows just how ground up flight becomes possible. It's really a cool study because it uses contemporary birds -- really chicks. Before the flight feathers come in, flapping the forelimbs lets the birds run up inclined surfaces (like Microraptor chasing insect prey?) up to even over the vertical! Just as the feathers get really good for running up inclined surfaces, that is just the point where the motion starts getting the animal off the ground! Kenneth P.Dial, Wing-Assisted Incline Running and the Evolution of Flight. Science, 299: 402-405, Jan 17, 2003. Now, before I leave this, I want you to notice the general trend of these arguments you found "persuasive". ALL of them are NOT based on evidence supporting the alternative hypothesis: archosaurians with feathers and other bird features. Instead, ALL the arguments are supposed "problems" with the dino-bird theory. At the most, they could be used to question/refute that theory. They do not support an archosaurian ancestry of birds. Arguments 1, 4, and 5 rely on "gaps" in data. Argument 2 and 5 rely on the supposed "impossibility" of something. When your arguments supporting a theory are really on the supposed weakness of a competing theory, then you are in serious trouble. In the last couple of years, the controversy has vanished and the dino-bird theory is accepted. Feduccia seems to have retired and is now Professor Emeritus at UNC. Sometimes "controversies" in science are "settled" simply because the major protagonists for one side retire or die. Since they were the only ones keeping the "controversy" alive, once they leave the scene there is no one to keep up the argument. Or Feduccia may simply have accepted overwhelming data. I can hope it is this one.

What is your hypothesis? Make that first, then you can get an idea of your methods and what you need to have. It sounds like your hypothesis could be: calls of captive blue monkeys are restricted compared to the calls of wild blue monkeys. If that is the case, compare the calls of the two groups and see if the captive monkeys use the full repertoire of calls of the wild monkeys. This is more a quantitative study. Alternatively, the hypothesis could be: captive monkeys have qualitatitively different calls than wild monkeys. In this case, you compare the actual vocalizations and see if the calls used are different in sound produced. OK, so make that a statement, not a question. Hypothesis: captive monkeys do not make as many calls as the wild monkeys. I think you are reaching beyond your available data. Forget the genetic component. You already have too many alternative hypotheses to check. 1. The captive monkeys were born in the zoo and therefore don't know any of the wild calls. You also have to determine whether the monkeys in the zoo were caught in the wild as adults or born in the zoo. 2. The calls in the wild refer to social interactions of an entire troop, but there are only 2 monkeys in the zoo. Thus many of the calls in the wild would not be appropriate. 3. The situations in the zoo are roughly similar to those in the wild: here is food, time to sleep, groom me, there is a predator (even if it is in a cage and can't get to them), etc. So you need to compare situations. Not at all circular. State your hypothesis and your methods. In this case all you want are the recordings of the vocalizations made by the captive monkeys. If possible, it would be good to have a physical context.

When dealing with populations, the larger the scale, the less generalizations are appropriate. That is because, the more people you get, the greater the standard deviation and the wider the bell-shaped curve! Remember, most evolution occurs in small, isolated populations. You almost never see transformation of large populations. That is because gene flow exerts a homogenizing effect and damps differences between sub-populations. They both were farmers -- by their own description! Both introduced new methods of farming. http://www.mountvernon.org/learn/explore_mv/index.cfm/ss/31/ "George Washington played many different roles in the founding of our nation:Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Army, first President , and leader of the Constitutional Convention to name but a few. And it is in these roles that we think of him today. However, if you were to ask him to describe his most important occupation, he would say quite simply that he was a farmer." "Washington was a leader in the development of American agriculture. Washington's passion was his land. He enjoyed the challenge of cultivating crops and learning what techniques and tools worked best for growing things. The same calm determination he showed under fire was evident in his constant experimentation and efforts to improve the productivity of his four working farms." Hmm. An inventor as a farmer, no less! http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2005_summer_fall/agronomist.htm "In his own eyes, Thomas Jefferson considered himself first and always a man of the land. He felt that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God….” ... Therefore, he was in the forefront in experimenting with fertilizers to bring his land back to productivity. Not content to assume that animal manure would revitalize the soil, he undertook tests to determine the exact number of cattle required to fertilize a given area of land. He measured its effectiveness by comparing yields of grain on manured fields with yields from an equal area that was unfertilized." Hey! Jefferson also did inventing as a farmer! Nice try to use their initial occupations to try to avoid that both Washington and Jefferson were farmers, but the Internet has too much real information for that trick to stand unrefuted. This does not follow. For one thing, it is circular reasoning. For another, you are describing technology now. What happens when a computer intelligent even by your standards is made? 3. J Weng, J McClelland, A Pentland, O Sporns, I Stockman, M Sur, E Thelan, Autonomous mental development by robots and animals. Science 291: 599-600, Jan 26 2001. Where is the line between skill and intelligence? Does it take intelligence to play chess or checkers, or is that a skill, too? Dancing is a physical skill! Are you saying Einstein wasn't intelligent since he couldn't dance? And what happens when technology makes robots better? Sorry, but you are wrong there. Several years ago an article in Analog described where a computer composed music in the style of Bach and Mozart. Human musical experts (and audiences in general) were asked to tell the genuine compositions from the computer ones. They couldn't, missing more than 50% of the time. This means that they thought the computer compositions were really done by Mozart or Bach. Stanley Schmidt -- the editor who did the article -- wondered just what you are touching on: that the computer wrote musical compositions that evoked the same stirring of the soul that Bach or Mozart did and concluded that the computer, in this case, was intelligent. I've got the issue around the house somewhere and will try to find it and the exact reference for you. How about inventing? Do you consider that only intelligence can invent?

Google searches are not that reliable if you take ALL the sites that come up. Because you get many, many sites where people have no idea what they are talking about. I used the American Museum of Natural History because they have the data. H. sapiens only goes back 160,000 years, not a million. Again, Wikipedia is not always a reliable source. Anyone can get on and add stuff; what is there doesn't have to be correct. Wiki is a place to start, not finish. As you note, "frogs" doesn't denote a species, but several thousand. However, the species that are alive today are NOT the same species that were alive 250 million years ago. Frogs have changed, both skeletally (that we can see) and probably physiology (which is harder to see via fossils). The evidence is in our genomes. We don't have enough genetic variation in our species. That lack of genetic variation can only be due to a bottleneck in population. And yes, I stated it more definitively than I should have. To be precise: the data indicate that approximately 200,000 years ago the human population went thru a genetic bottleneck where the effective breeding size dropped to a maximum of 50 breeding individuals. 7. A Gibbons, Studying humans -- and their cousins and parasites. Science 292:627-629, April 27, 2001. "The findings confirm what some previous studies had suggested: We are all descended from a small founding population whose offspring multiplied rapidly in the past 200,000 years. The lack of diversity in humans is now so striking that it strongly supports the theory that our ancestors survived a "bottleneck" that quickly winnowed a larger, genetically diverse population into a smaller, homogeneous one. ... Studies have shown for a decade that chimpanzees have three to four times as much genetic diversity in their maternally inheri-ted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as humans do. But are chimpanzees exceptionally diverse, or humans exceptionally alike? No one had sequenced enough DNA from other apes to find out, until a study reported in February in Nature Genetics. Geneticists Svante Pääbo and Henrik Kaessmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology compared a 10,000-base-pair stretch of noncoding DNA on the X chromosome in humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. They found that humans had not only much less genetic variation than all other great apes, but also had relatively few of the mutations that accumulate in noncoding regions of the genome at a relatively steady rate. That's a signal that humans underwent a major expansion starting 190,000 to 160,000 years ago, says Pääbo. ... No, I don't respond with "credentials". What matters is the data -- which is why I sent you to the AMNH site. I only respond when it is suggested I'm not a scientist. I'm sure he was. I was giving the AMNH data and Tattersall is a "splitter". He uses H. ergastor for the species in Africa and the differences seen later in Asia are H. erectus. The Dali cranium is one of the many transitional individuals linking H. ergastor/erectus to H. sapiens. There is also the Tauteval skull that is 200 kya. And the Vertesszollos skull is ~ 400 kya. It has teeth like H. erectus but occipital skull like H. sapiens. The Bouri fossils are ~ 160 kya and are considered the oldest fully H. sapiens. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0611_030611_earliesthuman.html Even here, the skulls still bear some erectus features: "They found that the fossils from Herto are similar to, but do not duplicate, the anatomy of modern humans. Their faces are longer, the skulls more robust, and the brow ridges are larger than those of modern humans, for example. " BTW, there are transitional individuals linking H. sapiens to H. ergastor/erectus to H. habilis to A. afarensis. You can't get a precise number of generations, but the calculation going from 800 kya (where you have the first transitional from erectus to sapiens) to 160kya gives a reasonable estimate. Of course, the situation is even more complicated in that many anthropologists are calling every species in Homo "human". Thus, you see an article that discusses finding H. erectus fossils in Dmansi, Georgia ~ 1.7 mya entitled "Global positioning: new fossils revise the time when humans colonized the earth." Scientific American 283: 23, Aug 2000. More like 2.5 mya. Of course, go back to A. afarensis and you are at ~ 3 mya and then some. Again, Wiki is the place to start, but not the definitive word. Did this calculation reference a scholarly work? As to Ice Age, again use a scholarly work instead of Google. You use Google to try to find .edu or other reliable sites, not treat every site as equally reliable. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/ice_age/ This is from the US Geological Survey, a reliable source that is going to give you accurate data and conclusions.

It looks like several species of snakes do: "A snake’s skeleton is lightweight and highly flexible. Like other reptiles, as well as fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals, snakes are vertebrates—that is, they have a backbone made of small, interconnecting bones called vertebrae. Snakes have an especially large number of vertebrae—all snakes have at least 100 vertebrae, and some species have more than 400. By comparison, humans have just 32 vertebrae. " http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578341/Snake_(reptile).html

Foodchain, your posts are getting more incoherent. In terms of genes, the simplest way to understand Mendelian genetics is one gene = one trait. And so you see that a lot because it is the simplest way to explain it. In reality, most traits are products of more than one gene (polygenic) and most genes participate in more than one trait (pleiotrophy). But that gets very complicated in the equations. The evolution of intelligence has several intermediate stages. There are many species that 1) use tools and a few that 2) make tools. Humans had a small modification: they make tools to make tools. That's a small change but it has huge results: all our technology. Many species communicate and some have a primitive language. However, humans have small modifications: the ability to vocalize better AND the ability to deal with abstract thoughts. This allows communication of technology from generation to generation. Again, small changes with huge effects. Don't be silly. By the time there were "cavemen" -- neandertals and Cro-Magnon (H. sapiens -- us), they were already hairless. Losing hair predated learning to use fire. Again, don't be silly. Or are you just trying to be irritating? Genes (the genotype) determines the phenotype, but it is the phenotype (individual) that is the subject of natural selection. 1. You don't seem to like Dawkins' "selfish gene" theory. You are not alone. Many evolutionary biologists don't like it either. Remember, "selfish gene" is NOT evolution! It appears that you are equating the two. Don't. 2. As to "why did we ever evolve", remember there is no consciousness in evolution. Remember, individuals vary. That is, you and I are not alike either in our genome or our phenotype. Those individuals lucky enough to have the genotype that gave the phenotype that could exploit a new food source did well. It's all about earning a living. Multicelled organisms can earn a living. And, initially, the multicelled organisms could exploit food sources that bacteria could not. Nor did we say all of human evolution was technology. BUT, in answer to your first questions, yes, the abilities of humans you referred to are a product of technology: even the primitive technology of stone tools and fur clothing. After all, our hominid ancestors did not have to kill animals for fur: the stone knives would have been sufficient to skin animals that died from other causes. That technology would allow humans to live in a wide variety of ecosystems and exploit the food sources of each. There has been quite a bit of work looking at the role of diet in human evolution. You can start here: 33. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=0007B7DC-6738-1DC9-AF71809EC588EEDF WR Leonard, Food for thought, Scientific American, Dec. 2002. Role of diet in human evolution. And the answer is: our technology! It's not "hypothetical" at all, but a well known fact. We can see and document how technology changes the environment -- from clear cutting the Amazonian rain forest to acid rain in New England. Shoot, the peppered moth as an example of natural selection is due to human technology: pollution to darken the bark of beech trees and then changes in technology that result in no longer darkening the bark of beech trees! You are being incoherent again. Behavior is part genetic. In humans that part is less than other species, but still the ability to conceptualize making tools to make tools is genetic. And yes, the ability to form precise sounds (necessary for language) is genetic. It involves the FOXP2 gene. We have an allele that allows finer control over the muscles that partake in speech. Other species have different alleles: 32. Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language. Wolfgang Enard, Molly Przeworski, Simon E. Fisher, Cecilia S. L. Lai, Victor Wiebe, Takashi Kitano, Anthony P. Monaco, Svante Pääbo Nature 418, 869 - 872 (22 Aug 2002) Yes, behaviors are determined by the genotype. This has been extensively studied in insects. Behaviors can be changed by changing the genes. For instance, change the gene FRU (fruitless) in male Drosophila and the male courts males instead of females. AH! Now we finally get to it! You don't like evolution! 1. You don't use Ockham's Razor to determine truth. I've done this in several threads and can do it again here if you want. So we don't care if evolution is against Ockham's Razor, because we don't use Ockham's Razor for theory evaluation to begin with! 2. Natural selection generates complexity. Natural selection is an unintelligent process that, if followed, is guaranteed to give you design (and complexity). So the complexity of the designs in living species has come about thru natural selection. 3. The initial "complexity" of the first cells is due to chemistry. 4. That evolution happened and that natural selection produces the designs in plants and animals is no longer open to doubt. You would need new data to cast doubt on evolution; ALL the data we have now says evolution by natural selection accounts for the diversity/complexity of life on the planet. You can't use human experiences to contradict evolution. Our brains have evolved to be so complex that there is plasticity in our behavior. Think of DOS vs Windows. Windows is much more complex that DOS, but it allows a "simpler" interface and much more flexible response to the computer user. So, for humans the genes provide predilection for behavior, but our brains are so complex that we get to choose individual behavior to some extent. Some of our behavior, such as suckling or sexual orientation, is purely due to genetics. But we may have a tendency toward violent behavior from our genes, but we can choose at any given situation to use violence. Or not. It's not debatable that hominids evolved in Africa and then migrated out. The facts don't allow any other interpretation. First H. erectus, then later transitionals between H. erectus and H. sapiens, and finally H. sapiens. Africa leaked tribes of hominids for 1.2 million years or more. We can discuss different hypotheses as to motives for the migrations, but no doubt at all that the migrations occurred. A logical hypothesis is simply population pressure and food sources: move on to the next valley looking for more game or more berries. Oh, evolution is still studied in the wild. But it is also studied in the lab. One doesn't exclude the other. In fact, a few recent studies are using the wild as a laboratory! 1. Case, TJ, Natural selection out on a limb. Nature, 387: 15-16, May 1, 1997. Original paper in the same issue, pp. 70-73 (below). Discusses natural selection in the wild where lizards were introduced to various islands in the Bahamas. Length of limbs varied according to the plant life present on the islands. JB Losos, KI Warheit, TW Schoener, Adaptive differentiation following experimental island colonization in Anolis lizards. Nature, 387: 70-73,1997 (May 1) 1a. JB Losos, Evolution: a lizard's tale. Scientific American 284: 64-69,March 2001. Phenotypic plasticity and evolution of Anolis lizards. 2. Reznick, DN, Shaw, FH, Rodd, FH, and Shaw, RG. Evaluationof the rate of evolution in natural populations of guppies (Poeciliareticulata). Science 275:1934-1937, 1997. The lay article isPredatory-free guppies take an evolutionary leap forward, pg 1880.

But that doesn't distill to ONE method! You admit that. Which means you can't use "the scientific method" as a way to define science. What you have done, SkepticLance, is circular reasoning: "the scientific method is all the methods that scientists have used because the scientific method is what scientists use." Not always. Often hypotheses are just made up. See above for the Nobel Prize winners. Darwin hadn't carried out observations on the subject at hand. Again you are using circular reasoning: we observe nature, therefore hypotheses are from anything we observe because hypotheses come from what we observe. Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection did not come from anything Darwin had observed relating to natural selection. It was only AFTER he formulated the hypothesis that Darwin started making observations about population increase, variability, etc. The observations were made specifically in an attempt to test the hypothesis. The hypothesis was not the digest of observations. It's nice to see you backpeddle, but the fact remains that football and religion are NOT part of science. Never have been. Won't ever be. That's why methodology can't be used to demarcate science from non-science. There are just too many disciplines that use the hypothetico-deductive method that we don't consider to be "science". (BTW, what you are doing is just what you accused religion of doing: not testing with the intent to falsify wrong ideas.) I find this ironic because testing hypotheses with the intent of falsification is pure Popper. You accept this conclusion of Popper, but reject Popper's other conclusion that he made at the same time: "I thought that scientific theories were not the digest of observations, but that they were inventions -- conjectures boldly put forward for trial, to be eliminated if they clashed with observations, with observations which were rarely accidental but as a rule undertaken with the definite intention of testing a theory by obtaining, if possible, a decisive refutation." Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 1963 p 38. So, why the selective use of Popper? Not testing for falsification is also done within science. For instance, we consider Hartle-Hawking-Turok's No Boundary to be part of science. Yet it was specifically formulated to avoid falsification! It's another reason you can't use methodology as a solution to the Demarcation Problem. PLEASE! Read Laudan and others on the subject. Stop trying to invent the wheel. This idea of science as methodology has already been tested, and falsified. It's not pointless. And it relates to your position. You maintained that "facts" were the product of science. I have pointed out that, because of the weird definition you have of "fact", that what you are actually saying is: The product of science is not facts as in observations, but hypotheses/theories that are either 1) falsified or 2) supported. For whatever reason, you won't agree with that. "fact" can be different things, not just one of those proposed. Facts are observations. Facts are also well-supported hypotheses that are used as part of other hypotheses. And your idea that we can separate science from non-science based on methodology is also simplification. It is also falsified by observation. There is no criteria to definitively separate science from non-science (= define science). All the criteria proposed have failed because they 1) exclude what we consider science and/or 2) admit into science what we consider not to be science. The whole idea of demarcating science from non-science got center stage due to creationism. Creationists wanted creationism taught "as science" in public schools. Lawyers decided that the best counter strategy was to show that creationism was not science. Therefore they conned Michael Ruse into offering a set of criteria for science in the 1982 MacLean vs Arkansas trial: "More precisely, the essential characteristics of science are: (1) It is guided by natural law; (2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) It is testable against the empirical world; (4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and (5) It is falsifiable. (Ruse and other science witnesses)." Notice that "scientific method" is not mentioned anywhere here. Yet this is the legal definition of science we have. Laudan and others have taken this to task. They did such a good job of refuting this that Ruse was left with, as his only defense, "the lawyers made me do it!" I'm not kidding. A problem, of course, is that the creationists of the 18th and 19th centuries did use the scientific method. Exactly as you say it should be done. And they succeeded in falsifying creationism. Which brings me to another question for you: what happens to falsified theories. You say science tests with the intent of falsification. So, what do you think happens to falsified hypotheses/theories? Are they part of science or do they somehow cease to be part of science? Actually, I may have misunderstood you. Looking back, it seems as tho you are saying that your insights came in a blinding flash of imagination and were not obvious conclusions from the equations. Many people tend to think that science and art have nothing in common. They think scientists simply go out and gather data and then the hypotheses are obvious conclusions from the hypothesis. That's not so. Both science and art rely on imagination. Did Beethoven's 6th Symphony come from his earlier observations of a day in the country? Yes. But again I'll ask you: did Beethoven hear the music that day? Or did the observations inspire his imagination to write the music? Can imagination be inspired by data? Oh yes. But there is that gap between the previous data and the hypothesis. That "vacuum". Think of hypotheses as virtual particles, which also come from a vacuum.

So, you are going to extrapolate your experiences to everyone? Volume 13, #22 The Scientist November 8, 1999 http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1999/nov/halim1_p1_991108.html Nobel Laureate Ready To Head Back to Lab Author: Nadia S. Halim Date: November 8, 1999 Courtesy of Rockefeller University Nobel laureate Günter Blobel -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- " When Günter Blobel and David Sabatini first proposed the signal hypothesis in 1971, the whole thing was simply ignored. There was not a shred of evidence to support it." They made this one up out of whole cloth. But it turned out to be correct. "The most powerful form of science, then, consists of formulating hypotheses, sometimes by observation and sometimes by intuition, analogy, or other sources of insight that we do not fully understand; and deducing conclusions from these hypotheses that can be tested directly or indirectly by observation or experiment." Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, 1995 ed., pg 169. An eloquent statement of my argument above. The key here is the testing. In order to be good at science, you have to be willing to discard the hypothesis if the evidence is against it.

ROFL! Geoguy, if all you have is ad hominem, then you have nothing. I have been a professional research scientist for 33 years now. I teach philosophy of science to graduate students. I suggest for you, three books: The Philosophy of Science: A Historical Perspective by John Lossee The Arch of Knowledge by David Oldroyd Theories on the Scrapheap by John Lossee. If you want a more technical look, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues edited by Cover and Curd Science is about "truth". That's what we do, try to find the "truth" about how the physical universe works. And some things we know are truth for certain: 1. The earth is not flat. 2. The earth is not the center of the solar system. 3. Each species was not specially created. 4. Proteins are not the hereditary material. What you are doing is mistaking the tentativeness of science for positive statements as equivalent to not knowing ANY truth. Yes, science builds knowledge, but how do we do that? By conclusively falsifying theories! We know those theories are false. IOW, that those theories are false is "true". Now, do we know -- with the same degree of certainty -- that currently valid theories are true? No. Why not? Two reasons: 1. Using deductive logic (the hypothetico-deductive method), you can't ever, strictly speaking, prove anything. No matter how many rocks you drop, there are still an infinite number of rocks yet to drop, and one of them might fall up. (see quote below) 2. It is possible that there is a better theory out there that we haven't thought of yet. What you are doing is focussing only on the positive (currently accepted) statements of science. You are forgetting the falsified theories. Don't feel bad, lots of scientists do the same. "the experimental results may square with the hypothesis, or they may be inconsistent with it. ... but no matter how often the hypothesis is confirmed -- no matter how many apples fall downward instead of upwards --the hypothesis embodying the Newtonian gravitational scheme cannot be said to have been *proved to be true*. Any hypothesis is still sub judice and may conceivably be supplanted by a different hypothesis later on. ...To my mind the great strength of Karl Popper's conception of the scientific process is that it is realistic -- it gives a pretty fair picture of what actually goes on in real-life laboratories." "The Threat and the Glory", by P.B. Medawar (Nobel Prize winner in medicine), HarperCollins, New York, 1990 (original publication 1959). pp 96-101. Hydrogen bonding is very important in interactions. All you have to do is read the first chapter "Water" in Lenninger's Biochemistry to realize that. However, it is not the only complexity within the cells. You also need hydrophobicity. I think you think that hydrophobicity and hydrogen bonding are the same thing, but it is not so. All you have to consider is that those are 2 different means of separating proteins. Lots of big words, but again the data isn't quite accurate. Yes, hydrogen bonding between the bases is responsible for 1) deciding the complementary bases and 2) the triple helix. However, the binding of transcription factors that help unwind DNA for transcription of specific genes involves more than hydrogen bonding. Hydrogen bonding is very weak: ~ 7 kcal/mole. Hydrophobic bonding is a bit stronger and covalent bonding is a LOT stronger. So, changing H bonding isn't going to account for synthesizing an mRNA strand and certainly can't account for putting amino acids together covalently to make a protein. It may be easier, but that doesn't make it more accurate. We want accuracy, not ease. Not by the data I've seen. Please post the papers with this link. What I have seen is that it is the firing of particular neurons, with releases of neurochemicals from vesicles and binding of those to receptors on adjacent neurons. Your imagination can make you "hungry" far faster than you can make mRNA and translate those to proteins. As Swansout has pointed out, you need more than an epidemiological correlation. Correlation is where you start, but in my graduate school statistics class the prof, on the first day, showed the fallacy of equating correlation with causation. You can plot the number of telephone poles/year on the x axis and the incidence of heart attacks/year on the y-axis. And it is a straight line! Perfect correlation. Conclusion: telephone poles cause heart attacks! It's completely wrong, of course. Instead, there is vast literature linking the chemicals in cigarette smoke with transformation of lung epithelial cells both in vitro (culture) and in vivo (animals and humans) to cancer cells. That is your causation. Epidemiological studies can get a handle on causation by doing the appropriate population controls and thus isolating one or more variables as "causes". But the controls have to be there. Not if you do the math correctly. Have you ever done statistics? Your body was ALREADY vulnerable to developing an allergy to peanut butter. The study didn't change your body, but rather found out a bit of how the immune system works. And yes, continued exposure to a foreign protein increases the likliehood that your immune system will make antibodies against it: an allergic reaction. It's not certain when your immune system will do so. You may die of other causes long before that happens. This is data. It then is up to you to decide what you want to do in regard to this risk. How do YOU evaluate your personal risk? If you evaluate it as very low, then you can ignore it. I don't know of any study -- if you read the peer-reviewed paper -- that tells you absolutely what to do. It simply tells you what the consequences are, and the likliehood of thos consquences. Look at it this way: physics tells you that jumping off the Empire State Building will result in a 99.999999+% chance of death. Do you want to discard physics for that? Is physics telling you NOT to jump? NO! Are you complaining about "getting on the cultural bandwagon" of not jumping? Why not? Remember, there may be some weird set of circumstances that would result in your survival from such a fall.

In humans, sex is not primarily for procreation. If it were, then females would only have sex during estrus -- when they could get pregnant. Several mammalian species -- such as cats and dogs -- have this type of sexual drive. When I got my college orientation (way back when), the orientor was trying to ease us into that college was probably a place where we would experiment with sex. He pointed out that, even without birth control, that it took an average of 1,000 sexual acts to produce a pregnancy. Since in Minnesota at the time a baby was being born about every minute, the orientor pointed out that this meant a LOT of sex going on in Minnesota! Human females are very vulnerable during pregnancy and the infants are very helpless for a long time afterwards. For human babies to survive, they need a parent (the male) around to protect the female and to help provide during infancy. The male must have a good (selfish) reason to stick around. Sex is that reason. So human females have evolved to feel sexual desire -- and pleasure during sex -- all the time. The analogy with food fails a bit because you haven't considered the evolutionary history. E.coli, as several have pointed out, "cheating" in a relationship involves a betrayal of trust. The idea that sexual activity outside the relationship is "cheating" is societal because the overwhelming number of people thru history have felt that it was. You and your girlfiend, of course, can make up whatever rules you want to apply to the two of you. As to sexual orientation being all or nothing, the existence of bisexuals shows that it is not completely either-or. The fallacy is thinking that sexual orientation is unigenic or determined by only one gene. Like most traits, sexual orientation is polygenic. So far, I know of 3 papers each identifying a different gene in Drosophila that, when changed, changes sexual orientation. The paper below delves into the theoretical of the situation for humans: 8: Arch Sex Behav 2000 Feb;29(1):1-34 Homosexuality, birth order, and evolution: toward an equilibrium reproductive economics of homosexuality.Miller EM.Department of Economics and Finance, University of New Orleans, Louisiana 70148,USA. emmef@uno.edu "The survival of a human predisposition for homosexuality can be explained by sexual orientation being a polygenetic trait that is influenced by a number of genes. During development these shift male brain development in the female direction. Inheritance of several such alleles produces homosexuality. Single alleles make for greater sensitivity, empathy, tender mindedness, and kindness.These traits make heterosexual carriers of the genes better fathers and more attractive mates. There is a balanced polymorphism in which the feminizing effect of these alleles in heterosexuals offsets the adverse effects (onreproductive success) of these alleles' contribution to homosexuality. A similar effect probably occurs for genes that can produce lesbianism in females. The whole system survives because it serves to provide a high degree of variability among the personalities of offspring, providing the genotype with diversification and reducing competition among offspring for the same niches. An allele with a large effect can survive in these circumstances in males, but it is less likely to survive in females. The birth order effect on homosexuality is probably a by-product of a biological mechanism that shifts personalities more in the feminine direction in the later born sons, reducing the probability of these sons engaging in unproductive competition with each other."

Yeah. I've been reading this junk so long that I read right over that gaff! LIke you are going to have "a progenitor" of both bunnies and galaxies!

That's 6-7 million years ago. By 3 million years ago, Australopithecus was already in existence. http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/humanorigins/ H. erectus is not that old and it lasted much longer. H erectus fossils dating to 30,000 years ago have been found in Indonesia. 1. "Modern man" is Homo sapiens (HS). YOU are Homo sapiens. 2. There are several transitional fossils linking H. erectus to H. sapiens from about 800,000 years ago to about 160,000 years ago, when the oldest completely H. sapiens skull dates from (and even these Bouri skulls have some residual erectus features). 1. You don't know the sexual rules of Sapiens society. Chimps regulate sex. 2. Generation time is limited to when individuals reach sexual maturity. In humans, girls cannot conceive until puberty, which is about 12-14 years (as CDarwin noted). So, human generation times cannot be shorter than about 14 years. Since the average lifespan was about 30 years, an average generation time of 20 years for H. sapiens is reasonable. Divide 160,000 years by 20 years gives you 8,000 generations since H. sapiens completely evolved from H. erectus. 3. The transitional time between H. erectus and H. sapiens was at least (800,000-160,000)/20 = 32,000 generations. The data indicates that the population went thru a bottleneck about 100,000 years ago when there were less than 50 breeding pairs of H. sapiens. Thus, we have a lot less genetic diversity than any other primate. Frogs are NOT a species. Frogs are an Order in the Class Amphibia. Thus "frog" is a group of hundreds of living and extinct species. And frogs have changed quite a bit since the Order first evolved.

Because that is when I stopped listening to him as a waste of time. Sigh. Oil does not contain water. It is liquid hydrocarbons. Coal is solid hydrocarbons. It's not "being stupid". He was using a tactic that (at least) was commonly used by him: used a mistaken fact as support of an argument. Thus, he claims to base his arguments on "fact", but the facts are lies. 1. He claimed the Titanic ran on oil. 2. When caught in that, he simply claimed that coal and oil were the same thing in regard to interaction with water. You know very well they are not. Coal is a solid and does not dissolve or form droplets in water. It is like a rock -- just sits there. In contrast, oil mixes with water, moves, and ends up coating shorelines and organisms. Since you weren't listening -- by your own admission -- then you don't "know" that he spent 30 minutues trying to dig himself out. And no, he didn't. He had finished the story by the time the e-mails got there. So we got a one line dismissal of refutation of the basis of his argument and then moved on to the next item on his agenda. But saying what you say isn't enough, is it? After all, I can say what you say but then go on to show what you say to be contrary to facts and reality. In that case, I'm not "validating" you anymore, am I? No, what Rush does is 1) say what you feel, but then 2) tells you that you are correct. And that is why you like him. Sorry, but you swallowed another Rush lie here. "Some greenhouse gases (most of the halocarbons, for example) have no natural source." The Sciam article I want you to read. "Furthermore the chemical agents that DO eat up the ozone layer have been clearly detected. Their path of destruction is now so well demonstrated that even the companies that make those chemicals believe the evidence. Ozone depletion is caused by chlorine compounds called CFCs produced and emitted by human beings -- Freons in our cooling systems, gases in our insulating foams, solvents in our electronics factories." http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn504ozoneed So, look at your argument He lied about fluorocarbons coming from volcanoes. Volcanoes, BTW, spew chlorine, not fluorine! So, in the same breath that you say you view Rush's "factoids" critically, you have uncritically accepted a fact that is a lie. Good work! Irony, then, that you heard the term from a man who is dedicated to manipulating you so that you don't think critically. As you said You are being a great case study of how people deny science. Now you are attacking how science works. Notice the Rushoid: changing "falsify" to "interpret". Yes, data does falsify. Remember the hypothetico-deductive method used by science: 1. Form a hypothesis. 2. Deduce consequences (observations/data) from the hypothesis if it is true. 3. Look for the consequences. 4. If the consequences are opposite of what the hypothesis predicts, the hypothesis is false. This goes back to "true statements cannot have false consequences". Data are the consequences. So we don't need "interpretation". First, let's have you document those "3 previous scientifically prophesied climate catastrophies". Since you have demonstrated that you get your "facts" from Limbaugh, have you independently documented them? Second, what more "convincing consensus" do you need? You notice that not every scientists' hand is up on evolution, so do you advocate that approach to evolution, too? So you would advocate "teach the controversy" in public schools, wouldn't you? C'mon, be consistent here. That's another tactic. Trying to claim that the issue is not settled when it is. Up above you said Here you think you are competent. So where did you lose that competence? Which one is in the peer-reviewed literature? So you really can't, or won't? Why is it that you don't accept the skeptic when they provide their own data on creationism? You haven't posted any contrary data. Your only "data" has been 3 supposed previous failed predictions. ROFL! And yet another classic tactic: make a strawman! Since no one is saying we'll "ignite in a ball of fire in 10 years" and the data is against it, you have set up a situation where "it's all BS" is much more likely! Nice deception and lawyering. Rush would be proud. You've learned well, his padawan apprentice.

I can think of a reason. It is known the cigarette smoke permeates fabric and wood, leaving a smell behind. Smokers don't notice because you are used to the smell. To non-smokers, it is as bad as if you didn't bathe. The owner can have as a reason that they don't want the property devalued by being permeated with the smell of cigarette smoke. The same argument would be used against your urinating, defecating, or spraying skunk scent in there. And remember, it's not YOUR potting shed. You are only renting. Owners do have the right to impose restrictions on the use of rental property. After all, if you lend your car, part of the unspoken agreement is that the lendee isn't going to do anything to damage it. Now, if you owned your house and the city council banned smoking there, they would be in the wrong. Now, can we get back to the thread? I have sympathy for smokers, since nicotine is as addictive as heroin and we have made tobacco use legal. However, I think it silly to try to say smokers are "discriminated" against in the same way homosexuals are. Apples and oranges.