lucaspa

Not good enough. What we have been taught is based on DATA. In science, trust in a person's good intentions is NEVER enough. What matters, and ONLY what matters, is the DATA. So far, what you said not only has no data, but is contradicted by the data. Not really. Well, in the sense that no one is going to censor you and keep you from posting that sentence, yes, you are "allowed" to say it. But you are NOT "allowed" that we must take the statement seriously and as an accurate description of the universe. In order to do that, you must provide data. Bare assertions don't work in science. "Dark energy" is simply a shorthand name given to the OBSERVATION of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Some "repulsive" force that is causing the expansion. And yes, the data is irrefutable that the expansion is accelerating: 7. J Glanz, Exploding stars point to a universal repulsive force. Science 279:651-652, 30 Jan. 1998. New data indicates the cosmological constant is back. 7a. J Glanz, No backing off from the accelerating universe. Science 282: 1249-1250, Nov. 13, 1998. As the title says, 2 independent and competing groups continue to get data that agrees. 8. G Tarke and S.P. Swordy, Cosmic Antimatter. Scientific American, 278(4): 36-41, April 1998. 10. CJ Hogan, RP Kirshner, and NB Suntzeff, Surveying space-time with supernovae. Scientific American, 280: 46-51, Jan. 1999. Studies indicate that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating. 11. LM Krauss, Cosmological antigravity. Scientific American, 280: 52-61, Jan. 1999. discusses cosmological constant to explain accelerating expansion.

What you "think" doesn't matter. It is what the data says that matters. As it happens, the data is very clear that the universe is: 1. Expanding. 2. The rate of expansion is accelerating, or speeding up. 3. Temperature is constant thru the vacuum of space. Remember, temperature is a measurement of the motion of molecules. Therefore the universe itself doesn't have a temperature. Separate entities within the universe have different temperatures. For instance, the cosmic microwave background radiation is about 3.7 degrees K. But our sun is several million degrees K. 4. As the universe expands -- as spacetime increases --then yes, the density of matter in the universe decreases. This, however, is NOT the same as "decompressing". However, all of this negates your idea of "falling into a black hole at the center of the universe". You mention "my theory". With all respect, this is not the place to promote your theory. What you need to do is write it up for publication and then try to submit it to a physics journal. There it will be peer-reviewed by the experts in the field. They will either find merit in it or show up the flaws, either one much better than we amateurs can do. If your theory holds up to peer-review, then fine. If not, too bad. But in either case arguing with us is a waste of your time; we are not the ones you have to convince in order to get your theory accepted.

Now you know something that does not have a "center" -- the universe. I think you would find this article very helpful: 7. Lineweaver CH and Davis TM Misconceptions about the Big Bang, Scientific American 36-45 March 2005. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147

http://www.fws.gov/news/newsreleases/r1/D7DABD7B-442E-4C09-834A61126A5C25F4.html ""These species are especially vulnerable to extinction due to loss of habitat, their limited range, and the small populations that currently exist," said Steve Thompson, manager of the Service’s California/Nevada Operations Office. ... Habitat loss, invasive nonnative plant species, and residential and commercial developments are major factors contributing to the decline of these species. " http://www.hear.org/pier/pdf/nrcs_plant_guide__triadica_sebifera.pdf "Attwater’s prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri), once abundant in the coastal prairie of Texas and Louisiana, is near extinction due to loss of habitat." http://www.cincikillies.org/Archive_Cons.htm "According to Wolfgang Eberl, Aphyosemion elberti (bualanum) N'tui is extinct due to land clearing, although it is being maintained within the hobby. The same is true of several of the Cynolebias species from Uruguay (Valizas), which are no longer found in the wild, including C. cheradophilius, C. viarius, C. melanotaenia and C. luteoflammumlatus." http://content.class.com/ewew_content/bio1b_v2/02pla/0202/0202_0403.htm "Horsetails belong to the subphylum Sphenopsida. They are much tougher and harsher plants than ferns, yet only about 40 species remain because many varieties have become extinct due to loss of habitat." http://quakeinfo.ucsd.edu/~gabi/erth15-05/Lecture27.html "most birds probably go extinct due to loss of habitat (e.g. Calfornia Gnatcatcher, Kauai O'o) " http://www.stors.tas.gov.au/item/stors/7b1a99a1-b1c5-3568-3d36... http://www.stors.tas.gov.au/item/stors/7b1a99a1-b1c5-3568-3d36-1ace96793eeb/1/ferns006.html "Populations of B. cartilagineum at Georges Bay, Glengarry and at Tin Hut Creek are now presumed extinct due to loss of habitat through logging"

SkepticLance, I have to wonder why YOU didn't do any research on specific examples of extinction due to habitat loss. You keep talking about "anyone could come up with". Why are you putting the responsibility on us? It's also YOUR responsibility to look for contrary data. Now, I immediately went to PubMed and entered the search "habitat, loss, cause, extinction" and got several papers. I am posting a few of them. Be sure to look at the reference list for the scientific articles to due the track back to specific examples. One thing to also consider: Lomborg may have created a strawman by saying "only" due to loss of habitat. Most extinctions involve a number of factors, of which loss of habitat is one. Hunting is also a major one. I picked only contemporary examples, but paleontology is full of examples where there was massive lost of habitat -- such as the desertification at the end of the Permian. 1. http://171.66.122.165/cgi/content/full/99/17/11229 This one you must go to. It is a PNAS article. Gives mathematical treatment of species exinction due to loss of habitat. 2. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/92/20/9343 4 species of bird lost thru habitat destruction of forests. 3. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 266 (5): 98-104 MAY 1992 4. http://www.wolfmoonpress.com/Books/lordgodbird.htm 5: J Anim Ecol. 2007 May;76(3):568-79. Changes in landscape composition influence the decline of a threatened woodland caribou population. Wittmer HU, McLellan BN, Serrouya R, Apps CD. Agroecology, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, University of British Columbia, 2357 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. huwittmer@ucdavis.edu 1. Large-scale habitat loss is frequently identified with loss of biodiversity, but examples of the direct effect of habitat alterations on changes in vital rates remain rare. Quantifying and understanding the relationship between habitat composition and changes in vital rates, however, is essential for the development of effective conservation strategies. 2. It has been suggested that the decline of woodland caribou Rangifer tarandus caribou populations in North America is precipitated by timber harvesting that creates landscapes of early seral forests. Such habitat changes have altered the predator-prey system resulting in asymmetric predation, where predators are maintained by alternative prey (i.e. apparent competition). However, a direct link between habitat condition and caribou population declines has not been documented. 3. We estimated survival probabilities for the threatened arboreal lichen-feeding ecotype of woodland caribou in British Columbia, Canada, at two different spatial scales. At the broader scale, observed variation in adult female survival rates among 10 distinct populations (range = 0.67-0.93) was best explained by variation in the amount of early seral stands within population ranges and population density. At the finer scale, home ranges of caribou killed by predators had lower proportions of old forest and more mid-aged forest as compared with multi-annual home ranges where caribou were alive. 4. These results are consistent with predictions from the apparent competition hypothesis and quantify direct fitness consequences for caribou following habitat alterations. We conclude that apparent competition can cause rapid population declines and even extinction where changes in species composition occur following large scale habitat change. 6: J. Theor. Biol. 2004 Oct 7;230(3):351-8. Who dominates whom in the ecosystem? Energy flow bottlenecks and cascading extinctions. Allesina S, Bodini A. Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Parma, Viale delle Scienze, 11/A, 43100, Italy. sallesina@nemo.unipr.it In this paper, we investigate the problem of secondary extinction in food webs through the use of dominator trees, network topological structures that reduce food webs to linear pathways that are essential for energy delivery. Each species along these chains is responsible for passing energy to the taxa that follow it, and, as such, it is indispensable for their survival; because of this it is said to dominate them. The higher the number of species a node dominates, the greater the impact resulting from its removal. By computing dominator trees for 13 well-studied food webs we obtained for each of them the number of nodes dominated by a single species and the number of nodes that dominate each species. We illustrate the procedure for the Grassland Ecosystem showing the potential of this method for identifying species that play a major role in energy delivery and are likely to cause the greatest damage if removed. Finally, by means of two indices that measure error and attack sensitivity, we confirm a previous hypothesis that food webs are very robust to random loss of species but very fragile to the selective loss of the hubs. 1: Sun. 1992 Apr 28;:11A. The mushroom message. Zimmerman M. A basic law of ecology is that living things are tightly dependent on one another, often in ways that are not easy to imagine. Who, for example, would have predicted that when the last dodo was killed in 1675, that death would lead to the slow extermination of the tambalocoque tree, whose fruits germinate only after passing through the dodo's digestive system? Now no natural strands of tambalocoque younger than 300 years can be found. Or who would have predicted that clear-cutting tropical rainforests would so significantly alter local weather patterns that the tropical rainforest biome itself and its vast diversity of life might not survive? I put this one up because, for the tree, there is a "loss of habitat". Not, in this case specific room to grow, but an essential part of the ecosystem.

Remember, you can ALWAYS find support for a theory, if that is what you are looking for. It looks like Lomborg did just that. I would start here: 1: Kareiva P. Ecology: compensating for extinction. Curr Biol. 2004 Aug 10;14(15):R627-8. Review. PMID: 15296781 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 2: Borrvall C, Ebenman B. Early onset of secondary extinctions in ecological communities following the loss of top predators. Ecol Lett. 2006 Apr;9(4):435-42. PMID: 16623729 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 3: Eklof A, Ebenman B. Species loss and secondary extinctions in simple and complex model communities. J Anim Ecol. 2006 Jan;75(1):239-46.

By noting that the required intelligence requires a large and complex brain in order to contemplate abstract thought. Dogs don't have the required brain. Which means 2 things: 1. You don't know dogs have souls, because the only reason we think humans have souls is because humans can discuss the subject with other humans. As you stated "I believe that all animals have souls." That's fine. You have stated a belief. But you can't go from that belief to taking it as a factual premise without the data. And, as you admit, you can't get the data! 2. My point wasn't only about "verbalizing thought", but having the ability to form abstract thoughts to begin with. Rhe only reason we even consider that babies have souls is because, as adults, we have the ability to formulate and communicate (verbalize) abstract thought. Dogs don't have that ability as adults. Therefore you have no means of determining whether dogs have souls.

Yes, they do. Because issues on the philosophy of science show up on other forums. For instance, in the Medicine forum now was a thread on Occam's Razor. That's philosophy of science -- theory evaluation. That's because the argument was in the next paragraph! You might try reading the entire post and argument next time before you reply.

No impact on the fact that ERV's falsify creationism and strongly support evolution. The main argument about ERVs was NOT that they were "random", but rather, if they were random or not, then there should be no pattern of relatedness to them. Think about this. If the insertion is not random but targets specific areas of the DNA, then every species with those areas should have the ERV. The problem is that this isn't what we see. Gorillas have some ERVs in common with us and chimps, from when the common ancestor was targeted. BUT, they don't have others even when the DNA area is the same. Yet your hypothesis says that they should, because the virus should put the ERV in every species where there is that sequence. Now, if the insertion is random and species are not related thru common ancestry, then there also should be no pattern of relatedness.

Bojowald is proposing a hypothesis to explain the positive cosmological constant. There are other hypotheses out there. Not surprisingly, Bojowald (the inventor and chief advocate of Loop Quantum Cosmology) thinks LQC provides such a hypothesis. Martin, I've notice a tendency of you to cheerlead Bojowald before. I caution against it. LQC is ONE of the hypotheses being proposed. Sit back, relax, and exercise a bit of patience. Wait to see what the results of the tests are. If you wanted to put this out as FYI, then you should have waited until you read the remaining articles and then put a list of the proposed hypotheses.

The cosmological constant is NOT in quantum mechanics. It's in Einstein's theories of Relativity. Please read my previous post about the history.

You obviously didn't read my post giving the history of this. We become involved in the cosmological constant because of the data. Look at the last paragraph: "Let's put this in historical context. When Einstein did the Relativity equations, it was thought that the universe was static. Since gravity was a solely attractive force, the equations needed lambda (the cosmological constant) as a positive quantity to counter the force of gravity and keep the universe from collapsing. The other aspects and predictions of Relativity were so strongly supported that this "fudge factor" was accepted. In the 1920s it was found that the universe was NOT static, but expanding. Therefore the cosmological constant was no longer needed in the equations and people just set it = 0. This is when Einstein called it a "blunder". It was thought that the expansion came from the Big Bang and was slowing as gravity countered the original expansion. The question was whether there was enough matter to generate enough gravity to halt the expansion or not. HOWEVER, starting in 1998 data started coming in that showed that the expansion was accelerating. This meant that the cosmological constant was not zero and NOT a "blunder", but actually represented a real phenomenon. For the wrong reasons, Einstein got it right."

Not the people, CELLS within the people. A CELL has to have a large number of mutations to be a cancer cell. No, it's not. You don't inherit colon cancer from your parents. What you inherent are alleles that make it easier for a cell to become cancerous. Not everyone with a parent with colon cancer gets it.

And I was responding to this statment of yours: "the more a cell replicates the more chance of a self mutation which is not corrected by intrinsic DNA proofreading mechanisms." Your response was another misstatement. Just having a mutation does not automatically mean "cancer". Which is what my post was about.

And that is what started the issue: clear examples of abuse. Which were also bad science. The classic example was the video of a research assistant waving a blowtorch over an anesthetized pig in order, supposedly, to study burns. This was stupid as science because the burn was going to vary widely from animal to animal as the researcher varied the number of passes, the width of the passes, and the distance from the skin. Thus the variations from animal to animal were going to overwhelm any consistencies about what happened with a burn. A much better way would be to heat a metal block to a constant temperature and then place it on the skin for a defined length of time. The area and severity of the burn would have been clearly defined. Anyone could then have understood the science involved. But the video just looked like sadism on the part of the scientists.

No. Uncertainty in quantum mechanics and decoherence (Schrodinger's Cat) are 2 different things: 1. Uncertainty refers to the inability to know exactly BOTH parameters of an intertwined pair of parameters, such as the position and momentum of an electron. The more you know the position, the less you know about the momentum, and vice versa. 2. Dechoherence is when an object exists in two states at the same time. That is, the cat is BOTH dead and alive at the same time and the cat turns into one or the other upon observation. What you have with the comedian is neither of these. Instead, you have "uncertainty" in the common usage that you simply don't know what the results of the experiment are going to be before you perform it. The joke and the audience response is the experiment.

In all fairness, reasonable rational political discourse has been killed by creationists and the Republican conservatives: Gingerich, Limbaugh, Shaun Hannity, etc. What the Republicans have shown over the last 20 years is that people don't respond to reason. Instead, the best way to get your message across and win votes is to lie and use fallacious arguments. In order to survive, people opposing the conservative agenda have had to adopt the same tactics. I dislike it too, but to point only to "the left" and ignore the use of the same tactic by the right is not reasonable. If you think slippery slope is fallacious, then you must (especially in a science forum) object to EVERY use of the argument. But, quite frankly, if you look at totalitarian governments generally, using an external enemy has been a common, and successful tactic to remove personal liberty. Historically, there is considerable evidence that, indeed, the trend does continue, manipulated by people who want power, until you have a totalitarian state. Look at Stalin, the Caesars, Khomeni (the USA was the outside threat), Pinochet, Castro, etc. Historically, the way to undermine a democracy has been the path that is being objected to. In the name of getting "security", you lose freedom. You can be perfectly safe or you can be free. You can't be both at the same time.

There are very low populated islands in Puget Sound and off the coast of Maine ... It would be easy to buy the people out. Of course, you could always refurbish Alcatraz and put several thousand there. Yes, but we already have problems trying to figure out what to do with pedophiles. New York wants to confine them to mental hospitals for life. Is that any different than giving them a geographical location such as an island? Isolation, yes. Exterminate, no. Of course, notice that I am not talking about a separate country for pedophiles, but an isolated area within a country. The verses can be interpreted that way, but it is not mandatory to interpret them that way and that interpretation may be inaccurate. http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibl.htm

In which case the teenage girls at the charity carwash are not against nature, since they are past the age of menarch and can bear kids.

No, lusting is fine. And admiring the female form is fine. However, actually having sex with an underage teenage girl is wrong. The difference between thoughts and actions. And yes, if a pedophile limits himself/herself to thoughts alone, then there is no crime. The problem is that evidence is accruing that pedophiles cannot exercise control and refrain from acting. However, I do think you have a point: there is too much exploitation of teenage girls for lusting.

The scientific data indicates that sexual orientation is genetic and can't be changed. That's not true. There is mounting evidence that pedophilia is also genetic and can't be changed. In New York, the Democratic legislature and governor are considering confining pedophiles to pyschiatric hospitals after release from prison. The "difference" in attitudes has a common root: personal liberty. As long as a person's sexual activity is between 2 consenting adults, we have no rationale for forcing heterosexuality on them. OTOH, once a person has served his time in prison (for raping a child), then their liberty must be restored. Since pedophilia has been looked at as a crime and therefore choice, rehabilitation is used like it is with all other crimes. The problem is that the data is increasingly showing that pedophilia is inherent and rehab fails. This presents everyone -- Republicans and Democrats -- with a new problem in balancing personal liberty in the absence of a crime vs safety of the public in the near certainty that the pedophile will commit another crime.

Very bad. BUT, the terrible consequences are not going to stop the failure nor can they be used to keep troops in Iraq. We have two separate issues: 1. Whether we can succeed in Iraq. 2. The consequences if we fail. I don't see how we can succeed in Iraq. Nothing our brave and dedicated people in the military can do will stop the failure. The failure is one at the NCA who ordered the invasion in the first place. At some point you have to decide not to reinforce and continue failure. There are some battles that simply can't be won and you have to quit and face the consequences.

For coma: http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch212/ch212a.html?qt=coma&alt=sh Brain death: http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch212/ch212d.html Compare and contrast for yourself.

And why didn't the OP think of this?

What you have is that this is no longer Shroedinger's Cat. Since you are looking at the cat, you do know whether it is dead or alive. Alive, in this case. "know the velocity of the cat though" is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, not Schroedinger's Cat. However, scientists have constructed a molecular version of Schroedinger's Cat and observed it with a quantum "mouse". It does turn out that the "cat" IS both dead and alive at the same time. Eventually, however, without observation, the waveform does collapse. 5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996. 6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence.