lucaspa

There isn't that much more variety gained from different mates. The reason the founder effect works (where 2 individuals are able to found an entirely new, viable population) is that over 75% percent of the genetic variability in the species is present in the 2 individuals. You are going to get variety in the kids by recombination. Bottom line, the beneficial alleles is just as likely to come out with multiple kids by the same mate as multiple kids by different mates. Also, remember, differential reproduction is the number of kids that SURVIVE to adulthood. Especially in humans, infants are extremely vulnerable. Having kids by one mate whom you stick to and protect the kids is more likely to result in adults than having kids by lots of women who you then abandon both them and the kids. Remember, we are talking our evolutionary history, where survival is constantly on a knife edge from trying to find food and avoiding predators without adequate weapons. We have had a myth in our society that males have the evolutionary drive to have sex with lots of women while women have the evolutionary drive to have sex with only one male so that he will stick around and help with the kids. Looked at carefully, this myth doesn't jive with evolution. The tendency of men to avoid settling down may be more cultural than evolution. Or, if from evolution, it may stem from having an alpha male that tries to monopolize the women. This happens in chimps. BUT, most of the kids are not descended from the alpha male. This means that the other males are sneaking off with the females to have sex. In order for this to work for the subordinate males, the subordinate males must want to mate with any of the females that will take them. If they stick to just one female, the alpha male would notice and then drive the subordinate from the group.

It's a question whether ants are a superorganism. http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Superorganism Being social doesn't necessarily mean being related. In the case of ants, all the worker ants are sisters. Thus they share half of their alleles. So if a worker ant sacrifices for the colony and saves more than 2 of its sisters, it is saving more copies of its alleles that is lost by the sacrifice of the individual. That's the calculation being run by Wilson and others looking at "altruism" as being evolutionarily sound. Since humans evolved in small extended family groups, the individuals in the group are either parents, grandparents, uncles/aunts, nieces/aunts, cousins, etc. That means that they have more or less the same alleles you do. So saving the group means saving more copies of your alleles than is lost by losing you. No one does. It's very difficult to separate behaviors that are hard-wired by evolution from those that are cultural. It's an area of very active research and even more active argument. I've also urged caution, but the work with altruism is pretty solid. We can confidently (provisionally) accept that altruism is a product of natural selection. Is their evolutionary causality at all? Evolutionary psychology would start by looking to see if dreams about losing homework are constant across all cultures. I suspect they are not. But their may be fear dreams that are analogous in all cultures. But then there has to be a reasonable selective advantage to such dreams. I can't think of one at the moment. Once you have a reasonable selective advantage, you have to do some calculations using the mathematics of population genetics to confirm that such a trait could propagate thru the population.

It's worse than that. One of the cancer cells would have a different way of inducing angiogenesis than what Avastin targets. So the tumor would still get angiogenesis as all the cancer cells are descended from the cell that has a different way of inducing angiogenesis. That's different. Surgery is the one way you can get a "cure". Because, unless the tumor has metastasized, you can remove ALL the cancer cells. And the idea behind this is that it is unlikely that a single cell will be resistant to BOTH radiation AND chemotherapy. Therefore the radiation kills the cancer cells the chemotherapy doesn't and vice versa. It is oncologists finally recognizing that they are dealing with a Darwinian system. 1. If the cancer has gotten to the stage that you notice it clinically, it has already gotten a mechanism to avoid the immune system. 2. Cancer cells have mutated proteins. Proteins are constantly being cleaved in lysosomes and then the fragments (smaller peptides) are cycled to the cell surface on the major histocompatibility complexes. The immune cells then "look" at these fragments. They have gotten acclimated to normal fragments and these fragments from normal cells are recognized as "self". But the abnormal fragments from cancer cells look different and the immune system says these are "not self" and starts to destroy them. So treatments based on immunotherapy are designed to boost the immune system so that it is better at recognizing the cancer cells as "non-self". 3. The problem is that a few of the cancer cells are going to be different and still be able to fool the boosted immune system that they are "self" and not be destroyed. Then they multiply and now all the cancer cells are descended from these. And the cancer is back -- all from the few cells that were able to survive the treatment.

Cancer cells vary. No cancer cell is exactly like any other cancer cell within the same tumor. And by the time a cancer become noticeable clinically, there are at least a billion cancer cells! So, by accident, one or a few of the cancer cells are going to have a variation that makes them resistant to the treatment. Kill off all the other cells by the treatment, and then the resistant ones divide and pass their resistance to the daughter cells by inheritance. So the cancer grows back, only this time the cancer is composed of cells that are resistant to the treatment.

There's plenty of supporting evidence. It's still not "proof". You can't "prove" anything either by induction or deduction. You can disprove by deduction. But, if you work in a lab, then you have access to PubMed. Do your own search! Be a competent lab worker.

But you can't, because they are another species snd not sentient. You are projecting human emotions and ideas onto another species -- saying that they "think" and "feel" the same as you. The Golden Rule applies among humans, not between species. As I noted, male rats are quite capable of looking at newborn rat pups as a tasty snack. Should we put your projection in reverse? If a rat eats its newborn and likes it, why shouldn't you? Put yourself in their shoes and go out and eat babies!

Because "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" applies and using them as experimental subjects without their consent violates that. What if someone would say "how about everyone who uses "GammaMambo" as their screen name", why not?

When you have a question like this, the place for you to go is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi This is database of the National Library of Medicine or PubMed. Enter your search terms. If you want to use the term "OR", you can simply use a comma. So, for you I would input "hydrazine, sulfate, cancer" and see what comes up. I couldn't resist doing that and found this article at #11: http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/cgi/content/full/54/2/110 You'll want to read it. BTW, science doesn't deal in "Proof". Please stop using that word. What you are looking for are studies that tested the hypothesis that hydrazine sulfate is effective in treating cancer. What you will get are studies that either falsify/refute the hypothesis or studies that support it (by failing to falsify it). You won't EVER get "proof", and certainly not with a capital "P".

Penguin, this goes back to Mokele's post: "Second, in order for it to be a relevant issue, human and animal life would have to be of equal moral value. While a few people think this is the case, most would not consider it to be so, for both superficial and logical reasons." You are equating rats and humans. Also, you are ascribing human feelings to rats: " SO tell me this is u have a family for say 2 chidren and a beautiful wife, and u got abbductied. When u got to the place that the kidnappers took u to, it was beautiful almost like a 5 star hotel. They gave u everything...Would u chose that over ur family, u see what im saying the rats dont want luxery they want FREEDOM!" This is pure projection: projecting human feelings and ideals onto rats. It's pure emotion on your part. Since this is a science forum, you need to demonstrate that rats even have a concept of "freedom" or a concept of the family attachment you ascribe to them. I know from experience that the family attachment doesn't apply. No male rat takes any interest in the kids. In fact, you have to remove the male before the pups are born because the father will eat them. To a male rat, pups are simply a tasty snack. With your premises in error, your logic falls apart.

As Mokele has been trying to point out, there is not a solid line between "sole purpose of knowledge" and "application". When scientists say "pure knowledge" what that really means is: "we don't know of any application right now and can't see any any application right now." It's a statement of about the state of the scientists' imagination and knowledge, not about whether there ever will be applications or not. We all agree on the last point: humans have to make a free and informed decision to participate in experiments. The Nazis obviously didn't do this, so they are outside the ethics. As Mokele said, they went for applied knowledge. 1. Your opinion is not backed by the data. In my work, there is no other way to see if regeneration happens but to use animals. 2. You have to define "suffer". In our experiments, we treat the animals with the same analgesics as we would humans. Does this mean the animals "suffer". And yes, eventually the animals are euthanized. But then, eventually humans die. The protocols specified by the FDA as permissible for euthanasia are that they are as painless as possible for the animal. You've never been involved with and IACUC committee or had to submit a protocol for research involving animals, have you? Part of the submission is specifically demonstrating that there are NO alternatives to the use of animals.

There is a REALLY bad assumption in the work: that switching off mitochondria is what makes cancer cells "immortal". There is growing evidence that cancers arise from adult stem cells. Some types of those cells already are immortal. There is also evidence from U of Michigan that 95% of cancer cells are partially differentiated and don't proliferate. Instead, it is the 5% of "cancer stem cells" that do the dividing. So I can see the rationale that cancer cells in the interior of a tumor switch to glycolysis. This may delay apoptosis. BUT, it isn't what made them immortal. So giving the drug may kill the 95% of the non-stem cancer cells, but it will leave 5% or less of the cells alive. And the cancer returns.

I've been down this road before. In the 1980s there were 2 "cures" for cancer. They involved the natural killer cells. In one treatment, blood was ultrafiltered to remove soluble receptors to TNF (tumor necrosis factor) put out by the cancer cells that interferred with activating the natural killer (NK) cells. The results were VERY dramatic. In one example, a person with 10 different lesions of lung cancer -- spread between both lungs -- was "cured". The cancer disappeared from the MRI. The problem was the cancer ALWAYS came back. The problem is that the treatments never kill EVERY cancer cell. Cancer cells vary from cell to cell. And there are billions of cells. So, for any single treatment, the odds are that at least ONE cell will be resistant or immune. So you kill all the other cancer cells. That one cancer cell simply multiplies and makes the cancer all over again. Now the treatment doesn't work because ALL the cells are resistant. It's natural selection at work. With a vengeance. So, this isn't "convincing" until we have the clinical trials AND a 10 year follow-up. My bet (and I would like to be wrong), is that the initial results will be astounding -- then the patients will have the cancer back in 5 years and die.

Yes, it is "quite a lot". But it's even a long way from a majority. The cancer rate didn't use to be this high, because life expectancy was 35-40 and most cancers develop after then. Same with heart disease -- it develops after age 50 and most people died before then. It's only with advances in public health, better nutrition, and antisepsis that we have gotten past the usual killers and are now living long enough to get these diseases. As the main killers were beaten, we (as a society) have come to expect our loved ones (and ourselves) to live a long time. Thus, any process that kills 1 out of 3 is going to be looked at as a "disaster" -- analogous to the disaster of the Black Death, which had about the same kill ratio in the Middle Ages. However, I would submit that, since this a science forum, that we try to stay objective, keep our emotions in check, and not overstate the issue. Notice that evolution is NOT going to have provided adaptations to minimize these diseases. They occur after the childbearing years, so adaptations only have to work to get the individual to live long enough to have kids. After that, natural selection doesn't care and can't "see" the problem.

Paralith, I think you have lost track that Immortal and I were replying to a specific challenge: find a logical way to justify saving the old woman. This was John Cuthbert's challenge on 5-26. Immortal and I took different paths for that logical justification. Neither logic involved evolution. Mine involved economics and Immortal's game theory. You are correct -- as the video pointed out -- that humans evolved in small extended family groups where everyone was a relative to you. This is necessary in order for the evolutionary explanation of this morality to work.

I agree. You need some documentation for this, as well as a definition of "selfish". The whole point of Wilson's work with altruism is that what is altruistic from one perspective is selfish from another. Several important conceptual errors here: 1. The difference between genes and alleles. Alleles are forms of genes. So yes, all life has a gene for cytochrome c, but each species has it's own alleles of that gene. In natural selection it is the alleles that count. So, saving a different allele from your own doesn't help you. For instance, saving a horse at the cost of your own life doesn't save your alleles; they still die -- including the allele that caused you to make the sacrifice! No, it's only when your alleles are saved does the evolutionary idea work. 2. "duplicted to adapt to the natural environment" is not what happens. Natural selection is a two-step process: variation and selection. Duplication won't produce adaptations. After all, all you are doing is duplicating (faithfully) one allele and that may not be the best adaptation. What you need are variations on that allele and then selection among the variations. Actually, natural selection works on traits and whole organisms, not on alleles. It is the individual that is the unit of selection, not the allele. Most traits are due to more than one gene, and thus to more than one allele. It is the trait that is selected, so if the allele doesn't help the trait, it won't be selected. The "duplication" comes from the idea that the selected individuals will have more children than the non-selected individuals. Therefore there will be more copies of the allele in the next generation than there were in this generation.

When the person has children. Period. Number of mates has nothing to do with it. It's all about preserving alleles to the next generation, and that depends on having children, not on number of mates. So ... in this society (with common birth control) the best evolutionary strategy is to have one mate with whom you agree to have children vs lots of mates, all of whom use birth control and will never get pregnant.

I'm glad you found something better. Thanks for the new link. Although the equations for W and s don't look right. What's "t" in the Malthusian equation? Let me caution you about the use of the word "absolute". ALL fitness is relative to a specific environment. So to evolutionary biologists there is no "absolute" fitness; it's all relative. However, what this may be is the "theoretical" fitness of the genotype --derived solely from the math of the Malthusian equations. I'll have to look closer. I've never seen an evolutionary biology textbook use the Malthusian fitness. Instead, it's always w and s.

You can find all manner of definitions for Ockham's Razor -- all of them incorrect. And that is wrong. This is where 1) it isn't what Ockham stated and 2) it doesn't work. B should not be preferred because, quite "simply" , the simplest answer is NOT correct! The only way to decide between competing theories is DATA! If you don't have the data to decide, then both theories stay on the table. Let me give you an example from cosmology. There are many competing theories for First Cause. Two of them are A) God and B) ekpyrotic. Both have the same predictive/descriptive power in that each gives us the universe we observe. However, B is less "parsimonious" because it has 4 entities: a 5 dimensional universe, two 4-dimensional 'branes, and a 'brane released from one of the 4D 'branes that collides with the other -- making a "Big Splat" that wipes out that universe and starts another. 1. C Seife, Big bangs's new rival debuts with a splash. Science 292: 189-190, Apr 13, 2001. http://www.arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/292/5515/189 2. Turok on ekpyrotic http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/turok2/ Now, according to you, we should choose A because it is more parsimonious -- only 1 entity instead of 4. But I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that you won't do this. So even you don't do this. As one example of how the Razor is mistakenly presented -- by scientists -- here is the following: “Consider for example the following two theories aimed at describing the motion of the planets around the sun: The planets move around the sun in ellipses because there is a force between any of them and the sun which decreases as the square of the distance. The planets move around the sun in ellipses because there is a force between any of them and the sun which decreases as the square of the distance. This force is generated by the will of some powerful aliens.” http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node10.html Notice that this is identical to Ockham's example of "a body moves". It's just that, in this case, the body is "planets". The author wants to use the Razor to eliminate "aliens". However, according to Ockham, everything after "because" should be eliminated. The Ockham statement is "The planets move around the sun in ellipses."

My apologies. I stand corrected.

It sounds like you are trying to use frame dragging to revive the Lorentz contraction. The problem is that you have to change c just enough and differently in relation to earth's motion in space to get the results of the Michelson-Morely experiments. That smacks of an ad hoc hypothesis and one that won't work. Since earth's rotation, and thus its frame dragging, is constant around the circumference, it should give different measurements for the velocity of c at different points on the earth's surface. That doesn't happen.

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.

But you didn't state this as "more reliable", did you? You stated it as FACT. You said "It is now expected that the world population will not exceed 9 billion." That isn't what is "expected". That is ONE possible scenario and is not even the most expected. It is the MIDDLE scenario of the "high, middle, and low" possibilities. It has taken THREE versions of "the" alledged trend. But there is no way to say that this has "greater probability". The site specifically says it is NOT talking probability, but simply cases. One reason for this is that birth rate may already be as low as it is going to go; the middle case supposes a birth rate less than replacement. That may not be likely. You continue to misrepresent the data and I, quite rightly, object to that. First you have to get the science right and you haven't done that. Now, if we extrapolate contemporary birthrates, then we don't get stabilization at all. But here there is an upper limit on productivity per acre. The trend can't continue forever. As I said, physics and biology set an upper limit to the yield per acre. So unless population stabilizes there is going to inevitably be a situation where there are more people than can be fed. Data, please? Checking up on your "data" so far shows that you haven't gotten the science correct. So your track record is poor and not to be trusted. We need the data behind this assertion.

Then you have made the Razor a tautology and useless. If you excuse all exceptions because "all things were not equal", then you have the tautology "the explanation found by the data is the simplest because the data does not show any simpler explanation." But the Razor is used when there are competing explanations and insufficient data to decide between them. In that case, the simplest explanation of the possible explanations is supposed to be the correct one. Right? But that is what we are saying doesn't work. The simplest explanation is very often NOT the correct one.

Sayonara, look at my post. It describes an actual case where the Razor (as stated as "parsimony") was used and failed. I was there. I was in one of the labs trying to purify BMP in the 1980s. The simplest explanation for having a protein that caused bone induction was that there was ONE protein that caused bone induction. So that was what everyone tried to purify.

Ockham did not talk about solutions. He talked about phenomenon! The example Ockham used most often (listed in Losee's book) was: "A body moves because of an impetus." This is not a "solution", but a description of a phenomenon -- the motion of something. The phrase "because of an impetus" is a proposed solution to the question "why does the body move?" BUT, this is the part Ockham said to remove. Ockham stated that the statement should simply be "a body moves". No solution attached.