Arete

From what I can gather, the trait under discussion is the fact that darker skinned humans have a red, inner lip and a melanistic outer lip. This can simply be explained by the inner lip being rarely exposed to sunlight, therefore increased melanism is not selected for and the tone appears red due to the vascularity of the interior of the mouth..

Some of the populations evolved to "eat" a completely new "food". I guess to flip this around - the E. coli populations are being evolved under a neutral model. The time to divergence of two allopatric populations in generations is 4 x effective population size x mutation rate. Given this, you would not expect "speciation" in the Lenski experiment in the given time frame.

Skin pigmentation is an evolutionary trade off between vitamin D synthesis and UV protection. As the inside surfaces of the mouth are not generally exposed to sunlight, there is no selective advantage of increased melanistic expression in these tissues.

Because evolution is a continuous process, the scales on which it operates change incrementally, and evolutionary process can be observed at various scales. The terms macro and micro evolution are used by evolutionary biologists to describe processes happening at different scales. However an important point of note is that the differences are a gradation of a continuous process - much like hours, days, weeks months and years are arbitrary categorizations of the passing of time. In the context of creation debates, I think what people are trying to say is that macro and micro evolution describe the same process at different scales, and that the separation is arbitrary, rather than reflective of a genuine biological distinction - thus accepting one and not the other is like believing in weeks, but not years.

My .02 An education in science (hopefully) teaches a person a particular style of critical thinking which makes a person much harder to convince of things using populist arguments. Appeals to common sense, or tradition, or popularity, or conspiracy theories are less likely to strike a common chord. And, resultantly, Alex Jones's rants, or a vacuous anti GMO argument. are more likely to be summarily dismissed as non-evidenced wild speculation by someone with a trained, ingrained level of critical thinking than the average person off the street. Of course hampering this is the backfire effect (there's a great oatmeal comic about it) In which humans are neurologically adapted to reject information which does not fit into our existing worldview. THis means that for eg when Al Gore gets up and tells people that climate change is real and we need to do something about it, people with an entrenched, conservative worldview have a huge degree of innate resistance to that message, and the facts Al Gore presents may actually reinforce their beliefs that climate change is not real. Importantly, all of us have this type of confirmation bias built in - it can be overcome of course, but it's there in all of us. If you actively pursue scientific research, your research is going to (at least in my experience) thoroughly kick your confirmation bias in the balls. Your data will almost always show something different from even your most confident;y held a priori expectations. Doesn't this mean scientists have perfectly overcome their backfire effects and only and always accept evidence based premises? Hell no - I know plenty of scientists who have thrown years of funding out the window chasing ideas that the data repeatedly demonstrates is wrong, there have been several instances of scientists making up or falsely manipulating data to support a flawed idea. THey also compartmentalize to allow for evidence free beliefs, hell I know an accomplished geneticist who regularly sees a homeopath.... I think, what often happens is that when an average person hears an idea/ideology that seems to make sense, they accept it. A scientifically trained thinker is more likely to consider it critically, require objective support for it, and if that support is not found, is more likely to reject it. Unfortunately, when the two encounter each other, the critical rejection of the idea appear elitist and condescending to the average person, which triggers a backfire effect. The person leaves more entrenched in the idea than before they encountered the contradictory evidence. This behoves the scientifically literate amongst us to approach an average person with a bad idea congenially, respectfully and with tact, if any changing of minds is gong to occur. Of course if it's a prothletising troll, this approach is probably acceptable:

I could scrunch my face up and squint at a pine cone and a rock until they both kind of look like potatoes, but I'm not sure what it might achieve.

I can absolutely appreciate your desire to approach the subject with an open mind, and unfortunately the label white supremacist/Nazi is in many cases here, self applied. I find it hard to find the notions put forth by such people any different from the Caliphate demanded by ISIS - thus it falls into something of a grey area for me with regard to free speech. While hate speech is protected under the First amendment, hate speech with the intent to incite violence is not. Much of the rhetoric, along with the deliberate intimidation and menacing physical attributes (the torchlight mach was supposedly deliberately meant to be reminiscent of National Socialist Party marches) along with the proud display of weapons means that it treads pretty close to the line between the two.

Christopher Cantwell, White Nationalist Speaker, "Unite the Right" “People die violent deaths all the time. This is part of the reason we want an ethno-state. So the blacks are killing each other in staggering numbers from coast to coast, we don’t really want a part of that anymore. The fact that they resist us when we say “Hey we want a homeland” is not shocking to me. These people want violence and the right is just meeting market demand.” From the Vice documentary.

No one I know of is saying "This shows that Christianity is a religion of violence and hate." or "We should ban all immigration from predominately white Christian countries in case some of them are Nazis." Regardless of the purported purpose of the demonstration, it was a self described white nationalist rally with a message of white supremacy - look at the imagery that was present; it's chilling The guise under which that message was presented does not eliminate the message, nor does the fact that some people who went to a white nationalist rally weren't white nationalists. Imagine I went to a march supposedly in solidarity for Syrian rebels, organized by and Abu Sayyaf chapter, and a significant proportion of the marchers were waving ISIS flags, carrying AK47s and chanting "death to the great Satan". Then one of them detonated a bomb in a crowd of counter protesters. The fact I went and wasn't an Islamic extremist wouldn't change the fact it was an Islamic extremist march.

So I know Trump has been pretty much teflon throughout his political career, but surely, no one comes back from this... Yeah, so one wants to say it Donald, because it equates being a Nazi/White Supremacist, with violently opposing a Nazi/White Supremacist. Over 400,000 Americans DIED violently opposing Nazis, and the majority of the country considers them heroes. The "quiet protest" involved a predominately white male crowd marching through a largely liberal college campus, carrying torches and swastikas, chanting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us." I mean... seriously? Seriously? Holy shit. The icing on the whole shit show is the President of the United States is openly sympathising with the fricken White supremacists, and equating the Founding Fathers with Confederate Generals.

Somewhat offtopic - feel free to delete if it's too far from the mark: The organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally and others are claiming that the counter-protesters violated their First amendment rights. Now, the First amendment states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Ergo - it protects free speech in the sense that it prevents the government from limiting what you can say. If you decide to gather publicly to espouse your views, and another private citizen engages is a counter protest, shouts over you, disrupts your gathering, etc. It has NOTHING to do with your constitutional rights. The First amendment doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to or respect your public speech. Whether or not your common right to not be assaulted in violent protests/counter-protests is important, but irrelevant to your right to free speech under the First amendment. If you want to engage in hate speech to an agreeable, compliant, non-confrontational audience, don't do it in public - and if you do, don't whine about your "rights" when people vocally disagree.

http://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-says-the-earth-is-flat/

Literate?

That's the exact opposite of what I actually said. You do realize that people can actually read the posts in order, right? Also, I've never actually commented on my political position, so you're now assuming I am a Democrat when I'm not actually a US citizen at all. You understand how casting unfounded aspersions and stereotyping anyone who disagrees with you into a convenient pigeonhole then stramanning them that makes you look, right?

Not to mention the irony, that historically, Republicans spend more on government funded science than Democrats. Making it a "left vs right" issue displays considerable ignorance. Edit to add the Committee on appropriations in a Republican held house elected to INCREASE the NIH budget by $2 billion, hold the DOE budget steady and decrease the NSF budget by 1.7% - supposedly none of which will come from grant programs. So the Republican government is at odds with significant cuts to science proposed by the White House.

Actually, through hindcasting, the accuracy of climate models has been shown to be generally accurate. They've also accurately predicted changes in land and ocean surface temperatures.

Are you going for a record in non sequitur?

My irony detector just broke.

BTWs - climate models account for water vapor, e.g. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI3799.1 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.441 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2267.1 As do empirical observations of historical climate fluctuations, e.g. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL035333/full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/296/5568/727 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL023624/full and yet, http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.441 All available data demonstrate that observed and predicted increases in global average temperature are not caused by natural phenomena, but by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Also, I'm not sure what one's willingness to point out the shortcomings of Carl Sagan has to do with climate change.

Can you explain what the quote has to do with my post? It appears to be irrelevant.

There seems to be this misnomer that "scientific consensus" is a bunch of lab coated white dudes sitting around in an ivory tower, sipping brandy and all agreeing on something. What it means (at least to me) is that a majority of independent, peer reviewed, data based hypothesis tests, approaching an issue from a variety of angles using a variety of different datasets and analytical approaches all reject the same null hypothesis and converge on supporting the same test hypothesis. It has nothing to do with opinion at all - it has to do with what multiple, independent data sources and analytical approaches demonstrate. In the case of the test hypothesis: "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are altering the thermal dynamics of the atmospheres and subsequently changing global climate patterns", as of 2012, an analysis of 13,950 peer reviewed articles demonstrating that 99.83% of these articles supported this test hypothesis. Other studies analyzing peer reviewed literature find similar results. This is extraordinarily strong support for a given test hypothesis. We can therefore conclude, grand conspiracy theories aside, that the empirical data strongly supports the mainstream scientific conclusion that anthropogenic climate change is indeed, real.

I am a professor at one of the UC's who specializes in bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. Typically a PhD program in the US entails 5-6 years of coursework, teaching assistance and research. In Europe and Australia, 3.5 years of pure research is more typical. Typically, there are 3 things I look for in a PhD student: 1) Meets minimum undergraduate GPA/GRE requirements to qualify for funding in the University of California system. While these scores don't actually predict success in graduate school and are kind of BS, I can't fund you unless you meet the minimum standard set by the system. 2) Research experience; all of the graduate students I've taken on have done something other than just as graduate degree - some have a research Masters, some have industry experience, some have both. I generally wouldn't take someone straight out of their undergraduate degree, unless they had exceptional experience as well. 3) A clear idea of why you are applying to grad school and what you want to do there - you'd be surprised at the number of applicants whose motivation boils down to "well, I got good grades and I don't really know what I want to do next" or "I want to be able to put Dr in front of my name on stuff". 6 years is a long time and grad school isn't always fun - you need determination to get through and there's a strong likelihood that someone with the wrong motivations will drop out. As for careers, along the way I've worked as a zookeeper, environmental consultant and a data consultant. One thing to keep in mind is that while unemployment rates for PhD's are much lower than the general average, only around 10-15% of STEM PhD graduates end up on the tenure track, and just over half will leave science altogether - so having a plan B career and being totally OK with it is something I would consider essential for a PhD student. One thing I would warn any bioinformatics savvy student is to be careful in picking a lab. Many of the big, biomedical labs treat students as cheap labor, and will keep a programming savvy student around for as long as possible in essentially a code monkey on a $20k salary. One the other end of the spectrum is a lab like mine, where I only ever have 2-3 students, who work independently on a broad range of projects - although because of this they don't tend to work terribly collaboratively. Pick somewhere in the spectrum that suits you best. So my advice in general would be to 1. Keep you grades up. 2.Get some research experience and 3. Read up on fields that interest you, e.g. metagenomics, microbiomes, co-evolution, gene regulation, genomics, phylogenomics, population genetics etc. keeping in mind which broad questions interest you. Best of luck!

They are simply rehashing an argument from ignorance. To quote their first citation: "Hence, we hope that our calculation will also rule out any possible use of this big numbers ‘game’ to provide justification for postulating divine intervention." Unfortunately the author's hopes are obviously not met here.