Arete

I never said you said it, it is a question - asked because you stated this: Any research funded by a federal grant is government supported. They are far, far from the only places these gag orders are being reported, and ad hom attacking the source is a weak argument.

He doesn't seem to be suggesting getting rid of it altogether... and in fact proposing the exact opposite of politicians gagging and hamstringing specific agencies that are saying things that disagree with one's political agenda. Again - are you suggesting that the NSF/NIH/NASA/DOE/DARPA etc research budgets all be defunded?

So, just to get this straight, you'd like to see NIH and NSF research budgets eliminated too?

Are gag orders for the USDA, NPS and EPA, along with immediate elimination of competitively awarded scientific grants without review, freezing of NIH, NSF, NOAA, USDA, USGS, etc postdoctoral hiring are things you wanted from your federal government? What do you think it bodes for the state of science in the US?

I felt like I'd fallen through a wormhole to North Korea when Spicer came out lambasting the press for not fabricating data to show that Dear Leader had the greatest and best inauguration ever, and then Conway doubled down on it calling ridiculously obvious BS "alternative facts". Not only is it baffling to see them bald faced lying about something so obviously demonstrated using empirical observation, but also about something which does not matter. Whether or not the turnout at his inauguration was the biggest ever is only consequential because Trump and his administration made it so. Stupid, easily disproven lies about how big and grand an event was are the kind of silly propaganda we laugh at North Korea and other tin pot dictatorships for. The fact that the Trump administration is acting like this from day one is embarrassing to watch. But more scarily, what does it mean for situation where transparency from the government DOES matter? Threats to national security, budgetary matters, etc? Also, wasn't a large part of the problem with Clinton was that she was a "liar"? Not that I imagine most Trump supporters feel like it, but if that was a large part of their reasoning for voting for him, there might be a little bit of face to egg happening right now...

In my experience of online forums (and human social groups in general) is that long standing members are given more leeway than newer members. It often comes with a cost - benefit style analysis of the poster's behavior. If they are generally useful, entertaining and genial, but prone to the occasional inappropriate outburst they might be tolerable, but if a new poster is inappropriate from the get go, it's easier to dismiss them entirely. There's also the factor that it's easier to overlook inappropriateness when the person is saying something you agree with, than if it's something you disagree with.

So, what he's naively explaining here is epigenetics - exposure to a particular environmental stressor - be it an emotion, hormone, chemical etc. can alter the regulation of gene expression thus leading to phenotypic changes in the organism. However the changes generally happen in somatic rather than germline cells, so the regulatory alterations are generally not passed on to offspring. He has nothing but hand waving between emotion and inherited mutation rather than any kind of new mechanism, thus rendering the whole idea something of a bar stool conversation rather than Nobel prize material. That's not to dismiss the gravity of coming up with this on your own with no education on the subject - which demonstrates some serious thought and brilliance on the subject. But there are many brilliant people and even more brilliant ideas, and what separates them in the scientific mainstream is experimentation and empirical data - which there is none for this concept. I've heard and read lots of good ideas in science and seen most of them left on the cutting room floor, unfortunately. As for the neanderthal visualization issue, I would defer to phylogeny. 1) Humans are a type of ape, as are neandertals. 2) Humans and neandertals are more closely related than either are to other apes. 3) It stands to reason that they share more inherited features than either do to other apes.

There's an absolute plethora of morphometrics software available that makes use of hi res images. Although the geometric analyses generally need photos from specific angles to resolve 3D characters, so you might need to re-take your photographs.

DNA sequencing technology is changing rapidly. The "standard method" is Sanger sequencing which would require a functional molecular lab. Most next generation methods would be cost and expertise prohibitive for a layperson with no training. One technique that may be approaching user friendliness attainable by a skilled citizen scientist is the Oxford Nanopore minION sequencer - but this still requires access to pipettes and for paired end sequencing, a thermocycler. This is simply untrue - almost every scientific journal requires data to be made publicly available via NCBI or similar databases. Almost all the DNA sequence ever produced is open source, with data mining and collaborative study actively encouraged.

a) The causes of mutation are manifold, including replication errors, spontaneous lesions, exposure to mutagens, DNA repair mechanisms, polymerase slippage, etc. b) Recombination is a FORM of mutation - ironically often introduced by chiasmata during meiosis. Other forms of mutation include point mutations, insertions, deletions and inversions. a) Cancer is best defined as a cell in which cell division and apoptosis have become unregulated. b) As cancer cells are somatic they do not sexually recombine - so I'm not sure what the ""recombination function" of a cancer cells refers to. c) There is an extraordinarily large body of empirical data demonstrating that cancer lines evolve. At this stage, your idea is too poorly characterized to even begin to critique meaningfully. Can you describe how it replaces the paradigm of mutation and differential heritability via selective and stochastic processes? For E.g. how would Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium be calculated under your theory?

I'm not sure why you would do this considering that replication error is itself a significant source of mutation. Also, given cancer cells, viruses, prions, organelles etc all evolve, I'm not sure why being "alive" according to an arbitrary definition is relevant to any theory of evolution.

1) Circadian rhythm is a critical adaptation for many organisms - especially those that photosynthesize. Most, if not all eukaryotes and many prokaryotes display daily cyclical patterns of metabolism in relation to circadian cycling. Therefore, daily patterns of environmental cycling - e.g. light, temperature, humidity are critical drivers of adaptation, sure. 2) However, to say that circadian rhythms fundamentally CAUSE evolution is well in the "not even wrong" category. Biological evolution is defined as change in allele frequency, in a population, through generations, over time. The only two parameters needed for evolution to occur are A) DNA replication/repair is imperfect, and B) populations are not infinite in size. 3) A direct demonstration of why circadian rhythm does not fundamentally cause evolution is shown by the fact that organisms not exposed to daily cycling e.g. deep sea vent ecosystems, cave organisms, endolithic microbial communities etc. all show adaptive evolution.

Just to clarify - you mean people with some form of tertiary education, or people with doctorate degrees?

That's not my general experience at all. PhD graduates do tend to fall into a diverse array of professions, but pretty much all of the graduates I know of, especially in the sciences tend to wind up in technical fields. Many are academics. Some are in government - from local to federal, some are consultants, some are analysts in the financial and non-profit sectors, some are entrepreneurs, one I know of is now a sommelier and another I know went into construction management. I don't know any who work minimum wage jobs.

I once had an urban planner describe it this way to me: You walk out your front door naked and: a) no one sees you - rural b) someone calls the cops - suburban c) no one cares - urban.

I think you might be missing the point of the protests. Trump, throughout his campaign, singled out and demonized particular groups of people. There were protests on our campus, where 84% of our student body identifies as being a member of a minority group. Our Muslim students were singled out and told they would face travel bans and "extreme vetting". Our LGBT students are faced with a VP who wants federal funding for conversion therapy. Our DREAM act students were told they are rapists and criminals who face mass deportation, our female students face a president who has trivialized sexual assault, etc. The protests, at least on campus where I am object to these potential policies, which single out and attack individual groups, and instead fostering inclusivity and protecting the vulnerable members of our community. There is some anger towards Trump supporters who promote these agendas of course, but I wouldn't say the root motivation of the protests I've seen was to attack the people who voted for Trump.

Trump is the most divisive political figure in contemporary American politics. He specifically targeted and vilified various minority groups during his campaign. There has been a spate of hate crimes against these minority groups since the election result was announced, so neither side of politics has a monopoly on antisocial behavior. Are protests really that surprising, given the platform Trump ran on?

On the flipside of this, there has been a rash of racially motivated attacks against minority groups in the wake of Trump's election. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/welcome-to-trumps-america-58-reports-of-people-bullied-by-emboldened-bigots-and-the-list-is-growing/

What about the birther movement? Also, thinks like this: Are not difficult to come across.

Say a woman undergoes genetic screening at 20 weeks and, sadly, it is discovered that due to a severe chromosomal abnormality, the fetus is unlikely to survive to term, and if it does it will certainly die within days of birth. Should this woman be forced to carry to term, or is it more ethical to perform a dilation and cutterage?

Making the observation is just that, and that's fine - making assumptions about causation with incomplete data is premature and potentially indicative of an underlying prejudice. The issue for me is when it's inferred that the explanation is differential genetics. There are many other plausible explanations - environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity, gene x environment interactions, induced regulatory switching, epigenetic factors, etc. When your groups are arbitrarily defined via k means clustering, the genes influencing the trait of interest are unknown, the degree of heritability of the trait is poorly defined, the environmental factors affecting the trait are complex (and also incompletely understood), and even the measurement of the trait is somewhat contentious, making statements about the cause of differentiation of the trait between populations is premature. I don't care that in this instance the study taxon is humans, I apply the same standards to any study species for e.g. we apply this level of rigor to evolution in stickleback fish, but we're seemingly expected to accept far less evidence for adaptive divergence in intellect for human populations. The tells for me are rapid descent into ad hominem and caustic language, and a refusal to accept standard terminology in population genetics (i.e. populations = genetic clusters, races = karyotypically distinct populations). When one takes a dispassionate and quantitative approach to analysing human population genetics, one should be able to discuss and disagree about data without insults, accusations,claims of conspiracy, and not making special exemptions about terminology for a particular species based on a fear of political correctness.

I have taken to telling anti-vaxxers that similarly, I have decided to no longer stop at red lights. I believe stopping at red lights is the root cause of cancer, and by not stopping at red lights I am promoting the health and safety of my family. My not stopping at red lights doesn't endanger anyone else, or prevent others from choosing to stop at red lights, so it's my right to choose not to stop.

The term subspecies is certainly not used ubiquitously to describe any level of genetic partitioning below the species level, and I'm repeating myself, but it's generally used using criteria specific to each organismal group as a matter of convenience - see previous "irrelevant" Trypanosoma example. Repeating myself again, one can certainly make some sort of case that human populations represent "subspecies" - however I would suspect that broad acceptance of such a classification would be impeded by the fact that the vast majority of genetic variation is within groups, and identification of hybrids (e.g. F1, F2, backcrosses) would be challenging due to long term genetic transfer between groups, rendering such a classification system of limited practical utility. This is not to say that humans can't be separated into genetic clusters, or that this is a fruitless task - from my first post in the thread: 2) Yes, distinct human populations exist - see Rosenberg et al. 3) In some cases distinctions are useful e.g. Scandinavian populations are ~90% lactose tolerant, East Asian populations ~10%. There are some ethnically associated genetic disorders (e.g. sickle cell anemia, Tay Sachs disease, etc.) and some ethnically specific drug metabolic responses that can be quite dramatic, even fatal. So identifying distinct human populations is possible and worthwhile. Now the heritability of IQ. In the case of lactose tolerance, we have differential expression of LCT caused by population level variation of the MCM6 promoter. Sickle cell anaemia can be tracked via allele frequencies in HBB,, etc. For genetic diseases we can track the frequencies of specific genetic variations in populations to determine disease risk. For IQ, we do not have specific alleles to track (that I'm aware of, but it's not my field so I'm happy to be informed of any). It's also intensely related to the environment one lives in - deleterious environments can reduce the heritability of IQ to almost zero, so one can neither identify explicit units of heritability for IQ, nor rule out plastic response to environment when explaining geographic variation in IQ. What one cannot do is simply look at average IQ values on a map and determine that human populations inherently vary in heritable IQ quotient. This is not specific to humans, but all claims of differential heritability in traits between populations. Studies trying to tease apart environmentally driven plasticity from adaptation have been conducted on a multitude of taxa - water striders, lizards, frogs, birds, etc. When I criticize hand waving speculation about differential IQ between human populations, it's not because I'm making a special case for humans, but because I'm expecting the same level of rigor as I do for other traits and other species, i.e. 1) Identification of a gene/s causatively linked to IQ 2) Demonstration that there is population variation in this gene with causative variation in the function of the gene 3) Demonstration that there is differential variation of the gene between populations 4) There is trait variation between populations that persists in a common garden experiment If one was to satisfy these conditions I would happily accept that human populations vary in IQ. I find the current level of evidence to be lacking to move beyond acceptance of the null hypothesis.

The generalized lineage concept doesn't have anything to do with monophyly, aside from the fact that reciprocal monophyly may or may not be an operational criteria for delimiting species in certain taxonomic groups. Given I currently work on microbes, I'm well versed in their taxonomy. Despite horizontal transfer, most genetic material is vertically inherited. Bacterial populations evolve in a linear trajectory - hence lineages still apply. A population can still haven an independent evolutionary trajectory in the face of gene flow. What exactly is a "normal" subspecies? As previously stated they tend to be categories of convenience specific to particular organismal groups.