Arete

I once saw Fabio and the Space shuttle at JFK airport on the same day.

Sexual selection favors rare traits in negative frequency dependent systems. http://www.indiana.edu/~curtweb/L567/readings/Sinervo%26Lively1996.pdf

This seems implausible, as major granting agencies (e.g. NSF, NIH, ARC, DOD, USDA, etc) require the principal investigator on any grant application to hold a permanent position at an accredited institution - this is for the purposes of overhead, support facilities and grant accountability. Generally, to get such a position, one requires an advanced degree, and thus to get major public funding, one would usually require an advanced degree. Private industry funding is of course, discretionary, and technically can be given to anyone - an example would be the Rolex enterprise awards which are generally given to individuals who cannot get funding from the major granting agencies. I would still suspect that the vast majority of industry research money goes to individuals with formal qualifications.

Particularly in organismal biology, I have known a number of amateur hobbyists (e.g. birdwatchers, reptile and fish keepers, horticulturists, etc) who have become deeply involved in their hobbies and subsequently become involved in the scientific community, publish their observations in peer reviewed journals and present them at conferences. A handful of these "gentlemen naturists", after decades of involvement have become well regarded as leading authorities in their chosen fields of expertise. However, I've never heard of an amateur naturist who has been significantly compensated financially for their work. In order to list "scientist" as your job title, you generally need an advanced degree to qualify for those positions. So in short, you can do science without formal qualifications, but except for a handful of very rare exceptional cases, it's tough to be a scientist without them.

I use super-computing facilities for analyzing high throughput sequence data. Output files are generally 3-5gb per sample, so you need a decent amount of computing power to run analyses in a sensible time frame. I also have a reasonably powerful desktop for data visualization with CLC Workbench, R, Tableau, etc.

What sequencing platform? Sounds like a microarray at the price rather than high throughput sequencing at a coverage that would allow for a decent assembly, which isn't your entire DNA, but a subset of known polymorphic sites across your genome. Given the human genome is over 99% homologous, sequencing the entire thing for each individual serves little purpose. As for whether or not it's a good idea, do you have any experience in bioinformatics, and what is your purpose in sequencing your genome?

Strippers, illicit substances, and what's left goes on black... that counts as long term on a postdoc salary, right?

But there are plenty of regulations and restrictions on the second amendment: Assault weapons bans High capacity magazine bans Gun bans for domestic violence offenders Permits required for concealed carry Gun free school zones Automatic weapons ban Gun free zones in airports and public buildings etc So to say that any limit on second amendment rights is unconstitutional would seem to fly in the face of current legislature.

Ok so my research experience is in Australia and the US - No one will give you access to medical records in a developed nation without an institutional review board (IRB) certification. The reason being at anyone who hold medical records, is bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or similar (e.g. EHCR, HREC, etc) to protect doctor/patient confidentiality. Therefore to access medical records you'll need: a) an affiliation with a recognized research organization - like a university or hospital, that has an IRB to give you a certification. This is so that you are accountable to a review board if you breach confidentiality. Punishments can range from expulsion from the organisation up to and including referral to a judicial organization that can sentence you to jail time. This is to ensure you are accountable for the responsible handling of whatever sensitive information you have access to. b) Approval from your organization's IRB. You'll need to adhere to whatever organization you are a member of's regulations, but they'll typically want to ensure that your study requires private medical records, that the exposure of those records will be limited to approved researchers, that the research is valid, and that the records will be disposed of appropriately. Basically, to access medical records, you'll need to prove you're accountable to a review board, your research necessitates access to patient records, and that your research is valid.

Or medication... who seriously feels that threatened that they need a loaded gun at the ready in their own home without suffering from some sort of diagnosable for of paranoia?

How risque

Viruses require living cells to replicate. If a virus kills ALL organisms it infects it will be heavily selected against in favor of less virulent strains - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence, so it's unlikely that such a virus would evolve.

They didn't. Amphibians are an older lineage than reptilia.

A) Roll a dice 100 times. The probability of rolling 100 sixes is around 6.5 x 10-77, making it rather unlikely. However the probability of all other outcomes is also 6.5 x 10-77. Therefore rolling a dice 100 times and then denying the result could occur by chance after the fact due the the low probability is not compelling. Compound probabilistic events inevitably result in low probability outcomes due to the compound nature of the possible outcomes - however these events result in outcomes. Using post hoc reasoning to deny the probability of the outcome is fallacious. B) Evolution is not a random process. Selection acts on mutation resulting in directionality - doubly making the above calculations irrelevant.

You mean genetic drift? I'd be interested in how genetic drift refutes natural selection, given that it's fairly routine to observe them simultaneously.

There is a of issues with yout respnse and I'm a little short on time, but I'll try and hit some of the bigger issues to assist you understanding. 1) Sorry, but irreducible complexity is a textbook example of argument from ignorance - as explained previously: "Put simply, just because you personally can't perceive that a part of the whole can't be under positive selection due to a functional utility, does not mean that such a functional utility, and therefore positive selection does not exist." 2) You haven't provided ANY citations, let alone scientific evidence to support your case. Flawed analogies and incorrectly posited lay examples do not evidence make. Furtthermore, as John Cuthber cites, every supposed example of an irreducible biological system has been shown to be, in fact, reducible. Resultantly, there is no viable evidence to support irreducible complexity, in your posts, or otherwise. 3) The concept of irreducible complexity isn't even one that CAN be properly evidenced, as it is a null hypothesis. It's the (falsely) claimed absence of evidence for simplified versions of a system which leads to the claim of irreducible complexity. Also, the use of reproduction is a spectacularly bad example of a supposedly irreducible system and I fear its use indicates a lack of basic biological understanding. The reason it such a terrible example is that the above is simply untrue for the majority of life on earth. Most life does not rely on sex for reproduction, and the myriad of reproductive and developmental strategies which are extant in nature (meaning we don't even have to go back in evolutionary time to observe them) run the gamut for very simple ( e.g. binary fission) to the very complex ( e.g. placental mammals). Most organisms even have the capacity to implement multiple strategies of varying complexity depending on circumstance (e.g. transformation, transduction, parthenogenesis, vegetative propagation, selfing, etc) The fact is, contrary to your claims, the scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that reproduction is reducible even in the same individual of the same species in many cases, and extraordinarily so when we look across the existing tree of life, without even having to go into the past. Most supposed examples of irreducibly complex biological structures show a similar pattern, completely converse to any claim of irreducible complexity. "Infertility" is a nebulous umbrella term for a multitude of biological conditions with an equally vast array of causes and medical properties. The generalizations forthwith begin to fall into "not even wrong" territory due to gross oversimplification, of which this: Is another prime example. Many, if not most of the underlying causes of infertility have nothing to do with biological complexity. Many are environmental - e.g. chemotherapy or even due to INCREASED biological complexity - e.g. chromosomal duplication can cause infertility. Irreducible complexity is not a vaild scientific argument for anything and is certainly not supported by any observational data in biological systems. To claim otherwise is simply false.

So, as some of you may know I recently started as junior faculty and am building a lab. I have had great experience integrating undergraduates into my research group in the past, however at my new institution, I have been informed that I can either offer my undergrads money as compensation OR credits graded at my discretion (previously I would give both) I need to decide which form of compensation I will offer before advertising (which I also have to do as a procedural requirement). Although I can switch between the two at the change of semester. I generally like to get in people at the freshman or sophomore level, so I can have them around for as long as possible. I would also like to get the highest caliber students possible, without overextending their commitments. At the moment, I'm planning on getting in a couple of students on credit based positions for one semester, reviewing based on the student's needs and performance at conclusion of the first semester in my lab. However, I'd love to hear from current students as to what would net me the best applicants - so let me know!

A) Because the argument for irreducible complexity falls under the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignoratium - also known as the argument from ignorance. Put simply, just because you personally can't perceive that a part of the whole can't be under positive selection due to a functional utility, does not mean that such a functional utility, and therefore positive selection does not exist. B) A trait does not have to be functional, or under positive selection to become fixed in a population. Through genetic drift, neutral traits can become fixed in a population.Therefore, a trait does not need to have any benefit for an organism at all to evolve in a population - it only needs to not place individuals at a selective disadvantage. As such, irreducible complexity as an argument addresses an oversimplified caricature of evolution which is not representative of reality, and becomes something of a strawman argument. C) There is no empirical evidence in your statement at all. You have a flawed analogy, and an unsupported assertion. Sexual reproduction is very poor example of irreducible complexity, as there are a number of independent mechanisms of sexual reproduction, including many nonessential (e.g. parthenogenesis, prokaryotic conjugation) and intermediate states (e.g. vivipary, monotremes) between the most derived mechanisms of sexual reproduction.

Then why does the USA rank as a 'medium' on the global human rights risk survey for 2014? https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/united-states http://reliefweb.int/map/world/world-human-rights-risk-index-2014 https://maplecroft.com/portfolio/new-analysis/2013/12/04/70-increase-countries-identified-extreme-risk-human-rights-2008-bhuman-rights-risk-atlas-2014b/ You're always welcome to your own opinions, but not your own facts. Once you start basing your opinions on falsehoods, they become trivially dismissable. Now I say the following as a gun owner (Ruger American in 308): The original purpose of the Second Amendment seems rather unequivocal - to allow the civilian population to violently overthrow any government of the USA which ceased to represent the will of the people through democratic elections. However, this amendment was written into the Bill of Rights at a time where the muzzle loading musket was at the pinnacle of military technology and obviously military technology has changed considerably since that time. Forms of weapon control are already in existence which ensure that the semi-automatic AR15 which a US citizen can buy is no match for the equipment used by the US military. Thus the US civilian population is unlikely to be able to overthrow a military dictatorship by means of force, and I think one would have to be somewhat deluded to imagine that the Second Amendment is still functional in its originally intended purpose. This renders the Second Amendment a symbolic right important in the fabric of American identity and history. The context in which this symbolic right is interpreted is not in the context of a militias capable of overthrowing a military-industrial complex with a nuclear arsenal, aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and a budget ten times that of the next 10 largest military powers combined. The framework which forms the context of gun ownership in the US is case law which clearly demonstrates that Second Amendment rights are very, very far from absolute and continually revised and updated. The staus quo on how the Second Amendment is interpreted, implemented and limited can and is regularly changed. To claim it cannot be is simply untrue. Hopefully this dispels any argument that gun laws in the US are enshrined in iron clad constitutional rights and cannot be revised in any way, and open a discussion as to whether laws like the Castle Doctrine and Stand your ground are really the precedent in which we wish society to function, why people are so scared of each other we feel the need to have loaded guns in the house, whether or not home protection is in the spirit of the Second Amendment, etc. I also think a lot of misconception exists among gun owners that gun control = banning guns. A lot of regulations have nothing to do with taking people's guns away.

In the 20 years before Australia brought in tighter controls on gun ownership there were 73 people killed in mass shootings. In the 20 years following tighter regulations, there were 2, and zero in the 12 years following a second round of gun law reforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_mass_murders Reforms included stricter licensing and permitting of firearms.

I use Virtualbox often to run Ubuntu and W7 on the same machine. A few points: 1) IIRC the free version of Virtualbox will only support 32 bit OS's. 2) If I'm asking a candidate for a job "can you use Linux/Unix" I'm not asking "Can you click around Ubuntu on your desktop like you do in Windows?" I'm asking "Can you drive my HPC cluster from the command line?" So if you're going to learn Linux, keep that in mind.

First off, "Digitalis" is a genus of around 20 species plants, commonly known as foxgloves. Your post sounds a little like you're trying to get someone to do your homework for you - which is not really what the forum is about. For a general start, try the wikipedia page.

I spent 4 years as a postdoc in a biological sciences department at an Ivy school and I saw early career candidates interviewed for junior faculty positions based on a single publication in a top tier journal, and I've seen others looked over for not having enough papers in top field specific journals ( in my case Evolution, American Naturalist, Systematic Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, etc). So it matters in my field - in physics/math with the advent of arxiv it probably matters less.

Except you've developed a strawman test based on a flawed interpretation of the point I was making. Of course you can pick apart individual bees by color if you use a high enough resolution method - that was never in question. The issue, and I'm repeating myself again here, is that the individual variation within species overlaps with the variation between species and vice versa - rendering delimitation using color alone insufficient to assign individuals correctly to species in a large number of cases. As an analogy, I could decide to use height to bin people into age classes. I could develop a laser measuring tool accurate down to 0.0001mm. Despite being able to very accurately measure the height of individual humans and distinguish between them, my method would still result in poor classification and thus fail. Why? because once humans reach adulthood, height is a poor indicator of age. Similarly, color alone is a poor indicator of species boundaries. Whether or not you can tell apart the individual bees in the aforementioned photograph is a moot point.

A photo of single individuals does not take into account intraspecific variation within each species - see post 168. As such, your test does not assist in determining the veracity of the method. Furthermore, as I've stated multiple times, we already know that the fundamental assumption of the method - species can be accurately delimited by color alone - is flawed. This means that the method, for this particular application, isn't going to function well.