Arete

You can't pray away the gay. Again, you're simply wrong. Conversion therapy is regarded as harmful by the WHO. "n 2012, the Pan American Health Organization (the North and South American branch of the World Health Organization) released a statement cautioning against services that purport to "cure" people with non-heterosexual sexual orientations as they lack medical justification and represent a serious threat to the health and well-being of affected people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy#Studies_of_conversion_therapy

You're wrong. Sexual orientation conversion therapy has been shown to both not work, and be harmful. The science demonstrates that people can't simply choose to change their sexual orientation. http://informahealthcare.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01612840802048915 http://www.psmag.com/culture/conversion-therapy-fails-to-pray-away-the-gay-36569/ It's thought that the basis of sexual orientation is laid out during fetal development. Epigenetic models exist to support the theory that the underpinnings of sexual orientation are determined during the neural development of the fetus. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300033/full http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-011-9896-0

Do you understand the concept of statistical significance? There's no such thing as "100% proof" in science.

So, how do you feel about smallpox and cholera - which are all natural versus vaccines and antibiotics - which are "unnatural"? And yet, you have and obviously use one. Where the line? Is a rock tied to a stick "unnatural" because a man made it? How about pig iron? or is it only "unnatural" when it's made of forged steel? The whole argument smacks of hypocrisy, special pleading and subjectivity.

I just read a really neat critique of this paper here: http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=16806 Turns out that the reason previous studies may have missed all these fish is that they are generally very small in size, and that's how they evade nets. While it's a cool result and all, it seems like the potential impact of the paper on fishery viability might have gotten hyped a bit too much so it could land in Nature - not that I blame the authors for doing it - it's more the journal's fault for forcing them to ham up the sensationalist side of the research for publicity.

The number of generations in isolation is not sufficient to determine evolutionary potential. You would also need to know effective population size (Ne) and the population mutation rate (θ) to determine any evolutionary rate in a given population.

Saw these guys play with Dillinger Escape Plan and loved them. It's like Deliverance and Slayer had a redneck metal baby covered in hair.

I think we're all overlooking the elephant in the room here - the evilness of walking. Walking is inherent in all the bad things people do. Without walking, you can't go to war or cut down a rainforest. Also, walking is unnatural - babies don't come out of the womb walking, they have to learn it from their brainwashed walking parents. Learning from your parents is also inherently evil, making walking doubly bad. In fact the only sensible thing to do to ensure we live long, happy and prosperous lives is to go back to our proper, natural means of locomotion of scooting around on our butts. I for one hope you all join me in forsaking the evilness of walking and creating a butt-scooting utopia for the sake of all mankind.

I've done a few studies looking at the comparative roles of plasticity vs adaptation in lizards, and one thing that I've always felt somewhat skeptical about with regards to IQ is just how squishy it is as a phenotypic character. Generally the phenotypic traits we use on animals are characters which have hard measurements - e.g. presence/absence characters (horns/no horns) , measurements like geometric morphometrics (measured differences in body shape), and count characters (e.g. scale or pore counts). These types of measurements are generally fixed for an individual's lifetime once they reach adulthood, they are also absolute rather than relative - in that for e.g. snout-vent length of a lizard doesn't change relative to the study group, and can be used or combined with any other measurements without significant issue. Where as IQ is a) normalized. That means the mean and standard deviation of a given IQ test in a given study group is fixed, regardless of whether the median scores of those two independent groups is different. This makes IQ inherently relative to the particular test and study group, and therefore results of one test in one group cannot easily be combined with scores from another group. B) IQ is variable for an individual i.e. "There's no such thing as "an" IQ. You have an IQ at a given point in time. That IQ has built-in error. It's not like stepping on a scale to determine how much you weigh." http://www.livescience.com/36143-iq-change-time.html c) There is also the issue of what exactly IQ is measuring, and how accurate it is as a metric http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/04/what-does-iq-really-measure What this means is that when measuring the heritability of intelligence, you can't treat IQ scores in the same way you do most morphological traits that evolutionary biologists look at when they examine the heritability of phenotypic traits. There's a lot more caveats and noise than there generally is for many other studies of trait inheritance, due to the inherent complexity of trying to measure an abstract trait like intelligence.

If it means that you can't demonstrate how your supposedly "natural word free" communication actually works, and the only thing supporting your assertion that words are bad is you repeating "words are bad" ad nauseam, then yes, I do.

Just to be clear, this unequivocally NOT what or the papers I've cited state. I fear you're dismissing the evidence provided to you without even looking at it. The specific anatomy of the supralaryngeal vocal tract specific to humans allows for the production of quantal vowels - i.e. "i" "a" and "u" sounds. Not grunts. Also, I've asked a few times for a demonstration of your word-free communication, or at least an explanation of how you would convey the idea you are presenting here without the use of words. Currently your inability to do so makes this thread a superbly ironic example of the fundamental flaws in your stance.

The ability to speak required the evolution of specific anatomical features which have no other function but to allow sounds associated with speech to be made. Speech is a trait intrinsically tied to human evolution - it's really rather impossible to make a claim that has any merit to the contrary, and doing so makes your entire argument trivially dismissable.

Well since you haven't explained the theory or evolution in grunts and interpretive dance, it appears to be invalid .

So just to confirm, you're intending to dismiss any and all empirical evidence which might contradict your point of view?

Well then there's not a lot of point in engaging with you on the topic - an argument rejecting the evidence at hand and based on unsubstantiated facts you made up along the way as it suits you is logically worthless.

You still haven't answered the questions I asked in post 23. What exactly do you disagree with? The point is that speech requires a species-specific superlaryngeal anatomy, and the trait that this specific anatomy allows for is speech. In order for that to become a fixed trait in a species - as it has, evolution requires it to increase fitness. I don't really see where there is any room for disagreement there - they are observable facts. I've already asked you to provide an example of how you would do this, and you were unable to. This contradicts basic evolutionary theory. All that is required for trait to fix in a population is for that trait to increase fecundity - not survival. There is no directed way in a trait is "meant" to be used, in the context of evolution. I disagree, as does the evidence. Children have been shown to learn language by listening to the people around them speak i.e. by example. http://tesl-ej.org/ej03/r19.html So the ability to solve problems, analyze complex data, engineer tools, etc doesn't factor at all in your model general intelligence? I would say that your definition of intelligence is comprehensively flawed, if that is the case. Plenty of things. Language is simply a conduit of information, rarely is language the information itself. Your'e going to have to provide an objective reason that human behavior and vocal communication is fundamentally different from other organisms. Your own, personal, subjective values don't cut it in a logical argument. Again the evidence disagrees with you - the anatomy of early hominids indicates that they had a wide vocal repertoire, as do primates, our closest evolutionary relatives. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661300014947?np=y http://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/21717 Could you explicitly state how the ability to speak limits human lifespans and creates suffering? I can think of numerous examples of how the opposite is true - for example the teaching o f modern medicine - directly responsible for doubling human life expectancy and reducing infant mortality by more than an order of magnitude is reliant on communication via words.

Peer reviewed evidence unequivocally supports the development of language as integral in human evolution. Being able to speak required the evolution of species - specific supralaryngeal vocal tract - a trait which emerged un the upper Paleolithic - at approximately the same time as human groups started to increase in size. http://www.cog.brown.edu/people/lieberman/pdfFiles/Lieberman%20P.%202007.%20The%20evolution%20of%20human%20speech,%20Its%20anatom.pdf Speech, and therefore words is an integral trait in human evolution. Stating that it isn't is straightforwardly incorrect. Language evolved before material society in the upper Paleolithic - see previously cited material, so what you're imagining is in opposition to the evidence at hand. Humans are very far from the only organisms which display learned behaviors, or even the teaching of behavior, or even the teaching of vocal language. So are the animals which also display learning, teaching and the teaching of language also unnatural, or is there a case os special pleading which you apply to humans? http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WO5BoHhUow0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=learned+behaviour+evolution&ots=W8wJ_HE-OO&sig=8F6vaRM39GBblFWlYx3dfoP4zAE#v=onepage&q=learned%20behaviour%20evolution&f=false http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanimal/2011/05/12/is-pedagogy-specific-to-humans/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1635977 I also asked you a number of questions in post #23 - is it possible to answer them, please?

Apologies, but it's not obvious to me. Could you bear with me and explain? Also, is that a statement conceding that you would be unable to communicate your contention that words are negative, without the use of words? Finally, there's significant empirical evidence that suggests a positive correlation between the ability to communicate and evolutionary potential. In fact, there;s evidence that language evolved in response to increasing group size in early hominids. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2743982?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103624569977 http://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution//retrieve/pii/S0169534706002096?cc=y Therefore, the ability to communicate in words improves your ability to survive in a competitive world - that's rather unequivocal.

I'm interested to know how you know what a Chimpanzee is thinking when using a pant-grunt to communicate the expectancy of food to other members of a troop? http://womeninthewild.org/chimpanzee-calls.html How is a pant-grunt different to the chimp saying "I'm looking forward to dinner guys" ? both use auditory ques to convey precisely the same information. Could you address the fact that you are currently using words to convey your idea, and potentially give an example of how you would communicate it using another form of communication?

I'll bite: Plenty of animals use verbal means of communication, some with extensive vocabularies: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/anthro/vocal.html http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(09)00228-9 An extraordinary example is seen in prairie dogs, whose vocalizations regarding predators carry information regarding the predator's species, color, speed of approach and direction. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635700001054 Or dolphins, who have unique vocal signatures (i.e. names) for each other, in addition to distinct "words" to convey detailed information regarding predators and prey to other members of a pod. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=fYUJ7jKhTkgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=communication+in+dolphins&ots=t-t_gMKh4G&sig=TyZKYWU2RJ6GuZCx5nPxB4Tw3Go#v=onepage&q=communication%20in%20dolphins&f=false Oh and apes already use "words" (i.e. specific sounds to communicate specific instrcutions or warnings to other members of a group) to communicate: http://colinallen.dnsalias.org/Secure/TCA/tomasello-final.pdf So, animals aren't simply grunting and growling to each other, and many examples of complex, rich vocabularies exist in animals other than humans. Ergo, vocal communication and "words" are not a uniquely human invention. I'm kind of intrigued, you do understand that by typing on a message board, you are using words, right? If words are so harmful, why are you using them?

What the original article claims is that the biomass of fish in the mesopelagic zone is much higher than previously thought, and speculates that the failure to detect this in the past is because the fish species which occupy this zone are capable of detecting and avoiding nets. The 95% increase the pop sci claims is dependent on an extrapolation of one one study using one echo-sounder used on one voyage is extrapolatable to the entire globe. Understandably, the results of this extrapolation have extraordinarily wide confidence intervals - from 3,000 to 70,000 million tons of fish biomass between the latitudes of 40 degrees North/ South. Therefore, a conservative estimate (using the lower 95% CI from the paper) is a considerable, but much less dramatic increase in estimated fish biomass from 1,000 million tons to 3,000 million tons, with the point estimate being a tenfold increase. The authors are also careful (at least in the actual paper) to couch their results in the context that they are a single study and that further study is needed to provide an accurate estimate. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140207/ncomms4271/full/ncomms4271.html What they AREN'T claiming, which makes this thread's title misleading, is that discovery equates to dramatic increases in fish species diversity.

Which is one of my points. If your "conservation effort" doesn't involve the conservation of the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms associated with the organism, it efficacy for the purpose of conservation is questionable. Sure, but the major purpose of seed banks (at least in terms of funding and collection effort) is for food security, rather than conservation. Museum collections, tissue collections, herbariums, etc all can play a role in conservation efforts, sure - I never denied that. However, the major purpose of these facilities is generally not conservation, and if your purpose is conservation, it is an expensive route, with extremely limited returns. Restoring a nonviable species once it has already become extinct is extremely intensive - in the midst of a biodiversity crisis as we are, an ounce of extinction prevention or ecosystem fuction retention is worth a ton of restoration, in terms of money and effort. The title of the thread explicitly refers to animals. Hence my use of animal examples. Sure, but expanding and maintaining a genetic resource is not synonymous with biological conservation. and I never said it was a black and white issue. Actually my exact words were " I think that species-centric approaches at the expense of systemic approaches are myopic." http://www.pnas.org/...0/9769.full.pdf - it seems likely that the dramatic tech advances since then provide at least the possibility of a useful entire genome or adequate reconstruction proxy thereof. I wouldn't bet on it yet. The thylacine genome project was a dismal failure http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/02/15/1302459.htm and theoir samples are in a much better state of preservation than the La Brea sabertooth samples. The only sequence in genbank for Smilodon fatalis is an mtDNA fragment 132bp in length http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/257782 which appears to come from the study you cited - so no additional saber tooth tiger DNA in 20 years.

The humble pigeon is able to accumulate empirical probabilities by observing the outcomes of numerous trials and adjusting their subsequent behavior to outperform humans in Monty Hall Dilemma trials. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086893/

I never said that there wasn't - in particular, implicit in maintaining the evolutionary potential of an ecosystem is maintaining maximal genetic diversity in that system. The issue arises in that there is limited funds available for conservation efforts. If you take a systems view of conservation, then for e.g. maintaining Siberian tiger populations in captivity so they do not become extinct has a cost from a limited pool available, with negligible benefit for the diversity and thus evolutionary robustness of a system. This is exacerbated exponentially for the costs involved in the revival of extinct species - in terms of conservation, rather than curiosity - what are you getting for your dollar? What ecological system are you restoring function to if the organism is never intended for wild release? How much biodiversity is each dollar buying you? The value answer immediately steers away from a species centric vision of conservation to a regional focus. An example of such a focus is the use of IBRA bio-region categories to plan a national reserve system in Australia. http://www.environment.gov.au/topics/land/national-reserve-system/science-maps-and-data/australias-bioregions-ibra#ibra Endangered species, endemic species, species richness and a large variety of other parameters are evaluated to prioritize land acquisition for an integrated reserve system. The aim being the maximize the amount of ecological and genetic diversity protected for the investment available for conservation. In contrast, the species-centrist approach to conservation generally makes qualitative and often subjective approach to selecting species of high conservation priority to invest in. While this is great for the particular organisms which are the target of such an approach, I personally question what the long term aims and goals are - I completely see the emotional aspect of it, subjective me sees the extinction of say, the Western Black Rhino as a tragedy and wishes we did more to prevent it, but pragmatic me understands that the loss of top level complexity is symptomatic of broader problems within an ecological system, and that saving charismatic species without investing heavily in protecting the entire system doesn't really achieve any long term conservation goal. As an aside, using the conservation of charismatic species to generate public interest and investment in conservation priorities is a different but related issue. There's no way you'd be able to sell biological conservation without the poster species... so you need a species-centric element to at least explain and fund conservation programs, sure.

Pleistocene rewilding proponents are advocating a very similar approach - the return of North America to 13,000 years ago http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7053/full/436913a.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01379.x/full. In the absence of extinct species, their idea is to populate North America with cheetahs, Asian and African elephants and lions to replicate the megafauna of the Pleistocene. If reintroducing mammoths were a possibility, they'd be all for it. "Although the cheetahs, lions and mammoths that once roamed North America are extinct, the same species or close relatives have survived elsewhere, and our discussions focused on introducing these substitutes to North American ecosystems. We believe that these efforts hold the potential to partially restore important ecological processes, such as predation and browsing, to ecosystems where they have been absent for millennia." http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v296/n6/full/scientificamerican0607-70.html Personally, I think biological conservation should be undertaken in a more systems based approach than species based. Ultimately, preserving the ecological function and evolutionary potential of a biome is vastly more important than preserving individual species. While the conservation of certain keystone and charismatic species might work well as a proxy for preserving biological systems and evolutionary units, I think that species-centric approaches at the expense of systemic approaches are myopic. As such, would think you'd need to carefully consider how intact the ecological system an extinct organism was a component of before its extinction, and how important to the robustness of that system the organism was before undertaking that type of approach. No point bringing back a thylacine if its habitat no longer exists, or the balance of the ecosystem it was a part of has fundamentally shifted.