Arete

The simple answer is exaptation. In the case of the tetrapod olfactory system, it actually arose very early in the evolutionary history of vertebrates, and was probably originally a sensory organ associated with foraging, before it had anything to to breathing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9310197 Mose specifically, it seems to be thought that ancient tetrapods had a relationship between the function of the Harderian gland and the function of the vomeronasal gland facilitated by the nasolacrimal duct. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-387-25160-X_27 Ergo, the nasolacrimal (aka "tear") duct had a different function before it evolved to fill its present role.

If you want to claim that there are four simultaneous days on earth you need to tell us what measurements will support this model, how you measured them and what the results are. At the moment the "evidence" provide makes as much sense as "If the earth were a banana it would taste good, therefore monkeys."

Are we an agreement that this quote is your "evidence"? The above is a speculative statement. without empirical observations to support it, it is a speculation. If you think the above statement represents evidence, then I don;t think you understand what empirical evidence actually is.

I think this is why you're fundamentally missing the point. The logic of science flows in the opposite direction - your test or new hypothesis is only accepted when it can be shown to have significant support. That is, if you have a speculation, you design an experiment or determine a set of observations that will substantiate it. You then determine the a priori level of support required to accept that speculation, although in many cases this will be determined by what level of support it will take to convince your peers of your speculation. You then carry out your experiment or observations. You then determine the level of statistical support they offer to your speculation. If they meet your a priori requirements, you then may claim evidence to support your speculation. Usually, several corroborating experiments will be necessary before it is widely accepted. An example in my field would be the hygiene hypothesis. Despite a lot of corroboratory evidence, the proof is not definitive, so the hypothesis remains somewhat speculative, awaiting confirmation through additional observation. Before this point, your speculation is unsupported. You don't get to make a speculation and then demand others prove it wrong, and still get to claim to be "scientific" because that is the opposite to how the scientific method works. The "evidence" in your post was a speculation. Until you make observations to support your speculation, it remains a speculation. It is up to you to prove your speculation through experiment and observations, and not up to others to disprove it.

No to mention that the US military invests heavily in for e.g. prevention, treatment and research of vector borne disease in the tropics; http://www.army.mil/article/113241/20_years_of_Army_research_yields_hope_for_malaria_vaccine/

"Atheist" is not a title. "Sir" or "Mr" is a title. Atheist is an adjective, describing non - belief in a deity. We've covered this multiple times already. As per the definition, "athiest" describes non-belief. Not the opposite. and what religion is that? You speak for all theists, and all theists are addressing a particular member of this forum? This doesn't make any sense, "atheist" is merely an adjective. Wait, now there's a "correct" representation for an atheist, and YOU decide what it is? That like saying that YOU personally get to decide how a not-football "fan" is supposed to be represented. I.e. It's nonsensical. I just spent a good portion of this evening hashing out with a six year old discussion the likelihood of the existence of a closet ghost. By your definition, I now must believe in closet ghosts. So someone becomes a "religious" atheist when they start discussing their atheism. I get it, perfect sense - not. If that were the case me discussing my passionate dislike of football would make me a football fan. It's a nonsensical proposal. It's also getting dangerously similar to don't ask, don't tell. Pot, meet kettle. And yet, atheists tend to be better educated and of higher IQ than theists.

That's a rather huge shift of the goalposts. Your instal question was: To which I presented a scientific study demonstrating discrimination. Here's more btw: http://www.secularismandnonreligion.org/article/view/snr.ad http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2012.642741#.Un0fdOKTVk8 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12035/full Here's one conducted in New England: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562413000413

The scientific study cited below conducted at the University of British Columbia showed that the level of distrust for rapists and athiests was not significantly different, and to quote it: "Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world)" http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~will/Gervais%20et%20al-%20Atheist%20Distrust.pdf

Is there actually a discussion point you want to raise or are you just soapboxing?

Sometimes me, sometimes the bike and sometimes the ground. IMHO the issue is that the purpose of WD40 is as a water displacer and rust preventer (was originally developed to protect nuclear missiles from corrosion according to wikipedia) . Its lubricating properites are due to a small amount of mineral oil in it and it's therefore not a replacement for actual grease or oil in on parts that need grease or oil.

Person A: "So what sport do you watch?" Person B: "I don't watch sport". Person A: "Well not watching a sport is watching a sport, really". Person B: "Umm I'm not sure that's true". Person A: "Sure it is! By actively not watching a sport, you're watching a sport." Person B: "I just told you, I don't watch sport. That's it." Person A: "Listen to you bang on about not watching sports! You're practically a football hooligan!" Person B: "I'm a apathetic towards sport. That kind of places me outside the realm of sports fans. Sorry" Person A: "Oh nonsense. You get together with your other non-sports watching pals and totally don't watch sport together. I mean, you all probably talk about not sports all day. Just like football fans." Person B: "Not really. I just don't watch sports." Person A" "There you said it - you're a not-sports fan!" etc.

So I race mountain bikes - 1. A 1-2 hour soak in kerosene is great for stripping muck off neglected drivetrains. However, it will strip ALL the grease out of the parts, so you need to relube liberally after doing so, and if you leave it overnight it will rust parts. 2. I use a dry lube like white lightning over a wet lube, as it attracts less gunk and supposedly self cleans. 3. A spray of WD40 on clean, non moving components makes them much easier to clean once they get covered in mud. 4. These things x million. http://www.nashbar.com/bikes/ProductDisplay?storeId=10053&langId=-1&catalogId=10052&productId=183924&utm_source=Google_Product_Search&utm_medium=pla&utm_campaign=datafeed&cm_mmc=Google_Product_Search-_-PLA-_-Datafeed-_-Park%20Tool%20CM-5.2%20Cyclone%20Chain%20Cleaner&CAWELAID=1011846749&catargetid=400006960000002266&cadevice=c&cagpspn=pla

You disagree that the purpose of communication is to convey information, or that the type of communication that is most suitable is context dependent? Guess we'll never know.

Well that's the first time you asked it, so I'm not sure how I was supposed to give you a "straight" answer prior to now. And the answer is neither is "better" than the other. They are simply conduits of information. If one conveys information better in a given situation, it is the best. With no context, the question is meaningless.

No one said that it was. No one apart from you implied that it was. In fact the idea that a method of commincation is greater or lesser than the information it is being used to communicate is non sequitur. It's like saying apples are better than pianos. If you want something to eat, and you're not a termite, the apple is likely to be superior. If you want to play music, you're likely better off with the piano. Merely stating that one is "greater" than the other with no context doesn't make sense. Sure. I have to give a lecture on coalescent theory - a rather abstract theoretical concept on Monday. I could give it by interpretive dance, but it would probably be more informative (albiet less entertaining) if I use words and a visual presentation. And your assumption is not only incorrect, but not actually sensible.

Because words are conduits of information. In order to convey a thought - or any other information to another human being, you need to communicate it to them. Words simply convey the necessary information for something you thought of to be understood by another human.

Err, your tongue doesn't come up with words, it merely assists your respiratory tract in generating sounds that others can interpret as words. The Broca's region of your brain is what actually facilitates speech/language.

So to cut through your - for a lack of a better word for made up terms - gibberish, you are claiming that verbal communication in humans is: a) unnatural. b) intrinsically bad/evil c) unintelligible is this correct?

Are you actually suggesting that the ability of humans to converse is a symptom of a viral infection? Otherwise it would appear that you've used the word in a metaphorical sense without actually defining the context - making it difficult to discuss your ideas in a "proper context".

Congratulations, with this nonsensical analogy we've just achieved the level of crackpottery known as "not even wrong" ' I now fully understand that you don't understand what antimicrobial resistance is.

The tell for me is the fact that he's only ever cited wikipedia. Furthermore, if you follow from post #38 to #46 to #48, it looks like he's creating the wikipedia pages he's subsequently using as citations. It's like a textbook example of why wikipedia alone is an insufficient source of citation, and why an armchair, wikipedia education isn't going to win you a Nobel prize.

Are you sure you don't have difficulty with reading comprehension? It's been pointed out to you repeatedly by multiple posters that the above statement is untrue:

I won't re-iterate the other posters which have pointed out that a number of your assertions about evoluiton and the fossil record are misconceived, aside from saying I am truly sorry that you have been misinformed. It is not fair to you, as a seemingly intellgent and articulate 14 year old to have been presented with flawed facts and strawman versions of science, and then be expected to come to an informed, well thought out conclusion. I will however say that the major shortcoming of the fossil record is its imcompleteness. It is woefully incomplete. Imagine it's a jigsaw puzzle, from which you have lost most of the pieces - the picture you can see is far from complete, but of what we see of it, it fits evolutionary theory extraordinarily well. Fortunately , it is also far from the only "jigsaw" of information we have: - We have direct observational evidence, like the Lenski experiment which has evolved E. coli populations for 25 years and shown how through evolutionary processes, they can develop new phenotypic traits. We also have instances where a population of organisms has diverged into two species during historical tiime, like the apple maggot fly and the yellow fever mosquito. - We have biogeographical evidence that organisms share common ancestry. For example, many of the organisms which are found on the former continents which made up Gondwana are more related to each other than the places they are near to now, providing evidence of common ancestry. - We have macro-morphological evidence, like vestigial organs like tail bones in humans and leg bones in whales, which support common ancestry with animals with tails and legs, respectively. - On the cellular level, the evidence for common ancestry becomes even more compelling. Despite the obvious differences between say an dandelion and a horse, when you look at the the structural components of the cells, they are largely the same. This suggests that, despite the massive differences in external morphology you see today, they share common ancestry. - Prehaps the most elegant (or maybe I'm just biased by working in genetics) evidence comes from genetics. All organisms on earth share the same basic structure and code for their blueprint. The study of genetics provides a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism by which phenotypic traits are inherited, how they can change, and provide the co-ordinates required to map the evolution of life. This is not an exhaustive list of the lines of evidence we have for evolution - but when you "overlay" each of these "jigsaws" with each other, you can put together a more complete picture of the overall evidence, and the image we get is overwhelmingly consistent with evolutionary theory. As we look more, get more pieces fo each puzzle, learn how to reshuffle the pieces we have more accurately, we get a better overall picture, and it only keeps looking more and more like evolution is the right fit for the data. As an ending, I don't believe that evolutionary theory is exclusive of religion - it would seem that the Pope strongly agrees, calling the argument "absurd". You can believe in evolution and God - I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Professor Francisco Ayala who is a former Dominican Priest, a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine and former president of the AAAS. You might find some of his essays on religion and science interesting, especially, his book - "Am I a monkey?" which addresses the question of what evolution is and whether it is compatible with belief in God. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/26/AR2010042603381.html http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2134

Ok, so what are they? I could suggest designing a oncolytic virus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus) - specifically VSV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_stomatitis_virus) with a transposon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element) that cause apoptosis of cancer cells (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis) - specifically LINE-1 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1475-2867-6-13). Oh wow I just invented a cancer vaccine! Guess we'll have to race to that Nobel prize nomination. However, without specifics, such a suggestion is simply a fanciful speculation, and fanciful speculations are worth little.