Arete

Around 8% of the human genome is viral in origin: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100107103621.htm and these genes can have a profound influence on the evolution of vertebrates. Carl Zimmer wrote a pretty cool article on it: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/06/14/we-are-viral-from-the-beginning/#.UOn883d1NSI

I'd just be echo'ing Charony in suggesting basic textbooks. Also there's a Yale open course on Principles of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour: http://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/eeb-122

The Ivy Leauge schools I have had experience with will not generally accept applications for mature age students. There are a couple of non-traditional entry schemes for older students, however: Yale - http://admissions.yale.edu/eli-whitney Brown - http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/advising/rue.php And there's degrees through the Harvard Extension School: http://www.extension.harvard.edu/

So your question makes the assumption that aborting a foetus is murder - therefore making the assumption that life begins at conception. Prehaps you can answer the qestions I posed Anders on page 1, which he is yet to answer himself: a) So do you consider life and therefore human rights to begin at conception? If so, how do you feel about the fact that only ~30-40% of fertilized embryos implant in the uterine wall, while the rest spontaneously abort? This would, if these embryos are to be considered human beings be the leading cause of human mortality - in fact more than all other causes of death combined. Wouldn't this make research on heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, etc. grossly disproportionate? b) Outlawing abortion doesn't lower the rate of abortions undertaken. If fact the previous link shows that the abortion rate is increasing in countries where it is outlawed, and decreasing in nations where it is legal. Providing free contraception does lower the abortion rate. Previously cited evidence shows the Republican party actively attempting to restrict and limit access to contraception. If reducing the number of abortions is the goal of the anti-abortion movement, rather than controlling the sexual behavious of others, why are counterproductive policies like de-funding Planned Parenthood so popular amongst pro-lifers?

There is an existent trend of the type of criminal you are trying to stop being clad in body armor. It is not a ridiculous "what if" scenario, and making analogies to one isn't a logical extension. I disagree on both points. It is not worth doing something ineffective and considerably more harmful than an unlikely event it attempts to mitigate. Guns come with an elevated risk http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110427101532.htm and that the risk significantly correlates with the number of firearms per person. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html It is therefore likely that significantly increasing the number of guns in schools will increase the risk of gun deaths in schools. If the likely increase in risk outweighs the likelihood of those guns stopping an attacker, it is worse than doing nothing. Just because it might make you feel safer, doesn't mean it actually makes you safer. edit: can has no spull gud.

That's pretty much my point. To expect joe schmoe civilian/billy security guard to a) figure out that the homicidal maniac is wearing body armor so a center mass shot, like they will have been trained to take will be ineffective b) take a clean, effective head shot at a moving target and c) not hit any bystanders in a crowded, chaotic area all whilst being shot at with an assault rifle is extremely unrealistic - especially given the trained professionals have a tough time pulling it off with no body armor involved.

1. There's a trend of these shooters wearing tactical body armor: Aurora, Newtown, Virginia Tech, etc. So what exactly would an armed guard/armed teacher do to stop them? 2. When trained, armed police took down a would-be shooter outside the Empire State building, they were commended for "only" hitting nine bystanders http://news.yahoo.com/nypd-empire-st...180844387.html http://observer.com/2012/08/breaking...tate-building/ So what's the collateral damage from a teacher, or good Samaritan in a classroom/cinema going to be?

It's still highly unclear what you're trying to do - it seems you're trying to resolve deep nodes in a tree of highly divergent organsims, but from your figures, it appears you're constructing a phylogentic tree from paralogous sequences. This fundamentally violates many assumptions underlying any of the tree building methods used. A) The method assumes a common origin for gene copies A, B and Z - which is a flawed assumption as distinct elements of a genome have a number of distinct origins I would assume a high likelihood of for e.g. assuming that copy A from the green species and copy B from the black would be incorrectly inferred as being more closely related than the correct copies of each gene - again, generating a tree of paralogs from seperate individuals will be uninformative with regards to organismal diversity.. B) If you're trying to construct a tree representative of whole organismal diversity, it's another fundamental assumption that the genes you're looking at are not under signficant selection, so of course severely violating that assumption will again, give you an incorrect tree. A tree, as I'm percieving you're decribing it, would be wholly uninformative for any biological hypothesis, and showing that it's incorrect is unsuprising. If you were trying to infer whole organismal ancestry , what you'd actually want to do is construct 3 (or preferably more) seperate gene trees, which were not paralogs, and summarize the gene tress using a species tree method. To investigate the evoltionary history of 3 gene families, you'd construct individual tree sets of each paralog from a single individual, and compare independent tree sets. I think ultraconserved genomic elements, and a phylogenomic species tree approach would be a far more realisitic approach than it seems like the one you've presented here, though it has been shown that even using entire genomes, deep polytomies sometimes remain unresolved. You might find these papers helpful: http://sws.bu.edu/msoren/Carstens.pdf http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/5/835.short http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/2/402.short http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/2/402.short http://genome.cshlp.org/content/22/4/746.short

There's a multitdude of potentially applicable statistical analyses: k means clustering, hierarchial bootstrapped clustering, Bayesian information criterion model based clustering, discriminant fuction of principle components... knowing which one is most appropriate for your data would mean knowing which assumptions best fit it - e.g. bootstrapped clustering would assume that you could apply Euclidean distances to your data. Can you use R? http://www.statmethods.net/advstats/cluster.html

It is clear from the OP and thread content your intention was not discussing the extinction of organisms recently declared extinct - but rather the notion that organisms only known from prehistoric evidence are still extant and therefore a valid explanation for phenomena mainstream science considers mythological. It therefore not a discussion of mainstream biology and is more appropriate for speculations. If you disagree feel free to report the thread to the moderation staff for further evaluation. There is a large body of research unequivocally demonstrating the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, e.g. "Eyewitness memory, even under idealized conditions, was highly unreliable..." https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=247043 "Experimental research has shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, including eyewitness testimony for anomalous events." http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2003/00000010/f0020006/art00009 "Thus, even for believers in the physical existence of the paranormal, it is clear that the bulk of paranormal observations lie in the realm of the psychological rather than of the physical." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-010-9091-9/fulltext.html "Cognitively biasing influences of preexisting psychological tendencies may predispose individuals to specific perceptual and cognitive errors during confrontation of real-world phenomena." http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/JRLP.140.6.579-590 etc.

Hmm, that sequences used to infer organimsal evolutionary history are orthologous is a fundamental assumption of a phylogenetic analysis. If you're trying to infer whole organism evolution from a tree generated from paralogous sequence, it goes without question that you're phylogenetic tree is wrong. If you're trying to determine the relationships amongst genes from a gene family, rather than whole organism, it makes sense to build a phylogeny of paralogs, however.

Genetically speaking, races don't exist: "Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters.Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or “races.”" http://genome.cshlp.org/content/14/9/1679.short "The genetic structure of human populations at neutral loci is largely characterized by clinal patterns that are consistent with global-scale IBD (Isolation by Distance)" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952507002326

Here's an image outing Moontanmans's mom as a direct descendant of raptor Jesus: And the smoking gun! Proof that cultists worship him today:

This was a speeding ad in Australia - prehaps something similar for being a douche with guns? http://youtu.be/ibAe8ArmvwY

We recently met with their rep - and they were promising mean read lengths of 10kb in the next year. We've also been error correcting PacBio data with Illumina reads, but they're also promising within-cell error correction to 99.9% by the end of 2013. Of course the sales rep always overpromises on any given technology - but if they can get close to those figures soonish, it will be extremely promising data.

Nope - more like pseudogene cassettes, transposeable elements and subtelomeric repeat units etc. http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1002384 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470015902.a0005065.pub3/full http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs004390050938?LI=true

Epigenetic changes do not preclude accumulated mutations. It's not an either/or situation, but and "and". Both processes are possible simultaneously. If the volume of epigenetic changes vastly overwhelmed accumulated mutations in most organisms, we would see vastly different phylogenetic arrangements inferred from genetic data than we do, and observations of clock like accumulations of mutations would not occur. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2005.01491.x/full http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/2/123.short http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/5/823.short

I know! I have proof that Jesus was a velociraptor: and his descendants live on amongst us to this day. Notice the earlobe location and the penchant for lambs. they've even infiltrated our highest levels of government: I, for one welcome our archosaur overlords, as they emerge from their long esconcement.

Being in posession of gun when you are assualted significantly increases the likelihood you will be shot during that assualt. "...After adjustment, individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 (P < .05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist, this adjusted odds ratio increased to 5.45 (P < .05)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/

Edit: due to its size and non reptitive nature mtDNA genomes are the easiest and the first eukaryotic genomes to be assembled. Hmm, couple of issues here: do you mean mapped or assembled? Mapping, at least in the genomics world generally means deterining the genomic location of a piece of DNA by "mapping" to a known reference - e.g. mapping short read illumina data to a reference genome to identify variants in a population. Assembling is a term generally used for putting together DNA sequence into a contig or consensus sequence. One of the big problems with mapping to a reference is in portions of the genome is repetitive. If a 75 base pair fragment plausibly matches to multiple localities on a genome, it can't be placed in any location with confidence and therefore cannot be mapped. Technology is coming along that will produce longer reads to minimize the challenge of mapping reptitive genomic regions, but there's a pandora's box of technical issues which still need to be overcome. Repetitive data is also a challenge for assembling for similar reasons. If you have a large repeat unit, it is extremely challenging to wrk out how many copies of the unit are in the genome. The big limitation is how big of a DNA strand you can directly sequence, as almost all the sequencing technologies we are using to sequence genomes sequence smaller fragments and then rely on bioinformatic techniques to assemble them. There's other challenges associated with the bioinformatics end, sequencing error rates, etc. Technologies like Pacific Biosciences strobe sequencer are producing longer and longer fragments that will help cover these regions, but they're still very much in development.

That's not what was claimed - this is one of the more blatant strawmen I've ever come across on SFN. A scientifically correct postion is to agree with the data. If there are no recordings of an organism outside of the fossil record, it is not a scientifically tenable postition to accept that the organism is extant. Taken to its logical extension, the claim that "science" can't accept the likelihood of an organism's extinction until it has searched everywhere is not a sensible place to be and leads, as this thread clearly shows to spurious claims. I've moved the thread to speculations pending evidence of contemporary neatherthal populations. It's clear the thread is about cryptozoology rather than mainstream biology

The author of the article you posted seems ignorant that data from the Framingham heart study uneviocally proves that humans are still evolving, quite dramatically when some traits, such as blood pressure and LDL cholestorol. "Our aims were to demonstrate that natural selection is operating on contemporary humans, predict future evolutionary change for specific traits with medical significance, and show that for some traits we can make short-term predictions about our future evolution. To do so, we measured the strength of selection, estimated genetic variation and covariation, and predicted the response to selection for women in the Framingham Heart Study, a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Boston University that began in 1948. We found that natural selection is acting to cause slow, gradual evolutionary change. The descendants of these women are predicted to be on average slightly shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause later than they would in the absence of evolution. Selection is tending to lengthen the reproductive period at both ends." http://www.pnas.org/content/107/suppl.1/1787.short

A scientific theory is never accepted in absolution, as new observations can lead to an alternative explanation and the chance that a better explanation of the currently known observations might be found are always entertained. To know if a new explanation fits the observations better than the existing one requires a thorough understanding of the currently accepted explanation. Without that understanding, there's no way one can know if their new theory fits the data better than what it is trying to replace. As such, a complete understanding of current theory is essential to evaluating the relevance of new proposals.

You do realize that Ian Plimer is a mining geologist with no actual qualifications in climate science, and massive financial conflicts of interest in coal mining right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer

Err, neither do I. It's an analogy. Good ideas in science are VALUABLE - I assume you'll agree that good scientific ideas are valuable right? If someone offers me an item of value, for nothing, I'm skeptical.