Arete

Yes - the one and only. I hope you liked the course he's an incredibly admirable biologist. Thanks - very flattering. I think the take home here is that the advent of all these mechanisms has been cumulative, rather than revolutionary. Horizontal gene transfer, sympatric speciation and so forth don't replace allopatric stochastic diversification, they are additional to that mechanism. Sure, they change the way we view evolution and increase our understanding, but they are not replacing what we already know. They are incrementally adding to it. This is why it's not a "revolution" and "new paradigm". If you have to make out that other scientists don't recognize things that they actually study and publish on - as in my humble, relatively early career case, in order to make your point seem pertinent, then you don't really have a point.

No. I've addressed them previously more than one of your many threads on the subject. I don't feel like repeating myself. It's the largest annual meeting of evolutionary biologists in the world. It's the joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution (Evolution), the Society of Systematic Biologists (Systematic Biology) and American Society of Naturalists (American Naturalist) this year the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (Journal of Evolutionary Biology) and the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution. There were over 3000 attendees. Plenaries were by Scott Edwards, Spencer Barrett, Stevan Arnold, David Mindell and Adam Eyre-Walker. I personally spoke about a phenotypic plasticity paper I recently had in JEB. I'm rather shocked that as an EEB student you've not heard of the meeting. Sorry you found the 9pm entertainment choice embarrassing. I'm again shocked that you think poster session are "pointless" Every major conference in Every discipline has them. I'm currently at the Tropical Medicine meeting and there are 4 poster sessions for graduate students predominately to present their work. Do you even read what you post? there's a BIAS towards studying genomic regions with a known evolutionary function - to quote Joe Felsenstein in your own link : " But proving that the fitness differences are small enough to be neutral is incredibly hard, so that the matter will still be in doubt even if no fitness differences are detected. Short summary: evolution can do an experiment much bigger and much longer than we can." I'm repeating myself - there is widespread acknowledgement that these mechanisms exist. I myself spoke at this particular meeting on phenotypic plasticity. The reason your position is a strawman argument is that by and large, evolutionary biologists don't see the need for a "new paradigm" to accept the role of these mechanisms in evolution. There's no point in embarking on a "My meeting was better than your meeting" debate, although you seem to be trying to suggest it. The joint Evolution meetings is again, the largest Evolutionary Biology meeting in the world. Here's a link to evolution 2013 http://www.evolutionmeeting.org No I don't. Suggesting that me not accepting your "revolution" meaning I don't believe in HGT or phenotypic plasticity is the very heart of why you have a strawman argument.

Rather than citing the same author over and over - do you want to point where the symposium on the revolutionary new evolutionary synthesis was at the 2012 joint evolution meetings? If it's happening at all these meetings it should have been all over the biggest evolution meeting in the world this year right? http://www.confersen...012/program.htm (Hint: there wasn't one)

I'm still waiting for a response to a similar question I posed way back on page 1: and also: Before we start answering your questions Anders it would be helpful to have your position on these issues clear, for the purposes of further discussion and comparison to other sociopolitical issues.

An assumption that' Peto's paradox shows to be false. Cancer development does not correlate with body size: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534711000152 http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/47/2/317.full http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688871/ Again trivially proven false by basic arthropod taxonomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_physiology Insects have all the major systems (i.e. respiratory, circulatory, digestive, neural, muscular, endocrine, reproductive, etc) vertebrates have. Not much research has been done on the rate of cancer in insects, however their relatively short life cycles probably limit the degree to which cancers impact their life histories. We also know that some insects produce chemicals which suppress the growth of tumors. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0952791595800220

Just a tip - if you were at the joint SSE/SSB/ESEB meeting, you might have attended one of those lectures by me and may have even encountered some of my papers it's dangerous to make assumptions about forum user's backgrounds. There simply isn't a "revolution" going on in the field, and no "paradigm shift" to reject the "modern synthesis". You go to the meetings and what you're saying simply isn't happening. The overwhelming attitude of scientists to your "revolution" is a big "Err yeah, we know." The gains in knowledge are incremental and do not reject, but add to previous knowledge. This "Neo-Darwininan" hold out and need for a massive paradigm shift you keep shoving down everyone's throats simply doesn't exist.

My point is that a very cursory examination of the scientific literature clearly demonstrates that there is widespread/unequivocal acceptance of the mechanisms you listed in your OP. Crying for a "paradigm shift" because of resistance to concepts, when that resistance is non-existent is a strawman argument. Paradigm shifts in scientific fields don't happen because people on internet forums don't accept scientific evidence.

This is a deflection which doesn't address the hypocrisy in your position. Again, why is it ok for the government to force women to undergo an unnecessary medical procedure based on moral grounds, but then unacceptable for them to "force" people to get health insurance based on humanitarian grounds? 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. Therefore, actions by the party you support are going to increase abortion rates - something you find abhorrent. Why aren't you addressing the Republican stance on contraception - given how much you abhor population growth and abortion? I'll pose a potential answer - what you actually want to control is people's reproductive and sexual behavior. At the same time as decrying freedom and demonizing the Democratic party for "big government" being involved in our everyday choices and lives, you actively want the government present in people's bedrooms and nurseries, dictating their reproductive and moral choices. Only it's easier to be to sell moral outrage to "the murder of innocents" than to advocate moral totalitarianism.

I see, it's OK for the government to force people to do things when you agree with them, but no ok when you don't agree with them. Totally consistent there, Anders...

and Republican party wants to forcibly insert a 6" wand up a woman's vagina and give your employer access to your medical records and demand explanations as to why your doctor prescribed you medications

Yes, I have a subscription to MEB and understand that a scientific journal issue is not written by a single author... So essentially what you're arguing is that the field of modern evolutionary biology is ignoring the bulk of the journal articles it publishes? Because that would be nonsensical. It seems like your continual push for a "new paradigm" is based on a rather huge strawman argument.

The table of contents in the current issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution (along with Evolution, Journal of Evolution etc.) disagrees with you. Your buzzword list appears in many titles in the current literature on an extremely regular basis: http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/ SNP Genotyping Identifies New Signatures of Selection in a Deep Sample of West African Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Parasites Parallel Relaxation of Stringent RNA Recognition in Plant and Mammalian L1 Retrotransposons An ACP-Independent Fatty Acid Synthesis Pathway in Archaea: Implications for the Origin of Phospholipids Molecular Signatures of the Three Stem Cell Lineages in Hydra and the Emergence of Stem Cell Function at the Base of Multicellularity Correlation between Nuptial Colors and Visual Sensitivities Tuned by Opsins Leads to Species Richness in Sympatric Lake Victoria Cichlid Fishes Ultradeep Sequencing Analysis of Population Dynamics of Virus Escape Mutants in RNAi-Mediated Resistant Plants Replacing and Additive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Streptococcus Origin and Spread of Photosynthesis Based upon Conserved Sequence Features in Key Bacteriochlorophyll Biosynthesis Proteins Testing the Infinitely Many Genes Model for the Evolution of the Bacterial Core Genome and Pangenome Genomic Sequencing of Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Parasites from Senegal Reveals the Demographic History of the Population An Alu-Based Phylogeny of Gibbons (Hylobatidae) Opsins in Onychophora (Velvet Worms) Suggest a Single Origin and Subsequent Diversification of Visual Pigments in Arthropods Estimating Divergence Dates and Substitution Rates in the Drosophila Phylogeny Differences in Selection Drive Olfactory Receptor Genes in Different Directions in Dogs and Wolf Loss of the DnaK-DnaJ-GrpE Chaperone System among the Aquificales Evolution and Diversification of the Organellar Release Factor Family Evolutionary History of Continental Southeast Asians: "Early Train" Hypothesis Based on Genetic Analysis of Mitochondrial and Autosomal DNA Data Evolution of the Australian Lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri) Genome: A Major Role for CR1 and L2 LINE Elements Evolutionary Dynamics and Functional Specialization of Plant Paralogs Formed by Whole and Small-Scale Genome Duplications Widespread Occurrence of N-Terminal Acylation in Animal Globins and Possible Origin of Respiratory Globins from a Membrane-Bound Ancestor Increased Genome Sampling Reveals a Dynamic Relationship between Gene Duplicability and the Structure of the Primate Protein–Protein Interaction Network A Stochastic Evolutionary Model for Protein Structure Alignment and Phylogeny Distortions in Genealogies Due to Purifying Selection Next-Generation Sequencing Reveals the Impact of Repetitive DNA Across Phylogenetically Closely Related Genomes of Orobanchaceae

Gene flow, horizontal gene transfer and hybridization all describe the same process. Stochastic evolution and genetic drift describe the same process. etc.

OK a) I'm not a US citizen, so I don't have anything to confront. But let's back up a little. The point I am trying to get across is that the outcome of an election does not "prove" any facts. If Romney wins the election it doesn't suddenly validate untrue arguments. It doesn't make Obama a Muslim, a Kenyan, an atheist, a communist etc and so on. It doesn't suddenly change the state of the economy, US deficit, unemployment rates over the last four years. The outcome of the election does not have any valid impact on whether there is a conspiracy over the US embassy attack in Libya. So why do you keep asserting that somehow the outcome of the election will "prove" these things? Surely you understand that the validity of all of these arguments and claims is independent of the election result, right?

I'm not sure why you constantly assert "we will find out the truth" about all these issues you're bringing up as a result of the election outcome. The election result is irrelevant to the events preceding the election or the veracity of what the candidates said in the lead up.

This contradicts every single interaction I've had on the topic with the physical science community in every discipline. Are you sure that you don't mean that the field of theoretical economics praises population growth?

I guess the closest I can think of off the top of my head are Bachelor of Environmental Science degrees - in which you touch on geology, geomorphology, atmospheric sciences, biology, etc. You might also be interested in GIS multifaceted spatial type studies - the added bonus being a significant industry demand for people with GIS skills. The issue that by becoming a jack of all trades, most scientists would become a master of none. Research, by its nature errs towards specialization, rather than trying to study everything at once.

There aren't. 97% of Royal society members and 93% of National academy of sciences members answer "No" to the question "Do you believe in a personal god?" http://www.humanreli...telligence.html www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html. This is in two nations (the UK and the USA) where 65% and 93% of the respective populations believe in some form of God. http://en.wikipedia....#United_Kingdom So, Mr. Rayon, the question according to the data is: Why are there so few religious scientists? Care to offer an answer?

Going by the wall-of-text copypasta of intellectually bankrupt creationist nonsense you just dumped on us, I sincerely doubt we agree on much at all.

Ok so going back here: Does this mean you submitted your paper and were desk rejected by the editor? or are you calling the opinions of this forum "peer review"? because if its a) you got peer reviewed you didn't pass the peer review process. Let us know where you submitted and what the reason for desk rejection was, and we can evaluate whether you were treated fairly. If its b) you haven't been denied peer review.

To expand and forgive me if I'm missing your point, but eyes seem like a horrible example if you're aiming to provide an example of God's "perfection". a) Human eyes are rather flawed. They project upside down, have limited spectral range, don't function very well in low light conditions, wear out, have their photocells pointing away from the light, have a natural blind spot, etc and so on. The eyes of a nautilus are even less perfect. In fact it is relatively trivial for us measly, insignificant, flawed humans to produce an optical sensory device (i.e. a camera) which outperforms the human eye in almost every capacity. So, the human and the nautilis eye are a long way from perfect optical sensory organs. b) Human eyes aren't even very good by the standards of vertebrates. I'm not sure if you were trying to hold up humans and nautili as two ends of a distribution of optical perfection, but there are many many vertebrates who can see with better resolution, have broader spectral sensitivity, better field of vision, better light sensitivity, etc, etc, than humans - the diversity of vision in birds is a good example - http://en.wikipedia....ki/Bird_vision. There are plenty of molluscs which see considerably worse than nautili. Ok, so another way of looking at it is God has had 500 million years to get the nautilus eye right and still hasn't managed it. Dragonflies arose 700 million years ago and have exceptional vision, seeing considerably more of the spectrum than humans: http://skurvits.trip...ossils/id1.html http://scienceblogs....ve-dragonflies/ Crocodilians have better eyesight than humans: http://books.google....Omn-ZiguLgIu-28 and are over 200 million years old. Phylogenetic age doesn't correlate with ocular prowess very well at all. I'll offer a couple alternative things which I find evident when looking at these eyes: 1) Similarities in anatomical arrangement suggests that there is common ancestry between the nautilus and the human. 2) Photons are scarce in the environment which nautilus inhabit (generally the mesopelagic zone below 100m http://en.wikipedia....t.2C_and_status) and are of generally very limited range. Even animals with excellent vision would be able to see very little in these conditions. As such, selection simply does not favor advance optical sensory organs - they would not work in the environment which the nautilus lives. As such, the nautilius has not evolved advanced vision. In fact heavy investment in an organ which would confer negligible selective advantage is selected against, maintaining a simple eye structure in the nautilus. 3) Humans live in an environment in which vision is far more important, but certainly haven't evolved the best eyes in the animal world. 4) Better vision than human eyes provide has been evident in the animal kingdom for a vastly longer period than humans have been around for.

Or convergent evolution, and nautilus's have poor eyesight to boot. "Unlike many other cephalopods, they do not have good vision; their eye structure is highly developed but lacks a solid lens. They have a simple "pinhole" eye open to the environment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus

Except your point is wrong - plate tectonics was a multidisciplinary, fundamental game changer. I work in biology. Before plate tectonics we had the mystery of how organisms in South America could more closely resemble those in Australia/Africa than those in North America. How there could be fossilized forests on Antarctica. Wallace's line, etc. The movement of continents eloquently and definitively solved many long standing biological mysteries. It also has significant impacts on vulcanology, oceanography, atmospheric science, etc etc. Even over the short duration of my career I've seem paradigm shifts. The movement from inference based to Bayesian biogeographic methods. The shift from concatenation to distinct gene tree - species tree estimation. The GIS revolution. The acceptance of sympatric speciation models. The current birth of systematics as a computational rather than bench based science... at least in my experience to characterize the field as "resistant" to paradigm shifts is contrary to every experience I've had. What is strange is that almost every time I see someone here characterize scientists as stuck in the mud ivory towered elitists here, they've done it based on an experience with an internet forum and absolutely no interaction with the actual scientific community....

I guess you'll be sticking with the original flu vaccine rather than the annual update then.