Arete

I keep an extinguisher in the car and one in my kitchen. I would also find it odd for someone to keep one under their pillow, however

Whoa, cheap shot strawman ahoy! We weren't even discussing the Aurora shootings - I used the device of sarcasm to suggest that you choosing insults rather than logical counter argument wasn't overly convincing. Are you saying my relative experience with guns impacts the likelihood an intruder will assail you in your own home? Why would you rely on the fire department if your home caught fire, but place a pistol under your pillow instead of relying on the police to deal with a home invader? I'm not saying don't own guns (or fire extinguishers for that matter) I'm just interested in why one and not the other... As an aside - I used to have a job that involved feral animal control, so have used firearms before. This experience is fundamental in me thinking it strange that you would keep a safety-off gun under your head while you slept.

Yes it is. The combination of mutation and selection results in the evolution of viruses. They mutate, some mutations confer an advantage to the individuals with the mutation, they become more successful and the new variant sweeps through the population. Here's some papers on influenza virus evolution: http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1000566 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/10/43/ http://cnls.lanl.gov/q-bio/wiki/images/9/91/066_Dreisigmeyer.pdf

Such a profound and insightful argument my good sir. You've thoroughly convinced me that all the things going bump in the night in my own home are communist ninjas bent on murdering my family as they sleep. I shall not sleep a jot until there are loaded firearms in every nook and cranny to be found to protect me from all the scary, scary and strange noises in the night. Just joking. Seriously - you feel unsafe enough in your own home, in your own bed to have a loaded gun under your pillow with the safety off? Do you live in downtown Aleppo, or Compton or something? Edit - for the sake of not starting a flame war (excuse the pun) - if a man was so afraid of his house catching on fire he would pull the pin on an extinguisher and put it under his pillow every night, we'd probably be a little worried about his undue paranoia about an exceptionally unlikely event. Only his fear of a house-fire killing his family would be better founded than the fear of an unknown assailant killing them. Is it just that the constitution doesn't say "right to bear fire fighting equipment" that makes one the perfectly normal exercising of a constitutional right and one symptomatic of unhealthy paranoia?

I dunno, I'd be seriously thinking about medication if I was paranoid enough to be sleeping with a loaded pistol with the safety off under my pillow in my own home.

I live in the US - but as a non-immigrant I am not allowed to own a gun (there are loopholes, but I've never really had the burning desire to own one). 1) One concern I've always wondered about with home protection firearms is how one deals with wall penetration - e.g. http://www.theboxotr...docs/bot3_2.htm Ammunition powerful enough to stop a human will go through several internal walls, and even external walls of a house. So even if you hit the bad guy you might hit a family member in another room, or even your neighbor asleep in his/her own bed... Ammunition that won't go through walls might not stop a bad guy intent on doing you harm... So you're a bit damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess. 2) Trolling Xenophobic NRA types is fun - "Hi, I'm interested in a home defense weapon." "Well here's your options..." "I'm not an American citizen or resident." "GARGHHH NO GUNS FOR YOU!!!111!!! 'MERICA, TOOK ER JERBS..!" "I pay US taxes, have a SSN, a driver's license, own a house..." "GARGHH NO AMENDMENT FOR FERINGERS! GO BACK TO UR OWN COUNTRY - TOOK ER JERBS!" lolololol

Seems like an insult to rocks, if you ask me.

The high school textbook equation applies to sexually reproducing, diploid organisms, sure. HWE as an assumption in the coalescent process is simply that, given proportional abundance, each allele in a population has equal probability of being inherited by the proceeding generation. Once a gene comes under selection, this assumption is violated. Hence, applying a coalescent model to populations and genes under selection is a violation of assumptions and thus not a valid procedure. In addition to violating the assumption of neutral selection, applying a calibrated, coalescent model in order to estimate time to coalescence makes a number of other assumptions e.g. 1) Mutations accumulate in a clock-like manner. 2) Generation time is known 3) Ne is constant, or if it fluctuates, the fluctuations are accounted for. 4) Calibrations are accurately timed and phylogenetically placed etc. Given there is absolutely no way of accounting for, or validating these assumptions for proto and early life, any hypothesis regarding the coalescent process and how it operated at these incredibly deep timescales is inherently, extremely speculative. It's hard enough to untangle the signal and processes from extant groups of organisms. E.g. http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/2/117.short http://www.springerlink.com/content/q6u1624w652w6185/#section=1045901&page=1 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.01097.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.01097.x/full

I covered his arguments in this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63509-scientism-and-how-this-worldview-affects-open-discussions-in-the-philosophy-and-religious-forums-threads/page__st__40 "It's a misapplication of coalescent theory. http://en.wikipedia....alescent_theory . As anyone who's ever worked in pop gen or phylogenetics will tell you, the assumptions of Bayesian random walk analysis are violated if the locus/loci in question deviate from either Hardy Wienberg Equilibrium or a neutral model of selection. The claim that not enough generations have passed to achieve coalescence is made invalid as soon as a non-neutral model of selection is invoked. As has already been pointed out by others, selective models become applicable even at the inception of the machinery that would become life. In addition, I'd be very interested in how he made an estimation of the generation time of primordial proto-life forms, or replication thereof. To apply the argument in any more than a speculative sense, Yockey would have to support the assertion of neutral selection and give us an iea of how generation times were calculated. ... This is why it's not accepted as a serious impediment to mainstream scientific theory. The reason being that we have no idea of the replication rate, generation time and effective population sizes of proto and early life forms, nor any idea of the selective pressure they underwent at the time. It is extremely difficult to evaluate these parameters for extant organisms for which we can directly measure them and inferring them for life forms we know essentially no details of is pretty much pulling them out of the air. "

To add to Ringer's post - it is unsurprising that a group of people who seek western medical attention at a lower rate than the average populous have a lower rate of diagnosis. A lower rate of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) in the Amish proves nothing in relation the MMR/autism given this and numerous other compounding factors, given the numerous lifestyle, heritable, diet, etc differences between the Amish and general population which are not controlled for. "As such, they do not typically use western medicine unless it is absolutely necessary or if an illness is in an advanced state. The Amish do not have medical insurance. They pay for their care in cash, and not with credit. Large medical bills are usually covered communally through Amish financial cooperatives. As the Amish are rural dwellers, most also do not live near any health facilities and require transportation for medical care." http://www.iowahealt...ments/amish.pdf You need to conduct a controlled study, not an arm-waving speculative comparison. Many such studies have been conducted and found no evidence of a correlation - see post #4 in this thread.

And the global decline of swashbuckling privateers causes global warming. Your "evidence" confuses simultaneity with causality http://www.forbes.co...global-warming/ I could also argue that the fact that there is 0.04 doctors per 1000 people in Somalia and 2.9 doctors per 1000 people in Denmark, that rates of diagnosis for all cognitive disorders might be higher in Denmark than Somalia simply due to the accessibility to a medical professional being 73 times better in Denmark than it is in Somalia - and that rates of diagnosis are a a heavily biased and effectively useless measure of prevalence of disease between undeveloped nations with extremely inadequate access to health care, and countries with the best access to health care in the world. http://www.nationmas...er-1-000-people

So what they did in this study was to challenge the immune system of pregnant mice by injecting them with a synthetic simulation of viral RNA, which causes the mothers to have an immune response similar to what they would have to an acute viral infection. This is long been known to cause physiological differences in the offspring compared to controls, particularly to do with chronic inflammation and abnormalities in the central nervous system of offspring. In this study, they linked that type of response to autistic like behaviors in the offspring. So, what it shows is that there may be increased risk of autism (along with a host of other behavioral and physiological abnormalities) in a baby if the mother experiences an acute viral infection while pregnant. So, while it may not be the best idea to get vaccinated with an attenuated virus while pregnant, but given expectant mothers aren't generally vaccinated with MMR, it in no way shows a link between MMR and autism. It does show that if a vaccination administered prior to preganancy can prevent an acute infection by a viral agent while pregnant, it might prevent autism (rather than cause it).

The paper cited simply shows that apples picked later in the harvesting season tend to have higher water content, be softer and spoil sooner - so assumedly aren't as nice as one picked sooner in the growing season, and even worse after long periods in cold storage. http://sodininkyste-darzininkyste.lsdi.lt/straipsniai/27-2/27%282%29-34.pdf

Additions in bold. Again, the above study does not link the MMR vaccine, or any vaccine with autism. What the above study shows is that an immune response to a viral infection of the mother during pregnancy, or maternal immune activation may be a risk factor in the development of autistic disorders in the foetus- not the vaccination of either mother or child. If anything, the study supports an indirect benefit of vaccination in that if the mother was vaccinated against the virus before she fell pregnant, the conditions which lead to the autistic symptoms in the offspring may have been prevented. Actual PNAS article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/10/1202556109.full.pdf+html

Again I'm slightly confused - GM apples are not being sold anywhere in the world, as for two days ago, the non-browning GM apple was still not approved by the USDA http://www.agprofessional.com/newsletters/agpro-weekly/articles/USDA-seeks-comment-on-non-browning-GM-apple-162352406.html?ref=406 http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/grocery_shopping/fruit_vegetables/6.genetically_modified_apples_eu.html Are you sure the fruit quality decline you're observing is not due to late harvesting and long periods of cold storage? These practices do reduce fruit quality and have nothing to do with selective breeding or GMOs. http://sodininkyste-darzininkyste.lsdi.lt/straipsniai/27-2/27%282%29-34.pdf http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/supermarket-apples-10-months-old/2008/01/19/1200620272669.html

I don't think anyone is denying that one of the reasons behind transgene containment is to protect profits and to make sure that if you want transgenic crops, you need to pay the company which developed them. I'm not really seeing the obfuscation you seem to be referring to in previous posts, and I guess I'm a little mystified as to the aggression/frustration that's coming across in your posts. There is also a suite of ecological, environmental and economical concerns associated with transgene escape which have all been brought up in this thread already. Transgenes getting into non-target species is universally considered a bad thing. http://www.edinforma...enic_plants.htm Scientists are also working on transgene escape mitigation which does not result in sterile seeds: http://www.lifescien...ne_escape_rnai/

It has happened: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100806/full/news.2010.393.html http://independentsciencenews.org/environment/transgene-escape/ Controlling it is something termed transgenic mitigation, which basically tries to limit gene flow between the source and recipient populations, in either one or both directions - there's a bunch of ways of doing this as outlined in a number of papers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14871372 http://www.isb.vt.edu/articles/feb0603.htm "Most molecular approaches with potential for controlling gene flow among crops and weeds have thus far focused on maternal inheritance, male sterility, and seed sterility. Several other containment strategies may also prove useful in restricting gene flow, including apomixis (vegetative propagation and asexual seed formation), cleistogamy (self-fertilization without opening of the flower), genome incompatibility, chemical induction/deletion of transgenes, fruit-specific excision of transgenes, and transgenic mitigation (transgenes that compromise fitness in the hybrid). As yet, however, no strategy has proved broadly applicable to all crop species, and a combination of approaches may prove most effective for engineering the next generation of GM crops." http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v20/n6/abs/nbt0602-581.html

Generally speaking, potatoes are not sterile, and can grow from both seeds and vegetative propagation. JMJones explained that pretty thoroughly I thought, here:

Here's a US federal list of invasive plants - note most of them are escapees of gardens or cultivation: I think, rice, sugar cane and backberries get a mention in there at a cursory glance. http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxious?rptType=Federal State lists also linked.

I moved from Australia to the US. A lot of local dialect from Australia and certain pronunciations of words from Australia are just not understood here. E.g. footpath vs sidewalk, rubbish bin vs trash can, boot vs trunk, etc. Australian tend to drop "r" sounds in words which confuses Americans. Being understood means altering the way you speak a little and these changes become force of habit.

"Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation. She notes that the frequency and population density of GM canola that they found may be biased as they only sampled along roadsides." Sounds like a biased sampling regime probably accounts for the extremely high prevalence in this case. It is of concern when supposedly sterile crops manage to escape however.

Say your transgene is BT toxicity - this means when insects eat the plant, they die. If this gene gets introgressed into native populations, plants which form the basis of the food chain could become toxic to the animals which eat them and could upset the balance of the entire ecosystem. Or say an invasive GM crop gets into an ecosystem, and you've engineered it to be resistant to herbicides so farmers can spray their fields for weeds without killing the crop. Once it's a pest, it will be extremely hard to control.

I'm not sure what you are not understanding... The thing particular to GM crops is not wanting the transgenes to get into the enviroment. The reasons are numerous and not limited to - conferring herbivore resistance on native populations and subsequent ecosystem imbalance, the advent of herbicide resistant domestic escapees becoming pests, the inability of companies to sell costly to produce GM crops once they are widespread, etc. One of the mechanisms by which transgenes could get into the environment is if a population of native plants was pollinated by a GM crop, resulting in hybrid offspring into which the transgenes had introgressed. In order to prevent this scenario, the companies which sell GM seeds have engineered them to be sterile. The pollen of these sterile GM crops is nonviable, and as a result there is no risk of the transgenes escaping into the enviroment via the mechanism of introgression with wild relatives of the GM crop. The second mechanism is migration and subsequent recruitment. Rather than hybridizing with the wild variants, the GM crop produces fertile seeds within itself, these spread into the enviroment via vectors and a population of plants with transgenes in it arises this way. If the GM crop is sterile, this obviously cannot happen as it will be incapable of producing viable seeds. Yes there are - maize is a domesticated variant of Teosinte' date=' with which it readily hybridizes - in fact numerous backcrosses between domestic maize and various teosinte species has been used to generate new commercial varieties. http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teosinte http://www.springerl...01x775455x6666/ Here's a picture comparing a wild teosinte seed head, a domestic maize seed head with a hybrid in the middle

There are two distinct mechanisms by which transgenes could escape from a GM crop into the environment, which I have tried to describe for you. 1) through introgression of genes into wild plants, via hybridization with wild relatives. 2) or the direct recruitment of transgenic individuals into the enviroment - i.e. transgenic individuals becoming pests. You stated you understood the second mechanism, but asked for further clarification of the first. I tried to provide you with a more extensive explanation. There's no need to get testy, I was actually trying to fulfill your request.

Hybridization and subsequent introgression occurs readily between cultivated plants like maize, rice, sunflower, etc, and their wild-type relations. In addition, pollen from these plants has high dispersal capability. If the pollen from GM crops was viable, it would readily spread from the crops to native, wild populations of related species and create hybrid individuals with modified genes introgressed in their genomes. Thus the modified genes would escape into natural populations. http://onlinelibrary...enticated=false http://www.jstor.org...sid=56308962303 http://web.sau.edu/biology/faculty/halfhill/PDFs/stewartnrgintrogression2003.pdf