Arete

Indeed. One of the fundamental reasons for GM crop sterility is to prevent horizontal gene transfer with non-GM crops and wild plants, and to prevent them from spreading and becoming pests themselves. Calling the companies out on sterilizing their crops while simultaneously deriding the potential environmental impacts of GM crops is putting them in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Either you allow the crops to be fertile and face increased risk of escape of the modified genes into the enviroment, or you sterilize them.

Speciation has indeed been observed: have a read through here for a comprehensive explanation and a number of examples http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

Dow and Pioneer actually had to abandon BT resistant sunflowers, even after investing millions of dollars. The issue was that in north and central America, sunflowers are native. The companies involved in its development funded research which showed the risk of modified BT genes getting into the native populations was too great, as was the impact it would have on the native herbivores which rely on wild sunflowers and subsequently dropped its development. http://www.ucsusa.or...effects-of.html http://www.cof.orst....news%202002.pdf

Adaptive radiation can occur at ecological timescales - i.e. very rapidly. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2007.01240.x/full Under the evolutionary species concept' date=' a species is a metapopulation of organisms with a distinct evolutionary history. It is highly improbable that genetic engineering will result in a new human metapopulation and thus a new species. It would require that the engineering result in reduced gene flow between engineered and non-engineered humans through either reproductive incompatibility, reduced hybrid fitness, etc. This is not seen in currently GM species, where gene flow between GM individuals and non GM individuals is of concern and the primary reason most GM crops are sterile. While not a direct example - manipulation of the HOM-C gene in Drosophila can turn either the antennae into another pair of legs, or a pair of legs into second pair of antennae. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene#Homeotic_mutations

1) No one organism can be described as the "most evolved species". Evolution is not a directed process, mutations are random and the enviroment simply dictates which ones are successful and which aren't. Plenty of organisms undergoing adaptive radiation have far more phenotypic diversity and deviation in terms of phenotype from their common ancestor e.g. the Hawaiian Silverswords http://ohia.org/ohia...s/sky/adapt.htm 2) Generation times vary because selection pressure on rapid maturity is variable - often due to differential longevity of organisms. Humans live longer than chimps and thus have longer to produce viable offspring, so there is less selective pressure on rapid sexual maturity. For example - most albatross species live for approx 50-60 years and breed for most of their lives, thus reach sexual maturity at around 8 years of age. Zebra finches can reach sexual maturity in 2 months, but only live for five years. Galapagos tortoises don't reach sexual maturity until 25 years of age.

That was my point - as a scientist - even the most trivial positive assertion I make needs to be supported by repeatable, statically verified and controlled experimental observation. If, as the OP has done on numerous occasions, you wish to equate a religious belief with acceptance of a scientific theory, you need equatable evidence. An anecdote of an single, unrepeatable, unexplained event is simply not enough to explain anything in science - it's simply not compelling enough to count as evidence. If one wishes to provide "Christian Evidence" equivalent to evidence for scientific theories like evolutionary theory or big bang theory - "miracles" as commonly defined, don't cut it.

Not quite - species form the fundamental unit of biological diversity - which in turn forms the basis for a broad range of biological studies. Given that the concept of species is reliant on evolutionary biology, any study based on species is reliant on evolutionary theory - be it an ecological, disease, population, etc. study. Sorry, poor use of language - when you design a drug to combat a disease, be it a pathogen, autoimmune or other disease, you will design it to target a particular component of the disease, be it a developmental stage, a metabolic pathway, motility, etc. If that trait is not conserved across your pathogen/host/patient, the drug will not work in 100% of cases and select heavily for resistant strains. Your drug will rapidly become ineffective if you don't account for evolution. Applied genetics doesn't actually make any sense without evolutionary theory - the basic principles like HWE, selection, Ne etc are founded in evolution. What I'm discussing in this example is that if your donor and recipient are too evolutionarily distant, your clone/skin graft/organ transplant will not work. Evolutionary distance is important to consider for any medical or research procedure in which biological material will be transferred from one organism to another. Understanding how diseases work means understanding how hosts, vectors and pathogens co-evolve. The management of disease in a epidemiological sense - as was undertaken in response to H1N1 is fundamentally based in population genetics, which is a subfield of evolutionary biology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_genetics Pesticide resistance isn't restricted to insects (glyphosate resistance in plants), and dividing organisms up based on whether they are vertebrates or not doesn't really make sense in light of the tree of life - most of the biota of the planet is not vertebrate. Nope. In one example you would model genetic diversity in order to maximize it through say, selective breeding of distantly related organisms. In the management of a harvested population you can use changes in allele frequencies to model reductions in effective population sizes, and thus monitor the sustainability of harvesting.

I understand and disagree that you're using the term "personal attack" correctly - i.e. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/personal_attack Noun personal attack (plural personal attacks) Making of an abusive remark instead of providing evidence when examining another person's claims or comments.Thus, in most common usage, the term "personal attack" would be roughly synonymous with insult - substitute insult for personal attack in my post if you wish. The main point I was illustrating is that in an argument, not all insults are ad hom fallacies and not all ad hom fallacies are insults.

I always thought the concept of an ad hominem fallacy was relatively simple and didn't imagine it needed as much clarification as it has gotten here. a) "Your argument is invalid because of x, y and z. Furthermore, you are an idiot" b) "You are an idiot, your argument is wrong because of x, y and z." are both not fallacies, but involve a personal attack. It seems like the OP is along the lines of a) c) "You're stupid, stop typing." is also not ad hominem fallacy as while it insults, it does not refute any arguments. d) "Your argument is wrong because you are an imbecile" Is an ad hominem fallacy and a personal attack. The argument is dismissed due to a personal assessment of the deliverer's character, not due to flaws in the argument. It is a fallacy, because being an imbecile has no bearing on whether the argument is correct or not. e) "Your argument is wrong as it appears you've never studied the topic." Is also an ad hominem fallacy, but not a personal attack. Whether or not someone has studied the topic is a personal judgment of the deliverer that has no bearing on the correctness of the argument.

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky. The theory of evolution is so fundamentally entwined with almost all other aspects of biological science such that most of our current understanding of cellular biology, molecular biology, genetics and ecology is reliant upon evolutionary principles. For example - - Management of wildlife is reliant on predator-prey cycling, which is based on the theory of natural selection. - The most broadly accepted concept of species - our fundamental unit of biological diversity relies on each species having an independent evolutionary history. - Choice of drug targets for diseases are centred around the mode of inheritance and selective conservation of the genes encoding them - the design of the annual flu vaccine is fundamentally dependent on evolutionary theory. - Drug breakthrough by diseases is founded in natural selection. - Cloning relies on evolutionary principles insofar as donor embryos cannot be too genetically distant from the individual being cloned - which depends on limited evolutionary divergence. - Epidemiological studies are fundamentally founded in the evolutionary histories of hosts, vectors and pathogens. It is impossible to model future disease outbreaks without understanding the evolutionary history of the relevant units. - Pesticide resistance (e.g. KDR resistance in Anopheles mosquitoes) is understood through selection. - Endangered species management has to be conducted in the light of evolutionary principles to maximize genetic variation. - Management of commerically harvested organisms (like fisheries) is conducted using population genetics - which is founded in evolutionary biology. etc.

Conversely, I feel it's extremely fortunate that the unscientific notion of a deity beyond the conditions of reality is becoming increasingly absent from scientific discussions. Did you miss the part where Hawking was almost certainly not discussing God in the context of supernatural being and actually using the term as a metaphor?

If the whole concept is unscientific, why are you demanding scientists/we "wake up to the possibility" and "deal with it" ? As stated, the scientifically correct position is to retain the null hypothesis in the absence of its rejection. There is simply no sensible reason to demand that science considers a supernatural explanation in the absence of evidence for it. Let's also not go down the route of insinuating scientists making statements of a religious nature by taking single quotes out of context. The use of the word 'God' in physics has a long standing history of being used in a metaphoric sense: http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-body.html "By "God" most of them simply mean the laws of nature, the principles that govern everything." -Prof. Steven Wienberg. Hawking is rather unequivocally an atheist and almost certainly using the term metaphorically - ""I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark" http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist ... It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7976594/Stephen-Hawking-God-was-not-needed-to-create-the-Universe.html "In a nutshell, do we need a God to set it all up so that a big bang could bang?" Hawking posed. "I have no desire to offend anyone of faith but I think science has some more compelling explanation than a Divine Creator." http://www.christianpost.com/news/stephen-hawking-something-out-of-nothing-is-possible-53589/

You may want to brush up a touch on the scientific method and experimental design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_testing Generally, a test hypothesis will take the form of a positive expression - i.e. H1: God exists. The null hypothesis will counter the test with a negative, null position - i.e. H0: God does not exist. The experiment, or observations will attempt to reject the null hypothesis, in relation to a predetermined statistical significance - e.g. p <0.01 If the experiment cannot reject the null hypothesis at this predetermined level, the test hypothesis is unsupported, and thus the null position is maintained. As such, a lack of proof God does not exist not only prevents the acceptance of the test hypothesis, but dictates, under strict application of the scientific method that we retain the null position until such time as sufficient evidence to reject the null is provided. Given that God is generally defined as beyond objective reality and thus we are prevented from gathering evidence to conduct any tests which would result in the rejection of the null hypothesis - the strict scientific position must be one that accepts that no evidence to support God's existence has been provided and thus assumes non-existence. However in the absence of any empirical data either way and the unlikeliness of the ever being any, the notion of a deity's potential existence is not a very compelling scientific topic - certainly not one I'd think the scientific community needs to "wake up" to.

Stop whining, report the post you feel is inappropriate like everyone else does and stop filling the forum up with your personal gripes. No one else wants to read post after post of a grown adult complaining about how his feelings got hurt on an anonymous internet forum.

Not necessarily. Papers are rejected due to lack of broad interest, falling outside the scope of the journal, unclear language/grammar, lack of perceived significant advancement, incorrect style and formatting, don't reference seminal works they build on... etc. If your paper is a poorly referenced, grammatical quagmire about an anachronistic point particular to a sub-field of a sub-field of obscure science, it won't matter how rigorous and well designed your experiments and analysis was - it will be difficult to publish. By the same token, if your posts are difficult to read, overly emotive, linguistically inaccessible or off topic and rambling, it won't matter how scientifically correct and rigorous they are, people won't enjoy reading them and vote accordingly.

To my knowledge, nothing specifically in Origin has really been proven wrong. The refinement of evolutionary theory http://en.wikipedia....onary_synthesis has largely been a refinement, rather than a dismissal with the inclusion of details Darwin did not consider. For example, aside from the introduction of the concept of selection, Darwin never really discusses the mechanisms of speciation through spatial variability of the enviroment, or the concept of ecological speciation. http://www.sciencema...3/5915/737.full Also, Darwin never seemed to consider for "punctuated evolution" i.e. temporal variation in the rates of speciation and extinction: "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer ... The difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian is very great . . . The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained" ( The Origin of Species, pp. 309-310). We now know that mutation rates, speciation and extinction can be extremely dynamic over time http://en.wikipedia....ted_equilibrium which accounts for observed differences in species diversity through time. There are other theories in evolutionary biology, such as Lamarckism http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Lamarckism which have been in the main, proven wrong, but nothing I know of in Origin.

I was going to say - how many times does a paper just sail into a top tier journal? Science and Nature reject something like 97% of submissions because they get so many. I've never had a rejection because my work was fatally flawed - but plenty because it wasn't "a significant enough advance" or "not of broad enough interest for the journal's readership". I've rejected some articles because I don't believe the evidence presented is enough to support the conclusions - this is not a rejection of the work itself, I just think that they've proven less than they're saying they did. Usually the paper comes back eventually in a much improved form - which is what peer review is there for. Rejection is part of the game. It doesn't mean your work has been rejected en masse by the scientific community. More often than not it's because an editor has 80 articles submitted, space for 10 and found a reason to publish someone else's work instead of yours. There's a hundred reasons why an article which turns out to be groundbreaking might be initially rejected - especially as scientists aren't trained in making their points and language as clear as possible. Bouncing an article which makes an extraordinary point a few times to force the authors to be clearer about what they're saying, or providing additional support for their hypotheses is a good thing, and certainly not an indication of peer review being broken.

Racing slicks are bald for this very reason. Whilst you undoubtedly get more traction by increasing the contact patch in the dry, If you give water under the patch nowhere to go and subsequently end up driving around on a fine layer of water, it's quite the opposite effect in the rain. Having driven in the wet on drag radials, I can tell you first hand that when changing direction or velocity it's quite easy to wind up with the driver's seat pointing the opposite direction to the one the car is traveling in - quite the sphincter clenching experience if there is anything nearby to potentially crash into.

Nah, then everyone would just think you're the vice squad... looking for a date, mister?

I have to wonder - do you actively publish in peer reviewed venues? If so, how do you deal with rejection of articles by anonymous reviewers? The rep system here isn't all that different in concept - people read what you write, evaluate it, and have the option of giving it points based on its merit. As for taking it personally - it's the internet, we could all be 12 year old schoolgirls trolling you or Nobel prize laureates.

Screw publication records. scienceforums.net reputation is clearly -

I asked for the ones which are repeatable for statistical validation and demonstration - if there are countless examples it should be pretty straightforward to provide us an example.

Can you point me to the one that's repeatable and not attributable to a natural phenomenon? For example, I've got a laminar flow hood here. I can switch it off and the air inside will be perfectly still. The ground is level, there's no risk of an earthquake. Say I put a beaker in the hood, and pray to God to tip it over, and it does. I upright it, and try again, it falls over again. Repeat 20 times. Only once the beaker fails to tip over. I now have p 0.05 that praying will make a beaker tip over [i.e. evidence of God]. I can take my laminar flow hood out in front of a lecture theater seated full of 500 students and repeat my experiment, demonstrating the power of prayer and providing evidence of God. Is there anything like that? All the bits which deviate from observations of reality, including but not restricted to: - Plants existed before the Sun and Moon (Genesis 1:11-16) - The Moon is a/produces light (Genesis 1:16, Isaiah 13:10) - The Hebrew population in Egypt somehow goes from dozens to millions in a few hundred years. (Exodus) - Hares and coneys are ruminants (Leviticus 11:5-6) - Dragons (Deuteronomy 32:33, Psalms 148:7) - Pi = 3(1 Kings 7:23, 2 Chronicles 4:2) - The Earth doesn't move.(1 Chronicles 16:30, Job 38:4-6, Psalms 93:1, 96:10..) - The Earth has four corners (Isaiah 11:12, Ezekial 7:2) etc. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread689074/pg1 [/url]<a name="pid11076913">