Arete

The frequency of certain alleles in a population can change over time due to stochastic random mutation in the absence of selection, and thus the population can evolve over time without alteration to heterozygote/homozygote ratios.

I, nor the studies cited, nor any of the multitude of studies easily available have outwardly stated - "marijuana will make you a schizophrenic." However, there is substantial evidence that THC and cannabonoids can aggravate psychotic/schizophrenic symptoms and/or trigger their onset in susceptible individuals. That's rather unequivocally describable as a 'link' between the drug and the disease. Granted, the use of "permanent" is strong - how about "Heavy use of cannabis impairs cognitive function for a considerable period after ingestion"? No I am not a journalist. On the contrary. While I intend in absolutely no way to try and belittle or trivialize your personal experiences - personal anecdotes are used heavily as "proof" of both the efficacy of alternative therapies like homeopathy and healing magnets - which I'm sure we will all agree are bollocks, and the associated evils of the "big pharma" drugs which they replace. When it comes to the efficacy and side effects of pharmaceuticals the invocation of personal experience is uncompelling and definitely calls for objective support. I guess the proponents I was mainly considering are the politically active, organized bodies such as Norml. I may have been exposed to one too many housemates who spent a bit too much time on the bong touting cannabis as a side effect free perfectly natural wonder product. Which is infuriatingly false - it's a cocktail of psychoactive chemicals which the preferred and most widespread method of ingestion is to burn and inhale the smoke of. Of course the smoke (like the combustible byproducts of most organic matter) is going to contain carcinogens and toxins and the psychoactive components will have side effects in some individuals - that's a reality of almost every drug known to man. Which brings us to this: Which I completely agree with. All drugs have side effects and negatives. It doesn't take much of an overdose of paracetamol/acetaminophen to do irreversible liver damage - making in more than likely considerably more dangerous than pot - ban Tylenol? [/sarcasm]. However, cannabis is not side effect free. Claims of it being the "the safest [insert drug comparison here]" are misleading and for a certain subset of individuals it could present significant side effects. At least - in my mind is actually an argument for legalising it if control doesn't prevent people using it in the first place and will allow better study of those side effects.

Hmmm No. HWE is calculated within a population at a single temporal point. If allele frequencies change from one generation to the next, so does HWE. A population will only progress towards HWE if the assumption of random panmictic mating are met. If non-random mating persists, the population will not be in HWE. This would and a lot of the other questions you have are answered in the first paragraph of the wiki article - it be immensely easier to discuss if you read it.

Wait, so the correlation is bogus because you learned to stop before the onset of symptoms? Go to Google scholar. Type "marijuana schizophrenia" into the search bar. 19,500 matches. I guess every single one is bogus right? And the correlation between long term mental deficiency is bogus because it only happens in heavy users who you're inferring "probably didn't stop smoking anyway"? Did you even read beyond the abstract of the other studies anyway? And after all that refutation of scientific articles as bollocks we get a personal anecdote as proof of your position? You do understand how uncompelling that is right?

No. They were asking why inbreeding causes a deficit of heterozygosity relative to expectations under HWE. Read the wikipedia link for an explanation of what HWE is. For the record, inbreeding does not cause mutations.

In the interests of positive criticism - the OP was a relatively simple question (my guess is he/she is taking a 100 level genetics class) about Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium and it went straight over your head. It might serve you and the rest of the forum well to do a touch more research and a little less posting when it's clear you're unsure of the answer. I would suggest starting here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle#Deviations_from_Hardy.E2.80.93Weinberg_equilibrium

To indulge in even further nitpicking - a population can evolve through stochastic drift without violating HWE, it's under selective evolution models it is violated

This is kind of what I was trying to get at. Measuring the life history traits you'd need to make assumptions regarding to even come up with a model to test what he says he's tested is difficult enough that we simply don't have it for the vast majority of extant organisms, let alone extinct ones. Extrapolating back to the primordial soup and trying to pull numbers for selection, generation time, number of replicates, effective population size, mutation rates, clock rates, etc is pure science fiction. The error bars around his estimates are effectively infinite. As far as the abstraction of the genome - I'm currently looking at both a photographed karyotype and a whole genome sequence from the same individual. The 11 chromosomes in front of me make up the nuclear genome of the organism in question. At the same time I have the WGS data displaying the sequences of nucleotides which comprise those chromosomes. A genome is word describing the collective genetic material of an organism/organelle and thus a description of a collection of physical objects...

This has nothing to do with disease at all - it's a basic pop gen question. A population in HWE is assumed to be panmictic with individuals mating randomly. The reason inbreeding creates a heterozygote defecit is because individuals are mating with other individuals that are more similar to themselves than expected in a randomly mating population and thus violates an assumption of the HWE model. Coefficients of relationship calculations are described here: http://en.wikipedia....of_relationship Inbreeding indviduals are more likely to produce with an individual with which they share common alleles, thus producing more homozyotic offspring than expected under HWE. Increased homozygosity can result in the expression of a higher proportion of recessive alleles and subsequent inbreeding depression of phenotype. Assortative mating is a different issue to inbreeding. Assortative mating implies selection, and populations/genes undergoing selection are generally not in HWE. This is because, again breeding is skewed in either a positive/negative direction for a particular phenotypic trait and thus, individuals displaying/lacking that trait are more or less likely to pass on their genes to the next generation than expected under a randomly mating panmicitc population. Basically, any phenomena that interrupts random mating, be it inbreeding, selection, population substructure etc will cause a population to deviate from HWE. This makes it a good test for selection in either a population or a particular gene

If you have a closer look you might notice I was responding to the statement that marijuana is the "safest antidepressant in the world" which it quite clearly is not, as shown by the research I cited. You also might notice I actually agreed with your points regarding the criminality of drugs

Never heard of that one. We just set the microwave to medium. Don't screw down the lid of the Schott bottle... had a tech do that in a lab I used to work in. The results are spectacular, but undesirable.

Proponents of decriminalization often gloss over the side effects of marijuana use: it's got them - A link between THC and schizophrenia/psychosis has been shown: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/192/4/306.abstract http://www.springerlink.com/content/a321772xw6056h34/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...06322304013101 etc: Chronic use impairs cognitive function permanently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...?dopt=Abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...?dopt=Abstract http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...95.2010.535505 And smoking pot increases your risk of cancer - particularly early onset testicular cancer in men, and each year of regular use increases your risk of lung cancer by ~8% (which is slightly more than regular tobacco use ): http://www.ersj.org.uk/content/31/2/280.short http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v9...l/nrc2617.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=20028743 I'm not saying it's all bad, it has some definite therapeutic benefits: THC:CBD is an effective analgesic and nausea medication: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...85392409007878 http://gradworks.umi.com/NR/53/NR53976.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...970.x/abstract Scientific evidence suggests that THC may be effective in symptomatically treating and preventing dementia: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/3/8/2689 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...1.01238.x/full http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...00006/art00003 As for the criminality of drug use - it seems fairly convincingly shown, at least to me, that criminalization of drugs is expensive, ineffective and promotes a host of other antisocial behaviors which piggyback along with criminality.

I guess I'm talking to myself in here. Please address the circularity of using the bible as proof of God. Otherwise this argument has as much merit as using the works of Tolkien as evidence of Hobbits.

That's the point - he's stating the bible is evidence of the existence of God and then claiming that this results in his religious beliefs being equatable with acceptance of scientific theories. To believe the Bible is the word of God, you need to believe in God first. Therefore belief in God is external to the bible. Saying the bible is the infallible word of God, and it describes God, therefore it is proof God exists, is circular and precisely what njaohnt has inferred in previous posts. As such, njaohnt needs to provide either a) an explanation of how the circularity is dealt with b) an independent source of evidence or c) accept the faith based nature of religious beliefs and the fallacy of equating them to scientific theories.

If you're intent on using the bible as evidence of God, please explain how you deal with circularity as described previously:

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. As for DNA and genomes being abstract - we can decode DNA sequence by measuring the mass of each nucleotide with a mass spectrometer: http://www.sequenom....ray-analyzer-4/

Your signature directly and deliberately calls out atheists and condemns them to hell. You're the one with the "thing". The forum's problem is your completely unsubstantiated and exclusive claims. I'd expect that the same demands being placed on you would be made of someone claiming that quartz crystals heal spinal injuries, or that cows are alien beings. Please address the circularity of the Bible - God proof described previously to you as quoted below or provide an independent sources of evidence to support your assertions: "the issue with using the bible as evidence of God is circularity. The authority of the bible comes from God. Proof of God comes from the bible. Without God, the bible is just another book, without the bible, there's no proof of God. Due to their co-dependence, you can't use one as an independent source of information on the other and attempting to do so results in a circular proof." Please address the failure of this line of argument via the principle of Occam's razor, as already stated to you: "You state "Gravity" (although gravitational force simply being a property of matter this translates to matter) cannot "simply exist" or "come into existence". However this results in the presumption that God had to "simply exist" or "come into existence". You can't refute one possibility as having unacceptable assumptions and then simply apply those assumptions to the possibility you have a personal preference for in a logical fashion. It also fails via the application of Occam's razor - despite natural, evidence based theories for the inception of the universe - say we have to accept that at some point, something had to inexplicably, spontaneously just exist. Given we have measurable, positive evidence of the existence of matter but none for God, and it follows axiomatically that if God is a sentient being capable of creating matter he is more complex than the matter itself, there are more unsupported assumptions in the spontaneous existence of God than there are in the spontaneous existence of matter. Therefore, the existence of God is less likely than the existence of matter." As a final note: consistently stating "you don't know" to others does NOTHING to support your assertion that the explanation is God. You could completely disprove evolutionary theory, big bang theory, radioisotope dating, plate tectonics, etc. but with out a shred of positive proof for the assertion that God was responsible, it is unfounded, faith based and therefore scientifically uncompelling

Have you even tried to understand the distinction between accepting something based on available evidence and believing something based on faith? If so, why do you keep equating the two?

Given that a) the initial assertion is patently false and b) even if it were true, it poses no conceptual challenge to evolutionary theory (i.e. a mammal exploits a novel niche and develops a novel respiratory trait - perfectly feasible under an adaptive radiation model) I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. It'd be like arguing with someone insisting that because flamingos are blue they can't fly.

Here's a peer reviewed paper that has a demonstrative diagram and extensive explanatory notes specific to sperm whales: My link Figure 1A clearly shows a common nasopalatine cavity with an epiglottis - the sperm whale simply doesn't have a tracheal bypass of the mouth as the PM you quoted suggests. and a book chapter specifically on the evolution of cetacean nasal anatomy: http://books.google....20nasal&f=false Here's a couple more relevant papers: http://onlinelibrary...0882.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary...0086.x/abstract http://scitation.aip...s_2/1143_1.html What is interesting from an evolutionary perspective is that 1/3 of a sperm whale's body is essentially its nose - the spermaceti organ. We don't have a great handle on exactly what it's for or how it evolved. The first paper I quoted is older (hence details more extensive basic anatomy) and the author speculates that the organ is related to a buoyancy function. A quick literature search shows it is most likely an organ associated with the production of sound - and thus potentially an echolocation organ (see last link) or a sexual display organ (see the third paper I listed). So if you really wanted to use the sperm whale as an example of what eolutionary biologists don't know, you wouldn't be making up falsehood about their respiratory anatomy, you'd be pointing out that we still don't really know what an organ that makes up a third of a whale's body weight is for, or how it evolved... edit link fixed.

*cue hat tipping and a firm handshake, good sir* In answer to the creationist argument: 1) The "fact" is simply not true. The nasal passages of cetaceans meet the trachea at the back of the throat - just like the rest of mammalia. 2) Even if it were true, displacement of a extant organ is rather unpersuasive as an anti evolution argument. Consider what a frog or a flounder can achieve over a single lifespan by relatively simple modification of expression and regulatory pathways. Take selection pressure over several thousand generations and the anatomical displacement of a individual, already present organ is well within the plausible range of evolutionary outcomes.

It's completely false. Blowholes in whales are anatomically analogous to nasal passages in terrestrial mammals. http://tolweb.org/Cetacea/15977 http://rebeccamackay...le-got-its-name http://www.spermwhale.org/

The presence of hereditary diseases which positively correlate with subscription to Judaism would suggest a genetic basis for being Jewish and therefore render it describable as an ethnicity in addition to being a religion. http://www.mazornet.com/genetics/ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Health/genetics.html http://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/

This is classic shifting the goalposts. You explicitly and repeatedly equated belief in God with acceptance of a scientific theory - which is what I was addressing in my response. Now you've shifted to a new argument which was not stated in your original post and criticized me for not addressing it. It's not a valid way of having a logical discussion. In any case, the new argument is as logically fallacious as the first. It's a transferrance - that "gravity" (although gravitational force simply being a property of matter this translates to matter) cannot "simply exist" or "come into existence". However this results in the presumption that God had to "simply exist" or "come into existence". You can't refute one possibility as having unacceptable assumptions and then simply apply those assumptions to the possibility you have a personal preference for in a logical fashion. It also fails via the application of Occam's razor - despite natural, evidence based theories for the inception of the universe - say we have to accept that at some point, something had to inexplicably, spontaneously just exist. Given we have measurable, positive evidence of the existence of matter but none for God, and it follows axiomatically that if God is a sentient being capable of creating matter he is more complex than the matter itself, there are more unsupported assumptions in the spontaneous existence of God than there are in the spontaneous existence of matter. Therefore, the existence of God is less likely than the existence of matter. That entirely the point of what I wrote in that post - citing the low likelihood of a past event occurring is in no way support for the event being miraculous. If we roll a dice 100 times the chances of getting the particular sequence we get is miniscule - but it's simply probability at work. In the same sense if we re-ran evolution over again many times each plausible outcome has an infinitesimal chance of occurring. It is not evidence of a creator, but simple probability at work.

What's with the bizarre point system? The theory of gravity makes the prediction that, notwithstanding air resistance, things I drop will accelerate towards the earth at 9.8ms-1. If I so desire, I could spend all day dropping things and measuring their acceleration due to gravity. I could compile my results, work out the probability that the things I dropped indeed accelerated at the rate predicted by gravity and thus work out the probability that the assertion made by the theory is correct, and thus decide if my observations support the theory or not. To my knowledge, a similar prediction for the existence of God does not exist, thus we cannot measure the effects of God and form observations to support or reject the possibility of his existence. If you can suppose a way to measure a phenomenon the existence of God predicts, we can equate acceptance of his existence to the acceptance of scientific theories. Until then, it's a false comparison. The problem with using the bible as proof of God is that the authority of the bible comes from God. You have to believe in the authority of God to accept it as proof of God and thus it's circular. As stated above a theory makes predictions of things we can independently measure and calculate the probability of the theory being acceptable or not. Love to see your calculations on that one... but regardless the argument is nonsensical. If I roll a dice 100 times the probability of obtaining the result, regardless of what it is, is (1/6)100. A result is inevitable, the chances of coming to a particular result "by pure chance" are miniscule - using the extremely low probability of the observed result after the fact as evidence that it couldn't happen by chance isn't logically sound.