Greg Boyles

Fine! But so far medical science has not discovered any receptors that can detect electric fields in human skin, and rather a lot of detail is known about the structure of human skin. Also air is a very poor conductor of electricity compared to water anyway. So even if we did have electro-receptors in our skin, the stimulation due to electric fields given off by other living things would be vanishingly weak. Hence they would be a little or no evolutionary value. Animals see only the infrared radiation that travels into the receptor from another object. Unless they have an infinite density, as in a black hole, and can cause infrared radiation emitted by their bodies to curve back around and into their receptor, they cannot see it. Any infrared radiation emitted by their bodies will strike other objects and be absorbed rather than reflected. Hence they can only see the infrared radiation generated within the bodies of other animals through metabolism or other objects that have been previously heated by the sun or what ever.

What's wrong with aluminium foil from the super market and spirits of salts (for cleaning brickwork) from the local hardware store? Both are quite pure. Sodium hydroxide / drain cleaner also dissolves aluminium like acid to give sodium aluminium hydroxide complex and hydrogen. But toilet cleaner probably contains sodium hypochlorite / bleach and ammonia, which would account for the unexpected reaction products.

For starters you have to show that what the telopathic stimuli is transmitted as. There is electromagentic radiation (heat and light). Eyes and skin heat receptors respond to these. There is vibration of air molecules (sound). The ears respond to this. In both cases the brain then decodes the information contained in these stimuli. If telopathy exists, what other stimuli do you propose that is transmitting the information that the brain then decodes? And what are the physical receptors in our bodies that respond to that additional stimuli? You are trying to tell me that telopathy exists outside the bounds physics and outside the bounds of physiology. You are in effect trying to do the same thing as argue that god exists based on faith.

Insects in general, not any particular species or group of species. And I believe David Attenborough stated this in his life on earth documentary. Humans certainly 'win' in terms of the breadth of ecological niches we can occupy or exploit etc.

I rufuse to give donations to aid organisations on principle. If one existed that could prove that the fertility control component of their efforts was equal to their food provision efforts then I might consider it. That is pretty much why most in the west are suffering from compassion fatigue and that shocking pictures of starving children no longer illicit the same meotional response that it did decades ago. Africa is a bottomless aid pit and most people, including me, are just over worrying about it. Aid will change nothing in Africa unless the providers of it significantly adjust their stategy.

I don't so much doubt that neanderthaals couldn't throw a spear as well as cromagnons. I doubt that this was the cause of their downfall given that they were far more successful big game hunters than the cromagnons apparently were. Perhaps they were more vulnerable due to their total reliance on hunting and therefore their tendancy to exist in small numbers. Where as the cromagnons started developing farming which allowed them to be more numerous.

Our ancestors have never been exceptionally common species in the same way as the massive herds of african herbivores. Any species that exists in small numbers and in isolation are very prone to extinction due to regional climatic shifts etc. Perhaps our direct ancestors developed farming and proliferated and spread sufficiently to be able to survive sunsequent regional climatic shifts. Any other remaining hominid lines, such as neanderthals, were then either absorbed or displaced by our exapnding numbers. Just as easily a climatic shift might have come before we developed farming and expnaded our numbers and thus caused our ancestors to become extinct. There has always and will always be an element of luck in evolution. Don't know about that! There is abundant evidence that they were big game hunters and very successful at it. So they can't have had that much trouble in wielding a spear. I have seen suggestions in various docos that neanderthaals may have been absorbed into the cromagnon population rather than exterminated by them. And that our genomes contain the remnants of neanderthaal genes. This is a common misconception of evolution that nearly all of us, even me, find it difficult to entirely put out of our mind due to our christian culture and herritage or perhaps just simple bias about our species. The author of the comment may not have explicitly intended to suggest that humans are the pinncale of evolution but it clearly came across in his/her post. I think it is reasonable to mention it in the context of the question. But any long running debate about can be had in another dedicated thread.

Perhaps the problem is with your clearly christian influenced, if not explicitly christian, perception of what it means to 'conquer' the planet. If you alter you perception of 'conquering' to mean sheer numbers or biomass then clearly insects would be the dominant lifeform on Earth. If you alter your concept of it to mean evolutionary longevity then again insects would be the dominant lifeform on Earth. They have existed on Earth for several hundred million years continuously. In contrast humans and our ancestors have been here for a mere 1 million years or so. Even the dinosarus existed on earth for some few hundred million years and their decendants, birds, are still with us. Your problem is that you subconsciously believe that evolution is a heirarchial process with the simplest and least valuable lifeforms in the lower branches of the evolutionary tree and humans, the most valuable at the very top. But as David Attenborough stated at the end of his life on earth series, there is no evidence what so ever that evolution's sole purpose on earth was to bring forth human beings into the universe.

Agreed in principle, but please note that eugenics already occurs with couples who know they carry genetic disorders and choose to carefully screen their embryos and selectively abort those that carry the defective gene(s) or choose to adopt rather than procreate. There is nothing wrong with this in my opinion. As we are seeing with aged care throughout the west, you can't allow the dependant portion of the population rise above a certain level without there being serious economic and social consequences. So we need to be mindfull of this when deciding how far we should go in preserving life at any cost. There are no doubt a small proportion of people that are inherrently unintelligent. But in most cases it is not a case of people BEING unintelligent, rather them being allowed to become unintelligent through poor education standards. That can be easily remedied by requiring children and adolescents to remain at school.

That assumes I am making a moral judgement about modern medicine and saving premature babies etc. My comment is not intended to make such a judgment, merely to point out the probable populaqtion wide evolutionary consequences of circimventing the natures natural genetic filtering process. It occurs with no other species, at least not on the same scale as it is occuring within the human population.

Well as they say a scientific consensus IS NOT equivalent to a personal opinion.

All the science tells us that neurones do not respond to directly to vibrations or air molecules (sound) or to electromagentic radiation (light). Receptor cells in the ears and retinas do however and induce a response in the neurone that link them to the brain. If you are going to discuss telepathy rationally then you need to limit yourself to hard science and not range off into superstition and mysticism etc. Telepathy may indeed be real, but does not work in the way that science illiterate people usually think it does. What is wrong with the idea that telepathy might simply be an unusually strong ability to read the body language of others as do most other animals that are not capable of language? It does not make it any less real. No cancer is caused by a single mutation in a single gene. The genetic changes that lead to cancer are many and varied and reliant on complex interactions between multiple deffective and/or mutated genes. In some case it is caused by a latent virus, e.g. cervical cancer, in some it is caused by changes to regions of our DNA outside our explicit genes. Having some modified fish genes is no revelation. In fact all forms of life, from bacteria to people, share a proportion of basic genes that vary little across millions of species. E.G. The genes involved with cell division. In fact in embryology it has been found that the humans trace their evolutionary history through the development of our embryos. I.E. A human embryo looks very similar to an average fish embryo at one point in its development.

When I was programming my website and teaching myself javascript web programming I was using client side javascript. But it was recommened to me that I should change it to server side programming. Hence I taught myself ASP javascript and converted my website. Getting my head around the client/server system was the hardest part, but I picked it up fairly quickly. Then I wanted to host my site on a unix webserver, so I taught myself php script and converted it all again. php is rather javascript like despite the differences in syntax. I converted my website with relative ease. I wrote myself a little C++ windows application that I ran each asp file through. It did 90% of the conversion and then I just had to tidy up a few loose ends that my utility didn't handle properly. It seems to be all server side programing these days, except for a few odd task that have to be done on the client side such as changing and disabling controls etc. What are applets precisely? I assume they are some sort of binary script, that is faster to read and process than text, that is still interpreted by the web browser in the same way as regular script.

Battery acid is 0.1M (I think) H2SO4

Is Java more like Pascal with stricter typing than C++? Can you use either Java or Javascript to program websites? In which case I assume that the html tags used to delineate java would be different to those for java script. Or is it programed seperately in a compiler and then the executables plugged into the website via appropriate html tags.

Perhaps not, but the specific climatic conditions that are ideal for temporarily sustaining a high consumption human population of 7 billion plus IS fragile in the face of our outputs. Life and the ecosystem will undoubtedly go on, as it has for hundreds of millions of years. But not necessarily human beings and our current civilisation. And arguing about the precise rate at which the rate of population growth is decreasing is rather like arguing about how fast the titanic was decelerating in the last 5 minutes before it hit the ice berg. Exact same sort of arguments employed by climate change deniers. They would specifically select 10 years of temperature data in the last decade in order to hide the longer term trends. You would employ the same tactics. Only consider the population data in the last couple of decades and ignore the long term trend. It wont make the problem disappear reality, merely allow you to sleep better at night.

Well evolution and genetics has never been black and white as to what is good and what is bad. I am aware for example that the gene that gives rise to sickle cell anaemia when a person inherrits two recessive genes from both parents, also provides some resistance to malaria when the individual inherrits only one recessive gene. But as a general rule the propagation of deffective genes through the human population must have some detrimental impacts eventually. If not for modern medicine it would rarely occur within the human population. I can't remeber the precise details, but I remember watching a documentary where researchers are noticing and increased prevalence of deffective genes concerning sight and hearing among premature babies.

Pascal is extremely strict with data types, i.e. declaring an integer variable and trying to assign a real number to it will generate a syntax error if my memory serves correctly C++ and C are less strict with data types and you can do implicit conversions by assigning a real number to an integer variable. Java script, which I assume I have been using to program my website, has the syntax of C but data declarations more like basic, where you do not specify the data type of variables and can assign any data type to it at any time. Not sure if java and java script are one and the same or slight different.

Irrelevant! Growth rate may be falling but the population is still growing well in excess of long term ecological carrying capacity.

Taking away personal responsibility for one's health is one disadvantage.

Modern medical science is allowing individuals with all manor of genetic disorder to survive and in many cases pass their defective genes on to the next generation. Normally such individuals are weeded out by natural selection long before they have a chance to pass their genes on. This must be having some detrimental impact on the human gene pool in the long term. That is not to make a moral judgement on this practice, merely to dispassionately consider long term evolutionary consequences of doing so.

Electromagnetic waves......that would be light......that is why they have eyes. Fish do a large amount of the communicating through body language, colour and patterns. Perhaps those who are purported to be capable of mental telepathy are just particularly skilled at reading the body language of others.

This is akin to having an argument over whether the titanic was travelling to fast or wheher the ice berg was in the way. Yes! Technology, particularly the green revolution, allowed the human population to tripple from about 2 billion to 6 billion. But it does not change the fact that there are too many of us and that we need to address our collective excess fertility sooner or later. It does not change the fact that there is an ultimate upper limit to the number of humans that can exists on earth without the global ecosystem, that allows us to live, collapsing killing all of us or most of us. Complex ecosystem dynamics that make it difficult to calculate precisely how many of us their should be is really rather irrlevant in the grand scheme of things.You can argue about precise numbers all you want. But you can't argue about the basic fact that there is an ecological limit to the human popoulation. Besides, you argue that technology is the main driver of ecological change. Therefore you are suggesting that perhaps the current number of humans might be ecologically sustainable if we dumped our current technology and lived as simple farmer or what ever. Except that technology is clearly responsible for allowing our population to expand to its current size. If, for example, we dumped all forms of fossil fuel technology (fertiliser, farm machinery and transport) that is causing global warming and returned to beast of burden power then it is patently clear that we would not be able to produce enough food to feed 7 the current billion humans.

Why bother? How about we just stick to good old fashioned diet and exercise!

Sorry I understand what you mean. If horses and primates shared a common ancestor then why did one start heading down the path of hooves and the other down the path of large skulls and brains. Well I would say that initially, when both were very close to the ancestral line there could have been potential for both lines to swap evolutionary paths....theoretically. But once they have travelled a certain distance down each pathway, the accumulated genetic changes locks them into that path I would guess. Or at least locks them out of the other path. I.E. you are very unlikely to get hooved animals with primate like brains ans skulls due to hooved animals being specialised for a particular ecological niche. Development of characteristics designed for another ecological niche would decrease their fitness for their quadraped herbivore niche most likely. That sound reasonable? Same thing I would have thought. Anyway genetics is not a simple linear system but rather a very complex system with many cross intereaction between genes and groups of genes. Understanding single bits of the whole by controlling variables etc, does not necessarily give you an understanding of the whole. There is a whole new field of epigenetics now which seems to involve what was previously regarded as junk DNA to a great degree. I also pondered that, if the genes represent the computer data, then perhaps large parts of the fomerly junk DNA represent the operating system. That research has probably come a long way since I was at uni however.