Greg Boyles

Europe and the USA have major debt and economic problems in common. Australia's debt and economic problems are no where near as big. Europe and USA also have virtually uncontrolled mass immigration from Africa and Mexico respectively. Australia has a very much small immigration intake. I wonder how closely uncontrolled mass immigration and debt and economic problems are linked. Clearly third world immigrants require significant welfare and services when they first arrive in a western country. The more immigrants the bigger the bill to the government.

Is anyone from Australia and did you watch the Four Corners report in the Comorra of Naples? It seems that the Italian government went on grandiose crusade of urban renewal, creating high rise appartment complexes that were supposed to house Italy's growing population and create vibrant high density communities. But it appears they have all become degraded high rise slums where the outcastes of Italian society are warehoused and that are the head quateres of all the Comorra familes. Does the former Italian vision sound familiar to anyone from the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane?

Biodiversity loss in favour of more humans is one obvious effect. Increased social tension and instability is another effect.Please note I did not use the term 'political instability' as an ET would not understand our politics but would probably be able to recognize social tension and instability.

Mmmmmm!. So some O2 may have been present due to 'cracking' of H2O, but most of this was consumed by oxidation of reducing gases produced by volcanism leaving only trace amounts. Presumably some of the N was oxidised to nitrogen oxides, some of the H was combined with N to form ammonia abd the volcaning reducing gases included H2S. It doesn't seem to entirely discount the assumed general nature of early Earth's atmosphere until cyanobacteria arose. It seems to only bring into question the absolute absence of O2 up until that time.

It is strongly suspected that yet another great human civilisation fell in part due to over population and in part due to climate change. Deforestation to build and maintain their civilisation and to grow their crops contributed to the regional climate altering the desert advancing across what was once a fertile region. Are we going to learn the numerous lesson of history or wil we allow our global civilisation to fall like all the rest that have gone before us?

I couldn't remember the proportions of each gas but I did remember that they were present and that CO2 and N were major components......from reading about Stanley Miller's experiment. Reducing or mildy reducing, the point is that there was no free oxygen or any other oxidant that tend to consume organic compounds. Well the other side of the coin is that now bacteria are every where and they also tend to consume organic molecules and assimilate the carbon. So the fact that life is now absolutely ubiquitous undountedly contributes to the fact that life can never arise again in the same way. Or at least the odds for life arising anew are remote.

How true. Some of that must have something to do with over population, including in the west, with to many would be alpha males in various walks of life competing against one another and confusing the masses. Same principal when retailers provide to much choice for consumers all it ends up doing is making it difficult for them to make a choice and hence they don't end up making one and walking out of the store. It seems to me that smaller groups of humans that ethnically or culturally uniform are always more cohesive than larger multicultural groups. E.G. Anglo-Saxon Australia at 15 million or so was far more united than multiculatural Australia at 23 million.

OK but what causes the tumbling? And what is the mechanism by which the rate of tumble can be varied in response to chemotactic signals? This implies that there is some sort of spoiler system over the cell surface that is analagous to fish fins. Or in the case of a speed boat with no rudder, it must be analagous to the passengers on one side of the boat dipping their legs in the water so that it creates differential drag that causes the boat to gradually turn in that direction. Facinating pondering such questions and it sometimes makes me miss the scientific community and the pure discovery and problem solving that science involves. One thing that I have found myself particularly talented at in the landscaping, home rennovation, horticulture and weed control world is problem solving.

It seems to me that a flagellated cell is like a speed boat with a propellor but no rudder. I don't undertand how it can move in specific direction given differential chemoctactic signals from its surface. Where is the equivalent of its rudder or teleost fish fins? Or is it all down to pure chance? Some cells happen to tumble in or are defelcted in the right direction and some don't. But because there are always so many that the chances that some cells will end up in the right place and survive to reproduce is overwhelming? Think about it in terms of spermatazoa finding their way up the fallopian tubes to meet the ovum.

In th usa all that wealthy people seem to do is evade taxes. It is the majority of ordinary people who can't afford the smart ar$e lawyers and accountants who collectively pay the bulk of the tax revenue. Wealthy people might therefore be regarded as a drain on the economy - taking a great deal of wealth and funnelling it off shore into Swiss bank accounts and not purchasing locally etc.

That is based on the premise that you know precisely how it works and how far you can push the components, in minor ways, before the thing fails entirely. Imaging puting some one from the middle ages in front of an engine and say tinker away. They would not comprehend how something so complex and finely tuned could have been developed slowly over a long time from much simpler devices. They might conclude that god or gods created it. Just thinking how little it takes to stop a 2-stroke brush cutter or what ever from working - gaskits not sitting quite right, a small speck of gaskit material blocking a fuel port, a missing tiy spring from the carburetta. Same situation with the moden flagellum. An advocate of intelligent design would be in the same situation as a person from the middle ages sitting in front of a modern engine.

In a previous thread about how human altruism fits into evolutionary imperitives and this was mentioned by some one. I.E. Sacrifice of one individuals reproduction enhances the survival of the species. But it occured to last night either in a dream or when I was half alseep that we may be looking at this from the wrong perspective. Altruism implies the suppression of an individual imperative for the good of the collective. But worker ants simply don't have the ability to reproduce and therefore have no individual imperative to do so. So is it really altruism from their perspective. Perhaps we need to look at it from the perspective of the ant queen who as the individual imperative to eat and be protected so she can reproduce. Hence she generates a heap of 'slaves' to do this for her so that all her efforts can be focused on reproduction. The workers have no importance for continuation of the species other than facilitating the queen. So therefore colonial insects can't really be viewed as an example of altruism when trying to explain this phenomenum in humans.

Yes I was aware of that which is why I asked if it included single cell organisms. Larvae probably have rundimentary muscles grouped around their appendages which allows them to move them differentially. With flagellated single cells........how do they tumble differentially? That implies they have some sort of spoiler system on their surface (like an aircraft) that can differentially create drag. How? Or is that still subject to ongoing research?

Yes, that's right it was zooplankton rather than phytoplankton. Does zooplankton include single cells with flagella or simple multicellular animals with multiple flagella or cillia? If so same question.

In the case of phytoplankton, both these examples of nanomachinery give individual phytoplankton the ability to move purposely in a specific direction, i.e. to move towards the ocean surface by night and down to the ocean depths by day. In the thread "how life begins" I saw and watched the series of youtube videos about abiogenesis and particularly the one about how the flagellum probably developed. The flagelleum simply rotates and a kink towards the end allows it to provide thrust. Question How can a flagellum that simply rotates give the cell the ability to move in a specific direction? With fish and worms etc there are various muscles associated with the propulsion structure that allows it to move in specific ways and therefore provide thrust in a specific direction. But there is apparently no such way to differentially move a flagellum.

Have been reading the "how life begins" thread and about irreducible complexity as it applies to the flagellum. It crossed my mind that there may be examples of human created irreducible complexity in the realms of engineering and computer software. Might the internal combustion engine be an example of this. Modern internal combustion engines are so precision engineered and so finely tuned that removal of any component or even slight alteration of any component will cause the engine to cease functioning. But is it the case with very early iterations of the internal combustion engine that they are more robust in that you could remove some components or alter them signficantly but the engine would still function........albeit not necessarily very well.

As previously state the pathways involved with self gratification and self interest etc are not linear and there is great scope for unpredicted behaviour that is not necessarily clearly linked with survival. Believe what you want to believe about your altruism. But in the end I doubt that what we believe about ourselves and our behaviour matters much because much of it is probably an illusion created in and by our grey matter.

This series of videos was facinating. I hadn't realised they had come as far as that in beginning to understand how the first prokaryotes arose. It all seems very plausible to me.

The post that triggered me to respond with this was about the ETS being effective or not. And it wont be in my opinion because its underlying premise is false.

Comparing population size between Yemen and Canada is rather meaningless You also have to compare the ecology of the two countries in conjunction with their populations to derive any meaning. An over populated country or region is not necessarily densely populated and a densely populated country or region is not necessarily over populated. One of the best and self evident indicators of over population must be polticial stability.

At the time that life first arose in Earth's oceans, it is believed that the atmosphere contained hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia and carbon dioxide etc, but no free oxygen. Such an atmosphere is said to be a reducing one rather than an oxidising one, as at present. And oxidizing atmosphere promotes degradation of organic molecules. A reducing atmosphere has the opposite effect on organic molecules. So once our atmosphere acquired free oxygen there was no way that life could ever spontaneously arise from free organic molecules ever again. Watch the first episode of David Attenborough's "Life On Earth". You can find it on youtube. As to how precisely proteins, lipids and nucleic acids came together to form the first prokaryote..........who knows. But it has been observed that phosolipids do spontaneously form bilayers identical to those found in cell membranes in the form of spherical structures and some simple proteins will spontaneously embed themselves in those phospholipid bilayers.

For some people leaving a tip is a status symbol similar to having an expensive car. Leaving a tip under such circumstances might be an act of self gratification or demostration of high social status. So it is not necessarily inconsistent with evolution and self interest.

Legalising drugs...... I am wavering on that. I agree that it will eliminate current forms a drug crime virtually overnight. But I can't help thinking that there will also be some rather disastrous side effects. E.G. There is strong link between schizophrenia and abuse of marijuana, hence a massive increase in its use could have some serious implications for national mental health. We could replace all the smoking related illnessses that we are gradually eliminating by clamping down on smokers and smoking with marijuana related illnesses, including some tabacco smoking illnesses.

But neither can be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later we will have to figure out how to run our economies efficiently with profit growth or population growth, i.e. we will have establish a steady state society. Clearly you are an economist or a student of economics because you have just demonstrated that you are yourself divorced from ecological reality on which all depends, including our economy. Where do you think your food comes from iNow? It is produced by and dependant upon ecological processes. Food is a major part of our economy and therefore our economy is dependant upon and is a subset of the global ecosystem! Where do fossil fuels come from iNow. From ecological followed by geological processes over hundreds of millions of years. Fossil fuels are a major component of our economy and therefore our economy is dependant upon and is a subset of global ecosystem. Where do biofuels (vegetable oil and ethanol) come from iNow? Where does wood come from iNow? Where does paper come from iNow? If we clear fell the last of the old growth forests on Earth and there sufficient plantations are not expected to be established within 100 years or so then our economy will take a massive hit. Or what if climate change (drought, flooding and super storms) signficantly reduces our global food production? Should I bother continuing? My previous statement is fact, not opinion.

I suspect your country would be better served by bringing your troops home from all your overseas deployments and have them man your very porous border with Mexico. That, and the drug cartals, are a far greater threat to America than international terrorists ever will be. Even now the destructive nature of drugs and drug crime has and does have a far more destructive effect on your society than the aftermath of 9/11 is currently having. I would argue that the aftermath of 9/11 is fairly insignficant, though terrible for those who were directly involved in it, compared to illegal immigration and drug crime from across your Mexican border.