Delta1212

I'd say that it's less a matter of "knowledge of evolutionary theory is an absolute prerequisite to practical advances" and more a case of allowing us to pre-emptively weed out obviously wrong answers and recognize potential issues before they occur. A mechanic with access to a lot of broken cars can learn how to fix them by trying a lot of things and seeing what works. A physicist with one broken car is going to be able to work out what the effect of his changes are before making them and probably figure out roughly where the problem might be based on the effect it has on the operation of the car. It's quite possible they'll both reach the right answer, the theoretical knowledge just makes it a bit quicker and cheaper, and you'll have the added benefit of knowing why your answer worked rather than just knowing that it did.

It's not perpetual motion that is impossible, since you could say any random object in space is perpetually moving with respect to some reference frame or another. It is a perpetual motion machine. A machine implies interaction and, as stated above, doing work of some sort, and there is always energy loss in such situations which means that rigging something to continuously run without an outside power source to draw from is impossible. Working backwards, perpetual motion as a phrase has come to mean the action of this hypothetical machine rather than just constant movement. By that definition, it is impossible.

What electron?

Using the word in its own definition is a bad practice from a dictionary perspective, but that serves as a good practical definition of simultaneity for distant events. If you consider the meaning of the words and how they are used, it's not really problematic.

As far as having all gay sons, there is, as mentioned, some evidence that the likelihood of being homosexual increases with the number of older brothers, which could theoretically be a mechanism for maximizing the benefits of being able having homosexual sons while minimizing the risks. Incidentally, I'm not really arguing that homosexuality provides major reproductive benefits to a family, merely that there are enough potential benefits to balance the associated costs and allow for the maintenance of a genetic basis in the population.

That essay is arguing against a fairly specific use of the term "group selection" that I don't think applies to what we've been discussing. In fact, he even makes the following point: "If a person has innate traits that encourage him to contribute to the group's welfare and as a result contribute to his own welfare, group selection is unnecessary; individual selection in the context of group living is adequate." Which is more or less how I've considered group selection to work anyway. Furthermore, the essay's discussion of eusocial insects makes exactly the same point I just did about self-sacrificing behavior being advantageous to the copy of the genes the caused it which exists in the "queen" or reproducing entity which birthed the self-sacrificer. The only reference anyone in the thread made to group selection was an offhand comment by CCWilson that, as far as I could tell, wasn't really making a point about the genetic source of homosexuality one way or the other. Don't get me wrong, it was a relatively interesting article, but I don't think it's going to change the course of this particular discussion much.

And my question as someone without expertise in this field is: Why not?

Yes, but this ignores the fact that they had to evolve into that state. Their whole reproductive strategy Is reinforced by a sort of positive feedback loop of kin selection, but if kin selection didn't work they wouldn't have started down the path to eusociality and hyper-relatedness. As far as success being defined as getting your genes passed on, let's back it up a generation. Let's have two competing families with the patriarchs Adam and Steve. Adam has five grown sons. Each son has two children. Each child gets resources from it's father and grandfather equally. Since there are ten children, that means each gets 50% of the total care output of one adult from their father and 10% of the total care output of an adult from their grandfather. Each child receives 60% of the total care output of an adult. Let's keep it simple and say that that's enough for 60% to survive to adulthood. Adam has 10 grandchildren, 6 of whome survive to adulthood. Steve also has five sons, but Steve carries genetic material that can cause homosexuality, and two of his sons are gay. Each of his six straight sons has two children. That's six children and six caregivers (each child's father plus the grandfather and two brothers). Each child receives 100% of the care output of each adult, so all six children survive. Now Adam and Steve have each managed to pass their genes on successfully to six children, however, Steve's grandchildren each received more resources than each of Adam's children and so are healthier and more likely to be able to care for their own children. The "gay gene" present in Steve's two gay sons made them less reproductively fit, but Steve's ability to have gay sons increased his ability to produce fit descendants and therefore the fitness of his own genes. Perhaps it is better to look at it not as a situation where having a gene that causes homosexuality increases your fitness, but having the gene that allows you to bear children who are gay as a small fraction of your offspring is advantageous, thereby perpetuating homosexuality on a genetic level.

In case this wasn't clear, eusociality is a reproductive strategy whereby most members of the species do not reproduce themselves but care for the young of the breeding members of the species who are the brothers and sisters (or nieces and nephews or whatever) of the non-breeders. It is most commonly seen in hive and colony species, like ants and bees. This isn't about socialization and empathetic responses to relatives. It's about an increase in reproductive fitness being achieved by members of the "family" failing to reproduce for themselves.

No, that is very clearly what his post said. I made no claims except that you failed to understand what he was asking and apparently continue to do so. Edit: But now that you mention it, do you understand that (i)if an expression represents wave-particle duality and (ii)you claim that wave-particle duality does not exist then you are making one of two definite claims: either the expression is wrong in some way or it does not actually represent a wave-particle duality. So you are definitely claiming one of those two things by asserting the non-existence of the wave-particle duality and while you are certainly not obligated to respond to anyone's arguements about anything, no one is obligated to take your arguments seriously if you refuse to address counter points. I'm not a quantum physicist, and I've seen enough "pop science" that I learned in my youth turn out to be inaccurate or flat out wrong to be receptive to the idea. When you first said that the wave-particle duality was wrong, my response was "Oh, really? That's interesting." In the time between that point and the point at which I started posting, I became rather comfortably convinced that you are wrong based on the fact that you're not backing up your point nearly as effectively as everyone else. If you want to convince anyone that you know what you are talking about, you have to address the points that people raise, and while I have seen you state that you have several times, the post that you dismissed as being an argument against a claim you didn't make was very clearly an argument against your entire premise. Either you are ignoring it, or you are truly failing to understand the applicability and in either case, that is undermining your credibility. If you do not wish to convince anyone, then carry on.

No, he isn't. He is saying that those expressions are representative of the wave-particle duality, and if you are claiming that there is no wave-particle duality, then you are, ipso facto, claiming that one or both of them is wrong. He is asking which it is.

Nutrition and lifestyle tends to play a pretty major role as far as both height and development goes, sometimes as much or even more than genetics.

First, the rebellious teenager is much more of a modern stereotype than you are giving it credit for, if not in subject then at least in degree. For most of human history, and still including today in many places, the extended family has provided a massive support network and was the basis of tribal society and most if not all of the government structures that developed. People did not simply walk out on their families as a matter of course. Second, having a large support network did have a hugely significant impact on survival. We're not talking about having a funny uncle to babysit the kids on Thursday nights. Most of human history saw people acquiring food themselves and living very literally day to day and week to week. A hunter could collect enough food for himself and maybe a couple more people if they didn't have a bad day, which they would. Since family would get priority as far as receiving that excess food, grandparents would be a vital supplemental food source. The fact that there is a correlation between number of older brothers and homosexuality in males could be very important if it is because a homosexual genetic predisposition is more likely to be expressed by a person carried to term by a mother who has already had a number of sons. A pair of grandparents providing for three families are going to be significantly more successful than a pair of grandparents who provide for five families in ensuring that the children all have adequate care to reach adulthood, and a pair of grandparents taking care of three families with the help of two non-reproducing males are going to be even more successful still. Now, you are right that a person reproducing for themselves is going to be more reproductively useful than someone who simply helps raise other people's children, but that usefulness diminishes with each additional reproducer. In a family with one child, it is infinitely more useful for them to start a family than for them not to. In a family with ten children, it's quite possible that having all of them start families would place a prohibitively expensive resource burden on the extended family to everyone's detriment of everyone, whereas having a few refrain from reproducing but increasing the resource pool available to everyone else will ensure a much higher survival rate than would be the case otherwise. I am not necessarily a proponent of kin selection as the driver behind homosexuality, but I do think you are underestimating the degree of its potential impact. If it was as weak of a force as you seem to imply, eusociality would be an impossible reproductive strategy to develop, and yet it is actually a fairly successful one as far as it goes.

juan, would you agree that quantum particles have some of the properties attributed to "little hard spheres following Newtonian laws", some of the properties attributed to waves, and some properties attributed to neither?

When a particle and its anti-particle collide, they annihilate. A photon is annihilated when it collides with another photon.

You'd need to know a lot more than just what a child's parents' hair looks like to give any sort of accurate probability. You need to know information about their genetic makeup, which information on the grandparents may help with but not enough to fix the problem. As an illustration, even if we simplified the issue of inheritance down, your results would look like this: Blond + Brunette = 50% chance of being blond/50% brunette or 0% chance of being blond/100% chance of being brunette. Based on the grandparents information, it is more likely to be a case of 50/50 blond/brunette, but again, that's assuming gross simplification of how hair color inheritance works.

The other alternative, and the more defensible one for traits that are common across species with otherwise significant divergence, would be that the trait is a neutral byproduct of some other advantageous trait and that decoupling them is either impossible or unnecessary. Although I personally find it unlikely, you could make an argument that fingerprints are simply annaccidental result of the way that the skin on our hands develops, and if that process had resulted in perfectly smooth fingers and palms instead, it would have no impact on human fitness whatsoever and the only difference would be the fact that we'd be debating the adaptive advantages of smooth skin over wrinkly koala hands in this topic instead.

I'm actually going to go with yes if we allow for the exclusion of those who are in a position where communication and social interaction are rendered difficult or impossible. I have yet to meet someone who has never said anything about any other person without that individual being present.

For QM, just think of an observer as something that interacts with the system. If a particle hits a brick wall, the wall has "observed" the particle. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's closer than the image most people bring up in their minds when they hear the word 'observer' used in quantum mechanics.

It's also a case of redundancy. You only need one ovary to reproduce, but what happens if it gets damaged? Then you're screwed (but not getting pregnant). Now you might say that you could also use a redundant heart as well, but it would be much harder to introduce an extra heart into the circulatory system without mucking it up, especially since the damage done to a heart would probably be fatally destructive to your vascular system even if you had a spare to keep beating.

That is not how that works. The inclusion of the names Adam and Eve in those terms have become vastly misleading for some people. They were not the first anything. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down through the remain line, and the Y-chromosome is passed down through the male line. Every male got his Y-chromosome from his father, who got it from his father and so on. Every person got their mitochondrial DNA from their mother, who got it from her mother and so on. Mitochondrial Eve is the woman from whose mitochondrial DNA everyone alive today's mitochondrial DNA is most recently descended. That DNA can also be traced back to her mother, her grandmother and so on. Who mitochondrial Eve is changes over time as genetic branches die out. There were lots of other women (and an entirely different mitochondrial Eve that existed far back in their past) at the time of the current mitochondrial Eve. All of the descendants of these women, however, eventually died out or ended in a male who ceased to pass on her mitochondrial DNA. By way of illustration, let's say there are two women: Eve and Lilith. Eve has a daughter and Lilith has a son. Theses two get married. Eve will be mitochondrial Eve for all of their descendants through her daughter, but that does not mean that Lilith didn't exist. Her mitochondrial DNA simply didn't get passed along because she had a son. The same can be said of Y-chromosomal Adam. Y-chromosomes are passed down only through males. So if Adam has a son and Steve has a daughter, and the two get married, all of their male descendants will have Adam's Y-chromosome. To illustrate how the specific Eve and Adam can change over time, let's say that Adam has two sons: Cain and Abel. Both boys have Adam's Y-chromosome, so he is Y-chromosomal Adam. Now let's say that Cain has two sons: Matthew and Mark. Cain, Matthew, Mark and Abel all have Adam's Y-chromosome. He is still Y-chromosomal Adam. Now Abel dies (of unspecified causes) without having any sons. Matthew and Mark are the only living male descendants and both have Cain's Y-chromosome. Cain is now Y-chromosomal Adam. This scenario also applies to mitochondrial Eve. Humans existed long before either mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam existed, and neither was the first or only member of their sex which existed at the time, they are merely the individuals that, if you traced your lineage from your father to his father to his father etc, and your mother to her mother to her mother etc, you would intersect with every other person on those two individuals. Everyone is still descended from other people who lived at those times, just not through a single unbroken line of one sex.

Life isn't magic. It's also a somewhat arbitrary categorization. If everything that we classify as alive is conscious, and nothing else is, it is either a massive coincidence, or else one of the requirements we have for determining whether something is alive is responsible for consciousness, also coincidentally since we don't intentionally include consciousness in our definition of life. Based on everything we've observed, the brain is inextricably linked with our own experience of consciousness. Changes to the brain change our state of consciousness. Based on the available evidence, it's fair to say that it is exceedingly unlikely that anything without a brain, or at least a rudimentary nervous system, experiences anything we'd call consciousness. If they did, it would legitimately make me wonder if rocks were conscious, or pocket calculators at the very least. Until we know more, we have to say that consciousness requires something brain-like in complexity, if not an actual brain. It's very unlikely that bacteria are conscious, but it may be possible to be conscious without, strictly speaking, a brain.

For the result you are proposing, you would need an environment with literally unlimited resources and no barriers to resource acquisition in addition to a complete absence of barriers to reproduction. Even then, random chance would eventually result in some form of life that would be lethal to other forms and that intently creates an environmental selection pressure.

You can have life without consciousness, therefore they are not the same thing. We don't know if you can have consciousness without life. Artificial life, to be considered artificial life, will need to be able to reproduce. It will very likely not display any signs of consciousness. You're putting the cart before the horse and asking about the creation of an artificial being that is conscious but not alive. That wouldn't be artificial life. That would be artificial intelligence.

Your answer is incorrect because they are already less than 120 miles apart when the BMW leaves. This means it tales less than an hour from the time the BMW leaves for the cars to meet. You have to factor in part of the last hour that only has the vette traveling at 90 mph while the BMW is stationary.