Delta1212

On the other hand, sometimes things just break.

It's generally a statement about experience and learning to overcome obstacles. Physically, it's obviously not literally true as many things are capable of weakening you without killing you and often do lasting damage. Mentally it's also not strictly true as traumatic events can leave deep psychological scars. But there is a kernel of truth that overcoming one hardship can often make it easier to deal with other problems in the future. As with most such sayings, though, it over-generalizes by quite a bit.

I'm suspicious of anything thing that is supported by the argument "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

Why is a belief in one God a pre-requisite for a perfect religion? What makes that better than a religion with multiple gods or no gods at all?

It's good to be inquisitive and think about how things might work, but it's difficult to speculate on the causes of things that no data exists for.

You seem to be looking for an explanation for a phenomenon that we don't have any evidence even exists in the first place.

Races are not separate species capable of intermating. Humans are not nearly that genetically diverse and "mixed race" offspring do not have fertility problems. We're all the same species.

It will when the young white guy beats out both of you for the position, though. Edit: Just to be clear on a few points. I work in a techy field. Through both direct experience and second hand anecdote, I've

Very much this. Their descendants all either died or had sons. We're all probably equally descended from several women (and men) from the same time period, just not in an unbroken female line. Everyone's mother's mother's mother's mother's etc eventually converges on Mitochondrial Eve. That's different from none of her contemporaries having any living descendants.

No. Do you dream about losing your frontal lobe?

A particularly narcissistic person is probably more likely to both post a lot of selfies and be selfish, but one doesn't necessarily imply the other.

Well, less than could work there. If it's referring to doing it in a smaller number of lines, it's fewer. If, however, "five lines" is a maximum length and any length less than that value is acceptable (e.g. 3 1/2 lines) then it would be less than. So it's parsed '(fewer than five) lines' or 'less than (five lines)'.

9.999999999... does equal 10, though.

And that's really an important point. If a population speciated in order to exploit a new niche, or series of new niches, it means that a sub-group within that population was better able to reproduce by exploiting a new strategy than the existing one, which implies that their reproductive fitness under the old model was comparatively suppressed in order for the new strategy to yield better results. Maybe there was less available energy for reproduction under the old system, maybe there was more competition, maybe there was less physical space in a necessary environment. And in any case, "low" pressure being poorly defined really is a problem. Say you have a relatively new species of tightrope walker. There's a whole unexploited environment of tightropes with plenty of room and food for billions of them, so lots of room for expansion of the species, and no predators whatsoever that can reach them as they run along the ropes. And they can exploit this environment because they are all expert tightrope walkers that never fall. That seems fairly low pressure, right? But is it? Because if any individual winds up being born that isn't so good at tightrope walking, they fall and die. That's a very small portion of the population of new births, and so could be relegated to the territory of "birth defect" but still. The environment is maintaining the population within an a range that is still capable of exploiting the environment that resulted in their abundance and success. They might not be killed off left and right by environmental dangers, but they still have a boundary on the directions that can fan out in evolutionarily. I think that any "low pressure" system that you could conceive of is still going to have a lot of these "hidden boundaries" that don't really seem like they are selection pressures any longer because the population in question has adapted to deal with them very well, or because they exist ist he fringes of he population's environment and so are rarely encountered, but which nevertheless present limits to the directions and vareity that the population can evolve in. A ground animal that can't climb trees doesn't seem like it would have an exclusively tree-dwelling predator as a selection pressure, for instance, but if any of them that did try climbing trees would immediately get eaten, there is a selection pressure against the evolution of climbing. If the bright yellow berries that none of them eat are poisonous, it might not seem like much of a selection pressure, but it does mean that there is a selection pressure against eating small yellow fruits and anyone who evolves away from this aversion is likely to wind up dead. You can't just assume that all of the traits that allow an organism to survive and avoid the pitfalls of their environment are a given at that they are therefore not subject to much selection pressure. There is likely to be a fairly strong selection pressure to maintain those traits even if the frequency with which that pressure comes into play is fairly low because the genes that might fall afoul of the pressure in question have long since been weeded out and new mutations are rare and quickly eliminated.

I agree on the tech savvy part. Perhaps a slightly higher comfort level when it comes to interfacing with consumer computing devices, but most people I know are actually quite bad at computers beyond a bare bones "able to navigate to and interact on social media" level of engagement. I get people coming to me asking them to solve their computer problems despite the fact that 9 times out of 10 I'm just going on Google and poking around until I figure out what the problem is and what the potential solutions were. And inevitably, I ask if they tried googling it first to figure out what was wrong and the answer is either "Yes" which I interpret to mean "I typed 'my computer isn't working' into the search bar and nothing in the first three results solved my problem" or "No, I don't even know what to search for." Actually, I've found that people are amazingly bad at using Google in general, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I also don't think that Millenials are particularly more fame obsessed than other recent generations, either.

You might not have, but plenty of people have on both counts. You can't really paint "human society" with the such a broad brush based on your personal experiences in what I assume is a relatively stable economic situation in a developed country. That said, selection pressure doesn't have to be strictly about predation or competition. Anything that disproportionately suppresses the reproductive rate of a select portion of a population is a selection pressure. In that way, you could consider, for instance, education to be a selection pressure, as it tends to be negatively correlated with number of offspring.

Tar, as someone who is just entering the thread, could you humor me for a minute. I read the whole thing over the span of a few days, so I don't remember whether you specifically touched on this yet. Could you list some policy positions that you consider to be important in differentiating the Republican Party from the Democratic Party and that you are particularly in favor of? Your reasons for favoring those positions would be nice but isn't necessary if you don't feel like elaborating.

That's a 100 year period. I think the last hundred years has seen quite a few geniuses and major practical scientific advances. Do you disagree?

People who deny the existence of mental illness have never known someone who was seriously mentally ill.

Once you do anything to affect the entangled property, entanglement is broken. And no, that doesn't disprove determinism, but I don't think quantum entanglement itself is often pointed to as a reason why the universe is not deterministic. That generally lies in other areas of QM.

Quantum entanglement is a lot less flashy sounding than most pop science articles tend to make out, because what it actually is doesn't sound all that exciting unless you have a little bit of background in QM to begin with. Quantum entanglement is just a correlation between the states of entangled particles. Imagine you take a coin, split it in half, place one half in one box and another half in the other box. Separate them by a couple of light years. Open one box and you instantly know what the other box contains. If you have heads, the other box has tails, and vice versa. That sounds very dull, except we're using a quantum coin that, for very reasons that we have evidence for outside of this experiment, we know that whether a half of that coin becomes heads or tails is determined randomly when you open the box. So it truly could be either before you open it, but as soon as you do, the other half-coin is immediately relegated to being the opposite of the one you got, despite being light years away with no way for a signal to travel all the way there to tell it that the state of the other one has been determined. You can't use this to send a signal, because you can only see the correlation once you've brought the two halves together or otherwise communicated their state through slower than light channels. Edit: heh

You do understand that there is a difference between the statements "God told people not to kill" and "God did not tell people to kill" right? An example of God telling people to kill proves the second false, not the first.

From the Wikipedia article: "Studies have found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality, or humor,[4] and minimal changes in cognitive function overall."

Ok, but if you can remove one half of your brain without killing "you" then you've just admitted that your objection (that the act of splitting your brain in half at the beginning of my thought experiment results in your death) is no longer founded. Care to review?

So is your contention, then, that a Hemispherectomy, a surgical procedure used to treat epilepsy in some extreme cases, is, in actuality, murder?