Delta1212

There are two ways to stop evolving: Humanity's sole means of evolution is reduced to replacing every individual with an exact clone every generation, or we go extinct. Anything else is inevitably going to result in a changing allele frequency in the population whether by selection or drift and evolution will thus occur.

I know you meant that as a rhetorical analogy, but there's a pretty decent debate to be had about what the Bug bang actually represents as far as the start of the universe goes. In actuality, it's not really a model of the creation of the universe. It's a model of the evolution of he universe from a hot dense state to a less hot, less dense state. Where the hot dense universe came from, or what if anything came before it, isn't really covered. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

I could make a few arguments for excluding children under the age of ~1-2 from falling into the "full human being" category. Not that I necessarily think we should, but I could make a consistent argument for doing so. And yes, that really is what the debate is about. We're debating where the cutoff point is, which is defined by what characteristics make something human or not.

The last option excludes the moment of conception and any time during or after birth. There's no comprehensive "it happens at some point" option, and I'm not sure that voting for it to be a single point even makes sense. From the moment of conception arguably through puberty that little bundle of cells is developing more and more human characteristics. The debate is really "which characteristics define us as humans and how many/which of them are needed before something qualifies for human status?" And that applies to animals as well as zygotes. Eventually it might apply to computers/software as well. Not that all of those things necessarily qualify as humans, but that the debate does/will exist for each of them.

Technically, after it's born, its life is still contingent on a variety of biological processes as well. Just not necessarily so many of the mother's. Biology doesn't really lend itself well to hard boundary lines and distinct classifications. We impose them for the sake of convenience, but they generally don't exist in a true sense the way they do in some other branches of science.

Things in salt water are more buoyant. Salt water itself is less buoyant. Both are the result of salt water being denser than fresh water, which yes, allows objects to displace a smaller volume to reach the same weight.

I want to see HBO take a stab at Night's Dawn. That seems like it's right up their alley. I'd settle for Showtime, but I don't think they have the budget.

Although the classic twin scenario involves sending a twin out into space and having them return younger, it's not going into space that causes this. What causes it is the twin moving at very close to the speed of light, and then turning around and coming back. That's obviously a bit difficult to imagine happening on Earth for any appreciable length of time, so we imagine the twin flying away in space. Now, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down and the shorter distances become. So if the twin on Earth watches the twin in space fly away at, let's say, about 86% of the speed of light. For every minute that passes for the Earth-bound twin, he will see only thirty seconds pass on his twin's spaceship. Here comes one of the more counter-intuitive parts of relativity. Once the twin in the spaceship has achieved cruising speed and is no longer accelerating, for him there will be no difference between his ship rocketing away from a stationary Earth at 86% the speed of light and his own ship standing still while the Earth recedes at 86% of the speed of light. It's a bit like looking out the window of your train and seeing another train going by, and needing a minute to tell whether your train is moving or the other train is. On the train you can usually figure it out from the vibrations as the train rolls over bumps in the tracks, but on a spaceship there are no bumps. There's no way to tell who is really moving. And that includes observing the time dilation of Earth. Because if the twin in the spaceship looks back at Earth, he'll see Earth's time ticking away at half the rate, not his own. So if both twins see each other aging half as fast, how do we end up with the twin in the spaceship being younger? Well, the situation is only symmetrical as long as no one is accelerating. Once the twin in the spaceship turns around and returns to Earth, he will have undergone an acceleration that returns him to the same rest frame as Earth (and his twin) and his clock will be synced up with what the twin on Earth observed. He'll have experienced half the amount of time that his twin did over the course of the trip. On the other hand, if the twin on Earth decides he misses his space-bound twin and gets in his own rocket to go catch up with his twin, upon arriving at the original spaceship the twins will discover that the twin who initially stayed on Earth is the one who experienced less time than the twin who first took off in the spaceship.

When in doubt, reverse the polarity.

Does a particle have to be a real physical object?

The assumption was implicit in the example. You could replace "landslide" with "nuclear bomb" if you wanted. The point is that we're assuming some event that would have killed anyone involved, regardless of physical characteristics and genetic makeup. A mini Pompeii maybe.

Which alleles were lost is independent of what the lost alleles were, since none of the alleles in the population would have been any more or less likely to avoid being removed in that situation.

Really, I think the issue is simply that overtone is using "selection" to refer to any event that has an impact on the allele frequency of the population (by removing some members). I think it's simply an issue of using the term overly broadly rather than a misunderstanding of how the whole thing actually works.

It really boils down to the fact that evolutionary processes are dependent upon the fact that things which make more copies of themselves more frequently wind up with larger numbers of copies of themselves in a shorter period of time. Which, yes, is trivially true. Organisms have traits. A trait is literally any aspect of phenotype that you care to categorize ranging from hair color to having hair to number of limbs to the angle of curvature of the leftmost toenail of your right foot. Some traits are more highly correlated with survival and reproduction than others. The more highly correlated with reproduction a trait is, the more likely that trait is to spread in a population.

Compared to the average human being, he is a superior football player.

That's not a criticism, it's a feature. It actually boggles my mind that something so tautologically simple as that isn't understood by some people, although I guess I now see that even understanding this fact doesn't really seem to aid comprehension. There will be more copies of things that make more copies of themselves. That's how natural selection works. Things that are better at copying themselves will gradually increase in number over time in comparison to things that are not as good at copying themselves. How do you define whether something is good at copying itself? By how many copies it successfully produces. Throw in variation among all of the copying and this inevitably leads to an accumulation of traits that that make things into better self-copiers, because eventually the majority will always be made up of whatever made the most copies of itself.

Not with my own eyes, but I know it my heart that it's there all the same.

As it says right there, they are bilaterally symmetric, so each arm on one side as a corresponding arm on the other, the same way you have an arm on one side and an opposing arm on the other side. They just have four on each side instead of one.

We chose to let gay people get married.

Alright, a few specific points that you may want to address: 1. Evolution operates generationally on a population level. Individuals do not biologically adapt to their environment. They either are adapted to it or they are not, and they live and die by the adaptations they are born with. Humans have the exceedingly important advantage of being able to culturally adapt to new environments within a generation by learning new behaviors. These sorts of adaptations operate on an individual level, but we're born with the capacity to learn, and entering or excelling in a new environment induces no biological changes in an individual whatsoever, regardless of cultural or behavioral changes. 2. Piggybacking off of that, the environment does not induce adaptations that are beneficial to living in the environment. In fact, unless it happens in the germline, and therefore only affects your offspring rather than you, the only changes the environment is going to make to your biology that will have any noticeable impact are broken things, generally resulting in cancer. That's what we call the most common significant result of an environmentally induced alteration to an adult individual's DNA. 3. You haven't proposed a mechanism by which what you're describing could happen. Things don't happen just because. Evolution, for instance, works and a fairly straightforward and almost tautologically simple principle: The more something makes copies of itself, the more of that thing there will be, and the better a thing is at making copies of itself, the more copies of itself it will make. That's all that is required to be true for natural selection to function, because that's really all natural selection is: The better something is at copying itself, the more copies of it there will be. This means any traits that result in more copies being made will wind up being more strongly represented in the next generation. Let's say you have a population of people that are constantly being chased by wolves, and the only way to avoid being eaten is to run away. This is a constant thing that happens. Well, the slower someone is, the more likely they are to be eaten, and consequently the less likely they are to have children, because it's hard to get it on in a wolf's stomach. On the flip side, the faster someone is, the more likely they are to escape and, since it is again much easier to have children outside of a wolf's stomach, the more likely they are to have kids. This means, generation after generation, the faster people are having more kids than the slower people. Eventually, the only people left are going to be the descendants of fast people, because all the slow people will have been eaten. So you'll have a population made up entirely of very fast people, but it won't be the case that being chased by wolves induced a biological change to increase speed. The traits to run quickly were already present, or we're equally prone to appear regardless of whether or not anyone was being chased by wolves, the wolves just killed everyone who didn't have the "speed gene." 4. Off the evolution point now, or at least tangential to it, you're proposing that people will live longer because they are more useful to a global brain network. The issues with this are A: can you demonstrate that there exists a global brain in any meaningful way and B: that there are any feedback mechanisms that would cause this network to improve the life expectancy of "useful nodes." Because contrary to your assertion, networks don't just spontaneously retain useful nodes. In networks that do, there is some mechanism that defines what is and isn't a useful node and a further mechanism for retaining those nodes. These things don't just happen.

I'm getting the sense that you don't have an especially strong grounding in how evolution actually works. Am I wrong in that assumption?

I don't think that is really an entirely fair statement. Not to give credence to the "science is wrong about everything" people, but by there very nature, we don't know what the unknown unknowns are. We seem to have a pretty good handle on a lot of things and we're running into fewer things that we didn't even know needed to be discovered before we stumbled upon them, but it's never going to be possible to state whether the things we don't know are generally things we know we don't know or not, since the things we don't know we don't know aren't quantifiable for comparison until after we know about them.

What we really need is a modern day Einstein or Stephen Hawking.

And possibly not even that. The typical mass shooting that gets pinned on violent games is perpetrated by a young male. What do you think is the percentage of young US males that have could not be described as having played violent videogames before? It's a bit like trying to correlate shooters with the behavior of pointing your finger in the shape of a gun. You might very well be able to say that most of them have done it, and it sounds vaguely ominous and you could create a mental association between the two behaviors, but is it really indicative of anything if practically everyone has done it at least once? Are violent people more likely to play violent videogame a than the average population, or do so many people play violent videogames that practically anyone who has committed a violent act has probably played one at some time or another? These days that can be difficult to tell.

I don't see where anyone said that...