mellowmorgan

Oh, I suppose that kind of makes sense. I was assuming both had a lethal recessive allele, because that seemed necessary. When he says, "for every lethal recessive that I possess, if I mate with my sister one in eight of our offspring will be born dead or will die young" it seems like that is the assumption because he is saying one in eight of the offspring WILL have the disorder and die young. None of the offspring would have it though if one of them didn't have the lethal recessive allele. Maybe it would have been more accurate to say, "for every lethal recessive that I possess, if I mate with my sister, there is a 50% chance that one in four of our offspring willl be born dead or will die young." I would not say Hamilton is the father to the entire idea of the selfish gene. He is the theorist responsible for first expounding upon kin selection and altrusim, both of which are essential to the selfish gene though. Also, Dawkins gives credit to these men several times and quotes them throughout his book, espiecially W. D. Hamilton. To my understanding, he helped popularize his work.

I got confused while reading a footnote by Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (which I so far thoroughly enjoy), elaborating upon why incestuous relations are highly detrimintal to offspring genetically. Here is the full note: “A lethal gene is one that kills its possessor. A recessive lethal, like any recessive gene, doesn't exert its effect unless it is in double dose. Recessive lethals get by in the gene pool, because most individuals possessing them have only one copy and therefore never suffer the effects. Any given lethal is rare, because if it ever gets common it meets copies of itself and kills off its carriers. There could nevertheless be lots of different types of lethal, so we could still all be riddled with them. Estimates vary as to how many different ones there are lurking in the human gene pool. Some books reckon as many as two lethals, on average, per person. If a random male mates with a random female, the chances are that his lethals will not match hers and their children will not suffer. But if a brother mates with a sister, or a father with a daughter, things are ominously different. However rare my lethal recessives may be in the population at large, and however rare my sister's lethal recessives may be in the population at large, there is a disquietingly high chance that hers and mine are the same. If you do the sums, it turns out that, for every lethal recessive that I possess, if I mate with my sister one in eight of our offspring will be born dead or will die young. Incidentally, dying in adolescence is even more `lethal', genetically speaking, than dying at birth: a stillborn child doesn't waste so much of the parents’ vital time and energy. But, which ever way you look at it, close incest is not just mildly deleterious. It is potentially catastrophic. Selection for active incest--avoidance could be as strong as any selection pressure that has been measured in nature." The bold print is where my confusion arose, and probably owes to my poor comprehension of genetics. With an autosomal recessive disorder like albinism (I'm not saying it's necessarily lethal in modern civilisation, but in the wild it is and it's the first thing I could think of), if two siblings carried the alleles heterozygously with only one recessive, then mated, wouldn't it be that 1 in 4 of their children would be albino, not one in eight? I figured this out using a Punnett square. Is this the wrong approach? Please explain this to me, and the proper calculations involved. Thank you.

It seems rather self-destructive, if you ask me, considering that before electricity we used lamp and candlelight, and before that, fire for the majority of our existence. But my guess would've been that distinguishing between lights that are harmful would've required a larger brain, not a single trait like colour or pattern achieved through natural selection, but I'm not so knowledgeable on this topic...

For billions of years, the only bright objects in the night sky were stars or the moon. Night-flying moths used to navigate in a straight line. Today, the instinct to fly toward bright objects causes moths to exhaust themselves fluttering around streetlights and banging against brightly lit windowpanes. This behavior is not adaptive, so why does it persist?

ok so for the gantt charts of a and b, this is what i got. so did i do it right? (i'm pretty confused with this class... so... please help me)

No, it's not unusual. Everyone in my programming class that I've talked to has had problems with this at some point, especially on exams when we are timed. Whenever I have to write a program, the first thing I do is read the instructions over and over until I know exactly what I need to do, and then sometimes write a summary of what I need to do in comment lines in my java file. Based on the instructions I'll try to figure out what variables and methods I need. Then I import my libraries and do all the headers and curly brackets. Obviously, this doesn't require much thinking but still makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. When it comes to writing out the code, pseudocode helps me to figure out what I need to do. Also PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! I also had a professor last semester that made us write our code out on paper for tests. It was horrible at first, but over time it helped with memorisation.

So on the UML Diagramming on Visio, I screwed up the settings on something and now I can't set the multiplicities on my arrows. Somehow I made it disappear from the edit window that pops up when you double click on the arrow. I can't get it to go back to the way it was. Is there a way to reset EVERYTHING so I can make sure it's fixed?

So for my Bio Lab, I have to write an essay on the spread of cancer throughout the body. Like how and why the cells separate from primary tumour and spread to other parts of the body. I read some scholarly journals but, to be honest, they were totally beyond my knowledge of cancer. They were so in depth, and I'm trying to just weed out the core concepts, since this is an intro class. I came up with some key words, like metastasis and clonal dominance theory, but I can't find anything providing a simple explanation of what clonal dominance is or a list of its major tenets. Is the clonal dominance theory not even a theory yet, and just a hypothesis? Because somewhere I read that it was only a hypothesis... Also, does anyone know specifically why cancer cells might spread away from their primary site? Thanks!

Thanks so much for your reply. Would you happen to know why my biology professor thinks it's 8?

I had an exam a couple days ago asking for maximum number of electrons in the third shell of an atom. The correct answer was 8, but I keep seeing all over the internet that it's 18. I also saw on the internet that elements like uranium and radon have 18 electrons in their third shells. Our textbook, however, does say that the max is 8. I asked my professor about it and he basically just looked at me like I was crazy and was really adamant about it being 8. Please help. I feel really confused at this point...

I assumed that we were confining the definition of life to the biosphere, as we have no evidence of life existing outside of it.

OK, so I'm in a Software Engineering class and we've just been assigned to groups for a project. Our project is to design an object-oriented system using the Unified Process. We can pick whatever system we want; some one suggested a system that does inventory for a bookstore. I don't know, that seemed a bit dull. So I'm looking for some other ideas that are more interesting - but not too complex as this is our first Software Engineering class and we only have until the end of November (of course we won't be constructing or implementing it, just going to end of Design/Elaboration phases). We are voting on a project Thursday so I need to have some good ideas by then! ...So, yeah, please help!

I have Visual Studio and Eclipse but my mean professor won't let us use them in class!

It works now! Yay! I replaced the cont == "Yes" with "Yes".equals(cont) I was so confused why my original didn't work because in c++ it seems to work fine to do this with strings but I guess strings are quite different in java?