Mokele

Do you recall which journal this was in? Or was it at the SVP meeting last week?

Dozens, possibly hundreds. There are a LOT of fossil hominins, especially common species like H. erectus.

A key thing to remember is that, while copying more base pairs costs more energy and more nutrients, energy and nutrients aren't always the most important thing. All other things being equal, organisms will try to economize, but all other things are almost never equal. Consider the energetic penalties of sexual ornamentation, or being built for high speed (which often requires a high basal metabolic rate too, reducing even resting energy expenditure). Furthermore, organisms can add DNA rapidly (anueroploidy, whole genome duplication, etc.), but loss of DNA isn't nearly so fast - dropping a whole chromosome might cause problems during meiosis for sexual organisms, so they have to lose it by little bits. Last but not least, whole genome duplication often results in physical transformation - polyploids are often larger, stronger, more resistant to disease, etc. which is why so many common crops are polyploid. In a species where size may have definite advantages (a frog that can lay more eggs, an amoeba that can eat bigger things), the benefits of keeping the extra DNA may outweigh the costs.

That's the same reason everyone else chooses plants. I'd google around about 'tropical ecology'). A lot of ecological research has been on temperate ecosystems simply due to proximity, and I've heard there are some pretty well-recognized gaps in our understanding of how the tropics work and are different. One possible non-plant system that I'm fond of is Anolis lizards. Look up Irschick & Losos work on them - it's a fascinating read, and you've got loads of them all over the island. You could potentially do much more detailed studies because you live there and thus can watch for longer.

Remember, everyone, that a LOT of psychology research (defined as 'research that goes on in the psychology department') includes fairly basic stuff such as understanding perception, memory, emotion, regions of the brain, learning, even proprioception and posture. The whole "id/ego/superego" crap and other attempts to completely explain the human mind are the tiny minority of research. Even the therapy parts are mostly treating the same few exceptionally common mental ailments again and again. Think about it like paleontology - the stuff that gets press is grand theories about dinosaurs, but the vast majority of work is stuff about early mammal tooth shape and ancient snail assemblages.

The whole "we only use a tenth of our brain" is a total myth. A human with 1/10th of our intellect would be about as smart as a dog. You missed the point - intelligence comes in a series of intermediate levels, each of which must be useful enough in the organism's environment to justify the expense. Will a smarter beetle have more offspring? A smarter dog? We're naturally biased to claim intelligence as a universal good, but the fact remains that for most species, it's not even useful.

Be sure to search for your idea under alternate possible names, or just using random combinations of associated keywords. One thing I will caution - put the idea on the back burner. It could be potentially disastrous to view your entire education through the lens of this hypothesis, with possible confirmation bias creeping in, leading you to rigidly cling to it. Get a notepad, jot it down, and use it to jot down any other ideas you have, either for big hypotheses or just one-off neat experiments, and then haul that pad out when it's time for grad school.

You want to know the problem? You're the reason we say "A little knowledge is dangerous". You clearly don't have anywhere near the level of expertise or experience you think you do, yet you feel no compunction about making definitive proclamations which are based on shoddy science at best (this thread, your other one) or are outright wrong (like the time you moronically suggested that a poster try to copyright a hypothesis). Your arguement skills are poor, your information is spotty, poorly-integrated, and usually gleaned straight from Wikipedia or blogs, and you respond to the minutiae of a post rather that considering the overall substance and underlying idea. I'd be considerably better disposed towards you if I didn't have to spend time correcting the errors you post in just about every thread. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedNow, as to the actual substance of your post, you have still failed to provide any empirical justification why the nervous system (or even part of it) is a better metric for "complexity" than any other system such as endocrine or muscular. All you've done is make assertions. Science is no assertions. Either you're prepared to back up your points, or you're wasting time.

... The article contained excellent evidence of a phase of Earth's history characterized by massive bolide bombardment. It does not, however, contain any even remotely convincing evidence that life had already appeared by this point. There's an oddity in isotopes, but that's hardly a fossilized stromatolite. I don't dispute the bombardment, I dispute the origin of life as prior to it.

Our intelligence, however, is merely the extreme form. A trait must be useful in some way at ALL levels in order to evolve. Evolution will not maintain a trait that's currently damaging just in case it becomes useful later. And there is a huge cost to intelligence - it requires a LOT of calories to maintain. Human brainpower can accomplish a lot, but it cannot let us live on less than ~2000 calories a day. In an environment with severe nutrient depletion, salamanders will live happily while we all starve to death. How beneficial is merely half our current intellect? A tenth? Is it beneficial enough to justify the energetic costs?

It's pretty simple - natural selection responds only to local conditions at the time. If there's a harsh winter, natural selection will improve cold tolerance in the population, even if on the whole, heat tolerance is more important and that harsh winter was just a random fluke. The difference between evolving to suit local, immediate pressures and "long-term goals" becomes important when dealing with mass extinction. Obviously, extinction is a total genetic failure for any species. If there were any long-term goal going on in evolution, species would adapt to face inevitable catastrophes like mass extinction, but ample evidence from the fossil record shows otherwise - species adapt to local conditions and immediate selection pressures, even if this makes them more likely to die out when a volcano goes off or an asteroid hits. Another problem is that "improvements" is poorly defined. An improvement for an ape is not the same as an improvement for a tapeworm (and there's a LOT more of the latter). If you define it by circumstance, it becomes no different from saying that evolution happens. Additionally, there is non-selective evolution - genetic drift, founder effect, etc. all can change population genetics (which is the very definition of evolution) and even serve to aid speciation, but either offer no real "improvement" or may even make the new species "inferior" to their ancestors (consider how many island species are easily wiped out by mainland competitors introduced by man). Now, there are *trends* in evolution, especially within certain groups - loss of limbs, increasing body size, increasing toxicity, sleeker body form, etc. But these are usually due to physical interactions (reducing drag, better surface area to volume ratio, etc.) or simple, potent evolutionary drives (a potent venom and a mild one cost the same calories, but the potent one has advantages). It's also important to note that many species have retained basically the same general form for many, many millions of years. Crocodilians are pretty much the same now as they were 100 million years ago. Finally, there's the issue of local vs global optima. Imagine a hilly landscape. Evolution directs you to move always uphill, so soon you'll be on top of a hill. But there's no guarantee that you're on the highest hill of all, and once you're up there, you can't get to any other hill without going downhill (reduced fitness), which evolution will not allow.

Then where is that "growing evidence"?

Firstly, the dates listed in the first link are close to the commonly accepted value of 3.8 bya for life, so they aren't exactly special. Your second link proves nothing. Can you link to an actual scientific journal article presenting evidence of life prior to 3.8 bya?

Wrong. The neocortex is present in all mammals, therefore at least 150 million years old, possibly as old as 200 million years. This predates the entire snake adaptive radiation, flowering plants, eusocial insects, bird flight, echlocation in any form, and modern coral reefs. By your logic, since snake venom glands evolved *after* the neocortex, they're a better metric of evolutionary rate. Or the ability to flower. Can you give any scientific reason for using the nervous system as a metric rather than, say, the digestive system, or the muscular system? All are essential to life.

A key question is "can you design an experiment which could potentially falsify your hypothesis?"

Forget gene loss, what about polyploidy? Whole genome duplications aren't as rare as folks think - within genus Xenopus (clawed frogs, a common model species for endocrine and developmental work) there are individuals with 2N, 4N, 8N, and 12N chromosomes. Is X. ruwenzoriensis really 6 times as advanced as the superficially identical X. tropicalis?

The problem is that there's no real evidence of teleology, nor is there a plausible mechanism. There's plenty of evolutionary "trends" (digit reduction in cursorial tetrapods, limb reduction in squamates, changes in body size over time, etc.), but all are merely the product of natural selection, developmental biology, and, quite often, physical constraints (drag, inertia, area-volume scaling, etc.). Without a plausible instance of teleological evolution that cannot be explained otherwise, and without a plausible mechanism by which such teleological evolution could occur, it's rather superfluous. That's a lot of "if" and "inevitable" for my taste, particularly the "inevitable" part. Consider sharks, dolphins & ichthyosaurs. All were subject to the same physical constraint (drag), and all turned out very similar. That could be seen as "direction" or "a goal", when it's simple convergence. I'd also note that you could make the same chain of "ifs" with regard to many common strategies - the existence of parasites, of social insects, of migration, etc. Just as one could predict streamlining in aquatic organisms, one could predict the evolution of certain strategies such as these. Plus, I think we humans place too much emphasis on our minds. Remember, as far as we know, our sort of highly advanced thought has evolved only once, in one group of organisms. That puts us on par with flying snakes and the platypus. One could actually put forth a much more convincing argument that evolution trends towards armor plating (turtles, assorted bugs, etc.), or flight (4 separate evolutions of it), or jointed limbs (arthropoda for the win).

All the link provides is evidence of a massive bombardment. There's no evidence that life preceded this bombardment except for "organic chemicals", which have turned up all sorts of places, including meteorites, and are therefore a poor indicator of the presence of life.

That's a completely arbitrary and useless metric. Why not use the complexity of the musculo-skeletal system and locomotion? After all, all animals have that, and all lifeforms move (actively, passively, or by differential growth)? Or why not the complexity of the endocrine system? Your post shows a high degree of "Scala Naturae" thinking, with humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Now, there is a grain of truth - from time to time, "key innovations" pop up, allowing rapid diversification, such as multicelluar forms, the complex jaws of fish, insect flight, the plant vascular system, etc. But these are essentially randomly scattered through time, and also prone to being arbitrarily defined.

Learn to use paragraph breaks.

agentchange has been banned for 7 days for blatant homophobia.

Syntax, you cannot copyright hypotheses. Please stop contributing to threads where it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about.

I highly doubt it's vascular - my bet would be you're straining a nerve or nerve plexus. Is it your whole arm? Or just certain regions (back, front, forearm, hand)?

Never, ever, EVER use bleach. It will cause the bone to crumble to dust within hours of soaking. If you need to whiten it, use hydrogen peroxide. If you just want sterility, plain old soap and water. Don't use anything for too long - teeth are held in by connective tissue, and if that's destroyed, the teeth will fall out.

IMHO, whether you think socialism is right or wrong, the mere fact that it's been completely ruled out of the debate (based only on cold-war fearmongering) is damaging, as it needlessly rules out options.