Mokele

The creationist's greastest success has been perpetuating the false dilema that if evolution is untrue or even has flaws, creationism is the only other option. Not true, there were many, many theories befoe Darwin of how life came about, both scientific and religious. If evolution were wrong, whose to say that the right answer wouldn't be the Norse myths? Personally, I'm kinda partial to the idea of a collosal sea serpent encircling the entire earth. Mokele

Some do, some don't, it depends which pill you take. Well, not you personally, but you know what I mean. Evidently there are many different pills that work in different ways. I learned this thanks to my GF having an unusually adaptive body which stops responding to pills after she's been on them 2-3 years, so she has to switch to different ones. Mokele

Ok, this may have already been covered, but it just occured to me after something Skye mentioned. Why does eating animal cause increased suffering, in a comparative sense? First, I'd like to rule factory farms out from this. I don't like them either. For the purposes of this post, I'm referring to 'farms' in the more traditional sense. So, we have two conditions, nature and farming. We can rule our death itself as a caue of suffering, since any living thing will eventually die, whether on the farm or in nature. While Farmer Bob might not use 100% humane approaches, neither does nature (wich goes double for everything we eat, since such animals are low on the food chain in nature), so I'd say there's no difference except in the cause of the death. If we exclude factory farms (as I explicitly did), the life on a farm involve much less suffering, since the animals are fed, cared for, and given medical treatment that they could never get in nature. In fact, one could say that your average cow or chicken has a *much* better life even if it's eaten, since the average life of a cow in the wild is probably lose to 2 year, because of the extreme infant mortality. Worse for chickens (anyone whose seen what happens when a large rat snake gets into a chicken coop knows what I mean). So, couldn't we simply view using animals for food as giving them a better life, a longer life and in return, we get to pick when and how it ends and use the carcass? Sure, they don't get a choice, but considering that the alternative for over 95% of them would simply be "death within the first year of life", I don't see that as a huge moral problem (especially since they lack the mental capacity to make that choice; in general herbivoes are exceptionally stupid animals). Mokele

Personally, I'm very, *very* for outsourcing/offshoring/whatever you want to call it, but for demograhic reasons. For a number of years, I was what I called a "post-environmentalist", the position of which boiled down to "the eventual Malthusian nightmare that awaits all humanity will result in the eventual destruction of everything we're working to save, so screw it, the sooner this species breeds itself into oblivion the better." Can we say "pessimism", everyone? Anyhow, after a while I realized that the problem wasn't developed countries or undeveloped countries, but ones in the transition, who have the low death rates of developed countries but high biths like undeveloped countries, the so-called 'demographic transition'. While they're no payed a good wage by our standards, outsource workers are usually still getting more than they would otherwise, and this will help raise the standards of living. So basically, I see the loss of jobs to overseas as a small price to pay to divert the malthusian dystopia oherwise bearing down on us. ::offers green wafers:: Soylent Green, anyone? Mokele

We just had a thread on this about a month ago. Please find it with the search function and add on to that one. Mokele

They do in flies and other animals, and fitness studies are actually rather common (though few are done via experimental manipulation, but rather taker advantage of existing natural variation). As for humans, no, since you can't make a test population, and we've altered out environment so much that it'd be hard to tell from observation if there's any effect. Test around, see who has the gene. Mokele

It sounds like a part of population genetics, but far in advance of the level at which I've been exposed to it. I can guess at the rudiments of the math behind it (mutation rates, genetic drift, selection pressures, etc), but I suspect the application to such a problem requires a computer. Mokele

How about human society itself, which is entirely a product of the evolution that gave us our big brains? Mokele

Personally, I consider all 'races' of humans to be invalid, biologically, for two reasons. First, as noted, the individual variation is so far beyond the variation between people from different localities that the latter effectively makes no difference. Second, and most important, is gene flow. Subspecies/races are isolated or mostly so from other subspecies of the same race. In contrast, human populations, due to our great mobility, have a huge amount of gene flow, enough that there isn't any reasonable way to delineate 'races'. http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_2.htm The maps on the above link show allele frequencies. You'll note that they do not correspond well to either skin color (which is mapped on a prior page from that link) or any other variable. If there is a local area of strong variation for one gene, it might not be distinguished from the surrounding area at all in other genes. If there were true races, we would expect local variation in repeating patterns due to isolation. Instead, we see patterns that vary from locus to locus, the product of local selection pressures, with no clear distinctions. Ergo, I would interpret this as strong support for my theory. IMHO, the closest you could get to a race would be Native Americans, but there was probably continual gene flow across the bering land bridge until that closed off, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some even afterwards by the more seagoing cultures. Plus there's all the mixing since colonization by Europeans. Mokele

Well, I don't know the math, but I do know that mutations do not occur at all points on the DNA molecule with equal probability, and that there are certain mutational "hotspots" which seem to be much more prone to mutations. Mokele

In your opinion, and even if you are correct, only to *some* relationships. Only to some individuals. And this matters why? The discussion is on health aspects, not beliefs. Mokele

In contrast to the english words... Sunday - Sun day Monday - Moon day Tuesday - Tyr's (Norse god of valor) day Wednesday - Wodin's (Odin, Ruler of Norse gods) day Thursday - Thor's (Norse god of combat) day Friday - Freya's (Norse godess of desire) day Saturday - Saturn's (Roman god of creation) day Mokele

That's one reason, yes. Imagine if you double the length of a bacteria, while keeping all proportions the same. That means the surface area would go up by four, and the volume by 8. Because it gets all nutrients (and exchanges all waste) through the surface, you have less surface area per unit volume as the size increases, until the surface area can no longer serve the needs of the cell. Mokele

I could make up ridiculous garbage about the end of the world too, but I have better things to do. Mokele

Actually, we don't need to know how it works to tell if it's evolving. All we need to know is that certain genes are associated with the brain, an that those genes are changing faster than would be predicted by random effects, and their frequency increasing faster than one would expect from random processes. What they *do* is superfluous to theinvestigation, only that they're spreading and changing rapidly. Mokele

From that I recall, The way imprinting works is thus: DNA makes the baby organism, which hatches / is born with a particular neural morphology already in place. This means some things, like breathing or crying are already in place. In other areas, there's room for future learning, of the normal kind like "don't eat that, it tastes nasty and makes you sick". But certain neural pathways become active only in certain sensitive periods, and then only to certain stimuli, and imprinting is on such pathway. Whatever triggers this area in the right time will become permanently encoded, such as when human-raised birds imprint on humans and then try to associate with humans from then onwards. So pretty much, the DNA sets up a recording center with certain timing and triggers, and the environment supplies the actual input that is recorded (correct or incorrect). How much of this applies to humans is unknown and hotly debated. Humans *do* have instincts, but unravelling them from culture and learning can be dificult. Mokele

Not necessarily. If selection favors the middle value of trait which occurs in a range of values, then the mean value will remain the same and thus no real evolution has occured, at least at that locus / for that trait. Also, humans have relaxed selection pressure so much that fast-evolving genes would be something of a suprise. Mokele

Which offers a simple moral solution to the whole problem... ::offers some square green wafers:: Soylent Green anyone? I think there needs to be one additional word in there: "majority". Yes, the majority of most people are uninformed about most things. Yay for the US public education system. The thing is your phrasing. If you say "the majority of my opponents don't hold informed views", that makes me think "Oh, perhaps I'm one of the exceptions, so I should try to make this clear by having a rational discussion and showing off how informed and ratioanl I am on the topic". In contrast, if you say "my opponents don't hold informed views", that sounds like you mean *all* of us, and that tends to get people defensive. I just wanted to point that out, FYI. I know that you don't mean to generalize, but in the heat of a debate about something you care passionately about, it happens; I do it too, and probably in a lot harsher of a manner. What I think Pangloss is getting at (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Pan), is that your veganism, like every system of philosophy or belief, is based on a set of assumptions. Not everyone shares these assumptions, so, in a way, it could be considered analagous to faith. For isntance, say I take the position that only what I see actually exists. We'd argue ourselves in circles forever, because the conflict boils down to who accept what assumptions. And that brings up the issue of forcing one's assumption on others, given that the original context of this thread was the "what would you do as a dictator?" thread. Pity we're about 50 million years too late for that; mesonychids, phorousrachids, and entelodonts would have been fun. Mokele

As swansont points out, many other sciences suffer from limitations, but that does not mean they are untestable. There are multiple ways to "test" a theory, and direct experiment is only one such method. For instance, at one point there was a theory that selenodont artiodactyls (deer, goats, cows; the ruminants) were, over evolutionary time, replacing the non-ruminating perisodactyls like horses and tapirs, on account of supposed digestive superiority (the idea that ruminants can extract more nutrition from their food). This theory is not testable by direct experiment, but it was tested in two ways. First, experiments were conducted on existing ruminants and perisodactyls to determine what the actual digestive efficiencies were. Second, numerous fossil strata and localities were compared, and the presence of genera of each group counted for each time period. The replacement hypothesis predicted that there would a detectable difference in digestive efficiency and that for every increase in ruminant species, the perisodactyl species would decline. The theory failed both tests: Digestive efficiency was not influenced to a detectable level by ancestry, and both groups rose and declined together, probably due to environmental factors. So it is very possible to test macroevolutionary hypotheses, including macroevolution itself. Mokele

Nifty, what sort of ecosystem are you modelling? Or are you trying for something generalizable? It's certainly a complex problem, especially since you'd also have to deal with novel species arising in other environments and emigrating into the area, and how much they change is pretty hard to predict. I know some species have repeat "themes" in evolution, like crocodilians and terrestriality, but predicting their occurence would be a long shot. Not those specificly, though I am familiar with groups of sticklebacks in Canadian lakes that show the same effect. And it can actually be random; genetic drift can play a significant role in isolating species, as can different selective pressures. There's also sexual selection, which is actually the context I'm familiar with the sticklebacks from. Apparently, those in clear waters have red spots that the males showcase, while those in "tea-colored" waters have black spots, and the females of those cannot distinguish between red and black (because of the optical effects of the water). Those males no longer had to chose between being unsexy and being visible to predators, so they just had black spots. Of course, this could be interpreted as supporting more than one hypothesis about the effects of speciation on sexual selection. Mokele

I don't think we're going to be having any more discussions with this particular trolling IDiot.... Mokele, taking out the intelectual trash once and for all.

Ok, perhaps a re-phrase: Each organism gets a set of copies of genes, which build the body and such. All of these copies are stuck together in the organism, which is the part that dies or reproduces, which in turn affects the genes. Basically, I agree that the genes are the currency and driving force, but, because the organism is the bit that lives or dies, mates or winds up alone, that's the level where selection (the events that kill or sterilize organisms, preventing geneflow) occurs. Let's go back to the team analogy. Selection occuring at the gene level would be like the individual players winning the game, regardless of team, based on some criterion. Selection occuring at the organism level is analagous to the team winning or losing. Basically, I'm saying that what defines the sucess of a gene, what makes or breaks it, is how many organisms carrying it survive and/or reproduce, and that the events that lead to that, while governed by genes, are occuring at the team/organism level, and either the whole team wins or loses. Of course, the team analogy breaks down for kin selection and such unless you postulate cloned players (hey, give it 30 years and we might see just that). But my point is that the events that determine how many copies of genes are made are at the organism level: sex and death. Eh, maybe. On one hand, Raup's paper in the early 80s showed that a *lot* of extinction was purely stochastic (random), because things don't adapt to circumstances that only occur rarely, and the future is more or less random. If a population splits into two species, and one becomes adapted to arid, desolate environments while the other becomes adapted to a semi-aquatic life, which goes extinct depends on whether the next big disaster is a flood or a drought. On a larger scale, species of a certain large order or class might all share common traits that just happen to be exploited by one particular extinction event. If this is so (and Raup argues fairly convicingly for most cases that it is), then extinctions are technically non-selective, as species cannot adapt to them to become better are surviving them. However, there are some cases (competetive replacement) where there *does* seem to be a selective element, though these cases are rarer than once thought. So it's not *always* random and non-selective, just mostly so. Except, as I point out above, genes cannot design on such a long timescale, because evolution is a fundamentally short-term, unanticipatory, local process: the animal adapts to here and now, not the possible future. Which lineages go extinct is pretty much random on a long timescale, and depends on the nature of the environmental change or particular cataclysm. This, I feel, underscores my assertion that selection occurs mostly at the level of the short lived organism compared to the long-lived gene. Any allele that would allow great success in surviving asteroid strikes, faced with an allele that would not allow such sucess but would allow a doubling of the number of offspring, would quickly be outcompeted and vanish, in spite of this being to the long term detriment of the species and all associated genes. Because genes/alleles persist for so long (your example from eye development, for instance), such a short-sightedness in evolution can only be explained by selection at the level of short-lived units, namely organisms. Mokele

Just poking in on a few things: Factually incorrect. Numerous primates' date=' particularly chimps, have been shown to have "culture" (in the sense of behaviors typifying individual populations and transmitted by teaching rather than genes), and that cultural behaviors, memes, are transmitted. This is actually an example of "herd immunity". Vaccines don't work in every person every time, but if enough of the people are immunized, the disease will be unable to find a foothold, unable to spread, and become locally extinct. However, should too few people be immune, the disease might make a comeback. An actual account of this, as a direct result of lack of vaccination, can be found here No. We're an advanced, tool-using monkey, and that's it. Yes, we have amazing brains, but what's so hot about brains? Why should we value brains above, say, the sophisticated venom-delivery system of a viper, or the chromatophore system of a cuttlefish? Only because the preference for brains is geneticly and culturally embedded. From a biologically realistic POV, we're the the last in a long line of now-dead monkeys, and one day, like every other species, we'll be nothing but fossils. We're just another leaky sack of dirty water. This depends on how one defines "aware". Even bacteria are aware of their surroundings and internal state via numerous chemical receptors that trigger protiens in response. How does one precisely delineate "aware"? And, more importantly, how does one devise a testable definition that does not collapse under cross-species examination as the "mirror test" does. I'm probably just going to split this thread up, if I can. Edit: Done; it's not perfect, but it should be good enough. Mokele

Here's a pic of the preserved specimens. I've got bones and such all over the place. I have exactly the same thing with my carnivorous plants. They grow so slowly that for many I can watch eagerly for each new leaf to pitcher or mature. Mokele

That I can agree with.