Mokele

Or, for online stuff, try both Wikipedia and Talk.origins

Skye pretty much covered it, as did the other, however, it should be noted that it's not always 10%. The trophic conversion for some snakes is around 50%, and up to 75% in some salamanders. In contrast, not a single mammals studied has topped a measly 5%, because they waste so much energy heating their bodies. Oh, and Hellbender, was that a typo about fruits and vegies? From what I know, they're almost entirely carbs, namely starch and sugar. Mokele

Basically, snakes have a head, which is connected to a neck (though to what degree this is distinct from the body is poorly understood and widely debated), and then a body. At the end of the body, lots of things happen, but mostly the vertebrae become less complex, the ribs vanish, and, most importantly, the cloaca (universal "out" hole) occurs. Most of any given snake is body, with only a short tail (contrasted with legless lizards, who are mostly tail). Length without tail is important since females and males may have drasticly different tail lengths (because that's where the male keeps his retractile hemipenes, thus males have longer tails), and because the tail has a limited role in much of locomotion (what I study). Mokele

Genetic drift can cause differentiation of body parts, with the best example being bat penises. See, bats are ungodly hard to classify, since just about everything about them is modified for flight and cannot change much. But their naughty bits are free to change, and indeed we see a diverse array of bat willies. Since there seem to be no repeated themes in bat willies, nor any great degree of difference, they might simply be different due to genetic drift. If so, it's possible that genetic drift could alter the endowment of males (and the corresponding parts of females) such that they don't fit with the members of the other species. The same could also be true for breeding colors, calls, displays, dances, etc. I just thought bat willies would be the most fun to talk about. Mokele

Actually, Nepenthes (tropical pitcher plants) and some sundews, as well as baby pitcher plants this summer. Carnivorous plants are the only type I keep, except a few houseplants.

How about the total lack of any kind of evidence except for one man's record of one loony's story? Seriously, there's more support for the existence of elves and goblins than Atlantis. At least stories about *them* are told by more than one culture. Mokele

calbiterol's right, the deflagration/detonation/transition scheme not only works for engines, that's where I learned it (though I've forgotten most of it). Back when I was in Aerospace engineering, I had to take two combustion courses, both of which included this. Detonation is simply rarely used except in pulse-det engines because it's such a royal pain in the ass to work with, in terms of forces, design constraints, noise, etc. So far as I recall, DDT applies to everything that burns in an atmosphere under any circumstances. Mokele

New pic from the field. For scale, the snake is 1.83 m without tail, 2.3 m with tail, and the marks on the pole are 20 cm apart. It's a Brown Tree Snake, which you'll see more about in my upcoming field report. Mokele

It's not. I've heard that arguement before, and completely demolished it. The entire idea and everything supporting it was a total load. If anything, I'd go with Knossus or somewhere else nearby getting volcanized, hurricaned, and then embellished heavily. Mokele

Helix is correct. Gro lights are special (I don't know precisely how), and plants can grow under them only. I've actually grown several fussy/tropical plants under them.

The answer is yes and no. Among similar species, when comparing across species, yes, it does provide a good measure. An excellent example is among primates. However, when extrapolated across broader phylogenetic lines, it breaks down rapidly, especially with species who have unusual body forms. For instance, the preditions show whales to be dumber than they really are because they have all that insulating fat, and snakes seem dumb too because the elongate body form doesn't require *that* much extra brain to run, but increases mass greatly. Mokele

I'm going to be in herpetology, specifically biomechanics and locomotion, with some interest in applying that to extinct species. Why? While I have always been interested in science in general, to say I have always had an 'interest' in herps (reptiles and amphibians) would be incorrect. "Obession" would be a better term, possibly modified by the word "fanatical". I went into my specific subfield because I originally trained in aerospace engineering (hoping to get money to travel and keep cool herps), and have a strong grasp of math and engineering as a result. I've already hit upon numerous interesting problems, including one that, should I solve it, could be a 'career-maker'. Actually, this is my first post since I got back from fieldwork in Guam on Brown Tree Snake locomotion. I'll post a full report of that later. Mokele

Well, I'm off! Seeya all in a bit over 2 weeks!

I saw that one. I actually have it, it's part of the first season which is out on DVD. I don't have the second season yet, but it's out too. I was especially fond of how they pointed out that the Raelians (the loonies who claimed they cloned a baby) believe exactly the same thing, just with aliens rather than god. Mokele

And why does a designer give *us* (who are supposedly made in his image) a crappy retina that's basically on backwards and can detatch and blind us from a slight bump to the head, while this designer gives the octopus the good retina that's on right-way-round and firmly attached. Unless..... All Hail Cthulhu, designer of the Cosmos!

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New "Intelligent Falling" Theory (from The Onion) I'm such a bastard....

To which I responded by listing 41 taxa *directly* between fish and humans, each of which represents a transitional stage in that pathway. You can clearly see characteristics such a limbs, the mammalian inner ear, etc becoming more and more developed in this list. That is, if you were to actually *read* it (and the associated link) rather than just dismissing it out of hand, as per your usual dogmatic, intellectually dishonest method. I listed 41 fossils, and that's an *abridged* list. I could easily double the length of it, showing even *more* transitional forms. All major aspects of what makes a mammal a mammal are shown evolving in that list. In short, I came up with more than enough fossils, both in quantity and quality, to completely refute your arguement. Your tactic seems to be to act as if I never posted them, because you bloody well know that if you faced the evidence, you would have to back down. You are an intellectually dishonest dogmatist, and have no place on these forums. Either face facts, or leave. This isn't terminology. This is your blatant and willful ignorance of the mountain of evidence I have just put forth that shows you are wrong. To quote a friend of mine: "There is a point beyond which willful ignorance becomes intellectual dishonesty". You've crossed that point and left it far in the dust at this point. 1) any purpose of the appendix is minor and likely residual. The fact that it can be safely and easily removed with absolutely no adverse long-term consequences shows that any purpose is trivial compared to the damage it can do. 2) These genes can be completely removed from chicks, and they grow up fine and healthy (and tasty). They have no purpose. Oh, and, incidentally, they have gotten chick embryos to grow teeth, by grafting mouse epidermal cells to the developing jaw. See, the genes are there, but need the activation signals (which the mouse tissue can supply) to start tooth development. And before you say it, no, it wasn't mouse teeth that grew. The chicks grew conical, pointed teeth that were the same all along the jaw line. Teeth that were oddly reminiscent of reptile teeth, and more specifically, reminiscent of the teeth of theropod dinosaurs. While you're dodging that with your typical intellectual dishonesty, lets hear an ID explanation for the occaisional horses born with 3 toes on each foot, and the whales that have been caught with *externally protruding* rear legs. For that matter, tell me why whales and pythons have pelvic and rear-leg bones. Mokele

I don't think you're going to, see below: So much for an answer...Not that he'd have one anyway...

If you're looking for "How do I know if it's the same product of the gene in each place?", can't you make an antibody for the protien, label it, and then dose tissue samples from various body parts with it? In theory, AFAIK, the antibody should only stick to the form of protien it was "made for", not transcriptional of conformational variants. Mokele

Let us grok Yourdad in fullness. ::gets out the cutlery::

My link is an *EXTENSIVE* list of transitional fossils. Your personal failure to understand the contents (and how badly they prove you wrong) is not our problem. You have no "out" here. Either you acknowledge that I am right about the plentiful transitional fossils, or you acknowledge that you are an intellectually dishonest waste of skin, driven soley by dogma rather than evidence. Pick one. Mokele

True, though it's one of those cases of "how close to 100% is close enough?". We've had lots and lots of instances of evolution reported in journals, and all of those (at least in biology) must have a p of less than 0.05. Now, I'm not really clear on how that aspect of statistics works (haven't gotten around to that class yet), but I'd think the overall p of the phenomenon as a whole can be extracted from the individual measures somehow, and with each instance it gets smaller (at least I'd expect so). So basically, at this point we're around p< 1*10^-7568273 for evolution as a whole. Well, on long time scales we can't directly observe it very well (what with our limited lifespans and such). However, we do have indirect evidence, mostly from genetic testing. An excellent example is the CCR-5 receptor gene, which codes for a cell surface protien on the CD4 immune cells. Previously, this receptor was the gateway into the cell for the bacteria Yersinia pestis, better known as the Black Death. Of course, mutations are common in any species (your average human as 4 mutations that affect the final form of a protien), including those that render protiens non-functional, so some people had fewer or none of this receptor, rendering them resistant or immune to the plague. Fast-forward a few hundred years to the days of genetic testing and HIV, which uses the same receptor (along with another one). We got curious about why some Europeans are resistant to HIV, and find out some are lacking a function CCR-5 receptor. Oddly, they all have the same mutation, a 25-base-pair deletion. We do widespread testing, and find that, for various part of europe, the gene frequency for that mutation (the one conferring resistance or immunity to black death or HIV) ranges from 0.05 all the way up to 0.25 (1 is 100% fixation, where it's the only gene in town). So basically, our own DNA (especially if you're European) holds evidence of a massive bout of natural selection, even though it's been nearly 900 years since then (during which the gene frequency probably fluctuated randomly via genetic drift, since without either disease, it's neutral). We have evidence from other species as well (fish and beetles are currently popular, along with fruit-flies), but for genetic evidence we're often restricted because of imcomplete knowledge of the past and having to recover the effects of selection from the current DNA code (though that's getting easier every year as sequencing advances occur). The fossil record itself can also provide examples, if you have enough fossils and enough temporal resolution to get at microevolution rather than macroevolution. An excellent example is from a species I'm reading up on now, Deinosuchus, a collosal crocodylian from the Creataceous USA. Back then, there was an sea cutting across the US north-to-south, roughly covering the midwestern states. We find two populations of this reptile on the eastern and western sides of this seaway. The easterners are smaller (only about 30 feet long on average), and seem to have been opportunistic predators who ate a lot of fish (10 foot coelocanths) and marine turtles. The Westerners, who show up slightly later, are much larger, up to and possibly over 40 feet long, with 6 foot skulls. This is apparently an adaptation to the high availability of dinosaurs as a food source on the western coast of this interior seaway. As for other mechanisms, yes, there's plenty. One is sexual selection, which is basically the quest to get laid, and explains why organisms my have traits clearly detrimental to survival (such as a peacock's tail). Another is genetic drift, which is basically randomness. If a gene isn't under any selective pressure, it's frequency will fluctuate randomly in a population because of random mating (with respect to this gene, though there may be selection on other genes). The smaller the population, the greater the genetic drift, and it can result in genes becoming 'fixed' (100% frequency) or gone without any selective pressure (which can affect evolution if the environment changes to put selective pressure on this gene). Inbreeding also affects gene frequency, by reducing heterozygosity (organisms become more likely to have two identical copies of a gene, and the gene easily becomes fixed in spite of any negative effects). Two of the champions for non-selective gene frequency alterations are founder effect and genetic bottleneck. They're both the same, except the former pertains to small colonizing populations while the latter pertains to small populations that survive disasters. Basically, imagine a big sack of beans (genes), with certain proportions of each type. If you take a small random sample, chances are it won't accurately reflect the composition of the sack as a whole. Infrequent beans/genes may be totally lost, and frequencies of more common ones might be altered. The smaller the sample, the worse the genetic bottleneck or founder effect. This is why things like cheetahs and Florida panthers and pretty much screwed: they've been through such a severe bottleneck that they've lost most of their genetic diversity, and damaging alleles have become the only ones around through this genetic sampling error (which is why many males of both cat species above have only one testicle). Does that answer your questions? I'm a bit zonked at the moment; I leave for fieldwork in just under 36 hours, and I'm still packing. Mokele

No, they haven't done it yet, but there's some indication that Cubans lived in FL during the pleistocene, so it'd fit into the "restoration" idea. And actually, there's some repopulation projects for the Orinoco croc doing fairly well, iirc.

Actually, Sev, he's right. Evolution is defined as change in gene frequency in a population over time. This has been observed, and is therefore fact. Similarly, small-scale evolution due to natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, inbreeding, genetic bottlenecks and founder effect has been observed countless times. So stating that microevolution is 100% proven is basically correct (in as much as anything can be proven in science). Even if there *was* a flaw that necessitated a re-write, this re-write would be very similar to the current version, as it must account for all of the above observations. Anyhow, the point is that from a purely empirical POV, all the known causes of evolution have caused it in empirically observed instances, and can thus be regarded as factual. Mokele

Let's not forget re-populating Florida with Cuban Crocodiles. It'll do wonders for tourism. "Come to Florida, overrun with terrestrial, fast-running, pack-hunting crocodiles!" Oh, and the American croc, too. People tend to be less fond of members of the pleistocene ecosystem who have meter-long heads and hundreds of pointy teeth. Mokele