Mokele

Under that specific statute, no, however, other laws in Texas and other states had that effect. IIRC, the inequality (forbidding it only for homosexuals) was an issue (though not the main one) in the law being overturned. Mokele

Have you ever seen a gay pride parade? Like in person, not a doctored and heavily edited newsclip designed to specifically show the weirdest people? As I said, I've marched in one (unfortunately I had to miss the last two due to work). There were only 6 drag queens, and nobody else dressed unusually. 6 queens in over 1500 people, the rest of whom looked like anyone you would pass on the street. I wore the outrageously provocative outfit of jeans and a t-shirt (which, like most of my shirts, depicted reptiles). As IMM correctly pointed out, that's a one-way ticket to becoming an underclass. Most gay people do *not* wander around proclaiming it for all to hear. Most only *do* bring it up when it comes up in conversation, which is very infrequently. If you were to go by that basis, you'd think, erroneously, that gays are tiny, tiny portion of the population, smaller than usual, because you don't *have* conversations like that with all the people you see every day. If there was never any pride parades, you'd think gays would be less than 0.001% of the population, because you'd unconsciously assume everyone you pass on the street is straight. That's why pride parades exist, to show that there's more than you suspect, and to show that they're people you'd never expect. The problem is twofold, though. First, it's only about 90% accurate. But secondly, the existence of that assumption is a huge problem for the gay rights movement because we have no external distinguishing features that allow people to realize they're discriminating against people they see every day. As I mentioned before, you're statistically less likely to hold homophobic views if you know a gay person, even as an aquaintance, so visibility is essential. The assumption directly counteracts that visibility. Thus spake someone who clearly has not studied the situation. Do you realize that until *last year* it was illegal for two consenting adult males to engage in anal sex in the privacy of their own home in the state of Texas? And that similar laws exist all over the country? How is that "our fault"? If a guy gets beaten to death just because he held hands in public with his boyfriend, did he bring that on himself, by not hiding who he is and avoiding a simple, harmless gesture that you see thousands or millions of straight couples doing every day? And how, exactly, does not being given the right to marry come from being visible? How dare we actually try to live our lives as we see fit! How dare we actually try to have a bit of the freedom this country is supposedly based on! I guess we'd all better return to hiding in case someone actually finds out that we're somehow 'different' and kills us for it. In case you haven't noticed, homosexuals *are* people. In short, you want us to remain invisible until you give us permission to speak up? You want us to willingly be complicit in the very invisibility that will see us lose our rights and basic freedoms at the hands of homophobes. --------------- Give me one good reason why I *shouldn't* parade down the street? One good reason. Does it offend you? Make you uncomfortable? Bring up some deeply supressed feelings you've been hiding? Give me one reason why I shouldn't enjoy the same basic freedom to be open about myself as anyone else? Do you also think that women should not advertise the fact that they are women until something bad is happening (like it always is)? The burka works very well for that purpose, and look how much it's done for women's rights. Mokele

First, you aren't going to impress anyone here by just using a scientific name in an insult. Second, FYI, guinea pigs are actually moderately intelligent, at least compared to the vast majority of living things. I call bullshit on that. Prove it. Mokele

Except that evolution works on the short term. Traits that help you have more kids become established, regardless of what damage they'll do to the population as a whole 100 generations down the line. However, that said, your objection to Luciddreamer is more or less right. The way I would phrase it is that intelligence usually confers benefits, but also comes with drawbacks. In some species, like mammals and particularly apes, the benefits outweight the drawbacks. But in most species, the reverse is true, and the benefits of a large brain do not outweight the tremendous costs (brain tissue is very, very metabolicly expensive). Mokele

By that logic, crystals cannot be the product of simple molecular interactions, a statement that is every bit as transparently wrong as yours. Mokele

Well, that is a problem, one that I vaguely recall has gotten attention in the scientific community. The issue with adressing it, however, is the penis. Birds lack a copulatory organ, but all reptiles except the tuatara have a penis or paired hemipenes, the former being the case with the closest extant dinosaur relative on the other side of birds, crocodilians. So if a male dino had a penis, it could become suitably long (and possibly even dextrous as in whales) to deal with the issue of a tail in the way, but if not, it'd be hard or impossible for some species to mate. And since the naughty bits don't fossilize, we don't know which it is. Personally, I suspect they had penii. This is due to the fact that there'd be no advantage in losing it, and many have tails that would have obstructed or prevented mating without it. IMHO the begining of flight was probably the most likely time for the loss of penii, because loss of the penis would reduce weight and the reduction of the tail to a short stub would allow for cloacal juxtaposition. Mokele

These parades are needed because people need to see that 'gays' are not just a nebulous term without a face, they need to see it's their friends, neighbors, kids, co-workers, etc. It is statistically much more likely for someone to support homophobic views if they don't know someone who is gay in person (it basically works the same way as racism). It also is important because it challenges the inbuilt social assumptions that everyone should be considered straight unless proven otherwise and that the only people for whom that doesn't apply are interior decorators, male hairdressers, etc. These parades exist to show society that the gay population of the area is real, large, not ashamed, not going away, and not who you think of automatically. Without being able to put faces to names, people will asume gays are yet another minority group whose rights can be trampled based on ancient prejudices. As for straigh-pride parades, they'd be useless, since straights are not (as a class) opressed or discriminated against, are considered the default and thus don't need to shout in order to be visible, and are highly numerous. If you wanted to, fine, everyone should be proud of their sexuality, but it'd basically be a pointless waste of time. Mokele, who's marched in gay pride parades before.

So? We've progressed in understanding since then. Would you object to a definition of gravity involving curved spacetime or something else Newton would not have understood. The definition *is* free of mechanism; it talks about measurable results. The mechanism is natural selection, the changes in allele frequency are the observable result. It's like throwing a ball. Gravity is the mechanism which governs the path, and the position it lands at is the observable result. Well, there's two problems: 1) some creationists deny evolution itself, as a result, regardless of mechanism and 2) most creationists realize that if they let themselves get drawn into debating natural selection, they'll be soundly defeated, so they avoid the discussion either by constantly shifting the goalposts, throwing constant red-herrings (like abiogenesis), or gibbering nonsense about accepting microevolutioon but not macro (which is like accepting the existence of snow but not ice). Mokele

...who are regarded as ignorant cranks, fools, and demagogues by every serious theologian, and given as much credence in serious academic theological circles as the Flat Earth Society is given in a geography dept. Mokele

Because that's what it is, moron. 'Dinosaur' does not mean 'erect-walking lizard' or any other such nonsense you might think (once again, your painful ignorance shows). 'Dinosaur' technically refers to any animal of the archosaurian lineage with an anorbital fenestra (or arising from a lineage with one, in cases of secondary loss like pachycephalosaurs). 'Crocodile' technically refers to any animal with any of the *numerous* derived features unique to this group, all of whom *lack* the anorbital fenestra. So limbs has precisely nothing to do with it. Any disagreement on your part is simply ignorance of what the *actual* terms mean. Bullshit. I can cite many logical reasons *why* my hypothesis is likely. You cannot cite shit except a dusty old book full of errors. In addition, your 'hypothesis' (that all the erect-walking reptiles became crawlers at The Fall) is directly *proven* wrong by Ziphosuchia. See above. For your definition, 'Lizard' is more properly 'Squamate', and the term is applicable based on skull architechture, specifically the lepidosaurian skull with it's kinetic joints and reduced mass (often with a streptostylic quadrate). Learn what terms mean before you use them, kid. Strawman fallacy, abiogenesis and the big bang have precisely nothing to do with the validity of evolution. We know atmospheric conditions of ancient earth, but since this 'Flood' never happened, there *are* no 'pre-flood' atmospheric conditions, and they would have precisely *zero* effect on any form of dating aside from carbon dating, which itself is used only for recent stuff. There are no atmospheric factors of any kind in, say, Uranium-Lead dating. Gladly, here it is: That's from page 4 of this thread, post number 75, if you care to look. The above statement is simply a lie. You were called on it, and asked to prove otherwise. You failed to do so. Until you produce such proof as I requested, your label of 'Liar' fits. If you don't like it, stop telling lies. Jesus would not be happy with you. Read the thread. It's all there, both from me and others. The only way you can fail to recognize it is the persistent intellectual dishonesty you have made your trademark. "There is such a thing as having a mind so open your brain falls out" - Richard Dawkins. You stated that Dinosaurs were 'gone' because during The Fall, God cursed all reptiles to crawl on their bellies. You stated, and I quote: "Why should only the dinosaur reptiles exclusively die out, every last one,, leaving their cousins the belly crawling reptiles surviving, nearly all of them? Maybe there's another explanation, like they were the Biblical pre-cursed reptile serpents which were not belly crawlers, but were cursed of God to have their descendendents become belly crawlers?" You erroneously stated that all dinosaurs died out (birds prove this wrong), you implied (in your paucity of knowledge) that only 'belly-crawlers' survived, and you never account for why only dinosaurs, and not the Ziphosuchids, were cursed. Your ideas clearly are delusional. Seek professional psychiatric help. Why? And why could it not have been different in a way that doesn't affect carbon dating? Because you're simply *assuming*, without evidence, that it fits into your crumbling theory in a sad attempt to delay the inevitable collapse. Coming from you, that's nothing short of hilarious. It's like a Republican talking about helping the environment. Mokele

I disagree (see other thread); if you specify generations, you lose a lot of important processes, like natural disasters imposing unusually harsh selection (on a sub-generational timescale) or founder effect. However, the way Hellbender defined it could be misconstrued; the way I put it is the same, but 'in a population' is added, so that it's specified that the genetic change is occuring at the population level, rather than in the individual. (Side thought: What about selfish genes? How do those fit into either definition?) Then you are quite simply guilty of blind faith. The acceptance of the former means that the only way to deny the latter is to deny evidence and depart from logic. Except you're taking the Bible literally, a position that has *no* theological merit and is considered a joke by every theologian, christian or otherwise. Mokele

No idea, but to fuel your fire, bonobos are matriarchal, while chimps are patriarchal, and some human societies, such as the Picts, were thought to have been matriarchal. Iirc, there are still some matriarchal societies. Mokele

Skuinders, LeVay's work does not prove innateness, and changes in brain morphology *can* be the result of environment. I'm not saying it's not innate, only that LaVey's work isn't actually the best support for innateness. Mokele

Wrong. Badly so. Lookie, it's a Ziphosuchid, a south american crocodilian group that walked fully erect and probably could run faster than most mammals. They lived *through* the extinction, and were not altered by it in any way. The dinosaurs died off because they, as a group, shared some particular flaw that left them vulnerable, most likely their endothermy. Ectotherms, regardless of stance, survived for the most part. Your "hypothesis" addresses a non-existent problem with a 'solution' that answers nothing and complicates things even more. The idea that all the dinos were killed by alien big-game hunters has more creedence and logical viability than your idea. Have you ever *seen* a chameleon. Not the things in the US, those are anoles and the use of 'chameleon' for them is erroneous. I mean *african* chameleons. Those are 100% fully upright, no in betweens. You cannot simply dismiss data that contradicts your theory. That's the same intellectual dishonesty that we so often ridicule creationists for. No, there isn't. Show me this "problem". Oh, wait, it's just a delusion of yours, like your beliefs. We don't for the same reason that you don't see Nature re-running stories from The Weekly World News about dwarves shooting two-headed bigfoots. And you failed to answer. You claimed that there is legitimate scientific concern over the use of radiometric dating. When I ask for you to back up the arguement, you dodge the question. Most logical conclusion: You are lying. Big suprise there. I never acussed you. I pointed out the FACT that you are lying. Until you offer a PEER-REVIEWED journal article that gives logical and credible reasons to doubt radiometric testing (and I am very sure no such article exists), your lable of liar remains accurate. Well, you're a creationist, so I'll have to use small words explaining this: You posted your bullshit in the evolution forum. That means it is *you* who is seeking to stir up shit, and that you should not be surprised that we're sick of hearing your delusions and lies. Simple enough for you? You want to stop this? Either don't post, or post *facts*, not your moronic beliefs. You are being ridiculed for one reason: because your beliefs are worthy of ridicule. Mokele

But that's not democratic. Science as a democratic process would mean that everyone would figure out which side they supported, and vote, and the one with the greatest number of ahderents would win, based on that, not on evidence. Instead, it's as you describe above, where the *evidence* (not # of people) is weighed. Unfortunately, I don't know if there actually is a term for that method, other than 'sensible'. Mokele

So we have big brains and special abilities through that. Whoop-de-doo. How is that any more special than the abilitiy of birds to fly? It's not, and only human arrogance makes us think it is. Our consciousness only presents an evolutionary puzzle because we cannot define it or understand the mechanisms. Once those are solved, the question of how it evolved will the rapidly solved, I suspect. Why? That smacks of human assumption that anything smart would be like us and our way is the best. We're social because we evolved from social primates. A species just as intelligent as us that evolved from leopards would *never* be social. This is because being social is not "better", it's just a different strategy for dealing with life, one we happen to employ. Mokele

Well, first and foremost, no alien would fit within earth taxonomy. They might be vaguely reptile-like or mammal-like or whatever, but they wouldn't truly be any of those groups. Wrong, actually. While there is less drag in air, that's only really a factor for animals that fly. Even fast-moving runners like cheetahs are much more limited by pace and muscle contraction speed than drag. Plus, water supports animals, so they don't have to waste energy holding themselves up. It's also easier to generate thrust by pushing against water than against air. In fact, I seem to recall that the net cost of transport (calories consumed per unit distance covered) for swimming is less than for walking. Note that echnioderms (starfish, crinoids, urchins, etc) were a dominant phyllum back in the Ordivician. Incects seem to be doing well. Just because it's that way on earth does not mean it *must* be that way. Also, what do you consider a monkey's prehensile tail? To me, that's a post-hoc modification of an existing structure into a 5th limb. Nope. A lot of evolution is randomness. There's no solid physiological or evolutionary reason that, for instance, vertebrates could not have evolved with six limbs. Or more. It's just coincidence that it happened the way it did. Mokele

I would like to note that this is the fault of the individual in question. He lived and worked in London for 4 years, and if he couldn't understand the language that's nobody's fault but his own due to sheer laziness. Additionally, the police report that he "challenged police and refused to obey orders" (cnn.com), indicating that he knew the language enough to understand and respond negatively. While I can understand the tension in the city and in individuals given the recent events, that is not an excuse for running from what you *know* are police officers. And even if there's the possibility that they are impersonating police officers, that's still not an excuse, as in that case they'd kill you anyway. Furthermore, the arguement of "I suspected they might have not been real cops" can be applied to *any* situation from this down to traffic tickets. And there are ways of dealing with it, like saying "I don't think you're real cops, so I'll only surrender in a place with video surveilance or somesuch to ensure my safety" etc. Frankly, I'm with the heartless bastard side on this. It was his own bloody fault. Mokele

Primarily, but it can be altered by exercise. To what extent it can be altered might also be genetic.

Congratulations, your "opinion" shows such collosal ignorance of the reptilian fossil record as to be barely worth considering. FYI: we have fossils of "belly crawling" reptiles for long, long before even the dinosaurs, and snakes existed for 60 million years *before* dinosaurs died. Oh, and please explain crocodilians and large lizards, which display semi-erect gaits, and chameleons, which display a *fully* erect gait. That's why we use something called "evidence". I suggest you become familiar with it, as it spells out precisely how wrong you are. Prove it. Show me a single *PEER-REVEIWED* journal article that questions the validity of all radiometric dating. Oh, that's right, you're lying, so you can't. My bad. Unfounded assumptions and post-hoc rationalizations to save a doomed belief, anyone? Only within a very, very narrow range of views. For instance, one can interpret the fossil record of snakes as showing aquatic or fossorial ancestry, but there is *NO* way that you can argue they were not descended from a varanoid lizard. The evidence permits no other explanation. We've observed it. That is proof. I win. Wrong. Christians are a minority compared to more sensible religions like Buddhism, which have no problem with evolution. Also, popularity is not validity. Most people believe snakes are slimy, but they are simply wrong. As you probably *don't* know, due to your evident ignorance of biology, there are reliable and easy ways of diagnosing pathological conditions from skeletal remains. In fact, paleopathology is a burgeoning field. We can *easily* tell the difference between deformity and adaptation. Next stupid and ill-informed creationist claim... ...because we find the *right* answers, rather than just making them up out of thin air. If you are so hostile and ignorant towards science, why are you here? Look up the recent studies of cactus-dwelling fruit flies in the american southwest. Oh, look, it's direct, un-arguable observation of evolution in action, including speciation and morphological changes. Unlike creationism, science has actually amassed 150 years of data that supports evolution. That data has increased exponentially since we figured out DNA and genetics, allowing us to quantifiably observe evolution. In contrast, it's creationists that recycle 150 year old arguements that have been disproven time and again. Try actually learning something about science and biology, then come back, kid. Oh, and both of your URLs are so childish that I could have refuted them when I was 10 years old, let alone now. More proof that creationists are gullible and have sub-normal intelligence. Given that we know for *certain* that genesis is not literally true (see this entire thread), I'd say that's bullshit, like all of your posts. ------------------ Ok, I'm sick of this. Creationists, try actually opening a goddamn biology textbook. Your arguements are *obviously* wrong to anyone with an understanding of the subject matter, and your painful lack of knowledge is obvious in every post. Mokele

I don't need to explain it, because it doesn't. Chemotherapy basically induces mutations. The idea is that even cancer cells can only function after so many mutations, and beyond that they die. They lack the mechanisms to repair mutations, while normal cells have those mechanisms intact. Other cells die simply by chance, and those that divide fastest (which is *NOT* the same as high metabolism) are most at risk for accumulating damaging mutations. That's because a) the article is crap and b) there *is* no science behind it. Not everything is possible. Perpetual motion machines, anyone? Biology has even more restrictions. Our bodies work in certain ways, and you have to work within that context. Mokele

It might also have to do with your muscles re-organizing themselves in the face of this new kind of exercise. Your muscles have 3 types of fibers: fast-twitch (fast but low endurance), slow-twitch (slow but high endurance) and intermediate. Focusing on a particular type of exercise can alter the ratios. I suspect, along with your newfound speed, that you won't be able to hold a 4 lb weigh aloft for as long as before. And if you train to regain your endurance at that, your speed will go down. Mokele

Not as such. You have to mix the fuel and air before injecting the mixture into the main tube. They are effective at low alts, and the calculations behind them are pretty simple (or you can just tinker until it works right). But for the love of your eardrums, wear a *lot* of hearing protection. Mokele

Your link doesn't work

I've heard quite a bit about it, and I'll sumarize shortly: It's creationist bollocks. The guy took historical measures of lightspeed (back when more primitive equipment induced more error and had less precision anyway) compared those to the present, and artificially extrapolated backwards. He even deliberately falsified the already-worthless data so that he'd show the universe was only 10,000 years old. He also arbitrarily set a date in the past as being the time when light magically decided to stop slowing down, so that his theory could never be tested. For the more thorough debunking and ridiculing that this work so richly deserves, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c-decay.html The short answer: More creationist idiocy. Mokele