Mokele

Skills like that definitely help, but it's very area-dependent. Move to somewhere far from anything, you'll be the only one with those skills. Move to a city that has a high-level technology university and you're boned. Mokele

I do not "deify" anything. I can *prove* that nerve cells are used by living organisms to gather informations about their environment, and that these nerve cells interact with each other, glands, and muscles. The brain is also made of neurons. Given that, not only is it logical to start looking at the neurons first as the source of consciousness, but you'd need a *damn* good reason to discount them. That your idea is just speculation. I don't give a crap how well the physics works; that's unimportant. What matters is *does it happen*? Lots of things are *possible*, but not all possibilities occur. Give me *empirical* support for your theory, or I'm going to ask the mods that this thread be moved to psuedoscience. Mokele

Nope, apparently ages ago some scientists claimed to have created "structured water" or "polywater" by exposure to a particular sound frequencies. They claimed that this water exhibited different properties, mostly in boiling and melting points, as well as viscosity. However, over the years, more and more experiments amassed and showed that these "differences" were the combined effect of impurities, improperly clean glassware, and normal experimental scatter. However, as donkey rightly postulated, the homeopathy crowd has latched onto this with a vengance. And why not, if you can just pump sound at some gallon jugs of tap water then turn around and sell them for $5 each? As I keep saying, if I only had less ethics, I'd be a millionaire off this crap. Mokele

I "get" all of what you're trying to say. The problem is that you aren't "getting" my objection. My objection: If condensed genetic material is present, and is replicated when the cell replicates, then it *MUST* impose a metabolic load (because you need materials and energy to replicate it) and it *MUST* gain mutations (because no copying method is perfect). So, first, the information *will* be corrupted. Secondly, chromosomal nondisjunctions are common in cell division. Every so often there's a screw-up and not all of the genetic material makes it into the new cell. If that happens in your cells, and the burdensome "memory store" is lost in one cell, that cell *WILL* enjoy a selective advantage, and *WILL* outcompete the others, eventually replacing them. Do you even understand what I'm saying here, and have been saying for this entire thread? As a friend of mine once said: "There is a point beyond which willful ignorance becomes intellectual dishonesty." Do not throw around words that sound technical without knowing their meaning, kid. It only highlights your ignorance. "Genetic drift", FYI, is the effect of randomness on natural selection, such as random death caused by non-selective forces like accidents, which would have an equal chance of killing any member of the population. It has nothing to do with this conversation. You'd know that if you knew the first thing about evolution. That aside, species fit into their environment by evolution, not borrowing DNA from some mythical storage. Flat-out wrong. Species *evolve* for only their own benefit, not that of the ecosystem. Ever hear of invasive species? The ones that practically destroy ecosystems for their own benefit? Well, that's been happening since *long* before man came into the picture. In addition to evolution, you also need to learn about ecology, since you also have no clue about that. Yes, they live in a situation that benefits both the plant and the bacteria. That's why it persists. If the association were detrimental to one of them(parasitism), they would do their best to break free of it (the drive to escape one's parasites is one of the strongest forces in evolution, including our own). Natural selection preseves sistuation which are beneficial to both organisms. Why are you even bringing this up? It has *nothing* to do with your main point. First, I am a bit of an old-schooler, I was mostly educated before "archea" was recognized as separate, and thus by habit refer to them as simply bacteria. Secondly, the difference is trivial anyway. My objections are about natural selection and evolution, and how it effectively renders your idea dead in the water. What kingdom the organisms belong to is irrelevant; natural selection still applies to them, and still functions on them. You seem to be under the delusion that there is something somehow "wrong" with natural selection, but have never once backed up this claim with anything more than "well it gets in the way of my ideas, so it must be wrong!" You've read a lot of books, and assimilated a lot of information, but you lack the basic understanding of certain core concepts of biology that is needed. Education and universities exist for a reason. Make use of them. Mokele

Lots of very mathematically elegant ideas have no place in reality. As I said over and over, theory is one thing, but it's useless without experimental confirmation. A scale which living processes do not interact with. The smallest part of a living system whose movement is governed by that system is a sodium ion, which, iirc, is so large that quantum effects are negligible. There's a few more ions, water, oxygen, co2, and assorted other compounds, all too large to show any significant quantum effects,and beyond that you get into fats, polysacharides, and protiens. Nothing in a cell is capable of controlled interaction at a quantum level. This might be the language barrier, but over here "structured water" is the name of a psuedoscience theory that subjecting water to particular sound frequencies will permanently alter it's properties, pushing it into another "phase" if you will. This has been shown, very conclusively, to be wrong. The water in a cell is just water with crap in it. If we assume that vibrations (or certain frequencies of photons) can set up these vibration patterns, what's to stop the very next signal from simply overwriting it? How can this supposedly stored information be accessed in a way that cells can understand? And how can this be linked to consciousness at all? There is a long, LONG way between showing that something happens in crystals and in living cells, and further still between that and showing that it's actually a the "cause" of consciousness. ------------- Actually, hang on a sec: If this common sugar causes consciousness, does that mean every living thing, from a human to an amoeba, is conscious? Mokele

Not quite. I'll explain. Most animals are diploid. This means they inherit one set of chromosomes from their mother, and one from their father. Each set of these chromosomes contains all the genes an organism needs, thus a fertilized egg have two copies of every gene, one from mom and one from dad. For instance, you have one gene for alpha-hemoglobin from mom, and one gene for the same protien from dad. Genes, like computer programs, come in versions, called alleles. While both your mom and dad's genes make alpha-hemoglobin, they might be different alleles, different "versions". Each allele (usually) makes the same overall protien, but there are subtle differences in the final form. The alpha-hemoglobin from your mom's gene might look and behave slightly differently from the alpha-hemoglobin from your dad's gene. These two alleles can interact. Sometimes, one allele is "dominant". This means, no matter what the other allele is, only the "Dominant" version is expressed. Others are "recessive", and can *only* appear if both copies (from mom and dad) are the same recessive allele. In Co-dominant, individuals who have one copy of each type express an intermediate phenotype. As for passing on to offspring, it's a craps shoot. When eggs or sperm are formed, they each only get one set of chromosomes, half of the organism's set. A sperm will have either mom's or dad's allele for a particular gene, but not both. Another gene might have the other parent's allele. There's some non-randomness, but that's rather more complex than I think you want. Which the offspring gets basically depends on which sperm gets to which egg, which is random (more or less). To put it in programming terms, think of an array. Each position is a "gene" (or behavior). The elements in each array can be a series of values (like alleles of a gene) for different forms of that behavior. An adult organism has 2 arrays, and when a particular array element is called on, the values in that element of both arrays interact via dominance, recessiveness, co-dominance, etc to produce an effect. When that organism reproduces, it produces gametes with just one array, and the elements of that array are filled randomly from the elements of the two arrays the adult has. The gametes combine, and now the new program has 2 arrays again. Repeat. Does that help? Mokele

It mentions structured water? Fancy that, psuedoscience based on psuedoscience. Mokele

Flat-out wrong. Most living creatures do *not* have a constant body temperature by any means. In fact, only 2 classes so: birds and mammals. In the former, many species drop their body temperature significantly during their sleep to conserve energy, and in the latter, not only are nocturnal temperature drops the norm, but many species also hibernate, during which time their body temperature drops to ambient and control systems are mostly suspended. This also doesn't answer my questions: 1) Where does this stored info come from? 2) How does it get into the molecules to begin with? 3) How can it be retrieved? 4) Where is the evidence that this is even happening at all? As I said earlier, lots of things *could* be, but science is concerned with what *is*. The very nature of your proposed system almost precludes it operating within cellular control (which means protien control), let alone communicating with the nervous system. It'd make a great science fiction story, but so far that's all it is, fiction. Mokele

Incorrect. I did a bit of checking, and the official minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. Now, individual states, counties, or whatever, can probably raise that if they want to, but the national limit is $5.15/hour. Mokele

Yep, hence the "snake diet". It's even better to eat it whole, since then you can be sure to get the gut contents, which are a major source of nutrition for carnivores. As husmusen and bluenoise pointed out, it can be converted to energy (this is why we urinate, because the conversion produces nitrogenous wastes). It's just not very efficient compared to converting carbs or fats to energy. But, in a normal human diet, most of the protien is converted back to aa's and then made into more protiens. Then again, Big Macs aren't "normal human diet", in the biological sense of what we evolved to eat. Mokele

On the other hand, one could get all the vitamins needed from eating meat. It's the snake diet: eat the *whole* animal. Bones, fur, organs, eyes, blood, everything. Technically, if it has everything it needs, so will you. Of course, that's not very apetizing, and your kidneys will still crap out in maybe 20 years from the overload, but in the short term it'd fix the malnutrition issue. Mokele

Interesting. But if it's viral, why does it strike so often at the same age? I'm thinking regulatory genes, myself. Perhaps something gets turned on by a stimulus of some sort at that age (maybe even infection), and that produces some form of defective protien that, in turn, affects dopamine levels somehow. Perhaps this gene is somehow easier to turn on at that age, or naturally turned on in males at that age? Just speculating... Mokele

ID *is* linked with christianity. I was ridiculing the Christian version of ID, not Christianity as a whole. Wrong, and I fail to see any reason why evolution could *not* produce a human. We're certainly pretty low on the scale of "amazing crap produced by evolution". Yeah, we're smart, whoop-de-doo, but there are things out there that are far more unsual products of evolution. No, it's quite within the reach of evolution to produce the measly complexity of humans. Seriously look at invertebrates if you want *real* complexity. Or snake muscle dynamics. We're actually pretty simple compared to some species. I'll address your main point in the other thread you made. Mokele

So, really, you've just put forth a possibility, rather than an actual solution. The problem I'm seeing is I can't see how information gathered by the senses could be tranfered to these vibrations. Nerve impulses are how everything works in terms of sensory input, so how can a nerve impulse become stored in this way? It just seems to me like a poor fit for the problem. So far as we know, there's no intracellular mechanism for doing this. Also, does altering the stored frequency change the shape or charge or the molecule? Mokele

Ok, a bit of biological input: Living beings often ingest and digest protiens. However, they need a way to get rid of the amonia that results from breaking down amino acids. Animals that live in freshwater can just dilute it and flush it out with copious dilute urine. Animals that need to conserve water have a problem: they can't waste water getting rid of amonia, but they can't let it build up because it's toxic. The solution is urea, a nearly totally harmless compound that lets the animal dispose of waste in a concentrated form. (It's also used by sharks and the coelocanth to regular the osmolarity of the body tissues, so whenever you eat shark meat, you're eating urine-soaked meat.) Uric acid is even more concentrated stuff, arranged in rings, and pumps out more nitrogen per molecule. It also is water insoluble (or of very low sulubility), unlike urea, so it can crystalize out in the bladder into a pasty white mass, allowing the animal to conserve even more water. It's the white stuff you see in bird and reptile defecations. Mokele

Technically everything generates heat by living, but the question is how much and how fast, compared to how fast they lose it. Reptiles produce heat, but very little because of their low metabolism, and compared to the rate of heat-transfer across the body surface, it's utterly insignificant. Same for other ectotherms. Mammals and birds, on the other hand, waste over 90% (sometimes over 95%) of the energy they take in maintaining their body temperatures by internal heat generation. Mokele

Ok, this is from my poor memory of US history class, but I seem to recally that, until recently, the US would institute "Sedition Acts", which made it illegal to publicly criticise the government. Googling that term might turn up more info, and *definitely* will turn up more than my memory. Mokele

Oh, that's easy! Just a few wires into selected portions of the brains of the entire populace, and problem solved. What, why is everyone looking at me like that?

Snakes are also *capable* of coiling up like a spring and bouncing, using that as a mode of locomotor. The muscles are there, and are certainly strong enough. Why do I bring this up? Just because something *can* be done doesn't mean it *is* done. So you showed that this monomer can store info. Bravo. But can you prove, empirically, that it actually *does* so in living organisms? Can you even test this hypothesis? For that matter, can you even propose a potential mechanism by which this information would be encoded, stored, and retrieved? Mokele

Could it have something to do with testosterone? I know that in other animals, testosterone levels can "prime" certain areas of the brain, perhaps this is happening here too? Mokele

And I expressed it without using any harsh linguini

That's part of the point. You see, ID is *supposed* to be "scientific", and the "designer" is not supposed to be any particular god, christian or otherwise (though, obviously, it *is* supposed to be Jehovah, and it's just veiled creationism). By replacing the christian god with something utterly ridiculous, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it shows just how ridiculous the entire ID "theory" is, and how it's only *real* support and purpose is Christian creationism. So, basically, it shouldn't be offensive to christians at all, unless ID isn't what they say it is, at which point they become fair game. Mokele

Not $1000, or at least I doubt it. If you get work, it'll either be full-time minimum wage (a bit more than $5 an hour for 40 hours / week) or Temping (7-12 per hour, depending on where you live, but very spotty employment).

Couldn't one say *every* process in the brain, abnormal or not, is structural changes? From OCD to me re-arranging a few synapses to remember Glider's post? Granted most are very small changes, a synapse here and there, but still...

Holy balls! In two weeks you spend more in serum than my entire project cost! Damn, I'm glad I'm working at the organismal level. Mokele