Mokele

Bingo. Plus, the virus/bacteria is usually weakened or killed by some other means, often radiation. Mokele

You've never met my girlfriend... You're confusing economicly driven engineering decisions with capability-driven decisions. There's a big difference between "what we can make?" and "what do enough people want that it's profitable to make?". Of course we've advanced. But the public's tastes have not. Hence why we haven't been back to the moon, yet we have a mechanical, sound-activated, plastic, singing bass. Damn skippy! Whenever we have flying cars, I'm living in an undergound bunker and *NEVER EVER* coming out. Have you *seen* the people on the roads? These people can't handle 2 degrees of freedom (one of which is very limited), let alone 6! Mokele

Not necessarily: What about inclusive fitness? Sure, he might not be helping his own DNA directly, but by helping his kids and relatives survive and prosper (via contribution of time and resources) he's gaining genetic benefit from staying alive. Mokele

Well, first, a thread about the possibility of the evolution of immortality can be found here. My general point from the thread was that first, immortality would have to overcome entropy (to a greater degree than life already does), and thus would be metabolicly expensive, and second, very few animals in the wild live to their maximum lifespan anyway, so why would it be an advantage to have an unlimited one? For example, ball pythons can live for 50 years in captivity, but you're *never* going to find a wild one that old; disease, parasites, natural disasters and predators would have killed it off long before then. So where's the advantage? All that cost and probably no significant benefit for the organism, plus passing on that cost to it's offspring. Mokele

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know crap about art, but that assertion seems very odd to me. I mean, clearly in the past there were people with the skill and dedication, so why not in the present? From the purely probabalistic POV, there's more humans now, so a greater chance that there is someone somewhere with the requisite skill and dedication. I'm interested why you assume that modern artists lack this skill and dedication? Mokele

Oh, I'm betting that even if you *did* go back in time to prove it, they'd still weasel their way around it somehow. "Satan is warping your vision!" Mokele

I'm not saying he wasn't a good man overall, nor that who's response was appropriate, but I *do* think that, after his death, people have been blindly ignoring his faults, while exaggerating his achievements and merits. To the point that I heard him credited with "the fall of communism." Like I said, I'm not saying he wasn't generally a good old geezer, but, in my eyes, by distorting who he was and what he did (even in a favorable way), you're doing a dis-service to his memory. Maybe I'm projecting my desires onto him, but when I croak, I want to be remembered as how I *really* was, good and bad, not as some idealized version of myself. Call me cynical, but I think those who are putting out this biased image of him are simply mourning the vesments, not the man who wore them. And I think that is we remember him in *all* his aspects, "warts and all" so to speak, and still see the good he's done, that's much more of a testament to his good nature than any two-dimensional idealization could ever be. Mokele

Speed of sound = (gamma*R*T)^1/2 Where T is temp, R is the ideal gas constant, and gamma is a property of the material, the nature of which I've completely forgotten. You look it up in tables in the back of the book. Pressure and density are involved because P= (density)*RT, and that can be re-arranged and substituted into the equation. Mokele

Oh, and don't forget "All dinosaurs were herbivores and lived peacefully with man in the Garden of Eden."

Oh, I've got a good one: A long time ago, my dad was friends with a guy getting his PhD in biology. He'd written up his thesis, and, since this was in the days before word processors, he gave it to a secretary to type up... ...and he wound up proving the existence of "Freudian slips", because for every page of a full length thesis, the secretary had written "orgasms" instead of "organisms". Mokele

A few things: 1) Mutation and other DNA foul-ups (most notably unequal crossing over during meiosis) can actually add DNA, often huge chunks containing many genes. Aside from the fact that we've seen it happen, it's past occurence is evidenced by "gene families", clusters of closely related genes that have duplicated in the past, then divereged. The hemoglobin/myoglobin family is an excellent example. 2) DNA *does* accomodate random mutation, both due to chemical insults and errors in replication. Can and do. pH, temperature, phosphorylation of the protien and other factors can all alter the shape and functionality of a protien. The trick is that, while we know that protiens are made from DNA, we haven't observed any process to run in the reverse. Such a process would, in a way, make Lamarckian evolution a possibility. Is it possible? Probably. Is it the case for life on earth? Very unlikely. We'd've noticed something by now, I think, if this as happening. Well, aside from the problem I mentioned above about there being no know mechanism to turn altered protiens back into DNA, what about kids? They inherit DNA, not protien from all over the body (especially from sperm). So wouldn't the kid have to "re-modify" itself, rather than having the modifactions passed down to it? An interesting sidenote: In a recent issue of Nature, someone found that a particular plant can do something vaguely similar to what you suggest, but using mRNA. The plant seems to store old mRNA transcripts, and can alter the DNA based on them even after several generations. Of course, this is bleeding-edge stuff, so there's not much more info floating around about it, but there's definitely more than we thought happening. Actually, we've got a pretty good handle on what chemical insults cause what chemical effects in DNA. Like UV light, which causes two adjacent thymines to form a bond, "kinking" the DNA and causing transcription and duplication errors. Mokele

Oh, great, we've moved from bad philosophy to bad poetry.

Next time you're going to dispense "knowledge" of similar quality, I suggest you use the bathroom down the hall. Mokele

Two things: 1) The term "natural selection" originated in biology. Yes, it has applications elsewhere, but the primary use of the term is still with biological systems. Any additional definitions would be, in my eyes, secondary. 2) This conversation is about biology, evolution, and genes. Ergo, it is logical and rational to deduce that "natural selection" is being used in a genetic context. If we're in a conversation about black hole formation, and you see the phrase "critical mass", a rational person does *not* attempt to bicker over the wording because the same phrase is used in nuclear reactors and atomic weapons with a different meaning. The lesson for today, boys and girls, is that *context* is important. See here for more details. Mokele

But there is still a *chance* that the stupid person who plays on the freeway will not survive to pass on their genes. Natural selection works on probabilities: if one genetype (and resultant phenotype) is less likely to play in traffic, it has a slightly lower mortality rate (all other things being equal), and will spread. Even a 1% increase in survival rate can spread through a population in as little as 1000 generations. Furthermore, you neglect one of the biggest sub-sets of natural selection: sexual selection. Whethere or not all humans survive the same, there are *definite* inequities in who gets to mate and how much. Sorry, that's one of the crappiest definitions I've seen. Try this, short and sweet: natural selection = differential perpetuation of genotypes. And that's wrong why? You seriously think that the criteria which we use to select mates has *not* been fine-tuned by evolution to search for geneticly meaningful information in appearance? Women with the "ideal" waist/hip ratio of 0.7-0.6 have the most successful pregnancies, both in terms of the baby's health and their own. Males and females with symetrical features are displaying genetic quality by showing they can overcome environmental insults and have good developmental genes. Males who are "manly" in form (broad shoulders, rugged, etc) are honestly advertising quality; testosterone inhibits the immune system, so only high-quality males can produce enough for these features. You're so focused on death that you forget the other major part of evolution: sex. Mokele

Of Bettina's list, IMHO, #2 is by far the biggest, and the deepest underlying cause. I base this on the principle of "Been there, damn near done that". Seriously, I actually have a warped form of respect for the school shooters for having the balls to stand up and fight back. Mokele

I think this post is destined for Psuedoscience, like ever post metatron makes.

Well, it's hard to say. Modern reptiles don't grow as fast as many mammals, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule; for instance, it takes humans 15 years to increase 40x in mass, when a reticulated python can do that in 6 months if fed well. Given that 95%+ of the energy a baby mammal receives is wasted (heat), I'm very skeptical of applying this rule of "reptiles always grow slowly". It is very possible that they just extended adolescence, which means they might not have been as disadvantaged as you'd think. Note the aforementioned retic growth. Similar growth rates are seen in other large reptiles, but are by no means universal (crocs are, compared to monitors and pythons, slow growers). To me, it seems like a ecological thing: some can afford to grow fast, others can't. I seem to recall there being a way to find out about the growth rate of extinct animals (they recently did it with T. rex), but I don't know if that's been done with sauropods yet. Shortly, I'm skeptical of the extrapolations, especially since closely-related reptiles can have such different growth rates. Mokele

From the strictly technical standpoint, no, it actively reduces diversity. Natural selection can only preserve or weed-out alleles, not generate new ones (that's mutation's job). Diversity helps a species, but evolution cannot create genetic diversity, only mutation can. However, in stable habitats, because competition is a problem, evolution *does* tend to favor species becoming specialized, which, it turn, results in greater diversity in that ecosystem. So, yes and no, but also remember that evolution doesn't truly "strive" for anything. Mokele

It's composed of 3 bones, the illium, ischium and pubis. The same 3 in all terrestrial vertebrates. In fact, the division of the two major groups of dinosaurs is based on the relative position of these bones. Mokele

Oh, we don't need artificially-imposed selective breeding for that. Those sorts of losers voluntarily display themselves as unfit mates (thereby weeding themselves out) either through verbal cues (mention of "Star trek" being the most common) or behavior (ex: furries). As for those with all 3, I got my example of that, and she's all mine. Compare your loves to mine and then kill yourselves! Mokele

I'd wager that a jellyfish could have outsmarted my late dog. At least in jellyfish there is evidence they can learn, and not fail obedience school *twice*. Mokele

Aha, I have found it! A news resource of such caliber that you can *know*, with 100% certainty, just how accurate every article is! I guarantee you will have *no* trouble determining the accuracy of any of these articles! Mokele

I think that's part of what they're trying to figure out. Mokele

But they aren't cool enough. Reptiles are also the pinacle of coolness. Biased, me? True, but why is intelligence needed for dominance? They did fine last time, after all, giant space rocks excluded. On a more serious note, while reptilian metabolism probably does limit intelligence, there are many reptiles (like monitor lizards) that display suprisingly high cognitive capabilities for their brain size. It's reminiscent of the problem of the octopus, which also displays unusual congitive capacity for such a small brain. I tentatively hypothesize that both "pull it off" because they have "outsourced" more of their functions to the rest of the nervous system, thereby making what's in the brain count more for "intelligence" than it would in mammals, who have a very centralized nervous system in comparison. But that's so tentative I'm hesitant to even call it a hypothesis. Mokele