Mokele

Luck, basically. Remember, 99.99% of all things that ever lived have died, and true phylogenetic trees of life are littered with dead branches. Hominins (defined as organisms closer to humans than chimps, encompasing what most would call "pre-humans") are a relatively small lineage of a relatively small family in a small order of mammals that only really inhabited a relatively limited area (aside from a few expansions). We're also fairly large organisms, which means we need more food and area to survive, and warm-blooded, which means we need still more food and area, meaning a given area of land can only support a few of us. We're also highly versatile, not prone to specialization, making competition likely. Taken together, you'd expect any lineage with this combination of characters to show a relatively limited diversity of extant members, including being a single-member subfamily. It's also worth noting that the times there were more than one hominin are when hominins violated some of the above, chiefly by migrating out of Africa to new regions.

Yeah, because it's not like cops ever shot young black men in the back when they're handcuffed on the ground. Or beat the crap out of and arrest a 12-year-old black girl for 'prostitution' on her own front lawn Or Or beating an already-restrained suspect Or dragging people out of car and beating the crap out of them And who can forget ? or callously dumping a paralyzed man from his wheelchair Or brutally beating a 15-year-old girl for malicious shoe-kicking. As much as it may shatter your illusions, cops are not *always* the good guys, and abuses of power are far more common and prevalent than you know. And as much as you may hate to hear it, there is a long and well-documented history of excessive abuse towards minority suspects. So, tell me, how exactly are you supposed to react to cops when you have friends who've been falsely arrested or even beaten by cops? When you get pulled over almost monthly just because you're black and drive an expensive car? Do they need your *permission* to be pissed off at relentless and obvious discrimination and racism? Sorry, but Disney World is closed - reality isn't nearly as pleasant.

Oh, I 100% agree. But you aren't making grandiose claims based only on in vitro data. That's the issue - in vitro alone isn't enough to support the claims tossed around in this thread. Eh, 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. The most important part is how effective each is. Jung was a crackpot, and there's good reason we've abandoned such lazy methods. But why accept anything based merely on proximity? An annecdote is still just an annecdote, and you can't distinguish it statistically from luck. I don't want "I heard from somewhere". Link to the publication directly from the study, so I can examine every aspect of the methods. "A study from somewhere proves I'm right, but I can't actually link to the study, so just take my word for it." First, it's a patent - not peer reviewed. Second, the sample sizes are so small as to be worthless. Third, there's no control group. Worthless.

Um, no. Gates showed the officer two different IDs upon request. The problems started when the cop didn't let it go after that.

Again, it's in vitro, with no real discussion (nor plausible mechanism) to prevent damage to healthy cells. They may have just invented the Death Ray, but unless they can isolate the effects in vivo, it's medically useless. Not actually applicable. Note the last sentence of the abstract: "Our findings suggest that a simple miniaturized microfluidic device can achieve important steps in sample preparation on-chip involving respiratory bacterial pathogens. " It's meant for preparation of samples, not curing disease. No control = bullshit. And PNAS papers can be published without review by members of the Academy (which explains some of the truly awful papers I've seen in there). See, that's the sort of thing I'm after, and I can consider that plausible (however, it also brings up the question of whether this method is any better than plain old colchicine therapy, which also disrupts tubulin and therefore mitosis). However, it should be noted that the above mechanism would only work for cancer (and possibly infections from eukaryotic pathogens) - there are no mitotic spindles involved in bacterial or viral replication, so those diseases should be utterly unaffected by electrical treatment, contrary to the claims of other posters. A few, perhaps, but certainly not all, and their acceptance (by myself and the medical community) hinges on proving their efficacy. That's all I really ask for - evidence-based medicine.

Another point, much more important - consider how much acceleration, expressed in "g's", it would take to reach light speed in even a human lifetime. The number you'll get will be enough to reduce any astronaut to a fine red paste. Hell, any acceleration much above 1g will prove to be *very* problematic for long-term exposure.

Your e-book? Sorry, no. Any idiot with adobe can make a pdf and stick it on the web. I want to see legitimate, peer-reviewed research, not ramblings. I want to see a double-blind study with controls and sham treatments and a sample size of over 500 inidividuals, with a nice clear ANOVA showing the results. And "testimonials" are not evidence. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". It's not even that hard. You and a friend could do it in 6 months for a few thousand dollars. Just buy 600 rats, keep them in isolation cages, inject 400 of them with a disease (200 controls), and then have your friend administer whatever therapy you want to the infected rats, with you hiding behind him and using a wireless device to connect and disconnect power to his treatment (giving you 200 treated rats and 200 that received "sham" treatments to control for the effects of handling etc.) Hell, I'll even do the stats for you myself (it'll take me ~10 minutes). As for wanting stuff handed to me, yes, yes I do. The burden of proof is always on the claimant (you). If I claim there's life on Mars, it's up to me to support my claim, not up to you to disprove it. You have claimed that this technique works, therefore it's your responsibility to support that claim. That's how science works.

Except when one side refuses to accept even basic facts as real, as is often the case.

Another point is that when something hits the moon, the crater stays there *forever*, unless disrupted by another crater. It's a dead ball of rock, with no processes to erase the signs of damage. In contrast, Earth has a tremendous amount of geological activity, erosion, and the effect of life itself. Craters quickly vanish, eroded away and buried. Even the 100+ miles-wide crater of the asteroid which supposedly killed the dinosaurs is now all but invisible.

In vitro tests =/= in vivo, whole-organism tests, which should be trivially simple to do in a proper fashion. Lots of things kill bacteria in a petri dish but not in an organism. The whole thing just seems too suspiciously "alternative medicine", with the claims that it can cure everything, is being suppressed, annecdata, lack of clinical trials, etc. If this is so effective, why isn't be being used by AIDS patients? Or those with drug-resistant TB? Or swine flu? Or herpes? Or hepatitis? I'd think that those with long-term, chronic, or serious infections would jump all over this. So why haven't they, or why are they silent? People have tried this as a remedy for snake bite, figuring it might denature the toxins (since they're just proteins, after all). Guess how well that worked. Here's a hint - the results involve a lot of missing limbs and dead people. And how, exactly, is this system supposed to distinguish your cells from viri or bacteria? If it's denaturing protein or screwing up membrane ion balance, it should do it for ALL cells, not just a select group of cells. Why doesn't it destroy blood cells too? And if it doesn't destroy your cells, how can it work against intracellular parasites, viral or otherwise? I don't want some hack noticing that bacteria can be hurt by electricity (no sh*t, I bet hammers hurt them too), I want IN VIVO tests, conducted via double-blind, published in a reputable journal, and I want a plausible mechanism. Lab rats are fine.

But then what's the answer? Ignoring them doesn't work. Labeling them doesn't work. Debating them doesn't work. Insulting them doesn't work. Unless you have a super-secret de-stupiding ray, how do we deal with crackpots (both anti-GW folks and of other sorts), especially when they exist in sufficient numbers to influence policy?

It's worth noting that the term "dogs" is meaningless, especially since it can include members of different genera (such as the African Wild Dog). We only apply it because we know their ancestry. Someone who had never seen of heard of these breeds might well split them into separate species, based on massive morphological differences and inability of some combinations to mate effectively. "Genus" and "Family" are also artificial concepts that humans have imposed for our convenience. There's no rigid definition for them, especially not in terms of the amount of change required, and the term does not necessarily have uniform meaning (there can be more diversity in a single beetle genus than in an entire mammal family, for example).

Dogs. Just try to breed a great dane with a chihuahua. They're an excellent example of both how drastically selection can alter appearance and how two animals with a *very* close common ancestor can become genetically separate.

Blah blah blah. Show me peer-reviewed double-blind study, and give me a plausible mechanism.

This should be in your textbook. Most textbooks have a figure of the cycle, and you should be able to trace around the cycle and add up the ATPs.

Gupta's a gullible dipshit. There has never, ever been a single confirmed case of MPD/DID. Ever. All the stuff about changing physical trait is similarly just a load of hogwash promoted by movies. Absolutely impossible. Sadly, it's been promoted by a group internet morons who call themselves "multiples" - sad people with no jobs or lives who've convinced themselves that simply having different aspects of their personality makes them "multiple personalities", and therefore they are special and don't have to account for the sad failure that is their lives beyond LJ communities. That Gupta fell for this crap and CNN published it is a shining example of why I trust neither.

There are several fairly serious mathematical errors in the above section that need correcting. 1) The purple line is explicitly labeled as the mean. A mean is just a single value, thus appears as a horizontal line. It conveys no information about the relationship over time. 2) The filtered data is not a linear regression. Otherwise it would be a straight line with a given slope. You're thinking of a general linear model (GLM), which can include squared, cubed, etc terms. However, that is also wrong. Filtered data =/= any sort of regression. A filter is a mathematical construct (originally from electrical use) which removes frequencies from a plot in a particular way. For instance, I sometimes do electrophysiology on muscle tissue. I get unwanted signals due to, for instance, the wire moving as the animal swings its leg (which will appear as a shifting baseline). I remove unwanted signals by using a 10 hz high-pass filter, which means any fluctuations of less than 10 Hz (movement artefacts due to the animal's motion, etc) are removed, leaving only the high-frequency components. I can do this safely because I know the firing rate of muscle in vivo is always over 10 Hz. The baseline shift is gone, and now I can do proper EMG analysis. Similarly, somewhere in the related text for this graph (or at least the technical documentation), it should say what the filter parameters were. Perhaps they used a 3-year high-pass, removing some inter-annual variation. It's also worth noting that a filter is substantially more complex than a running average, too. I'm sure Wikipedia has something on the math behind it. 3) The area thing is a common misconception about linear regressions. What a least-squares linear regression does is try to minimize and equalize the squares of the distances from the points to the lines. This is not the same thing as the area, and in linear regressions across data with a few exceptional outliers, the area relationship you suggested will be violated, as will the equality of simple distance. Furthermore, and most simply, were it a regression line ("trend line" is pretty much never used by anyone in science), it would be labeled as such. Mokele

Because one sues the other.

It's commonly thought that, prior to the Big Bang, there was nothing. However, recent evidence shows there were actually already 3 Starbucks franchises and a Wal-Mart open within a short drive from the singularity.

In my experience, it is prestigious, but it's also not nearly as well-paid as law and medicine, which could account for some of it.

It's also worth noting that, IME, anthropology is very much "its own little world", somewhat insulated from broader biology and paleontology. I've been consistently shocked at the paucity of non-primate references in primate functional morphology and locomotion literature, as well as the seeming collective focus on one aspect of a system to the near-exclusion of other questions (more interesting ones, IMHO).

From the paleo perspective, PE is pretty widely accepted as a valid mechanism. It's a pretty common occurrence in both marine invertebrates (where SJG first noticed it) and in terrestrial ectotherms. Of course, it's not the *only* mechanism, and it's pretty much lost all vestiges of politics, but it's pretty widely accepted, IME

Oh, DNA definitely codes for phenotype, such as number of legs, size of organs, etc. It's just a very, very complex process involving hundreds of genes and regulatory elements. Essentially, your arm is the same as a bat's arm - what differs is when the genes are turned on and off and at what concentrations, which is controlled by either developmental genes or non-gene regulatory sections of the DNA.

In my field (organismal biology), it's actually very uncommon to publish raw data in any form, mostly because it's useless. Nobody would look at it, much less process it and try to use it for something else or to replicate. The sheer amount of manual labor in biological data processing is intense and monotonous (my time ratio of experiment:data processing is easily 1:100, probably closer to 1:200), the inherent organismal variability prevents anyone from discerning anything without statistics anyway, and if you desperately want the data, all it takes is a quick email. Seriously, if someone ever tried to re-create my work from my stored data, they'd hang themselves by the third month. Assuming that carpal tunnel from manual digitizing hadn't rendered them unable to tie a knot. Another point worth making is that, at least in my field, the experiment tends to be very strongly tailored to the hypotheses, and extraneous information is rarely collected, so the chances of finding something new in the data are pretty slim. For instance, there are many studies in animal locomotion using a 3-axis force plate that never even bother to videotape the animal, since that data would just be wasted disk space. In short, I suspect you think raw data may be more useful than it really is in some fields. Mostly it just sits in the file cabinet and rots.

Well, it would reduce them - reduced growth can also be due to other factors such as the need to move fast and fit into small spaces, or simply lack of necessity (after all, how big does a male spider really have to be if he's just going to mate and get eaten?)