Mokele

No, it cannot. Your skin's apparent color can become paler, redder, or bluer depending upon blood perfusion and oxygenation, and your skin can darken in response to UV exposure (tanning). There is no healthy way for skin to be yellow or green.

Isn't that called cocaine?

Gigantothermy is always a possibility, but you have to be careful about overheating. Part of the reason elephants lack fur and have large ears is because of their need to dump excess heat.

No, not even close.

Time isn't really a relevant variable. If it takes more time, but there's a reproductive advantage in it, it'll evolve.

Um, no. Yellow skin in humans is caused by jaundice and the buildup of toxic metabolic byproducts. Green, as seen in bruises, is also due to toxic metabolic byproducts and the body breaks down damaged tissue.

So....you're getting data from the future? Because last time I checked, 2009 isn't finished yet. Wait, so a giant, planet-wide system with huge historical dependency and complex, non-linear, interacting factors, don't behave in a linear fashion?

You are aware that nobody is seriously proposing just letting these people go, right? Just moving them to secure facilities in the mainland US.

Definitely. AFAIK, no such species currently exists, but likely did at some point in the past during the transition from cold to warm blood.

If he doesn't show the data, then he's a fraud. That's how science works - you report your data. Is it too late for a refund on those classes? Because I'm fairly sure "we've watched it happen" counts as 'proven'. Also, what about Earthquakes? Plate Tectonics predicts that they happen, where they happen, and how often. Expanding Earth predicts that earthquakes are impossible, yet they happen. 1) if it was space itself expanding, the frame of reference would expand too, yielding no change in perceived shape. 2) If planets expanded like stars, they'd have fusion in their core, and thus gasseous cores. We KNOW from seismic density readings that this is not the case. 3) No other moon or planet is expanding. Bullshit. Show me evidence. You keep saying that. I do not think it means what you think it means. Wrong. Geological uplift is also predicted by plate tectonics. Then why can we trace the edges of pangaea's coastline by the boundary of marine vs terrestrial fossils? That means there were seas at the edges, not in the middle. Or maybe you think coral lives on land, and trees live underwater? Geological uplift. We have marine fossils going back over 3 billion years. I've dug fossils out of the ground in Cincinnati that showed marine organisms over 450 million years old. Face it, you're WRONG. So trees and rats live on the bottom of the ocean? Because we have terrestrial fossils from all over pangaea, including things that cannot live underwater. You claim we refuse to see evidence. You're the one claiming palm trees lived 1000 feet under the sea. Then where did that come from? ------------------- Ok, this is getting assinine. You clearly don't have the slightest clue about geology, paleontology, biology, physics, biogeography, or how science works in general. We have presented you with HEAPS of data that your theory cannot explain, or that flatly contradicts your theory. Instead of actually thinking about this, you either ignore these points, whine about persecution, or present a hand-waving explanation that defies all known laws of physics. I'm going to give you one last chance. Stop and *think* about Expanding Earth Theory. Think about all the things this theory predicts about geology, paleontology, biogeography. Think about how such a world would work. Don't look at reality - just extrapolate, based on your idea. Now find a prediction of EET, one that DIFFERS from PT. For instance, EET predicts that plate material should never be lost/subducted, while PT predicts that it does. Or that EET predicts there should either be no coastal ecosystemson Pangaea or (if water was on top) that the coastlines should not match with modern coasts at all, while PT predicts that coastal ecosystems would have occured at the edges of Pangaea and those should align with modern coasts, give or take a bit due to sea level change. Give a prediction in which the two DIFFER. For which we can test the predictions, and for which you DO NOT ALREADY HAVE A PRE-MADE EXCUSE. Any other post will be deleted.

Perhaps a better phrase would be "we shell out boatloads of grant money and have a nearly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor (aka grad students), so there's a lot of global competition for faculty positions in the US."

To some extent, but remember that what's alive today is a pale shadow of the true diversity of life. In the past, many animals were probably 'intermediates', and some may even be today. The leatherback sea turtle maintains its body a few degrees over the water temperature, for instance.

Different animals have different optimal muscle temperatures. The evolutionary change between high and low optimal temperatures seems to have occurs multiple times within diurnal and nocturnal geckos, for instance. Well, if it's natural temperature is just 10 degrees lower than humans, then it's likely the animal will be just fine - remember, not all warm blooded animals have the same active temperature. Humans are 98.6 F, dogs and mice are 101F, elephants are 97 degrees, and birds can be 104 to 108 F. A Platypus has only a 90F temperature. In each case, the animal's muscles, nerves and proteins have evolved to function optimally at those temperatures.

I haven't either, but I couldn't turn up much on my searching on the topic in either direction. Show me this mythical "decrease". Every graph I've found shows at most a leveling off, with some minor wobbling. As for when it becomes more than a blip, that's determined statistically. It depends on the magnitude of the change, the duration, the consistency, and the natural variability of the system. The ocean would be one candidate, and unfortunately, we can only measure the very top of it. You're relying upon an abstract? And you haven't read the paper? Are you serious? Possibly, though we should note that there are likely to be differences between the UHI in developed vs developing countries. I also note you failed to include the whole quote, which states: "Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period."

I've encountered fax machines with speakers. I assume it's so that you can hear what the machine is doing, and so you have some sort of audible assurance that it did make the connection correctly.

Can you post these MRIs and CAT scans? And what were his methods?

Like what? A nice dose of the placebo effect?

Yes and no. Most biologist never have to use some of the insanely complex stuff physicists do, and so lack those skills (and often can get by on just algebra). But IME, biologists tend to have much more complex statistical skills, as a result of having to deal with statistical problems like evolutionary relatedness, individual variation, behavioral motivation, etc.

Wikipedia is wrong - a quick romp through the scientific literature showed they have a low metabolic rate, 2/3 that of a mouse of the same size, but they can maintain their body temperature over a modest range of ambient temps. I've fixed the entry. You are definitely right about food, though - warm blooded animals require a LOT more food than cold-blooded animals of the same size, usually between 10-20 times more. As for size, that's more difficult. Cold blooded animals can be *smaller*, simply because warm-blooded species have a minimum size below which there's too much surface area per unit volume and they cool too quickly. But as far as upper limits, that's hard to say. Part of the problem is thermal inertia - bigger animals of any sort take longer to cool due to less surface area per unit volume. As a result, very large mammals like elephants have lower metabolic rates per unit mass than mice, because they lose less heat. Once you reach dinosaur or whale size, even a low metabolism is enough to keep the body warm. Looking at the fossil record, there are giant ectotherms and giant endotherms, but both are rare enough that it's hard to say which is more likely.

The link's dead.

I can't believe I forgot one of the best refutations: fossils. We know when Pangaea occured (about 250 million years ago) based not just on geological evidence, but also on fossil evidence, namely the type and distribution of fossils. Contrary to those videos, there was NO period in which there was no ocean, as evidenced by unambiguously marine organisms in very large areas. Furthermore, we know of unambiguously marine fossils prior to Pangaea, in some cases predating it by hundreds of millions of years. On top of that, it's pretty much certain that life itself originated in the water, and indeed, there are NO terrestrial mulitcellular fossils until about 450 million years ago. Of course, if the water was already there, it would have been so deep it covered the whole world, meaning terrestrial life could not have begun until well after Pangaea, which is clearly false as well. The fossil record proves this theory wrong, and there's no way around it.

Except the embryos used are "surplus" embryos from fertility clinics. If not used in biomedical research, they'll sit in storage for a few years, then be tossed in the incinerator. So, if you were an embryo, would you rather be used in research to save lives, or be tossed out in the trash along with removed appendixes and liposuctioned fat?

You know, I'm not actually sure *how* slime molds deal with the mitochondria issue. Or whether it's an issue for all organisms. In googling, I found this paper (free) that discusses the topic and mechanisms, the punchline of which seems to be that there's no simple answer, and some organisms do quite well with a mix of organelles from each parent.

Ahh, my bad. The source I pulled them from wasn't clear about whether the numbers were per 100,000 or had already been multiplied by population. Still, those numbers pale in comparison to car crash deaths, and for the same year (2007), there were 57 law enforcement officers killed (non-accidentally). Considering the constant danger of their field, that's not particularly bad.

Well, first, there's the advantage of sex over cloning, namely increased disease resistance. However, our version of sexual reproduction, with two gametes of massively different sizes, is a derived trait - at first, gametes were the same size. This means any two gametes can combine, and raises the possibility of self-fertilization and the problem of inbreeding. This sort of 'genetic match' test, where organisms sharing alleles at a gene locus cannot fertilize each other, is a way to prevent inbreeding, and is found in some flowering plants, too - pollen tubes cannot form if the pollen is the same allele as the flower it lands on. This not only prevents self fertilization, it also prevents breeding with close relatives. So the question that remains is, why so many alleles? Simply put, the more alleles, the more spores you can combine with. If there are only 2 alleles, a given spore can only combine with 50% of other spores. If there are 3 alleles, the percentage rises to 66%, and at 5 alleles, a given spore can combine viably with 80% of other spores.