Mokele

Well, it *can* have an effect on car temperature. Ever notice that UPS vans have white tops, and they don't paint their planes brown? They do that explicitly because of heat issues. However, I'm not sure how much this matters for passenger cars, which are usually unused for 90%+ of the time (and often used for commutes, which occur during times of sub-maximal light intensity). If you *constantly* kept the car cool, it could have a big effect, but just cooling it down once you get in probably isn't that big of a deal. Plus, in northern areas (including Northern CA) during winter, having a car that rapidly heats up in the sun would mean not having to use the heater as much (and not leaving the car running to warm up in the morning).

If he needs to resort to tricks like that to get into med school, his chances are pretty low anyway.

Because people want to feel smart, even if they aren't.

I recommend Gaining Ground by Jennifer Clack, one the leading researchers on early tetrapods. She's very good, and her writing is very understandable. In the case of crocodiles, it seems very likely. Early tetrapods are often reconstructed as having a crocodile-like lifestyle (preying on the large insects that colonized land before them), and very crocodile-like forms evolved more than once, namely Prionosuchus, Archegosaurus, and Melosaurus. After they died out, a group of non-crocodile reptiles occupied the niche, the Phytosaurs, and only once they vanished did modern crocodiles take their present form (previously, they looked like reptilian greyhounds).

Oh, come on, that doesn't rhyme at all! There once was a man called Duration And he loved mental masturbation His claims about mass were stupid and crass and never account for rotation. See, easy!

So that would be nothing?

You mean the methodology you flatly admitted you don't have a clue about a mere 8 posts ago? How would you know? I know you admitted that you don't know anything about science, but I'm pretty such science is not a type of food.

The problem is the word. You have a 'belief', a poorly-formulated, vague idea without any sort of evidence or logical basis. Scientists have 'hypotheses' which are specific, detailed ideas based on prior work and observations. And nobody 'believes' results. That's why we use statistics. Damn, you really *don't* know what you're talking about.

So, you want all of the credit without doing any of the work?

Math is worthless without evidence. Look at Super-string theory.

No, we have quite strong evidence that tetrapods only left the water once, and all modern tetrapods evolved from them. Modern amphibians (technically called "Lissamphibia") are just a highly specialized lineage who evolved a hyper-permeable skin loaded with toxin glands.

Really? So the fact that *everyone* else defines NS as a process, not a result, doesn't phase you at all? From now on, I'm going to call genes flugles. Because I can. It is according to your definition. So drift and founder effect? I'm not just being pedantic - the problem with defining NS as a result is that there are other mechanisms that lead to the same result. What's walking? Is walking the place you wind up, or the process by which you got there? ::bangs head against wall:: And where do ribosomes come from? Do they get left in the cytoplasm overnight by the ribosome fairy if the cell has been good and not become cancerous? What determines what the ribosomes do? Do you think all genes are always produced all the time? What do they produce? When? Look, it's blatantly clear you don't actually understand what you're talking about. I suggest you take some time to familiarize yourself with the subject in more detail before continuing.

Yes, those poor oppressed millionaries. Whatever shall they do!

Natural selection is not a result, it's a process. If you define NS as "an occurrence of differential reproductive success amongst individuals of a population", you've defined drift and founder effect as natural selection, since both result in differential reproductive success. Differential reproductive success can happen as a result of natural selection, but natural selection itself *is* the process of organisms living and dying and breeding, all of which acts on phenotype. Consider the race again, with cars, specifically. Each car is built from a set of blueprints, but the winner is not determined from examining the blueprints, but rather on the speed of the resulting car. It's the winning car's blueprints that are used to make the next generation of racecars, but the actual determinant of who won was based on the performance of constructed cars. A construction error or deviation from plans due to resource shortages may doom a good blueprint. That's my problem with this "all genes all the time" crap - it ignores the fact that genes build organisms, and that the performance of the organism is what determines how many offspring it has or whether it survives.

Is it possible for political philosophies to Jump the Shark?

The problem is you're confusing the tallying of scores with the race itself. What determines which animal gets to reproduce and which doesn't? It's not genes - nature doesn't peer into the genetic code and decide who gets eaten. It's phenotype - who is faster, stronger, better at hiding, produces more eggs, etc. Learning is a poor example, admitedly, so I'll try a different one. Snapping turtles lay a LOT of eggs, buried in a hole, and let ambient nest-site temperatures deal with incubation. We know that hatchling turtles from the same parents raised in cool nests not only are slower moving than their hot-nest kin, but that these differences persist over at least 6 months, possibly more (possibly the entire lifespan of the turtles). This is a particular problem because the baby turtles are subjected to heavy predation, and snappers have minimal belly shells that offer little protection (they also cannot withdraw their heads). So, here you have a situation where environment affects phenotype, and thus selection, independent of genotype. All baby turtles are equally impeded by a cool nest, and the mother cannot control nest temperature (it's influenced very strongly by weather, even in optimal sites). If genotype was the level of selection, cold and warm babies with 'fast' genotypes should be selected equally, but they aren't. Phenotype (speed) determines who lives and who dies, regardless of the genotype. A fast-genotype baby from a cold nest will be slower and is more likely to be eaten than a slow-genotype baby from a warm nest. Another excellent example is from reticulated pythons. The males are a "mere" 14 feet long, but the females can exceed 27 feet in length, weighing hundreds of pounds, all for one reason - bigger snakes lay more eggs (egg size is mostly fixed). But size is determined by food availability, and even a baby snake with genes to make it a good hunter will not grow as large without sufficient food, to the point of outright stunting - a baby retic can grow from 2 feet (hatching) to 12 feet in a year if it gets all the food it can process, but will remain stunted at 2 feet indefinitely (and in permanent sexual immaturity) with 'survival rations'. Their genotype is important, but the availability of prey is even moreso. Yes, genotype builds phenotype, along with some environmental factors, and selection results in changes in gene frequency, but it's the performance capabilities of phenotypes which are acted on by natural selection.

Before we overhaul education, we need to overhaul our social expectations. Japan has a great educational system, largely because their society values education. In the US, education is not valued, and frequently is actively scorned. Until it is, we won't see the willingness to spend the time, money, and effort to reform it. People simply don't care enough.

Well, consider where you see flightlessness evolve: usually in situations where there's few predators or competitors. Insects returning to the ocean, on the other hand, would face intense competition, both from crustaceans and from larvae of other insects. Perhaps "waste" was the wrong word. Without their wings, insects would have no special advantage over other arthropods and would face increased competition. Only a few lineages have lost their wings, and those usually only do so because they have some other advantage, like eusocial ants. That doesn't preclude a return to the water, but it makes it more difficult. Only a few species have made that switch, largely because of competition. As far as using insect wings underwater, it's doubtful. The flight of vertebrates like birds and bats relies on fairly simple laminar flow, like over an airplane wing, which makes the transition to a more viscous fluid easier. Insect flight, however, depends a lot more on vortices, turbulence, etc, which makes it hard to switch fluids. Plus, their wings are usually relatively light and fragile, which may prove problematic for dealing with heavy loads associated with water. The few insects that have returned to the water, such as diving beetles, actually retain their wings and flight to move between locations, but fold up their wings and use limbs only when moving underwater.

Actually, it was saltier. See here. I got the full text of the article, and there is indeed a general decline in ocean salinity since the Cambrian. At the time of the origin of tetrapods, seawater was at roughly 4.5%, now it's at 3.5%.

Phenotype, definitely. Selection can act on non-genetic phenotype, such as learned behavior, resulting in a failure to change gene frequency. Plus, well, a cheetah doesn't catch a gazelle based on PCR results - it catches it based on speed. Genotype + environment = phenotype. Phenotype is selected upon, resulting in changes in population genetic structure.

Ok, this is *way* off topic. If you want to discuss this theory, start a thread on it.

Exactly, but that's also the problem - the only way to distinguish 'plausible' from 'real' is empirical data, which seems to be lacking.

So which describes business? Is being a CEO really like frog calling, where only the best give any benefit at all? Or is it like frog jumping, where you only actually have to be 'good enough', and our troop-primate brains have decoupled this from actual compensation? Basically, what if the difference to the company between a good and great CEO isn't that big, but our primate minds have turned it into a "who's the alpha male of the troop" situation and showered rewards according to psychology, not economics?

But couldn't that also be said for any field? Engineering, delivery driving, welding, janitorial services, there are always individuals who are hyper-skilled. Why aren't the hyper-skilled rewarded in the same manner in all fields, if they offer such an advantage? I disagree - our highly-selective, multi-stage winner-take-all nature of athletic competition creates that illusion. We purposefully make events as demanding as possible to ensure maximal variation within humans, and then select only a tiny fraction. I've been thinking about exactly this for frog jumping recently, so I'll use that as an example. Every year in CA, there's a large frog-jumping competition, with prizes for the longest jump. Competitors collect thousands of (invasive) bullfrogs, test them, and then put the best of those through a system of tryouts, semi-finals and finals, eventually finding the longest jumper. But while we as humans like to see which number is higher, how much does it actually matter in nature? Does a frog that can jump 7 feet stand a significantly better chance of evading predation than one which can jump only 6 feet? And what's the distribution within a population? Normal? Skewed high or low? Does that tiny difference in ability actually translate to substantial benefits? If I have two CEO job candidates, one of whom wants 10x the salary of the other, will he actually be 10x as good for the company? Especially since I can use what I save to do productive things like expand, research, advertise, etc.? I know I'm on a bit of a frog-kick, but the real question is whether this is like frog calling or frog jumping. A jumping frog just has to be faster than the reflexes of the best predator, and improvements beyond that don't matter much. For calling frogs, however, the very loudest and best get all the rewards. We assume it's like the latter, and pay like it is, but is it? What if it's more like the former? Has anyone actually checked? That's the big problem - Where's the empirical data? The manipulative studies? If ecologists can do similar studies (which are fare more difficult, since animals can't talk), why can't economists? Or have they, and I just don't know of them? Without empirical (and preferably manipulative) studies, we'll just talk around in circles endlessly about possibilities and theory. Where's the data?

No, drift is sampling error, and alters the overall allele frequency in the population. Inbreeding, on the other hand, keeps the same allele frequency, but just alters the distribution so that more individuals than expected are homozygous (that's actually how we measure inbreeding - percent of expected heterozygosity). No, I *do* think fecundity is part of natural selection. My objection was that your term, 'natural elimination' focuses exclusively on mortality and ignores fecundity differences.