Mokele

In the body, hormones are always in solution with the bodily fluids (which themselves are mostly water)

But at that level, the differences are minor, because you bump up against physiological limits. The distribution of sports performance (or any other biological performance) doesn't have an infinitely long tail, and once you're in the top fraction of a percent, you're at the limits of what physiology and skill can accomplish. No, the sheer number of graduates churned out by business schools means supply exceeds demand. Even if you take the top 10% of these, they still exceed demand to a much greater degree that the skilled workers under them, such as engineers. More than you'd probably think, if you actually tested. As I pointed out about, physiology limits our capacity, regardless of skill, so the 'long tail' doesn't go on infinitely. True, but then why the low salaries compared to jobs without such restrictions (such as business) where skill is important?

Wrong. I suggest this book. It explains the difference between the two using Hardy-Weinberg equations, and they are *very* different. Drift is random sampling error between generations, while inbreeding is a type of assortative mating which increases individual and population-wide homozygosity. Both can be expressed in purely mathematical terms, and the results are not equivalent. They are the same. Dawkins himself, and any reputable biologist, will tell you that genes become phenotype via development, and that alterations to developmental genes or their expression can have far greater impacts than altering the gene for fur color. What do selfish/altruistic genes have to do with it? My point is that the genes didn't change, only their expression, pointing out the role non-gene hereditary elements (such as regulatory regions) and development in evolution. And we actually know this - we've sequenced the relevant HOX genes and mapped their expression in the snake embryo. No, I'm merely arguing that your position, in the initial post, is insufficient and inaccurate. Evo-devo is one reason. Fecundity differences are a second. Gene duplication is a third. And developmental genes *are* important, but so are non-coding gene regulatory regions that control their expression. Seriously, you will not find any biologist *anywhere* who disputes the importance of gene regulation. And evo-devo is *about* developmental genes and their expression. That's like saying my assertion that wheels are cool translates to an opposition to cars. Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm for the subject, but you *really* need to catch up on recent development. The book I linked to is very current and very understandable, and should help you realize just what we're talking about.

I've been thinking about this recently, especially with all the Wall Street stuff on the news, and I was wondering if there's any studies on what determines pay. I know, I know, "Supply and Demand", but that doesn't seem to be the only factor. For instance, look at any engineering company - the managers get paid more than the engineers, even though you need fewer of them and there's far, far more to hire. It seems ubiquitous - those who are 'in charge' are paid more, regardless of their relative position on the supply vs. demand curve, probably as a result of basic instinctual programming from our days as troop primates. For another issue, consider pro athletes and academic scientists. In both cases, there are many, many more people than there are job openings (high supply, low demand), so even though the employer stands to make great money from either (stadium seat sales or grant overheads), they should both be paid poorly, right? Yet the one regarded as 'prestigious' is paid exceptionally highly. Yes, the athletes make more absolute money for the employer, but what incentive is the employer under to share that when he could just hire a replacement so close in skill as to be effectively identical? Shouldn't that keep wages low? Ditto for Hollywood actors. So, has much actual research been done on this? How much do we know about factors, primarily psychological, altering or even over-riding the traditional 'supply and demand' model? And have any companies actually tried circumventing these issues?

My sister didn't bat an eye at it, but she's in optics, and freely admits she's forgotten a lot of her astrophysics. I did find something saying curved spacetime causes gravity, but it's in the introduction of the Wikipedia article on gravity, so in about 10 minutes it'll say that peanuts cause gravity.

I have no idea, hence why I'm asking. I was under the impression that the distortion in space-time actually is what causes things to move into gravity wells and, in effect, causes gravity. Is that not the case?

What's the motive behind the move? I assume it's not just blatant greed. In the US, we constantly have tuition increases, every year. My last school was considered especially affordable in part because they had some sort of contractual obligation to limit tuition increases to a mere 9% per year. Do any of the schools have athletic programs they can axe? I realize you probably don't have the same foolish obsession as consumes the US, but still...

Thanks. Anyone else with more expertise in the subject? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Before everyone starts screaming about 'OMG COMMIES!', look at the article in detail. It's specifically proposing that executive pay be more closely tied to company performance, that shareholders be given more say in executive pay, and merely reporting the details of executive pay to the SEC. How, exactly, does any of that translate into "salary caps"? If the shareholders agree they want someone enough to pay him a lot, he does a good job, and reports the pay and perks to the SEC, he can still get as much as he wants.

No, actually, it isn't. Inbreeding will not alter the total allele frequency in a population, only make individuals more homozyous, while genetic drift will alter total allele frequency. Yes and no. Gene flow typically refers to transfer between populations of the same species. Horizontal gene transfer and hybridization do move genes, but the issues of interaction of long-separated genes complicate things. Precisely. We need to know more and incorporate it. I think you missed the point, then. Evo-devo deals with how phenotype can change as the result of changes in gene regulation, such as adding body segments or altering expression. Dawkins' 'extended phenotype' is a result of evo-devo, not an alternative. Consider, for instance, snakes. Traditional gene-based systems cannot explain them, but when you look in a developmental perspective, it's obvious that while the genes are the same, the expression has been altered to produce an incredibly long series of thoracic segments. You know crossing over, where homologous chromosomes swap information? Well, it doesn't always match up perfectly, and as a result, one chromosome winds up missing genes, another with extra copies. Obviously the organism missing the gene will be at a severe disadvantage, but the organism with a duplicate gene will have a 'spare' copy, which is free to mutate into new functions. Often, the gene just degrades, but sometimes it results in a new, functional gene. Over time, you get 'gene families', all related by duplication and subsequent modifications. Hemoglobins are an excellent example of this. Occaisionally, due to errors in meiosis or mitosis, whole-genome duplication may occur, allowing every single gene to have a 'spare', including vital developmental genes. It has been suggested that events of whole genome duplication may be responsible for many of the 'leaps' in vertebrate evolution such the origin of vertebrates themselves, the origin of gnathostomes, and the incredibly complex jaws of teleosts. Mokele

Agreed; I think the 'big leap' will come when we integrate development with gene-based approaches, so we can understand the underlying evolutionary processes acting on complex phenotypic traits such as limb morphology and behavior. Plus, I'm impatient to be able to use genetic methods to cause large phenotypic changes in order to examine their consequences.

Evo-Devo is revolutionizing how we think about evolution, along with advances in the understanding of phenomena like epigenetics. There's no "super-new-synthesis" yet, but I figure in 10-20 years, we'll have advanced enough to justify a new stab at it. How? Rocks can't select *or* eliminate, all they can do is be selected or be eliminated. I think the wording is a non-issue. This is the first I've heard anyone bring it up, either in science or from creationists. If even they can figure out that natural selection doesn't imply active agency, I think it's not really that important. So, you want to switch a perfectly good term that applies to both for an inferior term that only applies to some? How is this a good idea? Also, your term doesn't apply well to *either*. In both r-selected and k-selected species display unequal fitness due to both death and failure to reproduce. Humans (strongly k-selected) display both pre-reproductive mortality and failure to reproduce without dying. Frogs (strongly r-selected) also display both pre-reproductive mortality and failure to reproduce without dying. So what possible use is your new term? Inbreeding, hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, developmental effects, gene duplication.

I'm very fond of the BBC's Life In Cold Blood, which, despite a few errors, manages to be very good. I'm also biased because in a brief clip, it showed the mode of snake locomotion I discovered being used in a natural habitat.

Two problems, one minor, one major: Minor - 'elimination' still implies agency or activity - someone doing the elimination. Major - it's wrong. While in r-selected species (high # offspring, low survival rate), elimination may occur, a large portion of differential fitness is simply differential mating success and # of offspring. 'Death' is irrelevant - while dead animals don't breed, an animal which is alive but lacks offspring has the same fitness, zero. The influences of these factors (and others, such as founder effect) are well known.

Yes, but we can already do this, though admittedly none of our mechanisms of swimming are based on hydrodynamic lift.

That's actually part of the problem - plants actually have very low metabolic rates in most cases, so it would take a LOT of plants to sustain one human. Couldn't you counter this by blowing out exactly the same quantity of air in the opposite direction?

So, let me get this straight: You can proclaim entire groups of people unworthy of life simply because of their behavior or image at any given time (even considering that behavior may change in future and that behavior has not cost anyone their life). Yet we cannot be allowed to make our own decisions about whether innocent human lives outweigh the lives of rats. How, exactly, are we the immoral ones?

Um, sorry SL, but that's almost entirely wrong. While many of the early tetrapods are from freshwater deposits, some are known from marine deposits, including some of the pre-tetrapod sarcopterygians such as Panderichthys. The geology of Tiktaalik may have been freshwater or a brackish water. In all likelyhood, they inhabited a wide range of salinities, mostly in coastal areas like modern river deltas. Second, lungs are a basal feature of bony fish - all bony fish started out with lungs, and those that lack them now either lost them secondarily or later turned the lungs into swim bladders. This was to address the issue of nourishing the heart. In fish without lungs, the heart only gets deoxygenated blood, greatly reducing endurance. Chondrichthyes like sharks have independently evolved coronary arteries (blood vessels after the gills that return a small portion of oxygenated blood to the heart), while bony fish have lungs which feed oxygenated blood to the heart (though by dumping it in the main heart vein, not by coronary arteries). Also, lungs did not evolve from the roof of the mouth, but rather from an outpocketing in the gut, and this can be seen in modern lung development in all tetrapods (which is controlled by the same genes for all of them). The use of fins probably was for lifting the head up, though not completely out of the water until later species - early tetrapods still had spiracles, a pair of valved holes behind the eye which connect the outside to the interior of the mouth. (These spiracles are the vestige of the first gill slit, which was lost after the evolution of jaws, and is retained even in modern mammals as the Eustachian tube.) They probably also played an important role is moving tetrapods back into the water after launching themselves after insects on the shore, much like modern crocodiles do (please note that these insects included six-foot millipedes and spiders the size of your head). Remember, the hyper-permeable skin of modern amphibians is a recent evolutionary trait. Tiktaalik has scales, and while other tetrapods lost some or all of these scales, a scale-less hide does not prevent tolerance of brackish or even marine waters, as the existence of entire families of marine catfish (which lack scales) testifies. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedI can't believe I forgot about this guy, Rana cancrivora, the only amphibian whose salt-water tolerance is known (apparently a species of toad also can tolerate brackish water, but hasn't been really studied well). None can tolerate fully marine conditions for extended periods, but apparently have hypertrophied excretory systems that can deal with brackish water for extended periods.

So, you'd murder 100 humans, random humans who may have done nothing wrong, to save mice? And make no mistake, it's murder. You're killing my inaction. Refusing to research the cure for a disease using mice is just as much murder as refusing to throw a life raft to a drowning man. Murder by inaction is still murder. What basis do you have for that? Why should people die to save an animal whose entire ecology and evolution is dictated by its role as 'a quick snack for the predator on the go'?

What's the difference? Dead is dead. And are you seriously saying that some humans are worth less than mice, because of some arbitrary aspects of them? You can either kill the 100 mice, or 100 humans. Pick one.

I think it's more more basic - our minds are keyed to specifically recognize shapes associated with eligible, fertile mates, at the very basic level of visual processing. Certain shapes will attract our attention, even if not actually on a female, simple because our minds are 'primed' to spot such patterns. It's a bit like why people see faces in toast burns and Mars - our mind has evolved to be particularly sensitive to this pattern, and to signal strongly when it detects it, even erroneously.

The problem with postulating different biochemistry is that you have a fundamental tradeoff. If you have more stable molecules, they're more resistant to heat, but they're also harder to process via metabolism. I'm not saying Earth is at the optimum, or that it's not possible, just that there are very real physical constraints on what life can do which are often brushed aside by invoking the argument of "but they're aliens!" As I pointed out, I'm skeptical how much insulation water would provide life, since life tends to congregate in the shallows - structural complexity leads to more niches, more critters, more food, etc. The relative biomass of the open oceans, especially in the deeper portions, is far poorer than most terrestrial deserts. Albedo and greenhouse effects could ameliorate things, but the vegetation issue is, IMHO, putting the cart before the horse - before you get vegetation, life has to originate in the first place, and those original lifeforms likely were too small in number or size to significantly alter their habitats at any appreciable level. That's part of the problem - unless we speculate about panspermia, for a planet to have life it must not only have conditions to which life could adapt, but must have conditions favorable to life originating in the first place. And there are fish that can tolerate -20C, and small invertebrates that can completely dessicate and then revive. But these are all derived traits - primitive life likely had roughly the same temperature tolerances as modern bacteria, which isn't really that far off from most other living things. I think we're getting hung up on details, and missing my main point, which is that life is *not* completely unpredictable, and is influenced by some very basic and universal physical rules. The whole point of an HZ is where life is likely to occur, so if we don't take these rules into account, what's the point? I'd also like the point out that speculation effectively destroys the value of the HZ - we could expand the HZ from 0.01 to 1000 AUs if we got creative enough about potential life forms, how to define life, etc. Hell, if we speculate enough, we could have life evolving in interstellar gas clouds, making the HZ basically anywhere that isn't inside of a star or black hole. I'm not saying life on a planet with an eccentric orbit is impossible; I'm saying that there are real limitations to life that are being overlooked in the current analysis, such as the lethal effect of certain temperatures regardless of the year-long average temperature. These can be ameliorated, as others have shown, but how much speculation about ameliorating factors is allowed? Is life on a highly eccentric planet possible? Sure. Is it possible outside the range of temperatures seen in the usual HZ? Sure. But based on our planet, as well as the underlying rules of life, planets in the HZ are more likely to have life than those outside, and those with less eccentric orbits are more likely to have life than those with high eccentricity.

Martin, the wiki link says the center of the habitable zone is defined by being warm enough for liquid water, which is more or less where I was going, except to point out that too high of an eccentricity would bring a planet beyond this range. IMHO, the important factor isn't the average, it's the minimum and maximum. If you have a planet with an average temperature of 20C, but it fluctuates between -50C and +250C, it cannot support life, as either of those conditions, especially the latter, would be lethal. Oceans retain heat, but there isn't a huge variation in solar input across the whole planet like there would be for a highly eccentric orbit. And remember, most of the oceans is a vast semi-empty dead zone - the vast majority of ocean biomass is near the shore and in shallow waters, where the insulating effect will be significantly less.

You're renaming something that's already known - adaptations. It's already well-known that some adaptations allow organisms to diversify into previously unavailable niches and forms. There's no need for a new word for it. Also, you seem to be repeating Haeckel's mistake of assuming that embryonic growth mirrors evolution, which was disproven about 100 years ago.

There's no way to know without knowing the genotypes of both parent flies and the nature of the dominance interaction of the allele in question.