Mokele

Joint capsules do not open, ever, without incredibly traumatic injury.

You do realize that most life has a fairly narrow range of temperature tolerances, right? And that sustained temperatures above 40C will kill just about any multicellular life form within hours? Add in that most life stops working at 0C, and you have an extremely limited range of eccentricities.

Well, what sort of biology experience are you looking for? You could do anything from culturing cells to ecological field experiments.

So who would you rather kill: 100 lab mice, or 100 humans?

Except that it doesn't any more that life evolves to have more legs (making millipedes the image of God). Self-awareness is an isolated occurance, an accidental side-effect of increased intelligence to deal with complex social systems, and if you look at the fossil record, you'll see no trend at all towards 'self-awareness' nor any other 'goal' of evolution.

It's not quite what you're after, but I find Chipotle (chain store) burritos. They're *huge*, and can be quite nutritionally complete.

If you prevented animal testing, you would limit my access to medicines and technologys without my consent, depriving me of the ability to make my own moral decision on the subject. Why not? If you had only two options, to kill 10 people or kill 1000, you would kill 1000? Make no mistake, there is no 'zero death' option. Either you kill mice, or you kill humans. There is no middle ground, no third choice. You have to pick which are more important, humans or mice. Because, in the case of mice, they have a brain the size of a pea, and can barely manage to do anything beyond screwing and eating.

Or, if you're in a coastal area where there's fishing, scrounge the shucked oyster and clam shells. Or any other mollusc shell, really.

So, two nobodies from obscure schools, and a paper which is flatly labeled as "an opinion piece" in a journal with a highly suspect review process? Yeah, they're cranks, and I'm becoming more and more critical of PloS by the day.

Yeah, that site is utter gibberish. And the "chemical imbalance" model has vast amounts of support, including experimental data - if you fix the imbalance, the symptoms go away.

Are you actually going to answer questions, or just continue to spew a mish-mash of random technical-sounding words?

The first link doesn't have an abstract, but does have all the reference info you need to look it up in your school's archives. For the second, it's in the title of the blog, but also in the very first post in the archives.

Here's one example. And here's a blog by a schizophrenic who's been blind from birth. Disproven.

That's all well and good, but what gives you the right to make that decision for other people? That's what opposition to animal testing is: you don't like something, so you want to forbid *anyone* from making their own choice and getting benefits from it. It's antithetical to the very concept of personal freedom.

I've actually got degrees in both science and engineering, and IMHO, there's definitely differences in mindset and methods. Engineers tend to be more focused on finding a particular solution to a particular problem, based on known information. Scientists, on the other hand, tend to work in the reverse, observing a phenomenon and investigating it's properties and how it works. In methods, I've noticed that engineers tend to be more 'try it and see' (obviously based on calculations), while scientists (at least good ones), tend to be much more rigidly hypothesis-driven (in that there are explicit criteria for falsification, etc.). I also think engineers tend to think more in terms of 'knowns', and tend to regard many things as 'settled', in part because a lot of these things *are* pretty much settled. However, this means they are usually quite unprepared to know *how* the challenge established theory, and thus wind up doing it badly (see Every Perpetual Motion Claim Ever). On the flip side, scientists can be ridiculously impractical and will obsess over refining minor details of established theory which offer on marginal improvements. Rather off topic, but you'd be surprised how *little* physicists are interested in collaborating on those sorts of questions, possibly because they see working in a Newtonian world as boring. And most of the engineering applications have just 'taken the next steps' from biological work rather than involving collaboration, with only a few exceptions.

Your entire premise, the distinction between "progressive" evolution and "non-progressive" evolution, is entirely false. You have made similar mistakes before, and I suggest you take some time to read works on evolution before continuing, particularly the works of Gould, who addresses this issue in many of his popular essays.

Yes, ID was explicitly created by several creationists within months of a Supreme Court decision ruling that creationism could not be taught in schools due to its religious content. ID is nothing but creationism dressed up in a cheap lab coat to try to circumvent the ruling, and so far, it hasn't worked, as the Dover case shows.

In theory, but I doubt it could be accomplished without serious damage to many associated systems.

How many people were saved by what we learned with this? How many burgers and pork chops have you eaten in the 5 years since this thread?

They'd both dehydrate and absorb salts, probably leading to death within a minutes.

99% of everything is extinct. All the proto-bats, all the proto-snakes, all the synapsid mammals, all the ostracoderm fish, all the euryapsid reptiles, all the toothed birds, all the amonites, all the trilobites, all the eurypterids, all the proto-whales, all the notoungulates, all the mesonychids, all the anapsid reptiles, all the acanthodian fish, all the belmenites, all the freshwater sharks, all the maadtsoiid snakes, and of course, all the non-avian dinosaurs. What we have left today is a pale shadow of biodiversity, the tattered remnants of a tree of life that has lost most of its twigs and many of the large branches. Most early tetrapods evolved in rivers or brackish regions where the river meets the sea, such a modern deltas and wetlands. Also, we know for a fact that the oceans were salty at the time via geological evidence, as well as where rivers and deltas were and how salty they were. EET is also flat-out wrong - how can Earth expand without additional mass? And the fact that we've *directly observed* continental drift is rather a big issue. This is drifting off topic and into pseudoscience. Because people live and breath on continents, not on ocean floors. In fossil hunting, you traverse *vast* areas prospecting for bones - dozens of miles a day. If you're lucky, after a few weeks or months of this, you find one fossil. If you're unlucky, you can spend an accumulated time of several years without finding anything. On land, this can be done for free with volunteers. Underwater, it simply cannot be done, and that's ignoring the silt, sand and detritus covering the ocean floor.

"…imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'" --Douglas Adams Part of the problem is that question is so ill-defined, usually because the putative 'designer' is so ill-defined. Consider everything humans have designed. Any random alien race could easily look at all of these things and deduce some aspect of our body form and mind from things like the shapes of doors and chairs, the reliance on visual feedback, the existence of agriculture, etc. Design says definite things about the designer and, conversely, in order to infer design, you have to have some idea of what to look for. For instance, if you said "Mars was inhabited by creatures that resembled giant brittle-stars", we would know what to look for in order to distinguish designed artifacts and ruins from natural geology (such as a reliance on touch and taste, broad flat hallways, control systems that take advantage of tentacle-like arms, etc.). So if you postulate design without specifying characteristics of a designer, you have no possible criteria for determining what is or isn't designed, thus you have an untestable hypothesis.

iNow is correct - this is a religion prize, not a science prize, though they frequently give it to scientists whose work they feel is supportive of faith. It has nothing to do with the scientific merit of their work, or even science at all, as famous past winners include Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. And, since we don't have a religion forum, the thread is closed.

Yes, but by that standard, hang-gliding already counts.

Your subdivisions should be connected - it should look like a rat's nest more than a tree. For instance, I study biomechanics, the fusion of physics and biology. You also have evolution listed separately from biology, when in fact it's the guiding theory of all of biology. In fact, it looks to me like you made the entire periphery of that ring by just paging through wikipedia and inserting vaguely related words.