Mokele

Duplicated genes are far from a problem for evolution, and in fact can be a boon. Current evidence suggests that what gave vertebrates a 'leg up' back in the Cambrian was a whole-genome duplication, which allows the duplicated genes to diversify into new roles (in this case, a complex head). A second genome duplication seems to be behind jaws and paired fins, and teleost fish have had yet another (probably responsible for their incredibly complex skulls). We've even watched it happening. Single-gene duplications are fairly common, about 1 in 100,000 divisions for yeast (probably similar for us), and don't require any specialized outside input. Deletions, too, but those are often lethal unless there's a duplicate. The paper linked to is by someone who clearly has no knowledge of genetics, evolution, or any paper written on gene duplication in the past 40 years. This sort of stuff is covered in undergrad-level biology courses. Mokele

So it's OK with you if a business puts up a sign saying "Now Hiring - No Blacks"? Or paying a worker less because they're Catholic? It's not just one business - women being paid less is an almost omnipresent phenomenon. Since it's impossible to know whether you're being treated fairly (since salaries are secret), there's no way to avoid it *or* to use it to your advantage in hiring, and the result is that women pay a penalty that, over their work life, can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, just because they don't have a penis. The right to equality under the law and equal treatment supercedes ALL other aspects of government, including the market. If you cannot expect fair treatment, that undermines the entire basis of even participating in civilization to begin with. Mokele

It's from a 'journal' published by the Discovery Institute, whose sole purpose is to promote creationism. Ergo it's about God/creationism. It's called 'evolution'. No, it doesn't. Because you're arguing a point, therefore you need to provide evidence. And because newpapers are a crap source - only pree-review journals have the data and information needed to evaluate the claim. TV is not a peer-reviewed source. And peer reviewed sources aren't the final arbiter of truth, but they contain detailed reports of the actual scientific methods and result, meaning we can see for ourselves. Mokele

It's very simple - while it is very complex, the brain is deterministic. You can determine the behavior of any neuronal network if you simply know the membrane properties and neurotransmitters involved. Yes, there are a lot of factors affecting membrane properties, but it's still predictable. All this stuff about quantum influences in neurons is simply bullshit. Why? Yes, everything is quantum probability, but why don't baseballs behave like quantum particles? Because they've got so many atoms that all the probabilities just cancel out. The throw of a pair of dice is random, but if you roll 100,000,000 pairs of dice, the average result is going to be 3.5. Your average cell has 10^14 atoms in it. And neurons are actually very, very big cells. We're talking *quadrillions* of atoms. Any quantum effects are going to be averaged out easily. Mokele

I doubt that would survive court - the main principle is that people should be paid equally for doing the same job just as well. In *any* company today, regardless of size, women will be paid less simply because the jobs that are considered most socially acceptable for women (and filled mostly by women) are lower-paid jobs. That's something that has to be handled by changing the culture itself, not by the courts or by laws. What the laws can address is that if you have 10 welders, one of which is a female who is of intermediate skill and intermediate experience, she should be in the middle of the pay range, not at the bottom. As Sisyphus points out, this assumes access to information. It's possible you may be able to hear things 'through the grapevine', but that's highly prone to sampling bias, exaggeration, etc, and with salary records confidential, there's no real way to check. On top of that, it strikes me as very condescending. The company is like your mom saying "Now I know you two will fight over who gets more candy, so I won't let either of you know how much is in each of your bags." Treat employees like grown-ups, and if they can't handle where they are on the pay scale and start fussing, they probably aren't much of an asset anyway. Mokele

Flat-out wrong. The law prohibits gender discrimination and race discrimination, regardless of race or gender. Honestly, I cannot think of a single reason why this bill would be opposed. Are people actually *against* fair pay? And the 180 day limit is a joke, effectively only there to obstruct equality. Think about it, how can you know what your salary is compared to others without violating most workplace rules? And even if you *did* find out, they could wave it aside as a "trial period" and promise a raise later, and by the time they default on that promise, the 180 days are up. It all boils down to something simple: you cannot talk about favoring equality, but then stack the deck so those discriminated against can't fight back.

To be more specific, the paternity/identity tests don't even test genes. They test hyper-variable elements called microsatellites, which are sequences in which 1-6 base pairs are repeated over and over. They form because DNA polymerase basically 'skips' when it gets to these short repeats, causing it to 'lose its place' and accidentally replicate more or fewer copies. As a result, they're incredibly variable between individuals, so testing just a few loci (which is cheap) gives you extremely high confidence levels. Actually testing for genes is a bit more difficult, and you have to know what you're looking for. You could test for known genetic diseases (though it would cost more), but you can't just scan the whole genome on a fishing expedition (not without tens of thousands of dollars and years of work). Mokele

It's complicated, because, well, why should DNA be any different from other identifying information, like fingerprints? Is it legal for a spouse to dust for prints to see if they've had someone over while they were on vacation?

The heat output of humans has minimal effect on global warming. It's all greenhouse gasses, because they retain heat from a much more powerful source, the sun. Given that fusion wouldn't produce any greenhouse gasses (beyond those emitted by trucks and such used to build the reactor), it would help a lot.

As others have pointed out, it would require a HUGE area/volume - ecosystems are vast things, and small ecosystems are easy to unbalance and destroy However, it also cannot only be one biome. No single biome on earth fulfills all the needs of the organisms in it. Wetlands purify the water while eroding mountains supply the new sediment to keep the wetlands intact. Forests rely on lakes for water, lakes rely on forests for nutrients. It may be simpler to just concentrate on a particular problem (such as waste processing or food growth) and install an artificial system using living organisms for it, rather than trying to create a whole new ecosystem. For instance, rather than trying to grow a functional wetlands to solve waste management, just have a tank full of water hyacinths. Grow crops hydroponically. Generally avoid as much of the complexity as possible. Mokele

Some of it may be due to departure from the assumption of neutrality - many of the 'molecular clock' estimates assume the sequence in question isn't under selection, and that may not be true.

Rutru7334 banned for spamming Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedspace1 is suspended due to accumulating 3 warnings about trolling.

Anything made of proteins, nucleotides, etc can and will decay on its own from just environmental effects. Hence why our bodies constantly re-make and repair themselves.

Well, so much for that idea. Looks like there were no massive fires and no impact event after all.

Ok, time's up and then some.

No luck there, but I found Waldo.

The seed analogy is a good one. A virus outside a cell is pretty much an inert package of proteins and genetic material, waiting to land. Just like seeds, they can decay or be eaten by various things. Some species are fragile (like HIV) and quickly break down, while others are durable and can last a long, long time. In the body, it's a bit different, mostly because the body has active defenses that not only target virii, but will generally just scoop up and destroy anything they don't recognize. So even if the virus was 'safe' from medicine by lurking passively outside a cell, chances are a wandering macrophage would just devour it anyway. Mokele

Actually, cross-species hybrids are very, very common in nature and cultivation, and I'm even aware of 3 cross-genus hybrids (one of which is between species separated by ~90 million years).

I'd also like the point out that we should be attempting to emulate scientific debate here, not political debate, and in the former, such line-by-line comments are frequent (and indeed, every review I've gotten of a paper submitted to a peer-review journal came in point-by-point format, with a sort of 'summary' at the beginning).

Pretty much, yeah.

He was clearly mistaken in using "gill slits", probably due to lack of knowledge of embryology. The underlying point about similarities in embryology is true, he was just wrong about the stage.

The pharyngeal pouches are indeed common across vertebrates. The difference is that only in gilled animals do they perforate and become gill slits. I should also note that this is precisely why books are considered inferior to scientific articles - books aren't peer-reviewed, so mistakes can slip through. Mokele

Probably. In technical literature, such a glossing-over of differences would be impossible, but in popular literature, it's practically a necessity (otherwise it winds up as unreadable as the technical literature). It may even have been insisted upon by the editor or publisher of his book. Mokele

Because he's an ornithologist, not an embryologist. The "gill slits" story is pretty prevalent, and I only know it to be false after having some embryology eduction. Because biology is so phenomenally diverse, once you get far beyond a scientist's relatively small area of expertise, they're often no better than a well-read layman - I'm a world expert in snake locomotion, but on molecular biology, I'm pretty awful, and there are likely plenty of undergrads and laymen who know more about molecular biology than I do. Mokele

It's hard to say. Maybe it did, but for elephants "love" means something different than for humans? Emotions are basically instinctive programs/reactions that exist because of natural selections, so it would only be logical the evolutionarily and ecologically different organisms would have different emotions. Can the love humans, as social primates, feel be the same as the love felt by solitary predators like big cats? And of course, the further away you get from humans, the more dicey it gets - can fish love? What about an octopus? Beetles?