Mokele

I think the problem is the word "belief", which can range from unquestioning acceptance of the existence of God to tentative evidence-based acceptance that a particular chemical reacts with another in a particular way to the informal assessment that I'm a good driver and more. It's a word with a lot of varying definitions, and trying to lump science and faith under it is like me trying to pass off my pet boa constrictor as "a distant relative of dogs" - true, but so broad as to be useless and vaguely shady. I think that's the reason science is famous for huge, complicated, multi-syllable words - because science realized the problems inherent in this sort of discussion long ago, and just opted for being ridiculously specific. Mokele

They're not the same thing, and the examples above are either sloppy writing, or simplifications for a lay audience. In all vertebrate embryos, you get pharyngeal pouches, but they're just pouches. A slice through the embryo would show you a series of thickenings joined by thin sheets of tissue, but without any actual "slit" or other communicating opening to the outside. In gill-less animals, the pouches never become true openings - the thick-thin-thick pattern is gradually overgrown by surrounding cells. Only in animals with actual gills do the thin portions become thinner and eventually open to the outside. So basically, the terms are not synonymous - a "gill slit" can only apply when there are actual openings, which doesn't happen unless the animals actually has gills. Now, as for recapitulation theory, part of it was because embryology wasn't very advanced yet, so it may not have been obvious to early embryologists that there were no actual openings. But some of it was simply wishful thinking and a refuted hypothesis. Organisms *do* share some developmental basis, and there are developmental relicts of our ancestry(such as in human kidney development), but it's much more complex than the simple 'recapitulation' that was initially favored. Mokele

It's a mix. IME, animals can be smarter than we give them credit for in some respects, but still quite dumb in others. The same for emotion - some animals clearly display emotions, others less so, and not all animals seem to have all emotions. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult field, because a lot of these terms are very hard to define and even harder to test in a consistent yet meaningful way.

Basically, what human and all vertebrate embryos have are properly called Pharyngeal Pouches. In fish, the pouches continue to develop, and open to the outside, forming slits, while gills form behind them (and are actually part of a separate developmental pathway). In mammals and other non-gilled vertebrates, the pouches recede, and the area becomes the neck (some traces of the originally patterning is still evidence in nerve positions, etc). There is one exception - the first gill slit. In jawless fish (lampreys and hagfish), it becomes a true gill slit. However, in jawed fishes, the bones on either side have become part of the jaw apparatus, and the first gill slit is reduced to a tiny hole. This tiny hole is visible behind the eye of modern sharks and rays, called a spiracle, and has no associated gills (though it can be used as a passage for water, allowing the animals to breathe while on the bottom). It actually persists in all vertebrates, though often covered by skin, and in everything that has ears, it's been re-routed to the inner ear. You know how your ears can "pop"? That's the tube (called the Eustachian tube in humans) between your mouth area and your ear (technically, the opening is in the nasopharynx, the throat behind the nose but above the mouth). Mokele

Why try to explain it? Because it's interesting. Homosexuality occurs in a wide variety of species, including humans, and by it's nature, seems to be contrary to the basic evolutionary drive to pass on genes. This in and of itself is enough to attract scientific interest. People are interested for precisely the same reason people are interested in hive insects with sterile workers and species which can choose between sexual and asexual reproduction - it takes the typical Darwinian strategy and adds a new twist. Explaining a trait which seems to be contrary to what one would expect is always interesting. As for why an evolutionary explanation - because there's clearly a genetic factor. There's a high level of twin concordance, and several other methods also show high heritability. This means that genes must be involved somehow, thus evolution comes into play. Finally, I don't think anyone here is using science to condemn homosexuality, and if they do, you have my word as a mod that they'll be on the receiving end of my banhammer very, very quickly. Mokele

How is it incorrect? It *hypothesizes* that it's the same, because that is and always should be the default hypothesis when you see a trait manifested over much of the animal kingdom. A basic rule of reconstructing trait evolution is parsimony - postulate the fewest origins and losses that can account for the observed distribution of the trait. In this case, that would mean postulating that there is a single origin, probably quite far down the evolutionary tree.

Something to think on for those favoring parental rights over government intervention: what about child abuse? Including religiously motivated child abuse? Clearly the rights of parents have limits, otherwise it would be legal to kill your kid at any time for any reason. The question is where those limits lie, and at what point do the rights of the child outweigh the rights of the parents. I'd also like the point out that just because the situation is complex doesn't mean it's legally intractable. Judges and DAs have broad lattitude in deciding what to prosecute and try, and generally are not going to waste time, money and effort on prosecuting folks who clearly did not display egregious neglect and willful subservience of their child's life to their own views. Mokele

A few important questions: Does the proposed ring have geological characteristics that match your proposed mechanism? Is it the right age? If this above-ground explosion is the source, how do that account for the impact debris found at other sites? Can the leftovers be accounted for without an impact, just by explosion? Would an explosion over this area have the effect you claim? Or would the soil and bedrock structures prevent it? I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I'm also skeptical, and need to see proof, and that level of proof is unfortunately beyond the scope of this thread (you'd need to actually go out and conduct the studies yourself, a time and money intensive prospect, or sign on as a grad student working under a prof in this field and make this your thesis). Mokele

Why is this topic even still open? Pmb asked a question: Why do people dislike the term "evolutionist"? That question has been given *several* answers: 1) It implies equivalence of status of the ideas 2) It implies that evolution is based on 'faith' 3) It has not been extensively used by the scientific community, thus has no grounding 4) It originated and is used as a label (often derrogatory/inflamatory) primarily by creationists when talking about those who accept evolution. IMHO, the 4th is the primary reason - why should we adopt a label that was invented and applied by another group? Especially when said label is often used in a derogatory way? Is there seriously anything else to say? Because IMHO, the question has been thoroughly and adequately answered, and everything else is OT. Mokele

I strongly disagree. Remember, ID was specifically created to circumvent legal rulings about religion in the classroom. All of them like to pretend to challenge evolution, but YEC is most obvious due to it's blatant stupidity. And there's the rub - any results which do not confirm YEC (or any other version) can be dismissed as "God moves in mysterious ways" or "God is testing our faith". Just as testability is important, so is falsifiability. If there is no circumstance under which a hypothesis can be show to be false, it's not scientific in any way shape or form. The arguments above show that there is no falsification possible. Mokele

Actually, they technically cannot fly, even though they generate lift, because they cannot also generate thrust while airborne. What they do is technically a form of gliding.

Kyrisch, I think you're stretching the word a bit too much - "Faith" is typically taken to mean "belief in the absence of evidence", therefore precluding the useages you apply.

Religious =/= creationist. Religious people can be rational (to a point), but creationists cannot be. Their entire belief system is dependent upon willful ignorance. However, since our thought process is dependent upon labels, surely you agree that *which* label matters a lot. "Evolutionist" is a far inferior label to other, admittedly more verbose labels such as "those who accept evolution". Precisely my point - by forcing a label on creationists while not adopting one for those who accept evolution, we reinforce the idea that the creationist worldview is an abberation and a departure from the norm. Hopefully, this extra bit of social pressure will help that failed ideology slide into the history books a bit sooner. Conversely, just because labels are useful doesn't mean that *all* of them are desirable. See above for the merits of not labeling. Mokele

The various polymers around are good, but not good enough yet. Actual muscle is surprisingly powerful, fast, and flexible. To give a point of comparison, I'm in a muscle physiology lab right now, working with frogs. The plantaris muscle (calf muscle) of a moderate sized frog is roughly the size of an almond shell. This little lump of tissue can go from resting to active inside of 50 ms, can contract by up to 30% (if unloaded), and can generate 15 lbs of force. Stop and think about that for a second - a lump of flesh the size of an almond shell generating enough force to lift a heavy textbook off a table. They're really amazing biological machines, when you get down to it.

I don't think anyone claims that creationism as a whole doesn't make predictions (it clearly does), but rather than ID (a specific facet of creationism) doesn't. The problem is that ID has stripped off all the more easily falsified predictions such as the flood myth, the young Earth, etc., and even accepted "microevolution", leaving very little else except the claim about "design". It's also important to note the difference between a prediction and a *testable* prediction. If I make up a Theory of Everything, but the only way it can be evaluated is when the universe ends, that's not scientific, because even though there is a prediction, that prediction cannot be tested. Ditto for 'design' - it's a prediction, but not a testable one, because 'design' is an amorphous, undefined property that cannot be evaluated on its own. So, in short: 1) there's more than one type of creationism and 2) prediction isn't the same as *testable* prediction. Mokele

A rational, thinking human being? Does there need to be a specific label? We don't have a label for those who accept gravity. IMHO, applying a personal label makes what should be a dispassionate argument of scientific evidence into a personal grudge-match rife with ingroup/outgroup conflict and needlessly bogs everything down. Making it into an "us vs. them" issue is what has allowed the creationists to survive, and adopting that tactic ourselves will only make things worse.

Honestly, there's no dino DNA left anywhere. No ice persisted since their time, and without cold temperatures any DNA strand would have complete decayed by now, even if sealed in amber or somesuch. The soft-tissue fossil from the T Rex bone was proteins, not DNA. IMHO, the only way to get dino DNA is time travel. Even if we got it, it would be damned hard to do anything with it. The two closest relatives, crocs and birds, have both diverged so far from their saurian cousins that it would be like trying to grow a monkey fetus in a platypus. Mixing the DNA would invariably result in the embryo's death, since the species are just too separate. Sure, new technology might help, but some things cannot be changed, such as the time over which the DNA has degraded or the surrogate parent species available, and these are the biggest challenges.

Personally, I think all of the money should go into functional morphology, but I'm biased. To answer honestly, I think the current method of funding works fine, but just needs more money. Currently, the NSF gets only $6 billion, and the NIH gets only $28 billion. For less than the cost of bailing out some useless stock firm, we can triple the funds for both (I'd actually stop there, because after that point there's just not that much research worth funding). As for the amount, I think it should be increased for one simple reason: it's trickle-down economics that actually *works*. You're giving money to scientists who *will* spend *all* of it in the given time frame, in the process funneling money to grad students, equipment makers, air travel personnel, etc, all of whom will then use that money to pay rent etc and help dig us out of this hole. Basically, funding science *is* a stimulus package.

I think it doesn't explain squat. Homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom, including in species with little or no sociality. While on the island in question, it may give a fitness benefit, I don't think that explanation works for the ultimate cause of homosexuality itself. Whatever that cause is (kin selection or just a genetic hiccup), it needs to explain the prevalence beyond humans. Mokele

Morphology of flying fish with comments on gliding performance More on flying fish (abstract only) Wikipedia knows all

Personally, I know a lot of evolutionary biologists, and I don't know any who use the term "evolutionist". Regardless of validity, definitions or anything else, the term has been poisoned by the creationists, and nobody uses it. I'm not really sure what the point of this thread is. The term exists, could be used, but isn't for a variety of reasons which are unlikely to change anytime soon. Given that there's nothing beneficial about this term over the current terminology, I fail to see the issue.

Well, "kingdoms" aren't often used anymore - we tend to refer to the three 'domains' (archaea, prokaryota, and eukaryota), which are based on cell structure, genetics, etc.

IIRC, Animals and Fungi are the most recent, with plants splitting off right before, protists before that, and archaea and bacteria were the first (it's unclear whether one evolved from the other and which was first).

Both electroshock and tetanus result in spasms, not just sustained contractions. I did some searching, but was unable to find anything clarifying whether the fractures due to tetanus were from muscles alone, or, more likely, due to impacts associated with powerful spasms. I did also find many refs on bone fracture during epileptic seizure, again due to impact. That would be applicable, if I was just thinking of what happens normally, but I'm thinking in absolute terms, gleaned from in-vitro data. The maximum force a muscle can produce is 30 N /cm2 The failure stress of trabecular bone is 655 N /cm2 The failure stress of compact bone is 16500 N/cm2 So, a muscle pulling on a bone (since all they can do is pull) would have to be 550 times the size of the bone in order to break it, a condition which not only does not occur in the human body, but doesn't occur anywhere in the bony vertebrates. This also leaves out muscle failure - muscles themselves rip and fail at around 1.5-2 times their maximal force. The muscles would be destroyed long before they broke bone. Bones aren't minimally designed, either. Even in birds, bones tend to be built to widthstand 3-5 times the maximal load they could face even in the most strenuous possible situation. The numbers just don't add up.

I highly doubt that - bone is very strong, and we actually *do* maximally recruit muscles during extreme but voluntary events (long jump, weight lifting, sprinting, etc.). Indeed, most vertebrates have at least a safety factor of 3 for their bones in terms of the maximal forces, both from muscles and external influences (impacts with the ground, etc.).