Mokele

Yep, that's pretty much the definition of ecology.

The evidence is simple - we're directly observed evolution, ranging from minor adaptation to the origins of new species and major phenotypic change. We've actually gotten to the point that reporting the direct observation of one species arising from another is considered uninteresting.

Make a circle with the thumb and middle finger of each hand. Stack your hands on top of each other, with your wrists on top of each other and the holds aligned (this may be a bit uncomfortable). Now bend one hand at the wrist.

No trend in cosmic rays as Earth warms More problems And more Still more Basically, it doesn't add up.

Pulling on the tail is part of cervical dislocation - restrain the animal by pressure on the neck and pull backwards via the tail.

frankcox has been permanently banned for creationist trolling.

Remember, only the top of the tree gets any appreciable light. It's actually quite dark in the understory.

Yes, you can easily kill someone that way. Basically, your vertebrae have a solid bone disk (the centrum), and towards your back (dorsal/posterior), your spinal cord lays on top of it, with a ring of bone encircling it. If you rotate about the centra (as such rotations always are), you can pinch/sever the spinal cord (which isn't really very strong). It's doubly bad in the neck, where you have two large arteries running parallel to the centra on each side, enclosed by bone rings. Theoretically, a strong enough twist could sever those as well. Mokele

We actually have those pneumatic muscles around lab - they're good, but still nowhere near as controllable or strong, and they require a huge associate set of machinery to supply a constant flow of compressed air.

It's also worth noting that we don't date fossils. Instead, we date igenous rock from lava flows that are in the same sediment layers. This is why we can resolve radimetric data to within a few thousand years, but often cannot resolve fossil dates beyond half a million - we just haven't found any igneous deposits closer than that.

It's also worth noting that C-14 is only useful for a bit more than 100,000 years. The vast majority of fossils aren't dated using C-14 at all, but other radioisotopes.

Not even slightly related. FSH has nothing to do with hair follicles - it stimulates the follicles in the female ovary (growths of endocrine cells that surround the egg) to grow to maturity. Mokele

It's very simple - hide for approximately 2 weeks. The moment the Age of Zombies begins, it will sow the seeds of the new age - the Age of Flies. Within hours, every Zombie on the planet will be infested with the eggs and maggots of the dozens of species of decomposer flies, and they each could *easily* be completely skeletonized within a week. Add another to take care of new zombies, and you'll just emerge into a world with a lot of skeletons and a lot of dead flies.

Um, no. I have never heard any verified report of bones being broken solely due to muscle contractions without some *major* confounding factor (such as osteoporosis). Bones are VERY strong, and most muscles are not oriented in a direction which would make it easy to break them. Actually, blood flow and nutrient levels won't increase strength at all. They'll increase the length of time you can function at maximum levels, but not the actual maximum force. Maximum force is strictly a property of the muscle proteins and the cross-sectional area of the muscle. Actually, yes, there is. Muscles have a well-known maximal force per unit cross-sectional area, which is very consistent across all animals (including humans), with only a few variations and influences. Adrenaline *does* increase maximum force, but not to an unlimited extent (it appears to depend upon a wide variety of factors, including muscle fiber type). Mokele In 3 seconds of googling, I was able to find that it can be done (via injection), and the lethal dose in rats is 1.0 mg / kg You could theoretically release it at will via stimulating the 'fight or flight' reflex, but I don't think it's physiologically possible to control the amount. Mokele

Changes in eye color over a short time are usually due to either changes in the contraction/opening of the iris or changes in blood flow to the iris or both, along with simple changes in the light quality of the area (indoors vs outdoors, etc.) Longer-term changes can be due to buildup of various proteins or chemicals in the body.

Basically, think of most parasites (like tapeworms) as predators who are just small enough to live on/in their prey and eat it. Unlike a virus, which needs to hijack its hosts' biochemistry to reproduce, all a parasite gets from us is food and shelter. To use the cook metaphor, a parasite is just the guy that steals a slice of the cake before it leaves the kitchen, rather than the guy holding the gun to the cook's head. Yep - a lot of people who work on hive insects call them "super-organisms" due to precisely this similarity.

Gliders tend to have bigger wing areas, longer, thinner wings, and to be larger overall. In muscle activity, I'm not entirely sure, but during gliding the activity is likely jut in the muscles that hold the wing up, rather than the large muscles that pull the wing down the deliver the powerstroke. However, it's worth noting that gliding does not equal flight. Lots of organisms glide, but to be capable of maintaining steady, level flight, they need to flap, however infrequently. This means that a) you'll never get true flight from gliding and cannot build a design based on gliding animals and b) any gliding bird will still have the anatomy for flapping flight, as they need it to maintain altitude and to take off. Two problems: That would only work for takeoff (as they'd need to keep up such a speed when airborne in order to *stay* airborne), and such running speeds would be completely beyond the range of muscle physiology for a biped (remember, fast quadrupeds like greyhounds are fast in part because their quadrupedal gallop allows for long stride length, something we can't do without falling on our faces). Mokele

Our reliance on air is different - the air doesn't actually *do* anything for us, but merely acts as a substrate or an ingredient. Think of it like cooking. An organism is like a cook who does stuff to make a cake, but still requires milk, eggs, flour, etc. A virus is like a guy who breaks into the kitchen and forces the cook to follow a recipe he has - he hijacks the system and provides the instructions, but cannot be said in any meaningful way to be the one who cooked the cake. Mokele

I just happened across this article on PLoS Biology, and figured it could spark some good discussion. It's fairly short, and an easy read:Historical and Genetic Perspectives on Cousin Marriage So, basically, should these bans be in place? IMHO, this has interesting sub-questions: 1) Does the government have the right to forbid pre-natal activities that will result in injury or risk of injury to a child? 2) Does the governmental responsibility depend on the level of risk? What is more appropriate, the relative increase in risk, or the absolute increase in risk? 3) What if one person taking the risk increases the chances of damage for everyone else (including those who don't)? This is actually the case in cousin marriages, as the article spells out. Mokele

But that's precisely the reason viri aren't alive - because they cannot do anything without the help of a cell with a metabolism.

To quote on of my scientific idols, Thomas Henry Huxley: "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."

Without a metabolism, how does it even accomplish anything? Magic?

A few points: First, and foremost is just stylistic, but is important: Succinctness. I have no doubt you're written a well-constructed essay here, it's rather long. It'd be fine for a book of essays or somesuch, but this particular medium of conversation (bulletin boards) is susceptible to the 'wall of text' phenomenon. I'll freely admit I didn't read all of this post - I just don't have time. I suspect most others won't either. IMHO, it'd be much better to have short, succinct posts either with links to segments of this essay stored elsewhere (a blog, perhaps), or simply explaining in more detail when asked. Anyhow, onwards to two points: While I do agree that genetics have shown races to be a lot less distinct and to have a lot more mixing than previously appreciated, I don't think you can draw the conclusion that 'race' is entirely fictional based on mere alleles. Basically, there's more to an organism than just genes: 1) Each gene can be spliced multiple different ways to make different proteins, and which splicing is used at any given point in time is determined through mechanisms I'm not sure anyone really understands (I certainly don't). 2) What gene is present isn't as important as when and where it's used in development. We have the same arm genes as a spider monkey, but what makes our arms different is when, where, and how intensely various proteins are expressed. 3) Genes aren't the only heritable component - there are segments of DNA which function solely to regulate the expression of genes. These are what controls the when, where and how much aspect of gene expression. We also don't have a very good map of these at all. Think of houses - some of your genes are like wood, steel, pipes, glass, etc, and work as structures, while others are like saws, rulers, levels, etc, and are used to assemble the parts, and finally there are gene and regulatory elements that are like the blueprints that show the way everything is used. As it stands, we have the parts list, and some of the tools, but we don't actually have the blueprints yet. The point is that there *may* be differences between the races in the regulatory elements, splicing patterns, or other poorly understood portions of DNA, and declaring that lack of major allele differences invalidates the concept of race is premature. Technically, this is true even if there *are* races, since all humans share a common ancestor. You could also say "Humans, chimps and gorillas are of one blood and one lineage" or even say "Humans, snakes, and fish are of one blood and one lineage". All life shares a common ancestor, so the issue isn't relatedness, but how close the relationship is.

While those were overblown, this sort of thing has happened before, and fairly recently, too: Remember the 1918 flu pandemic that killed over 20 million people. Sadly, our health system hasn't exactly improved by leaps and bounds - we still have shortages of vaccines for the regular flu. I'd say the same for just about every doomsday scenario. The one difference is that, unlike nuclear weapons or asteroids, pathogens evolve.

Honestly, I think the AI and nanotech ones are a bit too speculative. IMHO, there's far more danger of global pandemics than any of the above possibilities.