Mokele

Ok, I'm not a chemistry buff, so I'm having a hell of a time trying to find some chemicals I need. I have, among the many, many dead animals in my apartment, many preserved in jars, and others still in the freezer awaiting jars. Additionally, I've found some protocols of clearing and staining specimens, so I want to give that a try. But there's two chemicals I just cannot seem to get in decent quantities. Maybe I'm just not finding the right stores. Anyhow, if anyone knows a source for Formaldehyde and Ethanol (lab grade, not reagent grade), especially in quantities of around 4L or so, I'd be very appreciative. Most of the traditional suppliers like Carolina and Wards won't seel to you if you aren't at a school. Mokele

Well, for years, we've only concentrated steady animal locomotion or acceleration, with little attention to anything else. Recently, work has begun to look at other important aspects, such as turning and braking. My current prof did the braking work (in fish), while the lab I desperately want to go to for PhD work did the turning work. Mokele

I'll take it, I need some more formaldehyde for my specimens. Out of curiousity, where did you get it, anyway? Mokele

"I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate!" - Dark Helmet!

Mine's fairly simple: I haven't seen anything or heard reliable reports of anything that, to me, gives sufficient evidence for any spirituality, divinity, etc. I see religions, modern and ancient, as interesting and often containing potent symbolism (I have a particular affinity for the Hindu Trimurti), but the same can be said of comic books. Faith, to me, is little more than an admission to giving in to wishful thinking in spite of a total lack of empirical support. 77 words, but close enough. Mokele

Well, it might prolong it enough for you to get out of the desert. Plus animal urine isn't exactly going to be the easiest to come by, especially since many desert animals either urinate as little as possible or, in the case of reptile and birds, produce no liquid urine (instead, they excrete nitrogen as uric acid salts, the white chalky stuff in the bird crap on your car). Mokele

On top of all of that, small species are able to make more use of microhabitats and may be able to divide niches that larger species cannot (think of all the hundreds of species of Anolis lizards specialized for living on various parts of the same tree), and are more suceptible to geographic barriers to reproduction (a 5 foot wide stream is nothing to a horse, but could isolate shrew populations on each side). Mokele

so, if I've been treated badly by some African Americans in the past, it's not racism for me to avoid all of them and call them untrustworthy?

And your actual empirical support for this is what, exactly? The actual fact is that a higher percentage of *men* cheat, and that while infidelity is becoming more common and the gap closing, there is still a substantial portion of relationships that remain faithful. So should we go around stating that men can't be trusted, and are less trustworthy than women? Because that's what the facts say. Mokele

Honestly, the tone of the poem seemed more like a joke to me, and jokes can get by with a lot more, even if they're openly racist, misogynistic, etc, simply because we laugh in spite of ourselves (the 'South Park' "Oh, that's so wrong but still so funny!" reaction). Other songs/media with a major misogynistic streak that's not ameliorated by humor? How about every gangsta rap song in the past 20 years? As for dealing with it, it depends on the context. If it persistently derails threads and causes fights/flamewars, it should be disallowed simply to keep the forums running. If it's part of legitimate discussions, it should be kept. The important thing is to keep the forums operational. Mokele

Um, adrenaline is not produced in the brain, it's produced in the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys. As to why it affects us so fast, my guess would be that it gets dumped right into one of the major veins coming from the kidney (a *lot* of blood goes through the kidneys), from there to the heart, and from there to everywhere. Mokele

The problem is it's not as simple as just getting the water out by heating. By volume, it's about 70% water, but most of what's in it is protien in some form or another, so I'd say it depends on the heat. If it's not quite hot enough, you won't get much water, as the blood will just congeal into a paste, trapping much of the water in it. And if hot enough to not just denature the protiens but to actually hydrolyze them, you'll lose some water to that reaction. But if it's *super hot*, enough to reduce the protien to nothing but carbon ash, CO2, NH3 and water, you might get more than the usual 70% (but tainted with amonia and undrinkable). Alternatively, you could not bother mucking around and just drink the blood straight. Yeah, you might get diseases, but it buys you time, and your body will both absorb all the water *and* break down the protiens into CO2, H2O and urea. The only problem is you'll lose water to having to pee. Urine and sweat would be your biggest water loss problems. Of course, that's all just assuming you don't do the *smart* thing and hide during the day (perhaps buried under sand) and move during the night, which can be quite cold and sometimes even humid. Mokele

It's not true, prokaryotes divide just like eukaryotes. They've got a few differences, what with the cell wall and having circular chromosomes, and a few extra tricks, like mature cells exchanging plasmids, but those are minor. Mokele

mmm, gotta love the smell of blatant misogyny in the morning...

That was an excellent video, Martin, thanks for linking it. It's certainly given me a good bit to think on. Mokele

IMHO, some paraphyletic groups, or even polyphyletic groups, are taxonomically useful. For instance, reptiles are polyphyletic, but it's a useful grouping for communication. That's the main thing: taxonomy was created for the purposes of communication. Some accuracy and reflection of biological reality is advantageous, but total accuracy would prevent any utility for communication. Mokele

Science is linked to a wide variety of things, but we cannot have boards for all of them. The main issue was that P&R was getting most of the attention (and not for topics even close to science) and generating a major headache in moderation. Furthermore, P&R will be resurrected on a new forum, linked to this one but with separate mods and suchlike. Mokele

Bwahahahaha!!

I used to be heavily into it, and I still find some good. I think there's some major points that you need to know in order to understand it. First, as Dak said, it utilizes a very effective form of art, but that really only unites it as far as being text unites all books. Most importantly, it's TV/movies. As such, it comes in a wide range of quality (from wonderful to atrocious), is targeted at a range of age groups and interests (kids to teens to adults), and comes in a variety of genres (sci-fi, teen comedy, western, etc). A lot of watching anime is filtering the shit from the good stuff. Also, it's worth noting that's it's a form of media produced for the populace of culture which is a) a lot more educated and b) deal with censorship via the almightly remote control and watching what kids watch. As such, even shows targeted towards the young is free to examine more mature themes (Sailor Moon, a show for pre-teen girls, had a prominent same-sex couple among the protagonists in the early 90s) or just indulge in mindless violence. Another thing I'd note is the lack of "gee-whiz" special effects. You can draw explosions and people equally easily, so there's less tendency toward shows/movies driven soley by special effects. So that's basically it in a nutshell. The main point is that it's not some monolithic whole. Most is mediocre, some sucks, and some is truly great, just like any other media genre/style. Mokele

And this is precisely why I never go into the nitty-gritty details when I write SF. Making it plausible is impossible: the more detailed the explanation, the more flaws and places for it to be wrong.

Legs are one thing, but so is the loss of them. It's occured 6 times in lizards (one being snakes, the others being lesser-known limbless or near-limbless forms), 3 times in extant amphibians, and at least once more in prehistoric amphibians. I both agree and disagree with Dawkins on "rewinding the tape". Solutions would occur again, yes, but not necessarily the *same* solutions. Some mechanism of force generation like muscles may evolve again, but maybe it would push rather than pull? Intelligent species, maybe, but it likely wouldn't look like us. I think the two are talking past each other: Gould was saying that the morphology and biology of life might be very different a second time around (solving problems in new ways), while Dawkins is noting that the same problems will still have to be tackled. Mokele

We all know in physics and chemistry that there are several simple, mathematical laws/rules/concepts that apply to everything, such as E=mc^2 or that oppositely-charged atoms/molecules attract each other. However, biology seems to have things tougher: evolution has given us such a cornucopia of diversity that general laws are hard to find. So, here's the challenge of this post: find general, over-arching concepts that pervade either all of biology or at least a major subset of it (all animal life, all plant life, all molecular biology, all ecology), and explain them. I'll go first, with a rule near and dear to my heart: Size matters. Every living organism moves at some stage of it's life, be it seed, spore, larvae or adult, and, furthermore, every organism is subject to phsyical interaction with the environment around it and to physical forces such as gravity or drag. But which forces and interactions predominate are, in a large part, determined by the size of the organism. Image we have a cube of matter, and we hit it with a sci-fi "enlarging ray", doubling it's linear dimensions. A cube that was 1 inch on each side is now two inches on each side. But consider the cross-sectional area and surface area: the former will have gone from 1 square inch to 4, and the latter from 6 square inches to 24. And what of volume, which, if density remains constant, equals mass? 1 cubic inch of volume becomes 8 cubic inches. Now, apply that to an animal. If you double the size of, say, a dog, it's surface areas will be increased 4-fold, including lung surface area, skin area (important in dissipating heat), bone cross-sectional area (determines the force a bone can take), and muscle cross-section (determines the force a muscle can exert). However, it's volume will be increased 8-fold, thus it's mass. So you have 4x the bone support for 8x the mass, and 4x the muscle c/s area moving 8x the mass. You also have 8x the volume of metabolically active, heat-generating cells, but only 4x the surface are to dissipate heat from. This is why animals do not scale up geometrically (with identical proportions); bigger animals have thicker bones and bigger muscles. But it extends to more than just how big your bones are. Gravity and inertial forces act on mass, but fluid florces from air or water act on surface area. As you shrink an animal, the effect of gravity and inertia is reduced cubically, while fluid forces are reduced to the square. When you're small enough, fluid forces predominate, which is why dust particles tend to remain in the air. Baby spiders make cunning use of this fact of scaling. Newly hatched spiderlings are big enough that gravity keeps them down, but only barely. In order to disperse to new places, they climb to the top of some vegetation, and extend a long line of silk. This silk line doesn't increase their mass (it's coming from inside them, after all), but it drastically increases their surface area, enough for the viscous forces to predominate, sweeping the spiderlings off to exciting new areas with plenty of bugs to eat in a dispersal method called 'balooning'. A thermal consequence is apparent when comparing the sizes of mammals to those of lizards. While some mammals are small, the mean size is typically larger than lizards, frogs and salamanders. The reason for this is simple: mammals need to stay warm, generating heat with their metabolic processes, which are proportional to their volume (number and volume of cells). However, they lose heat from their skin. As mammals shrink, there's more surface area per gram of body weight, making heat retention difficult. While there are many secondary adaptations to deal with this, most truly small mammals live on a metabolic razor's edge, feeding nearly continuously to fuel their bodies. In contrast, small ectotherms have an advantage: the same high ratio of surface area to body that causes heat-retention problems for mammals allows these small animals to warm up with only minimal basking in the sunlight. Because mammals have trouble with small size, ectotherms have moved into the vacant ecological niche of truly tiny animals, feeding on tiny insects such as termites or ant larvae. Of course, there's a myriad of other implications of size, from growth to reproductive capacity to population sizes, but I'll leave it here for now. So, anyone else? General ideas that seem to pervade biology? Mokele

I doubt many are assuming it's only selection, but that it's the original definition, the one aspect most people are familiar with, and the one responsible for adaptations. When talking with those who aren't really familiar with evolution (basically 99% of the US population), it's usually the best place to start, especially since it can be grasped fairly easily (while drift and such require more extensive familiarity with genetics, sampling, stats, etc). Not as anything more than lizard food, at least. But to each their own... Ahh, I'm used to using it only for geographical range disjunction, while other forms of genetic isolation that occur in sympatry being termed things like non-random mating, pre- and post-mating barriers, etc. Oh, I know how that goes; I chastize people for applying the term "run" to locomotion that doesn't precisely fit the definition of running gaits. Well, it can contribute or even drive speciation, fixing different genes in different populations so that, say, pattern changes enough that they no longer recognize each other as viable mates, or changing various genes that result in hybrid embryos being inviable. Well, that depends. I'd argue that some traits *can* be defined, a priori, as advantageous. A good example would be more potent venom for a snake; it kills the prey faster, thereby reducing the risk of injury to the snake or the risk of loss of prey, but doesn't actually cost any more to make, as it's just a differently-shaped protien (same amino-acid number would mean same metabolic cost to manufacture a given quantity). This one-sided selection is likely why many snakes have venom so much more potent than what they need to kill the mice and rats they eat. Also, I don't think Dak's language was loose. He was using "advantageous" as simply another word for "higher fitness". Mokele

Well, it's been experimentally verified, so it's a moot point; there's loads of literature about heritable variations in the performance of numerous ecologically relevant tasks. How is he not a reliable source? His work on demographics and the inherent limitations of populations forms the basis of all ecology. That *is* natural selection. Natural selection is defined as "unequal propagation of genotypes", meaning that if different genotypes which result in different phenotypes in turn result in different lifetime reproduction (due to differences in survival, reproduction, reproduction of kin, survival of offspring, etc), the proportions of those genotypes will change. There's all sorts of sub-sets of natural selection, such as kin selection, sexual selection, and the issue of quantity of offspring versus quality, but all of them boil down to heritable variation in the ability to make copies of oneself. True, but as you said, the thread is about natural selection. Nobody denies drift and various other factors, they're just not the main point of this thread. I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. Is it the issue of how do we know a trait is there because of selection rather than because of drift? If so, I'd recommend a work simply called "Adaptation" by Lauder (possibly part of a book; I've only got a photocopied version, and that's back at lab), which details the various methods one can undertake to make the case for a trait being an adaptation and the shortcomings/limitations of each. The definition you posted, change in allele frequency over time, is AFAIK the common one, with selection, drift etc being the various mechanisms occuring either separately or together to produce evolution. However, well, to be blunt, selection is just plain more interesting, and thus gets more attention. I know in my work, though I try not to be adaptationist, there's a strong emphasis on selection, since it's pretty easy to see how variation that affects the locomotor performance of an animal can be selected for (running away from predators or chasing down prey). I'm not sure what terminology you're using. So far it doesn't seem that different. The only term I find odd is allopatry, which literally means having non-overlaping ranges. While I'm familiar with allopatric speciation, I usually only see the term alone in descriptions of biogeography or species ranges. For reference, I'm using the 'change in allele frequency' definition of evolution, the 'unequal propagation of genotypes' definition of selection, and 'change in allele frequency due to population-size-related sampling error' for drift. Mokele

Yes, because running away from your problems is always the solution. After all, it's not like humans are inherently social creatures for whom lack of social interaction can cause psychological damage. Do you do anything but whine?