Mokele

However, that's the same basic logic as the sanctimonious morons who seek to artificially restrict birth control access. Who are you to say who's mature or not? What if you're just shy? Point is, you shouldn't be imposing judgement on other people's sex lives. If they want to have sex, that's up to them, and it's not your place to try to manipulate their behavior, either directly or indirectly. Mokele

You have two copies of every gene, so a non-mutated copy may "override" the mutated copy. On the simplest level, say you have two individuals who each have 2 copies of a gene, a normal and mutant copy each. When they mate, there are 4 outcomes: Normal/normal, normal/mutant, normal/mutant again, and mutant/mutant. In the 1/4th of the kids who are mutant/mutant, the mutant gene is expressed, because there is no longer a normal gene to cover it up. Those are exposed to natural selection. Either the number of mutants are increased (if it's beneficial) or decreased (if harmful). It should also be noted that a mutant gene can be good or bad depending on environment. For instance, a pure white coat of fur is beneficial in the arctic, but makes you an easy target in the rainforest. Mokele

Not to mention that it simply treats promiscuity as some sort of universally bad thing, which is nothing but imposing a particular morality on everyone. So what if it increases promiscuity? IMHO, that's a good thing. Mokele

Hence the large sample sizes of most medical studies. Makes me damn glad I can do direct experiments, thus getting by with smaller samples and less data. Mokele

Sounds fun; I'd be more than happy to post my major WIP in installments. Perhaps we should just have one big forum, though, to include both written works and other artistic endeavors. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here who does something creative. Incidentally, the portions I've edited and polished so far are up at my dA page: http://mokele.deviantart.com/ Mokele

Actually, it *isn't* well-defined. Try finding a definition that *everyone* accepts and which works for all animals, sexual and non-sexual. You won't find one. Natural selection affects the individual (not the gene; it's the individual who lives or dies), but individuals don't evolve, populations do. Populations (or gene pools) evolve based on which individuals natural selection kills or spares. So while the individual is what selection acts on, that action shapes the evolution of the population. Also, there *is* species level selection, though granted it's not important as individual level selection. Imagine two species which are reproductively and geographically distinct, but fill the same niche. Now imagine that suddenly the geographic barrier has been removed, and the two species are competing for the same ecological niche. While natural selection is still acting on the individual, as always, in contrast to competition within a population, there are now two 'teams' (species) which do not exchange genes, rather than a free-for all where genes are mixed. What about asexual organisms? Each organism does not mix genes with any other, and thus there *is* no gene pool? This is what I mean about it being difficult to define a species. Also, what of hybrids? Fertile inter-species hybrids are common, even between obviously distinct species. Hell, I've even seen an inter-generic hybrid (though I don't know if it was fertile). Not strictly. Think of the genome like a deck of cards. Mutation changes the 3 of clubs into the 3 of hearts, recombination just shuffles the deck. That said, recombination *can* occur within genes, altering their sequence and thereby causing mutation (like cutting the 3 of clubs and hearts in two, and taping them back together with the peices swapped). But recombination does not necessarily do that; it only happens in some cases. Mokele

So? Everyone knows it's not perfect, and even if it was, so what? Attempting to control people's level of sexual behavior by controling their access to contraceptives is every bit as ethical and effective as encouraging people to learn how to swim by banning life-boats, life-vests and other such floatation devices. Um, an abortion, like any other medical procedure, requires informed consent. That means the doctor has to sit down and tell the prospective patient *exactly* what will be done, the risks involved, potential pain, everything. Nobody has an abortion without being fully breifed on precisely what happens during the procedure and all of the potential medical consequences. Also, how do you know they haven't thought enough about sex to take preventative measures? Condoms break, St. John's wort (a common herbal remedy) can interfere with birth control pills, and sperm are tough little bastards who can survive a lot (there have been reports of pregnancy from non-vaginal sex due to a small amount of semen accidentally getting in or on the female sexual organs). Well, we know that, unprotected, sex will result in pregnancy X% of the time. If sex follower by the pill resulted in less pregnancies, Y%, and this difference is statistically significant, we can say that the pill reduced pregnancy by (Y-X)/X %. To pull numbers out of my ass, if the base rate is 60%, and a contraception method reduces it to 10%, then the sucess rate of the method is 83%. At least, that's how I suspect they figure it. Mokele

Pangloss: I think the basic theme boils down to both side would prefer less/no abortions, but for different reasons. I certainly agree that a state where most pregnancies only happen when they're wanted would be vastly preferrable. I disagree about the "casual birth control" part: abortion is highly invasive proceedure which is not exactly a fun time for all involved, and carries all the usual risks of any such invasive procedure (bad reactions to anaesthetic drugs, complications, infection, etc). Compound upon this that the individual must sort out the social crap going along with it, and it can hardly be regarded as casual. It's essentially a last resort, and we've all heard what happens when that last resort is eliminated, so I won't even go there. I am optimistic, however, about some recent advanced in male birth control, specifically a plug inserted into the vas deferens that prevents any sperm from escaping, but is also removable; in effect, it's a totally reversible vasectomy. IIRC, it can also be done without incisions, on a totally outpatient basis. Given that guys can get quite paranoid about knocking up their partner, I suspect such a method would be widely used. Last I heard, it was in clinical trials. Mokele

First, 'species' is both singular and plural, like 'sheep'. Second, can occur in any population of organisms. If your species is one big population, then while they change over time due to natural selection, they're still just a different version of what came before. However, if your species is one big population, but then is split into two smaller populations (say by rising sea levels), they're initially the same, but natural selection might take different directions in each of the now-separate populations. Over time, they become more and more different, until they can no longer interbreed, and thus are separate species. So the short answer is that natural selection affects any population of animals. When it makes two populations increasingly different, that eventually results in speciation. Mokele

That's assuming they have a logically consistent basis for their positions, which, frankly, isn't the case for most people. As others have said, I think it depends on the reason for the positions, rather than the positions themselves. If their basis is that it's always wrong to end life, then it's hypocritical, but if it's something else (like, say, biblical law, which encourages the death penality), then it may not be. It's not what the answer is, it's how you get there. Mokele

So, any more plans on this? Or perhaps we could just have a new portion of the forum for creative endavors of the members, science-related and otherwise? Mokele

The mutation occurred once, back when there were very few humans (or pre-human hominins) and spread through the population via natural selection. So there's no need to postulate multiple simultaneous mutations. Mokele

The lizards with green blood have normal blood that's laced with a colored toxin to make them unpalatable to predators. Blue blood (colorless when deoxygenated) is copper-based hemocyanin, used by annelid worms and many arthropods. Green is just hemocyanin combined with assorted other bodily fluids. Mokele

An excellent example of the uselessness of local tales is that of Megalania, an extinct australian monitor lizard that was roughly twice the size of a Komodo dragon. There are currently lots of stories by locals about super-huge lizards they've seen, and some stories in the past all the way back to...1860, when the fossils were discovered. Were the stories based on actual encounters, they'd surely have preceeded the knowledge of the fossil species. Cryptozoologists are those with too little knowledge of biology and too much gullibility to actually do *real* biology. Mokele

Proving that a hole through the earth would not produce perpetual motion, or much of anything of interest, is simple: the mantle (the layer between the crust and the core) is fluid, albeit a very viscous one. It'd be like trying to drill a hole through oatmeal. Mokele

To quote a climate scientist whose seminar I recently attended, "Just because we don't know everything about a system doesn't mean we don't know anything about a system." As for me, I drive very rarely (though more frequently now that my fiancee is in town, since I need to aquire food more often), and walk to school whenever I go, rain or shine (in part because I don't have a campus parking permit). Mokele

We have actually recovered some DNA (degraded and incomplete) from a mamoth jaw bone which was mostly frozen for about a million years, IIRC. However, the "mostly frozen" part is what matters. Without that, you won't get DNA from bones even a tenth of that age. Mokele

Bones are typically just left in storage, without much special preservation beyond maybe some varnish to protect from degradation and a quick brush with hydrogen peroxide to whiten then up. There's little done to them to destroy the DNA, but nothing done to protect it either. Given that it decays pretty readily in dead tissue, I wouldn't be optimistic about lots of usable DNA without grinding up a *lot* of bones. Mokele

There's always the sperm donor route for lesbian couples, but many gay male couples have kids too, as a result of marriages to opposite-sex partners prior to 'coming out'. Mokele

I was wondering how long that would take. ;-)

Why not just solve the actual problem and give teachers a high enough wage that people will *want* to be teachers, and so we can actually hire good ones, not just anyone who shows up to the interview. Seriously, my fiancee is trying to emigrate to the US, and the easiest way for her to do that is to get a job her. Easiest job to get: teacher, because the requirements are so abysmally low. They've now abolished the "anyone with a pulse" rule and are hiring vampires and zombies, so long as they promise to not eat too many students. Mokele

Sisyphus has a point; US suburban white kids (I forget the guy's name now) have been captured while fighting for Al-Qaeda, so we know they can recruit outside the 'profile'. Not to mention the possibility of using non-profile people as decoys by slipping stuff into their luggage. Profiling is essentually a heuristic approach to searching for terrorists; it's a cognitive shortcut that's limits a search based on assumptions. This works fine for the human brain, where 'good enough' is often good enough, and assumptions are based on fairly straightforward rules like gravity, but bad when dealing with an opponent actively trying to trick you. For instance, if I'm looking for my car keys, I restrict my search based on the assumption that they're heavy and thus will not float up to the ceiling. This works well and lets me search faster...unless I have a dickhead roommate who's playing a prank on me by taping the keys to ceiling. Mokele

On a related note, there's actually a species of fungus that lives in concentrated formaldehyde, such as that found in museum specimen jars. It got into one of the snakes when I was in Guam last year, and my prof recognized it because he'd encounted it decades ago in a shipment of preserved sea snakes from Malaysia. It's apparently common knowledge among biological specimen curators. Mokele

Sorry, no idea.

Sounds like fun, though I'll have to come up with something new, since my current work in progress probably exceeds just about any word limit (45K words and growing). Mokele