Mokele

Not my most technical post, but I just had to share this lovely pic I just took/made. It's my young Nepenthes bicalcarata, a carnivorous plant from the lowland jungles of Borneo. The 'fangs' are actually nectar gands that overhang the pitcher of fluid; insects come for the nectar, fall in, drown, and are digested. This pitcher is less than 2 inches tall; adult plants can have pitchers over 10" tall. I did a bit of photomanip, which I think makes it look really kickass, but nothing major; the plant really does look like that. Mokele

Don't forget animals and organismal level biology. In addition to being a vital area of biology (after all, the organism the the true unit that selection acts upon), organisms are fun, and animals can help keep students enthusiastic and interested. For a dirtier track, remember: evolution is all about sex and death. Two or three classes on the sex lives of invertebrates and you'll have them hooked. Mokele

Wrong. I assume you mean that a guy would have to be erect, and thus if he prevented this, would be incapable of sex. This is totally untrue; the male erection is primarily a physiological response. Mindset can make it more difficult, but that can be overcome by someone who knows how. This isn't exactly rare knowledge; ask any Dom or Domme and they'll confirm it. Mokele

Which is very ironic, considering how much of their actions are determined by polls and focus groups.

It's unlikely that gravity plays a role in development. Most of development is governed by signal molecules moving within and between cells. Due to the tiny size of these molecules, the viscous forces of the fluid around them has much, much more influence on their motion than gravity.

Interesting stuff. You must admit, though, it certainly sounds weird as initially phrased. Good for WTF value.

This is what's confusing you. Africa actually has very diverse conditions, from mountains to deserts to seashores to savannahs to jungle to forests. Humans likely evolved from a group of apes which moved into one of these habitats from a different habit. Apes are a strictly Old World lineage, meaning that apes don't exist in North or South America. In the Old World, apes only exist in Asia and Africa, with gibbons (the closest living apes to monkeys) also inhabiting India. Mokele

A small correction: the vertebrae don't change in height at all (except during growth). What's changing is the thickness of the intervertebral disks between them. Basically, structual biology is mostly about fibers. Fibers are great for having a little matter resist a lot of force, especially in tension, and so in a lot of situations in the body where compressive forces happen (not all situations, though), there are anatomical details that covert the forces to tension, allowing cheap, small collagen fibers to take the load. Imagine you have two cylinders (vertebrae) on top of each other, flat ends meeting. Ordinarily, this would mean that something between the flat ends would be compressed. However, instead imagine that the edges of the cylinders are joined by a sheet of fibrous tissue, forming an enclosed cylindrical space between the two ends of the cylinders, and that this space is filled with an incompressible goop. Now, when you push down on the top cylinder, rather that smashing whatever's between the cylinders, you merely increase the pressure in the goop cavity, and that pressure change is resisted by tension in the wall of the goop cavity. When you're in zero-g (or reduced gravity), there's nothing to generate pressure in the goop cavity, so it expands, making you taller. Mokele

I knew it was from someone here, thanks. Pity it didn't have a reference, though.

Ahh, blotter paper is what LSD is stored on, in sheets of numerous doses. The reference to terrorist werewolves sounded either very trippy, or oddly like a bit of fiction I'm working on (not that such commonality bodes well for my sanity).

Um....you do know you're only supposed to take one square of the blotter paper, not the whole sheet, right?

I disagree; the question does *not* logically arise from the use of terminal experiments on animals for pure knowledge. First, much of what the Nazis did was applied, not pure. They kept people in ice baths and re-warmed them to learn how to save their own fighter pilots when they had to bail over the sea. So there's no real special connection to research for pure knowledge here. Second, in order for it to be a relevant issue, human and animal life would have to be of equal moral value. While a few people think this is the case, most would not consider it to be so, for both superficial and logical reasons. You've also failed to address my key point from last post: Application doesn't guarantee results, and pure knowledge can general amazing application. Either way, it's a crapshoot, and so you cannot use an unknown end result to justify the actions. If pure knowledge isn't a valid reason, neither is application, since there's a very good chance that the drug all those mice died for will never reach market for various reasons. Mokele

Above is an image (which I'd *love* the proper reference for, if anyone knows) depicting the various eyes seen in polychaete worms. Since not all organisms need very good eyesight, it's reasonable to expect that eyes have been evolved and lost many times, and that we should also see intermediate stages of the evolution of eyes preserved in some species who simply never needed anything better (in other words, the energetic cost of maintaining more complex eyes wasn't worth the benefits). From left to right, top to bottom, we see a simple pit of photoreceptors (which can tell what direction light comes from), a pinhole camera eye (which can form a crude image), an eye with a vitreous mass (to allow more precise image formation), an eye with a more rounded vitreous mass (even sharper images), and finally an eye with a lens. Mokele

Frankly, that's just a piss-poor arguement. First, there's absolutely no proof that *any* of the incidents you mentioned had anything to do with abortion, nor was it used to rationalize them. Second, even if it *were* the case, just because something *can* happen doesn't mean it will. You cannot simply look at any idea and construct some flimsy sequence of events that may possibly lead to a bad outcome, then turn around and use that to negate the idea. That's like saying that freedom of religion is bad because it'll lead to human sacrifice and the eventual legalization of rape and murder. 'Life' does not confer any moral rights. Personhood does. What qualifies as a person varies, but a ball of cells certainly doesn't in any conception. Mokele

Actually sciop *is* on topic. You have three choices: Animal experimentation, human experimentation on a huge scale (probably on the unwilling too, due to the numbers needed), and a total cessation of all medical and biological advances. There's no other option, period. You also didn't adress sciop's point that pure knowledge and become beneficial later on; back when they discovered Taq polymerase, they had no idea what it could be used for, and now it's the basis of all modern biotech. Furthermore, the converse occurs: many drug trials go nowhere, due to failure during the testing phase or too many side-effects. So basically, in any animal test, we cannot predict the outcome. Cancer drug trials could fail, while some useless work like mine could have implications I've never dreamed of. Either way, it's a gamble, so the ends cannot justify the means, since we have no way of assessing the ends before the experiment. Mokele

By that logic, it's immoral to have an immune system, or to eat. Either you're a hypocrite, or you'll kill yourself right now. Oh, but wait, that's killing too! News flash: death isn't just a part of life, it *is* life. Deal with it.

My Fiancee actually is Coeliac (UK spelling), and came down with it since I met her. Basically, she was fine for a long while (though she always had unexplained bouts of listlessness and stomach trouble), but then the Xmas before last we both came down with a horrible stomach bug that had us both bed-ridden for days (and not in the fun way). After that, the coeliac really showed up. She's always had it, but the disease triggered it to really show up. The good news is that there are several communities for this, including several on Livejournal, which I recommend she join. It'll help, and they trade helpful hints (what has gluten in and what doesn't) and good recipes. Honestly, a lot of them are really good. The bad news: No cheating! The nature of the disease means that repeated ingestion of gluten will cause permanent damage to the intestines. Mokele

Does it have to be real? If not: I want a high-resolution, high-speed video imaging machine which can simultaneously show me the bones and muscles of an animal *and* when the muscles (or better yet, individual motor units) are active *and* the strain in the muscles/motor units. If it has to be real: a collection of de-vemoned elapid snakes of almost all species. The procedure to do this is very difficult, though it's often done by hack-job idiots without anaethesia (resulting in a 99%+ mortality rate), but if done by a vet, it would allow me safe access to an indisputably monophyletic clade of caenophidian snakes who have a *huge* range of habitats, thus letting me explore the relationships between morphology and performance in great detail. Mokele

If it's asymptomatic, there are no detectable consequences. However, you should tell all future partners. Mokele

What if it's not life-or-death, but is simply the pursuit of knowledge? That's what I do (zero real application value), and I do terminal experiments on animals. Now, granted, our N is usually around 5 or 6 (if you do multiple tests per animal, individual can be a factor in the ANOVA, preventing psuedoreplication effects), but still isn't pure knowledge worth it? Mokele

Chromatophores in reptiles are actually very widespread, with many species being able to change color slightly or to a great extent, and this is due to their likely origin as a mechanism of thermoregulation. The desert iguana is an excellent example: in the morning, it turns very dark grey, to absorb as much heat as possible, then, in order to prevent overheating as it forages in the hot desert sun, it becomes white. Some species co-opted this existing mechanism to serve for camoflage and display. The mechanism isn't that complicated either, just sacks of melanin (and other pigments in some species) moving around inside the skin cells. Mokele

Well, somehow I doubt individual SFN posts will be high up that list. Other sites, such as Talk.Origins do a much better job of that, anyway. The problem is that creationism is an unending tide of idiocy; such posts multiply *very* fast, consume the poster's efforts which are best spent on *real* science, and clog the forum with drivel. As noble as rebutting them may be, it would significantly impede the functionality of the board. Mokele

Just because you haven't been fortunate enough to experience something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I assure you it does, but that it's not what the movies would have you think.

How so? I mean, there's 6 billion *huge* mammals running around massively altering their environment and burning lots and lots of stuff. That doesn't sound like an extraordinary claim to me; it sounds quite reasonable. An extraordinary claim would be something like all of the CO2 increases are due soley to increased farting of ruminant herbivores. The problem is that you're never going to have truly wonderful evidence for it, ever, even if people *are* the cause. You can do correlational studies with the past, using various past measurements, but those get attacked all the time anyway since correlation doesn't equal causation. You can use computer models to make predictions (and, FYI, the major source of variation in climate models isn't the effect of CO2, it's how much humans release, how many of us there are, etc), and check those, but in such a complicated system, they're never going to be perfect. In fact, the *only* way we can conceivably get better evidence than now is by direct experimentation, and I don't happen to have any spare planets lying around for us to use. Basically, that's my gist: I don't think it's such an extraordinary claim, and I don't see the evidence getting much better over time. Finer resolution, perhaps, but never enough to eliminate any doubts. However, policy decisions must be made, and to discard something simply because the evidence isn't perfect is foolish, especially when the constraints of the field limit the availible evidence. Mokele

Tapeworms are cuter.