Mokele

I'm familiar with convergent evolution (which is actually why I named my pet lizard "Darwin", because he's convergent with monitor lizards), but MM was referring to some mathematical theorem. Mokele

It might be a good idea to split this thread, in order to discuss the specifics of the NYU situation in one thread and the general socialism/capitalism debate going on in another one. And I will get back to it, I promise. I'm just *super* busy right now. Pangloss, please bother me via PM if I haven't gotten back to this thread in about a week. Mokele, getting ready to pull the rest of a 12 hour workday for the 4th day in a row.

First, on what basis do you make such an objection? Second, how do you account for predictability arrived at through inferences based on observation. We observed and observed and observed and eventually inferred that F=ma, and when we build something using that principle, it works and gives the predicted results. What we see *is* reality. Anything we cannot percieve, by definition has no effect, and is therefore irrelevant. Whether there is an observed plane with differences doesn't matter if we have no contact with that plane. Is there evidence for this? While I agree that ancient people were far from stupid (some Greek whose name I forget calculated the diameter of the Earth to within a few dozen kilometers with only the tools of the day availible), I don't think there is any need to appeal to a cycle of consciousness for what can be explained by wars (armies may burn libraries) and fluctuation in political systems (democracy, imperialism, feudalism) which resulting in fluctuating public education. Evidence, as I am familiar with it, is something not open to interpretation. It's something like "This snake is 5 feet long", which cannot be disputed or altered by beliefs or biases. Now, we can disagree over whether the mean or median is the best representation of the length distribution in a population of snakes, but not on the actual evidence. Science has undeniably elucidated the working mechanisms of many phenomena (genes are the first thing that come to my mind). Possible, but until then, why bother with it? If it can't produce observable effects until that point in time, does it really matter? Frankly, science rejects it because witnesses are unreliable. I'll give you an example, an experiment an old psychology prof of mine did. He was just about to start class, and had called for people's attention, when a student came in and started arguing with him about a grade he'd recieved in front of everyone, making quite a show of it. The student stormed out. After a brief pause, the prof instructed everyone to get out a piece of paper and write down things about the student, and hand it in. The result? People got his *race* wrong, and sometimes the individuals *sex*, and this was a person they'd seen only moments ago. Witness testimony is, by definition, unreliable. The human brain is far from a perfect recorder, with numerous biases and errors. It's admissible in court, but have you noticed how many people are being *proven* innocent and released now on the basis on DNA evidence that flatly contradicts the word of witnesses? Actually, iirc, it doesn't. Light and rest of the EM specturm has a frequency, but Kinetic Energy, for example, does not. ------------ However, I suggest this is all simply a pointless diversion from the main topic of the thread. Please return to the main topic. If this topic is of enough concern, please create a new topic for it. Mokele

You could just use the Star Trek Technobabble method and just make up stuff that sounds good. Personally, I find it better, when I write, *not* to explain how such things work. First, such explanations are often awkward to work in, especially if complex. Second, how many people on earth know the physics behind a microwave? They just push the button and it works. Same for senses and our physical capabilities. People can figure things out and use them (possibly even very well) without understanding what actually happens. Third, it opens the doors for nit-picking. The way I see it, attempting a real and plausible explanation breaks the suspension of disbelief. The moment the explanation starts, for a subset of your audience, they begin to look at things logically and that can 'break the spell' of the book/story. In fact, in the story that I'm currently working on, one character litterally says "Well, we don't really know how they work, so we just shrug and call it magic." Mokele

Unfortunately, I don't remember enough about convergence theory to be able to respond. I remember having it in a class a long time ago, but I can't remember what it actually is. Can you refresh me? Mokele

Ok, as I understand it, all combustion of fossil fuels will produce CO2 and H2O. Now, if the combustion heat is too low, you also get CO, but if it's too high (and using air rather than pure oxygen) you get NO, NO2, etc (collectively referred to as NOX). There's no point that eliminates one without increasing the other; the best you can do is minimize both. Airplanes use fossil fuels, but most rockets don't. IIRC, most rockets are liquid-fueled, and use just hydrogen and oxygen, meaning they only produce water as waste. Also, SUVs are substantially less efficient than airplanes (even prop-driven ones). In order to match an airplane flight from point A to B with single-person vehicles, each vehicle would need to get over 60 miles per gallon. Some of the very large jet engines get 75 miles per seat-gallon. Mokele

Actually, the use of swim-bladders as lungs is extremely widespread in fish, not just confined to lungfish. And ecoli's right, it seems to have been a very gradual process. It was probably motivated by the free food on land, in the form of plentiful insects which had already invaded the land millions of years earlier. Animals capable of lunging out onto shore to catch a yummy millipede would have had an advantage, those able to actually move on land even more, and so on and so forth. Also, it wasn't technically the seas vertebrates moved from, but rather the shallow swamps, rivers, and lagoon systems. Think of modern Lousiana bayous or Florida swamps. Mokele

I don't have time for a proper reply (I'm supposed to be working), but I'll just toss something out both to keep things rolling and so that when I come back there'll be new posts and I won't forget the thread exists. You mention how safety nets provide the necessities for life, and I agree. But the problem is that you're no longer eligable for the safety net once you start working, as it's presumed that employers will give you a decent living wage. If this isn't the case, then there's no impetus to ever lift one's self out of that safety net, is there? There's a lot more, mostly in that I think there are several fallacies going on here, especially with this "inherently equal" stuiff. But I'm supposed to be working now. Mokele

Actually, think of it like this: you have an animal, which has a given surface area and thermal transfer properties governing how fast it loses heat. Without the production of internal heat, any animal will become room-temperature (like they do when dead). Now, this animal has two options: 1) It had respire very slowly, generating little heat, far less than needed to keep itself warm, and instead stay warm by using external energy sources such as the sun (this would be reptiles) 2) Respire a lot, burn a lot of food, and generate heat at the same rate it's lost in order to maintain a constant body temperature (this would be mammals). Without an external heat source, a reptile will always cool down to room temperature. Because they don't generate any significant internal heat, they don't use as much food and don't respire as much, which is why they can do things like remain underwater for 6 hours at a time. So in a 10 degree room, a reptile will just cool down (and probably go to sleep) without spending any more energy and thus without an increase in respiration. If you stick a thermometer up it's cloaca, you'll find the core body temperature to be 10 degrees, the same as the room. In contrast, a mammal *must* maintain it's high body temperature through burning fuel. The colder the environment is, the more rapidly an animal loses heat, so the mammal must generate more heat in cold environments to make up for the loss. Mokele

I've never liked that phrase, and I don't think it's accurate. You'd agree I have a right to live, correct? Well, in order to live, I need certain things, such as food and water. Given the lamentable state of the human body, I also need things such as shelter, clothing when cold, and a location to retreat to for sleep and such. All of those things cost money (except for the most determined primitivist), and the only way to get money is via a job. Now, I'll be the first to admit that "rights" do not actually exist, and are merely a social contract of sorts. But what I'm saying is that the social contract is self-contradictory if it claims that you have a right to life, but that you don't hve a right to what you need to sustain that life. And like any ordinary citizen, they have moral obligations about how they spend it. Just as it is neglectful for an ordinary citizen to buy a dog they cannot afford to feed, it is neglectful for a company to require the full-time commitment of an employee they cannot afford to pay enough to live. You're missing my point, I think. There's more demand for the jobs than there are jobs availible. As a result, this means the employers can, under a totally free-market system, get away with treating their employees like shit, because anyone leaving in protest will immediately be replaced. Just because the employers can get away with it because of market forces dos not mean they should be allowed to. The problem is that it is impossible not to care *at all* about money; I still need to eat, after all, and I think the administration would frown on "a novel method of ensuring total classroom participation via threat of cannibalism". The point isn't so much that I should be able to do whatever I want and still be paid. It's that if I take a full-time position, *any* full-time position (with the simplifying assumption that it precludes other work), I have a reasonable expectation that I will be given enough to live off. Actually, what I'm saying is that if there is only enough demand for fingerpainters to hire 10 with a living wage, we should not hire twenty and give each half of what they need to live while expecting the same level of work. I've got no problem laying off those 10 fingerpainters that we can't afford, or denying work to the countless other fingerpainters. I have a problem with expecting full-time (and more) commitment from the fingerpainters without giving them enough to live off, and I have a problem with taking advantage of the desperation of the fingerpainters in order to get them to take said jobs. The problem is when *nobody* will pay you what you even need to live. Yes, you can change careers, but that just means some other poor sod will wind up in the same position until *they* get sick of it. The company is, in effect, treating you as a disposable resource rather than a human being. An excellen real-life analogy: EA Sports. You've probably heard of thm if you've ever even glanced at sports-focused computer games. Well, EA Sports basically treat their employees about 3 degrees better than Ghengis Khan treated just about everybody. 80 hours weeks are the norm (no overtime), working through vacations, denial of time off that was previously allowed (including for things like the birth of an employee's child), and "crunch times" of over 120 hours a week. The pay is crap, no overtime because it's all salaried, no benefits worth speaking of. Why? Because *everyone* wants to write computer games for a living, and for every employee who finally gets fed up and leaves (to face months or years of unemployment due to high competition in the computer industry), there's ten more naive applicants dying for a chance. Whether the employees can leave or not, or switch careers, isn't the question. The question is "Is it moral and socially acceptable to let a company treat it's employees so abysmally just because market forces allow them to do so"? It comes back to the dog example. When you buy a dog, you have a *moral obligation* to spend he money it takes to feed and care for this animal (a position which is written into law in the case of animal cruelty). But if you have an employee who is totally financially dependent upon you, how is it that you don't have a moral obligation to provide adequately for them? Well, indirectly, we do that already. It's accepted and convinced that scientific research not palatable or profitable enough for companies should recieve money, so the NSF gets funding. Then people like you and I write gran proposals saying why this expansion of knowledge is worth it, and it gets decided by a panel of experts in the field. While the individual cannot decide the merits of most such work (how many people on the street know anything about th comparative morphology of snake musculature?), we provide indirect expert representation to ensure that the money goes to real science rather than, well, perpetual motion machines. One should not have to resort to force to get an employer to live up to their moral obligation. But that *was* true in our society during the great depression, and it's true of th *academic* options availible to grad students. They do have non-academic options, but those are often a last resort and tantamount to giving up. The point, as before, is that an employer is making use of the desperation of potential and current employees to get away with shirking their moral duty. Not even remotely. I mean enough money to either afford a studio apartment close to campus or an apartment farther away plus bus fare, as well as enough money for clothes, non-ramen food, heat, and water. And yes, there *are* places where grad students cannot afford these on the stipends given. Additionally, I'm skepetical of your description of the standard lifestyle of the poor. Link? Is the appropriate social response to a serial killer to just give everyone lessons in running away, or to actually have the cops catch and stop him. Quitting solves the problem for *you*, but what about *other* people who'll be brought in to replace you? All you do is create an endlss cycle of people being hired, abued, and quitting in disgust. Is that what our economy has become? How to suck the life out of people and discard them like used coke cans? I actually suggested fewer TAs as a solution, both in this post and prior ones. And it doesn't necessarily have to come out of your pocket. Shit, at my school we have a big football team (which is a waste of money anyway, IMHO, but that's beside the point), and thus a big stadium, in which we leave the goddamn lights on all day and night. And these are *huge* bloody lights; you can *hear* the hum of high voltage as you walk past the poles they're on, an you can see the glow for *miles*. Turn the damn things off and they could pay 20 TAs a good stipend, I'd guess. Because disgruntled employees do things like strike. Nobody's complaining about the level of work. I *happily* put in 50-60 hour weeks every week. What's being complained about is the lack of pay and the employer' refusal to treat the employee with the same respect as the law mandates you treat a dog with. Even if it's not the employer's job, does that mean they shouldn't be expected to? My job isn't a policeman, but I should be expected to intervene or call for help if I see a mugging. A certain level of common decent treatment of your fellow is necessary to the operation of any society. It's not classes of individual, but rather how much power the individual has accumulated through various means. A human is still a human, but a 120 lb weakling can still be trambled by a 300-lb bully, due to intra-specific discrepancies of power. There are numerous methods of dealing with the situation. They can all agree not to bully, but that's merely at the whim of the powerful, who can revoke that at any time. The weaker can buy guns and solve it that way, but that's generally not acceptable in civilized socieity. Or the weaker can just group together and mob the big guy, pirhana-style. No, they don't. Rights do not exist unless they are fought for. Treating employees decently is a right that was fought for by labor unions who united against the robber barons. Treating races equally is a right that was fought for by the civil rights movement. Rights only are extended if you have the physical, financial or political power to seize them. The above should also be self-evident. When was the last time some group was given rights just because it was "the good and proper thing to do", rather than being given rights when they had enough political power to force the issue? Depends on if you equate financial worth with self worth. I don't. I do see what salary I can ask as dependent on market forces (yay for the Baby Boomer retirement and the resultant staff shortage!), but I don't really care about my salary as part of my self esteem. I'll willingly go to my HS reunion, face the guy who made 50 million and say "so what, I discovered something completely new to science" and consider that a decisive win. In fact, I'd like to note that I'm posting under the influence of a fictional character I'm writing, who happens to be socialist. It's actually interesting, and forcing me to take a different look at things. Fortunately for y'all, I don't have an army of werewolves at my disposal to "argue my point", as she does. Mokele

The mammal itself isn't at 20 or 10, morely likely somewhere over 30. It needs to maintain that 30 or die. In colder environments, heat is lost more quickly, thus in order to keep their temperature constant, a mammal would need to burn more fuel. Also, mammals can only tolerate a narrow range of internal temperatures, and all of their adaptations from everything from desert heat to polar winer hinge around retarding heat loss or enhancing heat loss to maintain themselves within that narrow internal range. Too cold and they have to burn extra energy to keep warm, too hot and they have to waste precious water cooling down. Mokele

No, it's usually trickier, like "Come here, do your thesis. Ok, now you've been here a year or two, we'll cut off most of your funding and double your teaching load, and you can't leave without having to start all over again and abandon all the progress you've made." The administration is tricky. Also, this isn't analogous to grabbing the free cash. According to my stipend versus my work, I make half of minimum wage. I do it because I love it, but at the same time, I need to have enough to live off. Think of it like this: Imagine a system of apprenticeship, except one stage doesn't give enough money to live on. It varies from place to place, but is universally low. What do you do if this is your calling? Espcially if you know the only reason the pay is so low is because they're just stingy? Depends how specialized you are. I'll only be able to apply to about hlf a dozen schools in the entire US, since only they have the faculty and equipment I need. If all of them have low stipends, what do I do? Abandon my field and spend 5 years doing something I'm bored by, possibly losing out on my only gateway into the prior field? That depends on what you want to do. Do I need my degree to get a good job? Hell no. Do I need it to get the job I *want* (professorship)? Absolutely, and then some (I'll need a doctorate too, a record of successful grant applications, and at least 3-4 years of post-doc work). Just because something isn't economically viable doesn't mean it shouldn't be pursued. Every major advance has come from useless theory. History majors might not be economically viable without support, but as we know, such information is far more valuable than anything generated by the more economically viable accounting majors. There's never enough money to go around. Ever. Everyone wants this or that, whether it's new labs, a better dorm security system, or spiffy new buildings. And when it comes time to decide who gets money, grad students are traditionally last on the list, in spite of doing most of the teaching *and* most of the research that makes the university's name worth anything. There's always more people wanting in than there are spaces, including those who don't need support on account of family wealth. There's always foreign students willing to come just in order to come to the US. It's like the great depression when mills could pay jack shit because if people didn't like it, they couldn't quit because they had too few other options. Now, i'm not tryin to say they have no other economic options, only that they have no other *academic* options for their chosen field. Personally, I think employers have a moral obligation to pay a living wage to any employee who's full time. If you expect someone to work for you, you've go to pay them enough to live. Also, I'll freely admit to being biased, I also see a huge problem with just defining things in terms of their economic worth. Plus, I find it amazing how society can make graduate school a thankless, imporverishing ordeal, but then turn around an act suprised that there's a shortage of qualified teachers at every level. Mokele

Like just about everything, there's no simple answer, because it depends on the trait or system you're talking about. Some traits will remain even if unneeded due to constraints based in developmental biology; if the loss of the now-useless trait would cause major problems in systems that as linked to it via the genes controlling embryonic development, it'll remain. However, if such constraints don't exist for the trait in question, then one of two things could happen if there's no selection acting to preserve the trait. First, the trait could become subject to genetic drift, which is basically the effects of randomness of evolution. It might stay the same, it might change shape, it might be lost, it might even become more prominent, all by luck of the draw. The second possibility is more likely: without selection maintaining it, the trait is useless but also costs energy to grow and maintain. As such, any organism lack or with a reduced version of the trait will have an energetic advantage over its fellows. As a result, selection will act to eliminate the now-useless trait. Sadly, that's their primary tactic, because understanding evolution makes it obvious. It's reported that Huxley, one of Darwin's strongest advocates at the time, responded to the pre-release version of Origin of Species that Darwin sent him seeking his input with "How utterly stupid of me not to have thought of it first!". Or just different. Take, for example, the transition between vertebrate life on land and life in the water. In the water, animals have to constantly worry about losing salts that keep their body working, while on land, they worry more about losing water. Respiration is easier on land (more oxygen per ml, air is easier to move across respiratory surfaces than water), but just moving around takes a *lot* more energy without the support of water. In the water, you don't need t bother much with temperature regulation, because the whole stream is more-or-less the same temperature (with some variation in shore versus middle), while there ca be tremendous variation from place to place in temperature on land (think of the difference between on top of a sun-warmed rock and in the dirt beneath it). This means land animals need to pay closer attention to their body temperature, but unlike fish, they can move between very different temperature locations to regulate it (whereas if the lake gets too hot, the fish can't escape). Basically, most of evolution is the story of how different traits and strategies work for different environments. The numerous extinctions every time the climate changes (think of the KT event that killed the dinosaurs) attest to the fact that there's no single "optimal" strategy for all environments. Pretty much; flying fish and penguins. Water has high drag (as I'm sure you've noiced whenever you've been swimming), so animals in the sea which move fast tend to have similar streamlining (as a result of physics). Sharks, dolphins and the extinct ichtyosaurs all look grossly similar because they've evolved to be fast-moving aquatic predators. But a bird will never *truly* become a fish. Notice how dolphins move their tails up and down rather than side-to-side like sharks. Most mammal locomotion is similar; watch a cheetah run and you'll see what I mean. Even though the dolphin is adapting to the same role, it's constrained by it's past history. True, but imagine if, to use a trivial example, our vision of colors is the reverse of what they "really" are. Does it matter at all? Blue is still blue, because 'blue' is just a word we have for what we see. If my blue and your blue are the same, does whatever else is out there truly matter? If we can't detect that other level, then whether it exists or doesn't exist is totally irrelevant. This is why science has proven to be so much more successful than philosophy (just look at the departmental budgets). Science basically said "if it's not observable, why care about it?", and abandoned the use of pure deduction in favor of induction and empiricism. After all, even if what we see and science analyzes isn't "the truth", it's what affects us as humans and our experiences, and is therefore both more important and more useful. But it all comes back to observability. If there is no evidence for these other dimensions, and they are not empiricially observable, then a) there's no reason to suppose they exist and b) even if they do exist, they don't matter, since they have no observable effect on anything. Now, if they *do* become observable, then we have to change things, and science does that all the time. Newton came up with some ideas. His ideas were nice but not complete, and future observations lead to relativity and quantum mechanics. Now we know that *those* ideas don't work perfectly, and so physics is investing a lot of effort into finding a replacement theory (the "theory of everything" or "grand unified theory"). Had the moon truly been made of cheese, Neil's first words would likely have been "Whoa, it feels all squishy", and we would have proceeded to re-evalute all known data in the face of this discovery. What makes science such a powerful tool for understanding the universe is that it's inherently tentative and self-correcting. Making a theory is the best way to get your name in the scientific history books, but destroying one is the second-best, and is far easier, so if the opportunity arrises, lots of people will leap at such an opportunity. Yes. We've check radiometric dating quite thoroughly, by dating things which we *know* when they occured (like the eruption at Vesuvius which destroyed Pompei), and checking them against each other. The chances *all* of the dozens of methods are wrong in precisely the same way for all the points they agree on is so infinitesimally tiny that it's not worth considering. Except that myth is just that, myth. In contrast, we can look as the anatomy, genetics, development, physiology, biochemistry and behaviors of humans and apes and note that they're very, very, very similar. We can also look at the fossil record and actually see the physical remains of the transition. History leaves its imprint on things. We can infer from the fact that people in the US speak English that the English were a dominant colonizing force. We can do the same with animals. An excellent example is dead viri. When a virus infects a cell, it injects its DNA into that cell, and the DNA becomes part of the cell's genetic code, commandeering it to produce more viri rather than whatever else it was supposed to be doing. But sometimes viri get mutations just like us, and the virus DNA gets in, but then fails to work properly. If it infects the right sort of cell, this "dead virus DNA" is inherited by the offspring of that individual. The human genome is littered with these things, as are the genomes of apes. Most importantly, though, humans and apes share many such dead viri at *exactly* the same location in the genome. The propability of two independent infection events that result in these dead virial DNA areas being in the same location is so remote as to be inconsequential. Furthermore, there's a pattern to it. There's a certain set shared by all apes (including us), presumabily inherited from the common ancestor. But then some are shared by all apes (including humans) except gibbons, then some shared by all except gibbons and organutans, then some shared only by chimps, humans and gorillas, then some only shared by chimps and humans. Some are unique to each species. Some are shared only by the two species of chimps or several species of gibbons. The take-home message is that the probability of this pattern occuring (and, incidentally, precisely matching patterns of evolution inferred by other means) by any method other than shared common ancestry is so remote that it doesn't warrant serious consideration. Ask a question Form a hypothesis (tentative answer) Devise a prediction of this hypothesis wich can be tested and shown to be consistent or inconsistent with the data Test the hypothesis Analyze data Accept or reject hypothesis based on data Repeat testing. An example: What color are the balls in this bag? I think they're all blue I can pull some out, and look at them. If they're all blue, I'm right, if any are red, I'm wrong (note that sampl size is statistically very important, and thus much of modern science is expressed in statistical terms) I take some balls out, and one is red. My hypothesis is wrong Make new hypothesis: balls are red and blue repeat cycle. All, no. Enough, yes. Consider the balls example above. If I have a bag of 100 balls, and I hypothesize they're all blue, how can I test that? Well, I could just empty them all out, but what if that's not possible? What if I can only look at one ball at a time, then put it back and mix up the bag? This is where statistics comes into play. Science does *not* offer 100% answers. But it *can* say, "We picked 100,000 times from this bag, and thus the chances that we missed a non-blue ball are less than 0.000000001%, and therefore insignificant". How statistically significant your results must be depends on the field of science. 95% is pretty universally accepted, considering all the difficulties of actual experiments (measurement error, animal behavior, contaminants, etc). Technically, the biological definition is "Change in gene frequency in a population over time". Bascule uses a different one, to incorportate technological evolution. But theories are supported by evidence. In science "Theory" refers to a postulated idea which was tested and confirmed. That doesn't mean it's involate, only that what evidence we have supports it. Also, evolution is also an evidence. We observe the phenomenon of evolution all the time (see antibiotic resistence in bacteria). That sense of "evolution" is a fact. The theory of evolution is how we explain the evolution we see (change in gene frequency over time). Think of it like gravity: there's the phenomenon (dropping an apple) and the theory (superstrings, gravitrons, spacetime curvature) of why it happens. We have a very nice sequence of fossils showing whale evolution (just google 'whale evolution'), and we've observed speciation caused by reproductive isolation in a group of flies who lay their eggs in cacti. One population developed a mutation to allow them to lay in a formerly toxic cactus, and eventually actually became dependent on the toxin as a metabolic source of a particular nutrient. As a result, this population can no longer mix genes with the other populations. Usually, speciation takes longer, but flies have such short generation times that it becomes practical to observe. We've got some more inferential stuff from various fish, particularly sticklebacks and cichlids, but we haven't observed the entire process in those, just the current state and we know when they became isolated. Yes, but if those theories say nothing about evolution, they don't need to take it into account. Any theory which *does*, no matter how distant from biology, must take it into account. This goes for all science. I actually have a friend who's head of the philosophy department here, and his primary passion is destroying philosophical "theories of the mind" which are based on neurobiology that's been subsequently overturned (in essence, the philosophical theories are based on old information, and he points out new information that proves them wrong). No coherent theory can simply ignore evidence concerning it. To use my bag of balls example, that's like saying they're all blue even if I see someone else pull an red ball from the same bag. Observation. If I run genetic tests on the stickleback fish mentioned above, that's evidence (unless I did it wrong, which is why all science papers have a section describing the materials and methods used to get the data). To return yet again to the bag of balls, every ball I pull out is evidence. It's only not evidence if you can show I palmed the ball and replaced it with a fake or somesuch. Not at all. Evolution is totally independent of the big bang and abiogenesis. Whether the universe was always here, made by god, or made by the big bag doesn't matter at all to evolution. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether life arose from the slime, was made by god, or was left by aliens, all that matters to evolution is that there is life which mutates, reproduces, and has heritable differences in reproductive/survival sucess. --------------------- As a side-note, SFN often gets creationists who *aren't* interested in learning, but rather in just spouting off their views no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary. This has generated a lot of ill-will towards creationism, as such actions are disruptive to the environment we try to maintain. So basically, don't take it personally if you get some harsh responses; we've not only learned that creationism usually means flaming, poor logic, and intellectual dishonesty, we've actually had to take a firm administrative stance against it because it was so disruptive and damaging. Threads like this, where someone with legitimate questions about science and evolution asks for information and discussion, are why I've always backed off on the idea of totally banning it, no matter how frustrating less well-conducted threads become. Threads like this provide a golden opportunity to fulfill SFNs core objective of eductation and information. So basically, I'd like to say that I'm glad you're taking an open approach to this subject, and I'll help in any way I can (within the time I have). Mokele

Well, I can see your point, but I also sympatize with the classics TAs. They've got coursework to do (and lots of it; science grads usually get few classes and concentrate on research), their thesis to do, and teaching. If a TAship doesn't cover the cost of going to school, some grads get loans or jobs, but some departments actually forbid grad students from having outside jobs at all. If that's the case at NYU, such small stipends can create a real burden. Part of it is also whether the university is behaving ethically or not by offering such small stipends. If it's not enough to live off, why not just reduce the number of grad students admitted so they each get a bigger slice of the pie, and hire some adjucts for the other stuff (they usually come from separate 'pies', as I understand university budgets). I'm trying to remember whether my school told me how much I'd be paid before I accepted or not. Any school that doesn't, frankly, has committed an ethical violation gross enough to warrant the firing of the entire administration, as they'd be essentially suckering people in binding contracts they can't live off. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to employ someone as full-time, you have to given them the money to survive. If you don't have the money, either don't offer the position, or make it a part-time position. Mokele

The reptile would have about 10% to respiration of the mammal (possibly less), since mammals waste so much energy heating their bodies. Similarly, a mammal in the cold will have to spend more energy to keep warm. As for he plants, I don't really know, but rakuenso's answer seems plausible.

No, actually, it's been explained in great detail, including many books. The problem is that it's just plain incorrect. Wrong again. Do some actual research. Two things: 1) Current theories of abiogenesis lean heavily towards RNA as the primal molecule, since it can function as an enzyme *and* as an information store simultaneously. 2) abiogenesis has *Nothing* to do with evolution. This has been repeatedly explained in great detail in many other posts. Because we are all sick of this strawman, it is board policy that conflating evolution and abiogenesis after being corrected will result in a "persistent strawman" warning. --------------- The problem with ID isn't that it's "beyond our comprehension". It's that it's not science, makes no testable predictions, and basically is just creationism in a cheap lab coat. Mokele

Actually, analysis of the collapse by *real* engineers (who actually know what they're talking about, unlike your sources) explained it very simply: te planes hit near the top. The part above them lost it's supports and began to fall. Physics 101: when things fall, then fall *down* unless they either had some prior velocity or are being acted upon by a sideways force. Neither applied to the top stories of the WTC. So basically, the plane impact and subsequent fire damage caused the top portion of the building to start falling downwards. So the floor below it gets hit by the tremendous mass of this top portion, plus whatever speed it's accumulated, and then the next floor, and so-on and so-forth. I heard it described like a locomotive plowing through the floors. It just got so much inertia and had so much mass that lower floors pretty much disintigrated on impact. Thread moved to where it belongs. Mokele

Which is where the Resident Experts, Mods, and Admins come in. While we can't check every person's credentials for every post, we *do* keep a keen eye out for BS and thoe who have a pattern of posting it. If they continue to do so we make them not our problem anymore, in a manner of speaking. Mokele

Not precisely, but more or less. AFAIK, outside of hibernation most endotherms tend to stick to the mid-90's to low-100's range, with birds being most often in the higher end of that and sometimes into 110's.

Well, how easy is it to break bits off, just with a moderate-strength blow from a normal hammer? If it's just sandstone, and you don't want to piss off the neighbors too much, you could try a pressure-cleaner or sandblaster and a *lot* of patience (or use those to make it into a sculpture). Hey, yeah, just hire an artist to make it into a statue of you! Mokele

Because this is a science forum? No, I don't. Show me something from someone with a degree in genetics and population ecology, who actually understands things. -------- This shouldn't be taken as a knee-jerk rejection of a view (I'm actually conflicted on the subject and can see both sides), but of the crappy source.

The 'controlled' part. Well, two problems: 1) If it really is negative, then nature will select against it for us, as with lethal or disabling genetic diseases. No input is needed on our part. 2) If it's not currently selected against by nature, where do we get off claiming it's negative? Sickle cell is prett negative...until malaria becomes a problem again. Remember, seemingly negative traits might actually merely be genetic side-effects of traits that are beneficial overall, even with said side-effect. Yes, how dare people resist the idea that they should have reproductive choices forced upon them. Furthermore, it's futile. We're on the cusp on being able to geneticly alter adults; wouldn't that be better? It'd certainly be faster, and probably also more economical and efficient. What makes you think we will in the future? Humans have always had one universal definition of negative traits: any trait others have that I (the individual) don't. It's not about trust, it's about choice. No matter how good my genes and my GFs genes are, we don't want kids, period, and any attempt to force them on us will simply result in us having no kids and a *very* fat pet python. And how far would it be taken? Picking which couples get to have kids would be selective, but it'd work even better if you just assigned people to mate together. Immunity is best at high heterozygosity, and strong selection reduces that. Genetic diseases can *never* be eliminated by selective breeding, ever. Think about it, why do we have lethal genetic diseases. They're being selected against, so why do they exist? Because mutation adds these damaging genes in while selection takes them out. Eventually the two reach an equilibrium. Altering the intensity of selection might alter the equilibrium, but mutations will always happen. Pesky freedom, ruining everything. Mokele

Wrong. You cannot just pull an idea from your rectal orifice and state it as if it's truth.

bascule, google "ring species" and see what you get. Basically, they're a species whose range is split in the middle by some barrier, such as a mountain or lake, and you see gradual variations along each side of the barrier, and by the time they meet again, they're distinct species.

Do you have *real* science site to back up those claims?