Mokele

Remember, organisms actually invest energy in making urea (or uric acid in those species that excrete that) from the natural product of protein breakdown, ammonia, due to the toxic properties of ammonia.

How do you teach creativity, though?

What's so surprising? The cult needs a holy text that's truly their own.

Using such definitions to claim evolution is "intelligent" is much like saying that, since it can grow, metabolize, reproduce, etc., then fire is a living organism. Intelligence itself is very hard to define. For instance, "language" is tricky, especially when including animals, since I've known completely asocial species which display problem-solving ability on a nearly primate level. "Problem solving" is one I'd dispute - evolution solves problems by dumb luck (stumbling on the right mutation) and brute force (sheer number of individuals and duration of time). "Learning" is another - even sponges can learn, and they don't even have nerves, let alone brains or intelligence. Even if we grant "learning", that's not the same thing as "history dependence", which is what evolution shows. If you stretch a muscle, it contracts more forcefully that otherwise, so are muscle cells intelligent? No, they just show history dependence. I'd actually dispute even evolution's creativity - developmental biology constrains many organisms to relatively limited morphological spaces. Plus, creativity implies the ability to deliberately come up with new solutions, rather than simply stumbling across them during brute-force high-throughput trying everything.

So, the question is, if these demagogues truly are unrepresentative, how can "mainstream" conservatives cast them off?

Exactly, 3 pairs of autosomal and 1 pair (X and Y) of sex chromosomes. If it's universal to the species (thus the species is being talked about as a singular entity), I think it's "has". D. melanogaster has six autosomal chromosomes.

X and Y are considered a "pair" even though they're different. The same holds true even in birds, where there's simply X or nothing (though, IIRC, XO is female and XX is male).

dunsapy has been banned for creationist trolling.

Well, after watching you practice your intellectual dishonesty, willful ignorance, avoidance of evidence, and general lack of understanding all over this thread, it's time to put an end to this sad spectacle. Bye bye, dunsapy.

So, your objection is that a term which is definable but has some wiggle room doesn't line up with an extremely nebulous and undefined term written by Bronze-Age goatherds who wouldn't know DNA from dirt?

So you accept that one species can evolve into another? Because we've actually watched it happen, both in the lab and in nature, many times.

So, what exactly *will* negate your hypothesis? Do you have explicit falsification criteria?

Thread closed due to failure to produce any sufficient evidence for this garbage.

So, you have no peer reviewed sources at all? None that support this? Moved the Psuedoscience & Speculations. Provide peer review sources in your next post, or the thread will be closed.

Can you cite any peer review journal articles supporting this? Because websites are not reliable sources - I can find websites promising to regress me through my past lives or reveal an alien abduction experience. Is there any peer-reviewed statistical analysis of outcomes compared against control groups?

Actually yes, air is much easier to breathe. Aside from being a less dense fluid (therefore less work to push across respiratory surfaces), it has much, much higher oxygen content. That's why some very small, permeable-skinned amphibians can get away with being totally lungless (the Plethodontid salamanders), but in the water, gills or lungs are absolutely needed, and effective cutaneous respiration is really only possibly at tiny sizes and in cold water (more dissolved O2). Breathing air is also the only way for an oceanic critter to be completely endothermic. If water has to pass over gills, the blood in the gills will assume water temperature. Some species of fish can be regional heterotherms via muscle heat and countercurrent exchangers in the vasculature, but never true endotherms. Depends on the species. Small does mean less food, but for species that lay many eggs, it can mean reduced number of offspring (which is why female turtles, snakes and frogs are often larger than males). For endotherms like whales, large size also means less skin area per unit volume, reducing heat transfer and allowing them to live in cold waters (where there's more O2 and nutrients, thus more plankton).

You do realize that, with minimal effort, we've managed to breed to grey wolf into a tiny, trembling, bug-eyed, stick-limbed, big-eared rat-thing, right? If you had no knowledge of their past, you'd say a wolf and a chihuahua aren't even in the same genus, let alone the same species separated by less than 10,000 years. That change is actually vastly greater than the change between similar species.

But that's not really a *goal*, that's just similar selection pressures. A goal, in the sense it's often used, is something beyond these pressures, some direction that cannot be explained simply by adaptation to local environmental conditions.

Dunsapy, go actually read something on evolution. Then come back. We're not going to waste time correcting your obvious errors.

There's selection and then there's genetic drift, a neutral, random process which can, over time, render two species unable to mate due to changes in gamete chemistry or mating displays.

No, but we can observe consequences, which would be different for different causes. Those aren't part of the definition, they're my explanation of how science works when manipulative experiments aren't possible. For instance, we cannot manipulate the temperature in a 200 square mile region precisely to test the theory that species get larger in warm climates. But we *can* look at an exceptionally wide-ranging species like the tiger salamander and see if there's a correlation between the average annual temperature and salamander size at various locations with different temperatures. I'm sure there's a thousand overly-elaborate philosophical papers on the subject, but in plain terms, we have to be able to detect something, to measure it, etc. (or to do so for a closely linked proxy) in order for it to be useful in science. If we cannot detect it, cannot measure it, we cannot test the hypothesis.

Let's back up - is there any a priori reason to assume any correlation between personality and skull shape? I don't mean personal experience, I mean developmental series, homologous genes in brain and skull formation, etc. Another point worth considering - what about individuals with cranio-facial deformities? If skull shape influences personality, or vice versa, there should be clear and particular personality traits associated with particular deformities.

1) Chromatin. 2) I'm not such what you mean by male and female traits being divided.

Thanks, I poked around google scholar with no luck, but I know there are paleo journals out there who don't have abstracts or even content on the web yet (I must resist the urge to make a 'Stone Age' pun).

As opposed to super-natural, mostly for practical reasons. If we hypothesize a natural cause for something, we can test that hypothesis by manipulating said cause (or by looking for 'natural experiments' where the cause varies naturally). If we hypothesize a supernatural cause for something, since that cause cannot be detected, manipulated, or quantified, we cannot test the hypothesis, ergo it's worthless as it cannot advance our knowledge. That doesn't necessarily mean we're limiting ourselves forever, only limiting ourselves right now. 400 years ago, if you claimed that there was a strange energy given off by certain materials that could cause cancer, it would be untestable. But once we discovered radiation and had ways to quantify it and control it, it became testable.