Mokele

The problem is our lack of knowledge of what the future holds. Clearly we will have the *capacity* to consciously alter our own DNA (as a species if not as individuals), but will we use it at all, or if so, how? How will this affect evolution? Is it even fair to call it evolution? Since we got this by evolving big brains, it could be argued that even genetic engineering is a highly derived type of evolution. Alternatively, because it's so different and under conscious control, it could be claimed to be totally different. Half the battle is terminology. I have little doubt that human form and genetics will change over time (just look at how many people are unsatified with theirs), but the question is *how* such changes will occur, and how this applies to evolution. Mokele

There's statistical blame and moral blame. Does said skinhead shoulder some statistical blame, yes. But the two are not the same, and regardless of the provokation, the moral blame would fall on those who resorted to violence. I've found the statistical/moral blame concept very useful in the past, and invented to deal with a debate on rape. Mokele

Depends which phylogenetic analysis you believe; there's about 100. The problem is that when the dinos died, the diversification of mammal orders and families was so rapid that it's very hard to retrospectively distinguish which diverged first and from whom. It's like a big knot in the phylogenetic tree, and our current tools don't have the resolution to "see" the individual strands in the knot, so generate contradictory results. Mokele

False. See other thread, and actually try doing some real research. Do programmers re-use bad code? Do they copy every error precisely, or do they fix it? Humans and chimps not only share the same genes, we share the same *mutations* in the genes. We share the same broken genes that no longer work. We share the same remants of faulty viri which got incorporated into our genetic code. Why would any programmer mindlessly duplicate code that has errors, repeatedly use code that has no purpose or function, and deliberately tranfer corrupted data? Try actually discussing the point, then. Offer a *single* credible arguement against the validity of Australiopithecus (any species). It is a *fact* that brain volume generally tends to increase along the hominin lineage. While brain volume does not *absolutely* correlate to mental capacity, we happen to find that more sophisticated artifacts (tools, fire, even jewlery) appear and increase in sophistication with increasing hominin brain size. Wrong. First, H. floresiensis is atypical due to being confined to an island. Weird things happen on islands. Note that HF lived alongside 10 foot lizards, giant rats and tiny elephants. Also, HF's behavior can only be inferred. It used advanced tools and fire, but it might have simply retained these from it's ancestral form via cultural transmission, as opposed to genetic. I'm not seeing how one obscure oddity, far removed from the mainline of human evolution, in any way invalidates evolution as a whole of human ancestry in particular. If you had done any research worth speaking of, you'd've noticed the *thousands* of transitional forms in the fossil record. Google triadobatrachus and tell me that's not a transition between a salamander and a frog. And that's just one of *thousands* of examples. Stop blowing hot air and *actually* research. Using *real* sites, not Answers in Genesis. Species vary in behavior just like they do in physical traits. These variations are the result of mutations. Should individuals expressing one form of behavior survive more often or reproduce more, they'll be proportionately over-represented next generation, and even more the next, until they're the only game in town. As for seeing into the future, evolution doesn't, but merely adapts to the local environment. There's a tree in Australia which has HUGE fruit. Like "Kill a person it falls on", 50 lbs huge. But there is no way for this fruit to disperse, nothing can eat it, so it just rots and the seedlings die. How did this situation come to be? It can be easily explained by the fact that evolution *doesn't* have foresight. The tree evolved when Australia had numerous very large land herbivores, such as giant wombats, who could and would eat the fruit and poop out the seeds some distance away, thereby distributing the seeds in a ready-made pile of fertilizer. Then, the Aborigines arrived and killed off the giant herbivores. Because the plant (and evolution)couldn't forsee this (or anything), it was trapped in an evolutionary situation that effectively doomed it, and it's been becoming rarer ever since. A good example is snakes, since they're so highly instinctual (and I study them). Scientists have found that if you present a Q-tip soaked in the scent of various potential food items to a snake immediately upon hatching, snakes will strike most quickly and frequently at those Q-tips that smell of their natural prey. Some species are specialists, like the Queen snake, which eats only crayfish, and the young display the same exclusivity. Other species, however, like the garter snake, are less picky, though they have preferences. They're also very wide-ranging, and different populations of the same species may face very different prey. Obviously, it's advantageous to be attracted to eating the local prey, so any variation that resulting in increased preference for local prey items would increase via evolution. The typical example of this is a pair of populations in california, one of which has access to yummy (to a snake) Bannana slugs, and the other doesn't. The difference in preferences that evolution predicts is not only found, but is found immediately upon birth (they're born live). The mechanism behind this is probably simply the number of chemoreceptors for particular prey scent molecules (snakes have a sense of smell that puts bloodhounds to shame), as well as their connections to parts of the brain. Mokele

There are no facts supporting creationism. If you feel differently, provide them. And I don't mean argue against evolution; that merely shows that creationism is a feeble theory that can only exist by casting doubt on it's more powerful adversary. If a theory is valid, it must stand on it's own two legs. I want you to present a single scrap of evidence that *unequivocally* supports creationism and *cannot* be interpreted any other way. Yet some deny an equally obvious and possibly even more important and relevant fact, namely evolution. Australiopithecus. I win. Look, see that, it's called *evidence*. Try looking at it some time. No more extreme that teaching Creationism/ID in science class. So, weren't fond of Galileo, were you? Evolution does not deny God, nor contradict *any* theologically valid faith. *Any* reputable theologian will tell you this. If you continue to espouse this ridiculous evolution=atheism stance, you *will* be warned for persistent strawman fallacy. I can put fruit flies in a jar, breed them, and kill off all who express a particular allele, resulting in change in allele frequency in time. You could do this too. Science has, many times. That's evolution. That the process occurs indicates that it is a *factual* observable process. Denying it is like denying gravity. You might not know whether it's superstrings or gravitrons, but the *process* is undeniable. There are hundred of them, any any google search will turn them up. Others have thoroughly countered this point. Continue making it and you'll get yet another strawman fallacy warning. Mokele

I disagree. I don't care who you are, and how offensive or ill-timed the words are, violence is *never* a justifiable reaction. Being provoked does not in any way ameliorate moral responsibility for the conscious decision to engage in acts of violence. Self control is vital to civilization. Mokele

I'm with zyncod on this: being an obligate parasite, a virus cannot effectively exist without a host. Then there would be no viruses, as doing what you describe would result in them all sacrificing their "lives" for others. Given that the virus gets nothing out of it, nor is there any reason to assume that viral intervention is necessary to sustain a vaible mutation rate, I find your idea highly implausible. Multicellular life evolves is much the same way as unicellular life. A Nobel Prizewinner once said "What is true for E.coli is true for the elephant". Mokele

The thread bascule indicated shows some evidence concerning other primates, however, in order to get gross % similarity figures, you have to analyze basically everything from the other species. This takes an inordinate amount of time, and, since we've got figures for chimps, why bother with things that are likely to show just a little bit more difference when you can move on to other more distant species. There should be figures between humans and rats floating around somewhere (google). However, phylogenies, especially molecular phylogenies, assess the level of difference between numerous species at one or several genes, thus you can expect phylogeny to *roughly* correlate to degree of genetic difference. Basically, humans are closest to chimps, then gorillas, then organutans, then gibbons, then Old-world monkeys, then New world monkeys, then various prosimians (lemurs, pottos, lorises, aye-ayes, etc). However, after that, it's a pretty long path back to the nearest common ancestor of primata and the rest of mammalia, since primates split off early, and a lot of those early intermediates are dead. It could still work. After all, it's common ancestry, and you don't get much more common than the people on those shows. Mokele

From Futurama: Fry, looking at enormous pill: "I can't swallow that!" Prof Farnsworth: "Good News, then! It's a suppository!"

But God already has left a sign written in those cosmos, letting us know just how much he cares about us: Upper left corner to see the very hand of God expressing His True Thoughts Mokele

"A project", very helpful. Care to give a more detailed description of your project and its goals? Mokele

The problem is that so many more people are completing college degrees these days than are needed (especially with wussy useless degrees like liberal arts and such). Too many college graduates for college-grad jobs, and the rest still need to eat, so they have to take more menial jobs. Basically, the market's been flooded and the value of the degree reduced to almost nothing except for some specialist fields (science and engineering, though those have suffered too, especially the glut of computer science people). As long as the supply of college grads outstrips the demand, grads will be forced to reduce their expectations. Mokele

I dunno about the average american, but it is for me. I've got so much to do and get so absorbed in my work that I routinely forget to eat meals altogether, and when I do eat, I purposefully arrange it to take the minimum time possible. But then, grad school does that to people... Mokele

::Goes and looks:: Dear god, that site is crap. And the graphics look like they were drawn by a retarded monkey. The link to the "Forum" just shows Hello1 here at another forum, where they tell him *precisely the same thing we did*. Gee, those pesky facts, they just keep turning up to ruin your plans. I suggest that Hello1 leave physics alone and concentrate on preparing for a job in his most likely future field. Remember to ask "Do you want fries with that?". Mokele

Not a clue. I'm only familiar with similar structures in snakes that give certain species an iridescent sheen, but I'm not aware of any specific name for those either. Mokele

Holy crap I love Canada's cheap drugs! Now I just need to figure out how to actually apply it in the right way to cause polyploidy in my plants. It'll probably be easier to use it to cause polyploidy in asexually propagated cuttings than in flowers and such, I'm guessing, but I'll google around. Bwahahahaha! You shall have your own personal army of monster Flytraps for this!

Actually, it's the reverse of what you said. Your body runs low on fuel, setting biochemical pathways into motion that eventually trigger certain nerves that produce what we call "hunger". The brain is slave to the genes, not the other way around. Mokele

I read that article as "Our customers don't have much money to spare, which means they're giving less money to us. We must find ways to ensure that people give us more money."

I'd attribute it to nuclear weapons and increasing technological gaps between the militaries of various countries. It's gotten to the point that anything approximating a large scale war like WW2 has become anything from a horribly bad idea to downright suicidal for the weaker country. Two evenly matched countries with nukes won't go to war, because they realize it'll mean everyone loses, and if one side has nukes and the other doesn't, the weaker will avoid conflict at all costs. Only guerilla warfare pits evenly-matched sides together because the fundamental unit (the human) hasn't changed nor become different between locations, and thus that's the only scenario any country can challenge any significant world power and hope to not get obliterated. Mokele, with my usual cynicism

Yes, but you know as well as I do that humanity will *never* do what is right when it means doing something that's detrimental to us, even on the short term.

Yes, more mutations happened that we thought. The rest of the article about how this somehow undermines evolution, is pure creationist bullshit, though. Talk about grasping at straws, that's like saying that because Bill Gates lost $20 in poker he's significantly less rich. The technical aspects of this link are the only reason it's not in Psuedoscience right now.

Not off the top of my head, no. Google is your best bet.

The problem is the benefit of society versus the benfit of the individual. If the individuals want monetary compensation for any loss of property value, fine, but one cannot let the desires of the few override the good of the many. Would it suck if something like that had to be done near my home? Yes. Would I whine, probably. But that's just because I'm a big bald ape who's fundamentally selfish by nature. Sometimes doing what's right, especially for society as a whole, means overcoming those ape instincts. Mokele

There's also Klienfelter syndrome (XXY males) and Turner syndrome (females with only 1 X). But for the most part, nondisjunctions are lethal, AFAIK As for plants, they can have all sorts of weirdness, including being triploid (3 copies of each chromosome) and more. Increasing ploidy often results in unusually large and vigorous plants (modern strawberries are octaploid). Personally, I'd *love* to find a way to make some my plants polyploid; you'll know I've succeeded when a race of super-sized walking venus flytraps devours Cincinnati. Mokele

It's hardly a sexist suggestion; sexual selection works both ways, hence why male birds are often so colorful (to please females). Basically, all non-monotreme mammals have mamaries (monotremes like the platypus have milk glands that simply empty into pores in the skin, and the young lap it up) and fat stores. This was simply a case to relocating the fat stores in a more prominent location to advertise fitness. Males had a pre-existing preference that females exploited, and in turn the males found that they could use it as an index of valuable information about the female. It's happened the other way around, too. Testosterone is an immuno-suppressor, so only fit males with strong immune systems and low parasite loads could afford to develop strong, 'masculine' secondary sexual characteristics, which the females could use to select the mate with the most beneficial genetic material. (Incidentally, female humans' preferences in male appearance shifts markedly towards more masculine men during ovulation, which is also the time when adultery is most likely). Sexual selection is a powerful force in evolution, one that can drive species to such ridiculous extremes as the male peacock's tail, or even outright suicide in the case of the male redback spider. You're right, but about the wrong organ. Male humans *do* have the largest dong among primates, both in terms of relative and absolute size. However, your logic is completely correct for testes size (and thus number of sperm produced per ejaculate, a vital thing when your sperm might be cometing with that of the previous lover). Gorillas have small nads due to lack of competition, chimps have big nads, and humans inbetween. Mokele