overtone

That's not a property of our society, but a consequence of failure in our education and media establishments. The political scale of left/right, for example, is essentially fixed - not relative to the temporary circumstances of a campaign season. It isn't an eternal absolute, maybe, but it is not whimsical or changeable or whatever some shill declares it to be on Fox. Not only is it fixed, but it is not really all that difficult to apply - community vs corporate control of economic resources, labor vs capital, etc: the division of issue is usually pretty clearly visible. The problem is that only a small fraction of the US population has any idea what it is any more. There's touchstone aplenty, but the blinded can't find any. So we have a situation in which the Heritage Foundation's recommended rightwing, corporate friendly health care policy, proposed and pushed by the Republican candidate for President in 1996, first established by a quintessential capitalist Republican and self-described "conservative" in his role as Governor of a State, to fend off a movement toward community control of health insurance and medical care in his State, is labeled "socialist" and "leftwing" by a dominant fraction of the pundits analyzing it today, and these pundits do not then get laughed out of their jobs and find themselves replaced by the competent. What Churchill meant by "liberal" bears little resemblance to the meaning of the term in US politics today. A closer term of current discourse might be "libertarian", but as leftwing libertarians are held to not exist by Murdoch media, and Murdoch media set the terms of discourse in the US these days, that would be misleading as well. The word "liberal" has been destroyed, rendered all but meaningless, by an organized and coherently managed propaganda campaign funded by the fascist right in the US. Churchill's quote must now be translated, as one woulc translate obscure references in Shakespeare, and without that effort its meaning is very different from the original.

This will be so almost certainly. But the original assertion specifically keyed on "races", not ethnic groups.

Somewhere in here it's time to repeat a basic fact: Evolutionary theory shows how life could emerge without first beating the long odds of random chance. In Darwinian theory, random or chance events are only one contribution to the process, and improbable events are generally assumed to have happened in much less improbable stages. It is a ratcheting process, that can acheive wildly improbable states one likely and selected event at a time. Darwinian theory shows how the apparently impossible by chance need not depend on such chance. So all those calculations of purely random assortment odds, etc, are irrelevant - right or wrong. And the OP is simply off on the wrong foot to begin with - a confusion, not a question.

We could use the thread to discuss similar incidents of the past couple of decades, for which we have had enough time to get perspective. a short partial list of possibilities: 2008 US embasy bombings in Yemen, ten killed. 2008 arson of the US Embassy in Serbia. 2007 grenade attack on the US Embassy in Athens. 2006 armed assault on the US Embassy in Syria, 1 killed. 2004 armed assualt on the US Embassy in Uzbekistan, 2 killed. 2004 armed assault on the US Consulate in Saudi Arabia, 8 killed. 2002 armed assault on the US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, 10 killed.

Side note: we have many examples of sexual orientation - even physiology - depending on environmental and developmental influences, genetically poised to take advantage of environmental cues. Turtles and other reptiles are often sex-determined by the temperature regime experienced by the incubating egg, for example; many species of fish change sex when they get bigger or otherwise rise in the dominance hierarchy (usually from male to female). Their sexual behavior, "orientation", develops or changes in synchrony. This is normal, natural, and not a choice, for turtles etc.

Continuing the comparison with physical reality, after noting above the absence of great intricacy of rhythm in the music of a wide variety of grassland dwellers on various continents: AFAIK the most rhythmically intricate folk music around is the drum chorus music of Burundi and neighboring regions to the west, through the African rain forest to the west coast - these are not primarily open and spacious grassland environs, but feature heavy jungle and/or rugged terrain: http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/africa/burundi/biland.htm Great rhythmic intricacy in folk music is also found in the monsoon agriculture regions of India (ragas and other music in that tradition have intricate rhythms delivered by highly skilled drummers), and the mountain terrain (terraced, often) rice regions of Bali and neighboring islands (Gamelan orchestras play inticate music in general, includign rhythm). No correlation with even sociological race is visible to me, nor any relationship with grassland and open country other than agricultural fields.

So where do the "races" come in? All the sociological races have representative grassland and lowland cultures, as far as I know. And all of them include cultures with intricate music, non-intricate music, and so forth. Some of the most intricate folk music I know of comes from the forested and mountainous regions of central and northern Europe. Meanwhile, the Tuvans and neighboring Mongols (the type specimens of open grassland dwellers) created music that although very profound and complex is not at all "intricate". Neither is the music of the NA Plains aborigines, or the Australian grassland nomads. Come to think of it, we do have a pattern here: people who ride horses and depend on them tend to have less intricate music than those who don't. Again, not sure where the business about "race" fits in. Whose theory is this, and why does it exist?

That a gay male has a more feminine, feminized, or female-altered brain than a straight male should not be assumed. There is very little evidence of that, and most of it barely reasonable much less rigorous. We have less dubious examples of female-identified or apparently feminized brains in male bodies, a condition sometimes treated by major surgery on the misfit body, and by all professional accounts these men are not gay - they are female, and either lesbian and straight as women are rather than as men are.

The more interesting question would be what prevents or deflects what would otherwise be an obvious mating situation. I have no idea, for example, why as a teenager and as driven, sexually, as a sane person could handle (or more), I never found any of my sisters sexually interesting - it certainly wasn't for lack of physical attractiveness on their part, or personal dislike, or great disparity in age. I was sexually interested in forty year old drugstore clerks with too much makeup, housewives in overcoats pushing baby carriages, an entire school full of girls that spun my head every three minutes from far down the hall in a crowd, complete strangers walking down sidewalks half-glimpsed from car windows, abstract paintings that somehow had the right set of curves to them: so why not the three nubile and friendly and healthy and playful young women I saw every day in their pajamas or less, right in my own house? There's your mystery.

Aside from that unsupported opinion, this thread has no topic. Do you plan to provide one?

This was posted under "Genetics" - what genetic "races" are you talking about, how did you identify them genetically, and how did you measure the quantity of rhythm they have? Again, as we are in a forum labeled "Genetics", who exactly are you identifying as genetically "Asian", and how did you do that?

That is where the mind reading needs avoiding. No guessing - it's too easy to divert. Who else do we exclude? Do we exclude the Republicans who worked so hard to cut security funding ? The military advisers involved? If we want to treat this kind of event as criminal negligence by administration officials, and prosecute, shouldn't we start with the more serious ones? Especially since we have had time to sift data and follow implications on many of the more or less recent past .

Any lack of such compensating horizontal flow - resisted by some means, even simple viscosity within the air volume itself - will reduce this rise. In thin layers (for various reasons) this horizontal flow can be (and often is) reduced to near zero. The air volume attempting to rise is then working against the pressure difference of a near vacuum "under" it. It is held in place as if glued there. I have no trouble believing a 16C temp difference between the ground layer and free air at waist height. Most of that difference could even be in the first few centimeters. People who study heat adaptation in insects noticed, years ago, that one common adaptation is simply long legs and greater height - a difference of less than a centimeter in a tiger beetle or desert ant on sand is significant, several degrees C.

Not just textbooks, but books in general, are not thoroughly proofread, indexed, or edited, these days. (Neither are newspapers, magazines, etc. And God help you if you rely on the internet, where such concerns are not even in general awareness). Especially in matters such as proofreading, the new corporate owners of the major publishing houses see inefficiency and needless expense - surely a competent author can write what they want to say, and minor spelling, grammar, etc issues can be handled by the word processing software? In technical books this is exacerbated by the difficulty and extra expense of finding someone even capable of proofreading, editing, etc. These people tend to come from the English department of the local university. I've heard at least one copyeditor mention that they were at sea - that they didn't know whether the stuff they were checking was even rightside up on the page. No conspiracy needed.

Nothing mentioned in this thread so far lacks attention, critical examination, etc. And this attention is not hidden, sidelined, cloistered, ivory towered - it's in the pop science articles, the layman's press, Scientific American, the Tuesday science supplement of the NYT, the more widely read writers's works, etc. Here's a quote from an article by David Quammen, reprinted in the Natalie Angier edited collection "Best Science Writing of 2009"; the subject is the evolution of cancer, cancer as an evolutionary entity, with the contagious Tasmanian Devil face cancer as example; "Weinberg" is Robert Weinberg, author of the textbook The Biology of Cancer:

No, he didn't. If this kind of misrepresentation is your entire source of issue, best drop the matter. If it isn't, let's see the more legitimate stuff.

I don't recall hearing anyone officially "running with" the mob protest story. Who did that, and on what venue?

Uh, Darryl, If you keep listing commonplace stuff like symbiosis and hybridization as "non-Darwinian" and in need of a radical new theory, nobody is going to take you seriously around here. This is a science forum.

To repeat then, what is quite accurate: All pregnancies carry significant risk of death, and all pregnancies run to delivery impose certainty of serious trauma - recovery, which is never "complete" in the sense of restoring the original physical state, is commonly weeks to months after the least traumatic gestations and deliveries. Any person setting out to inflict on the unwilling that, or any equivalent, risk of death, certainty of suffering, and degree of physical damage, can be killed in self defense in any State of the US I know about. This is most dramatically so in the States with the highest proportion of "pro-life" citizens, where often even the Government is allowed (is approved by them) to kill people who have committed such assaults, as a third party not even defending itself. And so we see just one of the many aspects of life and times in which the ascription of personhood to a three month embryo has not even crossed the mind of the pro-life citizen. Others would be religious, medical, legal, and other official procedures surrounding miscarriage, statistical categories and enumerations, social customs of naming and recognition, and so forth. There is only one arena of decision in which a three month embryo's personhood is claimed by anyone - consideration of voluntary abortion. In such a situation, we are under no obligation to grant respect to what is clearly and verifiably special pleading, convenient adoption of temporary and automatically discarded claims for the sake of argument, claims which have no visible basis in reality and are contradicted by a slew of physical facts and circumstances.

The "positive" or + designation refers to the presence of "Rhesus factor", a certain kind of protein in the membrane of most people's red blood cells - O+ blood has the antigen, and sensitized people of any ABO type who lack it (such as Rh- people who have been pregnant with an Rh+ fetus, or received a previous transfusion of Rh+ blood) will suffer adverse reactions to transfusions of O+ blood (or any other Rhesus positive blood regardless of ABO type) which can be severe. Rh- mothers will often create an immune reaction against (and inside) second or subsequent Rh+ fetuses (the first one sensitized their immune system, like a vaccination), and this special concern is one of the differences between Rhesus factor and the blood type factors of the ABO system. The persistence of Rh negative populations (mostly among northern Europeans and their descendants) in a world of people mostly Rh positive, despite this targeted risk to reproduction, indicates by presumption the likelihood of advantage of some kind.

All pregnancy carries significant risk of death. All pregnancy causes significant trauma to the body of the woman - enough to justify lethal force in self-defense, in any other circumstances involving actual perps believed to be people.

As stated, that's not a main tenet of modern Darwinian theory. It's a consequence, and not an inevitable one - a probability. Much hinges on the meaning of the word "gradual" (see Dennett's critique of "punctuated equilibrium), for starters. If you are going to argue against a school of thought last seen dominating evolutionary theory with its particulars decades before the structure and role of DNA was elucidated, then no problem - horizontal gene transfer would, as you claim, "challenge" that anachronistic framework. But there's no sense in confusing it with what Darwinian evolutionary theory is now. Playing whack-a-mole with your latest obtusity is not an indefinitely engaging game - the fate of your assertions regarding Mendelian genetics and horizontal gene transfer and so forth, above, is not interesting, for example. It's commonplace. But this table of yours does have a source not obviously and immediately crackpot, so let's look at it: Yes means an agreement between the author's notion of "neo-Darwinian" theory and the author's notion of physical reality as recently established. Despite the immediate temptation to take that "Yes" and move on, we note that nothing in Darwinian theory requires the heritable (not "inherited", note) variation to be "random" in every strict sense imaginable. Bacteria are known to manage their mutation rates and locations, swap genetics wholesale, etc, for example, and Darwinian theory has no problem with that. Modern Darwinian theory is explicit in denying the inevitability of "progress", and has no problem with the many examples of degenerative evolution (flightless birds, blind cave dwellers, tapeworms and the like, etc). As far as "general trend", that is an observation of the real world which was explained by Darwinian theory only after some difficulty - a success of the theory in application, not a "basic principle". Nothing in Darwinian theory requires that the steps be "infinitesimally small". One of the strengths of the theory is that very small steps - which are much more probable - are all that is needed, but larger steps are not ruled out thereby. They are merely less common, on probabilistic grounds. The article seems a bit confused here - it seems to take endosymbiosis as a supposed counterexample to that, among other muddlings, and posits the necessity of unspecified evolutionary mechanisms other than the also unspecified "normal" ones before the advent of familiar cellular life, for some reason not clear. But overall we have agreement - Darwinian evolutionary processes such as we see now also proceeded in the distant past. This is just wrong. Even in the early years, Darwin used the theory to explain the origin of species - as a consequence, not a prerequisite or necessary "unit". Famous explicators of the more modern theory have written entire books titled "The Selfish Gene". The unit of Darwinian evolution is not the species Well, yeah. Just because bacteria don't do it quite the same, it isn't important? This is a nice idea for explicatory diagram, and very useful with large animals and such. But explanatory posters on school classroom walls are not the foundation of fundamental theory, of "basic principles". likewise: This is even less a basic principle - Darwinian theory says almost nothing about how many separately originating lines of evolution there are (it says: you only need one. That doesn't mean there weren't more). The conclusion that there are very few, perhaps even only one, is a consequence of research and reasoning informed by Darwinian theory - again, a successful application, not a basic principle. So the reward for yet again taking your posting much more seriously than would be indicated, is what?

Nobody who is familiar with it thinks the modern Darwinian theory of evolution is "simple" in its real world application. Non-Mendelian inheritance has been incorporated into standard evolutionary theory for almost a century now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Mendelian_inheritance. Mendelian inheritance itself was not rediscovered and finally incorporated into applications of Darwinian theory until fifty years or more after Darwinian theory had become generally accepted. The early basic principles of Darwinian theory were developed without reference to it. The explanation of complex Mendelian inheritance patterns in complicated situations was one of the accomplishments of Darwinian theory - not a limitation of it. Bullshit. The claim is that the best name for this new synthesis will be "Darwinian Theory of Evolution", or "neo-Darwinian" if you prefer, since the basic principles of Darwinian theory will remain at its core - they seem to be unchallenged, and the recent elaborations of their mechanisms rather improve than replace them in application.

No. I have said nothing at all about what motives they actually hold, or why. I have merely observed - with evidence and argument that you continue to ignore - that they do not hold the belief that a three month embryo is a person, in general. Their behavior is inconsistent with such a belief - not their logic, not their ideology, not their rhetoric: their behavior over centuries of time and continents of area. That is false. It is both centrally relevant, and with difficulty partially and significantly knowable - we can discover things through reason, evidence, research, etc, - even about what people believe, in many circumstances. What I said was that motives are central when responses to abuse are being chosen by other people - that appears to me to be evident enough to pass without argument. Are you claiming otherwise? It is also important to firmly deny obviously false claims of self-justification, by abusers. You can deny false claims, if you have a huge pile of incontrovertible, verifiable, physical evidence and solid argument behind you. You can, at a minimum, put the burden of proof - that is, the burden of providing evidence and argument far beyond simple assertion - on the self-justifying person.

Yes, and as noted: No actual person has any Constitutional right to be inside someone else, and anyone inside a house behaving as an embryo does inside a woman could be killed in self defense by the householder. The claim of rights and so forth for embryos is never made other than when debating abortion, and rides on a necessary, unadmitted, temporary, and expedient denial of actual personhood (which would invoke the self-defense, location, etc, issues). There is no reason to assert that - no evidence, no argument. They apparently don't. This is quite clear in their centuries of repeated, verifiable, recordable, physically incontrovertible, behavior. The entire fields of miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, child mortality and disease, cemetary layout, EMT responses, industrial pollution regulation, and how many others, would be significantly and visibly different, if they held any such belief or ever had. And observation, deduction from circumstance repeated and verifiable, etc. Do you have an answer to the observations and reasoning above, other than the assertion that "heavy assumptions" (unspecified, we note) and personal circumstances explain the lot? This, for example, has nothing to do with what I've posted here: I said nothing of the kind. What I observe to be obviously false is the claim of a common human belief, scientific conclusion, or evidence based physical reality, that a three week embryo is a person. When false motives are claimed and people abused on that basis, motives become central. Motives are not irrelevant in choosing appropriate responses to this stuff. In particular, the actual motives of those who are trying to ban abortion in the US are critical to choosing a response, and largely unknown, maybe, especially to themselves.