CharonY

There is a difference in equivalent response and punitive proportionality. Also I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to trying to translate criminal justice to diplomatic relationships. Even worse, the literature on deterrence (going back a long time) shows not simple relationship between punishment and deterrence. But where the largest agreement is that punishment works best as deterrent on minor crime, whereas the effect in violent crime has almost no relationship to the severity of punishment (up and including death sentences). Likely because many of these acts are not part of rational decision-making.

That is certainly not the experience I have. And I am not sure what in your mind the difference between mainstream biology and the science community is in this context. Do you mean non-biologists? That might be true. But then it wouldn't be their field now, would it. This is so generic that is says nothing. Rather obviously if you read a molecular genetics paper on cells, it is rather obvious you will see little in terms of larger physiological context of the organism. The field of biological sciences is vast- and asserting some type of specific undertone without working in an area is very difficult. Edit: crossposted, removed repetition.

As far as I can remember this has never been the case in scientific circles. I remember back in high school a bit about nurture vs nature discussions, but first semester university pretty much demolished that idea. Again, popular science vs actual science. And you are basing it on what? As far as I can tell, Dawkins mostly wrote popular science books and I have seen him mostly cited in essay-like articles, but not really in actual original works, for example. I suspect there was more impact in areas where biology and sociology or philosophy shortly overlapped (such as the short-ish attempt at establishing sociobiology). But the impact on mainstream biology was rather muted. At best it gave us some ways to communicate certain concepts to the public. But again, I think it is the difference between a laypersons view and what is actual happening among science circles.

No, your quotes are mostly about function and do not show much of a link regarding inheritance. Function arises from interplay (obviously) it is it is not the interplay that visitors inheritance. If you got cancer your kids won't necessarily inheritmit. But they could inherit a higher likelihood of getting cancer. dawkins had more impact on popular rather than professional science, and I think we are still discussing the former.

Most of thar is fairly trivial and it is missing a fair bit of nuance. But most physiologist and systems biologist have long realized that except for simple functions the genome holds limited capacity. Only in conjunction with a given cellular environment does physiology and function happen. That being said, the genetic background is still the major, though no longer exclusive element of inheritance which is a different level of functionality. Dismissing one aspect due to evidence of another does not make sense.

There is the aspect of proportionality, however. If someone punched you and you eat their liver in response, it may raise eyebrows.

What does it have to do with anything? I say that because scientific terms have specific meanings. Or don't you think that in the context of public health a pandemic affecting birds is the same as a pandemic affecting humans? I mean for an ecological discussion this would be a alright starting point, but certainly not if the context is public health, which is assumed if one mentions the WHO. Edit: perhaps that is what you are confused about. In the medical field (other than veterinary medicine) the baseline is the effect on humans. Hence, if public health officials talk about pandemics or outbreaks, they imply outbreaks and pandemic affecting humans. But if they talk about zoonotic events, the movements of animals becomes relevant (e.g. to outline that human risk is not localized). This is in fact what the article is saying, they the virus is widespread as it is an animal pandemic (widespread in animals). If the health officer had said that it was a "pandemic" without the animal qualifier, the assumption would be large spread in human population over wide geographic areas. I cannot believe that it took so many posts to emphasize that.

So, both, the traditionalist camp (i.e. the bomb resulted in capitulation) as well as the revisionist camp had prominent US scholars. For example the American historian Aleperovitz wrote (to my knowledge) one of the first publications arguing that the use of the bomb was ultimately a strategy toward the Soviet Union. Funnily as student I was more familiar with the revisionist school of thought, as the lectures I attended were led by a very prominent (I was not aware of it at that time) scholar who was a proponent it. Which kind of shows how a perspective is heavily influenced where you go to school.

Gosh, I must say either I am not communicating clearly or you have to increase your reading comprehension. He said it is an animal pandemic. Do you understand the difference if he only said "pandemic" without the qualifier? Or in other words, do you think that we can use the terms animal pandemic and pandemic in the given context interchangeably?

The TEE is dependent on fat-free body mass and Hadza adults are not only leaner, but are also smaller. Specifically the component relating to fat-free body mass is the BMR. In the cited study TEE was measured, but BMR was calculated based on equation given by a paper by Henry (2007), which include age, body weight, height and sex. Physical activity was estimated as TEE/ calculated BMR. So body fat is not measured or otherwise included, from what I can tell.

You are missing my point entirely. I am saying you keep mixing up terms and using them in a wrong way. What we have here are zoonotic outbreaks, not pandemics. I.e. if you changed the word in the above quote, you would be accurate. Calling it pandemic in this context is just wrong from a technical viewpoint. And every potential jump from animal influenza to humans is worrisome, regardless of scope. The reason is that it keeps mixing in animals, including farm animals and there is a chance of new variants that might be able to spread human to human. An important example was the 2009 swine flu pandemic, where H1N1 jumped to human (and pig-human is an expected route due to many similarities between these species) and spread from human to human.

You keep mixing up concepts (or using them in a bit sloppy manner) which confused matters a fair bit. To clarify things here are some rough definitions and relevant context. Zoonotic disease: infectious disease that can cross from non-humans to humans. They are very common and happen certainly more frequently than once a weekend. A very common infection is for example salmonellosis. Pandemic: generally refers to wide spread of an epidemic crossing international boundaries (especially spanning continents) and typically affecting large-ish number of people. It does not refer, for example, to severity. Using these definitions in OP refers to an animal pandemic (i.e. a large number of animals affected over a large area), but it is not a human pandemic, as there are only few jumps to humans. Any zoonotic infection can be a source of worry as mutations over time could lead to human to human infections (such as the case with swine flu and SARS-CoV-2 and ebola) but certainly it cannot be a human pandemic at the current state.

Yes of course, zoonotic disease are an ongoing concern. COVID-19 was one. It is just not a pandemic as COVID-19 is, as suggested in OP.

Actually that part is included in term "reproductive success".

No, it is a zoonotic disease as in there have been limited incidences in the spread from animal to human. That part is correct. But it is currently an animal pandemic as opposed to a human pandemic.

I think you missed a critical word in the statement. They said it was an animal pandemic, as in it is a pandemic among animals (specifically birds). It is not a human pandemic as human-to-human transmissions have not been documented yet, I believe. There are quite a few diseases circulating among e.g. migrating animals that are spreading, but most are not yet relevant to humans.

Conflating cultural and biological aspects generally makes poor arguments as it pre-supposes some natural order that folks should adhere to. While I am not (yet) saying that this is the case here, it is often a tactic used to push a narrative under the guise of "just asking questions", as we have seen in the past. So far OP seems to continue to ignore clarifications and counter arguments, though.

Considering that the context seems to be reproduction, that is a reasonable limitation (i.e. large and small gamete producers). But then it does indeed make no sense to focus on the human species for the rest of the, I am not sure what to call it. Argument?

The issue I have is that our classification of instinctive behaviour is really only specific when we talk about (almost) reflexive behaviour. There are examples in higher vertebrates which at this point (and it took really long to establish that) are considered higher levels of thought and planning. But at a simpler level, often data is missing as we don't have good experimental designs that are not simply variations of the ways we think. This has led to the rise of newer concepts such as that of behavioral flexibility (i.e. some understanding that animal behavior is not necessarily bound by instinctual constraints). A challenge which behavioural scientists are looking at is how identify what an animal understands about its environment how problems are solved using that knowledge.

Probably it has been said already and I missed it, but one way to think about it is that a brain (and potentially similar structures) are necessary but likely not sufficient to whatever one might define as mind.

How does your assumption square with reality? Is every woman constantly pregnant? Is the availability of women limiting the size of human populations? What is the evidence? If a hypothesis does not square up with reality/data one should revise one's assumptions, rather than doubling down. Starting with wrong premises results in wrong conclusions, even if the steps in-between are logical. Asking questions suggests that one is open to new information. What is your response to the information outlined in the posts above? In fact, have you perhaps bothered to google the term "gonochorism" and its evolution? That makes it way easier than trying to describe it the way you continue to do. Information is out there, but one has to seek it out (and be willing to learn).

Generally speaking, a self-limiting disease would not lead itself to a larger outbreak (essentially, if the effective reproduction number is >1. Rather, in a typical infection model the limit is based on proportion of immune to susceptible folks and is parametrized by e.g. infectious period and basic reproduction number). However, a combination of awareness training, testing and educating/isolating folks have managed to reduce the number of new infections (in the above framework it is basically reducing the effective reproduction number). Without that, it would likely have continued to circulate. As I said, the fact that it was going down was seen as a public health success, whereas the fact that it circulated to multiple countries was seen as a failure. The latter also showed us (together with the COVID-19 lessons) how badly most of the world is prepared to contain outbreaks. These numbers seem to to come from reports published (I think New England Journal of Medicine) and were from 2022. This particular outbreak was from clade II mpox, but past infections tended to hit younger folks (especially in Africa). That is another thing that has been discussed, mpox does occasionally break out, mostly in West in Central Africa. The 2022 outbreak also made headlines probably because it not only reached over 100 countries, but epicenters were in the Americas (especially US, but also Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) and Europe, which also explains the age demographics. Since 2022 numbers in those regions went down, but are still lingering at low numbers in Africa and a small surges in 2023 in South Asia and Western Pacific regions. Just to re-affirm that it is not simply gone.

I think there is a distinct difference how the public and how public health are seeing these events. Here is the thing, when mpox started to spread, it was kind of a best case scenario for public health intervention. It is moderately harmful, but not catastrophic, has visible symptoms, diagnostics exists and it requires direct contact to spread. Especially with elevated public health control still ongoing and rapidly deployed monitoring efforts (including wastewater testing), the assumption was that it should have been easy to mount a rapid response. What actually happened is still being discussed. However, what clearly did not happen was an early containment, it ultimately spread across multiple countries and was declared a so-called public health emergency of international concern in 2022. The case numbers went down in 2023 and the emergency ended, and some consider that an success (around 100k infections in more than 100 countries). But critics highlight the issue that the most effective control, early containment, failed utterly, and that just in the wake of the lessons from COVID-19, casting doubts on future outbreak control efforts with more dangerous infections.

That is not how nature works. Nature does not follow any ideals or thinks ahead. Whatever works, works. If it leads to reproductive success it will stick around. If it doesn't, it vanishes. You cannot think of nature like a planning entity and expect to be scientific about it.

If that was the case, why is hermaphroditism not the dominant reproductive strategy?