CharonY

This is an oxymoron. By definition all rodents belong to Rodentia. If they don't, they are not rodents.

To be precise, I do not like the term instinct too much as the definition has been muddled quiet a bit. In general it refers to a series of behaviors that are initiated upon a certain stimulus. However there are many issues with that. A less complex behavior are reflexes. While less complex, they are still orders of magnitude more complex than certain regulatory circuits that are based on biochemical reactions (i.e. receptor-ligand binding leading to activation of transcription factors, leading to gene expression changes, to give a rough example).

As I mentioned, the direction is coupled to the tumble frequency. If it is on the right track it tumbles less and moves towards it. If it deviates, tumble frequency increases and will continue to do so until they are on the right track and the tumble frequency gets reduced. How they are oriented due to the tumble is by chance. But since the frequency is gradient dependent, the net movement will be towards the attractant. Essentially it is a random walk with a net movement towards the attractant (or away from a repellant). So, no, it is not a pure chance event.

I am not sure what you mean with differentially. Do you mean how the frequency is controlled? The system is overall very simple but incredibly clever. To clarify, the tumble is induced by either stopping flagellar movement or by rotating it the other way round. The latter is the case in some bacteria and it results that the flagella (which in this case are organized in a bundle) become disorganized and induce a random tumbling of the cell. The tumbling can therefore be partially active (unorganized movement) or, depending on cell size and morphology be a combination of diffusion, momentum and liquid viscosity. The trick is that the activity of the regulator that determines the movement of the flagellar motor is directly coupled to the concentration that the cell senses. There are other types of movements, of course which utilize a number of mechanisms.

It is not instinct either. It is in essence a biochemical reaction cascade (or the result thereof). We have a long way to go to bridge the understanding of these relatively simple chemical processes (which, to a large part, we still do not really understand), to the much more complicated question regarding intelligence and consciousness (or the illusion thereof).

A nitpick, but as Ophiolite pointed out, rabbits are related to rodents, but are themselves not members of Rodentia.

Unfortunately there is not enough information to do proper troubleshooting. Typical questions would e.g. whether you got technical replicates and how consistent the findings are on that level. Then what is the observed biological variance etc.

Can you imagine how socially awkward it can be if you are by far the dimmest bulb in a group?

One think I have to mention first is that flagella is used as a term both for eukaryotic as well as for prokaryotic systems. However, while the functions are similar, structurally they are not related. That being said, the best understood and common chemotactic orientation using flagella is the run-and-tumble mechanism. Essentially linear movements are broken up by random tumbles in which the organism reorients its path (randomly) and then starts moving again. The trick is that the frequency of the tumble is dependent on the taxis. I.e. in the case of positive taxis the tumble frequency is reduced while swimming towards the attractant, and increased, if moving away from it. This model for flagellar-mediated taxis has been derived from bacterial motility and elements are also found in zooplankton. But there are also other motility patterns indicating that more mechanism exists (depending on species) and likely include more mechanisms. Note that zooplankton includes a wide array of organisms, independent on the presence of flagella per se. Basically any smallish animal drifting in water can be considered one, which includes e.g. metazoa in various developmental stages.

We do not have a real cancer expert here. But even if we have, there is no good medical recommendation you can get in these kinds of forums, especially without details about the precise diagnostic information. There are websites for cancer patients in which they can exchange experiences and he could try to find information whether his condition is common, for instance. But again, there is nothing you can really do (except suggest that to him).

There may be a little bit to it, but it depends on the overall occasion. In Germany there is a social pub culture, where you go in the evening to meet up, drink and talk. Often people change into non-work clothes to relax (and coming in in work clothes would be slightly impolite, i guess). There are certain pubs that cater for after-work drinks (which are shorter events) and I have seen plenty of people in working clothes there, especially when there is someplace to sit outside (Biergarten). However, people working in areas that create a lot of dirt, usually wash up and change and rarely go into restaurants in pubs, to avoid making a mess, obviously. There may be local differences, though. I am talking about mos of the north-western half of Germany.

May I also ask what the absolute truth of biological system is supposed to be?

Nice to have you back, iNow.

Depending on what you already know and what kind of paper you want to write (I assume it is something like a term paper?) you may want to first check textbooks and maybe wikipedia to get a general idea. Then check Pubmed for instance and pick out reviews of specific cool examples to make your paper stand out. Homosexual rape and sexual selection in worms ´, for instance.

I would argue that life is an emergent property. So it is not merely a function of complexity. It has been speculated that the precursors of life came from replicating nucleic acids (and the rest of life is a kind of an add-on).

Bacteria do not have a nucleus. The lowest measured intracellular pH that I came across in bacteria (and remembered) was around 5. Edit: short sentences and I managed to introduce numerous typos. I suck.

This is far from being a fact, depending on the system. That in principle such cycles exist is not the issue, though. The question is whether these are examples of equilibrium systems. And as ecologists have pointed out, there is, as a whole, little evidence for such systems. The experimental recreation is an example of a non-equilibrium hunter-prey cycle, for instance.

This is indeed the crux of this discussion and something that Greg does not appear to accept. L-V has so far not been validated on a broad basis. And I think this is the reason: In secondary school "facts" are taught. The problem in teaching at university is that you have to unteach many of these facts. This is an incredibly big deal. We are not talking about rough trends, but about direct relationship. If there is none, we just matched random patterns (and again, the linked papers discuss it in that terms). Only because it looks neat it does not mean it survives statistical scrutiny (which is what ecological model have to provide, otherwise it is just gut feeling). Let us spin this around, if there are copious examples of it, why do text books rely on these few that have been thoroughly criticized in academic literature? Text books are good introductory reads. By their very nature they tend to make shortcuts to provide easy to understand narratives. And sometimes these narratives are wrong or incomplete.

Without reading: human ear is already wrong (as in it is not a human ear).

Do the afterimages appear similar to the "shape" of the glare you see on the screen?

The point is not the time. The problem is that the data set where collected from different areas. I.e. connections between these two populations are likely by chance, not by mechanism (in order to show that they have to be from the same region, obviously). If you look at the respective graph, you will also notice that at times the lynx increase predates the hare increase, a point also discussed in the Hall paper (have hares started hunting?). Also it was mentioned that similar cycles are also found in populations where hares alone live, further indicating that the found association was just chance. Really, check those papers out. They should be worth your time.

Here is the thing: unless it is in the public domain or otherwise distributed freely, it is not legal. I agree that textbooks are too expensive. Getting used ones is probably the best way to reduce costs, though some argue that this is one of the reasons why the prices are so high...

Greg, I think you missed the point. Due to the spatial separation there is cannot be any connection between the indicated lynx and hare population. In the review (which is really a good read and with a few hundred of citations it is also one of the central reviews in this area), the authors showed that overall empirical data is not in agreement with predictions of equilibrium models, including the study John mentioned. The conclusion is that there is no good direct evidence of truly equilibrium systems to be found.

Most organelles have a turnover. Same goes for proteins, lipids etc. If your question is whether the molecular make-up of a neuron is static, then the answer is no. The components are more or less in a coordinated flux.