CharonY

Drinking urine to gain water is a lousy idea. The basic idea is to concentrate urine before getting rid of it while minimizing water loss. Drinking the high concentrated salt solution would not be fatal but lead to more water loss (as you need more water to get rid of the added salts).

While 16s rRNA has become poppular for higher taxa, they were found to be problematic e.g. at genus or species level. However, even at higher taxa the groups can shift a little. However some are better established than others. The most "official" version, if one wants to call it, is derived from Bergey's manual. Last time I looked there were over 20 phyla (and an enormous group of unclassified ones, so there is potential for more).

Sea turtles have a life expectancy in the eighties. Squids as most (if not all) cephalopods have a rather low life expectancy. Somewhere around 3-5 years maybe. Also moved to speculations.

The regulation is determined by the equilibrium between the target RNA and the sRNA. So if there is an excess of the target RNA it would be indeed translated. This would be a situation when no silencing occurs. During silencing either the sRNA concentration would be increased or the mRNA decreased based on other regulatory mechanisms to determine their final balance.

Sounds like homework. Please post your posts and let others comment on them.

Well, what do you think? What would happen during Gram staining of either bacterium and what is their overall shape? Bonus question: what is the (phylogenetic) relationship between those two bacteria?

These are not really phylogenetic groups....

The premise is wrong. Shrinking is not due to reduced cell proliferation. We even change height a little during the day due to diurnal variations in swelling of invertebral disks. During aging the height changes are also mostly due to changes in the spine. Wrong premises usually result in wrong conclusions and even worse extrapolations.

Did you sequence the inset or just determined size? The strain is restriction deficient. Most likely the ligation did not work as expected, or you had a mix in fragments and the smaller gets preferentially cloned etc. etc.

I think few dispute the fact that a nation has the right to regulate the borders. There is of course a question of what are the cost-benefit estimates of immigration and illegal immigration. The main problem I have with that discussion is that they are often grossly distorted and not based on facts or at least informed estimates. Based on these one could/should determine what influx of immigration is desirable, what is sustainable and where one would like to put the rates. But again, I would like to have this based on data, not ideologies.

Similar trends were started in Europe maybe a decade (or a bit longer than that?) when the taxes for fuel were increased. People got more interested in fuel efficiency, did not require the big cars (average family size was already pretty low) but sill needed acceptable performance (autobahn without sufficient horse powers can be quite a challenge). So industry rolled out fuel efficient cars. Essentially the technology was already there, only the market conditions were not right yet. The increase in taxes was a move to change that. However the average horsepower also decreased as the goal was to create a niche (and then expand it) for small (roughly Yaris sized) cars with a mileage of around 40 mpg.

Check out a few names. Do you notice the (very simple) difference?

Also regarding sensitivities, is there data around how many of the 9/11 survivors are against the mosque?

There is almost nothing accurate in the post above, starting with the definition of evolution. Evolution describes a process and hence does not merely describe existing variation. Things deteriorate from there.

The short version is that not all loci mutate (or maintain mutations, to be more precise) at the same rate.

Basically it depends on what kind of data you have and also somewhat what you want to test. Assuming that your data appears to be discrete (I guess something in the line of solved the problem yes/no or how many times), usually a chi-square is can be used. Note that I am only guessing what you want to test, though.

Loci in this context are simply regions on the DNA. Mitochondria possess their own DNA and mitconchondrial loci refer regions on it, where as nuclear loci refer to DNA regions in the main chromsomes (which are located in the nucleus).

There is no time limit, that is the point. It is all contextual. It all depends on where you draw the boundaries for a given population and what you want to discuss. The reason is that evolution is a smooth function and does not naturally lead to discrete boundaries. Species is just something that we added to create structure in phylogeny. In other words, it depends on the context you want to describe whether the term evolved is correct, or not. For instance, it is mostly correct for the most part to state (as above) that the current wolf and dog populations have evolved from a common population ("ancestor" is mostly used in situations where speciations occured). There are exceptions, however. Dogs and wols are still able to reproduce and the above description would be inaccurate to apply to this offspring. To summarize, the term evolved is used to describe the history of a given population or the phylogenetic history of given populations. The accuracy is determined by how strong the boundaries between the populations are. Species would be on the one end (very strong) anything below that would be fuzzier and context-dependent.

In the simplest definition evolution is the process resulting in gene pool composition. As such you could take any two populations and try to make evolutionary inferences. Speciation is merely one special (and slightly arbitrary) event. However, extant species generally have not evolved from each other. Dogs and wolves share common ancestors and while dogs (as a subpopulation) have diverged differently, the gene pool in current wolves will have diverged from the original stock as well (albeit presumably at a lower rate). To use the term evolved you would walk back in time and trace the phylogeny of ancestors.

Also it depends on how they are inactivated. A simple point mutation, for instance, could happen rather fast, but the complete loss of genes would require probably gene duplication events plus mutations to generate enzymes with similar function. That could take very long (or may not happen at all). Note that this has nothing to do with the complexity of an organism (whatever metric one would use to assess it).

Let us go back to this claim Note that at this point we are talking about information content of search algorithms. Not about information per se. That being said it is true that averaged over all possible landscape no algorithm outperforms a random walk. A rather obvious observation. Algorithm only performs well in specific search spaces- no surprise there. Averaging over all search spaces results in identical outcomes to each node and thus each choice would lead to the same result. So what it basically boils down to is that certain search algorithm perform better in specific search spaces and not at all in others. Surprise! It has been postulated much earlier that search algorithms do not generate information but merely transform it. This does not really provides deep insights, the only interesting bits were the attempts to quantify the content, in which a rather abysmal job was done. There must be a place for dull papers, too, I guess. Now what he tries to do (not in peer-reviewed publications from what I can see) is to apply this to evolution and here is where he fails. Even disregarding the problems of trying to model evolution as a search, Dembski overlooks some very basic facts. The single most important element is that evolution does not work on all possible search spaces but in specific, ordered ones. Essentially, it works in a landscape in which each search step in the landscape informs upon the structure of the landscape. To translate this into a biological equivalent is that this particular search works, if the survival rate informs upon the fitness (i.e. offspring with variation and natural selection) . Of course, nature has much more upon her sleeves, but we shall leave it as that in order to keep things simple. However, another important aspect about evolution is that (again if we want to discuss it as a form of search) it is not a static search (Dembski mostly discusses static searches). The search is constantly changing by incorporating information about the current landscape. Thus you do not need to put the information into the algorithm beforehand, but let it learn by reading the landscape it walks over.

Well, the paper has been retracted now. Strong indication of lousy editorial work, though.

I have to add to that roughly half of the illegal immigrants present in the US do not cross the borders illegally, but have overstayed their Visa. An interesting question would be how many of these are parents. Another question is what problems these anchor babies bring and whether it would justify a new amendment.

Actually I am not that sure about the social pressure. For most of my colleagues I have no idea about their religious attitudes. The reason is that it simply does not factor in into science. I know a handful of Christians, mostly because they mentioned at one point or another that they are going to church (and are thus not available e.g. for meetings). It is likely that the vast majority are atheist, but it simply never came up.

Well technically there are more mechanisms out there. This is just the very first idea as described by Darwin.However, even in the absence of natural selection other events, as e.g. stochastic ones can influence the gene pool composition, depending on the size of the population, for instance.