Moontanman

There is no doubt that many people get comfort from their religion but creationism is a lie fostered by people who are manipulating people into giving them huge sums of money, creationism depends on making everyone believe the bathwater is murky and pretending to look for the baby while their hands are in the pockets of the person who is doing the looking. It's just another way of muddying the water so you can't tell how deep it really is, but hey dive in, the water is fine..... I've spent quite a bit of time listening to Rays MBE, he is full of it and himself and makes his living from lying to people about religion, not to mention trying to make them believe that creationism is the one and only real religion and that any one who isn't a creationist has to be an atheist. I have zero respect for him and those like him... and there are a lot of them and show casing any of them just increases their power and fills their pockets, they need to be opposed at every turn by pointing out the facts of their deceit...

Ray comfort is an attention whore, he lives to spread his MBE and make money from it and while he wasn't paid for this i am sure it will indeed induce others to look him up on the net and eventually he will make more money off it. His MBE is so extensive it has become almost a religion all by it's self, he did of course win the Golden Crocoduck, in 2009 i think it was, for violating the 9th commandment in the name of his religion. I've been praying to ydoaPs for some time now, he always gives me what I ask for....

What sort of mutations are expecting to be able to induce? You can kill them with the agents you mentioned but I'm not certain where you intend to go with this.

I think it is arguable that there are only 3 senses in humans, taste and smell are the same thing, sensing chemicals, touch and hearing are the same thing, sensing vibrations of matter, then you have sight which is sensing electromagnetic radiation. Some animals can sense magnetic and electrical fields like Mormyrids (fish) and knife fishes, they generate their own elctromagnetic fields and actively use them to both communicate and navigate. Sharks as well can sense electromagnetic fields although it is passive detection, some birds have been shown to sense magnetic fields passively as well. For there to be a sense other than these you first have to have a mechanism for that sense. Brain waves are electro-chemical in nature but far too weak as far as anyone can tell to be sensed by another brain through air but Mormyrids do indeed connect with each other through electromagnetic fields because water conducts these fields much better than air.

So, you are saying that mammals in general are somehow less related to reptiles than birds are related to reptiles? Are you saying that mammals somehow appeared with no basil forms? Are you saying that mammal like reptiles are basil to achosaurs but not mammals? Mammal like reptiles were not basal to archosaurs by any definition of the idea. One group of reptiles evolved in one direction and another evolved in another direction (I am sure there were more groups that went no where in an evolutionary way and much more complexity but as you said earlier we are being crude here) Mammals as we know them did not spring into existence, they had precursors just like dinosaurs did. If not for the ecological pressures of dinosaurs the mammal like reptiles would never have given rise to the animals we see as mammals today. It's like you are trying to say humans are related to apes but not monkeys. (humans are both apes and monkeys by definition) Archosaurs, specifically dinosaurs dominated the mammal like reptiles not due to chance but do to real superior adaptations that the mammal like reptiles simply didn't have, like an upright stance, bipedal, better respiratory systems, the mammal like reptiles, even the more advanced ones we would have seen as more mammalian couldn't compete and were driven to extinction by the competition of dinosaurs. Only those mammal like reptiles that had evolved to fill the niches occupied by small creatures survived. This evolutionary pressure changed them drastically from their ancestors but the connection is still there. I honestly do not see how you can separate mammals from reptiles so completely when they obviously evolved from reptiles at some point in their evolutionary past as did archosaurs, yes most archosaurs do superficially resemble reptiles more than most mammals but that is due to the more reptilian mammals having been eliminated by competition with the dinosaurs. Can you honestly say that crocodiles are reptiles with no caveats? Compare a Komodo Dragon with a Crocodile, not the same type of creature, they only superficially resemble each other and their evolutionary connection is just as distant as the distance between a Komodo Dragon and a Lion. An alligator is no more a lizard than a bird is a lizard, some mammals not only lay eggs but lack both the upright stance of most mammals and also lack efficient thermo-regulatory systems. In our modern world none of the more basil mammals have survived, the three types of mammals that do survive are quite different from each other, some would say as different as crocodiles from dinosaurs at least. Either I am stupid which is of course entirely possible or we do not understand each other very well.

I view the tea party as the future of humanity, they possess the absolute truth as described in their revealed word of god, this absolute truth has so much weight with the people who believe, it will eventually create such a pull of absolute truth it will pull the entirety of human society into an intellectual black hole from which nothing intelligent will ever be able to return. that is what I think of the tea party... brainteaserfan, it was a joke, not a real suggestion of how run a government but the tea party is no joke and the danger it poses is no joke either....

I never said archosaurs were ancestral to mammals, I never said that dinosaurs shared more affinities with mammals than reptiles, why do you keep saying this? I simply said that both dinosaurs and mammals were descended from reptiles, I did not say mammals were decended from dinosaurs. If i wanted to draw a crude phylogeny, as you did of archosaurs and thier relationship with dinosaurs, of mammals I would show the mammal like reptiles as being similar in their relationship to mammals as archosaurs were to dinosaurs. Again, i did not ever, not even once, suggest that mammals descended from archosaurs or dinosaurs.... and the demitrodon was not an archosaur, it was a mammal like reptile. Dinosaurs were no more reptiles than birds are lizards, yes they shared common ancestors but dinosaurs were not just big reptiles any more than crocodiles are just big lizards.

All I can say is WOW! I had no idea I had fallen into the trap of AGW denialists, lol It just looked like an interesting article about how the Earth exchanges heat with space....

You seem to be thinking that mammals emerged from reptiles fully formed as mammals when in fact (and yes you are correct mammals in this sense did indeed evolve before archosaurs did but not by much) http://genesispanthesis.tripod.com/fossils/rept_mam.html The mammal like reptiles were the first of the mammalian line Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur, it was on of the first mammal like reptiles from which all mammals derived. Dimetrodon was not a direct ancestor of modern mammals but they are related as much as crocodiles are to dinosaurs. later mammal like reptiles like Tetraceratops had more mammalian characteristics but were not modern mammals any more than crocodiles are birds or ancestral to birds. Your mistake is equating the mammals that emerged at the end of the dinosaurs as the only mammals but the mammal like reptiles were ancestral to mammals as we know them and if they were still around we would classify them as mammals not reptiles and if not for the rise of the dinosaurs these mammal like reptiles would have dominated and it's doubtful that mammals as we see them would ever have evolved. mammals as we see them now are just a tiny branch of the mammal like reptiles just like all the dinosaurs including birds are just branches of archosaurs. a great many dinosaurs even the really large ones more not the reptilian beasts we imagine but were covered with feathers and the living animals would have born as little similarity to a lizard as a chicken does an iguana. BTW, reptilian like scales occur in some mammals as well so the idea that mammals have no connection to reptiles because they have fur and not scales is as inaccurate as saying dinosaurs didn't a connection because some of them had feathers. The animals we call mammals had deep roots, every bit as deep as dinosaurs, quite possibly deeper if you count the mammal like reptiles but the first mammals were not tiny harry creatures hiding from dinosaurs, they were large animals every bit as large and impressive as the first dinosaurs but the dinosaurs won the evolutionary lotto, at least the first few of them...

If they are bringing their entire culture with them, note that does not mean they bring everyone in their culture, why would FTL communication be necessary? If their reason to come here is to utilize the resources of the solar system to make more colony/ships and to spread to other stars and do the same why would they have to have FTL communication? When Europeans come to the western hemisphere messages to the home countries took years to make it back. Why would that be a bad thing for space travelers?

Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest ScienceDaily (July 29, 2011) — Data from NASA's Terra satellite suggests that when the climate warms, Earth's atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change may indicate. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110729031754.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_environment+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+--+Top+Environment%29

Again, where did I suggest that mammals evolved from dinosaurs? Both archosaurs and mammals evolved from reptiles, a similar crude phylogeny could be made with mammals and reptiles.

If aliens are visiting our solar system it's likely they have been here a long time, and IMHO have no use for planets other than asteroids and kuiper belt type objects, no need for FTL and the point would be what ever the aliens wanted it to be but the possibility exists. (guessing the motivations of aliens is yet another can of worms) I doubt they would help humans build anything and i have seen no evidence of this help, I am sure if you watch the show with some skepticism you will not see any either. The Drake equation is meaningless if aliens do colonize other star systems. Using technology not much more advanced than we already have humans could, if they wanted, colonize the entire galaxy in a million years or so. (I've read estimates of 250,000 years to 25,000,000 years but either extreme is a blink of the cosmic "eye") We could do this and never set foot on an object big enough to be round by it's own gravity. Maybe they already have or do and keep quiet to not attract competition and simply do not use planets, especially planets with life that is potentially a harmful source of disease and parasites. Gravity wells are hard to transport things out of and all the materials needed to build colonies, which could double as slow boat type ships, are already in orbit around the stars, the ort cloud and kuiper belt are a vast source of everything any life forms could possibly want. Why they would hide from us is a legitimate question and the best idea i have is that they are not hiding from us but use communication techniques designed to hide themselves from other civilizations that might compete with them in some way we have no concept of, noisy aliens might not survive as well as quiet ones. The only reason i can see for such aliens to have contact with us is to influence us in some way that is beneficial to them, i think quite possibly inspiring religion in us and using these differing religions to control and confuse us and to keep us fighting among our selves so we take a very long time to achieve enough cooperation between ourselves to begin to explore our own solar system and to colonize it the same way they are doing is a reasonable assumption. I guess i went a little too far OT, sorry. But if you want we can continue on another thread, there are several similar ones already here or start a new one, i vote a new one but for sure watch the show, i am sure if you use a little bit of skepticism you'll see the alien part is mostly hype much like my assessment of aliens being here already. (but still a lot of fun to speculate about )

Possibly being assigned to office could be random but at the end of the term a vote, to either retire you in luxury or shoot you, could be taken? That might be a bit of an incentive to do a good job, now it's just a popularity contest to get elected so you get the perks after whether you are a total disaster or not.

Exactly where did i suggest mammals evolved from dinosaurs?

Thank you mooey for that link, it saddened me very much to think that i am always under scrutiny as a potential rapist due to the actions of others. While I would never even consider propositioning a woman in an elevator to begin with I honestly never considered how vulnerable women must feel under those circumstances.

Hello Catherine

I'm not sure if it has been tried but it shouldn't be difficult to do, we have already done the opposite in wild populations of everything from fish to mammals. We have also reversed the process in wild populations and resulted in larger animals instead of smaller. all you have to do to make individuals in populations smaller is to eliminate the larger animals regularly. This is done routinely in wild fish populations by requiring that only larger sized fish can be harvested and smaller fish are thrown back. This results in smaller fish breeding and larger fish not being able to breed because they are dead, over all, the size of individuals decreases. The opposite effect can be seen by only taking smaller fish and leaving larger sized fish, this results in the over all size of individuals in a given population being larger, if you slowly increase the size of individuals allowed to be taken while still taking small individuals then the over all size of individuals will increase.

Damn, maybe John Titor was real.....

It's actually not proper to say Dinosaurs were reptiles any more than it is proper to say mammals are reptiles. Both animal groups evolved from reptiles through various intermediate forms. Dinosaurs and mammals split from the reptiles at approxamately the same time, dinosaurs pretty much domionated mammals and through this domination/competition the mammals we see today evolved. Many ancient animals that are commonly thought of as dinosaurs were not and were more closely related to mammals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimetrodon If not for the dinosaurs mammals would have no doubt never evolved into the forms we see today and might have more closely resembled the dimetrodon.

This tale keeps popping up, Tokay gekos are weird looking lizards but weird looking doesn't equal a cure for anything, i bet the gekos are taking a beating from people looking to get rich quick.

There are various ways to look at this, there was a age of wood, when the things we made were basically sticks, often modified in various ways but wood none the less, then came stone, for weapons and building, then metals, bronze and iron, and now we are entering the age of carbon, carbon fibers and nanotubes, carbon is replacing metals and soon we will be in the age of carbon.

If a man is fooled by a female who is under the age of consent (which i think is so totally arbitrary as to really be meaningless) and that man has consensual sex with that female calling him a rapist is just wrong. (calling him a child molester is criminally slanderous) On the other hand taking advantage of a woman who is drunk or other wise incapacitated is wrong if she is 12 or 112. The idea that a woman is somehow responsible for being raped just because she is dressed immodestly or she is alone or vulnerable in some other way is despicable. I have been a nudist much of my life, there is no reason what so ever to assert that anyone is to blame for having sex forced on them due to being immodestly dressed, this idea of uncontrolled sexual urges is bullshit, it is at the very least a sign of mental illness, sociopath or psychopath would be my guess in some cases but being a part of a society that tells you that is an excuse for rape is also part of the problem, I think this makes that society mentally ill as well. Being sexually attracted to someone is not an excuse for rape, anyone, man or woman who cannot control their sexual urges well enough that simply being in contact with a nude or vulnerable fellow human being is an excuse for forcing sex on them is simply unacceptable. There is no excuse for forcing sex on anyone under any circumstances.

The Sunny Side of Smut For most people, pornography use has no negative effects—and it may even deter sexual violence By Melinda Wenner Moyer | July 22, 2011 | It used to be tough to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20110722

Rigney, don't back down off this, it is very true that more people die from other causes every year, probably more people die slipping on soap in the bath tub but terrorism is an attempt to disrupt our entire first world civilization. Terrorism affects every one. Fear of terrorism has far reaching consequences to all of us. literally billions of dollars are spent to try and ensure that terrorists do not succeed in disrupting the every day comings and goings of our society. Terrorists and the fear they spread costs us billions and living in fear touches the lives of nearly every one. Terrorism disrupts not only business and the money trade creates that provides for all of us to live our lives it also disrupts entire governments and causes war and subjugates entire populations and incites them to do horrendous things that they normally would not do. Terrorists of the fundamentalist religious types incite the subjugation of women, influences governments to go to war, terrorist stifles the advance of our entire first world civilization. This effect probably kills more people in third world countries by keeping first world countries from helping than anything else. You are correct Rigeny, terrorism is a huge evil that needs to be stopped if for no other reason it keeps us from fixing things that kill far more people.