exchemist

Yes, that would be a start but I don't think it's enough just to replicate known physics with this scheme. For the theory to be properly testable, there needs to be a prediction it makes of an observation that would not be expected from standard physics. Otherwise all you have is something like Bohmian mechanics, which does no more than replicate QM (at best) but with an added hypothesis, and thus gets knocked on the head by Ockham's Razor. One might expect an aether theory like this to have some observable distinguishing features.

I'm getting that feeling myself, having just tried to explain to a guy at Richer Sounds that I want to find a way of getting a wireless connection between my amp and a pair of remote speakers that I want to put in my kitchen. I don't think he has grasped that these speakers are the Wharfedale Denton 2s that I bought just before going up to uni in 1972, and so I want not just a wi-fi signal, but something with enough power to drive a pair of passive speakers. I actually don't think it's possible - I'll just have to run some thick wires. Cooking with Floyd, or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, with the garden door open should annoy the neighbours!

As I understand the paper, here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2024.0137. from which the Science Daily bulletin is taken, the UV screening pigment syctonemin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytonemin. is also found in desert cyanobacteria. It seems to be hypothesised that it may have evolved very early in the Archaean, before the Great Oxygenation Event, when there would have been a reducing atmosphere with no free oxygen - and presumably therefore no protective ozone layer. However I notice the paper also says that at that time reduced iron (I suppose they mean Fe²⁺ as opposed to Fe³⁺) would have been present at quite high concentrations in seawater, i.e. before it oxidised and precipitated out into the rusty red rocks generated when free oxygen appeared. The paper suggests this dissolved iron may have played a role in absorbing UVC and helped screen organisms from it. Which rather seems to militate against the need for a sunscreen pigment like syctonemin against UVC. But then they say when the Great OxygenationEvent took place the shielding iron would have gone, leading to an advantage in having a UV screening pigment to hand - and also an antioxidant since avoiding oxidation then became a further challenge for organisms. I suspect the answer may be that syctonemin gives broad spectrum protection from UV, not just against UVC. It may be protection from UVB and A that was the issue when its synthesis evolved. In other words it is just a matter of luck, as it were, that it happens to protect against UVC as well - which is what these exobiologists were interested in, as they were looking at life outside the Earth in harsher environments. But I may have misconstrued this so would welcome other commentary.

To some extent this must be a natural progression. I'm old enough to have ground the valves in the cylinder head and tuned the carburettors of an MGB, but you can't do that kind of thing on a modern car because of all the computer connections and emission-related adjustments. So I'm not surprised about all the TCP/IP stuff. But I admit one might expect people to know the difference between a broadband connection and a mobile. After all, they are commonly supplied by different providers on different contracts.

What? We have the data on infant mortality today and we have estimates from the c.19th and from the Medieval period. That's what we need, so we have it. The rest of your post doesn't make much sense. I have no idea what you mean by "joining" religion with evolution. Evolution is natural science. Religion isn't. The only attempt to join them I'm aware of was so-called "Intelligent Design", which is pseudoscience. And it makes no sense to connect evolution in its biological sense with the development of medicine, as the latter is due to increasing human knowledge, which is not determined by evolutionary processes. As for this ape business, which for some weird reason seems to consume you, that's not for discussion here.

I see you have twice in the last 24hrs tried to resurrect this topic in other threads, whie ignoring this one. I refer you to my post on your other thread "Blowing the Cover off Mathematics". As I explain there, this guy Colin Leslie Dean may not even exist and certainly is no philosopher. He, or whoever is behind his possibly fake identity, seems to be just an extremely bad composer of erotic poetry, somewhere in Australia. On-line searches for him as an author, thinker or academic yield no result. His argument is obviously wrong, as others have pointed out - and as is, in fact, explained on the physics stack exchange to which your OP directed us. Why raise the topic again on other threads if you are not willing to discuss it here? Or are you just trying to generate publicity for Colin Leslie Dean?

I realise I need to correct one point in my post. The references I made to "Gem" are not appropriate to this poster. I was confusing @prjna with @Prajna . The rest however stands, I think.

That is not what this survey says: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country According to that, in 2024 the USA scored 83 points while most European countries scored 90 +/- 1 or so. Of course you have to read the report to understand the ranking criteria. But whatever the criteria, I would expect the ranking of the USA to fall further in 2025 and 2026, due to loss of media and academic freedom, the loss of independence of the justice system, the collapse of the Legislature in controlling the Executive, and all the other things we read about daily.

This seems confused. To try to sort it out a bit: 1) the data on infant mortality has already been posted in the thread from available sources, so it's pointless for you to demand original data, sampling etc. 2) You most certainly cannot apply the term evolution here, at least not in its biological sense. The thread is about the history of development in human understanding of what is needed for infant health, not about evolution. 3) Having nevertheless set up the Aunt Sally of treating this topic as if it is evolution you then suggest that, according to an evolutionary view, medicine could not be said to have progressed, only "changed". I assume you do this in order to make evolution look ridiculous. But, as nobody with any sense would treat the growth of human knowledge as biological evolution, it is your attempt to do so that that looks ridiculous. 4) And finally, surprise, surprise, we arrive at your perennial preoccupation with denying that mankind is a species of ape. That, I suspect, is what lay behind your rather unclear post. But that's not the subject of the thread either. Just for clarity, as it is not shown on the graph as reproduced here, the figures are per thousand live births.

Good, so now you've got some insight into the answer to your original question, plus the knowledge that the big change was actually not at the end of the Middle Ages as you originally assumed, but between about 1850 and 1950. (I rowed at school with a guy who had a withered leg from polio - he was born in 1954, like me, but had somehow missed the vaccination that I had been given. So that tie was about the end of polio cases in the UK.)

He is, however, a resident expert on biology, which is why he is able to speak with a degree of authority on subjects like this.

Untrue. Anonymity on a forum like this is provided already, in the form of the handle you can choose to be known by when you join. Subterfuge designed to mislead is not required.

The preservation of anonymity neither requires nor justifies misrepresentation. You misrepresented a paper you wrote as being by a 3rd party, with the deliberate intention of gaining a more favourable reception for it. That is by your own admission. All this guff about anonymity is entirely irrelevant. Especially since you, just a few weeks later, posted another paper bearing the name of the same author, which you said you wrote. So anonymity was - suddenly - no longer a concern, apparently.

Just for fun, it being a slow day, I looked up Colin Leslie Dean's poetry and found this amusing critique: "Trust me, dude, I read it. I wish I hadn't, but I read the first poem it gave. It read like angsty beat poetry, only with a different structure. And bad. It was completely unpoetic and unoriginal, it was about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead (only without the sledgehammer's emotional impact), and it had exactly the same erotic qualities as a train wreck. As to the content: it was so far-right and misogynist that the best analogy I can think of is some hideous combination of Hemmingway and Pound, only with a complete lack of any literary worth. Dean shows a hillariously bad understanding of both the basic precepts of feminism and the actual content of The Female Eunuch not to mention some fairly twisted ideas of female sexuality. It's an obvious attempt to create controversy as a means of getting attention, rather than actually writing good verse. This guy is the Ed Wood of poetry, only without Wood's sense of fun. That poem is to poetry as falling down the stairs and breaking your collar-bone is to ballet. In conclusion: I didn't like it." (From: https://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?23714-Controversial-poet-colin-leslie-dean ) I laughed aloud, reading this. The reviewer didn't mince his words. "The Ed Wood* of poetry" is great. Further on in the discussion on that forum, the same poster quips that: "I've seen better pathos on license plates". Arf arf. And this guy, if he exists at all, thinks he's a great philosopher, able to pontificate on where mathematics is leading us all astray. 😆 Perhaps he's a Vogon in disguise. *For anyone who does not know Ed Wood, he's responsible for producing the worst film of all time: "Plan Nine from Outer Space", which I used to have on videotape. So bad it's now a cult classic.

Whose words are you quoting here? I ask as I think you and your chatbot may have been taken in by a fraud. "Colin Leslie Dean" may not exist: https://prabook.com/web/fraud_colin_leslie.dean/638346 What he writes certainly reads like silly rubbish to me. And the website of the "publisher", looks a lot like a crank site: http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com As to the content, the attempt to make out that mathematics is some sort of political power structure strikes me as absurd paranoia and ignorance of a high order. I actually chuckled to read that mathematics is said to be "trapped" by its own logic. Well, er, yes, that's rather the point. Mathematics has logical rules that constrain it - to be logical, that is. Unlike a soi-disant composer of erotic poetry, somewhere in Australia. 😁 If I were you I'd give "Gem" a goodnight kiss and get out more. P.S. It seems this forum had a brief run round the track with nonsense from whoever this is, or was, back in 2008: https://scienceforums.net/topic/28167-biggest-maths-fraud-in-history/ P.P.S. maybe you might set your chatbot on the case of who this "Colin Leslie Dean" is and what credentials he has. I think it will draw a blank, as I have done. He certainly has no presence on the internet as an academic or author that I can find. Funny thing is, this name rings a bell with me. I think I've run across it before and it turned out to be all invention.

What time? If you have read the thread you will already know what diseases we have been talking about. Yes, it seems reasonable that ancient peoples could distinguish deaths from specific causes such as disease, conflict and famine from those due to what they might think of natural old age. So 70 is about right for that.

An absurd premise, and an absurd non-sequitur.

So you thought your paper would get a better reception if you pretended it was written by a third party. I see. And you think that deception is OK, apparently.

Interesting idea. I don't know whether signs of resistance to particularly virulent diseases might be recognisable in the genome. Perhaps @CharonY would know. But food shortage in the cold winters of N Eurasia may well be what bred lactose tolerance in only the people living in that part of the world. I wonder when cheese was invented. That must have been a crucial step in winter provisioning. But I am leading us off-topic for the thread.

Hmm, I didn't know hydroquinone could be used for that. It's a mild reducing agent (oxidising to benzoquinone), but I see it works as a skin lightener by decreasing melanin production in some way. Not clear how exactly. I do recall the ads for skin lightening concoctions when I was in Dubai in the 80s, aimed at the substantial population from the Indian subcontinent.

I presume you mean in science, given the context. I would say by considering observations of nature and learning the theories that account for them, and then by either making new classes of observation that go beyond what these theories account for, or by forming hypotheses, testable by observation, that account for observations that the theories do not cover adequately.

That is really interesting and thought-provoking. It is also somewhat reassuring, for those of us worried about the value to be placed by business - and wider society - on the human intellect in the future.

Very interesting indeed. And yet another zoonotic disease of course, something many of us are more aware of nowadays than a decade ago. But, to be clear, this is not the origin of Yersinia pestis itself, just of the strain that gave rise to the Black Death. There have been earlier plague outbreaks in human history, e.g the Plague of Justinian, in ~500AD. And according to Wiki, there is DNA evidence of Yersinia pestis infection in specimens from the Eurasian Bronze Age, back to 5000BC or so.

I see that on this thread you claim to have "found" this paper, by one Frank Lombard, while searching for something. But in a later thread you reference another paper, by the same Frank Lombard, while claiming you wrote it. Why the deceit?

This looks to me like tendentious language. Life experiences can't "program" you. They happen to you. A "program" presupposes a programmer, i.e. an entity with intention, acting on you in some way. What you make of experiences is up to your own (independent) thought processes, surely? As for the idea of consciousness being what's left over, after all the measured reactions to influences are accounted for, that does not seem to be how a doctor, for example, would determine consciousness in a patient. He or she would do that by means of an expected (measurable) reaction to a stimulus. So I don't think your conception of consciousness works. It's far too narrow.