Improvision

Really? I was under the impression that Piracy was quite profitable (for the pirates) in the waters around Somalia.

 

If the warlords have the guns, they can just take whatever they want from whomever has the money and the merchants can't really do anything about it. Seriously, how will the merchants, peasants, etc. prevent the warlords from taking their belongings?

 

Their only option is to hire "protection" from other warlords (until such time as they run out of money of course). You do see that is the same thing as having the warlords simply take their stuff?

Individual merchants and civilians would been armed themselves. In any stable country/community a loyal military is formed and also funded mostly by and of its own self sufficient people.

Well, first of all, you're not describing anarchy. You're describing a small state without its own military, but instead reliant on mercenaries. States that rely heavily on mercenaries always, always fail, usually quite quickly. They don't fight well, they aren't loyal, and they often turn on their employers.This is a big part of what destroyed the Roman Empire, in fact, but that's hardly the only instance. Machievelli talks about this extensively in The Prince.

You might as well describe the US or any country's military/police as a mercenary group.

In anarchy, leadership is paid for and supported by the followers. The people who are doing any trade and commerce are the ones that are making the money to fund any kind of armed force, so it would naturally be in the best interest of anyone with any group fighting ability to protect the people who are supporting their economy. Any fighting would be between fighters themselves. If one fighting group is victorious against another fighting group, then whoever on the winning side of the fighters is left standing from the conflict is going to have to fight other individual armed people if it wants to conquer those people and those people would of been the ones who are producing any kind of wealth. Another protective "militia" can be paid for if one militia falls. Surrounding individual groups of people who also have their own militias can aid their partners or simply not do any business with groups that are known to be aggressive and the aggressors are left to their own funding if they have any at all.

Being a warlord in an anarchy would not be profitable and therefore not sustainable.

There's a debate that's been constantly talked about. That is, is there such thing as free will?

 

What is free will? Free will is the ability for us humans to make our own decisions based on analysis of the event. Does it exist?

 

Or is it a specially set chemically formula within our own brain triggered my certain stimuli meaning we don't have free will?

 

If we do have free will. How is it that we are able to control our own decisions based on events?

 

Post your opinions here, and let's try to keep religion out of this. Pure science all the way.

Whether you want to call it chemical reactions or whatever, YOU have your own thoughts about things and you would act based on those thoughts if allowed.

Iceland survived with anarchy for over 290 years without any large scale civil war. Ireland lasted for 1000 years. They collapsed when they had become less anarchic and/or when they were invaded by armies of foreign non-anarchic states.

In an anarchy it doesn't matter who has the most arms, because you cannot simply order one group of people beyond their free will to go fight another group. Anyone who had leadership of any group was at the mercy of whether or not the followers agreed with who they agreed upon as the leader. A leader comes about as other people willingly follow, because they feel that the leader is going to lead with their best interest. If a leader wants to fight another group of people and the followers do not feel the need to attack, they can simply ignore the leader and the leader would be left to fight another group on their own or possibly with small support against what they individually consider an "enemy" of unknown size and strength.

People will go with ruling that is profitable, and war is not profitable.

Anarchic Iceland

http://www.eurekatube.net/index.php/articles/48-anarchic-iceland

Anarchic Ireland

http://www.eurekatube.net/index.php/articles/49-anarchic-ireland

There are some more recent smaller anarchic communities that have existed within a government dictated borders. It is usually in far off rural areas that a government may not have bothered to enforce with any local stationed regulators.

Found a video on anarchy vs statism (government)

Part 2

Part 3

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb135k/telomeres.html

Telomere shortening - the end replication problem

 

• Telomeres shorten with each cell division (S phase)
  
  
  • The "end replication" problem:
    
    
    • DNA replication is bidirectional
      
      
    • DNA polymerases are unidirectional
      
      
    • DNA polymerases must initiate replication from a primer

  [*]Therefore: each round of DNA replication leaves 50-200 bp DNA unreplicated at the 3' end
  [*]Cells with telomeres that are 10-12 kb in length (average) divide 50-60 times
  • Telomeres are 4-6 kb [5-7 kb] in length (average)
  [*]Cellular senescence is triggeredwhen telomeres are on average 4-6 kb

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Systemic_telomere_length_and_aging

As a measure of systemic telomere length, generally, peripheral blood leukocyte telomere length is preferred. Systemic telomere length has been proposed as a marker of biological aging. A subject's systemic telomere length is predominantly genetically determined, but has several other known determinants: age (shorter telomeres in older people), paternal age at birth (longer telomeres in subjects with older fathers at their birth) and sex (shorter telomeres in men, probably due to a faster telomere attrition). Evidence suggests that elevated levels of oxidative stress and inflammation further increase the telomere attrition rate.[8]

 

Vitamin D may have an effect on peripheral blood leukocyte telomere length. Richards and coworkers examined whether vitamin D concentrations would slow the rate of shortening of leukocyte telomeres. The authors stated that vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of the proinflammatory response and slows the turnover of leukocytes. Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) predicts the development of aging-related disease, and length of these telomeres decreases with each cell division and with increased inflammation. Researchers measured serum vitamin D concentrations in 2160 women aged 18–79 years (mean age: 49.4) from a large population-based cohort of twins. This study divided the group into thirds based on vitamin D levels, and found that increased age was significantly associated with shorter LTL (r = -0.40, P < 0.0001). Higher serum vitamin D concentrations were significantly associated with longer LTL (r = 0.07, P = 0.0010), and this finding persisted even after adjustment for age (r = 0.09, P < 0.0001) and other variables that independently could affect LTL (age, season of vitamin D measurement, menopausal status, use of hormone replacement therapy, and physical activity). The difference in LTL between the highest and lowest tertiles of vitamin D was highly significant (P = 0.0009), and the authors stated that this was equivalent to 5.0 years of aging. The authors concluded that higher vitamin D levels, (easily modifiable through nutritional supplementation), were associated with longer LTL, which underscores the potentially beneficial effects of vitamin D on aging and age-related diseases.

 

 

Long story short... They get shorter because they divide.

Merged post follows:

Also it is a regulatory mechanism. Single cell organism can divide and proliferate basically endlessly. However, within a larger multicellular organism this will cause detrimental effects as manifested in tumors. In the end it is likely a trade-off.

Why do telemeres get shorter?

All the cells in your body are replaced when they die. When your body is replacing cells, why would cells in our "youthful" bodies be replaced over time by NEW cells that make up our "aged/old" bodies, which are not as good as the cells that were there before? Why do living things just come to a grinding halt in "death"?

Essentially you are asking about the evolution of the multi-cellular state? There is quite some literature out there, if I find the time I can check if I can find a nice review. I think much research has probably be done on volvox. However even in a few bacterial species there are multi-cellular states. For instance during nutrient stress Myxococcus xanthus forms elaborate fruiting bodies in which spores are formed. It is likely that initially multicellular stages have evolved in otherwise free-living cells to overcome certain stress or to gains specific selective advantages.

If you scrape your knee when you fall down, the blood cells and skin cells that are separated from the rest of the body and left behind on the ground will die while left in the open environment.

Current evolutionary theory would suggests the tissue and organs in a multi cellular organism evolved by cells in the past joining together to from those cell structures that you see in present day animals and plants. But since individual cells in such organisms can not survive on their own, how did they exist separately in the past to merge together in the first place?

Galaxies are basically at rest in space relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation. There is little movement relative to the speed of light but local gravitational forces do cause some local movement. Hubble's law talks about space expanding. Every light year in open space is getting bigger causing galaxies to spread out. At the edge of the observable universe, galaxies are separating from us at near the speed of light. Galaxies much further away, because of the expansion of space, exceeds light speed and we can not see them. Nothing is moving that fast, it is all because of expansion.

 

There are a couple of other threads next to this one talking about the same stuff. You may want to join in there.

What is the current scientific definition of "space"?

I see it as looking at light that took 13+ billion years to get here and seeing a new born.

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Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

 

 

Don't forget about the expansion of space. Light that took 13 billion years to get here was emitted from a galaxy when it was 3.3465 billion light years away and is now 29.701 billion light years away.

How does the galaxy move ~26 billion light years in 13 billion years?

are really used as a base to estimate the age of the universe? The oldest stars we see are "some of the first"?

Thats like looking at the oldest living human who is say 115 years old and using them to estimate that the human race started 115 years ago.