PhDP

You are right, I will reformulate. It is possible racism is the consequence of evolution (kin selection or other selection-based mechanism) but in our context it's a bad strategy. What I'm trying to explain is that kin selection can make us protect our "tribe", but it doesn't make us "breed" with our "tribe". Racism supports homozygotes and reduce fitness. There no such thing as "less evolved" in biology. And the biological differences between "black" and "white" are so thin, that by applying to humans the same rules as we use on other animal, we cannot distinguish any races. There's no human races, at least biologically.

It's out of the subject... This topic is about "Evolution" and "Racism". And such primitive biological concept as the "white race" are not worth a capital letter.

That Racism is an evolved trait is probably false. From a purely strategic point, it is a nonsense. I totally agree that we all give more energy to protect those who are genetically closer to us, because of kin selection, however it doesn't mean we have to breed with them. Anyone with elementary knowledge in genetics and population genetics know how inbreeding reduce fitness. A racist will not breed with some people because of their "race", it's a deviant strategy, he could miss extremely fertile woman/men, extremely fit mates because of a prejudice, how could that help ? Or could racism raise fitness ? It seems to me racism is very hard to justify using evolutionary biology, sociobiology or game theory, the fact that my children would be healthier if their mother isn't genetically close to me should be enough to refute that racism is consequence of natural selection.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/O/Or/Origin_of_life.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Abiogenesis Conclusion; We don't really know , but as Hilbert said, we must know, we will know... About "species", it was'nt of any. It was probably a very simple cell, without nucleus (unlike animals, plants, algaes, mushrooms...), so it's was relatively similar to a bacteria (and there's no "species" of bacteria, only strains).

The very fact that you are using informations from Zundel's website is probably not giving you lots of credibility, he's a clown, and a racist one.

By the way, I'm an "evil" separatist, and I find this topic very funny because I have NOTHING, really NOTHING against english-speaking Canadians and I'm often surprised how much anti-separatists hate us. It's really sad.

Hi meucat, In fact, according to some theories, we COULD live eternally, without aging, it's not physiologically impossible, in fact some multicellular organisms in many phyla doesn't seems to age. The reason we get old and die is probably because it's advantageous from an evolutionary point of view (I know it sound strange at first). What you need to ask is; it is advantageous to age/die for the individual or his genes. At first it doesn't seem so. If you don't age, you could reproduce longer, have more children, and therefore making a greater contribution to the next generation (increasing fitness). You must understand that all organism tend to increase their fitness (their genetic contribution to the next generation) and do not care about "species survival". To increase fitness, reproducing early is better than late, because your children will have children faster and your genetic contribution to next generations would be greater (By the way this is the subject of a subdiscipline of evolutionary ecology; life history evolution). Medawar (1952) proposed that, as late reproduction does not contribute much to fitness, the selection against genes affecting individuals late in life is very weak, so they accumulate. Another explanations, probably complementary to Medawar's theory, made by Williams (1957) is that some genes are affecting positively the individuals early in life but negatively later in life, contribution to the fitness of the individual at the expanse of his long term survival. We call that an antagonistic pleiotropy. The existence of those genes were confirmed by many experiments (Rose and Charlesworth, 1981; Luckinbill et al, 1984 and Leroi et al, 1994) Sure, it doesn't explain the physiological reason for aging, in fact, according to those theories, aging is the consequence of diverse genetical and physiological causes. However it explain WHY, in essence, we experience senescence. References; Roff, D.A. 2002. Life History Evolution. Sinauer Associates. The best book on life history evolution, lots of maths Stearns, S.C. 1992. The Evolution of Life Histories. Oxford University Press. Fox, C.W., Roff, D.A. and Fairbairn, D.J. (Editors). 2001. Evolutionary Ecology: Concepts and Case Studies. Oxford University Press. Have a whole chapter on senescence. Medawar, P.B. 1952. An Unsolves Problem in Biology. H.K.Lewis, London. Williams, G.C. 1957. Pleiotropy, natural selection, and the evolution of senescence. Evolution, 11, 398-411. Leroi, A.M. Chippindale, A.K., and Rose, M.R. 1994. Long term laboratory evolution of a genetic life-history trade-off in Drosophila melanogaster. I. The role of genotype-by-environment interaction. Evolution, 48, 1244-1257. Luckinbill, L.S., Arking, R., Clare, M.J., Cirocco, W.C. and Buck, S.A. 1984. Selection for delayed senescence in Drosophila melanogaster. Evolution, 38, 996-1003. Rose, M.R., and Charlesworth, B. 1981. Genetics of life history in Drosophila melagaster. II. Exploratory experiments. Genetics, 97, 187-196.

We all know our theory of evolution is'nt perfect, still, it's far from being agonising. Creationism is backed by a minority of extremely conservative "scientists", most of them do not have any credentials in biology. It's an exageration to say people are using "science" to attack evolution, they distort both theories (like the second law and thermodynamic) and the philosophy of science (by claiming evolution is'nt a fact) to attack evolution. The sad thing is, people are buying it.

It might be from the order Hemiptera (true bugs), and more precisely from the family Berytidae (Stilt bugs).

If you could get your hand on this book; Johnson, N.F. and Triplehorn, C.A. 2004. Borror and DeLong's Introduction to the Study of Insects. 7th ed. Brooks Cole. 864 p. And really it's a great pictures, I'm curious to know what species it is, however I don't think it's a mantid.

The moment you see "second law of themodynamics" in a discussion about evolution, you know the creationist does probably not hold the scientific knowledge to understand correctly evolution. That's probably the funniest argument against evolution... And what about molecular evolution ? Evolution is not a religion, we have the right to criticize it, the day science will became dogmatic, it'll die.

The fact that "Asian Guy" use Flynn and Rushton-like pseudoscience to support his claims show a certain lack of seriousness. They don't understand basic genetics and obviously "eugenist" do not seem to care about rationality but only to give support to conservatism (witch, btw, is shown to correlative negatively with IQ, dear irony...). About this "some race are genetically more intelligent", it's just bad science made by people who do not understand the word "phenotype". By eliminating environmental factors, it was shown the gap between races was no more (Refs; The Minnesota adoption studies and a study on american soldiers in WW2) And you must really be ignorant to claim that, because the average IQ in poor country is lower, poverty is the cosequence of low IQ. It's nearly unconceivable that someone with knowledge of genetics would make such claims, i'm not surprised at all those racist pseudoscientists are nearly always psychologists without any formal eduation in evolution or genetics. [math] V_P = V_G + V_E + V_{GE} + cov(G,E)[/math]