PhDP

yep, and you can believe in astrology and be a great scientist. There's still, IMO, a contradiction. Science is all about not having faith. Religions require that someone believe in something with no evidences, most of the time simply because that person was born in this religion.

If they were dominants, then the parents would have had the disease.

Image two alleles (versions of a gene). One gives the disease, we'll call it "a", and one is normal, we'll call it "A". Very often, a disease will be recessive, meaning you have to get 2 copies of "a" to get it. So, if both parents carry only one copy (genotype Aa); There's a 50% chance for their children to be also carriers; Aa 25% change of getting the 2 normal alleles; AA 25% change of getting the disease; aa

Bogus. Negative numbers don't exist. Complex numbers don't exist. ...same thing goes for infinity, it's just an abstraction. And atheism is not a religion.

I disagree. Again, you chose a trait, and for some unexplained reasons you've decided that this trait could be used as a measure of intrinsic moral value. What if I choose that organisms with lower body size have a greater intrinsic moral value ? Why not ? If moral value is based on a trait, how can we choose this trait ? Where's the philosophy forum when we need it

Nuclear wastes are dangerous for humans, but they are not going to destroy the environment. And nuclear energy could (in fact,would have to) be supported by even cleaner sources of energy. But for now, we're unable to satisfy the demand in energy of an industrialized nation with eolian/solar energy.

iNow; ecoli, What I meant is that we can't just solve this problem with technology, I bet 100% of the improvements made possible by technology in the next 10 years would be offset by the increasing number of cars and the increasing demand in energy. Technology is mostly an excuse to do nothing and wait for a solution that won't come, we have to make some changes to our lifestyle. I think the first thing we have to realise is that it's more a political problem than a technological one. Political parties are bashing nuclear energy, even though it might be the only real alternative source of energy for the next few decades. ... and when it comes to cars, well, we do need smaller cars, and we need less cars. Not only because of AGW, but because the air in many large cities is downright disgusting. We need to find a way to force people to use other means of transport when possible, I just can't believe that the average guy in New-York needs a car weighting several tons to traval a couple of kilometers. It's total nonsense, even so-called 'compact cars' are huge machines made to travel hundreds of kilometers. In truth, it wouldn't be that hard, it could be done by implementing a tax directly related to the average fuel consumption of the car. But the tax would be implemented progressively, so people would now that in X years, they would have to find something smaller than a compact. It could also be done to protect ourself against inflation, food inflation is a real issue and the oil price increases don't help.

We have to be pragmatic. There's too many cars, especially when we consider the number of new cars in countries like China. People will have to start walking a little ...or get smaller cars.

Most CO2 emissions are caused by transportation and the production of electricity. So my solutions would be; #1 we have to reduce the number of cars on our roads, honestly, I don't know what is the best way to do it, but it has to be done. #2 Nuclear energy. No... I'm not running for office

...my 'latin' initials (I think I would've to drop the 'h' in English). I generally like to borrow names from mythologies, but I wanted a 'serious' username for this forum. Because science is a serious business, if you have fun, it's not science !

It's an old tradition to use "X" as a shortcut for "Christ". The term "Xmas" is actually very old, it was first used at least several centuries ago. ...but let's be clear, Atheists like me are common in science forums. So you might find a few things here offending, not because we don't like religious people, but many of us don't like the whole concept of religion.

I don't really care what Darwin did or said, sexual selection is definitely a form of natural selection. I know some people think otherwise, but my guess is; most evolutionary biologists would agree with me on this. Endler covered this question quite well in the first part of "Natural Selection in the Wild". It's a different way to classify, that's all. Different need = different classification, of course frequency-dependence could be included in the "3 forms" you named. So what ? Much ado about nothing, I don't understand why you get so upset at the notion that natural selection is divided differently according to the discipline. 'Your' 3 forms, they're the standard "types/forms" of population genetics (arguably the core of evolution), and I never disputed that. But I stand on my claim that natural selection can be classified differently, depending on the need. It's what I'm trying to explain to you, different area of study = different classification. You might think what you want of "positive" selection, but it's a very useful expression in molecular evolutionary biology. When studying long-term patterns of evolution, molecular evolutionary biologists are mostly interested in 'positive'/'negative' selection (and of course, sexual selection is included). It's pretty clear to me that he claims goup selection is a fact;

CDarwin, I'm not an expert on multilevel selection, but it's clear that evolutionary biologists are now open to the notion of group selection. Martin Nowak and Sean H. Rice are actively working on this. T. Ryan Gregory also wrote about group/species selection, with words and no maths. oh I know, it's blasphemy ! but he's doing some interesting research and his articles are easier to read.

True. It's fair to say that molecular systematics is more reliable than the old classifications based on morphology.

CDarwin; after reading a lot about the early history of evolution, I have to say I think the greatest evolutionary biologist was S. Wright. About "modern" evoltunary biologists, I continue to think it's impossible to say, not because they're all trivial, but there's just too many of them; Michael Lynch, Russel Lande Sarah Otto, John Gillespie, Masatoshi Nei, Felsenstein, Kingman, Ohta... lucaspa; Surely, we don't live in the same universe. Of course, you could quote about a dozen articles supporting the notion that selection is the most powerful force. And I could do the same for drift. In Li's molecular evolution, he says (I'm paraphrasing) that we'll continue to hear people saying the neutral theory is dead, and some will claim it has won the debate. There's simply no clear resolution to the neutral theory, it's very clear that Fisher's view of evolution is losing ground to Wright's view (it terms of dominance, the size of mutations, the shape of the adaptive landscpace, the impact of drift), but we still don't know exactly how much of evolution is neutral/nearly-neutral. It must, however, be obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of evolutionary biology that both orthodox neutralism and panselectionism represent extremes which ought to be rejected. It's also clear to me that you don't understand well what 'drift' is. You claimed that drift could not work with N > 50. It's just total nonsense, there's absolutely no population limit to drift. If a mutant has no effect on fitness, its fate will be determined by drift even if the population size is nearly infinite. The chance of fixation of a mutant is both influenced by population size and by the selection coefficient (of course, other factors can be included). After a rapid and drastic change in the environment, strong selection is expected to act, but most populations in the wild are not subjected to strong selection, so drift will tend to be a very important force.

Who decided that 'intelligence' or 'conscience' were the criteria to evaluate the moral value of an organism ? Of course, it's just a coicidence that everyone here share these traits... ...it's just another attempt to rationalize the irrational. Many mammals have codes of conducts, we're no different. And of course, ultimately, they are made to secure our own survival within this society of interdependence we're in. So there is a rational reason why we care for other humans, but it's based on a subjective experience, humans are not more valuable than other being from an objective point of view. But of course, we're not objective when it comes to morality... Any extension to other animals makes no sense. It's probably based on the fact that it's easier to us to feel empathy for a similar organism like a gorilla.

I don't want to be picky but... I agree with everything except that part; phylogeny is a description of genetic relatedness. Phylogeny is a description of evolutionary relatedness. Genetic relatedness is used as a mean to understand evolutionary relatedness, but it's not the goal of phylogeny to study genetic similarities.

You can find several articles about canine evolution in Science 298(5598).

...I'm going to make a PDF of the last post to keep it in my "notes/lectures" folder

... but is this really relevant ? You could benefit from the belief in eternal life, it doesn't make it true.

r². The 2 comes from the fact that we're looking for something in two dimension; an area. The formula for the perimeter is 2pi*r (one dimension = r^1), the volume of the sphere is (4/3)pi*r³ (3 dimensions), et cetera... And yes, pi can only be found by brute force. It's an irrational number, it can't be described by any fraction A/B. If I remember correctly, the first 'good' values of pi were found using polygons. For example, if you inscribe a triangle in a circle, you will get a pretty bad estimate of the area of the circle, if you inscribe a square, it's a little better, so by inscribing regular polygons with an increasingly large number of sides, you'll get a better estimate of pi.

It depends. When it comes to plastids and mitochondria, endosymbiosis is a solid hypothesis. But about the evolution of other structures (i.e.: the flagellum), there's little positive evidences. Overall, I think it's fair to say that endosymbiosis was a great idea, but fails to live up to some expectations. It's probably a minor mechanism.

As humans, we all feel that human life is more valuable. Just as we tend to care more about species close to us. However, we have to be lucid, it's purely subjective. BTW, I do think that species membership is morally relevant. As much as I find sexism and racism disgusting, I do embrace speciesm (at least to a certain extant).

1:00 am. Tired. Too much MatLab. Too much genetics. Need a good laugh. Solution; a free visit to M. Behe's website, Mr. Irreductible complexity. Very funny. First of all, unlike most scientists, Behe doesn't feel the need to use visually appealing graphics. Nooooooooooooooooo. But, he got a mousetrap. I could not believe this, I mean, this guy must sit on more $$$$ than most evolutionary theorists (of course, the source is different). Right after that, there's the "the Lehigh university is ashamed of my ideas but for some reason hasn't fired me yet" disclaimer. Which is also quite unusual. But hey, when you're a révolutionaire... And at last, a list of 'publications'. Again, a novelty. Most of the "selected publications" are from the 'New York Times'. For some reason I don't yet fully understand yet, most scientists prefer to include articles from what we call 'science journals'. Not Behe, he's beyond that kind of logic. Well, wait, no, there's ONE real publication there. An article published in Protein Science. But to be fair, it can't really be a good science journal, at least, not when it comes to evolutionary theory. There's also something that I find quite funny about this article; Michael Lynch wrote the most comprehensive critique of the article. You read right; Michael Lynch ! Most people don't know Michael Lynch, but he's one of the most influencial evolutionary biologist, not only he wrote the bible of quantitative genetics, but he's also a very creative scientist. And, the most ironic thing of all; he's as far as you can get from guys like Dawkins (the typical deamon in the ID mythology). #1; he actually does research, and he's good at it, we can easily name several contributions he made to our understanding of evolution. #2, most importantly, he's not a darwinist. He strongly believe in the importance of drift/mutations and has often critizised biologists for their naive interpretation of evolution; Yet, of all people, he was the one to challenge Behe's article, and I'm sure there's plenty of IDists out there to portray him as a "darwinist". It's not even sad anymore, it's just funny. The link = http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html And I'll finish this post with a quote from our darwinlusionist of the day; Michael Lynch;

For insects, it's pretty clear that thermoregulation was the first purpose. I think it's not as clear for dinosaurs and the origins of birds.