PhDP

It's still surprising that so few articles were published, 10 years is a whole era in science. Honestly, I'm skeptical about this, I'm not saying that he's wrong, but I was not impressed with his article. Do you have some lecture notes with references ?

... it wouldn't be easier to get tofu to taste like meat (...and with a similar texture) ?

It is. Not because killing animals is wrong. But because farming is disastrous for the environment (and for so many reasons; methane, pollution of the soil and of water, reduced biodiversity). First of all, as I said, getting rid of farming would certainly increase biodiversity, who cares that a few species will live in zoos if thousands of other species will have a better change to thrive. It's especially true for beef production, one of the stupidest thing done by humans.

I think yourdadonapogos' point was that "Darwin was a racist" is a myth. I'm not very fond of science mags like the "New Scientist", but I must admit their section "Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions" is really well done. Some professional evolutionary biologists are embracing some of the myths included.

Human uniqueness, what an arrogant concept. We're a pretty normal species in a group that was not especially successful (primates), within a big clade that's also not very successful (mammal). I'm not surprised that CDarwin has never heard of the theory, Bingham published very little about his theory, and he wasn't cited often.

...not really. Many scientists use this distinction, especially those studying development and molecular genetics.

It depends what you mean by "Darwin-type". If you're looking for evolutionary scientists disputing the existence of natural selection, you're not going to find many. On the other hand, among theoretical population geneticists and molecular evolutionary biologists, there's still no consensus about "Darwinism". The relative importance of the 3 main mechanisms of evolution is still debated. But we don't hear much about the debates within evolutionary biology, IMO, for 2 main reasons; 1; Outside the scientosphere, most of the things we hear about evolution are related to the so-called "creation-evolution debate". 2; The debate is complicated and often counterintuitive. I had the hell of a time trying to explain how "junk DNA" was predicted by the neutral theory (but not Darwinism, btw). Which is in fact a simple prediction supported by pretty much all evolutionary biologists. It's something that is debated using advanced maths (theoretical population genetics) or molecular biology, either way, it's not very accessible. In a way, it's a continuation of the theoretical debates between Fisher and Wright.

Physics. Economy. Music.

I have a D.E.C in Social Sciences (mostly Anthropology). But I discovered that I really hate social "sciences", so I got a B.Sc in Mathematics/Biology (I finish this year). Then I'll get a Ph.D in [evolutionary] biology...

Thank you !

Unrelated; Is there a conspiration to replace "the" and "there" for "teh" and "tehre". Not that I care about spelling... ah, I see

hey ! I'm dead serious, I hate "Phil", and I really have no idea how I could've chosen this as my nickname here.

As far as I know, there are 4 distinct ways to publish articles; Traditional journals; peer-review (behind closed doors), the authors lose some rights by publishing, access is limited. Publishing takes months. Open access journals; The same as traditional journals, but the access is not limited and sometime, the authors keep more rights. Publishing takes months. arXiv; no peer-review but a system of "endorsement". PLoS One; open peer-review process, articles are never rejected because of perceived lack of importance, they're rejected only if the content is not scientific (i.e.: creationism). It's easy to write answers and criticism about an article. Publishing is fast. The authors keep all their rights. Many scientists in the past had troubles publishing because their work was unorthodox, it's the case of Feigenbaum, Pontryagin, Belousov and many others... Also, the ability to access information and to criticise it is, IMO, an important aspect of science. In traditional journals, answering to an article is sometime so difficult that a scientist will need to find a way to fit a small, but sometime important remark, in a stand-alone article. It seems to me that PLoS One is much closer to the ideal of science than anything else because.

I think all british students learn French. As for me, I'm a francophone Quebecer, but I've never been to Canada

You can do that ? I want "PhDP". I don't know why I choose "Phil" when I registered here, nobody calls me Phil, I hate it. And now I have to carry this burden every single day, why, WHY ?! But seriously, PhDP, if possible

I never liked this life/non-life dichotomy, viruses have some of the important characteristics of life, but they're also missing some (i.e.: they can't reproduce on their own). I don't feel the need to classify them either as living or nonliving; viruses are somewhere in between (IMO, closer to living systems).

Of course, the probability to have 3 boys is ~1/8, + ~1/8 for girls = 1/4. There's only 8 (2³) possible combinations, so it's easy to check all of them; bbb bgb bbg bgg gbb ggb gbg ggg

I'm in.

[math]\left(\frac{1}{2}\right)^{3} = \frac{1}{8}[/math]

In some weird way, I sympathize with both the family AND Walmart. ...in the first place, it shouldn't be Walmart's job to pay for health care plans, it should be the job of everyone. It's so much easier with an universal, state-owned system

Although I think Japan should stop "studying" whales, I also think there's an absurd overemphasis on protecting whales. Greenpeace is a little like Nancy Grace, they only care when 'cute' animals are in danger.

According to Molnar's "Human Variation"; "The adaptive signifiance of hair form is not understood, but it is likely that certain forms, woolly or spiral, allow for an air space between the scalp and the outer edges that insulates the head from the intensity of the sun's heat in the tropics"

I think you're falling for the "all-powerful-natural-selection" fallacy, even slightly deleterious alleles can reach fixation if the population size is low (and it's often the case for animals). The fact that something has reached fixation doesn't mean it's favourable. For a gene to be deleterious, it needs to have a real impact on fitness. We're talking about an event that would never reduce fitness by even 1/1000000000. The cost in terms of energy to support this extra gene is nothing compared to all the energy we spent. Because of variations between individuals, an allele will be considered neutral (and thus, driven by drift, not selection) unless; [math]s>\sqrt{\frac{2}{N}}[/math] With N being the effective population size (about 25-75% of most populations), s being the selective coefficient. If this equation is not satisfied, the fate of the mutation will not be affected by natural selection, it'll be driven by drift. So even for a very large population (N = 2 000 000), s must be greater than 1/1000 for natural selection to have an impact. Is there really someone to believe a duplication event would reduce fitness by that much? We're not talking about a large-scale duplication event in bacteria; we're talking about a tiny fraction of the ~3 billion bps of our genome. If we were to consider natural variations in metabolism, the energy spent on that extra "Junk" gene would be insignificant. It's obvious to me that natural selection can't remove this kind of junk, whether it takes more or less energy to get rid of it doesn't matter, it's just beyond the power of natural selection. It's why I say "Junk DNA", especially true junk caused by duplication events, is predicted by the theory of evolution. ... and I just quoted an article about biais against stochastic processes

But what about gene duplications ? Neutral mutations ? Obviously I believe in evolution, and from my point of view, it's absolutely impossible that we would have no "junk DNA", it's a basic consequence of population genetics. It seems to me that nobody is even willing to consider the possibility that some things in life have no purposes, they're simply the results of some stochastic process. If populations were infinite in size, then, perhaps, we'll have no "junk" in our DNA. But it's not the case and at some point, a duplication occurs, one copy is destroyed by a mutation and it's carried by the host. Because it's neutral, it can reach fixation, and a whole species will then carry a dead gene.

... fundamental evolutionary genetics ?