TheVat

Seems problematic that in a philosophy forum, there is dodging the work of finding a common philosophical definition of truth from which to proceed. I tried a while back to elucidate a little, but it doesn't seem to have been taken onboard. @Eise seems also to have difficulties getting concepts across. Another try: https://iep.utm.edu/truth/ Philosophers are interested in a constellation of issues involving the concept of truth. For example, what makes an assertion be true? Surely the assertion has grounds and does not float in mid-air, so to speak. The grounds might involve a variety of things: our evidence, or the assertion’s correspondence with the world beyond the assertion, or the meanings of the concepts involved in the assertion, or the nature of mind, or our social conventions about making assertions, or some combination of these. A preliminary issue, although somewhat subsidiary, is to decide what sorts of things can be true. Is truth a property of assertions, or of sentences (which are linguistic entities in some language or other), or of propositions (nonlinguistic, abstract and timeless entities)? Is truth even a property? The principal issue is: What is truth? It is the problem of being clear about what you are saying, implying, and presupposing when you say some claim or other is true. The most important theories of truth are the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. They are explained and compared here.... This is a personal and idiosyncratic definition of what is meant by true. Please feel free to read the IEP article on how philosophers have defined this word. And be aware that belief does not always reliably lead to knowledge. People believed many things about the world outside their heads which were never true. Examples are numerous and obvious.

Nice to acquaint meself with this band - sounds like they borrowed some old US country-western tune and adapted it a bit. Hereabouts, titmouse is a synonym for chickadee, which could be handy to anyone writing a song and needing just two syllables. When I lived east of the Mississippi River, the common species was the tufted titmouse. When I was a callow youth, I enjoyed the mental image that moniker evoked. I feel compelled to share that the song of the tufted titmouse is usually described as a whistled "peter-peter-peter!"

It has to be acknowledged that the OP, thought it did use fancy language like "extra-pair paternity," did concern itself with two-timing housewives sneaking off with clever navigators and having bastards. Sordid stuff! Not sure I can continue to recommend this website as family friendly. 😉

Wales Act on Simenon? None: M. is not case law. Emily also finds her friend's method for artificial insemination of livestock confusing: Liam, go hand Deirdre her dried DNA (hog) mail.

The real test of spatial skills is if they can drive the streets of Boston without GPS nav systems. Others seem fixated on boobies: AudubonBrown BoobyTropical seas around the world are home to this large, long-winged, strong-flying seabird. In North America the Brown Booby is seen most often near the Dry Tortugas, Florida, where it perches in...

Immortal words.

Please define in clear language what you mean by "the logic of DNA." Are you somehow trying to map the coding of protein synthesis by base pairs onto something other than making proteins? What is meant by "reflecting the logic" ? This is vague and unscientific - sounds a bit like dorm philosophizing. Who is "we"? Not everyone thinks symbols are reality, nor that maps are the territory. I think a fair number of people understand that categories are ways of mentally organizing perceptions or emotions or imaginings and not the things or patterns or feelings themselves. Words denote, connote, refer. We understand that abstraction is compression, in information science. I can say "the wild street dogs of Istanbul" without having to compose a lengthy string which points to every single wild dog within the city limits..."there's Abdul, there's Jeff, there's Old One-Eye, there's Monseigneur Tripod...." We know they're all being referred to. We grasp that the category reference is not actually the furry butt sniffers themselves - it's a verbal act (please see Saul Kripke's causal theory of reference) of denotation passed through a community.

If we have a thread here in the philosophy forum, wouldn't we use definitions proper to that domain? In philosophy, when it's done well, hammers and screwdrivers have their specific purpose. The sentence "I believe X to be true" is true as a statement of belief, i.e. when the speaker isn't lying, it's an honest report of one's state of mind. X itself, however, is true only when it is a proposition which aligns with reality.

Emily's friend, Deirdre R. Dried, runs a motel which only allows travelers with cats and has mystical beliefs about them. Dog woe, motel cat's bonus: a sun obstacle to meow God?

Grusch again? The same Grusch who had no direct knowledge of anything but "knew people"? And can't say everything in open session? My bs meter is also whipping like a flagella glued to a puppy's tail glued to a paint shaker. Har!

One doesn't rule out the other, as I understand it. Changes in gene expression (epigenetics, in this case centered on mRNA - enzymes in the octopus's cells swap out specific molecular letters in the RNA, essentially changing the instructions used to build proteins) don't mean there can't be separately changes in gene frequencies and structure as well. I should also note that epigenetics in this instance of mRNA and IncRNA modification can't pass from a parent to a child, since this example is just a short term response as @CharonY notes. RNA mods are a different layer of epigenetics from DNA methylation etc.

Chomsky's distinction between syntax and semantics (meaning ) may be helpful here. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

I asked because biologists tend to distinguish between language and calls. Calls (vocal or chemical or gestural) communicate, yes, but I can see how it is that many question if this rises to the level of language. Calls are innate, fixed signals triggered by immediate environmental stimuli (like food or danger or announcing presence to rivals). In contrast, language is a flexible, rule-based system of arbitrary symbols. They don't just signal basic responses. We can combine discrete sounds to express abstract ideas, discuss the past or future or things far removed, and create entirely novel meanings. IOW, some say that just being procedural, and not symbolic, doesn't qualify as language. And I question that pyramid builders who could use written codes were being merely procedural. It has the earmarks of a symbol system. Are you suggesting that "staff eyeball bird woman man with arms held up Ankh snake wiggling" is to be taken literally?

Wait, pheromones are a language?

Mined Stibnite - antimony? No MIT, nae! Tin bits, denim. Meanwhile, Emily, learns of a link between sadness in Shakespeare's hometown and Brazilian sixties pop... Diagnose Avon as sobs arise, sir, as Bossa Nova e-song aid.

Been time traveling musically and realizing it's important we never let bossa nova die. Here's a hit people my age heard everywhere (radio, records, muzak) in the late sixties. Move over, Ipanema girl.

Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration. The new site was created by former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the government's lead scientific agency for climate, weather and ocean monitoring — who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks. Climate.gov had long been a trusted source for official government climate data. Nearly 1 million visitors came to the site each month, according to 2021 numbers. Most of the data remains technically accessible on government servers, but it is difficult to find, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former program director for Climate.gov who now heads the Climate.us project. In August 2025, she and two other former NOAA employees who helped run the government site began to re-create it.... NPREx-NOAA employees re-create a valuable climate data site...Former NOAA staffers have launched a new website that provides climate information. It replaces a government site that was shut down when the Trump administration took office.

Given that all POTUS projects are (in some sense) vanity projects, devoid of expert oversight and involve corrupt contracting, the LMRP project would have been a black swan event if it had actually worked as hyped. An interesting spinoff thread might be: name one thing the POTUS initiated which has shown any benefit to this country or the world, or at least been implemented as was promised. Aside from elimination of the penny, I'd be hard put to name something...(and even the penny elimination has stumbled - some merchants haven't gone along with the official request for rounding, and I still get pennies in my change, as they keep circulating).

A null model is a baseline statistical or pattern-generating model that assumes no meaningful relationships, external forces, or non-random processes are acting on a system. It serves as a benchmark or point of comparison to test whether observed data differs significantly from pure chance. It's not a theory that there's no natural selection or other evolutionary mechanisms. Indeed it's purpose is to make clear that there are non-random processes being revealed by the data. Four of the mechanisms I listed earlier are the most relevant, and considered key to understanding how a population might exhibit a change in allele frequency from one generation to the next. Those are evolution, right? The big four are mutation, genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow. (We should also add non-random mating, so call it five) The reason they are all important to your question is that we have to discern which of these (or two working together, like mutation and NS e.g.) is the mechanism of changes in allele frequency. You can't just fixate on NS as if that's the whole story.

Haha! Knew there was a joke built into that example. You might be onto a new and groundbreaking (or ground-shaking, at least?) evolutionary theory. Call it the MigL-Eastwood Gas/Romance Equilibrium. Too little gas means insufficient complementary protein and lowered fertility, too much gas means diminished mating behavior. Expressed as a pair of nonlinear differential equations...

Another point I saw neglected was the way certain equilibria are beneficial not to a species but rather species that prey on them ("prey" used in the broad sense of feeding upon). In a world with many large predators, an environment change and adaptive response which caused (low tech) humans to proliferate could invoke a Lotka-Volterra modeling where it was the big predators (call them "manflesh-loving supertigers") which had a better environment for themselves but the humans not so much. Humans would suffer more and their numbers fall back to previous densities. And every cycle their adaption caused their numbers to rise, the larger predator population would come pouncing to bring them down. This has actually happened with iron fertilization experiments where the hypothesis was that increased phytoplankton would sequester more carbon: there was a short bloom in phytoplankton, which was quickly consumed by other organisms (such as small fish or zooplankton) and that limited the effect of Fe enrichment mainly to increased predator density, which in turn limited the carbon sequestration. This is as predicted by the equilibrium population densities of the Lotka–Volterra predator-prey model. (my super tiger scenario, of course, could also bring in the Dual Inheritance theory, where you have a human gene-culture coevolutionary response where our particular species would have a benefit from being able to culturally develop novel adaptations... moving away from a Lotka-Volterra equilibrium model to some unique set of cultural innovations which turns the table on the super tigers and erases the "free buffet!" benefit they were enjoying.)

From what training I've had in this area, I would say there is a minimum bar to reach on several concepts. If someone started looking at this 12 years ago (as the OP did, per @swansont ) then I would see them as needing to reach that bar. Start with Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium: it's a null model for evo bio. A baseline with which to compare RW data. Its principle is stating that a population's allele and genotype frequencies will remain constant from generation to generation in the absence of evolutionary influences. There are five assumptions of HW, and in the RW at least one is always violated - the OP can look these up. Then you move on to what evolutionary influences will violate the null model. A basic awareness of these ones -- genetic drift, mate choice, assortative mating, natural selection, sexual selection, mutation, gene flow, meiotic drive, genetic hitchhiking, population bottleneck, founder effect, inbreeding and outbreeding depression -- is very helpful. So... it's complicated. And each species violates HW in different ways. As several members are striving to point out. ( I find meiotic drive to be especially subversive of ordinary assumptions about how the mechanism of evolution is working ) And with humans, you have so many of those "violators" at work, and some rippling down through complex economic pathways you don't find in other species. One can imagine scenarios where, say, meat/dairy becomes so expensive to produce (feed crop degradation, mass spread of prions, arable land loss, cultural changes on acceptable livestock practices, etc) that large human populations must switch to beans. So this could change selective pressures on those with strong genetic predispositions to intolerance of legumes like soy, other beans, and peanuts. It wouldn't necessarily kill people (we're good at improvising and adapting), but it could cause sufficient "failures to thrive" to reduce fertility levels in the most susceptible subpopulations.

Sub-minarets, a master, a nimbus. ETs at EU granola salon argue taste. "Mood," a sign I soldered. Losing is a doom.

It would help if you could reply to the posts responding to your question about lactase persistence. And do the homework that's needed to really engage with this topic.

Clearly a missed opportunity when it wasn't named "nano babbler." In other news, I see they've finally caught the pool vandals ringleader....