CDarwin

It think you just have thing with Paul Krugman, then. Well, he's an economist, not a scientist. That's kind of a joke, but economists really do operate a little differently. They will accept more things into their theories that can't be empirically verified on the basis of their accordance with first-principles. I think all Krugman is saying is that A) Insurance should represent the collectivization of risk (essentially a first-principle), B) Theory says that the profit motive isn't good at ensuring that, C) Looking around the world, free-market-heavy systems (the US, Eastern Europe, China) don't seem to work, while regulation/government-heavy systems do. Ergo, extensive government regulation to beat the profit motive into a shape is needed for an effective health insurance system. That would seem to be a valid chain of argument for an economist. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I think this is a misconception, actually. In the Industrial Revolution the United States and Europe had strongly pro-corporate government policies, but that doesn't necessarily coincide with liberal and free markets. Most countries engaged in extensive protectionism and modified laws to allow large companies to more easily muscle smaller ones and labor. The extensive grants of land to railroads along their rights of way in the American West is a good example.

Well, just addressing this, Gould himself drew some of the connections. He wasn't a politically timid man, and he was perfectly willing to cross-fertilize his politics with his science (if not vice-versa). I wouldn't call Lysenkoism particularly Marxist, either. Lysenko suited Stalin because his 'work' supposedly supported the collectivization of agriculture, which Stalin wanted to do anyway to push along industrialization.

It's an historical thing. Medicine and law (and the clergy and the military) were the only respectable careers open to gentry. Business as such was too bourgeosie, although investing was acceptable. Doctors and lawyers were expected to be the principle civic leaders in their communities, so they would generally come in a lot of contact with each other and developed a sort of common professional identity. The two groups are also still educated similarly in thier own special professional schools. And they both also make more than PhDs.

I would disagree with that. Doctors use science (hopefully), and some are also scientists by virtue of being scientists, but doctorin' as such is a profession, not a science. It combines other elements. I think that's like calling social work a science, because social workers use psychology and sociology.

Ok, perhaps, but punctuated equilibrium has paleontological consequences that rather differ from phyletic gradualism. Eldridge and Gould are saying that 'gaps' in the fossil record represent real data: evidence of rapid evolutionary change and the splitting of lineages. At least, that's how I've always read where I've seen it used. I don't think Gould ever said that on the generation-to-generation level evolution wasn't gradual, but that doesn't seem to answer my question as to whether-or-not his general program is broadly accepted by scientists today. By 'general program' I suppose I mean whatever Callaway means. The statement that punctuated equilibrium has been rejected by 'most scientists' just surprised me.

A few weeks ago I came across this review by Ewen Callaway of a recent biography of Stephen Jay Gould (one that looks pretty interesting, actually, I'll have to get to it at some point): Review: Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution The review briefly talks about the intellectual connections between Punctuated Equilibrium and leftist-Marxist politics ('Communist biology'), which is interesting enough, but it was this statement that particularly caught my attention: Now this was news to me. All the introductory biology texts I've used in high school and thus-far in college have included Punctuated Equilibrium as pretty much orthodox. The authors, two anthropologists, of the book I'm reading right now, actually, Stones, Bones, and Molecules allude specifically to PE to support their notions on cladogenesis in human evolution. So, who's wrong here? Is Callaway off in his reading of the biological consensus, or does PE as articulated by Eldridge and Gould really mostly exist as a 'popular' theory that gets put in introductory textbooks and used by nonspecialists (like anthropologists, I suppose), but which Serious Biologists maybe don't put as much stock in, or only see as a popularization and generalization of more basic work by other researchers? Edit: Misspelled 'equilibrium' in the thread title. I don't think I've ever gotten that word right on the first try.

See, that might be a good objection to compulsory voting. Elections validate systems of government (arguably, it's that validation that is the biggest single contribution any citizen makes to his own government with his vote). Compulsory voting mandates everyone to participate in giving the system its legitimacy, even if they object to that system or to a particular election.

The BBC is in on it. Now, Unless the Archbishop of Canterbury has usurped the authority of monarch again, they seem pretty mainstream. This is the website: http://creationthemovie.com/ How dare you accuse Jennifer Connelly of being a Christian. There does seem to be a lot of "action" in the trailer (although that would tend to be a trait of trailers, I guess). Darwin's battles were more internal or carried out through letters. I don't know as he had that many intense dramatic conversations about how his theory would kill God and all of that. A guy taking notes and writing letters for two hours might not make a very good movie, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCYafqq9ljk I don't know if it looks good or not. The glimpse of the pigeons cheered me. Darwin's work with pigeons was an important part of how he formulated his model of selection, which is usually under-appreciated. I'll have to see it. Incidentally, do you English posters buy American actors doing English accents generally? Jennifer Connelly is the only American in the trailer, and she sounds ok, I think, but I can't really tell.

Ohh. Sorry. I read that rather uncarefully. Well. Maybe neocortex ratios get larger with smaller brain size. I don't really know. Monotremes might not follow the regular mammals rules as well, either.

I thought only mammals were conventionally considered to have a "neocortex." That might not be a homologous structure in echinoderms.

This is Stephen Jay Gould's response to the argument in the Bell Curve, which is basically a condensed version of his book The Mismeasure of Man, which I finished reading a little while ago. Basically, the authors of the Bell Curve make the mistake of assuming 'g' to be a real, inherited, and importantly, immutable entity simply on the basis of a statistical technique that does not prove any of those things. Gould says it better than I did from memory: The statistical existence of 'g,' the entity presumed to represent general intelligence, could be entirely due to entirely genetic or entirely environmental factors for all that the statistical methods that identify it can tell us. And also, as Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge, their own bell curves couldn't be applied to any individual anyway, as the overlap between the groups is so great and it would be useless to presume that any given African American is less intelligent than any given white American based on the position of the means alone (I think they only dealt with Americans, as I recall). Someone has brought this up before and Lucaspa posted a much more thorough refutation. EDIT: I realize I didn't post the link I meant to, sorry: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html

If you've passed exams in these fields, you probably know all of this, but in my understanding architecture overlaps more heavily with the fine arts, where-as engineering is far more of a science, although obviously there are commonalities. It's probably more of a historical difference than an essential one, but that's how the fields have developed. So, are you more of an artistic or a scientific mindset?

I'm mostly interested in primate and human evolution. I'm an anthropology major, actually. I think the Eocene is really interesting, but I've oscillated back and forth a lot around paleoanthropology. Thanks everyone for your advice, incidentally.

Interesting note on the North Korean economy in Newsweek this week: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200069

I don't think this is Kim Jong Il particularly. He's erratic, but not this erratic. It probably reflects some sort of internal power struggle. The military hierarchy might be flexing its muscles, taking a harder line agenda to smack down anyone in the top echelons calling for detente. I really don't think you can blame this on Obama or congratulate Bush for this not happening while he was in office. We have very little control over the internal power dynamics of the North Korean government. As Kim Jong Il weakens, it's probably only going to get more unstable. We can only respond, and I think everyone realizes by this point that our options for response are rather limited. To explicate, talking to Kim Jong Il as a hegemon in North Korea might have been productive (and arguably was in the Clinton administration). We don't know who, or what constellation of forces, we're dealing with now.

It's another attempt at an umbrella hypothesis, trying to explain everything "human" with a single big change. I don't see anyone doing that for any other mammal. I don't think there are many complex umbrella theories for how mice acquired their mice-ness. Cooking probably had its role in human evolution, but the trend toward smaller jaws began long before the archaeological record gives any hint of the presence of controlled fire, and it may not have even been present in time to account the expansion of the hominid brain in Homo erectus, which Wrangam is assuming.

I don't know, maybe members of minorities really do have a superior experience. I think about myself, a middle class WAS former P, and a male. The entire culture and mass media which surrounds me is geared, essentially, toward me. My experience at home, at school, and what I see around me are all essentially consistent. I very rarely have to stretch myself. An Hispanic woman from a working class family might well have very different experiences which she has to reconcile. Minorities traverse multiple cultures. Surely that builds, at least, flexibility and a broader understanding.

That might be a plausible way multicellularity could have evolved, but I don't believe that's the sequence most biologists imagine. I think the models more often involve certain free-living single celled organisms (like choanocytes) that come together in some circumstances and how those temporary associations could become a permanent part of how a whole, emergent organism lives. Part of that process involves cells specializing in ways that would be useless to them as free living organisms, like having some cells that just serve as conduits of communication between the outside and the inside of a body. That's the special thing about multicellular division of labor. (I think).

I'm curious as to opinions. I took an introductory psychology course last semester where 'g,' general intelligence, was, at least, considered a legitimately measurable factor, even if others might be more important. And I just finished (or am finishing; I've got 3 of the essays in the back of 1996 edition to go) Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which obviously has a rather strong opinion as to 'g,' holding it as basically a reified mathematical artifact (maybe that's stating Gould's position too strongly, but he's definitely skeptical of the concept). So, what are some other opinions? Do you think 'g' is meaningful?

I'll be a lot more worried about that after the demographics of the United States government begins to vaguely resemble the demographics of the United States population. And there is something legitimately to be said for a diversity of experiences, especially on the bench. In this case, appointing a minority might be less about correcting inequality than an entirely appropriate consideration of judicial diversity. Really, I don't see anything to complain about in Sotomayor.

I'm wondering what sort of mathematics one should be looking at pursuing in undergraduate courses with a view applying them to work in paleontology. What kind of math is math is most commonly used? I believe principal component analysis and multivariate statistical techniques like that are pretty important, not that I know at at all what that means. Is there a lot of mathematical ecology, population modeling and what-not, these days? I'm ever leery of calculus.

There are other important features. Rodents are distinguished form lagomorphs like rabbits, for example, by only having two upper incisors (rabbits have four). And the incisors are the only teeth that grow continuously. Dentition is an interesting angle actually. Rodents don't have canines, so they would have to co-opt some of their other teeth to grasp pray and chunks of flesh in a carnivorous manner. They are limited in their number of incisors, so I imagine they would probably modify their first premolar into something caniniform (sort of like in your marsupial lion; lemurs also have caniniform premolars). Modifying rodent incisors would seem tricky to me, since they only have dentin on the inside surface and grow continuously. They might have to lose that ability and encase the whole tooth in enamel. Elephant tusks are modified incisors that grow continuously, but I don't imagine those would be very useful for tearing into flesh.

See, capybaras are heavily herbivorous, as are beavers and rabbits. I think that tends to be the trend in rodents. The whole rodent adaptive system is geared toward processing low grade foods that need a lot of chewing. The smaller ones can supplement their diets with a wider variety of foods, but I don't see a large rodent ever becoming, say, an ace predator, ttyo888. If you want big rodents, you'd better have lots of low grade plant material on your island for them feed on. Capyburas graze, I believe, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine herding rodents feeding off of grasses. Incidentally, they would have to reingest their feces. All herbivorous rodents do, because they ferment their cellulose in a large sac at the beginning of their large intestine, the caecum, which means most of it misses the small intestine the first time through, where most of the energy and nutrients of food are taken up. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Actually, that's how rodents got to South America across the Atlantic, so that's not a stretch at all.

The context is more a societal one. Bible quotes mean something in our society, and to the Muslim world, that quotes from, say the Talmund, don't.