CDarwin

Boeing and GM are about making profit and returning income to their investors, and yet they make safe vehicles. Saying that profit motive is the cause of this is like complaining about water flowing down hill. [/Quote]

 

Boeing and GM have a profit motive that lies in producing safe vehicles, though, or at least sufficiently obscuring the fact that they don't. And they are both made to produce safe vehicles by significant government regulation, anyway. The profit motive of health insurance companies lies in decreasing the ratio of the amount they have to pay out to policy holders to their income in premiums.

 

We have to create a situation where downhill is a GOOD thing, instead of the opposite. That means the right environment and the right kind of regulation. (This is essentially what Krugman is saying, I just get annoyed with him because he manipulates people's fear of corporations.)

 

It think you just have thing with Paul Krugman, then.

 

That's right, that's what he's saying, but his "evidence" for this is that complete freedom won't solve the problem. That's like saying if NASCAR removed all regulations the cars will go flying off the edge of the track, therefore a quarter-inch change in the restrictor plate is a bad idea. They don't do that -- they make slight changes in BOTH directions and then observe the results. That's what a good scientist or engineer does. But that's not Paul Krugman.

 

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.

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Consecutive posts merged

 

2) Second, we *have* tried truly free markets, back in the Industrial Revolution. It failed, miserably, and we put regulations in place as a *direct* result of failures of the free market system.

 

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.

The 'Marxist' Science which has been performed in the light of a Marxist ideology was actually more Lamarckian in tone and has been termed Lysenkoism. This man, Lysenko, was an idiot and embarked upon bizarre Lamarckian science without an empirical framework, eventually leading to crop failures in the Stalinist USSR. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism To attempt to put S.J. Gould, an accomplished scientist and polymath, in the same light as apparent liberal science shows huge ignorance of the scientific method itself. I don't think S.J. would have been so obtuse.

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.

Seriously, though, what does doctorin' have to do with lawyerin', that they always seem to be associated? Does anyone actually know?

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.

Doctors are basically specialized scientists, so science is a prestigious profession.

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.

Indeed. It is often confused with saltationism. But as Azure pointed out, it just states that the evolutionary rates are not constant.

Depending on perspective (e.g. from the molecular viewpoint) this is for the most part a non-issue.

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:

Punctuated equilibrium never caught on as a new theory of evolutionary change among most scientists. Critics had good scientific reasons for rejecting it, but the link between punctuated equilibrium and liberal politics surely didn't help.

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.

 

The Electoral Act also provides that a person with "valid and sufficient reason" is not required to vote. One such reason is mental impairment. Should a person become mentally impaired to such an extent that they no longer understand their "duty" (and a Doctors Certificate is supplied) that person is no longer required to vote.

 

People have tried a number of "valid and sufficient reasons" over the years but I like this one;

 

He was still fined $20, but a good effort all the same.

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.

Um, that's echidnas, not echinoderms! They are mammals, albeit bizarre ones.

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:

Intelligence, in their formulation, must be depictable as a single number, capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable.

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?

 

The kind of math really depend on what you're interested in (I know, what a cheap answer). Is there a particular subject you're passionate about ?

 

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

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aT01vl_zTYJ8&refer=home

 

Yeah, this situation isn't getting any better. Is there any resolution in sight?

 

I'm afraid the resolution is going to be: North Korea uses a nuclear device on another nation (i.e. South Korea) and the world will have to forcibly remove Kim Jong Il from power.

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.

In terms of the politics, these recent developments would seem to vindicate the Bush administration's earlier North Korea policy (as opposed to its later one following the "we're not even talking to them" pressure from the left).

 

I guess now we're back to seeing what happens when people say "no" to this man. Because, you know, that's worked out so well for us in the past. Almost as well as when we say "yes" to him.

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.

Wow. Yeah, I don't see any ammo there either. There's clearly no experience argument, and the racism angle is a bit silly. It is popular, especially in entertainment, to trump up the wisdom of minorities, but people generally understand that as humor more than anything else. The way I figure it, all people are shaped by their experiences, and some of those experiences are as minorities in repressive environments (to varying degrees). That seems to be what she's reflecting in that quote. At most one might accuse her of over-generalizing, but it's not as if she says that white men cannot be great judges.

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.

Division of labour (through cellular specialization)?

 

but complex cells have organelles. and acellular organisms also have organs. there is no sharp distinction here between cellular organisms and noncellular organisms.

 

I think the question breaks down into 2 questions.

why did single celled organisms become multinucleate?

why did multinucleate organisms become cellular (with cell walls between nuclei)?

 

cell walls in the interior of an organism would seem to just get in the way. but as a protection from viruses they would be very useful.

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?

However, Gov. David Paterson replaced Hilldawg's senate position with another woman. And is there any surprise that Roland Burris is a black man, as Obama's replacement?

 

Ok, so this is anecdotal, but maybe its a real trend?

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.

it May also help to remember that a Rodent simply means a mammal that`s teeth continue to grow (a bit like our fingernails do), the "dent" (dentia, dental etc...) in the name is a bit of a give-away

so you Could have them evolve into all manner of creatures if you wanted to, even Giraffe like if there was a reason to reach higher for food.

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.

you may find this interesting (I did): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara

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.

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Theory 1: Drift Wood Migration= based on New Zealand environmental tragedy and Madagascar

The rodents drifted from the earthquake prone Sunda Shelf which included Indonesia in the past. Perhaps in the past, a Kratatoa like eruption or another natural disaster had send a substantial amount of rodents onto the "virgin" Gnaw Island via driftwood like the lemurs reaching Madagascar. "Virgin" Gnaw Island probably like New Zealand had an avian-dominated ecosystem. But once the rodents drifted there, being rodents they ate all of the native avian fauna to extinction. It is suspected that the rodents that drift there were from the Sciuridae[squirrels] stock as even the flying species of avians were not spared either.

[squirrels have been known to eat insects, eggs, small birds, snakes and rodents].

Actually, that's how rodents got to South America across the Atlantic, so that's not a stretch at all.

Ah, so you feel that because the war was already "venturing dangerously close to 'crusade'", that we have sufficient context to determine that these quotes are intended to support that position, rather than a simple motivational thing.

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.