CDarwin

Your lens is a bit ethnocentric. All of that refers to modern, more-or-less Westernized populations with birth control as a factor. Sexual monogamy would be much closer to genetic monogamy if there was no birth control. And you can actually refer to a real world examples of females making different choices in terms of long-term mate and short-term affair. Consider the Ache people of Paraguay. There good hunters don't generally enjoy higher status or accrue more power as a result of their kills. There are specific social mechanisms, begging and teasing, that are designed to prevent hunters from becoming too powerful and dominating the group. What hunters do enjoy, however, is greater success in affairs with women. When surveyed, women don't report a preference for hunters as husbands, but they do as lovers. Now, I haven't seen that correlated with masculinity or ovulation cycles, but it's a proof of concept. Women do seem capable of having affairs with an eye to improving the genetic standing of their children. That's presented here: Hunting Ability and Reproductive Success Among Male Ache Foragers: Preliminary Results. Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill. Current Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1985), pp. 131-133 I'm not necessarily cheerleading for the "ovulating females like hypermales" hypothesis. I'm just saying.

Governments can and do use terror, to control their own populations, to disrupt other countries, and to achieve ideological aims. Those governments also use conventional armies to achieve their aims in different circumstances. Are those governments "terrorists"? The whole definition just seems useless. Terrorism is a very dirty, very nasty way of fighting asymmetrical war that anyone can resort to. The point is that the same organizations, indeed the same people, can use terrorism one day and light infantry tactics the next, all as part of a single effort.

Early humans didn't live on the savanna, they lived on the forest edge, and they didn't evolve from baboons who are highly specialized to move on all fours on the ground as efficiently as they do and evolved from ancestors who also moved on all fours. Humans evolved from apes, which, as you point out, already have a propensity for upright movement. You want to look at modern savanna dwelling primates to demonstrate that savanna adapted primates are always quadrupedal. Well, look at water-adapted primates. Talapoin monkeys (Miopithecus talapoin), Allen's swamp monkey (Allenopithecus nigroviridis), macaques, and proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) all swim frequently. All are quadrupeds or partial brachiators and all show adaptations like webbed feet missing in humans. Of the animals you listed, only penguins actually walk upright on land. I'm really not sure where you got seals from. And penguins walk upright principally because they're birds. Have you ever seen a quadrupedal bird?

Do kids use dolls to make fun of each other that much really? I can't imagine how a 10 year old would get a hold of one of these if his parents didn't buy it for him online. Now teenagers are a different issue.

Well, a freedom fighter can be a 'terrorist,' in that they can (and often do) use terrorism to achieve goals that are looked upon as noble.

I don't even know that there can be such a thing as a terrorist. Terrorism is a tactic and anyone can use it, be they ragtag guerrillas or modern nation-states. Osama bin Laden is a leader of an extremely violent international militant movement which relies heavily on terrorism. They also use other tactics, though, so calling them "terrorists" seems to make up a category of fighter which is wrought with difficulty.

What does "Tantalisingly, the book hints at the beginnings of a strategy that could be developed with the aim of returning mankind to its former evolutionary path, with all the glory and magnificence that would entail." mean, exactly? The evolutionary path toward robust australopithecines? That one wasn't so glorious.

Hydrogen/Solar have the best future, I'd say. Nuclear is great and all, but it too relies on a fuel source (Uranium) that isn't unlimited, and is already past peak in many countries. That's could make supplies of it less inexpensive and less reliable in the future.

I get the idea. If you're a kid and all the dolls you can get are of "normal" children, they would seem to just be more evidence that you're "abnormal." At least I would imagine that's the theory.

Demeter, my very Classical mixed breed dog.

Except when ovulating, supposedly. Females would seem to want their children fathered by masculinized males and then raised by their feminized mate. Or at least if this study is right (and it says that the evidence is equivocal). I don't have any acumen in neuroscience to be able to tell. http://www.springerlink.com/content/xh514w2101rg6rw5/

Either way, that would open up more forest edge, and that's the sort of environment that early hominids tend to be found in. It's not a bad place to be if you're mobile. You can range out onto into open woodland or savanna to find what food might be there and always have a treeline to run back to in case one of your big cats or a large bird or other predator shows up. Archaeologyinfo.com describes the environment for Australopithecus afarensisthus: That study of early hominid wrist joints is here, from Nature.

We should make the distinction between "life" surviving and a living world we want to be in surviving. Sure, life survived the end of the Permian, but I wouldn't want to be around for it. I'd probably get trampled by a Lystrosaur. Which bridges into a point about amphibians. We might not miss them per se, but what would fill their place? Would we want a bunch of whatever that would be? Would other animals that eat amphibians be able to switch over to the new replacements? Ecosystems may not be as fragile as they are sometimes assumed, by they are also very much more unpredictable.

Humans probably had knuckle-walking ancestors, not ones that would "swing through the trees." The latter notion is known as the gibbon theory of the evolution of bipedality and it was once very popular, but the pretty indisputable realization that chimpanzees and humans form a clade distinct from gorillas has brought it into doubt. Why? Because if the common ancestor of all the African apes was a brachiator, then knuckle-walking would have had to independently evolve twice in both gorillas and chimpanzees. Not impossible, but unlikely. There's also been a recent study done of the forearms of early hominids that has reported some of the remnants of the wrist-locking mechanism seen in modern chimps and gorillas essential in keeping that joint stable for knuckle-walking, which if its right, would pretty much lock up the case. I'll find it in the morning. That's important, because if our prebipedal ancestors were knuckle-walkers, that changes the game somewhat. Bipedality is a more efficient means of striding long distances on the ground than knuckle-walking. Now that doesn't answer your question, but it's a good preface for any answer. You should also consider the fact that the apes radiated explosively during the Miocene, and that's when bipedality would have evolved. When you have forests crawling with apes trying out every conceivable ecological niche, then you can imagine there is going to be a great amount of diversity in the way these apes will get around. Some species might just naturally be more inclined to stand and walk upright for short distances (like modern chimpanzees do) than others. If a group of one of those species found itself isolated in some environment where striding might be at a premium, like perhaps the forest's edge, then who knows?

Might lowering the barrel price eventually raise the price of gas by allowing large state buyers like China to purchase more barrels and then subsidize the price? I've no expertise in economics at all, though, so I'm really just making that up.

This is the ugly side of the Democratic Party: ag subsidies, protectionism, and populism. And Sisyphus is right; I don't think Obama can win if he divorces himself from it entirely.

HEY. I stay in media room, not the basement. I forgot to put 1337 up there, too. I've conversational in it.

Right I just didn't get why cells with more lipids would reproduce faster. I figured it out, though. It's the mechanism of reproduction: The more lipids, the bigger the vesicle, the more likely it would break apart and carry the nucleotides with it.

TV spots are all about people who probably shouldn't be allowed to vote in the first place... That's elitist of me, I suppose. Well, no, I'm quite sure that's elitist of me. I don't know, I should be the young, naive college student-politico, I suppose, but I just don't expect that much of politicians. Obama breaking a fairly minor promise or McCain being close to a lobbyist or two doesn't really phase me. Rhetoric doesn't match reality sometimes. It happens. Do we really expect that much more of ourselves?

We'd gotten off track on to the issue of Israel actually attacking Iran. Or at least I had.

Well, if them jumping off the Brooklyn bridge would have the same impact on you as it would on them, but you would miss out on the temporary fun of the falling, then yes. Aren't I a master of rhetoric? Of course, the way world markets work, unless oil is purposefully diverted to the US, most of it drilled off-shore is going to go to other countries anyway. Oil loses value pretty quickly the longer you have to ship it (you're burning oil to move oil), so the majority of it will go to the nearest large market, which in the case of Alaska, would be Japan.

The scene from Casablanca is the only reason I like the La Marseillaise.

I know, all the splitting seems to be fairly arbitrary.

I don't see how Israel could act to really save itself, though. Any strikes are at best a stop-gap that have worse ramifications down the road. Blowing stuff up isn't going to solve this.

Well, biological anthropologists cite molecular studies a lot (there's a field called molecular anthropology), but I still don't see how that would outweigh citations to, say, sociological journals by all the cultural anthropologists. They're most of the field. I get the connections to medicine and ecology and evolutionary biology, though. And how to do crop scientists not cite agricultural journals more than that? There's something weird in the way these connections are laid out. Maybe some fields are supposed to connect through other fields?