Arete

I've lived in Australia and the US. Australia has a government run medical system - a levy is taken out at federal tax time, standardized to taxable income (i.e. you earn more, you pay more medicare levy) which doesn't cover private hospital care, ambulance rides, dental or optical care - for which you need private cover. In the US I still pay a compulsory medial care levy as tax, but I am also obligated to pay for health insurance through my employer. My health insurance is approximately an order of magnitude higher than govt. medical + private optional (dental, optical, ambulance) was in Australia. The level of care I have recieved when I've needed a doctor in both places have been adequate but the treatment is the US has been more comprehensive and the waiting times less in most circumstances. As I see it - health insurance is in reality - a necessity: do you know anyone who could afford health insurance but chooses not to have it? The vast majority of people with no coverage in the US are in such a position because they are unable to afford it. The other reality I see is we pay for uninsured people whether or not it's legitimized by the system or not. Hospitals are obligated to provide acute care to save lives regardless of the ability of the patient to pay - and having to recoup costs for those treated who don't pay - will add this operating costs to the bill for paying patients. The other way we all pay is through liability - people who can't afford to pay their medical bills through having no insurance are left with few options but to try and make someone else pay. It's a motivation for a lot of the frivolous lawsuits the US is notorious for, which chew up a lot of taxpayer funds. A third is the crippling effect on an already downtrodden economy of medical bankruptcies. 60% of all personal bankruptcies in the US are due to medical bills. http://articles.cnn....ce?_s=PM:HEALTH So, I think the arguments suggesting it is "unfair" to pool medical expenses under a government system are extremely myopic, I think healthcare in the US is exorbitant compared to elsewhere in the world and I think the current status quo has a wide range of indirect negative effects on US society as a whole.

I was stopped at an intersection. The road perpendicular comes down a large hill to the traffic lights. When my light went green I hesitated. Right as the car behind me started to honk its horn, a fully laden truck went through the opposing red light with failed brakes. Did God stop me? If so, why did God waste a "miracle" on a non-christian? It's simply far more plausible that I noticed something wrong with my peripheral senses and the action they were warning me about happened beofre I had time to consiously perceive the threat. Whilst true, over 2/3rds of the world are not Christian. Most of the humans - which God supposedly holds an incomprehensibly deep love for are condemned to burn in hell for eternity, for not holding a belief. Given believing or not believing in something is not a conscious choice but a position you are compelled to by consideration of the evidence, God will punish most people with incomprehensible severity for eternity, for something beyond their control. That rather at odds with incomprehensibly deep love, don't you think? Here's some miracles Islam claims: http://www.miraclesofislam.com/ Here's some attributed to Budda: http://en.wikipedia...._Gautama_Buddha Here's some for hinduism: http://en.wikipedia....du_milk_miracle you get the picture. What prediction does the existence of God make and how can we measure it?

You have been posted many examples form the literature which document speciation. Ignoring the evidence doesn't make it disappear. You have repeatedly had the concept of laws and theories as it applies to scientific concepts explained to you. It's specific and leaves little room for misinterpretation, which is the reason science has specific definitions - specifically to AVOID misleading statements.

Natural selection has a specific definition in a scientific context - you can't change the definition of things to suit your specific argument - this is called a strawman argument and is a logical fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You might wish to go back to one of the two posts where I linked to a number of studies which do exactly this. or read these ones: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9724.short http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ujWvn-wiBsoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=speciation+experiments&ots=rgqxM_TNgO&sig=na9h2JqeDmaE_3hD77WmkJ1GsNo#v=onepage&q=speciation%20experiments&f=false http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1704/399.short http://www.pnas.org/content/106/suppl.1/9955.short http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00665.x/full PLEASE read the post about the relationship between scientific laws and theories. Theories DO NOT become laws. They are different entities entirely and no hierarchy is implied whatsoever. http://science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html Repeating something that isn't true does not make it true.

It's a dangerous division - as it's a description of the same process over different time scales. Given the predilection of the ID crowd to "believe" in micro evolution but not "macro" evolution, I think it's necessary to point out that what is actually occurring is a continuum and the "micro"-"macro" separation is akin to separating time into days and months. Accepting "micro" evolutin but rejecting "macro" evolution is like saying you believe in days but not months. Speciation, as defined by postmating reproductive isolation has been observed in Drosophila and Wolbachia http://www.pnas.org/content/98/12/6709.short http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2640819 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2407714 etc. Observational evidence for ecological speciation exists. http://rstb.royalsoc.../1587/354.short http://www.sciencema.../5915/737.short http://dspace.mit.ed...le/1721.1/61788 etc Chromosomal speciaton is simply one model of speciation - Chromosomal fusions also don't necessarily lead to reproductive isolation - metacentric fusions lead to reduced fitness of hybrid offspring and can operate as isolating mechanisms once accumulated in allopatric populations, but the suggestion that chromosomal rearrangement itself drives speciation fell out of favor in mainstream evolutionary theory some time ago. sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/2/153.short

This is a copy paste from you other thread which it appears you didn't take the time to read. http://science.kenne...3380theory.html " Some scientists will tell you that the difference between them is that a law describes what nature does under certain conditions, and will predict what will happen as long as those conditions are met. A theory explains how nature works. Others delineate law and theory based on mathematics -- Laws are often times mathematically defined (once again, a description of how nature behaves) whereas theories are often non-mathematical. Looking at things this was helps to explain, in part, why physics and chemistry have lots of "laws" whereas biology has few laws (and more theories). In biology, it is very difficult to describe all the complexities of life with "simple" (relatively speaking!) mathematical terms. Regardless of which definitions one uses to distinguish between a law and a theory, scientists would agree that a theory is NOT a "transitory law, a law in waiting". There is NO hierarchy being implied by scientists who use these words. That is, a law is neither "better than" nor "above" a theory. From this view, laws and theories "do" different things and have different roles to play in science. Furthermore, notice that with any of the above definitions of law, neither scientists nor nature "conform" to the law. In science, a law is not something that is dictated to scientists or nature; it is not something that a scientist or nature has to do under threat of some penalty if they don't conform."

It's a refutation based on non-evidence. http://www.talkorigi...b/abioprob.html Current mainstream scientific theories are not baseless "stories" and suggesting so is false: these theories are based on the best evidence at hand. http://www.talkorigi...iginoflife.html http://journalofcosm...mentary202.html http://www.sciencema...987/52.abstract http://www.wired.com...synthetic-life/ http://pandasthumb.o...enesis-how.html There's is distinction between personal incredulity and there being simply no evidence for an assertion. I don't not reject the possibility of your ability to walk on water outright - but without evidence of it, I conclude it as unlikely and therefore - if you made an assertion that you could without evidence to support the assertion I would feel confident in maintaining a position of skepticism and rejecting the suggestion as not compelling. This is simply untrue, given my position is the scientific position.

I know it's in violation of the modnote (sorry) but I thought it may be useful for posterity to have a decent explanation of how scientific laws and theories differ: http://science.kenne...3380theory.html " Some scientists will tell you that the difference between them is that a law describes what nature does under certain conditions, and will predict what will happen as long as those conditions are met. A theory explains how nature works. Others delineate law and theory based on mathematics -- Laws are often times mathematically defined (once again, a description of how nature behaves) whereas theories are often non-mathematical. Looking at things this was helps to explain, in part, why physics and chemistry have lots of "laws" whereas biology has few laws (and more theories). In biology, it is very difficult to describe all the complexities of life with "simple" (relatively speaking!) mathematical terms. Regardless of which definitions one uses to distinguish between a law and a theory, scientists would agree that a theory is NOT a "transitory law, a law in waiting". There is NO hierarchy being implied by scientists who use these words. That is, a law is neither "better than" nor "above" a theory. From this view, laws and theories "do" different things and have different roles to play in science. Furthermore, notice that with any of the above definitions of law, neither scientists nor nature "conform" to the law. In science, a law is not something that is dictated to scientists or nature; it is not something that a scientist or nature has to do under threat of some penalty if they don't conform." Phenotypic variation (i.e. - "random mutations") is observed in virtually every population and species http://www.sciencema.../6002/372.short http://onlinelibrary...10.00858.x/full http://onlinelibrary...09.04229.x/full Some human phenotypes are better at say - resisting disease than others. http://www.nature.co...ature07175.html http://hmg.oxfordjou...8/R2/R202.short Given they're not actually true, they aren't problems. Speciation has been observed, many times. http://rstb.royalsoc.../1587/354.short http://www.sciencema.../5915/737.short http://dspace.mit.ed...le/1721.1/61788

Held to the same standards as any other directly observed phenomena in a lay sense it's a fact. Any other lay fact held to scientific validation is also a theory.Like gravity, time and the theory that we are using computers to communicate.

We use likelihood surfaces a fair bit in evolutionary biology. Imagine the likelihood surface hypervalent posted as a fitness surface, with the hypothetical optimal phenotype as the highest peak. Imagine a population has ascended the phenotypic cline into one of the suboptimal peaks on the fitness surface. Because it is a local fitness peak, stabilizing selection begins to reduce stochastic variation within the population and reduce the likelihood of the persistence of reduced fitness phenotypes in the saddle between the suboptimal peak and the optimal peak. As such, it's highly plausible and in some cases highly likely that a lot of organisms have evolved a specific, suboptimal phenotype on a given surface. Add into the concept of fitness surfaces the fact that you have multiple optimal phenotypes for different selection pressures and the landscape becomes quite complicated. So, even without the paper that hypervalent iodine posted suggesting that green is the optimal phenotype, the suggestion becomes an non issue for current evolutionary theory - in fact it took me a while to even realize why you presented it as a flaw.

His basis was wild speculation to the point where his argument may as well be based on fiction, as previously discussed. This is why it's not accepted as a serious impediment to mainstream scientific theory. The reason being that we have no idea of the replication rate, generation time and effective population sizes of proto and early life forms, nor any idea of the selective pressure they underwent at the time. It is extremely difficult to evaluate these parameters for extant organisms for which we can directly measure them and inferring them for life forms we know essentially no details of is pretty much pulling them out of the air. So, again at the crux of it you seem to be arguing for a system of investigation which makes positive assertions, but has no obligation to offer any form of proof of those assertions... it just doesn't seem like such a system would be actually useful in gaining any knowledge of much at all. Again I disagree - if someone makes religious claims that are either at odds with the observed world (e.g. miracles) ascribe exclusive cause (e.g. claims of exclusive moral authority) or insist on supernatural explanations for phenomena accounted for by naturalistic explanations (e.g. so called "qualia") I see no reason for them not to be questioned.

Sure, if you exceed the word/page limit and/or include color figures they sting you for it - which given the sell the printed journals is a bit rich... but my experience has beent he opposite - I've only had to pay for one article and the $150 color page fee was a lot cheaper than PLoS biology's $2900 Sometimes if you're a member they waive the fee - e.g. if you're an SSE member they'll let you publish in Evolution for free once a year.

Emergent scientific fields generally start off with broad hypotheses that don't really have a "box". Asgeneral hypotheses are verified or rejected, "the box" of parameter space in which the answer lies slowly becomes apparent. Further hypothesis testing and experimentation leads to a shrinking of the dimensions of the "box" on the parameter space in which the answer is most likely to be. Often when the well meaning layperson presents an 'out of the box" hypothesis, they are presenting a hypothetical which lies in a region of parameter space which as been rejected by previous investigation - often due to the natural lack of knowledge that comes from not having spent a full time career investigating the problem at hand. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to me all the time, only I consider it flattering to have independently come up with concepts predecessors I would consider mentors and role models did too, but then proved to be false. The trap that many people not classically trained in the sciences fall into is turning a hypothesis into a pet hypothesis. They then take the robust criticism and evaluation of a hypothesis which part of the normal evaluation of science as a personal affront and subsequent rejection of those hypotheses found to be wanting as personal rejection and offense from the establishment. I'd hate for you to fall into that trap. While evolutionary biology is my field and I'm not here to critique your theory, be aware of the miniscule chance that an "out of the box" proposal has not already been considered and turned out to be wrong, nor take offense if it is robustly critiqued. It's part of the process and happens to all of us

Then why did you both start a thread specifically equating the two and then post in this one to again, directly compare them?

Whilst dealing with the reviewer who says "change something trivial and redo ALL THE ANALYSIS!" Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine. If you like things that sound similar to what Mike Patton does, you'll like them too.

I haven't seen it posted elsewhere - forgive me if it is... A significant number of scientists have begun to boycott the major scientific publisher Elsevier. http://thecostofknowledge.com/ The reasons for the boycott: They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals. In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information. This goes hand in hand with the push towards open access publication of science: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/ps/cacm01.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=1 http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2010/08/25/does-post-publication-peer-review-work/ etc. Now I see the merits of moving science to free public access. Many of the citizen scientists on this forum simply don't have access to the peer reviewed literature because they can't fork out for numerous journal subscriptions - even though as taxpayers, they are paying for research funded by NSF, NIH, the ARC etc. Scientists like myself are effectively used as a free labor pool for both the writing of articles and the peer review of them by companies like Elsevier. Seems like the journals are getting a free ride all the way and both the academics and the public are copping the raw end of the stick. But is open source the answer? The quality of peer review in open source journals has been brought into question: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html And the cost of publishing in open source is directly incurred by the researcher. If I had of published all of the papers from my PhD in PLoS for example, about 1/4 of my research budget would have gone directly into publishing costs, versus, well - none for submitting to propriety journals. I daresay my funding body prefers one model to the other... So what do we do? Do we write publishing costs into our grant proposals? If so how does an open sourcer compete with a non-open sourcer who can get the same amount of research done for cheaper? I'm not sure if there's an easy answer.

Before this way you mean at 1.39pm, right? Because there appears to be a fair bit of name dropping and big word using in that post, at least to me.

I'm in the midst of writing a research statement and the first sentence is: "The central research interest that connects my studies across a diversity of biological systems is striving to understand the processes by which homogeneous populations diversify and eventually speciate." The tools that I use to effectively answer my central question are generally describable as "science".

The great artesian basin? http://en.wikipedia...._Artesian_Basin

My academic career has moved me around a lot. I haul a couple of texts around with me, but most are in a box in my parent's attic.

Re-read what I actually posted. Professor =/= MD. Your father, if your description is accurate was a research scientist and not a typical medical doctor. A PhD or equivalent is generally the prerequisite for a professorship, not a medical doctorate.

Simply being a practicing medical doctor does not automatically qualify you as a scientist. I work jointly between the school of Epidemiology and Public Health and the school of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I interact with MDs, med students, medical scientists and evolutionary biologists on a regular basis. Most practicing MDs do not conduct novel research and no, applying validated medical research in the form of treatments is not scientific research. Having been directly involved in the med school AND more traditional scientific disciplines I can confidently say that the training those destined to become MDs and those destined to research differs considerably. MDs are, generally speaking NOT research scientists nor are they trained to be. This is not said in any way to belittle MDs or that there aren't MDs who are also qualified to do research - but the job they do is distinct and different from research and thus, requires different training.

Find what evidence? I quite clearly state - "If such evidence were found". Are you implying that scientific theories are not altered in light of new evidence?

As an example - if new evidence supports a theory which explains biological diversification better than evolution by natural selection, science will adopt it. If new evidence which proves Jesus didn't rise from the dead is found - what happens to Christianity?