Mr Skeptic

Nope! The whole concept of one contemporary species being "newer" or "superior" to another goes against everything evolution says, and is reminiscent of the ancient Greek and Lamarkian ideas of a Great Chain of Being. One species may be closer to its ancestral species but that does not make it any worse nor better. You cannot ever tell by comparing two individuals which is closer to the ancestral species. To be able to claim similarity to a common ancestor would require either comparison with several other current related species or with fossils from the ancestral ones. No... You will no more find "chimp DNA" in humans than you will find "human DNA" in chimps. You will find "common ancestor DNA" in both, in addition to finding "chimp DNA" in chimps and "human DNA" in humans. Even if you show that the chimps are closer to the common ancestor than are the humans, the shared DNA will still be "common ancestor DNA". All it would mean is that the species closer to the common ancestor would have a little more "common ancestor DNA" and a little less "new species DNA" than would the species less similar to the common ancestor.

Very well then, suppose you know of DNA that all humans hold in common. Could this DNA be used to distinguish between groups of humans? If so, how? If not, why not?

No, species do not get stuck in time nor do species stop evolving. Why do you expect modern Europeans to have something in common with modern Africans, that the modern Africans do not have in common with the modern Europeans? Yes we all share ancestral DNA but that is not what this test is measuring. We have DNA in common with all species all the way down to bacteria. And we have genes separate from them too. But these tests are of modern Africans and modern Europeans, not modern Europeans and time-travel-back-a-million-years Africans. And even if you did test against time-travel-back-a-million-years Africans, the result would be the same -- the genes common to both get ignored for the test, and the different genes get used to compare which group someone belongs to.

You are being observed. You are leaving your scent all over the place, for example. This leaves a record in your room that you were there, so you were observed by your room just as surely as if you took photographs of yourself.

It seems you can get rich quick, by selling Iraq dinars to gullible people. Not by being one of the gullible people who buy it.

No tradeoff. Beautiful people are more intelligent, ugly people less intelligent. (on average, of course) http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200903/beautiful-people-are-more-intelligent-i It seems to me like the study says the the sexually selected genes do have an advantage but that it is limited and not selected for beyond a certain point.

How about this situation: A man comes at you with a weapon hollering that he's going to kill you. However, you manage to knock him out, then tie him up. Then you shoot him. While almost no one would have faulted you to shoot him in the first place, shooting him after he gets tied up is going to get you charged for murder. Yes, even though in this situation there is no need for a trial to determine the man's guilt due to the circumstances, it would still be murder. Except when the state does it, in which case it is execution. Now I'm not against execution but in the US it is not particularly cheaper than life imprisonment so there is little reason to carry one out.

I think that, using technology to help, we will split into three species -- one for land, one for (salt) water, and one for space.

Sources please! Your first statement I'm pretty sure was Paul's and not Jesus', and your second one I doubt you will find anywhere in the Bible.

Or studies in peacocks.

If this is for class, one of your professors might have access, or your school itself might have access.

Hydrogen is a fuel. It is also like the article said, an energy carrier. It's not an energy source but that is not what the article said.

But we've already done that, minus the sugar cubes, to adults, and they were not able to defend themselves against it. Eventually, we decided it was a bad idea and outlawed slavery. And here is the heart of the matter: for almost every right and protection we want to grant to children, we want to and for the most part already have, granted that right to people regardless of whether they are children or adults. But children do need additional protection -- from themselves and their parents. Back in the day, or even now where allowed, many parents would send their children off to work whatever job they could for whatever money they could get. This of course is a problem since that would sabotage the child's ability to get educated so they can be even more productive members of society. However, I don't think entirely outlawing child labor was the right answer. Many children nowadays go around thinking they have the right not to work, they don't want to work, and they don't want to grow up and have to work, and they don't understand responsibility. No work experience, no work ethic, no desire to work. And part of this I would say would be due to their being forbidden to work. Other children are controlled by their parents because their parents are their only possible source of money, and not only have we allowed that but made it the law. Yet others get a feeling of entitlement because their parents must provide them with everything. Why not simply ensure they get paid fairly and work limited hours, maybe no more than 2 or 4 hours per day? Then they could gain work experience, some responsibility, and realize the value of things. Surely a little bit of work wouldn't ruin their education nor even their fun?

I too almost ignored the whole thread due to the title.

I agree, and I will add that adults have to be protected from adults, there is simply no way to be a civilized nation unless we protect our adults from exploitation.

The visible part of the breath is of course water droplets formed by condensation of hot humid air from your lungs in the cold air. As to what would make it more visible: a dark background and proper lighting. The dark background will make a sharper contrast when light reflects/refracts/disperses from the droplets. Try playing around with a flashlight to see what effects extra lighting would have.

I think the "best time" from biological, psychological, traditional, and sociological perspectives would each give different answers. Define what you mean by "best", and answers will be easier to find.

No. I'm against forcing a person to work against their will. It really doesn't matter to me whether that person is a child or not. How come people act like things are only terrible when done to children?

Hint:

And this has anything to do with child labor how? It was not only children who were abused such -- worker safety and worker compensation are separate issues.

The strong force that binds the nucleus together is very short-ranged, but the electromagnetic repulsion from the protons has a larger range and opposes it. The optimum is iron, and anything either heavier or lighter can gain energy by fusion or fission that moves it closer to iron.

As I understand it it was the unions that wanted to eliminate child labor (and prison labor too) since it represented a source of cheap labor and undermined their bargaining position. I'm not convinced it was a good idea.

Think of it like this. Suppose you have a species of flower that can have red, white, blue, and purple flowers. Then someone takes the wild population and divides it into groups based on the color. Later on, you could do a genetic analysis of the DNA and determine which group an individual plant belongs to (or you could just look at the color). However, that grouping was rather arbitrary, and you could as easily grouped them by height, pest resistance, seed size, or whatever other attributes you can think of. Racial genetics is rather like this, but not so much based on specific genes that either exist or not in a population, but rather the frequency of an enormous range of genes. One assortment of gene frequencies we call "african", another "european", "asian", or "native american". You could take any of these populations and through careful breeding change the gene frequencies to match those of another race, unless there are some genes unique to any one group, but that would take a very long time. Because so many genes are involved, for quite a while it would be possible to identify the proportions of the groups which form your ancestry. Another example would be if you had four children. One of your children stayed at home and the rest went each to a different continent, and all had children of their own. By DNA testing you can tell which of your children the grandchildren belong to, even though they are all descended from you. You could also tell that one of the grandchildren was not the son of your stay-at-home son, which of course should be no surprise. So humanity divided from its common origins into a few groups each of which went their separate way genetically with low intermingling. It should no more surprise you that the tests might show no african ancestry in an euoropean than if it shows no euoropean ancestry in an african, since all are from a common origin.

There is no 0.0000....1 nor 1.0000....1, any more than there is an end to something endless. Some real numbers have two ways you can write them, which is little different than five = 5 = V = cinco = 5.0 = 4.99999... = the third prime number = (any other way you feel like representing the number 5)

Think of it this way: if you try to match speeds with the photon, by moving in the direction it is traveling as fast as you possibly can, the photon gets red-shifted and thus its energy and relative mass lowered. Now you could say that the mass of things depends on how fast we're going, but we have a perfectly good word for that already: energy. If you measure the mass of something when it is at rest, it is an intrinsic property rather than a relative property, which is more useful. To remove confusion you can say rest mass, which is labeled [math]m_0[/math] rather than m, but often it is called mass either way. The other type of mass could be called relative mass or mass-energy or energy to avoid confusion.