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LucidDreamer

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Everything posted by LucidDreamer

  1. Huh? I think Bush is a moron. I think a lot of the blame for the situation in Iraq can be placed at his feet and some of the failures in New Orleans can be placed there as well. However, some of the quotes I have read recently from Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore make me think that they have both lost it.
  2. A great many medicinal plants produce chemicals that are useful to the plant that also happen to have medicinal properties to animals. Some plant chemicals may have evolved to actually prevent animals from eating them, such as pain medications or sleep medications. Some chemicals evolved to prevent microbe infections or insect infestations, and thus were useful to man for the same reasons. Some chemicals, such as vitamins in fruit, may have evolved to attract animals because the animals provided a service to the plants.
  3. I think the amount of physical trauma that results in shock can vary from person to person. I think their emotional state probably affects whether they go into shock as much as how much pain they are in.
  4. One of the best methods of population control is to increase the standard of living. The wealthy and middle class have substantially less children than the poor so if you can increase the standard of living in areas where people are poor, then you can create a very humane way to control population. The additional value of increasing the standard of living in the world is that you increase productivity, which means the world is able to sustain a larger population. Even with a higher standard of living with its increased productivity you will still have to enforce strict reproduction laws or face the consequences of famine, war, and epidemics. I think creating unequal ratios of females to males is a bad idea; it will only lead to more violence. A world full of men with only a few women will result in men slaughtering each other to get the woman. I think at some point reproduction can no longer be considered a right and only people who earn some sort of distinction or win some sort of lottery should be allowed to reproduce. It's harsh, but it is preferable to famine and war.
  5. You are confused about what evolution is. It doesn't say that the universe or life came about by chance, or give any predictions about the who and the why of the universe and life. Evolution is a theory for the mechanism that resulted in the diversity of life. Perhaps there is a God. Perhaps He is the Christian God and He created all life on Earth. Science doesn't tell us, but what it definitely tells us is that if He does exist, He used Evolution.
  6. " J. E. Coligan et al., Eds., Current Protocols in Immunology (Wiley, 1999)." If you have access to a library or online library.
  7. Apparently Mokele is doing some research of his own. Maybe he will be able to put this whole question to rest after more field work.
  8. I can't believe we have been arguing against a Jack Chick track. LOL, the joke is on us.
  9. I will repeat the question to him that I asked in my really voluminous post earlier, which probably nobody read. Why are you covering your ears and yelling ”nany nany booboo?” *Follows Hellbender*
  10. I have some liberal extremist views from your list IMM. I like: Eliminate all guns off the face of the planet, socialize Medicine, and free public education for everyone. I'm also somewhat of a libertarian and don't want a massive overbearing federal government. So I would pay for the free medicine and public education by eliminating all the money we spend on "defense," if such a thing were actually possible and practical.
  11. I. Do you believe in the theory of evolution? --Yes. I. Do you think man evolved from apes? --Yes (the classification of things might make that statement a little iffy, but I get what you are asking.) I. Why? --Well, all the evidence that says so. I. What kind of evidence? –Well Mr. Interviewer, there is a staggering amount, but to start you out lets take a look one of my favorite sites on evolution. Talkorigins.org has an excellent list of evidence for macroevolution, which would include the evolution of man. 1. Anatomical parahomology 2. Molecular parahomology 3. Anatomical convergence 4. Molecular convergence 5. Anatomical suboptimal function 6. Molecular suboptimal function 7. Unity of life 8. Nested hierarchies 9. Convergence of independent phylogenies 1. Statistics of incongruent phylogenies 10. Transitional forms 1. Reptile-birds 2. Reptile-mammals 3. Ape-humans 4. Legged whales 5. Legged seacows 11. Chronology of common ancestors 12. Protein functional redundancy 13. DNA functional redundancy 14. Transposons 15. Redundant pseudogenes 16. Endogenous retroviruses 17. Anatomical vestiges 18. Atavisms 1. Whales with hindlimbs 2. Humans tails 19. Molecular vestiges 20. Ontogeny and developmental biology 1. Mammalian ear bones, reptilian jaws 2. Pharyngeal pouches, branchial arches 3. Snake embryos with legs 4. Embryonic human tail 5. Marsupial eggshell and caruncle 21. Present biogeography 22. Past biogeography 1. Marsupials 2. Horses 3. Apes and humans Part 5. Change 23. Genetic 24. Morphological 25. Functional 26. The strange past 27. Stages of speciation 28. Speciation events 29. Morphological rates 30. Genetic rates http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ I. You're right, there are similarities. Does this prove we came from apes? --Well, I gave you a much larger list than just physical similarities, so I would consider that question a form of strawman. However, physical similarity is one method of determining the relationship between two animals. Evolution is a slow process that often builds or reconstructs new physical features from old ones. Two animals that display common anatomical features are more likely to be related than if they don’t share features, but morphology is only one of the many tools that biologist use to make classifications and determine evolutionary relationship. Some of the other methods can be found in that large list above. I. Are robins and eagles similar? --I guess you could say that. I. Does this prove eagles evolved from robins? --Hmm, it seems odd to me that an interviewer is asking me leading questions as if he were poorly constructing a flawed Aristotelian argument instead of giving an interview, but I’ll play along. No. First of all, I have already told you that morphology is only one method used in determining evolutionary relationship. Second, the similarity between an eagle and a robin is relative. An eagle may look a whole lot like a robin compared to an octopus, but among birds there isn’t a lot of similarity. Third, when a biologist looks at two creature’s physical traits for classification he does extensive research on a hundreds of physical features, such as bone size, bone shape, bone density, ligand sizes, number of ligands, beak size, beak shape, color of beak, organ sizes, etc (the list could go on forever). It’s not as if a biologist visited his cousin Jethro on the farm one day and looked up and said, “Hey, them bird things look alike; they must be related.” I. Have you ever seen the old fighter planes flown in WWII ? --Yes. I. Have you ever seen the fighter planes of today? --Yes. I. Are they similar? --Depends on what you definition of similarity. Again, that word is relative. A WWII fighter plane looks more like an F-15 than a toaster. I. Does this prove F-15's came from the old WWII planes. --Hmm, what exactly does “came from” mean? The technology used to build WWII planes provided a lot of the information used to build modern planes, such as the F-15. I. Then why are they so similar? They both have wings and a tail. Right? --Yeah, that’s two similarities between two airplanes. I. Could it be that the designer used the same law of aerodynamics to build the similar planes? --I would hope so. I. So the similarities could just be that they just have a similar blue print? --That’s a very simplistic view of things, but I could agree to that. However there is a great deal more evidence for evolution, including the evolution of man? I. What evidence is there? --Hmm, it seems you have a bad memory. Please refer to the list I gave above. --Well....There's Lucy that was found, and Neanderthal Man. I. Lucy was later found to be just a three foot tall chimp. Neanderthal Man was the skull of an old man who suffered from arthritis. --That’s very interesting Mr. Interviewer, but I thought I was the one who was suppose to be answering the questions. However, since it’s make believe sharing time I want to make sure you know that Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t really a large meat-eating dinosaur; it was just an iguana exposed to incredible amounts of radioactive llama poo. Diplodocus wasn’t really a large sauropod, but a large breed of dog with elephantitis of the tail. Lucy was a name given to an Australopithecus that had a great deal of anatomical differences from humans or chimpanzees. Biologists who studied the fossils are quite convinced of this. There have been dozens of Neanderthal bones found and they too have a great deal of anatomical differences to Homo sapiens. Apparently that arthritic man’s skull was enormous, broken up into a thousand pieces, spread throughout Europe, and some of the pieces even look like other skulls, femurs, kneecaps, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal 31. I. In fact, some were delibrate hoaxes made to prove evolution, like Nebraska man, who had an entire skeleton constructed by people who found a tooth of an extinct pig. Why do you think evolutionists would do that? --Because it’s an enormous evil conspiracy orchestrated by Satan. You know too much. I have been commanded to kill you. It won’t be a pleasant death either. You’re to be tied down with your eyes pinned open while you watch hours of teletubby and Barnie videos until you gnaw your own limbs off to escape. I. Let's get back to topic. Can you give any examples of transitional forms? --Here: Transitional forms 1. Reptile-birds 2. Reptile-mammals 3. Ape-humans 4. Legged whales 5. Legged seacows http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates " The following are fossil transitions between species and genera: 6. Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them. 7. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974). 8. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997). 9. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978). 10. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change. 11. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45). 12. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981). 13. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985). 14. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983). 15. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975). 16. Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968). The following are fossil transitionals between families, orders, and classes: 17. Human ancestry. Australopithecus, though its leg and pelvis bones show it walked upright, had a bony ridge on the forearm, probably vestigial, indicative of knuckle walking (Richmond and Strait 2000). 18. Dinosaur-bird transitions. 19. Haasiophis terrasanctus is a primitive marine snake with well-developed hind limbs. Although other limbless snakes might be more ancestral, this fossil shows a relationship of snakes with limbed ancestors (Tchernov et al. 2000). Pachyrhachis is another snake with legs that is related to Haasiophis (Caldwell and Lee 1997). 20. The jaws of mososaurs are also intermediate between snakes and lizards. Like the snake's stretchable jaws, they have highly flexible lower jaws, but unlike snakes, they do not have highly flexible upper jaws. Some other skull features of mososaurs are intermediate between snakes and primitive lizards (Caldwell and Lee 1997; Lee et al. 1999; Tchernov et al. 2000). 21. Transitions between mesonychids and whales. 22. Transitions between fish and tetrapods. 23. Transitions from condylarths (a kind of land mammal) to fully aquatic modern manatees. In particular, Pezosiren portelli is clearly a sirenian, but its hind limbs and pelvis are unreduced (Domning 2001a, 2001b). The following are fossil transitionals between kingdoms and phyla: 24. The Cambrian fossils Halkiera and Wiwaxia have features that connect them with each other and with the modern phyla of Mollusca, Brachiopoda, and Annelida. In particular, one species of halkieriid has brachiopod-like shells on the dorsal side at each end. This is seen also in an immature stage of the living brachiopod species Neocrania. It has setae identical in structure to polychaetes, a group of annelids. Wiwaxia and Halkiera have the same basic arrangement of hollow sclerites, an arrangement that is similar to the chaetae arrangement of polychaetes. The undersurface of Wiwaxia has a soft sole like a mollusk's foot, and its jaw looks like a mollusk's mouth. Aplacophorans, which are a group of primitive mollusks, have a soft body covered with spicules similar to the sclerites of Wiwaxia (Conway Morris 1998, 185-195). 25. Cambrian and Precambrain fossils Anomalocaris and Opabinia are transitional between arthropods and lobopods. 26. An ancestral echinoderm has been found that is intermediate between modern echinoderms and other deuterostomes (Shu et al. 2004)." http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html I. Yes. --Yes, what? Why are you covering your ears and saying ”nany nany booboo?” I. Like? --You know that really was childish of you. I. Really? You can't name one? But wouldn't you be able to end this debate by just providing one? After all, there'd be nothing evolution oposers could say. And there are millions of species of animals to chose from. You can't name just one transitional form out of them? ---Actually, I have given many examples of transitional fossils to creationists, but they always make give some pathetic rationalization. In the case of hominids every example is just a really strange chimp, a man with a disease, or and extinct ape that looked kind of like a man. The transitional fossils leading to whales are just whale-like creatures that had legs. How is it possible to show a creationist a transitional fossil if they already have their mind made up that it can’t possibly be a transitional fossil because no such thing exists? Every fossil that has anatomical characteristics of both ancient and modern animals becomes just another extinct animal or a diseased modern animal. There is no possible transitional fossil that can exist to satisfy a creationist. There is a field with several layers of strata containing progressive levels of foot bones, starting with three toes and ending with the full-blown hooves of modern horses. However, creationists claim that those bones only represent several kinds of horse-like animals that have gone extinct. Apparently sometime within the last ten thousand years there were dozens of horse-like animals all hanging out together in the same field. Perhaps they had a good view of the 3 foot chimp, the Arthritic old man, and the whale-like creature with legs before the flood came and wiped them away. --Well, some viruses evolve to adapt and become more suitable to their environment---like some evolve resistance to certain medicines. I. That would be micro-evolution. ---I’m not sure how one would go about defining an exact distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution when there is no known method to create a barrier between to two. I. Micro-evolution is a true fact. But it doesn't change into another kind of virus. It's just a different type of the same virus. Cold viruses don't evolve into HIV viruses, do they? ---No, but the primate virus SIV has evolved into many kinds of viruses, including HIV. I. Because that would be macro-evolution, which is changing into a different species altogether. Like apes to humans. There are examples of micro-evolution. Can you, since you're an evolutionist, give an example of a fossil found in the process of macro-evolution? --You seem to talk a lot about your beliefs for an interviewer that is suppose to be unbiased in his reporting. Haven’t I already given you several examples of transitional fossils? I. Okay. Well, how did it all begin? --The Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang? --I don't know. Some scientists say from some really dense matter or energy that just exploded. The big Bang does not attempt to explain why or who was involved, however. I. Do you think that life came out of the water? --Yes I. So when the first life forms came out of the sea, did they have lungs or gills? --They had scuba gear and used the Malibu Barbie convertible to cruise around looking for chicks and drive in movie theatres. They obviously evolved the capacity to exist both in the water and on land. There are many examples of fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals that live partly in the water and on land and have evolved the ability to deal with both kinds of environments. Some have gills, some have lungs, some have one and then the other, and some have both. I would say that the first creatures to start exploring land had gills and lungs at the same time and their lungs became more and more efficient through time and evolution. I. So when this creature came out of the sea, why didn't it die the way other creatures with gills do when they're out of water? --Some modern creatures obviously don’t die when they come out of the water because they have evolved the capacity to survive on land as well as the water. The first creatures didn’t just decide one day that they would rather be land creatures so they could visit Taco Bell and then permanently move the whole family onto dry land. They were obviously like many of the beach creatures today who spend some time in the water and some time on land. These creatures gradually started to spend more time on land over time. There was a bounty of plant material and insects on the land plus they could get away from their predators, so there were great advantages and selective pressure for the alleles that allowed these creatures to stay on land for greater periods of time. I. What caused it to become amphibious? --Went over this one already. I. Well, when this creature first came on land, was it male or female? --Neither. It sang high-pitched songs and grabbed its crotch. It had unhealthy love for children and gave them Jesus juice. It called itself Michael Jackson. It wasn’t one individual creature that came onto land. It was one type of creature that obviously had two sexes, that gradually started spending more time on land over many generations and characteristics that allowed this creature to spend more time on land were selected over these many generations. I. What made it become two sexes? --The doctors, but only after many operations and hormone pills. I. Okay. Well let me wrap this up. Do you, as an evolutionist, believe that everything in the universe, from our ecosystem, full of millions of types of animals that have existed for thousands of years, without chaos, full of order and structure--- And this solar system with these gigantic masses called planets, that never crash into each other--- all came about by chance? ---No. The processes that govern all of these events are controlled by natural forces that exert predictable change and therefore are not random. I. That's true. Tell me, do you believe, that our planet will crash into the sun? ---It's possible this could happen along time from now. I. But not in our life time. --Well, no. I. What's keeping the planet from crashing into the sun now? Or what's keeping the planets from coliding? Right now as we speak, our galaxy is traveling along at 60,000 miles an hour, surrounded by hundreds of other galaxies. What's keeping our galaxy, which is surrounded by all these other galaxies with these unfathomably huge gravitational fields from crashing into one of them? --Silly putty. Galaxies sometimes do collide but most don’t because there is a lot of space between them and planets are involved in this strange phenomena called orbitals. I. Are we just lucky? --Depends, who are we talking about? I know I have been loosing a lot of money playing poker lately and I feel very unlucky. Luck is a man-made concept that is relative, making that question hard to answer.
  12. I don't think Cro Magnum man would have been too keen on breeding with the Neadrathals. We are already biggoted towards people that have almost no genetic differences from us at all. I think when we saw a neandrathal man or woman we killed them if we could. We probably thought it disgusting to think of mating with them and shunned anyone who had a Neanderthal parent. Even still, some genes might have snuck in.
  13. So basically my opinion is that hair insulates the body from exposure to the outside air's convection currents and reduces the amount of evaporation that is needed for a sweat-based cooling system that was essential to our adaptation to the dryer savanna environment.
  14. I think most of the issues have already been covered, but I'll put in the way I understand it. Western Africa, where man's ape-like ancestor came from is very moist and there is a dense cover of trees that provides constant shade. Under the cover of the trees our smaller ancestors were able to keep cool. Our hair acted like an insulator that kept us warm during the occasional chilly night and cool when it got a little warm. Now, as man's environment changed from a lush jungle to a dry savanna man needed to adapt or perish. To find food he needed to make increasingly more trips out of the trees to scavenge food or get a drink of water from a water source. This meant speed was a necessity because there were dangerous predators like large cats. So being able to run faster became a priority. We needed our hands because we already made use of very primitive tools and we still needed to climb the trees for protection. Plus we already had a semi-upright flexible body type from our ancestors. So there we are, an ape-like creature that has become somewhat more upright to run faster on two legs and with a somewhat larger body size to accommodate longer more muscular legs so we can awkwardly run out of the trees into the savanna to gather resources. The problem with the larger body size is that the larger you become the easier it is to hold onto body heat but the harder it becomes to get rid of the body heat. In addition, we are running, which uses way more energy and heats up our core body temperature quickly. Not only are we running, we are running out under the hot African sun. In order to maintain longer periods of running without overheating we needed a more efficient cooling system. The mechanism of sweating didn't use to be all that useful in the wet forest because there wasn't much of an air flow in the jungle, it wasn't as hot, and most importantly, it was very moist. Because it was so moist in the jungle sweating wouldn't have done much to cool us off because when there is already so much moisture in the air there isn't much in the way of evaporation. But now we are in the savanna where it is much dryer and the direct sunlight makes it much hotter so a sweat-based cooling system becomes the greatest thing in the world. But what about our hair? It use to be great as an insulation system when we only experienced a certain amount temperature change but now the most important thing is being able to avoid hyperthermia when we are running our ass off from a hungry cat. The problem with hair is that it acts like an insulator by creating a pocket of air around the body that is insulated from the environmental air's temperature and convection currents. Plus in is keeping all of our already over heating body heat next to our body when we really need to get rid of it. Most importatnly it is interfering with our newly developing sweat-based cooling sytem that needs the exposure of the convections of air currents to constatly take away heat through the process of evaporation. So those among us that have alleles that cause us to produce thiner, more sparse body hair are able to cool down more efficiently and they are able to get away from the preditors and possibly chase down a poor creature or two without overheating, so they are surviving and they are able to pass down their genes. Those who have thicker coats are overheating and perishing before they can procreate.
  15. Buzsaw, I admire your steadfastness and temperance.
  16. It is normal and it is neither good nor bad. You are just out of the habit of remembering your dreams.
  17. I could see that the time that you are lucidly dreaming might interfere with some of the benefits of REM sleep--to what extent, I don't know. But, generally the amount of time that you are actually lucidly dreaming is short, so it shouldn't interfere much with how much replenishment you get. For instance, if you manage to lucidly dream for 5 minutes each night, I can't seen that it would hurt you very much. I think, but I am not positive, that Steve La Barge, a lucid dream researcher, said something similar in one of his books. However, I definitely see something like sleep paralysis interfering with the amount of replenishment you get from sleep.
  18. Martin, I am totally flabbergasted. I provided exactly what you asked for. I provided a quote where he specifically claims a relationship to culture and civilization and you claim somebody must have goofed and misrepresented him. Then I provide another quote where he says that the alleles arose through natural selection, and you say that doesn't count because I once used the word specific. My use of the word specific was not intended to indicate that he claimed to know the exact mechanism, but from the comments that I have read about him he seems to believe that they are specifically related to culture and civilization and that natural selection has acted on these two genes in this capacity. Now, it could be that I am totally insane or a complete idiot and I have totally misunderstood the two articles that I read about the subject, but I think they were pretty clear and either somebody is misrepresenting him or he is really, indirectly or directly, proposing exactly what I have said. Now, I want to clarify one last thing. I don’t necessarily disagree with his position, which I am only deducing from two articles that I read and a few quotes. I totally agree for one thing, that natural selection was probably involved in the spread of the allele that arose 5800 years ago, assuming that his research about the emergence of allele is good. You claim that I have said terrible and unjust things about both a reporter and then a scientist, but I feel I have only repeated what I read on the article provided with very minimal induction. I did say that it is unscientific to suggest that these genes are related to culture and civilization because they are as yet unsubstantiated, and I stand by that. Scientists say all kinds of things like that all the time because they like to believe that the work that they put their heart and sole into is extremely significant, which is only human nature. I am only trying to differentiate what his research really indicates from what he would like to believe and his opinions. I can’t fathom what exactly made you turn on me like that, but I can only tell you that I very much enjoy and appreciate all of the many excellent posts you have made on this forum. I will indeed read his papers when I get a hold of them.
  19. Check again Most fruits are full of fructose and some vegetables, like potatoes, are full of starch. But I agree with you, the atkins diet is not healthy if you consume lots of saturated fats and cholesterol. Sorry, off topic.
  20. I'm guessing you mean physically weak, which we are. But we are somewhat physically versatile though, which is strength and particularly useful to an intelligent tool user.
  21. Some mature plants can actually survive from the light from a light bulb, but I dont think they thrive. I think most plants will die though.
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