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User: ocellaris

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  1. Re:How convenient! on Geneticist Claims Human Evolution Is Over · · Score: 1

    IMHO women do tend to look for intelligent, caring, creative (good fathers) when they want to get pregnant... they go for the handsome idiots when they're not planning it. Same for men with marriage but to a lesser degree maybe. Also, if a population has instincts to do something that no longer fit their environment (sex with good looking jocks/models made sense in the stone age maybe) then eventually that instinct will evolve into what's good for the survival of the species. Right?

  2. Discrimination against anxiety disorders on Homeland Security Department Testing "Pre-Crime" Detector · · Score: 1

    3-13% of the population has fear of crowds in some time in their life, not to mention any of a dozen other anxiety disorders that can be triggered by a huge crowds, authoritarian TSA security theater, deadlines to get on claustaphobic planes, the stress of travel, etc etc - "Sensors look at facial expressions, body heat and can measure pulse and breathing rate from a distance." - That's what anxiety looks like. If they implement anything like this it's going "catch" anxious people who are already terrified of being caught being anxious and make them choose not to travel anymore.

  3. Climate stability and exiting the stone age on Another 150,000 Years of CO2 Data · · Score: 1
    People tend to talk about global warming as if it's just going to get hot and we're going to lose some costal cities and maybe some bad weather. Those are all adequate reasons to change the way we live because the human and economical cost of that would be tremendous.

    But, what really got me was when I started looking at it this way: Civilizations sprang up for the first time all over the world simultaneously about the same time: 10,000 years ago and if you look at a graph of temperature with the scale showing recent ice ages but still showing the last 10k years as more than a line, you see what's unique about the last 10k years isn't hot or cold but stability. (Not the best but here's one: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Ice_Age _Temperature_Rev.png)

    I read once somewhere somebody had the theory that certain cultures have done very well (Europe, parts of Asia, not Africa) because the orientation of the continent they are on. Europe stretches east to west, Africa north to south. Small cultures who learned to domesticate the animals and crops in their climate were able to expand as far as the climate spread. If you live on a land mass that spreads north to south temperature and climate are much more likely to change than if it spreads east to west... so Europe had a big advantage over Africa. And to this day famines tend to strike those longitudinal areas (Africa, India)

    If everything about us including the wheel, sliced bread, the steam engine, books, everything short of stone tools was actually a result of this stability in climate maybe this is a really really really big problem. We can't rely on breadbasket regions to be there from decade to decade and civilization will have to scale waaaaay down.

    I'm a total layman so if somebody in the know can correct my misinterpretations please feel free to enlighten me.