We're all just afraid of uncertainty. It is the shadow from which anything potentially could arise. Our brains are just hardwired to be much more fearful than hopeful (for obvious evolutionary reasons).
It really depends on the context. For some things were overly fearful and for some were overly hopeful. One of the most common errors in reasoning is to engage in wishful thinking. Some forms of wishful thinking are very blatant with people explicitly believing in something because they'd rather have it be true than not.
The major advantage is that it becomes a plausible source of power for implanted devices. Health monitoring devices but also storage, computer interfaces, pretty much anything you can imagine. This sort of technology makes cyborg implants much more plausible.
In certain restricted contexts, yes. It doesn't work well when there are externalities. Or when there are major information imbalances or substantial transaction costs. The nice thing about setting up a cap and trade system is that if is implemented correctly it avoids these three classic pitfalls.
No they don't. How do they have the incentive to do that when they have less and less working funds? If I have $50 million I can put into R&D for alternate energy without a carbon tax or cap and trade or $25 million I can put into R&D for alternate energy with cap and trade/carbon tax which do you think will get more work done?
Silly hypothetical that doesn't reflect what happens in reality. If there's a cap and trade system, the industries that become very efficient get further gain from trading offsets. This helps in particular the industries that would not be able to do so efficiently. This creates a large incentive for certain industries to do research.
Yes, regulating So2 has worked because Sulfur was pretty easy to catch and was really unnecessary in burning of fuels.
It actually took a lot of research and a lot of work to be able to burn coal without releasing much SO2.
Did you read the article you actually linked to? The problem in question is primarily a problem with the set-up of the European value added tax in general. The scam used has noted by the article you linked been used with a variety of tangible goods before such as cell phones. This problem has very little to do with a cap and trade system.
However, as a whole if an energy source pollutes its not that efficient. For example, one gram of coal yields a small amount of energy, one gram of nuclear fuel yields much more power.
Are pollution and efficiency intrinsically connected? That's almost certainly not the case. It isn't even clear to me how you would go about defining that in a meaningful sense when you aren't talking about the same pollutants (how do you compare radioactive byproducts with CO2 or SO2 or particular for example?)
I also don't know where you are getting the idea that energy prices are falling in India and China. Both countries are having a lot of trouble supplying enough electricity to their booming populations. Prices are going up, not down.
I also have religious beliefs, like you. I believe in pink unicorns and fairies.
There's a lot of both economic theory and empirical data backing up that cap and trade systems are more efficient. See for example this study showing that cap and trade would very well for handling levels of sulfur dioxide pollution in the US http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647033.
My comment above wasn't in defense of a cap and trade system but rather explain the important economic differences between a carbon tax and a cap and trade system. The fact that you couldn't see that is fascinating. Incidentally, much of what you write above is incidentally wrong. For example, Cap and trade does not stifle innovation. Quite the opposite, if a given industry normally produced a lot of CO2 then under a cap and trade system they have a lot of incentive to find ways to reduce that, more than they do in a general tax. In fact, cap and trade systems have been tried before. For example, in the early 1990s, the US created a cap and trade system for a cap and trade system. This system successfully reduced SO2 levels a lot. Moreover, economists estimate that this was much more efficient than simple regulation. See http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647033
Pollution is wasted energy, technology will eventually catch up with it and make great progress.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. In the most efficient burning of a fossil fuel, the result is CO2 and water. There's no way to make the CO2 not be there. There's no wasted energy. Moreover, added CO2 is an externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality so individuals have no incentive to reduce the creation of CO2. This is true with pollutants in general. As with most difficult externalities, the impact of the pollution is not directly on the individual who created it, and it is diffuse enough that one cannot easily trace any specific bit of pollution back to any specific source. That's precisely why we have the government regulate the sources. Cap and trade is a very efficient system which takes advantage of market forces to more efficiently reduce pollution.
It isn't the same thing at all. For one thing, direct emissions taxes are not as likely to hit specific levels of CO2. For another, the presence of trading in a cap and trade system allows for the efficiencies of the market to come into play. Thus, a cap and trade system works more efficiently than a direct tax.
Yeah well, until you can prove to me that anyone exists at all rather than being figments of my imagination, that argument is kind of moot?
Um, what? So because no one can rule out complete solipsism people have to take claims about God seriously? Imagine someone says to you "well, you can't really prove that anyone else exists so you might as well believe that there's a fleet of cloaked Klingon warships constantly orbiting Earth." Doesn't seem like such a great argument now does it? Just because there's always some doubt and all claims are probabilistic doesn't mean I need to take every unlikely claim seriously.
Unfortunately, The Pirate Parties (including the Swedish one) are now the party to go to for a lot of reasonable views on many issues. Not just copyright, but other IP issues and even some non-IP issues. We should be worried by the fact that even some people who are massively in favor of copyright reform (such as myself) are not happy with The Pirate Bay and think that at minimum a lot of what Pirate Bay does is unethical. Having one of the Pirate parties directly associated in this way already reinforces perceived connections between the Pirate parties and outright software piracy to an extent that really isn't helpful.
That is a hypothesis used by cosmologists but it isn't part of the Standard Model. The Standard Model predicts particle behavior, not as much the macroscopic stuff. For most purposes the Standard Model agrees with the cosmological observations. This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.
Seating is usually dictated by the individual airline that buys the planes. Rest assured that all of the US based carriers will cram as many seats in as possible so even a little guy like me - 5' 7" 155lbs - will feel cramped.
Yeah, see and then the genuinely little people like me - 5' 2'', 104 lb will still have plenty of room. Actually not really. Even for people in my size they can be surprisingly cramped. So it must be really awful for normal size people.
Are you telling me that the years I've spent practicing "Power Word: Pain" were fruitless?
Of course D&D magic isn't real. You are supposed to say "Crucio!"
This finding seems to give support to the Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction) theory of quantum consciousness proposed by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. One of the main objections to the theory is that quantum coherence could not be sustained in the warm biological environment for sufficient duration. If quantum entaglement is a normal feature of photosynthesis, it's less of a stretch to believe that quantum coherence could be one of the mechanisms to give rise to consciousness in higher lifeforms
This might give support but only to a very tiny extent. The entanglement in the plant case we're talking here about quantum entanglement on a very small scale. Most versions of quantum consciousness hypothesis are positing entanglement on much larger scales. The Orch-OR theory requires entanglement occurring at the level of microtubules which are orders of magnitude larger objects.
Fusors actually do have practical uses. Fusors have been used commercially as a compact neutron source that can be turned on or off easily. Note that the other commercial neutron sources of a similar sort actually also use fusion. They work by using a linear accelerator to collide deuterium and tritium.
The definition of species is the inability to reproduce outside a given genetic group.
A precise definition of species is surprisingly difficult. The classical definition was the "biological species definition" which said that two organisms were the same species if they could mate to produce fertile offspring. However, this leads to many problems: For example, every asexual organism might have to be its own species. Worse, even if you restrict to sexually reproducing species, you have the problem of so-called ring species http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species where you can have three groups A,B and C and members from A and B can reproduce fine as can B and C, but A and C cannot. There's a lot of deep thinking about this subject. The bottom line is that there's no single good definition of species. That shouldn't be surprising; this is a consequence of evolution. Since species split off slowly from each other, the boundaries of what separates species are inherently fuzzy. The book to read on this subject is "Species: A History of the Idea" by John Wilkins.
Well, that would make scientists ecstatic also. Oil means there was life in the past. Enough life to produce oil would upset a lot of models and make things very interesting. I doubt that the discovery of oil on Mars would actually cause industry to be that much more interested than they would be now. The energy cost of moving the oil back to Earth would probably be much larger than that gained from getting the oil. I'm not even sure it would make industry much more practical on Mars since there's not much oxygen on Mars that you can use to burn the oil there.
Dorpus, I really think it would help if you maybe brushed up on your level of biological knowledge. To be blunt, you seem to be repeatedly misunderstanding statements. In your post previous to this one, you completely confused what the article in question was saying about chimpanzees and orangutans and had other problems. Your recent comment above. Since I have finite amount of time, I'll only note four of them: First, you are confusing HIV with AIDS. What scientists would have said is that only primates could get HIV (even then that's not strictly true). Second, SIV was discovered in 1985, only 4 years after the discovery of HIV. Regarding the comparison of the Y chromosome, there's been heavy selective pressure on that chromosome (apparently). That chromosome is however tiny (indeed, there are good evolutionary reasons for expecting the Y chromosome to be tiny). There are only around a hundred genes on the Y chromosome and it is about 2% of all the genetic material in a human male. So trying to make comparisons based on it for the general similarity as a whole. Fourth, electrophoresis is one of the main methods we've determined the high genetic similarity beteween humans, chimpanzees and orangutans. This particular data point is thus chemistry with no assumptions from evolution. If it turned out that when we examined the individuals genes and other DNA in the entire genome in detail that they were all much farther apart, that wouldn't just be a problem for evolution that would be a problem for basic chemistry.
I have to wonder if you're actually reading what you've linked to. There was a lot of controversy over where animals and sponges stood in relation to each other. That's discussed in the article in question. Genetic data settled that issue. The second one I'm very sure you didn't read at all since it is talking about a group of scientists arguing based on physical evidence that humans are more closely related to orangutans than chimps. They are making that argument despite the DNA evidence showing the reverse as the article says "the researchers reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence." How you got that to become what you've said where you claim that "humans share more DNA similarity to Asian orangutans" is beyond me. Similarly, the last example shows a lack of understanding of what you were taught in school (unless you got taught something very garbled). HIV is relatively new. What is old are precursor viruses such as SIV (the version for apes) and FIV (the version for cats). That article is talking about HIV's ancestors, not HIV. Moreover, what you think that has to do with the general theory of evolution is beyond me.
So yes, there seem to be giant gaps in our understanding of life's origins. It will be interesting to see how different the theory of evolution will be in the future; maybe by then, "evolution" will be a dirty word and scientific zealots will demand that nobody mention it.
The only gaps seem to be your reading comprehension and understanding of biology. Yes, it will be interesting to see how things change as we get more data. That's part of the amazing nature of science, we don't have "zealots" but rather change opinion when the evidence presents itself. In the meantime, instead of vague claims about "zealots" and "dogma" it might help if you actually read the articles you've linked to and maybe brushed up on a little general biology.
That's simply not true. We've had a lot of redrawing of minor aspects. But the overall tree looks almost identical to it did 30 or 40 years ago. The great apes for example look about what they should look like. As do mammals as a whole. Most of the redrawing that has occurred has been when we have a handful of species and we were wrong about the precise order they broke off from each other. It shouldn't be surprising that morphological data isn't always perfectly interpreted. The sort of thing that would seriously undermine evolution (say rabbits being more closely related to snakes than humans or something like that) simply hasn't happened.
The current dogma of genetics says that DNA homology between species is caused solely by evolutionary relationships. How long before we realize that this isn't true either? I'm not an evolution denialist, but I do think the current scientific understanding of evolution has a religious zeal.
Frankly, I don't think you understand what you are talking about. The linked to article is an example where DNA homology isn't due to an "evolutionary relationship" (that is, recent common ancestry) but rather horizontal gene transfer. And this isn't the only example of this. We have many other examples of horizontal gene transfer by viruses for example. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus. However, we do know that the vast majority of similarities in DNA are due to evolutionary relationships because the genetic sequences when one graphs them by how different they are from each other form a tree, exactly as evolution would expect. You can't just say that we'll "realize" something if you don't have a different mechanism to propose. Disregarding such comments isn't dogma, it is simply not willing to listen to someone shout "Your wrong!" when they aren't going to propose an alternate model. Propose a different explanation for the DNA similarities that we see and then people might be willing to listen. But please don't make nebulous claims about religious zeal.
While not as universal as with the Catholic Church, there have been in charedi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) schools and institutions similar problems with attempted cover ups. This has extended not just to pedophilia but other forms of abuse as well. See for example the scandal with Rabbi Leib Tropper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leib_Tropper where he used his position to have sex with women who were studying to convert to Judaism. The establishment repeatedly tried to cover up his behavior and when it got to be too much quietly eased him out. They still won't discuss the issue in any detail or to even discuss what went wrong in a way to prevent it from happening again.
Hierarchies do this sort of thing almost naturally, and hyper-authoritarian religious hierarchies often try to cover things up as the go-to solution.
As I recall it was Al Gore who first politicized this area of science. How much of the blame does he get for letting the political genie out of the bottle on a topic so important as this one could be? Seems to me that if we are going to bust anyones chops for that particular offense, it oughta be his...
Does this mean that if someone is already involved in one political issue and they decide they really care strongly about something else they shouldn't discuss that issue in the public sphere? That seems unreasonable.
Interval arithmetic is not a magic bullet. It has multiple problems.
First, some functions just don't work very well when you try to describe them using interval arithmetic and you get bounds that are much larger than what you want. Consider for example x^2+x on the interval [-1,.1]. You'll get a much larger interval for the final answer than what you can actually obtain in practice (you get a resulting interval of [-1,2] when in fact the function ranges from [-1/4,2]. There are ways of handling this with quadratic functions so you in fact get the correct interval (essentially by completing the square). However, for higher degree polynomials this doesn't work. Thus for example, x^4+x^3+x^2+x has the same problem around 0. And when you try more complicated functions like say x^2 + sin kx for large k, you get similar problems.
Second, in order to do interval arithmetic you need to implement the intervals upper and lower bounds as floating point numbers if you don't want to incredibly computationally intensive. If you use such an implementation then things can break down in certain extreme cases if you aren't careful. There are ways around this (essentially you have your lower interval always round down and your upper interval always round up) but this leads to more problems of the type in the previous paragraph.
Both these problems are (generally) solvable if one is careful but the upshot is that relying on interval arithmetic is not a guarantee of correctness.
While I'm all for renewable energy, We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants so it would lead to brown/blackouts in the long run if it was taken up more.
There are multiple solutions to this. The two which have been most discussed are energy storage and variable pricing. Storage methods can include batteries, flywheels and simple compressed gas. Also some forms of renewable energy don't have substantial problems of this sort. For example, tidal power doesn't have this sort of issue if it is built in the right area.
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We're all just afraid of uncertainty. It is the shadow from which anything potentially could arise. Our brains are just hardwired to be much more fearful than hopeful (for obvious evolutionary reasons).
It really depends on the context. For some things were overly fearful and for some were overly hopeful. One of the most common errors in reasoning is to engage in wishful thinking. Some forms of wishful thinking are very blatant with people explicitly believing in something because they'd rather have it be true than not.
The major advantage is that it becomes a plausible source of power for implanted devices. Health monitoring devices but also storage, computer interfaces, pretty much anything you can imagine. This sort of technology makes cyborg implants much more plausible.
In certain restricted contexts, yes. It doesn't work well when there are externalities. Or when there are major information imbalances or substantial transaction costs. The nice thing about setting up a cap and trade system is that if is implemented correctly it avoids these three classic pitfalls.
No they don't. How do they have the incentive to do that when they have less and less working funds? If I have $50 million I can put into R&D for alternate energy without a carbon tax or cap and trade or $25 million I can put into R&D for alternate energy with cap and trade/carbon tax which do you think will get more work done?
Silly hypothetical that doesn't reflect what happens in reality. If there's a cap and trade system, the industries that become very efficient get further gain from trading offsets. This helps in particular the industries that would not be able to do so efficiently. This creates a large incentive for certain industries to do research.
Yes, regulating So2 has worked because Sulfur was pretty easy to catch and was really unnecessary in burning of fuels.
It actually took a lot of research and a lot of work to be able to burn coal without releasing much SO2.
Yeah in Europe. And what happened? Oh yeah, massive fraud and less innovation. I don't see Europe suddenly having all these great solutions. Look at this http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/europes-cap-and-trade-model-loses-billions-to-fraud/19274092
Did you read the article you actually linked to? The problem in question is primarily a problem with the set-up of the European value added tax in general. The scam used has noted by the article you linked been used with a variety of tangible goods before such as cell phones. This problem has very little to do with a cap and trade system.
However, as a whole if an energy source pollutes its not that efficient. For example, one gram of coal yields a small amount of energy, one gram of nuclear fuel yields much more power.
Are pollution and efficiency intrinsically connected? That's almost certainly not the case. It isn't even clear to me how you would go about defining that in a meaningful sense when you aren't talking about the same pollutants (how do you compare radioactive byproducts with CO2 or SO2 or particular for example?) I also don't know where you are getting the idea that energy prices are falling in India and China. Both countries are having a lot of trouble supplying enough electricity to their booming populations. Prices are going up, not down.
I also have religious beliefs, like you. I believe in pink unicorns and fairies.
There's a lot of both economic theory and empirical data backing up that cap and trade systems are more efficient. See for example this study showing that cap and trade would very well for handling levels of sulfur dioxide pollution in the US http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647033.
Pollution is wasted energy, technology will eventually catch up with it and make great progress.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. In the most efficient burning of a fossil fuel, the result is CO2 and water. There's no way to make the CO2 not be there. There's no wasted energy. Moreover, added CO2 is an externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality so individuals have no incentive to reduce the creation of CO2. This is true with pollutants in general. As with most difficult externalities, the impact of the pollution is not directly on the individual who created it, and it is diffuse enough that one cannot easily trace any specific bit of pollution back to any specific source. That's precisely why we have the government regulate the sources. Cap and trade is a very efficient system which takes advantage of market forces to more efficiently reduce pollution.
It isn't the same thing at all. For one thing, direct emissions taxes are not as likely to hit specific levels of CO2. For another, the presence of trading in a cap and trade system allows for the efficiencies of the market to come into play. Thus, a cap and trade system works more efficiently than a direct tax.
Yeah well, until you can prove to me that anyone exists at all rather than being figments of my imagination, that argument is kind of moot?
Um, what? So because no one can rule out complete solipsism people have to take claims about God seriously? Imagine someone says to you "well, you can't really prove that anyone else exists so you might as well believe that there's a fleet of cloaked Klingon warships constantly orbiting Earth." Doesn't seem like such a great argument now does it? Just because there's always some doubt and all claims are probabilistic doesn't mean I need to take every unlikely claim seriously.
Unfortunately, The Pirate Parties (including the Swedish one) are now the party to go to for a lot of reasonable views on many issues. Not just copyright, but other IP issues and even some non-IP issues. We should be worried by the fact that even some people who are massively in favor of copyright reform (such as myself) are not happy with The Pirate Bay and think that at minimum a lot of what Pirate Bay does is unethical. Having one of the Pirate parties directly associated in this way already reinforces perceived connections between the Pirate parties and outright software piracy to an extent that really isn't helpful.
That is a hypothesis used by cosmologists but it isn't part of the Standard Model. The Standard Model predicts particle behavior, not as much the macroscopic stuff. For most purposes the Standard Model agrees with the cosmological observations. This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.
Seating is usually dictated by the individual airline that buys the planes. Rest assured that all of the US based carriers will cram as many seats in as possible so even a little guy like me - 5' 7" 155lbs - will feel cramped.
Yeah, see and then the genuinely little people like me - 5' 2'', 104 lb will still have plenty of room. Actually not really. Even for people in my size they can be surprisingly cramped. So it must be really awful for normal size people.
Are you telling me that the years I've spent practicing "Power Word: Pain" were fruitless? Of course D&D magic isn't real. You are supposed to say "Crucio!"
This finding seems to give support to the Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction) theory of quantum consciousness proposed by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. One of the main objections to the theory is that quantum coherence could not be sustained in the warm biological environment for sufficient duration. If quantum entaglement is a normal feature of photosynthesis, it's less of a stretch to believe that quantum coherence could be one of the mechanisms to give rise to consciousness in higher lifeforms
This might give support but only to a very tiny extent. The entanglement in the plant case we're talking here about quantum entanglement on a very small scale. Most versions of quantum consciousness hypothesis are positing entanglement on much larger scales. The Orch-OR theory requires entanglement occurring at the level of microtubules which are orders of magnitude larger objects.
Claims about the big bad pharma companies not wanting to research this due to the inability to patent are inaccurate. See this analysis: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/01/in_which_my_words_will_be_misinterpreted.php.
Fusors actually do have practical uses. Fusors have been used commercially as a compact neutron source that can be turned on or off easily. Note that the other commercial neutron sources of a similar sort actually also use fusion. They work by using a linear accelerator to collide deuterium and tritium.
The definition of species is the inability to reproduce outside a given genetic group.
A precise definition of species is surprisingly difficult. The classical definition was the "biological species definition" which said that two organisms were the same species if they could mate to produce fertile offspring. However, this leads to many problems: For example, every asexual organism might have to be its own species. Worse, even if you restrict to sexually reproducing species, you have the problem of so-called ring species http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species where you can have three groups A,B and C and members from A and B can reproduce fine as can B and C, but A and C cannot. There's a lot of deep thinking about this subject. The bottom line is that there's no single good definition of species. That shouldn't be surprising; this is a consequence of evolution. Since species split off slowly from each other, the boundaries of what separates species are inherently fuzzy. The book to read on this subject is "Species: A History of the Idea" by John Wilkins.
Well, that would make scientists ecstatic also. Oil means there was life in the past. Enough life to produce oil would upset a lot of models and make things very interesting. I doubt that the discovery of oil on Mars would actually cause industry to be that much more interested than they would be now. The energy cost of moving the oil back to Earth would probably be much larger than that gained from getting the oil. I'm not even sure it would make industry much more practical on Mars since there's not much oxygen on Mars that you can use to burn the oil there.
Dorpus, I really think it would help if you maybe brushed up on your level of biological knowledge. To be blunt, you seem to be repeatedly misunderstanding statements. In your post previous to this one, you completely confused what the article in question was saying about chimpanzees and orangutans and had other problems. Your recent comment above. Since I have finite amount of time, I'll only note four of them: First, you are confusing HIV with AIDS. What scientists would have said is that only primates could get HIV (even then that's not strictly true). Second, SIV was discovered in 1985, only 4 years after the discovery of HIV. Regarding the comparison of the Y chromosome, there's been heavy selective pressure on that chromosome (apparently). That chromosome is however tiny (indeed, there are good evolutionary reasons for expecting the Y chromosome to be tiny). There are only around a hundred genes on the Y chromosome and it is about 2% of all the genetic material in a human male. So trying to make comparisons based on it for the general similarity as a whole. Fourth, electrophoresis is one of the main methods we've determined the high genetic similarity beteween humans, chimpanzees and orangutans. This particular data point is thus chemistry with no assumptions from evolution. If it turned out that when we examined the individuals genes and other DNA in the entire genome in detail that they were all much farther apart, that wouldn't just be a problem for evolution that would be a problem for basic chemistry.
So yes, there seem to be giant gaps in our understanding of life's origins. It will be interesting to see how different the theory of evolution will be in the future; maybe by then, "evolution" will be a dirty word and scientific zealots will demand that nobody mention it.
The only gaps seem to be your reading comprehension and understanding of biology. Yes, it will be interesting to see how things change as we get more data. That's part of the amazing nature of science, we don't have "zealots" but rather change opinion when the evidence presents itself. In the meantime, instead of vague claims about "zealots" and "dogma" it might help if you actually read the articles you've linked to and maybe brushed up on a little general biology.
That's simply not true. We've had a lot of redrawing of minor aspects. But the overall tree looks almost identical to it did 30 or 40 years ago. The great apes for example look about what they should look like. As do mammals as a whole. Most of the redrawing that has occurred has been when we have a handful of species and we were wrong about the precise order they broke off from each other. It shouldn't be surprising that morphological data isn't always perfectly interpreted. The sort of thing that would seriously undermine evolution (say rabbits being more closely related to snakes than humans or something like that) simply hasn't happened.
The current dogma of genetics says that DNA homology between species is caused solely by evolutionary relationships. How long before we realize that this isn't true either? I'm not an evolution denialist, but I do think the current scientific understanding of evolution has a religious zeal.
Frankly, I don't think you understand what you are talking about. The linked to article is an example where DNA homology isn't due to an "evolutionary relationship" (that is, recent common ancestry) but rather horizontal gene transfer. And this isn't the only example of this. We have many other examples of horizontal gene transfer by viruses for example. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus. However, we do know that the vast majority of similarities in DNA are due to evolutionary relationships because the genetic sequences when one graphs them by how different they are from each other form a tree, exactly as evolution would expect. You can't just say that we'll "realize" something if you don't have a different mechanism to propose. Disregarding such comments isn't dogma, it is simply not willing to listen to someone shout "Your wrong!" when they aren't going to propose an alternate model. Propose a different explanation for the DNA similarities that we see and then people might be willing to listen. But please don't make nebulous claims about religious zeal.
While not as universal as with the Catholic Church, there have been in charedi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) schools and institutions similar problems with attempted cover ups. This has extended not just to pedophilia but other forms of abuse as well. See for example the scandal with Rabbi Leib Tropper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leib_Tropper where he used his position to have sex with women who were studying to convert to Judaism. The establishment repeatedly tried to cover up his behavior and when it got to be too much quietly eased him out. They still won't discuss the issue in any detail or to even discuss what went wrong in a way to prevent it from happening again.
Hierarchies do this sort of thing almost naturally, and hyper-authoritarian religious hierarchies often try to cover things up as the go-to solution.
As I recall it was Al Gore who first politicized this area of science. How much of the blame does he get for letting the political genie out of the bottle on a topic so important as this one could be? Seems to me that if we are going to bust anyones chops for that particular offense, it oughta be his...
Does this mean that if someone is already involved in one political issue and they decide they really care strongly about something else they shouldn't discuss that issue in the public sphere? That seems unreasonable.
Interval arithmetic is not a magic bullet. It has multiple problems.
First, some functions just don't work very well when you try to describe them using interval arithmetic and you get bounds that are much larger than what you want. Consider for example x^2+x on the interval [-1,.1]. You'll get a much larger interval for the final answer than what you can actually obtain in practice (you get a resulting interval of [-1,2] when in fact the function ranges from [-1/4,2]. There are ways of handling this with quadratic functions so you in fact get the correct interval (essentially by completing the square). However, for higher degree polynomials this doesn't work. Thus for example, x^4+x^3+x^2+x has the same problem around 0. And when you try more complicated functions like say x^2 + sin kx for large k, you get similar problems.
Second, in order to do interval arithmetic you need to implement the intervals upper and lower bounds as floating point numbers if you don't want to incredibly computationally intensive. If you use such an implementation then things can break down in certain extreme cases if you aren't careful. There are ways around this (essentially you have your lower interval always round down and your upper interval always round up) but this leads to more problems of the type in the previous paragraph.
Both these problems are (generally) solvable if one is careful but the upshot is that relying on interval arithmetic is not a guarantee of correctness.
While I'm all for renewable energy, We can't live off it in it's present form, you can't ensure a minimum output like coal/nuclear power plants so it would lead to brown/blackouts in the long run if it was taken up more.
There are multiple solutions to this. The two which have been most discussed are energy storage and variable pricing. Storage methods can include batteries, flywheels and simple compressed gas. Also some forms of renewable energy don't have substantial problems of this sort. For example, tidal power doesn't have this sort of issue if it is built in the right area.