why can't we identify a currently living transitionary animal to a currently existing "latest and greatest" evolved creature?
An analogy: do you understand that German, English, and Dutch are all descended from the same ancestral language? And likewise that French, Spanish, and Italian are all descended (all "evolved") from Latin?
Think about this for a while, and you'll realize that your question is equivalent to "why does no one currently speak Middle English"? It's not a stupid question, but you certainly shouldn't conclude, from the fact that no one now speaks Middle English, that modern English did not develop out of it.
And if people did still speak Middle English, you would consider it either a separate language or a dialect of modern English, and you would still ask, why don't the transitional forms exist? Why doesn't anyone speak Anglo-Frisian, or Proto-Norse?
To give a simpler answer to your question, the transitional animal to the dog is the wolf.
As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.
I find the strength of religion in the U.S. depressing, too, but what's this about "suppressed as un-American"? Both books have been pretty prominently covered in the press (NY Times, Newsweek...), and I got both books at my local public library. Are you using "suppressed" to mean "some people disagreed with"?
We have no clue about how the ecosystem of our world actually works... So the proposal of building a "shade" system for the planet to "cool it down" is so laughable due to the vast amount of hubris required to give it any consideration at all.
There's a lot we don't understand about the role of ocean currents, biological systems, and so on, but I'm pretty sure "the Sun warms the Earth" is pretty well-established knowledge.
The questions are whether we can calculate the amount of shading needed accurately enough, whether these things would stay in place long enough to be cost-effective, and whether we can get rid of these sun-shades if we do manage to screw things up.
I assumed that was clear. I agree completely that employer-provided health insurance is a bad way of dealing with health care. Arguably it was not such a bad system back in, say, the 1950s, when more workers had the expectation of stable, long-term employment with a large company (say, GM); those conditions no longer exist.
You might have added that employer-provided health insurance in America came about, not because of an interest in "maintaining capital assets", but because businesses needed a way to get around the wage controls Roosevelt imposed during WWII.
There is a possible advantage to employer-provided health insurance that wouldn't apply to food or transportation, though--a large employer that provides health care to all of its workers can distribute the cost among all of them and avoid the problem of adverse selection. On the other hand, if workers seek employment with health benefits in mind, adverse selection is back: unskilled workers with poor health will find jobs at Wal-Mart (lower pay, better benefits), while unskilled workers in good health will wait tables (better pay, no benefits).
God damn you guys are funny.
I considered modding you up--your comment is somewhat insightful--but you aren't going to persuade many people when you come across as such a smug prick.
the bible WAS on the catholic church list of limited access book all the way till the list was abolished in the mid-20 century.
Do you have any sources for this claim? This link says you're wrong: Did the Catholic Church Prohibit Bible Reading?, and the Bible does not appear in the 1948 edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1948 was the last year the Index was updated).
This is why we need to start genetically engineering humans not to have allergies.
I'm more or less serious about this; I have asthma, and I will happily select against asthma when I have children, if the technology is available. I would imagine most reasonable people with wheat or peanut allergies would do the same.
What everyone seems to be missing is that saving seeds is not practical with the most widely grown non-GM corn varieties, either. The vast majority of the corn that is commercially grown in the US comes from hybrid varieties that do not breed true, and are far less productive in the second generation (grown from saved seed). That's been true roughly since the Second World War. So if we shouldn't be giving GM corn to people in the third world, we shouldn't be giving them "conventional" corn, either, for the same reasons.
The primary disadvantage of hybrids is the seeds cannot be saved from year to year. Seeds saved from hybrid plants usually will not produce the same plant the following year because most varieties are not self-sustaining. Offspring of hybrids usually show an unpredictable mixture of characteristics from the grandparent plants instead of being similar to the parent. http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/hortihints/0102a.html
If you think you can listen to Magical Mystery Tour on random play, then you're missing half the point of the work.
If you had said Sgt. Pepper's I'd agree completely. But side two of Magical Mystery Tour (in the American LP version; tracks 6-11 on the CD) is a collection of singles. MMT is not by any means a unified work of art. And I wouldn't say side one is especially well thought-out, either.
...in February 1996...[t]he Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to "baby-sit" him--monitoring all his activities and associates.
Clinton denies this, for what it's worth, and the 9-11 Commission failed to substantiate the claim:
Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.
So it's possible that Sudan offered to arrest Osama, but the evidence is sketchy, and he was never "captured".
Pedophilia isn't really the issue here--you can be a Boy Scout from age 11 till you turn 18 (I was.) Men who are sexually attracted to seventeen-year-olds (of either sex) aren't pedophiles. They also aren't especially uncommon. (Did Lindsay Lohan magically become hot on her 18th birthday?) The liability issue is legitimate, as is parental concern.
On the other hand, the BSA argument in America v. Dale (the Supreme Court case regarding gay Scout leaders) was that the BSA policy against gay scoutmasters is a matter of freedom of expression--the BSA as an organization is against homosexuality, and it is free to choose leaders who reflect its positions and exemplify its values.
So the Boy Scouts of America is homophobic, even if the grandparent post isn't.
Well you havent attacked the root of the issue. Creationism vs. Evolution. This is a false question as these two ideas do not conflict with one another.
I'd say that the real root of the issue is faith vs. reason. And there is a fundamental conflict between those epistemological points of view--between believing because of the evidence, and believing in the absence of evidence, or in defiance of the evidence. (Credo quia absurdum est, and all that.)
I'd also say that while it may be possible to reconcile creation and evolution, it's a ridiculous and misguided project. It's like saying that there's no conflict between the theory of universal gravitation and the theory of "angels pushing the planets around"--sure, it's possible that the angels are pushing in accordance with the relevant laws of mechanics so as to make their presence undetectable--but in that case, why do you believe in the angels?
A temperature system with an arbitrary zero point can be useful, sure--I think in Fahrenheit, like most Americans--but talking about percentages to compare temperatures in such a system is meaningless. If the temperature changes from 50F to 75F, is that a 50% increase? Convert the same temperatures to Celsius and the numbers are now 10C and 24C--does that make the same change in temperature a 140% increase? In the absence of a universally accepted zero point, ratios and percentages just aren't a useful way of comparing temperatures.
Are you suggesting that Europe does not protect freedom [of] speech as much as the US does?
Yes. American prudery when it comes to sex and nudity is ridiculous, sure--but in the US there is no idea which cannot be expressed. Whereas much of Europe has laws against "hate speech" or Holocaust denial, and at least a couple European countries still have laws (however rarely enforced) against blasphemy. I think this is an important distinction--in much of Europe there is an official government position on what ideas can and cannot be expressed, and while I understand the historical context that may seem to justify that, it still seems like a dangerous precedent.
The price Google gives is WRONG. The cost is based off the zones you go through. To go through all three zones, it costs $1.75, not $1.50. I don't even know where $1.50 comes from. It's $1.35 for 2 zones. $1.75 for all 3 zones. This is obviously still beta.
Google is correct; fares increased a while back. Two zones is now $1.50; all zones is $1.80. Check trimet.org. And fares are going to increase again on January first, thanks to high diesel prices.
I agree that the trimet trip planner works just as well, but google's information is accurate, as far as I can tell.
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank...?
Funny you should mention Anne Frank—the first published version of her diary was edited by her father, who "removed certain passages, most notably those which referred to his wife in unflattering terms, and sections that discussed Anne's growing sexuality." (See here.)
And Anne Frank herself had also rewritten some portions of her diary, before her death, with the intention of eventually having it published. There isn't a single, well defined original version, and any publication of the diary will require some choices about what material to include, and how to organize it.
Anne Frank's diary is also an interesting case because Frank never had the chance to decide on a finished, official version—had she lived, it's quite possible that she wouldn't have wanted the world to read the sections dealing with her own sexuality, which is probably part of the reason her father initially removed them.
This is unfortunate, but I don't know that it's anything particularly new--I just read Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which was written in 1945 and heavily revised fifteen years later. And Stravinsky regularly revised his works, partly so that he could maintain copyright on the latest version (back when copyrights actually expired). So artists have been tinkering with their works for both artistic and commercial reasons for at least the past century.
What has changed are the copyright laws governing the old versions of the works: I don't care if George Lucas wants to digitally add a burqa over Princess Leia's metallic lingerie, but he shouldn't be able to indefinitely suppress the original version.
You obviously haven't read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend--excellent book about a plague that causes symptoms much like traditional vampirism. Basically a horror novel with an SF background, but certainly no less plausible than the average Star Trek episode.
In your view, then, "freedom of speech" means "right to force other people to distribute what you have to say"?
Right protection precisely means "not preventing you from". Possibly freedom of religion means you have a right to sacrifice chickens if you want to; it certainly doesn't mean the rest of us have to buy chickens for you to sacrifice.
Just because the text of a book is in the public domain doesn't mean that everything else about it is. Google isn't showing these books as plain text; it is showing gif images that reproduce the typesetting of particular modern editions.
So, with Dracula, for instance, Bram Stoker held the textual copyright, which expired decades ago--but the publishing company (Penguin, in this case) owns the typographical copyright. And of course any forewords and afterwords may still be under copyright as well.
Is it that profanity is in the eye of the beholder?
This is something I think about on a fairly regular basis--my handle, here and on E2 (Kafir/kaffir) is the South African equivalent of "nigger". In Arabic "kafir" means "unbeliever", which is why I chose it; to an American (which I am) it probably doesn't mean anything, or possibly it's a kind of lime.
Anyway, I get outraged South Africans writing to me once in a while, and sometimes I feel a little bad about it--but it's hard to take their complaints seriously. I realize intellectually that I'd be a bit shocked by someone with the username "Nigger"--but it's hard to imagine actually being shocked by "kaffir", which I think of, again, as a kind of corn, a kind of lime, or an accurate description of my beliefs from a Muslim perspective. These people speak, in theory, the same language as I do, and I'm not offended.
Then again, my grandmother never stopped calling Brazil nuts "niggertoes", so maybe insensitivity runs in the family.
Why is it that words come to be 'forbidden' after normal usage before?
As the article points out, words often become forbidden because of people's feelings about the things they describe. The article gives the example of toilet->bathroom->men's room, but racial slurs work the same way. "Negro" (or "nigra", in Southern American pronunciation--just like tobacco/tabacca) was once the preferred term for describing people of African descent (See "United Negro College Fund"), but because so many racist people used the word to express their racist ideas, the word (particularly in its southern form) became offensive. Same with "colored"; it was conceived as a neutrally descriptive word (think NAACP), but became tainted by the racism of the culture in which it was used. (Though again, my grandma never stopped saying it.)
In a culture where enough people hate (or at think somewhat negatively of) black people, or gay people, or whatever, any words used to describe those groups are going to become slurs. (Well, maybe not any word; "person of color" is probably too unwieldy to ever become an epithet).
Same with other things people dislike; there isn't any really polite way to say "take a shit", because shitting isn't something people are comfortable talking about. Any new euphemism will pick up the same "taint", once it becomes closely enough associated with shitting.
For the human species to really evolve, the 4 major gene types (Caucasian, Asian, Aborigine, Afro-African) must mix as much as possible.
First, your "four major gene types" are somewhat arbitrary; despite superficial appearances, there is more genetic diversity among Africans than among the rest of the world put together. A more reasonable "four types" might be !Kung, other sub-Saharan African, Aborigine, and "other" - but that would still be arbitrary, and, more important, irrelevant.
Mating between groups that were once genetically isolated from each other is actually the main reason (in my opinion) humanity is unlikely to undergo any significant evolution in the foreseeable future. Species don't generally "evolve into" other species; they branch and split. Apes didn't "evolve into people" en masse, for instance; humans are just one branch that split off and happened to survive. It's hard for those splits to happen when an entire large population is interbreeding, though.
For example, Europeans (and especially northern Europeans) have clearly been selected for pale skin, and apparently for long noses (to deal with cold air, perhaps) for quite a while - but if a pasty, long-nosed Englishman has children by a brown-skinned, short-nosed Polynesian, the evolutionary trend toward long-nosed whiteness has effectively been set back (in that case) by quite a few millennia - as has the separate adaptation to brownness that was selected for in the tropical Pacific. That's not a bad thing; if the Englishman is living in, say, Tahiti, his white skin isn't doing him any good anyway. The point is, a larger interbreeding population will tend to damp genetic change, while small, genetically isolated populations will be very prone to genetic change - see the Galapagos islands.
And finally: The supremme being would technically have all the dominent genes out of each pool.
What the hell does that even mean? Are blue-eyed, blond-haired people genetically inferior, in your view? That's an interesting reversal of Nazism, but it's equally misguided.
Found another interesting example, a parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that infects cats and rats—rats are infected by eating cat feces, then the parasite affects their brains to make them less fearful, and more likely to be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma can have neurological effects in humans, too (especially those with weakened immune systems), though fortunately people tend not to get eaten by cats.
Slashdot Mirror
why can't we identify a currently living transitionary animal to a currently existing "latest and greatest" evolved creature?
An analogy: do you understand that German, English, and Dutch are all descended from the same ancestral language? And likewise that French, Spanish, and Italian are all descended (all "evolved") from Latin?
Think about this for a while, and you'll realize that your question is equivalent to "why does no one currently speak Middle English"? It's not a stupid question, but you certainly shouldn't conclude, from the fact that no one now speaks Middle English, that modern English did not develop out of it.
And if people did still speak Middle English, you would consider it either a separate language or a dialect of modern English, and you would still ask, why don't the transitional forms exist? Why doesn't anyone speak Anglo-Frisian, or Proto-Norse?
To give a simpler answer to your question, the transitional animal to the dog is the wolf.
As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.
I find the strength of religion in the U.S. depressing, too, but what's this about "suppressed as un-American"? Both books have been pretty prominently covered in the press (NY Times, Newsweek...), and I got both books at my local public library. Are you using "suppressed" to mean "some people disagreed with"?
We have no clue about how the ecosystem of our world actually works... So the proposal of building a "shade" system for the planet to "cool it down" is so laughable due to the vast amount of hubris required to give it any consideration at all.
There's a lot we don't understand about the role of ocean currents, biological systems, and so on, but I'm pretty sure "the Sun warms the Earth" is pretty well-established knowledge.
The questions are whether we can calculate the amount of shading needed accurately enough, whether these things would stay in place long enough to be cost-effective, and whether we can get rid of these sun-shades if we do manage to screw things up.
This isn't an advantage
I assumed that was clear. I agree completely that employer-provided health insurance is a bad way of dealing with health care. Arguably it was not such a bad system back in, say, the 1950s, when more workers had the expectation of stable, long-term employment with a large company (say, GM); those conditions no longer exist.
You might have added that employer-provided health insurance in America came about, not because of an interest in "maintaining capital assets", but because businesses needed a way to get around the wage controls Roosevelt imposed during WWII.
There is a possible advantage to employer-provided health insurance that wouldn't apply to food or transportation, though--a large employer that provides health care to all of its workers can distribute the cost among all of them and avoid the problem of adverse selection. On the other hand, if workers seek employment with health benefits in mind, adverse selection is back: unskilled workers with poor health will find jobs at Wal-Mart (lower pay, better benefits), while unskilled workers in good health will wait tables (better pay, no benefits).
God damn you guys are funny.
I considered modding you up--your comment is somewhat insightful--but you aren't going to persuade many people when you come across as such a smug prick.
"Our" should not have been capitalized.
Capitalizing the first letter after a colon is optional when the clause following the colon is a complete sentence. This is not incorrect.
a comma before the "and" would help.
I agree, but this is not an error. Style guides disagree on this point—see Wikipedia on the serial comma.
"More concerning"?
This is an odd usage, but the OED cites precedents for "concerning" as an adjective (meaning "worrying") going back to 1649.
And a few transposed letters in a Slashdot posting hardly indicate an incompetent writer. Don't be a dick.
the bible WAS on the catholic church list of limited access book all the way till the list was abolished in the mid-20 century.
Do you have any sources for this claim? This link says you're wrong: Did the Catholic Church Prohibit Bible Reading?, and the Bible does not appear in the 1948 edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1948 was the last year the Index was updated).
This is why we need to start genetically engineering humans not to have allergies.
I'm more or less serious about this; I have asthma, and I will happily select against asthma when I have children, if the technology is available. I would imagine most reasonable people with wheat or peanut allergies would do the same.
What everyone seems to be missing is that saving seeds is not practical with the most widely grown non-GM corn varieties, either. The vast majority of the corn that is commercially grown in the US comes from hybrid varieties that do not breed true, and are far less productive in the second generation (grown from saved seed). That's been true roughly since the Second World War. So if we shouldn't be giving GM corn to people in the third world, we shouldn't be giving them "conventional" corn, either, for the same reasons.
l
Nearly all the field corn now grown in the United States and most other developed nations is hybrid corn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
The primary disadvantage of hybrids is the seeds cannot be saved from year to year. Seeds saved from hybrid plants usually will not produce the same plant the following year because most varieties are not self-sustaining. Offspring of hybrids usually show an unpredictable mixture of characteristics from the grandparent plants instead of being similar to the parent.
http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/hortihints/0102a.htm
If you think you can listen to Magical Mystery Tour on random play, then you're missing half the point of the work.
If you had said Sgt. Pepper's I'd agree completely. But side two of Magical Mystery Tour (in the American LP version; tracks 6-11 on the CD) is a collection of singles. MMT is not by any means a unified work of art. And I wouldn't say side one is especially well thought-out, either.
Clinton denies this, for what it's worth, and the 9-11 Commission failed to substantiate the claim:
So it's possible that Sudan offered to arrest Osama, but the evidence is sketchy, and he was never "captured".
Pedophilia isn't really the issue here--you can be a Boy Scout from age 11 till you turn 18 (I was.) Men who are sexually attracted to seventeen-year-olds (of either sex) aren't pedophiles. They also aren't especially uncommon. (Did Lindsay Lohan magically become hot on her 18th birthday?) The liability issue is legitimate, as is parental concern.
On the other hand, the BSA argument in America v. Dale (the Supreme Court case regarding gay Scout leaders) was that the BSA policy against gay scoutmasters is a matter of freedom of expression--the BSA as an organization is against homosexuality, and it is free to choose leaders who reflect its positions and exemplify its values.
So the Boy Scouts of America is homophobic, even if the grandparent post isn't.
Well you havent attacked the root of the issue.
Creationism vs. Evolution. This is a false question as these two ideas do not conflict with one another.
I'd say that the real root of the issue is faith vs. reason. And there is a fundamental conflict between those epistemological points of view--between believing because of the evidence, and believing in the absence of evidence, or in defiance of the evidence. (Credo quia absurdum est, and all that.)
I'd also say that while it may be possible to reconcile creation and evolution, it's a ridiculous and misguided project. It's like saying that there's no conflict between the theory of universal gravitation and the theory of "angels pushing the planets around"--sure, it's possible that the angels are pushing in accordance with the relevant laws of mechanics so as to make their presence undetectable--but in that case, why do you believe in the angels?
A temperature system with an arbitrary zero point can be useful, sure--I think in Fahrenheit, like most Americans--but talking about percentages to compare temperatures in such a system is meaningless. If the temperature changes from 50F to 75F, is that a 50% increase? Convert the same temperatures to Celsius and the numbers are now 10C and 24C--does that make the same change in temperature a 140% increase? In the absence of a universally accepted zero point, ratios and percentages just aren't a useful way of comparing temperatures.
Are you suggesting that Europe does not protect freedom [of] speech as much as the US does?
Yes. American prudery when it comes to sex and nudity is ridiculous, sure--but in the US there is no idea which cannot be expressed. Whereas much of Europe has laws against "hate speech" or Holocaust denial, and at least a couple European countries still have laws (however rarely enforced) against blasphemy. I think this is an important distinction--in much of Europe there is an official government position on what ideas can and cannot be expressed, and while I understand the historical context that may seem to justify that, it still seems like a dangerous precedent.
The price Google gives is WRONG. The cost is based off the zones you go through. To go through all three zones, it costs $1.75, not $1.50. I don't even know where $1.50 comes from. It's $1.35 for 2 zones. $1.75 for all 3 zones. This is obviously still beta.
Google is correct; fares increased a while back. Two zones is now $1.50; all zones is $1.80. Check trimet.org. And fares are going to increase again on January first, thanks to high diesel prices.
I agree that the trimet trip planner works just as well, but google's information is accurate, as far as I can tell.
Think Huxley.
Aldous, Julian, or Thomas Henry?
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank...?
Funny you should mention Anne Frank—the first published version of her diary was edited by her father, who "removed certain passages, most notably those which referred to his wife in unflattering terms, and sections that discussed Anne's growing sexuality." (See here.)
And Anne Frank herself had also rewritten some portions of her diary, before her death, with the intention of eventually having it published. There isn't a single, well defined original version, and any publication of the diary will require some choices about what material to include, and how to organize it.
Anne Frank's diary is also an interesting case because Frank never had the chance to decide on a finished, official version—had she lived, it's quite possible that she wouldn't have wanted the world to read the sections dealing with her own sexuality, which is probably part of the reason her father initially removed them.
This is unfortunate, but I don't know that it's anything particularly new--I just read Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which was written in 1945 and heavily revised fifteen years later. And Stravinsky regularly revised his works, partly so that he could maintain copyright on the latest version (back when copyrights actually expired). So artists have been tinkering with their works for both artistic and commercial reasons for at least the past century.
What has changed are the copyright laws governing the old versions of the works: I don't care if George Lucas wants to digitally add a burqa over Princess Leia's metallic lingerie, but he shouldn't be able to indefinitely suppress the original version.
You obviously haven't read Richard Matheson's I Am Legend --excellent book about a plague that causes symptoms much like traditional vampirism. Basically a horror novel with an SF background, but certainly no less plausible than the average Star Trek episode.
No argument about Buffy, though.
In your view, then, "freedom of speech" means "right to force other people to distribute what you have to say"?
Right protection precisely means "not preventing you from". Possibly freedom of religion means you have a right to sacrifice chickens if you want to; it certainly doesn't mean the rest of us have to buy chickens for you to sacrifice.
Just because the text of a book is in the public domain doesn't mean that everything else about it is. Google isn't showing these books as plain text; it is showing gif images that reproduce the typesetting of particular modern editions.
So, with Dracula, for instance, Bram Stoker held the textual copyright, which expired decades ago--but the publishing company (Penguin, in this case) owns the typographical copyright. And of course any forewords and afterwords may still be under copyright as well.
Is it that profanity is in the eye of the beholder?
This is something I think about on a fairly regular basis--my handle, here and on E2 (Kafir/kaffir) is the South African equivalent of "nigger". In Arabic "kafir" means "unbeliever", which is why I chose it; to an American (which I am) it probably doesn't mean anything, or possibly it's a kind of lime.
Anyway, I get outraged South Africans writing to me once in a while, and sometimes I feel a little bad about it--but it's hard to take their complaints seriously. I realize intellectually that I'd be a bit shocked by someone with the username "Nigger"--but it's hard to imagine actually being shocked by "kaffir", which I think of, again, as a kind of corn, a kind of lime, or an accurate description of my beliefs from a Muslim perspective. These people speak, in theory, the same language as I do, and I'm not offended.
Then again, my grandmother never stopped calling Brazil nuts "niggertoes", so maybe insensitivity runs in the family.
Why is it that words come to be 'forbidden' after normal usage before?
As the article points out, words often become forbidden because of people's feelings about the things they describe. The article gives the example of toilet->bathroom->men's room, but racial slurs work the same way. "Negro" (or "nigra", in Southern American pronunciation--just like tobacco/tabacca) was once the preferred term for describing people of African descent (See "United Negro College Fund"), but because so many racist people used the word to express their racist ideas, the word (particularly in its southern form) became offensive. Same with "colored"; it was conceived as a neutrally descriptive word (think NAACP), but became tainted by the racism of the culture in which it was used. (Though again, my grandma never stopped saying it.)
In a culture where enough people hate (or at think somewhat negatively of) black people, or gay people, or whatever, any words used to describe those groups are going to become slurs. (Well, maybe not any word; "person of color" is probably too unwieldy to ever become an epithet).
Same with other things people dislike; there isn't any really polite way to say "take a shit", because shitting isn't something people are comfortable talking about. Any new euphemism will pick up the same "taint", once it becomes closely enough associated with shitting.
For the human species to really evolve, the 4 major gene types (Caucasian, Asian, Aborigine, Afro-African) must mix as much as possible.
First, your "four major gene types" are somewhat arbitrary; despite superficial appearances, there is more genetic diversity among Africans than among the rest of the world put together. A more reasonable "four types" might be !Kung, other sub-Saharan African, Aborigine, and "other" - but that would still be arbitrary, and, more important, irrelevant.
Mating between groups that were once genetically isolated from each other is actually the main reason (in my opinion) humanity is unlikely to undergo any significant evolution in the foreseeable future. Species don't generally "evolve into" other species; they branch and split. Apes didn't "evolve into people" en masse, for instance; humans are just one branch that split off and happened to survive. It's hard for those splits to happen when an entire large population is interbreeding, though.
For example, Europeans (and especially northern Europeans) have clearly been selected for pale skin, and apparently for long noses (to deal with cold air, perhaps) for quite a while - but if a pasty, long-nosed Englishman has children by a brown-skinned, short-nosed Polynesian, the evolutionary trend toward long-nosed whiteness has effectively been set back (in that case) by quite a few millennia - as has the separate adaptation to brownness that was selected for in the tropical Pacific. That's not a bad thing; if the Englishman is living in, say, Tahiti, his white skin isn't doing him any good anyway. The point is, a larger interbreeding population will tend to damp genetic change, while small, genetically isolated populations will be very prone to genetic change - see the Galapagos islands.
And finally:
The supremme being would technically have all the dominent genes out of each pool.
What the hell does that even mean? Are blue-eyed, blond-haired people genetically inferior, in your view? That's an interesting reversal of Nazism, but it's equally misguided.
Found another interesting example, a parasite ( Toxoplasma gondii ) that infects cats and rats—rats are infected by eating cat feces, then the parasite affects their brains to make them less fearful, and more likely to be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma can have neurological effects in humans, too (especially those with weakened immune systems), though fortunately people tend not to get eaten by cats.