What is it with idiots like you, and why do so many other idiots feel the need to mod you up? Are you driven by some compulsion to denigrate the parenting skills of others?
The Washington Times (owned by the founder of the Unification Church) and ADHDFraud are hardly unbiased sources, and for every David Neeleman you quote, psychiatrists can tell you of several hundred anonymous failures of whom you are unaware, whose biggest failing in life was never to have had the chance to receive the sort of treatment that is now widely available.
There's a certain delusion out there that seems to be widespread, which goes like this: ADHD is treated with drugs, drugs are "unnatural" and therefore bad, so any parent whose child is receiving treatment for ADHD is somehow negligent. But this is simply rubbish, as many "natural" things are extremely bad, while some "unnatural" things are very helpful. Faeces is "natural", but would you want some near you? Smallpox is natural, as is Polio, or skin cancer for that matter. On the other hand, Aspirin and soap are man-made and "unnatural", but you wouldn't willingly give either up, would you?
Parents with children who have ADHD already have enough to handle, without having busybodies and know-it-alls like you lecturing them for their supposed failings. Do you suppose that any sane parent would willingly see his or her child diagnosed with such an affliction and subjected to medication? What do you know of what it must be like to live with the consequences of such a problem? You wouldn't presume to tell the parents of an autistic or retarded child to just "get over it", but you feel yourself qualified to do the same with ADHD? Why is that? Is it because ADHD is actually treatable, while those afflictions aren't?
So, because you managed to find something that works for you, everyone else who's been diagnosed with ADHD is somehow a malingerer or a weakling? How wonderful it must be for you, having the psychic powers you surely possess: afterall, you can see into the minds of others to determine the reality or otherwise of their predicaments!
Here's a news-flash for you and others like you - your personal experiences do not make you a medical authority of any sort. It is the height of presumption for you to dismiss out of hand other people's plight based on your sample of 1, and if you don't think you have a problem, you can at least spare those who do the irritation of having to deal with the consequences of the ignorance spread by fools like yourself.
The artist's illustration in the Berkeley article (also used on the cover of the current edition of Nature) is misleading, in as much as it gives the figure kinky hair and thick lips, making for a more "African" look than is likely to have been the case.
The truth of the matter is that the earliest men almost certainly would have had straight hair, not curly or kinky but straight, and thin lips, just like most Europeans and Asians today. The wild-type for hair in primates is straight, and all of the great apes conform to that type. Similarly, no ape has thick lips, and our closest living relatives are pretty much lipless. Given these facts, why would any reasonable person expect the "first" men to look like modern day Africans?
Of course, it is logically impossible to rule out that our species evolved to gain the features of modern-day Africans only to lose them once again, but this flies in the face of both probability and Occam's razor - it is extremely unlikely that a feature, once lost, can then be regained down the line, simultaneously around all of the world outside Africa.
One mistake people tend to make is to assume that because our species originated in Africa, modern day Africans are somehow "closer" to what we must have originally been like, but this is nonsense. Africans are just as far removed from the original homo sapiens populations as any other population groups, so they've had just as much time to diverge from the original type. Africans, like any other populations, haven't stood still in evolutionary terms, contrary to the misleading notion that this article illustration propagates.
Surely you're joking; are you so unaware of what North Korea is like that you think it necessary to state something like this? Do you actually believe that the North Korean government would even let ordinary citizens go online?
The SR-71 was in many ways an impractical, expensive and unweildy aircraft. The U2, on the other hand, the very same aircraft in which Gary Powers was shot down in while flying over the Soviet Union in 1960, continues to gather invaluable intelligence to this day - intelligence not even satellites can gather - in such dangerous places as Iraq and North Korea.
In the field of military aviation, I have to say that, apart from the B52 and the A-10, no aircraft has continued to play its role so well long after it was meant to have been retired.
Don't expect to get into any graduate mathematics program without additional courses in real analysis, complex analysis and basic topology. As for numerical methods and differential equations - those are only really essential if you want to be an applied mathematician or a physicist.
Or maybe i just went to a bad university
Hate to say, but you probably did... rote memorization played absolutely no part in my mathematical education.
I actually studies mathematics at a liberal arts college (an Ivy League school I'd rather not mention here) and so I can say with some assurance that when you talk about mere "technique," you are talking sheer nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that in fields like mathematics and theoretical physics one cannot claim to have really understood the material at a "deep" level until one has acquired a technical facility in handling the material.
So what if Gould had criticized The Adapted Mind? How does that make John Maynard Smith's criticisms any less trenchant? All you've done here is attempt an ad-hominem attack, as you have no way of knowing what was in Maynard Smith's mind when he wrote his critique.
The truth of the matter is that John Maynard Smith is right, and he is not the only one to have made the criticisms of Gould that he did. Gould's mischaracterization of Maynard Smith, Dawkins and E.O. Wilson (who I am no fan of, given his appeals to authority to dismiss Bjorn Lomborg) was blatantly egregious to anyone who bothered to actually read what these individuals had written.
Furthermore, Gould's theory of 'punctuated equilibrium' was by no means the gigantic paradigm shift that he sought to make it out to be, while his and Richard Lewontin's attacks on 'reductionism' were straw-man arguments blatantly motivated by their left-wing politics, which Gould and Lewontin went out of their way to make clear.
Stephen Jay Gould was a wonderful writer, and I am saddened to hear of his death, but I am inclined to agree that he was more a creator of interesting fictions than he was a serious scientist.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with idiots like you, and why do so many other idiots feel the need to mod you up? Are you driven by some compulsion to denigrate the parenting skills of others?
The Washington Times (owned by the founder of the Unification Church) and ADHDFraud are hardly unbiased sources, and for every David Neeleman you quote, psychiatrists can tell you of several hundred anonymous failures of whom you are unaware, whose biggest failing in life was never to have had the chance to receive the sort of treatment that is now widely available.
There's a certain delusion out there that seems to be widespread, which goes like this: ADHD is treated with drugs, drugs are "unnatural" and therefore bad, so any parent whose child is receiving treatment for ADHD is somehow negligent. But this is simply rubbish, as many "natural" things are extremely bad, while some "unnatural" things are very helpful. Faeces is "natural", but would you want some near you? Smallpox is natural, as is Polio, or skin cancer for that matter. On the other hand, Aspirin and soap are man-made and "unnatural", but you wouldn't willingly give either up, would you?
Parents with children who have ADHD already have enough to handle, without having busybodies and know-it-alls like you lecturing them for their supposed failings. Do you suppose that any sane parent would willingly see his or her child diagnosed with such an affliction and subjected to medication? What do you know of what it must be like to live with the consequences of such a problem? You wouldn't presume to tell the parents of an autistic or retarded child to just "get over it", but you feel yourself qualified to do the same with ADHD? Why is that? Is it because ADHD is actually treatable, while those afflictions aren't?
So, because you managed to find something that works for you, everyone else who's been diagnosed with ADHD is somehow a malingerer or a weakling? How wonderful it must be for you, having the psychic powers you surely possess: afterall, you can see into the minds of others to determine the reality or otherwise of their predicaments!
Here's a news-flash for you and others like you - your personal experiences do not make you a medical authority of any sort. It is the height of presumption for you to dismiss out of hand other people's plight based on your sample of 1, and if you don't think you have a problem, you can at least spare those who do the irritation of having to deal with the consequences of the ignorance spread by fools like yourself.
The artist's illustration in the Berkeley article (also used on the cover of the current edition of Nature) is misleading, in as much as it gives the figure kinky hair and thick lips, making for a more "African" look than is likely to have been the case.
The truth of the matter is that the earliest men almost certainly would have had straight hair, not curly or kinky but straight, and thin lips, just like most Europeans and Asians today. The wild-type for hair in primates is straight, and all of the great apes conform to that type. Similarly, no ape has thick lips, and our closest living relatives are pretty much lipless. Given these facts, why would any reasonable person expect the "first" men to look like modern day Africans?
Of course, it is logically impossible to rule out that our species evolved to gain the features of modern-day Africans only to lose them once again, but this flies in the face of both probability and Occam's razor - it is extremely unlikely that a feature, once lost, can then be regained down the line, simultaneously around all of the world outside Africa.
One mistake people tend to make is to assume that because our species originated in Africa, modern day Africans are somehow "closer" to what we must have originally been like, but this is nonsense. Africans are just as far removed from the original homo sapiens populations as any other population groups, so they've had just as much time to diverge from the original type. Africans, like any other populations, haven't stood still in evolutionary terms, contrary to the misleading notion that this article illustration propagates.
Perhaps you might try reading the actual articles in
http://www.nature.com
Nature magazine before going into "Sceptical Scientist" [TM] mode?
Surely you're joking; are you so unaware of what North Korea is like that you think it necessary to state something like this? Do you actually believe that the North Korean government would even let ordinary citizens go online?
Dude, it was meant to be a joke! Don't take everything so literally!
In the field of military aviation, I have to say that, apart from the B52 and the A-10, no aircraft has continued to play its role so well long after it was meant to have been retired.
What a load of bunkum!
Don't expect to get into any graduate mathematics program without additional courses in real analysis, complex analysis and basic topology. As for numerical methods and differential equations - those are only really essential if you want to be an applied mathematician or a physicist.
Or maybe i just went to a bad university Hate to say, but you probably did ... rote memorization played absolutely no part in my mathematical education.
I actually studies mathematics at a liberal arts college (an Ivy League school I'd rather not mention here) and so I can say with some assurance that when you talk about mere "technique," you are talking sheer nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that in fields like mathematics and theoretical physics one cannot claim to have really understood the material at a "deep" level until one has acquired a technical facility in handling the material.
So what if Gould had criticized The Adapted Mind? How does that make John Maynard Smith's criticisms any less trenchant? All you've done here is attempt an ad-hominem attack, as you have no way of knowing what was in Maynard Smith's mind when he wrote his critique.
The truth of the matter is that John Maynard Smith is right, and he is not the only one to have made the criticisms of Gould that he did. Gould's mischaracterization of Maynard Smith, Dawkins and E.O. Wilson (who I am no fan of, given his appeals to authority to dismiss Bjorn Lomborg) was blatantly egregious to anyone who bothered to actually read what these individuals had written.
Furthermore, Gould's theory of 'punctuated equilibrium' was by no means the gigantic paradigm shift that he sought to make it out to be, while his and Richard Lewontin's attacks on 'reductionism' were straw-man arguments blatantly motivated by their left-wing politics, which Gould and Lewontin went out of their way to make clear.
Stephen Jay Gould was a wonderful writer, and I am saddened to hear of his death, but I am inclined to agree that he was more a creator of interesting fictions than he was a serious scientist.
You are an animal. Why don't we do begin to do something for population control by first castrating you?
You, sir, are a moron.