We are able, pretty much, to change the Environment, or at least bend it to our will, as and when we please.
Every organism possesses this ability. It's just a question of scale. Like I said in another post, anaerobic bacteria completely changed the composition of Earth's atmosphere way back in geological time. They did this by polluting it: filling it with their biological by-products. Human beings are not unique in their ability to change the environment.
Some people don't like change. Some people would rather that the world stay exactly the way it is right now. Some people would prefer that we don't cut down any forests, or kill any animals, or change the world in any way. Those are all fine and wonderful things to believe in. But they're not realistic. Every organism changes its environment, and adapts along with the changes. That's how it works.
if you've finished with some wrapper or your cigerette, don't throw the fucker out the window, just take it home and dispose of it like you know you should!
Heh. That's a funny example. If you throw something out your window, it ends up lying in the grass beside the road where everybody who drives by can see it. (This is, incidentally, a violation in many jurisdictions. You can get a ticket for it.) On the other hand, if you take that same thing home and put it in your garbage can, it will end up in a landfill that most people will never see.
The moral of the story is that garbage that can be seen is bad, while garbage that cannot be seen is okay.
Have we even scientifically defined the concept of "species"?
I thought we had, and said as much in another post in this thread, but I was corrected. It seems like the idea of a species is a nebulous one at best, and at worst downright nonsensical.
Besides, upon further reflection, wouldn't any project like this necessarily run up against a sort of Heisenberg effect? In order to be absolutely certain that you have catalogued every species on the planet, you have to examine every organism on the planet. Single-celled organisms, too. And examining a single-celled organism on the genetic level would necessarily result in the destruction of that organism. Practically speaking, this would happen with any microscopic organism; we simply can't learn about them without squishing them to see what goo comes out.
So carried to its natural conclusion, a project like this would would mean absolute genocide for untold teeming billions of microscopic and single-celled organisms.
Wish I'd thought to post this a few days ago. Surely it would have been good for an "insightful" mod point or two.;-)
If the competition gets the bugs worked out of their OS/Software then Apple could be in for a world of hurt
No. See, if Linux or Windows XP worked perfectly, to spec, all the time, they would still be inferior to Mac OS X (which, for fairness, we will imagine also works perfectly all the time). That's the thing. Mac OS X is just plain better than any other desktop operating system.
If everything is equal and the Mac cost more and is significantly slower, then why would you buy it?
The point, of course, is that everything is not equal.
I would still argue that the current Mac fans would still buy a Mac given ANY processor if the quality remained the same and the performance didn't suffer too bad.
Sure, and if wishes were horses we could all have a merry Christmas... or whatever the hell that old saying is.
It's important to realize that changing processor architectures would have a significant negative impact on both current and future Mac users, not to mention developers.
I'll give you an example. I use Photoshop a lot. If I bought a new Mac, one based on a faster G4 or a 970 or some other binary-compatible CPU, I could be absolutely certain that I could install my already purchased copy of Photoshop and see performance gains ranging from the perceptible to the dramatic. This would not be true of a new Mac built on Joe's Discount Processor with E-Z Credit Terms. Or whatever.
Who wants to grow marketshare anyway...
Actually, it seems like a surprising number of people just don't get this. Apple doesn't give a damn about increasing their market share. They care about sales. So long as more people buy stuff from Apple this year as bought last, everybody is happy. If the people buying Macs are ex-Windows or Linux users, that's fine. If the people buying Macs are people who already own one or more Macs, that's fine, too. And if the people buying Macs are first-time computer buyers, that's the best of all.
Apple cares only about market share so far as it impacts potential customers' buying decisions. Beyond that, nobody cares.
Umm how exactly is a Palm going to do realtime handwriting recognition? It's not, a P4 can't do a very good job of it so a couple Mhz Dragonball doesn't stand a chance.
Handwriting recognition isn't a computationally bound task. It's an algorithmically bound one. We just simply don't have great (there are good, but no great) algorithms for recognizing natural handwriting yet.
It's a laptop for christsakes. People do turn those off everyonce in a while. To, you know, travel with them.
Sleep mode, man. Sleep mode. I haven't seen a Mac that's actually off, as in completely powered down, in forever.
Not different (sic).
I don't know where people got the idea that "think different" really means "think differently." It doesn't. "Different" is the object of the transitive verb "think." What's really ironic about this is that the people who made fun of Apple for the slogan "Think Different" always did it with an air of superiority, of smugness, that was downright hilarious in light of the fact that they completely didn't get it.
But there's a reason there wasn't an ozone problem until recently!
Define "problem." You mean a variance over time in ozone levels? There's lots of evidence that ozone levels in the atmosphere have been varying since the Cambrian. If you use the anthropic sense of "problem," meaning any situation that is different from what's optimal for human beings, then you're right. But that should come as no surprise. Every organism evolves in an optimal environment (or for that environment, depending on which way you look at it) and then proceeds to alter that environment. Single-celled anaerobes polluted the hell out of the planet with all their oxygen, remember.
reef damage
From the point of view of the sea bed, reefs are merely pollution, the inorganic waste products of colonies of microorganisms. From the point of view of the sea bed, a reef is about a natural as a department store.
We're fucking the planet six ways from Sunday.
That's the point where I call bullshit. All organisms change their environment. Human beings are not unique in this. Nor should we be.
If you like coral reefs, great. Say that you want to preserve coral reefs. If you like forests, say that you want to preserve forests. But when you jump to the conclusion that we are "fucking the planet," that's the point where I stop listening.
However, it didn't take Apple and others long to move to the PPC architecture.
That's not true, though. Even four years later, in 1996, only slightly more than a third of the Mac operating system was PowerPC native code. We didn't really get rid of the last few pieces of 68K code until Mac OS X, which was completely new.
Would the switch be painfull for Apple, yes. Would it be good in the long run? It depends.
I don't agree. Yes, the switch would be painful. But the fact that it would be painful means that it could not possibly be good in the long run. Apple is doing well right now. Their hardware is absolutely the best available, their operating system is widely considered to be the world's most advanced, their applications are second-to-none. To screw all that up by changing processor architectures when it is not necessary would be a disaster.
I still hope to own a powerbook late this year or next year! But if they don't have that new chip ready and AMD has their new 64bit in a laptop, then it will probably be some other laptop with Linux on it.
Nothing personal, but anybody who would choose to run Linux on his laptop just doesn't need OS X. If you would be happy with something else, then by all means use it! I, on the other hand, would not be happy using Windows, and I would sooner go back to pencil and paper than use Linux. I don't care what the processor clock speed is.
What a crock. I remember having a brand-new (and incredibly expensive) Power Mac 8100/80 on my desktop and a Quadra 950 on the floor next to me. I spent all my time using the Quadra because the 8100 was too damn slow!
Apple will not subject its customers to the nightmare of emulation again.
You may not, talk radio hosts may not, but there are plenty of people who have spent their entire lives studying the field who do.
Look, you're not hearing me, here. These "plenty of people" have theories, and they have some evidence gleaned from the fossil record. But that's it. They don't know anything about it. An important part of the scientific method is acknowledging, up front, the limits of your knowledge. We can look at the evidence and make some hypotheses, but we can never, ever know.
I could use that line of reasoning to justify any action whatsoever, because anything that I'm capable of doing is, by definition, just "natural".
When people say "natural" in this context they're talking about "the world as it would be without humans" whether or not that is something we could ever accurately gauge.
Yes, I know that that's what some people mean when they say "nature." My point is that this is a silly way of looking at things.
Of course we're talking the work of scientists here, not lawyers, but are you telling me that you really need that "natural" extinction rate to prove to you that we're destroying the planet, one forest, many species at a time?
Let me give you one example. In the 80's CFC's were a big deal. Everybody was concerned about the release of CFC's and the effects of CFC's on the ozone layer. "We're destroying the planet," they said.
When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it did more damage to the ozone layer than all human activity since the beginning of recorded history combined.
The world is a big place, and people are small. Anybody who thinks that humanity has a really significant impact on large-scale systems is suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Extinction at a rate that is orders of magnitude beyond normal is not "an important part of nature".
The problem, of course, is that no one has the foggiest idea of what a normal rate of extinction is. Not to mention the fact that in a system as large as the Earth the rate is sure to vary wildly over different sample periods. Human beings have only been recording history for 10,000 years, give or take. During that microperiod, the "normal" rate of extinction might be N, or it might be N^2. We have no idea.
I just always get somewhat bemused when people hold the opinion that "nature" is the world in the absence of humanity, that humanity is not part of the natural world. If the lions eat all the zebras, that's nature. If human beings kill all the lions, that's not nature. Seems like a rather foolish viewpoint to me.
Would you still buy a Macintosh if it had an Intel/AMD chip in it?
No. Why? Because none of my software would run on it!
Apple already went through this once. They went from the 68000 series to the PowerPC series, and we users had to live with a lot of awful emulated software for a long, long time. Apple will not do that again, I think.
That's why the PowerPC 970 is such a big deal. It's binary compatible with the chips currently in use in Macs, including support for the AltiVec instruction set. You could, if they were available now, just plop any existing software on a PowerPC 970 Mac and run it. Same, only faster.
Binary compatibility is a huge issue. That's why Apple won't be releasing a computer with an IA-32 or IA-64 CPU in it.
The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot.
How do you know? If you're booting your iBook that often, you're doing something wrong.
I've booted this Mac one time for every kernel upgrade since I bought it, and one time for a kernel panic I got when running the original release of 10.2. I honestly can't tell you how long it takes this Mac to boot. Have no idea.
Another poster mentioned some of them and I'll mention a couple more: Cisco, Nintendo (you've heard of the GameCube right) and Sony's next Playstation will have a PowerPC.
Don't forget TiVo. Your TiVo has a PowerPC chip in it.
But what this article doesn't really go into is why some people prefer the Mac over the PC in photography.
Yes, I agree 100%. The best endorsement for the Mac is to say, proudly, "Yes! Macs are slower than PC's! And millions of people use them instead of PC's anyway!"
It actually kind of reminds me of that old joke. She says, "You're drunk." He says, "Yes, but you're ugly, and tomorrow I will be sober."
The PC says to the Mac, "You're slow." The Mac says, "Yes, but you're running Windows, and tomorrow I will be faster."
We don't know that. You could be off by an order of magnitude in either direction.
and almost all of them evolved within the last million years...
We don't know that, either; there's a lot the fossil record doesn't tell us.
then the rate is probably ten per year
No, you mean that the rate was ten per year on average over the last million years. That means you could have seen zero species per year for 999,999 years, and then poof! Massive speciation all at once.
I stand by my statement that we really know nothing about speciation.
That's right, there's need to worry about the possible extinction of tigers, elephants, orangutans or any other species.
Actually, you're right. There is no need to worry about the extinction of tigers, elephants, orangutans, or any other species, unless you happen to be particularly fond of those animals. The environment changes over time, and animals either adapt to it, migrate around in it, or die off. Extinction is an important part of nature.
I guess this relates to Gould's punctuated equilibria; I think the overall hypothesis is that repeated mass extinctions caused by catastrophe were followed by explosions in diversity, or something like that.
Whenever I've read about the punctuated equlibrium theory, I've thought of it in terms of laziness. Whenever a species can get by without doing any extra work, it will. I picture animals just lying around in the grass sunning themselves, because it's summertime and the livin's easy. But when faced with a threat, a species will evolve like crazy: gazelles will sprout wings to escape a charging lion. This may not be the most perfect interpretation of the theory, and of course it's not literally true, but it helps me remember it.
there are more non-tasty specieses than tasty ones
How do you figure?
See, this particular subject has a special fascination with me. I'm always surprised by what various cultures do and don't eat. Somewhere around the world, you can find somebody who will eat any creature that has enough mass (or that exists in sufficient quantities) to make it worth their while. For example, in America we never eat horsemeat-- we feed it to our animals-- but in France and Belgium it's considered a delicacy. I've had horsemeat-- it's often prepared like lamb or mutton-- and found it to be quite delicious.
I think every animal is tasty. It's just a question of finding a group of people who think it's okay to eat it.
(Of course, the rules change completely when you talk about plants. We can't eat most plants, simply because our digestive system isn't set up for it. We have to eat heavily processed plants, like flour made from grains; juvenile plants or plant by-products like fruit; or plants that have been specially bred over the millennia to be perpetually juvenile. If you were to just go out and grab a handful of good old Kentucky crabgrass, you'd find it to be a memorable meal, but not one you'd long to repeat.)
Maybe all orchids really belong to the same species?;-)
I see your point. Another poster already pointed out that my definition can't even be applied to asexual organisms, so it was dead before you even came along. Good info, though, about orchids.
Is it possible that governmental projects are not the end-all of research?
I think it's possible that somebody wildly overestimated the scope of the project. Or wildly underestimated the resources that could be applied to it. Or both.
But of course you're right. As I understand it, the vast majority of pure research is being funded by private companies now. So even if that research is being done at universities-- which it is, largely-- it's being paid for with corporate dollars. Which, some people's opinions to the contrary, is not inherently a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
We are able, pretty much, to change the Environment, or at least bend it to our will, as and when we please.
Every organism possesses this ability. It's just a question of scale. Like I said in another post, anaerobic bacteria completely changed the composition of Earth's atmosphere way back in geological time. They did this by polluting it: filling it with their biological by-products. Human beings are not unique in their ability to change the environment.
Some people don't like change. Some people would rather that the world stay exactly the way it is right now. Some people would prefer that we don't cut down any forests, or kill any animals, or change the world in any way. Those are all fine and wonderful things to believe in. But they're not realistic. Every organism changes its environment, and adapts along with the changes. That's how it works.
if you've finished with some wrapper or your cigerette, don't throw the fucker out the window, just take it home and dispose of it like you know you should!
Heh. That's a funny example. If you throw something out your window, it ends up lying in the grass beside the road where everybody who drives by can see it. (This is, incidentally, a violation in many jurisdictions. You can get a ticket for it.) On the other hand, if you take that same thing home and put it in your garbage can, it will end up in a landfill that most people will never see.
The moral of the story is that garbage that can be seen is bad, while garbage that cannot be seen is okay.
Have we even scientifically defined the concept of "species"?
;-)
I thought we had, and said as much in another post in this thread, but I was corrected. It seems like the idea of a species is a nebulous one at best, and at worst downright nonsensical.
Besides, upon further reflection, wouldn't any project like this necessarily run up against a sort of Heisenberg effect? In order to be absolutely certain that you have catalogued every species on the planet, you have to examine every organism on the planet. Single-celled organisms, too. And examining a single-celled organism on the genetic level would necessarily result in the destruction of that organism. Practically speaking, this would happen with any microscopic organism; we simply can't learn about them without squishing them to see what goo comes out.
So carried to its natural conclusion, a project like this would would mean absolute genocide for untold teeming billions of microscopic and single-celled organisms.
Wish I'd thought to post this a few days ago. Surely it would have been good for an "insightful" mod point or two.
If the competition gets the bugs worked out of their OS/Software then Apple could be in for a world of hurt
No. See, if Linux or Windows XP worked perfectly, to spec, all the time, they would still be inferior to Mac OS X (which, for fairness, we will imagine also works perfectly all the time). That's the thing. Mac OS X is just plain better than any other desktop operating system.
If everything is equal and the Mac cost more and is significantly slower, then why would you buy it?
The point, of course, is that everything is not equal.
I would still argue that the current Mac fans would still buy a Mac given ANY processor if the quality remained the same and the performance didn't suffer too bad.
Sure, and if wishes were horses we could all have a merry Christmas... or whatever the hell that old saying is.
It's important to realize that changing processor architectures would have a significant negative impact on both current and future Mac users, not to mention developers.
I'll give you an example. I use Photoshop a lot. If I bought a new Mac, one based on a faster G4 or a 970 or some other binary-compatible CPU, I could be absolutely certain that I could install my already purchased copy of Photoshop and see performance gains ranging from the perceptible to the dramatic. This would not be true of a new Mac built on Joe's Discount Processor with E-Z Credit Terms. Or whatever.
Who wants to grow marketshare anyway...
Actually, it seems like a surprising number of people just don't get this. Apple doesn't give a damn about increasing their market share. They care about sales. So long as more people buy stuff from Apple this year as bought last, everybody is happy. If the people buying Macs are ex-Windows or Linux users, that's fine. If the people buying Macs are people who already own one or more Macs, that's fine, too. And if the people buying Macs are first-time computer buyers, that's the best of all.
Apple cares only about market share so far as it impacts potential customers' buying decisions. Beyond that, nobody cares.
Any chance anyone will ever resurrect the Newton's handwriting recognition engine?
Yes.
Umm how exactly is a Palm going to do realtime handwriting recognition? It's not, a P4 can't do a very good job of it so a couple Mhz Dragonball doesn't stand a chance.
Handwriting recognition isn't a computationally bound task. It's an algorithmically bound one. We just simply don't have great (there are good, but no great) algorithms for recognizing natural handwriting yet.
Slashdot isn't made out of people who think the same way everyone else does
You're new here, right?
or else that'd be boring
It certainly is.
It's a laptop for christsakes. People do turn those off everyonce in a while. To, you know, travel with them.
Sleep mode, man. Sleep mode. I haven't seen a Mac that's actually off, as in completely powered down, in forever.
Not different (sic).
I don't know where people got the idea that "think different" really means "think differently." It doesn't. "Different" is the object of the transitive verb "think." What's really ironic about this is that the people who made fun of Apple for the slogan "Think Different" always did it with an air of superiority, of smugness, that was downright hilarious in light of the fact that they completely didn't get it.
Cracks me up, man.
But there's a reason there wasn't an ozone problem until recently!
Define "problem." You mean a variance over time in ozone levels? There's lots of evidence that ozone levels in the atmosphere have been varying since the Cambrian. If you use the anthropic sense of "problem," meaning any situation that is different from what's optimal for human beings, then you're right. But that should come as no surprise. Every organism evolves in an optimal environment (or for that environment, depending on which way you look at it) and then proceeds to alter that environment. Single-celled anaerobes polluted the hell out of the planet with all their oxygen, remember.
reef damage
From the point of view of the sea bed, reefs are merely pollution, the inorganic waste products of colonies of microorganisms. From the point of view of the sea bed, a reef is about a natural as a department store.
We're fucking the planet six ways from Sunday.
That's the point where I call bullshit. All organisms change their environment. Human beings are not unique in this. Nor should we be.
If you like coral reefs, great. Say that you want to preserve coral reefs. If you like forests, say that you want to preserve forests. But when you jump to the conclusion that we are "fucking the planet," that's the point where I stop listening.
However, it didn't take Apple and others long to move to the PPC architecture.
That's not true, though. Even four years later, in 1996, only slightly more than a third of the Mac operating system was PowerPC native code. We didn't really get rid of the last few pieces of 68K code until Mac OS X, which was completely new.
Would the switch be painfull for Apple, yes. Would it be good in the long run? It depends.
I don't agree. Yes, the switch would be painful. But the fact that it would be painful means that it could not possibly be good in the long run. Apple is doing well right now. Their hardware is absolutely the best available, their operating system is widely considered to be the world's most advanced, their applications are second-to-none. To screw all that up by changing processor architectures when it is not necessary would be a disaster.
I still hope to own a powerbook late this year or next year! But if they don't have that new chip ready and AMD has their new 64bit in a laptop, then it will probably be some other laptop with Linux on it.
Nothing personal, but anybody who would choose to run Linux on his laptop just doesn't need OS X. If you would be happy with something else, then by all means use it! I, on the other hand, would not be happy using Windows, and I would sooner go back to pencil and paper than use Linux. I don't care what the processor clock speed is.
It worked Just Fine
What a crock. I remember having a brand-new (and incredibly expensive) Power Mac 8100/80 on my desktop and a Quadra 950 on the floor next to me. I spent all my time using the Quadra because the 8100 was too damn slow!
Apple will not subject its customers to the nightmare of emulation again.
You may not, talk radio hosts may not, but there are plenty of people who have spent their entire lives studying the field who do.
Look, you're not hearing me, here. These "plenty of people" have theories, and they have some evidence gleaned from the fossil record. But that's it. They don't know anything about it. An important part of the scientific method is acknowledging, up front, the limits of your knowledge. We can look at the evidence and make some hypotheses, but we can never, ever know.
I could use that line of reasoning to justify any action whatsoever, because anything that I'm capable of doing is, by definition, just "natural".
So?
When people say "natural" in this context they're talking about "the world as it would be without humans" whether or not that is something we could ever accurately gauge.
Yes, I know that that's what some people mean when they say "nature." My point is that this is a silly way of looking at things.
Of course we're talking the work of scientists here, not lawyers, but are you telling me that you really need that "natural" extinction rate to prove to you that we're destroying the planet, one forest, many species at a time?
Let me give you one example. In the 80's CFC's were a big deal. Everybody was concerned about the release of CFC's and the effects of CFC's on the ozone layer. "We're destroying the planet," they said.
When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it did more damage to the ozone layer than all human activity since the beginning of recorded history combined.
The world is a big place, and people are small. Anybody who thinks that humanity has a really significant impact on large-scale systems is suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Lets assume that all your old software ran under emmulation like it did with the jump from 68xxx code to ppc jump.
Did you actually have a Power Mac in 1992 or so? It sucked. Emulation is not acceptable.
Again I am an Apple fan; but if I was Apple I would be working hard on getting their OS + emmulation to work with IA-64 and AMD's 64BIT technology.
Well, thank god you're not Apple, then.
Your obviously the simple one. You don't know a fucking joke when it's right in front of you?
Maybe I would have been better able to recognize it if you'd made it funny at all.
(Witty comeback plan B: "I may be simple, but at least I know the difference between 'your' and 'you're!'")
Extinction at a rate that is orders of magnitude beyond normal is not "an important part of nature".
The problem, of course, is that no one has the foggiest idea of what a normal rate of extinction is. Not to mention the fact that in a system as large as the Earth the rate is sure to vary wildly over different sample periods. Human beings have only been recording history for 10,000 years, give or take. During that microperiod, the "normal" rate of extinction might be N, or it might be N^2. We have no idea.
I just always get somewhat bemused when people hold the opinion that "nature" is the world in the absence of humanity, that humanity is not part of the natural world. If the lions eat all the zebras, that's nature. If human beings kill all the lions, that's not nature. Seems like a rather foolish viewpoint to me.
Strangely, I didn't have any problem with it until that guy pointed out the missing word. My brain just filled it right in as I read your post.
Neato.
Would you still buy a Macintosh if it had an Intel/AMD chip in it?
No. Why? Because none of my software would run on it!
Apple already went through this once. They went from the 68000 series to the PowerPC series, and we users had to live with a lot of awful emulated software for a long, long time. Apple will not do that again, I think.
That's why the PowerPC 970 is such a big deal. It's binary compatible with the chips currently in use in Macs, including support for the AltiVec instruction set. You could, if they were available now, just plop any existing software on a PowerPC 970 Mac and run it. Same, only faster.
Binary compatibility is a huge issue. That's why Apple won't be releasing a computer with an IA-32 or IA-64 CPU in it.
The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot.
How do you know? If you're booting your iBook that often, you're doing something wrong.
I've booted this Mac one time for every kernel upgrade since I bought it, and one time for a kernel panic I got when running the original release of 10.2. I honestly can't tell you how long it takes this Mac to boot. Have no idea.
Another poster mentioned some of them and I'll mention a couple more: Cisco, Nintendo (you've heard of the GameCube right) and Sony's next Playstation will have a PowerPC.
Don't forget TiVo. Your TiVo has a PowerPC chip in it.
But what this article doesn't really go into is why some people prefer the Mac over the PC in photography.
Yes, I agree 100%. The best endorsement for the Mac is to say, proudly, "Yes! Macs are slower than PC's! And millions of people use them instead of PC's anyway!"
It actually kind of reminds me of that old joke. She says, "You're drunk." He says, "Yes, but you're ugly, and tomorrow I will be sober."
The PC says to the Mac, "You're slow." The Mac says, "Yes, but you're running Windows, and tomorrow I will be faster."
If there are 10 million species today...
We don't know that. You could be off by an order of magnitude in either direction.
and almost all of them evolved within the last million years...
We don't know that, either; there's a lot the fossil record doesn't tell us.
then the rate is probably ten per year
No, you mean that the rate was ten per year on average over the last million years. That means you could have seen zero species per year for 999,999 years, and then poof! Massive speciation all at once.
I stand by my statement that we really know nothing about speciation.
That's right, there's need to worry about the possible extinction of tigers, elephants, orangutans or any other species.
Actually, you're right. There is no need to worry about the extinction of tigers, elephants, orangutans, or any other species, unless you happen to be particularly fond of those animals. The environment changes over time, and animals either adapt to it, migrate around in it, or die off. Extinction is an important part of nature.
I guess this relates to Gould's punctuated equilibria; I think the overall hypothesis is that repeated mass extinctions caused by catastrophe were followed by explosions in diversity, or something like that.
Whenever I've read about the punctuated equlibrium theory, I've thought of it in terms of laziness. Whenever a species can get by without doing any extra work, it will. I picture animals just lying around in the grass sunning themselves, because it's summertime and the livin's easy. But when faced with a threat, a species will evolve like crazy: gazelles will sprout wings to escape a charging lion. This may not be the most perfect interpretation of the theory, and of course it's not literally true, but it helps me remember it.
there are more non-tasty specieses than tasty ones
How do you figure?
See, this particular subject has a special fascination with me. I'm always surprised by what various cultures do and don't eat. Somewhere around the world, you can find somebody who will eat any creature that has enough mass (or that exists in sufficient quantities) to make it worth their while. For example, in America we never eat horsemeat-- we feed it to our animals-- but in France and Belgium it's considered a delicacy. I've had horsemeat-- it's often prepared like lamb or mutton-- and found it to be quite delicious.
I think every animal is tasty. It's just a question of finding a group of people who think it's okay to eat it.
(Of course, the rules change completely when you talk about plants. We can't eat most plants, simply because our digestive system isn't set up for it. We have to eat heavily processed plants, like flour made from grains; juvenile plants or plant by-products like fruit; or plants that have been specially bred over the millennia to be perpetually juvenile. If you were to just go out and grab a handful of good old Kentucky crabgrass, you'd find it to be a memorable meal, but not one you'd long to repeat.)
Maybe all orchids really belong to the same species? ;-)
I see your point. Another poster already pointed out that my definition can't even be applied to asexual organisms, so it was dead before you even came along. Good info, though, about orchids.
Is it possible that governmental projects are not the end-all of research?
I think it's possible that somebody wildly overestimated the scope of the project. Or wildly underestimated the resources that could be applied to it. Or both.
But of course you're right. As I understand it, the vast majority of pure research is being funded by private companies now. So even if that research is being done at universities-- which it is, largely-- it's being paid for with corporate dollars. Which, some people's opinions to the contrary, is not inherently a bad thing.