Close, but not quite. My theory is that everyone No, I bet SOHO is led by aliens. They don't want us to know about their invasion fleet. And everyone knows Venus has no spacebabes.
They live in bubble cities under the oceans of Europa.
The Archaeoraptor specimen was pretty easy to tell as a fake...there were all kinds of things that didn't match up. If they had tried to do the actual science, they would have found that it's left and right wings were part/counterpart of the same wing, that the tail was displaced, and that feathers abruptly stopped when you got to the piece of rock that the tail was on. There were plenty of warning signs and the people who were looking at it (a nonscientist and Phil Currie, who has a history of being easily duped) were just fools. Had they tried to publish it in a scientific journal, the peer reviewing process would have culled it out as bad science. That was National Geographic's fault for jumping the gun.
No, this one is pretty convincingly real, and I'd say that Nature is a much more scientific publication than National Geographic.
But don't take my word for it. Read the damned paper. Maybe that's a bit more convincing than a quick soundbyte on NYTimes or CNN. Just maybe.
There are still arguments as to whether -ANY- of the fossils with "feathers" found are genuine, whether the feathers are merely scales that fossilised, or whether (even if they were feathers) they were even used, and were merely a genetic anomoly that died out.
You need desperately to stop reading Feduccia and believing everything he says as undeniable truth. The guy does piss-poor paleontology (ask any paleontologist and they'll tell you the same thing). He doesn't even publish in peer-reviewed papers...he writes books which are NOT peer reviewed. As far as I'm concerned, HE'S the fraud.
But about the feathered dinosaurs. The whole "scales or connective tissue" argument is long-dead. That argument was used against Sinosauropteryx because the only feathers it had was a small amount of "dinofuzz." Dinofuzz has not been proven to be feathers, but it seems likely that it is indeed protofeathers. Since Sinosauropteryx, however, we've found MANY more feathered dinosaurs, many of which indeed have true feathers. Some of these have been found by paleontologists as opposed to villiagers and are therefore unaltered. Microscopic analysis of the feathers shows a LOT of detail in structures that we find in the feathers found in, say, Confucisornis and other birds found in the Liaoning beds.
The infamous Archaeoraptor debacle was NOT as big a problem as you would think. There were two seperate animals stuck together...a composite specimen made up of a bird and a Microraptor. The guy who found it AT A ROCK AND GEM SHOW(who was NOT, I repeat, NOT a paleontologist but rather a dinosaur fanatic who wanted his name on a paper) took it straight to National Geographic and had all sorts of stuff done with it LONG before the whole thing was even looked at in more detail. This was a result of bad science, not the convincing value of the composites/fakes coming out of China.
Another problem is scientists speaking outside their fields of expertise. Geologists have no business speculating on the nature of flight, with the SOLE exception of when they can produce a complete physical replica and can carry out hard science on that replica.
No offense or anything, but you, sir, are an ignorant fool. Most paleontologists are NOT trained primarily in geology. Many have specialized in comparative anatomy, developmental biology, and other areas that are more important to understanding the morphology of the animals they study. I've even met a few paleontologists who DO have a good background in aerodynamics or structural engineering so they can understand what the animals they're looking at could and could not do. Don't think all paleontologists are geologists who pick up fossils, name them, and make up unfounded stories as to the animal's behavior.
I'd say this makes more sense as an anti-aircraft tool. But that raises a question....we're not dealing with countries with particularly advanced air forces. If anything, development of such weapons would simply HURT us....Imagine how much harder it would be for our air force to destroy 3rd world militaries. And it's quite a strong terrorist tool, as you can just camp out near a commercial airstrip and point and click with a shoulder-mounted one of these.
Seriosuly, this guy has a point. What do you define as new? Is Card new? I mean, another book from the Ender series just hit the shelves a few months ago (Shadow Puppets). How about Sterling? Or Rucker? Or Stephenson? Or Gibson? Word on the street says that Gibson's got a book coming out in just a few scarce weeks called Pattern Recognition.
Or do you mean new as in the last ten years? Greg Egan's great. So's Charles Stross (off-topic: Charles Stross ALSO happens to be a Linux user...it's a wonder Slashdotters don't cling to him like they do to Neil Stephenson). Ian MacLeod's pretty good, too.
I guess you've never read William Burroughs, Phil K. Dick, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Disch, etc.
REAL sci-fi is not campy adventure stuck in the future (or past or whatever). Real Sci-Fi is philosophy and/or satire masquerading as escapist fiction. It just happens to be set in the future, or an alternate universe, or something else that is not our own world.
Oh, and Aldous Huxley wrote Sci-Fi....that's what Brave New World is. So did Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, etc.
Your ignorance does not a dissertation make. Just because A World Out Of Time and Moon is a Harsh Mistress seem sexually or socially deviant (which you say as if such things are "bad") does not mean they necessarily are, nor does it men that thye don't have value. So Heinlein is a Libertarian. So was Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Alduous Huxley, and a good many more. If you think Heinlein is "head in the clouds" you must think Ayn Rand's philosophy that you should NEVER submit your own desires for the sake of others NO MATTER WHAT is completely and utterly off the wall.
No, most Sci-Fi is NOT appropriate for kids...plenty of it is simply too complex for kids to understand and a lot more is just too adult. However, to say that all sci-fi is trash because it condones behavior and ideas that YOU are to damned INTOLERANT to accept as OTHER PEOPLE'S CHOICES is ignorant in the least, and fascist when you get right down to it.
Sure. Robert Jordan's books are god to spend a lot of time reading. That is, if you don't mind the simple fact that the guy's a complete and total hack.
ISRAEL HAS NO OIL. PERIOD. IN THE PAST, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL HAS ONLY LED TO OIL EMBARGOS BY OPEC AS A MAJORITY OF OPEC HATES ISRAEL.
The reason people like Bin Laden, the Saudis, etc hate Israel is because they can't accept that 1) Muslims are living in a nation in which Jews are the majority and make most of the governmental decisions and 2) DESPITE a lack of oil and other mineral resources, Israel is THE most technologically advanced, wealthy, and progressive nations in the Middle East (and among the most technologically advanced and wealthy in the world). And they've been under seige from all borders for 54 years.
It's funny. We're a science board and yet, we're still inundated with ignorance. How many biomedical, technological, physics, etc papers do you see coming out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, etc? Now how many do you see coming out of Israel? THAT'S why the US likes Israel.
I agree that feathers definitely originated as some sort of heat-retaining integuement. Look at the assorted flightless feathered dinosaurs that just have a layer of downy "dinofuzz" and it's clear that the integuement was originally insulatory.
Flight feathers are something different.
The long, broad, and stiff feathers you see arising in deinonychosaurs and other maniraptors are NOT insulatory, at least, not insulatory as far as keeping the individual animal warm. However, we DO know that maniraptorans minded their nests, often sitting on the nest to keep the eggs warm (fossils of nesting oviraptorids from Mongolia and troodontids from Montana prove that for at least some species). With the manner that they seem to hold their arms in such a nesting position, protoflight feather would be covering the nest, lending to the insulation of the nest. Keep the eggs warmer, you have fewer young that die in the egg, and an evolutionary edge. From these elongated feathers, you may have some of the smaller dinosaurs start gliding and eventually end up with flight.
Another possibility is as display. We know a lot of maniraptors were at least marginally social and some were much more social (such as Deinonychus). The originally nonfunctional feathers could easily have served as courtship displays. Once again, what was originally NOT a flight mechanism then found use as a gliding and then flight mechanism when other structures formed.
A third possibility is that feathers acted to help small maniraptors to trap prey. Maniraptors probably relied on their arms and long fingers (and large claws) to catch prey items. Stiff quills might have added a maginally netlike structure that could have given that extra edge on competitors. Eventually, once again, this structure evolved for something else becomes useful for flight and further develops.
It would not surprise me to find out that flight developed in several dinosaurs in parallel, given that we see it evolving in several quite different critters today (insects, reptiles, mammals, fish).
I'd actually be less surprised to learn that most maniraptorans are descendants of flying dinosaurs that lost their ability to fly. Too many structures that otherwise don't make sense. Reversed hallux. Certain structures of the feathers, overly-long arms, etc.
Also, don't mistake gliding for true powered flight. Gliding has evolved countless times (especially in vertebrates). True powered flight has not. Birds, pterosaurs, bats, and insects are the only organisms I can think of that have evolved true powered flight. Whether the flight mechanism has wavered between functional and nonfunctional (as it may have been in early flying dinosaurs/birds) is a totally different question than how many times it independantly arose.
Because he's a HACK. And an annoyingly successful one at that.
Timeline, Congo, Jurassic Park, Lost World, Sphere, Prey, Terminal Man, Andromeda Strain...they're all the same book with different characters and different technologies. Eaters of the Dead is different because it's just an adaptation of Beowulf. Airframe is a hack detective story; nothing unique.
If they try any of that crap, the MPAA will sue their extraterrestrial asses for copyright infringement before they can say "Take me to your leader." After 5 years of extensive lawsuits, do you really think they'll have the will to live, let alone run a massive full-scale invasion?
No, when a triploid (3n) organism produces 1n gametes, the offspring is simply 2n. When the triploid (3n) organism produced 2n gametes, the chromosomes from the diploid parent so you get 2(1n)+2n=4n. The chromosomes are, of course, not homologous, so really it's a 2n organism with n=(twice the normal haploid number) but because it has a diploid (2n) component of the chromosomes from each parent, it's considered tetraploid (4n)
There are more banana-cheetah similarities, I believe...
Cheetahs: yellow, have black spots, are experiencing problems due to low genetic diversity, don't have seeds
Bananas: yellow, may have black spots when very ripe, may experience problems due to low genetic diversity, don't have seeds
The real research question is not about sequencing the banana or the cheetah. I think we need to start researching whether cheetahs can be peeled and eaten for a tasty snack.
Yeah...here goes.
The triploid gamete is 2n, being effectively diploid. The offspring is a hybrid, so the chromosomes don't entirely pair up, so the chromosomes from the 1n gamete duplicate themselves and pair up with their duplicates. It's really 2n, but because you have 4 sets of chromosomes, they still call it tetraploid.
A gene is either passed on or it is not. However, genes do not determine the entire final phenotype of the organism (there are environmental effects as well) and it is the PHENOTYPE that is acted on by natural selection, not the genes. Therefore, it is a population's morphospace that is the real unit of evolution rather than the species, individual, or gene. For the most part, that's just referred to as "species" even though species isn't truly accurate.
I've read The Selfish Gene and although I agree that Dawking's theory applies to some situations, he ignores the simple fact that genes are not the only things which determine morphology and behavior and that it is THAT which is acted on by natural selection.
Actually, it's more like this. Generally, the species is well evolved to its environment. Individuals in ALL extremes die regularly, so the only ones to survive and breed are those in the middle of the bell curve. This maintains that bell curve. However, a change in the environment suddenly occurs because we all know that the environment is not static. Suddenly, the individuals on one extreme are not dying out and the individuals on the other extreme are dying out much more. The morphospace that the species takes up then shifts until the individuals dying out on both extremes balance each other.
Also, remember that it's species, not individuals, that evolve. Individuals survive or don't survive. That is all.
Dingos can mate with dogs and produce fertile offspring. Dogs can mate with wolves and procuce fertile offspring. However, Dingos cannot mate with wolves and still produce fertile offspring.
In othe words, your definition is flawed because it assumes that species are static, whereas they REALLY are always in the process of splitting into multiple species. Plus, there's that time thing. A species not only has to be able to be classified solidly in today's environment, but it also needs to have a set classification that spans time so that we can deal with paleontological species as well. And since you can't mate two Tyrannosaurus skeletons and see if they produce viable offspring...well, I'm sure you get the point.
No, I am not. However, both are quite similar. They stem from the same things and are both very limited in quantity. Therefore for argument's sake, one can consider them equal, though they are not.
The lack of ethics of people below is the only reason these people are in power.
So you're blaming the people for whoever takes power over them. You're still caught in a contradiction, though not as obvious as the earlier one. If the people ruled by such a leader are unethical, then such severe laws are required to maintain a peaceful society. Therefore these severe laws are NOT unjust, regardless of how much you claim them to be.
You're stuck. The only way you can't contradict yourself is to agree that power and ethics are completely and entirely independent of each other.
You contradict not only history, but also yourself. You claim that the people in power are making unjust (and therefore unethical) laws, and yet you also claim that you can't have power unless you're ethical. That's an example of cognitive dissonance if I've ever seen one.
Power and wealth generally come to people who are either lucky or clever. Lucky people stumble across it...like the lottery or someone who inherits a fortune (or a political position in dynastic governments). They had no part in generating that wealth or power...it just came to them. These people often lose it quickly because with things in as sort supply as money or power, everyone's trying to chisel some away from you and unless you know how to hold onto it, you lose it all. Clever people use their knowledge of others to generate power/wealth. For instance, Bill Gates used his knowledge of the market to eliminate competition and further his product and company. This has resulted in him becoming very, very wealthy. Similarly, Hitler used his knowledge of the way most Germans felt about Jews, their losses in WWI, and the military power and attitudes of Europe to rise in power in Germany, then take over most of Europe. Both these people are/were VERY clever and VERY intelligent.
Now please, tell me how any of these people (the lucky person, Bill Gates, or Hitler) is somehow exceptionally ethical? All the lottery winner did was buy a ticket for $1...he might very well go home every night, drink a six-pack of beer, and beat his wife and kids before alling asleep on the couch. He might also be a really great person who volunteers all his free time to work in a soup kitchen. We don't know, and frankly, it has nothing to do with the outcome. Is Bill Gates ethical? Monopolizing the market, frivolous lawsuits, and massive buyouts doesn't seem ethical to me. How about Hitler? I don't think murdering 11 million innocent men, women, and children due to ethinicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or political beliefs is ethical in the least.
But you can't stereotype all people with wealth or power as being unethical, either. Plenty of people make their fortunes completely ethically or come to power with the pure intention of helping people or at least protecting them from the more malevolent forces in government.
So you only have to be ethical if you are powerful/wealthy? Ah...so if I'm poor, I can commit murder, rape, sell people into slavery, etc as long as I don't make a whole lot of money off of it? Thanks for clearing that up.
Ethics are ends, not means. You should be ethical simply for the sake of being ethical. Regardless of economic or political status.
Yes, I agree that the US government is too strict about plenty of things. However, getting authoritarian and totalitarian governments confused (or worse yet, assuming they are the same) is a mistake. The US, no matter how much you dislike their policy, is not Sudan or Saudi Arabia. We don't have legal state-sponsored slavery, we don't have state-sponsored gang-raping a woman as punishment for her brother's misdeeds, we don't have the death penalty for adultery, etc. While the US does indeed have plenty of flaws, I challenge you to find 5 states that lack similar legislation.
I'm not saying we should settle for American government. I'm saying that going off and saying that America is equivalent to Sudan is just plain ignorant and seems to follow this "might-makes-wrong" doctrine that is currently screwing over the world. Military, political, and economic power does not have anything to do with a nation's power. I'm sick of seeing constant criticism of the US (and Israel, and the UK, and a few other nations) becaue they aren't ashamed that they have a powerful military whereas ethical transgressions of poorer countries are excused or even supported (consider the Sudanese slave trade) because they're poor and weak. Last time I checked, power/wealth and ethics are entirely unrelated.
Oh, please. ANY government is authoritarian. If a government does not enforce laws, it becomes anarchistic and ceases to be a government. However, the US is NOT totalitarian like Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, Sudan, etc.
Laws mean authority, yes, but they don't equal totalitarianism. Making it illegal to murder someone in cold blood does not mean that tomorrow you're gonna wake up with barcodes tattooed to your forehead, a computer chip in your head monitoring your thoughts, and a name like Equality 7-2521.
Generally, you wouldn't have to MOVE 50 ships to take over a barely defended planet, unless you were using scouts armed with lasers or something. By the time my fleet was that big, I was moving around fleets of 10 Doom Stars packed with 70 Heavy Plasma Cannons each. Only the big enemy fleets actually got a taste of my REAL fleet, which was a pile of titans and doom stars with gauss cannons to kill shields, Ion Cannons and neutron beams to kill marines and to immobolize the ships, whatever the jump technology there was to let you go basically anywhere in the battle screen, and pods to increase my total marine capacity. The best thing about a fleet like that is that it just keeps on growing and growing and growing...
Slashdot Mirror
Close, but not quite. My theory is that everyone No, I bet SOHO is led by aliens. They don't want us to know about their invasion fleet. And everyone knows Venus has no spacebabes.
They live in bubble cities under the oceans of Europa.
The Archaeoraptor specimen was pretty easy to tell as a fake...there were all kinds of things that didn't match up. If they had tried to do the actual science, they would have found that it's left and right wings were part/counterpart of the same wing, that the tail was displaced, and that feathers abruptly stopped when you got to the piece of rock that the tail was on. There were plenty of warning signs and the people who were looking at it (a nonscientist and Phil Currie, who has a history of being easily duped) were just fools. Had they tried to publish it in a scientific journal, the peer reviewing process would have culled it out as bad science. That was National Geographic's fault for jumping the gun.
No, this one is pretty convincingly real, and I'd say that Nature is a much more scientific publication than National Geographic.
But don't take my word for it. Read the damned paper. Maybe that's a bit more convincing than a quick soundbyte on NYTimes or CNN. Just maybe.
My sources say it's name is officially Microraptor gui.
Do some research next time.
You need desperately to stop reading Feduccia and believing everything he says as undeniable truth. The guy does piss-poor paleontology (ask any paleontologist and they'll tell you the same thing). He doesn't even publish in peer-reviewed papers...he writes books which are NOT peer reviewed. As far as I'm concerned, HE'S the fraud.
But about the feathered dinosaurs. The whole "scales or connective tissue" argument is long-dead. That argument was used against Sinosauropteryx because the only feathers it had was a small amount of "dinofuzz." Dinofuzz has not been proven to be feathers, but it seems likely that it is indeed protofeathers. Since Sinosauropteryx, however, we've found MANY more feathered dinosaurs, many of which indeed have true feathers. Some of these have been found by paleontologists as opposed to villiagers and are therefore unaltered. Microscopic analysis of the feathers shows a LOT of detail in structures that we find in the feathers found in, say, Confucisornis and other birds found in the Liaoning beds.
The infamous Archaeoraptor debacle was NOT as big a problem as you would think. There were two seperate animals stuck together...a composite specimen made up of a bird and a Microraptor. The guy who found it AT A ROCK AND GEM SHOW(who was NOT, I repeat, NOT a paleontologist but rather a dinosaur fanatic who wanted his name on a paper) took it straight to National Geographic and had all sorts of stuff done with it LONG before the whole thing was even looked at in more detail. This was a result of bad science, not the convincing value of the composites/fakes coming out of China.
No offense or anything, but you, sir, are an ignorant fool. Most paleontologists are NOT trained primarily in geology. Many have specialized in comparative anatomy, developmental biology, and other areas that are more important to understanding the morphology of the animals they study. I've even met a few paleontologists who DO have a good background in aerodynamics or structural engineering so they can understand what the animals they're looking at could and could not do. Don't think all paleontologists are geologists who pick up fossils, name them, and make up unfounded stories as to the animal's behavior.
I'd say this makes more sense as an anti-aircraft tool. But that raises a question....we're not dealing with countries with particularly advanced air forces. If anything, development of such weapons would simply HURT us....Imagine how much harder it would be for our air force to destroy 3rd world militaries. And it's quite a strong terrorist tool, as you can just camp out near a commercial airstrip and point and click with a shoulder-mounted one of these.
Mod Parent +1 Insightful
Seriosuly, this guy has a point. What do you define as new? Is Card new? I mean, another book from the Ender series just hit the shelves a few months ago (Shadow Puppets). How about Sterling? Or Rucker? Or Stephenson? Or Gibson? Word on the street says that Gibson's got a book coming out in just a few scarce weeks called Pattern Recognition.
Or do you mean new as in the last ten years? Greg Egan's great. So's Charles Stross (off-topic: Charles Stross ALSO happens to be a Linux user...it's a wonder Slashdotters don't cling to him like they do to Neil Stephenson). Ian MacLeod's pretty good, too.
Fascinating. Simply fascinating.
I guess you've never read William Burroughs, Phil K. Dick, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Disch, etc.
REAL sci-fi is not campy adventure stuck in the future (or past or whatever). Real Sci-Fi is philosophy and/or satire masquerading as escapist fiction. It just happens to be set in the future, or an alternate universe, or something else that is not our own world.
Oh, and Aldous Huxley wrote Sci-Fi....that's what Brave New World is. So did Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, etc.
Your ignorance does not a dissertation make. Just because A World Out Of Time and Moon is a Harsh Mistress seem sexually or socially deviant (which you say as if such things are "bad") does not mean they necessarily are, nor does it men that thye don't have value. So Heinlein is a Libertarian. So was Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Alduous Huxley, and a good many more. If you think Heinlein is "head in the clouds" you must think Ayn Rand's philosophy that you should NEVER submit your own desires for the sake of others NO MATTER WHAT is completely and utterly off the wall.
No, most Sci-Fi is NOT appropriate for kids...plenty of it is simply too complex for kids to understand and a lot more is just too adult. However, to say that all sci-fi is trash because it condones behavior and ideas that YOU are to damned INTOLERANT to accept as OTHER PEOPLE'S CHOICES is ignorant in the least, and fascist when you get right down to it.
Sure. Robert Jordan's books are god to spend a lot of time reading. That is, if you don't mind the simple fact that the guy's a complete and total hack.
Call me easily hooked, but I'll bite.
ISRAEL HAS NO OIL. PERIOD. IN THE PAST, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL HAS ONLY LED TO OIL EMBARGOS BY OPEC AS A MAJORITY OF OPEC HATES ISRAEL.
The reason people like Bin Laden, the Saudis, etc hate Israel is because they can't accept that 1) Muslims are living in a nation in which Jews are the majority and make most of the governmental decisions and 2) DESPITE a lack of oil and other mineral resources, Israel is THE most technologically advanced, wealthy, and progressive nations in the Middle East (and among the most technologically advanced and wealthy in the world). And they've been under seige from all borders for 54 years.
It's funny. We're a science board and yet, we're still inundated with ignorance. How many biomedical, technological, physics, etc papers do you see coming out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, etc? Now how many do you see coming out of Israel? THAT'S why the US likes Israel.
I don't know a whole hell of a lot about Norwegian law, but in the US, wouldn't that be considered Double Jeopardy?
Flight feathers are something different.
The long, broad, and stiff feathers you see arising in deinonychosaurs and other maniraptors are NOT insulatory, at least, not insulatory as far as keeping the individual animal warm. However, we DO know that maniraptorans minded their nests, often sitting on the nest to keep the eggs warm (fossils of nesting oviraptorids from Mongolia and troodontids from Montana prove that for at least some species). With the manner that they seem to hold their arms in such a nesting position, protoflight feather would be covering the nest, lending to the insulation of the nest. Keep the eggs warmer, you have fewer young that die in the egg, and an evolutionary edge. From these elongated feathers, you may have some of the smaller dinosaurs start gliding and eventually end up with flight.
Another possibility is as display. We know a lot of maniraptors were at least marginally social and some were much more social (such as Deinonychus). The originally nonfunctional feathers could easily have served as courtship displays. Once again, what was originally NOT a flight mechanism then found use as a gliding and then flight mechanism when other structures formed.
A third possibility is that feathers acted to help small maniraptors to trap prey. Maniraptors probably relied on their arms and long fingers (and large claws) to catch prey items. Stiff quills might have added a maginally netlike structure that could have given that extra edge on competitors. Eventually, once again, this structure evolved for something else becomes useful for flight and further develops.
I'd actually be less surprised to learn that most maniraptorans are descendants of flying dinosaurs that lost their ability to fly. Too many structures that otherwise don't make sense. Reversed hallux. Certain structures of the feathers, overly-long arms, etc.
Also, don't mistake gliding for true powered flight. Gliding has evolved countless times (especially in vertebrates). True powered flight has not. Birds, pterosaurs, bats, and insects are the only organisms I can think of that have evolved true powered flight. Whether the flight mechanism has wavered between functional and nonfunctional (as it may have been in early flying dinosaurs/birds) is a totally different question than how many times it independantly arose.
Because he's a HACK. And an annoyingly successful one at that.
Timeline, Congo, Jurassic Park, Lost World, Sphere, Prey, Terminal Man, Andromeda Strain...they're all the same book with different characters and different technologies. Eaters of the Dead is different because it's just an adaptation of Beowulf. Airframe is a hack detective story; nothing unique.
If they try any of that crap, the MPAA will sue their extraterrestrial asses for copyright infringement before they can say "Take me to your leader." After 5 years of extensive lawsuits, do you really think they'll have the will to live, let alone run a massive full-scale invasion?
No, when a triploid (3n) organism produces 1n gametes, the offspring is simply 2n. When the triploid (3n) organism produced 2n gametes, the chromosomes from the diploid parent so you get 2(1n)+2n=4n. The chromosomes are, of course, not homologous, so really it's a 2n organism with n=(twice the normal haploid number) but because it has a diploid (2n) component of the chromosomes from each parent, it's considered tetraploid (4n)
There are more banana-cheetah similarities, I believe...
Cheetahs: yellow, have black spots, are experiencing problems due to low genetic diversity, don't have seeds
Bananas: yellow, may have black spots when very ripe, may experience problems due to low genetic diversity, don't have seeds
The real research question is not about sequencing the banana or the cheetah. I think we need to start researching whether cheetahs can be peeled and eaten for a tasty snack.
Yeah...here goes. The triploid gamete is 2n, being effectively diploid. The offspring is a hybrid, so the chromosomes don't entirely pair up, so the chromosomes from the 1n gamete duplicate themselves and pair up with their duplicates. It's really 2n, but because you have 4 sets of chromosomes, they still call it tetraploid.
A gene is either passed on or it is not. However, genes do not determine the entire final phenotype of the organism (there are environmental effects as well) and it is the PHENOTYPE that is acted on by natural selection, not the genes. Therefore, it is a population's morphospace that is the real unit of evolution rather than the species, individual, or gene. For the most part, that's just referred to as "species" even though species isn't truly accurate.
I've read The Selfish Gene and although I agree that Dawking's theory applies to some situations, he ignores the simple fact that genes are not the only things which determine morphology and behavior and that it is THAT which is acted on by natural selection.
Actually, it's more like this. Generally, the species is well evolved to its environment. Individuals in ALL extremes die regularly, so the only ones to survive and breed are those in the middle of the bell curve. This maintains that bell curve. However, a change in the environment suddenly occurs because we all know that the environment is not static. Suddenly, the individuals on one extreme are not dying out and the individuals on the other extreme are dying out much more. The morphospace that the species takes up then shifts until the individuals dying out on both extremes balance each other.
Also, remember that it's species, not individuals, that evolve. Individuals survive or don't survive. That is all.
Dingos can mate with dogs and produce fertile offspring. Dogs can mate with wolves and procuce fertile offspring. However, Dingos cannot mate with wolves and still produce fertile offspring.
In othe words, your definition is flawed because it assumes that species are static, whereas they REALLY are always in the process of splitting into multiple species. Plus, there's that time thing. A species not only has to be able to be classified solidly in today's environment, but it also needs to have a set classification that spans time so that we can deal with paleontological species as well. And since you can't mate two Tyrannosaurus skeletons and see if they produce viable offspring...well, I'm sure you get the point.
No, I am not. However, both are quite similar. They stem from the same things and are both very limited in quantity. Therefore for argument's sake, one can consider them equal, though they are not.
So you're blaming the people for whoever takes power over them. You're still caught in a contradiction, though not as obvious as the earlier one. If the people ruled by such a leader are unethical, then such severe laws are required to maintain a peaceful society. Therefore these severe laws are NOT unjust, regardless of how much you claim them to be.
You're stuck. The only way you can't contradict yourself is to agree that power and ethics are completely and entirely independent of each other.
You contradict not only history, but also yourself. You claim that the people in power are making unjust (and therefore unethical) laws, and yet you also claim that you can't have power unless you're ethical. That's an example of cognitive dissonance if I've ever seen one.
Power and wealth generally come to people who are either lucky or clever. Lucky people stumble across it...like the lottery or someone who inherits a fortune (or a political position in dynastic governments). They had no part in generating that wealth or power...it just came to them. These people often lose it quickly because with things in as sort supply as money or power, everyone's trying to chisel some away from you and unless you know how to hold onto it, you lose it all. Clever people use their knowledge of others to generate power/wealth. For instance, Bill Gates used his knowledge of the market to eliminate competition and further his product and company. This has resulted in him becoming very, very wealthy. Similarly, Hitler used his knowledge of the way most Germans felt about Jews, their losses in WWI, and the military power and attitudes of Europe to rise in power in Germany, then take over most of Europe. Both these people are/were VERY clever and VERY intelligent.
Now please, tell me how any of these people (the lucky person, Bill Gates, or Hitler) is somehow exceptionally ethical? All the lottery winner did was buy a ticket for $1...he might very well go home every night, drink a six-pack of beer, and beat his wife and kids before alling asleep on the couch. He might also be a really great person who volunteers all his free time to work in a soup kitchen. We don't know, and frankly, it has nothing to do with the outcome. Is Bill Gates ethical? Monopolizing the market, frivolous lawsuits, and massive buyouts doesn't seem ethical to me. How about Hitler? I don't think murdering 11 million innocent men, women, and children due to ethinicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or political beliefs is ethical in the least.
But you can't stereotype all people with wealth or power as being unethical, either. Plenty of people make their fortunes completely ethically or come to power with the pure intention of helping people or at least protecting them from the more malevolent forces in government.
So you only have to be ethical if you are powerful/wealthy? Ah...so if I'm poor, I can commit murder, rape, sell people into slavery, etc as long as I don't make a whole lot of money off of it? Thanks for clearing that up.
Ethics are ends, not means. You should be ethical simply for the sake of being ethical. Regardless of economic or political status.
Yes, I agree that the US government is too strict about plenty of things. However, getting authoritarian and totalitarian governments confused (or worse yet, assuming they are the same) is a mistake. The US, no matter how much you dislike their policy, is not Sudan or Saudi Arabia. We don't have legal state-sponsored slavery, we don't have state-sponsored gang-raping a woman as punishment for her brother's misdeeds, we don't have the death penalty for adultery, etc. While the US does indeed have plenty of flaws, I challenge you to find 5 states that lack similar legislation.
I'm not saying we should settle for American government. I'm saying that going off and saying that America is equivalent to Sudan is just plain ignorant and seems to follow this "might-makes-wrong" doctrine that is currently screwing over the world. Military, political, and economic power does not have anything to do with a nation's power. I'm sick of seeing constant criticism of the US (and Israel, and the UK, and a few other nations) becaue they aren't ashamed that they have a powerful military whereas ethical transgressions of poorer countries are excused or even supported (consider the Sudanese slave trade) because they're poor and weak. Last time I checked, power/wealth and ethics are entirely unrelated.
Oh, please. ANY government is authoritarian. If a government does not enforce laws, it becomes anarchistic and ceases to be a government. However, the US is NOT totalitarian like Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, Sudan, etc.
Laws mean authority, yes, but they don't equal totalitarianism. Making it illegal to murder someone in cold blood does not mean that tomorrow you're gonna wake up with barcodes tattooed to your forehead, a computer chip in your head monitoring your thoughts, and a name like Equality 7-2521.
Generally, you wouldn't have to MOVE 50 ships to take over a barely defended planet, unless you were using scouts armed with lasers or something. By the time my fleet was that big, I was moving around fleets of 10 Doom Stars packed with 70 Heavy Plasma Cannons each. Only the big enemy fleets actually got a taste of my REAL fleet, which was a pile of titans and doom stars with gauss cannons to kill shields, Ion Cannons and neutron beams to kill marines and to immobolize the ships, whatever the jump technology there was to let you go basically anywhere in the battle screen, and pods to increase my total marine capacity. The best thing about a fleet like that is that it just keeps on growing and growing and growing...