"it is just not acceptable to have someone who can believe in myths and nonsense in charge of science."
I didn't know anyone was "in charge of science"-
"If you have the predilection to believing absurdities, you are automatically disqualified from being a scientist."
Ah, I now see I was wrong, because it's obvious from this quote that you are in charge of science by dint of having the power to say who can and cannot be a scientist.
"religion (at least Christian theology) does have explanations for things like birth defects, but if I bring up the concept of original sin, that will be even harder for you to swallow at this point."
If birth defects are punishment for original sin (i.e. the fall of man), then why do so many other organisms also have them?
It got modded down because there are vast numbers of Slashdotters who are congenitally incapable of recognising any humour that isn't a minor on a known meme.
You saying this does not make it true, especially given the fact that Genesis has two distinct creation stories, one of which has the Earth already existing as a misty desert when God starts creating things in an entirely different order.
Lamaitre's theory was _actually_ inspired by new (at the time) astronomical data which indicated that all observed galaxies appeared to be moving away from one another. He wasn't the first to propose the idea that this could best be explained by assuming that they all started at a single point, but he was the first to formulate a falsifiable theory which explained the assumption in terms of Einstein's general relativity.
"Many great theories come from some notion that is built into a framework that produce testable hypotheses."
All _scientific_ theories must be falsifiable, not just the great ones.
"Just because it comes from a desire to explain the Universe with a moment of creation, that doesn't make it "Creationism disguised as science.""
My assertion was that some people said this when Lemaitre published his theory, not that it was a valid criticism.
"I've heard this before, but I don't see what other options we had."
We had the option of not prescribing antibiotics for colds, 'flu, and other ailments that they were useless at treating because "people expect to be given something when they visit the doctor"; we had the option of not using spectrum antibiotics when a specific one would have been more appropriate; we had the option of not injecting huge numbers of cattle with spectrum antibiotics for decades because it makes them grow more quickly; we had the option of ensuring that TB patients completed their treatment regimes; etc., etc., etc.
"There should have been no surprise that the critters eventually adapted."
Unfortunately, everyone in the medical profession seems to have been very surprised indeed by what happened, although evolutionary biologists of course were not.
"if we didn't use antibiotics we would have just let people die, which is no better than people dying in the case of resistant strains now"
It wasn't using antibiotics in life or death situations that led to most of our current problems, and even when they were combating diseases such as TB, ensuring that patients completed their treatment instead of stopping when they felt better would have prevented some of the resistant strains developing as quickly as they did.
"I highly doubt that being more stricter with antibiotic use would have significantly delayed adaptation"
It could have delayed things for decades by _significantly_ reducing the number of bacteria that were exposed to all antibiotics, and in the case of TB, ensuring that all the pathogenic bacteria in a patient's body were killed instead of stopping treatments at the point where the slightly more resistant ones were still alive.
Evolution is a numbers game where sustained culling of the general population reduces the competition for those that don't die, so you inevitably arrive at a point where every organism has traits that the ones who died lacked. Whether this happens slowly or quickly obviously depends on how frequently and completely you cull the general population.
"It was always just buying time until we could develop something else."
We'd have had a lot more time to develop something else if we hadn't spent over half a century acting as if antibiotics were the gift that keeps on giving. Science knew about natural selection, and it knew how quickly the process could work with organisms that produce a new generation every few minutes, so there is no excuse for having abused antibiotics the way we did, and in many cases, still do.
"If you're right that invasive bacteria will be able to outlast us in this war of attrition, then we're screwed anyways and always were screwed whether we used antibiotics or not."
The problem was not antibiotics in and of themselves, but massive abuse of them despite warnings by evolutionary biologists about the inevitable consequences of doing so.
"However, I doubt that's the case. I think the war will ebb and flow for the foreseeable future both with the adaptation of our immune system and our discoveries of different means of antibiotic action."
Different means of antibiotic action will inevitably be abused just like the others were until we end up with polyextremophile pathogens that thrive in any conditions we can throw at them that don't kill us first. They key to dealing with pathogens is therefore to either modify them, modify us, or both so that we can tolerate them instead of killing them, just as we tolerate an extremely wide range of micro-organisms that live on and in us, producing all sorts of waste products that may well have been lethal to the majority of our ancestors.
"Oh, and by the way, The Big Bang theory is based on Genesis and was formulated by a Priest as a way to give physics a "moment of creation" that was previously lacking in the steady-state notions of the Universe."
While Lamaitre was definitely a priest, he was also a physicist who built his ideas around hard data from astronomical observations (he worked closely with astronomers) and how they fitted in with Einstein's theory of general relativity. Claiming that he based it on Genesis is therefore a notable disservice to the memory of a brilliant scientist whose work was often discounted by others at the time because they accused him of peddling Creationism disguised as science.
Any more claims about things that organisms which have happily survived at least 3.5 billion years of drastic environmental changes in planetary conditions can't become resistant to that wouldn't result in the entire planet being rendered unsuitable for any form of life?
"wouldn't one expect that as these bacteria adapt immunity to current antibiotics that they'll open up a weakness to something else?"
No.
"I suppose it's _possible_ that they're evolving to be stronger in a general sense, but usually I think of evolution as becoming more fit for one's environment -- which usually makes one less fit for another environment."
It _sometimes_ results in organisms that are less fit for other environments, but the many, many cases of plants and animals that humans have deliberately or accidentally introduced into environments they didn't evolve in with disastrous results for native species demonstrates the fact that organisms which manage to survive high degrees of environmental stress can end up being better all round than ones which specifically evolved in a particular place.
" Engineering is all about tradeoffs -- whether via intelligent design (our designs) or evolution (natures "design")."
"We created a new environment for them by introducing antibiotics, which they've adapted to."
Antibiotics aren't a human invention, they're a human discovery of a natural defence mechanism whose origins predate multi-cellular life, so we weren't creating any sort of environment that bacteria haven't been successfully dealing with for hundreds of millions of years. The fact that bacteria weren't wiped out log ago by organisms which produce natural antibiotics should have been a pretty good indicator that they were capable of surviving attacks from these weapons in an unimaginably ancient war, so somebody should have realised that indiscriminately exposing vast numbers of them on a continuous basis over several decades wasn't a very bright thing to do.
"So we'll change the environment again."
Until we run out of environments that we can survive in but bacteria can't, which won't take long when we're dealing with organisms that can thrive in conditions which would be lethal to us, e.g. the thermophylic bacteria that live around deep sea volcanic vents, and happily grow in 114C water at pressures of 400 atmospheres where they metabolise hydrogen sulphide and metals.
"The organisms that survive this defense generally do it by preventing the host's cells from exposing them to the radicals, and not by having a resistance to the radicals themselves. (I'm not aware of any that withstand radicals, but I'm willing to be informed)."
Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand hydroxyl and superoxide radicals inside itself. These things can withstand extremely high doses of ionising radiation, UV light, hydrogen peroxide, and desiccation by freeze-drying:
" I'm learning how volatile a state the rest of the world is now"
The world's been volatile for the entire span of recorded history, and was in all likelihood volatile before then. The location of the "hotspots" varies over time, but there hasn't been a single day on which no wars are being fought anywhere on this planet at least since the invention of civilisation, and probably before the invention of civilisation.
"Things like the LHC excites me and gives me hope for the so-called 'better tomorrow', seeing these people fuck with it like this gives me no surprise, and that's why it hurts."
We could be living in a golden age where everyone on the planet had everything they could possibly need, and any act that didn't harm others was allowed, but there would still be groups of people who aren't satisfied with their lot in life, and show their frustration by attacking the property and / or lives of others, and a small but disruptive element made up of malicious fuckers that derive pleasure from depriving others of it.
A wise man once said that humanity is like a septic tank because although the biggest lumps of shit always float to the top, this doesn't mean what's underneath isn't also a load of shit.
Of course they do. And those customers are HP, Dell, and various other major OEMs who are telling them people don't want Vista, hence the fact that they're putting a sales team together instead one that could help _end-users_ solve some of the problems that have resulted in Vista ending up with such a dreadful reputation.
"If they are not providing tech support, where does the improved customer satisfaction come from?"
It comes from knowing that you only have to accept part of the blame for not listening to all those people who told you to only buy machines that come with a version of Vista which has fully manufacturer-supported XP "downgrade" rights.
"The problem is, pretty much every time something breaks, it can be categorized as either "accidental damage" or a "manufacturing defect", and so their warranty effectively covers *nothing*."
It does however give you the pleasure of knowing that by ending up paying more for something from a zero-service box shifter than the full-service ones charge, you have conclusively proved to the world that you aren't a stingy bastard who always goes for the cheapest option.
"even if if you drop it in the toilet, they'll give you a new (reconditioned) phone for the cost of the deductible, which is like $50. A very good deal for someone with a $300 or more cellphone"
Especially of you can avoid thinking about the possibility of being given a phone that was reconditioned because it was dropped down somebody else's toilet...
I already see lots of doctors. They live in the walls, and creep out to torment me with cold stethoscopes on sensitive places during the night, but they forget to take their white coats off, so I can still see them in the dark. Don't tell them that though, otherwise they'll take the white coats off before coming out of the walls, and that wouldn't be very nice at all.
I don't blame all the Jews, just the Hassidic ones who wear hats and big overcoats even in the summer. They could be hiding _anything_ inside that sort of clothing: ninja Chihuahuas that have been trained to sit on the seats of fat sysadmins and give them coronaries by biting and yapping when they try to sit down; small monkeys who sneak in and type swear words on keyboards; boxes full of suicide spiders that have been genetically engineered to crawl into computers and short out components; or even low calorie food stuffs that can nefariously substituted for the fatty, sugary items that IT people depend on to maintain their complexions and waistlines.
As St. Barry The Lambent said in his famous warning to the Parthians: "He who accepts a gift of ants from a man of Gaul shall have no comfort from any shoe, for the feet of the ant coveter are anathema in the eyes of The Lord".
"I remember there was quite an uproar about stability when NT4 came out with kernel-mode graphics drivers."
MS decided to do the same with NT as Windows-95 because, as we all know, W-95 was a rock solid piece of wonderware that proved kernel-mode drivers were a brilliant idea that should have conferred instant saint-hood on whoever came up with it.
OK, so there were a few unexplained crashes in W-95, sometimes even a few a day, hour, or minute, but it's now been proven that far from being caused by dodgy drivers running in kernel mode, they were actually the result of emotionally sensitive computers not getting enough of what scientists call "love vibes", a special heart-shaped wave that emanates from people who really, really adore their computers, and wouldn't think of shouting at them, let alone throwing them at the floor or through a window.
Dr. Adrian Stoat of the National Center For Spurious Claims is one of the notable scientists who confirm that Pentium-2 computers were especially vulnerable to Love Deficit Disorder (LDD):
"You'd be surprised how many Pentium-2 machines were brought to us for extensive courses of counselling that could easily end up costing their owners thousands of dollars. Yet despite this, some of them never recovered from the humiliation of being forced to display pornography for hours at a time, the stress of repeated verbal abuse, or living in constant fear of yet another savage beating with a copy of "The Road Ahead". Most of these machines have no future outside our special Caribbean Sanctuary For Sad Computers, where dedicated staff nurse them entirely at their owners' expense. Just think how much suffering and money could have been saved if only the people who bought these tragic systems had given them just a little love instead of erroneously assuming that Windows was to blame for every minor failure".
"As for the Nephalim though--what do they have to do with polytheism? As I understand it, the 'sons of God' were simply fallen angels with physical earthly bodies. "
As I said previously (but perhaps not clearly enough), the polytheistic reference is in the Hebrew term "Beni Elohim" for those that mated with human women. Elohim is the plural of Eloah, so Beni Elohim literally means Sons of The Gods, not Sons of God.
Elohim (and singular forms "El" and "Eloah") occur quite frequently in Genesis, so there's a considerable amount of debate among scholars about both their derivation and meaning when it's not obvious from context. I'm far from alone in thinking that they point quite strongly at the ancient Hebrews originally having the same polytheistic religion as the Canaanites, but I also realise that there are others with differing opinions, and that we'll probably never know for sure (unless of course we invent time travel).
I wasn't refuting the fact that religion can provide many people with a coping mechanism for a wide variety of things, but religion is a sub-set of superstition, and there are many superstitious beliefs about life after death that are anything but comforting (vampires, revenants, and restless spirits who are condemned to haunt some place or other for eternity are three well known Western examples, but there are many, many others from around the world).
"Wrong. There is such programming. There are many studies that prove that."
If this is the case, then please cite half a dozen from independent sources (i.e. scientists who aren't funded by racial or religious groups to cherry-pick data which supports their preconceptions while ignoring anything that doesn't).
"It is also highly logical - perhaps your logic is flawed."
Even the best logic will lead to the wrong conclusions if it is based on false axioms.
"The reason it is not very strong is that the ability for races to intermingle was highly limited by primitive transportation technologies in the past for the vast majority of our evolution."
Those "primitive transportation technologies" were good enough to let humans colonise Australia _at least_ 50,000 years ago, so this example of your mighty logic is definitely flawed.
"People all lived in villages and rarely left their home village, if ever"
Another fallacy which is easily refuted by the copious archaeological evidence which proves that trading links existed between peoples living in and around the Sahara and Asia between 4000 BCE and 6000 BCE (the Africans imported domestic animals from the Asians), and a variety of Syrian artefacts have been found in the Egyptian Badarian culture that have been dated to 5,000 BCE. By 3,000 BCE, there were regular maritime trade routes between Egypt and locations as far East as Afghanistan (a valuable source of Lapis Lazuli, which the Egyptians valued greatly), and by the 3rd. millenium BCE, they were regularly trading with India, Europe (the Minoan culture in particular, whose economy was almost entirely based on maritime trade). The Phoenicians (another African culture) were trading with people throughout the whole of the Mediterranean, and established regular routes that went as far north as Britain's Outer Hebrides which may well have been in place as long ago as 1500 BCE. The Tarim Mummies also indicate that there were trading links between Europe and China as long ago as 1500 BCE too.
"Before that they were even smaller groups of tribes"
Yes they were, but hunter-gatherer cultures are extremely mobile, hence the copious archaeological evidence for migrations over extremely long distances by such peoples when the need to do so arose.
"There was contact, hence why there is the instinct, but not a lot of contact, hence the small strength of the instinct."
You have yet to establish the existence of such an instinct. Saying it's there doesn't prove it's there, and the large number of pictorial and textual historic sources from the ancient world together with archaeological evidence indicate that far from being a primal instinct, racism is a fairly modern invention that people in the ancient world would have been extremely puzzled by.
"Your last paragraph contradicts itself, and also is incredibly wrong."
It is not and does not.
"The fact of interbreeding means nothing for race! Races are defined as being able to interbreed!"
Hence the fact that they are not, as you claimed in your prior post, distinct organisms, but as I said, regional variations in the same organism.
"Even for a species this is fuzzy"
It's more than fuzzy, because there isn't really a hard definition of "species" that fits all cases. This is known in biology as "the species problem".
"The polar bear and the grizzly bear are considered SEPARATE SPECIES, yet they still are able to interbreed, and fertile hybrids have been found in the wild (although incredibly rare)"
This is an excellent point, because many types of bears can and do interbreed, at least in captivity -- in fact, the only types that don't (with any other type of bear) are the giant panda and spectacled bear. Whether they produce living offspring, let alone fertile ones depends on how closely related they are: black / brown bear hybrids for example are usually born dead or die shortly after birth because their parents are chromosomally incompatible, whereas brown bear / polar bear hyb
"the fact that all races have this trait, as is demonstrated by countless studies"
Please cite these "countless studies".
"It is pretty logical when you think about it."
It's not in the least logical, because the tendency for humans to associate themselves with particular groups isn't just a racial thing, and is by no means restricted to sexual preferences. Here are a few examples of human groupings that have no relationship with race whatsoever:
1) Political, ideological, and regional groupings, which have (among other things) led to extremely bloody conflicts _within the same countries among people of the same racial groups_. The ancient Greek city states were constantly at war with each other; Celtic clans were constantly at war with each other; Mongol clans were constantly at war; England had it's Wars Of The Roses and English Civil War, both of which had members of the same race in the same country killing each other in large numbers; the Spanish civil war had members of the same families killing one another; etc., etc., etc.
2) Religious groupings, which often frown not only on marriage with members of other religions, and in some cases other sects within the same religion, but other types of social interactions as well. These can also cause extremely bloody conflicts and in some cases exterminations, e.g. The Crusades, Shia Muslims vs. Sunni Muslims, Protestants vs. Catholics, the Catholic extermination of the Cathars, and many, many others going back to remote antiquity.
3) Ethnic groupings within the same race, which can lead to bloody conflicts, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Modern examples are the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in RWanda, but history is filled with other examples.
4) Gangs, who have and still do kill members of other gangs that belong to the same "race".
5) Exclusive clubs and secret societies, who favour members above non-members in a variety of ways, and sometimes formulate sets of secret signals which allow them to identify said members (e.g. the Freemasons).
6) Supporters of sports teams, who use team colours, badges, and other paraphernalia to identify other supporters of both their own and rival teams. People in Europe and South America know how thin the line is between friendly rivalry and violent clashes that result in large-scale property damage, serious injury, and death.
I could go on and on listing examples of human groupings that have existed for thousands of years, have no relationship whatsoever with race, but nonetheless discriminate against members of different groups (outsiders) in ways that run the gamut from not being offered jobs and other business opportunities up to internment, "cleansing", and mass slaughter.
"Anything that has the desire for self preservation is on average going to have a higher probability of survival than something that lacks such a desire."
If this is the case, then I suggest you explain how 99.9999% of the Earth's biomass manages to consist of plants, bacteria, fungi, and small invertebrate animals that are far too simple to "desire" anything. If you want a real biological success story, then you need look no further than the bacteria who build stromatolites, because they were around 3.5 billion years ago, and are still here today despite their lack of anything remotely like your "desire for self preservation".
Slashdot Mirror
"it is just not acceptable to have someone who can believe in myths and nonsense in charge of science."
I didn't know anyone was "in charge of science"-
"If you have the predilection to believing absurdities, you are automatically disqualified from being a scientist."
Ah, I now see I was wrong, because it's obvious from this quote that you are in charge of science by dint of having the power to say who can and cannot be a scientist.
"show me a single atheist group that's even remotely aggressive"
I'll cite two: Soviet Russia and Mao's China.
"religion (at least Christian theology) does have explanations for things like birth defects, but if I bring up the concept of original sin, that will be even harder for you to swallow at this point."
If birth defects are punishment for original sin (i.e. the fall of man), then why do so many other organisms also have them?
In Soviet Russia, known meme is minor on you.
1. Minor on known meme.
2 ???
3. Profit!
In my day, we only had minors on unknown memes, and we thought we were luck.
All your known memes are belong to us.
It got modded down because there are vast numbers of Slashdotters who are congenitally incapable of recognising any humour that isn't a minor on a known meme.
"The Big Bang is clearly inspired by Genesis."
You saying this does not make it true, especially given the fact that Genesis has two distinct creation stories, one of which has the Earth already existing as a misty desert when God starts creating things in an entirely different order.
Lamaitre's theory was _actually_ inspired by new (at the time) astronomical data which indicated that all observed galaxies appeared to be moving away from one another. He wasn't the first to propose the idea that this could best be explained by assuming that they all started at a single point, but he was the first to formulate a falsifiable theory which explained the assumption in terms of Einstein's general relativity.
"Many great theories come from some notion that is built into a framework that produce testable hypotheses."
All _scientific_ theories must be falsifiable, not just the great ones.
"Just because it comes from a desire to explain the Universe with a moment of creation, that doesn't make it "Creationism disguised as science.""
My assertion was that some people said this when Lemaitre published his theory, not that it was a valid criticism.
"I've heard this before, but I don't see what other options we had."
We had the option of not prescribing antibiotics for colds, 'flu, and other ailments that they were useless at treating because "people expect to be given something when they visit the doctor"; we had the option of not using spectrum antibiotics when a specific one would have been more appropriate; we had the option of not injecting huge numbers of cattle with spectrum antibiotics for decades because it makes them grow more quickly; we had the option of ensuring that TB patients completed their treatment regimes; etc., etc., etc.
"There should have been no surprise that the critters eventually adapted."
Unfortunately, everyone in the medical profession seems to have been very surprised indeed by what happened, although evolutionary biologists of course were not.
"if we didn't use antibiotics we would have just let people die, which is no better than people dying in the case of resistant strains now"
It wasn't using antibiotics in life or death situations that led to most of our current problems, and even when they were combating diseases such as TB, ensuring that patients completed their treatment instead of stopping when they felt better would have prevented some of the resistant strains developing as quickly as they did.
"I highly doubt that being more stricter with antibiotic use would have significantly delayed adaptation"
It could have delayed things for decades by _significantly_ reducing the number of bacteria that were exposed to all antibiotics, and in the case of TB, ensuring that all the pathogenic bacteria in a patient's body were killed instead of stopping treatments at the point where the slightly more resistant ones were still alive.
Evolution is a numbers game where sustained culling of the general population reduces the competition for those that don't die, so you inevitably arrive at a point where every organism has traits that the ones who died lacked. Whether this happens slowly or quickly obviously depends on how frequently and completely you cull the general population.
"It was always just buying time until we could develop something else."
We'd have had a lot more time to develop something else if we hadn't spent over half a century acting as if antibiotics were the gift that keeps on giving. Science knew about natural selection, and it knew how quickly the process could work with organisms that produce a new generation every few minutes, so there is no excuse for having abused antibiotics the way we did, and in many cases, still do.
"If you're right that invasive bacteria will be able to outlast us in this war of attrition, then we're screwed anyways and always were screwed whether we used antibiotics or not."
The problem was not antibiotics in and of themselves, but massive abuse of them despite warnings by evolutionary biologists about the inevitable consequences of doing so.
"However, I doubt that's the case. I think the war will ebb and flow for the foreseeable future both with the adaptation of our immune system and our discoveries of different means of antibiotic action."
Different means of antibiotic action will inevitably be abused just like the others were until we end up with polyextremophile pathogens that thrive in any conditions we can throw at them that don't kill us first. They key to dealing with pathogens is therefore to either modify them, modify us, or both so that we can tolerate them instead of killing them, just as we tolerate an extremely wide range of micro-organisms that live on and in us, producing all sorts of waste products that may well have been lethal to the majority of our ancestors.
I'm extremely lazy too, but I always remember these because of the nickname microbiologists have given them: Conan The Bacterium.
"Oh, and by the way, The Big Bang theory is based on Genesis and was formulated by a Priest as a way to give physics a "moment of creation" that was previously lacking in the steady-state notions of the Universe."
While Lamaitre was definitely a priest, he was also a physicist who built his ideas around hard data from astronomical observations (he worked closely with astronomers) and how they fitted in with Einstein's theory of general relativity. Claiming that he based it on Genesis is therefore a notable disservice to the memory of a brilliant scientist whose work was often discounted by others at the time because they accused him of peddling Creationism disguised as science.
"no bacterium is resistant to chlorine, and we don't worry about it happening."
There are chlorine-resistant strains of Escherichia coli that can cause food poisoning in humans and some other animals:
"http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1058053"
Any more claims about things that organisms which have happily survived at least 3.5 billion years of drastic environmental changes in planetary conditions can't become resistant to that wouldn't result in the entire planet being rendered unsuitable for any form of life?
"wouldn't one expect that as these bacteria adapt immunity to current antibiotics that they'll open up a weakness to something else?"
No.
"I suppose it's _possible_ that they're evolving to be stronger in a general sense, but usually I think of evolution as becoming more fit for one's environment -- which usually makes one less fit for another environment."
It _sometimes_ results in organisms that are less fit for other environments, but the many, many cases of plants and animals that humans have deliberately or accidentally introduced into environments they didn't evolve in with disastrous results for native species demonstrates the fact that organisms which manage to survive high degrees of environmental stress can end up being better all round than ones which specifically evolved in a particular place.
" Engineering is all about tradeoffs -- whether via intelligent design (our designs) or evolution (natures "design")."
"We created a new environment for them by introducing antibiotics, which they've adapted to."
Antibiotics aren't a human invention, they're a human discovery of a natural defence mechanism whose origins predate multi-cellular life, so we weren't creating any sort of environment that bacteria haven't been successfully dealing with for hundreds of millions of years. The fact that bacteria weren't wiped out log ago by organisms which produce natural antibiotics should have been a pretty good indicator that they were capable of surviving attacks from these weapons in an unimaginably ancient war, so somebody should have realised that indiscriminately exposing vast numbers of them on a continuous basis over several decades wasn't a very bright thing to do.
"So we'll change the environment again."
Until we run out of environments that we can survive in but bacteria can't, which won't take long when we're dealing with organisms that can thrive in conditions which would be lethal to us, e.g. the thermophylic bacteria that live around deep sea volcanic vents, and happily grow in 114C water at pressures of 400 atmospheres where they metabolise hydrogen sulphide and metals.
"The organisms that survive this defense generally do it by preventing the host's cells from exposing them to the radicals, and not by having a resistance to the radicals themselves. (I'm not aware of any that withstand radicals, but I'm willing to be informed)."
Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand hydroxyl and superoxide radicals inside itself. These things can withstand extremely high doses of ionising radiation, UV light, hydrogen peroxide, and desiccation by freeze-drying:
http://medgadget.com/archives/2007/03/the_secrets_of.html
" I'm learning how volatile a state the rest of the world is now"
The world's been volatile for the entire span of recorded history, and was in all likelihood volatile before then. The location of the "hotspots" varies over time, but there hasn't been a single day on which no wars are being fought anywhere on this planet at least since the invention of civilisation, and probably before the invention of civilisation.
"Things like the LHC excites me and gives me hope for the so-called 'better tomorrow', seeing these people fuck with it like this gives me no surprise, and that's why it hurts."
We could be living in a golden age where everyone on the planet had everything they could possibly need, and any act that didn't harm others was allowed, but there would still be groups of people who aren't satisfied with their lot in life, and show their frustration by attacking the property and / or lives of others, and a small but disruptive element made up of malicious fuckers that derive pleasure from depriving others of it.
A wise man once said that humanity is like a septic tank because although the biggest lumps of shit always float to the top, this doesn't mean what's underneath isn't also a load of shit.
"MS continues to listen to customers"
Of course they do. And those customers are HP, Dell, and various other major OEMs who are telling them people don't want Vista, hence the fact that they're putting a sales team together instead one that could help _end-users_ solve some of the problems that have resulted in Vista ending up with such a dreadful reputation.
"If they are not providing tech support, where does the improved customer satisfaction come from?"
It comes from knowing that you only have to accept part of the blame for not listening to all those people who told you to only buy machines that come with a version of Vista which has fully manufacturer-supported XP "downgrade" rights.
"The problem is, pretty much every time something breaks, it can be categorized as either "accidental damage" or a "manufacturing defect", and so their warranty effectively covers *nothing*."
It does however give you the pleasure of knowing that by ending up paying more for something from a zero-service box shifter than the full-service ones charge, you have conclusively proved to the world that you aren't a stingy bastard who always goes for the cheapest option.
"even if if you drop it in the toilet, they'll give you a new (reconditioned) phone for the cost of the deductible, which is like $50. A very good deal for someone with a $300 or more cellphone"
Especially of you can avoid thinking about the possibility of being given a phone that was reconditioned because it was dropped down somebody else's toilet...
"see a doctor about that"
I already see lots of doctors. They live in the walls, and creep out to torment me with cold stethoscopes on sensitive places during the night, but they forget to take their white coats off, so I can still see them in the dark. Don't tell them that though, otherwise they'll take the white coats off before coming out of the walls, and that wouldn't be very nice at all.
"Humanity is really starting to disappoint me"
You must be quite young to not have realised how disappointing humanity is until now.
I don't blame all the Jews, just the Hassidic ones who wear hats and big overcoats even in the summer. They could be hiding _anything_ inside that sort of clothing: ninja Chihuahuas that have been trained to sit on the seats of fat sysadmins and give them coronaries by biting and yapping when they try to sit down; small monkeys who sneak in and type swear words on keyboards; boxes full of suicide spiders that have been genetically engineered to crawl into computers and short out components; or even low calorie food stuffs that can nefariously substituted for the fatty, sugary items that IT people depend on to maintain their complexions and waistlines.
As St. Barry The Lambent said in his famous warning to the Parthians: "He who accepts a gift of ants from a man of Gaul shall have no comfort from any shoe, for the feet of the ant coveter are anathema in the eyes of The Lord".
"I remember there was quite an uproar about stability when NT4 came out with kernel-mode graphics drivers."
MS decided to do the same with NT as Windows-95 because, as we all know, W-95 was a rock solid piece of wonderware that proved kernel-mode drivers were a brilliant idea that should have conferred instant saint-hood on whoever came up with it.
OK, so there were a few unexplained crashes in W-95, sometimes even a few a day, hour, or minute, but it's now been proven that far from being caused by dodgy drivers running in kernel mode, they were actually the result of emotionally sensitive computers not getting enough of what scientists call "love vibes", a special heart-shaped wave that emanates from people who really, really adore their computers, and wouldn't think of shouting at them, let alone throwing them at the floor or through a window.
Dr. Adrian Stoat of the National Center For Spurious Claims is one of the notable scientists who confirm that Pentium-2 computers were especially vulnerable to Love Deficit Disorder (LDD):
"You'd be surprised how many Pentium-2 machines were brought to us for extensive courses of counselling that could easily end up costing their owners thousands of dollars. Yet despite this, some of them never recovered from the humiliation of being forced to display pornography for hours at a time, the stress of repeated verbal abuse, or living in constant fear of yet another savage beating with a copy of "The Road Ahead". Most of these machines have no future outside our special Caribbean Sanctuary For Sad Computers, where dedicated staff nurse them entirely at their owners' expense. Just think how much suffering and money could have been saved if only the people who bought these tragic systems had given them just a little love instead of erroneously assuming that Windows was to blame for every minor failure".
"As for the Nephalim though--what do they have to do with polytheism? As I understand it, the 'sons of God' were simply fallen angels with physical earthly bodies. "
As I said previously (but perhaps not clearly enough), the polytheistic reference is in the Hebrew term "Beni Elohim" for those that mated with human women. Elohim is the plural of Eloah, so Beni Elohim literally means Sons of The Gods, not Sons of God.
Elohim (and singular forms "El" and "Eloah") occur quite frequently in Genesis, so there's a considerable amount of debate among scholars about both their derivation and meaning when it's not obvious from context. I'm far from alone in thinking that they point quite strongly at the ancient Hebrews originally having the same polytheistic religion as the Canaanites, but I also realise that there are others with differing opinions, and that we'll probably never know for sure (unless of course we invent time travel).
I wasn't refuting the fact that religion can provide many people with a coping mechanism for a wide variety of things, but religion is a sub-set of superstition, and there are many superstitious beliefs about life after death that are anything but comforting (vampires, revenants, and restless spirits who are condemned to haunt some place or other for eternity are three well known Western examples, but there are many, many others from around the world).
"Wrong. There is such programming. There are many studies that prove that."
If this is the case, then please cite half a dozen from independent sources (i.e. scientists who aren't funded by racial or religious groups to cherry-pick data which supports their preconceptions while ignoring anything that doesn't).
"It is also highly logical - perhaps your logic is flawed."
Even the best logic will lead to the wrong conclusions if it is based on false axioms.
"The reason it is not very strong is that the ability for races to intermingle was highly limited by primitive transportation technologies in the past for the vast majority of our evolution."
Those "primitive transportation technologies" were good enough to let humans colonise Australia _at least_ 50,000 years ago, so this example of your mighty logic is definitely flawed.
"People all lived in villages and rarely left their home village, if ever"
Another fallacy which is easily refuted by the copious archaeological evidence which proves that trading links existed between peoples living in and around the Sahara and Asia between 4000 BCE and 6000 BCE (the Africans imported domestic animals from the Asians), and a variety of Syrian artefacts have been found in the Egyptian Badarian culture that have been dated to 5,000 BCE. By 3,000 BCE, there were regular maritime trade routes between Egypt and locations as far East as Afghanistan (a valuable source of Lapis Lazuli, which the Egyptians valued greatly), and by the 3rd. millenium BCE, they were regularly trading with India, Europe (the Minoan culture in particular, whose economy was almost entirely based on maritime trade). The Phoenicians (another African culture) were trading with people throughout the whole of the Mediterranean, and established regular routes that went as far north as Britain's Outer Hebrides which may well have been in place as long ago as 1500 BCE. The Tarim Mummies also indicate that there were trading links between Europe and China as long ago as 1500 BCE too.
"Before that they were even smaller groups of tribes"
Yes they were, but hunter-gatherer cultures are extremely mobile, hence the copious archaeological evidence for migrations over extremely long distances by such peoples when the need to do so arose.
"There was contact, hence why there is the instinct, but not a lot of contact, hence the small strength of the instinct."
You have yet to establish the existence of such an instinct. Saying it's there doesn't prove it's there, and the large number of pictorial and textual historic sources from the ancient world together with archaeological evidence indicate that far from being a primal instinct, racism is a fairly modern invention that people in the ancient world would have been extremely puzzled by.
"Your last paragraph contradicts itself, and also is incredibly wrong."
It is not and does not.
"The fact of interbreeding means nothing for race! Races are defined as being able to interbreed!"
Hence the fact that they are not, as you claimed in your prior post, distinct organisms, but as I said, regional variations in the same organism.
"Even for a species this is fuzzy"
It's more than fuzzy, because there isn't really a hard definition of "species" that fits all cases. This is known in biology as "the species problem".
"The polar bear and the grizzly bear are considered SEPARATE SPECIES, yet they still are able to interbreed, and fertile hybrids have been found in the wild (although incredibly rare)"
This is an excellent point, because many types of bears can and do interbreed, at least in captivity -- in fact, the only types that don't (with any other type of bear) are the giant panda and spectacled bear. Whether they produce living offspring, let alone fertile ones depends on how closely related they are: black / brown bear hybrids for example are usually born dead or die shortly after birth because their parents are chromosomally incompatible, whereas brown bear / polar bear hyb
"the fact that all races have this trait, as is demonstrated by countless studies"
Please cite these "countless studies".
"It is pretty logical when you think about it."
It's not in the least logical, because the tendency for humans to associate themselves with particular groups isn't just a racial thing, and is by no means restricted to sexual preferences. Here are a few examples of human groupings that have no relationship with race whatsoever:
1) Political, ideological, and regional groupings, which have (among other things) led to extremely bloody conflicts _within the same countries among people of the same racial groups_. The ancient Greek city states were constantly at war with each other; Celtic clans were constantly at war with each other; Mongol clans were constantly at war; England had it's Wars Of The Roses and English Civil War, both of which had members of the same race in the same country killing each other in large numbers; the Spanish civil war had members of the same families killing one another; etc., etc., etc.
2) Religious groupings, which often frown not only on marriage with members of other religions, and in some cases other sects within the same religion, but other types of social interactions as well. These can also cause extremely bloody conflicts and in some cases exterminations, e.g. The Crusades, Shia Muslims vs. Sunni Muslims, Protestants vs. Catholics, the Catholic extermination of the Cathars, and many, many others going back to remote antiquity.
3) Ethnic groupings within the same race, which can lead to bloody conflicts, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Modern examples are the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in RWanda, but history is filled with other examples.
4) Gangs, who have and still do kill members of other gangs that belong to the same "race".
5) Exclusive clubs and secret societies, who favour members above non-members in a variety of ways, and sometimes formulate sets of secret signals which allow them to identify said members (e.g. the Freemasons).
6) Supporters of sports teams, who use team colours, badges, and other paraphernalia to identify other supporters of both their own and rival teams. People in Europe and South America know how thin the line is between friendly rivalry and violent clashes that result in large-scale property damage, serious injury, and death.
I could go on and on listing examples of human groupings that have existed for thousands of years, have no relationship whatsoever with race, but nonetheless discriminate against members of different groups (outsiders) in ways that run the gamut from not being offered jobs and other business opportunities up to internment, "cleansing", and mass slaughter.
"Anything that has the desire for self preservation is on average going to have a higher probability of survival than something that lacks such a desire."
If this is the case, then I suggest you explain how 99.9999% of the Earth's biomass manages to consist of plants, bacteria, fungi, and small invertebrate animals that are far too simple to "desire" anything. If you want a real biological success story, then you need look no further than the bacteria who build stromatolites, because they were around 3.5 billion years ago, and are still here today despite their lack of anything remotely like your "desire for self preservation".