I agree. It has a lot of variation in letter shapes, which makes for easy readability compared to other sans-serif typefaces. And not surprisingly, considering that it was derived from comic book hand-lettering, it is more readable in caps that most typefaces. And it is one of the few typefaces that conveys an air of informality without looking cutesy. I personally prefer Apple's Chalkboard, which I find more attractive, but neither one is going to win awards for beauty.
I wouldn't want to read a paragraph of Comic Sans--but then I feel the same way about Helvetica, a font that manages to be simultaneously boring, unattractive, and slow to read. Indeed, if I had to choose between magically converting all text in Helvetica to Comic Sans, or the reverse, I would definitely choose the former.
Unless they were specifically excepted, a law against human-animal hybrids would probably also ban transgenic animals with human genes. These include:
Animals engineered to produce human proteins to be used as treatment for human disease.
Animals engineered to express human proteins as disease models for testing treatments of human disease, such as mice expressing genes associated with Alzheimer's Disease or Huntington's Disease
Animals engineered to express human proteins for basic research, to study the function of those proteins
An immediate consequence of such a law would probably be a lot of researchers in cutting-edge fields of biology leaving the state.
A 37% increase in the concentration of a trace gas is still a small increase. A 4-degree mean temperature increase, given historic temperature trends and the amount of energy involved, is a large increase.
Again, this is a scientifically illiterate comment. The earth receives an immense amount of energy from the sun. So it is obvious that even a small change in either the rate of energy influx or energy efflux could make a substantial difference in the equilibrium temperature.
Suggesting that a "trace" gas can have little effect is foolish and unscientific. What matters is what it does, not its absolute level. A "trace" level of cyanide will kill you. The fact that atmospheric levels of CO2 make a major contribution to the energy balance of the earth has been known since the 17th century. There is no meaningful scientific dispute about this.
a) quit your job to live in a clinic indefinitely with a poor quality of life, spending $100,000 on experimental treatments before it bursts in the hope of delaying the problem that will inevitably come anyway, or b) keep your job and save up money, wait until the appendix bursts, and spend $10,000 to have the operation to fix the problem, and get on with your life.
Except, of course, that sometimes when your appendix finally bursts, there's a pretty good chance that you'll get sick so fast that you can't make it to the doctor, and you die....
If a rise in CO2 follows temperature increase, then CO2 levels are an effect not a cause.
In the real world, many things manage to be both effects and causes. Most of us learn this basic fact about nature in childhood, from contemplation of the the famous riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Those who understand this riddle don't find anything particularly remarkable about the fact that CO2 can either lead or follow, depending upon circumstances--it is possible for an increase in CO2 to cause an increase in temperature, and it is also possible for an increase in temperature to cause an increase in CO2. In the former case, CO2 leads temperature; in the latter case it follows.
I'm a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion...The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: "small changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature".
Large by what standard? Projected increase in atmospheric CO2 are on the order of a couple of percent or so. Predictions of the temperature rise are on the order of 4 degrees Kelvin. On the absolute temperature scale, the only one that makes physical sense, that's an increase of maybe 1.5%. That doesn't seem so large compared to the 37% increase in CO2 since the 1700's. The projected increase in sea level is a few feet, also a small percentage of the total ocean depth.
Unfortunately, small percentage changes in the natural world can sometimes have dramatic effects on people. Hardly surprising. After all, if your body temperature rises by 5%, you are pretty sick.
And you say that you are a scientist? In some nonmathematical field, I presume?
Yes, opiates work extremely well for a cough, but you can't get them over the counter because they are drugs of abuse. It actually doesn't matter which one you take; they all work.
I had severe bronchitis with a horrible cough, and my doctor prescribed 20 mg codeine. So I went to the pharmacy, and they told me, "Sorry, we don't have this; all we have is 10 mg tablets."
I said, "That's fine, I'll take two," but they said, "No, we can only dispense what the prescription is written for, and we don't have it." Another pharmacy told me the same thing. By this time it was Friday night, the doctor's office was closed, and I was desperate for something to relieve my cough and let me sleep.
Fortunately, I remembered that I had some left over vicodin from an injury in my medicine cabinet. Worked like a charm.
Knee surgeries work, atheletes and the team owners have way too much money invested and knee injuries lead to knee surgeries often with remarkable success.
These are knee surgeries for acute injuries. TFA is talking about arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis.
Point: when the government "retires" beta blockers --- based on strong evidence that they're ineffective --- you can expect objections having to do with 'patient choice' and how the government is telling doctors what to do.
There is not "strong evidence that beta blockers are ineffective." The article refers only to the use of beta blockers for acute MI. There is strong evidence that beta blockers are effective in reducing the death rate post-MI, and also in patients with heart failure.
Yes, I am limited to thinking about individuals within a population. If there's a population, there are individual members. It's not a clump that has collective properties, it's a physically non-cohesive group of individual entities.
Nevertheless, they interact, by exchanging genetic material across generations, which influences the way that the population expands to occupy the space of possible genotypes, in a manner analogous to the way molecules of a gas expand to fill a volume. Limiting yourself to only thinking of individuals blinds you to a lot of important behavior, whether you are thinking about gasses or populations of organisms.
Also, I'm not sure if you are using "drift" to describe actual behavior or as an analogy to visualize the behavior, but I've been using "drift" and the word "tide" as a metaphor. I prefer "tide" because it more accurately describes flexible, often reversible genetic morphisms. It's not the physical movement like molecules in a gas, but the genetic change that is "drifting" or changing like the "tide".
Tide implies a directionality that is not present here. As I said, it is more like a gas occupying a volume. Except of course that the genotype "space" that a population occupies has a much higher dimensionality than 3-dimensional space, with every possible mutational change offering a degree of freedom.
No, I'm not going to let you get away with getting all fuzzy and covering up discrete events with "multiple generations". Genetic traits are discrete. You either have blue eyes, brown eyes, or red eyes. Setting aside subtle variations that are developmental or dietary, it's observed and verifiable that grandpa's blue eyes don't fade to green by the time grandson has a kid.
However, that kid may have eyes that do not exactly resemble any of his ancestors. "Green," "blue" or "brown" are either-or characteristics as you seem to imagine; they are phenotypic descriptions that do not reflect the diversity of effects at the genome level. So two people may have "blue" eyes for different reasons, and end up with a child whose eyes look different from either of them.
Okay maybe my response was inadequate, but I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you mean to assert that the product of a computer simulation is proof of something, you don't understand the concept of a model. The model doesn't prove anything, it simulates a behavior, a behavior which now needs to be verified through observation of the real thing.
Precisely. You offered a model in which evolution required some sort of "coordinated drift." I pointed out that computer simulations do not support your model.
Your conclusion is still entirely inductive and circular. You are talking about nominal behavioral preference which may be a product of a genetic trait (there's actually a genetic mutation among humans that creates a very repugnant odor), but which is not a trait that PHYSICALLY PREVENTS mating, or from which no offspring comes forth.
From the point of evolution, it does not matter whether individuals of two populations are less likely to breed because they do not like one another, are physically incapable of doing so, or simply are rarely in the same place at the same time. If the level of gene flow is too small to compensate for genetic drift, genetic incompatibilities will begin to accumulate, and fertility across groups will begin to decline. So it is a gradual, continuous process. For example, there are examples of populations distributed across wide areas in which individuals in each area can breed with their nearby neighbors, but not with more distant populations. If the linking populations die off, you then have two completely separate, non-interbreeding species.
Maybe you slipped it in accidentally when you mentioned members of the same species not "frequentin
What you are suggesting then is that a single individual (or pair for sexually reproducing species) is not a large enough sample because it is the diversity that brings about the genetic drift. Well, I guess you have to drift away from something, so for the sake of comparison you need the larger population.
No, you are still limited by thinking about individuals rather than populations. Genetic drift is not about drifting "away" from something; it is more like the way the molecules in a gas expand to fill a volume. You really have to think of it in terms of the collective behavior of populations of molecules or individuals.
But the behavior of a gas as the many molecules interact, is not parallel because genetic traits don't "Rub off" from one member to another.
They do, it just happens over multiple generations. The genetic process is known as recombination.
Computers are created by [mostly] intelligent entities, so claiming that an intelligence can solve the problem doesn't provide any support for the assumption of spontaneous speciation.
That's a cop-out. The "intelligence" in this case extends solely to copying the processes of natural selection that are observed in nature. Genetic algorithms solve problems that the programmer does not even know the solution to, and so obviously could not have programmed the solution into the algorithm. In particular, the programmer does not need to include the kind of "in concert genetic drift" that you believe to be necessary.
Says you. Seriously, the definition of a species is a group of organisms separate from others that they cannot breed. Can we agree that the definition of a species is that one of it's members cannot mate with a member of another species, not by "preference", but by physical incompatibility?
Certainly not. In many cases, different species can breed but do so only rarely because their mating behavior is not very compatible, or because they don't frequent the same territory, or because they have many incompatible genes so that fertility is low. So it really is a matter of degree, not a binary incompatibility as you prefer to imagine. Of course, as gene flow decreases between two populations, genetic incompatibility will gradually increase due to genetic drift, which reduces gene flow, etc., etc. And even within a species, you can find particular individuals who cannot successfully breed with one another. Once again, you confuse yourself by thinking of individuals, rather than a continuum of mating compatibility and fertility distributed across populations.
I don't have to convince myself there's no such thing as a curve. Curves only exist in theory. Magnify any curve and you'll eventually see dots.
Mathematical curves do not break up into dots at any magnification, they remain continuous and simply more closely approach straight lines. It sounds like your insistence on breaking things up into tiny pieces is also crippling your understanding of mathematics--fortunately, Newton and Leibnitz were able to deal with the concept of curves, rather than individual dots, and thus were able to develop the calculus. "Only in theory" is a meaningless qualification, since our entire understanding of the world around us is theory. It is theory, and theory alone that unifies isolated observations (the "facts") into such generalizations as objects, principles, and mechanisms.
I stand firm that if speciation cannot occur in one or two members of a population, it can't transpire on the whole, no matter how much time granted or how big the population gets, WITHOUT intervention. That is intelligent design.
No, it is an arbitrary assertion without any evidence or logical basis. Considering that the evidence that populations can have emergent properties that not evident in individual behavior is
No, you are mistaken in your distinction between populations and individuals. The base unit of a population IS an individual
This is mere sophistry. The base unit of a gas is a single molecule, but gasses have properties such as density, temperature, and pressure that individual molecules do not have. Similarly, populations of organisms have properties such as genetic diversity that individuals do not have. Natural selection is an emergent property of populations. It is dependent upon there being genetic diversity--a large degree of genetically heterogeneity among individuals, each of whom possesses a different set of mutations.
It may appear to be a group phenomena if you could somehow look at a vertical descent, but there's no horizontal expansion of the same genetic mutation simultaneously occurring in multiple members of the same population of a species
Nor is there any need for such a thing. Computerized genetic algorithms are quite successful in solving problems without any such mechanism.
Not only is this rare to have genetically identical multiples, but with the survival rate of aberrations being skewed low, it is extremely unlikely that you'd have a robust AND sexually incompatible (you use the word "preference" so I want to be clear that "compatibility" does not infer preference, but physical interoperability) pair AND they have to be sexually compatible with EACH OTHER.
I am using "preference" because separation of populations does not require complete incompatibility--it can occur by the gradual accumulation of variations that enhance within group mating preference relative to outgroup. In such a situation, genetic drift will eventually begin to impair outgroup reproductive success. There is no point at which there needs to be two individuals that are only compatible with each other, and completely incompatible with everybody else.
If you look at basic integral calculus, you'll see that what appears to be a curve (gradual) can only be solved by looking at the finite elements
But if you insist on looking only at tiny finite elements, you can easily convince yourself that there are no such things as curves--which seems to be pretty much the error you are making in thinking about speciation.
There are arguments for parapatric and allopatric speciation, but they are just smoke screens because separation of population is immaterial with spontaneous speciation which occurs sympatrically. Another way to look at it is even with a slow "drift", there still has to be measurable movement. Even within a million year time scale, you still have to have a single moment in time where there are members of a NEW species that can no longer mate with the original species.
So what? Remember, evolution happens within populations, not between individuals. Even within a species, there will be some individuals that cannot successfully breed with one another because of incompatible genetic variations. So if you have a large population in which some individuals preferentially mate with individuals who share some of their own genes, for reasons that may be either genetic or geographic, you can gradually develop a situation in which there is increasing genetic or behavioral incompatibility across groups. There does not have to be a single moment at which incompatibility becomes absolute. There are examples of different species that are potentially capable of mating to some extent, but are regarded as different species because productive cross-species mating is so rare in the wild that gene flow between the two populations is effectively negligible.
I've never understood why religious folk have such a hard time with evolution. I mean, can't they just say "okay, fine, evolution is the process, and God is the architect". Far as I can see, that kind of solves it.
That's pretty much the way a huge number of religiously inclined scientists, as well as most major Christian denominations think of it. But those people do not become Creationists.
Creationists are people of shaky faith who demand proof of the existence of God in nature. The problem that Creationists have with evolution is that while evolution could be God's method (and a brilliant method it would be), it does not require God.
Although this proposal, and the people behind it, are certifiable, the idea that a theory of evolution holds some special uncriticizable position because of the 'preponderance of evidence' is just as stifling to scientific progress as the dogmatic fervor with which academia held to Newton's theory of gravitation. A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory.
The notion that evolution somehow has a privileged position that makes it immune to testing and modification reflects a fairly profound ignorance of the subject. Indeed, the differences between modern evolutionary theory and Darwin's original idea are at least as great as the difference between Einsteinian physics and Newton's original formulation.
That's what is meant by macro evolution and it's the part that is not falsifiable. It is legitimate to point this little fact out to evolutionists but they will not listen to reason. Claiming that part of the fossil record shows a progression is not proof
Typical creationist, still trying to debate the science of the 19th century. It has been a long, long time since the fossil record was the primary evidence for evolution. Today, we have gene sequencing, so we can look directly at the DNA, and compare differences between species to those within species. And what do you know? they turn out to be the same kinds of small DNA sequence changes, translocations, and duplications, exactly as predicted by evolutionary biologists. The supposed "wall" between species that ID/Creationists imagined to distinguish "micro" from "macro" evolution turns out not to exist.
Also, the only popular game Apple/Mac can play is WoW. What about Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty?
There is quite a long shelf of games at the Apple store, and of course you can always install Windows under Bootcamp if you want to play a PC game that is not available in an OS X version. Nevertheless, I would not recommend a Mac to somebody who wants a PC primarily for gaming, as Apple does not make systems optimized specifically for that purpose.
I call this the Swiss Army Knife Fallacy. It's like thinking that screwdrivers, scissors, and toothpicks are all going to vanish because a swiss army knife can do all of those things.
Just as you might carry a swiss army knife in your pocket, smartphones are handy as a portable solution when you are out and about. But when I'm at home and I need to tighten a screw, I don't dig in my pocket for my swiss army knife; I reach into my toolbox and get a dedicated screwdriver that is designed to do just that one task as well as possible, instead of being adequate at multiple tasks.
When I'm using my entertainment center, I want a remote that is ideally adapted to that one task. I don't need it to browse the web, or answer the phone; I've got devices optimized for those particular uses ready to hand in my home. For example, touch screens are great for general purpose devices that have to serve many functions. But when I want to adjust the volume on my TV set, I want a device with fixed, physical buttons with distinctive shapes that I can feel in the dark.
I hate 2 button trackpads. Constantly twisting your wrist around to hit that second button with your thumb is a recipe for RSI. Even Apple's old scheme of a modifier key is better than that. But the new Apple method (one finger click for button 1; 2-finger click for button 2) is efficient and comfortable.
For me, the Magic Mouse is indeed magical. Within a day, it was like it was reading my mind. I didn't have to think about it. When I want a left click, I get a left click. When I want a right click, I get a right click.
Otherwise a good comment, but Apple hardware isn't even overpriced. Or rather, it may be slightly (but not very much) more expensive than a PC with similar specs
It varies. You probably could get a better deal on a PC with similar specs to a Mac Pro, but what is the comparable computer to a MacBook Pro? Obviously, you'd need one with a multi-touch glass trackpad built in...
But the software is a big part of the added value of a Mac. When I go back and forth between a Windows machine and a Mac, I am reminded of the difference between, sitting in a Honda automobile and a Mercedes. They both have pretty much the same controls, but when you sit in a Mercedes, you can tell that some designer sat there in that seat, and invested a great deal of time in thinking, "Now is this the right place for that knob, or would it be more convenient if it were a half-inch higher? And should the edges be smooth or knurled?" To some people, that isn't worth much. To others, it is worth a great deal.
Where's the outrage by end-users for not being able to load Linux as a replacement OS? Or the laughing commentary on the user who wants to load Windows on their Intel MAC?
People do this all the time, but they do this in addition to the Mac OS, not instead of it. After all, Apple's software is a big part of the added value of an Apple computer. The computers themselves are arguably a bit better designed than most, but if you really aren't interested in Apple's software at all, you probably can get a better deal with a generic PC.
The price differential exists precisely because the head of Microsoft doesn't understand what it is about Apple software that causes many people to consider an Apple computer to be worth a few hundred bucks more than a similar-spec Windows machine.
Here is my personal list of reasons against embryonic stem cell research:
And yet, none of them make sense
There are a great deal of people that consider this immoral. Personally, I agree with this perspective.
If we didn't do everything that somebody considered immoral, there wouldn't be much left. Some Muslims consider education of girls immoral. What makes your feelings more important than theirs?
Treatment may cause cancer?
So do many chemotherapeutic agents, yet we use them because the benefit outweighs the risk. For stem cells, the research is far too early to make any judgement about what the benefits/risk ratio of the mature technology will be. There are great potential benefits, and great potential risks. This is true of almost any medical technology at an early stage of development.
Adult stem cell treatments do exist and can be used without needing any moral discussions.
All stem cells are not the same. Only after more research will we know whether adult stem cells will be as valuable as embryonic.
Use cord-blood stem cells instead of embryonic. If this is just as effective, then this removes the moral discussion
If other kinds of stem cells turn out to be just as useful, then use of embryonic stem cells will disappear for economic reasons. No government regulation required. But only after more research on all forms of stem cells will we know if this is true. It is even possible that the study of embryonic stem cells will aid in developing methods of replacing them with other forms of stem cells.
I can see a middleman market arising to supply the correct/most effective/well tested embryonic stem cells. Middlemen cost money.
So do new drugs. Medical technologies are expensive to develop, and tend to be expensive when first introduced. But untreated illness can also be expensive.
Embryonic stem cells are in less supply than adult stem cells. This costs money.
So if adult stem cells are just as good, nobody will want embryonic. But that is not the case today.
Treatment requires anti-rejection drugs even if for a short time. This costs money.
Yes, and people who get organ transplants require anit-rejection drugs for an extended period of time. So what?
Taking notice of the moral issues, I see no sense in taking the more difficult (moral) and costly ($$$) course to achieve the same results.
So we should let people die and suffer unnecessarily because helping them costs $$? What a strong moral argument. Even if (as seems probable) non embryonic stem cells eventually replace embryonic, the study of embryonic stem cells will likely accelerate the development of effective treatment for diseases that cause immense suffering and death.
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I agree. It has a lot of variation in letter shapes, which makes for easy readability compared to other sans-serif typefaces. And not surprisingly, considering that it was derived from comic book hand-lettering, it is more readable in caps that most typefaces. And it is one of the few typefaces that conveys an air of informality without looking cutesy. I personally prefer Apple's Chalkboard, which I find more attractive, but neither one is going to win awards for beauty.
I wouldn't want to read a paragraph of Comic Sans--but then I feel the same way about Helvetica, a font that manages to be simultaneously boring, unattractive, and slow to read. Indeed, if I had to choose between magically converting all text in Helvetica to Comic Sans, or the reverse, I would definitely choose the former.
Unless they were specifically excepted, a law against human-animal hybrids would probably also ban transgenic animals with human genes. These include:
Animals engineered to produce human proteins to be used as treatment for human disease.
Animals engineered to express human proteins as disease models for testing treatments of human disease, such as mice expressing genes associated with Alzheimer's Disease or Huntington's Disease
Animals engineered to express human proteins for basic research, to study the function of those proteins
An immediate consequence of such a law would probably be a lot of researchers in cutting-edge fields of biology leaving the state.
Again, this is a scientifically illiterate comment. The earth receives an immense amount of energy from the sun. So it is obvious that even a small change in either the rate of energy influx or energy efflux could make a substantial difference in the equilibrium temperature.
Suggesting that a "trace" gas can have little effect is foolish and unscientific. What matters is what it does, not its absolute level. A "trace" level of cyanide will kill you. The fact that atmospheric levels of CO2 make a major contribution to the energy balance of the earth has been known since the 17th century. There is no meaningful scientific dispute about this.
Except, of course, that sometimes when your appendix finally bursts, there's a pretty good chance that you'll get sick so fast that you can't make it to the doctor, and you die....
In the real world, many things manage to be both effects and causes. Most of us learn this basic fact about nature in childhood, from contemplation of the the famous riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Those who understand this riddle don't find anything particularly remarkable about the fact that CO2 can either lead or follow, depending upon circumstances--it is possible for an increase in CO2 to cause an increase in temperature, and it is also possible for an increase in temperature to cause an increase in CO2. In the former case, CO2 leads temperature; in the latter case it follows.
Large by what standard? Projected increase in atmospheric CO2 are on the order of a couple of percent or so. Predictions of the temperature rise are on the order of 4 degrees Kelvin. On the absolute temperature scale, the only one that makes physical sense, that's an increase of maybe 1.5%. That doesn't seem so large compared to the 37% increase in CO2 since the 1700's. The projected increase in sea level is a few feet, also a small percentage of the total ocean depth.
Unfortunately, small percentage changes in the natural world can sometimes have dramatic effects on people. Hardly surprising. After all, if your body temperature rises by 5%, you are pretty sick.
And you say that you are a scientist? In some nonmathematical field, I presume?
Yes, opiates work extremely well for a cough, but you can't get them over the counter because they are drugs of abuse. It actually doesn't matter which one you take; they all work.
I had severe bronchitis with a horrible cough, and my doctor prescribed 20 mg codeine. So I went to the pharmacy, and they told me, "Sorry, we don't have this; all we have is 10 mg tablets."
I said, "That's fine, I'll take two," but they said, "No, we can only dispense what the prescription is written for, and we don't have it." Another pharmacy told me the same thing. By this time it was Friday night, the doctor's office was closed, and I was desperate for something to relieve my cough and let me sleep.
Fortunately, I remembered that I had some left over vicodin from an injury in my medicine cabinet. Worked like a charm.
These are knee surgeries for acute injuries. TFA is talking about arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis.
There is not "strong evidence that beta blockers are ineffective." The article refers only to the use of beta blockers for acute MI. There is strong evidence that beta blockers are effective in reducing the death rate post-MI, and also in patients with heart failure.
Nevertheless, they interact, by exchanging genetic material across generations, which influences the way that the population expands to occupy the space of possible genotypes, in a manner analogous to the way molecules of a gas expand to fill a volume. Limiting yourself to only thinking of individuals blinds you to a lot of important behavior, whether you are thinking about gasses or populations of organisms.
Tide implies a directionality that is not present here. As I said, it is more like a gas occupying a volume. Except of course that the genotype "space" that a population occupies has a much higher dimensionality than 3-dimensional space, with every possible mutational change offering a degree of freedom.
However, that kid may have eyes that do not exactly resemble any of his ancestors. "Green," "blue" or "brown" are either-or characteristics as you seem to imagine; they are phenotypic descriptions that do not reflect the diversity of effects at the genome level. So two people may have "blue" eyes for different reasons, and end up with a child whose eyes look different from either of them.
Precisely. You offered a model in which evolution required some sort of "coordinated drift." I pointed out that computer simulations do not support your model.
From the point of evolution, it does not matter whether individuals of two populations are less likely to breed because they do not like one another, are physically incapable of doing so, or simply are rarely in the same place at the same time. If the level of gene flow is too small to compensate for genetic drift, genetic incompatibilities will begin to accumulate, and fertility across groups will begin to decline. So it is a gradual, continuous process. For example, there are examples of populations distributed across wide areas in which individuals in each area can breed with their nearby neighbors, but not with more distant populations. If the linking populations die off, you then have two completely separate, non-interbreeding species.
No, you are still limited by thinking about individuals rather than populations. Genetic drift is not about drifting "away" from something; it is more like the way the molecules in a gas expand to fill a volume. You really have to think of it in terms of the collective behavior of populations of molecules or individuals.
They do, it just happens over multiple generations. The genetic process is known as recombination.
That's a cop-out. The "intelligence" in this case extends solely to copying the processes of natural selection that are observed in nature. Genetic algorithms solve problems that the programmer does not even know the solution to, and so obviously could not have programmed the solution into the algorithm. In particular, the programmer does not need to include the kind of "in concert genetic drift" that you believe to be necessary.
Certainly not. In many cases, different species can breed but do so only rarely because their mating behavior is not very compatible, or because they don't frequent the same territory, or because they have many incompatible genes so that fertility is low. So it really is a matter of degree, not a binary incompatibility as you prefer to imagine. Of course, as gene flow decreases between two populations, genetic incompatibility will gradually increase due to genetic drift, which reduces gene flow, etc., etc. And even within a species, you can find particular individuals who cannot successfully breed with one another. Once again, you confuse yourself by thinking of individuals, rather than a continuum of mating compatibility and fertility distributed across populations.
Mathematical curves do not break up into dots at any magnification, they remain continuous and simply more closely approach straight lines. It sounds like your insistence on breaking things up into tiny pieces is also crippling your understanding of mathematics--fortunately, Newton and Leibnitz were able to deal with the concept of curves, rather than individual dots, and thus were able to develop the calculus. "Only in theory" is a meaningless qualification, since our entire understanding of the world around us is theory. It is theory, and theory alone that unifies isolated observations (the "facts") into such generalizations as objects, principles, and mechanisms.
No, it is an arbitrary assertion without any evidence or logical basis. Considering that the evidence that populations can have emergent properties that not evident in individual behavior is
This is mere sophistry. The base unit of a gas is a single molecule, but gasses have properties such as density, temperature, and pressure that individual molecules do not have. Similarly, populations of organisms have properties such as genetic diversity that individuals do not have. Natural selection is an emergent property of populations. It is dependent upon there being genetic diversity--a large degree of genetically heterogeneity among individuals, each of whom possesses a different set of mutations.
Nor is there any need for such a thing. Computerized genetic algorithms are quite successful in solving problems without any such mechanism.
I am using "preference" because separation of populations does not require complete incompatibility--it can occur by the gradual accumulation of variations that enhance within group mating preference relative to outgroup. In such a situation, genetic drift will eventually begin to impair outgroup reproductive success. There is no point at which there needs to be two individuals that are only compatible with each other, and completely incompatible with everybody else.
But if you insist on looking only at tiny finite elements, you can easily convince yourself that there are no such things as curves--which seems to be pretty much the error you are making in thinking about speciation.
So what? Remember, evolution happens within populations, not between individuals. Even within a species, there will be some individuals that cannot successfully breed with one another because of incompatible genetic variations. So if you have a large population in which some individuals preferentially mate with individuals who share some of their own genes, for reasons that may be either genetic or geographic, you can gradually develop a situation in which there is increasing genetic or behavioral incompatibility across groups. There does not have to be a single moment at which incompatibility becomes absolute. There are examples of different species that are potentially capable of mating to some extent, but are regarded as different species because productive cross-species mating is so rare in the wild that gene flow between the two populations is effectively negligible.
That's pretty much the way a huge number of religiously inclined scientists, as well as most major Christian denominations think of it. But those people do not become Creationists.
Creationists are people of shaky faith who demand proof of the existence of God in nature. The problem that Creationists have with evolution is that while evolution could be God's method (and a brilliant method it would be), it does not require God.
The notion that evolution somehow has a privileged position that makes it immune to testing and modification reflects a fairly profound ignorance of the subject. Indeed, the differences between modern evolutionary theory and Darwin's original idea are at least as great as the difference between Einsteinian physics and Newton's original formulation.
Typical creationist, still trying to debate the science of the 19th century. It has been a long, long time since the fossil record was the primary evidence for evolution. Today, we have gene sequencing, so we can look directly at the DNA, and compare differences between species to those within species. And what do you know? they turn out to be the same kinds of small DNA sequence changes, translocations, and duplications, exactly as predicted by evolutionary biologists. The supposed "wall" between species that ID/Creationists imagined to distinguish "micro" from "macro" evolution turns out not to exist.
The only facts are the observations. All generalizations, interpretations and explanations are theory.
iPhoto, Dashboard, Mail, Expose, iCal, iDVD, Garageband, iMovie, iWeb, TimeMachine, BootCamp
And of course...OS X
There is quite a long shelf of games at the Apple store, and of course you can always install Windows under Bootcamp if you want to play a PC game that is not available in an OS X version. Nevertheless, I would not recommend a Mac to somebody who wants a PC primarily for gaming, as Apple does not make systems optimized specifically for that purpose.
I call this the Swiss Army Knife Fallacy. It's like thinking that screwdrivers, scissors, and toothpicks are all going to vanish because a swiss army knife can do all of those things.
Just as you might carry a swiss army knife in your pocket, smartphones are handy as a portable solution when you are out and about. But when I'm at home and I need to tighten a screw, I don't dig in my pocket for my swiss army knife; I reach into my toolbox and get a dedicated screwdriver that is designed to do just that one task as well as possible, instead of being adequate at multiple tasks.
When I'm using my entertainment center, I want a remote that is ideally adapted to that one task. I don't need it to browse the web, or answer the phone; I've got devices optimized for those particular uses ready to hand in my home. For example, touch screens are great for general purpose devices that have to serve many functions. But when I want to adjust the volume on my TV set, I want a device with fixed, physical buttons with distinctive shapes that I can feel in the dark.
I hate 2 button trackpads. Constantly twisting your wrist around to hit that second button with your thumb is a recipe for RSI. Even Apple's old scheme of a modifier key is better than that. But the new Apple method (one finger click for button 1; 2-finger click for button 2) is efficient and comfortable.
For me, the Magic Mouse is indeed magical. Within a day, it was like it was reading my mind. I didn't have to think about it. When I want a left click, I get a left click. When I want a right click, I get a right click.
It varies. You probably could get a better deal on a PC with similar specs to a Mac Pro, but what is the comparable computer to a MacBook Pro? Obviously, you'd need one with a multi-touch glass trackpad built in...
But the software is a big part of the added value of a Mac. When I go back and forth between a Windows machine and a Mac, I am reminded of the difference between, sitting in a Honda automobile and a Mercedes. They both have pretty much the same controls, but when you sit in a Mercedes, you can tell that some designer sat there in that seat, and invested a great deal of time in thinking, "Now is this the right place for that knob, or would it be more convenient if it were a half-inch higher? And should the edges be smooth or knurled?" To some people, that isn't worth much. To others, it is worth a great deal.
People do this all the time, but they do this in addition to the Mac OS, not instead of it. After all, Apple's software is a big part of the added value of an Apple computer. The computers themselves are arguably a bit better designed than most, but if you really aren't interested in Apple's software at all, you probably can get a better deal with a generic PC.
The price differential exists precisely because the head of Microsoft doesn't understand what it is about Apple software that causes many people to consider an Apple computer to be worth a few hundred bucks more than a similar-spec Windows machine.
And yet, none of them make sense
If we didn't do everything that somebody considered immoral, there wouldn't be much left. Some Muslims consider education of girls immoral. What makes your feelings more important than theirs?
So do many chemotherapeutic agents, yet we use them because the benefit outweighs the risk. For stem cells, the research is far too early to make any judgement about what the benefits/risk ratio of the mature technology will be. There are great potential benefits, and great potential risks. This is true of almost any medical technology at an early stage of development.
All stem cells are not the same. Only after more research will we know whether adult stem cells will be as valuable as embryonic.
If other kinds of stem cells turn out to be just as useful, then use of embryonic stem cells will disappear for economic reasons. No government regulation required. But only after more research on all forms of stem cells will we know if this is true. It is even possible that the study of embryonic stem cells will aid in developing methods of replacing them with other forms of stem cells.
So do new drugs. Medical technologies are expensive to develop, and tend to be expensive when first introduced. But untreated illness can also be expensive.
So if adult stem cells are just as good, nobody will want embryonic. But that is not the case today.
Yes, and people who get organ transplants require anit-rejection drugs for an extended period of time. So what?
So we should let people die and suffer unnecessarily because helping them costs $$? What a strong moral argument. Even if (as seems probable) non embryonic stem cells eventually replace embryonic, the study of embryonic stem cells will likely accelerate the development of effective treatment for diseases that cause immense suffering and death.