It's hard to be sure since the original article is not a proper journal article, but if I understand it correctly, the pups were swapped between the mothers at birth. This clearly allows for considerable influence of the birth mother, even though it would not be as strong as it would be if she had raised the pups as well. Various nutritional and hormonal influences might be at work here - in fact this struck me as a major weakness in the study: they should have swapped the embryos at a very early stage in development, but that's less convenient. In any case I do not think it is necessary to posit either some kind of "psychic connection" or full-blown Lamarckianism.
And yes, I did read the article in question before I posted. And FWIW, my degree is in evolutionary biology. I know it's/., where flames are the order of the day, but I think your comments are uncalled-for.
Really, this is hardly a surprising result. There are many possible mechanisms that suggest themselves, operating either on the embryo or on the newborn - parents who are more intelligent are likely to be able to pass on more of what they've learned and/or provide a "richer" environment for their offspring, even if we're only talking about mice. The mammalian brain is remarkably plastic.
The real problem for the Lamarckian paradigm is that once you've optimized the environment, socialization, and gene expression for the animals in question, it's hard to propose a mechanism for making more radical changes through "acquired characteristics" - and in fact no such changes have been observed. This study does not change that fact.
The original article sounds to me to be altogether too credulous and sensationalistic.
I hate to break it to you, but I seem to recall that ol' Isaac had a lot to say about momentum as well. If it's going to come to believing your speculations as opposed to Newton and Einstein, well, you're going to lose every time, at least in my book.
The satellites were pretty much shredded into perhaps tens of thousands of little bits - and the bits and pieces are going to have a variety of orbits and velocities. I don't think I ever said that NONE of it could be deorbiting this quickly, just that it's very unlikely that very MUCH of it could be doing so, and that it requires a fair amount of debris to make a visible display. Moreover given that the pieces almost certainly don't all have exactly the same velocity, it's highly unlikely that very many of them would deorbit simultaneously.
There might well be some fragments heading "straight down" (as you put it) - but that would mean that other pieces would need to be kicked into a higher orbit in order to conserve momentum. Probably most of the debris cloud would remain at approximately the same altitude but in a somewhat different orbit. Most small orbital objects (on the order of a few grams or less) reentering the atmosphere just don't produce much of a display; you need more mass - a whole intact satellite, for example. I just don't see this as a likely outcome, certainly not that quickly.
Every single event is unique and unprecedented, by definition - but that's no reason to throw out basic principles like the conservation of momentum.
I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm attacking you - it's just that it's very unlikely that enough debris from those satellites could be de-orbiting that quickly and also sufficiently simultaneously that the event would actually be visible from the ground. The odd tiny chunk of metal, perhaps, but that would almost certainly not make a visible display. The expectation is that the vast bulk of the debris will not even intersect with the altitude of the much lower ISS orbit for decades if not centuries.
It's still high enough that it's unlikely that significant debris from the collision could de-orbit that quickly - which was the point. A few miscellaneous chunks of debris would not make a trail visible from the ground - you'd need a significant mass in a single chunk or at least in a cloud that all de-orbited together.
This is obviously true, but it usually takes a while for debris to de-orbit especially if it's not in very low orbit (where it will encounter more atmospheric drag). Offhand the only way I see for this to be likely to happen so quickly would be if the satellites had been moving in opposite directions (a head-on collision, in other words) - that ought to result in at least some debris having a markedly different orbital energy from that of either of the two satellites before the collision. But most satellites orbit in either an easterly direction (it takes less energy to launch them in that direction because you get an energy boost from the Earth's rotation) or in a polar orbit (which is useful because even though it requires more energy the satellite can pass over all of the Earth's surface) - so head-on collisions are relatively unlikely.
I'm not arguing that the IP address is useless information, or that the police shouldn't be able to use it for legitimate purposes; in fact it would probably be very easy to get a search warrant for this kind of situation. Clearly the IP address standing alone isn't very strong evidence of anything, but it's certainly a good place to start in tracking down the culprit in many criminal cases.
The question is not whether the police can and should be able to do reverse IP tracking, but whether the police can compel reverse tracking without a warrant, as well as whether a provider is or should be obligated to require such a warrant. The point is not so much to limit their ability, but rather to ensure that that power is not abused by forcing the request to be reviewed (if only in a cursory manner) by a third party.
The problem is that an IP address is NOT a unique identifier for an individual. In most cases, it's going to be a dynamically-allocated address that may map to many subscriber locations within your neighborhood or your city or even the entire country, depending on how your ISP allocates addresses. At any given moment in time, it will only map to one subscriber location, but the only one who has access to that information will be your ISP, possibly in conjunction with the telephone company if you're connected by modem.
But even apart from that, an IP address can be multiplexed between many individuals or even other locations once the traffic for it reaches the subscriber location.
So it's not like a phone number at all - there's not even approximately a one-to-one mapping between IP addresses and individuals, nor is the mapping that does exist stable over even fairly short spans of time.
I'm not sure whether I think that the police should have the authority to do a reverse IP lookup without a warrant (though from a civil liberties standpoint it does make me distinctly uneasy, since this is in no sense "public" information and has serious potential for abuse), but the analogy with the phone system is badly flawed.
And in what way is the electronic transaction processing any less secure than the piece of paper? It's pretty easy to generate the printed check if you have the appropriate numbers, and in either case by the time anyone notices something is amiss you can be long gone.
The problem isn't that the printed checks are any more secure, but rather that in both cases all of the necessary numbers are right there in plain sight and unencrypted.
Arrgh. Somehow Slashdot logged me out before I posted this, so it got put up under "Anonymous Coward" - but I did have a couple things to add to it.
3% of $500,000 is $15,000, not $150. $500k would pay for a lot of concrete though - a whole lot more than a few metric tons.:-) But the point is well taken - for large transactions that kind of processing charge can be prohibitive.
ACH/wire transfers can sometimes also be expensive to set up, though not nearly as much so as credit cards - perhaps $25 (unless you're a big company and able to negotiate a good deal with the bank), as opposed to checks which are nearly free; plus they have their own security issues (once again you need the bank routing code and the account number, which allows all sorts of mischief).
Business to Business (B2B) transactions are largely based on trust and ignorance: if you don't trust your client/customer, you don't do business with them, or you put them on some kind of "cash-only" basis, including for example things like certified checks (free at many banks if you have a commercial account, but a pain to deal with because of the extra processing); and ignorance because the general public "should" never know either the bank routing codes or bank account numbers for either company.
In the long run some kind of pseudo-encrypted or even certificate-based transaction scheme will probably become necessary if the fraudsters continue to become more sophisticated, but at the moment just about all of the methods for transferring money are vulnerable to relatively unsophisticated attacks.
Unfortunately much (most?) of the US public thinks that:
Everything that's "natural" is good. (Umm... what about ricin? Perfectly respectable "natural" product...)
Everything "nuclear" is bad. (The parent is potentially a good counterexample).
Everything "renewable" is good. (Using corn-based ethanol as a fuel source is a really bad idea... there are better sources that have less environmental and economic impact).
Etc. Unfortunately the state of science education in the US is in such a sorry state that too many people are unable to think rationally about many of the choices facing us - they'll pay more attention to what Oprah or Paris think about some scientific question than they would to the scientists and engineers who actually do know something about those choices.
For all those people, I've got a bridge for sale in Manhattan! Cheap!! Buy it now while you have the chance, because it'll sell fast!!!
:-(:-(:-( Our country is so screwed... hopefully some of the rest of the world can keep civilization going until the nitwits here die out...:-(:-(:-(
Cosmic radiation is probably the least of your worries. Unless you can shield yourself from nearly all of it (which is difficult at best), you can actually make your exposure worse because the cosmic radiation will interact with the material in the shielding to produce secondary radiation which can actually be worse than the cosmic radiation itself since it will interact more readily with matter (i.e., you).
But a lot of solar radiation is not nearly as energetic as cosmic radiation, and besides it would be very useful to have a protective heat sink so that your living quarters don't get too hot during the lunar "day" or too cold during the lunar "night."
Solar Energy on the moon is much better then on earth. 2 weeks of sunlight, no clouds.
... Followed by two weeks of cold and darkness. Better have some really good batteries, or a good transmission system to that moon base on the far side so that you can supply each other with energy when the sun goes down on your respective sides. At least on Earth you don't have to store the energy for so long, which does help somewhat.
The lunar poles aren't much better: You never do get a lot of light on a lot of surface area unless you build some very large hills or towers so that you always have a large surface area pointing at the sun, plus you only get two possible locations for your colony.
Still, probably not a bad tradeoff if you can solve the problems.
Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta (there are alpha releases available). The previous versions of Seamonkey (1.1.*) are based on Gecko 1.8. There are plans to get Seamonkey 2.0 into beta "Real Soon Now" but that probably won't be until Firefox 3.1 goes gold.
A bit of a shame since Seamonkey is the logical inheritor of the the old Netscape feature set and look-and-feel, but done right (and with far fewer bugs). It even has a WYSIWYG HTML editor that works much like the old Netscape editor, except that it very rarely (if ever) crashes - Unlike Netscape, in which it was always a gamble whether you'd be able to get anything done in the composer before Netscape crashed and you'd lose all your work.
Yeah, it's open to the criticism of being a prime example of the Swiss Army knife approach to software design - but in fact it does many of these things quite well, often better than specialized applications. For example, although there are a few other open source WYSIWYG HTML editors out there, virtually all of the others have died on the vine at this point.
I would submit that in the vast majority of cases, if a species couldn't survive a temperature change of a degree or so without any evolutionary changes required (and assuming that that was the only change to its habitat), that that species is probably too specialized to survive in the long run. That kind of temperature change is well within most natural year-on-year temperature variation, except in a few habitats like caverns and the deep ocean.
However that has little or nothing to do with the possible effects of a similar rise in global average temperature. As soon as you start talking about destabilizing glaciers and ice caps, changes in sea level, and changes in weather patterns and rain distribution, you're talking about far more than just the effect of a single degree rise in temperature in an isolated local environment.
It depends on the toxin or other insult, and what the genetic inventory of the species in question was. I agree that it seems doubtful that it's possible for most fish to evolve to survive in an anoxic environment, except possibly for a few species like the lungfish. Certainly also it wouldn't be likely to be a quick process. As for other toxins, there are species that can survive in extremely hostile environments - but for any specific species, the question would be whether some kind of immunity could readily be found within their genetic space; if not, then it's a moot point.
The problem with your examples of lead and alcohol is that in both cases their effects will be most severe well past the childbearing years - so selection on that basis would be a second-order effect based on reduced familial support. They may also not be loci that are readily accessible within our genetic space, or even completely nonexistent.
Evolution doesn't guarantee that a species will be able to solve any curve ball their environment throws at them, certainly not if the environment changes both drastically and quickly.
Question: if almost every niche environment is already filled with a specialized organism
What makes you think that? Just because you can't think of more niches, therefore they can't exist?
It's more of a question of what niches are most accessible (that is, within the genetic and geographic spaces of existing species) than it is of how many niches might exist or that might become occupied over time.
It's probably not particularly good form to follow up on one's own post, but I should mention that the issue of acidification is a specific subcategory of pollution: It is more difficult and expensive to reduce acid emissions than many other types of pollution; and it can spread hundreds or even thousands of miles from its source, which is more difficult for many other pollutants. It is certainly a concern for the acidification of various streams and lakes, where it can have very serious consequences for habitat; however it is, by and large, not a major contributor to cancers and many other human diseases.
19th and early 20th century cities were incredibly dirty by modern standards. For example I've heard of accounts from women who were nurses at the time, and they would have to change their "whites" several times a day because the air pollution was so bad that they would turn gray within a few hours (!).
We in the developed world have it much better than any of our ancestors, better than we even realize.
The industrial junk we've been pumping out can't be good; I don't think you'll find many people that are pro-pollution... The problem with your argument is studies show cancer has been decreasing for decades -- not just mortality, but also the diagnosis and development of. Considering detection has certainly improved and pollution has certainly NOT improved, it should be on the rise in a big way.
*ack* *choke*
You can't be serious - in virtually all Western countries, pollution has been greatly reduced in recent years (Nota Bene: Not eliminated, but certainly reduced). Look at practically any pictures of industrial America or Europe from the 19th or early 20th Century, or read some of the contemporary accounts from the time. Moreover, such things as tobacco use have also greatly declined in Western countries. It's hardly surprising that the incidence of cancer should have gone down in the West - which is what you're looking at when you look at the NCI statistics.
On the other hand, both pollution and cancer (and often even tobacco use) are on the rise in many "third-world" countries. Hardly a big surprise there either.
In addition, in many places in Western countries there is now actually MORE natural habitat than there was 100 years ago. In those days, marginal agriculture was practiced even in the developed world, taking up vast tracts of land which have since reverted to a more natural state. Just consider how the balance of population has shifted in that time: 100 years ago, most of our ancestors were farmers, or at least very closely tied to the support of farming; nowadays farmers have become a much smaller slice of the population. The development of megacities with endless suburbia might threaten that to some extent, but even the 'burbs are generally a more natural habitat than subsistence farms.
Again, this scenario is not being repeated in the third world: There, large tracts of land and natural habitat are being developed for subsistence farming.
If anything, in much of the developed world we should be seeing a resurgence of animals such as amphibians - but we're not; instead we're seeing precipitous declines. Given what we know about the situation, disease appears to be one of the most likely causes.
Let me try and put this in the way so a kindergarten kid could understand it.
The problem with the cake analogy is that it's really not a useful analogy at anything above the kindergarten level.
Like many such false analogies (economics comes to mind as another area where such things abound), it assumes that everything is a zero-sum game: The more I win, the more you lose. That's true in things like sports and games, but it's true in very little else. Sometimes we both win (perhaps by cooperating with each other to do things neither of us could do alone). Sometimes we both lose (perhaps by each of us making it impossible for the other to accomplish anything).
Since I would hope that most of us here are past the kindergarten level, perhaps it would be best to avoid such oversimplified attempts to "explain" things.
So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve.... _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
In general I think your post is quite good, but it sounds here as if you're making the (quite common) mistake of thinking that evolution is driven primarily by mutation rather than by recombination. Most species already have a very large supply of alleles whose recombination provides the fodder for natural selection to work upon; they don't need to wait for the rare favorable mutation event. Of course, the basic diversity provided by mutation is necessary to provide the library of alleles that can be recombined, and if a species is evolving very rapidly eventually you do run out of what can be done purely with recombination and need to wait for mutation to provide more of that diversity - but most species already have a very large amount of diversity in their gene pool.
In light of this, it's also not true that evolution always requires large amounts of time. In this case, 38 years is more than enough for species such as those we're talking about (which can produce several generations per year) to evolve new traits under appropriate selective pressure. There are plenty of examples in the literature, though if you insist on them becoming new species within that period then I suppose that's rarely enough time. But becoming a new species is hardly necessary in order for them to develop some resistance if that's a possible node within their gene space and if the initial assault didn't wipe them all out immediately.
In this case, there are multiple factors at work - both novel diseases (which were most likely spread inadvertently through human activity) and pollution (ditto) being two big ones. It's always harder to evolve a response to multiple simultaneous novel threats than to one single one, because you need to survive both threats in order to live long enough to make new little froggies.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked: [quote from SF Chronicle]
Sigh. It seems that there is some kind of requirement lately for news reporters (of whatever stripe) to be both innumerate and scientifically illiterate. And the worst of it is, too often they can't even seem to write grammatically correct sentences in their mother tongue. The barbarians are at the gates!
I suppose that this will likely get modded as flamebait, but it's intended as an honest assessment of the sorry state of our society. You can't trust anything you read in the "popular" press, of which the SF Chronicle is undoubtedly a member. Even SciAm is no longer a reliable publication. Even as science has become more advanced and complex, the knowledge of science by popular science writers has declined precipitously.
If you want the real scoop on any scientific story, your only reliable choice is to go to primary sources, but nowadays that's beyond the ability of most of the non-science-educated public.
Oh please. Except in arctic and alpine habitats, temperatures just haven't risen very much (yet) - certainly far less than normal yearly variation, not even to mention seasonal variation. At most, global warming could be having an effect in temperate and tropical areas by changing global rain distribution patterns and causing some areas to become drier and others wetter - but that would just mean that the amphibian populations would (in effect) move around, not be in a global decline.
There are plenty of other changes caused by human activity that would have a more direct effect on amphibian habitat - pollution and deliberate habitat destruction (draining the marshes to make more farmland, for example). Some of these might well weaken populations that could resist the fungus before so that they could no longer resist it.
My bet would be on the introduction of novel strains of the fungus to which many populations have not yet developed resistance. This is one of the classic scenarios of human intervention - the introduction (deliberate or not) of species into locations far removed from their original habitat.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to be sure since the original article is not a proper journal article, but if I understand it correctly, the pups were swapped between the mothers at birth. This clearly allows for considerable influence of the birth mother, even though it would not be as strong as it would be if she had raised the pups as well. Various nutritional and hormonal influences might be at work here - in fact this struck me as a major weakness in the study: they should have swapped the embryos at a very early stage in development, but that's less convenient. In any case I do not think it is necessary to posit either some kind of "psychic connection" or full-blown Lamarckianism.
And yes, I did read the article in question before I posted. And FWIW, my degree is in evolutionary biology. I know it's /., where flames are the order of the day, but I think your comments are uncalled-for.
Really, this is hardly a surprising result. There are many possible mechanisms that suggest themselves, operating either on the embryo or on the newborn - parents who are more intelligent are likely to be able to pass on more of what they've learned and/or provide a "richer" environment for their offspring, even if we're only talking about mice. The mammalian brain is remarkably plastic.
The real problem for the Lamarckian paradigm is that once you've optimized the environment, socialization, and gene expression for the animals in question, it's hard to propose a mechanism for making more radical changes through "acquired characteristics" - and in fact no such changes have been observed. This study does not change that fact.
The original article sounds to me to be altogether too credulous and sensationalistic.
Gravity is a foreign concept to some.
I hate to break it to you, but I seem to recall that ol' Isaac had a lot to say about momentum as well. If it's going to come to believing your speculations as opposed to Newton and Einstein, well, you're going to lose every time, at least in my book.
The satellites were pretty much shredded into perhaps tens of thousands of little bits - and the bits and pieces are going to have a variety of orbits and velocities. I don't think I ever said that NONE of it could be deorbiting this quickly, just that it's very unlikely that very MUCH of it could be doing so, and that it requires a fair amount of debris to make a visible display. Moreover given that the pieces almost certainly don't all have exactly the same velocity, it's highly unlikely that very many of them would deorbit simultaneously.
Gravity is only part of the story.
There might well be some fragments heading "straight down" (as you put it) - but that would mean that other pieces would need to be kicked into a higher orbit in order to conserve momentum. Probably most of the debris cloud would remain at approximately the same altitude but in a somewhat different orbit. Most small orbital objects (on the order of a few grams or less) reentering the atmosphere just don't produce much of a display; you need more mass - a whole intact satellite, for example. I just don't see this as a likely outcome, certainly not that quickly.
Every single event is unique and unprecedented, by definition - but that's no reason to throw out basic principles like the conservation of momentum.
I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm attacking you - it's just that it's very unlikely that enough debris from those satellites could be de-orbiting that quickly and also sufficiently simultaneously that the event would actually be visible from the ground. The odd tiny chunk of metal, perhaps, but that would almost certainly not make a visible display. The expectation is that the vast bulk of the debris will not even intersect with the altitude of the much lower ISS orbit for decades if not centuries.
It's still high enough that it's unlikely that significant debris from the collision could de-orbit that quickly - which was the point. A few miscellaneous chunks of debris would not make a trail visible from the ground - you'd need a significant mass in a single chunk or at least in a cloud that all de-orbited together.
This is obviously true, but it usually takes a while for debris to de-orbit especially if it's not in very low orbit (where it will encounter more atmospheric drag). Offhand the only way I see for this to be likely to happen so quickly would be if the satellites had been moving in opposite directions (a head-on collision, in other words) - that ought to result in at least some debris having a markedly different orbital energy from that of either of the two satellites before the collision. But most satellites orbit in either an easterly direction (it takes less energy to launch them in that direction because you get an energy boost from the Earth's rotation) or in a polar orbit (which is useful because even though it requires more energy the satellite can pass over all of the Earth's surface) - so head-on collisions are relatively unlikely.
That's far from the lowest LEO. The International Space Station (ISS) orbits at about 358km.
I'm not arguing that the IP address is useless information, or that the police shouldn't be able to use it for legitimate purposes; in fact it would probably be very easy to get a search warrant for this kind of situation. Clearly the IP address standing alone isn't very strong evidence of anything, but it's certainly a good place to start in tracking down the culprit in many criminal cases.
The question is not whether the police can and should be able to do reverse IP tracking, but whether the police can compel reverse tracking without a warrant, as well as whether a provider is or should be obligated to require such a warrant. The point is not so much to limit their ability, but rather to ensure that that power is not abused by forcing the request to be reviewed (if only in a cursory manner) by a third party.
The problem is that an IP address is NOT a unique identifier for an individual. In most cases, it's going to be a dynamically-allocated address that may map to many subscriber locations within your neighborhood or your city or even the entire country, depending on how your ISP allocates addresses. At any given moment in time, it will only map to one subscriber location, but the only one who has access to that information will be your ISP, possibly in conjunction with the telephone company if you're connected by modem.
But even apart from that, an IP address can be multiplexed between many individuals or even other locations once the traffic for it reaches the subscriber location.
So it's not like a phone number at all - there's not even approximately a one-to-one mapping between IP addresses and individuals, nor is the mapping that does exist stable over even fairly short spans of time.
I'm not sure whether I think that the police should have the authority to do a reverse IP lookup without a warrant (though from a civil liberties standpoint it does make me distinctly uneasy, since this is in no sense "public" information and has serious potential for abuse), but the analogy with the phone system is badly flawed.
And in what way is the electronic transaction processing any less secure than the piece of paper? It's pretty easy to generate the printed check if you have the appropriate numbers, and in either case by the time anyone notices something is amiss you can be long gone.
The problem isn't that the printed checks are any more secure, but rather that in both cases all of the necessary numbers are right there in plain sight and unencrypted.
Arrgh. Somehow Slashdot logged me out before I posted this, so it got put up under "Anonymous Coward" - but I did have a couple things to add to it.
3% of $500,000 is $15,000, not $150. $500k would pay for a lot of concrete though - a whole lot more than a few metric tons. :-) But the point is well taken - for large transactions that kind of processing charge can be prohibitive.
ACH/wire transfers can sometimes also be expensive to set up, though not nearly as much so as credit cards - perhaps $25 (unless you're a big company and able to negotiate a good deal with the bank), as opposed to checks which are nearly free; plus they have their own security issues (once again you need the bank routing code and the account number, which allows all sorts of mischief).
Business to Business (B2B) transactions are largely based on trust and ignorance: if you don't trust your client/customer, you don't do business with them, or you put them on some kind of "cash-only" basis, including for example things like certified checks (free at many banks if you have a commercial account, but a pain to deal with because of the extra processing); and ignorance because the general public "should" never know either the bank routing codes or bank account numbers for either company.
In the long run some kind of pseudo-encrypted or even certificate-based transaction scheme will probably become necessary if the fraudsters continue to become more sophisticated, but at the moment just about all of the methods for transferring money are vulnerable to relatively unsophisticated attacks.
Unfortunately much (most?) of the US public thinks that:
Everything that's "natural" is good. (Umm... what about ricin? Perfectly respectable "natural" product...)
Everything "nuclear" is bad. (The parent is potentially a good counterexample).
Everything "renewable" is good. (Using corn-based ethanol as a fuel source is a really bad idea ... there are better sources that have less environmental and economic impact).
Etc. Unfortunately the state of science education in the US is in such a sorry state that too many people are unable to think rationally about many of the choices facing us - they'll pay more attention to what Oprah or Paris think about some scientific question than they would to the scientists and engineers who actually do know something about those choices.
For all those people, I've got a bridge for sale in Manhattan! Cheap!! Buy it now while you have the chance, because it'll sell fast!!!
:-( :-( :-( Our country is so screwed... hopefully some of the rest of the world can keep civilization going until the nitwits here die out ... :-( :-( :-(
Cosmic radiation is probably the least of your worries. Unless you can shield yourself from nearly all of it (which is difficult at best), you can actually make your exposure worse because the cosmic radiation will interact with the material in the shielding to produce secondary radiation which can actually be worse than the cosmic radiation itself since it will interact more readily with matter (i.e., you).
But a lot of solar radiation is not nearly as energetic as cosmic radiation, and besides it would be very useful to have a protective heat sink so that your living quarters don't get too hot during the lunar "day" or too cold during the lunar "night."
Solar Energy on the moon is much better then on earth. 2 weeks of sunlight, no clouds.
... Followed by two weeks of cold and darkness. Better have some really good batteries, or a good transmission system to that moon base on the far side so that you can supply each other with energy when the sun goes down on your respective sides. At least on Earth you don't have to store the energy for so long, which does help somewhat.
The lunar poles aren't much better: You never do get a lot of light on a lot of surface area unless you build some very large hills or towers so that you always have a large surface area pointing at the sun, plus you only get two possible locations for your colony.
Still, probably not a bad tradeoff if you can solve the problems.
Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta (there are alpha releases available). The previous versions of Seamonkey (1.1.*) are based on Gecko 1.8. There are plans to get Seamonkey 2.0 into beta "Real Soon Now" but that probably won't be until Firefox 3.1 goes gold.
A bit of a shame since Seamonkey is the logical inheritor of the the old Netscape feature set and look-and-feel, but done right (and with far fewer bugs). It even has a WYSIWYG HTML editor that works much like the old Netscape editor, except that it very rarely (if ever) crashes - Unlike Netscape, in which it was always a gamble whether you'd be able to get anything done in the composer before Netscape crashed and you'd lose all your work.
Yeah, it's open to the criticism of being a prime example of the Swiss Army knife approach to software design - but in fact it does many of these things quite well, often better than specialized applications. For example, although there are a few other open source WYSIWYG HTML editors out there, virtually all of the others have died on the vine at this point.
I would submit that in the vast majority of cases, if a species couldn't survive a temperature change of a degree or so without any evolutionary changes required (and assuming that that was the only change to its habitat), that that species is probably too specialized to survive in the long run. That kind of temperature change is well within most natural year-on-year temperature variation, except in a few habitats like caverns and the deep ocean.
However that has little or nothing to do with the possible effects of a similar rise in global average temperature. As soon as you start talking about destabilizing glaciers and ice caps, changes in sea level, and changes in weather patterns and rain distribution, you're talking about far more than just the effect of a single degree rise in temperature in an isolated local environment.
It depends on the toxin or other insult, and what the genetic inventory of the species in question was. I agree that it seems doubtful that it's possible for most fish to evolve to survive in an anoxic environment, except possibly for a few species like the lungfish. Certainly also it wouldn't be likely to be a quick process. As for other toxins, there are species that can survive in extremely hostile environments - but for any specific species, the question would be whether some kind of immunity could readily be found within their genetic space; if not, then it's a moot point.
The problem with your examples of lead and alcohol is that in both cases their effects will be most severe well past the childbearing years - so selection on that basis would be a second-order effect based on reduced familial support. They may also not be loci that are readily accessible within our genetic space, or even completely nonexistent.
Evolution doesn't guarantee that a species will be able to solve any curve ball their environment throws at them, certainly not if the environment changes both drastically and quickly.
Question: if almost every niche environment is already filled with a specialized organism
What makes you think that? Just because you can't think of more niches, therefore they can't exist?
It's more of a question of what niches are most accessible (that is, within the genetic and geographic spaces of existing species) than it is of how many niches might exist or that might become occupied over time.
It's probably not particularly good form to follow up on one's own post, but I should mention that the issue of acidification is a specific subcategory of pollution: It is more difficult and expensive to reduce acid emissions than many other types of pollution; and it can spread hundreds or even thousands of miles from its source, which is more difficult for many other pollutants. It is certainly a concern for the acidification of various streams and lakes, where it can have very serious consequences for habitat; however it is, by and large, not a major contributor to cancers and many other human diseases.
19th and early 20th century cities were incredibly dirty by modern standards. For example I've heard of accounts from women who were nurses at the time, and they would have to change their "whites" several times a day because the air pollution was so bad that they would turn gray within a few hours (!).
We in the developed world have it much better than any of our ancestors, better than we even realize.
The industrial junk we've been pumping out can't be good; I don't think you'll find many people that are pro-pollution... The problem with your argument is studies show cancer has been decreasing for decades -- not just mortality, but also the diagnosis and development of. Considering detection has certainly improved and pollution has certainly NOT improved, it should be on the rise in a big way.
*ack* *choke*
You can't be serious - in virtually all Western countries, pollution has been greatly reduced in recent years (Nota Bene: Not eliminated, but certainly reduced). Look at practically any pictures of industrial America or Europe from the 19th or early 20th Century, or read some of the contemporary accounts from the time. Moreover, such things as tobacco use have also greatly declined in Western countries. It's hardly surprising that the incidence of cancer should have gone down in the West - which is what you're looking at when you look at the NCI statistics.
On the other hand, both pollution and cancer (and often even tobacco use) are on the rise in many "third-world" countries. Hardly a big surprise there either.
In addition, in many places in Western countries there is now actually MORE natural habitat than there was 100 years ago. In those days, marginal agriculture was practiced even in the developed world, taking up vast tracts of land which have since reverted to a more natural state. Just consider how the balance of population has shifted in that time: 100 years ago, most of our ancestors were farmers, or at least very closely tied to the support of farming; nowadays farmers have become a much smaller slice of the population. The development of megacities with endless suburbia might threaten that to some extent, but even the 'burbs are generally a more natural habitat than subsistence farms.
Again, this scenario is not being repeated in the third world: There, large tracts of land and natural habitat are being developed for subsistence farming.
If anything, in much of the developed world we should be seeing a resurgence of animals such as amphibians - but we're not; instead we're seeing precipitous declines. Given what we know about the situation, disease appears to be one of the most likely causes.
Let me try and put this in the way so a kindergarten kid could understand it.
The problem with the cake analogy is that it's really not a useful analogy at anything above the kindergarten level.
Like many such false analogies (economics comes to mind as another area where such things abound), it assumes that everything is a zero-sum game: The more I win, the more you lose. That's true in things like sports and games, but it's true in very little else. Sometimes we both win (perhaps by cooperating with each other to do things neither of us could do alone). Sometimes we both lose (perhaps by each of us making it impossible for the other to accomplish anything).
Since I would hope that most of us here are past the kindergarten level, perhaps it would be best to avoid such oversimplified attempts to "explain" things.
So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. ... _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
In general I think your post is quite good, but it sounds here as if you're making the (quite common) mistake of thinking that evolution is driven primarily by mutation rather than by recombination. Most species already have a very large supply of alleles whose recombination provides the fodder for natural selection to work upon; they don't need to wait for the rare favorable mutation event. Of course, the basic diversity provided by mutation is necessary to provide the library of alleles that can be recombined, and if a species is evolving very rapidly eventually you do run out of what can be done purely with recombination and need to wait for mutation to provide more of that diversity - but most species already have a very large amount of diversity in their gene pool.
In light of this, it's also not true that evolution always requires large amounts of time. In this case, 38 years is more than enough for species such as those we're talking about (which can produce several generations per year) to evolve new traits under appropriate selective pressure. There are plenty of examples in the literature, though if you insist on them becoming new species within that period then I suppose that's rarely enough time. But becoming a new species is hardly necessary in order for them to develop some resistance if that's a possible node within their gene space and if the initial assault didn't wipe them all out immediately.
In this case, there are multiple factors at work - both novel diseases (which were most likely spread inadvertently through human activity) and pollution (ditto) being two big ones. It's always harder to evolve a response to multiple simultaneous novel threats than to one single one, because you need to survive both threats in order to live long enough to make new little froggies.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked: [quote from SF Chronicle]
Sigh. It seems that there is some kind of requirement lately for news reporters (of whatever stripe) to be both innumerate and scientifically illiterate. And the worst of it is, too often they can't even seem to write grammatically correct sentences in their mother tongue. The barbarians are at the gates!
I suppose that this will likely get modded as flamebait, but it's intended as an honest assessment of the sorry state of our society. You can't trust anything you read in the "popular" press, of which the SF Chronicle is undoubtedly a member. Even SciAm is no longer a reliable publication. Even as science has become more advanced and complex, the knowledge of science by popular science writers has declined precipitously.
If you want the real scoop on any scientific story, your only reliable choice is to go to primary sources, but nowadays that's beyond the ability of most of the non-science-educated public.
Sigh, again.
before rising temperatures weakened them.
Oh please. Except in arctic and alpine habitats, temperatures just haven't risen very much (yet) - certainly far less than normal yearly variation, not even to mention seasonal variation. At most, global warming could be having an effect in temperate and tropical areas by changing global rain distribution patterns and causing some areas to become drier and others wetter - but that would just mean that the amphibian populations would (in effect) move around, not be in a global decline.
There are plenty of other changes caused by human activity that would have a more direct effect on amphibian habitat - pollution and deliberate habitat destruction (draining the marshes to make more farmland, for example). Some of these might well weaken populations that could resist the fungus before so that they could no longer resist it.
My bet would be on the introduction of novel strains of the fungus to which many populations have not yet developed resistance. This is one of the classic scenarios of human intervention - the introduction (deliberate or not) of species into locations far removed from their original habitat.