StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Your version comes a bit closer to implying causality. "A has a lot to do with B" is a causal statement: A might not be causing B, but there's causation in there somewhere. Welf's version doesn't say there's causation involved at all. Also, Welf's version uses a different version of B, ca...

Well, that's the nice thing about how simple the ANOVA is. It doesn't try to pin a causation down, it just says that population-weighted centroid latitude has a lot to do with whether people think religion is important. No. It just says that population-weighted centroid latitude has a statistical r...

So before we say climate accounts for much of the variance, we need to figure out a way to see whether there are any confounding variables we need to strip out of the variance. Well, that's the nice thing about how simple the ANOVA is. It doesn't try to pin a causation down, it just says that popul...

Okay. Take this with a grain of salt, but I felt a strange need to go and look at the data myself. I'm using the data here, from wikipedia , and combining that with the latitude data from here, since I figure the centroid is probably more accurate than the average latitude and I ran an ANOVA using S...

So ships from one nation are ignoring another nation's conservation, licencing and quota systems and just doing whatever the fuck they want? None of this is surprising at all. Fisheries is one gigantic global clusterfuck dedicated to the complete decimation of ecosystems and mass extinctions in the...

Well, it actually does make sense if you look it from the right angle. Libya just finished fighting a war, so that embassy's security should have been cut less (or increased, even) according to the Republicans. Nevermind that there are so many dangerous embassies around the world that cutting that m...

EF, think: a population is divided into two equal-sized groups, and one has a disadvantage that is very important to society overall. If that group makes up half of all people, doesn't it make sense to have a small ministry responsible for looking into where the disadvantage comes from, and how to ...

Mars was too small. It had a smaller magnetic field which meant more of it's air could be blown away by solar winds. It just wasn't massive enough to hang on to enough air for advanced life to form. The "not massive enough" part is the important factor with respect to retaining an atmosph...

Indeed, Memnon. I wasn't trying to say "Oxytocin doesn't do 1 thing, it does 2," but more "narrowing down a chemical in the brain to any small set of activities is almost always destined to fail miserably." Most neurotransmitters and neurochemicals operate on multiple levels and...

This isn't even casually true on a biochemical level. Oxytocin does not just produce warm fuzzy intimate feelings. Studies suggest that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. Which means oxytocin partially expla...

Coffee has a pH of around 5, which is very mild.

Okay, sure, those are actually interesting theories to contemplate. Of course, do note that they all rely on a subtle redefining of the word "universe" for the sake of convenience; the word technically refers to all that exists, which means that the "multiverse" speculated in bo...

(assuming the universes are of equal complexity). That's the thing though. Must we assume the universes are of equal complexity? If there wasn't a universe, there wouldn't be an "us" to look at the universe and wonder why it's there. For us to wonder "why is the universe there" ...

I never even said that it hasn't evolved far enough in the human direction, just not far enough! But what about dolphins, which may have comparable-ish powers of language? That isn't really in the human direction, after all. And yet you're using human traits as your basis of language skills. Consid...

I really don't see how the anthropic principle is a great answer to why there's something rather than nothing. Clearly there is something, but what caused there to be something in the first place? If so, is there a why and a how? I guess you could say that it's always been there, but that seems unsa...

Sure it is, if you're just measuring the single variable of language skills. But language by definition is not a single variable. It is a complex interaction of biomechanics, sound processing, memory, and other higher cognitive functions. Using it as a linear variable to judge relative evolutionary...

D.Turtle wrote:

But donating for selfish reasons is not good either.

Disagreed. It is less good, but still good.

Can someone articulate for me why being perfectly altruistic is a good thing? Pretty sure Aristotle would say that's an excess of virtue, and the negative effects for the person are obvious.

A chimp brain hasn't evolved that far. Please don't put evolution on a linear scale, that's not how it works. You and I are the result of nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary success. So is a cockroach. Sure it is, if you're just measuring the single variable of language skills. Seems pretty reas...

You know philosophers do ask why there's something rather than nothing, right? It's not just physicists. Heck, humans have been doing it since time immemorial -- in a little thing some people like to call religion. Does this guy have to trot out every single major philosopher since Aristotle or some...

I disagree with this because I think it's fine for Monsanto to receive grants for basic research -- but if they do receive them for product development beyond the initial discovery process, that seems wrong to me. Provided they publish and not patent said basic research, I have no problem with them...

So, what do the people here who know about this stuff think about this: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637 ? I took a while to read the paper very thoroughly, and this part in the discussion was very important: By contrast, the levels of caffeic and ferulic acids in ...

Since I feel like I'm responding to multiple people, I'll just answer this way. Here's a good article on the current cost-benefit situation: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12804 "Many American farmers are enjoying higher profits due to the widespread use of ce...

Not that I have anything against GM food. What I have is against herbicide/pesticide resistant corn, because I don't see the reason why I should support the development of something meant entirely to make companies profits, when I could be buying something like vitamin enriched or salt tolerant gra...

Most certainly. You wont find me of all people saying we should not test things to make sure they are safe (I do not think the FDA, EPA, and USDA are anywhere close to stringent enough). And we definitely need to make sure that we refine our techniques so we have more control over where, say, a tra...

So, transgenes from other organisms are automatically safe? That doesn't follow, even just on the face of it. The whole point of both papers is that plant RNAi can affect our physiology, and that it should be investigated further before CSIRO takes this step. *sigh* No. Permit me to be more precise...