Earlier quoted context omitted.
DNA's half-life is 521 years. http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11...
521 not 512, according to the article you mention.
> 521 not 512
Rounding to the nearest whole number.
New human-like species discovered
151–160 of 218 posts
Re: New human-like species discovered
#152Jerry Coyne had written a nice blogpost that discusses the exaggerated media response and the actual academic novelty of this discovery and its description.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/a-new-sp...
Tl;dr: the fossils possess intriguing anatomical features that appear to be (or more probably closely related to) a transition point between Australopithecus and Homo. Any inference of behaviour or even fossil age is speculation. The academia behind it seems to be quite good, but again the media are blowing it out of proportion.
Re: New human-like species discovered
#153In the past decade or so, I've become aware of a vaguely human-like species that invades my lawn now and then. Usually playing some disco music drives them off.
Re: New human-like species discovered
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a political thing. Species definition is messy, to the point of absurdity. Indeed, the differences between long-separated human populations are such that even non-racist scientists acknowledge subspecies.. http://dienekes.blogspot.sk/2009/09/is-homo-sapiens-polytypi...
Thanks for posting this. It has always baffled me that we are led to believe that all of humanity springs from one common root. Absolutely ridiculous and goes against common sense -what other species (of anything) has just one single representative??? Who's been selling this and why???
> Who's been selling this and why???
The New York Intellectuals, who were connected to the Frankfurt School, who got the baton from Psychoanalysis.
Read The Culture Of Critique by Kevin Macdonald and you will have precisely your answer.
Re: New human-like species discovered
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I made a perfect copy of you, then that copy would share your memories up to the point when I made the copy, but you yourself would not even necessarily know the copy exists; so how would that help you?
Which of the instances is the last "you" in your question?
The poster I was replying to (not their copy).
Re: New human-like species discovered
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.
> Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name…
> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.
Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed.
For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter?
The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported!
So what is the reason for that?
Re: New human-like species discovered
#157Come on. No Donald Trump jokes yet?
Get back to reddit! Shoo!
Re: New human-like species discovered
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
A species cannot be clearly defined until you try to mate it with something else and it fails to produce a viable offspring, as far as I'm aware. No DNA analysis is indisputable with what we currently know.
So each infertile individual belongs into their own species?
Not always, but some infertile individuals belong to their own new species, yes. It happens all the time with plant hybrids.
Plants can clone itselves so to be infertile is not the same as to be extinct for them. Infertile also means normally something like "99,9999% unable to produce seeds" but with enough time and a high number of tries, planets will align in the polinisation of two "unfertile" stems of the same plant. At the end seeds will be produced and the new species will exit the 'trap' perfectly (or all DNA of the father will be discarded reverting to the original mother species). Is just a question of time.
Re: New human-like species discovered
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I made a perfect copy of you, then that copy would share your memories up to the point when I made the copy, but you yourself would not even necessarily know the copy exists; so how would that help you?
This a very long discussion, but essentially if you think Star Trek teleportation preserves identity, then I would get into the future.
It might preserve identity from the perspective of the created copy, but the original still dies a death of disintegration the way I see it. And since it's their own subjective experience they want to preserve, and not just that experience being had by someone, I'd say their own having of that experience ends, and that's that. It's not that they die painlessly and wake up again, they die painlessly and something else wakes up, which they themselves will not be aware of, being dead and all that.
Re: New human-like species discovered
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably you don't work in a biological field!
Re-constructing neanderthals has been suggested as being perfectly viable..
DNA decomposes very quickly. It's half-life is 521 years. Even in best case, DNA becomes unreadable in 1.5 million years.
While Neanderthals lived 38k years ago, this species lived ~ 3 million years ago.
Reconstructing this species is practically impossible.