181–190 of 218 posts
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Do we still depend on bone structure to define species? DNA analysis is indisputable. Its all speculation until that is done.
DNA's half-life is 521 years. http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11...
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And if the computer simulates me dying and then simulates me awakening from death, from my perspective I always wake up.
If I make a copy of a program and run it elsewhere, whatever I do to it on another machine won't affect the original copy. Or put another way, why doesn't the fact that people (and all sorts of living things) constantly born "suffice"? How similar to you do they have to be for it to suffice? If you really split hairs, even exact copies of a thing are never exact, since no two things can occupy the same space at the s…
The Guardian's coverage of this contains a fair amount of scepticism: Christoph Zollikofer, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, said that many of the bone characteristics used to claim the creature as a new species are seen in more primitive animals, and by definition cannot be used to define a new species. “The few ‘unique’ features that potentially define the new species need further scrutiny, as they ma…
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DNA's half-life is 521 years. http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11...
I'm guessing that shotgun sequencing techniques are used -- that is, you don't need full length segments in order to reconstruct significantly long lengths of DNA. Again a guess.
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I'm guessing that shotgun sequencing techniques are used -- that is, you don't need full length segments in order to reconstruct significantly long lengths of DNA. Again a guess.
No, they're not used, because they didn't find DNA -- they found rocks. We're dealing with fossils here, not organic matter. Tissue does not last for millions of years.
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I'm guessing that shotgun sequencing techniques are used -- that is, you don't need full length segments in order to reconstruct significantly long lengths of DNA. Again a guess.
No, they're not used, because they didn't find DNA -- they found rocks. We're dealing with fossils here, not organic matter. Tissue does not last for millions of years.
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As opposed to "scientists who are boys"? How old are scientists these days?
In modern speech, the opposite of "girls" is "guys". Think "girls night out" vs. "guys night out". I have female friends approaching their fifties who refer to themselves and their female friends as "the girls". Perhaps this is a regional thing, where saying "women" sounds old-fashioned and stodgy.
Honestly, I can't believe you'd think that would be remotely appropriate in this context (or that I'd even have to have this discussion on Hacker News at all, or that ainiriand would feel a sense of "pride" as a male -- yeah, I checked his gender -- over a group of female biologists -- a science that is more than 50% female...)
"Guys" is casual. "Guys" is sometimes used for a mix-gendered group, but with a female-only group, you might use "Gals" or even "Ladies," but "Girls" is only used if you want to emphasize youth/casualness/fun (hence, the group of 50-something's calling themselves "the girls")
I've lived on the east coast, I've lived on the west coast, I've spent a great deal of time in the middle -- no one refers to a group of women in a professional context as "girls." After mid-puberty, that word starts to carry specific connotations when used as a description.
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I think the problem is the "species" construction itself. Remember, it's completely made up by people and has no obligation to reflect the sometimes messy reality on the ground. I'm more interested in what we can learn about these people (using the term for convenience) than what they are called. When did they live? How much genetic distance is there between us and them? Do modern humans carry some of their genes? Co…
I do seem to remember being taught in school that the definition of species is "organisms that can reproduce and generate fertile offspring". Apparently, though, it's not that simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem
If we had a record of every organism that had ever lived, trying to classify them into "species" would be a ridiculous task -- regardless of how punctuated-equilibriumy things are. Since the fossil record is fairly spotty, it's only a slightly ridiculous task.
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> 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 inste…