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Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#81

Post by eropple »

jnbiche wrote: post #65
repsilat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought was, "I hope it isn't sterile." If goat/sheep hybrids are this rare then a fertile "bridge" (even in one direction) would be of some scientific (and agricultural) interest. Food is a distant second...

It's almost certainly sterile. Look at what happens to mules, and horses and donkeys appear to have diverged closer in time than goats and sheep.

While mules are overwhelmingly sterile, I thought it was neat to learn that there are instances of fertile female mules, though no male ones are on record as having been fertile.

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#82

Post by ghshephard »

jnbiche wrote: post #65
repsilat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought was, "I hope it isn't sterile." If goat/sheep hybrids are this rare then a fertile "bridge" (even in one direction) would be of some scientific (and agricultural) interest. Food is a distant second...

It's almost certainly sterile. Look at what happens to mules, and horses and donkeys appear to have diverged closer in time than goats and sheep.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep%E2%80%93goat_hybrid

quoting: "Darwinism – An Exposition Of The Theory Of Natural Selection With Some Of Its Applications (1889)"

"It has been long known to shepherds, though questioned by naturalists, that the progeny of the cross between the sheep and goat is fertile. Breeds of this mixed race are numerous in the north of Europe.""

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#84

Post by dang »

ronaldx wrote: post #75
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try hard not to be mean. If you'd care to suggest how to improve my wording, I'd be happy to. It's possible that my frustration after a year and a half of reading such comments as eps's with no ability to reply to them leaked through. A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email and ask us to check why lacero's comment was dead. We would have replied with a tha…

> A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email... This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this. You seem to be making an assumption that, by not doing what you prefer, eps was deliberately acting with negative intent. From an outside point of view, it is very hard to understand how e…

This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this

Well, it is what the guidelines say, and what we've been saying on the site for years. But you're right: that doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone, and the benefit of the doubt would have helped a lot. That was my mistake.

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#85

Post by cptn_brittish »

ronaldx wrote: post #75
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try hard not to be mean. If you'd care to suggest how to improve my wording, I'd be happy to. It's possible that my frustration after a year and a half of reading such comments as eps's with no ability to reply to them leaked through. A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email and ask us to check why lacero's comment was dead. We would have replied with a tha…

> A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email... This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this. You seem to be making an assumption that, by not doing what you prefer, eps was deliberately acting with negative intent. From an outside point of view, it is very hard to understand how e…

Is it in anyway possible to have automatic emails sent to people who have been hellbanned?

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#86

Post by dang »

supersystem wrote: post #59
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try hard not to be mean. If you'd care to suggest how to improve my wording, I'd be happy to. It's possible that my frustration after a year and a half of reading such comments as eps's with no ability to reply to them leaked through. A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email and ask us to check why lacero's comment was dead. We would have replied with a tha…

"with as much fairness and clarity as we can possibly muster" When it comes to exercising authority less is more. If you've ever been "forced" to smile at lame jokes from bouncers when going in to a club you probably know what I mean. Your comments reads like passive aggressive lectures rather than "fair and clear" moderation.

I think I know what happened here. This was the first false statement about HN moderation I was able to reply to, after seeing hundreds of them on the site over the last 18 months. It was frustrating not to be able to say anything for so long, so—even though I tried to control it—that pent-up energy came out in my comment.

Re "lectures": I've been erring on the side of responding to things and giving information. None of that is really on-topic for HN, of course, and I don't intend to do it for long.

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#87

Post by tlg »

Houshalter wrote: post #74
Steuard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that claim in the article, yes. I'll admit that I don't know enough about genetics to make strong claims here, but it doesn't sound remotely plausible to me. He wants to simultaneously claim that 1) hominids got so much porcine DNA that they have lots of substantial, recognizable anatomical features as a result, and 2) hominids have so little porcine DNA that it's all but invisible in our genetic code. I'm not…

I don't see why it's that implausible. You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago. Can you find any significant amount of DNA contributed from only a single one of your ancestors? What he is suggesting is that a single hybrid made it's way back into the hominid population. It had children with other hominids, and those children would have had half as much pig DNA. They had children w…

"You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago."

If a generation is about 30 years then you will have close to 33 ancestors lines in your family tree over those 1000 years. That makes 2^33 ancestors or 10 billion, that's impressive (well there is probably a large overlap)

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#88

Post by dang »

cptn_brittish wrote: post #85
ronaldx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email... This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this. You seem to be making an assumption that, by not doing what you prefer, eps was deliberately acting with negative intent. From an outside point of view, it is very hard to understand how e…

Is it in anyway possible to have automatic emails sent to people who have been hellbanned?

Many HN accounts don't have email addresses.

We would like to implement a better feedback mechanism for HN moderation, but that's a long-term prospect.

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#89

Post by lutusp »

tlg wrote: post #87
Houshalter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it's that implausible. You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago. Can you find any significant amount of DNA contributed from only a single one of your ancestors? What he is suggesting is that a single hybrid made it's way back into the hominid population. It had children with other hominids, and those children would have had half as much pig DNA. They had children w…

"You are descended from almost every single human being alive 1,000 years ago." If a generation is about 30 years then you will have close to 33 ancestors lines in your family tree over those 1000 years. That makes 2^33 ancestors or 10 billion, that's impressive (well there is probably a large overlap)

Yes, but remember the "bottleneck" from 70,000 years ago, when the human race was nearly wiped out. At that time, because of a nuclear winter brought on by a volcanic supereruption, there may have been fewer than 10,000 humans in the entire world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

So, based on that, we're descended from fewer people in the past than most people realize. Another way to say it is that most of our ancestors were cousins.

Re: Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm

#90

Post by eps »

dang wrote: post #49
eps wrote: post #29

@lacero - you are hell-banned

Lacero is not "hell-banned" or any other kind of banned. Lacero's comment came from an IP that had been caught by a spam filter. I just unbanned the IP and unkilled the relevant comments. Please don't claim things on or about Hacker News that you can't possibly know are true. Concerns about dead comments and anything else about HN can be sent to hn@ycombinator.com. Edit: I deleted things that were too harsh.

1. Emailing is not a viable option. I simply don't have email setup on all but one device that I use to browse HN.

2. You can nitpick on technicalities, but it doesn't matter to lacero if he was hell-banned or ip-blacklisted. All that matters is that his comments go in trash can and that's what I was trying to rectify.

PS. A proper way to support these cases is to add "flag for mod review" option to dead comments and/or user accounts. Unlike the email option, it would be actually usable for everyone. Until then I will keep posting "hell-banned" when I see an account with auto-killed, but otherwise reasonable comments. Have a nice weekend.

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