Complete abstinence, marriage, crazy wild monkey sex, guilt, confessions, more crazy wild monkey sex, divorce from guilt.

Srsly? You think a couple would divorce because they have too much wild sex? I thought that was one of the underlying reasons why you GOT married.

Besides, the woman would never allow it, silly. Sex does eventually get old, man. You move on the the arguing, the compromise, the pushing and shoving, trying new, weird things that neither of you like but thought you would, onto the marital aides (toys, edible underwear, the like)...

And Catholics annul the marriage, Otherwise, you stuck for life, man. That's why either we make sure we've got our soulmates, or we muddle through and try to improve each other in marriage*.

_{*I tempted to make fun of this, but I really wanna see marriage in a positive light. I really do. I'll worry about criticizing marriage WHEN it actually happens.}


Lastly, Sawyer, I was expecting a REAL Eggman - like this one:

God damn. I knew that was going to happen.

share in my semi-amusement



wish this was better quality, this is prolly best

[This message has been edited by General_II (edited 02-28-2010 @ 11:18 PM).]

Forrest Gump is my 2nd favorite movie of all time...

by the way, those were great.

"I love, you Jen-ie" never sounded so creepy.

"Sometimes we do things that just don't make no *bleep* sense" hahahahhahaha


Horror movie was my favorite.

[This message has been edited by Cheesewiz (edited 03-01-2010 @ 01:18 AM).]

my favorite movie of all time is gladiator. that movie is incredibly good and i don't really know what about it makes me love it so much.

Rocky is my personal favourite.

I do however love the "Jen-ni" line too. I do it all the time to this girl in my math c class. Hey Jen-nay. I used to watch Forest Gump all the time when I was younger.

The Who: I'm just posting one of many possible situations, in this hypothetical case, the couple split up because of the weird stuff that came out and the secret shame they've been hiding all these years for having a foot fetish or etc. Not necessarily accurate but it happens.

Lastly, Sawyer, I was expecting a REAL Eggman - like this one:

[This message has been edited by As_Saffah (edited 02-28-2010 @ 08:25 PM).]

woohoo!!


Forrest Gump was an excellent movie. Loved it. I thought it was a movie about a real person (not like a documentary or anything like that, mind) when I first saw it, but that was way back in the 90s. I wasn't even ten yet.

It was so freaking strange. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.

Is anyone else finding HG takes ages to load a page sometime, and fails to load pages due to timeouts quite often?

Or is it just me?

Other pages load fine.

yeah. especially when i try to reply to a topic. I think this reply took like 5 min to load

Yeah, the forums occasionally asplode.

Yeah.

Spah sappin mah forum.

Send a pyro in to burn it to death, K mods?


In other words, u gotz fingers, and I imagine they ain't broken, so use them to find the problem if you can, k?

Everytime I look at that Eggman, I laugh because I always assume he's flicking me off. Me and me alone.

It's almost like a gift from God.

[This message has been edited by D0CT0R WH0 (edited 03-01-2010 @ 10:16 PM).]

Yeah, we could wipe Canada off the map if we wanted to

re: Brain size and eating meat

I can't remember which thread the discussion was in originally, so I'm posting this in here.

Did the discovery of cooking make us human?

How did our ancestors learn to cook if they didn't already have big brains?

Before they could discover cooking of food, they had to discover fire, which means they also had to have mastered tools to reproducibly make sparks, and strategies to gather/cut tinder and brush.

In order to do these two things, they needed to be out of the trees already, walking about.

Seems to me something else happened before cooking to set us on the path to humanity. I think it's a matter of degree - the leap from tree ape to ground ape is probably one thing, the leap from eating raw foods and having a thick coat of hair and long gut to conserve and extract energy, to harnessing fire and cooking foods and losing the gut and the hairy coat, another thing maybe an order of magnitude more important towards abstract reasoning. Somewhere between tree ape and fire, came social organization and cooperation for achieving goals.

mete any thoughts on the order of these things, their magnitude, etc.?

You raise interesting points, I will comment after I've watched the program tomorrow evening.

Well, one thing sticks out to me early in the article:

It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.

Food did not directly lead to evolution. It can't. The genes for big brains were already in the population, and increased calories and protein from meat allowed that advantage to be exploited.

Meat diets were a catalyst, not a cause.

Quoted from Saffah:

How did our ancestors learn to cook if they didn't already have big brains?

The program appears to support this idea:

"Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidently. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction."

This seems plausible...although one would think that harnessing fire would have come with a big brain already.

Either way, I think it's a big silly to say "good brain" "bad brain". Any changes would have been gradual over dozens and dozens of generations, and as a rule there was no more variance/per person in the population than there is now. (We may have more people, but in a person to person ratio that cancels out). So, people you consider smart now, are probably thought of much in the way they thought of their above average buddies who were suddenly (with meat diet) able to figure things out better and survive.

That is an interesting theory.

BTW, does anyone feel darwin's theory of evolution isn't completely correct? It seems as though some species have adapted to their situation too fast for natural selection to have been the sole cause for it.

This discussion is not really an example of what I'm talking about, natural selection could have easily been the sole cause for the monkey-to-human evolution.

shutupshutupshutup we are not talking about darwin and evolution we all know how those discussions turn out

You talking about religious arguments? If so then I'll shut up.

[This message has been edited by X_omni_X (edited 03-02-2010 @ 05:23 PM).]

yesyesyes

weve had this sorta discussion about a dozen times, each time it becomes 'no fµck you' 'no fµck YOU' etc etc etc

BTW, does anyone feel darwin's theory of evolution isn't completely correct?

Well, it is never seen as complete. It was written 150 years ago by a guy who knew nothing about genes, DNA, or even much about cells. Natural selection is of course an absolute. It's completely unavoidable. However, there are other factors we know of that also influence your DNA and thus your microevolution:

Epigenetics: Your DNA has little clumps on it called histones. They help it to wind up and stay in good form. However, they can also effectively silence genes in big areas by winding the DNA up so tightly that it is impossible for it to be transcribed. They are inherited, but only in the sense that when new ones are made they tend to act like the old ones before them. However, several natural factors can influence them, for example: smoking, food intake, sunlight exposure, air quality, diet type, and a lot more. They appear to be designed to make the best of a certain situation, but they have very interesting effects that can last generations. For example, I recall a study of Swedish family lines that showed that if a Great-Grandmother or Great Grandfather was exposed to droughts or starvation, that generations after them would live longer but be smaller in size on average. Likewise, it was the opposite in times of plenty. Even odder, the effect was statistically significantly different between grandmothers vs grandfathers who experienced the drought. The effects on one ancestor seemed to last a while without being permanent or all that susceptible to selection.

Interesting stuff.


Perhaps more along the lines of what you are thinking is in the microbial world. They also experience natural selection, but they are very, very good at rapid evolution. Anti-biotic resistance to nearly every drug we've invented/discovered has only taken a decade or so to develop from first exposure. The reason being that out of a billion bacteria, if one is lucky enough to have a minor mutation that allows him to live better in the presence of that antibiotic, then he'll be able to out reproduce the others and the resistance spreads. If then out of his millions of offspring another is resistant, then that one will be even more dominant. It just builds on itself.

Bacteria and Archaea can also pick up DNA from outside their cells of nearly any type. That's part of the research area that I am currently involved in. For instance, early this week I took a small amount of round pieces of DNA called a plasmid which we'd previously made to have a gene we want to study on it, broke it open with heat, then inserted some more genes, and then had it make a few billion copies of itself with some enzymes. I then put these new plasmids in solution with some E. Coli, and sure enough, they took it right in and now have that DNA in their cell. I then killed all the ones who didn't take in my plasmid (the trick here is putting a gene for antibiotic resistance on the plasmid, so only the ones who've got the plasmid will survive the antibiotic I soak on it). Just like that, I've got a reproducing line of E. Coli that have been artificially selected to be vastly different from their counterparts.


The point is, all of Darwin's rules apply, but not in the way we first think of. Rapid evolution is easy so long as the pressure is great enough and the population is large enough to make due. I made a line of cells with genes for human blood proteins in about 4 hours (we're eventually going to put them into fly cells then make oodles and oodles of this protein for study), surely natural selection can pull of something far simpler in a few years.

Lamarck says hai gaiz wats goin on in this epigenetics amirite?

Epigenetics: Your DNA has little clumps on it called histones. They help it to wind up and stay in good form. However, they can also effectively silence genes in big areas by winding the DNA up so tightly that it is impossible for it to be transcribed. They are inherited, but only in the sense that when new ones are made they tend to act like the old ones before them. However, several natural factors can influence them, for example: smoking, food intake, sunlight exposure, air quality, diet type, and a lot more. They appear to be designed to make the best of a certain situation, but they have very interesting effects that can last generations. For example, I recall a study of Swedish family lines that showed that if a Great-Grandmother or Great Grandfather was exposed to droughts or starvation, that generations after them would live longer but be smaller in size on average. Likewise, it was the opposite in times of plenty. Even odder, the effect was statistically significantly different between grandmothers vs grandfathers who experienced the drought. The effects on one ancestor seemed to last a while without being permanent or all that susceptible to selection.

I had no clue stuff like that existed. But yeah that pretty much explains what I was thinking. It was always my believe that Lamarck's theory of evolution was more accurate than we gave him credit for, but to my knowledge before just now there was nothing to back his theory up. Do you believe that epigenetics could back up his theory?

And I was thinking about things like human races. I don't think that natural selection alone would have carved races out of our ancestors, based on geographic locations. Thus it was my theory that living conditions could influence the genetic code in some way.

An example of what I am trying to say would be the case of Asians. I don't think not having slanted eyes in Asia would have caused people to go through natural selection and eliminate those without slanted eyes, leaving a slanted eyed race throughout Asia. It seemed more likely that the slanted eye trait was useful for living in their environment, but not essential, so nature found some way to alter the genetic code.

Edit: Yeah Saffah, I don't understand why I've been taught in highschool that Lamarck was wrong even though epigenetics seems to support his theory. Is it too new of a discovery to be added into the textbooks?

[This message has been edited by X_omni_X (edited 03-02-2010 @ 06:24 PM).]

Well, Lamarck is wrong for the vast majority of traits, but, he happens to be right occasionally. Indeed, environmental factors are absolutely just as important as genes in determining how your body works, but they are rarely inheritable. Lamarck liked the idea of Giraffes growing longer necks because they spent their whole lives reaching for bigger trees. That idea was put under once they discovered that it was natural selection.

Of course, it turns out both sides were wrong. Giraffes' necks aren't long so they can reach higher leaves. They still eat lower leaves with little competition, plus their body isn't designed for reaching all that high. It would have been a lot easier for them to just grow taller on average. Turns out, their necks are a sexual competition trait, in particular, they use them to fight one another for mating rights, check it out:

[This message has been edited by Cheesewiz (edited 03-02-2010 @ 06:47 PM).]