Ah, good to know.
I had not been keeping track of his other ‘contributions’ to the board. I see I didn’t miss anything of value.
I would like to sign up for your newsletter.
Silly me; I thought they already had, like several years ago.
I believe the idiom is Hear, hear!
Good memory, I did a quick check and it was about 11 years ago.
So first off, humans probably didn’t “domesticate” dogs the way you’re thinking.
Like, have you ever been camping and had to deal with raccoons? Most raccoons want nothing to do with humans, but raccoons in urban areas have figured out that 1) humans aren’t really a threat, and 2) they have food. Therefore, they’re not afraid of humans and they exhibit different behavior.
Natural selection would predict that urban raccoons might exhibit different physical traits as well, and lo-and-behold, that’s what we’re seeing.
So, some dogs had mutations that made them less afraid of humans, causing them to hang around human camps. And eventually they stopped mating with their wolf counterparts. In other words, dogs found a different ecological niche which applied an adaptive pressure to select for certain traits.
How do you explain giraffes?
Agreed. There’s a relatively new term for this called “AI psychosis” where the sycophantic characteristics of AI chat bots feed into, and reinforce, the delusions of psychologically vulnerable individuals. I’ve skimmed the original “Unified Field Theorem” and his contributions to the “What were you thinking” threads and he’s using Chatgpt extensively. He’s likely using it even more than he’s letting on as well.
I’m resistant to trying to diagnose mental illness in other posters as it can be inaccurate, disrespectful, and dangerous but reading cladking’s posts it’s difficult not to reach the conclusion something like that is happening here
The London foxes are going through a similar process as the North American urban raccoons.
But even in Ocean County NJ, foxes are adapting to the large senior community leaving out food for cats. They now come up to doors to beg for food in many of the communities.
Also something similar was happening on Island Beach State Park where mother foxes were teaching the kits to beg tourist for food. Feeding them is strongly discouraged though and prohibited. My understanding it is less common now than 10 years ago.
I was at Philmont Scout Ranch a few weeks back and one of their campsites was overrun by a family of skunks. They figured out 1) humans aren’t really a threat, and 2) they have food. The little buggers were practically climbing into tents to hang out, and wouldn’t go away when yelled at, or clapped at, you had to basically kick sand in their faces like Charles Atlas’s bully.
That’s a camping story to remember years from now.
I love it. But do you have a proper cite, or do I have to assume it’s apocryphical and can’t be properly attributed?
WTF is wrong with you people? This is the PIT, for cryin’ out loud. You’re trying to turn it into something INFORMATIONAL and USEFUL.
Darwin put his revolutionary model into the framework he lived in. His principle has been refined over and over again, leading to how we understand evolution today. Richard Dawkins added to that understanding in his “selfish gene”-themed publications during the 70s.
Brrr Error!!!
A species is defined by two individuals being able to produce fertile offspring. A horse and a donkey aren’t the same species, because while they can mate and produce an offspring, a mule isn’t fertile.
Why don’t you read up before coming back?
Some of us posts replies because we hope that someone else that the OP might learn something. Even if the OP is a lost cause.
To be fair, the definition of species is fuzzy. Wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs all interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The “coywolves” in my neighborhood are descendants of all three species.
Mules are routinely castrated in their youth. My understanding is that some of them would otherwise be fertile. They just don’t produce especially useful offspring.
And domestic dogs are all considered to be one species, but a Chihuahua and a Great Dane can’t interbreed.
This is how the SDMB has always worked. Pedantry and overly literal thinking are staples around here. Dopers can’t help themselves, we see misinformation and there’s an almost pathological urge to correct it. Just understand there will be no constructive conversation here. It will just be misinformed delusions followed by corrections over and over again until the OP loses interest and slinks off, (which he’s done before), or he finally flames out and gets himself banned. I would consider either possibility likely at this point.
This OP is like if I went into a Christian Theology forum, and spouted off about how Christianity can not exist, because it’s obvious that Christ himself was actually NOT a space alien from Betelgeuse. like all those Christians say and Martin Luther claimed in his Ph.D. thesis.
Good point about “AI psychosis”, but I think he said he’s using Copilot, not ChatGPT. Copilot runs on a similar OpenAI framework but it has different design objectives and is generally inferior to GPT for general queries.
Which is necessarily also associated with a closely similar DNA sequence, similar general morphology, and karyotype similarities. While some distinctions may be somewhat arbitrary, “species” is a very specific biological taxonomy, contrary to the opinion of the King of Clad.
It’s allowed, but never fear, HRH the King will no doubt be along shortly to spew misinformation. I note that the common feature of his pronouncements in the areas where he has claimed expertise (so far, Egyptian pyramids, physics and cosmology, and now biological evolution) is that the estabished consensus of experts in the field is completely wrong.
We’ve had a few other geniuses like that in the past – at least one who completely re-invented physics, and another who proved that it’s easy to exceed the speed of light (I believe you just have to push harder!).
Sorry, yes that’s correct. Copilot, not chatgpt.
Well, of course any and every scientific definition will be contested, which is as it should be. However,
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