Aargh!! Late 19th century! 19th! Actually, since Wegener would have been just 20 in 1900, almost all of his work would have been in the early 20th century anyway.
ETA: My unsupported science belief is that centuries should be named after the goddam numbers that they start with, not their goddam ordinal position. 
I believe science would be a more popular field of study if students weren’t forced to work with lab partners.
No wonder they have to recall the Water Wiggles, “Yeah!” said a toy manufacturer, let’s put a device on an already evil hose that will ensure that the hose will jump at kids, “what could go wrong?”
I would like to sign up for your anti-hose newsletter, please.
That’s kind of the attitude I was alluding to.
We have no problem acknowledging that racial differences can lead to physical differences - sickle-cell traits, eyelid shapes, skin color, higher or lower rates of lupus or Type-2 diabetes, stomach cancer, etc.
But somehow we pretend as if the brain cannot be influenced by genetics likewise. The odd thing is, we even acknowledge that the brain can differ on gender/sex, can differ even in political differences (it’s known that conservatives have greater “fear” attributes in brain wiring than liberals,) can change in age, can change or be different based off of a dozen different factors, etc. But somehow the idea that genetics/race could possibly have any differences in brain matter, neuron wiring, etc. is considered taboo. The brain is immune to racial/genetic factors, but is vulnerable to everything else, so goes the logic.
The brain (and behavior) being influenced by genetics is widely accepted among behavioral scientists, even if the public is 30 years behind. Conflating race and genetics might be where you are finding doubt. Socially constructed race \ne genetics.
In the US, we use eyelid shape and skin color as part of the definition of race. Those are both genetically determined traits, but there is no particular reason that the genes determining those traits are going to be linked to genes influencing brain related traits.
My unsupported belief is that obesity is in large part due to people eating too much. 
More completely, eating too much, exercising too little, and leading sedentary lifestyles. It’s also substantially due to poor diet choices.
The idea that environmental pollution would suddenly spawn obesity seems implausible to me. I do tend to concur with some indicators that environmental pollution and excessively processed foods are contributors to diseases of otherwise unknown cause, particularly cancers. We certainly know for a fact that some pollutants are definitely carcinogenic. Whether they cause disease or not is certainly a function of concentration and exposure time, but it’s ultimately all probabilistic – my unsupported belief is that even a single molecule of a carcinogen hitting the wrong cell at the wrong time could trigger a metastasizing cancer.
We know that… The questions is why did people suddenly start eating too much?
This is the big issue. Obesity rates in the US suddenly started going way up in the 70s and 80s, with most of the rest of the world following with a range of lag. Lots of people want to think it is sedentary life style, but that hasn’t found great support when studied.
Changes in food—more processing, addictive flavor profiles, and such—all are likely factors. That comes back to my (mostly) unsupported belief that pollutants play a role, largely as endocrine disrupters.
Who is pretending this? No one I know. The best scientific understanding is that there’s pretty much zero biological science of any kind behind the socio-cultural classifications known as race, and while perhaps someday there could be real, factual genetic evidence that genetic tendencies for intelligence really do vary by biological ethnic group or ancestry (which are very different than race – some physical traits like sickle-cell do vary by geographical ancestry [tropical ancestry lines, being more likely to have been in high-malaria zones, were more likely to evolve the sickle-cell trait to protect against malaria, for example], they don’t vary biologically by race), we have no such evidence at this time.
Some day, when we can finally start putting research dollars into actual causes and syndromes, instead of proving for the nth time that vaccines don’t cause it, this will bear out.
I think removing tonsils and adenoids can drastically reduce the number of viral upper respiratory infections a person gets, in many cases, and the pendulum has swung too far from avoiding the surgery.
I think the people who produced all the Stranger Danger material in the 80s and 90s failed to research what the word “stranger” actually meant to a child under five. They are accustomed (or, at the time, were) to being told by their parents that So-&-so they did not recognize wasn’t a stranger, that it probably becomes a truism for a little kid that when a grown-up insists they have already met an adult, they have.
Some ancient Egyptians taught that the god Atum masturbated, and ejaculated the universe. I like that story. It tells you your place in the grand scheme of things.
When I read about Quantum Mechanics, I often find myself thinking that Coyote or the Monkey King must be running the universe.
It is, of course evident that the moon emits ‘cold rays’.
The evidence is obvious: clear sky, moon visible: gets bloody cold.
Thanks for the clarification.
I believe it has something to do with the stuff we feed the animals we later eat, in particular hormones and medication, and with corn syrup used as an additive.
There are actually two definitional problems here; one is that the current classifications of race have any real meaning in terms of proscribing a narrow range genetic traits and capabilities, and the second that we have an adequate grasp upon ‘intelligence’ such that we can actually make fundamental measurements and develop well-defined statistical variability across a population.
In our currently accepted racial definition, all people of direct sub-Saharan ancestry are defined as “Black” (as are some, like Australian Aboriginal peoples, in some definitions despite the fact that they are descended through other pre-modern “Out of Africa” populations), even though the genetic diversity of sub-Saharan African populations is greater than all other recognized races combined. This is notwithstanding that racial definitions were really created to establish a legal justification for slavery, discrimination, and persecution, and have various ludicrously over time to include or exclude groups based upon societal agreement. It beggars belief that for unexplained reasons African ‘Blacks’ have some distribution of genetic characteristics not related to appearance or driven by the physical environment that do not envelope Europeans, Asians, et cetera.
Intelligence is ostensibly measured by the “IQ test”, a metric that is not only widely regarded as demonstrating a narrow range of intellectual abilities but is also influenced by culture, education, nutrition, stress and trauma, and many other non-genetic factors. This, too, has a long history of usage to deny access and opportunity to non-whites (with the occasional exception, “to prove the rule”) with little scrutiny or examination of motives of the test-wielders. There has yet to be an identification of a specific set of genes that control ‘intelligence’ or identification with specific haplogroupings that are used to define ethnicity, much less the much more expansive and variable definition of ‘race’.
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As for my “unsupported scientific beliefs”, I believe (despite a lack of direct evidence) that extraterrestrial life is extremely common (and would give even odds on discovering independently developed life on one of the icy moons of Jupiter or Saturn), and that ‘intelligent’ life capable of modifying its environment and creating some kind of technology is not uncommon. I base this on how our basic biochemistry is based upon the most common elements of the universe (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, et cetera) and using unspectacular organic chemical reactions, and that there is a fundamental evolutionary drive toward complexity in service of survival fitness over just breeding copiously. I’ll acknowledge that animal life on Earth had to go through multiple unlikely hurdles (multicellularity, endosymbiosis, sexual reproduction, et cetera) to achieve the current level of sophistication, but given time and opportunity it seems likely (to me) that the necessary evolutionary pathways will be exercised, and in fact I suspect that while our post hoc viewpoint we are only seeing one linear path of many that were probably taken but ultimately extinguished (or not…many of our complex capabilities, such as vision, were evolved independently many times).
The reason that we see the universe is being empty and lifeless is not because life outside of Earth is uncommon but because we tend to overestimate our expectation of what we can see with our current tools, largely because of the influence of pop culture science fiction which tells us that aliens are just a hop away (or, perhaps are already here, abducting our comedians and eviscerating livestock for their entertainment). In reality, there could be thousands of civilizations at our level of complexity in our galaxy alone, but distributed with a statistically probably likelihood such that they will never observe, much less communicate, with one another. Most may be extinguished long before they gain the capacity to communicate across interstellar distances (or live on timescales that make such communication fundamentally pointless), and even those that develop and survive either see little point in signaling others, much less expending the extraordinary amount of energy to try to travel across the vast expanse of space, nor will put their efforts into building megastructures visible to other systems. Even if there were advanced alien civilizations within signaling or contact range it is likely that they would either have an interest in interacting with us (if they are many generations ahead in technological and social development) or that there is any possibility of advanced communication of concepts and philosophies owing to fundamental differences in perception about the physical world.
Stranger
I’m fond of string theory, though I’m quite aware of its problems and that it is not currently testable.
I almost completely agree with that entire post and the general outlook on extraterrestrial life. I think the point about inflated expectations is particularly astute. I would not, however, give anything like even odds for discovering life on, say, Europa or Enceladus. I’d love to be proved wrong, of course, but I think this supposition arises from a similar fallacy of proximity – that if some nearby place is capable of harboring some life form, then it probably does. That is, in fact, pretty much true for Earth, where life, once started, has had billions of years to proliferate into every nook and cranny of the planet. There is no evidence that this is true on an interplanetary or interstellar scale, and IMHO it probably is not. We can posit the likelihood of millions of life-bearing planets in our own galaxy, some of which are home to intelligent civilizations and some of which are far more advanced than we are, while still acknowledging that the spontaneous development of life is exceedingly rare. Kick-starting life may require an exquisite balance of conditions far beyond just being in a “Goldilocks zone”.
At the risk of inspiring permanent topic drift, I think that it is virtually certain we are the only intelligent (self- aware) technogical species in the entire universe. I base this on the immense number of hurdles that must be successfully navigated for such a species to even have a chance of existing in the first place (f. just one Great Filter, there are inevitably uncountable G.F.'s). Quickie estimate of the number of stars in the universe that I just got off the 'net is 2 x 10 ^ 23. But one can easily do a riff on the Drake Equation (which note likely contains innumerable subfactors for each main factor) and get odds MUCH steeper than that figure.
[Consider 50 G.F.'s, each with modest but not insurmountable odds of 1 out of 10. 0.1 ^ 100 = 1 x 10 ^ -50, utterly dwarfing the star estimate]
OK fine more than one option/pathway may exist for certain subfactors, which can indeed be modeled mathematically. That may just lower the odds to 1 x 10 ^ -40 or so, which is still pretty durned unlikely. Point is, people toss around the phrase “But all those stars!” as if just A huge number is proof enough of anything. The actual odds may in fact be much much bleaker than my quick and dirty estimate.
I think you pretty much have to invoke teleology into play somehow (either strong or weak, where the latter simply means it is the nature of this particular universe to foster the formation and persistence of life) to claim that N > 1, to be honest. Take just one example, the development of mitochondria. If that happened exactly once on this planet, then it isn’t anywhere close to inevitable by any stretch. Then WI that one lone mutant symbiote ends up fried by a nearby volcano 3 minutes after the two organisms manage to merge?
You’re right. I see that we’ll just eventually reach maximum entropy. All the energy burns out and that will be that. Nietzsche was right: “Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.”
If you caveat that with “in most humans” I concur.
Same with salt. (of course you can get too much)
Yep. Life- certainly, maybe even close, maybe even in our Solar system (not counting Earth, of course). Intelligent star faring life? In a galaxy far far away.
As a volunteer ranger, there are “harmless things” that we hate (rock stacking) but this seems harmless.
It can be, sure, NP. But if so, we have to include Eris (about 30% more massive). Either 8 or 10, not 9. (Pluto turned out to be a LOT smaller than we thought). Pluto is smaller than 7 moons.
Some have reached respectability like the OverKill Hypothesis, which has been proven wrong, but is still taught.
Yep, which makes him lose the title of discovering it.
Mine- that L’Anse aux Meadows is NOT Vinland. Vinland is further down the coast, and could be underwater now, or have been built over. L’Anse aux Meadows is clearly a stop over ship repair stations, where they had an abundance of bog iron.