No, that’s not how evolution works. The reason the appendix stays on is for the same reason women get menopause and I have a deformed circulatory system: There’s no selection pressure in favor of removing it from the gene pool. Given industrial society has made appendicitis frequently survivable, such pressure seems unlikely to arise in our civilization.
I dunno. That’s almost kinda cute, especially if the apple ends up looking like a face.
Probably not any more. At least in the western world poisoning and intestinal illnesses aren’t common or severe enough to give much of an advantage.
But throughout most of human history severe food poisoning probably occurred at least a couple of times every year. With no refrigeration and a tendency to scavange carrion, even our recent ancestors would have been at high risk. Other animals will replenish their gut flora after scouring by eating the faeces of other animals of the same species. Primates don’t do this, probably because our arboreal ancestry has left us with an aversion to faeces. So it’s at least plausible that the appendix has been retained as a way of recolonising the gut after scouring.
the whole sail thing seems to go back to the justifications for the ‘flat earth’ theory used to explain how jimmy cefalo, oops, i mean chris columbus, was so brilliant in figuring out that the earth was round. in that vein, i was told no ships ever sailed over the horizon, but of course they did, because the sailors of that time knew more than my teachers. is there a field of study covering the invalid myths used to explain other invalid myths? how far will this go? i’d better drink some milk to calm my ulcer.
Nonsense. Living in the subtropics my brothers and the neighbourhood kids grew up in backyard pools. We and our parents had heard of the rule but not being terribly obedient we used to just go in anyway. We quickly discovered that there were no ill effects whatever. We never cramped and given that cramps in my understanding have more of a relation to lack of food and minerals than an excess this is hardly surprising. We were never sick in the pool. We were never uncomfortable. I guess if we’d felt sick or uncomfortable we would have, yanno, got out or something rather than follow some dumbass rule that some idiot dreamed up based on nothing.
Luckily we had parents who were essentially empirical (rather than following old wives tales) and they quickly realised based on actual experience that no harm came of swimming straight after meals and dropped the rule.
I believe there were actually conservative elements within American Lutheranism who were still clinging to geocentrism into the 19th Century (and even a handful of fringe types on the Internet who are still doing so today, who are definitely arch-Protestants, though I think Calvinist rather than Lutheran.)
Which kind of makes sense; sola Scriptura–the authority of “scripture alone”–is a classic Protestant position, and Protestantism rather than Catholicism has always been the bastion of Biblical literalism and Biblical inerrancy.
I graduated from a reasonably good high school in the 70’s, and I was also never taught that Columbus set foot on North America proper. He wasn’t just lucky, though. Columbus may have been a deceitful, arrogant, general all around ass, and possible genocidal to boot, but give him his due. He was one of the all time determined men and great dead reckoners. He not only knew where he was and how far he had traveled, he deliberately lied to his crew about it, so they’d continue. (Earlier explorers were more cautious, and never sailed further than they could get back. He also told his crew that the first man to sight land would get a fancy jacket he brought, he lied about that too. He also lied about finding gold mines, etc. He he may well have been lying about believing he found Asia, too.) Accurate, ocean going time pieces were a long way away, yet.
His misunderstanding for the circumference of the Earth was based on an incorrect conversion of a unit of distance used by the long gone Romans. That was covered in a Straight Dope article. I’ve also read that he used evidence gathered by the explorers of the African coast. Essentially, that he argued based on debris washed up on the African coast, there must be something at his idea of the proper distance away. I’ve never seen that claim since, so I have my doubts about it.
Really interesting pictures. I had never heard of “browse lines” (or whatever they’re called in my own language) nor noticed them despite having been brought up in a forest covered area.
Nothing too special. This talks about some cases where that form of abuse was supposedly legal. Another link from our Uncle. This possibly apocryphal rule was conflated with “rule of thumb” meaning estimate, while that term was never used in conjunction with the latter.
The totality of the giraffe’s defense against the pack of lions consisted of being tall. And it survives. I think the survival advantage is patently obvious, not conjectural at all.
[QUOTE]
I disagree… the giraffe in that video survived because is was a bad ass giraffe… one point there were four lions hanging off all four legs… and what did the giraffe do?? took the lions for a walk to the river to see how they liked the water… are you kidding me??? that was crazy…
That was not the average giraffe… taller or shorter other, less bad assed giraffes would have been taken to the ground and eaten…
That giraffe survived because he was [SIZE=“7”]THE BADDEST MOTHER FUCKING GIRAFFE[/SIZE]
in the Savannah…
It survived and hopefully passed on its bad ass genes to the next generation… poof… evolution…
It’s somewhat worth noting that the original name of the panda bear was the particolor bear, and the original name of the red panda, was just “panda.” It was actually some years later when the physiological similarities were noted and taxonomists decided that there were actually both different kinds of “panda,” resulting in the renaming of “giant panda” and “lesser (or red) panda.” So, they actually had it right before they got it wrong.
But you would already know that. Just in case anyone else hadn’t.
And, unrelated to that. . .
I’ve seen a couple of references to “North America proper.” I know you’re referring to the mainland, but I don’t see any definition of “proper” that makes it synonymous with “mainland.” Nor do I see how the islands do not constitute part of “North America proper,” unless this is idiomatic to cartographer types.
Sorry, I was imprecise. I meant that he was lucky in that the verdict of history, for quite some time, was to give him credit for getting things rolling; not that he was lucky to find his away across the Atlantic.
The teacher really didn’t like me to begin with and when I pointed out that the those tunnels were built in the early 1900’s and the Underground Railroad operated in the 1850’s our student teacher relationship began to end…
he was quite condescending when he told me that I was wrong and the tunnel was much older and most definitely used to sneak slaves into Canada… I disagreed again pointing out the dates and he said to me, and I will never forget this, “shut your mouth and stop interrupting my class”… and I responded with “you’re an Idiot”…
So he booted me… I waited in the “detention room” until the end of the class and then I saw him come into the main office and go directly into the VP’s office… then he left and I was called into the VP’s office… The Funny thing was that it wasn’t even my VP, we had two and the students were assigned alphabetically, but of course the teacher had me dealt with by the “meaner” of the two VPs… He started off on a yelling tirade about respect and what not and when I tried to explain to him what everything started over, he interrupted me saying that did not matter… eventually I convinced him to let me tell the whole story and after I told about the Underground Railroad and what and how the teacher spoke to me his tone changed… eventually I was told that if I wanted to continue in the class I would have to apologize… I refused to and just dropped the class, but there was no other punishment involved… That teacher could never look me in the eye again…
It was a weird bittersweet moment in my life concerning my view of authority… On the bad side I was thinking how do they let this idiot teach… and it wasn’t just that one incident either, looking back on it now as an adult, that man wasn’t all that intelligent…
but on the other hand I gained a huge amount of respect for the VP… obviously he had to chastise me for disrespecting a teacher, but in the end he listened to reason and respected the two sides of the story…
Indeed. The original scientific name for the “parti-colored bear” was Ursus melanoleucus, assigned in 1869 by Jean Pierre Armand David. In 1870, it was renamed Ailuropoda melanoleuca (the name it bears [heh] today) by Alphonse Milne-Edwards, and was thought by him to be allied more closely to procyonids on the basis of various bone and dental characters. He later re-examined the creature, and felt it lay somewhere between bears and the “lesser panda”. In 1875, Paul Gervais published his own examination, wherein he concluded it was an “aberrant bear”. Then, in 1885, St. George Mivart published a review of all the arctoid carnivores, and concluded that a) Ailurus (the “lesser panda”) was a procyonid, and b) that Ailuropoda was allied with Ailurus, and was therefore also a procyonid. This was the conclusion upheld by most American and British authors for quite some time (and is the source of the “Pandas are more closely related to raccoons than bears” bit that many here learned in school). In 1895, Herluf Winge concluded that Ailuropoda was a relative of the extinct Hyenarctos (bear), and was thus a basal ursid, whereas Ailurus remained a procyonid. This was the view that many European authors accepted from this point on.
So, basically, from there, various authors would publish works over the years defending one view or the other, largely split along geographic lines. In 1964, D. Dwight Davis (an American) published perhaps the most decisive anatomical study of Ailuropoda ever made (around 368 pages), wherein he affirmed the ursid affiliation of giant pandas. Unfortunately, most American and British workers steadfastly held onto the procyonid affiliation. Then, sometime during the 1980s (I haven’t been able to find the source yet, with my admittedly cursory searches) molecular evidence pretty much sealed the deal, so to speak: Ailuropoda was most definitely a bear. And so, here we are
And that is more than anyone cared to know about the history of panda taxonomy…
That does not seem right. The Catholic Church officially pronounced heliocentrism to be “formally heretical” in 1616. (“Formally” here seems to mean something like “technically”: they were saying that it is not really very bad, or very important, but, technically, yes it is heretical.)
This was, in fact, very largely, in response to Galileo pushing them for a formal decision. Presumably he thought the case would go the other way, but he was not arrested and put on trial at this time (that did not happen until 1632, 16 years later). Indeed, in 1616 he obtained a written declaration from Cardinal Bellarmine certifying that he, personally, was not suspected of being a heretic in the light of this. This document, however, also contained an injunction that Galileo should no longer promote the Copernican theory, something he obeyed for the next sixteen years, until there was a new pope in power who he thought was on his side. The actual charge eventually brought against Galileo was that he had disobeyed this injunction from Bellarmine (who was dead by then), not that he had committed heresy as such.
I do not know when, or under what circumstances, the Church reversed itself on this issue, but I think it was in the 19th century sometime. Up until then, heliocentrism was officially considered heretical. (Although no-one, I think, after Galileo, ever got into any real trouble over it. I think the powers-that-were in the Catholic Church fairly quickly realized that the Galileo prosecution had been a very serious mistake, and a PR disaster for the Church.)
Well, the original point I was trying to make is that, by the standards of the time (when it was quite normal for rarefied intellectual disputes to degenerate into some quite nasty name calling), the arguments about heliocentrism were not very vehement at all. The puzzling thing about the whole affair is how Galileo ever wound up getting prosecuted over a matter that most people regarded as, from a religious perspective, thoroughly trivial.
I guess the crux is the word “machine”. You’re looking at “machine” and seeing “do work” and thus requiring that the wheel and axle must be connected to different things. I’m looking at “machine” and seeing “device” and seeing the axle wheel is fundamentally different from the lever. YMMV.
Derleth said:
I suppose I should have put it more past tense. It’s only within the last hundred years or so that surgery has gotten to the point that appendicitis can be dealt with - largely because of antibiotics. Before that, appendicitis was a selection pressure against retaining the appendix - a part of the gut that did no useful work and was subject to getting infected and killing the host. But if it did serve a useful purpose by retaining gut flora in case of severe intestinal distress and cleansing, then that would be a counter selection pressure.
I’m firmly aware that surgery and antibiotics have changed the game.
Princhester said:
I looked up “enfilade”. Definition 1 is gunfire directed along the length of a column of troops. Definition 1 is a target vulnerable to sweeping gunfire. I suppose being lengthwise to the gun is what makes the target “vulnerable”, but I wouldn’t read it that way, giving contradictory definitions. YMMV.
Here is the Wiki article on enfilade (and defilade) with pictures, yet. I think what is confusing is using “column” in the definition. If you had a column of troops coming towards you then you’d want your guns pointing down the road at the length of the column. That would be more of an ambush, though; infantry does not voluntarily attack from a column formation but rather from a line formation. In fact, the original reasons for inventing formation marching and drill commands in the first place was so a commander could get his troops on the scene efficiently and then quickly array them for the attack (or defense).
If you have a line of troops attacking you, then, as the Wiki article and machine gun movie point out, the best practice is to have the guns on your flanks, firing at the width of the attacking line.