Anti-Vaccination Legislative Win In California

No, I definitely wasn't here for that, but I'm not gonna comment. As a passionate monarchist, I find democracy silly to begin with.

It's high school biology, something most people were forced to take and probably did a brain dump after passing whatever test was associated with it.

Alright I'll say something controversial: if our ability in the field of genetic manipulation was so good that we could apply eugenics without discarding people for it, I say bring it on!

*Innuendo guitar solo*

Damn Monarchist!

Go back in time and take over France! Or just take over France now. They need the help.

It was, until parents started giving teachers the same treatment they got for teaching about evolution.

The problem with eugenics is the same problem with a lot of other things. It has bad associations, so no matter how good it would be if properly implemented, it's "evil", and, secondly, that people thing that their feelings should dictate how the world is run, instead of their logic and reason. Or maybe they think that their feelings should dictate reality because they have no logic or reason. Chicken-and-the-Egg problem there.

Sorry, too busy plotting to have the Kaiser returned to power whilst humming Deutschlandlied.

Mmmm...Are we talkin' with or without a side of E. Coli? If passing the glass shards and the mercury don't get you, there's always E. Coli roulette! :D

RED CARD! BLANTANT AND IRRESPONSIBLE DISREGARD OF THE SOURCE MATERIAL.

Don't you mean BIZARRO disregard?

I'm Bizzaro Stormy.

Most definitely can't be genetic, it wouldn't of survived the dozens or so generations it takes for a random mutation to become permanently part of our genome not to mention how homosexuality has arisen in nearly all genetically separated variants once social stability is established. The "but they were forced to have children" explanation doesn't work since this mutation would of happened at least a hundred thousand years ago, long before "society" or even complex language existed. Women have also out reproduced men at a ratio of five to one so a random mutation that lowered a males desire to win access to female reproduction rights would of been disastrous and squashed fairly quickly by natural selection.

This talks about it a bit, notable a huge bottleneck that appeared when "society" started that caused only one male to successfully reproduce for every seventeen females vs the typical four or five females for every male.

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/17-to-1-reproductive-success

http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.abstract

Since we can sequence the genome, Y chromosome DNA is representative of male reproduction while mitochondria DNA is representative of female reproduction. We can actually compare these numbers and nature was not kind to men, they lived short brutal lives and died at a much higher rate then females but those that survived and won the genetic lottery won it big.

The big ethical problem comes from who gets to decide what is and is not good? Only the wealthy would be able to afford it, which would give them an even better competitive advantage then they already have from generations of carefully controlled marriages. People would start choosing to have smarter, faster, stronger, taller and more competitive children which would create a secondary caste of non-genetically optimized children that could never compete. And that's without getting into the whole racial aspect of choosing your child's ethnic features.

Man, I love when an allegorical episode of Star Trek can pretty much sum up the entire conversation.

Plato's Stepchildren

I'm too tired to look up the proper names for things at the moment.

You're overlooking a couple of different things. If homosexuality is genetic, it will only tend to disappear from a population if the behaviors or other traits caused by the gene have a negative impact on the gene's ability to reproduce itself. It has been well established that there are genes which are beneficial to one sex, but detrimental to the other, in many species. If Gene A caused half of your male offspring to never reproduce, but causes your female offspring to have twice as many offspring, then it's not going to get weeded out.

The mechanism by which a gene can affect sexual reproduction and selection need not be limited to gross effects like medea genes. For example, look at kin altruism.

If a homosexual member of the population, in not having children, was a genetic dead end for the gene or gene complex that caused them to be homosexual, but, their lack of offspring, and then competition by their offspring, and by them for their offspring, for resources (food, living space, attention, whatever), caused an increase in those things for the offspring of the homosexual individual's siblings who carried the gene, but either as a recessive in one form or another, or in the form of a gene that only expresses itself and therefore causes homosexuality in a specific sex, and this increase in resources for the nieces and nephews of the homosexual individual caused a significant enough increase in their survival and ability to reproduce, this would propagate such a gene.

JBS Haldane has a somewhat famous quip about he'd die for two brothers, four cousins, or eight nephews, or something to the effect.

A problem people often face in coming to grasp with genes and their expression when affecting complex behavior is that what is good for the individual and what is good for the gene are not always the same thing. Just look at a mantis. Allowing your mate your eat your head is very bad for the individual, but that behavior causes the female with whom the male has just mated to have a massive increase in calories (and useful ones, too, since nothing contains exactly everything you need in nutrients like a healthy member of your own species), which leads to an increased number of offspring. So what is bad for the individual (dying) is good for the gene (which gets passed on in larger amount/to more descendants because of said death).

That's one example, and we could argue all day about whether that qualifies as a 'genetic' example, but the concept stands. DNA has only one purpose in life, and that is to make more DNA. And life has only one purpose, and that is to help DNA make more DNA.

So it's very likely that homosexuality very well could be a 'beneficial' mutation, in that your gay uncle who never had kids isn't going to compete as hard against his brothers and sisters for a job or other resources, because he won't have kids that will require those resources, and thus there will be more of those resources for his niece and nephews, and, in a species like Homo sapiens, your gay uncle will have no kids of his own to take care of, and can spend time looking after his nieces and nephews, and providing for them, which would increase their chances of survival, and, thusly, of reproducing, and, therefore, of passing said gene or gene complex, etc, on to another generation.

Consider also certain forms of bamboo. They will live for decades, without reproducing, and then suddenly they all reproduce all at the same time, and then all die off.

There is a belief that evolution is a constant arms race between parasite and host. Hosts tend to have significantly longer life spans than their parasites. This means that parasites can, in one generation of a host species, become extremely adapted to the dominant 'strain' of that species. Sexual reproduction scrambles the password, so to speak, and therefore, what was very good at killing one's parents's generation will likely not be so good at killing their children.

So you have a species of bamboo which lives for decades, during which time hundreds of generations of parasites of that species of bamboo can come and have gone. Then the bamboo all reproduce, all at once, which changes the mix of Ican'trememberthewordIwanttodescribehowimmuneresponseandparasitismthingyworks in the next generation, and then, on top of that, they parents all die off, so they are not competing with their children for resources.

Imagine if, as soon as one's children were all adults, humans were irresistibly compelled to kill themselves. It'd make the job market a lot better, wouldn't it? Real estate prices would go down, too. It might be a bad analogy, but such is life in the Red Queen zone. The worst competition comes from one's own species, and dying in furtherance of the propagation of one's own genes is great for the genes, but shitty for the individual.

And I'm very tired, and it's been a long time since I actually had to care about this stuff academically.

Which is why you should be very areful before saying things like this.


And none of that would of meant a damn thing 100,000 years ago when there was no communication, no society and your "resources" were what you could hold in your hands. Stop applying relatively modern constructs to proto-human existences, they are very much alien to each other.

Did you miss the four to five females reproducing for every one male part? A homosexual male child is an evolutionary disaster, that's four to five potential children gone. We are a species that, in our natural state, the men fiercely compete with each other for access to the females reproduction system. We form tribes and due to the females having hidden ovulation, the males do not know which children are theirs.

There never was a homosexual genetic mutation, only scenarios where males no longer need to fiercely compete with each other over scarce resources. When that happens, men can do whatever they want and that can include forgoing entirely the giant headache that is women and just seeking sexual pleasure with other like minded men.

Wasn't there a movie about this concept (kind of)?

Oh, sorry. I didn't know we had God here in this thread to give us absolute certainty with his vaunted Omniscience as to the existence, or lack thereof, of a thing.

While you're here, O Lord, could you please smite the unbelievers?

Good. The lizard men need to get theirs, eventually.


Well when you treat women like ***and refuse to even consider them as equals, what do you expect?

I don't know many viruses that enter though the skin (none which have been mentioned)so I dot know why you mentioned that. Unless this was your mistake.
Your/we are obviously talking about the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system.

So ill direct you here
Wiki took like 1 min to find.


Looks like your wrong. The innate activates the adaptive meaning the innate barriers are bypassed.


Who said nutrition is a cure on its own.
You basically agree here that the body is already capable and that nutrition is the fuel for it to do that job.
Essentially what we are saying is happening nowadays, starvation of the immune system, which is a problem.


Seen as most viral desease kill through complications through other means ; infection, pneumonia, etc. which is delt with by the innate system. Which makes nutrition two fold important.
Helping both systems as you've already agreed.
Which work in tandem with each other.

And when you can no longer debate you resort to personal attack and ridicule, nice.

Listen, I don't care what makes people feel happy or what they wish would of happened, I only care about the hard information. That information points to us being a very ugly, fiercely competitive species where the males fought over rights to the females. These competitions were not lethal and were more shows of force and ability to dominate each other. Females were passed around the tribe as the top male got his pick but would frequently be replaced by another male, who couldn't be sure which children were his and thus didn't kill them all off. We know this from genetic evidence. We weren't egalitarian, we weren't some gia worshiping super nice people. We were nasty, violent and brutish for the vast majority of our existence. A random genetic mutation that lowers reproduction rate of males simply wouldn't of survived long enough to become a permanent part of our genome, it would of been drowned out by all the other beneficial mutations that involve reproducing.

Now you can conjecture all you want, but I'll just view you the same as I do anti-vax boy up above. Merely someone values what they want to be true over what's likely to be true.

It seems like that article is weighing a little too heavily on wealth and only touches on the viability and success of Y Chromosome fertilization when factors like seasons and the availability of food. (I'm trying to find an article that uses the dust-up in Kosovo as a recent indicator at the moment.)

Not to mention, that the lifespan of the X and Y sperm can be dependent on the PH levels of the mother and how close the mother is to her date of ovulation. That Y is impatient, and will check out before the X if it's left twiddling its' thumbs.

EDIT: Looks like we're already going this route. :/

DOUBLE EDIT: Choo-choo! The typical Seavel thought train we've come to know and love (?) is leaving P&R Central Station. Is anyone surprised at this point?

New study founds eating is necessary for survival.

World in shock at the discovery.

Oh projecting much are we.

Everything I say is based on unbiased scientific evidence, hard evidence dealing with genetics, biology, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Did you know that human dimorphism is extremely internal? Male and female brains are different since before birth and develop differently. Male and female bodies have radically different levels of androgynous hormones. Homo sapiens males and females are specialized for different roles in the grant game called life. We just happened to develop higher order thinking recently which has some of us thinking we are different from the other animal species on the planet.

What you would call a "hate fact", I just call truth.

If homosexuality is genetic, the odds of it being due to a SNP are so incredibly low that we can safely disregard the possibility in its entirety. There is no specific allele that codes for "the gay", and we'll never be able to say someone is hetero- or homo-zygous for "the gay".

It is very well possible that there are multiple genes involved in the mechanics of sexual attraction. Actually, there most certainly are. Therefore, given that said genes exist, and, operating under the assumption that there is no single specific gene that says "I like redheads" anymore than there is one that says "I like to engage in penis fencing", we are face with the idea that, just as there are "degrees" of homosexuality, that is, homo-/hetero-sexuality is not a Boolean condition, but a spectrum along which one may find one's self (a la Kinsey), that what is most likely is that, should homosexuality have any genetic basis whatsoever, that there is more than one gene at play, and that, again, should there be a genetic basis, then it is the result of the interactions of multiple genes in concert, and that this could explain why there are are varying degrees of heterosexual and homosexual inclination.

However, nothing occurs in a vacuum. You can have all the tallest of the tall genes in the world, but a childhood of poor nutrition will never see you shoot up to eight feet. Sexual attraction is a complex thing, to say the least. There is a definite psychological component to sexual attraction (see: fetishists, and -philiacs), and any genetic predisposition towards a particular complex behavior pattern can be encouraged or discouraged via conditioning.

The simple fact of the matter is we do not know for sure whether it is biological, psychological, or both and in what ratio, and even then, said ratio could vary from person to person, population group to population group. The *only* people who will adamantly proclaim, with utter certainty, that it is either nature or nurture, are people with a political ideology to back here, and therefore I cannot trust them.

I personally do not give a damn whether or not homosexuality is nature, nurture, or some combination of the two, except in the same sort of vague disinterested interest I display in a great deal many other things. It would be interesting to know, but I doubt we will ever know with any great deal of certainty, and in any case, I don't particularly care. Furthermore, I don't give a damn if it's either all nature or all nurture (both of which I do not think are likely in any case), as I need seek no justification for either a prejudice against homosexuals that I don't have (and therefore do not require justification for), or to defend against such.

I do not give a bent penny for who touches naughty bits to other naughty bits as long as it is consensual, safe, and done responsibly. And please do not try to start an age of consent argument, as that is beyond the scope of this conversation. If you have a *** and you like ***, that's none of my goddamn business. Same for vagina on vagina. I don't think it is immoral or a sin. It does not affect me.

What does affect me is the constant *** petty bickering on both sides seeking to find some scientific justification for their own prejudice and preconceptions. It pisses me the *** off.

Not so much projecting, but I suppose, in a way, you're right.

People like you definitely exemplify how far we still have to go evolutionarily speaking. Clinging to facts from thousands of years ago as validation for your shitty behavior is pathetic. Yes, I understand that from an evolutionary standpoint, it's not that long ago.

But it's long enough that we (well, many of us, anyhow) have managed to develop a slightly more enlightened, even view of things beyond "Ooga booga, need to eat, need to stick *** in woman!"

You ended the debate when you asserted something as a fact which is, as a matter of fact, not a fact. You asserted it was a fact because you feel it to be true, not because it is true. And I am done arguing at you.