Science: Sperm, Homosexuality and Primordial Soup
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Especially it's right under the part about sperm.SharedProphet said:
...yeah, not going there.
On-topic, it'd be pretty awesome if they figured out how exactly plants do their quantum-trick, and ever more awesome if we had a way to replicate it. After all, today's solar cells might be a nice source of 'green' energy, but if you compare the amount of solar energy going in and the amount of electricity coming out, they're really inefficient. A 95% efficiency would give the usability of solar energy a huge boost.
Well, I'm not so certain that replicating the "Experiment" and creating new species would be a good idea. It's dangerous to tamper with things beyond our understanding. Even if we figure out how life started on Earth, we'd still be a long way from understanding life completely.Visulth said:
Nevertheless, I agree that figuring out how life started can only benefit us. How can we understand ourselves if we don't know how we began. Ideally, science is suppose to work from the ground up. You don't start with the results you want and work your way back. Until we figure out how life got started, scientific fields like biology will be working on assumptions which could lead to serious errors.
We don't even have to be searching for life as we know it. There's an entire subset of "Link [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile]Visulth said:
It doesn't split, it takes both paths. Simultaneously. I know it doesn't make sense, but that's quantum mechanics for you.f0re1gn said:
RE: fa'afafine survey experiment
Transexuality and homosexuality are quite different. The fa'afafine are transexual, men who identify at a young age as feminine. Furthermore, the fact that the fa'afafine are a cultural phenomenon with lots of cultural and societal behaviors attached to them. So I find the research and conclusions spurious at best.
Why not just survey gay men and women? We make up between 2-6% of the human population depending on what survey you believe. The rates are pretty constant across all societal, cultural, and geographic lines. You don't have to go to the jungles of an Asian country to survey homosexuals in their 'natural habitat'. You can just do a wide survey with a large sample size across the globe which will factor out any variation for cultural or societal factors to see if there's anything else in common with the way gay people are wired other than their sexual orientation -- my guess: no more so than people with black skin color or blonde hair.
Transexuality and homosexuality are quite different. The fa'afafine are transexual, men who identify at a young age as feminine. Furthermore, the fact that the fa'afafine are a cultural phenomenon with lots of cultural and societal behaviors attached to them. So I find the research and conclusions spurious at best.
Why not just survey gay men and women? We make up between 2-6% of the human population depending on what survey you believe. The rates are pretty constant across all societal, cultural, and geographic lines. You don't have to go to the jungles of an Asian country to survey homosexuals in their 'natural habitat'. You can just do a wide survey with a large sample size across the globe which will factor out any variation for cultural or societal factors to see if there's anything else in common with the way gay people are wired other than their sexual orientation -- my guess: no more so than people with black skin color or blonde hair.
Haven't heard of that Chimerism theory before, pretty interesting.Epoetker said:
It seems a little odd but I think he's closer to the right answer than most mainstream theories.
The mainstream concept is either genetics or environment. Environmental explinations have never made sense to me, the rate of homosexuality is remarkably constant across the world. Whether it's punnishible by death or a liberal sexually free society the difference in people who identify as gay doesn't vary a ton. Genetics is also a pretty poor explination because of the obvious natural selection angle.
I think it has a lot more to do with how the human gets constructed in the womb. Something happens when the brain is getting created and a wire gets crossed in the process. You can't change the way a brain is wired and there you go.
They actually bring up why they focused on Samoan fa'afafine in the study - Samoan families are very tight-knit and have extended families, whereas Western families tend to be more individualistic and homophobic. For a study focused on kin selection, they would naturally have more data/open mindedness in Samoa, but at the same time, it's hard to extend the study results to a broad selection of homosexual behavior.Whispering Death said:
There are no problems with it because it is HAWT.
Seriously, though, great article. I'm not sure what future researches will have to tell us about homosexuality, and I'd heard that theory before, but it seems more like a way for evolution to counterbalance the fact that the person is homosexual rather than an explanation of it, since all in all just having the children is a much simpler way to carry on your genes.
First life actually evolving from non-life sounds pretty awesome. Strange that nowadays scientists find life in those very vents and are all like 'wow, life can actually happen here!'
The quantum plants just shows nature is much weirder than we thought.
...so what, homosexuals are the suckers of evolution? Raising someone else's kids to pass on someone else's genes?
Don't forget that plants, like a vast majority of things in this universe follows the Fibonacci sequence. That is, 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc etc, plants especially with their petals, and flowers. That's why the center of flowers have these awesome spiral patterns.