Aren't must asians lactose intolerant, as their ancient ancestors never drank milk on a regular basis? Interestingly it was evolution that gave neolithic european and middle eastern peoples the ability to digest and process lactose as adults, a genetic mutation that soon became widespread.

But for asia, must be a difficult market to break into.

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

You survived the end of the world with your beautiful wife, ready to repopulate the glorious Earth! *club to the head. found footage of your corpse being eaten by mutants with a zombie desire for flesh but still believing they're human as they innocently mate with your wife and create a new branch of subhumans with two heads and tentacles. your corpse breeds a new type of bacteria from a pre-apocalypse strain that mutates and will one day rejoin with the offspring of your wife's mutant spawn, becoming the future mitochondria of a race of planet conquering horrors*

Yes, but you're talking about the religious people in the outside band with no antibiotic. They are mutating their philosophy into Intelligent Evolution in order to move into band 2. Therefore God intelligently designed evolution.

If band 1 with no antibiotic is Intelligent Design and band 2 is Intelligent Evolution, is band 3 Intelligent Abiogensis? God must be in the middle somewhere hiding in 1000x antibiotic land.

I wonder if / how often that same mutation occurs in Caucasians / Westerners... My mom goes very red after not much booze, and I do to a certain extent also.

Damn, now I have to go do some digging. I'd thought that De Staat was a video FX company. But are they a musical group instead?

And a quick check says yes, musical group, and quite an interesting one, with a good range of genres for such a young group.

And thus I find more mutations for my Pandora channel. Woohoo!

Tasmanian has had a very rough time with the Tassy Tiger also being hunted to extinction (kind of a marsupial wolf iirc) and, not to equate humans to animals, the Tasmanian Aboriginals also being wiped out due to small pox and other diseases from well meaning missionaries.

In the devils case, this seems to be an awful trick of evolution, as noted in the video, a single animal experienced a cell mutation which left it with a communicable cancer that is uniquely suited to transmit via the devils form of (anti)social interaction... = (

Terrorist attacks are more multifaceted.

First, they are an opportunity to generate work for the defense industry.

Second, they are usually for a reason. Often some angst over our own actions in foreign countries. For example, the news says AQ is a bunch of crazies that hate freedom, however AQs demands prior to 9/11 were to get our military out of the holyland. While that's not an offense that deserves blowing up buildings, it is definitely not the same as some banal excuse like hating freedom.

Thirdly, they are often perpetrated by some persons/groups that we had a hand in creating. We install the mujahedin in Afghanistan, knowing full well what they'll do to women, and then use their treatment of women as one excuse to later invade. Saddam worked for us, was egged on to fight Iran, was egged on to suppress insurgents (the 'own people he gassed'), and we later used his actions as one excuse to invade.

At the time, the mujaheddin was useful for fighting Russia as a proxy. At the time, Saddam was useful for perpetuating a war where we sold arms to both sides. Afterwards, they were useful for scaremongering so we could perpetuate war when otherwise things got too quiet and folks would ask about why we're spending big $$$ on defense.. (In the mean time hand-waving the much more direct 9/11 Saudi connection).

... Plus if on the off chance things do 'settle down' in areas we invade, that creates new markets for US companies to peddle their wares. You can reopen the Khyber pass for western land trade with Asia, you can build an oil pipeline, and you can prevent a euro based oil exchange from opening in the middle east. All things that benefit our industry.

So in practice, as far as big industry is concerned, there's a utility in 'fighting terrorism' (and perpetuating terrorism) that just doesn't exist with internal shootings. As such, unless another 'evil empire' shows up, the terrorism cow is gonna get milked for the foreseeable future.

Sure, there's a rhetoric about preventing terrorism, but our actions do nothing to that effect. It's just a statement that's useful in manufacturing consent.

There's a particular irony, though. That is, that while such behavior is 'not very nice' (to put it mildly), it does however provide for our security by keeping our armed forces exercised, prepared, and up to date - such that if a real threat were to emerge, our military would be ready at that time. While that seems unlikely, when you look back in history at previous major conflicts, most were precipitated rather quickly, on the order of months (it takes many years to design and build equipment for a military, and the first ~half a year of any major war has been fought with what was on hand). So in a round-about, rather evolutionary way, perpetuating threats actually does make us safer as a whole.

To clarify the word 'evolutionary' : Take 10 microbes. All 10 have no militant nature. None are made for combat. It only takes 1 to mutate and become belligerent in order to erase all the others from existence. If some others also mutate to be combative, they will survive. The non combative are lost, their reproductive lines cut off. As there's always a chance to mutate to anything at any time, eventually, there is a combative mutation. So, all life on earth has a militant nature at some layer of abstraction - those that exist are those that successfully resisted some force (or parried the force to its benefit. Like plants that use a plant eater's dung to fertilize the seeds of the eaten fruit).

The relationship holds true at a biological level, interpersonal, societal, national, and international level. Societies that allow the kind of educational and military development that leads to victory, are those that have dominated the planet socially and economically. For example, Europe's centuries of infighting made it resistant to invasions from the Mongols, Caliphates, etc, and ultimately led to the age of colonialism. For the strengths built with infighting, are later leveraged for expansion. As such, the use of "terrorism" to perpetuate conflict, is ultimately an exercise in developing strength that can later be leveraged.

Our national policy is largely developed in think tanks, and those organizations are planning lifetimes ahead. So these kinds of considerations are very relevant.

TL/DR : Yes, agreed, the terrorism thing is B.S. on many levels.

-scheherazade

Everyone loves boobs. Even if you think you don't, chances are you'd suck on one (and then the other) to save your life.

Unless you like death, or you're an adult and you lack the European genetic mutation possible to digest lactose (Thank you post-ice age Poland!): http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1.13471

Fuck the sun gods! Worship the cowgod! Glorify thy holy mountains.

How did he get up there?

It must be some form or telepotation mutation.

In the field of artificial intelligence, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural selection. This heuristic (also sometimes called a metaheuristic) is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems.[1] Genetic algorithms belong to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA), which generate solutions to optimization problems using techniques inspired by natural evolution, such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover.

I direct your attention to the first sentence. In the field of AI, in other words, an artificially created intelligence. Now even if you go to the the idea Turing had that a computer could learn and adapt itself to the point of AI, it is a device that had to be created by an outside designer at some point. It didn't just manifest, it was created and reached AI level, then it could at that point begin to try to 'imitate' natural selection.

It has become clear to me over our last couple of discussions that you are incredibly reluctant to think outside of the box YOU have created for yourself. You believe what you believe and damn the torpedoes with the rest.

I'm looking forward to .gif memes of this mutating and spreading far and wide all over the internet until every single human being has seen his fucking head explode in some funny way or another. Good luck stopping that Kim.

I'm late back to this party and iI don't have time to properly address all the points you make so I'll just stick to this one.

The ancestry of living beings isn't just traceable through the fossil record. The study of genetics shows us a huge and utterly overwhelming amount of evidence for the common ancestor idea. Common genes can be traced back to show the lineage of different animals and plants and groups of animals and plants.

There really is a lot of very good peer reviewed scientific evidence.

Darwin may well have taken a leap of faith but it is one which has now been backed up with a huge amount of evidence. Evolution is not open for questioning any more than gravity is. It's a very simple process which can even be seen happening around us.

Ring species show that small changes can indeed lead to separate species. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are evolution in progress. You say that just because small changes can be seen it doesn't follow that big changes can evolve but that's stupid. Big changes are just a series of connected little changes.

That said mutations can be big as well as small. We've all seen photos of two headed snakes for example. That happens to be a detrimental change, but if a large change occurred that happened to be beneficial and the individual survived to breed then a large change could occur very quickly. Remember these are chance occurrences, there's no intelligence driving evolution, it's just a simple process of random mutation and natural selection.

If you accept that genes can mutate randomly (something which is known to be fact and can be shown happening) and that natural selection occurs (again something which can be shown happening) then there really isn't anything more to be said. Those two processes, given a lot of time can change an animal or plant dramatically. And time is something life has had a lot of. Even the cambrian explosion you mentioned happened over 20 million years or so.

This is evolution. There's nothing complex about the process, there really isn't. There's no way that mutations and natural selection can fit together in any way that isn't evolution.

say hello to the next dominate species on the planet!
pack your bags kids because we are going bye-bye,just another failed mutation on the evolutionary ladder that couldn't pull its head from it's own ass.

Funniest looking dog I ever saw was a Whippet with that mutation.