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Ekuran Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
#551: Jan 29th 2016 at 8:09:36 PM

Because it's a combination of great brain structure and relative size, which should be obvious.

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#552: Jan 29th 2016 at 8:21:45 PM

Yeah I'd assume that there's a minimum size required for any smarts.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#553: Jan 30th 2016 at 1:27:47 AM

Sentience/Sapience is not just a function of brain size. A bigger animal will need a bigger brain anyway to run a larger body.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#554: Jan 30th 2016 at 4:05:47 AM

Yes, complexity of brain structure is more important than brain size when it comes to developing sapience.

... No feedback on my last question?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Eriorguez Since: Jun, 2009
#555: Jan 30th 2016 at 10:30:02 AM

They wouldn't be humans as they aren't descendants of the last common ancestor of humans, if you want to go pedantic.

Also, personally, Human Aliens is a trope I despise, so I cannot really make a decent critique on something based on such a concept. And Prometheus did it as well.

rmctagg09 The Wanderer from Brooklyn, NY (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: I won't say I'm in love
The Wanderer
#556: Feb 1st 2016 at 12:25:27 AM

Laboratory-bred corals reproduce in the wild: "Researchers have, for the first time, successfully raised laboratory-bred colonies of a threatened Caribbean coral species to sexual maturity. Due to its large size and branching shape, elkhorn corals created vast forests in shallow reef waters that protect shores from incoming storms and provide a critical habitat for a myriad of other reef organisms, including ecologically and economically important fish species. An estimated 80% of all Caribbean corals have disappeared over the last four decades and repopulating degraded reefs has since become a management priority throughout the Caribbean region. The elkhorn coral was one of the species whose decline was so severe that it was one of the first coral species to be listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species act in 2006."

Male mice without any Y chromosome genes can father offspring after assisted reproduction: "Live mouse progeny can be generated with assisted reproduction using germ cells from males without any Y chromosome genes. In these males, the two Y genes previously demonstrated to be essential for the development of testes and male gametes were replaced with their homologues encoded on other chromosomes."

Ancient extinction of giant Australian bird points to humans: "The first direct evidence that humans played a substantial role in the extinction of the huge, wondrous beasts inhabiting Australia some 50,000 years ago — in this case a 500-pound bird — has been discovered research team."

Snake-hunting secretary birds use the force of five times their body weight to stamp on and kill their prey: "A team of scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London, the Royal Veterinary College and the Hawk Conservancy Trust have discovered Secretary Birds can kick with 195 Newtons, which is equivalent to five times their own body weight, when they attack and kill their prey. And the contact time between the bird's feet and the snake is delivered extremely quickly - on average just 15 milliseconds."

Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#557: Feb 2nd 2016 at 9:44:21 AM

Say, I think I have an even better question: What would taxonomists do if we discovered a planet with life thriving on it, and due to the environmental conditions being similar to Earth's own, the general categories of life are also just as similar (i.e. clearly divided into animals, plants, fungi, protists, and so on so forth)? For example, would they classify the animal-type lifeforms under Kindgom Animalia, or would they invent a whole new taxon for them?

edited 2nd Feb '16 9:44:55 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#558: Feb 2nd 2016 at 10:19:34 AM

Nothing, I suspect. Chances that we can make taxonomy from interstellar distances are fairly low. It needs some minimum amount of data.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#559: Feb 2nd 2016 at 10:23:49 AM

Well, on a different note... Why has cladistics become the rage in taxonomy in the last decade or so? What's with the fixation on reorganizing the taxons so that all groupings follow lines of (supposed) common descent?

edited 2nd Feb '16 10:24:07 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#560: Feb 2nd 2016 at 10:27:28 AM

Dislike of random groupings and with the idea to make taxonomy usable as a genealogical tree.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#561: Feb 2nd 2016 at 10:44:57 AM

... How is grouping species by common biological characteristics "random"?

Oh, and apparently there are three methodologies for taxonomy that are competing against each other: cladistics and phenetics at opposite ends of the spectrum, and evolutionary taxonomy as an attempt to compromise between the two. How is the latter faring?

edited 2nd Feb '16 11:09:43 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#562: Feb 2nd 2016 at 11:21:53 AM

I dunno. Taxonomy is one of these aspects of biology I don't care about.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
CassidyTheDevil Since: Jan, 2013
#563: Feb 12th 2016 at 9:58:59 PM

12-Year-Old Shreya Darji Has An Ant Colony Living In Her Head, And Doctors Are Clueless About How To Stop It

Normally when someone says they have an ant problem, they mean ants have infested their home, not their head. The latter is actually true in the case of Shreya Darji, 12.

Hundreds of ants continue to live inside the girl’s head, with about a dozen or so emerging from her ears every day, according to the Toronto Sun. The Deesa, Gujarat girl complained of ear pain last August, and doctors discovered she had a colony inside her head. They have repeatedly pulled the creatures, dead and alive, from her ears, but the ants continue to reproduce and occupy their space in Darji’s head.

Doctors have tried flushing her ears with antiseptic to drown the ants, and have tried several times to locate and kill the queen ant with laparoscopic cameras. Darji has even seen witch doctors, but nothing seems to help — the ants keep reproducing, the Sun reported.

“The girl’s case is very challenging for me, as I have never seen such a case, nor found it in medical history,” Dr. Jawahar Talsania told the Times of India. “The big ants must be biting her, but the girl did not feel pain inside her ears. Besides, there was no damage inside her ear.”

Darji is currently under video surveillance in an Ahmedabad medical unit.

Holy fucking shit.

MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#564: Feb 13th 2016 at 6:40:34 AM

O_o Reminds me of the story of that one Mesopotamian king who mocked the prophet Abraham, only for God to curse him to have a mosquito/fly more or less inhabit his head (via the ear), forcing the man to regularly resort to having someone bash his head in order to temporarily silence the bug when it becomes too unbearably noisy.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
rmctagg09 The Wanderer from Brooklyn, NY (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: I won't say I'm in love
The Wanderer
#566: Feb 25th 2016 at 1:46:41 AM

Humans speeding up evolution by causing extinction of ‘younger’ species: "Just three years after crayfish were introduced to a B.C. lake, two species of fish that had existed in the lake for thousands of years were suddenly extinct. But it's what took their place that has scientists fascinated.

New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed it in Enos Lake on Vancouver Island where two similar species of threespine stickleback fish disappeared within three years."

Genomic evidence sheds new light on our understanding of spider evolution: "After a burst of work in the 1980s, it was believed that science had a sound understanding of the evolution of spiders. However, in a new study employing cutting edge bioinformatics and next generation sequencing techniques, scientists have reconstructed the spider 'tree of life' to come to intriguing new conclusions about the evolution of the web, something which has important implications for the overall story of spider evolution."

Dodos might have been quite intelligent, new research finds: "New research suggests that the dodo, an extinct bird whose name has entered popular culture as a symbol of stupidity, was actually fairly smart. The work finds that the overall size of the dodo's brain in relation to its body was on par with its closest living relatives: pigeons — birds whose ability to be trained implies a moderate level of intelligence. The researchers also discovered that the dodo likely had an enhanced sense of smell."

Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.
rmctagg09 The Wanderer from Brooklyn, NY (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: I won't say I'm in love
The Wanderer
#567: Mar 26th 2016 at 12:01:49 AM

First evidence found that 'cryptic female choice' is adaptive: "Researchers studying chinook salmon have provided the first evidence that 'cryptic female choice' (CFC) enhances fertilization success and embryo survival. Cryptic female choice involves females using physical or chemical mechanisms to control which male fertilizes their eggs after mating, and is known to occur in a number of species."

Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#568: Apr 11th 2016 at 3:37:23 PM

A question that keeps bugging me: Why would you use the word "irregularis" in a species' binomial name? How do you determine that a species is so "unusual"/"irregular" compared to sister taxa within the same genus that it merits using irregularis as the specific epithet?

Examples: the variable burrowing asp (Atractaspis irregularis) and Viper's Bugloss (Hadena irregularis), both of which have a lot of sister species that are named after a person (almost certainly the species' discoverer), a location, or what is obviously a distinctive phenotypic trait (e.g. reticulata, or "reticulated").

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Eriorguez Since: Jun, 2009
#569: Apr 11th 2016 at 3:48:45 PM

Because they felt like it when erecting the species. Don't try to understand it, sometimes the choices don't make much sense.

MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#570: Apr 11th 2016 at 5:48:06 PM

Well, at least this one grasshopper species' article actually gave an explanation for this one case: It's because it "indicates the diversity of colour within this species".

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#571: Apr 30th 2016 at 12:36:45 PM

Say, when comparing the genomes of two closely related species (e.g. their parent genera are sister taxons), would it be accurate to describe a high degree of similarity between them by saying that "X% of the two species' genomes are effectively identical"?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Eriorguez Since: Jun, 2009
#572: Apr 30th 2016 at 6:33:12 PM

[up][up] Ethymology is a thing. But it is used to explain the choice, and it doesn't follow any rule other that standard lack of repeats and not naming anything after yourself.

Also, what do you mean by "identical genomes"? You know, genomes HAVE to have variety even within the same population. Most of the comparative sequence stuff is done with stable genes that have the same selective pressure across the different analyzed species (so, metabolic enzymes most of the time).

And, would you be accounting for introns and exons, the different relative intraspecific diversity and that kind of stuff? Because boiling it down to a number is not helpful.

Oh, and treating primitive and derived characters as if they were the same is always a terrible idea.

MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#573: May 1st 2016 at 4:13:20 AM

I mean just like how the Neanderthal genome project revealed that the Neanderthal genome was over 99% "identical" to the modern human genome (compared to chimpanzees being 98% to 94%).

edited 1st May '16 4:14:00 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Eriorguez Since: Jun, 2009
#574: May 1st 2016 at 12:15:28 PM

It makes an attractive headline, but at the end it is meaningless.

Nerevarine Since: Mar, 2016
#575: May 1st 2016 at 12:37:13 PM

We covered this in my intro genetics class only a couple of weeks ago, so my knowledge on it isn't complete.

However, you actually can compute genetic similarity. If you take a stretch of DNA (let's say 100 amino acids) of one species and compare it to another, you can determine how genetically different the two species are. So when a study says that chimpanzees are 98% genetically different, that means 98 out of 100 amino acids between humans and chimpanzees are the same on average (assuming we're talking 100 amino acids studied). Some more detailed phylogenetic charts will even use these statistics to calculate horizontal branch length as a visual indicator for genetic similarity.

I imagine things get much more complicated when you go further in and there are probably other and maybe better techniques, but that's the gist of it to my understanding.


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