JeanneAnne
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Posts posted by JeanneAnne
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carissabelle wrote:Yes thats what i been doing. But theres alot of numbers and i would like to know why my breasts move sideways instead of bouncing up and down.Any ideas what i could put in there?
Breasts moving sideways is sway. Moving up & down is bounce. Sounds like you have bounce set lower than sway. I've found that both need to be set pretty low - like in the vicinity of 15% - in order to not appear ridiculous. How many times they sway or bounce can be limited with the damping slider. Sounds like you should turn it up. Have you looked at how bouncy & swayie your butt is? I payed attention to my breasts & got them about right but neglected my butt. Had to go back & edit butt sway & bounce too.
Jeanne
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Mayalily wrote:... I love dancing... and I'd love to see more dance art here. I have choregraphed amazing dances to music in my dreams my whole life, and would love to find some more 'art of dance' here on SL. Something choregraphed and beautiful. SL seems to miss the 'art' of dance for me, yet I do have some dances that are well done.
I like to dance in SL too Mayalily. I always wear a dance chim above my head so I can dance anywhere. Some of the dance animations are pretty bad, and others aren't all that bad. The thing, though, that kinda bothers me is that the dances don't conform to the time signatures of the music. There may be waltzes, & things like that, but the avvies don't really move in 3/4 time to them, or if they're supposed to they don't conform to the tempo. What I'd like to see are dances that actually conform to the time signature & tempo of the song that's playing. It would be awesome if someone would script dance annies that would do that! Would probably just cause lag, tho... which is prolly why no1 seems to have done it.
Jeanne
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I've only recently passed my second month since discovering sl back in August. I certainly don't claim to have sampled all that sl has to offer but I do feel that I have sampled enough to have a pretty good idea of what sl is & what it is not.
To my mind, the two features that make sl worthwhile are the music and making friends. While the sound quality is often poor in sl, the variety of music is phenomonal and the best DJs stream thru Winamp so that I don't have to listen to the crappy inworld sound. (In fact, I often listen to my favorite DJs stream while dancing in a club, ignoring the music playing locally.) I have learned a lot about music in the past two months and have heard a lot of new (and old) stuff I almost certainly would not have heard outside sl.
I have met a lot of weirdos in sl and am already on my second boyfriend but I have also met some very cool people and made some amazing new friends. Most of the people who have befriended me are DJs or people I have met in clubs, or are people who share my Pagan beliefs. Already I call a handful of people dear friends and many others have made it onto my friends list who I would like to get to know better. It amazes me how many very intelligent and well educated people hang out in sl. I might've thought that it was only pervs & weirdos & kids who hang out in a "mere game" world like sl. While it's true that there are plenty of these types to be encountered, there are also some very interesting & good-hearted people to chat with and get to know, especially if one hangs out in the coolest jazz or blues or class rock clubs. I give thanks to all the people I've met so far, who have made sl interesting for me.
Some things that I originally thought might be of interest to me in sl have turned out to not be worth my time. Building and scripting, for example. When I first came to sl, I intended to learn to build so that I could build a shrine to Freyja, who I believe led me to sl. Towards this end I learned to bring an object into being, move, rotate and stretch it. I built a simple rectangular house, with a flat roof and all 90^o angles, but with interior walls and rectangular openings for doors and windows. I even changed the plywood texture to brick. Pretty basic, huh? But at least it was a start.
But then I discovered the Freyja Castle in Folkvangr, on the Lexicolo sim. It's gorgeous! The shrine to Freyja I had envisioned already exists! In fact, it would take me months or years of practice to ever create something so beautiful, granted that I'm even capable of learning to build so well. But the thing is, nearly every time I go to Folkvangr, the place is deserted. The same is true of so many other really well done & beautiful places in sl. So what would the point be in me building? It would take a long time for me to get good at it and even when I did, what's the use of adding one more nice place to sl, that no one frequents? I would rather spend my inworld time socializing than bother with mastering building.
The same is true of scripting. I took C++ in college & am familiar with html code. I've looked at the LSL and am convinced I could learn it. But why should I go to the trouble? People who already know how to script for sl provide scripts for things and friends give these to me for free or I acquire them in other ways. I don't need to join the ranks of these folks. It's too tedious. Once again, I'd rather send the time chatting & making friends.
One thing I am learning to do is DJ. For a variety of reasons (primarily hardware related) I'm not quite ready to start DJing yet. In the meantime, a friend has suggested that I serve as hostess for her when she DJs. I like to greet people but I can't really see myself gesturbating & saying "Show some Linden love" all the time. I don't really care about earning $L anyway and only want to DJ in order to share music. I don't even intend to put out a tip jar. In my opinion all the worst features of sl boil down to it being owned by a corporation that only cares about profit. I would like to see sl run by its residents as a Marxist utopia.
SLex is another thing that had an initial fascination for me but has already become boring. At best, it can be a mutual masturbation session for two people who like one another. But I seldom have the privacy for this, on my end. I still like to please my partner but there's only so many creative ways to fake orgasm while watching avatars hump repetitively. Last night while endeavoring to get my partner off all I could think about was how boring this is & how much I'd just like to log out & go to bed.
I've met vampires & Goreans & nekos & all sorts of rp stuff in sl. None of it interests me too much. I used to rp a fighting dinosaur in the now defunct Neoraptorics rpg and had fun doing so, so it's not that I'm averse to rp. It's just that I haven't seen anything in sl even that much fun. Or maybe it's just that I'm a bit older now. I see people with boats & motorcycles & helicoptors and I just don't get it. Why bother with such things when you can fly? Flying is actually one of my favorite things to do in sl. Same is true of weapons. What's the point of them when an avatar can't die?
These are just some of my thoughts about sl, from the perspective or a relative gnu bee. I will probably burn out on sl, perhaps long before several years are up. But for the time being, it's still fun. Maybe if you can just focus on the people you meet, the friends you make... you can still enjoy sl, even after all the time you've "wasted" inworld.
Jeanne
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Dillon Levenque wrote:... I think I might start a thread... that would let the people that know genetics and biology weigh in...
Would be a waste or time Dillon, because 1.) very few ppl who actually know genetics & biology read these fora, & 2.) the few who do don't care to waste their time.
Jeanne
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Dillon Levenque wrote:JeanneAnne wrote:Phenotype = (genetic component)(environmental component)(nonadditive genetic x environmental component)(dominance component)Phenotype includes behavior and is readily observable.All components are at least theoretically measurable altho can be problematic to measure in practice.Jeanne
Yes, that was sort of where I was going with my comment, which was offered mostly in jest. Almost everyone agrees that observable characteristics are a combination of environmental influence and genetic makeup. Almost nobody, it seems, agrees on exactly how much of each is involved in any particular case.With microorganisms or Drosophila raised in culture where precise crosses can be made over multiple generations, these components are readily quantifiable. Altho I wasn't explicit about this, I was referring more to organisms with long generation times and particularly to humans, to whom ethical considerations apply, when I said that these components can be problematic to measure in practice. In these cases, twins studies and comparisons to the mid-parent must be resorted to in order to arrive at approximate values for these components.
Jeanne
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Dillon Levenque wrote:I must say I had hoped the General Discussion Forum would be the place that Nature v Nurture would be settled once and for all, but it appears the debate will continue. :smileyhappy:
This question was settled ages ago:
Phenotype = (genetic component)(environmental component)(nonadditive genetic x environmental component)(dominance component)
Phenotype includes behavior and is readily observable. All components are at least theoretically measurable altho can be problematic to measure in practice. The equation can be rearranged to solve for the component in question. This is Chpt. 1 in any quantitative genetics text.
Jeanne
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Chelsea Malibu wrote:JeanneAnne wrote:Don't you suppose that the spammer is paying LL to tolerate their spamming? That would be my assumption. A corporation will do anything they can get away with for $$.Jeanne
No, I believe LL is doing a good job manually removing them however, this should not be a manual process as much. I actually feel bad for the moderators and many other LL employees who get all of our crap but cannot make the changes they need as they need to be approved by higher management.Isn't that the way it usually works? Those how make the decisions aren't the ones who have to live with them.Guess you're prolly rite Chelsea. I really dunno how it all works. Those who actually work 4 the Capitalist pigs r in a worse position than we are. We can always log off & decline 2 participate whereas they hav2 kiss a** if they wanna get paid. Must sukk ...
Jeanne
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Don't you suppose that the spammer is paying LL to tolerate their spamming? That would be my assumption. A corporation will do anything they can get away with for $$.
Jeanne
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I recently made a purchase from the marketplace and my $L were deducted & the product not delivered. I contacted the seller and she apologized and made sure I recieved my item. She said that the delivery failure was due to LL resetting their software, or something like that. So altho delivery of my purchase was delayed approx. 24 hrs, I still received it & no harm was done. I think that reputable sellers will be glad to make things right with you if you contact them and explain the situation politely.
Jeanne
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Yeah, well... Point out the obvious & be jumped all over by Capitalism apologists suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, aka "cohesion unto the oppressor." What's the point? Linden Lab is our corporate overlord and all they care about is profit. They're not going to pay any attention to what the users, players, residents, suckers or whatever they call us... have to say, unless it will make them more money. We can have a SL "Arab Spring" or "Occupy Wallstreet" if we want, and all that will accomplish is to get us banned. So why bother? Just enjoy SL, I say, and don't spend a cent of real money on it . Babylon the Great will fall... but until that day, just have fun!
Jeanne
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Ethanol is an interesting molecule. The hydroxyl end is hydrophilic, which is what allows etoh to be water soluble, while the aliphatic end is lipid soluble, allowing it to stick into the lipid bilayer of cell membranes, disrupting their integrity. Having a lotuv ethanol molecules stuck tail first into the plasmalemma of neurons is what being drunk IS. They interfer with the transmission of action potentials down the neuron.
This is why it's bs when she says, "..so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic "placebos" - we shed our inhibitions," and "The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol." What nonsense! I don't think she knows any basic chemistry or physiology at all.
As for ethnic differences in reaction to ethanol, different populations have different ratios of alleles coding for alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenanse enzymes in the liver. Different populations don't differ in how ethanol affects them but they do differ in the rate at which ethanol & ethanal are metabolized. Also, these enzymes are inducible, in that these alleles are expressed relative to the presence or absence of the substrates of the enzymes they code for. In other words, the more a person drinks the more rapidly they break down ethanol & ethanal to ethanoic acid, which then enters the Krebs cycle. Ethnic differences in reaction to ethanol consumption can be explained in terms of the relative prevalance of these alleles. Cultural considerations need not even be invoked.
But I have more than an academic interest in ethanol. I had trouble with the stuff, along with X, when I was younger, and this trouble delayed me finishing college. When my friends & I would go into Queens to party, it wasn't them who routinely became behaviorally disinhibited to the point of doing things I never would have dreamed of doing sober. It wasn't them who ended up lost & abused & at risk for HIV infection, on several occasions. It was always only me. The reason it was always only me, and not my friends, is due to the way my liver processes ethanol, which is all about genetics and has nothing to do with culture. If it was about culture then why did my friends, who are basically from the same culture, react so differently?
So when the author of this article says, "I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs - to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour," not only is she being stupid, but she is threatening the lives of young people. She patently has no idea what she is talking about and needs to just shut up before someone takes her seriously and kids get hurt because of it.
Jeanne
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Dana Dielli wrote:...But specifically addressing your concern about textures not rezzing, I had this very problem myself last week, and after investigation, found that my Phoenix Viewer (1.5.2.1185) had suddenly turned off "HTTP Get Textures" on it's own. (Advanced/Rendering/HTTP Get Textures)...
This is interesting because I've had the opposite problem. I've turned off HTTP textures in Firestorm, and found them turned back on again when I logged in the next time. I was told that this might be because having them on is the default and my viewer might revert to default after a crash or a forced logout after the program stopped responding. Dunno ...
Jeanne
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Thank you Ariel, Marianne & everyone. Just bought the Sexy Mama prim nails & can't wait to get get home, login & try them out!
Jeanne
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Dana Hickman wrote:JeanneAnne wrote:I turned HTTP textures off on both Viewer 2 and Firestorm. Then yesterday I noticed that the pattern on my blouse looked a little fuzzy so I checked again, and they were back on! I hadn't changed it. Do HTTP textures come back on after you've unclicked them, when you log back in (with Firestorm)? Or did I do something else inadvertantly to turn them back on?Thanks,Jeanne
I haven't seen this particular setting get reset, but I have seen similar ones that i know were unchecked become checked after a crash. I think some of them like to revert to their default state after a crash, or possibly a dodgy or incomplete logout, and i know http texture is ON by default in firestorm. Other than that I really can't say.I bet that's it Dana. Sometimes I crash & just call it an evening. Or I go to logout & get hung up & get a message that the program is not responding & if I end now, I will lose unsaved data. I click 'end now' anyway. I bet that when this happens
Firefox(edit: Firestorm, I meant) resets to default. I try to go home & put my avvie to bed or into meditation before logging out but this doesn't always happen.Jeanne
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I turned HTTP textures off on both Viewer 2 and Firestorm. Then yesterday I noticed that the pattern on my blouse looked a little fuzzy so I checked again, and they were back on! I hadn't changed it. Do HTTP textures come back on after you've unclicked them, when you log back in (with Firestorm)? Or did I do something else inadvertantly to turn them back on?
Thanks,
Jeanne
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I've been using glove layer painted nails & I'm not entirely satisfied with them. I've shied away from the prim nails because I understand that they have to be edited to fit. If anyone knows of any nice looking, inexpensive, easy to fit prim nails (yeah, right, huh?) I'd like to know.
Jeanne
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Void Singer wrote:My perspective is... looking backwards from the present, yours seems to be of the general flow, possibly from the past forward (feel free to correct any of that) ?
Yeah, I would say this is a fair statement, altho its a little more complicated than this, in that coalescent methods explicity look backwards from the present, but in general, what interests me, for the sake of this discussion, is tracing the one true genealogical or phylogenetic history of life here on the Ocean Planet; of how organisms are related to one another by descent from a common ancestor. All other aspects of an organism's biology are important and certainly worthy of study. It's just that those aspects aren't what concern me here.
This thread began with a discussion of "race." I think that the concensus among posters has been what whatever race may mean, it doesn't apply to humans in any biological sense. Some have argued that the concept applies in a cultural or self-identification sense. I really have no opinion about that. In the discussion of what race may mean, or even if it means anything at all, it was pointed out that any proposed racial groupings must necessarily be arbitrary. My point was that groupings such as "subspecies," "species," "genera," etc., are likewise arbitrary. This point was challenged and the example of canines was brought up. Dogs and wolves have recently been "officially" placed in the same species, but jackels & coyotes are still considered to belong to distinct species. I questioned the logic of this and Ishtara seemed to defend these distinctions on biogeographical, behavioral or ecological grounds. I concur that these groupings have geographical, behavioral & ecological differences between them, but should this be grounds for making taxonomical distinctions?
I believe not. Darwin was the first to propose that the only thing taxonomy should reflect is descent. I agree with Darwin. Darwin's view has been resisted and is still being resisted, as objections in this very thread attest. If coyotes and jackels, which are fully interfertile, are going to be regarded as separate species solely because they live on different continents and have behavioral & ecological differences between them, then may as well place Europeans & North Americans in different species. Why not, since the same (il)logic applies? Polar bears eat seals, are bigger & white, and live further north than Eurasian brown bears do, yet they are more closely related to Siberian populations of brown bears than Siberian brown bears are to brown bears from the Carpathians. Ishtara, if I read her right, would disregard genealogy and lump all brown bears into a species distinct from polar bears, based on shared range, morphology, behavioral & ecological considerations. This would render the brown bear species paraphyletic which Darwin and myself would object to.
I really don't care how people choose to categorize groups of organisms. All that concerns me is doing what Darwin said ought to be done, to whit: uncovering the one and only true historical pattern of phylogenetic descent. I could care less how this analog stream of information is then chopped up into arbitrary groupings. Of course, Darwin had no idea how to go about accomplishing the very task he called for. No one did, until Willi Hennig showed how it might be done in the 1960s. Even then, Hennig's methods were of little more than academic interest because the morphological characters he recommended using were hopelessly shot thru with homoplasy, and the math was intractable on the crude computers of his time. But times have changed. DNA sequencing has become reliable and cheap. Computer processors have become fast & powerful. Details, such as how to weigh transversions vs. transitions, or deal with long-branch attraction, etc., have been worked out. Today we actually can begin to make progress towards fulfilling Darwin's dream. My only argument is that those who don't understand modern molecular phylogenetics, or who object to purely cladistic taxonomy on philosophical grounds, or who think that taking considerations other than strictly genealogical ones into account only makes "common sense....." should just shut up & let professional systematists get on with the task Darwin set forth.
Sorry if these paragraphs are too long or too dense or fail to hold the reader's attention.
Jeanne
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>>coding loci define the current state of whatever critter you happen to be looking at, and define it's attributes... not only it's morphological features, but also it's breeding compatibility with any other critter you might look at. This makes it absolute importance to it's speciation.<<
Very true, Void. Transcribed loci have everything to do with development, morphology, metabolism, behavior, evolutionary ecology.... with what an organism IS. But all of this has nothing to do with phylogenetic analysis. In fact, these considerations obscure phylogenetic analysis precisely because coding loci are constrained by selection, by fitness considerations, by the necessity to promote adaptation to a given environment. These very constraints can very well result in homoplasy or convergence and the very essence of phylogenetic analysis resolves to sorting out homoplasy from homology.
>>now non-coding loci do carry a great deal of information about our ancestry... because they are much more susceptible to successful mutation making them more prone to... drift ...<<
Yes! This is exactly my point. Thank you for restating it. Because random mutations in nontranscribed loci are free to drift, i.e., aren't eliminated by selection, phylogenetic signal tend to be retained in noncoding loci whereas it may be lost or obfuscated in functional genes. Simple as that.
>>given those premises I can't agree with the statement that non-coding loci have more phylogenetic signal than coding loci...<<
Here you are contradicting what you just said in the paragraph above, or are drawing the exact opposite conclusion from what the facts suggest!
Thanks for debating these issues with me Void. Seems like you know some biology, perhaps even have a degree in it. I hope that the interest you show by the mere fact of your willingness to explore this topic with me, will lead you to learn more about molecular genetics & modern methods of phylogenetic reconstruction. Feel free to friend me inworld, if you would like...
Jeanne Anne Decosta
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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:As I pointed out in my last post, not everything can be neatly measured. Different species of Lycaedis butterflies or haplochromine cichlids are genetically identical for all we can tell, but they are still morphologically and behaviorally different. This means that DNA analyses only get us so far, and that we need to put equal or greater importance on the field observations of zoologists and ethologists. You think that all brown bear subspecies and even polar bears should be lumped together, but how do you explain the vastly different morphology and behavior of grizzly and polar bears? If they were different human populations, we'd attribute this to culture, but I don't think that this applies here. I'm pretty certain that if a polar bear cub was raised by a grizzly mother, it would still behave like a polar bear for the most part.I agree that the two chimpanzee species shouldn't be placed in their own genus. That really is an example of anthropocentric bias. But at the same time, this example shows that DNA sequencing is not the be-all end-all, because the same genetic 97-99% difference can be found between human males and femalesSeeing that the two human genders are a lot more alike than H. sapiens and P. (or H.) troglodytes, mere percentage differences tell us nothing about the impact that these differences have on the appearance and behavior of an animal.
I don't know much about butterflies, Ishtara, but I do know a thing or two about cichlids. If it's true that the myriad species of haplochromine cichlids in the African Great Lakes are genetically identical, how is it that Axel Meyer, Guillermo Ortiz, et al., have been able to derive robust phylograms, often with good bootstrap values, for them based on mitochondrial & nuclear sequence data? They aren't "genetically identical;" even individuals of the same ecotype occuring on the same rock outcropping in the same lake show some variation. But I get your point and will concede that the various ecomorphs demonstrate great genetic similarity relative to their rather considerable morpological and behavioral differences. Epigenetic mechanisms largely explain this discrepency. Subtle differences in the timing of transcription of a handful of critical loci during development can result in rather large phenotypic differences. I'm sure you know this. I have little problem with recognizing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of true and good species of haplochromine cichlid, since once an outcropping has become colonized, and the various ecomophs established, sexual selection (along with reinforcement) ensures that virtually no gene flow between ecomorphs - let alone between outcropping populations - occurs. Since the introduction of Lates into the Rift Lakes, however, all of these considerations have become moot.
Differences between the various populations of panarctic ursine bears are simply adaptations to the respective habitats of these populations. There isn't much morphological difference besides size (Kodiak bears eat a lot of salmon) and behavioral differences are largely learned. "I'm pretty certain that if a polar bear cub was raised by a grizzly mother, it would still behave like a polar bear for the most part." I disagree. It is unlikely that such a natural experiment would ever be observed in the wild, however, so our differing views on this are merely our own opinions.
There is more genetic difference between human males and human females, and between chimpanzee males and chimpanzee females, than there is between human and chimpanzee males, and human & chimp females. This is true simply because of the sheer size of the X chromosome. Think about this. If you limit what you say to the autosomes, then I agree with you. As I said in a previous post, however, I in no way advocate phenetic groupings, be they based on % genetic similarity, morphometrics, or any other invalid or obsolete form of numerical taxonomy. Sokal is dead.
Jeanne
Edited to insert: "(along with reinforcement)"
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Void Singer wrote:(general response: no target)"there lies, damn lies, and then statistics"percentage of a sequence means about diddly squat... seriously. all gene codings are not created equally, some have a larger role in differentiation than others. while I agree that there is some nonsense that goes on in classification, basing it on percentage of sequence in common is a faulty premise. but if anyone wants to go there then you may as well boil it down to all life as we know it sharing the same 4 base pairs, and then hey for fun, humanity is is beat out of the game by plants and fish that have 40 to 45 times the genetic material, maybe all topped by an amoeba....
Whether or not a particular locus plays a role in ontogeny is irrelevant to phylogenetic analysis. In fact, noncoding loci often carry more phylogenetic signal than do functional genes. This is because they are largely free of constraints imposed by selection and are free to mutate in random, but statistically perdictable, ways. Grouping organisms based on % sequence similarity is a phenetic method and is wholly outdated & invalid. I apologize if my post gave you the impression that I was advocating such a methodology but I was responding to Ishtara and assumed she would understand what I was saying. If you are interested in molecular phylogenetics Void, I would suggest you begin with Willi Hennig (1966) and follow the modern literature from there. Hillis & Moritz, 2nd edition, is a standard text & I highly recommend it. Thank you for your point about relative genome size! Protopterus, the African lungfish, has a genome 100x the size of Homo's. So not only are we highly derived sarcopterygian fish, we're genomically degenerate sarcopterygians compared to our less derived sisters.
Jeanne
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Dana Hickman wrote:However, what I noticed was that other avatars stayed gray for aloooooooooongtime. I hadn't typically had this problem before. Could unchecking HTTP textures cause a delay in me being able to see other avs as anything more than gray outlines for like 15 or 20 minutes? Did fixing one problem create a new one?Jeanne
The choice of using HTTP or UDP textures isnotpart of your account settings and it doesn't get carried over from one viewer to another. It's specific to each individual program you use to connect to the grid with. What you probably saw is Firestorm "cache sharing" with viewer2 and using some of its previously downloaded textures. They both use the same cache location by default IIRC, and thus the same downloaded textures that are already in it. The gray AVs I'm guessing was Firestorm still trying to use http to get the textures, combined with what sounds like could be primetime and busy sim symptoms, and not doing a very good job at it. You'll need to find and disable http textures in firestorm to make that work in firestorm.Thank you Dana.
This is very informative. Slowly but surely I'm beginning to see how sl works. I still have a lot to learn.Jeanne
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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:I'll go out on a limb and say that probably all mammals are interfertile within the same genus, unless there are major size differences that render hybridization physically impossible. Grizzlies frequently interbreed with kodiak bears and occasionally with polar bears...I also don't agree that our taxonomical categorization efforts are completely arbitrary. There are some debatable details, such as the genus Pan that should probably be merged with the genus Homo considering the close relationship between chimpanzees and humans, but the zoological taxonomy seems overall pretty sound to me. Especially when you look at the higher taxa. I mean, the class distinction between insects and mammals is clearly not completely arbitrary
I agree that humans have self-domesticated. My poorly expressed point was that we don't get to establish breeding standards for humans the way we do with domestic pets and livestock. Some people tried to do that in the past and it didn't end well. Humans are free to breed with whomever they want (more or less anyway. There are still irrational laws against interspecies romances).I only want to address some of your points Ishtara, so I took the liberty to cut up the quotes above.
With some mammalian genera, all species are completely interfertile in P1 and all subsequent crosses. The genus Canis is a familiar example of this. In other genera, Haldane's rule applies, as the genus Equus attests. In others, different species have different karyotypes and postgametic reproductive isolation renders hybrid zygotes inviable from the getgo. Probably in most cases, as with bears, a combination of these situations occurs. Grizzlies, Eurasian brown bears, Kodiak bears & polar bears are all completely interfertile and to my mind, should be considered the same species. However, grizzly x black bear crosses are almost always inviable and in the rare cases where hybrid offspring have obtained, they are infertile in the F1 generation.
All of this supports my contention that systematics & taxonomy is arbitrary. (Okay, not completely arbitrary, as your statement about the distinction between mammals & insects illustrates.) But on the levels of orders on down, at least, the way that humans categorize organisms is largely arbitrary. Molecular systematics & Hennigian algorithms have improved the situation somewhat, but not much. If Mayr's criterion of reproductive isolation applies to a given taxon, so much the better. But when it doesn't apply systematists just choose an alternative species concept to support their preconcieved notions about how to lump & exclude critters from the groups they invent. Why not include all canines in the same species? Why not kick black bears out of the genus Ursus? Oh, just cuz we don't want to do that, I guess. Invertebrates can share only 40% of their nucleotide sequences & be lumped in the same species. On the other hand, Homo & Pan shares ~98% of their sequence & are placed in different genera. Anthropocentric bias, anyone? May as well just say that you, me & all us tetrapods are nothing more than highly derived sarcopterygian fish, and be done with it. Cuz if you go much beyond this, it becomes a mere matter of opinion, not science. Darwin was justa bout the only biologist I know of who was honest about this.
Maybe we "don't get to establish breeding standards for humans the way we do with domestic pets and livestock" today, but people have imposed selective breeding on themselves for tens of millenia. Slaves have been selectively bred since far beyond the beginning of recorded history. But far more significant to the issue of artificial selection and domestication of humans has been the virtually universal practice of the family choosing or selecting or buying brides for their sons. Whether this cross-culturally ubiquitious practice has ended well for humanity or not, is a personal value judgement, but it has certainly largely determined who & what we are as a species today: the ultimate domesticated animal.
Jeanne
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>>There are many races of dogs, for example, but there is no subspecies called Canis lupus doberman or C. l. labrador, simply because there is no wild population of these domestic breeds. Let them out into wild, and before long, all those different races are history. You'd probably end up with something resembling Canis lupus dingo, which unlike dog races is a genuine subspecies by now.<<
Well Ishtara, I'm not even sure how to respond to this. Since all individuals of all "species" of the genus Canis are fully interfertile, as are their offspring, I'm not even sure how the concept of "species" applies to dogs, let alone subspecies & races. There's like, what? 20 some odd "species concepts" out there... Mayr's reproductive isolation concept being but one among them? How's that supposed to apply to canines, leta lone to clonal "species." With modern humans & Neandertals I'm not even sure this much is true. While there was limited introgression, current evidence suggests that most hybrids were sterile. Coyote x jackal hybrids apparently deserve to be considered the same species more than human x Neandertal hybrids do. Yet the "official" systematics don't reflect this. As with so many things, Darwin himself seems closest to being correct when he says that "species" (& by extension subspecies, races, & varieties) reflect whatever the person most familair w/ the taxon says it reflects. It's all just arbitrary anthropocentric categorization.
>>The fact that humans are not domestic animals...<<
Oh! I couldn't disagree with this sentiment more. Humans are the epitome of domesticated animal. In fact, "domestication" means nothing if not in terms of artificial selection, which humans have practiced on themselves LONG before every dreaming of practicing it on other species. Today, undomesticated humans are virtually extinct. Perhaps this is why you can imagine that humans are not domestic animals; because you are unfamiliar with undomesticated humans to compare those of us today with.
The bottom line on human "race" is that for there to be sucha thing as distinct human races, there'd need to be more variation between than within races. This is not the case. Hence, "race" as a concept that applies to humans is meaningless.
Jeanne
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Pussycat Catnap wrote:
And yes race is real... Its a culture thing. And it is a shared ancestry thing.Okay Pussycat, I'll buy that: It's a culture thing. But it isn't a biological thing, not with humans anyway.
Jeanne
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Why I Didn't Buy Your Dress
in Fashion
Posted
I recently purchased a fur jacket (the sleeves are detachable & I actually wear it as a vest) that is lined with spotted white cat fur. When I put it on I was surprised & delighted to discover that there is a mouse in the back pocket! Its head sticks out the top of the pocket and its tail sticks down thru a hole in the bottom. Whoever created a cat fur vest with a mouse in its rear pocket sure has a sense of humor! Had I been able to see the back of the vest before I bought it, I would have missed out on the surprise.
Jeanne