Patrick Caldon
Posts: 68 Joined: April 2006
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Quote (VMartin @ Sep. 15 2007,00:20) | 1) Are ladybirds aposematic?
2) What was the coloration of the ladybirds ancestor? Was it dull, cryptic or bright, aposematic? |
Hi VM,
I vaguely remember pointing out to you the following: there is a difference between the statements "I do not know the answer to X" and "X is false".
I recall you agreeing.
In any event, I have no fricking idea why ladybugs have different colors. If you want to put 10-100 million dollars/euros/whatever towards a crack team of entymologists to work it all out, I'm sure someone can set up a big aviary and work out how to breed ladybugs, and sequence a hella-lotta ladybug genome and work out exactly, and come up with a reasonable answer for you, and provide employment for a few PI's and a great many grad students.
I'm reluctant to come up with the x million myself, because:
- I don't have it; - if I did I know you'd immediately just ask why the yellow-bellied glider had a yellow belly, whereas the sugar glider doesn't; and - there's many more useful charitable causes (even of a evolutionary nature) that the cash could be spent on, for instance in research into disease, or endangered species preservation, and indeed many grant bodies seem to share my biases.
So VM, given that you can't tell us whether man and ape has a common ancestor, can you at least answer this question (and save you, and me, and a bunch of charities several million dollars in the investigation of the Petaurus genus ...)
- Why do yellow bellied gliders have a yellow belly and sugar gliders do not?
Given that no-one has to my knowledge answered this question you would be providing a great contribution (on the level of a couple of Nature publications) if you could tell us the answer.
Or alternatively:
- Explain the coloration of ladybugs.
Again, this is millions of dollars of salaries and taxpayer expenditure which you can apparently click you fingers at.
I also recall a discussion about swans, and vaguely recall saying something along the above lines (i.e. no-one seems to have got a big grant for bazillions to study swan coloration) ... why are black swans black and white swans white?
Why are zebra stripey and horses not stripey?
Given your theory is so powerful, perhaps you could answer one of these questions without having a team of grad students wear themselves out over answering it?
Or maybe you could tell us whether humans and apes have a common ancestor. As it happens someone has bothered to study this question from a "Darwinian" perspective. Teams of graduate students have fought (and probably died) to give you an answer from the "Darwinian" point of view, unlike gliders, ladybugs, zebras and swans, where funding is a bit trickier.
If you could therefore explain human-ape ancestry from a VMartin point-of-view, and explain how the millions spent on human-ape evolution (and not spent on ladybug, marsupial glider, zebra/horse, and swan) have been wasted, you would do us all a great service, as our society will then not go on to waste millions of dollars and years of researcher-time on ladybugs etc.
So how about it VM? Now we've sequences a human and a chimp (unlike swans, ladybugs, zebra/horse and gliders - but if you want to fund this study I'm sure we can find you someone ...), what's your theory's view on human-ape ancestry?
It's not a hard question, and there's a lot of funding and research effort in this area (unlike just about every other species on the planet ... ) so an answer would be peachy.
How about it VM? Do humans and apes have a common ancestor? Why or why not?
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