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Actually, most do (your brother notwithstanding). This is pretty established research. Even children who have been specifically guided into opposite gender roles, for variously awful reasons (e.g., accidental genital mutilation during circumcision), typically grow up feeling out of place and...

What, in your view, is usually intended by "conscious"? I was under the impression that consciousness referred to, well, phenomenal experience. Leaving the "conscious aspect" out of that doesn't make sense to me. I don't see how this leads to an infinite regress. As you say, what is mine is...

I don't think so. It would be a pretty gross oversimplification to say that one's entire conscious experience could ever be synonymous with an emotion, which is what the above would require. Even if I feel happy or angry, there are lots of other things going on phenomenologically for me beyond...

This is what I was going to point out. In my opinion, all this talk of chairs and axes has gotten us off on entirely the wrong foot from the very start. Considering chair-continuity is no more instructive to the question of self-continuity than it is to the questions of continuity of love...

Breeding, as a species concept criterion, is typically taken further to mean that the resultant offspring can in turn produce viable offspring (i.e., that they are not sterile). Thus, horses and donkeys can interbreed, but since the offspring of these encounters (mules) are sterile, horses and...

I'm a nutritionist. ;)

:facepalm: Should it be a herd of groups of elephants? A culture of aggregates of bacteria? A swarm of couples of bees? What do you think collectives are comprised of?

How the hell do you think natural selection works? It operates on collectives! In this case, it works on the collective of individual genes. It would make no sense at all for natural selection to operate on a single entity -- there would be no pool of alternatives from which to select! To...

Your ignorance is stunning. The theory does not predict that the fittest gene will always survive. It predicts that the fittest genes have a higher probability of surviving and propagating, and thus over huge stretches of time they tend to dominate the gene pool. Is this really the root of your...

No one says they have to be saved at all. If a beneficial gene gets grouped with a detrimental gene, well, shit happens. Too bad. Presumably the beneficial gene was not the only one of its kind in the gene pool -- but even if it was, that's also just too bad. You're once again displaying your...

What the hell? That's exactly what I'm saying! That's natural selection operating on genes in a nutshell. Nonsense. Crossing over only affects how genes get allocated. Crossing over is not equivalent to gene mutation. There are copies of genes. Most genetic material is copied without mutating...

I'll post it for the third time:

And now we're right back to where we were earlier, with you attacking the (didactic -- I said it! :runaway:) metaphor of a gene which is actively and consciously concerned with its own replication, and we pointing out that this is not a problem with the theory which the metaphor represents...

I misread your virus example as saying something else. Anyway I will repeat myself: what is the problem again? In this special case the descendant does not contain material which originated in the parent -- but so what? It's a copy of the parent (assuming mutations haven't occurred). For all...

I'm curious how you think reproduction would be possible without any transfer of genetic material from parent to offspring. Is a stork involved? In point of fact, a newly fertilized zygote contains one genome from each parent -- genomes which were physically manufactured inside the body of...

...are you asking if selfishness is defined in terms of itself? :wtf: Can I get a little clarification here?

She has elsewhere identified herself as a "nutritionist," which I am charitably assuming as being close to a dietitian. I feel embarrassed for having to step forward to say this for her, but I think it's important that readers aren't misled into believing that a professional biologist would have...

:runaway:

Who said anything about algorithms? Leave it to you to look up the wrong usage of the term heuristic.

Christ himself is facepalming right now.