What I was saying is that humans are the only living member of the Homo family
So was the claim "Humans are the only single species mammal" simply a claim that humans are the only mammal with their own genus? That's certainly not true, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Monotypic_mammal_genera
The reproductive isolation can be genetic, or it can be simply geographical or habitual.
This is probably not relevant to our point, but Futuyma (2005) Evolution p356 defines reproductive isolation as "reduction or prevention of gene flow b...
Could you direct me to the comparative analysis of Mammalian reproductive systems that discusses hermaphrodites in other species?
What I meant was that we can think about other mammals ourselves, and note that no other mammal species has hermaphrodites at significant frequencies. I had no specific research in mind.
there would be a decent size population of hermaphrodites able to develop a stable social station; if there were a stable hermaphrodite community their genes would spread
This depends both on a genetic cause, and also on hermaphrodites havin...
Yes, that seems reasonable. There are four biologically possible scenarios I can think of to explain the numbers:
intentional out breeding [elimination] of more sexes
A comparative analysis of Mammalia shows this to be extremely doubtful, unless you think that only humans have these extra sexes. In all mammals the vast bulk of individuals can be cleanly assigned to male or female without ambiguity, and no such intentional elimination was required. [Note "outbreeding" means something else.]
You have to look at quite distantly related species before hermaphrodites show up at interesting frequencies. Certainly some fish can be hermaphrodite.
I might come, though there's a conflicting Starcraft 2 tournament...
[Edit] But since I failed to qualify in a satelite tournament, I shall attend the LW meeting.
I've noticed lately a lot of websites seem to use some bizarre font that looks awful. But since they keep doing it, I'm beginning to wonder if it's just me that sees it looking awful. Does it look like this for anyone else?
Which is the case?
Your initial read off your calculator tells you with 99% certainty.
Now Omega comes in and asks you to consider the opposite case. It matters how Omega decided what to say to you. If Omega was always going to contradict your calculator, then what Omega says offers no new information. But if Omega essentially had its own calculator, and was always going to tell you the result even if it didn't contradict yours, then the probabilities become 50%.
Ignoring Bostrom's book on how to deal with observer selection effects (did Omega go looking for a Wrong Calculator world and report it? Did Omega go looking for an Odd World to report to you? Did Omega pick at random from all possible worlds? Did Omega roll a four-sided die to determine which world to report?)
Actually, isn't this the very heart of the matter? In my other comment here I assumed Omega would always ask what the correct answer is if the calculator shows The Other Result; if that's not the case everything changes.
I'm not following you.
Imagine this scenario happens 10000 times, with different formulae.
In 9900 of those cases, the calculator says , and Omega asks what the answer is if the calculator says .
In 100 of those cases, the calculator says , and Omega asks what the answer is if the calculator says .
So you are more likely to be in the first scenario.
Statistically, there's nothing wrong with the null hypothesis being p=0.9. It's probably not a test you would see very often in practice because usually there is nothing interesting about p=0.9. But if you wanted to test whether or not p=0.9 for some reason - any reason, setting the null hypothesis as p=0.9 is a perfectly valid (frequentist) way of doing it.
being convinced you deserve something that it's totally unreasonable (socially) for you to be granted
There's some sort of ambiguity in the word "deserve". I would say that every harmless person deserves to be loved, or deserves an enjoyable job, but that doesn't mean anyone owes anyone anything. The world is the way it is.
I wonder if Eliezer has or should read this review of Ender's Game (a book I never read myself, but the reviewer seems to provide a useful warning to authors).
This fact though -- that monkeys are paraphyletic -- argues in favour of (not against) the view that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was itself monkey-like...
If you think about when the "ape traits" must have evolved, it would be after the new-world monkeys had already diverged away. The common ancestor of monkeys and apes wouldn't have had them, but must have had those traits common to both old and new-world monkeys. It itself has to be basically a monkey.
(I drew out a phylogenetic tree for this but couldn't get it to format, alas...)