One the current problems with current populations genetics is the assumption of a bean bag model for traits where traits have no affect on each other. This makes sense of alot of reasons and in a simple organism,it could be true. But in complex organisms like human beings we have so many genes that they're bound to create some very complex and convoluted feedback loops. Now if throw in the environment too we get some really insane issues with casaulity in an already complex system that could be made even more complicated. Factor in epigenetic change and things could get very dicey vis a vis predictability.

As someone who didn't major in biology and found out all he knew about evolution on his own I think the biggest problem I see with way evolution is presented is that most people (even people who are very knowledgable in evolutionary theory) don't really present good facts or even theories. To really understand evolution you have to be able to have some grasp molecular markers,rates of genetic change and even viruses and evolution in general.  
 
These sorts of topics just aren't covered well by many evolutionary texts. Think about if you can explain molecular markers and how intrinsic rates of genetic change can be correlated with phenotype changes you can explain speciation right there to anybody. It's hard to argue that genes don't change by themselves and that after a while you're going naturally get speciation between two different population groups, assuming isolation and enough time. 
 
The material on viruses is even crazier. Read Luis Villareal's book: 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Viruses-Evolution-Life/dp/1555813097/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256178732&sr=8-6 
 
There is so much great material out there but some of it so obscure and abstract that I think even specialists aren't aware of it. Most people in the general public will NEVER take the time to delve into evolution in such a detailed way. That's why creationism exists, people are lazy and want easy answers.

I think the implicit question that everyone needs to ask is this: do markets price things properly? That may sound like an easy question but it's underlying assumption that underlies all economic pricing.  
 
For example during the bubble days a few years ago the average median house price in California was $450,000. I think everyone implicitly believed that a house was worth that much. If not no one would have bought a house, because no rational investor will buy something if believes the prices will come down substantially. 
 
I haven't read Minsky, but the secondary accounts emphasize his point that debt acquired for productive investments is ok, but debt acquired to buy assets with the intent of flipping them is a Bad Thing.  
 
This is where ecology and economics in theory converge. One of the unstated assumptions of both is that systems tend to converge towards some sort of equillibrium state. However as a believer of the Medea Hypothesis: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ward_(paleontologist) 
 
I believe life is inherently self destructive we only have to look at the "oxygen holocaust" that occurred because the first life on earth produced oxygen,a substance that was poisonous to those organisms but which allowed higher life to flourish. Or own produced of C02, incidently the ideas for curbing global warming by spraying sulfer particles in the air strike me as really dumb and probably even worse than global warming. 
 
Economic systems are very similar in the fact that stable systems lead to ever increasing levels of instability. In this case it's investors who invest with a false sense of security, which is my read on Minsky. All economic systems eventually evolve into systems of "Ponzi Finance". What a great name it describes our credit system to a tee.  
 
Of course if you really want to get crazy with this analysis there is another great book on economics written by a religion professor called. Confidence Games about how the markets are really based on faith: 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Games-Redemption-Religion-Postmodernism/dp/0226791688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250880709&sr=8-1 
 
The author doesn't come out and say it but he infers that all markets function because of faith. Once that faith is lost things go to hell in a handbasket. From a GNXP point of view this is more evolutionary psychology than biology.  
 
As far as mathematical modeling is concerned Nicholas Taleb wrote some great stuff on it: 
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=nicholas+taleb 
In his lay books he believes that most models make an assumption that most distributions are gaussian when in fact they are not. He believes in "fat tails" or black swans. Hence the title of his one book. The
More....

Someone has actually come up with an economic theory on why we have price bubbles: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_Minsky 
 
Minsky believed that stability bred complacency in financial systems and that this encouraged borrowers and lenders to become ever more reckless. 
Minsky's Actual Paper (PDF form) 
 
http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp74.pdf 
 
Another author also wrote something about economic bubbles: 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Dollar-Crisis-Causes-Consequences-Cures/dp/0470821027 
 
Duncan that the dollar acted like steroids for economies running large trade surpluses with the US and believe this led to hyperlending and the Asian currency crisis of 1997 
 
Last but not least there is too big to fail: 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Too-Big-Fail-Hazards-Bailouts/dp/081570304X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250767678&sr=1-1 
 
The author of this book believes that financial institutions are inherently reckless because of government guarantees that underwrite reckless behaviour. 
 
Yes I did get a degree in economics but I didn't read any of the aforementioned texts for school and hardly covered any of the issues that the authors raised in my classes.

Nevermind, found it. After adjusting for deaths due to car accidents and violence, America has the highest life expectancy. Interesting. 
 
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20061017_OhsfeldtSchneiderPresentation.pdf

America is a much more violent society, with violence usually affecting the youth. That affects life expectancy a bit. How much does that affect this outcome?

I am of a similar position to Hyperbole's. 
 
The idea that you expressed at the end of your monologue sounds exactly like the foundation for Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

Its hard to believe that such intelligent people can make such stupid decisions. You guys all deserve Darwin Awards. Voting for Obama or McCain is a vote for the same system that got us into this mess. 
 
Both candidates refused to talk about the economy for the first debate and simply fail to acknowledge the obvious fact that the US is broke on a corporate as well as a governmental level. Not to mention all the over indebted consumers! 
 
I'm not going to waste my vote this year and continue the system of failure I'm going to vote for a third party candidate. 
 
Of course most people would say "don't waste your vote." My answer is an obvious one "don't waste yours by voting for these jackasses in COngress who screwed things up." 
 
As Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said about the financial crisis ,"We don't know what to do." 
 
Voting for Obama or Mc Cain is like asking yourself is it better to be shot or hung? I would argue neither, that's its better to ask for clemency no matter how unlikely it is.

I think the Republican and Democratic primaries are very different contests.  
 
The Democrats are looking for someone who take their party to the whitehouse and kick ***. 
 
From what I see of the Republican primary I think there seems to be more of a desire to push the status quo. John Mc Cain aka George Bush part III. 
 
In addition there is another force at work in the Republican primary. It seems that the conservatives are truly divided between Huckabee and Romney. 
 
Romney is strong where Huckabee is weak and vice a versa, at least as far as convservatives are concerned. 
 
Huckabee is very strongly pro gun, Romney is weak on gun owners rights. 
 
Romney is a moderate on immigration, HUckabee supports amnesty. 
 
The Republican primary is actually a pretty good evolutionary model on how a "generalist" (Mc Cain) could out ahead of the "specialists" (Romney and Huckabee). 
 
However if economic circumstances were more dire I think Ron Paul would really come out ahead. The more radical the situation the more radical the perceived questions would be. 
 
This whole primary process is at the heart of evolution and near and another example of a dynamic system in play.

Mencius is right but really, what other words are there? Congratulations to all of you.

The idea that disease is good is an extrapolatin of an absurd model used in economics, called the Solow Model. 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exogenous_growth_model 
 
What it implies is that if population growth were lower per lower per a given savings rate the output per worker would be higher since there would be more capital availber per worker. 
 
Implying higher productivity. Of course these models fail to take into to account the fact that industrialized countries also have "paygo" social welfare systems and "medical systems" that require taxes from workers to support retirees. 
 
Or the fact that retirees need to be supported. 
 
So although in theory developing countries with high population growth rates are at a disadvantage versus industrialized country they do have more workers per retiree, also life expectancy is lower so even if you do collect retirement benefits chances are you probably wouldn't use them as long as someone in an industrialized country. 
 
However back to Solow's model I think its highly flawed for this very reason. Although I don't think it would be too difficulto add some sort of stochastic to adjust for aging. 
 
A population's average age is related to its fertility or "growth rate". The higher the growth rate the lower the average age, this would be an easy variable to add back into the model to account for a population "aging". 
 
In effecting aging might be modeled as a variation of frequency dependent selection, although my math skills suck, this definitely looks very similar to that.

Is the production of coins really a marker of the health of civilisation? Inflation is usually seen as an indicator of trouble, the state struggling to finance itself through its usual taxation system (note: I'm not as monetarist as that sounds, but my doubtless ignorant caricature of classicists' heuristics on economics assumes this). I'd have thought that more coining might be correlated with war in particular. 
 
Given that these economies were strongly metallic-standard, I would suggest that analysing the content of the coins could be very useful.

PaulRC:Incidentally I learned today (is this true?) that the only Gaelic/Scottish University is in Nova Scotia, Canada. 
 
No. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/

Julia Roberts. Look at her from the shoulders up - clearly a bloke.

10. What's this error message doing in my left field of vision?