The widening genetic gap

[Scarlett Wampus]

Yah. Elements of his thoughts reveal Halcyon's secret agenda at work: To produce an army of giant badgers.

Can't trust him.

 

[Halcyon]

Yah. Elements of his thoughts reveal Halcyon's secret agenda at work: To produce an army of giant badgers.

Can't trust him.

Ack! Shush Wampus, the project is already half way to completion. I can't let you ruin it when i'm so close!

*Releases Geoff, Ninja assassin badger*

Mwa hahahahaha

 

[Valjean]

Well, a 9 foot sea scorpian is pretty big. And we still have the horseshoe crab which is dinner plate sized.

We have larger examples than that, century-old, meter long lobsters are occasionally hauled up.

I'm not sure what you say holds true. Think of a tree, the structure of a twig is almost exactly the same as that of the trunk, yet the trunk is stronger than a twig.

This is a basic principle of engineering/physics/materials science. Research it.
The trunk is stronger than the twig, but not proportionately so.

Plus, look at your average spider today - its got about 5mm-1cm body length. Yet in the Carboniferous we had spiders the size of cats.

But not the weight of cats, and never the size of cows.
and we still have some pretty impressive spiders ...

 

[Halcyon]

I'm not sure what you're debating with me Sey.

I made a mistake with the bus sized centipede, i exaggerated, but you're not denying that giant insects existed in the Carboniferous, are you? And that they are not the same as todays insects?

 

[Torgo]

There is an effective limit on the size of terrestrial animals with exoskeletons. The weight of an animal is proportional to its volume, and volume increases with the cube of size. The amount of supporting exoskeleton is proportional to the square of size. The weight increases much more rapidly than the strength of the exoskeleton: beyond a certian size it simply cannot support itself. This is the same reason that large animals tend to be slow: mass is proportional to the cube of size, while strength is proportional to the cross-sectional area of muscles, which increases with the square of size.

Not to disrupt the current direction of the thread or anything, but about the chimpanzees: most of the differences actually ended up being in noncoding DNA which does not generate proteins and has little effect on the body. If you look at coding DNA which has by far the most important effects on phenotype, the difference is lower (more like 2 or 3%). Non-coding DNA diverges faster than coding DNA because it is not under selective pressure.

 

[Endless]

Considering it was only recently (2006) that a prelimary sequence comparision was done between chimps and Humans, and considering that we have not yet mapped out all the gene segments in the chimp you must be working in a highly advanced and secretive laboratory isolated from the world, or you aren't getting your information from somewhere useful....