[ale] [OT] Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent or Not.

[Kilroy, Chris]

->> Whether they're random is certainly debatable (and is 
->debated -- that's one
->> reason some of the philosophy of science guys are now 
->interested in biology
->> instead of physics)


i'd say that a big part of that is because the funding has been moving towards biology pretty heavily for the past 10+ years.  I have quite a few friends who were trained as physicists who are now biologists.  

->
->I was under the impression that each sperm and egg held 
->exactly 1/2 of the 
->parent's genes.  Is this incorrect?  
->


a more accurate way to say it than each one has 1/2 a parents genes is that each sperm or egg has 1 copy of each chromosome.  Normal cells in a human have 2 copies of each chromosome.  But the chromosomes are not exact duplicates of each other.  As one is essentially a maternal contribution, and the other is a paternal contribution.   

A great deal of our characteristics, including our neuroarchitechture and thus our personalities have tremendous genetic components.  How our genes also respond to our environment as our development continues after birth is also a large part of it, and then there is simply environmental influence that is independent of gene regulation, but still effects certain things =)

-chris




->> Even for physical characteristics, genes don't strictly 
->determine them.
->> Take height.  In higher mammals such as ourselves, 
->quantitative genetics
->> shows that it's determined by a combination of ~100 genes, plus your
->> environment (where environment contributes about as much as 
->the genes).
->> That still doesn't say it's random, though. In fact, it 
->says exactly the
->> opposite....
->
->That's if you take the posistion that your enviroment isn't 
->random in many 
->ways.  I've read that our height is greatly influenced by our 
->nutrition, for 
->example, which is why all those civil-war uniforms at the 
->cyclorama look like 
->they were made for children- but do you have absolute control 
->over what 
->nutrition your children get in all circumstances? 
->
->> Maternal hormones have nothing to do with it, at least for 
->all we know now.
->> If they did, someone would have long since marketed a pill so that
->> expectant moms could pick the gender of their babies ;-). 
->It's determined
->> by which sperm wins the great race to the egg (which can be 
->controlled by
->> flow sorting sperm to pick the desired X or Y, then doing artificial
->> insemination, but not by manipulating maternal hormone levels)....
->
->OK.  I stand corrected.  Like I said, I'm not a genticist, or 
->even a doctor, 
->for that matter...  :-)  Still, barring intervention such as 
->you describe 
->above, there's *at least* a 50/50 chance involved in producing the 
->characteristics of your physical base make-up, wouldn't you agree?  
->
->
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