On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 07:12:56PM -0500, James and Mary Burbidge wrote: > Damien Sullivan wrote: > > > > > Around the time the fly result was announced there was also a paper on > > parallel evolution of stickleback fish populations in some lakes over the > > past 12,000 years, but I won't try summarizing that here. > > Cichlids? These have diversified quite heavily in a short time in a > number of African lakes which used to be joined but have separated with > gradually falling water levels. Ooh, another good example. The sticklebacks are up in Siberia, I think. > Yes; there's a book on this (_Darwin's Finches_) which I first heard Right, I should check that out sometime. > By our standards there were _no_ non-nasty countries, regardless of > religion, until about the seventeenth / eighteenth centuries, which is > when Western European countries started to accept the model of tolerance > as a positive value, following on a hundred years of "religious" wars (I The Dutch did take in the Spanish middle class -- I mean, Jews -- in 1492, for that that's worth. Going back aways I recall some level of tolerance in the Roman Empire, apart from Christians, and I'm wondering about China. Religious tolerance per se seems to have existed elsewhere, basically wherever religious persecution hadn't been invented et. Not that there weren't other nasty bits, like slavery. > were, if anything, even more civilized than this one on the Bujold list, > but the list environment has changed since -- not for the better -- and > it is now rather less able to handle this sort of thing than this list. Pity. -xx- Damien X-)