Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Evolution Poses Challenge to Darwinism
spaceorb writes "In his book, "Quantum Evolution", UK biologist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden asserts that life did not originate from the random movement of particles, simply because it is far too complex. Instead, he argues that evolution is a quantum system - genetic code exists in a quantum multiverse and cells are able to choose advantageous mutations. Click the above link for the story on UniSci; it's worth a read. "
Here comes the winey Creation vs Evolution debates
Hard SF writer Greg Egan recently wrote a story about a similar idea in his book Teranesia. Check Greg Egan's Home Page for more informatino about the story and this fascinating geek/programmer/author.
"German scientists have recently demonstrated that a single fullerene molecule, composed of a sphere of 60 carbon atoms (the famous "buckyball"), can be in two places at once.
Now if I can only send my "buckyself to work, while I stay at home and read (/.) all day. :)
_________________________
This is all some very interesting stuff, but I fail to see how it really goes -against- Darwinian theory of evolution. Even if you are dealing with DNA at a quantum level of mutation, there is still some element of probability on which thread in the multiverse it is going to follow. I think that the use of the term "choice" when applied to cells is a bit iffy in the article. IANAQP, but I always thought that quantum mechanics could only really be applied to individual particles, not complex macromolecules.
God does play dice, and life was a lucky roll.
From what I've seen, over the last few years every argument against Evolution other than the "It just can't happen" argument has been dropped. When asked why, most of the people say "Well, life's too complex to evolve!!!" *sigh* Now we get another arguement stating the same thing only on a quantum level.
What I'd like to know is how is life too complex? It's not like we evolved our noses first, then worked on every body part and biological system concurrently after that. Evolution as I understand it works on everything at once... that's why it takes so darn long. Life isn't too complex to make itself better, but saying that our individual cells get to choose their next mutation sounds a bit on the laughable side, not the respectable, but heck, I could be wrong. heh, the next time I get to choose my next perk, I'll let you guys know. However, this isn't Fallout, so I doubt I'll get to choose.
*shrug*
Looks like random spiritualistic / fluff-soft-SF crap. Is there any real science involved here? How the hell is DNA supposed to slip into the "quantum multiverse"? Somebody help me out here!
We are just imperfect images of multiqantumverse(tm).
Some scientists seem desperate to find some theory - any theory will do - that might possibly explain the existence of life without the need to postulate a God. For a while, it was macro evolution - an extension of the micro evolution we all know, love and observe. That theory having been found wanting, they switch to a quantum sleight of hand - all mutations happen and, in some hand-wavy multi-dimensional way, the most beneficial (by whose judgement?) are chosen and the rest are discarded.
In this way, you can try and get around the mind-bogglingly massive unlikelihood of life ever coming into existence by chance (as the article recognises).
Forgive me if I don't jump in the air and scream "At last! Non-belief in God is intellectually credible! I can stop this Christianity lark and go out into the evil, bad world as an atheist with my intellectual pride intact..."
Gerv
Because we don't sense the passage of time while we didn't exist. For all we know, it took the creation and destruction of 1e512 universes of time before intelligent life happened to arise and we were able to think about the fact.
Now, if we happen to discover life on other planets someway, then we would be able to say how statistically probable life is. Until then, "probablistic" arguments are complete nonsense.
Not to mention that it doesn't argue against Darwin anyway. Darwin only poses Natural Selection (I believe) which is an observed, provable fact of biology.
--
C'mon, this is something from a late-night, low-budget sci-fi show, not real science. This is mumbo-jumbo metaphysics -- there's absolutely zero science behind it. The "life is too complicated" argument seems to be the only one he's really got, and that one's pretty easily refuted by "well, here we are".
Physicists don't understand quantum mechanics.
Sure, it's complicated stuff. But people understand it a lot better than this guy does. We've got lasers that work, for example.
Today, one of the most popular interpretations, and one that has the backing of Nobel prize-winning physicists, is that there exists a multiverse in which everything that can happen really does happen -- but in parallel universes.
A fun explanation, and good for sci-fi, but I believe the "Copenhagen Interpretation" is more widely accepted -- essentially, particles not being observed exist in a state of probability waves. But anyway, if one is to accept this, this completely destroys the "life is too complicated" argument. Sure, it's complicated -- but even very small probablities have to happen somewhere in the "multiverse". And the only universes within which we'd be able to ask questions would be ones where that small chance happened.
Cells may enter quantum states when they are unable to divide and replicate and become isolated....
Um, no, that's when they d-i-e.
I haven't read the book, just the web article linked to above. But it sounds ridiculous to me. And the author is no expert in quantum mechanics -- he specializes in infectious diseases. Sounds like he read something about quantum mechanics in a pop science mag, and went from there.
--
Uh, that's what I meant. Even then, the grammar kind of sucks.
How about: "The probability of life is irrelevent". Much better.
--
I have wondered from time to time how Darwinian evolutionary theory works in respect to the law of thermodynamics. Ordinary particles tend to break down into simpler forms, approaching equilibrium, not develop into increasingly complex forms of their own accord. Quantum evolution appears to address this issue, and I think it should be addressed.
One thing I would like a better explanation of is how exactly the DNA "chooses" which variant to keep after entering a quantum state. This is a critical concept to the whole theory, and the article didn't explain it to my satisfaction. Perhaps the book describes it more fully.
If the book is anything like this article, then it would have to be the biggest lump of crap to come along in a while. Several other posters have hit the nail right on the head, this guy definately does not understand QM, and the fact that he can even get a publisher is just strange. Ah well, I guess it may have a market in the Science Fiction section of your local Barnes and Noble.
This whole article makes very little sense -- I get the feeling that the author doesn't really understand the subject. From the talk of DNA "entering the quantum multiverse" (as if it is some sort of alternate reality), to the assumption that the existence of said multiverse implies some sort of choice on the part of evolving molecules, nothing really follows here.
It doesn't really contradict Darwinian theory, as far as I can tell. In fact, it pretty much demolishes one of the main arguments of the anti-evolutionists -- that evolution is just too unlikely to have occured. Well in this theory everything that can happen does happen, no matter how unlikely. Well clearly there is no one in any universe where life didn't evolve to ponder why it didn't happen. If life is possible, then it must happen in some universe, and whoever is in that universe will ponder the sheer unlikeliness of their own existence.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
It also doesn't get rid of the "creation" problem. In no way does it explain where all the stuff came from in the first place. No answer is given for those who'd incessantly argue "But what happened before that?"
It also doesn't explain what's outside the universe. It does propose the infinity of possible universes, but my take on the author's mention of this is that they're all overlaid, not side-by-side.
In short, it's possibly an advancement on the current best answer, but it still leaves a lot of the tricky stuff up to "God."
- - - -
A forehead VCR... who'd buy that????
The fact this was printed in a book instead of a scientific journal should give you one clue.
When a cell can't divide, it doesn't just sit there for a while and after some time...oh look it's fixed and it starts dividing again. There are very complex and elegent repair mechanisms that come in to play and actively attempt to repair any mutations in the DNA. If it can't be fixed, then the cell dies.
Also, given the few billion years before life arose and the prebiotic conditions on earth it isn't all that unlikely as this astronomer (WTF is an astronomer talking about evolutionary biology for?) says it is. Random events occur between interacting particles and molecules at fairly significant rates, and give a few billion years, the evolution of life isn't all that unlikely.
Mike
The fundamental differentiation between the arguments of Science and Religion are that science can be proven ("Look! Monkey bones!") and that Religion relies on faith ("Yeah, God did that!"). What this article seems to imply is that everything in evolution is based on these "multiple threads" of reality, which is basically the halfway point between Science and Religion: a faith we can (kinda) prove.
The question is, what can we do with this knowledge? Quantum mechanics will be, along with genetic engineering, the greatest controversy of the new century (mark my words, ladies and gentlemen) and I, for one, am going to try my damndest to keep the affair out of the meddling hands of those that want to discard it.
And this goes for both scientists and the religious this time. It's too phantasmic to be actual "science"; hell, Quantum Mechanics baffles most physicists. And it's too concrete to be accepted by the Christian sects (at least, those who still believe in creationism). Talk about a catch 22.
I never thought I'd hear a science article that talks equally about the existence of evolution (mutations from DNA) and the existence of a higher power (it's not random, somebody's pulling the strings here). Hopefully we'll see more of this in the future.
------------
"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
All it says is that the mechanism of evolution itself evolves, a stunningly obvious observation that follows directly from Darwin's theory. Yes, first it's random, but that stage lasts only an eye-blink, because the first thing that happens is a better shuffling mechanism evolves and takes over the universe. Then selection isn't random any more, any more than the positioning of arms and legs is random.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
anyone else?
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
Now the "other side" will no doubt cry out "but science is a religion too!" Au contrair mon amie, but science has debunked itself countless times over the centuries, and what's left grows stronger as a result. No existing religion is willing to continually challenge and dispute itself in this manner. And this is what separates science from any religion. People within science often stubbornly hold on to old idea, usually to preserve their own self interests, careers, or philosophical status, like scientists who could not accept a heliocentric sol system (Ptolemy), or accept that the universe is expanding (Einstein), etc. But eventually, they die, and science accepts its own debunking of some of its former doctorines and what remains gains strength.
If the bible and christianity (or similar for any religion) can continually question and challenge and dispute its own doctorines and continue to survive and maintain logical cohesion, I'll believe that the religion has merit. But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system.
If you cannot accept the possibility that what you believe is false, then neither can you ever know truth.
"At its most fundamental, life is a quantum phenomenon, this book argues."
obviously, since quantum mechanics ist the fundamental basis of everything.
Well, since I haven't read the book...
I hope the author must be aware of the Gradualism vs Punctuated Equilibrium debate that plagued biology during the early seventies. That was ended, in part, with Dawkin's master essay "The Blind Watchmaker" which is a must read.
Dawkin's explains for the unbelievers of eveolution how it is possible to build a complex organ in a very few million years.
A former class-mate of mine, Susanne Pelger, demonstrated that, on average (!), it requires only 500,000 generations to develop a perfect fish eye from a single photoreceptor embedded in skin tissue!!! That's less than two million years for animals with generation cycles of about 2-4 years.
To me it seems, there is no need for any quantum leaps away from good old Darwinism. The explanatory power was already there.
His idea is that one of the proteins involved in splitting and recombining the DNA strands becomes a quantum computer which can use the many worlds property of quantum mechanics to calculate the optimial form for the new genome, including defences against predators which don't, but could, exist.
It makes a cute plot device but he doesn't propose it as an explanation of how it all started, which seems to be McFadden's thesis.
I didn't quite get the article, but then again, The Tao of Physics (one of the more laymen friendly descriptions of quantum physics, I've been told) made we want to curl up in a ball and suck my thumb :)
Anyway, the author of this theory (or the reporter who summarized it into an article) didn't explain where bad mutations come from. From what I understand, most mutations are neutral or bad and selected out. If our DNA is picking beneficial mutations, where do the bad mutations come from?
Dana
The article you have cited looks familiar to me: remember the guy who made fun of post-modernistic brabble writing an article heavily loaded with serious physic terms taken out of the context? This sounds similar to me: "quantum" is a nice, popular word, and using it out of the context and not in its proper meaning is nothing more then retorics.
As for a biologist, this whole article sounds like cheap boulevard sh*t to me. J. McFadden, OTOH, is a serious evolutionary biologist, publishing in good journals. He works as a theoretical biologist - as far I understand - with transposone mutagenesis. So maybe he did something interesting, and tried to make "a big thing" out of it - and notified some journalists, who got it wrong. There was a similar thing with the "theory of punctuated equilibria", which finally fitted nicely in the "synthetic theory of evolution" or "neodarwinism" (which is to darwinism in as much as quantum physics is to Newton's laws).
I am an evolutionist - and I certainly see possibilities for bacteria to judge which mutation could be better. There are some reasonable hypothetical mechanisms, which have nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, in spite of various tries and much research there are no convincing experiments. In most of the cases either noone could repeat the experiments, or better, easier explanations could have been found. Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift). You have to have a broader view: most of the organisms try to influence the genes they passed to their offspring: for example, by coupling them to an other set of good genes - when choosing a good mating partner, who can demonstrate that he has good genes (for example, using the handicap strategy). You could say there already exists a kind of directional mutagenesis :-)
So much for the "controversy" of directed mutations. What I wanted to say is that there is no much incoherency with the current evolutionary paradigm (STE) per se. However, there is lot more on "sampling of the quantum space" and so on in the article you have posted here. Well, although I got some kind of introduction in quantum physics I cannot say I am fit in this field. However, I suspect strongly that people who are fit, are, on the other hand, not necessarily skilled in evolutionary sciences and molecular biology. I can't tell at this point: maybe this is something interesting, but to pose a challenge to the current model, a theory has to explain everything the former theory did plus a couple of other things plus do it more cleanly, more simply. I really don't know, but even if there is something in this quantum brabble I do not understand, it is only on the level of simple mutations and a very short time scale. OTOH, natural selection is known to work also on a larger time-scale.
One more thing left: the arousal of life itself. Well, one important point: the biologists have problems to tell how it happened not because they lack an explanation or a model, but because finding evidence for evolving molecules with a time scale of millions of years is unlikely to be found in sediments several billions years old, and unlikely to be demonstrated in an experiment, because such an experiment would take too long. However, it is not at all as unlikely as assembling a 747 by a tornado. Imagine a tornado that works for millions years on a planet covered with intact 747 parts; and if two parts get correctly assembled, they stay assembled and they propagate itself and produce they replica. Does it still sound improbable to you? What I really hate is biologists commenting on quantum physics like they were quantum physicists, physicists commenting on food science, and astronomers commenting on biology. Do I tell you how to program? ("Hey, you over there! C is obsolate! Use VB![*]). There are experiments with evolving and self-replicating RNA molecules; RNA is a nucleic acid which can both contain genetic information and act as an enzyme. Compared to a living cell, it has a very simple biochemic structure. However, chance of finding RNA fossils are, ehm, like building a 747 by a tornado... out of straws :-)
Stephen J. Gould, the co-author of the "punctuated equilibrium theory", which was supposed to dismiss neodarwinism, had to write a book entitled - I'm translating from polish, don't know the english title - "Darwins too-early funeral". Well, let's see what happens to this theory :->
Regards,
January
[*] Disclaimer: I program in C on an AIX.
Since it states that a conscious obvserver decides about reality. Can you say "Reality created by consciousness?".
The multiverse (or Everetts interpretation) is a more logical alternative, since it doesnt need an esoteric element. Its accepted by many well known physicists, and pretty old, too.
Yes, this fellow is most likely completely off his rocker. But let's keep something in mind, all right?
1. This theory depends on DNA/RNA molecules being able to perform quantum computations. If DNA/RNA are not efficient chemical "vehicles" for quantum computation, then this theory is completely and utterly wrong.
2. This theory can actually be proven wrong, unlike almost every other evolutionary theory out there. You name the theory -- Punctuated Equilibrium, Red Queen, Designed Evolution... their mechanisms are all-but-unobservable, and cannot be empirically tested in a lab (as best I know). This theory can be tested in a lab; if DNA/RNA isn't good at quantum computation, presto, the theory's wrong.
3. Don't dismiss it because it didn't appear in a scientific journal. Odds are nobody would touch this one with a ten-foot pole; it's so far from conventional science that it's easy to dismiss it as being crackpot. But this fellow has a serious idea, and he's also conveniently provided us with a way to prove him wrong. Don't write him off as a nut and not worth your time just because he's published in a book -- first prove him wrong, and then write him off as a nut. Not before, and certainly not in the reverse order.
4. Dismiss anyone who says "this man doesn't know a thing about quantum mechanics" just because he takes a weird view of the implications of quantum mechanics. His theory, as best as I can tell, depends on the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but you know what? Neither one of them is in the slightest bit scientific.
Quantum mechanics is a fact. It describes observed phenomena, it has successfully predicted phenomena, and it can be proven wrong (not that it ever has been proven wrong -- but if you were to ever successfully measure both the precise location and velocity of a particle, you'd prove QM to be an incorrect theory). The problem is that quantum mechanics is so alien to our idea of the universe that most physicists have to come up with a framework from which quantum mechanics makes some sort of sense.
This gentleman's interpretation of quantum mechanics is no nuttier than the Copenhagen Interpretation, or even an interpretation that the collective farts of all the universe's sentient races causes the weirdness in QM. Any interpretation of QM is metaphysics, not science. It's easy to say "this guy's a crackpot, since his interpretation isn't shared by any other "serious scientist". It's just as easy, and as accurate, to say "a lot of guys are crackpots because they believe in a multiverse which is constantly splitting off from itself, as proposed by Everett."
For all this fellow's failings, I've got to give him credit for coming up with a perfect theory.
(1) It's insane. As Wolfgang Pauli is supposed to have said to a colleague, "We are all divided on whether or not your theory is crazy. I do not believe it is crazy enough." In QM, crazy is good.
(2) It explains observed phenomena.
(3) It predicts future phenomena.
(4) It's empirically testable.
... In other words, it's a hell of a lot better than most evolutionary theories I've seen. It's probably wrong, of course. But it's wrong to dismiss this one out-of-hand.
The astronomer, Fred Hoyle, has described the likelihood of random forces generating life as equivalent to the chances that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747.
Well kids, let's look at it this way. If the universe is (in theory) infinite, as well as infinitely old (or at least as far as we're concerned.) Then probability would say that, yes, in fact - somewhere in the recesses of some really old or really new galaxy - a Boeing 747 was in fact assembled by a tornado. In an infinite system pretty much everything has to come to pass at one time or another. So, on the author - i call shenanegans!! Science has always agitated my in the respect that, while they all seem to believe in god, they are constantly searching for a way to refute his existance. I'm not saying we know the meaning of life or whether or not there actually is a god (coughs: bullshit!) but Dr. McFadden has gone a little far out on this one.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Even if you do accept this guy's theory (and like most everyone else, my bs-ometer pegged a few time while reading it), how would you apply it to multicelled life, especially those with dedicated sex organs? What enviromental influences can an egg or sperm cell respond to by "entering a quantum state" and "choosing" a mutation? I don't see how anything but mutation and recombination can effect evolution at this scale.
If "buckyballs" were shown to hav QM characteristics, then DMA can have too.
Since it has the same diameter.
About 20 years ago I predicted (you'll have to take my word for it;-) that a non-random mechanism for evolution would be discovered, and it now seems clear that that is about to happen.
So, not content to rest on my coatails (gad I love mixing metaphors) I'll make another prediction: a mechanism will be discovered by which learned information is transcribed to the DNA of reproductive cells, thus providing a path for the propagation of hereditary memory.
This mechanism has not been discovered yet because we haven't got much of a clue what the brain uses for coding mechanisms, and we've only recently began to have a clue about the higher-level coding systems of DNA. We're only beginning to have an inkling how the turing machines in our cells process the DNA tapes. Still, this research is accelerating, so I'll feel comfortable guessing that the timeframe for this discovery will be about 10 years.
A generic algorithm for making predictions about evolution is: Dream up any advantageous mechanism and predict that it already exists but hasn't been discovered yet. You'll be right most of the time.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Although the mutations of DNA are a molecular phenomenon and thus must be bound by whatever rules govern quantum mechanics, it does not follow that DNA can "sample multiple mutations simultaneously." A gene is with few exceptions required to be trascribed and, if the active gene product is not the mRNA transcript, translated into a protein. Only then is the mutation expressed via interactions with other proteins in biochemical and regulatory pathways. It is highly unlikely that DNA is "aware" that one mutation is more advantageous than another, especially within changing genomic contexts and environments! Such a conclusion is the frequent and unfortunate consequence of the phrase "X evolved to do Y", that effectively anthropomorphizes X into a living, thinking being. (I say anthropomorphise because human characteristics are often bestowed upon X as well!) It should be clear that the article contains a collection of facts from physics and then mis-applied into statements about biology. I don't seek to disagree that quantum mechanics may have very useful applications to computation and fundamental physics, but it is another ballgame altogether in evolutionary biology! I wish these chuckle-headed comments on my chosen discipline would please stop. It's very annoying when religious people shout in my face waving a pamphlet about the refutation of an entire body of science by two or three unrelated facts stuck together.
>"But what happened before that?"
:)
"Before" (the big bang), there was no time.
So there is no "before".
Easy, isnt it?
Next, point (2). I don't see how this theory explains, for example, sexual selection, co-evolution and other complex evolutionary patterns - unless it replaces only a part of the synthetic theory of evolution (STE).
Last thing: this guy is what you call "a serious scientist", he publishes in biological journals like Microbiology or Journal of Theoretical Biology. These are high-impact, specialist journals. It's just he didn't publish any of his quantum stuff there.
Regards,
January
I've heard of this quantum universe. It has a lot more than just genetic code, mainly pretty colors, shapes and patterns.. People also often tell me something about a chick named Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but that part I never really understand..
I wonder who brought up that dumb argument of Hoyle's -- McFadden or the journalist? The article (and perhaps McFadden) ignores the fact that evolution is guided by natural selection. Complex things like skeletons and brains do not require highly unprobable events in which gazillions of elementary particles glom together at the same instant in just the right way. There is a long sequence of incremental improvements, and the best improvements increase the odds of survival and the odds of the improvement being passed on. Other than the point about cells sometimes appearing to choose advantageous mutations, the article doesn't say why this quantum explanation is needed, or why it explains things better than natural selection. (E.g. another possible explanation of the cells choosing advantageous mutations is that they've evolved to do so.)
That the genetic code may inhabit the quantum multiverse has startling implications. Mutations are the driving force of evolution; it is they that provide the variation that is honed by natural selection into evolutionary paths.
First, mutation isn't necissarily the driving force behind evolution. There's a little something called recombination that's also amazingly important. Go read up on genetic algorithms, and you'll find it's generally more important than mutation is.
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone.
Here we go, it's our old friend the creationist argument against the origin of life. If I thought that the first living thing was a fully formed modern cell, I sure wouldn't believe that it could have arisen by chance either. But the first living thing wasn't going to have been a fully formed cell. Much much simpler things can reproduce themselves. And even simpler things show the right dynamics of life, like autocatalytic networks of chemicals.
Besides all these glaring inaccuracies in the article, it seems as if the author is trying to push a voodoo science. One in which analogy and important sounding words take the place of real science. Unfortunately, I'd have to see the actual book to see how well the reviewer really reviwed it. There really is a grain of something interesting down there, but if it's really got all the hype and hooplah of the review, it'll be pretty useless.
-Dan
I'm curious. What evolutionary theory fails to explain observed phenomena, predicts future phenomena and is not empirically testable? With the exception of amateur theories, there is a robust body of evolutionary theory that we continue to study and empirically verify in biology.
If a theory is presented in a journal that fails to explain empirical data and does not provide a means of verification, it does not succeed as a theory insofar as no one cares to study it. As a theoretical evolutionary biologist, I can tell you that we are very careful about meeting these criteria.
So the take home message is that those "theories" you may be referring to are ones that we don't take seriously, but that evolutionary theory as a discipline is quite vital!
As someone pointed out, this many worlds stuff isn't that widely accepted. There is even QM version that is deterministic (started by David Bohm). Buckyballs showing wave-like properties (e.g. seeming to be in two places at once) is confounding to us, because it does not match our daily experience. It seems that this is how nature really is on an atomic or molecular scale. But on larger scales (cells, humans elephants) things are obviously quite different.
I think this illustrates an unfortunate side of science - the quest for notoreity rather than the quest for knowledge. It strikes me that this guy is out for the first, based solely on the title. Then again this could be reporters blowing things out of proportion...
I'm sorry. I'm not usually a "whiner". But that is a crappy post.
An astronomer says that life manipulates quantum physics? What are we gonna see next, "vampire girl discovered"?
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
"God did it so we don't have to think any more" is not an acceptable answer. [Christians believe that] God makes atoms work, yet we have a good understanding of how they work, how they interact with other atoms, and how they can be created and destroyed through nuclear processes. Given a bucket of atoms, science has a very good understanding of how they will behave. In contrast, we don't know anything about the origins of life. We don't know where it started, when it started, whether it started more than once, whether it exists outside Earth, whether living organisms must have a body based upon chemical reactions, etc.. You may say "God created life" but you have no idea in what circumstances he created it. You don't know any more about it than an atheist who says life arose through processes he doesn't understand.
Just because you know[/believe] it was God's work, it doesn't mean you can stop trying to understand more.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
This explanation of the article sounds something like the anthropic principle. Is there any difference between what the article's saying and that?
Round Earth vs. Flat Earth
One can make a legitimate case for Windows, in spite of all of its warts. The same cannot be said for "Creation-science" (an classic oxymoron). "Creation Science" is utterly and completely useless -- complete rubbish -- it has nothing more to offer than "Flat Earth" theory.
No existing religion is willing to continually challenge and dispute itself in this manner.
Now say that, maybe, just maybe, the premise of, say, Christianity is true--that being, that every word in the Bible is the inspired truth of God himself, the creator of all things. What you would have is a PERFECT system of information that did not need to be continually self-corrected (like an imperfect system such as science).
Still with me?
Then you say
If the bible and christianity (or similar for any religion) can continually question and challenge and dispute its own doctorines and continue to survive and maintain logical cohesion, I'll believe that the religion has merit.
I don't know about you, but any religion that disputes and changes its own doctrines year after year would seem, to me, to be a man-invented hoax not worthy of anyone's time. After all, isn't religion (or Christianity, at least) simply a way for man to get to know God? With your system, we would have a Board of Priests continually revising the Bible depending on what's in style for that decade or century, with arbitrary judgements on right vs. wrong. Come to think of it, you might consider joining the Roman Catholic church. ;)
Remember, I'm not arguing with you on whether Christianity is true or not. I'm simply asking you to dig a little further in your criticism of religion as a whole.
Greg Bear's latest (?) is called Darwin's Radio. It is a (fictional) account of one of these evolutionary (sp) steps. A good read.
Seems that Slider's has been saying this the entire time =)
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
I would like to point out that Einstein did understand Schroedinger's theories about quantum mechanics, he just did not like what he saw as a precise science reduced to probability. The way he saw things, they were on the verge of defining everything in a universal law, much the way Newton thought he did.
Also, about the dual existence of buckey-balls (carbon 60), it has been known for years now that inside a quantum box an object can have two superstates. These superstates are position probabilities, either inside or outside the box. In order for a particle to be "in two places at the same time", the particle needs two superstates of high probability. (Like 50% and 40%)
Ciao
nahtanoj
you cant refute an argument by calling
it names, no matter how stupid it is.
'scientific method' includes observation
and experimentation, and that is all. it does
not include big agencies, it does not include
calling people "stupid", it does not include
books and papers and lectures and websites, it does
not include computers, or anything else.
observation and experimentation
that is all.
If you haven't read Richard Dawkins' *The Blind Watchmaker* yet, people, please do. It's the best explanation for the layman (that I know of) on the mechanisms and powers of natural selection. It is also replete with refutations of most of the common misconceptions of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a complicated idea, folks. And it is opposite of randomness. Get the real story about it and arm yourself against the ignorant press, as well as those who try to make it seem confusing, unprovable, or impossible.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Fascinating thought processes. However, I can't figure out two of the multiverse matters. One, the steely marble which weighed as much as the universe (at the big bang moment), then expanded at a temp of 10,000 to the 43rd digit temperature, then cooled enough to become 101 elements, most of which are inert until combined, heated or cooled, I guess because of the the initial temp thing. Second, in this hard, cold, hot mineral world, how the heck did fragile feely-touchy-thinking humans get involved ? something is weirder than lasers .
In the end, such analysis leads simply to a better scientific understanding. Just as our knowledge of the world has progressed since biblical times, it will continue to progress in the future. But there will always be things that science hasn't explained.
Newton discovered that f=ma, but something else made it true. Darwin may have discovered evolution, but something else made it happen. Search as we might, science will always fall short of answering the fundamental spiritual question of "why?"
Somewhere along the line, I was able to reconcile my scientific/anthropological training with my faith, and realized that the two are not in conflict. Nutshell version: Science is born of God-given talents, and therefore we should not ignore it or belittle it. Maybe the world wasn't created in seven days, but I'm still in awe of whatever made it happen, and I don't intend to mess with it.
Continue studying, continue advancing science, but don't expect it to explain that which it can't. In science, there is always one more unanswered question; only some sort of faith can make you comfortable with that.
We are all in the multiverse. But in all the universes where life doesn't exist there is nobody to think about the inprobability of lifes existense.
I don't see how this is revelent to anything. Just because someone isn't alive dosn't make a problem any less interesting at all.
When a quantum wave collapses you can't really tell if all the other possibilities that isn't this exact one it collapsed to, ceases to exist or lives on in their own world
Picard: Enough Data how do we collapse this anomaly and save Omicron Beta-Thraxis 6?
Really what exactly is a "quantum wave" and why is it so interesting. I can see how it is possible that uncertainy can occur however that would depend on the dimention that the wave was in and how it interacted with other areas in at least 4 space. You see for transition to another "multiverse" would require movement in something higher than 3 space. Which would mean at least 4 space. You then could have the wave in any point in time and space.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Attn moderators:
my post was not insightful. I had a question, but nothing that demonstrated any particular insight. It was just a call for help in understanding the article, and a hastily posted one at that. I didn't substantiate anything that I said, and I didn't give any reasons for my opinions. I didn't preemptively counter responses to my question that I had thought of already and that I knew didn't work. The third sentence was the only thing of value, but certainly not 2 moderation points' worth. Intelligent responses are most likely much more deserving of upwards moderation.
Now I have a question for you:
WHY THE HELL DID YOU MODERATE THIS UP, WHEN I SPEND REAL TIME WORKING ON EXCELLENT POSTS THAT MODERATORS NEVER TOUCH? WHY NOT THOSE?
Thank you for your time.
Can't we just stick to the point here, please? This man, with or without academic title, obviously has no clue what he's talking about. Yes, there's evolution. No, molecular biology in no way implies everything 'is too complex' to have evolved step-by-step. No, nobody has ever convincingly showed quantummechanics to have ANY influence on DNA, neurons,... (fill in your favorite). This is just one more of those (pseudo-)scientist types hoping to make a fast buck off New Age/Sci Fi afficionados. [Disclaimer: if you live in Kansas, reading this message may damage your state-imposed outlook with new (19th century) insights].
------
sigs are a total waste of bandwith, especially when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than 1:10.
Evolution does work like a "Quantum Computer" in one way, essentially having to do witht he fact that both are massively parallel. I don't think we need to introduce the Occam's Razor-defying hypothesis of quantum evolution to explain how beneficial mutations propagate. To totally beat a dead horse, positive mutations are "chosen" not by the cell/organism that has them but simply by the fact that that cell/organism survives and leaves more offspring than other cells/organisms that don't have the mutation. The DNA doesn't have to be in a state of nebulous quantum uncertainty from which individual cells can somehow "pluck" a favourable outcome.
:-)
And to reiterate previous posters' point, we can't speculate on the probability of life arising until we have a sample size of greater than one. On to Europa!
Freedom: "I won't!"
If you saw five billion coins laying on the ground, 4 billion heads up and 1 billion heads down, would you conclude that flipping a coin gives 80% heads 20% tails?
No, but the reason is that there is a reasonable possibility of someone placing them in that configuration. In the case of observing life on other planets, I have no evidence that the probability was artificially manipulated, so it's valid to create a theory based on statistical survey.
Is it valid to try and create cosmological theories based on our observations that galaxies tend to "clump"? Of course, even though the theoretical possibility exists that someone went through and clumped them to fool us (ala coins on the ground).
--
Even if scientists were forced to postulate that a God exists (say, if it dropped by for a visit in the UN building tomorrow morning), they still wouldn't be satisfied, because they'd want to know how God came to being, and who (or what) created it.
JMS, chief writer of SF series "Babylon 5", once said (regarding the origins of a certain gadget in B5) that if he said that "The Great Machine was created by Bob", it would diminsh the mystery of the Great Machine, but create a mystery around Bob.
The same goes for God. Even if we have to postulate we were created by something else, just because we can give that thing a name doesn't mean we have any idea what that thing is. And, of course, if the world was created by something else, a God, why not assume that God was also created by something else?
The thing is, right now there isn't conclusive proof that we were created by any sort of being, other than the circumstantial evidence that we exist. But if we assume that we were created by something that has always been around and was never created, why not short-circuit and reduce the number of unnecessary entities (as Hanlon's razor suggests) and just assume the universe was always around?
Yes, scientists have gone to great lengths to find explanations to the creation of intelligence that don't involve the postulate of a God. But that's because all these explanations are eventually simpler, and derive from theories already proved to be correct, and are therefore much likelier to be correct in themselves.
- Ido (a coward, but not anonymous)
Does this writer have any credentials? This just goes to show that people do not even have a clue on how evolution works! " I am a little cell that can't get anywhere! OH! I wil pop into a quantum state and make myself a paramecium!" What a load of crap! I am going to find this book in the bookstore and use it for my toilet paper!
...cells are able to choose advantageous mutations.
I don't know much about quantum mechanics, but I don't remember anything about unconscious objects being able to chose anything. This is one of the worst cases of misapplying scientific knowledge from one field to another where it doesn't belong. DNA is large enough that quantum effects aren't needed to calculate it (although, since it in most cases is a reaction involving one cell, you could say mutations could be caused by quantum effects). But saying that mutations exist in a 'quantum multiverse' is just silly. And saying that cells can "chose" what mutations that will be advantageous is idiotic. (I'd love to see the math to back that up!). What's next? Are we going to have a bunch of Creationists coming out saying that evolution is entopicly disfavorable now? That makes just about as much sense as what this guy's saying.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"It's too improbable" he says, ignoring the very fact that under the Many Worlds Theory, his ideas and Darwinism are essentially identical.
Then, there's one detail that he conveniently ignores. Biochemistry is VERY SPECIFIC. You can't join any old chemicals together.
DNA, for example, has 4 possible bases. This should give you 16 (4^2) possible combinations. You don't get those. There are 4 ways, and 4 ways alone to join up those 4 pairs. (You can read from either side, so the order is important.)
That reduces the complexity of the system, substantially. In theory, you could read any number of pairs from 1 to infinity, but RNA takes a block of exactly 3. No more, no less.
You see the catch with this whole complexity idea? The fact is, biochemistry is complex through scale, not permutations. The permutations are all dealt with, by the very nature of the system.
In short, biology exists because it removes the complexity at any given level. Each level within the system is extremely simple.
Protein construction involves 1 copy operation (which takes place nearly automatically, via messenger RNA), 3 identical attach operations (which take place without any active participation of the mechanism) and 1 destruction operation of the template. (You really don't want too many templates floating around. Could cause a mess.)
Nothing in there is complicated. The messenger RNA attaches to the DNA. The appropriate chemicals attach to their mirror images on the DNA. (Nothing else -can- attach. It's not possible.) The Messenger RNA, plus template, detatch. Fresh chemicals now attach to the RNA, mirros of the mirror, thus the original sequence. This is your protein. The template is then destroyed, and the process repeats.
What's so complicated about that? All you have there is something that replicates and inverts. Very trivial to construct.
How do you get DNA and RNA in the first place? I imagine the reverse of the current process, almost. Amino acids probably clumped together, onto some simple strand, with related amino acids pairing off. Strands that weakly attached would give you your proto-RNA. Those that bonded more firmly would give you proto-DNA.
In other words, the environment would become one gigantic proto-cell.
Last, but not least, if anyone's read this far, I do have something to say to the God theory. I am Christian, and I believe that life, of all kinds, exists for a reason beyond merely being. However, I do =NOT= subscribe to the theory that we should live in ignorance and fear.
If you read and accept the Bible, whether as literal or moral truth, there are two pertinent ideas that come forward. God created humanity in His image. Humanity is inquisitive, and has always been. Thus, wonder is a part of God's creation. To deny wonder, and worship ignorance is to sin against God, for it is to tell God that His image isn't good enough for you.
The second part is Jesus telling his followers to be like children. "For it is such as these who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." You find a child who won't ask "WHY?" You find a child who won't question. If questioning, and not blindly accepting an alleged truth which isn't even given =in= the Bible, for all the claims of the allegers, is to enter the Kingdom of God, you'll find more geeks in Heaven than the Christians who aren't.
After all, THEY are the ones who have become like little children, forever questioning. Seeking. Trying things out. Learning.
Those who "know it all", because they claim to be a Christian, are like harsh parents, always critical and condemning. God does, indeed, have a place in mind for those who seek to put themselves above Him. I've heard it's nice and warm there, too.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The whole point of natural selection is that a creature is more likely to survive if it has a built-in trick that provides an advantage in its environment. Furthermore, it is advantageous to be as adaptable as possible (as opposed to adapted) because the world is always changing. The exception to this is when you have a self-reinforcing system that generates a "lowest common denominator" order that grows ever higher in an adaptive cycle. For example, if oxygen were to disappear from the earth, only some of the life on this earth would die. That's because the human creature is built for a system that contains oxygen to be breathed. And finally, some systems are abstract enough to spontaneously generate a dynamic self-reinforcing, adaptive environment that accelerates evolution: namely, the idea-processing brain. Read Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, etc.) and Hofstadter (Godel Escher Bach, Mind's I, etc) for some cool ideas.
So that brings us to two separate points: first, some folks are mistakenly assuming that the DNA is "sampling the quantum multiverse" in a manner implying that it knows what mutation will work in its environment. Second, it was mentioned that consciousness only exists in one of the multiverses, which is inconsistent with any theory on the evolution of life containing higher cognitive functions.
First, DNA is quite independent from it's environment. Sure it makes proteins, and cell machinery and then organs and chemical systems and finally an animal form, but the actions taken by these forms are only guided by the DNA. If any changes occur in the DNA, they can only be tested asynchronously from the final creatures environment by means of probablistic survival. UNLESS there is an immediate feedback mechanism to the DNA. Feedback mechanisms can take subtle forms, so I wouldn't be surprised if one existed but hasn't been found yet. However, I think the research scientists are doing their job and it appears as though one doesn't exist. So that does away with a notion that any DNA change would have a direct cause in the final creatures environment.
It does NOT imply that "sampling the quantum multiverse" doesn't generate advantageous mutations. For example, there could be a DNA structure which "knows" which strands are new and which are old, and then build the new structures such that there is a lot of "sampling" and testing and tweaking going on there, while the old structures (like for example the notion of building DNA itself!) would stay intact. Very interesting indeed!
Second, he mentioned that our consciousness only exists in this multiverse, which is very peculiar. It's pretty clear to people that although they've changed over the years, they are still "them" somehow. This is mainly due to memories, and of course a similar thought structure to interpret them. So to say that a consciousness that diverges from our own in space time is not a consciousness is peculiar. Anyway, this notion was probably brought on by a "soul" attempt to look at it, which is also very peculiar when framed in a natural selection context. For example, does an ape have a soul? No? So when do you "get" one? Only when you're as intelligent as a human? To me, it is clear that intelligence was produced by evolution.
Anyway, that was way longer than I intended. If you actually read all that... then... wow. Later.
I think a more workable solution would be to simply work somewhere that has a decent Internet connection. But, that's just me...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Set up something in a superposition of two states.
;). Can't die eh?
;).
;).
:)
Set up something to fire a loaded gun given one of the two states after a minute or so.
Sit in front of gun, so that if fired will kill you.
What happens to you?
Scenario A: No life after death.
You will be alive in one multiverse path
You will be dead in the other. But since you are you only if alive - you're in the other path
Scenario B: there's life after death.
This is a tad more complex
Scenario C: You screwed up something...
Uh oh
Scenario D: Things are a bit more complicated - turns out 'you' and everything are also in a superposition of states. And either:
1) You are unfortunate and the possible "collapse" is such that you won't survive - not alive in any of the resulting multiverses
2) You are lucky..
3) You have a choice?
Now don't try this.
Link.
I don't understand how people can moderate up such a vacuous post simply because of its anti-religious content. However, when a response is better written with more content, it is left alone.
Moderation is not to pump your beliefs, but to acknowledge meaningful, informative, well thought out posts.
For the moment, I don't care if it's pseudo-science or not - it's interesting, it's intriguing and even has some entertainment value. I trust the system of scientific peer review enough to let it sort out the science from pseudo-science by itself. It doesn't really need me to strike at the infidels.
If you take the idea of interaction between living beings and quantum mechanics too far you end up with magick. I highly recommed the book Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll - just as long as you don't take it too seriously. Magick can get quite dangerous if you start believing in it.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Evolution (macro), on the other hand, is not provable (perhaps someday it will be), and is certainly not disprovable (i.e. it does not even make allowances for being disproved).
.. it's that the things that could have falsified it have not.
What on Earth are you talking about? One of the repeated arguments that is made by the enemies of evolution and scientific progress is that it is not falsifiable. "Sure," they claim. "You argue that nobody can falsify Genesis creation because it doesn't make any claims. Well, the same is true of evolution," they complain. If I read you right, that's what you're saying above.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. Genetics is one example. If we looked at the DNA of two different but similar creatures and saw that there were very few similarities, then that would be very strong evidence against the sort of common descent that is currently postulated. Now, that doesn't mean that some god couldn't have engineered the DNA that way, but that's not the point; we're looking at things that could falsify evolution, not prove a god.
Design would be another example. If every creature on Earth appeared to be optimally "engineered", you would not see some of the deficiencies that are present. Take humans, for example. Creationists like to arrogantly claim that humans are "perfect." We are? Then why do we have (for example) an appendix? At best, it's a useless organ. At worst, it can become infected and threaten your life. Why is it even there? If a god engineered it, he's a pretty lousy engineer.
On the other hand, if you approach things from the standpoint that life has evolved in twin-nested hierarchies from common ancestors, you would pretty much expect to see an appendix in mammals such as ourselves, even if we've gotten to the point where it's no longer of any use. If we saw individual families of creatures with wildly varying designs, all of which appeared to be optimal, that would obviously deal the death blow to evolutionary common descent theories.
And the examples go on and on. No, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
If anyone loves these sorts of controversies, you should check out "Fashionable Nonsense" by Alan Sokal and some French guy. It's all about how critical theorists use large and meaningless terms, coupled with references to science, to present their literary and social critiques. Only, Sokal and his co-author demonstrate most of science terms and concepts they use are mangled and meaningless even to the scientists that invented them. Is the phallus a imaginary number (like the square root of -1)? Does consciousness have topagrahy of a mobius object? Lacan seems to think so, but his explainations demonstrate that he has no idea what these concepts mean. Along that same line, I know something about chaos theory, which is quite relevant here. Despite the confusing name, which theologists and wacko's use it as proof that science's used to be rigidly deterministic, and these embarrasing discoveries of chaos have proved that things are simply too complex to be viewed by humans, the cheif mathematical insight in the field is that in many situations, order is actually a lot more likely than randomness. Many of the coincidences that people think are mystical turn out to be occurances which are simply much more mathematically likely than people assume they are. Like- how many different people have to be in a room before there's a 50% chance of 2 having the same birthday? Most people guess something like 134- the actual answer is 23.
Oh, please don't misunderstand me -- I'm not calling evolutionary science meaningless, or based on shaky foundations. I just draw a line between observed phenomena and hypothetical explanations for those phenomena. I've read plenty of descriptions of evolution in action to believe that it exists; I've yet to read a theory explaining evolution which I feel has a substantial chance of being substantially correct.
:)
:)
This doesn't mean that the field is useless. Far from it; it means the field is extremely useful, because somewhere there's a whole lot of discoveries just waiting to be made.
I just think we're a long way from having a good theory of how evolution occurs -- that's all.
Insofar as explaining observed pheonomena, predicting future phenomena, empirically testable, I submit the punctuated-equilibrium theory to you. Hypothesizing that evolution happens in times of catastrophic ecological upheaval is all fine and dandy, but it's kind of hard to conduct controlled tests of the same, don't you think?
My own personal belief is that geographic isolation and punctuated equilibrium are, taken together, probably the most promising ideas. The geographic isolation bit you can actually test under reasonably controlled conditions; the ecological catastrophes, less so.
Warning: I am not a biologist. I am a computer scientist. As you can guess, I'm not an expert in the field -- I've read enough to be dangerous and maybe enough to hold an intelligent conversation, but that's all.
$1,040,000,000 for this? News for crackpots, stuff that really doesn't matter at all.
I want something better. I've got the domain "cluedot.{org,net,com}". I've got collaborative filtering technology, implemented on Advogato that might just solve the problem of miniscule S/N ratios. I just don't have the time myself to put it into production right now, as I'm too busy developing free software projects. Anyone?
Yes, yes, I know. Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait, whatever. Karma be damned, I'm pissed off to see a site that used to be my kind of news site indulge in such stupid crap.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Sorry, I probably didn't explain myself clearly. I wasn't saying that all, or even most, Christians use the "God did it so we don't have to think about it" argument. I was just saying that the poster appeared to be using the argument on this occasion. Many top scientists are Christians who think hard about the creation question.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I think the article cited probably does a poor job of explaining the ideas. But there is a way to look at this that is, in a sense, similar to the "anthropic principle."
The anthropic principle addresses the issue of how the laws of the universe happen to be "just right" to create a system in which our form of life can evolve. Tiny variations in physical constants would make such life impossible. Thus the very values of the constants are improbable, which presents a challenge. One answer is that of all the zillions of possible universes, we can only exist and ask such questions in the one that gets the values right.
Quantum evolution could be viewed in a similar manner.
First, a short explanation of the "multiverse" as I understand the concept.
Every time an quantum event occurs, it is a "choice" among possible events: the electron either did or did not tunnel; the nucleus did or did not engage in a certain decay. Thus every one of these events "forks" the universe into two or more universes. In one universe, the electron tunneled, while in the other one, it did not. The number of these events is enormous, of course, since every macroscopic event is composed of huge numbers of these quantum choices. The number of universes in the multiverse is thus immense, as each choice increases the number of universes by the product of how many universes it occurs in times the number of outcomes.
Going back to quantum evolution and the anthropic principle, it could be stated that:
We exist in the universes of the multiverse where the "correct" evolutionary events happened.
The arguments that there do not exist enough trials (random choices) for evolution to have achieved the current result are based on *one* universe. But in the multiverse quantum view, this number of universes is multiplied immensely, greatly improving the probabilities.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Yes, but they are divided popularly, though not scientificly, by time scale. "Microevolution" are things that happen on a time scale people understand. "A long long time ago all dogs were kinda wolf-like, but through concentrated efforts at breeding throughout human history, we got different strains of dog." What people don't think about is that "throughout human history" is an evolutionary blink. Hell, its practically an evolutionary screen refresh.
People just can't deal with things on certain scales unless they really work on it. It is, ironicly, evolution. Scientists try all sorts of examples (time since earth cooled on your outstretched arm, human civilization is a dust mote almost falling off the end of your fingernail, etc.) But the truth is that even people who understand it intellectually usually don't have a good emotional grasp of it. Thats why arguments from incredulity work so well in this debate.
-Kahuna Burger
OT, I thought about writing a science fiction story about a world with two independant forms of life - silicon and carbon. The silicon form would be so much slower than the carbon based that instead of developing tool use, they just evolve plants and animals into what they need with selective pressure. Need a knife? Sure you can learn to smelt metals (but now that I think about it, that might actually not be posible since the melting point would be reached so "fast") but why not just spend a few hundred generations eliminating the 90 dullest percent of a field of grass until you have a field of razors? As a hobby you could improve the stem at the base into a handle. The story most likely would be about the carbon based life, but I don't really have the time or energy for good fiction writing these days. *sigh*.
...will work for Chick tracts...
well, he belived that life didn't start at conseption.
Anyway, that quote didn't even seem to make sense to me, and the "recent scientific work in the field of molecular biology" was just a load of crap from a Creationist...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Oh, for fucking out loud. This is not a difficult concept.
- microwalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from one end of the living room to the other
- macrowalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from Los Angeles to New York
They're the same damned thing! They're the same process! The only difference is (you may want to take notes here) the amount of time that it takes. I submit that if I can walk across my living room, I can also walk to Los Angeles, given enough time. Do you deny this?People often say that brute forcing 128 bit crypto is impossible- quoting lifetime of universe, not enough atoms/particles and stuff like that.
;).
:).
:)
So is 'creating/evolving' life so much easier?
I find it interesting that in the Bible, often when people want to find out what God wants they draw lots. See Jonah, Acts of the apostles, and so on.
Borrowing a concept from one of those SF stories[1]. Perhaps all living creatures have the blessed/lucky gene/multiverse-pathern. Naturally being blessed/lucky is definitely advantageous
Conventional wisdom has it that all of us lose the game in the end (personal death, heat death of universe, or erm roulette). But somehow something inside most of us seem to think that we're gonna beat the odds .
Maybe that's why there are so many gamblers - it's in their genes.. Those that didn't think they'll make it probably gave up trying at 4 billion BC?
Heh, and who's to say we won't make it
And perhaps God just takes a personal interest in things, eh?
May God smile on us all,
And not laugh too hard..
Cheerio!
Link.
[1] Ringworld by Larry Niven? Concept- breeding for luck. Lottery for reproduction rights. So the only the luckiest get to reproduce.
Now say that, maybe, just maybe, the premise of, say, Christianity is true--that being, that every word in the Bible is the inspired truth of God himself, the creator of all things. What you would have is a PERFECT system of information that did not need to be continually self-corrected (like an imperfect system such as science).
I don't understand. Why would anyone suppose such an idiotic, nonsensical premise?
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In particular, most people don't seem to realize that the "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics isn't any different from any other interpretation of quantum mechanics. The "universes" don't even interact with each other. "Multiverses" don't explain anything that ordinary QM doesn't. And phrases like "entering the quantum multiverse" or "entering quantum states" are just gibberish. (A system is always in some quantum state, and can always be described by some superposition!) I can't even tell what the article is talking about except that it seems to be referring to Bose-Einstein condensates.
I love how the article mentions that MWI has the backing of Nobel-Prize Winning Physicists (TM). Gee, can't the argument stand on its own without appeals to authority? But no, we've got to throw in some yellow journalism like "Darwinian dogma" and "heresy" to spice things up too. I wonder if McFadden really wrote the article himself.
I have to differ with you on this. There is a proposed experiment to test the Everett theory. It just can't be done with the current technology. I'm not even convinced he *was* using Everett, since there is no collapse of the wavefunction in Everett's theory, but the article refers to 'collapse of the multiverse' in places.
It sounds to me like a variation on the anthropic principle - ie you have to exist to ask the question 'why do I exist?'.
What I mean is, he seems to suggest that we see beneficial mutations because we are on the branch of the multiverse where the mutations were beneficial. Which doesnt really tell you anything.
Or, more controversially, he may really mean that the multiverse collapses, back to an earlier point in time, so that only beneficial mutations can result. Well, theres an obvious argument against that - there are clearly genetic defects in the population.
Without reading the guys book I suspect he's not arguing anything like this at all, but is arguing the toss about how organized systems came to be in the first place. Life seems to get along just fine after that.
There are other competing explanations for this stuff - Kaufmann's work on self organising systems, Hoyle's stuff about life being seeded from space (simple biological molecules have been discovered in interstellar gas), Cairns-Smith and his clay crystals, the folk who work on black smokers, etc etc. And of course theres the God theory. All of them controversial, most of them testable to some extent. I dont think this one amounts to much more than that. -Baz
I liked Back to the Future to when I was little!
I disagree, and so do many scientists. The theory that *all* the steps of evolution are attributable to chance makes the mechanism of evolution unbelieveably inefficient.
Think of the dolphin's blowhole. Did nature try out every possible place on the body for the blowhole, were many dolphins born with blowholes on their sides or under their fins or chins (ever seen a dolphin's chin?) or at the tips of their tails before the ones that had them on the tops of their heads won out evolutionarily speaking? I'm not saying that this didn't happen; but think if it did. Why should *only* the dolphins with the blowholes on their heads survive? Why not on their backs, say just in front of the dorsal, and why not on the tail? If it were entirely up to chance, it seems to me that some different blowhole mutations, while not providing as *great* an evolutionary advantage as the one placing it on the head, would still provide *enough* advantage for there to have developed dolphins with small but significant differences in biological makeup. This could be said of any species perhaps.
Next there is the matter of chance. If we rely conceptually on chance as much as you think we must, then it stands to reason that there is a greater chance of *not* evolving the blowhole than of actually evolving the blowhole. How many blowhole mutations would provide as much or close to as much advantage as the one on the head? A few. How many wouldn't? A LOT. Even if you restrict the number of possibilities of the placement of the blowhole by taking for granted the placement of the lungs, the mouth, and other organs and biological features, you still get A LOT of possibilities, and all of them will result in dead dolphins and a dead species.
Now I'm no creationist, but it seems clear to me (always has) that there's more going on than simple *chance* when it comes to evolution. I don't know about this multiverse thing, seems kinda like a big rationalization, in terms of an old paradigm, for phenomena that only appear under a new paradigm (it's only in classic physics that you can't have one thing in two places at the same time; but it's only in QED that you have things which can, so it's a bizarre little crutch). It would be much easier to account for evolution in terms of some sort of deeply rooted (DNA level) but geologically paced learning mechanism, by which experiences of the organism get translated into information on the level of DNA and are implemented in the next generation of the species. So, some kind of feedback system. I mean, after all, think about it: isn't it a little *too* coincidental that species generate evolutionary *beneficient* mutations, most of the time?
Of course, according to some observations, evolution jumps forward in fits and starts, so the learning mechanism would probably have to account for that.
Forgive me if I don't jump in the air and scream "At last! Non-belief in God is intellectually credible! I can stop this Christianity lark and go out into the evil, bad world as an atheist with my intellectual pride intact..."
What the hell kind of crack are you smokin' boy?
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"With your system, we would have a Board of Priests continually revising the Bible depending on what's in style for that decade or century, with arbitrary judgements on right vs. wrong. Come to think of it, you might consider joining the Roman Catholic church. ;)"
A little rough on the RC church aren't we? That being said, you have a point here it is often stated as the Liar, Lunatic, Lord hypothesis. Jesus was either wrong because he is lying, wrong because he is crazy, or dead on. There is not a balance, a midpoint.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
and here is the abstract:
Biosystems 1999 Jun;50(3):203-11
A quantum mechanical model of adaptive mutation.
McFadden J, Al-Khalili J
Molecular Microbiology Group, School of Biological Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. j.al-khalili@surrey.ac.uk
The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such as the shift of a single proton (hydrogen atom) from one site to an adjacent one. We consider here the wave function describing the quantum state of the genome as being in a coherent linear superposition of states describing both the shifted and unshifted protons. Quantum coherence will be destroyed by the process of decoherence in which the quantum state of the genome becomes correlated (entangled) with its surroundings. Using a very simple model we estimate the decoherence times for protons within DNA and demonstrate that quantum coherence may be maintained for biological time-scales. Interaction of the coherent genome wave function with environments containing utilisable substrate will induce rapid decoherence and thereby destroy the superposition of mutant and non-mutant states. We show that this accelerated rate of decoherence may significantly increase the rate of production of the mutated state.
PMID: 10400270, UI: 99325857
ok, over and out.
jose nazario jose@biocserver.cwru.edu
Positing the existance of God only sets back the question of origins by one step and doesn't explain the origin of God. Why not use the principle of parsimony (aka Occam's razor) to eliminate the middle man?
This is kind of like the old story of the cosmologist who was approached by the little old lady who corrected his worldview by claiming that the Earth was really supported on the back of an elephant standing on the backs of turtles. When the scientist asked what the turtles were standing on, the little old lady said, "You're not fooling anyone, young man! It's turtles all the way down!"
Actually, it has not yet been established whether our universe is finite or infinite in spatial extent. It's one of the main open questions (pardon the pun) in cosmology. Of course, the observable universe is finite -- but that's a different matter, because there can be parts of the universe from which light has not reached us.
The theory of evolution as *two* parts. One is, as you hint, random variation. But the other indispensable part is SELECTION which is by no means random! Which organism lives and which dies has nothing to do with toin cosses, and much to do with the physics of the environment.
This is a big point of misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. To cast doubt on it on the grounds that it expects too much from mere randomness is to attack a straw man.
There is no test of Everett's interpretation that can distinguish it from any other interpretation of QM, since Everett carefully designed his to be equivalent to any other. Deustch proposed a "test" of MWI, but what he didn't point out is that he was really talking about a modification of QM "in the spirit of MWI", not MWI itself -- as Visser points out somewhere in a footnote of his book.
The bad mutations all come from Milwaukee.
Ah, you expose the flaw in your logic here. The basis, the assumptions that science holds have not changed and are not questioned. The one exception here is Mathematics, they found they will never know the complete truth (Godel's Incompleteness theorem). The bible is an assumption in Theology much like the scientific method, it is not up for question. Specific theories, like Origin's ideas on creation, or Aquinas's Transubstantiation, or Papal Infallibility are disputed with regularity. Look at the reformation or the counterreformation? That way Christianity can maintain the intellectual cohesion you want it to have, that being said where is that same cohesion in Science?
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
First cause was demolished over 200 years ago.
First cause is the idea that life is a complex system and any complex system *must* have a creator. Keep going down the chain of causes, until you have something that doesn't appear to have been caused by something else. Well, that first something *must* have been cause by something, and we'll say that it is god. The first cause argument is usually combined or enhanced with the argument from design (nature is designed so well it must have had a designer).
The argument against the first cause is if that if god caused that first thing, then god must be a remarkable and complex being. For the same reason that all the other things that are complex *must* have had a cause, then *god* must have had a cause too! oops.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Now... what happend before god?
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"If the bible and christianity (or similar for any religion) can continually question and challenge and dispute its own doctorines and continue to survive and maintain logical cohesion, I'll believe that the religion has merit. But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system."
You portray scientific research on the whole as a pristine and selfless quest for truth. You say that "science accepts its own debunking of some of its former doctorines and what remains gains strength." You are correct that scientists can be at least as egomaniacal as the rest of us. But you don't seem to understand that they can be, and have been, at least as suppressive as any mainstream American religion. In particular, you seem to think that scientists are open to rational debate, when in religion "everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence." But within the scientific community, scientists have been as eager to silence opposition as anyone else.
Do you know of the feud between English and Continental mathematics? A ridiculous dispute about who invented the calculus set back mathematics by decades. The English schools stubbornly taught the antiquated system of fluxions because it had been invented by Newton, while the other Europeans used differentials.
In the nineteenth century: Kronecker did everything he could to humiliate Cantor, and did succeed in destroying his career. (Cantor was the *inventor* of topology.) Cantor never saw his opinions accepted by the community. Plenty of slashdot posters can tell you how the brilliant scientist Tesla was cheated, both during his life and after his death. He has never really been vindicated. Oppenheimer was isolated from the community in the 50's for his stance against nuclear weapons. Teller is largely isolated from the community *today* for his support of arms buildup. And although you can ceratinly argue that cold fusion was correctly debunked, the reaction to *legitimate* research in the anomalous heating associated with Pons and Fleischmans' apparatus was, and is, shameful.
Furthermore, science does not free you from the need for faith. I believe in the results of quantum mechanics and special relativity partly because I have tested some of them myself in classes. However, most people cannot say as much. To them the laws of physics may as well have been brought down from on high. The average person does not participate in your scientific quest for truth. Even for those people who are scientists, it is impossible to personally test all of the things generally accepted as true. I have seen no direct evidence of GR, for example. I don't deny that experiments tend to support GR, but in spite of testing as much of science as I can, I have no opportunity to "question and challenge and dispute," as you want of religion.
It is true that when religions are in control of the state, the government has tended to suppress opposition. But that has also been true when religions are not in control of the state. Whether religious or atheist, people always have human failings. So I will keep my own religion, thank you very much.
Personally, without having any sort of faith, I am comfortable that in science, as in the rest of life, there is always one more unanswered question. A paramecium is not going to "get" opera, and the human brain may simply not be complicated enough to understand all aspects of the universe. So be it. But I'm enjoying the ride, and I have three science degrees.
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind. Even though he is widely discredited among theorizers in this area, some people think that because he published a pop science book about it that it must be reputable.
I'm not claiming that this quantum evolution stuff is bogus. If it produces testable predictions, then it's a welcome addition to the theory of the origins of life. But from the article, it seems to bandy about the catchword "quantum" without much real meaning to it. One should always be wary of researchers who publish controversial science-related stuff as popularizations... it may just be that they didn't succeed through the normal scientific channels, and maybe for good reasons. [An example of this phenomenon is Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe, where he argues against evolution using some pretty ill-defined concept of "irreducible complexity". This flaky stuff would've never made it pass a journal's referee... but you see the nice glossy book at Barnes and Noble and you might just think it has some credibility.]
As Prof. Stephen Pinker put it in a psych class I took with him, in reference to Penrose's consciousness stuff, the reasoning is as follows: "Hmm... consciousness is kind of weird. And quantum mechanics sure is weird. They must be... the same thing!!"
I really like that idea. I don't know about all the "quantum" bla bla bla, but I think something more than randomnes directs evolution. I've been believing in something like directed evolution for a couple of years, and it's nice to hear about it from someone else to.
Of course this is just a belief from my side, nothing scientific about it...
< RANT >
/RANT >
Religion is a big hoax - but not necessarily a malicious one. If your people are eating tainted pork and dying and they won't listen to you when you tell them to stop, then what do you do? You tell them that GOD wants them to stop and if not several horrible things will happen to them. This worked wonderfully until science came along, providing us not only with good, clean pork but with enough technology to see that the omnipresent, all-controling god that told us not to eat it probably doesn't exist. Belief in a supreme deity was also a way of controlling the masses so they wouldn't kill and steal from each other (2 of the most popular commandments) or overthrow the current government and cause anarchy. I thank religion for helping humanity get past those first few years of civilization without destroying itself, but enough is enough. Now that most of the things that can harm us are well understood (germs make you sick, not pork) and governments can do more harm than good, religion has become obsolete like my 486 that hasn't worked in years. It scares the hell out of me to see so many people blindly following a "charismatic leader" instead of thinking for themselves. I don't know of any religious figure that doesn't skim some off the top of the collection plates (some much more than others) and the presence of multiple religions has just turned the whole thing into a big war of denial. Religion, please stop messing with us so that science can make the world a better place.
<
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
Sure, it's complicated stuff. But people understand it a lot better than this guy does. We've got lasers that work, for example.
With due respect, your statement has shown that you do not understand quantum mechanics.
The actions of atoms and subatomic interactions can be described, certainly. Predicted, absolutely. But understood, never. Niels Bohr once said that "if the quantum theory does not astonish you, then you do not understand it". Brilliant physicists have tried to understand quantum mechanics and all they get are splitting headaches. The theory is too astonishing; it is so contrary to our everyday experience that it might as well have come from an alien culture.
Quantum mechanics is describable, yes.
Understandable, never.
I don't know a single physicist who understands quantum mechanics. I know lots of people who don't understand QMech who say it's understandable.
Lets face it, until we build a time machine we will never know how/who/what made the universe, how we came to be (not being born but rather beging of life as a whole)
Until then all we have are theory's. Thousands of them. From what are called scientific to extreme religous. Religous ones flaw in the way they came to be. "Because my god said so, and that being said there is no question or need to prove it." Some of the scientific ones are wackos. In reality the way scientific ones are more accepted is because they are based on our current logic, if the situation was right we could run an experoment and do it, and it can be repeated.
Sometimes I get really tired of Christianity...
Darwinian evolution is the idea that evolution occurs through natural selection. We have observed microevolution (changes of a single variable over a short period of time, i.e. a moth changing color) but natural selection cannot acount for macroevolution (the creation of new bodily systems and types, i.e. the development of vision). Macroevolution through natural selection requires that every step along the path from beginning to end is linearly advantagous for survival since that is the only mechanism for choosing mutations Darwin's theory allows. It can be shown that some developments are simply NOT possible this way, for example vision. The simple act of recognizing light (which is light years from our complex equipment allowing us to see) requires the existence of over 10 complex chemicals without any one of which it would never take place in addition to the required organ of sight and processing capabilities. In Darwininian evolution these things CANNOT develop together, even given 100Billion years, since none are beneficial without the others. This does not disprove Darwinian evolution, that still happens, it just shows that Darwinian evolution DOES NOT explain life as it now exists on earth, it only explains individual traits of some organisms.
The second major problem with Darwinian evolutin is the fossil record. Darwinian evolution would occur at a gradual pace and would require the existence of more transitional fossils than we find, for instance during the rise of mammals or the appearance of land creatures. The only possible somewhat legitimate response to the first challenge to Darwinian evolutino, the many worlds hypothesis, is defeated by the fossil record, since even if this is the one place where intelligent life evolved, it will not be a place where "random" evolution happened at hyperaccelerated rates at random intervals.
Evolution through natural selection is a theory which has some truth, but cannot explain life as we see it. That is why people are searching for what could have caused the directed evolution on our planet and even if you disagree with this author's theories, at least he should be respected for attempting to find an explanation.
-benjc
I couldn't find a single statement supported by solid evidence in this article. It's all just speculative idealism ("Quantum Mechanics allows us to escape this gloomy outlook.") It's full of flawed arguments. For example, it's true that larger molecules have been demonstrated to be in two places at once, but these molecules must be removed from all quantum interaction with other matter (in a vaccum chamber.) DNA is in constant interaction with other cellular molecules. Also, the "life is too complex to have evolved" argument has absolutely NO scientific basis. It's really beyond our scope of knowledge to calculate the odds of life beginning on earth since we have no idea what this first life looked like. Quantum evolution seems to be vastly more complex a process than evolution and it involves too many unknowns. I really don't think that we can take this theory seriously.
I didn't mean to poke at the Catholic church so much...it was more a pre-emptive strike against someone bringing up something such as the Vatican I and II councils. I suppose I do agree with those councils on this: religion should question and challenge its own open-mindedness with regards to accepting what the Bible plainly and clearly says. This is an on-going challenge. :)
that theyll use quantum resonance for the next generation UDMA drives, since they found no other way to move 100 MB/s over an IDE cable... ?
ok, no problem. Hope thats clear now...
"
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have
arisen by chance alone.
"
this is the oldest, lamest, most boring anti-evolution argument that just won't go away. and anyone perpetuating the the stupid boeing-747-from-a-pile-of-parts argument should be carried out of their homes and universities naked.
people need to read more darwin, more dawkins, more sagan, and less from websites like unisci.
i am... therefore i think
Nuclear weapons are a big hoax - but not necessarily a malicious one. If two allied nations with different philosophical views are eyeing each other nervously over the body of a defeated enemy, and the populace of both nations are calmouring for war, then what do you do?
You tell them that NUKES will rain out of the sky if either side attacks, and several horrible things will happen to them. This worked wonderfully until the Soviet government collapsed, and peace and joy spread throughout the world. With the fall of the Evil Empire, surely the people would see that there was no more need for a standing army, no need bully others, and there would be no need for the nukes to exist.
Belief in the nukes was also a way of controlling the masses so they wouldn't burn too many bras or ROTC buildings (2 of the most popular combustibles) or overthrow the current government and cause anarchy. I thank nukes for helping the US get past those first few years of postwar civilization without destroying itself, but enough is enough.
Now the people know enough not to start another world war, and governments can do more harm than good, nukes have become obsolete like my 486 that hasn't worked in years. It scares the hell out of me to see so many people blindly following a "charismatic leader" who pretends to have the nukes on his side, instead of thinking for themselves. I don't know of any President or Prime Minister that doesn't skim some pork off the top of the barrels (and some humidor contents I might add) and the presence of multiple nations pretending to have developed these so-called nukes, or stealing nonexistent `warhead technologies' has just turned the whole thing into a big war of denial. Nukes, please stop messing with us so that science can make the world a better place.
</PARODY>Consider the example of opening a safe with a number lock. Let's say it has 10 fields, so 10^10 (10 billion) combinations for random number entering. Selection would be like a light over each field that lights when you find the right number. So you need at worst 10 attempts for one field. So after entering at worst 100 numbers the safe opens. Selection accelerates the process 100 million times.
Look at a dog or cat. Look at the 'fifth' digit. Ask yourself wy it is there, and if an omniscient being would have placed it there.
His theory, as best as I can tell, depends on the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but you know what? Neither one of them is in the slightest bit scientific.
Bommeian (sp?) mechanics successfully predicts the behavior of quantum systems, but dose not require these "interpretations." Instead it say, there is this particle fling arround in phase space (it is a phase space particle so it dose not suffer from the locality problems of other hidden variable theories). Now, this particle can not be found, so it existance is not falsifiable and thus not scientific, BUT the consistancy of the theory prooves that quantum mechanics in not a weird as we think it is, i.e. Bommian mecahnics is to quantum mechanics as classical mechanics is to statistical mechanics. This means we should always try to seperate the "phase space weirdness" of quantum mechanics from the "statistical weirdness" of quantum mechanics. These interpretations of quantum mechanics are at best attemopts to explain the statistical weirdness and at worst attempts to muddle the distinctions between the difrent wierdnesses of quantum into one big weirdness.
As Wolfgang Pauli is supposed to have said to a colleague, "We are all divided on whether or not your theory is crazy. I do not believe it is crazy enough." In QM, crazy is good.
I like the quote, but as I showed above.. there has been much confusion on the craziness of quantum mechanics ad combining two diffrent crazinesses into one massive craziness is not a good idea.
In other words, it's a hell of a lot better than most evolutionary theories I've seen.
This is incorrect. The christian right has been yelling and screeming about the holes in evolution, but they manage to stay quite far (like 100 years) behind the current research. One would wonder if they go back and read very old articles improving the theory to find evidence to debunk the theory in the popular press.
The truth is the theory of evolution has been MUCH improved over the years. It seems that the evolutionary process loves to make devices (like sex, genes, central nervus systems, enviromental learning) to complicate the process and improve the rate of evolution.. just look at how evolution speeds up over time. I do not realy understand the mechinism, but it seems complex and the study of the mechinism of evolution seem quite scietific. I do not think of evolution as a single finnished theory, but as the only working principal we have by which to construct theories (since there is so much evidence that things have changed). Just like in math we have no evidence or proof that axioms are a good way to structure things, but they seem like a good idea and they provide the necissary framwork. When we find a contradiction in the axioms of set theory we do not all quit doing math, we fix set theory. Evolution works the same way. (I've heard people claim the big bang is one of these too, but I don't know)
Jeff
BTW> I do not know much aboutthe many worlds interpretation of QM, but it sounds like something I used to convince a friend of mine that logical contradiction allon is not enough to prove that time travel is not possible, i.e. maybe our statistics, probabilities, and logic come from QM in some way and traveling back in time to create a paradox would "cancel out" in the universes supper possition or something (like quantum computers get wrong answers to cancel out). I don't trust the idea of macroscopic supper possitions, like the above of the many world interpetations, but it is possible that they are the norm and our ideas of logic and probablility are just biproducts.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Which begs the question: How can you dismiss this theory simply based on a (IMHO poorly written) book review? The knee-jerk twitchers out there have called it everything from voodoo science to utter tripe without knowing anything (or at best very little) about the author's actual argument. How exactly does this distinguish your intelligence from that of our intellectually challenged brethren, the creationists?
I haven't read the book either but I'll make a few comments anyway. First off I'd like to point out that it was Everett, in trying to refute the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, who was the first to come up with the "many world" interpretation of QM. This interpretation was later examined and expanded by DeWitt and Wheeler. All of these scientists are luminaries of physics and on the same level as an Einstein or Schrodinger or Dirac or Pauli, etc. So if your dismissal of this theory is simply based on your rejection of the "MultiVerse" concept, maybe you should educate yourself a little.
Second of all, if you read the article intelligently, you will note that he isn't saying the entire DNA molecule is in a quantum state; he's saying that particles of the molecule (i.e. electrons) are in a quantum state (obviously). Where he introduces controversy is in his thesis that these particles can somehow send quantum "tendrils" to their MultiVerse cousins (who are in a simliar DNA framework) and somehow bring back (or send) information. I, for one, would like to read the book to see how he presents and defends this theory before I twitch. You shouldn't need reminding (especially on this forum) but this is called having an open mind.
Is it just me or is this just a big pile of incoherent 1950s sci-fi pulp fiction? It sounds awfully hokey to me.
/makes sense/.
The review says that the probability of life originating "by chance" are like the probability of a tornado constructing a 747. First of all, what the reviewer quips as "chance", physicists call the laws of physics. And second of all, continuing the 747 analogy, how more probable would it be for the tornado to build a 747 if dust particles could move through a "multiverse"? Would they pop out, read up on 747s, and then pop back in and build one?
It all seems way to far fetched for me to swallow. At least the theory that life originated from a highly improbably combination of physical circumstances
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
the evolution of raisins is more important because you can smear them on your chest while doing the macarena
Science currently has nothing to say about conditions before the big bang. Where is the proof that time or anything else, did or did not exist prior to the big bang ?
> I mean, after all, think about it: isn't it a little *too* coincidental that species generate evolutionary *beneficient* mutations, most of the time?
I'll just answer this with the following quote:
"...Thus a real scientist like Professor J.B.S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes that have rendered creatured (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception. And for every case of it there are ten of degenration.'"
C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, The Funeral of a Great Myth p.85
my (rather anecdotal) notes: JBS Haldane, along with two others, is considered one of the fathers of neo-darwinism. His major theoretical work was outlined in his book, "Causes of Evolution."
C.S. Lewis wrote a heck of a lot more than just the Narnia books (with which, among other fantasy writings, he had a hearty rivalry with his good friend and fellow Christian J.R.R. Tolkein). Christian Reflections, a compilation of short essays on various topics, is one of the best.
Yes, and no. MWI/Copenhagen have existed just
about as long as each other - since the beginning of quantum mechanics.
Probably the best interpretation of quantum mechanics comes from Roger Penrose, who taught a class I was in. Simply put, he said that we do not know enough to make any claims whatsoever as to the true nature of the Schrodinger's Cat problem. Which is true. We unfortunately still have several paradoxes to resolve before we can even approach explaining Schrodinger's Cat - the Quantum Xeno Paradox, for instance, which states that one can make an improbable state persist infinitely by continuously observing it - i.e., by making it continuously interact with its environment. This will tell us whether or not measurements actually do what we think they do - i.e., collapse the wave function. Currently the quantum xeno paradox favors quantum mechanics, but unfortunately the results can be easily explained away.
That's just the beginning of the problems facing the philosophical aspects of quantum mechanics. The other major hurdle is the use of the word "random". Einstein probably hurt us the worst when he said "God doesn't play dice," since dice rolls are random (more or less).
Quantum mechanics is -not- about randomness, or probability. It is about distributions. An electron in a mixed spin-up, spin-down state does not have a 50% "chance" of being measured in spin up. Quantum mechanics means *nothing* for
individual particles or systems. It only has meaning for large collections of indistinguishable objects. In other words, in the previous example, an electron in a mixed spin-up, spin-down state doesn't have a "probability" of being measured in a spin-up or spin-down. It'll be measured in whatever it's measured in. However, if you take a thousand of those electrons, on the average, you'll get 500 up,
and 500 down. Plus or minus 10 on both. Gotta love Poisson statistics.
*That* is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics - it's the same interpretation of statistical mechanics as well. The theory means crap for individual objects. Only large numbers of objects. Therefore, talking about "one molecule" of DNA is bunk. You need to talk about a large number of DNA molecules, all in the same mixed quantum state. Then, on the average, if their states are measured, then QM will give the right results. Not for each one. This whole "choice" thing and "quantum multiverse entering" is meaningless.
People think GR can be seen in human experience and it's only wierd stuff that happens at sub atomic levels or near black-holes. The advance of the perihelieon of Mercury's orbit dumbfounded astronomers for ages. It took GR to finally explain it. Newton and Kepler's rules could not.
I know. Even with the preview I missed them. Where's that coffee now?
> have rendered creatured
should be
>have rendered creatures
and (much worse)
>therefore inclined progress
should have been
>therefore inclined to view progress
There. Fixed.
> If you accept those biblical doctrines, you must also accept the biblical account of creation (Gen. 1-2), which clearly describes God's six-day creation.
So the WHOLE bible is literal ??
I don't think so.
Cheers
People have been killed by nukes, we have video evidence of it.
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
Don't be an ass. We have the widely understood facts of biology that form the basis of much of our new medical advances vs a flat refusal to consider it. Your requests for "proof" in the face of easily understood references are just childish debating and would be moderated down as flame if they regarded any branch of science except this one. (Which says more about this group than it does about this branch of science unfortunately.)
If you want to understand the processes you are deriding, read any of the books that have been recomended here which make very clear how complex systems can arrise from simple ones and large changes can take place over large periods of time. Dawkins' "the blind watchmaker" and "climbing mount improbable" are good, layperson oriented starts as is the FAQ page and related info on talk.origens.
If you don't feel that these are really "proof" because you insist on misunderstanding the underlying processes, I suggest you go (back) to college and take, in order : Basic Chem, Bio 101, cell biology, developmental biology (also may be called embyotic biology) comparative vertabrate anatomy, invertabrate antomy, phisiology I and II, Genetics (with lab if possible), statistics and probablity, and an evolution semimar if its offered. Throw in some geology and paleantology while your at it to get some idea of time scale.
I am not going to attempt to recreate several good books and a major in Bio-psych on /. so that you can make some stupid ass comment back. I know when someone is playing "Argument from incredulity" and will keep playing it until the other person gets tired and gives up on him. (Giving up on you will of course be interpreted as "giving up" and you will go on saying that no one can give you any proof of evolution.)
...will work for Chick tracts...
> Are you still clinging to a belief that the earth is only 5000 years old? (A much smaller, less mind boggling number)
Where does the bible say the earth is only 5000 years old ?
Oh wait, the WHOLE bible is LITERAL.
Yeah right.
Cheers
For a course project I've spent the past six months exploring the connections between machine/biological vision and our growing understanding of Quantum mechanics and it's implications for computing. The bottom line is that we are far enough along to ask credible scientific questions about the implications of Physics to Computation and Biology. For another popular science account that makes connections between evolution, Quantum mechanics and theory of computation read: Fabric of Reality
It is very early to judge what "Physics can do for Evolution" but I've read enough Dawkins to know that we can fruitfully think of evolution as a kind of computation. Quantum computer "simulations" of evolution or intelligence may turn out to be much more efficient than the "real" thing. OR it might turn out that Nature already "thought" of that and used the most powerful computing model available-- that would be the Quantum computing model and it's what many people are trying to find out.
If my memory serves me correctly, a blowhole is in all likelihood an adapted nasal passage. It started out in the front, like in most other mammals, but over time it gradually moved upwards.
Concerning mutations, there were undoubtedly some mutations which caused the blowhole to be placed either a little bit higher, or a little bit lower, than in the parent. The thing about air-breathing sea denizens is that they have to come up for air from time to time, even when chasing prey. If a blowhole is too low, a dolphin would have to raise its head up above the water more in order to gasp in some air; if its higher, a dolphin loses less speed when chasing after fish. A dolphin which catches fish has a greater tendency to survive than a dolphin which loses its prey whenever it has to stop for air; thus, natural selection tends to favor dolphins with higher blowholes.
Mutations also tend to cause small changes: a one or two centimeter shift in the position of a blowhole is -much- more likely than a mutation which would radically alter the respiratory system and cause a nasal passage to appear on a dolphin's tail (as you mentioned in your post).
Oh, and I'm posting this from lynx, so forgive me if the formatting of my post is crap.
This is a self enforcing arguement: The Bible says that itself is True, therefore it must be True. YThis is the classical arguement for the existance of God in classical philosophy, and really doesn't hold much, if any credence now adays. You should do some reading up on a priori and a posteriori logic
I know that you were being sarcastic, but a lot of sociologists do believe that the reason that we never had the big war with the USSR during the Cold War era was because we did have nukes. Both sides knew deep down that if they did start anything, we'd all be fucked...
Mathematics is an abstract way of thinking though...the only reason that we can think about mathematics in the way we do is because we have defined it in the way we do...math is a descriptive discipline, not an emperic one
> "Before" (the big bang), there was no time.
> So there is no "before".
So the universe just decides one day to create itself?
Where did the material from the universe come from?
What caused the big bang to happen?
Cheers
Hmmmm.... well why didn't I think of that? When I'm looking for an openminded book on the subject of the existance of gods, I go straight to a theological advisor to the Catholic Church. Yep! Just can't beat a guy well up in the Catholic heirarchy for really seeing both sides of a faith issue.
I've gotta say, you got your faults, but you are great for a laugh.
For a well reasoned argument (or twenty) try the alt.atheism FAQ. Many of the people on that group were religious at some point in their lives and actually have a somewhat even handed veiw of both states.
...will work for Chick tracts...
I'm getting really tired of most of the universe not understanding evolutionary theory. It's a simple theory, but few seemingly understand it correctly. Even in conversations with intelligent people they'll say things like "blah blah evolved into blah blah....", without putting much thought in to evolution. Christ, don't they teach it in biology class any more? (well, there's that Kansas thing.....)
A couple of points:
While I'm not a complete fan of Occam's razor, I think it fits here. There isn't anything _wrong_ with evolutionary theory the way it is. It works fine. Why make it more complicated than necessary. Hell, let's start talking about super strings and plate tectonics next.
He ignores how the mutated DNA gets passed on. Fine a cell becomes somehow isolated, dips into the multiverse and mutates. Fine. Unless this happens to all the cells in my body it isn't going to help me a damn bit. If it doesn't get translated to the genetic code my sperm carries, it won't get passed on to my offspring. Come on! What crap.
Why in the world would a cell, if it had all the multiverses of choice possible pick a disadvantageous mutation? This is observed in nature you know.
Anyway, I could go on and on. Please don't post this stupid psuedo-science crap.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
You've just disappeared up your own definitions. I'm disagreeing with your assertion that "Some Sort of Faith" is required to be comfortable with the "one more unanswered question", and yet you reinterpret that very lack of faith as a sort of faith, essentially making your statement impossible to disprove by redefining faith. Please accept that I have no faith and yet am still comfortable, hence your assertion is not true.
Mutations are simply the result of alterations to DNA. DNA, like all molecules, rapidly interconverts between several energetically equivalent conformations. Specifically, the bases that comprise DNA can interconvert between imidine forms and amino forms. (And the base pairing rules change depending on which form the base adopts.) As long as nothing interacts with the base, it exists, in a sense, in an indeterminate state (This might serve as the mechanism for "sampling" mutations.) Only when the base interacts with another molecule, such as its base pair, does the base "crash out" of the "quantum foam" into one of those conformations. Whatever it is interacting with, whether a mutagen, an enzyme, or its base pair, actually forces it to adopt a conformation. (And vice-versa. Although in reality, I imagine that it still isn't really locked into one conformation, it's just that the probability of it existing in that conformation has increased, while the probability of it existing in the other conformations has decreased.)
It is because of base-pairing that mutations don't happen more often, but when DNA is replicating, or being transcribed, the bases can often be in an unpaired (and therefore indeterminate) state. When the base is again paired, it might have adopted the "mutated" conformation instead of the (normal) "wild-type" conformation. But even then, most mutations are still reversible because of the energy available in the system (manifested through repair enzymes and the concomitant hydrolysis of ATP)
So in a sense, every single base in every single cell in your body is rapidly fluctuating between a "wild-type" state and a "mutated" state. So every single moment, a sort of natural selection occurs in that the combinations of conformations that favor survival is selected for. But here is where "quantum evolution" might be flawed, if what the article seems to implying is true. The article seems to say that there is some novel principle that provides this selective pressure--some force that favors life. But I think the nature of this selective pressure is a lot simpler. I think it's just thermodynamics.
Whether or not a mutation persists depends on whether it is energetically favorable or not. Normally, the wild-type, particularly when it is interacting with its base pair, is energetically favored, but put in energy, like in the form of a gamma ray, and the mutant conformation can be favored. Of course, the mutation can always be repaired, but this too depends on the energy available in the cell. If the cell doesn't have a lot of ATP to spare, and the mutation doesn't kill it right then and there, it is likely that the mutation will persist.
This process is pretty much what directs evolution in single-celled organisms (which pretty much make up the majority of all life forms and whose history pretty much dominates all of evolution), and it works pretty much the same in multicellular organisms, except that only a small fraction of cells actually get to propagate mutations, and a lot of it gets covered up by sex anyways. Mutation isn't really an all-or-nothing event, but more a summation of probabilities, which don't actually get locked in until it's time for the mutation to be propagated. And all this applies to acellular DNA, too. Since we know that DNA can be synthesized abiotically from simple gases and lightning, and that the ability to replicate is a direct consequence of the structure of DNA, it isn't really that much of a leap to imagine the evolution of a nucleic acid into a single celled organism. It's really all just thermodynamics.
One might argue that thermodynamics actually favors the destruction of life (i.e., since disorder ever increases), and in a sense it's true since we all die, but luckily thermodynamics doesn't say anything about how fast something happens. Using the hydrolysis of proteins as an example: protein + H2O --> amino acids, which is exergonic, may seem to prove this even further, but this forgets to include the fact that in protein synthesis, ATP is hydrolyzed too, and this actually makes it thermodynamically favorable to make proteins. The reason life occurs is because thermodynamics says it can, and given enough time (namely, billions of years), anything that thermodynamics says can happen will, no matter how improbable you think it is. So evolution isn't really random at all, and you don't need to look farther than college chemistry to see why.
For those versed in computer science, all you need to do really is go back to Codd's assumptions about relational databases, change his normalizations to allow duplicate rows and then allow negative rows in cases where a row is deleted before it is present. The theorems of such a relational calculus turn out to encompass the essential "weirdness" of quantum physics.
But they encompass much more:
They describe an entire range of relational objects which are neither quantum nor classical. That we might end up with strange things like synchronicities is no more surprising than that the ripples from a stone thrown in the middle of a pond strike all sides simultaneously -- except that we have to admit the "inverse Markovians" in which "effect" seems to precede "cause".
There have been many studies of identical twins separated at birth exhibiting synchronicities that, when confronted, make "skeptics" of the universal weirdness of things start sounding more like fundamentalist adherents to a new form of religion than intellectually honest scientists. The fact that these studies are on such macroscopic entities as human beings, involving complex behaviors over extended time and space separations is a clue as to just how far we are from appreciating the relationship between DNA and universal weirdness deriving, not from "nature" but from from the fundamental laws of relationships.
Seastead this.
On Dawkins' other books, I'd hold off. Selfish Gene is more philosophical IMHO, and Unweaving the Rainbow is Dawkins trying to be Sagan and failing miserably (where Sagan made you inspired by science, Rainbow just tries to tear down humanities. (OK, I didn't really read much of it, that was a generalization from the introduction, I'm sorry. But it was strong enough in the intro that it turned me off FAST.)) Dawkins does a better job of inspiring when he just writes what he knows.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
What you are proposing is yet another interpretation of QM but it's not nearly as widely held as the Copenhagen Interpretation which *does* insist that individual events do not resolve between potential states until observed.
As for Roger Penrose, this is the guy who rejected neurobiology in favour of a theory that our consciousness is based on orchestrated collapse of quantum wave functions...and that the basic computational unit of thought is the protein microtubules inside our cells. similar story to the guy in the article.
I always think it's sad when an eminent scientist steps outside of his own field and makes a complete ass of himself.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Regards
Crush
Please forgive in advance this (functional) atheist for butting in here. I looked up your first quote from various random bibles to see what I could make of it (the quotes are appended below for reference).
I think your interpretation is the direct opposite of the real intention of what is written. It says: ``no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation'', but what you are doing is making an interpretation -- a literal interpretation -- a fairly arbitrary interpretation ``made by an act of human will''.
Rather, it says that the truth of Scripture came from ``men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God''. That is, it is saying that the truth comes from mystical inspiration from God, via the Holy Spirit.
The original poster, Waldo, made the point well I think: a literal interpretation of the Bible ends up cutting down the grandeur of the physical world. I would add to this that a literal interpretation cuts down the grandeur of everything the Bible addresses; to do so would be to completely miss the metaphorical and mystical aspects of the Bible. It is in these aspects where I find the most value.
Finally, what I have said here may or may not be true, depending on the degree to which I was inspired by the Holy Spirit :) (I'm serious, I'm not trying to be flippant).
Peace be with you.
---------------------
New American Standard
2 Peter 1:18
and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.
2 Peter 1:19
So we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.
2 Peter 1:20
But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation,
2 Peter 1:21
for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.
Young's Literal
2 Peter 1:18
and this voice we -- we did hear, out of heaven borne, being with him in the holy mount.
2 Peter 1:19
And we have more firm the prophetic word, to which we do well giving heed, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, till day may dawn, and a morning star may arise -- in your hearts;
2 Peter 1:20
this first knowing, that no prophecy of the Writing doth come of private exposition,
2 Peter 1:21
for not by will of man did ever prophecy come, but by the Holy Spirit borne on holy men of God spake.
King James Version
2 Peter 1:18
And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
2 Peter 1:19
We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:
2 Peter 1:20
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.
2 Peter 1:21
For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake [as they were] moved by the Holy Ghost.
You are a CS major who thinks he knows more about biology than he really does.
Asking a CS major to critique evolution is even worse than asking an MCSE to admin a Linux box.
If I remember right, the total mass/energy of the universe is supposed to be exactly zero.
Seems to be due to the negative energy stored in gravitational fields (well, if I remember right).
You said: "A little rough on the RC church aren't we? That being said, you have a point here it is often stated as the Liar, Lunatic, Lord hypothesis. Jesus was either wrong because he is lying, wrong because he is crazy, or dead on. There is not a balance, a midpoint."
There is no balance, no midpoint may lie in the likely possibility that Jesus was misinterpreted and censored to give Jesus and Christianity such an absolutist flavor. The proof lies in the discovery of the Nag Hammadi (Dead Sea scrolls) and other documents. The early roman catholic church did indeed censor and modify the (then) current christian texts in order to remove all ambiguity and give christianity the absolutist flavor we see today (Jesus is either right or wrong, believe he is wrong and go to hell!).
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
...is believed to have popped into existence with the big bang.
So, "before" most likely makes no sense. Since there is no continuity of time.
I think the original poster was correct in saying Hans Kung is an open minded thinker, given that he is both looked to for counsel and also officially refuted by the Vatican. It also says something about Rome's balance as well, as they are willing to listen to contrary points of view when evaluating doctrine. But some would rather think (as it comforts them and fits with their narrow world-view) that Catholic hierarchy consists entirely of closed-minded, senile old men who desperately cling to their power base. How immature.
Waitress: "Can I take your order?"
McFadden: "there exists a multiverse in which everything that can happen really does happen -- but in parallel universes. Although our conscious self inhabits only one branch of the multiverse -- our own universe -- fundamental particles inhabit the entire multiverse. It is this property that allows them to occupy multiple places or states simultaneously: Each place or state is in a parallel universe."
Waitress: "And you?"
Customer2: "Uh... I'll have what he's having."
Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.
A choice of masters is not freedom
Maybe when we all have quantum computers on our desks and in our pockets, people will come to understand that quantum computation has limits too, that it does not get around Godel's Theorem, and does not make us the center of the universe again. One can only hope.
(hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy of course)
Which goes something like that:
Universe: description of the universe
Superficy: Infinite.
Population: Null, given that not all planets carry life, there must be a finite number of planets that are inhabited and given that the superficy of the Universe is infinite the population per kilometer square is a finite number of people divided by the infinite superficy of the universe gives zero person per square kilometer, therefore any person that you may encounter can only be the fruit of your disturbed imagination.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Alright, this just really annoys me. Everyone is like, "this is just pseudoscience" when they haven't even read the book and given it a fair hearing, whereas few people are criticising Darwinism, but the truth is that neo-Darwinism has almost no empirical support either.
No, I'm not a creationist. No, I'm not crazy. I've just read this paradigm-changing book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton.
Let's briefly run down some of the key arguments: (see also this article which was censored on request of the high priest of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins)
- We don't actually know how old the earth is. I'll repeat that, because I'm sure someone will say I'm trying to claim the earth is 6000 years old or whatever: No, we don't actually know how old the earth is. Given that realisation, there is then no evidence whatsoever that the earth has existed long enough for the tortuously slow process of neo-Darwinian evolution to produce humans. Rocks are used to date fossils, but fossils are also used to date rocks - a totally circular argument. All forms of radiological dating are very inaccurate and untrustworthy - recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to be "thousands of years old" using radiological methods. Uniformitarian geological theories predict that stalagmites should take on the order of thousands of years to form, yet they have been observed forming in mines less than 30 years old.
- There is no universally accepted definition, even among Darwinists, of what the word "species" means in Darwinian terms, so to even debate the point of whether speciation has been proven is to get mired in confusions. Darwin himself claimed to have observed speciation in Galapagos finches, but this was just trivial intra-species differentiation. No evidence has ever been discovered of significant speciation that could really prove, once and for all, that a man could evolve from an ape purely through natural selection of random mutations. It's all hypotheses - no matter how much Darwinists want to scream and shout that "it is not just a theory, there is enough evidence to be as certain as we'll ever be that it's true" - in reality, what little evidence of speciation there is (e.g. homological similarities) is purely circumstantial - suggestive but nowhere near constituting proof.
- What's more, random beneficial mutations are not just very rare, they're extremely freak occurrences - there is nowhere near enough experimental evidence of random beneficial mutations to believe that they are a significant factor in evolution (if it occurs) at all. On the other hand, directed beneficial mutations in microorganisms have been observed, as other expert Slashdot posters have already noted - in repeated experiments, beneficial mutations appeared far faster than would be possible by chance alone. (Of course, there is usually a nonzero probability of the results being caused by contamination, but that possibility doesn't help neo-Darwinism either.)
- Punctuated equilibrium is just an ad-hoc explanation to explain the embarrassing lack of "missing link" fossils. The only reason for adopting it is to explain away the lack of missing links. It's almost as bad as theologians getting around any awkward question, like "How did Noah's children reproduce without committing incest?" by saying "The ways of God are too deep for us mere mortals to understand."
- The idea that DNA entirely determines the characteristics of the organism does not sit well with these observations -
- Limited Lamarkian change has been observed in the lab - see "Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare" by Mae Wan Ho. Larmarkianism isn't correct either as an overarching theory of evolution, but inheritance of acquired characteristics can sometimes occur.
- "Natural selection" is an empty tautology. Fitness is defined as "leaving most offspring" - so what it actually means is that "Those who leave most offspring will leave most offspring". Which says nothing at all. What's crucial to realise is that there is a related, non-empty, insight here - that the distribution of offspring with certain characteristics can be a factor in changing characteristics of organisms - and this is the insight that Darwin should be rightly recognised for; but it's quite a trivial one, and says nothing about how significant that factor is in relation to other factors such as, say, directed mutation.
In conclusion, neo-Darwinism is as full of holes as a fishing net, and should not be accepted as proven by an serious scientist.Female Prison Rape in NY
The problem I have with that, is that in order to invoke mysterious quantum effects you really should exhaust the classical possibilities first. The areas where this is going on (evolution, brain function) are already well-enough understood that the gaps which exist are not of the "...and then a miracle happens..." type. They're usually just waiting for someone to come up with the funds to pay someone to ask the right questions and do an experiment. Biology is a mundane subject these days. The basic mechanisms underpinning evolution, in particular, are well understood. From molecular biogenesis onwards. The rest is just a matter of details.
.sig to find out why.
The only question which science shall never be able to answer with or without quantum is why it is that there is a subjective conscious experience associated with self-awareness. And the reason this question will never be answered is because it's a stupid question. See my
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Yes, the vatican is very largly made up of old men clinging to their power base, as the new rules on Catholic Universities in the US readily attests. More to the point however, the poster introduced the author as a openminded source then identified him only as an advisor to and writer for the vatican. Methinks you are jumping at the wrong person. And a bit sensitive about attacks on the most heirarchical institution given nigh universal deference to boot. Think they can take care of themselves without little ol' you saving them from the bad thoughts and *gasp* words of a bored /.er in Cambridge.
...will work for Chick tracts...
hey, for anyone who hasn't read it you
just gave away a MAJOR plot point in Quarentine, i.e. the mystery of the bubble. Don't read the above post if you haven't read Greg Egan's Quarentine and you intend too!
I have yet to see an Evolution vs. Creation debate that has yet to degrade into name calling. This one has not disapointed that prediction.
I haven't looked at all the posts (too little time), so maybe this stuff was covered already. But I wanted to put in my two cents worth into this debate.
For the first part of my argument, I'll ignore this new Quantum Evolution twist. I'll get to it later.
Now then, look at the pure mathmatics of the situation. The chances of creating the 20 amino acids nessary for the starting up of life are 1:1*10^73. In mathmatics, if anything has a chance of happening once in 1*10^50 or more, its considered so remote so as to be immpossible.
Some years ago, someone attempted to replicate the creation of a genitic soup. They created 4 of the 20 on the first try. Further experements have yielded somewhat better results, but never all 20. This was under a controled expereiment, not real life.
If, by some chance, all the acids were to form, where would it go? If it gets into a lot of water, the soup would be dilluted and spread all over the earth's oceans. If it stays on land, the suns rays would quickly break apart the bonds keeping the acids together.
Lots of stuff, like the fact that human ebryos (and several other mammals) have gills, are shown as evidence of evolution. In essence, these biologists are saying "Of course ebryos have gills! We evolved from fish!" and never give it a second thought. There could be millions of resons for such an occurence! They just refuse to look for them.
Darwin himself said in "The Orgin of Life" that if the gaping holes in the fossil record weren't filled that it would kill his theory. After more then 150 years, these holes actualy got bigger! New animal fossils were found that didn't fit the evolutionists' theories, so they rearanged the heiracracy of life several times to make them fit. But the end result was even bigger holes.
It is absolutely true that Creationism cannot be proved nor disproved by current scientific meathods. But evolution most certianly can. Also, it is true that Creationists usualy can't put up much of a fight on a scientific front. Most of them are not sceintists. Its just good enough for them that they have their faith and thats that. But by doing so they do themselves and others like them a tremendus disservice because they can't show facts to help disprove evolution. I hope I'm doing a better job.
Now, on to Quantum Evolution. This makes all my previous arguments irrelvent. I'll bet this theory gains widespred support because it can explain away all the current theory's problems.
Our understanding of Quantum Physics is kinda like figuring out Quantum Physics itself; we both understand it and we don't. I have somewhat of a passing intrest in Quantum Mechanics, so I'll see what I can find out about this. I will be posting again.
------------------------
Not a typewriter
Why do we hear the "It's very complex so it couldn't have happened by chance" arguement so often?
If I take a deck of cards with the jokers removed, and shuffle it, there are 52! possible arrangements of the deck. That's a big number. In fact, the odds of the pack coming out the way it did are one in 52! - imagine that, against tremendous odds, that arrangement still came out.
This guy is using the same kind of misunderstanding of probabilities. Just because the odds are slim that life could have evolved in this specific way doesn't mean it couldn't have happened another way. And don't forget just how much time it took for life to evolve the way it did.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I (partly) appologise. He did say non-grata reading list, but he also said "chief theological advisor". Which looks like the best you could hope for is for him to not be a tool of the catholic church in particular, and no real hope for an evenhanded treatment of belief vs non.
...will work for Chick tracts...
I'm not agreeing with the article (as others have said, the 'look-ahead' stuff looks a lot like mumbo-jumbo), but would it be possible to evolve an organism which could select the best mutations for their offspring? This obviously requires some level of conciousness in the organism, so wouldn't be applicable to bacteria or DNA. I can't see any theoretical problems with this, but then I'm not a biologist or a physist.
This would obviously be beneficial to the organism, so would be selected for by evolution. I'd guess that the probablity is too small to be worth considering, though.
Well, Darwinian evolution is impossible...true science has proven that, and so has the fossil record. Other attempts to modify the theory or should I say explain where the missing links are, are again attempts to explain something that doesn't exist. Now we come to the point, where evolution is so much off the rocker of reality that someone needs to dream up another ridiculous fantasy to keep it alive. Why?--Simply because there are people out there who don't want to believe in a Creator. Yes--God? Why don't they want this? Because the existence of God (and yes does exist and did create life) would obligate such individuals to be responsible for their life course. Quantum Evolution?--What's the next fairy tale garbage that will come out of the world of metaphysical research.
microwalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from one end of the living room to the other
macrowalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from Los Angeles to New York
* OOPS! *
- The reality -
microwalking - the act of crossing a crack in the pavement in one small step.
macrowalking - the act of crossing something like the Standley Chasm or between the tops of the World Trade Centre towers in a series of small steps.
For a practical example, the odds of forming a single short genome in 30 billion years from a universe made entirely of the right proteins, (ignoring mismatches, decay, chirality, space/distance and a few other minor inconveniences) are about 1E80 against. Not a working organism, just a genome. Welcome to the wonderful world of macroevolution.
What happens when the dust clears? 'Bye 'bye coyote...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The problem with this idea is that quantum mechanical systems tend to remain coherent for extremely short times when they are coupled to an environment. For instance, it might be plausible that a couple of atoms become superposed and remain uncorrelated with the rest of a cell for a few nanoseconds, but this superposition will rapidly decohere (on a time scale much smaller than that of cell division). You're certainly not going to be able to preserve a quantum-mechanical superposition long enough to influence the evolution of a species!
(Incidentally, rapid decoherence is also a major problem for those people who want to construct quantum computers. You may be able to store a few qubits in a couple of atoms in a single molecule long enough to perform a simple calculation, but to do anything nontrivial would require hundreds of qubits, and no one knows how to keep such a large system from decohering too quickly.)
Take that 'why?' attitude and apply it to the beliefs of science 'purists' who insist that evolution is the most reasonable belief we can have. Why? In the words of a previous poster, "Because we're here, aren't we?" Yes I'm oversimplifying a LOT, but if you look carefully at arguments on BOTH sides of the issue, you'll see this same idea popping up. Someone who believes in a materialistic universe (deterministic or quantum, whatever) will tend to accept evolution because it's POSSIBLE for it to happen, and they see no more likely option. Those who believe in a spiritual/material world will accept that divine intervention could create the world, because it's POSSIBLE for it to happen, and they see no more likely option!
It seems to me that this whole debate comes down to what you choose to assume about the world - your fundamental beliefs, your FAITH. If you assume that the world is affected only by what we can observe, then the only conclusions you can accept are those that science gives you. If you believe that God can do whatever the heck he wants, then you will conclude otherwise. As for why you choose to believe these things, there are debates going either way but often that's just a lot of talk - the real decision is a matter of what seems 'sensible' to yourself.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Gawd what a load of crap. This guy understands m. tuberculosis genetics (though he hasn't published much on it -even I have written more ;) ) but definitely not quantum mechanics. The idea that mutations can exist in a superposition of quantum states is a load of BS. Any superposition collapses once it is sampled by the outside world and a DNA base is too large not to be sampled continuosly as it were. Even then, a definite sampling occurs only if the cell divides and survives - it cannot predict the effect of a mutation. This guy effectively states that DNA can sample mutations in a "quantum state" and sort of simulate their outcome. But the effect of mutations only becomes known upon procreation either of the cell or of the whole organism! There is no way that DNA can predict its own functional state since it contains no information of that kind. The informational content is carried in the proteins that use DNA (strange loops, anyone?). In short: don't buy this book. It's merely creationism in a flashy new jacket. You might as well think that god is a quark or something.
OPEN THE FLOODGATES
Odd it is that this term you should be choosing.
Polystrate fossils, huge homogenous volumes/areas of deposits, fossil animal trackways without sign of food, "inverted" rock layers, "inclusions", short-life radio-halos, environmentally grouped fossils, extensive turbidites, yadda-yadda-yadda are all expected phenomena in a global-flood scenario, and each of these features is a broad hint that there is no debate.
And the more reasearch that scientists do, the more information there is to hand, the less debate seems possible. 250,000 fossil species have been discovered - where are the intermediates?
Somehow or other, their DNA hasn't done anything sensible in any multiverse - and when you consider the difference in scale between a potentially multiversable DNA molecule, and even the tiniest cell, the reason should be obvious.
For those reading this over morning coffee with an as-yet unstarted brain, the DNA would have to be off exploring alternatives for quite a while before any "choice" it made (teleonomy - ooh, heresy!) had an impact on the whole cell, let alone whole lifeform.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not a theologian or a physicist, nor a practicing member of a religion, but I have thought long and hard about this word 'God' we have.
The short of it, is that 'God' is a word for 'everything', or 'the whole of existence', or just plain 'all'.
Any attempt to define 'God' as anything other is illogical, since the act of defining what something -is- also defines what it is -not-. Definitions differentiate something from its context. But if there is God and something else that is not God, then there is something greater than God in the combination, which misses the point- God is a word for everything.
Trying to associate words like 'created' and 'causes', etc with God is missing the point as well. Time is part of God, just another aspect of existence. If you are at the level of thinking about everything, there is no was, there is no will-be, there just IS. All of time exists, every 'frame' of it in a time-space.
The many words for God in different religions speak about aspects of existence as it relates to us. The Judge, the Merciful, Our Lord, Protector, etc. These aspects have personified the word and have tended to distract people from the true meaning (a unifying and empowering principle) and into deity worship, and from there, into the control of religions 'authorities' who may have a divisive purpose.
Remarkably, the word 'Elohim', a word for God in Hebrew, is -plural-, a possible indication that someone was trying to convey a single word for the multitude that composes 'everything'.
The laws of God are the laws of existence (physics, psychology, chemistry, interpersonal relationships, etc), the ones we know and the ones we haven't learned about yet. The laws of God cannot be broken, only our assumptions about them can be (Newtonian->Quantum paradigm shifts).
Imagine trying to explain the concept of 'everything' to people, especially those without a philosophically and historically rich language, in order to get people to think bigger picture than their day-to-day existence. Eventually, the word you use for that 'everything' gets deified. People that haven't caught on to the concept start worshiping the word, much like their other gods. Picture the dialog:
Random person: 'You mean 'everything' is more powerful than Ra, the sun god?'
Philosopher: 'No, 'everything' is bigger than Ra, bigger than all the gods put together'
Random person: 'Oh, ok, long live 'everything', our greatest lord'.
Sometimes I think the commandment (of the 10 commandments of popular knowledge) 'Thall shall not worship the graven image', means 'Don't worship the tablets this is written on' and 'Don't worship the word God' as much as it means not to worship statues.
One of the most important prayers of Judaism contains the phrase 'The lord is one and his name one'. This sounds like an attempt to drive home the point that the God means the 'all'. (Even the word 'Universe' is overloaded these days). Language is somewhat incapable of doing the opposite of defining and dividing.
So in my humble philosophy, the Supreme Being is everthing; us, time, evolution, science, love, war, disease, the cycle of big-bang and big-bust, etc. There is no such thing as God vs. science, because they are one and the same. Everything can be ascribed to God, without putting an end to the scientific investigation of 'how'.
Saying that God created everything is like saying that the Earth starts at the North Pole. It's just not linear, even if it looks that way from our point of view. Time is part of 'everything' just like space.
Overall, thinking about God as a word for everything is faultlessly logical, is compatable with interpretations of ancient religious texts and can well be a source of great spiritual inspiration (God spoke to Einstein, or rather, Einstein, through dedicated thought and observation, came to a profound conclusion about the nature of Everything---- what's the difference here? None, as far as I can see). This also leaves NO room for disagreement about 'the nature of God' , but rather puts the realm of disagreement into constructive academic research on the nature of the universe and life.
I apologize if I have offended anyone, but I would like to hear what others think about this approach.
Mike
I think it might be good for the more open minded to also read Phil Johnson. Dawkins is an excellent writer but a flawed logician. The final say in such matters ultimately comes down to what presuppositions we wish to start with.
So "What can QC do for AI?" Well, if humans are Turing machines, then in principle you can write down my algorithm and run it faster than my own brain can. On a quantum computer you could run my algorithm (ME essentially) not just a constant amount faster (more MHZ or a constant number of parallel processors) but quadratically faster and maybe even exponentially faster. It's not clear that "faster" would lead to more intelligence but I'd be surprised if you never ran out of time on an exam-- in those cases Faster would be smarter.
So, "What can QC do for Evolution?" We are in the proccess of decoding all 3 billion bits of the human genetic code. The specific arrangement of 3 billion bits came into existence through an evolutionary process over generations and generations of organisms (ultimately humans) on this planet. Now imagine we simulate that process. [We used to do this for fun in high-school] On a quantum computer entirely new ways of searching the available state space emerge-- once again we have a minimum of quadratic improvement on exhaustive search (for a QC) and exponential improvements are possible. That means my evolutionary simulations on a QC will be much richer and more interesting than your simulations on a classical computer.
Clearly, the simulation of evolution is not the same thing as evolution itself. My genetic algorithms will evolve more interesting behaviour than yours if mine run on a quantum computer-- that's the best --I-- can do. In "Quantum Evolution" a book that I haven't read McFadden tried to make a strong connection between QC and Evolution and previously I posted an Amazon link (lots of reviews there) that explores this QC-Evolution connection. I've read that book and I still can't explain the Many-worlds-evolution thing! Deutsch book is, for the most part, sound so maybe this new "Quantum evolution" thing is sound too. You can NEVER judge science by the press-releases. Look at this as an example. The journalists are actually talking about an experimentally verified technique (Quantum teleportation) that might be used to help us build a practical quantum computer. Did you get that from the article?
A. Wait.
This review is so full of fundamental errors of science and fact that if it is a reflection of the book, it is not something I will be reading soon. Is he looking for the 'Unified Theory' by other means? BTW micro/macro - The girls father said his daughter was pregnant, "what steps do you propose to take?" Fcking great big ones, I said.
The argument against the first cause is if that if god caused that first thing, then god must be a remarkable and complex being. For the same reason that all the other things that are complex *must have had a cause, then *god* must have had a cause too!
Interesting argument, however there's a flaw.
If indeed the universe was created by God, then God must have existed before the universe did. Which also means that God must not be originally of this universe. Therefore, even if God did have a cause, such cause would have no meaning here. Therefore, "God" (or whatever name you choose to call it) still is the first cause of this universe, even by your definition.
This isn't science it's mysticism. We have to little data about the beginning of life to be making theories about it.
For a practical example, the odds of forming a single short genome in 30 billion years from a universe made entirely of the right proteins, (ignoring mismatches, decay, chirality, space/distance and a few other minor inconveniences) are about 1E80 against. Not a working organism, just a genome. Welcome to the wonderful world of macroevolution.
What the hell? You're trying to suggest that the actual origin of life is some form of macroevolution? The origin of life (that is, the appearance of life where it was not before) is not a concern of evolution. Do you normally erect such glaring strawmen? If you want to argue that abiogenesis is unlikely, then go ahead, but at least be intellectually honest enough to admit that you're not talking about evolution.
Or have I fallen for a troll for Jesus?
Thanks. I never took a philosophy course, and I did hear a radio program (Ideas on CBC) which mentioned him, so I'd never seen the written form before. "The light is now on";)
Well, if you read Carl Sagan then it's no wonder your an atheist. Sagan was an intellectual terrorist and one of the worst enemies of Christ. He is spending eternity in excruciating torture and I only hope that his screams are being broadcast in heaven where the faithful can listen to them and relish them. No amount of penance can undo the damage that Carl Sagan did to faith in the Bible as a focal point in life. Even Darwin was better because he did not popularize and stylize his material like Sagan did. Burn your Sagan books, you'll be glad you did.
As a brief side note, I have no idea why you are accusing the gentleman of "lusting for objectionist thought", how one could lust for a thought, and why you classify Sagan as an objectionist (whatever that is.) but more to the point....
no, you sheep minded bleater, Sagan did not have a death bed conversion!!!!!
OK kahuna, breath... breath.....
I appoligize for the bleater reference. Nonetheless, you have proved yourself to be largely contemptible in any discussion of this nature for swallowing and perpetuating the BIG LIE of evangelical xtians : The deathbed conversion of X. Darwin didn't do it, Einstien didn't do it, and no, Sagan wrote a book at the end of his life and a moving afterword from his wife carried the narritive up to his deathbed, and there was no conversion of any type.
And don't think that a little "I could be wrong" gets you off the hook. If you didn't read it or see it referenced to one of his books or an interview you could at least quote, you are just spreading the most irresponsible and unethical type of rumor - the kind that is purposely falsified to change perception of a person's charecter after their death.
Let me give you a quick hint. Anytime you see someone say "well didn't [person who was a proponent of X and is now dead] actually come out and condemn [X] just before his/her death?" Take the default state that the answer is a resounding "No". And do not even file the information as tenitive unless they can point to at least a claim of where this info was from. Then file it as tenative and don't spread it in any form until you have checked the reference yourself. It will prevent you from being flamed then killfiled by people who have respect for that person and for the truth.
PS, where do you meet your atheists? I have met atheists who liked Rand only over email, most people I know rate her between "interesting to read, but wouldn't take her advice on how to run my life" and "what a stupid little git!" And in fact the only case I have ever seen of someone changing their mind on a topic due to email discussion was on an atheist only newsgroup where one poster came around to a change of heart on capital punishment after a long discussion of the philosophical, legal, practical and ethical issues involved. (religion was of course left out of the debate entirely, which was a nice change from the newspaper countershots on the subject in Boston.)
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Either that or Fred Phelps posts to /. as AC.
...will work for Chick tracts...
I was not one of the moderators, but I can assure you that the first two sentences were why. You very succinctly summed up the entire article, accidentally perhaps. The moderators saw meaning you never intended. This is the way evolution happens. On a large scale it can look as if it were designed, perhaps it is.
Cheap trick. Stop using it.
I don't dispute what you claim for Quantum Computing, I was only asserting my view that Biology - as implemented on this planet up to now, at any rate - is explicable entirely in terms of classical physics.
With regard to David Deutsch, he made one elementary common error in his interpretation of the famous Church-Turing hypothesis about computability, undermining most of his subsequent conclusions about the computability of the human mind (that's unfortunate because I'm planning to get uploaded before I die...). The error is a common one apparently. You can read about it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
As a senior in college with a life sciences background I'd like to provide a little info on the current state of evolutionary theory. No, it's not possible to demonstrate macro-evolution of humans in a lab environment using humans. (obviously, to the delight of creationsists). And yes, there are some differences between micro and macro evolution. Since there seems to be a case of too few words chasing too few facts, I'd like to try and provide a breif outline of the state of evolutionary theory, why it exists, and how it is incomplete.
It's important to review the evidence occasionaly. Just because most science textbooks try to make an 'argument from authority' (which I hate) dosen't mean that anyone who argues is automaticaly an authority. I've tried to outline the scientific standpoint here as clearly as possible without getting bogged down in jargon. There are, of course, some supporting arguments not listed.
For starters; Any good scientific theory is predictive. It's possible to justify absolutly anything in the world after the fact. You can say, for instance, that objects fall to the floor because the sky is pushing them away, but once you traveled out into space, you'd have to change your explanation. A good theory predicts the results of an experiment before the experiment is performed. Darwinian evolution suggested that each individual had a fixed hereditary code which can't be changed by the environment as Lemark and later lysenko suggested. This was confirmed by the discovery of DNA, which is such a code.
Darwinian evolution also suggests that animals thought to be decended from one another would demonstrate similarities in their genetic code. Analysis of genetic phenomenon such as single nucleotide polymorphisms corroborate this. So the theory of Darwinian evolution did manage to predict the scientific framework under which future discoveries would fall, beating out competing scientific theories. It is predictive, in that sense.
Unfortunatly, the theory of evolution could be more predictive than it is
Black moths can suddenly come to dominate a population over the course of a few decades because the gene that allows it already existed as a recessive mutation in the population. This is not the same as creating a new and complex gene from scratch.
While you can't see humans evolving in the laboratory, bacteria and viruses are a different story. Since some bacteria can conjugate (bacteria sex) this should be a decent demonstration that new genes can evolve.
Some bacteria, if memory serves, can experience a few hundered thousand years worth of human evolution over a few decades real time.
Of course, there are still problems with the theory of evolution. While we can predict that animals will evolve, but it's still an open question as to just what they're going to evolve into or when, or even what causes them to change. Do they change suddenly with stable periods in between or do they change slowly and gradualy?
Paul Ewald recently published a book entitled 'the evolution of infectious diseases' which pointed out certain conditions under which diseases would become more virulent (harmful to their host). Cases involved frequent lateral bloodborne transmission or trasmission through another fluid medium (like diarrhea(sp?) contaminating the water supply) and other cases. This argued against Burnette and White's hypothesis, based on airborne pathogens, that diseases evolve to harmlessness since hosts become resistant and diseases don't want to 'kill the hand that feeds them'. Likewise, David Raup published "Extinction" which argued that species don't become extinct due to competition, but because they encounter a sudden stress that they hadn't evolved to handle. Without getting too boring or technical, I hope this provides some insight into the current state of evolutionary theory, why it's the most predictive theory to date, and how it needs to be improved. It's not that scientists are looking for a godless cause for the creation of life. It's just that bibicaly based creationism has proven to be very non-predictive.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
No, I haven't read the piece. From the "intro" it sounds too much like something from someone yelling "RANDOMNESS" and then forgetting about the little thing we call natural selection. Randomness is good, it what keeps us climbing those peaks, but natural selection is what really gets life 'ticking'. http://www.talkorigins.org
Belief is the currency of delusion.
OK, starting random.
...
Mutation A is "random" evolution.
Mutation B is "directed" evolution.
Iterate over a few billion years and observe.
If there is a survival advantage to "directed" evolution, it will be there.
Also there is a human tendency to see patterns, faces in clouds,
Even if (and I don't concede the point) that every word of the Bible (or Koran, or...) is the inspired word of God, words don't have exact, precise, unique, or unchanging meanings. You can't have a "PERFECT system of information" with a degenerate code.
Even if the Bible is perfect knowledge, religion is in fact human interpretation of a book, not the book itself much less the content of that book. Even if the Word Of God needs no correction, people's interpretaions of that word certainly would. Otherwise, how do you account for the many divergent (and sometimes overtly hostile) forms of Christianity?
As a matter of historical fact Christianity has disputed its doctrines year after year. Are you saying then that it is a man-invented hoax not worthy of anyone's time?
Basically, what you're saying is that a person can't win a weekly lottery in her lifetime either.
Think about it.
Marko Karppinen
``...two sets of functions are of special--although certainly not exclusive--interest. These are the functions that are computable by an idealized human being who is unaided by machinery, and the functions that are in principle computable in the real world, which is to say, are computable by machines, or organs, or in general entities, that physically could exist, given the resources on offer in the real world, even if they do not actually exist, nor ever do so. Turing argued, we think persuasively, that the first of these sets is coincident with the set of Turing-machine-computable functions. We believe that the extent of the second set is an open, empirical question. [...]
Copeland believes, like Penrose, that the mind is NOT a Turing machine! On the other hand the best analysis of modern physics indicates that any finite physical process, understood by modern physics, can be simulated efficiently, i.e. with a number of gates polynomial in the size of the system, by a Quantum network. Copeland believes that Deustch is wrong not because he is too radical but because he is too conservative. (A Turing machine can perfectly simulate a Quantum computer although it is VERY UNLIKELY it can do it efficiently-- if it could we could crack RSA in real-time on your linux box.)
A. Wait.
The argument that life is improbable is an old one. In fact, no lesser physicist than Lord Kelvin himself has argued that the eye is so improbable that God must have had a hand in creating life.
:-)
Anybody with computer inclinations and an interest in the question of evolution should read Richard Dawkins' "Climbing mount improbable".
In a very readable book, Dawkins examines the development of the same organs in various creatures, and points out how (and why) their evolutions took different paths, sometimes arriving at widely different organs that have the same effect. He also uses computer simulations to SHOW how evolution works. It's a realy amazing book, and once you work through it, you won't have trouble beleiving in evolution again. (Though you may never again look at a fig in quite the same way - if you read the book, you know what I mean
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
Sure. Montana, Yukon Territories, Polar Ice sheet, Siberia, Italy, Spain, Paris, London. Evolution is not direct and simple.
Copeland believes, like Penrose, that the mind is NOT a Turing machine!
:o(
I think (hope) that "believes" is too strong a word. I haven't read his book but I got the idea from the encyclopedia article that Copeland was simply expressing reservations about what is proven and what isn't.
Penrose on the other hand is so wrapped up in his own qmind theory that he's completely lost touch with reality
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The real challenge would be walking from New York to London
No problem. All you have to do is start long enough ago that the continents hadn't broken apart yet.
Walk over the polar icecaps, and then through the Chunnle. Blowing up these stupid brainless arguments if fun (just don't ask me how to walk to austrailia...)
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
No, Mathmatics is a strictly defined science, while its theoroms don't allways have the aplicability of say - physics, it is however a valid method of finding truth and dhould be treated as such.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
You really don't understand anything about evolution, do you?
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
And you replied: I think (hope) that "believes" is too strong a word. I haven't read his book but I got the idea from the encyclopedia article that Copeland was simply expressing reservations about what is proven and what isn't.
Later you wrote: Penrose on the other hand is so wrapped up in his own qmind theory that he's completely lost touch with reality :o(
As it turns out Copeland uses Penrose to support his own arguments! Penrose, essentially, says that modern physics must be wrong because, as I said previously, modern quantum-gravity theories are consistent with the idea that a classical (probabilistic) Turing machine can simulate any physical system perfectly and a Quantum Turing machine can simulate any physical system efficiently (and perfectly). Penrose is trying to find a theory that unified Quantum mechanics and gravity in such a way that some permitted physical processes cannot be simulated by any kind of Classical or Quantum computer. This is an extremely ambitious goal! If he does find such a theory, however, we are going to look pretty stupid. His machine based on this new physics will be able to do things that Turing machines and Quantum computer cannot do in principle.
From the paper I mentioned, which everyone can download and read for themselves, Copeland says on QC: "It is perhaps somewhat surprisng that not all classical algorithms are manual methods. That this is in fact the case has emerged from recent work on quantum computation. Algorithms for quantum Turing machines are not in gernal manual methods, since not all of the primitive operations made available by the quantum hardware can be performed by ap person unaided by mahcinery. Nevertheless the algorithms exected by Deutsch-Solovay-Yao quantum Turing machines are all classical in the sense used here."
In that paper he goes on to cite Penrose: "Others who have speculated about the existence of physical proceses that are not Turing-machine-computable include Geroch and Hartle 1986, Komar 1964, Penrose 1989,1994 and Vergis et al. 1986." At least Penrose is actively working on a new theory of physics that will support the (somewhat) outlandish arguments he makes about consciouness; Copeland on the other hand is saying that someone else (like Penrose) will figure out a new physics that will support his outlandish arguments!
Probably I'm spending too much time here but honestly I think these ideas are close to the most interesting research on the planet and that's why I think we should be careful before we burn people at the stake for pseudo-science.
The book by Dr. McFadden is supported by published research. And I think it is worth repeating one abstract here:
Biosystems 1999 Jun;50(3):203-11
A quantum mechanical model of adaptive mutation.
McFadden J, Al-Khalili J
Molecular Microbiology Group, School of Biological Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. j.al-khalili@surrey.ac.uk
The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such as the shift of a single proton (hydrogen atom) from one site to an adjacent one. We consider here the wave function describing the quantum state of the genome as being in a coherent linear superposition of states describing both the shifted and unshifted protons. Quantum coherence will be destroyed by the process of decoherence in which the quantum state of the genome becomes correlated (entangled) with its surroundings. Using a very simple model we estimate the decoherence times for protons within DNA and demonstrate that quantum coherence may be maintained for biological time-scales. Interaction of the coherent genome wave function with environments containing utilisable substrate will induce rapid decoherence and thereby destroy the superposition of mutant and non-mutant states. We show that this accelerated rate of decoherence may significantly increase the rate of production of the mutated state.
Can anyone with a strong bio-molecular background comment on this? Rather than the press-release?!?
A. Wait
This sounds very much to me like a rehashed -- albeit a very interesting and well-thought-out -- version of the anthropic principle. This is, in brief, a theory that states that the universe is as it is because it must be that way in order for us to exist; a tautology.
This is actually pretty obvious when one thinks about it. Certain things must be true for us to exist. All the anthropic principle means is that our existence is an end of itself; it doesn't matter how improbable conditions for life are, because, as mentioned in another post, we have no idea how rare we are.
In the case of this "quantum DNA" theory, the idea is the same. The universe we observe is simply the one in which the randomly-mutated DNA worked out to support life. While there are lots of possible futures where DNA was never created, we don't observe those because, well, we couldn't exist in those futures to observe them.
The problem is that this is still a tautology and really pretty meaningless in terms of sating the desire for knowing why these things happen on a deeper level. Oh well. -Adrian
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
I doubt that I can walk to L.A., given a huge amount of time without the external support necessary that isn't needed when walking across my living room. So given those conditions I do deny that one can walk across my living room, then using identical means walk to L.A.
Now say that, maybe, just maybe, the premise of, say, Christianity is true--that being, that every word in the Bible is the inspired truth of God himself, the creator of all things. What you would have is a PERFECT system of information that did not need to be continually self-corrected (like an imperfect system such as science).
;)
Still with me?
Sure. Of course, as soon as I can point to an inconsistency with the physical universe, then I have proved that your perfect system of information is not perfect, and is therefore not worth the paper it's printed on. This is why fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible literally tend to not look too favourably on the theory of genetic evolution.
I don't know about you, but any religion that disputes and changes its own doctrines year after year would seem, to me, to be a man-invented hoax not worthy of anyone's time. After all, isn't religion (or Christianity, at least) simply a way for man to get to know God? With your system, we would have a Board of Priests continually revising the Bible depending on what's in style for that decade or century, with arbitrary judgements on right vs. wrong. Come to think of it, you might consider joining the Roman Catholic church.
Well, perhaps that's why the Roman Catholic Church was dominant for so many centuries, because it could adapt to changing circumstances. However since its judgments were, as you put it, arbitrary and not constrained by an objective selection process such as experimental verification, it was also subject to hijacking for personal interests (i.e. indulgences and other abuses which fostered the protestant revolution).
However religions are useful in providing an external motive for "moral" behaviour, and their success in this increases the competitive efficiency of the cultures which adopt them (i.e. the protestant work ethic). The Judeo-Christian God's Ten Commandments seem to be a pretty good baseline for rules fostering effective and orderly communities and societies. Until science provides us an effective substitute for this cultural glue/lubricant we should be very careful before dismantling religious beliefs. Many resources have been wasted in the 20th Century on "scientific" social theories (i.e. Communist or Fascist) which have claimed, and then failed, to achive the goal of replacing religion. The price of experimental verification of these social theories is high indeed.
On the other hand, diversity in cultural memetic systems is important for flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. Democracy would probably be less efficient than feudalism or tribalism for the case of an agrarian (or hunter-gatherer) society with a poor communications infrastructure. Something to keep in mind the next time somebody talks about a utopian single world government.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I find his arguments against macro-evolution at the molecular level to be quite convincing. Having said this however, I am only a 19 and have little knowledge of micro-biology, that's why I was interested in your opinion on Behe. Specifically, what do you think of his analysis concerning blood clotting and cascading nature of it's process? Thanks, Stephen
Its like saying a person can't win the lottery 10^140993 times in there life. or a billion billion billion billion billion billion(repeat 1506 times...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
while i cannot answer your question directly, having never read behe myself, i can at least suggest the proper forum for you. on usenet, look at talk.origins, or on the web, www.talkorigins.org. michael behe used to write to the usenet group.
i would also recommend picking up richard dawkins' "the blind watchmaker" for a convincing take on the other side of this argument.
happy contemplation,
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
The laughing Jesus twin is not from the Dead Sea scrolls but from the Gnostic Gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in December of 1945. For more see "The Gnostic Gospels" by Elaine Pagels, 1979, Random House. Interesting book, seems that there was a whole 'nother flavor of Christianity in the first couple of centuries A.D. that the church which became the Roman Catholic church felt very threatened by and did their best to supress.
BTW, did Schroedinger's Cat evolve or was it created?
For an explanation of Schroedinger's Cat as well as material on quantum theory and evolution see the book "Other Worlds" by Paul Davies (orig. pub. circa 1980 by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. and in 1982 by Simon and Schuster as a paperback under the Touchstone imprint).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Greg Egan's novel Teranesia discusses ideas that sound similar to Quantum Evolution. By the way, although Teranesia is not my favorite of Egan's works, I think Egan is the deepest and most interesting novelist writing today that I know of; his themes as exposited in Diaspora, Axiomatic, Permutation City, have relevance to computer science.
WARNING : This post runs long. Even for my posts, which I realise usually take up a page or two when I'm at my most quiet on Slashdot. I just realised I have spent well over three hours typing up this reply, due to the length of it (ok, it touches on a lot of my favourite subjects, and this tends to induce just a bit of typed verbal diarrhea :), and I do not even want to think just how many pages this will take. I may well win the record for "Longest Post Ever Posted On Slashdot That Is Not A Blatant Attempt To Launch A DOS Attack On The Message Board System" for this one. If you don't want to read a long, possibly rambling post, feel free to skip ahead. It's not going to hurt me any (I don't post to be a karma-whore, just when something tickles my interest).
Now that the ObWarning is out of the way for those who don't want to risk a case of repetitive stress injury from hitting the space bar... :)
KahunaBurger dun said:
A wonderful example of this is how wings for powered flight evolved separately in insects, pterosaurs, dinosaurs (I'll explain more on that in a bit, I promise :) and (possibly twice) in bats.
Insects evolved from a common ancestor of insects, arachnids, other arthropods (like millipedes), and crustaceans; if you go farther down the line in the fossil record you find that this group and segmented worms share a common ancestor. Pretty much what insects had to work with were external limbs; these evolved eventually into wings, and in beetles further as protective covering. (There is still a type of insect, a very tiny one, that has a primitive type of wing; we can also determine from fossil records of insects and the huge number of surviving insect groups roughly how wing evolution has gone. They've had around 400 million years to improve on the idea, give or take a few, and flies are one of the two or three existing groups of flying critters to have mastered hovering flight. About the only type of flight insects haven't mastered is soaring flight, but that's because insects have serious trouble getting big enough for soaring flight to be possible.)
Pterosaurs (at least according to most theories) either evolved from a basal archosauromorph or possibly from a common ancestor of "bird-hip-jointed" archosaurs (archosaurs have evolved two forms of hip joints--the other is seen in crocodilians, by the way, which are very derived archosaurs which started out as land-runners and ended up as water-hunters)--we aren't entirely sure which, because there is not a hell of a lot of good fossil material from when pterosaurs first evolved. (It is also suspected-- largely from examining the two fossil groups we DO have halfway decent evidence of how flight may have developed--that flight is incredibly advantageous to animals in general and tends to be refined on very quickly; flight, oddly enough, might be an example of "quantum evolution"). They evolved wings from flaps between the arms and body of gliding archosaurs (of which we do have a few in the fossil record); they seem to have evolved "pterosaur fuzz" (probably protofeathers, and it is now thought protofeathers are a general "warm-blooded" archosaurian trait--see the next paragraph for info) around that time or possibly shortly after.
Now we come to the real example of successful jerryrigging in the world of flight--dinosaurian flight. :) First off, dinosaurs aren't entirely extinct--birds are now classified by most paleontologists as at least a group, if not a subgroup, of theropod dinosaurs and even many ornithologists have become convinced of it. (I'll note more on this below.) Theropods started off as ground-runners; we have very good evidence now (scattered feathers dating all the way back to the Triassic when theropods were first starting out, including a full impression of wing feathers that may be from a dilophosaur or similar early theropod, and some absolutely incredible fossil material coming out of several sites in China including Liaoning which have included at least five species of feathered dinosaur, including at least possibly some pre-Archaeopteryx material and including at least three non-avian dinosaurs). We now know from the incredible fossils coming out of China that feathers in dinosaurs probably started out as "fuzz" or hairlike or bristly stuff to keep them warm (Sinosauropteryx is one of the main examples we know of re "dinofuzz", and was the first major "feathered dino" find out of China; yes, it's been determined it's actual protofeathers and not "muscle tissue" like some have tried to claim), possibly going to wing feathers and tail feathers for display (we see this in Caudipteryx, now thought to be a basal oviraptor, and (assuming archaeopterygids and dromaeosaurs came from a common ancestor, and that dromaeosaurs aren't actually secondarily flightless--more on this in a bit--Sinornithosaurus, a feathered dromaeosaur or "raptor" and an unnamed dromaeosaur (possibly another Sinornithosaurus) that is now identified as being the "mirror image" of the tail section of "Archaeoraptor" (now known to be a chimaera composed of a feathered dromaeosaur tail and a feathered dinosaur (whether avian or not, we don't know for sure--it's suspected avian though))...also, some reports of a feathered theriziniosaur, a group of dinosaurs which have just been discovered to be abberant theropods and possibly the ancestors of ornithomimid dinosaurs).
By the time dinosaurs started evolving flight, their hips were so modified for erect stance that trying to splay one's feet would have dislocated their hips. Plus, there was no real way for skin "tents" to develop like those in pterosaurs or bats. They already had feathers for warmth and (probably) sexual displays or brooding...so dinosaurs made do with what they had, and modified their feathers (and later, their fingers by merging them and losing their claws) for flight. This is incredibly well documented--from dinofuzz to display feathers to early fliers (like Archaeopteryx to birds losing flexible fingers and claws and using the thumb as the alula feather--possibly now the best evidence we have of how animals learned to fly. About the only things still really up in the air are whether fliers were around earlier than Archaeopteryx and whether dinosaurs learned to fly from the ground up or the trees up (on the former, Protoarchaeopteryx from China might have been able to fly; on the latter, we're getting some evidence leaning towards "ground up").
(A minor note on some things I've pointed out. Many folks (a few ornithologists, one Feduccia for example) have serious problems with the idea that birds are dinosaurs--possibly because of old ideas they have regarding dinos, or possibly because they really don't want Aves to be sunk into a subclass of theropod dinosaurs (which are in themselves a subclass of a renewed Dinosauria, which in turn would be a subclass of Archosauria which would be the same rank as the rest of Reptilia, Amphibia, and Therapsidia (yes, there's talk of sinking mammals too). The thing with what happened to birds...there is a theory (based on a fair amount of evidence from the fossil record) that the animals that have the best chance of survival in a bad extinction event are small animals. This has happened at least three times in the fossil record (big therapsids disappearing and mammals evolving from little survivors; most big archosaurs disappearing and the little ones evolving into crocs and pterosaurs and dinosaurs; most big dinosaurs dying off and surviving as birds) and you could make a darn good argument it may be happening on a lesser scale now (most megafauna of the Ice Age has died off, we came pretty darn close to possibly losing whales, we are still on dicey edge of losing a fair number of large land animals (elephants, most of the big cats, some others)...yes, we are going through an extinction event of sorts right now, much of it probably human-caused (definitely so in the latter bits), in case nobody noticed :P). In the past instances, it's seemed like animals around sparrow-sized or a bit larger and down seem to be "right-sized" to get through an extinction event ok. What has happened to dinosaurs is that they went through a major extinction event in which the only survivors were small flying toothless ones; a rough equivalent for mammals would be if all mammals with the exception of the smaller insectivorous bats were to become extinct--and the surviving species of insectivorous bats were all that were left to continue the entire line of mammals. (In a real-life extinction event mice would probably make it ok, as well as rats and other such small critters. The smallest non-avian dinosaur we know of is probably Comsognathus which was right around the size of a large chicken; the smallest dinosaurs around at the time of the K-T boundary were, well, what we tend to call birds. The smallest pterosaurs were at the least around the size of large crows, most were around pelican-sized, and at least one pterosaur (Quetzalcoatlus) had the largest wingspan of any flying animal; if there's merit to the "small animals survive extinctions" rule, non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs probably never had much of a chance. Even modern crocs evolved from smaller crocs that survived the K-T boundary (really huge ones seem not to have made it) so there may be merit to it...
(With dinosaurs in particular, the matter of learning how they learned to fly is made even more complicated by two things--firstly, reversions have occured all over the place (flightless birds are common, at least one group (phorusracids) that was alive as recently as (possibly) 75,000 years ago in the Americas seems to have redeveloped movable, clawed fingers, and even chickens on occasion have teeth--yes, hen's teeth do exist, but they are rare indeed, and it's an old theropod trait that sometimes shows up). Secondly, the closest relatives to the first known group of flyers (archaeopterygids) happen to be dromaeosaurs like Deinonychus...which are so closely related that except for minor details (arm length, size of toe-claws (yes, it's been found Archie has a tiny sickle-claw just like Deinonychus though much smaller) and head details) it's been argued that they could be placed in the same family or as a suborder at the least. Even worse, dromaeosaurs tend to show up after Archaeopteryx and we now know feathers aren't diagnostic of Aves (dromaeosaurs, and stuff older than Archie, had feathers). Even worse STILL, there are a hell of a lot of transitional forms being found now between Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurs like Rahonavis (which looks almost exactly like a tiny flying Deinonychus). Worse yet, we've not found a hell of a lot of sickle-clawed animals before Archie, because the fossil records aren't so great then, but we've found a hell of a lot of them (including basal birds, especially) AFTER Archie...so there's a rather lively debate going on about whether dromaeosaurs and archaeopterygids are "sister species" or whether Deinonychus should call Archie (insert large number of "greats"-grandpa-birdie). IF it turns out dromaeosaurs ARE secondarily flightless (and the evidence looks more and more like they may well be--it's been known to happen before--look at phorusracid birds) a lot of people, including paleontologists, are going to have to find yet another way to redefine what is "Aves" or give up and lump them all in with the theropods without trying to separate them (since it's been found out dinos had feathers, the "diagnostic characteristic" for Aves in cladograms has been "all those animals with ancestors closer to Archaeopteryx than Deinonychus. Needless to say, if it turns out Deinonychus and other dromaeosaurs are secondarily flightless descendants of flying archaeopterygids, this is going to bugger up cladistic diagrams JUST a wee bit, because if Archie is the base of Aves you have just defined dromaeosaurs as birds. :) A fair number of people (including those who draw cladograms) would probably go into apoplexy at the thought of Deinonychus (not to mention probably oviraptorids, not to mention troodontids...not to mention a lot of other theropods not typically thought of as avian) in Aves. :)
As for bats...we're pretty sure they evolved flight in much the same manner as pterosaurs did-- from the trees up, from small gliding animals. Of special interest to those following evolution--it seems insectivorous bats and fruit-eating bats may not be terribly closely related, and in fact may have both evolved flight separately from completely different groups of mammals (insectivorous bats from small insectivores or proto-rodents; fruit-eating bats possibly from very early primates (!!!) (Yes, you may well be a distant cousin to a flying fox, and lemurs may be a somewhat closer cousin)...) So this has been jerry-rigged from flaps of skin possibly not once, but twice...apparently it was so useful and so jerry-riggable that it was almost bound to happen eventually. :) (One wonders if, whenever a major extinction event does happen to the mammals, if whatever evolves from mice and/or birds 65 million years down the road (should their descendents evolve sentience) even realises that bats are of that old class known as mammals that nearly all died off ;)
Flight, though (especially with dinosaurs) is almost the classic example of jerry-rigging. (Dinos really didn't have anything BUT feathers and arms to base wings off of... ;) Hell, how phorusracids hunted and came about is also a good example of this (flexible fingers, and big size and good ground-running, were selected for; this resulted in (for a while, at least till anywhere from 2 million to 75,000 years ago) essentially land-running, land-hunting dinosaurs coming back and becoming the terror of the Pampas of Tertiary and early Quaternary South America :)...of course, birds ARE theropods, and birds haven't entirely lost a lot of early theropod adaptations (see the occasional "freak" of a hen with teeth, when the old genes coding for teeth are turned on again-- by the way, the genes are known and scientists have grown hens with teeth on purpose to study bird evolution and development--or phorusracids, or even baby hoatzins (who have little claws on their wings and lose them as adults) or ostriches (which, I've read, are occasionally born with claws on their wings as well). For most birds, wing-claws and teeth aren't needful (actually detrimental--beaks don't protect teeth terribly well, and claws make it hard to control landings (the thumb in birds is modified to the alula feather, which is necessary for controlled landings instead of four-pointers). Baby hoatzins, who can't fly yet, seem to have been done good by keeping wing-claws so they can climb back up into the nest, at least till they can fly. Phorusracids did darn good by having fingers :)
(Apologies, by the way, if this has run really long-winded. I have a bit of a recreational interest in paleontology, especially mammilian and archosaurian paleontology, especially theropods, especially early avians and protoavians like dromaeosaurs and archaeopterygians and oviraptors (I STILL think it's the bee's knees that there's been found a brooding oviraptor) and early birds like Hesperornis. One of the things that has always fascinated me is how it's come about, just from theories in maybe the past twenty years or so and fossils dating back from 1964, that we've found out dinosaurs aren't extinct but we just call them cardinals, and one of the damn near coolest (IMHO) dinosaurs may well have been secondarily flightless and maybe even got its hunting style from flighted ancestors. Even going from the ideas in "Jurassic Park" (the book), which were based on the best science at the time...to "Raptor Red", which was based on Bob Bakker's idea of what life was like for Utahraptor, a large dromaeosaur (found while filming for "Jurassic Park" (the movie), oddly when Steven Spielberg wanted to put a Giant Dromaeosaur of Death in there) to knowing that dinosaurs brood (the "broody oviraptor" fossil find) to dinosaurs having feathers and all us nutters who drew Deinonychus with feathers (including, well, myself on a piccie at avatar. furry.org in an anthropomorphic piccie of a deinonych--ok, allow me a LITTLE self-advertisement :) being vindicated. (OK, so I read Greg Paul's "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World" and Bakker's "Dinosaur Heresies", and between that and the fossil evidence I have absolutely cringed every time I've seen someone draw Deinonychus naked as a jaybird (actually more so, seeing as jaybirds have feathers :). Especially the "'raptors" in "Jurassic Park". Even reading "Raptor Red" (Bakker's description of Red had her nekkid; I'll give him credit, though, because he HAS drawn feathery dromaeosaurs and it wasn't known then for sure that non-avian dinosaurs did have feathers, much less dromaeosaurs). It's just an odd sense that nekkid dromaeosaurs are just wrong to my sense of What Is Right In The World. Skies tend to be blue and grass green (unless one is in the middle of a field in Kentucky in the middle of spring storm season during a tornado warning, in which case the grass tends to be more bluish than the sky is, but we're all fscked up in Kentucky anyways, especially with the weather), cats tend not to give birth to puppies, and by God/dess, deinonychs should have proper feathers :)...wow, things have come a long way. Especially the last two years. We live in interesting times, and not entirely in the means of a Chinese curse (though those who keep wanting to think birds aren't dinosaurs might disagree with me, especially in light of some Chinese fossils :)...)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Isn't this just another wordplay of explaining things? Eg. a solar eclipse --> some deity eats the sun, but then spits it out because it's too hot --> end of solar eclipse.
I mean, why should any cell or piece of DNA suddenly disappear into a parallel universum and then appear when it's wanted? That sounds pretty far off. AFAIK we don't fully understand how things happen in the DNA/cell level. So I think these kind of parallel universum -assumptions are a bit off. Think of Occams razor if you will.
I'm sure there's a simpler and more plausible bottom line behind all that, but what is it? DNA strands vibrate so they change position? Cells move around?
Okay, whatever
For one thing, I'm pretty sure that in one of Johnson's books, he uses the "if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes" argument! That really makes me hard to take Johnson seriously on the issue.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
One of the points Behe repeatedly uses is the notion of irreducible complexity. Behe says that a system is "irreducibly complex" if removing any part of the system causes it to cease functioning. He then goes on to claim that such systems cannot have arisen from successive slight changes. This is, simply, incorrect.
Consider a stone arch. It is clearly irreducibly complex, for you cannot take away any stone without the whole arch collapsing. And yet, the stone arch can be constructed by successive slight changes. What you do is you make a big pile of stones to serve as scaffolding, lay down the arch's stones on top of the scaffolding, then remove the scaffolding. This is incomplete, of course, as an analogy to an evolved system; we would have to find an evolutionary advantage, or at least lack of disadvantage, for each one of the scaffolding stones. But the stone arch analogy does demonstrate that irreducible complexity isn't a "magic bullet" to demonstrate that a system cannot evolve.
I'm not qualified to address the specific examples that Behe uses to support his position, though, For example, I don't know enough about the blood clotting cascade to comment in detail on it; I have seen critiques that purported to demonstrate how the structure could have arisen by successive slight modifications, all advantageous by themselves, but I'm afraid I've lost track of any links to them. On the other hand, I think that Behe is being unfair in some of his other examples. For example, he points out that we have absolutely no idea how the bacterial flagellum may have evolved. Well, of course not! We still have only a very rough understanding of how the bacterial flagellum even works; how can we possibly expected to guess how it could have worked in the past?
You can probably find better critiques of Behe's arguments at the talk.origins archive.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
I had a discussion in philosophy about this one, and I have to admit that this is some new form of antropocentrism (though not very explicit). People have always been in search of their own free will. They seem determined to establish something that accounts for this free will and they seemingly can't accept determinism, although this certainly doesn't imply that everyone leads a life in which he is doomed to 'live like a robot'. Even if there exists a 'demon' who can foresee everything, based on all the knowledge of every particle in the universe, this has no implications on us human beings, as we can't see or know everything. ... Secondly, if we accept the parallel universes or multiverse, how do we astabish ourselves as an entity who seems (to itself) as to live in only one universe. How come we have a concept of self (that's what its all about in the end, that's the difficult question :) ? Or are you prepared to accept that every time you take a decision, there begins to exist (there is no other reasonable expression for this) a clone of you who has chosen the other decision and now lives in a parallel universe ? To me this goes a little to far, but people have accepted stranger things before. :)
There are objections against reeling in free will through quantum mechanics. The first one is very obvious, though not a lot of people seem to realize this one. If we talk about free will, we talk about thinking something and then doing it, because we 'wanted' us to do what we thought about. How do we go from thinking to a microscopical process ? This is not something trivial that can be looked over
Haven't got time to finish this one now, but i look forward to seeing your comments.
Sory to have started a new thread
Someone explain to me the difference between the Big Bang theory and evolution. Also what each believes is the way the universe started
Thankyou muchly
-- J. "There goes one of gods own prototypes, some kind of mutant never even considered for mass production, too wei
I just want to make the point that A->B does not imply B->A; the possible existence of conscious quantum computers does not imply that other consciousnesses such as human brains use quantum computation of any kind.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
> This is jumbo metaphysics, there's absolutely zero science behind it.
How the *fuck* do you know. You haven't read the book, you know nothing about the author (who almost certainly knows a damn site more about quantum mechanics than you do). Yet you feel qualified to make assertions about the value of what he says because "it sounds ridiculous to me".
That doesn't sound very "scientific" to me. So I suppose that anything that "sounds ridiculous" must be rubbish and can be ridiculed without even reading it first . Somehow these comments strike a cord with the new slashdot and this gets moderated up to a 5.
This is *exactly* the attitude that holds humanity back. Every single advance in understanding goes through a period of ridicule while people who know nothing about anything heap scorn on the idea. It is the most cherished notion of the truly ignorant that they already understand everything. Any idea that is at odds with the orthodox opinion must be wrong.
The earth is round - ridiculous, everybody knows its flat. The earth revolves around the sun - ridiculous, just look at it. Mass is energy - ridiculous pseudo science coming from someone who "is no expert" in the field, just a patent clerk for heaven's sake.
PS, I haven't read this yet either, but I'm going to.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
you see, once you start throwing around infinity, its hard to stop, cause it is such a big (really??) concept. and just think, in all of infinity, you are infinitely meaningless, now doesn't that feel great :)
Chronos
Daniel Dennet (though annoying in his own right) writes frequently from Darwin's point of view. See e.g. "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", http://store.yahoo.com/scibook/dardanid.html For people tired of quantum mechanical angels and the rest of the hogwash that seems to pass for believable theories these days, Dennet is a breath of fresh air.
Lamark said, essentially, that when animals try to adapt to their environment the positive adaptations are passed down to their offspring. When wolves move into a colder area, they grow in more warm undercoat. Their offspring, when born, naturally have thicker undercoats than their parents had to start with. Giraffs stretch their necks to get at high leaves, and the babies have longer default necks to start the stretching with.
So you can't call it lamarkian just because DNA changes for a reason other than mutation, because neither theory is (at its base) about DNA. The question is: Are changes in species due to random variation which is then selected in certain directions by the environment (Darwin) or do those changes come about because small physical adaptation throughout animals lives can be passed on to their offspring (Lamark). I honestly don't see where retroviruses can play into the discussion, except for your (IMHO flawed) assertion that natural selection in bound to a strict model of the possible ways DNA can be altered. So I guess the real question is, why do you think darwinian theory requires that?
...will work for Chick tracts...
So, does this mean that all my cool Lego spaceships I built-then-took-apart are still there in a parallel universe...somewhere?
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
- Jim Elliot
Very, very nice post. But I have a completely unrelated question. Did you used to post to alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die?
I drew one interesting idea that I drew from this article. I'm not sure the author was really trying to say this, but it kinda sparked my imagination on this subject, so here it is.
The search for an explanation of origins heretofore has focused soley at the macro level. The big bang, formation of galaxies and planets, evolution of life, and so forth are all phenomena we can observe.
But what if things at the macro level evolved from smaller things? Some scientists once thought that atoms were individual, until sub-atomic particles like electrons were discovered. Then they were thought to be the smallest particles until quarks were theorized. How small do things go?
Well at the quantum level things start to get strange, but maybe it is only because macro scale phenomena originally evolved from the quantum level, and in doing so took on a form quite different from the quantum level. Even quantum events may have evolved from an even smaller world so strange that it makes quantum physics seem common sense. Where does it all end, if it does?
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I said it before and I'll say it again, trust God, have faith in him, and you will go to heaven. Now that's a nice place to be! If you are afraid of going to burning hell, it is not too late. To and confess all your sins this Sunday. Alternatively, you can use one of the online confession services.
Don't want to be nitpicking an otherwise genius arguement, but how is the word creation and the word science oxy-moron's, in my opinion they mean many different things.
No offense but I myself as a science student I wouldn't call myself a scientist yet.. actually find myself believing alot , quantum theory for instance presents many problems to us.......
It would be interesting if you picked up a copy of some university texts on Bell's theorem and other areas I have to say that for me belief becomes a big thing..........................
I myself have a problem with believing in "creationism" as well....but I don't know if any current serious theologians uphold GENESIS and the FLOOD at all.
Many scientists themselves are Christians and accept the fact that evolution occured (or perhaps didn't, I am not so clever as to think I have the knowledge of the whole universe in my tiny little head)
I myself don't believe in God but that doesn't mean I would call any of my own "belief's" inviolate.
Peace man...........
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
Ooh! And I just noticed there's an article posted about the "death of usenet"! How apropos.
I think you are referring to the work of David Bohm. see: http://www.muc.de/~heuvel/bohm/
Brute forcing a key is harder because partial results are totally useless. Gene sequences don't have to be perfect, just good enough so they reproduce. If you could detect a difference between 1xxxxxxxxxxx and 0xxxxxxxxxx then you could get the correct answer in 2 * bits tries.
Well, IANA Evolutionary theorist, but my amature but interested observation of the field would indicate that this might be an assumption, but not a tenet or neccessity. I imagine that neo-darwinists would be interested, but not challenged by this additional source of variation.
However, it does play into a (fairly annoying) trend I have noticed in popularized science. It seems that some people feel that to be interesting, an idea cannot merely add to what we know, but must oppose a previously held idea. Like to hold the public interest, science has to be turned into a WFW cage match with the bold new challenger promising the utter defeat of the old order. Not only does this (IMHO) reduce the amount of respect the public holds for science (Darwinian Evolution Challenged! Maybe its all wrong and Goddidit!) It seems to be turning the practice of strawman construction into a fine art.
So, while the book you read sounds interesting, I suspect that the writer fell into the trap of fearing he would not be interesting enough if his work couldn't be billed as "a challenge to years of evolutionary thinking!"
Interesting though... Did the author indicate what size of DNA code could be implanted by your average retrovirus? One protein worth? one amino acid into a protein? My initial assumption would be that the smaller a change they made, the more likely they would be to have a real impact of evolution.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Somebody else mentioned in another post that there are two types of science - empirical and theoretical. It needs to be seen that you can't group science as a whole as a religion, as taken on faith. Empirical science is true science. It is the visible, testable and repeatable method. Theoretical science is the science of basically coming up with the best solution to a problem, realizing it can never be proven empirically.
Empirical science does not fall under religion or taken by faith. Non empirical science must. At the core it is based on the belief that information that has been passed on to you is truth. You weigh the difference possibilities, and in your mind you believe that one is the right one. This is the Church of Science.
So yes, science is not faith. Bu it has been mixed with fact and theoretical science, so that ideas are misunderstood as truth. Back on topic, for evolution (macro), it is a theoretical science, not empirical. Just as believing in creation and God is theoretical, essentially, and not empirical.
Creation Science, essentially, is science, since it is the study of observable, repeatable, and testable events which can be used to strengthen the belief that God created the universe. The beliefe in that is theoretical since it can never be proven, nor disproven. Just as the belief in evolution can never be proven nor disproven - thus both are beliefs, both taken on faith. The empirical science is used to present cases that may pursuade someone to believe one or the other, but that is all. It must also be noted on this basis that NO empirical science can without a doubt disprove either belief. If it does it is one of two things:
1 - it's not empirical.
2 - it IS the truth.
Until number 2 is discovered, evolution and creation are both belief systems about which debate and argument will never cease.
'Debating' in the small scale voice, ie via slashdot or usenet, etc, will not get anywhere unless some revolution hypothesis is noted and receives media attention. Insults will flare, flames will abound, tempers will grow and people will only get hurt. This is simply because the views of people differ so much from the basis of what they profess that people get pissed because they're insulted because of someone else who doesn't quite believe the same thing, and this happens on both sides...
There are fundamental evolutionists and fundamental Creationists, and there are open-minded evolutionists and open-minded Creationists, and there are those stuck in between. Everyone gets insulted at one time or another and nothing is solved.
The only safe way to debate is not to group beliefs generally, but to disprove one aspect or another, or focusing on proving your points. If you group 'evolutionists' together, you'll get flamed. If you group 'creationists' together, you'll get flamed. If someone believes something that has been disproven, don't flame them, tell them why. If someone gives you proof that your point is wrong, don't get personal - look it up, study it more to prove to yourself that it's true. Proving to yourself is the only way, generally, that you will believe something.
Even this statement won't solve anything on a large scale, maybe not even a small scale, and that's not expected. It's stimply my belief at how to solve an endless debate scientifically and an attempt to ease the suffering of people involved because no one really sees why people get hurt. sigh
g'night
If life can't just happen in some manner, then how the hell could a god just happen? If life was created by a god concept, then where did that first cause come from. A god concept ain't no answer, if anything it is at all, it be a question. why does your god concept need 10% of my money, aint it got its own money? why was your god concept so weak, he rested. on and on it can go...
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
For those who want more than the rather wild press release, I have set up a QUANTUM EVOLUTION website on: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe You will find an outline of the theory, bits of the book (and some bits that aren't in the book) and details of where to buy it. I will try to add in more links etc soon. I am considering whether to set up a bulletin board on quantum aspects of biology - any takers? Johnjoe
1) My theory does not depend on the multiverse interpretation of QM. As any physicist knows, all the interpretations are functionally equivalent. In QE I describe the theory in terms of the multiverse because I find it easier to visualise, but leave the reader to make up their own minds. The press relaeses have highlighted the parallel universe approach - because it sells more copy.
Life, in the Copenhagen interpretation is just as interesting because living cells become unique quantum measuring devices that collapse their own quantum states by amplifying them to the classical level.
2) The talk about 'multiple states' is an attempt to explain what's going on in layman's language. Of course a particle is in a single quantum state before measurement but that can collapse into a variety of possible classical states. To make this accessible in few words I am using the 'conventional' not technical, meaning of the word 'state'.
3) Finally, the classical world and classical laws are an illusion built upon the dissipation of quantum effects when you look at large numbers of particles in one lump. Once you realise that living cells and heredity are driven by single-particle dynamics (e.g. the dynamics of protons and electrons within a single DNA molecule) then you realise that quantum mechanics must loom larger in their dynamics. The implications of this are, I belive, a new understanding of what it means to be alive, and how we got here.
4) For more info, visit the Quantum Evolution website: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe Johnjoe