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Subatomic Darwinism

blamanj writes "In the beginning was Darwinism, then there arose Social Darwinism, now physicists are proposing Quantum Darwinism. According to the Nature article: "If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states."."

5 of 556 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't forget ... by johnnyb · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    "The Earth is flat, because this passage from the Bible talks about God stopping the Sun directly overhead!"

    Actually the earliest record of the Earth (a) being round and (b) floating in space come from the Bible. The "flat earth" myth is just that, a myth.

    As to the sun stopping overhead, don't you think it's interesting how on the other side of the world there is a record of an extended night?

    "Okay, okay! But the celestial bodies are little lights in the sky, and perfect and unblemished, and the go around the Earth!"

    That was actually the current science, not a religious idea. As most science, it was superceded by later science.

    "But the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, as we can determine from Biblical genealogies!"

    Actually, the geneologies indicate the age of _man_, not the earth. The age of the earth is not mentioned biblically. The six days of "creation" was not of the creation of the earth -- which was already there, but was a wasteland (i.e. "without form and void"). Of course, all current geological dates are mere guesses, because they assume many things about the earth and the earth's past that we simply don't know (and are often found to be wrong). Uniformitarianism is an assumed fact, even when data shows it to be wrong. For example, we now know from observations at Mt. St. Helen's that formations like the grand canyon can be formed in days, and it doesn't necessarily take millions of years.

    "Um, no, actually, we look an awful lot like other apes, and that's really not a coincidence, and here's the proof."

    You're right, it isn't a coincidence -- we have the same designer! Most people like to gloss over the fact that the fossil record does not support evolution. The Cambrian explosion, assuming that it is the result of "millions of years" and not the flood, shows EVERY KNOWN PHYLUM coming into existence fully formed. Since then, we have only LOST phylums to extinction, and have not gained new ones. That is the exact _inverse_ of the tree of life predicted by Darwin and even neo-Darwinists.

    So, sure, if you make up what other people believe, you can prove them wrong, and if you ignore the facts, you can prove even more people wrong, and if you call all disproved scientific ideas "religion" then you can say that all bad ideas are religious, since you just defined them that way. But I wouldn't go around arguing that as conclusive proof.

  2. Science cannot disprove the Bible by CrazyJim1 · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Yes, people have read the bible and guessed about what's going on in the universe before.

    When science disproves that person's theory, you cannot then say it disproves the bible. You're not disproving the Bible, you're disproving a man's theory he imagined from reading the bible.

    You say there is proof that the world is older than 10,000 years, but you fail to consider that God could have made everything look like its that old. You also fail to realise that a day of God's time isn't the same as a day in man's time.

    You're using narrowmindedness and faulty logic to make the claim that science disproves God. I know God exists. If you want to read up on logically understanding God, I did a write up last night. Its in my link. You can use earthly logic to understand God.

  3. Re:Don't forget ... by SnapShot · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The parent ain't a troll, but it looks like there is a jihadist out there with mod points.

    --
    Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
  4. Look at it this way by CrazyJim1 · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    "Sure, he might've. He might've created the universe three seconds ago. But why would he do that? Just to fool us into thinking he doesn't exist?"

    The bible is 100% true. You can focus on the easy to comprehend truths first, then you believe on faith the rest. I provide strategies for examining the truths in the bible in my link. One of the easiest proofs of God in the bible is that prophesies take place. No one around today can prophesize the future, they're all made out to look like fools.

  5. Re:Don't forget ... by ekuns · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    For fucks sake, a day is a fucking day.

    Geez ... hostile much? Ever heard of a parable? If you were going to descrbe the scientific version of creation to a pre-industrial society, how would you put it? I think the Biblical version does a reasonable job of describing creation in a pre-industrial, pre-higher-mathematical way. How do you explain the Big Bang to people who don't have a concept for more than hundreds or (maybe) thousands of years? People who don't understand celestial mechanics and who are thousands of years away from such understanding?

    It turns out that you're more of a Biblical literalist than most radical Creationists I've met! I'm not used to encountering people who disagree with the Bible while at the same time insisting that the only possible interpretation of the book is the most literal one.

    You also assume that the Bible that we have today -- published in English -- says the same thing as earlier versions in the original languages. You assume that the translations were accurate and did not expand or subtract from any of the concepts or stories or discussions.