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Happy Darwin Day!
proclus writes "In honor of the day, I have released
some autobiographical material, which forms the background for GNU-Darwin and
some other projects. Alternatively, you can celebrate by joining the Friends of Charles Darwin, or baking some Trilobite Cookies."
You might even win a Darwin Award! Which I wish you all, Happy Darwin Day!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
There were too many words in front of the cookie part.
...in one day! Repent!
A Darwin day? I'd like to remind you people that evolution is only a theory, but this story shows that for some Evolutionists it is indeed a religion. This is crazy. Do we have a Newton day when we sing together and celebrate gravitation? No, because there are no Gravitationists like there are Evolutionists. And before you flame me for saying the obvious, ask yourself a question: who is worse, a religious nut praying to his God, or another religious nut praying to Darwin? Who is stupider? Who is more close-minded? This is an interesting question.
Who fucking whom?
I'm sorry, but that's just a bad image. I'm all supportive of healthy homosexual relationships among men or women, but I'd prefer you keep your gay pr()n to yourself.
I wish these guys a lot of luck. Free (as in freedom) distros are important. If FOSS ever gets big enough that the big shots will take shots at it, via copyright issues, patents etc, then distros like GNU-Darwin may provide a refuge. Or at least won't stop working when private companies recall all their linux binaries. This is kind of what Redhat fear I suppose. Hence no DVD or MP3 support in fedora.
Unlikely? People would have said a situation like the SCO debauckle was unlikely. If companies supplying Linux binaries and tools are threated with cross licensing fees from a big company like MicroSoft, Oracle, Adobe or others, do you think they'll stand up for FOSS?
Actually is there an all free Linux distro? What's the linux equivilent of GNU-Darwin?
May the Maths Be with you!
jajaja Cookies are the best
Darwin was 90% correct.But to change you first have to want or be forced to change. And changes cannot be random mutations .It would take too much energy to produce something better using random mutations.The answer to this is really complex and would take too long to explain.God is not the answer.
To clarify, evolution and the theory of evolution are two different things. If you are talking about evolution, then you are refering to a change in a species over time. This is proven to occur and explains the great variety of different kinds of dogs. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, refers to a theory that claims a species can evolve into into an entirely different species, most noteably, Homo neanderthalensis to Homo sapien. This theory has a great deal of evidence supporting it, and the only reason it is a topic of such controversy is because it contradicts popular interpretations of the worlds most commonly believed in religious texts. If you need to see some of the evidence for yourself, then just look inside you own mouth. Wisdom teeth were once used for the crushing of bones when predatorily feeding on other animals, however, due to the competitive advantages of being a more omnivorous species and the fact that bone provides little sustinance, the wisdom teeth in mankind evolved to be much smaller, and have become a nuisance. Evolution today is much like Galileo's theory that the Earth rotated around the Sun. Like evolution, it was ridiculed by the religious, to the point that Galileo was even persecuted for his beliefs. I expect that evolution will one day be proven, just like Galileo's theory. Evolution will eventually become completely accepted among the general populous, and a new theory will arise to take its place among Religion/Science debates. It should be noted that Science is not the enemy of Religion. Science is simply an attempt at understanding the world around us by using a method involving evidence and proofs. Science has never tried to disprove the existance of a diety, and if a diety does in fact exist, Science should provide evidence supporting that. The utter lack of evidence supporting the existance of a god is what causes people to look at other possibilities. The problem with religion is that it often leads to lazy or inaccurate science. The religious are overly eager to prove thier belief is valid and conclude that anything that cannot be readily explained is an act of God. Over time, this becomes the common belief in a society, and when a theory arises that challenges that belief, the public rejects it. Evolution does not even contradict the Bible, Torah, or Koran, as I understand them, because the order in which the Gods of these texts created life are exactly identical to the order in which life was expected to evolve. Who's to say that God did not create man through the process of evolution? None of these texts describe exactly how Adam was created. The only thing the theory of evolution is guilty of is that it contradicts the commonly held interpretation of these texts.
I would have thought that we could avoid homophobic insults on slashdot. Whatever you think about homosexuality surely calling someone a "fag" as an insult is rather immature. I thought slashdotters were smarter than that.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
Happy Darwin Day everybody! For this sort of thread, I feel it is necessary to briefly explain how the theory of evolution, for which Darwin is best known, works. Male and female gametes (eggs and sperm) are created during a process called Meiosis. These are haploid cells, meaning they only have half the dna of a normal cell. When the gametes meet, the dna goes through a process called crossing over, in which the dna of the two cells are combined. It is very rare, but occasionally some acids will be lost or gained during this stage. This is what causes mutations. 99.9% of all mutants are still born, but a few will survive. A common example of a mutant that survives is an albino. If the trait derived from the mutation benefits the individual and gives it a competative advantage for food, water, shelter, or sex over the non-mutants, then it will be more likely to survive and reproduce, hence spreading the mutant gene. This process is called natural selection. Over a long period of time, The non-mutated population may be phased out completely. Over an even longer period of time, there are even more mutations created the same way. Eventually, the mutants will be so changed that they will no longer be able to mate and create fertile offspring with the origional, unmutated population (assuming they are not extinct). When this happens, they are then considered to be a different species!
I thought slashdotters were smarter than that.
;)
You must be new here
On-topic....hrmmm....
I for one welcome our new ever-evolving overlords..?
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Satan is better.
Do urself a favour5 262002/qid=1108195258/sr=8-10/ref=pd_bbs_10/002-06 91541-5684038?v=glance&s=books&n=507846Evolution Myth or Science
buy this book
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/089
and how many transitional species exist today.
Name one species which is 'evolving' today.
and Read the last chapter of origin of species
and Darwin was a racist(Read the damn book)
Satan is better.
Yay Satan! Booze, babes and bankroll.
Actually, I've done a little research on Satanism, and they are a fairly nihilist bunch of people. Not really my cup of tea, even if I weren't an atheist.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
+5 Insightful, methinks.
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Is that close enough?
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It's the Mathematicians who don't think evolution is possible.
Mostly because it isn't, if you set the boundary anywhere less than about 1e300,000 in a universe 1e18 seconds old and containing 1e81 atoms recombining 1e12 times a second. (-:
PS, is this day for Erasmus Darwin, or really for Charles? Erasmus has a better claim on having "invented" evolution.
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Certainly, his explanations are. It's a kind of compatibility.
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...how asexual critters evolve, how sexuality arose in the first place and provide some kind of viable cover for abiogeneis, I think you'd be on to something.
One major problem with existing mutations is that they all represent destruction of information. My favourite analogy is of a blind man trying to improve the structure of a Lego diorama using only a rifle from across the street. There seems to be no way to add new and useful information, which is kind of essential, nor to prevent any which somehow magically manages to get added from being drowned out by the "genetic burden" of otherwise universally destructive mutations.
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"pissing into the wind" (-:
Ironically enough, "fag" - a diminuitive of "fagot" or kindling - was originally applied to Protestant Christians burned at the stake for being honest and helpful, then came to mean anybody burned at the stake, then settled on the narrower meaning of "pervert suitable for burning at the stake" and finally seems to have come to rest as a descriptor for male homosexuals.
I've never seen a lesbian called a "fag" but OTOH I don't hang out in or near gay nightclubs.
So, you were expecting to escape "poofter-bashing" on SlashDot? Why?
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Sigh. Chances of getting CowboyNeal to allow separate moderation of selected sentences?
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...since while they're right at the bottom of the geological column but they've also got a bunch of highly developed features like their powerful underwater low-light eyesight. They've also got living relatives (which somehow managed to "not evolve") in horseshoe crabs.
Better avoid Darwin's Finches, too, since they turned out to be homeostatic around a norm. And the wings are a bastard to get off the tray without breakage.
If you wanted glow-in-the-dark bikkies, you could try a coleocanth - except that all of those fins are a bit fiddly, and, oh, yes - they turned to to still be alive and unevolved as well.
Horses? No, the horse lineage turned out to be a furphy. Brontosaurus? No, sorry, that head belongs to an apatosaurus, and the limbs are too delicate to avoid burning them when they bake. You could make coffee-flavoured Java Man cookies, or Peking Man cookies with a fortune in them - but both of those turned out to be frauds, too. Hummmm - archaeopteryx? No, that's just a hoatzin with teeth. Hippos are a possible - nice and round - but you'd have to wait until the various factions finish squabbling over which major phylogenetic tree they came from (pigs, whales, whatever)...
I'm sure you get the picture. (-:
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Sorry. I used the enter key to break this up into paragraphs, but it didn't show up when I submitted. I'm new to slashdot, so if I'm doing something wrong, please let me know.
Is "survival of the fittest" motivation enough?
Intel. Design (ID) Creationism (C) Evolution (ToE)
Since ID and C cannot be DISproven, they are not science.
The above poster relies on the logic of "If it's too complicated to explain today, God must have done it." This is unscientific thinking, and so this logic cannot be used to debunk anything scientific. In order to debate science, one must use science. On the reverse, to debate religion, one must use religion, since disproving the existance of God is impossible.
Science explains the natural world, Religion explains the supernatural. There is no overlap.
Iam saying that The only way politics,Religion and science can work is if they are combined.Like three wrongs make a right.Each on there own would produce a system that could not addapt to the enviomental changes.
salmon.
and use a spell checker.
To celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) two academics have performed extracts from The Origin of Species in dub (hybrid form of reggae) as the Genomic Dub Collective. The BBC has an informative piece about the inspiration for doing this.
The aim is to create a new musical genre, Genomic Dub, that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology. They also aim to highlight common threads that link current scientific, artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins' involvement in the anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encoding macromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.
Samples of the Origin of Species in Dub can be downloaded from the Genomic Dub Collectives web site, or a CD can be ordered by sending an e-mail to m.pallen@bham.ac.uk
A whacking great mirror across the front? (-:
And the hymns?
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No transitionals, ever-increasing range and overlap for our index fossils, a single massive explosion in complexity over a very narrow range, ecologically grouped fossils, fossils of incredibly delicate creatures, "boneyards" of fossils, fossils with soft parts intact or only partially fossilised, total stasis of form in everything from mosquitos to sharks, and full-blown complex critters (e.g. trilobite) right at the bottom of the stack.
From this, it is obvious that either there has been no evolution, or our dating systems are totally cocked up, or both.
The logical consequence of this is that Darwinian theory is not so much wrong as irrelevant.
Irrelevant or not, it's still wrong. Darwin imagined each of the billions of cells of which we consist to be - as his buddy Earnst Haeckel put it - "a simple little lump of albuminous carbon". In that light, which to us today looks breathtakingly insane, molecules-to-man evolution looked like a reasonable proposition. Given what we now know, it's far beyond merely inadequate for the task. But who ever said that all religions were rational?
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But I don't see how massively amplifying the negative factors as well as the positive in any way helps your case.
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Your Pentium IV analogy is hilarious!
Who took parts of the primordial cell and "rearranged them and added new stuff"? Time and chance? Or researchers aided i their planning by powerful computers and reams of physics?
Who dictated the x86 lineage (I favour MIPS myself)? Breeding? Or policy decisions by managers?
Who sets policy for a cell?Well, I must say that you walked right into this one! (-:
Go and read any modern medical text on the subect to discover why doctors are becoming increasingly reluctant to excise such organs at a whim. What you'll find is that the scorn heaped on them was a product of our collective ignorance, coupled with the evolutionary assumption that such features would exist. Now we as a race know better, but evidently you've got some catching up to do. (-:
Damn, I replied to an AC again.
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...if improvements to reproduction were the goal, we'd all be lemmings - or E. Coli.
Mutagenic influences don't just move blocks, they damage and randomise them.
The selection feedback is the shop assistant removing the damaged blocks and replacing them with fresh ones (and presumably calling a glazier about the window).
In Evolution (capital E for molecules-to-man) there is no observer, only a blind man with no feeling in his hands.
Genetic evolution requires a complex computer, and rules. Another way of saying "rules" is "design".
How did the necessary preconditions get there? You can't just assume them without explanation.
There are many more destructive mutations than beneficial. Selection is not a magic wand, it is a gradual thing - remember that there is no observer. It seems obvious (but there is also much research and proof) that minor destructive changes will accumulate faster than constructive, simply by weight of numbers. So we would expect to see species growing weaker and becoming extinct rather than growing stronger and branching out in various successful directions - and we do.
Prediction says that overall there will be decay, not progress. Observation backs this up. Where do we find a live dragonfly with a hundred-and-ten centimeter wingspan to match the vigour of the fossils? We don't. Evolution is doing exactly what actual science (rather than fairy tales for Atheists) says it should be doing: destroying us. There is no natural (Materialist) mechanism for improving us.
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...of this thesis, or should I call it a sermon? (-:
However, it stuill stumbles over a few mundane problems.
Regardless of the species-level information processing capabilities available (and how would that come about in the first place? one wonders), the actual litmus test of a gene's suitability is the survival-to-reproduction or not of individuals within the species. The engine cannot be divorced from its parts. If these mutations are not lethal and are spread therough the population, then the whole species is accumulating cruft.
The punchline is that it's being accumulated in such a way that errors cannot be filtered out, since any one or small group of them is minor enough not to be noticeably engaged by selection factors. By the time the effect is large enough to be "noticed" by selection, the whole species is littered with various more-or-less-randomly allocated pieces of useless or harmful information, so a candidate for being a better species is not competing with the species at its starting point, the candidate is competing with other individuals suffering a broad range of damage similar to its own. The micro-changes in each member of the speies have changed (damaged) the species as a whole without significant selection occuring.
A neutral mutation is still a nett error because it is displacing (competing with) a gene (or whatever; unit of "genetic" information) which has the potential to contain that most elusive of developments, a helpful mutation.
These and similar reasons are why, despite the statistical wonderland laid out by your proposal, you will still hear of "survival of the luckiest" theories. Perhaps the best way I've heard it put is "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they're different."
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