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."

Comments

If you are fortunate enough

[Pan T. Hose]

You might even win a Darwin Award! Which I wish you all, Happy Darwin Day!

MMMMMM Cookies

[varuul]

There were too many words in front of the cookie part.

Insane

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Insane

[varuul]

"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."

I am all in favor of a few Fig Newton's.

Re:Insane

[FleaPlus]

This is crazy. Do we have a Newton day when we sing together and celebrate gravitation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonmas

Plus, I think you're also forgetting things like Pi Day. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, it was a pretty hard-core holiday.

Re:Insane

[Madcapjack]

No, because there are no Gravitationists like there are Evolutionists

the only reason there are no Gravitationists like there are Evolutionists (as you say it), is simply because gravitational theory does not directly contradict people's religious beliefs like the theory of evolution does. Evolutionists are evolutionists because anti-evolutionists call them evolutionists instead of calling them what they call themselves, biologists.

Re:Darwin is a fag

[Claire-plus-plus]

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.

+3 Funny? Come on, mods, put some effort in! (-:

[leonbrooks]

+5 Insightful, methinks.

What's the weather like on your planet? (-:

[leonbrooks]

Religion beliefs produce large populations because they ignore reality. Science is left to figure out ways to protect this huge population. If religion and science wasted all their time arguing about it they would not evolve. So insert the greedy politicions and the species evolves in a steady forward motion.

Yeah, well, I can understand why you'd mod him down for the homophobia, but I think this part of the post deserved a +1, Funny...

Amino acids cant improve themselves without defining improve first.

...and this needs a +1, Insightful.

Sigh. Chances of getting CowboyNeal to allow separate moderation of selected sentences?

Re:There's already a Church of Humanism

[Dachannien]

Maybe. But it's pretty hard to take seriously a church whose website includes a button labeled "Ordain Me".

Re:Er, that's Mathematicians

[Madcapjack]

"It's the Mathematicians who don't think evolution is possible"

Correction: some mathematicians Certainly not the majority who actually care to become intimately familiar with the subject.

Two: Evolution has occured irregardless of whether Darwinian theory of the mechanics of evolution are correct. The fossil evidence is massively clear.

Re:How evolution works

[chgros]

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
Darwin's theory of evolution isn't this at all (DNA was discovered in the second half of the twentieth century). His theory was that of natural selection, meaning that there are (random) variations in individuals (that can be caused by crossing over and mutations), and that those better adapted for the environment are more likely to be passed on to the next generation, making the species more adapted on average.
On a different note, albinism is probably very seldom the result of a direct mutation, rather it is due recessive genes received from both parents (these genes being mutations of regular alleles that can have happened many generations before)

Re:Er, that's Mathematicians

[Alsee]

Thanx for the link! It was a good laugh :)

And just in case you were serious, it's actually mathemticians who are demonstrating that the mathematics of evolution are immensely more powerful than biologists realized.

If you have reasonable scientific and mathematical capability then I recommend googling on Implicit Parallelism. Of course if you really do think that evolution is impossible then I suspect the mathematics and evolutionary systems of Implicit Parallelism are likely going to be over your head. But heay, give it a try. If you can grasp the mathematics it explains how evolutionary genetic recombination and selection is exponentially more powerful than it first appears. Only a limited amount of information is processed/improved in each generation step, but that information processing gets multiplied by an astronomically huge Implicit Parallelism factor. The exact same sort of astronomically large numbers that supposedly make evolution mathematically impossible.

As for any mathemeticians (or anyone else) who thinks they've prooven evolution impossible, well yeah, you can have "correct" math proving it's impossible for bumblebees to fly when you don't actually understand bumblebees. If you grab the wrong equations in the first place then you calculate something totally irrelevant. Those equations can all be worked out "correctly" and the results can look quite convincing (if you don't already adaquately understand bumblebees), but they were the wrong equations in the first place. Bumblebees can fly, and when you you look at the right things and the right equations it all works.

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