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Largest Genome Ever
sciencehabit writes "A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome — and the largest genome ever found. The genome would be taller than Big Ben if stretched out end to end. The researchers warn however that big genomes tend to be a liability: plants with lots of DNA have more trouble tolerating pollution and extreme climatic extinctions—and they grow more slowly than plants with less DNA, because it takes so long to replicate their genome."
Why exactly does this matter to anybody?
Dang it. I read it as "Largest Gnome Ever". My brain was already thinking: "WTF? Why would someone need a large desktop manager? Larger than what?" Then, I read the summary. All became clear.
Since the article was light on visuals, I found a picture of the largest genome ever.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
"Does ist need a Multipass...?"
I'm glad they warned me. I was considering enlarging my genome, but now that I know the dangers I guess I'll pass.
How big is this flower .... ?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
My girlfriend always said it's not the size of the genome that counts, its what you do with it.
Big Ben is, technically, the nick-name of the Great Bell inside the clock tower. That bell is only slightly taller than 2 meters.
Please to be fucking off of my internet.
One of the coolest sites, ever: zombo.com
Everyone on the internet who has read or come near your post is now dumber because of it. I award you no points, and may Al Gore have mercy on your soul
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation. This plant should, therefore, be highly resistant. That is potentially quite useful knowledge. Back in the days when people looked to hydroponics and Biosphere 2 as a way of getting oxygen into an artificial environment, they forgot to take into consideration that most plantlife won't cope with the radiation on, say, Mars. In order to be able to get a livable environment for humans, you must first create a livable environment for the plants needed. Obvious solution - use rad-resistant plants as part of an initial program for building up the environment.
Once you've got an artificial environment that is biologically stable and sustaining good O:CO2 ratios for plantlife, you can look to advancing that environment. I'd suggest having a two layer dome, with the gap between the inner dome and outer dome flooded at as high a pressure as the domes can take something that'll filter the radiation. By having an organic system that can cope, you can take your time getting it right. Regardless of what is actually done, these plants will provide a rich topsoil that will be valuable to the plants that are actually needed by humans.
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)
Fact: Jesus was gay.
Mohammed was too, probably. They may be in heaven right now porking the shit out of each other.
Not that I have read TFA, but this is probably another plant with multiple copies of each chomosome. In which case it's not really a newsflash; this is the case for many plants. Sugar cane and many other monocots have extremely multiploid genomes.
So does this plant run around asking for a MUL-TI-PASS?
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
they have all the sensitivities of an advanced life form.
Read radical news here
And started thinking about what size a gnome must be in order to not be a gnome.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
You fail right there.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Perhaps the DNA is not compressed properly.
The Universe is defined as something of which no greater can be conceived.
Such a thing can be conceived.
If there were no such thing in reality, then a greater thing—namely, a thing than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists—can be conceived.
Yet nothing can be greater than a thing than which no greater can be conceived.
Therefore a thing than which no greater can be conceived—i.e., the Universe—must exist.
The Universe is the entity of which nothing greater can be thought.
It is greater to be necessary than not.
The Universe must therefore be necessary.
Hence, the Universe exists necessarily.
QED.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Well first off TLDR.. I did read the first few lines though, and you have a logic issue.
Well you said:
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
Our universe could easily have been created by another universe. We could be living inside a black hole.
Now I know your response.. What created the other universe? That would be another logical fallacy. Who created the creator would be my reply.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
It must be made by Microsoft. Far too many lines of code. :)
Some of them genomic combinations will probably produce Jurassified species that can eat humans for dessert. And that's after spending the rest of the day converting sunlight into carbohydrates.
Taller than Big Ben? I assume they mean the "Clock Tower" as Big Ben is actually just the bell inside the tower.
As tall as Big Ben? That hardly expresses how much data is packed into this genome. I need to know is how many Library of Congresses this genome is in order to fully comprehend the size.
You confused me with all those big words, like "conceived" - but I think you just said the universe could (or has?) go fuck itself?
Please clarify and let me know how I can subscribe to your newsletter. (Assuming you are not a lightning struck smudge.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Bloated code is unmaintenable.
Likewise, a bloated genome means it's hard to evolve.
"The universe had a beginning"
A conclusion without facts...
"Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else"
True
"Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)"
Where did the creator come from?
Let me answer for you... The creator has always existed...
So lets simplify our model of everything and just state for simplicity that the universe has always existed.
No creator required. NOTE: Usually, the simplest model is correct.
The answer is simple:w
The earth was created by god. god was created by a giant frog. the giant frog was created by robotic jesus.
And all those lies were created by man, in particular, certain individuals who where trying to control the rest of the population.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The Greek philosopher Thrasymachus said: With religion, the clever manipulate the foolish.
Converted to mathematics, the error in logic if more clear:
1) You say that for all 'x', there must be an 'x-1'. ("a cause", "antecedent", "precedent", or whatever)
2) You say that "we atheists" claim that the "first thing" is '1'.
3) Hence, if there's a '1', there must be a '0'. ("the first thing must be created")
4) Then, you basically make the unfounded claim that '0' must be 'God'.*
The problem is that this simply implies that all negative numbers must exist also, (-1, -2, -3, etc...), since there's no reason to stop at 0.
In other words, there's no reason to stop at "God". God must also have a cause. And the cause of God must also have a cause, etc...
If you say that "God" is special and has no cause, then (1) was not true, it's actually "for all 'x' except some 'x' there must be an 'x-1'", which is a different rule. Hence, the whole argument is hogwash, since the original rule cannot be true for it to work. That is, if there are exceptions to the rule, then there's no reason for the Universe itself to not be one of those exceptions. This argument, and it's counter-arguments have been known since ancient times, it's not exactly new. You're not exactly surprising any Atheists with a shocking new proof. For crying out loud, there's a 10-page Wikipedia article about it's long history.
* I assume that you refer specifically to the Abrahamic God that spoke to a barely literate goat herder on the side of a mountain in ancient Palestine, raped some woman who was apparently a virgin despite living with her husband, and then watched his illegitimate son get executed, right? Otherwise you could be speaking of any God. Lets say, Zeus. I like Zeus. He's the kind of womanising, lightning-bolt throwing God I can relate to! Some of his human consorts were even awake when he impregnated them -- what a gentleman! If we're going to start making assumptions that "the cause of the universe" must be a specific God, lets pick a good one!
http://www.kcci.com/r/23101808/detail.html
Did anyone else misread this as "Largest Gnome Ever" and momentarily get excited that someone had discovered a species of Gnomes that was larger than expected?
Ok, sure it sounds stupid when you say it out loud, but dammit for a second there...
“I contend we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”- Stephen F. Roberts
We could be living inside a black hole.
If so, then is it still black?
a .312 batting average with men's butts. da doom che
Teach me! I want to know how to be like you!
What about Carl Sagan's argument?
He argued (in 'Cosmos') that if it was necessary to postulate a cause for the universe, it was necessary to postulate a cause for whatever caused the universe, and if it was not necessary to claim there was a cause for "God", it was also not necessary to claim a cause for the universe. But not 15 pages before he made that claim, he discussed the old Steady State theory and how it was succeeded by the Big Bang model. Sagan allowed the steady state to be causeless, since there was no first moment for an infinitely old universe. But if that's true, Dr. Sagan was also arguing that a 'Big Bang' type universe had a special reason for needing a cause that the Steady State version did not. He was claiming that it was sufficient in one case for science to simply say that not everything has to have a cause, but in the other case that science was only specifically able to skip reasoning about the cause of a thing because it did not have an origin. Why then was it fair to allow the steady state to be causeless, but demand that God must have a cause if the current (Big Bang) model must have a cause? Wouldn''t "God" be more like the steady state than the big bang (at least as most religions define God)? Why did Carl Sagan reason from Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else to conclude that something that had no beginning didn't need a first cause, and then reject the very same idea not 15 pages later? Why did he treat a question as strictly rhetorical when he in fact had given a straight, non-rhetorical answer to it not 15 pages before?
So, going by the way the first post was modded and responded to, Carl Sagan was nothing better than a slashtroll who made us all dumber. Personally, I disagreed with him on several points, but thought he was legitimately brilliant and certainly worthy of publication. I guess I should adopt some of your attitudes and burn his books instead.
Fact: Dozens of distinguished scientists in the 1930s and 40s pointed to the Steady State model as a positive disproof of God, and fought against accepting the Big Bang model because they claimed it was bringing religious superstition back into science. Not one of them was willing to admit after the Big Bang won out by actual evidence that they had been wrong to interpret the science that way. Most of them, when pressed on it, stipulated two things: 1) That even if the Steady State and Big Bang theories were opposite in their predictions in just about every other respect, they were not opposite in their implications about religion, and 2) that the Big Bang would not be a scientific theory unless it shared the common property of disproving the existence of God.
I see several logical flaws in the initial post. In particular, the claim that an actual infinite cannot exist is highly suspect. A lot of the post is rehashed Augustine, and the debate about Augustine's reasoning has echoed through philosophy for over a millennium now. Some of it borrows from Pascal, but then, most people don't reject Pascal's contributions to probability theory and logic just because there are flaws with "Pascal's Wager". However, the refutations here are just as flawed, if not more-so, and I've seen some brilliant men make the same sort of errors many of you are mocking, in the modern era. If you're not prepared to stoop to Karma mods and dumb one-liners for them, maybe some of you just might want to set yourself a better standard here.
Who is John Cabal?
Thanks for the warning; I'll remember it when designing future plant species.
- God
Congratulations, we now have a new unit of measurement to join the myriad:
* Libraries of Congress
* Landmasses of Texas
* States of Massachusetts
* California Economies
* Lines of Code
* Man-Hours
* Kilobits per second
Welcome to the fold, Big Bens!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Worst... Genome.... EVER!
Thrasymachus wasn't as much as a philosopher as a giant douche invented to help Plato drive home some points in his Republic. Other tidbits from Thrasymachus: "Justice" is little more than getting ahead, and the "just" will stab anyone in the back should it benefit them.
DATABASE WOW WOW
that's what SHE said!
Wow! Been playing too much Warcraft. Thought that said largest GNOME EVAH
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
However, the refutations here are just as flawed, if not more-so, and I've seen some brilliant men make the same sort of errors many of you are mocking, in the modern era. If you're not prepared to stoop to Karma mods and dumb one-liners for them, maybe some of you just might want to set yourself a better standard here.
As a matter of fact, things without causes happen all the time. For example, look up "vacuum energy". I'm sure Sagan knew more about that than I do. You would have to ask him why he didn't bring it up. Presumably, it was because he was following Aquinas' line of thought (which would have been familiar to about a billion Catholics and surely many other Christian denominations at the time)
You can't refine your ontology so that the universe contains everything that exists while simultaneously postulating a cause for the universe (because then it is not a part of the universe, and so does not exist). Have you heard of Russell's Paradox? Initial elements are ur-elements. We don't (and can't) ask what they are. We build the theory around them and the ways in which they interact.
Modern physics has tended to look at the Big Bang as the "white hole" side of a black hole in some other universe. If you want to call that other universe "God", that is fine by me. But that universe cannot interact with us, because black holes destroy information.
Look! A Vim user!
After all, I am strangely colored.
Because God say's they're false?
This is the greatest post ever, anywhere.
Fact: TOO LONG, DID NOT READ.
Fact 2: "Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." gets in the way of posts that are intended to be only 6 words long.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For a moment there I thought it was "Largest Gnome Ever"!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I do believe that there is God but when you use this fact to believe the man made books you read I just laugh.
I know I shouldn't respond... But I think you only made two points, with the rest rehashing those.
> Every part of the universe is dependent
Mr. Heisenberg disagrees. Subatomic particles exhibit true randomness.
> If an infinite number of moments had to elapse before today, then today would never have come
> But today has come
Didn't recognize you Zeno. Are you still chasing that turtle?
They say he married a 7-9 year old girl and consummated the relationship at the socially acceptable appropriate time - presumably the onset of her puberty.
If he was gay why would he even bother?
By the way, before anyone jumps in with "OMG Mohammed was a pervert!!!" it wasn't uncommon in that culture to marry someone before puberty but hold off having "marital relations" until she was older. Heck, Mary mother of Jesus was probably barely old enough to get pregnant and she was about to marry Joseph and according to all surviving accounts was impregnated by a being older than the universe. I'm not saying that marrying a girl still in single digits is right by modern Western values, only that it wasn't wrong by the social standards of the time.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Largest [pause] Genome [pause] Ever"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A large genome might mean more copies of the same protein encoded, but it might also mean more proteins to do the same job.
There could be a lot of "two step" processes, where a one step process is possible.
There could be a mutation which generates an extra lethal chemical. Dominate genes exist, and they are not always beneficial.
I'd stick with the article's premise that while there's more possibility to resist failure, there's also more moving parts to fail, and the cost to replicate the redundancies is more expensive than just having one good working gene.
The answer is simple:w
Are you typing your slashdot comment with vi?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I agree, Zeus wouldn't stand for it.
I suppose there's also a matter of scale, when you're probably not going to live to see 30, waiting till 25 seems a bit of a stretch.
Another proof that it's not the size, but how you use it!
On another note, plants are around much longer than animals, so they probably have more complex DNA. I guess this is an example of this.
Silly Troll...it's turtles all the way down.
An important change for education.
The earth was created by god. god was created by a giant frog. the giant frog was created by robotic jesus.
And all those lies were created by man, in particular, certain individuals who where trying to control the rest of the population.
You can't fool me, Mr. James. It's frogs all the way down.
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
Nope he wouldn't, Zeus would just fuck his mother.
Clearly humans are more efficiently coded.
This is a whole world of logic fail.
ROFL-McWaffle
Hey hey Giant Douche is property of the South Park Corp. It cannot be used without expressed written consent.
Wtf dude not all, of us are Asian.
Or perhaps another universe that generated this one?
Not sure this is the case for particles accelerating away from us faster than light-speed, such as the other "side" of the universe.
Table-ized A.I.
That's one of the worst arguments I've ever heard.
The universe had a beginning
[Premise I] HadBeginning(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
A widespread assumption that can reasonably be introduced as a premise.
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
[Premise II] HadBeginning(x) -> CausedBy(x, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Not neccessarily something I agree with but you can of course introduce any premise you like.
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
[Sentence III] CausedBySomething(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This sentence follows from the premises you introduced.
Every part of the universe is dependent
[Premise IV] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I assume you meant "dependent on something". Still, there's no reason not to allow this new premise.
If every part is dependent, then the whole universe must also be dependent
[Premise V] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) -> Dependent(Universe, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Since this follows from nothing you introduced so far, I assume you want to introduce it as a new premise.
Therefore, the whole universe is dependent for existence right now on some Independent Being
[Sentence VI] Dependent(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
You made an error here. There are no premises from which follows that the universe must be dependent on an Independent Being. It could also be dependent on itself or a part of itself.
Every event that had a beginning had a sufficient cause
[Premise VII] HadBeginning(x) -> HadSufficientCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I don't see why we shouldn't introduce this premise, even though it might have been better style to introduce all the basic premises first.
The universe had a beginning
You just repeated sentence I.
Therefore, the universe had a sufficient Cause
[Sentence VII] HadBeginning(Universe) -> HadSufficientCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises I and VII.
Every effect has a cause
[Premise VIII] IsEffect(x) -> HasCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
The universe is an effect
[Premise IX] IsEffect(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Therefore, the universe has a Cause
[Sentence X] HasCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises VIII and IX.
An infinite number of moments cannot be traversed
If an infinite number of moments had to elapse before today, then today would never have come
But today has come
Therefore, an infinite number of moments have not elapsed before today (i.e., the universe had a beginning)
I'm going to skip assigning sentences to these since all you did with them was to restate premise I.
But whatever has a beginning is caused by something else
Hence, there must be a Cause (Creator) of the universe
These two sentences are just repetitions of premise II and sentence III.
An actual infinite cannot exist
[Premise XI] !\is x: Infinite(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Given the fact that (for example) the set of rationa
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Yep. How do you suppose a male deity, Yahweh, gave birth to Adam?
My blog
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
That's the only part of your post that wasn't stark raving stupidity. I understand you don't like me. That's fine, I'm even happy that you don't like me. Because your behavior is beyond help. You copy amazon reviews as comments (and I've called you out on it because you keep doing it). And I'm calling you out again. The above post that you put up there is copy pasted from creation.com. You can't even come up with your own troll posts.
... and yet you login to relay these ramblings to us. Does not compute.
You have the weird CmdrTaco sexual fetishes under your name. You manage to pack homophobia and xenophobia all into one post. You are well versed in the art of cruise control for awesome. You're all over the road in the spectrum of what's wrong with posts on Slashdot
I'm honored to be so diametrically opposed to you that you must call me an idiot in your sig but seriously what drives you, man?
My work here is dung.
If you take "creator" to mean "cause of our universe" then the sentence stands as another universe would work perfectly fine as a creator.
It's a good thing you didn't read further, though; the logic only gets more and more shaky as the proof goes on. For example, in the end the proof introduces "and this cause we're talking about is the Christian god" as a premise (well, two premises actually) and then uses that premise to derive "God exists". A shorter version that requires far fewer unprovable premises would be:
Something exists.
This something is the Christian god.
Therefore god exists.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
He didn't give birth to him. He is a mud man duh. Made out of dirt then God gave him CPR. check your bible before you start talking nonsense.
Then he made Eve out of one of Adams ribs, making her his genetic sibling. The entire human race came from two siblings and is a result of massive inbreeding. Christianity big on inbreeding, not surprising...
The universe had a beginning
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
And who caused the creator then ?
Fools. Can't even follow simple logic.
The universe had a beginning
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
That is correct if we assume that the axiom "everything has a cause" exists independently of our universe (which is a pretty big assumption). But even if that assumption is true, your post is incomplete. It needs run like this:
The universe had a beginning
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
Therefore, the creator was caused by something else (a creator-creator)
Therefore, the creator-creator was caused by something else (a creator-creator-creator)
Therefore, the creator-creator-creator was caused by something else (a creator-creator-creator-creator)
And so on and so fourth...
I guess you just gotta pick one among the infinite number of creators, pray to him and hope that he is the one of them that runs Heaven. (Pro tip: creator number 42 runs Geek Heaven.)
Among the pervasive flaws in your arguments is the failure to understand Zeno's Paradox.
Generally, your statements are huge masses of non sequiturs. Look at 7.6
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The researchers warn however that big genomes tend to be a liability:
That is until it's irradiated in a nuclear test and goes all Godzilla on us
"plants with lots of DNA have more trouble tolerating pollution and extreme climatic extinction"
What kind of genome do you need to survive extinction?
So if I have viruses infiltrate my cells and add on another billion pairs to my dna ... will that slow down my cell replication and let me live as long as a giant redwood?
No I'm not volunteering.
I guess you just gotta pick one among the infinite number of creators, pray to him and hope that he is the one of them that runs Heaven. (Pro tip: creator number 42 runs Geek Heaven.)
Actually, not. Mathematics has already worked this out, through the use of transfinite induction. If this line of thought is to be believed, the greatest God "is" the proper class of all things including gods (which is slightly different than the set of all things).
I would prefer to not have to justify this assertion. Unfortunately, it takes quite a few years of mind bending math for this to make any sense at all. The theory of sets is the place to start. Russell's paradox follows, and then the creation of the stratified set theories, which introduces transfinite induction. In short, transfinite induction is an injection of the proper class of ordinals into some structure. The proper class of ordinals is "basically" the biggest thing we can ever talk about, even abstractly. Anything "bigger" is contained in it, specifically because of how it is constructed.
This is not a joke or exaggeration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_(set_theory)
One thing I find interesting is that many people seem to want a beginning point. On a cosmic perspective, we are tiny. If we start dealing with creators, and their creators, and theirs and so on, we see that what we live in is a consequence of a process that has been going on "forever" (in some strange inter-cosmic sense of time) and will never end.
A surprising amount of Hindu "mythology" is meant to bring this point out. Whatever you can imagine, it isn't even a tiniest fraction of what we can talk about.
I forget some of the specifics, but there is an old Hindu story of a king who ascended to some kind of godhood, and met Ganesh in a weird infinite space (a cube of inward facing mirrors is a good way to picture it). There was an "uncountable" line of ants on the "ground" crawling by Ganesh. The new god had domain over "uncountably" many universes. And was very full of himself, because of that. Ganesh laughed, and said, "Each of those ants is one of your predecessors". The god-king became humbled. (Obviously I'm paraphrasing. I heard this from a Joseph Campbell lecture)
After all, I am strangely colored.
Never seen that quote, I like. Very valid and very true.
All we can infer from Big Bang theory is that the current state of the observable universe originated from a single point of space some 13.5 billion years ago, and has expanded out from that point ever since.
It makes no judgement on what the universe looked like immediately before, or it's cause. Possibilities such as a cyclical universe, or the observable universe as part of a greater whole (such as a multiverse), are not ruled out by BB theory (and predicted by some theories, such as M-String theory).
The possibility of "all of existence" essentially following a Steady State model is still an open one. And unfortunately due to the nature of the observability of the universe, probably impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
IANATheoreticalCosmologist, by the by.
:) I'm not the poster you are asking that question to /. (or anywhere else for that matter) :)
But I, for one, do use vi(m) to post on
This is thank's to this very nice firefox addon
You might want to try it
Interestingly, the average life expectancy of a 16 year old in most civilisations since roman times has been higher than 60. The reason we commonly think they died young is a matter of statistics - infant mortality was massive.
Other people spoke of the other parts of this already, but I thought I'd make a point I rarely see:
When people speak of religion being the source of morality, it becomes obvious they never actually read the bible. In it, Moses, Abraham and a few other people actually argue with God and get him to change his mind on smiting some people. If they can argue with God on smiting, then they must have a source of morality that's not God, because otherwise whatever God says is the moral thing, and there can't be an argument.
...which reminds me of my philosophy professor telling us Gasking's proof (an ontological argument for the non-existence of God. He would have had many beers with Gasking.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Exactly! We have a designated source of nonsense. Ad-libbing will not be tolerated.
.evom ton seod gis eht
but seriously what drives you, man?
Probably the fact that you and so many other Slashdotters bother to feed such a lame troll. Thanks to your collective idiocy, this mind-numbingly offtopic thread contains the majority of posts in this story.
YOU ARE ALL FUCKING RETARDS.
polyploidy, when the whole genome is duplicated (every single chromosome, unlike trisomy where 1 pair of chromosome has one of the two in 2 copies instead),isn't that much problematic because all the genetic material is evenly duplicated, there is no disbalance with some genes with more copies as the others (unlike trisomy, again).
this only leads to a nucleus having more DNA material, and thus being bigger. As in lots of situations cells tend to evaluate their size and growth stage based on the ratio of the nucleus and the rest of the cell, this can lead to bigger cells,and some time even to bigger specimens or bigger parts. (in addition to the redundancy mentionned elsewhere in the comments).
lots of human-selected and made crops are polyploids.
the phenomenon even occurs naturally in some human cells through a phenomenon called endomitosis, where the cell doesn't split or sometimes doesn't even separate its chromosome copies). It occurs naturally in human liver cells. Could be a mechanism acquired through evolution to make the cells bigger, and providing a useful redundancy given the fact that this cells' role in detoxification and thus their exposition to aggressive chemicals.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
you joke, but that's indeed the case :
- were're hot blooded and thermally regulated
- we live in an environment with a very narrow varability
(i mean the direct environment next to our skin. When it's cold outdoor, we just put more clothes on, instead of going out naked)
thus our enzymes have only to work in a very specific range of conditions. Unlike this plant which has to sustain a wide range of variations, and thus needs lots of different genes coding for similar proteins,but each optimised for a slightly different set of conditions to cover the whole range (to be able to carry on a reaction no matter the temperature, plant just picks up the variant which works best at the current temperature. Meanwile, we just set the internal thermostat on 37C, use only the 37C-optimized enzyme, and be done with it)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
One thing I got is that you don't understand physics and math(including logic) enough to make your point. ... they are concepts of our mind. If you don't know, what they mean to describe, don't know the ideas behind it, the assumptions that are made, then you are unable to built up a flawless argumentation.
Time, space, cause and effect
Physicist should know the difference between their models and reality. Creationist seem do not know, otherwise they would try to prove that they are right that way.
Can a biologist confirm the summary/TFA are right? Wikipedia seems to disagree...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Comparison_of_different_genome_sizes
Which one is trustworthy?
Because you don't know a reply on that?
A second reason was death in childbirth, due to infections because of the unclean environment. It makes no difference if you die at 18 after giving birth or at 36 after giving birth.
There are logical errors in every single one of your conclusions.
The Ontological argument has been shown to have several flaws, for instance.
Moral laws do NOT imply a moral law giver.
I dispute that the idea of God as the "prime cause" is IDENTICAL with the Christian God.
I dispute that anything that exists with a structure is necessarily "a design".
And as for your final argument: "everything we desire must exist". I desire you to learn some logic. Somehow I don't think that will be fulfilled.
Finally, what did you expect, posting this on Slashdot?
Wouldn"t "God" be more like the steady state than the big bang (at least as most religions define God)?
I take issue with that statement. It should read "at least as most monotheistic religions define God". Only a few religions are monotheistic at all, most of them being in the tradition of Zoroastrism.
Many other religions don't have a problem with the sudden appearence of a god and his disappearance again. So those religions would rather tend to a big bang universe. The Greek with their aeons would even accept the idea of several universes appearing in a big bang and dissappearing again to make room for a newly formed universe. Also the Aztek myths know at least about the creations of five suns, the first four being somewhat unstable or unbalanced and being replaced by other suns.
I may understand why you dismiss my God, but I will contend that your assumption, that the criteria which eliminate all the other Gods extends on to my God, is a faulty assumption. I understand why you would make your conclusion, and it is a false conclusion.
Large plant genomes tend to be polyploid (>2 copies of chromosomes) and full of repetitive elements. In other words, the overall complexity is similar to other plants, even though the total size is much larger.
The following are some of the reasons these arguments fail:
7.1: (By the way, if you're going to copy and paste, at least try to copy and paste the whole thing, thanks.)
"If an infinite number of moments had to elapse before today, then today would never have come"
You assume here that a "moment" is a non-reducible quantity of time. However, this is untrue. Just as there are an infinite number of real numbers between 0 and 1, there are an infinite number of moments between any two nonequal points of time. Yet you can still reach 1.
"Therefore, God exists / This God who exists is identical to the God described in the Christian Scriptures / Therefore, the God described in the Bible exists"
Absolutely NOTHING supports this. This sequence could be replaced with "Therefore, God exists. / This God who exists is identical to the Flying Spaghetti Monster described in the Pastafarian religion. / Therefore, the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists." with the same validity.
"Every part of the universe is dependent / If every part is dependent, then the whole universe must also be dependent"
Every part of the universe is dependent upon the existence of the universe. Therefore, the whole universe must also be dependent upon the existence of the universe.
7.2:
"Time, space and matter came into existence at a certain point in the finite past."
This is unproven. Time could be infinite. We don't know.
7.3:
"All designs imply a designer / There is great design in the universe"
This assumes the universe is "Designed", as in, there is no way for a non-influenced sequence of events to lead to the universe in its current state, even by random chance. Granting that life in its current state is incredibly unlikely, there's still no proof that we aren't simply the output of a "monkey on a typewriter". Arguments against the human body being designed (especially by a "perfect" being) are numerous, including: The appendix, the ability to choke, and cancer.
7.4:
"God is defined as a being than which no greater can be conceived. / Such a being can be conceived."
What proof is there that such a being can be conceived? Not just "given a name", that's not conceiving. Even putting this aside, however, such a being would be completely unable to act. Any act, whether it be creating, or making a decision, would cause this Being to become something else, which is by definition not "perfect" (because it's different than the previous, which was defined to be perfect), and thus there is something "greater": the Being that had not performed that action.
7.5:
This argument mixes "Moral Law" (as in Natural Law, as in the laws the natural universe follows such as Physics) and morality (as in the rules that people should adhere to). As such, it is completely worthless in all ways. The "permissible" would claim to state that anything is possible (for example, that we could fly because there is no natural law to state we can't), but atheism never, at any point, makes that suggestion. A similarly nonsensical argument would be, "Apples must be oranges. But apples are not oranges, therefore God is real."
7.6:
"If man is “the chief of the earth” then he can abandon absolute standards (i.e., morality)"
And yet, many Christians do exactly that. Or are all the altar boys lying?
"If man can abandon the absolute standards then “everything is permissible”"
This assumes that one cannot be atheist and yet have any moral code of their own at all. Patently false. Not every moral standard has to end with "Or else my imaginary invisible daddy in the sky will spank you forever and ever and ever!" after all.
7.7:
"Every natural innate desire has a real object that can fulfill it"
Completely ridiculous. I don't even have the energy to point out WHY this is such a pointless, useless statement anymore.
Troll's source: http://creation.com/atheism
Hardly an unbiased source. Learn to read and think about what you copy and paste, please.
Without going into my own beliefs, I don't think that follows logically. I know Catholic doctrine states that other religions actually worship the same God, they just have a faulty understanding of him. Their view is that there's SOMETHING out there, and they think they have the most complete and accurate explanation of what that is. So to apply their own stance to their own faith (that their interpretation is ALSO wrong) still leaves the presupposition (correct or not) that there is some sort of higher power.
It's not yelling if it's only six words?
When someone just speculates about the unknown or the unknowable, we call them a philosopher. When someone uses the scientific method to try and prove a speculation, we refer to them as a scientist. Sometimes, scientists wear the hat of "bad philosopher."
A priest is someone who knows the unknown or unknowable. Watch out for those guys; they can be easily spotted by their sheep clothing.
He didn't give birth to him. He is a mud man duh. Made out of dirt then God gave him CPR. check your bible before you start talking nonsense.
God gave them Car Plate Recognition? Or the Canadian Pacific Railway? Or a Common-Pool Resource? Or the Critique of Pure Reason?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not only that. Adam and Eve had two sons, Kain and Abel. But where did their wives come from? The bible doesn't tell us, but since there were just one woman which could have born them, it's quite obvious.
Moreover, after there were quite a few people on earth, and therefore marrying close siblings was no longer necessary, God decided to kill all of them but one family by a great flood. So again, inbreeding was enforced.
Maybe the whole world is just an experiment about the results of inbreeding? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The name "black hole" is now considered non-PC. Please use "African-American hole" instead.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Damn! Nop, I'm an Emacs user, but I posted that comment from my cellphone. I hate touchscreen keyboards.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
>The universe had a beginning
There you go quoting scientists again. Look, scientists are evil atheists. The fact is, nobody knows if the Universe had a beginning, any more than anyone knows if the Universe is a big stage, and if you go Stage Left enough, you go clear off of it into the curtains. If the Universe "had to" have a beginning, doesn't it "have to" have a beginning of its stage? The answer to both questions is "no, it doesn't."
>Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
First of all, you still don't know if it had a beginning. (Except for scientist's "big bang", the same scientists who tell you there is no God). Secondly, the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, etc) have a beginning: 1. Does that mean somebody "caused" 1? No, it is just a fact that it is the first natural number. 2 is the first prime. Did anyone "cause" 2 to become the beginning of all primes? Obviously no. It just is that way.
>Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
First of all, where do you get "by something else"?? Maybe the creator made a small part of the Unvierse, and the Universe made the rest of itself.
>Every part of the universe is dependent
How do you know there aren't two halves of the Universe, like the Old and New Worlds (Europe and America) with currently no dependency or contact?
>If every part is dependent, then the whole universe must also be dependent
As you just saw, perhaps it is not all dependent.
I can go on and on, but why bother.
“I contend we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”- Stephen F. Roberts
I wonder if that was a smart argument originally, or if it completely missed the point, but I bet many of the atheists don't understand it when they read it.
Better way to put it would be "I contend we are both same kind of believers, even though I'm an atheist and you're not. You have religious faith in the god(s) you know in your heart to exist. So do I."
Though that doesn't yet account for the two groups of atheists, those who have faith that there is no god, and those who just don't have faith in any god.
And who caused the creator then ?
Fools. Can't even follow simple logic.
Fools caused the creator?
Well, that explains a lot, I guess.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Where is his minion?
A minute or two on Wikipedia says that this would be the largest plant gemome.
It lists the largest genome as that of Polychaos dubium ("Amoeba" dubia) with 670,000,000,000 pairs.
IANAG
"The universe had a beginning"
- according to current deductions: yes
"Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else"
- that's a logical statement, and there's no way to say that it is true regarding the big bang, or false. Don't you just love the uncertainty?
"Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)"
- well, that's a logical fallacy. you might think it's true, but logically you haven't proven your case because there's no way of knowing why the universe began. There's not even the certainty that you can use logic before the beginning of the universe. It's a complete unknown, you just don't know, but you try and fill that unertainty with something. Try acknowledging that uncertainty instead.
You basically reiterate the same logical fallacy, so I'll cut that out, i.e.
"This God who exists is identical to the God described in the Christian Scriptures"
- what about the gods of egyptian cultures? Your (incorrect) reasoning has in no way ruled out that it might mean other gods, rather than stick to your incorrect reasons, do the right thing, accept the uncertainty.
"Time, space and matter came into existence at a certain point in the finite past."
- this is the same argument as the first sentence above, i.e.: true.
"Since time, space and matter began to exist they had a cause."
- This is the same as second sentence form you above, i.e. false. There's no way to know whether we can really say whether logic can explain what caused the beginning. It's a complete uncertainty. Embrace it.
"Therefore, whatever caused them was time-less (or eternal), space-less (not subject to locality, or omnipresent) and matter-less (immaterial, non-physical, or spirit)."
- Because of the uncertainty, you can't use logic, and because of the inability to use logic, this can't be proven, because this can't be proven, you can't prove a higher power exists.
"All designs imply a designer"
- A cosmological fart of space/time/matter which expands randomly isn't a design.. but this is what the universe is, there's no sign that anything we all can see and corroborate and theorise about has been designed. It has all been explained by theories of gravity, relativity, electro-magnetism and other provable scientific theories.
"There is great design in the universe"
- no there isn't, take a ball, throw it. can you design the path to do an S-shape while it falls? Can you ask your god to do it for you? Everything we see is designed by natural forces. there's no design other than human design, and that's mostly to make dildos and other less self-entertaining enterprises.
"God is defined as a being than which no greater can be conceived."
- that's a logical statement, i.e. there's no truth in it in and of itself, no more than if I were to say "god is made out of peaches". these 2 statements are equally true, and equally false. there's an uncertainty just within making that statement. If you can disprove that "god is made of peaches", then you can disprove that god is "a being than which no greater can be conceived". If you can prove that god is "a being than which no greater can be conceived", then you have also proved that "god is made of peaches".
"Moral laws imply a Moral Law Giver"
- I would take this to mean "Human laws imply Human law giver", who else but humans are interested in what is ethical and what isn't? Ever heard of bears or ants being interested in that?
"There is an objective moral law"
- that's a logical statement. same as above with the pears, there's a basic uncertainty regarding its validity because its validity isn't based on truth or untruth. Accept the uncertainty and you'll understand that the content of this sentence is and can be completely arbitrary (i.e. the laws about peaches).
"Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver"
- a logical fallacy, see above.
"If atheism is true, everything is permissible."
- finally, a true sentence. Everything which
Interesting. Thanks for that.
Silly Troll...it's turtles all the way down.
There are only three Ninja Turtles.
Turtles are not recursive.
Suppose we change the subject.
An important change for education.
If atheism is true then man is "the chief of the earth". What makes you think (hah) that atheism implies that, or that "the chief of the earth" actually means anything?
If there's no higher authority than whatever animals may be on hand, wouldn't it fall to the most dominant animal to define the rules? Whether anybody actually follows them is another matter, so yes, your last "actually means anything" is true.
If man is "the chief of the earth" then he can abandon absolute standards (i.e., morality). Depending upon content, "absolute standard" implies that it is not possible to abandon the standard or that there are cause-and-effect repercussions for abandoning the standard. In the first case, your statement is trivially false. In the second, man is not special in being able to abandon the standard, and nothing is able to evade cause-and-effect.
I think what he meant might have been "if man is the chief of the earth, there is no reason the standards have to be absolute and he is thus free to abandon them." Or if he didn't, I guess I might as well say it. But I didn't really understand your argument so I dunno, you could very well be right.
If man can abandon the absolute standards then "everything is permissible". Huh? Where does "permission" have a connection to standards?
I'm guessing this is a reference to 1 Corinthians 6:12, " 'Everything is permissible for me'--but not everything is beneficial. 'Everything is permissible for me'--but I will not be mastered by anything,' " which is a quote of somewhere else. The way I understood it is "just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea to." If we interpret his argument this way, then it seems to me to pretty much be a tautology.
If you have better ideas than what I've slopped out here, by all means I'd like to hear them (no sarcasm implied).
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea."
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
"Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?"
Rest assured: It is just *your* observation.
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
Maybe the whole world is just an experiment about the results of inbreeding?
Well that explains the British royal family and the American legal system.
I'm an Omnist, you insensitive clod.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Prove it. Does a continuous line traversing a moebius strip have a beginning?
As the ancient Indian scriptures say (roughly paraphrase) "Men cannot know how the universe began, because no man was there to see it". Everything we think we know about the universe's origins is just theory.
A mishmash of unsupported premises and conjecture does not make a logical argument. Your premises must be valid, and they aren't, since they do not rest on observable, repeatable, falsifiable data.
You'd be better off using the argument of faith than trying to chop logic, given the conclusions you are determined to reach.
My condolences :)