It's because the money isn't being given to teachers. Pay all the teachers twice as much, and stop filling schools with iPads and massive swimming pools and ultrafast broadband and all that crap. Pay the teachers.
a digital code that is analogous to a computer's source code.
I don't think that there's any evidence for this statement. And it would be dangerous to extrapolate from it to any theories about how much change is required from a DNA point of view to effect change from an organism point of view.
In any case, maybe we should remember that knowledge about the structure and function of DNA is relatively recent compared to the history of the theory of evolution.
You don't have to look far into, say, the fossil record, to observe that life has increased in complexity over time. Darwin's theory was that this was driven by creatures attempting to out-compete each other, and this led him to the theory of natural selection.
Genetics showed us how this is possible, from a biochemical standpoint. So that how an organism's characteristics might be passed on from one generation to the next is no longer complete mystery.
However a great deal of mystery remains. Scientists are often identifying such-and-such a 'gene', and how it relates to such-and-such a characteristic of the final organism. But I suspect that this may be misleading, in the sense that we actually know very little about how a full complement of DNA leads to the final creature. It's probably also worth remembering that DNA isn't enough to create a creature, you also need a functioning developmental environment (such as a womb, or an egg) before you can get a creature at all. The complexity of a life-form's developmental pathway is mind-boggling. Suggesting that the code contained in DNA is analogous to computer source code is probably a huge over-simplification.
An enormous amount of evidence clearly points to life evolving over billions of years from single-celled organisms to the diversity we see today. Is your point then that what little we understand about genetics is insufficient to support the notion that this development came about through natural means? Do you concede that this development took place?
I'd be perfectly astonished if your objects weren't very well known. What I understand about the theory of evolution has completely satisfied me, in the sense that it seems believable and rational and plausible. You obviously feel differently, and I'd encourage you to ask these questions somewhere other than slashdot - which is mostly frequented by IT professionals - perhaps you could even take an undergrad course in developmental biology (if such a thing exists - the course that is, not the subject).
I wonder too if you entertain similar scepticism about other branches of scientific endeavour. There's plenty of out-there theories about all sorts of matters. Take particle physics, the evidence for the existence of things like quarks and such is far harder to grasp than the evidence for evolution. And the notion that the entire universe is made up of things with properties as peculiar as spin, and entanglement, and wave-particle-duality, and true randomness, and so-on - well, these notions seem far less likely to me than natural selection. What about that experiment where the photons appear to be in some sense aware of being observed? I'm not trying to get off-topic, I'm just asking why it is that evolution seems to get all the flack, when there's far weirder stuff out there.
DNA is not computer code. It is not analogous to computer code. There isn't enough information to encode the human brain in DNA, so clearly small changes to DNA can have large effects.
It really seems to me, with all this arguing over information theory and so-on, that you just don't understand what the theory of evolution posits. Your basic argument seems to be that evolution is obviously wrong for all these obvious reasons, and those scientists just aren't smart enough to see what seems to obvious to you.
In my rather contrived melody example, you suggest that the method is equivalent to brute-forcing the entire solution space. This is false for numerous reasons. First, the solution space is infinite, as modifications to the melody may add notes as well as change them and/or remove them - so it is theoretically impossible to brute-force, and therefore I can't be brute-forcing it. Secondly, you suggest that because in my example I have human ears choosing the 'best' melody, that I am actually running an experiment in 'intelligent prediction'. This is also false, since in the example the only way of choosing the 'best' melody is via some-ones ears. In real evolution your objection falls away, since the 'filter' through which only the 'better' mutations - or recombinations, or viral insertions, etc - is the environment itself. Thirdly, and this is the most important point, at no point do we try every possibility in the solution space. We create random changes, and only allow those that are in some sense better to survive and thus go-on to reproduce. We don't just create billions of random tunes and choose the best, for that would be absurd. We take the melody, and make - say - ten thousand ever-so-slightly different variations. We the enlist the efforts of humans to determine which is the best - and yes I know that humans are intelligent agents, but please understand that this is an objection to the analogy, not to evolution itself. From our ten-thousands of modified tunes we choose a few hundred of the best, and repeat the process with those.
This is more or less exactly how evolution works for populations of bacteria. There are limited resources, and so only a smaller number of the thousands of slightly modified individuals survive.
In the early days of life, something - and we don't know what, but probably not DNA as we know it today - was busy reproducing in those ancient oceans for literally billions of years. During each one of those billions of years, trillions of individual reproductive units - whatever they might have been - were busy reproducing and changing uncountable numbers of times. So we have billions multiplied by trillions multiplied by maybe hundreds of thousands. This seems like quite a large number to me.
I just don't think you understand how the process is supposed to work. It isn't remotely like brute-forcing. Because there's this environmental filter that weeds out things that don't work. So the things that do work, need only happen *once* and then they spread. It's a feedback loop, wherein only the 'better' outputs are fed back in.
Anyway, look - it's exhausting arguing with you. I just think you don't get it. Let's try to narrow this down to a single question - can a theoretical feedback loop with (very very slight and quite rate) mutations, that selects only outputs that are as least as good as its inputs were and then feeds those output back in, over time produce better individuals? I believe it can, and that it's perfectly obvious that it can. You, as far as I can make out, do not. Or at least you believe that such a process would take too long. Despite all the evidence of far simpler ancient creatures - see the Cambrian Explosion for instance - that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. How did they turn into us, if not via evolution?
And please, can we leave abiogenesis out of it? You must know, as well as I know, that evolution as a theory starts with s
Except that I don't think that's its majority use. I rather think it's used more for image editing, which is impossible on the command line.
Point is, the command line is demonstrably not more powerful than GUIs. The command line is more or less a programming language, which fulfills a rather different need to graphical interfaces. We do have a fairly large part of our brains devoted to interpreting images, and it seems a shame to waste it.
Perhaps this is why devotees of the command-line interface often prefer graphic novels?
Evolution is not a moral position. Fitter organisms reproduce more often, that humans appeared sometime in the last twenty thousands years or so and got their knickers in a twist about whether or not it's moral to allow such a mechanism to continue is irrelevant.
Evolution will continue irrespective of humanities moral position on the matter. There are just too many organisms on the planet, reproducing and changing a tiny bit all the time - what are we going to do about it?
There is a misunderstanding here. All steps are intermediate steps. There is no such thing as a non-intermediate step. Hell, there's no such thing as a 'step'. Gradual change is what we're looking at, and the fossil record is incomplete for perfectly reasonable reasons. The formation of a fossil is a highly unlikely event, and thus it didn't happen all that often.
If the only evidence for evolution were the fossil record, you might have a point. But the evidence is massive, and comes from areas as separate as molecular biology and geology.
The problem with this whole 'where are the intermediate forms' argument, is that it can never be satisfied. As soon as you fill one 'gap', you are left with two - albeit smaller - 'gaps'. Then you've got to fill those too.
It's interesting that you seem satisfied with the evidence for languages descending from each other, and rightly see no problem with missing details about intermediate languages (again though, all languages are intermediate) - yet you cannot accept the sparsity of the fossil record. Why the distinction?
You know, there are people in this world who actually don't have memories. There's an interesting documentary about a particular English individual called 'The Man with the Thirty Second Memory'. It's quite heartbreaking. If you haven't already watched it, I suggest that you do so. I would have thought it rather an insult to his memory to persist with your absurd navel-gazing.
And of course we use faith when we take most of what we experience as in some sense truth. This is the only rational course of action, and I'm fairly sure that Philosophy as a discipline moved on from questions such as these a fairly long time ago. More interesting, and more difficult ones, are available. Perhaps you could put your playful attitude to work on the problem of the existence (or non-existence) of Morals.
Not the question that was asked. The question was; which field uses the 'theory of Creationism'? Not; which scientist believes in God? And the answer is, None. There is no field of engineering that uses the theory of Creationism, being the idea that God created everything. This is not an idea that you can 'use'.
I think this is where you're stuck. Information + Noise, fed through a filter that only allows fitter results to reproduce, will obviously encourage change. The question surely is, if evolution does not occur, then why not? The whole argument can be approached from another direction - and so, answer me this; what prevents evolution?
They're making the assumption that the average mutation is a net gain,
This is plainly false. No such assumption is being made. The assumption - actually the fact - is that if a mutation is a gain, then that mutation will survive and spread.
Why bother removing noise when noise could be adding information to the message you're transmitting? You just need to filter it afterwards!
Because in information transfer, you actually want the original message. If you wanted to construct a system that created millions upon millions of randomly altered messages, and were somehow able to convince millions upon millions of people to read those messages and choose the one's they preferred, then absolutely you would eventually produce new information. Question; where did that information come from? Let's remove the issue of the syntax of the message, and instead suggest that the message should be a melody. Let's randomly alter the melody millions of times, and recruit millions of willing listeners to choose their favorite. Let's do this for millions of years. Are you suggesting that the result wouldn't be a better melody?
I'm wondering though, what's your position on the issue of nuclear waste? I'd like to hear about it from someone such as yourself, who obviously thinks nuclear power is, on balance, a good technology. I've only ever heard about it from those who'd rather boil their kettle via pedal-power than countenance nuclear power, and I wonder if their view is all that balanced.
Probably because nuclear weapons tests have very little to do with the safety or otherwise of nuclear power, and certainly nothing at all to do with the matter under discussion - which, in case you've forgotten, is the relative safety of coal powered electricity generation vs. nuclear powered.
Also, "unintentional nuclear accident" is a tautology.
Now I've heard that, and having read lots of Vonnegut I finally came across a copy of Cats Cradle and read it. Personally I found it rather disappointing, and felt that both Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan (both earlier, and allegedly lesser novels) were superior. I found the whole ice-9 thing a bit... I don't know.. heavy-handed? Dare I say it, implausible?
In any case, Vonnegut is well known, but far from well known enough. Slaughterhouse Five is a masterpiece by any measure, and multiple other works (Deadeye Dick for instance) are equally wonderful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because the money isn't being given to teachers. Pay all the teachers twice as much, and stop filling schools with iPads and massive swimming pools and ultrafast broadband and all that crap. Pay the teachers.
a digital code that is analogous to a computer's source code.
I don't think that there's any evidence for this statement. And it would be dangerous to extrapolate from it to any theories about how much change is required from a DNA point of view to effect change from an organism point of view.
In any case, maybe we should remember that knowledge about the structure and function of DNA is relatively recent compared to the history of the theory of evolution.
You don't have to look far into, say, the fossil record, to observe that life has increased in complexity over time. Darwin's theory was that this was driven by creatures attempting to out-compete each other, and this led him to the theory of natural selection.
Genetics showed us how this is possible, from a biochemical standpoint. So that how an organism's characteristics might be passed on from one generation to the next is no longer complete mystery.
However a great deal of mystery remains. Scientists are often identifying such-and-such a 'gene', and how it relates to such-and-such a characteristic of the final organism. But I suspect that this may be misleading, in the sense that we actually know very little about how a full complement of DNA leads to the final creature. It's probably also worth remembering that DNA isn't enough to create a creature, you also need a functioning developmental environment (such as a womb, or an egg) before you can get a creature at all. The complexity of a life-form's developmental pathway is mind-boggling. Suggesting that the code contained in DNA is analogous to computer source code is probably a huge over-simplification.
An enormous amount of evidence clearly points to life evolving over billions of years from single-celled organisms to the diversity we see today. Is your point then that what little we understand about genetics is insufficient to support the notion that this development came about through natural means? Do you concede that this development took place?
I'd be perfectly astonished if your objects weren't very well known. What I understand about the theory of evolution has completely satisfied me, in the sense that it seems believable and rational and plausible. You obviously feel differently, and I'd encourage you to ask these questions somewhere other than slashdot - which is mostly frequented by IT professionals - perhaps you could even take an undergrad course in developmental biology (if such a thing exists - the course that is, not the subject).
I wonder too if you entertain similar scepticism about other branches of scientific endeavour. There's plenty of out-there theories about all sorts of matters. Take particle physics, the evidence for the existence of things like quarks and such is far harder to grasp than the evidence for evolution. And the notion that the entire universe is made up of things with properties as peculiar as spin, and entanglement, and wave-particle-duality, and true randomness, and so-on - well, these notions seem far less likely to me than natural selection. What about that experiment where the photons appear to be in some sense aware of being observed? I'm not trying to get off-topic, I'm just asking why it is that evolution seems to get all the flack, when there's far weirder stuff out there.
Just try to apply that to computer code.
DNA is not computer code. It is not analogous to computer code. There isn't enough information to encode the human brain in DNA, so clearly small changes to DNA can have large effects.
It really seems to me, with all this arguing over information theory and so-on, that you just don't understand what the theory of evolution posits. Your basic argument seems to be that evolution is obviously wrong for all these obvious reasons, and those scientists just aren't smart enough to see what seems to obvious to you.
In my rather contrived melody example, you suggest that the method is equivalent to brute-forcing the entire solution space. This is false for numerous reasons. First, the solution space is infinite, as modifications to the melody may add notes as well as change them and/or remove them - so it is theoretically impossible to brute-force, and therefore I can't be brute-forcing it. Secondly, you suggest that because in my example I have human ears choosing the 'best' melody, that I am actually running an experiment in 'intelligent prediction'. This is also false, since in the example the only way of choosing the 'best' melody is via some-ones ears. In real evolution your objection falls away, since the 'filter' through which only the 'better' mutations - or recombinations, or viral insertions, etc - is the environment itself. Thirdly, and this is the most important point, at no point do we try every possibility in the solution space. We create random changes, and only allow those that are in some sense better to survive and thus go-on to reproduce. We don't just create billions of random tunes and choose the best, for that would be absurd. We take the melody, and make - say - ten thousand ever-so-slightly different variations. We the enlist the efforts of humans to determine which is the best - and yes I know that humans are intelligent agents, but please understand that this is an objection to the analogy, not to evolution itself. From our ten-thousands of modified tunes we choose a few hundred of the best, and repeat the process with those.
This is more or less exactly how evolution works for populations of bacteria. There are limited resources, and so only a smaller number of the thousands of slightly modified individuals survive.
In the early days of life, something - and we don't know what, but probably not DNA as we know it today - was busy reproducing in those ancient oceans for literally billions of years. During each one of those billions of years, trillions of individual reproductive units - whatever they might have been - were busy reproducing and changing uncountable numbers of times. So we have billions multiplied by trillions multiplied by maybe hundreds of thousands. This seems like quite a large number to me.
I just don't think you understand how the process is supposed to work. It isn't remotely like brute-forcing. Because there's this environmental filter that weeds out things that don't work. So the things that do work, need only happen *once* and then they spread. It's a feedback loop, wherein only the 'better' outputs are fed back in.
Anyway, look - it's exhausting arguing with you. I just think you don't get it. Let's try to narrow this down to a single question - can a theoretical feedback loop with (very very slight and quite rate) mutations, that selects only outputs that are as least as good as its inputs were and then feeds those output back in, over time produce better individuals? I believe it can, and that it's perfectly obvious that it can. You, as far as I can make out, do not. Or at least you believe that such a process would take too long. Despite all the evidence of far simpler ancient creatures - see the Cambrian Explosion for instance - that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. How did they turn into us, if not via evolution?
And please, can we leave abiogenesis out of it? You must know, as well as I know, that evolution as a theory starts with s
....ooookay...
Except that I don't think that's its majority use. I rather think it's used more for image editing, which is impossible on the command line.
Point is, the command line is demonstrably not more powerful than GUIs. The command line is more or less a programming language, which fulfills a rather different need to graphical interfaces. We do have a fairly large part of our brains devoted to interpreting images, and it seems a shame to waste it.
Perhaps this is why devotees of the command-line interface often prefer graphic novels?
;-)
Photoshop isn't so useful on the command line though.
as I don't have a deep education in the life sciences, but I follow along as best I can.
Which, and I genuinely don't mean disrespect, wouldn't appear to be very well.
Yes. But hopefully, not by you.
What an extraordinary point of view.
Evolution is not a moral position. Fitter organisms reproduce more often, that humans appeared sometime in the last twenty thousands years or so and got their knickers in a twist about whether or not it's moral to allow such a mechanism to continue is irrelevant.
Evolution will continue irrespective of humanities moral position on the matter. There are just too many organisms on the planet, reproducing and changing a tiny bit all the time - what are we going to do about it?
Let me guess. You're a guy.
intermediate steps in the evolutionary process.
There is a misunderstanding here. All steps are intermediate steps. There is no such thing as a non-intermediate step. Hell, there's no such thing as a 'step'. Gradual change is what we're looking at, and the fossil record is incomplete for perfectly reasonable reasons. The formation of a fossil is a highly unlikely event, and thus it didn't happen all that often.
If the only evidence for evolution were the fossil record, you might have a point. But the evidence is massive, and comes from areas as separate as molecular biology and geology.
The problem with this whole 'where are the intermediate forms' argument, is that it can never be satisfied. As soon as you fill one 'gap', you are left with two - albeit smaller - 'gaps'. Then you've got to fill those too.
It's interesting that you seem satisfied with the evidence for languages descending from each other, and rightly see no problem with missing details about intermediate languages (again though, all languages are intermediate) - yet you cannot accept the sparsity of the fossil record. Why the distinction?
You know, there are people in this world who actually don't have memories. There's an interesting documentary about a particular English individual called 'The Man with the Thirty Second Memory'. It's quite heartbreaking. If you haven't already watched it, I suggest that you do so. I would have thought it rather an insult to his memory to persist with your absurd navel-gazing.
And of course we use faith when we take most of what we experience as in some sense truth. This is the only rational course of action, and I'm fairly sure that Philosophy as a discipline moved on from questions such as these a fairly long time ago. More interesting, and more difficult ones, are available. Perhaps you could put your playful attitude to work on the problem of the existence (or non-existence) of Morals.
Not the question that was asked. The question was; which field uses the 'theory of Creationism'? Not; which scientist believes in God?
And the answer is, None. There is no field of engineering that uses the theory of Creationism, being the idea that God created everything. This is not an idea that you can 'use'.
To say that noise adds information is absurd
I think this is where you're stuck. Information + Noise, fed through a filter that only allows fitter results to reproduce, will obviously encourage change. The question surely is, if evolution does not occur, then why not? The whole argument can be approached from another direction - and so, answer me this; what prevents evolution?
They're making the assumption that the average mutation is a net gain,
This is plainly false. No such assumption is being made. The assumption - actually the fact - is that if a mutation is a gain, then that mutation will survive and spread.
Why bother removing noise when noise could be adding information to the message you're transmitting? You just need to filter it afterwards!
Because in information transfer, you actually want the original message. If you wanted to construct a system that created millions upon millions of randomly altered messages, and were somehow able to convince millions upon millions of people to read those messages and choose the one's they preferred, then absolutely you would eventually produce new information. Question; where did that information come from? Let's remove the issue of the syntax of the message, and instead suggest that the message should be a melody. Let's randomly alter the melody millions of times, and recruit millions of willing listeners to choose their favorite. Let's do this for millions of years. Are you suggesting that the result wouldn't be a better melody?
I believe evolution occurs but do I believe Humans came from a single celled organism. No.
Then you are wrong.
physical objects and digitally replicateable media.
The distinction is due only to limitations of current technology. In the future, everything will be media.
The book "How To Fix Copyright" by William Patry has details on this and much more.
Doesn't that constitute at least a semi-citation?
I now have one orange LESS than I had before
FEWER
You're welcome.
Yes, but on slashdot everyone appears terrified of it.
Which is actually a really bad thing.
I'm wondering though, what's your position on the issue of nuclear waste? I'd like to hear about it from someone such as yourself, who obviously thinks nuclear power is, on balance, a good technology. I've only ever heard about it from those who'd rather boil their kettle via pedal-power than countenance nuclear power, and I wonder if their view is all that balanced.
Probably because nuclear weapons tests have very little to do with the safety or otherwise of nuclear power, and certainly nothing at all to do with the matter under discussion - which, in case you've forgotten, is the relative safety of coal powered electricity generation vs. nuclear powered.
Also, "unintentional nuclear accident" is a tautology.
Which is because he's not under-appreciated, but is in fact quite celebrated.
Now I've heard that, and having read lots of Vonnegut I finally came across a copy of Cats Cradle and read it. Personally I found it rather disappointing, and felt that both Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan (both earlier, and allegedly lesser novels) were superior. I found the whole ice-9 thing a bit... I don't know.. heavy-handed? Dare I say it, implausible?
In any case, Vonnegut is well known, but far from well known enough. Slaughterhouse Five is a masterpiece by any measure, and multiple other works (Deadeye Dick for instance) are equally wonderful.
"The Caves of Steel" is one of his mystery novels. Hugely enjoyable, and once adapted for TV (but now lost).
... then why not Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek?
Not that I disagree, but the answers to this seem to be all around us.
+1 poetry