I study ecology, and have been finding that much of the mathematics is not notably different from economic theory and that there are clear similarities between some ecological equations and quantum physical equations. The reason why is obvious: all three are using the same statistical base to ask questions about the behavior of large populations behaving in certain ways.
My question is, how much cross-over between ecology, economics, and physics do you see, and what effect is that having on physics?
The reason that horses and donkeys can mate is that they are genetically related, not visually. As much as bat and a bird might be visually similar, they'll never mate. Neither would a marsupial wolf ever mate with a placental wolf. As I said above, there may be real constraints on what characters intelligent life must have, but that doesn't imply that all intelligent life can interbreed, any more than the similar constraints on the characters necessary for flying animals makes bats capable of breeding with birds.
The distinction I'm making is that between convergent evolution and relative monophyly. You could also think of it as being genetically related versus ecologically related. Just because you see some guy walking down the street that looks just like your dad doesn't mean that when he dies, you'll get any inheritance. Similar appearances can be generated by widely different genetic structures.
So your claim that there might be some "recipe for intelligent life" might be correct, but that recipe would be in the ecological realm, not the genetic.
Your comparison between physical laws and genetic laws is false because the rules of genetics that we know of may not hold for all life in the universe. DNA and carbon based bodies are common on earth, and those building blocks imply a particular mode of cell replication and genetic replication. If other molecules were used to pass on information between generations, the rules that we use on earth make no sense. Gravity is a characteristic of matter (or matter with mass, or something). Mendelian genetics are a character of the particular way that terrestrial life developed very early on.
Another way to look at it is to consider what is known of the evolution of humans. In order for humans to evolve, it was necessary that primates exist in an area where large brains, tool making and learning were seletive. Without that, the step from chimp to human need not have occured.
But the presense of apes implies that mammals evolved. The rise of mammals was a result of the extinction of the dominant taxa of the time due to a completely random event. Had an asteroid not struck Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula when it did, who's to say what life would look like now. See Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs for one suggestion. But what if sea levels where higher for longer? Reptiles may never have had an advantage over amphibians if dry land were less extensive, so the reptile families that evolved into birds and mammals may never have evolved, and one day an intelligent frog would discover an alien signal with his SETI@home screensaver.
Could a modern human mate with that frog?
Can a modern human mate with a modern frog?
Genetic change builds up by random mutations. The number the random mutations that lead to the flora and fauna of the modern world and each species in it is huge. To replicate that would be close enough to impossible that it can be ignored in any universe with finite inhabited planets and finite time.
My objection stands that even if DNA is a universal genetic code, there are problems.
Panspermia is an interesting hypothesis, and the process of testing it will reveal a lot about life and how it works. With an appropriate combination of raw materials and the right conditions, it's possible to make DNA and RNA. Whether those raw materials were present and whether those conditions held is an open question. If it holds true, then DNA could have developed on any planet moderately like earth.
But if that's true, a lot has happened in 3.5 billion years. To suggest that the particular skeleton common to all terrestrial vertebrates would evolve on other planets is unlikely, but if there is some advantage to that body plan, perhaps it would have happened by convergent evolution. But to suggest that the particular sutures in the skull are that adaptive is stretching it, and to suggest that the dominant "vertebrates" on other planets have 46 chromosomes is nigh impossible. The variation in chromosome numbers within mammals is huge, and is non-trivial within some genera.
So I argue that even if the greys are really DNA based, the chances of them having a genetic structure even close to humans is close enough to 0 that I'll ignore it.
I reject the time travel hypothesis as a massive violation of Occam's razor. I'm no physicist, but I've taken it as given that time travel was impossible, or at least impossible to survive. If I'm wrong, fine. But no need to invoke time travelling people from the future when perfectly good genetic defects will do.
I neglected to post a reference for my claim that humans and chimps can't hybridize, and I think I found what I was thinking of. I saw it in a Lary Gonick cartoon in some magazine way back when, but I think this reference is the original.
Sunny Luke and Ram S Verma, "Human (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) share similar ancestral centromeric alpha satellite DNA sequences but other fractions of heterochromatin differ considerably," American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 96(1). 1995. 63-71.
In particular, the abstract notes "Furthermore, cross-hybridization experiments using chromosomes of gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) suggest that the alphoid repeats of human and great apes are highly conserved, implying that these repeat families were present in their common ancestor. Nevertheless, the orangutan's chromosome 9 did not cross-hybridize with human probe."
What I find hard to believe is the concept of an alien/human hybrid.
Even granting that aliens are visiting earth and abducting people, how are they impregnating anyone? I mean, assuming what we know about the origins of life on earth is fairly true, there's no reason to think that ETs would have DNA. And if they did, why would it be compatible with human DNA? Chimps, our nearest relative based on genetic and morphological analyses, could not produce a hybrid with humans, so why would aliens be able to?
Other questions are, would an alien have a skeleton like a human's? While one could argue that the development of DNA as a genetic material could be widespread, it is harder to argue that the particular skeletal arrangement of modern vertebrates would have developed on a different planet, down to the details of how the skull sutures form. And if the aliens don't have that structure, why do their hybrids?
There are a couple of parts to the scientific method. One is that one ought not to just reject things you disagree with, but should offer evidence. OTOH, that evidence can be from theory, and that leads you to another important part of science: Occam's razor. If it is necessary that we discard all that we know about life on earth to explain a skull, then people are going to expect the evidence supporting the hybrid origin of the skull to be very strong.
So what I'm saying is that the evidence available suggests that this child had some congenital defect that produced a very strange skull morphology. Without an alien to give a paternity test to, it'll be pretty hard to get evidence that will make anyone willing to toss a lot of sound theory out.
People might rightly point out that many true theories were dismissed like this, but I would remind you that a lot more wrong ones were rejected this way.
Bull! I know he has a right to his opinion, but when he speaks for the community, he shouldn't make us sound like fools. We believe in freedom, in overcoming the evil empires of the world. We tend to believe that Microsoft is an evil empire, and it didn't get there with the government's help. The classic monopolies all came from unregulated markets, careful regulation prevents monopoly.
As for China, the Chinese people and their government have every right to choose to run Linux. If we can show one billion people the power of freedom, good. And the core of that freedom is their opportunity to choose. ESR is off-base, and as an unofficial spokesman, he ought to speak more carefully.
Except that AOL is a content provider. No one can start their own service to relay AOL content to blind users, because AOL provides a proprietary service.
Not sure why everyone is complaining about HTML, when the suit seems to be targeted at the proprietary part of AOL, if not exclusively, then at least in part. The suit seems to be saying that there is no good way to tell what is on the screen when you first log on. There's the famous "You've got mail!" but most of the buttons to click are graphics with no text and no keyboard shortcut. AOL could do better.
In addition to the points raised by the article and by posters here, I think that the biggest worry is still un-addressed. Even if the election board could set up a system that was uncrackable, and robust to DoS attacks, there is still the problem of voter fraud.
What's to stop Steve Forbes from buying a lot of computers and setting up his own voting booths and busing people in? One reason there are election judges that sit and check your signature is to watch and make sure candidates and their aides don't just lead people in and punch the card for them. That's why there are rules about how close to voting places any campaign material can be. With internet voting, there's no way to protect the independence of the voting.
All of this assumes that a technique can be developed that will verify a voter's identity while ensuring the anonymity of votes.
Anything that increases the number of people who vote is good, but not if it makes it impossible to ensure that the voting is fair.
Slashdot Mirror
I study ecology, and have been finding that much of the mathematics is not notably different from economic theory and that there are clear similarities between some ecological equations and quantum physical equations. The reason why is obvious: all three are using the same statistical base to ask questions about the behavior of large populations behaving in certain ways.
My question is, how much cross-over between ecology, economics, and physics do you see, and what effect is that having on physics?
The reason that horses and donkeys can mate is that they are genetically related, not visually. As much as bat and a bird might be visually similar, they'll never mate. Neither would a marsupial wolf ever mate with a placental wolf. As I said above, there may be real constraints on what characters intelligent life must have, but that doesn't imply that all intelligent life can interbreed, any more than the similar constraints on the characters necessary for flying animals makes bats capable of breeding with birds.
The distinction I'm making is that between convergent evolution and relative monophyly. You could also think of it as being genetically related versus ecologically related. Just because you see some guy walking down the street that looks just like your dad doesn't mean that when he dies, you'll get any inheritance. Similar appearances can be generated by widely different genetic structures.
So your claim that there might be some "recipe for intelligent life" might be correct, but that recipe would be in the ecological realm, not the genetic.
Your comparison between physical laws and genetic laws is false because the rules of genetics that we know of may not hold for all life in the universe. DNA and carbon based bodies are common on earth, and those building blocks imply a particular mode of cell replication and genetic replication. If other molecules were used to pass on information between generations, the rules that we use on earth make no sense. Gravity is a characteristic of matter (or matter with mass, or something). Mendelian genetics are a character of the particular way that terrestrial life developed very early on.
Another way to look at it is to consider what is known of the evolution of humans. In order for humans to evolve, it was necessary that primates exist in an area where large brains, tool making and learning were seletive. Without that, the step from chimp to human need not have occured.
But the presense of apes implies that mammals evolved. The rise of mammals was a result of the extinction of the dominant taxa of the time due to a completely random event. Had an asteroid not struck Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula when it did, who's to say what life would look like now. See Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs for one suggestion. But what if sea levels where higher for longer? Reptiles may never have had an advantage over amphibians if dry land were less extensive, so the reptile families that evolved into birds and mammals may never have evolved, and one day an intelligent frog would discover an alien signal with his SETI@home screensaver.
Could a modern human mate with that frog?
Can a modern human mate with a modern frog?
Genetic change builds up by random mutations. The number the random mutations that lead to the flora and fauna of the modern world and each species in it is huge. To replicate that would be close enough to impossible that it can be ignored in any universe with finite inhabited planets and finite time.
My objection stands that even if DNA is a universal genetic code, there are problems.
Panspermia is an interesting hypothesis, and the process of testing it will reveal a lot about life and how it works. With an appropriate combination of raw materials and the right conditions, it's possible to make DNA and RNA. Whether those raw materials were present and whether those conditions held is an open question. If it holds true, then DNA could have developed on any planet moderately like earth.
But if that's true, a lot has happened in 3.5 billion years. To suggest that the particular skeleton common to all terrestrial vertebrates would evolve on other planets is unlikely, but if there is some advantage to that body plan, perhaps it would have happened by convergent evolution. But to suggest that the particular sutures in the skull are that adaptive is stretching it, and to suggest that the dominant "vertebrates" on other planets have 46 chromosomes is nigh impossible. The variation in chromosome numbers within mammals is huge, and is non-trivial within some genera.
So I argue that even if the greys are really DNA based, the chances of them having a genetic structure even close to humans is close enough to 0 that I'll ignore it.
I reject the time travel hypothesis as a massive violation of Occam's razor. I'm no physicist, but I've taken it as given that time travel was impossible, or at least impossible to survive. If I'm wrong, fine. But no need to invoke time travelling people from the future when perfectly good genetic defects will do.
I neglected to post a reference for my claim that humans and chimps can't hybridize, and I think I found what I was thinking of. I saw it in a Lary Gonick cartoon in some magazine way back when, but I think this reference is the original.
Sunny Luke and Ram S Verma, "Human (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) share similar ancestral centromeric alpha satellite DNA sequences but other fractions of heterochromatin differ considerably," American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 96(1). 1995. 63-71.
In particular, the abstract notes "Furthermore, cross-hybridization experiments using chromosomes of gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) suggest that the alphoid repeats of human and great apes are highly conserved, implying that these repeat families were present in their common ancestor. Nevertheless, the orangutan's chromosome 9 did not cross-hybridize with human probe."
So not Pan troglodytes, but close.
What I find hard to believe is the concept of an alien/human hybrid.
Even granting that aliens are visiting earth and abducting people, how are they impregnating anyone? I mean, assuming what we know about the origins of life on earth is fairly true, there's no reason to think that ETs would have DNA. And if they did, why would it be compatible with human DNA? Chimps, our nearest relative based on genetic and morphological analyses, could not produce a hybrid with humans, so why would aliens be able to?
Other questions are, would an alien have a skeleton like a human's? While one could argue that the development of DNA as a genetic material could be widespread, it is harder to argue that the particular skeletal arrangement of modern vertebrates would have developed on a different planet, down to the details of how the skull sutures form. And if the aliens don't have that structure, why do their hybrids?
There are a couple of parts to the scientific method. One is that one ought not to just reject things you disagree with, but should offer evidence. OTOH, that evidence can be from theory, and that leads you to another important part of science: Occam's razor. If it is necessary that we discard all that we know about life on earth to explain a skull, then people are going to expect the evidence supporting the hybrid origin of the skull to be very strong.
So what I'm saying is that the evidence available suggests that this child had some congenital defect that produced a very strange skull morphology. Without an alien to give a paternity test to, it'll be pretty hard to get evidence that will make anyone willing to toss a lot of sound theory out.
People might rightly point out that many true theories were dismissed like this, but I would remind you that a lot more wrong ones were rejected this way.
I still want to slag of ESR for speaking for the community. As an advocate for liberty, he's unmatched. That doesn't mean he speaks for Linux or Open Source idealogy. I objected to him saying "The whole premise of antitrust law is wrong. Governments don't break up monopolies, markets do. Governments create monopolies."
Bull! I know he has a right to his opinion, but when he speaks for the community, he shouldn't make us sound like fools. We believe in freedom, in overcoming the evil empires of the world. We tend to believe that Microsoft is an evil empire, and it didn't get there with the government's help. The classic monopolies all came from unregulated markets, careful regulation prevents monopoly.
As for China, the Chinese people and their government have every right to choose to run Linux. If we can show one billion people the power of freedom, good. And the core of that freedom is their opportunity to choose. ESR is off-base, and as an unofficial spokesman, he ought to speak more carefully.
Now the question is how the average home user will setup a firewall ...
Isn't this why Cobalt stock is selling like hotcakes?
Except that AOL is a content provider. No one can start their own service to relay AOL content to blind users, because AOL provides a proprietary service.
Not sure why everyone is complaining about HTML, when the suit seems to be targeted at the proprietary part of AOL, if not exclusively, then at least in part. The suit seems to be saying that there is no good way to tell what is on the screen when you first log on. There's the famous "You've got mail!" but most of the buttons to click are graphics with no text and no keyboard shortcut. AOL could do better.
In addition to the points raised by the article and by posters here, I think that the biggest worry is still un-addressed. Even if the election board could set up a system that was uncrackable, and robust to DoS attacks, there is still the problem of voter fraud.
What's to stop Steve Forbes from buying a lot of computers and setting up his own voting booths and busing people in? One reason there are election judges that sit and check your signature is to watch and make sure candidates and their aides don't just lead people in and punch the card for them. That's why there are rules about how close to voting places any campaign material can be. With internet voting, there's no way to protect the independence of the voting.
All of this assumes that a technique can be developed that will verify a voter's identity while ensuring the anonymity of votes.
Anything that increases the number of people who vote is good, but not if it makes it impossible to ensure that the voting is fair.