This is a far better protocol than the one they used. In fact, I can't find any evidence in the article that they did anything with controls at all. It just says they observed public servers. For all we know, the data could be telling us that people like the color more than blue, and so for slightly more players red is the "first choice" team, leading to stacking effects. Only if players were completely randomized and also made to each play a set time... as well as using your little trick, could we be sure the effect was actually from an in game advantage to red.
It may be "expectable" now, but it certainly wasn't always. No one was shrugging at this idea before the M/U experiment. No one expected that these sorts of molecules would appear in space either.
Your assumptions about RNA also seem a little underdramatic. Yes, in modern life that's how RNA works. But the RNA systems of today are amongst the very oldest systems on the planet, and have likely been evolving for far longer than anything else. Who knows if there is a simpler form that early life used that did not employ anything like a modern ribosome? RNA is not just intangible information floating off somewhere in the abstract: it's a physical molecule with real causal effects, and in particular RNA is capable of various forms of chemical catalysis.
And I think part of the reason many of the meteorite stuff is interesting is because we find in them some of the amino acids that don't form all that easily on what we think early earth conditions were.
Which is fine if your purpose is to be a dot on a general's battlefield-eye view of things. But that's not necessarily the right stance for all sorts of other jobs which involve innovative responses and solutions. That's not to say that soldiers cannot be innovative problem solvers, but the point is that the training is gearing people towards different things.
The problem is that even if the candidates wanted to play nice, there are entire partisan media empires that will play dirty, and those will drive the press cycles and cause the candidates to play along, regardless of what they wanted to talk about.
You probably meant that as a joke, but that actually might be a good point: perhaps the internet's origins in the military have led to some overexposure in modern use that wouldn't have otherwise been the case if it had its roots elsewhere.
This is a really important question going forward. A lot of military recruitment seems to still be somewhat centered around the sorts of "grunt"-based wars we were fighting decades ago. But there's no reason a fat out of shape guy who happens to be a brilliant programmer needs to go through boot camp and get shouted at by a drill instructor, or learn how to march, just to be part of a group devoted to fighting cyber-terrorism.
Obviously quasi-military operations need lots more in the way of security clearance and chains of command, but it seems like civilian-structured government organizations are better suited to many of these tasks than the conventional military. The NSA, DOD, CIA, etc. are full of bright people, many of whom have never done a push-up.
Is it the military that's going to change how it trains and retains, or will it be civilian-based government agencies that start to take over more and more of the functions of technological-based warfare?
I'm interested in why so many sensitive networks are even hooked up to the internet in the first place, or why trivial systems are so often bundled with sensitive ones under the same security frameworks.
Why aren't there more isolated networks that would require physical contact or interception to get to in the first place? Do sensitive systems really need any connection at all to the conventional internet in the first place?
I know that many places in the DoD do take this approach (people having one computer for safe email and browsing, and a completely different computer for sensitive intel), and certainly it's more expensive and less convenient. But when the internet is basically just a big pathway leading directly to your backdoor, why take any chance at all, ever?
The problem with all of this fine-tuning stuff is that we don't know the ranges or even the possible variables that we can "tune." There's just no way to insist that our universe is incredibly "unlikely." How can you judge probability when you don't know the odds?
We have no idea what is likely or unlikely for a "universe," seeing as we only have the one that we can look in. For all we know, the most probable outcomes for a universe forming are incredibly more complex and bursting with intelligent order than ours is. For all we know, our universe might be so unlikely that we'd have to appeal to an intelligent chaos-lover god in order to explain why we have so few universal constants, dimensions, and lifeforms.
Didn't he at one time flirt with the idea of switching over to the Democrats, or going fully independent? It's still hard to imagine how we got from there to him being their nominee.
You're quite wrong here. Theories generally do not ever become laws, because they are terms describing two very different sorts of things. Theories are bodies of explanation, often quite robust and complex. Laws are simply statements of universally true regularities and relationships: they rarely actually explain anything. Theories can contain laws: for instance, the theory of evolution contains Dolo's law (a statistical law).
Likewise, the law of gravity did not replace the theory of gravity. We still have a theory of gravity, and always will. The law of gravity is PART of the theory of gravity.
"Theory" is not a comment on how well established something is. It's the form of the word meaning abstract reasoning and modeling, not "guessimating." We still call things that are flat out untrue "theories" (like Orgone Energy Theory) and we call things that are deductively 100% provable from their axioms theories (i.e. number theory, which, again, contains various number laws)
This argument: sometimes called "lord, lunatic or liar" is far from just not compelling: it's just about one of the silliest in all apologetics.
It ignores all sorts of very obvious objections:
1) Jesus did in fact do quite a number of nutty things, many of which only really make sense as mythical symbolism rather than real events (like cursing the fig tree)
2) Sanity is not a matter of black and white. Lots of people believe all sorts of nutty things while still functioning normally in most areas of life. Ever heard of schizotypal personality disorder?
3) Lewis begs the question on sanity in any case: he assumes that the more out there religious claims in the Gospels are not themselves signs of insanity, thus ruling out by definition the very sorts of things that could be used as evidence of zaniness
4) The idea that Jesus couldn't be a huckster or a little insane, OR both flies in the face of our experience. There are tons of people today, in an age of modern science, that believe all sorts of kooky and false things: some earnestly, some who convince others 100% that they are earnest when in fact they are just shameless self-promoters. The idea that this would be impossible or even unlikely in a highly superstitious, illiterate age, is just silly
5) Jesus didn't clearly say, in the Gospels, he was God: he was remarkably confusing on this point
And so on.
And that's not even getting into the alternatives that Lewis completely ignores, such as the possibility that the Gospels are not an accurate account of who Jesus was or what he said: many of the grander claims could have developed later, or sayings added by others, and so on.
Why is this, if we are all just destined to die anyhow, and be dust, and our heirs to be wiped out by the heat death of the universe?
I'm endlessly confused by how silly this question is. It's like asking "why go see a movie when it will just end after two hours?" Why? Because we care. The amount of time something lasts doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you find it meaningful. If a finite existence is not worth living: has 0 meaning, than an infinite life is no better. Zero is still zero no matter how much of it you have.
I have thought about this a lot, and I believe I have a soul.
Really? Here's the problem: can you explain what a soul is? How does it work? What are it's functional characteristics? What does it do? Where is it located? How does it interface with your brain?
Like so many supernatural concepts "soul" is basically a conceptual black hole: it means nothing and explains nothing. It exists purely as a sort of anti-concept that allows strange non-sequitur assertions to claim a legitimacy they have not earned.
You seem to misunderstand the scope of what you are talking about. First of all, actually making something happen artificially is actually often a lot harder in terms of technical than understanding how it happened. You also seem deeply confused as to the nature of historical (forensic) science. You don't need to run an experiment that lasts several million years to confirm some past event. Do historians needs to re-enact the 30 years war in its entirety in order to know anything about it?
As it happens, plenty of scientists are working on what you call "step 1" and making good progress, all in line with the tools and technologies we have at present, despite it being a technically very difficult problem to enact in a lab.
But this really doesn't have anywhere near as much bearing as you seem to think it does as to figuring out how life originated naturally. (And, by the way, it wouldn't be by "evolution" at least not in the same sense as the theory of evolution). There are just too many ways in which it could happened, few of which would necessarily track up with anything we do in the lab, which itself would only be one of countless different ways. We don't even know yet if, for instance, metabolisms came first or some form of reproducible heredity came first. And things like that really matter. That's what we're trying to figure out, hindered largely simply by the lack of any good window on the historical past.
And this statement: "This doesn't seem to have prevented the scientific community from vociferously claiming that they have a good understanding of stage 2 despite not coming anywhere near completing stage 1."...is pure lie. No scientist I've ever heard has claimed that they have a "good understanding" of exactly how life began. We don't. We have a good idea that it began, and even roughly when. We have a good idea of how it fits into an overall picture of ancestry, biochem, and so forth. We have tantilizing guideposts like the existence of many of the core structural components apparently existing in the right conditions. But we don't pretend to know the exact physical process or steps.
Oh noes: a creationist challenge that was answered two decades ago, but which they keep bringing up over and over again as if it were some deep insight that nasty scientists were conspiring to ignore?
Say it ain't so, joe.
To understand what difference it makes, you need to have some overview of the specific sorts of issues those looking at early life are considering. One of those issues is the fact that different sorts of amino acids form in different natural conditions. If we toss extraterrestrial matter into the mix, what that does is allow us to consider a wider diversity of natural processes that would create a wider range of amino acids.
Your latter question is, of course, the really exciting one. However, just because we don't know "the" answer doesn't mean that we're shooting in the dark. We have a heck of a lot of the picture filled in. Our main problem at this point is that we don't know enough about biochem or early earth conditions to know for sure what could plausibly go on, and we don't have enough historical information to know precisely which of many different possible things DID go on, in this one case.
Actually, the point of the seeding scenarios is that they do explain where CERTAIN amino acids that we find on Earth would have come from, given that they are far less likely to form in Earth-like conditions. Not ALL amino acids.
The really interesting thing about the sorts of amino acids that we DO think could have formed on is that when you try to find sections of genetic information common to all life, in the hopes that these are the most "primitive" versions still represented in modern genes, you find a surprising bias towards sequences that favor the Earth-likely AAs over those less likely to have formed naturally on Earth.
RTFA:)
The machine doesn't know what you are thinking. It just knows what you are currently looking at, right when you do the scan. This makes it pretty much the most expensive way imaginable to browse a gallery of images... all filtered through the head of the observer.
They are hinting that it might be able to handle things like vivid visual memories and dreams, but there's way too many unknowns on that, and its hard to see how even that could be used against you.
Also, as the article says, it's not like they can scan people walking down the street: they have to be strapped into a huge MRI machine.
Is evolution falsifiable? Here's how I understand evolution:
Uh Oh.
Evolution is based on the idea that billions of years ago there was nothing, then it exploded into the universe.
Uh, what? No. This has nothing to do with evolution. People who think it does are pretty much giving the game away as far as not having a clue what they are talking about.
And for the record, physics and cosmology (the ACTUAL disciplines involved) do not say that there was "nothing." All it says is that we don't know what there was prior to the BB, when it appears things would have been at the point of a singularity.
It then proceeded to condense into stars and planets, some of which managed to end up spinning the wrong way.
There is no "wrong way." You are confused.
Earth somehow got a huge moon without messing up its orbit,
There are countless ways for planets to have a moon, or many moons, and many as likely to stabilize a particular orbit as harm it. Like your "wrong way" comment, this bears little relation to any understanding of physics, gravity, or stellar/planetary formation. The attempt to make it all look self-contradictory is, thus, laughable.
and then chemicals washed from rocks managed to spring into bacteria that could reproduce.
The bacteria you likely envision here are MODERN organisms (and extremely complex ones at that), not what would have constituted early life. We don't know how early life began, but none of the possibilities are as simple or as lame as "chemicals where washed from rocks and spring into." All of them concern specific chemical mechanisms based on the conditions of the early earth and the formation of specific sorts of structures which would allow for hereditary reproduction.
None of this, of course, has so far had anything to do with evolution.
These got more and more complex over time,
No. Some things did. Things adapted to their environments better and better over time, and some things, by this, got more complex. But again, not in a handwaving way. Through specific mechanisms and following specific patterns and processes.
and thousands of dead animals got fossilized (except for the transition forms, which apparently aren't allowed to fossilize).
You clearly do not have a clue what a transitional fossil is, why they are considered significant, and where and how we'd expect to find them in the fossil record. In fact, we do find them there, in exactly the places and quantity we'd expect from evolution.
If the transition fossils are missing, then they didn't exist.
They aren't "missing." You simply have no idea what you are talking about.
2. We get to believe in punctuated equilibrium, where not only did those random helpful mutations occur, but they all happened at the same time!
PE is about the phyletic pace of change. I bet you don't even know what phyletic means. And nothing about PE suggests that they "happened at the same time." It simply suggests that changes are not a matter of constant modification, but rather dips and peaks as environmental pressures change and demand quick responses.
Personally, I think the whole things is bunk. Until you show me some half-this, half-that fossils
Such a thing would be COUNTER evolution, not evidence of it. Evolution proceeds along a pattern of descent via modification, not "one thing becomes something else." Instead, things are sub variations on their parent groups. The fact that you obviously do not understand this is probably why you don't know what a transitional fossil is.
But people want to believe it so badly that they still excuse the total lack of fossil evidence for evolution.
The fossil record is entirely in line with what we'd expect to see from a history of evolution. The problem remains that you don't understand what evolution is, and hence your criticism is of a caricature.
Yep. Catholicism's official position is that evolution and science are compatible with core Christian doctrine, and acceptable for Catholics.
Which thus automatically puts creationists in a minority amongst Christians on this issue.
But as I wrote numerous times in this thread, there is no place for quasi-religious conviction.
The idea that scientists have a "quasi-religious" conviction about evolution is just a lazy BS talking point that bears little resemblance to how scientists actually talk about science.
But, for example, the cold fusion guys were certainly asked to demonstrate their claims.
Are you saying that biologists aren't asked to demonstrate their claims? Of course they are, and they do. Evolutionary biologists and all forensic scientists replicate their findings all the time. What you are confused about is the subject of the replication. The replication in the case of things being studied is a replication of the EXPERIMENTS confirming them, not of the _historical_ phenomenon they are studying. Historians do not replicate the Battle of Hastings to demonstrate that there is more than enough evidence to support the idea that it happened.
So yes, anyone claiming to be 100% sure that life and non-life is completely the same will be asked to demonstrate the transformation.
The burden of proof here is on you. No one has claimed to be "100% sure" of anything. The point is that there is no evidence that life is anything more than a particular application of the same interactions that govern non-life.
Really? So we must be able to create worldwide earthquakes in labs to understand what they are and how they are caused?
I think you are confused as to what replication is in science.
If you think there is anything more to it, then please postulate what special extra physical forces living things are subject to that non-living things are not subject to. There isn't one chemistry for biological organisms and another for non-biological ones. And there is no hard bright line between life and non-life. Are viruses alive? Prions? Replicators in Conway's game of life?
You seem pretty confused here. Thinking of species turning into a different species is very much the wrong way to think about it: if cats turned into dogs, that would be disproof of evolution, not what evolution says. Aside from the rare results of fertile hybridizations (well, rare in the animal kingdom anyhow: a lot more common in plants), speciation is a process of sub-variations on a theme. Human beings are not half ape and half human with some jump in between. They are all ape and all human, because human is a TYPE of ape: it's a particular variation on the larger category of ape features. Any species that are descendants of human beings will likewise not be something non-human: they will still belong to the now larger group "human" but be variations on a homo sapien. This is confusing to laypeople because the most well known taxonomic systems were structured prior to evolution, and they thus treat everything, even ancient lifeforms, as if they were all on the same species level, when in fact all descendant species are sub-species of their ancestors, and their descendants sub-sub-species of them. This is simply an artifact of the naming convention used, but it seems to throw a lot of people way off when it comes to understanding how evolution works.
Anyway, this is why we do not find the sort of "intermediate" transitional forms you are looking for: dramatic bridging from one species to another is not how evolution works. Rather, it's about descent with modification. We DO find countless transitional forms of exactly the sort that evolution describes: the problem is, you don't know what you are looking for. What we headline as "transitional forms" are special largely because of historical significance rather than anything particularly dramatic in and of themselves. All transitional forms are as fully functional as any other species in their own right. Their importance comes from the clues they give towards precisely nailing down an ancestry and trait order.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a far better protocol than the one they used. In fact, I can't find any evidence in the article that they did anything with controls at all. It just says they observed public servers. For all we know, the data could be telling us that people like the color more than blue, and so for slightly more players red is the "first choice" team, leading to stacking effects. Only if players were completely randomized and also made to each play a set time... as well as using your little trick, could we be sure the effect was actually from an in game advantage to red.
It may be "expectable" now, but it certainly wasn't always. No one was shrugging at this idea before the M/U experiment. No one expected that these sorts of molecules would appear in space either.
Your assumptions about RNA also seem a little underdramatic. Yes, in modern life that's how RNA works. But the RNA systems of today are amongst the very oldest systems on the planet, and have likely been evolving for far longer than anything else. Who knows if there is a simpler form that early life used that did not employ anything like a modern ribosome? RNA is not just intangible information floating off somewhere in the abstract: it's a physical molecule with real causal effects, and in particular RNA is capable of various forms of chemical catalysis.
And I think part of the reason many of the meteorite stuff is interesting is because we find in them some of the amino acids that don't form all that easily on what we think early earth conditions were.
Which is fine if your purpose is to be a dot on a general's battlefield-eye view of things. But that's not necessarily the right stance for all sorts of other jobs which involve innovative responses and solutions. That's not to say that soldiers cannot be innovative problem solvers, but the point is that the training is gearing people towards different things.
The problem is that even if the candidates wanted to play nice, there are entire partisan media empires that will play dirty, and those will drive the press cycles and cause the candidates to play along, regardless of what they wanted to talk about.
You probably meant that as a joke, but that actually might be a good point: perhaps the internet's origins in the military have led to some overexposure in modern use that wouldn't have otherwise been the case if it had its roots elsewhere.
This is a really important question going forward. A lot of military recruitment seems to still be somewhat centered around the sorts of "grunt"-based wars we were fighting decades ago. But there's no reason a fat out of shape guy who happens to be a brilliant programmer needs to go through boot camp and get shouted at by a drill instructor, or learn how to march, just to be part of a group devoted to fighting cyber-terrorism.
Obviously quasi-military operations need lots more in the way of security clearance and chains of command, but it seems like civilian-structured government organizations are better suited to many of these tasks than the conventional military. The NSA, DOD, CIA, etc. are full of bright people, many of whom have never done a push-up.
Is it the military that's going to change how it trains and retains, or will it be civilian-based government agencies that start to take over more and more of the functions of technological-based warfare?
Jooooiiiiiiin uuuuusss. It's bliissssss.......
I'm interested in why so many sensitive networks are even hooked up to the internet in the first place, or why trivial systems are so often bundled with sensitive ones under the same security frameworks.
Why aren't there more isolated networks that would require physical contact or interception to get to in the first place? Do sensitive systems really need any connection at all to the conventional internet in the first place?
I know that many places in the DoD do take this approach (people having one computer for safe email and browsing, and a completely different computer for sensitive intel), and certainly it's more expensive and less convenient. But when the internet is basically just a big pathway leading directly to your backdoor, why take any chance at all, ever?
The problem with all of this fine-tuning stuff is that we don't know the ranges or even the possible variables that we can "tune." There's just no way to insist that our universe is incredibly "unlikely." How can you judge probability when you don't know the odds?
We have no idea what is likely or unlikely for a "universe," seeing as we only have the one that we can look in. For all we know, the most probable outcomes for a universe forming are incredibly more complex and bursting with intelligent order than ours is. For all we know, our universe might be so unlikely that we'd have to appeal to an intelligent chaos-lover god in order to explain why we have so few universal constants, dimensions, and lifeforms.
Didn't he at one time flirt with the idea of switching over to the Democrats, or going fully independent? It's still hard to imagine how we got from there to him being their nominee.
You're quite wrong here. Theories generally do not ever become laws, because they are terms describing two very different sorts of things. Theories are bodies of explanation, often quite robust and complex. Laws are simply statements of universally true regularities and relationships: they rarely actually explain anything. Theories can contain laws: for instance, the theory of evolution contains Dolo's law (a statistical law). Likewise, the law of gravity did not replace the theory of gravity. We still have a theory of gravity, and always will. The law of gravity is PART of the theory of gravity. "Theory" is not a comment on how well established something is. It's the form of the word meaning abstract reasoning and modeling, not "guessimating." We still call things that are flat out untrue "theories" (like Orgone Energy Theory) and we call things that are deductively 100% provable from their axioms theories (i.e. number theory, which, again, contains various number laws)
This argument: sometimes called "lord, lunatic or liar" is far from just not compelling: it's just about one of the silliest in all apologetics. It ignores all sorts of very obvious objections: 1) Jesus did in fact do quite a number of nutty things, many of which only really make sense as mythical symbolism rather than real events (like cursing the fig tree) 2) Sanity is not a matter of black and white. Lots of people believe all sorts of nutty things while still functioning normally in most areas of life. Ever heard of schizotypal personality disorder? 3) Lewis begs the question on sanity in any case: he assumes that the more out there religious claims in the Gospels are not themselves signs of insanity, thus ruling out by definition the very sorts of things that could be used as evidence of zaniness 4) The idea that Jesus couldn't be a huckster or a little insane, OR both flies in the face of our experience. There are tons of people today, in an age of modern science, that believe all sorts of kooky and false things: some earnestly, some who convince others 100% that they are earnest when in fact they are just shameless self-promoters. The idea that this would be impossible or even unlikely in a highly superstitious, illiterate age, is just silly 5) Jesus didn't clearly say, in the Gospels, he was God: he was remarkably confusing on this point And so on. And that's not even getting into the alternatives that Lewis completely ignores, such as the possibility that the Gospels are not an accurate account of who Jesus was or what he said: many of the grander claims could have developed later, or sayings added by others, and so on.
So, how big does something have to be to qualify for being called "nearly" infinite? I mean, exactly, what's the exact figure. :)
You seem to misunderstand the scope of what you are talking about. First of all, actually making something happen artificially is actually often a lot harder in terms of technical than understanding how it happened. You also seem deeply confused as to the nature of historical (forensic) science. You don't need to run an experiment that lasts several million years to confirm some past event. Do historians needs to re-enact the 30 years war in its entirety in order to know anything about it? As it happens, plenty of scientists are working on what you call "step 1" and making good progress, all in line with the tools and technologies we have at present, despite it being a technically very difficult problem to enact in a lab. But this really doesn't have anywhere near as much bearing as you seem to think it does as to figuring out how life originated naturally. (And, by the way, it wouldn't be by "evolution" at least not in the same sense as the theory of evolution). There are just too many ways in which it could happened, few of which would necessarily track up with anything we do in the lab, which itself would only be one of countless different ways. We don't even know yet if, for instance, metabolisms came first or some form of reproducible heredity came first. And things like that really matter. That's what we're trying to figure out, hindered largely simply by the lack of any good window on the historical past. And this statement: "This doesn't seem to have prevented the scientific community from vociferously claiming that they have a good understanding of stage 2 despite not coming anywhere near completing stage 1." ...is pure lie. No scientist I've ever heard has claimed that they have a "good understanding" of exactly how life began. We don't. We have a good idea that it began, and even roughly when. We have a good idea of how it fits into an overall picture of ancestry, biochem, and so forth. We have tantilizing guideposts like the existence of many of the core structural components apparently existing in the right conditions. But we don't pretend to know the exact physical process or steps.
Oh noes: a creationist challenge that was answered two decades ago, but which they keep bringing up over and over again as if it were some deep insight that nasty scientists were conspiring to ignore? Say it ain't so, joe.
To understand what difference it makes, you need to have some overview of the specific sorts of issues those looking at early life are considering. One of those issues is the fact that different sorts of amino acids form in different natural conditions. If we toss extraterrestrial matter into the mix, what that does is allow us to consider a wider diversity of natural processes that would create a wider range of amino acids. Your latter question is, of course, the really exciting one. However, just because we don't know "the" answer doesn't mean that we're shooting in the dark. We have a heck of a lot of the picture filled in. Our main problem at this point is that we don't know enough about biochem or early earth conditions to know for sure what could plausibly go on, and we don't have enough historical information to know precisely which of many different possible things DID go on, in this one case.
Actually, the point of the seeding scenarios is that they do explain where CERTAIN amino acids that we find on Earth would have come from, given that they are far less likely to form in Earth-like conditions. Not ALL amino acids. The really interesting thing about the sorts of amino acids that we DO think could have formed on is that when you try to find sections of genetic information common to all life, in the hopes that these are the most "primitive" versions still represented in modern genes, you find a surprising bias towards sequences that favor the Earth-likely AAs over those less likely to have formed naturally on Earth.
RTFA :)
The machine doesn't know what you are thinking. It just knows what you are currently looking at, right when you do the scan. This makes it pretty much the most expensive way imaginable to browse a gallery of images... all filtered through the head of the observer.
They are hinting that it might be able to handle things like vivid visual memories and dreams, but there's way too many unknowns on that, and its hard to see how even that could be used against you.
Also, as the article says, it's not like they can scan people walking down the street: they have to be strapped into a huge MRI machine.
Because the bill does nothing to define what is or isn't scientific, and hence any random person can claim any random view is scientific.
Yep. Catholicism's official position is that evolution and science are compatible with core Christian doctrine, and acceptable for Catholics. Which thus automatically puts creationists in a minority amongst Christians on this issue.
Really? So we must be able to create worldwide earthquakes in labs to understand what they are and how they are caused? I think you are confused as to what replication is in science. If you think there is anything more to it, then please postulate what special extra physical forces living things are subject to that non-living things are not subject to. There isn't one chemistry for biological organisms and another for non-biological ones. And there is no hard bright line between life and non-life. Are viruses alive? Prions? Replicators in Conway's game of life?
You seem pretty confused here. Thinking of species turning into a different species is very much the wrong way to think about it: if cats turned into dogs, that would be disproof of evolution, not what evolution says. Aside from the rare results of fertile hybridizations (well, rare in the animal kingdom anyhow: a lot more common in plants), speciation is a process of sub-variations on a theme. Human beings are not half ape and half human with some jump in between. They are all ape and all human, because human is a TYPE of ape: it's a particular variation on the larger category of ape features. Any species that are descendants of human beings will likewise not be something non-human: they will still belong to the now larger group "human" but be variations on a homo sapien. This is confusing to laypeople because the most well known taxonomic systems were structured prior to evolution, and they thus treat everything, even ancient lifeforms, as if they were all on the same species level, when in fact all descendant species are sub-species of their ancestors, and their descendants sub-sub-species of them. This is simply an artifact of the naming convention used, but it seems to throw a lot of people way off when it comes to understanding how evolution works. Anyway, this is why we do not find the sort of "intermediate" transitional forms you are looking for: dramatic bridging from one species to another is not how evolution works. Rather, it's about descent with modification. We DO find countless transitional forms of exactly the sort that evolution describes: the problem is, you don't know what you are looking for. What we headline as "transitional forms" are special largely because of historical significance rather than anything particularly dramatic in and of themselves. All transitional forms are as fully functional as any other species in their own right. Their importance comes from the clues they give towards precisely nailing down an ancestry and trait order.