Now I'm confused. You started by saying that the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
Then, when I asked you if you had any evidence that the government was using Commies as stand-in for U.S. citizens, you replied that they were not, in fact, using Commies as an excuse: almost all of the political pressure was coming from the FBI, and most of the PR examples they were giving were about domestic situations such as narcotics wiretapping.
Again, it wouldn't surprise me if they had been using the "Commie" bogeyman as a cover for their secret agenda contra US citizens, but from the way you're telling the story it sounds like they did nothing of the kind. And isn't "US citizens" a pretty broad descriptor for the targets of an FBI investigation? Normally, they're called "suspects" or "criminals". If you're implying that the FBI was actually targetting US citizens wholesale, that's another thing I'd love to see some evidence for.
Anyway, the "commies"-to-narcotics transition seems about right, for that period of recent history: First the major powers get the technology, and include it in their strategies and counter-strategies in the 80s. As the technology matures, it becomes more widespread (especially in the West, with its greater amount of freedom), until by the 90s the FBI has to deal with it in their own more mundane domestic investigations. Your narrative certainly supports this interpretation.
I thought you had something interesting here. But this all seems pretty pedestrian to me.
They aren't exactly renowned for their health and safety records.
Totally! I mean, since the Revolutionary War our continental army has made no improvements at all in soldier hygiene, survivability, casualty rates, the human cost of achieving tactical and strategic objectives, the physical and psychological recovery of wounded soldiers, the minimization of civilian casualties and collateral damage, or any other aspect of an army's health and safety records. Naturally, this gum will be just one more empty gesture, right up there with the lack of advanced lightweight body armor, the steady refusal to train troops in first aid and send medics into battle alongside them, and the contiuing omission of more accurate long range weapons in all our battle planning.
When will the ADA save us from such incompetence?!
Oh, wait. What I meant to say was, You, sir, are a tiny party hat for my behind.
There's a grandparent post in this thread, which alleges that nylon-eating bacteria evolved in less tha 50 years. That's a pretty impressive allegation. I wish the poster would be more forthcoming with evidence to support such a dramatic and ground-breaking claim.
Most of what I've been trying to get at since that post has been, do we have any idea of how likely that is? Have we collected any statistics on that mechanism and its success rate?
What you seem to be saying here is that what little experimentation we've been able to do doesn't actually tell us anything one way or the other.
That our experimental support for the theory of evolution amounts to nothing more than "well, the numbers are really big, so intuitively the sums must add up; but we can't really test this assumption experimentally, so we're just going to go with it anyway". Is that what you're saying? That in the realm of things we can't study scientifically, hey, anything could happen, so why not evolution? Here's a thought: since we can't scientifically study meta-space and meta-time, anything could happen, so why not Intelligent Design? For all we know, Intelligent Designers might be statistically more likely than the natural evolution of complex sentient organisms. After all, it's not like we can effectively test either theory using science.
You caught me. I said I was leaving Slashdot. Then I changed my mind.
I'm not sure where I said I supported ID. We've been pretty solidly stuck on this thing about the amateur scientists.
Speaking of which, what you actually said on the subject was
But I guess you don't realize that science has ALWAYS depended on amateurs for a large part of the discoveries. Astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics - a lot of the important discoveries were by non-professionals. We can't afford to just junk all the stuff that was ever produced by people when they were not "working as scientists". Case in point - arguably the greatest discovery of the last century - was produced by some dude working as a patent clerk.
Was I wrong to paraphrase that as hobbyists being "a critical component in proving the validity of the theory of evolution"? I hope I didn't cause any misunderstanding! If they're not a critical component, why do you keep pointing me at fifty year-old articles about them? And if they are a critical component, where did they publish their experimental results, that have so advanced our understanding of the theory of evolution? Where is Darwin's own patent clerk?
Based on the fact that new species created by the direct and "unnatural" (your word) intervention of an intelligent being isn't much of an endorsement of the theory of evolution, but rather bears an eerie resemblence to the theory of intelligent design.
Now, I happen to be concerned that someone being paid so little should be handling rare books. Not to mention the college graduate getting paid so little.
May we assume that you will therefore be donating additional funds, up to the level of your concern or the amount you can afford (whichever is less)?
... the 1970s-1990s Export Control regulations scenarios, where the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
I'm curious: Do you have evidence to suppor that claim, or is it a conspiracy theory?
I mean, I wouldn't put it past our government (or any other) to perpetrate exactly those kinds of shenanigans. I was just wondering if you had any proof of the government's alleged ulterior motives in that particular case.
Less vulnerable, since there will be less insane people wasting resources on false alarms, and more sane people spending resources wisely on real threats.
The people of New Orleans were self-governed. No nation of free citizens could really force New Orleans to have a coherent evacuation plan and a competent municipal government. Only the people of New Orleans could do that, and only by their own choice.
Sometimes, free peoples choose to go to the moon. Other times, they choose to cross their fingers and hope the storm doesn't hit them.
The whole point of trademarks is so that the owner of the trademark can use it to promote his own goals, while others are prohibited from using it to promote their own goals.
Nowhere is it written that Microsoft can't use their own trademark to market their own products. Nowhere is it written that Microsoft has to discuss their entire business plan for their own trademark when enforcing that trademark. And for damn sure nowhere is it written that someone else's claim to Microsoft's trademark is in any way contingent upon Microsoft's plans for that trademark.
True, but manga was designed to be totally accessible to its culture of origin, whereas Zippy was designed to be totally inaccessible to its culture of origin.
While Americans might actually learn something about a foreign culture through exposure to manga, the Japanese would learn nothing at all from exposure to Zippy.
So if amateur hobbyists were a critical component in proving the validity of the theory of evolution, where are all the experimental results published by amateur hobbyists, proving the validty of the theory of evolution?
The fruit fly experiments studied the mechanism of natural selection, not the mechanism of random mutation combined with natural selection to produce beneficial new traits and new species. The top result was interesting because it made this point very clearly. The other results were interesting because they supported this point, either by discussing what the experiment did do (prove the theory of natural selection) or what it did not do (prove speciation through random mutation combined with natural selection).
I am not interested in experiments which prove natural selection. I do not consider the mechanisms of natural selection to be controversial or unproven or even difficult to prove.
What interests me is experiments which prove the end-to-end process of the evolution of new species, beginning with random mutations and ending with speciation due to the filtering effect of (well-understood and noncontroversial) natural selection. Do you know of any such experiments?
There have been uses of evolution with unnatural selection to create life that did not exist before. The critter was even patented. And everyone shuddered at the implication.
What implication? That an intelligent designer, working outside the system in "unnatural" ways, can create new species at will?
Take an "industry standard" bacteria culture and subject it to a hostile environment. For example, an environment that is too hot to support the culture. Then, induce mutations at as high a rate as possible. I suggested radiation. If you know of a better method to induce mutation, feel free to substitute it here. In the expermient, a "good" mutation would be any mutation that promoted survival of the mutant bacteria at the higher temperature. The important part would be to make sure that the heat-tolerant trait was a new trait caused by mutation after the start of the experiment.
I recognize that it would be a lot of work to collect this data. But I also think that collecting this data would give us real, statistical information on the core process of evolution: mutation + natural selection = speciation. And this is why I am surprised that nobody seems to have made the effort to collect any data like this, if it were at all possible. I mean, the claim is that this is how all life on earth developed. Shouldn't somebody have made some attempt to replicate the process in human-time?
Please note that the comment to which I replied asserted that nylon-eating bacteria evolved in less than fifty years by exactly this process. Shouldn't there be an ongoing study somewhere, running for the past 20 or 30 years or so, that is showing some promising preliminary results, at least?
I mean, heck. If radiation is such a problem to bacteria, then why hasn't there been any studies of how bacteria evolve in response to the naturally-selective effects of the radiation being used to trigger random mutations in them?
You've just answered the question "what was the radiation type?". The question I asked was "what was the radiation source?" Please tell me more about your superior education.
Also, you seem to have no clue if such experiments were ever carried out by a reputable research laboratory. We don't normally look to grade-school hobbyists as the front line of cold, hard, scientific fact.
Surely the experiment must have been carried out under rigorously scienitific conditions, long before it was published in magazines and taught in schools. It's the records of those experiments I'm interested in. Any ideas, or do you get all your scientific facts out of Popular Science?
Interesting. What radiation source was proposed, for these home experiments?
Additionally, were these experiments ever actually carried out in a lab, with proper scientific controls, and results published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal?
If it's that easy to conduct such an experiment, then I'm even more amazed that nobody has thought to do it yet, and published the Nobel-prizeworthy results so that all may see this incredible proof that the theory of Evolution is, indeed, fact.
The top Google result for 'fruit fly experiments + evolution' seems dedicated to the proposition that not only have these experiments been conducted at great length, but that the experimental results strongly suggest that mutation does not produce new species. However, other Google results (see below) indicate that the fruit fly experiments were not actually experimenting with induced mutations, so this result might completely beside the point.
The second and third top links seem to be irrelevant to our discussion.
The fourth Google result indicates that the fruit fly experiments focused on applying Natural Selection to existing mutations.
The remaining results on the first page seem to fall into two main categories: They either use the experiments as a basis for arguing against evolution, or they describe the experiments as being concerned with selecting for existing traits.
This process by which existing traits are tested by the environment for viability, and only beneficial traits are passed on to the next generation, is natural selection, and I don't have any problem with that.
But this process is not the process by which new traits are introduced into a species. For this, we need random mutations. Natural selection filters existing traits. And the fruit fly experiments demonstrate its mechanisms quite clearly. But only a constant influx of new, random, traits can give the process of natural selection something to filter.
My question is, have there been any experiments done with induced mutation, combined with natural selection, to establish benchmarks for the end-to-end evolutionary process under controlled conditions?
For example, has anyone bombarded bacteria with cosmic rays in a laboratory, and made a note of how long it takes for speciation to occur? (For that matter, has anybody been able to trigger speciation in a lab at all?)
Okay, here's what I want to know, regarding the predictive power of Evolutionary Theory:
Shouldn't it be trivial to culture some bacteria, put them in a hostile environment (too hot, too cold, whatever), and then bombard them with cosmic rays and whatnot to induce random mutation?
And couldn't we get some very useful benchmarks on the evolutionary process, which is essentially the interaction between random mutations and environmental forces to produce successivly more viable generations?
Shouldn't we know by now--for certain standard experimental bacterial cultures, at least--exactly how many mutations per year per bacterium is typical, and how many of those mutations are beneficial? Shouldn't we have some pretty solid numbers regarding how much mutation in a bacterial culture is too much? Shouldn't we have a pretty good idea of how often a beneficial mutation is likely to occur in a bacterium, and what other factors lead to a more viable culture, rather than complete extinction?
At this point, shouldn't we be applying all this hard data to experiments with rats and other more complex organisms?
Have I missed this whole area of research, into forcing evolutionary progress in a laboratory, to see if it even remotely matches evolutionary theory?
If this kind of thing is actually going on, can anybody tell me the results?
I mean, if
Random Mutation + Natural Selection = Evolution
Then it should be pretty easy to test the whole thing out on bacteria in a lab in something less than Epic Amounts of Time, neh? After all, you're asserting that it happened with bacteria in the real world in less than a century's span. Surely the most advanced labs in the world could beat that time under controlled conditions. So: have they? If so, what were the results? If not, why not?
So, how would ID explain the nylon eating bacteria?
Trivial.
The Intelligent Designer designed bacteria such that their internal logic included the capability to develop nylon-eating characteristics. When the circumstance arose, the bacteria performed exactly as they had been designed.
Besides, since pure evolutionary theory doesn't have a lot of predictive mathematics either, it's not a very useful point of comparison--except to say that it isn't superior to ID theory in this particular way.
You were a stage hand on the set of The Lone Gunmen? Awsome! Lucky you, man. Is it true the show was canceled because the writers were getting too close to the truth?
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm confused. You started by saying that the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
Then, when I asked you if you had any evidence that the government was using Commies as stand-in for U.S. citizens, you replied that they were not, in fact, using Commies as an excuse: almost all of the political pressure was coming from the FBI, and most of the PR examples they were giving were about domestic situations such as narcotics wiretapping.
Again, it wouldn't surprise me if they had been using the "Commie" bogeyman as a cover for their secret agenda contra US citizens, but from the way you're telling the story it sounds like they did nothing of the kind. And isn't "US citizens" a pretty broad descriptor for the targets of an FBI investigation? Normally, they're called "suspects" or "criminals". If you're implying that the FBI was actually targetting US citizens wholesale, that's another thing I'd love to see some evidence for.
Anyway, the "commies"-to-narcotics transition seems about right, for that period of recent history: First the major powers get the technology, and include it in their strategies and counter-strategies in the 80s. As the technology matures, it becomes more widespread (especially in the West, with its greater amount of freedom), until by the 90s the FBI has to deal with it in their own more mundane domestic investigations. Your narrative certainly supports this interpretation.
I thought you had something interesting here. But this all seems pretty pedestrian to me.
On the other hand, since there's been steady improvement the entire time, I think we can safely disregard your implication on purely logical grounds.
They aren't exactly renowned for their health and safety records.
Totally! I mean, since the Revolutionary War our continental army has made no improvements at all in soldier hygiene, survivability, casualty rates, the human cost of achieving tactical and strategic objectives, the physical and psychological recovery of wounded soldiers, the minimization of civilian casualties and collateral damage, or any other aspect of an army's health and safety records. Naturally, this gum will be just one more empty gesture, right up there with the lack of advanced lightweight body armor, the steady refusal to train troops in first aid and send medics into battle alongside them, and the contiuing omission of more accurate long range weapons in all our battle planning.
When will the ADA save us from such incompetence?!
Oh, wait. What I meant to say was, You, sir, are a tiny party hat for my behind.
There's a grandparent post in this thread, which alleges that nylon-eating bacteria evolved in less tha 50 years. That's a pretty impressive allegation. I wish the poster would be more forthcoming with evidence to support such a dramatic and ground-breaking claim.
Most of what I've been trying to get at since that post has been, do we have any idea of how likely that is? Have we collected any statistics on that mechanism and its success rate?
What you seem to be saying here is that what little experimentation we've been able to do doesn't actually tell us anything one way or the other.
That our experimental support for the theory of evolution amounts to nothing more than "well, the numbers are really big, so intuitively the sums must add up; but we can't really test this assumption experimentally, so we're just going to go with it anyway". Is that what you're saying? That in the realm of things we can't study scientifically, hey, anything could happen, so why not evolution? Here's a thought: since we can't scientifically study meta-space and meta-time, anything could happen, so why not Intelligent Design? For all we know, Intelligent Designers might be statistically more likely than the natural evolution of complex sentient organisms. After all, it's not like we can effectively test either theory using science.
Ooh.
You caught me. I said I was leaving Slashdot. Then I changed my mind.
I'm not sure where I said I supported ID. We've been pretty solidly stuck on this thing about the amateur scientists.
Speaking of which, what you actually said on the subject was
But I guess you don't realize that science has ALWAYS depended on amateurs for a large part of the discoveries. Astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics - a lot of the important discoveries were by non-professionals. We can't afford to just junk all the stuff that was ever produced by people when they were not "working as scientists". Case in point - arguably the greatest discovery of the last century - was produced by some dude working as a patent clerk.
Was I wrong to paraphrase that as hobbyists being "a critical component in proving the validity of the theory of evolution"? I hope I didn't cause any misunderstanding! If they're not a critical component, why do you keep pointing me at fifty year-old articles about them? And if they are a critical component, where did they publish their experimental results, that have so advanced our understanding of the theory of evolution? Where is Darwin's own patent clerk?
Dude, joke.
Based on the fact that new species created by the direct and "unnatural" (your word) intervention of an intelligent being isn't much of an endorsement of the theory of evolution, but rather bears an eerie resemblence to the theory of intelligent design.
Now, I happen to be concerned that someone being paid so little should be handling rare books. Not to mention the college graduate getting paid so little.
May we assume that you will therefore be donating additional funds, up to the level of your concern or the amount you can afford (whichever is less)?
... the 1970s-1990s Export Control regulations scenarios, where the US government was using the excuse that Commies might get secure communications as a way to prevent US citizens from getting non-wiretappable communications.
I'm curious: Do you have evidence to suppor that claim, or is it a conspiracy theory?
I mean, I wouldn't put it past our government (or any other) to perpetrate exactly those kinds of shenanigans. I was just wondering if you had any proof of the government's alleged ulterior motives in that particular case.
Except for the bad people in the government ...
Sadly, that seems to be the one problem that nobody has a solution for, except to turn society over to the bad people not in government...
About your sig: Isn't your question equivalent to "ask what you did to your country"?
Also, while it's not clear from your sig, I strongly suspect that you are confusing "country" and "government".
Less vulnerable, since there will be less insane people wasting resources on false alarms, and more sane people spending resources wisely on real threats.
It's voluntary.
The people of New Orleans were self-governed. No nation of free citizens could really force New Orleans to have a coherent evacuation plan and a competent municipal government. Only the people of New Orleans could do that, and only by their own choice.
Sometimes, free peoples choose to go to the moon. Other times, they choose to cross their fingers and hope the storm doesn't hit them.
Another form of the same answer: Human nature.
You have got to be kidding me.
The whole point of trademarks is so that the owner of the trademark can use it to promote his own goals, while others are prohibited from using it to promote their own goals.
Nowhere is it written that Microsoft can't use their own trademark to market their own products. Nowhere is it written that Microsoft has to discuss their entire business plan for their own trademark when enforcing that trademark. And for damn sure nowhere is it written that someone else's claim to Microsoft's trademark is in any way contingent upon Microsoft's plans for that trademark.
True, but manga was designed to be totally accessible to its culture of origin, whereas Zippy was designed to be totally inaccessible to its culture of origin.
While Americans might actually learn something about a foreign culture through exposure to manga, the Japanese would learn nothing at all from exposure to Zippy.
So if amateur hobbyists were a critical component in proving the validity of the theory of evolution, where are all the experimental results published by amateur hobbyists, proving the validty of the theory of evolution?
You missed my point.
The fruit fly experiments studied the mechanism of natural selection, not the mechanism of random mutation combined with natural selection to produce beneficial new traits and new species. The top result was interesting because it made this point very clearly. The other results were interesting because they supported this point, either by discussing what the experiment did do (prove the theory of natural selection) or what it did not do (prove speciation through random mutation combined with natural selection).
I am not interested in experiments which prove natural selection. I do not consider the mechanisms of natural selection to be controversial or unproven or even difficult to prove.
What interests me is experiments which prove the end-to-end process of the evolution of new species, beginning with random mutations and ending with speciation due to the filtering effect of (well-understood and noncontroversial) natural selection. Do you know of any such experiments?
There have been uses of evolution with unnatural selection to create life that did not exist before. The critter was even patented. And everyone shuddered at the implication.
What implication? That an intelligent designer, working outside the system in "unnatural" ways, can create new species at will?
The experiment I proposed was quite specific:
Take an "industry standard" bacteria culture and subject it to a hostile environment. For example, an environment that is too hot to support the culture. Then, induce mutations at as high a rate as possible. I suggested radiation. If you know of a better method to induce mutation, feel free to substitute it here. In the expermient, a "good" mutation would be any mutation that promoted survival of the mutant bacteria at the higher temperature. The important part would be to make sure that the heat-tolerant trait was a new trait caused by mutation after the start of the experiment.
I recognize that it would be a lot of work to collect this data. But I also think that collecting this data would give us real, statistical information on the core process of evolution: mutation + natural selection = speciation. And this is why I am surprised that nobody seems to have made the effort to collect any data like this, if it were at all possible. I mean, the claim is that this is how all life on earth developed. Shouldn't somebody have made some attempt to replicate the process in human-time?
Please note that the comment to which I replied asserted that nylon-eating bacteria evolved in less than fifty years by exactly this process. Shouldn't there be an ongoing study somewhere, running for the past 20 or 30 years or so, that is showing some promising preliminary results, at least?
I mean, heck. If radiation is such a problem to bacteria, then why hasn't there been any studies of how bacteria evolve in response to the naturally-selective effects of the radiation being used to trigger random mutations in them?
You've just answered the question "what was the radiation type?". The question I asked was "what was the radiation source?" Please tell me more about your superior education.
Also, you seem to have no clue if such experiments were ever carried out by a reputable research laboratory. We don't normally look to grade-school hobbyists as the front line of cold, hard, scientific fact.
Surely the experiment must have been carried out under rigorously scienitific conditions, long before it was published in magazines and taught in schools. It's the records of those experiments I'm interested in. Any ideas, or do you get all your scientific facts out of Popular Science?
Interesting. What radiation source was proposed, for these home experiments?
Additionally, were these experiments ever actually carried out in a lab, with proper scientific controls, and results published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal?
If it's that easy to conduct such an experiment, then I'm even more amazed that nobody has thought to do it yet, and published the Nobel-prizeworthy results so that all may see this incredible proof that the theory of Evolution is, indeed, fact.
The top Google result for 'fruit fly experiments + evolution' seems dedicated to the proposition that not only have these experiments been conducted at great length, but that the experimental results strongly suggest that mutation does not produce new species. However, other Google results (see below) indicate that the fruit fly experiments were not actually experimenting with induced mutations, so this result might completely beside the point.
The second and third top links seem to be irrelevant to our discussion.
The fourth Google result indicates that the fruit fly experiments focused on applying Natural Selection to existing mutations.
The remaining results on the first page seem to fall into two main categories: They either use the experiments as a basis for arguing against evolution, or they describe the experiments as being concerned with selecting for existing traits.
This process by which existing traits are tested by the environment for viability, and only beneficial traits are passed on to the next generation, is natural selection, and I don't have any problem with that.
But this process is not the process by which new traits are introduced into a species. For this, we need random mutations. Natural selection filters existing traits. And the fruit fly experiments demonstrate its mechanisms quite clearly. But only a constant influx of new, random, traits can give the process of natural selection something to filter.
My question is, have there been any experiments done with induced mutation, combined with natural selection, to establish benchmarks for the end-to-end evolutionary process under controlled conditions?
For example, has anyone bombarded bacteria with cosmic rays in a laboratory, and made a note of how long it takes for speciation to occur? (For that matter, has anybody been able to trigger speciation in a lab at all?)
Okay, here's what I want to know, regarding the predictive power of Evolutionary Theory:
Shouldn't it be trivial to culture some bacteria, put them in a hostile environment (too hot, too cold, whatever), and then bombard them with cosmic rays and whatnot to induce random mutation?
And couldn't we get some very useful benchmarks on the evolutionary process, which is essentially the interaction between random mutations and environmental forces to produce successivly more viable generations?
Shouldn't we know by now--for certain standard experimental bacterial cultures, at least--exactly how many mutations per year per bacterium is typical, and how many of those mutations are beneficial? Shouldn't we have some pretty solid numbers regarding how much mutation in a bacterial culture is too much? Shouldn't we have a pretty good idea of how often a beneficial mutation is likely to occur in a bacterium, and what other factors lead to a more viable culture, rather than complete extinction?
At this point, shouldn't we be applying all this hard data to experiments with rats and other more complex organisms?
Have I missed this whole area of research, into forcing evolutionary progress in a laboratory, to see if it even remotely matches evolutionary theory?
If this kind of thing is actually going on, can anybody tell me the results?
I mean, if
Random Mutation + Natural Selection = Evolution
Then it should be pretty easy to test the whole thing out on bacteria in a lab in something less than Epic Amounts of Time, neh? After all, you're asserting that it happened with bacteria in the real world in less than a century's span. Surely the most advanced labs in the world could beat that time under controlled conditions. So: have they? If so, what were the results? If not, why not?
So, how would ID explain the nylon eating bacteria?
Trivial.
The Intelligent Designer designed bacteria such that their internal logic included the capability to develop nylon-eating characteristics. When the circumstance arose, the bacteria performed exactly as they had been designed.
Besides, since pure evolutionary theory doesn't have a lot of predictive mathematics either, it's not a very useful point of comparison--except to say that it isn't superior to ID theory in this particular way.
Are you saying that things are much better in Paris than the media would have me believe? I'm shocked and amazed, but also encouraged.
I wonder if the media is misrepresenting the situation in Iraq, too...
Lone Gunmen crew
You were a stage hand on the set of The Lone Gunmen? Awsome! Lucky you, man. Is it true the show was canceled because the writers were getting too close to the truth?