You are overstating it. Before the advent of the Federal Reserve, eventual move to a baseless currency and the adoption of a debt-based economy, things were pretty good.
Yeah, the gold standard combined with no way of controlling the monetary base was pretty swell. Deflation, depression, and massive unemployment in the 1890s comes to mind when thinking of problems that a baseless currency and a strong federal reserve would have mitigated. To be fair, the Great Depression of the 20th century is an example of regulation gone wrong, but just about everything we do now in terms of regulation is done to correct mistakes of the past.
People may complain about the minimum wage and government regulation of the banking systems, but these regulations don't come out of nowhere. Large scale exploitation of workers, runs on banks, bad-debt banking crises...all of these things happen with unregulated financial systems. It just takes a quick look at our history or the current state of other economies to tell us that.
But what did our founders know? Society was different then. Bullshit. Human nature, especially as concerns power and greed, is ever the same.
Bullshit to that. Human nature and greed are certainly the same as they were when Jefferson wrote those words (God knows he was right about just about everything else), but our economy and industries are far different. Complex international lending institutions, insurance companies, securities exchange, and manufacturing were all in their infancy (at best) 200 years ago. Society was different back then. It is because, as you point out, of the fact that human nature hasn't changed that modern economies need government oversight to prevent dangerous system-wide failures.
As for a debt-based economy, there are some good arguments in favor of a constantly balanced budget, but the ability to run deficits and surpluses depending on the state of the economy would do a lot for California and several other states right now. Perpetual debt is bad, but without the option of temporary debt, I would argue that any large economy would grind to a halt.
You know what always seemed to make sense to me? I think the jury should be able to ask questions at the end of cross examination. Isn't the whole point of bringing witnesses up for examination that the jury completely understands what the witnesses know? It seems like a logical thing to have the supposedly impartial decision makers asking questions--probably even more important than having one side or the other asking questions in order to put their own spin on the truth.
Oh well. I guess that's why I'm an engineer and not a lawyer.
Well - like wow - NFS/CIFS anyone. They've been ftp'ing docs to each other? ROFL:)
Actually, they have a specially written parallel FTP client/server that stripes large pieces of data across multiple physical connections. Remember, we're talking about data sets that can be terabytes in size. To do this type of thing more efficiently, they've put together lustre. Check it out. It's no NFS/CIFS. It's supposedly the next step after IBM's GPFS.
Lustre is a new distributed filesystem being developed by a company called Cluster Filesystems in conjunction with developers at LLNL. They're doing it because there is no good distributed filesystem for large Linux clusters. NFS doesn't even end up on the radar for a project like this, and PVFS has enough flaws in it to make it a fairly bad idea for such a large system.
Anyway, it's a Linux kernel add-on, and yes, the code is publically available. Last I checked, though, it wasn't exactly a walk in the park to set up.
From the tone of your post, I suppose you've built a "real computational cluster." Tell me, where did the nodes store their temporary data? An overloaded NFS server?
The cruft thing is an incredibly important detail to me these days. How many people installing Red Hat have ended up installing ALL of the libraries just to avoid having to deal with finding libraries and their dependencies in order to install a single new package? Sure, they're working on that, but Debian has had it solved for a long time now.
The installer may be easier for most people, but adding and removing software is infinitely easier. Believe it or not, whenever I'm helping a technically competent person learn Linux, I install and configure Debian for them and then teach them how to use a solid Linux system rather than having them build an unstable, ragtag Linux system on their own with an "easy" installer. My experience has been that they're more likely to fall in love with the functionality Linux offers rather than getting pissed off at the initial configuration (it's easily as frustrating to try to install a package with broken dependencies as it is to install an OS whose installer you don't understand).
Re:Ignorance is beaming
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Haiku vs Spam
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Wow. I almost have no words for this. Either you slept through history and don't totally understand what your just said, or you're also one of the people who makes jokes about the holocaust under Hitler and wonders why nobody laughs.
Perhaps if you're the network admin for an elementary school. What if you're the network admin for a hospital? A bank? Sure, not necressarily life and death. Important enough to be taken very seriously? Probably.
Hmmm... I remember hearing a request for more cases or information on "macroevolution" and that is what those pages deal with.
I'm not sure what you're hoping for in terms of a "big bang" theory unless you're one of the people who believe that theories on the origins of the universe and evolutionary theory are somehow linked. They're not. The so-called big bang theory could fall apart tomorrow and have no effect on the theory of evolution (unless it fell apart because it was proved that the universe is only a few thousand years old or something along those lines). They're two very separate things. Some people tie them together because they fall into some peoples' single theory of the atheistic origins of everything. So be it, but they're still separate theories from separate disciplines.
You're not going to get an evolutionary biologist talking about "the theory of the origins of everything" and trying to put together a complete string of events from the beginning of the universe to modern time. The general theory of evolution is, quite simply, that thanks to natural selection, new species arise from ancestral ones. Modern animals are related through common descent. It says nothing about the origins of matter. It just seeks to explain why we have so many different species, why most of those species appear as though there was a time when they didn't exist (that is, we can't find a *really* old human fossil next to dinosaur fossils because there were no humans yet), and why most modern animals appear to have vestigial parts and processes that are shared with different species (like, why do some species of whales have a pelvis?).
If you're looking for a single theory that covers matter, space, time, genetic diversity, and the origins of life, you're in for disappointment. You have to take each theory separately (something a lot of creationists seem to forget...they argue with the big bang theory as if it's somehow going to change the fact that species are currently evolving).
An excellent place to start would be here. There's plenty more in there if you want to browse a bit. If you have specific questions, their site is indexed by an internal Google appliance and they'll usually respond to feedback and questions through their site or the newsgroup talk.origins. Happy reading.
An important nit to pick is that when you hear the word "macro-evolution," you're usually hearing it from somebody who is trying to move the goalposts for evolutionary evidence (or somebody who is arguing against them in terms they can understand). The trick is that "macro-evolution" is conveniently difficult to define, so as soon as evidence comes up to support evolution, the threshold for "macro" versus "micro" shifts a bit in order to settle that evidence neatly into "micro." The above links refer to speciation, which, while still somewhat difficult to define, is a more concrete way of referring to the phenomenon.
The overall match, yes. However, Kasparov was able to beat the second Deep Blue in one of the games and draw 3(?) others. That indicates to me that at his best, Kasparov is better than DB. In a nutshell, until we have a decisive victory (computer can consistently beat our best representative) the question is still very much open (and very interesting, IMO).
No reason why not, but let's see the evidence. The weight of observation to this point (new article notwithstanding) seems to be against it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Bring it on!
I haven't read the article yet myself, but I have some response to this.
Creation scientists claimed for a while the possibility of the speed of light decreasing. They were hammered about this from every quarter. Now it seems that it might be credible.
An analysis of Setterfield's famous c-decay paper can be found here. Among other problems, it includes a claim that while none of the data points lie on his curve, it achieves an r^2 value of 1.000000000. Is there another, better paper that should't have been torn apart so quickly? Otherwise, I leave the decision as to whether the "hammering" is fair as an exercise for the reader.
A lot of science done seems to be based on the assumption that the universe is billions of years old, and that the earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old (subject to change). Indeed, a lot of dating methods such as c14 rely on assumptions that can't be verified - that would actually be false assumptions if we accept the creationist model including a worldwide flood.
A couple of issues with this statement: First, C14 has nothing to do with dating the age of the earth (it's a short time scale tool). Second, the complaint against these methods is somewhat non-specific, but most of them are addressed in a good paper on the subjects (a number of which can be found here. Really, if the various methods were as fraught with problems as some people would lead you to believe, they would not agree with each other (they do) and scientists using them for other subjects that are not so politically charged would have stopped long ago. Do you really think that the experts in the field haven't thought about Dr. Brown's rudimentary criticisms? Bear in mind that a number of different methods rely on different "assumptions" but give the same answers. Third, we if we are stuck between assuming that a number of things we've observed as long as we've been doing science and assuming a worldwide flood, I'll assume the former.
So anyway, Dr Walt Brown has a challenge [creationscience.com] of a written debate to settle this question. So far argument has been refined to pockets of discussion that don't go far, and books published against each other. This would be a great opportunity if anyone was confident enough in evolution.
Dr. Brown consistently complains that people attack him in forums in which he cannot respond (books, etc.). I've never seen him in the talk.origins newsgroup. It's a written forum, just as he required. A number of the participants have Ph.D.s in their fields, just as he required. In fact, Dr. Brown's questions come up frequently and are usually answered by somebody knowledgable in the field.
The fact is, people with Ph.D.s in natural sciences do have better things to do than spend a huge amount of time rehashing arguments that have long been responded to in other forums (please see the entire FAQ at talkorigins.org for examples). Dr. Brown points out that they have time to write books attacking his ideas. News flash: books are a perfectly valid form of written discourse and people get paid to write books.
Anyway, my suggestion to Dr. Brown is this: If you have a specific complaint about a particular scientific method used to support modern evolutionary theory and or modern geology, write it up and see if you can get it into a real journal with real experts waiting to critique your reasoning. That's what the rest of the card carrying Ph.D.s in the world are doing while you're asking them to devote lengthy periods of their lives to debating under your terms. Remember, we're looking for specific problems that experts have not thought of and addressed already, not "I choose not to look at the extensive fossil record so it doesn't exist."
At any rate, STOP treating creationists like children. I have had many evolution discussions and there is very little evidence for evolution at all. The weight certainly seems to be on the creationist side (and yes I am biased). There is certainly enough evidence for creation theory to make it credible, and not the realm of fairy tales. At least, before you feel tempted to call creationism a fairy tale, consider the following:
20 problems [creationscience.com]
I have to point out that using the talkorigins.org handy dandy search engine, good answers (or at least, reasons why the question has nothing to do with evolution) to most of these questions are readily available. Specific complaints about those documents are more than welcome in the newsgroup.
In kind, Tom Scharle has posted a set of 10 largely unanswered questions for the creationist side of things here. Among highlights are, "Where did all of the water from the flood come from and go?" and "Is there any observation which was predicted by your [creation] theory?"
Anyway, I encourage anybody who is truly interested in complete, scientific answers to most of the questions Dr. Brown and others pose to spend a few hours searching the talkorigins.org archive. It's thorough, it's written by people who know their fields, and it includes complete references to papers reviewed and published in serious journals. They welcome and respond to feedback and if you want a real written debate, a number of the authors regularly post in the talk.origins newsgroup. This is more than can be said for most of the people who run major creationist sites. Perhaps, instead of trying to entice people into a debate on his terms, why doesn't Dr. Brown join the fray in a convenient, international forum where anybody can be heard?
This depresses me. Seeing these types of arguments always depresses me. Are there really people out there whose understanding of evolution is that misguided?
I'm only 34. I haven't seen it happen. So "we" haven't seen it happen. You must be very old...
You haven't seen it because you haven't read any of the countless articles in which scientists have written about specific instances of observed speciation. We haven't observed wings developing in a species that didn't have wings. We haven't been around that long. We have, however, seen speciation a number of times. www.talkorigins.org is a good place to start if you're actually interested in learning about some of the specifics.
And you have not submitted a test of evolution. Please do so.
OK. I'll bite. Start with a colony of E. coli and select one cell to start a new colony in a clean dish. This colony should have all the same DNA as the original. Repeat this using the new colony. Now you have two colonies of what should be identical E. coli. Dump a bunch of penicillin in one of the dishes and watch the colony die. OK. So we know the original cell was most likely susceptible to your antibiotics (the colony of clones showed a significant reduction in population). Now put a small amount of watered down penecillin into the first dish and let it quickly run out. Let the survivors of the colony regenerate a bit and then start a new colony. Repeat. You'll eventually end up with a colony that's resistant to the penicillin treatment. What can we conclude here?
Well, the original cell was susceptible (its decendents tended to die when treated heavily with penicillin). Over the next several generations, a few lucky ones mutated in such a way that penicillin doesn't bother them. Those survived. Natural selection (or at least, simulated natural selection) refined the population to contain only penicillin resistant bacteria. Neat, huh? We know that the DNA changed or all would be dead (exact copies of the parent cell). Try this test for yourself, or simply acknowledge the fact that it has been done countless times with a number of bacteria and antibiotics. It doesn't always work (depending on the organism and the chemical) but it often does. Evolution. Bang.
Oh, so the Creationist wins points for finding only well-developed/complicated organisms in any stratum of rock. Thanks!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't understand the example rather than assuming that you're deliberately mischaracterizing the argument. The point is that if you can prove that species haven't changed smoothly over time (we have significant fossil records that indicate that they have), evolution would be turned on its ear. Another way to do it would be proving that the earth is too young for the process to have advanced so far (people try this to little avail). There are a number of things that could turn up that could make evolution obviously impossible. None have, though. On the other hand, it's not possible to prove that an intelligent creator didn't just create things the way they are. People actually argue that the creator made it look like evolution happened when really it didn't. Argue against that. Scientific? I think not.
How is this evolution? It is "natural selection," but is insufficient to cause speciation as no new DNA has been created.
The fact that you, obviously a layman, have decreed that no new DNA sequences exist does not make it so. Sexual reproduction by its very nature invariably causes new combinations of genes to pop up. You can't scramble two organisms' genes together and come up with a child organism with the same genes as both parents. The string of DNA is different. New base pairs are not (necessarily) added to the strands of DNA. The strands are different, though. The result is a different organism. The "no new DNA" argument is way overused by people who haven't seen the experiments that control for this (like the example I gave above).
Again, talk.origins is a great place to go if you're actually interested in getting some of these questions answered. If you're more interested smugly shooting down arguments that you don't understand, it's probably not the place for you.
The batch scheduling is huge and, don't forget, it's a classified side machine, so ordinary academics, even those who are affiliated with the lab, don't exactly have free access to the system.
I hate to sound skeptical, but why did Dr. Behe omit the names of the journals and editors when he posted his correspondence with them? It generally sounds a bit fishy. It's very easy to debate an opponent who also happens to be a sock on your hand...
Mutation, for example, is almost universally bad - especially in terms of the immediate survivability of the organism suffering the mutation, such as Sickle Cell Anaemia - yet somehow lots of this badness is supposed to accumulate together to make improvements, and without leaving any trace of the steps in between.
Remember, you said "almost". There are a number of instances in which good mutations have been observed. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a good example. Let's not get into the "that gene was already there!" debate as when people say that, it proves that they didn't read or understand the experimental design for those experiments. Given enough time (and we've had *lots* of it), the rare "good" mutations can add up.
Lots of creatures (and processes within creatures) have no sensible path from what was supposed to have been its ancestor, across a metabolic ``death chasm'' to a functional system which would be highly destructive to the organism if at all incomplete (immune systems being a classic example). How did the organism cross the gap? Obviously, some kind of planning must be involved, yet there is no such mechanism even postulated in evolutionary theory, mostly because doing so would attract condemnatory cries of ``teleology!''
It sounds very much like you're parroting the ideas behind irriducible complexity. Remember, a particular process doesn't have to serve the same purpose at the end of an evolutionary change as it does during the transitional stages. As for postulating intelligent design in evolution, it doesn't happen because science strives for explanations based on what can be observed and what we know.
Actually, currency exchange rates are a pretty good way to go. Not totally accurate based on the different job markets, but wages are a price too, and if prices in general are higher due to a weaker currency, wages go the same route. The Canadian dollar simply has less buying power than the US dollar, both in buying goods *and* labor. Think about it: Do you really think that if you're making $50K a year here, you're going to make 50K yen if you move to Japan? Bzzzt...I don't think so. At least, hopefully not, since it only amounts to $370 or so. The Canadians aren't poor. Their currency simply exchanges for less and as a result, they move more of it around to purchase the same amount of goods. In nations with comparable standards of living, jobs that give you the same standard of living should have salaries that convert fairly neatly given the standard exchange rate.
Something people appear to be neglecting in this thread: There's a big difference between being gouged for computer games and paint programs and being gouged for electricity and water. Producers of luxury goods tend not to have price ceilings imposed because their goods aren't necessary, so the substitution effect (the tendency for people to buy other stuff if what they're buying gets too expensive) keeps prices somewhat capped without regulation (which generally has significant social costs). id Software isn't charging $400 a copy for Quake III because the market won't bear it. If the water industry were unregulated and desired to do so, it could charge as much as it wanted for water and people in areas without clean natural water sources available to them would pay...or die.
The same thing happens with the power industry. If we let organizations like power companies set whatever prices they wanted, we'd see prices jump high enough to cause the partial collapse of the economy and a huge transition to private genrators that aren't as efficient or clean. Thus, we regulate (if we know what's good for us).
Finally, we even sometimes regulate when the good isn't necessary, but there is no possibility for good competition to keep the price capped. Cable TV is a good example. Only one company can really run cable through a city efficiently, so only one does. That company's prices are then regulated (not as vigorously as water suppliers, but still somewhat)--a so-called "natural" monopoly.
Basically, I fail to see how a company that makes non-essential software which could easily find competition in another small firm's products is at all worth regulating, because again, regulation has its costs to both producers and consumers as well. You really only do it when there's a damn good reason.
This is all true, but I guess my question is: what constitutes "proper" use of this information? I can see how the *number* of people on these lists might be relevant, but their email and postal addresses? I'm no expert, but I can't find any possible need for information like that in a trademark suit.
You make a good point. I would guess, though, that you'd see some of it (as you said) from the male side as 45 is hardly a practical limit for men. It's also probably partially a probability thing. Err a little on one side and you might get a maximum age in the 90's but see cancer before you're 30 (bad thing). The reverse on the other side. It would seem like getting imbalances to varying degrees would tend to reduce the probability of reproduction at an accelerating rate toward the edges of what would likely look somewhat like a bell curve surrounding our current balances. In fact, this would seem like something that would have a relatively large variation in a given population, but it doesn't seem all that improbable that natural selection could cause the balance we have now--just not in such a clear-cut fashion as it does other traits.
The assumption is not exactly that the rock "ages a certain way" over time. The assumptions are assumptions about the behavior of isotopes over long periods of time, and they're not assumptions that are made out of the blue or for the convenience of the resarcher. The reality is that basically everything we know about radioactive decay supports the predicatable decay behavior for these isotopes
and there has been no siginficant evidence suggesting otherwise. Calling these
things assupmtions is technically correct, but given that definition of the word assumption, we're only assuming that the sun won't suddenly blink out within the next week or so. Sure, there's no reason to think that it would and all of our long-term observations are to the contrary, but we have not solid *proof* that it won't.
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Yeah, the gold standard combined with no way of controlling the monetary base was pretty swell. Deflation, depression, and massive unemployment in the 1890s comes to mind when thinking of problems that a baseless currency and a strong federal reserve would have mitigated. To be fair, the Great Depression of the 20th century is an example of regulation gone wrong, but just about everything we do now in terms of regulation is done to correct mistakes of the past.
People may complain about the minimum wage and government regulation of the banking systems, but these regulations don't come out of nowhere. Large scale exploitation of workers, runs on banks, bad-debt banking crises...all of these things happen with unregulated financial systems. It just takes a quick look at our history or the current state of other economies to tell us that.
But what did our founders know? Society was different then. Bullshit. Human nature, especially as concerns power and greed, is ever the same.
Bullshit to that. Human nature and greed are certainly the same as they were when Jefferson wrote those words (God knows he was right about just about everything else), but our economy and industries are far different. Complex international lending institutions, insurance companies, securities exchange, and manufacturing were all in their infancy (at best) 200 years ago. Society was different back then. It is because, as you point out, of the fact that human nature hasn't changed that modern economies need government oversight to prevent dangerous system-wide failures.
As for a debt-based economy, there are some good arguments in favor of a constantly balanced budget, but the ability to run deficits and surpluses depending on the state of the economy would do a lot for California and several other states right now. Perpetual debt is bad, but without the option of temporary debt, I would argue that any large economy would grind to a halt.
Oh well. I guess that's why I'm an engineer and not a lawyer.
You mean like these? It's not a classified project, dude.
Actually, they have a specially written parallel FTP client/server that stripes large pieces of data across multiple physical connections. Remember, we're talking about data sets that can be terabytes in size. To do this type of thing more efficiently, they've put together lustre. Check it out. It's no NFS/CIFS. It's supposedly the next step after IBM's GPFS.
Anyway, it's a Linux kernel add-on, and yes, the code is publically available. Last I checked, though, it wasn't exactly a walk in the park to set up.
The cruft thing is an incredibly important detail to me these days. How many people installing Red Hat have ended up installing ALL of the libraries just to avoid having to deal with finding libraries and their dependencies in order to install a single new package? Sure, they're working on that, but Debian has had it solved for a long time now.
The installer may be easier for most people, but adding and removing software is infinitely easier. Believe it or not, whenever I'm helping a technically competent person learn Linux, I install and configure Debian for them and then teach them how to use a solid Linux system rather than having them build an unstable, ragtag Linux system on their own with an "easy" installer. My experience has been that they're more likely to fall in love with the functionality Linux offers rather than getting pissed off at the initial configuration (it's easily as frustrating to try to install a package with broken dependencies as it is to install an OS whose installer you don't understand).
Wow. I almost have no words for this. Either you slept through history and don't totally understand what your just said, or you're also one of the people who makes jokes about the holocaust under Hitler and wonders why nobody laughs.
Perhaps if you're the network admin for an elementary school. What if you're the network admin for a hospital? A bank? Sure, not necressarily life and death. Important enough to be taken very seriously? Probably.
I'm not sure what you're hoping for in terms of a "big bang" theory unless you're one of the people who believe that theories on the origins of the universe and evolutionary theory are somehow linked. They're not. The so-called big bang theory could fall apart tomorrow and have no effect on the theory of evolution (unless it fell apart because it was proved that the universe is only a few thousand years old or something along those lines). They're two very separate things. Some people tie them together because they fall into some peoples' single theory of the atheistic origins of everything. So be it, but they're still separate theories from separate disciplines.
You're not going to get an evolutionary biologist talking about "the theory of the origins of everything" and trying to put together a complete string of events from the beginning of the universe to modern time. The general theory of evolution is, quite simply, that thanks to natural selection, new species arise from ancestral ones. Modern animals are related through common descent. It says nothing about the origins of matter. It just seeks to explain why we have so many different species, why most of those species appear as though there was a time when they didn't exist (that is, we can't find a *really* old human fossil next to dinosaur fossils because there were no humans yet), and why most modern animals appear to have vestigial parts and processes that are shared with different species (like, why do some species of whales have a pelvis?). If you're looking for a single theory that covers matter, space, time, genetic diversity, and the origins of life, you're in for disappointment. You have to take each theory separately (something a lot of creationists seem to forget...they argue with the big bang theory as if it's somehow going to change the fact that species are currently evolving).
An excellent place to start would be here. There's plenty more in there if you want to browse a bit. If you have specific questions, their site is indexed by an internal Google appliance and they'll usually respond to feedback and questions through their site or the newsgroup talk.origins. Happy reading.
An important nit to pick is that when you hear the word "macro-evolution," you're usually hearing it from somebody who is trying to move the goalposts for evolutionary evidence (or somebody who is arguing against them in terms they can understand). The trick is that "macro-evolution" is conveniently difficult to define, so as soon as evidence comes up to support evolution, the threshold for "macro" versus "micro" shifts a bit in order to settle that evidence neatly into "micro." The above links refer to speciation, which, while still somewhat difficult to define, is a more concrete way of referring to the phenomenon.
The overall match, yes. However, Kasparov was able to beat the second Deep Blue in one of the games and draw 3(?) others. That indicates to me that at his best, Kasparov is better than DB. In a nutshell, until we have a decisive victory (computer can consistently beat our best representative) the question is still very much open (and very interesting, IMO).
No reason why not, but let's see the evidence. The weight of observation to this point (new article notwithstanding) seems to be against it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Bring it on!
Creation scientists claimed for a while the possibility of the speed of light decreasing. They were hammered about this from every quarter. Now it seems that it might be credible.
An analysis of Setterfield's famous c-decay paper can be found here. Among other problems, it includes a claim that while none of the data points lie on his curve, it achieves an r^2 value of 1.000000000. Is there another, better paper that should't have been torn apart so quickly? Otherwise, I leave the decision as to whether the "hammering" is fair as an exercise for the reader.
A lot of science done seems to be based on the assumption that the universe is billions of years old, and that the earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old (subject to change). Indeed, a lot of dating methods such as c14 rely on assumptions that can't be verified - that would actually be false assumptions if we accept the creationist model including a worldwide flood.
A couple of issues with this statement: First, C14 has nothing to do with dating the age of the earth (it's a short time scale tool). Second, the complaint against these methods is somewhat non-specific, but most of them are addressed in a good paper on the subjects (a number of which can be found here. Really, if the various methods were as fraught with problems as some people would lead you to believe, they would not agree with each other (they do) and scientists using them for other subjects that are not so politically charged would have stopped long ago. Do you really think that the experts in the field haven't thought about Dr. Brown's rudimentary criticisms? Bear in mind that a number of different methods rely on different "assumptions" but give the same answers. Third, we if we are stuck between assuming that a number of things we've observed as long as we've been doing science and assuming a worldwide flood, I'll assume the former.
So anyway, Dr Walt Brown has a challenge [creationscience.com] of a written debate to settle this question. So far argument has been refined to pockets of discussion that don't go far, and books published against each other. This would be a great opportunity if anyone was confident enough in evolution.
Dr. Brown consistently complains that people attack him in forums in which he cannot respond (books, etc.). I've never seen him in the talk.origins newsgroup. It's a written forum, just as he required. A number of the participants have Ph.D.s in their fields, just as he required. In fact, Dr. Brown's questions come up frequently and are usually answered by somebody knowledgable in the field.
The fact is, people with Ph.D.s in natural sciences do have better things to do than spend a huge amount of time rehashing arguments that have long been responded to in other forums (please see the entire FAQ at talkorigins.org for examples). Dr. Brown points out that they have time to write books attacking his ideas. News flash: books are a perfectly valid form of written discourse and people get paid to write books.
Anyway, my suggestion to Dr. Brown is this: If you have a specific complaint about a particular scientific method used to support modern evolutionary theory and or modern geology, write it up and see if you can get it into a real journal with real experts waiting to critique your reasoning. That's what the rest of the card carrying Ph.D.s in the world are doing while you're asking them to devote lengthy periods of their lives to debating under your terms. Remember, we're looking for specific problems that experts have not thought of and addressed already, not "I choose not to look at the extensive fossil record so it doesn't exist."
At any rate, STOP treating creationists like children. I have had many evolution discussions and there is very little evidence for evolution at all. The weight certainly seems to be on the creationist side (and yes I am biased). There is certainly enough evidence for creation theory to make it credible, and not the realm of fairy tales. At least, before you feel tempted to call creationism a fairy tale, consider the following: 20 problems [creationscience.com]
I have to point out that using the talkorigins.org handy dandy search engine, good answers (or at least, reasons why the question has nothing to do with evolution) to most of these questions are readily available. Specific complaints about those documents are more than welcome in the newsgroup.
In kind, Tom Scharle has posted a set of 10 largely unanswered questions for the creationist side of things here. Among highlights are, "Where did all of the water from the flood come from and go?" and "Is there any observation which was predicted by your [creation] theory?"
Anyway, I encourage anybody who is truly interested in complete, scientific answers to most of the questions Dr. Brown and others pose to spend a few hours searching the talkorigins.org archive. It's thorough, it's written by people who know their fields, and it includes complete references to papers reviewed and published in serious journals. They welcome and respond to feedback and if you want a real written debate, a number of the authors regularly post in the talk.origins newsgroup. This is more than can be said for most of the people who run major creationist sites. Perhaps, instead of trying to entice people into a debate on his terms, why doesn't Dr. Brown join the fray in a convenient, international forum where anybody can be heard?
This depresses me. Seeing these types of arguments always depresses me. Are there really people out there whose understanding of evolution is that misguided?
I'm only 34. I haven't seen it happen. So "we" haven't seen it happen. You must be very old...
You haven't seen it because you haven't read any of the countless articles in which scientists have written about specific instances of observed speciation. We haven't observed wings developing in a species that didn't have wings. We haven't been around that long. We have, however, seen speciation a number of times. www.talkorigins.org is a good place to start if you're actually interested in learning about some of the specifics.
And you have not submitted a test of evolution. Please do so.
OK. I'll bite. Start with a colony of E. coli and select one cell to start a new colony in a clean dish. This colony should have all the same DNA as the original. Repeat this using the new colony. Now you have two colonies of what should be identical E. coli. Dump a bunch of penicillin in one of the dishes and watch the colony die. OK. So we know the original cell was most likely susceptible to your antibiotics (the colony of clones showed a significant reduction in population). Now put a small amount of watered down penecillin into the first dish and let it quickly run out. Let the survivors of the colony regenerate a bit and then start a new colony. Repeat. You'll eventually end up with a colony that's resistant to the penicillin treatment. What can we conclude here?
Well, the original cell was susceptible (its decendents tended to die when treated heavily with penicillin). Over the next several generations, a few lucky ones mutated in such a way that penicillin doesn't bother them. Those survived. Natural selection (or at least, simulated natural selection) refined the population to contain only penicillin resistant bacteria. Neat, huh? We know that the DNA changed or all would be dead (exact copies of the parent cell). Try this test for yourself, or simply acknowledge the fact that it has been done countless times with a number of bacteria and antibiotics. It doesn't always work (depending on the organism and the chemical) but it often does. Evolution. Bang.
Oh, so the Creationist wins points for finding only well-developed/complicated organisms in any stratum of rock. Thanks!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't understand the example rather than assuming that you're deliberately mischaracterizing the argument. The point is that if you can prove that species haven't changed smoothly over time (we have significant fossil records that indicate that they have), evolution would be turned on its ear. Another way to do it would be proving that the earth is too young for the process to have advanced so far (people try this to little avail). There are a number of things that could turn up that could make evolution obviously impossible. None have, though. On the other hand, it's not possible to prove that an intelligent creator didn't just create things the way they are. People actually argue that the creator made it look like evolution happened when really it didn't. Argue against that. Scientific? I think not.
How is this evolution? It is "natural selection," but is insufficient to cause speciation as no new DNA has been created.
The fact that you, obviously a layman, have decreed that no new DNA sequences exist does not make it so. Sexual reproduction by its very nature invariably causes new combinations of genes to pop up. You can't scramble two organisms' genes together and come up with a child organism with the same genes as both parents. The string of DNA is different. New base pairs are not (necessarily) added to the strands of DNA. The strands are different, though. The result is a different organism. The "no new DNA" argument is way overused by people who haven't seen the experiments that control for this (like the example I gave above).
Again, talk.origins is a great place to go if you're actually interested in getting some of these questions answered. If you're more interested smugly shooting down arguments that you don't understand, it's probably not the place for you.
Amazing (and very pretty) work.
The batch scheduling is huge and, don't forget, it's a classified side machine, so ordinary academics, even those who are affiliated with the lab, don't exactly have free access to the system.
I hate to sound skeptical, but why did Dr. Behe omit the names of the journals and editors when he posted his correspondence with them? It generally sounds a bit fishy. It's very easy to debate an opponent who also happens to be a sock on your hand...
Remember, you said "almost". There are a number of instances in which good mutations have been observed. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a good example. Let's not get into the "that gene was already there!" debate as when people say that, it proves that they didn't read or understand the experimental design for those experiments. Given enough time (and we've had *lots* of it), the rare "good" mutations can add up.
Lots of creatures (and processes within creatures) have no sensible path from what was supposed to have been its ancestor, across a metabolic ``death chasm'' to a functional system which would be highly destructive to the organism if at all incomplete (immune systems being a classic example). How did the organism cross the gap? Obviously, some kind of planning must be involved, yet there is no such mechanism even postulated in evolutionary theory, mostly because doing so would attract condemnatory cries of ``teleology!''
It sounds very much like you're parroting the ideas behind irriducible complexity. Remember, a particular process doesn't have to serve the same purpose at the end of an evolutionary change as it does during the transitional stages. As for postulating intelligent design in evolution, it doesn't happen because science strives for explanations based on what can be observed and what we know.
Actually, currency exchange rates are a pretty good way to go. Not totally accurate based on the different job markets, but wages are a price too, and if prices in general are higher due to a weaker currency, wages go the same route. The Canadian dollar simply has less buying power than the US dollar, both in buying goods *and* labor. Think about it: Do you really think that if you're making $50K a year here, you're going to make 50K yen if you move to Japan? Bzzzt...I don't think so. At least, hopefully not, since it only amounts to $370 or so. The Canadians aren't poor. Their currency simply exchanges for less and as a result, they move more of it around to purchase the same amount of goods. In nations with comparable standards of living, jobs that give you the same standard of living should have salaries that convert fairly neatly given the standard exchange rate.
The same thing happens with the power industry. If we let organizations like power companies set whatever prices they wanted, we'd see prices jump high enough to cause the partial collapse of the economy and a huge transition to private genrators that aren't as efficient or clean. Thus, we regulate (if we know what's good for us).
Finally, we even sometimes regulate when the good isn't necessary, but there is no possibility for good competition to keep the price capped. Cable TV is a good example. Only one company can really run cable through a city efficiently, so only one does. That company's prices are then regulated (not as vigorously as water suppliers, but still somewhat)--a so-called "natural" monopoly.
Basically, I fail to see how a company that makes non-essential software which could easily find competition in another small firm's products is at all worth regulating, because again, regulation has its costs to both producers and consumers as well. You really only do it when there's a damn good reason.
This is all true, but I guess my question is: what constitutes "proper" use of this information? I can see how the *number* of people on these lists might be relevant, but their email and postal addresses? I'm no expert, but I can't find any possible need for information like that in a trademark suit.
You make a good point. I would guess, though, that you'd see some of it (as you said) from the male side as 45 is hardly a practical limit for men. It's also probably partially a probability thing. Err a little on one side and you might get a maximum age in the 90's but see cancer before you're 30 (bad thing). The reverse on the other side. It would seem like getting imbalances to varying degrees would tend to reduce the probability of reproduction at an accelerating rate toward the edges of what would likely look somewhat like a bell curve surrounding our current balances. In fact, this would seem like something that would have a relatively large variation in a given population, but it doesn't seem all that improbable that natural selection could cause the balance we have now--just not in such a clear-cut fashion as it does other traits.
The assumption is not exactly that the rock "ages a certain way" over time. The assumptions are assumptions about the behavior of isotopes over long periods of time, and they're not assumptions that are made out of the blue or for the convenience of the resarcher. The reality is that basically everything we know about radioactive decay supports the predicatable decay behavior for these isotopes and there has been no siginficant evidence suggesting otherwise. Calling these things assupmtions is technically correct, but given that definition of the word assumption, we're only assuming that the sun won't suddenly blink out within the next week or so. Sure, there's no reason to think that it would and all of our long-term observations are to the contrary, but we have not solid *proof* that it won't.