So, as unfortunate as it is, I'm willing to accept a restriction on one of my DERIVED rights (the right to privacy) in order to protect one of my FUNDAMENTAL rights (the right to life).
What ratio of protection versus restriction of rights did you have in mind? I think that the argument most people have is not whether such a trade off exists, but what the right trade off is. Personally, I like warrants and judicial oversight, especially given the vanishingly small probability that a terrorist is going to kill me.
Not much more, but there are also fewer chemists and biologists than English and history majors. The supply curve does have something to do with this.
Probably IT people don't make more either, after outsourcing is factored in.
I can't really think of what a general IT person would bring to the table in terms of teaching math or science, so I'm not really considering those salaries.
SOME engineering and science fields do pay more, and some talented people in these fields do very well for themselves. But then again, SOME people with a talent for language work in Park Ave. for millions, or have successful law firms, or make big bucks writing novels or movie scripts. Others do very weell in journalism, law, training, and communications.
In my experience, basically all engineering fields pay more. Science fields vary, but let's think about the market clearing wage here, not necessarily the outliers. Let's also think about entry level pay. This is key. In the long run, different fields often "level out" but that doesn't really make up for the fact that you're hardly making anything for your first few years as a teacher. Moving out of engineering at any point along the timeline is a cut in pay. Moving out of a good career in the humanities later along the line is likely a cut in pay because pay is based largely on how long you've been a teacher rather than the type of wage you'd command elsewhere. Neither of these is good for the teaching applicant pool.
I think your proposed pay differential is based largely on slashdotters being more familiar with engineering and science fields. There are, admittedly poor English majors working for small news papers, just as there are poor biologists counting dandelions in a field someplace as we speak. Bisaing your pay to a favor a select set of slashdotter's favorite fields will exact;y become "Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price" as anyone with any real skill with language leaves for careers where they are appreciated.
Actually, I think we're simply proposing that pay reflect market rates for a skill. Look at any university salary survey for recent grads and you'll generally see science, engineering, and business degrees at the top, well above more general fields of study. The fact that a good English major can close the gap doesn't change the fact that the pay differential during their early years is substantial. All we need to do is exactly what most businesses and other sensible employers do: take into account the market rate for the person we're hiring. If the people we're hiring aren't good enough to do the job, target a "better" set of employees (whether they're trained biologists or skilled writers), figure out what it will cost to bring them in, and offer salaries that will bring them in.
I'm responding less to the idea that paying math and science teachers more than other teachers is sensible and more to the idiotic backlash against it on general "fairness" principles. If we can't hire competent math teachers at our current wage, our current wage clearly isn't high enough. Examine the market and fix it. If we can show that our English departments are not up to snuff, I'd say the same thing about them.
If all you have are objective skills, why should I hire you when a $500 computer can do it faster? What bubble on a scantron represents your ability to develop new transistor materials to keep us moving along Moore's law? Which half-done essay will tell me whether you can negotiate with an Asian firm to obtain the best price for getting a foundry built for our processors? What number tells me what you'll bring to my company that a $500 computer could not do?
Your post points out a lot of good subjective skills that are important for students to acquire, but the bottom line is, they're no substitute for the objective skills that they're supposed to acquire at the same time. We can't simply say, "Don't test the students' grammar and math skills! Those skills aren't the only important things for them to learn!" and wash our hands of the issue.
I know a lot of people whose social skills are great, but they can't count to ten on their fingers or write a coherent sentence. They may be brilliant, but they're completely unemployable. The fact that we need skills above and beyond the "3 R's" doesn't absolve us of responsibility for teaching the basics. We clearly haven't mastered imparting those basics to our students, and we have every reason to require them, so why not test them on those skills? We need to walk before we can run, and we're definitely not running.
Anyway, I'm not buying the idea that high school graduates can't read a novel or manipulate fractions because they're spending every moment of their academic careers learning to be go-getter people-loving out-of-the-box thinkers. I'm leaning toward believing that they lack those skills because we don't require them.
Your job market is not so great if the only application of your skills is teaching these skills to others. Its another version of a pyramid scheme - only one of math students will be able to take over your job when you retire.
Let's take this nonsense as gospel for the moment. Your statement doesn't change the fact that people with math and science skills--however useful you may think they are--have higher wage options elsewhere. This is a simple market problem, and ignoring one of the major factors that drives prices and quantities is simply not a good solution.
Think about it this way. The number of new teachers who quit after one year is 50% of the total of all new teachers. By two years, 75% of all new teachers have quit. Anyone who doesn't see that as the #1 problem to examine is clearly ignorant of it or a legislator.
All of your points are very good. I think that the sensible thing for most people to do when faced with this sort of problem is ask themselves, "Why am I doing X and not teaching?" My answer is, I'm making far more money doing what I'm doing, and I'm working in an environment where I'm appreciated. I seriously doubt that I'm the only person who comes up with those two reasons.
Teachers have it good and are well paid... not as well paid as medicine, but certainly as well paid as administrative assistants, receptionists, and other jobs often held by people with similar qualifications in major cities.
Here's the point of the article: People who can teach high school calculus or physics don't have educations that put them at salary parity with administrative assistants or receptionists. Hence the suggestion that they should be paid more than people whose alternative employment is as administrative assistants or receptionists.
Yes, it's hard to teach 3rd graders how to spell. In fact, there may be fewer good 3rd grade spelling teachers than there are good calculus teachers. The problem is, the people who know calculus well enough to teach it typically have degrees that could get them better pay elsewhere. If you can't offer them something competitive, they're not going to work for you. Net result: You've taken a situation where you have a larger pool of potential calculus teachers than 3rd grade teachers and cut your pool of potential calculus teachers down to where it's smaller than the pool of potential 3rd grade teachers. The policy guarantees failure.
Simply put, the set of potential calculus teachers who don't have more lucrative options (or opt not to take those options) is apparently pretty darned small. Restricting ourselves to that subset is why we have so many sub-standard math teachers.
I'm sorry, it just sounds like a bad idea to me for math or science teachers to be paid more.
It's just asking for personnel issues, and it's creating a teacher economic hierarchy where none currently exists, and none needs to exist.
How does teaching differ from any other endeavor in that respect? If I own a company and I need to hire an electrical engineer and a copy editor to proof read my technical documentation, I'll pay the EE more. Maybe they work the same hours. Maybe they both have bachelor's degrees from the same school. Why the pay discrepancy? Because the EE could earn more at another employer, so I need to pay more in order to be competitive. It doesn't cause personnel issues. I'm simply creating an economic hierarchy that matches the one in the market at large in order to be competitive in that market.
If I don't do that, the only EEs who will work for me are EEs who can't find a job elsewhere (not a good sign) or people who really like me (and I may have some of those, but I'm certainly limiting myself). This would be a terrible decision for my business and my customers. If my employees can't understand that, I'm not sure that they're smart enough to be worth hiring.
What kind of high paying job are you going to land with your work on Riemann's theorem?
The cute answer to that is, "Obviously something. Otherwise, I'd be teaching."
The more complete answer is that the list of people who know math well enough to teach high school level math isn't limited to pure mathematicians (although the idea that mathematicians are unemployable isn't exactly right either). Unfortunately, the set of people who can teach high school math and science also happens to be an expensive bunch. There are *lots* of people with engineering degrees for whom any high school level math or physics course is child's play who might be qualified to teach those subjects, and they're simply not applying for the job because they can make tends of thousands of dollars more per year working as engineers. I'd definitely consider teaching math or physics as a viable career if it didn't have such a high opportunity cost. As it stands, though, leaving engineering to teach is simply too expensive.
And this is exactly the solution. Instead of only paying certain teachers more, how about paying them all what they deserve and raising the standard of eduction in all subjects?
Because they don't all have the same earning power if they decide not to be teachers. The point of a salary is not to reward merit or make the world a better place. The point of a salary is to attract qualified people to do a job. Qualified technical people are more expensive than qualified history teachers. That doesn't mean they're better people or somehow more deserving on a moral scale. It simply means that they have other options and won't respond to the same salary that will attract a good history teacher. Not acknowledging basic economics is just about the worst thing you can do when trying to hire people or buy goods, and it looks like the school districts are doing just that at the behest of the unions.
Sure, teachers should probably make more money across the board, but the idea that you pay somebody with a highly marketable education the same as somebody who doesn't have nearly as many job prospects simply doesn't work in the real world. I'd be more than happy to consider teaching math or science as a career. I like teaching, I'm reasonably good at getting ideas across, and I have the technical background. As it stands, though, going into teaching could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income. That's just too big of a jump to make, so I don't consider it a viable option.
Well, I wouldn't say that math and science teachers have more "merit" that warrants higher pay, but the price for a good generally correlates with its value at its next best use. Somebody who is good at math or science (hopefully a qualification for teaching math or science) usually has pretty solid pay options should they choose to go elsewhere. Not acknowledging that in your pay scale is just begging for a shortage of qualified people.
It's not a matter of "merit" or "fairness." It's a matter of acknowledging that most people who leave serious technical jobs to teach incur a serious opportunity cost. Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price is not really a good idea.
Do you think that part of the problem might be a set of rules that cause essentially every player in the game to behave the same way? The rules that Congress plays by to write and pass laws practically guarantee that type of outcome. Replacing the players and tossing new ones into the same game with the same rules and goals won't change anything, regardless of how great the newly elected members are.
The way to make a difference is to support people who actually try to change the rules. People who support something along the lines of the Read the Bills Act have my vote. People who fight against those changes don't have my vote. We simply need to make noise to encourage the scrapping of a system that can turn even those with the best intentions into the people we're complaining about.
And who do you propose we put in charge of deciding which spending items are "pork" and which are legitimate needs? I, for one, don't think the midwest should have any Interstate highways paid for with federal money, because I have no intention of driving on them. Maybe we should have some sort of elected body that makes these decisions. We could call it "Congress" or something.
I propose a computer program with a pseudorandom number generator that simply votes "yes" 90% of the time. It would have roughly the same effect as a Congress that passes bills it doesn't read.
Seriously. Their job is to consider bills and make decisions. We don't just pay them to vote on bills. If all we wanted was 535 people who voted on bills with no clue what's in them, we could take 535 homeless people off the streets of DC and pay them a fraction of the amount to do it. At least that would be putting some unemployed people to work. The idea of a "Congress" that makes those decisions for us in an intelligent way is fabulous. I just don't think we have that at the moment.
As a form of directing the populace, it's pretty hard to disagree with.
Well, that's a big part of the point. Religion is absolutely one of the most effective ways of getting a populace to do what you want it to. History shows that the question of whether or not those actions are moral or right, though, is a completely orthogonal matter.
I guess my point is, your post had a tone of "What has religion done for me?". I was pointing out something large and obvious.
Well, it wasn't originally my post, but let me try to make my position clear. I think that people adopting a moral code imposed upon them by an arbitrary and (probably) imaginary external entity is a crap shoot at best. There's no good reason to think that religiosity or following religious teachings necessarily leads to moral behavior any more than flipping a coin to determine one's behavior. There are times when it works out just fine and there are times when it turns out to be an unmitigated disaster. I don't think that religion is necessarily evil, but it certainly is adding an arbitrary element ("The Will Of God") into what should otherwise be a rational and considered process: determining how we should behave.
A particular religion is often painted as the only source for morality (substitute your own locally popular religion--in the case of me as an American, it's Christianity) when it appears that cultures all over the world have ended up coming up with large overlaps in their moral codes, indicating that we don't really owe that to religion so much as necessity as social beings. I don't think that "Keep Holy the Sabbath" is necessarily something I should be thankful for--at least not in the same sense as I'm thankful for the idea that most people aren't interested in murdering me. Really, I think that Christianity was in the right place at the right time to get credit for Western moral values, and that fact is causing us a lot of heartburn. How many people are so confused about morality that they think that anybody who doesn't share their religious traditions can't possible be a moral being?
I think that religion in general gets way too much play as The Source of Morality. Listening to the whims of an unmeasurable invisible entity, while often having great results, isn't necessarily the safest way to build a moral code. Sure it's all good and fine when your deity says "Don't steal that guy's stuff" but what about when that deity starts asking for virgin sacrifices or the extermination of the left-handed? When social moral codes are imposed arbitrarily without an opportunity for discussion (at least, not beyond, "Ahhh! Please don't burn me at the stake!"), you're seriously rolling the dice.
The Humanist ethics considered the norm in Western Countries are the direct outgrowth of Christian morals.
There are plenty of other morals to choose from. Choose them if you want to be free of Christian taint.
If you remove from the Christian set of moral codes those codes that overlap with a lot of others (e.g. don't murder people and take their stuff), what are you left with that's uniquely Christian, though? Is it reasonable to say that Christianity is necessarily the root of Western moral codes, or is it simply a particular embodiment of a set of codes that almost inevitably arises? I tend to think that we westerners give too much credit to Christianity for moral codes that, by all appearances, other cultures have managed to arrive at without any input from Jesus.
No gene needed here. I am dying, and have two options:
1. Eaten up by worms,
or
2. Live forever, and party every nite with all the relatives that I loved.
Even if (2) is a big lie, there is nothing to loose, so it takes a lot of character to willingly going for (1).
Why only two options? What about (3) Be chased around by a giant spider for all eternity or (4) Relive the same life you just lived, but everything tastes like crab or (n) Be reincarnated as Oprah's workout thong?
At some age, children must learn that the world is not, in fact, a happy, fun, intelligent, or fulfilling place by default -- *THEY* individually, are responsible for making their lives happy, fun, intelligent, and fulfilling. It can be done, if they are willing to invest the time, intelligence, and discipline into making it so.
I had a truly great math professor in college who summarized it this way (paraphrasing): I don't know who told you that learning is always supposed to be fun. Sometimes learning can be downright miserable. Sometimes you need to sit down and practice integration by parts or going over your Taylor series until you get it right. Knowing is fun. Learning is how you get there.
That is another topic, the arrangement of the fossils. I was talking about a more basic thing -- the existence of fossils in the first place.
It's an important topic, though, because there's absolutely no way a flood can account for this ordering. It kind of devastates the whole proposal.
Tell me about how that happened and then we can discuss the layering thereof.
Why is the existence of fossils an issue? When bones are buried, there is a limited probability that they'll be fossilized. Are you expecting to find no fossils?
I'll give you a hint: The layering of fossils is nor all that consistent in all the diverse places we find fossils. They are found however all over the planet. There are in fact few places that DON'T have fossils.
Again, this isn't exactly a surprise given a long enough history over which just about every surface has had life at one time or another.
The flood was not some tranquil overflowing like a giant bathtub, but a horrendous upheaval from raging, rapidly flowing waters all over the planet. Think of the power of a tsunami multiplied millions of times.
You haven't explained how such a thing would cause such nice sorting. On the one hand, you're decrying the idea that unguided processes could ever do things like sorting and on the other hand, you're appealing to the chaos of a flood to determine the difference between icthyosaur bones and whale bones.
Making a blind copy of something, unless digital always decreases the information.
I hope I don't sound too accusatory here, but you made that up. What type of information theory are you applying here?
In the case of digital and DNA (which is digital) the information content remains the same. That is the best that can be done.
I gave you two DNA strings. Show your work. How much information is in them? I don't think that Shannon, Chaitin, or Kolmogorov would agree with your assertion. Are you using another definition of information?
Two copies of Hamlet don't contain more information than one. In an activity of mind, you can make a copy of Hamlet and your added commentary about it is added information to the basic work. Information ONLY comes from a mind, NEVER anywhere else. Nobody has ever demonstrated a source of information other than a mind, an intelligent being.
If you can give me a non-handwavy definition of information, I'll gladly try my hand. If your definition of information is "something that comes from a mind" then I suppose you win. If your definition of information is actually a meaningful thing that can be measured, I'd seriously like to hear it.
What I am thinking of is tracking mutations in DNA to show who descends from what, and approximately when. Then show that various groups of critters determined to have a common ancestor look like they have resulted from mutations from a parent genome (as opposed to a common designer) Basically, that would mean that these genomes result from a bunch of random mutations of the parent genome, including some that have no benefit (= not designed) such that they are properly dispersed in the right proportions, and proportional to mutation rate the amount of time since common ancestry. With the mapping of genomes going on as it is, this should be possible soon if not already.
Well, I think that "already" is the better word for it. This is a big part of the world of phylogenetics. Quite a lot of work has been done in that area, and there are a lot of genetic markers that are best explained by common descent and don't make a lot of sense in terms of a common designer. A good example is the Robertsonian translocation explanation of the human chromosome count of 46 rather than the typical ape count of 48. I would say that the work done in reconstructing our phylogenetic tree has been some of the most important work in evolutionary biology and is probably the single strongest piece of support for evolutionary theory.
How did the universe explode out of nothing? Either there is something outside this universe, not bound by our rules of time and space, with no beginning or end, that can cause the beginning of the universe. Or the universe somehow arose without any cause at all, and all this energy arose out of nothing. Any other explanation would require an infinite series of things (universes, gods, whatever) that can cause other things.
So, how exactly does positing an entity that is, itself, uncaused solve the problem that everything needs a cause? Why even bother with special pleading?
There are fossils, but nobody today has ever made one or see one form naturally. Today, whenever a living thing dies, it decays. To make a fossil, the living thing must be killed, buried and all decay causing organisms killed within hours. An unimaginably violent, world wide, sudden catastrophe, such as a flood could have made fossils and coal beds found all over the globe, not slow burial in sediments over immense periods of time.
Why did all of the whales end up above the ichtyhosaurs? Do icthyousaurs sink faster than whales? How did all of the pterosaurs end up being buried underneath the rabbits? I would certainly expect winged creatures to last a lot longer than rabbits in a flood.
Mutations NEVER result in an increase of information, but always a decrease.
OK, here's a DNA string: AGTTACCT
Simple duplication (a common mutation, kept short for brevity): AGTTACCTCCT
How are you measuring information in such a way that the second string contains less? None that I can think of.
It's actually "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but that tends to get swept under the rug since race supposedly is a social construct these days, or is just a skin color, or some such bollocks.
Well, that and the fact that the word "race" has a different meaning in that context than it does in modern political discussion. And of course, the fact that we generally don't include subtitles when we talk about book titles.
Or try and get grant money to investigate the possibility that a bacteria/virus causes homosexuality. That might lead to a vaccine, and of course we can't have that.
I bet that if you came up with a halfway decent test protocol that might produce some results, you'd have a number of conservative "think tanks" dropping brief cases full of cash on your doorstep to do it. There's a dearth of research these days that conservatives can use to make their anti-homosexual agenda look "scientific" so any opportunity to generate some is probably welcome.
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I can't really think of what a general IT person would bring to the table in terms of teaching math or science, so I'm not really considering those salaries.
In my experience, basically all engineering fields pay more. Science fields vary, but let's think about the market clearing wage here, not necessarily the outliers. Let's also think about entry level pay. This is key. In the long run, different fields often "level out" but that doesn't really make up for the fact that you're hardly making anything for your first few years as a teacher. Moving out of engineering at any point along the timeline is a cut in pay. Moving out of a good career in the humanities later along the line is likely a cut in pay because pay is based largely on how long you've been a teacher rather than the type of wage you'd command elsewhere. Neither of these is good for the teaching applicant pool.
Actually, I think we're simply proposing that pay reflect market rates for a skill. Look at any university salary survey for recent grads and you'll generally see science, engineering, and business degrees at the top, well above more general fields of study. The fact that a good English major can close the gap doesn't change the fact that the pay differential during their early years is substantial. All we need to do is exactly what most businesses and other sensible employers do: take into account the market rate for the person we're hiring. If the people we're hiring aren't good enough to do the job, target a "better" set of employees (whether they're trained biologists or skilled writers), figure out what it will cost to bring them in, and offer salaries that will bring them in.
I'm responding less to the idea that paying math and science teachers more than other teachers is sensible and more to the idiotic backlash against it on general "fairness" principles. If we can't hire competent math teachers at our current wage, our current wage clearly isn't high enough. Examine the market and fix it. If we can show that our English departments are not up to snuff, I'd say the same thing about them.
I know a lot of people whose social skills are great, but they can't count to ten on their fingers or write a coherent sentence. They may be brilliant, but they're completely unemployable. The fact that we need skills above and beyond the "3 R's" doesn't absolve us of responsibility for teaching the basics. We clearly haven't mastered imparting those basics to our students, and we have every reason to require them, so why not test them on those skills? We need to walk before we can run, and we're definitely not running.
Anyway, I'm not buying the idea that high school graduates can't read a novel or manipulate fractions because they're spending every moment of their academic careers learning to be go-getter people-loving out-of-the-box thinkers. I'm leaning toward believing that they lack those skills because we don't require them.
Yes, it's hard to teach 3rd graders how to spell. In fact, there may be fewer good 3rd grade spelling teachers than there are good calculus teachers. The problem is, the people who know calculus well enough to teach it typically have degrees that could get them better pay elsewhere. If you can't offer them something competitive, they're not going to work for you. Net result: You've taken a situation where you have a larger pool of potential calculus teachers than 3rd grade teachers and cut your pool of potential calculus teachers down to where it's smaller than the pool of potential 3rd grade teachers. The policy guarantees failure.
Simply put, the set of potential calculus teachers who don't have more lucrative options (or opt not to take those options) is apparently pretty darned small. Restricting ourselves to that subset is why we have so many sub-standard math teachers.
If I don't do that, the only EEs who will work for me are EEs who can't find a job elsewhere (not a good sign) or people who really like me (and I may have some of those, but I'm certainly limiting myself). This would be a terrible decision for my business and my customers. If my employees can't understand that, I'm not sure that they're smart enough to be worth hiring.
The more complete answer is that the list of people who know math well enough to teach high school level math isn't limited to pure mathematicians (although the idea that mathematicians are unemployable isn't exactly right either). Unfortunately, the set of people who can teach high school math and science also happens to be an expensive bunch. There are *lots* of people with engineering degrees for whom any high school level math or physics course is child's play who might be qualified to teach those subjects, and they're simply not applying for the job because they can make tends of thousands of dollars more per year working as engineers. I'd definitely consider teaching math or physics as a viable career if it didn't have such a high opportunity cost. As it stands, though, leaving engineering to teach is simply too expensive.
Sure, teachers should probably make more money across the board, but the idea that you pay somebody with a highly marketable education the same as somebody who doesn't have nearly as many job prospects simply doesn't work in the real world. I'd be more than happy to consider teaching math or science as a career. I like teaching, I'm reasonably good at getting ideas across, and I have the technical background. As it stands, though, going into teaching could cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income. That's just too big of a jump to make, so I don't consider it a viable option.
Well, I wouldn't say that math and science teachers have more "merit" that warrants higher pay, but the price for a good generally correlates with its value at its next best use. Somebody who is good at math or science (hopefully a qualification for teaching math or science) usually has pretty solid pay options should they choose to go elsewhere. Not acknowledging that in your pay scale is just begging for a shortage of qualified people.
It's not a matter of "merit" or "fairness." It's a matter of acknowledging that most people who leave serious technical jobs to teach incur a serious opportunity cost. Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price is not really a good idea.
Do you think that part of the problem might be a set of rules that cause essentially every player in the game to behave the same way? The rules that Congress plays by to write and pass laws practically guarantee that type of outcome. Replacing the players and tossing new ones into the same game with the same rules and goals won't change anything, regardless of how great the newly elected members are.
The way to make a difference is to support people who actually try to change the rules. People who support something along the lines of the Read the Bills Act have my vote. People who fight against those changes don't have my vote. We simply need to make noise to encourage the scrapping of a system that can turn even those with the best intentions into the people we're complaining about.
Seriously. Their job is to consider bills and make decisions. We don't just pay them to vote on bills. If all we wanted was 535 people who voted on bills with no clue what's in them, we could take 535 homeless people off the streets of DC and pay them a fraction of the amount to do it. At least that would be putting some unemployed people to work. The idea of a "Congress" that makes those decisions for us in an intelligent way is fabulous. I just don't think we have that at the moment.
A particular religion is often painted as the only source for morality (substitute your own locally popular religion--in the case of me as an American, it's Christianity) when it appears that cultures all over the world have ended up coming up with large overlaps in their moral codes, indicating that we don't really owe that to religion so much as necessity as social beings. I don't think that "Keep Holy the Sabbath" is necessarily something I should be thankful for--at least not in the same sense as I'm thankful for the idea that most people aren't interested in murdering me. Really, I think that Christianity was in the right place at the right time to get credit for Western moral values, and that fact is causing us a lot of heartburn. How many people are so confused about morality that they think that anybody who doesn't share their religious traditions can't possible be a moral being?
I think that religion in general gets way too much play as The Source of Morality. Listening to the whims of an unmeasurable invisible entity, while often having great results, isn't necessarily the safest way to build a moral code. Sure it's all good and fine when your deity says "Don't steal that guy's stuff" but what about when that deity starts asking for virgin sacrifices or the extermination of the left-handed? When social moral codes are imposed arbitrarily without an opportunity for discussion (at least, not beyond, "Ahhh! Please don't burn me at the stake!"), you're seriously rolling the dice.
(3) Be chased around by a giant spider for all eternity
or
(4) Relive the same life you just lived, but everything tastes like crab
or
(n) Be reincarnated as Oprah's workout thong?
"Dad, the neighbors have a bunch of food and water stored up in case of an emergency. Do you think we should do that too?"
"No, honey. We have guns, and you just told me where we can get food and water in case of an emergency."
I can only hope to give my children the same type of healthy upbringing. Is he joking? Is he joking...?
Why is the existence of fossils an issue? When bones are buried, there is a limited probability that they'll be fossilized. Are you expecting to find no fossils?
Again, this isn't exactly a surprise given a long enough history over which just about every surface has had life at one time or another.
You haven't explained how such a thing would cause such nice sorting. On the one hand, you're decrying the idea that unguided processes could ever do things like sorting and on the other hand, you're appealing to the chaos of a flood to determine the difference between icthyosaur bones and whale bones.
I hope I don't sound too accusatory here, but you made that up. What type of information theory are you applying here?
I gave you two DNA strings. Show your work. How much information is in them? I don't think that Shannon, Chaitin, or Kolmogorov would agree with your assertion. Are you using another definition of information?
If you can give me a non-handwavy definition of information, I'll gladly try my hand. If your definition of information is "something that comes from a mind" then I suppose you win. If your definition of information is actually a meaningful thing that can be measured, I'd seriously like to hear it.
OK, here's a DNA string: AGTTACCT
Simple duplication (a common mutation, kept short for brevity): AGTTACCTCCT
How are you measuring information in such a way that the second string contains less? None that I can think of.
I bet that if you came up with a halfway decent test protocol that might produce some results, you'd have a number of conservative "think tanks" dropping brief cases full of cash on your doorstep to do it. There's a dearth of research these days that conservatives can use to make their anti-homosexual agenda look "scientific" so any opportunity to generate some is probably welcome.