I looked at the nylonase case on wikipedia. Definitely interesting. It's not something I find totally unexpected, though.
I would not say the bacteria had been created with the ability to break down nylon molecules. I would say the bacteria was created to survive. Bacteria is more important to the earth than we give it credit for. Kill all humans and the earth would still need bacteria to maintain nature. So it's ability to survive matches very well with its responsibility in the grand scheme of things.
Here's an article I found enlightening on the broad subject:
As an aside, "survival of the fittest" is often far more closely associated with evolution than it is with creation - but I was struck one day how brilliant the idea is. If you could design a free-wheeling thing like this earth, how would you design it any other way? Hindsight is 20/20, they say. I look at it and I think it's an inspired concept. Any other mechanism would seem forced or faux in some way, I think.
"Previous research has shown that wild-type E. coli can utilize citrate when oxygen levels are low."
In some of my previous posts, I've tried to convey the idea that perhaps we're not seeing new characteristics generate - rather we're seeing a reconfiguration / recombination / whatever of existing information.
As the quote says, it already knew how to use citrate. Creationists are fine with that. I think when you look closely at each example of evolution, this theme will keep coming up. The information was already there, it just needed to be flipped on or off or the genes reconfigured or recombined.
Ask yourself again if it's an evil broken system when you're on your deathbed for lack of medicine that could have been developed and manufactured cheaply had it not been for prohibitive licensing and monopolistic practices surrounding these patents.
This has already happened and continues to happen in other areas of medicine.
But "it's not my problem" and "it doesn't affect me"...yet.
Maybe I've never realized before how bad slashdot is at beating a dead horse.
But, really, this is going overboard with apple stories of the least bit of consequence or relevance (barring this story for once).
I'm starting to think slashdot doesn't have pre-arranged deals with apple, and others, but that they get paid if a submission does happen to come through and is approved.
I'm sorry, I find it very difficult to write these in-depth posts. I don't know why, it used to come easier. At any rate, that's my excuse for my tardy reply.
It would be a lot less objective of me to always consider things from the point of view that "the Christian god is real, now how can I twist everything else to fit into that worldview?",
I know my explanations sometimes come off like "assume god is right," but I honestly try to word it in such a way as to deflect that.
The truth is I approach any biblical issue like anything else that needs proof. I see a statement implying truth and I say, ok, let's go out and prove it.
They never truly consider the idea that god might not be real, and that just creates a very biased mindset.
I honestly think most christians doubt their faith quite a bit, perhaps daily. They're not great doubts, they're just nagging doubts. Most christians work out their faith in a very internal way so you wouldn't notice. I often find my second-guessing my faith and I have to remember all the moments in my life that prompted my belief.
I think you should give them a little more understanding. People pose in public but mostly people aren't as hard as they appear.
But now I have come across things which the bible simply gets wrong or doesn't account for
Now that's where I came from. I had these things thrown at me, these flaws in the bible. I told myself that if I was going to believe in this god than his bible had better stand on its own. So I went out and found out how the bible does stand on its own.
and see that it would be quite easy to make a religious book that fits to the known world, but later on starts failing, which I think is happening now in educated countries.
Oh it's been happening for a lot longer than that. In any age where knowledge has been respected, wise men have "doubted" and people followed. Who wants a cosmic killjoy anyway? It's so much easier to just live without him anyway.
These religious quandaries have been going on ever since man was created. Many come to faith by it (and "faith" it is, in the end) and many do not.
I say it's a "faith" not because the bible gets things wrong--I don't believe it does after years of studying it and researching it--but I call it a faith because god, being outside his creation, may or may not be able to be observed by the laws inside the universe. That's why, when it comes right down to it, if we can not observe God, than belief in that God is a faith matter. Again, many have come to the conclusion that it's a natural conclusion to come to.
Same as I now feel with Christianity. It's obvious that most religion is simply man-made pap, and it's seems quite likely to me now that it all is.
I've absolutely had that same thought that it's clear most religions are clearly man-made. The beautiful thing about God's faith is that it's downright topsy-tervy, not at all like what man would think up. It's foolishness.
God claims we're sinners and then provides an effortless way out? We sin, so God sacrifices the one person who couldn't be blamed to save us? God, the perfect one, provides forgiveness to us, in comparison worthless to a god? God puts up with Job questioning him? And then he turns around and doesn't answer a single question but raises more questions about just how strange and amazing this creation actually is? God uses sacrifices but never thought of the sacrifice of humans except in the single case it was least warranted? God calls King David a man after his own heart, this guy who slept with another man's wife and then had the man killed? I'd could go on and on and on...
Just thinking about all the little things God's word speaks about and which are absolutely not what man would've written about a religion...I am ceaselessly amazed.
I wonder, when you started questioning the integrity of your belief, did you keep going that route or did you try to make your faith prove itself?
I had a very similar situation. I considered myself a christian from 0-23 or so. For some reason, I told myself that I didn't want to believe a lie and if I didn't want that than my faith had better be true. So I put it to the test. I've had countless disussion about the integrity of the bible and of questions about the faith. Researching every accusation I came to the conclusion the bible resoundingly stands on its own. That cemented my faith.
I should note I didn't just test my own faith. I started researching other faiths to see if they were in fact true.
Sin is an interesting aspect of christianity. Many have argued that in order for there to be any free will at all - actions counter to what is good for you must be possible. And what is good for you is the point tht God was trying to make: That you should obey Him in everything that you do - which up to that point was just simply not eating of one tree. God created them and put them in a perfect situation. Is that the sign of someone with bad intentions?
These things to me show that the bible is a bunch of crap, though when you already believe in God (most likely because you were brought up doing so, though some people are roped into it later, usually trying to get rid of some guilt in their life IMO because it's often the 'worst' people that are attracted an offer of salvation) you have to think up ludicrous excuses which place the blame for sin upon anything but God...
That's so classic. The worst people are attracted to salvation? You betcha! It's only when you realize your depravity (simply because you couldn't keep up your own version of "good") that you realize you need salvation and there's nothing you can offer anymore for it. All you can do is except the grace that would save someone as unworthy as you or I are.
Jesus told the religious elite of his time that he came as a doctor, not to for those who were well, but for those who were sick. It's just that most people's pride blocks them from seeing or admitting they are just as sick as the worst offenders in society. And so those religious elite didn't get it. Even today many don't get it.
It is a parent's responsibility to supervise a small child, the child can't be legally held responsible for anything it does before it knows the difference between right/wrong in certain situations.
Are you claiming that, in your adulthood, you don't know the difference between right and wrong? We all know the difference. We know the difference in our own ways because we violate our own versions of how we "ought" to live - when we break our own code. And the amazing thing is God knows that not everyone has His absolute law of what is right or wrong - but he made each of us know within degrees how we should be acting. That's how we know something's messed up. That's a prompting to go and look for something - that something is God who has been telling us a single thing for all eternity: Follow Him.
No, I'm not trolling. I'm not in school so, no, not trapped in any school teaching questionable topics. I would love to hear the factual errors, I'm all about knowing what is the truth.
The problem with YEC types is that they aren't giving God the benefit of the doubt. And they're ignoring the awe-inspiring experiences that - assuming He exists - God's set out there for us to figure out. We've got answers most of the things in God's rant in the Book of Job, "Thus Spake God The Lord Out Of The Whirlwind", yet God could still lay that rant on us, He'd just have to change the scientific questions.
That's really interesting. I've always thought many people put God in a box so we can understand him. Some christians go along with evolution because it makes things really simple: God is God and, if I don't think about it too much, evolution is an unproblematic way that things came to be.
What I'm doing is sitting back, letting God say his piece, giving him the benefit of the doubt, going out and seeing if he's on crack or not.
My idea of giving the "benefit of the doubt" is counter to what I see many people do. What I see are people who love the idea of a faith and a god but then they go and ignore the texts they call holy and think that certain thigns can fit into the bible.
My view on the bible is that it is way too coherent and way too cohesive to be, for example, shoe-horning evolution into the account of creation.
I would not believe in a god who couldn't get his bible right. What I've found, through numerous discussions just like this, is that the bible has proven itself time and again.
One thing is absolutely certain about our Universe. No God hashed the whole thing together in a week some time around the invention of human writing, and He sure as hell didn't fill it with faked evidence that it's much older than 6000 years. That's the kind of hack job a human would imagine.
Hashed? The guy made a brilliantly elegant, partly organized and partly chaotic...complete universe. It's work of art.
Yeah the "faked evidence" bit is a popular conception of the account of creation. When you really get into it there's really much, much more going on. Why do things look so old? I don't know exactly off the top of my head. Try googling "starlight and time". It's an interesting cosmological theory that tries to solve some time problems while taking the genesis at its word. It may not stand the test of time but I've always been impressed at the outside the box thinking. The flood of genesis, and the surrounding issues of what the world was like before and after, may also be related in many ways to why the world appears old. Note this is all due to calibration of dating methodologies which make assumptions about half-lives and life spans.
God, if He exists, is way smarter than that.
Hey, no qualms there, God is smarter than I give him credit for. Nobody will ever truly fathom him until, perhaps, we die and see what's what
Now, take a Being that could, by nudging a couple of mathematical entities (branes), set things up such that when they intersect, a different mathematical entity (a universe) gets spawned, and one of them (maybe more than one, but how would we humans know?) just happens to be spawned with physical constants suitable for stellar nucleosynthesis, and some 13.2 billion years later - intelligent life evolves on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet that's smart enough to notice (stellar parallax) that the nearest stars are very far away, some of them vary regularly (Cepheid variables), and can be used as yardsticks to compute the distance to other consistently-bright objects (supernovae), which could be used as yardsticks to compute the distance to galaxies, which revealed the Hubble red shift, and ultimately, the mapping of variances in the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang...
Wow. I'm impressed you took the time to rip apart my post line for line. That's good. We need more dissections of errant posts around here.
MODERATORS: Please mod the parent poster down as a troll or offtopic. And mod me down as flamebait or offtopic. I've wasted enough of my own time writing a response. Don't let any more readers waste their time reading any of this garbage.
I certainly hope nobody does that. This kind of discussion is exactly what is needed.
Would you care, shovas, user number 1605685 (my that IS a shiny new user account, isn't it!) to wager a guess as to what I think the real reason was for you posting that meandering soliloquy?
I've made two or three posts now and I've already got someone questioning my user ID. Awesome. I suppose it doesn't count for anything I've been reading here since the 90s? Why join now? I didn't think it was worth it before. I enjoy the site. I read a lot of the discussion. I saw a lot of misinformation on my hot button topics I thought I'd like to weigh into, though, so I thought I'd join after hearing my buddy join up recently too.
And, yes, I'd love to know what you think the real reason is.
Oh really. Do you have any reputable source to back that up? How about even one verifiable, specific number? A single believable example? Surely if you did, as a "staunch supporter of using scientific method", you would have mentioned it.
You know, mostly, I just assume if people wanted info on creation they'd google for "creation", maybe "creation science" if they think nothing of creation relating to science is out there. That's honestly why I didn't link to anything. I guess I'm seeing that most people just don't know about the creation "scene". I call it a scene, I know, but really there is a whole area of people and of study out there surrounding origins. There is so much serious research and data out there.
Without further adieu, Answers in Genesis (quite solid, I think), True.Origin (quite impressive the history between them and Talk.Origins), Institute for Creation Research (can't vouch for them but they've been around), Creation Research, and, I wish I had this in front of me, but a few weeks ago I was reading this dense, dense study on the atmosphere, it's composition, and relating it to young earth concepts.
This is just an example of what I thought most people would do: Google for "creation". Those are the items of interest which I particularly respect or that have a history. There is a whole world of creation science out there just a google away.
Do you have even a basic appreciation for how much information we carry around in our DNA [go.com]?
You are amusingly abrasive. That's ok, I can take it. I have a fuller apprecation than you know, although I'm always willing to learn more. The linked article is interesting and something, as I've read the news over years, I've already thought about (ie. "junk dna" is just our name for something whose purpose we haven't figured out yet).
To answer the first question: it was brought about by one or more mutations. Either you didn't read the article, or you don't understand basic biology... or both. Your second question is invalid owing to the fact that you didn't know the answer to your first question.
Perhaps you want to read up on genetic mutation. My layman terms for pedant terms aren't really that confusing.
Did a mutation occur in which the genetic material acquired new information? My suggestion is that the mutation we're seeing is a re-expression of existing information.
I'll freely admit I believe in a six day creation. I'm a staunch supporter of using scientific method to establish what is true. Many will think there's a conflict there between that and my faith. But there isn't. There's an incredible amount of material out there and an incredible amount of very respected professionals who have both researched and believe in creation. I don't think there are many who comment on creation who actually know the creation science community and its work in-depth. I remember reading that article and I'm not sure what conclusion I came to at the time.
Having read the article, I'll make an observation and ask a question.
First, barring for the moment the article in question. what many have already noticed over the course of the past few hundred years is that there has been no observation of increased genetic information.
Do you remember that recent article about a deactivated anti-aids gene in chimps? if we hadn't known it was deactivated we might have said they evolved it to combat a modern pandemic of aids in the chimpanzee population. The interesting thing here is that the information was already there. Keep that in mind.
My question is probably pretty obvious by now: Was the new trait, in the referenced article, brought about by new information or was it brought out by a recombination of existing information? The crux being, can this bacteria evolve into something completely different because it's creating new information, given enough time, or is it not possible because it doesn't have the information already and can only recombine what information it has?
I'll just put this out there because seeing it in an alternate light is an awe-inspiring experience. When you give God just a little benefit of the doubt, assume he might actually be right, go out and see how this world's current state may have come about by what he's told us, you see that it's plausible, and you realize the intelligence, the wisdom, the intellect of that being, you just have to sit back, quite literally stunned.
That last point is no excuse for the tireless pursuit of truth. It's just that some people, having seen so far what the pursuit of truth has shown them, firmly believe that science will establish the integrity of what God has been telling us, unchanging, for six thousand years.
This is what I was talking about concerning "best tool for the job." You're throwing the baby out with the bath water because a very specific implementation detail isn't as efficient as it could be.
You have to think bigger picture. This is pretty much the only way to achieve accelerated graphics in the browser with open standards and decent penetration.
That's just it, I think you missed my point: What looks like a square peg based on little information is actually a round one based on more information.
Best tool for the job is nice and all. But, really, there are more things to consider than just what immediately seems pragmatic.
For instance, Word might be "the best tool for the job", but not in my books because of a number of things. Closed-source, expensive, anti-competitive, closed-format, etc.
As far as javascript + graphics go, it's not just about the fact that C is faster than JS. It's about the platform, the availability, the ease of use, the open standards, the de facto standards, etc.
Go ahead, try to achieve the same goal and see how far you get without tools that are already available en masse.
Sometimes "the best tool for the job" takes more into consideration that what immediately seems pragmatic.
It's important to note that "socialism done right" isn't what most would consider a socialist state. Instead, as with most things in life, it's somewhere in between the extremes of democracy, capitalism and socialism.
Not everything is black and white. Throwing out the good ideas of socialism is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Linus is respected but not liked.
I've acted like him in my youth and couldn't get away with it. I learned to be more personable.
The only reason Linus gets away with it is partly because he is an intelligent person and partly because of the stature of his position.
One day he will be an old man with no friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked at the nylonase case on wikipedia. Definitely interesting. It's not something I find totally unexpected, though.
I would not say the bacteria had been created with the ability to break down nylon molecules. I would say the bacteria was created to survive. Bacteria is more important to the earth than we give it credit for. Kill all humans and the earth would still need bacteria to maintain nature. So it's ability to survive matches very well with its responsibility in the grand scheme of things.
Here's an article I found enlightening on the broad subject:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v4/n1/beneficial-mutations-in-bacteria
As an aside, "survival of the fittest" is often far more closely associated with evolution than it is with creation - but I was struck one day how brilliant the idea is. If you could design a free-wheeling thing like this earth, how would you design it any other way? Hindsight is 20/20, they say. I look at it and I think it's an inspired concept. Any other mechanism would seem forced or faux in some way, I think.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/a-poke-in-the-eye
"Previous research has shown that wild-type E. coli can utilize citrate when oxygen levels are low."
In some of my previous posts, I've tried to convey the idea that perhaps we're not seeing new characteristics generate - rather we're seeing a reconfiguration / recombination / whatever of existing information.
As the quote says, it already knew how to use citrate. Creationists are fine with that. I think when you look closely at each example of evolution, this theme will keep coming up. The information was already there, it just needed to be flipped on or off or the genes reconfigured or recombined.
Ask yourself again if it's an evil broken system when you're on your deathbed for lack of medicine that could have been developed and manufactured cheaply had it not been for prohibitive licensing and monopolistic practices surrounding these patents.
This has already happened and continues to happen in other areas of medicine.
But "it's not my problem" and "it doesn't affect me"...yet.
There is nothing but shame in this.
Maybe I've never realized before how bad slashdot is at beating a dead horse. But, really, this is going overboard with apple stories of the least bit of consequence or relevance (barring this story for once). I'm starting to think slashdot doesn't have pre-arranged deals with apple, and others, but that they get paid if a submission does happen to come through and is approved.
I'm sorry, I find it very difficult to write these in-depth posts. I don't know why, it used to come easier. At any rate, that's my excuse for my tardy reply.
I know my explanations sometimes come off like "assume god is right," but I honestly try to word it in such a way as to deflect that.
The truth is I approach any biblical issue like anything else that needs proof. I see a statement implying truth and I say, ok, let's go out and prove it.
I honestly think most christians doubt their faith quite a bit, perhaps daily. They're not great doubts, they're just nagging doubts. Most christians work out their faith in a very internal way so you wouldn't notice. I often find my second-guessing my faith and I have to remember all the moments in my life that prompted my belief.
I think you should give them a little more understanding. People pose in public but mostly people aren't as hard as they appear.
Now that's where I came from. I had these things thrown at me, these flaws in the bible. I told myself that if I was going to believe in this god than his bible had better stand on its own. So I went out and found out how the bible does stand on its own.
Oh it's been happening for a lot longer than that. In any age where knowledge has been respected, wise men have "doubted" and people followed. Who wants a cosmic killjoy anyway? It's so much easier to just live without him anyway.
These religious quandaries have been going on ever since man was created. Many come to faith by it (and "faith" it is, in the end) and many do not.
I say it's a "faith" not because the bible gets things wrong--I don't believe it does after years of studying it and researching it--but I call it a faith because god, being outside his creation, may or may not be able to be observed by the laws inside the universe. That's why, when it comes right down to it, if we can not observe God, than belief in that God is a faith matter. Again, many have come to the conclusion that it's a natural conclusion to come to.
I've absolutely had that same thought that it's clear most religions are clearly man-made. The beautiful thing about God's faith is that it's downright topsy-tervy, not at all like what man would think up. It's foolishness.
God claims we're sinners and then provides an effortless way out? We sin, so God sacrifices the one person who couldn't be blamed to save us? God, the perfect one, provides forgiveness to us, in comparison worthless to a god? God puts up with Job questioning him? And then he turns around and doesn't answer a single question but raises more questions about just how strange and amazing this creation actually is? God uses sacrifices but never thought of the sacrifice of humans except in the single case it was least warranted? God calls King David a man after his own heart, this guy who slept with another man's wife and then had the man killed? I'd could go on and on and on...
Just thinking about all the little things God's word speaks about and which are absolutely not what man would've written about a religion...I am ceaselessly amazed.
I get this idea because
They do. It's called Ubuntu "There's no need to click that console icon or type ctrl-alt-f1" Klowny Koala.
I wonder, when you started questioning the integrity of your belief, did you keep going that route or did you try to make your faith prove itself?
I had a very similar situation. I considered myself a christian from 0-23 or so. For some reason, I told myself that I didn't want to believe a lie and if I didn't want that than my faith had better be true. So I put it to the test. I've had countless disussion about the integrity of the bible and of questions about the faith. Researching every accusation I came to the conclusion the bible resoundingly stands on its own. That cemented my faith.
I should note I didn't just test my own faith. I started researching other faiths to see if they were in fact true.
Sin is an interesting aspect of christianity. Many have argued that in order for there to be any free will at all - actions counter to what is good for you must be possible. And what is good for you is the point tht God was trying to make: That you should obey Him in everything that you do - which up to that point was just simply not eating of one tree. God created them and put them in a perfect situation. Is that the sign of someone with bad intentions?
That's so classic. The worst people are attracted to salvation? You betcha! It's only when you realize your depravity (simply because you couldn't keep up your own version of "good") that you realize you need salvation and there's nothing you can offer anymore for it. All you can do is except the grace that would save someone as unworthy as you or I are.
Jesus told the religious elite of his time that he came as a doctor, not to for those who were well, but for those who were sick. It's just that most people's pride blocks them from seeing or admitting they are just as sick as the worst offenders in society. And so those religious elite didn't get it. Even today many don't get it.
Are you claiming that, in your adulthood, you don't know the difference between right and wrong? We all know the difference. We know the difference in our own ways because we violate our own versions of how we "ought" to live - when we break our own code. And the amazing thing is God knows that not everyone has His absolute law of what is right or wrong - but he made each of us know within degrees how we should be acting. That's how we know something's messed up. That's a prompting to go and look for something - that something is God who has been telling us a single thing for all eternity: Follow Him.
No, I'm not trolling. I'm not in school so, no, not trapped in any school teaching questionable topics. I would love to hear the factual errors, I'm all about knowing what is the truth.
That's really interesting. I've always thought many people put God in a box so we can understand him. Some christians go along with evolution because it makes things really simple: God is God and, if I don't think about it too much, evolution is an unproblematic way that things came to be.
What I'm doing is sitting back, letting God say his piece, giving him the benefit of the doubt, going out and seeing if he's on crack or not.
My idea of giving the "benefit of the doubt" is counter to what I see many people do. What I see are people who love the idea of a faith and a god but then they go and ignore the texts they call holy and think that certain thigns can fit into the bible.
My view on the bible is that it is way too coherent and way too cohesive to be, for example, shoe-horning evolution into the account of creation.
I would not believe in a god who couldn't get his bible right. What I've found, through numerous discussions just like this, is that the bible has proven itself time and again.
Hashed? The guy made a brilliantly elegant, partly organized and partly chaotic...complete universe. It's work of art.
Yeah the "faked evidence" bit is a popular conception of the account of creation. When you really get into it there's really much, much more going on. Why do things look so old? I don't know exactly off the top of my head. Try googling "starlight and time". It's an interesting cosmological theory that tries to solve some time problems while taking the genesis at its word. It may not stand the test of time but I've always been impressed at the outside the box thinking. The flood of genesis, and the surrounding issues of what the world was like before and after, may also be related in many ways to why the world appears old. Note this is all due to calibration of dating methodologies which make assumptions about half-lives and life spans.
Hey, no qualms there, God is smarter than I give him credit for. Nobody will ever truly fathom him until, perhaps, we die and see what's what
On first im
Wow. I'm impressed you took the time to rip apart my post line for line. That's good. We need more dissections of errant posts around here.
I certainly hope nobody does that. This kind of discussion is exactly what is needed.
I've made two or three posts now and I've already got someone questioning my user ID. Awesome. I suppose it doesn't count for anything I've been reading here since the 90s? Why join now? I didn't think it was worth it before. I enjoy the site. I read a lot of the discussion. I saw a lot of misinformation on my hot button topics I thought I'd like to weigh into, though, so I thought I'd join after hearing my buddy join up recently too.
And, yes, I'd love to know what you think the real reason is.
You know, mostly, I just assume if people wanted info on creation they'd google for "creation", maybe "creation science" if they think nothing of creation relating to science is out there. That's honestly why I didn't link to anything. I guess I'm seeing that most people just don't know about the creation "scene". I call it a scene, I know, but really there is a whole area of people and of study out there surrounding origins. There is so much serious research and data out there.
Without further adieu, Answers in Genesis (quite solid, I think), True.Origin (quite impressive the history between them and Talk.Origins), Institute for Creation Research (can't vouch for them but they've been around), Creation Research, and, I wish I had this in front of me, but a few weeks ago I was reading this dense, dense study on the atmosphere, it's composition, and relating it to young earth concepts.
This is just an example of what I thought most people would do: Google for "creation". Those are the items of interest which I particularly respect or that have a history. There is a whole world of creation science out there just a google away.
You are amusingly abrasive. That's ok, I can take it. I have a fuller apprecation than you know, although I'm always willing to learn more. The linked article is interesting and something, as I've read the news over years, I've already thought about (ie. "junk dna" is just our name for something whose purpose we haven't figured out yet).
Perhaps you want to read up on genetic mutation. My layman terms for pedant terms aren't really that confusing.
Did a mutation occur in which the genetic material acquired new information? My suggestion is that the mutation we're seeing is a re-expression of existing information.
I'll freely admit I believe in a six day creation. I'm a staunch supporter of using scientific method to establish what is true. Many will think there's a conflict there between that and my faith. But there isn't. There's an incredible amount of material out there and an incredible amount of very respected professionals who have both researched and believe in creation. I don't think there are many who comment on creation who actually know the creation science community and its work in-depth. I remember reading that article and I'm not sure what conclusion I came to at the time.
Having read the article, I'll make an observation and ask a question.
First, barring for the moment the article in question. what many have already noticed over the course of the past few hundred years is that there has been no observation of increased genetic information.
Do you remember that recent article about a deactivated anti-aids gene in chimps? if we hadn't known it was deactivated we might have said they evolved it to combat a modern pandemic of aids in the chimpanzee population. The interesting thing here is that the information was already there. Keep that in mind.
My question is probably pretty obvious by now: Was the new trait, in the referenced article, brought about by new information or was it brought out by a recombination of existing information? The crux being, can this bacteria evolve into something completely different because it's creating new information, given enough time, or is it not possible because it doesn't have the information already and can only recombine what information it has?
I'll just put this out there because seeing it in an alternate light is an awe-inspiring experience. When you give God just a little benefit of the doubt, assume he might actually be right, go out and see how this world's current state may have come about by what he's told us, you see that it's plausible, and you realize the intelligence, the wisdom, the intellect of that being, you just have to sit back, quite literally stunned.
That last point is no excuse for the tireless pursuit of truth. It's just that some people, having seen so far what the pursuit of truth has shown them, firmly believe that science will establish the integrity of what God has been telling us, unchanging, for six thousand years.
This is what I was talking about concerning "best tool for the job." You're throwing the baby out with the bath water because a very specific implementation detail isn't as efficient as it could be.
You have to think bigger picture. This is pretty much the only way to achieve accelerated graphics in the browser with open standards and decent penetration.
That's just it, I think you missed my point: What looks like a square peg based on little information is actually a round one based on more information.
Best tool for the job is nice and all. But, really, there are more things to consider than just what immediately seems pragmatic.
For instance, Word might be "the best tool for the job", but not in my books because of a number of things. Closed-source, expensive, anti-competitive, closed-format, etc.
As far as javascript + graphics go, it's not just about the fact that C is faster than JS. It's about the platform, the availability, the ease of use, the open standards, the de facto standards, etc.
Go ahead, try to achieve the same goal and see how far you get without tools that are already available en masse.
Sometimes "the best tool for the job" takes more into consideration that what immediately seems pragmatic.
I was wondering about that sig, too.
It's important to note that "socialism done right" isn't what most would consider a socialist state. Instead, as with most things in life, it's somewhere in between the extremes of democracy, capitalism and socialism.
Not everything is black and white. Throwing out the good ideas of socialism is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Linus is respected but not liked. I've acted like him in my youth and couldn't get away with it. I learned to be more personable. The only reason Linus gets away with it is partly because he is an intelligent person and partly because of the stature of his position. One day he will be an old man with no friends.