This paper said in the summary that this process leads to "realignment of chromosomes at themetaphase plate." So, they do not merge back into one.
What the scientists were mostly concerned with is the fact that this supported the theory that a particular protein directed cell division, at least during a certain phase. The partial reversal of mitosis was just an interesting side effect. The medical and other biological research interest comes in place because now that we have identified this protein and proven that it is indeed the one that regulates mitosis, we can prevent further mitosis by the use of an inhibitor chemical. While this may seem to be a possible cure for cancer, such a discovery would be extremely difficult to put into practice as a pill you take or shot you take. This inhibitor would likely suspend mitosis of ALL cells, breaking down the functioning of many biological processes. Unless a compound is found that preferentially affects cancer cells, which may be possible due to the high division rate in some forms of cancer. This would have little to no effect on cancers caused by a failure in apoptosis. Then again "Cancer" is just a blanket term for a large number of different disorders in which a group of cells grows and divides without control, causing detriment to the rest of the body. Making cancer study mroe difficult is that it often takes failures in several different control systems for a cell to become carcinogenic, as there is a fair bit of redundancy built into these sytems. A "predisposition" to a certain type of cancer often means that one of the inherited genes controlling one arm of the control system is already flawed, so less somatic mutations are required before carcinogenesis. Inherited failure in too many of the control pathways would probably result in termination or developmental failure at a very early stage of embryonic development.
The whole reason for the "stem cell" line was the will President Bush cap Google's eligibility at 78 stem cell lines bit. Just some journalist trying to sound clever by throwing out a piece of pop-trivia, but not realizing that it went out of fad to talk about it a while ago. And trying to craft some FUD out of thing air. The jab at G.W.B is just gravy on the cake.
With iPods, I believe the "hide in the pocket" potentiral works more for the thief than the potential victims. People listening to their iPod usually have the signature white headphones (although some companies are coming out with copycat white earbuds because people want the look without necesarilly having an iPod) so thieves know pretty much who has one. The thief, once he has the iPod, can hid it in HIS pocket untill he knows he made a clean getaway. If this was a bulky laptop or something, it would be easier to yell "stop the thief with the laptio."
Although I suppose not being in a pocket does allow for some crimes of opportunity... setting the laptop down unguarded for just a minute while the owner goes to the bathroom, gets another cup of coffee, goes outside for a cigarette or... whatever... an iPod would go with the owner.
I never said this DISPROVES a personal god, but it does show that the personal god as described in... well... most western monotheistic religions is not actually necessary for us to have gotten from a single cell floating around in a broth to the walking, thinking, complex organism that we are today. This makes the existance of that god less likely, as there is an alternative path of events that could have happened, as defined by natural laws, for us to get where we are today.
If I go somewhere to eat and there are only hamburgers on the menu, I will order a hamburger (assuming that I order something, but us existing would be the correlary to ordering SOMETHING off the menu.) If there are hamburgers and chicken salad on the menu, it is less likely that I will order the hamburger as I could order the chicken salad instead. Wow... did I just compare god to a hamburger?????
You had me worried for a little bit, so I did some looking around. Modern theories state that it wasn't even RNA that was the original genetic carrier, but self replicating proteins. Turns out it would have statistically taken somewhere around the order of one year for the creation of a self replicating protein to arise on the primordial earth. That gives plenty of time for that self replicating protein to have a couple of chances at being in the right place at the right time in the right conditions to bootstrap the life process..
I don't know that we have as of yet been able so show a living cell bootstrap from basic inert materials (I'm using non-living as the definition of inert in this context. There may be a better word, but I didn't think "dead" would be appropriate, as it has an implication of "once was living".)
However, it has been shown that many organic materials can be created in an environment similar to primordial earth. It has also been shown that many of these materials do tend to self-organize in a way that would be compatible with a cell possibly forming given enough organic material and time.
Cell wall: phospholipids, mostly being hydrophobic with one or two ends being hydrophilic tend to organize in sheets or water filled bubbles, and so could naturally form a cell wall. Amino acids do self aggragate to some extent, and a random aggregation could form a useful protein, ditto for RNA (which I believe preceded DNA evolutionarilly for a number of reasons.)
There is only one protein that would have to aggregate naturally before life as we know it could arise... ribosomes (or some suitable analog.) From there RNA could be transcribed into protein. At first most of the protein would pretty much be useless globs, untill a protein arises that can create copies of RNA. This protein could either aggregate naturally or be encoded by random chance into a strand or RNA. From there Darwinian evolution kicks in and as more beneficial RNA sequences come about that improve the transcription process and copying mechanism as well as the defense mechanisms, cellular life would not be too wild of an outcome. The progression of life would seem to be fairly slow at first, but the copying mechanism in RNA would probably be so imperfect that new variations arise very frequently, but most of those variations would likely be detrimental. Eventually better copying mechanisms arise, and eventually use of a more stable genetic material (DNA) make life blossom, expanding at a decent pace. Once some organism figured out a way to systematically capture and store energy from sunlight (or any energy source, really... thermal vents, gradiants across a thermo/chemocline etc) and a way to release that energy, then evolution can start proceeding at an exponential rate.
So, if it can be proven that a ribosome or some other RNA-Protein copying method could eventually arise from a random mix of amino acids it would greatly support the possibility of some method of abiogenesis. It does not have to be likely that this ribosome would arise in a human time scale... it could take millions or billions of years. It just has to happen eventually.
Complex hemes, carbohydrates and many other materials that are necessary for life at a complexity of ours would not be necessary to bootstrap the system from inert materials. Just some strands of RNA and something like a ribosome. Once you have those, something as complex as an RNA transcriptase could eventually arise from random permutations of RNA strands. And once you have RNA that has RNA -> RNA transcriptase encoded somewhere inside of itself and has some ribosome analogue working on it, then you have the bare bones beginning of organic life.
To be fair, evolution does not disprove of A god...
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities, and so is a reason to behave in a moral way and more importantly, to then worship that god and tithe to the church who claims to be the bridge between man and god.
(Note, I was not saying that atheists are not moral with the "is a reason to behave..." line, but for some people the existance of a personal god is one of the reasons to behave in a moral manner.)
I was referring more to the extra development time that would go into making the system robust enough to release, and then the exponential level of testing and redevelopment when you do run into issues. I think Apple would not use their customer base as Alpha or even Beta testers...
Although I am sure that there are people at Apple hired to crunch the numbers to find out how much it would cost to do this, including losses of sales from the hardware end vs the amount of money they would make and predicting long term marketshare impact. And the price of a "war" against Microsoft. If they think it will benefit their bottom line and business plan, then they will do it. I just think it would take some major change in the field to make this a reasonable move.
Then again, I'm not an industry analyst. I'm just going on gut feeling.
Something disturbing about a user with the name "bloodstains" posting "I want a Pony."
Something very disturbing about that. And it somehow seems disturbing on more than one level. I'm just going to try to stop thinking about it before I realize just what those levels are.
Jobs already went down that road with the x86 version of NextStep, and then OpenStep, when NeXT stopped making hardware. They couldn't make sufficient money on it, even with OS prices of several hundred dollars per unit. How has the equation changed?
The equation has changed in that OSX is a product that a large number of consumers have heard of and, more importantly, may be interested in. NeXT was something that only a limited number of people had even heard about (I'm talking Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie here... people for who MacOS would be vastly more suited than windows is.
The reason Apple can't do it is because if it doesn't work on someone's particular configuration, "Some random guy on the internet" isn't going to have to put in all the tech support trying to get it working right and suffer massive PR flack for messing it up in the first place. Apple will have all that against them. That means that Apple has to make their bootstrapper much more robust and flexible than SRGOTI.
I should probably explain what I meant by direct inheritance. It probably was not the correct term. I was referring to a "true breeding" trait which all descendants of an individual with the trait would carry. This particular trait can only be expressed in the heterozygous condition. Heterozygous only traits follow an erratic path of inheritance. True, many types have been well documented and studied. I just can't think of many where the heterozygous condition is more beneficial than either homozygous state, without one of the homozygous states being crippling. Things like the malaria/sickle cell anemia connection, etc. Hmm... actually now that I think of it there are some traits involving the immune system which produce more fit offspring in the heterozygous state (I.E. genes which allow for the coding to fight off certain types of infection. The individual gene can be for agent A or agent a. A homozygous AA would be susceptible to agent a, and a homozygous aa would be susceptible to agent A. A heterozygote with Aa would not be susceptible to either A or a.
I guess what I was trying to say is that this is a different pattern of inheritance than those most studied (or at least taught in undergraduate biology classes) such as classic dominant/recessive traits or the occasional continuum traits (such as in labrador retrievers, where chocolate coat color is the heterozygous condition between yellow and black alleles.)
Yes, tetrachromacy is heritable to some extent, but it follows a different path of inheritance than most of the well studied traits that I am personally familiar with.
I believe that by "meaningless" they mean it does not matter to human beings what happened before the big bang, as anything outside of this universe has no effect on us, and there is no way we can observe or affect anything outside of the universe. There may be multiverses, but we currently have no theories as to how to pass objects or even information between them.
Science comes in again with the score... there are many many animals with a very primative "eyespot" which can not actually form an image but only tell whether or not there is light (or maybe light level.) This is extremely useful evolutionarilly... it might help the organism get to the right depth in the water, help in predator avoidance and prey finding by knowing when something is passing over, and I suppose it helps to determine if it is day or night, which could be of some use.
Going from this extremely simple eyespot to a human eye can be accomplished in many many litlle concrete steps which can be accounted for by evolution. The nervous system is plastic enough that there is probably very little genetic change that needs to occur on the brain in order to make some use of the finer and finer visual information that a more complex eye brings.
All that is required for humans to go from 3 to 4 color vision (and obslete RGB color space...) is for this mutation to be active in some, but not all cells.
For this to be a heritable trait, the mutation pretty much has to happen in a gamete (egg or sperm) cell or reproductive stem cell which eventually produces gametes. I believe the female tetrachromacy is a not exactly related to direct inheritance, but a fluke of the difference between men and women. Females have inherited two copies of the X chromosome which Males have one copy of the X and one copy of the Y. The X chromosome does not work when paired with another active X chromosome in the same cell (insert joke about women not able to work together.) So what happens is that fairly early on in life individual cells will either express the maternal X chromosome or the paternal X chromosome, and the other will be essentially never used again in that cell or any cell that descends from it. This is a fairly random pattern and so there will be patches of maternal X chromosome and patches of paternal X chromosome.
The best visual image of this is a tortishell pattern in female cats which is a direct result of this phenomenon, in which one color is inherited on the maternal X chromosome while another color of the pattern is inherited from the paternal X chromosome. This is why the tortishell pattern is only found on female cats (except for the rare case of a polyploid XXY male, who is generally sterile.) The calico pattern is similar, except it is not so much an inherited color as an inherited pattern that is passed down in this "patchwork mosaic" style. A technically more accurate description is "a tortishell of orange and black/white" or some similar, but... on to the topic.
This patchwork mosaic style of cell formation is likely what is causing the tetrachromacy, with a mutation in one of the inherited X chromosomes resonating with a slightly different frequency of light. If there happens to be patchwork in the eyes, then indeed it would be trivial to be able to be tetrachromatic. This probably also explains why red/green colorblindness is so much more prevalent in males: a disfunctioning receptor is the mutation rather than a different natural frequency. While if men inherit this dysfunctional receptor, they are red/green color blind. If one of the copies that a woman inherits is dysfunctionl, there is a chance that the other copy of the same gene will be active somewhere in an eye. So, there are probably a significant number of women who could be clumsilly described as "tetrachromatic, with the fourth color not functioning." Yeah... I'm going to stop now.
It seems to me to be more satisfying to see the evolution of human beings not as contingent and accidental but as a contingent and purposeful miracle, ie as the creative act of God.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying to never die.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if it were warm enough outside for me to go outside in shorts and a t-shirt.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if I had won the $174million powerball lottery last night.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if there was a gorgeous readheaded woman giving me a massage at this very moment.
Doesn't mean that any of this is true. Guess what... there is no inherent meaning to life. Your desire for their to be meaning doesn't automatically make God exist. The only meaning is that which you make inside of yourself.
The prediction part wasn't so much that we would find some creature that fits the age, the situation is more like this. Evolutionists realized this creature must have existed in order to get from water to land. The prediction comes in that, before we actually found the fossil, we had a good idea of what the fossil would look like, what type of stone it would be found in, what age it would be, etc etc etc. The predictions we had about the fossil helped us to find it. While evolution requires the fossil to exist, evolutionary science predicted where to find it.
irreducible complexity is not as watertight as you may think. The situations described as "irreducible" could be achieved through other methods. The general examples of irreducible complexity are proteins which only work together in a group of, we'll say 3 for this example. According to IC, if you remove one of the proteins then the whole system does not work. The chance of the three proteins spontaneously evolving to fill the use is so infintessimal that it could not have happened naturally.
However what IC fails to see is that these "irreducibly complex" situations could arise in a different manner: the system could have arisen at first with one protein, then another protein eventually comes about which makes the system more effective, and then another, then another protein. Eventually a protein arises which works so well with, say proteins 2 and 5 that none of the other proteins are needed anymore. Since making proteins is costly both resource wise and energetically, there is an evolutionary pressure to stop making those proteins which are essentially redundant. Eventually, you are left with a number of proteins which work very efficiently TOGETHER but would be worthless on their own. The situation could be more of a REDUCED complexity than an irreducible complexity.
Regarding not being able to learn music, there are several possibilities (I don't know enough about your personal background (actually, I know nothing about your musical background) so these may not apply to you.) Sorry if any of these sounds like insults, it's just conversation and mental excercise
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
2) It is possible that you are simply tone deaf. Not meant to be an insult. Some people have innate "perfect pitch" and can replicate any tone given to them. Some people are on the other end of the spectrum and have a very difficult time differentiating between any pitches. This seems to be mostly a physiological limitation of some sort, although practice can move one significantly closer to the "perfect pitch" end of the spectrum. (Personally, I don't have "traditional" perfect pitch in which I can hear a tone and tell if it middle C or not, but am fairly decent at discerning relative pitches... E.G. if one note is four steps above another, if one pitch is an octave double of another, etc etc.)
3) The people who tried to teach you how to read music may have simply not been good teachers in this particular field.
4) Whether or not the reading music was in an attempt to learn an instrunment that you are interested in playing can make a big difference. And some instrunments are more suited for learning to read music: the piano being pretty much ideal as it is laid out in pretty much the exact form that sheet music is written in. But I think whether or not you are actually interested in learning that particular instrunment is more important (assuming a melodic instrunment... learning to play drums or other rhythmic instrunments would not help.)
5) Many of the other details in your post imply that you are an extremely visual thinker as opposed to verbal. Your relative ability to play tetris over doing a crossword puzzle is very telling of this. Even your doing poorly early on in school and then finally racing ahead is very telling. Much of early education seems to be rote memorization, which is done better in a verbal mindframe. Since speech is a linear process it would seem logical that memorizing lists of facts etc would come easier to a verbal thinker. Defining a visual thinker is a bit difficult to do with words, but it is my opinion that the thought processes are not nearly as linear and there are multiple parallel concepts being processed at the same time. This allows for a greater ease in learning certain abstract topics which would only come into play later in an academic career. I believe that visual thinkers have a little bit more difficult time learning a completely foreign topic. This is because (in my opinion) that visual thinkers need to compare the thing being learned to other related ideas. But once a few key concepts in the area are known, it becomes quite trivial for the visual learner to visualize the patterns of how other concepts link into the framework of the entire topic or discipline. This could possibly be compared to object oriented programming, where once a class is set up all the information and functions contained within can then be reused by something which needs it. A visual mode of thinking means that you have to have a baseline knowledge built up to be a
And not to mention... that graph does indeed show that the actual debt, when corrected for inflation, declined during the clinton years... which means a net surplus for that time. Now, I'm not giving full credit to Clinton on this, a lot of it being a strong economy at the time (and therefore higher taxes) due in large to the dot.com era tech bubble. But then again, the econmy was pretty strong in the 80's under Reagan, and look what the debt did during that time.
Really makes sense considering that FULLY HALF of the current budget is in military related expenses. I mean... of course the united states has to spend more on its military than the rest of the world... combined.
The problem is that omnipotent does indeed mean able to do anything. Otherwise you and I would be omnipotent... because I know that I can do anything that is possible for me to do.
This study doesn't prove that prayer is useless...
It just shows that praying for someone else is.
But seriously, this would be quite the difficult experiment to pull off as a true double blind. I'm just picturing that if prayer is beneficial, a congregation of strangers in a sterile room praying that "patient 2342A" gets a speedy recovery wouldn't exactly get the same results as your friends and loved ones praying in a church, their homes, a forest or wherever. And if you just do a case study history comparing recovery rates of those who had people praying for them vs. those who did not have people praying for them, it would seem obvious that those with people praying for them would have better recovery rates due simply to the extended support system likely provided by those praying.
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This paper said in the summary that this process leads to "realignment of chromosomes at themetaphase plate." So, they do not merge back into one.
What the scientists were mostly concerned with is the fact that this supported the theory that a particular protein directed cell division, at least during a certain phase. The partial reversal of mitosis was just an interesting side effect. The medical and other biological research interest comes in place because now that we have identified this protein and proven that it is indeed the one that regulates mitosis, we can prevent further mitosis by the use of an inhibitor chemical. While this may seem to be a possible cure for cancer, such a discovery would be extremely difficult to put into practice as a pill you take or shot you take. This inhibitor would likely suspend mitosis of ALL cells, breaking down the functioning of many biological processes. Unless a compound is found that preferentially affects cancer cells, which may be possible due to the high division rate in some forms of cancer. This would have little to no effect on cancers caused by a failure in apoptosis. Then again "Cancer" is just a blanket term for a large number of different disorders in which a group of cells grows and divides without control, causing detriment to the rest of the body. Making cancer study mroe difficult is that it often takes failures in several different control systems for a cell to become carcinogenic, as there is a fair bit of redundancy built into these sytems. A "predisposition" to a certain type of cancer often means that one of the inherited genes controlling one arm of the control system is already flawed, so less somatic mutations are required before carcinogenesis. Inherited failure in too many of the control pathways would probably result in termination or developmental failure at a very early stage of embryonic development.
My guess is that the power requirements for this thing would be WAY too much for a satellite to manage.
The whole reason for the "stem cell" line was the will President Bush cap Google's eligibility at 78 stem cell lines bit. Just some journalist trying to sound clever by throwing out a piece of pop-trivia, but not realizing that it went out of fad to talk about it a while ago. And trying to craft some FUD out of thing air. The jab at G.W.B is just gravy on the cake.
With iPods, I believe the "hide in the pocket" potentiral works more for the thief than the potential victims. People listening to their iPod usually have the signature white headphones (although some companies are coming out with copycat white earbuds because people want the look without necesarilly having an iPod) so thieves know pretty much who has one. The thief, once he has the iPod, can hid it in HIS pocket untill he knows he made a clean getaway. If this was a bulky laptop or something, it would be easier to yell "stop the thief with the laptio."
Although I suppose not being in a pocket does allow for some crimes of opportunity... setting the laptop down unguarded for just a minute while the owner goes to the bathroom, gets another cup of coffee, goes outside for a cigarette or... whatever... an iPod would go with the owner.
I never said this DISPROVES a personal god, but it does show that the personal god as described in... well... most western monotheistic religions is not actually necessary for us to have gotten from a single cell floating around in a broth to the walking, thinking, complex organism that we are today. This makes the existance of that god less likely, as there is an alternative path of events that could have happened, as defined by natural laws, for us to get where we are today.
If I go somewhere to eat and there are only hamburgers on the menu, I will order a hamburger (assuming that I order something, but us existing would be the correlary to ordering SOMETHING off the menu.) If there are hamburgers and chicken salad on the menu, it is less likely that I will order the hamburger as I could order the chicken salad instead. Wow... did I just compare god to a hamburger?????
You had me worried for a little bit, so I did some looking around. Modern theories state that it wasn't even RNA that was the original genetic carrier, but self replicating proteins. Turns out it would have statistically taken somewhere around the order of one year for the creation of a self replicating protein to arise on the primordial earth. That gives plenty of time for that self replicating protein to have a couple of chances at being in the right place at the right time in the right conditions to bootstrap the life process..
I don't know that we have as of yet been able so show a living cell bootstrap from basic inert materials (I'm using non-living as the definition of inert in this context. There may be a better word, but I didn't think "dead" would be appropriate, as it has an implication of "once was living".)
However, it has been shown that many organic materials can be created in an environment similar to primordial earth. It has also been shown that many of these materials do tend to self-organize in a way that would be compatible with a cell possibly forming given enough organic material and time.
Cell wall: phospholipids, mostly being hydrophobic with one or two ends being hydrophilic tend to organize in sheets or water filled bubbles, and so could naturally form a cell wall. Amino acids do self aggragate to some extent, and a random aggregation could form a useful protein, ditto for RNA (which I believe preceded DNA evolutionarilly for a number of reasons.)
There is only one protein that would have to aggregate naturally before life as we know it could arise... ribosomes (or some suitable analog.) From there RNA could be transcribed into protein. At first most of the protein would pretty much be useless globs, untill a protein arises that can create copies of RNA. This protein could either aggregate naturally or be encoded by random chance into a strand or RNA. From there Darwinian evolution kicks in and as more beneficial RNA sequences come about that improve the transcription process and copying mechanism as well as the defense mechanisms, cellular life would not be too wild of an outcome. The progression of life would seem to be fairly slow at first, but the copying mechanism in RNA would probably be so imperfect that new variations arise very frequently, but most of those variations would likely be detrimental. Eventually better copying mechanisms arise, and eventually use of a more stable genetic material (DNA) make life blossom, expanding at a decent pace. Once some organism figured out a way to systematically capture and store energy from sunlight (or any energy source, really... thermal vents, gradiants across a thermo/chemocline etc) and a way to release that energy, then evolution can start proceeding at an exponential rate.
So, if it can be proven that a ribosome or some other RNA-Protein copying method could eventually arise from a random mix of amino acids it would greatly support the possibility of some method of abiogenesis. It does not have to be likely that this ribosome would arise in a human time scale... it could take millions or billions of years. It just has to happen eventually.
Complex hemes, carbohydrates and many other materials that are necessary for life at a complexity of ours would not be necessary to bootstrap the system from inert materials. Just some strands of RNA and something like a ribosome. Once you have those, something as complex as an RNA transcriptase could eventually arise from random permutations of RNA strands. And once you have RNA that has RNA -> RNA transcriptase encoded somewhere inside of itself and has some ribosome analogue working on it, then you have the bare bones beginning of organic life.
To be fair, evolution does not disprove of A god...
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities, and so is a reason to behave in a moral way and more importantly, to then worship that god and tithe to the church who claims to be the bridge between man and god.
(Note, I was not saying that atheists are not moral with the "is a reason to behave..." line, but for some people the existance of a personal god is one of the reasons to behave in a moral manner.)
I was referring more to the extra development time that would go into making the system robust enough to release, and then the exponential level of testing and redevelopment when you do run into issues. I think Apple would not use their customer base as Alpha or even Beta testers...
Although I am sure that there are people at Apple hired to crunch the numbers to find out how much it would cost to do this, including losses of sales from the hardware end vs the amount of money they would make and predicting long term marketshare impact. And the price of a "war" against Microsoft. If they think it will benefit their bottom line and business plan, then they will do it. I just think it would take some major change in the field to make this a reasonable move.
Then again, I'm not an industry analyst. I'm just going on gut feeling.
Something disturbing about a user with the name "bloodstains" posting "I want a Pony."
Something very disturbing about that. And it somehow seems disturbing on more than one level. I'm just going to try to stop thinking about it before I realize just what those levels are.
Jobs already went down that road with the x86 version of NextStep, and then OpenStep, when NeXT stopped making hardware. They couldn't make sufficient money on it, even with OS prices of several hundred dollars per unit. How has the equation changed?
The equation has changed in that OSX is a product that a large number of consumers have heard of and, more importantly, may be interested in. NeXT was something that only a limited number of people had even heard about (I'm talking Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie here... people for who MacOS would be vastly more suited than windows is.
The reason Apple can't do it is because if it doesn't work on someone's particular configuration, "Some random guy on the internet" isn't going to have to put in all the tech support trying to get it working right and suffer massive PR flack for messing it up in the first place. Apple will have all that against them. That means that Apple has to make their bootstrapper much more robust and flexible than SRGOTI.
I should probably explain what I meant by direct inheritance. It probably was not the correct term. I was referring to a "true breeding" trait which all descendants of an individual with the trait would carry. This particular trait can only be expressed in the heterozygous condition. Heterozygous only traits follow an erratic path of inheritance. True, many types have been well documented and studied. I just can't think of many where the heterozygous condition is more beneficial than either homozygous state, without one of the homozygous states being crippling. Things like the malaria/sickle cell anemia connection, etc. Hmm... actually now that I think of it there are some traits involving the immune system which produce more fit offspring in the heterozygous state (I.E. genes which allow for the coding to fight off certain types of infection. The individual gene can be for agent A or agent a. A homozygous AA would be susceptible to agent a, and a homozygous aa would be susceptible to agent A. A heterozygote with Aa would not be susceptible to either A or a.
I guess what I was trying to say is that this is a different pattern of inheritance than those most studied (or at least taught in undergraduate biology classes) such as classic dominant/recessive traits or the occasional continuum traits (such as in labrador retrievers, where chocolate coat color is the heterozygous condition between yellow and black alleles.)
Yes, tetrachromacy is heritable to some extent, but it follows a different path of inheritance than most of the well studied traits that I am personally familiar with.
I believe that by "meaningless" they mean it does not matter to human beings what happened before the big bang, as anything outside of this universe has no effect on us, and there is no way we can observe or affect anything outside of the universe. There may be multiverses, but we currently have no theories as to how to pass objects or even information between them.
Science comes in again with the score... there are many many animals with a very primative "eyespot" which can not actually form an image but only tell whether or not there is light (or maybe light level.) This is extremely useful evolutionarilly... it might help the organism get to the right depth in the water, help in predator avoidance and prey finding by knowing when something is passing over, and I suppose it helps to determine if it is day or night, which could be of some use.
Going from this extremely simple eyespot to a human eye can be accomplished in many many litlle concrete steps which can be accounted for by evolution. The nervous system is plastic enough that there is probably very little genetic change that needs to occur on the brain in order to make some use of the finer and finer visual information that a more complex eye brings.
All that is required for humans to go from 3 to 4 color vision (and obslete RGB color space...) is for this mutation to be active in some, but not all cells.
For this to be a heritable trait, the mutation pretty much has to happen in a gamete (egg or sperm) cell or reproductive stem cell which eventually produces gametes. I believe the female tetrachromacy is a not exactly related to direct inheritance, but a fluke of the difference between men and women. Females have inherited two copies of the X chromosome which Males have one copy of the X and one copy of the Y. The X chromosome does not work when paired with another active X chromosome in the same cell (insert joke about women not able to work together.) So what happens is that fairly early on in life individual cells will either express the maternal X chromosome or the paternal X chromosome, and the other will be essentially never used again in that cell or any cell that descends from it. This is a fairly random pattern and so there will be patches of maternal X chromosome and patches of paternal X chromosome.
The best visual image of this is a tortishell pattern in female cats which is a direct result of this phenomenon, in which one color is inherited on the maternal X chromosome while another color of the pattern is inherited from the paternal X chromosome. This is why the tortishell pattern is only found on female cats (except for the rare case of a polyploid XXY male, who is generally sterile.) The calico pattern is similar, except it is not so much an inherited color as an inherited pattern that is passed down in this "patchwork mosaic" style. A technically more accurate description is "a tortishell of orange and black/white" or some similar, but... on to the topic.
This patchwork mosaic style of cell formation is likely what is causing the tetrachromacy, with a mutation in one of the inherited X chromosomes resonating with a slightly different frequency of light. If there happens to be patchwork in the eyes, then indeed it would be trivial to be able to be tetrachromatic. This probably also explains why red/green colorblindness is so much more prevalent in males: a disfunctioning receptor is the mutation rather than a different natural frequency. While if men inherit this dysfunctional receptor, they are red/green color blind. If one of the copies that a woman inherits is dysfunctionl, there is a chance that the other copy of the same gene will be active somewhere in an eye. So, there are probably a significant number of women who could be clumsilly described as "tetrachromatic, with the fourth color not functioning." Yeah... I'm going to stop now.
It seems to me to be more satisfying to see the evolution of human beings not as contingent and accidental but as a contingent and purposeful miracle, ie as the creative act of God.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying to never die.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if it were warm enough outside for me to go outside in shorts and a t-shirt.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if I had won the $174million powerball lottery last night.
It seems to me that it would be more satisfying if there was a gorgeous readheaded woman giving me a massage at this very moment.
Doesn't mean that any of this is true. Guess what... there is no inherent meaning to life. Your desire for their to be meaning doesn't automatically make God exist. The only meaning is that which you make inside of yourself.
The prediction part wasn't so much that we would find some creature that fits the age, the situation is more like this. Evolutionists realized this creature must have existed in order to get from water to land. The prediction comes in that, before we actually found the fossil, we had a good idea of what the fossil would look like, what type of stone it would be found in, what age it would be, etc etc etc. The predictions we had about the fossil helped us to find it. While evolution requires the fossil to exist, evolutionary science predicted where to find it.
irreducible complexity is not as watertight as you may think. The situations described as "irreducible" could be achieved through other methods. The general examples of irreducible complexity are proteins which only work together in a group of, we'll say 3 for this example. According to IC, if you remove one of the proteins then the whole system does not work. The chance of the three proteins spontaneously evolving to fill the use is so infintessimal that it could not have happened naturally.
However what IC fails to see is that these "irreducibly complex" situations could arise in a different manner: the system could have arisen at first with one protein, then another protein eventually comes about which makes the system more effective, and then another, then another protein. Eventually a protein arises which works so well with, say proteins 2 and 5 that none of the other proteins are needed anymore. Since making proteins is costly both resource wise and energetically, there is an evolutionary pressure to stop making those proteins which are essentially redundant. Eventually, you are left with a number of proteins which work very efficiently TOGETHER but would be worthless on their own. The situation could be more of a REDUCED complexity than an irreducible complexity.
Regarding not being able to learn music, there are several possibilities (I don't know enough about your personal background (actually, I know nothing about your musical background) so these may not apply to you.) Sorry if any of these sounds like insults, it's just conversation and mental excercise
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
2) It is possible that you are simply tone deaf. Not meant to be an insult. Some people have innate "perfect pitch" and can replicate any tone given to them. Some people are on the other end of the spectrum and have a very difficult time differentiating between any pitches. This seems to be mostly a physiological limitation of some sort, although practice can move one significantly closer to the "perfect pitch" end of the spectrum. (Personally, I don't have "traditional" perfect pitch in which I can hear a tone and tell if it middle C or not, but am fairly decent at discerning relative pitches... E.G. if one note is four steps above another, if one pitch is an octave double of another, etc etc.)
3) The people who tried to teach you how to read music may have simply not been good teachers in this particular field.
4) Whether or not the reading music was in an attempt to learn an instrunment that you are interested in playing can make a big difference. And some instrunments are more suited for learning to read music: the piano being pretty much ideal as it is laid out in pretty much the exact form that sheet music is written in. But I think whether or not you are actually interested in learning that particular instrunment is more important (assuming a melodic instrunment... learning to play drums or other rhythmic instrunments would not help.)
5) Many of the other details in your post imply that you are an extremely visual thinker as opposed to verbal. Your relative ability to play tetris over doing a crossword puzzle is very telling of this. Even your doing poorly early on in school and then finally racing ahead is very telling. Much of early education seems to be rote memorization, which is done better in a verbal mindframe. Since speech is a linear process it would seem logical that memorizing lists of facts etc would come easier to a verbal thinker. Defining a visual thinker is a bit difficult to do with words, but it is my opinion that the thought processes are not nearly as linear and there are multiple parallel concepts being processed at the same time. This allows for a greater ease in learning certain abstract topics which would only come into play later in an academic career. I believe that visual thinkers have a little bit more difficult time learning a completely foreign topic. This is because (in my opinion) that visual thinkers need to compare the thing being learned to other related ideas. But once a few key concepts in the area are known, it becomes quite trivial for the visual learner to visualize the patterns of how other concepts link into the framework of the entire topic or discipline. This could possibly be compared to object oriented programming, where once a class is set up all the information and functions contained within can then be reused by something which needs it. A visual mode of thinking means that you have to have a baseline knowledge built up to be a
And not to mention... that graph does indeed show that the actual debt, when corrected for inflation, declined during the clinton years... which means a net surplus for that time. Now, I'm not giving full credit to Clinton on this, a lot of it being a strong economy at the time (and therefore higher taxes) due in large to the dot.com era tech bubble. But then again, the econmy was pretty strong in the 80's under Reagan, and look what the debt did during that time.
Really makes sense considering that FULLY HALF of the current budget is in military related expenses. I mean... of course the united states has to spend more on its military than the rest of the world... combined.
The problem is that omnipotent does indeed mean able to do anything. Otherwise you and I would be omnipotent... because I know that I can do anything that is possible for me to do.
This study doesn't prove that prayer is useless...
It just shows that praying for someone else is.
But seriously, this would be quite the difficult experiment to pull off as a true double blind. I'm just picturing that if prayer is beneficial, a congregation of strangers in a sterile room praying that "patient 2342A" gets a speedy recovery wouldn't exactly get the same results as your friends and loved ones praying in a church, their homes, a forest or wherever. And if you just do a case study history comparing recovery rates of those who had people praying for them vs. those who did not have people praying for them, it would seem obvious that those with people praying for them would have better recovery rates due simply to the extended support system likely provided by those praying.
We already are Chimeras. Viruses transfer genetic information between species quite often. It's just that it's random, not a directed process.
You're looking too deep... auro is the (latin? greek? not sure which) root for gold.