Evolution science should take on the difficult questions posed by it's skeptics
Two things:
1) Such as?
2) Cutting facts that would allow understanding of Evolutionary science from children's education is not going to help us "struggle with" the question.
Problem here is that in order to make the jump from asexual to sexual reproduction it takes two independent mutations happening at the same time and location that produce a male and female before you get the transition
Eh, no actually, I'm no biologist, but many invertebrates are still hermaphrodites, so whatever chromosome swapping mechanism first appeared (by intention or accident whatever) only had to appear in one creature that split allowing its children to be able to reproduce with one another. Though many creatures now days can still fertilize themselves, so I would think it would be sometime before they discovered the happiness of sexual reproduction with others.
Much, much, much later did anything try having genders. I also suspect that sexual reproduction would have only occurred once, since it is a far greater mutagen than anything else around.
Seems that this implies pretty long odds. Then if you consider the observed rate of mutation we currently see
The only reason that I can accept that it took 2 billion years (again not a biologist what's the exact number?) for cells to start making whoopie is that is what the fossil record seems to say.
My point here is not to convince you that you should be a creationist,
Cool, cool, we can clearly debate this stuff for eons but eventually we will have to decide what to teach the kids. And I think students need the facts that biologists have discovered even if there may be some gaps in our understanding. Parents are welcome to fill in those gaps for their kids, but removing facts that make one particular non-scientific view point difficult to accept is imo the wrong way to educate.
but that there are problems raised by them that are not easily dismissed. You would do well to at least consider how best to answer the issues they raise.
This is a widespread misunderstanding creationists have of evolutionists. We have considered the issues as much as you have and came to different conclusions. Especially biologists, part of the reason they are so static-y about creationism is that they have investigated the origins of life far harder than the rest of us and are asked to repeatedly answer the same semi-educated trick questions that attempt to show their ignorance of some new (but long filled) hole in their thinking.
Huh, I had the opposite reaction: I think I'll go learn Lua this weekend. Maybe it'll make me look edgy when a non-geek asks about it. I think a lot of other young, wannabe hackers have the same weekend agenda now.
Occam's Razor favors the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions not the shortest explanation.
Evolution rather succinctly fits together the evidence we have.
Creationism must assume that that there is an powerful creator that put together the earth in a certain way, covered his tracks with all this false evidence pointing towards evolution and then expected us to ignore the evidence he shows us and accept the explanations he planted in the minds of a few of his loyal followers. Even allowing God to be a pre-accepted assumption, His odd behaviors are additional assumptions that lead to more assumptions that after a lot of Sunday school and philosophy courses I have only begun to explore.
>> You can't use it to say you're right and they're wrong. This.
Also, sorry to see you got marked troll, since a brief review of Jamestos's posts shows that you nailed it. The astroturfer's are probably out to get you. I hope they are from Microsoft, then they'll mod my last post up!
There is clearly an anti-google astro-turf/troll thing going on here, but why blame Microsoft? Have they been knowing for astroturfing here before?
There are tons of companies and organizations out there that could hate Google for any number of reasons. For example Oracle (not that I accuse Oracle though).
Don't forget the sheep posting the details of eachother's lives. You might keep my posts professional enough for my boss and grandma while not disclosing but you just need that one asshole frienemy to tag you taking jello shots off a stripper for that strategy to fail. You can decide not to have an account and be blissfully ignorant of all the posts you're included in but, they are still there.
Most of the pages you visit will have Facebook widgets to carefully track your browsing usage for whatever analytics they might want to try, whether or not you sign up or sign in.
So no, I don't have to tell them anything about my life for them to spy on me (and make some money from it).
how often do you actually find infinite loops (that you KNOW are infinite loops) in software that's actually been released?
Never, because I can't be sure. Though, when a program freezes up (happens almost daily to me) and one of my CPUs jumps to 100% usage and sits there for a few minutes, I get suspicious. I've never put any other structures that do that in my code (besides near infinite loops), so I am forced to assume: infinite loops.
Yeah, I like not programming infinite loops, and I often add my own reactive fixes if I suspect there is a small possibility of infinite loops occurring.
It's all those other programmers who disagree with us that this is good for; I could really use a tool to kick their libraries and applications back into a running state.
IE user: "FYI: I had difficulty loading your page 8/3/11. I use IE6 on XP." Netscape User: "Dear Sir or Madame, I was greatly inconvenienced this morning by the inability of my internet browser to correctly display the information I requested from your site. Please see the included appendices that should detail the specifics of my browser's difficulties in rendering you're hypertext as well as numerous files, ordered alphabetically, detailing the current configuration of my operating system and internet client..."
I've worked and studied with a few people with high verbal intelligence and I really prefer not to when given the choice, but maybe that's because I use IE.
My understanding was that your average conductive thingamajig only absorbed tiny amounts of energy from a passing wave as the electrons shuffled about resulting in a tiny bit of heat, while something designed to take the signal and convert it into power (or even just signal) sucks far more energy out of the signal.
When some guy comes along and says you need snake oil. He has a shill that tells you how good it was. You believe them and waste some money. That's getting suckered.
Same story, but instead of some guy, it's bank bigwigs, and instead of some shill, it's everyone you know and all the media you see. Same thing though. GPPP clearly didn't need his house and could not afford it, but got smooth talked into it anyway: suckered.
Suckers aren't blameless, just screwed out of money.
I don't disagree with the fact that our political system is locked in the hands of corporations, but I do disagree with the idea that it is getting worse. Look back over the history of the country and you'll see that that has always been a problem. Labor rights and consumer protection have definitely improved over the last century and I expect that they will continue to improve as incidences like this spark internet outrage, while 20 years ago they would go completely unnoticed.
A revolution? In a democracy? Who are we going to vote for when that's over? I'm serious. I just don't understand the concept; all of our leaders are up for reelection in the next couple years, how is that different than removing them from office at gun point (besides being much more pleasant for the politicians)?
I'm surprised this isn't +5 insightful yet, because seriously, that's the first thing you notice and the only thing you can't replace it by printing some out at work.
- I also noticed you can't research every little thought you have, but maybe that is a plus. - You can't wikipedia things to settle an argument, which is way more annoying than it sounds. - You can't get a "how to fix such and such" or "how to prepare such and such" so you won't be able to repair or assemble things properly until you remember to look them up. - I really missed net radio, I can't seem to own enough music not to get sick of my collection. I recorded net radio while online at work or at coffee shops and brought it home. - Net TV can be just as bad if you depend on it, but I just found myself reading more.
Otherwise, when I was without internet I didn't miss much: you usually keep a list of things you need to search for and look them up at a coffee shop, and print out anything you need to read or reference at home.
...until you sober up and realize that the liquor store is 20 miles away.
Who lives 20miles from a liquor store? Really, I've lived in small remote towns before and they all have a "General Store" which provides liquor, smokes and some snacks to enjoy with the former.
I currently need a car to pick up groceries, but not booze and smokes.
Yes and women who willfully allow themselves to be raped should be stoned to death. See how fun this logic is?
Uh...
First: Your analogy should be "women who willfully allow themselves to be raped should forfeit relevant patents. I've never forfeited patents or been stoned to death, but I assume the former is slightly less harsh.
Second: Someone should make a law about internet debate and rape similar to Godwin's. I've noticed whenever law arguments degrade into "lets compare this situation to rape," No reasonable debate continues. Patent infringement is not the "brain rape."
"Chemicals" are rather vague, y'know, they make chemical free products these days.
Anyway, I would narrow it down to avoid chemicals that are designed to kill things. It destroys microbes, so I'll let it be tested on somebody else's skin cells first.
You got +4 insightful so many people agree, and there seems to be some serious "it's obvious!" flamey comments below you, so I must be missing something obvious, but I've used linux under windows for some time for many reasons, could someone just spell out the issue for the denser among us?
You don't know how to hunt or grow your own food? You plant it, make sure it's watered, make sure it's weeded, and it produces nearly all of the time.
Yeah, why do people need apple's wifi? They could build it themselves! Just build a wifi antenna program some drivers for it and make sure it's compatible with most routers out there. Voila! It's so easy why doesn't everyone do it?
It's much more efficient to have people who know what they are doing do the things they are doing well
The difficulty of food production was a bit of a stretch in GP's argument, but not by too much, as a kid I had some fancy electronic kits and I with some time I could probably build myself some walkie-talkies (I have). But I don't think I'll ever try to build my own wifi card even though with some research and a lot of time I could. I'll just let apple's connect me automatically.
I get grumpy about the fact that news feels like they have to protect me from the actual science. They need artists to render what some other dudes imagination thinks the planet might look like. I know scrutinizing those pixels and running their color changes through really long boring formulas was tedious and I don't plan to replicate it, but until I came and read your comment, I wouldn't have known they did any of that.
Here, because I get news out of it. I gave up on farmville, because I got nothing from it.
That's one reason that political articles are so big and hard science articles normally get little play.
I disagree. Political stories have a lot of nuances and spur a lot of arguments while to science stories (being one of the main reasons I'm on/.) my comments would be something along the lines of "cool," or "huh." I could make such comments, but the reason they would not be modded up is because no one would care to read them.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution science should take on the difficult questions posed by it's skeptics
Two things:
1) Such as?
2) Cutting facts that would allow understanding of Evolutionary science from children's education is not going to help us "struggle with" the question.
Problem here is that in order to make the jump from asexual to sexual reproduction it takes two independent mutations happening at the same time and location that produce a male and female before you get the transition
Eh, no actually, I'm no biologist, but many invertebrates are still hermaphrodites, so whatever chromosome swapping mechanism first appeared (by intention or accident whatever) only had to appear in one creature that split allowing its children to be able to reproduce with one another. Though many creatures now days can still fertilize themselves, so I would think it would be sometime before they discovered the happiness of sexual reproduction with others.
Much, much, much later did anything try having genders. I also suspect that sexual reproduction would have only occurred once, since it is a far greater mutagen than anything else around.
Seems that this implies pretty long odds. Then if you consider the observed rate of mutation we currently see
The only reason that I can accept that it took 2 billion years (again not a biologist what's the exact number?) for cells to start making whoopie is that is what the fossil record seems to say.
My point here is not to convince you that you should be a creationist,
Cool, cool, we can clearly debate this stuff for eons but eventually we will have to decide what to teach the kids. And I think students need the facts that biologists have discovered even if there may be some gaps in our understanding. Parents are welcome to fill in those gaps for their kids, but removing facts that make one particular non-scientific view point difficult to accept is imo the wrong way to educate.
but that there are problems raised by them that are not easily dismissed. You would do well to at least consider how best to answer the issues they raise.
This is a widespread misunderstanding creationists have of evolutionists. We have considered the issues as much as you have and came to different conclusions. Especially biologists, part of the reason they are so static-y about creationism is that they have investigated the origins of life far harder than the rest of us and are asked to repeatedly answer the same semi-educated trick questions that attempt to show their ignorance of some new (but long filled) hole in their thinking.
Huh, I had the opposite reaction: I think I'll go learn Lua this weekend. Maybe it'll make me look edgy when a non-geek asks about it. I think a lot of other young, wannabe hackers have the same weekend agenda now.
All publicity is good publicity!
Occam's Razor favors the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions not the shortest explanation.
Evolution rather succinctly fits together the evidence we have.
Creationism must assume that that there is an powerful creator that put together the earth in a certain way, covered his tracks with all this false evidence pointing towards evolution and then expected us to ignore the evidence he shows us and accept the explanations he planted in the minds of a few of his loyal followers. Even allowing God to be a pre-accepted assumption, His odd behaviors are additional assumptions that lead to more assumptions that after a lot of Sunday school and philosophy courses I have only begun to explore.
>> You can't use it to say you're right and they're wrong.
This.
Also, sorry to see you got marked troll, since a brief review of Jamestos's posts shows that you nailed it. The astroturfer's are probably out to get you. I hope they are from Microsoft, then they'll mod my last post up!
There is clearly an anti-google astro-turf/troll thing going on here, but why blame Microsoft? Have they been knowing for astroturfing here before?
There are tons of companies and organizations out there that could hate Google for any number of reasons. For example Oracle (not that I accuse Oracle though).
Don't forget the sheep posting the details of eachother's lives. You might keep my posts professional enough for my boss and grandma while not disclosing but you just need that one asshole frienemy to tag you taking jello shots off a stripper for that strategy to fail. You can decide not to have an account and be blissfully ignorant of all the posts you're included in but, they are still there.
Most of the pages you visit will have Facebook widgets to carefully track your browsing usage for whatever analytics they might want to try, whether or not you sign up or sign in.
So no, I don't have to tell them anything about my life for them to spy on me (and make some money from it).
Ghostery to the rescue. Don't be the product.
Also known as:"actively make the effort" :P
how often do you actually find infinite loops (that you KNOW are infinite loops) in software that's actually been released?
Never, because I can't be sure. Though, when a program freezes up (happens almost daily to me) and one of my CPUs jumps to 100% usage and sits there for a few minutes, I get suspicious. I've never put any other structures that do that in my code (besides near infinite loops), so I am forced to assume: infinite loops.
Yeah, I like not programming infinite loops, and I often add my own reactive fixes if I suspect there is a small possibility of infinite loops occurring.
It's all those other programmers who disagree with us that this is good for; I could really use a tool to kick their libraries and applications back into a running state.
You mean like:
IE user: "FYI: I had difficulty loading your page 8/3/11. I use IE6 on XP."
Netscape User: "Dear Sir or Madame, I was greatly inconvenienced this morning by the inability of my internet browser to correctly display the information I requested from your site. Please see the included appendices that should detail the specifics of my browser's difficulties in rendering you're hypertext as well as numerous files, ordered alphabetically, detailing the current configuration of my operating system and internet client..."
I've worked and studied with a few people with high verbal intelligence and I really prefer not to when given the choice, but maybe that's because I use IE.
My understanding was that your average conductive thingamajig only absorbed tiny amounts of energy from a passing wave as the electrons shuffled about resulting in a tiny bit of heat, while something designed to take the signal and convert it into power (or even just signal) sucks far more energy out of the signal.
When some guy comes along and says you need snake oil. He has a shill that tells you how good it was. You believe them and waste some money. That's getting suckered.
Same story, but instead of some guy, it's bank bigwigs, and instead of some shill, it's everyone you know and all the media you see. Same thing though. GPPP clearly didn't need his house and could not afford it, but got smooth talked into it anyway: suckered.
Suckers aren't blameless, just screwed out of money.
I don't disagree with the fact that our political system is locked in the hands of corporations, but I do disagree with the idea that it is getting worse. Look back over the history of the country and you'll see that that has always been a problem. Labor rights and consumer protection have definitely improved over the last century and I expect that they will continue to improve as incidences like this spark internet outrage, while 20 years ago they would go completely unnoticed.
A revolution? In a democracy? Who are we going to vote for when that's over? I'm serious. I just don't understand the concept; all of our leaders are up for reelection in the next couple years, how is that different than removing them from office at gun point (besides being much more pleasant for the politicians)?
I'm going to patent "whooosh!"
I'm surprised this isn't +5 insightful yet, because seriously, that's the first thing you notice and the only thing you can't replace it by printing some out at work.
- I also noticed you can't research every little thought you have, but maybe that is a plus.
- You can't wikipedia things to settle an argument, which is way more annoying than it sounds.
- You can't get a "how to fix such and such" or "how to prepare such and such" so you won't be able to repair or assemble things properly until you remember to look them up.
- I really missed net radio, I can't seem to own enough music not to get sick of my collection. I recorded net radio while online at work or at coffee shops and brought it home.
- Net TV can be just as bad if you depend on it, but I just found myself reading more.
Otherwise, when I was without internet I didn't miss much: you usually keep a list of things you need to search for and look them up at a coffee shop, and print out anything you need to read or reference at home.
...until you sober up and realize that the liquor store is 20 miles away.
Who lives 20miles from a liquor store? Really, I've lived in small remote towns before and they all have a "General Store" which provides liquor, smokes and some snacks to enjoy with the former.
I currently need a car to pick up groceries, but not booze and smokes.
Yes and women who willfully allow themselves to be raped should be stoned to death. See how fun this logic is?
Uh...
First: Your analogy should be "women who willfully allow themselves to be raped should forfeit relevant patents. I've never forfeited patents or been stoned to death, but I assume the former is slightly less harsh.
Second: Someone should make a law about internet debate and rape similar to Godwin's. I've noticed whenever law arguments degrade into "lets compare this situation to rape," No reasonable debate continues. Patent infringement is not the "brain rape."
maybe you should narrow it down from 'chemicals'?
"Chemicals" are rather vague, y'know, they make chemical free products these days.
Anyway, I would narrow it down to avoid chemicals that are designed to kill things. It destroys microbes, so I'll let it be tested on somebody else's skin cells first.
Forgive me for missing the obvious, but why not?
You got +4 insightful so many people agree, and there seems to be some serious "it's obvious!" flamey comments below you, so I must be missing something obvious, but I've used linux under windows for some time for many reasons, could someone just spell out the issue for the denser among us?
You don't know how to hunt or grow your own food? You plant it, make sure it's watered, make sure it's weeded, and it produces nearly all of the time.
Yeah, why do people need apple's wifi? They could build it themselves! Just build a wifi antenna program some drivers for it and make sure it's compatible with most routers out there. Voila! It's so easy why doesn't everyone do it?
It's much more efficient to have people who know what they are doing do the things they are doing well
The difficulty of food production was a bit of a stretch in GP's argument, but not by too much, as a kid I had some fancy electronic kits and I with some time I could probably build myself some walkie-talkies (I have). But I don't think I'll ever try to build my own wifi card even though with some research and a lot of time I could. I'll just let apple's connect me automatically.
I get grumpy about the fact that news feels like they have to protect me from the actual science. They need artists to render what some other dudes imagination thinks the planet might look like. I know scrutinizing those pixels and running their color changes through really long boring formulas was tedious and I don't plan to replicate it, but until I came and read your comment, I wouldn't have known they did any of that.
Google just sounds so sweet to my ears, much better than some random names that I don't know are associated with my favorite company of all time.
why do people tolerate this crap?
Here, because I get news out of it. I gave up on farmville, because I got nothing from it.
That's one reason that political articles are so big and hard science articles normally get little play.
I disagree. Political stories have a lot of nuances and spur a lot of arguments while to science stories (being one of the main reasons I'm on /.) my comments would be something along the lines of "cool," or "huh." I could make such comments, but the reason they would not be modded up is because no one would care to read them.
I'm probably about to get whooshed, but where's your love for the Japanese?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami