It's not just about sex, death is just as prevalent in Giger's paintings.
His paintings look weird because they're not just art for art's sake, they are evocations of his inner demons in the literal sense also. Giger was a rather well known occultist.
The author is unable to differentiate happiness and pleasure !
No, the author is very well able to differentiate happiness and pleasure. The brain is clearly wired for pleasure, it has an extensive reward system that can even be tricked into working overtime (leading to addiction).
His point is that our brains have a natural bias towards storing and recalling negative experiences over positive experiences. We have evolved to immediately learn from physical and emotional pain because learning to avoid pain is a better survival strategy than learning to seek pleasure.
Why wouldn't a malevolent tyranny nuke its own population? Hitler condemning the German population to death in 1945 because he deemed them traitors to the German cause, and the Khmer Rouge's killing fields seem to indicate that real tyrannies have no qualms about slaughtering their own citizens.
The problem with nukes is that there won't be a 'true civil war' because it will be over too soon. The military splitting up in opposing factions with nuclear capabilities during will only hasten the deployment of tactical nukes.
He's not a moron (in spite of his eyebrows), he just plays one.
This guy earns a ton by providing services to well known spammers and other criminal organisations, but every time he makes the headlines and gets interviewed he either plays the naïve internet activist or the village idiot, depending on his public.
The european crater you referred to is probably the Nördlinger Ries in Germany. Gene Shoemaker was on holiday in Nördlingen with his wife, when they discovered the stones used to build the local St. George Cathedral contained suevite and came up with the impact crater hypothesis. In 1961 he and Edward Chao proved it was actually an impact crater.
Agreed, but the problem still remains the same, as long as you let anyone else give you advice on your encryption, it better be strong encryption so your advisor can't easily decode your messages if/when he intercepts them. The catch 22 is you can't determine the strength of your encryption unless you're a fairly knowledgable cryptographer yourself, in which case you don't need anyones advice on how to secure your communication in the first place. If you're truly paranoid, you don't trust anyone.
I wonder if the latest management strategies would keep you out of jail for more than 40 years while running a crime empire? Hmm, maybe that's not a very good question...
More importantly, in the crime business you can't even expect your own employees to be trustworthy, so telling a lot of your secrets to one person (which is capable of hiding his own secrets effectively from you) might not be a good idea. I expect anyone to become a mob boss not to be a complete moron so I guess he was using the cypher to hide information from his fellow mobsters and not from outsiders.
I know, I read NS too. The point is they're referring to an unpublished paper, and "he says he detected no neurogenesis, no matter what dose he gave or the length of time he gave it for" doesn's sound like a very scientific claim to me (for how long did he run his tests and what was the maximum dose he administered?). This looks like NS is trying to keep out of the political crossfire on the marijuana debate by downplaying Zhangs claims with unverifyable statements.
My post wasn't meant as a personal attack, its just that you can't refute research with unpublished papers.
But similar results done with THC (Tetra Hydro Cannabinol), the main compound in hash and weed have found no evidence for this cellgrowth stimulation. One experiment/paper does not mean it has been accepted as scientific fact yet.
Please post a link to the research you are referring to. It is clear from the article that Xia Zhang, the professor of neuropsychiatry who did the research on HU210, doesn't know of its existence:
"Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months,"
It strikes me as odd that you're better informed on the subject than he is, considering his research and all?
I've seen operation Fastlink in action here in the Netherlands and the only red herring I can spot is the denial of money being involved, people I know have been offered up to 100 euro/month to run a 10TB dumpsite on a 100mbit (universitiy campus) line.
No, I think you got it wrong. It's not that democracy isn't inherently good. (Or rather better than the alternatives.)
It's just inherently very _unstable_.
If something is inherently good, nothing bad can come from it. Since democracy is unstable it can't be inherently good (as history shows), which means you can't use democracy in the same way in an ethical argument like you would use freedom or right to life. If you argue you can kill some people in a population to eventually bring the survivors democracy, ethicly that's a bad argument.
It's like balancing a ball on a fingertip. One moment of not paying attention, and it falls. And in the case of democracy there's always someone actually having an interest in it falling.
So why not build better safeguards into democracy itself; why run a constant risk? I fully agree with you that each individual citizen must take care and responsability for his government not to devolve into a dictatorship, but this doesn't solve the problem of the mayority of citizens refusing to do this and (in a delusion of fear and/or hate) wanting a dictatorship.
Actually the United States constitution has some strong safeguard in it as well. And they revolve around not restricting freedoms, but restricting the government.
You need strong safeguards against government declaring a state of emergency at random, but still leave strong enough government to defend the nation in case of war. As the recent blurring of the distinction between war and terror adequately proves, the US constitution is not well-balanced enough in this aspect.
Such things as the first ten amendments to the constitution. The first and second especially.
The sheer number of amendments make it clear it's relatively easy to change the meaning and powers of the constitution; a populistic dictator like Hitler would have enough electoral backup to change the US constitution into something you can't dream of.
The SA-brownshirts had relatively good organization and enough manpower to rival te regular army; can you imagine how much faster Germany would have devolved into the nightmare it eventually became if the brownshirts would have been allowed to bear arms? Because of their numbers and deployment I think it's safe to say it would have taken weeks or perhaps months instead of years.
Hitler's gaining absolute power was also based on another heinous (and fabricated) act of terrorism. A symbolic building, the Reichstag (Parliament building) is burned down on 27 February 1933.
Just like the Americans now, the shocked Germans back then didn't see anything wrong to give up some liberties in such an extreme situation. The very next day, on the Februaray 28'th, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which permits the suspension of civil liberties in time of national emergency.
The Weimar Republic isn't only a historical warning about giving up civil liberties, it's a permanent reminder of democracy in it self not being inherently "good" and as such it can't be a moral justification for political change or a goal of militairy intervention; there is no guarantee whatsoever that a (newly installed) democracy will not turn into a dictatorship.
The only democracy that has some real constitutional safeguards against ending up as a dictatorship is (you guessed it) Germany, but to install this kind safeguards you have to take away some civil liberties too...
They didn't just catch three people in this operation, but they took down several servers, some of which the operators might not have realized were even being used for warez distribution.
That's bullshit. I know some people who've been raided here in the Netherlands, and I can tell you that almost all of those confiscated servers were in student dorms and connected to university networks; most of them on 100mbit lines, some on 10mbit lines.
It's the fat lines those groups are after, you would need thousands of cable/dsl lines to "race" an ISO (these groups are in competition to get the cracked versions out as fast as possible). And they're not hacking those boxes, they're paying for them with status as a "courier" or with real money. I know students who've been offered 100 euro a month or more to put a 10TB server in their room.
Before that mechcanical systems, I would imagine fluid systems, etc.
Steam engines were mighty popular, Freud's psychoanalysis is partly based on the stream engine analogy (mental "pressure" a "governor", etc.) Today, quantum mechanics is popular with psychoanalists.
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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In order for speciation to occur, genetic diversity must be lost. That's what speciation does - more useful genes are selected for in a particular environment under particular selective pressures, and the harmful ones are lost. Allowing the most beneficial ones to dominate most or all of the time.
Yes, but speciation does not remove genes from the originating species genepool (it could wipe out the species by competition though), it creates a new species from those useful genes but leaves the originating species' genes intact. More importantly, once a species boundary has formed the new species' genepool quickly becomes more varied; instead of one genepool we now have two.
Answering how harmful mutations survive natural selection - strong warriors fall in love with beautiful, weak women.
If the women are beautiful and by their beauty achieve to reproduce more often, their beauty is not a harmful genetic feature but a useful one; their weakness is relative and only becomes harmful if it interferes with their capacity to reproduce (to survive childhood and give birth). Of course such real weakness gets rooted out by natural selection quickly.
A woman falls in love with a handsome man in a family full of heart troubles that don't express until after child birth.
Then in a genetic sense, the mans heart troubles are irrelevant. Genes are "selfish", they could care less about about an adult that's passed the reproductive stage. In fact, in many species genes strive to kill their hosts (especially male hosts) once they have reproduced: the fiercest competition to an individual in its biotope is always members of the same spiecies; killing off non-reproductive individuals strongly reduces competition.
This one of the reasons I warned about introducing morals: Judeo-Christian morals don't adapt well to the observable "selfishness" or even "immorality" (quoted because these a moralistic statements) of genes; it leads you to percieve life -or the world itself- as evil.
Darwin also admitted later, it seems, that natural selection was not so strong as he indicated - but was useful to express in such terms in order to defeat opponents of evolution.
Natural selection is not a constant, agreed. Higher social animals for instance build a "culture" and tend to those unable to care for themselves; humans are particulary strong at this and consequentially natural selection in humans is rather weak.
Regarding metaphysics, I fail to see the problem. The arguments for the existence of God are *very* strong (so much so that I believe the atheist has no reasonable reply).
I wanted to avoid this, but here we go. I'll highlight just one problem for all mentioned categories:
The problem of metaphysics in general: they are by definition not observable, if you can measure/observe something, it's called a physical entity/process. By introducing metaphysics you introduce unprovable assertions in your hypothesis, because you have nothing to measure.
The problem with gods in general: everybody talks about them (even atheists), but there are various disagreeing concepts of what a god is. There is no objective way of telling if say the Christian-trinitary god-concept is better than the hinduist god-concept.
The problem with (the Christian) God: He is supposed to be immanent and transcendent at the same time (thus not be completely metaphysical), yet the immanent (worldy) part of God has never been objectively demonstrated. Needless to say there is disagreement about the nature of God amongst the Christian sects also (Mormons LDS believe that God is a deified man, that God was a human once; Gnostics OTOH didn't believe that even Christ was a human).
That's one thing I dislike about the current state of science. No, I should say, I detest. People seem to think that science and naturalism go hand in hand. This is in fact an unproven, unfounded philosophical position.
What you seem to for
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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This part confuses me, because I don't know what IOW stands for, and I don't think I have the same definition for evolution and devolution as you. Can you word it another way please?
IOW stands for In Other Words:) If we agree that natural selection causes better adaptation to the environment (by adaptation and speciation), we can only describe this as a negative development or as "less perfect" if we think the global environment/world itself is degrading independent of adaptation and speciation. This is where morals and/or metaphysics come into play in devolution, aside from presenting an explanation of how all those different species, families and kingdoms came into existence in the first place, if it wasn't by evolutionary diversification.
Again, I'm confused, possibly by different understandings of the words evolution and devolution.
I think that if we're only talking about micro-evolution (defined as the generation to generation change in a population's frequencies of alleles or genotypes), there would be no dispute; adaptation and speciation are micro-evolution, and we both agree these processes are observeable.
Selective pressure itself does not cause changes in genes. Mutations do.
My mistake, I should have said genotype or genetic makeup (of the population). I was under the impression you called micro-evolution devolution too, but that's cleared up now.
Definitions aside, do you see how it is possible to interpret the available data as showing rapid speciation and a degredation of the gene pool - both through a loss of diversity, and the introduction of harmful mutations?
I did already admit such an interpretation is possible, but I think this interpretation raises more questions than the (macro-)evolutionary interpretation does. The loss of diversity by adaptation is not per definition permanent (cross-breeding brings back diversity), and in the case of speciation I can't see how that would count as losing diversity. Generally harmful mutations do get introduced, but get rooted out by natural selection if they don't give some advantage (like sickle cell anemia enables immunity to malaria). That's one of the big questions of this interpretation (aside from introducing metaphysics as mentioned above): how can (absolutely) harmful mutations survive natural selection? (In building hypotheses, when you throw in absolutisms, you're almost always on the brink of metaphysics.)
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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However, this theory says nothing about the direction evolution takes. Through its overuse in the context of the advancement of a species, evolution is assumed to mean a progression.
The question is how you define qualifications like "progess" and "perfection". If progess means "better adapted to the current habitat/environment" then most certainly evolutionary progress is taking place. This however says nothing about the state (of perfection) of the changing environment; which makes evolution and devolution interchangeable in a metaphysical context, but not in a physical/biological context. IOW you can speak of devolution if you (morally) judge the environment to be degrading, while evolution does not make such moral judgements.
Not with careful defining of the terms. Rapid speciation is not devolution. It is merely the reduction of genetic diversity in a gene pool, but with the advantage of specialisation in a particular area or areas. For example, humans of different skin colours being suited to different environments. And diversity can be reintroduced simply by two different species that share a common ancestor interbreeding to have children with greater diversity again.
This begs the question of how to call these changes in genetic markup if they're not of devolutionary nature and there is no such thing as evolution.
Not sure what you mean by this, sorry.
Earlier in this discussion I was under the impression you believed that more selective pressure causes less changes in genes. I was just trying to show the contradiction in that statement by various examples.
I don't see rapid speciation as harmful, and in fact it is even an integral part of the darwinist model.
I know, but again, the problem I have with this is how to call this rapid speciation if it's not devolution and there is no evolution.
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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So if we accept the premise that natural selection performs a slowing function (slowing degredation of a species) rather than enhancing it, then we would see the following: 1. Rapid speciation - the gene pool would initially be large, and offspring would be selected based on the traits they inherited. This is the faster change you noted when there's high selective pressure
I'm sorry, but I still don't get this. The way I see it: if we accept the concept of devolution, meaning the genetic makeup of species was perfect to begin with and can only degrade over time; we must also accept that losing bits of these perfect genes is one of the processes by which devolution does its job. If there is no such thing as evolution, all processes that change the genetic markup of a species must be devolutionary. IOW the way I see it, rapid speciation means rapid devolution; rapid speciation and slow devolution at the same time would be contradictory. I tried to demonstrate this contradiction by my entropy example: if you apply more pressure to a chaotic system it tends to speed up/increase in temperature, not the other way around.
Even metaphysically speaking, if you would argue natural selection speeds up devolution, I could only agree with you; this way the whole of creation would move farther and farther from God('s perfection), but creatures would still be able to adapt to the hell they're descending into, picking up speed and creating an even deeper hell in the process.
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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Natural selection would still work to balance things out, as would predators of predators. If a predator feeds off insects, then when the insect population gets low, so would the predators start to die, giving the insects a chance to grow, and so on.
No, natural selection can't balance out devolution; the more selective pressure there is on a species, the less it would devolve. This is not symmetrical to evolution!
Evolution would speed up when the selective pressure is high, causing the species to change faster and adapt to the new situation. Devolution OTOH would slow down, causing the species to change slower, rendering it incapable of adapting to the new situation; ergo the species would die out.
Re:Don't let the religious zealots see this story.
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What if natural selection does not improve the species? What if all living things were created in their best form, and have been heading downhill since then? Natural selection then plays the role not of improving a species, but of slowing its decline - such that if the power of natural selection was absent, the fall of a species would be hurried. Yet if natural selection was present, the species would still degrade, but at a much slower rate.
This "genetic entropy" concept has a fundamental flaw: if there was but little pressure on the population, the population would grow larger but at the same time devolve faster, while if there was great pressure on the population, it would decline but devolve slower.
This means a prey species that's on the menu of a lot of different predators (take insects) wouldn't stand a chance and would be decimated, because the devolution would be spread out over a lot of preditor species, leaving them enough time to kill off the prey species; while by killing off prey species predators would slow down their devolution. Ultimately this leaves you with predator species which are still allmost perfectly suited for hunting prey species that no longer exist...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just about sex, death is just as prevalent in Giger's paintings.
His paintings look weird because they're not just art for art's sake, they are evocations of his inner demons in the literal sense also. Giger was a rather well known occultist.
The author is unable to differentiate happiness and pleasure !
No, the author is very well able to differentiate happiness and pleasure. The brain is clearly wired for pleasure, it has an extensive reward system that can even be tricked into working overtime (leading to addiction).
His point is that our brains have a natural bias towards storing and recalling negative experiences over positive experiences. We have evolved to immediately learn from physical and emotional pain because learning to avoid pain is a better survival strategy than learning to seek pleasure.
A person is a "Christian" if they believe the Apostles' Creed.
I don' t think the Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Churches are going to be happy with your definition.
Why wouldn't a malevolent tyranny nuke its own population? Hitler condemning the German population to death in 1945 because he deemed them traitors to the German cause, and the Khmer Rouge's killing fields seem to indicate that real tyrannies have no qualms about slaughtering their own citizens.
The problem with nukes is that there won't be a 'true civil war' because it will be over too soon. The military splitting up in opposing factions with nuclear capabilities during will only hasten the deployment of tactical nukes.
The girl I met in Eridu
Was kind beyond belief;
The hours that I spent with her
Were hours far too brief.
Where willows shade the river bank,
She urged that I recline.
She fed me figs and poured me full
Of pomegranate wine.
I told of force and time and space,
I told of hence and yonder;
I asked if she would come with me
To know my worlds of wonder.
She clasped her knees; her voice was soft;
"It dazes me to ponder
The blazing stars and tintamars,
The whirling ways you wander!
"You are you and I am I,
And best that you return.
And I will stay in Eridu
With all this yet to learn."
- Navarth
R.I.P. mad poet, you will be missed dearly
He's not a moron (in spite of his eyebrows), he just plays one. This guy earns a ton by providing services to well known spammers and other criminal organisations, but every time he makes the headlines and gets interviewed he either plays the naïve internet activist or the village idiot, depending on his public.
The european crater you referred to is probably the Nördlinger Ries in Germany. Gene Shoemaker was on holiday in Nördlingen with his wife, when they discovered the stones used to build the local St. George Cathedral contained suevite and came up with the impact crater hypothesis. In 1961 he and Edward Chao proved it was actually an impact crater.
Agreed, but the problem still remains the same, as long as you let anyone else give you advice on your encryption, it better be strong encryption so your advisor can't easily decode your messages if/when he intercepts them. The catch 22 is you can't determine the strength of your encryption unless you're a fairly knowledgable cryptographer yourself, in which case you don't need anyones advice on how to secure your communication in the first place. If you're truly paranoid, you don't trust anyone.
I wonder if the latest management strategies would keep you out of jail for more than 40 years while running a crime empire? Hmm, maybe that's not a very good question...
More importantly, in the crime business you can't even expect your own employees to be trustworthy, so telling a lot of your secrets to one person (which is capable of hiding his own secrets effectively from you) might not be a good idea. I expect anyone to become a mob boss not to be a complete moron so I guess he was using the cypher to hide information from his fellow mobsters and not from outsiders.
- People lacking knowledge of facts disproving their theory (the ignorant)
- People with personality disorders (the paranoid)
- People who chose to live in denial of facts disproving their theory (the religious)
- People incapable of understanding how the facts disprove their theory (the stupid)
Apart from the ignorant and the paranoid, don't invest much hope in convincing them there is no conspiracy.If conspiracy theorists could be beaten with facts they would be. The facts, however, are in favor of the conspiracy theorists.
Conspiracy theories bloom in the absence of fact; if there were facts to deal with, the theories could be either proved or disproved.
I know, I read NS too. The point is they're referring to an unpublished paper, and "he says he detected no neurogenesis, no matter what dose he gave or the length of time he gave it for" doesn's sound like a very scientific claim to me (for how long did he run his tests and what was the maximum dose he administered?). This looks like NS is trying to keep out of the political crossfire on the marijuana debate by downplaying Zhangs claims with unverifyable statements.
My post wasn't meant as a personal attack, its just that you can't refute research with unpublished papers.
But similar results done with THC (Tetra Hydro Cannabinol), the main compound in hash and weed have found no evidence for this cellgrowth stimulation. One experiment/paper does not mean it has been accepted as scientific fact yet.
Please post a link to the research you are referring to. It is clear from the article that Xia Zhang, the professor of neuropsychiatry who did the research on HU210, doesn't know of its existence:
It strikes me as odd that you're better informed on the subject than he is, considering his research and all?I've seen operation Fastlink in action here in the Netherlands and the only red herring I can spot is the denial of money being involved, people I know have been offered up to 100 euro/month to run a 10TB dumpsite on a 100mbit (universitiy campus) line.
If something is inherently good, nothing bad can come from it. Since democracy is unstable it can't be inherently good (as history shows), which means you can't use democracy in the same way in an ethical argument like you would use freedom or right to life. If you argue you can kill some people in a population to eventually bring the survivors democracy, ethicly that's a bad argument.
It's like balancing a ball on a fingertip. One moment of not paying attention, and it falls. And in the case of democracy there's always someone actually having an interest in it falling.
So why not build better safeguards into democracy itself; why run a constant risk? I fully agree with you that each individual citizen must take care and responsability for his government not to devolve into a dictatorship, but this doesn't solve the problem of the mayority of citizens refusing to do this and (in a delusion of fear and/or hate) wanting a dictatorship.
You need strong safeguards against government declaring a state of emergency at random, but still leave strong enough government to defend the nation in case of war. As the recent blurring of the distinction between war and terror adequately proves, the US constitution is not well-balanced enough in this aspect.
Such things as the first ten amendments to the constitution. The first and second especially.
The sheer number of amendments make it clear it's relatively easy to change the meaning and powers of the constitution; a populistic dictator like Hitler would have enough electoral backup to change the US constitution into something you can't dream of.
The SA-brownshirts had relatively good organization and enough manpower to rival te regular army; can you imagine how much faster Germany would have devolved into the nightmare it eventually became if the brownshirts would have been allowed to bear arms? Because of their numbers and deployment I think it's safe to say it would have taken weeks or perhaps months instead of years.
Just like the Americans now, the shocked Germans back then didn't see anything wrong to give up some liberties in such an extreme situation. The very next day, on the Februaray 28'th, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which permits the suspension of civil liberties in time of national emergency.
The Weimar Republic isn't only a historical warning about giving up civil liberties, it's a permanent reminder of democracy in it self not being inherently "good" and as such it can't be a moral justification for political change or a goal of militairy intervention; there is no guarantee whatsoever that a (newly installed) democracy will not turn into a dictatorship.
The only democracy that has some real constitutional safeguards against ending up as a dictatorship is (you guessed it) Germany, but to install this kind safeguards you have to take away some civil liberties too...
That's bullshit. I know some people who've been raided here in the Netherlands, and I can tell you that almost all of those confiscated servers were in student dorms and connected to university networks; most of them on 100mbit lines, some on 10mbit lines.
It's the fat lines those groups are after, you would need thousands of cable/dsl lines to "race" an ISO (these groups are in competition to get the cracked versions out as fast as possible). And they're not hacking those boxes, they're paying for them with status as a "courier" or with real money. I know students who've been offered 100 euro a month or more to put a 10TB server in their room.
Steam engines were mighty popular, Freud's psychoanalysis is partly based on the stream engine analogy (mental "pressure" a "governor", etc.) Today, quantum mechanics is popular with psychoanalists.
Yes, but speciation does not remove genes from the originating species genepool (it could wipe out the species by competition though), it creates a new species from those useful genes but leaves the originating species' genes intact. More importantly, once a species boundary has formed the new species' genepool quickly becomes more varied; instead of one genepool we now have two.
Answering how harmful mutations survive natural selection - strong warriors fall in love with beautiful, weak women.
If the women are beautiful and by their beauty achieve to reproduce more often, their beauty is not a harmful genetic feature but a useful one; their weakness is relative and only becomes harmful if it interferes with their capacity to reproduce (to survive childhood and give birth). Of course such real weakness gets rooted out by natural selection quickly.
A woman falls in love with a handsome man in a family full of heart troubles that don't express until after child birth.
Then in a genetic sense, the mans heart troubles are irrelevant. Genes are "selfish", they could care less about about an adult that's passed the reproductive stage. In fact, in many species genes strive to kill their hosts (especially male hosts) once they have reproduced: the fiercest competition to an individual in its biotope is always members of the same spiecies; killing off non-reproductive individuals strongly reduces competition.
This one of the reasons I warned about introducing morals: Judeo-Christian morals don't adapt well to the observable "selfishness" or even "immorality" (quoted because these a moralistic statements) of genes; it leads you to percieve life -or the world itself- as evil.
Darwin also admitted later, it seems, that natural selection was not so strong as he indicated - but was useful to express in such terms in order to defeat opponents of evolution.
Natural selection is not a constant, agreed. Higher social animals for instance build a "culture" and tend to those unable to care for themselves; humans are particulary strong at this and consequentially natural selection in humans is rather weak.
Regarding metaphysics, I fail to see the problem. The arguments for the existence of God are *very* strong (so much so that I believe the atheist has no reasonable reply).
I wanted to avoid this, but here we go. I'll highlight just one problem for all mentioned categories:
The problem of metaphysics in general: they are by definition not observable, if you can measure/observe something, it's called a physical entity/process. By introducing metaphysics you introduce unprovable assertions in your hypothesis, because you have nothing to measure.
The problem with gods in general: everybody talks about them (even atheists), but there are various disagreeing concepts of what a god is. There is no objective way of telling if say the Christian-trinitary god-concept is better than the hinduist god-concept.
The problem with (the Christian) God: He is supposed to be immanent and transcendent at the same time (thus not be completely metaphysical), yet the immanent (worldy) part of God has never been objectively demonstrated. Needless to say there is disagreement about the nature of God amongst the Christian sects also (Mormons LDS believe that God is a deified man, that God was a human once; Gnostics OTOH didn't believe that even Christ was a human).
That's one thing I dislike about the current state of science. No, I should say, I detest. People seem to think that science and naturalism go hand in hand. This is in fact an unproven, unfounded philosophical position.
What you seem to for
IOW stands for In Other Words :) If we agree that natural selection causes better adaptation to the environment (by adaptation and speciation), we can only describe this as a negative development or as "less perfect" if we think the global environment/world itself is degrading independent of adaptation and speciation. This is where morals and/or metaphysics come into play in devolution, aside from presenting an explanation of how all those different species, families and kingdoms came into existence in the first place, if it wasn't by evolutionary diversification.
Again, I'm confused, possibly by different understandings of the words evolution and devolution.
I think that if we're only talking about micro-evolution (defined as the generation to generation change in a population's frequencies of alleles or genotypes), there would be no dispute; adaptation and speciation are micro-evolution, and we both agree these processes are observeable.
Selective pressure itself does not cause changes in genes. Mutations do.
My mistake, I should have said genotype or genetic makeup (of the population). I was under the impression you called micro-evolution devolution too, but that's cleared up now.
Definitions aside, do you see how it is possible to interpret the available data as showing rapid speciation and a degredation of the gene pool - both through a loss of diversity, and the introduction of harmful mutations?
I did already admit such an interpretation is possible, but I think this interpretation raises more questions than the (macro-)evolutionary interpretation does. The loss of diversity by adaptation is not per definition permanent (cross-breeding brings back diversity), and in the case of speciation I can't see how that would count as losing diversity. Generally harmful mutations do get introduced, but get rooted out by natural selection if they don't give some advantage (like sickle cell anemia enables immunity to malaria). That's one of the big questions of this interpretation (aside from introducing metaphysics as mentioned above): how can (absolutely) harmful mutations survive natural selection? (In building hypotheses, when you throw in absolutisms, you're almost always on the brink of metaphysics.)
The question is how you define qualifications like "progess" and "perfection". If progess means "better adapted to the current habitat/environment" then most certainly evolutionary progress is taking place. This however says nothing about the state (of perfection) of the changing environment; which makes evolution and devolution interchangeable in a metaphysical context, but not in a physical/biological context. IOW you can speak of devolution if you (morally) judge the environment to be degrading, while evolution does not make such moral judgements.
Not with careful defining of the terms. Rapid speciation is not devolution. It is merely the reduction of genetic diversity in a gene pool, but with the advantage of specialisation in a particular area or areas. For example, humans of different skin colours being suited to different environments. And diversity can be reintroduced simply by two different species that share a common ancestor interbreeding to have children with greater diversity again.
This begs the question of how to call these changes in genetic markup if they're not of devolutionary nature and there is no such thing as evolution.
Not sure what you mean by this, sorry.
Earlier in this discussion I was under the impression you believed that more selective pressure causes less changes in genes. I was just trying to show the contradiction in that statement by various examples.
I don't see rapid speciation as harmful, and in fact it is even an integral part of the darwinist model.
I know, but again, the problem I have with this is how to call this rapid speciation if it's not devolution and there is no evolution.
1. Rapid speciation - the gene pool would initially be large, and offspring would be selected based on the traits they inherited. This is the faster change you noted when there's high selective pressure
I'm sorry, but I still don't get this. The way I see it: if we accept the concept of devolution, meaning the genetic makeup of species was perfect to begin with and can only degrade over time; we must also accept that losing bits of these perfect genes is one of the processes by which devolution does its job. If there is no such thing as evolution, all processes that change the genetic markup of a species must be devolutionary. IOW the way I see it, rapid speciation means rapid devolution; rapid speciation and slow devolution at the same time would be contradictory. I tried to demonstrate this contradiction by my entropy example: if you apply more pressure to a chaotic system it tends to speed up/increase in temperature, not the other way around.
Even metaphysically speaking, if you would argue natural selection speeds up devolution, I could only agree with you; this way the whole of creation would move farther and farther from God('s perfection), but creatures would still be able to adapt to the hell they're descending into, picking up speed and creating an even deeper hell in the process.
No, natural selection can't balance out devolution; the more selective pressure there is on a species, the less it would devolve. This is not symmetrical to evolution!
Evolution would speed up when the selective pressure is high, causing the species to change faster and adapt to the new situation. Devolution OTOH would slow down, causing the species to change slower, rendering it incapable of adapting to the new situation; ergo the species would die out.
This "genetic entropy" concept has a fundamental flaw: if there was but little pressure on the population, the population would grow larger but at the same time devolve faster, while if there was great pressure on the population, it would decline but devolve slower.
This means a prey species that's on the menu of a lot of different predators (take insects) wouldn't stand a chance and would be decimated, because the devolution would be spread out over a lot of preditor species, leaving them enough time to kill off the prey species; while by killing off prey species predators would slow down their devolution. Ultimately this leaves you with predator species which are still allmost perfectly suited for hunting prey species that no longer exist...