I know there have been a couple cases where people have used PGP to encrypt files to protect them from subpoena or prying employers. Unfortunately, the only cases I can think of are the subpoena to Kevin Mitnick, and the Hotline Communications fiasco. In both cases, the use of PGP was to thwart execution of the law. In my opinion, the laws were applied badly, but that doesn't make PGP look good to a lay person.
We agree that random change was insufficient to create a single celled organism from amino acids & a lipid bilayer. In fact, all evolutionists agree with you. Since you misunderstood the evolutionist argument in this manner, I assumed that you were not familiar with it. Dawkins is the first person to suggest that natural selection must already be in place for something as complicated as a single celled organism to come into existence. I don't see how that point could possibly debunk him.
Of course you need a self-replicating system. That is why people searching for the origins of life tend to look for simple self-replicating systems. Not single celled organisms.
There are a number of candidate simple self-replicating systems. None of them are particularly impressive, but it's imaginable that they could have lead to RNA and protein chains. We may not have discovered the correct process. We may never. This does not make evolution false.
You might feel that Dawkins has been debunked. But you also seem to think that all of evolution has been debunked. Evolutionists certainly haven't abandoned Dawkins because of something Behe said. No one has ever brought up Behe in this sort of discussion with me after they had heard the counterpoint. A good starter is here. That review's mousetrap argument is pretty lame, but the rest is ok.
Behe's irreducible complexity argument has been asked and answered many times before Darwin's Black Box. Just because one scientist cannot imagine an evolutionary pathway does not mean that one did not exist.
Still, Dawkins' books aren't flawless. No one's ever complained to me about him, but in a simple reading of any of his books, a number of little details rubbed me the wrong way. None of those details, however, are essential to his conclusions. I only brought up his book because he has a good discussion of Fred Hoyle's argument (and yours).
Anyway, I would love to continue this conversation in email. I think it's a little out of place on slashdot, but I'll leave it up to you as to where we should continue.
Imagine a pile of all the parts required to build an airplane. If a hurricane hit this pile, it would be ludicrous to imagine that a functional airplane would be formed.
This would be as ludicrous as imagining that a fully functioning single-celled organism could be created by microwaving amino acids.
That is why NO EVOLUTIONIST BELIEVES THAT LIFE BEGAN IN THAT MANNER. If you want to attack their theories, learn the theories first. Start with The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins.
The peak share price of VA Linux had nothing to do with any real value. It had everything to do with CSFB hustling private investors. If you want a real measure of the change in value of the company, look elsewhere.
Fun conversation, even now that the story is way off the main page.
Of course, natural selection selects for success. But success at what? Why does it require more than fair issue?
Being an alpha male or alpha female certainly guarantees you better mating options if you are a gorilla or a chimp. If you look at primate social structures, many do not mate in this fashion. Off the top of my head, lion tamarinds are monogamous and couple for life. Some monkeys even practice polyandry.
It doesn't matter how socially successful an animal is if it doesn't have children. It'll die someday. Wealth and social power is a means to an end. Reproductive success is the only kind of success that will extend the lifetime of a species, increase it's likelyhood of survival, etc.
If we can reconcile this point, right or wrong, then maybe we can talk about your other ideas.
Giving money to your descendants centuries after your death, even when you have a good chance of getting immense benefits for your line, feels too distant to get any satisfaction. YOU are not THERE, you don't see it happen, so you could really care less if your grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children own the world.
I've discussed this with a few people, and some of them feel exactly the same way you do. I can think of people however that strive to accumulate wealth and power for their issue. Medieval Europeans did not only seek kingdoms and dukedoms for their own personal leisure, but also for their distant descendants. Of course, in retrospect, we can see that accumulating wealth in this manner does not guarantee wealth for your offspring. Money is not secure for large durations.
Personally, that's absolutely not my goal. I do not hope that my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children are fantastically wealthy, but rather that there are thousands of them. And I care that my brother and my cousins are similarly blessed. If my brother and cousins are so, then I would be quite willing to risk my line on a long-shot endeavor such as the (completely hypothetical) generation starship.
Human intelligence was designed, from the ground up, to "selfishly" achieve success for offspring.
By "success" I do not mean wealth. I mean fair issue. That is all that natural selection selects for. Of course, it's been a very short time that humans have lived in large communities. Give us time, and somewhat restricted resources, and we might all see goals farther off.
The main reason that the parent post is moronic is the basic assumption that humans are evil right now. Of course they're selfish. Reciprocal altruism is a beautiful selfish thing.
A consequence of limited resources for survival was that it encouraged human intelligence. Human intelligence was designed, from the ground up, to "selfishly" achieve success for offspring. In that regard, colonists may very well seek to extend the domains of the human race, if only so that they can extend the domains of their offspring.
You might be surprised how ambitions, convenience, and laziness disappear when they are no longer efficient behavior.
Um, eugenics how? I believe all your points may be true, and maybe I'm just being blind, but how is my position even related to eugenics?
Oh. Nevermind. Just read through your webpage. If eugenicists are pro choice, that doesn't make pro choice people eugenicists. Simple logical fallacy. It's unfortunate for pro-choice people to have eugenicists associate themselves. Just as it's unfortunate for pro-lifers to have clinic bombers and Pat Buchanan associate themselves with the pro-lifers. I'm pro-choice and eugenics is insane.
Is there any other way in which the extension of my point is eugenics? Because I really don't see it.
Hrm. I guess that's a logical extension of my point. Except that the only reason I feel this way is because of the effect on the child when it is outside of the womb.
And it would be a pretty weird thing to say, "If you carry this crack baby to term, you should go to jail, but if you abort it, you're fine." I'm pro-choice and all, but I wouldn't want to legislate required abortions.
So, I don't know where I stand on that. But I am definitely opposed to a doctor creating a life that may only know pain because of his own hubris.
No, the assertions that I made weren't correct. Stem cells don't migrate. Migratory cells do. Stem cells spawn migratory cells. What I was trying to suggest is that the migratory cells know their destination by their generation and the hormone environment. But I don't know if that's true now. Are there hormonal interactions between the mother and the fetus required for embryological developement? Sounds like I was full of it.
Erg. Yeah, it is. But it's not what I meant. It's just that the way a baby turns out is dependent on both genetics and the care it recieves in the womb. Are you telling me that the embryo produces all the required hormones? The only influence that the womb has is care and feeding?
1) pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
Discovering how to extract that value may cost more than it earns. And, you may recieve some small benefits from putting your IP in the public domain. As many companies engage in charity work for PR, this would allow you to do the equivalent of charity work in a field full of potential employees.
2) protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.
If your work is in the public domain, then you no longer own it, right? A "no warranty, express or implied" clause might actually mean something for IP in the public domain. You're right, this might be a real issue, but isn't that exactly the problem that these licenses will need to address?
You're right, we'd never have the problem of an artificial womb having a few beers after work. But we have no idea how much monitoring gets done by the expecting mother. There are hugely complex hormonal interactions between the womb and the fetus. I do not believe that we could begin to approximate this process in the near future.
Sure, progress marches on, but I really think this is just too complex.
Right. When something horrible happens to someone because of cruel fate, there is no one to blame. However, if one person causes something horrible to happen to another, then there *is* someone to blame. That's like saying that we shouldn't jail murderers because people die all the time.
The obvious ethical concerns have nothing to do with where the womb is. There is a huge risk of creating a human that lives a short painful life outside of the womb.
In my most humble opinion, if a doctor created a baby through some kind of high science (an artificial womb, cloning, whatever) and that baby lived for three months of pain while it's underdeveloped lungs collapsed on themselves, that doctor deserves jail time. Let alone ethical scrutiny.
That's the least of the problems. Embryology is fantastically complicated. There are numerous things that we just don't understand. For example, in many species, hormones dictate which end of the embryo is which. So that the stem cells destined for the head migrate to the correct place, and the stem cells destined for the tail migrate elsewhere. If we have similar (or much much more complex) systems, then we might be able to approximate them, but we'll never know how well we've done. We could discover that we had improperly measured out the amount of hormones necesary to give the XY fetus male genitals. And we might only discover our mistake when none of these males could produce sperm.
Embryology is 100% as complicated as all of human evolution. Every peice of genetic code is only functional in the context of the mother's womb.
You have many critical responses. I think most of them are *somewhat* off the mark. You suggest that by allowing less fit people to procreate, we are actively working against evolution. They suggest that you are wrong because those less fit people may in fact be more fit at some thing that you have not considered. This is true. But the real point of advances such as this one (This is a bad example, because I don't think it will ever work very well.) indicate fitness in the people who *CREATE* them. Those people will be well rewarded by others who need their services. The people able to acquire this service have indicated their fitness simply by being able to acquire it. And I am *not* a social darwinist.
And, even more importantly, we do not know the next threat to humankind. We do not know the environment of our future. If we do not preserve diverse genetics (such as the congenitally blind) then at the next time our resouces become restricted, we may not have the right combinations available to survive.
And, for those of you that read the last evolution related article on/., the interbreeding of diverse cultures will in fact help the human race support a wider amount of diversity. Phenotypes may become more similar, but genotypes will not unless the population decreases significantly.
Remember, evolutionary fitness is determined by who survives and procreates. Not by any preference of your own.
I'm a great big Stallman fan. And I'm always interested in hearing the comments of those who hate him so vehemently. Perhaps the attacks on him are off the mark, but I still want them to break my threshold. And moderation is *supposed* to be blind to the opinions of the poster.
She could have easily failed to uncheck all of the opt-in spam that Yahoo asks you to accept. Hotmail's best one is the "Internet White Pages". Gotta love that.
True, but what most people don't realize is that we see just as much depth in a TV screen, as we would in real life if we covered one eye.
Remember, a strong queue for 3D perception does not require two eyes: Moving your head just slightly gives you stereo vision over time. Sometimes you can't get the same thing from a steadicam shot.
Slashdot Mirror
I know there have been a couple cases where people have used PGP to encrypt files to protect them from subpoena or prying employers. Unfortunately, the only cases I can think of are the subpoena to Kevin Mitnick, and the Hotline Communications fiasco. In both cases, the use of PGP was to thwart execution of the law. In my opinion, the laws were applied badly, but that doesn't make PGP look good to a lay person.
This might be a dumb question, but what exactly is your setup? How do you start Quartz again from Darwin?
We agree that random change was insufficient to create a single celled organism from amino acids & a lipid bilayer. In fact, all evolutionists agree with you. Since you misunderstood the evolutionist argument in this manner, I assumed that you were not familiar with it. Dawkins is the first person to suggest that natural selection must already be in place for something as complicated as a single celled organism to come into existence. I don't see how that point could possibly debunk him.
Of course you need a self-replicating system. That is why people searching for the origins of life tend to look for simple self-replicating systems. Not single celled organisms.
There are a number of candidate simple self-replicating systems. None of them are particularly impressive, but it's imaginable that they could have lead to RNA and protein chains. We may not have discovered the correct process. We may never. This does not make evolution false.
You might feel that Dawkins has been debunked. But you also seem to think that all of evolution has been debunked. Evolutionists certainly haven't abandoned Dawkins because of something Behe said. No one has ever brought up Behe in this sort of discussion with me after they had heard the counterpoint. A good starter is here. That review's mousetrap argument is pretty lame, but the rest is ok.
Behe's irreducible complexity argument has been asked and answered many times before Darwin's Black Box. Just because one scientist cannot imagine an evolutionary pathway does not mean that one did not exist.
Still, Dawkins' books aren't flawless. No one's ever complained to me about him, but in a simple reading of any of his books, a number of little details rubbed me the wrong way. None of those details, however, are essential to his conclusions. I only brought up his book because he has a good discussion of Fred Hoyle's argument (and yours).
Anyway, I would love to continue this conversation in email. I think it's a little out of place on slashdot, but I'll leave it up to you as to where we should continue.
Imagine a pile of all the parts required to build an airplane. If a hurricane hit this pile, it would be ludicrous to imagine that a functional airplane would be formed.
This would be as ludicrous as imagining that a fully functioning single-celled organism could be created by microwaving amino acids.
That is why NO EVOLUTIONIST BELIEVES THAT LIFE BEGAN IN THAT MANNER. If you want to attack their theories, learn the theories first. Start with The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins.
The peak share price of VA Linux had nothing to do with any real value. It had everything to do with CSFB hustling private investors. If you want a real measure of the change in value of the company, look elsewhere.
To be fair, the story here was that apple.slashdot.org existed. So it was just fine.
Fun conversation, even now that the story is way off the main page.
Of course, natural selection selects for success. But success at what? Why does it require more than fair issue?
Being an alpha male or alpha female certainly guarantees you better mating options if you are a gorilla or a chimp. If you look at primate social structures, many do not mate in this fashion. Off the top of my head, lion tamarinds are monogamous and couple for life. Some monkeys even practice polyandry.
It doesn't matter how socially successful an animal is if it doesn't have children. It'll die someday. Wealth and social power is a means to an end. Reproductive success is the only kind of success that will extend the lifetime of a species, increase it's likelyhood of survival, etc.
If we can reconcile this point, right or wrong, then maybe we can talk about your other ideas.
Personally, that's absolutely not my goal. I do not hope that my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children are fantastically wealthy, but rather that there are thousands of them. And I care that my brother and my cousins are similarly blessed. If my brother and cousins are so, then I would be quite willing to risk my line on a long-shot endeavor such as the (completely hypothetical) generation starship. By "success" I do not mean wealth. I mean fair issue. That is all that natural selection selects for. Of course, it's been a very short time that humans have lived in large communities. Give us time, and somewhat restricted resources, and we might all see goals farther off.
The main reason that the parent post is moronic is the basic assumption that humans are evil right now. Of course they're selfish. Reciprocal altruism is a beautiful selfish thing.
A consequence of limited resources for survival was that it encouraged human intelligence. Human intelligence was designed, from the ground up, to "selfishly" achieve success for offspring. In that regard, colonists may very well seek to extend the domains of the human race, if only so that they can extend the domains of their offspring.
You might be surprised how ambitions, convenience, and laziness disappear when they are no longer efficient behavior.
Written authorization? Like, for example, your signed terms of service?
Um, eugenics how? I believe all your points may be true, and maybe I'm just being blind, but how is my position even related to eugenics?
Oh. Nevermind. Just read through your webpage. If eugenicists are pro choice, that doesn't make pro choice people eugenicists. Simple logical fallacy. It's unfortunate for pro-choice people to have eugenicists associate themselves. Just as it's unfortunate for pro-lifers to have clinic bombers and Pat Buchanan associate themselves with the pro-lifers. I'm pro-choice and eugenics is insane.
Is there any other way in which the extension of my point is eugenics? Because I really don't see it.
Hrm. I guess that's a logical extension of my point. Except that the only reason I feel this way is because of the effect on the child when it is outside of the womb.
And it would be a pretty weird thing to say, "If you carry this crack baby to term, you should go to jail, but if you abort it, you're fine." I'm pro-choice and all, but I wouldn't want to legislate required abortions.
So, I don't know where I stand on that. But I am definitely opposed to a doctor creating a life that may only know pain because of his own hubris.
No, the assertions that I made weren't correct. Stem cells don't migrate. Migratory cells do. Stem cells spawn migratory cells. What I was trying to suggest is that the migratory cells know their destination by their generation and the hormone environment. But I don't know if that's true now. Are there hormonal interactions between the mother and the fetus required for embryological developement? Sounds like I was full of it.
Erg. Yeah, it is. But it's not what I meant. It's just that the way a baby turns out is dependent on both genetics and the care it recieves in the womb. Are you telling me that the embryo produces all the required hormones? The only influence that the womb has is care and feeding?
1) pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
Discovering how to extract that value may cost more than it earns. And, you may recieve some small benefits from putting your IP in the public domain. As many companies engage in charity work for PR, this would allow you to do the equivalent of charity work in a field full of potential employees.
2) protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.
If your work is in the public domain, then you no longer own it, right? A "no warranty, express or implied" clause might actually mean something for IP in the public domain. You're right, this might be a real issue, but isn't that exactly the problem that these licenses will need to address?
You're right, we'd never have the problem of an artificial womb having a few beers after work. But we have no idea how much monitoring gets done by the expecting mother. There are hugely complex hormonal interactions between the womb and the fetus. I do not believe that we could begin to approximate this process in the near future.
Sure, progress marches on, but I really think this is just too complex.
Right. When something horrible happens to someone because of cruel fate, there is no one to blame. However, if one person causes something horrible to happen to another, then there *is* someone to blame. That's like saying that we shouldn't jail murderers because people die all the time.
The obvious ethical concerns have nothing to do with where the womb is. There is a huge risk of creating a human that lives a short painful life outside of the womb.
In my most humble opinion, if a doctor created a baby through some kind of high science (an artificial womb, cloning, whatever) and that baby lived for three months of pain while it's underdeveloped lungs collapsed on themselves, that doctor deserves jail time. Let alone ethical scrutiny.
That's the least of the problems. Embryology is fantastically complicated. There are numerous things that we just don't understand. For example, in many species, hormones dictate which end of the embryo is which. So that the stem cells destined for the head migrate to the correct place, and the stem cells destined for the tail migrate elsewhere. If we have similar (or much much more complex) systems, then we might be able to approximate them, but we'll never know how well we've done. We could discover that we had improperly measured out the amount of hormones necesary to give the XY fetus male genitals. And we might only discover our mistake when none of these males could produce sperm.
Embryology is 100% as complicated as all of human evolution. Every peice of genetic code is only functional in the context of the mother's womb.
You have many critical responses. I think most of them are *somewhat* off the mark. You suggest that by allowing less fit people to procreate, we are actively working against evolution. They suggest that you are wrong because those less fit people may in fact be more fit at some thing that you have not considered. This is true. But the real point of advances such as this one (This is a bad example, because I don't think it will ever work very well.) indicate fitness in the people who *CREATE* them. Those people will be well rewarded by others who need their services. The people able to acquire this service have indicated their fitness simply by being able to acquire it. And I am *not* a social darwinist.
/., the interbreeding of diverse cultures will in fact help the human race support a wider amount of diversity. Phenotypes may become more similar, but genotypes will not unless the population decreases significantly.
And, even more importantly, we do not know the next threat to humankind. We do not know the environment of our future. If we do not preserve diverse genetics (such as the congenitally blind) then at the next time our resouces become restricted, we may not have the right combinations available to survive.
And, for those of you that read the last evolution related article on
Remember, evolutionary fitness is determined by who survives and procreates. Not by any preference of your own.
I'm a great big Stallman fan. And I'm always interested in hearing the comments of those who hate him so vehemently. Perhaps the attacks on him are off the mark, but I still want them to break my threshold. And moderation is *supposed* to be blind to the opinions of the poster.
She could have easily failed to uncheck all of the opt-in spam that Yahoo asks you to accept. Hotmail's best one is the "Internet White Pages". Gotta love that.
Remember, a strong queue for 3D perception does not require two eyes: Moving your head just slightly gives you stereo vision over time. Sometimes you can't get the same thing from a steadicam shot.
Oh, wow. Those aren't the only scientific names you can find for those species. This website: umich says that the names are:
Wolves = Canis lupus lycaon
Hounds = Canis lupus familiaris
There are also places that use the names I did, but now I'm not so sure of my definition of species.