The reason that a Newfie is the same species as an Afghani is that Newfies interbreed with a number of people from a number of nations, and Afghanis breed with a number of people from a number of nations. Eventually, it is likely that an Afghani could recieve genetic code from a Newfie, even if that Newfie was living in the US right now. Wolves and Dogs do not interbreed in this fashion.
Like I said, you're using a different definition of the word species. We're both right.
Ugh. Athiests cannot say, conclusively, "There is no God." Most of us do not. Christians decided that "athiest" was a foul word, so people started calling themselves "agnostic" so as to seem less offensive. I just think it's unlikely that there is a divine creator.
Many athiests define faith as the belief in something for which you do not have evidence. In that respect, I am an athiest, and I have no faith. I defy you to show otherwise. Many other athiests feel just the same way.
Also, Behe's "irreducible complexity" theory has been roundly rejected. See other posts in this thread. Just because Behe cannot imagine how a biochemical process could have evolved does not mean that it did not. It may be a failure in evolution, and it may be a failure of Behe's imagination. I see plenty of evidence for evolution, and I see no evidence for Behe's imagination.
Ok, you're right, all creationists are capable of higher brain function. There are many otherwise intelligent people that do not understand science properly. Some scientists do not understand science properly.
As someone has replied already, creationists either do not believe in science, or they do not understand its tenets. Science is our best explanation of observed fact. To not believe it is a mistake. So, if all I know about someone is that they are a creationist, all I will know about them is that they have made a logical mistake.
Usually, people only invoke the accusation of stereotyping when someone prejudges based on unrelated characteristics.
The definition of a species is a group of animals that can and do interbreed to produce viable offspring. If two groups of animals *can* interbreed and do not, then they are of separate species. No biological change whatsoever is required for speciation. Witness dogs and wolves. Two different species, totally viable offspring. The definition of species is a human invention. We use the word to describe a group of animals. It does not necesarily have anything to do with evolution. Often, however, evolution acts differently on two different species that could interbreed. After evolution makes enough change, then those animals will not be able to interbreed even if they are reintroduced to eachother.
Uh, basic flaw with argument. "Forks are always resolved by market share."
No, most of the forks that I can think of are either never resolved, or involve the GPL with no patents. If Microsoft can kill Mono dead with their patents, then Miguel is insane. If he thinks mono can be reworked in the event that MS uses their patents, then forking is not a concern at all. So what if his.NET has a smaller market share? I don't think the objective was cross-platform compatibility with Windows or with Microsoft's.NET. The motivation is that Miguel thinks.NET is a good technology and would add to the capabilities of Gnome.
Forking doesn't have to be resolved at all. The required contact with a microsoft server could also be easily dealt with by using other servers for authentication.
And Gnome needs a compelling reason for people to switch from _what_ at microsoft? Switch to *nix? I just thought that Gnome needed good GPL apps. If a.NET framework knockoff helps them do that, great.
I'll try to clarify, but I guarantee I'm speculating wildly at this point.
I thought you were saying that someone with more diversity in their ancestry would be orders of magnitude better at surviving viral outbreaks. I was just trying to suggest that they might be worse at specialized immune system tasks than either of their parents, and thus not necesarily better at surviving viral outbreaks. They might be better off in a situation where they must deal with a wider variety of less difficult diseases.
That would only apply if these were multigene traits. If each parent has a different advantageous dominant-recessive style gene, then it's a simpler calculation. One kid in four will significantly more fit, one will be less fit, and two will be similarly equiped to their parents.
Anyway, if that didn't make sense, then maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
Change of environment because of climactic change is very important in evolution, but not necesarily more important than other things. For example, change of environment because of migration. Of course an ice age will have a huge impact on natural selection. It's just annoying that the punctuated evolutionists suggest that this sort of event is required for complex evolutionary change.
And, I don't know if an immune system with widespread diversity would be an order of magnitude better at anything. It would be more likely to protect against a wider group of diseases, but it might not be as good at protecting against a disease that requires intense specialization. No way to know, and no way to guess who would be more fit.
Oh. Species delineation is rather arbitrary. I guess I refer to H sapiens + direct ancestors. All I mean by breakneck pace is that certain changes happened very quickly. Other aspects of H sapiens haven't changed at all since we were tree shrews.
I don't think we'd notice it. The fastest bit of evolution that I can think of is brain size. Brain size exploded over a couple million years. There's no way that we could see something like that in progress. It could be in progress now, or it could be reversing at full speed. No way to know for another hundred thousand years.
And yes, we might cast it away as a disease. But keep in mind that all evolutionary change occurs in tiny little steps. Drastic changes require a long series of mutations that all offer advantages.
Hence, the blending of our genes which will soon produce a uniformly brown-skinned population. Apart from that, there will be little change in the species.
This *is* a statement of judgment. You're right, it's not particularly descriminatory toward any race, but it implies that racial mixing has stopped evolution. And that *is* horseshit. More mixing in a large population allows for a much larger amount of genotype variation, even if the resulting phenotypes seem similar. Since genes are digital, once we have a struggle for existence, those uniformly brown-skinned people will have *more* variety. Evolution will go unimpeded.
B)
The point of the article is *not* that there is less chance of lucky combinations of genes - the point is that these fortunate new humans have no advantage to everybody else. Therefore the race as a whole will only benefit extremely marginally from this contribution to the gene-pool. And for every beneficial mutation, there's a thousand harmful. But without any selection each of these thousands of disadvantaged individuals will contribute as much to the next generation as the single lucky one. This adds up to a general degeneration.
You would be exactly right if genes combined with eachother. Their effects may combine but the actual genetic data does not, and natural selection will be able to influence the frequency of a gene in a population. This was one of the earliest real contradictions to Darwin's theory of natural selection. If genotypes combined, then eventually all variety would disappear. Thankfully, Gregor Mendel discovered that genes behave in a digital manner, and saved Darwin's theory.
B.5)
No, no, no. As is widely known - and described in an earlier post - succes does *not* result in more kids. Quite the opposite actually. Those who don't win the nobel-prize or run a multi-billion company tend to produce more offspring instead, put bruntly. So we actually have a selection towards the lower end of the spectre.
Wow, that's ignorant. Evolution doesn't see a higher or lower end of the spectrum. It sees survival and death. If your nobel prize winners don't survive as much, then they're less evolutionarily fit. There might be a more effective way for humans to spend their energy to survive.
C)
The people living in those cities are the survivors. Every year simple diseases kill people in the developing world. The local population builds a resistance. The disease mutates and kills again. The local population builds more resistance. And so on and so forth. Westerners, living in their sterile and hygenic conditions, eating denatured food full of salt, fat and sugar, won't have any resistance to these viscious new cold strains. This is an evolutionary event just waiting to happen.
Err, dunno about thirdrock's point here. Virii evolve a little too fast for human evolution to keep up with. That's why mammals evolved the technique of transmitting antibodies via breastmilk. And "evolutionary event" is a silly idea. If the frequency of a gene is changing in population, then evolution is happening. You don't need an event.
Human population is growing fast enough that we'll hit a limit pretty soon in evolutionary time. Even if it takes 10,000 years. So we'll have a struggle for existence. And I don't think it would even require war, famine, or epidemic. "Punctuated Equilibrium" is no different from modern Darwinism. It's just a way of describing the same things differently. Gould tries to make Darwinians sound like absurdly strict gradualists, which they're not.
There are many examples of how we are not perfectly adapted to our environment. We have changed it so much in the past 400 years that there is no way our genetics could have changed that much. The easiest example is diet. Humans crave fats and sugars because those sources of food used to be difficult to find and very valuable. Now they are plentiful, but we still crave them. This can be regulated by our brains just fine, but given a lot of time, our genetics would fall back in line too.
And. The fossil record shows that we've been evolving at a breakneck pace up until now. Eventually our population will stop expanding so fast, and selection will start again in earnest.
Ah, but you're wrong. The slightly off-point reason first: Medicine has not made us weak. It is evolutionarily *unfit* to live to a ripe old age. Living long will cause you to use energy that might otherwise go to your offspring. That is why diabetes, heart disease, and cancer exist. Not de-evolution.
But even for the youthful genetic diseases, consider this. There are many genetic traits like sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia seems to make the patient less evolutionarily fit. We have seen now that this is not necesarily the case. There may be many genetic disorders that seem completely deleterious. We may discover in 500 years that they are not. It is advantageous for us to preserve as much variety as possible.
Right now we're still in a population boom. When we start to run low on resources, we may find that some strange variation in humanity is much more fit than we expected. So save that woman, man and child if you can.
The likely supposition would *not* be that humanity as a whole would "devolve". Evolution is an explanation of a large collection of observations. It isn't a magical force. Evolution does not want us to be smarter. If we are more fit to have more survivable offspring, then we will have more survivable offspring. If social success were a genetic trait, as you accidentally imply, and social success caused people to have significantly fewer children, then after a certain amount of time this trait would go away entirely.
Just keep in mind. People have undergone a fantastically huge population explosion in a very short order of time. There is very little variation in our genetics. Once mutation starts to catch up to us, and we start to have resource limitations again, then people might do some real changing.
Digital devices do encourage people to be more creative in a particular special way. Since there's no cost per photo, per song, or per movie, people do less self-censorship. I've seen otherwise unartistic people making interesting movies and taking artistic photos with their digital cameras.
However, you're probably right in a more important regard. I don't think that many of these people would have considered it a selling point of their digital camera. They never said "Now I'll get to do all the art photography I've always wanted!" But it just worked out that way.
On Kazaa, queries go through supernodes, right? Supernodes keep track of who is connected to them. If someone stops responding after a minute or so, the supernode removes their files from the database. This is both the way they say it works, and it is also the way it seems to work in practice. When I disconnect manually, my files are immediately gone, and when the kazaa client crashes, they are gone after a short period of time.
So, where are you getting your information? I have never seen any information to support your clame.
Ok, I'm not educated on the matter. Please tell me how RSA is not a factoring problem. Iduno about other public key systems, but I was pretty sure that fast factoring of large numbers breaks RSA.
Well, you're lucky. A lot of aspergers and autistics have no advantage whatsoever over "neurotypicals."
There is good evidence that the *reason* primates evolved larger brains and prefrontal cortex was to improve social interaction. I guarantee you, if neurotypicals were gone, we'd have a hell of a time getting along with *anyone*. Social interaction is absolutely a more essential skill than any technical field. If you hand no ability to interact socially (Some autistics can barely speak) it wouldn't matter how you perform in academia.
When your three year old son stops being able to speak, stays rigid while you hold him, and spends all day rocking himself, don't worry, I'll know it's not because you didn't teach him something.
Slashdot Mirror
Wolves = Canis lupus
Hounds = Canis domesticus
The reason that a Newfie is the same species as an Afghani is that Newfies interbreed with a number of people from a number of nations, and Afghanis breed with a number of people from a number of nations. Eventually, it is likely that an Afghani could recieve genetic code from a Newfie, even if that Newfie was living in the US right now. Wolves and Dogs do not interbreed in this fashion.
Like I said, you're using a different definition of the word species. We're both right.
Ugh. Athiests cannot say, conclusively, "There is no God." Most of us do not. Christians decided that "athiest" was a foul word, so people started calling themselves "agnostic" so as to seem less offensive. I just think it's unlikely that there is a divine creator.
Many athiests define faith as the belief in something for which you do not have evidence. In that respect, I am an athiest, and I have no faith. I defy you to show otherwise. Many other athiests feel just the same way.
Also, Behe's "irreducible complexity" theory has been roundly rejected. See other posts in this thread. Just because Behe cannot imagine how a biochemical process could have evolved does not mean that it did not. It may be a failure in evolution, and it may be a failure of Behe's imagination. I see plenty of evidence for evolution, and I see no evidence for Behe's imagination.
Ok, you're right, all creationists are capable of higher brain function. There are many otherwise intelligent people that do not understand science properly. Some scientists do not understand science properly.
As someone has replied already, creationists either do not believe in science, or they do not understand its tenets. Science is our best explanation of observed fact. To not believe it is a mistake. So, if all I know about someone is that they are a creationist, all I will know about them is that they have made a logical mistake.
Usually, people only invoke the accusation of stereotyping when someone prejudges based on unrelated characteristics.
The definition of a species is a group of animals that can and do interbreed to produce viable offspring. If two groups of animals *can* interbreed and do not, then they are of separate species. No biological change whatsoever is required for speciation. Witness dogs and wolves. Two different species, totally viable offspring. The definition of species is a human invention. We use the word to describe a group of animals. It does not necesarily have anything to do with evolution. Often, however, evolution acts differently on two different species that could interbreed. After evolution makes enough change, then those animals will not be able to interbreed even if they are reintroduced to eachother.
Uh, basic flaw with argument. "Forks are always resolved by market share."
.NET has a smaller market share? I don't think the objective was cross-platform compatibility with Windows or with Microsoft's .NET. The motivation is that Miguel thinks .NET is a good technology and would add to the capabilities of Gnome.
.NET framework knockoff helps them do that, great.
No, most of the forks that I can think of are either never resolved, or involve the GPL with no patents. If Microsoft can kill Mono dead with their patents, then Miguel is insane. If he thinks mono can be reworked in the event that MS uses their patents, then forking is not a concern at all. So what if his
Forking doesn't have to be resolved at all. The required contact with a microsoft server could also be easily dealt with by using other servers for authentication.
And Gnome needs a compelling reason for people to switch from _what_ at microsoft? Switch to *nix? I just thought that Gnome needed good GPL apps. If a
I'll try to clarify, but I guarantee I'm speculating wildly at this point.
I thought you were saying that someone with more diversity in their ancestry would be orders of magnitude better at surviving viral outbreaks. I was just trying to suggest that they might be worse at specialized immune system tasks than either of their parents, and thus not necesarily better at surviving viral outbreaks. They might be better off in a situation where they must deal with a wider variety of less difficult diseases.
That would only apply if these were multigene traits. If each parent has a different advantageous dominant-recessive style gene, then it's a simpler calculation. One kid in four will significantly more fit, one will be less fit, and two will be similarly equiped to their parents.
Anyway, if that didn't make sense, then maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
Change of environment because of climactic change is very important in evolution, but not necesarily more important than other things. For example, change of environment because of migration. Of course an ice age will have a huge impact on natural selection. It's just annoying that the punctuated evolutionists suggest that this sort of event is required for complex evolutionary change.
And, I don't know if an immune system with widespread diversity would be an order of magnitude better at anything. It would be more likely to protect against a wider group of diseases, but it might not be as good at protecting against a disease that requires intense specialization. No way to know, and no way to guess who would be more fit.
Oh. Species delineation is rather arbitrary. I guess I refer to H sapiens + direct ancestors. All I mean by breakneck pace is that certain changes happened very quickly. Other aspects of H sapiens haven't changed at all since we were tree shrews.
I don't think we'd notice it. The fastest bit of evolution that I can think of is brain size. Brain size exploded over a couple million years. There's no way that we could see something like that in progress. It could be in progress now, or it could be reversing at full speed. No way to know for another hundred thousand years.
And yes, we might cast it away as a disease. But keep in mind that all evolutionary change occurs in tiny little steps. Drastic changes require a long series of mutations that all offer advantages.
That or we're evolving into pedestrians and bicycle riders. There aren't that many cars on the planet and there are lots of people.
A)This *is* a statement of judgment. You're right, it's not particularly descriminatory toward any race, but it implies that racial mixing has stopped evolution. And that *is* horseshit. More mixing in a large population allows for a much larger amount of genotype variation, even if the resulting phenotypes seem similar. Since genes are digital, once we have a struggle for existence, those uniformly brown-skinned people will have *more* variety. Evolution will go unimpeded.
B)You would be exactly right if genes combined with eachother. Their effects may combine but the actual genetic data does not, and natural selection will be able to influence the frequency of a gene in a population. This was one of the earliest real contradictions to Darwin's theory of natural selection. If genotypes combined, then eventually all variety would disappear. Thankfully, Gregor Mendel discovered that genes behave in a digital manner, and saved Darwin's theory.
B.5)Wow, that's ignorant. Evolution doesn't see a higher or lower end of the spectrum. It sees survival and death. If your nobel prize winners don't survive as much, then they're less evolutionarily fit. There might be a more effective way for humans to spend their energy to survive.
C) Err, dunno about thirdrock's point here. Virii evolve a little too fast for human evolution to keep up with. That's why mammals evolved the technique of transmitting antibodies via breastmilk. And "evolutionary event" is a silly idea. If the frequency of a gene is changing in population, then evolution is happening. You don't need an event.
Human population is growing fast enough that we'll hit a limit pretty soon in evolutionary time. Even if it takes 10,000 years. So we'll have a struggle for existence. And I don't think it would even require war, famine, or epidemic. "Punctuated Equilibrium" is no different from modern Darwinism. It's just a way of describing the same things differently. Gould tries to make Darwinians sound like absurdly strict gradualists, which they're not.
There are many examples of how we are not perfectly adapted to our environment. We have changed it so much in the past 400 years that there is no way our genetics could have changed that much. The easiest example is diet. Humans crave fats and sugars because those sources of food used to be difficult to find and very valuable. Now they are plentiful, but we still crave them. This can be regulated by our brains just fine, but given a lot of time, our genetics would fall back in line too.
And. The fossil record shows that we've been evolving at a breakneck pace up until now. Eventually our population will stop expanding so fast, and selection will start again in earnest.
Ah, but you're wrong. The slightly off-point reason first: Medicine has not made us weak. It is evolutionarily *unfit* to live to a ripe old age. Living long will cause you to use energy that might otherwise go to your offspring. That is why diabetes, heart disease, and cancer exist. Not de-evolution.
But even for the youthful genetic diseases, consider this. There are many genetic traits like sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia seems to make the patient less evolutionarily fit. We have seen now that this is not necesarily the case. There may be many genetic disorders that seem completely deleterious. We may discover in 500 years that they are not. It is advantageous for us to preserve as much variety as possible.
Right now we're still in a population boom. When we start to run low on resources, we may find that some strange variation in humanity is much more fit than we expected. So save that woman, man and child if you can.
The likely supposition would *not* be that humanity as a whole would "devolve". Evolution is an explanation of a large collection of observations. It isn't a magical force. Evolution does not want us to be smarter. If we are more fit to have more survivable offspring, then we will have more survivable offspring. If social success were a genetic trait, as you accidentally imply, and social success caused people to have significantly fewer children, then after a certain amount of time this trait would go away entirely.
Just keep in mind. People have undergone a fantastically huge population explosion in a very short order of time. There is very little variation in our genetics. Once mutation starts to catch up to us, and we start to have resource limitations again, then people might do some real changing.
Don't mean to nitpick, but I think the new apple machines have 64bit 133mHz PCI busses. Let alone 66mHz. The listed tech specs are here
As the Beatles said: No no no, you're wrong.
Digital devices do encourage people to be more creative in a particular special way. Since there's no cost per photo, per song, or per movie, people do less self-censorship. I've seen otherwise unartistic people making interesting movies and taking artistic photos with their digital cameras.
However, you're probably right in a more important regard. I don't think that many of these people would have considered it a selling point of their digital camera. They never said "Now I'll get to do all the art photography I've always wanted!" But it just worked out that way.
On Kazaa, queries go through supernodes, right? Supernodes keep track of who is connected to them. If someone stops responding after a minute or so, the supernode removes their files from the database. This is both the way they say it works, and it is also the way it seems to work in practice. When I disconnect manually, my files are immediately gone, and when the kazaa client crashes, they are gone after a short period of time.
So, where are you getting your information? I have never seen any information to support your clame.
And if you're trolling, I guess you caught me.
Oh. Sorry. Reread top level post. Ignore please.
Ok, I'm not educated on the matter. Please tell me how RSA is not a factoring problem. Iduno about other public key systems, but I was pretty sure that fast factoring of large numbers breaks RSA.
Well, .doc s are really easy to index in windows. That would be one reason.
Right. And that's a good indication that you're not that autistic. You might be intelligent, but the two aren't necesarily linked.
Yet. You do not need help yet. You've got a long time to go before you get to say that you did not need help.
And I'm not saying that you should be on drugs, either. Therapy is an excellent tool.
Well, you're lucky. A lot of aspergers and autistics have no advantage whatsoever over "neurotypicals."
There is good evidence that the *reason* primates evolved larger brains and prefrontal cortex was to improve social interaction. I guarantee you, if neurotypicals were gone, we'd have a hell of a time getting along with *anyone*. Social interaction is absolutely a more essential skill than any technical field. If you hand no ability to interact socially (Some autistics can barely speak) it wouldn't matter how you perform in academia.
When your three year old son stops being able to speak, stays rigid while you hold him, and spends all day rocking himself, don't worry, I'll know it's not because you didn't teach him something.
Please. This is not just a socialization problem.
You should take a college course on brain biology. Dunno if you have already. It would definitely improve your brain-computer metaphors :)