Quantum theories about how all matter and energy is connected and interacts only help to prove to me that astrology is not so easily dismissed.
This is a profound misunderstanding of quantum mechanics that is entirely divorced from the reality of that science.
Your statement is essentially the equivalent of Star Trek technobabble (random science-sounding words used to justify whatever plot device is necessary), except that sentences like this are worse because in the real world they are used to justify belief in a system that has been repeatedly proven wrong.
Fortunately for woodlands and municipal water supplies, the popularity of this bizarre sport is on the wain. [Myself, I'd go mountain biking with that extra hour of daylight.]
You snark, but I've heard fairly serious accusations that DST is primarily driven by the golf-and-country-club lobby, which wants more months in which wealthy businessmen have light in the evenings after they get off work.
The results of this study are entirely unsurprising. DST saved energy when lighting was the primary use for electrical power in the home. More light in the evening, fewer lights on. But since the 1970's or so, air conditioning has come to consume far more energy in the summer than lighting, so sending people home from work while the sun is still strongly heating their homes means more home AC units. And it's far more efficient to cool a few large buildings (=low surface area) with industrial AC than millions of individual home-sized units.
And yet... just last year, the Congress voted to extend DST by a few weeks on each end, way out in the spring and fall when it can't possibly make much difference.
If time and other dimensions are a result of the big bang (a change), and time is the dimension through which all change is currently measured (dX/dt),
Stop there; your premise is incorrect. Changes can be measured equally well against any variable that can change. Time is not in any way defined as "that axis along which change is measured" because we can and do measure changes through space or against many other baselines that aren't among the basic four dimensions.
Change is not what defines time to a physicist. Time is the dimension on which it appears that we are compelled to travel, but that doesn't guarantee that it exists outside some predetermined boundary as defined by the big bang.
Also, the "both us and the other apes evolved" phrase is grammatically wrong
Ouch. Yes, I was attempting to use "us" as a singular pronoun synonymous with "Homo sapiens". But you are correct.
Apes are ape-like. I am ape-like.
They (and you) are indeed ape-like, but I think most people would read "ape-like" in the original sentence to imply that the common ancestor was not actually an ape, but a proto-ape or some other "almost ape" critter. I think my formulation clarifies that ambiguity.
more precisely, we and modern apes descended from a common, ape-like ancestor.
Even more precisely, we are apes. We are in the ape superfamily Hominoidea, and inside that in the Great Ape family Hominidae. Within that family, we are in a closely related subgroup (tribe Hominini) that includes both us and the two chimpanzee species Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes, with gorillas and orangutans being more distant relatives.
So it is not correct to say "both us and the apes evolved from a common ape-like ancestor", because "the apes" includes Homo sapiens and also because said ancestor would likewise be classified as an ape. (i.e. not "ape-like", but an actual ape.)
Correctly put, the sentence should be:
"We and the other extant apes descend from a common ancestral ape that is now extinct."
Theory means more than one thing, and even a lot of scientists can't elucidate the difference.
Def 1:"hunch" "guess" or "hypothesis". This is the sense that creationists mean when they say "evolution is just a theory". It's not technically correct to use theory this way in science, but people (even scientists) do all the time when speaking colloquially. ("If my theory is correct...") This is a problem - scientists should be careful not to speak this way, and when they do, they muddy the waters and make openings for the creationists.
Def 2:A model that explains all the known facts and has survived at least some testing. "The theory of evolution" and "the theory of special relativity", as phrases, mean this kind of theory. Unfortunately, theories of this definition vary quite a bit in their level of confidence and/or the amount of testing they have undergone.
Def 3:A set of principles, assumptions, and a body of work underlying a certain field. What exists when a def 2 theory has been confirmed so well and so long that it is assumed as true and used as the base principles for an entire field of scientific endeavor. Examples: "Evolutionary theory" is the understanding of DNA, mutation, genetics, heritability, natural selection and evolutionary descent that gives the inseparable background for all of biology. "Atomic theory" is the understanding of atom structure, valence electron, orbitals, quantum states, and bonds that underlies all of chemistry.
Science is a century past def. 2 "the theory of evolution" and long since completely employing def. 3 "evolutionary theory".
The key thing about a Type 3 theory is that it is so key to its field that it has become inseparable. Trying to understand contemporary research in biology while "rejecting evolution" is 100% as stupid as trying to understand chemistry while "rejecting the atom".
Atomic and Evolutionary theory are quite parallel: both arose as type 2 theories in the 19th century, replacing prior assumptions held by most knowledgeable people (special creation and infinitely divisible matter), and through decades of continuously accumulated support and evidence became essentially irrefutable type 3 theories by early in the 20th century. Both actually had inklings all the way back to the ancient Greeks but didn't become coherent (def. 2) theories until missing pieces and observations were filled in by Rutherford and Darwin.
When talking to creationists I often employ the analogy of a faith that demanded that atoms aren't real and that matter is continuously divisible because some allegorical section of their holy book could be read that way. It's easy to imagine:
"And on the second day, The Lord took the clay he had created and divided it in two, and again to make four, and again indefinitely until he had enough lumps of clay. And he fashioned their myriads into the earth, and the stars, and the waters, and the clouds, and every living thing, and every stone, and every grain of sand."
Suppose such a faith demanded that science classes miseducate their children with that obviously unsupportable position based on that one passage of text. That would only be conceivable to people who really don't understand the facts (if the atom isn't real, how in hell did we make the atomic bomb?), and it would be hazardous to our kids.
To anyone who understands biology, creationism is misguided on a nearly identical level. (if evolution isn't real, why do genetic drift/mutation accumulation, genetic structure analysis, morphological structure analysis, and the fossil record *all* produce a broadly similar tree of life? Why do we find literally billions of fossils of extinct intermediate species that fit that tree? Why do we find that every structure both macroscopic and microscopic looks like an adapted version of some preexisting structure that filled a different role?)
If God exists, He used evolution in the same way he used atoms. End of story.
. You don't buy a joystick if you haven't a game to go with it, and you don't buy appropriate games if you don't have a joystick.
You won't buy a game you don't already have the controller for? Tell that to the DDR/Guitar Hero/Rock Band crowd.
People will upgrade their whole gaming rig if there's a good enough game to play for it. If there was a good enough game, I'd happily buy a new joystick. Unfortunately, the last time I was interested in a game enough to buy a joystick, it was World War II Online. (Which was pretty cool, but very hard in the name of realism... I think I only ever had 3 kills)
Give me these three things, and I'll give you pages that smoothly scale to all screen sizes and resolutions:
1) 100% of the public using browsers that correctly implement CSS. 40% are still using the superbly broken IE6, and FF2 (20%) doesn't implement display: inline-block, which is important for making bordered tabs and such that scale with the size of their fonts.
2) Full SVG support in all browsers. IE has none, the others have a mix of laughable crap.
3) Clients who trust the designer's artistic sense and ability to compat-test on multiple rigs, instead of, say, looking at it on one windows machine in IE6 at 800x600 resolution and complaining "no, we want the text to wrap after this word, not that word".
Sadly, this environment doesn't exist. Sizing things in pixels and limiting the scope of the primary content to 780px wide is STILL the most reliable way to get a consistent appearance that makes clients happy.
SVG doesn't even really exist in any substantive, usable way, so graphics have to be done in pixels. Font sizes are usually scaled to match those sizes. At least all major browsers will let you override that.
This is the environment we have, and trust me the designers aren't any happier about it than you are. I do fluid-width displays every time my clients will let me (~20%), and I always try to make sure the page won't break when the fonts scale. Beyond that, I'm constrained by the tools I've got.
And I have a 16:10 ratio monitor... which means that often I will read a web site and there will be a narrow strip of text in the center, and tons of wasted space to either side, again because some web designer hard-coded things with pixel counts.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.
Until you can answer the question of what was there before the big bang... that is a debatable statement.
I am not a physicist, but as I understand it, contemporary physics considers the dimension of time as having come into existence at the big bang along with the familiar dimensions of space. If so, "before the big bang" is a meaningless phrase.
Yes, that's weird and hard to comprehend, and outside what human brains are built to grasp. But so is much of physics; the human brain can't really get a handle on the particle/wave duality, relativity, or quantum tunneling, either. The best most of us can do is represent it symbolically with mathematics - and few enough of us can do that.
Anyway, as counterintuitive as it is, "what was there before the big bang" may be as meaningless of a question as "how far do I have to walk on the earth before I get to the end?" We don't need religion to explain what was before the big bang for the same reason we don't need religion to explain what's past the edge of the (flat) Earth.
Just because kids are stupid, doesn't mean abstinence shouldn't be taught.
That's not what GP said. He said it doesn't work, not that it shouldn't be taught.
Abstinence should always be taught. But it should never be the only thing that is taught because it has been repeatedly shown that teaching only abstinence is ineffective public policy. If you teach only abstinence, experience shows that more kids will die of sexually transmitted diseases than if you teach about both abstinence and condoms. (and likewise, there will be more unwanted pregnancies, but that's OT.)
This is so well established at this point that anyone who crows "abstinence only" anymore either wants kids to die or is willfully sticking their fingers in their ears and going "nah nah nah I won't listen to the evidence" because they prefer their ideology to practical results that save lives.
while offering absolutely nothing new in the way of end-user features,
I have to disagree on only one feature: Vista adds scalable, anti-aliased screen fonts. XP is still stuck with bitmapped fonts. (When Mac had scalable fonts in, what, OS 9 almost a decade ago?)
Do you know how many big corporations out there buy expensive 19" and 20" LCD screens, and then run them at 800x600 resolution (causing horrific pixel interpolation) because the non-scalable fonts of XP appear too small at the full screen resolution?
I've spent many, many hours trying to explain the effect of pixel interpolation to corporate execs who look at websites I've designed on their poorly-set-up monitors and complain that the "fonts look fuzzy". When of course the problem is how their display is set up, not that I've chosen some inexplicably blurry font.
Seriously, the number of people who are still running their monitors at 800x600 just because of XP's fonts is tremendously large.
When I was in 9th grade (I guess about 10 years ago!), there were five "kingdoms": bacteria, protista, fungi, plantae, and animalia.
What's happened is that better information has rapidly come to the fore as genetic analysis have been done during the last 15 years. The tree has been revised several times.
The five kingdom model was already known to be wrong 10 years ago, but that information hadn't propagated to gradeschool and highschool textbooks yet. If you'd studied biology in college, your information would be more up to date.
These days there are three superkingdoms: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. (Bacteria and Archaea were formerly grouped together as "monera" or "bacteria" before it was realized that genetically they are as distinct from each other as they are from Eukarya.) Eukarya is broken into a number of kingdoms, and that number has just changed from 5 to 4. Even the 5 they were last year weren't exactly same ones that you learned in school.
Mutation is partly random, but selection definitely is not. Genes and traits are selected for by their ability to pass themselves on to the next generation. That's a criterion, not "randomness".
Note: mutation is definitely not always random, either. Organisms have developed extensive systems for modifying and altering how much mutation they incur, and what part of the genome receives those mutations. Look up, for example, the bacterial SOS response, in which bacterial colonies under stress will suddenly amplify their own mutation rate in the hopes that one or more of their member cells will "find a solution" to whatever the current stress and continue to survive. In addition, all organisms protect more critical parts of their genome from mutation to some degree. Truly important things like the region coding for ribosomal RNA and protein subunits tend to get very few mutations, because having a fucked-up ribosome is a death sentence.
Evolution itself is subject to evolution, and has been crafted to be less than perfectly random.
Yes, the science-informed members of the upper ranks (like Behe) absolutely know what they are talking about. They simply lie and deceive and misuse language on purpose in order to get the rank and file to further their agenda in blissful ignorance. I am 100% in agreement with you on this.
However there are plenty of "guys leading the Creationist" charge who are religious leaders with no scientific training and a poor understanding of science in general. This would include folks like Dobson, and most of the fundamentalist politicians, like Huckabee. I suspect they don't know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, and use the term only in its colloquial meaning.
One key point I didn't include - but I will as a refinement the next time I post this - is that to be a Type-2 theory, the theory must logically account for all the observed facts. A type-1 hypothesis is only such a thing before it is fully tested. After that, it's either a true theory or it is rejected.
Evolution existed as a definition-1 hypothesis for at least 2000 years before Darwin; descent of species is mentioned as a possibility by C. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus and many others going back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosophers. C. Darwin's contribution was the addition of the mechanism of natural selection, thus explaining the known facts and turning evolution into a type-2 theory.
Since then, the discovery of DNA, protein translation, genetic correlation of related organisms etc. have turned the viable type-2 theory into a whole body of coherent type-3 theory. Just as the discovery of subatomic particles, nuclear physics etc. have done the same for atomic theory.
A note on how silly it is to "reject evolution": Imagine if some other religion, say Wicca, held as a theological principle that matter was infinitely divisible: there are no atoms, you can keep slicing a gold brick in half forever and you will always have a smaller chuck of smooth, continuous gold.
Then imagine that Wiccan fundamentalists in 2008 demanded that Atomic Theory was "just a theory" despite 180 years of chemistry, nuclear physics, and atom bombs. They demand that we "teach the controversy" in science classes, and in some case school boards removed all mention of atoms from chemistry textbooks! They would point to the fact that the Higgs Boson hasn't been found yet, and that no lower-lever explanation (e.g. String Theory) is complete and so the properties of the Standard Model particles aren't explained, and therefore therefore Atomic Theory is wrong. They point to a religious parable where a prophet divides a small chunk of gold among a large number of people, turning them all rich, and claim this proves that matter is infinitely divisible.
We'd all laugh. As well we should. Fortunately, the Wiccans I know are smarter than that.
But this is exactly how ridiculous today's "debate" is. The analogy between Atomic Theory and Evolutionary Theory is nearly perfect in terms of how and when they arose, the amount of evidence they have accumulated in 150 years, and how deeply they underly the modern practice of their respective fields.
There are three meanings of theory, and people frequently misunderstand them.
(Theory defitition 1): "supposition" or "hunch". This is the use in the sentence "If my theory is correct, then..." This is the meaning that creationists usually think they are arguing against. But in science, it is never correct to use theory in this sense, though even scientists speaking casually often use it like that. The correct word for this in science is "hypothesis". It is certainly not the correct definition for the phrase "the theory of evolution".
(Theory definition 2): "a description of a process that explains observed facts". These vary in their degree of supportability, and sometimes, multiple warring theories are supported to different degrees by existing experiment. For example, there are at the moment multiple theories about what process gives matter mass. Examples: The theory that matter is atomic, i.e. not continuously divisible. The theory that natural selection coupled with variation leads to evolution. The theory that particles have mass because of their interaction with the Higgs field.
(Theory definition 3): "a body of knowledge and understanding that supports much other past and future work"; it describes an entire framework of internally consistent principles, understanding and data. Meanings used in this sense:
* Atomic theory (the understanding of the structure of the atom and it's constituent particles and interactions that underlies all of nuclear science and chemistry)
* Evolutionary theory (the understanding of how organisms and species give rise to one another, and the genetic mechanisms thereof that underlies all of biology)
It's instructive to note that evolutionary theory and atomic theory are approximately equivalent in terms of evidentiary support and use in their fields. Both arose as type-2 definitions around the same time (mid 19th-century), supplanting prior theories (matter is continuous, God created all organisms at one time and they have been unchanged since then). Both have since then become into type 3 theories that completely underly the relevant fields (chemistry, biology).
Religious fundamentalists don't understand the difference between these definitions, and they think evolution is a "type 1" theory, more properly called a hypothesis. It is not. Evolution is the entire framework of over a century of biological research. Attempting to understand research in biology while rejection evolution is like attempting to understand chemistry while rejecting the atom. Or attempting to understand higher math while rejecting arithmetic. It's flat-out ludicrous.
(This is a repost of my statement from the last time we had this debate. I will keep reposting it, hoping to educate a few people eventually.)
I can't really agree with your sig. The two are comparable in quality in their respective industries, but Budweiser has the redeeming quality of being inexpensive.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a profound misunderstanding of quantum mechanics that is entirely divorced from the reality of that science.
Your statement is essentially the equivalent of Star Trek technobabble (random science-sounding words used to justify whatever plot device is necessary), except that sentences like this are worse because in the real world they are used to justify belief in a system that has been repeatedly proven wrong.
Fortunately for woodlands and municipal water supplies, the popularity of this bizarre sport is on the wain. [Myself, I'd go mountain biking with that extra hour of daylight.]
Word to that.
You snark, but I've heard fairly serious accusations that DST is primarily driven by the golf-and-country-club lobby, which wants more months in which wealthy businessmen have light in the evenings after they get off work.
The results of this study are entirely unsurprising. DST saved energy when lighting was the primary use for electrical power in the home. More light in the evening, fewer lights on. But since the 1970's or so, air conditioning has come to consume far more energy in the summer than lighting, so sending people home from work while the sun is still strongly heating their homes means more home AC units. And it's far more efficient to cool a few large buildings (=low surface area) with industrial AC than millions of individual home-sized units.
And yet... just last year, the Congress voted to extend DST by a few weeks on each end, way out in the spring and fall when it can't possibly make much difference.
Stop there; your premise is incorrect. Changes can be measured equally well against any variable that can change. Time is not in any way defined as "that axis along which change is measured" because we can and do measure changes through space or against many other baselines that aren't among the basic four dimensions.
Change is not what defines time to a physicist. Time is the dimension on which it appears that we are compelled to travel, but that doesn't guarantee that it exists outside some predetermined boundary as defined by the big bang.
Ouch. Yes, I was attempting to use "us" as a singular pronoun synonymous with "Homo sapiens". But you are correct.
They (and you) are indeed ape-like, but I think most people would read "ape-like" in the original sentence to imply that the common ancestor was not actually an ape, but a proto-ape or some other "almost ape" critter. I think my formulation clarifies that ambiguity.
Even more precisely, we are apes. We are in the ape superfamily Hominoidea, and inside that in the Great Ape family Hominidae. Within that family, we are in a closely related subgroup (tribe Hominini) that includes both us and the two chimpanzee species Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes, with gorillas and orangutans being more distant relatives.
So it is not correct to say "both us and the apes evolved from a common ape-like ancestor", because "the apes" includes Homo sapiens and also because said ancestor would likewise be classified as an ape. (i.e. not "ape-like", but an actual ape.)
Correctly put, the sentence should be:
"We and the other extant apes descend from a common ancestral ape that is now extinct."
How's that for pedantry?
Theory means more than one thing, and even a lot of scientists can't elucidate the difference.
Def 1: "hunch" "guess" or "hypothesis". This is the sense that creationists mean when they say "evolution is just a theory". It's not technically correct to use theory this way in science, but people (even scientists) do all the time when speaking colloquially. ("If my theory is correct...") This is a problem - scientists should be careful not to speak this way, and when they do, they muddy the waters and make openings for the creationists.
Def 2: A model that explains all the known facts and has survived at least some testing. "The theory of evolution" and "the theory of special relativity", as phrases, mean this kind of theory. Unfortunately, theories of this definition vary quite a bit in their level of confidence and/or the amount of testing they have undergone.
Def 3: A set of principles, assumptions, and a body of work underlying a certain field. What exists when a def 2 theory has been confirmed so well and so long that it is assumed as true and used as the base principles for an entire field of scientific endeavor. Examples: "Evolutionary theory" is the understanding of DNA, mutation, genetics, heritability, natural selection and evolutionary descent that gives the inseparable background for all of biology. "Atomic theory" is the understanding of atom structure, valence electron, orbitals, quantum states, and bonds that underlies all of chemistry.
Science is a century past def. 2 "the theory of evolution" and long since completely employing def. 3 "evolutionary theory".
The key thing about a Type 3 theory is that it is so key to its field that it has become inseparable. Trying to understand contemporary research in biology while "rejecting evolution" is 100% as stupid as trying to understand chemistry while "rejecting the atom".
Atomic and Evolutionary theory are quite parallel: both arose as type 2 theories in the 19th century, replacing prior assumptions held by most knowledgeable people (special creation and infinitely divisible matter), and through decades of continuously accumulated support and evidence became essentially irrefutable type 3 theories by early in the 20th century. Both actually had inklings all the way back to the ancient Greeks but didn't become coherent (def. 2) theories until missing pieces and observations were filled in by Rutherford and Darwin.
When talking to creationists I often employ the analogy of a faith that demanded that atoms aren't real and that matter is continuously divisible because some allegorical section of their holy book could be read that way. It's easy to imagine:
"And on the second day, The Lord took the clay he had created and divided it in two, and again to make four, and again indefinitely until he had enough lumps of clay. And he fashioned their myriads into the earth, and the stars, and the waters, and the clouds, and every living thing, and every stone, and every grain of sand."
Suppose such a faith demanded that science classes miseducate their children with that obviously unsupportable position based on that one passage of text. That would only be conceivable to people who really don't understand the facts (if the atom isn't real, how in hell did we make the atomic bomb?), and it would be hazardous to our kids.
To anyone who understands biology, creationism is misguided on a nearly identical level. (if evolution isn't real, why do genetic drift/mutation accumulation, genetic structure analysis, morphological structure analysis, and the fossil record *all* produce a broadly similar tree of life? Why do we find literally billions of fossils of extinct intermediate species that fit that tree? Why do we find that every structure both macroscopic and microscopic looks like an adapted version of some preexisting structure that filled a different role?)
If God exists, He used evolution in the same way he used atoms. End of story.
You're about an hour too late to Godwin this discussion. C.F. the traditional "hindenburg/flaming nazi gasbag" joke upthread.
You won't buy a game you don't already have the controller for? Tell that to the DDR/Guitar Hero/Rock Band crowd.
People will upgrade their whole gaming rig if there's a good enough game to play for it. If there was a good enough game, I'd happily buy a new joystick. Unfortunately, the last time I was interested in a game enough to buy a joystick, it was World War II Online. (Which was pretty cool, but very hard in the name of realism
1) 100% of the public using browsers that correctly implement CSS. 40% are still using the superbly broken IE6, and FF2 (20%) doesn't implement display: inline-block, which is important for making bordered tabs and such that scale with the size of their fonts.
2) Full SVG support in all browsers. IE has none, the others have a mix of laughable crap.
3) Clients who trust the designer's artistic sense and ability to compat-test on multiple rigs, instead of, say, looking at it on one windows machine in IE6 at 800x600 resolution and complaining "no, we want the text to wrap after this word, not that word".
Sadly, this environment doesn't exist. Sizing things in pixels and limiting the scope of the primary content to 780px wide is STILL the most reliable way to get a consistent appearance that makes clients happy.
SVG doesn't even really exist in any substantive, usable way, so graphics have to be done in pixels. Font sizes are usually scaled to match those sizes. At least all major browsers will let you override that.
This is the environment we have, and trust me the designers aren't any happier about it than you are. I do fluid-width displays every time my clients will let me (~20%), and I always try to make sure the page won't break when the fonts scale. Beyond that, I'm constrained by the tools I've got.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.
I am not a physicist, but as I understand it, contemporary physics considers the dimension of time as having come into existence at the big bang along with the familiar dimensions of space. If so, "before the big bang" is a meaningless phrase.
Yes, that's weird and hard to comprehend, and outside what human brains are built to grasp. But so is much of physics; the human brain can't really get a handle on the particle/wave duality, relativity, or quantum tunneling, either. The best most of us can do is represent it symbolically with mathematics - and few enough of us can do that.
Anyway, as counterintuitive as it is, "what was there before the big bang" may be as meaningless of a question as "how far do I have to walk on the earth before I get to the end?" We don't need religion to explain what was before the big bang for the same reason we don't need religion to explain what's past the edge of the (flat) Earth.
The DS screens break (top one specifically) if you fart too close to it.
How close is too close, does it matter if it's a small or large fart, and how long did you spend figuring this out?
... but everybody wants prosthetic iPhones on their real heads!
Just because kids are stupid, doesn't mean abstinence shouldn't be taught.
That's not what GP said. He said it doesn't work, not that it shouldn't be taught.
Abstinence should always be taught. But it should never be the only thing that is taught because it has been repeatedly shown that teaching only abstinence is ineffective public policy. If you teach only abstinence, experience shows that more kids will die of sexually transmitted diseases than if you teach about both abstinence and condoms. (and likewise, there will be more unwanted pregnancies, but that's OT.)
This is so well established at this point that anyone who crows "abstinence only" anymore either wants kids to die or is willfully sticking their fingers in their ears and going "nah nah nah I won't listen to the evidence" because they prefer their ideology to practical results that save lives.
while offering absolutely nothing new in the way of end-user features,
I have to disagree on only one feature: Vista adds scalable, anti-aliased screen fonts. XP is still stuck with bitmapped fonts. (When Mac had scalable fonts in, what, OS 9 almost a decade ago?)
Do you know how many big corporations out there buy expensive 19" and 20" LCD screens, and then run them at 800x600 resolution (causing horrific pixel interpolation) because the non-scalable fonts of XP appear too small at the full screen resolution?
I've spent many, many hours trying to explain the effect of pixel interpolation to corporate execs who look at websites I've designed on their poorly-set-up monitors and complain that the "fonts look fuzzy". When of course the problem is how their display is set up, not that I've chosen some inexplicably blurry font.
Seriously, the number of people who are still running their monitors at 800x600 just because of XP's fonts is tremendously large.
What's happened is that better information has rapidly come to the fore as genetic analysis have been done during the last 15 years. The tree has been revised several times.
The five kingdom model was already known to be wrong 10 years ago, but that information hadn't propagated to gradeschool and highschool textbooks yet. If you'd studied biology in college, your information would be more up to date.
These days there are three superkingdoms: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. (Bacteria and Archaea were formerly grouped together as "monera" or "bacteria" before it was realized that genetically they are as distinct from each other as they are from Eukarya.) Eukarya is broken into a number of kingdoms, and that number has just changed from 5 to 4. Even the 5 they were last year weren't exactly same ones that you learned in school.
If you could demonstrate that with sufficient evidence, you could even convert me away from my athiest beliefs.
;)
However, I ain't buying it. God wouldn't have a seven-digit slashdot ID.
Mutation is partly random, but selection definitely is not. Genes and traits are selected for by their ability to pass themselves on to the next generation. That's a criterion, not "randomness".
Note: mutation is definitely not always random, either. Organisms have developed extensive systems for modifying and altering how much mutation they incur, and what part of the genome receives those mutations. Look up, for example, the bacterial SOS response, in which bacterial colonies under stress will suddenly amplify their own mutation rate in the hopes that one or more of their member cells will "find a solution" to whatever the current stress and continue to survive. In addition, all organisms protect more critical parts of their genome from mutation to some degree. Truly important things like the region coding for ribosomal RNA and protein subunits tend to get very few mutations, because having a fucked-up ribosome is a death sentence.
Evolution itself is subject to evolution, and has been crafted to be less than perfectly random.
Yes, the science-informed members of the upper ranks (like Behe) absolutely know what they are talking about. They simply lie and deceive and misuse language on purpose in order to get the rank and file to further their agenda in blissful ignorance. I am 100% in agreement with you on this.
However there are plenty of "guys leading the Creationist" charge who are religious leaders with no scientific training and a poor understanding of science in general. This would include folks like Dobson, and most of the fundamentalist politicians, like Huckabee. I suspect they don't know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, and use the term only in its colloquial meaning.
One key point I didn't include - but I will as a refinement the next time I post this - is that to be a Type-2 theory, the theory must logically account for all the observed facts. A type-1 hypothesis is only such a thing before it is fully tested. After that, it's either a true theory or it is rejected.
Evolution existed as a definition-1 hypothesis for at least 2000 years before Darwin; descent of species is mentioned as a possibility by C. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus and many others going back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosophers. C. Darwin's contribution was the addition of the mechanism of natural selection, thus explaining the known facts and turning evolution into a type-2 theory.
Since then, the discovery of DNA, protein translation, genetic correlation of related organisms etc. have turned the viable type-2 theory into a whole body of coherent type-3 theory. Just as the discovery of subatomic particles, nuclear physics etc. have done the same for atomic theory.
A note on how silly it is to "reject evolution":
Imagine if some other religion, say Wicca, held as a theological principle that matter was infinitely divisible: there are no atoms, you can keep slicing a gold brick in half forever and you will always have a smaller chuck of smooth, continuous gold.
Then imagine that Wiccan fundamentalists in 2008 demanded that Atomic Theory was "just a theory" despite 180 years of chemistry, nuclear physics, and atom bombs. They demand that we "teach the controversy" in science classes, and in some case school boards removed all mention of atoms from chemistry textbooks! They would point to the fact that the Higgs Boson hasn't been found yet, and that no lower-lever explanation (e.g. String Theory) is complete and so the properties of the Standard Model particles aren't explained, and therefore therefore Atomic Theory is wrong. They point to a religious parable where a prophet divides a small chunk of gold among a large number of people, turning them all rich, and claim this proves that matter is infinitely divisible.
We'd all laugh. As well we should. Fortunately, the Wiccans I know are smarter than that.
But this is exactly how ridiculous today's "debate" is. The analogy between Atomic Theory and Evolutionary Theory is nearly perfect in terms of how and when they arose, the amount of evidence they have accumulated in 150 years, and how deeply they underly the modern practice of their respective fields.
Or is gravity an article of faith too, because you never know, one day something might fall upwards?!
Nothing will ever fall upwards, because the theory of intelligent falling explains how God ensures that unsupported objects will go downward.
That's farking awesome. You just made my day. :)
There are three meanings of theory, and people frequently misunderstand them.
..." This is the meaning that creationists usually think they are arguing against. But in science, it is never correct to use theory in this sense, though even scientists speaking casually often use it like that. The correct word for this in science is "hypothesis". It is certainly not the correct definition for the phrase "the theory of evolution".
(Theory defitition 1): "supposition" or "hunch". This is the use in the sentence "If my theory is correct, then
(Theory definition 2): "a description of a process that explains observed facts". These vary in their degree of supportability, and sometimes, multiple warring theories are supported to different degrees by existing experiment. For example, there are at the moment multiple theories about what process gives matter mass. Examples: The theory that matter is atomic, i.e. not continuously divisible. The theory that natural selection coupled with variation leads to evolution. The theory that particles have mass because of their interaction with the Higgs field.
(Theory definition 3): "a body of knowledge and understanding that supports much other past and future work"; it describes an entire framework of internally consistent principles, understanding and data. Meanings used in this sense:
* Atomic theory (the understanding of the structure of the atom and it's constituent particles and interactions that underlies all of nuclear science and chemistry)
* Evolutionary theory (the understanding of how organisms and species give rise to one another, and the genetic mechanisms thereof that underlies all of biology)
It's instructive to note that evolutionary theory and atomic theory are approximately equivalent in terms of evidentiary support and use in their fields. Both arose as type-2 definitions around the same time (mid 19th-century), supplanting prior theories (matter is continuous, God created all organisms at one time and they have been unchanged since then). Both have since then become into type 3 theories that completely underly the relevant fields (chemistry, biology).
Religious fundamentalists don't understand the difference between these definitions, and they think evolution is a "type 1" theory, more properly called a hypothesis. It is not. Evolution is the entire framework of over a century of biological research. Attempting to understand research in biology while rejection evolution is like attempting to understand chemistry while rejecting the atom. Or attempting to understand higher math while rejecting arithmetic. It's flat-out ludicrous.
(This is a repost of my statement from the last time we had this debate. I will keep reposting it, hoping to educate a few people eventually.)
Windows boots are bad because of their end result.
Why, thank you for the compliment!
I can't really agree with your sig. The two are comparable in quality in their respective industries, but Budweiser has the redeeming quality of being inexpensive.