Ok... what exactly is wrong with consenting adults??? Nothing. The trouble is with misinterpreting 2000+ year old religious texts and trying to expose the same distorted sense of morality upon everyone else. I don't think the religious texts actually have anything to do with it. Controlling other people's sexual behavior just seems to be something a lot of people feel like they need to do, and religion provides them with a convenient "ultimate authority" for doing it.
Notice that it's not limited to a single religion.
Notice also that I said "other people's". If news stories are any indication, hypocricy is rampant among these types.
There is a saying amongst psychologists that at some point, each must come up with a reason why humans are fundamentally different from the other animals, only for someone to eventually prove them wrong. I accept your challenge!
"Humans are fundamentally different from other animals, because we can travel into space using only tools we built." I can't.
Now, think of it in a new way. Suppose you were a civilization that just developed space travel, much like where we are now. You have a galaxy around you with 400 billion stars, and that's a lot. It takes you 100,000 years at light speed to cross the galaxy, and that's a long time. However, you have 2 billion years to explore. I have no good grasp on where humans will be 2 billion years from now, but I am sure we will be pretty advanced. Now add to the mix that there are maybe 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 other advanced civilizations alongside with you, and you can see why we are wondering where everyone is. Oh, and there are a trillion or so other galaxies out there, so if you start to consider the possibility of intergalactice travel, you can even go futher with this. Maybe intelligent species are popping up all the time, but don't last very long. For example, what are the relative probabilities that within the next hundred years we will send a successful colony ship to a nearby habitable planet, versus obliterating ourselves with nukes or pathogens, or poisoning our nest, or merely using up all the easy energy that we need to sustain a technological civilization?
Those probabilities are hard to guess. I doubt that the colony ship will ever happen because it doesn't seem to offer much of a ROI; OTOH I suspect that there will be many times over the next hundred years when a psychopath releases a bug with the intent of killing everybody.
And then there are the nutcases who are actively trying to set up WWIII because they think it will help Jebus get back sooner.
You made one crucial mistake in the above... it doesn't take "all" civilizations, it takes only one. Only one civilization has to either want to expand throughout the galaxy, or wants to create self-replicating probes to explore the entire galaxy. Assuming intelligent life is relatively common, do you think it's reasonable that not one over the last few billion years would do it? If they are indeed intelligent, they might pause to ask why before undertaking it.
And as for the probes, hopefully everybody out there is asking whether it is safe. At best it would strip the galaxy of its harvestable resources. Even if they don't mutate, you'd eventually be plagued by a galaxy full of hungry probes looking for planets to gobble up.
Heh. Maybe our great^n grandchildren will sustain their lifestyles by shooting down the hordes of their ancestors' probes seeking to harvest the earth, and scavenging the minerals and power supplies that the probes brought home from distant corners of the galaxy.
It only takes one race with an expansion desire to fill up the galaxy at sublight speeds around 1 to 10 million years (via geometric expansion). Not sure any species would be both capable of that and at the same time insane enough to stay dedicated to a million-year plan. I suspect an intelligent species' colonists would ask WGAF about some dead people's master plan, and spend their lives making their new home comfortable instead of seeing how soon they can launch their obligatory two colony ships.
Look how short our own species' attention span is. We can't even follow divine marching orders without an endless forking of opinions on what the orders were and how they should be undertaken. How long would our species dedicate itself to such a dubious goal of colonizing the galaxy for the sake of colonizing the galaxy?
The bill would make it harder to secure a patent and easier for rivals to challenge one By the time it gets out of committee it will be just another gimmee for the biggest corporations.
Intelligence is all around us and has no natural origin. Can you justify that belief?
Design is all around us and has no natural origin. Can you justify that belief?
Nothing comes from nothing. Can you justify that belief?
You look at design and call it "by chance" and then call it science? Scientists rarely attribute things to chance. Their entire purpose is to find explanations for stuff.
What I find most surprising about ID and/. is that it is always first mentioned, and mostly tossed about, by those who obviously disagree (to put it mildly). That's what happens to beliefs that become a joke.
You'll notice that the idea that aliens abduct people to 'probe' them doesn't get a lot of respect around here either.
Okay, let's assume, we all originated from Africa. I may be wrong, but that might suggest that we were all a single "black?" race at the beginning. But is it possible to evolve into "white", "yellow", etc. from "black"? If you look at chidren of interracial marriages, they tend to carry very visibly the characteristics of different races - can these racial traces "evaporate" over the time and somehow evolve into separate races? Due to selective pressures a human population will evolve to an appropriate skin pigmentation for its latitude over a few thousand years (say 5K-20K). We can see it in the results of historical and late prehistorical population movements: the more recent the move, the less well the population fit the typical pigmentation for the latitude. There was a great article on this in Scientific American a few years ago, with lots of maps and photographs. It may be worth trying to find in your library.
However, plains alone don't see to be reason enough for uprightness, and thus the mystery remains. One theory is that uprightness allowed parents to carry food back to children, who hid in the safety of trees. The latest Scientific American reports observations of Ourangs walking upright in the forest canopy, leading some to speculate that the basics of bipedalism preceded our permanent descent from the trees.
Unfortunately it's just a short note, not a full article.
It just seems to me a hard to believe idea that somehow we evolved to have the exact same set of genetic make up in multiple places at once. I think the idea was that the various branches were still mutually fertile, and there has been a lot of cross-breeding to share stuff around.
However, I think the MO hypothesis depended on a lot of ignorance about genetics. Back when it was reasonable to think that modern Europeans had a lot of Neandertal ancestry, the MO hypothesis would have almost been a necessity. But the huge accumulation of genetic information over the last couple of decades - not just this specific study - has essentially killed it.
There are a few holdouts, just as there are a few "birds are not dinosaurs" holdouts, but they're dying breeds.
What drives science forward, though, is when you have two groups of fanatics screaming at each other, the non-fanatics generally cluster to the side with the better arguments and better evidence. That's why the Big Bang theory is now taught in schools, and the various steady state theories are discarded, as are most of the 'Big Crunch' ideas. Fanatics came up with the idea of the big bang? That's going to be news to lots of cosmologists.
Unless we get the opportunity to witness another Big Bang or talk to God, it seems likely we will never even have that good of an idea. I see lots of people who talk to God on the evening news, always in the segment about some horrid crime. I wouldn't recommend it as a method for understanding reality.
Many peoples insist they originated in their native location. There are genetic groupings that indicate some of them were isolated human populations for quite some time. Evolution includes parallel evolution for disparate species, but more so for evolution of a single species at different locations. Parallel evolution, in the way biologists use the term, does not result in a unified species. E.g., you can say that bats' and birds' wings are the result of parallel evolution, but a bat isn't a bird and a bird isn't a bat.
Petroglyphs in North America appear to predate the African diaspora of 80ky ago. Cite?
As a scientist I rely on evidence, and logic when evidence is not forthcoming. What's your field and specialty?
However, even if you could conclusively prove that all humanity came from one population - that doesn't disprove evolution (which is probably why you didn't immediately get the ID crowd all posting "see! see! we were right!". Actually, the Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin is doing that right now, on the topic of junk DNA.
He's about as wrong as he can be, but that never gave pause to anyone affiliated with the Discovery Institute.
This is a widely accepted theory, but you are wrong about all life using DNA: some virii and bacteria are still relying on RNA. Strictly speaking (and this was a surprise to me as well), biologists don't consider viruses to be 'life'. Because they don't metabolize, or some such technicality.
This leads me to conclude that all life must have come form one ancestor that materialized somewhere on the planet. But the earth is a big place. To me it seems very unlikely that life hasn't occurred in more than one place and more than one time. So how is it possible that all life, on a chemical level, is more or less the same? Probably the kind we have now outcompeted any other flavors that might have arisen. Kind of like the way we (probably) killed off all the other varieties of human (whether directly or indirectly), and are now in the process of killing off all the other apes for good measure.
You can imagine what would happen if an independent variety of life arose these days: good food for the nearest bacterium.
They can. Only creationists (from multiple religions, btw) can't deal with science, and only a subset of those.
Probably the majority of scientists in the USA are Christians, and presumable most of them believe that the Christian god created the universe. They just don't feel that they have to abandon rationality (like the idiots at most creationist advocacy organizations) or honesty (like con artists from the Discovery Institute) in order to hold to their religion.
since some people seem to think that there are only 2 theories: Evolution and Creationism Only creationists think that. Everyone else can plainly see that there's no theory of creationism.
Whilst the US indeed produces many a good paper, it should not be forgotten that many of the reviewers for papers hint that inclusion of their papers in the citation list of an article might be beneficial to further the goal of acceptance of the paper Speaking of citations, you need one for that claim.
Review is almost always done anonymously, and by reviewers who aren't assigned until the paper is received. How would you know who to suck up to?
I wonder what it would look like if we also plotted the funding allocated to the NSF alongside the number of papers published.
The NSF has had some serious funding woes since the 90s that very well may be causing this "draught" The academes that I know frequently complain that they're drowning in paperwork, in comparison to a decade ago.
John Walker (AutoDesk founder) has had a true random number generator available for web access for quite a long time. Looks like his site's currently down That's how you get your random bits: up = 1, down = 0.
Slashdot Mirror
News for Nerds.
Notice that it's not limited to a single religion.
Notice also that I said "other people's". If news stories are any indication, hypocricy is rampant among these types.
"Humans are fundamentally different from other animals, because we can travel into space using only tools we built." I can't.
Those probabilities are hard to guess. I doubt that the colony ship will ever happen because it doesn't seem to offer much of a ROI; OTOH I suspect that there will be many times over the next hundred years when a psychopath releases a bug with the intent of killing everybody.
And then there are the nutcases who are actively trying to set up WWIII because they think it will help Jebus get back sooner.
And as for the probes, hopefully everybody out there is asking whether it is safe. At best it would strip the galaxy of its harvestable resources. Even if they don't mutate, you'd eventually be plagued by a galaxy full of hungry probes looking for planets to gobble up.
Heh. Maybe our great^n grandchildren will sustain their lifestyles by shooting down the hordes of their ancestors' probes seeking to harvest the earth, and scavenging the minerals and power supplies that the probes brought home from distant corners of the galaxy.
Look how short our own species' attention span is. We can't even follow divine marching orders without an endless forking of opinions on what the orders were and how they should be undertaken. How long would our species dedicate itself to such a dubious goal of colonizing the galaxy for the sake of colonizing the galaxy?
You'll notice that the idea that aliens abduct people to 'probe' them doesn't get a lot of respect around here either.
If you look at chidren of interracial marriages, they tend to carry very visibly the characteristics of different races - can these racial traces "evaporate" over the time and somehow evolve into separate races? Due to selective pressures a human population will evolve to an appropriate skin pigmentation for its latitude over a few thousand years (say 5K-20K). We can see it in the results of historical and late prehistorical population movements: the more recent the move, the less well the population fit the typical pigmentation for the latitude. There was a great article on this in Scientific American a few years ago, with lots of maps and photographs. It may be worth trying to find in your library.
Unfortunately it's just a short note, not a full article.
However, I think the MO hypothesis depended on a lot of ignorance about genetics. Back when it was reasonable to think that modern Europeans had a lot of Neandertal ancestry, the MO hypothesis would have almost been a necessity. But the huge accumulation of genetic information over the last couple of decades - not just this specific study - has essentially killed it.
There are a few holdouts, just as there are a few "birds are not dinosaurs" holdouts, but they're dying breeds.
There are genetic groupings that indicate some of them were isolated human populations for quite some time.
Evolution includes parallel evolution for disparate species, but more so for evolution of a single species at different locations. Parallel evolution, in the way biologists use the term, does not result in a unified species. E.g., you can say that bats' and birds' wings are the result of parallel evolution, but a bat isn't a bird and a bird isn't a bat. Petroglyphs in North America appear to predate the African diaspora of 80ky ago. Cite? As a scientist I rely on evidence, and logic when evidence is not forthcoming. What's your field and specialty?
He's about as wrong as he can be, but that never gave pause to anyone affiliated with the Discovery Institute.
You can imagine what would happen if an independent variety of life arose these days: good food for the nearest bacterium.
They can. Only creationists (from multiple religions, btw) can't deal with science, and only a subset of those.
Probably the majority of scientists in the USA are Christians, and presumable most of them believe that the Christian god created the universe. They just don't feel that they have to abandon rationality (like the idiots at most creationist advocacy organizations) or honesty (like con artists from the Discovery Institute) in order to hold to their religion.
(A collection of claims is not a theory.)
Review is almost always done anonymously, and by reviewers who aren't assigned until the paper is received. How would you know who to suck up to?
The NSF has had some serious funding woes since the 90s that very well may be causing this "draught" The academes that I know frequently complain that they're drowning in paperwork, in comparison to a decade ago.
If you subtract one site's numbers from the other, is all the randomness gone from the difference?