> Why should I? Based on your thinking why should I be nice to anyone unless it serves my own self-interest. Why should I follow the rule of law, etc? Why shouldn't I just become a totally self-centered anarchist--kill or be killed? Survival of the fittest and all that, right?
What makes you think a totally self-centered anarchist would be fittest?
> Intelligent Design is something most Christians reject and even a lot of fundamental Christians reject. Intelligent Design was created for political purposes and no religion has publicly supported the theory.
I think some of the traditional creationist outlets have been jealous of all the media attention Intelligent Design has been getting over the past few years, and from the post-Dover-ruling editorials I've read, it seems that a number of them are taking the opportunity to rip ID as a compromise on things that oughtn't be compromised.
Still, it might be worth pausing to consider how much of the technology you rely on to read this post is the result of science, vs. how much is the result of religion, philosophy, or New Age thinking.
> The earliest known pottery, some 20~30,000 years old, is found in Japan and China (every couple of years one side or the other finds an even older one). Pottery indicates civilization, simply because nomadic hunter gatherer type people don't have a lot of time to sit down, find suitable clay, mold it, and build a firing kiln, and pottery doesn't trvel particularly well to boot. If the first civilization arrose in Asia, then it is not a completely abberational jump to say that humans started around there. Still would need a lot of investigation, of course.
The problem is, regional DNA sampling world-wide has given us a pretty good map of the spread of modern human from Africa. If they originated in Asia, we've really missed something.
> It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics.
However, it seems odd that the Flores people would have survived such a catastrophe, since the volcano was also in Indonesia. Perhaps they moved there later? Or maybe the volcano didn't cause population bottlenecks after all. (Ourangs also persist in the region, even to the present.)
If you can't digest the message, maybe you should review your notion of what a theory is.
> Evolution clearly isn't science. It doesn't use the scientific method, its "researchers" don't do any research
Demonstrably false, just as my claims about ID are demonstrably true.
> they report their "results" through evolution-friendly media
The scientific media is evolution-friendly because evolution won the field in a fair fight. (Over 100 years ago.)
ID, OTOH, wants a free pass. And failing to get the free pass, they have preferred to skip the scientific forums altogether, and publish their claims in gradeschool textbooks instead.
> As for why it's considered religion, you can think out its implications (where did the matter come from for the Big Bang?)
The theory of evolution doesn't address the origin of matter. Nor the origin of life, for that matter. Evolution is simply what happens to biological systems, whether created by God, Space Aliens, or natural processes.
> Scary, huh?
s/Scary/Silly/
> I'm looking for a justification for calling intelligent design religion without calling evolution religion.
And you won't accept a straight answer.
> The scientific method is moot.
Now it's time for you to tell us what you think science is.
> Those little steps "observation" and "repetition" are a little finicky when it comes to the origin of the universe.
No science requires direct observations. No science requires repeatable experiments.
It appears that your inability to distinguish ID from science is a result of you not understanding the most basic concepts of what science is and how it works.
Which, BTW, is exactly the audience the Discovery Institute is targeting. They know darn well that putting on a lab coat and mumbling technobabble isn't going to convince scientists.
> My guess is that Feynman would have been more apprehensive than most to say that he understood quantum mechanics.
Here's a quote attributed to him:
No, you're not going to be able to understand it [...] You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That's because I don't understand it. [...] The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with an experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is -- absurd.
There's also a "shut up and calculate" meme that some physicists push in opposition to all the familiar attempts to interpret QM, which seems to be in line with what Feynman was saying.
BTW, the slide set is aimed at non-physicists, and uses CS-style concepts at a level of abstraction just above QM itself, so interested Slashdotters with a bit of CS and Math background may find them interesting as a demystified introduction to quantum computation. Also, the author of the slides (Marek Perkowski) has an article in the latest issue of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's newsletter, in which he suggests that ordinary non-physicist CSers can do worthwhile research in the field of quantum computation now, by means of simulators for these abstractions, though the conceptual and software toolkit is still very limited. (Your research may involve inventing your own tools, but for most of us that's more nearly feasible than learning the physics and getting access to the tools for real experiments.)
> Schroedinger's cat is a poor thought experiment because it is inconsistant with the observational concept of the Copenhagen Interpretation. If the cat is capable of observing its own state, then doesn't that cause the wave-form to collapse?
It gets more interesting than that. Suppose the emitted particle sets off a nuclear device rather than releasing a gas, and the cat is vaporized so fast that it' can't observe what's happening. Then the cat will be able to observe one outcome but not the other, so the second can never happen.
For related ideas, see quantum suicide from the POV of the many-worlds interpretation.
> Right. Extortion is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they divided the federal and state governments.
Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that it's possible even in principle to write a constitution that covers everything without any loopholes that politicians can exploit.
I used to play wargames, and I found that whether the rules were lean and mean or exhaustively detailed, there was always some situation that wasn't covered clearly, and always some overly competitive player who would insist on the most outrageous interpretations in order to fit the battlefield needs of the moment.
Rules, whether games or constitutions, operate in the realm of human behavior, and even the most microscopic of faults will be exploited to the fullest.
> > but it does illustrate, in a very compelling and inspiring way, the very real civil rights abuses going on every day in this country.
> You have got to be kidding. No, it would seem to prove there are so few cases regarding civil rights abuses that someone had to make one up. Or at least it would lead a logical person to conclude this.
No, a logical person would conclude no such thing. If I make up a fake claim that "X happened", it has absolutely no bearing on whether similar things are happening.
Examples (both false) -
"The police beat me up."
"The police gave a banquet in my honor."
Can you conclude anything about the frequency of police doing those things, on the basis of my two false statements?
> I mean, if there are 10s of thousands of real stories, and no one hears about them, and we only hear about this one, and it is fake? Do the math.
I'm sure millions of people are having sex, even though the stories I hear around the water cooler are fake.
> If macroevolution and intelligent design are two different theories addressing the same question (the origin of the universe), then how can one be religion and the other not?
> Let's keep this objective... can anyone justify the classification of one theory as religion and another as science, when they both address the same thing?
Ignoring the fact that ID isn't a theory...
It's not what they address, it's how they address it.
ID clearly isn't science. It doesn't use the scientific method, its "researchers" don't do any research, they report their "results" at religious gatherings rather than scientific conferences, etc. Anyone who says they can't distinguish it from science is ill informed about what goes on in one or both camps, or hasn't stopped to think about it, or is being disingenuous.
As for why it's considered religion, you can think out its implications (where did the first generation of designers come from?), or you can look at what its leading proponents say when they're not pretending to be scientists.
If your questions is honest rather than rhetorical, you would do well to read the judge's written opinion, which you can find with Google and download.
> > The separation of church and state is enshrined in the US constitution
> Anyone care to pint out WHERE? [...] It amazes me that a judge is ruling this "unconstitional", despite the fact that the constitution has no bearing on religion outside of the church.
The judge did nothing more (or less) than appeal to long established precedent in interpreting the first amendment.
Apparently the Thomas Moore Law Center put the school board up to adding ID to their curriculum for the sole purpose of triggering a case that would overturn that precedent. Don't blame the judge if he didn't take the bait.
Maybe someday there'll be another case where the school board doesn't get voted out before they can appeal, and the Supreme Court will reverse the traditional interpretation. When that happens, we'll find out whether it was a good thing or not.
As for the letter of the Constitution... Don't kid yourself into thinking that we abide by the letter of it in much of anything. For example, the Constitution (as amended) forbids having the President and Vice President from the same state. In the run-up to the 2000 election somebody noticed that, so Cheney filled out a change of address form as a fig leaf. A couple of guys tried to challenge it in court, but the case was thrown out on the grounds that they didn't have standing to challenge it.
If you want to revert to the letter of the Constitution - or rather, to somebody's opinion about what the letter of the Constitution means - a lot of stuff would change, and you might find that you didn't like all of it.
Maybe we should do it anyway, on principle, though we'd probably end up fighting another civil war to see whose "literal interpretation" wins. Meanwhile, for better or worse, the courts operate on the system of precedent, and judge Jones did his job.
> I don't at all agree that it's unconstitutional, or even improper. [...] However, in order to say that teaching ID is unconstitutional, the following criteria must be met:
Believe it or not, in some circles a Federal judge's opinion about these things carries more weight than yours do.
> The theory of ID on its own makes no claim as to whom this being might be, what its motives were, or how we should regard it.
But a couple of clowns on the Dover school board did make some very specific claims.
> Either it happened by chance, or it didn't.
FYI, the theory of evolution isn't a simple matter of "it happened by chance". Like the formation of stars and planets, lots of randomness is involved, but that's hardly all there is to it.
> Acknowledging an opposing viewpoint is not anti-science
It is if the viewpoint is mere propaganda, and is pushed on schoolkiddies for political reasons.
> To blindly follow any hypothesis or theory without regard to alternatives is the definition of bad science.
ID doesn't offer any hypotheses. It's nothing more than a collection of bad arguments against evolution.
> I do believe it's a slippery slope, but sheltering children from various ideas is the opposite of education.
So is teaching them religious propaganda.
> [...] That, however, does not make it unconstitutional.
The judge applied a long-established body of precedent on how the Establishment Clause applies to teaching creationism in public schools.
> I don't particularly like the idea of teaching ID, but when I try to think about it objectively, I just can't reconcile its prohibition.
> For a consumer power supply, this thing is insane. I mean, there are certainly applications for it with today's use of RAID arrays, SLI video cards and Pentium 4 processors
Also good for arc welding, starting cars with dead batteries, electrifying the fence around your ranch, firing your railgun, and giving yourself electroshock therapy to prevent you from buying another one in the future.
> Check the FA. The fools want people to run client-side software to verify that all your software and hardware are on the approved list. ("Gee, does your client run on PC/104 ARM9 hardware?")
I wonder how many minutes it would take for someone to write an emulator to send back the "A-OK" signal.
I can't imagine the system working even if people didn't try to jack with it. It would require regular automatic updates as new products came out, and a simple bug could result in shutting down most their customers in one swoop.
More likely it would serve as a conduit for a new class of worms.
> You have every right in the world to run an insecure PC. But as soon as you plug that insecure PC into the Internet and it starts spewing spam and viruses to my computer (and my neighbor's, and my company's, and my ISP's...), you've just crossed a line. You've infringed upon everyone else's right to not pay bandwidth fees for your viruses and spam
If ISPs could charge individuals for the bandwidth they use, those who own spew hosts would either fix them or drop off the net due to inability to afford the fees.
> and you've also infringed upon everyone else's right to not spend their time dealing with viruses sent out by your zombified Winbox.
Huh? Against everybody else's right to run an insecure machine???
Slashdot Mirror
> I have intense religious experiences on a frequent occurance
Dude, that's your hand, not God's.
> a. No more dupes.
"Dupes" is such an ugly word. Try to think of them as "stories about stories carried on Slashdot".
So your mom's a drug dealer too, eh?
> Why should I? Based on your thinking why should I be nice to anyone unless it serves my own self-interest. Why should I follow the rule of law, etc? Why shouldn't I just become a totally self-centered anarchist--kill or be killed? Survival of the fittest and all that, right?
What makes you think a totally self-centered anarchist would be fittest?
> Intelligent Design is something most Christians reject and even a lot of fundamental Christians reject. Intelligent Design was created for political purposes and no religion has publicly supported the theory.
I think some of the traditional creationist outlets have been jealous of all the media attention Intelligent Design has been getting over the past few years, and from the post-Dover-ruling editorials I've read, it seems that a number of them are taking the opportunity to rip ID as a compromise on things that oughtn't be compromised.
> Too many people have 100% faith in science
The well-informed don't.
Still, it might be worth pausing to consider how much of the technology you rely on to read this post is the result of science, vs. how much is the result of religion, philosophy, or New Age thinking.
> The earliest known pottery, some 20~30,000 years old, is found in Japan and China (every couple of years one side or the other finds an even older one). Pottery indicates civilization, simply because nomadic hunter gatherer type people don't have a lot of time to sit down, find suitable clay, mold it, and build a firing kiln, and pottery doesn't trvel particularly well to boot. If the first civilization arrose in Asia, then it is not a completely abberational jump to say that humans started around there. Still would need a lot of investigation, of course.
The problem is, regional DNA sampling world-wide has given us a pretty good map of the spread of modern human from Africa. If they originated in Asia, we've really missed something.
Google for WorldMigrations.pdf to see an example.
> It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics.
One popular hypothesis is that that was the result of a catastrophic volcanic eruption around 70,000 years ago.
However, it seems odd that the Flores people would have survived such a catastrophe, since the volcano was also in Indonesia. Perhaps they moved there later? Or maybe the volcano didn't cause population bottlenecks after all. (Ourangs also persist in the region, even to the present.)
> or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
You can also find a lot of links about it on Slashdot.
Here is an explanation of "ex parte".
> Good job at staying objective
Don't shoot the messenger.
If you can't digest the message, maybe you should review your notion of what a theory is.
> Evolution clearly isn't science. It doesn't use the scientific method, its "researchers" don't do any research
Demonstrably false, just as my claims about ID are demonstrably true.
> they report their "results" through evolution-friendly media
The scientific media is evolution-friendly because evolution won the field in a fair fight. (Over 100 years ago.)
ID, OTOH, wants a free pass. And failing to get the free pass, they have preferred to skip the scientific forums altogether, and publish their claims in gradeschool textbooks instead.
> As for why it's considered religion, you can think out its implications (where did the matter come from for the Big Bang?)
The theory of evolution doesn't address the origin of matter. Nor the origin of life, for that matter. Evolution is simply what happens to biological systems, whether created by God, Space Aliens, or natural processes.
> Scary, huh? > I'm looking for a justification for calling intelligent design religion without calling evolution religion.
And you won't accept a straight answer.
> The scientific method is moot.
Now it's time for you to tell us what you think science is.
> Those little steps "observation" and "repetition" are a little finicky when it comes to the origin of the universe.
No science requires direct observations. No science requires repeatable experiments.
It appears that your inability to distinguish ID from science is a result of you not understanding the most basic concepts of what science is and how it works.
Which, BTW, is exactly the audience the Discovery Institute is targeting. They know darn well that putting on a lab coat and mumbling technobabble isn't going to convince scientists.
Here's a quote attributed to him:(Quoted on page 11 of this slide set on quantum computing [81 page PDF].)
There's also a "shut up and calculate" meme that some physicists push in opposition to all the familiar attempts to interpret QM, which seems to be in line with what Feynman was saying.
BTW, the slide set is aimed at non-physicists, and uses CS-style concepts at a level of abstraction just above QM itself, so interested Slashdotters with a bit of CS and Math background may find them interesting as a demystified introduction to quantum computation. Also, the author of the slides (Marek Perkowski) has an article in the latest issue of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's newsletter, in which he suggests that ordinary non-physicist CSers can do worthwhile research in the field of quantum computation now, by means of simulators for these abstractions, though the conceptual and software toolkit is still very limited. (Your research may involve inventing your own tools, but for most of us that's more nearly feasible than learning the physics and getting access to the tools for real experiments.)
> Schroedinger's cat is a poor thought experiment because it is inconsistant with the observational concept of the Copenhagen Interpretation. If the cat is capable of observing its own state, then doesn't that cause the wave-form to collapse?
It gets more interesting than that. Suppose the emitted particle sets off a nuclear device rather than releasing a gas, and the cat is vaporized so fast that it' can't observe what's happening. Then the cat will be able to observe one outcome but not the other, so the second can never happen.
For related ideas, see quantum suicide from the POV of the many-worlds interpretation.
> This is just further proof that we are living in the Matrix.
Too bad it isn't The Perils of Gwendolyn instead.
> Right. Extortion is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they divided the federal and state governments.
Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that it's possible even in principle to write a constitution that covers everything without any loopholes that politicians can exploit.
I used to play wargames, and I found that whether the rules were lean and mean or exhaustively detailed, there was always some situation that wasn't covered clearly, and always some overly competitive player who would insist on the most outrageous interpretations in order to fit the battlefield needs of the moment.
Rules, whether games or constitutions, operate in the realm of human behavior, and even the most microscopic of faults will be exploited to the fullest.
> > but it does illustrate, in a very compelling and inspiring way, the very real civil rights abuses going on every day in this country.
> You have got to be kidding. No, it would seem to prove there are so few cases regarding civil rights abuses that someone had to make one up. Or at least it would lead a logical person to conclude this.
No, a logical person would conclude no such thing. If I make up a fake claim that "X happened", it has absolutely no bearing on whether similar things are happening.
Examples (both false) -
"The police beat me up."
"The police gave a banquet in my honor."
Can you conclude anything about the frequency of police doing those things, on the basis of my two false statements?
> I mean, if there are 10s of thousands of real stories, and no one hears about them, and we only hear about this one, and it is fake? Do the math.
I'm sure millions of people are having sex, even though the stories I hear around the water cooler are fake.
> If macroevolution and intelligent design are two different theories addressing the same question (the origin of the universe), then how can one be religion and the other not?
> Let's keep this objective... can anyone justify the classification of one theory as religion and another as science, when they both address the same thing?
Ignoring the fact that ID isn't a theory...
It's not what they address, it's how they address it.
ID clearly isn't science. It doesn't use the scientific method, its "researchers" don't do any research, they report their "results" at religious gatherings rather than scientific conferences, etc. Anyone who says they can't distinguish it from science is ill informed about what goes on in one or both camps, or hasn't stopped to think about it, or is being disingenuous.
As for why it's considered religion, you can think out its implications (where did the first generation of designers come from?), or you can look at what its leading proponents say when they're not pretending to be scientists.
If your questions is honest rather than rhetorical, you would do well to read the judge's written opinion, which you can find with Google and download.
> Are there any examples of similar situations?
Diet.
> > The separation of church and state is enshrined in the US constitution
> Anyone care to pint out WHERE? [...] It amazes me that a judge is ruling this "unconstitional", despite the fact that the constitution has no bearing on religion outside of the church.
The judge did nothing more (or less) than appeal to long established precedent in interpreting the first amendment.
Apparently the Thomas Moore Law Center put the school board up to adding ID to their curriculum for the sole purpose of triggering a case that would overturn that precedent. Don't blame the judge if he didn't take the bait.
Maybe someday there'll be another case where the school board doesn't get voted out before they can appeal, and the Supreme Court will reverse the traditional interpretation. When that happens, we'll find out whether it was a good thing or not.
As for the letter of the Constitution... Don't kid yourself into thinking that we abide by the letter of it in much of anything. For example, the Constitution (as amended) forbids having the President and Vice President from the same state. In the run-up to the 2000 election somebody noticed that, so Cheney filled out a change of address form as a fig leaf. A couple of guys tried to challenge it in court, but the case was thrown out on the grounds that they didn't have standing to challenge it.
If you want to revert to the letter of the Constitution - or rather, to somebody's opinion about what the letter of the Constitution means - a lot of stuff would change, and you might find that you didn't like all of it.
Maybe we should do it anyway, on principle, though we'd probably end up fighting another civil war to see whose "literal interpretation" wins. Meanwhile, for better or worse, the courts operate on the system of precedent, and judge Jones did his job.
> I don't at all agree that it's unconstitutional, or even improper. [...] However, in order to say that teaching ID is unconstitutional, the following criteria must be met:
Believe it or not, in some circles a Federal judge's opinion about these things carries more weight than yours do.
> The theory of ID on its own makes no claim as to whom this being might be, what its motives were, or how we should regard it.
But a couple of clowns on the Dover school board did make some very specific claims.
> Either it happened by chance, or it didn't.
FYI, the theory of evolution isn't a simple matter of "it happened by chance". Like the formation of stars and planets, lots of randomness is involved, but that's hardly all there is to it.
> Acknowledging an opposing viewpoint is not anti-science
It is if the viewpoint is mere propaganda, and is pushed on schoolkiddies for political reasons.
> To blindly follow any hypothesis or theory without regard to alternatives is the definition of bad science.
ID doesn't offer any hypotheses. It's nothing more than a collection of bad arguments against evolution.
> I do believe it's a slippery slope, but sheltering children from various ideas is the opposite of education.
So is teaching them religious propaganda.
> [...] That, however, does not make it unconstitutional.
The judge applied a long-established body of precedent on how the Establishment Clause applies to teaching creationism in public schools.
> I don't particularly like the idea of teaching ID, but when I try to think about it objectively, I just can't reconcile its prohibition.
Have you read the judge's written opinion?
What did you expect from a webcam?
> For a consumer power supply, this thing is insane. I mean, there are certainly applications for it with today's use of RAID arrays, SLI video cards and Pentium 4 processors
Also good for arc welding, starting cars with dead batteries, electrifying the fence around your ranch, firing your railgun, and giving yourself electroshock therapy to prevent you from buying another one in the future.
> was not afraid to admit how much of an overkill it is for the enthusiast market.
Nothing is overkill for a true enthusiast.
(You should see my friend's stereo speakers.)
> You click the Start button to START the Shutdown process.
What do you click to shut down the start process?
> Check the FA. The fools want people to run client-side software to verify that all your software and hardware are on the approved list. ("Gee, does your client run on PC/104 ARM9 hardware?")
I wonder how many minutes it would take for someone to write an emulator to send back the "A-OK" signal.
I can't imagine the system working even if people didn't try to jack with it. It would require regular automatic updates as new products came out, and a simple bug could result in shutting down most their customers in one swoop.
More likely it would serve as a conduit for a new class of worms.
> You have every right in the world to run an insecure PC. But as soon as you plug that insecure PC into the Internet and it starts spewing spam and viruses to my computer (and my neighbor's, and my company's, and my ISP's...), you've just crossed a line. You've infringed upon everyone else's right to not pay bandwidth fees for your viruses and spam
If ISPs could charge individuals for the bandwidth they use, those who own spew hosts would either fix them or drop off the net due to inability to afford the fees.
> and you've also infringed upon everyone else's right to not spend their time dealing with viruses sent out by your zombified Winbox.
Huh? Against everybody else's right to run an insecure machine???