> > No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
> Are you sure that's all they are saying? The slashdot article said, "For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'" It looks like they are going much further than saying "amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
I don't see the word "proves" anywhere in that quote. And the fact that the major building blocks of life AWKI can be built from lifeless matter is exactly what convinces most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.
Science works under the assumption that nature behaves the same elsewhere as it does here, so it follows that in a big universe, interesting stuff that happens here will also happen elsewhere, with high probability.
> No thanks. At what might seem like a cop-out, I'll not engage in debates on specifics here on slashdot. It quickly deteriorates into a waste of time
It is a waste of time, for you at any rate, because you always lose the debate as soon as you go beyond your "trust me, I know God personally" argument.
> and I'm sick of being called a believer in fairy tales before the idiot who's "discussing" with me understands what it is I believe.
It's no shame to believe in fairy tales; I suppose most of us believe in one or the other. The idiocy lies in making up idiotic arguments to convince others and reassure yourself.
> Atheism is by far the minority the world over, so I consider the burden of proof with them.
So it's a voting thingy? Whichever god is most popular is real, and if a new god becomes more popular next week the current one has to get off the throne and work on his PR campaign instead of ruling the universe?
Don't you ever stop to think before you post?
> I've seen ample evidence to prove God exists. I'd have to go through all that with you step by step - and you'd have to demonstrate to me each one how that particular evidence is in fact no proof of God. An arduous task no doubt.
Go for it. Science is an arduous task, but we're accustomed to careful examination of the facts.
> am I the only one here who thinks that the human race is special in anyway?
Zebras probably think zebras are special too. What of it?
> language skills?
Only somewhat more than chimps. (That may sound surprising, until you compare the difference between us and chimps to the difference between chimps and toadstools.)
> delicate hands that can craft tools?
Only somewhat more than chimps.
> math ?
Only somewhat more than porpoises.
> less bodily hair?
I presume that you think snails are even more "special" than we are, then?
> sure you can disect a human and document everything about the body and invent medicine and do whatever you want with the human body but you will be like a kid who is breaking the toy to find out what makes it tick. very exciting but you can never match the original knowledge of the creator who made.
Mighty big assumption, mighty small supporting argument.
> Correction: no one has pursuaded you that God exists. I have seen more than enough evidence to convince - ie, prove - that He exists. Just because you have not yet encountered it does not mean nobody has.
Funny thing is, people have been having your experience throughout history, "proving" the existance of mutually incompatible deities all along the way.
> Extraordinary claim is that there is no God. Ordinary claim is that there is.
How you figure? Do you also say "Extraordinary claim is that there is no Invisible Pink Unicorn. Ordinary claim is that there is."? If not, why not? Just because you have not encountered the evidence to convince that the IPU exist, does not mean that nobody has.
> If it is mother nature only, evolution, only the strong survive. Life then has no intrinsic value and it is everyone for themselves.
Whereas if it's special creation then life has no intrinsic value and everything is just a toy for the creator, to be drowned in a snit if things don't go to suit him.
> So your creation is the result of a series of random, uncontrolled events. Therefore, your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God?
If it was all created by a puppetmaster, how could you trust it then either?
Did the lady in Texas who stoned her children a few days ago do well to trust her thoughts, to trust her ideas about God?
> You want proof? Look at Saul, who later became Paul in the New Testament of the Bible. There is lots of historical evidence that Paul existed and that the accounts of his actions in the Bible are historically accurate. How is this proof, you ask? His changed life. He went from Saul, persecutor and slayer of Christians, to Paul, martyr for Jesus Christ and author of a large portion of the New Testament.
And the people at Jonestown drank the coolaid.
How are the quirks of human behavior supposed to count as evidence for the divine?
> If I'm right and you're wrong, you lose. You spend eternity in hell and I live out eternity in heaven.
And if you're worshiping the wrong god you're just making the right one madder and madder every week. (With apologies to H. Simpson.)
> Atheists, Agnostics, etc are not really that way because they BELIEVE what they say. They're rejecting truth based on their own self-absorption.
How the FUCK do YOU know what motivates them?
> Given the above argument, you are either a) a complete idiot, or b) too selfish and fatalistic to consider eternity. Those are the only two options.
Given the above argument, you've never stopped to think things out very carefully.
> Eternity is not something worth gambling with.
So of course you make sacrifices to all the gods, to make sure your spiritual ass is covered.
> As an aside, I find it pretty irritating that slashdotters can express any view except the Christian without being called a troll.
It isn't expressing Christian views that gets people modded down or flamed, it's expressing the kind of asinine argument you invoked in your post.
> If you are interested to learn, the evidence is there. I can point you to the place where the most misunderstandings occur - and that's with inheritence. Evolutionists commonly quote examples similar to Darwin's finches as proof of evolution. They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.
The problem is that you can explain any observation with the creationist model, since at heart it is an appeal to magic.
At least the scientific theories are dependent on the evidence.
> I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive. People can use it as a theoretical model to understand a lot of things, but I have kept my eyes on too many of the details to say it can be said true for sure.
Please list some of the details that you think cast doubt on it, along with some insightful comments that will let us know whether you're talking about something you understand instead of just quoting creationist Web sites.
> So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.
non sequitur
> (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)
God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.
> Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post.;)
Providing supporting details is outside the scope of creationism altogether.
> I agree that the heavens are several billion years old. The earth, however, is not. You probably think this is twisted. I assure you it is not. Read this book [amazon.com] if you want to know how.
Or save your money, skip the creationist bunkum, and read this instead, while you're waiting for Humpreys' twisty logic to make it to the pages of a peer reviewed journal.
> From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.
No, the existence of iron ore shows otherwise. It precipitated out of the seas when oxygen started building up in the atmosphere; in an oxydizing atmosphere there could never have been enough iron in the oceans to for the massive deposits we actually find.
BTW, I learned this a while back by spending a very little time with google. Make sure you're not getting all your "facts" from creationist Web sites.
> Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?
Out of my league, so I'll let someone else answer.
Though of course an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.
> Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.
One hypothesis is that the earliest life formed by polymerization on a quasi-crystaline base such as clay, which could show a preference to one orientation over the other.
Another hypothesis is that both orientations were once used by life forms, but that the luck of the draw meant one crowded the other out. (You get that kind of thing in hereditary systems; a long time ago Scientific American had an interesting article about how surnames dissappear from populations over time due to differential breeding rates and essentially random factors.)
> So it seems to me that what Miller demonstrated is that creating amino acids requires an intelligent mind controlling the process.
Ignoring the problems with the claims you base that conclusion on, that is a major non sequitur. It is tantamount to saying "I rolled my car over yesterday, proving that cars can't be rolled over due to natural causes."
> Saying that the existance of amino acids on an early earth proves spontaneous generation is almost like saying the existance of carbon and water on a planet proves the existance of life on that planet.
No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
But consider how differently we view the building blocks of life now than our ancestors viewed them 500 years ago, because of experiments like this.
> My Warcraft III EULA (and I'm sure others -- that was just a random selection from my game collection) explicitly states that I have the right to make one backup copy.
Does it say how many copies you can make of the backup copy?
> I used Ada for my second semester of Data Structures in college. All that I really remember about it was that the code was really hard to get to compile. But once you got it to compile, it usually worked as intended.
And that's really only a newbie problem. I found it very frustrating to try to get stuff to compile when I first started using Ada and still thought like a C programmer, but after a few years of programming with it intermittently (hobby time only) I have started thinking like an Ada programmer and can almost always get my stuff to compile the first try.
> The design of the language moves a lot of logic errors into the realm of compiler errors. Which was nice for learning, but might be annoying once you were experienced enough to avoid the logic errors on your own because you'd presumably still be having to go through the syntactic rigor without as much benefit.
That's part of the design intention, since Ada was designed for use on big, complicated projects with lots of people working on them and an extended life for the program to be maintained after deployment. All those definitions you could potentially keep in your head instead of typing in are actually an important part of the program specification: all those other developers and maintainers can't be expected to read your mind.
Think of the syntactic rigor as a type of constraint-based programming. The more you constrain the possible meaning of your program, the less likely certain classes of error become.
> Bad points: The scarcity of operators (no +=, no ?:
You can easily write your own extensions for that kind of stuff, though you can't make it look like the syntax from the C family of languages. I have a package of math utilities where I define an overloaded inc procedure for various data types, so that
inc (x)
will increment x by 1 (or by 1.0 if its a floating point number), and
inc (x, y)
will increment x by y rather than by one. I in-line the procedure so that there won't be any call overhead for it.
Different syntax; same result.
> no bitwise operators in ada '83
AFAICT, there's no reason for anyone to use Ada 83 unless they're maintaining legacy code. Ada 95 has been out for eight years now...
> Ada '95 tried to do OOP, and it came out a bit alien (IMO).
The syntax is different from the C++ tradition, but it works well enough. The bindings to GTK+ are all OO, and you can easily derive new kinds of widgets by inheritance from the old. The GTK+ bindings include support for GtkExtra, and I've used that to create some "plot" objects that I can create on the fly, paste on a canvas, and update as the program runs. Designing them as objects makes programming with them trivially easy.
I use objects for all kinds of other stuff too, ranging from specialized message loggers to map viewers for experimental games to the neurons in artificial neural networks. (Using objects for maps is really cool, because it makes it easy for you to provide players with the ability to dynamically create and destroy auxiliary maps giving different views of the world. For example, if your game supports auto-centering on an agent in the game, you could have different maps following different agents around with almost no extra programming required.)
> I haven't used ADA, but I understand that it is somewhat designed for self-documenting code, and that as a result you are hemmed in on all sides by language rules. (ADA fans please comment here.)
In my experience Ada feels like a strait jacket when you first start using it - especially if you don't come from a Pascal background - but after you get some experience with it it starts feeling very liberating instead.
For a nontrivial program there will be lots of rigorous definitions up front, but once you've made a good set of definitions you can deal with your data very abstractly, so you end up programming at a "higher level" than you would in lots of other languages.
Unfortunately Ada is a "big" language and it will take you a while to absorb all the goodies it provides. On the plus side you can write real programs with a subset of the language that is conceptually identical to Pascal (with just a few syntactic tweaks) and bootstrap your knowledge of the language from there.
Other plusses are the free GNU compiler (GNAT, now rolled into GCC 3.x, but the GCC version not quite ready for prime time yet), lots of on-line reference sites, and some really nice built-in stuff like support for multi-tasking, distributed programming, and multi-lingual programming; OOP; very powerful generics; etc. There's also a first rate and well documented set of bindings for GTK+ in case you want to do some GUI programming.
But possibly the nicest thing about Ada is that its strong typing[*] moves bug-catching forward in the development process. In Ada you will catch a lot of things at compile time that would only be caught at run time in most other languages, and you'll catch things at run time that you would only catch in most other languages if you happen to notice that the output is incorrect. For me those features are priceless, and make the language well worth using even as a beginner when you still feel like the rules are too strict.
* When I say "strong typing" I'm talking about something far beyond what C++ers call "strong typing". Ada programmers laugh when they hear someone say that C++ offers strong data typing.
It has been a while since I took my architecture class, but I thought I remembered that they were working on designs that would execute along both branches simultaneously, and then throw one branch of the execution away a few cycles later when it became clear which branch should commit.
> I wonder when they'll finally realize that you can't make a thinking machine. It doesn't have a a soul, a consiousness.
Chimps and certain other animals are intelligent - arguably closer to humans in that regard than to amoebas. Are we to assume that chimps have half a soul, half a consciousness?
Invoking "a soul" to explain intelligence is vacuous, except as a reaffirmation of your belief in cause and effect, because it boils down to saying "something causes it, and I'll call that something 'XYZ', although I don't have the faintest idea what it is, how it works, or how I might go about observing it".
Do you propose to 'expain' the unknown by invoking the unknowable?
> It just follows some programming. At the most basic level, it's just a binary program. It follows whatever instructions it was given.
There are piles of evidence that the brain operates by pushing ions and molecules around in meatspace, and that those meaty activities directly correlate with our experiences, feelings, and actions. You had best brace yourself for the idea that we are just "programs" as well, because it's sure starting to look that way.
Perhaps not, but as research accumulates it is getting harder and harder to hold on to the Medieval world view of human = body + soul. Compare the progress we've made over the past ~500 years in understanding the body (blood circulates??? wow!) vs the progress we've made in understanding souls. The soul keeps getting pushed into smaller and smaller gaps in our knowledge as our investigations continue. Is there really any reason to believe that that trend won't continue?
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
> Okay, here's the current evolutionary biology problem set:
I'm passing that part because Kazoo has already addressed your three points very well...
> So call me a skeptic. Faith is something that should exist in religion, not science
It sure has gotten popular over the past few years to dis evolution by calling it a faith. Is that perhaps because evolution deniers aren't making any progress at refuting it on the facts?
> and in light of these problems, I'm not convinced that evolution was responsible for the beginning of life.
Neither am I. Evolution doesn't have anything to do with the beginning of life; it's what happens to imperfect replicators after they come in to being.
BTW, evolution is compatible with special creation, as much as it is compatible with non-magical notions of abiogenesis or the transport of life to earth from elsewhere.
> Ask yourself this: if evolution as we understand it can really bring about living beings, why is it that scientists to date have not been able to produce a living organism from dead material? No other legitimate science would accept something as truth if the results could not be reproduced
Now that is just plain silly. Can astronomers make black holes? Can geologists cause continental drift? Can meteorologists create hurricanes? Can archaeologists make prehistory repeat iself?
> and until such happens, evolution is still just a theory.
And it would still be "just a theory" if we did create life too. "Theory" is as good as it gets in the empirical sciences, which is why we have "atomic theory" and "theory of relativity" and all that other good stuff, in addition to the "theory of evolution".
A theory, for scientists, is just a well-founded explanation of some class of phenomena.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> The problem with "creation scientists" is the same problem with "evolutionary biologists" - each firmly believes in their position regardless of the weakness of the position or evidence to the contrary.
Could I trouble you to summarize the weakness of the position of evolutionary biologists and the contrary evidence? Presumably you have something beyond the same old tripe that has been refuted hundreds of times, or you wouldn't be saying that.
> Weak minds often have a hard time with the intelligent design arguments of creation. While we don't specifically deny evolution, we posit that there was a Creator who started the process, and has and does attend to his creation.
And that position is completely worthless as a way of understanding the universe, because it is compatible with any observation whatsoever.
> When one looks at the complexity of living things compared to that of inanimate objects, one can't help but be struck by the difference in complexity between what merely exists and those things that grow.
What measure of complexity are you using? I'd like to see your calculations showing the complexity of a squirrel and the complexity of the Nile delta.
But maybe before we get into that too deeply... What has complexity got to do with anything? Are you making an underlying claim that complexity can only come about as a result of intelligent design? Is the Nile delta the result of intelligent design? Are intelligent designers the result of intelligent design? (Where did the first intelligent designer come from?)
> Interestingly, while this study can show the merits of evolution, it does more to bolster the intelligent design theory than to destroy it. While the experiment was very interesting, we must remember that the digital organisms did have an intelligent designer - it's not like the programs sprang to life on their own!
Yes, and our simulations of continental drift are written by humans too. Are we to conclude that humans are pushing the continents around?
Study up on the concept of "non sequitur" when you have a little spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
> > No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
> Are you sure that's all they are saying? The slashdot article said, "For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'" It looks like they are going much further than saying "amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
I don't see the word "proves" anywhere in that quote. And the fact that the major building blocks of life AWKI can be built from lifeless matter is exactly what convinces most scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.
Science works under the assumption that nature behaves the same elsewhere as it does here, so it follows that in a big universe, interesting stuff that happens here will also happen elsewhere, with high probability.
> Ooh, I was just about to reply then I noticed it was you Black Parrot! Hi, and bye.
Hi. Don't like to discuss this topic with people who'll make you support your claims, do you.
> No thanks. At what might seem like a cop-out, I'll not engage in debates on specifics here on slashdot. It quickly deteriorates into a waste of time
It is a waste of time, for you at any rate, because you always lose the debate as soon as you go beyond your "trust me, I know God personally" argument.
> and I'm sick of being called a believer in fairy tales before the idiot who's "discussing" with me understands what it is I believe.
It's no shame to believe in fairy tales; I suppose most of us believe in one or the other. The idiocy lies in making up idiotic arguments to convince others and reassure yourself.
> Atheism is by far the minority the world over, so I consider the burden of proof with them.
So it's a voting thingy? Whichever god is most popular is real, and if a new god becomes more popular next week the current one has to get off the throne and work on his PR campaign instead of ruling the universe?
Don't you ever stop to think before you post?
> I've seen ample evidence to prove God exists. I'd have to go through all that with you step by step - and you'd have to demonstrate to me each one how that particular evidence is in fact no proof of God. An arduous task no doubt.
Go for it. Science is an arduous task, but we're accustomed to careful examination of the facts.
> am I the only one here who thinks that the human race is special in anyway?
Zebras probably think zebras are special too. What of it?
> language skills?
Only somewhat more than chimps. (That may sound surprising, until you compare the difference between us and chimps to the difference between chimps and toadstools.)
> delicate hands that can craft tools?
Only somewhat more than chimps.
> math ?
Only somewhat more than porpoises.
> less bodily hair?
I presume that you think snails are even more "special" than we are, then?
> sure you can disect a human and document everything about the body and invent medicine and do whatever you want with the human body but you will be like a kid who is breaking the toy to find out what makes it tick. very exciting but you can never match the original knowledge of the creator who made.
Mighty big assumption, mighty small supporting argument.
> Correction: no one has pursuaded you that God exists. I have seen more than enough evidence to convince - ie, prove - that He exists. Just because you have not yet encountered it does not mean nobody has.
Funny thing is, people have been having your experience throughout history, "proving" the existance of mutually incompatible deities all along the way.
> Extraordinary claim is that there is no God. Ordinary claim is that there is.
How you figure? Do you also say "Extraordinary claim is that there is no Invisible Pink Unicorn. Ordinary claim is that there is."? If not, why not? Just because you have not encountered the evidence to convince that the IPU exist, does not mean that nobody has.
> If it is mother nature only, evolution, only the strong survive. Life then has no intrinsic value and it is everyone for themselves.
Whereas if it's special creation then life has no intrinsic value and everything is just a toy for the creator, to be drowned in a snit if things don't go to suit him.
I'll take my chances with mother nature.
> So your creation is the result of a series of random, uncontrolled events. Therefore, your brain is the result of such random, uncontrolled events. How then can you possibly trust ANY thought that your brain has, including the idea that there is no God?
If it was all created by a puppetmaster, how could you trust it then either?
Did the lady in Texas who stoned her children a few days ago do well to trust her thoughts, to trust her ideas about God?
> You want proof? Look at Saul, who later became Paul in the New Testament of the Bible. There is lots of historical evidence that Paul existed and that the accounts of his actions in the Bible are historically accurate. How is this proof, you ask? His changed life. He went from Saul, persecutor and slayer of Christians, to Paul, martyr for Jesus Christ and author of a large portion of the New Testament.
And the people at Jonestown drank the coolaid.
How are the quirks of human behavior supposed to count as evidence for the divine?
> If I'm right and you're wrong, you lose. You spend eternity in hell and I live out eternity in heaven.
And if you're worshiping the wrong god you're just making the right one madder and madder every week. (With apologies to H. Simpson.)
> Atheists, Agnostics, etc are not really that way because they BELIEVE what they say. They're rejecting truth based on their own self-absorption.
How the FUCK do YOU know what motivates them?
> Given the above argument, you are either a) a complete idiot, or b) too selfish and fatalistic to consider eternity. Those are the only two options.
Given the above argument, you've never stopped to think things out very carefully.
> Eternity is not something worth gambling with.
So of course you make sacrifices to all the gods, to make sure your spiritual ass is covered.
> As an aside, I find it pretty irritating that slashdotters can express any view except the Christian without being called a troll.
It isn't expressing Christian views that gets people modded down or flamed, it's expressing the kind of asinine argument you invoked in your post.
> If you are interested to learn, the evidence is there. I can point you to the place where the most misunderstandings occur - and that's with inheritence. Evolutionists commonly quote examples similar to Darwin's finches as proof of evolution. They do not understand that these observations are explained equally well, or better, under the creationist model.
The problem is that you can explain any observation with the creationist model, since at heart it is an appeal to magic.
At least the scientific theories are dependent on the evidence.
> I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive. People can use it as a theoretical model to understand a lot of things, but I have kept my eyes on too many of the details to say it can be said true for sure.
Please list some of the details that you think cast doubt on it, along with some insightful comments that will let us know whether you're talking about something you understand instead of just quoting creationist Web sites.
> So, if evolution in its strictest sense does turn out to be false, the only alternative is creation.
non sequitur
> (Even God guided evolution can be thought of as a form of creation to a point.)
God-guided chemstry, god-guided weather, god-guided planetary orbits, and god-guided nuclear fission make a lot of sense too.
> Outlining all of this thought with exhaustive examples would be well beyond the scope of this post.
Providing supporting details is outside the scope of creationism altogether.
> I agree that the heavens are several billion years old. The earth, however, is not. You probably think this is twisted. I assure you it is not. Read this book [amazon.com] if you want to know how.
Or save your money, skip the creationist bunkum, and read this instead, while you're waiting for Humpreys' twisty logic to make it to the pages of a peer reviewed journal.
> Yeah, because nothing spells "truth" like an article on the internet.
At least an article on the internet can be evaluated on its merits, unlike a bold claim with no support whatsoever.
> From what I recall (and a quick Google search), there is a big problem with Miller's experiment: the "environment" that Miller created was nothing like the environment of pre-biotic earth, becaus Miller's "atmosphere" was oxygen free, but geological evidence indicates that free oxygen has always been present on earth.
No, the existence of iron ore shows otherwise. It precipitated out of the seas when oxygen started building up in the atmosphere; in an oxydizing atmosphere there could never have been enough iron in the oceans to for the massive deposits we actually find.
BTW, I learned this a while back by spending a very little time with google. Make sure you're not getting all your "facts" from creationist Web sites.
> Also Miller had to create a "trap" to collect the amino acids being formed to protect them from breaking down again. What would the comparable "natural" trap be?
Out of my league, so I'll let someone else answer.
Though of course an obvious 'trap' is "life", e.g. if some of the AAs were incorporated into some kind of primitive self-replicator.
> Finally, the mix of both D and L aminos in Miller's soup presents a major problem. Living cells only use L amino acids. D aminos and proteins are toxic.
One hypothesis is that the earliest life formed by polymerization on a quasi-crystaline base such as clay, which could show a preference to one orientation over the other.
Another hypothesis is that both orientations were once used by life forms, but that the luck of the draw meant one crowded the other out. (You get that kind of thing in hereditary systems; a long time ago Scientific American had an interesting article about how surnames dissappear from populations over time due to differential breeding rates and essentially random factors.)
> So it seems to me that what Miller demonstrated is that creating amino acids requires an intelligent mind controlling the process.
Ignoring the problems with the claims you base that conclusion on, that is a major non sequitur. It is tantamount to saying "I rolled my car over yesterday, proving that cars can't be rolled over due to natural causes."
> Saying that the existance of amino acids on an early earth proves spontaneous generation is almost like saying the existance of carbon and water on a planet proves the existance of life on that planet.
No ones says it "proves" anything, except that amino acids can be made from lifeless matter.
But consider how differently we view the building blocks of life now than our ancestors viewed them 500 years ago, because of experiments like this.
> My Warcraft III EULA (and I'm sure others -- that was just a random selection from my game collection) explicitly states that I have the right to make one backup copy.
Does it say how many copies you can make of the backup copy?
> I used Ada for my second semester of Data Structures in college. All that I really remember about it was that the code was really hard to get to compile. But once you got it to compile, it usually worked as intended.
And that's really only a newbie problem. I found it very frustrating to try to get stuff to compile when I first started using Ada and still thought like a C programmer, but after a few years of programming with it intermittently (hobby time only) I have started thinking like an Ada programmer and can almost always get my stuff to compile the first try.
> The design of the language moves a lot of logic errors into the realm of compiler errors. Which was nice for learning, but might be annoying once you were experienced enough to avoid the logic errors on your own because you'd presumably still be having to go through the syntactic rigor without as much benefit.
That's part of the design intention, since Ada was designed for use on big, complicated projects with lots of people working on them and an extended life for the program to be maintained after deployment. All those definitions you could potentially keep in your head instead of typing in are actually an important part of the program specification: all those other developers and maintainers can't be expected to read your mind.
Think of the syntactic rigor as a type of constraint-based programming. The more you constrain the possible meaning of your program, the less likely certain classes of error become.
will increment x by 1 (or by 1.0 if its a floating point number), and will increment x by y rather than by one. I in-line the procedure so that there won't be any call overhead for it.> Bad points: The scarcity of operators (no +=, no ?:
You can easily write your own extensions for that kind of stuff, though you can't make it look like the syntax from the C family of languages. I have a package of math utilities where I define an overloaded inc procedure for various data types, so that
Different syntax; same result.
> no bitwise operators in ada '83
AFAICT, there's no reason for anyone to use Ada 83 unless they're maintaining legacy code. Ada 95 has been out for eight years now...
> Ada '95 tried to do OOP, and it came out a bit alien (IMO).
The syntax is different from the C++ tradition, but it works well enough. The bindings to GTK+ are all OO, and you can easily derive new kinds of widgets by inheritance from the old. The GTK+ bindings include support for GtkExtra, and I've used that to create some "plot" objects that I can create on the fly, paste on a canvas, and update as the program runs. Designing them as objects makes programming with them trivially easy.
I use objects for all kinds of other stuff too, ranging from specialized message loggers to map viewers for experimental games to the neurons in artificial neural networks. (Using objects for maps is really cool, because it makes it easy for you to provide players with the ability to dynamically create and destroy auxiliary maps giving different views of the world. For example, if your game supports auto-centering on an agent in the game, you could have different maps following different agents around with almost no extra programming required.)
[snip other good points]
> I haven't used ADA, but I understand that it is somewhat designed for self-documenting code, and that as a result you are hemmed in on all sides by language rules. (ADA fans please comment here.)
In my experience Ada feels like a strait jacket when you first start using it - especially if you don't come from a Pascal background - but after you get some experience with it it starts feeling very liberating instead.
For a nontrivial program there will be lots of rigorous definitions up front, but once you've made a good set of definitions you can deal with your data very abstractly, so you end up programming at a "higher level" than you would in lots of other languages.
Unfortunately Ada is a "big" language and it will take you a while to absorb all the goodies it provides. On the plus side you can write real programs with a subset of the language that is conceptually identical to Pascal (with just a few syntactic tweaks) and bootstrap your knowledge of the language from there.
Other plusses are the free GNU compiler (GNAT, now rolled into GCC 3.x, but the GCC version not quite ready for prime time yet), lots of on-line reference sites, and some really nice built-in stuff like support for multi-tasking, distributed programming, and multi-lingual programming; OOP; very powerful generics; etc. There's also a first rate and well documented set of bindings for GTK+ in case you want to do some GUI programming.
But possibly the nicest thing about Ada is that its strong typing[*] moves bug-catching forward in the development process. In Ada you will catch a lot of things at compile time that would only be caught at run time in most other languages, and you'll catch things at run time that you would only catch in most other languages if you happen to notice that the output is incorrect. For me those features are priceless, and make the language well worth using even as a beginner when you still feel like the rules are too strict.
* When I say "strong typing" I'm talking about something far beyond what C++ers call "strong typing". Ada programmers laugh when they hear someone say that C++ offers strong data typing.
> What if those soccer robots develope their own conscience, start killing the humans
I think you mean "consciousness". If they develop a "conscience" then they'll behave OK.
> and send a robot back to the past to kill the leader of the human resistance?
No problem: we'll just appoint the guy who invented them to be the leader of the human resistance.
It has been a while since I took my architecture class, but I thought I remembered that they were working on designs that would execute along both branches simultaneously, and then throw one branch of the execution away a few cycles later when it became clear which branch should commit.
> Oh, is that all? A mere 1000km storage ring. For you US folks out there, that is approx 600 miles.
> On a serious note, what happens if you miss with this thing?
How do you 'miss' when your gun's barrel is 600 miles wide?
> I can't think of anything funny or intelligent to say...
Unsubscribe, so you'll see the "new article coming up" warning and have a little lead time to think about it.
> I wonder when they'll finally realize that you can't make a thinking machine. It doesn't have a a soul, a consiousness.
Chimps and certain other animals are intelligent - arguably closer to humans in that regard than to amoebas. Are we to assume that chimps have half a soul, half a consciousness?
Invoking "a soul" to explain intelligence is vacuous, except as a reaffirmation of your belief in cause and effect, because it boils down to saying "something causes it, and I'll call that something 'XYZ', although I don't have the faintest idea what it is, how it works, or how I might go about observing it".
Do you propose to 'expain' the unknown by invoking the unknowable?
> It just follows some programming. At the most basic level, it's just a binary program. It follows whatever instructions it was given.
There are piles of evidence that the brain operates by pushing ions and molecules around in meatspace, and that those meaty activities directly correlate with our experiences, feelings, and actions. You had best brace yourself for the idea that we are just "programs" as well, because it's sure starting to look that way.
Perhaps not, but as research accumulates it is getting harder and harder to hold on to the Medieval world view of human = body + soul. Compare the progress we've made over the past ~500 years in understanding the body (blood circulates??? wow!) vs the progress we've made in understanding souls. The soul keeps getting pushed into smaller and smaller gaps in our knowledge as our investigations continue. Is there really any reason to believe that that trend won't continue?
> Okay, here's the current evolutionary biology problem set:
I'm passing that part because Kazoo has already addressed your three points very well...
> So call me a skeptic. Faith is something that should exist in religion, not science
It sure has gotten popular over the past few years to dis evolution by calling it a faith. Is that perhaps because evolution deniers aren't making any progress at refuting it on the facts?
> and in light of these problems, I'm not convinced that evolution was responsible for the beginning of life.
Neither am I. Evolution doesn't have anything to do with the beginning of life; it's what happens to imperfect replicators after they come in to being.
BTW, evolution is compatible with special creation, as much as it is compatible with non-magical notions of abiogenesis or the transport of life to earth from elsewhere.
> Ask yourself this: if evolution as we understand it can really bring about living beings, why is it that scientists to date have not been able to produce a living organism from dead material? No other legitimate science would accept something as truth if the results could not be reproduced
Now that is just plain silly. Can astronomers make black holes? Can geologists cause continental drift? Can meteorologists create hurricanes? Can archaeologists make prehistory repeat iself?
> and until such happens, evolution is still just a theory.
And it would still be "just a theory" if we did create life too. "Theory" is as good as it gets in the empirical sciences, which is why we have "atomic theory" and "theory of relativity" and all that other good stuff, in addition to the "theory of evolution".
A theory, for scientists, is just a well-founded explanation of some class of phenomena.
> The problem with "creation scientists" is the same problem with "evolutionary biologists" - each firmly believes in their position regardless of the weakness of the position or evidence to the contrary.
Could I trouble you to summarize the weakness of the position of evolutionary biologists and the contrary evidence? Presumably you have something beyond the same old tripe that has been refuted hundreds of times, or you wouldn't be saying that.
> Weak minds often have a hard time with the intelligent design arguments of creation. While we don't specifically deny evolution, we posit that there was a Creator who started the process, and has and does attend to his creation.
And that position is completely worthless as a way of understanding the universe, because it is compatible with any observation whatsoever.
> When one looks at the complexity of living things compared to that of inanimate objects, one can't help but be struck by the difference in complexity between what merely exists and those things that grow.
What measure of complexity are you using? I'd like to see your calculations showing the complexity of a squirrel and the complexity of the Nile delta.
But maybe before we get into that too deeply... What has complexity got to do with anything? Are you making an underlying claim that complexity can only come about as a result of intelligent design? Is the Nile delta the result of intelligent design? Are intelligent designers the result of intelligent design? (Where did the first intelligent designer come from?)
> Interestingly, while this study can show the merits of evolution, it does more to bolster the intelligent design theory than to destroy it. While the experiment was very interesting, we must remember that the digital organisms did have an intelligent designer - it's not like the programs sprang to life on their own!
Yes, and our simulations of continental drift are written by humans too. Are we to conclude that humans are pushing the continents around?
Study up on the concept of "non sequitur" when you have a little spare time.