> and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article.
Couldn't you provide something a little shorter, for those of us who are too lazy to read your whole post?
> Disputing with ambigious authority grabs like "this is frequently debunked on talk.origions" is probably the single most frequently attempted evolutionist arguement.
I didn't profess to have debunked the cilium argument, nor even to have then necessary biological expertise. But I do know where to find someone who can, which is why I directed people's attention to the biologists on talk.origins.
> Notice, lurkers, that the topic of "irriducible complexity" and its ramifications to Dariwn's theory is not answered at all in that post, nor attempted.
You can't imagine how hypocritical you look, saying that in defense of an argument that was presented in the form of a link to a creationist club's Web site.
> > "Irreducible complexity" is a myth creationists invented because the big words made their ranting sound scientific.
> Wrong [ucsd.edu].
The cilium example given at that link is probably the single most frequently debunked creationist argument in talk.origins. Lurkers may want to post a question about it there and see what real biologists have to say about it.
> Actually the concept of irreducible complexity is described as follows
An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.
> To me this sounds simply to be a quantification of the likelyhood of a mutation to arise. In particular a series of non-beneficial mutations that are at the end beneficial. The mechanism above for "storing" a series of mutations seems a pretty good example of a way to bypass the non-beneficial steps to get to the benefit of the combined mutations.
IMO, you deserve some upmods for pointing that out. Also notice that the whole creationist argument is based on the asinine assumption that everything is built up linearly, one step at a time, rather than (say) by removal of components or change of function in one or more components. But removals and change of function are readily visible in both the fossil record and the genetic record.
Also, it's not obvious that every component of an individual has to be directly selected for. Witness my big bushy beard: lots of men shave, and some adult men can't grow beards at all. It does not appear that there is any direct selection process maintaining the ability to grow beards. Are "unselected steps" really all the big problem creationists make them out to be?
> Just because the idea for measuring complexity comes from creationist research why does it need to be 'debunked'. If the definition of the term is usefull why not just use it?
I think I've read somewhere that the term actually predates its adoption by creationists. My problem with it is that creationists carefully define it one way and then treat it as if it meant something else when they construct their arguments on it. (Actually they use two definitions, though apparently not in any attempt at bait-n-switch. You gave the newer definition; there was an earlier definition that refered to breakage arising from removing components, but apparently Behe gave up on it because he kept getting creamed every time he gave an example using it. But I only follow Behe casually, so ask on talk.origins if you want the straight scoop on all this.)
> I think that any mention to Creationism in a discussion about Evolution here should be modded as a trool.
Love that misspelling. I do it sometimes too, and I think I'm going to quit correcting it.
> Just a term of comparison, think about someone posting claims that the Earth is flat to any discussion about space missions. I believe the same moderation should apply to other supertitions.
Yeah, but space scientists have buff old astronauts to beat the crap out of unbelievers, so that problem doesn't get out of hand so often.
> As someone who has way more than dabbled in both fields, I can say that a hard engineering mindset does not lend itself to understanding the biological sciences in general, and ecology/evolution in particular.
Yes, cf. the famous Salem Hypothesis re engineers and creationism. (Use google if you must, O Lurker.)
> I was solving practical problems with GAs [scheduling problems for a billion dollar/year factory]. I was working on this stuff full time for 2 years. I succeeded. I think I understand GAs at least as well as you do, thanks. In fact, I think I have an understand of what GAs can and cannot do that is pretty much impossible to aquire without actually experimenting with these things.
> It is very very difficult to analyze this stuff mathematically, one needs experimental computer science [along the same lines proposed by Wolfram in a New Kind of Science] to gain a feel for it. Your warm fuzzy feeling of "natural selection can produce design improvements" will evaporate when you properly understand what you can and cannot achieve like this.
Alas, you err in your assumption that you have more clock time and formal study of genetic algorithms under your belt than I do. I stand by all my previous assertions on this topic.
> Most importantly, you could disprove evolution right now if you could show verifiable supernatural causality for what we observe in speciation.
Actually, it would be much easier than that. You need merely show that mutations aren't heritable, that mutations don't affect the odds of successful reproduction, that the genetic relationships between species are completely random, etc, etc, etc.
But there's a reason that creationists prefer armchair arguments about "information", "complexity", "first causes", etc., rather than arguments based on the relevant empirical evidence - namely that the relevant empirical evidence supports the theory of evolution rather than the claims of creationism.
> I used to believe in the neo darwinist theories [NGT] completely, but two years full time work with genetic algorithms changed by mind. GAs work, but not as well as they would need to for life to have evolved in the time frames involved. It does not add up.
GAs, as usually implemented, are a very bad model for biological evolution. That's because they aren't intended to be models for biological evolution; they're merely inspired by biological evolution.
However, they are useful for demonstrating some principles that creationists are fond of denying. Such as the fact that completely random mutations in the genotype, when filtered by a biased selection process, can result in evolutionary "progress". They can also show the importance of the component processes, e.g. take your favorite GA and run it with mutations turned off and see what happens, or run it with random selection rather than fitness selection and see what happens. You will find that GAs make a very good case that random mutations filtered by natural selection are a plausible explanation for change in an otherwise unguided system, such as the earth's biological system.
> I recommend "Not by Chance" by Dr. Lee Spetner who explains why not in a more authorative manner than I could manage.
I have not had time to read Dr. Spetner's book, but I am told by scientists who have read it that he pulls a real whopper of a bait-and-switch argument when it comes to the dénouement. You may want to visit the talk.origins newsgroup and ask about the logic of Dr. Spetner's argument before you take him too strongly to heart. For a warmup, read this:
To summarize: Spetner defines "information" as the specificity of enzymes to particular substrates (the number of sites on the enzyme that bind to only that substrate), except when he defines it otherwise. Musgrave pointed out that (a) even if you accept the notion of specificity as equivalent to information, there are other ways of increasing it, and (b) when mutations that increase specificity are pointed out to Spetner, he changes the way he measures information.
> although Philip Glass isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Yeah, some pundit once described modern composer John Cage as "a Philip Glass with brains". I think that's way too harsh, though admittedly my response to Glass varies from piece to piece. Some don't interest me, and some are tasty but don't wear too well, but a few are f*king incredible.
To wit, IMO one of the best legal highs you can get is to listen to Glass's Akhnaten while lying on the floor in a pitch black room with the speakers suitably arranged.
YMMV, of course. If you're fond of boy bands, this definitely won't be for you. It's an opera, but not of the "fat lady" type your local classical station plays on Saturday afternoons. The lead role is, in fact, sung by a male soprano. The structure, orchestration, and vocals are austere by traditional operatic standards, more like the Who's Tommy than something by Mozart or Rossini. Most of the libretto is taken from ancient Egyptian texts, though one song is in Hebrew - presumably a nod to Freud's famous theory. (I rather suspect that there are several subtexts to this piece.)
If anyone does decide to give this a try, get the CBS Masterworks edition, use a changer (yuck) so you won't have to get up just when you get into the groove, and set the volume so that the opening bars are rather quiet, so you won't blow your eardrums together later.
It's not perfect; in fact I would probably have cut out one scene both for the length and the redundancy, but for most Slashdotters it is probably unlike anything you've ever heard, and the atmosphere is so rich you can get lost in it.
Yeah, probably the FBI agents assigned to monitor Slashdot. I can see them frantically flipping through their printous of the Jargon File even as we speak.
> Lots of that stone stuff was built by slaves or other compulsory forms of labor.
Didn't you see the FOX Live Pyramid Adventure? If you had, you'd know that the pyramids were build by a free association of CEOs' sons who had brisket for lunch and catch-of-the-day for dinner, which they ate in spacious air-conditoned halls and sat around afterward vetting ideas for playing pranks on future archaeologists.
> But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
Only among them what get their Viagra and LSD mixed up.
> I think because that type of forgery has a huge impact on their bottom line. I mean they were spending millions on what this guys claimed, and would have spent millions more.... Fraud of this scale is reprehensible. Plus I'm sure they want to make sure he never works again.
Shouldn't they hope he goes to work with their competitors?
> Musical geniuses can be easily split between two groups: Those who can write good music, and those who can play it exceptionally well.(not neccessarily excluding each other).
Whoa - you're forgetting the fourth group: those who can do neither.
Slashdot Mirror
> and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article.
Couldn't you provide something a little shorter, for those of us who are too lazy to read your whole post?
Pretty soon we'll start calling it the ozone hole layer instead of the ozone layer.
> Disputing with ambigious authority grabs like "this is frequently debunked on talk.origions" is probably the single most frequently attempted evolutionist arguement.
I didn't profess to have debunked the cilium argument, nor even to have then necessary biological expertise. But I do know where to find someone who can, which is why I directed people's attention to the biologists on talk.origins.
> Notice, lurkers, that the topic of "irriducible complexity" and its ramifications to Dariwn's theory is not answered at all in that post, nor attempted.
You can't imagine how hypocritical you look, saying that in defense of an argument that was presented in the form of a link to a creationist club's Web site.
> This is a duplicate of Monday's
d00d! Didn't you know that redundancy is the key to error detection?
> > "Irreducible complexity" is a myth creationists invented because the big words made their ranting sound scientific.
> Wrong [ucsd.edu].
The cilium example given at that link is probably the single most frequently debunked creationist argument in talk.origins. Lurkers may want to post a question about it there and see what real biologists have to say about it.
> To me this sounds simply to be a quantification of the likelyhood of a mutation to arise. In particular a series of non-beneficial mutations that are at the end beneficial. The mechanism above for "storing" a series of mutations seems a pretty good example of a way to bypass the non-beneficial steps to get to the benefit of the combined mutations.> Actually the concept of irreducible complexity is described as follows
IMO, you deserve some upmods for pointing that out. Also notice that the whole creationist argument is based on the asinine assumption that everything is built up linearly, one step at a time, rather than (say) by removal of components or change of function in one or more components. But removals and change of function are readily visible in both the fossil record and the genetic record.
Also, it's not obvious that every component of an individual has to be directly selected for. Witness my big bushy beard: lots of men shave, and some adult men can't grow beards at all. It does not appear that there is any direct selection process maintaining the ability to grow beards. Are "unselected steps" really all the big problem creationists make them out to be?
> Just because the idea for measuring complexity comes from creationist research why does it need to be 'debunked'. If the definition of the term is usefull why not just use it?
I think I've read somewhere that the term actually predates its adoption by creationists. My problem with it is that creationists carefully define it one way and then treat it as if it meant something else when they construct their arguments on it. (Actually they use two definitions, though apparently not in any attempt at bait-n-switch. You gave the newer definition; there was an earlier definition that refered to breakage arising from removing components, but apparently Behe gave up on it because he kept getting creamed every time he gave an example using it. But I only follow Behe casually, so ask on talk.origins if you want the straight scoop on all this.)
> I think that any mention to Creationism in a discussion about Evolution here should be modded as a trool.
Love that misspelling. I do it sometimes too, and I think I'm going to quit correcting it.
> Just a term of comparison, think about someone posting claims that the Earth is flat to any discussion about space missions. I believe the same moderation should apply to other supertitions.
Yeah, but space scientists have buff old astronauts to beat the crap out of unbelievers, so that problem doesn't get out of hand so often.
--
Cloning? Why bother? Aren't most Americans exactly alike already?
I resemble that remark!
> These vulnerabilities only allow DoS attacks, not intercepting data.
Couldn't a hostile party use your server's pattern of up and down times as Morse code, to send secret messages or something?
> As someone who has way more than dabbled in both fields, I can say that a hard engineering mindset does not lend itself to understanding the biological sciences in general, and ecology/evolution in particular.
Yes, cf. the famous Salem Hypothesis re engineers and creationism. (Use google if you must, O Lurker.)
> I am not saying that I don't believe in large evolutionary changes - just that they require different, more difficult evidence than small changes.
Hox gene.
> I was solving practical problems with GAs [scheduling problems for a billion dollar/year factory]. I was working on this stuff full time for 2 years. I succeeded. I think I understand GAs at least as well as you do, thanks. In fact, I think I have an understand of what GAs can and cannot do that is pretty much impossible to aquire without actually experimenting with these things.
> It is very very difficult to analyze this stuff mathematically, one needs experimental computer science [along the same lines proposed by Wolfram in a New Kind of Science] to gain a feel for it. Your warm fuzzy feeling of "natural selection can produce design improvements" will evaporate when you properly understand what you can and cannot achieve like this.
Alas, you err in your assumption that you have more clock time and formal study of genetic algorithms under your belt than I do. I stand by all my previous assertions on this topic.
> Most importantly, you could disprove evolution right now if you could show verifiable supernatural causality for what we observe in speciation.
Actually, it would be much easier than that. You need merely show that mutations aren't heritable, that mutations don't affect the odds of successful reproduction, that the genetic relationships between species are completely random, etc, etc, etc.
But there's a reason that creationists prefer armchair arguments about "information", "complexity", "first causes", etc., rather than arguments based on the relevant empirical evidence - namely that the relevant empirical evidence supports the theory of evolution rather than the claims of creationism.
> I used to believe in the neo darwinist theories [NGT] completely, but two years full time work with genetic algorithms changed by mind. GAs work, but not as well as they would need to for life to have evolved in the time frames involved. It does not add up.
GAs, as usually implemented, are a very bad model for biological evolution. That's because they aren't intended to be models for biological evolution; they're merely inspired by biological evolution.
However, they are useful for demonstrating some principles that creationists are fond of denying. Such as the fact that completely random mutations in the genotype, when filtered by a biased selection process, can result in evolutionary "progress". They can also show the importance of the component processes, e.g. take your favorite GA and run it with mutations turned off and see what happens, or run it with random selection rather than fitness selection and see what happens. You will find that GAs make a very good case that random mutations filtered by natural selection are a plausible explanation for change in an otherwise unguided system, such as the earth's biological system.
> I recommend "Not by Chance" by Dr. Lee Spetner who explains why not in a more authorative manner than I could manage.
I have not had time to read Dr. Spetner's book, but I am told by scientists who have read it that he pulls a real whopper of a bait-and-switch argument when it comes to the dénouement. You may want to visit the talk.origins newsgroup and ask about the logic of Dr. Spetner's argument before you take him too strongly to heart. For a warmup, read this:
> How can you trust eyes (created through a series of random events) to see anything correctly?
Who sez they do?
> How do you trust your brain's (again, created through a series of random events) interpretation of what your eyes see?
Maybe you've noticed that the brain doesn't always interpret the retinal image correctly?
> The ridiculousness goes on and on.
You certainly got that part right!
> although Philip Glass isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Yeah, some pundit once described modern composer John Cage as "a Philip Glass with brains". I think that's way too harsh, though admittedly my response to Glass varies from piece to piece. Some don't interest me, and some are tasty but don't wear too well, but a few are f*king incredible.
To wit, IMO one of the best legal highs you can get is to listen to Glass's Akhnaten while lying on the floor in a pitch black room with the speakers suitably arranged.
YMMV, of course. If you're fond of boy bands, this definitely won't be for you. It's an opera, but not of the "fat lady" type your local classical station plays on Saturday afternoons. The lead role is, in fact, sung by a male soprano. The structure, orchestration, and vocals are austere by traditional operatic standards, more like the Who's Tommy than something by Mozart or Rossini. Most of the libretto is taken from ancient Egyptian texts, though one song is in Hebrew - presumably a nod to Freud's famous theory. (I rather suspect that there are several subtexts to this piece.)
If anyone does decide to give this a try, get the CBS Masterworks edition, use a changer (yuck) so you won't have to get up just when you get into the groove, and set the volume so that the opening bars are rather quiet, so you won't blow your eardrums together later.
It's not perfect; in fact I would probably have cut out one scene both for the length and the redundancy, but for most Slashdotters it is probably unlike anything you've ever heard, and the atmosphere is so rich you can get lost in it.
> Is anyone else very confused?
Yeah, probably the FBI agents assigned to monitor Slashdot. I can see them frantically flipping through their printous of the Jargon File even as we speak.
All this promiscuous 'partnering' is sure to result in a computer virus that won't wash off so easily.
> Lots of that stone stuff was built by slaves or other compulsory forms of labor.
Didn't you see the FOX Live Pyramid Adventure? If you had, you'd know that the pyramids were build by a free association of CEOs' sons who had brisket for lunch and catch-of-the-day for dinner, which they ate in spacious air-conditoned halls and sat around afterward vetting ideas for playing pranks on future archaeologists.
> but what type of application requires that much horse power?
Locomotives. You use the heat to drive the steam engine.
> But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
Only among them what get their Viagra and LSD mixed up.
> CDex -> for converting their CDs to MP3...
fdisk -> for installing Linux!
ps - I included tags so you can tell whether this is supposed to be funny, informative, or trollish. Too bad Slashdot won't recognize the markup.
> I think because that type of forgery has a huge impact on their bottom line. I mean they were spending millions on what this guys claimed, and would have spent millions more.
Shouldn't they hope he goes to work with their competitors?
I think it's a damn shame that we don't build everything by stacking up blocks of stone like our ancestors did.
> Musical geniuses can be easily split between two groups: Those who can write good music, and those who can play it exceptionally well.(not neccessarily excluding each other).
Whoa - you're forgetting the fourth group: those who can do neither.