> gEdit and some other GTK+ based applications have some pretty nifty tabbed effects: basically, dragging one out of a window makes a new window. Dragging it back into another windows combines the tabs into one main parent window.
Cool... I never realized that you could do that with Galeon 1.2.5 until I saw your post and gave it a try.
You can also use a menu command to move the current tab to a different window by name, which is convenient if you have a different Galeon window open on each of your virtual desktops.
> I like a browser. One that's fast, intuitive, fast, simple, feature-rich, and fast.
The G2 link is/.ed, so maybe this is already on the agenda... but if any developers are reading this, the enhancements that would please me best would be to support preferences that let me treat JavaScript, image loads, etc., exactly the way I treat cookies now: pop up an "Allow this?" query the first time I visit the site, and remember my answer for next time I visit.
But it's already one fine browser. Just fetched the 1.2.5 update a couple of days ago.
> There's no anti-javascript popup ads support. I'm sticking with Mozilla.
I quit getting popups when I unplugged that little cable that used to go out the back of my system.
Re:CNet Review - "Don't switch browsers"
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
> btw, shouldn't people like the reporters for CNET do some basic google'ing before they say it doesn't have popup-blocking, I mean it's not that hard to find this. [ufaq.org]
If they were smart enough to do that, they'd be IT consultants insteadof reporters.
> The first problem I have is the small number of species in the fossil record. Evolution predicts the past existence of millions of species and we've only got thousands of different fossils.
First, I suspect you underestimate the number of fossils we have by several orders of magnitude. Second, there's nothing in the ToE that predicts that fossils will be preserved.
Question: How many people lived in the Roman Empire in 31 BCE? Question: How many of those people's bones could you find if you spent the rest of your life looking for them? Question: How many would alien archaeologists be able to find if they started looking 100,000,000 years from now? Question: How much harder would it be to find the fossilized remains of an organism that died on a mountainside, in a jungle, swamp, or shallow sea, and was left to be scavenged and/or rot without a protective burial like so many Roman citizens benefitted from?
The sparsity of the fossil record is completely unsurprising. In fact we can explain many of the gaps by examining the evidence that tells us what the environment was like at certain places and times where gaps exist.
But focusing on the gaps is a red herring. What paleontologists need is an explanation for the astonishing fossil evidence that we do have, and that is completely incompatible with all pre-scientific notions of the world's history. The theory of evolution was conceived, in part, to meet that requirement.
> The second problem I have with the theory is the lack of evidence for mutations increasing the amount of information in a gene pool.
I see this argument a lot, but I've never seen it presented by anyone who offered a definition of "information" to go along with it. You can't make arguments about constraints on the increase or decrease of some quantity that you can't measure, and you can't measure a quantity that hasn't even been defined.
The best I can do with this handwavy argument is assume that you are talking about Shannon information. It turns out that there are several ways of applying Shannon information to biology, though AFAIK none of them tell us very much useful.
Possibly of more concern to evolution deniers is the fact that it can't be taken for granted that Shannon information does increase during evolution. Shannon information boils down to predictability, with "more predictable" being associated with "less information". The maladaptive genetic meltdown that creationists predict as the result of mutations would actually be an increase in Shannon information!
Sorry, but handwavy arguments are useless for refuting theories - let alone for understanding the universe.
> In contrast, mutation doesn't have any real world examples (again, that I know) of increasing the information of a gene pool over time. Basically, I'm saying that it is not sufficient to say that randomness 'just works'. At least show me how it works or, failing that, at least provide an actual working experiment showing randomness adding information to a system.
> Sorry for the long winded response but I really think there are some fatal flaws in the present theory. Anyone who knows better, please feel free correct this post.
Hopefully I've done so with as little flamebait as I can manage on a tetchy topic. The important thing to realize is that biology, like geology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., has gone far beyond the naive intuitions that bronze age mythology was founded on, and unfortunately it's now really difficult for amateurs (including myself, BTW) to offer cogent criticisms of the various theories, because there's just so damn much you need to know before you can even comment on them intelligently.
Sadly, the hail of criticisms of the theory of evolution is politically motivated, and I suspect that the majority of critics understand that they're completely incompetent to criticise the theories of other fields. With few exceptions it's loyalty to their religion that makes them forget to think when it comes to evolution. But don't mistake the political controversy surrounding the ToE for a scientific controversy. That issue was settled well over a century ago. Those who continue to hurl poorly framed arguments against it need to realize that vehement ignorance can never invalidate a scientific theory. Those few better informed parties who spend their time rallying the masses with bad arguments need to pray that there isn't a place in hell for liars.
> > > You have got to be kidding. Evolution doesn't try to explain the origin of life?
> > Nope. Evolution is a theory of how life has changed, not how it formed in the first place. The question of the origin of life is a very different, and much more controversial question.
> Evolutionists are increasingly using this tactic to back away from their positoin because they know it is untenable. Evolution as generall regarded and promoted (by Gould, Dawkins, etc.) very definitely *does* attempt to explain the origin of life. It has to, because to do otherwise might be to admit God's toe in the door, and thay can't deal with that. Nice try, but if you can't explain the origin of life, you're not even in the game.
You, sir, are blinded by your religious fanaticism. You will never understand what the theory of evolution says until you quit viewing it as a rival to your religious sect. It is simply an attempt to understand some otherwise bizarre things we observe in nature: no more; no less. That it conflicts with your particular sect's mythology is mere historical happenstance. Scientists are going to keep trying to understand what they see regardless of what fairytales you or anyone else happens to believe, and you flatter yourself excessively when you believe that they only say things to hold you at bay.
And since the theory of evolution isn't a sectarian rival, it doesn't need to cover the same bases your sect professes to cover. It doesn't try to explain the origin of life (abiogenesis) any more than it tries to explain the origin of the universe (cosmology) or the origin of English (historical linguistics).
Most scientists do think that abiogenesis was a purely natural event, but that's because everything else we understand about the universe is the result of purely natural events, and we don't have any reason to suppose that abiogenesis will be any different in that regard. It has nothing to do with rivalry with a belief system that was already falsified over half a century before Darwin wrote his famous book.
> Not to mention that if such an evolutionary supposition were true, it would require that original living thing to posess, but not express, all genes for every living thing that has ever followed, an argument I've not yet heard even the wackiest evolutionist make.
It would indeed be a whacky scientist who made such a claim. In fact, I have only ever heard it from creationists, offering it as part of their "theory" of creation!
But the explanation is simple, and lies at the heart of the neo-Darwinian synthesis: mutations. Yessir, new genetic material is created by mutations. And genetics will often let us track the natural history of certain mutations, such as one famous one pertaining to the processing of vitamins in humans and closely related species.
Do take a bit of trouble to learn what the theory of evolution says before you blast it in public. It makes you look... well, someone else has already called you 'dumbass' in another reply, so I don't suppose there's any need in mincing words now. Your spew of ignorance in the threads under this story ranks you as one of the worst purveyers of bullshit I have ever seen on Slashdot.
> > perhaps someone should attempt to define order or disorder, without being circular in their definitions.
> Someone did. His name was Boltzmann. The more ordered a system is, the fewer microstates available to it. What does that mean? Well, a macroscopic example is this: imagine you have a bunch of books you're putting on a shelf. There's only one way to put the books alphabetically (assuming you have no duplicate copies). But there's a really large number of ways to put them on if you put them every which way. So let's compare the order of two systems. Our first system is our books on the shelf, restricted to alphabetical ordering. The second is our books on the shelf. The first system has only one way it can be arranged; the second (assuming we have more than one book) has more. So the first system is more ordered.
Forgive my nit-picking, but your macroscopic example is apt to lead certain people (creationists) to faulty conclusions about what the second law of thermodynamics actually says, and I'd like to try to nip that in the bud, since I'm really tired of hearing bogus 2LoT arguments against the theory of evolution. (Other than that it's an excellent post - not least because it made me drag my physics book out.)
Let's start with the conventional statement of the 2LoT:
deltaS = deltaQ/T >= 0
S is "entropy", I've used the formulation for a closed system, for simplicity, since the distinction between open and closed systems shouldn't enter into what I say in this post.)
Notice that the units for deltaQ/T are J/K, Joules per Kelvin, units of heat and temperature respectively. (No intent to lecture you on something you probably know better than I, Fiver-rah; I'm just trying to make sure all the newbies are on board for what follows.) At any rate, these units may sound kind of odd if you try to visualize what J/K means, but ultimately there's no surprise at seeing those units in the 2LoT because it is, after all, a law of thermodynamics.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but at the bottom line the 2LoT is about limits on the ability to exploit the heat in a system to do work. In particular, it claims that non-reversible processes have a permanent cost to the theromodynamic "budget" of the universe. [Insert comments about open vs closed systems here, if needed.]
Now look at Boltzman's analysis of S:
S = k ln W
Notice in passing that we're now talking about S rather than deltaS, so this is not a restatement of the 2LoT; it's a statement about one of the quantities that appears in the 2LoT.
Now W is a measure of arrangements of state space, a count normalized into a probability, and thus a dimensionless number. Thus ln W is dimensionless as well. But k is Boltzman's constant, with units of - you guessed it - J/K. So Boltzman's analysis, though expressed in terms of "order", is still a statement about thermodynamics.
And that's why I don't like your macroscopic example. (OK, it's good for understanding "order", and you admitted that it was a little simplistic, so I'm not so much faulting your post as pointing out the danger of using your example to gain an understanding of the 2LoT, which experience tells me some people will certainly try to do.)
My point, framed as a question, is: what the heck does the ordering of the books have to do with J/K? Or with entropy at all, in the thermodynamic sense? Unless the individual books are at different temperatures, the amount of thermodynamic work you can extract from them doesn't depend on their alphabetic ordering at all. And if they are at different temperatures, any thermodynamic concerns will be based on their ordering w.r.t. the various books' temperatures, not on their ordering w.r.t. alphabetical considerations.
You did mention microstates in your post, and that works fine. E.g., if you have a sealed room that is "ordered" in the sense that the air on one side is hot and the air on the other side is cold - a gross description of a very low-probability microstate of the air molecules - then it is easy for an agent in the room to exploit that ordering to do work. But if the air is at the same temperature throughout - a gross description of a very high-probability microstate of the air molecules - it is impossible to extract work from that "disordered" state. Moreover, in the "ordered" room, if the agent does exploit that "order" to get some work out of the system, it is only done at the cost of decreasing the "order", i.e. by converting part of that convenient heat arrangement to noise, AKA "waste heat", an increase in disorder of the thermal microstate. Finally, within the "ordered" room it is possible for certain irreversible processes to happen spontaneously, i.e. in the absence of any barricade the two halves of the room will settle down to a constant temperature throughout, without the help of any occupant of the room. (And ultimately, in spite of anything an occupant of the room could do about it, since the occupant would have to do work fighting the disorder, and merely add disorder of his own by doing that work.)
But when you go from microstates to a macroscopic example you can get into trouble very quickly. I.e., if you treat the books as a system and all the books are the same temperature (as you would expect on a bookshelf, generally speaking), then you can't get any more thermodynamic work out of the ordered row of books than you could get out of the same books in a randomized order. Moreover, the "ordered" arrangement of books will never spontaneously rearrange itself into a disordered arrangement, the way the "ordered" gasses in the room would.
This macroscopic ordering and any "entropy" calculated from it simply isn't the kind of thing the 2LoT is talking about. When reading about the 2LoT, always keep in mind that it's a law of thermodynamics, and it's ultimately about extracting work from heat sources. Otherwise you're likely to draw some incorrect conclusions about the way the universe works. Notice that I don't dogmatically say "there are no other applications"; I'm merely saying that you have to be careful about where you try to apply it. It's certainly safe to think of thermodynamic entropy in terms of the "ordering" of heat in some collection of molecules, but if you want to go beyond that you'd better be a physicist, or spend some quality time with some physics books before you stick your neck out.
The key difference between the molecules in the room and the books on the shelf, as far as I can tell, is that the molecules are in Brownian (AKA "thermal") motion and can easily pass one another by, or transfer energy between each other via collisions, so that any "order" the the heat in the room gets spread out evenly (at the macroscopic level) spontaneously. But the books are not in motion on a macroscopic scale - certainly not enough to pass each other by on the shelf - so they can't spontaneously re-arrange themselves on the shelves. The laws of thermodynamics tell us lots of interesting stuff about the, well, thermodynamics of the molecules that the books are made of, but nothing at all about the conceptual ordering of the books on the shelf on the macroscopic scale.
So unless I'm badly mistaken, Boltzman's expression should be taken as a statement about the distribution of heat in a system rather than about some abstract concept of "order".
BTW, notice that Boltzman's analysis is what inspired the "entropy" that lies at the bottom of information theory:
S = - \sum p_i log_2 p_i
S is "entropy" again, but not at all the same thing as in thermodynamics. p_i ("p sub i") is the probability that the random variable under consideration is in state i, some index of all the possible states. Notice that Boltzman's constant is absent, and thus so are the units. However, when we use log_2 we say the units are bits, since in fact this information entropy, the negated sum over all the possible states i for the random variable under consideration, tells us how many bits, on average, are needed to describe the state the variable is in whenever it is observed. (Rarely you will see someone use the natural ln instead of log_2, in which case the units are variously described as "nats" or "nits", on analogy with "bits".)
At any rate, notice that it is fair to start talking about the entropy of macroscopic states, such as rows of books, using this definition of "entropy", if you want to treat the ordering of the books as a random variable. But notice, very importantly, that although it shares the same name and a very similar formulation, it is not the same thing as thermodynamic entropy. This can be seen, very readily, by noticing that one has units of J/K and the other has units of bits, and there is not direct conversion between those two types of units. The information entropy in the books' ordering w.r.t. the alphabet is not affected by their temperature (unless of course you let them get hot enough to combust).
So please, please, please, don't try to apply the 2LoT some non-thermodynamic concept of "order". Your room gets messy because you're a slob, not because of the 2LoT.
For those objecting to the theory of evolution in the other thread, I submit that this is exactly how the human race got smarter. Those guys are going to miss out on a lot of breeding opportunities - at least, breeding of the kind that produces babies.
> The Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution says that all life evolved as the result of random mutations combined with natural selection. The driving force is therefore random mutation. Natural selection can do nothing except select the random mutations that happen to occur.
Yep, that's pretty much it, though a biologist would probably insist on a footnote about genetic drift, sexual selection, and maybe symbiosis. But in general I think the mutations are critical, since otherwise there would never be any new material to work with.
> The point is that no intelligent design is necessary, according to the theory.
Yep. It's also what we see with genetic algorithms: mutation and natural selection have amazing powers.
> Spetner argues conclusively that this model does not cut it. RTFB. Oh, I know. It's an unfair debating tactic to simply refer you to the book. OK, fine. RTFB.
Unfortunately, creationist arguments have such a dismal track record that I have to be motivated before I invest the time it takes to read one of their books. (You wouldn't expect me to read a book on astrology without some solid motivation, would you?)
As I mentioned in another post, I have recently read a review that claims that Spetner used a bait-and-switch tactic when it came to the rub in his book. I was wondering whether any of the creationists pushing his book in this thread have actually read it and understood it well enough to give me a summary of his main argument, and to defend it if I think I see a defect in the summary. Maybe you? I'll undertake to read the book if I see a summary of the main argument that's both concrete and error-free.
In lieu of that, I'll stick with what the review says, based on nothing more than past experience with creationist arguments. For that matter, it's not at all uncommon to hear a creationist push this or that source of "proof" for something, and then discover that the creationist in question hasn't even read it, or didn't understand the subject matter if he did read it.
Forgive my cynicism toward your cause, but I've heard hundreds of creationists give thousands of arguments, but I've never seen one that would stand up. Most can be discarded due to logical fallacies, before you ever get to the biology. Can you convince me that Spetner is different from, say, Walter ReMine? [Lurkers, please visit the talk.origins newsgroup, find the thread with initial subject line "Weasel program", trace it down to where ReMine joins in and changes the subject line, and read the rest of the thread from there. Pay particular attention to his "I didn't say that" assertions, and then ask yourself why I might be just a wee bit skeptical about the claims of creationist authors posing as subject matter experts. Then come back and tell everyone what you found in the thread.]
> If you haven't figured it out, Reno is running against Bush in Florida...that is why no mention of her or Clinton is made anywhere regarding this issue. The media puts this out now, hoping get the people thinking Bush/Ashcroft bad, Democrats good.
Hate to bust up a good conspiracy theory, but I saw the story on two different television stations, and they both mentioned it as a Clinton-era issue.
> Assuming this new system is completely secure, there will need to be explicit instructions and examples to ensure even the most brain-dead person can cast their vote.
And auditable enough to ensured that dead-dead people aren't casting their vote.
> With some luck we won't see a repeat of the election insanity we saw in Florida and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that election insanity has merely brought out the snake oil salesmen.
The general rule of thumb for understanding the USA is that whenever something goes wrong it is eagerly embraced as an excuse to do lots of other things wrong. Particularly if it can be used as an excuse to feather a businessman's bed. (The reader shouldn't have any trouble thinking up lots of recent examples.)
> so now our election system is run by microsoft, yay! now because it's closed source, couldn't microsoft run a service in the backround that changes the vote tallies?
Why should they bother, when its easier for them to buy off whoever gets elected than to write a background service that works like it's supposed to?
> For all you fools out there who think evolution is a proven fact, please read a book called Not By Chance! by Lee Spetner, an information theorist from MIT who has studied evolution on the side since the 1960's. He proves rigorously that Neo-Carwinian evolution could not have happened -- or rather is about as unlikely as tossing 10,000,000 coins at random and having them all come up heads (yes, that is "possible", I guess).
I haven't read Spetner, but I recently read a review that says he used a dishonest bait-and-switch in his "proof", namely using one definition of information in his first example but then switching to another for his second example, where his original definition of information patently wouldn't support his claim.
Have you read the book carefully enough to comment on that charge?
> I am amazed at how completely fooled Slashdot readers are by the completely discredited neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
If it has been discredited, someone needs to bring that to the attention of the people who actually study it.
> Maybe I am coming at this the wrong way, but can someone explain how evolution would even get off the ground? If we start near the beginning (if there is such a thing) where we have a single-celled organism (how that organism came about we can leave to another discussion), how did it become multi-cellular?
I am not very expert on this, but I know that there are unicellular organisms in the world now that group themselves into "multicellular" colonies, somewhat blurring the distinction between unicellular and multicellular. And things like sponges are only a short step beyond that.
> With the little biology I know, single-celled organisms reproduce by creating an exact copy of themselves. Without sexual reproduction, then there is no change in the next creature that comes out. That leaves us to random mutations to somehow create more complex living multi-cellular organisms.
I think that's correct. Notice also that even sexually reproducing species would simply reshuffle existing genetic material, if there were no mutations. So evolution ultimately depends on mutations, regardless of species' erotic habits.
> Now I may be wrong, but if I remember from my biology book, mutations are most of the time harmful (if not always -- especially dealing at this level of simplicity, mess with anything and it will probably die).
Actually, I think most mutations are neutral. Regardless of that, the relevant point is that some are "good", and that natural selection leverages them by giving them preference in the construction of the next generation. Think of natural selection as a filter, and remember that there can be a lot of qualitative difference between a filtered substance and the unfiltered substance it was derived from. (Think of all the rock that comes out of a diamond mine, vs the little bag of raw diamonds at the end of the process.)
At any rate, genetic algorithms demonstrate very clearly that random mutations can contribute to evolutionary "progress". I have seen a plot somewhere on the Web where someone had an A/B comparison between running a GA with mutations turned on and then running it again with mutations turned off, and there was an astonishing difference in the performance of the two runs.
The key to understanding evolution is not to focus on the mutations, but to focus on the process that exploits those mutations. To paraphrase the US Marines' recruitment slogan, "All we need is a few good mutations."
Remember, Darwin published the basic theory while Mendel was still playing gardner, and we didn't have any clue about genetic mutations. But the process of leveraging variation was still discernable in nature.
> Yes, of course it happened. The question is not whether it happened or not, but how it happened.
FYI, scientists aren't keen on "random chance" as an explanation of anything either. The whole history of science can be understood as an investigation of why lots of really interesting stuff doesn't happen by "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any regularity to which direction something moves when you drop it; the theory of gravity explains why you get a result contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any regularity to what happens when you mix two chemicals in a beaker; the atomic theory explains why you get a result contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any pattern in the fossil record; the theory of evolution explains why we see a pattern contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any relationship between the genomes of different species, families, orders, etc; the theory of evolution explains why we see a relationship contrary to "random chance".
Scientists know darn well that things are very surprising if you consider them to be the result of "random chance". The difference between scientists and creationists is that scientists want to know why things are the way they are rather than a random smear of matter-energy.
The whole probability argument is a red herring that serves no purpose other than to excuse not looking for an explanation. You can't disprove biology with a probability argument any more than you can disprove physics, chemistry, astronomy, or any other branch of science with it. Arguments involving probability and information are, as they say, "not even wrong".
> I bet it's easy to go through life thinking you're a biological mistake. No morals, no absolute truth; no right or wrong. It's all random chemical interactions in your brain. Rape, steal, kill. No reason not to if this is all there is.
And how is divine creation any different? In a divinely created universe it's perfectly OK to commit genocide against a tribe competing with yours for the possession of a land you think your god promised to your people, or to fly a passenger plane into a building, if that's what you think your god wants you to do.
There is no morality in religion, just self-justification. I'll take my chances in a secular universe.
> Have you listened to talk radio these days? It's like Bill Clinton's still in office. It's bizarre! They're locked in fatal copulation [...] with the Clinton administration.
One of the negative ads running in Texas right now says candidate Ron Kirk "supports liberal judges, like Hillary Clinton does", and even flashes a picture of her on the screen. It's funny to see that HC is such a bogeyperson that you can use her to scare voters all the way down in Texas.
> Reagan's excuse was the War on Communism. Clinton's was the War on Drugs. GW's is going to be the War on Terrorism.
The problem with democracy is that you eventually get the kind of government the voters deserve.
With elections coming up in 2-3 months we've already been treated to six months of ads for politicians promising to throw more people in jail. When have you ever seen a politician run on a platform of keeping innocent people out of jail, or of cutting back on the state spying on it's own citizens, which it is supposedly "of the, by the, and for the"?
> Basically, government agencies have tried to prey on the fears of Americans after 9-11 in order to achieve the greater flexibility in domestic espionage that they have always sought. Are they justified? I say no, because I believe that our personal liberties are inalienable. But some people believe that the sacrifice of certain freedoms is preferable to living in fear.
Slashdot Mirror
> gEdit and some other GTK+ based applications have some pretty nifty tabbed effects: basically, dragging one out of a window makes a new window. Dragging it back into another windows combines the tabs into one main parent window.
Cool... I never realized that you could do that with Galeon 1.2.5 until I saw your post and gave it a try.
You can also use a menu command to move the current tab to a different window by name, which is convenient if you have a different Galeon window open on each of your virtual desktops.
> I like a browser. One that's fast, intuitive, fast, simple, feature-rich, and fast.
The G2 link is
But it's already one fine browser. Just fetched the 1.2.5 update a couple of days ago.
> BTW, Proxomitron basically lets you apply regex-like filtering and search/replace to your incoming HTML, so it's useful for a *lot* of stuff.
Can you come up with a regex that will filter out the pix of porkers and jailbait, and let everything else through?
Thanx
> There's no anti-javascript popup ads support. I'm sticking with Mozilla.
I quit getting popups when I unplugged that little cable that used to go out the back of my system.
> btw, shouldn't people like the reporters for CNET do some basic google'ing before they say it doesn't have popup-blocking, I mean it's not that hard to find this. [ufaq.org]
If they were smart enough to do that, they'd be IT consultants insteadof reporters.
> The first problem I have is the small number of species in the fossil record. Evolution predicts the past existence of millions of species and we've only got thousands of different fossils.
First, I suspect you underestimate the number of fossils we have by several orders of magnitude. Second, there's nothing in the ToE that predicts that fossils will be preserved.
Question: How many people lived in the Roman Empire in 31 BCE? Question: How many of those people's bones could you find if you spent the rest of your life looking for them? Question: How many would alien archaeologists be able to find if they started looking 100,000,000 years from now? Question: How much harder would it be to find the fossilized remains of an organism that died on a mountainside, in a jungle, swamp, or shallow sea, and was left to be scavenged and/or rot without a protective burial like so many Roman citizens benefitted from?
The sparsity of the fossil record is completely unsurprising. In fact we can explain many of the gaps by examining the evidence that tells us what the environment was like at certain places and times where gaps exist.
But focusing on the gaps is a red herring. What paleontologists need is an explanation for the astonishing fossil evidence that we do have, and that is completely incompatible with all pre-scientific notions of the world's history. The theory of evolution was conceived, in part, to meet that requirement.
> The second problem I have with the theory is the lack of evidence for mutations increasing the amount of information in a gene pool.
I see this argument a lot, but I've never seen it presented by anyone who offered a definition of "information" to go along with it. You can't make arguments about constraints on the increase or decrease of some quantity that you can't measure, and you can't measure a quantity that hasn't even been defined.
The best I can do with this handwavy argument is assume that you are talking about Shannon information. It turns out that there are several ways of applying Shannon information to biology, though AFAIK none of them tell us very much useful.
Possibly of more concern to evolution deniers is the fact that it can't be taken for granted that Shannon information does increase during evolution. Shannon information boils down to predictability, with "more predictable" being associated with "less information". The maladaptive genetic meltdown that creationists predict as the result of mutations would actually be an increase in Shannon information!
Sorry, but handwavy arguments are useless for refuting theories - let alone for understanding the universe.
> In contrast, mutation doesn't have any real world examples (again, that I know) of increasing the information of a gene pool over time. Basically, I'm saying that it is not sufficient to say that randomness 'just works'. At least show me how it works or, failing that, at least provide an actual working experiment showing randomness adding information to a system.
Have you tried this?
> Sorry for the long winded response but I really think there are some fatal flaws in the present theory. Anyone who knows better, please feel free correct this post.
Hopefully I've done so with as little flamebait as I can manage on a tetchy topic. The important thing to realize is that biology, like geology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., has gone far beyond the naive intuitions that bronze age mythology was founded on, and unfortunately it's now really difficult for amateurs (including myself, BTW) to offer cogent criticisms of the various theories, because there's just so damn much you need to know before you can even comment on them intelligently.
Sadly, the hail of criticisms of the theory of evolution is politically motivated, and I suspect that the majority of critics understand that they're completely incompetent to criticise the theories of other fields. With few exceptions it's loyalty to their religion that makes them forget to think when it comes to evolution. But don't mistake the political controversy surrounding the ToE for a scientific controversy. That issue was settled well over a century ago. Those who continue to hurl poorly framed arguments against it need to realize that vehement ignorance can never invalidate a scientific theory. Those few better informed parties who spend their time rallying the masses with bad arguments need to pray that there isn't a place in hell for liars.
> > > You have got to be kidding. Evolution doesn't try to explain the origin of life?
> > Nope. Evolution is a theory of how life has changed, not how it formed in the first place. The question of the origin of life is a very different, and much more controversial question.
> Evolutionists are increasingly using this tactic to back away from their positoin because they know it is untenable. Evolution as generall regarded and promoted (by Gould, Dawkins, etc.) very definitely *does* attempt to explain the origin of life. It has to, because to do otherwise might be to admit God's toe in the door, and thay can't deal with that. Nice try, but if you can't explain the origin of life, you're not even in the game.
You, sir, are blinded by your religious fanaticism. You will never understand what the theory of evolution says until you quit viewing it as a rival to your religious sect. It is simply an attempt to understand some otherwise bizarre things we observe in nature: no more; no less. That it conflicts with your particular sect's mythology is mere historical happenstance. Scientists are going to keep trying to understand what they see regardless of what fairytales you or anyone else happens to believe, and you flatter yourself excessively when you believe that they only say things to hold you at bay.
And since the theory of evolution isn't a sectarian rival, it doesn't need to cover the same bases your sect professes to cover. It doesn't try to explain the origin of life (abiogenesis) any more than it tries to explain the origin of the universe (cosmology) or the origin of English (historical linguistics).
Most scientists do think that abiogenesis was a purely natural event, but that's because everything else we understand about the universe is the result of purely natural events, and we don't have any reason to suppose that abiogenesis will be any different in that regard. It has nothing to do with rivalry with a belief system that was already falsified over half a century before Darwin wrote his famous book.
> Not to mention that if such an evolutionary supposition were true, it would require that original living thing to posess, but not express, all genes for every living thing that has ever followed, an argument I've not yet heard even the wackiest evolutionist make.
It would indeed be a whacky scientist who made such a claim. In fact, I have only ever heard it from creationists, offering it as part of their "theory" of creation!
But the explanation is simple, and lies at the heart of the neo-Darwinian synthesis: mutations. Yessir, new genetic material is created by mutations. And genetics will often let us track the natural history of certain mutations, such as one famous one pertaining to the processing of vitamins in humans and closely related species.
Do take a bit of trouble to learn what the theory of evolution says before you blast it in public. It makes you look... well, someone else has already called you 'dumbass' in another reply, so I don't suppose there's any need in mincing words now. Your spew of ignorance in the threads under this story ranks you as one of the worst purveyers of bullshit I have ever seen on Slashdot.
> When this question was first posted, (in about 1982), I gave a full, comprehensive answer.
Talk about "first post"!
S is "entropy", I've used the formulation for a closed system, for simplicity, since the distinction between open and closed systems shouldn't enter into what I say in this post.)> > perhaps someone should attempt to define order or disorder, without being circular in their definitions.
> Someone did. His name was Boltzmann. The more ordered a system is, the fewer microstates available to it. What does that mean? Well, a macroscopic example is this: imagine you have a bunch of books you're putting on a shelf. There's only one way to put the books alphabetically (assuming you have no duplicate copies). But there's a really large number of ways to put them on if you put them every which way. So let's compare the order of two systems. Our first system is our books on the shelf, restricted to alphabetical ordering. The second is our books on the shelf. The first system has only one way it can be arranged; the second (assuming we have more than one book) has more. So the first system is more ordered.
Forgive my nit-picking, but your macroscopic example is apt to lead certain people (creationists) to faulty conclusions about what the second law of thermodynamics actually says, and I'd like to try to nip that in the bud, since I'm really tired of hearing bogus 2LoT arguments against the theory of evolution. (Other than that it's an excellent post - not least because it made me drag my physics book out.)
Let's start with the conventional statement of the 2LoT:
Notice that the units for deltaQ/T are J/K, Joules per Kelvin, units of heat and temperature respectively. (No intent to lecture you on something you probably know better than I, Fiver-rah; I'm just trying to make sure all the newbies are on board for what follows.) At any rate, these units may sound kind of odd if you try to visualize what J/K means, but ultimately there's no surprise at seeing those units in the 2LoT because it is, after all, a law of thermodynamics.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but at the bottom line the 2LoT is about limits on the ability to exploit the heat in a system to do work. In particular, it claims that non-reversible processes have a permanent cost to the theromodynamic "budget" of the universe. [Insert comments about open vs closed systems here, if needed.]
Now look at Boltzman's analysis of S:Notice in passing that we're now talking about S rather than deltaS, so this is not a restatement of the 2LoT; it's a statement about one of the quantities that appears in the 2LoT.
Now W is a measure of arrangements of state space, a count normalized into a probability, and thus a dimensionless number. Thus ln W is dimensionless as well. But k is Boltzman's constant, with units of - you guessed it - J/K. So Boltzman's analysis, though expressed in terms of "order", is still a statement about thermodynamics.
And that's why I don't like your macroscopic example. (OK, it's good for understanding "order", and you admitted that it was a little simplistic, so I'm not so much faulting your post as pointing out the danger of using your example to gain an understanding of the 2LoT, which experience tells me some people will certainly try to do.)
My point, framed as a question, is: what the heck does the ordering of the books have to do with J/K? Or with entropy at all, in the thermodynamic sense? Unless the individual books are at different temperatures, the amount of thermodynamic work you can extract from them doesn't depend on their alphabetic ordering at all. And if they are at different temperatures, any thermodynamic concerns will be based on their ordering w.r.t. the various books' temperatures, not on their ordering w.r.t. alphabetical considerations.
You did mention microstates in your post, and that works fine. E.g., if you have a sealed room that is "ordered" in the sense that the air on one side is hot and the air on the other side is cold - a gross description of a very low-probability microstate of the air molecules - then it is easy for an agent in the room to exploit that ordering to do work. But if the air is at the same temperature throughout - a gross description of a very high-probability microstate of the air molecules - it is impossible to extract work from that "disordered" state. Moreover, in the "ordered" room, if the agent does exploit that "order" to get some work out of the system, it is only done at the cost of decreasing the "order", i.e. by converting part of that convenient heat arrangement to noise, AKA "waste heat", an increase in disorder of the thermal microstate. Finally, within the "ordered" room it is possible for certain irreversible processes to happen spontaneously, i.e. in the absence of any barricade the two halves of the room will settle down to a constant temperature throughout, without the help of any occupant of the room. (And ultimately, in spite of anything an occupant of the room could do about it, since the occupant would have to do work fighting the disorder, and merely add disorder of his own by doing that work.)
But when you go from microstates to a macroscopic example you can get into trouble very quickly. I.e., if you treat the books as a system and all the books are the same temperature (as you would expect on a bookshelf, generally speaking), then you can't get any more thermodynamic work out of the ordered row of books than you could get out of the same books in a randomized order. Moreover, the "ordered" arrangement of books will never spontaneously rearrange itself into a disordered arrangement, the way the "ordered" gasses in the room would.
This macroscopic ordering and any "entropy" calculated from it simply isn't the kind of thing the 2LoT is talking about. When reading about the 2LoT, always keep in mind that it's a law of thermodynamics, and it's ultimately about extracting work from heat sources. Otherwise you're likely to draw some incorrect conclusions about the way the universe works. Notice that I don't dogmatically say "there are no other applications"; I'm merely saying that you have to be careful about where you try to apply it. It's certainly safe to think of thermodynamic entropy in terms of the "ordering" of heat in some collection of molecules, but if you want to go beyond that you'd better be a physicist, or spend some quality time with some physics books before you stick your neck out.
The key difference between the molecules in the room and the books on the shelf, as far as I can tell, is that the molecules are in Brownian (AKA "thermal") motion and can easily pass one another by, or transfer energy between each other via collisions, so that any "order" the the heat in the room gets spread out evenly (at the macroscopic level) spontaneously. But the books are not in motion on a macroscopic scale - certainly not enough to pass each other by on the shelf - so they can't spontaneously re-arrange themselves on the shelves. The laws of thermodynamics tell us lots of interesting stuff about the, well, thermodynamics of the molecules that the books are made of, but nothing at all about the conceptual ordering of the books on the shelf on the macroscopic scale.
So unless I'm badly mistaken, Boltzman's expression should be taken as a statement about the distribution of heat in a system rather than about some abstract concept of "order".
BTW, notice that Boltzman's analysis is what inspired the "entropy" that lies at the bottom of information theory:S is "entropy" again, but not at all the same thing as in thermodynamics. p_i ("p sub i") is the probability that the random variable under consideration is in state i, some index of all the possible states. Notice that Boltzman's constant is absent, and thus so are the units. However, when we use log_2 we say the units are bits, since in fact this information entropy, the negated sum over all the possible states i for the random variable under consideration, tells us how many bits, on average, are needed to describe the state the variable is in whenever it is observed. (Rarely you will see someone use the natural ln instead of log_2, in which case the units are variously described as "nats" or "nits", on analogy with "bits".)
At any rate, notice that it is fair to start talking about the entropy of macroscopic states, such as rows of books, using this definition of "entropy", if you want to treat the ordering of the books as a random variable. But notice, very importantly, that although it shares the same name and a very similar formulation, it is not the same thing as thermodynamic entropy. This can be seen, very readily, by noticing that one has units of J/K and the other has units of bits, and there is not direct conversion between those two types of units. The information entropy in the books' ordering w.r.t. the alphabet is not affected by their temperature (unless of course you let them get hot enough to combust).
So please, please, please, don't try to apply the 2LoT some non-thermodynamic concept of "order". Your room gets messy because you're a slob, not because of the 2LoT.
For those objecting to the theory of evolution in the other thread, I submit that this is exactly how the human race got smarter. Those guys are going to miss out on a lot of breeding opportunities - at least, breeding of the kind that produces babies.
> The Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution says that all life evolved as the result of random mutations combined with natural selection. The driving force is therefore random mutation. Natural selection can do nothing except select the random mutations that happen to occur.
Yep, that's pretty much it, though a biologist would probably insist on a footnote about genetic drift, sexual selection, and maybe symbiosis. But in general I think the mutations are critical, since otherwise there would never be any new material to work with.
> The point is that no intelligent design is necessary, according to the theory.
Yep. It's also what we see with genetic algorithms: mutation and natural selection have amazing powers.
> Spetner argues conclusively that this model does not cut it. RTFB. Oh, I know. It's an unfair debating tactic to simply refer you to the book. OK, fine. RTFB.
Unfortunately, creationist arguments have such a dismal track record that I have to be motivated before I invest the time it takes to read one of their books. (You wouldn't expect me to read a book on astrology without some solid motivation, would you?)
As I mentioned in another post, I have recently read a review that claims that Spetner used a bait-and-switch tactic when it came to the rub in his book. I was wondering whether any of the creationists pushing his book in this thread have actually read it and understood it well enough to give me a summary of his main argument, and to defend it if I think I see a defect in the summary. Maybe you? I'll undertake to read the book if I see a summary of the main argument that's both concrete and error-free.
In lieu of that, I'll stick with what the review says, based on nothing more than past experience with creationist arguments. For that matter, it's not at all uncommon to hear a creationist push this or that source of "proof" for something, and then discover that the creationist in question hasn't even read it, or didn't understand the subject matter if he did read it.
Forgive my cynicism toward your cause, but I've heard hundreds of creationists give thousands of arguments, but I've never seen one that would stand up. Most can be discarded due to logical fallacies, before you ever get to the biology. Can you convince me that Spetner is different from, say, Walter ReMine? [Lurkers, please visit the talk.origins newsgroup, find the thread with initial subject line "Weasel program", trace it down to where ReMine joins in and changes the subject line, and read the rest of the thread from there. Pay particular attention to his "I didn't say that" assertions, and then ask yourself why I might be just a wee bit skeptical about the claims of creationist authors posing as subject matter experts. Then come back and tell everyone what you found in the thread.]
> If you haven't figured it out, Reno is running against Bush in Florida...that is why no mention of her or Clinton is made anywhere regarding this issue. The media puts this out now, hoping get the people thinking Bush/Ashcroft bad, Democrats good.
Hate to bust up a good conspiracy theory, but I saw the story on two different television stations, and they both mentioned it as a Clinton-era issue.
> Assuming this new system is completely secure, there will need to be explicit instructions and examples to ensure even the most brain-dead person can cast their vote.
And auditable enough to ensured that dead-dead people aren't casting their vote.
> With some luck we won't see a repeat of the election insanity we saw in Florida and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that election insanity has merely brought out the snake oil salesmen.
The general rule of thumb for understanding the USA is that whenever something goes wrong it is eagerly embraced as an excuse to do lots of other things wrong. Particularly if it can be used as an excuse to feather a businessman's bed. (The reader shouldn't have any trouble thinking up lots of recent examples.)
> Florida = unauditable mystery box system
I thought that's what they were trying to replace.
> so now our election system is run by microsoft, yay! now because it's closed source, couldn't microsoft run a service in the backround that changes the vote tallies?
Why should they bother, when its easier for them to buy off whoever gets elected than to write a background service that works like it's supposed to?
What a sad commentary, that home computers should be the obvious metaphor for an unreliable piece of junk.
> But even a single cell is ridiculously complex; even a small strand of DNA is amazinglycomplicated. How did these form in the first place?
That's not the question I was answering, but the answer is probably essentially the same: bootstrapped from simpler precursors.
> For all you fools out there who think evolution is a proven fact, please read a book called Not By Chance! by Lee Spetner, an information theorist from MIT who has studied evolution on the side since the 1960's. He proves rigorously that Neo-Carwinian evolution could not have happened -- or rather is about as unlikely as tossing 10,000,000 coins at random and having them all come up heads (yes, that is "possible", I guess).
I haven't read Spetner, but I recently read a review that says he used a dishonest bait-and-switch in his "proof", namely using one definition of information in his first example but then switching to another for his second example, where his original definition of information patently wouldn't support his claim.
Have you read the book carefully enough to comment on that charge?
> I am amazed at how completely fooled Slashdot readers are by the completely discredited neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
If it has been discredited, someone needs to bring that to the attention of the people who actually study it.
> Maybe I am coming at this the wrong way, but can someone explain how evolution would even get off the ground? If we start near the beginning (if there is such a thing) where we have a single-celled organism (how that organism came about we can leave to another discussion), how did it become multi-cellular?
I am not very expert on this, but I know that there are unicellular organisms in the world now that group themselves into "multicellular" colonies, somewhat blurring the distinction between unicellular and multicellular. And things like sponges are only a short step beyond that.
> With the little biology I know, single-celled organisms reproduce by creating an exact copy of themselves. Without sexual reproduction, then there is no change in the next creature that comes out. That leaves us to random mutations to somehow create more complex living multi-cellular organisms.
I think that's correct. Notice also that even sexually reproducing species would simply reshuffle existing genetic material, if there were no mutations. So evolution ultimately depends on mutations, regardless of species' erotic habits.
> Now I may be wrong, but if I remember from my biology book, mutations are most of the time harmful (if not always -- especially dealing at this level of simplicity, mess with anything and it will probably die).
Actually, I think most mutations are neutral. Regardless of that, the relevant point is that some are "good", and that natural selection leverages them by giving them preference in the construction of the next generation. Think of natural selection as a filter, and remember that there can be a lot of qualitative difference between a filtered substance and the unfiltered substance it was derived from. (Think of all the rock that comes out of a diamond mine, vs the little bag of raw diamonds at the end of the process.)
At any rate, genetic algorithms demonstrate very clearly that random mutations can contribute to evolutionary "progress". I have seen a plot somewhere on the Web where someone had an A/B comparison between running a GA with mutations turned on and then running it again with mutations turned off, and there was an astonishing difference in the performance of the two runs.
The key to understanding evolution is not to focus on the mutations, but to focus on the process that exploits those mutations. To paraphrase the US Marines' recruitment slogan, "All we need is a few good mutations."
Remember, Darwin published the basic theory while Mendel was still playing gardner, and we didn't have any clue about genetic mutations. But the process of leveraging variation was still discernable in nature.
> Yes, of course it happened. The question is not whether it happened or not, but how it happened.
FYI, scientists aren't keen on "random chance" as an explanation of anything either. The whole history of science can be understood as an investigation of why lots of really interesting stuff doesn't happen by "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any regularity to which direction something moves when you drop it; the theory of gravity explains why you get a result contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any regularity to what happens when you mix two chemicals in a beaker; the atomic theory explains why you get a result contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any pattern in the fossil record; the theory of evolution explains why we see a pattern contrary to "random chance".
In a universe ruled by randomness there wouldn't be any relationship between the genomes of different species, families, orders, etc; the theory of evolution explains why we see a relationship contrary to "random chance".
Scientists know darn well that things are very surprising if you consider them to be the result of "random chance". The difference between scientists and creationists is that scientists want to know why things are the way they are rather than a random smear of matter-energy.
The whole probability argument is a red herring that serves no purpose other than to excuse not looking for an explanation. You can't disprove biology with a probability argument any more than you can disprove physics, chemistry, astronomy, or any other branch of science with it. Arguments involving probability and information are, as they say, "not even wrong".
> I bet it's easy to go through life thinking you're a biological mistake. No morals, no absolute truth; no right or wrong. It's all random chemical interactions in your brain. Rape, steal, kill. No reason not to if this is all there is.
And how is divine creation any different? In a divinely created universe it's perfectly OK to commit genocide against a tribe competing with yours for the possession of a land you think your god promised to your people, or to fly a passenger plane into a building, if that's what you think your god wants you to do.
There is no morality in religion, just self-justification. I'll take my chances in a secular universe.
> Have you listened to talk radio these days? It's like Bill Clinton's still in office. It's bizarre! They're locked in fatal copulation [...] with the Clinton administration.
One of the negative ads running in Texas right now says candidate Ron Kirk "supports liberal judges, like Hillary Clinton does", and even flashes a picture of her on the screen. It's funny to see that HC is such a bogeyperson that you can use her to scare voters all the way down in Texas.
> > There is no sense of personal responsability, it's always Clintons fault.
> Does anyone else see the incredible irony in this statement?
LMAO. Help yourself to a bucket full of virtual mod points.
> Reagan's excuse was the War on Communism. Clinton's was the War on Drugs. GW's is going to be the War on Terrorism.
The problem with democracy is that you eventually get the kind of government the voters deserve.
With elections coming up in 2-3 months we've already been treated to six months of ads for politicians promising to throw more people in jail. When have you ever seen a politician run on a platform of keeping innocent people out of jail, or of cutting back on the state spying on it's own citizens, which it is supposedly "of the, by the, and for the"?
> Basically, government agencies have tried to prey on the fears of Americans after 9-11 in order to achieve the greater flexibility in domestic espionage that they have always sought. Are they justified? I say no, because I believe that our personal liberties are inalienable. But some people believe that the sacrifice of certain freedoms is preferable to living in fear.
And the irony is that 9-11 killed about as many people as we lose to motorcycle accidents every year, or to auto accidents every month , but look at how people kick and scream and complain about the loss of trivial freedoms whenever the feds come out with a new highway safety regulation that causes a minor driving inconvenience or raises the price of a new car by a couple of hundred bucks.