> Why would a creator feel the need to come up with unique ways of doing the same things for all organisms?
Unfortunately, that convenience is a blow against creationism as a scientific explanation. As I said last time this topic came up, creationism is a wildcard explanation:
Two animals are similar? God re-used the design! Two animals are different? God decided not to re-use the design!
Wildcard explanations are useless to science because they don't really explain anything at all. A good theory makes testable predictions, or at least tells you where to look to find more interesting stuff. But the creationists' knee-jerk "Goddidit" explanation for everything tells you there's nothing more to see. It's a recipe for ignorance, not for science.
> A mule is a mutation, the fact that its sterile and that there NEVER has been a good mutation is more evidence against the evolution theory.
Actually, a mule is the product of mating two species that have diverged so much that the chances of having a fertile offspring between them is extremely small, but have not diverged so much as to make a viable offspring unlikely.
IOW, mules are exactly the kind of thing you expect from the theory of evolution. As usual, even the tiniest knowledge of biology stands the creationist argument on its head.
> One more thing, as I understand it we have more in common with frogs and pigs genetically than we do with apes anyway.
Not so. You need to start getting your "facts" from more reliable sources.
> Evolution is akin to a tornado hitting a junkyard and creating a fully functional 737
No, evolution is more like a genetic algorithm that slowly refines a solution that does not conform to any human design at all.
> these are the kinds of trial and error odds we are talking about.
No, not at all. Evolution usually works by very small tweaks, which accumulate over time. Probability arguments are irrelevant because (a) there's not "correct" target to calculate the odds of hitting - anything that survives will do, and (b) the odds of different outcomes are not at all uniform, partly because life is based mostly on chemistry, which definitely plays according to rules rather than absolute randomness, and partly because whatever randomness the chemistry does produce is passed through a filter - natural selection - which greatly biases the distribution of the mutations that get passed on to the next generation.
If you want to debate the theory of evolution you have to start by understanding it, and if you want to understand it you have to start by realizing that it is nothing like human design processes.
> The assumption in that comment was that light decreased at a fixed, static rate. I was merely saying that it could decrease in the manner I suggested.
Sure it could. And if you want to play scientist you could work out the consequences, test them, and publish the results.
But the first thing you need to learn is that things do have consequences. You can't just change one of the major descriptors of the universe to fit your model and expect that there will not be any other consequences.
For instance, if you think the speed of light decayed exponentially, calculate the value for 6,000 years ago, plug it into the famous E=mc^2, and then ask yourself what Adam and Eve used for sunscreen.
You get a similar problem when biblical literalists argue that a smooth exponential population growth explains how the present population of the world arose from Noah's family of eight. The problem arises when you look at other points on the curve and realize that there would have only been a couple of hundred people in the whole world when the Great Pyramid was built.
It's trivially easy to find a curve that fits two data points. The hard thing is to find a curve that fits reality.
Most creationist attempts to explain away the evidence end up introducing more problems than the original evidence did, resulting in an endless regression of applying epicyclic fixes to the fixes. They apparently don't realize that science requires a coherent model of the universe rather than a short checklist of beliefs.
> I am aware of that. C14 dating is common, and was an example I plucked out of numerous ones. [...] To test this hypotheses creationists did some tests on samples that were supposedly millions of years old with no trace of C14. Tests showed that they did have acceptable amounts of C14 for a relevant testing. What does this say?
This says that you are not only completely ignorant about the subject matter you are arguing so vigorously, you are also either unwilling or incapable of learning even when the basics are pointed out to you.
C 1 4 i s a l m o s t c o m p l e t e l y u s e l e s s f o r t h e s t u d y o f e v o l u t i o n comma b e c a u s e i t i s n o t a c c u r a t e b e y o n d a b o u t 5 0 comma 0 0 0 y e a r s a g o stop
For some reason scientists can deal with that fact and creationists can't. It is the fact that creationists persist in offering erroneous arguments based on a complete lack of knowledge of the subject matter that makes them so despised among folk who know better.
If you want to argue the science, start by learning some science.
> Sure, but evolutionists only ever quote talkorigins.org
That's because talkorigins.org is specifically intended to serve as a clearinghouse to dispense information about the most common creationist arguments. It doesn't do a lot of good to spend a lot of time refuting the same really basic stuff over and over, so the active participants in t.o. write up summaries and add them to the Web site for easy reference. Then when you quote a creationist argument that was soundly refuted 120 years ago someone can merely post the link rather than trying to teach you basic geology in a Slashdot post.
> The argument that you can learn a small subset to be productive tends to bite you when you start trying to ramp up to multi-developer projects.
Presumably anyone iterested in learning the language will go ahead and learn the rest of it, or at least most of it, after mastering the subset. My point was simply that you can bootstrap yourself into an admittedly "big" language by learning an easy Pascal-like subset, and then start mastering the additional features as time and motivation allow. The ability to learn a simple subset greatly reduces the frustration it would present you otherwise.
No one wants to learn a language that requires you to read a thick book before writing your first Hello World program, but if you can master Hello World at your first sitting, and write at least some types of useful programs after a few days of playing with it, and then learn the more exotic properties of the language later, then even a big language will not scare you off.
> As I understand it, its the law of gravity, but I may be wrong, i'm no scientist.
If by "it" you mean the 2LoT, then no, it's about limits on our ability to extract useful work from heat. Since you say you're no scientist, please be informed that the 2LoT tells us nothing useful about evolution, and the people you heard that argument from don't understand it any more than you do. You would do well to get your information from more reliable sources, such as college textbooks.
> We are both seeking truth, I am coming from the faith and biblical angle, and you are coming from the humanist angle and science is our common element.
Actually, I'm coming from the angle that evidence trumps tradition. That has nothing to do with humanism.
Also, science is not our common element. You have been misinformed by people who use pseudoscientific claims to validate their beliefs, but it isn't science. (I suspect that most of them do it from ignorance rather than mendacity, simply repeating what they've heard their own authority figures say. But dressing myth up in scientific jargon doesn't make it true.)
I'm sorry if I gave offense. Please understand that I am quite offended by people trying to use pseudoscience to justify teaching their religion in public schools, and I am going to refute it everywhere I see it.
> OO != speed. NUmber crunching must have speed. a 10% degradation in speed add many hours to some fortran calculations.
True, but with modern CPU speeds the bottleneck for the vast majority of applications is the development and maintenance time. If you're doing supercomputer applications where you need the result in 10 days instead of 9 and you can't run out and buy a supercomputer, then sure, do whatever it takes to get that 10% improvement.
But don't let speed be the deciding issue in the general case. It's just one of several factors that need to be weighted for a trade-off.
Much of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think Ada [sic] is much easier on the eyes than most of the other languages that are popular this week.
> It looks like a language developed by a very large committee
It was in fact designed by a team as part of a language-design competition. Is design by a team, or even a committee, a bad thing? I prefer to look at the resulting design rather than at the number of people involved. When I go shopping for a new car I don't give the least thought to how many people may have had a finger in the pie.
> that wanted a language to do everything well.
Sounds to me like a reasonable thing to want.
> It acheives this, at the cost of being next to impossible to learn.
Actually, it's really easy to learn because you only need to learn a small subset of it before you can start writing "real" programs. Then you can add knowledge (and use) of the sophisto stuff as you get more comfortable with it. (I would guess that 10% of the language does 90% of the work.)
Just my experience. I think the biggest issue when evaluating new languages is the "not what I'm used to" effect.
> It goes against the first and second laws of thermo-dynamics
This has never been demonstrated, or even argued well, in spite of the fact that creationists have been appealing to it for decades. (Quick, taftman - can you even tell us what units are relevant to the 2LoT without looking it up? Hint: it it's a law of thermodynamics. It doesn't say a heck of a lot about speciation.)
> and is still a theory
As is atomic theory and electromagnetic theory and the theory of gravity and the theory of relativity and all the other big stuff that gives shape to our knowledge in the empirical sciences. Don't confuse a scientific theory with the conversational use of the term as a synonym for "wild ass guess". "Theory" is as high as you can go in the empirical sciences; once a theory, always a theory - unless refuted. So yes, the theory of evolution is still a theory, since no one has come close to refuting it. (Indeed, the supporting evidence keeps pouring in.)
> and unproven
We don't prove things in the empirical sciences. (As the saying goes, "Proof is for mathematicians, alchohol, and gunpowder.")
> in these hundred or so years since its inception.
143 years since the first publication on the topic, if I subtract correctly. That's 143 years of continual attempts by creationists to refute it, but instead of going away it is now better established than ever.
You may want to get yourself a bit better informed on these topics before posting on them again, if you don't like to come off sounding like a fool in public.
Next thing you know they'll get the internet and we'll have another September that never ended, as all the monks "log in the internet" and fill defile it with their spam and meetoo posts.
> Take for example the BS theories of evolution that were passed around as fact until recently. You know, the ones that said that evolution happens at a very slow rate. Creationists argued against this for years because of the nature of how fossils are created. Evolutionists finally caught on and now almost all the recent theories talk about periods of very rapid evolution.
Pardon, but you're showing the ignorance that is a prerequisite for being a creationist. Scientists still think that most evolution proceeds at a very slow rate, and even the "fast" episodes in Gould's punctuated equilibrium model are "fast" only on the geological scale. And BTW, punctuated equilibrium is nothing like the creationist catastrophist models you are trying to claim as an intellectual predecessor for it.
> It's true that a lot of what they're saying is shit.
It's true that everything they say is shit.
> No true scientist can read the traditional "irreducible complexities" (like the Bombardier Beetle) without questioning current theories of evolution.
No true scientist can hear the term "irreducible complexity" without laughing an ass off. IC is just a variant of the traditional god-of-the-gaps modle of the universe, where god is active exactly where we don't know the details of the real explanation yet. And whenever we do discover new details, creationists just relocate their god to a smaller gap.
> >...correct about a number of things, many of which are still to be discovered.
> How can you be correct about somthing wich has yet to be discovered?
That's how creationism works. Scientists try to deduce how the universe works by looking at the evidence, but creationists start with a "known" answer and spend their time spinning the evidence to support it.
> I don't disagree with all of the assesments on the site, but I don't like to see numbers abused so horribly.
What offends me even more than the amount of money involved is the fact that some of goes to directly support violations of the Geneva Convention, namely the construction of settlements in occupied territory.
> Now I may be as thick as a whale omelet, BUT how will they transport it to the rocket and then launch it and ensure that everything else is clean room ? The Rocket will have to remain sterile inside, the transport to the rocket will have to be sterile.
"Factory sealed to ensure freshness."
I.e., put it in a big baggie and leave it there until it separates from the rocket.
> All of the "wars" america has handled in the last little bit were total one sided slaughters. It's not like if Iraq of Afganistan had an extra 2 weeks to prepare they would have "won"...
To attempt a thread-relevant spin on that, the USA was woefully short of ground troops in the arena when the Taliban unexpectedly collapsed. (Most of the slaughter was done by native factions.)
Yeah, here's a bench across the back where IT marketeers sit. The Air Force lures them on with the offer of a free ride in a high-tech airship, and then exploits them for the free propulsion.
> They changed the copyright strings... That's a definite no-no. Basically they really stole the source, and claim they are the sole authors.
Hopefully someone will be able to prove that the rip-off wasn't the other way around. Nasty court case, if someone relabels your code and then takes you to court for robbing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Wildcard explanations are useless to science because they don't really explain anything at all. A good theory makes testable predictions, or at least tells you where to look to find more interesting stuff. But the creationists' knee-jerk "Goddidit" explanation for everything tells you there's nothing more to see. It's a recipe for ignorance, not for science.> Why would a creator feel the need to come up with unique ways of doing the same things for all organisms?
Unfortunately, that convenience is a blow against creationism as a scientific explanation. As I said last time this topic came up, creationism is a wildcard explanation:
> A mule is a mutation, the fact that its sterile and that there NEVER has been a good mutation is more evidence against the evolution theory.
Actually, a mule is the product of mating two species that have diverged so much that the chances of having a fertile offspring between them is extremely small, but have not diverged so much as to make a viable offspring unlikely.
IOW, mules are exactly the kind of thing you expect from the theory of evolution. As usual, even the tiniest knowledge of biology stands the creationist argument on its head.
> One more thing, as I understand it we have more in common with frogs and pigs genetically than we do with apes anyway.
Not so. You need to start getting your "facts" from more reliable sources.
> Evolution is akin to a tornado hitting a junkyard and creating a fully functional 737
No, evolution is more like a genetic algorithm that slowly refines a solution that does not conform to any human design at all.
> these are the kinds of trial and error odds we are talking about.
No, not at all. Evolution usually works by very small tweaks, which accumulate over time. Probability arguments are irrelevant because (a) there's not "correct" target to calculate the odds of hitting - anything that survives will do, and (b) the odds of different outcomes are not at all uniform, partly because life is based mostly on chemistry, which definitely plays according to rules rather than absolute randomness, and partly because whatever randomness the chemistry does produce is passed through a filter - natural selection - which greatly biases the distribution of the mutations that get passed on to the next generation.
If you want to debate the theory of evolution you have to start by understanding it, and if you want to understand it you have to start by realizing that it is nothing like human design processes.
> The assumption in that comment was that light decreased at a fixed, static rate. I was merely saying that it could decrease in the manner I suggested.
Sure it could. And if you want to play scientist you could work out the consequences, test them, and publish the results.
But the first thing you need to learn is that things do have consequences. You can't just change one of the major descriptors of the universe to fit your model and expect that there will not be any other consequences.
For instance, if you think the speed of light decayed exponentially, calculate the value for 6,000 years ago, plug it into the famous E=mc^2, and then ask yourself what Adam and Eve used for sunscreen.
You get a similar problem when biblical literalists argue that a smooth exponential population growth explains how the present population of the world arose from Noah's family of eight. The problem arises when you look at other points on the curve and realize that there would have only been a couple of hundred people in the whole world when the Great Pyramid was built.
It's trivially easy to find a curve that fits two data points. The hard thing is to find a curve that fits reality.
Most creationist attempts to explain away the evidence end up introducing more problems than the original evidence did, resulting in an endless regression of applying epicyclic fixes to the fixes. They apparently don't realize that science requires a coherent model of the universe rather than a short checklist of beliefs.
For some reason scientists can deal with that fact and creationists can't. It is the fact that creationists persist in offering erroneous arguments based on a complete lack of knowledge of the subject matter that makes them so despised among folk who know better.> I am aware of that. C14 dating is common, and was an example I plucked out of numerous ones. [...] To test this hypotheses creationists did some tests on samples that were supposedly millions of years old with no trace of C14. Tests showed that they did have acceptable amounts of C14 for a relevant testing. What does this say?
This says that you are not only completely ignorant about the subject matter you are arguing so vigorously, you are also either unwilling or incapable of learning even when the basics are pointed out to you.
If you want to argue the science, start by learning some science.
> Sure, but evolutionists only ever quote talkorigins.org
That's because talkorigins.org is specifically intended to serve as a clearinghouse to dispense information about the most common creationist arguments. It doesn't do a lot of good to spend a lot of time refuting the same really basic stuff over and over, so the active participants in t.o. write up summaries and add them to the Web site for easy reference. Then when you quote a creationist argument that was soundly refuted 120 years ago someone can merely post the link rather than trying to teach you basic geology in a Slashdot post.
> The argument that you can learn a small subset to be productive tends to bite you when you start trying to ramp up to multi-developer projects.
Presumably anyone iterested in learning the language will go ahead and learn the rest of it, or at least most of it, after mastering the subset. My point was simply that you can bootstrap yourself into an admittedly "big" language by learning an easy Pascal-like subset, and then start mastering the additional features as time and motivation allow. The ability to learn a simple subset greatly reduces the frustration it would present you otherwise.
No one wants to learn a language that requires you to read a thick book before writing your first Hello World program, but if you can master Hello World at your first sitting, and write at least some types of useful programs after a few days of playing with it, and then learn the more exotic properties of the language later, then even a big language will not scare you off.
> As I understand it, its the law of gravity, but I may be wrong, i'm no scientist.
If by "it" you mean the 2LoT, then no, it's about limits on our ability to extract useful work from heat. Since you say you're no scientist, please be informed that the 2LoT tells us nothing useful about evolution, and the people you heard that argument from don't understand it any more than you do. You would do well to get your information from more reliable sources, such as college textbooks.
> We are both seeking truth, I am coming from the faith and biblical angle, and you are coming from the humanist angle and science is our common element.
Actually, I'm coming from the angle that evidence trumps tradition. That has nothing to do with humanism.
Also, science is not our common element. You have been misinformed by people who use pseudoscientific claims to validate their beliefs, but it isn't science. (I suspect that most of them do it from ignorance rather than mendacity, simply repeating what they've heard their own authority figures say. But dressing myth up in scientific jargon doesn't make it true.)
I'm sorry if I gave offense. Please understand that I am quite offended by people trying to use pseudoscience to justify teaching their religion in public schools, and I am going to refute it everywhere I see it.
> OO != speed. NUmber crunching must have speed. a 10% degradation in speed add many hours to some fortran calculations.
True, but with modern CPU speeds the bottleneck for the vast majority of applications is the development and maintenance time. If you're doing supercomputer applications where you need the result in 10 days instead of 9 and you can't run out and buy a supercomputer, then sure, do whatever it takes to get that 10% improvement.
But don't let speed be the deciding issue in the general case. It's just one of several factors that need to be weighted for a trade-off.
> Looking at ADA is painful.
Much of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think Ada [sic] is much easier on the eyes than most of the other languages that are popular this week.
> It looks like a language developed by a very large committee
It was in fact designed by a team as part of a language-design competition. Is design by a team, or even a committee, a bad thing? I prefer to look at the resulting design rather than at the number of people involved. When I go shopping for a new car I don't give the least thought to how many people may have had a finger in the pie.
> that wanted a language to do everything well.
Sounds to me like a reasonable thing to want.
> It acheives this, at the cost of being next to impossible to learn.
Actually, it's really easy to learn because you only need to learn a small subset of it before you can start writing "real" programs. Then you can add knowledge (and use) of the sophisto stuff as you get more comfortable with it. (I would guess that 10% of the language does 90% of the work.)
Just my experience. I think the biggest issue when evaluating new languages is the "not what I'm used to" effect.
> It goes against the first and second laws of thermo-dynamics
This has never been demonstrated, or even argued well, in spite of the fact that creationists have been appealing to it for decades. (Quick, taftman - can you even tell us what units are relevant to the 2LoT without looking it up? Hint: it it's a law of thermodynamics. It doesn't say a heck of a lot about speciation.)
> and is still a theory
As is atomic theory and electromagnetic theory and the theory of gravity and the theory of relativity and all the other big stuff that gives shape to our knowledge in the empirical sciences. Don't confuse a scientific theory with the conversational use of the term as a synonym for "wild ass guess". "Theory" is as high as you can go in the empirical sciences; once a theory, always a theory - unless refuted. So yes, the theory of evolution is still a theory, since no one has come close to refuting it. (Indeed, the supporting evidence keeps pouring in.)
> and unproven
We don't prove things in the empirical sciences. (As the saying goes, "Proof is for mathematicians, alchohol, and gunpowder.")
> in these hundred or so years since its inception.
143 years since the first publication on the topic, if I subtract correctly. That's 143 years of continual attempts by creationists to refute it, but instead of going away it is now better established than ever.
You may want to get yourself a bit better informed on these topics before posting on them again, if you don't like to come off sounding like a fool in public.
Next thing you know they'll get the internet and we'll have another September that never ended, as all the monks "log in the internet" and fill defile it with their spam and meetoo posts.
> What's interesting to me is the uniformly violent reaction of the "educated" crowd to creation scientists
Perhaps you should ask yourself why educated people trash creationism and ignorant people trash science - instead of the other way around.
> Take for example the BS theories of evolution that were passed around as fact until recently. You know, the ones that said that evolution happens at a very slow rate. Creationists argued against this for years because of the nature of how fossils are created. Evolutionists finally caught on and now almost all the recent theories talk about periods of very rapid evolution.
Pardon, but you're showing the ignorance that is a prerequisite for being a creationist. Scientists still think that most evolution proceeds at a very slow rate, and even the "fast" episodes in Gould's punctuated equilibrium model are "fast" only on the geological scale. And BTW, punctuated equilibrium is nothing like the creationist catastrophist models you are trying to claim as an intellectual predecessor for it.
> It's true that a lot of what they're saying is shit.
It's true that everything they say is shit.
> No true scientist can read the traditional "irreducible complexities" (like the Bombardier Beetle) without questioning current theories of evolution.
No true scientist can hear the term "irreducible complexity" without laughing an ass off. IC is just a variant of the traditional god-of-the-gaps modle of the universe, where god is active exactly where we don't know the details of the real explanation yet. And whenever we do discover new details, creationists just relocate their god to a smaller gap.
> >
> How can you be correct about somthing wich has yet to be discovered?
That's how creationism works. Scientists try to deduce how the universe works by looking at the evidence, but creationists start with a "known" answer and spend their time spinning the evidence to support it.
> I don't disagree with all of the assesments on the site, but I don't like to see numbers abused so horribly.
What offends me even more than the amount of money involved is the fact that some of goes to directly support violations of the Geneva Convention, namely the construction of settlements in occupied territory.
> Now I may be as thick as a whale omelet, BUT how will they transport it to the rocket and then launch it and ensure that everything else is clean room ? The Rocket will have to remain sterile inside, the transport to the rocket will have to be sterile.
"Factory sealed to ensure freshness."
I.e., put it in a big baggie and leave it there until it separates from the rocket.
> All of the "wars" america has handled in the last little bit were total one sided slaughters. It's not like if Iraq of Afganistan had an extra 2 weeks to prepare they would have "won"...
To attempt a thread-relevant spin on that, the USA was woefully short of ground troops in the arena when the Taliban unexpectedly collapsed. (Most of the slaughter was done by native factions.)
> It's a form of buzzword propulsion.
Yeah, here's a bench across the back where IT marketeers sit. The Air Force lures them on with the offer of a free ride in a high-tech airship, and then exploits them for the free propulsion.
> They changed the copyright strings... That's a definite no-no. Basically they really stole the source, and claim they are the sole authors.
Hopefully someone will be able to prove that the rip-off wasn't the other way around. Nasty court case, if someone relabels your code and then takes you to court for robbing them.
> "I can operate and function as effectively as any member of Congress from behind bars." Jim Traficant
Jay Leno suggested that his first priority will be to introduce some new anti-sodomy legislation.
> Many of today's programmers are curiously nonchalant about Y2038
That's because we're confident that an asteroid will come along and save us the trouble.
(Didn't you realize why near earth asteroids are considered News For Nerds?)
> I think the real record he's going for is the highest newspaper column inches to importance ratio.
Probably a different ratio; one suspects that he's trying to compensate for having been born with something shorter than expected.
> But again, who cares?
Thanks. I was starting to think I'm the only person bored 5417less with the incessant media coverage of how some rich fart pisses off his money.
I eagerly awaited the completion of his balloon trip, but only because I thought that would be the last I heard of him.
It might be interesting to watch HP's stock values, if word of this gets out before a patch does.