Yeah, there are certainly other definitions. I didn't mean to state that as the only possible definition, only that it was the best description of modern evolutionary theory as applied to the current topic of conversation. I find the allele level interpretation much more useful as a parallel to GAs than a molecular, codon, or population level.
In the end, though, you can show that the molecular evolutionist and the zoologist's definitions are equivalent to the population geneticist definition, and vice versa. There's also 1001 ways of "defining" the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but that doesn't invalidate telling a creationist using the old "entropy means order never spontaneously appears" that the 2nd law doesn't say that at all, even though some of them really do for precise definitions of "order" and "spontaneously".
My argument is that "micro-evolution" has not been shown to be the mechanism by which "macro-evolution" can occur.
Define micro-evolution and macro-evolution and a set of criteria that a person could use to determine which of the two an adaptive event falls into.
For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear.
Selection is far more likely to make the species go extinct altogether, if I'm reading you correctly. Extinction by far the more common result of selection than success. Since the creation of nylon in the 30s, species of bacteria have evolved to eat it. If suddenly the entire planet had to survive off of eating nylon, you wouldn't see most species evolving that ability, you'd see most species going extinct. Evolutionary success usually occurs as a result of something moving from a niche that it already successfully occupies into an unoccupied niche.
. For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear. [...] I hardly stated that GA's were "pointless". The idea is fine. However, it doesn't produce "evolution". A GA "caching" algorithm, for example, will never be able to "evolve" a P2P network to leverage existing caches like itself. It can't do that because the code doesn't exist.
I don't believe you understand the word "evolution". Evolution is not a huge jump that rapidly redefines something, it's an almost unnoticable change over time. Evolution can be understood as a search through a problem space. The caching algorithm sets up a problem space of "all possible caching algorithms". A P2P server would be completely outside of the problem space and thus irrelavent. However, an explicit view of the problem space is far larger than the algorithm and seeding data. The GA is just a way to walk through a subset of the problem space in a way that lets you ignore large areas of useless algorithms. You certainly could create a GA capable of creating a caching algorithm or a P2P network, you'd just have to have a huge population size and millions of generations to do it. It wouldn't be worth the time.
No, it's not that simple. Evolution has been defined as changes adding up enough so that a single celled organism becomes a multi-celled organism, which develops RNA and DNA, which then grows in complexity to develop various "macro" level systems such as a cardio-pulminary system, a digestive tract, a nervous system, and a central control "brain" system. Each of these changes requires a macro change of which no predecessor exists in the current chain of organics.
That is one of the facts that it explains, not the definition. You're doing the equivalent of saying that a ball falling is the definition of gravity. Evolution is the collection of mechanisms by which these occur, which under the modern synthesis is by various alleles changing over time in a population.
Actually, my first example was the very real issue of a single celled ameba becoming multi-celled. And oddly, stages between single cell and multicell still exist. The Volvox are single cell creatures that only function in colonies. A colony is a sphere that can grow a daughter colony inside it, then give birth to a new colony. Yet all of the cells involved are generic, not specialized into tissues. Sponge and jellyfish are on the other end of the gap. They both show tissue level specialization without organs.
A giraffe sprouting gills would be an evolutionary change, but is highly unlikely.
A giraffe sprouting gills would be a challenge to modern evolutionary theory, not an example. Modern evolution relies on the existing material being gradually changed or coopted.
A more realistic example is a fish developing lungs. According to the current theories, most life originated in the ocean. I don't remember if the current thought is that lungs and gills developed simultaneously or if they developed in unison. Either way, the effect is much the same. A low order life form developed features not currently in its genetic makeup.
Such as a mud skippers and lung fish? They both occupy niches and use mechanism similar to the first air-breathers using modified gills and air bladders, respectively. Not only are the transition species possible, but they're descendants still exist.
Which is exactly my point. No new algorithm will be generated through the "genetic breeding". Only existing algorithms will rise to the top.
That's interesting. I can write a program that contains the Axioms and rules from ZF Set theory, then randomly applies them to create new theorems. But that would be pointless since only theorems that existed in the orginal data and algorithms "will rise to the top". The whole of mathematics is pointless since all theorems are tautologies from the axioms and rules of manipulation.
Evolution is the change in allele frequencies over time. Pure and simple, that's all it is. Check any evolutionary biology book. The notion of giraffes sprouting gills is absurd and not even remotely what evolution is except in the creationist strawmen. What prevents a whole lot of small changes from adding up? No one has discovered a barrier or any reason that this wouldn't occur. It's like saying that water can move grains of sand, but there's no proof that a lot of water will eventually erode a beach.
The evolutionary algorithm will have a range of all possible algorithms that can be developed, so in a sense it is limited to "test various algorithms", though it would be testing all possible algorithms. Similarly biological evolution is limitted to testing various imperfect self-replicators, meaning all possible imperfect self-replicators. It is further constrained by the current state, but then that's the problem with non-biological GAs as well, the King of the Hill effect.
not according to many court rulings that allowed for EULAs and stuff to actually exist. Some lawyer back in the 80s actually convinced a judge that copying from the original media into memory is a licensable copying and not fair use. How else do you think EULAs and such work?
Credible leaders have been wrong, but it's always anothe credible scientist that shows them to be wrong. The days of the brilliant outsider are more or less over in science, there's just too much that's already been done for someone to have insight into problems without extensive knowledge provided through the current system.
Because it will only spread from carp to carp, and carp don't live in salt water. At least not the species in question. Where the australian carp can go, the gene can go.
I think it more likely that this will have no effect at all rather than an overblown effect. Look at the gene from an epidemiology standpoint. You have a disease with 100% transmission rate that is "fatal" to the infected female. How interconnected are the carp populations and how fast could it spread before it kills off it's host populations?
If it does work, it's a huge selection pressure for the female carp to select for an enzyme that ignores the one they are targetting. So if they make it slow enough to spread well, then you have a lot more time for selection pressure to work around it. If you make it fast enough to jump evolution, then it might flare up and only kill the target population.
Which is what they probably want, now that I think about it.
There needs to be some equivalent to Godwin's Law for the DMCA. How does "Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have ended."
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
So by the time you make windows reliable and usable, you've invested as much time and energy as using linux?
also because there's something there to comprimise. If I crack gramma's win98 machine, there's not a lot I can do with it except use it as a relay to attack spamhause.
Do worms count as a comprimise? I can't see any possible way that you couldn't count them, and I can't see any possible way that linux would have more comprimises in a year than any of the latest worms would generate in a month.
The "Big Bang" is rather simple, actually. We see that the universe is expanding. If you run the clock backwards, it comes to a point. So at some point in time, the universe had to expand from that single point at a fairly quick rate. "Big Bang" was a moniker given to Hubble's expanding universe by an opponent to be mocking. It was adopted and stuck around.
The M-Brane theory doesn't contradict the Big Bang, it is just a model of what might have caused the expansion to start. The "Big Bang" doesn't really address what cause the expansion, only that there logically must have been an expansion 13.5 billion years ago.
That's just a bad layout of your accounts. My apartment allows a monthly rent charge to a credit card. If my credit card was stolen, then the same thing would happen. If you're truly paranoid about it, you could open two checking accounts, one for spending and one for fixed bills, and set up your direct deposit correctly.
I lost my Wachovia check card not too long ago. They can freeze the card without touching the account. As far as I can tell from my contracts and whatnot, it's exactly like a VISA card so far as liability goes. The race conditions you describe can happen with any account, not just a checking with check card.
Check any of the articles on fair.org. I'm sure you'll then come back with a well thought out criticism of their methodology, rather than just dismiss it out of hand as most conservatives do.
Look at one of the more liberal mainstream media outlets: The Washington Post. They criticized the hell out of Clinton. Where is the conservative media criticizing Bush for all of his screw ups? Even the "liberal" media is barely criticizing him.
Ever listen to talk radio? There's NPR... and ten thousand Rush Limbaugh wannabees. Then there's fox news, which survives on shouting down anyone who disagrees or cutting off their mike halfway through the interview.
For the most part, it doesn't matter what language you learn in, just that you get the fundamentals. Seems rather fast to dismiss it out of hand due to language bigotry.
Now MS using school funding as a marketting tool is a whole 'nother issue.
I think the point is that even after SCO knew about the code in linux, the continued to distribute it under the GPL by making it available on their site. It's not a magic bullet, it's just yet another example of SCO's disregard for mitigating their own damages and fillipant attitude towards doing more than filing court documents.
Not exactly a parallel case. Prohibition was in response to a high demand, and the black marketters filled the supply-side of that equation. There is no corresponding demand for spam.
They shouldn't even have a KVM. If you work on a government site, you get more slack than a contractor, but you still usually have to have an air-barrier between machines of different classifications. Same thing applies for projects of different classifications, usually.
Contractors negotiate the level of seperation, but it's not uncommon that machines of different classification aren't allowed in the same room as each other.
Complicated contract language is just legal code bloat. Show me any 200 year old system that has never been rewritten or refactored and doesn't have a bunch of ugly looking hacks in it's extension modules. Would you expect someone to write an custom extension to the system (contract under law) without somewhat extensive training or knowledge?
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Yeah, there are certainly other definitions. I didn't mean to state that as the only possible definition, only that it was the best description of modern evolutionary theory as applied to the current topic of conversation. I find the allele level interpretation much more useful as a parallel to GAs than a molecular, codon, or population level.
In the end, though, you can show that the molecular evolutionist and the zoologist's definitions are equivalent to the population geneticist definition, and vice versa. There's also 1001 ways of "defining" the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but that doesn't invalidate telling a creationist using the old "entropy means order never spontaneously appears" that the 2nd law doesn't say that at all, even though some of them really do for precise definitions of "order" and "spontaneously".
My argument is that "micro-evolution" has not been shown to be the mechanism by which "macro-evolution" can occur.
Define micro-evolution and macro-evolution and a set of criteria that a person could use to determine which of the two an adaptive event falls into.
For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear.
Selection is far more likely to make the species go extinct altogether, if I'm reading you correctly. Extinction by far the more common result of selection than success. Since the creation of nylon in the 30s, species of bacteria have evolved to eat it. If suddenly the entire planet had to survive off of eating nylon, you wouldn't see most species evolving that ability, you'd see most species going extinct. Evolutionary success usually occurs as a result of something moving from a niche that it already successfully occupies into an unoccupied niche.
. For example, if humans lack the genome for an exoskeleton, and exoskeletons are "nature's selection" for space survivability, then the "micro-evolutionary theory" says that humans who live in space should eventually experience genetic mutations from which exoskeleton code will appear.
[...]
I hardly stated that GA's were "pointless". The idea is fine. However, it doesn't produce "evolution". A GA "caching" algorithm, for example, will never be able to "evolve" a P2P network to leverage existing caches like itself. It can't do that because the code doesn't exist.
I don't believe you understand the word "evolution". Evolution is not a huge jump that rapidly redefines something, it's an almost unnoticable change over time. Evolution can be understood as a search through a problem space. The caching algorithm sets up a problem space of "all possible caching algorithms". A P2P server would be completely outside of the problem space and thus irrelavent. However, an explicit view of the problem space is far larger than the algorithm and seeding data. The GA is just a way to walk through a subset of the problem space in a way that lets you ignore large areas of useless algorithms. You certainly could create a GA capable of creating a caching algorithm or a P2P network, you'd just have to have a huge population size and millions of generations to do it. It wouldn't be worth the time.
No, it's not that simple. Evolution has been defined as changes adding up enough so that a single celled organism becomes a multi-celled organism, which develops RNA and DNA, which then grows in complexity to develop various "macro" level systems such as a cardio-pulminary system, a digestive tract, a nervous system, and a central control "brain" system. Each of these changes requires a macro change of which no predecessor exists in the current chain of organics.
That is one of the facts that it explains, not the definition. You're doing the equivalent of saying that a ball falling is the definition of gravity. Evolution is the collection of mechanisms by which these occur, which under the modern synthesis is by various alleles changing over time in a population.
Actually, my first example was the very real issue of a single celled ameba becoming multi-celled.
And oddly, stages between single cell and multicell still exist. The Volvox are single cell creatures that only function in colonies. A colony is a sphere that can grow a daughter colony inside it, then give birth to a new colony. Yet all of the cells involved are generic, not specialized into tissues. Sponge and jellyfish are on the other end of the gap. They both show tissue level specialization without organs.
A giraffe sprouting gills would be an evolutionary change, but is highly unlikely.
A giraffe sprouting gills would be a challenge to modern evolutionary theory, not an example. Modern evolution relies on the existing material being gradually changed or coopted.
A more realistic example is a fish developing lungs. According to the current theories, most life originated in the ocean. I don't remember if the current thought is that lungs and gills developed simultaneously or if they developed in unison. Either way, the effect is much the same. A low order life form developed features not currently in its genetic makeup.
Such as a mud skippers and lung fish? They both occupy niches and use mechanism similar to the first air-breathers using modified gills and air bladders, respectively. Not only are the transition species possible, but they're descendants still exist.
Which is exactly my point. No new algorithm will be generated through the "genetic breeding". Only existing algorithms will rise to the top.
That's interesting. I can write a program that contains the Axioms and rules from ZF Set theory, then randomly applies them to create new theorems. But that would be pointless since only theorems that existed in the orginal data and algorithms "will rise to the top". The whole of mathematics is pointless since all theorems are tautologies from the axioms and rules of manipulation.
Evolution is the change in allele frequencies over time. Pure and simple, that's all it is. Check any evolutionary biology book. The notion of giraffes sprouting gills is absurd and not even remotely what evolution is except in the creationist strawmen. What prevents a whole lot of small changes from adding up? No one has discovered a barrier or any reason that this wouldn't occur. It's like saying that water can move grains of sand, but there's no proof that a lot of water will eventually erode a beach.
The evolutionary algorithm will have a range of all possible algorithms that can be developed, so in a sense it is limited to "test various algorithms", though it would be testing all possible algorithms. Similarly biological evolution is limitted to testing various imperfect self-replicators, meaning all possible imperfect self-replicators. It is further constrained by the current state, but then that's the problem with non-biological GAs as well, the King of the Hill effect.
not according to many court rulings that allowed for EULAs and stuff to actually exist. Some lawyer back in the 80s actually convinced a judge that copying from the original media into memory is a licensable copying and not fair use. How else do you think EULAs and such work?
Credible leaders have been wrong, but it's always anothe credible scientist that shows them to be wrong. The days of the brilliant outsider are more or less over in science, there's just too much that's already been done for someone to have insight into problems without extensive knowledge provided through the current system.
Because it will only spread from carp to carp, and carp don't live in salt water. At least not the species in question. Where the australian carp can go, the gene can go.
I think it more likely that this will have no effect at all rather than an overblown effect. Look at the gene from an epidemiology standpoint. You have a disease with 100% transmission rate that is "fatal" to the infected female. How interconnected are the carp populations and how fast could it spread before it kills off it's host populations?
If it does work, it's a huge selection pressure for the female carp to select for an enzyme that ignores the one they are targetting. So if they make it slow enough to spread well, then you have a lot more time for selection pressure to work around it. If you make it fast enough to jump evolution, then it might flare up and only kill the target population.
Which is what they probably want, now that I think about it.
There needs to be some equivalent to Godwin's Law for the DMCA. How does "Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have ended."
So by the time you make windows reliable and usable, you've invested as much time and energy as using linux?
Fair enough...
also because there's something there to comprimise. If I crack gramma's win98 machine, there's not a lot I can do with it except use it as a relay to attack spamhause.
Do worms count as a comprimise? I can't see any possible way that you couldn't count them, and I can't see any possible way that linux would have more comprimises in a year than any of the latest worms would generate in a month.
The "Big Bang" is rather simple, actually. We see that the universe is expanding. If you run the clock backwards, it comes to a point. So at some point in time, the universe had to expand from that single point at a fairly quick rate. "Big Bang" was a moniker given to Hubble's expanding universe by an opponent to be mocking. It was adopted and stuck around.
The M-Brane theory doesn't contradict the Big Bang, it is just a model of what might have caused the expansion to start. The "Big Bang" doesn't really address what cause the expansion, only that there logically must have been an expansion 13.5 billion years ago.
That's just a bad layout of your accounts. My apartment allows a monthly rent charge to a credit card. If my credit card was stolen, then the same thing would happen. If you're truly paranoid about it, you could open two checking accounts, one for spending and one for fixed bills, and set up your direct deposit correctly.
I lost my Wachovia check card not too long ago. They can freeze the card without touching the account. As far as I can tell from my contracts and whatnot, it's exactly like a VISA card so far as liability goes. The race conditions you describe can happen with any account, not just a checking with check card.
go back?
"Computer Control Implants for the Paralyzed"
But why would I want to control a paralyzed person?
Check any of the articles on fair.org. I'm sure you'll then come back with a well thought out criticism of their methodology, rather than just dismiss it out of hand as most conservatives do.
Look at one of the more liberal mainstream media outlets: The Washington Post. They criticized the hell out of Clinton. Where is the conservative media criticizing Bush for all of his screw ups? Even the "liberal" media is barely criticizing him.
Ever listen to talk radio? There's NPR... and ten thousand Rush Limbaugh wannabees. Then there's fox news, which survives on shouting down anyone who disagrees or cutting off their mike halfway through the interview.
Liberal media my ass.
Hanta virus was just the first strike...
Unless you run linux, of course.
I think your foil hat is wrapped a little too tightly.
Why?
For the most part, it doesn't matter what language you learn in, just that you get the fundamentals. Seems rather fast to dismiss it out of hand due to language bigotry.
Now MS using school funding as a marketting tool is a whole 'nother issue.
I think the point is that even after SCO knew about the code in linux, the continued to distribute it under the GPL by making it available on their site. It's not a magic bullet, it's just yet another example of SCO's disregard for mitigating their own damages and fillipant attitude towards doing more than filing court documents.
Not exactly a parallel case. Prohibition was in response to a high demand, and the black marketters filled the supply-side of that equation. There is no corresponding demand for spam.
Doesn't that make the contract that SCO has with IBM to make quite a few copies of UNIX available (via AIX) invalid?
They shouldn't even have a KVM. If you work on a government site, you get more slack than a contractor, but you still usually have to have an air-barrier between machines of different classifications. Same thing applies for projects of different classifications, usually.
Contractors negotiate the level of seperation, but it's not uncommon that machines of different classification aren't allowed in the same room as each other.
If you violate a patent knowingly, it trebles your penalties over violating it unknowingly.
Thus the simple solution is that engineers should *never* look at patents, so if they violate one, they can limit the damage.
Complicated contract language is just legal code bloat. Show me any 200 year old system that has never been rewritten or refactored and doesn't have a bunch of ugly looking hacks in it's extension modules. Would you expect someone to write an custom extension to the system (contract under law) without somewhat extensive training or knowledge?