I see your guess and raise you actual science. What they did, from the article, was take a gene the fish already possessed and multiply it.
I stand corrected, provided that hoxd13 is chemically identical in the two species, and it probably is However, I would still maintain that the scientists had to import more code, per my original guess, in more subdued fashion, into the genome - if not, then a copy-paste of a function alongside a copy of itself would not increase the size of a source file.
We already know that the genetics are similar, because we've sequenced the DNA of a number of organisms and determined that they're really very similar, even when the organisms appear quite different.
True.
changes the development of the fins to something much closer to hands is consistent with common descent. It shows how small changes over time could have changed fins (or fin-precursors) into hands.
Also possible. However, if I were the scientists behind this study, I wouldn't be really publicizing it. Not that I expect fish to grow actual functional hands, but the fact that the fish died in the embryonic stage tells me that, while the work produced a cool-looking mutant, it also destroyed any fitness the animal had. Autopods? Yes. Incompatibility with life? Also yes. I do not mean to overgeneralize this "Hah, see! It couldn't have happened in nature!" I merely mean to comment on this particular individual case. Mutating an animal to produce a weird-looking result in a way that kills it before it even hatches seems a lot like flipping bits in the kernel then cheering as it begins to boot, then crashes and bricks. We already knew that misregulated hoxd13 expression produces mutation in appendages...is it really an increase in knowledge that forcing misregulation of hoxd13 by means of genetic engineering produces....mutation in appendages?
No argument there, but where is the modularity in DNA? Where are the boundaries between the libraries and the rest of the organism?
What we have in DNA are effectively the equivalent of binaries. As I can't read DNA "binaries" (or actual binaries), I can't tell you. However, as you stated, organisms share much more genetic code than we realize. Also, the percentage of genomes relegated to "junk dna" is shrinking. Identical code with identical or similar function in more than one place is inherently the use of libraries and modularity. Now, one might argue that we will never be able to reverse-assemble or reverse-compile genetic code because there are no actual operative organizational principles along which to do so. This is speculation either way - however, we had better hope that there are, if we ever want genetic engineering to become anything resembling practical for comprehensive programming.
As a side note, as impressively knowledgeable as genetic engineers are, and I greatly value genetic engineering, no human can really comprehend DNA binaries with anything resembling the robustness with which we can understand, say, Java source. If we handled production releases of code the way we handle genetic engineering, our software testers would quickly descend into sobbing, screaming madness.
You're the one that brought up religion.
Perhaps, but from my perspective that's not the case. From the GP...
Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar? No doubt, if our own experience as designers is anything to go by, it would be far easier to achieve ideal fins and ideal hands without that constraint.
Postulating about what a designer should do, or why it would do one thing or another, I would say, descends (or ascends, depending on one's point of view) into religion, just as it would do the same for someone to argue what morality a god should endorse, or how extra-terrestrials might choose to behave toward us. Though, I will admit that the line between "religion" and "not religion" is more of a huge, foggy, land-mine-pocked demilitarized zone than it is a clear and definite line.
Honestly, presuming some kind of designer - omnipotent God, sneaky genetic-engineer alien, whatever - how would we know whether that designer would or wouldn't use things like abstractions and libraries? Saying that a perfect creator wouldn't use such things (and I said nothing about a perfect creator in the first place), is presuming that we know, despite not being perfect programmers ourselves, exactly how a perfect programmer would write code. There are plenty of human programmers who are better than me, and I'm not even sure of all the details of how they write code. If I did, I'd be as good as they are. We can't presume that some sort of non-human creator, if such a thing even exists, would conform its work to what we think, based on our snapshot of programming knowledge, it should do.
Also...not streamline the codebase? Really? Man, I'd get fired if I didn't concern myself with not bloating the codebase..
the genetic codes for fins and hands are very similar, perhaps differing by just a couple of mutations
Except for the fact that while the effect of the transplanted gene was relatively small - an increase in the quantity of a protein - there is nothing saying that the code of the mouse genes which produced the change was "just a couple of mutations." My guess is that the scientists probably imported at least several Kb of already-functional code into the fish genome to produce the marginal change in the protein production. Could be more, could be less.
Saying that the genetics are similar because the effect is similar is akin to going, "Hey, this custom Cinnamon theme on Fedora looks a whole lot like Windows XP - it must be just a few tweaks to get from one to the other!" The underlying code might be similar, or it might not, (In the case of Fedora and Windows XP, it is not) but the presumption of code similarity from product similarity is unfounded. Likewise, the presumption that the functional mouse genes are just a simple tweak or two away from functional fish genes is nonsense. In this case, they might be, or they might not, but there is simply no way to make that judgment based on the effect the code produces.
Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar?
Code similarity is far from a "constraint." Libraries, modularity, and code reuse are the bread-and-butter of effective and efficient programming. Why make something similar? As a designer of code, I have an answer - because if similar code works in similar cases, then you don't have to bother doing it all twice, ten, or ten thousand times, saving work and reducing the likelihood of error or corruption.
Of course, that doesn't support Intelligent Design. However, claiming that experience designing code suggests that it would be easier to re-implement a feature from scratch for every use case rather than to re-use code is a bad idea.
On a related note - Hey, let's make this an argument about religion on a tech news site, right where arguments about religion belong! Again....
I'm not even trying to touch on the issue of fundamentalism, endorsing it or countering it. Maybe fundamentalism in America needs to be countered, maybe not. I don't even mean to remark on that. As far as congressional committees go, I think you are giving the US too much credit. Give it a couple hundred years and this country won't even exist any more. My point was more about how useless Slashdot is becoming with regard to these sorts of articles.
I'm just saying, this is a sci/tech news site. I'd like it if my time spent reading comments added to my knowledge of the topic. Instead, that time doesn't give me any new topical knowledge. It just adds to my knowledge of the fact that yes, the majority of Slashdot members are quite hateful and condemning people, and truly despise religion and everyone who takes value from it.
You say something interesting,
After the thousandth time you're told you're going to Hell....it's time to bash back.
So, you're hitting them because someone - maybe a parent, or a former pastor - bashed you "for the thousandth time." I'm sorry you were hurt by someone telling you that you were going to Hell. Probably wasn't the best way to approach the situation. But bashing back isn't really the way to go. Everyone from Jesus to John Stuart Mill would agree on that. It's petty.
Moreover, ranting on Slashdot isn't bashing creationists. It's more like *trying* to hit a creationist and instead swiping at thin air. The creationists are in Southern Baptist churches, not on Slashdot. I'd bet that less than 0.1% of Slashdot readers are YECs...so ranting about how wrong you think YEC is on this site is (pardon the religious idiom) preaching to the choir. It's pointless. I'd like to read science instead of spending time scrolling across a bunch of people who already all believe, with all their heart, the same thing, and sit around telling one another how right that belief is, when they all already agree. I don't know of any "Christian Warriors" who are going to be reached by picking on creationism here.
I could direct myself to several sites which are dedicated to ridiculing Christianity. There are tons of those sites, and they're easy to find. Instead, I come to a tech news site. I just wish the comments would discuss tech news instead of how silly they think religion is, in keeping with the whole point of why Slashdot exists.
Hi. Your name comes up a lot in these discussions. I mean, I don't memorize people's slashdot ids - at one point I even forgot my own - but yours does ring a bell. I'm sorry if I offended you.
I'm really not ranting; I'm just saying that for a sci/tech news site, people here certainly are awfully concerned with lambasting religion, which is usually classified as neither science nor tech. It's just...weird. If people were knowledgeable scientists or science enthusiasts, I would expect more comments about actual science. I'd like to know if people have, oh, I don't know, questions or comments about the fossils that were found....their relationships to other fossils....conditions or sponsor of the dig...an analysis of TFA...followup plans...anything...anything at all scientific or newsworthy. Something where I actually gain new useful knowledge about the article's topic in return for my time spent reading people's remarks.
Instead, it's just a bunch of moronic...."Lol ever-body who lieks God is stoopid n sux" in fifty different varieties. I'm not ranting - just, I come here to read science, and lately, whenever paleontology or evolution is involved, the comments have more to do with hating religion than with anything productive.
Comments about science? Paleontology? Dinosaurs? Not one.
Rants about creationism and insults to theists? Forty....I thought this was a science and tech site, not one dedicated to the analysis and criticism of religion. Apparently I was wrong.
You guys are more obsessed with creationism than the creationists.
If we get a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything" that fully explained all the goings-on in the universe with information available to us in the universe, then atheism becomes the pure unvarnished truth
This is not unequivocally true, for two reasons. Firstly, for this to be true, a theist must posit: "A god is only a god if it transcends the universe"
This is the case with most of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and a variety of other faiths, but it is not universally true of all religions. In fact, it's not even universally true of Christianity - Mormons believe, unless they have recently abrogated this tenant, that the God of the Old Testament was born on another planet *in* this universe as we understand it even today, yet they still call Him a God.
In essence, even if your assertion were true, depending on one's precise definition of "God," it could still be true that a being powerful enough to warrant that title existed *within* the universe we know today. As a gratuitous pop-culture analogy, how many steps must one take from "Time Lord" before one reaches the status of "god?" ("Time God?" Basically it's even the same wording...)
Secondly, the definition of "universe" is ever-growing as we discover more. To the average ancient man, it was a flat rock a solid dome sky above. As we learn more *about* the universe, we always learn that there is more *of* the universe than we thought existed before.
Remember, there was a time not even two hundred years ago when if you described gamma radiation, someone who refused to believe in the supernatural would have laughed at you and accused you of superstition. "Energy that can sicken you if you get too much of it, that comes out of certain rocks, and can destroy entire cities? You're describing a 'curse!'"
What about the idea of radio? "Energy that carries information across nothing, from one side of the planet to the other in the blink of an eye? Bah! That doesn't exist!" Surely the Internet would have been labeled "magic" in the middle ages.
Yet, even as we learned more about the universe, we learned that these people - those who believed that there was nothing in the world which wasn't observable *in their day,* were dead wrong, and the universe was much bigger than we thought - containing the massive world of the electromagnetic spectrum and all that it can do to help or hurt us, from war, to medicine, to astronomy, to this website. What our ancestors once called "supernatural," we now call "natural," but nonetheless, things which they would have called supernatural DO really exist!
In similar fashion, it is beyond idiotic to believe that the "universe" as we define it today is all that there is to the real universe. The history of all science testifies against that idea. Surely, we will in future years discover real things - in the real, observable universe - which are not observable today. Certainly, there are things which are in the universe which are not in the "universe" as we currently scientifically describe it. So, if we were armed with all scientific knowledge about all of the universe as it truly is, many things which atheism says do not exist because we today call them "supernatural" - souls, existence after death, or a Being or beings who extend beyond our three-dimensional "brane" and have interacted with it, or still do, are entirely possible. Just as "magic exploding sickness rocks" are not magic, today's "supernatural" may be both natural and real. Such things would be fully within the real universe - and which would thus be observable and provable if we had perfect knowledge, but, as the Christians and others claim, transcends what we *today* call the "universe."
--- Science is a snapshot. What can tomorrow's camera see that is invisible to today?
No, THAT is absurd, and makes the parent's point. Atheism is the *agenda* that there is nothing to believe in, in the practical conception. Sure, on a purely philosophical, academic level this is not the case, but in all practicality, it is.
Some tenants of Christianity are as follows: 1)A god - specifically, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, exists. 2)There is life after death. 3)If you "behave," that is, believe in Jesus, you are rewarded after death. 4)If you "misbehave," that is, in the popular mind, do not believe in Jesus, you are punished after death. 5)Human life has inherent meaning as humans are "in the image of God" or for various other reasons, and transcends biological processes. For that reason its meaning transcends those processes. 6)One who is a Christian believes the truth. All corresponding but conflicting beliefs are wrong.
The corresponding tenants of Atheism are: 1)No supernatural being exists. 2)There is no experience whatsoever after death. 3)If you "behave," there is no reward or punishment after death. 4)If you "misbehave" there is no reward or punishment after death. 5)Life and all it's experiences is a complex chemical reaction, and nothing more. By implication, the chemical reaction which we describe as "joy" or "pain" or "hatred" or "love" is no more or less significant than the chemical reaction we describe as "oxidation." 6)One who is an atheist believes the truth. The corresponding belief systems of all non-atheists are fundamentally wrong.
As the central axiom of all education is "spread true information," it is then inherently good in the view of an atheist to teach the "truth" of atheism, just as it is right in the view of Christian to teach the "truth" of Christianity, or, for a more mundane example, right in the view of a chemist to teach truth about chemistry. Further , it is "right" in the Atheist view to support destroying ideas which are contrary to that truth, just as science supports destroying the idea that the chemical formula of water is NaCl, Christianity supports debunking anti-Christian ideas.
Of course, none of those tenants listed above are at all knowable, experimental, or scientific, for either group. Yet they are clearly parallel. So, if the points listed for Christianity constitute or contribute to an agenda, and I would wholeheartedly say they do, so do the analogous points for atheism.
Moral of the story: Everyone loves to think they're better than everyone else. Atheism is no different.
One word. Archaeology. Book aside, you can't claim "the Jews never lived here" when people are digging Jewish artifacts that date back two and three thousand years out of the dirt beneath your feet on a monthly basis. The Jews *obviously* had a sustained and established presence in the Land. But no, you just had to take an unsolicited swipe at people of faith. How tolerant and mature of you.
The real rub is, "I say the Jews have no right to Israel because it is in some way, in some people's minds, connected to a religion, and religion makes me uncomfortable!"
'The Palestinians have been encouraged to believe that murdering innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic for advancing their cause....They blame suicide bombing on "desperation of occupation."....The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel's independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the "desperation" of "occupation" but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state.'
--Nour Saman, Lebanese Christian, at Duke University, 15 Oct, 2004
The willingness of Hamas to indiscriminately shell Israeli cities has nothing whatsoever to do with the circumstances of living in Gaza. It is predicated upon the belief that Israel - the state, as well as the people - has no right to exist and should be wiped off the face of the planet. This isn't exactly a new idea, stretching back thousands of years, so it's not really much of a surprise.
The willingness to turn residential districts into explosives warehousing facilities, launch rockets from the roofs of recreational complexes, and make a military base in the basement a hospital is based on a similar precept - the destruction of Israel must be accomplished at all costs. It is far more important than protecting human life, even the lives of fellow Muslims, or other Arabs. It is and end which legitimizes oppressing all the Arabs in and around the area, to subjugate them to an agenda of warfare and destruction.
Give me a break, people. You would not be satisfied until Israel stood in the open and let themselves be bombed into the World to Come without so much as a mutter of protest.
Biology is a three letter code of chemical components.
Yes. Genes have three bases - adenine, thymine, guanine, and nothing. Cytosine is a silly myth. Also, all of "biology" is this simple.
The rest of the example, while decent, neglects the fact that we are ignorant of any information which has been completely removed from both genomes, and thus is ignored in our comparisons, or which has been modified in both to different outcomes, so that it appears to be new in each, but is not. We can devise a new similar genome using the methods you describe - however, it is merely a probable recombination of the two modern original genomes - an engineered third. It is a shot in the dark whether the proportions and pathways which we observe today were equally distributed millions of years ago. This is a major operative assumption which must be absolutely true to recreate a previously extant genome, and it is not guaranteed to hold true.
Moreover, we're dealing with random mutations. Randomness inherently implies that it cannot be reliably re-created - nature is not a seeded pRNG. We may observe variation across species, but we cannot know the precise mutations which occurred - only the "diff" across each species. Any changes not evidenced by these diffs are lost by virtue of the fact that they were randomly created and then randomly modified - if we had the original, we could only compare step A to step C - B is effectively obscured. Similarly, we can only create a possible "ancestral step A" from the data which we have in our various C0...Cn descendants. Even if we understand probable pathways as they stand today, there is substantial lost data through the mutation process, and it cannot be recreated.
We might be able to guess at it by our observations of modern mutations, but this is folly. Presuming the "most probable mutation path" to be stable and static over millions of years is just as silly as presuming the species of animals to be equally static over such a timescale.
Extrapolation is a b---h, in statistics or in science.
Also, I love the arrogance inherent in labeling others as "lay person[s]" while having no idea what their background may or may not be, while assuming oneself relatively more qualified and able to educate the original poster. As much as I hate to do it, I have to agree with the grandparent here - we're not going to make any headway getting fanatics to shut up as long as we're as condescending as they are.
As the story goes, Jesus was gone for three days, came back, and there were still people standing there who had not died. How is this such a problem for people?
Slashdot Mirror
I see your guess and raise you actual science. What they did, from the article, was take a gene the fish already possessed and multiply it.
I stand corrected, provided that hoxd13 is chemically identical in the two species, and it probably is However, I would still maintain that the scientists had to import more code, per my original guess, in more subdued fashion, into the genome - if not, then a copy-paste of a function alongside a copy of itself would not increase the size of a source file.
We already know that the genetics are similar, because we've sequenced the DNA of a number of organisms and determined that they're really very similar, even when the organisms appear quite different.
True.
changes the development of the fins to something much closer to hands is consistent with common descent. It shows how small changes over time could have changed fins (or fin-precursors) into hands.
Also possible. However, if I were the scientists behind this study, I wouldn't be really publicizing it. Not that I expect fish to grow actual functional hands, but the fact that the fish died in the embryonic stage tells me that, while the work produced a cool-looking mutant, it also destroyed any fitness the animal had. Autopods? Yes. Incompatibility with life? Also yes. I do not mean to overgeneralize this "Hah, see! It couldn't have happened in nature!" I merely mean to comment on this particular individual case. Mutating an animal to produce a weird-looking result in a way that kills it before it even hatches seems a lot like flipping bits in the kernel then cheering as it begins to boot, then crashes and bricks. We already knew that misregulated hoxd13 expression produces mutation in appendages...is it really an increase in knowledge that forcing misregulation of hoxd13 by means of genetic engineering produces....mutation in appendages?
No argument there, but where is the modularity in DNA? Where are the boundaries between the libraries and the rest of the organism?
What we have in DNA are effectively the equivalent of binaries. As I can't read DNA "binaries" (or actual binaries), I can't tell you. However, as you stated, organisms share much more genetic code than we realize. Also, the percentage of genomes relegated to "junk dna" is shrinking. Identical code with identical or similar function in more than one place is inherently the use of libraries and modularity. Now, one might argue that we will never be able to reverse-assemble or reverse-compile genetic code because there are no actual operative organizational principles along which to do so. This is speculation either way - however, we had better hope that there are, if we ever want genetic engineering to become anything resembling practical for comprehensive programming.
As a side note, as impressively knowledgeable as genetic engineers are, and I greatly value genetic engineering, no human can really comprehend DNA binaries with anything resembling the robustness with which we can understand, say, Java source. If we handled production releases of code the way we handle genetic engineering, our software testers would quickly descend into sobbing, screaming madness.
You're the one that brought up religion.
Perhaps, but from my perspective that's not the case. From the GP...
Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar? No doubt, if our own experience as designers is anything to go by, it would be far easier to achieve ideal fins and ideal hands without that constraint.
Postulating about what a designer should do, or why it would do one thing or another, I would say, descends (or ascends, depending on one's point of view) into religion, just as it would do the same for someone to argue what morality a god should endorse, or how extra-terrestrials might choose to behave toward us. Though, I will admit that the line between "religion" and "not religion" is more of a huge, foggy, land-mine-pocked demilitarized zone than it is a clear and definite line.
Honestly, presuming some kind of designer - omnipotent God, sneaky genetic-engineer alien, whatever - how would we know whether that designer would or wouldn't use things like abstractions and libraries? Saying that a perfect creator wouldn't use such things (and I said nothing about a perfect creator in the first place), is presuming that we know, despite not being perfect programmers ourselves, exactly how a perfect programmer would write code. There are plenty of human programmers who are better than me, and I'm not even sure of all the details of how they write code. If I did, I'd be as good as they are. We can't presume that some sort of non-human creator, if such a thing even exists, would conform its work to what we think, based on our snapshot of programming knowledge, it should do.
Also...not streamline the codebase? Really? Man, I'd get fired if I didn't concern myself with not bloating the codebase..
the genetic codes for fins and hands are very similar, perhaps differing by just a couple of mutations
Except for the fact that while the effect of the transplanted gene was relatively small - an increase in the quantity of a protein - there is nothing saying that the code of the mouse genes which produced the change was "just a couple of mutations." My guess is that the scientists probably imported at least several Kb of already-functional code into the fish genome to produce the marginal change in the protein production. Could be more, could be less.
Saying that the genetics are similar because the effect is similar is akin to going, "Hey, this custom Cinnamon theme on Fedora looks a whole lot like Windows XP - it must be just a few tweaks to get from one to the other!" The underlying code might be similar, or it might not, (In the case of Fedora and Windows XP, it is not) but the presumption of code similarity from product similarity is unfounded. Likewise, the presumption that the functional mouse genes are just a simple tweak or two away from functional fish genes is nonsense. In this case, they might be, or they might not, but there is simply no way to make that judgment based on the effect the code produces.
Why would a "designer" put in the effort to make the DNA so similar?
Code similarity is far from a "constraint." Libraries, modularity, and code reuse are the bread-and-butter of effective and efficient programming. Why make something similar? As a designer of code, I have an answer - because if similar code works in similar cases, then you don't have to bother doing it all twice, ten, or ten thousand times, saving work and reducing the likelihood of error or corruption.
Of course, that doesn't support Intelligent Design. However, claiming that experience designing code suggests that it would be easier to re-implement a feature from scratch for every use case rather than to re-use code is a bad idea.
On a related note - Hey, let's make this an argument about religion on a tech news site, right where arguments about religion belong! Again....
Man, I wish Slashdot had a private messaging system. Condescending how?
I'm not even trying to touch on the issue of fundamentalism, endorsing it or countering it. Maybe fundamentalism in America needs to be countered, maybe not. I don't even mean to remark on that. As far as congressional committees go, I think you are giving the US too much credit. Give it a couple hundred years and this country won't even exist any more. My point was more about how useless Slashdot is becoming with regard to these sorts of articles.
I'm just saying, this is a sci/tech news site. I'd like it if my time spent reading comments added to my knowledge of the topic. Instead, that time doesn't give me any new topical knowledge. It just adds to my knowledge of the fact that yes, the majority of Slashdot members are quite hateful and condemning people, and truly despise religion and everyone who takes value from it.
You say something interesting,
After the thousandth time you're told you're going to Hell....it's time to bash back.
So, you're hitting them because someone - maybe a parent, or a former pastor - bashed you "for the thousandth time." I'm sorry you were hurt by someone telling you that you were going to Hell. Probably wasn't the best way to approach the situation. But bashing back isn't really the way to go. Everyone from Jesus to John Stuart Mill would agree on that. It's petty.
Moreover, ranting on Slashdot isn't bashing creationists. It's more like *trying* to hit a creationist and instead swiping at thin air. The creationists are in Southern Baptist churches, not on Slashdot. I'd bet that less than 0.1% of Slashdot readers are YECs...so ranting about how wrong you think YEC is on this site is (pardon the religious idiom) preaching to the choir. It's pointless. I'd like to read science instead of spending time scrolling across a bunch of people who already all believe, with all their heart, the same thing, and sit around telling one another how right that belief is, when they all already agree. I don't know of any "Christian Warriors" who are going to be reached by picking on creationism here.
I could direct myself to several sites which are dedicated to ridiculing Christianity. There are tons of those sites, and they're easy to find. Instead, I come to a tech news site. I just wish the comments would discuss tech news instead of how silly they think religion is, in keeping with the whole point of why Slashdot exists.
Hi. Your name comes up a lot in these discussions. I mean, I don't memorize people's slashdot ids - at one point I even forgot my own - but yours does ring a bell. I'm sorry if I offended you.
I'm really not ranting; I'm just saying that for a sci/tech news site, people here certainly are awfully concerned with lambasting religion, which is usually classified as neither science nor tech. It's just...weird. If people were knowledgeable scientists or science enthusiasts, I would expect more comments about actual science. I'd like to know if people have, oh, I don't know, questions or comments about the fossils that were found....their relationships to other fossils....conditions or sponsor of the dig...an analysis of TFA...followup plans...anything...anything at all scientific or newsworthy. Something where I actually gain new useful knowledge about the article's topic in return for my time spent reading people's remarks.
Instead, it's just a bunch of moronic...."Lol ever-body who lieks God is stoopid n sux" in fifty different varieties. I'm not ranting - just, I come here to read science, and lately, whenever paleontology or evolution is involved, the comments have more to do with hating religion than with anything productive.
Seems more like 4chan, really.
Article about dinosaur bones.
Comments about science? Paleontology? Dinosaurs? Not one.
Rants about creationism and insults to theists? Forty. ...I thought this was a science and tech site, not one dedicated to the analysis and criticism of religion. Apparently I was wrong.
You guys are more obsessed with creationism than the creationists.
This is a decent analysis, with one exception.
If we get a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything" that fully explained all the goings-on in the universe with information available to us in the universe, then atheism becomes the pure unvarnished truth
This is not unequivocally true, for two reasons. Firstly, for this to be true, a theist must posit:
"A god is only a god if it transcends the universe"
This is the case with most of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and a variety of other faiths, but it is not universally true of all religions. In fact, it's not even universally true of Christianity - Mormons believe, unless they have recently abrogated this tenant, that the God of the Old Testament was born on another planet *in* this universe as we understand it even today, yet they still call Him a God.
In essence, even if your assertion were true, depending on one's precise definition of "God," it could still be true that a being powerful enough to warrant that title existed *within* the universe we know today. As a gratuitous pop-culture analogy, how many steps must one take from "Time Lord" before one reaches the status of "god?" ("Time God?" Basically it's even the same wording...)
Secondly, the definition of "universe" is ever-growing as we discover more. To the average ancient man, it was a flat rock a solid dome sky above. As we learn more *about* the universe, we always learn that there is more *of* the universe than we thought existed before.
Remember, there was a time not even two hundred years ago when if you described gamma radiation, someone who refused to believe in the supernatural would have laughed at you and accused you of superstition. "Energy that can sicken you if you get too much of it, that comes out of certain rocks, and can destroy entire cities? You're describing a 'curse!'"
What about the idea of radio? "Energy that carries information across nothing, from one side of the planet to the other in the blink of an eye? Bah! That doesn't exist!" Surely the Internet would have been labeled "magic" in the middle ages.
Yet, even as we learned more about the universe, we learned that these people - those who believed that there was nothing in the world which wasn't observable *in their day,* were dead wrong, and the universe was much bigger than we thought - containing the massive world of the electromagnetic spectrum and all that it can do to help or hurt us, from war, to medicine, to astronomy, to this website. What our ancestors once called "supernatural," we now call "natural," but nonetheless, things which they would have called supernatural DO really exist!
In similar fashion, it is beyond idiotic to believe that the "universe" as we define it today is all that there is to the real universe. The history of all science testifies against that idea. Surely, we will in future years discover real things - in the real, observable universe - which are not observable today. Certainly, there are things which are in the universe which are not in the "universe" as we currently scientifically describe it. So, if we were armed with all scientific knowledge about all of the universe as it truly is, many things which atheism says do not exist because we today call them "supernatural" - souls, existence after death, or a Being or beings who extend beyond our three-dimensional "brane" and have interacted with it, or still do, are entirely possible. Just as "magic exploding sickness rocks" are not magic, today's "supernatural" may be both natural and real. Such things would be fully within the real universe - and which would thus be observable and provable if we had perfect knowledge, but, as the Christians and others claim, transcends what we *today* call the "universe."
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Science is a snapshot. What can tomorrow's camera see that is invisible to today?
No, THAT is absurd, and makes the parent's point. Atheism is the *agenda* that there is nothing to believe in, in the practical conception. Sure, on a purely philosophical, academic level this is not the case, but in all practicality, it is.
Some tenants of Christianity are as follows:
1)A god - specifically, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, exists.
2)There is life after death.
3)If you "behave," that is, believe in Jesus, you are rewarded after death.
4)If you "misbehave," that is, in the popular mind, do not believe in Jesus, you are punished after death.
5)Human life has inherent meaning as humans are "in the image of God" or for various other reasons, and transcends biological processes. For that reason its meaning transcends those processes.
6)One who is a Christian believes the truth. All corresponding but conflicting beliefs are wrong.
The corresponding tenants of Atheism are:
1)No supernatural being exists.
2)There is no experience whatsoever after death.
3)If you "behave," there is no reward or punishment after death.
4)If you "misbehave" there is no reward or punishment after death.
5)Life and all it's experiences is a complex chemical reaction, and nothing more. By implication, the chemical reaction which we describe as "joy" or "pain" or "hatred" or "love" is no more or less significant than the chemical reaction we describe as "oxidation."
6)One who is an atheist believes the truth. The corresponding belief systems of all non-atheists are fundamentally wrong.
As the central axiom of all education is "spread true information," it is then inherently good in the view of an atheist to teach the "truth" of atheism, just as it is right in the view of Christian to teach the "truth" of Christianity, or, for a more mundane example, right in the view of a chemist to teach truth about chemistry. Further , it is "right" in the Atheist view to support destroying ideas which are contrary to that truth, just as science supports destroying the idea that the chemical formula of water is NaCl, Christianity supports debunking anti-Christian ideas.
Of course, none of those tenants listed above are at all knowable, experimental, or scientific, for either group. Yet they are clearly parallel. So, if the points listed for Christianity constitute or contribute to an agenda, and I would wholeheartedly say they do, so do the analogous points for atheism.
Moral of the story: Everyone loves to think they're better than everyone else. Atheism is no different.
One word. Archaeology. Book aside, you can't claim "the Jews never lived here" when people are digging Jewish artifacts that date back two and three thousand years out of the dirt beneath your feet on a monthly basis. The Jews *obviously* had a sustained and established presence in the Land. But no, you just had to take an unsolicited swipe at people of faith. How tolerant and mature of you.
The real rub is, "I say the Jews have no right to Israel because it is in some way, in some people's minds, connected to a religion, and religion makes me uncomfortable!"
Grow up.
'The Palestinians have been encouraged to believe that murdering innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic for advancing their cause....They blame suicide bombing on "desperation of occupation." ....The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel's independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the "desperation" of "occupation" but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state.'
--Nour Saman, Lebanese Christian, at Duke University, 15 Oct, 2004
The willingness of Hamas to indiscriminately shell Israeli cities has nothing whatsoever to do with the circumstances of living in Gaza. It is predicated upon the belief that Israel - the state, as well as the people - has no right to exist and should be wiped off the face of the planet. This isn't exactly a new idea, stretching back thousands of years, so it's not really much of a surprise.
The willingness to turn residential districts into explosives warehousing facilities, launch rockets from the roofs of recreational complexes, and make a military base in the basement a hospital is based on a similar precept - the destruction of Israel must be accomplished at all costs. It is far more important than protecting human life, even the lives of fellow Muslims, or other Arabs. It is and end which legitimizes oppressing all the Arabs in and around the area, to subjugate them to an agenda of warfare and destruction.
Give me a break, people. You would not be satisfied until Israel stood in the open and let themselves be bombed into the World to Come without so much as a mutter of protest.
Biology is a three letter code of chemical components.
Yes. Genes have three bases - adenine, thymine, guanine, and nothing. Cytosine is a silly myth. Also, all of "biology" is this simple.
The rest of the example, while decent, neglects the fact that we are ignorant of any information which has been completely removed from both genomes, and thus is ignored in our comparisons, or which has been modified in both to different outcomes, so that it appears to be new in each, but is not. We can devise a new similar genome using the methods you describe - however, it is merely a probable recombination of the two modern original genomes - an engineered third. It is a shot in the dark whether the proportions and pathways which we observe today were equally distributed millions of years ago. This is a major operative assumption which must be absolutely true to recreate a previously extant genome, and it is not guaranteed to hold true.
Moreover, we're dealing with random mutations. Randomness inherently implies that it cannot be reliably re-created - nature is not a seeded pRNG. We may observe variation across species, but we cannot know the precise mutations which occurred - only the "diff" across each species. Any changes not evidenced by these diffs are lost by virtue of the fact that they were randomly created and then randomly modified - if we had the original, we could only compare step A to step C - B is effectively obscured. Similarly, we can only create a possible "ancestral step A" from the data which we have in our various C0...Cn descendants. Even if we understand probable pathways as they stand today, there is substantial lost data through the mutation process, and it cannot be recreated.
We might be able to guess at it by our observations of modern mutations, but this is folly. Presuming the "most probable mutation path" to be stable and static over millions of years is just as silly as presuming the species of animals to be equally static over such a timescale.
Extrapolation is a b---h, in statistics or in science.
Also, I love the arrogance inherent in labeling others as "lay person[s]" while having no idea what their background may or may not be, while assuming oneself relatively more qualified and able to educate the original poster. As much as I hate to do it, I have to agree with the grandparent here - we're not going to make any headway getting fanatics to shut up as long as we're as condescending as they are.
As the story goes, Jesus was gone for three days, came back, and there were still people standing there who had not died. How is this such a problem for people?
Easily discounted.