There's a classic n-Gage 'review' at somethingawful, I don't think I'll ever forget this phrase:
"Nokia has spent millions despite the fact that every sensible indication is that the N-Gage is the biggest piece of shit since a meteor made of shit crashed into the planet Crapulon's capital city of Shitopolis."
I suppose the claims made by SCO are going to be tested in the case against IBM, a US company, so US courts will make a decision on that issue. I'm sure an Australian court could ignore that decision if they had reason to, but it makes sense to see how it goes first.
Of course, SCO should be waiting until that case is resolved of their own accord before they start on their licensing scam, but I'm sure they know that.
I think it would be more a matter of the ACCC telling SCO to bugger off until they have some evidence to back up their claims. When the IBM case shows they have none, the ACCC can tell them to bugger off fullstop.
Well, there was an unusual set of icons by your username: friend of friend and also enemy of friend, so I was curious enough to click the little grey icon. Your username doesn't help, and a quick look at your latest comments probably showed Troll, Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic or the like. That's the main criteria I use if I ever set +foe on anyone.
--[As Brian and his mum come over the top of a hill, they see a large number of people stoning some unfortunate. MC hurries Brian along to get to the next victim in time. When he is, we see that he crowd consists entirely of women wearing fake beards. An elder stands in front of the next prisoner holding a scroll as he waits for the crowd to settle down.] ELDER: Mathias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath. MATHIAS: [to a guard] Do I say yes? GUARD: Yes. MATHIAS: [To the elder] Yes. ELDER: You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of our lord, and so as a BLASPHEMER... CROWD: Ooooh. ELDER:...you are to be stoned to death. --[The crowd looks anxious to kill Mathias] MATHIAS: Look. I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah'. CROWD: Oooooooh! ELDER: BLASPHEMY!!!! He said it again CROWD: Yes, yes. [etc] ELDER: Did you hear him? CROWD: Yes, yes. [etc] WOMAN1: Really. --[There is a moment of silence as the elder thinks, after hearing the woman's voice.] ELDER: Are there any women here today? CROWD: [Guiltily] [mumble mumble] ELDER: Very well. By virtue of the authority vested in me... --[One of the more impatient women throws a stone and hits MATHIAS on the head.] MATHIAS: Oh lay off... we haven't started yet. ELDER: Come on. Who threw that? Who threw that stone? Come on. CROWD: She did, she did, he, he, he, him, him, him, he did. [Their voices drop as they realize their mistake.] WOMAN1: Sorry, I thought we'd started. {Said lovelyly.} ELDER: Go to the back. There's always one, isn't there. Now where were we? MATHIAS: Look, I don't think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying Jehovah. CROWD: [Shocked] He said it again! Edler: You're only making it worse for yourself. MATHIAS: Making it worse? How could it be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah. CROWD: Oooooooh! ELDER: I'm warning you... If you say Jehovah once more... [A stone flys by and hits the elder.] Right. Who threw that? Come on. Who threw that? CROWD: She did she did, he, him, him, him, him, him, him. ELDER: Was it you? WOMAN2: Yes. ELDER: Right... WOMAN2: Well you did say Jehovah. [She gets stoned {the blasphemer}] ELDER: Stop, stop. Will you stop that... stop it. Now look. No-one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle. Do you understand? Even, and I want to make this absolutely clear; even if they do say Jehovah. --[The shocked women stone the elder to death, ending in the dropping of a huge bolder on his fallen body.] WOMAN3: Good shot. --[One of the two Roman guards looks at the other, who shakes his head. They do nothing.]
I'm pretty sure it's exactly as restrictive as the authors want it to be. If you or Realtek don't like, it, go and write your own damn OS and license it however you feel is best.
Speaking for myself and probably a lot of others, I don't give a rats arse how accepted Linux is by anyone else, so long as it exists and is Free.
"In the future, we will not hesitate to take whatever actions we deem necessary to ensure that you fulfill your duties as a responsible corporate citizen."
Oh, right. I have a duty to be a responsible corporate citizen now?
WTF does that mean anyway, and why the fuck should I care?
Yep, definitely looks like sedimentary rocks to me. It's unlikely that the stratification would be weathering I think, it looks a lot like rocks which were once sand bars or sand dunes.
The interesting weathering effect there is the way that it has split into squarish blocks, which is usually a sign of 'unloading'. That is, overlying rock layers have been eroded away, reducing the pressure on the lower layers. Given that the lower layers were slightly compressed under that weight, they fracture into cubical blocks when the pressure is removed. Safety glass basically works the same way.
Ok then, which of these are organisms by your definition:
a worker ant an ant colony the queen of the ant colony
Are they autopoietic systems?
How about commensalism or parasites? a virus?
Giraffe necks? Well, it's possible that an SNP could measureably affect the affinity of a growth hormone receptor. Complex systems are more easily perturbed than simple ones, IMO.
Yes, sure you won't be able to predict 100% exactly what will result from a given selection pressure. A random mutation might occur which grants psychic windmill avoidance powers to giraffes, who knows. It doesn't mean there is no predictive power to ND. Given the timeframe and known mutation rates, you can limit the possibilities, statistically at least. Maybe there's an infinitesimally small chance that a 'head air-bag' organ appears in one individual and is selected for in it's offspring. Even then, ND would predict that it would be something like a modification of the antlers for example, rather than a totally new feature.
Dunno about playing god, I get no respect I tell ya =) It's funny how many times I've had bugs in the simulation which are 'exploited' by the little suckers. I'd say that's evidence against a need for an 'overmind' too. I didn't mean to do some things, but they had an effect anyway.
My fitness function is there to define the environment, and my critters evolve to better suit their environment. In the real world, the fitness function is the environment. Stuff like the availabilty and type of food, predators, weather, geography, etc, etc.
I'm not confused about how selection works in my simulation, it's mathematically precise =) I take the first generation (which has a completely random genome) and calculate a fitness for each individual. I then 'breed' the next generation from the 'most fit', and so on and so on.
It seems obvious to me that an improvement in average fitness is a result of selection. Sure, if I culled at random, and it just so happened that the next generation was better, then yes, it would look a lot like selection had occurred. The difference is that I *know* that I'm not selecting randomly, and the selection happens *before* the improvement. Cause and effect. I also know that clumsy mountain goats fall off cliffs and slow antelope are lion food.
The 'components' of my 'organisms' are created ex nihilo, but if I did somehow manage to simulate autopoietic systems for my work, I don't see how that would change anything.
The prevalence of inaccurate reproduction (yeah, not replication) is something I see as evidence for ND. If life on earth evolved under the influence of NS, then we would expect most organisms to exhibit traits which allowed that evolution:
- Greater numbers of offspring than is absolutely necessary - non-perfect DNA copying during reproduction, while normal cell-division (replication) is pretty much error-free. - Shorter lifespans than are 'necessary'
It seems to me that evolution by any other mechanism would not require these features.
I did read some Varela, thanks. Not a great deal, but I get some of it at least. I'm sure autopoiesis is a useful concept, and is a good description of 'life as we know it'. Can't see how it replaces natural selection though. I also don't see why NS can't apply to the evolution of autopoietic systems, nor can I see anything that prohibits non-autopoietic life, whether it evolves or not.
A friend of mine runs Debian, and owns, drives and races Fiat 500s =)
Myself though, Debian, VW Karmann Ghia, Hyundai.
Didn't have much choice on the Hyundai, but I used to drive a '67 VW type III, and identify with that a lot more. Fun to drive, well engineered and easy to fix.
"Organism:: a molecular autopoietical system, of first (parts are mere molecules) or second order (parts are themselves organisms e.g. you and me)."
What about energy beings from Proxima Centauri?
Yes, I know my experiment was crap, but I'm sure you could learn something from it. What you would learn is that differences arise in the cat DNA as time passes, some of these differences are preserved, others are not. Compare phenotypes of preserved differences to non-preserved, and draw some conclusions. What you learn is known to apply to cats. Only later does someone need to come along and say, maybe this happens everywhere, not just with cats. Then populations, species etc etc come in to play.
How about this "study":
"In South Africa there is a large valley used for wind power generation. This valley also has a large giraffe population. Someone notices that field records kept by giraffe biologists in the region indicate a trend towards shorter necks. Also, windmill maintenance personnel report frequent "incidents" involving giraffes and windmills. The maintenance personnel also happen to have stored the damaged blade tips from these incidents, from which sufficient amounts of DNA can be recovered to tie individuals involved to DNA samples gathered by field biologists. A study of single nucleotide polymorphisms in surviving giraffes reveals...."
If this were to actually happen, would you say that something other than "natural" selection was at work? If giraffe neck length is known to be affected by a single base pair mutation, and windmills are an ideal 'filter' for neck length, why is there any cause to invoke some unknown factor?
Suppose Greenpeace demands that the area around each windmill is fenced off. What will the next study reveal? How do you explain the effect of the fences on evolution under your hypothesis? If the fence isn't removing a factor for selection, what is really happening?
So far as my 'simulation' goes, yes, I do have a fitness function. I actually use many different fitness functions depending on what I want to achieve at the time. The evolution occurs in a direction towards satisfying whichever fitness function I choose. If I let some random process choose the fitness function, it will still work. IMHO, this looks like evidence that 'natural' selection has a measurable affect. What is 'causing' the evolution here is inaccurate replication. I use 'sexual' reproduction, with crossover and mutation, but no deletions or duplications (unless caused by crossover). All this is all totally random. What is not random is the selection, which preserves 'better' individuals, and eliminates 'worse' ones.
I would contend that some of the more 'magical' abilities of evolution are result of evolved 'evolvability'. That is, if a species is here today after 3 billion years, it's ancestors were able to contend with many diffent and varied 'fitness functions', so what we see today is a system which is very good at evolving. I think the fact that this system is so good is what makes you think something else is at work.
Regarding falsification, I'm quite sure anything at all can evolve with no natural selection, but it is statistically unlikely. It's the *rate* of evolution that is improved by NS.
If you want to point to an undeniable example of 'NS is the only possible cause for this observation', I suppose that's difficult. A cat might starve to death because it wasn't quite fast enough to catch a rat. It's 'slow' genes are not passed on, leading to a greater frequency of the 'fast' gene in the population. If you ran the experiment again, you obviously can't have the same cat again, and you can't guarantee similar performance from a different rat. Given the ability to perfectly duplicate organisms, I think it would be possible to devise a control group which might satisfy you.
If you want to know what is the criteria for sorting, I say it's the entire environment, including the individual being 'filtered'. Some aspects of that
Yes, I was being facetious really, but I don't see that your definition for lineage is any less circular than the usual definitions for population, species etc. You did use the term organisms, no? Why then can't I say that a species is a set of organisms which interbreed?
The point of my cat experiment was that it can be explained and carried out without reference to or even a need for understanding of populations, species, organisms etc.
I dont think anyone is saying evolution is *caused* by NS, rather, the path that it takes is guided by NS. If it appears that NS is actually driving evolution, that's because the path taken by 'unguided' evolution is going to go around and around in circles, whereas with NS, the "path" will likely lead somewhere away from the 'starting point'.
If you have looked at emergent behaviour on computers, how about simulations of evolution? Can you point me to one which works without some form of selection? I have done some genetic algorithm stuff, and I can't see how it would have worked without selection. I count that as evidence for NS.
I don't think ND says 'it's all random', more like, 'it's a filter for randomness'. It's the difference between roulette and draw poker.
No biologist will tell you that NS is the only factor in evolution, just that in most cases it's probably the strongest factor.
"Searched English and Finnish and Russian pages for evidence for natural selection. Results 1 - 20 of about 1,610,000. Search took 0.21 seconds."
No, it's not difficult, I just defined it in very simple language for you.
It then seems to me that by your standards, 'lineage' becomes a non-term also. Obviously your theory is just going in circles.
Certainly everything is not black and white, especially in biology, and we define terms which don't apply to all situations. Why do you think this means we can't discover anything useful even if this is the case.
How about a thought experiment:
Take 500 common house cats. Build a very large cage for them (1km^2). Arrange a separate facility for breeding large rats as a food source for the cats. Sequence the DNA of each cat. Sequence the DNA of any kittens born in the cage. Continue this monitoring for several thousand years. Finally, analyse the DNA data for evidence of evolution.
Where is the vagueness here? Did I use any of the terms you are opposed to?
You might think it's a silly idea, but it's not too far from work done with fruit-flies or bacteria.
Got a name for one of these scientists?
I do actually think that huge amounts of evidence gathered by many researchers is quite different to an idea that some invisible being poofed everything into existence in the recent past. The ID whackos are just trying to associate themselves with real science for the purpose of getting their religion into US public schools. That may sound like a paranoid conspiracy theory, but would you believe they have a website detailing it:
Sorry, but it's your statement that is truly vague, so I asked for clarification.
Population is not a difficult concept. You have one animal, that's not a population, it's an individual. You have 100 of these same animals, it's a population. If you have only 10, 5 or 2 animals, it's probably not a viable population, but is a population nevertheless.
Yes, but can you have a lineage without a population? Sure, an immortal species that doesn't reproduce will not evolve. That's getting silly though don't you think?
Good news, hopefully we'll see some good work done there which inspires others to follow.
Other Aussie states might be slow in actually requiring consideration of OSS, but the ACT's work could build a collection of useful software and government IT people will gain experience with OSS alternatives. That can only help with adoption elsewhere.
It seems to me that it was GWB + co. leading people to believe that the US must invade Iraq, because the UN was doing nothing to stop Iraq from unleashing its huge stockpiles of WMD on the world.
The 12 years of sanctions were exactly what the UK and USA wanted, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were hurt by them. If the UN was doing nothing, it was because any steps it proposed were voted down by the US and UK.
Here's something I find interesting:
Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." - Feb. 24, 2001
What did you expect the UN to have done? Authorise an invasion?
USAians seem to forget that the whole reason for the creation of the UN was to avoid another situation like WW2.
The first line of the UN charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind"
IMO, they need to be way more anti-US than they have been recently.
I've used Clearcase too. You're on drugs if you think it's any good.
Maybe if you have 20+ developers it's no big deal to have a competant revision control administrator who can spend all day screwing with ClearCase (while developers are standing around waiting for it to let them do their job). I see it as wasting the time of someone who could be doing something more useful with their time.
Sure you need to know what you are doing to do source control right, but for 95% of people it's a choice of:
Give X * $10k to Rational Waste time and more $ on training and support calls. Waste hours more when it screws up.
"The Eclipse plug-ins are licensed under the GNU public license."...
"The basic Delta Debugging technique (narrowing down relevant circumstances by experiments) is not covered by any patent (as far as we know); in fact, we have released Delta Debugging plug-ins for Eclipse under a GNU license.
However, Passau University has filed international patents for the automatic isolation of cause-effect chains from computer programs--that is, Delta Debugging applied to program states. This is the core technology of AskIgor. This means that if you want to make money out of AskIgor technologies, you'll have to license the patent. (That's how Passau University attempts to get some revenue from its research.) Patent licenses are handled by the Fraunhofer Society in the BayernPatent initiative. "
GPL:
"For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
WTF?
Maybe there is some difference between what the Eclipse plugins do and what AskIgor does, but it's not very clear from the FAQ if that is the case.
Strange that they do not mention Mono or DotGNU in their discussion of MS.Net migration, but instead rave about the superiority of J2EE for a couple of pages. They go so far as to say.NET is Windows only...
Yes, I have read some of what they are passing off as science, and I can tell why they are wrong. You are just assuming that I know nothing about them or their views.
Yes, of course I was referring to the peer reviewed work done by thousands of scientists since Darwin published the Origin of Species.
This is not an argument from authority, I am not saying Darwin or Gould said such and such which agrees with my position. I'm saying that there is a mountain of evidence supporting evolution, and no evidence at all to support the ideas of Dembski and co. If you have some evidence which supports their position, you had better get on the phone to them real quick, because they have come up with nothing so far. They will be thrilled to hear from you.
There is the danger that you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
If someone can come up with an explanation which explains all the evidence better that the ToE, then I'm all for it. That's having an open mind.
Believing in something the face of contrary evidence is gullibility, not open-mindedness.
To get back to my original statement, can you tell me where I can find an alternative theory to evolution, which is well supported by the evidence collected by thousands of biologists, botanists, geologists, paleontologists and so on?
I enquired about your religious persuasion only because it seems that it is *only* fundamentalist religions that have a problem with evolution. I only asked because you are accusing me of unquestioning belief. How's that thing about motes and beams go again?
If you were honestly questioning evolution, and not just trying to hype up the scientific popularity of your creationsist viewpoint, I'd be happy to direct you to some critiques of Dembski and Behe's work.Why aren't you questioning what the creationists are telling you?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a classic n-Gage 'review' at somethingawful, I don't think I'll ever forget this phrase:
"Nokia has spent millions despite the fact that every sensible indication is that the N-Gage is the biggest piece of shit since a meteor made of shit crashed into the planet Crapulon's capital city of Shitopolis."
"Let's see, we have two leading theories of how we got here ..."
We do? What are those then?
"Mono will always be behind .net and never be a real alternative. The libraries are different too."
.net or vice versa."
Who says everyone has to use absolutely every feature? As long as the important stuff is there it doesn't matter how far 'behind' mono is.
"Very doubtfull a mono app could ever compile on
Funny, I do that all the time.
So are you astroturfing for MS, or just plain ignorant?
I suppose the claims made by SCO are going to be tested in the case against IBM, a US company, so US courts will make a decision on that issue. I'm sure an Australian court could ignore that decision if they had reason to, but it makes sense to see how it goes first.
Of course, SCO should be waiting until that case is resolved of their own accord before they start on their licensing scam, but I'm sure they know that.
I think it would be more a matter of the ACCC telling SCO to bugger off until they have some evidence to back up their claims. When the IBM case shows they have none, the ACCC can tell them to bugger off fullstop.
(answered by an Aussie =)
Well, there was an unusual set of icons by your username: friend of friend and also enemy of friend, so I was curious enough to click the little grey icon. Your username doesn't help, and a quick look at your latest comments probably showed Troll, Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic or the like. That's the main criteria I use if I ever set +foe on anyone.
--[As Brian and his mum come over the top of a hill, they see a large number of people stoning some unfortunate. MC hurries Brian along to get to the next victim in time. When he is, we see that he crowd consists entirely of women wearing fake beards. An elder stands in front of the next prisoner holding a scroll as he waits for the crowd to settle down.] ...you are to be stoned to death.
ELDER: Mathias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath.
MATHIAS: [to a guard] Do I say yes?
GUARD: Yes.
MATHIAS: [To the elder] Yes.
ELDER: You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of our lord, and so as a BLASPHEMER...
CROWD: Ooooh.
ELDER:
--[The crowd looks anxious to kill Mathias]
MATHIAS: Look. I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah'.
CROWD: Oooooooh!
ELDER: BLASPHEMY!!!! He said it again
CROWD: Yes, yes. [etc]
ELDER: Did you hear him?
CROWD: Yes, yes. [etc]
WOMAN1: Really.
--[There is a moment of silence as the elder thinks, after hearing the woman's voice.]
ELDER: Are there any women here today?
CROWD: [Guiltily] [mumble mumble]
ELDER: Very well. By virtue of the authority vested in me...
--[One of the more impatient women throws a stone and hits MATHIAS on
the head.]
MATHIAS: Oh lay off... we haven't started yet.
ELDER: Come on. Who threw that? Who threw that stone? Come on.
CROWD: She did, she did, he, he, he, him, him, him, he did. [Their voices drop as they realize their mistake.]
WOMAN1: Sorry, I thought we'd started. {Said lovelyly.}
ELDER: Go to the back. There's always one, isn't there. Now where were we?
MATHIAS: Look, I don't think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying Jehovah.
CROWD: [Shocked] He said it again!
Edler: You're only making it worse for yourself.
MATHIAS: Making it worse? How could it be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah.
CROWD: Oooooooh!
ELDER: I'm warning you... If you say Jehovah once more... [A stone flys by and hits the elder.] Right. Who threw that? Come on. Who threw that?
CROWD: She did she did, he, him, him, him, him, him, him.
ELDER: Was it you?
WOMAN2: Yes.
ELDER: Right...
WOMAN2: Well you did say Jehovah. [She gets stoned {the blasphemer}]
ELDER: Stop, stop. Will you stop that... stop it. Now look. No-one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle. Do you understand? Even, and I want to make this absolutely clear; even if they do say Jehovah.
--[The shocked women stone the elder to death, ending in the dropping of a huge bolder on his fallen body.]
WOMAN3: Good shot.
--[One of the two Roman guards looks at the other, who shakes his head. They do nothing.]
Could you explain 'overly-restrictive' please?
I'm pretty sure it's exactly as restrictive as the authors want it to be. If you or Realtek don't like, it, go and write your own damn OS and license it however you feel is best.
Speaking for myself and probably a lot of others, I don't give a rats arse how accepted Linux is by anyone else, so long as it exists and is Free.
The draft says:
"In the future, we will not hesitate to take whatever actions we deem necessary to ensure that you fulfill your duties as a responsible corporate citizen."
Oh, right. I have a duty to be a responsible corporate citizen now?
WTF does that mean anyway, and why the fuck should I care?
Yep, definitely looks like sedimentary rocks to me. It's unlikely that the stratification would be weathering I think, it looks a lot like rocks which were once sand bars or sand dunes.
The interesting weathering effect there is the way that it has split into squarish blocks, which is usually a sign of 'unloading'. That is, overlying rock layers have been eroded away, reducing the pressure on the lower layers. Given that the lower layers were slightly compressed under that weight, they fracture into cubical blocks when the pressure is removed. Safety glass basically works the same way.
(IANAG)
Ok then, which of these are organisms by your definition:
a worker ant
an ant colony
the queen of the ant colony
Are they autopoietic systems?
How about commensalism or parasites? a virus?
Giraffe necks? Well, it's possible that an SNP could measureably affect the affinity of a growth hormone receptor. Complex systems are more easily perturbed than simple ones, IMO.
Yes, sure you won't be able to predict 100% exactly what will result from a given selection pressure. A random mutation might occur which grants psychic windmill avoidance powers to giraffes, who knows. It doesn't mean there is no predictive power to ND. Given the timeframe and known mutation rates, you can limit the possibilities, statistically at least. Maybe there's an infinitesimally small chance that a 'head air-bag' organ appears in one individual and is selected for in it's offspring. Even then, ND would predict that it would be something like a modification of the antlers for example, rather than a totally new feature.
Dunno about playing god, I get no respect I tell ya =) It's funny how many times I've had bugs in the simulation which are 'exploited' by the little suckers. I'd say that's evidence against a need for an 'overmind' too. I didn't mean to do some things, but they had an effect anyway.
My fitness function is there to define the environment, and my critters evolve to better suit their environment. In the real world, the fitness function is the environment. Stuff like the availabilty and type of food, predators, weather, geography, etc, etc.
I'm not confused about how selection works in my simulation, it's mathematically precise =) I take the first generation (which has a completely random genome) and calculate a fitness for each individual. I then 'breed' the next generation from the 'most fit', and so on and so on.
It seems obvious to me that an improvement in average fitness is a result of selection. Sure, if I culled at random, and it just so happened that the next generation was better, then yes, it would look a lot like selection had occurred. The difference is that I *know* that I'm not selecting randomly, and the selection happens *before* the improvement. Cause and effect. I also know that clumsy mountain goats fall off cliffs and slow antelope are lion food.
The 'components' of my 'organisms' are created ex nihilo, but if I did somehow manage to simulate autopoietic systems for my work, I don't see how that would change anything.
The prevalence of inaccurate reproduction (yeah, not replication) is something I see as evidence for ND. If life on earth evolved under the influence of NS, then we would expect most organisms to exhibit traits which allowed that evolution:
- Greater numbers of offspring than is absolutely necessary
- non-perfect DNA copying during reproduction, while normal cell-division (replication) is pretty much error-free.
- Shorter lifespans than are 'necessary'
It seems to me that evolution by any other mechanism would not require these features.
I did read some Varela, thanks. Not a great deal, but I get some of it at least. I'm sure autopoiesis is a useful concept, and is a good description of 'life as we know it'. Can't see how it replaces natural selection though. I also don't see why NS can't apply to the evolution of autopoietic systems, nor can I see anything that prohibits non-autopoietic life, whether it evolves or not.
I'll do a bit more reading though.
A friend of mine runs Debian, and owns, drives and races Fiat 500s =)
Myself though, Debian, VW Karmann Ghia, Hyundai.
Didn't have much choice on the Hyundai, but I used to drive a '67 VW type III, and identify with that a lot more. Fun to drive, well engineered and easy to fix.
"Organism:: a molecular autopoietical system, of first (parts are mere molecules) or second order (parts are themselves organisms e.g. you and me)."
What about energy beings from Proxima Centauri?
Yes, I know my experiment was crap, but I'm sure you could learn something from it. What you would learn is that differences arise in the cat DNA as time passes, some of these differences are preserved, others are not. Compare phenotypes of preserved differences to non-preserved, and draw some conclusions. What you learn is known to apply to cats. Only later does someone need to come along and say, maybe this happens everywhere, not just with cats. Then populations, species etc etc come in to play.
How about this "study":
"In South Africa there is a large valley used for wind power generation. This valley also has a large giraffe population. Someone notices that field records kept by giraffe biologists in the region indicate a trend towards shorter necks. Also, windmill maintenance personnel report frequent "incidents" involving giraffes and windmills. The maintenance personnel also happen to have stored the damaged blade tips from these incidents, from which sufficient amounts of DNA can be recovered to tie individuals involved to DNA samples gathered by field biologists. A study of single nucleotide polymorphisms in surviving giraffes reveals...."
If this were to actually happen, would you say that something other than "natural" selection was at work? If giraffe neck length is known to be affected by a single base pair mutation, and windmills are an ideal 'filter' for neck length, why is there any cause to invoke some unknown factor?
Suppose Greenpeace demands that the area around each windmill is fenced off. What will the next study reveal? How do you explain the effect of the fences on evolution under your hypothesis? If the fence isn't removing a factor for selection, what is really happening?
So far as my 'simulation' goes, yes, I do have a fitness function. I actually use many different fitness functions depending on what I want to achieve at the time. The evolution occurs in a direction towards satisfying whichever fitness function I choose. If I let some random process choose the fitness function, it will still work.
IMHO, this looks like evidence that 'natural' selection has a measurable affect. What is 'causing' the evolution here is inaccurate replication. I use 'sexual' reproduction, with crossover and mutation, but no deletions or duplications (unless caused by crossover). All this is all totally random. What is not random is the selection, which preserves 'better' individuals, and eliminates 'worse' ones.
I would contend that some of the more 'magical' abilities of evolution are result of evolved 'evolvability'. That is, if a species is here today after 3 billion years, it's ancestors were able to contend with many diffent and varied 'fitness functions', so what we see today is a system which is very good at evolving. I think the fact that this system is so good is what makes you think something else is at work.
Regarding falsification, I'm quite sure anything at all can evolve with no natural selection, but it is statistically unlikely. It's the *rate* of evolution that is improved by NS.
If you want to point to an undeniable example of 'NS is the only possible cause for this observation', I suppose that's difficult. A cat might starve to death because it wasn't quite fast enough to catch a rat. It's 'slow' genes are not passed on, leading to a greater frequency of the 'fast' gene in the population. If you ran the experiment again, you obviously can't have the same cat again, and you can't guarantee similar performance from a different rat. Given the ability to perfectly duplicate organisms, I think it would be possible to devise a control group which might satisfy you.
If you want to know what is the criteria for sorting, I say it's the entire environment, including the individual being 'filtered'. Some aspects of that
Yes, I was being facetious really, but I don't see that your definition for lineage is any less circular than the usual definitions for population, species etc. You did use the term organisms, no? Why then can't I say that a species is a set of organisms which interbreed?
The point of my cat experiment was that it can be explained and carried out without reference to or even a need for understanding of populations, species, organisms etc.
I dont think anyone is saying evolution is *caused* by NS, rather, the path that it takes is guided by NS. If it appears that NS is actually driving evolution, that's because the path taken by 'unguided' evolution is going to go around and around in circles, whereas with NS, the "path" will likely lead somewhere away from the 'starting point'.
If you have looked at emergent behaviour on computers, how about simulations of evolution? Can you point me to one which works without some form of selection? I have done some genetic algorithm stuff, and I can't see how it would have worked without selection. I count that as evidence for NS.
I don't think ND says 'it's all random', more like, 'it's a filter for randomness'. It's the difference between roulette and draw poker.
No biologist will tell you that NS is the only factor in evolution, just that in most cases it's probably the strongest factor.
"Searched English and Finnish and Russian pages for evidence for natural selection. Results 1 - 20 of about 1,610,000. Search took 0.21 seconds."
0.21 seconds < 2 weeks
No, it's not difficult, I just defined it in very simple language for you.
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It then seems to me that by your standards, 'lineage' becomes a non-term also. Obviously your theory is just going in circles.
Certainly everything is not black and white, especially in biology, and we define terms which don't apply to all situations. Why do you think this means we can't discover anything useful even if this is the case.
How about a thought experiment:
Take 500 common house cats.
Build a very large cage for them (1km^2).
Arrange a separate facility for breeding large rats as a food source for the cats.
Sequence the DNA of each cat.
Sequence the DNA of any kittens born in the cage.
Continue this monitoring for several thousand years.
Finally, analyse the DNA data for evidence of evolution.
Where is the vagueness here? Did I use any of the terms you are opposed to?
You might think it's a silly idea, but it's not too far from work done with fruit-flies or bacteria.
Got a name for one of these scientists?
I do actually think that huge amounts of evidence gathered by many researchers is quite different to an idea that some invisible being poofed everything into existence in the recent past. The ID whackos are just trying to associate themselves with real science for the purpose of getting their religion into US public schools. That may sound like a paranoid conspiracy theory, but would you believe they have a website detailing it:
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.htm
Sorry, but it's your statement that is truly vague, so I asked for clarification.
Population is not a difficult concept. You have one animal, that's not a population, it's an individual. You have 100 of these same animals, it's a population. If you have only 10, 5 or 2 animals, it's probably not a viable population, but is a population nevertheless.
Yes, but can you have a lineage without a population? Sure, an immortal species that doesn't reproduce will not evolve. That's getting silly though don't you think?
"autonomous systems cannot be instructed by the environment, so there can be no such thing as Natural Selection"
What do you mean by this exactly?
Do you realise that evolution applies to populations, not individuals?
Stop calling it "computing." It's really just electronics!
How is this crap insightful?
You have no idea what causality is, don't seem to know much biology, but you are sure your invisible friend is a better idea.
Good news, hopefully we'll see some good work done there which inspires others to follow.
Other Aussie states might be slow in actually requiring consideration of OSS, but the ACT's work could build a collection of useful software and government IT people will gain experience with OSS alternatives. That can only help with adoption elsewhere.
It seems to me that it was GWB + co. leading people to believe that the US must invade Iraq, because the UN was doing nothing to stop Iraq from unleashing its huge stockpiles of WMD on the world.
The 12 years of sanctions were exactly what the UK and USA wanted, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were hurt by them. If the UN was doing nothing, it was because any steps it proposed were voted down by the US and UK.
Here's something I find interesting:
Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." - Feb. 24, 2001
What did you expect the UN to have done? Authorise an invasion?Well said!
USAians seem to forget that the whole reason for the creation of the UN was to avoid another situation like WW2.
The first line of the UN charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind"
IMO, they need to be way more anti-US than they have been recently.
I've used Clearcase too. You're on drugs if you think it's any good.
Maybe if you have 20+ developers it's no big deal to have a competant revision control administrator who can spend all day screwing with ClearCase (while developers are standing around waiting for it to let them do their job). I see it as wasting the time of someone who could be doing something more useful with their time.
Sure you need to know what you are doing to do source control right, but for 95% of people it's a choice of:
Give X * $10k to Rational
Waste time and more $ on training and support calls.
Waste hours more when it screws up.
or
apt-get install cvs
Tell your developers to RTFM
Igor FAQ:
...
"The Eclipse plug-ins are licensed under the GNU public license."
"The basic Delta Debugging technique (narrowing down relevant circumstances by experiments) is not covered by any patent (as far as we know); in fact, we have released Delta Debugging plug-ins for Eclipse under a GNU license.
However, Passau University has filed international patents for the automatic isolation of cause-effect chains from computer programs--that is, Delta Debugging applied to program states. This is the core technology of AskIgor. This means that if you want to make money out of AskIgor technologies, you'll have to license the patent. (That's how Passau University attempts to get some revenue from its research.) Patent licenses are handled by the Fraunhofer Society in the BayernPatent initiative. "
GPL:
"For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
WTF?
Maybe there is some difference between what the Eclipse plugins do and what AskIgor does, but it's not very clear from the FAQ if that is the case.
Strange that they do not mention Mono or DotGNU in their discussion of MS .Net migration, but instead rave about the superiority of J2EE for a couple of pages. They go so far as to say .NET is Windows only...
Yes, I have read some of what they are passing off as science, and I can tell why they are wrong. You are just assuming that I know nothing about them or their views.
Yes, of course I was referring to the peer reviewed work done by thousands of scientists since Darwin published the Origin of Species.
This is not an argument from authority, I am not saying Darwin or Gould said such and such which agrees with my position. I'm saying that there is a mountain of evidence supporting evolution, and no evidence at all to support the ideas of Dembski and co. If you have some evidence which supports their position, you had better get on the phone to them real quick, because they have come up with nothing so far. They will be thrilled to hear from you.
There is the danger that you can be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
If someone can come up with an explanation which explains all the evidence better that the ToE, then I'm all for it. That's having an open mind.
Believing in something the face of contrary evidence is gullibility, not open-mindedness.
To get back to my original statement, can you tell me where I can find an alternative theory to evolution, which is well supported by the evidence collected by thousands of biologists, botanists, geologists, paleontologists and so on?
I enquired about your religious persuasion only because it seems that it is *only* fundamentalist religions that have a problem with evolution. I only asked because you are accusing me of unquestioning belief. How's that thing about motes and beams go again?
If you were honestly questioning evolution, and not just trying to hype up the scientific popularity of your creationsist viewpoint, I'd be happy to direct you to some critiques of Dembski and Behe's work.Why aren't you questioning what the creationists are telling you?