The truth is, there are holes in the evolutionary theory.
There are 'holes' in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, too. (They make conflicting predictions in conditions we can't yet test, so at least one and probably both are wrong.) But we still teach them in schools, because they are the best theories we have and they cover such a huge range of phenomena with such precision that, whatever the truth turns out to be, it'll still look a hell of a lot like GR and QM.
As Isaac Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Newton's Laws are wrong, yes... but they are so close to right we still use them every day, and teach them in schools. Hell, NASA still uses plain old Newtonian physics to pilot their space probes, with just a few occasional relativistic fudge factors, because a full GR treatment would be prohibitively complex and add no useful accuracy.
Evolution is true. Will there be further clarifications and refinements? Sure. But they won't upend evolution any more than GR and QM could possibly be 'overturned'.
Look, Newton's Laws of motion didn't explain "where the First Motion came from" but people didn't claim that meant that Newton's Laws were wrong. In Christianity, the doctrine of Original Sin doesn't explain where God came from, does that mean Christianity is therefore wrong?
Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the vertebrate immune system.)
That's why you need more than "barely". Simple molecule, studied for safety... except they didn't test long enough, among enough diverse circumstances, to catch a major issue. Biological systems are orders of magnitude more complex than the things humans normally work with, and are the equivalent of spaghetti code, with just oodles of non-obvious interactions, kludges, and general weirdness.
So no, 'barely' isn't enough. You need 'thoroughly'.
Via "natural" selection? 'Cause the problem is, sickle cell is an example of a very simple gene with a non-obvious side effect. It changes one kind of molecule in an easy-to-detect way, and still it took time and research to tease out the beneficial side effect.
Hardly anything's that simple in genetics. We already know that the genes for red hair also tend to produce freckles, and it turns out it apparently affects pain response in the skin, too. Everything's interrelated.
The proposal is to select for genes affecting personality, though. How complicated can we expect gene effects to be in the brain? Nasty mazes of interrelated and overlapping effects. A gene that might produce alcoholism in some people might produce a great artist or adventurer or scientist when combined with different genes. We just are not informed enough yet to be making such calls.
If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself.
So, yeah, links aren't convincing. You need to click them, and read the information, and engage with the arguments. Then you need to show why they are wrong, before you can do any speculating about why people might believe it.
I'm not using an older P4, though. Core i7-2600K, 16GB RAM, GF 560 Ti, etc. I swear, the first hour or so I wondered if the CPU monitor widget was broken. Then I ran a big HD media encode and finally saw some activity on the graphs.:)
But I agree, on resource-constrained systems Lubuntu would be a good option.
The parasite "as described" didn't just warp sexuality, it also eroded inhibitions. Unfortunately, people are already known to get violent, and sexual, and violent sexual, compulsions naturally, no parasite required. Considering we also already know of examples of parasites that have disinhibiting effects, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to me.
The point was that the parasite only had to do two things: 1) reduce sexual inhibitions, and 2) suppress the normal interruption of the (posited) link between violent predation and sexuality in male mammals. At that point it's elegant, in a horrifying way. Get one half to kill the other half, then take out much of itself when targets thin out, by targeting just a couple weak fracture lines.
...and enjoying it. XFCE works pretty well and is easy to use. This actually makes Debian more attractive to me.
However... there are definitely some issues that bespeak a need for more polish. E.g. this one, or this one. Hopefully a bit more focused attention will lead to quicker fixes.
I haven't read it, but if you feel it is plausible, maybe that Wiki page needs to be substantially rewritten.
You actually have to read it. The author makes a good case for male mammalian sexuality being a specialized - and normally interrupted - form of predation. The fact that there are so many psychopaths in real life who murder for sexual gratification - practically all of them male - lends just enough credibility to the thesis to make it decidedly unnerving.
I've got a Transformer Prime and it really does the tablet + keyboard well. The dock actually adds things besideds a keyboard and trackpad - like extra battery, USB port, and SD card reader. And the latest version, the Infinity, has a 1080p screen, too. Can't see what Surface would add to that.
...can get excellent performance out of the hardware and software. I'm actually an OpenGL partisan, but Direct3D is only part of DirectX. Input, sound, graphics, networking, all in one API - that really is a powerful argument for DirectX. OpenGL + SDL + OpenAL is far from a bad API set to develop for, but you gotta admit it could use some polish. Hopefully, greater attention to Linux gaming will catalyze that polish. Which should mean that not-so-major game companies who don't have the hardware vendors on speed dial can get some benefits from this, too.
On the other hand, Android likes a bit more RAM than 256MB. My original Droid has 256MB of RAM, and had some issues with version 2.2 (Froyo). I had to do some fairly extensive tweaking to get acceptable performance with Cyanogenmod (2.3 Gingerbread). I'd be quite nervous to try to run ICS with that amount of RAM...
Maybe someday it'll change, but for now Windows is massively targeted by malware. I'll take the risk of occasional tech support chores, rather than the certainty of regular malware-cleaning chores.
On Linux, you almost universally find meaningful error messages, log files, verbose mode, etc. On Windows, you hardly ever do. So yeah, fixing Linux is easier because it's much easier to figure out what's actually wrong.
Anything that presents the familiar desktop experience to the end user. Unfortunately, this rules out the current versions of Ubuntu.
Um, Xubuntu is a current version of Ubuntu. My elderly and not-technically-inclined parents are using it.
This is not something I would expect a novice to do though.
Note that 'novices' don't install operating systems, either. In practice, everyone who's not a techie leans on someone for tech support - family, friends, the neighbor's kid who's "good with computers". Windows sure doesn't maintain itself.
The Asus Transformer Prime my wife bought for me has:
A Tegra 3 CPU/GPU
An HDMI output, and
Can use PS3 controllers, just plug-n-pair
Some of the more 'high-end' Android 3D games support controllers - I have Max Payne, Shadowgun THD, and Dead Trigger, all of which support the PS3 controller with no extra configuration. I haven't had time to play with emulation yet, that's coming, and the emulators out there support controllers, too.
Of course, the Prime costs a bunch more than the Ouya is supposed to cost. I'm still dubious about them getting things ready in time, and getting developer support... but from a technical perspective, it's almost a solved problem.
Well, the Prime I have isn't perfect. There's an issue with I/O speeds to flash memory; it's kind of finicky about copying large files. And the metal case does limit the wifi range considerably (but that's not a problem on TF300 or the Infinity). And there's software for Linux/Windows that just isn't available for Android. And I ran into a hotel wifi system where I could connect, but some setting issue wouldn't let me authenticate through their portal and get out on the net.
On the pro side, though, I do like the dock a lot. Turns the thing into basically a netbook with stupidly long battery life. For general web, email, Skype, etc. it's quite good. I can sit in my bed two floors away and ssh/VNC into my desktop in the basement with a nice screen size and decent performance. Movies and media play really well on the thing.
And I'll repeat about the battery life. I can take it around all day long and not have to worry about charging it. The only time it's ever run out of juice was when one of my kids played a big ol' 3D game for hours and hours when I was away.
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There are 'holes' in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, too. (They make conflicting predictions in conditions we can't yet test, so at least one and probably both are wrong.) But we still teach them in schools, because they are the best theories we have and they cover such a huge range of phenomena with such precision that, whatever the truth turns out to be, it'll still look a hell of a lot like GR and QM.
As Isaac Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Newton's Laws are wrong, yes... but they are so close to right we still use them every day, and teach them in schools. Hell, NASA still uses plain old Newtonian physics to pilot their space probes, with just a few occasional relativistic fudge factors, because a full GR treatment would be prohibitively complex and add no useful accuracy.
It's the same with evolution. We know that all life is related by common descent, and that life has changed drastically over the course of 3.5 billion years, and that complex structures were built by numerous small tweaks well within the realm of chance. Natural selection has been demonstrated now and over the fossil record.
Evolution is true. Will there be further clarifications and refinements? Sure. But they won't upend evolution any more than GR and QM could possibly be 'overturned'.
Gimme the name of any textbook actually in use in any school that "claims that life can be created synthetically using Natural means".
Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the vertebrate immune system.)
(Oh, and progress is actually being made on the abiogenesis front anyway.)
That's why you need more than "barely". Simple molecule, studied for safety... except they didn't test long enough, among enough diverse circumstances, to catch a major issue. Biological systems are orders of magnitude more complex than the things humans normally work with, and are the equivalent of spaghetti code, with just oodles of non-obvious interactions, kludges, and general weirdness.
So no, 'barely' isn't enough. You need 'thoroughly'.
Hardly anything's that simple in genetics. We already know that the genes for red hair also tend to produce freckles, and it turns out it apparently affects pain response in the skin, too. Everything's interrelated.
The proposal is to select for genes affecting personality, though. How complicated can we expect gene effects to be in the brain? Nasty mazes of interrelated and overlapping effects. A gene that might produce alcoholism in some people might produce a great artist or adventurer or scientist when combined with different genes. We just are not informed enough yet to be making such calls.
What makes anyone think we can actually identify all the interrelated effects of any gene - especially ones that affect the brain?
So, yeah, links aren't convincing. You need to click them, and read the information, and engage with the arguments. Then you need to show why they are wrong, before you can do any speculating about why people might believe it.
And even if that were true (it isn't) it wouldn't address the point I was making.
Even if evolution had all the negative effects you claim (it doesn't), what bearing would that have on whether it's true or not?
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/235824711601360898
But I agree, on resource-constrained systems Lubuntu would be a good option.
The point was that the parasite only had to do two things: 1) reduce sexual inhibitions, and 2) suppress the normal interruption of the (posited) link between violent predation and sexuality in male mammals. At that point it's elegant, in a horrifying way. Get one half to kill the other half, then take out much of itself when targets thin out, by targeting just a couple weak fracture lines.
However... there are definitely some issues that bespeak a need for more polish. E.g. this one, or this one. Hopefully a bit more focused attention will lead to quicker fixes.
Read it.
You actually have to read it. The author makes a good case for male mammalian sexuality being a specialized - and normally interrupted - form of predation. The fact that there are so many psychopaths in real life who murder for sexual gratification - practically all of them male - lends just enough credibility to the thesis to make it decidedly unnerving.
Fortunately, it's available online for free (legally): http://web.archive.org/web/20080702231205/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html.
The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon. Extinction of humanity in the most horrifying - and horrifyingly plausible - means possible.
I've got a Transformer Prime and it really does the tablet + keyboard well. The dock actually adds things besideds a keyboard and trackpad - like extra battery, USB port, and SD card reader. And the latest version, the Infinity, has a 1080p screen, too. Can't see what Surface would add to that.
...can get excellent performance out of the hardware and software. I'm actually an OpenGL partisan, but Direct3D is only part of DirectX. Input, sound, graphics, networking, all in one API - that really is a powerful argument for DirectX. OpenGL + SDL + OpenAL is far from a bad API set to develop for, but you gotta admit it could use some polish. Hopefully, greater attention to Linux gaming will catalyze that polish. Which should mean that not-so-major game companies who don't have the hardware vendors on speed dial can get some benefits from this, too.
On the other hand, Android likes a bit more RAM than 256MB. My original Droid has 256MB of RAM, and had some issues with version 2.2 (Froyo). I had to do some fairly extensive tweaking to get acceptable performance with Cyanogenmod (2.3 Gingerbread). I'd be quite nervous to try to run ICS with that amount of RAM...
What if I want to be condescending?
Maybe someday it'll change, but for now Windows is massively targeted by malware. I'll take the risk of occasional tech support chores, rather than the certainty of regular malware-cleaning chores.
On Linux, you almost universally find meaningful error messages, log files, verbose mode, etc. On Windows, you hardly ever do. So yeah, fixing Linux is easier because it's much easier to figure out what's actually wrong.
Um, Xubuntu is a current version of Ubuntu. My elderly and not-technically-inclined parents are using it.
Note that 'novices' don't install operating systems, either. In practice, everyone who's not a techie leans on someone for tech support - family, friends, the neighbor's kid who's "good with computers". Windows sure doesn't maintain itself.
Some of the more 'high-end' Android 3D games support controllers - I have Max Payne, Shadowgun THD, and Dead Trigger, all of which support the PS3 controller with no extra configuration. I haven't had time to play with emulation yet, that's coming, and the emulators out there support controllers, too.
Of course, the Prime costs a bunch more than the Ouya is supposed to cost. I'm still dubious about them getting things ready in time, and getting developer support... but from a technical perspective, it's almost a solved problem.
On the pro side, though, I do like the dock a lot. Turns the thing into basically a netbook with stupidly long battery life. For general web, email, Skype, etc. it's quite good. I can sit in my bed two floors away and ssh/VNC into my desktop in the basement with a nice screen size and decent performance. Movies and media play really well on the thing.
And I'll repeat about the battery life. I can take it around all day long and not have to worry about charging it. The only time it's ever run out of juice was when one of my kids played a big ol' 3D game for hours and hours when I was away.