I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.
I remember back in the day that one suggested (by some hobbyist magazine) workaround for the overheating problem was to run it with a carton of cold milk sitting over the PSU (regulator?) area of the case. I worked for the competition (Acorn), so we rather enjoyed hearing stuff like that. I also remember Uncle Clive (Sinclair) hitting on our hot HR babe at an Acorn Christmas party, and Acorn co-founder Chris Curry being seen shagging his secretary back at work after another drunken company party.
I worked for Acorn from '79 to -'82, primarily programming (in assembler) the 6502 based BBC micro (and it's little brother the Electron), and from what I can recall the 6502 was - at same clock speed - faster than the Z80. The Z80's main advantage was being available in higher clock speeds, althogh the 6502 did I think get up to 4MHz in the end
While the Z80 had more registers, the 6502 had "page 0" addresses that allowed offset-only access to the first 256 bytes of RAM, which in a way made up for it. The 6502 instruction set was very minimal, and in fact was the inspiration for the ARM RISC processor designed by Acorn (originall ARM = Acorn RISC Machine, later re-acronymed as Advanced RISC machine).
The trick with getting performance out of the 6502 (or any of the early 8 bitters) was to execute as few instructions as possible - things like the BBC Basic and Acorns's ISO Pascal (I was 1/2 of the team that wrote the latter) were written in extremely hand optimized assember. You would never do JSR sub; RET - always JMP sub instead. Never do LD A, 0 (two bytes), always XOR A, A (one byte, same effect) instead. Never JMP addr, when you knew the state of the CPU flags and could do JRZ addr (jump relative on zero flag vs jump absolute) instead.
These are only a few examples, but it was surprising how much fucntionality you could fit into a tiny space by using efficient code like this. The Acorn ISO Pascal implementation fitted into 2 16KB EPROMS, yet packed in a full ISO compliant Pascal compiler (written in Pascal, and self-compiling to an internal pseudo-code - 16KB), the pseudo-code interpreter, run-time library (floating point, heap, I/O, etc), full screen editor (in 4KB of code) with regular expression search/replace, block move etc, and a command line interpreter.. The pseudo-code interpreter, etc, comprised the other 16KB and were all written in super-tight assembler... and the interpreter had to self-relocate itself out of EPROM into RAM to be able to run the compiler since the two 16K EPROMS (1 = compiler in pseudo-code, 2 = p-code interpreter, etc) occupied the same address space in the BBC micro.
Computing was generally a hell of a lot more fun back then, partly because it was new but also partly because of the challenge of getting stuff like this to run given the limitied CPU/memory resources. I hate to think how big a modern ISO Pascal implementation with all the extras (interpreter, library, screen editor, etc) would be - maybe a factor of 1000 times bigger (32MB vs 32K) or thereabouts?!
Those really were the good old days, although it's also exciting what's possible given the speed/memory available today.
A child has two parents, and it's between those two parents to decide whether they can afford a child in the first place, and if so what that entails in terms of jobs. Ideally the mother would stay at home and look after the child (better yet in a fantasy world if both parents could stay at home), but whatever they choose is between that couple and no-one else. If a couple decide to have kids but both still need to work (bad decision IMO, but each to their own), then THEY need to make appropriate child care arrangements. A company offering you a job has no responsibility (moral or otherwise) to give you anything other than a paycheck and a sane 9-5 work week (or whatever you signed up for).
You may well be right. It would certainly be good to see a demo of it solving a complex real-world recognition task that defies other approaches. The stick figure demo is a proof of concept, but nothing more.
On the other hand, it's also possible that Hawking has reasons to believe that it really does work, and just wants to seed the robot revolution by releasing this... Maybe his only real self-interest is in wanting to see intelligent robots/applications in his own lifetime, and he realizes that the best way to achieve this is to set the idea free.
On the other other hand, maybe he just wanted to get his idea in print so that he can later claim to be the "father of intelligent robotics" or somesuch, should this prove to be an important idea, which it well may be, if not totally unique. He does seem rather egotistical, and IMO doesn't really give proper recognition to others such as Stephen Grossberg working in the field of cortical architecture.
I'm in the process of reading Hawking's HTM book "On Intelligence", and I've got to say that a lot of his associated ideas about free will, consciousness etc are completely half-baked (if baked at all). We're meant to be impressed at an anecdote of Hawking purporting to be an unconscious "zombie", that comes across as if he's a CS or Psych 101 student coming across the idea for the first time.
I am explaining to you how animals with different DNA evolve. Call them teletubbies rather than species if you prefer.
The point is just that new species are trivial to create - and are being created all around us right now. Lion/Tiger are almost divereged - soon to be new species. Horse/Donkey are in the process of diverging right now. Man/Chimpanzee diverged quite recently and are now separate species.
Modern DNA sequencing makes denying the evidence rather, uh, stupid. Darwin (pre DNA) had a theory. Darwin + DNA = proof.
New species creation: 1) Red teletubbies group #1 evolve and become purple 2) Red teletubbies group #2 evolve seperately (maybe they live on their own island) and become orange 3) Purple and orange teletubbies can't successfully breed ----> Now they are separate teletubbies (since no more DNA mixing) 4) Purple teletubbies continue to evolve and maybe become tall and hairy 5) Orange teletubbies continue to evolve and maybe become short with a long tail 6) Creationist realizes that the tall hairly purple teletubbies are a different species from the short orange ones with the long tail, and falls out of his tree
The definition of species (can't interbreed) I gave you is the modern evolutionary one. The old classifications were based on external chanracteristics and are functionally meaningless. The interbreeding definition of species makes sense becuase once the DNA of two groups (formerly same species) has diverged beyond the point of them being able to interbreed then there is no going back - the DNA can no longer be mixed and therefore the newly branched species will now evolve indpendently. Correpondingly, if two populations of the same species have genetically diverged, but NOT beyond the point of being able to interbreed, then there is still a chance that they may interbreed and remix the DNA.
Lions and Tigers can interbreed (and have healthy young), therefore - by definition - they are the same species, despite looking a bit different (just as dachshunds and pitbulls are also the same species as each other, despite looking and behaving different).
Mules are (generally) sterile, so the combined DNA can't be further mixed and the interbreeding has therefore effectively failed. Actually it's more subtle than that because *sometime* a horse/donkey mix (M=mule, F=hinny) can breed, so really it's more accurate to say that horse/donkey is currently - right nbw - in the process of forming two seperate species.
Wolf and (all breeds of) dog are able to interbreed.
It's interesting how you think this is a word game rather than having anything substantive to say, or any response to the fact that I've just explained how trivial the creation of new species is. Oh well.
Do you even understand what the definition of species is? Two groups of animals are considered as a separate species if they can't successfully interbreed.
The way new species are created isn't by some magic or anything different than normal incremental change... there just becomes a point where the DNA has diverged due to those accumulated tiny incremental steps that the two groups of animals can no longer viably mate (even if they wanted to, which is unlikely).
There are animals around us in absolutely every stage of speciation you can imagine. Just to pick one, lions and tigers are close to becoming separate species... they can currently still interbreed, but in the wild they do not and therefore they will carry on diverging. Or how about horses and donkeys - just past the point of speciation - they can breed, but the offspring (mules) cannot, so they (horses, donkeys) have therefore permanently diverged into new species.
I don't know why so many people get hung up on the creation of new species as if it were something different from any other type of incremental change... I can only assume it's because people don't even realize that speciciation is just the loss of ability to interbreed.
Genes don't code for features - they are much lower level than that (creating proteins, controlling expression, etc), so putting existing genees in novel combinations also makes a unique individual (why you share features from your parents but have you own unique features too). Nowadays we can sequence DNA and see these changes directly.
The nature of evolution is necessarily to modify what has gone before in some incremental way rather than creating brand new features, but a few million generations of incremental changes (longer legs, shorter neck, more hair, etc, etc) will still create something very different (incl. new species) from the original. Old structures such as gills get repurposed into new functions such as ears as behavior and habitat changes... Legs shrink and almost disappear to turn a walking animal into a slithering snake, etc, etc. Thinking in terms of "new features" is really a wrong way to look at it - that may be the cumulative effect of millions of evolutionary steps if you look at the end points, but it's not how evolution actually occurs; evolution occurs by incrementally changing *existing* features.
People compartmentalize, so it's not surprising to find people who are otherwise intelligent but don't accept evolution, but OTOH there comes a point where denial is a form of stupidity or abnormaility. What if I was a college graduate who didn't accept gravity, or didn't accept that we're all going to die? At what point do you say that despite the degree I'm stupid?
People can have all the additional beliefs they want, but evolution (changing of species, creation of new species) is something that HAS to happen given that we're based on a changeable hereditory mechanism. Denying that the gene pool will change due to natural selection is like denying that the sea will come in.... I don't case how many degrees you have - that's just plain dumb.
Actually, evolution is an interpretation of facts observed in nature and is thus a theory.
No... Evolution is just the word we use to describe hereditory systems that change due to "survival of the fittest". Applied to the evolution of species it was only a theory as long as it was based on a theorized heereditory mechanism... when that mechanism (DNA) was then discovered, it became a fact.
Evolution can not be wrong. It's not a theory - it's just a plain fact.
If your DNA causes you to have more children than me, then the DNA of our species has taken a step in the direction of your DNA rather than mine. If the DNA of species A group #1 has diverged from that of species A group #2 to the extent that they can't interbreed then (by definition) one of these groups is a new species.
There may be additional subtleties to how evolution actually plays out (there's plenty of post-Darwin realizations such as that it's environmental change that drives punctuated equilibrium), but the mechanism itself can't be wrong - it's just plain fact. More children = more descendents with your DNA.
is anyone else disturbed that unwavering belief in the theory of evolution has become a litmus test for intelligence?
Why is it disturbing to define intelligence as having a modicum of knowledge and rational analysis capability?
DNA + "survival of the fittest" = evolution. It's not a theory - it's just a plain consequence of the the tautology "survival of the fittest" and the fact that we're based on a naturally varying chemical hereditory mechanism (DNA). If you don't understand that people who have more children leave more descendents, or that we're based on DNA, then, YES, you are stupid.
I believe you are confused, evolution doesn't even attempt to answer the question of genesis. It only attempts to answer how we got from single cell life form to what we are today. How that single celled life form was "created" is not answered by evolution. The origin of life is a different question than the question of how organisms develop and evolve over time.
The origin of the earliest forms of "life" (simple single "cells", pre-DNA, pre_RNA) is surely one of the easiet things to answer - this is nothing more than self-sustaining chemical reactions occuring in a lipid bubble (maybe naturally occuring - oily froth by the sea shore, or maybe the fatty polymers being a product of the chemical reactions that occured inside them). I think what confuses non-scientists is how chemistry became life, since they don't realize it's just a matter of definition... at the point where your chemistry has become capable of feeding (consuming more chemicals from the enviroment), reproduction (large bubble of chemical soup splits into to), etc, then we assign the label of "life" to it... The real early "breakthru" was the formation of complex chemicals such as RNA or even simpler precursors (catalysts to begin with) that caused these early chemical soups to start to become self-defining.
Maybe, but this denial of evolution is a US-only phenomena. Could be related to poor US high school education I suppose (since that's the only time most people are going to be taught about it).
A man might be more easily persueded by another man over e-mail, but nothing can beat the viscerally persuasive power of a woman with a low cut top and short skirt.
What you say is true if you're looking to squeeze max perfomance out of a custom platform, but does not apply as a general solution towards concurrent programming.
As multi-core and multi-processor systems are becoming more the norm, it'd be good to see software technology such as languages and compilers keeping up. The easiest way to take advantage of hardware parallelism would be if you can somehow express that parallelism in your program rather than use a low level imperative language like C++ to painstakingly spell out how the concurrency should be implemented. An explicit thread model is about the worst possible solution because it's the most low level one, although conceivably one might create a new language by extending C++ with concurrency constructs that are compiled down to threaded code the same way early C++ compilers compiled to C. Complete paradigm shifts such as fucntional languages are also an option, but I don't see that becoming mainstream.
As far as low level and threaded programming - been there done that. I've implemented multiprocessor (mixed 68000/Z80) embedded systems entirely in assembler back in the day, and nowadays write multi-threaded Solaris code in my sleep - it's easy enough with experience, but experience also says that there are much more productive ways we could be doing this.
Yep - line printers could certainly crank it out. I remember over 30 years ago visiting a datacenter and being wowed by those things - they showed one that neeed to use a partial vaccuum to suck the paper out of the printer it was coming out so fast.
But, if you really want speed then I don't know if anything can beat a mainframe page printer - it prints a full page at a time by writing to an electrostatically charged drum that picks up the ink - same technology as photocopiers.
Well, I use an ATI 9200 based board because it's passively cooled and therefore silent. I can confirm that ATI driver support for it under Ubuntu is crap. Some people get it working with a few caveats, others don't, the Ubuntu forums have entire threads dedicated to the topic. I ended up using the buggy open source driver since it was the only way I could get acceleration working on my system. YMMV.
I'd actually be quite happy to buy a new graphic card to get better driver support if there was one that met my needs, but all the new cards seem to be intended for gaming and require active cooling which I can't tolerate in my quiet system. I also need an AGP based card and am not about to buy/build a new system just to get a new graphics card - my current 2.8GHz P4 (Northwood core) system is still plenty fast for my needs.
US censorship currently has the weird view that extreme violence and torture are good family fun, but that an exposed breast is a terrible thing. Related to the religous right, presumably.
That's a massive logical fallacy. Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. It's also plain wrong given the existence of the gospels, the epistles, the testimony about the resurrection, the existence of the Jewish religion for millenia, the way the church has thrived in the face of persecution, personal experience of miracles and answerer prayer by some people. In some cases, some of these things do not constitute great evidence, but to suggest that there is no evidence God exists is really quite laughable.
Sure, lack of evidence doesn't PROVE that there is no god, but OTOH it also doesn't PROVE that there is no tooth fairy. However given a lack of evidence it would not be rational to believe in either.
Addressing your list of evidence:
The Gospels
I guess you're talking about miracles, since I'm not disputing that there was a historical (normal human) Jesus. You've listed the resurrection as a seperate issue, below. To keep this at least reasonably brief I'll just provide a number of bulletted points:
- Jesus was essentially a faith healer - something that exists today, and surely needs no supernatural explanation. Do I need to explain this?
- Other people such as Apollonius were also doing miracles (contemporary Christians believed in them) including bringing people back from the dead... Insert your explanation of choice here, and explain why you believe accounts of Jesus miracles, are different. One simple explanation is that the reports are in essence true (i.e not outright fabricated) but that these people were just showing few vital signs, not actually dead. Even today with infinitely better medical knowledge people sometimes wake-up in hospital morgues, revive from comas, etc. Two thousand years ago, without vaccinations, there were many more severve illnesses that were common, and even the faith healers themselves (not savages - but also not with 20th Century medical knowledge) may have believed that they were bringing people back to life by the laying on of hands, etc.
- Miracles were a competetive business, which is why apologists bemoaned Apollonius. Miracles were a way to increase stature/faith and so there was every reason to exagerate/play them up, or even outright fabricate them. Odd how many of the miracles occur at some unspecified location, or out of town, or include that people were told not to discuss them... It all creates "plausible" deniability that later failure to find eye witnesses meant anything.
- If Jesus was perfoming anything that appeared unique (certainly not!) and truly extraorinary at the time, then why did only 4 of his 12 disciples bother to record it, and of those 3 only 30 years after the fact and one 60 years after the fact? Why is this "evidence" primarily in the synoptic gospels, missing from the non-cannonical gospels, missing from any other contemporary account?
- Odd how miracles occured back then, by pagans as well as Jesus, but not today (unles you include faith healers, witch doctors, maharishis materializing books, levitating and appearing simulataneoulsy in multiple places)... Funny how none of these modern "miracles" can ever be dupicated in the lab.
Why shouldn't we believe what we see here? If someone believes and tells us, why shouldn't we believe that second hand account?
The Epistles
Makes you wonder what happened to the miracles, doesn't it. Did Paul have a vision of a resurrected Jesus or really see the man alive? Both have rational explanations.
Testimoney about the resurrection
Maybe he was seen alive after his crucifiction, maybe not. Did Paul see a vision of him, or actually see him? Who knows. We simply don't know what happened - all we can do is work with what's reported in the Bible and offer suggestions. One possibility
I'm not that familiar with Christian theology in general (not totally unfamilair either - I collect 3rd/4th C Roman coins and am very familiar with the issues that Constantine got involved with such as the Arian controversy and Donatist schism), but I agree there's no reason to doubt that it is - internally at least - consistent and rational. It may be that intellectual acceptance of Christianity is indeed based on a satisfying theology, but it would seem odd to me to accept it based on those grounds unless you also beieve the supernatural claims made for Jesus that it is based upon. It's the latter rather than the theology (which is just doctrine - not a matter of truth or falsehood) that is obviously false (presumably you agree, else you'd be a Christian).
It's belief in mind-body dualism and supernatural spirituality that I think is quite easy for many intellectuals to believe in, for the reasons that I indicated. For that matter, I think most people (not me) believe in free will (because subjectively it's so obvious) which is already a rejection of science and belief in some supernatural control of the brain, and once you've bought into that then it's a small step to accept other non-scientific beliefs such as life-after-death, etc, etc.
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Yeah.. sounds like some bitrot has set in to my brain. I must have been thinking of XOR A on the Z80.
I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.
I remember back in the day that one suggested (by some hobbyist magazine) workaround for the overheating problem was to run it with a carton of cold milk sitting over the PSU (regulator?) area of the case. I worked for the competition (Acorn), so we rather enjoyed hearing stuff like that. I also remember Uncle Clive (Sinclair) hitting on our hot HR babe at an Acorn Christmas party, and Acorn co-founder Chris Curry being seen shagging his secretary back at work after another drunken company party.
I worked for Acorn from '79 to -'82, primarily programming (in assembler) the 6502 based BBC micro (and it's little brother the Electron), and from what I can recall the 6502 was - at same clock speed - faster than the Z80. The Z80's main advantage was being available in higher clock speeds, althogh the 6502 did I think get up to 4MHz in the end
While the Z80 had more registers, the 6502 had "page 0" addresses that allowed offset-only access to the first 256 bytes of RAM, which in a way made up for it. The 6502 instruction set was very minimal, and in fact was the inspiration for the ARM RISC processor designed by Acorn (originall ARM = Acorn RISC Machine, later re-acronymed as Advanced RISC machine).
The trick with getting performance out of the 6502 (or any of the early 8 bitters) was to execute as few instructions as possible - things like the BBC Basic and Acorns's ISO Pascal (I was 1/2 of the team that wrote the latter) were written in extremely hand optimized assember. You would never do JSR sub; RET - always JMP sub instead. Never do LD A, 0 (two bytes), always XOR A, A (one byte, same effect) instead. Never JMP addr, when you knew the state of the CPU flags and could do JRZ addr (jump relative on zero flag vs jump absolute) instead.
These are only a few examples, but it was surprising how much fucntionality you could fit into a tiny space by using efficient code like this. The Acorn ISO Pascal implementation fitted into 2 16KB EPROMS, yet packed in a full ISO compliant Pascal compiler (written in Pascal, and self-compiling to an internal pseudo-code - 16KB), the pseudo-code interpreter, run-time library (floating point, heap, I/O, etc), full screen editor (in 4KB of code) with regular expression search/replace, block move etc, and a command line interpreter.. The pseudo-code interpreter, etc, comprised the other 16KB and were all written in super-tight assembler... and the interpreter had to self-relocate itself out of EPROM into RAM to be able to run the compiler since the two 16K EPROMS (1 = compiler in pseudo-code, 2 = p-code interpreter, etc) occupied the same address space in the BBC micro.
Computing was generally a hell of a lot more fun back then, partly because it was new but also partly because of the challenge of getting stuff like this to run given the limitied CPU/memory resources. I hate to think how big a modern ISO Pascal implementation with all the extras (interpreter, library, screen editor, etc) would be - maybe a factor of 1000 times bigger (32MB vs 32K) or thereabouts?!
Those really were the good old days, although it's also exciting what's possible given the speed/memory available today.
What a bunch of feminist crap.
A child has two parents, and it's between those two parents to decide whether they can afford a child in the first place, and if so what that entails in terms of jobs. Ideally the mother would stay at home and look after the child (better yet in a fantasy world if both parents could stay at home), but whatever they choose is between that couple and no-one else. If a couple decide to have kids but both still need to work (bad decision IMO, but each to their own), then THEY need to make appropriate child care arrangements. A company offering you a job has no responsibility (moral or otherwise) to give you anything other than a paycheck and a sane 9-5 work week (or whatever you signed up for).
You may well be right. It would certainly be good to see a demo of it solving a complex real-world recognition task that defies other approaches. The stick figure demo is a proof of concept, but nothing more.
On the other hand, it's also possible that Hawking has reasons to believe that it really does work, and just wants to seed the robot revolution by releasing this... Maybe his only real self-interest is in wanting to see intelligent robots/applications in his own lifetime, and he realizes that the best way to achieve this is to set the idea free.
On the other other hand, maybe he just wanted to get his idea in print so that he can later claim to be the "father of intelligent robotics" or somesuch, should this prove to be an important idea, which it well may be, if not totally unique. He does seem rather egotistical, and IMO doesn't really give proper recognition to others such as Stephen Grossberg working in the field of cortical architecture.
I'm in the process of reading Hawking's HTM book "On Intelligence", and I've got to say that a lot of his associated ideas about free will, consciousness etc are completely half-baked (if baked at all). We're meant to be impressed at an anecdote of Hawking purporting to be an unconscious "zombie", that comes across as if he's a CS or Psych 101 student coming across the idea for the first time.
I am explaining to you how animals with different DNA evolve. Call them teletubbies rather than species if you prefer.
The point is just that new species are trivial to create - and are being created all around us right now. Lion/Tiger are almost divereged - soon to be new species. Horse/Donkey are in the process of diverging right now. Man/Chimpanzee diverged quite recently and are now separate species.
Modern DNA sequencing makes denying the evidence rather, uh, stupid. Darwin (pre DNA) had a theory. Darwin + DNA = proof.
New species creation:
1) Red teletubbies group #1 evolve and become purple
2) Red teletubbies group #2 evolve seperately (maybe they live on their own island) and become orange
3) Purple and orange teletubbies can't successfully breed ----> Now they are separate teletubbies (since no more DNA mixing)
4) Purple teletubbies continue to evolve and maybe become tall and hairy
5) Orange teletubbies continue to evolve and maybe become short with a long tail
6) Creationist realizes that the tall hairly purple teletubbies are a different species from the short orange ones with the long tail, and falls out of his tree
The definition of species (can't interbreed) I gave you is the modern evolutionary one. The old classifications were based on external chanracteristics and are functionally meaningless. The interbreeding definition of species makes sense becuase once the DNA of two groups (formerly same species) has diverged beyond the point of them being able to interbreed then there is no going back - the DNA can no longer be mixed and therefore the newly branched species will now evolve indpendently. Correpondingly, if two populations of the same species have genetically diverged, but NOT beyond the point of being able to interbreed, then there is still a chance that they may interbreed and remix the DNA.
Lions and Tigers can interbreed (and have healthy young), therefore - by definition - they are the same species, despite looking a bit different (just as dachshunds and pitbulls are also the same species as each other, despite looking and behaving different).
Mules are (generally) sterile, so the combined DNA can't be further mixed and the interbreeding has therefore effectively failed. Actually it's more subtle than that because *sometime* a horse/donkey mix (M=mule, F=hinny) can breed, so really it's more accurate to say that horse/donkey is currently - right nbw - in the process of forming two seperate species.
Wolf and (all breeds of) dog are able to interbreed.
It's interesting how you think this is a word game rather than having anything substantive to say, or any response to the fact that I've just explained how trivial the creation of new species is. Oh well.
Do you even understand what the definition of species is? Two groups of animals are considered as a separate species if they can't successfully interbreed.
The way new species are created isn't by some magic or anything different than normal incremental change... there just becomes a point where the DNA has diverged due to those accumulated tiny incremental steps that the two groups of animals can no longer viably mate (even if they wanted to, which is unlikely).
There are animals around us in absolutely every stage of speciation you can imagine. Just to pick one, lions and tigers are close to becoming separate species... they can currently still interbreed, but in the wild they do not and therefore they will carry on diverging. Or how about horses and donkeys - just past the point of speciation - they can breed, but the offspring (mules) cannot, so they (horses, donkeys) have therefore permanently diverged into new species.
I don't know why so many people get hung up on the creation of new species as if it were something different from any other type of incremental change... I can only assume it's because people don't even realize that speciciation is just the loss of ability to interbreed.
New features require the addition of genetic code
Genes don't code for features - they are much lower level than that (creating proteins, controlling expression, etc), so putting existing genees in novel combinations also makes a unique individual (why you share features from your parents but have you own unique features too). Nowadays we can sequence DNA and see these changes directly.
The nature of evolution is necessarily to modify what has gone before in some incremental way rather than creating brand new features, but a few million generations of incremental changes (longer legs, shorter neck, more hair, etc, etc) will still create something very different (incl. new species) from the original. Old structures such as gills get repurposed into new functions such as ears as behavior and habitat changes... Legs shrink and almost disappear to turn a walking animal into a slithering snake, etc, etc. Thinking in terms of "new features" is really a wrong way to look at it - that may be the cumulative effect of millions of evolutionary steps if you look at the end points, but it's not how evolution actually occurs; evolution occurs by incrementally changing *existing* features.
You can't prove, empirically, your mechanics of evolution, can you?
;-)
The mechanics of evolution is just DNA and genetic inheretence, so I'd say it's pretty well proved!
Unless maybe you're denying that if I have more children that you then there'll be more copie of my DNA in our children's generation?
People compartmentalize, so it's not surprising to find people who are otherwise intelligent but don't accept evolution, but OTOH there comes a point where denial is a form of stupidity or abnormaility. What if I was a college graduate who didn't accept gravity, or didn't accept that we're all going to die? At what point do you say that despite the degree I'm stupid?
People can have all the additional beliefs they want, but evolution (changing of species, creation of new species) is something that HAS to happen given that we're based on a changeable hereditory mechanism. Denying that the gene pool will change due to natural selection is like denying that the sea will come in.... I don't case how many degrees you have - that's just plain dumb.
Good grief! As an ex-Brit living in the US who's considering relocating back to get away from this type of ignorance, that's pretty disheartening.
Actually, evolution is an interpretation of facts observed in nature and is thus a theory.
No... Evolution is just the word we use to describe hereditory systems that change due to "survival of the fittest". Applied to the evolution of species it was only a theory as long as it was based on a theorized heereditory mechanism... when that mechanism (DNA) was then discovered, it became a fact.
Evolution can not be wrong. It's not a theory - it's just a plain fact.
If your DNA causes you to have more children than me, then the DNA of our species has taken a step in the direction of your DNA rather than mine. If the DNA of species A group #1 has diverged from that of species A group #2 to the extent that they can't interbreed then (by definition) one of these groups is a new species.
There may be additional subtleties to how evolution actually plays out (there's plenty of post-Darwin realizations such as that it's environmental change that drives punctuated equilibrium), but the mechanism itself can't be wrong - it's just plain fact. More children = more descendents with your DNA.
is anyone else disturbed that unwavering belief in the theory of evolution has become a litmus test for intelligence?
Why is it disturbing to define intelligence as having a modicum of knowledge and rational analysis capability?
DNA + "survival of the fittest" = evolution. It's not a theory - it's just a plain consequence of the the tautology "survival of the fittest" and the fact that we're based on a naturally varying chemical hereditory mechanism (DNA). If you don't understand that people who have more children leave more descendents, or that we're based on DNA, then, YES, you are stupid.
I believe you are confused, evolution doesn't even attempt to answer the question of genesis. It only attempts to answer how we got from single cell life form to what we are today. How that single celled life form was "created" is not answered by evolution. The origin of life is a different question than the question of how organisms develop and evolve over time.
The origin of the earliest forms of "life" (simple single "cells", pre-DNA, pre_RNA) is surely one of the easiet things to answer - this is nothing more than self-sustaining chemical reactions occuring in a lipid bubble (maybe naturally occuring - oily froth by the sea shore, or maybe the fatty polymers being a product of the chemical reactions that occured inside them). I think what confuses non-scientists is how chemistry became life, since they don't realize it's just a matter of definition... at the point where your chemistry has become capable of feeding (consuming more chemicals from the enviroment), reproduction (large bubble of chemical soup splits into to), etc, then we assign the label of "life" to it... The real early "breakthru" was the formation of complex chemicals such as RNA or even simpler precursors (catalysts to begin with) that caused these early chemical soups to start to become self-defining.
Evolution is, to many, extremely unintuitive
Maybe, but this denial of evolution is a US-only phenomena. Could be related to poor US high school education I suppose (since that's the only time most people are going to be taught about it).
A man might be more easily persueded by another man over e-mail, but nothing can beat the viscerally persuasive power of a woman with a low cut top and short skirt.
What you say is true if you're looking to squeeze max perfomance out of a custom platform, but does not apply as a general solution towards concurrent programming.
As multi-core and multi-processor systems are becoming more the norm, it'd be good to see software technology such as languages and compilers keeping up. The easiest way to take advantage of hardware parallelism would be if you can somehow express that parallelism in your program rather than use a low level imperative language like C++ to painstakingly spell out how the concurrency should be implemented. An explicit thread model is about the worst possible solution because it's the most low level one, although conceivably one might create a new language by extending C++ with concurrency constructs that are compiled down to threaded code the same way early C++ compilers compiled to C. Complete paradigm shifts such as fucntional languages are also an option, but I don't see that becoming mainstream.
As far as low level and threaded programming - been there done that. I've implemented multiprocessor (mixed 68000/Z80) embedded systems entirely in assembler back in the day, and nowadays write multi-threaded Solaris code in my sleep - it's easy enough with experience, but experience also says that there are much more productive ways we could be doing this.
Yep - line printers could certainly crank it out. I remember over 30 years ago visiting a datacenter and being wowed by those things - they showed one that neeed to use a partial vaccuum to suck the paper out of the printer it was coming out so fast.
But, if you really want speed then I don't know if anything can beat a mainframe page printer - it prints a full page at a time by writing to an electrostatically charged drum that picks up the ink - same technology as photocopiers.
Well, I use an ATI 9200 based board because it's passively cooled and therefore silent. I can confirm that ATI driver support for it under Ubuntu is crap. Some people get it working with a few caveats, others don't, the Ubuntu forums have entire threads dedicated to the topic. I ended up using the buggy open source driver since it was the only way I could get acceleration working on my system. YMMV.
I'd actually be quite happy to buy a new graphic card to get better driver support if there was one that met my needs, but all the new cards seem to be intended for gaming and require active cooling which I can't tolerate in my quiet system. I also need an AGP based card and am not about to buy/build a new system just to get a new graphics card - my current 2.8GHz P4 (Northwood core) system is still plenty fast for my needs.
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US censorship currently has the weird view that extreme violence and torture are good family fun, but that an exposed breast is a terrible thing. Related to the religous right, presumably.
That's a massive logical fallacy. Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. It's also plain wrong given the existence of the gospels, the epistles, the testimony about the resurrection, the existence of the Jewish religion for millenia, the way the church has thrived in the face of persecution, personal experience of miracles and answerer prayer by some people. In some cases, some of these things do not constitute great evidence, but to suggest that there is no evidence God exists is really quite laughable.
Sure, lack of evidence doesn't PROVE that there is no god, but OTOH it also doesn't PROVE that there is no tooth fairy. However given a lack of evidence it would not be rational to believe in either.
Addressing your list of evidence:
The Gospels
I guess you're talking about miracles, since I'm not disputing that there was a historical (normal human) Jesus. You've listed the resurrection as a seperate issue, below. To keep this at least reasonably brief I'll just provide a number of bulletted points:
- Jesus was essentially a faith healer - something that exists today, and surely needs no supernatural explanation. Do I need to explain this?
- Other people such as Apollonius were also doing miracles (contemporary Christians believed in them) including bringing people back from the dead... Insert your explanation of choice here, and explain why you believe accounts of Jesus miracles, are different. One simple explanation is that the reports are in essence true (i.e not outright fabricated) but that these people were just showing few vital signs, not actually dead. Even today with infinitely better medical knowledge people sometimes wake-up in hospital morgues, revive from comas, etc. Two thousand years ago, without vaccinations, there were many more severve illnesses that were common, and even the faith healers themselves (not savages - but also not with 20th Century medical knowledge) may have believed that they were bringing people back to life by the laying on of hands, etc.
- Miracles were a competetive business, which is why apologists bemoaned Apollonius. Miracles were a way to increase stature/faith and so there was every reason to exagerate/play them up, or even outright fabricate them. Odd how many of the miracles occur at some unspecified location, or out of town, or include that people were told not to discuss them... It all creates "plausible" deniability that later failure to find eye witnesses meant anything.
- If Jesus was perfoming anything that appeared unique (certainly not!) and truly extraorinary at the time, then why did only 4 of his 12 disciples bother to record it, and of those 3 only 30 years after the fact and one 60 years after the fact? Why is this "evidence" primarily in the synoptic gospels, missing from the non-cannonical gospels, missing from any other contemporary account?
- Odd how miracles occured back then, by pagans as well as Jesus, but not today (unles you include faith healers, witch doctors, maharishis materializing books, levitating and appearing simulataneoulsy in multiple places)... Funny how none of these modern "miracles" can ever be dupicated in the lab.
Here are some more miracles for you:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=chris+angel& hl=en
Why shouldn't we believe what we see here? If someone believes and tells us, why shouldn't we believe that second hand account?
The Epistles
Makes you wonder what happened to the miracles, doesn't it. Did Paul have a vision of a resurrected Jesus or really see the man alive? Both have rational explanations.
Testimoney about the resurrection
Maybe he was seen alive after his crucifiction, maybe not. Did Paul see a vision of him, or actually see him? Who knows. We simply don't know what happened - all we can do is work with what's reported in the Bible and offer suggestions. One possibility
I'm not that familiar with Christian theology in general (not totally unfamilair either - I collect 3rd/4th C Roman coins and am very familiar with the issues that Constantine got involved with such as the Arian controversy and Donatist schism), but I agree there's no reason to doubt that it is - internally at least - consistent and rational. It may be that intellectual acceptance of Christianity is indeed based on a satisfying theology, but it would seem odd to me to accept it based on those grounds unless you also beieve the supernatural claims made for Jesus that it is based upon. It's the latter rather than the theology (which is just doctrine - not a matter of truth or falsehood) that is obviously false (presumably you agree, else you'd be a Christian).
It's belief in mind-body dualism and supernatural spirituality that I think is quite easy for many intellectuals to believe in, for the reasons that I indicated. For that matter, I think most people (not me) believe in free will (because subjectively it's so obvious) which is already a rejection of science and belief in some supernatural control of the brain, and once you've bought into that then it's a small step to accept other non-scientific beliefs such as life-after-death, etc, etc.