If there will be a scientific experiment or scientific observation showing that change of the number of chromosomes on the individual level of a species of a sexually proliferating animal could spread and produce successful progeny then I am ready to remove this division line. So far I have seen no such evidence.
Evolution, in the contrary, for its explanation of the origin of species needs a whole range of elementary steps: mutations work, of course, on the level of microevolution, that is evolution within species, but each larger scale of evolution requires addition of a SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT kind of genetic modification (there are plenty of them).
Do you have any other bright, dividing lines in mind?
Churches tend to be mutually exclusive. One can be a methodological naturalist and belong to any (non-wingnut, I suppose) church on the planet.
It's obvious that you have learned your catechism well as you will spit it back any time your comfort level drops. How about dealing with the facts and having a mature discussion?
I suppose you'll be cranky when I use a common reference source, but the fact is that your talking points are so stale that they're growing mold.
Let's look at some facts:
Yes, let's.
FACT: Darwinian evolution is NOT proved by the fossil record. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason for the theory of punctuated equilibrium is because Darwinian gradualism (yep, the one taught in your holy books) can't be supported by the evidence.
Science isn't in the business of proving anything. Everything is subject to disproof. As for punctuated equilibrium disproving gradualism, see CC201 and CC201.1.
FACT: Natural selection and every observed mutation (including beneficial mutations) result in either less genetic information or at best no new information, not more. Government behavior not withstanding, no matter how long you give it, removing information will not produce more information.
Many types of mutation are reversible. If mutating in one direction removes information, mutating in the opposite must add it. Creationists tend to get around this problem by dancing around any attempt to nail down what is meant by "information". See CB102.
FACT: Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny was discredited shortly after Haeckel fudged his drawings in the 1800s and unleashed this fraud on the earth. Yet last time I check, most of the texts used in the government churches still teach this as truth.
It's certainly a good thing, then, that recapitulation theory isn't taught any more, and that it was never a part of the theory of evolution. See CB701.1. Of course, many structures that become wildly divergent in adulthood stem from similar structures in embryos; the field of evolutionary developmental biology is built around this. And embryology does provide interesting insights into evolution.
So who is it that is imposing which religion in the schools?
I suppose it would be the ones who are constantly trying to enforce their brand of prayer and slip past the scientific method by selling their holy snake oil directly to the public, but I suppose you define religion in the public schools as "something I disagree with because it bothers my Jesus".
Fail. You're trying to show that your morality is objective, and everyone else's is subjective, and so yours (being theistic) is superior.
But there are plenty of people who claim to have objective morality, much as you do, and they're all very convinced and very conflicting. At most one of them can be right; chances are you're not. In fact, what you slap the label "objective" on is nothing more than tradition, revelation and authority--not very good ways of knowing anything at all.
In short, nobody's morality is objective. Claiming that yours is just makes you more dangerous, as you'll probably do all kinds of freaky shit in its name--and if you won't, someone will do it on your behalf.
The observation that aspects of living forms seem to be too complex, or fit together in too coordinated a way to come about as proscribed by the leading theory, is a valid argument for a science
Already said, but it bears repeating: No, it's not. It's the argument from ignorance, or, if you wish, the argument from personal incredulity,
and even if the evidence doesn't exist to resolve that argument one way or the other.
What is it that you think there's insufficient evidence for?
But those considerations are exactly what will most likely motivate the next generation to figure out how to get the evidence to shed more light on the process of evolution, and what truly is and is not possible under the leading theory.
Oh, please. The idea of intelligent design is a non-theory, a formalized throwing up of our hands in confusion. "Those considerations" are a waste of time and serve to misinform the public in the service of a medieval-at-best agenda; to claim that they're somehow good for the advancement of science is sheer bullshit.
It's rude to criticize someone's beliefs. But when they stick those beliefs into the public sphere, they're subject to just as much mockery and derision as anything else is. The moral, one would think, is to keep religion the hell out of politics, but some people just can't grasp that.
Yep, I expected this would provoke the inevitable attacks on religious people by that predictable band of/.ers who apparently never think about anything else.
Feel free to look at the recent comments list of anyone mocking creationism in this thread. I'd wager you that most if not all of them think about "anything else".
Also, these aren't attacks on religious people (pro tip: really good whiners use the phrase "people of faith" for maximum martyrdom); they're attacks on taking Bronze Age myths seriously, which is a ridiculous thing to do--it deserves ridicule, and damn skippy we're going to serve it up.
As someone else pointed out, the KT boundary was 65 Mya, not 85. Also, early mammals of that era are usually described as "shrew-like" (also nocturnal, which is why we all have different color vision systems than reptiles), so probably even smaller than that.
The line that would eventually give rise to the mammals split from the reptile lineage before the emergency of the dinosaurs (the number cited is 324 Mya); look up "synapsid" for more information. It was actually the dominant type of land fauna until the greatest mass extinction in history at the end of the Permian (250 Mya), which was followed by the emergence of the dinosaurs. There were large synapsids in the early years of the Mesozoic, but the branch that would give rise to the mammals--the cynodonts--emerged about 220 Mya. There's a rather exhaustive description over at Wikipedia; also see talkorigins.
On a more relevant note, consider the whales. It appears now that whales are more closely related to hippos than hippos are to cows. (Again, see Wikipedia for a good summary.) This was mightily confusing, because we generally take phenotypic change as an indicator of distance between species. The important thing to remember here is that species change due to pressures put on them. Rapid pressures brought on by migration into a new environment (like the sea, for example) will cause a greater rate of phenotype change than would exist if the environment remained constant--consider the shark for this latter case.
Also, as another commenter has pointed out, the mammalian lineages had already split at that point; divergence points for some groups of mammals are after the KT boundary, but many are before it. However, it appears that even though the groups were separate, they all looked pretty much alike until they migrated into the niches vacated by the dinosaurs and diverged widely.
And lastly, your math isn't quite right. 7 million years (the divergence point for the chimp and human lineages, notwithstanding a very poorly written article) is more like a tenth of the time it took to get from (many kinds of!) shrew-like mammals to a similar level of mammalian diversity to what we see today.
Any theory is subject to revision based on new evidence. Nobody's trying to "PROVE evolution". Common descent is the best explanation for the dual-nested hierarchy that we see; a theory is simply the best explanation.
If you've proven it, where are the repeatable experiments that are accurately matched by your theory? People that speak in absolutes tend to be the bane of science.
So... does that mean that you're "skeptical" about evolution?
We are perfectly capable of making half a ton vehicle transporting 2 adults and a child at 35mph while not contributing much to global warming and minimizing risk to others regardless of driver's level or impairment.
Yes, but the reason people drive two-ton-and-up behemoths isn't safety regulations; it's partly the weird status-symbol thing of having a large vehicle, and partly the arms-race thing due to other people driving said behemoths. Safety regulations aren't a limiting factor; why would you think they are?
well guess what, men feel angry and insulted when articles are put out assuming every mans a sexist pig and that women should live their lives and view everything through a prism of assumed sexism.
If you don't act like a sexist pig, then that article clearly isn't about you, now is it?
But the problem is that, I would suppose, even if you don't act like that, you almost certainly remain silent when other people do, thus giving your tacit consent to that sort of conduct.
The rest of your comment is repeating what the rest of the comments say: you don't see what the bitches are so uppity about, why can't they just shut up, why do they hate men so much, and so on. Have you been reading the posts from women here? (Given the atmosphere, it's surprising that any bother to post.) It's remarkably insensitive of you to, when confronted with evidence that the IT workplace is unfriendly to women, start whining that your tender, tender fee-fees have been bruised, and that women--who are dealing with actual trouble in the workplace--apologize to you for daring to rock your overprivileged boat.
Look, you're comparing people who have undergone real hardship at work with the tears you're shedding over having to (gasp, horror) hear about it. Doesn't that strike you as at least a little inequitable?
The impressive thing, to me, is all the whiners complaining that there's no such thing as sexism, and why do the damned women have to be so uppity, right between a story tagged "bitches" and "misandry" and comments consisting of misogynist copypasta and "back in the kitchen" jokes. If ever one was to doubt that IT culture is unfriendly toward women, I think the Slashdot response to the article is evidence aplenty.
But Bush's proposal wouldn't have fixed solvency issues with Social Security--depending on the exact plan chosen, it might have a negative effect, but certainly not a positive one. It was essentially a proposal to get rid of Social Security as it's understood and replace it with something completely different under the same name.
I was expecting to get some over-defensive crap, maybe some Internet Tough Guy talking about how he could kick my ass, but that was actually pretty interesting. Do you know the relationship between the set of people who play WoW and the subset who play it addictively? Do you think that the obsessive-geeky stereotype is more likely to develop a gaming problem, or does it seem to hit people more or less randomly once they start playing?
Addiction to things that are not physically addictive is a symptom of depression, not a disease in itself.
Are you sure you don't have the battery plugged in backwards there? Isn't watching the circle of your life contract until it only contains you and your addiction pretty depressing in and of itself? (It sure sounds depressing.) Which came first? Does this apply to sex, gambling, or other addictions? Why do you feel that the nature of chemical addiction is different from other kinds of addiction, especially when both have been shown to cause similar effects on brain chemistry?
We get bored, I think, so that we won't end up in situations like the WoW addicts, endlessly repeating a few short actions. We get bored so that we won't get stuck. It's a protective instinct. However it's done, MMORPGs are excellent at short-circuiting that. You have a quick succession of rewards at the beginning, and an endless series of ever more time-consuming tasks to be performed to achieve the same high that was at first so simple and so easy. I'm sure most addicts didn't start out intending to play for ninety hours a week, just like no one starts drinking with the intent of being an alcoholic.
I liked Warcraft III, and I enjoyed playing it all the way through. But it had an ending. It could be completed, finished, done with. WoW has no ending, and that's why I won't go near it, no matter how much fun it looks like--it's similar to the reason I didn't start smoking when I was younger: loads of cautionary examples walking around hating themselves for their habit.
"Any game against this player will end in, at best, a stalemate" and "This player never loses; this player is impossible to beat" are the same. The second one just doesn't mention the possibility of a draw, so it can easily be read the wrong way.
It doesn't matter whether or not authors think copyright law is fair. Mark Twain thought anything short of infinite copyright was immoral. But it's not up to the authors to decide that; they can hate the length of copyright as much as car manufacturers hate mileage standards, and it shouldn't have any bearing on how the question is decided.
The argument that works passing into the public domain are somehow stealing an author's wealth is the same one used by advocates of infinite copyright. The problem is that there's no ending to that--if you think that intellectual property should be treated the same way as real property, then it's always wrong for the government to come in and socialize your stuff so that some punk kid can score your music for free.
If you're not arguing for infinite copyright, you can't argue for the inherent wrongness of the public domain's existence. If you're arguing for the benefit of the creators, you're going to have to explain why the government has an interest in enriching them at the expense of everyone else. If your response to that is that having active creators benefits everyone, then you're not arguing from the creators' benefit any more.
... but it sure would have been nice if we'd started dumping hundreds of millions of bucks into fossil fuel alternatives the last time oil went through the roof. Seriously, this should have been a solved problem ten years ago. But no, OPEC decided to open the taps and no one wanted to use a half-ounce of foresight, and we stuck the needle back in our collective arm.
Slashdot Mirror
But there are plenty of people who claim to have objective morality, much as you do, and they're all very convinced and very conflicting. At most one of them can be right; chances are you're not. In fact, what you slap the label "objective" on is nothing more than tradition, revelation and authority--not very good ways of knowing anything at all.
In short, nobody's morality is objective. Claiming that yours is just makes you more dangerous, as you'll probably do all kinds of freaky shit in its name--and if you won't, someone will do it on your behalf.
I think Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is relevant here.
It's rude to criticize someone's beliefs. But when they stick those beliefs into the public sphere, they're subject to just as much mockery and derision as anything else is. The moral, one would think, is to keep religion the hell out of politics, but some people just can't grasp that.
Also, these aren't attacks on religious people (pro tip: really good whiners use the phrase "people of faith" for maximum martyrdom); they're attacks on taking Bronze Age myths seriously, which is a ridiculous thing to do--it deserves ridicule, and damn skippy we're going to serve it up.
As someone else pointed out, the KT boundary was 65 Mya, not 85. Also, early mammals of that era are usually described as "shrew-like" (also nocturnal, which is why we all have different color vision systems than reptiles), so probably even smaller than that.
The line that would eventually give rise to the mammals split from the reptile lineage before the emergency of the dinosaurs (the number cited is 324 Mya); look up "synapsid" for more information. It was actually the dominant type of land fauna until the greatest mass extinction in history at the end of the Permian (250 Mya), which was followed by the emergence of the dinosaurs. There were large synapsids in the early years of the Mesozoic, but the branch that would give rise to the mammals--the cynodonts--emerged about 220 Mya. There's a rather exhaustive description over at Wikipedia; also see talkorigins.
On a more relevant note, consider the whales. It appears now that whales are more closely related to hippos than hippos are to cows. (Again, see Wikipedia for a good summary.) This was mightily confusing, because we generally take phenotypic change as an indicator of distance between species. The important thing to remember here is that species change due to pressures put on them. Rapid pressures brought on by migration into a new environment (like the sea, for example) will cause a greater rate of phenotype change than would exist if the environment remained constant--consider the shark for this latter case.
Also, as another commenter has pointed out, the mammalian lineages had already split at that point; divergence points for some groups of mammals are after the KT boundary, but many are before it. However, it appears that even though the groups were separate, they all looked pretty much alike until they migrated into the niches vacated by the dinosaurs and diverged widely.
And lastly, your math isn't quite right. 7 million years (the divergence point for the chimp and human lineages, notwithstanding a very poorly written article) is more like a tenth of the time it took to get from (many kinds of!) shrew-like mammals to a similar level of mammalian diversity to what we see today.
Any theory is subject to revision based on new evidence. Nobody's trying to "PROVE evolution". Common descent is the best explanation for the dual-nested hierarchy that we see; a theory is simply the best explanation.
You'd need a very subtle knife for that kind of work.
Intel has been supporting open source drivers for their video hardware for quite some time now. I suppose the hardware isn't nearly as sexy as that from nVidia or ATI, but it is an option.
If you don't act like a sexist pig, then that article clearly isn't about you, now is it?
But the problem is that, I would suppose, even if you don't act like that, you almost certainly remain silent when other people do, thus giving your tacit consent to that sort of conduct.
The rest of your comment is repeating what the rest of the comments say: you don't see what the bitches are so uppity about, why can't they just shut up, why do they hate men so much, and so on. Have you been reading the posts from women here? (Given the atmosphere, it's surprising that any bother to post.) It's remarkably insensitive of you to, when confronted with evidence that the IT workplace is unfriendly to women, start whining that your tender, tender fee-fees have been bruised, and that women--who are dealing with actual trouble in the workplace--apologize to you for daring to rock your overprivileged boat.
Look, you're comparing people who have undergone real hardship at work with the tears you're shedding over having to (gasp, horror) hear about it. Doesn't that strike you as at least a little inequitable?
The impressive thing, to me, is all the whiners complaining that there's no such thing as sexism, and why do the damned women have to be so uppity, right between a story tagged "bitches" and "misandry" and comments consisting of misogynist copypasta and "back in the kitchen" jokes. If ever one was to doubt that IT culture is unfriendly toward women, I think the Slashdot response to the article is evidence aplenty.
No, no. Anonymous is actually *two* people. You and the one other guy that's posting, you know?
(Also, given the '~~~~', do you hit some kind of internet trifecta for being on Slashdot, 4chan *and* Wikipedia?)
... that sig about "landing strips for gay martians, I swear to god" would actually be relevant.
But Bush's proposal wouldn't have fixed solvency issues with Social Security--depending on the exact plan chosen, it might have a negative effect, but certainly not a positive one. It was essentially a proposal to get rid of Social Security as it's understood and replace it with something completely different under the same name.
I was expecting to get some over-defensive crap, maybe some Internet Tough Guy talking about how he could kick my ass, but that was actually pretty interesting. Do you know the relationship between the set of people who play WoW and the subset who play it addictively? Do you think that the obsessive-geeky stereotype is more likely to develop a gaming problem, or does it seem to hit people more or less randomly once they start playing?
Are you sure you don't have the battery plugged in backwards there? Isn't watching the circle of your life contract until it only contains you and your addiction pretty depressing in and of itself? (It sure sounds depressing.) Which came first? Does this apply to sex, gambling, or other addictions? Why do you feel that the nature of chemical addiction is different from other kinds of addiction, especially when both have been shown to cause similar effects on brain chemistry?
We get bored, I think, so that we won't end up in situations like the WoW addicts, endlessly repeating a few short actions. We get bored so that we won't get stuck. It's a protective instinct. However it's done, MMORPGs are excellent at short-circuiting that. You have a quick succession of rewards at the beginning, and an endless series of ever more time-consuming tasks to be performed to achieve the same high that was at first so simple and so easy. I'm sure most addicts didn't start out intending to play for ninety hours a week, just like no one starts drinking with the intent of being an alcoholic.
I liked Warcraft III, and I enjoyed playing it all the way through. But it had an ending. It could be completed, finished, done with. WoW has no ending, and that's why I won't go near it, no matter how much fun it looks like--it's similar to the reason I didn't start smoking when I was younger: loads of cautionary examples walking around hating themselves for their habit.
I think it's more that the average old lady could kick the ass of the average WoW addict.
"Any game against this player will end in, at best, a stalemate" and "This player never loses; this player is impossible to beat" are the same. The second one just doesn't mention the possibility of a draw, so it can easily be read the wrong way.
It doesn't matter whether or not authors think copyright law is fair. Mark Twain thought anything short of infinite copyright was immoral. But it's not up to the authors to decide that; they can hate the length of copyright as much as car manufacturers hate mileage standards, and it shouldn't have any bearing on how the question is decided.
The argument that works passing into the public domain are somehow stealing an author's wealth is the same one used by advocates of infinite copyright. The problem is that there's no ending to that--if you think that intellectual property should be treated the same way as real property, then it's always wrong for the government to come in and socialize your stuff so that some punk kid can score your music for free.
If you're not arguing for infinite copyright, you can't argue for the inherent wrongness of the public domain's existence. If you're arguing for the benefit of the creators, you're going to have to explain why the government has an interest in enriching them at the expense of everyone else. If your response to that is that having active creators benefits everyone, then you're not arguing from the creators' benefit any more.
... but it sure would have been nice if we'd started dumping hundreds of millions of bucks into fossil fuel alternatives the last time oil went through the roof. Seriously, this should have been a solved problem ten years ago. But no, OPEC decided to open the taps and no one wanted to use a half-ounce of foresight, and we stuck the needle back in our collective arm.
And, of course we have yo-yos who want to believe that oil is infinite to add to the mix. Brilliant.