It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country.
Sais-tu, t'es dans mes "amis" de slashdot, mais avec une attitude comme celle-là, c'est assé tentant de t'enlever de cette liste.
And you apparently are unaware of the existance of Canada. Sad.
Nonsense. Posts/threads in a non-English language are NOT spam.
Messages unrellated to the subject of a community sent to all members of that community are spam.
I got tons of these until I disabled recieving messages sent to communities.
you can't be bothered to try to learn another language.
Why should I be bothered into learning brazilian portugese just because I joined the Simpson's community? A community who's description is in english and that is about a show that is in english. There is a portugese Simpson's community, that is a place to discuss the portugese version of the Simpsons. Its really annoying when you just keep recieving unsollicited messages in a language you do not understand because you joined a community to discuss something you enjoy with others.
The whole point of joining the community was to join a discussion, I can't discuss it if its in a language I don't speak, and I joined a community that was established in a language I understood. Its very annoying!
You think Heinlein wouldn't hurl seeing Strship Troopers? The lack of respect stretches from the original work to the end consumers intelligence. I am frequently mystified as to why movie studios feel these stories (ST as a prime example) are not mass market ready as they are.
I do not respect the intelligence of anyone who thinks the Starship Troopers movie wasn't intelligent.
Just because its got pretty people and violence doesn't mean that there isn't a second layer of intelligent social commentary.
Although Asimov did try to write stories about robots
Stop implying that he failed.
In Caves, a robot transported the weapon that served in a murder. In Nake sun, a robot with detachable limbs gave its arm to a woman with which she bludgered her husband. In Empire, a Solarian robot tries to kill a human being because her definition of such a being depends on his accent.
Used as an unwitting tool to help, but not participate, in a murder.
Used as a blunt object (his brain was fried by that, he couldn't deal).
Played with the difinition of "human" (also discussed in "Robot Dreams' in another fashion).
None of these are rampaging hordes of killbots like what we see in this movie's trailers. All of these were done in a smart, intelligent, toughtfull, non rampaging hordes of killbots kinda way.
One of Asimov's late-career novels "The Bicentennial Man(*)" was made into a movie several years ago, starring Robin Williams. Its plot was about a Pinnochio-like robot who progressively becomes more human.
That movie took out the novel's motivation for the robot to want so badly to be human, and replaced it with the usual hollywood "love conquers all" crap.
In the "Bicentenial man" novel, SPOILER SPOILERY SPOILING SPOILER, there is a scene where he is walking alone on a country road, and two rednecks in a pick up stop, and start to order him to first take off his clothes, and then to dismantle himself. Being a positronic robot, he is forced to obey any human, so long as they do not order him to harm a human. And so he is forced to humiliate and then harm himself. This is a very disturbing scene of rape-like abuse that illustrates why the robot would be willing to become mortal: For freedom. A very relevant notion when in the context of the independance bicentennial (subtle too). So he wanted to be human because humans don't have to obey abusive orders from other humans, he wanted freedom, he wanted to be able to say "no" when someone says "take off your own arm".
But they took that distrubing and moving scene from the movie, to sanitize it, and in so doing took out the story's entire premise! They replaced it with "he wants to be human because he's in love". What? He's allready in love, and loved by his beloved, being human changes jack shit to that. They ruined it.
This Will "the fresh prince" Smith vehicle, however, is much worse. Its simply using Asimov's name to add some visibility to an unrellated script! Its a movie about rampaging killbots, dressed up superficially with some of Asimov's copyrighted names and concepts for marketing reasons. Its horrible, dishonest, evil.
many people take the three laws of robotics as if they were actual laws
These are probably the same people who think that Kevin Warwick is the first cyborg. Meh, there was a blind guy with cables connected to his brain sticking out from the back of his skull for a dozen years before that Warwick blowhard started claiming that getting a transponder under his skin made him a cyborg...I hate that guy.
Ironically, when they mention the laws as if they are true, they actually point out that they had never read the aforementioned tales.
Not so much "ironic" as "obvious", though I guess one could expect them to obfuscate their ignorance rather than mentioning it. Had they read the tales, they wouldn't be ignorantly spounting off about them, now would they? : )
Sure, it was the basis for dozens of books, all very well written and filled with intelligent dialog. But you just totally blew me away there. Crap you say? How so very insightfull!
We are talking about software systems
No, we are talking about positronic brains, which it turns out are not possible, but were an interresting science fiction concept in the nineteen forties.
buggy, incomplete, and able to do things the creators never imagined.
Which is exactly what the Robot stories were all about. Exploring the many buggy, unexpected behaviours that would result from these very simple laws.
What Asimov brought to robotics (besides the word itself, which appears to have been coined by Asimov, although I believe he himself said he was sure he had heard it before he used it) was the notion that they were simply tools. A robot would resent being a slave no more than a car or screwdriver does. Also, like other tools that can be dangerous, there would be safeguards. Hence, the three laws.
Thank you. Asimov wrote robot stories that were the opposite of the usual Frankenstein rehash. And from the rampaging hordes of killbots we get to see in this trailer, and from that review up there, its clear that they co-opted Asimov's good name make one more Frankenstein rehash.
the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.
The child shall have the right to freedom of expression;
the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
etc.
Yeah, wishy washy stuff there. Right to life, free speech, freedom of religion... who could possibly care about stuff like that? Certainly not the U.S.A., they would never care about a document that grants such rights...
Unicef, UN, and Amnisty International can all bite me with their anti-American spew.
That's funny, because there was nothing anti-american in my post. I simply named the 2 countries on earth who refused to ratify the declaration on the rights of children.
so, you're saying that kids of Iran, Iraq (two years ago), Afghanistan (3 years ago) Syria, and the like all have a right to privacy?
Yes, they had a right to it. Maybe their rights were being violated...but they had rights.
Where's the UN on the Sudan? Rwanda?
When the genocides started in Rwanda in 1994, the U.N. tried to move in with a peacekeeping force, but the move was blocked by the U.S. because they didn't think the deathtoll of hundreds of thousands of africans was high enough to risk U.S. soldier casualties that might result from their participation.
The religious right probably isn't up in arms abou this because, it has been prophesied. Therefore it must happen. And in their prophesy, the end result is ultimately good. They are sitting in anticipation of the rapture -- they probably want the RFID tagging to happen faster so the rapture comes sooner.
I guess I should expect logic from people like that, but it seems to me that supporting the devils work because it has been prophetised shouldn't be a good excuse when you get to heaven's gates...
Right to privacy, yes, in the sense that companies & strangers can't hound them. Parents, however...
Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
But hey, why not. Tag 'em, bag 'em, 'cause you don't want no one to grab 'em...
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
Mutations are not adaptations. Adaptations are mostly beneficial. I submit that mutations are generally bad. Tell my nephew with Down Syndrome that mutations are not generally bad for him.
Mutations can be either bad, good, or neutral.
If you have a mutation that shifts your perception of the colour blue a little bit compared to the rest of humanity, it is neutral. You still have the ability to percieve the colour blue, you just see a wavelenght that is slightly out of synch with the one your parents saw. If you have a genetic mutation that lets you hold your breath a little longer, it is beneficial. If you have a mutation that gives you Down syndrome, it is bad.
Without widespread DNA analysis, you will never find most neutral and beneficial mutations. But the bad ones stand out, and so you assume that most are bad.
The Bible contains poetry, prose, narrative, and parable. Reading poetry as literal description is foolishness, and a bit of a red herring.
So who gets to pick and choose when your god's word is to be taken literally and when he was being poetical, or funny?
Maybe the whole thing about stoning people for wearing shirts that have two or more different fibers in their weaving was a jest that got out of hand? Or maybe god really wants everyone who's ever worn a cotton poly-blend to die a bloody death?
I'm inclined to give God the benefit of the doubt because of the consistency that I see in the majority of the rest of the Bible.
Yeah, when you have editors tweaking a book for five thousand years, they do manage to end up with some level of consistency.
If the real explanation is something supernatural, how is it unreasonable to consider that the supernatural is a possibility? Doesn't it seem unreasonable to suggest that the supernatural is impossible?
If the only explanation you can find is SUPERnatural, your understanding of the natural world is unsufficient.
Why did the rains not come this year?
God must be angry with us!
It must be a witch!
A cyclic heat redistribution disturbed the normal weather patterns and caused the prevailing winds to shift to the north.
If you do not understand the real world, you make stuff up to explain it, or accept and regurgitate fiction that was fed to you by what you consider a trustworthy source.
Some dude did pray for the sun to stop, (Joshua in Joshua chapter 10) and the Bible says that it did. It says something similar in 2 Kings chapter 20 about Hezekiah. Did it? I think it did
Well well, one wild claim, no proof at ALL except the claim itself, and you believe it. And you want to give lessons to others about the need for empirical proof? You can't fanthom that an eye would evolve step by step, but you accept, just because this one book says so, that the rotation of the earth stopped abruptly for a while? Puh-lease.
Evolution is not a great explanation, but it's the best naturalistic explanation that scientists have been able to come up with.
THAT is true. And creationism was the best explanation that myth makers could come up with. Its just sad that some people confuse myths and science.
Respectfully, Anomaly
I do talk down to people who confuse science and mythology. Especially those that are absurdly uncritical when it comes to stuff in the bible and are at the same time excessively critical to stuff published in Science. Inconsistency like that...its irritating, and it doesn't really inspire confidence or respect. But I do not assume a lack of intelligence in their part. People can simultaneously be very intelligent when it comes to most thing and incredibly thick-headed and irrationnal when it comes to emotionally potent issues to which they have been conditioned to think and feel a certain way.
Religion is a crutch to help us poor little humans deal with the complexities
Tell that to that family in Italy that never gets heart attacks. Or that superbaby from Germany that was on/. not long ago (though they don't know if he'll stay healthy...lets see).
You make a HUGE logical leap by going from "most mutations are bad" to "there cannot be enough good mutations". Most mutations that we notice are bad, because their badness makes them noticed. How many neutral or subtlelly beneficial mutations go by unnoticed? You do not know. Stop claiming "most" when you don't have the numbers.
Creation science as religious dogma. This one is precious. We all have a worldview bias. Creationists, evolutionists, deists, atheists - all of us. Science is pressed forward by people with a bias.
Next time you are sick, or injured. Don't rely on medical science, just go see a preacher and have him pray your illness away. He claims that Jesus has the power to heal, have him prove it to you. Have him prove it tto you with the numbers that medical science can give.
Did praying ever stop an epidemy? Did polio go away magically by praying it away or was it cured by medical science?
There are two groups, both claiming to know how the world works, both claiming that they have power over that world. One can prove it, the other has a very convoluted argument to explain why they can't prove it. Science demonstrate its power every day, right now, typing away on the result of many scientific wonders. Religion, however, doesn't.
Religion is not the equal of science. Religion requires faith, science provides proof.
"Holy writings said the earth was flat." Rubbish. They never did.
Oh yes, it does. I don't have the time to dig this one out, but it does say somewhere in the bible that the sky is a dome over the earth, and in another chapter that some dude prayed for the sun to stop its trek in the sky.
If the best reasonable explanation is that something supernatural occured, perhaps that's really the answer.
It is never the best reasonable argument that "it was magic". Sorry. The supernatural is the stuff we tell ourselves to quiet our troubled minds when something happens that cannot be exlpained by what we know. It stops being ok when you desperatly hold on to these makeshift explanations in the face of a real explanation.
Most serious creationists are not the flaming morons that they are assumed to be in Slashdot circles.
Not "assumed to be", make that "repeatedly prove to be".
Microevolution (adaptation) does repeat in nature and under lab conditions, is observable, and therefore is scientifically documented. Who can argue with good science?
Trolls, and a hell of a lot of creationists.
Macroevolution (from one type of creature to another) has not been observed
Yes it has, agriculture has created many new species to suit our needs. Corn was once about the size of rice, but through carefull selection it grew to be the huge, tasty meal we now know. Not to mention what we did to wolves. Put a wolf and a chihuahua side by side, its hard to believe one came from the other. Some might argue that the chihuahua is more of a devolution, but hey, its a change (and a beneficiary change: it allows him to survive in a human-dominated environment whereas normal wolves tend to be exterminated). But then that's just tweaking... though most of evolution is tweaking. The difference between a wolf and a buffalo isn't that great. They are both four legged furry creatures with lungs and one 4 chamber heart, a bone-encased spinal chord, etc.
What you want to do, instead of looking for something that takes eons to happen in your lifetime, is look at the intermediate forms that still survive.
Take for example the transition between fish and mammals. You have plenty of mid-evolution snapshots to look at. You have fish with bony flippers, fish with oxygen-absorbing swimming bladder (the swimming bladder is an organ filled with air that regulates buoyancy in fish), and the conditions where these fish live. The air-gulping fish live in rivers that regularly dry up, the air breathing allows them to survive there while other fish die out. There is that freaky chinese fish that can cross dry land, by breathing and slithering around. Clearly a first step towards land life.
Then amphybians, lizards, and finally mammals. you can see the evolution in internal organs as well as in exterior appearance. Amphibians have primitive lungs, more advanced than the swimming bladders they evolved from, but not quite as good as what mammals have, reptiles have lungs like ours (negative pressure lungs). Lizards have brains with many features that are physically similar to features of mamalian brains, they even perform the same functions, but mammals have an additional layer to their brain. Etc.
And microevolutionary changes causing macrochanges have been demonstrated by mutating fruit flies. They didn't create a new species, just deformed mutants, but its a proof that changes in just one gene can have drastic effects on the outward appearance of the animal.
Its all there for persons of good faith to look at. The only persons that deny it are the same sort of persons that refused to look in Gallileo's telescope. Arguing blindly.
there was a time that that the prevailing scientific wisdom was that the earth was the center of the universe. Today we reject that. At some point science may reject Macroevolution, too.
It wasn't the prevailing scientific knowledge, it was the dogmatic truth imposed by the exact same religious institutions that deny biology today as they denied cosmology in the past. Its quite amazing that you would use the greatest historical example of religious denial of scientific fact to support your religious denial of scientific fact.
The scientific proof that the earth was round had been found thousands of years ago, by observing the earth's shadow on the moon and the shadows of a stick of a known length on the same day at different points on the earth. But that knowledge was buried by religion because their "holy" writings said the earth was flat, and so saying otherwise was not allowed (unless you enjoyed being burned alive).
There is no such thing as creation science. Its religious dogma dressed up in scientific nomenclature. Its a travesty.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, it is; living biological tissue [...] it is most certainly a living thing.
My appendix is not living biological tissue.
My appendix is not a living thing.
God specially created all living things, including your appendix.
My appendix is not a living thing.
Clearly the churches tell the truth and worshipping there will make you safe from the wrath of god!
Its not like they are in denial or anything.
We have faith in God because He has proven Himself trustworthy, time after time after time.
No, he hasn't.
Knowing beyond doubt that God exists
Because why?
You had a nice rational post going there...and WHAM, some random assumption stated as undeniable fact.
Sigh : (
It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country.
Sais-tu, t'es dans mes "amis" de slashdot, mais avec une attitude comme celle-là, c'est assé tentant de t'enlever de cette liste.
And you apparently are unaware of the existance of Canada. Sad.
Nonsense. Posts/threads in a non-English language are NOT spam.
Messages unrellated to the subject of a community sent to all members of that community are spam.
I got tons of these until I disabled recieving messages sent to communities.
you can't be bothered to try to learn another language.
Why should I be bothered into learning brazilian portugese just because I joined the Simpson's community? A community who's description is in english and that is about a show that is in english.
There is a portugese Simpson's community, that is a place to discuss the portugese version of the Simpsons. Its really annoying when you just keep recieving unsollicited messages in a language you do not understand because you joined a community to discuss something you enjoy with others.
The whole point of joining the community was to join a discussion, I can't discuss it if its in a language I don't speak, and I joined a community that was established in a language I understood. Its very annoying!
You think Heinlein wouldn't hurl seeing Strship Troopers? The lack of respect stretches from the original work to the end consumers intelligence. I am frequently mystified as to why movie studios feel these stories (ST as a prime example) are not mass market ready as they are.
I do not respect the intelligence of anyone who thinks the Starship Troopers movie wasn't intelligent.
Just because its got pretty people and violence doesn't mean that there isn't a second layer of intelligent social commentary.
Memorable themes seem to be needed in musicals, superhero movies and... Titanic, I guess. :)
Star Wars...
Stop implying that he failed.
In Caves, a robot transported the weapon that served in a murder. In Nake sun, a robot with detachable limbs gave its arm to a woman with which she bludgered her husband. In Empire, a Solarian robot tries to kill a human being because her definition of such a being depends on his accent.
None of these are rampaging hordes of killbots like what we see in this movie's trailers. All of these were done in a smart, intelligent, toughtfull, non rampaging hordes of killbots kinda way.
One of Asimov's late-career novels "The Bicentennial Man(*)" was made into a movie several years ago, starring Robin Williams. Its plot was about a Pinnochio-like robot who progressively becomes more human.
That movie took out the novel's motivation for the robot to want so badly to be human, and replaced it with the usual hollywood "love conquers all" crap.
In the "Bicentenial man" novel, SPOILER SPOILERY SPOILING SPOILER, there is a scene where he is walking alone on a country road, and two rednecks in a pick up stop, and start to order him to first take off his clothes, and then to dismantle himself. Being a positronic robot, he is forced to obey any human, so long as they do not order him to harm a human. And so he is forced to humiliate and then harm himself. This is a very disturbing scene of rape-like abuse that illustrates why the robot would be willing to become mortal: For freedom. A very relevant notion when in the context of the independance bicentennial (subtle too).
So he wanted to be human because humans don't have to obey abusive orders from other humans, he wanted freedom, he wanted to be able to say "no" when someone says "take off your own arm".
But they took that distrubing and moving scene from the movie, to sanitize it, and in so doing took out the story's entire premise! They replaced it with "he wants to be human because he's in love". What? He's allready in love, and loved by his beloved, being human changes jack shit to that. They ruined it.
This Will "the fresh prince" Smith vehicle, however, is much worse. Its simply using Asimov's name to add some visibility to an unrellated script! Its a movie about rampaging killbots, dressed up superficially with some of Asimov's copyrighted names and concepts for marketing reasons. Its horrible, dishonest, evil.
I don't think that refers to privacy from their own parents.
RTFA
many people take the three laws of robotics as if they were actual laws
These are probably the same people who think that Kevin Warwick is the first cyborg.
Meh, there was a blind guy with cables connected to his brain sticking out from the back of his skull for a dozen years before that Warwick blowhard started claiming that getting a transponder under his skin made him a cyborg...I hate that guy.
Ironically, when they mention the laws as if they are true, they actually point out that they had never read the aforementioned tales.
Not so much "ironic" as "obvious", though I guess one could expect them to obfuscate their ignorance rather than mentioning it.
Had they read the tales, they wouldn't be ignorantly spounting off about them, now would they? : )
The "Three Laws Safe" idea is crap.
Sure, it was the basis for dozens of books, all very well written and filled with intelligent dialog.
But you just totally blew me away there. Crap you say? How so very insightfull!
We are talking about software systems
No, we are talking about positronic brains, which it turns out are not possible, but were an interresting science fiction concept in the nineteen forties.
buggy, incomplete, and able to do things the creators never imagined.
Which is exactly what the Robot stories were all about. Exploring the many buggy, unexpected behaviours that would result from these very simple laws.
What Asimov brought to robotics (besides the word itself, which appears to have been coined by Asimov, although I believe he himself said he was sure he had heard it before he used it) was the notion that they were simply tools. A robot would resent being a slave no more than a car or screwdriver does. Also, like other tools that can be dangerous, there would be safeguards. Hence, the three laws.
Thank you.
Asimov wrote robot stories that were the opposite of the usual Frankenstein rehash. And from the rampaging hordes of killbots we get to see in this trailer, and from that review up there, its clear that they co-opted Asimov's good name make one more Frankenstein rehash.
Yeah, wishy washy stuff there. Right to life, free speech, freedom of religion... who could possibly care about stuff like that? Certainly not the U.S.A., they would never care about a document that grants such rights...
Since when does anyone take orders from Unicef, or the UN for that matter? This is like saying that because the Communist Party...
Yes, yes, they're all dirty red commies.
Unicef, UN, and Amnisty International can all bite me with their anti-American spew.
That's funny, because there was nothing anti-american in my post. I simply named the 2 countries on earth who refused to ratify the declaration on the rights of children.
so, you're saying that kids of Iran, Iraq (two years ago), Afghanistan (3 years ago) Syria, and the like all have a right to privacy?
Yes, they had a right to it.
Maybe their rights were being violated...but they had rights.
Where's the UN on the Sudan? Rwanda?
When the genocides started in Rwanda in 1994, the U.N. tried to move in with a peacekeeping force, but the move was blocked by the U.S. because they didn't think the deathtoll of hundreds of thousands of africans was high enough to risk U.S. soldier casualties that might result from their participation.
Where's Unicef on female genital mutilation?
Here.
The religious right probably isn't up in arms abou this because, it has been prophesied. Therefore it must happen. And in their prophesy, the end result is ultimately good. They are sitting in anticipation of the rapture -- they probably want the RFID tagging to happen faster so the rapture comes sooner.
I guess I should expect logic from people like that, but it seems to me that supporting the devils work because it has been prophetised shouldn't be a good excuse when you get to heaven's gates...
Tag 'em, bag 'em, 'cause you don't want no one to grab 'em...
Children don't have a "right" to privacy.
In all the countries of the world, except the United States of America and Somalia, they do.
Article 16
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
I'm just waiting for the conspiracy theorists on this one:
It's the sign on the devil!
What I want to know is why the religious right isn't all up in arms about that one.
The goverment is actually moving forward with apocalyptic prophecies, doing the beast's work no less, and the religious groups are not on this? Why?
Mutations can be either bad, good, or neutral.
If you have a mutation that shifts your perception of the colour blue a little bit compared to the rest of humanity, it is neutral. You still have the ability to percieve the colour blue, you just see a wavelenght that is slightly out of synch with the one your parents saw.
If you have a genetic mutation that lets you hold your breath a little longer, it is beneficial.
If you have a mutation that gives you Down syndrome, it is bad.
Without widespread DNA analysis, you will never find most neutral and beneficial mutations.
But the bad ones stand out, and so you assume that most are bad.
The Bible contains poetry, prose, narrative, and parable. Reading poetry as literal description is foolishness, and a bit of a red herring.
So who gets to pick and choose when your god's word is to be taken literally and when he was being poetical, or funny?
Maybe the whole thing about stoning people for wearing shirts that have two or more different fibers in their weaving was a jest that got out of hand? Or maybe god really wants everyone who's ever worn a cotton poly-blend to die a bloody death?
I'm inclined to give God the benefit of the doubt because of the consistency that I see in the majority of the rest of the Bible.
Yeah, when you have editors tweaking a book for five thousand years, they do manage to end up with some level of consistency.
If the real explanation is something supernatural, how is it unreasonable to consider that the supernatural is a possibility? Doesn't it seem unreasonable to suggest that the supernatural is impossible?
If the only explanation you can find is SUPERnatural, your understanding of the natural world is unsufficient.
Why did the rains not come this year?
If you do not understand the real world, you make stuff up to explain it, or accept and regurgitate fiction that was fed to you by what you consider a trustworthy source.
Some dude did pray for the sun to stop, (Joshua in Joshua chapter 10) and the Bible says that it did. It says something similar in 2 Kings chapter 20 about Hezekiah.
Did it? I think it did
Well well, one wild claim, no proof at ALL except the claim itself, and you believe it.
And you want to give lessons to others about the need for empirical proof?
You can't fanthom that an eye would evolve step by step, but you accept, just because this one book says so, that the rotation of the earth stopped abruptly for a while?
Puh-lease.
Evolution is not a great explanation, but it's the best naturalistic explanation that scientists have been able to come up with.
THAT is true.
And creationism was the best explanation that myth makers could come up with. Its just sad that some people confuse myths and science.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
I do talk down to people who confuse science and mythology. Especially those that are absurdly uncritical when it comes to stuff in the bible and are at the same time excessively critical to stuff published in Science. Inconsistency like that...its irritating, and it doesn't really inspire confidence or respect.
But I do not assume a lack of intelligence in their part. People can simultaneously be very intelligent when it comes to most thing and incredibly thick-headed and irrationnal when it comes to emotionally potent issues to which they have been conditioned to think and feel a certain way.
Religion is a crutch to help us poor little humans deal with the complexities
Mutations are almost universally bad for you
/. not long ago (though they don't know if he'll stay healthy...lets see).
Tell that to that family in Italy that never gets heart attacks. Or that superbaby from Germany that was on
You make a HUGE logical leap by going from "most mutations are bad" to "there cannot be enough good mutations".
Most mutations that we notice are bad, because their badness makes them noticed. How many neutral or subtlelly beneficial mutations go by unnoticed? You do not know. Stop claiming "most" when you don't have the numbers.
Creation science as religious dogma. This one is precious. We all have a worldview bias. Creationists, evolutionists, deists, atheists - all of us. Science is pressed forward by people with a bias.
Next time you are sick, or injured. Don't rely on medical science, just go see a preacher and have him pray your illness away. He claims that Jesus has the power to heal, have him prove it to you. Have him prove it tto you with the numbers that medical science can give.
Did praying ever stop an epidemy? Did polio go away magically by praying it away or was it cured by medical science?
There are two groups, both claiming to know how the world works, both claiming that they have power over that world. One can prove it, the other has a very convoluted argument to explain why they can't prove it. Science demonstrate its power every day, right now, typing away on the result of many scientific wonders.
Religion, however, doesn't.
Religion is not the equal of science. Religion requires faith, science provides proof.
"Holy writings said the earth was flat." Rubbish. They never did.
Oh yes, it does. I don't have the time to dig this one out, but it does say somewhere in the bible that the sky is a dome over the earth, and in another chapter that some dude prayed for the sun to stop its trek in the sky.
If the best reasonable explanation is that something supernatural occured, perhaps that's really the answer.
It is never the best reasonable argument that "it was magic". Sorry.
The supernatural is the stuff we tell ourselves to quiet our troubled minds when something happens that cannot be exlpained by what we know. It stops being ok when you desperatly hold on to these makeshift explanations in the face of a real explanation.
Most serious creationists are not the flaming morons that they are assumed to be in Slashdot circles.
Not "assumed to be", make that "repeatedly prove to be".
Microevolution (adaptation) does repeat in nature and under lab conditions, is observable, and therefore is scientifically documented. Who can argue with good science?
Trolls, and a hell of a lot of creationists.
Macroevolution (from one type of creature to another) has not been observed
Yes it has, agriculture has created many new species to suit our needs. Corn was once about the size of rice, but through carefull selection it grew to be the huge, tasty meal we now know.
Not to mention what we did to wolves. Put a wolf and a chihuahua side by side, its hard to believe one came from the other. Some might argue that the chihuahua is more of a devolution, but hey, its a change (and a beneficiary change: it allows him to survive in a human-dominated environment whereas normal wolves tend to be exterminated).
But then that's just tweaking... though most of evolution is tweaking. The difference between a wolf and a buffalo isn't that great. They are both four legged furry creatures with lungs and one 4 chamber heart, a bone-encased spinal chord, etc.
What you want to do, instead of looking for something that takes eons to happen in your lifetime, is look at the intermediate forms that still survive.
Take for example the transition between fish and mammals. You have plenty of mid-evolution snapshots to look at. You have fish with bony flippers, fish with oxygen-absorbing swimming bladder (the swimming bladder is an organ filled with air that regulates buoyancy in fish), and the conditions where these fish live. The air-gulping fish live in rivers that regularly dry up, the air breathing allows them to survive there while other fish die out. There is that freaky chinese fish that can cross dry land, by breathing and slithering around. Clearly a first step towards land life.
Then amphybians, lizards, and finally mammals. you can see the evolution in internal organs as well as in exterior appearance. Amphibians have primitive lungs, more advanced than the swimming bladders they evolved from, but not quite as good as what mammals have, reptiles have lungs like ours (negative pressure lungs). Lizards have brains with many features that are physically similar to features of mamalian brains, they even perform the same functions, but mammals have an additional layer to their brain.
Etc.
And microevolutionary changes causing macrochanges have been demonstrated by mutating fruit flies.
They didn't create a new species, just deformed mutants, but its a proof that changes in just one gene can have drastic effects on the outward appearance of the animal.
Its all there for persons of good faith to look at. The only persons that deny it are the same sort of persons that refused to look in Gallileo's telescope. Arguing blindly.
there was a time that that the prevailing scientific wisdom was that the earth was the center of the universe. Today we reject that. At some point science may reject Macroevolution, too.
It wasn't the prevailing scientific knowledge, it was the dogmatic truth imposed by the exact same religious institutions that deny biology today as they denied cosmology in the past.
Its quite amazing that you would use the greatest historical example of religious denial of scientific fact to support your religious denial of scientific fact.
The scientific proof that the earth was round had been found thousands of years ago, by observing the earth's shadow on the moon and the shadows of a stick of a known length on the same day at different points on the earth. But that knowledge was buried by religion because their "holy" writings said the earth was flat, and so saying otherwise was not allowed (unless you enjoyed being burned alive).
There is no such thing as creation science. Its religious dogma dressed up in scientific nomenclature. Its a travesty.