The argument is that if you aggregate the out production of wind and solar over vast geographies (think of all of Europe of maybe even the US), the fluctuations will be smaller. Then they say Europe could store massive amounts of energy in Norwegian hydro facilities, as they have suitable geography (fjords if I understand this correctly).
Connecting the US and European energy grids? The ones that use different voltage and phases? Separated by an ocean?
Yeah, there's a reason that's only an "argument".
To cut a long story short - German Romanticism at work. Rationally speaking, wind and solar generation is insane and cannot be afforded.
Which is why we need to beat every insane "green power" proposition to death with knowledge.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar?
Solar doesn't have the density or the reliability to even be considered a competitor to nuclear.
Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)
It's not too big a deal if your lights go out. You won't like it if your internet goes out. The factory churning out widgets will NOT accept the power going out because of a cloudy day.
Because solar cannot provide reliable baseline power generation, you're asking the wrong question. "Why can't we use solar?" should be replaced with, "what baseline power generation techniques are environmentally friendly?"
The answer to *that* question is most definitely not solar, or wind, or any of the other "green power" fads.
91,500 jobs would be cut for an annual savings of $6.8 billion.
The IRS bureaucracy isn't going to like that.
Neither will the income tax software folks.
Taxes should be simpler, but people whose livelihoods depend on its complexity are going to be a lot more passionate about keeping the status quo. (Or adding more complexity)
Ergo, if states were more responsible in their own financial matters (and we didn't have an overbearing federal government)... then there would actually be an impact to the federal budget.
Assuming that the federal money earmarked for "subsidizing" the states is in any way linked to the budget shortfalls of the states.
Those federal agencies don't exist because states can't pay the bills, they exist to expand federal power over the country. "Here's a pot of federal money if you do things the federal way, instead of how your state wants to do it."
If the states don't ask for money, will the spending at those federal agencies go down? Money is power, and bureaucracies have a vested interest in maintaining their own power base. My guess is "No".
You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force.
That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.
If you call George Lucas a prophet, I will force choke you over the Internets.
I'm given to understand taxes are of no value to balancing budgets.
State sales taxes are of no value to balancing federal budgets.
Actually, the increase in state sales tax will probably result in less federal income taxes collected, because they can be claimed as a federal income tax deduction.
No, I bring those to bear on the larger issue of evolution.
Which was not the original topic. The topic was whether the examples of "natural selection evolution" support that "larger issue of evolution".
For the sake of argument, let's say that the larger issue of evolution is 100% correct. Do cliff swallows and finches oscillating between phenotypes provide the type of change that will result in evolutionary "progress"? Note that no genetic testing has been performed here, and for all we know, the birds develop their beak/wings differently depending on food availability. (like how current generations are taller than previous generations due to better nutrition)
I believe your topic switch to the broader issue of evolution has already conceded that point - it's "No". You didn't make it explicit, but you're saying, "No, it doesn't, butwe can believe that evolution happened in the past because of fossils and other evidence!" In other words, this isn't strong evidence for evolution, but there's other strong evidence!
Thank you for sharing your faith that evolution happened, but I don't find it relevant to the discussion. Science isn't about dogma, it's about reliable processes and repeatable observations.
You can test a process against a reference - put in known inputs and see if you get the expected outputs. Unfortunately, belief in evolution is a horrible litmus test for one's scientific ability. It's a subjective belief in a provisional history - how is historical belief a prereq for scientific observation and experimentation? It isn't. Yet that's what you have used when you call me ignorant for not professing evolutionary faith.
I hope our discussion on various evolutionary and scientific concepts has demonstrated that I am not ignorant. Mistaken and wrong, perhaps, but definitely not ignorant. Are you willing to incorporate that observation into your understanding, or does your evolutionary faith require you denounce me as a heretic against Science regardless of my ability or argument? Your call.
Good for you. Having cornered many creationists into finally admitting their a priori assumptions, I no longer have the patience to assume that someone who is presenting the same old arguments is doing so in good faith.
Having seen the logical fallacies you've flung against my points, I have little faith that you actually have answers to those "same old arguments". But that's okay, because I'm not threatened by the existence of an opposing viewpoint.
Evolution is defined in biology as a change in the frequency of gene alleles in a population over time. Learn this and remember it. If you want to argue against evolution, that is the assertion you must refute.
I am arguing against the part of evolution that claims that bacteria can be incrementally improved by random mutation into a human being.
Evolutionary proponents don't help the issue by deliberately obfuscating the word to mean any type of generational change observed in biology. I can describe the difference with words, why do we need to obfuscate the vocabulary to prevent people from recognizing the distinction?
In the case of the finches, it entirely depends on which genes you're considering and the length of the observation. It does no good to just say "there is no net change" without specifying a time period.
I don't need to specify a time period. I only need to show that a sin wave does not scale with time. As time goes to infinity, a sin wave value stays within [-1, 1]. Contrast that to a linear, exponential, or even square root function, where value->infinity as t->infinity.
To use your sine wave example, if you look at it through 1 cycle or n cycles, you see no net change. If you look at it through half a cycle, you see a big change.
If you then extrapolate that quarter cycle observation to say that you will see an even bigger change over 1 cycles or 20 cycles, you'd be wrong. The net change you can have in a oscillating function is bounded. This does not help a bacteria evolve into a human being, which is the claim I dispute.
If evolution just means "change", I'm an "evolutionist", I just find that it doesn't scale as well as commonly believed.
Examples include trisomy, insertions and gene duplication.
Trisomy: "Trisomies can occur with any chromosome, but often result in miscarriage"
Insertions: "Insertions can be particularly hazardous if..."
Gene duplication: "Gene duplication doesn't necessarily constitute a lasting change in a species' genome. In fact, such changes often don't last past the initial host organism"
Clearly evolutionary progress is inevitable.
Point taken. So, start here, then(a good overview of precisely the mistake I made). The lowest estimated mutation rate based simply upon human genomes is 1.0 x 10-8 per site per generation. Still the same order of magnitude, so it won't have a substantial effect on my point.
So estimate 30 million mutations over 6 million years - but not every mutation is an improvement - what is the ratio of "good" to "bad" mutations?
See, if evolution is true, then there's no reason why we can't one day reverse engineer DNA completely (hey, it's random and we're semi-intelligent). At that point in time, we can create any arbitrary DNA sequence, and should be able to reconstruct the intermediate life forms from the DNA sequences. If it happened once by lucky circumstances, we can do it again, intentionally.
And why would you assume that? We could create a lookalike, but we will never know if we got all of the genes correct.
The reason that's important to verify is that we don't know that you can generate a continuous line of organisms from bacteria to human with incremental changes.
In the CS world, the equivalent would be to mutate your way from DOS to Win8 with random bit flips. It may be possible, but it is tedious and not very efficient.
If it turns out that you need to make discrete million base pair jumps between viable species, you put a stake into the heart of gradual evolution. (Leaving you with punctuated equilibrium, hoping for consecutive lottery wins)
What are you talking about? I am talking about death. An organism with a broken metabolism won't survive past a single cell stage. An organism lacking cellular adhesion would not survive past that stage. No "reference" involved at all. Things that are broken just die.
Early life would have had more errors in transcription, which is exactly what we would expect. Later, as gene expression became more robust and complicated, selection pressure would increase for less error prone mechanisms.
You're giving me a headache with the repeated circular reasoning. "I expect this, which is what I would expect". That's nice, but that's not evidence.
That is because you are starting off from a bad theoretical foundation and expecting the theory to match up to that.
Your dogmatic faith in evolution is noted. There is no reason why there cannot be a solid mathematical model for evolutionary probabilities. It involves many large numbers which places it solidly in the realm of statistics.
"Take away some of the proof, and all you have left is evidence that I personally disagree with."
If all the remainder of your evidence is fossil interpretation, then yeah, you're not even doing science any more.
If you're trying to recreate the past, you're performing forensics to discover history. What happened 200 million years ago is not something you determine with control groups and scientific experiments. You can collect scientific evidence to support a historical theory, but one does not deal with "proofs" in history. ("proofs" is the realm of logic and math)
Fossil evidence, DNA evidence, geological evidence. You know, converging lines of evidence.
So you can bring those to bear on the subject of finches and cliff swallows? Please, do cite away.
Nope. Why would I? You have simply rehashed an old creationist canard which is usually presented to assert that microeveolution occurs while macroevolution does not. It's also usually presented as an example of Biblical "kinds." It is certainly an example of evolution. Whether it is an example of complete speciation is another question, but it has no bearing on the larger issue.
...All evolution, by definition, results in change. So, no, it's not a useful distinction. It's just an attempt to evade the obvious conclusions of evolutionary theory.
So if a population oscillates between two dominant phenotypes (small beak/big beak; short wings/long wings), you are satisfied that this is an example of evolution even if there are no net changes to the organism's genome?
And you find that this is strong evidence that over a time period of millions/billions of years, that this oscillation will result in an entirely different animal?
I'm tempted to rescind my prior apology. Are you really so obtuse that you think that we should expect some drastic evolutionary change in those finches in hundreds of years?
If there is no net change over hundreds of years, how do you that into non-zero net change over millions of years?
No, I prefer honesty in approaching science and evidence, not deliberate obfuscation to support creationism.
We can both accuse each other of obfuscation, but I haven't relied on accusations of dishonesty and ignorance. I don't find it useful to slap "evolution" on any type of change, when the character of the change is entirely different. Does a child "evolve" into an adult?
Why did you ignore this? Is it because it doesn't fit your "all changes are minimal," sine wave theory? Australopithecus is not just a variation of humans. We don't vacillate between those extremes. Why are you ignoring the thousands of examples out there of biological change over time in favor of your static vision of species?
When was that observed?
Oh, it wasn't? You're extrapolating based on fossil evidence? That's nice.
This is why I bandied the term "ignorant" around. Either you are not aware of the numerous examples of cumulative changes resulting in new species, or you are. One is a form of ignorance, which is blameless and can be easily remedied. The other is a rejection of the evidence, and, given the fact that you are a literate human with access to the Internet for research, is far more problematic. I apologize for being dismissive, but I am really trying to get you to justify your position that changes over time cannot add up to speciation events.
You still aren't talking about the finches. Did you concede that as a point?
If you're going to concede the finches, which of those other "numerous" examples are based on observation of live specimens, and which are extrapolations from fossil records?
Do you think it is useful for the sake of scientific observation to distinguish between "evolution" that results in no change, as opposed to "evolution" that results in brand new organisms? Is it impossible to distinguish between the two, even though Darwin's finches are still finches after hundreds of years of "evolving"? Do you prefer a scientific lexicon that deliberately obfuscates different activity by using the same word in different senses?
See, this is where your simplified version gets you into trouble. Genes are added to genomes all the time, from gene copying mistakes to interspecies breeding to bacterial gene interchange to endogenous retroviruses. Entire chromosomes are sometimes duplicated. Random events are adding genetic material all the time, and natural selection is winnowing out the non-working combinations.
"All the time"... Observed how?
Nope. I demonstrated that, if evolutionary theory is true, the rate of change as demonstrated by our closest living relatives is consistent with the amount of time that change had to have happened, which is precisely what you are denying.
Danger, Will Robinson.
"If evolutionary theory is assumed to be true, I shall extrapolate a pattern that I shall then claim proves evolutionary theory to be true."
Sure. Start here:
"We investigated the rate and pattern of mutations at the nucleotide level by comparing pseudogenes in humans and chimpanzees to (i) provide an estimate of the average mutation rate per nucleotide"
In short, no, human mutation rate was not measured. They compared human and chimp genomes, assumed the difference is due to evolution and then treated that difference as the human mutation rate using dates derived from evolutionary assumptions. Exactly what you just said before in summary, which I challenged for being circular when used as a rebuttal to my challenge.
You plugged the estimated mutation rate into the problem and claim vindication when it matches evolution. That you seem to think this is amazingly convincing evidence for evolution is pathetic. Do I need to spell out why circular reasoning is not valid?
Can we extrapolate the likely form and location of the intermediate organisms? Sure. That's how we discovered Tiktaalik, for example...
Read this and question for a moment the fallibility of human imagination.
. As for whether they can be recreated exactly, then no, and there is no reason to expect it to be possible at all.
See, if evolution is true, then there's no reason why we can't one day reverse engineer DNA completely (hey, it's random and we're semi-intelligent). At that point in time, we can create any arbitrary DNA sequence, and should be able to reconstruct the intermediate life forms from the DNA sequences. If it happened once by lucky circumstances, we can do it again, intentionally.
Natural selection works on a higher level, so to speak. Genes live or die in the organisms which they build. So, while the filters represent a high level view of how natural selection works, it would take a few more steps to make it more realistic: interpreting the "genome," building an "organism" from that genome and allowing it to compete in a simulated environment. This is, coincidentally, one of my current personal projects.
In short, there's nothing in natural selection that can select against specific base pair mutations. Natural selection can't select for the future, it only compares against now.
OK, let's go with that, noting that we are ignoring a large part of the organisms on earth. Most catastrophic genetic combinations are selecting against before birth.
Not by natural selection based on overall fitness, but by highly specific genetic "error-check" systems (against what reference?). Now how did natural selection work *before* that system evolve
You are the one switching topics. The fossil record clearly demonstrates the changes in lifeforms over billions of years. You refute that by appealing to a sine wave, with no justification for ignoring the evidence. Saying that you are ignorant is the kindest assumption.
Slashdot topic: Bird wing sizes changing near highway, evolution!
My point: Finch beak changed and is still changing; but not really example of evolution.
Your point: Fossils. You're ignorant. (topic change + name-calling)
You're appealing to a subjective interpreted history extrapolated from fossils, switching the topic away from a scientifically observed fact.
Scientific observations of Darwin's finches is that their beak sizes have continued to oscillate over the seasons. They are certainly an example of natural selection, but there is no evolutionary "progress" going on - unless you think "smaller beaks" just like previous finches is to be considered a "novel mutation" and progress towards some sort of new lifeform. If you graphed the change of their beak size over time, you'd probably find something that looks like a sin wave. Is change without net change a good example of evolution? Does evolution just mean change, any change?
Observations of Darwin's finches are scientific evidence, and at no point in this back and forth have you addressed my interpretation (large/small beaks is oscillation, not progress), which is itself a very relevant analog to the original topic.
If you want to ignore scientific evidence and analysis, that's your call.
And you completely miss the point. My example is a very crude example of how filters turn random input into non-random output. Of course it doesn't take into account mutations, extinctions, etc. It's a model which can be expressed in a short Perl script, after all. But it's still closer to what is actually happening than the mess you posted.
An algorithm designed to create a sequence of 6s succeeded in creating a sequence of 6s.
Is natural selection an algorithm that is "looking for" humans?
Of course not. That's a legacy of my model. And I've made more complex models which do not guaranteee survival of "correct" genes and model sexual reproduction, random deletions, random additions and various mutations. The same filtering process is apparent there, too.
That inheritance improves the odds slightly was not in question. The point was that there are other unaccounted forces (survival, environmental changes, luck) working against the unaccounted filtering effect, such that you cannot assume progress just because a filtering effect exists.
Proteins do not have to be perfectly effective to work. And non-functional or semi-functional proteins are not necessarily detrimental to survival, thus having no effect on survivability. For example, suppose a primitive proto-bacteria had a duplication event and now two proto-genes are generating the same protein. This very well may have no effect on its ability to reproduce(and it very well could, too; there are no guarantees). However, now one of those copies can be subject to mutation without affecting the original protein. It may end up non-functional(so called "junk DNA"), it may end mutating and functioning slightly different from the original gene(like the many related proteins responsible for blood clotting) or it may end up deleted at some point. In fact, if you want a good example of how proteins can evolve, look up the evolutionary history of blood clotting mechanisms.
Half a protein doesn't do what the full protein does. You want to claim every single half-protein or non-working protein is a survival advantage over not having one? (no bad consequences for non-functioning cellular components?) A significant enough survival advantage that the population is guaranteed to acquire the trait, 300 billion times?
Given that we share a large part of our genes with bacteria, roughly along the lines of 40%, then a lot of that took place rather rapidly. At a generation rate of 20 minutes and shooting for 40%(1.2 billion generations), that takes 937,000 years, roughly. Subtract that from 3.6 billion years, and you have a 40% human genome with 3.599 billion years left to generate the remaining 60%. The generations do get longer for multicellular organisms, but that is counter balanced by the development of sexual reproduction which speeds up the exchange of novel and complimentary genetic changes.
Again, for reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome
Consider that bacteriums have genomes in the range of Mbs, while humans have a genome 3.2 Gbs, The genomes are different by orders of magnitude, so 40% gene similarity does not capture all the relevant details.
Do you believe that 3.1 Gbs of human genome is filler?
If true, you should be able to irradiate and randomly mutate somewhere around 99% of a human's DNA sequence with no ill effect.
Let's look at it from the opposite side. We differ from chimpanzees by roughly 2% of our DNA, or 60 million base pairs. We diverged from their line about 6 million years ago. That's a rate of 10 base pair changes per year. Using that rate, we have a possible 5 billion base changes in the past 500 million years, which is roughly the age of fish. We only differ from fish by about 25% of our DNA, or 750 million base pairs. At that rate, there was enough time to evolve a human from a fish 6.6 times.
Apparently the history of life on this planet is a mystery to you.
You've called my statement ignorant, but my statement accurately describes an oscillating function. A sin wave is always changing, but if you sum up the entirety of its changes, it will always be between the value 1 and -1. If you pick an interval that is a precise multiple of its period, you have an average value of 0. There is no net change.
If you only looked at an interval where the sin wave is increasing and extrapolated, you might predict that the function goes to infinity as time goes to infinity, and that would be completely wrong.
Faced with an inability to defend your assertion, you have switched topics. Keep digging.
Take a very much simplified version where results of 6 are kept. At that point, it generally only takes 25-30 rolls to get the required result. Quite a difference, wouldn't you say? Here's a simple example of that in Perl if you want to try it yourself:
Your model is incapable of failure (extinction), which makes it rigged.
It assumes that every single "correct" base pair you hit is "hard-saved" from ever being lost. Your model only takes 25-30 independent rolls to "hit" the target, because every dice is rolled in parallel and is utterly independent of the dice around it. You end up measuring how long it takes a single dice to roll a 6, which on average is 6 rolls, and should definitely have been hit once by the 30th roll P(30) = 1-(5/6)^30.
If that model had any bearing on reality, it predicts we should see life from scratch and new lifeforms popping up every day! After all, with 4 base pairs, all 4 possibilities can be rolled pretty easily. (You're also looking at a 100% mutation rate for every base pair location. I wonder how an organism with 10 million base pairs rolls for 300 million base pair slots?)
Natural selection acts to conserve working combinations and discard detrimental combinations. Just like applying the filter of selecting 6's dramtically drops the required number of tries to reach an unlikely outcome, so to does natural selection radically drop the generations required to reach complex lifeforms.
That estimate was a first pass approximation and did ignore natural selection; but it also ignores extinction rates and "bad mutations".
Certainly there's no real world guarantee that every "correct" mutation to the genome gets saved and never gets corrupted. (Natural selection is going to determine survival or death with 100% certainty based on a single base pair mutation in a 10 million/1 billion base pair sequence?)
The models we've used also ignore that code doesn't work incrementally. Half of a protein is more likely going to be a non-effective protein rather than a half-effective protein. The dice are interdependent. "THE" is a word and has meaning. "TNE" is not.
So let's try a different analysis. How many generations do you need to get from "nothing" to human? If we assume each generation can add one "correct" base pair, that takes 3 billion generations. That's not too hard to hit with just bacteria, but at the "halfway point", it's not bacteria any more - it's something with a reproduction period measured in years, not hours. To fit evolutionary timelines, we are exponentially increasing genome size, but organisms with larger genomes have much slower reproduction rates and longer reproduction periods (less individuals, less chances). To make it fit, the mutation rate on the later generations has to be much higher, and there has to be more than one addition per generation.
You end up cramming billions of "good" mutations into several hundred million years. But we don't observe rampant mutation in higher life forms - and rampant mutation is more likely to break than to improve. ex: With 30 million "correct" base pairs; 30 million chances to mutate "incorrectly", and being generous, several million chances to mutate "correctly".
Non sequitur. It does not follow that because natural selection does not generate new genetic material that it is a process which is only destructive. It facilitates increased fitness. This is certainly an additive or, as you seem to prefer, creative process.
If natural selection only removes individuals from the population, it cannot increase genetic diversity, which means it cannot add the information needed to get from life Zero to humanity.
Perfect natural selection does improve your chances if it only lets the "most correct" individuals reproduce, but that assumes a winner take all system where every tiny reproductive advantage is propagated across the entire po
if you add up a lot of small changes, you eventually end up with a big change
Right. What is the alternative, add up a lot of small changes and then not see any change?
Yes. If a body part gets bigger, then smaller, then bigger over hundreds of generations, you end up in an equilibrium rather than with runaway "progress".
See Darwin's finches - they're not becoming a large beak/small beak species, but rather varying with the cycle of seasons for their part of the world. Hundreds of years later, they're still finches, and their beak sizes are still varying up *and* down.
There was change, but there is no net change. Thus the need to distinguish between "natural selection" (variation within a species) and "evolution" (one species into something entirely new).
There are species of bacteria who have several times more 'genetic material' than humans or swallows. The amount of DNA has nothing to do with evolution. If you meant 'changed' rather than 'added' when you said "new genetic material" then I agree with you, the sentence is a bit ambiguous.
Can you have a self-reproducing lifeform with a single DNA basepair?
Considering that you need to code for proteins to decode DNA, proteins to build protein building blocks, and proteins to harvest energy to operate the other proteins, there is a minimum size of genetic material needed for a bacterium, let alone a vertebrate with specialized cells and tissues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Genome_size
Looking at the list on wiki, there is most definitely a correlation between amount of genetic material and functionality/capability. You cite the existence of bloated code, but that fails to prove there is no minimum size for code. In fact, that's an absurd claim to anyone with passing knowledge of software development.
Human genome size is 3 billion base pairs, with 4 possible values for each pair.
Let's say that you can vary half of the human genome without consequence . (Note: Many human genetic defects are caused by very small genetic changes; this restricts the actual number of viable variations) That leaves 1.5 billion base pairs that *must* be a certain value in order to create a functional human being.
Out of 4^1.5e9 possibilities, you need a specific sequence for a human being. You need to try 9*1e1e8 possibilities to expect to randomly happen upon it. Note that a googol is a 1e1e2 (1e100).
Even if we relax the "minimum number of base pairs for a human being", the numbers are still ridiculously large. If only 300 million base pairs are necessary, you still need to try 1.8e1e8 possibilities before you might randomly hit the human combination.
How many combination do you need to try each year to reach that in 3.6 billion years? That's 3.6e9, or 3.6e1e0.95.
1.8e1e8 divided by 3.6e1e0.95 - you're still dealing with around 1e1e8 (1e100000000) individuals every year. Again, for reference, a googol is 1e100. The number of chances we need to have tried per year is orders of orders of magnitude greater than an already ridiculously large number.
One more fun calculation. Mass of single bacterium: 1e-14g. 1e100000000 individuals is 1e99999986g, or 1e99999983 kg. Mass of earth? 6e24 kg.
So no, we don't have enough time, because for the expected chance of human life to pop up to equal one, we need a universe much much much much older than it is currently calculated to be.
What a useless, unsupported claim. Who was guiding this "guided mutation" that you start with? And upon what grounds are you basing your idea that natural selection is incapable of producing the results we see?
You just agreed with me that natural selection does not generate new genetic material. It is incapable of creating, is it only able to destroy the failures.
Random mutation doesn't have enough tries in several billion years to exhaust the entire sample space of "possible genetic combinations".
That leaves non-random mutation, which is "guided" mutation - but then we need a mechanism that provides non-random mutation, which as I note is "unexplained" and "unobserved".
In as much as it is possible to prove that, it has been done.
You do not have enough time for random mutations to generate enough possible answers for natural selection to sift out the "right ones". You're left with some unexplained and unobserved form of guided mutation, which natural selection is incapable of providing.
It's not remotely proven, which is why it is necessary to point out the difference between natural selection and evolution, and why the various examples of natural selection are not actually proofs for evolution as it is claimed.
If they'd had a DRM authentication requirement and it didn't stop people from playing the game, and the game were good, there wouldn't be a problem (for most users).
For most gamers, that's an acceptable compromise. Yes, there are some costs, but people are willing to pay that. Some gamers refuse to do DRM on principle, and there's a part of the gaming market that caters to them, but for the rest, all they care about is enjoying the game. If they get to enjoy their game, who is anyone else to deny them their enjoyment?
This failure is going to encourage companies to do DRM non-intrusively (more effort, more expensive), or avoid it altogether (cheaper). That's still a positive step IMAO.
The problem with your idea is that EA has been consistently in denial about this issue. This is not the first EA title some people have avoided due to oppressive DRM. It's simply the first one that made the news.
EA's ability to be in denial is not as important as the ability of their shareholders and their competitors to see cause and effect.
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
Actually, I'd say it's far more important that the CEO got sacked. If the gaming industry learns that stupid DRM results in Bad Things (tm) like losing your job, even for upper level management, than this will be less likely to happen in the future.
It is better that future games avoid this inanity than that this specific game gets fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument is that if you aggregate the out production of wind and solar over vast geographies (think of all of Europe of maybe even the US), the fluctuations will be smaller. Then they say Europe could store massive amounts of energy in Norwegian hydro facilities, as they have suitable geography (fjords if I understand this correctly).
Connecting the US and European energy grids? The ones that use different voltage and phases? Separated by an ocean?
Yeah, there's a reason that's only an "argument".
To cut a long story short - German Romanticism at work. Rationally speaking, wind and solar generation is insane and cannot be afforded.
Which is why we need to beat every insane "green power" proposition to death with knowledge.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar?
Solar doesn't have the density or the reliability to even be considered a competitor to nuclear.
Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)
It's not too big a deal if your lights go out. You won't like it if your internet goes out. The factory churning out widgets will NOT accept the power going out because of a cloudy day.
Because solar cannot provide reliable baseline power generation, you're asking the wrong question. "Why can't we use solar?" should be replaced with, "what baseline power generation techniques are environmentally friendly?"
The answer to *that* question is most definitely not solar, or wind, or any of the other "green power" fads.
But I guarantee you, once enough also rans have left the business, the rest of the people will make money hand over fist.
If and only if the business is profitable at all.
How's the horse and buggy industry going?
91,500 jobs would be cut for an annual savings of $6.8 billion.
The IRS bureaucracy isn't going to like that.
Neither will the income tax software folks.
Taxes should be simpler, but people whose livelihoods depend on its complexity are going to be a lot more passionate about keeping the status quo. (Or adding more complexity)
Ergo, if states were more responsible in their own financial matters (and we didn't have an overbearing federal government)... then there would actually be an impact to the federal budget.
Assuming that the federal money earmarked for "subsidizing" the states is in any way linked to the budget shortfalls of the states.
Those federal agencies don't exist because states can't pay the bills, they exist to expand federal power over the country. "Here's a pot of federal money if you do things the federal way, instead of how your state wants to do it."
If the states don't ask for money, will the spending at those federal agencies go down? Money is power, and bureaucracies have a vested interest in maintaining their own power base. My guess is "No".
You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force.
That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.
If you call George Lucas a prophet, I will force choke you over the Internets.
I'm given to understand taxes are of no value to balancing budgets.
State sales taxes are of no value to balancing federal budgets.
Actually, the increase in state sales tax will probably result in less federal income taxes collected, because they can be claimed as a federal income tax deduction.
No, I bring those to bear on the larger issue of evolution.
Which was not the original topic. The topic was whether the examples of "natural selection evolution" support that "larger issue of evolution".
For the sake of argument, let's say that the larger issue of evolution is 100% correct. Do cliff swallows and finches oscillating between phenotypes provide the type of change that will result in evolutionary "progress"? Note that no genetic testing has been performed here, and for all we know, the birds develop their beak/wings differently depending on food availability. (like how current generations are taller than previous generations due to better nutrition)
I believe your topic switch to the broader issue of evolution has already conceded that point - it's "No". You didn't make it explicit, but you're saying, "No, it doesn't, but we can believe that evolution happened in the past because of fossils and other evidence!" In other words, this isn't strong evidence for evolution, but there's other strong evidence!
Thank you for sharing your faith that evolution happened, but I don't find it relevant to the discussion. Science isn't about dogma, it's about reliable processes and repeatable observations.
You can test a process against a reference - put in known inputs and see if you get the expected outputs. Unfortunately, belief in evolution is a horrible litmus test for one's scientific ability. It's a subjective belief in a provisional history - how is historical belief a prereq for scientific observation and experimentation? It isn't. Yet that's what you have used when you call me ignorant for not professing evolutionary faith.
I hope our discussion on various evolutionary and scientific concepts has demonstrated that I am not ignorant. Mistaken and wrong, perhaps, but definitely not ignorant. Are you willing to incorporate that observation into your understanding, or does your evolutionary faith require you denounce me as a heretic against Science regardless of my ability or argument? Your call.
Good for you. Having cornered many creationists into finally admitting their a priori assumptions, I no longer have the patience to assume that someone who is presenting the same old arguments is doing so in good faith.
Having seen the logical fallacies you've flung against my points, I have little faith that you actually have answers to those "same old arguments". But that's okay, because I'm not threatened by the existence of an opposing viewpoint.
Evolution is defined in biology as a change in the frequency of gene alleles in a population over time. Learn this and remember it. If you want to argue against evolution, that is the assertion you must refute.
I am arguing against the part of evolution that claims that bacteria can be incrementally improved by random mutation into a human being.
Evolutionary proponents don't help the issue by deliberately obfuscating the word to mean any type of generational change observed in biology. I can describe the difference with words, why do we need to obfuscate the vocabulary to prevent people from recognizing the distinction?
In the case of the finches, it entirely depends on which genes you're considering and the length of the observation. It does no good to just say "there is no net change" without specifying a time period.
I don't need to specify a time period. I only need to show that a sin wave does not scale with time. As time goes to infinity, a sin wave value stays within [-1, 1]. Contrast that to a linear, exponential, or even square root function, where value->infinity as t->infinity.
To use your sine wave example, if you look at it through 1 cycle or n cycles, you see no net change. If you look at it through half a cycle, you see a big change.
If you then extrapolate that quarter cycle observation to say that you will see an even bigger change over 1 cycles or 20 cycles, you'd be wrong. The net change you can have in a oscillating function is bounded. This does not help a bacteria evolve into a human being, which is the claim I dispute.
If evolution just means "change", I'm an "evolutionist", I just find that it doesn't scale as well as commonly believed.
Examples include trisomy, insertions and gene duplication.
Trisomy: "Trisomies can occur with any chromosome, but often result in miscarriage"
Insertions: "Insertions can be particularly hazardous if ..."
Gene duplication: "Gene duplication doesn't necessarily constitute a lasting change in a species' genome. In fact, such changes often don't last past the initial host organism"
Clearly evolutionary progress is inevitable.
Point taken. So, start here, then(a good overview of precisely the mistake I made). The lowest estimated mutation rate based simply upon human genomes is 1.0 x 10-8 per site per generation. Still the same order of magnitude, so it won't have a substantial effect on my point.
So estimate 30 million mutations over 6 million years - but not every mutation is an improvement - what is the ratio of "good" to "bad" mutations?
See, if evolution is true, then there's no reason why we can't one day reverse engineer DNA completely (hey, it's random and we're semi-intelligent). At that point in time, we can create any arbitrary DNA sequence, and should be able to reconstruct the intermediate life forms from the DNA sequences. If it happened once by lucky circumstances, we can do it again, intentionally.
And why would you assume that? We could create a lookalike, but we will never know if we got all of the genes correct.
The reason that's important to verify is that we don't know that you can generate a continuous line of organisms from bacteria to human with incremental changes.
In the CS world, the equivalent would be to mutate your way from DOS to Win8 with random bit flips. It may be possible, but it is tedious and not very efficient.
If it turns out that you need to make discrete million base pair jumps between viable species, you put a stake into the heart of gradual evolution. (Leaving you with punctuated equilibrium, hoping for consecutive lottery wins)
What are you talking about? I am talking about death. An organism with a broken metabolism won't survive past a single cell stage. An organism lacking cellular adhesion would not survive past that stage. No "reference" involved at all. Things that are broken just die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_cell_death
Early life would have had more errors in transcription, which is exactly what we would expect. Later, as gene expression became more robust and complicated, selection pressure would increase for less error prone mechanisms.
You're giving me a headache with the repeated circular reasoning. "I expect this, which is what I would expect". That's nice, but that's not evidence.
That is because you are starting off from a bad theoretical foundation and expecting the theory to match up to that.
Your dogmatic faith in evolution is noted. There is no reason why there cannot be a solid mathematical model for evolutionary probabilities. It involves many large numbers which places it solidly in the realm of statistics.
"Take away some of the proof, and all you have left is evidence that I personally disagree with."
If all the remainder of your evidence is fossil interpretation, then yeah, you're not even doing science any more.
If you're trying to recreate the past, you're performing forensics to discover history. What happened 200 million years ago is not something you determine with control groups and scientific experiments. You can collect scientific evidence to support a historical theory, but one does not deal with "proofs" in history. ("proofs" is the realm of logic and math)
Fossil evidence, DNA evidence, geological evidence. You know, converging lines of evidence.
So you can bring those to bear on the subject of finches and cliff swallows? Please, do cite away.
Nope. Why would I? You have simply rehashed an old creationist canard which is usually presented to assert that microeveolution occurs while macroevolution does not. It's also usually presented as an example of Biblical "kinds." It is certainly an example of evolution. Whether it is an example of complete speciation is another question, but it has no bearing on the larger issue.
So if a population oscillates between two dominant phenotypes (small beak/big beak; short wings/long wings), you are satisfied that this is an example of evolution even if there are no net changes to the organism's genome?
And you find that this is strong evidence that over a time period of millions/billions of years, that this oscillation will result in an entirely different animal?
I'm tempted to rescind my prior apology. Are you really so obtuse that you think that we should expect some drastic evolutionary change in those finches in hundreds of years?
If there is no net change over hundreds of years, how do you that into non-zero net change over millions of years?
No, I prefer honesty in approaching science and evidence, not deliberate obfuscation to support creationism.
We can both accuse each other of obfuscation, but I haven't relied on accusations of dishonesty and ignorance. I don't find it useful to slap "evolution" on any type of change, when the character of the change is entirely different. Does a child "evolve" into an adult?
Why did you ignore this? Is it because it doesn't fit your "all changes are minimal," sine wave theory? Australopithecus is not just a variation of humans. We don't vacillate between those extremes. Why are you ignoring the thousands of examples out there of biological change over time in favor of your static vision of species?
When was that observed?
Oh, it wasn't? You're extrapolating based on fossil evidence? That's nice.
This is why I bandied the term "ignorant" around. Either you are not aware of the numerous examples of cumulative changes resulting in new species, or you are. One is a form of ignorance, which is blameless and can be easily remedied. The other is a rejection of the evidence, and, given the fact that you are a literate human with access to the Internet for research, is far more problematic. I apologize for being dismissive, but I am really trying to get you to justify your position that changes over time cannot add up to speciation events.
You still aren't talking about the finches. Did you concede that as a point?
If you're going to concede the finches, which of those other "numerous" examples are based on observation of live specimens, and which are extrapolations from fossil records?
Do you think it is useful for the sake of scientific observation to distinguish between "evolution" that results in no change, as opposed to "evolution" that results in brand new organisms? Is it impossible to distinguish between the two, even though Darwin's finches are still finches after hundreds of years of "evolving"? Do you prefer a scientific lexicon that deliberately obfuscates different activity by using the same word in different senses?
See, this is where your simplified version gets you into trouble. Genes are added to genomes all the time, from gene copying mistakes to interspecies breeding to bacterial gene interchange to endogenous retroviruses. Entire chromosomes are sometimes duplicated. Random events are adding genetic material all the time, and natural selection is winnowing out the non-working combinations.
"All the time" ... Observed how?
Nope. I demonstrated that, if evolutionary theory is true, the rate of change as demonstrated by our closest living relatives is consistent with the amount of time that change had to have happened, which is precisely what you are denying.
Danger, Will Robinson.
"If evolutionary theory is assumed to be true, I shall extrapolate a pattern that I shall then claim proves evolutionary theory to be true."
Sure. Start here:
"We investigated the rate and pattern of mutations at the nucleotide level by comparing pseudogenes in humans and chimpanzees to (i) provide an estimate of the average mutation rate per nucleotide"
In short, no, human mutation rate was not measured. They compared human and chimp genomes, assumed the difference is due to evolution and then treated that difference as the human mutation rate using dates derived from evolutionary assumptions. Exactly what you just said before in summary, which I challenged for being circular when used as a rebuttal to my challenge.
You plugged the estimated mutation rate into the problem and claim vindication when it matches evolution. That you seem to think this is amazingly convincing evidence for evolution is pathetic. Do I need to spell out why circular reasoning is not valid?
Can we extrapolate the likely form and location of the intermediate organisms? Sure. That's how we discovered Tiktaalik, for example. ..
Read this and question for a moment the fallibility of human imagination.
http://io9.com/5965389/a-book-that-will-make-you-question-everything-you-know-about-dinosaurs
Then look at these two pictures and tell me why the concept art is "scientific" as opposed to "fantasy".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tiktaalik_skull_front.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tiktaalik_BW.jpg
. As for whether they can be recreated exactly, then no, and there is no reason to expect it to be possible at all.
See, if evolution is true, then there's no reason why we can't one day reverse engineer DNA completely (hey, it's random and we're semi-intelligent). At that point in time, we can create any arbitrary DNA sequence, and should be able to reconstruct the intermediate life forms from the DNA sequences. If it happened once by lucky circumstances, we can do it again, intentionally.
Natural selection works on a higher level, so to speak. Genes live or die in the organisms which they build. So, while the filters represent a high level view of how natural selection works, it would take a few more steps to make it more realistic: interpreting the "genome," building an "organism" from that genome and allowing it to compete in a simulated environment. This is, coincidentally, one of my current personal projects.
In short, there's nothing in natural selection that can select against specific base pair mutations. Natural selection can't select for the future, it only compares against now.
OK, let's go with that, noting that we are ignoring a large part of the organisms on earth. Most catastrophic genetic combinations are selecting against before birth.
Not by natural selection based on overall fitness, but by highly specific genetic "error-check" systems (against what reference?). Now how did natural selection work *before* that system evolve
You are the one switching topics. The fossil record clearly demonstrates the changes in lifeforms over billions of years. You refute that by appealing to a sine wave, with no justification for ignoring the evidence. Saying that you are ignorant is the kindest assumption.
Slashdot topic: Bird wing sizes changing near highway, evolution!
My point: Finch beak changed and is still changing; but not really example of evolution.
Your point: Fossils. You're ignorant. (topic change + name-calling)
You're appealing to a subjective interpreted history extrapolated from fossils, switching the topic away from a scientifically observed fact.
Scientific observations of Darwin's finches is that their beak sizes have continued to oscillate over the seasons. They are certainly an example of natural selection, but there is no evolutionary "progress" going on - unless you think "smaller beaks" just like previous finches is to be considered a "novel mutation" and progress towards some sort of new lifeform. If you graphed the change of their beak size over time, you'd probably find something that looks like a sin wave. Is change without net change a good example of evolution? Does evolution just mean change, any change?
Observations of Darwin's finches are scientific evidence, and at no point in this back and forth have you addressed my interpretation (large/small beaks is oscillation, not progress), which is itself a very relevant analog to the original topic.
If you want to ignore scientific evidence and analysis, that's your call.
And you completely miss the point. My example is a very crude example of how filters turn random input into non-random output. Of course it doesn't take into account mutations, extinctions, etc. It's a model which can be expressed in a short Perl script, after all. But it's still closer to what is actually happening than the mess you posted.
An algorithm designed to create a sequence of 6s succeeded in creating a sequence of 6s.
Is natural selection an algorithm that is "looking for" humans?
Of course not. That's a legacy of my model. And I've made more complex models which do not guaranteee survival of "correct" genes and model sexual reproduction, random deletions, random additions and various mutations. The same filtering process is apparent there, too.
That inheritance improves the odds slightly was not in question. The point was that there are other unaccounted forces (survival, environmental changes, luck) working against the unaccounted filtering effect, such that you cannot assume progress just because a filtering effect exists.
Proteins do not have to be perfectly effective to work. And non-functional or semi-functional proteins are not necessarily detrimental to survival, thus having no effect on survivability. For example, suppose a primitive proto-bacteria had a duplication event and now two proto-genes are generating the same protein. This very well may have no effect on its ability to reproduce(and it very well could, too; there are no guarantees). However, now one of those copies can be subject to mutation without affecting the original protein. It may end up non-functional(so called "junk DNA"), it may end mutating and functioning slightly different from the original gene(like the many related proteins responsible for blood clotting) or it may end up deleted at some point. In fact, if you want a good example of how proteins can evolve, look up the evolutionary history of blood clotting mechanisms.
Half a protein doesn't do what the full protein does. You want to claim every single half-protein or non-working protein is a survival advantage over not having one? (no bad consequences for non-functioning cellular components?) A significant enough survival advantage that the population is guaranteed to acquire the trait, 300 billion times?
Given that we share a large part of our genes with bacteria, roughly along the lines of 40%, then a lot of that took place rather rapidly. At a generation rate of 20 minutes and shooting for 40%(1.2 billion generations), that takes 937,000 years, roughly. Subtract that from 3.6 billion years, and you have a 40% human genome with 3.599 billion years left to generate the remaining 60%. The generations do get longer for multicellular organisms, but that is counter balanced by the development of sexual reproduction which speeds up the exchange of novel and complimentary genetic changes.
Again, for reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome
Consider that bacteriums have genomes in the range of Mbs, while humans have a genome 3.2 Gbs, The genomes are different by orders of magnitude, so 40% gene similarity does not capture all the relevant details.
Do you believe that 3.1 Gbs of human genome is filler? If true, you should be able to irradiate and randomly mutate somewhere around 99% of a human's DNA sequence with no ill effect.
Let's look at it from the opposite side. We differ from chimpanzees by roughly 2% of our DNA, or 60 million base pairs. We diverged from their line about 6 million years ago. That's a rate of 10 base pair changes per year. Using that rate, we have a possible 5 billion base changes in the past 500 million years, which is roughly the age of fish. We only differ from fish by about 25% of our DNA, or 750 million base pairs. At that rate, there was enough time to evolve a human from a fish 6.6 times.
You assumed that human
Apparently the history of life on this planet is a mystery to you.
You've called my statement ignorant, but my statement accurately describes an oscillating function. A sin wave is always changing, but if you sum up the entirety of its changes, it will always be between the value 1 and -1. If you pick an interval that is a precise multiple of its period, you have an average value of 0. There is no net change.
If you only looked at an interval where the sin wave is increasing and extrapolated, you might predict that the function goes to infinity as time goes to infinity, and that would be completely wrong.
Faced with an inability to defend your assertion, you have switched topics. Keep digging.
Take a very much simplified version where results of 6 are kept. At that point, it generally only takes 25-30 rolls to get the required result. Quite a difference, wouldn't you say? Here's a simple example of that in Perl if you want to try it yourself:
Your model is incapable of failure (extinction), which makes it rigged.
It assumes that every single "correct" base pair you hit is "hard-saved" from ever being lost. Your model only takes 25-30 independent rolls to "hit" the target, because every dice is rolled in parallel and is utterly independent of the dice around it. You end up measuring how long it takes a single dice to roll a 6, which on average is 6 rolls, and should definitely have been hit once by the 30th roll P(30) = 1-(5/6)^30.
If that model had any bearing on reality, it predicts we should see life from scratch and new lifeforms popping up every day! After all, with 4 base pairs, all 4 possibilities can be rolled pretty easily. (You're also looking at a 100% mutation rate for every base pair location. I wonder how an organism with 10 million base pairs rolls for 300 million base pair slots?)
Natural selection acts to conserve working combinations and discard detrimental combinations. Just like applying the filter of selecting 6's dramtically drops the required number of tries to reach an unlikely outcome, so to does natural selection radically drop the generations required to reach complex lifeforms.
That estimate was a first pass approximation and did ignore natural selection; but it also ignores extinction rates and "bad mutations".
Certainly there's no real world guarantee that every "correct" mutation to the genome gets saved and never gets corrupted. (Natural selection is going to determine survival or death with 100% certainty based on a single base pair mutation in a 10 million/1 billion base pair sequence?)
The models we've used also ignore that code doesn't work incrementally. Half of a protein is more likely going to be a non-effective protein rather than a half-effective protein. The dice are interdependent. "THE" is a word and has meaning. "TNE" is not.
So let's try a different analysis. How many generations do you need to get from "nothing" to human? If we assume each generation can add one "correct" base pair, that takes 3 billion generations. That's not too hard to hit with just bacteria, but at the "halfway point", it's not bacteria any more - it's something with a reproduction period measured in years, not hours. To fit evolutionary timelines, we are exponentially increasing genome size, but organisms with larger genomes have much slower reproduction rates and longer reproduction periods (less individuals, less chances). To make it fit, the mutation rate on the later generations has to be much higher, and there has to be more than one addition per generation.
You end up cramming billions of "good" mutations into several hundred million years. But we don't observe rampant mutation in higher life forms - and rampant mutation is more likely to break than to improve. ex: With 30 million "correct" base pairs; 30 million chances to mutate "incorrectly", and being generous, several million chances to mutate "correctly".
Non sequitur. It does not follow that because natural selection does not generate new genetic material that it is a process which is only destructive. It facilitates increased fitness. This is certainly an additive or, as you seem to prefer, creative process.
If natural selection only removes individuals from the population, it cannot increase genetic diversity, which means it cannot add the information needed to get from life Zero to humanity.
Perfect natural selection does improve your chances if it only lets the "most correct" individuals reproduce, but that assumes a winner take all system where every tiny reproductive advantage is propagated across the entire po
The level of ignorance which this statement implies is breathtaking.
Apparently the concept of oscillation is beyond you.
What is the average of a sin wave?
if you add up a lot of small changes, you eventually end up with a big change
Right. What is the alternative, add up a lot of small changes and then not see any change?
Yes. If a body part gets bigger, then smaller, then bigger over hundreds of generations, you end up in an equilibrium rather than with runaway "progress".
See Darwin's finches - they're not becoming a large beak/small beak species, but rather varying with the cycle of seasons for their part of the world. Hundreds of years later, they're still finches, and their beak sizes are still varying up *and* down.
There was change, but there is no net change. Thus the need to distinguish between "natural selection" (variation within a species) and "evolution" (one species into something entirely new).
There are species of bacteria who have several times more 'genetic material' than humans or swallows. The amount of DNA has nothing to do with evolution. If you meant 'changed' rather than 'added' when you said "new genetic material" then I agree with you, the sentence is a bit ambiguous.
Can you have a self-reproducing lifeform with a single DNA basepair?
Considering that you need to code for proteins to decode DNA, proteins to build protein building blocks, and proteins to harvest energy to operate the other proteins, there is a minimum size of genetic material needed for a bacterium, let alone a vertebrate with specialized cells and tissues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Genome_size
Looking at the list on wiki, there is most definitely a correlation between amount of genetic material and functionality/capability. You cite the existence of bloated code, but that fails to prove there is no minimum size for code. In fact, that's an absurd claim to anyone with passing knowledge of software development.
3.6 billion years is plenty of time.
Human genome size is 3 billion base pairs, with 4 possible values for each pair.
Let's say that you can vary half of the human genome without consequence . (Note: Many human genetic defects are caused by very small genetic changes; this restricts the actual number of viable variations) That leaves 1.5 billion base pairs that *must* be a certain value in order to create a functional human being.
Out of 4^1.5e9 possibilities, you need a specific sequence for a human being. You need to try 9*1e1e8 possibilities to expect to randomly happen upon it. Note that a googol is a 1e1e2 (1e100).
Even if we relax the "minimum number of base pairs for a human being", the numbers are still ridiculously large. If only 300 million base pairs are necessary, you still need to try 1.8e1e8 possibilities before you might randomly hit the human combination.
How many combination do you need to try each year to reach that in 3.6 billion years? That's 3.6e9, or 3.6e1e0.95.
1.8e1e8 divided by 3.6e1e0.95 - you're still dealing with around 1e1e8 (1e100000000) individuals every year. Again, for reference, a googol is 1e100. The number of chances we need to have tried per year is orders of orders of magnitude greater than an already ridiculously large number.
One more fun calculation. Mass of single bacterium: 1e-14g. 1e100000000 individuals is 1e99999986g, or 1e99999983 kg. Mass of earth? 6e24 kg.
So no, we don't have enough time, because for the expected chance of human life to pop up to equal one, we need a universe much much much much older than it is currently calculated to be.
What a useless, unsupported claim. Who was guiding this "guided mutation" that you start with? And upon what grounds are you basing your idea that natural selection is incapable of producing the results we see?
You just agreed with me that natural selection does not generate new genetic material. It is incapable of creating, is it only able to destroy the failures.
Random mutation doesn't have enough tries in several billion years to exhaust the entire sample space of "possible genetic combinations".
That leaves non-random mutation, which is "guided" mutation - but then we need a mechanism that provides non-random mutation, which as I note is "unexplained" and "unobserved".
In as much as it is possible to prove that, it has been done.
You do not have enough time for random mutations to generate enough possible answers for natural selection to sift out the "right ones". You're left with some unexplained and unobserved form of guided mutation, which natural selection is incapable of providing.
It's not remotely proven, which is why it is necessary to point out the difference between natural selection and evolution, and why the various examples of natural selection are not actually proofs for evolution as it is claimed.
If they'd had a DRM authentication requirement and it didn't stop people from playing the game, and the game were good, there wouldn't be a problem (for most users).
For most gamers, that's an acceptable compromise. Yes, there are some costs, but people are willing to pay that. Some gamers refuse to do DRM on principle, and there's a part of the gaming market that caters to them, but for the rest, all they care about is enjoying the game. If they get to enjoy their game, who is anyone else to deny them their enjoyment?
This failure is going to encourage companies to do DRM non-intrusively (more effort, more expensive), or avoid it altogether (cheaper). That's still a positive step IMAO.
The problem with your idea is that EA has been consistently in denial about this issue. This is not the first EA title some people have avoided due to oppressive DRM. It's simply the first one that made the news.
EA's ability to be in denial is not as important as the ability of their shareholders and their competitors to see cause and effect.
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
Actually, I'd say it's far more important that the CEO got sacked. If the gaming industry learns that stupid DRM results in Bad Things (tm) like losing your job, even for upper level management, than this will be less likely to happen in the future.
It is better that future games avoid this inanity than that this specific game gets fixed.