There have been recent computer simulations that have shown that the eye (argueably one of the most complex mechanisms in a living system) could easily have evolved over a course of several million years, well within the acceptable time frame
Yeah, but like somebody said before, multiply that toss by everybody else on the planet tossing at the same time, and your numbers will build up pretty fast
Of course there's more than chance involved. The things that you describe are exactly what the theory of natural selection is about (only one of many mechanisms of evolution that have been bandied about [see Lamarkism]). Probability just provides the raw materials of genetic diversity; natural selection ensures that those best suited to the organism's survival are the ones that perpetuate.
Lamark, who actually wrote several decades before Darwin, supported a theory that was sort of proactive evolution; that is, you started out with a giraffe without a long neck: that giraffe tries to stretch the neck that it does have to get at the higher up food in the trees, and as a result some sort of signal is sent back down to the DNA so that the giraffe's offspring will now have a longer neck. Although this theory quickly fell to the wayside once Darwin came along, there is actually some recent research going about this type of phenomenom occuring in certain types of bacteria (of course, bacteria are much better suited to providing direct chemical feedback to their DNA then mammals are)
Creationists are usually quick to point out the fact that since scientists themselves can't agree on how evolution occurs as evidence that the theory is bunk. Granted, most scientists will admit that the -process- of evolution is not fully understood, but there is a big difference between admitting that you don't quite know how something works and saying that it doesn't work at all. And any scientist that is unwilling to stray from Darwin's original theory is worth his grants. The fact that the Origin of Species isn't taken as an absolute is what makes it a work of science instead of scripture.
The problem with any third alternative theory is that you still get back to the basic arguement at the end...even if life did come about on Earth as a result of some other sort of intelligent design, the question remains, who designed the designers? If you say God, et al, then you're back to creationism; if you don't believe in evolution, fine...but if not, then what is your alternative? You can pull some agnostic sleight of hand, but that's really just dodging the question....evolution really is the best explanation thus far.
btw, its only the creationists that insist on capitalizing Creationism as if it were some absolute...you don't find scientists talking about the Theory of Gravity, or The Theory of Evolution...
If you've ever seen one of the so call "Creation vs Evolution" debates you would know what I'm talking about. I've known people who've been in these types of debates with the likes of Henry Morris from the Creation Research Institute. They tend to very quickly devolve into an excercise in getting the audience all riled up (and the creationists usually pack said audiences with Christians that are sympathetic to their cause and have already made up their minds). The creationists usually just fall back to the arguement of "you have to take it on faith" in the end. This leaves the evolutionists at the unfair position of almost always having the burden of truth.
There is no Creation vs. evolution debate. Debate implies rational arguement on both sides...Scientific creationism at best has only ever put up the guise of being based on rational thought
This is all some very interesting stuff, but I fail to see how it really goes -against- Darwinian theory of evolution. Even if you are dealing with DNA at a quantum level of mutation, there is still some element of probability on which thread in the multiverse it is going to follow. I think that the use of the term "choice" when applied to cells is a bit iffy in the article. IANAQP, but I always thought that quantum mechanics could only really be applied to individual particles, not complex macromolecules.
I think that this is an important point. These type of tests, things that look for "leadership qualities" and such, seem to favor things like social skills over purely academic ones. I'm not saying that one is necessarily a better justification for letting somebody into college than the other, but this is certainly a trend that I've seen at institutions of higher learning lately. Sure, this may be important for the political science or business students, but what about the math geeks who would rather just go off into the corner and build their Lego robot on their own?
Another of McGrath's little crusades was against the Women's Studies departments at Arizona universities. She claims that they should be renamed as Lesbian Studies, because thats all they really are and she doesn't feel that it is right for some innocent little girl to be exposed to such things...
Keep in mind that McGrath's proposal is referring to all campus internet connections, not just those in the dorms. At ASU, there are only two dorms that currently have ethernet, but we have very large common computing resources that would also be affected by this legislation...
Why would it? Tidal patterns are affected by the moon's gravitation pull, which has nothing to do with the fact that there is a shadow passing over it
Re:Hundreds of lunar and solar eclipses since Bibl
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Which begs the question, if "God" is truly omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why does he feel the need to go through all of these little games in the firstplace. Christians like to thrown around the notion that God sacrificed his only son so that humans could be absolved of their sins, blah blah blah...but if god is omnipotent, then this whole little game of human suffering and sin seems to contradict the second attribute of the Christian god, that of omnibenevolence, no? The devil exists because God allows him to exist, but if god really does want nothing but happiness for his creations, why doesn't he just cut through the bull and stop playing perverse little games?
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Yeah, but where are they getting the actual MP3s from? Is somebody gonna go and rip all the tracks from my favorite eastern european techno-industrial-noise band that only two other people outside of germany have ever heard of? Since your not uploading the mp3 files to their database yourself, the actual files are coming from somewhere, right?
So how extensive is the mp3 database that they are using? If I can only authenticate my pop/mainstream CDs that they are likely to already have encoded, I'm not sure I'd want to. I have a lot of non-mainstream CDs, and I'd imagine that I wouldn't be able to use this for a good portion of them.
Ok, granted...but its still the best theory that is out there. I'd challenge anybody to come up with a better -scientifically reasonable- explanation. Critics of evolutionary teaching tend to harp on the idea of "well, its still 'only' a theory" idea. If you talk to any serious biologist, you'd find that evolutionary theory is accepted to almost the same degree as Newtons Laws are to a physicist. 95% of modern biological science simply doesn't make any sense except in the context of evolution
I've been meaning to pull my full tower apart and paint it for a while now; does anybody have any advice on does and don'ts. What's the best type of paint to use? Also, what's the best way to deal with your CD/floppy/zip drives and monitor?
Actually, natural selection ensures that it is an efficient process. The more DNA in a given cell's genome, the more energy and the longer time it takes that particular cell to replicate all of its DNA and divide/reproduce. Therefore, it is beneficial for the cell to get rid of any DNA that is not absolutely necessary. You can actually see this working at bacteria; engineer a run of random DNA into a bacterial genome, and you'll see that after a few generations, the cells that have managed to (randomly) excise the extra DNA will grow faster and more efficiently than cells still carrying around the extra baggage. This is where "survival of the fittest" kicks in," allowing the more efficient cells to dominate the population
>Hahahah yeah right. Show me where one species has >had its DNA changed or altered and remained >viable, and even reproduced. We're not talking >natural selection... that's not really evolution.
Nobody said that natural selection was evolution...certainly not Darwin. Natural selection is merely one mechanism proposed by which evolution occurs. Darwin's original theory proposed a combination of natural selection and sexual selection as the mechanism by which evolution occured. There are others out there, most notably Lamarkism, which actually predated Darwinian theory by at least a couple of decades. One of the favorite creationist remarks against evolution is that biologists themselves can't seem to agree on what evolution is; in fact most of them will agree that evolution does occur, the only point up for arguement is the mechanism by which that evolution progresses..and as for species that undergo persistant changes, it happens almost constantly in bacteria and other types of microbes (and if you want to think that bacterial genetics isn't applicable to higher order organisms, then you should go back to BIO 100)
Actually, the theory of evolution really doesn't have much to say at all about the origins of life...the best it can offer is that once life did get started (i.e. a buch of chemicals randomly got together to form self replicating amino acids, or some Divine edict, take your pick), that things would sort themselves out into the best possible arrangement.
Granted...but its the charge of the neurons themselves that determine the function of the brain...you can mess around with the levels of neurotransmitters that are being sent, but you still have to deal with the fact that at a functional level, each neuron has only two states that it can be in, on or off/charged or uncharged...you can mess with whether or not an individual neuron reaches the threshold energy to fire or not, but as long as you're below that threshold point, or above it, it doesn't really matter how much more chemical you pump in...I'm not an electrical engineer, but continuing with the computer analogy, I'd imagine this would be a bit like messing around with the voltage that is being sent across circuit; sure you could tweek the performance, but but you're still dealing with a quantum system, and in the end you could only affect the rate at which things happens...that doesn't mean that the system itself is analog
...except that even if you do wrap a string around the nails and measure that, you're still dealing with quantas, i.e. the tick marks on whatever scale you're using to measure the string...for the brain to be truly analog, it would require an infinite regression of points...this is one of the basic tenets of quantum physics; that when you talk about analogs, all you're really talking about is a larger and larger collection of quantum points...and since we've already understand the brain at a, at least rudimentary, quantum level (i.e. the firing of neurons), there is no reason to think that things would go back to behaving in an analog fashion...you never have a case where the neurotransmitters get halfway there to the next neuron, and therefore cause a milder version of the response...its all or nothing; if the neurotransmitters never reach the threshold energy in one step, they might as well never have tried...this is really the way all of our molecular systems work, its not until you start to get to a larger, cellular level that things start to seem analog...
Slashdot Mirror
see my reply to this a few posts up. the eye could have easily evolved within the space of several million years
There have been recent computer simulations that have shown that the eye (argueably one of the most complex mechanisms in a living system) could easily have evolved over a course of several million years, well within the acceptable time frame
Yeah, but like somebody said before, multiply that toss by everybody else on the planet tossing at the same time, and your numbers will build up pretty fast
Of course there's more than chance involved. The things that you describe are exactly what the theory of natural selection is about (only one of many mechanisms of evolution that have been bandied about [see Lamarkism]). Probability just provides the raw materials of genetic diversity; natural selection ensures that those best suited to the organism's survival are the ones that perpetuate.
Lamark, who actually wrote several decades before Darwin, supported a theory that was sort of proactive evolution; that is, you started out with a giraffe without a long neck: that giraffe tries to stretch the neck that it does have to get at the higher up food in the trees, and as a result some sort of signal is sent back down to the DNA so that the giraffe's offspring will now have a longer neck. Although this theory quickly fell to the wayside once Darwin came along, there is actually some recent research going about this type of phenomenom occuring in certain types of bacteria (of course, bacteria are much better suited to providing direct chemical feedback to their DNA then mammals are)
I once read an arguement against probabilistic evolution that went like this:
-the chance of life evolving from the chance collisions of inorganic molecules is 1 in 10^x (some enormously high power)
-the inverse of this probablility therefore is the probablilty of life not evolving by chance (i.e. intelligent design/creation)
-therefore, statistics prove that God created the earth in seven days, blah blah blah...
I had to read over this several times to get what they were saying, and then proceeded to fall on the floor laughing my ass off
Creationists are usually quick to point out the fact that since scientists themselves can't agree on how evolution occurs as evidence that the theory is bunk. Granted, most scientists will admit that the -process- of evolution is not fully understood, but there is a big difference between admitting that you don't quite know how something works and saying that it doesn't work at all. And any scientist that is unwilling to stray from Darwin's original theory is worth his grants. The fact that the Origin of Species isn't taken as an absolute is what makes it a work of science instead of scripture.
The problem with any third alternative theory is that you still get back to the basic arguement at the end...even if life did come about on Earth as a result of some other sort of intelligent design, the question remains, who designed the designers? If you say God, et al, then you're back to creationism; if you don't believe in evolution, fine...but if not, then what is your alternative? You can pull some agnostic sleight of hand, but that's really just dodging the question....evolution really is the best explanation thus far.
btw, its only the creationists that insist on capitalizing Creationism as if it were some absolute...you don't find scientists talking about the Theory of Gravity, or The Theory of Evolution...
If you've ever seen one of the so call "Creation vs Evolution" debates you would know what I'm talking about. I've known people who've been in these types of debates with the likes of Henry Morris from the Creation Research Institute. They tend to very quickly devolve into an excercise in getting the audience all riled up (and the creationists usually pack said audiences with Christians that are sympathetic to their cause and have already made up their minds). The creationists usually just fall back to the arguement of "you have to take it on faith" in the end. This leaves the evolutionists at the unfair position of almost always having the burden of truth.
There is no Creation vs. evolution debate. Debate implies rational arguement on both sides...Scientific creationism at best has only ever put up the guise of being based on rational thought
This is all some very interesting stuff, but I fail to see how it really goes -against- Darwinian theory of evolution. Even if you are dealing with DNA at a quantum level of mutation, there is still some element of probability on which thread in the multiverse it is going to follow. I think that the use of the term "choice" when applied to cells is a bit iffy in the article. IANAQP, but I always thought that quantum mechanics could only really be applied to individual particles, not complex macromolecules.
I think that this is an important point. These type of tests, things that look for "leadership qualities" and such, seem to favor things like social skills over purely academic ones. I'm not saying that one is necessarily a better justification for letting somebody into college than the other, but this is certainly a trend that I've seen at institutions of higher learning lately. Sure, this may be important for the political science or business students, but what about the math geeks who would rather just go off into the corner and build their Lego robot on their own?
Another of McGrath's little crusades was against the Women's Studies departments at Arizona universities. She claims that they should be renamed as Lesbian Studies, because thats all they really are and she doesn't feel that it is right for some innocent little girl to be exposed to such things...
Keep in mind that McGrath's proposal is referring to all campus internet connections, not just those in the dorms. At ASU, there are only two dorms that currently have ethernet, but we have very large common computing resources that would also be affected by this legislation...
Why would it? Tidal patterns are affected by the moon's gravitation pull, which has nothing to do with the fact that there is a shadow passing over it
Which begs the question, if "God" is truly omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why does he feel the need to go through all of these little games in the firstplace. Christians like to thrown around the notion that God sacrificed his only son so that humans could be absolved of their sins, blah blah blah...but if god is omnipotent, then this whole little game of human suffering and sin seems to contradict the second attribute of the Christian god, that of omnibenevolence, no? The devil exists because God allows him to exist, but if god really does want nothing but happiness for his creations, why doesn't he just cut through the bull and stop playing perverse little games?
Now that's a copout answer....
Yeah, but where are they getting the actual MP3s from? Is somebody gonna go and rip all the tracks from my favorite eastern european techno-industrial-noise band that only two other people outside of germany have ever heard of? Since your not uploading the mp3 files to their database yourself, the actual files are coming from somewhere, right?
So how extensive is the mp3 database that they are using? If I can only authenticate my pop/mainstream CDs that they are likely to already have encoded, I'm not sure I'd want to. I have a lot of non-mainstream CDs, and I'd imagine that I wouldn't be able to use this for a good portion of them.
Ok, granted...but its still the best theory that is out there. I'd challenge anybody to come up with a better -scientifically reasonable- explanation. Critics of evolutionary teaching tend to harp on the idea of "well, its still 'only' a theory" idea. If you talk to any serious biologist, you'd find that evolutionary theory is accepted to almost the same degree as Newtons Laws are to a physicist. 95% of modern biological science simply doesn't make any sense except in the context of evolution
I've been meaning to pull my full tower apart and paint it for a while now; does anybody have any advice on does and don'ts. What's the best type of paint to use? Also, what's the best way to deal with your CD/floppy/zip drives and monitor?
Actually, natural selection ensures that it is an efficient process. The more DNA in a given cell's genome, the more energy and the longer time it takes that particular cell to replicate all of its DNA and divide/reproduce. Therefore, it is beneficial for the cell to get rid of any DNA that is not absolutely necessary. You can actually see this working at bacteria; engineer a run of random DNA into a bacterial genome, and you'll see that after a few generations, the cells that have managed to (randomly) excise the extra DNA will grow faster and more efficiently than cells still carrying around the extra baggage. This is where "survival of the fittest" kicks in," allowing the more efficient cells to dominate the population
Read Robert Heinlen's "All You Zombies," for an interesting take on this
>Hahahah yeah right. Show me where one species has >had its DNA changed or altered and remained >viable, and even reproduced. We're not talking >natural selection... that's not really evolution.
Nobody said that natural selection was evolution...certainly not Darwin. Natural selection is merely one mechanism proposed by which evolution occurs. Darwin's original theory proposed a combination of natural selection and sexual selection as the mechanism by which evolution occured. There are others out there, most notably Lamarkism, which actually predated Darwinian theory by at least a couple of decades. One of the favorite creationist remarks against evolution is that biologists themselves can't seem to agree on what evolution is; in fact most of them will agree that evolution does occur, the only point up for arguement is the mechanism by which that evolution progresses..and as for species that undergo persistant changes, it happens almost constantly in bacteria and other types of microbes (and if you want to think that bacterial genetics isn't applicable to higher order organisms, then you should go back to BIO 100)
Actually, the theory of evolution really doesn't have much to say at all about the origins of life...the best it can offer is that once life did get started (i.e. a buch of chemicals randomly got together to form self replicating amino acids, or some Divine edict, take your pick), that things would sort themselves out into the best possible arrangement.
Granted...but its the charge of the neurons themselves that determine the function of the brain...you can mess around with the levels of neurotransmitters that are being sent, but you still have to deal with the fact that at a functional level, each neuron has only two states that it can be in, on or off/charged or uncharged...you can mess with whether or not an individual neuron reaches the threshold energy to fire or not, but as long as you're below that threshold point, or above it, it doesn't really matter how much more chemical you pump in...I'm not an electrical engineer, but continuing with the computer analogy, I'd imagine this would be a bit like messing around with the voltage that is being sent across circuit; sure you could tweek the performance, but but you're still dealing with a quantum system, and in the end you could only affect the rate at which things happens...that doesn't mean that the system itself is analog
...except that even if you do wrap a string around the nails and measure that, you're still dealing with quantas, i.e. the tick marks on whatever scale you're using to measure the string...for the brain to be truly analog, it would require an infinite regression of points...this is one of the basic tenets of quantum physics; that when you talk about analogs, all you're really talking about is a larger and larger collection of quantum points...and since we've already understand the brain at a, at least rudimentary, quantum level (i.e. the firing of neurons), there is no reason to think that things would go back to behaving in an analog fashion...you never have a case where the neurotransmitters get halfway there to the next neuron, and therefore cause a milder version of the response...its all or nothing; if the neurotransmitters never reach the threshold energy in one step, they might as well never have tried...this is really the way all of our molecular systems work, its not until you start to get to a larger, cellular level that things start to seem analog...