Please, please, please try to discuss things rationally without spouting off stupid slurs, since you seem so intent on worshipping the rational process. Educating yourself on the topic at hand would also be nice.
Mostly red fish -> mostly black fish is not evolution. It's adaptation by natural selection. That is, a redistribution of the frequency of an attribute already existing in a population due to a change in the population's environment.
Evolution involves the introduction of new genetic material, generally through the mechanism of mutation, which is then subject to natural selection.
Not part of the scientific defintion, but something that is usually assumed in these sorts of discussion is that these evolutionary changes, over the course of time, change a simple organism to a more complex one.
With a large enough population, and enough generational cycles, you'll eventually get some mutations, some of which may be beneficial, some of which will just kill the organism, and some of which will have no discernable effect. The organism has now evolved. OK? It's changed.
Yes, I agree, if that is observed the organism fits with the definition of evolution quoted. I was pointing out that adaptation through natural selection is not evolution.
Personally, I think that mutation is another mechanism for adaptability. I don't think that the gradual accumulation of mutations would really result in a more complex organism. As far as I know, organisms have never been observed to evolve in complexity, just to adapt better to their environment. That, however, is my opinion. I consider it to be a reasonably educated opinion, but I don't follow the field incredibly closely.
Your inability to read and comprehend written language must be how they convinced you to believe the absolute truth of something that is still a work in progress.
When an individual is born that contains a geneset composed of genes from both his parents, there has been no genetic change in the population. Read what I wrote. I'm talking about the gene pools of populations, not individuals.
Fine. As long as you stick "Juils Caesar's existance is an untestable hypothesis that can never rise to the validity of a theory. Belief that 'Julius Caesar' once ruled the Roman Empire is as demonstrable and testable as 'invisible pink elephants' ruled the Roman Empire.
You can scientifically prove neither God's existence nor the existence of Julius Caesar. You can examine what evidence there is, and come to a conclusion on the basis of that evidence, but that is not the scientific method. It's an historical method. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be proved with your methodology.
No, most theories do not become laws. Laws must be provable mathematically. While in most other areas (law, history, etc) proof can be taken to mean a preponderance of evidence, thats not the case in science. The sort of topics addressed by theories generally contain so many variables that we are unlikely to ever be able to understand them fully enough to formulate a mathematical proof - just a limited, mathematical model.
For something to be a "theory" in science it must be falsifiable.
Unfortunately, the only real way to experiment with evolution is to hang around and watch for a few million years. Experiments with bacteria have demonstrated adaptation, but not progression - even with the rapidity of bacterialogical reproduction that would, if evolution is true, take far too long for us to observe in our lifetime.
Intelligent design/creationism are not falsifiable and do not belong in a science class. They belong in a class studying mythology and fairy tales.
Or history and archeology. There are a vast number of "facts" which cannot be proved scientifically, but which are commonly accepted due to evidence from non-scientific sources. For example, you cannot scientifically prove that Julius Caesar existed. You prove it historically.
You can't really test evolution either, due to the massive times over which it is supposed to be happening.
Another problem is that people coming from a scientific background continually try and derive religion. That is the scientific way, after all. Start assuming nothing, look around, see what you have, start connecting it together and see what you end up with. But Protestant Christianity (the only religion I am really familiar with doctrinally; I assume other modern religions make similar claims in this respect) expressly says that it is not possible to derive it from the surrounding world. (The Bible says that the natural world is sufficient to demonstrate the existance of a God, but not to understand His nature).
Christianity claims that it can only be understood on the basis of a revelation from God (ie: the Bible). If you accept that as an assumption, it all makes sense. If you don't, it will all look weird and dis-jointed. Jesus explicitly says that none of the people hearing him are going to understand what he's really saying. It is only later when they accept Jesus as the Son of God that they look back and think "In the light of what I know now, it all makes sense.".
If Mendel's work is gold, but ignore mutation then you'll end up with genes being kicked out and none being created... meaning life would have died out a very, very long time ago.
Not really. What you'd expect is that as a species spreads out over the earth, it adapts according to its environment as certain genes are selected.
The thing is, not every gene that is not "selected" is discarded. They usually hang around somewhere in the population as recessive genes, or in the odd indivudual here and there, and are then pulled out of the genetic cupboard when the environment changes to favor them.
Thats not evolution, its genetics. You haven't evolved, you've inherited different genes. A population exchanging genes in this way cannot progress - evolution depends on the addition of extra genetic material into a population. Usually this is through mutation.
And the same holds for bacteria - no new genetic information, just expressions of different subsets of the genetic information of the whole population.
evolution is a change in the genetic makeup of a group
Evolution and change are not the same thing. According to the article you quoted, it is only evolution if there is a change in the genetic population of a group.
What the parent was saying is that in the case of bacteria, there were no new attributes being developed. All that was happening is that the distribution of an attribute over a population was being altered.
An example: There are 1,000 bacteria. 100 of them are resistant to a certain type of pollution. Their environment becomes polluted. 900 die, the 100 live, breed, and in the end, we get a population that is now mostly resilient to that polution. The bacteria have adapted. But they have not evolved - there has been no genetic change in their makeup. Just the genes that represent pollution resistance have become more widespread.
Bacteria do indeed evolve as they become adapted better to the environment due to reproductive pressures. That is the _definition_ of evolution as it was hypothesized.
No. Evolution has two components. One, that organisms adapt to become better suited to their environment. Two, that over time, these adaptations accumulate into a more complex organism.
The parent poster is agreeing with one, but disagreeing with two. Evolution is not the same thing as change. Evolution is change leading towards increased complexity.
There's two separate things implied by the term "evolution", one of which I agree with, and one of which I don't.
Firstly, there's the notion of adaptability, or change. When a population is exposed to a change in environment, the change kills off that proportion of the population least able to cope with the change, and thus only the better adapted organisms survive. These then reproduce, creating a population which has an overall greater number of individuals adapted to the environmental change.
That sounds fine to me. Notice that one of the assumptions is that the attribute "selected" here is already present in the population. This sort of "evolution" does not create any new attribute - it simply changes the proportions of the population which possess that attribute.
The other element of evolution is progression. That due to a series of mutations, an organism is able to progress from a simple creature to a complex one. That attributes can spontaneously occur (usually ascribed to mutation), advantage an individual, are propogated throughout the group and, by increments, result in a drastically different organism. I don't hold with this, and I haven't seen much compelling evidence for it. Most evidence held up for evolution - those moths everyone learns about in biology, for example, or the stories about bacteria linked to by another poster, are an example of populations adapting, not progressing.
An interesting thing to note, is that Charles Darwin, when he proposed what became evolution, was not familiar, as we are now, with basic genetics. We can see that variation within a population can be accounted for, not by mutation, but by the combination of dominant/recessive genes. Darwin had no such knowledge - to him two brown eyed parents giving birth to a blue eyed child would have been only explainable as mutation, not as the expression of two recessive genes inherited from each parent. Some of the effects he sees which he ascribes to mutation are more readily explainable now as genetic phenomena.
To him, variation in a population could only be explained by evolution. We can now explain it through genetics.
This is not about developing more eye-candy.
It's about moving the load in current eye-candy *from* the CPU *to* the GPU. This is a good thing, as the GPU is idle for pretty much all of the time when windows are being rendered (only exception I can think of are 3d graphics progs, or 3d games running in windowed mode).
This is used purely and simply to free resources currently being used displaying eye candy. They can of course use the newly-freed resources to display *more* eye-candy, but that's not a given.
Pity we've never seen it happen. Evolution is not observable or testable because it happens over a period of time far, far greater than human life. All we can do is inspect the evidence, and construct theories around that evidence. That's closer to the study of history than science. Both science and history are methods of discerning truth, but they use very different mechanics. If you can't test something, or observe if, it's hard to form a scientific theory about it. You may use scientific techniques to find the evidence, but when it comes to interpreting it, all you can do is try and find an explanation that matches most of the facts you know about.
Sorry, but this just isn't true, unless you accept that "accepting j.c. into your heart" is the natural state of man - he who accepts him into his heart shall be saved implies pretty god-damned strongly that he who does not will not be saved. hence your statement would seem to be patently false - or is this just one of those contradictions that's been waved off as insignificant?
The point I was making is that your worthiness to God is not the result of some huge balance scale comparing all your good deeds to all your bad ones. No protestant theology believes that you get to heaven by doing lots of good things - one of the core beliefs of the reformation was that only God's intervention (sending Jesus to pay off our debts for us) can get us to heaven. There is still debate as to whether God predestined those who are saved (Calvinism) or whether an individual chooses to accept God's offer (Arminianism). I'm not really decided on that question, but even if you go with the Arminian argument, salvation is determined by the combination of God's grace and a single decision on your part to accept it - not the innate morality of your own actions.
Society at large should be mature enough to reasonably discuss the issue when it comes up with fact and to not take another's views personally. Unfortunately we don't yet live in a mature society.
Including you, it seems:
The people are suckers, let this happen, and still take the book for gospel even though any reasonable person would not believe King So and So are making these changes on behalf of "god" but instead are doing it for their own purposes.
Way to not make a personal attack on the beliefs of others.
Why should I put up with any crap for a diety that I wouldn't accept from a human?
Possibly because that deity made you, and therefore has some claim on you?
The belief that God has shown himself through some non-obvious means is exactly that, a belief, not a fact, and requires a leap of faith. It's a circular reference.
One of my favorite passages in the Bible is Matthew 16. In it the Pharisees come to Jesus and say "Your the Son of God then? Show us a sign!".
If you like back over the last few chapters, Jesus had just walked on water, and fed 5,000 people from a meagre amount of food. The signs were all over the place, but the Pharisees didn't see them. I think that the existence of a supernatural creative force is obviously seen in the existence of our universe - but other people seem determined to hunt around for a rationalistic explanation that, in the end, requires a leap of faith just as belief in a creator does.
Do you really believe there is a supreme being who apparently learned to walk and talk all by himself even though you haven't ever seen him? Do you really believe he learned how to create planets and people all by himself too?
The point I was making was not that religion is more rational than science - I was saying that on the issue of the origin of life, both the scientific and religious explanations require belief - there is no proof either way. So if you prefer your explanation well and good, but its just as unproven and irrational as my explanation.
And just a little note - if, as the Bible says, God created man in his own image, then he's not really anthropomorphic, more like we're deiamorphic, or something like that.
You're right. That's crazy. Everyone needs to accept the cold, rational truth: a big, magic, invisible, all-powerful, timeless dude made us out of mud.
The thing is, religion isn't basing itself on rationalistic explanation. Religion is based on faith. Science says it is based on rationalism, but when it comes down to the origin of life issue, "scientific" explanations are just as much based on faith as religion.
I assume your talking about the Miller experiment. Firstly, that experiment didn't create life - it created amino acids, which are fundamental componenents of living organisms, but it did not spontaneously generate a living organism. Secondly, the experiment was fudged a bit - the gasses he used in the experiment were not the ones thought to have existed in primordial earth. Miller used ammonia, methane and hydrogen, and passed an electrical current through them. But our current atmosphere is composed of things like nitrogen and carbon dioxide - inert gasses that would not produce such a reaction - and Miller provided no evidence that demonstrated a substantially different atmospheric makeup in primordial earth.
On to your second point. Your amalgamating a whole bunch of different things under the heading of evolution. Evolution deals with gradual changes of existing life, it has nothing at all to do with anything that cannot reproduce. The origin of life could not be due to evolutionary mechanisms - the only reason they are connected is because you need to prove both to come up with a model of the universe without a creator.
As it stands, I don't believe in the spontaneous generation of life, nor the form of evolution that generates new information. I believe that evolution is a mechanism for adaptation, that through natural selection, descendants of an individual have the best subset of that individuals genes for their particular environment. But I don't believe that evolution is responsible for generating new genes, and, as far as I know, that process has never been observed. Science is all about observation - observation and repeatable experiments. We have not observed evolution. We have not managed to reproduce it in an experiment. Evolution remains in the domain of a conjecture made from historical evidence, rather than solid, reproducable scientific proof.
Communism works in some smaller systems - like communes, for example. Or most families. I know my family never practiced a democracy. They key to communism working, it seems, is that those that give up their personal possessions for the greater good do so voluntarily - parents, people working together in a commune, etc. Trying to enforce communism on a group of people that don't want to live communally is what leads to trouble.
Better get your own theology straight before you do - AFAIK, no Christian denomination teaches that. Standard Christian theology teaches that hell is the default destination of every human being (ie: not dependant on your misdemeanours) and protestant Christians at least (not too up on Catholic theology) believe that you are saved from hell by the grace of God (again, not dependant on your actions.)
By the by, do you really believe non-living chemicals learnt to walk and talk all by themselves?
I don't think the grandparent is talking about reviews not giving adequate information - for the most part, it seems they do. I think he's complaining about game reviews being too dry and factual, and not artsy enough. In areas like literature, art, and increasingly, film, criticism seems to be approaching an artform itself (as Oscar Wilde talks about in "The Critic As Artist"). But not so with game reviews, they stick to just rating each component of a game.
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Please, please, please try to discuss things rationally without spouting off stupid slurs, since you seem so intent on worshipping the rational process. Educating yourself on the topic at hand would also be nice.
Mostly red fish -> mostly black fish is not evolution. It's adaptation by natural selection. That is, a redistribution of the frequency of an attribute already existing in a population due to a change in the population's environment.
Evolution involves the introduction of new genetic material, generally through the mechanism of mutation, which is then subject to natural selection.
Not part of the scientific defintion, but something that is usually assumed in these sorts of discussion is that these evolutionary changes, over the course of time, change a simple organism to a more complex one.
With a large enough population, and enough generational cycles, you'll eventually get some mutations, some of which may be beneficial, some of which will just kill the organism, and some of which will have no discernable effect. The organism has now evolved. OK? It's changed.
Yes, I agree, if that is observed the organism fits with the definition of evolution quoted. I was pointing out that adaptation through natural selection is not evolution.
Personally, I think that mutation is another mechanism for adaptability. I don't think that the gradual accumulation of mutations would really result in a more complex organism. As far as I know, organisms have never been observed to evolve in complexity, just to adapt better to their environment. That, however, is my opinion. I consider it to be a reasonably educated opinion, but I don't follow the field incredibly closely.
Your inability to read and comprehend written language must be how they convinced you to believe the absolute truth of something that is still a work in progress.
When an individual is born that contains a geneset composed of genes from both his parents, there has been no genetic change in the population. Read what I wrote. I'm talking about the gene pools of populations, not individuals.
If he said that, then yep.
Fine. As long as you stick "Juils Caesar's existance is an untestable hypothesis that can never rise to the validity of a theory. Belief that 'Julius Caesar' once ruled the Roman Empire is as demonstrable and testable as 'invisible pink elephants' ruled the Roman Empire.
You can scientifically prove neither God's existence nor the existence of Julius Caesar. You can examine what evidence there is, and come to a conclusion on the basis of that evidence, but that is not the scientific method. It's an historical method. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be proved with your methodology.
No, most theories do not become laws. Laws must be provable mathematically. While in most other areas (law, history, etc) proof can be taken to mean a preponderance of evidence, thats not the case in science. The sort of topics addressed by theories generally contain so many variables that we are unlikely to ever be able to understand them fully enough to formulate a mathematical proof - just a limited, mathematical model.
For something to be a "theory" in science it must be falsifiable.
Unfortunately, the only real way to experiment with evolution is to hang around and watch for a few million years. Experiments with bacteria have demonstrated adaptation, but not progression - even with the rapidity of bacterialogical reproduction that would, if evolution is true, take far too long for us to observe in our lifetime.
Intelligent design/creationism are not falsifiable and do not belong in a science class. They belong in a class studying mythology and fairy tales.
Or history and archeology. There are a vast number of "facts" which cannot be proved scientifically, but which are commonly accepted due to evidence from non-scientific sources. For example, you cannot scientifically prove that Julius Caesar existed. You prove it historically.
You can't really test evolution either, due to the massive times over which it is supposed to be happening.
Another problem is that people coming from a scientific background continually try and derive religion. That is the scientific way, after all. Start assuming nothing, look around, see what you have, start connecting it together and see what you end up with. But Protestant Christianity (the only religion I am really familiar with doctrinally; I assume other modern religions make similar claims in this respect) expressly says that it is not possible to derive it from the surrounding world. (The Bible says that the natural world is sufficient to demonstrate the existance of a God, but not to understand His nature).
Christianity claims that it can only be understood on the basis of a revelation from God (ie: the Bible). If you accept that as an assumption, it all makes sense. If you don't, it will all look weird and dis-jointed. Jesus explicitly says that none of the people hearing him are going to understand what he's really saying. It is only later when they accept Jesus as the Son of God that they look back and think "In the light of what I know now, it all makes sense.".
If Mendel's work is gold, but ignore mutation then you'll end up with genes being kicked out and none being created... meaning life would have died out a very, very long time ago.
Not really. What you'd expect is that as a species spreads out over the earth, it adapts according to its environment as certain genes are selected.
The thing is, not every gene that is not "selected" is discarded. They usually hang around somewhere in the population as recessive genes, or in the odd indivudual here and there, and are then pulled out of the genetic cupboard when the environment changes to favor them.
Thats not evolution, its genetics. You haven't evolved, you've inherited different genes. A population exchanging genes in this way cannot progress - evolution depends on the addition of extra genetic material into a population. Usually this is through mutation.
And the same holds for bacteria - no new genetic information, just expressions of different subsets of the genetic information of the whole population.
evolution is a change in the genetic makeup of a group
Evolution and change are not the same thing. According to the article you quoted, it is only evolution if there is a change in the genetic population of a group.
What the parent was saying is that in the case of bacteria, there were no new attributes being developed. All that was happening is that the distribution of an attribute over a population was being altered.
An example: There are 1,000 bacteria. 100 of them are resistant to a certain type of pollution. Their environment becomes polluted. 900 die, the 100 live, breed, and in the end, we get a population that is now mostly resilient to that polution. The bacteria have adapted. But they have not evolved - there has been no genetic change in their makeup. Just the genes that represent pollution resistance have become more widespread.
Bacteria do indeed evolve as they become adapted better to the environment due to reproductive pressures. That is the _definition_ of evolution as it was hypothesized.
No. Evolution has two components. One, that organisms adapt to become better suited to their environment. Two, that over time, these adaptations accumulate into a more complex organism.
The parent poster is agreeing with one, but disagreeing with two. Evolution is not the same thing as change. Evolution is change leading towards increased complexity.
There's two separate things implied by the term "evolution", one of which I agree with, and one of which I don't.
Firstly, there's the notion of adaptability, or change. When a population is exposed to a change in environment, the change kills off that proportion of the population least able to cope with the change, and thus only the better adapted organisms survive. These then reproduce, creating a population which has an overall greater number of individuals adapted to the environmental change.
That sounds fine to me. Notice that one of the assumptions is that the attribute "selected" here is already present in the population. This sort of "evolution" does not create any new attribute - it simply changes the proportions of the population which possess that attribute.
The other element of evolution is progression. That due to a series of mutations, an organism is able to progress from a simple creature to a complex one. That attributes can spontaneously occur (usually ascribed to mutation), advantage an individual, are propogated throughout the group and, by increments, result in a drastically different organism. I don't hold with this, and I haven't seen much compelling evidence for it. Most evidence held up for evolution - those moths everyone learns about in biology, for example, or the stories about bacteria linked to by another poster, are an example of populations adapting, not progressing.
An interesting thing to note, is that Charles Darwin, when he proposed what became evolution, was not familiar, as we are now, with basic genetics. We can see that variation within a population can be accounted for, not by mutation, but by the combination of dominant/recessive genes. Darwin had no such knowledge - to him two brown eyed parents giving birth to a blue eyed child would have been only explainable as mutation, not as the expression of two recessive genes inherited from each parent. Some of the effects he sees which he ascribes to mutation are more readily explainable now as genetic phenomena.
To him, variation in a population could only be explained by evolution. We can now explain it through genetics.
This is not about developing more eye-candy.
It's about moving the load in current eye-candy *from* the CPU *to* the GPU. This is a good thing, as the GPU is idle for pretty much all of the time when windows are being rendered (only exception I can think of are 3d graphics progs, or 3d games running in windowed mode).
This is used purely and simply to free resources currently being used displaying eye candy. They can of course use the newly-freed resources to display *more* eye-candy, but that's not a given.
Pity we've never seen it happen. Evolution is not observable or testable because it happens over a period of time far, far greater than human life. All we can do is inspect the evidence, and construct theories around that evidence. That's closer to the study of history than science. Both science and history are methods of discerning truth, but they use very different mechanics. If you can't test something, or observe if, it's hard to form a scientific theory about it. You may use scientific techniques to find the evidence, but when it comes to interpreting it, all you can do is try and find an explanation that matches most of the facts you know about.
Sorry, but this just isn't true, unless you accept that "accepting j.c. into your heart" is the natural state of man - he who accepts him into his heart shall be saved implies pretty god-damned strongly that he who does not will not be saved. hence your statement would seem to be patently false - or is this just one of those contradictions that's been waved off as insignificant?
The point I was making is that your worthiness to God is not the result of some huge balance scale comparing all your good deeds to all your bad ones. No protestant theology believes that you get to heaven by doing lots of good things - one of the core beliefs of the reformation was that only God's intervention (sending Jesus to pay off our debts for us) can get us to heaven. There is still debate as to whether God predestined those who are saved (Calvinism) or whether an individual chooses to accept God's offer (Arminianism). I'm not really decided on that question, but even if you go with the Arminian argument, salvation is determined by the combination of God's grace and a single decision on your part to accept it - not the innate morality of your own actions.
Society at large should be mature enough to reasonably discuss the issue when it comes up with fact and to not take another's views personally. Unfortunately we don't yet live in a mature society.
Including you, it seems:
The people are suckers, let this happen, and still take the book for gospel even though any reasonable person would not believe King So and So are making these changes on behalf of "god" but instead are doing it for their own purposes.
Way to not make a personal attack on the beliefs of others.
Why should I put up with any crap for a diety that I wouldn't accept from a human?
Possibly because that deity made you, and therefore has some claim on you?
The belief that God has shown himself through some non-obvious means is exactly that, a belief, not a fact, and requires a leap of faith. It's a circular reference.
One of my favorite passages in the Bible is Matthew 16. In it the Pharisees come to Jesus and say "Your the Son of God then? Show us a sign!". If you like back over the last few chapters, Jesus had just walked on water, and fed 5,000 people from a meagre amount of food. The signs were all over the place, but the Pharisees didn't see them. I think that the existence of a supernatural creative force is obviously seen in the existence of our universe - but other people seem determined to hunt around for a rationalistic explanation that, in the end, requires a leap of faith just as belief in a creator does.
Do you really believe there is a supreme being who apparently learned to walk and talk all by himself even though you haven't ever seen him? Do you really believe he learned how to create planets and people all by himself too?
The point I was making was not that religion is more rational than science - I was saying that on the issue of the origin of life, both the scientific and religious explanations require belief - there is no proof either way. So if you prefer your explanation well and good, but its just as unproven and irrational as my explanation.
And just a little note - if, as the Bible says, God created man in his own image, then he's not really anthropomorphic, more like we're deiamorphic, or something like that.
You're right. That's crazy. Everyone needs to accept the cold, rational truth: a big, magic, invisible, all-powerful, timeless dude made us out of mud.
The thing is, religion isn't basing itself on rationalistic explanation. Religion is based on faith. Science says it is based on rationalism, but when it comes down to the origin of life issue, "scientific" explanations are just as much based on faith as religion.
I assume your talking about the Miller experiment. Firstly, that experiment didn't create life - it created amino acids, which are fundamental componenents of living organisms, but it did not spontaneously generate a living organism. Secondly, the experiment was fudged a bit - the gasses he used in the experiment were not the ones thought to have existed in primordial earth. Miller used ammonia, methane and hydrogen, and passed an electrical current through them. But our current atmosphere is composed of things like nitrogen and carbon dioxide - inert gasses that would not produce such a reaction - and Miller provided no evidence that demonstrated a substantially different atmospheric makeup in primordial earth.
On to your second point. Your amalgamating a whole bunch of different things under the heading of evolution. Evolution deals with gradual changes of existing life, it has nothing at all to do with anything that cannot reproduce. The origin of life could not be due to evolutionary mechanisms - the only reason they are connected is because you need to prove both to come up with a model of the universe without a creator.
As it stands, I don't believe in the spontaneous generation of life, nor the form of evolution that generates new information. I believe that evolution is a mechanism for adaptation, that through natural selection, descendants of an individual have the best subset of that individuals genes for their particular environment. But I don't believe that evolution is responsible for generating new genes, and, as far as I know, that process has never been observed. Science is all about observation - observation and repeatable experiments. We have not observed evolution. We have not managed to reproduce it in an experiment. Evolution remains in the domain of a conjecture made from historical evidence, rather than solid, reproducable scientific proof.
Communism works in some smaller systems - like communes, for example. Or most families. I know my family never practiced a democracy. They key to communism working, it seems, is that those that give up their personal possessions for the greater good do so voluntarily - parents, people working together in a commune, etc. Trying to enforce communism on a group of people that don't want to live communally is what leads to trouble.
Better get your own theology straight before you do - AFAIK, no Christian denomination teaches that. Standard Christian theology teaches that hell is the default destination of every human being (ie: not dependant on your misdemeanours) and protestant Christians at least (not too up on Catholic theology) believe that you are saved from hell by the grace of God (again, not dependant on your actions.)
By the by, do you really believe non-living chemicals learnt to walk and talk all by themselves?
They also let you setup and run a battle.net server in places without net access - a LAN that I went to used to have a bnetd server up all the time.
I don't think the grandparent is talking about reviews not giving adequate information - for the most part, it seems they do. I think he's complaining about game reviews being too dry and factual, and not artsy enough. In areas like literature, art, and increasingly, film, criticism seems to be approaching an artform itself (as Oscar Wilde talks about in "The Critic As Artist"). But not so with game reviews, they stick to just rating each component of a game.