Dselect IS your friend, specially when running unstable.
I gotta agree here. apt-get is fine for installing single packages, or for doing updates off of security.debian.org, but for unstable, I want dselect. I like to have the list of new packages available...
You're not familiar with creationism are you? It does not claim that new species were created any time after the initial creation. After the initial creation, there were no claims of new species being dropped in. Your characterization of creationism is incorrect. You're arguing against your own characterization, not the Biblical account.
Sorry, I was farther along in the argument than you were.
Allow me to reiterate: The fossil record is as valid as the historical record, as the method of extracting data and the nature of that data are both quite similar. George Washington didn't exist for thousands of years of human history, and then he did for a while, and now he doesn't. Eohippus did not exist for billions of years of natural history, and then they did for a while, and now they don't. The evidence supporting these two statements is very similar, one written on paper, the other on rock.
I have never seen an argument against the fossil record that didn't have a parallel against the historical. The basic creationist argument boils down to an assertion that information cannot be extracted from the past. It's as valid as any other philosophical argument, but should be applied evenly across the liberal arts and sciences, not just to evolutionary biology.
A change in species requires essentially that a generation be born that can breed with itself, but not with prior generations that are capable of breeding with themselves. So somewhere along the line, a change must occur that makes a generation incompatible. If that's not akin to spontaneous change after the appearance of the parent species, I don't know what is.
If evolution (Darwinian or otherwise) actually required such an occurance, I'd be the first new convert to creationism. But what usually occurs is a seperation of a species into two groups that can but don't. Geographical isolation is a prime candidate. If subspecies A is on one island and B is on another, and they can't interbreed, then given microevolution and enough time, the two groups will drift into seperate species. Natural selection and evironmental pressures will speed the process, but they're not even necessary.
Biology works in continuums, not discrete quanta. You will never be able to point at a particular newborn and declare that speciation has occured.
I'm not sure I see the connection to science here. The record on George Washington is fantastic, and witnessed and recorded first-hand.
The point is that history and natural history use the same methods for gathering data (if not interpretting them), and you can't invalidate one without destroying the other. Why not apply the same arguments about the fossil record to the written one? How do you know that ink won't migrate across a page if left alone long enough? When we read old documents we see changes in spelling, grammer and all that and we say the language is evolving, but how do we know the record isn't lying to us?
Again, "Washington" is not a scientific principal. He was not a species or change of species.
He is a historical entity, as much as any species.
If spontaneous generation of species occured, something better would have come along and either ate them or starved them out.
And this has happened repeatedly, regardless of how species came to be! What is your point here?
Evolution by natural selection happens within historical constraints while creation is unfettered. We have millions of years of history of isolated, maladapted communities getting by because there were no other pressures on them. This is explainable by evolution, but if new organisms can really appear out of thin air, why didn't they appear and wipe out the easy meat? I am comfortable with random chance in physical systems (and even directed creation, albiet I'd need more proof) but we have absolutely no evidence that it has ever occured.
If species don't arise by spontaneous generation or by macro-evolution, what is left? Either they came from something that was there before, or not. There is no third choice.
Evolutionist : "Look how all the slow and clumsy Dinosaurs died out while the agile and quick mammals survived"
That's a pretty poor evolutionist. Dinosaurs out-competed mammals for millions of years. We didn't get our chance until they died off, an act that was completely independant of furry little forebearers.
But, I do want to point out that macroevolution also does not stand up to standard lab reproduction. We simply haven't been observing long enough.
I want you to experimentally prove George Washington to me. Reproduce the man and all his acomplishments in a lab. We can't, and we can't "prove" he existed, but will still teach it. Natural history got its name for a reason, and like all historical sciences, it is not well suited to laboratory experimentation. Like all geologic-scale systems, it is even less suited to observation.
This invalidates neither the science nor the conclusions we draw from it.
We prove Washington existed by looking at the record he left behind, and we can do likewise with previous pecies. There is the fossil record, yes, but that is woefully incomplete. Fortunately, they left another record, their children. And their children's children, and each bears the mark of its history.
And how that history shines! Forget the perfectly adapted creatures, they prove nothing. But for every organism so beautiful it makes you fall to your knees and proclaim the glory of God, there's three more that are put together out of duct tape and bubble gum. Flightless birds, pandas, any number marsupials (but not all of them). Organisms, constrained by their pasts, that can survive only because there's nothing better to push them out. If spontaneous generation of species occured, something better would have come along and either ate them or starved them out.
Consider our teeth. I can't explain our teeth from creationism. Why would a benevolent God give us teeth that, without constant care, rot out of our mouths in less than half our life span? Especially when the Supreme Engineer already had a better system in place in sharks? But I can explain them from natural selection. Our teeth lasted for most of our ancestors lives, and certainly all through the breeding years. We don't have better teeth because we didn't need them. We do now, but natural selection, unlike God, has no foresight, so we live with imperfect teeth. A relic of our past.
I *just learned that one the other day from the Particle Adventure Homepage. I'm not suppose to know that one yet, and I piss off the teachers whenever I point out the TRUTH.
Don't do that. It's annoying and antagonistic and you'll rgret it later, especially if you ever have to do any teaching. If you really want more information, ask about it outside of class, but remember that your teachers are not lying to you out of spite.
Teaching is the art of taking a sea of raw knowledge and distilling it down to something that can be understood by the students in the time alotted. Yes, that means you gloss over some things, and completely ignore some others, but do you think that when 11th graders are first introduced to energy conservation, they need a side trip in QM?
If your teacher says something that is outright false (e.g. "glass is a liquid", I got that one in HS chemistry), nail 'em on it, but otherwise just let it pass. some subjects are a horrible time sink and just can't be dealt with.
I really recommend The Science of Discworld. Among many other things, they talk about "lies to children" and the reasoning behind it, and they admit that make "lies to readers". There was a Slashdot review you can look up, or just hit Amazon(.co.uk, if it's not out at.com yet).
It is true that no theory can ever be proven, but I'd humbly submit that there's a lot more evidence in favor of gravity than evolution. In particular no one ever argues that there are inconsistencies with the theory of gravity.
If only. Newton's gravition was disproved early this century, and replaced with Relativity. But as Quantum Mechanics came into its own, it became clear that either Relativity or Quantum Mechanics was wrong, and most people pointed at Relativity. This is the source of that "God does not play dice with the universe" quote another poster has sigged. Einstein hated QM, and died a lonely hold-out against it.
The result? There is no theory of gravity. Newton or Eintein seem to be decent approximations at times, but no one really has any idea how or why gravity occurs. A good bit of wild speculation is out there, but no proof.
Evolution as theory (natural selection acting on genetic variation) is a good bit stronger than Gravity...
he's probably talking about in-house, non-gpl development, and if you walk up to your manager with a linux development program that costs $40K in licensing, for libraries alone, it does make visual cpp and nt a more viable (and cost effective) solution.
That's insane. I've seen any number of comparisons between Linux and NT, but "NT is cheaper" is definately a new one. Read what I wrote again. Even if yu pay an extra 20k in development, Linux boxes for the users are cheaper than NTs.
Buy Qt and use a free Unix now, and never pay anyone a dime again, or buy Microsoft now for the developers, and buy Microsoft later for the users, and then again for the users after that (old software is never thrown away)... Which one is really cost effective?
KDE and Qt? I don't think so. If our software group wants to use the qt library, it's $1550 * ~30 developers.
You want TrollTech's programmers to work for free? Well, you first. Stop collecting a paycheck and you can write all the Qt apps you want.
Gee, I could get Microsoft NT and Visual Studio for each developer...for less!
Maybe, but then the user evironment costs money. Unless you're shipping boxed software or something similar, where the user isn't really your concern, it comes out cheaper in the long run. It takes less than a dozen users per developer to make Qt cheaper.
Re:KDE took up all the bandwidth of a certain ISP
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
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· Score: 1
Mind you, this is only a measure of the number of Debian users. People who have to go *out of their way* to install and use KDE.
Of course, once you add the sources.list line, it's no problem at all to hit it repeatedly. I use potato, and run apt-get a couple times a week. There's so little work involved, why not run it often?
We still don't have a way to get radio signals to the dark side of the moon.
Hang a couple of repeater satellites in such a way that at least one of them can always see both stations. You could do this with lasers just as easily (well...) as radio, too.
what kind of rubbish is this, by the time were populating other planets dont ya think this protocol will be obsolete?
There's a manned Mars mission in ten or fifteen years, and it ain't no week-long trip. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to Mars if I can't get Slashdot...
Check out DonkPunch's user info page. See all those 2's and 3's? He's been moderated up so much that Slash recognizes him and bumps him up automatically. No moderator sat down and decided his post was more worthy than yours.
You can tell automatic moderation because there'll usually (always?) be no tag on it. "(Score:2)" rather than "(Score:2, Informative)" or whatever.
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
I agree...but I sure hope that you are against the prosecution of MS with this attitude -- otherwise you're a hypocrite.
Have you ever tried to wonder around microsoft.com with a non-MS browser? It's not very pleasant. But while we may bitch about it, and not think it a very bright move, no one has tried to force them to allow Netscape users access.
This is the most hackneyed myth in American culture
No argument there, but...
Firstly, American soldiers haven't fought to directly defend American lands or citizens in over a century.
This isn't even close to true. Aside from the fact that Flanders isn't nearly as far away from Kansas as it was a few hundred years ago, American soil saw fighting the World Wars. Remember Pearl Harbor? There were Japanese attacks on Alaska, as well. And plenty of American civilians died to German subs.
WW1 is a dicier affair, but we finally entered because Germany was talking to Mexico about an invasion. Would you rather we wait until the fighting was in Texas?
That's true to a point but I think that one of the main reasons is that both aircrafts and nuclear power facilities are very time-critical applications.
Nah, I've seen the same thing of Motorola real-time contollers. It's a standard clause on any sort of embedded component, and doesn't have anything to do with the capabilities or limitations of the product. Everything has bugs, and Sun is just covering their butts.
What do you think? Is it just numbers, or is there something to this? Why are so many KDE users (almost half in THIS survey) not interested in developing for Qt?
Several populations are showing up here:
RAD coders: "If I have to think about what toolkt I'm using, you're slowing me down." A good visual GUI builder means never having to care about the widget's code.
Desktop agnostics: People who don't care or even dislike the idea of tight coupling between desktop and apps. I fall into this group myself, unless I wan't some specific feature of the desktop, I'll use whatever widget set it easiest. For me, that means Qt for a C++ project, GTK for C, Tk for perl.
Cross-platform cheapskates: Notice that 60% wanted to develop for both Windows and Linux, with source code compatibility being quite popular. Qt for Windows costs money.
X Newbies: They're still learning the ropes, and don't quite know what's going on yet. Toolkit choice is hardly a big part of Windows programming... They're using KDE or GNOME because their distribution starts it by default.
I'd say this is most of them. Anybody see a group I missed?
That 2% may be composed of forgotten boxes in university/corporate offices.
Doesn't matter. If any machine on a network is insecure, then the entire network is insecure. Read the story of their own crack. J. Random Employee runs an insecure NT box. Result: Entire company network is compromised, and one of the most secure machines on it is rooted.
That 450,000 compromises millions of other machines. And those millions compromise others, which compromise others... What depth does one need to reach any machine on the net? What's the average degree of seperation of two random boxes?
One of my ISP's n-thousand users has a cracked box. This is a certainty. Now I could be running trojans, and my school's network is compromised. From there, access to hunreds of private, academic, and government networks...
Re:Incomplete packages released as Open Source...
on
AOL Jilts Open Source
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· Score: 1
Obviously, a client that could be used as a base for a completely open source solution is a different matter.
But with the client and the protocol, you can build a server. Of course, you don't have access to their database...
why aren't the overwhelming majority of large species hermaphrodites?
Because a male requires less energy investment and will likely have more offspring than a hermaphrodite. It's the same as the difference between a spider with hundreds of young who are on their own, and a mammal with handful of well-protected offspring. Sometimes it's better to protect a single investment, sometimes it's better to cover as many bases as possible.
Just as all of an artist's works share some similarities, couldn't this "genetic progression" you refer to be that the species were created by the same intelligence?
Certainly, but that's immaterial. Whether the pattern is random or by design, the pattern is still there, and worth investigating.
As far as I understand it, the belief that a "big bang" created the universe is similar to shaking a puzzle in it's box, throwing the pieces on the table, and having them all fall perfectly into place. From an mathematical standpoint, this is impossible.
Not impossible, just improbable. And if the physicists are right and there an infinite number of universes, then how improbable doesn't matter. Life will happen somewhere, it has too.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's K&R C?
They mention both AT&T's compiler, which I would assume is the first. Someone corrct if I'm wrong...
Dselect IS your friend, specially when running unstable.
I gotta agree here. apt-get is fine for installing single packages, or for doing updates off of security.debian.org, but for unstable, I want dselect. I like to have the list of new packages available...
tonight I shall run apt-get with abandon from all my Deb boxen
Bad idea.
a) The freeze isn't till this weekend
b) A freeze doesn't mean it's gotten any better. Slink had a number of bugs that were both created and fixed in freeze.
If you want Stable, wait till the release. Of course, I'm running potato now myself, and am not having any trouble...
Can't. It'd be a massive amount of load on the servers
So why not sort the comments when the stories are archived? Personally, I'd rather have forcible sorting by score than forcible sorting by post order.
You're not familiar with creationism are you? It does not claim that new species were created any time after the initial creation. After the
initial creation, there were no claims of new species being dropped in. Your characterization of creationism is incorrect. You're arguing against your own characterization, not the Biblical account.
Sorry, I was farther along in the argument than you were.
Allow me to reiterate: The fossil record is as valid as the historical record, as the method of extracting data and the nature of that data are both quite similar. George Washington didn't exist for thousands of years of human history, and then he did for a while, and now he doesn't. Eohippus did not exist for billions of years of natural history, and then they did for a while, and now they don't. The evidence supporting these two statements is very similar, one written on paper, the other on rock.
I have never seen an argument against the fossil record that didn't have a parallel against the historical. The basic creationist argument boils down to an assertion that information cannot be extracted from the past. It's as valid as any other philosophical argument, but should be applied evenly across the liberal arts and sciences, not just to evolutionary biology.
A change in species requires essentially that a generation be born that can breed with itself, but not with prior generations that are capable of breeding with themselves. So somewhere along the line, a change must occur that makes a generation incompatible. If that's not akin to spontaneous change after the appearance of the parent species, I don't know what is.
If evolution (Darwinian or otherwise) actually required such an occurance, I'd be the first new convert to creationism. But what usually occurs is a seperation of a species into two groups that can but don't. Geographical isolation is a prime candidate. If subspecies A is on one island and B is on another, and they can't interbreed, then given microevolution and enough time, the two groups will drift into seperate species. Natural selection and evironmental pressures will speed the process, but they're not even necessary.
Biology works in continuums, not discrete quanta. You will never be able to point at a particular newborn and declare that speciation has occured.
I'm not sure I see the connection to science here. The record on George Washington is fantastic, and witnessed and recorded first-hand.
The point is that history and natural history use the same methods for gathering data (if not interpretting them), and you can't invalidate one without destroying the other. Why not apply the same arguments about the fossil record to the written one? How do you know that ink won't migrate across a page if left alone long enough? When we read old documents we see changes in spelling, grammer and all that and we say the language is evolving, but how do we know the record isn't lying to us?
Again, "Washington" is not a scientific principal. He was not a species or change of species.
He is a historical entity, as much as any species.
If spontaneous generation of species occured, something better would have come along and either ate them or starved them out.
And this has happened repeatedly, regardless of how species came to be! What is your point here?
Evolution by natural selection happens within historical constraints while creation is unfettered. We have millions of years of history of isolated, maladapted communities getting by because there were no other pressures on them. This is explainable by evolution, but if new organisms can really appear out of thin air, why didn't they appear and wipe out the easy meat? I am comfortable with random chance in physical systems (and even directed creation, albiet I'd need more proof) but we have absolutely no evidence that it has ever occured.
If species don't arise by spontaneous generation or by macro-evolution, what is left? Either they came from something that was there before, or not. There is no third choice.
Evolutionist : "Look how all the slow and clumsy Dinosaurs died out while the agile and quick mammals survived"
That's a pretty poor evolutionist. Dinosaurs out-competed mammals for millions of years. We didn't get our chance until they died off, an act that was completely independant of furry little forebearers.
But, I do want to point out that macroevolution also does not stand up to standard lab reproduction. We simply haven't been observing long enough.
I want you to experimentally prove George Washington to me. Reproduce the man and all his acomplishments in a lab. We can't, and we can't "prove" he existed, but will still teach it. Natural history got its name for a reason, and like all historical sciences, it is not well suited to laboratory experimentation. Like all geologic-scale systems, it is even less suited to observation.
This invalidates neither the science nor the conclusions we draw from it.
We prove Washington existed by looking at the record he left behind, and we can do likewise with previous pecies. There is the fossil record, yes, but that is woefully incomplete. Fortunately, they left another record, their children. And their children's children, and each bears the mark of its history.
And how that history shines! Forget the perfectly adapted creatures, they prove nothing. But for every organism so beautiful it makes you fall to your knees and proclaim the glory of God, there's three more that are put together out of duct tape and bubble gum. Flightless birds, pandas, any number marsupials (but not all of them). Organisms, constrained by their pasts, that can survive only because there's nothing better to push them out. If spontaneous generation of species occured, something better would have come along and either ate them or starved them out.
Consider our teeth. I can't explain our teeth from creationism. Why would a benevolent God give us teeth that, without constant care, rot out of our mouths in less than half our life span? Especially when the Supreme Engineer already had a better system in place in sharks? But I can explain them from natural selection. Our teeth lasted for most of our ancestors lives, and certainly all through the breeding years. We don't have better teeth because we didn't need them. We do now, but natural selection, unlike God, has no foresight, so we live with imperfect teeth. A relic of our past.
I *just learned that one the other day from the Particle Adventure Homepage. I'm not suppose to know that one yet, and I piss off the teachers whenever I point out the TRUTH.
.com yet).
Don't do that. It's annoying and antagonistic and you'll rgret it later, especially if you ever have to do any teaching. If you really want more information, ask about it outside of class, but remember that your teachers are not lying to you out of spite.
Teaching is the art of taking a sea of raw knowledge and distilling it down to something that can be understood by the students in the time alotted. Yes, that means you gloss over some things, and completely ignore some others, but do you think that when 11th graders are first introduced to energy conservation, they need a side trip in QM?
If your teacher says something that is outright false (e.g. "glass is a liquid", I got that one in HS chemistry), nail 'em on it, but otherwise just let it pass. some subjects are a horrible time sink and just can't be dealt with.
I really recommend The Science of Discworld. Among many other things, they talk about "lies to children" and the reasoning behind it, and they admit that make "lies to readers". There was a Slashdot review you can look up, or just hit Amazon(.co.uk, if it's not out at
It is true that no theory can ever be proven, but I'd humbly submit that there's a lot more evidence in favor of gravity than evolution. In particular no one ever argues that there are inconsistencies with the theory of gravity.
If only. Newton's gravition was disproved early this century, and replaced with Relativity. But as Quantum Mechanics came into its own, it became clear that either Relativity or Quantum Mechanics was wrong, and most people pointed at Relativity. This is the source of that "God does not play dice with the universe" quote another poster has sigged. Einstein hated QM, and died a lonely hold-out against it.
The result? There is no theory of gravity. Newton or Eintein seem to be decent approximations at times, but no one really has any idea how or why gravity occurs. A good bit of wild speculation is out there, but no proof.
Evolution as theory (natural selection acting on genetic variation) is a good bit stronger than Gravity...
he's probably talking about in-house, non-gpl development, and if you walk up to your manager with a linux development program that costs $40K in licensing, for libraries alone, it does make visual cpp and nt a more viable (and cost effective) solution.
That's insane. I've seen any number of comparisons between Linux and NT, but "NT is cheaper" is definately a new one. Read what I wrote again. Even if yu pay an extra 20k in development, Linux boxes for the users are cheaper than NTs.
Buy Qt and use a free Unix now, and never pay anyone a dime again, or buy Microsoft now for the developers, and buy Microsoft later for the users, and then again for the users after that (old software is never thrown away)... Which one is really cost effective?
KDE and Qt? I don't think so. If our software group wants to use the qt library, it's $1550 * ~30 developers.
You want TrollTech's programmers to work for free? Well, you first. Stop collecting a paycheck and you can write all the Qt apps you want.
Gee, I could get Microsoft NT and Visual Studio for each developer...for less!
Maybe, but then the user evironment costs money. Unless you're shipping boxed software or something similar, where the user isn't really your concern, it comes out cheaper in the long run. It takes less than a dozen users per developer to make Qt cheaper.
Mind you, this is only a measure of the number of Debian users. People who have to go *out of their way* to install and use KDE.
Of course, once you add the sources.list line, it's no problem at all to hit it repeatedly. I use potato, and run apt-get a couple times a week. There's so little work involved, why not run it often?
We still don't have a way to get radio signals to the dark side of the moon.
Hang a couple of repeater satellites in such a way that at least one of them can always see both stations. You could do this with lasers just as easily (well...) as radio, too.
what kind of rubbish is this, by the time were populating other planets dont ya think this protocol will be obsolete?
There's a manned Mars mission in ten or fifteen years, and it ain't no week-long trip. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to Mars if I can't get Slashdot...
Check out DonkPunch's user info page. See all those 2's and 3's? He's been moderated up so much that Slash recognizes him and bumps him up automatically. No moderator sat down and decided his post was more worthy than yours.
You can tell automatic moderation because there'll usually (always?) be no tag on it. "(Score:2)" rather than "(Score:2, Informative)" or whatever.
"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
I agree...but I sure hope that you are against the prosecution of MS with this attitude -- otherwise you're a hypocrite.
Have you ever tried to wonder around microsoft.com with a non-MS browser? It's not very pleasant. But while we may bitch about it, and not think it a very bright move, no one has tried to force them to allow Netscape users access.
This is the most hackneyed myth in American culture
No argument there, but...
Firstly, American soldiers haven't fought to directly defend American lands or citizens in over a century.
This isn't even close to true. Aside from the fact that Flanders isn't nearly as far away from Kansas as it was a few hundred years ago, American soil saw fighting the World Wars. Remember Pearl Harbor? There were Japanese attacks on Alaska, as well. And plenty of American civilians died to German subs.
WW1 is a dicier affair, but we finally entered because Germany was talking to Mexico about an invasion. Would you rather we wait until the fighting was in Texas?
That's true to a point but I think that one of the main reasons is that both aircrafts and nuclear power facilities are very time-critical applications.
Nah, I've seen the same thing of Motorola real-time contollers. It's a standard clause on any sort of embedded component, and doesn't have anything to do with the capabilities or limitations of the product. Everything has bugs, and Sun is just covering their butts.
What do you think? Is it just numbers, or is there something to this? Why are so many KDE users (almost half in THIS survey) not interested in developing for Qt?
Several populations are showing up here:
RAD coders: "If I have to think about what toolkt I'm using, you're slowing me down." A good visual GUI builder means never having to care about the widget's code.
Desktop agnostics: People who don't care or even dislike the idea of tight coupling between desktop and apps. I fall into this group myself, unless I wan't some specific feature of the desktop, I'll use whatever widget set it easiest. For me, that means Qt for a C++ project, GTK for C, Tk for perl.
Cross-platform cheapskates: Notice that 60% wanted to develop for both Windows and Linux, with source code compatibility being quite popular. Qt for Windows costs money.
X Newbies: They're still learning the ropes, and don't quite know what's going on yet. Toolkit choice is hardly a big part of Windows programming... They're using KDE or GNOME because their distribution starts it by default.
I'd say this is most of them. Anybody see a group I missed?
"I tried sniffing coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck up my nose"
- Unknown (to me, at least)
Sound like Steven Wright, but that's just off the top of my head...
That 2% may be composed of forgotten boxes in university/corporate offices.
Doesn't matter. If any machine on a network is insecure, then the entire network is insecure. Read the story of their own crack. J. Random Employee runs an insecure NT box. Result: Entire company network is compromised, and one of the most secure machines on it is rooted.
That 450,000 compromises millions of other machines. And those millions compromise others, which compromise others... What depth does one need to reach any machine on the net? What's the average degree of seperation of two random boxes?
One of my ISP's n-thousand users has a cracked box. This is a certainty. Now I could be running trojans, and my school's network is compromised. From there, access to hunreds of private, academic, and government networks...
Obviously, a client that could be used as a base for a completely open source solution is a different matter.
But with the client and the protocol, you can build a server. Of course, you don't have access to their database...
He's an authoritarian socialist
AKA, fascist. "Government knows best, and requires the authority to enforce it."
why aren't the overwhelming majority of large species hermaphrodites?
Because a male requires less energy investment and will likely have more offspring than a hermaphrodite. It's the same as the difference between a spider with hundreds of young who are on their own, and a mammal with handful of well-protected offspring. Sometimes it's better to protect a single investment, sometimes it's better to cover as many bases as possible.
Just as all of an artist's works share some similarities, couldn't this "genetic progression" you refer to be that the species were created by the same intelligence?
Certainly, but that's immaterial. Whether the pattern is random or by design, the pattern is still there, and worth investigating.
As far as I understand it, the belief that a "big bang" created the universe is similar to shaking a puzzle in it's box, throwing the pieces on the table, and having them all fall perfectly into place. From an mathematical standpoint, this is impossible.
Not impossible, just improbable. And if the physicists are right and there an infinite number of universes, then how improbable doesn't matter. Life will happen somewhere, it has too.