... is the closing of minds
ideas are dangerous to closed minds.
However, an open mind is no reason not to properly categorize things.
The question of what is versus what isn't science is one of philosophy. Science requires certain underlying philosophical assumptions; the question of what assumptions should be used is fair to debate... but is NOT a scientific question.
Assumptions of basic Boolean logical and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory axioms are exceptionally uncontroversial in philosophy. They allow for construction of most of the familiar mathematics geeks play with. If you make the assumption of the Strong Church-Turing Universe Thesis to bound complexity, you can derive (or, being sensible, read the papers where Wallace/Dowe and Vitanyi/Li derived) a formal relationship between "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity", which allows for a rigorous definition of science as competitive testing for a very formal sense of "simplest descriptive explanation for all the evidence". And, no, "God Diddit!" doesn't win, because it's insufficiently descriptive of the evidence under the formal criteria.
As such, Intelligent Design becomes a candidate hypothesis rejected because it does not descriptively explain the evidence anywhere near as concisely as Evolution. Intelligent Design is not science, any more than the idea of the Luminiferous Ether is. Perhaps the Search for Intelligent Design might remain a scientific pursuit (as SETI is), but to do so it must admit that it has failed even more miserably than SETI.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here.
Almost. You have to distinguish between the scientific principles that are theories, laws, hypotheses, and conjectures which must be thus challenged as you note, from the scientific principles that are the underlying methodology and philosophy of science. The ID-iots are taking advantage of a slightly sloppy demarcation between what is "science" and what isn't, and argue when you question whether or not what they're trying to do is "really" science, and bring up questions like experimental repeatability.
Of late, I've found you can get a nicely formal definition useful for bludgeoning them senseless is to use as your underlying philosophical assumptions the Robbins Axioms, ZF set theory, and the Strong Church-Turing Universe Thesis. From there, via Wallace & Dowe's "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity" and Vitányi & Li's "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity", we get something that looks a lot like the scientific method of testing hypotheses against each other.
The downside is that that doesn't care whether you got your theory by watching an apple fall or it came handed to you on Golden Tablets by a choir of Seraphim. On the other hand, most journals don't really care about that either, as long as you attribute the co-authorship.
Isn't one of the points of the movie that while scientists espouse neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc. that they are not actually following it?
Neither neutrality, lack of bias, nor objectivity require lack of judgment.
ID supporters merely cannot understand the writing on the wall: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
Yes, I really do wear one at work. I do IT support at a University, and it makes me easy to pick out from amidst the faculty and students, and even the CS majors don't argue with my tech advice any more; they just nod respectfully. I suppose it may be a question of what you want to be in charge of....
The closest thing I have ever come across as a meaningful definition of macro evolution as being distinct from any other (micro) evolution is:
Change enough to cause non-interbreeding and thus a separate species dividing line.
Pretty much. Macro-evolution refers to the process after speciation; to quote Mayr, "A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characteristics which promote or guarantee reproductive isolation when the external barriers break down." (E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, ISBN 0-674-89665-3; p 442) I consider his "geographic isolation" criterion to merely be the most prevalent mechanism, and not a specific requirement. Thus, any time you have developments which will promote or guarantee reproductive isolation (IE, non-interbreeding), you can have speciation, and thus macroevolution.
There are several dozen instances of such recorded in the literature; I understand you can do it in the lab with fruit flies in only a couple years.
Scientifically there's no dispute any more.
There's some, but it's not so much whether as details of how. EG: while it's known that geographic isolation is generally believed the most common trigger for speciation, other possible mechanisms have been proposed. The relative frequency of the trigger types is pretty far up in the air. If people want to "teach the controversy" about the details of how, I could live with that. However, the "teach the controversy" crowd still thinks it applies to "whether", and it doesn't.
Actually, it's sodium's low neutron absorption levels in the MeV range that fission neutrons come out at, which in turn allows for breeder reactor operation.
Lead-206 and -207 each make up about a quarter of naturally occurring lead, and if I recall, have a non-trivial neutron capture rate leading to lower breeder efficiency than Sodium. While the immediate danger to the plant infrastructure from this kind of accident is reduced, lead is also a permanently poisonous heavy metal. The short term ease-of-operation would probably be a trade-off with long term damage from the rare accidental release. Frankly, I'd prefer sodium.
...that the only thing the current bunch of thugs learned from their Nixon days was how to do better on the coverup. I believe I was mistaken; they also seem to be getting better at trying to limit dissent.
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
To some extent, parsimony. String theory was an attempt to condense multiple distinct models into a single one. Assume the strong Church-Turing universe thesis; the work of Vitanyi/Li and Wallace/Dowe indicate that the simpler prediction correctly describing the known data is more likely to be correctly predictive.
That said, I would say that until some solid evidence turned up that previous theories didn't cover, String Theory was more philosophy than science per se.
No, really, read the paper before you mod me off-topic — page 1180 (24th of PDF):
SunnComm, the company that delivered MediaMax, offered even
more cause for concern. The company began as a provider of Elvis impersonation
services. After a change in management following a false press
release announcing a non-existent $25 million production deal with Warner
Brothers, the company purchased a 3.5" floppy disk factory in 2001,
displaying a disturbing dearth of technological savvy. After two employees
announced their intention to leave the fledgling company to develop
copy protection software, SunnComm convinced the pair to lead a
new division, leaving both Elvis and floppy discs behind in order to develop
what would become MediaMax.
I swear, I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything this surreal even if I tried.
It doesn't matter if we evolve, because we change the environment around us as opposed to adapting to it. Therefore evolution has been irrelevant as a factor of survival since humans learned to use tools.
Wrong. Your position presumes that all environmental changes caused by humans are deliberate and increase our prospect of survival. For a historical example, the shift to urban life allowed by the advent of agriculture resulted in easier spread of disease. For a contemporary example, Global Warming is likely have widespread undesirable environmental consequences.
And as previous coverage (linked this post and mentioned in TFA) has noted, evolution has actually sped up since humans began using tools, at least through the advent of agriculture.
I would have suggested a more traditional response involving a mob carrying torches and pitchforks, accompanied by a less-traditional mob of press invited for a slow news day outing.
Well I'm going to suggest you talk to the Department of Energy about it, they were the ones who made the statements with regards to ASCI Red originally.
You misunderstand the import of their remarks. The DOE has data from a couple dozen tests, and the exact (bloody frigging highly classified) designs used for them. THIS is the Secret Sauce needed. With this, and a good computer, yes, they can do simulations with a reasonable degree of expectation that the model will accurately predict reality by making sure the model also predicts the previous results observed, and no longer rely on regular testing.
Without that Secret Sauce, you still need to experiment. Supercomputers may help give a better idea on what experiment to run, but the Iranians will still need to experiment.
However supercomputers have now progressed to the point that you can actually TEST a bomb all in software.
This is inaccurate.
The basic nuclear design tools are finite element modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. With larger and larger number of elements modeled, you can get more and more accurate simulations in the same timeframe, so that the model has closer and closer resemblance to experimental reality. You also need some baseline data; some of that is declassified, some can be obtained experimentally on smaller scale using neutron beams, lasers, and high explosives. But the most important data on the high efficiency yield properties, and the algorithmic optimizations allowing rapid and detailed simulations, remain classified.
Even with a supercomputer design, without an actual test, you can't be sure your extrapolations and simulations will be as good as you hope. Getting a nuclear explosion isn't the real challenge; it's making one that's efficient. (This may have been North Korea's problem; sub-kiloton yields can result if you make a mistake.) However, a good computer lets you get a better idea of the sorts design variants you want to play with before you go risking your very expensively obtained fissionables on a test explosion.
But basic work and a rough model once you have the basic materials data? Two days on the HP-49 calculator, including programming time. A 7x7x7 element model gives you numbers that will be within 10% of the final... which does translate into an order of magnitude difference in possible yield, but anything from 1 to 100 kilotons still gets attention.
I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to built a cluster of PCs than it is to vaporize a Pacific island nation.
Sorta. Actually, the point is it lets you do design and testing while conserving the fissionables that are the real bottleneck to nuke production. Making a nuclear weapon is trivial given fifty kilos of 99.99% pure U235; getting it to give you more than a kiloton yield -- "fizzle" instead of fissile design -- is the challenge.
These folks have more kinds of cd/dvd holders than you could possible need.
Cyberguys doesn't carry the 80mm paper sleeves for miniCD/DVD-Rs, but do carry a six-in-one DVD case as well as the four-packs. Some of the stuff they carry can be found cheaper elsewhere (even ThinkGeek, in some cases!), but there's enough unique-and-cheap stuff there that it's on my regularly visited tech shopping bookmarks.
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
It appears you presume that the majority of the human race has access to modern medical care.
If a University is using NAT then all traffic coming from the University will appear as a single IP address.
Not necessarily; the University of Virginia uses NAT for machines connected to their Wireless network, but I believe each class-C chunk of 172.16 Wireless addresses has an individual gateway with its own public IP, and certainly the wired connections all have separate IP addresses.
As for why they went after college students, they figure they ought to have money about for tuition somewhere, as opposed to random schmucks still in their parent's basements.
A big assumption in the mathematical proof is randomness of both the data and the rule-set we are comparing against.
Actually, I think it's that the individual data elements are individually random (EG, not picked by God to mess with the experimenter's poor little brain), that the rule-set is finite (and self-consistent).
While there's good empirical evidence that our universe is fundamentally random, an all-encompassing "God" might still be able to "fool" all measurements in the wrong direction. so this is not really an argument that can be won on a rational basis.
That, of course begs the question as to what kind of God would do such a thing. As for whether it's "winning" or not, you can at least force them to make clear what foundational assumptions they're making.
Only accepting "we dont know for sure" is the answer, and that runs afoul of most religion's definition of "faith" where you are not supposed to doubt your creator's existence.
More that it's usually just "the gods smite unbelievers". The story of Thomas in John 20:19-29 is a bit of an exception, which has helped some varieties of Christianity (such as the Roman Catholic church) gradually become more accomodating to the idea of skeptical scientific inquiry, and that faith is limited to where knowledge ends.
(and another big assumption is that first-order mathematical logic governs this universe and that thus the mathematical logic that governs these proofs is valid. That's a popular hole any philosoph can drive a truck through without having to bother themselves with too much tiresome education.)
Not so much "governs" as "describes", nor "valid" as "relevant". While any philosopher can drive a truck through that hole, you can at least force them to make explicit the assumptions they've had to load on in order to get their truck through. Of course, the fun part is getting them to admit this assumption, and that they therefore have to consider that 2+2 may equal 5 — though asking random Literalist Xian nutjobs for money and quoting Matthew 5:42 (much the same as Luke 6:30) at them is not only more fun, but profitable.
Perhaps... but on the other hand, electric shocks work almost as well.
No, last I heard, electroshock aversion therapy had been found generally ineffective; while at onset the treatment is ineffective, over time the subject becomes habituated, requiring higher and higher negative stimulus levels. On the other hand, H. Keith Henson has speculated about how religion is able to use the same nervous system triggers as addictive drugs; his paper Sex, Drugs, and Cults notes that "Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins". It's been a successful method over a timescale sufficient for evolution to reinforce it genetically.
Besides, it's hard to find a quality cattle prod these days.
We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know.
Quibble: cause and effect are consequence of time's axis; it makes no sense to talk about them ("X lead to Y") past an essential discontinuity in the axis.
Slashdot Mirror
ideas are dangerous to closed minds.
However, an open mind is no reason not to properly categorize things.
The question of what is versus what isn't science is one of philosophy. Science requires certain underlying philosophical assumptions; the question of what assumptions should be used is fair to debate... but is NOT a scientific question.
Assumptions of basic Boolean logical and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory axioms are exceptionally uncontroversial in philosophy. They allow for construction of most of the familiar mathematics geeks play with. If you make the assumption of the Strong Church-Turing Universe Thesis to bound complexity, you can derive (or, being sensible, read the papers where Wallace/Dowe and Vitanyi/Li derived) a formal relationship between "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity", which allows for a rigorous definition of science as competitive testing for a very formal sense of "simplest descriptive explanation for all the evidence". And, no, "God Diddit!" doesn't win, because it's insufficiently descriptive of the evidence under the formal criteria.
As such, Intelligent Design becomes a candidate hypothesis rejected because it does not descriptively explain the evidence anywhere near as concisely as Evolution. Intelligent Design is not science, any more than the idea of the Luminiferous Ether is. Perhaps the Search for Intelligent Design might remain a scientific pursuit (as SETI is), but to do so it must admit that it has failed even more miserably than SETI.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here.
Almost. You have to distinguish between the scientific principles that are theories, laws, hypotheses, and conjectures which must be thus challenged as you note, from the scientific principles that are the underlying methodology and philosophy of science. The ID-iots are taking advantage of a slightly sloppy demarcation between what is "science" and what isn't, and argue when you question whether or not what they're trying to do is "really" science, and bring up questions like experimental repeatability.
Of late, I've found you can get a nicely formal definition useful for bludgeoning them senseless is to use as your underlying philosophical assumptions the Robbins Axioms, ZF set theory, and the Strong Church-Turing Universe Thesis. From there, via Wallace & Dowe's "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity" and Vitányi & Li's "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity", we get something that looks a lot like the scientific method of testing hypotheses against each other.
The downside is that that doesn't care whether you got your theory by watching an apple fall or it came handed to you on Golden Tablets by a choir of Seraphim. On the other hand, most journals don't really care about that either, as long as you attribute the co-authorship.
Isn't one of the points of the movie that while scientists espouse neutrality, lack of bias, objectivity, etc. that they are not actually following it?
Neither neutrality, lack of bias, nor objectivity require lack of judgment.
ID supporters merely cannot understand the writing on the wall: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
Which method - radiocarbon or by slicing thenm and counting the rings?
Slicing to count the rings is no longer approved of; drilling is the preferred method.
(There's probably a "rings" marriage joke here, too, but I'm too lazy to find it.)
...any problems with pocket protectors!
Yes, I really do wear one at work. I do IT support at a University, and it makes me easy to pick out from amidst the faculty and students, and even the CS majors don't argue with my tech advice any more; they just nod respectfully. I suppose it may be a question of what you want to be in charge of....
Find another job if you cannot work with your boss.
There are BOFH alternative approaches to the problem, of course...
The closest thing I have ever come across as a meaningful definition of macro evolution as being distinct from any other (micro) evolution is: Change enough to cause non-interbreeding and thus a separate species dividing line.
Pretty much. Macro-evolution refers to the process after speciation; to quote Mayr, "A new species develops if a population which has become geographically isolated from its parental species acquires during this period of isolation characteristics which promote or guarantee reproductive isolation when the external barriers break down." (E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, ISBN 0-674-89665-3; p 442) I consider his "geographic isolation" criterion to merely be the most prevalent mechanism, and not a specific requirement. Thus, any time you have developments which will promote or guarantee reproductive isolation (IE, non-interbreeding), you can have speciation, and thus macroevolution.
There are several dozen instances of such recorded in the literature; I understand you can do it in the lab with fruit flies in only a couple years.
Scientifically there's no dispute any more.
There's some, but it's not so much whether as details of how. EG: while it's known that geographic isolation is generally believed the most common trigger for speciation, other possible mechanisms have been proposed. The relative frequency of the trigger types is pretty far up in the air. If people want to "teach the controversy" about the details of how, I could live with that. However, the "teach the controversy" crowd still thinks it applies to "whether", and it doesn't.
Actually, it's sodium's low neutron absorption levels in the MeV range that fission neutrons come out at, which in turn allows for breeder reactor operation.
Lead-206 and -207 each make up about a quarter of naturally occurring lead, and if I recall, have a non-trivial neutron capture rate leading to lower breeder efficiency than Sodium. While the immediate danger to the plant infrastructure from this kind of accident is reduced, lead is also a permanently poisonous heavy metal. The short term ease-of-operation would probably be a trade-off with long term damage from the rare accidental release. Frankly, I'd prefer sodium.
...that the only thing the current bunch of thugs learned from their Nixon days was how to do better on the coverup. I believe I was mistaken; they also seem to be getting better at trying to limit dissent.
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
To some extent, parsimony. String theory was an attempt to condense multiple distinct models into a single one. Assume the strong Church-Turing universe thesis; the work of Vitanyi/Li and Wallace/Dowe indicate that the simpler prediction correctly describing the known data is more likely to be correctly predictive.
That said, I would say that until some solid evidence turned up that previous theories didn't cover, String Theory was more philosophy than science per se.
No, really, read the paper before you mod me off-topic — page 1180 (24th of PDF):
I swear, I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything this surreal even if I tried.
It's:
Fletcher: "Your honor, I object!"
Judge: "Why?"
Fletcher: "Because it's devastating to my case!"
Judge: "Overruled."
(Only Jim Carrey movie I didn't walk out of midway....)
It doesn't matter if we evolve, because we change the environment around us as opposed to adapting to it. Therefore evolution has been irrelevant as a factor of survival since humans learned to use tools.
Wrong. Your position presumes that all environmental changes caused by humans are deliberate and increase our prospect of survival. For a historical example, the shift to urban life allowed by the advent of agriculture resulted in easier spread of disease. For a contemporary example, Global Warming is likely have widespread undesirable environmental consequences.
And as previous coverage (linked this post and mentioned in TFA) has noted, evolution has actually sped up since humans began using tools, at least through the advent of agriculture.
I would have suggested a more traditional response involving a mob carrying torches and pitchforks, accompanied by a less-traditional mob of press invited for a slow news day outing.
Well I'm going to suggest you talk to the Department of Energy about it, they were the ones who made the statements with regards to ASCI Red originally.
You misunderstand the import of their remarks. The DOE has data from a couple dozen tests, and the exact (bloody frigging highly classified) designs used for them. THIS is the Secret Sauce needed. With this, and a good computer, yes, they can do simulations with a reasonable degree of expectation that the model will accurately predict reality by making sure the model also predicts the previous results observed, and no longer rely on regular testing.
Without that Secret Sauce, you still need to experiment. Supercomputers may help give a better idea on what experiment to run, but the Iranians will still need to experiment.
However supercomputers have now progressed to the point that you can actually TEST a bomb all in software.
This is inaccurate.
The basic nuclear design tools are finite element modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. With larger and larger number of elements modeled, you can get more and more accurate simulations in the same timeframe, so that the model has closer and closer resemblance to experimental reality. You also need some baseline data; some of that is declassified, some can be obtained experimentally on smaller scale using neutron beams, lasers, and high explosives. But the most important data on the high efficiency yield properties, and the algorithmic optimizations allowing rapid and detailed simulations, remain classified.
Even with a supercomputer design, without an actual test, you can't be sure your extrapolations and simulations will be as good as you hope. Getting a nuclear explosion isn't the real challenge; it's making one that's efficient. (This may have been North Korea's problem; sub-kiloton yields can result if you make a mistake.) However, a good computer lets you get a better idea of the sorts design variants you want to play with before you go risking your very expensively obtained fissionables on a test explosion.
But basic work and a rough model once you have the basic materials data? Two days on the HP-49 calculator, including programming time. A 7x7x7 element model gives you numbers that will be within 10% of the final... which does translate into an order of magnitude difference in possible yield, but anything from 1 to 100 kilotons still gets attention.
I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to built a cluster of PCs than it is to vaporize a Pacific island nation.
Sorta. Actually, the point is it lets you do design and testing while conserving the fissionables that are the real bottleneck to nuke production. Making a nuclear weapon is trivial given fifty kilos of 99.99% pure U235; getting it to give you more than a kiloton yield -- "fizzle" instead of fissile design -- is the challenge.
These folks have more kinds of cd/dvd holders than you could possible need.
Cyberguys doesn't carry the 80mm paper sleeves for miniCD/DVD-Rs, but do carry a six-in-one DVD case as well as the four-packs. Some of the stuff they carry can be found cheaper elsewhere (even ThinkGeek, in some cases!), but there's enough unique-and-cheap stuff there that it's on my regularly visited tech shopping bookmarks.
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
It appears you presume that the majority of the human race has access to modern medical care.
If a University is using NAT then all traffic coming from the University will appear as a single IP address.
Not necessarily; the University of Virginia uses NAT for machines connected to their Wireless network, but I believe each class-C chunk of 172.16 Wireless addresses has an individual gateway with its own public IP, and certainly the wired connections all have separate IP addresses.
As for why they went after college students, they figure they ought to have money about for tuition somewhere, as opposed to random schmucks still in their parent's basements.
A big assumption in the mathematical proof is randomness of both the data and the rule-set we are comparing against.
Actually, I think it's that the individual data elements are individually random (EG, not picked by God to mess with the experimenter's poor little brain), that the rule-set is finite (and self-consistent).
While there's good empirical evidence that our universe is fundamentally random, an all-encompassing "God" might still be able to "fool" all measurements in the wrong direction. so this is not really an argument that can be won on a rational basis.
That, of course begs the question as to what kind of God would do such a thing. As for whether it's "winning" or not, you can at least force them to make clear what foundational assumptions they're making.
Only accepting "we dont know for sure" is the answer, and that runs afoul of most religion's definition of "faith" where you are not supposed to doubt your creator's existence.
More that it's usually just "the gods smite unbelievers". The story of Thomas in John 20:19-29 is a bit of an exception, which has helped some varieties of Christianity (such as the Roman Catholic church) gradually become more accomodating to the idea of skeptical scientific inquiry, and that faith is limited to where knowledge ends.
(and another big assumption is that first-order mathematical logic governs this universe and that thus the mathematical logic that governs these proofs is valid. That's a popular hole any philosoph can drive a truck through without having to bother themselves with too much tiresome education.)
Not so much "governs" as "describes", nor "valid" as "relevant". While any philosopher can drive a truck through that hole, you can at least force them to make explicit the assumptions they've had to load on in order to get their truck through. Of course, the fun part is getting them to admit this assumption, and that they therefore have to consider that 2+2 may equal 5 — though asking random Literalist Xian nutjobs for money and quoting Matthew 5:42 (much the same as Luke 6:30) at them is not only more fun, but profitable.
Perhaps ... but on the other hand, electric shocks work almost as well.
No, last I heard, electroshock aversion therapy had been found generally ineffective; while at onset the treatment is ineffective, over time the subject becomes habituated, requiring higher and higher negative stimulus levels. On the other hand, H. Keith Henson has speculated about how religion is able to use the same nervous system triggers as addictive drugs; his paper Sex, Drugs, and Cults notes that "Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins". It's been a successful method over a timescale sufficient for evolution to reinforce it genetically.
Besides, it's hard to find a quality cattle prod these days.
It's called "The Texas Education Agency."
What? Evolution allows for so-called "living fossils" like the coelacanth.
We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know.
Quibble: cause and effect are consequence of time's axis; it makes no sense to talk about them ("X lead to Y") past an essential discontinuity in the axis.