That's great, until you limit them to that subset. I'm so glad I placed out of a class, taught in Java, where we were forbidden to use switch, break, and continue. The next class, taught in C++, was much better. I was able to teach myself about pointers to member functions on an assignment where everyone else was resorting to massive code duplication.
Why are pointers a bad thing in a beginning language?
I'm sophomore in CS who taught myself to program (QBASIC, ugh) in 3rd grade. When that got too limiting, I learned C. Pointers were a bit confusing, but now they're second nature. A good portion of my classmates, however, were first introduced to programming in CS125, taught in Java. People were having real trouble understanding recursive functions. In CS225, taught in C++, pointers are eating them alive.
So first teach them C, and a big part of that is the layout of memory, what a pointer is, and the stack. Spend one lesson on function calling conventions. Then it's obvious how recursive functions work. Then, since pointers are a much more concrete concept than references, when it comes time to learn about Java's references, it's much easier.
Also, I think there ought to be some sort of introduction to the command line. That's also very informative about how computers work, and it's hard getting people to experiment with compiling programs when they have no idea what a relative path is, or what cd does, or what stdout is.
I agree with C, for two big reasons. One, it's one of a few languages that it's possible to fully master. It's just not that complex. C++ introduces tons of special cases in its type system, and it hides more behind the curtains. Java simplifies this, but hides still more. Which is the second reason - C is much closer to the machine. As soon as you learn a bit of C, you should be familiarized with assembly language, the stack, etc., just so you get an idea of what's actually going on. Only then do you bother with object oriented programming and all the rest.
Some might argue that being "close to the metal" is not a benefit, but I think it depends on what you want to do. If you're just trying to make one project, to hack together code once, hopefully working (not that there's anything wrong with this), then use a language that will let you do that. But if you want to make a career of programming, you're going to need to understand many languages, why they are designed how they are, and how to use them efficiently. This requires a good knowledge of what's actually happening underneath the hood, and so you may as well start with C. Plus, C syntax is the gold standard to which all other languages aspire.
Once somebody wanted to learn about programming, and I lent him the K&R C book. I never got back. So screw it, teach them PHP or something.
You seem to harbor the misconception that DRM has anything to do with stopping piracy. It does not.
The nature of internet piracy is such that only one unencrypted copy is necessary before all the pirates have access to it. And the nature of books, music, and movies is such that in order for them to be experienced by human eyes and ears, they must be decrypted at some point. The music, movie, and now textbook industries know this, yet they still persue DRM. Why?
Because nothing technical can be done to combat piracy. That's what PR campaigns, lawsuits, and *gasp* price reductions are for. I'm actually in favor of all these things.
However, the industries have learned that while piracy is in an upswing, they can profit by it by associating DRM with it. DRM is actually intended to do two things. First, to eliminate fair use - no copying CDs to your computer or watching DVDs on non-sanctioned players, no buying DVDs in other countries, and in the case of books, no borrowing them from your friend, and no libraries. The second issue is that even congress hasn't extended copyright's term as quickly as some would like (that pesky Constitution gives them pause), but DRM, and legal empowerment thereof, makes copyright's term infinite.
Obviously these are big problems. Loss of consumer rights, and worse, huge portions of our culture being locked up, with no guarantee that the keys will ever be released - they could actually perish in hard drive crash or bankruptcy. (Piracy is the only safety against this, because only pirated, non-DRM copies will not perish.) Consumers normally wouldn't stand for this - especially in the publishing industry, where there is still some competition, and where "consumers" are supposed to be well-read, intelligent members of society, interested in its preservation. But if they continue to believe that DRM has something to do with piracy, these problems may all come to pass.
P.S., digital televisions's encryption probably hasn't been broken because the people who paid for it already have access to it - it gets decrypted and sent to their television. The only related technology that would stop them from using it fairly, Macrovision, has been broken. This is similar to how iTunes music can be liberated only if it's the music you paid for - only when you have the key. As for unbreakable eBooks - will they have a reflection in the mirror, or rather, a camera? The recent Harry Potter book was not released as an eBook - yet within at most a few days, a scanned copy was available online. This would be just as easy to do with an ebook, and there would be no way to stop it.
Well, we already have a model for how colonization works economically. After a huge initial investment, the colony becomes mostly self-sufficient and begins to offer economic benefits to it's parent, and when it gets tired of its parent "recouping its investment" you get a revolution.
Now, you could argue that in the case of other planets, the initial investment is comparatively larger and the economic benefit less or nonexistant. But that's open to debate, and besides, the reward for our species is much greater. Can you put a price on improving our ultimate chances of survival? That's some ROI right there.
Because the equipment is more advanced than a wooden sailing ship, one of the benefits can actually be the economic activity of producing the equipment - jobs for technical people like us. And we may be on the brink of advances (space elevators) making it much cheaper to move significant mass between planets, albeit slowly.
Also, physical transport of raw materials isn't the only way to profit or provide benefit. A big one is land. It was land, not resources, that prompted the colonization of West. Granted, Earth isn't crowded to the extent that Martian land is worth the drawbacks, but that isn't to say it will never be. Heck, we could use Mars as a NIMBY place to put our nuclear power plants, or to incarcerate our multitudes of IP criminals.
I didn't mean that not trying to colonize other planets will cause technology to fail to progress on the whole, but it's pretty clear that it will cause there to be significantly less interest, and no experimentation, in the specific areas of technology related to colonizing other planets. Luckily, the world has too many people for them all to agree, so at least some people will try to help, even if others think it's a lost cause.
The biggest benefit of tabbed browsing is that it eliminates waiting for pages to load. For example, do a Google search, and middle-click on the first few likely-sounding pages. By the time you're done, the first page is loaded, and if that wasn't what you wanted, close the tab and lo, there is the second page, also fully loaded.
Another benefit can be compared to the benefit of nested directories. The window manager has a flat view of windows, and recently, can automatically group windows according to what program they are. (Which means every time you go back to your browser, you have to choose which window - I want it to go to the most recently used!) By having tabs in one browser window, you have more levels. This is the same reason multiple desktops are useful to me. One desktop for mail and such, one desktop for news, which includes one browser window full of tabs for slashdot, other desktops for useful work, including just one browser window with tabs for browsing documentation. Basically, all these level allows you to context-switch more efficiently.
BTW, you can switch between tabs with Ctrl-Tab and to specific tabs with Ctrl-[0..9], and you can close them with Ctrl-W.
Having two tabs open side-by-side is a cool idea, though. It could be implemented by shift-clicking on two tabs (the same way you select multiple things from a list), and then there would be a new band under the tab-bar with lines going from the tab to their half of the page. Of course, the same thing would also be useful in a window manager - it would basically be an easier way to do what "Tile windows horizontally" does.
The bright red sail could easily confuse birds, causing them to be unable to reproduce as they repeatedly hit the sails in a comical fashion. Why won't anybody think of the cute little birds?
The thing is, as technology improves, the definition of "habitable worlds" broadens. It becomes possible to have entirely self-sufficient, and thus not expensive to Earth, colonies. Other planets have raw materials that can, with the help of energy that can be captured from the sun, be turned into oxygen, food, and building materials. Just because a planet is cold doesn't mean you can't build a greenhouse with an artifically stabilized ecosystem in it. Now, this certainly isn't possible with current technology. But current technology won't advance if we don't start trying to do these things.
I've had the experience of being in a class of around 200 people that used infrared eInstruction "clickers" (it's just a remote control with a unique ID). Probably the biggest problem is that they weren't reliable. Even when the software for the receivers worked, we needed more than four receivers in the room. Range was a problem, and also, I suspect that 200 people clicking like mad because they're being graded on attendence leads to interference. The infrared system just doesn't scale well, which is a fatal flaw because there's no need for remotes in a class small enough for them to work. I'm told that in the next semester, they switched to an even more expensive radio version.
In our CS173 class, the remotes' main use was simply taking attendance, which was for a grade. So, for two minutes, everyone would frantically click their (and their absentee buddy's) remotes, and a queue would form by the teacher's desk for the people whose remote didn't work. The feedback that your press was registered was poor because not all students are shown on the screen at the same time. If they just wanted to take attendance (something I disagree with, but anyway...), it would be more efficient and more secure against cheating to just swipe our student IDs at the door. (The other attendence scheme the CS department subjected us to was passing around WiFi-enabled palmtop computers and having us log on to a website. Whatever happened to K.I.S.S.?)
When the remotes are actually used during instruction, they're not any more useful than a show of hands. Granted, there's nothing too discrete about discrete math answers, but in my highschool sex ed class, we didn't have a problem with just writing embarrasing questions ("can you live without your penis?") on notecards, and we could have voted that way if we were so inclined. The feature our teacher was most fond of was the ability to pick on a student at random - again, something that can easily be done without the remotes.
In my opinion, the remotes were just more trouble than they were worth.
If I understand you, the weak ID claim would be that, just as the inukshuk appears to have been made by intelligent humans, rather than some as-yet unknown non-intelligent process, life appears to have been made by an intelligent designer, rather than some as-yet unknown non-intelligent process.
While I don't expect just this to convince you, there are many theories on the specifics of how life formed that don't mention an intelligent designer. That said, I'll try to focus more on intuition, to build a criteria for what intelligence can design, and to explain why I think life sprung from evolution.
The only thing we really know about intelligence is that humans have it. So look at the things we create. They are obviously quite different from things which are alive - few would mistake a human creation for life even if that was the explicit goal of the creator. The distance between human creations and life is the same as the distance between inanimate objects and life. Yet we are the most intelligent species we know.
Why the difference? The most obvious reason is that we design things for a purpose - yet if life has a purpose, humanity hasn't agreed on it. But a less subjective, more fundamental difference is that intelligent creatures need to understand what they create. This limit leaves its mark on everything we create.
Intelligence can only create what it can understand. Thus our designs are either simple (so they can be understood) or modular (so that while the system is incomprehensible, each part can be understood, and the interactions between parts can be understood). Making an analogy to software design, we like our code clean, object-oriented, and modular. If each line of code could affect every other, we wouldn't be able to understand the software, so we try to limit the interactions.
Consider our DNA - if it were software, it would be far worse than the most abominable lump of spaghetti code ever written by humans. Not only can one person not understand it, all the people in the world could not understand it - it's not modular at all; it cannot be divided into a part for me to understand and a part for you to understand. Thus, if life were designed by an intelligent creature, that creature's intelligence would need to be practically infinite.
Now, though I can't deny the possibility of a unseen and almost-infinitely intelligent creator, I will suggest a more believable alternative (and a theory with more predictive power). The process of evolution is not intelligent, and does not have the inherent limitations of intelligence. The process of evolution does not understand what it creates, and it doesn't need to.
As a concrete example, consider the experiment described in this story. Basically, an analog signal recognizer was made using only 100 cells of an FPGA, via a process of artifical evolution. What stands out to me is that the result is wholly unlike anything a human designer would make on an FPGA. There are parts of the circuit which aren't connected to the remainder, but which are still essential, communicating with the rest of the circuit via either radio or power consumption. The resulting circuit is not portable across logically identical FPGAs unless it was evolved on multiple FPGAs. It has very low tolerances for different temperatures unless it was evolved at different temperatures. It is not like anything designed by humans - it is not modular, it's not easy to understand. However, it has qualities in common with life - spaghetti-code-like complexity, dependence on physics that humans don't understand well enough to use, adaption to the environment in which it evolved.
If you found a circuit made by this evolutionary process lying in the desert, you might believe it to be an alien technology - when you try to understand how it works, you get the impression that it was made by someone with more than a human ability to
I'm afraid "faith" is rather like "free," in that it has many nuanced meanings, confusion between which can lead to rather bitter fights. I will concede that what we have is a good definition of what I would call "blind faith." Abbreviate that to just "faith" at your peril. I would point out that this is the type of faith science tries not to exhibit, because it tends to lead to dark ages and other annoyances.
Another kind of faith would be believing something to be true without evidence. That's "without evidence," not "in spite of evidence to the contrary." This is the kind of faith some physicists have in string theory, the kind of faith Palmer Joss had for Ellie's story at the end of Contact, and the kind of faith people should have in their God(s) or the lack thereof.
It's not perticularly important to the scientific method when the experiment occurs. Would the Theory of Relativity been any less evident if the eclipse data that only it could explain was collected before the theory's conception, rather than after? If we can agree on events that happened in the past, they are fair game for a theory to explain and or to be falsified by. For example, if we agree that fossils represent the shape of animals that once lived, and weren't planted by the Devil to deceive us (and "the Devil did it" is not falsifiable), then that data from the fossil record is as valid as data from an experiment performed yesterday.
Who is guiding the selection? The environment is guiding the selection ("natural selection" = selection by nature). No, the environment is not sentient, and it doesn't give a shit, but I don't that precludes it's guiding anything.
Actually, if you wait until kids are university age before discussing origins, you have probably waited until they have already formed a possibly uninformed opinion and are no longer "mushy" enough to change it. Instead, we should give kids what they need to make an informed decision. Church exists partially to teach the religious side of things, and school exists partially to teach science - so let the institutions do their thing, and let the kids decide.
It's interesting that no scientist wants to force churches to put a little sticker in every Bible asking churchgoers to give evolution a chance. Maybe they're a bit more confident?
Atheism is the belief that there is no god, and agnosticism is the belief that we don't or can't know. Neither belief has a theology, because the word "theology" means "the study of god," and clearly doesn't apply to a group that doesn't. If there is a religion where one is one's own god, I don't know what it's called, but it surely isn't Atheism. Why do you insist in spinning the denial of the exsitance of god into some twisted egomaniacal self-god belief? Not everyone believes in god, get over it.
Hmm, if evidence that disagrees with your beliefs tests your faith, and the stronger your faith is, the more evidence that your belief is incorrect you can withstand, how is strong faith any different from being dumb as a rock and proud of it? Why again is blind faith a good thing?
What evidence is there that complexity indicates intelligence? I can think of plenty of counterexamples, and I would actually argue that one's intelligence places a limit on the complexity of things one can create. I'll agree that this would make a good philosophical discussion.
Also, in a sense, history is a science, as it deals in theories (about what happened) that explain evidence (about the past), which theories are changed or abandoned in light of new evidence. From that standpoint, saying something is history, not science, doesn't really make sense. Evolution is taught in biology classes because it's a theory about the history of life, just as volcanoes are taught in geology because they are a theory about the history of igneous rocks.
Intelligent design is not a hypothesis, because it's not falsifiable. There is nothing that an intelligent designer, (oh let's just admit it - God), couldn't do, thus no way to disprove His influence. Discoveries could be made, however, that would necessitate the theory, that the evolutionary process has influenced all life on Earth, to be changed or even abandoned.
How can you say evolution is unobservable? It fits the fossil record. Natural selection and even speciation can be directly observed with moths, fruit flies, bacteria, and anything with a short enough life-span to make observation practical. We have a very good understanding of the language of natural evolution, DNA. We have used artifical selection since the dawn of humanity to grow our food, it clearly occurs. It has been simulated in computers. Simulating evolution on a population of FPGAs has created signal recognizers that work with fewer gates than a human design would need, yet are so complex as to deny understanding (just like natural life). (Evolution can produce such wonders as it does because unlike intelligent designers, it needn't understand what it makes.) It's also created fault-tolerant circuits, neural nets and body plans that can move efficiently, and programs that compete for CPU. And besides all the glaringly obvious direct evidence of it's existance, it's really an obvious mathematical process - if only the more successful units reproduce, and offspring tend to be like their parents, then clearly there will be a general trend towards more suitable units.
I'd say it's random in about the same sense that the motion of water molecules is random - on the scale of individual molecules and organisms, shift happens, but on a much larger scale, water flows downhill and species become better adapted to their environment.
Alot of it is marketing. When people think of random, they think of flipping a coin. Many people hear that evolution is a random process and envision human DNA being built base-pair upon base-pair by 3 billion successive coinflips, or the proverbial tornado hitting a junkyard and building a 747. I'll readily agree those processes are unlikely to produce anything useful, but that's not at all what evolution is. The danger of using the word "random" is that if people only remember three sentences of information about evolution, "random" conveys the wrong impression.
I think it's much more informative to say that evolution is a process guided by the necessities of surviving and reproducing in the environment, just as water is guided by gravity, fluid dynamics, and surface tension. If you go into more depth, you see that both processes have random elements, but that's not the important part. I dunno, maybe we have to break it down even more for the average American. Evolution is, like, a big reality TV show held in a jungle, and if you don't score in 30 years you get voted off. The winner's kids get guaranteed slots in next season's show. Fossils are like reruns.
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That's great, until you limit them to that subset. I'm so glad I placed out of a class, taught in Java, where we were forbidden to use switch, break, and continue. The next class, taught in C++, was much better. I was able to teach myself about pointers to member functions on an assignment where everyone else was resorting to massive code duplication.
It's quirky in that it allows both spaces and tabs to be used interchangeably, instead of forcing indentation to be done the One True Way, tabs.
I'm sophomore in CS who taught myself to program (QBASIC, ugh) in 3rd grade. When that got too limiting, I learned C. Pointers were a bit confusing, but now they're second nature. A good portion of my classmates, however, were first introduced to programming in CS125, taught in Java. People were having real trouble understanding recursive functions. In CS225, taught in C++, pointers are eating them alive.
So first teach them C, and a big part of that is the layout of memory, what a pointer is, and the stack. Spend one lesson on function calling conventions. Then it's obvious how recursive functions work. Then, since pointers are a much more concrete concept than references, when it comes time to learn about Java's references, it's much easier.
Also, I think there ought to be some sort of introduction to the command line. That's also very informative about how computers work, and it's hard getting people to experiment with compiling programs when they have no idea what a relative path is, or what cd does, or what stdout is.
Some might argue that being "close to the metal" is not a benefit, but I think it depends on what you want to do. If you're just trying to make one project, to hack together code once, hopefully working (not that there's anything wrong with this), then use a language that will let you do that. But if you want to make a career of programming, you're going to need to understand many languages, why they are designed how they are, and how to use them efficiently. This requires a good knowledge of what's actually happening underneath the hood, and so you may as well start with C. Plus, C syntax is the gold standard to which all other languages aspire.
Once somebody wanted to learn about programming, and I lent him the K&R C book. I never got back. So screw it, teach them PHP or something.
One alternative is Free/Libre Open Source Software - FLOSS. I can't think of anything that would conflict with ;-)
The nature of internet piracy is such that only one unencrypted copy is necessary before all the pirates have access to it. And the nature of books, music, and movies is such that in order for them to be experienced by human eyes and ears, they must be decrypted at some point. The music, movie, and now textbook industries know this, yet they still persue DRM. Why?
Because nothing technical can be done to combat piracy. That's what PR campaigns, lawsuits, and *gasp* price reductions are for. I'm actually in favor of all these things.
However, the industries have learned that while piracy is in an upswing, they can profit by it by associating DRM with it. DRM is actually intended to do two things. First, to eliminate fair use - no copying CDs to your computer or watching DVDs on non-sanctioned players, no buying DVDs in other countries, and in the case of books, no borrowing them from your friend, and no libraries. The second issue is that even congress hasn't extended copyright's term as quickly as some would like (that pesky Constitution gives them pause), but DRM, and legal empowerment thereof, makes copyright's term infinite.
Obviously these are big problems. Loss of consumer rights, and worse, huge portions of our culture being locked up, with no guarantee that the keys will ever be released - they could actually perish in hard drive crash or bankruptcy. (Piracy is the only safety against this, because only pirated, non-DRM copies will not perish.) Consumers normally wouldn't stand for this - especially in the publishing industry, where there is still some competition, and where "consumers" are supposed to be well-read, intelligent members of society, interested in its preservation. But if they continue to believe that DRM has something to do with piracy, these problems may all come to pass.
P.S., digital televisions's encryption probably hasn't been broken because the people who paid for it already have access to it - it gets decrypted and sent to their television. The only related technology that would stop them from using it fairly, Macrovision, has been broken. This is similar to how iTunes music can be liberated only if it's the music you paid for - only when you have the key. As for unbreakable eBooks - will they have a reflection in the mirror, or rather, a camera? The recent Harry Potter book was not released as an eBook - yet within at most a few days, a scanned copy was available online. This would be just as easy to do with an ebook, and there would be no way to stop it.
Now, you could argue that in the case of other planets, the initial investment is comparatively larger and the economic benefit less or nonexistant. But that's open to debate, and besides, the reward for our species is much greater. Can you put a price on improving our ultimate chances of survival? That's some ROI right there.
Because the equipment is more advanced than a wooden sailing ship, one of the benefits can actually be the economic activity of producing the equipment - jobs for technical people like us. And we may be on the brink of advances (space elevators) making it much cheaper to move significant mass between planets, albeit slowly.
Also, physical transport of raw materials isn't the only way to profit or provide benefit. A big one is land. It was land, not resources, that prompted the colonization of West. Granted, Earth isn't crowded to the extent that Martian land is worth the drawbacks, but that isn't to say it will never be. Heck, we could use Mars as a NIMBY place to put our nuclear power plants, or to incarcerate our multitudes of IP criminals.
I didn't mean that not trying to colonize other planets will cause technology to fail to progress on the whole, but it's pretty clear that it will cause there to be significantly less interest, and no experimentation, in the specific areas of technology related to colonizing other planets. Luckily, the world has too many people for them all to agree, so at least some people will try to help, even if others think it's a lost cause.
Another benefit can be compared to the benefit of nested directories. The window manager has a flat view of windows, and recently, can automatically group windows according to what program they are. (Which means every time you go back to your browser, you have to choose which window - I want it to go to the most recently used!) By having tabs in one browser window, you have more levels. This is the same reason multiple desktops are useful to me. One desktop for mail and such, one desktop for news, which includes one browser window full of tabs for slashdot, other desktops for useful work, including just one browser window with tabs for browsing documentation. Basically, all these level allows you to context-switch more efficiently.
BTW, you can switch between tabs with Ctrl-Tab and to specific tabs with Ctrl-[0..9], and you can close them with Ctrl-W.
Having two tabs open side-by-side is a cool idea, though. It could be implemented by shift-clicking on two tabs (the same way you select multiple things from a list), and then there would be a new band under the tab-bar with lines going from the tab to their half of the page. Of course, the same thing would also be useful in a window manager - it would basically be an easier way to do what "Tile windows horizontally" does.
Hi, can you please show me a CD player made in the past 20 years, for any price, that doesn't have perfect channel seperation? Thanks.
Heh - someone on a Harley acting against noise polution.
The bright red sail could easily confuse birds, causing them to be unable to reproduce as they repeatedly hit the sails in a comical fashion. Why won't anybody think of the cute little birds?
The thing is, as technology improves, the definition of "habitable worlds" broadens. It becomes possible to have entirely self-sufficient, and thus not expensive to Earth, colonies. Other planets have raw materials that can, with the help of energy that can be captured from the sun, be turned into oxygen, food, and building materials. Just because a planet is cold doesn't mean you can't build a greenhouse with an artifically stabilized ecosystem in it. Now, this certainly isn't possible with current technology. But current technology won't advance if we don't start trying to do these things.
In our CS173 class, the remotes' main use was simply taking attendance, which was for a grade. So, for two minutes, everyone would frantically click their (and their absentee buddy's) remotes, and a queue would form by the teacher's desk for the people whose remote didn't work. The feedback that your press was registered was poor because not all students are shown on the screen at the same time. If they just wanted to take attendance (something I disagree with, but anyway...), it would be more efficient and more secure against cheating to just swipe our student IDs at the door. (The other attendence scheme the CS department subjected us to was passing around WiFi-enabled palmtop computers and having us log on to a website. Whatever happened to K.I.S.S.?)
When the remotes are actually used during instruction, they're not any more useful than a show of hands. Granted, there's nothing too discrete about discrete math answers, but in my highschool sex ed class, we didn't have a problem with just writing embarrasing questions ("can you live without your penis?") on notecards, and we could have voted that way if we were so inclined. The feature our teacher was most fond of was the ability to pick on a student at random - again, something that can easily be done without the remotes.
In my opinion, the remotes were just more trouble than they were worth.
Doesn't seem like your relative would have, but someone really ought to file a bug report / feature request for that. If you haven't, I might.
While I don't expect just this to convince you, there are many theories on the specifics of how life formed that don't mention an intelligent designer. That said, I'll try to focus more on intuition, to build a criteria for what intelligence can design, and to explain why I think life sprung from evolution.
The only thing we really know about intelligence is that humans have it. So look at the things we create. They are obviously quite different from things which are alive - few would mistake a human creation for life even if that was the explicit goal of the creator. The distance between human creations and life is the same as the distance between inanimate objects and life. Yet we are the most intelligent species we know.
Why the difference? The most obvious reason is that we design things for a purpose - yet if life has a purpose, humanity hasn't agreed on it. But a less subjective, more fundamental difference is that intelligent creatures need to understand what they create. This limit leaves its mark on everything we create.
Intelligence can only create what it can understand. Thus our designs are either simple (so they can be understood) or modular (so that while the system is incomprehensible, each part can be understood, and the interactions between parts can be understood). Making an analogy to software design, we like our code clean, object-oriented, and modular. If each line of code could affect every other, we wouldn't be able to understand the software, so we try to limit the interactions.
Consider our DNA - if it were software, it would be far worse than the most abominable lump of spaghetti code ever written by humans. Not only can one person not understand it, all the people in the world could not understand it - it's not modular at all; it cannot be divided into a part for me to understand and a part for you to understand. Thus, if life were designed by an intelligent creature, that creature's intelligence would need to be practically infinite.
Now, though I can't deny the possibility of a unseen and almost-infinitely intelligent creator, I will suggest a more believable alternative (and a theory with more predictive power). The process of evolution is not intelligent, and does not have the inherent limitations of intelligence. The process of evolution does not understand what it creates, and it doesn't need to.
As a concrete example, consider the experiment described in this story. Basically, an analog signal recognizer was made using only 100 cells of an FPGA, via a process of artifical evolution. What stands out to me is that the result is wholly unlike anything a human designer would make on an FPGA. There are parts of the circuit which aren't connected to the remainder, but which are still essential, communicating with the rest of the circuit via either radio or power consumption. The resulting circuit is not portable across logically identical FPGAs unless it was evolved on multiple FPGAs. It has very low tolerances for different temperatures unless it was evolved at different temperatures. It is not like anything designed by humans - it is not modular, it's not easy to understand. However, it has qualities in common with life - spaghetti-code-like complexity, dependence on physics that humans don't understand well enough to use, adaption to the environment in which it evolved.
If you found a circuit made by this evolutionary process lying in the desert, you might believe it to be an alien technology - when you try to understand how it works, you get the impression that it was made by someone with more than a human ability to
Another kind of faith would be believing something to be true without evidence. That's "without evidence," not "in spite of evidence to the contrary." This is the kind of faith some physicists have in string theory, the kind of faith Palmer Joss had for Ellie's story at the end of Contact, and the kind of faith people should have in their God(s) or the lack thereof.
It's not perticularly important to the scientific method when the experiment occurs. Would the Theory of Relativity been any less evident if the eclipse data that only it could explain was collected before the theory's conception, rather than after? If we can agree on events that happened in the past, they are fair game for a theory to explain and or to be falsified by. For example, if we agree that fossils represent the shape of animals that once lived, and weren't planted by the Devil to deceive us (and "the Devil did it" is not falsifiable), then that data from the fossil record is as valid as data from an experiment performed yesterday.
It's interesting that no scientist wants to force churches to put a little sticker in every Bible asking churchgoers to give evolution a chance. Maybe they're a bit more confident?
Atheism is the belief that there is no god, and agnosticism is the belief that we don't or can't know. Neither belief has a theology, because the word "theology" means "the study of god," and clearly doesn't apply to a group that doesn't. If there is a religion where one is one's own god, I don't know what it's called, but it surely isn't Atheism. Why do you insist in spinning the denial of the exsitance of god into some twisted egomaniacal self-god belief? Not everyone believes in god, get over it.
Wow, I'll be eaten alive for posting this non-AC.
Also, in a sense, history is a science, as it deals in theories (about what happened) that explain evidence (about the past), which theories are changed or abandoned in light of new evidence. From that standpoint, saying something is history, not science, doesn't really make sense. Evolution is taught in biology classes because it's a theory about the history of life, just as volcanoes are taught in geology because they are a theory about the history of igneous rocks.
Intelligent design is not a hypothesis, because it's not falsifiable. There is nothing that an intelligent designer, (oh let's just admit it - God), couldn't do, thus no way to disprove His influence. Discoveries could be made, however, that would necessitate the theory, that the evolutionary process has influenced all life on Earth, to be changed or even abandoned.
http://www.lib.calpoly.edu/infocomp/modules/05_eva luate/WIC2a.html
How can you say evolution is unobservable? It fits the fossil record. Natural selection and even speciation can be directly observed with moths, fruit flies, bacteria, and anything with a short enough life-span to make observation practical. We have a very good understanding of the language of natural evolution, DNA. We have used artifical selection since the dawn of humanity to grow our food, it clearly occurs. It has been simulated in computers. Simulating evolution on a population of FPGAs has created signal recognizers that work with fewer gates than a human design would need, yet are so complex as to deny understanding (just like natural life). (Evolution can produce such wonders as it does because unlike intelligent designers, it needn't understand what it makes.) It's also created fault-tolerant circuits, neural nets and body plans that can move efficiently, and programs that compete for CPU. And besides all the glaringly obvious direct evidence of it's existance, it's really an obvious mathematical process - if only the more successful units reproduce, and offspring tend to be like their parents, then clearly there will be a general trend towards more suitable units.
Alot of it is marketing. When people think of random, they think of flipping a coin. Many people hear that evolution is a random process and envision human DNA being built base-pair upon base-pair by 3 billion successive coinflips, or the proverbial tornado hitting a junkyard and building a 747. I'll readily agree those processes are unlikely to produce anything useful, but that's not at all what evolution is. The danger of using the word "random" is that if people only remember three sentences of information about evolution, "random" conveys the wrong impression.
I think it's much more informative to say that evolution is a process guided by the necessities of surviving and reproducing in the environment, just as water is guided by gravity, fluid dynamics, and surface tension. If you go into more depth, you see that both processes have random elements, but that's not the important part. I dunno, maybe we have to break it down even more for the average American. Evolution is, like, a big reality TV show held in a jungle, and if you don't score in 30 years you get voted off. The winner's kids get guaranteed slots in next season's show. Fossils are like reruns.