So suppose Microsoft started shipping a default-on webserver and DynDNS account with Windows, so even people who didn't know what they were doing had webservers. Should we suddenly ignore the precedent and institute criminal penalties for connecting to those servers?
Basically, what's important isn't the intent of the owner per se, but what the user can reasonably infer about it. As a user, I don't want to be exposed to criminal liability because, even though I had no way of knowing this, you were too stupid to understand how you were setting up your router. The owner needs to take responsibility. As a user, my responsibility in turn is to not break whatever security the owner sets up, however weak.
BTW, if you follow the instructions and use the install CD for your router, it makes it pretty clear what's going on, and that anyone can access it if you set it to unsecured.
Nitpick in your favor: the user doesn't ask for available WAPs, rather, the WAPs broadcast their availability to the user. (Unless they've been configured not to, in which case, it's clear that you shouldn't connect to them.)
Well, you obviously shouldn't use as much bandwidth (or water) as possible. But if you just need a drink, or to check your email, it's not a big deal. How do we determine how much is too much? Instead of arresting everybody seen with a laptop, we could wait for the owner to complain? Heck, the owner could just ask the leech to lay off, or secure his network, and we don't have to get the police involved at all. Much cheaper, plus we don't have to worry about our computers automatically making us criminals.
And it's been said before, but - the leech did ask first, and permission was granted. I haven't seen a convincing argument why automated electronic permission, given as configured by the network owner, in the absence of any information to the contrary, is insufficient.
Other than the bicycle analogy, why should we assume the default state is "I don't want you using my WiFi"?
If we must use analogies, let's keep it in the realm of computers. Running an open WiFi is like running a public web server - even if the url isn't use-this-webserver.example.com, we still assume you intend for people to connect to it. In other words, there's nothing magical about express permission - there are lots of things you can do by convention. Since this is a new legal area, we have a choice which convention to choose.
Besides that argument, there are other advantages to assuming it's open unless secured. You're less likely to be arrested just for hanging around somewhere with your laptop. We don't have to waste public funds arresting you unless the owner complains. And we all get more free WiFi.
Okay, so we look at our accident, and think something else is involved. If there's a third vehicle, maybe we'll find it. But what if one of the survivors says, "God intervened, because He is saving me for his greater plan."?
The belief that God saved the victim can certainly make him feel better. But it contributes nothing to our understanding of the crash. In fact, it hinders it, because if the insurance agency accepts that explanation, they won't search further, and won't find the third vehicle.
Now if we do fail to explain the crash, we could say that God intervened and broke the laws of physics. But suppose it takes us ten years to adequately explain the crash. Nine years in, you could declare that we've failed to explain it, so God did it. But you would be giving up early.
There are still lots of questions about how we got here. Nobody says there isn't. The argument against intelligent design is that it's simply not helpful to ascribe those unknowns to God. That would be giving up early, while we still have so much left to learn.
When they say species "jump", they obviously don't mean "in one generation". (I can only blame the media that you got this impression.) They're basically saying the change happens in fits and starts, rather than at a constant rate. But those fits are still very large numbers of generations.
Life coming from a comet is not an alternative to evolution, it's an alternative to many theories of abiogenesis.
As for probability - flip a coin 80 times, and if it spells "BillyBlaze" in ASCII, let me know. If you do, I will admonish that there's only about a 1 in 1200000000000000000000000 chance that it actually happened. Doesn't make it false, though. Read up on the anthropic principle.
It didn't happen on it's own, but it did happen through mutations. It's a small step from breeder to environment - both simply cause selective pressure. As for dogs popping out cats - uh, nobody ever said they did. These changes, even the "rapid" changes, take many, many generations.
Um, if you put forth a hypothesis, and it is falsified by evidence, and then you change it, then obviously it was falsifiable! Otherwise why did you change it?
When has ID ever changed it's so-called hypothesis? I'd argue "never" - it's always the same - "God did it."
I'm curious as to how one can believe micro-evolution, yet deny macro-evolution. It seems to me the latter is a consequence of the former. Yet I've heard lots of people take this stance.
Suppose you have a population of mice, and you split it into two, and in one group, you killed the pregnant mothers after 90% of their normal gestation cycle, causing that population's gestation cycle to decrease (as the premies are favored). Suppose this change in the biochemistry of reproduction and development was significant enough that the two populations could no longer interbreed. (If you don't buy this, just keep changing the populations until they can't.) Bam, new species.
So what's your objection to that? Is the environment fundamentally incapable of acting analogously to the experimenter? Would something keep the mice from adapting in such a way as to be unable to reproduce with the other, estranged population? (If so, what?)
In the case of (asexually reproducing) bacteria, it's even simpler. Species for them is just defined as, two bacteria that are different enough that we give them a different name. A bacteria won't pop out a protozoa in 1 generation, but what stops it from popping out a bacteria that's one billionth of the way to a protozoa, and a grandchild that's two billionths of the way, and so on, for a billion generations?
This is Slashdot, so I assume you have an appreciation for the very hierarchical and modular designs that pervade software and hardware. We try as hard as we can to limit the complex interdependence of systems we design. We have to understand it.
The life we see around us on Earth is not like that at all. It is spaghetti code, littered with gotos and heisenbugs and neat little tricks that would send Mel running for the hills, taking advantage of undocumented behaviors, uglier than Perl. So ugly it's beautiful. The only aesthetic is that it has to work. There are no clean modules, and it defies human understanding.
There are two ways machines can exist - they can be designed, or they can evolve. When they are designed, one necessary design goal must be that they can be understood by the designer. Evolution is not limited in this way. It's limited in other was, though - it only takes baby steps from what it's done before. And we see this limitation in the species that exist - for example, no multicellular organism has wheels.
My point is, we can look at a machine and guess whether it evolved or was designed. Your robots could look at themselves, note their clean, modular, hierarchical design, the comments in their source code, their varied and non-connected forms, and guess that they were designed. We on the other hand can conclude, from our terribly, beautifully complex DNA, our structure that defies compartmentalization, and the remarkable similarity of all the life we see, that we evolved.
"Biased"? In fact, our brains aren't meant to do scientific modeling. They are meant to create models of our immediate physical environment, and (importantly) to help us in the process of sexual selection.
That's pretty much my point. One of our instincts is to ascribe purpose to objects in our environment. It helps us understand that the tiger wants to eat us, and we should run away. But it's a liability in science and philosophy. There is a chapter on this in Dawkins' "The God Delusion", definitely worth a read. As for jumping levels, certainly society plays a role, though I guess I didn't make that clear.
It's not that M-theory isn't falsifiable, or even that it's predictions don't differ from the standard model, it's that the differences are currently too small to practically measure. Three very different concepts, and I think only the first disqualifies a scientific theory.
I would want the person administering the antivenom to be suspicious of mid-wife's tales, trusting rather to science. A belief can only be so stupid and still be called religion. At some point it reflects on the intelligence of the holder. The jury's out on mainstream religion, but I'm willing to draw the line at flat-earthers.
As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in the crust of the earth?
Fossilization is very rare. Unless members of every generation are fossilized, there will always have been transitional forms not embedded in the ground.
Why is not all nature in confusion instead of being, as we see them, well-defined species?
Species are not nearly so well-defined as you think - look at, for example, ring species. To the extent that they are - the process of sexual reproduction, combining genetic material at random, and then incubating offspring, obviously requires great compatibility between mates. To the extent that without environmental factors, a heterogeneous group might converge into just one species. With an environment, however, there tends to be a species for each niche, defining niche as a maximum in the parameter space sufficiently far from it's neighbor that it's hard for a species to span both.)
Mechanisms for this have been posited. It's helpful for our species to believe what our parents tell us. And we're biased towards simplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as the assignment of purpose. Both of these instincts have been very useful to us. Their side effects, such as religion, have not yet been harmful enough to uproot them.
Despite many humanly-imperfect drawings, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has no beginning and no end - he is a beautiful bifurcating strange-loop of Noodly Goodness (plus some meatballs for eyes).
Even if Einstein's theory was conceived before we had the technology to test it, it still would have been a testable, valid hypothesis. It may even have been somewhat accepted, owing to it's elegance. (Something similar is happening with string theory.)
"Testable" means testable in principle. Even if you could never ever test it in practice, as long as there's some way you could test it, it can be a hypothesis.
ID isn't even testable in principle, because an omnipotent being could cover his tracks arbitrarily well.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should accept intelligent design as a hypothesis, or even as true, because it makes people feel better?
Obviously the "useful" we refer to as a criteria for a scientific hypothesis means it tells us something we can use about the world. So "the God hypothesis" fails there.
Now, if one chooses to believe a (non-scientific) "hypothesis" because it makes them feel better, well I guess ignorance is bliss. But keep it out of the classroom, please.
So you're looking for precise numbers? Like "if I lift these trees 3 meters of the ground, the average giraffe neck hight will increase.237 cm/generation until it reaches the trees"? Actually I wouldn't be surprised if you could get data like this in a tightly controlled experiment with they type of populations you can only get with bacteria. Of course your predictions would need to be based on some rather specific mathematical model, a minuscule subset of "evolution". The popular idea of evolution, what we're talking about here, tends to be more qualitative. Not all science is particle physics.
If you actually meant "absolute" and not "precise", then I fear you're confusing science with math. Science doesn't ever "prove" things in the absolute sense that math does. Science doesn't have the luxury of choosing the axioms.
This is moot anyway - the accuracy of evolution's predictions are irrelevant when comparing it to a "theory" that doesn't even make any.
Someone already pointed out that abiogenesis != evolution, but let's talk about abiogenesis.
Abiogenesis is actually more of a field, with lots of different theories, most of them with lots of difficulties. There are real facts to contend with - we know something about the environments in which it could have occurred, and we know the result. Now, supposing science does settle down on one plausible model for abiogenesis, you'd be right to question it. But that wouldn't be helpful unless you could offer a better scientific idea, with evidence.
What I'm saying is, there's something we don't understand. Science is trying to understand it. You're saying you already understand it, based on what you read in the Bible. You've basically given up trying to learn more, by putting it under the catch-all "God did it." Science, however, will not give up.
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So suppose Microsoft started shipping a default-on webserver and DynDNS account with Windows, so even people who didn't know what they were doing had webservers. Should we suddenly ignore the precedent and institute criminal penalties for connecting to those servers?
Basically, what's important isn't the intent of the owner per se, but what the user can reasonably infer about it. As a user, I don't want to be exposed to criminal liability because, even though I had no way of knowing this, you were too stupid to understand how you were setting up your router. The owner needs to take responsibility. As a user, my responsibility in turn is to not break whatever security the owner sets up, however weak.
BTW, if you follow the instructions and use the install CD for your router, it makes it pretty clear what's going on, and that anyone can access it if you set it to unsecured.
Nitpick in your favor: the user doesn't ask for available WAPs, rather, the WAPs broadcast their availability to the user. (Unless they've been configured not to, in which case, it's clear that you shouldn't connect to them.)
Well, you obviously shouldn't use as much bandwidth (or water) as possible. But if you just need a drink, or to check your email, it's not a big deal. How do we determine how much is too much? Instead of arresting everybody seen with a laptop, we could wait for the owner to complain? Heck, the owner could just ask the leech to lay off, or secure his network, and we don't have to get the police involved at all. Much cheaper, plus we don't have to worry about our computers automatically making us criminals.
And it's been said before, but - the leech did ask first, and permission was granted. I haven't seen a convincing argument why automated electronic permission, given as configured by the network owner, in the absence of any information to the contrary, is insufficient.
The fact that science has been wrong in the past is not a valid excuse to ignore it today.
Why does a web server have legal authority to grant access to a network, if a wireless router does not?
Hmm, every time anyone's asked me to use my WiFi, I've let them. Geez, do you make your guests pay for the water they use flushing your toilet?
Other than the bicycle analogy, why should we assume the default state is "I don't want you using my WiFi"?
If we must use analogies, let's keep it in the realm of computers. Running an open WiFi is like running a public web server - even if the url isn't use-this-webserver.example.com, we still assume you intend for people to connect to it. In other words, there's nothing magical about express permission - there are lots of things you can do by convention. Since this is a new legal area, we have a choice which convention to choose.
Besides that argument, there are other advantages to assuming it's open unless secured. You're less likely to be arrested just for hanging around somewhere with your laptop. We don't have to waste public funds arresting you unless the owner complains. And we all get more free WiFi.
The GPS also surprised me. There's no GPS on the Moon.
Okay, so we look at our accident, and think something else is involved. If there's a third vehicle, maybe we'll find it. But what if one of the survivors says, "God intervened, because He is saving me for his greater plan."?
The belief that God saved the victim can certainly make him feel better. But it contributes nothing to our understanding of the crash. In fact, it hinders it, because if the insurance agency accepts that explanation, they won't search further, and won't find the third vehicle.
Now if we do fail to explain the crash, we could say that God intervened and broke the laws of physics. But suppose it takes us ten years to adequately explain the crash. Nine years in, you could declare that we've failed to explain it, so God did it. But you would be giving up early.
There are still lots of questions about how we got here. Nobody says there isn't. The argument against intelligent design is that it's simply not helpful to ascribe those unknowns to God. That would be giving up early, while we still have so much left to learn.
When they say species "jump", they obviously don't mean "in one generation". (I can only blame the media that you got this impression.) They're basically saying the change happens in fits and starts, rather than at a constant rate. But those fits are still very large numbers of generations.
Life coming from a comet is not an alternative to evolution, it's an alternative to many theories of abiogenesis.
As for probability - flip a coin 80 times, and if it spells "BillyBlaze" in ASCII, let me know. If you do, I will admonish that there's only about a 1 in 1200000000000000000000000 chance that it actually happened. Doesn't make it false, though. Read up on the anthropic principle.
It didn't happen on it's own, but it did happen through mutations. It's a small step from breeder to environment - both simply cause selective pressure. As for dogs popping out cats - uh, nobody ever said they did. These changes, even the "rapid" changes, take many, many generations.
I'd ask, "What are your feelings on theocracy - at home and abroad?"
Um, if you put forth a hypothesis, and it is falsified by evidence, and then you change it, then obviously it was falsifiable! Otherwise why did you change it?
When has ID ever changed it's so-called hypothesis? I'd argue "never" - it's always the same - "God did it."
I'm curious as to how one can believe micro-evolution, yet deny macro-evolution. It seems to me the latter is a consequence of the former. Yet I've heard lots of people take this stance.
Suppose you have a population of mice, and you split it into two, and in one group, you killed the pregnant mothers after 90% of their normal gestation cycle, causing that population's gestation cycle to decrease (as the premies are favored). Suppose this change in the biochemistry of reproduction and development was significant enough that the two populations could no longer interbreed. (If you don't buy this, just keep changing the populations until they can't.) Bam, new species.
So what's your objection to that? Is the environment fundamentally incapable of acting analogously to the experimenter? Would something keep the mice from adapting in such a way as to be unable to reproduce with the other, estranged population? (If so, what?)
In the case of (asexually reproducing) bacteria, it's even simpler. Species for them is just defined as, two bacteria that are different enough that we give them a different name. A bacteria won't pop out a protozoa in 1 generation, but what stops it from popping out a bacteria that's one billionth of the way to a protozoa, and a grandchild that's two billionths of the way, and so on, for a billion generations?
This is Slashdot, so I assume you have an appreciation for the very hierarchical and modular designs that pervade software and hardware. We try as hard as we can to limit the complex interdependence of systems we design. We have to understand it.
The life we see around us on Earth is not like that at all. It is spaghetti code, littered with gotos and heisenbugs and neat little tricks that would send Mel running for the hills, taking advantage of undocumented behaviors, uglier than Perl. So ugly it's beautiful. The only aesthetic is that it has to work. There are no clean modules, and it defies human understanding.
There are two ways machines can exist - they can be designed, or they can evolve. When they are designed, one necessary design goal must be that they can be understood by the designer. Evolution is not limited in this way. It's limited in other was, though - it only takes baby steps from what it's done before. And we see this limitation in the species that exist - for example, no multicellular organism has wheels.
My point is, we can look at a machine and guess whether it evolved or was designed. Your robots could look at themselves, note their clean, modular, hierarchical design, the comments in their source code, their varied and non-connected forms, and guess that they were designed. We on the other hand can conclude, from our terribly, beautifully complex DNA, our structure that defies compartmentalization, and the remarkable similarity of all the life we see, that we evolved.
That's pretty much my point. One of our instincts is to ascribe purpose to objects in our environment. It helps us understand that the tiger wants to eat us, and we should run away. But it's a liability in science and philosophy. There is a chapter on this in Dawkins' "The God Delusion", definitely worth a read. As for jumping levels, certainly society plays a role, though I guess I didn't make that clear.
It's not that M-theory isn't falsifiable, or even that it's predictions don't differ from the standard model, it's that the differences are currently too small to practically measure. Three very different concepts, and I think only the first disqualifies a scientific theory.
I would want the person administering the antivenom to be suspicious of mid-wife's tales, trusting rather to science. A belief can only be so stupid and still be called religion. At some point it reflects on the intelligence of the holder. The jury's out on mainstream religion, but I'm willing to draw the line at flat-earthers.
Mechanisms for this have been posited. It's helpful for our species to believe what our parents tell us. And we're biased towards simplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as the assignment of purpose. Both of these instincts have been very useful to us. Their side effects, such as religion, have not yet been harmful enough to uproot them.
Despite many humanly-imperfect drawings, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has no beginning and no end - he is a beautiful bifurcating strange-loop of Noodly Goodness (plus some meatballs for eyes).
RAmen!
Even if Einstein's theory was conceived before we had the technology to test it, it still would have been a testable, valid hypothesis. It may even have been somewhat accepted, owing to it's elegance. (Something similar is happening with string theory.)
"Testable" means testable in principle. Even if you could never ever test it in practice, as long as there's some way you could test it, it can be a hypothesis.
ID isn't even testable in principle, because an omnipotent being could cover his tracks arbitrarily well.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should accept intelligent design as a hypothesis, or even as true, because it makes people feel better?
Obviously the "useful" we refer to as a criteria for a scientific hypothesis means it tells us something we can use about the world. So "the God hypothesis" fails there.
Now, if one chooses to believe a (non-scientific) "hypothesis" because it makes them feel better, well I guess ignorance is bliss. But keep it out of the classroom, please.
So you're looking for precise numbers? Like "if I lift these trees 3 meters of the ground, the average giraffe neck hight will increase .237 cm/generation until it reaches the trees"? Actually I wouldn't be surprised if you could get data like this in a tightly controlled experiment with they type of populations you can only get with bacteria. Of course your predictions would need to be based on some rather specific mathematical model, a minuscule subset of "evolution". The popular idea of evolution, what we're talking about here, tends to be more qualitative. Not all science is particle physics.
If you actually meant "absolute" and not "precise", then I fear you're confusing science with math. Science doesn't ever "prove" things in the absolute sense that math does. Science doesn't have the luxury of choosing the axioms.
This is moot anyway - the accuracy of evolution's predictions are irrelevant when comparing it to a "theory" that doesn't even make any.
Someone already pointed out that abiogenesis != evolution, but let's talk about abiogenesis.
Abiogenesis is actually more of a field, with lots of different theories, most of them with lots of difficulties. There are real facts to contend with - we know something about the environments in which it could have occurred, and we know the result. Now, supposing science does settle down on one plausible model for abiogenesis, you'd be right to question it. But that wouldn't be helpful unless you could offer a better scientific idea, with evidence.
What I'm saying is, there's something we don't understand. Science is trying to understand it. You're saying you already understand it, based on what you read in the Bible. You've basically given up trying to learn more, by putting it under the catch-all "God did it." Science, however, will not give up.