A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...) China (and, arguably, Russia) would have to become democratic first. This would good for the US, since we'd be able to offload our World Policeman responsibilities, while everyone else would get the ability to say how it gets used.
>The idea that technological advance is as inevitable as a law of nature is a fallacy. It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. [...] American Indians never discovered a wheel, by the way.
Actually, the Aztecs *did* invent the wheel. It's just that they only used it for toys. Why? No horses. Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Technological advances do rely on *somebody* *somewhere* getting lucky, as well as a social/economic/technological system that can exploit it. With as large as the world is now, that might not be much of a problem. There is a lot of room for new memetic mutations, and we have a very complex ecosystem where new advances can take root.
>Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.
Not quite. Moore's Law is about number of transistors per area, not clock speed. I realize I'm slightly out of touch with computer technology, but last I checked, Moore's Law is still holding, even though clock speeds have topped out. Hence the drive towards parallelism.
I'm voting for Obama, but I also don't like the idea of a filibuster-proof senate. Fortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I'm curious about the correlation of a mixed system and economic good times, and I wonder which way the causation runs. It seems to me that a single party taking multiple branches of government is a sign of voter unrest, and an economic downturn usually causes voter unrest. Maybe it's that economic downturns cause unmixed government, and not the other way around?
>Why do you treat your 'theory' as if it were fact?
Name me one fact that ain't a theory. On the basis of my sensory perceptions, I abduct that I'm sitting in this chair right now. This "fact" is very well confirmed, but it is still "just" a theory.
>It's complete conjecture.
You might say that a conjecture is a theory before it's been tested. The theory that I'm sitting in this chair right now has been tested, so has evolution. Conjectures about an Intelligent Designer have not held up so well under testing.
>No, it's actually your faith.
I actually have a very rigorous definition of faith, so I can say quite categorically that my belief in evolution is not based on faith. How about your belief in an Intelligent Designer? (Assuming you're an IDer, of course...)
>Really? There are direct observations of [evolution happening over the course of thousands of generations]?
Have there been any direct observations of the sun rising tomorrow? Would you say that the proposition "the sun will rise tomorrow" is a mere conjecture?
We know that in humans, there is usually about one single base difference between a descendant and his or her parents. This matches up with the genetic differences between different species (based on when we think they split), and with the rate of phenotypic change we see in fossils. With only one single base difference per generation, it takes a while for any real change to be apparent. How much change is required for a speciation event to occur - for a subpopulation to develop which can't interbreed with the main population - would be highly variable. There is a way to get a speciation event in a single generation, but this requires a self-fertilizing species (usually plants). In such a case, there is a huge error, and the descendant doesn't have the same number of chromosomes as the parent (think of it as Down's Syndrome on steroids). The descendant can interbreed with itself and its descendants, but not with its parent's population. But even this is not a case of a single organism evolving, which happens all too often on TV.
>Your example does not show the change of one specie into another. [...]After 24,000 generations they are still E. coli
The biological definition of species - an interbreeding population - breaks down in the case of asexually reproducing organisms like E. coli. For examples of speciation involving sexual organisms, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html It's an open question whether or not a speciation event would have occurred if you had put a sexually reproducing population through the hurdles these E. coli got sent through. I would say that, if it didn't, it probably wouldn't take many more generations to send them over the edge.
>THAT [speciation] is what Evolution is - not your example of adaptive (to diet) changes.
Nope, evolution refers to both speciation and adaptation.
>Ultimately, the article you linked to, shows that what they are doing is not the observation of one specie becoming another because they "...forced them to evolve back into [their original] form..."
In that particular case, the scientists forced them back into a similar phenotype, which might have very dissimilar genomes. They originally started with 24 strains of "wrinkly spreaders," and the difference in the amount of time it took them to evolve back into a "smooth form" phenotype strongly implies that these "wrinkly spreaders" were very different genetically despite their similar phenotype. This could mean that these new smooth forms are also very differently genetically.
In other words, different populations can have very similar forms/phenotypes, but still have very different essences/genomes.
>what is merely the natural ability of the E. coli specie.
It sounds like what you're describing is Lamarckism. If these E. coli showed phenotypic adaptations while remaining the same genetically, then you would be correct. Unfortunately for you, these scientists found many examples of genetic change, probably only limited by the time and cost of doing genetic assays. The only "natural adaptive ability" that these E. coli required was the ability to make errors during genetic replication. Natural (or in this case, artificial) selection took it from there.
Science doesn't prove anything, it merely demonstrates. Proofs are for mathematicians and philosophers.
>And by correct I mean one animal/plant/insect changing from it's past form to a completely different present form.
1) Despite what TV SciFi will tell you (Star Trek, etc.), one animal can not evolve within it's own lifetime. Even in punctuated equilibrium, evolution happens over the course of thousands of generations.
2) Depends on what you mean by "species" or "form." The intellectuals of Darwin's day didn't believe in speciation for the same reason they didn't believe in alchemy - because it involved a change in "forms." But now we define elements by the number of protons contained in the nucleus, which can be modified. (That's how we make plutonium.) We've also redefined species. We now understand it in terms of reproductive isolation. Darwin said that if you asked the cattle breeders of his time if an Angus shared a common ancestor with a longhorn, they'd laugh at you - they're two different forms. Same thing with dog breeds - surely a dachshund and a St. Bernard are of different forms, right? Yet an Angus and a longhorn are of the same species, as are dachshund and St. Bernards. (Although that last pair is verging on a ring species...)
> The statement that some dinosaurs evolved into Birds is NOT science either, it's just Darwin's Theory.
1) Theories are the very heart of science. 2) Darwin may have created the theory, but a gigillion others have banged on it since. For example, Darwin didn't know about genetics, and genetics has been banged on so much that Mendel would no longer recognize it. 3) IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist, I'm just a philosopher), but: a) birds share several anatomic features with the fossilized dinosaurs we've found - they're more similar to dinosaurs than they are to mammals or lizards b) we've found fossils that are transitional between dinosaurs and modern birds c) a genetic analysis strongly suggests that T. rex's closest living relative is the chicken. Therefore: Along with the evidence we have for the Neo-Evolutionary Synthesis in general, we can abduct (not *deduct*!) that birds are descended from dinosaurs. (That is, birds and dinosaurs share a common ancestor, and we would classify the common ancestor as a dinosaur. Classification above the species level is somewhat arbitrary, and even species are fuzzy around the edges.)
> Teach both theories with evidence.
1) There is a great diversity in Creationist accounts - Old Earth vs. New Earth, just to give one. By contrast, there is a strong consensus among evolutionary biologists. There are disagreements among evolutionary biologists, but these are molehills that get turned into mountains because scientists want to spice things up a bit in their papers. They might argue about gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, but they can certainly agree on things like whether the Earth is a few thousand or a few billion years old. The Creationism "debate" isn't between two theories, it's between one theory and a very large sheaf of half-baked hypotheses/conspiracy theories.
2) While I won't argue that a given Creationist hypothesis isn't testable, I will say that, without exception, they have been disconfirmed by the available evidence down to an absurdly infinitesimal probability. (I'm going with a Bayesian account of theory confirmation here.) It's not logically impossible for one of them to be true (Quine-Duhem Thesis), but they'd require some drastic ad-hockery in order to bring them into line with available evidence. We're talking
I haven't read Freedom Evolves yet. This semester is a bit hectic and my education is getting in the way of my learning.
Part of the problem of the free will debate is that amateur philosophers tend to define free will simply as non-determination. One of Dennett's beginning points in that article is that simple randomness and non-predictability are not sufficient for free will. His method of describing free will is at least a stab in the right direction.
There does seem to be a slight difference in terms here. "Intentional" refers to an object that has beliefs and desires and acts on the basis of those beliefs in order to satisfy those desires. For Dennett, the "intentional stance" is not a theory that is either true or false but a methodological approach that is either useful or not useful in a given context. An example that he uses is that a podium can be treated as a degenerate and uninteresting intentional system - the podium doesn't move because it doesn't "want" to move.
Given access to the entire set of possible alternatives, any intentional system would become a determinate one - the system would always pick the best choice. Limiting it to a relatively small set of alternatives causes it to become a somewhat indeterminate one - at the very least, it pushes the problem of determination to whatever system generates the alternatives, which would be specified in the design or physics levels of description. At the same time, the moral dimensions of free will, including accountability for choice, are retained.
This "authoring" process has some fairly obvious parallels to evolution (variation + selection). Nothing about evolution rules out "intelligent design" being a source of variation, it's just that evolution powered by simple random mutation is sufficient to explain all the apparent design in the biological world. The *real* "intelligence" is in the selection. (Programing the selection criteria in genetic algorithms is a real bitch.) A similar thing seems to be happening here - our subconscious is apparently doing the creative function (which may or may not be pseudo-random - any theory about how different alternatives are generated are so much handwaving at this point, AFAICT). Our conscious minds seem to be involved only in the selection process. Of course, if the decision is non-trivial, then our conscious minds might get involved in "intelligently designing" alternatives.
I'm a philosophy student myself. Part of the problem with the Free Will debate is that the term 'Free Will' is so ill-defined. The focus in the debate is Free Will vs. determination, but if our actions were completely random and non-predictable, decided by some sort of fair die, then that wouldn't be 'Free Will' either. Dennett has suggested (in "Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want," IIRC) that we "author" our actions. He says that this "authoring" has a creative phase and a editing phase. In the creative phase, we randomly or psuedo-randomly spawn a relatively small set of alternative plans, and in the editing phase we select the best of these alternatives against some set of selection criteria.
You see, if we selected the absolute best alternative from the entire set of possible alternatives, then that would be determinate, since we would always pick the best option (possibly doing a coin-toss in the case of a tie). But because we're choosing from only a limited, finite set, there is room for variation - we would only choose from the best of our particular lot, somebody else would have a different lot. The idea of a limited set of alternatives also makes sense from a practical standpoint - generating an (near) infinite list of possible alternatives would presumably require a (near) infinite amount of computational resources. With a limited set, we might not get the best choice, but we should get a "good enough" choice. If the "creative" phase is only psuedo-random, it might be possible to perfectly predict a person's action. But this would require dropping out of the intentional stance and using the physics stance, and Dennett has provided reasons elsewhere for why that would be a Bad Thing. Using the intentional stance, we can provide some predictions - for example, if we give somebody the choice of pushing the right button or the left button, we can predict that they won't stab themselves in the eye, barring suicidal tendencies. But beyond that, our ability to predict is limited.
Under this account, it still makes sense to hold people ethically accountable for their actions, since punishment or reward modifies the selection criteria we use. We might be excused for not finding the best alternative - "I didn't think of that" is a valid excuse - but we are definitely accountable for wildly bad decisions. ("Wildly Bad" might be defined as "being worse than taking time out to come up with more alternatives.")
This experiment seems to suggest that our hypothetical "creative" phase is subconscious, and that our subconscious also tries to predict which alternative we will decide and takes preliminary actions along those lines. The scientists are guessing that the conscious mind only becomes involved in the "editing" phase, in the form of a veto - but there doesn't seem to be any experimental evidence to support this, just the intuition that our conscious selves are involved in the process *somehow*.
Proportional representation wouldn't have worked too well. The Founding Fathers saw the United States as a federal republic of individual states, not as a unified nation-state. If the Founding Fathers knew about proportional representation, it might have been used to allocate representatives from the same state, or for electing the state legislatures. It wouldn't work for Senators since they are elected one at a time. It also wouldn't entirely help with selecting the President. What would work a lot better for the United States is Instant Runoff Voting, since it would let people vote their conscience without the spoiler effect.
Yes, because legendary hero status will help you recoup the money and/or time you spent on eleventeen other pills that did absolute crap, plus the research you did to make sure that the Super Pill actually does what it's supposed to and doesn't cause people to grow third nipples or whatever.
I've often wondered about a vampire tap for powering portable electronics - gets rid of all that excess blood sugar from eating too many donuts, keeps your cell phone topped off. One step closer to the Borg. I have no idea how feasible it would be.
>Perhaps the mule, which it its core is a defective creature genetically, should be eradicated, instead of held up as a mascot.
Sirrah, you have not only insulted the mule, you have also insulted the great state of Missouri!
To quote the Wikipedia:
"The mule possesses the sobriety, patience, endurance and sure-footedness of the donkey, and the vigour, strength and courage of the horse. Operators of working animals generally find mules preferable to horses: mules show less impatience under the pressure of heavy weights, whereas their skin, harder and less sensitive than that of horses, renders them more capable of resisting sun and rain. Their hooves are harder than horses', and they show a natural resistance to disease and insects. Many North American farmers with clay soil found mules superior as plow animals, especially in the U.S. state of Missouri, hence the expression "stubborn as a Missouri mule."
Y'know, my state's state animal is the mule. So is my university's mascot. Call it a hunch, but I think that's a bit more radical than two humans of slightly different melanin counts having a kid.
>What is so bad about wanting your linage to remain pure and not become some sort of grey amalgam?
Well, I personally think that castes (which are defined by who eats with who and who marries who) tend to be divisive to a society. But I'm not too worried, since your kids and/or grandkids might disagree with you. My ancestors include Huguenot peasants and French aristocrats (very near the crown - escaped Paris because of the Revolution). I probably have some great-great-great-great-great-great ancestors spinning in their graves somewhere in France. Y'know, their pure, noble blood mixing in with that of the riff-raff. Though I'm not exactly grey, I suppose. Reasonably tan, more like. That'd be the Lapplander. Or so we think - my great-grandpa never did 'fess up, claimed to be Swedish. Bit of a prejudice against Lapplanders in Scandinavia. But at least none of my lineage is non-European - yet. The generation is young.
I think most 'AI' will still be 'prosthetics' for humans. In other words, they will enhance human abilities, not replace humans. (Much like computers these days, only more so.) But there are advantages to modeling human intelligence on computers. Aside from figuring out how human brains and minds work, the obvious application is uploading human intelligence. This will also require being able to image working human brains... It will also require so pretty spiff virtual realities in order to keep the uploads from going nuts.
>That folding you mention, the vast three-dimensionality of the whole process, is such a big deal that people really don't know jack and need to quit sounding authoritative about it. [...]You've got the parsing done; now what of the lexical analysis?
The folding is such a big deal that its the focus of a distributed computing project. Working it out is a big, hairy, computationally intensive task. And that's assuming we have all the principles of it down. There is always the possibility that our model will say that the protein will fold *this* way and nature says that it folds *that* way. But Popper and Occam say that we should assume that our model is right until we get new information that kicks it over. So, until we notice some anomalies... If we *do* find anomalies, I seriously doubt its the Creator showing up on the small scale, since I hope that He'd have better things to do. Hand-folding every single protein has *got* to be a thankless task.
Working out the folding is a big hairy mess. But the cell infrastructure doesn't 'know' crap about folding. As far as it 'knows,' it's just stringing amino acids together. Doing the folding is our universe's physics engine's job. A ribosome synthesizing a protein off of a strand of mRNA is just as one-dimensional as a Turing machine going through its tape. Granted, the ribosome has to be fed tRNA, which carry the amino acids, and has to be fed ATP to power the process. But our computers also have power supplies, right?
Evolution also doesn't 'know' crap. To evolution, a protein and the gene that codes for it are all just black boxes. It neither 'knows' nor 'cares' that this heme that transports oxygen is only a few (or one) atom away from this heme which used to be used for sulfur-based photosynthesis (and, indeed, that the gene that codes for the oxygen transport heme is a mutant descendant of the gene for the sulfur photosynthesis heme). Of course, evo-devo probably does care, since the current state of the organism narrows down what ways it can evolve, but that's beside the point.
True genetic engineers *will* have to care about this crap. They'll have to figure out what protein will result from a give gene sequence, etc. I expect it will be really, really difficult. So far, genetic 'engineering' has just been cut-and-pasting genes that evolution has already 'designed.' If we're to the point where we're making synthetic chromosomes, then we might be entering the era of true genetic engineering, where we design new proteins from the ground up.
Maybe we'll even get around to fixing all of those bugs in our anatomy that happened because we we're 'designed' by evolution. Things like inside-out retinas and larynxes that wrap around the aorta. Maybe this Creator of yours really is using quantum-level interventions to influence our evolution. (Nothing in evolutionary theory says that mutations *have* to be random. It's just that random mutations are simple and, in conjunction with natural selection, is sufficient to create pretty cool 'designs.') But, if so, then He ain't fixing things that only intelligent design can fix. Daniel Dennett once said that the best way you can study a designed artifact is to look at the mistakes - to the extent that designs are done right, all designs for the same spec look the same. The difference is in the mistakes. While our 'design' is pretty good on the whole, the mistakes scream "evolution," not "intelligent design." Lots of small changes, not wholesale redesigns.
As far as junk DNA goes, there are two main theories: 1) that it really *is* junk, probably resulting from evolution 'commenting out' a bit of useless code. 2) it plays some sort of non-coding regulatory function. And then there's the third main theory, which says that some is junk, some is regulatory. The simplest assumption is that it is all junk. That way, if we find out that some of it *isn't* junk, we can be surprised and try to figure out what it actually does.
Evolution is economical, but it does need some time to work. If som
Perfection is always relative to some set of values. It represents an optimum. "Indestructible" and "immortal" are values that are usually taken to be good, but I would think that a perfectly recyclable material wouldn't be indestructible or 'immortal.' Whether or not these values would be part of what defines a perfect being is open to discussion.
It has been said that evolution is a satisfier, not an optimizer. So, yes, evolution does tend to produce good enough, not perfect. Intelligent design also generally produces good enough, not perfect. As a certain class of intelligent designers are found of saying, "There is always another bug." This, in some ways, a good thing. When the definition of perfection changes, a bug might well become a feature.
Expansion of the universe. Objects at the edge of the observable universe were 13.7 billion light years away when they emitted the light that is reaching us now. At present time, they are now 46.5 billion light years away. (Assuming something really funky hasn't happened to the expansion of the universe outside of our past light cone, I guess.) See observable universe and comoving distance over at the 'pedia.
I also forgot that the kernel size is in *bytes* not *bits*, so my babble about how complex the linux kernel is actually a bit of an underestimate. Oh well. At any rate, figuring out what a genome is doing is rather like trying to figure out the program from "The Story of Mel." No helpful comments, and a lot of brain-twisting optimization. Evolution is a Real Programmer. (Junk DNA aside.)
Is the 'execution' of the prokaryote genome really that much different from executing a program on a von Neuman machine? The genome is fairly one dimensional - the cell transcribes a gene, runs the mRNA through a ribosome, adds a lot of ATP, and translates the mRNA into a protein, three bases to the amino acid. The function of the protein is determined by how it folds. Predicting how a given chain of amino acids will fold is non-trivial, but it's not like the cell works out how it will happen. Intramolecular attractions does all the work there.
With a eukaryote, there is a lot of things going into determining what gene gets expressed when, but I'm not sure that happens in minimalistic prokaryotes. (I don't even have the credentials of having flunked a biochem course. I just read a *lot* of pop sci.) Prokaryotes don't have a nucleus. IIRC, we're not even sure that Mycoplasma genitalium makes its own ATP. There is quite a bit of infrastructure involved in turning the information encoded on a hunk of DNA into a working protein, but compared to a modern processor? I'm not sure which would win. I'm not even sure how you would go about comparing - how many transistors equals one protein?
Existing is dangerous. That is what drives evolution. Evolution happens when chaos (mutation) and destruction (natural selection) conspire to create order. Who says destruction is a bad thing?
A 'perfectly designed' being, in this case, would be one that its perfectly suited to its environmental niche. It might be an ant (ant species are stable over deep time, so they must be doing *something* right), or a bacteria. It might not be terribly complex or intelligent. (Have you ever wondered if the hicks that surround might actually be more evolutionary fit than yourself? brr!) If organisms could get away from the kind of matter and energy we know of into some kind of strange omni-vector energy, which is in omni-superposition, then that *might* increase their fitness. But then they probably wouldn't need such mundane things as a metabolism. In which case, it might be an open question whether or not these 'organisms' are actually alive.
Perfection is not really obtainable. Bug fixes are, but this does not change the fact that there will always be one more bug. Perfection might not even be desirable - 'perfection' is relative to a particular environmental niche. Change the environment, change the niche, change what perfection means. Perfection (over-specialization) can get you killed.
Hmm. A vitamin c tweak wouldn't be that hard to do. You wouldn't need to localize it in any particular tissue, I wouldn't think. (Unless some tissues find it toxic?) You'd should just be able to plug the gene for it anywhere in the human genome and let 'er rip. Controlling the dosage would be a bit of a bitch, of course. Get it right and 'backwards compatibility' wouldn't be an issue. If one of the tweakers have sex with a baseline, then some of the kids will have the gene, some won't. Hell, its not even like evolution didn't come up with it on its own - the only reason it got removed is that our ancestors were good enough at gathering resources that they didn't *need* to be able to make their own. So evolution said, 'hey, why waste my time making this crap?'
Compared to rationalizing the testicles, the vitamin c tweak should be cake.
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A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...) China (and, arguably, Russia) would have to become democratic first. This would good for the US, since we'd be able to offload our World Policeman responsibilities, while everyone else would get the ability to say how it gets used.
>The idea that technological advance is as inevitable as a law of nature is a fallacy. It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. [...] American Indians never discovered a wheel, by the way.
Actually, the Aztecs *did* invent the wheel. It's just that they only used it for toys. Why? No horses. Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Technological advances do rely on *somebody* *somewhere* getting lucky, as well as a social/economic/technological system that can exploit it. With as large as the world is now, that might not be much of a problem. There is a lot of room for new memetic mutations, and we have a very complex ecosystem where new advances can take root.
>Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.
Not quite. Moore's Law is about number of transistors per area, not clock speed. I realize I'm slightly out of touch with computer technology, but last I checked, Moore's Law is still holding, even though clock speeds have topped out. Hence the drive towards parallelism.
I'm voting for Obama, but I also don't like the idea of a filibuster-proof senate. Fortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I'm curious about the correlation of a mixed system and economic good times, and I wonder which way the causation runs. It seems to me that a single party taking multiple branches of government is a sign of voter unrest, and an economic downturn usually causes voter unrest. Maybe it's that economic downturns cause unmixed government, and not the other way around?
>Why do you treat your 'theory' as if it were fact?
Name me one fact that ain't a theory. On the basis of my sensory perceptions, I abduct that I'm sitting in this chair right now. This "fact" is very well confirmed, but it is still "just" a theory.
>It's complete conjecture.
You might say that a conjecture is a theory before it's been tested. The theory that I'm sitting in this chair right now has been tested, so has evolution. Conjectures about an Intelligent Designer have not held up so well under testing.
>No, it's actually your faith.
I actually have a very rigorous definition of faith, so I can say quite categorically that my belief in evolution is not based on faith. How about your belief in an Intelligent Designer? (Assuming you're an IDer, of course...)
>Really? There are direct observations of [evolution happening over the course of thousands of generations]?
Have there been any direct observations of the sun rising tomorrow? Would you say that the proposition "the sun will rise tomorrow" is a mere conjecture?
We know that in humans, there is usually about one single base difference between a descendant and his or her parents. This matches up with the genetic differences between different species (based on when we think they split), and with the rate of phenotypic change we see in fossils. With only one single base difference per generation, it takes a while for any real change to be apparent. How much change is required for a speciation event to occur - for a subpopulation to develop which can't interbreed with the main population - would be highly variable. There is a way to get a speciation event in a single generation, but this requires a self-fertilizing species (usually plants). In such a case, there is a huge error, and the descendant doesn't have the same number of chromosomes as the parent (think of it as Down's Syndrome on steroids). The descendant can interbreed with itself and its descendants, but not with its parent's population. But even this is not a case of a single organism evolving, which happens all too often on TV.
>Your example does not show the change of one specie into another. [...]After 24,000 generations they are still E. coli
The biological definition of species - an interbreeding population - breaks down in the case of asexually reproducing organisms like E. coli. For examples of speciation involving sexual organisms, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html It's an open question whether or not a speciation event would have occurred if you had put a sexually reproducing population through the hurdles these E. coli got sent through. I would say that, if it didn't, it probably wouldn't take many more generations to send them over the edge.
>THAT [speciation] is what Evolution is - not your example of adaptive (to diet) changes.
Nope, evolution refers to both speciation and adaptation.
>Ultimately, the article you linked to, shows that what they are doing is not the observation of one specie becoming another because they "...forced them to evolve back into [their original] form..."
In that particular case, the scientists forced them back into a similar phenotype, which might have very dissimilar genomes. They originally started with 24 strains of "wrinkly spreaders," and the difference in the amount of time it took them to evolve back into a "smooth form" phenotype strongly implies that these "wrinkly spreaders" were very different genetically despite their similar phenotype. This could mean that these new smooth forms are also very differently genetically.
In other words, different populations can have very similar forms/phenotypes, but still have very different essences/genomes.
>what is merely the natural ability of the E. coli specie.
It sounds like what you're describing is Lamarckism. If these E. coli showed phenotypic adaptations while remaining the same genetically, then you would be correct. Unfortunately for you, these scientists found many examples of genetic change, probably only limited by the time and cost of doing genetic assays. The only "natural adaptive ability" that these E. coli required was the ability to make errors during genetic replication. Natural (or in this case, artificial) selection took it from there.
>Neither argument has been proven correct.
Science doesn't prove anything, it merely demonstrates. Proofs are for mathematicians and philosophers.
>And by correct I mean one animal/plant/insect changing from it's past form to a completely different present form.
1) Despite what TV SciFi will tell you (Star Trek, etc.), one animal can not evolve within it's own lifetime. Even in punctuated equilibrium, evolution happens over the course of thousands of generations.
2) Depends on what you mean by "species" or "form." The intellectuals of Darwin's day didn't believe in speciation for the same reason they didn't believe in alchemy - because it involved a change in "forms." But now we define elements by the number of protons contained in the nucleus, which can be modified. (That's how we make plutonium.) We've also redefined species. We now understand it in terms of reproductive isolation. Darwin said that if you asked the cattle breeders of his time if an Angus shared a common ancestor with a longhorn, they'd laugh at you - they're two different forms. Same thing with dog breeds - surely a dachshund and a St. Bernard are of different forms, right? Yet an Angus and a longhorn are of the same species, as are dachshund and St. Bernards. (Although that last pair is verging on a ring species...)
And, yes, speciation events (i.e., a single interbreeding population diverging into two different populations that are reproductively isolated) have been observed: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
> The statement that some dinosaurs evolved into Birds is NOT science either, it's just Darwin's Theory.
1) Theories are the very heart of science. 2) Darwin may have created the theory, but a gigillion others have banged on it since. For example, Darwin didn't know about genetics, and genetics has been banged on so much that Mendel would no longer recognize it. 3) IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist, I'm just a philosopher), but: a) birds share several anatomic features with the fossilized dinosaurs we've found - they're more similar to dinosaurs than they are to mammals or lizards b) we've found fossils that are transitional between dinosaurs and modern birds c) a genetic analysis strongly suggests that T. rex's closest living relative is the chicken. Therefore: Along with the evidence we have for the Neo-Evolutionary Synthesis in general, we can abduct (not *deduct*!) that birds are descended from dinosaurs. (That is, birds and dinosaurs share a common ancestor, and we would classify the common ancestor as a dinosaur. Classification above the species level is somewhat arbitrary, and even species are fuzzy around the edges.)
> Teach both theories with evidence.
1) There is a great diversity in Creationist accounts - Old Earth vs. New Earth, just to give one. By contrast, there is a strong consensus among evolutionary biologists. There are disagreements among evolutionary biologists, but these are molehills that get turned into mountains because scientists want to spice things up a bit in their papers. They might argue about gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, but they can certainly agree on things like whether the Earth is a few thousand or a few billion years old. The Creationism "debate" isn't between two theories, it's between one theory and a very large sheaf of half-baked hypotheses/conspiracy theories.
2) While I won't argue that a given Creationist hypothesis isn't testable, I will say that, without exception, they have been disconfirmed by the available evidence down to an absurdly infinitesimal probability. (I'm going with a Bayesian account of theory confirmation here.) It's not logically impossible for one of them to be true (Quine-Duhem Thesis), but they'd require some drastic ad-hockery in order to bring them into line with available evidence. We're talking
Well, I suppose you could smash something and not break anything off. But atom means "indivisible," not "invisible." So, um, yeah, FAIL.
Yeah, and "atom" means "indivisible." Therefore, "atom smasher" is an oxymoron, and particle physics is just the product of deranged imagination.
I haven't read Freedom Evolves yet. This semester is a bit hectic and my education is getting in the way of my learning.
Part of the problem of the free will debate is that amateur philosophers tend to define free will simply as non-determination. One of Dennett's beginning points in that article is that simple randomness and non-predictability are not sufficient for free will. His method of describing free will is at least a stab in the right direction.
There does seem to be a slight difference in terms here. "Intentional" refers to an object that has beliefs and desires and acts on the basis of those beliefs in order to satisfy those desires. For Dennett, the "intentional stance" is not a theory that is either true or false but a methodological approach that is either useful or not useful in a given context. An example that he uses is that a podium can be treated as a degenerate and uninteresting intentional system - the podium doesn't move because it doesn't "want" to move.
Given access to the entire set of possible alternatives, any intentional system would become a determinate one - the system would always pick the best choice. Limiting it to a relatively small set of alternatives causes it to become a somewhat indeterminate one - at the very least, it pushes the problem of determination to whatever system generates the alternatives, which would be specified in the design or physics levels of description. At the same time, the moral dimensions of free will, including accountability for choice, are retained.
This "authoring" process has some fairly obvious parallels to evolution (variation + selection). Nothing about evolution rules out "intelligent design" being a source of variation, it's just that evolution powered by simple random mutation is sufficient to explain all the apparent design in the biological world. The *real* "intelligence" is in the selection. (Programing the selection criteria in genetic algorithms is a real bitch.) A similar thing seems to be happening here - our subconscious is apparently doing the creative function (which may or may not be pseudo-random - any theory about how different alternatives are generated are so much handwaving at this point, AFAICT). Our conscious minds seem to be involved only in the selection process. Of course, if the decision is non-trivial, then our conscious minds might get involved in "intelligently designing" alternatives.
I'm a philosophy student myself. Part of the problem with the Free Will debate is that the term 'Free Will' is so ill-defined. The focus in the debate is Free Will vs. determination, but if our actions were completely random and non-predictable, decided by some sort of fair die, then that wouldn't be 'Free Will' either. Dennett has suggested (in "Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want," IIRC) that we "author" our actions. He says that this "authoring" has a creative phase and a editing phase. In the creative phase, we randomly or psuedo-randomly spawn a relatively small set of alternative plans, and in the editing phase we select the best of these alternatives against some set of selection criteria.
You see, if we selected the absolute best alternative from the entire set of possible alternatives, then that would be determinate, since we would always pick the best option (possibly doing a coin-toss in the case of a tie). But because we're choosing from only a limited, finite set, there is room for variation - we would only choose from the best of our particular lot, somebody else would have a different lot. The idea of a limited set of alternatives also makes sense from a practical standpoint - generating an (near) infinite list of possible alternatives would presumably require a (near) infinite amount of computational resources. With a limited set, we might not get the best choice, but we should get a "good enough" choice. If the "creative" phase is only psuedo-random, it might be possible to perfectly predict a person's action. But this would require dropping out of the intentional stance and using the physics stance, and Dennett has provided reasons elsewhere for why that would be a Bad Thing. Using the intentional stance, we can provide some predictions - for example, if we give somebody the choice of pushing the right button or the left button, we can predict that they won't stab themselves in the eye, barring suicidal tendencies. But beyond that, our ability to predict is limited.
Under this account, it still makes sense to hold people ethically accountable for their actions, since punishment or reward modifies the selection criteria we use. We might be excused for not finding the best alternative - "I didn't think of that" is a valid excuse - but we are definitely accountable for wildly bad decisions. ("Wildly Bad" might be defined as "being worse than taking time out to come up with more alternatives.")
This experiment seems to suggest that our hypothetical "creative" phase is subconscious, and that our subconscious also tries to predict which alternative we will decide and takes preliminary actions along those lines. The scientists are guessing that the conscious mind only becomes involved in the "editing" phase, in the form of a veto - but there doesn't seem to be any experimental evidence to support this, just the intuition that our conscious selves are involved in the process *somehow*.
Proportional representation wouldn't have worked too well. The Founding Fathers saw the United States as a federal republic of individual states, not as a unified nation-state. If the Founding Fathers knew about proportional representation, it might have been used to allocate representatives from the same state, or for electing the state legislatures. It wouldn't work for Senators since they are elected one at a time. It also wouldn't entirely help with selecting the President. What would work a lot better for the United States is Instant Runoff Voting, since it would let people vote their conscience without the spoiler effect.
Presumably the same place that the electricity for hydrogen electrolysis comes from.
Yes, because legendary hero status will help you recoup the money and/or time you spent on eleventeen other pills that did absolute crap, plus the research you did to make sure that the Super Pill actually does what it's supposed to and doesn't cause people to grow third nipples or whatever.
Yes, and World War II was essentially a frank exchange of opinion.
I've often wondered about a vampire tap for powering portable electronics - gets rid of all that excess blood sugar from eating too many donuts, keeps your cell phone topped off. One step closer to the Borg. I have no idea how feasible it would be.
>Perhaps the mule, which it its core is a defective creature genetically, should be eradicated, instead of held up as a mascot.
Sirrah, you have not only insulted the mule, you have also insulted the great state of Missouri!
To quote the Wikipedia:
"The mule possesses the sobriety, patience, endurance and sure-footedness of the donkey, and the vigour, strength and courage of the horse. Operators of working animals generally find mules preferable to horses: mules show less impatience under the pressure of heavy weights, whereas their skin, harder and less sensitive than that of horses, renders them more capable of resisting sun and rain. Their hooves are harder than horses', and they show a natural resistance to disease and insects. Many North American farmers with clay soil found mules superior as plow animals, especially in the U.S. state of Missouri, hence the expression "stubborn as a Missouri mule."
Not bad, for a "grey amalgam"!
>Animals don't do it
Y'know, my state's state animal is the mule. So is my university's mascot. Call it a hunch, but I think that's a bit more radical than two humans of slightly different melanin counts having a kid.
>What is so bad about wanting your linage to remain pure and not become some sort of grey amalgam?
Well, I personally think that castes (which are defined by who eats with who and who marries who) tend to be divisive to a society. But I'm not too worried, since your kids and/or grandkids might disagree with you. My ancestors include Huguenot peasants and French aristocrats (very near the crown - escaped Paris because of the Revolution). I probably have some great-great-great-great-great-great ancestors spinning in their graves somewhere in France. Y'know, their pure, noble blood mixing in with that of the riff-raff. Though I'm not exactly grey, I suppose. Reasonably tan, more like. That'd be the Lapplander. Or so we think - my great-grandpa never did 'fess up, claimed to be Swedish. Bit of a prejudice against Lapplanders in Scandinavia. But at least none of my lineage is non-European - yet. The generation is young.
I think most 'AI' will still be 'prosthetics' for humans. In other words, they will enhance human abilities, not replace humans. (Much like computers these days, only more so.) But there are advantages to modeling human intelligence on computers. Aside from figuring out how human brains and minds work, the obvious application is uploading human intelligence. This will also require being able to image working human brains... It will also require so pretty spiff virtual realities in order to keep the uploads from going nuts.
Right before somebody runs off a billion copies of themself and elects themself President.
>That folding you mention, the vast three-dimensionality of the whole process, is such a big deal that people really don't know jack and need to quit sounding authoritative about it. [...]You've got the parsing done; now what of the lexical analysis?
The folding is such a big deal that its the focus of a distributed computing project. Working it out is a big, hairy, computationally intensive task. And that's assuming we have all the principles of it down. There is always the possibility that our model will say that the protein will fold *this* way and nature says that it folds *that* way. But Popper and Occam say that we should assume that our model is right until we get new information that kicks it over. So, until we notice some anomalies... If we *do* find anomalies, I seriously doubt its the Creator showing up on the small scale, since I hope that He'd have better things to do. Hand-folding every single protein has *got* to be a thankless task.
Working out the folding is a big hairy mess. But the cell infrastructure doesn't 'know' crap about folding. As far as it 'knows,' it's just stringing amino acids together. Doing the folding is our universe's physics engine's job. A ribosome synthesizing a protein off of a strand of mRNA is just as one-dimensional as a Turing machine going through its tape. Granted, the ribosome has to be fed tRNA, which carry the amino acids, and has to be fed ATP to power the process. But our computers also have power supplies, right?
Evolution also doesn't 'know' crap. To evolution, a protein and the gene that codes for it are all just black boxes. It neither 'knows' nor 'cares' that this heme that transports oxygen is only a few (or one) atom away from this heme which used to be used for sulfur-based photosynthesis (and, indeed, that the gene that codes for the oxygen transport heme is a mutant descendant of the gene for the sulfur photosynthesis heme). Of course, evo-devo probably does care, since the current state of the organism narrows down what ways it can evolve, but that's beside the point.
True genetic engineers *will* have to care about this crap. They'll have to figure out what protein will result from a give gene sequence, etc. I expect it will be really, really difficult. So far, genetic 'engineering' has just been cut-and-pasting genes that evolution has already 'designed.' If we're to the point where we're making synthetic chromosomes, then we might be entering the era of true genetic engineering, where we design new proteins from the ground up.
Maybe we'll even get around to fixing all of those bugs in our anatomy that happened because we we're 'designed' by evolution. Things like inside-out retinas and larynxes that wrap around the aorta. Maybe this Creator of yours really is using quantum-level interventions to influence our evolution. (Nothing in evolutionary theory says that mutations *have* to be random. It's just that random mutations are simple and, in conjunction with natural selection, is sufficient to create pretty cool 'designs.') But, if so, then He ain't fixing things that only intelligent design can fix. Daniel Dennett once said that the best way you can study a designed artifact is to look at the mistakes - to the extent that designs are done right, all designs for the same spec look the same. The difference is in the mistakes. While our 'design' is pretty good on the whole, the mistakes scream "evolution," not "intelligent design." Lots of small changes, not wholesale redesigns.
As far as junk DNA goes, there are two main theories: 1) that it really *is* junk, probably resulting from evolution 'commenting out' a bit of useless code. 2) it plays some sort of non-coding regulatory function. And then there's the third main theory, which says that some is junk, some is regulatory. The simplest assumption is that it is all junk. That way, if we find out that some of it *isn't* junk, we can be surprised and try to figure out what it actually does.
Evolution is economical, but it does need some time to work. If som
Perfection is always relative to some set of values. It represents an optimum. "Indestructible" and "immortal" are values that are usually taken to be good, but I would think that a perfectly recyclable material wouldn't be indestructible or 'immortal.' Whether or not these values would be part of what defines a perfect being is open to discussion.
It has been said that evolution is a satisfier, not an optimizer. So, yes, evolution does tend to produce good enough, not perfect. Intelligent design also generally produces good enough, not perfect. As a certain class of intelligent designers are found of saying, "There is always another bug." This, in some ways, a good thing. When the definition of perfection changes, a bug might well become a feature.
Expansion of the universe. Objects at the edge of the observable universe were 13.7 billion light years away when they emitted the light that is reaching us now. At present time, they are now 46.5 billion light years away. (Assuming something really funky hasn't happened to the expansion of the universe outside of our past light cone, I guess.) See observable universe and comoving distance over at the 'pedia.
I also forgot that the kernel size is in *bytes* not *bits*, so my babble about how complex the linux kernel is actually a bit of an underestimate. Oh well. At any rate, figuring out what a genome is doing is rather like trying to figure out the program from "The Story of Mel." No helpful comments, and a lot of brain-twisting optimization. Evolution is a Real Programmer. (Junk DNA aside.)
Is the 'execution' of the prokaryote genome really that much different from executing a program on a von Neuman machine? The genome is fairly one dimensional - the cell transcribes a gene, runs the mRNA through a ribosome, adds a lot of ATP, and translates the mRNA into a protein, three bases to the amino acid. The function of the protein is determined by how it folds. Predicting how a given chain of amino acids will fold is non-trivial, but it's not like the cell works out how it will happen. Intramolecular attractions does all the work there.
With a eukaryote, there is a lot of things going into determining what gene gets expressed when, but I'm not sure that happens in minimalistic prokaryotes. (I don't even have the credentials of having flunked a biochem course. I just read a *lot* of pop sci.) Prokaryotes don't have a nucleus. IIRC, we're not even sure that Mycoplasma genitalium makes its own ATP. There is quite a bit of infrastructure involved in turning the information encoded on a hunk of DNA into a working protein, but compared to a modern processor? I'm not sure which would win. I'm not even sure how you would go about comparing - how many transistors equals one protein?
Existing is dangerous. That is what drives evolution. Evolution happens when chaos (mutation) and destruction (natural selection) conspire to create order. Who says destruction is a bad thing?
A 'perfectly designed' being, in this case, would be one that its perfectly suited to its environmental niche. It might be an ant (ant species are stable over deep time, so they must be doing *something* right), or a bacteria. It might not be terribly complex or intelligent. (Have you ever wondered if the hicks that surround might actually be more evolutionary fit than yourself? brr!) If organisms could get away from the kind of matter and energy we know of into some kind of strange omni-vector energy, which is in omni-superposition, then that *might* increase their fitness. But then they probably wouldn't need such mundane things as a metabolism. In which case, it might be an open question whether or not these 'organisms' are actually alive.
Perfection is not really obtainable. Bug fixes are, but this does not change the fact that there will always be one more bug. Perfection might not even be desirable - 'perfection' is relative to a particular environmental niche. Change the environment, change the niche, change what perfection means. Perfection (over-specialization) can get you killed.
Hmm. A vitamin c tweak wouldn't be that hard to do. You wouldn't need to localize it in any particular tissue, I wouldn't think. (Unless some tissues find it toxic?) You'd should just be able to plug the gene for it anywhere in the human genome and let 'er rip. Controlling the dosage would be a bit of a bitch, of course. Get it right and 'backwards compatibility' wouldn't be an issue. If one of the tweakers have sex with a baseline, then some of the kids will have the gene, some won't. Hell, its not even like evolution didn't come up with it on its own - the only reason it got removed is that our ancestors were good enough at gathering resources that they didn't *need* to be able to make their own. So evolution said, 'hey, why waste my time making this crap?'
Compared to rationalizing the testicles, the vitamin c tweak should be cake.