he was joking. There were never any "canals" on Mars
Not sure quite what to make of this, since the original links spoke of water gushing from cracks and flowing through channels on Mars' surface (unrelated, as you might expect, to Lowell's original canali).
What floods would these be? Biblical ones?
That too. Many ancient records speak of either a global flood, or at least something much bigger than a local flood, something overwhelming. Science in general won't take these records too seriously lest they be seen to undermine naturalism/materialism or even (horrors!) support the dreaded cult of Creationism. At least, that's the only reasonable conclusion I've seen. A succinct way of putting it is, ``it's too scary to take seriously''.
Whatever happened to ``investigate, and let the facts fall where they may?''
As to the big canal, the only natural force which fits all of the characteristics (flat bottom, steep sides, subcanyons tending to intersect perpendicularly, no clear source or sink, pairs of parallelish canyons, sausage-strings of canyons blending to craters) is a lightning bolt. A nice big lightning bolt. A good time to be elsewhere... a good event to watch from a distance... maybe a few dozen planetary radii... maybe further...
there's a good FAQ on this here A bit heavy on anti-creationist polemic, but it still contains a readable introduction to modern abiogenesis theory.
The talkorigins crew repeatedly stuff up bigtime and would rather crawl up their own asses than admit either error or defeat. The possibility that Santa Claus exists does not equal the certainty, but that is how their logic generally runs when arguing in favour of one of ``their'' points (for examples of such begging-the-question, where does the hypothetical lipid layer in their non-self-reproducing HypUrCell come from, why does it form a layer rather than disperse, what powers the lipid-generating reaction, how does one get from a fat-bubble to the complex, filtering, active membrane in the prokayote below it, where did the primordial peptide come from, and do they also believe in sympathetic medicine - with which their HypUrCell comparison bears a more than passing resemblance?). Arguments against opposing points are generally pretty abusive. You get a lot of the tone (with the offensive language distilled off) from their article.
I can't resist my own separate dig at this page, it's just asking for it:
Even at 1 chance in 4.29 x 10[E]40, a self-replicator could have turned up surprisingly early. [...] So, if on our prebiotic earth we have a billion peptides growing simultaneously, that reduces the time taken to generate our replicator significantly.
If you covered the entire Earth with amino acids useful for generating Ghadiri's peptides - and never mind sources of raw materials and sinks for elimination, decay and other factors - a nice sticky layer a third of a millimeter deep, odds are even that you would get one after a thousand iterations of the whole planet. If we inject a sliver sliver (and no more) of reality into the scenario, and reduce the total area of entirely-composed-of-useful-amino-acid-only lakes on Earth at any one time to that of the Great Lakes (roughly a quarter million square kilometers vs 500 million square kilometers) we're up to two million planetary iterations per peptide. How fast do these processes iterate? What happens when we account for impurities? How about dispersion in a hypothetically (but not realistically) neutral medium like ocean water? How long does a peptide hold together? How many peptides do we need in order to be useful for the next stage? Note that I'm focussing on just one putative stage, not stacking them as the article accuses all opponents of doing.
As a GSV I get to choose my own name
The idea of making GSVs transparent was a good one, I thought. The idea of stations with rank upon rank of GSVs parked inside them was a bit breath-taking... the human mind doesn't accept scale very well, but the Port of Fremantle, just down the road from here, is about the right size to be a GSV docking cradle, and I can mentally replicate that to car-park quantities.
If you look at Mars' atmosphere, you see a 50x higher concentration of carbondioxide compared to earth.
Well... not exactly. The CO2 is about 50x more common in proportion, but remember that there is also 100x less pressure (7-10 millbars versus roughly 1000 millibars) so the total amount of CO2 around on Mars is about 1/2. Low atmospheric pressure complicates things even more by boiling off most of the volatiles which would generally be considered useful for quite a big stretch along the putative road to life.
After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments which produced some amino acids also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.
The experiment was highly artifical, not at all a good representation of putative early Earth conditions
despite this, we would expect some amino acids to form anyway, due to the chemical potentials involved (there is a dip in the road to life, into which some chemical processes will roll with very little pursuasion)
the dip in potential has another side, and that looks kind of like the roads you see in some cartoons, which lead up to the base of a cliff, then trundle straight on up the face of it; what this means in real terms is that not only do some simple atoms/molecules find it relatively easy to become amino acids, but also more complicated molecules find it much easier to relapse to aminoness and it's very unlikely that aminos will self-assemble into anything much more complicated
the acids formed were racemised, that is, about half of them were twisted the wrong way; with one exception, amino acids in living beings are twisted left-handed (are said to have left-handed chirality)
the putative primitive conditions also destroy even the simple amino acids formed by the experiment very quickly
the early conditions involve a heck of a lot of chemicals unlikely to exist in useful amounts on Mars
for that matter, there is much evidence that Earth did not have a reducing atmosphere like the one used in the experiment, or at least did not have one for very long.
I think it's more important that the presence of water enables us to create colonies on Mars in the near future
Really? But the biggest canal was neither formed by water nor carried significant water.
Since these scientist chappies are getting so good at finding water on a completely dry planet (and explaining away global floods on another planet which is covered in water to an average depth of 2.7km), perhaps they can figure out where that much lightning came from? It certainly explains all of those rocks you see strewn around in Mars lander images.
You go apply for a job and put "linux advocate" on your resume and I will put advocate of "quality computing" on mine.
I'd hire the Linux Advocate because at least he doesn't have his head up his ass so far that he can't see out (ie no delusions of grandeur).
Many, even most quality systems suck like a Kirby: they fail to deliver on their promises, introduce significant overheads, and cost heaps. It's a good way to dig yourself into a hole with confidence.
Quality Consultant is usually resume code for ``I'm useless in my industry, so the only job I could get was as a combined critic, form-herd and bullshit merchant.''
The Linux Advocate will actually have some focus, and will be more likely know enough of the details of what he works with to be useful.
I can do everything linux can on Solaris
Really? Write or do significant modifications to a device driver then, go on! A driver for Conexant WinModems would be a good place to start...
Windows in it's current state is a hammer trying to remove a screw; use all the hammers you want, it won't get the screw any looser.
Actually, it does loosen the screw. The rellies on the farm use a hammer quite effectively as a screwdriver (both ways) and spanner where appropriate. It just doesn't do the screw in question much good...
I've used a hammer myself to gut a dead hard drive for the magnets, when I didn't have a small enough star driver. I just flattened the top of the bolt out to tinfoil thickness and pulled it straight through the metal cover. The technique with screws is different, some light taps can loosen them in their substrate (typically wood or sheetmetal) enough to winkle out by hand. Using somer CRC/WD40 often helps as well.
it doesn't cover the server licenses only the cals.
D'ya think this might be a response to Samba's CAL server ability?
BTW, don't knock savings on CALs. Get 1000 students onto Exchange and you're staring down the throat of at least $USD30,000 in CALs alone. Get 1000 students into PostFix and you're staring down the throat of, well, no licencing costs at all. And you have capacity on the same hardware to serve roughly four times as many mailboxes...
Persuade one of your mates to sell them a site license for Linux.
What's an M$ site licence worth for that site? Ten grand? A hundred grand? That'd almost make it worthwhile suffering through ISO-9002 certification and all of the other bullshit necessary before selling to gummint... we'd sell a Linux site licence for half price and throw in site licences for OpenOffice, AbiWord, SIAG, Apache, Zope, PostgreSQL, MySQL, GIMP, PERL and Python site licences too. (-:
There were two mirrors made, and the company which made one of the mirrors (Company P) got to ``test'' them and decide which went to space. The mechanism they used to make their mirror, and also to check the mirrors was stuffed. Some the other mirror (made by Company K) stayed on the ground, and the buggered one flew. The rest, as they say, is history.
When Apple transitioned from the M68K line to the PPC, they were in the same situation - 68K code would run faster on a 40Mhz 68040 than on a 40Mhz PPC 601. The reason consumers didn't mind was that the the PPC 601 started at 60Mhz (approximately the break-even point to the emulation layer), and (to the end user) didn't cost significantly more.
There's a bit more to it than that. Apple also strongly encouraged developers to ship ``fat binaries'', that is, the executable component of programs came in two ``forks'', one for the 68K and one for the PPC, made together from one set of sources. This meant that you could write stuff for the PPC that would still run on the 68K, or from another POV, simply recompile your 68K stuff and be able to also run it on a PPC.
Linux (or at least the bulk of the gcc-related stuff) is set up to enable this kind of thing fairly simply. The same piece of loader that decides what to do with Java executables and the like would be able to select code for different CPUs from one binary. Careless application implementation would involve a significant memory and performance hit, but it would still work. Windows, on the other hand...
It would be kind of neat to have a truly asymmetric multi-processor system and be able to run x86/Alpha/MIPS/Sparc/PPC binaries on the one Linux box without blinking. I wouldn't want to be the one sorting out the data structures common to all of the kernels, though.
BTW, does anyone remember the Dec Rainbow (PC-100)? Imagine how much better that would have fared if.COM (Z80/8080 on CP/M-80) and.CMD (808[68] on CP/M-86 or MS-DOS) files were able to be run seamlessly on the appropriate CPU.
Then instead of VLIW it could run Java bytecode, and Java pages would load under Netscape in less than an hour.
Alternatively, as Intel seem to like skipping letters, you could have a Pytanium that ran Python bytecode - or just ran the ASCII Python source.
Naturally, Microsoft would like a Netanium that ran CLR. The licencing costs would quadruple the cost of the CPU, which from Microsoft's POV is ideal since they can give Windows away, live off the CLR licencing costs built into the CPU, and claim to no longer be driving up the price of commodity systems with an expensive OS.
Since when do criminals get to negotiate their punishment?
When they have lots of money.
Sad but true. Even more so for America, because...
But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors. (James 2:9)
thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. (Deuteronomy 16:19)
...America is called ``a Christian country'' and has a large proprtion of at least nominal Christians in the population. Hmmm.
Would you want the government to take the word of the people that run the meat-packing plant that everything inside is clean and tidy, or do you want inspectors going inside and looking for themselves?
If hotmail changed their terms of use this drastically slashdot would be up in arms.
First demonstrably true statement I've seen in this story (other than ``FSF hosts Savannah''). Last time Hotmail changed its terms of service, SlashDot was indeed up in arms, not to mention legs, tentacles and antennae.
All of the above in sensible doses. Plus it's more fun. And a prettier colour. (-:
BTW, XP isn't a cheap ripoff, just a clumsy one. I suspect that the TCO will work out noticeably worse than WinME. Windows started life without scaleable elevators (to pick a known example) because one William Henry Gates III told the developers to take them out again so that it looked more Mac-like. Dilbert of a few days ago is fitting commentary.
i guess you could say that had you never had the sex you wouldn't have gotten the disease but that's not what the article is trying to say.
True, but the standalone point is still entirely valid, and it's not hard to find other purely mechanistic examples where behaviour clearly defined as sinful in the Good Book will guarantee or at least tend towards illness. There is also the well-known influence of emotional state on health, and this is all without touching on the truly spiritual aspects of the situation.
A classic example was the Jews who went through the Black Plague; because they obeyed the health and sanitation rules spelled out in Deuteronomy and the like, the Black Plague generally missed them: so their Catholic neighbours burned them at the stake as witches under the protection of the Devil. Even though they did not weigh the same as a duck. Yay. )-:
BTW, distinctions like clean/unclean clearly predated Deuteronomy, for example, Noah's herds were classified and enumerated differently in these categories.
a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill.
If you're geek enough to read Slashdot, hopefully you're geek enough to hack together a genetic algorithm (or download one off the 'net) and see by experiment that your logic isn't sound.
The only ones I've found on the 'net, such as ev.p, have massive fundamental flaws in their operating assumptions. Also, no less than Walter ReMine agrees with me. Don't confuse genetic load and genetic cost. Have a hack at really solving Haldane's Dilemma while you're there.
No one claims that every adaptation is going to be successful over the long run.
No, but we will claim, backed by figures provided by fervent evolutionists, that the mechanisms in question are nothing like enough - even under ideal conditions and given lots of dumb evolutionary assumptions about dates and the like - to produce the results we observe today.
Basically you're asking us to prefer the conclusions of your thought experiments rather the conclusions based on the evidence.
The conclusions to which you refer are not based on evidence, they are based on a collossal and theoretical house of cards, made necessary by a Gnostic base philosophy.
If you're serious about this, I can easily bury you in pictures (my budget doesn't extend to actually flying you to site, which is what the usual toromanura demands amount to) of many other sites directly showing either processes in action which geology prefers their own theories for, or out of place fossils and formations.
What's your specialty? We can probably find something that's right up your alley. (-:
Yah, we're talking a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill. Uphill is waaaaaaay outvoted.
There are a number of instances in which good mutations have been observed. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a good example.
No, that gene was borrowed... and the bacteria are designed to do that.
It sounds very much like you're parroting the ideas behind irriducible complexity.
I take it that you don't like the concept of irreducible complexity? No, I'm not parroting anything. Black Parrot does that. (-:
Remember, a particular process doesn't have to serve the same purpose at the end of an evolutionary change as it does during the transitional stages.
True, but it's even more true (if that's possible) the the organism has to survive with the part-features; even more so, in order to survive for very long, the part-features have to avoid burdening the creature until enough miracles happen that the part-feature becomes whole (else the creatures without the part-feature will out evolve it). While this is happening, the feature has to be spread throughout the population, and the un-part-featured are ``trying'' to do the same thing.
As if that all wasn't enough, I'm describing part-features which are lethal to the organism. Say we have three kinds of organism, original, half-featured and full-featured. What do you do when the intermediate feature would be instantly lethal?
Now consider that each of these part-features has to be transmissible as well, and we're well into the realms of fantasy. Hey, lookit all them zeroes, all lined up!
the theory of evolution does not AFAIK invoke any processes, laws, etc. that we do not already know to exist.
It most certainly does.
Mutation, for example, is almost universally bad - especially in terms of the immediate survivability of the organism suffering the mutation, such as Sickle Cell Anaemia - yet somehow lots of this badness is supposed to accumulate together to make improvements, and without leaving any trace of the steps in between.
Lots of creatures (and processes within creatures) have no sensible path from what was supposed to have been its ancestor, across a metabolic ``death chasm'' to a functional system which would be highly destructive to the organism if at all incomplete (immune systems being a classic example). How did the organism cross the gap? Obviously, some kind of planning must be involved, yet there is no such mechanism even postulated in evolutionary theory, mostly because doing so would attract condemnatory cries of ``teleology!''
I have many more examples, but not many more minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure quite what to make of this, since the original links spoke of water gushing from cracks and flowing through channels on Mars' surface (unrelated, as you might expect, to Lowell's original canali).
That too. Many ancient records speak of either a global flood, or at least something much bigger than a local flood, something overwhelming. Science in general won't take these records too seriously lest they be seen to undermine naturalism/materialism or even (horrors!) support the dreaded cult of Creationism. At least, that's the only reasonable conclusion I've seen. A succinct way of putting it is, ``it's too scary to take seriously''.
Whatever happened to ``investigate, and let the facts fall where they may?''
As to the big canal, the only natural force which fits all of the characteristics (flat bottom, steep sides, subcanyons tending to intersect perpendicularly, no clear source or sink, pairs of parallelish canyons, sausage-strings of canyons blending to craters) is a lightning bolt. A nice big lightning bolt. A good time to be elsewhere... a good event to watch from a distance... maybe a few dozen planetary radii... maybe further...
The talkorigins crew repeatedly stuff up bigtime and would rather crawl up their own asses than admit either error or defeat. The possibility that Santa Claus exists does not equal the certainty, but that is how their logic generally runs when arguing in favour of one of ``their'' points (for examples of such begging-the-question, where does the hypothetical lipid layer in their non-self-reproducing HypUrCell come from, why does it form a layer rather than disperse, what powers the lipid-generating reaction, how does one get from a fat-bubble to the complex, filtering, active membrane in the prokayote below it, where did the primordial peptide come from, and do they also believe in sympathetic medicine - with which their HypUrCell comparison bears a more than passing resemblance?). Arguments against opposing points are generally pretty abusive. You get a lot of the tone (with the offensive language distilled off) from their article.
Try this essay for balance. If you enjoy sarcasm, this one is amusing as well.
I can't resist my own separate dig at this page, it's just asking for it:
If you covered the entire Earth with amino acids useful for generating Ghadiri's peptides - and never mind sources of raw materials and sinks for elimination, decay and other factors - a nice sticky layer a third of a millimeter deep, odds are even that you would get one after a thousand iterations of the whole planet. If we inject a sliver sliver (and no more) of reality into the scenario, and reduce the total area of entirely-composed-of-useful-amino-acid-only lakes on Earth at any one time to that of the Great Lakes (roughly a quarter million square kilometers vs 500 million square kilometers) we're up to two million planetary iterations per peptide. How fast do these processes iterate? What happens when we account for impurities? How about dispersion in a hypothetically (but not realistically) neutral medium like ocean water? How long does a peptide hold together? How many peptides do we need in order to be useful for the next stage? Note that I'm focussing on just one putative stage, not stacking them as the article accuses all opponents of doing.
The idea of making GSVs transparent was a good one, I thought. The idea of stations with rank upon rank of GSVs parked inside them was a bit breath-taking... the human mind doesn't accept scale very well, but the Port of Fremantle, just down the road from here, is about the right size to be a GSV docking cradle, and I can mentally replicate that to car-park quantities.
Well... not exactly. The CO2 is about 50x more common in proportion, but remember that there is also 100x less pressure (7-10 millbars versus roughly 1000 millibars) so the total amount of CO2 around on Mars is about 1/2. Low atmospheric pressure complicates things even more by boiling off most of the volatiles which would generally be considered useful for quite a big stretch along the putative road to life.
After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments which produced some amino acids also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.
Agree. And let's do it properly, by building a Beanstalk now that it is technically feasible. Or is that the mistake the Babelians made? (-:
Really? But the biggest canal was neither formed by water nor carried significant water.
Since these scientist chappies are getting so good at finding water on a completely dry planet (and explaining away global floods on another planet which is covered in water to an average depth of 2.7km), perhaps they can figure out where that much lightning came from? It certainly explains all of those rocks you see strewn around in Mars lander images.
Maybe finger was the trial version of Exchange? That would explain why the code name for the full version got censored...
Excellent! WeirdX might run in realtime... (-:
I'd hire the Linux Advocate because at least he doesn't have his head up his ass so far that he can't see out (ie no delusions of grandeur).
Many, even most quality systems suck like a Kirby: they fail to deliver on their promises, introduce significant overheads, and cost heaps. It's a good way to dig yourself into a hole with confidence.
Quality Consultant is usually resume code for ``I'm useless in my industry, so the only job I could get was as a combined critic, form-herd and bullshit merchant.''
The Linux Advocate will actually have some focus, and will be more likely know enough of the details of what he works with to be useful.
Really? Write or do significant modifications to a device driver then, go on! A driver for Conexant WinModems would be a good place to start...
Actually, it does loosen the screw. The rellies on the farm use a hammer quite effectively as a screwdriver (both ways) and spanner where appropriate. It just doesn't do the screw in question much good...
I've used a hammer myself to gut a dead hard drive for the magnets, when I didn't have a small enough star driver. I just flattened the top of the bolt out to tinfoil thickness and pulled it straight through the metal cover. The technique with screws is different, some light taps can loosen them in their substrate (typically wood or sheetmetal) enough to winkle out by hand. Using somer CRC/WD40 often helps as well.
D'ya think this might be a response to Samba's CAL server ability?
BTW, don't knock savings on CALs. Get 1000 students onto Exchange and you're staring down the throat of at least $USD30,000 in CALs alone. Get 1000 students into PostFix and you're staring down the throat of, well, no licencing costs at all. And you have capacity on the same hardware to serve roughly four times as many mailboxes...
What's an M$ site licence worth for that site? Ten grand? A hundred grand? That'd almost make it worthwhile suffering through ISO-9002 certification and all of the other bullshit necessary before selling to gummint... we'd sell a Linux site licence for half price and throw in site licences for OpenOffice, AbiWord, SIAG, Apache, Zope, PostgreSQL, MySQL, GIMP, PERL and Python site licences too. (-:
There were two mirrors made, and the company which made one of the mirrors (Company P) got to ``test'' them and decide which went to space. The mechanism they used to make their mirror, and also to check the mirrors was stuffed. Some the other mirror (made by Company K) stayed on the ground, and the buggered one flew. The rest, as they say, is history.
There's a bit more to it than that. Apple also strongly encouraged developers to ship ``fat binaries'', that is, the executable component of programs came in two ``forks'', one for the 68K and one for the PPC, made together from one set of sources. This meant that you could write stuff for the PPC that would still run on the 68K, or from another POV, simply recompile your 68K stuff and be able to also run it on a PPC.
Linux (or at least the bulk of the gcc-related stuff) is set up to enable this kind of thing fairly simply. The same piece of loader that decides what to do with Java executables and the like would be able to select code for different CPUs from one binary. Careless application implementation would involve a significant memory and performance hit, but it would still work. Windows, on the other hand...
It would be kind of neat to have a truly asymmetric multi-processor system and be able to run x86/Alpha/MIPS/Sparc/PPC binaries on the one Linux box without blinking. I wouldn't want to be the one sorting out the data structures common to all of the kernels, though.
BTW, does anyone remember the Dec Rainbow (PC-100)? Imagine how much better that would have fared if
The ultimate in speculative execution? If it turns out right every time, it's ``pure ass''? Sounds very quantum to me...
Then instead of VLIW it could run Java bytecode, and Java pages would load under Netscape in less than an hour.
Alternatively, as Intel seem to like skipping letters, you could have a Pytanium that ran Python bytecode - or just ran the ASCII Python source.
Naturally, Microsoft would like a Netanium that ran CLR. The licencing costs would quadruple the cost of the CPU, which from Microsoft's POV is ideal since they can give Windows away, live off the CLR licencing costs built into the CPU, and claim to no longer be driving up the price of commodity systems with an expensive OS.
Sad but true. Even more so for America, because...
...America is called ``a Christian country'' and has a large proprtion of at least nominal Christians in the population. Hmmm.
Actually, the proper word should be disintegrate, as in ``if I could disintegrate IE, about 12% of my security issues would evapourate''.
Actually, IE for the Mac is quite livable. But what are the odds against getting that back-ported? To the nearest million?
I'm a vegetarian. (-:
First demonstrably true statement I've seen in this story (other than ``FSF hosts Savannah''). Last time Hotmail changed its terms of service, SlashDot was indeed up in arms, not to mention legs, tentacles and antennae.
Ruby!
All of the above in sensible doses. Plus it's more fun. And a prettier colour. (-:
BTW, XP isn't a cheap ripoff, just a clumsy one. I suspect that the TCO will work out noticeably worse than WinME. Windows started life without scaleable elevators (to pick a known example) because one William Henry Gates III told the developers to take them out again so that it looked more Mac-like. Dilbert of a few days ago is fitting commentary.
Dons asbestos undies, prepares to duck...
True, but the standalone point is still entirely valid, and it's not hard to find other purely mechanistic examples where behaviour clearly defined as sinful in the Good Book will guarantee or at least tend towards illness. There is also the well-known influence of emotional state on health, and this is all without touching on the truly spiritual aspects of the situation.
A classic example was the Jews who went through the Black Plague; because they obeyed the health and sanitation rules spelled out in Deuteronomy and the like, the Black Plague generally missed them: so their Catholic neighbours burned them at the stake as witches under the protection of the Devil. Even though they did not weigh the same as a duck. Yay. )-:
BTW, distinctions like clean/unclean clearly predated Deuteronomy, for example, Noah's herds were classified and enumerated differently in these categories.
The only ones I've found on the 'net, such as ev.p, have massive fundamental flaws in their operating assumptions. Also, no less than Walter ReMine agrees with me. Don't confuse genetic load and genetic cost. Have a hack at really solving Haldane's Dilemma while you're there.
No, but we will claim, backed by figures provided by fervent evolutionists, that the mechanisms in question are nothing like enough - even under ideal conditions and given lots of dumb evolutionary assumptions about dates and the like - to produce the results we observe today.
The conclusions to which you refer are not based on evidence, they are based on a collossal and theoretical house of cards, made necessary by a Gnostic base philosophy.
We will also ask: when we have observed varved rock establishment in real time (with pictures), why do evolutionists prefer theory to observation as an explanation for the origin of varved rocks? (more pictures here, same story, different location, strata not as clear). And when mammalian remains are found in rocks dated at 280Ma old...?
If you're serious about this, I can easily bury you in pictures (my budget doesn't extend to actually flying you to site, which is what the usual toromanura demands amount to) of many other sites directly showing either processes in action which geology prefers their own theories for, or out of place fossils and formations.
What's your specialty? We can probably find something that's right up your alley. (-:
Yah, we're talking a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill. Uphill is waaaaaaay outvoted.
No, that gene was borrowed... and the bacteria are designed to do that.
I take it that you don't like the concept of irreducible complexity? No, I'm not parroting anything. Black Parrot does that. (-:
True, but it's even more true (if that's possible) the the organism has to survive with the part-features; even more so, in order to survive for very long, the part-features have to avoid burdening the creature until enough miracles happen that the part-feature becomes whole (else the creatures without the part-feature will out evolve it). While this is happening, the feature has to be spread throughout the population, and the un-part-featured are ``trying'' to do the same thing.
As if that all wasn't enough, I'm describing part-features which are lethal to the organism. Say we have three kinds of organism, original, half-featured and full-featured. What do you do when the intermediate feature would be instantly lethal?
Now consider that each of these part-features has to be transmissible as well, and we're well into the realms of fantasy. Hey, lookit all them zeroes, all lined up!
Venereal diseases are a pretty direct counterexample to that assertion.
And what has the Vatican got to do with Christianity, to say nothing of common sense?
It most certainly does.
Mutation, for example, is almost universally bad - especially in terms of the immediate survivability of the organism suffering the mutation, such as Sickle Cell Anaemia - yet somehow lots of this badness is supposed to accumulate together to make improvements, and without leaving any trace of the steps in between.
Lots of creatures (and processes within creatures) have no sensible path from what was supposed to have been its ancestor, across a metabolic ``death chasm'' to a functional system which would be highly destructive to the organism if at all incomplete (immune systems being a classic example). How did the organism cross the gap? Obviously, some kind of planning must be involved, yet there is no such mechanism even postulated in evolutionary theory, mostly because doing so would attract condemnatory cries of ``teleology!''
I have many more examples, but not many more minutes.
Great, six fingers, we'd be able to count up to 4096 on our hands. It's an historical occurrence as well.