I appear to have used a word which carries a specific technical meaning in a way that conveyed the technical part of the meaning to you but not the common-use meaning, and did not intend to.
Adding randomness in the gross sense screws things up, which is not predicted by this piece of information theory. From that experience we learn that the pure information theory application is too simplistic to be useful here.
Bringing the argument back to 0, 1 or even 2 bits of information unfortunately files off all of the meaningful sidebands. What you are addressing with core information theory is very clear and elegant and has essentially zero relevance for Evolution in real life.
I could make cute assertions about not adding a "B" but adding a "?", however that wouldn't make it really clear that the problem does not fit into this framework at all, so can't really be sensibly addressed by it.
Perhaps you can tell by the way I'm re-approaching the statement from several slightly different angles, but I'm struggling to think of a clear illustration for just how poor a fit it is.
Let's try an analogy. Consider replacing one heat tile on a space shuttle with a random object - a brick, a food mixer, a cat, a block of styrofoam or perhaps more appropriately a tile from a different part of the shuttle. Information theory says that we've added information to this shuttle, which clearly distinguishes it from other shuttles. Real life says we're about to need another seven astronauts. We haven't added useful information. "Useful" is a concept a long way up the cognitive scale from an individual base-pair.
In the field, there might be billions or trillions of a particular lifeform to experiment with, and so if a significant portion of them mutate and don't die off, there ought to be perhaps thousands to millions of different extant mutations in the population for selection to work with.
In practice, there aren't. Many articles have been written about the surprising stability of E. Coli alone. E. Coli is not evolving. Yet if the information theory above was a valid application, it would obviously and continuously be so.
Before digital media, there was microfiche
on
Low Tech Gutenberg?
·
· Score: 1
She's likely to be able to lay hands on a reader for it, too. Shipping her a couple of kilos of microfiche is more likely to succeed and less likely to get stolen than a PDA. At a pinch, she can use a random light-source and a magnifying glass, and/or ship her a fold-down Fresnel lens too.
Get a genuine hardcover book, preferably a boring one from an op-shop or bargain bin with a stark (black and white) cover, easy to read through the packaging. Open it, use a craft knife to chop out (a) hollow rectangle(s) for the PDA and accessories. Pad the PDA so it doesn't rattle, tape the book shut with clear tape so it doesn't flop open in transit.
Runs up the shipping costs a little, but since hardcovers feel heavy anyway, only an xray will show it up. You can even thwart some of those by putting a couple of leaves of tinfoil inside the covers, but you'd be better off using tinfoil silhouettes to spell out "P D A" to help avoid bomb scares.
We want added informational entropy - we want more randomness in order for natural selection and Evolution to work. Without some measure of randomness being added, natural selection quickly stops. This is where information is added; mutation adds, while selection loses, information.
Oops.
Adding randomness/entropy is not adding information. As you said, selection selects from existing information, it doesn't add anything. You still lack a mechanism for adding information. Selection does indeed operate on randomness, where it is made accessible by expression. Selection removes the entropy again. Selection is, in a way, a limiting entropy filter.
If a mutation (in real life, a set of mutations are required since a single mutation is easily erased by the wonderful cross-checking built into the DNA transcription machinery) could add a structure which was genuinely advantageous, you might have a point.
he ignores the huge survival gain for a favorable mutation; in effect, you only need one good mutation to wipe out a hundred million bad ones.
Not exactly.
The homeostatic machinery itself would select strongly against reproduction of a "costless" mutation even if once could be identified. No nominally helpful mutation has been identified which has arrived without a significant burden of negative properties as an intrinsic part (a "cost") of the mutation. Neither the DNA machinery nor external "natural" selection is able to separate the good and bad effects.
The genetic burden of these destructive effects is also cumulative, so the one good mutation cannot wipe out all of the baddies without also wiping out itself, and the nett effect has always been negative, entropic.
The piccies make the material look no heavier than a cool-drink can. If that's so, one for Hubble need only be a few times as heavy duty to shed the majority of relatively high re-entry speed to Earth by aerobraking. Lofting a 50kg heat shield to 750km (actually, if Hubble was deorbited in stages, not even that - maybe 200km) is a lot easier than lofting anything as cumbersome as the system used to protect the Shuttles.
So the plan is: use Hubble's remaining fuel to begin the deorbit, meet it en route with a small booster built into a light heat shield plus two sets of 'chutes to strap onto the other end - one small drogue to keep it oriented/stable and one real 'chute to slow it down once the nice compression-plasma has faded a bit. Fire the booster to initiate the final deorbit stage, kick the drogue out at the first sign of atmosphere, ride the plasma, kick the big 'chute out, have that intercepted by a 'plane with a big bungee and the ability to cope with suddenly adding 12t of deadweight, and you're done.
They're moving to millstone people down to MS-Office, MS-Access,.NET, anything else they can lay hand to because they realise that but for these ties (did somebody say "illegal abuse of monopoly power"?), operating systems are about to become unimportant. And who would pay AUD$200 for a slightly dodgy ShortHorn when instead they can have a rock-steady Linux for free?
Thankfully, their efforts along these lines in the past have mostly come to nought. Does anyone remember Blackbird? Or the original MSN?
Basically, you seem to have a strange idea about what natural selection implies. The variant hemoglobin/malaria issue provides strong evidence for the correctness of the theory of natural selection as a mechanism for intraspecies change.
The point you seem to be missing is that the change is a destructive one. It results in loss of genetic information, loss of oxygen carrying capacity, massive infant mortality.
In order for Evolution to work (capital E for molecules-to-man rather than the vague and prevaricating "change over time" definition), you need to find creative mutations that stick.
If you can't do that, you're just diluting the genetic information available, site by site, with junk. It's like scraping a nail or scourer across a CD and calling it "added information" - it's almost entirely added entropy, and entropy is your enemy here.
They will be granted a "+1 Interesting" each when the next mod points roll around. That still leaves three points unspent, so if you make any more good posts in the next week or so, email them to anything in the cyberknights.com.au domain.
Implementing that ruling would provide a lovely little dilemma for Microsoft to solve. Would they back off from software patents, or would they just brace for the inevitable oograh of lemon lawsuits?
Try this one. Not FOSS, but free-as-in-beer and very pretty. The images are displayed through the Flash app rather than hidden by it, but it's more than enough to stall the average punter, if that's what you want to do.
Except over a remote RDP link, where the fading and flashing can cause a page to take 20 minutes or more to finish loading over a 128kb ADSL uplink.
We do not insert or accept magical entities into the process of science.
Yes, we do.
A good half of the scientific articles published in reputable peer-reviewed journals which spout on about evolution invoke teleology. They speak of organisms "striving" to accomplish certain functionality and otherwise anthropomorphise and turn the organism in question magical.
Many articles also speak of mutation as if it were a magically creative force instead of, as observation repeatedly confirms, a destructive one. Others speak of chemicals magically being able to march themselves up a long, steep and slippery entropic slope to lifehood.
One appeals to known, repeatable, testable phenomena, the other does not.
Yeah?
Then you'll be able to link me to a cite for anyone who's sat there with a video camera and taped the last hundred million years of animal development, will you? Or perhaps a link to where someone walked chemical evolution through its paces and came up with something self-sustaining from inorganic molecules? Is there a series of stills on the net anywhere recording the development and progress of Protoavis and his contemporaries, the birds? Any photos of the missing intermediates? Has anyone repeated that development sequence and varied it to see what would happen? Or any like it?
Provided you accept that the low end user is not a factor here, let us move upscale. People who want to send files from within the application, do mail merge in word. They record and modify macros in Excel. These are the people you are talking about, the common clay of Microsoft Land.
...these are the guys (and gals) who will innocently base their entire core stratum of MS-Office macros around one obscure.NET feature and one obscure OLE2 feature and one obscure MicrosoftFeatureOfTheSeason that makes their stuff difficult to impossible to port off.
...if you email me the URLs of some of your recent posts that you're pleased with, I'll park them to one side and consider modding them up when I next get points (typically about every 4 days). Use my forename at cyberknights com au rather than the FDNS address, lest your message get drowned in spam.
It'll help your karma a lot if you don't charge in defiantly with all guns blazing as Step One of your responses. (-:
...that the Russian launchers have a better history of reliability than either the Shuttle or most of the conventional Western launchers. So they are cheaper and more reliable - just not politically correct.
So there's no thing as an areligious position in anything?
Do your irises have a colour? Or not?
Put it another way: everybody believes something about how the world works, and none of us was there to see it put together and take notes. That something, whatever it is, is a religious position.
Also, you're trying to arrogate a position for your own religious stance by claiming for it a solid basis on uninterrupted logic. You're fooling yourself. Reasoning from the known chemical and physical properties of atoms, the number of such in the known universe (10^81), the number of ways in which they can be arranged and the maximum amount of time (~10^18 seconds) they've had to so arrange themselves does not lead to the conclusion that life is possible. And yet life is all around us.
The only rational conclusions are either that materialism is hogwash or fundamental science is badly, badly wrong in practically every "hard" branch. And no, Evolution is not science. Evolution, as in molecules-to-man, is an interpretation overlaid on science by Atheists desperate to feel, as Richard Dawkins put it, "intellectually fulfilled".
44%???? Where do you get that? 4.4, maybe even 14%, I will believe. But Americans are not that foolish or stupid.
Yes, I'm afraid that only 44% of Americans outright reject this creation myth for Atheists. That figure was published by National Geographic in their ham-fisted cover article/opinion piece "Was Darwin Wrong?" and is based on a long history of consistent Gallup poll results.
I'm not asking you to like it, but I am calling you a moron for not checking the figure yourself. Google is only a click away so you've no real excuse.
As to the suffering, I think of Gallileo, Corpernicus, and Kepler vs. the christian church.
I see you've done no research here, either.
Not only was this the political church of the Dark Ages, and not only did most of the scientists and churchmen of the age side with Galileio, but Galileio actually got into trouble for being rude and political rather than because of any perceived deficiencies in his theory.
You might also want to consider the Jews who were lynched during the Black Plague because the plague didn't touch them. And why didn't it? Because they were following the hygiene rules from an old, outmoded, inaccurately copied compilation of tribal myths, formerly known as The Old Testament.
For some inexplicable reason, the science scattered through the Bible is 100% accurate, even down to naming Arcturus as highly mobile (Job 38:32) and Orion as a cluster (Job 38:81). It also says that the Earth is suspended in space, not embedded in any crystal spheres (Job 26:7). Pretty damn good for a bunch of primitive tribesmen and you'll notice that it stands with Galileio, not with the politicians. No, the Bible is not a science textbook, but yes, the science in it is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that close enough?
+5 Insightful, methinks.
I appear to have used a word which carries a specific technical meaning in a way that conveyed the technical part of the meaning to you but not the common-use meaning, and did not intend to.
Adding randomness in the gross sense screws things up, which is not predicted by this piece of information theory. From that experience we learn that the pure information theory application is too simplistic to be useful here.
Bringing the argument back to 0, 1 or even 2 bits of information unfortunately files off all of the meaningful sidebands. What you are addressing with core information theory is very clear and elegant and has essentially zero relevance for Evolution in real life.
I could make cute assertions about not adding a "B" but adding a "?", however that wouldn't make it really clear that the problem does not fit into this framework at all, so can't really be sensibly addressed by it.
Perhaps you can tell by the way I'm re-approaching the statement from several slightly different angles, but I'm struggling to think of a clear illustration for just how poor a fit it is.
Let's try an analogy. Consider replacing one heat tile on a space shuttle with a random object - a brick, a food mixer, a cat, a block of styrofoam or perhaps more appropriately a tile from a different part of the shuttle. Information theory says that we've added information to this shuttle, which clearly distinguishes it from other shuttles. Real life says we're about to need another seven astronauts. We haven't added useful information. "Useful" is a concept a long way up the cognitive scale from an individual base-pair.
In the field, there might be billions or trillions of a particular lifeform to experiment with, and so if a significant portion of them mutate and don't die off, there ought to be perhaps thousands to millions of different extant mutations in the population for selection to work with.
In practice, there aren't. Many articles have been written about the surprising stability of E. Coli alone. E. Coli is not evolving. Yet if the information theory above was a valid application, it would obviously and continuously be so.
She's likely to be able to lay hands on a reader for it, too. Shipping her a couple of kilos of microfiche is more likely to succeed and less likely to get stolen than a PDA. At a pinch, she can use a random light-source and a magnifying glass, and/or ship her a fold-down Fresnel lens too.
Get a genuine hardcover book, preferably a boring one from an op-shop or bargain bin with a stark (black and white) cover, easy to read through the packaging. Open it, use a craft knife to chop out (a) hollow rectangle(s) for the PDA and accessories. Pad the PDA so it doesn't rattle, tape the book shut with clear tape so it doesn't flop open in transit.
Runs up the shipping costs a little, but since hardcovers feel heavy anyway, only an xray will show it up. You can even thwart some of those by putting a couple of leaves of tinfoil inside the covers, but you'd be better off using tinfoil silhouettes to spell out "P D A" to help avoid bomb scares.
Still, there are smelly individuals who deliberately set up their browsers like that that. Who would want mud on their wand?
Adding randomness/entropy is not adding information. As you said, selection selects from existing information, it doesn't add anything. You still lack a mechanism for adding information. Selection does indeed operate on randomness, where it is made accessible by expression. Selection removes the entropy again. Selection is, in a way, a limiting entropy filter.
If a mutation (in real life, a set of mutations are required since a single mutation is easily erased by the wonderful cross-checking built into the DNA transcription machinery) could add a structure which was genuinely advantageous, you might have a point.Not exactly.
The homeostatic machinery itself would select strongly against reproduction of a "costless" mutation even if once could be identified. No nominally helpful mutation has been identified which has arrived without a significant burden of negative properties as an intrinsic part (a "cost") of the mutation. Neither the DNA machinery nor external "natural" selection is able to separate the good and bad effects.
The genetic burden of these destructive effects is also cumulative, so the one good mutation cannot wipe out all of the baddies without also wiping out itself, and the nett effect has always been negative, entropic.
The piccies make the material look no heavier than a cool-drink can. If that's so, one for Hubble need only be a few times as heavy duty to shed the majority of relatively high re-entry speed to Earth by aerobraking. Lofting a 50kg heat shield to 750km (actually, if Hubble was deorbited in stages, not even that - maybe 200km) is a lot easier than lofting anything as cumbersome as the system used to protect the Shuttles.
So the plan is: use Hubble's remaining fuel to begin the deorbit, meet it en route with a small booster built into a light heat shield plus two sets of 'chutes to strap onto the other end - one small drogue to keep it oriented/stable and one real 'chute to slow it down once the nice compression-plasma has faded a bit. Fire the booster to initiate the final deorbit stage, kick the drogue out at the first sign of atmosphere, ride the plasma, kick the big 'chute out, have that intercepted by a 'plane with a big bungee and the ability to cope with suddenly adding 12t of deadweight, and you're done.
They're moving to millstone people down to MS-Office, MS-Access, .NET, anything else they can lay hand to because they realise that but for these ties (did somebody say "illegal abuse of monopoly power"?), operating systems are about to become unimportant. And who would pay AUD$200 for a slightly dodgy ShortHorn when instead they can have a rock-steady Linux for free?
Thankfully, their efforts along these lines in the past have mostly come to nought. Does anyone remember Blackbird? Or the original MSN?
In order for Evolution to work (capital E for molecules-to-man rather than the vague and prevaricating "change over time" definition), you need to find creative mutations that stick.
If you can't do that, you're just diluting the genetic information available, site by site, with junk. It's like scraping a nail or scourer across a CD and calling it "added information" - it's almost entirely added entropy, and entropy is your enemy here.
I think winetools downloads one of those, so maybe the licence issue isn't as worrisome as Sidenet says. Or perhaps just not everywhere in the world.
...now we wait for /. to come to the party.
They will be granted a "+1 Interesting" each when the next mod points roll around. That still leaves three points unspent, so if you make any more good posts in the next week or so, email them to anything in the cyberknights.com.au domain.
Implementing that ruling would provide a lovely little dilemma for Microsoft to solve. Would they back off from software patents, or would they just brace for the inevitable oograh of lemon lawsuits?
...and then shows the menu. It's probably a bug, but it's both useful and amusing.
Try this one. Not FOSS, but free-as-in-beer and very pretty. The images are displayed through the Flash app rather than hidden by it, but it's more than enough to stall the average punter, if that's what you want to do.
Except over a remote RDP link, where the fading and flashing can cause a page to take 20 minutes or more to finish loading over a 128kb ADSL uplink.
Yes, it can be transmitted by kissing, accidental inhalation of ejecta, many different ways.
Yes, remaining pure is even more effective than monogamy, but unfortunately it's not heritable.
Some of her game/edu CDs will run under WINE, some not. Other than that, she's happy.
A good half of the scientific articles published in reputable peer-reviewed journals which spout on about evolution invoke teleology. They speak of organisms "striving" to accomplish certain functionality and otherwise anthropomorphise and turn the organism in question magical.
Many articles also speak of mutation as if it were a magically creative force instead of, as observation repeatedly confirms, a destructive one. Others speak of chemicals magically being able to march themselves up a long, steep and slippery entropic slope to lifehood.Yeah?
Then you'll be able to link me to a cite for anyone who's sat there with a video camera and taped the last hundred million years of animal development, will you? Or perhaps a link to where someone walked chemical evolution through its paces and came up with something self-sustaining from inorganic molecules? Is there a series of stills on the net anywhere recording the development and progress of Protoavis and his contemporaries, the birds? Any photos of the missing intermediates? Has anyone repeated that development sequence and varied it to see what would happen? Or any like it?
Good on you. (-:
...if you email me the URLs of some of your recent posts that you're pleased with, I'll park them to one side and consider modding them up when I next get points (typically about every 4 days). Use my forename at cyberknights com au rather than the FDNS address, lest your message get drowned in spam.
It'll help your karma a lot if you don't charge in defiantly with all guns blazing as Step One of your responses. (-:
...that the Russian launchers have a better history of reliability than either the Shuttle or most of the conventional Western launchers. So they are cheaper and more reliable - just not politically correct.
Put it another way: everybody believes something about how the world works, and none of us was there to see it put together and take notes. That something, whatever it is, is a religious position.
Also, you're trying to arrogate a position for your own religious stance by claiming for it a solid basis on uninterrupted logic. You're fooling yourself. Reasoning from the known chemical and physical properties of atoms, the number of such in the known universe (10^81), the number of ways in which they can be arranged and the maximum amount of time (~10^18 seconds) they've had to so arrange themselves does not lead to the conclusion that life is possible. And yet life is all around us.
The only rational conclusions are either that materialism is hogwash or fundamental science is badly, badly wrong in practically every "hard" branch. And no, Evolution is not science. Evolution, as in molecules-to-man, is an interpretation overlaid on science by Atheists desperate to feel, as Richard Dawkins put it, "intellectually fulfilled".
I'm not asking you to like it, but I am calling you a moron for not checking the figure yourself. Google is only a click away so you've no real excuse.I see you've done no research here, either.
Not only was this the political church of the Dark Ages, and not only did most of the scientists and churchmen of the age side with Galileio, but Galileio actually got into trouble for being rude and political rather than because of any perceived deficiencies in his theory.
You might also want to consider the Jews who were lynched during the Black Plague because the plague didn't touch them. And why didn't it? Because they were following the hygiene rules from an old, outmoded, inaccurately copied compilation of tribal myths, formerly known as The Old Testament.
For some inexplicable reason, the science scattered through the Bible is 100% accurate, even down to naming Arcturus as highly mobile (Job 38:32) and Orion as a cluster (Job 38:81). It also says that the Earth is suspended in space, not embedded in any crystal spheres (Job 26:7). Pretty damn good for a bunch of primitive tribesmen and you'll notice that it stands with Galileio, not with the politicians. No, the Bible is not a science textbook, but yes, the science in it is accurate.
...that you can't spell hypocrite and either can't be bothered right-clicking and choosing "Dictionary" or you use a browser that sucks. (-: