Evolution does not depend upon the Big Bang, or even a one- or two-ended universe. It could just as well happen in a steady-state or cyclic universe.
In point of fact, the Big Bang has been in trouble all along, and still is. While one bunch of scientists are crowing about measuring the viscosity of dark matter, another bunch (in somewhat better contact with reality, IMESHO) produce explanations with far fewer fudge factors and no dark matter. The two bunches are not alone. A different crew somewhere, you can be sure, will be producing a different viscosity value while others are producing different reduced-fudge-factor no-dark-matter explanations of the observations. Big Bang devotees are happy about WMAP's CMB maps, while other scientists are busily pointing out where the celebrated bumps happen to frequently coincide with local stellar and galactic clusters. And so on, ad infinitum (or possibly just ad astra).
The one clear lesson which you can draw from this is that it is basically still all speculation. Be very, very wary when dealing with someone who regards the Big Bang as an unassailable fact.
For larger bridges, at least, the engineers go out and measure gravity at several points along the length of the proposed bridge, so that it isn't weakened by overlooking a gravity anomaly. They will also do stuff like put up weather stations, looking for anomalies and microweather patterns that ordinary weather reporting misses.
This is the difference between engineers and scientists. If an engineer screws up, people die (and often on the spot). You can go out and knock on most of the stuff an engineer does. Engineers believe in working with error bars and well-defined uncertainties. Scientists often have no such assurance, and surprisingly few scientific disciplines treat uncertainties as rigorously as engineers routinely do.
The canonical scientific reaction to uncertainty is either rejection of the whole concept ("burn the heretics!"), or to ride roughshod over the uncertainty because certain key items look to be in about the right places ("only an heretic would question that!", in this case evolution). Neither approach is particularly rational.
The creation scientists might well be totally wrong (although it's likely that even if the majority of their ideas are wrong, a few will be pure gold), but so far they have typically been more rational in their approach than elephant-hurlers like the parent poster.
...can be a bit of a bastard, and when you do find it, the newly installed software might not work, or might break something else.
For a case in point, the wireless on this laptop is unreliable under MS-Windows XP and bulletproof under Mandriva Linux 2006.0; it was even less reliable until I figured out that ZoneAlarm kept forgetting to allow DNS access to fully-blessed programs (I had to give it carte blanche on DNS), and finding that out was pretty obscure.
Installing stuff on Mandriva Linux is a breeze, you just scroll down to it in RPMdrake, click on it and here comes the package and everything it needs to survive. I understand that Synaptics, YAST and friends are pretty much the same. On MS-Windows, you first have to search out the program (forex, on TuCows) and a program to do what you want may not be available from a trusted supplier, so you probably have to install it "blind" from some random site on the net -- or three or four of them. And even the ones without nastyware enclosed might have specific, conflicting prerequisites, in which case you're screwed: pick your favourite and delete the other(s). If you can. Under Linux I have the option of pulling down an SRPM (the source! shock, horror) and clicking on it to have the machine make a version tailored to itself. Oh, yes, and if you delete a package (using one central tool), it's really gone (it and optionally any dependencies unique to it).
VB is an effing nightmare to maintain, or to build anything really large in. Use Ruby and FreeRIDE instead -- yes, even on MS-Windows.
The people studying bones look at a myriad factors. They study density and structure in the bones themselves, wear patterns and tooth-marks (or whatever), state of articulation, any adjacent indications of soft tissue or the like, chemical residues in the bones (including, in several cases, complete blood cells and still-flexible cartilage: a flares-fireworks-and-sirens tip-off that we really are barking up the wrong tree in several fields of scientific endeavour, but one which has been largely blippedover), features in bones of similar appearance, location, orientation, lots of stuff. It's not at all slapdash in that regard, but it is all still basically a guess. Often a very educated one, mind you, nevertheless, a guess.
The results of a change in genetic coding are not bound to reflect the size of the change itself.
The fact that you've bolded "beneficial" seems to imply that you understand this already, but I see no particular reason to arbitrarily decide that a more sweeping effect is going to be more survivable than a small one. Intuition tells us that a small experimental change is easier to manage than a larger one, but Real Life(tm) may not agree with our intuition.
As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical species of gliding squirrel which is, overnight, trapped on an island as a large wave comes through and erodes the land-bridge connecting the colony to most of their food sources. I chose a gliding quirrel for their noted swimming abilities (ie, they don't have any). If a large mutation tripled the gliding range of one of the squirrels and allowed it to glide ashore to food, and back to mate, the massive advantage this confers might more than compensate for other massive damage (albinism, susceptibility to cancer, ugliness, reduced ability to grip trees, whatever) caused by a "reckless" mutation.
Sound plausible? That's the beauty of thought experiments: it's very difficult for anybody to prove you wrong. (-:
I suspect that this theory is, at heart, being mooted as an answer to the concept of Irreducible Complexity. It isn't, but it does look like a step in the right direction.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile tossing together a thesis on the developmental progress of all of these attempts to replace an obviously broken set of theories with one that bears at least a passing resemblance to reality? I could call it something like "the evolution of evolution" and flog the film rights for a small fortune. Genius (sometimes demented) plays the role of mutation, and peer pressure (often wrong) plays the role of natural selection. It's bound to be a winning formula!
it's essentially without the "equilibrium" part. (-:
SJG advocated "survival of the luckiest" rather than "survival of the fittest", which is another distinction between punk-eek and this.
But yes, it is different to moribund gradualism. Now all they need is an actual mechanism, and they're away. Cue much hooting and jeering from the Progressive Creation crowd.
can be found in the study of Gouldian Finches, which were selected for bigger beaks (more access to food) during times of hardship, but that selection relaxed again when the hardship eased. This is not theory, competent people watched it happen.
...a rapidly dwindling pool of friends to help bail them out of the diplomatic cacky every time they arrogantly stomp all over some "lesser" country's rights, something Dubya is sadly reknowned for but hardly the pioneer of.
China has Intelligent Design too, and Creationists, but they are unofficially forbidden by the government there. In America, freedom of thought is more of a detente, with the Christian Right and Liberal Atheists having fought each other more or less to a standstill across the board, leaving what amounts to a tense two-way balance of power rather than genuine freedom of thought.
I'm tempted to start in on the sorry state of freedom in Germany, France, Australia (my own country) and a few others to demonstrate that I'm not actually picking on the USA, but it would take too long. Please deem that all included.
"The $FEATURE of $SPECIES probably functioned as a signal, either to attract potential mates or for species recognition." translates in lay terms as "We have absolutely no idea what $FEATURE really was or how $SPECIES used it, but don't want to seem ignorant".
AFAIK, nobody has ever done anything like videotape a therapod in motion, or even snap a still shot of one.
Before you write that concept off as too bizarre to deal with, consider the many species which have been written off as extinct (for 65 million years, in the case of ceolacanth) only to turn up later (in an Indonesian fish market, for this one) in real life.
While there is still scope for an herbivorous dinosaur to be kicking about on our fine planet, a colony of something more than twice as long as a very large crocodile, ten times as massive and striding about on two feet would be kind of hard to miss. We may yet still stumble across aquatic dinosaurs (think chronosaurus) as there is much more opportunity for concealment underwater, however I rate this as unlikely.
What this means is that we only have the bones to go on. We're basically guessing when we decide how they stood and moved. Intelligent guesses, yes, but no way to prove anything. A very few dinosaurs have been preserved with some stomach contents, so we have some broad hints about what they eat (although it's more than possible to come unstuck here, too; several contemporary animals were thought of as predators based on bones but in real life were fructivores; a small animal inadvertantly ingested alongside a herbivore's large meal of fruit may have been preserved where the fruit was not; conditions leading up to interment may stress the "sample" and cause it to behave atypically; and so on).
In short, what we "know" is a guess piled on an hypothesis perched on a huge mound of surmise. If it all happens to come together at the end, that's excellent, but we really have no way to know whether we arrived at a good-looking set of answers through correct reasoning, or have simply convinced ourselves through protracted wishful thinking that a wrong answer is "correct enough", as Mr All Therapods Had Feathers in the original article evidently did.
Every so often someone questions the emperors' new clothes in public, and if providence smiles upon us a certain amount of real scientific progress is made before the defenders of the status quo find their feet again and rush to re-establish scientific homeostasis.
I leave you with a quote from a bloke who goes by the name of Planck... you may have heard of him? If not, start looking up the names of German scientific establishments:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Maxwell Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck
John Roach did this with a National Geographic article on the discovery of dilong paradoxus, also reported in Nature. Five fossils were found, the most decripit of which had "a partial coat of hairlike feathers", which in other articles are described as "evidence of hairlike structures" on its head and as "'protofeathers'". Need I point out that there is a world of difference between hairs and feathers?
D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? Guanlong wucaiihas no feathers.
Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said."
Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did.
Obviously, several people really, really want there to be feathered dinosaurs, even if they have to glue each pinion on personally.
Stalin's original purpose (and Hitler's too) was the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, pure and simple, of which the Tsars were the secular arm. The story of how that aim was thwarted is an interesting one, but far beyond the scope of one post.
Hitler started out being friendly with the Roman Catholic Church because of the help it constantly supplied him, up until the point where it was becoming obvious that he was going to lose (so the RCC threw him to the wolves, how sad). Up to that point, he'd come down hard on everyone who wasn't Atheist or Catholic; then he ruled a line through "Catholic" and it was on for young and old.
You may remember six million Jews? The real figure is almost certainly not that bad -- maybe two million, IRL, bad enough -- but he definitely regarded the Jews as a genetically inferior race, to be used as a labour force for as long as necessary and then disposed of (along with many others) once the Reich had absolute control. This view had a 100% Atheistic basis, and was in fact inspired by Charles Darwin, whose writings Hitler adored, and the entailed Eugenics movement.
Bizarre, you might think -- for a short, dark-haired man -- but he evidently didn't think that way.
Mao deliberately set out to destroy "all religion" (by which he meant "every religion bar Humanism AKA Atheism"). His deaths were mostly consequent on that, except for a large chunk due to policies once again based on the Darwinian (Atheistic) ethics which are once again becoming so popular.
The page has a long list of lesser dictators; those I recognise all have similar tales to tell.
...since I already covered parallelism, and parallelism doesn't cure all -- there are many definitely sequential dependencies -- and parallelism doesn't necessarily help as much as one might hope, considering that natural selection operates against the development of useless features (towards homeostasis unless there's a clear and present benefit in the difference).
New features are not cost-free, and large morphological changes aren't the same as useful morphological changes. Those ~2000 changes have to happen in the first place (and it's not like each generation gets to roll the i ching and decide which part they want to change today), and in roughly the right order, and without branching off into a dead end, and be conserved, and be selected for. That's what makes such a development impossibly hard.
The example you chose also left out a serious number of necessary supporting changes. A fish eye would be an encumbrance (ie selected against) if not well attached, and not appropriately connected to a suitably-adapted brain. It has to be useful to be selected for, so every single one of the steps has to be more useful than its predecessor if the change is to be driven by mutation-plus-selection. Why, for example, would a more-vulnerable and muck-accumulating dent in the skin be selected for until it conferred a distinct compensating advantage? This makes progress an essentially random factorial progress rather than a linear one, and is why Mr Gould spoke of "survival of the luckiest".
There's also that word "can"; even useless large morphological changes are very much in the minority, which of course leaves to facing the prospect of choosing way-more-than-2000 correct mutations this way from a field of squillions of wrong (useless or damaging) ones.
What we do has a massive impact on how and when we typically die. Consistently eating too much is a ticket to widespread degenerative disease, and a relatively slow and painful death. Getting mud on your dipstick opens the door much wider for several infectious diseases than any other common practice (and also specific forms of damage to the circulatory and eliminatory systems) and an even slower and more painful death. Smoking is an embossed invitation to a wide variety of cancers and -- huge surprise -- a slow and painful death. A fat, bent, smoker is basically making themselves a target through their actions, regardless of whether doctors agree that it's so or not. Reality doesn't care.
...might be, "If Linux is so bad, why do the NSA and US Army use it? Why are Intel shipping hundreds of millions of Farmer PCs based on it in China? Why are the Brasilian state bank's ATMs run on it? Why are Norway moving 100,000 students to it? Why is it used in Satellites and aboard Fred? Why are IBM and Novell switching to it across the board? Why is the European Union moving to Linux's most popular document standard (OpenDocument) across the board? Why is the $100 laptop project using it even though Microsoft offered them MS-Windows for free? Why do Google and Akamai, the biggest search and content-cache companies, utterly rely upon it? What's the matter, those organisations not big and important enough for you?"
Mao, Stalin and Hitler killed many tens of millions apiece, and each of them were Atheists (or close enough: Hitler admired the Roman Catholic Church and particularly the Jesuits -- he wanted to model the Reich after them; his own personal faith was not unsullied Atheism and probably included various themes from the broad swathe of views referred to at the time as Occultism, but by and large there was no monotheism in it and probably not even enough deism of any sort to disqualify him as an Atheist).
Problem solved. That'll be twenty dollars and take the yak of your choice.
Meanwhile, you also have to distinguish between various kinds of Christian and Muslim, which the brains-of-a-carrot grandparent poster didn't. A Quaker or Amish is quite a different proposition to most kinds of Catholic, for example, and news footage notwithstanding the typical Muslim, like the typical Christian or Atheist or whatever, just wants to get on with life rather than go around pissing off their neighbours. Which [caution: topic change] is what's wrong with the infamous Danish cartoons.
In Atheism, you are in essence your own highest authority (or so you believe). If Scouts can assign $DIETY to many different identities, I don't see a problem with adding one more ($DIETY = 'me'). I strongly suspect that getting up people's noses about one's faith and making a martyr of oneself over it without real cause is how some people try to add value to their lives, but it seems pretty self-defeating to me.
Buy one in Denham, Western Australia for AUD$120,000 (USD$88,700 today) each; buy all ten and sell the rest for a 10% markup to get an office for free. Unbeatable fishing, Francois Peron National Park just around the corner, Shell Beach, Hamelin Pool, the old Telegraph Station (with genuine shellite loos and stromatolites), Kalbarri and Carnarvon just** up the road, dolphins, turtles, dugongs, the lot*.
Notes:
* Also tiger sharks and sea-snakes; welcome to Australia. (-:
If they'd had their dramatic culture shift towards Linux and back towards Openness only a year or two earlier, it would have made a big difference to them. Five years earlier, and they'd be dictating terms to the likes of Sun nowadays.
Too little, too late. Pity, much of their gear is excellent. I suppose it's too late now for AMD64s on a stick or some other Plan B which slashes manufacturing costs without destroying quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution does not depend upon the Big Bang, or even a one- or two-ended universe. It could just as well happen in a steady-state or cyclic universe.
In point of fact, the Big Bang has been in trouble all along, and still is. While one bunch of scientists are crowing about measuring the viscosity of dark matter, another bunch (in somewhat better contact with reality, IMESHO) produce explanations with far fewer fudge factors and no dark matter. The two bunches are not alone. A different crew somewhere, you can be sure, will be producing a different viscosity value while others are producing different reduced-fudge-factor no-dark-matter explanations of the observations. Big Bang devotees are happy about WMAP's CMB maps, while other scientists are busily pointing out where the celebrated bumps happen to frequently coincide with local stellar and galactic clusters. And so on, ad infinitum (or possibly just ad astra).
The one clear lesson which you can draw from this is that it is basically still all speculation. Be very, very wary when dealing with someone who regards the Big Bang as an unassailable fact.
For larger bridges, at least, the engineers go out and measure gravity at several points along the length of the proposed bridge, so that it isn't weakened by overlooking a gravity anomaly. They will also do stuff like put up weather stations, looking for anomalies and microweather patterns that ordinary weather reporting misses.
This is the difference between engineers and scientists. If an engineer screws up, people die (and often on the spot). You can go out and knock on most of the stuff an engineer does. Engineers believe in working with error bars and well-defined uncertainties. Scientists often have no such assurance, and surprisingly few scientific disciplines treat uncertainties as rigorously as engineers routinely do.
The canonical scientific reaction to uncertainty is either rejection of the whole concept ("burn the heretics!"), or to ride roughshod over the uncertainty because certain key items look to be in about the right places ("only an heretic would question that!", in this case evolution). Neither approach is particularly rational.
The creation scientists might well be totally wrong (although it's likely that even if the majority of their ideas are wrong, a few will be pure gold), but so far they have typically been more rational in their approach than elephant-hurlers like the parent poster.
...can be a bit of a bastard, and when you do find it, the newly installed software might not work, or might break something else.
For a case in point, the wireless on this laptop is unreliable under MS-Windows XP and bulletproof under Mandriva Linux 2006.0; it was even less reliable until I figured out that ZoneAlarm kept forgetting to allow DNS access to fully-blessed programs (I had to give it carte blanche on DNS), and finding that out was pretty obscure.
Installing stuff on Mandriva Linux is a breeze, you just scroll down to it in RPMdrake, click on it and here comes the package and everything it needs to survive. I understand that Synaptics, YAST and friends are pretty much the same. On MS-Windows, you first have to search out the program (forex, on TuCows) and a program to do what you want may not be available from a trusted supplier, so you probably have to install it "blind" from some random site on the net -- or three or four of them. And even the ones without nastyware enclosed might have specific, conflicting prerequisites, in which case you're screwed: pick your favourite and delete the other(s). If you can. Under Linux I have the option of pulling down an SRPM (the source! shock, horror) and clicking on it to have the machine make a version tailored to itself. Oh, yes, and if you delete a package (using one central tool), it's really gone (it and optionally any dependencies unique to it).
VB is an effing nightmare to maintain, or to build anything really large in. Use Ruby and FreeRIDE instead -- yes, even on MS-Windows.
Someone willing to change their mind on the basis of fresh evidence is something of an anomaly here. (-:
...if it seems necessary.
The people studying bones look at a myriad factors. They study density and structure in the bones themselves, wear patterns and tooth-marks (or whatever), state of articulation, any adjacent indications of soft tissue or the like, chemical residues in the bones (including, in several cases, complete blood cells and still-flexible cartilage: a flares-fireworks-and-sirens tip-off that we really are barking up the wrong tree in several fields of scientific endeavour, but one which has been largely blipped over), features in bones of similar appearance, location, orientation, lots of stuff. It's not at all slapdash in that regard, but it is all still basically a guess. Often a very educated one, mind you, nevertheless, a guess.
The results of a change in genetic coding are not bound to reflect the size of the change itself.
The fact that you've bolded "beneficial" seems to imply that you understand this already, but I see no particular reason to arbitrarily decide that a more sweeping effect is going to be more survivable than a small one. Intuition tells us that a small experimental change is easier to manage than a larger one, but Real Life(tm) may not agree with our intuition.
As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical species of gliding squirrel which is, overnight, trapped on an island as a large wave comes through and erodes the land-bridge connecting the colony to most of their food sources. I chose a gliding quirrel for their noted swimming abilities (ie, they don't have any). If a large mutation tripled the gliding range of one of the squirrels and allowed it to glide ashore to food, and back to mate, the massive advantage this confers might more than compensate for other massive damage (albinism, susceptibility to cancer, ugliness, reduced ability to grip trees, whatever) caused by a "reckless" mutation.
Sound plausible? That's the beauty of thought experiments: it's very difficult for anybody to prove you wrong. (-:
I suspect that this theory is, at heart, being mooted as an answer to the concept of Irreducible Complexity. It isn't, but it does look like a step in the right direction.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile tossing together a thesis on the developmental progress of all of these attempts to replace an obviously broken set of theories with one that bears at least a passing resemblance to reality? I could call it something like "the evolution of evolution" and flog the film rights for a small fortune. Genius (sometimes demented) plays the role of mutation, and peer pressure (often wrong) plays the role of natural selection. It's bound to be a winning formula!
it's essentially without the "equilibrium" part. (-:
SJG advocated "survival of the luckiest" rather than "survival of the fittest", which is another distinction between punk-eek and this.
But yes, it is different to moribund gradualism. Now all they need is an actual mechanism, and they're away. Cue much hooting and jeering from the Progressive Creation crowd.
...previewed the theory?
(grin/duck/run)
can be found in the study of Gouldian Finches, which were selected for bigger beaks (more access to food) during times of hardship, but that selection relaxed again when the hardship eased. This is not theory, competent people watched it happen.
However, you can choose the odds for an early death by changing what you do.
...in favour of a 17m, 9-tonne Spinosaurus.
My paleontological qualifications are about the same as yours, but include 8- and 10-year-old nephews as well.
...a rapidly dwindling pool of friends to help bail them out of the diplomatic cacky every time they arrogantly stomp all over some "lesser" country's rights, something Dubya is sadly reknowned for but hardly the pioneer of.
China has Intelligent Design too, and Creationists, but they are unofficially forbidden by the government there. In America, freedom of thought is more of a detente, with the Christian Right and Liberal Atheists having fought each other more or less to a standstill across the board, leaving what amounts to a tense two-way balance of power rather than genuine freedom of thought.
I'm tempted to start in on the sorry state of freedom in Germany, France, Australia (my own country) and a few others to demonstrate that I'm not actually picking on the USA, but it would take too long. Please deem that all included.
"The $FEATURE of $SPECIES probably functioned as a signal, either to attract potential mates or for species recognition." translates in lay terms as "We have absolutely no idea what $FEATURE really was or how $SPECIES used it, but don't want to seem ignorant".
Before you write that concept off as too bizarre to deal with, consider the many species which have been written off as extinct (for 65 million years, in the case of ceolacanth) only to turn up later (in an Indonesian fish market, for this one) in real life.
While there is still scope for an herbivorous dinosaur to be kicking about on our fine planet, a colony of something more than twice as long as a very large crocodile, ten times as massive and striding about on two feet would be kind of hard to miss. We may yet still stumble across aquatic dinosaurs (think chronosaurus) as there is much more opportunity for concealment underwater, however I rate this as unlikely.
What this means is that we only have the bones to go on. We're basically guessing when we decide how they stood and moved. Intelligent guesses, yes, but no way to prove anything. A very few dinosaurs have been preserved with some stomach contents, so we have some broad hints about what they eat (although it's more than possible to come unstuck here, too; several contemporary animals were thought of as predators based on bones but in real life were fructivores; a small animal inadvertantly ingested alongside a herbivore's large meal of fruit may have been preserved where the fruit was not; conditions leading up to interment may stress the "sample" and cause it to behave atypically; and so on).
In short, what we "know" is a guess piled on an hypothesis perched on a huge mound of surmise. If it all happens to come together at the end, that's excellent, but we really have no way to know whether we arrived at a good-looking set of answers through correct reasoning, or have simply convinced ourselves through protracted wishful thinking that a wrong answer is "correct enough", as Mr All Therapods Had Feathers in the original article evidently did.
Every so often someone questions the emperors' new clothes in public, and if providence smiles upon us a certain amount of real scientific progress is made before the defenders of the status quo find their feet again and rush to re-establish scientific homeostasis.
I leave you with a quote from a bloke who goes by the name of Planck... you may have heard of him? If not, start looking up the names of German scientific establishments:
Yes, I am serious!
The Nature news report is based on another Nature article by Xu (subscription required) which does not mention feathers because there are none!
John Roach did this with a National Geographic article on the discovery of dilong paradoxus, also reported in Nature. Five fossils were found, the most decripit of which had "a partial coat of hairlike feathers", which in other articles are described as "evidence of hairlike structures" on its head and as "'protofeathers'". Need I point out that there is a world of difference between hairs and feathers?
D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? Guanlong wucaii has no feathers.
Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said."
Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did.
Obviously, several people really, really want there to be feathered dinosaurs, even if they have to glue each pinion on personally.
Stalin's original purpose (and Hitler's too) was the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, pure and simple, of which the Tsars were the secular arm. The story of how that aim was thwarted is an interesting one, but far beyond the scope of one post.
Hitler started out being friendly with the Roman Catholic Church because of the help it constantly supplied him, up until the point where it was becoming obvious that he was going to lose (so the RCC threw him to the wolves, how sad). Up to that point, he'd come down hard on everyone who wasn't Atheist or Catholic; then he ruled a line through "Catholic" and it was on for young and old.
You may remember six million Jews? The real figure is almost certainly not that bad -- maybe two million, IRL, bad enough -- but he definitely regarded the Jews as a genetically inferior race, to be used as a labour force for as long as necessary and then disposed of (along with many others) once the Reich had absolute control. This view had a 100% Atheistic basis, and was in fact inspired by Charles Darwin, whose writings Hitler adored, and the entailed Eugenics movement.
Bizarre, you might think -- for a short, dark-haired man -- but he evidently didn't think that way.
Mao deliberately set out to destroy "all religion" (by which he meant "every religion bar Humanism AKA Atheism"). His deaths were mostly consequent on that, except for a large chunk due to policies once again based on the Darwinian (Atheistic) ethics which are once again becoming so popular.
The page has a long list of lesser dictators; those I recognise all have similar tales to tell.
...since I already covered parallelism, and parallelism doesn't cure all -- there are many definitely sequential dependencies -- and parallelism doesn't necessarily help as much as one might hope, considering that natural selection operates against the development of useless features (towards homeostasis unless there's a clear and present benefit in the difference).
New features are not cost-free, and large morphological changes aren't the same as useful morphological changes. Those ~2000 changes have to happen in the first place (and it's not like each generation gets to roll the i ching and decide which part they want to change today), and in roughly the right order, and without branching off into a dead end, and be conserved, and be selected for. That's what makes such a development impossibly hard.
The example you chose also left out a serious number of necessary supporting changes. A fish eye would be an encumbrance (ie selected against) if not well attached, and not appropriately connected to a suitably-adapted brain. It has to be useful to be selected for, so every single one of the steps has to be more useful than its predecessor if the change is to be driven by mutation-plus-selection. Why, for example, would a more-vulnerable and muck-accumulating dent in the skin be selected for until it conferred a distinct compensating advantage? This makes progress an essentially random factorial progress rather than a linear one, and is why Mr Gould spoke of "survival of the luckiest".
There's also that word "can"; even useless large morphological changes are very much in the minority, which of course leaves to facing the prospect of choosing way-more-than-2000 correct mutations this way from a field of squillions of wrong (useless or damaging) ones.
...from an overdose of happiness, I guess.
What we do has a massive impact on how and when we typically die. Consistently eating too much is a ticket to widespread degenerative disease, and a relatively slow and painful death. Getting mud on your dipstick opens the door much wider for several infectious diseases than any other common practice (and also specific forms of damage to the circulatory and eliminatory systems) and an even slower and more painful death. Smoking is an embossed invitation to a wide variety of cancers and -- huge surprise -- a slow and painful death. A fat, bent, smoker is basically making themselves a target through their actions, regardless of whether doctors agree that it's so or not. Reality doesn't care.
...the AUD$120,000 is per each.
Nearly halfway to Broome. Good tourism into the Pilbara, too (Karajini, Wittenoom etc, and you can dig around in Wyloo Station's amethyst mine).
...might be, "If Linux is so bad, why do the NSA and US Army use it? Why are Intel shipping hundreds of millions of Farmer PCs based on it in China? Why are the Brasilian state bank's ATMs run on it? Why are Norway moving 100,000 students to it? Why is it used in Satellites and aboard Fred? Why are IBM and Novell switching to it across the board? Why is the European Union moving to Linux's most popular document standard (OpenDocument) across the board? Why is the $100 laptop project using it even though Microsoft offered them MS-Windows for free? Why do Google and Akamai, the biggest search and content-cache companies, utterly rely upon it? What's the matter, those organisations not big and important enough for you?"
On second thought, scratch that last sentence.
Mao, Stalin and Hitler killed many tens of millions apiece, and each of them were Atheists (or close enough: Hitler admired the Roman Catholic Church and particularly the Jesuits -- he wanted to model the Reich after them; his own personal faith was not unsullied Atheism and probably included various themes from the broad swathe of views referred to at the time as Occultism, but by and large there was no monotheism in it and probably not even enough deism of any sort to disqualify him as an Atheist).
Problem solved. That'll be twenty dollars and take the yak of your choice.
Meanwhile, you also have to distinguish between various kinds of Christian and Muslim, which the brains-of-a-carrot grandparent poster didn't. A Quaker or Amish is quite a different proposition to most kinds of Catholic, for example, and news footage notwithstanding the typical Muslim, like the typical Christian or Atheist or whatever, just wants to get on with life rather than go around pissing off their neighbours. Which [caution: topic change] is what's wrong with the infamous Danish cartoons.
explain how your creation myth frees you from the demon of religion.
Miltant Atheist: Use the First Amendment liberally to quash any hint of the practice of competing beliefs.
Just suggestions. (-:
...not getting up anyone's nose about it.
In Atheism, you are in essence your own highest authority (or so you believe). If Scouts can assign $DIETY to many different identities, I don't see a problem with adding one more ($DIETY = 'me'). I strongly suspect that getting up people's noses about one's faith and making a martyr of oneself over it without real cause is how some people try to add value to their lives, but it seems pretty self-defeating to me.
Notes:
If they'd had their dramatic culture shift towards Linux and back towards Openness only a year or two earlier, it would have made a big difference to them. Five years earlier, and they'd be dictating terms to the likes of Sun nowadays.
Too little, too late. Pity, much of their gear is excellent. I suppose it's too late now for AMD64s on a stick or some other Plan B which slashes manufacturing costs without destroying quality.