...and you can have directionality even without pits. Walk past a working slow-combustion stove with your eyes closed and you should be able to point to it reasonably reliably.
There is, however, a stupendous amount of ground to cover between a photosensitive patch and anything remotely resembling the eye (of an octopus, cat or person) and the very weakest of unintelligent forces working, hah, blindly along that path. Given a generational time of (reaches down, pulls out figure) one week, you only have about twenty (american) trillion generations to get the transition done in.
This is, of course, likely to be a massive overestimate in anyone's terms since the typical generational times will go up as the beastie becomes complex enough to support an eye, and things like trilobites are found interred in Cambrian rock with incredibly complex vision systems already in place. Call it five trillion, give or take.
Now consider an eye. There's lots of info there, a rather excellent site, so have fun clicking on the links to the right to learn a bit more about all of the components. Bear in mind that each component here is composed of many different and usually highly specialised cells, each of which in turn makes a modern oil refinery look hopelessly simplistic.
Are five trillion generations enough to convert a photosensitive patch into one of these, step by step, with each intervening generation no worse off than the one before (else you'd expect natural selection to cull them), along with the corresponding physically supporting and neurological updates required in parallel to make the better vision useful rather than a confusing, clumsy, expensive burden? How many generations does it take for said selection to cleanse the population of less developed eyeball carriers, so that the race as a whole might proceed? How many pioneering organisms were killed inadvertantly, despite being the bearers of better eyes?
Five trillion sounds like a lot of generations, but it gets used up in a mathematical trice despite the possibilities for massive parallelism (overlapping developments, independent population groups etc).
What of features like an inverted retinal layer? How do you have a halfway inversion process? Eye development would have had to be repeated many times, and in many ways; for example, humans focus by changing the shape of the lens (without distortion!), but octopi (which share our backwards retina) focus by moving the lens in and out; others by changing the sape of the eyeball.
I don't really have time, space or inclination to spend on the maths, but many others have done so. GIYF.
...kill off the irresponsibles, or at least it does it too slowly to be much of a useful selection agent and takes out a lot of more-or-less innocent bystanders in the process.
However, your point about mislabelling of cases still stands. I can't comment on the truth or falsehood of it, or more specifically on whether enough of it happens to make a real difference, but will ask, and I'd expect it to be true in at least some cases.
It's also inevitable that many of these people have AIDS and something else, given that it is indeed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome we're dealing with.
Not sure why this AC got pounded into the sand by the moderators. Perhaps some of them could comment instead? What (s)he said was on-topic and better thought-out than a lot of the surrounding prattle, inadequate as it is. I don't think it's a great post, but I don't think it's worth modding down either.
What else would you call the common ancestor of sharks and men?
Digressing for a paragraph: I want to know what the common ancestor between octpuses and man is, since we share an uncommon eye structure, and why the others in our line (cats, for example) abandoned said structure.
Bill Gates is widely regarded as an evolutionary throwback to this time before emotions other than greed had developed. A certain amount of inbreeding allowed his McDuck gene to be expressed.
Last I looked, the AIDS toll in Africa stood at 30 million, which is more people than live in my entire country -- and more than another 25 million have the disease and know that they're going to die because of it. In Africa alone.
The figures for 'way back in 2000 were 10,000 a day, 4,000 of those from AIDS. Last year, there were over 3 million deaths and nearly 5 million new infections. That would wipe out my entire state in five months, eight through AIDS alone, and AIDS alone would do in the entire country in about eight years.
True, there are those other diseases around -- curable ones too -- but don't underestimate the damage which AIDS does. There are 12 million AIDS orphans alive as I type, for example.
Amongst other things, a common urban myth in Africa is that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS... so you get AIDS-infected men raping girls who are so young that they have to be virgins. Nice.
It's also largely curable by the same education which would reduce AIDS and practically eliminate tuberculosis and malaria. In fact, the basic directives for achieving this are something like 4500 years old. Nevertheless, a magic bullet for AIDS would be a more than welcome assistant. My only real reservations center around what else it kills besides AIDS.
...if there's a spike in the "forest" for NGC 7319 in its quasar's spectrum, I can't see it. That's why detractors blather on about "fortuitous voids" and other question-begging deux ex machinae instead of simply pointing to the Lyman notches and pronouncing "I told you so!" (can you see them missing the chance if they had one?).
You might also want to grab a copy of this image, drop it into a graphics editor (here is a free one) and have fun with the intensity curves (Layer, Curves, drag the centre of the curve left to 50,160 (scale 0-255), then grab the curve where it crosses the 25% mark and drag that to 27,36). Now think about what you see, as you toy with that curve.
...and constantly answering questions about spooky/random/malware-related problems that only arise because they can admin the machine is more work than adminning their machines with Linux. Roughly 3-6 times as much work, in practice, and that's working from the most annoying users.
The only exception is if you firmly instruct them to stop bugging you and they treat the machines as kind-of thin clients: when things go wahoonie-shaped, insert the System Restore CD, reboot, and kiss your data/email/porn/whatever goodbye.
I can tell you from personal experience which of the two causes the most work. Hint: adminning a Linux box is mostly automated and the rest can be done by remote control, even over a low-bandwidth link.
...to regularly whisk multiply-redundant copies of their stuff away to some other place on the hard drive. And never, ever tell them the root password.
BBNH are a long way from the only group discrediting BB; you may notice if you read carefully that I prefaced the link with "The least subtle that I can recall is";
There aren't "a few" anomalies incompatible with BB, there are many, in many places, in many different ways;
Don't dismiss Arp's observations along with Arp. Chicken Little only needs to be right once (well, a few times) and some of the "debunkings" of his observations are insane stretches;
Look at the friggin' pictures. JPL and BU are not fly-by-nighters, and the "geometry" explanation of the BU data is, well, tenuous at best -- and doesn't touch NGC 7319 -- and there are many more where they came from;
Post under a real name if you expect a specific reply.
To the rest of you, thanks for the posts on hypothesis/theory/law, it's been interesting reading them.
Big Bang is an hypothesis, and a wrong one, too. I've seen four different groups point out four different ways in which the hypothesis is unquestionably refuted. The least subtle that I can recall is the BigBangNeverHappened crew, but they're only one of many. They're not religious whackos, either.
My personal favourite refutation is this image, of a highly redshifted (z=2.11) quasar sitting between us and an opaque galaxy (NGC 7319, part of Stephan's Quintet, z=0.0225), but many others prefer the Blazar 3C 345, an object which is changing shape, if current astrophysics is correct, at roughly seven times the speed of light. However, there's no reason to fight, 'coz there's plenty of other "anomalous" objects to go around.
Notice that the NGC 7319 shot is from Hubble and hosted by JPL; this is not a backyard job or some random Russian with a unique idea, and 3C 345 is from the VLBA and hosted by Boston University.
I disagree with a lot of what bhiestand says, but that doesn't make him a "twit". Likewise for ultranova.
Your original post was unreadable: did you preview it, or was the presentation of your pearls of wisdom before us intellectual swine too urgent a matter to forgo for the few minutes (or seconds) it would have taken to make it readable?
Just leave a blank line between paragraphs, and/. will do the rest. And if you try to make that blank line by leaning on the spacebar, I'm gunna laugh, I warn you. Raucously.
You need to read up on Pascal's Wager before rabbitting on about how you didn't dare "become" an Atheist. Fear of some kind of hell won't make a believer out of you any more than a signature obtained at gunpoint would make a statuatory declaration true.
Everything that you know is wrong.
Yes, really. That's a historically true statement. Long ago, Europeans "knew" that flies were generated by meat, and mice by rags (look up "spontaneous generation"). Scientists were sure only a century or two ago that travelling in steam-powered railway carriages at 15 whole miles an hour would cause passengers' heads to explode (well, that it would be harmful in a variety of ways). A handful of years ago we "knew" that comets were subliming snowballs being blown about by the sun rather than the parched, asymmetrical, electrically active rocks which our space missions now show us. And so on, ad infinitum.
Expect everything you depend upon now to reach your conclusions to be disproven (possibly several times) in your lifespan.
The first thing to go is your assumption that Atheism is somehow not religion. Atheism is the belief that there is no god of any sort. This is a religious belief, stated in religious terms. If you don't understand the very words you're using, you can't expect to get good results from them.
Care to clarify your thinking (and formatting) and try again?
Congratulations! You've just defined evolution as a faith.
Or at least, Mencken has, and you agree with him.
At its heart, evolution is based on the idea that you can start with a simpler core lifeform and work up from there.
Unfortunately, the simplest workable lifeform (single cell, barebones ecosystem) is considerably more complicated than an A380, which makes a belief in the spontaneous assembly of it from essentially random components somewhat less than Mencken's "improbable".
What's worse is that it must be assembled operating. There is an oft-quoted saw about a tornado ripping through a junkyard and inadvertantly producing a working jumbo jet, but the reality is that the jumbo jet (or A380, your choice) also has to be produced in flight. Probability calculations -- even those based on ridiculously short genetic codes -- all implicitly assume the entire set of support mechanisms required by a living cell, and there ain't none when you're starting from scratch.
But I digress. By Mencken's standards, evolution is a faith. Best hasten to register it with the appropriate authorities so that you can start claiming tax deductions.
Oh, and please learn to produce analogs which are actually representative of the Real Life(tm) situation they're intended to explain. The ones you chose above are useless.
An Atheist would necessarily treat anything anomalous in a strictly materialistic fashion, but science has absolutely nothing to say WRT materialism vs supernaturalism. The presumption of materialism introduces a bias into the science, in exactly the same way as a presumption of supernaturalism (typically expressed as "God dunnit") would.
For an illustration, pick any of the hundreds or thousands of discourses on evolution available which are riddled from keel to crowsnest with teleological assumptions. You know, "the organism developed this" or "the organism strove to achieve that".
The organism doesn't know or care or strive or have definite species-wide goals (well, except for Harold the Intelligent Sheep), but absent external guidance there's no specific reason for an organism to develop one way versus another. Any selective process strong enough to have a significant influence is dominant enough to drive the species off any one of a number of developmental cliffs en route.
At some level, every Athiest seems to be aware of the inability of any natural process to produce anything like sufficient useful variation for a species to survive the ravages of selection long enough to evolve, and compensates by embedding the guidance in the wee beastie itself -- or in benevolent, supervisorial Mother Nature, or some similar mumbo jumbo.
This is (strictly speaking, if seldom openly recognised) an apostasy from Atheism. It is also bad science.
Lose the Atheism and suddenly the scientist is free to entertain alternatives: What if development of this species were externally guided? What if this species did not "develop" as such (ie the appearance of development is a red herring)? What if the developing mechanism is nothing like canonical evolution? What if what we're seeing here has the appearance of external, reasoning assistance?
These questions are, I know, heresy in the Church of Atheism... which brings us back to the main point: Atheism hobbles science by restricting "valid" fields of enquiry.
Atheistic moderators likewise hobble free enquiry by nuking opponents of the party line on SlashDot (as they will no doubt nuke this post) and supporting their philosophical fellow travellers regardless of the real value of said fellow travellers' actual input. Meanwhile accusing all non-Atheists of "anti-science" bigotry, of course. (-:
Religious bigots, don't start feeling too smug. As soon as you turn the discussion into a "scream for your team" thing, every shred of the conversation's value is rapidly destroyed. You're just as bad as the Atheists (but often outnumbered here).
Give it a rest, all y'all, and just vote on the value of the content, not on the precieved team affiliation of the poster.
Most packaging systems list authors. At worst, you'd download the source packages and grep them for email addresses to produce a seriously long list of names (guessing of the order of 100,000 names for a typical distro) upon which the SOX advocates can happily choke.
Slashdot Mirror
...and you can have directionality even without pits. Walk past a working slow-combustion stove with your eyes closed and you should be able to point to it reasonably reliably.
There is, however, a stupendous amount of ground to cover between a photosensitive patch and anything remotely resembling the eye (of an octopus, cat or person) and the very weakest of unintelligent forces working, hah, blindly along that path. Given a generational time of (reaches down, pulls out figure) one week, you only have about twenty (american) trillion generations to get the transition done in.
This is, of course, likely to be a massive overestimate in anyone's terms since the typical generational times will go up as the beastie becomes complex enough to support an eye, and things like trilobites are found interred in Cambrian rock with incredibly complex vision systems already in place. Call it five trillion, give or take.
Now consider an eye. There's lots of info there, a rather excellent site, so have fun clicking on the links to the right to learn a bit more about all of the components. Bear in mind that each component here is composed of many different and usually highly specialised cells, each of which in turn makes a modern oil refinery look hopelessly simplistic.
Are five trillion generations enough to convert a photosensitive patch into one of these, step by step, with each intervening generation no worse off than the one before (else you'd expect natural selection to cull them), along with the corresponding physically supporting and neurological updates required in parallel to make the better vision useful rather than a confusing, clumsy, expensive burden? How many generations does it take for said selection to cleanse the population of less developed eyeball carriers, so that the race as a whole might proceed? How many pioneering organisms were killed inadvertantly, despite being the bearers of better eyes?
Five trillion sounds like a lot of generations, but it gets used up in a mathematical trice despite the possibilities for massive parallelism (overlapping developments, independent population groups etc).
What of features like an inverted retinal layer? How do you have a halfway inversion process? Eye development would have had to be repeated many times, and in many ways; for example, humans focus by changing the shape of the lens (without distortion!), but octopi (which share our backwards retina) focus by moving the lens in and out; others by changing the sape of the eyeball.
I don't really have time, space or inclination to spend on the maths, but many others have done so. GIYF.
...kill off the irresponsibles, or at least it does it too slowly to be much of a useful selection agent and takes out a lot of more-or-less innocent bystanders in the process.
However, your point about mislabelling of cases still stands. I can't comment on the truth or falsehood of it, or more specifically on whether enough of it happens to make a real difference, but will ask, and I'd expect it to be true in at least some cases.
It's also inevitable that many of these people have AIDS and something else, given that it is indeed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome we're dealing with.
Not sure why this AC got pounded into the sand by the moderators. Perhaps some of them could comment instead? What (s)he said was on-topic and better thought-out than a lot of the surrounding prattle, inadequate as it is. I don't think it's a great post, but I don't think it's worth modding down either.
...back in the day.
(deem roll of eyes included)
...halfway between man and fly must have been a wonder to behold.
..."the lawyer".
What else would you call the common ancestor of sharks and men?
Digressing for a paragraph: I want to know what the common ancestor between octpuses and man is, since we share an uncommon eye structure, and why the others in our line (cats, for example) abandoned said structure.
Bill Gates is widely regarded as an evolutionary throwback to this time before emotions other than greed had developed. A certain amount of inbreeding allowed his McDuck gene to be expressed.
Last I looked, the AIDS toll in Africa stood at 30 million, which is more people than live in my entire country -- and more than another 25 million have the disease and know that they're going to die because of it. In Africa alone.
The figures for 'way back in 2000 were 10,000 a day, 4,000 of those from AIDS. Last year, there were over 3 million deaths and nearly 5 million new infections. That would wipe out my entire state in five months, eight through AIDS alone, and AIDS alone would do in the entire country in about eight years.
True, there are those other diseases around -- curable ones too -- but don't underestimate the damage which AIDS does. There are 12 million AIDS orphans alive as I type, for example.
Amongst other things, a common urban myth in Africa is that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS... so you get AIDS-infected men raping girls who are so young that they have to be virgins. Nice.
It's also largely curable by the same education which would reduce AIDS and practically eliminate tuberculosis and malaria. In fact, the basic directives for achieving this are something like 4500 years old. Nevertheless, a magic bullet for AIDS would be a more than welcome assistant. My only real reservations center around what else it kills besides AIDS.
...into this.
...walking into things. (-:
...if there's a spike in the "forest" for NGC 7319 in its quasar's spectrum, I can't see it. That's why detractors blather on about "fortuitous voids" and other question-begging deux ex machinae instead of simply pointing to the Lyman notches and pronouncing "I told you so!" (can you see them missing the chance if they had one?).
You might also want to grab a copy of this image, drop it into a graphics editor (here is a free one) and have fun with the intensity curves (Layer, Curves, drag the centre of the curve left to 50,160 (scale 0-255), then grab the curve where it crosses the 25% mark and drag that to 27,36). Now think about what you see, as you toy with that curve.
...and constantly answering questions about spooky/random/malware-related problems that only arise because they can admin the machine is more work than adminning their machines with Linux. Roughly 3-6 times as much work, in practice, and that's working from the most annoying users.
The only exception is if you firmly instruct them to stop bugging you and they treat the machines as kind-of thin clients: when things go wahoonie-shaped, insert the System Restore CD, reboot, and kiss your data/email/porn/whatever goodbye.
I can tell you from personal experience which of the two causes the most work. Hint: adminning a Linux box is mostly automated and the rest can be done by remote control, even over a low-bandwidth link.
...to regularly whisk multiply-redundant copies of their stuff away to some other place on the hard drive. And never, ever tell them the root password.
To the rest of you, thanks for the posts on hypothesis/theory/law, it's been interesting reading them.
He also answers that page on his site.
Big Bang is an hypothesis, and a wrong one, too. I've seen four different groups point out four different ways in which the hypothesis is unquestionably refuted. The least subtle that I can recall is the BigBangNeverHappened crew, but they're only one of many. They're not religious whackos, either.
My personal favourite refutation is this image, of a highly redshifted (z=2.11) quasar sitting between us and an opaque galaxy (NGC 7319, part of Stephan's Quintet, z=0.0225), but many others prefer the Blazar 3C 345, an object which is changing shape, if current astrophysics is correct, at roughly seven times the speed of light. However, there's no reason to fight, 'coz there's plenty of other "anomalous" objects to go around.
Notice that the NGC 7319 shot is from Hubble and hosted by JPL; this is not a backyard job or some random Russian with a unique idea, and 3C 345 is from the VLBA and hosted by Boston University.
In every detail.
One more generation of crapware filters should just about bring Vista to its knees.
"They always the Nouns with capital Letter write?"
/ME had an Austrian grandmother :-)
(-:
I disagree with a lot of what bhiestand says, but that doesn't make him a "twit". Likewise for ultranova.
/. will do the rest. And if you try to make that blank line by leaning on the spacebar, I'm gunna laugh, I warn you. Raucously.
Your original post was unreadable: did you preview it, or was the presentation of your pearls of wisdom before us intellectual swine too urgent a matter to forgo for the few minutes (or seconds) it would have taken to make it readable?
Just leave a blank line between paragraphs, and
You need to read up on Pascal's Wager before rabbitting on about how you didn't dare "become" an Atheist. Fear of some kind of hell won't make a believer out of you any more than a signature obtained at gunpoint would make a statuatory declaration true.
Everything that you know is wrong.
Yes, really. That's a historically true statement. Long ago, Europeans "knew" that flies were generated by meat, and mice by rags (look up "spontaneous generation"). Scientists were sure only a century or two ago that travelling in steam-powered railway carriages at 15 whole miles an hour would cause passengers' heads to explode (well, that it would be harmful in a variety of ways). A handful of years ago we "knew" that comets were subliming snowballs being blown about by the sun rather than the parched, asymmetrical, electrically active rocks which our space missions now show us. And so on, ad infinitum.
Expect everything you depend upon now to reach your conclusions to be disproven (possibly several times) in your lifespan.
The first thing to go is your assumption that Atheism is somehow not religion. Atheism is the belief that there is no god of any sort. This is a religious belief, stated in religious terms. If you don't understand the very words you're using, you can't expect to get good results from them.
Care to clarify your thinking (and formatting) and try again?
Congratulations! You've just defined evolution as a faith.
Or at least, Mencken has, and you agree with him.
At its heart, evolution is based on the idea that you can start with a simpler core lifeform and work up from there.
Unfortunately, the simplest workable lifeform (single cell, barebones ecosystem) is considerably more complicated than an A380, which makes a belief in the spontaneous assembly of it from essentially random components somewhat less than Mencken's "improbable".
What's worse is that it must be assembled operating. There is an oft-quoted saw about a tornado ripping through a junkyard and inadvertantly producing a working jumbo jet, but the reality is that the jumbo jet (or A380, your choice) also has to be produced in flight. Probability calculations -- even those based on ridiculously short genetic codes -- all implicitly assume the entire set of support mechanisms required by a living cell, and there ain't none when you're starting from scratch.
But I digress. By Mencken's standards, evolution is a faith. Best hasten to register it with the appropriate authorities so that you can start claiming tax deductions.
Oh, and please learn to produce analogs which are actually representative of the Real Life(tm) situation they're intended to explain. The ones you chose above are useless.
2. No, Atheism != Science
An Atheist would necessarily treat anything anomalous in a strictly materialistic fashion, but science has absolutely nothing to say WRT materialism vs supernaturalism. The presumption of materialism introduces a bias into the science, in exactly the same way as a presumption of supernaturalism (typically expressed as "God dunnit") would.
For an illustration, pick any of the hundreds or thousands of discourses on evolution available which are riddled from keel to crowsnest with teleological assumptions. You know, "the organism developed this" or "the organism strove to achieve that".
The organism doesn't know or care or strive or have definite species-wide goals (well, except for Harold the Intelligent Sheep), but absent external guidance there's no specific reason for an organism to develop one way versus another. Any selective process strong enough to have a significant influence is dominant enough to drive the species off any one of a number of developmental cliffs en route.
At some level, every Athiest seems to be aware of the inability of any natural process to produce anything like sufficient useful variation for a species to survive the ravages of selection long enough to evolve, and compensates by embedding the guidance in the wee beastie itself -- or in benevolent, supervisorial Mother Nature, or some similar mumbo jumbo.
This is (strictly speaking, if seldom openly recognised) an apostasy from Atheism. It is also bad science.
Lose the Atheism and suddenly the scientist is free to entertain alternatives: What if development of this species were externally guided? What if this species did not "develop" as such (ie the appearance of development is a red herring)? What if the developing mechanism is nothing like canonical evolution? What if what we're seeing here has the appearance of external, reasoning assistance?
These questions are, I know, heresy in the Church of Atheism... which brings us back to the main point: Atheism hobbles science by restricting "valid" fields of enquiry.
Atheistic moderators likewise hobble free enquiry by nuking opponents of the party line on SlashDot (as they will no doubt nuke this post) and supporting their philosophical fellow travellers regardless of the real value of said fellow travellers' actual input. Meanwhile accusing all non-Atheists of "anti-science" bigotry, of course. (-:
Religious bigots, don't start feeling too smug. As soon as you turn the discussion into a "scream for your team" thing, every shred of the conversation's value is rapidly destroyed. You're just as bad as the Atheists (but often outnumbered here).
Give it a rest, all y'all, and just vote on the value of the content, not on the precieved team affiliation of the poster.
Most packaging systems list authors. At worst, you'd download the source packages and grep them for email addresses to produce a seriously long list of names (guessing of the order of 100,000 names for a typical distro) upon which the SOX advocates can happily choke.
...an accounting program expressed in FPS terms. Like DoomAdmin only more useful. Auditing in big spiked, armoured boots.
That would be crows, seagulls or vultures rather than pigeons.