The US was isolationist? Yeah, for a few years between the wars, maybe. But don't think that those America First nutjobs represented the whole country, even then. During the great depression we perhaps lacked the will or desire to involve ourselves in another war; but lest you forget, we had been engaged in a major European conflict just 25 years before. No "isolationist" country would have gotten involved in something as bloody and horrible as World War I when they lived on the other side of the world and had no reason whatsoever to do so.
And before that, the US was constantly involved in warfare, often on its own soil. The Mexican American war, for example (you know much of the southwestern US, including California, was Mexico in the 19th century, right?) During the Civil War, both the CSA and the USA actively courted European military support for their side, again, not an isolationist strategy.
The US has historically been a militaristic expansionist power on the North American continent, and has acted as such for most of its history. Furthermore, it has been intimately involved with the European powers since its inception. England and France both courted supporting the CSA during the Civil War because they felt that a divided US would be better for them — not a concern one would have about a truly isolationist power (and indeed, it was only the Emancipation Proclamation that prevented them from doing so — Lincoln only freed the slaves to prevent the world powers of the day from coming in on the side of the rebels, because once the Civil War seemed to be about slaves and not about state's rights, the anti-Slavery European powers could not in good faith support the south).
With all due respect, Iran-US political history goes back further than the hostage debacle, and an objective analysis of our role in that soap opera will probably reveal that Iran has been the victim of our aggression more often than not.
Which does not make Iran's government nice or mean that we should ignore them if they threaten us — but don't act like everything was peaches and roses until bad ol' Iran took some US hostages and "refused to let them go" (ignoring, of course, that in the end, they did let them go).
I agree. I'm 6'4" and have a 32" waist, and I could stand to loose a few pounds... I'm slim by any stretch of the imagination but my stomach is soft, and it's not soft muscle, unfortunately.
"Without warning" is key here. The theaters ask you to turn off your cell phone as it is; they could similarly warn you that you're unlikely to have reception in the theater in any case. Oops, there goes your lawsuit.
OOooo, a biker and a truck driver! So manly! Let's all brag about our virility on the internet!
With all due respect, neither driving a truck nor riding a bike require any sort of combat prowess. Your empty threats to someone you don't know on the internet make no one quake in any case. You have no idea who the OP is; he might be a skinny geek with an attitude problem that would be frightened by your obesity. Then again, he might be career military, or he might work in a bar as a bouncer. He might be carrying a gun.
Bragging about what a hard ass you are on Slashdot makes you look like an imbecile.
At the risk of pointing you to the work of a five year old, perhaps you should check out this Wikipedia article on the slippery slope and why it can be a fallacy. Its use in conjunction with a straw man argument seems particularly relevant to your post.
First of all, just because you haven't opted to continue writing on subjects you research does not mean that everyone does. For example, I have written a number of whitepapers — papers, if you will — since I graduated, and I don't work in academia. Many people write on subjects they care about in a less structured way — technical blogs are a good example of the phenomenon. You're being disingenuous if you think that just because you don't, no one does.
Secondly, material written by the passionate is not always accurate or bias-free, either; in fact, people who care a lot about a subject, especially a subjective one, will tend to have formed their own opinions and those opinions will be reflected in their writing. Students who are more removed from the topic, but who are required to provide references for their edits, could possibly be a big help in improving articles. Granted, the end result won't likely be perfect, but Wikipedia isn't about getting it right the first time — and a short article with references written by a relatively disinterested student is better than a content-less stub or worse, no article at all.
As for whether they ever contribute in the future, who can say? At least they'll know they can. You opted not to ever write a hated paper again, but others like myself still enjoy the occasional foray into writing. It's hard to make accurate generalizations in this scenario, I think.
No, I am not talking about color changes. I'm talking about speciation, which requires that one species branches into two that are sexually incompatible. This has been observed in non-bacterial organisms, so I would suggest that you stop pretending that it doesn't happen.
There is no scientifically rigorous distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. Our limited lifespans preclude us from directly observing evolution over sufficiently lengthy timescales to observe first-hand the development of flight in birds, for example, but the fossil record shows us that as expected, it's not like proto-birds grew wings one day and started flying. Our suspicions are further supported by the wide-variety of not-quite-flying organisms that appear to be in the process of developing flight (flying squirrels and fish do not actually fly, but glide, just as the first birds are suspected to have done).
Of course, if you believe the fossil record was put there to test us, we can't really have a rational discussion on this topic. All I can say is that even long journeys are comprised, at their core, of a (very long) series of small steps. Those small steps can also take you in a circle and you can end up back where you started; but that in no way precludes some people from walking very, very far and never coming back.
And again, and this is the last time I will say it, evolution (whether called macro or micro by you) does not, never has, and will never attempt to address the mechanism by which life emerged from non-life. I respect — although I do not agree with — your doubts about the validity of evolution. But do not attempt to make evolution into something it is not and that no scientist claims it is. In doing so you are only attacking a straw man, not evolution itself, and appearing the fool in front of all who have actually bothered to research the topic. Evolution does not preclude the possibility of God creating life. It simply says that life changes, rapidly enough that those changes are observable in our lifetime, and theorizes that selection pressure is the core reason for those changes. The idea that we (and everything else) evolved from very small, simple organisms is widely accepted in the scientific community because it makes sense that if we can observe small changes over a short period of time, big changes should occur over long periods of time. It is further supported by the fossil record, which extensively documents the history of life on this planet, which predates man by billions of years, and which becomes progressively simpler and more primitive the further back you go.
You can question the validity of this if you'd like, but understand: none of this evidence says anything about where the first cells come from! We simply know that there were first cells, and that before there were first cells, there weren't first cells. So obviously, the first cells must have come from somewhere. Maybe God created them. Maybe there was some mechanism by which relatively short strands of self-replicating RNA came into existence and "evolved" due to catalytic pressures. We have no idea. We have no evidence, no way to observe the process, etc. Abiogenesis is not evolution.
I seem to remember reading back in the day that Steve Jobs offered to port MacOS X to the machine and give it away for free, and was turned down because MacOS X isn't open source. Presumably, the same argument would apply to Microsoft.
I think the reason for preferring open source was because the computer was ultimately about education, not about pretty widgets. Certainly, the user interface is important, but I think the project wanted to encourage kids to look under the hood, to be able to read and understand every bit of what the computer was doing. Anything closed source, no matter how pretty or user-friendly, fails in this respect.
No, evolution does not require abiogenesis. Evolution is an observable phenomenon in the world today. We know that life evolves; we see bacteria do it in a matter of hours in the lab, and we've seen speciation occur in the famous finches of the Galapagos — other examples abound. The theory of evolution, as advanced by Darwin, takes natural selection to be the driving force behind evolution.
This is an important thing to understand: scientists observed evolution in the natural world, much as we all observe gravity, and advanced an explanation for how evolution occurs (via natural selection) much as Newton and later Einstein advanced explanations for how gravity behaves. The existence of evolution is not theorized. It is observed. The theoretical part of it is how it happens, not that it happens.
The question of the origin of life, however, is something else entirely. Since you appear to be of a religious persuasion, consider for a moment that God made the first living organisms out of thin air and put them on Earth. These organisms would then be expected to evolve just as today's organisms do. In that hypothetical scenario, you have evolution occurring without abiogenesis. So your statement that "evolution requires abiogenesis" is clearly non-sensical. How the first life got here is completely irrelevant to the fact that evolution occurs today.
There are many theories of how life first formed; some religious folks do take it to be God's work (I don't). There are others who think that the first organisms — something bacteria-like or even simpler — may have appeared elsewhere first, and been transported to earth on comets or meteors (this is called Panspermia). That doesn't solve the life from non-life problem, of course, but it allows for the possibility that abiogenesis might have occured somewhere other than Earth under somewhat more favorable conditions. These days, more mainstream theories that are popular are the RNA world hypothesis and the Iron-sulfur world hypothesis and variations on these themes. However, even the most scientific of these theories is full of holes, and it's not creationists poking them, either. Even those that advance the theories see difficulties in them. In other words, there is no scientific consensus on the origin of life.
Haha, no. I wasn't even thinking about the expression "to dig oneself into a hole". I just meant that math is a tool that makes the task of doing science easier, but that science can exist without math, just as a hole can exist without a shovel. The two are not equivalent. Perhaps it was a poor analogy.
I suspected as much. Interesting, though, that you should pick Euclid as an example: one of his axioms, the parallel postulate, was "overturned" as nearly as one can do such a thing in mathematics: it was found to be independent of the others he advanced. This did not make Euclidean geometry invalid, however, which is very important: Euclidean geometry continues to be studied and is not "wrong" because in a mathematical context, the only way something can be wrong is for it to be logically inconsistent. The discovery that an axiomatic system consisting of Euclid's other axioms plus the logical negation of the parallel postulate itself constitutes a consistent geometry — hyperbolic geometry — resulted in an immense amount of mathematical development, however.
But understand: Euclidean geometry remains just as valid today as it did when Euclid wrote the Elements. It has been refined and placed on more rigorous footing, but none of it was wrong. In fact, it has been shown that hyperbolic geometry is consistent if and only if Euclidean geometry is consistent — one cannot be right and the other wrong. They are either both right, or both wrong.
At the time that mathematicians began studying hyperbolic geometry, there were a lot of hysterical raisins that made a lot of fuss about which was "real". Note, however, that these people were talking about which system better models the real world, and were at their core making physical arguments, not mathematical ones. The same sorts of criticisms were leveled at negative numbers, complex numbers, spaces with dimensions greater than 3, etc. They are always non-mathematical criticisms based on the idea that things that do not have an obvious counterpart in the real world should not be studied. Thankfully, mathematicians have always told these people to sod off.
Science depends on the assumption that observations of the world actually correlate to a real world that exists. Also there is the belief that one has the ability to interact with the world, hence experiments are possible.
This is true. At some level, we must take it on faith that we exist and that we can interact with the natural world. But really, if we don't, who cares? Unlike the religion vs. science argument, there aren't really two sides to this.
Doesn't inductive reasoning itself require an unsupported axiomatic trust in the idea that "the future will be like the past"?
Yes, it does — sort of. The scientific method is founded on the idea that experiments are repeatable and that observable phenomena have naturalistic causes. This may turn out to be untrue, but to date, we have never had this principle violated. It's important to understand that it's non-trivial to engineer a violation of this principle. If gravity stopped working tomorrow, a scientist would want to know why — he takes it on faith, I suppose, that there is a reason. In order for the scientific method to be unworkable, gravity would not only have to stop working tomorrow, it would also have to do so for no reason whatsoever. It's not just that the future will be like the past, that doesn't adequately capture it. It's that there are reasons for things that happen, and that we are able to understand these reasons.
This might not be true, of course — in fact, it's very likely that there are some things we simply aren't capable of understanding, much as there are many things an ant is not capable of understanding. However, saying that because there are likely to be things we aren't capable of understanding that we should give up on trying to understand what we are capable of understanding is defeatism.
Then there is the fact that science depends heavily on math. Can y
Repeat after me: abiogenesis is not evolution. The two are completely unrelated. Evolution talks about how life changes under the assumption that it already exists; it is an observable phenomenon with literally a mountain of evidence to support it (and not just in bacteria, either). Abiogenesis, on the other hand, attempts to explain how life might have come from non-life; unlike with evolution, there are various competing theories and much dispute within the scientific community.
If you are under the impression that evolution explains how something inert becomes something that is alive, you are seriously misrepresenting evolution. It makes no attempt to explain this, never has, and never will. This is like criticizing the library for not selling you a hamburger.
The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
Not necessarily. Blanket statements like this are stupid. Sure, some people refuse to allow their faiths to be challenged, but most of my experience with people of faith has been the opposite.
While I agree that blanket statements are often stupid, sometimes they are correct. In this case, your experiences seem to fly in the face of everyone else's.
All science is based on axioms as well, which aren't supported either, that's why they're called axioms.
No, science is not based on axioms — you're thinking of mathematics, which is not the same thing. Science is not based on deductive logic like math is — quite the opposite, in fact. Science is based on inductive logic, which works in the opposite direction: the scientist observes the world around him and tries to elucidate its underlying structure from those observations. So in a sense, the scientist does not know what the axioms are; he is trying to discover them.
Both scientists and people of faith have a hard time when someone questions their axioms.
Ignoring for a moment your misuse of the term "axiom": I will concede that a scientist who has developed his own theories and who accepts them may find it difficult or painful to accept that they are wrong. However, science as a discipline is founded on the notion that models and theories must be tested, and one scientist (or a group of scientists) stubbornly refusing to accept that their models are incorrect does not materially effect science as a whole, especially in the long term. Religion is not at all the same in this regard; many people continue to reject observable phenomena because they contradict their faith.
But I see no evidence to show that people of faith are less likely to accept a challenge of their axioms: in fact, they are more likely to accept that challenge, and if truly presented with something that can prove it's falsity, I would say a person of faith is much more likely to overturn that belief than a mathematician would be to overturn one of Euler's axioms.
I should warn you; I am a mathematician. What are Euler's axioms?
Leaving that aside for now, it seems from your comment that you are profoundly confused about the differences between science and mathematics, the latter being properly thought of as a branch of philosophy, and not science at all. Math does not concern itself with what is true in a physical sense; from a mathematical perspective, whether the world is flat or round is of no importance whatsoever. Math is a logical excursion, and at a core level axioms are totally arbitrary. It's a game of logic, and we deduce what we can from a few axioms that we essentially make up. Now, it is true that it is not possible to prove that a sufficiently complex set of axioms is self-consistent; you might say that we take this as a matter of faith. But it isn't faith that is anything like religious faith: it's more like having faith that the Sudoku puzzle you're wrestling with has a solution even if you lack the mathematical ability to prove that it really does.
Math cannot, by its nature, be in conflict with religion. It does not attempt, by itself, to predict or characterize anything in the natural world. That scientists find it a useful tool is a happy coincidence (or unhappy, depending on your belief system).
vi? Don't you mean ed? Ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Not to mention that vi really doesn't work very well, I'm not sure why everyone is so hot on it... whenever I've tried to run it, my line printer prints out all sorts of control characters and related garbage. Not so with ed. Ed just works.
Some genetic mutation is no doubt helpful; genes mutate all the time. If you've ever seen a bubble chamber (there's one at the Exploratorium in SF, for example) you'll know that we are constantly being bombarded by cosmic rays. When these high energy particles strike organic molecules, the tendency is for these molecules to come away changed in some way. The vast majority of changes to our DNA have no observable effect; of those that do have an effect, many are not positive. But genetic mutations that are not positive tend not to last very long in a population, and the positive ones tend to dominate very quickly. So genetic mutation undoubtedly does play a part, especially in the long term.
However, the difference between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua should be enough to demonstrate how much variation in physical appearance (for example) can come about without much in the way of genetic mutation in a relatively short time. Humans have only been breeding dogs for about a hundred thousand years, which on the evolutionary timescale is astonishingly short. Yet we have a huge diversity of dog breeds now, many of which differ in more than just appearance: behavioral traits (take a Pointer, for example) to physical capabilities (Bloodhounds have a sense of smell that is roughly an order of magnitude more sensitive than the average for dogs), etc.
As for what needs to happen to develop trachea, etc: it is important to remember that just as a journey of a million miles can be made with a series of single steps, large changes come about as a result of many small ones. Or a mathematical analog, if you prefer: both sin(x) and e^x look linear when examined on a small enough interval, and yet neither looks anything like the other (or like a straight line) when examined over its entire domain.
If you can accept that a population of fish can go from being unwilling to leave the water to doing it routinely in a few hundred generations, why can you not accept that as they spend more and more time being outside of the water, their gill covers might not become more substantial? That cartilage might not extend into the gill covering tissue to strengthen it? These are small changes, but before you know it, you have an animal which has covered gills and a hole in the front which it passes water into. While this makes it less dynamic in the water, it gives it the ability to stay on the shore longer, evade predators, and eat more insects.
Each time you're making a very small change. Each takes a few hundred generations; but after a million generations, well, you've made 10 thousand small changes at this rate. 10 thousand small changes is likely to seem pretty large when taken in aggregate.
The timescales here are very important, because these things happen slowly. Think of it in terms of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times in a row, the chances of flipping heads 10 times is very low. But if you flip the coin 100 times, the chances of flipping heads ten times in a row is much better; flip it 10000 times, and the chances are better yet. Flip it constantly for 2 billion years, and the probability, for all intents and purposes, is 1. Then add the fact that you're not the only person doing the flipping; for the whole 2 billion years, there are billions of "people", all flipping coins, all continuously. If even one of you succeeds, you all win.
Well, the odds of flipping heads 10 times in a row are pretty good to begin with, but even if the chances were astonishingly low, given 2 billion years and enough people flipping, the probability would still be very close to 1.
The chances are even better than this, though, because evolution and coin flipping are actually nothing alike. The latter is a random process: each time you flip a coin, the probability of flipping heads is always 0.5, no matter what you've flipped before. With evolution, though, each step affects the next step.
I'm not a biologist, but here are some things for you to consider. First, fish do not breathe water, they too breathe oxygen; the oxygen they breathe is simply found in the water they swim in, rather than in the (mostly) nitrogen we walk in. A fish's entire biology is, at the core, still centered around oxygen. So really, the only thing that needs to change in this scenario are the gills.
As you rightly pointed out, gills need to be moist to function. As it turns out, this is also the case with our lungs. Inside our lungs are tens of thousands of small, moist alveoli which function much the same way that gills do. Because our atmosphere is dry, we cannot simply expose these membranes directly to the outside the way that a fish does; instead, we keep our "gills" internal. But they are essentially very similar structures both in form and in function.
Having seen this, you are no longer looking at a completely new physiology -- simply a variation on an old theme. Gills are already semi-covered in most fish; it's not much of a mental jump to imagine them getting more and more covered until they are finally mostly inside an animal.
Not only that, but there are fish with lungs — the aptly named lungfish is one such example.
It's important to realize that it's not like some fish decided one day to grow legs and lungs and walk up on to the beach. If you've ever owned a goldfish you probably know from experience that a fish can jump out of its bowl and survive for a minute or two before it dies of asphyxiation. As long as it gets back in the water quickly, it can survive. Now suppose that there were some good reason to hop a little bit out of the water and back in; I'm not talking feet here, but inches. Perhaps the muddy bank of a river or bay had a lot of edible insects, for example. If some fish — perhaps born with slightly higher tolerance to the burn of the air on its gills than its peers, nothing serious mind you, just marginally better, in the same way that some humans are born stronger than others — discovered this and hopped out of the water onto the bank, ate some insects, and hopped back — he would be eating better than the other fish that were around. It stands to reason that he would probably live longer and produce more offspring. Some of his offspring would probably also have marginally better tolerance to air, much as a big man is more likely to have big sons. They too would benefit from the ability to get at those insects just inches further away. We're not talking big steps here — these are little, itty-bitty steps.
It's sort of the same way that Dachshunds were bred: their particular shape made them ideal for hunting certain kinds of earth-burrowing game, and so humans deliberately bred only the offspring that had that characteristic short, long body. After a few hundred generations, these new dogs looked very different from the breed they'd been bred from.
Well, in the case of our fish, there is no human choosing which fish reproduce and which fish don't, but nature is doing something equivalent: the fish that have high tolerance to air eat better, live longer, and reproduce more, whereas the fish that don't don't reproduce as much, don't eat as well, etc. It shouldn't be hard to see that in a few hundred generations or so, most all of the fish would be able to jump onto the bank, eat some insects, and jump back.
Notice that in this scenario, there is no "random mutation" — while mutations do play a part in evolution, at its core, evolution is just a shift in allele frequency. It causes certain already existing traits to become dominant in a population. Despite the fact that the breed of dog that produced the Dachshund wasn't short and long to begin with, it got shorter and longer as a result of selective breeding — ie, letting some dogs reproduce and others not.
But given enough generations, this can cause very serious shifts in physical appearance, behavior, and similar. Eventually, the offs
That's probably true — but then again, lamentably few web designers design for Linux or the Mac, either, so that comparison doesn't necessarily mean much in this particular context.
Luckily, Windows Vista still has all the old fonts and even defaults to Times New Roman when a font isn't specified, so there's really nothing forcing anyone to use these fonts.
I think the GP was referring to this: Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files. I agree that his tone was unnecessarily FUDdy, but as a Vista user you should probably be aware of this bug. You need to copy a lot of files to cause it (around 16 thousand, if memory serves) but that actually can happen more easily than you might imagine (backing up your system, for example, or putting in a new hard drive). One of the original bug reporters actually had it happen because an application (an anti-virus program, IIRC) copied many small files as part of its normal operation.
Slashdot Mirror
The US was isolationist? Yeah, for a few years between the wars, maybe. But don't think that those America First nutjobs represented the whole country, even then. During the great depression we perhaps lacked the will or desire to involve ourselves in another war; but lest you forget, we had been engaged in a major European conflict just 25 years before. No "isolationist" country would have gotten involved in something as bloody and horrible as World War I when they lived on the other side of the world and had no reason whatsoever to do so.
And before that, the US was constantly involved in warfare, often on its own soil. The Mexican American war, for example (you know much of the southwestern US, including California, was Mexico in the 19th century, right?) During the Civil War, both the CSA and the USA actively courted European military support for their side, again, not an isolationist strategy.
The US has historically been a militaristic expansionist power on the North American continent, and has acted as such for most of its history. Furthermore, it has been intimately involved with the European powers since its inception. England and France both courted supporting the CSA during the Civil War because they felt that a divided US would be better for them — not a concern one would have about a truly isolationist power (and indeed, it was only the Emancipation Proclamation that prevented them from doing so — Lincoln only freed the slaves to prevent the world powers of the day from coming in on the side of the rebels, because once the Civil War seemed to be about slaves and not about state's rights, the anti-Slavery European powers could not in good faith support the south).
With all due respect, Iran-US political history goes back further than the hostage debacle, and an objective analysis of our role in that soap opera will probably reveal that Iran has been the victim of our aggression more often than not.
Which does not make Iran's government nice or mean that we should ignore them if they threaten us — but don't act like everything was peaches and roses until bad ol' Iran took some US hostages and "refused to let them go" (ignoring, of course, that in the end, they did let them go).
I agree. I'm 6'4" and have a 32" waist, and I could stand to loose a few pounds... I'm slim by any stretch of the imagination but my stomach is soft, and it's not soft muscle, unfortunately.
It was sort of an ironic joke. Note that I am not the OP.
Terminal, obviously. Who doesn't?
"Without warning" is key here. The theaters ask you to turn off your cell phone as it is; they could similarly warn you that you're unlikely to have reception in the theater in any case. Oops, there goes your lawsuit.
OOooo, a biker and a truck driver! So manly! Let's all brag about our virility on the internet!
With all due respect, neither driving a truck nor riding a bike require any sort of combat prowess. Your empty threats to someone you don't know on the internet make no one quake in any case. You have no idea who the OP is; he might be a skinny geek with an attitude problem that would be frightened by your obesity. Then again, he might be career military, or he might work in a bar as a bouncer. He might be carrying a gun.
Bragging about what a hard ass you are on Slashdot makes you look like an imbecile.
At the risk of pointing you to the work of a five year old, perhaps you should check out this Wikipedia article on the slippery slope and why it can be a fallacy. Its use in conjunction with a straw man argument seems particularly relevant to your post.
First of all, just because you haven't opted to continue writing on subjects you research does not mean that everyone does. For example, I have written a number of whitepapers — papers, if you will — since I graduated, and I don't work in academia. Many people write on subjects they care about in a less structured way — technical blogs are a good example of the phenomenon. You're being disingenuous if you think that just because you don't, no one does.
Secondly, material written by the passionate is not always accurate or bias-free, either; in fact, people who care a lot about a subject, especially a subjective one, will tend to have formed their own opinions and those opinions will be reflected in their writing. Students who are more removed from the topic, but who are required to provide references for their edits, could possibly be a big help in improving articles. Granted, the end result won't likely be perfect, but Wikipedia isn't about getting it right the first time — and a short article with references written by a relatively disinterested student is better than a content-less stub or worse, no article at all.
As for whether they ever contribute in the future, who can say? At least they'll know they can. You opted not to ever write a hated paper again, but others like myself still enjoy the occasional foray into writing. It's hard to make accurate generalizations in this scenario, I think.
No, I am not talking about color changes. I'm talking about speciation, which requires that one species branches into two that are sexually incompatible. This has been observed in non-bacterial organisms, so I would suggest that you stop pretending that it doesn't happen.
There is no scientifically rigorous distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. Our limited lifespans preclude us from directly observing evolution over sufficiently lengthy timescales to observe first-hand the development of flight in birds, for example, but the fossil record shows us that as expected, it's not like proto-birds grew wings one day and started flying. Our suspicions are further supported by the wide-variety of not-quite-flying organisms that appear to be in the process of developing flight (flying squirrels and fish do not actually fly, but glide, just as the first birds are suspected to have done).
Of course, if you believe the fossil record was put there to test us, we can't really have a rational discussion on this topic. All I can say is that even long journeys are comprised, at their core, of a (very long) series of small steps. Those small steps can also take you in a circle and you can end up back where you started; but that in no way precludes some people from walking very, very far and never coming back.
And again, and this is the last time I will say it, evolution (whether called macro or micro by you) does not, never has, and will never attempt to address the mechanism by which life emerged from non-life. I respect — although I do not agree with — your doubts about the validity of evolution. But do not attempt to make evolution into something it is not and that no scientist claims it is. In doing so you are only attacking a straw man, not evolution itself, and appearing the fool in front of all who have actually bothered to research the topic. Evolution does not preclude the possibility of God creating life. It simply says that life changes, rapidly enough that those changes are observable in our lifetime, and theorizes that selection pressure is the core reason for those changes. The idea that we (and everything else) evolved from very small, simple organisms is widely accepted in the scientific community because it makes sense that if we can observe small changes over a short period of time, big changes should occur over long periods of time. It is further supported by the fossil record, which extensively documents the history of life on this planet, which predates man by billions of years, and which becomes progressively simpler and more primitive the further back you go.
You can question the validity of this if you'd like, but understand: none of this evidence says anything about where the first cells come from! We simply know that there were first cells, and that before there were first cells, there weren't first cells. So obviously, the first cells must have come from somewhere. Maybe God created them. Maybe there was some mechanism by which relatively short strands of self-replicating RNA came into existence and "evolved" due to catalytic pressures. We have no idea. We have no evidence, no way to observe the process, etc. Abiogenesis is not evolution.
I seem to remember reading back in the day that Steve Jobs offered to port MacOS X to the machine and give it away for free, and was turned down because MacOS X isn't open source. Presumably, the same argument would apply to Microsoft.
I think the reason for preferring open source was because the computer was ultimately about education, not about pretty widgets. Certainly, the user interface is important, but I think the project wanted to encourage kids to look under the hood, to be able to read and understand every bit of what the computer was doing. Anything closed source, no matter how pretty or user-friendly, fails in this respect.
No, evolution does not require abiogenesis. Evolution is an observable phenomenon in the world today. We know that life evolves; we see bacteria do it in a matter of hours in the lab, and we've seen speciation occur in the famous finches of the Galapagos — other examples abound. The theory of evolution, as advanced by Darwin, takes natural selection to be the driving force behind evolution.
This is an important thing to understand: scientists observed evolution in the natural world, much as we all observe gravity, and advanced an explanation for how evolution occurs (via natural selection) much as Newton and later Einstein advanced explanations for how gravity behaves. The existence of evolution is not theorized. It is observed. The theoretical part of it is how it happens, not that it happens.
The question of the origin of life, however, is something else entirely. Since you appear to be of a religious persuasion, consider for a moment that God made the first living organisms out of thin air and put them on Earth. These organisms would then be expected to evolve just as today's organisms do. In that hypothetical scenario, you have evolution occurring without abiogenesis. So your statement that "evolution requires abiogenesis" is clearly non-sensical. How the first life got here is completely irrelevant to the fact that evolution occurs today.
There are many theories of how life first formed; some religious folks do take it to be God's work (I don't). There are others who think that the first organisms — something bacteria-like or even simpler — may have appeared elsewhere first, and been transported to earth on comets or meteors (this is called Panspermia). That doesn't solve the life from non-life problem, of course, but it allows for the possibility that abiogenesis might have occured somewhere other than Earth under somewhat more favorable conditions. These days, more mainstream theories that are popular are the RNA world hypothesis and the Iron-sulfur world hypothesis and variations on these themes. However, even the most scientific of these theories is full of holes, and it's not creationists poking them, either. Even those that advance the theories see difficulties in them. In other words, there is no scientific consensus on the origin of life.
Haha, no. I wasn't even thinking about the expression "to dig oneself into a hole". I just meant that math is a tool that makes the task of doing science easier, but that science can exist without math, just as a hole can exist without a shovel. The two are not equivalent. Perhaps it was a poor analogy.
I suspected as much. Interesting, though, that you should pick Euclid as an example: one of his axioms, the parallel postulate, was "overturned" as nearly as one can do such a thing in mathematics: it was found to be independent of the others he advanced. This did not make Euclidean geometry invalid, however, which is very important: Euclidean geometry continues to be studied and is not "wrong" because in a mathematical context, the only way something can be wrong is for it to be logically inconsistent. The discovery that an axiomatic system consisting of Euclid's other axioms plus the logical negation of the parallel postulate itself constitutes a consistent geometry — hyperbolic geometry — resulted in an immense amount of mathematical development, however.
But understand: Euclidean geometry remains just as valid today as it did when Euclid wrote the Elements. It has been refined and placed on more rigorous footing, but none of it was wrong. In fact, it has been shown that hyperbolic geometry is consistent if and only if Euclidean geometry is consistent — one cannot be right and the other wrong. They are either both right, or both wrong.
At the time that mathematicians began studying hyperbolic geometry, there were a lot of hysterical raisins that made a lot of fuss about which was "real". Note, however, that these people were talking about which system better models the real world, and were at their core making physical arguments, not mathematical ones. The same sorts of criticisms were leveled at negative numbers, complex numbers, spaces with dimensions greater than 3, etc. They are always non-mathematical criticisms based on the idea that things that do not have an obvious counterpart in the real world should not be studied. Thankfully, mathematicians have always told these people to sod off.
This is true. At some level, we must take it on faith that we exist and that we can interact with the natural world. But really, if we don't, who cares? Unlike the religion vs. science argument, there aren't really two sides to this.
Yes, it does — sort of. The scientific method is founded on the idea that experiments are repeatable and that observable phenomena have naturalistic causes. This may turn out to be untrue, but to date, we have never had this principle violated. It's important to understand that it's non-trivial to engineer a violation of this principle. If gravity stopped working tomorrow, a scientist would want to know why — he takes it on faith, I suppose, that there is a reason. In order for the scientific method to be unworkable, gravity would not only have to stop working tomorrow, it would also have to do so for no reason whatsoever. It's not just that the future will be like the past, that doesn't adequately capture it. It's that there are reasons for things that happen, and that we are able to understand these reasons.
This might not be true, of course — in fact, it's very likely that there are some things we simply aren't capable of understanding, much as there are many things an ant is not capable of understanding. However, saying that because there are likely to be things we aren't capable of understanding that we should give up on trying to understand what we are capable of understanding is defeatism.
Repeat after me: abiogenesis is not evolution. The two are completely unrelated. Evolution talks about how life changes under the assumption that it already exists; it is an observable phenomenon with literally a mountain of evidence to support it (and not just in bacteria, either). Abiogenesis, on the other hand, attempts to explain how life might have come from non-life; unlike with evolution, there are various competing theories and much dispute within the scientific community.
If you are under the impression that evolution explains how something inert becomes something that is alive, you are seriously misrepresenting evolution. It makes no attempt to explain this, never has, and never will. This is like criticizing the library for not selling you a hamburger.
Well, as Ben Franklin famously quipped, God helps those who help themselves!
While I agree that blanket statements are often stupid, sometimes they are correct. In this case, your experiences seem to fly in the face of everyone else's.
No, science is not based on axioms — you're thinking of mathematics, which is not the same thing. Science is not based on deductive logic like math is — quite the opposite, in fact. Science is based on inductive logic, which works in the opposite direction: the scientist observes the world around him and tries to elucidate its underlying structure from those observations. So in a sense, the scientist does not know what the axioms are; he is trying to discover them.
Ignoring for a moment your misuse of the term "axiom": I will concede that a scientist who has developed his own theories and who accepts them may find it difficult or painful to accept that they are wrong. However, science as a discipline is founded on the notion that models and theories must be tested, and one scientist (or a group of scientists) stubbornly refusing to accept that their models are incorrect does not materially effect science as a whole, especially in the long term. Religion is not at all the same in this regard; many people continue to reject observable phenomena because they contradict their faith.
I should warn you; I am a mathematician. What are Euler's axioms?
Leaving that aside for now, it seems from your comment that you are profoundly confused about the differences between science and mathematics, the latter being properly thought of as a branch of philosophy, and not science at all. Math does not concern itself with what is true in a physical sense; from a mathematical perspective, whether the world is flat or round is of no importance whatsoever. Math is a logical excursion, and at a core level axioms are totally arbitrary. It's a game of logic, and we deduce what we can from a few axioms that we essentially make up. Now, it is true that it is not possible to prove that a sufficiently complex set of axioms is self-consistent; you might say that we take this as a matter of faith. But it isn't faith that is anything like religious faith: it's more like having faith that the Sudoku puzzle you're wrestling with has a solution even if you lack the mathematical ability to prove that it really does.
Math cannot, by its nature, be in conflict with religion. It does not attempt, by itself, to predict or characterize anything in the natural world. That scientists find it a useful tool is a happy coincidence (or unhappy, depending on your belief system).
What part of "patent" do you not understand?
vi? Don't you mean ed? Ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Not to mention that vi really doesn't work very well, I'm not sure why everyone is so hot on it ... whenever I've tried to run it, my line printer prints out all sorts of control characters and related garbage. Not so with ed. Ed just works.
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Ah, good to know. Thanks.
Some genetic mutation is no doubt helpful; genes mutate all the time. If you've ever seen a bubble chamber (there's one at the Exploratorium in SF, for example) you'll know that we are constantly being bombarded by cosmic rays. When these high energy particles strike organic molecules, the tendency is for these molecules to come away changed in some way. The vast majority of changes to our DNA have no observable effect; of those that do have an effect, many are not positive. But genetic mutations that are not positive tend not to last very long in a population, and the positive ones tend to dominate very quickly. So genetic mutation undoubtedly does play a part, especially in the long term.
However, the difference between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua should be enough to demonstrate how much variation in physical appearance (for example) can come about without much in the way of genetic mutation in a relatively short time. Humans have only been breeding dogs for about a hundred thousand years, which on the evolutionary timescale is astonishingly short. Yet we have a huge diversity of dog breeds now, many of which differ in more than just appearance: behavioral traits (take a Pointer, for example) to physical capabilities (Bloodhounds have a sense of smell that is roughly an order of magnitude more sensitive than the average for dogs), etc.
As for what needs to happen to develop trachea, etc: it is important to remember that just as a journey of a million miles can be made with a series of single steps, large changes come about as a result of many small ones. Or a mathematical analog, if you prefer: both sin(x) and e^x look linear when examined on a small enough interval, and yet neither looks anything like the other (or like a straight line) when examined over its entire domain.
If you can accept that a population of fish can go from being unwilling to leave the water to doing it routinely in a few hundred generations, why can you not accept that as they spend more and more time being outside of the water, their gill covers might not become more substantial? That cartilage might not extend into the gill covering tissue to strengthen it? These are small changes, but before you know it, you have an animal which has covered gills and a hole in the front which it passes water into. While this makes it less dynamic in the water, it gives it the ability to stay on the shore longer, evade predators, and eat more insects.
Each time you're making a very small change. Each takes a few hundred generations; but after a million generations, well, you've made 10 thousand small changes at this rate. 10 thousand small changes is likely to seem pretty large when taken in aggregate.
The timescales here are very important, because these things happen slowly. Think of it in terms of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times in a row, the chances of flipping heads 10 times is very low. But if you flip the coin 100 times, the chances of flipping heads ten times in a row is much better; flip it 10000 times, and the chances are better yet. Flip it constantly for 2 billion years, and the probability, for all intents and purposes, is 1. Then add the fact that you're not the only person doing the flipping; for the whole 2 billion years, there are billions of "people", all flipping coins, all continuously. If even one of you succeeds, you all win.
Well, the odds of flipping heads 10 times in a row are pretty good to begin with, but even if the chances were astonishingly low, given 2 billion years and enough people flipping, the probability would still be very close to 1.
The chances are even better than this, though, because evolution and coin flipping are actually nothing alike. The latter is a random process: each time you flip a coin, the probability of flipping heads is always 0.5, no matter what you've flipped before. With evolution, though, each step affects the next step.
I'm not a biologist, but here are some things for you to consider. First, fish do not breathe water, they too breathe oxygen; the oxygen they breathe is simply found in the water they swim in, rather than in the (mostly) nitrogen we walk in. A fish's entire biology is, at the core, still centered around oxygen. So really, the only thing that needs to change in this scenario are the gills.
As you rightly pointed out, gills need to be moist to function. As it turns out, this is also the case with our lungs. Inside our lungs are tens of thousands of small, moist alveoli which function much the same way that gills do. Because our atmosphere is dry, we cannot simply expose these membranes directly to the outside the way that a fish does; instead, we keep our "gills" internal. But they are essentially very similar structures both in form and in function.
Having seen this, you are no longer looking at a completely new physiology -- simply a variation on an old theme. Gills are already semi-covered in most fish; it's not much of a mental jump to imagine them getting more and more covered until they are finally mostly inside an animal.
Not only that, but there are fish with lungs — the aptly named lungfish is one such example.
It's important to realize that it's not like some fish decided one day to grow legs and lungs and walk up on to the beach. If you've ever owned a goldfish you probably know from experience that a fish can jump out of its bowl and survive for a minute or two before it dies of asphyxiation. As long as it gets back in the water quickly, it can survive. Now suppose that there were some good reason to hop a little bit out of the water and back in; I'm not talking feet here, but inches. Perhaps the muddy bank of a river or bay had a lot of edible insects, for example. If some fish — perhaps born with slightly higher tolerance to the burn of the air on its gills than its peers, nothing serious mind you, just marginally better, in the same way that some humans are born stronger than others — discovered this and hopped out of the water onto the bank, ate some insects, and hopped back — he would be eating better than the other fish that were around. It stands to reason that he would probably live longer and produce more offspring. Some of his offspring would probably also have marginally better tolerance to air, much as a big man is more likely to have big sons. They too would benefit from the ability to get at those insects just inches further away. We're not talking big steps here — these are little, itty-bitty steps.
It's sort of the same way that Dachshunds were bred: their particular shape made them ideal for hunting certain kinds of earth-burrowing game, and so humans deliberately bred only the offspring that had that characteristic short, long body. After a few hundred generations, these new dogs looked very different from the breed they'd been bred from.
Well, in the case of our fish, there is no human choosing which fish reproduce and which fish don't, but nature is doing something equivalent: the fish that have high tolerance to air eat better, live longer, and reproduce more, whereas the fish that don't don't reproduce as much, don't eat as well, etc. It shouldn't be hard to see that in a few hundred generations or so, most all of the fish would be able to jump onto the bank, eat some insects, and jump back.
Notice that in this scenario, there is no "random mutation" — while mutations do play a part in evolution, at its core, evolution is just a shift in allele frequency. It causes certain already existing traits to become dominant in a population. Despite the fact that the breed of dog that produced the Dachshund wasn't short and long to begin with, it got shorter and longer as a result of selective breeding — ie, letting some dogs reproduce and others not.
But given enough generations, this can cause very serious shifts in physical appearance, behavior, and similar. Eventually, the offs
That's probably true — but then again, lamentably few web designers design for Linux or the Mac, either, so that comparison doesn't necessarily mean much in this particular context.
Luckily, Windows Vista still has all the old fonts and even defaults to Times New Roman when a font isn't specified, so there's really nothing forcing anyone to use these fonts.
I think the GP was referring to this: Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files. I agree that his tone was unnecessarily FUDdy, but as a Vista user you should probably be aware of this bug. You need to copy a lot of files to cause it (around 16 thousand, if memory serves) but that actually can happen more easily than you might imagine (backing up your system, for example, or putting in a new hard drive). One of the original bug reporters actually had it happen because an application (an anti-virus program, IIRC) copied many small files as part of its normal operation.
And this gets flamebait why, exactly? What he's saying is completely true.