Agreed. Grouping in threes effectively lets you highlight with four different colours because your eye will follow the line based on the colour change between one line in the next. With greenbar you get {WW, WG, GG, GW} which makes it hard to accidentally skip up or down if you're following a line a long way across a page.
Concerning minor improvements; you know you've been working with computers too long when you think improvements are trivial because they are less than an order of magnitude.
I've been tangentially involved with data collection for the health system in New Zealand. The 'race' issue is really very complicated, even if you're just collecting it for statistical purposes. Official forms in New Zealand never refer to race, the question is "What is your ethnicity? (select up to three)". Ethnicity is considered as a social group which you identify with, and is specifically not related to genetics. It is collected for such reasons as correlating illnesses with demographic groups, and I've never seen it used in a case where the ethnicity you selected would make any difference to your treatment.
Of course there are plenty of people who get snotty that there is a distinction between Pakeha/New Zealand European and Maori, and dutifully write in "I am a New Zealander!!1!"
It is a useful question to ask for statistical purposes, although I couldn't comment on how the data is treated in America.
Oh, and speaking of complicated questions, don't get me started on the problems of asking what sex a person is. If you think it's easy, you've never had a job where it mattered.
That's the same false argument that says the world will starve if we can grow biofuels on cropland.
Being able to choose an appropriate ratio of fuel:food or fuel:park is a good thing. It may mean that we have to, as a society, assign a dollar value to park land and consciously give up that much fuel production, but farming provides the same threat and we still have national parks.
Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult.
You're making a huge over-statement there. No sane person defends child rape, but child pornography could be a 17yo boy's picture of his 17yo girlfriend's tits, or even presumably a pencil sketch thereof (although I don't think that has ever hit the courts). You're automatically assuming the worst possible scenario. The same thing happens with (dramatic chord) "sex offenders", who may simply have been caught peeing in the bushes.
Playing devil's advocate; even if our biochemistry is incompatible, isn't it likely that alien life would also be composed of mostly water and hydrocarbon chains due to their relative abundance and chemcial properties? Any alien organism which had not evolved in parallel with us would likely be entirley novel to our immune system, leaving us as defenceless piles of food with slight impurities. I'm thinking free-living bacteria or fungus here, not viruses or large carnivores.
in an infinite universe that has totally random initial conditions, every possible state will be realized somewhere.
I think this is a fallacy, but I'm not sure. I've certainly thought the same thing myself in the past, and I've never heard anyone called out on that statement.
Instead of the universe, consider prime numbers. A list of randomly chosen prime numbers can be infinite, but definitely does not contain the number 4. Now consider that list, with 4 as the first element. The other elements are all prime, so 4 must be unique in the infinite list. Earth could be the same in our universe.
This rings a bell from my logic of computation class a long time ago. If there is a (formal) language A that describes all possible states in the universe, it could be that the universe can actually be described by a language B which is entirely contained within Language A. Or something. It was a long time ago, and the terminology escapes me.
If co-operation is beneficial for groups, co-operation by an individual will benefit the group and thereby themselves, reinforcing that behaviour in the gene pool.
If a group is largely co-operative, defecting (in the terminology of the prisoner's dilemma) may benefit you greatly and be a detriment to the group as a whole. This would be selfishness, since only you benefit.
If a group is mostly co-operative but there are occasional defectors, it is to the benefit of the group to exile or beat the living crap out of the defector, since they are harming the group - and thereby reducing the reproductive success of defectors - so this should be reinforced.
In a pre-rational species, behaviour would be reinforced by associationg good feelings with successful behaviours. This can arise without any planning if individuals start with randomly genetically coded preferences or dislikes for behaviours and are (naturally) selected for if they like beneficial behaviours.
Finally, since people generally like co-operating (even without a clear benefit to them) we can assume that it has been beneficial in our recent evolution. It should also feel good to hear about justice being served, since that is a natural pairing with enjoying co-operation.
Also, in my experience people who say that humans are inherently selfish are just pushing an agenda, probably a religious one, which says that you should submit to their benevolent control because you don't know what's best for you.
Of course this is all an extremely simplified view. There should be an equilibrium between co-operation and defection which is based on how easy it is to successfully defect. This would imply that people should enjoy gaining by defection BUT only if they are not found out and punished by the co-operators, even though they are themselves co-operative in most situations.
Then we get into gossiping, so we know who has defected in the past... but spreading false rumour then becomes a successful defective behaviour as long as you're not found out.
And there are Us vs Them issues where groups can co-operate within themselves, but still defect relative to other groups without wrecking internal co-operativeness. This tends to have a genetic basis, since co-operating with your relations at the expense of strangers increases your genes' reproductive success, even if the total result is damaging to society in general.
That last point is, I think, the largest problem with our society at the moment. Praising the defective actions of people in your in-group while refusing to co-operate with an out-group without rational cause is rife, from school sports teams all they way up to international relations. It is something that happens most often when we go with 'gut feelings' instead of reasoning, and is the natural result of fear-mongering in the media and by government.
Just a quick note on dysgenics; like eugenics it adds a 'directionality' to evolution which isn't there with natural selection. Natural selection only cares about reproductive success, where dysgenics and eugenics are concerned with the promotion or deletion of other traits which are considered 'good' or 'bad'.
From the wiki article (note: three balance warnings on the page, sounds like fun:) the example of the dysgenic effect of the strongest healthiest young men being killed in the first world war only makes sense if you say strong and healthy is good; from a natural selection perspective, the first world war just means that it's more beneficial to be relatively strong and healthy, but with a pronounced limp so you don't get sent to battle.
Anyway, for selective breeding purposes it DOES make sense to declare some traits such as tastiness (plants) or intelligence (humans) to be positive, it's just that natural selection might not see it the same way. I only mention this because it sounds like Expelled confuses evolution by natural selection (the most reproductive pass on their genes) with eu/dysgenic selection (the individuals I like best pass on their genes) which is an extreme disservice to Darwin.
P.S. Is this a record for Godwin? The movie whose trailer is on youtube, linked from the summary compares its opponents to Nazis? Does that mean this thread was officially over in the -3rd comment?
Why do we teach kids the difference between laws, and theory and then act like evolution is a law?
The difference between scientific laws and scientific theories is a strawman, the classification is mostly based on what the originator decided to call it. And do we teach the distinction in schools? Not where I'm from. What would the distinction be, anyway? Laws are just as open to being falsified as theories are. But don't take my word for it, I'm just pointing out that this issue has already been beaten to death.
Evolution is really good at explaining how butterflies change color overtime, it does not explain how you get from paramecium to human does that not leave room for some alternate theories?
Science is open to other theories, it's just that they all suck way more than evolution. Come up with a better one if you like, nobody's stopping you. And evolution does provide a plausible pathway from an initial biogenesis (a- or otherwise) to humans, it's just a matter of how definite you want the evidence to be before you agree to believe in it. The evidence is improving over time with research, and as I said there are no better explanations.
In what way does the presents of evolution rule out an intelligent designer; might that designer have included an evolutionary mechanism?
Evolution does not rule out an intelligent designer in the same way that it does not rule out ultra-powerful aliens, or the possibility that I had bacon and eggs for breakfast, they are simply not relevant because there is no evidence for them. Get some evidence, then we can talk about it.
Sorry if I'm getting grouchy, it's a long thread even browsing at +4.
I think your post has been well answered already, but I would like to add:
First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design.
Such predictions are notoriously un-forthcoming.
I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing.
That's an interesting statement, for one thing it suggests a lazy creator who cut'n'pasted between species, but I digress. If I understand what you mean, convergent evolution already has it covered. The idea is that there are only a few sensible ways to perform some tasks, so even distantly related species should develop a similar form or strategy.
For instance, sharks and dolphins which are VERY distantly related but occupy a similar niche should have evolved similar structures because there is only really one way to be a free swimming predator at the top of the food chain. Evolution would predict that such species should be functionally similar, but would disagree on vestigial details and arbitrary developments which do not effect fitness. As expected, dolphin skeletons show their ex-quadruped heritage and sharks are cartiliginous despite being outwardly similar. Even more telling, sharks wiggle side-to-side to swim, while dolphins wiggle up-down (I am not a biologist, 'wiggle' may not be the correct technical term) - an arbitrary difference which supports the idea that the two species evolved independantly for a similar function.
Theories such as infinitely expanding and collapsing universe, universes. And various other ideas often taught have serious lacks on disprovability.
An expanding universe suggests things about how distant astronomical objects should appear, so it is testable. You should have mentioned string theory, which is largely untestable - but rightly catches a lot of flack for it.
Kuhn's is one perspective. It's true that bad scientists will ignore inconvenient data and letting them grow old and die is one way to remove an outdated viewpoint. They are acting against the scientific ideal though, and institutions like universities are specifically opposed to dogma.
To imply that a theory as widely used (and proven, but never mind that) as evolution is held dogmatically in the face of contrary evidence requires a ludicrously vast conspiracy spanning nations and thousands of individuals.
And quit it with the "Bzzz". It's inflammatory and unbecoming even when you're not shamefully oversimplifying the history of astronomy.
It's worth noting that the interviewees, despite being in the credits of the film, weren't allowed to see it. PZ Myers was barred from an open invitation screening as hilariously related on his blog here.
There was further discussion about how open the invitations to that particular screening were, but the fact that Myers (and Richard Dawkins) was IN THE FILM and NEVER allowed to see it makes the overall situation quite clear.
I think you're getting a lot of hostility because you're in the territory of a 'teach the controversy' talking point. Getting statements about ID or the 'merely a theory' status of evolution into science textbooks is high on the agenda for religious groups. See here for a quick intro, but you've probably heard about it before anyway.
The problem is that they're trying to force non-scientific statements into a scientific context and give them a false aura of scientific validity. Discussion of the scientific method, its successes and failures, alternatives to scientific theories and so forth are all valid and interesting (I studied some of them at university), but they are not science, they are about science and do not belong in science books.
Imagine if you merely had one or two lines in a whole text about evolution that said "some people believe evolution was guided by the hand of God."
It's actually very innocuous, it's completely true (some people obviously DO believe it), and there are certainly scientists who believe in evolution who believe God may have had a hand guiding it.
That statement is misleading and pernicious in the context of a scintific textbook or paper. It is factually true, but it implies that there is a scientific basis for holding that belief. While there are Christian scientists who reconcile their faith with science, you will not hear them say that they have scientific evidence for their faith.
That's a weird quote. Google agrees that it's from Darwin, but I can't see a concrete reference at a glance. It sounds like a subtle mis-statement of his theory.
Specifically, adaptability to change is only useful if there is a change in the environment which requires adaptation. If the environment is relatively stable from generation to generation (e.g. 10k years of savannah), being properly adapted is beneficial, but being adaptable in general is not.
Or perhaps I am mis-parsing the quote. It sounds like he's talking about which individual in a species survives, which is only important as a prerequisite for reproductive success (which is the real goal). Perhaps the quote refers to which single species from group of species will survive. In that case, species will indeed fail if the environment changes and they are not sufficiently adaptable. But again adaptability is only beneficial in conjunction with environmental change, not as an end in itself.
isn't it ironic that Dawkins is appearing on a show that has been portraying the Doctor as a Messiah figure for the past three series?
On first glance perhaps. It's an opportunity to make the subtle point that if you have a messiah who actually is cavorting around the space-time continuum messing things up, you should believe in him. I think Dawkins would agree - he doesn't ever say that Gods are impossible, just that there's absolutely no evidence they exist. See another thread here about how Dawkins is technically an agnostic but only because it's impossible to scientifically prove that God doesn't exist.
I don't know where you got the false premise idea from, or the US vs EU angle. Paraphrasing:
OP: "just about every vice in our [presumably US] society now is handled by psychologists instead of jail guards". By implication, more people should be imprisoned.
But yes, generally, most people, myself included, would agree pedophiles are scum and deserve a fate worse than the death penalty. I was just playing devil's advocate.
I suspect you were just being flippant, but in case you weren't...
A lot of people believe that the death penalty is never justified. Check out the wikipedia map. It strikes me as odd that the US constitution doesn't prohibit state-endorsed murder. I believe that the highest legal punishment should be life imprisonment, but that's a different rant.
You also conflated pedophilia with child molesting which I'm sure you didn't mean, but that's how you wrote it. I'm sure there are closet pedophiles who are quite unhappy to find children sexually attractive and never act on their feelings. I agree that any actual child abuse (sexual or otherwise) is a particularly heinous crime.
The DS screens are not identical. Only the lower screen is touch sensitive so it makes sense to have an interface-dedicated screen and an information-dedicated screen. But I think you're right, apart from form factor and cost saving issues a single screen would be better.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Grouping in threes effectively lets you highlight with four different colours because your eye will follow the line based on the colour change between one line in the next. With greenbar you get {WW, WG, GG, GW} which makes it hard to accidentally skip up or down if you're following a line a long way across a page.
Concerning minor improvements; you know you've been working with computers too long when you think improvements are trivial because they are less than an order of magnitude.
I've been tangentially involved with data collection for the health system in New Zealand. The 'race' issue is really very complicated, even if you're just collecting it for statistical purposes. Official forms in New Zealand never refer to race, the question is "What is your ethnicity? (select up to three)". Ethnicity is considered as a social group which you identify with, and is specifically not related to genetics. It is collected for such reasons as correlating illnesses with demographic groups, and I've never seen it used in a case where the ethnicity you selected would make any difference to your treatment.
Of course there are plenty of people who get snotty that there is a distinction between Pakeha/New Zealand European and Maori, and dutifully write in "I am a New Zealander!!1!"
It is a useful question to ask for statistical purposes, although I couldn't comment on how the data is treated in America.
Oh, and speaking of complicated questions, don't get me started on the problems of asking what sex a person is. If you think it's easy, you've never had a job where it mattered.
That's the same false argument that says the world will starve if we can grow biofuels on cropland.
Being able to choose an appropriate ratio of fuel:food or fuel:park is a good thing. It may mean that we have to, as a society, assign a dollar value to park land and consciously give up that much fuel production, but farming provides the same threat and we still have national parks.
Insightful? Shame on you mods.
Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
Indeed. That's what I'll be doing, going in the opposite direction.
Yes, I will be flying through Singapore or Dubai because the alternative of flying through America scares me.
You're making a huge over-statement there. No sane person defends child rape, but child pornography could be a 17yo boy's picture of his 17yo girlfriend's tits, or even presumably a pencil sketch thereof (although I don't think that has ever hit the courts). You're automatically assuming the worst possible scenario. The same thing happens with (dramatic chord) "sex offenders", who may simply have been caught peeing in the bushes.
Playing devil's advocate; even if our biochemistry is incompatible, isn't it likely that alien life would also be composed of mostly water and hydrocarbon chains due to their relative abundance and chemcial properties? Any alien organism which had not evolved in parallel with us would likely be entirley novel to our immune system, leaving us as defenceless piles of food with slight impurities. I'm thinking free-living bacteria or fungus here, not viruses or large carnivores.
I think this is a fallacy, but I'm not sure. I've certainly thought the same thing myself in the past, and I've never heard anyone called out on that statement.
Instead of the universe, consider prime numbers. A list of randomly chosen prime numbers can be infinite, but definitely does not contain the number 4. Now consider that list, with 4 as the first element. The other elements are all prime, so 4 must be unique in the infinite list. Earth could be the same in our universe.
This rings a bell from my logic of computation class a long time ago. If there is a (formal) language A that describes all possible states in the universe, it could be that the universe can actually be described by a language B which is entirely contained within Language A. Or something. It was a long time ago, and the terminology escapes me.
If co-operation is beneficial for groups, co-operation by an individual will benefit the group and thereby themselves, reinforcing that behaviour in the gene pool.
If a group is largely co-operative, defecting (in the terminology of the prisoner's dilemma) may benefit you greatly and be a detriment to the group as a whole. This would be selfishness, since only you benefit.
If a group is mostly co-operative but there are occasional defectors, it is to the benefit of the group to exile or beat the living crap out of the defector, since they are harming the group - and thereby reducing the reproductive success of defectors - so this should be reinforced.
In a pre-rational species, behaviour would be reinforced by associationg good feelings with successful behaviours. This can arise without any planning if individuals start with randomly genetically coded preferences or dislikes for behaviours and are (naturally) selected for if they like beneficial behaviours.
Finally, since people generally like co-operating (even without a clear benefit to them) we can assume that it has been beneficial in our recent evolution. It should also feel good to hear about justice being served, since that is a natural pairing with enjoying co-operation.
Also, in my experience people who say that humans are inherently selfish are just pushing an agenda, probably a religious one, which says that you should submit to their benevolent control because you don't know what's best for you.
Of course this is all an extremely simplified view. There should be an equilibrium between co-operation and defection which is based on how easy it is to successfully defect. This would imply that people should enjoy gaining by defection BUT only if they are not found out and punished by the co-operators, even though they are themselves co-operative in most situations.
Then we get into gossiping, so we know who has defected in the past... but spreading false rumour then becomes a successful defective behaviour as long as you're not found out.
And there are Us vs Them issues where groups can co-operate within themselves, but still defect relative to other groups without wrecking internal co-operativeness. This tends to have a genetic basis, since co-operating with your relations at the expense of strangers increases your genes' reproductive success, even if the total result is damaging to society in general.
That last point is, I think, the largest problem with our society at the moment. Praising the defective actions of people in your in-group while refusing to co-operate with an out-group without rational cause is rife, from school sports teams all they way up to international relations. It is something that happens most often when we go with 'gut feelings' instead of reasoning, and is the natural result of fear-mongering in the media and by government.
Boy, what a rant. I hope some of that was useful.
Just a quick note on dysgenics; like eugenics it adds a 'directionality' to evolution which isn't there with natural selection. Natural selection only cares about reproductive success, where dysgenics and eugenics are concerned with the promotion or deletion of other traits which are considered 'good' or 'bad'.
:) the example of the dysgenic effect of the strongest healthiest young men being killed in the first world war only makes sense if you say strong and healthy is good; from a natural selection perspective, the first world war just means that it's more beneficial to be relatively strong and healthy, but with a pronounced limp so you don't get sent to battle.
From the wiki article (note: three balance warnings on the page, sounds like fun
Anyway, for selective breeding purposes it DOES make sense to declare some traits such as tastiness (plants) or intelligence (humans) to be positive, it's just that natural selection might not see it the same way. I only mention this because it sounds like Expelled confuses evolution by natural selection (the most reproductive pass on their genes) with eu/dysgenic selection (the individuals I like best pass on their genes) which is an extreme disservice to Darwin.
P.S. Is this a record for Godwin? The movie whose trailer is on youtube, linked from the summary compares its opponents to Nazis? Does that mean this thread was officially over in the -3rd comment?
That sounds like a great movie! Now that he's finished making Expelled, I hope Ben gets to work on it.
The difference between scientific laws and scientific theories is a strawman, the classification is mostly based on what the originator decided to call it. And do we teach the distinction in schools? Not where I'm from. What would the distinction be, anyway? Laws are just as open to being falsified as theories are. But don't take my word for it, I'm just pointing out that this issue has already been beaten to death.
Science is open to other theories, it's just that they all suck way more than evolution. Come up with a better one if you like, nobody's stopping you. And evolution does provide a plausible pathway from an initial biogenesis (a- or otherwise) to humans, it's just a matter of how definite you want the evidence to be before you agree to believe in it. The evidence is improving over time with research, and as I said there are no better explanations.
Evolution does not rule out an intelligent designer in the same way that it does not rule out ultra-powerful aliens, or the possibility that I had bacon and eggs for breakfast, they are simply not relevant because there is no evidence for them. Get some evidence, then we can talk about it.
Sorry if I'm getting grouchy, it's a long thread even browsing at +4.
Such predictions are notoriously un-forthcoming.
That's an interesting statement, for one thing it suggests a lazy creator who cut'n'pasted between species, but I digress. If I understand what you mean, convergent evolution already has it covered. The idea is that there are only a few sensible ways to perform some tasks, so even distantly related species should develop a similar form or strategy.
For instance, sharks and dolphins which are VERY distantly related but occupy a similar niche should have evolved similar structures because there is only really one way to be a free swimming predator at the top of the food chain. Evolution would predict that such species should be functionally similar, but would disagree on vestigial details and arbitrary developments which do not effect fitness. As expected, dolphin skeletons show their ex-quadruped heritage and sharks are cartiliginous despite being outwardly similar. Even more telling, sharks wiggle side-to-side to swim, while dolphins wiggle up-down (I am not a biologist, 'wiggle' may not be the correct technical term) - an arbitrary difference which supports the idea that the two species evolved independantly for a similar function.
An expanding universe suggests things about how distant astronomical objects should appear, so it is testable. You should have mentioned string theory, which is largely untestable - but rightly catches a lot of flack for it.
Kuhn's is one perspective. It's true that bad scientists will ignore inconvenient data and letting them grow old and die is one way to remove an outdated viewpoint. They are acting against the scientific ideal though, and institutions like universities are specifically opposed to dogma.
To imply that a theory as widely used (and proven, but never mind that) as evolution is held dogmatically in the face of contrary evidence requires a ludicrously vast conspiracy spanning nations and thousands of individuals.
And quit it with the "Bzzz". It's inflammatory and unbecoming even when you're not shamefully oversimplifying the history of astronomy.
It's worth noting that the interviewees, despite being in the credits of the film, weren't allowed to see it. PZ Myers was barred from an open invitation screening as hilariously related on his blog here.
There was further discussion about how open the invitations to that particular screening were, but the fact that Myers (and Richard Dawkins) was IN THE FILM and NEVER allowed to see it makes the overall situation quite clear.
I think you're getting a lot of hostility because you're in the territory of a 'teach the controversy' talking point. Getting statements about ID or the 'merely a theory' status of evolution into science textbooks is high on the agenda for religious groups. See here for a quick intro, but you've probably heard about it before anyway.
The problem is that they're trying to force non-scientific statements into a scientific context and give them a false aura of scientific validity. Discussion of the scientific method, its successes and failures, alternatives to scientific theories and so forth are all valid and interesting (I studied some of them at university), but they are not science, they are about science and do not belong in science books.
That statement is misleading and pernicious in the context of a scintific textbook or paper. It is factually true, but it implies that there is a scientific basis for holding that belief. While there are Christian scientists who reconcile their faith with science, you will not hear them say that they have scientific evidence for their faith.
That's a weird quote. Google agrees that it's from Darwin, but I can't see a concrete reference at a glance. It sounds like a subtle mis-statement of his theory.
Specifically, adaptability to change is only useful if there is a change in the environment which requires adaptation. If the environment is relatively stable from generation to generation (e.g. 10k years of savannah), being properly adapted is beneficial, but being adaptable in general is not.
Or perhaps I am mis-parsing the quote. It sounds like he's talking about which individual in a species survives, which is only important as a prerequisite for reproductive success (which is the real goal). Perhaps the quote refers to which single species from group of species will survive. In that case, species will indeed fail if the environment changes and they are not sufficiently adaptable. But again adaptability is only beneficial in conjunction with environmental change, not as an end in itself.
Very odd.
isn't it ironic that Dawkins is appearing on a show that has been portraying the Doctor as a Messiah figure for the past three series?
On first glance perhaps. It's an opportunity to make the subtle point that if you have a messiah who actually is cavorting around the space-time continuum messing things up, you should believe in him. I think Dawkins would agree - he doesn't ever say that Gods are impossible, just that there's absolutely no evidence they exist. See another thread here about how Dawkins is technically an agnostic but only because it's impossible to scientifically prove that God doesn't exist.
Richard Stallman, is that you?
I don't know where you got the false premise idea from, or the US vs EU angle. Paraphrasing:
OP: "just about every vice in our [presumably US] society now is handled by psychologists instead of jail guards". By implication, more people should be imprisoned.
GP: The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate[1] and total documented prison population in the world[2] and you say we need to lock more people up?
OP appears to be authoritarian fringe psychologist bashing and rapidly drifting off topic, God only knows how they got modded up.
Eventually, it would stop, once everyone is dead or under the uber-strict control we went [to Iraq] to break.
Oh, is that what it was about?
</snark>
That was the original research title, until the engineers were (embarrassingly) replaced by a small shell script:
#!/bin/bash
true
I suspect you were just being flippant, but in case you weren't...
A lot of people believe that the death penalty is never justified. Check out the wikipedia map. It strikes me as odd that the US constitution doesn't prohibit state-endorsed murder. I believe that the highest legal punishment should be life imprisonment, but that's a different rant.
You also conflated pedophilia with child molesting which I'm sure you didn't mean, but that's how you wrote it. I'm sure there are closet pedophiles who are quite unhappy to find children sexually attractive and never act on their feelings. I agree that any actual child abuse (sexual or otherwise) is a particularly heinous crime.
The DS screens are not identical. Only the lower screen is touch sensitive so it makes sense to have an interface-dedicated screen and an information-dedicated screen. But I think you're right, apart from form factor and cost saving issues a single screen would be better.