The brain is a strange thing. I spotted the typo too, but for some inexplicable reason my brain also thinks that the string contains the word 'kittens' somewhere after the apostrophe.
The point I was trying to make to the parent of my first post was that there are plenty of moderate and reasonable Christians despite the fact that the louder and crazier ones get all the press. I didn't mean to say that US Christians are in general any kookier than their foreign counterparts, but i can see how you read it that way. Also apologies to any Catholics I may have offended; the Catholics I know in real life take my jokes about ritual cannibalism with good grace, and I forget that friendly deadpan humour on the internet looks just like flamebait.
Thank you for your very informative reply, I feel I understand more about the development of Christianity in the US now. It looks like all the moderators have moved on from this discussion so I suppose you won't get any karma, which is a shame. Your post deserves it.
Someone slap me if I'm wrong, but I don't think chaos theory has anything to do with non-computability. IIRC, a chaotic system is one where there is no substantially better way to model the system than to, well, make a model of the system and let it run to the point you wish to examine. My understanding is that chaotic systems are computable (and any real-world system should be, given perfect knowledge of its state) - it's just wildly impractical to actually compute.
Also, I don't understand how even in theory you could have a deterministic but uncomputable system, since the system itself could be considered a computer for determining its own future states.
I come from a family with a strong religious and academic background (not me though, I'm just academic). My grandfather was a minister, with a degree in history. Fought in the second World War. Very smart man, very good man. Not a biblical literalist. There are plenty of people who believe in God who know it's dumb to maintain that the world was created literally in 6 days, and plenty who believe that new species can arise through evolution. You just don't hear about them because reasonable people who believe in God don't need to push an agenda to shore up a precarious and specific belief system.
Also, I am not from the US. Maybe I'm being unfair but you guys sure seem to have the lion's share of Christian extremists, more so than even traditional Catholic countries.
Oh, one last thing. Some people accept that there is no/can be no proof that God exists but believe anyway. This seems strange to me, but in my experience these are also people who don't let their religion interfere with the practicalities of life and are relatively inoffensive.
There was also a cardboard box with ~150 floppy disks, some as old as 20+ years. NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS BAD. Yes, "Zork" still works!
I'm surprised to hear that. It's a well known fact that the high quality graphical images Zork used are extremely fragile against data corruption - a single incorrect bit could ruin the whole image. After all that time I'd expect you'd only have the descriptive text remaining with an image or two if you're really lucky. It's a shame, Zork was a pioneering effort in photo-realistic rendering but you'll pay through the nose for a copy in original condition.
This is an important point for advocates of science to remember, because, in the long view, a lot of science's tenets, e.g. Occam's Razor, seem equally religious to non-subscribers.
I'm not sure Occam's Razor is a good example, you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist who would call it a tenet (syn. doctrine, dogma). It's an heuristic or rule of thumb, another one of those strange cases where the universe seems to follow a pattern for no particular reason. See also: Inductive reasoning, why should the future resemble the past?
The universe is arbitrary, and we may therefore speculate about whether an arbiter exists. That speculation is by definition pure projection, so we can learn from it, even if only about ourselves. Nothing fruitless about that...
I'm not sure if you're trying to make an argument or just indulging in some exposition. I don't have any problem with speculation about hypothetical creators, or their relevance to humanity and morality. Tain't science though.
It's a while since I read it but I remember "The Panda's Thumb" being enjoyable if fairly lightweight natural history. It seems like the odd one out. Honest question, is there some controversy I missed?
The most important need for falsifiability is to do with utility. Consider this:
A scientific theory is only useful in that it makes predictions about the universe. If any prediction is made, it is possible that the prediction is not borne out - the theory is contradicted/disproved.
Conversely, if a theory cannot be disproved it clearly did not make a testable prediction and therefore has no utility, since we could gain no advantage from using the theory.
This sounds a bit abstract, but it's actually very important for the scientific method. ID likes to pretend to be science, but makes no testable predictions so it is strictly speaking useless. It's not a good scientific theory or a bad scientific theory; it has no scientific value.
Another consequence of a theory being unfalsifiable is that it becomes logically equivalent to any other unfalsifiable theory. Take, for instance, the idea that the world was created by the Judeo-Christian God. This is an unfalsifiable theory, and unfortunately there is no way to distinguish it from the theory that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster* because there can be no evidence to show which theory is correct.
But the Universe is under no obligation whatsoever to cooperate with the aesthetics of human scientists. It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
Well, I think that by definition laws (of nature) must be falsifiable because laws must make predictions about how the universe works, and any prediction is an opportunity to be falsified.
As for aesthetics, I think it is the most astounding coincidence that the 'laws of nature' happen to be comprehensible to humans. For example, the fact that gravity works on (approximately) an inverse square law is extremely fortuitous. Why does gravity not operate based on an arbitrarily complex polynomial which would be utterly incomprehensible to humans? There are tentative suggestions for why that might be, which other posters have mentioned, but it may be that one day in the far future science must accept that some things could have happened differently but in the end Just Are. It would be an unsatisfying end to the scientific method which as proved so inexplicably fruitful.
*I can never decide whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a wonderful invention or a blight on a serious discussion. On one hand it is great to have a standard reply to statements of the form "God [x]", i.e. "no, no, The Flying Spaghetti Monster [x]" because as I said above there's no way to prove that God exists but the FSM doesn't. On the other hand, I think many people who refer to the FSM aren't aware of the logical point that is being made and are instead indulging in ridicule of religion.
For one thing, you're committing the naturalistic fallacy (nature does it this way, so it must be right) with a touch of intelligent design thrown in. For another, genetic diversity is usually believed to be a good thing. A gene which increases the chance of heart disease may also protect against ebola (or something, who's to know until we as a species need the gene?).
Not quite what you're talking about, but look at The Baldwin Effect. It's basically the idea that general learning ability can be selected for as a survival trait - sure seemed to work for us.
You might also be interested in the idea of the 'extended phenotype', a term apparently coined by Richard Dawkins during one of his more useful phases. The extended phenotype considers factors beyond simply the body plan of an organism; for instance beavers' dams are part of the extended phenotype of beavers, and technology is part of the extended phenotype of humans.
...that's how inductive mathematical proofs work: once you build your little machine that proves P(N) -> P(N+1), you can set that machine to work over an enumerable set to complete your proof. But I don't think biologists have done thorough enough job to claim something like that.
As you say, I think we are mostly in agreement. Cell + evolution = [all life] certainly isn't up to any mathematical standard, and I think we both have a decent grasp over the strength of the argument. Where you would say (correctly) that the argument is insufficiently rigorous, I would say it's predictive and a useful approximation of the real world, rigorous or not. I respect your scepticism, and I certainly wouldn't look sideways at anyone who was researching an alternative (scientific) model to evolution.
You see? This is why reasonable, rational people never get on talk shows. How exciting is it to see two people agree on the facts and respectfully disagree on the interpretation of them?
Thanks for the conversation anyway, it's been fun.
I don't usually indulge in... err... my computer is smaller than yours contests, but there's a lesson here: I started playing WoW the weekend it opened on my Athlon 800mHz with 512MB RAM and Windows 98SE - I dialled down all the eye candy, but it was entirely adequate to experience the game.
The important point is that it was the same computer I had run Warcraft III on. Even though the hardware was sub-par at the time (I think the RAM was the only thing that didn't suck) Blizzard had made the choice to target their shiny new game at the hardware that all the fans of their shiny old game already had. I hope whoever it was that argued for low system requirements got a promotion.
I remember the original Dungeon Siege being appalling. The game was pretty well designed, decent combat mechanics and skill system, good loot system... a lot like diablo II with an entire party. Graphics were very good for the period and the environment was nicely designed. No level-loading either, I think it was one of the first games to stream in nearby areas before you got to them so you could walk from the start of the game to the end without seeing a loading screen. Problem: completely linear. There was exactly one way to walk from the start of the game to the end. A very pretty corridor with some open areas such as large caves and forest clearings, and I don't think enemies ever respawned so at any point there was usually exactly one group of enemies which you had to kill next to advance the game.
I think some people liked it, I recall some critical acclaim at the time it was released, but that may have been due to reviewers snorting too much coke through the hundred-dollar bills they were paid.
Bitching aside, apart from the level design it was a fantastic game and there were some very interesting mods for it; notably the Ultima 5 Lazarus project which was a complete remake of U5 with the Dungeon Siege engine.
But you still have not answered the central question: Is evolution, in its full scale as is claimed, falsifiable?
Well, my question is: What is "evolution, in its full scale". It's entirely possible that we're not talking about precisely the same thing. I'll just paste in a quote from a very smart guy (*grin*) to remind us of a point I half made in my last post:
When I say 'evolution' I mean 'the evolution of species by means of natural selection', and it's important to remember the full phrase. Plain old evolution is a mathematically provable (obvious, even) mechanism which is observable in nature and repeatable in the lab if you can be bothered to do it. The only argument you can have in the 'evolution vs creationism' debate is whether evolution was responsible for ALL of the variety in life on earth.
So, to expand a bit... plain old evolution of a species over time is not controversial - it's just something you can go look at. Dog breeding, where particular traits are selected for by breeders, is evolution within a species by un-natural selection. Same thing with selecting favoured plant lines to develop different varieties of fruit. This is what I mean when I say plain old evolution just happens. No arguments, it's just a fact of life and mathematics. If you do some Mendellian (spelling? never mind, Mendel the monk dude who did genetics with peas. You know the one) experiments with peas you can demonstrate evolution trivially.
Imagine that you have some pea plants with blue flowers that have two dominant genes for blueness, call that genotype (BB). If you keep breeding those pea plants all the offspring will be blue too because they inherit the (BB). Now, imagine that you get a random mutation where a plant acquires a recessive gene for pink flowers, call the genotype (Bp). It will still look blue because the blue gene is dominant, but if you breed some of these plants together you can get children with the genotype (pp) which will express as pink flowers. OK, still no evolution here, just high school biology. We have mutation, combination, and to call it evolution we need selection as well... lets assume we have a homophobic gardener who refuses to grow pink flowers because people will think he's a nancy boy (damn, it's late at night sorry for the crazy example). The homophobic gardener ruthlessly kills all the pink peas. Now we have a selection pressure, and we can call this an evolutionary system! Consider what happens in this system. In evolutionary terms:
1. Pea plants with genotype (pp) (pink) are extremely unfit. The gardener kills them all! 2. Pea plants with genotype (Bp) or (pB) (blue, recessive pink gene) are not so fit, because if they breed with other (Bp) or (pB) plants, some of their offspring will be pink, and will be killed. 3. Pea plants with genotype (BB) are maximally fit because if they breed with other (BB) plants the offspring will never produce the pink phenotype.
Now, over time as the pink peas are all killed the blue peas, and more specifically the (BB) peas will increase in proportion because each generation their offspring will be most likely to survive.
That is a trivial example of an evolutionary system - it has mutation (we assumed a mutation occured for the sake of the example, and nobody argues that mutations aren't possible in plants), it has combination when the plants breed new generations, and it has (artificial) selection when the gardener kills plants he doesn't like. That's all there is to it. Mutation, Combination, Selection. Evolution.
Is this falsifiable? The statistical fact that if you kill all the pink plants there will be fewer pink plants in future generations cannot be falsified any more than you can falsify the process of multiplication, but you can discover that what you thought was an evolutionary system is in fact a [something else] system, for example an [intelligent design] system. Evolution as a workable process is a fact, but you can question whethe
ID isn't science. It's philosophy of science. You'd think that the average geek would understand the difference, but here on/., every time ID is mentioned, someone goes out of their way to say that it's not science.
Well, ID is usually presented as if it were an alternative scientific theory (although the better charlatans make sure to not talk about scientific theory or falsifiability) so its not surprising that people point out it's not. It does get tedious though.
But actually, I think it would be wrong to call ID philosophy of science. I did philosophy of science at university. ID is a particular example of a class of statements from philosophy of science. My teacher called them surrealist (for surrogate realism) arguments, but I've never seen the term anywhere else so I suspect it's one of his. I also know the concept as Last Thursdayism. The guts of ID is that it might look like animals evolve, but that's just because God^W the Designer made it that way. It's a vacuous statement, because for any $FOO, $FOO because the Designer made it that way. It's untestable, unfalsifiable. Not science, not philosphy of science.
Now if you want to separate ID from proper criticisms of evolution that's fine, but I think nobody's very interested in challenging Darwinian evolution except for those with, shall we say, an agenda. It's a solid theory; anyone who could defeat it would be a hero but it's stood up for a long time, there's no need to replace it because it works, and there's nothing plausible to replace it with. Now I'm just an amateur, I don't keep up with the research papers so I can't comment on the 'intellectual rigor' angle, but I'm not sure you do either. For instance:
Does evolution favor wings over legs, and if so, why aren't all species winged/legged?
This is a straw man from somebody who doesn't know the field, or is deliberately misrepresenting it. Briefly, there is a cost associated with using wings (requires low bodyweight, probably high metabolism). Having wings provides benefits such as high mobility, but the tradeoff is most useful if there is an ecological niche you can fit into with wings which isn't already covered by some other creature. Once there are already a bunch of creatures with wings it's just not that efficient to add another one to compete for the same resources. It's just a matter of pressure and equilibrium. Nobody working with evolution is asking that kind of question, it's an artifact of the ID 'debate'.
we routinely see each and every interesting animal trait, (and even human behavior!) attributed to evolution
Well, yeah. For one thing, going by evolutionary theory EVERY trait, human or otherwise, is evolved by definition. The relevance of this is that every trait should be useful, or at least not counterproductive, so if an animal is doing something weird it bears some investigation to see what possible use it could have. On the other hand, there are also plenty of lame pop-scientist types who love to go "ooh! evolution!" even when there's nothing interesting going on, see: the crappy narrator on Heroes. The 'evolution' on Heroes is such junk it makes me want to scream and throw things every time he opens his mouth.
...how global warming will affect the evolution of species. Will it favor warm or cold blooded animals?
That's an interesting question. I'd guess it would favour cold-blooded animals, since they usually live in warmer climates now. But anyway I am not a biologist. The problem with predicting evolution is that an evolutionary system is complex and interrelated in the same way that a weather/climate system is - predicting the state of any part of the system means you have to model the whole effing thing. Predicting the future evolutionary changes in a species would require that you know the exact details of the future environment and the other species in the environment, it's ju
I see your point, and I agree with you. But I think anyone who has been chugging enough kool-aid to make that argument in the first place will also be one of the ones who believes that the Bible is 'divinely inspired'. So as correct as you are, I don't think you could win an argument with that point.
Well, if you're 9 and your teacher is being so unprofessional there's not much you can do. Probably the best option would have been to just tell your parents and hope that they're sensible enough to go down to the school and raise hell.
In my opinion the correct attack against creationism is to point out that it's unscientific - most importantly that it cannot be disproved. The statement that all species were created by God cannot be disproved; for any evidence the response is "well, God made it that way. He can do what He likes". Evolution on the other hand makes very specific predictions about what kind of animals could evolve, most importantly that every animal must be a slightly modified version of an older existing animal and there are important ramifications of such a process which is what makes it interesting and useful.
On the other hand, the unprovability of the creationist statement puts it in the same bucket as "all species were put on earth by aliens and they secretly watch us for amusement with undetectable cameras" and "the entire universe was created last thursday and all your memories from before then are fake". Unfortunately, this kind of argument makes creationists very angry because it's the same argument that works against almost the entirity of religious dogma. Anybody who says "but the bible..." or "but God wants..." is only going to be made angry by the same argument that ridicules them for believing in Zombie Jesus and the Sky Fairies.
But it's not like its competitor is on a solid ground as far as scientific principles go.
The evolution of species by means of natural selection is one of the most successful scientific theories ever, and is wildly over-supported by available evidence. It annoys me that I even have to make posts like this. Seriously. If you think evolution* is a poor scientific theory, there's 95% of human knowledge you should be throwing out first because it's less solid.
Please excuse my tone, I'm usually very polite about disagreeing with people but your post has a plausible sounding argument which is misleading and misrepresentative of the scientific method and even on slashdot I'm sure there are some people who would take it at face value and end up being measurably stupider as a result. It's the kind of argument I've heard from creationist speakers who use finely honed weasel words and pseudo-scientific bullshit to push their social agenda under the guise of a scientific argument. In your defence, you're probably just repeating something you heard from one of the aforementioned professional liars, and it's their fucking job to trick people. Don't feel bad, but your post is wrong and I will not let it pass.
* When I say 'evolution' I mean 'the evolution of species by means of natural selection', and it's important to remember the full phrase. Plain old evolution is a mathematically provable (obvious, even) mechanism which is observable in nature and repeatable in the lab if you can be bothered to do it. The only argument you can have in the 'evolution vs creationism' debate is whether evolution was responsible for ALL of the variety in life on earth.
And now I will tediously rebut your post, with reference to the usual creationist talking points. Dear readers, you can skip this. It's not that interesting.
...it requires that you design an experiment that will either prove or disprove the hypothesis...
(nitpick: scientific theories cannot be proved, they can only be disproved. A good scientific theory is one that has survived many, many plausible attempts to disprove it)
One of the most important properties of a scientific theory is that it can be disproved. Evolution is a proper scientific theory - it makes definite predictions about what kind of animals can possibly exist, and what kind of fossils we should find. There are a bunch of ways it could be disproved, but off the top of my head there are two big ones which wouldunarguably blow evolution away.
1. The 'irreducible complexity' problem. This is a favourite of creationists, but if there was any evidence which supported it the argument would be over already. Briefly, since it is posited by the theory of evolution that all life on earth evolved from the most basic replicating molecules, every biological function and structure must have been created incrementally by adding extra bits to existing functional organisms. The theory of evolution also says that the only mutations which can survive in a population are beneficial (strictly speaking, non-detrimental on average) ones. If you add those facts together, it's a BIG statement for the theory of evolution. Everything in every creature ever must have been produced by making small beneficial additions to existing creatures starting from a single, extremely simple basis. Wow! EVERYTHING! This is a very testable hypothesis. All you need to do to refute the theory of evolution is find one example somewhere of any part of any organism which wasn't made by taking an older version and making it slightly better. In the entire collection of all the animals that have ever lived. This is the holy grail for creationists and scientists alike.
No such structure or function has ever been found.
Some creationists will go on at length about irreducible complexity, and how something as complicated and perfectly formed as the human eye could never have arisen by mere chance. These are weasel words, and any
Slashdot Mirror
The brain is a strange thing. I spotted the typo too, but for some inexplicable reason my brain also thinks that the string contains the word 'kittens' somewhere after the apostrophe.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Calvin and Hobbes finished in 1995.
(Although according to Wikipedia The Far Side finished earlier the same year, for all you nitpickers out there)
The point I was trying to make to the parent of my first post was that there are plenty of moderate and reasonable Christians despite the fact that the louder and crazier ones get all the press. I didn't mean to say that US Christians are in general any kookier than their foreign counterparts, but i can see how you read it that way. Also apologies to any Catholics I may have offended; the Catholics I know in real life take my jokes about ritual cannibalism with good grace, and I forget that friendly deadpan humour on the internet looks just like flamebait.
Thank you for your very informative reply, I feel I understand more about the development of Christianity in the US now. It looks like all the moderators have moved on from this discussion so I suppose you won't get any karma, which is a shame. Your post deserves it.
Someone slap me if I'm wrong, but I don't think chaos theory has anything to do with non-computability. IIRC, a chaotic system is one where there is no substantially better way to model the system than to, well, make a model of the system and let it run to the point you wish to examine. My understanding is that chaotic systems are computable (and any real-world system should be, given perfect knowledge of its state) - it's just wildly impractical to actually compute.
Also, I don't understand how even in theory you could have a deterministic but uncomputable system, since the system itself could be considered a computer for determining its own future states.
I may just be adding fuel to the fire here but...
I come from a family with a strong religious and academic background (not me though, I'm just academic). My grandfather was a minister, with a degree in history. Fought in the second World War. Very smart man, very good man. Not a biblical literalist. There are plenty of people who believe in God who know it's dumb to maintain that the world was created literally in 6 days, and plenty who believe that new species can arise through evolution. You just don't hear about them because reasonable people who believe in God don't need to push an agenda to shore up a precarious and specific belief system.
Also, I am not from the US. Maybe I'm being unfair but you guys sure seem to have the lion's share of Christian extremists, more so than even traditional Catholic countries.
Oh, one last thing. Some people accept that there is no/can be no proof that God exists but believe anyway. This seems strange to me, but in my experience these are also people who don't let their religion interfere with the practicalities of life and are relatively inoffensive.
Based on the first data available, following graph edges back from known infection sites leads to... Kevin Bacon.
There was also a cardboard box with ~150 floppy disks, some as old as 20+ years. NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS BAD. Yes, "Zork" still works!
I'm surprised to hear that. It's a well known fact that the high quality graphical images Zork used are extremely fragile against data corruption - a single incorrect bit could ruin the whole image. After all that time I'd expect you'd only have the descriptive text remaining with an image or two if you're really lucky. It's a shame, Zork was a pioneering effort in photo-realistic rendering but you'll pay through the nose for a copy in original condition.
I never thought I'd want to mod an article summary "-1, Offtopic"
This is an important point for advocates of science to remember, because, in the long view, a lot of science's tenets, e.g. Occam's Razor, seem equally religious to non-subscribers.
I'm not sure Occam's Razor is a good example, you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist who would call it a tenet (syn. doctrine, dogma). It's an heuristic or rule of thumb, another one of those strange cases where the universe seems to follow a pattern for no particular reason. See also: Inductive reasoning, why should the future resemble the past?
The universe is arbitrary, and we may therefore speculate about whether an arbiter exists. That speculation is by definition pure projection, so we can learn from it, even if only about ourselves. Nothing fruitless about that...
I'm not sure if you're trying to make an argument or just indulging in some exposition. I don't have any problem with speculation about hypothetical creators, or their relevance to humanity and morality. Tain't science though.
It's a while since I read it but I remember "The Panda's Thumb" being enjoyable if fairly lightweight natural history. It seems like the odd one out. Honest question, is there some controversy I missed?
I don't know what they're complaining about. I mean, if one of the characters kills God He must exist, right? *evil grin*
The most important need for falsifiability is to do with utility. Consider this:
A scientific theory is only useful in that it makes predictions about the universe. If any prediction is made, it is possible that the prediction is not borne out - the theory is contradicted/disproved.
Conversely, if a theory cannot be disproved it clearly did not make a testable prediction and therefore has no utility, since we could gain no advantage from using the theory.
This sounds a bit abstract, but it's actually very important for the scientific method. ID likes to pretend to be science, but makes no testable predictions so it is strictly speaking useless. It's not a good scientific theory or a bad scientific theory; it has no scientific value.
Another consequence of a theory being unfalsifiable is that it becomes logically equivalent to any other unfalsifiable theory. Take, for instance, the idea that the world was created by the Judeo-Christian God. This is an unfalsifiable theory, and unfortunately there is no way to distinguish it from the theory that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster* because there can be no evidence to show which theory is correct.
But the Universe is under no obligation whatsoever to cooperate with the aesthetics of human scientists. It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
Well, I think that by definition laws (of nature) must be falsifiable because laws must make predictions about how the universe works, and any prediction is an opportunity to be falsified.
As for aesthetics, I think it is the most astounding coincidence that the 'laws of nature' happen to be comprehensible to humans. For example, the fact that gravity works on (approximately) an inverse square law is extremely fortuitous. Why does gravity not operate based on an arbitrarily complex polynomial which would be utterly incomprehensible to humans? There are tentative suggestions for why that might be, which other posters have mentioned, but it may be that one day in the far future science must accept that some things could have happened differently but in the end Just Are. It would be an unsatisfying end to the scientific method which as proved so inexplicably fruitful.
*I can never decide whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a wonderful invention or a blight on a serious discussion. On one hand it is great to have a standard reply to statements of the form "God [x]", i.e. "no, no, The Flying Spaghetti Monster [x]" because as I said above there's no way to prove that God exists but the FSM doesn't. On the other hand, I think many people who refer to the FSM aren't aware of the logical point that is being made and are instead indulging in ridicule of religion.
For one thing, you're committing the naturalistic fallacy (nature does it this way, so it must be right) with a touch of intelligent design thrown in. For another, genetic diversity is usually believed to be a good thing. A gene which increases the chance of heart disease may also protect against ebola (or something, who's to know until we as a species need the gene?).
Not quite what you're talking about, but look at The Baldwin Effect. It's basically the idea that general learning ability can be selected for as a survival trait - sure seemed to work for us.
You might also be interested in the idea of the 'extended phenotype', a term apparently coined by Richard Dawkins during one of his more useful phases. The extended phenotype considers factors beyond simply the body plan of an organism; for instance beavers' dams are part of the extended phenotype of beavers, and technology is part of the extended phenotype of humans.
And female characters in particular tended to the caricaturish in their unidimensionality.
I agree, my usual gripe with the series (well, one of them...) is that Jordan only has one female character who wears a lot of different masks.
Min is written as a boy in a skirt though; I'm not sure what Rand thinks about that.
Sorry for the late reply.
...that's how inductive mathematical proofs work: once you build your little machine that proves P(N) -> P(N+1), you can set that machine to work over an enumerable set to complete your proof. But I don't think biologists have done thorough enough job to claim something like that.
As you say, I think we are mostly in agreement. Cell + evolution = [all life] certainly isn't up to any mathematical standard, and I think we both have a decent grasp over the strength of the argument. Where you would say (correctly) that the argument is insufficiently rigorous, I would say it's predictive and a useful approximation of the real world, rigorous or not. I respect your scepticism, and I certainly wouldn't look sideways at anyone who was researching an alternative (scientific) model to evolution.
You see? This is why reasonable, rational people never get on talk shows. How exciting is it to see two people agree on the facts and respectfully disagree on the interpretation of them?
Thanks for the conversation anyway, it's been fun.
I don't usually indulge in... err... my computer is smaller than yours contests, but there's a lesson here: I started playing WoW the weekend it opened on my Athlon 800mHz with 512MB RAM and Windows 98SE - I dialled down all the eye candy, but it was entirely adequate to experience the game.
The important point is that it was the same computer I had run Warcraft III on. Even though the hardware was sub-par at the time (I think the RAM was the only thing that didn't suck) Blizzard had made the choice to target their shiny new game at the hardware that all the fans of their shiny old game already had. I hope whoever it was that argued for low system requirements got a promotion.
I remember the original Dungeon Siege being appalling. The game was pretty well designed, decent combat mechanics and skill system, good loot system... a lot like diablo II with an entire party. Graphics were very good for the period and the environment was nicely designed. No level-loading either, I think it was one of the first games to stream in nearby areas before you got to them so you could walk from the start of the game to the end without seeing a loading screen. Problem: completely linear. There was exactly one way to walk from the start of the game to the end. A very pretty corridor with some open areas such as large caves and forest clearings, and I don't think enemies ever respawned so at any point there was usually exactly one group of enemies which you had to kill next to advance the game.
I think some people liked it, I recall some critical acclaim at the time it was released, but that may have been due to reviewers snorting too much coke through the hundred-dollar bills they were paid.
Bitching aside, apart from the level design it was a fantastic game and there were some very interesting mods for it; notably the Ultima 5 Lazarus project which was a complete remake of U5 with the Dungeon Siege engine.
Well, my question is: What is "evolution, in its full scale". It's entirely possible that we're not talking about precisely the same thing. I'll just paste in a quote from a very smart guy (*grin*) to remind us of a point I half made in my last post:
So, to expand a bit... plain old evolution of a species over time is not controversial - it's just something you can go look at. Dog breeding, where particular traits are selected for by breeders, is evolution within a species by un-natural selection. Same thing with selecting favoured plant lines to develop different varieties of fruit. This is what I mean when I say plain old evolution just happens. No arguments, it's just a fact of life and mathematics. If you do some Mendellian (spelling? never mind, Mendel the monk dude who did genetics with peas. You know the one) experiments with peas you can demonstrate evolution trivially.
Imagine that you have some pea plants with blue flowers that have two dominant genes for blueness, call that genotype (BB). If you keep breeding those pea plants all the offspring will be blue too because they inherit the (BB). Now, imagine that you get a random mutation where a plant acquires a recessive gene for pink flowers, call the genotype (Bp). It will still look blue because the blue gene is dominant, but if you breed some of these plants together you can get children with the genotype (pp) which will express as pink flowers. OK, still no evolution here, just high school biology. We have mutation, combination, and to call it evolution we need selection as well... lets assume we have a homophobic gardener who refuses to grow pink flowers because people will think he's a nancy boy (damn, it's late at night sorry for the crazy example). The homophobic gardener ruthlessly kills all the pink peas. Now we have a selection pressure, and we can call this an evolutionary system! Consider what happens in this system. In evolutionary terms:
1. Pea plants with genotype (pp) (pink) are extremely unfit. The gardener kills them all!
2. Pea plants with genotype (Bp) or (pB) (blue, recessive pink gene) are not so fit, because if they breed with other (Bp) or (pB) plants, some of their offspring will be pink, and will be killed.
3. Pea plants with genotype (BB) are maximally fit because if they breed with other (BB) plants the offspring will never produce the pink phenotype.
Now, over time as the pink peas are all killed the blue peas, and more specifically the (BB) peas will increase in proportion because each generation their offspring will be most likely to survive.
That is a trivial example of an evolutionary system - it has mutation (we assumed a mutation occured for the sake of the example, and nobody argues that mutations aren't possible in plants), it has combination when the plants breed new generations, and it has (artificial) selection when the gardener kills plants he doesn't like. That's all there is to it. Mutation, Combination, Selection. Evolution.
Is this falsifiable? The statistical fact that if you kill all the pink plants there will be fewer pink plants in future generations cannot be falsified any more than you can falsify the process of multiplication, but you can discover that what you thought was an evolutionary system is in fact a [something else] system, for example an [intelligent design] system. Evolution as a workable process is a fact, but you can question whethe
Hi res satellite image
ID isn't science. It's philosophy of science. You'd think that the average geek would understand the difference, but here on /., every time ID is mentioned, someone goes out of their way to say that it's not science.
...how global warming will affect the evolution of species. Will it favor warm or cold blooded animals?
Well, ID is usually presented as if it were an alternative scientific theory (although the better charlatans make sure to not talk about scientific theory or falsifiability) so its not surprising that people point out it's not. It does get tedious though.
But actually, I think it would be wrong to call ID philosophy of science. I did philosophy of science at university. ID is a particular example of a class of statements from philosophy of science. My teacher called them surrealist (for surrogate realism) arguments, but I've never seen the term anywhere else so I suspect it's one of his. I also know the concept as Last Thursdayism. The guts of ID is that it might look like animals evolve, but that's just because God^W the Designer made it that way. It's a vacuous statement, because for any $FOO, $FOO because the Designer made it that way. It's untestable, unfalsifiable. Not science, not philosphy of science.
Now if you want to separate ID from proper criticisms of evolution that's fine, but I think nobody's very interested in challenging Darwinian evolution except for those with, shall we say, an agenda. It's a solid theory; anyone who could defeat it would be a hero but it's stood up for a long time, there's no need to replace it because it works, and there's nothing plausible to replace it with. Now I'm just an amateur, I don't keep up with the research papers so I can't comment on the 'intellectual rigor' angle, but I'm not sure you do either. For instance:
Does evolution favor wings over legs, and if so, why aren't all species winged/legged?
This is a straw man from somebody who doesn't know the field, or is deliberately misrepresenting it. Briefly, there is a cost associated with using wings (requires low bodyweight, probably high metabolism). Having wings provides benefits such as high mobility, but the tradeoff is most useful if there is an ecological niche you can fit into with wings which isn't already covered by some other creature. Once there are already a bunch of creatures with wings it's just not that efficient to add another one to compete for the same resources. It's just a matter of pressure and equilibrium. Nobody working with evolution is asking that kind of question, it's an artifact of the ID 'debate'.
we routinely see each and every interesting animal trait, (and even human behavior!) attributed to evolution
Well, yeah. For one thing, going by evolutionary theory EVERY trait, human or otherwise, is evolved by definition. The relevance of this is that every trait should be useful, or at least not counterproductive, so if an animal is doing something weird it bears some investigation to see what possible use it could have. On the other hand, there are also plenty of lame pop-scientist types who love to go "ooh! evolution!" even when there's nothing interesting going on, see: the crappy narrator on Heroes. The 'evolution' on Heroes is such junk it makes me want to scream and throw things every time he opens his mouth.
That's an interesting question. I'd guess it would favour cold-blooded animals, since they usually live in warmer climates now. But anyway I am not a biologist. The problem with predicting evolution is that an evolutionary system is complex and interrelated in the same way that a weather/climate system is - predicting the state of any part of the system means you have to model the whole effing thing. Predicting the future evolutionary changes in a species would require that you know the exact details of the future environment and the other species in the environment, it's ju
I see your point, and I agree with you. But I think anyone who has been chugging enough kool-aid to make that argument in the first place will also be one of the ones who believes that the Bible is 'divinely inspired'. So as correct as you are, I don't think you could win an argument with that point.
Now, I'm not from the US and I don't know anything about the validity of your statements, but on the other hand...
;) (Score:5, Flamebait)
BURN!!!
Nice, man
Well, if you're 9 and your teacher is being so unprofessional there's not much you can do. Probably the best option would have been to just tell your parents and hope that they're sensible enough to go down to the school and raise hell.
In my opinion the correct attack against creationism is to point out that it's unscientific - most importantly that it cannot be disproved. The statement that all species were created by God cannot be disproved; for any evidence the response is "well, God made it that way. He can do what He likes". Evolution on the other hand makes very specific predictions about what kind of animals could evolve, most importantly that every animal must be a slightly modified version of an older existing animal and there are important ramifications of such a process which is what makes it interesting and useful.
On the other hand, the unprovability of the creationist statement puts it in the same bucket as "all species were put on earth by aliens and they secretly watch us for amusement with undetectable cameras" and "the entire universe was created last thursday and all your memories from before then are fake". Unfortunately, this kind of argument makes creationists very angry because it's the same argument that works against almost the entirity of religious dogma. Anybody who says "but the bible..." or "but God wants..." is only going to be made angry by the same argument that ridicules them for believing in Zombie Jesus and the Sky Fairies.
But it's not like its competitor is on a solid ground as far as scientific principles go.
...it requires that you design an experiment that will either prove or disprove the hypothesis...
The evolution of species by means of natural selection is one of the most successful scientific theories ever, and is wildly over-supported by available evidence. It annoys me that I even have to make posts like this. Seriously. If you think evolution* is a poor scientific theory, there's 95% of human knowledge you should be throwing out first because it's less solid.
Please excuse my tone, I'm usually very polite about disagreeing with people but your post has a plausible sounding argument which is misleading and misrepresentative of the scientific method and even on slashdot I'm sure there are some people who would take it at face value and end up being measurably stupider as a result. It's the kind of argument I've heard from creationist speakers who use finely honed weasel words and pseudo-scientific bullshit to push their social agenda under the guise of a scientific argument. In your defence, you're probably just repeating something you heard from one of the aforementioned professional liars, and it's their fucking job to trick people. Don't feel bad, but your post is wrong and I will not let it pass.
* When I say 'evolution' I mean 'the evolution of species by means of natural selection', and it's important to remember the full phrase. Plain old evolution is a mathematically provable (obvious, even) mechanism which is observable in nature and repeatable in the lab if you can be bothered to do it. The only argument you can have in the 'evolution vs creationism' debate is whether evolution was responsible for ALL of the variety in life on earth.
And now I will tediously rebut your post, with reference to the usual creationist talking points. Dear readers, you can skip this. It's not that interesting.
(nitpick: scientific theories cannot be proved, they can only be disproved. A good scientific theory is one that has survived many, many plausible attempts to disprove it)
One of the most important properties of a scientific theory is that it can be disproved. Evolution is a proper scientific theory - it makes definite predictions about what kind of animals can possibly exist, and what kind of fossils we should find. There are a bunch of ways it could be disproved, but off the top of my head there are two big ones which wouldunarguably blow evolution away.
1. The 'irreducible complexity' problem. This is a favourite of creationists, but if there was any evidence which supported it the argument would be over already. Briefly, since it is posited by the theory of evolution that all life on earth evolved from the most basic replicating molecules, every biological function and structure must have been created incrementally by adding extra bits to existing functional organisms. The theory of evolution also says that the only mutations which can survive in a population are beneficial (strictly speaking, non-detrimental on average) ones. If you add those facts together, it's a BIG statement for the theory of evolution. Everything in every creature ever must have been produced by making small beneficial additions to existing creatures starting from a single, extremely simple basis. Wow! EVERYTHING! This is a very testable hypothesis. All you need to do to refute the theory of evolution is find one example somewhere of any part of any organism which wasn't made by taking an older version and making it slightly better. In the entire collection of all the animals that have ever lived. This is the holy grail for creationists and scientists alike.
No such structure or function has ever been found.
Some creationists will go on at length about irreducible complexity, and how something as complicated and perfectly formed as the human eye could never have arisen by mere chance. These are weasel words, and any