Most seeing is done BETWEEN the eye and the brain, in the visual cortex (which is usually considered a part of the brain). Of course, when we are talking about engineered cat's eyes (natural ones will keep falling out of human eye sockets), this is a moot point, since we can engineer them to see diagonals.
The visual cortex is unquestionably part of the brain. The only thing "between the eye and the brain" is the optic nerve, which does no processing. I expect that we'd see diagonals just fine, even if we had cat eyes, because our brains are capable of extracting diagonals.
Now the other side - and that's the really scary one - since when do we weed out bad genes? Today most people die a natural death, no matter if they were stupid, disabled or had any other issues. In the past, those would have been the first to get killed by lack of food, deciese or wild animals. That kept the gene pool cleaner. Today, they have kids just like everyone else - and that has severe negative impact on the human race.
Seems doubtful. We are protected from some hazards, but we have new ones. Early humans did not have to learn at an early age how to avoid being struck by multi-ton metal vehicles traveling at high speed. Or the danger of poking things into electric sockets. Or that the sweet-tasting stuff that Daddy fills the radiator with is actually very bad for you.
It's pretty clear that the environment has been dysgenic for intelligence in the modern world for at least a century. The more intelligent you are, the better education you get, and the more education you get, the less children you have.
The most likely outcome of future human evolution might be something like Kornbluth's "Marching Morons." Over the next few centuries, the average IQ of the human race will drop to 60-70.
You are assuming that we are not already at steady-state. A little intelligence helps you to survive, but really intelligent people get distracted by other things, like trying to figure out things work, and get distracted from their primary business (evolutionarily speaking) of having children. This is probably not an evolutionarily recent phenomenon--it has likely been true throughout human history.
The flip side of that argument is that it may be fairly easy to improve human intellectual capacity, because there may be a lot of intellectually deleterious genes going around, maintained in the population by selection against too much intelligence.
It is interesting to speculate what the consequences would be for humanity if advances in genetic diagnosis and therapy increase the average IQ to say, 160.
Keep in mind that evolution does not necessarily lead to perfection, only to a local optimum, where any mutation is likely to reduce reproductive fitness. So there are a lot of potential beneficial modifications that will never happen by natural selection, because there is no pathway from "here" to "there" that does not lead through a region of drastically reduced fitness. The panda will probably never evolve a "real" thumb.
So most of your wish list is more likely to arise from genetic technology than evolution.
Well for starters we could get rid of those violent tendancies, they don't seem to help anyone. And whats with religion? If our brains could wire themselves not to need it we'd have it made in the shade.
Until we got wiped out by a tribe of violent religious fanatics. That's natural selection, too.
You're assuming intelligence is hereditary. There may be a correlation, but plenty of bright people come from parents who were not so bright
Which is pretty much what you'd expect if intelligence is controlled by multiple genes. Let's suppose that there are 10 genes that enhance intelligence, and the average person has 5. Chances are that both parents will not have the same 5 "good" alleles, so they could easily produce a child with more good alleles than either parent.
Apple has done it before. They did it with Panther and Jaguar. When they first announced Tiger, they referred to it as Tiger, they had big banners that said Tiger, etc. If TigerDirect was truly taking this seriously as a real threat to their trademark value, they would've done enough research to find this out (it wouldn't have been hard). They were just looking for some easy money.
So what should they have done? Sued Apple in advance? Changed their name and made it hard for previous customers to find you. The ruling is clearly correct as far as Trademark law is concerned. TigerDirect customers are not going to get confused and start buying things from Apple that they previously bought from TigerDirect. People are not going to be calling up TigerDirect and complaining about problems with Apple products. Still, TigerDirect used to come up at the top of a Google search for Tiger, and now they don't. A high Google rank can have considerable value. TigerDirect was clearly hoping the court would broaden Trademark law to cover this, but the court declined to do so. What it comes down to is that where web searches are concerned, a big company like Apple is the 600 pound canary. If they happen to announce a product that knocks your company off of the first Google search page, you are just SOL.
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software
What the GPL specifically does not promise is that your altered software will be useful for any specific purpose. You are free to alter the software, but that does not mean that Dish is required to support hardware with user-altered software, or make it easy for users to alter the unit's software.
It is interesting, isn't it, that nobody is now using Intel who is not locked into it by a commitment to legacy code? All 3 new game machines are using PowerPC processors.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the OS of XBox360 is based on Windows. Perhaps Microsoft will follow Apple's example with the 68K to PowerPC transition and release a PowerPC based Windows PC that runs old applications in emulation.
Also, even if they know it's not backwards compatible, they don't want to announce it now. That would hurt current sales of games for the current XBox, because a lot of people see them as an investment.
Conversely, if it is backwards compatible, this would have been the time to announce, as many people will likely defer buying XBox software over compatibility concerns
yeah but the point of the original argument was that they CPU architecture was different.
I guess that he didn't feel the need to point out the obvious--different CPU architecture means that compatibility could only be achieved by emulation, and emulation always extracts a major performance penalty, such that in practice it is only possible to adequately emulate machines multiple generations back.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 1
The point is Apple didn't have to write a browser from scratch, and in fact was able to take a lot of hard work and make money off of it for free.
If people shouldn't be allowed to make money off of an open source project, than shouldn't that little detail be part of the license? Of course, companies would gravitate to open source projects that don't have such restrictions. Which is probably why such restrictions weren't written into the license in the first place. Now it is beginning to sound like some people want to have their cake and eat it too..
At least Microsoft buys the freaking companies when they want to use technology they didn't develop, they aren't running around sucking off Open Source projects and sticking their label on it and strictly complying with the licensing as little as they have to as Apple has been doing with OSX...
Oh horrors! They are observing the letter of the agreement! Get out the pitchforks! The whole point of a license is you put in there what you want from the other party. You don't turn around after the fact and start screaming, "Yes, I know that you are doing everything that I asked for, but I really wanted a bunch of other stuff that I didn't bother to mention. You should have understood that! What is wrong with you?"
The whole Open Source community should have pitch forks and ready to hang Apple for what they have done to HARM and exploit the open source world, instead we find tons of Apple fans telling us how Wonderful Apple is by ripping off all these good ideas, and making them proprietary.
I don't see any harm here, and I don't see any good ideas that have been made proprietary. That's certainly not what the KHTML people have been complaining about; their only issue seems to be that they aren't benefiting as much as they hoped. How, precisely, is Apple's offering to make WebObjects open source "taking a good idea and making it proprietary?" KHTML has as many good ideas as they started with. And maybe even a few from Apple, even if Apple is not offering to hold their hands and help them figure it out.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
There would be no fucking Safari if it were not for the KHTML team.
Uh, no. Do you really imagine that KHTML was the only game in town? Apple could just as well have gone with Gecko, and at the time some criticized their choice to use KHTML as a starting point.
The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
Yes, this is clearly going well beyond the letter of the license, whether or not the KHTML people choose to take them up on it.
The real problem seems to be unrealistic expectations on the part of the KHTML guys. I can sort of see the point of the original complaint, "Everybody thinks we're getting all this help from Apple, but actually we're having to work just as hard as before!" Fair enough, but now it is just starting to look mean-spirited.
I don't care how many DRM formats the iPod supports? One is more than I need. The key point to me is that I can rip MP3's from my CDs, which I can put on whichever computers I want to and use on every player known to man. Usually, I can find albums used on CD cheaper than I can buy them from iTMS, and with better music quality to boot.
Is it too much to ask that vendors use beta versions of their own software in-house for a month before they release it? Is it too much to ask that they ship the software to a small number of beta testers before the final release in order to find those wrinkles and iron them out?
This is a common complaint heard about all kinds of products from cars to drugs. What it reflects is ignorance of the statistics of testing. By necessity, testing must be done on a pool of people that is orders of magnitude smaller than the final pool of users (a test on everybody is not a test, it is a product roll-out ). So let us say that you beta test on 1,000 people and roll the product out to a million. Then you will have about a 35% chance of missing a problem that affects 1 person in 1,000. On roll-out, each such problem translates into 1,000 people with problems.
You are right. The genetic code is arbitrary (to the extent that DNA could hypothetically encode any arbitrary information).
Yes, the DNA could encode any arbitrary information, but I'm talking about the code itself. There is no particular reason why a particular 3-letter code needs to represent the same amino acid in different animals. Indeed, it would probably be better if different organisms had completely different codes, and there is no biological reason, aside from common descent, why they couldn't.
You are right. The genetic code is arbitrary (to the extent that DNA could hypothetically encode any arbitrary information). And the Darwinian hypothesis has absolutely no explanation for how the current genetic code "evolved". At best it give poor description of how the MEDIUM (the DNA itself) may have evolved. But it gives absolutely no hint as to how the MESSAGE (the genetic code itself) came into being.
It is not hard to see how the genetic code could have evolved. Of course, living organisms do not require a genetic code; in principle, everything could be done with special purpose enzymes or ribozymes. The entire code would not have to come into being at once. Even hooking together a couple of amino acids would be useful. So one possible scenario would be a pair of ribozymes involved in synthesizing a dipeptide. Initially, they would probably associate with one another directly to catalyze the peptide bond formation, but the affinity and specificity of that interaction could be enhanced by an accessory RNA that binds to complementary regions of those ribozymes. Once the basic mechanism exists, it is easy to expand it with duplication and mutation of the ribozymes to add other amino acids. Ultimately, the specificity gets taken over by the RNA, and the ribozymes get simplified to become transfer RNAs
I just read that book recently, and while I enjoyed most of it, I found the chapter on the theories about the emergence of DNA extremely "hand wavey". The clay mineral culture idea was only presented as one possibility, but it didn't sound very convincing. If anyone has pointers to more compelling theories, I would be interested in reading them.
Check out Stuart Kauffman's The Origins of Order. This is the best book I've seen. Kauffman is a "protein-first" guy. I think that is still somewhat the minority view, but he makes a good case.
For the clay theory from the horse's mouth, check out Cairns-Smith . I think most biologists regard theory this as sort of a long-shot.
The most popular (at least that is my impression) theory is that a self-reproducing RNA-like molecule was the earliest form of life, but I don't know of a good book...
You must not have clicked through the link. They are all either MDs or PhDs in scientific fields. Most are members of the usual scientific professional organizations. Most taught at recognizable mainstream universities before joining the ICR.
An MD or PhD does not make you a scientist, and many scientific professional organizations accept anybody who pays dues. Pretty much the only organization that means much in the US is the National Academy of Science (any Academy members on that list?). The other thing to look for is publications in major peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. For the most part, these guys don't do real science. One of the few "Intelligent Design" guys who has made real scientific contributions is Behe, and he actually believes in most of evolution; he just thinks that Earth was seeded with a designed microorganism that evolved into everything else. (This isn't a crazy idea, although I find Behe's arguments extremely unpersuasive) .
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome.
Nope, this is a logical error known as "argument by incredulity." Evolution does not predict that you will be able to figure out retrospectively, the pathway by which something evolved.
It does, however, predict that species should have commonality in basic functions, with only minor variations. For example, finding even one species with a completely different genetic code would disprove evolution.
Evolution is non-falsifiable and therefore will not fit this definition of Science.
Find even one species with a completely different genetic code and evolution is falsified. Experiments have shown that the genetic code is arbitrary, so there is no reason why different species should have the same code, unless species evolved from one another. Indeed, it would be better for species to have different genetic codes, because they would be protected from cross-species viral transmission. Considering that the theory of natural selection predates knowledge of DNA, the discovery of genes, mutation, and the commonality (with some minor variants) of the genetic code is a remarkable confirmation of the theory's predictions. If any of these had turned out otherwise, evolution would have been out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
Most seeing is done BETWEEN the eye and the brain, in the visual cortex (which is usually considered a part of the brain). Of course, when we are talking about engineered cat's eyes (natural ones will keep falling out of human eye sockets), this is a moot point, since we can engineer them to see diagonals.
The visual cortex is unquestionably part of the brain. The only thing "between the eye and the brain" is the optic nerve, which does no processing. I expect that we'd see diagonals just fine, even if we had cat eyes, because our brains are capable of extracting diagonals.
Now the other side - and that's the really scary one - since when do we weed out bad genes? Today most people die a natural death, no matter if they were stupid, disabled or had any other issues. In the past, those would have been the first to get killed by lack of food, deciese or wild animals. That kept the gene pool cleaner. Today, they have kids just like everyone else - and that has severe negative impact on the human race.
Seems doubtful. We are protected from some hazards, but we have new ones. Early humans did not have to learn at an early age how to avoid being struck by multi-ton metal vehicles traveling at high speed. Or the danger of poking things into electric sockets. Or that the sweet-tasting stuff that Daddy fills the radiator with is actually very bad for you.
It's pretty clear that the environment has been dysgenic for intelligence in the modern world for at least a century. The more intelligent you are, the better education you get, and the more education you get, the less children you have.
The most likely outcome of future human evolution might be something like Kornbluth's "Marching Morons." Over the next few centuries, the average IQ of the human race will drop to 60-70.
You are assuming that we are not already at steady-state. A little intelligence helps you to survive, but really intelligent people get distracted by other things, like trying to figure out things work, and get distracted from their primary business (evolutionarily speaking) of having children. This is probably not an evolutionarily recent phenomenon--it has likely been true throughout human history.
The flip side of that argument is that it may be fairly easy to improve human intellectual capacity, because there may be a lot of intellectually deleterious genes going around, maintained in the population by selection against too much intelligence.
It is interesting to speculate what the consequences would be for humanity if advances in genetic diagnosis and therapy increase the average IQ to say, 160.
Bah. Cat's eyes can't see diagonals.
Most seeing is done in the brain, not the eyes. The eyes just collect the data and do some very preliminary processing.
Keep in mind that evolution does not necessarily lead to perfection, only to a local optimum, where any mutation is likely to reduce reproductive fitness. So there are a lot of potential beneficial modifications that will never happen by natural selection, because there is no pathway from "here" to "there" that does not lead through a region of drastically reduced fitness. The panda will probably never evolve a "real" thumb.
So most of your wish list is more likely to arise from genetic technology than evolution.
Well for starters we could get rid of those violent tendancies, they don't seem to help anyone. And whats with religion? If our brains could wire themselves not to need it we'd have it made in the shade.
Until we got wiped out by a tribe of violent religious fanatics. That's natural selection, too.
You're assuming intelligence is hereditary. There may be a correlation, but plenty of bright people come from parents who were not so bright
Which is pretty much what you'd expect if intelligence is controlled by multiple genes. Let's suppose that there are 10 genes that enhance intelligence, and the average person has 5. Chances are that both parents will not have the same 5 "good" alleles, so they could easily produce a child with more good alleles than either parent.
Xbox Live dashboard with the words 'Xbox 1 Zone' clearly marked and an icon of the current Xbox title Fable.
Seems like that might just mean that XBox Live will maintain backward compatibility for people who still have XBox1.
Apple has done it before. They did it with Panther and Jaguar. When they first announced Tiger, they referred to it as Tiger, they had big banners that said Tiger, etc. If TigerDirect was truly taking this seriously as a real threat to their trademark value, they would've done enough research to find this out (it wouldn't have been hard). They were just looking for some easy money.
So what should they have done? Sued Apple in advance? Changed their name and made it hard for previous customers to find you. The ruling is clearly correct as far as Trademark law is concerned. TigerDirect customers are not going to get confused and start buying things from Apple that they previously bought from TigerDirect. People are not going to be calling up TigerDirect and complaining about problems with Apple products. Still, TigerDirect used to come up at the top of a Google search for Tiger, and now they don't. A high Google rank can have considerable value. TigerDirect was clearly hoping the court would broaden Trademark law to cover this, but the court declined to do so. What it comes down to is that where web searches are concerned, a big company like Apple is the 600 pound canary. If they happen to announce a product that knocks your company off of the first Google search page, you are just SOL.
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software
What the GPL specifically does not promise is that your altered software will be useful for any specific purpose. You are free to alter the software, but that does not mean that Dish is required to support hardware with user-altered software, or make it easy for users to alter the unit's software.
It is interesting, isn't it, that nobody is now using Intel who is not locked into it by a commitment to legacy code? All 3 new game machines are using PowerPC processors.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the OS of XBox360 is based on Windows. Perhaps Microsoft will follow Apple's example with the 68K to PowerPC transition and release a PowerPC based Windows PC that runs old applications in emulation.
After all, they already own VirtualPC...
Also, even if they know it's not backwards compatible, they don't want to announce it now. That would hurt current sales of games for the current XBox, because a lot of people see them as an investment.
Conversely, if it is backwards compatible, this would have been the time to announce, as many people will likely defer buying XBox software over compatibility concerns
yeah but the point of the original argument was that they CPU architecture was different.
I guess that he didn't feel the need to point out the obvious--different CPU architecture means that compatibility could only be achieved by emulation, and emulation always extracts a major performance penalty, such that in practice it is only possible to adequately emulate machines multiple generations back.
Personally I can't wait for the KDE response which scolds the Firefox developers for having such huge and stupid security holes in their browser.
Uh, dude, they're already fixed
The point is Apple didn't have to write a browser from scratch, and in fact was able to take a lot of hard work and make money off of it for free.
If people shouldn't be allowed to make money off of an open source project, than shouldn't that little detail be part of the license? Of course, companies would gravitate to open source projects that don't have such restrictions. Which is probably why such restrictions weren't written into the license in the first place. Now it is beginning to sound like some people want to have their cake and eat it too..
At least Microsoft buys the freaking companies when they want to use technology they didn't develop, they aren't running around sucking off Open Source projects and sticking their label on it and strictly complying with the licensing as little as they have to as Apple has been doing with OSX...
Oh horrors! They are observing the letter of the agreement! Get out the pitchforks! The whole point of a license is you put in there what you want from the other party. You don't turn around after the fact and start screaming, "Yes, I know that you are doing everything that I asked for, but I really wanted a bunch of other stuff that I didn't bother to mention. You should have understood that! What is wrong with you?"
The whole Open Source community should have pitch forks and ready to hang Apple for what they have done to HARM and exploit the open source world, instead we find tons of Apple fans telling us how Wonderful Apple is by ripping off all these good ideas, and making them proprietary.
I don't see any harm here, and I don't see any good ideas that have been made proprietary. That's certainly not what the KHTML people have been complaining about; their only issue seems to be that they aren't benefiting as much as they hoped. How, precisely, is Apple's offering to make WebObjects open source "taking a good idea and making it proprietary?" KHTML has as many good ideas as they started with. And maybe even a few from Apple, even if Apple is not offering to hold their hands and help them figure it out.
Uh, no. Do you really imagine that KHTML was the only game in town? Apple could just as well have gone with Gecko, and at the time some criticized their choice to use KHTML as a starting point.
The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
Yes, this is clearly going well beyond the letter of the license, whether or not the KHTML people choose to take them up on it.
The real problem seems to be unrealistic expectations on the part of the KHTML guys. I can sort of see the point of the original complaint, "Everybody thinks we're getting all this help from Apple, but actually we're having to work just as hard as before!" Fair enough, but now it is just starting to look mean-spirited.
I don't care how many DRM formats the iPod supports? One is more than I need. The key point to me is that I can rip MP3's from my CDs, which I can put on whichever computers I want to and use on every player known to man. Usually, I can find albums used on CD cheaper than I can buy them from iTMS, and with better music quality to boot.
Is it too much to ask that vendors use beta versions of their own software in-house for a month before they release it? Is it too much to ask that they ship the software to a small number of beta testers before the final release in order to find those wrinkles and iron them out?
This is a common complaint heard about all kinds of products from cars to drugs. What it reflects is ignorance of the statistics of testing. By necessity, testing must be done on a pool of people that is orders of magnitude smaller than the final pool of users (a test on everybody is not a test, it is a product roll-out ). So let us say that you beta test on 1,000 people and roll the product out to a million. Then you will have about a 35% chance of missing a problem that affects 1 person in 1,000. On roll-out, each such problem translates into 1,000 people with problems.
You are right. The genetic code is arbitrary (to the extent that DNA could hypothetically encode any arbitrary information).
Yes, the DNA could encode any arbitrary information, but I'm talking about the code itself. There is no particular reason why a particular 3-letter code needs to represent the same amino acid in different animals. Indeed, it would probably be better if different organisms had completely different codes, and there is no biological reason, aside from common descent, why they couldn't.
You are right. The genetic code is arbitrary (to the extent that DNA could hypothetically encode any arbitrary information). And the Darwinian hypothesis has absolutely no explanation for how the current genetic code "evolved". At best it give poor description of how the MEDIUM (the DNA itself) may have evolved. But it gives absolutely no hint as to how the MESSAGE (the genetic code itself) came into being.
It is not hard to see how the genetic code could have evolved. Of course, living organisms do not require a genetic code; in principle, everything could be done with special purpose enzymes or ribozymes. The entire code would not have to come into being at once. Even hooking together a couple of amino acids would be useful. So one possible scenario would be a pair of ribozymes involved in synthesizing a dipeptide. Initially, they would probably associate with one another directly to catalyze the peptide bond formation, but the affinity and specificity of that interaction could be enhanced by an accessory RNA that binds to complementary regions of those ribozymes. Once the basic mechanism exists, it is easy to expand it with duplication and mutation of the ribozymes to add other amino acids. Ultimately, the specificity gets taken over by the RNA, and the ribozymes get simplified to become transfer RNAs
I just read that book recently, and while I enjoyed most of it, I found the chapter on the theories about the emergence of DNA extremely "hand wavey". The clay mineral culture idea was only presented as one possibility, but it didn't sound very convincing. If anyone has pointers to more compelling theories, I would be interested in reading them.
Check out Stuart Kauffman's The Origins of Order. This is the best book I've seen. Kauffman is a "protein-first" guy. I think that is still somewhat the minority view, but he makes a good case.
For the clay theory from the horse's mouth, check out
Cairns-Smith . I think most biologists regard theory this as sort of a long-shot.
The most popular (at least that is my impression) theory is that a self-reproducing RNA-like molecule was the earliest form of life, but I don't know of a good book...
You must not have clicked through the link. They are all either MDs or PhDs in scientific fields. Most are members of the usual scientific professional organizations. Most taught at recognizable mainstream universities before joining the ICR.
An MD or PhD does not make you a scientist, and many scientific professional organizations accept anybody who pays dues. Pretty much the only organization that means much in the US is the National Academy of Science (any Academy members on that list?). The other thing to look for is publications in major peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. For the most part, these guys don't do real science. One of the few "Intelligent Design" guys who has made real scientific contributions is Behe, and he actually believes in most of evolution; he just thinks that Earth was seeded with a designed microorganism that evolved into everything else. (This isn't a crazy idea, although I find Behe's arguments extremely unpersuasive) .
One thing not predicted by evolution: existence of exclusively homosexual behavior in animals. Does this make evolution "falsified"?
Nope, there are multiple ways this can evolve. For example:
1) A gene with different effects in different sexes: suppose a gene increased homosexuality in males, but increased fertility in females.
2) Nepotism: Suppose homosexuals provided additional support to their siblings, increasing their reproductive success.
3) Gene interactions: Suppose two genes that individually increase reproductive success result in homosexual behavior when present together.
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome.
Nope, this is a logical error known as "argument by incredulity." Evolution does not predict that you will be able to figure out retrospectively, the pathway by which something evolved.
It does, however, predict that species should have commonality in basic functions, with only minor variations. For example, finding even one species with a completely different genetic code would disprove evolution.
Evolution is non-falsifiable and therefore will not fit this definition of Science.
Find even one species with a completely different genetic code and evolution is falsified. Experiments have shown that the genetic code is arbitrary, so there is no reason why different species should have the same code, unless species evolved from one another. Indeed, it would be better for species to have different genetic codes, because they would be protected from cross-species viral transmission. Considering that the theory of natural selection predates knowledge of DNA, the discovery of genes, mutation, and the commonality (with some minor variants) of the genetic code is a remarkable confirmation of the theory's predictions. If any of these had turned out otherwise, evolution would have been out the window.