The "living fossil" claim is a rather dangerous one, and a sloppy use of language to my mind. We have organisms who certainly look like their distant ancestors tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, but it is highly unlikely that they are truly unchanged at a molecular level.
As I say elsewhere, no humanity's age is much more than 6,000 years. Even just limiting it to modern H. sapiens, we're somewhere around 150k to 200k years old now.
I gotta ask, how is it that you can, in the face of the overwhelming body of evidence, insist that humans have only been around 6000 years? Is your faith that weak that it could be ruined if you admitted to yourself that Genesis is not a science text and cannot rationally be read literally?
It's Saturn sized with density of water. It's a friggin' gas giant. It has no surface, unless you count the super-dense core that's probably hydrogen in a metallic state.
And humanity has been around a lot longer than 6,000 years. Depending on how you define human, can be a few million, or about 900k years for genus Homo or somewhere around 150k for morphologically modern humans or somewhere between 90k and 60k years for humans that appear to behaviorially identical to us. 6k years no longer even reasonably measures the beginning of civilization, which has been pushed back to somewhere between 8k and 9k years ago, relatively soon after the end of the last ice age.
Sorry pal, every single drop of research done over the last two hundred years has absolute and completely obliterated any notion of humans only being around for 6,000 years. It's bullcrap based solely on Bibliolatric readings of Genesis. A literal reading of Genesis is a faerie tale that not even most of the major churches will back up.
Huh? Mutations are errors in transcription. You get that in any replication system. In digital replication systems, of course, you have CRC checks and the like which basically tell a protocol "resend last block". DNA and RNA transcription do not have that luxury, because the encoding simply works on what fits. While there is some capacity for error correction, it is nowhere near as reliable as, say, Kermit, zmodem or TCP/IP, and even with these I've still seen corruption in data streams. It's a fact of life (pun partially intended) in a universe governed by entropy.
What's more, transcription errors are only one form of mutation. There's neutral drift, which may in fact be as much a force in molecular evolution as out-and-out screw ups. Not to mention my favorite evidence for evolution, endogenous retroviral insertions, which allow for horizontal gene transfer in more complex eukaryotic organisms.
At any rate, nothing miraculous at all about mutations. The miracle would be finding a perfect replication system. Living organisms certainly have not.
Years ago when I was hanging around talk.origins, I remember the famous observation that if radioactive decay happened at the levels YECs claimed, the Earth would be molten due to the sheer amount energy being released.
Decay rates are well understood, and providing a researcher understands what external factors can influence isotope decay rates (which physicists who measure decay rates for chronological purposes certainly can), it is a powerful tool for dating.
But as others observed, the first evidence that the Earth and life on it were much older than 6,000 years came in the 18th century, though back then they thought it was merely millions of years old, and it took the better part of a century to finally figure out that the Earth was billions of years old. Still, the fact remains that for well over two hundred years, scientists have known that the Earth is much much older than 6,000 years. Radiometric dating allowed us to accurately determine the ages of various geological features (including fossils), but it wasn't necessary for the initial determination that a literal reading of Genesis was pure crap.
Years ago I worked for an employment center that had a public-use phone for job hunting and the like. Some people would abuse it to phone the girlfriends, make drug deals and so on. The price of a new phone system that could be monitored was looked at it, and while not steep, there were some privacy concern. Finally, someone had the bright idea and put a sign over the phone "All Phone Calls Are Monitored And Recorded", and almost overnight the problem all but disappeared.
It's the Big Brother theory of surveillance. Your surveillance apparatus doesn't have to be perfect or even near-perfect. All that matters is that everyone thinks your surveillance is near-perfect.
We have no first hand accounts of people who talked to Jesus. The Gospels were written decades after his death, and since they largely seemed to have cribbed off of one another, they're highly questionable as accurate accounts. The only actual contemporary account of Jesus from an outside source is Josephus, and once you rip out the later additions, Josephus doesn't say much more than that there was a holy man with a group of followers named Jesus who was put to death by the Romans.
On the other hand, fossils and molecular data paint very clear pictures of previous epochs, of how life evolved from prokaryotic organisms through to the vast assemblage of life that exists today. We can tell fairly accurate how closely or distantly related two organisms are, we can, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, even date when the common ancestor of two populations may have lived.
Simply put, the evidence for evolution and common descent dwarfs the evidence for Jesus. Biblical scholars should be so lucky as to have a hundredth of the the amount of data points that exist for evolution.
Evolution is taught as a concept things changing but it makes the grand claim of things improving upon themselves to do it, by gaining complexity and self forming into "higher" life forms
Maybe your problem is you had a bad biology teacher, because what you just wrote there would be rejected by every single biologist over the last 80 or 90 years. No one in the better part of a century has thought that evolution has a direction. Evolution, simply put, is the change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. It can lead to more complexity, the same level of complexity or less complexity. Features can evolve, can change, can even be lost and evolve again.
I'm standing by my other comments. You've shown sufficient ignorance of biology and evolution that I have to state quite openly that you have never ever ever ever ever ever read a book by biologists on evolution. Even reading one of the layman books like Dawkins' would have corrected you of the above error, probably in the first chapter of the The Blind Watchmaker.
With that in mind, I have to ask you, what makes you think you have any business lecturing anybody on a theory that you know absolutely nothing about? What made you so arrogant?
Yes, C14 contradicts it, as does every other form of radioisotope dating, not to mention every other single bit of data relating to humanity's time on the planet. C14 is only good for, as I recall, up to somewhere around 30,000 years ago.
What the f--- does C14 dating have to do with anything? It's like your vomiting up every crappy Creationist bit of handwaving you've ever read.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you've never actually read anything on evolution by an actual biologist. You're just posting AIG and ICR nonsense.
The problem is that life doesn't have a nice clean definition. In a way, the life concept is like the species concept, you can create definitions that apply to most situations and admit that there are always outliers that don't fit to the definitions you've produced, or create definitions so broad that you end up with little enough descriptive power.
Would we have called the first proto-cells that were say, simply a lipid shell, life? Probably not. They couldn't self-replicate, their heredity system was probably just the gross physical properties of the cells themselves, and yet, indirectly, they could replicate, they could, in some very primitive way, metabolize. Not life as we know it, but closer to it than crystals.
Second of all, no one thinks primitive cells were at all like the cells we see today, or for the last 3.5 to 3.8 billion years. This is like insisting that a Model T isn't an automobile because it doesn't have fuel injection, or ENIAC wasn't a computer because it didn't have USB ports and a hard drive.
Third, evolution happened. As much as anything in science is a fact, evolution is a fact.
I've read of some theories that suggests that the earliest kinds of life, before RNA or DNA, may not have self-replicated as we understand it, but may have used external forces, like wave action or turbidity to physically cause cell division. You really have to stretch your mind here and get past a lot of the assumptions we've built up because we live in a world with fully-evolved life forms.
Not even researchers into organic abiogenesis think life started with DNA. In fact, I'd say from my understanding of current theories, DNA came along relatively late in the game in the evolution towards life, and that earlier proto-organisms may have had a much simpler heredity system. Even the "RNA world" hypothesis doesn't start with RNA.
Unless, of course, that movie is I, Robot. I can dig Will Smith in most action nonsense films, and sometimes he even shows some chops (Ali comes to mind), but I, Robot was a horrible movie. They would have been better off sticking to the book.
Maybe, or maybe, the IE team, like the Firefox team, is awfully tired of their software being used as a vector for Flash's seemingly infinite supply of vulnerabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
The "living fossil" claim is a rather dangerous one, and a sloppy use of language to my mind. We have organisms who certainly look like their distant ancestors tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, but it is highly unlikely that they are truly unchanged at a molecular level.
As I say elsewhere, no humanity's age is much more than 6,000 years. Even just limiting it to modern H. sapiens, we're somewhere around 150k to 200k years old now.
I gotta ask, how is it that you can, in the face of the overwhelming body of evidence, insist that humans have only been around 6000 years? Is your faith that weak that it could be ruined if you admitted to yourself that Genesis is not a science text and cannot rationally be read literally?
It's Saturn sized with density of water. It's a friggin' gas giant. It has no surface, unless you count the super-dense core that's probably hydrogen in a metallic state.
And humanity has been around a lot longer than 6,000 years. Depending on how you define human, can be a few million, or about 900k years for genus Homo or somewhere around 150k for morphologically modern humans or somewhere between 90k and 60k years for humans that appear to behaviorially identical to us. 6k years no longer even reasonably measures the beginning of civilization, which has been pushed back to somewhere between 8k and 9k years ago, relatively soon after the end of the last ice age.
Sorry pal, every single drop of research done over the last two hundred years has absolute and completely obliterated any notion of humans only being around for 6,000 years. It's bullcrap based solely on Bibliolatric readings of Genesis. A literal reading of Genesis is a faerie tale that not even most of the major churches will back up.
But it does have to be on land...
Nah, the cause of Ringworld's fall was Larry Niven's senility.
Huh? Mutations are errors in transcription. You get that in any replication system. In digital replication systems, of course, you have CRC checks and the like which basically tell a protocol "resend last block". DNA and RNA transcription do not have that luxury, because the encoding simply works on what fits. While there is some capacity for error correction, it is nowhere near as reliable as, say, Kermit, zmodem or TCP/IP, and even with these I've still seen corruption in data streams. It's a fact of life (pun partially intended) in a universe governed by entropy.
What's more, transcription errors are only one form of mutation. There's neutral drift, which may in fact be as much a force in molecular evolution as out-and-out screw ups. Not to mention my favorite evidence for evolution, endogenous retroviral insertions, which allow for horizontal gene transfer in more complex eukaryotic organisms.
At any rate, nothing miraculous at all about mutations. The miracle would be finding a perfect replication system. Living organisms certainly have not.
Years ago when I was hanging around talk.origins, I remember the famous observation that if radioactive decay happened at the levels YECs claimed, the Earth would be molten due to the sheer amount energy being released.
Decay rates are well understood, and providing a researcher understands what external factors can influence isotope decay rates (which physicists who measure decay rates for chronological purposes certainly can), it is a powerful tool for dating.
But as others observed, the first evidence that the Earth and life on it were much older than 6,000 years came in the 18th century, though back then they thought it was merely millions of years old, and it took the better part of a century to finally figure out that the Earth was billions of years old. Still, the fact remains that for well over two hundred years, scientists have known that the Earth is much much older than 6,000 years. Radiometric dating allowed us to accurately determine the ages of various geological features (including fossils), but it wasn't necessary for the initial determination that a literal reading of Genesis was pure crap.
Ignoring for the moment horizontal gene transfer, what do you call prokaryote reproduction, if not self-replication?
Years ago I worked for an employment center that had a public-use phone for job hunting and the like. Some people would abuse it to phone the girlfriends, make drug deals and so on. The price of a new phone system that could be monitored was looked at it, and while not steep, there were some privacy concern. Finally, someone had the bright idea and put a sign over the phone "All Phone Calls Are Monitored And Recorded", and almost overnight the problem all but disappeared.
It's the Big Brother theory of surveillance. Your surveillance apparatus doesn't have to be perfect or even near-perfect. All that matters is that everyone thinks your surveillance is near-perfect.
We have no first hand accounts of people who talked to Jesus. The Gospels were written decades after his death, and since they largely seemed to have cribbed off of one another, they're highly questionable as accurate accounts. The only actual contemporary account of Jesus from an outside source is Josephus, and once you rip out the later additions, Josephus doesn't say much more than that there was a holy man with a group of followers named Jesus who was put to death by the Romans.
On the other hand, fossils and molecular data paint very clear pictures of previous epochs, of how life evolved from prokaryotic organisms through to the vast assemblage of life that exists today. We can tell fairly accurate how closely or distantly related two organisms are, we can, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, even date when the common ancestor of two populations may have lived.
Simply put, the evidence for evolution and common descent dwarfs the evidence for Jesus. Biblical scholars should be so lucky as to have a hundredth of the the amount of data points that exist for evolution.
Maybe your problem is you had a bad biology teacher, because what you just wrote there would be rejected by every single biologist over the last 80 or 90 years. No one in the better part of a century has thought that evolution has a direction. Evolution, simply put, is the change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. It can lead to more complexity, the same level of complexity or less complexity. Features can evolve, can change, can even be lost and evolve again.
I'm standing by my other comments. You've shown sufficient ignorance of biology and evolution that I have to state quite openly that you have never ever ever ever ever ever read a book by biologists on evolution. Even reading one of the layman books like Dawkins' would have corrected you of the above error, probably in the first chapter of the The Blind Watchmaker.
With that in mind, I have to ask you, what makes you think you have any business lecturing anybody on a theory that you know absolutely nothing about? What made you so arrogant?
Yes, C14 contradicts it, as does every other form of radioisotope dating, not to mention every other single bit of data relating to humanity's time on the planet. C14 is only good for, as I recall, up to somewhere around 30,000 years ago.
I don't care what the rationale is, the death of Flash would be a good thing.
What the f--- does C14 dating have to do with anything? It's like your vomiting up every crappy Creationist bit of handwaving you've ever read.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you've never actually read anything on evolution by an actual biologist. You're just posting AIG and ICR nonsense.
The problem is that life doesn't have a nice clean definition. In a way, the life concept is like the species concept, you can create definitions that apply to most situations and admit that there are always outliers that don't fit to the definitions you've produced, or create definitions so broad that you end up with little enough descriptive power.
Would we have called the first proto-cells that were say, simply a lipid shell, life? Probably not. They couldn't self-replicate, their heredity system was probably just the gross physical properties of the cells themselves, and yet, indirectly, they could replicate, they could, in some very primitive way, metabolize. Not life as we know it, but closer to it than crystals.
First of all, your last sentence is bizarre.
Second of all, no one thinks primitive cells were at all like the cells we see today, or for the last 3.5 to 3.8 billion years. This is like insisting that a Model T isn't an automobile because it doesn't have fuel injection, or ENIAC wasn't a computer because it didn't have USB ports and a hard drive.
Third, evolution happened. As much as anything in science is a fact, evolution is a fact.
I've read of some theories that suggests that the earliest kinds of life, before RNA or DNA, may not have self-replicated as we understand it, but may have used external forces, like wave action or turbidity to physically cause cell division. You really have to stretch your mind here and get past a lot of the assumptions we've built up because we live in a world with fully-evolved life forms.
Not even researchers into organic abiogenesis think life started with DNA. In fact, I'd say from my understanding of current theories, DNA came along relatively late in the game in the evolution towards life, and that earlier proto-organisms may have had a much simpler heredity system. Even the "RNA world" hypothesis doesn't start with RNA.
Unless, of course, that movie is I, Robot. I can dig Will Smith in most action nonsense films, and sometimes he even shows some chops (Ali comes to mind), but I, Robot was a horrible movie. They would have been better off sticking to the book.
Maybe, or maybe, the IE team, like the Firefox team, is awfully tired of their software being used as a vector for Flash's seemingly infinite supply of vulnerabilities.
Better cross-platform compatibility. Mono just plain sucks.
Or maybe that that they want portability that isn't reliant on rubbish like Mono.
Okay, what functionality would that be?
I gather he drank the kool-aid when he went through the door. I'm halfway through the interview and its basically ".NET is better than Java"