1989? Hm, wasn't that before STL? Boost? Templates? The latest version of iostream? wchar_t? Leaving off the.h?
I can't speak for jcr, but I gave up on C++ around 1992, when it became clear the Stroustrup was going to announce, with every new feature, that it was "essential" to programming in C++, hinting that the design up to that point had been half-assed, even after several major feature additions.
Template meta-programming is impressive, in the sense that it allows people to do computation using the C++ compiler as something just above a Turing machine. This was not obviously part of the design of templates, but the fact that the C++ crowd crows about this "feature" of the language just goes to show how little they care about actual language design.
Folks, life is much easier when meta-programming is done with a real, honest-to-goodness programming language, instead of gross hack of a mechanism originally intended to provide limited type genericity.
I would have evolution taught from high-quality textbooks based on real science, by teachers who understand the theory better than you do, and are able to answer real questions that students pose. Unfortunately, the religious right has managed to make most biology textbooks CRAP, but that is the a symptom of the anti-evolution disease, not a problem with evolution. If necessary, one could create a course around Darwin's Origin of Species. I linked to it because it is out of copyright, and so can be reproduced on the network for free download, and also because it is a masterpiece of scientific writing. More likely, you could find a copyrighted book like John Maynard Smith's book, or even one of Richard Dawkins' books, although I don't particularly like them.
Just like I would have schools teach algebra and chemistry and earth science and physics, and even world and U.S. history to be taught. Lots of kids get Ds in algebra, never able to comprehend it, but we don't rip math out of the curriculum.
Some kids might not get it, some teachers might not be qualified, but that doesn't mean we replace the curriculum with unfounded speculation that evolution is just one among several alternative explanations. It is the ONLY theory that has scientific support here in the 21st century.
"Weak ones dying off" and "becoming complex" are only different concepts when Weak != less complex.
Evolution suggests that complexity results because it is *adaptive*. That is, complex creatures can inhabit ecological niches that simpler ones cannot. For instance, being a predator.
Also, there is no particular reason that things become more complex. Some things become *simpler* through evolution, because they have found a particular niche where they do not need the complexity. For instance, becoming a parasite.
YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND EVOLUTION FROM READING THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION, YOU NUMBSKULL, any more than you will be ready to prove the Pythagorean theorem after reading the dictionary definition. You need to make an effort to learn BEYOND dictionary.com.
And the theory that the earth was flat was taught as fact.
When? What century? By whom?
No educated person since ancient Greek times, or even earlier, has believed the Earth was flat.
Certainly, no one since the development of modern science (around the time of Galileo), that is, no one who had the concept of "theory" in the modern sense, believed in anything other than a spherical Earth.
The idea that Christopher Columbus was fighting some sort of flat-earth orthodoxy, if that is what you are basing this on, is completely non-historical. In fact, Columbus was scoffed at because his belief in the size of the Earth and of Asia were inaccurate. Which they WERE; Columbus had no chance of making it to Asia; he barely made it over the Atlantic, not to mention that little puddle called the Pacific.
Programming in dynamic languages using a static style (which is what you are advocating: declare all types, and use an pseudo-compiler to check for type agreement) is a total loss. You are giving up the main advantages of the dynamic language, and gaining nothing.
But hey, they say you can program FORTRAN in any language.
If Google figured out a way to charge people for search at a price that could beat the ad-supported competition, that would be a huge BENEFIT for the world-wide web.
There's so much potential on the web that is held back by an inability to effectively charge even minimal fees.
In the meantime, back in the real world, Google is profitable on the basis of advertising revenue.
I must admit I do most of my serious programming in Common Lisp, which has a very different approach to OOP than C++ does. I have about 30 seconds of experience with Python, so I can't say anything useful there.
In *principle*, any tool can be given just as much intelligence as the compiler; in C++, it could trace the types of variables, by class and superclass and subclass, and reliably find calls to any particular method specific to the class that has had the change.
In dynamic languages, of course, there is a great deal of information that isn't actually specifically stated in the code, and can only be definitively found at run time.
Still, all is not lost; it is not just the language that is different, but the whole approach programmers take to their task, including naming conventions, OOP design techniques and patterns, source code organization, etc., etc.. Many times in these kind of debates, the static side will say "but the compiler finds so much for me to fix" and the dynamic side says "funny, I never noticed myself having that problem." They both manage to get work done, somehow.
It should be emphasized, as you noted previously, that all of these mathematical models are idealizations. In the messy, real world, there is no particular reason to believe that an "adaptive surface" exists as a nice, continuous mathematical object, if for no other reason than the genetic code is discrete.
Furthermore, even if there is such a surface, it is not necessarily static on the timescale of reproduction and speciation.
On the other hand, mathematical models allow for rigorous deduction, and are valuable as frameworks to analyze actual data from lab experiments (where conditions can be made hopefully identical to the model assumptions), and even from the field (where there is then room for discussion as to what likelihood there is that the model assumptions hold true).
A similar situation occurs in economics; people can rigorously analyze situations where there are, for example, two countries trading two goods and have two currencies, and two input factors, etc., and that's the entire world economy. The real world economy is made up of six billion often irrational actors, in a constantly changing environment where technology is developing, and traders are churning markets non-stop.
The problem is not with the definition, because you keep starting from a definition, and go on to say nonsensical things that you claim "disprove" the theory. You can't disprove a definition.
A scientific theory is not simply a definition, it is a way of framing a problem for analysis. The definition of "gravity" as "what makes things fall down" is not a theory. Defining the laws of motion, and a force law, and a definition of mass and inertia, and claiming these things are true for all material bodies in the universe, and determining the gravitational constant---all that is a theory of gravity.
3a in your link is the most appropriate for the discussion, but it comes from a general English dictionary; definition 1, for instance, attributes a value judgement of "improvement" which is not strictly true for biological evolution.
In any case, can you tell me from the defintion you link to on "geometry" why the Pythogarean theorem is true? No. The definition is NOT ENOUGH. You need to know the axioms, the mode of deduction, and so on, to claim to understand geometry. Just because you can read a dictionary means you understand English or science.
Algebra takes a whole book to explain. Geometry takes a whole book to explain. Trigonometry, Calculus, Chemistry, Earth Science, U.S. and world history, etc., all take long books to explain. Yet we teach those.
The earlier they start learning about the topic, the easier it will be to understand.
I assume you prefer children to grow up ignorant of everything that can't be explained in a ten-minute discussion? Sounds like a terribly low standard.
They probably don't exist for C++, because C++ users rely on the compiler.
Now, of course, compilers don't detect when you change around the order of arguments with compatible types, but you apparently don't worry about those.
Doing a search for a complete function name (and TAGS helps you use autocompletion) shouldn't have "gazillions" of false hits, unless you use cryptically short function names, or ones that are confusingly identical to variable names.
Read the damn book, dumbshit. Darwin didn't write two sentences to explain his theory, he wrote a huge book. If you don't understand it, or the modern books for the layman, it is because you are too dumb, and should consider keeping silent in evolution discussions so that you don't embarrass yourself.
What proof do you expect? A trip in a time machine to 2 billion years in the past to see exactly what happened? You admit that I have given a thorough, presumably plausible explanation of something that happened billions of years ago, all evidence for which has long ago been eaten.
There are single-celled organisms, there are loosely-congregated multicell organisms, there are fully-integrated multi-celled organisms, all of which exist, are able to function in a wide range of environments.
That, and they all contain genetic mechanisms that are virtually identical; an amazing amount of similarity even between yeast and humans. For that reason, we believe to be related.
You have given no reason to disbelieve that unicellular forms could evolve into multicellular forms, other than repeating "it has never been proven [to my satisfaction]."
Your standard of proof is too high to be satisfied by *any* theory.
I have one issue at the core of it, evolution says a single celled protazoan (from memory here) mutated/morphed/changed, through whatever process to a more complex multicelled organim.
Is this true or not true?
To get again attempt to answer your question, the way one generally answers these questions of "how did X evolve into Y" is to look for existing life forms (because they are much easier to study and understand than fossils) which are intermediate between X and Y, and hypothesize that the intermediate step in the ancient transition might resemble it.
First of all, biologists aren't exactly sure exactly what the family tree looks like back, say, 2 billion years ago, because organisms at this stage are poorly preserved in fossils. Just like it is much harder to be sure who your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was than it is to know who your uncle is.
In any case, it seems extremely likely that the earliest life forms were made of single cells, and that multicellular life arose at least once, possibly multiple independent times, from single celled life.
One way this could happen is by a mutation that reduced the tendency of the organism to split apart after mitosis. I.e. instead of splitting from one parent into two separate children, there became an increased likelihood that the parent cell would divide and stick together to create a two-celled organism, where each cell could survive equally well on its own. We would tend to call these "colonies" because you can take a colony, split it up into multiple pieces, and each piece pretty much works on its own.
This "stickiness" might not be very strong, so that at some point, say, after dividing 10 or 20 times, the colony would tend to physically break (like a soap bubble that gets too big) into two or more subcolonies.
There--now you've got multicellular colonies that reproduce by splitting into subcolonies.
The next step is for this colonial organism to develop a more controlled way of governing the colony size and the splitting process. I.e. some protein which regulates the division process would evolve into a form which would more precisely govern the size of the colony before subdividing.
Then, similar protein mechanisms can arise which cause the subdivision process to cause differentiation; instead of all identical cells, you get cells which have different functions, depending on what stage of division they are in. That allows different kinds of tissues to develop, so you can get the beginning of organs, such as in coelenterates.
I fail to see how any of this is such an insurmountable problem or implausible scenario that you think it is sufficient to reject evolution.
which are available for you to read, instead of asking confusing questions on Slashdot and expecting to get good answers from a guy calling himself "sickofthisshit".
While reading it, try adopting the mindset (temporarily, if you like) that evolution is true, and when you are confused, it is because you misunderstand rather than your having found some mistake in the theory that has somehow escaped the finest minds in biology over the last 150 years.
You are using the compiler to basically do a search through your source code.
Surely, you can find a working environment in which you can find all instances of a particular class or calls of a particular function without invoking the compiler?
Actually, Galileo was one of the first to *take* something resembling a modern scientific approach to natural questions. The idea of "non-scientific" did not exist in Galileo's time. "Contrary to church teachings" was a concept of the time, and church teachings at that time included a great deal of Aristotelian cosmology and physics.
He got into trouble for promoting (too loudly and with too much certitude) heretical views, not for being unscientific.
Evolution is supported by a huge amount of evidence. That you do not accept the overwhelming evidence is either because you are
1) unaware of the evidence, which can be found by reading books not written by anti-evolution kooks 2) are unconvinced by the evidence, which probably means you are impervious to persuasion 3) are utterly confused about what evolution is supposed to be, and unable to understand the logical arguments
I can no longer make any sense at all of what you are trying to say about multicellular organisms. Maybe I need to carefully track your responses to the other posters in the thread, but you seem to have multiple contradictory ideas about how multicellular life exists and could come into being.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of biologists who firmly believe in evolution because of the scientific evidence. There is not some kind of conspiracy trying to push evolution while secretly believing it to be false. There are just some nutcases who can't accept that evolution *might* be true, and therefore must spend a huge amount of effort insisting that it *isn't* true, no amount of evidence withstanding.
Darwin never recanted his theory on his deathbed. That's a complete falsehood, and exhibits the kind of intellectual integrity you anti-evolution types will stoop to.
The agenda is on the side of those who refuse to believe evolution no matter how much evidence is provided, and would rather believe in something that has no evidence, and teach it to children although it is worthless as science.
Believing in evolution has very little to do with one's moral, ethical, or religious agenda. It has much more to do with an open, scholarly mind seeing nature in its vast complexity, and trying scientifically to understand the principles that underlie it, as opposed to attributing various agendas to people who hold beliefs for scientific reasons.
Your programming example is totally irrelevant, because that is not at all how evolution works.
Furthermore, your being a blockhead means, in part, you are apparently incapable of recognizing proof when you see it. You need to be able to understand the terms being discussed to understand the proof.
It is impossible to prove 2+2=4 to someone who doesn't understand what "2" means or "+" means or "=" means, or has some crazy definition, where numbers go 1,5,18,2,4,3,...
You obviously have some bizarre ideas on what evolution and multicellular life and genetics are all about. Perhaps you are stupid, perhaps you are ignorant, I don't know. Perhaps your inability to understand evolution theory is a problem with YOU not with the theory.
Do you know what "viable" means? You might as well call my fingernail clippings "organisms" that "reproduce" because there are more and more of them everytime I cut my nails. Gametes exist so that adult organisms can exchange genetic material to produce children. They do not have an independent existence. More importantly, to address your last sentence, the sperm and egg each have only *half* the genetic material needed to make an organism. They combine to make something just as complex as a single cell of one of the parent organisms. There is no net increase in "complexity" caused by reproduction.
What I was trying to contradict was your apparent counterargument, which perhaps you meant to withdraw with your statement "it was a logical error," against multicellular life forms ever being able to evolve from single-celled life forms. Your growth from a fertilized egg is a completely obvious example that there is no essential biological barrier to single cells developing into multicellular organisms with NO INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY. There is no barrier, hence nothing evolution had to overcome.
No, you are absolutely and completely wrong in saying these balance out.
1) my "assuming god didn't do anything" is the same as assuming nothing did anything. I place no requirements at all on the nature of God's interaction, because I claim there is none. I do not depend on the truth or falsity of the statement. It is *not* an assumption at all! If you cannot grasp this, you are lost to all logical thought.
2) More importantly, your assuming God put everything together in exactly the right way does NOTHING to change the predictions of the theory. Just scratch it completely out, and all the observations and predictions stay absolutely the same. It is totally superfluous, and thus has no motivation to be included. This is the famous Ockham's razor.
There is no essential philosophical distinction between what scientists call a law and a theory.
The facts are that (heavier-than-air) things fall to the ground when they are dropped, the Earth goes around the sun, the Moon goes around the Earth, etc., etc.
The theory that attempts to describe these motions is a theory of gravity. Newton had one. Part of that is the inverse-square formula for gravitational force. The currently favored theory is Einstein's general theory of relativity. At some point, some physicists hope to have developed string theory to the point where they can supplant Einstein's theory with one fully integrated with quantum theory.
We could conceive of alternative theories such as "All matter seeks the center of the universe" or "Angels push the planets around the solar system." These are less predictive than even Newton's theory, and certainly cannot form a successful basis for predicting the motion of spacecraft, and so on, so we choose not to adopt these.
In biology, the facts are that almost all creatures, both those alive today, and those seen in fossils, can be classified into groups that appear to have arisen from common descent; that forms preserved in fossils generally appear different from forms preserved earlier or later, or found today; that genetic material is the basis by which creatures reproduce to form creatures that share many of the qualities of their parents; that most species reproduce at a rate far larger than can survive to future reproductive success, and so on and so on.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is a concept that makes sense of all of these things, without depending on "God did it just so", and there is essentially no biological evidence that the theory is not correct.
There is no essential difference between the two theories; nothing that makes one more of a "LAW" and one "only" a "THEORY." To try to denigrate evolution and elevate gravitation is pure sophistry.
Slashdot Mirror
1989? Hm, wasn't that before STL? Boost? Templates? The latest version of iostream? wchar_t? Leaving off the .h?
I can't speak for jcr, but I gave up on C++ around 1992, when it became clear the Stroustrup was going to announce, with every new feature, that it was "essential" to programming in C++, hinting that the design up to that point had been half-assed, even after several major feature additions.
Template meta-programming is impressive, in the sense that it allows people to do computation using the C++ compiler as something just above a Turing machine. This was not obviously part of the design of templates, but the fact that the C++ crowd crows about this "feature" of the language just goes to show how little they care about actual language design.
Folks, life is much easier when meta-programming is done with a real, honest-to-goodness programming language, instead of gross hack of a mechanism originally intended to provide limited type genericity.
I would have evolution taught from high-quality textbooks based on real science, by teachers who understand the theory better than you do, and are able to answer real questions that students pose. Unfortunately, the religious right has managed to make most biology textbooks CRAP, but that is the a symptom of the anti-evolution disease, not a problem with evolution. If necessary, one could create a course around Darwin's Origin of Species. I linked to it because it is out of copyright, and so can be reproduced on the network for free download, and also because it is a masterpiece of scientific writing. More likely, you could find a copyrighted book like John Maynard Smith's book, or even one of Richard Dawkins' books, although I don't particularly like them.
Just like I would have schools teach algebra and chemistry and earth science and physics, and even world and U.S. history to be taught. Lots of kids get Ds in algebra, never able to comprehend it, but we don't rip math out of the curriculum.
Some kids might not get it, some teachers might not be qualified, but that doesn't mean we replace the curriculum with unfounded speculation that evolution is just one among several alternative explanations. It is the ONLY theory that has scientific support here in the 21st century.
"Weak ones dying off" and "becoming complex" are only different concepts when Weak != less complex.
s _darwin/origin_of_species/ is one place where you can find it, or that John Maynard Smith text that I cited before.
Evolution suggests that complexity results because it is *adaptive*. That is, complex creatures can inhabit ecological niches that simpler ones cannot. For instance, being a predator.
Also, there is no particular reason that things become more complex. Some things become *simpler* through evolution, because they have found a particular niche where they do not need the complexity. For instance, becoming a parasite.
For the Nth time, the basis of evolution is not gleaned from a general English dictionary. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charle
YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND EVOLUTION FROM READING THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION, YOU NUMBSKULL, any more than you will be ready to prove the Pythagorean theorem after reading the dictionary definition. You need to make an effort to learn BEYOND dictionary.com.
And the theory that the earth was flat was taught as fact.
When? What century? By whom?
No educated person since ancient Greek times, or even earlier, has believed the Earth was flat.
Certainly, no one since the development of modern science (around the time of Galileo), that is, no one who had the concept of "theory" in the modern sense, believed in anything other than a spherical Earth.
The idea that Christopher Columbus was fighting some sort of flat-earth orthodoxy, if that is what you are basing this on, is completely non-historical. In fact, Columbus was scoffed at because his belief in the size of the Earth and of Asia were inaccurate. Which they WERE; Columbus had no chance of making it to Asia; he barely made it over the Atlantic, not to mention that little puddle called the Pacific.
Is this supposed to be a joke?
Programming in dynamic languages using a static style (which is what you are advocating: declare all types, and use an pseudo-compiler to check for type agreement) is a total loss. You are giving up the main advantages of the dynamic language, and gaining nothing.
But hey, they say you can program FORTRAN in any language.
If Google figured out a way to charge people for search at a price that could beat the ad-supported competition, that would be a huge BENEFIT for the world-wide web.
There's so much potential on the web that is held back by an inability to effectively charge even minimal fees.
In the meantime, back in the real world, Google is profitable on the basis of advertising revenue.
I must admit I do most of my serious programming in Common Lisp, which has a very different approach to OOP than C++ does. I have about 30 seconds of experience with Python, so I can't say anything useful there.
In *principle*, any tool can be given just as much intelligence as the compiler; in C++, it could trace the types of variables, by class and superclass and subclass, and reliably find calls to any particular method specific to the class that has had the change.
In dynamic languages, of course, there is a great deal of information that isn't actually specifically stated in the code, and can only be definitively found at run time.
Still, all is not lost; it is not just the language that is different, but the whole approach programmers take to their task, including naming conventions, OOP design techniques and patterns, source code organization, etc., etc.. Many times in these kind of debates, the static side will say "but the compiler finds so much for me to fix" and the dynamic side says "funny, I never noticed myself having that problem." They both manage to get work done, somehow.
It should be emphasized, as you noted previously, that all of these mathematical models are idealizations. In the messy, real world, there is no particular reason to believe that an "adaptive surface" exists as a nice, continuous mathematical object, if for no other reason than the genetic code is discrete.
Furthermore, even if there is such a surface, it is not necessarily static on the timescale of reproduction and speciation.
On the other hand, mathematical models allow for rigorous deduction, and are valuable as frameworks to analyze actual data from lab experiments (where conditions can be made hopefully identical to the model assumptions), and even from the field (where there is then room for discussion as to what likelihood there is that the model assumptions hold true).
A similar situation occurs in economics; people can rigorously analyze situations where there are, for example, two countries trading two goods and have two currencies, and two input factors, etc., and that's the entire world economy. The real world economy is made up of six billion often irrational actors, in a constantly changing environment where technology is developing, and traders are churning markets non-stop.
The problem is not with the definition, because you keep starting from a definition, and go on to say nonsensical things that you claim "disprove" the theory. You can't disprove a definition.
A scientific theory is not simply a definition, it is a way of framing a problem for analysis. The definition of "gravity" as "what makes things fall down" is not a theory. Defining the laws of motion, and a force law, and a definition of mass and inertia, and claiming these things are true for all material bodies in the universe, and determining the gravitational constant---all that is a theory of gravity.
3a in your link is the most appropriate for the discussion, but it comes from a general English dictionary; definition 1, for instance, attributes a value judgement of "improvement" which is not strictly true for biological evolution.
In any case, can you tell me from the defintion you link to on "geometry" why the Pythogarean theorem is true? No. The definition is NOT ENOUGH. You need to know the axioms, the mode of deduction, and so on, to claim to understand geometry. Just because you can read a dictionary means you understand English or science.
Algebra takes a whole book to explain. Geometry takes a whole book to explain. Trigonometry, Calculus, Chemistry, Earth Science, U.S. and world history, etc., all take long books to explain. Yet we teach those.
The earlier they start learning about the topic, the easier it will be to understand.
I assume you prefer children to grow up ignorant of everything that can't be explained in a ten-minute discussion? Sounds like a terribly low standard.
They probably don't exist for C++, because C++ users rely on the compiler.
Now, of course, compilers don't detect when you change around the order of arguments with compatible types, but you apparently don't worry about those.
Doing a search for a complete function name (and TAGS helps you use autocompletion) shouldn't have "gazillions" of false hits, unless you use cryptically short function names, or ones that are confusingly identical to variable names.
Read the damn book, dumbshit. Darwin didn't write two sentences to explain his theory, he wrote a huge book. If you don't understand it, or the modern books for the layman, it is because you are too dumb, and should consider keeping silent in evolution discussions so that you don't embarrass yourself.
What proof do you expect? A trip in a time machine to 2 billion years in the past to see exactly what happened? You admit that I have given a thorough, presumably plausible explanation of something that happened billions of years ago, all evidence for which has long ago been eaten.
There are single-celled organisms, there are loosely-congregated multicell organisms, there are fully-integrated multi-celled organisms, all of which exist, are able to function in a wide range of environments.
That, and they all contain genetic mechanisms that are virtually identical; an amazing amount of similarity even between yeast and humans. For that reason, we believe to be related.
You have given no reason to disbelieve that unicellular forms could evolve into multicellular forms, other than repeating "it has never been proven [to my satisfaction]."
Your standard of proof is too high to be satisfied by *any* theory.
I have one issue at the core of it, evolution says a single celled protazoan (from memory here) mutated/morphed/changed, through whatever process to a more complex multicelled organim.
o 0100.htm
Is this true or not true?
To get again attempt to answer your question, the way one generally answers these questions of "how did X evolve into Y" is to look for existing life forms (because they are much easier to study and understand than fossils) which are intermediate between X and Y, and hypothesize that the intermediate step in the ancient transition might resemble it.
First of all, biologists aren't exactly sure exactly what the family tree looks like back, say, 2 billion years ago, because organisms at this stage are poorly preserved in fossils. Just like it is much harder to be sure who your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was than it is to know who your uncle is.
In any case, it seems extremely likely that the earliest life forms were made of single cells, and that multicellular life arose at least once, possibly multiple independent times, from single celled life.
One way this could happen is by a mutation that reduced the tendency of the organism to split apart after mitosis. I.e. instead of splitting from one parent into two separate children, there became an increased likelihood that the parent cell would divide and stick together to create a two-celled organism, where each cell could survive equally well on its own. We would tend to call these "colonies" because you can take a colony, split it up into multiple pieces, and each piece pretty much works on its own.
This "stickiness" might not be very strong, so that at some point, say, after dividing 10 or 20 times, the colony would tend to physically break (like a soap bubble that gets too big) into two or more subcolonies.
There--now you've got multicellular colonies that reproduce by splitting into subcolonies.
Something like this: http://www.micrographia.com/specbiol/alg/colo/col
The next step is for this colonial organism to develop a more controlled way of governing the colony size and the splitting process. I.e. some protein which regulates the division process would evolve into a form which would more precisely govern the size of the colony before subdividing.
Then, similar protein mechanisms can arise which cause the subdivision process to cause differentiation; instead of all identical cells, you get cells which have different functions, depending on what stage of division they are in. That allows different kinds of tissues to develop, so you can get the beginning of organs, such as in coelenterates.
I fail to see how any of this is such an insurmountable problem or implausible scenario that you think it is sufficient to reject evolution.
Apparently you are less educable than the typical grade schooler.
1 451280/qid=1135295014/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl 14/104-6105266-3267137?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
There are whole goddamn books, such as John Maynard Smith's excellent book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052
which are available for you to read, instead of asking confusing questions on Slashdot and expecting to get good answers from a guy calling himself "sickofthisshit".
While reading it, try adopting the mindset (temporarily, if you like) that evolution is true, and when you are confused, it is because you misunderstand rather than your having found some mistake in the theory that has somehow escaped the finest minds in biology over the last 150 years.
You are using the compiler to basically do a search through your source code.
Surely, you can find a working environment in which you can find all instances of a particular class or calls of a particular function without invoking the compiler?
Actually, Galileo was one of the first to *take* something resembling a modern scientific approach to natural questions. The idea of "non-scientific" did not exist in Galileo's time. "Contrary to church teachings" was a concept of the time, and church teachings at that time included a great deal of Aristotelian cosmology and physics.
He got into trouble for promoting (too loudly and with too much certitude) heretical views, not for being unscientific.
You have just proved you do not understand the word "viable."
If you truly are so uninformed, or stupid, it is pointless to believe you will ever understand evolution or anything else in biology.
Evolution is supported by a huge amount of evidence. That you do not accept the overwhelming evidence is either because you are
1) unaware of the evidence, which can be found by reading books not written by anti-evolution kooks
2) are unconvinced by the evidence, which probably means you are impervious to persuasion
3) are utterly confused about what evolution is supposed to be, and unable to understand the logical arguments
I can no longer make any sense at all of what you are trying to say about multicellular organisms. Maybe I need to carefully track your responses to the other posters in the thread, but you seem to have multiple contradictory ideas about how multicellular life exists and could come into being.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of biologists who firmly believe in evolution because of the scientific evidence. There is not some kind of conspiracy trying to push evolution while secretly believing it to be false. There are just some nutcases who can't accept that evolution *might* be true, and therefore must spend a huge amount of effort insisting that it *isn't* true, no amount of evidence withstanding.
Darwin never recanted his theory on his deathbed. That's a complete falsehood, and exhibits the kind of intellectual integrity you anti-evolution types will stoop to.
The agenda is on the side of those who refuse to believe evolution no matter how much evidence is provided, and would rather believe in something that has no evidence, and teach it to children although it is worthless as science.
Believing in evolution has very little to do with one's moral, ethical, or religious agenda. It has much more to do with an open, scholarly mind seeing nature in its vast complexity, and trying scientifically to understand the principles that underlie it, as opposed to attributing various agendas to people who hold beliefs for scientific reasons.
Your programming example is totally irrelevant, because that is not at all how evolution works.
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Furthermore, your being a blockhead means, in part, you are apparently incapable of recognizing proof when you see it. You need to be able to understand the terms being discussed to understand the proof.
It is impossible to prove 2+2=4 to someone who doesn't understand what "2" means or "+" means or "=" means, or has some crazy definition, where numbers go 1,5,18,2,4,3,
You obviously have some bizarre ideas on what evolution and multicellular life and genetics are all about. Perhaps you are stupid, perhaps you are ignorant, I don't know. Perhaps your inability to understand evolution theory is a problem with YOU not with the theory.
You are being a complete blockhead.
Do you know what "viable" means? You might as well call my fingernail clippings "organisms" that "reproduce" because there are more and more of them everytime I cut my nails. Gametes exist so that adult organisms can exchange genetic material to produce children. They do not have an independent existence. More importantly, to address your last sentence, the sperm and egg each have only *half* the genetic material needed to make an organism. They combine to make something just as complex as a single cell of one of the parent organisms. There is no net increase in "complexity" caused by reproduction.
What I was trying to contradict was your apparent counterargument, which perhaps you meant to withdraw with your statement "it was a logical error," against multicellular life forms ever being able to evolve from single-celled life forms. Your growth from a fertilized egg is a completely obvious example that there is no essential biological barrier to single cells developing into multicellular organisms with NO INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY. There is no barrier, hence nothing evolution had to overcome.
No, you are absolutely and completely wrong in saying these balance out.
1) my "assuming god didn't do anything" is the same as assuming nothing did anything. I place no requirements at all on the nature of God's interaction, because I claim there is none. I do not depend on the truth or falsity of the statement. It is *not* an assumption at all! If you cannot grasp this, you are lost to all logical thought.
2) More importantly, your assuming God put everything together in exactly the right way does NOTHING to change the predictions of the theory. Just scratch it completely out, and all the observations and predictions stay absolutely the same. It is totally superfluous, and thus has no motivation to be included. This is the famous Ockham's razor.
There is no essential philosophical distinction between what scientists call a law and a theory.
The facts are that (heavier-than-air) things fall to the ground when they are dropped, the Earth goes around the sun, the Moon goes around the Earth, etc., etc.
The theory that attempts to describe these motions is a theory of gravity. Newton had one. Part of that is the inverse-square formula for gravitational force. The currently favored theory is Einstein's general theory of relativity. At some point, some physicists hope to have developed string theory to the point where they can supplant Einstein's theory with one fully integrated with quantum theory.
We could conceive of alternative theories such as "All matter seeks the center of the universe" or "Angels push the planets around the solar system." These are less predictive than even Newton's theory, and certainly cannot form a successful basis for predicting the motion of spacecraft, and so on, so we choose not to adopt these.
In biology, the facts are that almost all creatures, both those alive today, and those seen in fossils, can be classified into groups that appear to have arisen from common descent; that forms preserved in fossils generally appear different from forms preserved earlier or later, or found today; that genetic material is the basis by which creatures reproduce to form creatures that share many of the qualities of their parents; that most species reproduce at a rate far larger than can survive to future reproductive success, and so on and so on.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is a concept that makes sense of all of these things, without depending on "God did it just so", and there is essentially no biological evidence that the theory is not correct.
There is no essential difference between the two theories; nothing that makes one more of a "LAW" and one "only" a "THEORY." To try to denigrate evolution and elevate gravitation is pure sophistry.