Religions don't appear to be common at all in present species, though there are strong hints for the presence of them in Neanderthals. And, of course, homo sapiens sapiens. Granted, there's not a lot of data points in one of those subsets but, taking all things into consideration, there are strong hints that religions are memetic contructs.;p A bit out of scope of genetics and mutations (as commonly understood, regarding genes; even if there might be some that contributed to particular structure of society
The greatest miracle would be if God designed a universe where natural selection could result in such wonders. I for one believe that is exactly what happened.
Although Nature is random and haphazard in its designs, it still has to follow the laws of physics. So large structures like trees, termite hills, and basalt cliffs are structured to be very strong.
Structures that must hold their form like honeycombs and coral reefs have interesting geometric structures.
And things that must be flexible, lightweight, and resistant to breakage like spider webs use multiple methods of increasing tensile strength.
If they didn't, physics would force them to break. So for each iteration of Nature, you get some strong and some weak structures, but due to the constant barrage of forces only the most adaptable survive. If genetically controlled, these traits get passed down to subsequent generations.
I wouldn't catgeorize nature as random or haphazard. Although in quantum mechanics
particle movements are intrisically random, as soon as you get to thermodynamically
significant ammounts of 'stuff'', physics acts very regularly. Even for non-living things,
nature is often produces very regularly and mathematically precise objects from the
spiral arms of a galaxy to the pattern of snowflakes.
In other words, we can make use of the fruits of billions of machine-hours on a huge supercomputer that's been running Evolution software for a long time. The results are quite solid, having been run through the equivalent of millions of test-driven development [wikipedia.org] cycles. There's an environment that will only give a passing result to designs which meet its strict criteria, and millions of designs thrown at it, with only a small number passing. And then the tests change, with new designs having to pass the new
The hexagonal "honeycomb" structure of basalt cliffs gives it resistance to landslides.
That's not what I see when I look at a columnar basalt structure. Instead I see an avenue for more rapid destruction than would be present in a monolithic structure that didn't fracture that way. Water and ice can penetrate through these flaws in the structure and break it up.
Consider the time required to create either of those "solutions" though. The basalt quickly solidifies into its columnar shape while granite may take many multiple times that amount to become monolithic in the same scope.
Are there points of weakness in columnar basalt? Undoubtedly. But the rapid development and reasonable lifespan of these is a pretty good tradeoff.
See, it's like this: I see strong structures like basalt columns as volkswagons, which as you know, are arch-shaped and therefore strong. Weak structures on the other hand, such as grasses, are more like smart cars: easily crushed and, well, no where to go from here. I got nothin'. Sorry. Ask BadAnalogyGuy.
Regardless of ones theological views i've always found the field of biomimetics fascinating. Looking at systems in the world around us to find better ways of doing human things creates novel solutions for oftentimes complex problems. Personally i believe in an intelligent Creator, and to me i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share. Again for the sake of the hypersensitive evolutionists out there, i'm not trying to change beliefs here, but from my perspective this is an especially interesting subject.
It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times. A material can be incredibly strong and yet it will show up only in a handful of generally related lineages. Moreover, if one looks at a scale beyond the details of exceptional materials the designer made some really strange decisions. The recurrent laryngeal nerve for example which goes from the brain to the voice box feels a need to loop already down around the heart and back up. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective given the essentially segmented form that vertebrates arose from (and hence that mammals were forced to work with). Yes any reasonable engineer would just have this use the direct path. This is even more glaring in other animals: The giraffe for instance has the exact same thing. That means that there are about 15 feet of extra nerve tissue. It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn't involved itself in the design of life. Which of those do you prefer?
Your argument seems to be "look! Here are things we thought we're useless and now they aren't. Therefore we should conclude that everything falls into that category even if we have no good reason to think so and no hypothetical mechanism for what it is doing usefully." That's great. Because after the laryngeal nerve I've got dozens of other examples. And your point doesn't deal with the primary issue raised which is that the mysterious designer seems oddly unwilling to use his clever solutions. And as long
I'm familiar with the notion of a fallen world. I didn't address it above for the simple reason that the individual wanted more examples. If we want to discuss that bit of apologetics we can. First of all, the whole notion of a fallen world really only makes much theological sense in Judaism and Christianity not for Islam or the Ba'hai. So we need to narrow the set of discussion a lot if we are going to use that particular argument.
The entire claim has much less theological justification in either Judais
It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn't involved itself in the design of life. Which of those do you prefer?
The former doesn't really make sense, especially when it is evident that there are a bunch of immutable laws (physics) that govern the behavior of things and he is both too stupid to design things properly and at the same time too clever to allow his immutable laws, er, not to be. If the latter, perhaps those laws were designed along with
>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?
Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.
Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.
>>It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times.
Convergent evolution is an example where it isn't the same thing at all. Why would an intelligent designer redesign the same thing for multiple lineages instead of using the same lineage? That's precisely what makes sense under evolution. It doesn't make sense for an intelligent designer to go through all the work again. It makes perfect sense for these to evolve. And note the original context we were discussing about really clever biological materials that aren't reused. This actually provides a perfect example; despite bats converging similarly to birds (albeit with very different muscle and skeletal structures you would expect from evolution), bats still don't get feathers. And nocturnal birds don't get the whole sonic radar system.
Besides, intelligent design is not creationism (though creationists tend to use it as a sort of disguise, hence the confusion). ID simply says that an intelligent wossname helped guide evolution. Depending on how you formulate it, it's either the weak form: a nice thought but not really provable either way (the approach the Vatican takes, FWIW), or the strong form, which says evolution couldn't happen without a guiding hand.
People may use "intelligent design" to mean something other than strict young earth creationism, but the term was made specifically to disguise to get creationism into the American public schools. In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism" which couldn't be taught in public school biology classes because it violated the First Amendment. Then the creationists decided to start talking about intelligent design. Indeed, the very next draft "Of Pandas and Peoples", a creation science textbook that was in the works did a search and replace for every single use of "creationists" or "creation scientists" or "creationism" and replaced them with the correct form of "intelligent design." However, in a truly ironic step, they screwed up in the next draft and actually left a transitional form of "cdesign proponentsists". This strange hybrid of "creation scientists" and "design proponents" was corrected in the next draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdesign_proponentsists#Pandas_and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22 [wikipedia.org] However, this draft, which remained unpublished, was disclosed during the Kitzmiller v Dover trial where it was decided that intelligent design really was just a cheap disguise for creationism. The decision in the Dover trial is really worth reading. The text can be found at http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf [uscourts.gov]. It includes a lot more very clear evidence that ID was made solely as a term to disguise creationism and get it into our public schools.
>>In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism"
Yes, because the supreme court is the ultimate source of definitions in America. Is it chaired by Emanuel Lewis, too? Do they carry a golden dictionary from which they make pronouncements from upon high? These are the same people that ruled the obscene is that which is without any redeeming social value.
And I agree, by and large the ID movement is, as I said, YEC's using it as a di
>>Despite how you try to slant it, ID only exists as a facade that the creationists put up to try and present a "theory" to throw at evolution. It is of little use except as an example of quackery.
While I agree it is probably often used as a facade, it is a testable (and therefore a scientific theory) that someone rigged the dice during evolution. You can make statistical tests for loaded dice - gaming commissions do this sort of testing all the time, in fact.
How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Here's a simple example, simplified: DNA analysis shows that human and chimp DNA is about 99% identical. I hypothesize that DNA is the mechanism by which genes are inherited and evolution happens. By this hypothesis, I should be able to look back in the fossil record and see human and chimp ancestors becoming more and more similar until there is no distinction. My hypothesis is falsif
>>How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Suppose Jurassic Park was real, and you could get a complete DNA record of every generation of an animal going back however many millions of years. You examine the mutation pattern and see if it corresponds to how mutations should occur, and see if there's any bias in the distribution pattern. That's the simplest way, I'd imagine.
Your suggestion is impossible to implement so it doesn't constitute an example of a method of falsifying Intelligent Design. I've spent a moderate amount of time looking into Intelligent Design and haven't found anything that I understand to be a legitimate proposal for falsifiability. Are you aware of any other tests?
No. There's a big difference. DNA replication is used by all life because all life has common descent and the code used for DNA is very fundamental to how life functions so tampering with it isn't going to create viable offspring. The type of solutions that don't get reused are precisely the sort of clever biological structures that TFA is talking about. These are exactly what you would not expect to be duplicated if evolution is correct. Moreover, the niche example is again an argument for evolution rather
Please read the rest of this thread. Convergence is not an example of that at all. If you had an engineer then they wouldn't construct almost identical solutions to the same problem repeatedly. Convergence aren't the same thing. They are examples of evolution finding very similar solutions to the same problem in different contexts. Thus for example, in Australia one has all sorts of marsupials that converge to what mammals do in most other continents. A designer would presumably just use the same species fo
Right. So it makes decisions that are absolutely indistinguishable from what one would expect from no designer? It is a good thing you don't believe that because that seems to be such a bad example of special pleading that it isn't funny.
Oh, yes the amazing designer. Who for some reason gave whales hips and leg bones, fused inside their bodies. He/she gave flightless birds wings with light weight bones. He/she gave us eyes with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina instead of behind, what a designer. At least the dude who invented the octopus got the eye thing right.
So much wisdom and love went into the design of cancer, MS and typhoid, the designer loves us so much he prefers us to painfully die so we can be closer to him./s
What's most fascinating is how most of the earth's "elements" are a mix of a few base elements in varied densities and forms, and one has only to study the "work" nature does to recreate them. Clay, for example, is a result of carbonic acid 'weathering' (dissolving) silica (sand) based minerals... so if clay is rare and sand is abundant, why not do all the "work" ourselves?
We have the chemical composition of most everything on this planet mapped - as a layman, I don't at all understand why we don't have the
Looking at systems in the world around us to find better ways of doing human things creates novel solutions for oftentimes complex problems.
... and then patent them. Never mind the fact that people have been using them for thousands of years and/or nature for millions or billions of years - it's "intellectual property", baby! >:-|
i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share
Others have pointed out what a weak argument this is, to no good effect because obviously you aren't interested in anything that contradicts your faith (by definition: it wouldn't be faith otherwise).
But I'm entirely unsure what you mean by "inherent wisdom" and "incredible harmony" of complex natural systems.
There are some pretty clever hacks, but so many amazingly stupid kludges and disgusting in
cry me a river. i'm not trolling i'm expressing my own ideas. i have just as much a right to do that as you. at worst i can understand being labeled "flamebait" thats why i went the extra mile to try to avoid an argument/discussion/conversation about creation/ID/evolution; that wasnt my point. my point was to help people to see that a different prespective gives me a heightened appreciation for this subject. if you cant gather that you need to work on your reading comprehension. really, the only ones on thi
perhaps heightened isnt the best adjective there. i suppose more appropriate would be "a different value of appreciation" that is, not comparable in terms of value or worth merely in frame of reference.
sort of like art. "you see a priceless french painting, i see a drunk naked girl" you know that whole analogy...
Humans are really quite bright and can think. Evolution has one serious advantage over humans: Evolution has had millions of years to try stuff out. When you've got millions of years of mutation and natural selection you are still going to do better than humans who've only been thinking about these things for a few centuries. The one serious advantage of intelligent entities is that we can look at the solutions used elsewhere and adopt them to our purposes. Nature doesn't have that option.
The one serious advantage of intelligent entities is that we can look at the solutions used elsewhere and adopt them to our purposes. Nature doesn't have that option.
That's the basis behind Primer:
No one would say that what they were doing was complicated. It wouldn't even be considered new, except for maybe in the geological sense. They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more.
Awesome. Please post this as a reply to every story on/. that introduces the "new" idea of engineers looking to nature for solution ideas, which has been a "new" idea for over a century.
After a couple of decades of posting this database link ever couple of months when we get stories on this "new" idea maybe, possibly, people will learn that engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration for over a century.
The notion that this is a new idea or phenomenon is one of t
I'm reminded of the movie, "The Last Mimzy", not the short story. There was a scene of a group of spiders building a bridge, together. Talk about communicating to an alien intelligence. What a Thesis to read, something about mimicking spiders in space to create a tether for space elevator applications.
the suggestion made me laugh, it reminded me of a Radio Lab episode where they were discussing patterns of life. they interviewed a researcher of some nature (pun) that examined the behavior of ants and she marveled at how frustrating it was to watch them try to move a leaf or a twig "one would tug it a millimeter this way, the other would tug it that way, still another a different direction and it would go on for weeks" yet out of all that seemingly thoughtless effort a working community managed to sustain itself.
at the best of times, when i'm feeling optimistic, i feel that/. is a colony of ants.
Have you ever seen a frozen waterfall? The water falls from a high energy position to a low energy position. There is certainly a "design" created. The trip from high to low energy doesn't have to be linear.
Other fields... (Score:3, Funny)
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Religions don't appear to be common at all in present species, though there are strong hints for the presence of them in Neanderthals. And, of course, homo sapiens sapiens. Granted, there's not a lot of data points in one of those subsets but, taking all things into consideration, there are strong hints that religions are memetic contructs. ;p A bit out of scope of genetics and mutations (as commonly understood, regarding genes; even if there might be some that contributed to particular structure of society
Re:Other fields... (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm, I wonder what parameters give a mutation of ID/creationism an advantage.... A higher degree of logical circularity maybe?
If creationists are right, then God created circular logic............. ohmygod! I just proved nothing!
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The greatest miracle would be if God designed a universe where natural selection could result in such wonders. I for one believe that is exactly what happened.
Nature is haphazard and random (Score:4, Interesting)
Although Nature is random and haphazard in its designs, it still has to follow the laws of physics. So large structures like trees, termite hills, and basalt cliffs are structured to be very strong.
Structures that must hold their form like honeycombs and coral reefs have interesting geometric structures.
And things that must be flexible, lightweight, and resistant to breakage like spider webs use multiple methods of increasing tensile strength.
If they didn't, physics would force them to break. So for each iteration of Nature, you get some strong and some weak structures, but due to the constant barrage of forces only the most adaptable survive. If genetically controlled, these traits get passed down to subsequent generations.
Re:Nature is haphazard and random (Score:4, Insightful)
---
Materials Science [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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These are not designs, they're results.
Design implies a conscious, driving force. As you say, it's merely the laws of physics ending up with results we didn't think of.
Cheers
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I never said it evolved. I simply said that large structures must have strong structures.
The hexagonal "honeycomb" structure of basalt cliffs gives it resistance to landslides.
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The hexagonal "honeycomb" structure of basalt cliffs gives it resistance to landslides.
That's not what I see when I look at a columnar basalt structure. Instead I see an avenue for more rapid destruction than would be present in a monolithic structure that didn't fracture that way. Water and ice can penetrate through these flaws in the structure and break it up.
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Consider the time required to create either of those "solutions" though. The basalt quickly solidifies into its columnar shape while granite may take many multiple times that amount to become monolithic in the same scope.
Are there points of weakness in columnar basalt? Undoubtedly. But the rapid development and reasonable lifespan of these is a pretty good tradeoff.
Re:Nature is haphazard and random (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure about your example of a basalt cliff... How exactly does a cliff evolve?
Look at his nick: BadAnalogyGuy. What did you expect from him, a car analogy?
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I'll take a shot at it!
See, it's like this: I see strong structures like basalt columns as volkswagons, which as you know, are arch-shaped and therefore strong. Weak structures on the other hand, such as grasses, are more like smart cars: easily crushed and, well, no where to go from here. I got nothin'. Sorry. Ask BadAnalogyGuy.
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You can see mostly cliffs that survive the elements for any significant amount of time? (owing to their structure - in this case, specific materials)
Biomimetics (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless of ones theological views i've always found the field of biomimetics fascinating. Looking at systems in the world around us to find better ways of doing human things creates novel solutions for oftentimes complex problems. Personally i believe in an intelligent Creator, and to me i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share. Again for the sake of the hypersensitive evolutionists out there, i'm not trying to change beliefs here, but from my perspective this is an especially interesting subject.
Re:Biomimetics (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, tonsils and the appendix are useless. Since we've figured everything out, we could design much better humans! Oh wait...
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I'm familiar with the notion of a fallen world. I didn't address it above for the simple reason that the individual wanted more examples. If we want to discuss that bit of apologetics we can. First of all, the whole notion of a fallen world really only makes much theological sense in Judaism and Christianity not for Islam or the Ba'hai. So we need to narrow the set of discussion a lot if we are going to use that particular argument.
The entire claim has much less theological justification in either Judais
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It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn't involved itself in the design of life.
I believe what you are referring to is called a "false dichotomy."
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The former doesn't really make sense, especially when it is evident that there are a bunch of immutable laws (physics) that govern the behavior of things and he is both too stupid to design things properly and at the same time too clever to allow his immutable laws, er, not to be. If the latter, perhaps those laws were designed along with
Re:Biomimetics (Score:5, Funny)
>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?
Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.
Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.
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>>It doesn't take a "hypersensitive evolutionist" to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don't get used multiple times.
Good thing birds and bats evolved from the same lineage, or you'd have a problem with your argument, eh? (You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution [wikipedia.org])
Besides, intelligent design is not creation
Re:Biomimetics (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, intelligent design is not creationism (though creationists tend to use it as a sort of disguise, hence the confusion). ID simply says that an intelligent wossname helped guide evolution. Depending on how you formulate it, it's either the weak form: a nice thought but not really provable either way (the approach the Vatican takes, FWIW), or the strong form, which says evolution couldn't happen without a guiding hand.
People may use "intelligent design" to mean something other than strict young earth creationism, but the term was made specifically to disguise to get creationism into the American public schools. In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism" which couldn't be taught in public school biology classes because it violated the First Amendment. Then the creationists decided to start talking about intelligent design. Indeed, the very next draft "Of Pandas and Peoples", a creation science textbook that was in the works did a search and replace for every single use of "creationists" or "creation scientists" or "creationism" and replaced them with the correct form of "intelligent design." However, in a truly ironic step, they screwed up in the next draft and actually left a transitional form of "cdesign proponentsists". This strange hybrid of "creation scientists" and "design proponents" was corrected in the next draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdesign_proponentsists#Pandas_and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22 [wikipedia.org] However, this draft, which remained unpublished, was disclosed during the Kitzmiller v Dover trial where it was decided that intelligent design really was just a cheap disguise for creationism. The decision in the Dover trial is really worth reading. The text can be found at http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf [uscourts.gov]. It includes a lot more very clear evidence that ID was made solely as a term to disguise creationism and get it into our public schools.
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>>In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the US Supreme Court ruled that "creation science" was the same thing as "creationism"
Yes, because the supreme court is the ultimate source of definitions in America. Is it chaired by Emanuel Lewis, too? Do they carry a golden dictionary from which they make pronouncements from upon high? These are the same people that ruled the obscene is that which is without any redeeming social value.
And I agree, by and large the ID movement is, as I said, YEC's using it as a di
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>>Despite how you try to slant it, ID only exists as a facade that the creationists put up to try and present a "theory" to throw at evolution. It is of little use except as an example of quackery.
While I agree it is probably often used as a facade, it is a testable (and therefore a scientific theory) that someone rigged the dice during evolution. You can make statistical tests for loaded dice - gaming commissions do this sort of testing all the time, in fact.
Of course, it's not really very popular to
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How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Here's a simple example, simplified: DNA analysis shows that human and chimp DNA is about 99% identical. I hypothesize that DNA is the mechanism by which genes are inherited and evolution happens. By this hypothesis, I should be able to look back in the fossil record and see human and chimp ancestors becoming more and more similar until there is no distinction. My hypothesis is falsif
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>>How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Suppose Jurassic Park was real, and you could get a complete DNA record of every generation of an animal going back however many millions of years. You examine the mutation pattern and see if it corresponds to how mutations should occur, and see if there's any bias in the distribution pattern. That's the simplest way, I'd imagine.
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Oh, yes the amazing designer. Who for some reason gave whales hips and leg bones, fused inside their bodies. He/she gave flightless birds wings with light weight bones. He/she gave us eyes with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina instead of behind, what a designer. At least the dude who invented the octopus got the eye thing right.
So much wisdom and love went into the design of cancer, MS and typhoid, the designer loves us so much he prefers us to painfully die so we can be closer to him. /s
Re:Biomimetics (Score:5, Funny)
You sir are and moron.
you sir, made my day. ;)
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I think the biggest stroke of ingenious design was giving male terrestrial mammals external gonads. Must have been the same day MJ was created.
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What's most fascinating is how most of the earth's "elements" are a mix of a few base elements in varied densities and forms, and one has only to study the "work" nature does to recreate them. Clay, for example, is a result of carbonic acid 'weathering' (dissolving) silica (sand) based minerals... so if clay is rare and sand is abundant, why not do all the "work" ourselves?
We have the chemical composition of most everything on this planet mapped - as a layman, I don't at all understand why we don't have the
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... and then patent them. Never mind the fact that people have been using them for thousands of years and/or nature for millions or billions of years - it's "intellectual property", baby! >:-|
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i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share
Others have pointed out what a weak argument this is, to no good effect because obviously you aren't interested in anything that contradicts your faith (by definition: it wouldn't be faith otherwise).
But I'm entirely unsure what you mean by "inherent wisdom" and "incredible harmony" of complex natural systems.
There are some pretty clever hacks, but so many amazingly stupid kludges and disgusting in
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cry me a river. i'm not trolling i'm expressing my own ideas. i have just as much a right to do that as you. at worst i can understand being labeled "flamebait" thats why i went the extra mile to try to avoid an argument/discussion/conversation about creation/ID/evolution; that wasnt my point. my point was to help people to see that a different prespective gives me a heightened appreciation for this subject. if you cant gather that you need to work on your reading comprehension. really, the only ones on thi
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perhaps heightened isnt the best adjective there. i suppose more appropriate would be "a different value of appreciation" that is, not comparable in terms of value or worth merely in frame of reference.
sort of like art. "you see a priceless french painting, i see a drunk naked girl" you know that whole analogy...
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"a different value of appreciation" that is, not comparable in terms of value...
yeah i know that didnt make sense like i wanted it to, but i'm thinking you're smart enough to get what i meant ;)
Nature has hard more time (Score:2)
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That's the basis behind Primer:
No one would say that what they were doing was complicated. It wouldn't even be considered new, except for maybe in the geological sense. They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more.
Ask Nature (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the bio-mimicry database: http://asknature.org/ [asknature.org]
Here's the really interesting TED talk where the founder introduces it, and describes some examples of nature's engineering at work: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html [ted.com]
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Check out the bio-mimicry database
Awesome. Please post this as a reply to every story on /. that introduces the "new" idea of engineers looking to nature for solution ideas, which has been a "new" idea for over a century.
After a couple of decades of posting this database link ever couple of months when we get stories on this "new" idea maybe, possibly, people will learn that engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration for over a century.
The notion that this is a new idea or phenomenon is one of t
Thesis Title,"Space Elevator Construction Methods" (Score:2)
Copying nature? Uh oh... (Score:2)
Re:The soylent nature of /. --- is people! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ants.
the suggestion made me laugh, it reminded me of a Radio Lab episode where they were discussing patterns of life. they interviewed a researcher of some nature (pun) that examined the behavior of ants and she marveled at how frustrating it was to watch them try to move a leaf or a twig "one would tug it a millimeter this way, the other would tug it that way, still another a different direction and it would go on for weeks" yet out of all that seemingly thoughtless effort a working community managed to sustain itself.
at the best of times, when i'm feeling optimistic, i feel that /. is a colony of ants.
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