Quantum Evolution Poses Challenge to Darwinism 528
spaceorb writes "In his book, "Quantum Evolution", UK biologist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden asserts that life did not originate from the random movement of particles, simply because it is far too complex. Instead, he argues that evolution is a quantum system - genetic code exists in a quantum multiverse and cells are able to choose advantageous mutations. Click the above link for the story on UniSci; it's worth a read. "
Greg Egan's Teranesia (Score:3)
bucky (Score:2)
"German scientists have recently demonstrated that a single fullerene molecule, composed of a sphere of 60 carbon atoms (the famous "buckyball"), can be in two places at once.
Now if I can only send my "buckyself to work, while I stay at home and read (/.) all day. :)
_________________________
Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:3)
God does play dice, and life was a lucky roll.
Creationism vs Evolution vs Q.Evolution==Icky (Score:2)
What I'd like to know is how is life too complex? It's not like we evolved our noses first, then worked on every body part and biological system concurrently after that. Evolution as I understand it works on everything at once... that's why it takes so darn long. Life isn't too complex to make itself better, but saying that our individual cells get to choose their next mutation sounds a bit on the laughable side, not the respectable, but heck, I could be wrong. heh, the next time I get to choose my next perk, I'll let you guys know. However, this isn't Fallout, so I doubt I'll get to choose.
*shrug*
WTF is this? (Score:2)
Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:3)
In this way, you can try and get around the mind-bogglingly massive unlikelihood of life ever coming into existence by chance (as the article recognises).
Forgive me if I don't jump in the air and scream "At last! Non-belief in God is intellectually credible! I can stop this Christianity lark and go out into the evil, bad world as an atheist with my intellectual pride intact..."
Gerv
It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:4)
Because we don't sense the passage of time while we didn't exist. For all we know, it took the creation and destruction of 1e512 universes of time before intelligent life happened to arise and we were able to think about the fact.
Now, if we happen to discover life on other planets someway, then we would be able to say how statistically probable life is. Until then, "probablistic" arguments are complete nonsense.
Not to mention that it doesn't argue against Darwin anyway. Darwin only poses Natural Selection (I believe) which is an observed, provable fact of biology.
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Ridiculous pseudo-science (Score:4)
C'mon, this is something from a late-night, low-budget sci-fi show, not real science. This is mumbo-jumbo metaphysics -- there's absolutely zero science behind it. The "life is too complicated" argument seems to be the only one he's really got, and that one's pretty easily refuted by "well, here we are".
Physicists don't understand quantum mechanics.
Sure, it's complicated stuff. But people understand it a lot better than this guy does. We've got lasers that work, for example.
Today, one of the most popular interpretations, and one that has the backing of Nobel prize-winning physicists, is that there exists a multiverse in which everything that can happen really does happen -- but in parallel universes.
A fun explanation, and good for sci-fi, but I believe the "Copenhagen Interpretation" is more widely accepted -- essentially, particles not being observed exist in a state of probability waves. But anyway, if one is to accept this, this completely destroys the "life is too complicated" argument. Sure, it's complicated -- but even very small probablities have to happen somewhere in the "multiverse". And the only universes within which we'd be able to ask questions would be ones where that small chance happened.
Cells may enter quantum states when they are unable to divide and replicate and become isolated....
Um, no, that's when they d-i-e.
I haven't read the book, just the web article linked to above. But it sounds ridiculous to me. And the author is no expert in quantum mechanics -- he specializes in infectious diseases. Sounds like he read something about quantum mechanics in a pop science mag, and went from there.
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This doesn't refute Darwin (Score:2)
All religion is wrong. (Not flamebait) (Score:2)
Now the "other side" will no doubt cry out "but science is a religion too!" Au contrair mon amie, but science has debunked itself countless times over the centuries, and what's left grows stronger as a result. No existing religion is willing to continually challenge and dispute itself in this manner. And this is what separates science from any religion. People within science often stubbornly hold on to old idea, usually to preserve their own self interests, careers, or philosophical status, like scientists who could not accept a heliocentric sol system (Ptolemy), or accept that the universe is expanding (Einstein), etc. But eventually, they die, and science accepts its own debunking of some of its former doctorines and what remains gains strength.
If the bible and christianity (or similar for any religion) can continually question and challenge and dispute its own doctorines and continue to survive and maintain logical cohesion, I'll believe that the religion has merit. But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system.
If you cannot accept the possibility that what you believe is false, then neither can you ever know truth.
Life imitates Art (Score:2)
His idea is that one of the proteins involved in splitting and recombining the DNA strands becomes a quantum computer which can use the many worlds property of quantum mechanics to calculate the optimial form for the new genome, including defences against predators which don't, but could, exist.
It makes a cute plot device but he doesn't propose it as an explanation of how it all started, which seems to be McFadden's thesis.
Bad mutations? (Score:2)
Anyway, the author of this theory (or the reporter who summarized it into an article) didn't explain where bad mutations come from. From what I understand, most mutations are neutral or bad and selected out. If our DNA is picking beneficial mutations, where do the bad mutations come from?
Dana
Quantum evoulutin, my foot (Score:5)
The article you have cited looks familiar to me: remember the guy who made fun of post-modernistic brabble writing an article heavily loaded with serious physic terms taken out of the context? This sounds similar to me: "quantum" is a nice, popular word, and using it out of the context and not in its proper meaning is nothing more then retorics.
As for a biologist, this whole article sounds like cheap boulevard sh*t to me. J. McFadden, OTOH, is a serious evolutionary biologist, publishing in good journals. He works as a theoretical biologist - as far I understand - with transposone mutagenesis. So maybe he did something interesting, and tried to make "a big thing" out of it - and notified some journalists, who got it wrong. There was a similar thing with the "theory of punctuated equilibria", which finally fitted nicely in the "synthetic theory of evolution" or "neodarwinism" (which is to darwinism in as much as quantum physics is to Newton's laws).
I am an evolutionist - and I certainly see possibilities for bacteria to judge which mutation could be better. There are some reasonable hypothetical mechanisms, which have nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, in spite of various tries and much research there are no convincing experiments. In most of the cases either noone could repeat the experiments, or better, easier explanations could have been found. Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift). You have to have a broader view: most of the organisms try to influence the genes they passed to their offspring: for example, by coupling them to an other set of good genes - when choosing a good mating partner, who can demonstrate that he has good genes (for example, using the handicap strategy). You could say there already exists a kind of directional mutagenesis :-)
So much for the "controversy" of directed mutations. What I wanted to say is that there is no much incoherency with the current evolutionary paradigm (STE) per se. However, there is lot more on "sampling of the quantum space" and so on in the article you have posted here. Well, although I got some kind of introduction in quantum physics I cannot say I am fit in this field. However, I suspect strongly that people who are fit, are, on the other hand, not necessarily skilled in evolutionary sciences and molecular biology. I can't tell at this point: maybe this is something interesting, but to pose a challenge to the current model, a theory has to explain everything the former theory did plus a couple of other things plus do it more cleanly, more simply. I really don't know, but even if there is something in this quantum brabble I do not understand, it is only on the level of simple mutations and a very short time scale. OTOH, natural selection is known to work also on a larger time-scale.
One more thing left: the arousal of life itself. Well, one important point: the biologists have problems to tell how it happened not because they lack an explanation or a model, but because finding evidence for evolving molecules with a time scale of millions of years is unlikely to be found in sediments several billions years old, and unlikely to be demonstrated in an experiment, because such an experiment would take too long. However, it is not at all as unlikely as assembling a 747 by a tornado. Imagine a tornado that works for millions years on a planet covered with intact 747 parts; and if two parts get correctly assembled, they stay assembled and they propagate itself and produce they replica. Does it still sound improbable to you? What I really hate is biologists commenting on quantum physics like they were quantum physicists, physicists commenting on food science, and astronomers commenting on biology. Do I tell you how to program? ("Hey, you over there! C is obsolate! Use VB![*]). There are experiments with evolving and self-replicating RNA molecules; RNA is a nucleic acid which can both contain genetic information and act as an enzyme. Compared to a living cell, it has a very simple biochemic structure. However, chance of finding RNA fossils are, ehm, like building a 747 by a tornado... out of straws :-)
Stephen J. Gould, the co-author of the "punctuated equilibrium theory", which was supposed to dismiss neodarwinism, had to write a book entitled - I'm translating from polish, don't know the english title - "Darwins too-early funeral". Well, let's see what happens to this theory :->
Regards,
January
[*] Disclaimer: I program in C on an AIX.
Re:Darwinian evolution (Score:2)
Regards,
January
Crackpot Science, But The Best Thing in Evolution (Score:5)
1. This theory depends on DNA/RNA molecules being able to perform quantum computations. If DNA/RNA are not efficient chemical "vehicles" for quantum computation, then this theory is completely and utterly wrong.
2. This theory can actually be proven wrong, unlike almost every other evolutionary theory out there. You name the theory -- Punctuated Equilibrium, Red Queen, Designed Evolution... their mechanisms are all-but-unobservable, and cannot be empirically tested in a lab (as best I know). This theory can be tested in a lab; if DNA/RNA isn't good at quantum computation, presto, the theory's wrong.
3. Don't dismiss it because it didn't appear in a scientific journal. Odds are nobody would touch this one with a ten-foot pole; it's so far from conventional science that it's easy to dismiss it as being crackpot. But this fellow has a serious idea, and he's also conveniently provided us with a way to prove him wrong. Don't write him off as a nut and not worth your time just because he's published in a book -- first prove him wrong, and then write him off as a nut. Not before, and certainly not in the reverse order.
4. Dismiss anyone who says "this man doesn't know a thing about quantum mechanics" just because he takes a weird view of the implications of quantum mechanics. His theory, as best as I can tell, depends on the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but you know what? Neither one of them is in the slightest bit scientific.
Quantum mechanics is a fact. It describes observed phenomena, it has successfully predicted phenomena, and it can be proven wrong (not that it ever has been proven wrong -- but if you were to ever successfully measure both the precise location and velocity of a particle, you'd prove QM to be an incorrect theory). The problem is that quantum mechanics is so alien to our idea of the universe that most physicists have to come up with a framework from which quantum mechanics makes some sort of sense.
This gentleman's interpretation of quantum mechanics is no nuttier than the Copenhagen Interpretation, or even an interpretation that the collective farts of all the universe's sentient races causes the weirdness in QM. Any interpretation of QM is metaphysics, not science. It's easy to say "this guy's a crackpot, since his interpretation isn't shared by any other "serious scientist". It's just as easy, and as accurate, to say "a lot of guys are crackpots because they believe in a multiverse which is constantly splitting off from itself, as proposed by Everett."
For all this fellow's failings, I've got to give him credit for coming up with a perfect theory.
(1) It's insane. As Wolfgang Pauli is supposed to have said to a colleague, "We are all divided on whether or not your theory is crazy. I do not believe it is crazy enough." In QM, crazy is good.
(2) It explains observed phenomena.
(3) It predicts future phenomena.
(4) It's empirically testable.
... In other words, it's a hell of a lot better than most evolutionary theories I've seen. It's probably wrong, of course. But it's wrong to dismiss this one out-of-hand.
Red Queen hypothesis (Score:2)
Next, point (2). I don't see how this theory explains, for example, sexual selection, co-evolution and other complex evolutionary patterns - unless it replaces only a part of the synthetic theory of evolution (STE).
Last thing: this guy is what you call "a serious scientist", he publishes in biological journals like Microbiology or Journal of Theoretical Biology. These are high-impact, specialist journals. It's just he didn't publish any of his quantum stuff there.
Regards,
January
Re:OPEN THE FLOODGATES (Score:2)
- Using this mode of thought, I have now decided to declare the following debates as non-existent:
- Linux vs. Windows (obviously!)
- Good 'n Fruity vs. Good 'n Plenty
- Great Taste vs. Less Filling
- Paper vs. Plastic
- Jar Jar vs. Ewoks
- Am I missing anything?
Boy, life is going to be so much easier now that I can dismiss all those pesky folks who disagree with me! Irrational fools!Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:3)
While that's true, we're not just talking about one lucky roll here, but millions. And the odds of hitting all of these could *possibly* be beyond the billions of years available.
Anyone remember Occam's Razor? (Score:3)
Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:2)
Daniel
Voodoo science (Score:2)
That the genetic code may inhabit the quantum multiverse has startling implications. Mutations are the driving force of evolution; it is they that provide the variation that is honed by natural selection into evolutionary paths.
First, mutation isn't necissarily the driving force behind evolution. There's a little something called recombination that's also amazingly important. Go read up on genetic algorithms, and you'll find it's generally more important than mutation is.
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone.
Here we go, it's our old friend the creationist argument against the origin of life. If I thought that the first living thing was a fully formed modern cell, I sure wouldn't believe that it could have arisen by chance either. But the first living thing wasn't going to have been a fully formed cell. Much much simpler things can reproduce themselves. And even simpler things show the right dynamics of life, like autocatalytic networks of chemicals.
Besides all these glaring inaccuracies in the article, it seems as if the author is trying to push a voodoo science. One in which analogy and important sounding words take the place of real science. Unfortunately, I'd have to see the actual book to see how well the reviewer really reviwed it. There really is a grain of something interesting down there, but if it's really got all the hype and hooplah of the review, it'll be pretty useless.
-Dan
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:3)
Lets say life only forms on one out of a billion planets (in my opinion a very low estimate, but this is for the sake of example). So out of a billion 'earths' only one forms life. It doesn't matter that life didn't form on 999 million other planets, since no intelligent life is there to notice!
The use of 'God' to explain everything we don't understand is repugnant to me. Just because we have yet to fully understand the mechanism by which life mutates and evolves doesn't mean that it should automatically be attributed to an omnipotent diety.
If you would rather eliminate all of your uncertainties by simply attributing them to 'God', then that's your choice, but I would rather truly know. If it really turns out that an intelligent entity is responsible for existence, then great. I have yet to see, however, any concrete evidence towards this conclusion. Remember, just because you cannot think of any other possible way doesn't mean a different (correct!) one doesn't exist.
Doug
Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:2)
In order to ask "why are we here?", we must be in a universe where the random chances did come out right -- or else we wouldn't be here. Not so amazing, really, 'cause look, here we are.
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Re:Greg Egan's Teranesia (Score:2)
You know when I heard this little story posted up on slashdot I pondered and thought:
How in the hell do they prove things that not even our most experienced theoretical physicists are barely even understanding. This must be a cast of wishful thinking.
Now correct me if I am wrong but has anyone ever conclusively proven than such a "multiverse" exists. I mean outside of maybe some form of science fiction it dosn't seem likely. What people have to realize is that when I want to prove something I just don't go looking for the most experimental alpha quality theory that I can find.
Re:Creationism vs Evolution vs Q.Evolution==Icky (Score:2)
Other than that, I agree with you, the science behind this sounds pretty suspect. But then again, so does the "science" behind creationism, and it's still a very popular belief...
So who created.... (Score:2)
Newton discovered that f=ma, but something else made it true. Darwin may have discovered evolution, but something else made it happen. Search as we might, science will always fall short of answering the fundamental spiritual question of "why?"
Somewhere along the line, I was able to reconcile my scientific/anthropological training with my faith, and realized that the two are not in conflict. Nutshell version: Science is born of God-given talents, and therefore we should not ignore it or belittle it. Maybe the world wasn't created in seven days, but I'm still in awe of whatever made it happen, and I don't intend to mess with it.
Continue studying, continue advancing science, but don't expect it to explain that which it can't. In science, there is always one more unanswered question; only some sort of faith can make you comfortable with that.
Data: Captain I may have an answer... (Score:2)
I don't see how this is revelent to anything. Just because someone isn't alive dosn't make a problem any less interesting at all.
When a quantum wave collapses you can't really tell if all the other possibilities that isn't this exact one it collapsed to, ceases to exist or lives on in their own world
Picard: Enough Data how do we collapse this anomaly and save Omicron Beta-Thraxis 6?
Really what exactly is a "quantum wave" and why is it so interesting. I can see how it is possible that uncertainy can occur however that would depend on the dimention that the wave was in and how it interacted with other areas in at least 4 space. You see for transition to another "multiverse" would require movement in something higher than 3 space. Which would mean at least 4 space. You then could have the wave in any point in time and space.
Re:The probability of life is irrelevent (Score:2)
If you saw five billion coins laying on the ground, 4 billion heads up and 1 billion heads down, would you conclude that flipping a coin gives 80% heads 20% tails?
No, but the reason is that there is a reasonable possibility of someone placing them in that configuration. In the case of observing life on other planets, I have no evidence that the probability was artificially manipulated, so it's valid to create a theory based on statistical survey.
Is it valid to try and create cosmological theories based on our observations that galaxies tend to "clump"? Of course, even though the theoretical possibility exists that someone went through and clumped them to fool us (ala coins on the ground).
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what a load of .... (Score:2)
I don't know much about quantum mechanics, but I don't remember anything about unconscious objects being able to chose anything. This is one of the worst cases of misapplying scientific knowledge from one field to another where it doesn't belong. DNA is large enough that quantum effects aren't needed to calculate it (although, since it in most cases is a reaction involving one cell, you could say mutations could be caused by quantum effects). But saying that mutations exist in a 'quantum multiverse' is just silly. And saying that cells can "chose" what mutations that will be advantageous is idiotic. (I'd love to see the math to back that up!). What's next? Are we going to have a bunch of Creationists coming out saying that evolution is entopicly disfavorable now? That makes just about as much sense as what this guy's saying.
[ c h a d o k e r e ] [dhs.org]
A refutation that doesn't (Score:4)
"It's too improbable" he says, ignoring the very fact that under the Many Worlds Theory, his ideas and Darwinism are essentially identical.
Then, there's one detail that he conveniently ignores. Biochemistry is VERY SPECIFIC. You can't join any old chemicals together.
DNA, for example, has 4 possible bases. This should give you 16 (4^2) possible combinations. You don't get those. There are 4 ways, and 4 ways alone to join up those 4 pairs. (You can read from either side, so the order is important.)
That reduces the complexity of the system, substantially. In theory, you could read any number of pairs from 1 to infinity, but RNA takes a block of exactly 3. No more, no less.
You see the catch with this whole complexity idea? The fact is, biochemistry is complex through scale, not permutations. The permutations are all dealt with, by the very nature of the system.
In short, biology exists because it removes the complexity at any given level. Each level within the system is extremely simple.
Protein construction involves 1 copy operation (which takes place nearly automatically, via messenger RNA), 3 identical attach operations (which take place without any active participation of the mechanism) and 1 destruction operation of the template. (You really don't want too many templates floating around. Could cause a mess.)
Nothing in there is complicated. The messenger RNA attaches to the DNA. The appropriate chemicals attach to their mirror images on the DNA. (Nothing else -can- attach. It's not possible.) The Messenger RNA, plus template, detatch. Fresh chemicals now attach to the RNA, mirros of the mirror, thus the original sequence. This is your protein. The template is then destroyed, and the process repeats.
What's so complicated about that? All you have there is something that replicates and inverts. Very trivial to construct.
How do you get DNA and RNA in the first place? I imagine the reverse of the current process, almost. Amino acids probably clumped together, onto some simple strand, with related amino acids pairing off. Strands that weakly attached would give you your proto-RNA. Those that bonded more firmly would give you proto-DNA.
In other words, the environment would become one gigantic proto-cell.
Last, but not least, if anyone's read this far, I do have something to say to the God theory. I am Christian, and I believe that life, of all kinds, exists for a reason beyond merely being. However, I do =NOT= subscribe to the theory that we should live in ignorance and fear.
If you read and accept the Bible, whether as literal or moral truth, there are two pertinent ideas that come forward. God created humanity in His image. Humanity is inquisitive, and has always been. Thus, wonder is a part of God's creation. To deny wonder, and worship ignorance is to sin against God, for it is to tell God that His image isn't good enough for you.
The second part is Jesus telling his followers to be like children. "For it is such as these who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." You find a child who won't ask "WHY?" You find a child who won't question. If questioning, and not blindly accepting an alleged truth which isn't even given =in= the Bible, for all the claims of the allegers, is to enter the Kingdom of God, you'll find more geeks in Heaven than the Christians who aren't.
After all, THEY are the ones who have become like little children, forever questioning. Seeking. Trying things out. Learning.
Those who "know it all", because they claim to be a Christian, are like harsh parents, always critical and condemning. God does, indeed, have a place in mind for those who seek to put themselves above Him. I've heard it's nice and warm there, too.
Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:2)
In order to ask "why are we here?", we must be in a universe where the random chances did come out right -- or else we wouldn't be here. Not so amazing, really, 'cause look, here we are.
I'm not real thrilled with these arguments that play fast-and-loose with cosmology. If we're allowed to pick from various universes with different physical law, shouldn't we expect to be in one where (intelligent) life is more probable?
Even better, I can take existing physics and apply it to a "steady state" universe (one of infinite extent, no big bang/heat death/crunch) with just as much consistency as our current universe. But in the steady state case, life occurs infinitely more often (in terms of conciousnesses) than in the big bang scenario. So shouldn't we expect to be in a steady state universe with probability 1?
What I'm trying to show you is that in order to call upon multiple universes, you must provide a meta-structure, which begs to question of why the meta-structure has the form it does. There is simply no way that science can explain why the universe is the way it is, since to do that it would have to show that all other ways are impossible.
That said, I must admit I'm convinced that life arose through evolution. But I don't think you can expect to pin down the processes through which it arose (whether natural or not) because Nature has got so many years and so much more processing power than you. If you're going to say that we had so-and-so many years to develop life, and probability is such-and-such per year... Well, I'll believe your so-and-so's, but your such-and-such's are going to turn out to be far too small!
This is like the rainbow... It is easy enough to explain in theoretical terms, just using Snell's law, but if you had never seen one, I doubt that you, or anyone else, would guess that a rainbow could ever happen! So if you could run a sensitive experiment to simulate the conditions of the early Earth and create RNA or whatever, then you might get a reasonable value for the such-and-such. But a theoretical calculation is not going to cut it, since the planet is so much cleverer at developing life than you are.
(And, just to beat the dead horse once more, no amount of science can explain the origin of physical law.)
Re:Well... (Score:5)
1) The real world (whatever that is) is, as far as anyone knows, governed by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Period. So the question is not the applicability of QM, but of Classical Physics which is an approximation of QM in some circumstances (very large distances scales, energies, quantum numbers etc.). So QM could be used to describe buckyballs -if you could do the calculations- and yield a more accurate answer than CM.
2) Getting closer to the topic, this article smells kind of fishy. McFadden doesn't seem to understand Quantum Mechanics. I know, I know. He claims noone does, and on some fundamental level, that may be true. But we do know how to make some pretty damn precise calculations and predictions with it. Which requires at least some understanding.
For example the claims about an electron going in two (or more)different directions: true, but it's somewhat more complicated than that. If you try to observe an electron doing that, you never will. But if you don't check which way the electron went it can look like it went two ways (you can do a double slit intereference experiment with electrons, to invoke Physics 102- depending on how you do the experiment, you get an intereference pattern or not. With the interefence pattern, that means that the electron went both ways in some sense).
Another example: a particle is always in one and only one state at a time, never billions. However one state (say a state of definite energy) can be thought of -for some purposes- as a combination (superposition) of many other states (say states with definite position). But it is really only in one state.
3) The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is strongly disfavored (though not discredited) by physicists. Primarily because there is no real way of testing or disproving it. It predicts exactly the same things as the "orthodox" (aka Copenhagen) interpretation, which is simpler.
Ok, that's all I have to say for now.
Interesting pseudo-science (Score:2)
If you take the idea of interaction between living beings and quantum mechanics too far you end up with magick. I highly recommed the book Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll [pipex.com] - just as long as you don't take it too seriously. Magick can get quite dangerous if you start believing in it.
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Wrong (Score:2)
What on Earth are you talking about? One of the repeated arguments that is made by the enemies of evolution and scientific progress is that it is not falsifiable. "Sure," they claim. "You argue that nobody can falsify Genesis creation because it doesn't make any claims. Well, the same is true of evolution," they complain. If I read you right, that's what you're saying above.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. Genetics is one example. If we looked at the DNA of two different but similar creatures and saw that there were very few similarities, then that would be very strong evidence against the sort of common descent that is currently postulated. Now, that doesn't mean that some god couldn't have engineered the DNA that way, but that's not the point; we're looking at things that could falsify evolution, not prove a god.
Design would be another example. If every creature on Earth appeared to be optimally "engineered", you would not see some of the deficiencies that are present. Take humans, for example. Creationists like to arrogantly claim that humans are "perfect." We are? Then why do we have (for example) an appendix? At best, it's a useless organ. At worst, it can become infected and threaten your life. Why is it even there? If a god engineered it, he's a pretty lousy engineer.
On the other hand, if you approach things from the standpoint that life has evolved in twin-nested hierarchies from common ancestors, you would pretty much expect to see an appendix in mammals such as ourselves, even if we've gotten to the point where it's no longer of any use. If we saw individual families of creatures with wildly varying designs, all of which appeared to be optimal, that would obviously deal the death blow to evolutionary common descent theories.
And the examples go on and on. No, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable
Fashinable Nonsense (Score:2)
Evolutionary theories (Score:3)
This doesn't mean that the field is useless. Far from it; it means the field is extremely useful, because somewhere there's a whole lot of discoveries just waiting to be made.
I just think we're a long way from having a good theory of how evolution occurs -- that's all.
Insofar as explaining observed pheonomena, predicting future phenomena, empirically testable, I submit the punctuated-equilibrium theory to you. Hypothesizing that evolution happens in times of catastrophic ecological upheaval is all fine and dandy, but it's kind of hard to conduct controlled tests of the same, don't you think?
My own personal belief is that geographic isolation and punctuated equilibrium are, taken together, probably the most promising ideas. The geographic isolation bit you can actually test under reasonably controlled conditions; the ecological catastrophes, less so.
Warning: I am not a biologist. I am a computer scientist. As you can guess, I'm not an expert in the field -- I've read enough to be dangerous and maybe enough to hold an intelligent conversation, but that's all.
Crackpot pseudoscience poses threat to Slashdot (Score:4)
I want something better. I've got the domain "cluedot.{org,net,com}". I've got collaborative filtering technology, implemented on Advogato [advogato.org] that might just solve the problem of miniscule S/N ratios. I just don't have the time myself to put it into production right now, as I'm too busy developing free software projects. Anyone?
Yes, yes, I know. Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait, whatever. Karma be damned, I'm pissed off to see a site that used to be my kind of news site indulge in such stupid crap.
Christianity and science (Score:2)
Re:This is what you are missing... (Score:2)
Brief primer for people who aren't in the know:
Microevolution is a species undergoing minute changes over small timespans (single generations) in response to changes in environment. This has been observed in the wild and experimentally reproduced.
Macroevolution is the creation of new species, even new types of species (i.e. fish->primates). The amount of time which (according to the fossil record) this takes is very difficult for people to comprehend. There are also many steps which cannot be explained simply in terms of microevolution, such as the advent of aerobic organisms, or animal life leaving the sea. There are, of course, cogent theories to explain these things, but they don't change the fact that macroevolution is scientifically unprovable and likely always will be. Not that this matters so much; several scientific phenomena which we take as fact are really only theories.
--neil
Issues of scale (Score:2)
Yes, but they are divided popularly, though not scientificly, by time scale. "Microevolution" are things that happen on a time scale people understand. "A long long time ago all dogs were kinda wolf-like, but through concentrated efforts at breeding throughout human history, we got different strains of dog." What people don't think about is that "throughout human history" is an evolutionary blink. Hell, its practically an evolutionary screen refresh.
People just can't deal with things on certain scales unless they really work on it. It is, ironicly, evolution. Scientists try all sorts of examples (time since earth cooled on your outstretched arm, human civilization is a dust mote almost falling off the end of your fingernail, etc.) But the truth is that even people who understand it intellectually usually don't have a good emotional grasp of it. Thats why arguments from incredulity work so well in this debate.
-Kahuna Burger
OT, I thought about writing a science fiction story about a world with two independant forms of life - silicon and carbon. The silicon form would be so much slower than the carbon based that instead of developing tool use, they just evolve plants and animals into what they need with selective pressure. Need a knife? Sure you can learn to smelt metals (but now that I think about it, that might actually not be posible since the melting point would be reached so "fast") but why not just spend a few hundred generations eliminating the 90 dullest percent of a field of grass until you have a field of razors? As a hobby you could improve the stem at the base into a handle. The story most likely would be about the carbon based life, but I don't really have the time or energy for good fiction writing these days. *sigh*.
ever seen a dolphin's chin? (Score:2)
Think of the dolphin's blowhole. Did nature try out every possible place on the body for the blowhole, were many dolphins born with blowholes on their sides or under their fins or chins (ever seen a dolphin's chin?) or at the tips of their tails before the ones that had them on the tops of their heads won out evolutionarily speaking? I'm not saying that this didn't happen; but think if it did. Why should *only* the dolphins with the blowholes on their heads survive? Why not on their backs, say just in front of the dorsal, and why not on the tail? If it were entirely up to chance, it seems to me that some different blowhole mutations, while not providing as *great* an evolutionary advantage as the one placing it on the head, would still provide *enough* advantage for there to have developed dolphins with small but significant differences in biological makeup. This could be said of any species perhaps.
Next there is the matter of chance. If we rely conceptually on chance as much as you think we must, then it stands to reason that there is a greater chance of *not* evolving the blowhole than of actually evolving the blowhole. How many blowhole mutations would provide as much or close to as much advantage as the one on the head? A few. How many wouldn't? A LOT. Even if you restrict the number of possibilities of the placement of the blowhole by taking for granted the placement of the lungs, the mouth, and other organs and biological features, you still get A LOT of possibilities, and all of them will result in dead dolphins and a dead species.
Now I'm no creationist, but it seems clear to me (always has) that there's more going on than simple *chance* when it comes to evolution. I don't know about this multiverse thing, seems kinda like a big rationalization, in terms of an old paradigm, for phenomena that only appear under a new paradigm (it's only in classic physics that you can't have one thing in two places at the same time; but it's only in QED that you have things which can, so it's a bizarre little crutch). It would be much easier to account for evolution in terms of some sort of deeply rooted (DNA level) but geologically paced learning mechanism, by which experiences of the organism get translated into information on the level of DNA and are implemented in the next generation of the species. So, some kind of feedback system. I mean, after all, think about it: isn't it a little *too* coincidental that species generate evolutionary *beneficient* mutations, most of the time?
Of course, according to some observations, evolution jumps forward in fits and starts, so the learning mechanism would probably have to account for that.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
You "call" bullshit, or you "can" bullshit? It looks like you did the latter. :)
If we looked at the DNA of two different but similar creatures and saw that there were very few similarities, then that would be very strong evidence against the sort of common descent that is currently postulated.
Actually, considering the current state of evolutionary theory, it probably wouldn't present a problem at all. Read on.
Creationists like to arrogantly claim that humans are "perfect."
They do?? That's news to me. Do you have any references? Or is this just 'conventional wisdom?
Then why do we have (for example) an appendix? At best, it's a useless organ. At worst, it can become infected and threaten your life. Why is it even there? If a god engineered it, he's a pretty lousy engineer.
It almost hurts me to respond to this. If you think that the appendix is a useless organ, I suggest you check up on current biological theory. The appendix contains any number of bacteria that aid in the digestion process. Ask any high school bio student. :) If you're looking for lousy engineers, I'd say humans are the answer, not the symptom.
And the examples go on and on.
I certainly hope they're stronger than the one you cited! :)
No, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable .. it's that the things that could have falsified it have not.
Or, perhaps, the things that could have falsified it have been ignored or misrepresented. Tell me, for instance, what was the evolutionary process that brought about RNA, DNA, and proteins in a mutually interdependent fashion? They all evolved at the exact same time, separately, and yet all relied on each other to operate. How does this work?? How did the giraffe evolve a circulatory system that keeps it from bursting an artery when it bends down to drink water? And the examples go on and on.
Bad analogy! (Score:2)
The theory of evolution as *two* parts. One is, as you hint, random variation. But the other indispensable part is SELECTION which is by no means random! Which organism lives and which dies has nothing to do with toin cosses, and much to do with the physics of the environment.
This is a big point of misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. To cast doubt on it on the grounds that it expects too much from mere randomness is to attack a straw man.
Re:Many humans are small-minded. (Not flamebait) (Score:2)
"If the bible and christianity (or similar for any religion) can continually question and challenge and dispute its own doctorines and continue to survive and maintain logical cohesion, I'll believe that the religion has merit. But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system."
You portray scientific research on the whole as a pristine and selfless quest for truth. You say that "science accepts its own debunking of some of its former doctorines and what remains gains strength." You are correct that scientists can be at least as egomaniacal as the rest of us. But you don't seem to understand that they can be, and have been, at least as suppressive as any mainstream American religion. In particular, you seem to think that scientists are open to rational debate, when in religion "everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence." But within the scientific community, scientists have been as eager to silence opposition as anyone else.
Do you know of the feud between English and Continental mathematics? A ridiculous dispute about who invented the calculus set back mathematics by decades. The English schools stubbornly taught the antiquated system of fluxions because it had been invented by Newton, while the other Europeans used differentials.
In the nineteenth century: Kronecker did everything he could to humiliate Cantor, and did succeed in destroying his career. (Cantor was the *inventor* of topology.) Cantor never saw his opinions accepted by the community. Plenty of slashdot posters can tell you how the brilliant scientist Tesla was cheated, both during his life and after his death. He has never really been vindicated. Oppenheimer was isolated from the community in the 50's for his stance against nuclear weapons. Teller is largely isolated from the community *today* for his support of arms buildup. And although you can ceratinly argue that cold fusion was correctly debunked, the reaction to *legitimate* research in the anomalous heating associated with Pons and Fleischmans' apparatus was, and is, shameful.
Furthermore, science does not free you from the need for faith. I believe in the results of quantum mechanics and special relativity partly because I have tested some of them myself in classes. However, most people cannot say as much. To them the laws of physics may as well have been brought down from on high. The average person does not participate in your scientific quest for truth. Even for those people who are scientists, it is impossible to personally test all of the things generally accepted as true. I have seen no direct evidence of GR, for example. I don't deny that experiments tend to support GR, but in spite of testing as much of science as I can, I have no opportunity to "question and challenge and dispute," as you want of religion.
It is true that when religions are in control of the state, the government has tended to suppress opposition. But that has also been true when religions are not in control of the state. Whether religious or atheist, people always have human failings. So I will keep my own religion, thank you very much.
Re:All religion is wrong. (Not flamebait) (Score:3)
Sounds like you haven't met your kind of Christians, yet, actually. Not all Christians react with "hostility or silence" when their beliefs are questioned. There are way too many that do, to be sure, but not all.
Besides, the truth of Christianity can't be proved or disproved by the behavior of those who claim to subscribe to it. If Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave, then he died and rose from the grave, whether or not the people who say they believe in that fact act like idiots or not. I suggest that if you are seriously interested in verifying Christianity that you nose around for yourself. "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell is probably a good start. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Re:Another "weird equals weird" theory? (Score:2)
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind.
Those two books were the first things that popped into my mind as I read that article. It's just another attempt to push evolution into an area that it is hard to argue that facts in because we don't have reasonable consensus in them. The sad thing is that there's no reason to do this - even given an overly simplistic Newtonian universe I have no difficulty believing that evolution could have produced life over the billions of years and vast size of the universe. Stuff like Behe and this guy are starting from the premise that it is too improbable that life or its precursor could happen once, randomly. If you buy that and you want to believe in evolution then you go with McFadden and if you want to believe in God you go with Behe.
Re:Crackpot Science, But The Best Thing in Evoluti (Score:2)
Bommeian (sp?) mechanics successfully predicts the behavior of quantum systems, but dose not require these "interpretations." Instead it say, there is this particle fling arround in phase space (it is a phase space particle so it dose not suffer from the locality problems of other hidden variable theories). Now, this particle can not be found, so it existance is not falsifiable and thus not scientific, BUT the consistancy of the theory prooves that quantum mechanics in not a weird as we think it is, i.e. Bommian mecahnics is to quantum mechanics as classical mechanics is to statistical mechanics. This means we should always try to seperate the "phase space weirdness" of quantum mechanics from the "statistical weirdness" of quantum mechanics. These interpretations of quantum mechanics are at best attemopts to explain the statistical weirdness and at worst attempts to muddle the distinctions between the difrent wierdnesses of quantum into one big weirdness.
As Wolfgang Pauli is supposed to have said to a colleague, "We are all divided on whether or not your theory is crazy. I do not believe it is crazy enough." In QM, crazy is good.
I like the quote, but as I showed above.. there has been much confusion on the craziness of quantum mechanics ad combining two diffrent crazinesses into one massive craziness is not a good idea.
In other words, it's a hell of a lot better than most evolutionary theories I've seen.
This is incorrect. The christian right has been yelling and screeming about the holes in evolution, but they manage to stay quite far (like 100 years) behind the current research. One would wonder if they go back and read very old articles improving the theory to find evidence to debunk the theory in the popular press.
The truth is the theory of evolution has been MUCH improved over the years. It seems that the evolutionary process loves to make devices (like sex, genes, central nervus systems, enviromental learning) to complicate the process and improve the rate of evolution.. just look at how evolution speeds up over time. I do not realy understand the mechinism, but it seems complex and the study of the mechinism of evolution seem quite scietific. I do not think of evolution as a single finnished theory, but as the only working principal we have by which to construct theories (since there is so much evidence that things have changed). Just like in math we have no evidence or proof that axioms are a good way to structure things, but they seem like a good idea and they provide the necissary framwork. When we find a contradiction in the axioms of set theory we do not all quit doing math, we fix set theory. Evolution works the same way. (I've heard people claim the big bang is one of these too, but I don't know)
Jeff
BTW> I do not know much aboutthe many worlds interpretation of QM, but it sounds like something I used to convince a friend of mine that logical contradiction allon is not enough to prove that time travel is not possible, i.e. maybe our statistics, probabilities, and logic come from QM in some way and traveling back in time to create a paradox would "cancel out" in the universes supper possition or something (like quantum computers get wrong answers to cancel out). I don't trust the idea of macroscopic supper possitions, like the above of the many world interpetations, but it is possible that they are the norm and our ideas of logic and probablility are just biproducts.
Fluff and pulp (Score:2)
The review says that the probability of life originating "by chance" are like the probability of a tornado constructing a 747. First of all, what the reviewer quips as "chance", physicists call the laws of physics. And second of all, continuing the 747 analogy, how more probable would it be for the tornado to build a 747 if dust particles could move through a "multiverse"? Would they pop out, read up on 747s, and then pop back in and build one?
It all seems way to far fetched for me to swallow. At least the theory that life originated from a highly improbably combination of physical circumstances
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
Re:QM -- understandable? (Score:2)
You're wrong. If the actions of subatomic particles can be both described and predicted, then there is scientific understanding. That's science's entire purpose--to make accurate predictions about the world. If you can mathematically describe a system and predict what it will do next, then you understand the system.
What you're talking about, I believe, is a "deeper understanding" that philosophers reach for. Science is not philosophy, and is not interested in such "deeper understanding."
Re:Acceptance of one more unanswered question (Score:2)
Well, that pretty much fits my broad definition of faith; it's the realization that at any given time some things are unmalleable and absolute and unexplainable, but yet we accept them and say "so be it."
Re:QM -- understandable? (Score:2)
Re:Copenhagen I. is even more metaphysical esoteri (Score:2)
about as long as each other - since the beginning of quantum mechanics.
Probably the best interpretation of quantum mechanics comes from Roger Penrose, who taught a class I was in. Simply put, he said that we do not know enough to make any claims whatsoever as to the true nature of the Schrodinger's Cat problem. Which is true. We unfortunately still have several paradoxes to resolve before we can even approach explaining Schrodinger's Cat - the Quantum Xeno Paradox, for instance, which states that one can make an improbable state persist infinitely by continuously observing it - i.e., by making it continuously interact with its environment. This will tell us whether or not measurements actually do what we think they do - i.e., collapse the wave function. Currently the quantum xeno paradox favors quantum mechanics, but unfortunately the results can be easily explained away.
That's just the beginning of the problems facing the philosophical aspects of quantum mechanics. The other major hurdle is the use of the word "random". Einstein probably hurt us the worst when he said "God doesn't play dice," since dice rolls are random (more or less).
Quantum mechanics is -not- about randomness, or probability. It is about distributions. An electron in a mixed spin-up, spin-down state does not have a 50% "chance" of being measured in spin up. Quantum mechanics means *nothing* for
individual particles or systems. It only has meaning for large collections of indistinguishable objects. In other words, in the previous example, an electron in a mixed spin-up, spin-down state doesn't have a "probability" of being measured in a spin-up or spin-down. It'll be measured in whatever it's measured in. However, if you take a thousand of those electrons, on the average, you'll get 500 up,
and 500 down. Plus or minus 10 on both. Gotta love Poisson statistics.
*That* is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics - it's the same interpretation of statistical mechanics as well. The theory means crap for individual objects. Only large numbers of objects. Therefore, talking about "one molecule" of DNA is bunk. You need to talk about a large number of DNA molecules, all in the same mixed quantum state. Then, on the average, if their states are measured, then QM will give the right results. Not for each one. This whole "choice" thing and "quantum multiverse entering" is meaningless.
Re:Quantum evoulutin, my foot (Score:5)
Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift).
I am surprised that you are not worried by the idea of directed mutation and I think that the amount of flak that Hall received when he talked about it is testimony to the fact that it is controversial. Suppose it were called Teleological Mutation - would that not be something that you would react against? I think most evolutionary biologists would explode at that.
Your equating of (what I presume to be Zahavis work?) good-genes models with a kind of directional mutagenesis :-) is at best misleading. There is no directional mutation going on in these models at all! That is part of their point, they are some of the intricatte theories worked out to show how selection of exisiting variation can tend towards certain results given certain parameters.
The problem with slashdot is that the audience has a low number of evolutionary biologists in it - otherwise the original article wouldn't get much of an airing.
I agree that it can be irritating to have non-experts quoted as authorities in fields that they are not, but I don't think that we should attack them on an authoritarian basis: dismissing someone's ideas just because they are not in the field doesn't actually address what the problems are with their theories and leaves one open to the charge of closed-mindedness. As I see it these are some of the problems with what the article says (and I suspect that you are correct about a clueless journalist making this into more than it might be):
This statement is unclear. One sees for example much order in crystals, lipid-bilayers (like micelles that form spontaneously) or indeed, one could even argue at the sub-atomic level:the number of neutrons and protons in every atom of a particular element is always the same, physicists are busy identifying exotic particles that are of types and in my book that counts as order. Finally there are the molecules of life itself - without any starting prejudice, we see them as ordered - doesn't this new theory start off by presupposing that we must not accept this?
This is similar to the arguments of Penrose about consciousness in "The Emperor's New Mind" - a claim that because something is composed of elements that behave at a sub-atomic level in a different manner does not invalidate the fact that they behave in a non-quantum, Newtonian manner at this level. Billiard balls still roll around on predictable courses. Just because DNA is composed of atoms which are composed of more fundamental particles that do weird things doesn't mean that it is going to wink in and out of existence
Yes, Directed Mutation is controversial, it presuppose that there is some mechanism which allows cells to teleologically influence the mutations that they encounter. The standard model is that mutation is random and that the cells either get lucky or that they don't. The data to show that directed mutation happens is not convincing to many in the field. However this warrants further work and this theory could explain it. But there are others that rely on more prosaic ideas - for instance that a starving cell's machinery is not repaired as well as a healthy one thus that more mutations are introduced and thus there is a greater chance that one that allows new food to be metabolized will crop up. Pretty prosaic compared to DNA winking out of the multiverse
Unsupported claim. Many of the building block of life seem to be out there, there are huge amounts of Valine, Arginine and some other amino acid just floating about in space. Miller and Urey demonstrated how some of the molecules arise "naturally".
Sure, but it's not necessary unless one accepts all the premises of the article. Is it all that gloomy anyway?
Re:It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:3)
FWIW, the Strong Anthropic Principle, which is not nearly as widely accepted, basically states that "A universe can only exist if it is observed, therefore only universes with intelligent life exist."
I was trying to come up with a nice analogy to illustrate this concept, but I'm drawing a blank, so I'll be content to just put a name on it for now.
Synchronicity and Relational DNA (Score:2)
For those versed in computer science, all you need to do really is go back to Codd's assumptions about relational databases, change his normalizations to allow duplicate rows and then allow negative rows in cases where a row is deleted before it is present. The theorems of such a relational calculus turn out to encompass the essential "weirdness" of quantum physics.
But they encompass much more:
They describe an entire range of relational objects which are neither quantum nor classical. That we might end up with strange things like synchronicities is no more surprising than that the ripples from a stone thrown in the middle of a pond strike all sides simultaneously -- except that we have to admit the "inverse Markovians" in which "effect" seems to precede "cause".
There have been many studies of identical twins separated at birth exhibiting synchronicities [brown.edu] that, when confronted, make "skeptics" of the universal weirdness of things start sounding more like fundamentalist adherents to a new form of religion than intellectually honest scientists. The fact that these studies are on such macroscopic entities as human beings, involving complex behaviors over extended time and space separations is a clue as to just how far we are from appreciating the relationship between DNA and universal weirdness deriving, not from "nature" but from from the fundamental laws of relationships.
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
I can safely assume that there are no pink-polka-dotted elephants running around downtown Manhattan, since there isn't any credible physical evidence to support it. That doesn't mean that I can prove it without being able to see every microscopic part of New York at every point in space-time.
Such is the case with 'God.' Personal belief is not stringent proof, and the statement that "God must exist since I cannot imagine any other way" is arrogant beyond any "intellectual purity" I could demonstrate.
I will believe in God when you can give me a repeatable, well designed and defined experiement for testing God's existence.
Doug
Re:Copenhagen I. is even more metaphysical esoteri (Score:2)
As for Roger Penrose, this is the guy who rejected neurobiology in favour of a theory that our consciousness is based on orchestrated collapse of quantum wave functions...and that the basic computational unit of thought is the protein microtubules inside our cells. similar story to the guy in the article.
I always think it's sad when an eminent scientist steps outside of his own field and makes a complete ass of himself.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:God ain't that good an explanation, either... (Score:2)
That's perfectly correct in a way. God is (a manifestation of, an aspect of) the universe. It's the only interpretation that doesn't result in self-contradiction.
Big Bang cosmology says that time began when spacetime came into being at the initial singularity. "Always" can only refer back to that point because there is no "before". You can't go further South than the South Pole.
As to how the Big Bang could have happened without a prior cause, as to how the mass/energy could have appeared spontaneously from no place or time - it could so it did. Basic Quantum Physics. Matter and Energy are spontaneously created everywhere, all the time, on a small scale, by a sort of temporary "borrowing". Bigger events like that are rarer of course.
For those of you still wondering about conservation of mass/energy (when are we gonna get annihilated and where the fsck is all the antimatter) I guess that when the stuff to make the universe got borrowed...it didn't belong to anyone and no-one was watching at the time, so no-one ever bothered to claim it back
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:QM -- understandable? (Score:2)
The problem with QM isn't that it can't be understood; maybe it can. The problem is that it isn't properly understood now. We know how it works for limited cases (small simple systems) but we don't really know its true boundaries, and therefore what other ramifications it might have that are as yet undiscovered.
Hence the proliferation of interpretations, and the search for a Grand Unified Theory/Theory of Everything.
And also hence all the New Age nitwits claiming that life is because of quantum, consciousness is because of quantum, ghosts and fairies are because of quantum, and the Quantum Theory of Wire Coathanger Proliferation.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:First Causes (Score:2)
Sheesh. If I had a penny every time...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
No, you have turned this back to front. In the absence of any evidence one way or the other it is impeccable to assume that the phenomenon does not exist. We have no evidence about either God or your poodle-farted ball lightning. Ergo we assume that neither exists.
Actually I do think there is a God of sorts but I'll readily admit that I don't know where or how, and that scientific evidence is of immeasurably more objective value than my personal faith. Where evidence shows that physics works by itself, faith must yield to science. After all, we're only guessing about faith on the basis of no evidence at all.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:2)
Alright, this just really annoys me. Everyone is like, "this is just pseudoscience" when they haven't even read the book and given it a fair hearing, whereas few people are criticising Darwinism, but the truth is that neo-Darwinism has almost no empirical support either.
No, I'm not a creationist. No, I'm not crazy. I've just read this paradigm-changing book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton.
Let's briefly run down some of the key arguments: (see also this article [alternativescience.com] which was censored on request of the high priest of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins)
- We don't actually know how old the earth is. I'll repeat that, because I'm sure someone will say I'm trying to claim the earth is 6000 years old or whatever: No, we don't actually know how old the earth is. Given that realisation, there is then no evidence whatsoever that the earth has existed long enough for the tortuously slow process of neo-Darwinian evolution to produce humans. Rocks are used to date fossils, but fossils are also used to date rocks - a totally circular argument. All forms of radiological dating are very inaccurate and untrustworthy - recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to be "thousands of years old" using radiological methods. Uniformitarian geological theories predict that stalagmites should take on the order of thousands of years to form, yet they have been observed forming in mines less than 30 years old.
- There is no universally accepted definition, even among Darwinists, of what the word "species" means in Darwinian terms, so to even debate the point of whether speciation has been proven is to get mired in confusions. Darwin himself claimed to have observed speciation in Galapagos finches, but this was just trivial intra-species differentiation. No evidence has ever been discovered of significant speciation that could really prove, once and for all, that a man could evolve from an ape purely through natural selection of random mutations. It's all hypotheses - no matter how much Darwinists want to scream and shout that "it is not just a theory, there is enough evidence to be as certain as we'll ever be that it's true" - in reality, what little evidence of speciation there is (e.g. homological similarities) is purely circumstantial - suggestive but nowhere near constituting proof.
- What's more, random beneficial mutations are not just very rare, they're extremely freak occurrences - there is nowhere near enough experimental evidence of random beneficial mutations to believe that they are a significant factor in evolution (if it occurs) at all. On the other hand, directed beneficial mutations in microorganisms have been observed, as other expert Slashdot posters have already noted - in repeated experiments, beneficial mutations appeared far faster than would be possible by chance alone. (Of course, there is usually a nonzero probability of the results being caused by contamination, but that possibility doesn't help neo-Darwinism either.)
- Punctuated equilibrium is just an ad-hoc explanation to explain the embarrassing lack of "missing link" fossils. The only reason for adopting it is to explain away the lack of missing links. It's almost as bad as theologians getting around any awkward question, like "How did Noah's children reproduce without committing incest?" by saying "The ways of God are too deep for us mere mortals to understand."
- The idea that DNA entirely determines the characteristics of the organism does not sit well with these observations -
- Limited Lamarkian change has been observed in the lab - see "Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare" by Mae Wan Ho. Larmarkianism isn't correct either as an overarching theory of evolution, but inheritance of acquired characteristics can sometimes occur.
- "Natural selection" is an empty tautology. Fitness is defined as "leaving most offspring" - so what it actually means is that "Those who leave most offspring will leave most offspring". Which says nothing at all. What's crucial to realise is that there is a related, non-empty, insight here - that the distribution of offspring with certain characteristics can be a factor in changing characteristics of organisms - and this is the insight that Darwin should be rightly recognised for; but it's quite a trivial one, and says nothing about how significant that factor is in relation to other factors such as, say, directed mutation.
In conclusion, neo-Darwinism is as full of holes as a fishing net, and should not be accepted as proven by an serious scientist.Re:It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:2)
Re:Ridiculous pseudo-science OR NOT! (Score:2)
The only question which science shall never be able to answer with or without quantum is why it is that there is a subjective conscious experience associated with self-awareness. And the reason this question will never be answered is because it's a stupid question. See my
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Quarentine: a SPOILER warning would have been nice (Score:2)
just gave away a MAJOR plot point in Quarentine, i.e. the mystery of the bubble. Don't read the above post if you haven't read Greg Egan's Quarentine and you intend too!
I hate that arguement (Score:2)
If I take a deck of cards with the jokers removed, and shuffle it, there are 52! possible arrangements of the deck. That's a big number. In fact, the odds of the pack coming out the way it did are one in 52! - imagine that, against tremendous odds, that arrangement still came out.
This guy is using the same kind of misunderstanding of probabilities. Just because the odds are slim that life could have evolved in this specific way doesn't mean it couldn't have happened another way. And don't forget just how much time it took for life to evolve the way it did.
--
grappler
Re:Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:2)
Re:Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:3)
First, we don't know how old the Earth is, and we don't know how old the Universe is, but we have some pretty good guesses. However, anything in the "thousands" of years is definitely waaay too short, unless you're going for the "everything spontaneously came into existence five minutes ago, complete with false memories" argument, which would mean that I didn't *really* get that A+ in "Philosophy of Science", I just remember it that way.
Second, radiometric dating is pretty accurate and well-verified, provided your timescale is in geological time (which is what matters, for the age of the Earth--we're not trying to compute *my* age here). So an error plus or minus a few thousand years doesn't really matter when your timescale is in the millions or billions of years.
I repeat, don't try to date anything recent, it just doesn't make sense. If you don't believe the earthi is actually that old, do some research on the magnetic properties of rocks and their correlation on the ocean floor (due to the periodic switch in the magnetism of the earth). This is how they found more evidence for continental drift, and there's enough there to make a convincing case for the age of the earth being much greater than thousands of years, and therefore makes a case for the use of radiometric dating as a useful tool (measuring for millions or even billions of years).
Third, a species isn't a hard-and-fast definiton, and it's purely practical. There are sub-species as well. But there are some good guidelines. You should be able to breed within a species, for instance. Some good evidence for differentiation and competition would be, say, Australia. Theoretically, it drifted away from the other continents before the marsupials got out-competed. Therefore, Australia still has marsupials, because they were dominant in a (relatively speaking) small area, and ended up succeeding. Some of the same environmental niches are present, and the marsupials evolved to fill them, just as other animals did on the other continents. Of course, this theory requires continental drift, and geological time, and evolution, etc., etc.
Random beneficial mutations *are* rare. However, selective breeding works pretty well. If a lot of people have a lot of latent genetic traits that aren't used under pressure, and then a disease wipes out a lot of people that didn't have those traits, the people left will breed, and tend to have more of those beneficial traits. Random mutation is all well and good, but diversity in the gene pool over a long period of time seems more helpful to me.
I'm sure there are good explanations for the gap in the fossil record. But in science, just as in religion, we have to go with what we know, and try our best to fill in the gaps. Maybe if we found more fossils, we'd have a more solid theory in that respect.
Or maybe God is just taunting us, eh, just like he taunts those Sunday school kids with "Who did Adam and Eve's children marry", or whatever.
Maybe some neo-darwinists got the speciation tree wrong there, it's something to think about. But snakes, crocodiles, and chickens are all pretty far apart, with snakes being the weirdest. Think about it, they lost their legs a long time ago, whereas crocodiles and chickens walk around just fine. Also, the dinosaurs might have been related to those chickens just as much as they were to the crocodiles, that's also been a recent evolutionary theory. At least there's argument and change happening in this field, that shows that it's alive and well, not dead and buried.
I don't know much about Lamarkian change, probably because it's a pretty lame theory. It seems to me that acquired characteristics couldn't strictly be bred for, which is the flaw in Lamarkian theory. However, individuals who learn how to do these actions might survive better, and teach their young, which would be a valid Darwinian theory.
(say a woman on a desert island learned how to shake coconut trees and get the food out of them. She's smart, she survives, she teaches her children, they survive. More of them survive and breed, and the rest of the island eventually learns the secret and gets smarter.
Fitness shouldn't be defined simply as leaving the most offspring, but that's a good start. Obviously you had to survive to do so, which is the point. Over a long period of time this is a good definition, because the survivors inherit the earth, and everyone else dies out. In that environment, they are fit.
That link you provided cleared things up a bit, thanks. It looks like neo-Darwinism is a specific branch of Darwinism that these people have chosen to attack. Of course, a decent theory would have to be a bit more complex than they have portrayed.
Yes, animals with different DNA can look more similar than animals with the same DNA might appear. (bats and blue whales are both mammals--DNA analysis tells you how long ago a species might have diverged, not what they look like now)
Yes, beneficial changes can happen very quickly. I don't know how that works exactly, but I'd gather it would be a survival trait that can be bred for. In fact, I wonder how many of these survival traits we don't know about. I doubt Luck is one, but that idea figures strongly into the Ringworld books, and even if its wrong, it looks like a good example of thinking outside the box, like the box that web page placed neo-Darwinism into, and definitely not all Darwinistic insights.
To keep coming up with more good theories, there have to be more insights. Followers, by definition, do not have more insights. The only way to get them is to think up something else, and see if it works. Evolution is more complex than Darwin let on, but he didn't finish the job here, he only started it.
If anyone really knowledgable has some insights on either of these topics, please respond.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Re:Fashinable Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:2)
Humanity builds a super-computer that can answer any question, and one of the engineers as a joke asks it to figure out how to reverse entropy.
Eons pass, humanity changes from physical beings to thought being, to pure energy, and entropy continues to take its toll, with the universe getting colder collapsing. The computer is still thinking -- "not enogh data, continuing observation" it would always say. in this time, the computer has changed to exist in an entirely different dimension than the universe we inhabit.
Our universe dies, and the computer watches, observing. An immesurable length of time passes, as the computer calculates.
Then, the computer discovers how to reverse entropy.
The computer says "Let there be light" and the universe is born again...
Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:2)
Re:It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:2)
Re:All religion is wrong. (Not flamebait) (Score:5)
Au contraire, mon ami. Almost all major religions are consistanty refining and reworking their beliefs to fit new information. Most Christian denominations, for instance, have annual meetings that, among other orders of business, decide on any 'platform' changes or additions. Just like science, some core truths are relatively stable (gravity, the divinity of Christ), some are slowly retired over time (flat earth, flat earth), and some are still in flux (particle physics, the role of women in the church).
Just because religions' criteria for changing truths is not necessarily based on empirical challenging doesn't mean their methods are demonstrably 'wrong.' Unless you're such a believer in the Church of Science's core tenets of demontrability and repeatability that any other scheme is 'heresy.'
>But if everything is True by Decree....
Again, science is a church. Unless you personally go out and demonstrate each and every scientific truth that you believe, for yourself, with strict application of scientific method and a healthy dose of skepticism, a belief in science IS "Truth by Decree," relying on the proclamations of wiser elders for truth, based on a faith in their higher knowledge of and closer contact with The Truth.
"Peer review" isn't an argument against the above, either. Almost all Christian elders, of any denomination and creed, will back each other up on the divinity of Christ, using the tools of their Church. If "peer review" is a criterion for truth, why don't you believe in those alleged truths?
Unless it's that what your argument boils down to is "if it doesn't work the way science says, I won't believe it." Which, to me, sounds like a belief system based in faith.
As a disclaimer, I, myself, am a Church of Science adherant, and not a religious person of any consequence. But I do see that my Church is just a system of ordered beliefs handed down from power structure to power structure, with a core set of unprovable assumptions, occasional attacks from 'fringe breakaway groups' that either succeed or fail, and with millions of amateur adherants that gobble up things that are sound like dogma and pooh-pooh things that don't, with very little except their incomplete understanding and faith to tell the difference. And just like any other Church, science is anxious to differentiate itself from other Churches by argument of how much better and more valid its ideas are.
The fact that the Church of Science has been the in-fashion flavor for the last few hundred years doesn't mean it's any less a Church, no matter how strongly it tries to redefine itself.
--
Religion comment - true, but take it both ways (Score:2)
Take that 'why?' attitude and apply it to the beliefs of science 'purists' who insist that evolution is the most reasonable belief we can have. Why? In the words of a previous poster, "Because we're here, aren't we?" Yes I'm oversimplifying a LOT, but if you look carefully at arguments on BOTH sides of the issue, you'll see this same idea popping up. Someone who believes in a materialistic universe (deterministic or quantum, whatever) will tend to accept evolution because it's POSSIBLE for it to happen, and they see no more likely option. Those who believe in a spiritual/material world will accept that divine intervention could create the world, because it's POSSIBLE for it to happen, and they see no more likely option!
It seems to me that this whole debate comes down to what you choose to assume about the world - your fundamental beliefs, your FAITH. If you assume that the world is affected only by what we can observe, then the only conclusions you can accept are those that science gives you. If you believe that God can do whatever the heck he wants, then you will conclude otherwise. As for why you choose to believe these things, there are debates going either way but often that's just a lot of talk - the real decision is a matter of what seems 'sensible' to yourself.
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Within whichever universe is being observed, that is.
I think McFadden's theory results from a confusion on his part between Copenhagen and Many Worlds.
The key point is his claim that since deleterious mutations can't live, beneficial mutations get sort of "shaken out of the pepper pot" in a kind of stochastic process whenever cells get thermodynamically isolated. In other words, unviable elements of a quantum superposition die but if one possible element of a superposition is capable of observing itself into existence, out it pops.
This is a feature of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation (and the reasoning behind Barrow and Tipler's Anthropic Principle which a few people have alluded to here today). But (according to MWI) on each occasion where this situation occurs, while one universe witnesses the happy event there are others where the death march is played instead. The selection of which universe gets the prize is essentially random in relation to similar universe selection games being played elsewhere.
Since all molecules - even DNA - should behave in a statistically correct fashion, the relative incidence of survival of such cells should be predictable according to ordinary physical chemistry. But I think he's asking us to believe that for any given isolated cell, the universe in which the best DNA configuration materialises...is going to be the one that we happen to observe rather more often that would be predicted by statistics (and Schroedinger's cats would emerge alive from their boxes more frequently than expected).
OK, that doesn't sound too implausible when stated like that and at least it's testable, right?
But if this is really happening, then cells all round the world are consistently choosing to survive in a common, unique reality.
And that would be a gross violation of current QM theory because MWI QM doesn't play favourites. The notion of choice and a single privileged reality belongs to the Copenhagen Interpretation, not to the MWI.
One has to ask, what benefit accrues to a paramecium that chooses to survive in the same reality as another paramecium somewhere else? Because that's what the theory seems to imply is happening. In actual fact, most individual organisms benefit if they survive to monopolise the food supply at the expense of others - the direct opposite of the consequences of McFadden's theory.
I don't think this is quite as daft as the QM consciousness theories, but given the massive distorting effect this ability would surely have on all statistics involving living systems, I'm sure we would have noticed by now if it were true. McFadden's theory is likely based upon a simple misunderstanding that a real QM Physicist would never have made.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:3)
Firstly, I'd like to recommend to you and everyone else that when you read and "earthshattering" book that punches holes in some scientiifc orthodoxy, you go out and check your facts. Mr Milton may be the untold genius of 20th century biology, but its much more likely (especially if you presentation of his arguments is faithful to his) that he's a second rate scientist,or even a simple kook, trying to make a few bucks.
Point by point now ...
Age of the Earth We don't know the age of the earth very precisely, but we have a pretty good idea. You can use rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks as long as you don't use the fossils to date the rocks you used to date the fossils. Nothing circular about it. Different radiometric dating techniques are used for different things - carbon dating (used for organic matterto get the date since death) is accurate to the hundreds of years, the techniques used for rocks are only accurate to thousands or millions of years, so using them to date recent lava flows in an exercise in bad science. Can't comment on the stalactites, but off the topof my head, surely it depends on the quantities of water, and the quantity and nature of the minerals dissolved in them. I know of stalactites that have formed in only 10s of years myself.
Definition of Species Species is not an important concepts in neo-darwinism as currently formulated. The only things upon which natural selection works are genes, and the only way in which it does so it through their phenotypic effects. Whether or not speciation has been observed is not terribly relevant - if you accept that the fossil record is an accurate but incomplete record of the earth's biological history, it must have happened. Several phenomena (ring species,evidence for punctuated equilibria in the fossil record) suggest that speciation occurs when a small population is separated from the rest of the species and evolves on a separate track.
Beneficial Mutation is stupendously improbable by ordinary human standards. noone is proposing that large scale evolutionary change occurs of timescalescomprehensible to human intuition. I don't know what the stuff about directed mutation is on about. If you have references I'd be interested.
Punctuated Equilibria isnot an ad-hoc explanation for anything. The absence of link fossils is explained quite sufficiently by the extreme rarity of fossilisation. Punctuated equilibria is just a theory about what happens during speciation and what we should expect to see in the fossils record in any given location -the interesting point being that if speciation really does usually occur in isolated populations, we should not expect to find link fossils in the same place as the parent and child species,even if all individuals were fossilised.
Haeomoglobin I've no idea how the quoteyou give is supposed to shed doubt on the idea that "DNA determines the characteristics of the organism". Taken literally, noone believes that anyway. Many other factors play a role.You can't taken cheicken DNA and magically produce a chickenfrom inorganic matter. Regardless, we're presumably meant to conclude from the quote than chickens are in fact more closely related to both snakes and crocodiles than they areto one another,or that common DNA is not a good measure of relatedness. Either is fine - neither is a blow to the neo-darwinian synthesis. Whether snakes and crocodiles are both reptiles is irrelevant - this taxonmic distinction has no bearing on anything else, least of closeness of relatedness. Similarly evolutionary forces may have acted on one or more of the three creatures to change the shape ofits haemoglobin.
Lamarkian Change Larmarkism is not a well formulated theory. Some darwinian change could be classified as Lamarkian.
Natural selection is not a tautology. The statement you make is a tautology, but is only half the story. Properly stated, the principle of natural selection is something like "those genes whose phenotypic effects cause creatures carrying them to tend to survive will spread through the population". This is not a terribly complcated concept, but it is not a tautology. The idea that this is the main driver behind evolutionary change is another matter -by and large this is believed because noone has proposed a more credible theory.
Interesting... (Score:2)
Interesting argument, however there's a flaw.
If indeed the universe was created by God, then God must have existed before the universe did. Which also means that God must not be originally of this universe. Therefore, even if God did have a cause, such cause would have no meaning here. Therefore, "God" (or whatever name you choose to call it) still is the first cause of this universe, even by your definition.
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:3)
1. Bible: God is the Creator of all things (Genesis 1).
Evolution: Natural chance processes can account for the existence of all things.
2. Bible: World created in six literal days (Genesis 1)
Evolution: World evolved over the aeons.
3. Bible: Creation is completed (Genesis 2:3)
Evolution: Creative processes continuing.
4. Bible: Oceans before land (Genesis 1:2)
Evolution: Land before oceans.
5. Bible: Atmosphere between two hydrospheres (Genesis 1:7)
Evolution: Contiguous atmosphere and hydrosphere.
6. Bible: First life on land (Genesis 1:11)
Evolution: Life began in the oceans.
7. Bible: First life was land plants (Genesis 1:11)
Evolution: Marine organisms evolved first.
8. Bible: Earth before sun and stars (Genesis 1:14-19)
Evolution: Sun and stars before earth.
9. Bible: Fruit trees before fishes (Genesis 1:11,20,21)
Evolution: All fishes before fruit trees.
10. Bible: All stars made on the fourth day (Genesis 1:16)
Evolution: Stars evolved at various times.
11. Bible: Birds and fishes created on the fifth day (Genesis 1:20,21)
Evolution: Fishes evolved over hundreds of millions of years before birds apeared.
12. Bible: Birds before insects (Genesis 1:20-31; Leviticus 11)
Evolution: Insects before birds.
13. Bible: Whales before reptiles (Genesis 1:20-31)
Evolution: Reptiles before whales.
14. Bible: Birds before reptiles (Genesis 1:20-31)
Evolution: Reptiles before birds.
15. Bible: Man before rain (Genesis 2:5)
Evolution: Rain before man.
16. Bible: Man before woman (Genesis 2:21-22)
Evolution: Woman before man (by genetics).
17. Bible: Light before the sun (Genesis 1:3-19)
Evolution: Sun before any light (on earth)
18. Bible: Plants before the sun (Genesis 1:11-19)
Evolution: Sun before any plants.
19. Bible: Abundance and variety of marine life appeared all at once (Genesis 1:20-21)
Evolution: Marine life gradually developed from a primitive organic blob.
20. Bible: Man's body created from the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7)
Evolution: Man evolved from monkeys.
21. Bible: Man exercised dominion over all organisms (Genesis 1:28)
Evolution: Most organisms extinct before man evolved.
22. Bible: Man originally a vegetarian (Genesis 1:29)
Evolution: Man originally a meat-eater.
23. Bible: Fixed and distinct kinds (Genesis 1:11,12,21,24,25; 1 Corinthians 15:38-39)
Evolution: Life forms in a continual state of flux.
24. Bible: Man's sin is the cause of death (Romans 5:12)
Evolution: Struggle and death existent log before the evolution of man.
Re:Ridiculous pseudo-science OR NOT! (Score:2)
With regard to David Deutsch, he made one elementary common error in his interpretation of the famous Church-Turing hypothesis about computability, undermining most of his subsequent conclusions about the computability of the human mind (that's unfortunate because I'm planning to get uploaded before I die...). The error is a common one apparently. You can read about it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here [stanford.edu].
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Anyone remember Occam's Razor? (Score:2)
Things like the eye, blood clotting and so forth would be very unlikely to come about through random chance alone. And the argument that "it can happen if you just give enough time" doesn't jibe with the archeological record -- there have been times in history when new species have popped up left and right. And times, like now, when relatively little innovation was going on. Currently, natural selection alone can't account for this. Which is why many bio types are looking for a better explanation (you can see hints of this debate within some of the posts from people withbio backgrounds).
The fundamental problem is that, as it currently stands, Natural Selection would appear to violate the second law of Thermodynamics (Entropy always increases) -- life requires a great deal of order, and selection for more order is difficult at best..
I don't propose an explanation for these things (no, I'm not a creationist): I just am smart enough to know when I don't know. From everything I've seen, if you can unreservedly affirm any current theory for speciazation, yhen you don't know enough about the field. This guy sounds like a crackpot -- but unless I've read his book, I'm not qualified to an opinion, am I?
Re:Ridiculous pseudo-science OR NOT! (Score:2)
I think (hope) that "believes" is too strong a word. I haven't read his book but I got the idea from the encyclopedia article that Copeland was simply expressing reservations about what is proven and what isn't.
Penrose on the other hand is so wrapped up in his own qmind theory that he's completely lost touch with reality
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Synchronicity and Relational DNA (Score:2)
Now, I'm not claiming that order in spacetime is entirely the result of proto-spacetime randomization, but when skeptics appeal to Ramsey as a means of debunking claims that synchronicity has deeper meaning than mere coincidence I find it ironic -- proto-spacetime is deeper than the spacetime that we observe and even if it were totally random, it would still have amazing amounts of order.
But I digress -- here's a typical example of self-proclaimed skeptics attempting to conduct a control experiment based on the Ramsey theory [csicop.org]:
CSICOP Presidential Coincidences Contest Back in 1992, the Skeptical Inquirer held a Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest, in response to Ann Landers printing "for the zillionth time" a list of chilling parallels between John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. The task was for readers to come up with their own list of coincidences between other pairs of presidents. There were two contest winners, Arturo Magidin of Mexico City, and Chris Fishel, a student at the University of Virginia. Magidin came up with sixteen stunning coincidences between Kennedy and former Mexican President Alvaro Obregón, while Fishel managed to come up with lists of coincidences between no fewer than twenty-one different pairs of U.S. presidents.
A few examples from Magidin's list:
Both "Kennedy" and "Obregón" have seven letters each; each was assassinated; both their assassins had three names and died shortly after killing the president; Kennedy and Obregón were both married in years ending in 3, each had a son who died shortly after birth, and both came from large families and died in their forties.
Fishel came up with dozens of coincidences; here are a few between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both men served two full terms; both their wives died before they became president; each had six-letter first names; both were in debt at the time of their deaths; each had a state capital named after him, and both their predecessors refused to attend their inaugurations. [For more information and the full lists, see SI Spring 1992, 16(3); and Winter 1993, 17(2).]
I leave it to the reader's skepticism as to whether this sort of "skepticism" is more self-congratulatory belief-maintanence than intellectually honest demonstration that seemingly meaningful coincidences are actually cognitive failures of biased observers.
Re:God ain't that good an explanation, either... (Score:2)
That's the $64,000 dollar question, isn't it?
I know of two answers.
First of all, there is a growing consensus among physicists that quantum theory is basically a theory of information and therefore absolute and fundamental - underpinning not only the laws governing spacetime, matter and energy in our universe but all phenomena in all possible universes; and even defining the behaviour of the abstract "metareality" which encompasses all. Everything that is has ultimately been created by/out of something abstract, no more substantial than information itself.
The first time I ever heard about the origin of the Big Bang itself was in a dumbed-down TV broadcast about inflationary theories. It talked about matter spontaneously springing intto existence from a timeless, dimensionless void. Naturally this spurred my curiosity so I went off and learned all I could about inflation. The details of inflation itself have been revised and revised over the years but I'm aware of only one explanation covering the origin itself.
The "timeless dimensionless void" is of course the Nothing that you referred to. Now given that even Nothing is governed by quantum mechanics, anything that can happen must happen. Within a spacetime, improbable events are separated by large distances of time and space. But within a Nothing, there is no time and space so these events just Happen, Always Happened, Are Happening, Will Happen...you see the difficulty. It's probably best just to envisage all events that are possible in a Nothing as being integral to and co-existent with the Nothing.
Anyway, one such improbable quantum event is the existence of a quantity of mass-energy...in our particular case, not much as it happens - just a few kilograms. Of course, existing only in Nothing this mass-energy is infinitely dense and hot and so is forced to expand spatially with time. The sudden expansion causes a phase change in spacetime at some later epoch which releases still more mass-energy out of the Higgs field to provide the vast bulk of the Universe's mass that we observe today and causing space to expand much faster until it cools suffiently to undergo another phase change. Meanwhile the fundamental constants of the universe are adjusted by the falling temperature and pressure, allowing the fundamental forces to separate out from each other ("symmetry breaking") and the laws of physics to assume their current form. This is "inflation". The rest is History as they say...quite literally in this case though.
It's worth remembering for the sake of perspective that the Nothing is still there by the way. Or perhaps I should say still Not There. The most common perceptual mistake people make is thinking in terms of the void being somehow "before" the Big Bang, even right after they've been told that time began at the Big Bang itself and only refers to the contents of the universe created thereby. The only way I've ever managed to get my own head around this is to follow Stephen Hawking's analogy...that is, there isn't any point in time prior to the Big Bang any more than there is a point on the Earth that is further South than the South Pole.
So the first answer to your question is that spacetime and physics in general aren't necessary conditions for quantum events and in fact spacetime and physics are generated by, in, or during such quantum events (it seems to come free with the mass-energy). I'm sure you'll remember that space is continues to be generated today as the matter continues to spread outward. Whether it can be said that time is being generated in the same way as that matter moves into the future, I don't know. Probably. Of course, from an outside point of view (eg back in the Nothing) the origin, the whole lifetime and the ultimate fate of this universe are co-existent as there's no time there anyway.
That kind of brings me to the second answer to your question.
You may remember me saying that in Nothing, anything that can happen will happen. In other words, it's a logical consequence of this model that all possible Universes must get created out of the Nothing in a similar manner. And when I say "all possible universes" I mean an infinite number of universes representing all possible starting configurations - different values of total mass-energy, angular momentum and whatever other constants can apply to a Big Bang.
Worse than that, it may be possible for ready-expanded universes to spring into being already partly or fully formed since this might be viewed as just another starting configuration. I'm not going to go down this route though as I'd just be speculating (and I'm not qualified to do so).
But I think you get the picture. This model leads directly to a multiverse comprising an infinite number of possible universes, all of which exist from their own point of view, but from a point of view within one of those universes, the universe you're in is all that there is. It's not the Many Worlds Interpretation by itself, but it is part of it. From the point of view of the Nothing, all alternate histories within a given universe are just different aspects of the same thing.
So the second answer to your question is that when a universe is created out of Nothing, it's only happened at all insofar as its inhabitants believe that it has. There are no external observers, so it has no external consequences. Since it has no external consequences it can do whatever it damn well likes as far as the Nothing and the rest of the multiverse are concerned. That's what I meant when I teasingly said in my original post that no-one came looking for the borrowed mass-energy because no-one saw it being taken in the first place. Existence is only relative to the universe you inhabit. Do inhabitants of other universes exist? Yes and no. It doesn't ever matter. Does our universe exist? It doesn't matter to anyone but us.
Stephen Hawking has advanced the notion of a universal wave equation which contains within it the origin and all possible evolutions of our universe up to their respective ultimate conclusions. So you are already just a part of of one possible solution to that universal wave equation.
Please note that the multiverse can be expressed as a larger wave equation which is a superposition of all possible universal wave equations, and of which any given universe is itself just one possible solution.
And that's all there is. Except of course, God, who I'm told can be found at the Omega Point (...AKA "The Nothing", AKA "The Timeless Dimensionless Void").
PS. In speaking of a "point of view of the Nothing" I'm aware I'm taking liberties (by definition there can be no observer there as there is no "there") but I find it a useful method of gaining an objective perspective on the whole picture.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:It's irrelevent matter how improbable life is (Score:2)
Re:Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:2)
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
It is the null hypothesis which is impossible.
Doug
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score:2)
To put it another way: the probability of intelligent life existing in a universe containing intelligent life is 1.
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Re:ARGH (Warning: long post) (Score:2)
WARNING : This post runs long. Even for my posts, which I realise usually take up a page or two when I'm at my most quiet on Slashdot. I just realised I have spent well over three hours typing up this reply, due to the length of it (ok, it touches on a lot of my favourite subjects, and this tends to induce just a bit of typed verbal diarrhea :), and I do not even want to think just how many pages this will take. I may well win the record for "Longest Post Ever Posted On Slashdot That Is Not A Blatant Attempt To Launch A DOS Attack On The Message Board System" for this one. If you don't want to read a long, possibly rambling post, feel free to skip ahead. It's not going to hurt me any (I don't post to be a karma-whore, just when something tickles my interest).
Now that the ObWarning is out of the way for those who don't want to risk a case of repetitive stress injury from hitting the space bar... :)
KahunaBurger dun said:
A wonderful example of this is how wings for powered flight evolved separately in insects, pterosaurs, dinosaurs (I'll explain more on that in a bit, I promise :) and (possibly twice) in bats.
Insects evolved from a common ancestor of insects, arachnids, other arthropods (like millipedes), and crustaceans; if you go farther down the line in the fossil record you find that this group and segmented worms share a common ancestor. Pretty much what insects had to work with were external limbs; these evolved eventually into wings, and in beetles further as protective covering. (There is still a type of insect, a very tiny one, that has a primitive type of wing; we can also determine from fossil records of insects and the huge number of surviving insect groups roughly how wing evolution has gone. They've had around 400 million years to improve on the idea, give or take a few, and flies are one of the two or three existing groups of flying critters to have mastered hovering flight. About the only type of flight insects haven't mastered is soaring flight, but that's because insects have serious trouble getting big enough for soaring flight to be possible.)
Pterosaurs (at least according to most theories) either evolved from a basal archosauromorph or possibly from a common ancestor of "bird-hip-jointed" archosaurs (archosaurs have evolved two forms of hip joints--the other is seen in crocodilians, by the way, which are very derived archosaurs which started out as land-runners and ended up as water-hunters)--we aren't entirely sure which, because there is not a hell of a lot of good fossil material from when pterosaurs first evolved. (It is also suspected-- largely from examining the two fossil groups we DO have halfway decent evidence of how flight may have developed--that flight is incredibly advantageous to animals in general and tends to be refined on very quickly; flight, oddly enough, might be an example of "quantum evolution"). They evolved wings from flaps between the arms and body of gliding archosaurs (of which we do have a few in the fossil record); they seem to have evolved "pterosaur fuzz" (probably protofeathers, and it is now thought protofeathers are a general "warm-blooded" archosaurian trait--see the next paragraph for info) around that time or possibly shortly after.
Now we come to the real example of successful jerryrigging in the world of flight--dinosaurian flight. :) First off, dinosaurs aren't entirely extinct--birds are now classified by most paleontologists as at least a group, if not a subgroup, of theropod dinosaurs and even many ornithologists have become convinced of it. (I'll note more on this below.) Theropods started off as ground-runners; we have very good evidence now (scattered feathers dating all the way back to the Triassic when theropods were first starting out, including a full impression of wing feathers that may be from a dilophosaur or similar early theropod, and some absolutely incredible fossil material coming out of several sites in China including Liaoning which have included at least five species of feathered dinosaur, including at least possibly some pre-Archaeopteryx material and including at least three non-avian dinosaurs). We now know from the incredible fossils coming out of China that feathers in dinosaurs probably started out as "fuzz" or hairlike or bristly stuff to keep them warm (Sinosauropteryx is one of the main examples we know of re "dinofuzz", and was the first major "feathered dino" find out of China; yes, it's been determined it's actual protofeathers and not "muscle tissue" like some have tried to claim), possibly going to wing feathers and tail feathers for display (we see this in Caudipteryx, now thought to be a basal oviraptor, and (assuming archaeopterygids and dromaeosaurs came from a common ancestor, and that dromaeosaurs aren't actually secondarily flightless--more on this in a bit--Sinornithosaurus, a feathered dromaeosaur or "raptor" and an unnamed dromaeosaur (possibly another Sinornithosaurus) that is now identified as being the "mirror image" of the tail section of "Archaeoraptor" (now known to be a chimaera composed of a feathered dromaeosaur tail and a feathered dinosaur (whether avian or not, we don't know for sure--it's suspected avian though))...also, some reports of a feathered theriziniosaur, a group of dinosaurs which have just been discovered to be abberant theropods and possibly the ancestors of ornithomimid dinosaurs).
By the time dinosaurs started evolving flight, their hips were so modified for erect stance that trying to splay one's feet would have dislocated their hips. Plus, there was no real way for skin "tents" to develop like those in pterosaurs or bats. They already had feathers for warmth and (probably) sexual displays or brooding...so dinosaurs made do with what they had, and modified their feathers (and later, their fingers by merging them and losing their claws) for flight. This is incredibly well documented--from dinofuzz to display feathers to early fliers (like Archaeopteryx to birds losing flexible fingers and claws and using the thumb as the alula feather--possibly now the best evidence we have of how animals learned to fly. About the only things still really up in the air are whether fliers were around earlier than Archaeopteryx and whether dinosaurs learned to fly from the ground up or the trees up (on the former, Protoarchaeopteryx from China might have been able to fly; on the latter, we're getting some evidence leaning towards "ground up").
(A minor note on some things I've pointed out. Many folks (a few ornithologists, one Feduccia for example) have serious problems with the idea that birds are dinosaurs--possibly because of old ideas they have regarding dinos, or possibly because they really don't want Aves to be sunk into a subclass of theropod dinosaurs (which are in themselves a subclass of a renewed Dinosauria, which in turn would be a subclass of Archosauria which would be the same rank as the rest of Reptilia, Amphibia, and Therapsidia (yes, there's talk of sinking mammals too). The thing with what happened to birds...there is a theory (based on a fair amount of evidence from the fossil record) that the animals that have the best chance of survival in a bad extinction event are small animals. This has happened at least three times in the fossil record (big therapsids disappearing and mammals evolving from little survivors; most big archosaurs disappearing and the little ones evolving into crocs and pterosaurs and dinosaurs; most big dinosaurs dying off and surviving as birds) and you could make a darn good argument it may be happening on a lesser scale now (most megafauna of the Ice Age has died off, we came pretty darn close to possibly losing whales, we are still on dicey edge of losing a fair number of large land animals (elephants, most of the big cats, some others)...yes, we are going through an extinction event of sorts right now, much of it probably human-caused (definitely so in the latter bits), in case nobody noticed :P). In the past instances, it's seemed like animals around sparrow-sized or a bit larger and down seem to be "right-sized" to get through an extinction event ok. What has happened to dinosaurs is that they went through a major extinction event in which the only survivors were small flying toothless ones; a rough equivalent for mammals would be if all mammals with the exception of the smaller insectivorous bats were to become extinct--and the surviving species of insectivorous bats were all that were left to continue the entire line of mammals. (In a real-life extinction event mice would probably make it ok, as well as rats and other such small critters. The smallest non-avian dinosaur we know of is probably Comsognathus which was right around the size of a large chicken; the smallest dinosaurs around at the time of the K-T boundary were, well, what we tend to call birds. The smallest pterosaurs were at the least around the size of large crows, most were around pelican-sized, and at least one pterosaur (Quetzalcoatlus) had the largest wingspan of any flying animal; if there's merit to the "small animals survive extinctions" rule, non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs probably never had much of a chance. Even modern crocs evolved from smaller crocs that survived the K-T boundary (really huge ones seem not to have made it) so there may be merit to it...
(With dinosaurs in particular, the matter of learning how they learned to fly is made even more complicated by two things--firstly, reversions have occured all over the place (flightless birds are common, at least one group (phorusracids) that was alive as recently as (possibly) 75,000 years ago in the Americas seems to have redeveloped movable, clawed fingers, and even chickens on occasion have teeth--yes, hen's teeth do exist, but they are rare indeed, and it's an old theropod trait that sometimes shows up). Secondly, the closest relatives to the first known group of flyers (archaeopterygids) happen to be dromaeosaurs like Deinonychus...which are so closely related that except for minor details (arm length, size of toe-claws (yes, it's been found Archie has a tiny sickle-claw just like Deinonychus though much smaller) and head details) it's been argued that they could be placed in the same family or as a suborder at the least. Even worse, dromaeosaurs tend to show up after Archaeopteryx and we now know feathers aren't diagnostic of Aves (dromaeosaurs, and stuff older than Archie, had feathers). Even worse STILL, there are a hell of a lot of transitional forms being found now between Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurs like Rahonavis (which looks almost exactly like a tiny flying Deinonychus). Worse yet, we've not found a hell of a lot of sickle-clawed animals before Archie, because the fossil records aren't so great then, but we've found a hell of a lot of them (including basal birds, especially) AFTER Archie...so there's a rather lively debate going on about whether dromaeosaurs and archaeopterygids are "sister species" or whether Deinonychus should call Archie (insert large number of "greats"-grandpa-birdie). IF it turns out dromaeosaurs ARE secondarily flightless (and the evidence looks more and more like they may well be--it's been known to happen before--look at phorusracid birds) a lot of people, including paleontologists, are going to have to find yet another way to redefine what is "Aves" or give up and lump them all in with the theropods without trying to separate them (since it's been found out dinos had feathers, the "diagnostic characteristic" for Aves in cladograms has been "all those animals with ancestors closer to Archaeopteryx than Deinonychus. Needless to say, if it turns out Deinonychus and other dromaeosaurs are secondarily flightless descendants of flying archaeopterygids, this is going to bugger up cladistic diagrams JUST a wee bit, because if Archie is the base of Aves you have just defined dromaeosaurs as birds. :) A fair number of people (including those who draw cladograms) would probably go into apoplexy at the thought of Deinonychus (not to mention probably oviraptorids, not to mention troodontids...not to mention a lot of other theropods not typically thought of as avian) in Aves. :)
As for bats...we're pretty sure they evolved flight in much the same manner as pterosaurs did-- from the trees up, from small gliding animals. Of special interest to those following evolution--it seems insectivorous bats and fruit-eating bats may not be terribly closely related, and in fact may have both evolved flight separately from completely different groups of mammals (insectivorous bats from small insectivores or proto-rodents; fruit-eating bats possibly from very early primates (!!!) (Yes, you may well be a distant cousin to a flying fox, and lemurs may be a somewhat closer cousin)...) So this has been jerry-rigged from flaps of skin possibly not once, but twice...apparently it was so useful and so jerry-riggable that it was almost bound to happen eventually. :) (One wonders if, whenever a major extinction event does happen to the mammals, if whatever evolves from mice and/or birds 65 million years down the road (should their descendents evolve sentience) even realises that bats are of that old class known as mammals that nearly all died off ;)
Flight, though (especially with dinosaurs) is almost the classic example of jerry-rigging. (Dinos really didn't have anything BUT feathers and arms to base wings off of... ;) Hell, how phorusracids hunted and came about is also a good example of this (flexible fingers, and big size and good ground-running, were selected for; this resulted in (for a while, at least till anywhere from 2 million to 75,000 years ago) essentially land-running, land-hunting dinosaurs coming back and becoming the terror of the Pampas of Tertiary and early Quaternary South America :)...of course, birds ARE theropods, and birds haven't entirely lost a lot of early theropod adaptations (see the occasional "freak" of a hen with teeth, when the old genes coding for teeth are turned on again-- by the way, the genes are known and scientists have grown hens with teeth on purpose to study bird evolution and development--or phorusracids, or even baby hoatzins (who have little claws on their wings and lose them as adults) or ostriches (which, I've read, are occasionally born with claws on their wings as well). For most birds, wing-claws and teeth aren't needful (actually detrimental--beaks don't protect teeth terribly well, and claws make it hard to control landings (the thumb in birds is modified to the alula feather, which is necessary for controlled landings instead of four-pointers). Baby hoatzins, who can't fly yet, seem to have been done good by keeping wing-claws so they can climb back up into the nest, at least till they can fly. Phorusracids did darn good by having fingers :)
(Apologies, by the way, if this has run really long-winded. I have a bit of a recreational interest in paleontology, especially mammilian and archosaurian paleontology, especially theropods, especially early avians and protoavians like dromaeosaurs and archaeopterygians and oviraptors (I STILL think it's the bee's knees that there's been found a brooding oviraptor) and early birds like Hesperornis. One of the things that has always fascinated me is how it's come about, just from theories in maybe the past twenty years or so and fossils dating back from 1964, that we've found out dinosaurs aren't extinct but we just call them cardinals, and one of the damn near coolest (IMHO) dinosaurs may well have been secondarily flightless and maybe even got its hunting style from flighted ancestors. Even going from the ideas in "Jurassic Park" (the book), which were based on the best science at the time...to "Raptor Red", which was based on Bob Bakker's idea of what life was like for Utahraptor, a large dromaeosaur (found while filming for "Jurassic Park" (the movie), oddly when Steven Spielberg wanted to put a Giant Dromaeosaur of Death in there) to knowing that dinosaurs brood (the "broody oviraptor" fossil find) to dinosaurs having feathers and all us nutters who drew Deinonychus with feathers (including, well, myself on a piccie at avatar. furry.org in an anthropomorphic piccie of a deinonych--ok, allow me a LITTLE self-advertisement :) being vindicated. (OK, so I read Greg Paul's "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World" and Bakker's "Dinosaur Heresies", and between that and the fossil evidence I have absolutely cringed every time I've seen someone draw Deinonychus naked as a jaybird (actually more so, seeing as jaybirds have feathers :). Especially the "'raptors" in "Jurassic Park". Even reading "Raptor Red" (Bakker's description of Red had her nekkid; I'll give him credit, though, because he HAS drawn feathery dromaeosaurs and it wasn't known then for sure that non-avian dinosaurs did have feathers, much less dromaeosaurs). It's just an odd sense that nekkid dromaeosaurs are just wrong to my sense of What Is Right In The World. Skies tend to be blue and grass green (unless one is in the middle of a field in Kentucky in the middle of spring storm season during a tornado warning, in which case the grass tends to be more bluish than the sky is, but we're all fscked up in Kentucky anyways, especially with the weather), cats tend not to give birth to puppies, and by God/dess, deinonychs should have proper feathers :)...wow, things have come a long way. Especially the last two years. We live in interesting times, and not entirely in the means of a Chinese curse (though those who keep wanting to think birds aren't dinosaurs might disagree with me, especially in light of some Chinese fossils :)...)
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Cje dun said:
It could be evidence agaisnt common descent. Or, it could be evidence of a hell of a lot of convergence. (This exact method, by the way-- studying the genetics of living things--is what has led not only to "domains" beyond kingdoms now used in cladistic systems (it's been found out that a group of lifeforms, previously lumped in with bacteria, are actually more related to us than bacteria are, and now get their own "Domain" or "Superkingdom" of Archaea) but has led to the rather astounding idea that mammals may well have evolved flight twice (it seems insectivorous bats and fruit-bats aren't terribly closely related, insectivorous bats being more closely related to insectivorous animals like rodents and (here's the real kicker) fruit-eating bats possibly sharing a common ancestor with lemurs--yes, that's right, primates learned to fly at least twice and the first time they didn't need tools to do it :). It's also been used to show that humans, chimps, and bonobos share a common ancestor around five million years ago or so, that bonobos really ARE a different species than chimps are, and humans are still closely enough related to chimps genetically that (if it weren't for silly things like people being too proud to do it) technically Homo sapiens and ALL of our immediate ancestors should still be classified as great apes (humans, chimps, and bonobos are literally more related to each other than any of them are related to gorillas or orangutans--on simple cladistics, we should sink hominids into a subclass of apes, but it will probably not happen for much the same reason that some people are screaming bloody murder about sinking Aves into even a subclass of Dinosauria (realistically, Aves should be sunk all the way into Theropoda, no higher than the coelurosaur/carnosaur (now defined as "advanced/ primitive theropods) divide and probably even down to a subclass to coelurosaur theropods, but there are enough people who'd go into apoplexy about it that it might not happen even if someone were to hit Feduccia upside the head with the fossilised remains of Sinonithosaurus, Rahonavis, Archaeopteryx, Deinonychus, and Sinosauropteryx and drive the idea in by brute force)...hell, one reason a lot of folks oppose evolution is "I'm not related to no bloody filthy ape", and they'd REALLY start bursting blood vessels and throwing Bibles if the scientific community finally admitted that humans ARE apes :P).
Unfortunately, for a lot of stuff we'd really like to get genetic info on, we can't. A good example is with the archosaurs--there are exactly two major surviving groups out of four, one is basically reduced to the rough equivalent of the only survivors of ALL mammals being insectivorous bats, and the two groups diverged over 200 million years ago (around the middle to end of the Triassic, when crocs and dinosaurs separately evolved from two groups of thecodonts which had ALREADY split on the basis of hip-joint and ankle-joint structure). Comparing croc DNA and bird DNA MIGHT get us to finding out around when the basal thecodont first came about; even the ANCESTORS of dinosaurs (including birds) and crocodilians had diverged a fair way from each other, and crocs themselves are as derived from their ancestor as dinosaurs are from their thecodont ancestor (crocs are amazingly specialised as aquatic animals; they may well have lost most warm-bloodedness as an evolutionary adaptation, their sprawling gait is secondary (early crocs were ground-runners and much higher off the ground; you can see it in baby crocs, and even adult crocs can run for short distances like big scaly ferrets), their heart may well be the most "derived" evolutionarily-speaking in the animal kingdom (there are adaptations for such things as suspended animation, for starters)...not at all primitive, really). It's not going to tell us the REALLY fun stuff we'd love to know, like just how closely related dromaeosaurs are to archaeopterygids (this is an important question now in paleontology) or how close T. rex was to flying birds, or how far away the ancestor of birds and hadrosaurs or diplodocids is, or how closely related dinosaurs really are to pterosaurs (there is debate on this--some say as derived as crocs are, some say they shared common ancestors in "bird-ankled" thecodonts)...because there aren't any dinos LEFT except for the birds, and no thecodonts or pterosaurs left at all. Hell, it'd be the absolute bee's knees (and potentially incredibly important for anthropology and mankind in general) to see, oh, how closely related early hominids like Australopithecus or Ardipithecus are to chimps, bonobos, AND us--unfortunately, we've not exactly been lucky enough to find any early hominid DNA (the earliest hominid DNA that's been found so far is with Neandertals, and their mitochondrial DNA is dissimilar enough to ours that it's now thought Neandertals might be a "sister species" to modern humans after all; we definitely seem to have split before the "mitochondrial Eve" of modern humans, who seems to date from around 200,000 years ago or so; we don't even have enough Neandertal DNA to know if they had the same number of chromosomes that we do (it'd be really interesting to know just WHEN chromatid shift--a change in the number of chromosomes--occured in hominids; bonobos and chimps have 48 chromosomes, while we have 46; if us and Neandertals had the same number of chromosomes, we could have potentially interbred (much like many felids can interbreed); if they didn't, we'd know they really WERE something different; if it occured after Homo split from australopithecines, we might have to reorder more than a few cladograms and possibly wound the pride of humans in the process).
As a minor aside--one of the reasons scientists are so excited about a recent frozen mammoth find is because there might be the chance to get enough DNA to compare mammoths to modern elephants. (It is thought that mammoths are closely related to Asian elephants, actually to the point of both being more related to each other than to African elephants--some folks think they were a third class, though--for those folks who have the plans to clone mammoths, much less folks doing cladograms of elephant evolution, this is important to know :)
If there's a God (we can't really prove or disprove it, seeing as there's no way to really prove Someone Is Mucking About With The Universe without stepping outside the universe itself, which nobody's really found a good way of doing without getting one's self Quite Dead in the process), He is probably as much of a jerry-rigger as, say, Tool Time Taylor on the TV show "Home Development" or people who believe that all things can be fixed with sufficient amounts of ingenuity, wood, nails, Super Glue, and duck-tape. :) If so, I'm proud to say that I must have gotten it honest at least, as I also tend to be one of the three inveterate jerry-riggers in my family. :) No wonder Yshua went into carpentry--jerry-rigging is, sometimes, just a bit of a black art and often necessary (as anyone who has attempted to build something off a set of building plans has found out, and spent the next six hours cursing Norm Abram AND his Bloody-Arsed Biscuit Machine and his entire shop full of tools for making visual lies about how building things is supposed to be simple...or how people fixing plumbing, even professionals, usually end up cursing the entire cast, past, present AND future, of "Hometime" for giving mere mortals the impression that plumbing is either easy or something that can be done with a minimum of jerry-rigging...or, for that matter, installing Linux on some cantankerous systems :). That, or God has a sense of humour in that we humans are supposed to only LOOK jerry-rigged. This brings the set of God suspiciously close to the set of Norm Abram for my liking. :)
Myself, having actually DELVED into home repair, Linux installations on cranky boxen, and general jerry-rigging, rather suspect the former case. ;)
As for the appendix--there is some evidence that it still does have a small function in the immune system (basically helping keep the colon from getting all infectious). Most surgeons won't remove it unless they have to, because of this (even though we have laparoscopic surgery, which could even be done on an outpatient basis). In animals which are largely herbivores (especially insectivore-group animals, such as rodents and lagomorphs), they tend to have huge appendixes; it is probably an organ that doesn't have much use outside of immune-system function in primates.
Pretty much, though, as much as we can tell, cladograms tend to agree pretty much with the genetic record (as far as we can determine that) and the fossil record as (to put a metaphor on it) things being jerry-rigged to work. Sometimes they give surprising results, the more data you get (such as dogs now being sunk into wolves, or chimps being closer to humans than either is to gorillas, or (on the basis of non-genetic evidence + some genetic comparison + genome studies including genetic engineering) the fact that birds are actually dinosaurs (now, tell me ONE person who doesn't think the fact that dinosaurs survived is neat as hell :)...). If the groups are separated enough, you can even find out from gross details (it's pretty obvious that Squamata (the group that includes therapsids (including mammals), "mammal-like reptiles" like Dimetrodon, and the like) split from the group that founded all the rest of the land-animals outside of amphibians a LONG time ago; birds and mammals evolved sex chromosomes that work exactly opposite from each other (birds use WZ sex determination--WW is male, WZ is female; mammals use XY sex determination--XX female, XY male) indicating they evolved separately but did an amazing amount of convergence, indicating that maybe sexual chromosomes are characteristic of warm-blooded animals in general (yes, that's right--you can learn basically where "God is applying duck-tape")...but there are so many differences that, in part based on genetic studies, "mammal-like reptiles" actually got split from reptiles, and it's now thought they diverged a short while after their immediate ancestor (probably the first "shelled egg laying animal" or close thereby) split from amphibians).
If you want to see a real example of God jerry-rigging :), look over the record of how dinosaurs evolved flight. (Pretty much bird flight is the most jerry-rigged of all animals, because development was largely limited because of existing adaptations of theropods--can't splay legs, they're all feathery, but if you modify the display feathers enough to catch air and make the arms long...and later on, fuse the fingers, lose the claws, and use the thumb as an "aileron" for braking in landings...there wasn't as much to work with as there was with bats or pterosaurs.)
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
I will believe that love exists when you can give me a repeatable, well designed and defined experiment for testing love's existence.
You can't test for everything.
Gerv
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
I would disagree with that - if the probability is sufficiently small compared to the estimated number of planets. And remember only a tiny, tiny percentage of planets are capable of being "earth" in the first place.
I don't use God to explain everything I don't understand. God explains many things that Science can't understand, because the two answer different questions.
Science can tell you (or make a good attempt at) how we came to be here, but not why.
Gerv
Re:Ridiculous pseudo-science OR NOT! (Score:2)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:God as an explanation of creation of life (Score:2)
Indeed. I was never claiming that we don't have to think any more. Christianity is not a blind faith.
You don't know any more about it than an atheist who says life arose through processes he doesn't understand.
So saying "I think life was created this way" is not saying more than "I don't know how life was created, but it certainly wasn't in the way you suggest"?
Gerv
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
You speak as if each translation was based upon the one before it. Every translation of the Bible ever done has been done from the earliest manuscripts we have - around 250AD. Saying it's been changed over 1000's of years is just silly
Gerv
Re:Yet another theory to explain life... (Score:2)
Atheism denies the existence of God. To deny God's existence demands omniscience on the part of the denyer - who would then be (by many definitions) God. So Atheism is not intellectually credible.
Atheism leads to agnosticism by this argument.
What do you think?
In more close response to your message, I would oppose your characterisation of Christians as people who let other people re-interpret the Bible for them on weekly basis. I read it for myself on a daily basis...
I would not use any of the above to argue the existence of God on their own (although I believe that argument from design has merits, as does the argument akin to Antiquity, that something must have happened in 30AD in Israel.
I do not believe the earth is 5000 years old. I also do not believe that all that many other Christians do. I do not see any conflict between an old earth and Genesis.
Gerv
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:God ain't that good an explanation, either... (Score:2)
The fact that the human mind can't really cope with "always existed" should not be an impediment to this view
Gerv
Re:Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Score:3)
Greenrd dun said:
In a word--Duh. For many reasons, at that.
First off, fifteen years ago, genetic cladograms were in their infancy.
Secondly, a good deal of what we now know about "reptilian" evolution has come about literally in the past fifteen to twenty years. (We have literally gone in twenty-five years from thinking dinosaurs were slow, cold-blooded creatures to realising that birds (which are among the hottest- blooded critters there are--sparrows typically have a normal body temperature of around 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 42 degrees C) are in fact theropod dinosaurs.) This has been both through genetic cladograms AND by fossil remains--much of the fossils that have shaped our present view of dinosaurs, in fact, have come up literally within the past five to ten years, and some of the most astounding yet (feathered dinosaurs, and many fossils that pretty much trace the entire history of how dinosaurs developed powered flight, along with typical "avian" traits like feathers, brooding eggs, even when hard-shelled eggs may have developed) have literally only come to light in the past two years).
Thirdly, I have my doubts that, even fifteen years ago, scientists thought crocs were closer to snakes than birds. (Just some info for you--on occasion, people who are trying to debunk evolution have been known to outright tell porkies. I've seen this far more often with "Creation Science" groups funded by fundamentalist "Christian" groups here in the States, but I wouldn't put it past some newage (rhymes with sewage) groups, either. And from what I've read, this sounds really suspiciously like newage (rhymes with sewage). In other words, don't trust everything you read--verify first. :)
The reason I doubt that they thought snakes and crocs were closer than crocs and birds is because it has been known for at least the past fifteen or so years that birds and crocodiles were part of a group called the Archosauria. (Archosauria, for your information, is a clade that is considered roughly equal to the old "Reptilia"--Reptilia has actually been split. Archosauria contains thecodonts, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and crocodilians (note I've not expressly mentioned birds--I'm going to get to that). Just FWIW.) Snakes have, for at least the past twenty years or so, been considered to have evolved from lizards; there is a controversial theory that snakes instead evolved from mosasaurs, but mosasaurs are still not terribly related to archosaurs (they instead form yet another sister clade) so the point still stands.
Anyone who had the faintest idea about paleontology--who had so much as kept up with some of the early writing on Deinonychus or read a copy of Robert Bakker's "The Dinosaur Heresies" (written in 1986, talking about the "hot theories" already circulating in paleontology--many of the "heresies" have been recently vindicated, btw)-- would bloody well know crocs are closer to birds than snakes, unless he didn't keep up with paleontology at all. (It is entirely possible they didn't. As late as the early 1990's people were still being taught about "slow, sluggish, cold-blooded, naked-skinned" dinosaurs.)
For the record, especially in the field of dinosaur paleontology, fifteen years is damned near an eternity nowadays. Among other things, we've found evidence that the closest relative of Deinonychus (the one dinosaur that, along with Archaeopteryx and now the feathered dinos coming out of China--yes, you heard right, feathered dinosaurs--gave paleontology a needed boot in the arse with its sickle-clawed feets) is in fact Archaeopteryx, the first bird; that dinosaurs cared for their young (this has now been documented from "duckbilled" dinosaurs all the way to Tyrannosaurus rex itself--a juvenile named "Tinker" has recently been found, which has been teaching a lot on both juvenile tyrannosaurs and tyrannosaur family life) and that theropods even brooded young like chickens or ostriches (at least two oviraptor fossils have been found brooding nests); there have been incredible fossils as of late coming out of China which include the first feathered non-avian dinosaurs; we now have a large number of transitional fossils documenting nearly the entire evolution of flight in dinosaurs (from pre-avian feathered dinos, including display feathers on arms and tail, to Archie, to development of the alula feather from the thumb); we have entire evolutionary sequences for many families of archosaurs (including dinosaurs and crocs--we now know early crocs were ground-runners and that crocs are actually incredibly derived archosaurs); we even now have evidence that some dinosaurs like (oddly enough) Deinonychus may well have evolved from early protobirds and become secondarily flightless. Paleontology has come by INCREDIBLE leaps and bounds; one might say the science fifteen years ago was in prehistory (pun intended).
Oh, among things (both from re-analysis of fossils and new finds, and from some genetic studies including embryology studies) relating to the little comparison: Reptilia has now been split into the four groups other than archosaurs (ichthyosaurs, lizards/snakes, tuataras, and turtles), and Archosauria is now class-status. Crocodiles' and birds' last common ancestor was approximately 225-200 million years ago, when basal thecodonts split into "arctotarsal" and "crurotarsal" lineages (this is denoting ankle structures--one can say "bird-ankled" and "croc-ankled". Around the end of the Triassic, crocs evolved from "croc-ankled" thecodonts as ground-runners; they then proceeded to specialise as water-hunters, including specialisations in the heart for suspended animation underwater, etc. (Croc hearts are supposedly some of the most derived in the animal kingdom.) Dinosaurs evolved at around the same time from "bird-ankled" thecodonts, probably little ones like Lagosuchus; birds are now recognised (after a hell of a lot of evidence, and finally a few clue-by-fours out of Liaoning, China that finally settled many questions of dinosaur and "bird" evolution) as being a surviving group of theropod dinosaurs (specifically, maniraptorian neotheropod theropod dinosaurs) that survived the K-T boundary (there is about as much link between dinosaurs and birds as there is between mammals and bats; birds are dinosaurs and always have been, and most paleontologists have sunk Aves into a subgroup of dinosaurs at best and usually down to a theropodian subgroup--you will actually hear discussions of "neornithian dinosaurs").
Oh, and for the record--the same shakeup in cladistics that has led to birds being finally recognised as dinosaurs has also removed "mammal-like reptiles" from Reptilia and put them in a group with mammals and therapsids (therapsids are basically proto-mammals; they're related to us in the same way that early dinosaurs like herrerasaurs or dilophosaurs are related to birds). Yes, Mammilia got sunk in the process, though not as badly as Aves has.
In other words, the genetic cladogram actually proved RIGHT (dinosaurs and crocs are, in fact, archosaurs which derived from thecodont lineages that split fairly early in archosaurian evolution). Which blows hell out of the argument. :)
Oh, another fun fact--the same genetic cladograms also show that chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans are literally more closely related to each other than to any of the other great apes (they also led to gibbons possibly losing their status as a great ape). Chimps and humans share around 98 percent of their DNA, and bonobos are even closer if memory serves. It is probably a matter of a few evolutionary changes and some reordering on chromosomes that differenciates Homo sapiens from Pan paniscus (the bonobo, the closest living relative to humans and not terribly far from australopithecines--they have been known to make tools and they do walk erect fairly often).
As for other arguments:
On the age of the earth: Most of what we know is based on dating of rocks here and in other parts of the solar system. For the oldest rocks on Earth we have a lower limit of around 3 1/2 billion years (this is based on radioactive decay halflives, which have been proven sound both mathematically and experimentally--if there is funkiness with radioactive decay, I'd suggest you share it now :). Both strata-dating AND radio-dating are used, as checks on each other (especially when you are dealing with very old rocks where there are no diagnostic fossils that can date the rock).
We've also got rocks from other parts of the solar system (most notably meteorites [some of possible Martian origin] and moon-rocks). These have likewise been radio-dated, and give an upper bound of around 4 1/2-5 billion years. (Rocks from Earth don't exist from then because Earth was essentially a big ball of cooling lava at that point. :) So between the two, we can safely state the Earth is probably around 4 1/2 billion years old, give or take a few million years. (FWIW, this has also been checked by extrapolating and finding the age of our Sun based on the millions of stars we've observed--we know pretty much how baby stars are born and grow and die, and how stars of the mass of our Sun tend to behave. Also, for really old rocks, one of the dating methods uses uranium--uranium has a half-life of some six billion years in its most stable isotopes, which is just about right for measuring the age of a solar system.)
On species: Actually, yes, there is a specific definition of species both for fossil remains and for living specimens--there is actually a specific convention of species nomenclature called the ICZN, or "International Convention on Zoological Nomenclature". Summed up:
Living Species/Non-Fossil Remains: Species is defined as when two members of a population have diverged genetically to the point that they cannot easily interbreed. (Incidentially--it is this very definition of species that caused both dogs AND cats to be sunk into subspecies. Until 1994 or so, dogs were officially listed as Canis familiaris and cats as Felis catus; recent genetic studies have shown that dogs and cats ARE genetically still wolves and African wildcats respectively (just with a lot of the natural genetic variation brought out by selective breeding)--hence dogs are now Canis lupus familiaris and cats are now Felis sylvestris domestica. For that matter, there's been a lot of DNA testing of Neandertal remains to see if we can find out whether we could have interbred with them--if it turns out Neandertals and modern humans could interbreed, Neandertals are just a subspecies of us (Homo sapiens neandertalensis) but if we couldn't, they get their own species name (Homo neandertalensis).
In fossil species: Species is defined as such point as a morphological change has occured in a fossil specimen as to distinguish it from other existing fossils that may be of that type. (Since in most cases genetic studies cannot be done of fossil remains, they basically go by "has there been a major or minor change in this organism". Most fossil classifications beyond the genus level tend to be controversial unless there is good evidence to account for them, both in morphology and (on occasion) in habitat (such occurs in the two species of tyrannosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex and Tyrannosaurus bataar--bataar is smaller than T. rex, and T. bataar is found in Mongolia where T. rex is found in Montana and western North America).
On random mutations: Actually, random mutations can sometimes be beneficial--and sometimes even both. A good example is with some genetic diseases such as Tay-Sach's Disease (nearly always fatal before 5), thalassemia, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis (all three of which are debilitating and potentially fatal)-- as it turns out, two copies are Bad, but having one copy actually protects you against some other disease (with Tay-Sachs, it's tuberculosis [which was very common in ghettos, where Ashkenazi Jews (the major carriers) lived]; with both thalassemia and sickle-cell anemia, one copy protects you against malaria (the genes evolved separately in the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa, and there are other sickling/"deformed" genetic diseases of red blood cells that have the same protective effect against malaria in small doses in Southeast Asian populations); one copy of the cystic fibrosis gene is protective against cholera (in fact, what goes wrong in cystic fibrosis is now known on a chemical basis as a defect in chloride excretion--as it turns out, the exact opposite disorder occurs in cholera! One stops you up, the other gives you the raging squits...). Even though these genes cause bad (sometimes tragic) effects in double-doses, they actually are beneficial enough that they've stayed in the human genome for thousands of years (unlike most genetic diseases with no good benefit, which generally only tend to show up when people end up marrying cousins or people get seriously inbred).
Also, sometimes it doesn't take a HUGE mutation. The length in arms of Archaeopteryx really is not that much longer (per body ratio) than that of Deinonychus (much bigger, non-flying, but skeletally very, very similar to Archie). If there is something to work with, it can give an animal an advantage. Said animal does the nasty, passes their genes along, and if it's good it spreads. (BTW, the fact that humans and chimps share 98% of DNA and have about as much difference both in actual gene content and chromosome-count as horses and donkeys do (humans have 46 chromosomes--chimps have 48) show that it does not take a terrible amount of mutation to evolve.
Also, sometimes it's not so much a matter of evolving new things as "sports" showing up with OLD traits that prove useful. Phorusracid birds, which evolved tens of millions of years AFTER non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, actually redeveloped flexible fingers with claws--a trait that had laid dormant in birds since the late Cretaceous--and adopted a ground-running hunter lifestyle, like nonavian theropod dinosaurs, which was very successful for millions of years (mammilian predators of megafauna finally did them in anywhere from 2 million to 750,000 years ago, but until then they were the top predator niche in South America). Hoatzins have claws when babies which is a reversion. Chickens are on occasion born with teeth (this too is an old archosaurian trait).
On punctuated equillibrium: Actually, there are cases where it does occur. One of the biggies seems to be powered flight (flight is incredibly advantageous, and is usually refined very quickly after invented). And even in that case we DO have "missing links"--plenty of them. Hell, with dinosaurs we have an almost 100-million-year-old continuous string of evolution showing from early protofeathers (Sinosauropteryx) to examples of display feathers on tail and arms (Caudipteryx) to possible pre-flyers or very early flyers (Protoarchaeopteryx) to full-fledged flyers (Archaeopteryx) to more advanced flight (fossils from China showing development of alula feather from clawed thumb) to advanced toothed forms (birds like Hesperornis) to paleornithe birds to the beginnings of a lineage of extant modern birds (chadriiforme ducks) to an actual reversion towards an older condition (phorusracids) to now. Also, around the time of Archaeopteryx we may well have a complete record (including many transitionals) of both an initial radiation of sickle-clawed early "birds" and (most tantalizing) either the co-evolution of archaeopterygids and dromaeosaurs as sister species or possibly dromaeosaurs outright evolving from archaeopterygids. (The latter would REALLY be something, and a fair amount of evidence IS pointing that way. Don't be surprised if you hear around two or three years down the road that Deinonychus is probably secondarily flightless.)
A more classic evolutionary sequence (with tons and tons and tons of transitional fossils) is the sequence of horse evolution.