Moore's Law and the Origin of Life 272
DoctorBit writes "MIT Technology Review is running a story about an arXiv paper in which geneticists Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon propose that life as we know it originated 9.7 billion years ago. The researchers estimated the genetic complexity of phyla in the paleontological record by counting the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides in typical genomes of modern day descendants of each phylum. When plotting genetic complexity against time, the researchers found that genetic complexity increases exponentially, just as with Moore's law, but with a doubling rate of about once every 376 million years. Extrapolating backwards, the researchers estimate that life began about 4 billion years after the universe formed and evolved the first bacteria just before the Earth was formed. One might image that the supernova debris that formed the early solar system could have included bacteria-bearing chunks of rock from doomed planets circling supernova progenitor stars. If true, this retro-prediction has some interesting consequences in partly resolving the Fermi Paradox. Another interesting consequence for those attempting to recreate life's origins in a lab: bacteria may have evolved under conditions very different from those on earth."
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
A single base pair is not alive, not even in a primitive way. The extrapolation is invalid. A more interesting statement would be the minimum complexity of the first living things 3.5-4.0 billion years ago.
Extrapolation and Confidence Limits (Score:3)
As anyone who is familiar with interpolation knows, extrapolation is a very risky business that provides little statistical confidence and error bounds in the prediction.
Of course, that doesn't prevents some from trying to use it to win the lottery anyway. Sure you get a prediction, but there is virtually no way to assign useful error bounds to the prediction.
Re: (Score:2)
> partly resolving the Fermi Paradox
Another problem not even mention is that the Fermi Paradox is based on lack of information; it is a pseudo Paradox become people don't understand all the variables. In 10 years this paradox will become moot as new information is made available on a new discovery.
--
Science is not about a path towards Truth, but a path of removing ignorance.
No. (Score:5, Informative)
A transistor isn't much of a computer, but it is a switch, and three of them is a logic gate. 3 nucleotides is not a genome of a living thing. There's no point in extrapolating the length of a genome below the minimum length of a viable genome if the question you're trying to ask is "when was the first genome?" The graph shows billions of years of very short genomes starting at 9 BCE.I don't know what the minimum genome is, but I'm sure it's not 1 pair, or 3 pairs. A good guess would be the 4 BCE mark on the graph, though.
Kilby and Noyce (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Non-peer reviewed... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a fine example of how not to use arXiv as a news source. This old yarn has been trotted out before, and it is based on bad assumptions about complexity and offers a handy False Dilemma Fallacy.
Either
1+1=6 or
1+1=8.
1+1=6 is disproved, so 1+1 =8!
Or your math is wrong.
Complexity != genome size.
See c-value enigma.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't understand what peer review is about. Peer review doesn't guarantee that a paper is true or even reasonable. Peer review, in general, just says that a paper is of sufficient interest to be published.
The paper doesn't make any "assumptions" about complexity, nor does it pose a "dilemma". It just measures a number associated with genomes and ex
Re: (Score:2)
This paper wouldn't pass peer review (at least in any not-completely-flaky-pseudodcience-field; there's probably a "genetic semiotics and wild-ass futurism" journal where this would fit right in). One key thing that immediately entirely disqualifies it: there is absolutely no discussion of how/why they selected the six data point categories on their main plot ("prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals"), or even what the points specifically refer to (what the hell are "worms"? there's a doz
Re: (Score:2)
There is a reference to a published paper that explains it, which is the way this sort of thing works in the sciences.
I'm not defending the paper (there are lots of things wrong with it), but both "anonymous" and you seem to be having real trouble reading scientific papers and understanding peer review.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh, I see, a reference to the author's own previous paper, in which he says basically the same stuff with a bit more detail. I like that the journal this one is published in shows the "open peer review" criticisms of the paper, including this statement from the second reviewer which neatly sums up the issues:
This paper is an example of how not to analyze data.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a fine example of how not to use arXiv as a news source. This old yarn has been trotted out before, and it is based on bad assumptions about complexity and offers a handy False Dilemma Fallacy.
Either 1+1=6 or 1+1=8. 1+1=6 is disproved, so 1+1 =8!
Or your math is wrong. Complexity != genome size. See c-value enigma.
Is "so 1+1 =8!" meant to be read as: "so one plus one equals eight... NOT"?
Re: Non-peer reviewed... (Score:3, Interesting)
I read the paper, and many many more. Here's an appropriate complexity measure:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/140
According to studies of protein complexity, life fits in the earth's timeline, as cited above. New protein folds emerge about every 100 million years, and that is the rate limiting step for the building blocks of complexity. Proteins.
The authors of this arXiv study apparently do not consider redundant protein domains or replicates of functional RNA (like multiple copies of ribosomal ge
oblig xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/605/
Or... maybe your assumption is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate. There is no reason that this has to be true. Environmental effects on organisms increases selective pressure and causes evolution to progress at a faster rate. Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms. Seems pretty uneven to me...
Re:Or... maybe your assumption is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
You said it better than I was going to say it.
The way I see it, they:
a.) Plotted some data
b.) Extrapolated a simple trend from that data
c.) Forecasted, using the trend function, before the point of data collection
d.) Came up with some wild conclusions from that forecast (or "beforecast"?) that rely heavily on the validity of the simple trend.
It kind of smells like bad science...or at least risky science.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with connecting dots?
Well, for one thing, there's zero explanation of why/how they chose the particular dots they connected (or even precisely what they refer to), other than "hey, if we cherry-pick these particular 6 points, they lie on a line that proves our hypothesis!".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the problem: reasonable functions exist which behave completely differently from what goes on inside the data set.
Let's take the article before us as an example. If x(t) is the average number of functional base pairs in an organism as a function of time, the article's authors are asserting that x'(t) = kx(t), or rather that the rate at which more base pairs are generated is proportional to the existing amount of base pairs.
But what if we change this just a tiny bit? What if x'(t) = kx(t) + C, where C
Re: (Score:3)
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate. There is no reason that this has to be true. Environmental effects on organisms increases selective pressure and causes evolution to progress at a faster rate. Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms. Seems pretty uneven to me...
All that aside, is there even a good logical reason to think the bootstrapping has much to do with the later processes? In the beginning a single mutation to a primitive life form is a much bigger deal than to a large, complex organism. Many bacteria have a life span of 20 minutes, that's 25000+ generations in a year so big positive or negative mutations would spread like wildfire. Meanwhile us humans have a regeneration cycle of 20-30 years and being large, complex organisms most of us carry a ton of posit
Cambrian Explosion (Score:5, Insightful)
The assumptions in the article are especially suspect, given the large number of quite well documented "explosions" of genetic diversity in Earth's history (see, e.g., the Cambrian Explosion [wikipedia.org] for the biggest example, though there are plenty of lesser events), where gigantic leaps in genetic diversity appeared over (geologically) short timescales. An extrapolation assuming a generally smooth growth rate is simply untenable.
Cataclysmic events may be required (Score:5, Interesting)
... Cataclysmic events happen every now and then and causes extinctions and hardship on surviving organisms
Indeed, it appears that periodic cataclysmic events are required in order to keep evolution going.
We've seen several eras in Earth's history where life appears to "stagnate" at some level, proceeding with little-or-no change for long periods. The last of which was the "age of dinosaurs", which lasted 170 million years or so, depending on how you define the starting point. It ended with the Chicxulub impact.
We also see numerous examples of species which are largely unevolved; for example, ants have been around for 120 million years and one species [americanscientist.org] of prehistoric ant is apparently still living in the Amazon. Coelacanths [wikipedia.org] have been around in their present form for about 400 million years.
The overall impression is that life tends to "stagnate": once life evolves into an efficient survival mechanism, there's no pressure to evolve further. Evolution aims at being a better "fit" for the unchanging environment, but more complexity is simply not needed.
This is why I believe the Drake equation [wikipedia.org] is overly optimistic. I think it omits the factor "fraction of star systems that experience occasional planetary meteor strikes". If we ever travel to another star, we're likely to find it teeming with life, but stagnated at some level.
This may be one factor (of possibly several) that explains the Fermi paradox.
The "doubling rate" identified in the article may be an artifact of Earth, and that's only if Genome complexity [fourmilab.ch] is even a reasonable measure to make. Lilies have 30x the genome size of humans - another explanation might be that genome complexity is related to genome size, which does not have much selection pressure. It's not a peer-reviewed paper.
To be clear (Score:2)
...another explanation might be that genome complexity is related to genome size, which does not have much selection pressure. It's not a peer-reviewed paper.
To be clear, I mean to say "genome size is not related to species complexity". Genomic data may be complex simply because it's large and presents a large target for evolutionary change, but a large genome doesn't necessarily result in a complex organism.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Similarly while the dinosaurs roamed the Earth the mammals were 'under the ice'; a lot of /lib changes, but no possibility to get big or more varied than your primitive rat because of the competition. Then once the big guys got wiped out all those ecological niches were available and filled out faster than one would expect from standard selection processes; simply because the genotype had lots of diversity already: it just needed to show in the phenotype and a few minor mutations did that.
Nice metaphor ("under the ice").
I like the explanation, where species have forced evolution to survive in a limited and changed environment, then fan out when new niches become available.
I'm told that there are niches which aren't populated, such as birds making holes in trees for nests. (The niche is not populated everywhere.) This would neatly fit in with that explanation - the species doesn't *need* to fill new niches to survive, until some environment-limiting catastrophe puts pressure to evolve, then w
Re: (Score:2)
We've seen several eras in Earth's history where life appears to "stagnate" at some level, proceeding with little-or-no change for long periods. The last of which was the "age of dinosaurs", which lasted 170 million years or so, depending on how you define the starting point.
Well that explains why we hardly saw anything interesting happen at all during the age of the... reptiles. [wikipedia.org] No real [wikipedia.org] change [wikipedia.org] at all [wikipedia.org]. Totally stagnant.
Whoa whoa whoa, the drake equation deals with intelligence arising out of evolution. And you're arguing that there needs to be a rapid rate of evolution on a global scale to achieve intelligence? It doesn't quite work that way. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution. You don't build up a value of evolution points and exchange them for opposable thumbs and en
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the sun does move about the galaxy and complete an orbit about every ~220-250 million years. Realistically if there's some section of the galaxy where you're more likely to run into planet bashing meteors then all of the planets in the galaxy will pass through it over geologic time scales. Heck, maybe there's two such bands, roughly half a galaxy apart, and after we pass through three of them the complexity of life roughly doubles to compensate for these wild changes. So every ~370 million years we
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
All of this assumes that the complexity of life, as he defines it, increases at a relatively constant rate.
The paper merely states that given: ...at least one of the above has serious flaws.
1) Our current understanding of evolutionary rates,
2) Our current understanding of the age of the earth,
3) Our current understanding of the origin of life
Re: (Score:2)
Take this gem for example from the article:
For example, the doubling time of the number of scientific publications from 1900 to 1960 was only 15 years (de Solla Price, 1971). Interestingly, extrapolating the exponential increase of scientific publications backwards gives us an estimated origin of science at 1710 which is the time of Isaac Newton.
That's not the origin of science, but it coincides with the industrial revolution, which sparked a new range of philosophical thinking from economy to nature. Besides printing press was readily established at that time to spread the news. There has always been science at some level. The selected viewpoint has an effect to the origin.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The larger the scope of what is being studied, the more entropy and unpredictable events factor into the sample size required. And computer models are incredibly bad at accounting for entropy and unpredictable events. A computer model with a mesh element cou
Re: (Score:2)
I find the idea extremely cool.
Of course, there's no rationale of any sort for the assumptions, so it's not science.
But still cool.
Finish the graph? (Score:2)
How about a label for the supposed graph points before Prokaryotes?
Otherwise one might conclude that they are simply assuming these "precursors" in the absence of even enough evidence such that they have a name--because that's what "must" have been the case per the assumed paradigm.
Moore's Law has nothing to do with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? (Score:2)
Look, we already know that genetic diversity doesn't increase at any predictable rare. For most pf life's existence on earth it was limited to anaerobic bacteria and that there was very little genetic diversity. Then the oxygen levels in the oceans and atmosphere reached saturation levels and aerobic live took over. And with the higher complexity of possible life forms, the increase in reproductive frequency, and the over-all speedup of this rocket-fueled form of life genetic diversity exploded.
Read up on Histones (Score:3)
Not true. Histones, the proteins that keep DNA ordered, are some of the earliest proteins. They provide an extremely accurate clock for when species diverged.
While on a short term, a few million years, you are right when you say the rate of genetic drift is not predictable. However, over a longer period of time the rate SEEMS to be fairly consistent. That is the point of the article.
You seem to be confusing genetic diversity with Phylogenetic diversity. Phylogenetic diversity describes how genes change
Alternate Titles (Score:5, Funny)
"SARS and the Origin of Life"
"Horny Rabbits and the Origin of Life"
"Rice on a chess board and the Origin of Life"
PROTIP: Just because there is exponential growth doesn't mean a subject has anything to do with Moore's "Law".
Uh... no. (Score:3)
Uhmmm.... "life as we know it" happens to be limited to life that originated on Earth. Earth isn't 9.7 billion years old. I trust you can see the problem with this notion.
Certainly the possibility exists that life on earth actually originated elsewhere and happened to land here after the earth was formed, this is far from an actual testable scientific theory until at least we find any evidence of life outside of this planet that we can verifiable say did not come from here.
Re: (Score:2)
mark-t wrote: ""life as we know it" happens to be limited to life that originated on Earth."
They are not saying that, they are saying the opposite of that. That "life as we know it" here on Earth does not happen to be limited to life that originated on Earth, and that life not originated on Earth is, in fact, the life that we know.
It may very well be completely wrong, but the premise per the summary is not inherently illogical.
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of how probable life elsewhere might be, our limited knowledge of the universe right now is such that the life which is right here on Earth is genuinely the only life that we know exists in the entire universe. Sure there can be life elsewhere, but we don't actually know about it yet.
Extrapolation! (Score:5, Insightful)
what could possibly go wrong, particularly when you extrapolate twice as far as you actually have data for.
Re: (Score:2)
The extrapolation on the other axis is even more fun. "Let's extrapolate six orders of magnitude down from the simplest known life (twice the log range of the entire span of known life), assuming the mechanics of complexity works exactly the same in the region between 10^6 and 1 base pairs!"
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and extrapolation even works sometimes when you have a lot of data and extrapolate just a little bit further. But this isn't a case of that, it's a massive extrapolation from a small data set.
the interesting part here (Score:2)
What I'm interested in is how MIT came to be in possession of a Cornell paper. Were they strictly authorized to use the paper in such a manner? Did they actually use their proper login credientials? Did they tell Cornell in advance of the fact they wished to cross state lines with it? If the answer to any of the above is "no" can we hound them to death about it like they did to Swartz?
Truer than it looks! (Score:3)
Missing mass? (Score:2)
This nicely explains where missing mass of the universe went - Dyson Spheres. I always thought "dark matter" suffered from Occam's Razor.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Aside from the evidence (via gravitational lensing measurements) for dark-matter halos with distinctly different spatial distributions from known-matter galactic disks (loose "blobs" indicating different, extremely-weakly-interacting types of matter than the normal stuff that accretes into galactic disks). So, your "Occam's Razor" solution is that observed mass distributions (consistent with two types of matter, visible/interacting and "dark"/non-interacting except through gravity) are due to super-advanced
Holy Data Cherrypicking! (Score:4, Interesting)
The critical "plot" in the article from which the age estimate is derived has 6 data points: "prokaryotes," "eukaryotes," "worms," "fish," and "mammals." Nowhere in the article is the selection criteria for these 6 particular categories explained. In other words, out of the hundreds of major categories of life which the authors might have chosen to plot, they arbitrarily pick 6 that vaguely fall on a log-linear line (with a bit of fudging for "functional, non-redundant genome"). Give me a big scattery cloud of hundreds of potential data points, and I can reach whatever conclusion you want with the proper selection of a half dozen.
I'm a little skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
The article really is not convincing, for several reasons:
Their graph, the one that supports the whole enchilada, has five data points. Color me unimpressed that they were able to fit a function to five data points. Furthermore, the specificity of classification even within the graph varies a lot- prokaryotes are a much broader classification than worms, fish, or mammals. Is there variance in the amount of functional base pairs within the prokaryotes? I don't know- I'm not a biologist. Their paper doesn't clarify this point at all. How do I know that they are not cherry-picking their organisms to fit an exponential curve?
They're extrapolating backwards without good justification. Even if the growth is exponential, what affects the time constant? Some organisms reproduce slower than others, which surely affects the exponential rate of growth. If bacteria existed on space-bound pieces of rock, would they be able to reproduce at the same rate as a bacterium in a pond? Surely the microbiology of the "first organism" would be very different than that of organisms many billions of years following? Would mutations occur more rapidly in space, increasing the rate at which function base pairs would grow?
They assume the origin of life had one base pair. I'm not a microbiologist- does it make sense for the DNA of the first organism to have one base pair? If the organism instead had 10 base pairs, their estimate for the origin of life is knocked forward by a billion years or so. Even without that, the error bars on their analysis are +/- 2.5 billion years, just due to statistical uncertainty.
They reference a "Another complexity measure yielded an estimate for the origin of life date about 5 to 6 billion years ago." Why are the results so different? What were the error bars on their data? They claim that those results are incompatible with an origin on Earth, but if the error bars are similar to those on their claims, then that statement doesn't hold water.
Old enough for galactic panspermia? (Score:2)
Article says predecessors may have evolved around the predecessor star to our Sun, but given the time spans involved why just our sun? If early bacteria were ejected into space by vulcanism, solar wind would accelerate them outwards to ~400km/s, or about .1% speed of light. At that speed, you could cross the galaxy in a scant 100 million years.
Depends on what happens to low-weight particles at the heliopause though, especially if they've become ionized during travel.
So using Moore's law... (Score:3)
4000 transistors per IC in 1975, 2000 in 1973...
The integrated circuit was invented in 1951.
I'm sure this is scientifically sound.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Informative)
This is dealing with evolution, not origin of life. While it fits even less with a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible than life originating on Earth, it weighs neither positively nor negatively on whether life arose on its own or was created by a deity.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Insightful)
It does, however, use a metric pretty much meaningless to biology and comes with an answer that will get it some attention from the tragically retarded known as scientific journalism (and by extension, Slashdot editors).
Re: (Score:3)
That, and even if they did have a good metric, I suspect the first few million to billion years, would have more rapid development.
SImply put, from an evolutionary perspective - the more precisely a genetic material copies itself, the more it will propigate. Until you run into a wall of needing to adapt to changing conditions in the environment.
Assuming that exact replication is not trivial, you can conclude that for the initial period of life, mutations would be more frequent than they are now, and therefo
Re: (Score:2)
They both unify with the first organisms at the start of time. Somewhere along the way, they switched from just being blocks of amino acids floating around and self-assembling into membranes and geodesic shapes being a self-reproducing bacteria with cell membranes, DNA, RNA, receptors, enzymes and proteins.
I could imagine that once the first complex molecules could self-assemble into sheets and spheres, it wouldn't be too long for some other molecule to figure out how to take those apart and incorporate tho
Re: Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
While basically you may well be correct, the exact same argument was made for the development of eyes. "It had to be all there at the same time", "it couldn't have evolved piecemeal", etc. etc. The problem was we didn't, at first, knew how it could have been built. But now we have a very good model for how it happens, starting with a few light-sensitive cells.
Same issue here: Intelligent design is not a theory, it doesn't give us falsifiable predictions and it doesn't help our understanding of the world we
Re: (Score:3)
First, "even the simplest prokaryotic cells" are hard-core veterans of the evolutionary process. The first living things almost certainly used slower and less efficient, but simpler, systems for absolutely everything. For exampl
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Funny)
I guess Moores Law proves Intelligent Design! :) Oh wait... Intel... I mean Intel Design... :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Informative)
Since the supernatural is completely imaginary
It depends on how you delimit natural. Math and logic laws aren't natural, at least in the sense that they're causal results from some physical/material/energetic/whatever process. In fact it can be argued it's the other way around, and nature as a whole "follows" the principle of non-contradiction, arithmetic, generalized geometry. That's pretty supernatural for me, in the strict sense of "beyond nature".
Still no literal "bearded man in the sky"-style deity though.
Re: (Score:2)
But if you think like Wolfram, it's all an algorithm, and this reductionist algorithm is the basis in the post.
Natural? Deific? Does it matter? It is, what it is.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Interesting)
But if you think like Wolfram, it's all an algorithm, and this reductionist algorithm is the basis in the post.
I think these kinds of discussion suffer from lack of philosophical literacy. Creationists are clearly wrong in whatever they think about the mechanisms of speciation. They don't pop out of nowhere "just because", and replacing "just because" with "because god so wished" doesn't improve the notion a bit. On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear. The set of all possible carbon-based DNAs hasn't changed since the Big Bang, or even before it. Natural selection only makes some of them appear as actual combinations of carbon atoms, it neither adds nor subtracts from the full set.
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking state, not delta.
There is a propensity, and there is change. There is survival of the fittest, but clearly what's fit is both accident (think Microsoft Windows success) and context.
There are four different base atoms, in basic protein configurations evolving from naught, and that's for what we know, not what we don't.
Some survived, some did not. All of them are dead, save for what we know these days. The oldest living creatures aren't that old. That means that the algorithm currently does no
Re: (Score:3)
I'll ignore lots, and say there are two or four strings of proteins. They're added and subtracted with various goo as things bind to them from external influence, or survive external influence.
There are strands, and some stands have affinities for various proteins to bind to them. Others will be rejected. Steven Jay Gould's _Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes_ explains hows and whys very well.
I start the considered domain life as we know it, which can be devolved backwards a considerable distance, as referenced i
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand evolutionists rarely notice that a process of natural selection doesn't create something "new", it only causes a (mathematically preexisting) potential arrangement of atoms, one of an infinite set, to actually appear
The problem with "philosophical literacy" is that it makes you say things like "mathematically pre-existing" as if it meant something other than "non-existent".
You seem to want to reify the mathematical language we use to describe reality, as if the tool we use to describe the world and which we have invented and adapted to describe the world ever more deeply, somehow "predates" the world that language was invented to describe.
I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard. Both are just languages we use to describe, understand and communicate our understanding. Neither has any ontology apart from us, the beings who invented them, and to impute otherwise is both unwarranted and uninteresting. There is no explanatory need to do so, nor any operational test we can apply to test the validity of the hypothesis (although it would be damned interesting if you could come up with one.)
There are certainly many cases where our mathematical description has to be "fixed up" by hand to actually describe the world, the most obvious one being the excess of solutions to almost all the basic differential equations we use in physics, particularly the things like the backward-in-time solutions to any given wave equation. (That the time-reversed solutions of the Dirac equation can be given meaning does not change this, it merely emphasizes what a poor tool mathematics is for describing the universe in all the other cases where the advanced wave has no apparent physical meaning.)
Given what a lousy tool math is to describe the world, it would be very, very weird if the world were somehow "following" math. The hypothesis that we invented math to describe the world in much the same way we invented to stone ax for changing the world looks a lot more plausible.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Insightful)
I see no reason to privilege math over English in this regard.
But you certainly see much reason to privilege reason, i.e., logic and all it implies.
There's no running around the fact that if you refuse the framework you're left with no knowledge at all. Either you accept some kind of basic realism or you give up and go with the methodological anarchism of a Feyerabend, who sees no difference at all between modern Physics and Astrology, or some kind of skepticism, be it classical skepticism, which affirms no possibility of knowledge of anything at all, or the Kantian alternative, which says science can be at best a very precise knowledge of our sensory input, but incapable of saying anything at all about this maybe existing thing that maybe multiple humans (supposing there are more than one) perceive as "the external world".
I tend to switch between realism and kantism, but I concede the later is more rigorous. Too bad it causes everything we say about anything to necessarily become surrounded by double quotes.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and the ideas represented by the words we speak aren't remotely accurately portrayed by the shape of the letters we write. Symbolic thought is a deceptive bitch!
Re: (Score:3)
Well, some parts are true by definition (like pure mathematics) and the rest are chosen to fit the real world like scientific theory (applied math and most of the rest). We shouldn't be any more surprised that math
Re: (Score:3)
One can say that it is true only while there is someone who somehow perceives the concepts of "triangle" and even "property". So unless you can say that all Psyche is supernatural, properties of a triangle is not a supernatural entity, it's just a psychical object - as natural as any physical object, just of the other nature (pun not intended).
If this were the case 3-body orbital mechanics wouldn't work before there were human beings around to think of them. Not to mention nothing with a trigonometric nature in whatever quantum-something went around in the Big Bang. And other universes, potentially or even actually existing, would be utterly devoid of them.
Re: (Score:3)
Can you show any evidence that those things existed before humans perceived them?
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with the kind of creationism some people are advertising is that they insist that it happened around 6000 years ago. A lot of scientists would be ok with the idea of creationism -- if you allow it to happen billions of years ago as the spark that created life, but then let life evolve independently. But of course then humanity is not special -- unless the creator helped things happen this way for the purpose to create intelligent life.
So creationism/intelligent design is OK, and a higher being managing/guiding the universe is OK; it just doesn't make sense for it to have happened 6000 years ago.
Re: (Score:3)
becasue when you say it happened at X time, you need to show evidence, and all the evidence show, very clearly, that it is older then 6000 years. So going the Catholic route, God help evolution in ways we can't see' make no prediction, so there is no argument.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I don't think it matters what a person believes in that regard. The universe looks to be 14 billion years old, so you might as well say that it is so, even if it chronologically has only been around for 6 thousand or so.
To posit that God made a universe with a perfect apparent history of 14 billion years only 6000 years ago according to God's wristwatch would create deep quandaries to any theist is thinks non-superficially. If God creates apparent facts, why are those facts not true? Why does God need to create a universe of lies?
Re: (Score:3)
And to be fair, as a computer programmer, it's much less tedious to write a program to solve a particular goal than to write a system that incorporates genetic algorithms, and wait for it to evolve and to that goal on its own.
Whatever some slashdotters might think, computer programmers are not omnipotent, omniscient supernatural beings.
You have just written the worst analogy in slashdot history. Good work.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:5, Funny)
"unless the creator helped things happen this way for the purpose to create intelligent life."
Assuming that humanity is evidence of intelligent life is a very big assumption.
Re:Looks like creationism... (Score:4, Interesting)
"unless the creator helped things happen this way for the purpose to create intelligent life."
Assuming that humanity is evidence of intelligent life is a very big assumption.
Well, let's do science to it: Back problems due to poor adaptation to walking vertically. Nerves that run under your feet. Your retinas are upside down and thus have a hole / blindspot where the blood vessels go through. Hooves exist, so do better spines like giraffe's necks, and cephalopod's eyes are right side out with no blind spot required (blood in the back, receptors in the front) so it's not like "god" didn't do it right elsewhere. I just can't believe a benevolent deity created man. If so, we were made to suffer and be laughed at.
Then you look at yourself and think, Oh, look, I don't have fur like other mammals do! Then you look about at other mammals that don't have fur... They are aquatic or have aquatic ancestors: Whales, Elephants, Manatee, Walrus, Hippopotamus. A small portion like the naked mole rat simply live underground -- They're all in contact with stuff more dense than air. What about those aquatic creatures though? Don't they all get layers of blubber -- fat concentrated towards the outside rather than distributed in the core. A dog, horse or even cow will die from fat clogging its heart long before it can reach the level of percentage of body fat that a human can reach -- That's because our fat isn't concentrated in our core, it's blubber. We have superior breath control than Apes & Chimps do -- They'll never learn to talk like we can. We can hold our breath, hell, you can pressurize your mouth and your soft palette will close off your sinus, making an air/water tight seal. The chimps and apes don't stand upright -- but they do when they're crossing or wading in water... They don't have our dexterous opposable thumbs and dexterous digits because they don't catch prey. Our hands would be pretty good for catching fish.
So, when we look at things rationally, and compare the evidence, it seems unless there's a prevailing scientific theory that we came from aquatic apes, then both religion and science are fucking morons. YOU ARE NAKED. YOUR ANCESTORS WERE MERFOLK OR MOLE PEOPLE!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with the kind of creationism some people are advertising is that they insist that it happened around 6000 years ago. A lot of scientists would be ok with the idea of creationism -- if you allow it to happen billions of years ago as the spark that created life, but then let life evolve independently. But of course then humanity is not special -- unless the creator helped things happen this way for the purpose to create intelligent life.
So creationism/intelligent design is OK, and a higher being managing/guiding the universe is OK; it just doesn't make sense for it to have happened 6000 years ago.
No the problem with creationism is that it's a crappy scientific theory. It doesn't add any predictive power, doesn't resolve the actual question of how life was created, and it fails Occam's Razor. It's exactly as useful as "a wizard did it".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But this idea also seems to have some improbable time scales. The summary says "just before" the earth formed, but in fact they are claiming that life is more than twice as old as the earth. And that would be an earth that was pretty inhospitable to life until another billion years or so.
I find the idea quite incredible:
And yet they claim this finding with scant
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So creationism/intelligent design is OK, and a higher being managing/guiding the universe is OK; it just doesn't make sense for it to have happened 6000 years ago.
Assuming that our estimates of millions and billions of years based on modern samples is an accurate way to estimate the age of the universe.
How do we even experimentally verify those methods? Prepare some samples and ask future scientists to check the results every 10,000 years to confirm conformance to our models?
Re: (Score:2)
It's a log-scale. So yes, it is a hockey-stick.
Re: (Score:3)
The idea that life here began out there is not new (see panspermia or Battlestar Galactica). We just never really thought about where life may have started if it didn't begin on Earth. Given that the Earth is only about as third as old as the Universe in general, and that stars from the earlier Universe tended to have shorter lifespans, means that a planet with life could have evolved over a few billion years, then the sun could have exploded and some trace of that life may have made it to Earth where it wa
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that arguing with true believers is a waste of time - right up to the moment someone who isn't stops to read or listen to the discussion. I never argue with stubborn people to convince *them*, I argue to convince the 10 bystanders indirectly.
On the arguments about creation: no scientist can accept an idea that cannot be argued with, cannot be amended and cannot be used to predict things. Unless he or she stops being a scientist when leaving the lab. That sort of separation of the personal and the pr
One Thing is For Sure (Score:2)
The industry that has formed around highly speculative science and mysteriology is alive, well, and thriving.
Re: (Score:2)
Look up at the night sky (if you live in an urban/suburban area, you might need to head out for a brief vacation in the wilderness for this to have the proper effect). Now, tell me, are billion-trillion-to-one odds against coincidences happening around any one star in the universe particularly a barrier to those things happening somewhere (or many many somewheres) in the universe? And, by "anthropic principle" arguments, the only intelligent observers capable of understanding the rarity of coincidences lead
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, "interstellar travel" != "FTL drives".
Last I looked at the Fermi Paradox, it assumed STL (Slower Than Light) expansion across the galaxy/universe
Re: (Score:3)
It automatically assumes that FTL drives are not only possible
No it doesn't. Von Neumann probes traveling at sub lightspeed and replicating exponentially could have traversed the galaxy in less time than it takes life to evolve on a bare rock.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody said anything about FTL. The Milky Way is only about 100,000 light years across. If a race could travel at even a measly 10% of lightspeed they could have crossed the entire galaxy 1,000 times in a paltry billion years, and sunlike stars started forming several billion years before our own. Even if they were just explorers their microbes would likely have colonized and terraformed every vaguely hospitable planet they stopped at, and had plenty of time to evolve into potentially starfaring races in
Re: increases exponentially (Score:2)
Re: increases exponentially (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Look again - I said a million years to cross *the entire galaxy*. There's no reason they'd have to do it all at once. Colonize a nearby star, wait a hundred or a thousand years to build up, then repeat, possibly from both stars. BOOM, you've got exponential growth and plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy by now. Hence the paradox. We have around sixty stars within 16 light-years of Earth, and we live in a relatively podunk outskirt neighborhood (a factor that *may* have facilitated life's emerg
Re: (Score:3)
Colonize a nearby star, wait a hundred or a thousand years to build up, then repeat
That sounds vaguely plausible if every star has an habitable Earth-style planet and you can send a pretty large number of people there to develop the infrastructure.
Otherwise, unless you're talking about terra-forming fantasies, you're just going to have a lot of people travelling for a very, very long time and ending up on places like Mars, where no one sane would want to spend their lives.
Re: increases exponentially (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry, I don't consider "stringing together Sci-Fi plot device jargon for nonexistent magic devices" to be "close to breaking" relativistic theories on FTL motion.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, at least it's a step up from people who use "exponentially" to mean anything that changes "a whole lot, really fast!".
Re: (Score:2)
There isn't one. Physics, chemistry and engineering show that we'll never go there, and they'll never get here. Just getting a signal across the gulf of space is hard enough.
and man will never land on the moon