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Date: 2013-11-25 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:52 pm (UTC)I also hate the pseudo-intellectual sounding anti-evolution arguments.
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:14 am (UTC)"in science fiction biology is the redheaded stepchild that comes to school covered in bruises"
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:30 am (UTC)I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the fact-denying end of Christianity.
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:38 am (UTC)http://austringer.net/wp/index.php/2008/07/05/a-pournelle-misunderstanding/
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 01:14 am (UTC)As I understand it, the RCC teaches that it is permissible to accept the findings of modern science, so a Catholic in good standing can accept Big Bang cosmology and deep time, and the fact that species have evolved over time. But it is not a teaching of doctrine that Catholics must accept all findings of science, so it is possible to be a Catholic in good standing and also be a YEC, and/or a geocentrist, and/or even a Flat-Earther.
I await with interest the possibility that the future might bring us JEP questioning the dogma of that whole heliocentrism fad.
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Date: 2013-11-25 08:45 am (UTC)http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2010/04/30/empathy-and-epistemic-closure/
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Date: 2013-11-25 09:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:12 pm (UTC)But isn't "opposing everything the left supports" the second most important goal of the right, after "tax cuts for the rich"? Heck, some of them flat out say it's their #1 duty.
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Date: 2013-11-25 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:59 pm (UTC)I cannot parse this sentence. Care to explain what you are trying to say?
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Date: 2013-11-25 03:57 pm (UTC)"I'm now curious to know how many radical authoritarians like Pournelle are in the section of Christianity that denies facts."
-- Paul Clarke
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Date: 2013-11-25 05:19 pm (UTC)There is a group of Christians who deny facts. Call this Group B. If Christians are placed on a spectrum, those in Group B fall at one end of the spectrum.
I'm now curious to know how many members of Group A are also in Group B.
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Date: 2013-11-25 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:50 am (UTC)Clarification: Not all physicists hate everything squishy. Just the annoying ones.
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Date: 2013-11-25 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:45 am (UTC)(I am thinking of that passage where Space Belisarius slaughters the Space Nika rioters at the Space soccer stadium,)
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Date: 2013-11-25 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 04:39 am (UTC)Also, a limited understanding that science is fundamentally a social process, rather than a giant deduction that some isolated person makes from first principles.
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Date: 2013-11-25 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 07:40 am (UTC)Doug M.
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Date: 2013-11-25 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:39 pm (UTC)But then he was never that strident or vocal in the first place. Some hard anarchy stories and commentary like being open minded about private ownership of nukes, but not exactly a Pournelle.
I caught the tail end of a Pournelle talk. They, uh, talk very differently. P is loud and confident and didn't sound burdened with doubts; I think he was talking about the space program or Star Wars (SDI) and stuff. V stammers and threw up lots of neat ideas and I got an impression one could argue with him without wanting to shoot one of you.
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Date: 2013-11-26 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 01:35 pm (UTC)Also, one of the things refuted with great thoroughness by Darwin in Origin and the refutation is one of the parts of Origin that's held up.
You're not talking about assembling a watch out of random parts; you're talking about an existing, ongoing, assemblage of parts gradually accumulating the characteristics of a watch. (Which has been simulated, and which happens in surprisingly few generations, if we postulate reproducing springs...)
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:27 pm (UTC)In biology, there's been so much work done both conceptually on local advantages accruing to minor improvements and in finding concrete evidence of intermediate forms that examples like the eye (having emerged several times in different contexts) are now better arguments for the operation of natural selection than for the presence of design.
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:37 pm (UTC)http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=book/table_of_contents
I very much like Bostrom's research agenda. It involves many issues science fiction authors try to address (usually much more hamfistedly.)
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Date: 2013-11-25 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:35 pm (UTC)It seems unlikely that he's going to change his method in the final years of his life. Rather, one should expect him to get even odder and more gullible as the inevitable processes of aging (and the damage caused by earlier decades of drinking) take their toll on his capacity for critical thinking, which was never terribly strong. It's why conmen prey on the elderly; it's the FOX News business model.
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Date: 2013-11-25 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 02:47 pm (UTC)(Of course this doesn't mean OoL required supernatural intervention, only that science hasn't demonstrated a good solution to the problem.)
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Date: 2013-11-25 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:03 pm (UTC)Biologists should look for very low complexity "life", in my opinion. Billions of atoms is too much.
BTW, I saw an interesting graph plotting complexity of life vs. time. Complexity has been gradually increasing, but if you plot backwards, the intercept with the horizontal axis is about 10 billion years ago. This suggests that life actually predates Earth, and Earth was seeded with a simpler kind of life that then continued to evolve. This might be another explanation for the "Great Filter" of the Fermi problem: such transfers of life to newly formed planets may be necessary for evolution to continue, but are also very uncommon.
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Date: 2013-11-25 05:19 pm (UTC)OTOH, I would expect very low-complexity "life" to have been eaten by the more complex stuff as it comes into existence. Essentially, the conditions that were favorable to the development of protolife/less complex self-replicators have long since been changed beyond recognition by the presence of life here.
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Date: 2013-11-25 05:27 pm (UTC)"The odds of my being hit by a car at this particular corner at this particular moment are staggeringly low!" Fine, but the odds of somebody being hit by a car at this corner seem to be about 20%, and the odds of your being hit by a car somewhere, at some point in your life, are quite substantial.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:33 pm (UTC)If Mars has life, we can't rule out the possibility (the probability, actually) of contamination from the early Earth (or vice versa). There were lots of impacts in the early solar system, which would have sent lots of rocks into solar orbit to carry simple cells back and forth.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 06:44 pm (UTC)Life as we know it, as we notice, as our intuitions expect, is macroscopic eukaryotic multicellular bilaterally symmetric segmented metazoans. That's probably five big steps -- original replicators, original cells, step before eukaryotes where there's enough environmental specialization to get cells that can club together to form eukaryotes, eukaryotes, and then embryology so you can have a substantial organism -- from where life arose.
Even figuring out what the environment was like back then is tough; not much rock, few temperature proxies, etc. The idea of catalytic surfaces and then chemical sheets has been getting a bit of traction, at least at the level I can follow along at.
Also, measures of complexity are very, very tough, and defining complexity is tougher. It's very easy to produce something delusive when you do. (what's the complexity of a diplodocid sauropod? why is this less than that of a minke whale?)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:00 pm (UTC)Catalytic surfaces really don't address the meat of the problem, which is how one puts together a system in which the replication of information is accurate enough for natural selection to occur (where the information not to be eroded away by excessive random error.)
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Date: 2013-11-25 08:52 pm (UTC)I don't think there's that much of a gap. Working from the top down, catalytic RNA has been known for over thirty years. Working from the bottom up, ribose forms in condensation reactions from formaldehyde; adenine forms in condensation reactions from hydrogen cyanide. The bottleneck step, to my mind, would be the formation of reaction conditions which favor the nucleoside linkage.
The pairing of replication with metabolism and membrane division are separate things, of course, but there are signs of early lock-in.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:30 pm (UTC)The scam in origin-of-life research is to show you can make chemical X at some low concentration in some mixture with other stuff, and then start the next round of experiments with pure X purchased from a supply house.
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Date: 2013-11-25 10:17 pm (UTC)There are also plausible natural circumstances which concentrate organic compounds with different properties, in processes roughly analogous to ore formation, or the separation procedures undergraduates perform in chemistry lab.
It's the specific problems -- nucleoside linkage, the origin of chirality, the coupling to phosphate energetics, etc -- that are the real pain in the ass. The "random glop" argument is a red herring.
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Date: 2013-11-26 03:50 am (UTC)Gareth Wilson
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Date: 2013-11-26 09:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 06:58 pm (UTC)(The particular Christian I'm trying to win over, and she will listen which seems to be unusual, has trouble with speciation and 'gaps in the fossil record.' I'm looking for good sources to convince her, starting from scratch, if anyone has ideas.)
It was also interesting to explain to them that 'life' does not, cannot, begin at conception. And the best they can come up with is a unique human life. Relying on DNA for the unique.
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Date: 2013-11-27 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 09:19 pm (UTC)wingnut pin ups have to embrace creatonsism ?
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Date: 2013-11-28 02:34 am (UTC)He says "Darwinian selection postulates that each step must be an ‘improvement’ over the last, not just a step toward an eye from a light sensitive cell, but a definite improvement over its predecessor causing the improved model to have more survivable offspring."
Then someone tries to explain that 'shaking a bag of watch parts to assemble a watch' is not the same as gradually building on past 'successes'. He replies "but sieving the ‘successes’ implies that you know where you are going. That is what we haven’t settled."
Well, no to either of those. Most changes are neutral, like duplicating globin genes, freeing the genome up to experiment on one copy while keeping the essential one optimal. You just can't postulate a requirement that every change is a "definite" improvement.
And "success" is having offspring. It has nothing to do with 'knowing where you are going'. It might even have nothing to do with your genome, e.g. when the local volcano goes off or the sea level changes.
And someone writes: "Now the idea that a mid-Victorian country squire hit on the Truth About Everything is remarkable, and biologists could learn a bit from the physicists, who have quite happily abandoned what they thought they knew ca. 1860. There could easily be multiple processes at work in evolution, just as there are in local motion (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — and we have turned "gravity" inside out since the Widow of Windsor’s day). So the "striving to the utmost" to reproduce coupled with the "struggle for existence" that forms the Darwinian engine may not account for everything in sight — except in the tautological sense that "survivors survive."
Hey, thanks. As a geneticist I really thought Darwin nailed it in 1859 and nobody ever had to do any more work on this "evolution" sorry I mean "Darwinist" thing. I better go check to see if anyone has ever done any experiments or anything because it sure sounds like we should get with the program!