Careful Arkizzle, you might just succeed in either convincing them to remove those rights if they're abused, or at the very least clogging the pipes for people who have a good use for the system.

We always called it Willy Wurst (with the german 'w' as 'v' pronunciation of course). I don't remember it tasting bad, but I was like 5, so...

Thanks Terry, I had forgotten the specifics of that flood.

This thread has been great for some of the logical and interesting responses alone.

Also, playing tennis against a wall is still decent exercise. I feel I've resolved a lot of loose ideas, I've learned a few things from (*gasp*) researching what I'm posting about, and I've gotten a bit more practice editing myself for clarity.

I guess it would have been nice if Evi had come up with an interesting argument, but apparently there's been nothing new in his world for several hundred years. It wasn't really expected.

I'm stepping out as well. Evidence, hope you manage to someday learn from a source that isn't confirming your own delusions.

Cheers

brief article on it:
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Nested_Hierarchy

Google turns up a lot of references that look pretty good at first blush.

Also, BTW, using the bible as a way to decide what to investigate sounds like a fairly neutral idea, but it's really quite useless for anything beyond the level of scientific inquiry that, no surprise, could have been done in the day and age it was authored in, which largely amounted to observing the simple aspects of the native world. Anyone with a round object can observe its shadow, and the shadow on the moon, and come to the conclusion that the world is round. It just takes some basic intuition. Any historical insistence of the flatness of the earth was the same kind of perpetuated dogma then that creationism is now - despite the clear truth if you pay attention to the evidence, people insist that God didn't do it that way, he did it some other way.

Which, honestly, is pretty blasphemous isn't it? If god created the world 6000 years ago to look young, then not only is that a lie, which you also claim he can't do (you sure like imposing limits on your god, don't you? Really must not want him to get out of that little box you have him in.), he also created all creatures to appear evolved.

So we look to the natural world, which would be god's direct creation, and see that it doesn't match the Bible, which is a book written by the hand of man, assembled by other men, translated and copied down the line, and you yet claim that while men lie and god doesn't, god must have created the world to deceive us and made sure the version of the book you use is his word (but not the other versions!).

---
So regardless of when God poofed the world into existence, we're going to explore it as it appears. That would be the true study of his works.

Some more evidence of evolution, then.

One prediction made by the theory of evolution is that since traits pass from 2 parents to each child and thereby can be passed around inside a population of a species, that a new trait or feature in a population should only be found in the species that evolve from the original common one where the trait first appeared. Furthermore, if one of the descendant species evolves a new trait, then that trait shouldn't be found in a species that doesn't have the trait from the parent. (The original trait could be lost, but in this case we can deal with very complex traits that are made up of many genes that are very hard to lose).

This is referred to as nested hierarchies. And we see it EVERYWHERE. It forms the entire basis of our classifications of animals. Mammals are creatures that produce milk, have hair, and are warm-blooded. "But wait!" you say, "what about the duck-billed platypus?!" Yes, it has fur, but also lays eggs like reptiles and birds. Yup, its tree split off a long long time ago. It also lacks many other things we associate with most mammals we're familiar with. Thought it makes milk, it has no teats. The nested hierarchies work out in the end. No other mammal has the platypus's venomous hind leg spur, for example.

This examination can be done on many many levels, from prominent external features to bone structure, brain construction, tooth shapes, genes, and so forth. We can choose any common part of a large group of species, such as jaw shape, and using only that, build a tree of how species are related. When we compare that to the tree of relations of brain structures, we find that the trees match up.

Quite often, separate species put in the same environment will end up developing very similar features. Whales and dolphins are mammals, but they have fins and tails like sharks and fish. But, whales fins have bones similar to mammalian hand bones, and their tails are horizontal like a pair of legs, not vertical like a fish's. In other cases, we can even look at the genes behind the feature, and we find that the genes between separate species are very different and incompatible. Usually there are significant physical differences between separately evolved similar traits anyway.

Of the millions of fossils discovered, they all fit into these hierarchies. We're so good at it now that we can look at a gap between two related fossils, figure out when something in that gap should have lived, consult geological maps and previous fossil discoveries, fly there, dig around for a while, and find a fossil that shares some of the traits of the descendant. This was how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik was discovered.

Pretty much everything I said about nested heirarchies and tiktaalik can be read about in greater detail and clarity in this book, btw:
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Year/dp/0375424474
The author was one of the people responsible for finding tiktaalik. Very educational book, has lots of references, and explains a lot of the evidence behind what we know of the basics of evolution.

But anyway, if god created all creatures individually, why did he follow this arbitrary scheme of distributing traits that only makes sense in the light of evolution? No, you can't just say 'because he wanted to', you've been saying that evolution is illogical, yet apparently it's part of god's creation, whether he's faking it to fool scientists or it was his tool for creating us.

Evidence,

I don't have a specific citation for this quote (I think it was mentioned in the public television video on the Dover trial), but I recall that the judge, after being shown a large bit of great evidence, asked why this new information wasn't being taught in public schools. The answer was that the anti-evolution groups have always lobbied strongly against including newer information.

From elsewhere, I've heard the following argument:
Biology textbooks that take too 'strong' a stance for evolution are rejected by schools because of the hordes of fundamentalist parents complaining. Textbooks are hard work to produce, and are often approved at a county level by school boards with no particular science education. So the textbook manufacturers have to hedge in order to get anything in at all.

Google for "evolution biology textbook", and you'll file tons of results from religious and Intelligent Design-related agencies decrying the available textbooks. It actually makes it hard to find anything else related to the subject. But notice how much the ID crowd crows about textbooks, but has NO experiments or evidence.

This is a large part of the reason WHY the general public is incredibly ignorant about the basics of evolution.

Thank you Xopher, that was very nice.

http://mnatheists.org/component/option,com_seyret/task,videodirectlink/Itemid,61/id,28/
http://mnatheists.org/component/option,com_seyret/task,videodirectlink/Itemid,61/id,29/

Bah, Pythagoras and Apollonius apparently did it all first.

Some references I dug up for the last thing he mentioned about Pythagoras counting fish, vs the 153 fish caught in John 21 (153 being a triangular number of great significance in Pythagorianism)
http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/pythagoras/pythagoras_v1.php?name=volume1.iamblichus.08
http://www.scripturessay.com/article.php?cat=&id=516

One thing to keep in mind, by the way...

The argument that mutation can only destroy information is easy to sympathize with, but it's based on a lack of understanding of the scale of time.

On a short time scale, we will have a hard time finding examples of newly created genes in complex animals. For example, one might argue that lactose tolerance is the damaging of a regulatory gene, showing only distruction. We don't see lactose digesting genes pop up suddenly.

The reason is that our library of genes has been created by mutations over billions of years. Lactase was probably the deformation of a very old digestive enzyme created before mammals even existed. There have been billions of years for all this mutation to accumulate.

We do, however, see the evolution of novel new genes in bacteria, who reproduce fast, and share often. New genes for enzymes that eat nylon have been found, and nylon only existed at all recently!

Complex multicellular animals such as mammals and reptiles are the exception rather than the rule. We don't mutate very much since we reproduce very slowly. Instead, we mostly repurpose the parts of the huge set of genes that already existed.

Every single piece of DNA today is a mutation. It was either a duplication, modification, deletion, insertion, or recombination of existing genes, all the way back to the first DNA.

We can show that the genes that determine our heads and tails are modifications of the same ones that do the same things in houseflies. (Interestingly enough, between insects and animals, our backs and fronts are flipped, genetically speaking. In one branch or the other, the gene that codes front from back was interpreted differently.)

Deformations such as multiple heads and limbs are most likely locational errors during the zygote phase. You're correct, they're not genetic information, but that's not really what I was referring to.

Those attributes won't breed true. The offspring of a two-headed cow will most likely have one head.

(The proclivity to have two heads probably has genetic roots, insomuch as genetics define body form, but there's probably not anything that specifically codes for twoheadedness. That's also offtopic though)

The lizards on the island presumably breed true. I don't know for certain, not having seen the paper myself, and if you accuse the scientists of such a failure without yourself getting the paper and analyzing their methodology, you're still just being an asshole and proving nothing.

Adaptation is a part of evolution. What are you calling information? If every lizard of this new generation is a different size, shape, and has a different structure than the original lizards on the island, and their children are similar to themselves even if put in a different environment, then it's clearly a change in genetic information.

The article doesn't go into the specifics of their methodology, but that's really basic stuff. Your insistence that the scientists are utterly incompetent without actually hunting down their published work is still insulting and assholish.

Timmy can work out all he wants, by the way, but his kids won't be any stronger for it. However, he can teach his kids to work out, and they will be stronger. Not all inheritance is genetic, of course. But for lizards, they're probably not learning from their parents. Lamarkism was a valid hypothesis, and if it worked, scientists would believe it. It didn't work. Genetic evolution does work.

No, that's not at all correct.

My understanding from that and other articles on the lizards is that the original species from the other island only had a few percent of its diet made up of plant material. It was unable to get a great deal of nutrition from plants because it was optimized for eating insects. It did not have a cecal valve, it just had muscles around that area and the area was smooth.

On the new island, there were not enough insects to support them. After they adapted to their environment by changing size and shape to a small degree, and forming a structure internally where no structure existed, they were able to subsist mostly on plants, and they ate the native lizards out of house and home.

I'm unaware how much they know about all of the changes, but it's not likely that all of them were just simple recessive genes. The effect was most likely (I'm guessing) caused by genetic changes in the volume of certain growth proteins produce. However, the cecal valve is important because it shows that a structure that didn't exist can come from minor changes. This is something that many creationists claim can't happen, as they seem to think a mutation is something that pops into existence a completely new gene that grows a third arm or something silly like that.

Wow, that's just sad. Are you really so impressed that you can cut the bible up into little snippets, and hunt through them until you get a handful that sound vaguely like something someone misheard in science class?

The 'science' you cite there is stretched out of context at best, and much of it is made up, twisted, or just plain nonsensical. Almost none of it whatsoever has more than the thinnest possible connection to your quotes.

Worse yet, it's pretty much impossible to predict anything from those quotes. They're devoid of any predictive power. Huh, great empty space in the north, eh? Well let's look north, find the first thing that might be 'empty', and use that? What could it be, the lands where no trees grow? Sure, that works! How about the north pole, where all the ice is floating and there's no land? Why not!

And on top of it all you've already admitted that you decide what to nitpick in the bible arbitrarily based on whether you can justify it to yourself!

These little things you reassure yourself with are not impressive. I'm just flabbergasted by how out of touch you are with so much of the rational knowledge we have of the world.

EVIDENCE:
The Earth is about 6,000 years old, is that young? (The rest of the quote was a bit wishy-washy. Please clarify if you didn't mean this statement literally, or if it's out of context.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
So, you're familiar with tree rings, right? You can tell the age of a tree by counting the rings. The rings also vary in size and makeup depending on the weather. In a small area, you can match dead trees against each other like puzzle pieces. You can figure out the exact calender year for each ring, for progressively older and older trees.

Guess how far back we can precisely date every ring? Over 10,000 years for one area, and over large areas of Europe over 7,000 years. In the US, bristlecone pines are dated back to 8,500 years ago. These are also verified against each other, so we know that the records are accurate. (For the record, because I fear this will get misinterpreted, 10,000 years old is the oldest for which we know the date of every single ring. Beyond that, we have floating islands of matched tree rings with gaps inbetween, which will go back much much further, but we just don't have enough pieces to tie them exactly to each other. This most certainly shouldn't be misconstrued as the world being 10,000 years old instead of 6,000)

To go further, creationists like to argue that this or that method of dating is unreliable. Well, how do we judge reliability? We compare things to each other. The trees are radiocarbon dated, and we can tell that it's very accurate along the entire length the well established tree timeline. We can tell that the depth in layers of earth is accurate because we can match fossilized trees there against our tree record, and against the carbon dating. We can take animal fossils from the same layers and compare them to modern animals, and observe the changes in features, and compare the DNA and check the expected mutation rate, and carbon date those as well.

ALL of this evidence matches up. Even once we go beyond the tree record, radiocarbon dating, geology, genetics, morphology, palentology and so many more all agree with each other extraordinarily well.

By the way, there's plenty of records of floods in areas. We know how a flood shows up in the layers of dirt, we know what happens to trees that have been submerged for extended periods, so on and so forth. Yet in all the millions of pieces of evidence, there's absolutely no sign of a global flood. None. It's not a matter of interpretation of the data, it just did not happen. The only way you could conceivably believe that it happened is to accuse millions of scientists of profound incompetence or some sort of sinister plot. It's insulting, which is why so many people get angry with creationists.

(Just in case someone says "OMG Wikipedia you lose all arguments evar!", the article HAS citations. Go read them before you start making up reasons why they're wrong. They're not online, so you'll have to go look them up.)

Conceded, I like to oversimplify things.

However, to nitpick back, not every possible trait is developed by evolution. Just because it might be useful doesn't mean it'll ever happen. Also, traits are not developed because they're useful, but are kept because they happen to be useful. We all know this, but it's worth repeating.

The difference between human eyes and insect eyes is, of course, depth. "water blocks IR, pretty damned fast." Human eyes are so large that useful IR can't really reach the back of our eyes. So even if we had some way to use the IR spectrum, we'd probably never develop much ability without deforming the eyes we have in ways that would be too detrimental to us vision-based creatures along the way.

Insects may even emphasize IR reception *because* it's mostly hidden to larger creatures, helping them be less predictable.

It tends to get simplified to "traits are selected for", but it might be more clear to say that a trait is selected against if it's sufficiently detrimental. As long as the environment supports it, evolution will expand the genetic possibilities. You could sort of visualize it as a sort of thick gas, slowly filling its environment. (That's a very weak analogy, don't try to extrapolate anything from it)

To be more clear on the irreducible complexity thing...
The idea is very much analogous to an arch. An arch could not have been constructed a brick at a time on its own, which is the same claim made for 'irreducible genes'. But clearly, god didn't poof all arches into existence. An arch can be made by filling the middle and placing stones on top, then removing the filling to allow the stones to stand. (proteins that support the function get outdated and can disappear when they're no longer necessary). Or it can be assembled on its side and lifted into place at once (a set of proteins fulfilling one purpose end up helping another process and eventually adapt to fit).

Another way of visualizing the mismatch between creationists and scientists is that the scientists describe the functionality of a gene or protein, and it sounds like the mean this:
http://www.bibleplaces.com/images/Gerasa%20Triumphal%20Arch%20of%20Hadrian,%20tb%20n031701.jpg
When in fact they actually mean this:
http://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/cdlin/picture/us/utah/delicate-arch.jpg
You can argue about god's hand in that arch, but it's clear the tools used were wind, water, and time.

On the scientific end, irreducible complexity is utterly meaningless and useless as a concept. No matter how many complicated things you find that don't work if you take pieces out, ALL of them could have been made like the arch, by removing structure to leave it afterwards. Just like god, even if you haven't found the exact history of those genes, you can't guarantee you'll never find them. And between the hypothesis of "God did it" and "a protein in the middle disappeared", one of them's much simpler. In fact, almost every example of irreducible complexity used by ID supports has been discredited by finding nearly identical versions of the proteins involved serving other purposes.

On eyes in particular, your eyes are a similar environment to the ocean, because our ancestors developed them there. It couldn't change too much because it'd break everything else. We don't see infrared because water blocks it. Thus we can't see what insects see, such as the beautiful infrared patterns on flowers. The lenses of our eyes are adapted from digestive proteins, which is why we get cataracts - a minor injury will set off a chain reaction and the proteins will coagulate.

After a bit of pondering this morning, I'll reel out a little more cynicism.

Why is it that spontaneity is considered such a huge factor in the "feeling of free will and authorship"? I'm not well versed in the related philosophy, but I am honestly curious.

It seems to me that any definition of free will should include how people feel a sense of control over things that really are random or uncontrollable.

For examples familiar to those around here, putting up a bag of water on what happens to be a windy day will still let people feel in control ( http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/15/water-filled-plastic.html#comment-165781 ). The article linked by http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/15/timelapse-video-of-m.html also mentions that the close-door buttons in elevators haven't done anything in over 10 years, yet people persist in pushing them.

(I really wish I could find a reliable reference for the cut corpus callosum experiment where the subject was told to stand, and when asked why he stood explained he was thirsty)

It seems from this aspect that free will is an illusion of control despite randomness. Humans should be expected to have a sense of authorship despite spontaneity of decisions. Cognitive dissonance has certainly never been a barrier.

"Do you actually think that thousands of people would be hanging water bags all around if no one ever saw some results? LOL"

Yes. It's a very common and well understood phenomena:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

So no, on its own, "thousands of people" is not proof, and it's not even suggestive that it might be likely to be true.

Now, there are strong first-person reports of great success, which is much better, and should also be easy to prove. Hang up a bag of water every other day near a garbage bin next to a white wall (so you can see the flies against it more easily), and take a picture of it on a consistent basis.

(Un)fortunately, I don't have a fly problem around here, so I'll use that as my excuse for being too lazy to do it myself :)

But without evidence, a lot of people nodding in agreement is *known* to be basically worthless.

Thanks for the post Brembs! It sounds like great research. I'm curious about precision vs flexibility. Any thoughts on analyzing the spontaneity of flies that live in different environments, and of one verses many generations in them?

For my own part, I'll try to rein in my cynicism a bit. It was probably a bit uncouth of me to project motives onto others.

I don't want this to sound mean, Slida, but at that point aren't you just slapping the "Free Will!" label on some bit of machinery in your head and patting yourself on the back?

I guess the real impetus behind the question of free will is people want to feel special, and the idea that someone could build a computer that could predict them makes them feel less so. But either the answer is 'no' due to quantum randomness, or 'yes' with enough computational power. It's an interesting topic worthy of investigation on its own, but asking about free will is just shoving your head between a rock and a hard place.

Why make yourself feel bad just because you are *merely* a fantastically complicated being in profoundly varied and rational universe?

Yeah, I actually read the article now. I suppose couching research on fly behavior in a discussion of free will is a great way to publicize what is, on its own, a fairly interesting discovery.

I'm still failing to see how this contradicts the idea of a program. It happens to not have arbitrary constraints that a human programmer would use for simplicity and sanity. Maybe I'm just confused by how surprised some react when we're reminded (once again) that analogies aren't perfect.

It also seems like we're looking for the pot of free will at the end of the rainbow, but I suppose I support it as long as we get to enjoy the scenery on the way. Guess it's harder to get funding when you tell people you're trying to figure out how to reduce them to an algorithm. :)

This makes me think of those programmable toy cars where you'd press buttons to add commands that made if go forward, turn, or reverse for a short time. You could make them navigate through a room, but if their starting position was off they'd bounce off walls and act completely random. You know, like a fly bouncing off the same window repeatedly.

This seems like the exact opposite of free will. The flies have a program in their noggins, optimized by randomization and selection for largest set of environments they tend to deal with, with some small amount of sensor input.

I'd go so far as to hypothesize that a farm house that's been mostly unchanged for many many years probably has flies that navigate it better than non-local flies.

For those missing the obvious, the wine bottle ~= lung size comes from the bottles being blown glass.

There's probably a correlation, yes, but I don't see enough evidence to imply causation. A glass blower can make a bottle however big they choose. Now, if it's some sort of tradition or something, that's another matter.

What makes them want to?
Hypothesis:
Working with others is hard, but confers a huge benefit. Altruism is the bred-in result of surviving in a world too hard to make it on your own. Funny contradiction, that hardship breeds kindness. It's just another benefit of intelligence: the ability to remember who's been kind to you creates a strong selection pressure to reciprocate.

However, like a dog humping a person's leg, the instinct of altruism extends beyond the problem it was originally solving. Social beings have an urge to be kind to everything. ("Only be kind to certain things" is actually a harder rule to follow, being less general)

Now, a lot of people will probably feel this is too dry, unmagical, or that it says that we should resist any urge to help others if they don't have something to give us back. No no no! What it says is that being good is part of being a social animal. Being kind to creatures, or to people that will never know is as basic a part of mankind as being curious or in love. Feeling good about doing good, regardless of gain is another way to improve your own lot - you'll be happier, because that's part of being human.

Now, go follow this dolphin's example and pay attention to your instincts - help someone else.

:)

Tom, while effect on people's lives is one measure of progress, I don't think it's the primary one to worry about for singularity.

Progress has, I think, outpaced some of the distribution channels. That doesn't mean that discovery isn't progressing, there's just an application barrier, which may also be solved by discoveries, or by the importance of discoveries.

Crazy stuff is just around the corner - we're already starting to grow new body parts, create cybernetics approximating human limbs, design neural interfaces, and we're speedily approaching the tech necessary for a space elevator.

And yet half of America still doesn't understand evolution. We can't measure the pace of science by the laggards.

Thanks bbG! You saved me $10 on STALKER, been planning to get it on steam, but I was putting it off 'till I finished a few other games.

My guess: assuming he's not dishonest, I'd like to see what happens when the coils are taken off and away from the device, and possibly the magnets exchanged for something of equal weight.

Personally I hate coffee and have no appreciation for wine, but I always wonder when this kind of thing comes up - how much of the 'taste' is in the price and novelty?

I'd like to see a blind taste test between this, vacuum, and starbucks.

There have been many studies on wine tasting - one I read about yesterday on a neuroscience blog I can't find again found that the college students rated every wine better when they were told the price was higher. But in a blind taste test they all thought the $5/bottle one was best. The article on the study said something to the effect of "but they were unsophisticated college students", but what that tells me is that connoisseurs have simply learned what subtle flavors indicate price, not quality.

Since I don't drink coffee, I have no idea how different vacuum and regular coffee are, but I'd put money on anything more expensive than your $50 vacuum pot being almost entirely psychological as long as you're doing it right. Now, consistent repeatable quality is worth paying for, but that's not what this is about.

A magnet in the head #3? Oh, goodie, I wonder how long THAT will last, given that shock tends to demagnatize most materials. If there's a magnet that isn't affected by it, it's news to me. Hopefully it at least would take a while to lose its power significantly.

Man, I wish someone would give ME money to turn shit into excrement! Easiest job EVAR!

(yeah, yeah, clearly that was intended to be 'electricity', let me have my fun! :) )

#8 - there's something oddly appropriate about the name Realyst - it's like Realist, only wrong.

"The building blocks of fat cells" ... The body isn't that simple, and most 'intuitive' guesses are not going to be correct. In the body's case, fats, sugars, and proteins are all disassembled and provide energy that can be stored as fat. It's not just fat that ends up as fat, so it's not clear that more of one than any other will make you obese.

I agree that calories in < energy burned is the most simple and reliable strategy, but you're piling other nonsense on top of it. "Once your body mass that was previously occupied by healthy cells is lessened"

If you must give health advice, stick to ideas that are thermodynamically logical.

Dvorak users are the audiophiles of the computer world, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.

The only studies where dvorak did any good were done by Dvorak himself, and that kind of self-confirming idiocy really shouldn't be lauded. It's a clusterfuck of feel good exclusivity wanking.

Seriously, spend the time learning to type qwerty better and your results will probably be more significant. The only real benefit is that almost any change will alleviate some wrist problems, but it's probably less of a waste of time to buy a different keyboard or office chair.

(Yeah, I'm a little anti-dvorak. I had a friend who would switch computers to it and forget to change them back. Clearly, for this all dvorak users should diaf. :) )