Posts by seattleniceguy

My girlfriend and I want to go watch the Blue Angels today, but I don't want to get into the Seafair festival. I just want to watch from some park somewhere for an hour or two. Where would you recommend watching from? I was thinking along Leschi Beach or something....ideas?

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Anyone going to TWICKENHAM Convention Fri, Sat or Sunday?? (London)

by dorayakii in

jw
friends

this is a whole different level to gillingham, big international rugby stadium, searching of bags.

i heard we're not even allowed in without a lapel-badge, so i'd better write my name on mine this time... don't think i'll be taking notes this time... .

http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/95009/1.ashx.

seattleniceguy

Hey dorayakii,

Sounds insane as ever! Nice documentation work.

the brother made a comment that "the number of possible combinations of neuron cells in the brain is more than the total number of atomic particles in the known universe"... "this proves that we can never overload our brain". i think this fact went over most peoples heads, but the "possible combinations of neuron cells" is merely equal to the number of different brain states that are possible, not a proof of brain capacity... Maybe i'm too analytical...

Grr...don't you hate it when people use science that they clearly don't understand to try to back up their theology?

Incidentally, here's a recipe for something else with more possible states than the total number of atoms in the universe:

Get a shoebox.
Purchase 125 six-sided dice.
Place the dice in the shoebox.

Voila! There are almost 10 to the 100th (1 followed by 100 zeroes) different possible combinations in that box! How wonderfully made it is! Praise be to Allah! :-)

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Randomness is not necessary for evolution

by seattleniceguy in

continuing this theme of evolution and randomness that has been going on this week, i wanted to address a common pitful for the would-be evolutionary student.

often, a person will remark, "i see how the theory works, but i just can't believe it all came about by chance.

" if you're such a person, you'll be happy to know that evolution does not require chance at all.

seattleniceguy

Pole,

I wasn't saying for a fact that there is no randomness in the universe (at least not on this thread ). I was just pointing out that evolution works regardless of whether or not there is randomness. For example, consider the myriad computer simulations of evolution. Evolution proceeds in spite of the fact that there is no randomness in the system.

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does "randomness" exist?

by googlemagoogle in

this is maybe largely parallel to the "free will" debate.

or if there is such thing like "chance".

many computer languages have a math function "random()".

seattleniceguy

How can it be shown that any process is truly random?

How can we show the motion of pollen is water is fully deterministic?

LOL...I guess the real question is, where is the burden of proof? On the random camp or the non-random camp? To me, it would seem that the notion that something can be uncaused that is the extraordinary claim, so the burden of proof should be on the random camp. So again I ask (I'm not doing this to be argumentative, I actually want to know) how can something be proven to be random?

Elsewhere, I know the claim is that nuclear breakdown is random. But how can you actually show that it is?

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Randomness is not necessary for evolution

by seattleniceguy in

continuing this theme of evolution and randomness that has been going on this week, i wanted to address a common pitful for the would-be evolutionary student.

often, a person will remark, "i see how the theory works, but i just can't believe it all came about by chance.

" if you're such a person, you'll be happy to know that evolution does not require chance at all.

seattleniceguy

Continuing this theme of evolution and randomness that has been going on this week, I wanted to address a common pitful for the would-be evolutionary student. Often, a person will remark, "I see how the theory works, but I just can't believe it all came about by chance." If you're such a person, you'll be happy to know that evolution does not require chance at all.

Evolution is a two-step process: 1) Make some changes. 2) Select out the unfit ones. The force that selects out the unfit ones, as we all know, is the natural selection of the cold, hard world, with its limited resources and harsh environmens. But the other force, the one that provides the genetic diversity, is typically less understood. Chance, or randomness, is not a requirement at all. The only requirement is that offspring be different from their parents. This could happen through totally deterministic means ("deterministic" is the opposite of "random"), and evolution would still work just fine.

There are three things required for evolution. They are:

Replication - the ability for something to make a (near) copy of itself
Mutation - essentially, the ability for the copies not to be exact duplicates
Heritability - the ability to receive traits passed down by your parents

The middle bullet point represents genetic change between parent and offspring. It can come from any means: random forces, deterministic forces, God actually tweaking the genes with his forefinger - it doesn't matter. Once these three things are present, evolution occurs automatically. It is impossible at this point for it not to occur.

The main point to all of this is that evolution doesn't care a lick whether or not the genetic change it works on is random. Randomness is not necessary for evolution. In reality, it may be a fundamental part of the universe, and evolution is fine with that. But in the end it doesn't matter. So the next time you catch yourself or someone you love saying, "But how could it come about by chance?" stop and think about the actual mechanisms of evolution.

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does "randomness" exist?

by googlemagoogle in

this is maybe largely parallel to the "free will" debate.

or if there is such thing like "chance".

many computer languages have a math function "random()".

seattleniceguy

How can it be shown that any process is truly random?

To go back to Pole's example in the previous thread about the phone calls coming into a building, clearly there is no randomness at play here at all. The people on the phone are presumably calling for a reason. It only seems random to the occupants of the building because they can't predict the calls. But someone with a comprehensive view of the earth could.

So now we go back to gas molecules bumping around or radioactive decay. Don't we instantly antiquate ourselves as soon as we say these things are unpredictable or causeless? It seems to me that it is a safer bet to assume that they simply have very complex causes that it is not possible for us to predict, at least not in real-time, and that therefore they seem random.

I suspect that these things are deterministic, but the universe is already the fastest possible means of calculating future states. So for all practical purposes, they are random for us. Except that they're not. :-)

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Creationist Answer Please

by skyman in

yesterday there was a post that made me think.

i have a question for you.

i think creationist are ruled by emotion and not by provable facts.

seattleniceguy

Individually, when we live things our genetic composition is altered in the process and can be passed on to future generations. It might not be perceivable, but I think it happens.

Actually, this is a really critical point. Nothing that you do in your life, short of intentional genetic manipulation or damage, changes your genes. So, for example, if you cut your finger off, your children are not born with a missing finger. Likewise, if you change your tastes, your new tastes are not passed onto your children, although the genetic predisposition that originally spurred you to change would presumably be passed to them as well. But as far as we know, none of the choices you make in your life cause changes to your genome. So unfortunately, you cannot "help" evolution to occur in a particular direction.

Interestingly, the concept of evoultion that you are describing is almost exactly the same as Lamarckism. From wikipedia:

Lamarck's own theory of evolution was in fact based on the idea that individuals adapt during their own lifetimes and transmit traits they acquire to their offspring. Offspring then adapt from where the parents left off, enabling evolution to advance. As a mechanism for adaptation, Lamarck proposed that individuals increased specific capabilities by exercising them, while losing others through disuse. While this conception of evolution did not originate wholly with Lamarck, he has come to personify pre- Darwinian ideas about biological evolution, now called Lamarckism.

[Edited to add the following paragraph]
So, in Lamarck's world, giraffes have long necks because they wanted to reach the leaves at the top of the trees. Actual effortrs of individuals, he believed, were passed on to offspring. In Darwin's world, we know that this is not the case. Giraffes have long necks because the ones with progressively longer necks were favored by the environment over their short-necked peers, and so on. To put this all in context, evolution could conceivably happen through many different mechanisms, Lamarckism being one possibility. That's why Darwin's theory is called evolution by natural selection. As it turns out, there is no evidence whatsoever for Lamarckism, and bountiful evidence for Darwinism.

Hope that helps!

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New MSN search

by seattleniceguy in

jw
friends

now, anyone who knows me knows that i am a major fan of google.

google is great, google is changing the world, yadda yadda yadda.. but for once, i really have to give it up for the boys at microsoft.

their new search engine has some very cool features.. go to http://search.msn.com.

seattleniceguy

LOL...no, I've been outta there for a little over six months now. :-)

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Creationist Answer Please

by skyman in

yesterday there was a post that made me think.

i have a question for you.

i think creationist are ruled by emotion and not by provable facts.

seattleniceguy

Hello foreward,

I appreciated your post. I wanted to respond to a couple points, not to nitpick, but hopefully to clarify or add footnotes to what you wrote.

It is stupid for creationists to deny that species can adapt. ; We as humans adapt everyday to changes in our world, so yes evolution does exist and I think that if god exists and created us, he did this ;with this possibility of change, sometimes necessary to survival.

I'm sure you're probably aware of this, but just as a footnote for any nascent evolution students out there, adaptation by an individual to changing circumstances is very, very different from biological adaptation. So technically, the fact that you and I can "adapt" to a new environment has nothing to do with evolution. Biological adaption means that the physical organism actually changes (across generational lines - not within an individual).

My only argument for creation is simply the intelligence which seems to exist behind everything

It is true that many things seem to indicate intelligence, inasfar as they seem like things we might design given the same engineering problem. But nature is very large and very diverse, and there are many examples that strike as as weird, wrong, or even cruel. Surely flies whose young hatch inside the mother, devouring her to death, represent a strange and twisted mind, if indeed one was involved in the design process.

To me, it makes better sense to say that if an intelligent mind was involved, it was in setting up the framework of life, of which evolution is one basic design principle.

No one has a leg to stand on. Proofs are rare. It's just hard for me to believe it all came out of chance.

I just want to remark that chance is only one half of the evolution equation. It is true that the present diversity of life could never have come about by chance. But that is not what evolution is proposing. We use "chance" to describe the genetic changes that happen, which we cannot predict, seemingly at random.They very well may be controlled by very definite rules which, if completely known, would allow us to predict them. But at any rate, that point aside, this so-called chance provides the genetic diversity from generation to generation, but the exact opposite of chance, namely the cold, hard fist of reality, does the selecting.

Think of it as a two-part machine. One part spews out widgets of varying shapes and sizes. The other part tries them out and throws away everything that doesn't work well enough.

Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to add a few points for any beginning evolution students out there who might not know these things yet.

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