1. Do they really think the earth is flat?

Comment #224290 by Alastor on August 4, 2008 at 12:27 pm

I wonder what the flat-earth theory for time zones is, how can it be midnight in the US but noon in China on a flat Earth?

2. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #180275 by Alastor on May 14, 2008 at 1:26 pm

Works fine for me from Safari.

3. Computer game's high score could earn the Nobel Prize in medicine

Comment #179037 by Alastor on May 12, 2008 at 12:29 pm

16. Comment #178758 by julianstirling

Yes, by 'strongest yet' I of course meant strongest at the time the prize was awarded.

4. Computer game's high score could earn the Nobel Prize in medicine

Comment #178409 by Alastor on May 11, 2008 at 11:13 am

Actually I think he got it for his papers on the Brownian motion (strongest yet evidence of atoms), and the photoelectric effect (particle nature of light).

5. Creation vs. Reality

Comment #98558 by Alastor on December 13, 2007 at 9:28 pm

I don't see why this is posted as news, I thought it was pretty dopey. The girl's voice sounds sexy though.

6. Is Infant Male Circumcision An Abuse Of The Rights Of The Child?

Comment #96214 by Alastor on December 10, 2007 at 7:08 am

I remember reading about the research on lower HIV infection rates in Africa among circumcised males. It occurred to me then that the rate could likely be reduced further by introducing penectomy as a standard procedure after birth.

Even if STD transmission rates are lower in uncircumcised males, the decision should be left to he who stands to lose the most from the procedure. Adolescent boys entering sexual maturity can be taught in health class at school about the research on any health advantages the procedure involves, as well as any disadvantages and risks. Allow him to make an informed decision about whether or not this is for him. Anything else is child abuse.

7. Pascal's Wager

Comment #82822 by Alastor on October 27, 2007 at 10:51 pm

I think prof. Dawkins said it best in answering a Liberty U. student's question, "What if your wrong?", as follows:

"What if you're wrong about the Great Jubjub at the bottom of the sea?!"

8. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62666 by Alastor on August 10, 2007 at 6:17 pm

72. Comment #62658 by Yorker

Yes indeed

9. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62647 by Alastor on August 10, 2007 at 2:46 pm

"...religion, at least in its modern manifestations, does not attempt to challenge the scientific method - the shrine at which Professor Dawkins worships."

This fella must have his head in the sand. The Kansas State Board of Education did just this in 2005 when they attempted to redefine science in their state science curriculum to include supernatural explanations of natural phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_evolution_hearings#New_science_standards

10. Ducking the God Question

Comment #60289 by Alastor on August 1, 2007 at 1:35 pm

This is rather sloppy, as other posters have noticed, but I am most outraged by his reference to a flying spaghetti machine. Our lord is the Flying Spaghetti MONSTER, sir. Blessed be the noodly, that is all.

11. Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

Comment #51741 by Alastor on June 24, 2007 at 2:26 pm

Steve, the arguments advanced by you are absurd to the highest degree. Drawing a line between life and non-life in terms of which collections of atoms are subject to evolution and which aren't is not vitalism. This division lays out the purview of the subject of biology. It is false to suggest that simple chemical compounds or vortices in a stream are subject to evolution, or that these compounds or vortices "compete" in any meaningful sense for energy. You must recognize that not all physical systems are subject to evolution. There are prerequisite conditions that must be fulfilled before evolution can even begin: replication, mutation, and selection pressure.

The emergence of the first replicating molecules was not steered by evolution. It is generally observed that life does not come from non-life, and this is almost a tautology if we define life in terms of what evolution can act on. You should not be afraid to admit that the beginnings of simple self-replicating molecules would have been unlikely if not for the vastness of chemical events in the universe.

Regarding your other point, "I don't think a video like this is going to change any minds unless it presents a far more realistic simulation, where functionality just appears by itself, with selection coming from within the model, and not from the programmer/user." In the real world, selection does not originate within an organism, it is imosed by the environmental conditions the organism is exposed to. Analogously, in this computer program the environment is more likely to eliminate watches that don't tell time as well. Although it is true that selection pressures change over time, remember this is a simplified model, but the correspondence to evolution is clear.

12. Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

Comment #51632 by Alastor on June 23, 2007 at 9:59 pm

Steve, evolution can act only where there is reproduction with mutation. So it seems to me that the origin of the first replicating molecule could not have been a Darwinian process. Abiogenesis is the investigation of how a simple replicating molecule could arise from non-replicating ones via chemical interactions. This is a much more difficult field because it involves dealing with the chemistry and physics of complex chemical systems. The elegence of evolution is that, in a way, it transcends its physical context. Once you have replicators with mutation and selection effects, you have evolution, whether your replicators are chemical compounds or matricies in computer memory.

I don't see why you think this artificial life program has a "long-term objective". There is simply a clockiness selection pressure on each generation. It is possible that there is an ideal clock genome which a population in this program would never evolve into. In order to demonstrate foresight, you would have to see the watches traversing the genome space in such a way that they might decrease there fitness in some generations in order to finally get to the best genome. The program simply selects the most fit at each generation, with no foresight into future generations. This is in analogy to natural selection. If you think equating the ability to tell time with survival fitness is artificial, then imagine that the watches eat insects that come out of their hives at very specific times, so the watches that can tell time better get more food and are more likely to survive.

In any case, I think the intent of the program is to point out that Paley's watchmaker analogy as an argument for design is a poor one because watches don't replicate with mutation, like people do. If you can convince someone that living things reproduce, and that they pass on their genes, and that genes can mutate, then these artificial life programs should show them how living things can evolve into more complex living things. As pointed out in the video, artificial life programs do not model abiogenesis - that would require highly computationally expensive molecular dynamics simulations. Such simulations are not possible with today's technology, but it would be interesting to see if someone could do simulations of some sort of simplified entities corresponding to chemical compounds, interacting through a simplified analogy to chemistry/physics. Maybe one could simulate an analogy to abiogenesis by finding a case where the simplified compounds interact to produce a self-replicating composite object. In the end though, that might not tell us much about how abiogenesis happened on Earth, because we may be talking about a rare chemical event that is highly specific to the particular chemical compounds and laws of chemistry/physics. In contrast, natural selection is so simple and robust that it happens in any situation with mutating replicators under selection pressure, so artificial life (like in the video) is a good analogy to how life really evolves.