51. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #134377 by sent2null on February 27, 2008 at 4:47 pm

It was working, they have been inundated by so many requests that the servers went down. This is a good and a bad thing, guess I'll have to wait a few more days yet to see it in action.

Thanks to the person that mentioned tolweb though, that also is quite an informative site.

52. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #133836 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:16 pm

26. Comment #133812 by ClemIsMe on February 26, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet, and I love being alive here and now?

so so true, I've stated this often in the last 10 years, we are living at a most revolutionary time in human history it behooves us to embrace the significance of this moment and enjoy it!

53. The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Comment #133827 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:04 pm

I stumbled across the EOL project some time early last year and was quite excited by what appeared to be an amazingly intuitive way to describe the relationship of all living things to all other living things. The use of animations is key to bringing the experience of exploring life coupled with a very well designed site could make this take off in a way that wikipedia pages on living creatures may not especially if experts take the time to update the pages with the latest information.

Though wikipedia has taken quite a few hits in the press recently due to the "many edit" feature of most pages, the technical articles are extremely refined and errors in them rarely last a few minutes let alone hours or days as they do in less technical subjects or subjects with less viewership. The last time I visited the EOL site about a month ago, it was still under construction so I am glad that the first 30,000 pages are going up in 2 days!!! woo hoo!...looks like I'll have yet another online destination where I can feed myself first rate knowledge.

Gotta love what this internet has wrought! To think that just 20 years ago I would have had to go to a library to get access to information as detailed as what will hopefully be in EOL, today you can get it at a keyboard at home, your laptop or your Iphone ...pretty much any where you can get net access. I vividly remember spending hours behind books in the libraries of my University as an undergrad, reading papers from mathematics journals , the ACM and Siigraph, the IEEE ..today my hard drive is filled with pdf's instead. ;) Will this pervasive access to factual information actually help us expedite the demise of mysticism and religious nonsense and help us avoid world calamity in the form of increased global warming???? It sure looks likely..hmmm.. Sounds like the source of another blog post. ;)

Regards,

54. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #133819 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 10:07 pm

These late days working have me neglecting RD.net, and now we have a favorite books thread that I almost missed! I need a vacation!

My 5 favorites in non fiction and fiction respectively from most to least favorite:

1) Murray Gel Man: The Quark and the Jaguar
2) Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
3) Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel (still reading but placing higher every day!)
4) Richard Feynman: QED
5) Stephen Rogers Peck: Drawing the Head and Hands

The Quark and the Jaguar does an excellent job of explaining complexity , how it is defined and measured and how it evolves. This book is most responsible for spurring a deep desire in me to read deeply into other areas of science. When I read it I was an undergraduate in electrical engineering and the experience led me to embrace the possibility of making novel and innovative realizations in my area by studying the results of other disciplines. This embrace of multi disciplinary studies quickly led to my disappearing faith in the mid 90's as I became convinced that religious belief was a man made band aid against the random fiat of a dispassionate world.

I read A Brief History of Time again as an early college undergraduate, one moment I remember reading vividly is the passage where Hawking explains that the sum total of energy density in the Universe is zero...it sent a chill up my spine (I was on the train going to school) the explanation opened my eyes to so much more possibility than I had up to that time come to.

Guns, Germs and Steel I am partly (first 100 pages) into (I've been reading it for over a year now so busy am I with work!) It is another grand synthesis, the weaving of ideas that I myself have had but put together in such a way that it must be the way it happened. It is turning out to be an excellent book, highly recommended.

Richard Feynman, the bongo playing, practical joke playing, lock picking genius..gave us QED, the book and the eponymous grand explanation of the quantum theory of light. The explanation of path integrals, sum over histories stays with me to this day and is a recurring mental structure in my understanding of other topics that have similar mathematical structure. I still vividly remember his simple explanation of the thin film refraction that we all have seen when looking at oil mixed puddles of water after a rainy day.

Stephen Rogers Peck wrote a technical art instruction text that was my bible for over 5 years. As a self taught illustrator it taught me the hard details of human anatomy and provided the ability for morphing those anatomical insights into the drawing of other animals and fantastic creatures which I still possess (but rarely practice) today.


1) Dante Aligieri: The Inferno
2) Alex Haley: Roots
3) Issac Azimov: The Foundation Series
4) George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
5) Stephen King: The Stand

Fiction comments:

The most marked up book in my library is Dante's Inferno. The triple line rhymes of the prose bring me extreme delight reciting. (to the chagrin of friends who aren't nearly as much a fan of the book as am I)The concept of hell as designed (yes designed) by dark and middle aged Christianity is made manifest in this book, a curiosity of the book is the discretization of the punishments for evil. It seems that God and the Devil are very much bureaucrats, employing a work force (angels/demons) and segregating sins based on percieve severity (matching up perfectly with dark and middle aged cultural norms of course) I always found the bureaucratic segmentation of hell in the book incredibly ironic.

Alex Haley's Roots was a book I didn't intend to read, I had noticed it for some time before I decided to read the first few pages..before I knew it I was rapt, the writing is brilliant and vivid describing the horrors of American slavery as it ravaged the lives of generations. A must read book for anyone who wishes to experience the depths of human despair stoked occasionally by the dull coals of hope.

Issac Azimov's Foundation series has sci-fi in it that is a bit dated by today's standards (personal nuclear devices???) but the grand vision is absolutely brilliant. The concept of psycho history is one that resonates deeply with my current non fiction book Guns, Germs and Steel (3 on the non fiction list so far) I wonder if it is possible to synthesize a mathematical description of such complex phenomena??? Prognostications aside, the books were amazing and inspired a flood of creativity in my drawings at the time.

The last 8 years have had me thinking about George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future dominated by thought police more and more. As an American citizen I watched my country go from the wild exuberance of the late 90's, to the utter shock of 9/11, to the resolute and rightly placed anger in Afghanistan to being duped by the obvious lies of an administration that cared more about crony ism than lives (Iraqi and American lives) The amazing use of words by the right wing media during this propaganda hype was taken directly from the play book of Big Brother. Use words to manipulate, to control, to misdirect...new speak was mastered by the republican administration and used artfully to get even democrats to bow in unison to the illegal horrible crimes of the Bush II administration.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

That wraps up the last 7 years in the US as commanded by the republicans.

Finally, Steven King's The Stand sticks in my memory as a well paced mix of magic and science fiction. I always enjoyed King's ability to mix the two genre's , sometimes brilliantly (The Darktower Series, The Deadzone ) sometimes only so so (Thinner,The Dark Half). The Stand is one of the brilliant ones in my book, a giant book I stuffed into my backback (along with my quantum mechanics, electronics and calculus texts) to take on my trip into and out of the city as an undergrad. I devoured the book in little over a week this way, I look forward to reading it again when I get some time.


In other news, I've recently started a blog. Currently it is heavy on my musing regarding my current software engineering tasks but I'll be adding more general posts as I move into business mode. Feel free to stop by and comment, my erudite and always sagacious friends at RD.net have an exclusive invite.

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/

Regards,

55. Pakistan blocks YouTube over blasphemous video

Comment #133218 by sent2null on February 25, 2008 at 10:27 pm

The funny thing about site "blocking" to IT geeks like myself is that it is rarely ever done properly. If you want to block a site to an entire region you have to do it at *every* inbound facing router port (ie filter the offending incoming IP address responses). Since many countries have dozens to hundreds to thousands of router lines into their countries this is impractical to do. The fastest way to block is to remove the DNS name to IP address mapping in their incoming DNS servers ( a much smaller set of machines that are usually governed in a known location) this is effective in masking access to the site but doesn't truly "block" it. Simply running a ping on the DNS name (or having someone outside your country do it for you) can get you the IP address of the source server, this will allow immediate access for "blocking" that only involves DNS. (unless again every incoming router has that single IP on a block list which never happens) Funny thing is even the IP route blocking trick is not as effective as it was in the past when one IP did indeed map back to a site, these days multiple public IP's can map back to a site hosted on a distributed cluster, so getting any one of the IP addresses allows access.

So, enterprising users in those countries can get to pretty much any "blocked" site if they use the right tricks (IP not DNS)...you lose the user friendly domain name "youtube" and replace it by the universal: 208.65.153.253 which should route into pretty much every large country in multiple locations. ;)

56. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #133215 by sent2null on February 25, 2008 at 10:02 pm

that line about evangelical atheism nearly knocked me out my chair with laughter.

and that's all I have to say about that!

57. Cutting Edge: Baby Bible Bashers

Comment #130558 by sent2null on February 20, 2008 at 9:02 pm

As I listen to these people speak with the horribly contorted drawl that they call the English language, I wonder if there is some correlation between proper enunciation of words and intelligence.

I am pretty much convinced that there is some correlation to be divined which will reveal that those lacking a facility for plastic verbal enunciation or mimicry of regional or individual accents in their mother tongue are mentally deprived in some way.

I don't mean to go all ad hominem on the subjects of the video but it amazes me that the people that tend to most vociferously promulgate the conservative or religious views speak as if they have balls of wax secured in their jowls. This is not just because they are from the South which in many ways is about 50 years behind the rest of the country as far as cultural evolution is concerned. Even the so called smart folks who stand up for "intelligent design" and other fact devoid and faith inspired nonsense tend to speak as if they barely mastered the art of producing word from tongue in an eloquent manner. There must be something behind it...

(Tongue firmly planted in cheek)

;)

58. Potentially Habitable Planets Are Common, Study Says

Comment #129944 by sent2null on February 19, 2008 at 7:48 pm

As I read this article I thought of an old idea I had concerning the evolution of planetary systems. We know that the stuff of which we and our planet are made is composed of mostly heavy elements fused into existence in the cores of the first few generation of stars that went Nova prior to the formation of our system 5 billion years ago.

This tells us that the chemistry of our system is intimately tied to the composition and organization of the previous star clusters and molecular clouds that existed in the region where our system was given birth. It should be possible to calculate probabilities for the percentage composition of various elements based on assumptions of what existed in the previous generation of stars and how those stars gave birth to the "dust" from which latter generation systems like ours formed.

It should be possible to study the many billions of stages of star formation we see (and through spectroscopy are able to make detailed measures of elemental composition) in clusters all over our galaxy to determine a measure of the generated "seed" matter that will result once the stars in the chosen system evolve. We know a great deal about the fusion of heavy elements in star cores, I think enough to come up with estimates of how much stuff is spewed into the surrounding space. By combining these measures with the knowledge of the existing surrounding stars mass and nebular composition we should be able to make a better approximation of the composition of any planets that will form in the vicinity of a selected star in a chosen cluster. Knowing the composition we should also be able to determine the type (rocky or gaseous) of planets most likely to evolve in a given region from the previous elemental composition. It sounds like a mountain of a problem but it seems to me the seeds for a solution lie all around us at various stages of development. It will just take some diligent investigation and correlation to divine out the patterns.

Any astronomers know if any such programs are in progress? It would be really cool if one day we had a planet formation calculator that could be used to evolve systems given an initial state of molecular hydrogen , forming stars and matter from previous generation stars. Maybe some enterprising graduate student reading this will answer the call!

59. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129129 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Re: 127. Comment #129078 by Steve Zara

.. I wonder if there is any research into if or how neural nets could be simulated in a quantum computer?

This is a vibrant area of research in quantum computers now, the problem is that we can get the solutions if only we knew how to precisely control the set of qubits needed to "process" the problem. The difficulties bubble down to:

a) feeding the problem to the computer without disrupting the computation.

b) insulating the computation from outside polluting signals that may modify the solution mid calculation

c) extracting the solution without disrupting the final state

d) doing a, b, c, for collections of qubits formed from 10's, hundreds or millions of atoms.

A neural network is a collection of connected memory nodes so the difficulties of building one with quantum bit storage elements (electron states in atoms) will necessarily involve solving the issues mentioned above. Certain elements of neural networks may be solved "for free" in quantum computations (like back propagation effects) which in electronic neural networks require active feedback loops being designed into the circuitry.

http://www.cic.unb.br/~weigang/qc/aci.html (scroll to section 4 many papers cited and a very nice summary of the results explained)

I love arXiv!

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0401127 (download the full pdf! )

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/8672/27487/01224069.pdf (requires purchase..shucks!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_neural_network

The wiki article I linked before provides a basic primer on quantum computation in general, but for more details see:

http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Problems

which displays a list of open problems.

and:

("recent papers" on right navigation)
http://www.quantiki.org/events_calendar

(basic intro tutorials)
http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Introductory_Tutorials

(extremely technical, headache inducing at least for me)
http://www.imaph.tu-bs.de/qi/entanglement.html

60. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129076 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:41 pm

RE: 117. Comment #128916 by Teratornis on February 18, 2008 at 9:48 am

Building an encyclopedia is different than building an AI, but the same mass collaboration that works well for an encyclopedia might also work well for building an AI. It's just a matter of figuring out how to break up the large task into little pieces that people can massively collaborate on.

It just turns out that a recently launched site employs novel algorithms to try and intelligently build a collection of related knowledge to allow the system to precisely answer complex questions. The name of the site is trueknowledge.com I recently received a beta account to the site and the technology is interesting though the requirement of training means it will be a while before its intelligence is built up to cover large areas of knowledge but it seems promising. I spent a few minutes playing around with it after I got my beta login , it seemed a bit too difficult to train the system but we should hope to see those issues worked out as the program proceeds.

Here is the available demo video:
http://www.trueknowledge.com/technology/video/

Here is the main site:
http://www.trueknowledge.com/

I am not sure if they are still giving out beta accounts.

Regards,

61. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129070 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Re 124 by Steve :

This was an exciting idea (I thought so when I first heard of it). Unfortunately, biological material just won't support quantum mechanical effects at the scale required.

Ah I see, I figured this could be what you were referring to after I typed my last response. I'd like to read the details do you know which of Krauss's writings contain the relevant details?

Though it may be useful toward allowing us to simulate aspects of human creativity if it were mirrored biologically, the fact that we can solve some very tricky problems with cleverly designed quantum computers still opens the way for clever engineering to do the rest of the work required to simulate say intuition in an artificial mind. Well possibly anyway, if our minds are NOT using entanglement to make those problems more tractable, to me it makes the simulation of AI easier as it means the solution is a matter of the right wiring as opposed to some innate effect (entanglement between sets of bit values) of the wired nodes(neurons).

62. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #129055 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 3:11 pm

RE: 121. Comment #129006

Steve wrote:

My impression is that although vast parallelism is possible with quantum computing, it is really only useful for a very specific set of algorithms, and may turn out to have no advantage for AI.

Quite true, the subset of problems quantum computers are useful for is small but some are broad (cryptography relies on difficulties calculating large primes for instance which is widely used for security online today) but they may be precisely the type of problems that reveal the key to instant or fast computation in humans. If we can tie those abilities together in an appropriately designed machine there would be no need to try the messy and difficult (from a logistical point of view) method of meshing our biology with crudely developed nanotechnology.

Also, it looks like the entanglement argument (favoured by people like Roger Penrose) is wrong - it seems to have been clearly dismissed by Lawrence Krauss (sadly!)

What aspect of entanglement are you referring to here as having been shown to be wrong? The problem solving efficiency of linked quibit states due to entanglement arises precisely because the sum over the history of possibilities is explored simultaneously for a given problem. Larger problem spaces are probed simply by adding more quibits to the computation.

I just looked up Krauss (who I'd not been aware of prior to your mention of him here) I've seen him on popular series regarding physics and science series on the Science channel and Discovery channel here in the US but I couldn't find anything technical regarding his views on the lack of scalability (assuming this is the con argument as it is a real one currently) for quantum computations (which use entanglement to do their magic). Though I am only going on an assumption on what you meant by "the entanglement argument", so clarification would be welcome.

Regards,

63. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #128999 by sent2null on February 18, 2008 at 1:14 pm

Kurzweil, definitely one of the people I looked up to as an undergraduate and a definite mind in the field of AI but I think his ignorance of other areas of science is showing through this prediction. To understand this we have to ask the question, why would we want to be integrated with machines at a time where our mastery of our own biology will be far more advanced than our mastery of nanotechnology?

We are only in the infancy of developing efficient manufacturing methods for nano machines, moreover the inherent mechanical nature of such devices makes them subject to effects (undesired quantum tunneling effects) that we are fighting against quite strongly in our attempt to build smaller and denser logic components on microprocessors.

At the same time, other researchers are making slow but steady advances in the area of quantum computation which could on its own obsolete any desire to merge biology with technology for the simple reason that if we get the machines to "think" like us, then we don't have to do the thinking. Quantum computation employing the beauty of entanglement is so powerful it could render the entire field of modern cryptography obsolete while at the same time opening up our computers to computations that currently would take thousands of years for the most powerful supercomputers of the world to solve. Some researchers theorize that the human brain possibly employs entanglement in some aspects of our intuition and computational speed in the minds of synesthetes and other savants. The developing technology could allow us to simulate this entirely artificially and then expand the number of computational nodes far beyond the number of discrete neurons enmeshed in even the biggest of human brains.

My prediction is that by 2029 we will have had practical quantum computers about 5-10 years solving instantaneously problems that a mere 5 years earlier were deemed impractical for all the traditional computers on the world combined.

At the same time, the advances that we are rapidly making in figuring out how to manipulate and synthesize biology will allow us to enhance the efficiency of our brains without requiring the invasive and tricky tactic of attempting to merge millions or billions of these foreign agents with your neurons to hopefully enhance their performance. No, I posit this method will be seen as far too difficult a path to pursue in a world where intimate knowledge of genetic methods for expressing neuron growth say in desired regions of the brain will very likely be available.

Of course I am just brain spouting here based on my own limited knowledge base, but from the rate at which we are making gains in understanding and manipulating biology independent of our advancing skills in quantum computation I see the idea of a mixed human /nanotech symbiote as being an idea that looks good now but will be deemed irrelevant later once these two technologies have reached maturity.

Some interesting wiki articles for the interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology

Regards,

64. Defying Gravity in Science Class

Comment #128757 by sent2null on February 17, 2008 at 10:30 pm

(After having read dkv's last post)

Steve,

Why do I get the sudden memory of the sense of astonishment I had reading the adventures of Alice after she went down the rabbit hole?

65. Defying Gravity in Science Class

Comment #128733 by sent2null on February 17, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Some necessary pedant ism at the risk that you were entirely serious concerning the statements made in your post.

In quantum mechanics the gravity doesnt work the way it works on large scale..

Really? how is it different?

Black holes emit energy.In other words the ball of energy defies gravity due to the uncertainity principle.

This smacks of doubletalk, black holes emit radiation precisely because they have strong gravitational effects near their event horizons.

Monster tides in the oceans also tend to defy gravity.. They rise 20-25 meters high.

That would depend on what you mean by defy. Gravity can be described as a spacial and temporal vector towards which massive objects move in order to conserve energy. In the context of the earth moon system, the net effect of "gravity" as defined above varies with space and time this is why the tides "rise". They are behaving precisely in accordance with predictions of gravity for the combined Earth Moon system, your description of "defy" implies you are only including the effects from the perspective of the Earth without account to the distortion caused by the presence of the moon, this is a critical error.

And all this happens in a real world..
The exact nature of Garvity is not yet known...

What exactly do you mean by "exact"? That said, you happened to pick on one of the most accurately verified areas of human investigation ever. The workings of gravity have been tested to astounding levels of accuracy. Are you referring to inaccuracy in the 14 significant bit which may very well be a result of instrumentation rather than theory?

The apple from tree doesn't "always" fall on the Earth. If a supernova explodes in near vicinity then the apple might get effected in strange ways.

Well let's play this game, the nearest star that could possibly go "super nova" would have to possess stellar mass in accordance with Chandrasakhar's limit, which would necessitate a mass of about 8-9 sol...the nearest such star is several hundred light years away. If it went nova today it would take several hundred years for us to even know about it (through light) but so far as gravitational effects any gravitational wave disturbances (an effect of gravitation that is still unverified) would be exceedingly small indeed...far too small to cause macroscopically observable changes to gravity locally on Earth.

The formation of Galaxy defies any Gravitational equation...

More gobbledygook, models of gravitational formation operate so long as we make the right accounting for missing factors (unseen mass) in the form of dark matter. You add the mass into the equations and poof you get our galaxies ...but you then have to find the dark matter ...that is what the LHC hopefully will do when it comes online late this year;)

Gotta love the fact, that there are a lot of fantastic, weird and bizarre events in this universe but through it all... there is no magic, no where.

There is an inherent anomaly in Randomness.

huh???!?!?!?!

66. Exploding black holes could expose hidden dimensions

Comment #128254 by sent2null on February 16, 2008 at 4:01 pm

For those that might find this interesting. A friend sent this to me a few days after my last post to this thread in which I stated it would be virtually impossible for us to empirically test hypothesis made from string theory.

Well looks like that may be a partially incorrect statement now:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/ns-llc021308.php

Though the use of the term "event horizon" is made in reference to this experiment it is important to note that certain critical effects that occur at real event horizons couldn't possibly be replicated in this experiment (as it is described here). Chief among them being the need for highly non linear and incredibly strong gravitational tidal forces that contribute to the temperature gradient between virtual particles created near the EH that are the source of Hawking radiation. This experiment may simulate well what light does but that is a long way from probing the possibly more novel and significant effects of gravity (without which Hawking radiation simply would not exist) on virtual particle pairs spontaneously created near the EH boundary.

That article subject line was definitely chosen for sensational effect. Still, it will be interesting to see what conclusions/predictions can be drawn from this experiment if any.

67. Hitchens and Boteach Debate on God

Comment #125487 by sent2null on February 11, 2008 at 12:41 pm

A perfect exposition by Hitchen's on what i call the Pre revelation problem when presented as Hitchens does here it is guaranteed to inspire big questions in the mind of any theist willing to accept the idea. Unfortunately some are so inculcated to their method of belief that even considering an alternative view is considered heretical by the belief system...a most unfortunate rigging of the game by the religious institutions indeed. "If any one says anything to oppose this , don't listen to them they are being guided by the devil!!" It is this type of thing that worries me most about trying to bring enlightenment to the sea of believers of one or many imaginary cosmic puppet masters (ie. Gods).

68. Sprinting down the evolutionary highway

Comment #123645 by sent2null on February 7, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Comment #122195 by babrock on February 4, 2008 at 10:37 pm

So where is the presure coming from for us to evolve from any particular unfitnes traits?

A common misunderstanding is being displayed in many of the posts here. Evolution occurs as a consequence of a combination of two factors, inborn mutation and external selection..note the word combination it is not saying that in all cases or at all times both must be present. We do know that mutation is always present but selection can vary significantly. Now it is hard for us to imagine non selection in a general sense but in particular characteristics we can (eg. controlling environment by building homes, ensuring consistent access to food by performing agriculture...etc.) that said, our "selection" methods vary and it is this variation that modifies the effects of the mutation on succeeding generations.

Ultimately what our biology does is take cues from the "environment" in which we find ourselves where I am using "environment" to cover more than just a particular biome in which we might live but to include our access to the resources such as food and water. Also by "cues" I don't mean that mutations are contingent on environment, indeed they just happen but some types can be precipitated by changes in the environment. As we have spread across the globe and found ourselves in particular environmental niches our biology and the inborn mutations we possess was selected on a local level for each of these areas, as we in these areas continued to expand in population , mutations that were in common and arose in the population in response to local selection processes spread. This continued until the time that we started to seriously migrate. Note the confluence of the estimates for the evolutionary changes with the precise period that large human civilizations began to flourish, this is not a simple coincidence.

As human cultures which had , up to that time evolved in their little bubbles started to cross pollinate as it were, the ability for hybridization of genetic traits between the populations went up significantly and that is why evolution seemed to speed up. Biologically the clocks were all running at the same rate but each clock had different sets of genetic data to mix as cultures encountered one another. An unrelated analogy that I think is instructive is that of a palette of paints. The dabs of paint have homogeneous color until they are mixed, the more distinct dabs used to mix a color the greater variation in hue that is possible in the output. Locally adapted populations of humans over the last 100,000 years have provided the "dabs" of paint over which the last 5 - 7,000 have been "mixed" through the process of cultural migration and technological advance.

That said, today the pressure to avoid "unfitness" traits is mostly inborn. Individuals that are birthed with severely unfit conditions are a drain both on themselves (in the case of debilitating disease conditions) and on their local family groups (simply from a perspective of resource utilization!!). In the past, humanity was not at all kind when it came to the fate of these individuals and they were often expunged from the genetic line through neglect or out right cultural practices. Today, the latter reason is much less of an issue (though it is in many third world countries still) but the former (of inborn drain) still is. Such individuals still face amazing levels of ostracism from human societies, they are less likely to interact socially and less likely to take a mate and reproduce. Though they are no longer subject to being the source of myths or derision they still have a reduced ability to propagate their "unfit" genes and are still subject to the drain (think various congenital diseases that are correlated with reduced life span) on resources that their "unfitness" leaves them with, this also reduced the chances that they will live long enough to reproduce.

Regards,

69. Exploding black holes could expose hidden dimensions

Comment #122750 by sent2null on February 6, 2008 at 12:13 am

My feeling is that this may have been justifiable before the appearance of the "String Landscape". The incorporation of something that seems to be a graviton (the force transmitter of gravity) was encouraging, until the inability to predict the physical constants of our universe. That was the promise of String Theory - that a clear, mathematical framework, with nothing added, would inevitably lead to our reality.

It has failed.

It is way to early to declare string theory a failure. I am not a physicists (engineer) but I have studied a small amount of mathematical physics (GR, tensor calculus) and there are several promising avenues from which testable hypothesis from the theory may soon be made. I agree that the long time since its inception lack of any concrete tests is troubling but that is a testament to just how difficult the work in this area is, not a signal that it is a dead end. The work of Ed Witten for example in explaining (partially) the relationships between the various "types" of String theories has led to a flood of research in the last 10 years. I think it shouldn't be surprising that as we get closer to "the answer" that it takes us a bit longer to figure it all out and that will include forming testable hypothesis. Given that the string theory solutions evolve entire universes it makes sense that tests of its validity will be necessarily found at the edges (either at its beginning or at its end) of our universe and what lies beyond. Even if falsifiable tests were to be conjectured we probably would never be able to practically test them since we are far from the edges of our universe or objects (like the singularities in black holes) that may allow us to test them.

70. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #122509 by sent2null on February 5, 2008 at 11:15 am

I am seriously peeved at this new comment system. It is even more erratic than before. I get through writing long posts only to have them disappear into the void upon hitting submit. Am I the only one who is having cookie time outs everytime he writes a long post? I have to get back in the habit of doing a "ctrl C" before hitting that button!

Anyway I just wanted to respond to MPhil.

Yes, I think we did get into a semantic issue though it stemmed from my imprecise use of the term mathematics. I agree that the conceptualization of what we percieve in the world that can be modeled by mathematics and logic is a subset of what the latter contains. Assuming I didn't just miss your point again. ;)

71. Are Darwin's Theories Fact or Faith Issues?

Comment #122426 by sent2null on February 5, 2008 at 8:51 am

266. Comment #122403 by Geoff on February 5, 2008 at 8:31 am

"One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis."

Does that mean that, originally, Einstein proposed a "general (and a special) hypothesis of relativity"? I've never really looked at the development of the theory of relativity in that sense, I always, perhaps naively, thought of the whole thing as Einstein's from the start.

And you would be quite correct in that conclusion Geoff. A theory makes a set of testable hypothesis from some empirical basis. Einstein's theory of Relativity both special and general provided several hypothesis (time dilation/space dilation/frame draggin/black holes..etc.) that could be and have been verified/ tested to astonishing accuracy. (only QM has been verified to a higher degree of certainty)

72. Are Darwin's Theories Fact or Faith Issues?

Comment #122190 by sent2null on February 4, 2008 at 10:18 pm

PZ took the flame thrower to everyone including the radio show, loved it.

"Biology IS..."

I said something similar about mathematics (oops Logic) in my last post.

This is great stuff.

73. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #122131 by sent2null on February 4, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Comment #117446 by MPhil on January

I'm not sure you are entirely aware of the ontological implications of what you're saying.

The veracity of this statement aside, I hope you didn't intend to raise my hackles by starting with this sentence but you must see that starting (prefacing your exposition with a conclusion) with it might be taken as confrontational to some! yes?

That is, you just implicitly denied materialism... of course you may be aware of that and actually hold the position that metaphysical universals exist as entities - but as for me, that position seems untenable.

I don't deny materialism, as an engineer certain aspects of reality are simply too self evident for me to waste my time thinking over the minutia of the implications behind them...this may seem anathema to a philosopher whose area of joyful mental play is to me akin to a desert. ;)

Let me address each point on its own: I think it entirely possible that other civilizations (should there have been such things) have come up with something functionally equivalent to our mathematics. In fact, if those hypothetical civilizations deserve that name, I'd pretty much say they would have had to. But this does not mean that mathematics is not a conceptual construct!

My point only is that mathematics or to use your correction , logic contains what is, our conceptions are simple mappings of what relations there are to what we have found useful to make relations for or find structures for and represent formerly as mathematical structures. I will accept that based on the definitions of Logic and mathematics that I was actually inadvertently making a category mistake. I should have said

Logic is

That is why I said that mathematics (and more so: logic (including set theory), as mathematics is an extension thereof) is such an extremely powerful tool, more powerful probably than we can imagine.

Well if you include logic as a tool you again raise my ire, as I don't think there is anything about the results derived from logic that makes it uniquely ours. The relationships would exist if we could conceive them or not, so for that reason I don't see them as tools (in the hammer and saw sense). I see them as inherent truths that we discover and give labels too.

There is simply nothing in the human mind more powerful than logic (I don't mean motivationally, just in case anyone was tempted to mention emotions), and its most powerful expansion, mathematics.

Agreed 100%

I also think (correct me if I'm wrong) that you might be thinking that without mathematics itself being something "more" than conceptual, we couldn't account for the success we had in applying it.

Why would you think that? No, I recognize mathematics usefulness as independent from our ability to conceptualize the logical foundations of which a small subset (mathematics) we are able to conceptualize and use. At least so far as the broader base of logical "truths" from which mathematics is derived is concerned.

I think it is pretty much natural that a species evolving in an environment (universe) where the entities behave in a certain way will find a way to model that way things behave conceptually, given enough time. Also, an account of "truth" of a statement can be given within such a naturalistic account (note: what is meant is the truth of a proposition, not 'knowing that a proposition is true'): truth can be described as a systematic and largely uniformity between the structure of the neuronal activation-pattern and the (structure of the) state-of-affairs described by the proposition. It is also natural to assume that a species evolving in a world where things behave according to certain patterns would have a means representation of the structure of these patterns, whether conscious or not.

Agreed.

I really do think you confuse the way things behave and the systematicity of relations among things with our way to model these ways-of-behaving, these relations and their systematicity.

Well, yes I was confusing the use of the words logic and mathematics as previously indicated. I am an engineer and not a philosopher after all.;)

Concerning your apology for the length of the response, Never apologize when the task of elucidation demands a rigorous if necessarily verbose detail. Your patience allowed the response to be quickly digested and not taken as an attack of my original post...eh save for the opening mildly confrontational salvo that is. *wink*

Regards,

74. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #117378 by sent2null on January 28, 2008 at 5:40 pm

Jeepjay,

With that statement regarding Hilbert Spaces you really spoke beyond your ken. There is much practical hard science that has developed from exploring them.

Would you have said the same thing in the early 18th century when the idea of imaginary numbers was being fleshed out? Imaginary numbers are pivotal to the foundations of electrical and electronic analysis upon which the modern technological world is built! And that is just an easy example.

I however don't see Mathematics as something we constructed, though many patterns and structures have been created utilizing the basic truths of mathematical theory it is a bit arrogant of us to think that we are the first to have discovered these patterns. I give good odds, that a billion years ago civilizations across 10,000 galaxies long dead came across the same patterns we've stumbled into and "invented" the same structures, to me math is the truth of what can be (and not just in the physical sense)...it is the analysis of all possibility. This is far far more grand than what I consider a dismissal by calling it "a tool", it is not a tool it is everything... and our current success with exploring it are akin to a baby's first words vocalized before a long life of more complex speech to come.

Mathematics is, we just happen to have discovered its usefulness and given names to the tiny fraction of relationships that it contains that we have been unblinded enough to see(thanks to their being used by systems in the physical world that we find important to understand). I think the idea that math is some how tied to our mode of conception is pure rubbish, it could be true that our mental processes constrain the type of structures we have success in finding in Mathematics but that says nothing of all that it contains..which in my view are every structure conceivable by us or not.

75. Gigantic fossil rodent discovered

Comment #113377 by sent2null on January 19, 2008 at 1:13 pm

Re comment 32

TMNT?

Don't see the relevance though...

Regarding the article, this discovery is more elegant confirmation that evolution has very predictable patterns on the flora and fauna in an environment. In the case of South America prior to the connection of the Isthmus the development of large mammals went hand in hand with what we know about the fauna that existed there at the time. South America is not known for any large land based non avian carnivores. (it does have some reptiles but they are mostly restricted to wet habitats) The Carnivorous mammals dominated the Northern continent with large populations of Smilodon, Dire Wolves and Bear ancestors and related species enacting a very "Savanah" like existence in the North American content while hunting proto horses, proto Bison and Mastodon's as well as other large herding herbivorous creatures. The connection of the land bridge opened the flood gates on the large rodents of the Southern continent, which got so large precisely because a) the flora accommodated it by being plentiful and b) the lack of predation on "big and slow" individuals. The connection allowed the carnivorous mammals of the north that had evolved with herding herbivores free reign into the territory of the Southern herbivores and that surely expedited the end of many species, that despite their size were no match for the Smilodon and wolves that evolved to take large herbivores down in the north and the pressures they placed on the existing species through their predation. No doubt the emergence of the ice age cycles around this time also led to great turmoil for species world wide leading to the extinction or adaptation of many of them.


I would love to see a video made that in say an hour span, provides an illustrated look at ancient history as we know it going back oh 65 million years. I've seen clips like it on countless series, "Blue Planet", "The Planets", "Walking with Dinosaurs"..but I'd like to see a full length animation, without the interruptions for narration..simply letting the video do all the talking. The video would chronicle the rise of mammals around the demise of the dinosaurs and the camera would flow freely as a ticker clocks time from the past to the present , slowing and speeding where necessary to illustrate key events. The camera would freely fly across oceans as it observes evolutionary responses to changes in the Earth's climate and geography in accelerated time. Ice ages, plate tectonics, creation and removal of evolutionary niches..such a show in one artistic movement could do what no amount of words on the subject ever could. I imagine it playing with no narration only a sound track, it's a thought anyway...maybe someone will come along and do something like it.

76. Huckabee Wants A 'Faith-based' Constitution

Comment #113111 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 3:07 pm

9. Comment #111898 by alfonso on January 16, 2008 at 1:11 am

No no, you don't understand, that god is the *REAL* one.

Is the whole of US so deluded or are there still places that can be considered havens against these tides of irrationality?

Here in NYC we tend to be a bit more progressive (ie: educated) than most. Huckabee followers are essentially non existent here. I am trying my best to fight the good fight friends, we're not all raving lunatics!

77. Huckabee Wants A 'Faith-based' Constitution

Comment #113108 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 2:59 pm

Yes , yes I saw a piece on his statement last night on CNN and couldn't believe my ears. I am glad though, he just single handedly destroyed any chance of him getting the nomination of his party let alone win the general election.

Good for you Huckadummy!

78. Ben Stein Bribing Schools to See His Anti-Evolution Movie 'Expelled'

Comment #113018 by sent2null on January 18, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Ben Stein is a perfect example of many of the types I (and many of you) met in university. You know the sort, they were very good at getting excellent grades in their courses, but pin them down to relate one piece of data learned in one course to another learned years earlier and mostly you got a dumb stare in response. He is a fact collector, a person with a good memory for bits of information but little machinery to put all that data together and analyze it for deeper truths. This is the difference between "knowing stuff" and having true intelligence. It is a shame that to the laymen, people that display the former with recounting facts often equate that to intelligence.

This theory however, is quite dashed to the rocks when we look at the details of how Stein puts together all those facts that he's acquired through the years. To assert that science (or by proxy evolutionary theory) is not self challenging is quite shocking and to me a personally egregious claim. Yet he doesn't stop there, he goes on to disregard one of the most tested pillars of modern science (behind what GR and QM?) as "new age" nonsense. Okay Stein, what ever you say, we all know you wouldn't have the platform you do today had it not been for a bit part in an mid 80's movie for the hormonally driven teens of the time. Oh well... I would be interested to see Stein debate Sam Harris, that would be great fun. Stein would come out (very Dinesh D'Souza-ish) with a machine gun attack of false "facts" , depending on the debate format...Harris would be able to interject and chop Stein's logic to shreds or he may be inundated by the quickly rising tide of bull$hit and appear in distress.

Hypothetical stage pugilisim aside, Stein will continue to do his reputation for knowledgeable quips great damage by publicizing these weird causes...I say let him rail.

No idiot is more quickly identified, then when he is given a podium to spout his ridiculous views.

Ra on Ben..Rail on...

79. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110733 by sent2null on January 12, 2008 at 8:20 am

This sounds dangerously close to the slippery slope of moral objectivity.

I thought the same at the point but he righted the view later in the passage and article. He is definitely a moral relativist from what I read in that article, he just seems concerned that a full embrace of the meaning of moral relativism may lead to social issues. Issues , not in the sense that a theist believes it would lead to amoral behaviors (as they constantly assert) but in a different sense of "our morals versus their morals" knowing the human penchant for out group versus in group fights, it is not beyond reason that some idiots will come along to do just that even in a world where objective morality has been made obsolete.

Regards,

80. The Moral Instinct

Comment #110731 by sent2null on January 12, 2008 at 8:12 am

Excellent article on the nuances behind moral choices and views.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago.

I had to chuckle at that sentence, to bad more theists aren't aware of its truth.

81. New attempt to end blasphemy law

Comment #110069 by sent2null on January 10, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Great news, hope the law is rescinded as it deserves. I am sure that there are similar antiques written in to the law books of several American states that probably also need to be purged.

82. Richard Dawkins on The Late Edition with Marcus Brigstocke

Comment #110046 by sent2null on January 10, 2008 at 11:26 am

That doll is soon to be a collectors item, hilarious. If it goes into production I shall have to get one!

83. It was a bad year for God.

Comment #109602 by sent2null on January 9, 2008 at 8:58 am

My question is, who do atheists shake their fists against?

I think that this question is worthy of a serious response, you'll have to excuse some of the other responders who exhibited a bit more sarcasm and bile in response to your query. I think that most atheists are not shaking their fists at any God in particular, but rather the concept of a sentient tinkering deity of any form. Since we have no evidence to support the existence of such a deity, the constant railing that appears to be done by some individuals in this forum shouldn't be taken as indication that they have some beef with this "God" (mind the generalization)that they claim not to believe in.

In my particular case I've found it quite easy to discuss deep questions about our existence without needing to reference or invoke a sentient tinkering creator. Mind you in the mind of many rationalists the idea that something sentient set all this going is not nearly as improbable or unacceptable as the idea that said sentient entity is actually observing the workings of the world and micro managing our fates. This latter position is one that most theists hold when they reference their flavor of "God", there are important exclusions (Buddhism stands out) which also draw less wrath from atheists than other forms of belief. Still all evidence indicates that all this could have arisen precisely from known mathematical relationships and principles without any sentient agent behind the event.(tinkering or no)

To suppose even an accidental creator pushes us up a few rungs on the ladder of improbability in comparison to what the evidence tells us could be so, and so we disregard it as well, until such time evidence is found to the contrary. Rationalist(note I didn't say atheist as some atheists don't truly know what they are railing against I've found) disbelief is based on the state of current evidence alone, and that state excludes belief in sentient deities.

We just don't think that time will ever come. ;)

Regards,

84. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #109119 by sent2null on January 8, 2008 at 11:40 am

Re: Comment #108597 by al-rawandi on January 7, 2008 at 10:19 am

Outstanding response, I would have responded but you basically said it all. I think Summer jumped the gun a bit.

good show!

85. Did mozzies, not a meteor, do for the dinosaurs?

Comment #108630 by sent2null on January 7, 2008 at 11:16 am

It should be obvious that lesser secondary and tertiary conditions attended the primary meteor impact and expedited the Dinosaurs demise. The use of the word "instant" in popular descriptions of theory is a most egregious practice that always has me wince in near pain. "instant" on a geological time frame can mean a 150,000 year long span...about as long as we've been walking around in our present form. I fear when these words are misused in relaying various theories on the progression of the dinosaurs demise it gives people (particularly theists) the wrong ideas. Anyway as Steve mentioned the majority of the large Dinosaurs bought it from the immediate and secondary effects of the impact in Mexico. The rest succumbed to the longer term effects that in a ravaged ecosystem will lead to the demise of any already crippled species, climate change, disease..etc. This idea is pretty obvious but I gather would be hard to prove without having many more fossils during the geologically small transition time between the Cretaceous and Tertiary boundaries.

86. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #108271 by sent2null on January 6, 2008 at 11:16 am

Re 307. Comment #108254 by ridelo on January 6, 2008 at 10:16 am

How come I cannot see this video any further than until about 1/3 of the total length?

I had the same issue but it went away after I reloaded the page in a new tab. That might work for you as well...

87. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #108267 by sent2null on January 6, 2008 at 11:13 am

172. Comment #107829 by Enlightenme.. on January 5, 2008 at 12:53 pm

comment To my mind this subject not even being raised in front of a Jewish audience by Sam was very puzzling.

I literally waited in anticipation at those moments, thinking Sam would throw the spear home but he didn't. I found it puzzling as well. The religiously underpinned Zionist motives that inspired the current conflict in the middle east is such an open wound to salt. I guess Sam was mentally engaged with other things at the time, though it seemed a ready parry to Wolpe's thrust.

Regards

88. New clues to why we see red

Comment #108188 by sent2null on January 6, 2008 at 8:01 am

well the detection would be much like any form of light, in fact it doesnt need to be a certain frequency because the bird isnt trying to listen to the oldies...just find the source. it would have the advantage with each step of making the bird more capable of finding a telephone wire or radio tower to perch on..

Light is composed of frequencies of em energy and it is only through specific receptors in our eyes that are sensitive to those frequencies that we can "detect" or see it. The same goes for other forms of em energy, you stated "radio waves" in your post and as I mentioned selection is necessary to pick out specific radio frequencies. As I mentioned birds already have a rudimentary sense of magnetic fields (which can be detected without requiring frequency selection using inductors) I agree that this known ability (to detect magnetic fields) coupled with enhanced survivability due to selection of perches away from predators as you suggest may select for birds with a more refined sense of magnetic field detection but that is a long way from radio wave detection which in engineering terms has a specific connotation (frequency selection) and that is what I was addressing in the original post.

Regards,

89. New clues to why we see red

Comment #107756 by sent2null on January 5, 2008 at 8:10 am

the_ultimate_samurai wrote:

i predict some time in the future, a creature (probably a bird) will develop a sensory organ to detect radio waves. first off, they are relatively unique to this time, radio has existed on earth but was rather scarce, second, radio wave indicate the existence of radio towers and perhaps of power lines, thus for migratory birds the ability to fly towards sources of radio makes an evolutionary advantage (since power lines and towers have more area to perch than trees. and less predators)
thus it seems likely that a bird may develop a sense to detect radio (not to mention perhaps the ability for something akin to natural radar though i believe that requires the source to be the person percieving it...so maybe not radar..)
but then again, im still waiting for animals to evolve the knowlege to avoid cars...that may be just as likely eh?

This question hints at a slight misunderstanding of how evolution works. Things do not evolve because they are needed, they evolve when they are selected by the environment provided the selected individuals of an observed species have the required nascent level of genetic variability in the range of the chosen selection criteria and enough time goes by. In the case of radio wave detection, we must ask to what physiological systems must a mutation or mutations be made to provide for the new sensation? The more mutations and the more radical the mutation that is needed the less likely it is to be selected. There is evidence that some birds can detect magnetic fields and using this sense are able to navigate massive distances on their migrations. It is possible that the use of this capability through individual variation across generations may indirectly serve the purpose you seek but in order to "detect" radio waves the biological organism must through specific selected mutations create what we electrical engineers call filter circuits. Essentially a biological system for selecting a frequency or set of frequencies from the em spectrum for processing from the countless frequencies flying around in near Earth space. A filter consists of two components a capacitor and an inductor and allow the selection through the set up of a resonance about the selected frequency. Tuning can be accomplished by changing the capacitance of the capacitor of the inductance of the inductor. The birds that are said to detect magnetic fields are almost certainly doing so through use of a biological analog to the inductor but what could serve as a capacitor (charge storage) I think it is unlikely to the point of impossibility that such a mutation will arise and that this mutation will benefit the realization of a filter circuit for precisely the frequencies in the radio range of the em spectrum. The combination of biological mutations needed to derive such a mechanism are extremely unlikely to evolve given the slow and chance process of mutation and selection behind it. Remember there is no direction to evolution and to detect radio waves, there would be a lot more direction involved beyond just being able to detect/harness and store magnetic and electric fields, the circuit would have to be designed to select only radio waves and that would be even more improbable from a natural selection perspective.

All that said, it is far more likely that we with our vastly increasing knowledge of genetic manipulation will custom design this capability in organisms long before it ever arises through natural selection.

90. Sam Harris debate with Rabbi David Wolpe

Comment #107629 by sent2null on January 4, 2008 at 9:24 pm

Re: 57. Comment #107574 by EvoStevo on January 4, 2008 at 7:04 pm

Pointing out the Scandinavian countries is a good rebuttal to the Stalin/Hitler/Mao canard.

There is some more meat to rebut the argument that Stalin/Mao/Hitler pursued the murderous courses they took because of their atheism (excluding Hitler of course who was NOT an atheist but that doesn't stop religious apologists from lumping him in) Aside from the fact that they (Stalin/Mao) didn't kill on behalf of any precepts of atheism but rather in order to eliminate possible competition so far as cults of worship were concerned but namely it is overlooking how the industrial revolution contributed to the dramatic efficiency in Man's ability to kill that attended the latter half of the 19th century. It should also be said though that Mao stands out in that the millions killed under his regime were mostly by the blunders of the failed economic policies of collectivization attempted in the late 50's and mid 60's and not by any active program of executions (which did occur but not nearly to the degree that they were done by Stalin).

That said, the development of efficient and powerful repeating rifles with encased projectiles (bullets) and machine guns to ensure that many bullets can be fired in a given time frame and that a bullet caught was usually a bullet that killed, the development of the internal combustion engine that dramatically reduced the time necessary to traverse long distances on land and in the sky, the invention of trinitrotoluene (dynamite), the development of radio communications that enabled rapid and large scale exercise of field logistics all contributed to the order of magnitude increase in death that resulted during the conflicts of the first half of the 20th century and beyond. It is true still that this "century of warfar" was incredibly violent but that violence would have been much less likely as well as less bloody had the developments of industry in the previous century not provided the ready and efficient technologies for exercising the goals of deluded individuals to such a relentlessly efficient degree.

I am willing to bet that if one were to look at the reduction in the costs of killing that occurred during the last 25 years of the 19th century due to technological advance, it would have also been exceedingly expensive to wage the war on the level of conflicts such as were fought in WWI and II had the industrial revolution not taken place. Think for example of the cost of controlling a massive area like say China if one does not have airplanes or automobiles to facilitate troop movements.

This is a huge factor that religious apologists always miss either by ignorance or inveigling of the consequences of military history and its advances in the late 19th century that made mass killing over large geographical expanses extremely cheap and efficient.

91. Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

Comment #107204 by sent2null on January 4, 2008 at 9:12 am

There would probably also have seen a significant mass extinction when bacteria started pumping out oxygen.

We'll probably never know the level of such an extinction event(s) since sufficient proterazoic fossils don't exist. The emergence of a rich oxygen atmosphere was necessarily toxic to whatever anaerobic forms that existed prior to the transition. Today their numbers are far smaller than aerobic life. If we look at the organelles in a cell today (Eukareotic or Prokaryotic) we see aerobic systems (mitochondria stand out) form a minority of the systems employed internally, which would reflect their late stage addition into the progenitor of modern animal cells, this shouldn't be surprising since most of the time life was on Earth it existed in Proterozoic and anaerobic forms!

These state transitions created by the dance between life and the early chemistry of Earth remind me of the state transitions that attended the formation of the Universe itself as the energy from the big bang spread out in the expanding space time. As it cooled energy became bound in the states of matter that formed the constituents of all matter in the universe today or it ran free in massless particles (photons for example). Similarly, the formation of elements in the heart of the first stars 8 or so billion years ago gave rise to the "complex"(more than 2 electrons/protons) elements that make up all life. Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen all could not be spontaneously created in the current temperature and pressure regime, not in a billion trillion years...but squeeze some hydrogen together into a star with the force of gravity and after a mere 5 billion years of the birth of the universe boom the first complex elements are formed. Through it all, the likelihood of events occurring because of adherence to conservation of energy principles in the formative chemical, temperature and pressure regimes stands alone as the only rational cause. If we no longer need to suppose a creator to guide the symmetry breaking of the early universe, or to account for the formation of massive elements beyond hydrogen and helium, why should the rise of complex life be any different? Life is the inevitable result of energy seeking conservation over time, just as argon and iron are, just as protons and photons are!

In the early Universe the formative environment for particles and forces was the intense energy and temperature in the early Universe coupled with the rapid expansion of spacetime.

In the growing Universe the formative environment for heavy complex elements beyond hydrogen and helium was the intense energy, temperature and pressure regimes inside the first stars as they burned the nascent hydrogen and trace helium in their cores and exploded into nova to create the heavier elements.

In the early Earth the formative environment for complex life was the electron affinities of simple compounds and molecules thrown together during the formation of the Earth itself. Forming the first anaerobic life forms. A few billion years later the more efficient aerobic systems emerged and were incorporated into the family of developing life. The chemistry of the nascent Earth was changed by the very life (really just very complex molecules) that it spawned as a relentless search for conservation of energy proceeded.

It is so simple and beautiful, no sentient guide in sight only the adherence to conservation of energy in a given chemical, pressure and temperature regime. This is the conundrum that stands out as the biggest to me for those that seek to inject a guiding hand in the Universe proper, let alone for just life.

92. Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

Comment #107147 by sent2null on January 4, 2008 at 7:37 am

steve

I agree with your statement that diversity of complex things is up today, however in the past there was a lot more diversity among simple things. I'll define "diversity" here as, ways in which molecules or organisms can combine to create new more complex molecules or organisms. If we include the interactions of the basic molecules of life into the mix, there are far more ways to combine them then there are to combine extant organisms, which by natural selection are incapable of mating across species boundaries. It is precisely this massive diversity among simple things in the pre biotic soup, that is most likely to have given rise to the more complex life we all derive from today.

Just thought that needed mentioning.

93. Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

Comment #107143 by sent2null on January 4, 2008 at 7:24 am

Look at that yet another amazing advance. The researchers succeed again in jumping my optimistic prognostications on the matter.



Regarding this discussion on the origins of life. I think rainbow is assuming that the chemistry of the Early earth was as inhomogeneous as it is today. This is a faulty assumption according to the fossil record, the planet was amazingly homogeneous in chemistry for a long long time. We know that life in the form of stromatolites were thriving along shores all along the forming continents (they were still being accreated from the interaction of the volcanic eruptions of the Earth's crust and the early seas) as early as 3.2 billion years ago. That is an astonishingly long time, but as wild as that is the very Earth itself had only formed barely a billion and a half year earlier.



I think the more likely process that led to abiogenisis was that the much more homogeneous chemistry allowed for a massive experimental space in which the early molecules could combine and recombine to form the first early protein chains and replicators. Once the first cannibalizing replicators emerged they would have rapidly spread through out the then much more homogeneous environment consuming useful submolecules. You have to look at the early Earth as almost a single global ecosystem. Today the Earth's biodiversity owes a significant reason for its existence to the great variety in biomes under which natural selection processes can proceed. In the early Earth the diversity was not in phenotypes selected through natural selection but rather in molecular types being nothing more than standard chemical affinities. Life today is highly segregated compared to the progenitors of life which being no different from complex chemical molecules could combine and recombine freely due to the laws of chemistry. From this perspective there was a much higher likelihood of chance molecular interactions producing new more complicated molecules. If we see these early molecules as "life" the natural selection was induced by the laws of chemistry providing a gigantic potential variability in the results compared to the present day biodiversity which may "look" far more diverse but in reality is much less so (if you think about it we all, from bacteria to bull are nothing more than genetic iterations of one another, highly conservative in energy due to our common use of structures that emerged in the billions of years that preceded the first visible signs of biodiversity during the Cambrian 542 mya.



If you look at a cell you see that the internal systems are more or less autonomous, they only require a particular environment and raw materials under which to carry out their chemical actions. Golgi bodies, mitochondria, ribosomes these simple engines perform specific tasks and do so without aim or direction so long as they have the necessary raw materials. The usefulness of their actions only makes sense in the context of the internals of the cell. Ironically, ID proponents claim that subcomponents have no use other then for which they were designed. I believe that for some relationships such as the relationship between a cell and its mitochondria for example, evolution itself predicts what the ID proponents conclude but for other reasons. Mitochondria are internally autonomous because the cytoplasm in which they thrive is the only remnant of the early environments in which their progenitors formed. Those environments only exist today in cells so we should not be surprised that we find them no where else. Note though that we still see that organisms amazingly similar to mitochondria exist outside cells as bacteria replete with similar DNA, the similarity is all we need to affirm the hypothesis of evolution. Just as we see symbiotic relationships between more advanced organisms today, it is very likely that the cell arose from just such beneficial symbiotic relationships arising between the various types of machinery that arose in the early biomes.



Different replicators in the form of the progenitors of the organelles coming together in order to enhance survivability by pooling resources or being forced together after being consumed by a parent organelle(the ancestors of the cell membrane or wall).



Tangentially in object oriented programming we perform this task as a matter of conservation of code, composition of class instances inside parent class objects allows us to use the attributes of the consumed objects without paying the penalty of having to recode the associated methods. When I look at a cell I see a superclass with composed child objects of other class types, by composing the objects the parent object avoids the energy expenditure of designing the consumed objects sub mechanisms. It simply need provide the environment and raw materials or in the programming case (data) required of the sub objects in order to have the sub object "catalyze" or process the data to yield a desired output data or perform some function. A good OO programmer composes well designed subobjects into parent objects to reduce the total code that must be written. The smaller the code, the faster the desired object performs its functions, the more such objects can be loaded into available memory and the faster the over all application runs. In this example the code maps to the data in the DNA but the possibilities for created functionality go up exponentially when the composed objects themselves have complex code behind their formation. In other words a cell would have taken possibly tens of billions of years to engineer a rhibosome through natural selection as the rhibosome is a relatively complex object but in the early soup the chemistry must have made such molecules exceedingly likely to form even if we have yet to form them. We can't assume that because we see a small set of internal organelles in living things today that this is all their was. As time went forward and the molecules became more complex energy would be conserved by interaction. Just as conservation of energy leads a ball down a slope using a particular path depending on the curvature of that slope and the energy in the ball, so to did the early molecules seek to conserve energy by interacting. Computer scientists can and have created simulations of the emergence of complex relationships such as these using interacting programs called cellular automatons. Though the relationships that arise are far simpler than that say between a ribosome and a cell they are emergent and non deterministic. The computer scientist has no idea how the initial conditions will seed for the emergence of interesting "behavior" in the automatons.



Now someone looking for design would claim the early Earth chemistry got "help" from a designer but there is no reason to make this assumption, the chemistry, the homogeneity of the early forming conditions and the law of conservation of energy and time are all that are required. Just as a computer scientists looking at an emergent simulated environment of interacting cellular automatons does not invoke God for the complexity, there is no reason to suppose God for the biological analog simply because we have yet to replicate the conditions that gave rise to our life.



For those unfamiliar with OO, here are some links on object oriented programming:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_orientation



http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/concepts/

94. Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

Comment #106984 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Regarding the nuanced beer discussion going on previously. I must admit to being quite perplexed by all the hubbub, they all taste like yeast piss to me!!!

*wink*

95. Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

Comment #106768 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 12:37 pm

Tangential news from today:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9055040

96. The OUT Campaign has its own Flea!

Comment #106766 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 12:31 pm

al-rawandi

You must warn us before concocting something so funny. You never know who might be eating or drinking as they are reading your post!

(getting napkins to wipe off monitor screen)

*wink*

97. The OUT Campaign has its own Flea!

Comment #106760 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 12:22 pm

We need to realize that Christians are watched by both other Christians and the lost world. We do not need to be seen in a negative conitation, giving them reason to blaspheme the Lord God or sin.

mind numbing, I guess by "lost world" he's referring to us, little does he know he's the horse with the blinders on. By the way does anyone know what "conitation" means? ;)

98. Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

Comment #106694 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 9:04 am

I think that some people are misinterpreting Harris' realization with this article. He is basically expressing his realization that, well exactly as it is titled "Mother Nature is Not Our Friend". Recall that Sam's path to the agnosticism/atheism that he currently expresses came through an appreciation of the truths of consciousness that could be derived from "mystical" (ie. drug induced) experiences. I am not implying he has first hand experience in this matter, only that he has studied it more extensively than most as can be divined from his writings on the subject.

I don't discount the possibility of making great realizations about the material world while under such influence, though I do (like Sam I gather) reject any of those realizations being funneled to us ala short wave radio from an unseen astral plane. I gather that in his previous views of the world, when he was unwary of the truths of extinction events locked in our geological fossil record, when he perhaps lacked the knowledge of the deep fiat that attended our existence here, the fact our planet has an active geological center, that this center produces life enabling magnetic fields (by preventing the life destroying cosmic rays from getting to the surface) and on and on.

I can see how this growing realization of our incredible vulnerability could leave one with a sense that we are doomed if we do not positively act to ensure our survival. I myself have had similarly enlightened moments of terror.

I think some members are reading into this article that Sam's realization is an immediate call to alarm but I didn't get that impression. 100,000,000 years is a long time to wait for another killer space rock, rather it seems he is saying that our place here should not be seen as something we can ensure by simply living in "harmony" with nature in the sense that we ensure at least the present dance of interaction between us and the ecosystems in which we live. Our extended survival (beyond a 100,000,000 year window) will require our mastery of the knowledge we have acquired of the world. I totally agree with this, the question is, are we mature enough to prevent ourselves from bringing in the very doom we wish to avoid from nature herself through its direct manipulation? I am still deeply divided on this latter question.

99. Mother Nature is Not Our Friend

Comment #106661 by sent2null on January 3, 2008 at 8:28 am

I too have been considering the coming power that humanity will wield over life. I expected that the current state of knowledge would not be reached for another 10 years but it seems the advances are outstripping even my wildly optimistic prognostications.

Last year alone, several Nobel Prize winning (I'll bet money on it) achievements were made, the invention of iPS, the use of viral vectors to reverse differentiate cells, these are huge achievements that as they are refined in the coming years will allow astonishing targeted modifications to human and non human organisms. iPS alone gives way to near future obsolescence of the entire organ transplant business. The astonishing thing is this is just the stone ages of this technology, we still have yet to understand the full details on how to orchestrate complete organ development. (which we will once we figure out how to properly "play" the genetic notes in order to express a desired phenotypic outcome)

We are entering a time where allocating the ability to replicate life processes will simply involve describing the "sheet music" if you will for a desired organs development cycle or enzyme or protein production process and simply playing it back as we wish providing the required raw materials for the underlying cellular machinery to do their work. As an object oriented software engineer I've been fascinated by the similarities between our methods in OO design and how biology seems to have constructed living organisms, there seems to be a nearly perfect mapping of function, though using different operative agents. Regardless, the question of if we should tinker with these processes to me is moot, we are tinkering with them and we will continue to, our survival as a species will be intimately tied to this act given the blind disregard that Nature has for not just our life but all life. To not rail against the inevitable doom that nature would launch against us is tantamount to sitting back like a rock on the shore of a beach, unknowing, uncaring of the slow erosion by the waves that will eventually reduce it to dust.

100. Changing my Mind

Comment #106284 by sent2null on January 2, 2008 at 3:51 pm

Re. Post 30

Not so fast al-rawandi I neglected to include the mouth salivating relish with which I invite the JW's into my abode. I fear I am not as much the better man that you might think. ;)