ing of much benefit, if it is a liability it will be selected out.
Again you have disproven your own idea. You point out there is a disadvant age to peacock feathers, but then also state the advantage.
What you fail to mention is that the feathers are not just decoration. The fact that the bird can exist with such plumage (as well as other birds and even other species) signals they are a *capable* individual and as such go od breeding stock. THAT is the reason why the FEMALES have adapted to pref er their mates with such bright plumage.
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Rick C.
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I consider the evidence of and for a creator to be lacking as well.
All this being had to do was make living creatures with impossible to explain parts.
In other words real irreproducable magic.
Instead we have DNA, RNA, etc. and other organic compounds with an understanding of how they work in development. Why would a creator be so
subtle? If the creator wants worship/etc why be hiding her skills like someone who wants to hide his tax returns?
Everything is linked together with elements that have a path of understanding from their origins as simple hydrogen via the stellar furnaces which connect us all together via the stardust we are made of.
Of course hydrogen and the universe are a bit hard to explain, but why does postulating a creator make it any easier?
Life is a quine (a program that outputs itself), but a special kind of quine; it also outputs the machine that runs the program. The name for this kind of quine is simply "life".
In Conway's "Life", a two-dimensional field where each cell contains either 0 or 1, and in each new generation, the content of each cell is determined by its direct adjacency. The rules give rise to "gliders" made of groups of four 1's that move infinitely through empty (0) space.
A more complex structure of a type which was long thought to be impossible, called a "glider gun". This is a structure that periodically emits gliders, and continues forever unless its damaged.
So far, we have not yet found a "glider gun gun" that emits copies of itself, but it is definitely possible, since it has been shown possible to construct a universal Turing machine - which is capable of computing any computable function; including one that emits itself.
There are videos of such things on Youtube also.
Within the world of Conway's Life, such a structure would be "living" because it reproduces itself completely. The machine that implements the "rules of the game" is analogous to particle physics in the real world, so it's ambient, it doesn't need to be emitted by the living structure.
Virii are quines, but not life, because they don't emit the machine required to run their program.
Perhaps we'll find something like a virus, but whose operation is essential to the life cycle of its host. That would not be "life", but merely a part of a "living" organism.
I'm not up with the quantum maths, but would like to report the claims of my ex brother-in-law Les Green (who tragically died quite recently in a house fire!). He spent much of his adult life exploring a reformulation of first-order logic from George Spencer-Brown, published in the "Laws of Form" in 1969.
GSB left a dangling clue that (reportedly) Bertrand Russel was glad to learn of, saying that it resolved the well-known paradox that had triggered his 35 years of work on the Theory of Types. GSB merely pointed out that the logical value of the statement "this statement is false" is self-referential in the same way that "x^2 = -1" is; he suggested rewriting it as "x = -1/x"; a self-referential expression. The implication is that there is a third truth value beyond True and False, which we might name Paradoxical; analogous to sqrt(-1) being a new kind of number.
Les Green realised that there is a fourth value: Undecidable. A statement of the general form "this statement is true" is true if it is true, but false if it is false, and it's not possible to know which it is a priori.
He named the two extra values Para and Meta, and used the symbols Z and S.
Using these four values (0, 1, Z, S) he constructed a twos-complement arithmetic (with infinities and infinitesimals), and showed various rather amazing things, like sqrt(2) = 1.z', e = z0, pi = s0. I don't have the maths chops to reproduce these results, but he also claimed that the resultant arithmetic behaved exactly like quantum math.
If anyone can reconstruct this mathematics, I'd like to know about it. It seems kinda... significant.
Because variation and selection works on what it has got. Vertebrates diverged from molluscs around 500 million years ago and the most recent common ancestor doesn't seem to have had eyes.
Horizontal gene transfers don't occur with multicellular organisms - or at least not for stuff as complicated as eyes. The vertebrates had to invent their own eyes, and couldn't poach the mollusc design.
We evolved eyes that were good enough for the job - not bad enough to get the owners deselected.
DNA encodes a program - in fact quite a number of programs - but it wasn't programmed. The programs evolved by reproduction with variation.
The variations that disrupted the programs already there killed the organisms that embodied them. The variations that worked as an improved program made the organisms that carried them more competitive, so they came to dominate the population.
What on earth do you think that inheritance with variation means?
If there was a creator who designed the human eye, it clearly could have do ne better. The emotional position that finds the existence of a creator att ractive interferes with a lot of reasoning - not that John Larkin would kno w much about that since his idea of reasoning isn't much more advanced than krw's.
Nobody is frightened of getting anywhere near creationism. Quite a few of u s find creationism distasteful, on account of the bad logic and specious ar guments used to promote it, but the same bad logic that makes creationists distasteful also makes them contemptible, rather than threatening. Fear doe sn't come into it.
There are other mechanisms that create the same effect. In John Larkin's ca se it's simple ignorance - he doesn't know enough about the subjects on whi ch he pontificates to have any useful thoughts, and he spends his time re-i nventing well known misapprehensions.
The point here is that if a change isn't useful at the moment it can survive for generations provided it doesn't do undue harm. Another change later could use the previous one to form a benefit. Individual changes don't have to provide a benefit to survive and can be utilised many generations later when they do offer a benefit. It doesn't have to be step by incremental step, provided the organism survives it has time, a lot of time.
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As I recall it was a FPGA and it was trained to do some telephony task, possibly DTMF decoding or V.21 decoding, it was not provided with an external clock signal, or possibly it was but it didn't actually use it..
yeah, the bitcode was not portable to other chips from the same batch.
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When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.
Australian aboriginals have better vision than the more recent immigrants t o the continent, though their domestic arrangements make them more prone to losing this advantage as they get older (and they typically don't get as o ld as the more recent immigrant stock).
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Fred Hollows pointed this out some time ago.
It doesn't seem to give them a useful competitive advantage at the moment, but it might later.
Would you also say that my old 1Mpixel digital camera isn't inferior to my current 6Mpixel camera because I use the old one in circumstances where there is a high chance the camera will be damaged?
See Rick's reply!
And believing in a God isn't?
To get people to believe in gods two arguments are used: fear and comfort. Both are purely emotional.
The phrase "why would" implies intent. Evolution is a machine with objectives (like survival under competition), but not intent.
A good book to read on how complex things must be structured (from an engineering perspective but also addresses biological systems) is "The Sciences of the Artificial", by Herbert A Simon, which is a classic. The third edition is available as a pdf for free:
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. What is also useful to view are the time-lapse movies of bacteria climbing their way up an anti-biotic gradient - one can see evolution in action.
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The movies are in the supplementary data:
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Watch them in full screen in a darkened room, so you can see low-contrast details.
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