OT? Rigol clearance

I can't predict the output of a 50 ohm resistor, except in a statistical way. Short-term, it's random. That doesn't keep me from using resistors.

About half of initial medical diagnoses are wrong (as my last two were). Economists and sociologists have essentially zero predictive ability. Some things are well understood, demonstrated by accurate prediction of experimental outcomes, and some aren't... but experts are confident anyhow.

which I would think makes them not really experts. But they don't agree.

NT

It's better than that, even. One of the two improved its own play from "complete novice" to world-beating in just a month or so, and could continue improving at that rate. Luckily it can't copy itself and dominate the available energy supply when it wins.

Que? What on earth do you mean by "primitive"?

You've missed the obvious: species mutate into new species.

Unless, of course, you believe that all species were created at the same time, and none have changed since then. But that /is/ a primitive belief.

Now you are being silly.

I presume you realise that epigenetic effects are subject to natural selection, i.e. evolution. The relationship they do/don't have with DNA is still being understood. That's satisfactory; our understanding is refined over time.

Evolution != DNA/genes.

They are no different. In both cases science progresses by the death of one professor at a time!

And, for those that understand biology, the lack of complete understanding of cellular mechanisms doesn't prevent them from using evolution theory to achieve useful effects.

Um, are you seriously conflating one individual's medical diagnoses with cellular mechanisms?

Epigenetics is the enable/disable of entire subroutines, or operating modes, as needed. Which suggests that we have a library of plug-in, macro-scale, working and tested sequences in reserve for when we need them.

That's curious. Maybe those switched-off, complex but quickly available routines were developed by point mutation and selection once a long time ago, and then switched off and saved for future use. Or something else.

I suspect something else.

The language you are using implies you are thinking that there is a "design authority" guiding evolution in some direction and/or for some purpose.

I see no reason to invoke that hypothesis, since the observed results are so imperfect that random chance (plus survival of the fittest) is sufficient.

What I'm thinking is that there are some very complex and very efficient algorithms at work. I'm not sure where they came from.

Feel free to speculate. I can't do all the work.

Sufficient but not efficient, so selected out.

That's evolution! It has no obligation to be simple just because you want it to be.

You don't understand JL. It's not a hypothesis, but an axiom. The facts must be bent to fit his certainty of a Designer.

Regarding "shaking components in a box to get a computer", a better analogy would be magnetic bricks, like Lego but with north and south magnets for each bump and opening. It's a much more realistic comparison to chemistry than using electronic components, which have no natural tendency to cling together.

Float a billion of them in a large vat and stir gently for a year. Then investigate what shapes they'd made, and whether any of the shapes tended to create copies of themselves.

It seems rather likely to me that this *would* happen. And that's all it takes for biogenesis.

Clifford Heath.

John Larkin wrote on 11/28/2017 11:53 AM:

I find it amusing that John talks about biology as something no one understands well enough and then proceeds to design circuits by trial and error because he doesn't understand them well enough.

Chuckle... that made me laugh. The central dogma of molecular bio, is that info goes mostly one way. There are a few exceptions, but not all that many. Here's a wiki page,

Bio is an experimental science so you're free to do some experiments. (It's more difficult to get 'identical particles' in bio. compared to chem. or phys.)

George H.

I was talking about "understood by science and scientists in general" - not "understood by John Larkin". You should not judge other people's ignorance by your own - when you don't even understand what a particular scientific field /is/, how can you make claims about what is known about it?

There is no way for those transistors to stick to each other and interact.

But as an alternative, you could pick random settings for gates and routes in an FPGA, download them to the chip, and see if it does something. Once you have found a few combinations that have basic success, you "breed" them by mixing their "genes" between the top performers and with a little random mutation thrown in. That is a somewhat better analogy.

And guess what? It has been done, and it worked. (I read of this many years ago, and have no reference I am afraid.) The research was done with a small FPGA with the task of identifying a number of different signal frequencies. The FPGA "designs" that emerged from the completely random start and then many generations of evolution were incomprehensible to the scientists involved. They don't know how they worked - those FPGA chips had no timing references or clock sources, but could accurately classify the signal frequencies and were stable over temperature. Putting the same designs into a different chip of the same type, however, resulted in very poor performance.

Make me a 32-bit precision 16 Gsps data acquisition system that fits in an oscilloscope probe and runs for months from a single AAA battery. Price tag under $200. Then I'll be impressed. You say you can't do it? Clearly you are no electronics engineer - obviously you are just floundering and fail to understand 99.99% of what you are doing.

Or could it be that I am making wildly unrealistic demands based on my own complete lack of understanding of the field in question?

The smallpox vaccine was discovered through hard work and careful experimentation, building on variolation that had been developed and used for hundreds of years. Developing a vaccine was the result of a long process by dedicated individuals and a lot of brave people. Cellular biology was unknown at the time, but the smallpox vaccine was part of the process that lead to an understanding of microbiology and the immune system. And all the way, they had to fight against anti-science morons.

The mass production and mass vaccination process was another astounding achievement of medicine, science, engineering, industrialisation, politics, diplomacy - it is known as the most noble achievement ever by the human race.

You really haven't the faintest clue how science works - especially medical and biological science - do you?

Some people look at science that they don't understand, and find it amazing. They are overwhelmed that there are people that can understand all these theories, do all these calculations, make all this stuff. They see it as akin to magic.

Most scientists, or scientifically-minded people, can look at them and say "/I/ don't understand that field of study - but I can appreciate how other people do". They know that the scientists there have studied long and hard, they know how research works, they know at least the basics of how scientific understanding progresses.

Then there are the anti-science nutjobs - the ones that think vaccines cause autism, Wifi is how "they" read our minds, fluoride in toothpaste is to keep the population passive, and that curing diseases is messing with god's plan to make us suffer because our mythical ancestor ate an apple.

But you seem to be in a different category. You appear to be so arrogant as to think that if /you/ don't understand something, then nobody does - anyone that works in a field that is beyond your ken is just bumbling along, making things up and relying on luck.

Occam's razor is a very useful tool.

No need; random mutation plus natural selection is a very powerful concept. No doubt it will continue to be refined.

And it has no obligation to be complex just because you want it to be!

I tend to agree, but it would be pleasing to see a solid demonstration of principal features of biogenesis.

No they are not. Aphids in relatively benign climates use asexual parthengenisis as their primary means of reproduction to great effect. Only when the population is under severe stress do they alternate sexual reproductive phases to increase genetic diversity and survival.

Plenty of things do still exist that reproduce exclusively asexually. Some of them are even very important commercial crops like the sterile triploid cultivars of banana for instance.

You really wouldn't like the tough wild seedy sexual forms very much.

Why do people with absolutely no understanding of genetics or science insist that their cranky ideas must be right because they say so?

Retro viruses, bacteria and fungi all have horizontal pathways for chunks of genetic code to jump between individuals of different species. What you end up with may be good or bad but it is certainly different. This has only been known since the 1950's so don't feel too bad about parading your ignorance. Magyck is always the best answer.

It is the main mechanism for the rise of antibiotic resistance in certain pathogens and virulent hospital acquired infections.

And work well enough until you have sexual recombinations from two individuals which evolves faster and gets closer to the ideal combination for the environmental constraints. This has recently been tested experimentally in fruit flies:

Lamarkianism never had any redeeming features and through its adoption as Lysenkoism by Stalin was responsible for disastrous crop failures in the USSR. It doesn't matter how many generations you cut the tails off mice for they won't evolve into tailless mice.

Epigenetics was not ridiculed for all that long before experimental evidence in favour of intergenerational changes to environmental stress were identified.

Physicists are open to new theories that are consistent with the observed data and testable. They are inclined to ridicule mercilessly any cranks that send in "MY NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE" and many do.

Orthodoxy is only what is presently known and established. It can be overthrown by a single well done novel experiment with unexpected results like Michelson-Morley or the photoelectric effect.

It is a bit harder in biology but now that we can read and sequence the entire human genome it is amenable to computational attack as a computer science data processing problem. New experiments and drugs can quite literally be designed in a computer to match molecular sites of interest. So far they have a toolkit that started with a blunderbuss and now includes scissors, scalpel and sutures. That is impressive progress.

Astronomy is similar to pre DNA sequencing era biology. We can only look at what is there in the universe and have only one universe to examine and from a particular position in time and space. We can do computer simulations but we can't look at other universes or alter this one beyond sending probes to look more closely at nearby interesting bits.

we

That's a very emotionally appealing argument. We all want to believe that a ll so-called scientists are scientists, that they're honest, impartial and highly competent and working for everyone else's benefit. But looking at me dical and psych research it doesn't take too long to discover that this vie w plainly ain't so.

NT

Arguably this has already happened in the novel BSE prion protein mutation that got amplified by the bad practice of feeding inadequately heat treated cattle remains to cannibalistic cattle in the UK. Once the badly folded protein arose by chance and was heat stable and a catalyst for making more it exploded into the reproductive environment accidentally created that permitted its propagation and reproduction.

If a designer really wanted to leave a fingerprint on his creation something like this would be be pretty cool (a new world record)

Self assembling Seirpinski gasket of 5th order rendered in iron atoms by truly inspirational designer ligands on a gold surface (pics too).

You mean like the human eye with a blind spot right in the middle. Yes that is a real example of superb design engineering.

It is said that God must be a civil engineer because no other branch of engineering would collocate the sewage plant and recreational area.

There is no point in making untestable wild speculations that everything works by magyck. It explains nothing predicts nothing and just leaves you with the additional question of who designed the designer.

Chiral DNA/RNA may not be the only game in town but it is the only one we have seen so far. Amino acids may be the only realistic organic polymers but it would be fun to find life using the other chirality.

If we find life on another planet or moon then we will have real evidence as to how common life is. My own instinct based on Earth it that anywhere with liquid water and an atmosphere will have some form of life but it may well be just green slime. We owe it to the inhabitants not to contaminate any planets we visit that might harbour life.

Necessary and sufficient. Random mutation and asexual reproduction still holds sway in plenty of species - especially during benign periods as it allows more rapid population explosions. Aphids are a classic for this.

Unless and until there is something that cannot be explained by conventional scientific theory I am not prepared to invoke magyck just because you don't understand what is already known by science.

It isn't simple there are undoubtedly mechanisms at work that happen intermittently and have yet to be observed. When they are found and demonstrated in a reproducible fashion they will become a part of the scientific knowledge base (aka orthodoxy). Meanwhile the predictive power of modern genetics is growing all the while.