failure

--- Total idiocy.

Refuse to speak to anyone but your attorney except to demand to speak to your attorney .

If you don't have one and you live in the US, the State has to appoint one to defend you.

Don't fall for good cop - bad cop, all they're looking for is a "collar". That is, credit for bringing in a dog, in their parlance.

Don't talk to them, don't drink any coffee they offer you and don't smoke any cigarettes they offer you. If you do, you'll feel that you're indebted to them and they'll try to make you feel like you owe them something, when you don't.

Do _not_ sign anything, no matter how ingratiating your interrogator may be.

Remember: All they're trying to do is to close a case, and whether or not you were the perpetrator is immaterial.

Sign a confession or admit to something you didn't do because they scared you into it and you're finished. You need to realize that once you're in custody, for whatever reason, you need to just shut up. No discussion, no "Would you like to tell us what happened", nothing except "I want to call my attorney."

-- John Fields Professional Circuit Designer

And remember that on one has ever passed a field sobriety test.

Am not. You seem to think that intelligence is necessary to evolve complex mechanisms, which places you firmly in the Intelligent Design camp.

Computers get by on just 1's and 0's, and they do pretty spiffy things.

And PhotoShop is just a string of 1's and 0's. The encoding mechanism is secondary; what matters is structure.

No sillier than "making plans" for a hummingbird. Again, your argument is anti-evolution, and you have precisely aligned yourself with the Bible-bangers.

Why do people accept that DNA can encode a stomach and a liver and a kidney, a superbly coordinated biochemical processing system, but insist that it's (somehow) forbidden from encoding improvements to itself? "Improved" DNA would certainly have competitive advantages over the plainer stuff.

Gosh, it's fun to hear people argue against evolution.

John

"No one"? Again, you invoke Intelligent Design.

"No possible way" is a pretty strong statement. How can you justify it? I can imagine all sorts of simple mechanisms to increase mutation rates in response to stress; give it a try yourself. It will be extremely telling if you *can't* suggest at least one such mechanism.

The history of science is littered by statement from prominent people that things are impossible. Just recently, we have things like lasers, retroviruses, prions, high-temp superconductivity, subwavelength imaging, negative refraction, all declared impossible by experts in the field.

This is funny: I keep arguing in favor of the power of evolution, and you argue against it.

John

So why do people have stomachs, but oak trees don't? Is there no difference between a fertilized human egg and an acorn?

Where are the plans for "stomach"?

John

Why not? If stress might increase mutation rates, wouldn't it be more efficient if the higher mutation rate were restricted to a chromosome that's related to the nature of the stress? If your potassiom channels are being blocked by a toxin, why not concentrate the mutations on the cell membrane genes? That doesn't sound unreasonably hard to mechanize to me.

Exactly. Now think big.

John

DNA cannot "build a hummingbird" - it is merely a mechanism for describing constituents for a hummingbird.

It may or may not be useful - but "being useful" is not sufficient to make a feature likely to turn up by evolution.

You are mistakenly attributing some sort of intelligence or purposeful behaviour to DNA. Traditionally, DNA is represented abstractly as lists of combinations of four letters (A, D, S and G, IIRC). DNA itself is just a list of these combinations - it is an information coding mechanism. It is exactly equivalent to simply listing the same letters on a piece of paper. Now, it may well be that as an encoding mechanism, it would be more efficient or more flexible if there was a fifth letter, or some such change - and theoretically such a change could evolve. But the concept of DNA "making plans" as to how it could improve itself is ridiculous.

That was Erik Carlsson.

Timo Makkinen drove Mini Coopers.

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

I read in sci.electronics.design that David Brown wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Sun, 2 Oct 2005:

Pardon? Human females are certainly different, even from other primate females, but all mammalian females cease to have fertile episodes if they survive long enough.

DNA didn't "cause" anything, but humans have evolved naturally to the stage where we can manipulate DNA. I also said "if you think about it in a particular way" - there are many ways to look at this.

Yes (at least, according to most theories, anyway). Have you ever wondered why the life expectancy for woman is longer than that for men (even excluding factors like violent deaths)? Or why humans are the only animals with female menopause? The most reasonable theory that scientists have come up with is that older women who can no longer have children of their own, grannies, are a net benefit to the species. It's a more complex evolutionary step, since "living to an older age and having a menopause" is a feature of the grandparent rather than the parent.

The thing about the "big chemistry set" argument is that it works well for the origins of life, but very badly once life has really got going. The difference is basically that in the early days of this world, if an interesting bunch of chemicals turned up by chance combinations excited by some UV rays, they could sit together and simmer for thousands of years, undisturbed but for the occasional volcano. Once RNA/DNA-based lifeforms had taken over the earth, any bunch of interesting chemicals or chance major change in the structure of DNA would be likely to be eaten ten minutes later.

It sounds perfectly reasonable except for one point - there is no one tuning the speed, and there is no possible way for DNA to control the speed itself in any way. It happens naturally as a result of major environmental changes - look at how the numbers of different species changed as a result of catastrophes such as the meteorite (plus volcanic activity) 65 million years ago the wiped out the dinosaurs and about 80% of the other species on the earth - it was followed by a huge boom in the number of species.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Sun, 2 Oct 2005:

Only YOU do that. It THAT part of your hypothesis that we don't go for.

IF DNA could 'encode' a stomach etc. then maybe it could 'encode' adapted DNA. But DNA simply doesn't work that way, any more than a graphics program produces graphics.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Sun, 2 Oct 2005:

These mechanisms do increase mutation rates, but they don't introduce

Science went there a long time ago with the appearance of penicillin resistance. Random evolution of the beta-lactamase enzyme initially seemed so improbable that it *looked* as though there might be a purposive principle involved. But that view didn't last; further discoveries showed how it happened.

Shhhhh! Kevin might hear you, and start talking about memes again.

Paul Burke

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'failure', on Sun, 2 Oct 2005:

The short answer is 'we don't know yet'. If we did, we could grow organs in vitro rather than just sheets of cells. But the over-simplified answer is 'in the proteome'. It's a method of manufacture so different from those that we use that it's difficult to comprehend.

I never meant to be unclear, and I have stated my conjecture a number of times: I think that complex self-organizing systems, such as DNA, are capable of evolving intricate mechanisms that perform very high-level functions. Simply put, if DNA can design a hummingbird, it can design itself, so it is logical that the mechanism of evolution has long ago transcended random mutation and natural selection. We progressed from programming with patch panels and toggle switches, to Java and VHDL, in 50 years; why would DNA stick with the equivalent of assembly language after a billion years?

So far, people are telling me here that it ain't so, because

1. It's not possible.

1. It's not necessary.

2. It would require intelligence to direct the process.

1. DNA is so complex that we can't begin to understand it, so therefore we should discount possible higher-level mechanisms.

2. I don't have a PhD in botany (although my daughter does, and *she* doesn't flat disagree with me.)

Geez, is there some sort of prohibition against thinking around here?

John

Fine. If we can't comprehend it, how can we state that it restricts itself to simple mechanisms, like random mutation and natural selection, just because those are mechanisms that *we* can understand?

John

I am only suggesting that self-organizing cellular-automata can evolve into very high-order processes; I've programmed very simple systems that go on to generate astounding structures. If that were not true, you wouldn't have a brain. So *use* that brain, and consider that DNA may have evolved itself with the same processes it used to evolve us.

Our bodies are proof of the algorithmic power of DNA. So how can you insist that it fails to apply that evolutionary process to itself?

No god need be invoked, no outside influence: just evolution. The human immune system sure doesn't work by mutation and selection; it works in hours by threat detection, analysis, and synthesis of antibodies, among other mechanisms. If DNA did this for us, why didn't it do it for itself?

John