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My apologies Martin. It is Australian (and North American?) slang for "eccentric", with perhaps a hint of being a pejorative term and of referring to an extreme form of eccentricity. It was not dialectal misunderstanding, it was criticism of the term.
This is not necessarily the case. It can be very difficult to work out an experiment which will test a theory, and even with an alleged falsification it may not be quite clear where to lay the blame (Google Quine-Duhem problem)
It is not necessary to "know where to put the blame" in order to show that a theory is false. If there is empirical evidence for something that the theory predicts should be impossible, then the theory is false. Period.
Just admit that we do not ####ing know, until it is tested. The whole term "burden of proof" is all based on a deluded belief that there must somehow be an official viewpoint. Just collect "uncomfortable" anomalies en masse and see what it leads to, even if it means having to come up with completely new ideas after the data is collected. This is not a practical possibility, because science is not a simple, timeless enterprise. There is no point at which we can say "we now have all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, so let us now go ahead and solve it". So at every point there has to be an "official viewpoint" corresponding to the best guess of the scientific community.
I meant collecting the results of already done experiments. It is not necessary to do a new experiment for every theory to falsify. And there is absolutely no need to pretend to know for sure when there is uncertainty. This "best guess" will generally involve leaving a number of issues unresolved on the "back burner". For example, when Marie Curie was concentrating her solutions of radium chloride, she arrived at the point where the solutions were glowing and getting quite warm -- emitting about 30 watts of power, but with no measurable change. This was as clear a counter example to the conservation of energy as one would ever have expected to find, but it was left on the back burner because too much else hinged on the conservation of energy. The issue was resolved a few years later when radon gas was discovered in the air above radium salt solutions, and it was recognized that the loss of mass in the radium would have been unmeasurable.
Well, of course falsifications must be real falsifications, not errors of measurement, so that was an invalid example. I was talking about actual falsifications. When a theory fails during an actual falsification, it does not matter at all "how much hinges on it", but the new theory must have a close enough superficial resemblance to the old mainstream theory in all the contexts of the specific observations where it have passed the test to predict those outcomes as well.
I believe that "morality" arises from an innate sense of good and evil -- frequently described as "conscience", and described in the creation myth in terms of Adam eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. An adherent of scientism, like Dawkins, might believe that it arises from a gene selfishly trying to ensure its continuing expression. The point is that we both think in terms of "morality" and we find a lot of common ground in what we see as moral, as well as a number of points of quite serious difference. Empirically I have been quite interested recently to find that here in Australia there is a lot of public sympathy for the Government to upgrade its spending on mental health facilities. I believe that this suggests support for my notion of morality rather than Dawkins', though he would probably have the "out" that it arises from cultural factors.
The evidence for the existence of rapid evolution proves that any belief in genetically-determined morality is bound to make racist predictions, as inevitably as the theory of a lumniferous aether predicts that the speed of light should be different in different directions due to the motion of the Earth. And the main point about morality is that there is no definition of what morality really means, and thus no way to say for sure that "science cannot give moral guidance without extra assumptions" either.
I am very familiar with this point in the atomist/anti-atomist debates in 19th century chemistry, and those who maintained that atoms were not a part of science because they would always be beyond the reach of the senses. The really interesting thing is that chemists of both persuasions were able to work together and lay out a lot of the foundations of their subject. What I do not understand is what all this has to do with religion, unless you are rather naively suggesting that at some future date scientific findings will rule out religion?
I never said that science will rule out religion. Just that it is naive to be absolutely sure that it never will. And in fact, I am not really atheist but rather ignostic. Ignosticism is the view that the question "does God exist?" cannot be answered due to the lack of a clear definition of what the word "God" really means.
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« Last post by CliffordK on Today at 09:18:52 »
The Great Auk, while not directly related to Penguins, it does outwardly resemble them. And, as a flightless bird in the Northern Hemisphere, it would have been exposed to many predators. One should also note that many penguins spend a significant portion of their lives on other southern continents other than Antarctica, again exposed to predators. Using wings as flippers while swimming sounds like a good explanation for penguin wings. I wonder if after several million years, there will be a branch of the penguinn family that will evolve to be 100% aqueous, somewhat like the dolphins and
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« Last post by fangz on Today at 08:35:14 »
just now i'm starting to think this must really be semantics.
it quantum entanglement just a theoretical thing? like it's a way of abstractly dealing with probabilities?
do people who believe it's true also believe there is one reality that if i draw one card out of a deck and burn the rest of the deck, maybe in theory, it could be any card out of a standard deck, but in reality it is the one card i picked.
like if i was shot in the head before i turned it over, it still is whatever card i picked right? that's reality
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« Last post by fangz on Today at 08:27:32 »
ok, here's another way of asking the question about what i don't understand about this.....
(and thanx a lot for all you're answers so far) i'm positive this is something that's really, really simple about how i'm not grasping this, and thank u so far for trying to help me....
here's another way of phrasing the problem i'm having....
I have a wife. one day she tells me she has two older twin sisters and they are coming over right now for lunch with us. there's a knock at the door right then and my wife's sisters walk in. one is blonde and the other has dyed her hair red...
i whisper to my wife "what are their names?"
my wife says "Ariel and Leira"
i say "which one is Ariel and which one is Leira? Is Ariel the blonde or the redhead?"
my wife whispers back "i don't know. see, my family is weird. there's always been a rule that if there's twin girls born, one's named Ariel and the other's named Leira, but it's random which one gets named Ariel. but the one that's not Ariel is gonna be named Leira"
and then I say "oh. that's a strange custom you guys have. so which one is Ariel, the blonde or the redhead?"
and then my wife says "i told you, i don't know. i know they are my sisters but i've never asked either of them."
i say "oh". my wife says "just ask the blonde what her name is. then u will know the name of the redhead, if the blonde says she's Ariel, the redhead must be Leira.
but if the blonde says she's Leira, then the redhead must be Ariel. just ask the blonde what her name is..."
i turn to my blonde sister-in -law and i ask "hi. nice to meet you, what's your're name?"
she says 'Ariel'. i say 'oh, hi Ariel' and then i turn to the redhead and say 'hi Leira'.
they both smile and are happy with my wife's choice to marry me.
so that's the example, but there's two ways to interpret what just happened in it.
here's possibility 1.......this is what it seems like quantum entanglement is saying.....
my wife's sister were not named when they were born. they were only told the rule that they were either Ariel or Leira but never told which one was which. i was the first person ever to ask either of them this question. so when the blonde sister decided she was going to be named Ariel, the redhead sister knew that she must be Leira.
here's possibility 2.......when they were born, their mother gave them names, it's just that my wife never cared to ask them which was which.
see what i mean? why would we assume that their mother never gave them names? they were named when they were born most likely, right?
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« Last post by fangz on Today at 07:29:47 »
... please say that's what u mean?
that every time i check the coin that i kept, there's a 50% chance of it being one or the other....
The coins are just an analogy. With the particles, checking (measuring their spin) disentangles them, so it only works once per pair.
does measuring the spin change the particles in some way? i don't understand how a particle can 'know' that it's been measured.
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« Last post by Vincent M on Today at 06:52:42 »
Thanks Prancer. Glad my constant advertisement of fenugreek paid off.
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That is actually a pretty good example that would support certain aspects your theory (see link) but it does not involve cell to cell transfer of genes.
But the principle can be combined with gene transfer between cells. If many cells need to correct the same error (as in either a genetic defect or an environmental change requiring new adaptation) the gene transfer between cells becomes very useful. As for the mechanism, I can imagine that since exosomes contain both proteins and DNA, when an exosome containing the proteins that helps the cell get the job done comes, the cell adopts the DNA content in the exosomes that happen to be within it. While that particular cell also retains many exosome DNAs that just happened to be within it, other cells will be hit by the exosomes in a different order and therefore not promote the same "freeloaders", so only the actually useful mutations are fileshared en masse. The quantity of that means that it will start leaking into other tissues including reproductive cells. Furthermore, the vast amounts of micro-RNA released when getting the production up and running floods the body, and is reverse-transcripted into DNA in reproductive cells by the vast amounts of symbiotic retroviruses that are empirically proven to be present in the reproductive organs.
And as the article points out, hyper mutability of white blood cells has a down side - like lymphoma and autoimmune diseases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_hypermutation
Any process can have downsides when used improperly. There is no reason to assume that a more proper use of the same process should not be able to solve those problems. See thread "Body's defences not immune to brain control".
Processes like these, or epigenetics, don't contradict or disprove conventional genetic processes like genetic change through recombination of genes during meiosis, sex, and natural selection. They just add to them. I still feel you are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I never claimed that there was no natural selection. I just shown that it was far to inefficient, and provided a more efficient form of evolution to do the bulk of the job. I agree that it would be theoretically possible (in mutation load terms) for conventional evolution to do the job alone on very simple bacteria, although I do not believe even them to be "stupid" enough to not use anything more efficient anyway, considering the general advantages of more efficient evolution.
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why aeroplanes have front tyres as tubeless and rear as normal tyres ?
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« Last post by Prancer on Today at 06:32:07 »
very good summary! and yes, the fenugreek tea decreases my symptoms. I think the visceral experience (so relaxing/warm) plays a big role, but it's probably also from the fenugreek itself (ps: I also have the fenugreek 610mg capsules and I take them once in a while too). I did get the idea from you a while back while I was a silent reader, thanks a lot! :D
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Yes, there is "function sensitive self correction" - all sorts of physiological feedback loops that maintain homeostasis - just not the kind you are proposing.
What do you believe is the principial difference, if any?
The principal difference is that in physiological feed back loops, cells respond to changes in concentrations of specific molecules, increases in CO2, H+ concentration, increases or decreases in energy containing molecules, hormones, neurotransmitters. In your theory, you still need to identify what it is the cell is sensing, when it is sensing that "something is wrong."
Since vital functions in the cell affect everything else in the cell, the cell will inevitably "feel ill" even if it has no specific sensor for that particular error.
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