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So does this mean thefinaltheory.com is wrong? *gasp*

I would consider a government sanctioned assassination of another country's leader an act of war, not terrorism. Was Pearl Harbor an act of "terrorism"? Pat Robertson is a big douche who deserves to be ridiculed, but asking our government to kill someone is just stupid, but certainly not criminal nor terrorist.

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett defined this as an "orienting mechanism," a kind of "all hands on deck" stimulus => response reaction which would cause several different parts of a ganglion/brain to analyze the stimulus and collectively dictate a flexible response in a pandemonic manner. Of course, I could be interpreting your question wrong. Does "lowest level" mean "most primitive"? That was my interpretation...

Anyone plan on busting out a new forum anytime in the near future? I think you could throw together another omnibus forum like all the others for what's been suggested... Meteorology / Climate Science / Earth Science seems like it'd be a good one.

Still trying to inch my way up the Baldwin curve. It just sucks nature decided to start me off way at the bottom. Then again, I perform "neat tricks" daily that confuse the hell out of others, so it's give and take...

If anything I'd like to work against needless partisan squabbles, and I thought these quotes served to illustrate some of the hypocritical bullshit (I'm sorry, I have Penn & Teller on the brain now) recent ones are based on. I need this on a bumper sticker, preferably next to a yellow ribbon magnet:

While photons have a rest mass of zero, they still have a relativistic mass... you can calculate this using Planck's constant and good old E=mc^2

I saw a very enlightening Penn & Teller's Bullshit last night on Intelligent Design. One scientist noted that the type of people who make an issue out of intelligent design are a certain breed of fundamentalist who feel that if one word of the Bible is shown to be wrong, then you have to throw the whole thing out. They apply this same ideology to evolutionary theories, nitpicking through scientific journals looking for one aspect that they believe to be wrong, then attempting to argue that if said aspect is wrong, you have to throw the whole theory out. Apparently they don't understand that science operates with the idea that any scientific claim is potentially falsifiable given enough evidence, and when a part of a theory is falsified, you simply move on to other explanations...

I think the question you should ask yourself, if you truly feel that way, is why are you wasting your time reading it? The thing about these quotes is that many of them sound very much like the liberal rhetoric of today, which the mouthpieces of the right (many of them quoted here, such as Hannity, Scarborough, and Tom Delay) continually lambaste the left for. And c'mon, you can't tell me you don't see the irony in: "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." -Governor George W. Bush (R-TX) Yep, social libertarian neo-hippie guilty as charged...

I'm certainly not going to say anything like "evolution is 100% correct." If you can't objectively weigh alternatives and instead cherrypick the facts to fit your desired result, you aren't practicing science, you're practicing bigotry. However, I'm yet to see anyone, namely gregw74, point out either a valid flaw in current explanations or providing an explanation which has any evidence that intelligence is somehow involved in the evolutionary process, epsecially when the natural selection model works fine on its own and doesn't need "help" from an intelligent entity. Ambiogenesis is still up in the air, but that's an entirely seperate issue which isn't tied into evolution/natural selection. We don't know how life started... we have some good ideas, but if you want to say "God sparked life" I'm not going to argue with you. However, natural selection/evolution is on firm scientific ground and the natural selection model can do all the heavy lifting of creating the illusion of design without a designer. The natural selection process does the "designing" with no intelligence involved. So bottom line, "design by natural selection" is in direct opposition to "intelligent design," because any interference in the process by an outside intelligent entity would constitute... unnatural selection. So gregw, I answered your bogus claims (which weren't even yours, but rather those of some random botanist at Answering Genesis). I asked you twice for something new and you've simply ignored me. Put up or shut up. Where is Dawkins wrong?

http://www.crooksandliars.com/stories/2005/08/17/heresWhatRepublicansSaidAboutClintonAndKosovo.html

gregw, are you done being a blowhard-by-proxy? I'd still like to see some more "evidence" as to how evolutionary theories are "wrong"... I answered the last you tried to present, it was something any sophomore biology student could've told you.

And you base this remarkable conclusion upon... So wait, didn't you just say that humans are devoid of purpose? Then why are you making an open-ended statement in which you claim that humanity might have a purpose? You should really take Philosophy 101 and study atheistic existentialism. People much more intelligent than yourself have been bitching about the purposelessness of mankind for quite awhile now... I see humans as products of a biological natural selection process who produce memes through a neurological natural selection process and exchange them in a memetic natural selection process (what Dennett called the "Third Age of Evolution"... for those of you who haven't read him he pretty much picks up philosophically where Dawkins left off scientifically) Before you say humanity has no purpose, you better ask yourself where these natural selection processes are going to take us... I would say that the "singular ultimate purpose" of reality (which I do believe exists) will memetically evolve through the collective thought process of mankind.

This has been mentioned before, but with the debate over climate change raging, I'm really surprised there's not a forum dedicated to Climate/Atmospheric Science. Maybe I say that because I work for a climate modelling group... Anyway, I'd really like to talk about: - What climate forcings are truly anthropogenic in origin? - Is "global warming" a result of these forcings? - What climate change metrics should we truly be considering, especially when assessing a "global warming" trend?

Conjecture: "If [polyploid DNA] had been an important factor in the ‘evolution’ of life, then we should find that the number of chromosomes and/or the mass of DNA per cell would increase as you move up the Tree of Life. The organisms with the most DNA should have had the greatest exposure to mutation and thus the greatest opportunity for evolutionary advancement." Blindingly obvious response: The majority of mutations are either deleterious or provide neither benefit nor harm to the resulting offspring. Comparatively, very few are beneficial. More DNA provides more opportunity for deleterious mutations. Polyploidy itself is typically deleterious, disasterously so in mammals. This is why in science there's this thing called "peer review" that, for some reason, ID people seem to despise. Must be because the evil evolution advocates are all part of a giant conspiracy to defend their inherently flawed idea, eh?

Hmmm... Too bad...

Cool Fair enough, but you have to postulate the former for the latter to make sense. I would contend that any algorithm which is both discrete and deterministic can be executed by a Universal Turing Machine. The question isn't whether the universe itself is a UTM, the question is whether or not the universe is Turing-complete. I think the best comparison is to a strange attractor, trajectories inside of which seem to skip around randomly but which eventually form higher level patterns that are only recognizable after being plotted at length. I was merely trying to say that there is (or could be) a higher level deterministic pattern which we presently lack the mathematics to recognize or describe, except with the possibility of the Global Consciousness Project

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/08/14/harvard_jumps_into_evolution_research_with_new_initiative/

Relative to man's evolution in the past when he made the dramatic change from ape (when traits like speech processing/language became fixed at an enormously rapid pace thanks to rapid ascent up the Baldwin curve) human genetic evolution is at a standstill. For the most part, humans are genetically the same as they were 75,000 years ago. But the memetic evolution of humanity progresses at ever increasing rates. To say humans aren't evolving is rather naive...

Before we begin I'd like to provide a little background to facilitate this conversation. I am asking what everyone has hypothesized through the sum of their life experience (or if you haven't yet, what you would). This isn't a particularly scientific approach, to be sure, but I don't think we yet have enough data to really answer these questions... Anyway, let's begin... agree/disagree! I'm numbering so you can agree or disagree on individual points. A one word answer is fine, and if you want to expound upon that, that's great too. The probabilistic nature of QM is merely an artifact of the observational nature of our inquiry into its inner workings. Because all of our observations take place in the theater of a temporospatial "background" whose state is unprobable via direct observation, its behaviour to us appears random in certain aspects. This is the cause of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. When a background independent theory of the universe is constructed, it will be both deterministic (i.e. conforming in all ways to a definable set of mathematical operations) and discrete (i.e quantifiable in integral terms). For example, insofar as I understand it, Loop Quantum Gravity presupposes such a universe. Given these qualities, the universe will be expressible as a Turing-complete algorithm, and we will discover that time is a mere artifact of the operational structure of the underlying algorithms (i.e. when the universe isn't "working" on "you," it's "working" on everything else. If we were to further analyze the entropy data, and perhaps correlate it in temporospatial terms, higher level patterns would emerge which would give us clues into the higher level state. Princeton's Global Consciousness Project attempts to do just that, and has noticed some astounding correlations in entropy data collected from random event generators (dubbed "eggs") that use quantum tunneling or "thermal noise" to generate "truly" random numbers. For example, here is a graph of variance in the temporospatially correlated egg data surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks: These patterns would seem to suggest higher level deterministic machinery working in the "background" whose state can be probed and ascertained by enough analysis and correlation of seemingly-random quantum events. Ed: Whoa, holy shit, I realized this transcends pseudoscience because I proposed a test! Go me, I think I'm learning how to pull myself out of the throwes of mere unscientific speculation...

Screw you pessamists! 6!

Japan, with a diet of mostly vegetables and seafood, isn't even in the top 10 fattest countries, and tops the list for longest average lifespan. If you're looking for another country to rank up there with America in terms of obesity. try Britain.

Humans are evolving memetically, not physically

Plug one of these lifters in while it's inside a vacuum and it will remain perfectly still. These work by ionized air, creating a pressure differential. No mysterious "anti-gravity" at work. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.