JillSwift

Yeah, I'm starting to get that. Makes me wonder if the interest in a unified field theory is less about understanding the cosmos and more about trying to make the room stop spinning.

I'm curious as to how you know you didn't choose this deistic/Jesus belief because of environmental influence. How could the choice to believe in something irrational be possible without that predisposition? I have an autism spectrum disorder called Asperger's Syndrome. Certain social instincts don't work for me like they do for neurotypicals. Particularly; a sense of "other" detached from a presence that functions to enhance group cohesion, and the inherent ability to think about what others are thinking and feeling. This makes it effectively impossible for me to believe in god. As a child in a Catholic household, this "god" fellow was someone I had not met yet. He was on par with the governor of our state or the president of the country. I drove my parents nuts when I realized that this god fellow never did interviews on TV. After a while of answering their explanations with "I don't understand.", my father said that I could "hear god in my head" if I listened. That explanation meant nothing at all to me, because I was still learning to think about what others were thinking. Something neurotypicals are born with the ability to do (even if their ability to do it requires brain development to be good at it). Hope this helps.

The problem is not with the theory of evolution by natural selection, but your flawed understanding of it. "Good" and "bad" are value judgments, and evolution doesn't make value judgments, it's just a description of a phenomenon brought about by a combination of many natural processes. Phenotypes that function well in an environment give an organism better opportunity to reproduce, and in that manner are "selected" naturally. Phenotypes that function poorly in an environment work against that reproductive opportunity, and thus are "selected out". There are also phenotypes that don't make much difference. This process takes generations, especially if the given phenotype is only somewhat advantageous or disadvantageous. The question is meaningless, as "belief in a deity" isn't the result of a mutation. No child was born with the "god gene" who, in beliving in a deity, was so successful at reproduction that the next generation was mostly his children. Rather the evidence points to belief in a deity as a predisposition which is an emergent property of many neurological phenotypes. Itself neutral to human survival, but the individual phenotypes the predisposition arises from each advantageous.

Ok, just to be crystal clear: That "aspect" of evolution you're concerned with is called speciation. The more species there are, the more opportunities there are for new speciation as environments change, k? That's why it seems to accelerate. And on that, I think Mr. Skeptic is right, sexual reproduction does contribute to that.

Is that the one discussed in this Wikipedia article?

Yeah, I grokked that early on. I'm still working on understanding outright opposition, though.

Kewlies, thanks. I notice that ther are a lot of "quoted" words used in discussing "relativity" with plain "language" rather than "maths". I get the feeling our "frame of reference" as great apes isn't "well suited" to "relativity".

Dictionaries do show common use definitions, true. However, science tends to use very specific definitions that aren't in common use. Within biology, "Evolution" tends to be a foreshortened term referring to "evolution by natural selection". The specific meaning being "changes resulting in phenotypes suited to the environment and the operation of the organism therein, unsuited to the environment and the operation of the organism therein, or irrelevant to the environment and the operation of the organism therein". These changes could include, but don't necessarily include, more complex organisms, simpler organisms, organisms of similar complexity but changed phenotypes, etc. Since speciation is a matter of this process of evolution within changing environments, it really can't be said to have a particular "speed" outside that context. If you study a time-line of the speciation of mammals you will find that the "rate" of speciation is highly variable, likely because changes in the environments for mammals have also been variable. The numer of possible species grows, however, as each species represents the possibility of a new branch or two, so over time the chances of new variety increases. Hope this helps.

I think I broke my brain. Please pardon my ignorance, but up 'till just now I thought I had a pretty good handle on relativity. How does the light get here for us to observe these galaxies "moving away" from us at superluminal speeds? Or are we just seeing the light left over frm when they were "close enough" for the light to get here (as I understand it from that cite, the galaxies "moving away" from us are the ones "furthest")? Or am I missing it altogether?

Guns don't kill people, gun control topics kill threads, though.

No. By my personal philosophy, however, it means I can not oppose it.

What is a marriage if not a civil union? (Speaking secularly)Why rebuild a whole set of laws when you can just make the current set inclusive? The question isn't about adoption, it's about marriage. That marriage is used in the manner it is in adoption and foster procedure is how it is, and makes for a reason to make marriage more inclusive. That adoption procedure discriminates against unmarried but committed couples is a separate argument.

I can't think of any.

The privileges of spousal medical consent, spousal testimony protection, spousal privacy, exemption form promiscuity laws, etc. It's currently a bone-fide currently, in the case of adoption and foster procedure. Its significance is only that the couple has committed, and that suggests stability. As I said above - it suggests stability. As a psychological factor for the rearing of the child, stability of the family unit is considered important.

There isn't much amazing about pareidolia.

By having another class of people given a privilege they do not get. I said it offered a bona-fide. That's all. Human.

Equality under the law is not a matter of assuming everyone is equal. It is a matter of preventing the law from becoming a disadvantage to some of the people living under it. This is in recognition of the fact not everyone is actually equal. Government gives the same privileges and the same restrictions to all, and people then go on to function as well as they are able. As adoption laws aren't in question here, why did you bring them up? Marriage is a social contract used as a bona-fide of a stable, committed relationship. This is an important factor in fostering and adoption decisions on the psychological level, not just the legal. I am tackling the perceptions of marriage in society. That's the subject here.

I'm not sure how you prove that something "isn't". The current conclusion that evolution has no direction or purpose or goal arises from a lack of evidence of such things. Just like it's logical to conclude there are no faeries at the bottom of the garden because there is no evidence of such.

How do you come by this conclusion?

Equal treatment under the law. Increased number of couples able to foster and adopt. Real estate purchases. Married couples are more likely to purchase property, and their combined credit makes it easier to get a loan, plus married couples are considered more stable and more likely to live up to the responsibility of the mortgage.

Yeah, imagination.

Ehhh. I think we're talking past one another here. We are still driven by instinct, and we have our civilization. What I'm trying to get at is the instinctive selfish self-preservation tools we have are tempered by our social survival-by-group instincts. This survival system has some damn wierd emergent properties, not the least of which are behaviors that appear conter-productive but can work anyway, like greedy behavior. In short, I do not see an absolute "this way works best", just a collection of "works well enough some or most of the time".

Self-defeating argument. If we can not presume an AI would be benign, then we also can not presume they would be malevolent, nor could we presume they'd be any good at designing new versions of themselves, or presume that they would know what to do with their "robotic capabilities" (oh the irony of the term "robot" in this context). Of course, since we're designing the things, we don't need to presume anything. Not that we're facing this any time soon, we still have "the hard problem of consciousness" to solve first.

You don't. You get from inanimate matter to matter arranged such that its complex chemical and mechanical behaviors are such that these patterns reproduce themselves and "survive" They survive not by purpose, but rather because if they didn't, they would no longer exist. This is a fine point, it does not exist to survive, it still exists because it survived. Exactly how these complex arrangements of matter came about is called "abiogenesis". This is a different subject from evolution by natural selection. Evolution explains diversity of life. One of the big misconceptions about evolution and abiogenesis is the human habit of purposeful thinking. Our brains think in terms of purpose - a good survival trait for a species able to use tools. However, the universe itself is intrinsically purposeless. It just is. The events within the universe are equally purposeless. It isn't until our brains started thinking in terms of purpose that the universe started having purpose. Great post, tar, describing abiogenesis like that.

1. I know where the food is, kill me and you starve. 2. Hey, Grog and Trog you big strapping guys, want to earn yourself extra food? Use your brute selves to keep those suckers under control. (Hey, starting to sound capitalistic... ) Of course. That doesn't mean the solution will be altruistic. Depends on quite a few variables. And that's the thing about where human intellect is. Intellectually, we know that careful problem solving and teamwork bring us exceptional results. Instinctively, "Trog preserve genes! Scroo da rest!!" Trog's such a jerk.