lucaspa

In addition to the 2 species of chimps, orangutuans have a large mental capacity that is easily demonstrable. E Linden, Can animals think? Time 154: 57-60, Sept 6, 1999. And, of course, we don't know exactly the capacity of dolphins and whales. We can rule out the "created" as in directly manufactured in our present form. The evidence is clear that that did not happen. However, there are at least 2 ways that evolution could have been nudged in the past and be undetectable by science. Bascule, your use of Occam's Razor is incorrect. It is the exact opposite of what William of Occam had in mind and the position he argued against. The simplest explanation is not necessarily the correct one.

Good point. There could even still be some microbe that came from among the pool of microbes that lived long ago. Also, since it has been shown that microbes exchange genes via lateral gene transfer, itis not clear even yet whether there was a SINGLE species of single-celled organism that was THE common ancestor. It's possible there were 2 or more and they exchanged genetic material. OTOH, the evidence from the genetic code argues very strongly for a single common ancestor.

That's not true. 997.4 mutations out of 1,000 are either neutral or beneficial. Only 2.6 out of a 1000 have any direct effect on lifespan or reproduction. Human health now is much better, due mostly to better nutrition. Most ailments come from the environment, not mutations. It's possible that, someday, we can change DNA sequences such that no one is born with muscular dystrophy, for instance. But if we wipe out ALL "DNA abnormalities", then we are also destroying the genetic variability within the species. When that happens, we will become extinct. As I said in the previous post: we are not nearly as smart as natural selection. The moment we really start tinkering with the genes to produce a "better" human, then we are hanging out a sign: "extinction sale, everything must go"

I hope you mean this, because there are several flaws in the theory. Organisms don't evolve. POPULATIONS evolve. Evolution happens to populations, not individuals. Read Darwin. Natural selection is a process of PRESERVATION, not elimination. NS preserves good designs and passes them on to the next generation. Natural selection is about numbers. It's not that an "unfit" individual will not reproduce AT ALL, but that it will have LESS offspring than those who are fitter for that particular environment. However, this all depends on competition for scarce resources. No competition, no evolution. Then blindness is NOT a disadvantage in that particular environment, is it? You are working with the fallacy that some traits are universally good and some are universally bad. That's simply not true. Every trait comes with costs as well as benefits. It takes energy during embryonic development to make an eye. An eye is vulnerable to damage. If the environment is such that eyes are not needed, then having eyes are a DISadvantage. That's why we see the loss of eyes in the evolution of species that live underground. There is no benefit to counter the cost. No, it won't. That would happen ONLY if this lineage has MORE kids than all other lineages. Why would this be so? What this does is keep the allele(s) in the population, but it doesn't increase the frequency in the population. So? All this means is that our "environment" now includes medical technology. You have also overlooked the possibility of other advantageous traits. Let's say your child with an allele for stomach cancer later in life also has an allele for absolute resistance to Ebola virus. By keeping that individual alive and his having children, we now also have insurance against an outbreak of Ebola -- those people with the resistant allele will survive -- even with the risk of stomach cancer. A problem with your thesis is that you think you are smarter than natural selection. You aren't. Natural selection can balance ALL the millions of variables in our environment, constantly selecting the best designs available. You, OTOH, look only at a couple of obvious traits, mistakenly pick traits that you think are "good", and would eliminate everything else in that genome as you eliminate the person. Losing that valuable genetic material from the population. So? And if the geek with the bad immune system is a genius? So he uses Tag body spray and fathers several children. Yes, the children MAY have his poor immune system, but they also may have his higher IQ. And some of the children will have their mother's good immune system AND their father's higher IQ. Remember what I said about competition? You are assuming no competition for the medical treatments. Yet that isn't true, is it? The cosmetic surgery you describe is not covered by insurance and is expensive. So not everyone can afford it. Those that can have demonstrated the ability to compete for money. Thus, they have already shown themselves to be "fit". Even if they buy cosmetic surgery for their children, the children will inherit the alleles the parents had that made them successful competitors in the marketplace. And if the children are successful, then the grandchildren will get the surgery. And there you have it: the more "fit" are having differential reproductive success.

I think we have our own poll on reading comprehension. "Who believes in evolution?" is the title of the thread. Not, as you so accurately pointed out, the question of the poll. And we can see that, even in a science forum, that several people did not realize this.

The title of the thread should have been: Who accepts evolution? You don't "believe" scientific theories. You accept them as (provisionally) true becauuse of the data. And yes, the US is very low. Shows the effectiveness and strength of Fundamentalism.

Severian, is there a website you can post with the math for this? Thanks. Also, can you answer a question I had for Elas? Elas stated: "The pseudo meson scale is: 1/8, 1/6, 1/4. but if this is continued in the same manner as the main sequence we get: 1/2, 2/4, 3/6." I asked: "1. Is it valid to continue the pseudo meson scale in the same manner as the main sequence? If so, why?" Thanks

1. The same quote may be used by others, but that's not the point, is it? The point is: is the statement still accurate? You argued that Morris' statement should apply to all science. But does it? IOW, is the statement accurate to describe all aspects of science? Is that 26 year old quote still accurate, by the only standard used in science: the data? I pointed out that String Theory has made lots of progress in the last 26 years. You haven't provided any evidence that the quote is still valid. I'm somewhat dismayed by your emphasis on quotes by people stating their opinion on the theories in question. You aren't looking at the theories themselves, but rather on the opinions of people who are dissatisfied. Elas, you can alwaysfind someone who is dissatisfied with a particular theory. Just look at Hoyle and Eric Lerner and their refusal to accept Big Bang and insistence on Steady State. So, what is important is the theory itself, not quoting opinions about the theory. Especially when you are looking just for opinions that match yours. As Popper pointed out, you can always find evidence in support, if that is all you are looking for. And that appears to be all you are looking for. After all, you never mention any of those working in the field who are satisfied with the Standard Model as a description or String Theory as an underlying explanation. 2. You've confused 2 different theories. The standard model is NOT String Theory. http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~alberto/physics/string.html "Our current knowledge about the subatomic composition of the universe is summarized in what is known as the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes both the fundamental building blocks out of which the world is made, and the forces through which these blocks interact. ... In the last few decades, string theory has emerged as the most promising candidate for a microscopic theory of gravity. And it is infinitely more ambitious than that: it attempts to provide a complete, unified, and consistent description of the fundamental structure of our universe. (For this reason it is sometimes, quite arrogantly, called a 'Theory of Everything'). The essential idea behind string theory is this: all of the different 'fundamental ' particles of the Standard Model are really just different manifestations of one basic object: a string. " So, the Standard Model is a description of subatomic particles and their interactions. String Theory is the explanation of those descriptions by providing an unifying theme: everything in the Standard Model are different manifestations of strings. This statement is somewhat incoherent. In order to "do those things that the old theory does not do", the new theory must do all the things the old theory did do. Otherwise, all you have now is a new theory that does not do something. You're trying to replace a theory that you say does not do things with another theory that does not do things. What have you gained? Your way of thinking seems to be an argument from personal incredulity. Being able to predict as understanding somehow doesn't resonate with you. Perhaps it's not the statement that is unacceptable, but your way of thinking.

The first quote does say mass will be predicted: it depends on the vibrational energy of the string via E=mc^2. An energy E(1) will correspond to a mass(1). So, knowing the energy of the vibration gives you mass of the particle. Now, it may be, as you say, that the energy of vibration is dependent on the compactification. I can't follow the equations well enough to tell. But that would still allow String Theory to predict masses; it would just constrain the compactification. Which, in turn, gives you limits of the compactification and allows you to test String Theory. If yourtest is sensitive enought to detect the compactification necessary to produce the mass, but you can't detect the compactification, then String Theory is refuted. I have read that String Theory is having troubles because there are tests to detect compactification and, so far, none has been detected. String Theory, so far, has been able to be modified to give smaller compactifications below the sensitivity of the tests: Kaku M, Testing string theory. Discover August 2005 http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-05/cover/ Or you can even run that in reverse and use it for prediction: knowing the mass of the particle, you should predict the vibration of the string. If that vibration is impossible, then String Theory is also in trouble.

Richard Morris is a good science writer. However, he is not talking about QM here. As I noted in a previous post, one of the attractions of String Theory is that it does provide a "why" for all of these: the observations are a result of the behavior of strings. Let me agree with Severian: WHY is there a wave structure? You haven't explained the wave structure, have you? When you admitted that your theory could not predict the values that QM or SM predicted, you admitted that your theory is inferior. Your underlying structure can't be correct if it can't give the correct observed values. That's how we initially test hypotheses in trying to falsify them: we test them against KNOWN data. Do they predict what we already know? This is why String Theory has undergone a number of modifications: the earlier versions could not predict what has already been observed.

You didn't give the years of the rest, but look at the DATE! 1980! That's 26 years ago. Thus, this is NOT the "current state of our knowledge". What's more, it is the author's opinion as of 26 years ago. Do you think there might have been some progress in String Theory? When you quote people, you have to check to make sure that what was said then is still valid now. You haven't done that.

It's looking more and more like the problem lies in what you see as "explanation". Let me take this to biology, where I am on more familiar, specific, ground. Surgeons had long known that bone would form in muscle at the site of bone surgery sometimes. What's the explanation? In 1965 Marshall Urist demonstrated that if he implanted demineralized bone matrix (bone from which all the mineral had been removed) in the muscle of a rat or rabbit, bone would form at the site. If he destroyed all proteins in the DBM, then bone would not form. Conclusion: there was a protein in DBM that caused extraskeletal bone formation following bone surgery. Yet is this an "explanation"? Does it satisfy you? The identity of the protein is unknown, the responding cell is unknown, and the mechanism of the protein causing the cell to become a bone cell is unknown. From reading your posts, it appears that these unknowns would cause you to reject "a protein in bone explains non-skeletal bone formation following surgery on the bone." Yet, for that phenomenon, I would say that we do have an explanation. In the years since, the protein has been identified, the receptor on the cell membrane has been identified, the signalling system inside the cell that transfers the binding of the protein to the cell membrane to turning on some genes in the DNA has been studied. However, we still don't know exactly which genes are activated, nor do we know how the products of these genes cause a cell to become a bone cell. So, would you say we still can't "explain" why surgery on a bone results in non-skeletal bone? Of course, there is the unanswered issue that only sometimes does non-skeletal bone form. So, we still don't know why only sometimes do we see non-skeletal bone. It seems obvious to hypothesize that most times not enough protein is released and that there are not enough responding cells. But that doesn't get us to the nitty gritty of exactly how much protein is necessary per cell. Of course, we still don't have the nitty-gritty of the exact movement of each atom in the cell-membrane receptor protein such that we can explain exactly why binding of the cell receptor starts the signalling cascade. Nor do we have the exact movement of every atom in either the protein that is the transcription factor and the DNA such that we can "explain" how binding the transcription factor results in activation of the gene. Do you see where I'm going here? There are layers of explanation. Because you don't have the next layer doesn't mean that you don't have any explanation. And there is the related issue of whether the explanation makes sense to you. There is a difference between having an explanation and whether any particular individual can understand it. You want explanations, for instance, in non-mathematical language. But that may not be possible. Mathematics is a language, and sometimes, like all languages, complete and exact translation is not possible. You must learn the language in order to understand what is being said.

Argument from Authority and selective quoting. If the SM and QT have no connection to what we observe, then they could not have been used, as they have been used, to predict new observations. It's quite obvious that the data make Gross, Barut, and Veltman wrong. Then your theory is inferior to both the SM and String Theory, because both of them predict mass. Which is one reason why you can't get the paper published thru peer-review but try to convince non-physicists it is correct. I understand it, too. Zero charge is a consequence of that particular symmetry group. What else is there to explain? Why there is a symmetry group? You (and apparently Veltman) seem to think that a hypothesis/theory should answer ALL question. That's never been the case yet. ALWAYS you get 3 or 4 new questions that pop up out of every answer. Zero charge is a result of the symmetry group. That's an answer. New question: why is there a symmetry group? But the symmetry group is the explanation for zero charge of some particles. I think the difficulty lies in your misunderstanding of what an "explanation" is.

"String theory, as stated above, postulates the existence of tiny vibrating strings that correspond to the observed elementary particles. Strings can undergo an infinite number of different vibrational patterns, called resonances, whose evenly-spaced peaks and troughs fit exactly along its spatial extent. By analogy, the strings of a guitar can similarly undergo an infinite number of vibrational patterns that meet the same requirement, though we only come in contact with a few of them. These recognizable vibrations are perceived by human ears as different musical notes. Similarly, the vibrations which strings undergo not only correspond to, but actually create, the different masses and charges observed in the various elementary particles. In other words, an elementary particle's precise properties are caused by the vibrations of its string. This connection is best illustrated for the mass of a particle. A vibrational pattern's energy is related to its amplitude, or the maximum height of a wave peak (or depth of a trough) and the wavelength, or the distance between one peak and the next. Greater amplitude and greater wavelength correlate with greater energy - that is, the more frenetic the vibrations of the string, the greater energy it has. Since energy is related to mass by Einstein's famous equation E=mc2, high vibrational energies correspond to high-mass particles." http://library.thinkquest.org/27930/stringtheory1.htm http://superstringtheory.com/basics/basic3a.html and following pages: "This is classical string. When we add quantum mechanics by making the string momentum and position obey quantum commutation relations, the oscillator mode coefficients have the commutation relations [equation in here on page] The quantized string oscillator modes wind up giving representations of the Poincaré group, through which quantum states of mass and spin are classified in a relativistic quantum field theory. So this is where the elementary particle arise in string theory. Particles in a string theory are like the harmonic notes played on a string with a fixed tension. By looking at the quantum mechanics of the relativistic string normal modes, one can deduce that the quantum modes of the string look just like the particles we see in spacetime, with mass that depends on the spin according to the formula: [equation did not copy]"

Acutally, String Theory does all of these. Defining mass in non-mathematical terms is simply convenience and involves translating the language of mathematics to English. ST says mass is the result of vibration of strings. Thus mass exists because strings vibrate and the vibration is the cause of mass. You need to read more on String Theory. Of course, ST does not tell you the source of strings. But then, it doesn't have to. The implication here is that the Standard Model can explain this in mathematical terms. If you don't understand the math (like I don't), too bad for you. That is our failure, not a failure of the theory. Your theory must "predict", from the statements of the theory, that charge will exist and have the values it does. If the allocation of the fractional charge to quarks is wrong, then that hypothesis would not give the charges we see. Your theory must give the charges we see. Does it? "why particles have there [sic] paticular mass" is predicting mass. Does your theory really predict what the particular mass of particles is? I know that isn't true. The "waves" in QM are often probability waves, not movements. This is one of the assumptions about the physical universe necessary to do science. It is usually put as the universe is accessible. That is, we CAN understand it (explain it). This isn't a fact as it is stated, but an assumption.

No. The idea that you need to know what something "really" is is an illusion. Things are what they are. What you are trying to do is impose your ideas on the universe instead of figuring out what the universe is. Charge is defined as a property that does such and so to other particles. Anything beyond that is philosophy and not science. What people are trying to tell you is that your theory must "predict" knowledge we already have AND predict new knowledge we should find IF it is true. This is the standard method of theory evaluation. Instead, as far as I can see, your "theory" is simply a philosophical interpretation of current theories. That is outside the scope of science. Try a philosophical journal. There are several, including the Journal of the Philosophy of Science Association: http://philsci.org/ Look at the site, get the Instructions for Authors for the journal, and submit your paper.

Not necessarily "picky". You can make a reasonable argument that the concept of Allah has strayed so far from the concept of Yahweh that the two now are separate, despite the common ancestry. What Allah wants from human beings is very different than what Yahweh wants in either Judaism or Christianity. Also, the very concept that the final revelation is a book instead of 1) intervention in history (Judaism) or 2) a person (Christianity) can be said to make Allah a different deity. Think of it as "descent with modification" into an entirely new species.

Does everyone realize that the idea that Darwin's theories are a "dangerous idea" is stolen from the title of a book by Daniel Dennett? The book is called Darwin's Dangerous Idea. The title refers to natural selection, not common ancestry. (BTW, Darwin did not advocate a single common ancestor, but rather several -- basically ancestors to the Classes seen in the Cambrian). Dennett's thesis is that natural selection is a dangerous idea. Because natural selection is an algorithm to get design: follow the steps without the use of intelligence and design is guaranteed. This concept of design not requiring intelligence is, says Dennett, dangerous to EVERY aspect of human endeavor. Philosophy, engineering, politics, science, etc. Not just to religion. Dennett refers to it as a "universal acid" that eats away at our concept of ourselves and the universe. Now, I don't agree that theism is a dangerous idea in and of itself. If you want to expand this to "beliefs masquerading as facts" and include militant atheism and the belief that religion is the most dangerous idea, then I could agree. "Beliefs masquerading as facts" is indeed a dangerous idea whenever it happens. But since most of theism, including Christianity, doesn't do that, it doesn't qualify. Fundamentalism does qualify. "Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, The Religious Aspects of Evolution, 2d ed. 1890, pg 68.