I guess my car video was an airball.

You've got mad stamina to keep going with this Rocket! I'm sure other readers are learning a lot from your posts (I always do).

(April 9, 2016 at 11:18 pm)AAA Wrote: I don't think it's a given that once you have a replicating system you have unlimited capacity to develop everything else. All we see in extant species are systems that can accomplish their task. In order to get from any system to another, you have to have functioning system at every step. Are you telling me that you believe there are different functioning systems going from (lets pick the brain) the most primordial nervous system to the higher evolved ones? Think of all the systems that would have had to exist in between. Is it not speculative to say that they existed? 

Also no I don't want to tell them they are off base, I never said that we should stop origin of life research. I look forward to seeing what they find. I don't discourage investigation into a scientific idea.

Yes, we do believe that, because that's what we observe. Take Invertebrate Zoology, next semester, and you'll see some of those extant systems that are "on the path" to the mammalian brain, still alive and kicking in their various stages of transition. Same for the other major systems I mentioned. Even more fascinating is Comparative Anatomy, in which you get to dissect a shark and cat and compare the systems of the two, to see their interrelatedness and similarities, despite many of their functions having evolved in different directions for quite some time.

(April 10, 2016 at 2:27 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:

(April 9, 2016 at 11:48 pm)Goosebump Wrote: So theories and laws aren't the same. There can't be a "law" of evolution even with the observable evidence of evolving bacteria and viruses etc? There could be a law of flu virus always evolving to fucks up our noses. But that wouldn't be the same as a theory? Am I remotely in the ball park of understanding this?

There are many laws contained within the Theory of Evolution. One of the most common is the law known as Natural Selection (co-discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace), which states that the gene-sets within a population which are more "successful" (in that they survive to produce children and grandchildren at a higher survival rate than their fellows within the population) will increase the percentage of those genes found within the population, and thus the population will evolve in the "direction" of those genes. Another is the law of genetic inheritance, which states that offspring will mainly (along with "edits" provided by new mutations occurring with each generation) contain the DNA of their ancestors/parents, but will not be duplicates or blends of those parents, as Gregor Mendel discovered with his pea plants.

Got it! So within the Theory are laws, which can be scientifically proven over and over again thus leading to their obvious validity. But the Theory contains parts that aren't yet laws. So the only way to call the Theory of Evolution a Law would be if everyone of it's components that add up to it were laws themselves?

I nailed it didn't I, rare moments! Or I didn't and i'm a sad banana.

The very common misconception is to mix up descriptive and prescriptive laws.

If you "make a law" such as we do with human laws, you are applying it to a system.

But in science, all we are ever doing is describing what appear to be laws that are already there. This is what gives rise to all this "breaking the laws of nature" bullshit. Like stuff is happening that we didn't allow.

Get a good whiff of that self righteousness, hypocrisy, ignorance, and arguments from emotion that's whats truly wrong with christianity
and other religions.

Laws are the Lego bricks of science; they are known and repeatable, and they behave consistently every time.

Theories are the instruction diagrams that show you how to assemble the bricks into the model.

It follows that the bricks can never be the instructions and vice versa.

Applying my point to this, the bricks are building up the model of reality, not reality itself. It may be a good replica, it may be excellent, but at no point does it dictate what reality has to do.

It's getting this backwards that causes all this supernatural garbage to arise.

Of course, it may simply be the case that some (actual) laws work differently in regard to some special objects. But calling that supernatural is again premature and pointless. It would just highlight an over-simplification in our model.

(April 10, 2016 at 2:36 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:

(April 9, 2016 at 11:18 pm)AAA Wrote: I don't think it's a given that once you have a replicating system you have unlimited capacity to develop everything else. All we see in extant species are systems that can accomplish their task. In order to get from any system to another, you have to have functioning system at every step. Are you telling me that you believe there are different functioning systems going from (lets pick the brain) the most primordial nervous system to the higher evolved ones? Think of all the systems that would have had to exist in between. Is it not speculative to say that they existed? 

Also no I don't want to tell them they are off base, I never said that we should stop origin of life research. I look forward to seeing what they find. I don't discourage investigation into a scientific idea.

Yes, we do believe that, because that's what we observe. Take Invertebrate Zoology, next semester, and you'll see some of those extant systems that are "on the path" to the mammalian brain, still alive and kicking in their various stages of transition. Same for the other major systems I mentioned. Even more fascinating is Comparative Anatomy, in which you get to dissect a shark and cat and compare the systems of the two, to see their interrelatedness and similarities, despite many of their functions having evolved in different directions for quite some time.

We don't have either of those two classes. Why not say that the mammalian brain is "on the path" to the less developed brain? After all, it is a lot easier to lose genetic information and weaken the phenotype than it is to improve it. If the shark brain was on the path to the mammalian brain, then why has it not changed in so many millions of years? I don't think sharks experience selective pressure for intelligence.

I think your argument is crumbling, AAA. Sorry. Positive evidence is a bitch of a thing, isn't it?

(April 10, 2016 at 11:58 am)AAA Wrote: We don't have either of those two classes.

No matter. You have a library. It's not as if this information is secret or hard to find.