Let's talk a moment about the theory of Plate Tectonics.
Scientists have this new-fangled theory about the continents sitting on huge "plates" that slosh around all over the place and collide with one another. They even say that at one point, all the continents were all joined up together in one big piece! They say they have a lot of evidence, and let's be honest, we're not arguing that there are certain facts we can agree upon, it's simply the interpreation of these facts that we disagree with. I mean, we've all experienced earthquakes or tremors, and this kind of micromovement we can agree upon, but macromovement? The movement of entire continents? I think not! Were you there to see them move? Also, isn't the whole thing rather circular? Earthquakes occur along fault lines and we know where fault lines are because earthquakes happen there? I'm not saying we shouldn't teach plate tectonics in geography and geology classes, merely that we should teach the strengths and weaknesses of the theory, teach the controversy, and let the kids decide. After all, it is only a theory.
More below the fold...
Of course the above paragraph is mostly bullshit. Plate tectonics is indeed an accepted science, and there is a lot of evidence for it (some quite recent). The point is, the exact same argument made by creationists against evolution can in fact be used against every area of science, and this is what some of them are actually driving at. Part of the problem, for some of these people, is that science doesn't deal in proof. It deals in evidence and the most likely explanations for a series of facts.
So, to begin with, let's get a few things straight.
A fact, in science, is roughly equivalent with the idea of data (though humanity studies love to point out that data is what is "given" while a fact is "made"...thanks guys). It is an observation that can be objectively verified. For example, it is a fact that when I release an object, it falls down. It is a fact that the sun appears to rise in the east. It is a fact that earthquakes occur. It is a fact that the magnetic orientation of rocks on various continents align to a point in space as they are now, but if the continents were closer together, they would converge on the north pole. It is a fact that we have a large, though certainly incomplete, fossil record of species that seems to show transformations from one to another while preserving significant morphological, geographical, biomolecular (in some special cases), and chronological similarities. It is a fact that we have witnessed events of speciation the lab and in the wild within the past few decades. It is a fact that we have witnessed novel mutations bringing about a net increase in fitness. Several of my previous posts deal with these issues and more.
A law, in science, is a description of how certain principles operate, typically expressed in mathematics. For example, there are Newton's Laws of motion. These describe the ways that objects behave and finally pin down those really hard observations like "the harder you shove something the faster it moves." I'm not trivializing here - F=ma is a very important law, and it took us centuries to nail it down. Good going, Newton. Likewise, there is Newton's Law of Gravity - it describes to a fair degree of accuracy how two bodies of mass interact with one another in the absence of other forces. There are also laws in population genetics, a field with some notable influence in evolutionary biology. A law is not the "highest" class of scientific ideas - they are merely a subset of them. Getting a law named after you is a pretty cool thing, though.
A theory, in science, is a well-tested explanation that attempts to tie together a large set of facts and laws and explain why they are the way they are. For example, we had Newton's Law of Gravity for a long time (as well as his theory), but it failed in some important aspects, specifically with the orbit of Mercury. Also, his theory had low plausibility. It wasn't until Einstein that we understood why the planets orbit the way they do (i.e., due to the curvature of space-time), and also picked up some pretty cool new predictions, such as gravitational lensing. These predictions, a necessary component of any theory, allow for evidence supporting its veracity, but they don't "prove" a theory true. A theory never graduates into a "law" or any such thing, it either stands the test of time, or is falsified and rejected in the harsh reality of the scientific world. What works stays and gets refined over the years, what doesn't work is rejected and scorned. Sorry, them's the breaks. So, for example, we still don't say that Einstein's Theory of Relativity has been proven true - people are constantly trying to disprove it. However, so far, no one has been able to offer verifiable evidence against it. It stands thus far, but may be replaced in the future. That's one of the wonderful things about science, we go where the evidence leads us, and we're willing to change our minds. Hell, we may even win a Nobel Prize in the process. Sweet! This is also why the "just a theory" claim is so laughable. A theory is a battle-tested and hardened contentor in science. We want to teach our theories, they're the best explanations we have in the world.
Anyways, back to what this has to do with plate tectonics and evolution.
I've heard the arguments I started out with said about evolution all the time. It's really pretty trite, I must say, and five minutes with a google search or a good librarian should be able to clear up these misconcepts. Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, and within a few decades, the scientific debate over the matter was settled - Darwin was right. Now, the funny thing is, I hear people say all the time, "We have evidence for microevolution, but not macro. That's just fantasy." What makes this laughable, beyond its merely being invented by creationists, is that it comes from our rather peculiar time in history. Had we lived when Darwin first published his book, the argument would have been exactly the opposite. Darwin based his theory on evidence from palentology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology and drew a very large picture. He had no workable theory of inheritance, the "micro" of this particular scale. It wasn't until the 1950s, actually, until we had a solid model of that, which allowed for the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Since that point, Creationists have been making a huge effort to ignore or create elaborate explanations for all the evidence that had existed and continues to mount against them.
One of the more laughable comments from creationists is the "Where you there?!" question, intended to cast doubt on any scientific theory, because, as they say, it is supposed to be based entirely on "observable evidence," which for them means only which can be seen under a microscope in a lab. I'm sorry, creationists, but science is bigger and more imaginative than that. When you have a theory that allows for predictions, and can go out and test those predictions, and follow the evidence, well, that's science. For example, Neil Shubin knew that there had to have existed an intermediary between fish and amphibians. He predicted, based on the theory of evolution, when this type of creature had to have lived. He went out and found rock of that age (I may go into how geological layers are laid down, and why there is no single geological column that contains all the layers, in another post), and bam...there Tiktaalik was. More confirmation of the predictions of evolutionary theory, which goes to offer more support for evolutionary theory. Listen, if you want to say evolutionary theory is false, well, okay, you've still got to explain the facts of evolution that we've seen, as well as come up with evidence that the theory doesn't work, and supply a theory that has at least as much evidence and plausibility as evolution has going for it now.
Now, the plausibility bit is important. The old saw is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and that's true. The more prior plausibility you have, the less extraordinary the evidence you must have to make a claim believable. For example, if I am known to love cookies and tell you that I had a cookie this afternoon, you'd probably believe me. If, however, I am deathly allergic to cookies, have shown you how terrible my reactions are in the past, and then saunter in and tell you that I just got done eating twenty-three pounds of cookies, you'd probably ask for some proof or just assume I'm bullshitting you. It's the same in science - the work is still based on evidence, but the more out-there your claims, or the more it directly contradicts all the evidence we have so far, or proposes new mechanisms, the more evidence you have to have to convince people. Likewise, this is why supernatural explanations don't work - they have low prior plausibility and they are utterly untestable. Science is a field in which testing is supreme. When you say you want to insert an untestable, unnatural explanation in there, you've got a contradiction of terms.
Some people say that evolution is a circular argument - the survival of the fittest really means that whatever survives is the fittest. Well, not really. Evolution predicts the differential survival of individuals dependent on the interaction of their differential genetic and behavioral characteristics and the dynamic environment. "Fit" is not a static thing, it changes from environment to environment and from species to species. Sometimes, otherwise fit organisms die in catacylsmic events. Too bad. What you end up with the differential survival of alleles in populations. That's the important thing - evolution is about populations.
Evolutionary theory takes evidence from biology, palentology, geography, geology, chemistry, and many other fields to create a comprehensive explanation for the diversity of life forms and generate new predictions. There are significant controversies in evolutionary theory, but they're not the ones that creationists tell you about. They're about things like gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium and the overall influence of genetic drift versus natural or sexual selection. If you doubt evolution, with all the evidence for it, I would argue either you haven't done your homework well enough, have been indoctrinated against it, or should also doubt that gravity exists, that the earth is roughly spherical, that modern medicine has anything going for (as so much of it is based on evolutionary theory anyway), or that atoms exist. We're talking about the same levels of evidence here.
Anyways, look up plate tectonics sometime. It's a fascinating field, and some of the lines of evidence for it are just great. Science, people!
Lastly, a guy I've had some frequent debates with, Tom Sheepandgoats, is fond of a phrase: "Why should I listen to scientists telling me that my car doesn't work when I'm driving along in it?" It's pithy, I admit. I can understand the feeling behind it - some of science is quite counterintuitive and some of it is incredibily difficult to grasp. However, my response would be that it was in fact science and technology that built the car and explain how it works in the first place - how chemical reactions release energy stored in hydrogen bonds in the hydrocarbon fuel and powers a drive train to produce rotation in the wheels, which interacts through friction with the road to propel the car foward. In fact, it seems more the creationists who want to argue that the car can't work, even though it clearly does. They continually deny evidence put before them, or argue things along the lines that because the drive train can't steer the car or because the steering wheel can't propel the car, cars are impossible, or because they haven't personally seen any tractor trailers, they deny the possibility that tractor trailers exist, even though other people have seen them.
For one example of this, I'm going to go for radioisotope dating. You get a lot of claims about radiocarbon dating being wildly inaccurate or incorrect. For example, Kent Hovind loves to talk about living mollusks being dated to millions of years old, or shrimp, or marine seals....hmm...there's something going on here. His statements are actually true - these creatures have been dated with obviously wrong dates, but they are also incredibly misleading. In one video, Hovind even cites one of the studies he's quoting from, but he doesn't give the title - which clearly states that the paper is about fraudulent dates for mollusks and marine animals and why it happens. Listen, these creatures are filter feeders that tend to live in and feed on carbon-14 depleted environments. This becomes incorporated in their shells and bodies, and then when other marine predators eat them, they likewise absorb depleted carbon. It's true, radiocarbon dating is very inaccurate for marine organisms, and this is one of the reasons that scientists don't use it for those types of creatures! See, that's the other thing. Scientists aren't stupid. They know the limits of their tools and they're careful to describe exactly what they're doing with what and why. You use radiocarbon dating for a narrow range of materials and it has a limited time period in which it is generally accurate. Luckily, we have many other kinds of radioactive dating, all of which can be independently verified by other means. Likewise, creationists often play up the "random chance" element of evolution - the mutations. They always forget the selective elements, or the evidence that mutations can increase fitness. If you need a real-world, real-time example...let's use viruses, Influenza A H1N1, for example. There you go. Thank you, done.
That's about it for now. If you want to comment or debate any of these issues, feel free to reply. Likewise, if you see any mistakes, go for it.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Plate Tectonics - A Theory in Crisis?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Running with the Red Queen
Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, regularly blows my mind with his science posts. He's got a market on really fascinating astronomy items, but let me try to steal two:
First, something weird is going on with our cosmic ray data. There appears to be a mysterious source that's pumping out a surplus of cosmic ray electrons in the 300-800 billion eV range. That's high-powered, which means that the source has to be fairly close - within about 3000 light years. Phil goes into the speculations on what's causing it, and I have to agree with him. What if we determine its direction as coming from "everywhere"? Wouldn't that be interesting? Here's a link to a ScienceDaily abstract from the article itself.
More below the fold...
Some new and exciting news from Mars! Subterranean glaciers! Woo! Total Recall was right! Now if only we can get Arnold in a mechanical woman's suit and...oh...wait...nevermind.
Guys, let's go back to the Moon. Let's get it right, get the technology down, and then head to Mars. We need this as a species. For the inspiration, initially, for the science, second, and for habitation last (but perhaps most importantly). I hope our President-elect is as far-seeing as he has made himself out to be.
Along the lines of making Mars habitable and new findings, to bring it a little closer to Earth, here's an article that details some new extremophiles. Now, this has implications for Mars exploration, if for nothing else then just showing how extreme of conditions life can withstand, if it ever developed on Mars in the first place. W00t! Go life!
Also still in the spacey mood, I'm a little late in posting about this, but a Universal Declaration of Human Rights has launched into space. Symbolic? Yes. Inspirational? I hope so. Likely to do much good? ...Eh. We'll see if this even hits the media.
I'm going to toss a can of worms out there - the newest article I've found on the eusociality/superorganism debate. E.O. Wilson's latest work hasn't been well received by a lot of biologists, and I can imagine that this is only going to stoke those flames higher. It's not a debate I'm competent enough to engage in intelligently, so...have at it bio-guys!
Lastly, some articles more in my field:
First, we've learned that neurons do not regenerate in part because of a down-regulation in the mTOR pathway. Active during cell development, but as the neuron matures, this pathway gets basically cut off. Scientists recently used genetic techniques to silence some of the key parts of this down-regulation mechanism in mice. Lo! And Behold! Neuronal regeneration!
Now, let's be clear. Of the neurons that sustained injury, about 50% survived in the mutant mice, but this is compared to 20% in the normal mice. That alone is a significant finding. More interesting, however, is that about 10% of the surviving cells in the mutant mice regenerated axons, and regrowth increased with time. That's fascinating! Of course, it does not yet provide proof that such regrowth is functional - more time and study is needed before we have a clear idea about that, but this is a great first step. It also tells us that maybe we've found one key in the puzzle - maybe we can get more than 10% of surviving cells experiencing regrowth. Again, the answer is more and better studies.
Lastly, a neurology article that suggests that pure sensory processing accounts for a great deal of our decision-making behavior. As I've said before, I do agree with determinism, but I don't find it depressing, and I can understand how it's a useful heuristic to talk about free will. This article is interesting to me because of its mechanical perspective - these are the kinds of things that we can and should model in neural networks. "But is it conscious?" should become a relatively unimportant question - this is complex behavior that appears conscious, even though it's just signal weights in the brain. Good stuff.
I also just want to say that I'm really busy right now with school, work, and Ph.D. applications. I'll be back next week, but don't expect much from me this weekend unless I just can't handle staring at my regular reading and such anymore.
Other blog writers, do you guys have anything to contribute? I'd appreciate it greatly.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Taking Place Science Quickies
Okay, so, getting back to some of the original intent of this blog, I'm going to toss you guys some quick science abstracts below the fold. Give me some feedback here, if you want, on what kind of stuff you want to hear about. If it were up to me, I'd mostly be posting neuroscience or cognitive psychology, as that's my field of interest.
Anyway, see you after the jump (quantum jump, that is...)
First of all, we have an abstract for a study that shows that development puts constraints on variety in evolution. Now, this article is interesting for several reasons. First of all, it is an interesting question: nature certainly seems to have an abundance of strange creatures...but the extent of this strangeness is nowhere near as large as it could be. For example, look through the creature creations of Spore players. Why aren't there things like that walking around? Also keep in mind, Spore creatures are bilateral and have a single spinal cord. So, basically, Spore players are exploring the design space of vertebrate, bilateral creatures...a much smaller subset of the total possible space. Why is it that creatures occupy only a small subset of possible design space?
This article suggests that developmental factors (basically gene regulation, all sorts of fun epigenetic factors, etc) allow for great variance between taxonomic groups, but less variance within a group - groups begin to occupy more diverse body types, but within a group, they tend to cluster. An interesting finding, overall. I'd like to know what level of taxonomic group they're talking about, so I'll probably be getting the actual paper. I suggest you do the same.
A good abstract on why some people are better at learning languages. Basically, it boils down to a correlation of being able to better discriminate sound differences. Impersonators, vocalists, etc, should be better at learning second languages, at least statistically. Of course, this is not a causal argument - some people may simply have an altered brain structure that would make them good at both. I do wonder how plastic that area of the brain is, however, and if you could train it...something to look into.
Next, we have the hypnotic induction of synaesthesia. Now, i know, I know. "Hypnosis" should set off all sorts of skeptical alarms in your head. I'd be interested to read the entire paper, though, and I'd like to see some confirmation from other lines of evidence - basically, that there is wide-range enervation between sensory modalities and that normal people merely have strong inhibition of these connections. That's about the only model I can think of that this would work for. We'll see. It's an interesting first find, and if it's confirmed by converging evidence, all the better. It actually tells us something about how the brain is hooked up.
Here's an interesting study on individual differences in memory damage as result of damage to the hippocampus. Now, in the literature, the hippocampus is thought to be key to memory formation. Damage that, and you get amnesia. For example, H.M., a famous case, had his hippocampus and adjacent parahippocampal gyrus removed to treat epileptic seizures. Well, his seizures stopped, but he also developed severe anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia for events about 11 years prior to the surgery. This study shows, however, that damage to the hippocampus does not necessarily lead to memory deficits. The authors admit it may be specific location and pathology - we just don't have technology sensitive enough for this, but it does put up a challenge to current neuroscience models of memory that involve the hippocampus. Look for more research in this area soon.
Finally, my favorite, the selective and safe erasure of memories in mice. Now, I read this article early this year for a class, and the abstract's just popped up on Science Daily. I find this one incredibly impressive. One of the basic take away messages is that recalling something is not like playing back a video tape - a steady-state relic of the event. Instead, recall is actually "reconsolidation" - you reconstruct an event when you remember it. This is one of the basic reasons why eye-witness testimony and memory in general is so dubious.
So, the basic paradigm is, you get a creature to "recall" an event, and then you suppress it's ability to form a memory. In this case, by the over-expression of a particular protein in the NMDA pathway. This thereby erases that memory. Now, hopefully this is memory-specific, and it seems to be, at least as far as we can tell with mice and the experiments that have been run so far.
Some people get a little antsy when you start talking about things like this..."The gub'ment's gonna come in an' take my mem'ries!" and such. Well, no...first of all, these mice were genetically engineered to be able to over-express this protein. We aren't. A drug could be developed that mimics the effects, maybe. But that's a long way down the line. Secondly, while there is certainly a potential danger in this technique, it could also be a powerful therapy tool. In fact, the "reconsolidation" idea can powerfully inform cognitive therapy already. On the other hand, the ability to erase particular memories, say, for war veterans, could be a useful tool if the patient so desires it.
Anyway, that's some of the science news that's caught my eyes in the last week or so. I'm going to try to get back on a more regular posting schedule. We'll see if it lasts.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
How big is Big?
So, Okada and I were having a discussion recently on the likelihood of evolution, and it started making me think of the size of the universe, how long it's been in existence, and the inability of humans to really comprehend such things. I consulted NOVA's website (one of the COOLEST places online) and got a few basic numbers, which I'll do my best to break down for everybody and give you some rough idea of just how significant we really are in the universe.
A warning: there are big numbers below the fold...
Okay, let's start off with the concept known as a "light-year." It's a term lots of us are familiar with thanks to Star Trek and the like, but just what is it? Well, light travels at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second (186,411.36 miles/sec). So, with a quick bit of number crunching later, we know that light travels at 9,467,280,000,000 kilometers per year (300,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25), which gives us the distance of a light-year: over 9 trillion kilometers.
So, now that we have that number down, let's go with figuring out how big the universe really is. The closest galaxy to our own Milky Way of any real size is Andromeda, which is 2 million light-years away. That translates as 18,934,560,000,000,000,000 kilometers away. The farthest point in the universe that we can see is about 12 billion light-years away, which is a whopping 113,607,360,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away. Now, keep in mind that's a radius, not an area or anything like that. That is the distance from us, the center of our visual sphere of the universe. There is another 12 billion light years in every other direction. Our visual sphere's volume is a number that is just astronomical...6.141974554241230393692905613093x10^69 cubic kilometers.
I've started throwing around the term "visual sphere," and I think I should elaborate on that a bit. Since we rely on light to see these distances, we can only see something that's as far away as light has had time to travel. So, if it's the 12-14 billion light years or so away from us and sheds light, we can see it here now. That forms our visual sphere of the universe. That means the universe is possibly much, much larger than what we can see.
So, let's say you want to make the ultimate road trip and drive over to Andromeda for the weekend. We've all been in a car going at 60 miles per hour, which translates as 96 kilometers per hour. To drive from Earth's surface to the edge of Andromeda, it would take our interstellar Prius approximately 23,478,260,869,565 years. You can do the gas math for that one if you really want to.
Now, you can look at these numbers and think about how big the universe is. Really think about it for a second...something you may notice is that our minds are incapable of wrapping around ideas like 2 billion light-years. Hell, we can barely comprehend what 10,000 is. Don't believe me? Try this game...imagine a penny. One tiny little piece of copper-plated zinc with the face of Lincoln stamped on it. Not hard to do, right?
Try ten pennies. Ten Lincolns in a row. Not even breaking a sweat, are you? Now do one hundred; ten rows of ten. You've probably seen this before in your lifetime, so no big deal. What about a thousand pennies? That square of 100 pennies stacked ten high. Okay, sure. Ten-thousand? One-hundred-thousand? A million? How high can you go before you can no longer picture the size of that number of pennies? It doesn't take too many zeros before it becomes impossible. (Fun fact: according to various sources, there are somewhere between 140- and 200-billion pennies in circulation today) Do this exercise with seconds (Okada's favorite method) and you'll get the same idea about time.
So, with your newfound knowledge of just how big the universe is, and just how old it has to be in order for us to have seen the horizon of our visual sphere, how is it hard to believe that evolution can and did occur? And is it that much more of a stretch to say that something as advanced as humanity could spring up from the innumerable cellular developments that occurred over the 14 billion-or-so year span? Is it hard to believe that it could *gasp* happen again, somewhere else?
Friday, August 1, 2008
Vacation, and some good links
I'm going to be on vacation, starting tomorrow. I'll try to post some while I'm at home, but honestly, I think I'll probably just sleep most of the time.
In the meantime, I'm sure The Rooster and DirtyGaijin will keep you entertained. If not, however, then just navigate yourself over to Thunderf00t. Always interesting, and hours of videos to watch. Likewise, he has a great number of links to follow for your better education and enjoyment.
Also, I want to direct you towards this reply letter from a librarian. Absolutely brilliant, and what we should all aspire towards. This, to me, is actually a really good understanding of what was intended by the Founding Fathers. Note, this is quite different from what those on the Right (and often those on the Left these days) will say about that topic. Tip o' the electronic card catalog to Skepchick.
Also wik, please welcome our Robot Overlords. This is actually an example of real progress in robotics. I'm most impressed by the thing's resistance to being kicked and moving over the ice. The recovery seems almost...natural...which is so...unnatural. Ah! Uncanny valley! Tip o' the articulating leg to Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy.
Also also wik, go and read about Sonic Hedgehog, or shh, over at Pharyngula. Good discussion. Take some time and read up on evo-devo. I highly recommend it. Just put down plastic tarp for when your head explodes (and oh...it will...).
Anyway, hope you kids have fun while I'm gone. Keep the place clean.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Creationists, the only proof of devolution around...
We're screwed.
Absolutely screwed.
They have fire!
Well, okay, not really. But they can use lighters and apparently don't have much fear of fire. Sweet. Combine this with chimps living in caves and making spears, and I'm about ready to welcome our new, hairy masters.
My real problem with that video is that she is so insistent on "this is cultural, it has nothing to do with biology." My question would then be: "Okay. Well, what if we attempted to do this with zebrafish? How about lemurs?" I think a better statement would have been: "There are very few biological differences between humans and bonobos, and thus a stimulating cultural and educational environment can make up a lot of ground between the two." Biology is still essential (in that some brain structures are necessary for linguistic abilities), but cultural/education is likewise essential.
Also, I'm concerned she has gotten a little too close to her subject and is willing to interpret some of the "symbol" drawings as more exact than they are. The first symbol, okay. Second, maybe. Third, not sure at all.
But I could be wrong.
More below the fold.
In relation to this, chimps are apparently "language-ready."
Sounds cool to me, and goes to show that language, while perhaps still unique to humans, has homologues throughout the primates. The last paragraph is quite good as well. Either way, it's a win. 1) Chimps are naturally language ready and only need the proper environment to begin engaging in it (and perhaps beginning to face selective pressures for it); or, 2) Chimps have extremely plastic brains and can develop linguistic processing areas through environmental processes. Also good news.
In other evolutionary news, a pliosaur has been discovered in Norway. As a fossil, of course!
This reminds me of something...what could it be...oh yes! A liopleurodon! It's a magic liopleurodon, Charlie!
In sadder news, there is this video from the 70's (maybe the early 90's. It does end with a Nirvana video). The really sad part is that creationist claims have not changed at all. We still have to deal with this shit today. It's completely rife with non-sequitors, logical fallacies, and out-right lies. I'd say we should make a drinking game out of this, but we'd all be dead by the end. You can't get even a quarter of the way through without alcohol poisoning.
And this is still going on. (Coincidentally, this is also where the title of the post comes in. "Devolution" is such a bullshit term. When cave fish lose functional eyes, this is an adaptation, because eyes are pretty expensive organs resource wise, and it's much more adaptive to let that organ go into non-functionality if it's useless. However, if there is anything which is evidence for "devolved" humans, it has to be creationists.)
I might devote an entire post to tearing this thing apart sometime soon, but for now, I'm just going to give a one-off:
"A true bird, not a reptile-bird intermediate." Your statement is utterly meaningless. The bird/dinosaur distinction is really pretty arbitrary and gets us a good way into understanding the whole problem of labeling species. It's a functional definition: two organisms that cannot reproduce a viable offspring. But here's the problem: if you trace your ancestry back far enough, eventually your ancestors are not going to be labeled homo sapiens. Where exactly is that line drawn? Well, sometimes it's sort of hard to tell. There's an unbroken line of reproduction stretching from you back to the first self-replicating molecules billions of years ago, and clearly at every step along that line organisms of a particular "species" could reproduce with one another, even though they are all, technically, transitional forms. Birds are still dinosaurs, we just choose to group them separately. Humans are still primates, just like we're still mammals, which are another branch off from the reptile line. Good job guys, seriously.
Now for something entirely sad and disturbing. I really want to know how you can watch this and not call it some form of child abuse.
It's a five part series. Here, I'll link them up.
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
And now back to school work. Ugh.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Quick ideas
I think we're all pretty bogged down with work, so, of course, I'm taking a break to make a post about some science.
Go figure.
First, some basic figures, which I think are pretty cool.
The orbital speed of the earth is right around 30 kilometers a second. That's roughly 10 times the speed of a bullet out of a rifle. Yet, we do not feel the motion because we're in a relatively stable inertial frame of reference. Like being in a speeding car, as long as the car isn't accelerating or decelerating, you can't really "feel" the motion. This is partially why open country roads on flat land are really dangerous: without any reference frame (i.e. hills, telephone poles, houses, etc) in the near distance to gauge your speed by, you can slowly accelerate to huge speeds and just daze out, not even knowing how fast you're going.
Also, the earth rotates at just about a thousand miles an hour (at the equator). The poles don't really rotate much at all. For the same reason as above, we don't really notice it. But, you might ask, what then is the rotational speed of my location?
Well, it turns out you can take the cosine of your latitude (getting more complex: vector calculus! Figure out your orbital speed by combining your rotational velocity and the velocity of the earth around the sun!) to find out your rotational speed. For my location (roughly 41.8 degrees north), my rotational speed is right around 745 miles an hour! Nice!
More below the fold.
Okay. A little more mathematics, then I'll move on to more interesting things.
Homeopathy. Homeopathy. Homeopathy. When will the quackery end? Let's take one of the most basic principles of homeopathy: "less is more," in the sense that the more you dilute a solution, the more powerful it becomes.
Try and wrap your mind around that one for a little bit.
The extra bit that is required to make any sense of it whatsoever is that apparently "water has memory," and thus retains some "memory" of substances it comes into contact with.
Now, I don't know about you, but I find this thought experiment enlightening for this. Think about the 4.5 billion years of the earth. Try to imagine the water cycle. Statistically, there are probably a lot of random water molecules out there which have been floating around in someone's bladder at some point. Now...if we combine "water has memory" and "dilution makes it more potent," well...I think you can see where we're going with this.
Another thing: the 30C dilution. I'll link here for a humorous discussion of it (good to see that the first responder to the post was basically a shut down).
30-C basically means that one part "medicine" is diluted into 1 x 10^30 parts water. That's a really big number. How big you ask? Well, I've done some calculations:
If we create an arbitrary cylinder in space, defined with a radius of 1 AU (astronomical unit, the distance between the sun and the earth, 149,597,870,691 meters, or, if you prefer, 149.6 x 10^6, and the thickness of the sun's diameter (6.955 x 10^8 meters) (Bad Astronomer! Please don't kill me for this! And if any of the math needs to be updated, let me know!), then, converting our values to centimeters (we're going to discuss volume, and hence, cubic centimeters), we have have roughly a radius of 14,960,000,000,000 (149.6 x 10^11 centimeters) and a thickness of roughly 69,550,000,000 centimeters (6.955 x 10^10 centimeters). Thus, we have an area of 703,093,462,421,641,470,437,121,129 centimeters squared (7.03 x 10^26) (pi x r^2). To find the volume, we simply multiply by the thickness, leaving us with roughly 4.87 x 10^37 cubic centimeters of volume in an arbitrary cylinder between the earth and the sun.
Let's compare. 4.87 x 10^37 and 1 x 10^30. Now, there is a several order of magnitude difference here. One away from the difference between a millimeter and a kilometer. That's nothing to sniff at; but there is a very important point to be shown here. The pure volume which they are talking about (assuming they use milliliter drops, which, would seem reasonable) is comparable to the volume of space between the suns and planets. There simply isn't enough water on earth to dilute something that much! We have about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water on earth. That would be 130,000,000,000,000 cubic centimeters, or 1.3 x 10^14 milliliters.
Think about that for a second. There are many, many orders of magnitudes difference between the amount of water on earth and the supposed dilution ratio of homeopathic remedies. At this point, we are left with two conclusions. A) There really is no "medicine" in them at all - they're just some saline solution; or B) The dilution rate is actually much less, and by homeopathy's own reasoning, it shouldn't work very well at all. If it does "work" so well when the dilution is less...well, this is in fact a good sign that homeopathy's principle about dilution is simply false (how could it be otherwise), and that modern medicine is actually doing something pretty good for us. Thanks chemists and medical technicians!
I doubt this will convince any homeopathic users out there...most would still go on using it because they feel it "works for them." Well, as long as you admit it's nothing but a placebo effect, or some condition that can clear up quite naturally on its own, then, okay. But are you really willing to spend the often ridiculous amounts of money on a mere placebo?
Okay, on to different topics.
A good, brief abstract of research done on the Burgess Shale, one of the most fascinating fossil finds in biology. I'm sure some creationist is going to tout this as some proof of a global flood, never realizing how many problems there are with that.
1) If, as you say, everything was created just as it is now 6,000 years ago, then why the hell the funky body designs here? Granted, in the Burgess Shale we can see the beginnings of all the major body plans found today; but this simply tells us that there was a lot of experimentation in body plans early on. Go pick up Neil Shubin's book, Your Inner Fish. He has a great section where he discusses this. Also, catch him on a podcast talking about the book!
2) If, as you say, there was a global flood, why do we not see more evidence of these kinds of mass deposits of fossils all over the planet? Oh, that's right...because this was a pretty special case where a mudslide buried them to such a depth that normal decay couldn't occur and thus preserved them...and they just happened to be in that localized place. Sorry, no real evidence for that whole "global flood" thing. Come back later when you have some science to back you up.
3) Why are there no modern fish looking things (or, hell, a bunny rabbit) sitting in the Burgess Shale? Well, the quite obvious answer, for the evolutionist, is that those creatures had not evolved yet. This happened in the Cambrian period, before modern fish-type things had evolved, and hence long before mammals. Sorry, creationists, but no rabbits before fishes in the fossil evidence. You'd have us stumped if there were.
For a bit more frightening look into the mind of a creationist/fundamentalist Christian, check out Rapture Ready. They're so...happy...about it. It's a little sickening. Okay, I take that back, it's incredibly sickening.
Need a vaccine against mindless inanity? Check out Thuderf00t's channel on YouTube. It's quite excellent, especially the "Why do People Laugh at Creationists?" series. He's up to 17 right now, and they're all worth it. Thunderf00t, if you're anywhere near 41.8 north latitude, I'd love to buy you a beer sometime.
Lastly, someone's doing research into the great ape's representational cognitive abilities. This should be very interesting to follow, and if I catch anything else on it, I'll try to keep you updated.
Okay, that's enough for now. I must get back to the grind and study.
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