moar funny pictures
Posted on 01/27/2009 6:59:07 AM PST by betty boop
Edited on 01/27/2009 7:16:52 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Citation?
“According to his theory a species is not only entitled but demanded to do anything in their power for further survival. No matter the fall out to other species. Other wise his whole theory falls apart once you limit a species to moral considerations for other species. For at that point you no longer have survival of the fittest but of the willing. Which throws out the theory.”
This would have serious implications for environmentalists and conservationists. Since there is a huge cross-section between environmentalists and evolution proponents, this sets up a major cognitive dissonance.
I suppose the “willing”, as you put it, do NOT survive because they do not serve self-interest. This has parallel applications to the lazier faire economics vs Keynesian economic approaches. Keynes would argue, as would environmentalists, that taking into consideration of others is, in fact, self-interest. It is a social system argument.
The political nonsense is seriously off topic.
BB, unless you want your thread run into the toilet, I suggest you discourage people from trying to argue from consequence.
Evolosers are always saying that. What it really translates into is something like “Hey, if we get good enough with the ad-hominems, we might could skate by with only having to defend one untenable ideological doctrine instead of TWO of em!”
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Irony is so sweet. You talk about the evos hoping to skate by on ad hominems in a post that you start with an, you guessed it, ad hominem. Who is going to skate by with their ad hominems?
Thanks for the laugh.
As a human being that continues to enjoy the observations and learnings of life, I can honestly testify in front of witnesses, there are days, though few, my mind only operates at 4.77 MHz. The rest of the bandwidth is either consumed with emotion or simple isn’t available due to EMP’s (elitist mingling politicians).
Not necessarily. It is my position you must achieve a sustainable balance between preservation and progress.
I was just trying to point out a disjunction in what I see as the views of most radical environmentalist.
As for the economics look at the USA need I say more.
I take responsibility for the sloppy wording about prions.
That section of our book tried to address the inevitable "laundry list" of anomalies when discussing information theory applied to molecular biology.
The point was that the prion contains no message (DNA, RNA) and is not autonomous to the molecular machine. Under the Shannon model, it would a type of "noise."
In sum, when the prion is introduced into the communication - it causes malfunctions either in the channel or decoding, e.g. blocking the successful communication of beneficial messages perhaps as you say by causing other proteins to misfold.
The emphasis was on the communication (information theory) of the message (DNA, RNA.) Prions have no message and are not part of the communication, they are like meteorites pounding a radio transmitter/receiver. They are made of the same 'stuff' but they don't belong there.
I think your point about balance is key. By comparing survival of species to lazier fare economics, another survival of the fittest context, that balance concept becomes more poignant.
When Googling for the answer as to how fast the human brain works, you'll get a range of values. As it happens the first response agreed:
Furthermore, there is no real consensus regarding the computational power of the human brain. Some estimates suggest that it is capable of 1017 FLOPS, or a 100 petaflops.
I, personally, wrote about economics, not politics, if you didn’t notice. By comparing survival of species to lazier fare economics, another survival of the fittest context, that behavioral implications become more poignant.
You certainly have the right to your indignation, but no one save the AM has the authority to do what you propose.
The “message” of an ingested prion protein is to “tell” a native prion protein to misfold. It is not “noise” so much as it is a molecular trap that other prion proteins can fall into, thus luring even more into the “trap” of being a misfolded mess.
Prions HAVE a message, and an essential function, when they are folded correctly. They are part of the message, made of the same “stuff” (that stuff being an amino acid chain coded for by a messenger RNA transcribed from DNA). It is only when the information is “garbled” by misfolding, and able to “garble” by misfolding other prion proteins that leads to the pathology.
As I said. What you wrote made absolutely no sense in the way you wrote it, betrayed a deep ignorance of molecular biology and no actual knowledge of prions, and would make no sense to anybody who possesses this knowledge.
Luckily in your case I don't think your “target audience” is either in possession of this knowledge or desires to know anything about Molecular Biology; and they will be well served by reading what you wrote, as it will not actually increase their knowledge of Molecular Biology.
Just because I haven't encountered Szostak before does not show that I know nothing about his line of investigation. He seems (from the YouTube video) to follow the general direction laid out by Harold Morowitz. Morowitz actually made it into A-G's and my book, Timothy —
...Harold Morowitz has done work precisely in this area [e.g., abiogenesis]. He did the probability calculations respecting the chance origin-of-life scenario, and decided that conjecture simply doesn’t hold water. So, [then] he based his origin belief on the self-ordering power of the elements of the periodic table. In other words, he does not regard the “primaeval soup” scenario as a plausible paradigm for the origin of life. It seems he thinks that biological life ... is simply “a natural extension of the laws of physics and chemistry.”Another key objection to Morowitz's model was raised by Dean Overman:... Viewed panoramically, Morowitz’s origin myth has a compelling logic to it. Life, in his view, arose through a series of levels, each more complex than the last. First were empty vesicles dividing and fusing like oil drops, then vesicles with simple chemistries inside. Among these were vesicles with the means for making their own components. When one of these cells “discovered” nitrogen, the next step was enzymes and the richer chemistries they entail. Finally came the enzymatic production of nucleic acids. With this development, the cells had the ability to keep a separate record of their genetic information; they could mutate and evolve. If Morowitz is right, the potentially unending regression … bottoms out in the laws of chemistry, which arise, in turn, from quantum mechanics. In the end, it is simple physics that gives rise to … the vesicles. Providing a buffer against the randomness of the environment, they allow for the formation of the delicate chemical arrangements which otherwise would be unlikely to emerge at all. [Quoting George Johnson here, Fire in the Mind, 1995, p. 225f]
...But you know what — it still doesn’t explain where the physico-chemical laws came from, nor how the periodic table got started. Which as already noted, is seemingly an evolutionary development itself.
The paradigm for the emergence of life contains algorithms which must have at least as much information content as the genetic messages they claim to generate. The method for such generation is not clear. Because the information content or complexity in the laws of physics is much less than the content in the genome, the gap in content must be explained. The information generation is not likely to flow from the laws of chemistry and physics alone.And Hubert Yockey had this to say:
The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry lies not in some esoteric philosophy but simply in the mathematical fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is much larger than the information content of those laws. Chaitin has examined the complexity of the laws of physics by actually programming them. He finds the complexity amazingly small. [i.e., Chaitin estimates it at 103 bits.]Note the statement, "When one of these cells 'discovered' nitrogen, the next step was enzymes and the richer chemistries they entail...." So cells can "discover" things, and then there are "next steps" when they do. The very language implies the pre-existence of information accessible to the cell, and an ordered process (i.e., "steps") already in place — which, one assumes, a model such as this tries to obviate, since information is not a material phenomenon.
And yet Morowitz's hypothesis itself implies the pre-existence of "inversely-causal information," which Williams calls "meta-information."
In the end, the materialist presupposition pre-qualifies the type of scientific findings that would be considered "legitimate." In other words, from that presupposition, only materialist answers are "acceptable."
And this is why materialist biologists interested in origin of life problems "hit the wall" at Level (iii) of the IC/AP model, every time. They try to explain away the information problem or fudge it with fuzzy language — such as cells "discovering" such-and-so, or cells having the ability "to keep a separate record of their genetic information...".
But what do such statements actually mean?
Indeed, Oztrich Boy — just as Darwin's theory and Einstein's theory are, well, theories, and not laws.
Proteins do not contain messages. Amino acids do not contain messages - hence the Urey/Miller experiments made no further progress whereas the Wimmer experiment did.
If one is focusing on the molecular biology, the observation that prions have no message is moot.
Both in the above article and in our book, Timothy - the spotlight is on "information theory and molecular biology" as an integrated whole.
Information is simply a dead end if all the “information” in DNA tells you is how to make functional RNA transcripts, and all the RNA transcript do is control and regulate and code for protein production.
Does this compute to you?
DNA codes for functional proteins. The only “information” in DNA is how when and where and the recipe for a functional protein.
If the protein doesn't contain any message or information then the “information” is a dead end.
Proteins convey information in chain reactions. Check out “Signal transduction” involving (usually) the phsophorylation and inactivation/activation of proteins by phosphorylation information chain reactions.
For example....
A small molecule binds to a cell surface receptor protein. That protein then is activated and posphorylates a protein that holds inactive a transcription factor protein, and that phosphorylation makes it let go the transcription factor. The transcription factor is then free to go into the nucleus and bind to a specific DNA sequence and turn on a specific subset of genes to produce a specific subset of proteins necessary to respond to whatever that original small molecule was telling the cell to do.
If “information” means anything than it is obvious that proteins contain and convey information.
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