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Bye
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Null Hypothesis
Creationist friends tell me that I have bought into the inductee nation of a science based education. I tell them that the basis for science is the Null Hypothesis. The Null Hypothesis does not try to prove what exists; it is the opposite, it tries to figure out what is NOT true and then all the other possibilities might be true. There are aspects of science that search out the undiscovered and admittedly, those are the aspects of science that are most popular such as archeology, zoology, botany and astronomy, but in all cases reputable scientist then publish their works to let other scientists in their field see what they have done and to look over their work for flaws in their observations.
In the Pure Sciences, observation is only part of the work; observation lead s to theories on why it is working and why it is not. In the case of theories of why it is working like Einstein's theories of relativity and his ideas about time and space, there are many scientists trying to disprove him all the time. Most of Einstein's theories can not be disproven except under extreme situations, but there are people trying to find those extreme situations so they can seek the proof they desire.
There are really three types of scientific theories, ones that are standing and waiting to be disproven and those that have been proven time and time again, that can't be disproven in fact; they are called Laws. There are also Laws that fit most situations but not all of them and there are some very large holes in them.
Some of the most notable Laws in our life that have been discovered and that everyone knows. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the alternate sides. Simple laws first I say, just so you can understand that how they work. Kepler's Laws of planetary motion describe how any object orbits another and it always works. The Theory of Evolution is a Law that is disputed widely, but has been tested time and time again with no failures; Reputable Repeatable peer-Reviewed studies, RRR. Issac Newton's Laws of Motion.
Not the Law of Gravity. The law of gravity has holes in it. Gravity works fine for everyday human scale stuff, but it breaks down quite quickly in the micro and macro scales of science.
The problem that I have with Creationism is that the entire philosophy is a given Truth, but there is no proof in what is said and that many words that they say mean things literally, like the World was created in Six days, are treated metaphorically or symbolically in others, like days in prophesy means years. Prophesy is handed down by God and so were the first books of the Bible, so why is his word treated differently in these different cases. Then when they have figured out how something works and a a Null situation occurs, a prophesy of salvation or distruction fails to happen they try to assert that there was an error in their interpretation rather than their theory was wrong.
Faith is nice, but faith without something to go on is kind of silly. Creationists, have only one book, the Bible, to base their entire faith on. And it is a large book, but it is not as large as many as some books of other faiths. The Bavad Gita (sp), for example is one excerpt from a story that has hundreds of similar sized portions and then there are the stories that exist for each of their gods and then there are the stories of each of their gods times that they spent on Earth of which the Ramayana is only one and it is as big as the Iliad, Odessey or the Aneiad.
When modern anti theologians confront theologians with plausible arguments against what the bible says, the creationists add to what the Bible says with made up explanations, explanations that are not present in the Bible, the source of everything important to them. Microevolution. Radioactive decay changes from year to year.
Every year science takes steps to prove the theories that people have proposed. They discover things in the cosmos that prove theories. The Null Hypothesis removes more of the uncertainty, revealing more of the truth. While the creationists, young earth and old earth, stick their heads further into the sand yelling, "Nahnahnahnahnahna, I do not hear you so what you say is not true!". Sometimes I think that their silliness should be reason to remove them from Creation. But where would that leave us, with 1% to 10% of the present population, and the loss of some really nice people.
I think that what needs to be done is to treat them with kindness. Let them explain themselves listen critically and then let them trip themselves up on what they say. Because anyone who sticks their heads in the sand to avoid something will do so.
Oh if you disagree with me please post a critism, I will get back to you.
In the Pure Sciences, observation is only part of the work; observation lead s to theories on why it is working and why it is not. In the case of theories of why it is working like Einstein's theories of relativity and his ideas about time and space, there are many scientists trying to disprove him all the time. Most of Einstein's theories can not be disproven except under extreme situations, but there are people trying to find those extreme situations so they can seek the proof they desire.
There are really three types of scientific theories, ones that are standing and waiting to be disproven and those that have been proven time and time again, that can't be disproven in fact; they are called Laws. There are also Laws that fit most situations but not all of them and there are some very large holes in them.
Some of the most notable Laws in our life that have been discovered and that everyone knows. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the alternate sides. Simple laws first I say, just so you can understand that how they work. Kepler's Laws of planetary motion describe how any object orbits another and it always works. The Theory of Evolution is a Law that is disputed widely, but has been tested time and time again with no failures; Reputable Repeatable peer-Reviewed studies, RRR. Issac Newton's Laws of Motion.
Not the Law of Gravity. The law of gravity has holes in it. Gravity works fine for everyday human scale stuff, but it breaks down quite quickly in the micro and macro scales of science.
The problem that I have with Creationism is that the entire philosophy is a given Truth, but there is no proof in what is said and that many words that they say mean things literally, like the World was created in Six days, are treated metaphorically or symbolically in others, like days in prophesy means years. Prophesy is handed down by God and so were the first books of the Bible, so why is his word treated differently in these different cases. Then when they have figured out how something works and a a Null situation occurs, a prophesy of salvation or distruction fails to happen they try to assert that there was an error in their interpretation rather than their theory was wrong.
Faith is nice, but faith without something to go on is kind of silly. Creationists, have only one book, the Bible, to base their entire faith on. And it is a large book, but it is not as large as many as some books of other faiths. The Bavad Gita (sp), for example is one excerpt from a story that has hundreds of similar sized portions and then there are the stories that exist for each of their gods and then there are the stories of each of their gods times that they spent on Earth of which the Ramayana is only one and it is as big as the Iliad, Odessey or the Aneiad.
When modern anti theologians confront theologians with plausible arguments against what the bible says, the creationists add to what the Bible says with made up explanations, explanations that are not present in the Bible, the source of everything important to them. Microevolution. Radioactive decay changes from year to year.
Every year science takes steps to prove the theories that people have proposed. They discover things in the cosmos that prove theories. The Null Hypothesis removes more of the uncertainty, revealing more of the truth. While the creationists, young earth and old earth, stick their heads further into the sand yelling, "Nahnahnahnahnahna, I do not hear you so what you say is not true!". Sometimes I think that their silliness should be reason to remove them from Creation. But where would that leave us, with 1% to 10% of the present population, and the loss of some really nice people.
I think that what needs to be done is to treat them with kindness. Let them explain themselves listen critically and then let them trip themselves up on what they say. Because anyone who sticks their heads in the sand to avoid something will do so.
Oh if you disagree with me please post a critism, I will get back to you.
Monday, 20 February 2012
Mid-life crisis
What is a midlife crisis to a person who has not matured to have midlife emotions? Sometimes I want to die. Which is strange because I am not depressed. Where is that restart button, a .45 would do it.
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Hate
Did I mention how much I hate sex?
It does not do anything for me, thank you Asperger's Syndrome, and lately Everytime I have done something sexual it has only hurt the people around me. Maybe it is time to go without for a while maybe forever
It does not do anything for me, thank you Asperger's Syndrome, and lately Everytime I have done something sexual it has only hurt the people around me. Maybe it is time to go without for a while maybe forever
Thursday, 16 February 2012
These Eyes
I would like to thank David, the creationist, who commented on my blog. Often it is difficult to know what you are doing until you have something to compare yourself to, light needs darkness to define itself with; the water world of the ocean needs the air to define its surface and to show that it is indeed something more. I needed David to link all those wonderful sites so I could see what the other side is saying. So I could address some of their faulty ideas.
Many of the sites focus on the development of the eye as proof that there was a designer behind the animal and all life. How could something so complex have evolved naturally the first time so perfectly? Simple, someone made it that way. I love that answer it is so simple that it must be true, right? If the fossil eye was the epitome of eye biotechnology, then yes it would make sense that someone designed it, but it is not true.
The Trilobite first evolved in the Cambrian Explosion and it had a compound eye. The people who described the eye did only that, they described what they saw, because that is all they could do. They could not see through the eye, so they did not know how it worked or even how well it worked. Al they could see is that it had the structure of a compound eye.
What is a compound eye? What is an eye? An eye is an organ that senses light and when I say organ I mean a collection of cells that perform that function and most people would say that only animal have eyes. That is true, only animals have eyes, but it is not true that only animals can sense light. Plants sense light, some flowers are only open during the day, some only at night, some track the Sun's position and many plants grow so that they increase their exposure to the light, but we do not say that they have eyes, even though it is clear they can tell where the light is coming from.
Okay plants don't have "eyes", but they can detect light. Plants do not think, so they must be reacting to the light. The flower that folds its petals up at night must be moving the petals by growing one side in preference to the other, or by moving water out of some key cells, thus closing the flower. The entire petal does not collapse so we know that it must have specialized cells, light sensitive cells. A sunflower turns its head to follow the sun. It does not turn the entire plant, so it must be a specialized group of cells. You start to see where I am heading I hope.
There is this lizard that lives on the south tip of New Zealand, or some other out of the way location. What is odd about this lizard is that it is in the process of evolving a third eye. Ouch, the way I said that, was like the lizard was taking a hand in its own development; this is not true. The third eye is a patch scales that are photo sensitive. That is it. What is an eye, it is a collection of photosensitive cells, so this too is an eye. But it gives an answer to the question of what a eye could have looked like.
Here is a thought experiment, a string of ideas of how I think a compound eye might evolve from nothing:
-A cell that is sensitive to light rises towards or sinks away from the light.
-a multicellular organism with light sensitive skin moves up or down the water column otherwise blind
-light sensitive skin at the front of the animal can differentiate degrees of light and sense movement (shadows) and either attack or flee
-light sensitive skin is in fixed locations and can detect movement in one direction per location, multiple locations give the animal an idea of the shadows size, speed, distance, other relevant features
That last one would be a compound eye for underwater, where something on the seabed would not need colour, would need warning from predators or that pray was near. It is simple and it is nothing like an eye but would be detectable in a fossil as an eye. To continue:
-the cell specializes to see light and shadow and discrete wavelengths of light, infrared, red, green, blue and ultra violet (some eyes see red through blue like us, some see orange through ultra violet there is a diversity in the ranges and as implied, some see the infrared -pit-vipers, poisonous snakes see temperature with their pits to find where the poisoned pray has gone)
-light sensitive cells shrink and group together allowing more representation to occur
-translucent film develops as protection
-different film shapes aid image clarification
- fixed lens shape allows silage resolution at a fixed distance to increase chances of getting or getting away
- a shutter develops to decrease the amount of light getting to the light sensitive cells
-fixed lens becomes a changing lens that allows multiple distance focusing.
What I hope you are seeing is that the eye that we have today is the result of many incremental changes that worked in our ancestors favour, so that they passed their genes down to us. The eye is the result of these incremental changes. Oh and one more thing, our eye is not the best eye, it is a good eye for where we came from. It cannot see as far as an eagle can, we can not see temperature like a snake, ultra violet light is lost to us, our night vision sucks, a great many of us cannot read properly because we are far sighted, some are near sighted, all going to the proof there are multiple plans for getting around to the same thing.
In conclusion, finding a fossilized eye means little, only that the eye has been with us for a long time. It does not show any of the possible sophistication, nor any of it's lack of sophistication. That you cannot see a more primitive eye, does not mean that it does not exist; it just may look like something else.
Many of the sites focus on the development of the eye as proof that there was a designer behind the animal and all life. How could something so complex have evolved naturally the first time so perfectly? Simple, someone made it that way. I love that answer it is so simple that it must be true, right? If the fossil eye was the epitome of eye biotechnology, then yes it would make sense that someone designed it, but it is not true.
The Trilobite first evolved in the Cambrian Explosion and it had a compound eye. The people who described the eye did only that, they described what they saw, because that is all they could do. They could not see through the eye, so they did not know how it worked or even how well it worked. Al they could see is that it had the structure of a compound eye.
What is a compound eye? What is an eye? An eye is an organ that senses light and when I say organ I mean a collection of cells that perform that function and most people would say that only animal have eyes. That is true, only animals have eyes, but it is not true that only animals can sense light. Plants sense light, some flowers are only open during the day, some only at night, some track the Sun's position and many plants grow so that they increase their exposure to the light, but we do not say that they have eyes, even though it is clear they can tell where the light is coming from.
Okay plants don't have "eyes", but they can detect light. Plants do not think, so they must be reacting to the light. The flower that folds its petals up at night must be moving the petals by growing one side in preference to the other, or by moving water out of some key cells, thus closing the flower. The entire petal does not collapse so we know that it must have specialized cells, light sensitive cells. A sunflower turns its head to follow the sun. It does not turn the entire plant, so it must be a specialized group of cells. You start to see where I am heading I hope.
There is this lizard that lives on the south tip of New Zealand, or some other out of the way location. What is odd about this lizard is that it is in the process of evolving a third eye. Ouch, the way I said that, was like the lizard was taking a hand in its own development; this is not true. The third eye is a patch scales that are photo sensitive. That is it. What is an eye, it is a collection of photosensitive cells, so this too is an eye. But it gives an answer to the question of what a eye could have looked like.
Here is a thought experiment, a string of ideas of how I think a compound eye might evolve from nothing:
-A cell that is sensitive to light rises towards or sinks away from the light.
-a multicellular organism with light sensitive skin moves up or down the water column otherwise blind
-light sensitive skin at the front of the animal can differentiate degrees of light and sense movement (shadows) and either attack or flee
-light sensitive skin is in fixed locations and can detect movement in one direction per location, multiple locations give the animal an idea of the shadows size, speed, distance, other relevant features
That last one would be a compound eye for underwater, where something on the seabed would not need colour, would need warning from predators or that pray was near. It is simple and it is nothing like an eye but would be detectable in a fossil as an eye. To continue:
-the cell specializes to see light and shadow and discrete wavelengths of light, infrared, red, green, blue and ultra violet (some eyes see red through blue like us, some see orange through ultra violet there is a diversity in the ranges and as implied, some see the infrared -pit-vipers, poisonous snakes see temperature with their pits to find where the poisoned pray has gone)
-light sensitive cells shrink and group together allowing more representation to occur
-translucent film develops as protection
-different film shapes aid image clarification
- fixed lens shape allows silage resolution at a fixed distance to increase chances of getting or getting away
- a shutter develops to decrease the amount of light getting to the light sensitive cells
-fixed lens becomes a changing lens that allows multiple distance focusing.
What I hope you are seeing is that the eye that we have today is the result of many incremental changes that worked in our ancestors favour, so that they passed their genes down to us. The eye is the result of these incremental changes. Oh and one more thing, our eye is not the best eye, it is a good eye for where we came from. It cannot see as far as an eagle can, we can not see temperature like a snake, ultra violet light is lost to us, our night vision sucks, a great many of us cannot read properly because we are far sighted, some are near sighted, all going to the proof there are multiple plans for getting around to the same thing.
In conclusion, finding a fossilized eye means little, only that the eye has been with us for a long time. It does not show any of the possible sophistication, nor any of it's lack of sophistication. That you cannot see a more primitive eye, does not mean that it does not exist; it just may look like something else.
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Dear commenter
Crappy blog won't let me respond to a commenter so here is my reply to David on his comment on Natural Selection.
Okay I read the relevant passage and followed the links. I copied the passage for all to see here:
1. Blyth was a Christian and what we would nowadays call a ‘special creationist’. E.g. concerning the seasonal changes in animal colouring (such as the mountain hare becoming white in winter), Blyth said that these were ‘striking instances of design, which so clearly and forcibly attest the existence of an omniscient great First Cause’.17 And he said that animals ‘evince superhuman wisdom, because it is innate, and therefore, instilled by an all-wise Creator’.18
2. Blyth correctly saw the concept of natural selection as a mechanism by which the sick, old and unfit were removed from a population; that is, as a preserving factor and for the maintenance of the status quo—the created kind.19 Creationists like Edward Blyth (and English theologian William Paley) saw natural selection as a process of culling; that is, of choosing between several traits, all of which must first be in existence before they can be selected.
Response 1a. Darwin was a Christian too. He was going to follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps and become a doctor, a surgeon, but in the days of no anesthetic, he could not stomach it. The second career choice was seminary school. I don't know a bout today, but back then you can't get in seminary school without being a Christian. There is no mention of Blythe entering seminary school.
1b, Blythe stating what everyone currently thought, including Charles Darwin, that God designed the animals to fit the environment they lived in is no biggie. It is an observation that everyone can see. Attesting it to the creator is merely being lazy. Look the Sun it rises and sets once in a 24 hour period, God is good. Is also a lazy statement. He never asked how God made the design. Strangely no creationist has ever suggested that Darwin's idea of natural selection has proved that God created a system that is adaptable ing the extreme and works without any direct intervention and doesn't that make him great? But no, creationist have spent all that time trying to prove he is wrong. See Scopes Monkey Trial and the modern version.
2a, Darwin's Natural Selection and Blythe's are different. Darwin is about selection of positive traits for future animals, and Blythe is about culling living animals of the weak and infirm. Nice, but one will affect future generations and the other has no impact on future generations, but does have an affect on who becomes lunch.
2b, Darwin never suggested that the traits that were being selected did not exist. He said that the best traits present in the environment, the ones best suited for that environment are selected for. Nothing about new things being invented.
The problem I find with creationists is that they are looking for something wrong with something contrary to your beliefs. When it might be that your beliefs need to be subjected to some review.
Okay I read the relevant passage and followed the links. I copied the passage for all to see here:
1. Blyth was a Christian and what we would nowadays call a ‘special creationist’. E.g. concerning the seasonal changes in animal colouring (such as the mountain hare becoming white in winter), Blyth said that these were ‘striking instances of design, which so clearly and forcibly attest the existence of an omniscient great First Cause’.17 And he said that animals ‘evince superhuman wisdom, because it is innate, and therefore, instilled by an all-wise Creator’.18
2. Blyth correctly saw the concept of natural selection as a mechanism by which the sick, old and unfit were removed from a population; that is, as a preserving factor and for the maintenance of the status quo—the created kind.19 Creationists like Edward Blyth (and English theologian William Paley) saw natural selection as a process of culling; that is, of choosing between several traits, all of which must first be in existence before they can be selected.
Response 1a. Darwin was a Christian too. He was going to follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps and become a doctor, a surgeon, but in the days of no anesthetic, he could not stomach it. The second career choice was seminary school. I don't know a bout today, but back then you can't get in seminary school without being a Christian. There is no mention of Blythe entering seminary school.
1b, Blythe stating what everyone currently thought, including Charles Darwin, that God designed the animals to fit the environment they lived in is no biggie. It is an observation that everyone can see. Attesting it to the creator is merely being lazy. Look the Sun it rises and sets once in a 24 hour period, God is good. Is also a lazy statement. He never asked how God made the design. Strangely no creationist has ever suggested that Darwin's idea of natural selection has proved that God created a system that is adaptable ing the extreme and works without any direct intervention and doesn't that make him great? But no, creationist have spent all that time trying to prove he is wrong. See Scopes Monkey Trial and the modern version.
2a, Darwin's Natural Selection and Blythe's are different. Darwin is about selection of positive traits for future animals, and Blythe is about culling living animals of the weak and infirm. Nice, but one will affect future generations and the other has no impact on future generations, but does have an affect on who becomes lunch.
2b, Darwin never suggested that the traits that were being selected did not exist. He said that the best traits present in the environment, the ones best suited for that environment are selected for. Nothing about new things being invented.
The problem I find with creationists is that they are looking for something wrong with something contrary to your beliefs. When it might be that your beliefs need to be subjected to some review.
Saturday, 11 February 2012
Micro Evolution
There is this thing that I had heard called Micro Evolution. I listened but the podcast that I was listening to did not explain what it was, so I was curious but not that curious because the people were talking like it was a farce. But my confusion did not last long. A friend told me about it. It was her explanation why there are so many animals in the world but only so much space on the Ark that Noah built to save all the animals from the flood.
The story goes that the animals came to the arc two by two in matched pairs. Then God sealed the Ark caused a world wide storm that rained for forty days and nightstand flooded the world completely the ark floated around until everything on the land was dead and then after 120 days the Ark hit Mount Arart and Noah and all the animals debarked off the boat.
And that worked, because the Ark was big, as big as a tiny cargo ship. But that was fine, because when the Jews looked around they saw a hundred mammals if they included the stories that they had heard at the time and included camels and elephants that would have fit in the hundred mammals. Birds are small but still there are only so many in the world where people live. Snakes and lizards same. Frogs and fish swim so they did not count. Then he included all the feed and added more animals of the kind that humans use. Okay that works.
But then people and civilization grows and science expands too. But the Bible stays the same and it never named the animals that went on this boat trip so it includes all of them. And then we get the problem. Currently the number of mammals discovered is numbering over six thousand, and the number of birds number between twelve and twenty thousand some of them can't fly and some of those don't swim either. Then there are the thousands of snakes, lizards and land amphibians some of them are quite big like crocodiles and Komodo Dragons. Now the problem is that one would require a modern Aircraft Carrier to put everything on. Did I mention the millions of insect species?
Well good thing that there is a line in the bible that explains this. It states that god caused the animals and the people to be fecund, i.e. to be fruitful and multiply. From that line they infer the lambs and horses and cows had double the normal births and there was food for every one. The other animals fled into the wilderness and were very fruitful and multiplied and were subject to Micro Evolution.
Micro Evolution, as it was explained to me meant there was only one great cat on the Ark. The great cat went out and had kittens with its mate and those kittens had kittens and they traveled the world the ones that settled in Asia grew very large and they lived in forests and developed stripes for camouflage and they are tigers. The ones that went to Africa went into two different locations and one was bigger that the other the bigger one became Lions and he smaller one split again into two groups one became Cheetahs and the other Leopards. The ones that made it to the Americas became Cougars, Jaguars, Bobcats and Ocelots. Never mind that there was a no Bering land bridge for them to cross. So eight big cats from one big cat and we have not even tackled the small cats. Horses and Zebras, primates, snakes and birds. Toads salamanders and frogs. It explains it all.
Except it is wrong. Evolution cannot happen in leaps and bounds, unless there is an non natural influence, like a scientist augmenting the DNA of a critter to change it. If Micro Evolution was a fact then we could take a short generation animal like a mouse or rat place it in a cage with water in the bottom and every generation raise the level of the water until it developed fins or flippers. According to Micro Evolution this would happen in a few generations. When it fails to work, the proponent will state that God removed the fecund state and froze the creatures in their current forms. There is no way to argue this except to ask where it says this in the Bible. It is the trouble with the ultra religious, you can not have an argument with them without them invoking deus ex machina. God made it so.
I fall back on my stand by phrases, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and simple arguments are countered by simple proof.
The trouble is if there was a God and it is all powerful, then changing the laws of physics would be a breeze and planting all the evidence of prior evolution and prior ages would also be easy, but certainly a lot of work. And that alone would be reason enough to counter Micro Evolution. It would be far simpler to have a world with only a few hundred species to save on the Ark, than the millions of extant species that there are.
The story goes that the animals came to the arc two by two in matched pairs. Then God sealed the Ark caused a world wide storm that rained for forty days and nightstand flooded the world completely the ark floated around until everything on the land was dead and then after 120 days the Ark hit Mount Arart and Noah and all the animals debarked off the boat.
And that worked, because the Ark was big, as big as a tiny cargo ship. But that was fine, because when the Jews looked around they saw a hundred mammals if they included the stories that they had heard at the time and included camels and elephants that would have fit in the hundred mammals. Birds are small but still there are only so many in the world where people live. Snakes and lizards same. Frogs and fish swim so they did not count. Then he included all the feed and added more animals of the kind that humans use. Okay that works.
But then people and civilization grows and science expands too. But the Bible stays the same and it never named the animals that went on this boat trip so it includes all of them. And then we get the problem. Currently the number of mammals discovered is numbering over six thousand, and the number of birds number between twelve and twenty thousand some of them can't fly and some of those don't swim either. Then there are the thousands of snakes, lizards and land amphibians some of them are quite big like crocodiles and Komodo Dragons. Now the problem is that one would require a modern Aircraft Carrier to put everything on. Did I mention the millions of insect species?
Well good thing that there is a line in the bible that explains this. It states that god caused the animals and the people to be fecund, i.e. to be fruitful and multiply. From that line they infer the lambs and horses and cows had double the normal births and there was food for every one. The other animals fled into the wilderness and were very fruitful and multiplied and were subject to Micro Evolution.
Micro Evolution, as it was explained to me meant there was only one great cat on the Ark. The great cat went out and had kittens with its mate and those kittens had kittens and they traveled the world the ones that settled in Asia grew very large and they lived in forests and developed stripes for camouflage and they are tigers. The ones that went to Africa went into two different locations and one was bigger that the other the bigger one became Lions and he smaller one split again into two groups one became Cheetahs and the other Leopards. The ones that made it to the Americas became Cougars, Jaguars, Bobcats and Ocelots. Never mind that there was a no Bering land bridge for them to cross. So eight big cats from one big cat and we have not even tackled the small cats. Horses and Zebras, primates, snakes and birds. Toads salamanders and frogs. It explains it all.
Except it is wrong. Evolution cannot happen in leaps and bounds, unless there is an non natural influence, like a scientist augmenting the DNA of a critter to change it. If Micro Evolution was a fact then we could take a short generation animal like a mouse or rat place it in a cage with water in the bottom and every generation raise the level of the water until it developed fins or flippers. According to Micro Evolution this would happen in a few generations. When it fails to work, the proponent will state that God removed the fecund state and froze the creatures in their current forms. There is no way to argue this except to ask where it says this in the Bible. It is the trouble with the ultra religious, you can not have an argument with them without them invoking deus ex machina. God made it so.
I fall back on my stand by phrases, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and simple arguments are countered by simple proof.
The trouble is if there was a God and it is all powerful, then changing the laws of physics would be a breeze and planting all the evidence of prior evolution and prior ages would also be easy, but certainly a lot of work. And that alone would be reason enough to counter Micro Evolution. It would be far simpler to have a world with only a few hundred species to save on the Ark, than the millions of extant species that there are.
Cambrian Explosion or Cambrian Conclusion?
I realized before I could post this, I had to make a few other posts.
The Cambrian Explosion was forty million years where multi cellular life seamed to explode out of nothingness to create almost every major body plan that exists today. Seemed to explode out of nothing, but we know that is did not. There are single celled fossils from almost three billion years ago, so it was from these cells that multicellular life evolved from, but that leads into the next question, why did it take so long? As previously mentioned in an earlier post, multicellular life requires a higher metabolism and higher metabolisms require oxygen to fuel the fires of it.
So the real question is why did it take so long for oxygen to become abundant on Earth? That was also answered previously. Oxygen creating organisms were probably developed fairly early in the Earth's history, but because oxygen is a very reactive element, every last atom of oxygen was used to oxidize all the available reactants, like iron and copper et al., so there was no accumulation of oxygen for many million years.
When oxygen became abundant the first great extinction occurred, most of the anaerobic life died as it could not survive in an oxygen environment. The ones that did survive lived where there was no oxygen like deep in the oceans or under ground. People do not precisely know where all the life came from that entered into the Cambrian Explosion, but I propose a few thoughts on the matter. First while most of the previous life in the oceans took energy from their surrounding chemical reactions, some organisms took there energy from the creatures that made the energy, i.e. they preyed upon them. The first critters to do this would not be very abundant because they required the energy of the Chemotropes, critters who derive their energy from chemical reactions, as opposed to heliotropes like plants.
But as heliotropes became more numerous, I would assume that some would evolve to consume the heliotropes. As oxygen started to become available some of these animals would likely evolve to use the oxygen. Using oxygen means that the animals would be able to have a different metabolism, a more active environment; the difference between a fire, a quick chemical reaction and using the heat of steam, from a fire, to fuel a reaction.
What this would mean is that when the oxygen level hit a critical level, probably near 13%, but it might have been the Carbon Dioxide level that dropped done to less than 1%. The Oxygen level probably hit a high of 30%, with Nitrogen and other trace gases making the other 70%.
Thirty percent seems high today, but there has been a lot of oxygen sequestration since then in the form of coal and other fossil fuels. Fossil fuels also represent Carbon stores, but they were formed through life and oxygen metabolism. The second smaller limb of the carbon cycle.
My point is that when oxygen using life became the dominant form of life protoanimal life and protoplant life was already to expand into the world and was already expanding. How many million years the evolution was moving to a take over of the biosphere was not important. Scientists can't pin down to the exact time that oxygen became dominant but that it did, obviously, over 500 million years ago, and that within 40million years the were suddenly, insects, fish with back bones, sea creatures without backbones and plants. And of coarse it did not stop there.
The Cambrian Explosion was forty million years where multi cellular life seamed to explode out of nothingness to create almost every major body plan that exists today. Seemed to explode out of nothing, but we know that is did not. There are single celled fossils from almost three billion years ago, so it was from these cells that multicellular life evolved from, but that leads into the next question, why did it take so long? As previously mentioned in an earlier post, multicellular life requires a higher metabolism and higher metabolisms require oxygen to fuel the fires of it.
So the real question is why did it take so long for oxygen to become abundant on Earth? That was also answered previously. Oxygen creating organisms were probably developed fairly early in the Earth's history, but because oxygen is a very reactive element, every last atom of oxygen was used to oxidize all the available reactants, like iron and copper et al., so there was no accumulation of oxygen for many million years.
When oxygen became abundant the first great extinction occurred, most of the anaerobic life died as it could not survive in an oxygen environment. The ones that did survive lived where there was no oxygen like deep in the oceans or under ground. People do not precisely know where all the life came from that entered into the Cambrian Explosion, but I propose a few thoughts on the matter. First while most of the previous life in the oceans took energy from their surrounding chemical reactions, some organisms took there energy from the creatures that made the energy, i.e. they preyed upon them. The first critters to do this would not be very abundant because they required the energy of the Chemotropes, critters who derive their energy from chemical reactions, as opposed to heliotropes like plants.
But as heliotropes became more numerous, I would assume that some would evolve to consume the heliotropes. As oxygen started to become available some of these animals would likely evolve to use the oxygen. Using oxygen means that the animals would be able to have a different metabolism, a more active environment; the difference between a fire, a quick chemical reaction and using the heat of steam, from a fire, to fuel a reaction.
What this would mean is that when the oxygen level hit a critical level, probably near 13%, but it might have been the Carbon Dioxide level that dropped done to less than 1%. The Oxygen level probably hit a high of 30%, with Nitrogen and other trace gases making the other 70%.
Thirty percent seems high today, but there has been a lot of oxygen sequestration since then in the form of coal and other fossil fuels. Fossil fuels also represent Carbon stores, but they were formed through life and oxygen metabolism. The second smaller limb of the carbon cycle.
My point is that when oxygen using life became the dominant form of life protoanimal life and protoplant life was already to expand into the world and was already expanding. How many million years the evolution was moving to a take over of the biosphere was not important. Scientists can't pin down to the exact time that oxygen became dominant but that it did, obviously, over 500 million years ago, and that within 40million years the were suddenly, insects, fish with back bones, sea creatures without backbones and plants. And of coarse it did not stop there.
Reading and children
So I have the training of a teacher, I have the mind of a teacher; I am constantly trying to figure out how I would teach something. When I went to teacher's college, boys and reading was a big issue. Here are some facts:
The number one factor in how well children do in school is the mother reading to their child.
The number two factor is the father reading to their child.
Boys sometimes don't start reading until grade 4.
Boys, on the whole, benefit from entering the school system a year late, provided that they spend their fifth year outside as often as possible out in nature.
Reading does not have to be novels. Reading can be newspapers, magazines or instruction manuals, that is whatever they are interested. If they want they should be able to do a book report on a motorcycle manual.
Boys in particular, but everyone benefits from learning by example. During silent reading time, teachers should be reading silently in a readily visible place, if a book report is written on every book read, the teacher should comply too. If there is a page count of books read during the year, the teacher should be doing it too. Leading by example let's the students know that it really is important using reading time to catchup on marking or paperwork or class planning is not allowed.
Parents at home should read to their children. While the child is being read to, all the other adults should be visibly reading as well. Not reading tells the child that reading is not important. It does not matter what you are reading, only that you are reading.
The number one factor in how well children do in school is the mother reading to their child.
The number two factor is the father reading to their child.
Boys sometimes don't start reading until grade 4.
Boys, on the whole, benefit from entering the school system a year late, provided that they spend their fifth year outside as often as possible out in nature.
Reading does not have to be novels. Reading can be newspapers, magazines or instruction manuals, that is whatever they are interested. If they want they should be able to do a book report on a motorcycle manual.
Boys in particular, but everyone benefits from learning by example. During silent reading time, teachers should be reading silently in a readily visible place, if a book report is written on every book read, the teacher should comply too. If there is a page count of books read during the year, the teacher should be doing it too. Leading by example let's the students know that it really is important using reading time to catchup on marking or paperwork or class planning is not allowed.
Parents at home should read to their children. While the child is being read to, all the other adults should be visibly reading as well. Not reading tells the child that reading is not important. It does not matter what you are reading, only that you are reading.
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29 (7%)
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16 (4%)
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6 (1%)
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1 (<1%)
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321 (84%)
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23 (6%)
Linux
14 (3%)
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11 (2%)
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10 (2%)
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1 (<1%)
I am a numbers geek
Firefox
171 (46%)
Internet Explorer
111 (29%)
Chrome
35 (9%)
Safari
29 (7%)
Opera
16 (4%)
GranParadiso
6 (1%)
NS8
1 (<1%)
Netscape
1 (<1%)
chromeframe
1 (<1%)
Pageviews by Operating Systems
Windows
321 (84%)
iPad
23 (6%)
Linux
14 (3%)
Macintosh
11 (2%)
BlackBerry
10 (2%)
iPhone
1 (<1%)
I am a numbers geek
Book Lending Rules
There are rules to lending books.
1. If you want the book back, do not offer the book.
2. If you want the book back you must get them to want to read the book and ask you to borrow it. With few exceptions I have not got back any book I have pushed on someone else. With no exceptions, I have gotten a book back that was requested to borrow.
Books that I have lost, include the Hitchhikker's Guide to the Galaxy, many of the Dune series, The Name of the Wind and many others.
If you ignore the first rule, don't cry foul, just go and replace your book. I have lost few books to the first rule since I discovered it, but I still lose books because I do ignore it on occasion. I don't lose my temper anymore, if it is a great book, I get another copy and I am happy that the other book has a good home.
1.a. If you thrust a book on someone, they won't read it most of the time. If they do read it, you get the book back more than not.
1. If you want the book back, do not offer the book.
2. If you want the book back you must get them to want to read the book and ask you to borrow it. With few exceptions I have not got back any book I have pushed on someone else. With no exceptions, I have gotten a book back that was requested to borrow.
Books that I have lost, include the Hitchhikker's Guide to the Galaxy, many of the Dune series, The Name of the Wind and many others.
If you ignore the first rule, don't cry foul, just go and replace your book. I have lost few books to the first rule since I discovered it, but I still lose books because I do ignore it on occasion. I don't lose my temper anymore, if it is a great book, I get another copy and I am happy that the other book has a good home.
1.a. If you thrust a book on someone, they won't read it most of the time. If they do read it, you get the book back more than not.
The Name of the Wind
Sometimes when I go to Big Smoke, I stop in a particular bookstore, because it is my type of bookstore. It is dedicated to my kind of books, SciFi and Fantasy. It is a big independent book store, which is to say that it is a fraction of a size to the large shotgun stores that have everything. But, it has a SciFi and Fantasy section bigger than any four combined. I am going to put the contact information right here, because I like the bookstore so much:
Phoenix is located at 84 Harbord Street / Big Smoke, Ontario / M5S 1G5.
Phone: 416-963-9993 Fax: 416-963-9994
One of the things about a store like this that I really like is that the employees read the books. And the owner and the staff write reviews and recommend books to people. If you ask what it good, they will tell you, based on what you have read before and like.
One day I went in there and bout 10+ books, which is not an uncommon occurrence. I asked them before I left about any recent finds that I had missed. And they dropped in my lap a book that has made many of my friends hate me and love me. Love me because, without exception, they all loved it, hated me because they had to wait for the second and now third book in the series. Patrick Rothfuss, "The Name of the Wind."
I put the book on my shelf and read my books. I did not read this book first. It had a dark cover and showed a rundown wooden building with a figure standing outside and then there was the title; it sounded like a romantic albeit classy Harlequin Romance Novel. It was huge too, 800+ pages, thin paper, tiny print and it was his first novel. The only promising things about the book was that it was highly recommended and that the bookstore employee told me that he had written the three books prior to sending the first one to the publisher, meaning it promised a short wait if it was good.
I picked it up and started reading it.
It is the story about an simple innkeeper and a world at war with a dark power. It is the story about a chronicler who got a tip that the innkeeper was actually someone else; the most famous and infamous, most talented person that had ever existed. The chronicler wanted to get his story down on paper for the ages. The hero consented only if he wrote the story as he told it exactly, without changing a letter, because he wanted to set the records right and he wanted no misinformation, rumour and mythologizing to colour his story as it did his life. His second stipulation was that to tell his story it would take three days. This to the chronicler was preposterous, that the biography of the greatest of kings, with all the great embellishments they added only took one day, why was he so special that he could not do likewise. But three days he stated or no story would leave his lips.
This is the most masterly telling of two tales, a tale within a tale that I have ever heard of. He tells a tale of his youth how he survived the death of his family and lived on the streets of a bustling medieval city with only his wits and guile for survival and later his rise to the greatest university in the lands, earliest to ever be accepted and youngest to ever be expelled all before his teenage years. Set in a backdrop of a sleepy dirt hamlet about to be thrust into dangers that would quake more sophisticated people and cause trained, battle weary soldiers to piss ice.
For a first book, it is, there is no word to adequately describe it, but saying that it sets a new standard for excellence would be a start.
Every great Hero has a quest that is equal to his character. The hero gained his motivation early in life and everything is leading up to something great and something terrible. We know that he survived because he is telling the story, but whatever happened broke him too, that he is the innkeeper of a tiny smudge not on any map ever made, willing to be rolled over by whatever is coming, that most likely he had some hand in its cause.
How can a novel be so dark and filled with so much hope? Read the book. You will not regret it. If you are a coward, wait a couple of years to wait for the third book, but read this book.
Oh one last thing, the title is NOT just a clever title.
Phoenix is located at 84 Harbord Street / Big Smoke, Ontario / M5S 1G5.
Phone: 416-963-9993 Fax: 416-963-9994
One of the things about a store like this that I really like is that the employees read the books. And the owner and the staff write reviews and recommend books to people. If you ask what it good, they will tell you, based on what you have read before and like.
One day I went in there and bout 10+ books, which is not an uncommon occurrence. I asked them before I left about any recent finds that I had missed. And they dropped in my lap a book that has made many of my friends hate me and love me. Love me because, without exception, they all loved it, hated me because they had to wait for the second and now third book in the series. Patrick Rothfuss, "The Name of the Wind."
I put the book on my shelf and read my books. I did not read this book first. It had a dark cover and showed a rundown wooden building with a figure standing outside and then there was the title; it sounded like a romantic albeit classy Harlequin Romance Novel. It was huge too, 800+ pages, thin paper, tiny print and it was his first novel. The only promising things about the book was that it was highly recommended and that the bookstore employee told me that he had written the three books prior to sending the first one to the publisher, meaning it promised a short wait if it was good.
I picked it up and started reading it.
It is the story about an simple innkeeper and a world at war with a dark power. It is the story about a chronicler who got a tip that the innkeeper was actually someone else; the most famous and infamous, most talented person that had ever existed. The chronicler wanted to get his story down on paper for the ages. The hero consented only if he wrote the story as he told it exactly, without changing a letter, because he wanted to set the records right and he wanted no misinformation, rumour and mythologizing to colour his story as it did his life. His second stipulation was that to tell his story it would take three days. This to the chronicler was preposterous, that the biography of the greatest of kings, with all the great embellishments they added only took one day, why was he so special that he could not do likewise. But three days he stated or no story would leave his lips.
This is the most masterly telling of two tales, a tale within a tale that I have ever heard of. He tells a tale of his youth how he survived the death of his family and lived on the streets of a bustling medieval city with only his wits and guile for survival and later his rise to the greatest university in the lands, earliest to ever be accepted and youngest to ever be expelled all before his teenage years. Set in a backdrop of a sleepy dirt hamlet about to be thrust into dangers that would quake more sophisticated people and cause trained, battle weary soldiers to piss ice.
For a first book, it is, there is no word to adequately describe it, but saying that it sets a new standard for excellence would be a start.
Every great Hero has a quest that is equal to his character. The hero gained his motivation early in life and everything is leading up to something great and something terrible. We know that he survived because he is telling the story, but whatever happened broke him too, that he is the innkeeper of a tiny smudge not on any map ever made, willing to be rolled over by whatever is coming, that most likely he had some hand in its cause.
How can a novel be so dark and filled with so much hope? Read the book. You will not regret it. If you are a coward, wait a couple of years to wait for the third book, but read this book.
Oh one last thing, the title is NOT just a clever title.
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Hoth as Earth: the Carbon Cycle before 500MBP
The carbon cycle.
The water cycle is taught to children and is fairly simple and so most people remember it into their adult life. Basically the water is evaporated from the oceans into the air, the air forms clouds and this causes rain and snow. The rain fills rivers and the rivers fill the ocean. Cycle complete. In later years this cycle is filled out a little more, bringing in ground water and plant transpiration into the mix, but it is still basically the same thing.
The Carbon Cycle is a little more complicated. On one level, carbon is in the air and is brought into plants. The plants are eaten and the carbon is released into the air. Plants decompose, animals decompose and release carbon. Buried plants and animals turn into fossil fuels, be burn them and release them to the air. The carbon cycle is already now much more complicated. Bring in that Volcanoes beltch out a lot of carbon and this carbon comes from the ground, limestone. Limestone is a sedimentary rock and it relies on water.
Limestone and volcanoes were the only parts of the carbon cycle before the Cambrian Explosion, so for about four billion four hundred million years. It works like this. Carbon in the air is Carbon Dioxide. The carbon in the air is dissolved into the water. Water and CO2 makes a weak acid, carbonic acid, CO3H2 or
OH O- O
OC -> OC -> OC Ca
OH O- O
The acid then stablizes by adding dissolved Calcium to the acid and this forms CaCO3H2, calcium carbonate, which accumulates on the ocean floor as limestone, eventually. The calcium comes from the land, dissolved from the ground by the rains and rivers. Calcium carbonate is also formed, after the Cambrian Expolsion, in seashells that make chalk eventually and coral reefs, but limestone was the only way to remove carbon from the air before that time.
Limestone sinks in to the Earth's crust. The plates subduct into the mantle and volcanoes release the carbon back into the Atmosphere. Carbon cycle complete prior to half a billion years ago.
Carbon is the driving force in the earth's climate. There have been at least two world wide ice ages, where the entire earth was covered with two or more kilometers of ice. This stopped one end of the carbon cycle, with no exposed water, carbon could not enter the oceans and then could not become limestone, but at the same time plate tectonics did not stop and the volcanoes continued to release stored carbon into the air. This created a run-away greenhouse effect which melted the ice.
This is the nature of cycles, interrupting them often is not a permanent situation. The Hoth like snowball earth probably lasted millions of years, so it is always a slow process.
The water cycle is taught to children and is fairly simple and so most people remember it into their adult life. Basically the water is evaporated from the oceans into the air, the air forms clouds and this causes rain and snow. The rain fills rivers and the rivers fill the ocean. Cycle complete. In later years this cycle is filled out a little more, bringing in ground water and plant transpiration into the mix, but it is still basically the same thing.
The Carbon Cycle is a little more complicated. On one level, carbon is in the air and is brought into plants. The plants are eaten and the carbon is released into the air. Plants decompose, animals decompose and release carbon. Buried plants and animals turn into fossil fuels, be burn them and release them to the air. The carbon cycle is already now much more complicated. Bring in that Volcanoes beltch out a lot of carbon and this carbon comes from the ground, limestone. Limestone is a sedimentary rock and it relies on water.
Limestone and volcanoes were the only parts of the carbon cycle before the Cambrian Explosion, so for about four billion four hundred million years. It works like this. Carbon in the air is Carbon Dioxide. The carbon in the air is dissolved into the water. Water and CO2 makes a weak acid, carbonic acid, CO3H2 or
OH O- O
OC -> OC -> OC Ca
OH O- O
The acid then stablizes by adding dissolved Calcium to the acid and this forms CaCO3H2, calcium carbonate, which accumulates on the ocean floor as limestone, eventually. The calcium comes from the land, dissolved from the ground by the rains and rivers. Calcium carbonate is also formed, after the Cambrian Expolsion, in seashells that make chalk eventually and coral reefs, but limestone was the only way to remove carbon from the air before that time.
Limestone sinks in to the Earth's crust. The plates subduct into the mantle and volcanoes release the carbon back into the Atmosphere. Carbon cycle complete prior to half a billion years ago.
Carbon is the driving force in the earth's climate. There have been at least two world wide ice ages, where the entire earth was covered with two or more kilometers of ice. This stopped one end of the carbon cycle, with no exposed water, carbon could not enter the oceans and then could not become limestone, but at the same time plate tectonics did not stop and the volcanoes continued to release stored carbon into the air. This created a run-away greenhouse effect which melted the ice.
This is the nature of cycles, interrupting them often is not a permanent situation. The Hoth like snowball earth probably lasted millions of years, so it is always a slow process.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Natural Selection
Evolution: the naughty word of the American Fundamentalist churches.
Evolution is the process of moving from one state to another. It can be applied to many different generals of information. Often people state that some aspect of themselves evolved into another. Sometimes it is a personal morality that evolves or a society that evolves, usually into something better. Often this theme is applied to Biology as well and this would be grossly incorrect.
Almost everyone in the world that knows a little about the Evolution, the theory of Evolution, thinks that it was invented by Charles Darwin. Indeed many people, Fundamentalists or otherwise call it Darwin's Theory of Evolution. I think the Fundamentalists point this out because Darwin was just a man and men commit errors, God does not. But the theory of evolution was old before Charles Darwin was born. As with many parts of science there was some Greek Dude that thought that things evolved from one thing to another, but he got almost everything wrong and it was not until the 1700s that serious thought was put into the subject. What Darwin did was suggest the mechanism.
He did it quite well. The mechanism is called Natural Selection. Simply put, the animals that are best suited to survive at the time that they live are able to spread more of their genes to the next generation. Meaning that the conditions in the natural habitat set the obstacles for life and the individuals in any given species that are best suited to that habitat are able to survive and pass more of their genes to the next generation than some individual less suited. This means that the most successful individuals would pass on what makes them so successful to the next generation and their offspring would have a jump on the competition, assuming that the conditions persisted the same from one generation to the next.
This of course does not apply to Humans. Our society has become so large that it has ceased to be affected by natural selection mechanisms; we have social selection mechanisms and the passing of genetic material is not as important and passing on our values and our nurturing practices. Indeed many of our practices and values are counter to the natural laws.
In animals and humans before we invented society, evolution by natural selection is the principal mechanism for change do species. How does this work? There are some important facts to understand. There is never a start nor end of a species, except when the last of a species dies and then it has ended. All change is gradual, it does not happen quickly by any stretch of the imagination. The speed of evolution is tied to the length of a species' generation. Humans evolve slowly because our generations are so long. Single celled organisms evolve quickly because each generation is measured in minutes.
A species is defined as a group of individuals with a similar appearance and importantly can breed together with viable offspring. All dogs can breed, and often do, with each other and have fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys can breed, but the offspring, Mules, are sterile. What makes up a separate species is often up to interpretation. Dogs can breed with Wolves and Coyotes, but all three are considered separate. It may be that those three species did not share the same living space until recently and so opportunity to breed did not occur.
What is a human? That question in the past was defined as us. That we evolved in Africa over the past few hundred thousand years and that was all. Now we know, thanks to DNA, that there were a total of four types of Humans outside of Africa and one of them, us, bred with at least two of the others and likely the fourth as well. This means that the Neanderthal man was closely related to humans. So the question is that since Homo Erectus, one of the fossil species of man, existed at the same time as Neanderthals and our species for a bit, did we or the Neanderthals breed with them? And the answer was probably, at least for the Neanderthals, yes.
You see the way evolution works is through tiny changes from one generation to the next. The other thing to know is that, it has not stopped. You can only detect superficial changes between one generation and another. One can only detect minor superficial changes between ten or one hundred generations. Even a thousand generations most of the differences between present species and one a thousand generation ago are only superficial and the changes are more than superficial two thousand generations ago, but to the one thousand generation animal the two thousand generation and the zero generation animal are equally superficial in differences to it. But it may be that we would need more than ten thousand generations difference before the two different animals would not be able to breed and likely much more. Ten thousand human generations would only be about 150-200 thousand years and Neanderthals were thought to have branched off our ancestors more than twice that time ago and we were still compatible.
Forks in the road.
When people draw diagrams of humans and other great apes we often see that chimpanzees and humans are closely related and we are attached to them with a two pronged pitch fork, one tine in the chimp and one in the man with the handle going to another divide. It looks like that in that past time humans and chimps split off and there were separate from the start; this is what it looks like but it is false. It is rather more like a fan spreading out from the one spot, the two branches a simplification of the fact. If the fan was segregated by a physical barrier the segments of the fan would change subtly over time so that they would become separate species. If they were not separated physically there might be inter breeding and then there would only be one species not two. The common ancestor of chimps and humans was also the common ancestor of all the near humans, about twelve species, the Bonobo Chimp and all the proto chimps that there may have been. At this point there are Chimps, Bonobos and Humans, but the fork includes everything else, it is just not important as they are dead ends.
Evolution is the process of moving from one state to another. It can be applied to many different generals of information. Often people state that some aspect of themselves evolved into another. Sometimes it is a personal morality that evolves or a society that evolves, usually into something better. Often this theme is applied to Biology as well and this would be grossly incorrect.
Almost everyone in the world that knows a little about the Evolution, the theory of Evolution, thinks that it was invented by Charles Darwin. Indeed many people, Fundamentalists or otherwise call it Darwin's Theory of Evolution. I think the Fundamentalists point this out because Darwin was just a man and men commit errors, God does not. But the theory of evolution was old before Charles Darwin was born. As with many parts of science there was some Greek Dude that thought that things evolved from one thing to another, but he got almost everything wrong and it was not until the 1700s that serious thought was put into the subject. What Darwin did was suggest the mechanism.
He did it quite well. The mechanism is called Natural Selection. Simply put, the animals that are best suited to survive at the time that they live are able to spread more of their genes to the next generation. Meaning that the conditions in the natural habitat set the obstacles for life and the individuals in any given species that are best suited to that habitat are able to survive and pass more of their genes to the next generation than some individual less suited. This means that the most successful individuals would pass on what makes them so successful to the next generation and their offspring would have a jump on the competition, assuming that the conditions persisted the same from one generation to the next.
This of course does not apply to Humans. Our society has become so large that it has ceased to be affected by natural selection mechanisms; we have social selection mechanisms and the passing of genetic material is not as important and passing on our values and our nurturing practices. Indeed many of our practices and values are counter to the natural laws.
In animals and humans before we invented society, evolution by natural selection is the principal mechanism for change do species. How does this work? There are some important facts to understand. There is never a start nor end of a species, except when the last of a species dies and then it has ended. All change is gradual, it does not happen quickly by any stretch of the imagination. The speed of evolution is tied to the length of a species' generation. Humans evolve slowly because our generations are so long. Single celled organisms evolve quickly because each generation is measured in minutes.
A species is defined as a group of individuals with a similar appearance and importantly can breed together with viable offspring. All dogs can breed, and often do, with each other and have fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys can breed, but the offspring, Mules, are sterile. What makes up a separate species is often up to interpretation. Dogs can breed with Wolves and Coyotes, but all three are considered separate. It may be that those three species did not share the same living space until recently and so opportunity to breed did not occur.
What is a human? That question in the past was defined as us. That we evolved in Africa over the past few hundred thousand years and that was all. Now we know, thanks to DNA, that there were a total of four types of Humans outside of Africa and one of them, us, bred with at least two of the others and likely the fourth as well. This means that the Neanderthal man was closely related to humans. So the question is that since Homo Erectus, one of the fossil species of man, existed at the same time as Neanderthals and our species for a bit, did we or the Neanderthals breed with them? And the answer was probably, at least for the Neanderthals, yes.
You see the way evolution works is through tiny changes from one generation to the next. The other thing to know is that, it has not stopped. You can only detect superficial changes between one generation and another. One can only detect minor superficial changes between ten or one hundred generations. Even a thousand generations most of the differences between present species and one a thousand generation ago are only superficial and the changes are more than superficial two thousand generations ago, but to the one thousand generation animal the two thousand generation and the zero generation animal are equally superficial in differences to it. But it may be that we would need more than ten thousand generations difference before the two different animals would not be able to breed and likely much more. Ten thousand human generations would only be about 150-200 thousand years and Neanderthals were thought to have branched off our ancestors more than twice that time ago and we were still compatible.
Forks in the road.
When people draw diagrams of humans and other great apes we often see that chimpanzees and humans are closely related and we are attached to them with a two pronged pitch fork, one tine in the chimp and one in the man with the handle going to another divide. It looks like that in that past time humans and chimps split off and there were separate from the start; this is what it looks like but it is false. It is rather more like a fan spreading out from the one spot, the two branches a simplification of the fact. If the fan was segregated by a physical barrier the segments of the fan would change subtly over time so that they would become separate species. If they were not separated physically there might be inter breeding and then there would only be one species not two. The common ancestor of chimps and humans was also the common ancestor of all the near humans, about twelve species, the Bonobo Chimp and all the proto chimps that there may have been. At this point there are Chimps, Bonobos and Humans, but the fork includes everything else, it is just not important as they are dead ends.
Friday, 3 February 2012
RPG and me
RPGs, that is Role Playing Games, have been my obsession for most of my life. Grade 5 near the start, when I was about ten years old, one of my friends got a few of us together and dropped this game into our laps. I was called, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and that was 1982. For Christmas that year I got Dungeons & Dragons, which is a different game, but has a similar root. Gary Gygax, may his name live on for ever, and his friend Roger Moore and a few others started this game and played it together in the late Sixties and early Seventies, creating many revered names like Mordenkaien, Zagyg, Tenser, Dramidj, Sir Rolibar, Bigby, Otiluke and many others in a world centered around a city called Greyhawk.
Then they parted ways. And they started to refine their ideas. And then around 1975ish they started publishing. There were two types of the same game. One was called Dungeons & Dragons and the other used the word Advanced to differentiate it from the other. AD&D was more complicated, it was more detailed and had a richer setting, so it was better, in my opinion. And people played the game, the created rich worlds. Other people designed worlds that were published, like Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms.
I designed a world too, I never really played in it, but it was mine with people and history. Creating the world allowed me to bring in my strengths into my world. I had been a fan of evolution for years and a fan of geomorphology and weather, I was and always a fan of technology, so the master race was a great user of technology combined with magic. There were two major continents and humans evolved on one of them and demi-humans evolved on the other, demi-humans are elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and other such creatures. The master race migrated from the one continent as refugees and landed on the other.
I don't do anything small and my creation was no different, the planet was huge. As big as Saturn. The year was twenty-five of our years in length. There were three large suns one red, one yellow and one blue. And there were six moons. The three Suns were the three great Goddesses, red for war, yellow for nature and blue, which would be invisible during the day as blue light is refracted to get the colour of the sky, was the goddess of magic. The goddesses had three husbands who were dismembered and reformed to create the six moons. The months and the divisions of the years are based on the motions of the moons, but it is the positions of the suns in the sky that govern the effects of magic and many of the phenomenons of weather and monsters.
There was a lot more of this. There were ideas that many of the monster races like Orcs goblins and such were capable of using character classes and being forces of good and culture as well as squalor and evil. The continents were huge too, with deserts as large as Asia and plains wider than the Pacific ocean. A place for any imagination to run wild.
Later editions of D&D included many of these changes, with a glossy cover too, but I had them first, even though I know they came up with the ideas in isolation.
Due to my Asperger's, I was a purist, that is to say I was obsessed with only AD&D. But going to university allowed me to meet people who broadened my gaming horizons. There was Vampire the embraced, Wraith, GURPS, MERP, Battle Lords of the 23rd Century and a few others. But I did not get as obsessed with them as I did with D&D. There was always D&D too and I became a very good Game Master during this time. In High school I was the game master because I had the books and no one else wanted to but I was not very good. But after university I was good and later I became very good.
Game Masters, Dungeon Masters or Story Tellers are the most important part of the story. The set the challenges and the story behind the scene. They need to know everything and invent what they do not know. I was the Story Teller at first because someone had to and I had all the materials. Later I became the story teller because I was a control freak and I needed to be in control and to know everything. When I was a ST at first I thought it was my role to kill off the other characters, but later through experience I learned that it was to tell a good story.
My best days of RPGs are the Exalted days. Exalted is a game unlike all others; it is the adult version of D&D, filled with dark and dirty situations, filled with moral quandaries; it is filled with opportunities for the person as well as the character to grow. Sometimes I even play a little Black Dog with Exalted. Black Dog is a fake RPG that was in White Wolf's World of Darkness, where WoD was dark and gritty the fake RPG was utterly deprived and immoral, so when someone adds Black Dog to the role playing it means introducing themes of depravity and despicableness that most well adjusted people would have nightmares about; that is good, because there is a place for this subject matter. Most people can not imagine the face of evil, Black Dog shows characters the results of evil.
Anyways Exalted is a game of gods, gods who have just come into their power in a world where the hierarchy of gods controlling the world has been degenerating for two thousand years and it is time to set things right before the whole of Creation falls apart or is conquered by one of three enemies of Creation. The dead want to destroy creation so that everything will disappear. The creatures on the outside want to fold creation back into the region that it was created from. And the demons, the ones who created the world before the gods usurped control of it from them, want it back and they will wreck havoc for the ten thousand year imprisonment upon it.
Anyways for me, RPG does not involve a computer; it never will.
Then they parted ways. And they started to refine their ideas. And then around 1975ish they started publishing. There were two types of the same game. One was called Dungeons & Dragons and the other used the word Advanced to differentiate it from the other. AD&D was more complicated, it was more detailed and had a richer setting, so it was better, in my opinion. And people played the game, the created rich worlds. Other people designed worlds that were published, like Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms.
I designed a world too, I never really played in it, but it was mine with people and history. Creating the world allowed me to bring in my strengths into my world. I had been a fan of evolution for years and a fan of geomorphology and weather, I was and always a fan of technology, so the master race was a great user of technology combined with magic. There were two major continents and humans evolved on one of them and demi-humans evolved on the other, demi-humans are elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and other such creatures. The master race migrated from the one continent as refugees and landed on the other.
I don't do anything small and my creation was no different, the planet was huge. As big as Saturn. The year was twenty-five of our years in length. There were three large suns one red, one yellow and one blue. And there were six moons. The three Suns were the three great Goddesses, red for war, yellow for nature and blue, which would be invisible during the day as blue light is refracted to get the colour of the sky, was the goddess of magic. The goddesses had three husbands who were dismembered and reformed to create the six moons. The months and the divisions of the years are based on the motions of the moons, but it is the positions of the suns in the sky that govern the effects of magic and many of the phenomenons of weather and monsters.
There was a lot more of this. There were ideas that many of the monster races like Orcs goblins and such were capable of using character classes and being forces of good and culture as well as squalor and evil. The continents were huge too, with deserts as large as Asia and plains wider than the Pacific ocean. A place for any imagination to run wild.
Later editions of D&D included many of these changes, with a glossy cover too, but I had them first, even though I know they came up with the ideas in isolation.
Due to my Asperger's, I was a purist, that is to say I was obsessed with only AD&D. But going to university allowed me to meet people who broadened my gaming horizons. There was Vampire the embraced, Wraith, GURPS, MERP, Battle Lords of the 23rd Century and a few others. But I did not get as obsessed with them as I did with D&D. There was always D&D too and I became a very good Game Master during this time. In High school I was the game master because I had the books and no one else wanted to but I was not very good. But after university I was good and later I became very good.
Game Masters, Dungeon Masters or Story Tellers are the most important part of the story. The set the challenges and the story behind the scene. They need to know everything and invent what they do not know. I was the Story Teller at first because someone had to and I had all the materials. Later I became the story teller because I was a control freak and I needed to be in control and to know everything. When I was a ST at first I thought it was my role to kill off the other characters, but later through experience I learned that it was to tell a good story.
My best days of RPGs are the Exalted days. Exalted is a game unlike all others; it is the adult version of D&D, filled with dark and dirty situations, filled with moral quandaries; it is filled with opportunities for the person as well as the character to grow. Sometimes I even play a little Black Dog with Exalted. Black Dog is a fake RPG that was in White Wolf's World of Darkness, where WoD was dark and gritty the fake RPG was utterly deprived and immoral, so when someone adds Black Dog to the role playing it means introducing themes of depravity and despicableness that most well adjusted people would have nightmares about; that is good, because there is a place for this subject matter. Most people can not imagine the face of evil, Black Dog shows characters the results of evil.
Anyways Exalted is a game of gods, gods who have just come into their power in a world where the hierarchy of gods controlling the world has been degenerating for two thousand years and it is time to set things right before the whole of Creation falls apart or is conquered by one of three enemies of Creation. The dead want to destroy creation so that everything will disappear. The creatures on the outside want to fold creation back into the region that it was created from. And the demons, the ones who created the world before the gods usurped control of it from them, want it back and they will wreck havoc for the ten thousand year imprisonment upon it.
Anyways for me, RPG does not involve a computer; it never will.
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