- #141
rewebster
- 877
- 2
Evo said:
oh--OH
(it sounds like you know him a lot better than I do--
----what's his dirty little secrets?)
Evo said:Don't trust him rewebster, he has absolutely no intention of making good on that guarantee.
Oh, good one! Did you remember to request the secret password so we know it's really him?rewebster said:Aether---This message is to the 'Aether' of the future (reading it in 5 billion years if you made it)---send me back a tachyon message to let me and the 'present' Aether know whether or not he is correct.
(please verify that YOU are the Aether of the future, too)
jim mcnamara said:Hmm.
Some interesting assumptions.
1. Duality. Fundamentalist Christians view the entire universe as part of
religion; nothing is separable from it. Everyday existence, science, and
all things are part of it and subservient to its dictates. Not separable
ever. Scientists dualize. Religious beliefs in one pile, Science in
another pile.
2. Motivation. Do you give 10% of your salary every week to an
organization whose only goal is to promote its views which, by the way, are
absolute? Absolute = black and white, no gray.
Assuming money is a resource, and the one with the most resources longterm
will eventually win:
Who is going to win- Fundmentalism or Science?
As an extra added bonus:
Guess who has already figured this out?
3. Being right. Everybody on all sides of the n-dimensional fence thinks
s/he is right. In this case, is it possible for anyone to be right? And
what if some folks know that their belief system also says that it must
be adopted by everyone?
4. Failure. In the West, religion lost ground when plague overran Europe
several times and upset the socio-economic applecart. Religion failed to
make the hurts go away. Science gained favor because it made some hurts go
away and the old order was not strong enough to oppress it. Science also
helped to spawn new hurts - like overpopulation. Now, religion is trying
to make a comeback. It is trying to turn the tables on Science by
exploiting the nastiness of 2007... IMO. To see what I mean try:
http://cogp.blogspot.com/
Two weeks ago, while driving on 3rd Mainland Bridge, the car in front of me got attacked by armed robbers. I sharply locked my doors put my gear into reverse and did a u-turn. It was the Angel Gabriel himself that cleared the one-way traffic behind me that day, God knows I cannot remember how I escaped.
As the poor driver was screaming for help, i shouted to him before winding my glass up
"HEAVEN HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES!" and sped away. I would have liked to add the chapter and verse of the bible for that quote, but alas, the automatic glass of the mercedes was too fast for me.
Aether said:You shouldn't have done that...
I was present at the game in Atlanta where Pete Rose's famously-long hitting streak came to an end, so this baseball card trick might help you. However, even if my future self does decide to send you a tachyon message, how do you expect to receive it?rewebster said:(I'll add Pete Rose and Barry Bonds rookie cards in there 'protected' from the firecracker when it goes off--just to make up for it)
mgb_phys said:Did you get the message yet from the further future Aether warning the future Aether that talkign to the present Aether would cause problems (obligatory Timescape reference)
turbo-1 said:Surely the further future Aether would appreciated the dangers of talking to the future Aether and refrain from contact, leaving the future Aether in the dark about the dangers, as it were.
The first step toward bringing back any extinct species is to reconstruct the genome for that species. One way to do this is to piece together fragments of degraded DNA from biological relics, but maybe there is also another way.rewebster said:I should have asked if there were any dinosaurs in the future
I don't think so. Given a specific animal it would be anyone's guess what it evolved from: we wouldn't know what aspect of it caused it to flourish, what environmental change it was responding to. If I give you bird-x how can you figure out how it represents some sort of better adapted animal without knowing what environmental change made it the better adapted animal?Aether said:... to reverse engineer the entire evolutionary history of life on Earth and recover the genomes of every extinct species in the process.
That's exactly what I was thinking of: Galapagos finches. Larger beaked finches recently flourished there when all but the large or tough seeded plants they feed on died out. But confronted with the bird by itself there is no way to determine what about it constitutes the advantage over the previous version. We have to know the concommitant history of its environment.turbo-1 said:Good point, Zooby. Adaptation and speciation do not happen in a vacuum. The Galapagos finches are a great example of this.
I'm just speculating here, but it seems to me that if we are able to simulate the life cycles of entire organisms from their genomes, then we would also be able to simulate entire ecosystems; and ultimately the biosphere itself.zoobyshoe said:I don't think so. Given a specific animal it would be anyone's guess what it evolved from: we wouldn't know what aspect of it caused it to flourish, what environmental change it was responding to.
If we wanted to deduce the conditions under which bird-x most likely evolved from its closest known predecessor, then we could take advantage of the fact that there are only a finite number of genomic variations separating any two known species; and then we could simulate all of their life cycles and see which of them (and their required environments) were consistent with the rest of what we know about Earth's history.If I give you bird-x how can you figure out how it represents some sort of better adapted animal without knowing what environmental change made it the better adapted animal?
Maybe they could. Biological evolution continues for every living creature, but only at a very slow pace. Technological evolution is already going millions of times faster than biological evolution though, and it is speeding up.rewebster said:I was thinking they could have just 're-evolved'
I think it's possible in principle but completely impossible in practice: aren't they always asserting that we haven't yet identified all current living species of plants and insects?Aether said:If we wanted to deduce the conditions under which bird-x most likely evolved from its closest known predecessor, then we could take advantage of the fact that there are only a finite number of genomic variations separating any two known species; and then we could simulate all of their life cycles and see which of them (and their required environments) were consistent with the rest of what we know about Earth's history.
I will stipulate that we have not identified all current living species of plants and insects. Do you think that it is impossible in practice to ever deduce the genome of any extinct species by the method that I have described, or that it is impossible in practice to ever deduce the genomes of all extinct species by this method?zoobyshoe said:I think it's possible in principle but completely impossible in practice: aren't they always asserting that we haven't yet identified all current living species of plants and insects?
Aether said:I will stipulate that we have not identified all current living species of plants and insects. Do you think that it is impossible in practice to ever deduce the genome of any extinct species by the method that I have described, or that it is impossible in practice to ever deduce the genomes of all extinct species by this method?
The first step would be to simulate the life cycles of known organisms from their known genomes based on observing how nature actually works. Maybe more information will be needed to do this than just an organism's genome, but any such information should be readily available to us in time. As I said before, we are only just now beginning to simulate how proteins are made from DNA. Do you have some reason to think that there is a limit to how far biotechnology can go beyond this, short of simulating the complete life cycle of an organism, given the current exponential trends in advancing biotechnology and computing power?turbo-1 said:Consider that the genetic code shared by chimps and humans is huge compared to the differences. Yet the differences in outcome is pretty darned significant. How is a computer simulation supposed to evaluate such differences, especially in organisms that it has no information on apart from relic DNA?
We would begin by sampling the DNA of these various finches, and then run simulations of their life cycles based on their genomes, and see if the simulations accurately reproduce the observed differences between the finches. If the simulations are flawed, then they aren't ready for general use. However, if the simulations are not flawed, then we can use them with confidence to simulate other creatures based on hypothetical genomes.I can't for the life of me imagine how the computer simulation might account for the differentiation of the beak morphology (and crossover characteristics) in the Galapagos finches, much less start reconstructing the genomes of creatures that are no longer extant.
Not necessarily. Consider these eleven species:zoobyshoe said:To the extent you have to take any individual species' environment into consideration, don't you have to know the genomes, and life cycles of every plant and insect and microbe it would have encountered? In other words, to be sure of your accuracy you'd have to be working back from a sort of onmiscience about the present, which we don't have, and take everything back all together step by step. To do it for one species you'd have to do it for all, and you'd also have to do it for the Earth's weather and climate.
I don't understand what you want me to notice. I have read previously that it is believed whales evolved from a cat-like creature based on plain fossil evidence which accounts for the chart. Are you saying someone has already accurately deduced the genome of the cat that became the whale?Aether said:We have apparently deduced that there is an evolutionary progression between these species. No doubt, if we compared the genomes of these species we would find a pattern that is consistent with this progression.
No, substitute any evolutionary chart that you like for this one. My point there is a general one, and that is that we would expect to see only small differences between the genomes of any given species, B, and its closest known evolutionary predecessor, A. We can already sequence the genomes of both A and B and know precisely how they differ. Interpolating between these two genomes doesn't seem implausible to me at all.zoobyshoe said:I don't understand what you want me to notice. I have read previously that it is believed whales evolved from a cat-like creature based on plain fossil evidence which accounts for the chart. Are you saying someone has already accurately deduced the genome of the cat that became the whale?
Aether said:No, substitute any evolutionary chart that you like for this one. My point there is a general one, and that is that we would expect to see only small differences between the genomes of any given species, B, and its closest known evolutionary predecessor, A. We can already sequence the genomes of both A and B and know precisely how they differ. Interpolating between these two genomes doesn't seem implausible to me at all.
We could interpolate between A and B for every known living species all the way back to the prokaryotes, and then the genomes of long-extinct species like the dinosaurs could be inferred from a forward propagating simulation if relic DNA isn't found for them. We could get this far in the next fifty years.zoobyshoe said:What you'd be trying to do, though, is not interpolating between A and B, but trying to deduce pre-A, then pre-pre A, and so forth, back to the dinosaurs. You would never have a reliable genome from back there to check against.
Aether said:We could interpolate between A and B for every known living species all the way back to the prokaryotes, and then the genomes of long-extinct species like the dinosaurs could be inferred from a forward propagating simulation if relic DNA isn't found for them. We could get this far in the next fifty years.
That's right, except for where we have a fossil record to calibrate our forward-propagating simulation.rewebster said:The only thing is how to 'program' random mutations, and to figure out how and why each mutation could/would manage in that 'unknown' environment---it would come down to a predisposed/predetermined 'random' selection process---which isn't really a 'true' random simulation.