OT: How life came to Earth...

[server]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:11:02 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 15/02/2022 02:59, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 2:52:14 AM UTC+11,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 18:24:13 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 13/02/2022 16:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 07:19:58 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 12 Feb 2022 15:19:00 -0800 (PST)) it
happened Anthony William Sloman <bill....@ieee.org> wrote in
fb8fcd39-787c-4c26...@googlegroups.com>:

Why evolution didn\'t come up with error-detecting and
-correcting codes as well (or instead) is an even more
interesting question.

Actually it did
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409/


Cool.

It is. Maybe you should read the article to see how cool.

It follows

It didn\'t.

snip

Perhaps you should read the article to see what is going on.
Small local errors - the most common ones - are usually fixed
before they lead to big errors. That\'s all. It\'s useful, and is
part of why life is stable and can support the kind of
reproduction seen in many eukaryotes. But there is nothing
calculating about it, nothing that predicts useful or dangerous
effects.

No is your mantra. Maybe is mine.

David Brown wasn\'t using \"no\" as a mantra. He might have explained
how you got it wrong in more detail - I did - but since you don\'t
read that kind of reaction it would have been a waste of time.


I could indeed have gone into detail. I was impressed on the density of
errors in John\'s claim - mistakes and misunderstandings are common, but
it\'s rare to see it taken to such a high level in such a compact statement.

Sloman and Brown. Soul mates.



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 15/02/22 13:08, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:11:02 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 15/02/2022 02:59, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 2:52:14 AM UTC+11,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 18:24:13 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 13/02/2022 16:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 07:19:58 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 12 Feb 2022 15:19:00 -0800 (PST)) it
happened Anthony William Sloman <bill....@ieee.org> wrote in
fb8fcd39-787c-4c26...@googlegroups.com>:

Why evolution didn\'t come up with error-detecting and
-correcting codes as well (or instead) is an even more
interesting question.

Actually it did
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409/


Cool.

It is. Maybe you should read the article to see how cool.

It follows

It didn\'t.

snip

Perhaps you should read the article to see what is going on.
Small local errors - the most common ones - are usually fixed
before they lead to big errors. That\'s all. It\'s useful, and is
part of why life is stable and can support the kind of
reproduction seen in many eukaryotes. But there is nothing
calculating about it, nothing that predicts useful or dangerous
effects.

No is your mantra. Maybe is mine.

David Brown wasn\'t using \"no\" as a mantra. He might have explained
how you got it wrong in more detail - I did - but since you don\'t
read that kind of reaction it would have been a waste of time.


I could indeed have gone into detail. I was impressed on the density of
errors in John\'s claim - mistakes and misunderstandings are common, but
it\'s rare to see it taken to such a high level in such a compact statement.

Sloman and Brown. Soul mates.

Of maybe \"great minds think alike\"?

There\'s a proverb for anything and everything

 

[server]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:25:11 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:04:08 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty,
especially about things that are unexplained and not subject to
repeatable experiment.

False. The \'caution\' you refer to is a social concern, NOT a knowledge-and-understanding
one, thus is not of primary interest in the sciences. The \'should be\' phrase means
you\'re trying to invoke some kind of value judgment, but whether this is true-false,
good-evil, or some religious morality scale, is completely obscure.

Science is a social system. It usually resists theories that upset the
concensus. It\'s been observed that the old guard has to die out before
new theories are taken seriously; that slows things down. Science is
also notorious for rejecting theories and discoveries from women,
which is hardly objective.

\"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
.. . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens
that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized
with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that
the future lies with the youth.

— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97


Are you a scientist?

Criticism of a science theory is easy: you suggest an improvement. You don\'t
discard bits and invoke cancel-culture concepts to demonize... if you expect to
be taken seriously.

\"Taken seriously\" is part of the problem in science. My version of
\"taken seriously\" is a purchase order.






--

I yam what I yam - Popeye

 

[server]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:35:13 +0100, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 14/02/2022 22:52, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 20:27:03 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 14/02/2022 17:05, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:53:43 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

..........

Established church tended to be into burning heretics and their books.
New knowledge conflicting with scripture was viewed as very dangerous by
the authorities. US YEC\'s still haven\'t got out of those Dark Ages.


The \"Genesis is a literal description of creation\" is a modern idea -
young earthers, like flat earthers, are not people that never left the
Dark Ages, they are people who have chosen to re-enter it. Until people
started finding geological proof that the earth is old, and Darwin and
others (before and afterwards) began to understand evolution, few people
really thought about the creation of the earth in any kind of real
sense. Theologians of the day knew fine that Genesis was not a literal
record of creation - they could see perfectly well that it contains two
contradictory accounts and thus literalism cannot possibly make sense.

But modern science and technology developed mainly in Christian
countries. The Jesuits have been great scientists and mathematicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jesuit_scientists

Europe was dragged kicking and screaming out of the dark ages by the
Islamic scholars. India and China were /way/ ahead for a long time.
But in the past few centuries the west took over.

The Islamic and Chinese science was not dissiminated, didn\'t become
beneficial technology, like western science did. Partially because we
printed a lot of books.


The Chinese were printing books in large quantities many hundreds of
years before it was even imagined in Europe. Their books were in
Chinese, for use in China - they did not spread.

Islamic scholarship and science formed the foundation of Western science
and technology. As well as their own developments, the Islamic scholars
collected, preserved and translated writings from the ancient Greeks and
Romans, Jews, Indian scientists and mathematicians, and others.

European scholarship, outside of insane theological debates, started
when European scholars visited the Islamic world to learn.

But you are right that the Gutenberg press meant that the new learning
could be spread faster in Europe. And Europeans were much better and
more enthusiastic at turning the science into practical technology for
killing and oppressing other people that they viewed as inferior.



However, it was not /because/ of the Christian church, it is mainly
/despite/ it.


For a long time, scientists in the west were all
religious - part of that was that saying anything could get your badly
burned, literally or at least metaphorically. And since education was
in the hands of the church, and education is required for real progress
in science, there was a strong overlap for a while. As long as the
scientists did not contradict the church (this was Martin\'s point), that
was fine.


The real point is that, as the Enlightenment and modern science
advanced, the church stepped aside.


Yes.

Science really took off in the west took off after the enlightenment,
when people started questioning the church teachings a lot more. But
the church still provided the backbone of higher education for a long
time. (Not least was the teaching of Latin, giving educated people a
common language.)

One reason printing flourished was to print a lot of bibles. One
reason literacy advanced was so people could read them.


Literacy rates were much lower in Europe than the Islamic empire. It
took a long time after the Gutenberg press before literacy became common
in Europe - in particular, when Bibles became available in common
languages rather than Latin, the Protestant Church (unlike the Catholic
Church) encouraged people to read it themselves. Meanwhile, back in the
Islamic world, literacy was extremely common - as it had been in Roman
times prior to the dark ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

(not that those numbers are entirely believable. 100% is impossible.)

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire ended of the supply of paper
from North Africa into Europe, leading to a massive decline in European
literacy. It turns out that having cheap stuff to write on was vastly
more important for literacy than any old book or religion.

There\'s no dispute that things were bad once everywhere. The
remarkable point is that western culture basically invented progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnVAq9k85gI

Google Street View is cool. Towns and cities all over the world look
like Dallas and its burbs, paved streets with SUVs and power poles and
boring houses and all. Lots of signs in English.

The biggest change in human history was electrification.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610397495

Then electronics.





--

I yam what I yam - Popeye

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 12:42:09 -0800, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com
wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:18:01 -0500, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:18:10 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:57:12 -0500, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 12:36:50 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 19:46:05 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-02-11 14:12, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.


It\'s astoundingly complex now, yes, but it can\'t have been in the beginning.

It had to be. DNA style reproduction is incredibly recursively
complex. Nobody has explained how that self-defining complexity could
have happened from a puddle of primordial soup. Lots of biologists
have calculated the probability as indistingishable from impossible.

Until someone does show how it could have happened, without
intelligent intervention, robots from outer space, or some master
designer, are as legit a theory as spontaneous generation.

It\'s pretty likely that life began with RNA and eventually proteins et
al. DNA came far later, from the RNA world. Much of the ancient RNA
word still exists, as the underlying machinery of modern DNA-based
critters.

Joe Gwinn

Is there any RNA life around now, independent of DNA? Where did it go?

Some DNA-free bacteria probably still exist, but have not yet been
found. But there are plenty of bacteria that have never been studied,
so don\'t lose hope. They may be only in extreme environments, like
near deep-sea \"smoker\" vents.

.<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22093146/

\"Does a DNA-less cellular organism exist on Earth?\", Akira Hiyoshi,
Kohji Miyahara, Chiaki Kato, Yasumi Ohshima,
Genes Cells, . 2011 Dec;16(12):1146-58.
doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2443.2011.01558.x. Epub 2011 Nov 17.


Some lab jock should invent some.

Could well be underway, done by the same folk who have been trying to
find the minimum number of genes a bacteria can have. I don\'t recall
the current number, but it was something like a thousand. I laid out
the details in the \"cool book\" thread of mid 2021, as I recall.

Joe Gwinn

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/how-many-genes-are-necessary-to-create-a-living-cell/

It\'s not said if that cell can reproduce.

Given that it\'s Venter, I would assume that it can reproduce. The
actual scientific articles (versus an interview) will likely tell.



Joe Gwinn

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 16, 2022 at 12:08:21 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:11:02 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 15/02/2022 02:59, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 2:52:14 AM UTC+11,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 18:24:13 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 13/02/2022 16:50, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 07:19:58 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 12 Feb 2022 15:19:00 -0800 (PST)) it
happened Anthony William Sloman <bill....@ieee.org> wrote in
fb8fcd39-787c-4c26...@googlegroups.com>:

Why evolution didn\'t come up with error-detecting and
-correcting codes as well (or instead) is an even more
interesting question.

Actually it did
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/dna-replication-and-causes-of-mutation-409/


Cool.

It is. Maybe you should read the article to see how cool.

It follows

It didn\'t.

snip

Perhaps you should read the article to see what is going on.
Small local errors - the most common ones - are usually fixed
before they lead to big errors. That\'s all. It\'s useful, and is
part of why life is stable and can support the kind of
reproduction seen in many eukaryotes. But there is nothing
calculating about it, nothing that predicts useful or dangerous
effects.

No is your mantra. Maybe is mine.

David Brown wasn\'t using \"no\" as a mantra. He might have explained
how you got it wrong in more detail - I did - but since you don\'t
read that kind of reaction it would have been a waste of time.

I could indeed have gone into detail. I was impressed on the density of
errors in John\'s claim - mistakes and misunderstandings are common, but
it\'s rare to see it taken to such a high level in such a compact statement.

Sloman and Brown. Soul mates.

Similarly competent? Picking up where you\'ve gone wrong on biological questions isn\'t exactly difficult.

It doesn\'t mean that our opinions are all that well aligned - just not as far off the wall as yours are.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 4:04:08 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown <david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 12/02/2022 16:45, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 16:21:54 +0100, David Brown

M<snip>

Not a bit. But \"The Science\" of both is incomplete. There remains room
for discovery.


Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty, especially about things that are unexplained and not subject to repeatable experiment.

It absolutely is. You don\'t know enough about the subject to appreciate precisely how this caution is baked into the scientific method.

Merely claiming that you understand things does not make it true - your ignorance shines through in your posts. There is no more evidence to your understanding than there is evidence to your \"ideas\".

You claim to understand the origin of life.

He didn\'t. He laid out what we do know about it.

> I speculate precisely because I don\'t understand it. Nobody does.

You speculate very imprecisely because you not only don\'t understand it , but also don\'t know enough about area to have any kind of remotely useful ideas.

Design is speculating widely about unknowns. Uncertainty, confusion,
wandering about the solution space are assets to design. Concensus,
surity, convention, \"good engineering practice\" are the enemies of
invention.

But you don\'t seem to have invented anything patentable, and your approach to the design process seems to be remarkably slap-dash.

> Design something, post it, and we can discuss it.

John Larkin plays what he imagines to be his \"get out of jail for free\" card.

He is asserting his usual claim that he is capable of design electronic design, which is suspect, and promises to discuss somebody else\'s design, which he never does.

<snipped the rest>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 7:39:13 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 20:03:12 +0100, Jeroen Belleman <jer...@nospam.please> wrote:
On 2022-02-12 18:03, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown <david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 12/02/2022 16:45, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 16:21:54 +0100, David Brown

<snip>

New evidence? What\'s the old evidence for life springing from
primordial soup and evolution in RNA World? Making a few organic
molecules in a test tube, with an electric arc, ain\'t making a living,
reproducing cell. It\'s not a chemistry problem, it\'s an information
problem.

At the lowest level, it *is* a chemistry problem. The known fact is that
polypeptides make copies of themselves under the right conditions. There
is no need for complex proteins to do it, even if it works better with
them. There is no need for this process to happen inside cells, although
that does provide a better environment with the right conditions. The early
details of the process, and the various steps towards increasing
sophistication are still very uncertain, but the overall outline is
pretty clear.

Uncertain and pretty clear?

You\'ve got a problem with that?

> RNA world is just as faith-based as life springing from the head of Zeus..

Not remotely correct. There are enough RNA-based mechanisms in our own cells to suggest that RNA preceded DNA, and RNA-genome viruses do seem to be hangovers from that RNA-world.

> The dilemma with DNA *is* an information problem. What was the bootstrap process for an incredibly complex machine that is programmed to make itself?

Where\'s the dilemma? DNA works by having the information it stores translated into shorter strings of RNA which then go off and turn that information into proteins or use it to regulate enzyme ativity. Quite how the original RNA machine acquired the capacity to translate itself into DNA and decode that DNA to make more reliable copies of the original DNA is an interesting question.

Why evolution didn\'t come up with error-detecting and -correcting codes as well (or instead) is an even more interesting question.

We can\'t exclude (yet) that life came from elsewhere, but even then, this
solves nothing. It\'s just another level of indirection. It has to start
somewhere. There may be life elsewhere, or not. We don\'t yet have the
statistics to make any plausible guesses.

Why do guesses have to be plausible? Seems like a very sterile way to live.

It saves time. There\'s nothing fertile in coming up with silly ideas that aren\'t likely to go anywhere. The scientific method does include a number of devices for throwing out bad ideas early so that only a few people get distracted by them. Peer-review before publication does exactly that. I haven\'t refereed al that many scientific papers, but most of them were un-publishable rubbish. I\'m rather proud of the one that got published after the authors corrected the mistake that I\'d objected to.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[server]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:51:29 +0000, Martin Brown
<\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 13/02/2022 17:31, David Brown wrote:
On 13/02/2022 17:51, Martin Brown wrote:

You can haggle about whether or not they are truly alive because they
need to hijack a cell to replicate (at least all the ones I know of do).

There are some viruses that are so simple that they can\'t hijack a
cell\'s replication systems - they hijack another virus\'s hijacking! In
a sense, they are small viruses that infect other large viruses. Fun stuff.

And little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite \'em.

Eventually in a quantised world they get too small to be viable.

Viral phages that attack bacteria are also quite interesting and some of
them may yet have therapeutic value. Progress in this field is slow but
steady as the various pieces are found and understood.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01880-6

The viruses that we see today have co-evolved with their hosts for many
billions of years. The earliest ones would have been much much simpler.

Is there evidence for that?



--

I yam what I yam - Popeye

 

[server]

whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com> wrote in
news:c7e0ae10-926c-4c54-b563-19ec4acf3b38n@googlegroups.com:

On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:04:08 AM UTC-8,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty,
especially about things that are unexplained and not subject to
repeatable experiment.

False. The \'caution\' you refer to is a social concern, NOT a
knowledge-and-understanding one, thus is not of primary interest
in the sciences. The \'should be\' phrase means you\'re trying to
invoke some kind of value judgment, but whether this is
true-false, good-evil, or some religious morality scale, is
completely obscure.

Criticism of a science theory is easy: you suggest an
improvement. You don\'t discard bits and invoke cancel-culture
concepts to demonize... if you expect to be taken seriously.

Think about the tardigrade. They have sequenced its DNA.

<https://www.sciencealert.com/the-tardigrade-genome-has-been-
sequenced-and-it-has-the-most-foreign-dna-of-any-animal>

It is very strange however as it \"adds\" DNA elements via \"horizontal
gene transfer\" as in not via reproductive hand off, but by adding
DNA elements of others into its own. They are trying to figure out
why it is so hardy.

from nearly absolute zero to very hot temps, and from the vacuum of
space to very high pressures it lives. even through radiation
exposure.

They had to do it twice though because they think the first set of
scientists may have accidentally included DNA from bacteria that was
on the animal when sampled.

We may have arrived here this way. I mean whatever we evolved
from, that is.

I found a very interesting piece y\'all might like...

<https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q>

Funny that the random YouTube link has a Q in it.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 16, 2022 at 12:30:23 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:35:13 +0100, David Brown<david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 14/02/2022 22:52, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 20:27:03 +0100, David Brown <david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:
On 14/02/2022 17:05, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:53:43 +0000, Martin Brown <\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

<snip>

Science really took off in the west took off after the enlightenment,
when people started questioning the church teachings a lot more. But
the church still provided the backbone of higher education for a long
time. (Not least was the teaching of Latin, giving educated people a
common language.)

One reason printing flourished was to print a lot of bibles. One
reason literacy advanced was so people could read them.


Literacy rates were much lower in Europe than the Islamic empire. It
took a long time after the Gutenberg press before literacy became common
in Europe - in particular, when Bibles became available in common
languages rather than Latin, the Protestant Church (unlike the Catholic
Church) encouraged people to read it themselves. Meanwhile, back in the
Islamic world, literacy was extremely common - as it had been in Roman
times prior to the dark ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

(not that those numbers are entirely believable. 100% is impossible.)

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire ended of the supply of paper
from North Africa into Europe, leading to a massive decline in European
literacy. It turns out that having cheap stuff to write on was vastly
more important for literacy than any old book or religion.

There\'s no dispute that things were bad once everywhere. The
remarkable point is that western culture basically invented progress.

They produced the agricultural revolution, which less a smaller proportion of the population feed the rest, which made universal education possible.
Then they produced the industrial revolution, where the redundant agricultural labourers were put to work in factories.

<snipped Thomas Sowell getting it wrong>

It wasn\'t exactly western culture as whole that did this - the scientific method played a significant role.

> Google Street View is cool. Towns and cities all over the world look like Dallas and its burbs, paved streets with SUVs and power poles and boring houses and all. Lots of signs in English.

So what?

The biggest change in human history was electrification.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610397495

Not exactly. The big change was the move away from muscle power. Electrification is a neat way of moving power from where it is generated to where people want to use it, but generating the power is the crucial element.

> Then electronics.

Again, not exactly. Electronics gave us computers and rapid high volume communications, which have changed society a great deal. Electronics was a vital part of that, but not the whole of it by any means.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 9:53:01 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:25:11 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:04:08 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown <david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty,
especially about things that are unexplained and not subject to
repeatable experiment.

False. The \'caution\' you refer to is a social concern, NOT a knowledge-and-understanding
one, thus is not of primary interest in the sciences. The \'should be\' phrase means
you\'re trying to invoke some kind of value judgment, but whether this is true-false,
good-evil, or some religious morality scale, is completely obscure.

Science is a social system. It usually resists theories that upset the
concensus. It\'s been observed that the old guard has to die out before
new theories are taken seriously; that slows things down. Science is
also notorious for rejecting theories and discoveries from women,
which is hardly objective.

\"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
. . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens
that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized
with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that
the future lies with the youth.

— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

That is the same Max Planck who published all four of Albert Einsteins \"annus mirabilis\" papers in 1905 without bothering to send them out for peer review.

https://guides.loc.gov/einstein-annus-mirabilis/1905-papers

He was being rude about some of his contemporaties, probably mainly Ernest Mach - who \"famously declared, after an 1897 lecture by Ludwig Boltzmann at the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna: \"I don\'t believe that atoms exist!\" From about 1908 to 1911, Max Planck criticized Mach\'s reluctance to acknowledge the reality of atoms as incompatible with physics. Einstein\'s 1905 demonstration that the statistical fluctuations of atoms allowed measurement of their existence without direct individuated sensory evidence marked a turning point in the acceptance of atomic theory. \"

> Are you a scientist?

Does it matter? We know that John Larkin isn\'t one.

Criticism of a science theory is easy: you suggest an improvement. You don\'t
discard bits and invoke cancel-culture concepts to demonize... if you expect to
be taken seriously.

\"Taken seriously\" is part of the problem in science. My version of \"taken seriously\" is a purchase order.

That\'s about as much as you can manage.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[David Brown]

On 15/02/2022 14:04, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:08:33 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 14/02/2022 22:43, John Larkin wrote:

I took a biologist to lunch today.


And you think that means you know biology?

You\'re not a biologist, and furthermore you weren\'t there.

We talked about DNA and Thai food and stuff.

I have no idea how much or how little you know about Thai food. You
could be an excellent Thai cook or food critic for all I know (or care).

Everyone here realises that you have many major gaps and faults in your
understanding of evolution and DNA. I don\'t need to be a biologist to
know that, nor do I need to have been at your lunch to know that it\'s
highly unlikely that you realised your deep-grained mistakes in just one
lunch. (But if you did, or made progress, then great.)

You\'re not an electronic designer either. Your profession seems to be
\"nasty.\"

Yes, that makes sense because those are the only two professions.

 

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 2:53:01 PM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:25:11 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whi...@gmail.com
wrote:
On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:04:08 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty,
especially about things that are unexplained and not subject to
repeatable experiment.

False. The \'caution\' you refer to is a social concern, NOT a knowledge-and-understanding
one, thus is not of primary interest in the sciences. The \'should be\' phrase means
you\'re trying to invoke some kind of value judgment, but whether this is true-false,
good-evil, or some religious morality scale, is completely obscure.

Science is a social system. It usually resists theories that upset the
concensus.

Coward. Give an example, at least. The \'upset\' and \'resists\'
are just the exact same observation, repeated. A force that upsets
your balance, is one that you resist, if you have any will at all.

Science is a philosophical branch, not a \'social system\', it organizes
only knowledge, not persons.

>It\'s been observed that the old guard has to die out before ...

Yeah, THAT\'s why we know science isn\'t social; the social pressure
to conform effectively doesn\'t exist in the sciences.

How do these errors continue to creep into JL\'s discourse?

 

[David Brown]

On 15/02/2022 14:30, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:35:13 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 14/02/2022 22:52, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 20:27:03 +0100, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 14/02/2022 17:05, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:53:43 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

..........

Established church tended to be into burning heretics and their books.
New knowledge conflicting with scripture was viewed as very dangerous by
the authorities. US YEC\'s still haven\'t got out of those Dark Ages.


The \"Genesis is a literal description of creation\" is a modern idea -
young earthers, like flat earthers, are not people that never left the
Dark Ages, they are people who have chosen to re-enter it. Until people
started finding geological proof that the earth is old, and Darwin and
others (before and afterwards) began to understand evolution, few people
really thought about the creation of the earth in any kind of real
sense. Theologians of the day knew fine that Genesis was not a literal
record of creation - they could see perfectly well that it contains two
contradictory accounts and thus literalism cannot possibly make sense.

But modern science and technology developed mainly in Christian
countries. The Jesuits have been great scientists and mathematicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jesuit_scientists

Europe was dragged kicking and screaming out of the dark ages by the
Islamic scholars. India and China were /way/ ahead for a long time.
But in the past few centuries the west took over.

The Islamic and Chinese science was not dissiminated, didn\'t become
beneficial technology, like western science did. Partially because we
printed a lot of books.


The Chinese were printing books in large quantities many hundreds of
years before it was even imagined in Europe. Their books were in
Chinese, for use in China - they did not spread.

Islamic scholarship and science formed the foundation of Western science
and technology. As well as their own developments, the Islamic scholars
collected, preserved and translated writings from the ancient Greeks and
Romans, Jews, Indian scientists and mathematicians, and others.

European scholarship, outside of insane theological debates, started
when European scholars visited the Islamic world to learn.

But you are right that the Gutenberg press meant that the new learning
could be spread faster in Europe. And Europeans were much better and
more enthusiastic at turning the science into practical technology for
killing and oppressing other people that they viewed as inferior.



However, it was not /because/ of the Christian church, it is mainly
/despite/ it.


For a long time, scientists in the west were all
religious - part of that was that saying anything could get your badly
burned, literally or at least metaphorically. And since education was
in the hands of the church, and education is required for real progress
in science, there was a strong overlap for a while. As long as the
scientists did not contradict the church (this was Martin\'s point), that
was fine.


The real point is that, as the Enlightenment and modern science
advanced, the church stepped aside.


Yes.

Science really took off in the west took off after the enlightenment,
when people started questioning the church teachings a lot more. But
the church still provided the backbone of higher education for a long
time. (Not least was the teaching of Latin, giving educated people a
common language.)

One reason printing flourished was to print a lot of bibles. One
reason literacy advanced was so people could read them.


Literacy rates were much lower in Europe than the Islamic empire. It
took a long time after the Gutenberg press before literacy became common
in Europe - in particular, when Bibles became available in common
languages rather than Latin, the Protestant Church (unlike the Catholic
Church) encouraged people to read it themselves. Meanwhile, back in the
Islamic world, literacy was extremely common - as it had been in Roman
times prior to the dark ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

That does not include historical rates, which would be the interesting
figures.

(not that those numbers are entirely believable. 100% is impossible.)

You can come very close. But often it depends on how the counting is
done, and countries vary in that respect (despite UN attempts at
standardising). A certain proportion of the population will be unable
to learn to read and write competently, due to handicaps, very low
intelligence, or extreme dyslexia. You will get closer to 100% if you
only count people who should be able to read and write, omitting these
groups - or if you are a country like North Korea where such people just
\"disappear\" and the state denies they ever existed.

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire ended of the supply of paper
from North Africa into Europe, leading to a massive decline in European
literacy. It turns out that having cheap stuff to write on was vastly
more important for literacy than any old book or religion.

There\'s no dispute that things were bad once everywhere. The
remarkable point is that western culture basically invented progress.

Pure and utter nonsense.

There\'s no doubt that Western culture has lead science and technology
for the past few hundred years, and that the pace has increased during
that time. Equally, there is no doubt that \"progress\" has been made
ever since the first person thought it would be a good idea to help food
plants grow in one place rather than moving around all the time.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnVAq9k85gI

(I haven\'t looked at that - perhaps I will later.)

Google Street View is cool. Towns and cities all over the world look
like Dallas and its burbs, paved streets with SUVs and power poles and
boring houses and all. Lots of signs in English.

The biggest change in human history was electrification.

The turning point for the west was /steam/, not electricity. If you are
going to make a list of the most important game-changing technologies
and inventions for human civilisation, then electricity would be on it
(as would electronics). But they would not could as \"the biggest\", not
by a long way.

> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610397495

(I don\'t follow advert links.)

Then electronics.

Ha!

 

[server]

whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com> wrote in
news:69a7cfcf-5b4f-467f-8535-4fe21c49bc0bn@googlegroups.com:

On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 2:53:01 PM UTC-8,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:25:11 -0800 (PST), whit3rd
whi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:04:08 AM UTC-8,
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 17:43:55 +0100, David Brown
david...@hesbynett.no> wrote:

Science is /always/ incomplete. That\'s part of the point.

Then Science should be cautious about concensus and certainty,
especially about things that are unexplained and not subject
to repeatable experiment.

False. The \'caution\' you refer to is a social concern, NOT a
knowledge-and-understanding one, thus is not of primary interest
in the sciences. The \'should be\' phrase means you\'re trying to
invoke some kind of value judgment, but whether this is
true-false, good-evil, or some religious morality scale, is
completely obscure.

Science is a social system. It usually resists theories that
upset the concensus.

Coward. Give an example, at least. The \'upset\' and \'resists\'
are just the exact same observation, repeated. A force that
upsets your balance, is one that you resist, if you have any will
at all.

Science is a philosophical branch, not a \'social system\', it
organizes only knowledge, not persons.

It\'s been observed that the old guard has to die out before ...

Yeah, THAT\'s why we know science isn\'t social; the social pressure
to conform effectively doesn\'t exist in the sciences.

How do these errors continue to creep into JL\'s discourse?

I call it a moderately BENT perception.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 12/02/22 22:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 14:25:11 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
Criticism of a science theory is easy: you suggest an improvement. You don\'t
discard bits and invoke cancel-culture concepts to demonize... if you expect to
be taken seriously.

\"Taken seriously\" is part of the problem in science. My version of
\"taken seriously\" is a purchase order.

Revealing, but not surprising.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 12/02/22 22:56, Anthony William Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 4:04:08 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
Design something, post it, and we can discuss it.

John Larkin plays what he imagines to be his \"get out of jail for free\" card.

The key word there is \"imagines\".

His statement doesn\'t fool the rest of us.

 

[server]

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote in news:su9jdj$sfr$1@dont-
email.me:

Nobody thinks the first lifeforms on earth were DNA-based.

Huh?

Bacteria was first, up to 3.22 billion years ago.

It may have started as RNA based, but very early on in their
existence everything was DNA based. We will never know if there was
RNA \"originals\".

<https://www.britannica.com/science/bacteria/Evolution-of-bacteria>

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 13/02/22 00:29, David Brown wrote:

On 11/02/2022 21:36, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 19:46:05 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-02-11 14:12, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.


It\'s astoundingly complex now, yes, but it can\'t have been in the beginning.

It had to be. DNA style reproduction is incredibly recursively
complex. Nobody has explained how that self-defining complexity could
have happened from a puddle of primordial soup. Lots of biologists
have calculated the probability as indistingishable from impossible.

Until someone does show how it could have happened, without
intelligent intervention, robots from outer space, or some master
designer, are as legit a theory as spontaneous generation.


This is all just the \"watchmaker argument\", wrapped up in
pseudo-scientific nonsense about alien robots and quantum mechanics.

Just so.

I\'ve previously pointed John to \"The Blind Watchmaker\", and
he indicated he would read it.

There is no indication that he has read it - or if he has,
then he hasn\'t understood it.