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Meh, that's not really true. Depends on the sect of Buddhism. Or the particular believer's choice of emphasis. You can read religious texts a lot of ways. Seriously, people since at least the Greeks have been aware and wrote about the issue of "Is something good because [the] god love it, or do they love it because it is good?" I read an article by a rabbi in the WSJ recently who divided various commandments into religious and moral categories of commandments. And as far as I know Zen Buddhism is the only thing that I think fits your description better than Christianity would overall. Hinduism though? What? different forms of Hinduism are all over the map. They aren't even the same religion in the sense that basically every form of Christianity is the same religion. In some of them the Socratic question I'm talking about might not even make sense because their beliefs are kind of similar to Spinoza's monism in the sense that everyone is part of the most important divinity. And it's important to realize that there's probably a big gap between various forms of hindu theology and how hindus actually practice in terms of whether or not they value worshipping their god more or practicing a particular value system. This is definitely true for Christians, Muslims, etc. so I'd be shocked if it wasn't true for Hindus.

Right, sorry. School has been giving me a lot of work to do. Should I continue on about multiple hypothesis testing and such or try to get the first post updated first? Either way, it probably won't happen before Saturday.

Generally, when I refer to competition, it's indirect. So they don't have to know they're competing or be intending to. It's just a consequence of limited resources. If one grizzly eats a salmon, another grizzly can't. If one grizzly carves out a hundred square mile territory another grizzly can't go there. Although my knowledge of evolutionary theory is limited, as far as I understand, this sort of indirect, nonobvious competition is an extremely important driving force. Yeah, we're talking obscenely exorbitant. Especially in terms of time cost. Even after you axe down obvious duplication. So the interesting that happens that people might not be aware of is rather than following or trying to hone in on a single hypothesis, one technique is to follow multiple hypothesis and give them relative chances of being true. It's a significantly different methodology and way of thinking than the normal null vs. hypothesis type testing.

It's a synonym, but it's a synonym that should make you think of the mathematical definition/sense of random variable. Anyways, stochastic is not "random" as in, "I randomly decided to wear my underwear on my head today", but random as in "the chance that there will be a random transcription error, such as copying a T where there should have been a G, when copying this chromosome is .01%". The thing though is that the traits do come about in an environment which has a great deal of uncertainty and randomness. Sure, a faster cheetah will catch prey more often than a slower one all other things being equal, but this statement being true is dependent upon an effectively infinite sample size. No single cheetah is going to be able to rely upon that. So even when an individual is superior, there's still some chance of that individual being randomly screwed. Dumb luck, Blizzard, volcano, tectonic shift, polluted food, etc. It's important to keep in mind than stochastic/random doesn't mean inscrutable or without some interactions that can be considered deterministic. If a cheetah doesn't eat for I dunno... a month, it will die. But if it had a chance to catch and eat prey each day, but happened to fail that whole month I'm going to treat that process as being stochastic. On the other hand, once something has actually happened, the chance it did is 100%, so if I look at the cheetah at the end of that month, it's death is deterministic in some sense. It depends... generally speaking, there's some argument over whether or not evolution is usually steadily occurring all the time or whether it happens a lot for a brief period then tapers off (you could say it's logistic I guess although I doubt anyone would try to peg an actual function describing this) EXCEPT that when the selective pressure rises evolution will happen quickly again. The tough thing about this sort of question is coming up with a good measure of "how much" evolution has happened. Do we determine "how much" evolution has occurred by looking at how fast species-wide genetic mutations accrue? This would be an essentially microbiology approach, but it's possible for genetic mutations to accrue which don't really benefit the species or don't result in changes in phenotype (the actual structure of the body, behavior of the animal, etc.). We could also look at how fast species-wide phenotypic changes occur, which may be more directly relevant to differences in reproductive success. However, phenotypic changes can occur without significant genetic changes due to changes in the environment. If I was going to look into this more deeply "punctuated equilibrium" is a good search term to start with. "Punctuated equilibrium" describes the second idea, that evolution is largely either not happening, or happening very rapidly. Right, I'll steal something along this line when I update the first post. It's also important to note, that you can achieve great complexity through a bunch of tiny random steps if there are intermediate stages which can be selected for by evolutionary pressure. So less complex intermediate stages is also part of the answer. Yes/No. Yes, if you're fit enough to survive and procreate, then everything else is gravy. But generally speaking each individual's strongest competitors are other members of its own species, because they require the same nutrients, live in the same habitat etc. So the question I'm trying to ask relates more to "how optimal will a species be overall" since its members compete with each other as well as others in the environment. And where "how optimal" is defined by how close you get to the theoretical most successful body type / behavior / etc. for your environment. I think the best way to explain this is by example. As an example, assume you have some human produced chemical X that you've just discovered, and you need to regulate its disposal. Ignore the economic and other non-biological issues involved. Questions to ask would include: "How do you use the knowledge that chemical X has a certain pH/electronegativity/molecular weight to extrapolate its effects on an individual fish if we inject that fish with Y micrograms of the toxin? Furthermore, what does this mean to a fish population if some amount Z of chemical X is put into a tank full of fish? Furthermore, if these fish are in a river instead of a tank, what changes, how will this affect other populations, and how will other species that say, eat fish, be affected by the toxin they absorb from eating fish containing chemical X?" Some of these questions you will attempt to answer with experiment. However, this is often impractical, overly expensive, or does not lead to a sufficiently clear answer. On top of that, humans synthesize novel chemicals so fast it's literally an impossible task to keep up on an experimental basis due to the vast numbers of species and chemicals you might want to attempt to crosscheck. In the excess of billions type numbers. The task is impossible, so you're forced to focus on "representative species" for experiment and to fall back upon knowledge of similar chemicals. And this still leaves too many things to check experimentally and doesn't give you a satisfactory answer. Then you fall back upon theory and modeling to attempt to piece together different bits of the puzzle. And then at the end you tack on a safety factor on allowable chemical discharge. But that last step isn't the one we're interested in. We're interested in how you get to that point in the first place. EDIT: I'm going to roll up changes to the first post once I've hit a significantly improved level of clarity. I'll probably update the phrasing of the questions to, add background information, a few references, my personal qualifications, etc.

I may be making a poor word choice here since random does not have a very tight definition; when I say it, I basically just mean "based upon events which are not deterministic". This is true. Saying evolution is a stochastic process would be superior word choice, but I thought it might be overly technical. Wikipedia' definition of stochastic is acceptable to me, so I'll use that as a starting point: "A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic, in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element." When I say evolution is a stochastic process, I mean it's not purely deterministic, not that it's doesn't have some sort of emergent rules. Any individual mutation may or may not be beneficial, and is most likely not beneficial because individual mutations happen due to radiation/transcription errors/etc. Similarly, more fit individuals (for a particular environment) may reproduce less in some cases than their less fit brethren. Species may also end up filling different niches rather than competing with each other. But overall, the result of all these interactions is heavily biased towards the winner reproducing more. And many of the winner's behaviors, physical appearance etc. will probably be passed onto its children. So we end up with a sort of emergent rule of "survival of the fittest". Fair point. The environment is not random in the same sense that individuals are. The environment is influenced by a great deal of physical processes that are relatively deterministic. On top of that, things tend to be adapted to environments that are changing more slowly than they are. And on top of that even, organisms can directly influence their environment. For example, plants affect atmospheric composition. Yes, this is true. I'll focus on disturbances first though. Although the concept of an equilibrium population(s) isn't precisely true, it's a useful approximation. Yeah, sorry. I'll get further on this one later. Fortunately, this is one I actually have personally worked on minor examples in. And I'll update the first post more later.

Ok, people listen up. I'm tired of seeing people tangentially touch upon very interesting ecological questions in boring, repetitive, should-have-been-dead-months-ago topics about God. And I am too old to go play whack-a-mole whenever someone has a horrible misconception about evolutionary theory, or ecology, or microbiology, or whatever that they're using to back up another argument in a total non sequitur. So I'm starting a topic here to talk about interesting questions such as the following: 1. How does a random process like evolution lead to complex systems? 2. How optimal do we expect organisms to be for their environment given that the environment itself is random as well as evolution? 3. How robust are ecosystems to change? 4. What the hell do we mean by ecosystem or "robust to change"? Ecosystems are constantly changing. All the time. And ecosystems don't sit in little protected bubbles separate from all the other ecosystems. 5. How do we connect the physical and chemical level of organisms all the way up to the ecosystem level and beyond? Are humans special flowers that are separate and different than every other living thing? No. Ok, so I don't really mean to ask this question. Other animals can use tools. Other animals can communicate verbally better than we expected. Other animals farm and build. It's ok to be human-centric (it's certainly convenient from a moral viewpoint) and humans are very interesting, but we're not focusing on them here. Why should humans give a crap about the ecosystem or any of these questions? In this thread, the only answers I'm interested in talking about now are A) because we may benefit from knowledge about our environment and B) curiosity and enjoyment. Also, please take it as a given that if you want to talk about God or how the banana proves something about intelligent design, that there are other threads about that and I'm going to kindly ask a moderator to remove that from this thread as being horribly off topic. If you really can't let go of the God thing, assume that God designed this whole process and you're investigating and pondering how it works based upon discoverable, observable principles that are unrelated to the fact he's God. Later, I'll come back and edit some partial answers into this post (I don't think a complete answer is known to anyone), but broadly speaking, this will raise more questions than the number of questions answered. References shall be posted when possible. Textbooks preferably to papers due to readability issues. Okay, partial answers time. 1. The evolution of the eye is a wonderful example of this process, and wikipedia has a wonderful article on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye . It's important to note that several phyla may have independently evolved similar structures for sensing light. Furthermore, there are examples of the multitude of levels of complexity of various types of "eyes". 2. Ok, this is a complicated question. Obviously, we don't expect birds to develop jet engines to migrate faster and laser eyes to catch their prey. So it's important to know what the constraints are in terms of the optimal wing shape (for birds/bats/etc.) or what the optimal strategy is for mating, hunting. etc. Constraints can include things from purely physical constraints, to a particular body part or behavior having to serve two purposes, to environmental constraints, to constraints due to evolution being a random process. As examples, purely physical constraints would include the high level of impracticality or impossibility of certain physical body types. A good example of a dual-purpose feature would be coloration, which can be used both as camouflage and as a display to potential mates; great camouflage might be horrible for mating, but being a super bright color that stands out from your surroundings may result in your imminent death. And building on the previous example, an example of environmental constraints would include the presence or absence of predators. If your predators aren't around, then camouflage may be worthless, but if an organisms predator is all over the place camouflage may be worth more than standing out. Examples of constraints due to evolution being a random process are very common. Whales fins have a very similar bone structure to a hand because whales evolved from land mammals. Human eyes perceive less of a range of colors compared to birds since some of our ancestors "lost" some of their cones while evolving, meaning our third cone is different from that of other vertebrates. 4. I'm not going to define change very tightly, but I'd like to note that we can in some sense classify the severity of a particular change. Population cycles in a particular ecosystem happen nearly constantly and even large cycles are a less dramatic change than a forest fire or a volcanic eruption. So a dramatic example of what is meant by "robust to change" is how well the plant population of an area recovers after a fire. Do the same species eventually come back and in a similar distribution? Are there intermediate stages where we see more of a particular plant than is normally expected? Or does the habitat look completely different after being burned to the ground and regrowing? Maybe it won't grow back until so much time has passed we hardly consider it the same place.

Interesting. My memory is fuzzy but... I didn't watch enough TV to see any ads, and there was a CA state government pamphlet (or something like that I think) with summaries (for every proposition) that should probably have been read before voting (and I got it without asking for it FOR FREE; it comes with... voter registration or something from the government. Unless Santa Barbara is just weird, I'd imagine most people got one in the mail). If you're too damn lazy to even read the half-page summary (which as I recall, was accurate), then you shouldn't be voting in the first place. Sure, the ads might add a bit of confusion, but if people are going to make stupid excuses for things that could have been solved in about 30 seconds then fuck them. Gaaahhhh... I know you're not condoning this, but Jesus Christ, it's not that hard. Nothing quite peeves me like stupidity combined with laziness. There's really no good excuse even if you didn't get the pamphlet too... And what is protecting straight marriage other than preventing gay marriage? That's the only thing I've ever taken it to mean (in the case of political arguments or ads). My first sentence of that section was a bad choice (Although Reagan got us... Anthony Kennedy so it's hardly surprising his nominees aren't strongly conservative). It's still irrelevant to the fact that legality (court rulings) has nothing to do with being logically correct or morally right (ok, it's slightly related to logic, maybe, kind of sort of). Which I'd argue is a good thing, considering you could argue parts of the Dred Scott decision were logical (from a certain point of view) but you probably wouldn't argue that it made slavery any more morally justifiable. It just seems like a reaaaallly bad idea to me to argue the validity of your point because you won a court case. Does losing court cases make your opponent's case more valid? Of course not. That would be insane. Wills being ignored probably wouldn't be fixed by changing the marriage law anyways. Shit, if you don't want your will to be ignored in any case of contention (inheritance for example), you'll probably require reliable legal firepower after you're dead. Of course, the quote I used wasn't complaining about these things (which is my point; it is very important to give the right reasons for things even if you are right), nor does gay marriage being allowed solve these things (some of which were difficult rather than almost impossible)- not that I'm claiming anyone is under the illusion it would solve these things. I can see legal gay marriage as part of a stepping-stone strategy towards equality, but I don't think this puts me on the same page as the article, which is a much more feeling-based type of appeal. An approach I generally disagree with if you're going to get facts wrong while doing it.

I'm not saying I trust them to do so, I'm saying it would be preferable. I also don't know if people being misled was the reason it passed in the first place. I think a lot of people really are afraid and ignorant, probably including some of the people who worked on those sort of ads. Does it count to mislead someone if you believe X and they might have been leaning towards X anyways? Well, in some cases, but that's not how I would phrase it. Secondly, bullshit that winning in court in California says anything other than you can win in a venue where the intelligentsia are roughly as blue as possible for the U.S. A court ruling one way or the other says nothing about the logical or moral validity of your position. Believability maybe. Thirdly, not being allowed to marry doesn't mean you are being "den[ied] the right to love" people of the same sex- or technically even that you're banned from ("protecting the ones we love"); write a living will or something, grant your significant other power of attorney in specific situations, whatever; you can workaround some things even though it happens to be bullshit that you shouldn't have to deal with in the first place although admittedly you might not get a change in your tax rate although I think in some places civil unions do- to suggest or imply that because you can't marry people means you're being denied the right to love people is patent bullshit. It might be a great line to use, but it's a pretty severe exaggeration. Also, on a tangent, has anyone written about any legal interactions gay marriage might with laws relating to divorce, alimony, etc? Or how it might affect legal debate about these topics? As a bit of a weak example, the original legal basis for alimony as I understand it is pretty explicitly grounded in certain gender roles (although it doesn't work precisely that way anymore), so when those are lacking... I'd think of it more as a slow decrease followed by a whimper, but that's not as dramatic. I'd also like to think the decline is due to the fact that most churches have as roughly much moral fiber per capita as I do (which is to say- not enough; at least I know that I'm not an upstanding person morally, just around average) and that in the rare cases that someone (in the church, although really this applies to any public position) has a pair (and is also not a crazy fanatical mofo who thinks that gays marrying is somehow more damaging to Christian values than the fact that 50% of heterosexuals divorce, the various pedophilia scandals in Catholicism, deadbeat dads, and the shitty way kids are sometimes treated all combined) they will promptly be gutted by both allies and enemies.

Not the way I would have preferred for this outcome to happen precisely, but eh... For the record, what I mean is that preferably, the voter base or lawmakers would repeal the damn thing instead of a court overruling it. Victory by court decision has often proved messy and incomplete. But practically speaking, I understand why this strategy is used (Even if I don't really buy that old law was written with coherent intent about today's controversial issues). But hey, maybe California's constitution is way more specific than I realize.

It depends on why the unhappiness exists. If it's for a valid problem, then the only reason I should make it go away is because I solved the problem. I view it as a way of how to tell when I'm not doing all I desired and should be doing. If it's for a valid reason but something I can't solve (like someone I loved died), then I'll try to come to some sort of resolution by handling it better or just letting time pass- but I wouldn't make it disappear without going through the intermediate stages. If I'm just being unhappy because of something a bit silly or trivial or something I can't or don't intend to do anything about, then I'd consider making it disappear; it's not helping me in anyway.

A lot of the times I remember being unhappy it's because I felt like I wasn't accomplishing enough. Generally, this was fixed by finding something to attempt and do, although sometimes I would have to wait quite a while for such a chance. The other times I remember being unhappy were probably somebody dying or something similar. For those, I basically just wait. There's nothing wrong with being sad about this sort of thing for a while as long as it doesn't interfere too much with the rest of your life or last too long.

Okay, first: What the fuck guys? Goddammit. Just because you haven't done an experiment yet doesn't mean you haven't done science; it means you aren't finished. Additionally, The validity of string theory does not determine the validity of science. You may as well argue that because the theory of the ether was wrong that science is invalid. The actual paper (which I doubt you've even read) referenced in the article is not a string theory paper. They didn't have sufficiently good telescopes for a long time. This makes astronomy sufficiently harder. They still hadn't figured out a grounding philosophy or methodology either. They also eventually figured it out. Also, they weren't wrong per se in thinking everything else went around the earth. There's nothing wrong with holding the earth at the center of your coordinate system and having everything else rotate around it. But it's less elegant, more difficult to understand, and obscures a better way of representing and thinking about the problem. Science doesn't say anything about the purpose of the universe. As of yet, it doesn't say anything about the cause either. And it's not so much a set of beliefs about the nature of the universe as an attempt to capture something about the nature of the universe with various approximations that are continually refined. Are you trying to demonstrate a misunderstanding of probability or something? In science, it's most often used as an approximation (there is only one case I can think of where it isn't interpreted as a form of approximation on some level). In math, you don't care as much whether or not how things actually work. Furthermore, once you flip a coin and turns up heads, probability says absolutely nothing about whether it could have been tales. Seriously. It doesn't. That's an easy to way to think of and understand it and because mathematicians don't want to be anal retentive about every statement we make that's not a bad approximation. When you say a coin has a 50% chance of being heads, a more accurate statement would be "general experience and observation of coin flipping (let's say a U.S. quarter) seem to indicate the the distribution of heads vs. tails over a large number of coin flips does not deviate significantly from what would happen if you possessed a truly ideal mathematical coin". See those things you had in your definition? They distinguish science from religion. Not because no religious philosopher has ever used those things, but more as a matter of the difference in significance placed upon these ideas. Furthermore, I don't think I'd define religion as being about trying to find out how and why things function either. And google seems to agree with me. Honestly, almost no one would really care whether or not there was a supreme being seeing as there exists no proof for such a thing if it weren't for the fact that people use supreme beings as an excuse to be dicks so goddamn much of the time. For the sake of sanity, I just use Occam's razor or the principle of "provide me with any fucking proof or reason whatsoever I should care" before I even bother arguing such a stupidly ill-defined question. I'm just going to quote somebody else on this. Newtonian physics is perfectly good for explaining the tides. It's a very tough problem computationally, but the rough idea would probably be to calculate curves of equipotential (essentially curves of height vs. the surface of the earth where massive objects would fall perpendicular to the curves) for a three-body problem (I think the earth, the moon, and the sun all exert enough gravity to significantly affect the tides) with Newtonian gravity being the relevant force. And Verlinde does recover Newton's laws for a particular case so you could kind of say it explains the tides. That'd be missing the point though as Newtonian physics is the natural and sensible way to do it. Anyways, I've read the first 9 pages or so of the paper (it's 29 pages long), but I'm still not sure how to summarize what I've read so far. Obvious things that pop into mind would be A) he basically assumes spacetime exists as far as I can tell (in many places, he makes technical assumptions that are equivalent), so I wouldn't really say it's an emergent property of his reasoning. It might make sense to say the the macrostructure of spacetime (Einstein's theory of general relativity) emerges from his assumptions about its microstructure (basically, its microstructure is normal Lorentzian spacetime) though. B) Saying the force of gravity is the result of disorder being maximized is probably not the best explanation. But I'm too tired right now to do much better, and my grasp of thermo is pretty basic so I'm probably not going to do much better.

Man, the more I learn, the less I feel I get. Or the more I think "Man, it's fucking amazing that any of our well-tested theories even work."

At some point in the next week, I'll try to get around to reading the original paper(s) and putting a summary (alternate to or expansion of the linked summary) for you guys (if I can make heads or tails of it). I've heard of similar ideas before and it looks interesting enough.