The Limits of Science

Turns out that a fish well-known to be extinct wasn't extinct at all. It moved.

It must be true. Science has said so.

Evolution vs. Parenthood

Have I really not posted a thing since July? I think that's actually criminal. Sorry for the unprogrammed hiatus.

I was reading this gem about human evolution, and I even commented in the thread. I scratched the surface of the problems with that article in my comments there, but there is sooo much wrong with what's being mulled over there I had to link you few remaining die-hard readers to it.

I'm willing to concede evolution for the sake of the discussion, btw. But one thing this discussion completely overlooks is that the way we make babies today in almost 99.99999% of the cases is by having sex -- not through some process akin to researching and then writing and defending a doctoral thesis on the desirable genetic markers in a set of single-source female gametes. I mean: my kids were not the product of some fully-reasoned process by which my wife and I thought about all the likely needs they would have and thereby first provided for all of them, then instituted scientific trial to create their perfect encoded sequence.

My children are a product of love -- and I hope yours are, too. And here's the crazy thing about love: I loved them before I knew them.

Discuss.

A fine point

This essay can only be true if God actually designed the human body. If the human body is a consequence of evolution -- that is, survival of the fittest; the ones ready to make it just make it -- then this essay makes no sense.

Discuss.

UPDATED: There are other things God designed as well, and this follow up story hints at at least one of them.

a note about taxonomy

I just read that we don't really know anything about 90% of the life on our planet.

If that's the case, I think we have to ask ourselves what kind of sweeping statements about life and its origins we can make based on observation.

How evolution works

See: ugly and stupid are genetically paired, and they are actually another species -- or destined to be, anyway.

If I said that without linking to some evolution guy saying it, I'd be a narrow-minded bigot. But the link makes me an intellectual -- very open-minded and smart.

Right?

Think about this:

I just read that physicists just predicted the end of cosmology because the universe will change over the next 250 billion years in such a radical way that most of it will be unobserveable.

That is: the assumptions of scientists at that time who have to start from scratch will be much different than the ones the guys and ladies practicing today will have. They won't have as much to work with based on what they will be able to observe.

Here's why I bring it up: what these people are saying is not that the laws of physics will have changed: they are saying that science will not be able to observe much of what would be necessary to predict or understand them. The underlying assumption is that this hasn't happened at least once already. Somehow people in the future could be victims of their own limited position and instruments but not us.

Seriously.

Them's the breaks

I read this today, and I'm wondering what the fuss is about.

Listen: isn;t the thing about evolution that species are supposed to die out? Isn't that the given? That's how it works, right? Species are not equipped for the environment, and they die. Teir death changes the environment, and the remaining species are either equipped, or nearly-equipped, to survive, and they adapt.

Doesn't protecting vanishing species disrupt the way evolution works? I'd be interested to find out ...