Creationism To Be Taught In UK Sciences Classes - Unbelievable
OK - this is slightly off-topic, but according to the BBC, Creationism is to be taught to children in UK science classes. This is both ridiculous and unacceptable. I realise that extremist factions in the United States have somehow gotten control of the educational agenda there; however, I had thought we might be more sensible in the UK. Apparently not.
Why is the creationist viewpoint unacceptable? The answer is simple - because the people that put forward the creationist viewpoint have no understanding of the simply overwhelming evidence that supports the theory of evolution. These people are ignorant; their views have no place science classes. What next - teaching that some people believe little green men from Mars are walking the Earth? And because some people believe that, we must teach children that those people’s views should be taken seriously?
Biology is arguably going to be the most important single discipline of the 21st century - in the same way that compting was the most important single discipline of the 20th century. It’s hard enough for the UK to compete in the global economy as it is - the very last thing we need is for children to waste time in science classes on “theories” that were relevant only thousands of years ago.
Asam Bashir wrote:
Have you read about the new theory of Evolution, like the whole purpose of the Universe is to create intelligence? Its called Biocosm..
See: http://www.biocosm.org
Must say, does kinda make sence in the grand scale of things.
What’s your view on the coming singularity btw?
see: http://www.kurzweilai.net
Anyway, sorry oregami was too lame for me to comment on - wait till 1st April when Apple brings out something special. Its been working on some novel imput methods and has some patents for gestures as imput method….
Posted 14 Mar 2006 at 12:33 am ¶
simon wrote:
Biocosm doesn’t makes sense to me in the context of what we know about the current state of the Universe. Specifically, if the “purpose” of the Universe is to create intelligence, it hasn’t been very successful, has it? I guess we’ll know if Biocosm is right in few billion years, if by that time the Universe is teaming with intelligent life.
As for the “coming singularity”, Ray Kurzweil is pulling the classic stunt of all so-called futorologists. That is, he “predicts” newsworthy events in the future that are just sufficiently far off that by the time we’re due for his predictions to have come true, everyone will have forgotten about them; and predicts obvious events in the short-term to give “credibility” to his long-term predictions.
So for example, he’s the kind of person that might say things like, “When I look at the roadmap for the future, I see that within 10 years, computers will be much smaller than they are now - you will be able to carry computer running Windows in your pocket. Within 20 to 30 years, we will have intelligent nanobots that can automatically repair your body and make you live for up to 1000 years.”
History shows us that people are incredibly bad at predicting the future. So, my guess is that Kurzweil is wrong not only about the “coming singularity”, but also about almost everything else.
Posted 14 Mar 2006 at 9:18 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
You’re making the assumption that there is only one Universe, Biocosm predicts there may be many multi-verses, and this isn’t too far from what M-theory is saying right? This particular universe lead to us, we’ve so far managed to put together this web of information, if intelligence is emergent behaviour then its not too far in the future that the Internet might wake up one day and say, I AM. Once it does that then it would help its own developement. Ignoring specific predications, the most important thing Kurzwell says to remember is that the future is exponential. That’s the mistake you’re making now assuming we need a billion years for a super intelligent being to evolve, you’re viewing the future as linear.
Posted 14 Mar 2006 at 3:21 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
BTW, if you not noticed, the big bang is in a mess these days, no proof for quantum cosmology and people turning more and more to Electric universe concepts. When you star looking at this and view the universe as a hug computation, things start looking even wierder.
See Oxford preparing for the future,
1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman†stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/
I wrote some stuff like that a few years ago, but they called me a nutter back then….
Posted 18 Mar 2006 at 5:38 am ¶
simon wrote:
Where on the FHI web-site does it talk about “posthumans” or “living in a computer simulation”? Where is the evidence that people are turning “more and more” to Electric Universe concepts?
Posted 18 Mar 2006 at 10:01 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
They’re ideas and as such lots of healthy debate, they provide better visions of the future then the current politicians,
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Sometimes we need to step back and think a little different, before stepping ahead, take a snap shot from the grand scale and just check it out….
Posted 19 Mar 2006 at 2:02 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400040922
Posted 19 Mar 2006 at 2:21 am ¶
simon wrote:
OK - I just read the Simulation Argument paper. I can’t believe people can get away with stuff like this. The problem with this type of work is that people construct quite sophisticated arguments based on simple assertions that are almost certainly wrong. In this case, the assertion is - “In the future, computers will be so powerful that it will be possible to simulate a hundred billion humans interacting with each other”.
This assertion is, IMHO, badly flawed. The argument ignores the difficulty in writing the *software* for this simulation. Developing more powerful computers is a trivial undertaking compared with writing such complex software. The truth is that it’s likely that writing the simulation software will always be impossible. And thus the whole “we’re living in a computer simulation” argument falls apart.
People often fall into this sort of trap. In the late 1990s, I recall having conversations with some IBM people and also some of the academics who they were collaborating with, when they were starting their BlueGene project. They were insistent they were going to solve the protein folding problem, with the vast computer power they were putting in place. The people on this project simply ignored the fact that the simulation software they were using wouldn’t (obviously, in my opinion) be up to the job of simulating protein folding; and they could provide me with no convincing arguments as to why they would succeed on any reasonable timescale As far as I know, IBM has still not yet solved the protein folding problem. What they have found, as the years have gone by, is that as well as more computer power, they need more sophisticated software. In other words, the real problem is the software, not the hardware.
It’s easy to build arguments on top of impossible/exceptionally unlikely hypotheses that “simply” require huge leaps in technology. Here’s another one. The universe is so large that there must exist super-intelligent life with super-advanced technology that enables them to travel at faster than the speed of light or otherwise traverse the universe on short-timescales. It follows that the Earth has been visited by aliens and they are walking among us.
If you accept the underlying assertion, then of couse there must be aliens walking among us. Of course, the problem with the argument is that there’s no reason to believe that it’s *possible* to build space vehicles that can travel anywhere in the Universe on short-timescales.
Posted 19 Mar 2006 at 9:29 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Do you think we could one day develop simple semi intelligent programs that put in a certain environment and given a copy mechanism could evolve in to better programs? True, to write an AI program from scratch would be impossible for human coders, but if if the code evolves itself? in computer time limited only by procssor availability and not time. Biology can be viewed as a computer program with the code as DNA, its not a silicon computer of course, but its a kind of computation right? Its not throwing everything we know from empirical evidence away, its just looking at it from a slight different stance.
We don’t have a grand unified theory to be able to say for certain if speed of light can be reached, we don’t really understand anything really to rule some possibilities out. Why is the grand unifying theory so elusive?
Posted 19 Mar 2006 at 7:21 pm ¶
simon wrote:
I take your point about DNA and biological systems. And self-evolving code is commonly used today (see e.g. genetic algorithms). Today, these are mosly quite trivial pieces of software, and they rarely (if ever) solve problems that couldn’t solved by other algorithms.
The challenge with developing self-evolving computer systems that could evolve to something approaching the complexity of interacting humans, would be to provide an “evironment” for the code, whereby the evolutionary pressures on the system could produce a sensible direction.
Now, in theory, you could say that, in a “future” with massive computer power, posthumans could have built a self-evolving computer system, and that we’re the product of the system. But surely, such theories are not falsifiable (in the Karl Popper sense); and it’s difficult (impossible) to make scientific advances if theories aren’t falsifiable. You might as well say we’re all figments of George W Bush’s imagination - you can’t prove that we’re not; in the same way you can’t prove that we’re not part of a posthuman computer simulation.
As for why the grand unifying theory is elusive, I would ask why you think it *shouldn’t* be elusive? The universe is complex. Progress towards greater understanding of complex areas is made by people coming up with falsifiable (but incorrect) theories.
Posted 19 Mar 2006 at 10:46 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
We might never be able to capture or measure a graviton, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925431.200.html - I’m not sure if that would make it a non falsifiable theory.
This looks spooky too, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRhFnIw09×4&search=qrio
Posted 20 Mar 2006 at 12:01 am ¶
simon wrote:
It you can’t design a test/make a prediction then it would indeed be a non-falsifiable theory. There is a good argument to say that, until current theories of gravity progress to the point where predictions are made and experiments can be done to test those predictions, these theories are no more “scientific” than saying “gravity is caused by invisible bunny rabbits running around looking for invisible carrots”.
Posted 20 Mar 2006 at 8:37 am ¶