Science, Technology & Health: May 2004 Archives
Wow, I've never read a less informed defense of evolution by someone who appears so confident.
What does the "theory" of ID [Intelligent Design; I haven't read the whole Wikipedia entry, but it looks like a decent description, although quite biased -- MW] predict? NOTHING - it simply provides a post facto rationalization for some of the processes observed in biology. Just like "F=mv" vs. "F=ma", ID chokes on those cases that are explained elegantly by the theory of evolution.Apparently, Gene Expression author "godless" isn't particularly familiar with typical descriptions of evolution. To quote some of Fred Reed's questioning of evolution:
So much of evolution contradicts other parts. Sparrows evolved drab and brown so that predators won’t see them. Cockatoos and guacamayas are gaudy as casinos in Las Vegas so they can find each other and mate. But…but….Not remotely. (Some of Mr. Reed's questions are refutable in detail, but they give a general sense of the most persuasive arguments against evolution.)The answers to these questions either lapse into a convoluted search for plausibility or else boil down to the idea that since guacamayas are as they are, their coloration must have adaptive value. That is, it is the duty of the evidence to fit the theory, rather than of the theory to fit the evidence. This is science?
I do not to deny that, as "godless" points out, the theory of evolution has led to some interesting lines of thought -- from molecular chemistry to computational algorithms (the utility of which he appears to vastly overrate) -- but that doesn't make the theory true. After all, one particular implementation of the theory of Intelligent Design, called Christianity, has had a substantial effect on civilization as well.
I could go through "godless'" post point by point, but I doubt I would convince anyone of anything, because -- as "godless" denies but Steven Den Beste accedes -- belief in evolution is based on faith. Despite what "godless" claims, evolution is not falsifiable, any more than is ID; absent a time machine or direct and convincing revelation, neither can be proven nor disproven. One is free to construe the existing evidence in the direction one finds most convincing -- in conjunction with other aspects of one's worldview -- but claiming that either theory is more fact than faith is intellectually dishonest.
(HT: Donald Sensing and S3.)
Steve Sailer, the author of the UPI story I quoted previously, commented and pointed me to a much longer and more detailed essay he wrote for National Review in 1997 titled "Is Love Colorblind?". He addresses many of the issues and gives a lot of data and historical background, and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about the issue. A short excerpt:
Interracial marriage is growing steadily. From the 1960 to the 1990 Census, white - Asian married couples increased almost tenfold, while black - white couples quadrupled. The reasons are obvious: greater integration and the decline of white racism. More subtly, interracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence.Nor is it surprising that white - Asian marriages outnumber black - white marriages: the social distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the distance between blacks and whites. What's fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites -- especially Asian men and black women -- have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage.This is a painful topic to explore honestly, so nobody does. Still, it's important because interracial marriages are a leading indicator of what life will be like in the even more diverse and integrated twenty-first century. Intermarriages show that integration can churn up unexpected racial conflicts by spotlighting enduring differences between the races.
For example, probably the most disastrous mistake Marcia Clark made in prosecuting O. J. Simpson was to complacently allow Johnny Cochran to pack the jury with black women. As a feminist, Mrs. Clark smugly assumed that all female jurors would identify with Nicole Simpson. She ignored pretrial research indicating that black women tended to see poor Nicole as The Enemy, one of those beautiful blondes who steal successful black men from their black first wives, and deserve whatever they get.
The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites.
Women tend to look for husbands who resemble their dads, according to some researchers in Hungary. That's pretty much conventional wisdom, and not particularly surprising. The reason I point out the article is because there are two strange assertions that are unsupported, and strike me as false.
Husbands and wives have long been suggested to look alike and this is known to occur in many animal species. Couples that look like each other are also more likely to share common genes, and having a degree of similarity is believed to beneficial. ...First cousins are generally too closely related to intermarry without a significant chance of accumulated genetic defects. Single instances of first-cousin marriage in a family will likely be just fine, but if the practice is carried on over generations the line will be severely weakened. There is a lot of evidence to support the notion that mating between widely different genomes leads to more robust children."One good possibility is that there are some fortuitous genetic combinations which are retained in the offspring if both parents are similar," he says. "In humans there is evidence to show a lower rate of miscarriage."
However, he points out that there is a balance between the benefits of marrying someone genetically close and the harmful effects of inbreeding. "There seems to be an ideal balance, maybe around the first or second cousin point."
Imprinting is a fast, instinctive form of learning, perhaps best known from the phenomenon in which newborn ducklings bond with the first object they see.Imprinting is generally considered to be a myth among humans. Ducks appear to imprint, but human babies do not. Until around 6 months of age, babies probably can't distinguish one adult from another, and most don't get fussy about who holds them until 12 months of age or older. Human children certainly do become attached to their parents, but not via "imprinting".To test whether women use imprinting to base their marital choices on the appearance of their fathers, the researchers took 26 adoptive families and examined how alike various family members looked. Using adoptive families meant inherited preferences could be ruled out. ...
The second showed a photo of the adoptive father as he would have looked when his daughter was between two and eight years of age, and the possible husbands. The third set showed the adoptive mother and the four possible husbands.
An "unexpected" finding, says Weisfeld, was that fathers who were judged by their daughters to have showed the most emotional warmth were much more likely to have son-in-laws who looked like them.This result undermines the above argument that women tend to select mates who look like their fathers because there's a benefit to marrying close genetic relatives. It's much more likely that this affinity is almost entirely environmental, and that women who had good relationships with their fathers will look for similar behaviors in their husbands.
Furthermore, doesn't it seem likely that men who have good relationships with their daughters will all share similar qualities? Isn't it likely that most women, regardless of their fathers, look for pretty much the same qualities in men? Those women with fathers who also possess those good qualities can be seen to be looking for the same things in mates, but really, that similarity is an effect of what most women want, not a cause of what any particular woman wants.
(HT: GeekPress.)
I think a computer architecture concept intended to reduce power consumption may also have a lot of potential for hardware-level artificial intelligence implementations.
Palem's team has designed a format for embedded chips that are capable of going with a hunch rather than performing painfully precise calculations. Early testing indicates that the chips can extend battery life and, as a bonus, may also enable mobile devices to run more complex applications, since an awful lot of time is currently wasted in churning out those exact calculations. ...A lot of computational power is used in AI to simulate probabalistic unreliability, but it would be pretty neat if we could get it built in on the hardware.In conventional computer circuits, each single bit of information is represented by a 0 or a 1. This information is definite; a circuit is either on or off -- the answer is either yes or no.
But with Probabilistic Bits, or PBits, chips, a circuit can be "on" with a high degree of certainty, but not with 100 percent certainty, said Palem, whose team developed the PBits prototype.
"In the chips being built today, the hardware obeys the software instructions absolutely, even though the application software does not require such precision," said Palem. "So the simple idea that we have is to make the following connection: If probabilistic algorithms do not need the hardware to be reliable, then why invest a lot of money and time in making hardware reliable?"
(HT: GeekPress.)
