Posted on 06/12/2005 7:27:56 PM PDT by betty boop
I never had track of it.
How does this thread with no pictures get 183 replies?
Of all the things held dear, security and shelter serve us best, for on the morn, we set out again to earn our rest.
Just like to add one bit. With regard to life, and scoped within current understanding of thermodynamics, it also calls for an external source of energy. In instant case, the Sun.
However, I have reservations about whether there is a theoretical ability of random energy, being applied according to some Darwinistic process of mutation and "natural selection", to create complex dynamically highly-ordered systems. In all cases I am familiar with it creates iether more disorder or simply ordered regular systems such as the hexagonal-cell flow patterns seen in liquids just before bubbling.
Note I am avoiding the word "information" -- for no one has yet put a handle on that, except for it being patterns -- which is a poor and incredibly limited definition. And I am shy of getting detailed on what "natural selection" means. For the purpose of tying down the scope of my reservations, I'll take "natural selection" to include some arbitrary combination of death rate and reproduction rate. And I'm not at all touching what "mutation" means. Does it include viral induced cross-dressings of DNA and RNA? Does it include transpositions? Sex? Etc. What is a "mutation" and what is a variance on a theme? So for the sake of scoping my reservation I'll include all of them.
I challenge anyone to show me that evolution as a process is necessarily a good or progressive scheme.
I am respectfully asking you to ping me exactly once in all existance of time, and if you do not, I will notify the Moderator of Moderators!
Well said, dear TXnMA!!!
'Science' tells you less about Reality
than the dream you had last night.
Maybe thats what being a human(frog) is all about.. Wearing proper humility as clothing so you/he can appreciate the ultimate clothier.. when the fitting comes.. and Bride of Christ kisses the frog to reveal the handsome Prince hidden inside..
If you are to be rigorous in your analysis, you must concede that this premise is inherently wrong.
E = MC2 declares that to be the case.
Correction: Not you, milady -- but Nadeau and Kafatos -- are guilty of gross oversimplification -- such as one might expect from the likes of K. Hamm...
Self-Ping
Good as beneficial to the race and to the host; progressive as improving toward a more perfect system where the host and its guests synergistically converge.
Isn't the universe itself awesome? All these infinite possibilities within God...and so much apathy.
Hi chilepepper! Great question! I think Rupert Sheldrake's proposal of a morphic field might be a candidate for where such intergenerational knowledge resides. The idea goes that once a behavior is learned, its related information is picked up and registered in the field. Thus the "knowledge" is preserved that later generations can access via the field. The time cycle for sparrows to "relearn" the behavior is enormously time-compressed compared to the learning time cycle of the first generation of sparrows because later generations of sparrows can access the relevant information from the field. A major point is once something is learned the first time, it gets easier for others to learn it later. As I recall the Italian physicist Dallaporta also says something to that effect. (I'd have to track that down though.)
Anyhoot, a morphic field would seem to facilitate the broadcast as well as the reception of signals. And like all fields, it is universal in scope. It's an interesting idea, similar to speculations about the existence of collective consciousness.
Why knows, there might be something to it after all!
Thanks so much for writing, chilepepper!
Your correction duly noted, TXnMA! Perhaps Kafatos -- a Romanian physicist -- and Nadeau -- an American historian of science -- have oversimplified a bit. Then again, one might give them a pass by qualifying their statement as an observation from the Newtonian point of view. I imagine prior to relativity theory and quantum theory, such a statement would have been accepted by scientists as essentially correct.
Yet one of the major points Nadeau and Kafatos stress in The Non-local Universe is the insufficiency of the Newtonian ("classical") view to explain what is really going on in the universe.
So "go figure!" :^) (I really did like the book.)
Thanks so much for writing, TXnMA!
I also find Sheldrake's experiments, research and theories to be quite engaging. The bottom line, IMHO, is that science continues to search for a source of information (successful communications) in the universe - and a universal vacuum field is a logical candidate for medium.
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