caross73

As they say, every industry needs people who make bad or unpopular decisions only if to make their competition look good.

I'm now extremely curious as to what is in that 50%. I'm betting transposons and repeat sequences make up the bulk of it, but thats without going on medline and finding the reference. When somebody says there is similarity, I go OF COURSE there is similarity. Its been recently shown by statistical inference that all extant life began as one lineage (as opposed to multiple origins and interbreeding), so go back far enough and everything living is directly related. But if it really is specific

Yeah, but its not the SAME 50% [e digicons]:annoyed:[/e] some of us are much more bananish than others. Finding a bit of homology between genes absolutely essential for all terrestrial life is nothing surprising, forgetting that at a certain point between any two stretches of DNA there HAS to be measurable similarity. There are only 4 letters. You try creating two strings, one million base pairs long, and see how hard you have to work so that only half the

How dare you accuse me of being related to a banana.

I suppose it is. Sorry for belaboring the point.

[quote who="Myles" reply="76" id="2645304"] Quoting caross73, reply 73"Fire doesn't/can't do that." The original life killed itself off by creating oxygen as a waste product. I'm not sure I would say that those primordial organisms weren't alive. Stromatolites are thought to have produce most/all off the oxygen we use today, and they are still around in Shark Bay, Australia. However, I'm over this discussion. Were arguing over the defin

"Fire doesn't/can't do that." The original life killed itself off by creating oxygen as a waste product. I'm not sure I would say that those primordial organisms weren't alive. If you were to ask me (and you haven't) I would say the difference is the degree of organization. Life can be viewed as a slow fire, that carefully regulates itself in order to maintain its own internal environment. It responds to the environment in order to maintain itself

"Life created itself with a purpose, to reproduce and survive." Tell me, in all your experience, have you ever seen something 'create itself' with a purpose in mind before it was created and thus able to conceive of that purpose for which it created itself?

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="66" id="2645277"] Survival is what life forms do (their actions directs them in that direction, evolving biologically and dinamically to the enviroment). To be alive is what they are (they would be stones or something else if not) and what survival must mantain. (Not trying to change your mind about it, just explaining myself)[/quote] I agree, but if they didn't DO it, they wouldn't be alive. So its not like its some additional t

If life didn't do things to survive, life wouldn't BE. Survival is what grass is. Green is what grass is. If survival wasn't what grass is, grass wouldn't BE. If photosynthesizing wasn't what grass is, grass also wouldn't be. It would be something else. If life didn't survive, it wouldn't be life. Purpose is something you have attributed to it. A reason. It doesn't exist outside of your head. A hammer has a purpose which we

Tell you what, if it didn't reproduce, would you still call it life? So how can a trait that is inextricably linked with what it is be called a purpose. Its like calling the purpose of grass, GREEN.

Myles, when you can demonstrate how a bacterium cares, in the usual sense of the word, an emotional interest, in whether it lives or dies, then I will admit that life has a 'purpose' other than just a 'defining characteristic'. How you will do this when its just a bag of self-copying chemistry, I have no idea.

[quote]Because we have stepped on His toes, creation of life is His territory.[/quote] Speak for yourself. WE didn't do anything. Your God sure seems to have a problem with us playing with the tools he gave us. Maybe he shouldn't have left them lying around. There is no reason an omnipotent power would have to allow us the capability to do these things in the first place except that apparently He wants us to. The Jews figured this out a long time ago. Ta

Or to put it ANOTHER another way, survival is what life forms ARE, its not what they DO.

Destiny is also an invented construct. Unless the future is real in some sort of physical way other than unrealized potential collapsing of probabilities, destiny doesn't exist any more than purpose does. To put it another way, plenty of other species have gone extinct. Just because we haven't yet and can actually think about it, try to infer some greater meaning into it, doesn't mean we are marked for specialness or that there IS a greater meaning.

[quote]If the purpose of humankind is survival[/quote] Zuh? Purpose was invented by humankind. How can it bootstrap itself with a purpose that would have had to exist before humans were around to think about it? Purpose is a construct. The fact that humans survive is a transient condition of nature, a fact, that at this time and place they survive and like to invent purposes for things. Morals likewise are a construct of social beings. The apes know about morality too. They kn

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="38" id="2645113"]For the record, I may be in favour of human extinction but not of harvesting babies.[/quote] But babies are tasty, and good with nachos. [e digicons]}:)[/e]

[quote who="PoSmedley" reply="33" id="2645058"] Nature selected them for extinction. And they were just walking around doing dinosaur stuff. I can't wait to see what nature does to us over the oil spill in the gulf.[/quote] No more stone crab. Oysters alot more expensive. Higher rates of cancer in anyone who eats fish world-wide. The gulf essentially dead for the next 1000 years. Loss of migratory birds / pollinators. Thats just the first things tha

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="29" id="2645015"] Quoting caross73, reply 17The ethical questions are important, "Ok, Mr Intelligent Neanderthal. We just cloned you and you know what? That's right? Direct to the disect table! Don't worry, the other clones may take some more time to die but will follow shortly and if they don't, don't hold your breath for them getting the proper treatment and respect that an intelligent lifeform should get." Why cannot we harvest babie

[quote] OK, now let me have it, I know it's coming....[e digicons]:ninja:[/e] [/quote] Its a secular society that doesn't regard any one religion as having exclusive access to truth (at least, if you're in most first world democracies). If you're going to make an argument against something, you should still be able to do it without resorting to untestable religious claims about who has divine authority and who doesn't. The argument should be just as good

"Nature selected them for extinction. We should leave them be." Yeah, and we're next, just in case nobody's paying attention.

The answer is 'of course we should', shortly followed by 'what is wrong with you people?' Somebody has to play God, it might as well be us! .. and I second Demiansky's comment. The ethical questions are important, but we don't know how humans evolved. Seeing a neanderthal to understand recent human evolution, among other things, might enable us to ultimately uplift other species to sapience. Imagine cities on the bottom of the ocean built by tool-using dolphins. Oil lea

[quote]And they didn't fail; they haven't even started to fight back yet. Impulse::Reactor, Stardock's answer to Steamworks, doesn't launch till August. It offers the same service as Steamworks without requiring the Impulse client to be installed or running, unlike Steamworks which requires Steam installed and running at all times.[/quote] Okay, I love Stardock, but I read the above and I can't help thinking: You will give me

Why would you get a caviar green? They are slower than the Caviar black and for a game system, you want a large cache and high speed. You're not trying to minimize power consumption. Edit: Oh, nevermind. Too late. At least you're being nice to the environment. I hate the way they market those drives, right alongside the much faster caviar black.

[quote who="Jafo" reply="214" id="2644589"] Oh yeah, definitely destroy a couple of parent's lives with a million dollar judgment because they didn't have a degree in network administration to know what was going on with all the blinking lights on their router. All they need to do is know what their kids are doing. It's called parental responsibility. It doesn't end with the sweating and panting of the beast with 2 backs. If only the world required a 'Lic