by sleepy 41 Replies latest jw friends
Can I just highlight that the word 'theory' in science is used slightly differently to what most people think it means. A theory can be proved but is still usually called a theory.
eg. Einsteins theory of relativity is still a theory even though it is well proved and accepted.
Ok I get the point.
What I mean by theory is a sound or probable idea unproven do to lack of evidence or not being true.
Prehaps I should say "Evolution fact or fallacy."
Much of the reason for evolution's privileged status has been due to confusion over just what scientists mean when they use the word evolution. Evolution is a slippery term. If evolution simply means "change over time," this is non-controversial. Peppered moths, Hawaiian drosophila fruit flies, and Galapagos finches are clear examples of change over time. If you say that this form of evolution is a fact, well, so be it. But this kind of "change over time" tells us nothing about where moths, fruit flies, and finches came from in the first place. Common examples of natural selection acting on present genetic variation do not tell us how microbes turned into magpies, maple trees and musicians.
The Darwinists attempt to make their case for molecules to man evolution by using a definition of evolution that simply means change over time. With this definition the Darwinist can assert that the little changes we can observe taking place in organisms today, can add up to big changes, given enough time. Seems logical.
However, the "evolution" that is in question isn't evolution that merely refers to change over time. After all, a downhill, information losing process produces change over time. Thus we find examples of insects losing the ability to fly and certain cave dwelling fish losing their eye sight. However, the evolution that is being challenged is the kind of evolution that is an uphill, information-adding process. This is the kind of process you need to produce eyes, wings and brains in the first place.
Now, the kind of evolution that we can actually observe happening today is the kind that can cause the ratio of dark to light peppered moths in a population to vary when the background trees become dark due to industrial air pollution, it can cause insects to become resistant to poisons that use to kill them, it can cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics, but can we extrapolate from this data that complex biological structures and organs like eyes, wings and brains can be created from this same process if we give it enough time?
Here is what is wrong with that hypothesis. The kind of changes we observe occurring in organisms today do not involve the creation of new informaton. The changes are due to information already in the genome or they result from a loss of information. On the other hand, the origination of eyes, wings and brains requires the input of massive amounts of new information, information that at one time never existed in any living thing on earth. You can't take a process that doesn't produce information or loses information and assert that if you give it enough time it will produce massive amounts of new information.
That selection and inheritance with modification together account for the full diversity of life--is an inflated view of the Darwinian mechanism. As a mechanism for conserving, adapting, and honing already existing biological structures, the Darwinian mechanism is ideally suited. But as a mechanism for innovating complex biological structures and organs, it utterly lacks the informational resources.
According to Darwinism, natural selection is a very grim natural reaper. At the very heart of evolution theory is the assertion that many small deletions in bulk--many small wanton deaths--feeding on the throwaway optimism of minor variation, can, in a counterintuitive way, add up to something truly new and meaningful. Death gives room for the new, it eliminates the ineffective. But to say that death causes wings to be formed, or eyeballs to work, is essentially wrong. Natural selection merely selects away the deformed wing, the unseeing eye. "Natural selection is the editor, not the author," says the evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis. What, then, authors innovation in flight and sight? Is it perhaps mutations?
Can random mutation generate the unbroken series of needed winners for selection to choose from? Darwinian theory has the sizable burden of proving that the negative, braking power of selective demise, coupled with the blind chaotic power of randomness, can produce the persistent, creative, positive drive toward more complexity we see sustained in nature over billions of years. Being a skeptic, I just don't see it. Evidently you have to be a true believer in Darwinian orthodoxy to have faith in what can't be demonstrated scientifically.
Saying that mutation and selection have creative ability is analogous to asserting that a great work of literature such as Moby Dick could emerge from lesser preexisting books, if there were enough typos and swapping of paragraphs along the way. The trouble is, when this process is actually attempted with text, it never succeeds. Only with guidance can random processes lead to meaningful sentences or paragraphs.
Chandra Wickramasinghe has compared the neo-Darwinian account of evolution to saying that all of world literature came from the book of Genesis by occasional typos. The mechanism is analogous to stipulating that every text along the way was viable as literature. Such gradualistic series have not been shown to be possible in written text or computer programs. Nor have they been shown to exist in biology. If this is how complex biological structures and organs are supposed to evolve, the mechanism remains to be demonstrated.
DNA is "alphabetic," a discrete language of A's,T's,G's, and C's that somehow encodes all the designs we find in organisms. DNA is not LIKE a code; it IS a code. Randomness in language is the enemy of order, a way of annihilating meaning. And not only in language, but in any language-like system--computer programs for example. The alien influence of randomness in such systems was first noted by the distinguished French mathematician M.P.Schutzenberger, who also marked the significance of this circumstance for evolutionary theory. "If we try to simulate such a situation," he wrote, "by making changes randomly...on computer programs, we find that we have no chance...even to see what the modified program would compute; it just jams."
So how can random perturbations in the genetic language yield the complex instructions necessary for producing new biological structures and organs? It is like saying you could put the instructions for producing an automobile into a computer and over time through occasional typos and paragraph swapping there would emerge a plan for building a nuclear power plant. In every other language we know of, randomness is the enemy of order. Random changes in English yield gibberish. Random changes in computer programs are even worse, they just jam. It follows, then, that circumstances known to degrade meaning in formal systems should be the source of alarm in the context of theoretical biology.
Evolution is basically the belief that everything in the biological world originated through non-intelligent processes. According to evolution, there was once a time when none of the creatures in the world had lungs. This means that there was no genetic information for lungs-anywhere. Then, at a later time, `lung information', arose and was added to the world, but no `feather information' as yet--feathers evolved later.
In other words, for every feature which arises by evolution, there would need to be new genetic information added to the total information in the biosphere (i.e.,all the information in all the creatures on earth). Some features could be lost subsequently, of course, so there will not always be a gain, but if microbes turned into magpies, maple trees and musicians, there must have been a massive net INCREASE in information. This is not just any jumble of chemical sequences, but meaningful information, since it codes for complex structures which have purposeful functions.
So if new information, new functional complexity, can be shown to be arising by itself where previously there was none, this would give some credibility to the idea of molecules-to-man evolution, although it would not strictly prove that it has occurred.
However, it can be shown that in every situation where populations of living things change, they do so without increase (and often with a decrease) of information. Thus, it is completely illegitimate for anyone to claim that such changes show `evolution happening'. Let me be perfectly clear. Not all change in organisms is "evolution". At least not the kind of evolution that is controversial. Organisms can change by losing information. This is not the kind of "evolution that is being questioned. The kind of evolution that is in dispute is that of an uphill, information-adding process. A process that creates brand new genetic programs that carry new instructions for building complex biological structures and organs that never existed in the world before.
It is this uphill, information-adding process that many consider to be best explained by Intelligent Design. What is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design begins with the observation that intelligent causes can do things which undirected natural causes cannot. As William Dembski puts it:
"Within biology, Intelligent Design is a theory of biological origins and development. Its fundamental claim is that intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology, and that these causes are empirically detectable.
To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist well-defined methods that, on the basis of observational features of the world, are capable of reliably distinguishing intelligent causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed such methods for drawing this distinction--notably forensic science, cryptography, archaeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (as in the movie Contact).
Whenever these methods detect intelligent causation, the underlying entity they uncover is information. Intelligent Design properly formulated is a theory of information. Within such a theory, information becomes a reliable indicator of intelligent causation as well as a proper object for scientific investigation. Intelligent Design thereby becomes a theory for detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and tracing its flow. Intelligent Design is therefore not the study of intelligent causes per se, but of informational pathways induced by intelligent causes.
As a result, Intelligent Design presupposes neither a creator nor miracles. Intelligent Design is theologically minimalist. It detects intelligence without speculating about the nature of the intelligence. Biochemist Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," physicist David Bohm's "active information," mathematician Marcel Schtzenberger's "functional complexity," and my own "complex specified information" are alternate routes to the same reality. It is the empirical detectability of intelligent causes that renders Intelligent Design a fully scientific theory, and distinguishes it from the design arguments of philosophers, or what has traditionally been called "natural theology." The world contains events, objects, and structures which exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural causes, and which can be adequately explained only by recourse to intelligent causes. Scientists are now in a position to demonstrate this rigorously. Thus what has been a long-standing philosophical intuition is now being cashed out as a scientific research program."
Anyone who thinks that Natural Selection and random mutation cannot increase information has never run computer simulations which demolish this claim. The computer program called Tierra, which I have run on my machine, creates self replicating programs that compete with other programs, die, and occasionally have mutations when they reproduce. From one parent program, viruses and more complex programs are created from nothing more than Natural Selection (the programs that reproduce the best in the computer environment win) and random mutation.
The problem with such analogies as works of English literature is that the only purpose of life is to reproduce. There is no end product that evolution is shooting for. As long as the DNA survives another generation it could care less whether the mechanism for propogating DNA is bacteria or humans. Even this language is to anthropomorphic. The only reason organs developed is because the organisms with such organs had some sort of advantage over the ones that didn't. There was no goal for the perfect wing or eye. After millions of years of refinement, we see what we have: many optimal and many suboptimal designs for organisms in their environment. The common denominator is that they are all "good enough" to survive and reproduce.
rem
"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
..........Bertrand Russell
To Teirce:
I have no such information.
To Warren:
Where did you borrow the material for your post immediately above from? It contains some good points, but also some misinformation. Since you're presenting it as your own material, I'll comment as if you wrote it:
The working definition of "evolution" for biologists and for most scientists certainly is "change over time". However, the way you've written about it tends to trivialize the scale of time because you haven't dealt with the fact that the fossil record contains a record of change in multicellular life forms going back about one billion years. Indeed, this record of change encompasses the entire span of life. Since we observe in the fossil record these changes over a billion years, and we observe massive changes in life forms over that time, and we observe both minor and major changes in categories of life forms that form sequences that many people would describe as "from simpler to more complex", the obvious conclusion is that on the whole life has tended to evolve (change over time) from simpler to more complex. The driving force behind this change is irrelevant to the observation of change.
Since we observe change in life forms on all time scales, and the changes we observe on relatively short time scales (such as in dog breeding, speciation in Hawaiian fruit flies and Galapagos finches, change in body structure and feeding habits of the Galapagos iguana from its South American ancestor, etc.) are certainly not the product of Intelligent Design (i.e., due to a Supremely Intelligent Designer), there is no particularly good reason to suppose that non-intelligent-designer-directed evolution does not also occur on longer time scales. Just where would one place a cut-off date, and by what evidence? What evidence can Intelligent Design proponents advance that shows why there cannot be a continuous gradation from minor to major change, all of which occurs without supernatural intervention?
Again the fossil record provides plenty of examples of change over time, even minor, gradual changes from organism to organism that form a sequence that strongly suggests Darwinian evolution -- even though the idea seems nonsensical to many people. One example is the evolution of the mammalian jaw structure, as seen in the fossil record of mammal-like reptiles called Therapsids that lived before roughly 220 million years ago. Early examples of therapsids had a fully reptilian jaw structure consisting of four bones per side of the face. Mammals have only a single bone that forms the jaw, while the other three bones -- believe it or not -- gradually migrated inside the skull to form the tiny internal earbones. Later therapsids display this gradual change in structure, and of course their skeletons tend to show more mammal-like features as well. By near the end of the Permian period therapsids are so mammal-like that paleontologists are sometimes unable to definitely classify a specimen as definitely therapsid or mammal. One specimen was found that actually had both the reptile style and mammal style jaws in parallel. It showed biologists just what was happening in these animals and what the reasons for the odd structures were. A living animal, the echidna I think, actually goes through a similar sort of evolution during its fetal stage. The jaw starts out reptilian, then three of the bones gradually migrate back inside the head and form the earbones. Now, with both a living example and a series of fossils that demonstrate the evolution of the mammalian jaw, what can be said about claims of young-earth creationists or "intelligent design" theorists that such an evolution is impossible? Obviously they're wrong.
One can find some references on the above in my essay "The WTS View of Creation and Evolution" here: http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/index2.htm .
Another problem for claims that gradual evolution is impossible is the fact that present day organisms contain huge amounts of "junk DNA" -- DNA that includes genes for structures the animals do not normally have. These genes are sometimes expressed naturally in the quirks of nature known as atavisms or throwbacks. For example, it was not uncommon for 19th-century whalers to pull in a whale that had hind legs in some stage of development. Sometimes the legs would be little stumps; other times they would be complete with bones, muscles and tendons. Modern biologists know how to apply certain hormones to chicken eggs such that the embryos develop teeth. Obviously, whale DNA contains unexpressed genes for legs and chicken DNA contains unexpressed genes for teeth. This is perfectly consistent with the fossil record of both of these types of animals, because certain ancient whales had small but fully developed legs, and all of the most ancient birds had teeth. There are many other examples showing that modern DNA contains all sorts of unexpressed potential structures. These observations are completely compatible with a gradual evolution of body forms.
Given the abundance of fossil and other observational evidence, the misgivings of intelligent design proponents about the mechanism of non-intelligence-directed evolution are not very credible. Their notion of intelligent design may well be true, but they have not demonstrated in any way that Darwinian or some other kind of "chance-directed" evolution is impossible, or even improbable.
You quoted someone to the effect that random changes to computer programs produce only junk. That is simply not so. I don't remember where I recently read about this (Scientific American?), but some computer science types recently designed a computer world inhabited by self-replicating computer viruses. The idea was to start with a few basic types of "organisms" that would "fight" among themselves, reproduce, and gradually evolve. The changes to the virus programs were made by a random substitution of a bit of junk code. Most "mutated" programs quickly died, but every so often a change was made that made the virus better able to survive in its battles with other viruses. After a long enough time, a set of pretty tough viruses were left. After analyzing the resulting virus code, the computer scientists were amazed to find that some of the viruses contained some amazingly "clever" code -- all designed "randomly" -- that they themselves said they would never have thought of. That's because an optimum survivability strategy in a complex "world" is impossible for people to calculate in advance. It literally has to evolve.
So if simple self-reproducing computer viruses can evolve, despite the pronouncements of people like your French mathematician, why shouldn't organic organisms be able to evolve, despite the pronouncements of skeptics who have a creationist agenda? Doesn't it make moot, questions like yours here?
: So how can random perturbations in the genetic language yield the complex instructions necessary for producing new biological structures and organs?
The simple fact is that complex instructions have "evolved" out of random changes in a computer environment. No one has demonstrated that similar organic evolution is impossible. Indeed, virtually all of the negative argumentation boils down to, "I don't see how it could work." This is the old "argument from incredulity" -- which has been demonstrated time and again to leave egg on the faces of those who invoke it to "explain" why they don't go along with some fairly well supported idea.
In reality "Intelligent Design theory" isn't a theory at all. It is more of an anti-theory -- anti-scientific-establishment to be specific. It proposes no driving mechanism capable of investigation. Its basic premise is, "I don't see how regular scientific theories of evolution could work; therefore the only thing left is a Supreme Intelligent Designer." I have yet to see a single proponent of this theory deal substantively with criticisms. Phillip Johnson is the most vocal proponent and he's the best example of ignoring substantive criticisms. You quote Dembski as saying, "Within biology, Intelligent Design is a theory of biological origins and development." Really. Do point your readers to an actual theory that consists of more than "God must have done it cuz evolution don't work". Perhaps Dembski has written a substantive book that actually demonstrates his claim that "scientists" are about to rigorously demonstrate the notion? If so, do point it out to readers here.
AlanF
Hi Sleepy,
Be sure to check your area for the PBS series on evolution. It's airing all day Sunday in my area.
It's great!!
pat
So if new information, new functional complexity, can be shown to be arising by itself where previously there was none, this would give some credibility to the idea of molecules-to-man evolution, although it would not strictly prove that it has occurred.However, it can be shown that in every situation where populations of living things change, they do so without increase (and often with a decrease) of information. Thus, it is completely illegitimate for anyone to claim that such changes show `evolution happening'. Let me be perfectly clear. Not all change in organisms is "evolution". At least not the kind of evolution that is controversial. Organisms can change by losing information. This is not the kind of "evolution that is being questioned. The kind of evolution that is in dispute is that of an uphill, information-adding process. A process that creates brand new genetic programs that carry new instructions for building complex biological structures and organs that never existed in the world before.
Not true at all. Look at our DNA. Most of it is junk DNA that is no longer used, we are using exactly that "new" DNA that you insist is impossible to evolve.
BTW evolution is not in question any more than the earth orbiting the sun is in question, or that gravity holds us down. The actual mechanism that causes the change is what is debated, but that the change occured is demonstrated very clearly.
>>Anyone who thinks that Natural Selection and random mutation cannot increase information has never run computer simulations which demolish this claim. <<
Wrong.
1) The program by Tom Ray called Tierra is well-known. It starts with a species that originally has 80 instructions. The creatures multiply and evolve until the computer's storage capacity is full. From then on the population is controlled by killing off creatures ranking lower on a fitness scale. One common outcome is the evolution of parasitism. Parasitism is known to be important in biological evolution. But the evolution of parasitism does not necessarily require any new genes-- the genes of the parasites and hosts already exist beforehand. True, biological genomes that become related in this way may in fact require new genes to make them compatible with each other. But in Tierra, nothing suggests that anything analogous to a new gene is ever created.
2) One well-known computer program that purports to mimic evolution is the one by Richard Dawkins that creates "biomorphs". The program generates stick figures that resemble insects, trees, bats, spiders, etc. The figures show a certain amount of variety as they evolve. But the evolution is by artificial selection, and nothing like gene duplication occurs. Instead, only nine or sixteen variables (in different versions) are allowed to wander within narrow ranges. These few variables occupy a tiny fraction of the "genome" that generates the biomorphs, which includes Dawkins's application program and the necessary parts of the computer's operating system. The sequence space explored by Dawkins's program is tightly confined and every member of it is functional. Saying that this process represents evolution is like saying that the song "Happy Birthday" evolves whenever it is sung for a different person. Certainly, nothing analogous to a new gene is created by Dawkins's biomorphs.
3) John Koza 's models of evolution, called Genetic Programming, start with selected algorithms that are shuffled and duplicated to create new subroutines. The subroutines are bred for their ability to solve a basic problem. While it is possible for an evolved subroutine to contain more algorithms than its parent, there is no suggestion that any new algorithms are created in Koza's process. All of the necessary algorithms-- and some that may be unnecessary-- are supplied from the outset.
I believe since before Darwin that biology does not have a different set of rules from the rest of science. If neo-Darwinian evolution works, it should be possible to mimic the process in software. Computers should be able to mimic what biological evolution has done. No computer program simulates the creation of new genes that code for new functions.
More broadly, if a software model of evolution is possible, ordinary personal computers should be able to evolve wholly new, unexpected features that are somehow advantageous to them or their software. For example, computers might acquire the ability to activate other helpful programs, network with other computers, use the telephone, identify and disarm harmful viruses, automatically backup themselves, survive crashes, etc. All of these improvements would require new computer code. Since computer programs are transferred constantly, and duplicated, and mistakes are inserted occasionally, just as in biology, the opportunity for existing computer programs to evolve by the neo-Darwinian method is already in place.
Of course, in the marketplace, computers have acquired these and many other new abilities, but not in a closed system. To mimic neo-Darwinian evolution, they would have to evolve improvements without input from programmers, starting with only programs already available. To suggest that computers might evolve significant improvements this way seems farfetched. Why? Can computers, without the input of new code, write for themselves any programs with fundamentally new meaning? Is there any example of an improvement
to personal computers that was written by the unguided random duplication, mutation and recombination of existing code? Is the modern neo-Darwinian account of the evolution of biological improvements equally farfetched?
Returning to the narrower original question, can any computer model of neo-Darwinian evolution produce the analog of new genes? If not, perhaps we should wonder if the neo-Darwinian mechanism is sufficient to produce new genes in biology, or whether another source for them is necessary.
"Synthetically reproduced protolife and artificial evolution in computers have already unearthed a growing body of nontrivial surprises. Yet artificial life suffers from the same malaise that afflicts its cousin, artificial intelligence. No artificial intelligence that I am aware of-be it autonomous robot, learning machine, or massive cognition program-has run more than
24 hours in succession. After a day, artificial intelligence stalls. Likewise, artificial life. Most runs of computational life fizzle out of novelty quickly. While the programs sometimes keep running, churning out minor variation, they ascend to no new levels of complexity or surprise after the first spurt (and that includes Tom Ray's world of Tierra). Perhaps given more time to run, they would. Yet, for whatever reason, computational life based on unadorned natural selection has not seen the miracle of open-ended evolution that its creators, and I, would love to see. As the French
evolutionist Pierre Grasse said, "Variation is one thing, evolution quite another; this cannot be emphasized strongly enough... Mutations provide change, but not progress." So while natural selection may be responsible for microchange-a trend in variations-no one can say indisputably that it is responsible for macrochange-the open-ended creation of an unexpected novel form and progress toward increasing complexity." (Kelly K., "Out of Control: The New Biology of machines", [1994], Fourth Estate: London,1995, reprint, p.476)
Warren,
Instead of cutting and pasting arguments from authors who are intent on mischaracterizing such computer simulations you should try one yourself. Download Tierra and run it.
The person you quote says that Tierra creates viruses. That is true, but it is a red herring. Tierra also creates other completely independend programs that reproduce themselves. Many times, these programs will be much larger than the original - this means there is new information. Thus your premise is incorrect.
I have created several, if not hundreds of these non-virus, self replicating programs on my computer. Sometimes they use less instructions than the original, sometimes more. It is true that the smaller programs tend to be more successful, but that is due to natural selection within the VM environment - they are able to use less memory and reproduce faster than larger programs.
rem
"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
..........Bertrand Russell
Engineering, simulation, computation, reality, and humility
by John Walker
"There's a tendency among those of us who spend our lives building models of the real world, whether of the geometry of a mechanical part, the flow of heat around a hypersonic vehicle, or the relationship between investment in certain aspects of a business and return over a five year period, to confuse the model with reality.
The model, of necessity, must be oversimplified and stripped of much of the richness that makes the real world a better place to live. It's oversimplified not just because the computational requirements of a faithful simulation would humble even the NSA computers you're not supposed to know about, but even more because which parameters are relevant and which can be ignored simply aren't known. Consequently, when we build a model, it embodies all of our present-day prejudices about what matters and what doesn't. And therefore, we shouldn't be surprised when it fails to prepare us for the surprises that nature has in store for us.
April 1 last, the first full-scale test firing of the Titan 4 Solid Rocket Motor Upgrade was conducted at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This is the second most powerful solid rocket ever built; only the Space Shuttle SRBs are larger. The motor ignited on schedule and performed as expected throughout the ignition transient period of 400 milliseconds.
Then, without apparent cause, pressure started to rise in the uppermost segment of the motor. In less than a second, the composite motor case burst at about 1800 psi, resulting in an explosion that destroyed the entire reinforced concrete test stand, which will cost between $20 and $50 million and take 8 to 10 months to repair.
I quote from Aviation Week (27.05.91, in the library):
Investigators determined that extensive three-dimensional computer simulations of the SRMU's firing dynamics did not reveal subtle factors that they now believe contributed to motor failure. Stirling (Col. USAF, Titan 4 program director) said the full-scale test was essential precisely because computer analyses cannot accurately predict all nuances of solid rocket motor dynamics. ``That's why we test,'' he said. Indeed....
As we build our models, it's wise, every now and then, to remember that they're only models--representations of the real world that are no more faithful, in all, than your Lionel train set of Christmas past was of the Burlington and Northern. Computation can, and has, given us important insights on reality which were inaccessible in the age of pencil and paper (the implications of chaos in the dynamics of nonlinear systems, for example). Yet the unquestionable triumphs of computer aided engineering which, today, are becoming manifest everywhere in products which could never have been created without first having been simulated (a few years ago, in the first flight of an airplane, the test pilot didn't even raise the landing gear; last week, on the first flight of the Dassault [makers of CATIA] Rafale, it went to Mach 1.2) risk engendering a kind of computational hubris. Last October, at the Foresight Nanotechnology conference, Bill Joy suggested that instead of building the SSC, we should spend the US$8 billion to build a computer which could simulate all the results the SSC could create. (This proposal evoked, at least at my table--derisory hoots.) But consider...if everything in Heaven and Earth is programmed in HORATIO.SYS, pourquoi pas?
Because reality is richer than simulation, and experience beggars computation. Richard Feynman said:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Albert Einstein said:
Subtle is the Lord, but not malicious.
Kelvin R. Throop sez:
Nature is a tricky Mother. Reality must take precedence over everything, or you'll wind up in deep doo-doo.
We can happily spend the next 20 years developing faithful simulations of the physics discovered in the last century and creating thereby tools which will empower people to create products we can't begin to imagine today. But let's remember we're merely bottling a vision of the real world, not the real thing. Reality always asserts itself through surprises, and that's part of what makes life worth living."
