There Was No First Human

by cofty 266 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Viviane

  Viviane usually programs are squishy(have bugs) because we don't have the same standards as other disiplines and we get away with it. Compare a bridge collapsing vs a program crashing. Some fields required very robous and bug free coding but those are few.

  The intent of developing software is not to have bug-free software, that's impossible, it's to reach the highest known state of software quality.

  Ah, I didn't know you were in the field. As it turns out, I have to eat my words, because your comment reminded me of what I'm working on at the moment, which is a complex network application. It's quite painful to diagnose problems when you can't use the debugger and have to deal with varying network conditions and issues that span multiple computer systems. It does often feel like I'm trying to get a grip on something slippery while tracking down problems. It's certainly not what I thought I was signing up for when I started learning programming!

  Things are not as exact as people would imagine in the field of computing..... I remember in my early days we were working on some debugging and put in code to write extra logging ... which caused the issue to disappear. At least we figured out the extra code was causing a timing isse that the extra time it took to do the logging was "fixing". And then there was the time a DB developer tried to outsmart the thread scheduler ....
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  jgnat

  The relative quality of an argument is not based on the reciprocity of insult! You are out of your league, atrapado.

  
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  Viviane

  Lets see 2^3billion is so big that we could say for practical reasons going through all those posibilities is impossible. We might not be able to do it ever. We might never find a way but I failed to see how without a doubt you can say there is no way period.

  Because you are creating a version of Zeno's paradox. If you want to sample every human alive, by the time your sampling is done, there will be new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, and by the time that is done, you have new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, so on and so forth.
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  Apognophos

  If you want to sample every human alive, by the time your sampling is done, there will be new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, and by the time that is done, you have new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, so on and so forth.

  Well, it is doable, just for the record. One word: nanomachines.
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  Viviane

  Well, it is doable, just for the record. One word: nanomachines.

  Nope, by the time you implant a nanomachine in a newborn, there is still another born, so you are still beind. Plus, the example is not explaining any ways to interpret many possible outcomes or potential problems with even defining the standard.
• 

  jgnat

  ...which I thought I covered with my explanation of "fuzzy borders" of definitions.

  These Juncos all interbreed so are therefore all the same species.

  
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  Apognophos

  The nanomachines don't need to be implanted. Nanomachines can self-replicate. They can blanket the earth. There is no hiding from the nanomachines. Perhaps there's one latched onto the embryo from early on, reading its DNA before it's even born. There are some obvious and big benefits to having access to this kind of data which have nothing to do with academic issues like nomenclature, such as personalized health care and the ability to fix genetic issues in the womb.

  As you said, having all this data would not solve the problem of what a species is. I think that goes back to my earlier suggestion about distilling the genome into a name, like a procedurally built word or a version number that represents iteration. I think cofty's objection to this was reasonable, though, which was that there's just too much DNA to take into account all the changes. It would take an artificial intelligence to collate the information and pick out the notable changes ("This genetic switch does nothing", "This one gives the rabbits furrier ears", "This one improves their digestion", etc.) Even if it was imprecise and a lot of information was "lost" in describing a species, I still think it would yield better results than the current approach of fixed species names.

  This is all science fiction now, of course, but I don't think it's in any way far-fetched.
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  cofty

  I think there is a mistaken assumption of an evolutionary ladder that underpins your suggestion of Homo sapien version 1.01.03
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  Viviane

  Perhaps there's one latched onto the embryo from early on, reading its DNA before it's even born.

  And by then there are 10 more embryos per second. Still can't keep up. And some people will opt out and every individual born has genetic drift so that has to be taken into account, etc., etc..

  It literally could not ever happen.
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  jgnat

  ...which is why science is happy with representative samples. But that would not provide an absolute definition. One would still have a working definition with fuzzy borders.

  A man with fuzzy borders.