Honey, I Finished The Internet

14 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

1. Interesting, but I am leaving that one alone.

2. Bats and moths have been engaged in a natural arms race for nearly 65 million years, each evolving strategies to outwit the other.
   Heh, they always have to include their evolution propaganda. No proof whatsoever, but who needs proof. Just like AGW…

3. Perhaps bats could hire the hawkmoths to direct their sonic blasts against wind turbines instead.

4. 65 million years, you’d think one of them would have come up with the Glock.

5. yes, because those assault rifles they came up with are going to be banned:-))))

6. Wonder if Suzuki has ever been zapped?

7. I have met guys who think a fart is a mating call. The world is truly a wonderous place eh?

8. That was really interesting. Now that I think about it, moths will eventually start coming up with countermeasures to bat sonar. What was really interesting was the fact that one of the moth species is capable of hearing at 300 KHz; whether this is just sensing the sound or actually breaking it down into individual octaves is something I have to look up. Use of insect genitalia for sound production is a good example of multi-functional body parts.
   As usual, though, there are some people who have to reject evolution. If one wants proof of evolution, look at how bacterial antibiotic resistance has evolved. This happens rather quickly and I’ve seen people treated with long term oral vancomycin for clostridium difficile infections suddenly showing up positive for vancomycin resistant enterococcus (this is a bug that ignorant hospital infection control people are terrified of and it’s my job to let patients know why they’re isolated and nurses wear gowns and gloves when dealing with them). Occam’s razor can be used to show that parallel evolution is the most likely explanation of the ultrasonic capabilities of bats and moths. OTOH, I can’t rule out the possibility that the whole world is just a computer simulation in a universe sized supercomputer that was started 3 minutes ago with all biologic organisms created in such a manner so as to suggest an evolutionary process at work. That hypothesis can’t be disproved but it also is of absolutely no use in understanding how the world works hence it gets junked. The divine creation hypothesis belongs to the same category of world models.

9. If one wants proof of evolution, look at how bacterial antibiotic resistance has evolved.
   Humans also build immunity to various things. Doesn’t mean they ‘evolved’. No matter what psychedelic visions one sees…

10. Adaptation is not evolution. Change occurs all the time in every species, including humans, yet we don’t evolve into another species (the Darwinian definition of evolution).
    Very recent research at Yellowstone National Park using new 3D technology to study crystal formations in rock, has revealed that the earth is much younger than previously thought. This confirms other researchers work.

11. WRT bacteria, they do turn into other species. Bacteria are very promiscuous acquirers of environmental DNA and 99.99999% of genetic engineering in the world goes on in our sewers. One could argue that bacterial acquisition of antibiotic resistance is merely transfer of mobile genetic elements and the “real” DNA of the bacterium stays constant, but I suspect that we’ll seeing development of new species of bacteria with the intense antibiotic selection program we’re currently carrying out.
    Viruses do have new species arise from time to time and HIV likely arose form the spontaneous combination of genes for human endogenous retroviruses (HERV’s) from humans and chimpanzees. For some reason apes and humans have a genome that’s littered with HERV genes and there has been speculation that these are involved in the rapid evolution of the human brain (Greg Bear takes the science out quite a ways in Darwin’s Radio.
    When it comes to seeing one species evolve into another, that’s something we’re not going to see unless we start really tinkering with genes. Evolution is a process that operates on geologic time scales. None of us has ever seen an ice age and the existence of ice ages is inferred by a collation of the bits of geologic evidence that litter the northern hemisphere. Curiously, the theory that aliens landed on the earth 25000 years ago and sucked up a good fraction of the oceans water to store in space for a while and then performed a major geoengineering operation on the N. hemisphere before letting the water fall back into the oceans doesn’t have a lot of support. It’s one of the ways in which one can explain an event which one has never seen but one only has scattered observations which, under the periodic ice age theory, suddenly all falls into place.
    People are free to believe whatever they like, but when it comes to evolution, the theory works for me and for most scientists. The success of a theory depends on its predictive value and it’s rather high for the theory of evolution. Of course, the theory presumes that there aren’t any external interventions by intelligent beings in the past; a male and female from an exploratory party could have been left on earth and all humanity is descended from them. The existence of apes would then require a devolutionary step in what were once humans. There are a lot of possibilities and it’s fun to play with them. However, at the end it comes down to providing proof for ones hypothesis and this involves use of a theory to predict something which has not yet been observed. That’s why CAGW is a failed theory and is now just a fanatical watermelon religion as all of its predictions have been falsified. My preference is to keep religion out of science.

12. Nonsense, evolutionary theory has never predicted anything. Evolutionists make observations and explain them using evolutionary theory. The explanation of the observations becomes the prediction.
    Circular reasoning. The theory is used to interpret the observations, and the observations are used to prove the theory.

13. Stradivarius, I really don’t care if you disbelieve in evolution or not. However, the example of circular reasoning you give could just as easily be applied to the landforms that are taken as evidence of ice ages. No one has ever seen an ice age and I doubt that anyone who lives in Canada will considering this country was alleged to be under a mile of ice.
    The native Indians I’ve talked to don’t believe in ice ages – as far as they’re concerned, they’ve been in this country forever and have never lived anywhere else. In comparison, arguing about evolution with a staunch disbeliever is far easier to handle as some of the native Indians I’ve talked to are the most dogmatic about how things have always been the same in nature until the white man came.
    So, if one takes the literal interpretation of the Bible in that the earth was created some 7000 years ago, then there cannot have been ice ages as the last ice age is estimated to have ended some 15000 years ago. I’ve talked to religious fundamentalists who are convinced that all of the evidence for evolution is actually the work of the devil who created dinosaur bones to make people think the earth was older than it actually is and likely its also the devils work that just the right proportions of decay products of radioactive isotopes exist to make scientists think that the earth is actually on the order of 4-5 billion years old.
    So, if you’re going to be logically consistent you have to also deny the existence of ice ages given that they conflict with scripture.

14. So, if one takes the literal interpretation of the Bible in that the earth was created some 7000 years ago,…
    You know what you’ve been told about scripture, never having studied it.
    Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
    Gen 1:2 And the earth was (became) without form (tohu), and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
    Isa 45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain (same word as Gen 1:2 , he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.
    It wasn’t created empty, it became that way. Exactly as true science says happened. The age of the dinosaur came to an end.