The Science of Intelligent Design

[MAdnRisKy]

Oh damn you theamion DAMN YOU.

No the Quran or Koran however you want to spell it is according to islam the direct word of God, as in God spoke the words to a mortal who wrote them down.

The bible is a collection of testimonies prophesies and letters amongst other things but it never claims to be the direct word of god.

See you should have paid attention in RE classes, then you could have actually blown someone out on an internet forum instead of pointing out how (interesting) the first 5 books / chapters of the christian, jewish and muslim faiths look very similar indeed.

[MAdnRisKy]

Originally Posted by sayonara

Then presumably that camp is one held over the summer, for people who wish to develop their powers of observation.

Heh

I like where you're going with this

[Knight Theamion]

it has to do with the fact that they are rewritten ofcourse


both the quran and the bible and the torah aren't emailed to us you know .....

[MAdnRisKy]

I don't think i can explain it much clearer Theamion sorry. There is a pretty big difference between the Bible and the Quran and that's it... Although you are right they've all been re translated quite a bit that isn't really the point I was getting at...

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by MAdnRisKy

I like where you're going with this

If you do, then I suspect your interpretation of where I'm going is not accurate.

Very few species strive for anything, never mind balance with the environment (by which I take it you mean their habitat, rather than the "don't litter" hippy version.)

The main selective drive for any given species is energy exploitation. Everything else - including reproductive success - comes from there. Note the key word in there: exploitation. It doesn't engender a sense of balance with anything.

[Knight Theamion]

ofcourse there is a difference but if you read the books they both have the same 'start' and history line, the religion that should be a result of it are indeed different.

[Gayle29uk]

Originally Posted by sayonara

I suppose something as mundane as "they generate lift more efficiently at high speed" could also be a factor.

Lift is generated more efficiently at speed but energy still has to be expended to gain and maintain that speed.

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by Gayle29uk

Lift is generated more efficiently at speed but energy still has to be expended to gain and maintain that speed.

True, but my trundling-along-at-work speed brain is rationalising it as energy required "per unit lift" - and by extension oxygen - must necessarily be lower if lift generation is more efficient. If that's true though it obviously won't make enough difference to account for the inverse prop. relationship.

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by Gayle29uk

Lift is generated more efficiently at speed but energy still has to be expended to gain and maintain that speed.

No it isn't. You get a significant increase in parasite drag at high speeds. At low speeds you get an increase in induced drag. You want to find a good balance between the two, which is dependant on many things, but generally aerodynamics.

For all you know, birds could have already found this optimum.

[Gayle29uk]

Originally Posted by sayonara

True, but my trundling-along-at-work speed brain is rationalising it as energy required "per unit lift" - and by extension oxygen - must necessarily be lower if lift generation is more efficient. If that's true though it obviously won't make enough difference to account for the inverse prop. relationship.

I can see your point but honestly don't know enough about the subject to go any further into it, you could be completely correct. My knowledge of avian physiology is exhausted already.

[MAdnRisKy]

well maybe strive is the wrong word, but such a balance is normally achieved. You'll have to excuse my lack of terminology I stopped science at O level, (and it can be very easy to use language to make it harder for people to follow your train of thought if you were so inclinded).

look at what happens to a population if it grows too big for its environment. You are right in what you say though, New Zealand is a prime example of what happens if you introduce something alien to the given ecological system, that organism just runs rampant and "takes over". However I'm fairly confident that it wouldn't do that until it wiped itself out with over population.... (take for instance the possum irritating little bugger that it is)

And actually no I thought you were going to lampoon christian summer camps

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by HAL-9000

No it isn't. You get a significant increase in parasite drag at high speeds. At low speeds you get an increase in induced drag. You want to find a good balance between the two, which is dependant on many things, but generally aerodynamics.

Well, in the case of birds, what do you mean by "high speed"?

I think we can take it as read that few bird species will have adapted to accelerate past the point where they are making the optimum use of their energy.


[edit]
Your post makes more sense when I read the last line.

If birds have found the optimum, and that is the effective limit of their acceleration, then over the full range of their flight speeds Gayle's proposed relationship will generally hold true.

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

Well, in the case of birds, what do you mean by "high speed"?

I think we can take it as read that few bird species will have adapted to accelerate past the point where they are making the optimum use of their energy.

We are talking air speed here, not ground speed. A bird flying into a 40 knot headwind? It will be well over its optimum, I'd wager. Especially seeing as feathers are not exactly the most aerodynamic of surfaces.

[sayonara]

Gah, see edit.

Yes, the headwind will make a major difference. If only the birds could assume ideal conditions too.

This is going to become a "why fly at all?" discussion soon.

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

Gah, see edit.

Yes, the headwind will make a major difference. If only the birds could assume ideal conditions too.

This is going to become a "why fly at all?" discussion soon.

Birds generally don't assume ideal conditions. In fact, wind is benificial for birds in many cases. Give a bird a 40 knot tailwind and it'll be soaring along! A sufficient headwind would also allow them to hover or even go backwards indefinately while expending no energy.

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by HAL-9000

Birds generally don't assume ideal conditions.

yes, hence the 'if only'.

In fact, wind is benificial for birds in many cases. Give a bird a 40 knot tailwind and it'll be soaring along! A sufficient headwind would also allow them to hover or even go backwards indefinately while expending no energy.

What I found strange during evol. lectures on bird flight was the emergence of that vortex-sharing behaviour. Now that was an interesting way to save energy.

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

yes, hence the 'if only'.


What I found strange during evol. lectures on bird flight was the emergence of that vortex-sharing behaviour. Now that was an interesting way to save energy.

Sounds interesting. I don't know about that - don't suppose you could explain it for me? (Sorry I'm interested in this sort of thing - I'm a pilot and I'm studying aviation technology at uni).

[sayonara]

I can't for the life of me remember the correct term, so I can only describe it as "that thing where a flock of birds fly in a delta formation, and the vortices caused by the wings of the birds ahead help reduce the energy expenditure of the birds behind".

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

I can't for the life of me remember the correct term, so I can only describe it as "that thing where a flock of birds fly in a delta formation, and the vortices caused by the wings of the birds ahead help reduce the energy expenditure of the birds behind".

Makes sense. Sort of like mulitple winglets acting outwards, though you'd assume that it would cause only a minor increase in lift as the forward component of lift generared by the companion birds would be offset by the decrease in lift generated by the birds own vortex on itself. It's all very cool :-)

[Edit]
Actually, re-reading your post would suggest that it might in fact not be a decrease in required energy expenditure, but an increase in stability. In truth, if vortices were created DIRECTLY in front of the bird, it could actually cause a severe increase in turbulent airflow and actually destroy all the lift, causing the bird to crash and burn. I am also curious as to how large the vortices created by such a small mass as a bird would be. I doubt very much whether they would have any effect at all...

[sayonara]

What I was most intrigued by was how that behaviour emerged, but that was never touched on

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

What I was most intrigued by was how that behaviour emerged, but that was never touched on

That touches on inheritance. How much is genetic and how much is learned? Perhaps this came about not through intuition on the birds part but because they are taught to do this by their parents. That is the trouble when using this example as a factor to evident efficient evolution.

[sayonara]

The problem with that is that it just moves the requirement for an explanation to the previous generation.


[edit]

Some monkey negative repped me for this 'state the obvious' comment, and didn't bother to say why.
How is that supposed to benefit anyone?

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

The problem with that is that it just moves the requirement for an explanation to the previous generation.

Does there always need to be a requirement? Why are some people supersticious? It isn't genetic but taught, and there is no reason to be afraid of stepping on the cracks between pavement slabs or walking under ladders, or walking backwards around the kitchen table 3 times after buying a new pair of shoes...

Things that are learned are not always useful.

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by MAdnRisKy

well maybe strive is the wrong word, but such a balance is normally achieved. You'll have to excuse my lack of terminology I stopped science at O level, (and it can be very easy to use language to make it harder for people to follow your train of thought if you were so inclinded).

This is just a thought, but if you don't know anything about ecology you probably shouldn't be making ecological statements, because you lack the knowledge and understanding required to support them.

look at what happens to a population if it grows too big for its environment. You are right in what you say though, New Zealand is a prime example of what happens if you introduce something alien to the given ecological system, that organism just runs rampant and "takes over". However I'm fairly confident that it wouldn't do that until it wiped itself out with over population.... (take for instance the possum irritating little bugger that it is)

A population crash is one possible consequence of a population explosion, yes, but that has nothing to do with "[striving for] balance" per se. That's like saying that people fall over because they strive to obey gravity.

[sayonara]

Originally Posted by HAL-9000

Does there always need to be a requirement? Why are some people supersticious? It isn't genetic but taught.

What I mean is, that my question now changes from "how did this behaviour emerge [in the birds under observation]", to "how did this behaviour emerge in the parents".

If a behaviour is taught, it has to have come from somewhere originally, just as a genetically programmed behaviour has to have been selectively emphasised within the population.

[HAL-9000]

Originally Posted by sayonara

What I mean is, that my question now changes from "how did this behaviour emerge [in the birds under observation]", to "how did this behaviour emerge in the parents".

If a behaviour is taught, it has to have come from somewhere originally, just as a genetically programmed behaviour has to have been selectively emphasised within the population.

yes I understood this, but what I was attempting to convey was the notion that this may not be a case of social darwinism, rather something that has no benifits on the population. This things can come from completely ludicrous events. Why are people, especially people in the British Isles, frightened of spiders? Legend has it that this was a response of the plague, as it was believed that this was spread by spiders. We now know that this has no evolutionary advantage as there are no dangerous spiders anywhere near the UK, and therefore, even though this behaviour has come about, it is not necessarily anything to do with darwinism.

[MAdnRisKy]

I thought the spiders thing was do to the way they move so quickly and that our sensory perception system is based on change (in this case movement) and that anything which changes very quickly causes us alarm. In the case of arachnophobics this fear is excessive but I can explain the way that that is both learnt and habituated in terms of its increase from "oh look a spider" to "omg a spider!" if you like (more my patch)

[HAL-9000]

I would like :-) If you don't mind, of course!

[MAdnRisKy]

ok, the theory started out as being one of classical conditioning, which for those that like a bit of referrencing is basically pavlov and his dog and all that followed from this, and for those that like the short and simple version it's "I experience a physical reaction inside me and associate it with something not related if it is presented to me as being congruant (or rather I see it as such) even though there is no actual link". That is to say you put the food infront of the dog and it salivates (in preparation for the eating of the food). you start ringing a bell when you present the food. After repetition you can now ring the bell without any food and the dog still salivates. (and funnily it works quite well with school kids and ringing a bell any time around lunch - infact it works on most humans if you tell them it's 12:30 and they're used to having regular lunches even if before they wouldn't have said they were hungry )

From this you go to what watson did to a small kiddie involving banging the back of his chair to cause alarm, whilst showing the kid a white rabbit. It didn't take long for the kid to associate the fear with just seeing the white rabbit (and indeed anything resembling it including santas beard).

Now this explains some of the more obvious phobias but it doesn't explain passing them on. I'll elaborate. If I as a mum am scared of lightning (doesn't particularly matter how I became scared but lets for arguement's sake say I was walking alone one night during a thunderstorm and I lost my way, while stumbling around trying to find my barings a particularly violent flash of lighting illuminated an inconspicuous area of scenery but because of my heightened state it alarmed me disproportionately. This is enough to become an initial trigger but it's unlikely to blossom into a full blown phobia of lightning without habituation which I'll come to...). So ok we've got this mum who's scared of lightnening, and every time there's a thunder storm she hides in a cuboard under the stairs. Now Molly is home and mum grabs molly and hides under the stairs with her (mum is engaging in saftey behaviour here, Molly is just flat out "WTFing" at mum). it's unlikely that Molly will develop a fear of lightning from her mum, BUT she is very likely to say develop a fear of closed spaces or the dark if she picks up the sense of danger from her mum and attributes it to something in her surroundings.


I give you all that slightly pointless back ground to make some of the rest of this easier. Lets say that mum was scared of flowers. this unlike lightning is really irrational, it's unlikely that i can make molly scared of flowers by showing her her mum's reaction to flowers. But what if mum is scared of spiders. Well the research suggests that Molly can quite likely become scared of spiders too, and this is because of an innate componant. Some things we are disposed to provoking a flight or fight response to. our body going from its sensory cues says "right trouble here, best get ready to do something" and starts pumping out adrenaline. Your heart rate increases, providing more oxygen for your muscles to work better, your senses heighten (but as an interesting aside not in a rational filing manner but in a threat detection sense, it's why witnesses involved in a crime like say a robbery tend to be lousey at giving accurate accounts of their assailants), and you experience the symptoms not a million miles away from anxiety. Infact that's what anxiety in the sense of the feelign of panic basically is, an adrenaline rush with no real source for you to attribute it to. It makes sense in the hunter gatherer sense to be afraid of say snakes and spiders and you'll nnotice how red is an arousing colour (not in the sexual sense) as it is one of natures more common danger colours (often used by many species to indicate "I'm poisonus me" that and say yellow and black. what it doesn't make sense is for us to be scared of tiny house spiders particularly in a country like Britain where there are no indigenous dangerous spiders and only the addar as a dangterous snake (go on, someone find me a scary spider and prove me wrong I;m sure there will be one because it'd be just my luck, but as a general rule lets say spiders snakes etc in britain not really dangerous). the reason some folks become phobic of them is because of habituation. A quick darting spider in the bath say which catches your eye, you barely even saw it before it disappeared into the plug hole, but you're left with a feeling of "what was that fast moving dark object" and it isn't a terribly pleasent one. Now for most of us we'll dismiss it, but lets say a week later you see another spider this time you get a good look at him, but instead of going "oh just a spider no harm" you go "oh look it's that fast moving black thing again" and you remember the feeling from last time, and now you have an actual object to associate this with. (btw it's probably important to point out that for the most part this thought process is more automatic tyhan concsious). And what starts to happen from this point is that rather than just face the slight anxiety you back away from it, and avoid it. "I don't like this feeling I'll escape" (flight - a pretty natural response if you look at it that way). But it's the avoidance which actually starts the phobic reactions, not the initial anxiety. BTW it's also possible that it isn't such a gently gently process you may have once been barked at by a dog and felt helpless (say you were young) and this provoked a large sense of anxiety all at once, next time you see a dog you try to stay at a safe distance. But it's the staying at a distance that causes it, "good job I stayed away from that dog / spider or it might have hurt me" .

So back to Molly and the fearing spiders. Mum screams out seeing a spider (she's now say 6 months down the line from the inital event and has got so used to avoiding spiders the threat has now become much bigger than the inital feeling the first time she saw one) Molly asks mum what's wrong and mum says she saw a spider. Molly has two choices. 1) think mum is silly 2) think that spiders must be dangerous. and she stands a vague chance of thinking 2 because spiders move quickly, and she has some hard wiring componant that spiders can be dangerous. So now lets say that molly starts to think that spidersd must be dangerous, whats the betting that when she does see one she wants to back off from it, just to play safe of course..... but that continuing to do this not only perpetuates the anxiety but exacerbates it.

it isn't the object of fear itself that is largely responsible for phobias, it's the avoidance and habituation of that avoidance followed by the (false) affermation that the avoiding behaviour has made you safer.

(and interestingly it's this cognitive - thinking compant addition that has shown a marked increase in phobia treatment, something which is very easy to do if not that pleasent. You basically have to face the object of your fear and experience the anxiety until it goes away often taking about 45 to 90 minutes until you "unlearn" the behaviour)
PS I think it's rats / mice from the plague or at least it would fit slightly better but I thik you'd find a fair ammount of folks afraid of them before the plague too

[Nodrog]

That doesnt explain why most phobias have a semi-rational basis. People are often scared of dogs, spiders and rats, which have historically been dangerous, poisonous and plague-carrying respectively. On the other hand, there arent many people scared of historically harmless animals such as cats and rabbits - this coincidence seems too big to write off. Maybe the average Briton doesnt encounter poisonous spiders now, but his ancestors did at some point, and fear of spiders will be reinforced by cultural depiction of them (spiders are often 'evil' characters on childrens tv shows, and most people will encounter someone being savaged by a dog on TV at some point in their life). The idea of these animals being 'bad' has also entered cultural mythos to some extent - rats are taken to symbolise uncleanliness even if they no longer carry the plague, and this will affect how people perceive them.

It's not hard to think up plausible hypothesis about how it all began. A group of early humans lose a few of their number due to poisonous spiders, and decide that they will be marked as 'dangerous'. They create images and stories which depict spiders as 'evil' in order to ensure their children learned to avoid them, and these symbols and myths remain throughout the development of the culture, pre-existing the birth of any individual member.

[MAdnRisKy]

Actually nod that was exactly what i was saying.....

if that didn't come accross then I need to re write that (or not break off when the missus arrioved and I had to do 14th duties like start cooking)

right on

[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by MAdnRisKy

Actually nod that was exactly what i was saying.....

if that didn't come accross then I need to re write that (or not break off when the missus arrioved and I had to do 14th duties like start cooking)

Fair enough, I just thought you were concentrating too much on the individual psychology involved (conditioning and so on) rather than on how the 'institution' of fearing spiders originally began, and how it lives on. The fear of spiders is a social phenomenon and I dont think it can be adequately explained by focusing on individuals.

[MAdnRisKy]

well I'll re word another post tomorrow or something, you're right there are some hard wired componants going on, high numbers of spider phobics are largely due to there being more initial triggers for spiders than say hampsters as you point out (and so did I somewhere...) but the process for both is the same.

[Yahwe]

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Fundamentalist Christians believe the world is 12,000 years old.

no they don't.

the catholic church said it began in something like 4,700BC

now my mathsa may not be very good... but still

(your other points were probably valid but i was far too drunk to get past the first sentence)

[*donkie*]

I just took a break from the forums to shift a spider from my bath.I tried to catch it with a pint glass - but its' legs didn't fit in. And yes, I live in England.

On another note, genetic/evolutionary theory has more credibility, simply because of the failings of religion in the past. Science also has the ability to change it's dogma when it realises it's wrong - something an extremist church isn't likely to do, though the more moderate churches have been known to.

Now, silence, before I whip out Hume's fork and prod you into submission. ¬_¬

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by *donkie*

Science also has the ability to change it's dogma when it realises it's wrong

Science doesn't have dogma :eng101:

[*donkie*]

Hush.

[Yahwe]

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Catholic Church aren't Fundamentalists genius.

perhaps you could tell us precisely which sect of christianity you are refering to then.

[sayonara]

Presumably, when he says "fundamentalist Christians", he is refering to [any] Christians who lean toward fundamentalism.

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by sayonara

Presumably, when he says "fundamentalist Christians", he is refering to [any] Christians who lean toward fundamentalism.

What the **** is your avatar? Seriously.

[sayonara]

Invader Zim, you squealy Earth worm baby.

[MrL_JaKiri]

I am ZIIIIM