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You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic. Why does everyone have such strong op

by fifnir 8y ago

You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic. Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists

booleandilemma 8y ago
Physicists get their share of doubt too. Reactions towards string theory, for example.
jerf 8y ago
"You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic." I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false. When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded. Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.

by fifnir 8y ago

booleandilemma 8y ago

Physicists get their share of doubt too. Reactions towards string theory, for example.

jerf 8y ago

"You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic." I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false. When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded. Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.