Please use this thread for (and only for) alerting admins to moderation issues and for raising complaints arising from particular decisions. We remind participants that TSZ is a benign dictatorship, the property of Dr. Elizabeth Liddle. All decisions regarding policy and implementation are hers alone.
There are alternatives, you know. Simply don’t respond to stupid posts.
At least DNA_Jock is here. Jock is the lone scientist here, as far as I know. John Harshman and Joe Felsenstein (a National Academy Member, as in ELITE) have moved on.
VJ Torley is professional scholar in his field, so are you and KN. But we all can’t participate much in each other’s discussion since we’re specialized in different places.
If you leave, Walto, you’ll be missed, but it was fun while it lasted.
I certainly got a lot out participating here, but that’s because I really wasn’t using TSZ to advocate my views as much as to get editorial review of my publications and presentations, which, btw got good reception — for example some of what I discussed here at TSZ made it’s way to a peer-reviewed journal.
Thanks, Sal.
IMHO, there are at least a dozen people who post or have posted here recently that know a TON of stuff about various sciences and other scholarly disciplines. Not only the people you mentioned. I’ve learned a lot from many of them. (And I don’t just mean the atheists.) And that I haven’t learned more has been my own fault. Much of the material has simply been over my head. But it was inspiring to see it here and pick up a few nuggets anyhow. It was a place one could (almost) be proud to participate in.
Anyhow, I have no particular interest in ditching: I’m too lazy and set in my ways to try to get to know the main players at another board. I’d just like to see an improvement in the content here. ‘Pure Thinking as the Road to Freedom’ and ‘Biblical Proofs via Numerology’ are not really winning OPs from my point of view. I mean, who the hell is going to participate here with that kind of crap on the front page? What kind of readership are we going for?
I know that, rather than whine, I could be putting up my own stuff (IF I THINK THAT’S SO GREAT! HAH!). But I never posted very many OPs here. A couple times a year is about as much as I can muster. There’s other stuff to work on.
Mods,
I have another OP languishing pointlessly in the pending queue.
The OP contains a duplicate paragraph. It would have been fixed and published long before now if the moderators hadn’t abused their privileges by changing my status from Author to Contributor.
keiths,
It is changed back to a draft, where I think you can now edit it.
I’ve fixed and resubmitted it.
Saner pastures? Where would that be?
Both materialist and DI view me probably as an enemy…
Have you followed the exchange between ID and the rest regarding the “fast evolution of the polar bears” at Evolution News and Peaceful Science?
If you have, you’d notice that “the fast evolution of the polar bears” is at the very least controversial or problematic…
However, it is in the best interests of both sides at issue to pretend that the polar bears have evolved even if the “beneficial mutations” are rare and every other polar bear has them… How do the bears without the much needed mutations cope with high fat, high cholesterol diet? Remember my cholesterol OPs? 😉
Recently, I have been researching the quantum vital spark in life systems…
Do you think TSZ is a good place to start a discussion on the theme like that?
Élan vital comes in quanta?
Love it! Sounds like a lovely woo mash-up!
Vitons? Bions perhaps?
All new ideas are first ridiculed…
Vitalism is not a new idea but quantum vitalism, or quantum vital spark, is relatively new…It can possibly be experimentally tested…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-08/mcfadden-it-seems-life-really-does-have-a-vital-spark/7148448
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
I would think first they are ignored.
Love the quote too. Very appropriate.
Jeffrey Shallit; Science, Pseudoscience, and The Three Stages of Truth.
I seem to remember William James saying much the same thing as that quotation (about pragmatism?). If there was no citation, it was ripped off.
No. I have not.
I don’t know. How have your other OPs done? Have you gotten the feedback you’re looking for?
walto,
Correct. He is mentioned at page 3 of the paper I linked to.
Quantum Simulation Could Shed Light on the Origins of Life
“For decades computer scientists have created artificial life to test ideas about evolution. Doing so on a quantum computer could help capture the role quantum mechanics may have played.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Dec 7, 2017
What role does quantum mechanics play in the machinery of life? Nobody is quite sure, but in recent years, physicists have begun to investigate all kinds of possibilities. In the process, they have gathered evidence suggesting that quantum mechanics plays an important role in photosynthesis, in bird navigation, and perhaps in our sense of smell.
There is even a speculative line of thought that quantum processes must have governed the origin of life itself and the formulation of the genetic code. The work to study these questions is ongoing and involves careful observation of the molecules of life.
But there is another way to approach this question from the bottom up. Computer scientists have long toyed with artificial life forms built from computer code. This code lives in a silicon-based landscape where its fitness is measured against some selection criteria.
The process of quantum evolution and the creation of artificial quantum life
It reproduces by combining with other code or by the mutation of its own code. And the fittest code has more offspring while the least fit dies away. In other words, the code evolves. Computer scientists have used this approach to study various aspects of life, evolution, and the emergence of complexity.
This is an entirely classical process following ordinary Newtonian steps, one after the other. The real world, on the other hand, includes quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that it allows. That’s how the question arises of whether quantum mechanics can play a role in evolution and even in the origin of life itself.
So an important first step is to reproduce this process of evolution in the quantum world, creating artificial quantum life forms. But is this possible?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Unai Alvarez-Rodriguez and a few pals at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. These guys have created a quantum version of artificial life for the first time. And they say their results are the first examples of quantum evolution that allows physicists to explore the way complexity emerges in the quantum world.
The experiment is simple in principle. The team think of quantum life as consisting of two parts—a genotype and a phenotype. Just as with carbon-based life, the quantum genotype contains the quantum information that describes the individual—its genetic code. The genotype is the part of the quantum life unit that is transmitted from one generation to the next.
The phenotype, on the other hand, is the manifestation of the genotype that interacts with the real world—the “body” of the individual. “This state, together with the information it encodes, is degraded during the lifetime of the individual,” say Alvarez-Rodriguez and co.
So each unit of quantum life consists of two qubits—one representing the genotype and the other the phenotype. “The goal is to reproduce the characteristic processes of Darwinian evolution, adapted to the language of quantum algorithms and quantum computing,” say the team.
The first step in the evolutionary process is reproduction. Alvarez-Rodriguez and co do this using the process of entanglement, which allows the transmission of quantum states from one object to another. In this case, they entangle the genotype qubit with a blank state, and then transfer its quantum information.
The next stage is survival, which depends on the phenotype. Alvarez-Rodriguez and co do this by transfering an aspect of the genotype state to another blank state, which becomes the phenotype. The phenotype then interacts with the environment and eventually dissipates.
This process is equivalent to aging and dying, and the time it takes depends on the genotype. Those that live longer are implicitly better suited to their environment and are preferentially reproduced in the next generation.
There is another important aspect of evolution—how individuals differ from each other. In ordinary evolution, variation occurs in two ways. The first is through sexual recombination, where the genotype from two individuals combines. The second is by mutation, where random changes occur in the genotype during the reproductive process.
Alvarez-Rodriguez and co employ this second type of variation in their quantum world. When the quantum information is transferred from one generation to the next, the team introduce a random change—in this case a rotation of the quantum state. And this, in turn, determines the phenotype and how it interacts with its environment.
So that’s the theory. The experiment itself is tricky because quantum computers are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, Alvarez-Rodriguez and co have made use of the IBM QX, a superconducting quantum computer at IBM’s T.J. Watson Laboratories that the company has made publicly accessible via the cloud. The company claims that some 40,000 individuals have signed up to use the service and have together run some 275,000 quantum algorithms through the device.
Alvarez-Rodriguez and co used the five-qubit version of the machine, which runs quantum algorithms that allow two-qubit interactions. However, the system imposes some limitations on the process of evolution that the team want to run. For example, it does not allow the variations introduced during the reproductive process to be random. (Can anybody here guess why random variations are not allowed??? EricMH?)
Instead, the team run the experiment several times, introducing a different known rotation in each run, and then look at the results together. In total, they run the experiment thousands of times to get a good sense of the outcomes.
In general, the results match the theoretical predictions with high fidelity. “The experiments reproduce the characteristic properties of the sought quantum natural selection scenario,” say Alvarez-Rodriguez and co….”
Full article:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609696/quantum-simulation-could-shed-light-on-the-origins-of-life/
walto,
The Polar Bear evolution is boring and just like I had predicted it ended up being: nobody really knows why poplar bears can tolerate the high fat diet while their cholesterol levels suspiciously remain high without any signs of atherosclerosis…
It’s here:
I wasn’t really looking for feedback when posting OPs… Few people here but Sal have some fundamental knowledge of QM, the theme I’m interested in…
I was mainly testing my arguments, something I will need very soon…
From the same article
Mods,
Another OP of mine is being held pointlessly in the pending queue.
Of course they didn’t. If they had allowed randomness, it would became una salada Valenciana…This experiment proves that most mutation are not truly random…
On the top of that, how does one account for the spatial information in cell differentiation for example? The law of conservation of quantum information could and probably is the answer… This means evolution is restricted within the law of conservation of quantum information…
I doubt it
How so? And what do you mean by “truly random”?
Anyway, I may very well be missing something, but why does it matter that the algorithm was run on a quantum computer? Isn’t this just another GA, only that it runs on a different platform?
Moderators:
I just edited a comment of mine that I had posted successfully to the “Correspondences between ID theory and mainstream theories” thread, and got a message indicating that it had been marked as spam. All I did was to delete one copy of a short phrase that I had accidentally entered twice. It’s very odd that such an edit should trigger spam detection.
Would you please make my comment visible?
Aren’t spam detectors wonderful?
It is probably reacting to the links. And maybe those links are more suspicious now, because it has seen them before. (Just guessing).
Neil Rickert,
Thanks for the prompt response.
I really enjoy that admins are nowhere to be found…lol
1. My rules: an attack on me or f. word- one week on ignore
2. I don’t care if people have some anger issues and come here to vent or vomit…
3. If people engage just to try to catch me on some discrepancy, bye byeo…
I’m around. This week, I have published two OPs that were submitted. I have released two posts incorrectly flagged as spam. And I found a post of yours in spam, but you had successfully reposted (with modifications), so I moved it out of spam to trash.
And I have seen evidence of other moderation activity.
Be careful. Some folk might want to be ignored by you, so they might see that as a challenge.
Has it been released? Because I want to write an OP “on mindless teleology, mindless CSI, autopilots, BIBO stable feedback control systems.” If not, I’ll wait my turn.
It’s been released. It was the “He’s baaack” OP.
Thanks Keiths.
This is pretty much what admins are needed for…
As keiths and others have said many times before, this blog does well without the admins bias…
Your introduction comment on my LTEE OP is the living monument of how embarrassingly biased and paranoid the admins are…
[Admin edit: This thread is, with the agreement of the thread author, a rule-free thread.]
Do you really believe I will lose sleep over that?
Most blogs like this are dead; supported by 1 or few people…
If creationists abandon TSZ , or are ignored, who’s going to talk to whom?
At one point not that long ago I counted less than 20 comments per day here…
I have an OP waiting to be published.
Let’s have fun with free will vs determinism
My latest comment ended up in the spam queue for some reason.
Mods, could you fish it out?
I’ve submitted a new OP for publication.
Due to continued moderator abuses, it is being held in the Pending queue.
Alan, in March:
Alan was ready to shut the site down. But now that he and his abuses are gone, TSZ is thriving again as a site for vigorous and substantive discussion.
There are still abuses, such as Neil and Jock’s refusal to restore me to Author status, but even they are behaving better in Alan’s absence.
It’s a shame that all of this didn’t happen before the three of them deposed Mung as moderator.
Something else worth noting: It’s been almost two months since the last comment was guanoed, and the site is doing just fine. Yet more evidence that moderation — and especially aggressive moderation — is unneeded.
Funny how Alan’s absence correlates with a lack of moderation kerfuffles. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
You had to open your big mouth, eh?
Blame Neil.
Moving that comment from one place to another serves no useful purpose. If he had left it alone, everything would have been fine.
My latest submitted OP is sitting pointlessly in the Pending queue instead of being published immediately.
I submitted a thread for possible publication. So please to the moderators to review it and publish it it if okay. thanks. Robert Byers
Any one waiting in the posting queue? It’s been a week since the last thread, and I’m wanting to post on Genetic Algorithms.
The mods are showing that they have power…again…
Le’t just hope that Alan Fox doesn’t return to show his self-inflated ego…
DNA_joke and Nail Brickhead are good enough…
I got an OP waiting to be published.
Awaiting new post in queue
Gregory.
Please edit your draft OP such that does not contain Joshua’s surname.
Thank you.
DNA_Jock,
What? You want me to remove the name ‘Swamidass’, in an OP that links to a post at PS that already includes his surname? Please explain.
Read the rules page, Gregory [redacted], specifically ETA 6.
We have covered this ground before.
Could others please weigh in? DNA_Jock appears confused about names. Does he really think he is “DNA_Jock [Redacted]?! = P
My name here is Gregory, not “Gregory [Redacted]”. I don’t link to an RLI. Yes, I have dropped a few links to my work over the years, which anyone could find in the archives. But my chosen name here & how I request to be addressed is ‘Gregory.’ 7 letters isn’t too much to ask.
Diminutizing or altering my name is not appreciated. I believe stating this is now clear & is indeed exactly what Lizzie had in mind for everyone: call people by what they are listed as, nothing more nor less. Be polite. Be respectful of names. Honour dignity of person when you can. If someone gives their permission for you &/or others to use a nickname or use a shortened name themself, then that is open season, go nuts with authorized diminutive.
Back to DNA_Jock’s current confusion. There are 20 threads with [redacted, the founder of Peaceful Science] on this site TSZ. 5 with his name in the title (4 admittedly I started). The first one is here, in which he participated: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/the-purpose-of-theistic-evolution/
The name he goes by here at TSZ, in the few times he has posted, is “swamidass.”
What are you actually asking for because I sincerely do not understand your confusion about this? Do you actually wish me to write ‘S. Joshua’ (sorry, man!) alone everywhere in the new post & leave out the Surname of the founder of Peaceful Science & former BioLogos affiliate?! He goes by S. Joshua Swamidass there. I have also called him ‘Sanjay’ here out of frustration, after getting repeatedly disrespected, taunted, bullied, as well as outed here & doxxed by this man, who called himself that name – i.e. the ‘S.’ before the ‘Joshua’ – at Peaceful Science.
You let Swamidass’ outing & doxxing of me go here, as if it hadn’t happened. At least the other moderators saw this as a violation simply for what it was & the redacting was done according to Lizzie’s rules. Mung (who you helped force out), Alan (currently away), then sorta, kinda Neil (who participates more at PS than here nowadays because, of course, it’s more inspiring, interesting & humane there than here, as I have repeated multiple times & even wrote an entire thread about here: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/peaceful-science-has-eclipsed-uncommon-descent-how-will-that-impact-tszs-reason-to-be/) agreed that Swamidass had violated Lizze’s rule as well.
Can I politely suggest, sir, that you have a very warped moral compass to now be asking for this before posting the queued OP?
What do others think?
Neil, can the new OP not be posted as is or does it need editing without the name ‘Swamidass’? Simple decision. You can do the edits or I will. DNA_Jock will likely just stew & delay in his anger & despair against God & those darned ‘religious’ people he antagonizes on the internet anywhere & everywhere they are.
Nathan Lents has just linked to the same article by David Sloan Wilson that I used in the OP, and he did so approvingly. UGGH – disgusting biologistic hubris!
Human errors; how far will Swamidass go with Lents & Wilson & Wilson & Trivers & Blackmore & Dennett & Cosmides & Tooby & Boyd & Richerson & Blute & Mesoudi & Laland & Sanderson & Diamond & Harari, et al.? This should be wonderfully fun to watch!
This site is dying. You could likely attract D.S. Wilson here. He is nowadays fawning for attention from anyone & everyone (current fetish with Brett Weinstein & the IDW) to ideologically indoctrinate with his disenchanting ‘faux-friend of religion,’ universal evolutionist worldview. He’d be a great addition to TSZ!
You telling me! Even keiths was praying for Nail_Blockhead and DNA-Joke to retire..😉.
They have such fulfilling lives they can’t leave…