Over on  the The War is Over: We Won! thread at UD, The subject of phone numbers is brought up by Bob O:

lots of things are sequences. But they can be produced in lots of different ways. Frankly, I have difficulty seeing how phone numbers mate and recombine, especially when within a longer string of sequences.

Our beloved Mung is quick to retort:

Ah, the old “I cannot imagine” defense. I could write a program in which phone numbers mate and recombine. Incredulity is not an explanation.

We all love Mung having a go at programming. Come back and walk us through it.

A few of thoughts for discussion:

1. How big is the state space for phone numbers and how much functional space (viable / live numbers) is there?
2. What is the ‘evolutionary’ history of telephone numbers? How big was the ‘biogenesis’ phone number?
3. Is there a stepwise evolutionary history for phone numbers?
4. Or is this all evidence for Evolution by design!!!1111???

1. Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.
2. Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.
3. When in another’s lair, show him respect or else do not go there.
4. If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.
5. Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.
6. Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.
7. Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.
8. Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.
9. Do not harm little children.
10. Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.
11. When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him

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Remember when I said that you can’t have genes switching on and off without a code, and how the sequence of DNA wasn’t the only code Keiths?

Read and learn:

http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-improve-understanding-of-dna-folds-2016-6

http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB

I hope this starts a lively discussion. Be thankful I didn’t do the Social Justice post I was going to!

Richard Dawkins has made his programs from The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable available via a web browser interface.

Sadly for our friends at Uncommon Descent, the Weasel is not included.

I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.

According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.

There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.

I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)

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There has been much discussion, here and elsewhere, on ‘epigenetics’, broadly understood as the control of gene expression. People who cling to ‘classical’ models are portrayed, by revolutionaries and their cheerleaders, as dinosaurs standing in the way of progress.

I could perhaps explain, to any interested bystander, my own rationale for my position, since I’ve requested that of others. Continue reading →

Any sufficiently convoluted explanation for biological phenomena is indistinguishable from epigenetics.

The Imprinter of All Maladies

Use of the word “epigenetics” over time

A Facebook friend of mine is a conspiracy nut. She was tagged in a post by a friend of hers, so up in my ‘news’ feed comes a post offering incontrovertible evidence that persistent contrails are in fact chemical spraying of the populace or the planet for nefarious purposes. I was dimly aware of this notion but was taken aback when encountering such people in the (virtual) flesh. Continue reading →