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Why birds do not fall while sleeping

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Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#171

Post by protonbob »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #150
protonbob wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the data that has gone into AI has been intelligently created. Also, there are plenty of intelligent people cleaning the test data and guiding its training. That is basically the entire premise of intelligent design. Not that there is no evolution, but that it is a guided process.

Right, genetic and morphological lineage data among hominidae and other families look exactly like you'd expect from unguided mutation. So any intelligent hand involved would have to be a real trickster to put so much effort into making the data look the way it does, or just shouldn't have bothered because it seems we end up at the same place regardless.

I'm just saying your conclusion doesn't follow from AI. I'm not arguing for God right now.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#172

Post by protonbob »

nkrisc wrote: post #93
protonbob wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago". This is false. There are plenty of ID advocates that believe in a scientific timeline, albeit, just with some intelligent guidance.

Which is conveniently unverifiable.

I'm just saying that your comment about 10k years is wrong and is not commonly held among intelligent design folks. I'm not arguing for that position though I do hold it.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#173

Post by tsimionescu »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #151
tsimionescu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single training session will iterate more than the number of generations of all birds. But that's not the right analogy. Evolution happens at the individual level, and even to some extent at the individual gamete level. So it's actually every single fecundated bird egg that ever existed, and even every single spermatozoon and egg cell every time two birds mated. Not to mention every division of every bacterial ce…

> Evolution happens at the individual level I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Genetic variation originates at an individual level, but "evolution" (differentiated survival of genetic variants) mostly happens at population level after genetic changes have spread among the population. In particular this is the case with "punctuated equilibrium" that has been observed in the fossil record (long perio…

I think this is a fair criticism, and excellent explanation of evolution.

I should have expressed myself more carefully. What I am thinking of is that each individual is essentially one training step, where the current model is confronted with the training data (in this case, the entire environment, including other members of the population). Or even multiple moments over the life of the individual might be considered distinct training steps, where the model is adjusted in minute ways (epigenetics) based on certain events.

Of course, this makes less sense for species that are highly communal, such as bees, ants, or termites, where the fitness of an entire population is highly interconnected, and even severe maladaptations in an individual can nevertheless be an improvement to the fitness of the overall population (e.g. sterility in the vast majority of individual bees and ants is not a detriment, when it is a fatal flaw in almost all other animals).

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#175

Post by m463 »

akovaski wrote: post #155
m463 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see that, are you talking about the bird's leg?

The last image is a pair of pictures of Needle Tower and Needle Tower II, which you can search for if the image doesn't load in the article for you.

oh sorry, I read the article, then switched to the paper

https://hal.science/hal-04287433/file/Version%20HALL.pdf

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#176

Post by michael1999 »

avar wrote: post #77

This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…

Because movement isn't 1% of the brain. Movement is why we have brains. Balance and head-righting do sensor fusion between vision, the vestibular system, and proprioception. That's a whole-body problem, and I don't see how that can be a low-energy activity. Brains are expensive.

We do have an unconscious falling reflex, but that works by startling us awake! Actually doing movement planning requires a running brain.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#177

Post by mrguyorama »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #147
smusamashah wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flaws is a wrong way to put these things you notice. Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?

I think a perfectly designed being would not require killing to live, would run on sunlight or other direct power sources and be steady state or mostly steady state. If we ever make silicone man that runs on sunlight then I'll say, "ah, this looks like a being created by a moral intelligent designer". It's going to be pretty revealing when a creature with such "lowborne morals" as ourselves creates a being that can f…

I would argue human beings don't need to kill to live right this moment.

But yes, there are a million ways in which the human biology is imperfect.

If our bodies are temples, then whoever made us is probably Nurgle. Nothing else really explains the reproductive organs sharing space with the waste removal ports.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#178

Post by fellowniusmonk »

protonbob wrote: post #171
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, genetic and morphological lineage data among hominidae and other families look exactly like you'd expect from unguided mutation. So any intelligent hand involved would have to be a real trickster to put so much effort into making the data look the way it does, or just shouldn't have bothered because it seems we end up at the same place regardless.

I'm just saying your conclusion doesn't follow from AI. I'm not arguing for God right now.

I think you're replying to the wrong person.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#179

Post by dhosek »

cryptoz wrote: post #4
dhosek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kangaroos engage in quadrupedal (actually pentapedal—using their tail as well) locomotion at slow speeds.

Humans also engage in quadrupedal locomotion, often at any speed and sometimes up stairs too. Also, I see both of my dogs standing on 2 legs every day, often walking short distances like that. According to wikipedia this only happens when they are trained to do it (?!) but we never trained them and they've been doing it since a few months old. Maybe I should update https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipedalism to indicate…

But that’s not a normative mode of movement. Among healthy adults, quadrupedal locomotion will represent a small portion of their movement and is far from a comfortable means of movement thanks to our short arms compared to other apes who engage in quadrupedal movement a significant fraction of the time.

Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping

#180

Post by TeMPOraL »

stevesimmons wrote: post #162
TeMPOraL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random factoid I picked up from The Machinery of Life : how do various proteins inside a cell know to find and bind to a specific chemical or protein they need? They don't - everything inside a cell just constantly bumps into everything else, and because of how fast things move at this scale, it doesn't take long for any single thing to touch approximately every other thing inside the cell. I.e. turns out random walk…

And presumably the size of cells is partly determined by constraining enough of the right things close enough together, so they will bump into each other quickly enough with probability approaching 1.

Right! Cells larger than that stop working reliably and end up self-selecting themselves out of the future generations.

Now I wonder if internal structure of cells can be attributed to that too - i.e. organelles create zones where processes relying on fast random walk can work, enabling the cell itself to grow bigger.

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