[feature request] What about the inability to selectively serialize memory and put it into sperm / egg? I mean, I get human long term memory is probably relatively new and gene serialization is as old as time, but it would be incredibly helpful if we could serialize even a little bit of our memories and experiences into our next generation. It would avoid tons of repeat learning every generation needs to figure out (e.g. don't touch fire, don't lick electrical sockets, don't shit in your bed, reading, writing, riding a bike, monads, etc.), and allow us to focus on higher level things like cracking Navier Stokes or unlocking immortality.
Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#72Mother Nature is not, and has never been an engineer. Evolution is trial and error. DNA is spaghetti code of the highest order.
There's a great chapter in "Group Theory in the Bedroom" [https://books.google.com/books/about/Group_Theory_in_the_Bed...] about the hunt for the mapping from DNA sequences to amino acids before the invention of X-ray crystallography allowed for direct observation of the machinery. Many elegant 3-letter mappings were hypothesized and tested chemically and statistically; they were all found to be incorrect.
Spoiler alert: once X-ray crystallography allowed for direct observation, the mapping was found to be a chaotic hodgepodge: some amino acids are coded by only one or two DNA triplets, and some are encoded by several. The only interesting property of the actual coding the book mentioned: the language is such that single-base errors in the triplet for an amino acid tended to result in a triplet that encoded to the same amino acid... For the amino acids involved in the most common cellular processes. In other words, transcription errors tend to not mess up the machinery in ways that are instantly fatal to the cell (because of course!).
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#73What about the heart or other critical yet non-redundant organs. In the tech world we try to avoid single points of failure like that.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad you bring that up, because these are the kinds of things you should cite to refute someone claiming that biological life bears the signs of an intelligent designer, supernatural or otherwise. What distinguishes intelligent from naive optimization is the ability to refactor instead of just making local improvements. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prosp…
I believe you're wrong. Take german and french cars. One of them, won't say which, are better designed than the others. To say that a plan is NOT designed because it's flawed is like calling names on a programmer because he uses Java. You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can…
>I believe you're wrong. Take german and french cars. One of them, won't say which, are better designed than the others. To say that a plan is NOT designed because it's flawed
Which is why that wasn't the argument. Both French and German cars have evidence of design (non-local improvements over earlier transportation), and both clear and garbled speech through a telephone have evidence of an intelligent agent behind them. In no case did I suggest making the inference that flaw -> not design. Rather, it's "being constrained to one domain of attraction in designspace" that indicates lack of intelligence behind the optimization.
>You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can not explicit intentions.
Specific variants of ID claim certain intentions, and the lack of intelligent optimization would refute intelligence being behind that intention. (To the extent that this intention is deliberately vague and kept from having observable implications, it can be rejected as non-scientific on that basis, without having to assert the claim, which I was criticizing, that the whole enterprise is unscientific.)
>Anyone can make an object that by all means can not be the product of a natural phenomena, and still someone else being able to tell it's design, could not really tell the purpose of it.
That just means inferences here (as everywhere else) are imperfect, not that detection of intelligence is impossible or unscientific. You can't know to 100% certainty whether the sound on the telephone is someone speaking to you or just a random coincidence of static, but that doesn't mean you throw up your hands, remain agnostic, and lambaste the ignoramuses who dare to claim they have heuristics for speech recognition.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "unscientific" argument is used because the "we are horribly designed" argument has been done over and over again and ID proponents just dodge it with nonsense about how it's all due to The Fall of Man or whatever. It's not like they don't know about these problems, or nobody ever told them. They just don't think it disproves their ideas. They're offering an alternative explanation that matches the data, but prov…
Darwinism is also full of "x happend differently than previously thought". Any theory is allowed an must adapt to new data. It's not like you're explaning a dozen of particles to which you add a new one every two decades or so. The domain of the theory shapes the theory.
Yes, scientific theories also adapt to new information. However, there's a substantial difference between this and what ID proponents engage in. The evolution (pun intended) of scientific theories involves saying "that was wrong before, here's what we think now" and the newly adapted theory is criticized and tested. Any scientific theory is falsifiable; even if not actually falsified, there's always some test that could, if it produced the appropriate results, disprove the theory.
Intelligent Design is just the God of the Gaps dressed up in scientific-sounding language. It collects the unanswered questions in biology and says, "We do not know how this happened, therefore an intelligence was involved." And of course if you dig deeply enough, "an intelligence" is almost always Yahweh, father of Jesus Christ, although they often try to keep that quiet in order to appear more objective.
There are two basic categories of contradictory facts for ID: there are things like the flaws we're talking about here, which say "this could not be intelligence" and there are direct attacks on the gaps, where unexplained things like the emergence of "irreducibly complex" features are explained naturalistically. Intelligent Design deals with both easily. The former can be dismissed by just saying that the intelligence wasn't involved in that particular bit. Or it can just be ignored, which seems to be the standard reaction. Any resource that discusses evolution will discuss unanswered questions and problems with the theory. Resources for intelligent design, as far as I can find, also discuss unanswered questions and problems with evolution but make no mention of any potential problems with ID. The latter can be dismissed by just moving on and continuing to object to other gaps. Or, as often happens, it can be dismissed by labeling the scientist as an anti-religious bigot.
There is literally no imaginable discovery that could overturn intelligent design. There are many imaginable discoveries that could overturn evolution. That's fundamentally what makes the latter scientific and the former not.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#76There is also the mitochondrial DNA which is probably placed in the most unsafe environment inside the cell.
Mitochondrial DNA needs to be in the mitochondria, presumably because of proximity and/or latency issues. That's why the vast majority of mDNA has moved to the regular DNA or simply disappeared. The stuff that's left behind isn't an accident.
Well, I suppose you would know better than the rest of us! :)
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.
They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable. Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.
>>They can't both be optimal.
They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#78My vote goes to menstruation. It's an extremely wasteful exercise. Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.
Most mammals go through some sort of estrous, but only a few menstruate. The main difference is that humans and some other primates have the capability to mate and rear young pretty much at any time of the year, which is why the women are generally always capable of becoming fertilized.
There are other, more advanced social theories that go into the role menstruation plays in society, but historically, menstruating monthly has been an advantage, not a disadvantage.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad you bring that up, because these are the kinds of things you should cite to refute someone claiming that biological life bears the signs of an intelligent designer, supernatural or otherwise. What distinguishes intelligent from naive optimization is the ability to refactor instead of just making local improvements. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prosp…
I believe you're wrong. Take german and french cars. One of them, won't say which, are better designed than the others. To say that a plan is NOT designed because it's flawed is like calling names on a programmer because he uses Java. You don't refute ID by showing some sub-optimal function in an animal body plan, firstly because ID doesn't claim everything is optimal. ID implies intentionality, but does not and can…
The implication of a very sub-optimal design is that the "intelligent" designer is a C- student who probably shouldn't have gotten their degree.
Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions
#80I think the biggest flaw is the location of the entertainment center next to sewer system.
Hitchens fan?