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No, Mickey! (Steamboat Willie entered public domain today; taken from bluesky)

Ah yes, according to Wiki that is indeed one of the applications for it. Hope you don't spill any on your clothes.

Making fish attractors. They are strongly attracted to that end of the chemical sphere.

It is fairly simple actually. Having no evolution means that the gene pool does not change from generation to generation. This is a situation we call the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle In order for that to happen it requires certain conditions to be satisfied, such as infinite population size, entirely random mating, no mutations etc. These are obviously not true for human, or in fact almost all populations. In other words, evolution is the normal situation and having no evolution is in fact an extraordinary claim. How would you, for example ensure that the next generation has the same genetic composition as the previous? Simple answer is, you cannot. What you might be thinking about are likely large-scale changes in visually obvious traits, but that is not what happens in the short time humans have been around. Rather, the level of phenotypic change you should be thinking about are things like, the shift in lactose tolerance, pigmentation. A fun study found that shift in folks growing up in the UK were an allele associated with higher nicotine dependency was weeded out because folks died young (due to high smoking habits). In populations where smoking was rare and also in modern times (again, fewer smokers) these alleles are becoming more frequent again (as selective pressure have lessened). In short both theoretical as well as empirical evidence clearly demonstrate ongoing evolution and one might need to revise ones preconception of what evolution is to fully realize that.

Just very quickly and generally (not really specific to the trait in question). We can start at the locus (site) of the mutation that provides the trait of interest and then look at the surrounding regions, which presumably are not under the same selective pressures. If the mutation arose in different persons independently, we would expect to see some variations in those surrounding areas (think of it as different persons providing different backgrounds for the mutation). Blue eyes arose likely not due to a mutation in a gene associated with eye color (OCA2) but in an upstream regulatory element. The interesting bit is that the surrounding area is also conserved in all (tested) folks with blue eyes suggesting that they all share a common ancestor providing this mutation. However, as this analysis relies on testing of folks who are still alive, it obviously cannot tell us if there had been other mutations with the same phenotype or even independent cases of the same mutations. I.e. we can say all currently living folks with blue eyes (who have been tested) have the same common ancestor, we we cannot say that there were no other cases of blue eyes in the past.

Searles point has always been that formal programs, as a set of coded instructions, can only embody the syntactic elements of expertise or knowledge, without the semantics (understanding of meaning). Put differently, computers enact only unconscious processes, be they symbol-based or stochastic (the current emphasis in deep machine learning). While I take the points here regarding the usage of unconscious - it hearkens back to Jungian woo, or to the unhelpful wobbly table vagueness that @iNow mentioned - it can refer in a literal way to operations like those involuntary ones in the autonomic nervous system and up to the brainstem. Such operations aren't preconscious because they never rise into the spotlight of conscious attention or deliberation. I have been AFK a lot the past two weeks so will try to catch up a bit more on the threads before saying more.

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it. Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in. Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population). Generations.

Not really, evolution is the change in the total genetic composition (i.e. gene pool) over time. Even if no traits are changed, the gene pool can. However, selection happens on heritable traits, which is what you are thinking about. But this is only one aspect of evolution and not the only one. And what parents transmit to the next generation are not identical traits, it is the genetic material. This is an important distinction as depending on the mix the next generation(s) receive, the traits might be quite different from those of the parents.

Nice example, Genady. And not to imply otherwise, but you only consider a linear scale factor as a function of time. And I'm sure you know of many functions f(x), that tend to infinity as x approaches a specific finite value. IOW, what if the scale factor is extremely non-linear ?with time

Or simply living beneath it

No parent! As evolutionists would say, intelligence is an emergent property of life; as life is an emergent property of matter.

Stop F-ing misrepresenting what I have said Mr. Knowitall and post the quote where I have ever stated that being removed from the ballot doesn't matter or isn't a big deal. What I actually said was that it SHOULDN'T be big deal because of previous instances of people being kicked off the ballot. I don't have to assume anything about your knowledge of ballot access laws and their history...it's pretty obvious.

The Total Perspective Vortex will show you your value...

Do you realise how much you would need to 'Torture' that premise!!!