JillSwift

Wow. That's just amazing. And to think it may even happen with eukaryotes. Thanks, dougalbod!

I don't mind Intel Core Duo T2500 (2.0GHz) ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 (And boy am I bugged that ATI dropped support for these older chips for Xorg 1.6+! Fortunately it runs fine with the open source drivers.) 2GB DDR2 120GB HDD 802.11a/g/b plus an Intel Pro 100 RG45 15.4" WXGA TFT display Its supposed to have bluetooth, but that never worked. (I got this thing used for a song, so I'm not complaining too loudly ) What's in your case?

The terms are not in the published paper, but in the Scientific American article that caught my attention above.

That the designer was working on a small budget, too? I can see your logic. However, I'm not sure that such strong similarities would suggest a rather unimaginative designer, or perhaps suggest that environments that allow or "encourage" intelligence tend to be similar enough that the other phenotypes are also similar. I think I'd actually be more likely entertain the idea of a designer if all the intelligent races were dramatically different, but were surprisingly easy to communicate with.

I find myself a bit confused with the terminology: "adaptive" and "random" genomic change. Is there a significant difference that I'm missing, or are they classed simply as a change that offered an adaptive facet, and a change that did not?

I'm running the Karmic beta on my laptop. I leave a partition open on it for testing/playing with other stuff. I tried Intrepid, and I agree. It was a stinker. Though I'll still try it just to satisfy curiosity, it's disappointing to hear Fedora has fewer packages on tap. GNOME, though KDE 4.3 looks very shiny and has fun toys. I may install it, too, and switch between the two as caprice demands. == Do you Compiz-Fusion?

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.Though Karmic is looking so good that I'm thinking of upgrading this time. I'm thinking about trying out Fedora. If for no other reason that to gain some familiarity with something other than Debian based distros. How's it treating you? Pretty much == I was able to abandon Windows entirely. I was surprised how often folks that use Linux based OSs dual boot with some flavor of Windows, most for gaming's sake. What keeps a copy on your machine?

"Meh" is an onomatopoeia for a sound one might make when disinterested and unimpressed.

Hehe - hadn't thought of that one. My "Meh" scenario: The AI is essentially human in most respects, but the human model is one of a disinterested couch potato. "All it ever does is download 'Family Guy' videos from Hulu!!"

Open source. Learn from others easily, with working examples. Modify to fit specific needs. Faster closing of security holes. (Usually. ) Outlasts originating entity - no worries if supporting company vanishes, another will take its place. Lighter system resource consumption. I are an Ubuntu geek grrrl.

Or "Meh". There's always "Meh".

Eh - that one is based on older data and has a something of an alarmist bent.

I think you'd find this book fascinating. Though it focuses mainly on violent antisocial behaviors, it's quite illuminating the effect environment has on the mind from birth.

Let's pretend for a moment that "IQ" actually has meaning. Even if you really have "average" intelligence, that does not leave you being an "average" person. Interest and the drive to know new things are more important than your strength of intellect. It's what makes you above average despite what a numerical result of a test otherwise suggests. A genius with no interest won't bother to come up with an answer at all. A below-average intellect with great interest will eventually come up with the right answer. Last but not least: IQ tests are something of a joke. Take a similar test in a few weeks and your score will be significantly different. By and large they barely rate a "starting point" number for assessing someone's faculties. Take a peek at the Wikipedia article on IQ tests for a quick overview of the controversies associated with them.

*blush* And that's the ultimate conundrum right there. The best you can hope to do is sample the actions of other firms and guage it against the market, and include that in your own models. And that means introducing further overlapping probabilities (plus the problem of unknowns like when they change their models). The more data you gather, the more chaotic it is. Unless you can get real-time data on businesses' intentions and internal conditions, of course. But the SEC rather frowns on that. They must know this, so I wonder why they keep building predictive simulations. I wish I could prove it. With proof perhaps we could take a little starch out of the market.

Not really. I think most behaviors - pro- or anti-social - have a certain predisposition genetically, but are in the end largely environmental and learned. Though that there may be the possibility of a genetic predisposition in individuals that drives them to antisocial or prosocial behavior, those would be statistical outliers.

I was hoping for this. THC appears to have a lot of potential as a medicine, and it would be nice to have a few places in the US where marijuana research doesn't require five tonnes of paperwork for a license to posses. That beside the fact that I prefer stoners over drunks... >.>

Holeh cwap that thing is huge. I had no idea they could produce so much power. Now I want 'em even more.

From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=evolution-details-revealed-through-2009-10-18 In 1988, an associate professor started growing cultures of Escherichia coli. Twenty-one years and 40,000 generations of bacteria later, Richard Lenski, who is now a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, reveals new details about the differences between adaptive and random genetic changes during evolution.

Call it an ongoing dynamic between individual survival and prosocial behavior. Human minds are flexible enough that we can be taught/learn to act on learned behavior over instinctive behavior. A person could easily learn that collecting as many resources as possible has more and better rewards than being more altruistic. Similarly, a person can be greatly rewarded for being very self-sacrificing. Plus there's abnormal psychology too - personality disorders that make it impossible for a person to connect socially or even inter-personally.

It was light-hearted silliness, Syntax. I explained it to you in that thread. See? It's just me doing the overly-literal/hyperbole thing. Don't take it so personally, hon. No one here is "out to get you".

Letting you know that your links didn't work is an "attack"? I thought it was just a "heads-up".

Well, you were asked for a source for the quote, and you said it was in a forum... so you can see where I'd think you meant Eistein posted in a forum. Neither link works. The first one is malformed, the second nets a 404.

Heehe! I think asking which is more important individual or society is like asking which is more important the heart or lungs. You're not going to do well if you remove either. Likewise a healthy in-group requires healthy members, and vice-verse. There is some evidence suggesting that we evolved social behaviors as a part of ensuring individual survival. After all, a group does do better than an individual, as in a group individuals can specialize their skill-set. The more prosocial behaviors in a group, the better the group is at acting in tandem. Thus, the better the individuals do.

Sure, if thinking that makes you feel happier. There are potentially fruitful arguments, then there's wasting time with someone disinterested in an exchange of ideas. This is the latter. Bye now.