Z-space

The magnetic field also shifts because of wobbling of the planet on its axis during its rotation about the sun.

Plants don't assimilate nitrogen from the atmosphere. They take it up through their roots, via a symbiotic co-evolutionary system with a bacterium called Rhizobium. These bacteria colonize the roots of legumous plants (such as pea and lentil) and form nodules. The bacteria fix nitrogen and export it from the nodules to the plant, and in return the plants provide the synthetic products of photosynthesis (sugars) for the bacteria. Co-evolution is a rich system of evolutionary complexity and is often observed in natural systems.

Here is a very fun site for lectures and labs about pendulum behavoirs. http://monet.physik.unibas.ch/~elmer/pendulum/

Indeed. I use it a lot on an applied level for analysis of periodic functions in biological systems. It's sweet fun.

Read "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" by Stuart Kauffman. Here is his home page, on it is a link to this book's TOC that will give you a taste of the depth of his analysis and its results. http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/

I would like to add my bit to this thread as it is a subject that interests me. The best book I've ever read on evolution is "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" by Stuart Kauffman. As a very brief (and therefore inadequate) explanation of this book - he uses complexity analysis to show that life likely sprang into existence when a critical number of biochemical reactions became interconnected. Stuart Kauffman's home page is here: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/

Rotfl

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I can almost visualize it as a Monty Python's Flying Circus routine. The camera could keep cutting back to the person falling...and falling...and falling.

"Combining that with a bannana skin could be interesting." (?!?!?!) LOL

Jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Free fall, what a rush. Panoramic views of the earth and sky.

About the question of how the oceans freeze, this is from "H2O: A Biography of Water" by Philip Ball. All the oceans are interconected and their water is constantly passing in concerted masses from one ocean to another both vertically and horizontally. Wind only drives the ocean surface currents to depths of about 100 meters. Deep circulation of the oceans (between 1-5 kilometers) is driven largely by difference in water temperature and forms a conveyor-belt flow that redistributes heat around the planet and links all 3 of the oceans via the Southern Ocean. Water that has been warmed in the tropics flows poleward, and as it does it becomes cooler and the surface becomes saltier due to surface evaporation (increased density). This dense cool water (called North Atlantic Deep Water) eventually becomes heavier than the water below and sinks before starting the return flow southward. A portion of this cool dense water will freeze as sea ice, leaving the remaining water even saltier. This denser water sinks even deeper and is the densest water in the oceans (called Antartic Bottom Water).

I recently read "H2O: A Biography of Water" by Philip Ball. A very interesting book about a fascinating topic. The following is condensed from this book. The structure of liquid water is determined more because of the attractive forces between the hydrogen bonds rather than the repulsive forces between molecules. Because the attractive forces are much stronger than the repulsive forces, the packing constraints are considerably lower for water than for other liquids, so the molecules pack more densely. The hydrogen-bonded network in liquid water is dynamic and disordered. When water freezes the hydrogen-bonded network locks into a rigid crystal lattice, and the upshot is that the space between adjacent molecules increases. So the density of ice is less than that of liquid water, and so ice floats. There are 13 different ice structures that have been identified to date, synthesized by varying the temperature and pressure during freezing. Ice-VII remains solid at temperatures above 100 C and has a density about 2 times greater than ice-I (normal ice).

Aeschylus: You are talking about a noisy signal. If you want to talk about a noisy signal, then I absolutely agree with you that a noisy signal can be either completely deterministic or chaotic. The pattern in noise that you mention was also mentioned in my preceeding post (#3 in this thread). In the post #7 in this thread, I am talking about pure noise (ie, no signal mixed in with the noise). Pure noise is a different thing altogether from a noisy signal, and its mathematical properties are also different.

Ms. DNA: Thank you for the interesting link. You are correct in pointing out that there can be some differences between identical twins. However, a clone is not an identical twin. The key is provided in the second paragraph of the link you posted: "Of course, such twins are genetically different, but they are still monozygotic (from the same egg)." Clones are not genetically different from each other. They are by definition genetically identical, and replicate the original at every level of the organism. So a cloned child would be a replica of the original child and not its identical twin equivalent.

sinexec: Noise and chaos are 2 very different things. Noise can not be chaotic. Noise is not determinant. The best way to differentiate noise from chaos is determine the Lyapunov exponent for the function. In practice, this is of limited applicability because usually the function is not known.

Going back to the opening discussion of this thread: If a child was cloned from cells taken from that child's body, then by definition the clone would be an exact replica of the original - from its external appearance to its biochemical and neural circuits. If the clone was raised by the same parents and exposed to the same environment, then environmental factors would have only a very minimal affect on the child's personality. The clone would have the same interests and likes/dislikes as the original.

It seems to me that the kind of question posed by the title of this thread is fundamentally flawed, because to question whether our universe is "too perfect" we would have to be able to compare it with universes that are less perfect and more perfect than the one we inhabit. From what you have written, the Susskind group's results indicate that the uniqueness of a given universe appears to be sensitive to initial conditions. This may not be so surprising being as recent results are now showing that the universe displays properties of dynamic nonlinear systems (eg, nonlinear expansion, the asymmetrical distribution of matter revealed by the COBE map). Sensitivity to initial conditions is one of the prime characteristics of dynamic nonlinear systems. Also, according to string theory, there are at least 11 possible dimensions, and depending on which dimension set unfolds at the time of creation of the universe, each of them will have unique properties.

Math is completely determinant. Chaos is also determinant but it is not predictable. The only thing that is neither determinant nor predictable is noise. Noise does display certain spectral properties that allows us to classify it, ie white noise, 1/f noise, etc. Noise is ubiquitous, especially in biological systems. IMO, noise functions as a buffer to circumvent the all-out propagation of chaos. As far as "randomness in nature", IMO randomness is likely manifest through noise.