cladking

I think it all goes back to the lack of responsibility resulting from a belief in a "sub conscious" mind. If peoples' ids are ruling their ever action then we can't hold them personally responsible and we can't punish only their ids or superegos. It's the lack of responsibilty that destroyed education and then the media and finally government but at the root is "we the people". One of the most extreme examples was the senator who accidently killed an aid while drunk and fleeing police and then covered up the crime by swimming to the mainland to establish an alibi. Still he was reelected for decades and was never charged with a crime. The mayor of New Orleans sat by as his city flooded and was reelected. In one race not too long back in the same state the voters had a choice between a thief and a bigot. The Chicago mayor allowed his city to flood and then allowed the engineer who tried to stop it to be fired. No matter how badly things go and how little approval Congress gets they are all reelected over and over. We're living in a time of the greatest erosion of quality and efficienbcy in human history and those who are in charge of running products into the ground are taking an ever increasiong share of alkl the wealth for themselves. They no longer compete to produce a better mousetrap but to make it ever cheaper and less effective so you need to buy dozens where one once sufficed. Then they market the mousetrap in packaging that can't be opened without implements of mass destruction (OK, just a little hyperbole). For this we may far more, create tons of garbage, and watch the rich take the profits from the workers who are forced to build the mousetraps according to the specs they've laid out. I actually have to make some of my own things now days just to keep having to run back and forth to the stores. Manufactuyrers are allowed by their buddies in government to call pressed cardboard "genuine leather" so belts break in the first use. They are allowed to omit the fact that they pump food full of chemicals and water so it costs far more and is more expensive to handle from the "food" label. The whole time a greater and greater percentage of natural and human resources are being tossed on the ash heap. Of course it's all our fault. No one demands quality in anything. We accept what we are offered and don't weant tpo stand in line to rertiurn it. We "vote our pocketbooks" because the quisling media say this is in our own best interest. We hold Congress in very low regard but keep electing our own congress critters because they bring home the bacon. We're willing to trade education for political correctness but never notice that it's the poor blacks who are being hurt the most by the failure of the system. Rather than repairing the fundamental problems goivernment now is taking money from the schools that are less damaged and throwing it into the exact same programs that destroyed these schools in the first place. But those who operate this system and profit from it are making more money than ever. Even the lobbyists are millionaires now days. If people complain about the system the leaders blame the products; the children. Rather than holding the administraators responsible they puyt pressure on the kids who are under much more stress than in the past as evidenced by rising suicide rates. I find it remarkable that more than the tiniest percentage of children would ever kill themselves. Kids can adapt to almost anything. This is about akin to a company blaming their mousetraps for the poor quality and punishing them. The draconian cuts in taxes on wealthy people in the '80's was an interesting experiment but it failed utterly. Now we may need draconian changes to return us to a state before the shark was jumped. It might not even be possible to remove business' tentacles from government without crippling one or the other. But if we don't then our children will live in a world where the few have everything and the many are beholden to them for everything. The first step is to get the taxes on the very wealthy back where they must belong. This should be done in stages to prevent disruption and allow planning. It should not affect hard working doctors and other professional making a million or two a year. This should be targeted as well as possible at those who have benefited from government interference with free markets. There need to be draconian taxes on bonuses especially in the financial industry. We need to get back the CEO's who know how to run business rather than who to call for favors. Of course some hard working people will be hit with high taxes but I guess this is just the price that has to be paid for the human propensity for greed. Even after very high taxes they'll have more left than everyone else. Of course so long as people won't hold government and manufacturers responsible there's not going to be any going back. So long as we tolerate poor quality, flooded food and cities, and lack of opportunity because we get lots of bacon there can be no change.

I don't disagree but I don't think it's a political issue. The parties are two sides of the same coin and a duck needs two wings to fly. The entire government is in bed with big business.

I couldn't disagree more. Not only do I believe "enviromental damage" is typically grossly overstated but the conditions which cause it are set up by the wealthy in order to grow wealthier. Gasahol for instance is a net waster of energy but there is money involved that goes to the few at the expence of the many because government has tipped the balance. In the 1940's an illegal consortium of companies bought up street car companies and shut them down to sell less efficient cars. Today companies are racing to the bottom to provide the poorest quality at the highest possible price so the owners can grow rich. Without government interference the companies would go bankrupt. When they go bankrupt anyway the bosses divide up the spoils and reward themselves with million dollar bonuses. Food is adulterated with the addition ofd water and chemicals to make it stay in as the consumer pays and the economy is less efficient. No! We waste far more than we use because we have an economy based on waste and engineered by big business which controls big government. In toto rich people "consume" five or ten times what poor people and the middle combined consumes. We reward rich people for destruction of resources and companies so they destroy. High taxes on the wealthy used to prevent this but now they use their ill gotten gains to buy ever more government which is employed to create ever more waste. There is no hyperbole here. ...Perhaps a little bit of flambouyant language but I'll defend any statement. If you want things to return to some semblance of normality high taxes on the very wealthy (income over 5,000,000 or bonuses over 1,000,000) are necessary because greed runs wild otherwise. The harder part is that we'll need to reinstitute the concept of "responsibility". This idea was mortally wounded early in the last century. Now we are led by the incompetent and the greedy in a corrupt system founded on waste.

The answer lies in the mechanism of thought. I can't say much about it but will say that this mechanism is shared by all and is the root of most all of our understanding. It is difficult to see from our perspective. We share far more than our subjective experience as we share the cause of our experience. Remember our scientific knowledge excludes this experience and it excludes reality except as reality affects experiment.

I think of it as hyperbole. But when an action has the effect of law and only one possible result then "mandate" isn't so very much hyperbolic.

Congress has authorized tax payer money to cover losses incurred by the comntinued growth of cities in low lying areas. This is where people generally prefer to build. It's been said that people would build a house on the beach when the tide went out if you let them. Congress is pledging the money of people who live on high land to allow cities to build where destruction is certain in the event of "global warming". The entire playing field is defined by government regulation. The entire economy is defined by what government does. The government has defined the city limits by holding insurance premiums at artificially low levels. This simply assures additional destruction with every storm but more importantly assures calamity in the event that sea levels actually rise. Infrastructure built in low lying areas will be of no value if oceans rise. It won't be safe to occupy or operate and will have to be rebuilt elsewhere. The wealth that was consumed to build it will be destroyed and the middle class will be poorer. Wealth can only be produced through mutual benefit between two parties. There is only destruction is sea level rises.

Just a few months back Congress refused to force insurance customers to pay for the calculated odds of flooding at sea level even under current conditions without extrapolating for the supposedly rising oceans. In other words taxpayers not only have to foot the bill for cities which are expanding onto the beaches but also for any increased damage that results from rising sea levels. Rather than allowing cities to march back onto high ground Congress is assuring that storm surges and "rising oceans" cause even more damage than in the past. Most of the port cities will be on the beaches. This might mean that Congress doesn't believe in global warming but there are other interpretations possible. Whatever the case it's apparent that our leaders are not walking the walk. They say one thing and do another. The executive and legislative branches of the federal government siezed power long ago from these united states. The Constitution was illegally adopted over the Articles of Confederation.

It's not socialism but idiocracy. "Enviromental concerns" is just another tool of the few to extract the wealth of the many. If there were really enviromental concerns then Congress would not have mandated that cities expand into the coming flood plane. Everything is a ploy to funnel more wealth to the few. The world breaths in and the wealthy get more, the world breaths out and the poor lose more.

We no longer have capitalism in the US. It was acquired in a hostile takeover in the 1980's. "Too big to fail" means that an interest is closely woven to the governing interests of the country. It means incompetence and malfeasance can be rewarded through ever shrinking tax rates on the real policy makers on Wall Street (not to mention Madisom Avenue). In the last several years Washington DC has gone from the poorest and least educated city in the country to the wealthiest and best educated city in possibly the world. Some might believe this is good for the country but those poor uneducated people kicked out of DC and no less poor and no more educated than they were. Every year more schools fail, more people are excluded from the middle class, and more wealth is destroyed or shipped abroad to profit Wall Street at the expense of the weal. More resources are destroyed to profit the few.

This is part of the problem. Specialization has taken over everything and even experts in a field might not be able to see pseudo-science in a closely related field. There is far more bad science out there than most people realize and the media is not even trying to separate the wheat from the chaffe. They don't care if what they publish is real or not because the public is starved for news in science and will lap up anything they publish. Much of what passes for "science" now days is really layers upon layers of speculation which never goes back and tries to test the original speculation with state of the art science and technology. I could tell stories that would curl your hair. There is probably nowhere that more speculative science happens than in dietary concerns. There's a lot that goes on with computer modeling and in fields that are too complex to duplicate parts in the lab. The most common hallmarks of pseudo science is that they are forever contradicting themselves and can't show real evidence of either experiment or real world observation for support. Some people seem to think that anything that doesn't contradict theory must be correct.

My friend predicted he's going to win the lottery tonight but I know for a fact he's wrong because I am. I believe the inventors of astronomy and magnets for navigation understood math and nature well enough to make such predictions. You probably do need to understand gravity to predict eclipses but you don't need to to fall off a mountain. All life must use observation and logic to survive. Modern man simply uses experiment as an intermediary for logic. "Logic" can be based on visceral knowledge or it can be based on facts established by experiment and understood largely through math which is quantified logic. A rabbit survives by out thinking, out guessing, and out running a predator. That this isn't obvious to human observers is because we have been trained to see something different, but even more, is that we see what we believe to be true. We see what we know and understand and most of us don't even believe the rabbit is conscious much less capable of understanding and learning about his surroundings. No behavior is encoded in genes but specific genes cause propensities to some behavior. Science has made remarkable progress but most of the progress is not so much in understanding nature as it is in things like technology. Obviously we don't need a unified field theory to have rocket science. We don't need to really understand gravity to land on the moon. We didn't even know the speed of gravity until long after the men came home. I've never said science doesn't work. I've never said it should be abandoned. I'm merely trying to say that it isn't understood much better than nature itself and, I believe, it can be modified to be more effective. I "know" teaching of science can be modified to make students more effective. But much of this is really beside the point that nature is infinitely complex and this would still be true even if every photon were exactly like every other photon. If nature cheated and used a cookie cutter to make a subatomic particle it simply doesn't change the facts that collisions aren't predictable even a moment before the fact so the future can't be predictable either. It doesn't change the fact that no two apples or rabbits are alike and it doesn't change the fact we see things from a perspective imparted by our paradigms. These paradigms are mere constructs and their applicability to the real world is merely assumed. Obviously the model works well for computing the distance a 60 MPH freight train engine will go in 5 seconds but it works much less well to predict where that same engine will be in five years. You can't predict what route an untrained rat will take in a maze.

Anyone can see a speeding freight train coming. You can predict it will stay on the tracks because it really has nowhere else to go. Of course there's no certainty a car won't get in its path and its engine block derail it or that it won't suddenly disintegrate but experience says there is a very high probability that it will arrive at most points in its path eventually. The same would apply to well engineered and exactingly built missiles and rockets. Most will usually hit the intended points in their trajectory. Anything from gremlins to cold temperatures to improper translation of english and metric units might intercede. This is less true with fireworks and other types of crude missiles. Precision and predictability are things invented in the lab. They are a physical manifestation of man's understanding of basic forces and processes that govern nature. They are a sort of magic trick that allows things learned from experiment to be engineered so they can be introduced to the real world. Man can use nature at his whim only to the degree he understands the basic concepts. It has always been this way. But being able to manipulate rabbit population equations or the math of photons does not allow us to make proper inferences about the causes of changes in population or the nature of any one single rabbit or where one single photon will end up. Science is an attempt to understand ALL the properties of nature and it's very obvious to even casual observers that it has a very very very long way to go. We not only can't predict the future, in most cases experts won't even agree on the causes of things that have already happened. We're blind and describing an elephant and have yet to deduce it's all one thing and it's alive. We've barely started on the journey of understanding all of nature's processes, matter, and forces.

Yes! My definition of logic is different because it doesn't employ "words" that aren't defined in each instance. And you are quite correct that logic is universal but it has language other than math. It is the means by which nature and all things operate. "Math" is simply a set of definitions appended to a system of logic. Math is quantified logic. But a rabbit doesn't need math to know that one stomach plus zero food equals no rabbit. A spruce doesn't sit down and compute combustion temperatures before awaiting its own demise in a forest fire. It doesn't figure how deep scorching has to go before being killed. The logic of nature handles all this automatically and humans are notoriously weak at using their knowledge to predict whether the tree will die before or after the fact. Even the most complex math is of no value in the real world without the variables to solve the equations or when it is misapplied. You are assuming that math is the only logic because you know that "logic" expressed in language can produce any result including inconsistency, contradiction, and total nonsense. One person uses the same facts and logic to prove Intelligent Design as the person who shows with great statistical certainty that life originated in the big bang. It's very obvious from your perspective that logic is the failure but perhaps the real failure is related to your perspective. The problem is misapplication of experimental results and knowledge combined with a perspective that eliminates the logic of nature and imposes a "quantified logic" that is not natural. This is made possible by an inability to even see that paradigms and models aren't real but rather constructs that are no more solid than the experiment and theory that underlie them. I can not parade by you every single thing and subatomic particle in pairs along with all other particles and things like some modern day Noah to show that no two things are identical. Even if we toss out comparing rabbits to photons or apples and oranges the task is still rather monumental. I'd be interested in a nice dumbed down explanation of how we know tho photons are identical. The last I heard they are thought to have characteristics of both energy and matter. Perhaps even photons can't quite achieve the speed of light because their tiny matter becomes too great at such speed. Perhaps some are slightly more like energy than others. Of course math is logical. If it weren't than two times two wouldn't equal two plus two. The fact remains though that it is a construct that has no independent reality in the real world. The real world doesn't reflect math unless we see it in terms of math but then other people will see it in terms of God, dirty floors, or people who drive too fast. Perhaps animals are notoriously bad at math because animals use different math. A rabbit sees two individual predators not two cats or a fox and a badger. What does it need with knowing one plus one equals two? A cop doesn't need to compute horse power to know a moped is being driven faster than the legal limit. The world will operate just fine without math. We can use "math" to understand experiment because experiment reflects reality and ties science to nature and nature is logical. Man's languages are not logical. There's a world of difference between "logic has no language" and the reality that nature is completely logical but we lack the words to describe it as such so are forced to use math. How ironic that even the existence of reality is beginning to be questioned by science. Initially it simply wasn't defined or assumed and now it is being proposed that it doesn't exist at all except in the minds of those who lack a means of tying reality to logic except through a math which is, quite obviously, being increasingly misapplied.

Most examples would be considered off topic. But I believe this very subject under discussion here is probably an example. Since I don't understand the math that was suggested proves some things are identical I have to just guess and rely on the logic which everyone seems to hate so very much. How ironic that the "evidence" saying they are identical is simply quantified logic while common sense and logic say you can't prove two things are identical unless you understand all of their characteristics. Nature doesn't make any two things the same that are within the experience and understanding of people so why would exceedingly small things that are largely outside our experience identical? When you use "math" to make 1000 tons of apple sauce there is no such thing as individiual apples. The math will simply ignore everything from green apples to worms. You simply compute wastage, added chemicals/ water, and percentage that might go bad in transit. You don't need an apple at all but rather rail cars full of apples. But not one single apple you use will have grown on a fig tree. Not one will have sprung from the ground or had a tiger as its progeniture. Such is life. But the same things apply everywhere. A molecule of water is very stable and can survive thousands of years passing through the hydraulic cycle as well as life forms. This means each has its own history as do the atoms of which it is composed. One of the molecules may have been in the apple that hit Newton's head or perhaps in his liver at the time. Nature is infinitely complex. You can't predict the future because the things that cause the future haven't happened yet. At any given point in time molecules and atoms are bouncing off one another and the tiniest difference in the trajectories of the collision will become more important like the beat of the Chinese butterfly's wings. Everything is caused by and composed of the tiniest features that reverberate forever. An electron assumes a lower orbit and someday a sperm wins the race because of it. Obviously this sperm is very very different than any of its "brothers". It might look like Granpa Gene while the loser would have looked like aunt Millie. It seems improbable that things that are all different would necessarily be composed of things that are identical. It's not impossible of course but I'd like to see a side by side comparison of two protons with each characteristic measured to at least 50 decimal places before being convinced. Two of anything at all will suffice. And obviously I'm not talking about measuring tiny things in Astronomical Units.

There's nothing wrong with the "state of the art" and I didn't mean to imply there was. This is what experiment and logic have created so far, it's the sum total of scientific knowledge at the current time and it's what's taught to students everywhere. That it is taught as a model is only natural since this is the way people understand things now days. I have no problem with science and no problem with its progress. I'm merely saying that the model is the means by which people understand reality and that this understanding is often unjustified by the actual experimental results that comprise the model. The model is applied even where it doesn't apply.

Models have no more reality than numbers. They are mere constructs. More importantly and more relevantly though models involve a great deal of extrapolation and interpolation. There are large gaps in experimental data and a problem with experiment not being necessarily relevant to a specific instance, event, process, etc. Still the model created by understanding of experiment will be applied to everything. Everything is seen in terms of the model even though the model has gaps. This isn't to say we should jettison models because thought and understanding tend to be too complex without the models. But rather that we should ascertain in every instance whether the model even applies. There are numerous reasons that it might not apply even in the hard sciences (the real sciences) but typically it is caused by misapplication. Something that exists outside the model has the model applied to it anyway.

Funny thing about evidence is that it is all interpreted based on one's model of reality. It is based on one's model of the science or on other principles unrelated to science. Those who interpret the evidence in terms of current scientific understanding are simply assumed by most to be more correct than others. The merits of an argument always matter less to most listeners than their ability to see it in terms of the current paradigm. This is simply the reality that people miss. It's why new ideas are always rejected and always have been. It applies to every individual lidstener to a greater or lesser extent. Some will say "God doesn't allow this" and others will say "It is inconsistent with known science" but in both cases it might just mean that the new idea doesn't fit with their personal construct of understanding. Maybe that eight apple will spawn an apple orchard. Maybe it's the one that hit Newton on the head.

Invented. Numbers don't exist in nature. They are a construct of the human mind. Since no two individuals are alike we could count first apple, second apple, third apple, etc. "One", "two" and "three" have no existence outside their definitions. "Pi" has no existence either even though it is the the number of times per unit distance a nummolite might roll divided by its diameter. Nature is "logical" therefore math works. It is quantified logic. Just as each of the apples differ, so too, do the nummolites and their individual math. Two humans who weigh about 117.3 pounds will balance on a teeter totter but they are not identical. If one gives birth before getting off the teeter totter they are not even two humans but "three". Numbers, counting, and math are all constructs with no independent reality. But so long as the logic is sound they work. Each apple retains its individual identity. The eight apple is different than the second apple.

I don't believe this is really true. As soon as you accept your contention then the idea of two identical things becomes possible. If one equals one then two things can be alike. Numbers aren't "real" and each is a construct such that 2 is equal to one plus one and three is equal to two plus one. Rather math is simply quantified logic. You could do the same operations with words if they each had a single meaning but they don't. They have many meanings and nuances. Ideas can't be set to math even though math reflects the logic of nature so can be used to prove ideas. Our models of reality must be tied to reality through experiment where math is usually the tool to confirm or deny hypothesis. Math is more like roadsigns to tell us where we are and where we might be headed. These signs must be interpreted correctly and the equations must be legimately applied to have meaning and to provide proper interpretation.

Babies are born with little cause of behavior other than instinct. "Instint" is simple behavior already imprinted on them by their genes. A baby cries because it isn't comfortable and the mother tries to provide what it needs to be comfortable. However, babies of most species have consciousness even before birth or hatching. This consciousness is the source of learned behavior, or more accurately, through consciousness an individual learns to deal with his enviroment even if the sum total of the learning might be to peck its way out of an egg. Even a baby has huge amounts of sensory input to process to try to learn what things are important. Learning and instinct play off of one another through out the individual's life. While young instinct plays a vital role and as the individual ages more and more behavior is the result of learning. One of the reasons babies have so few behaviors is that they have so little learning. It's different in humans because babies must learn the language of the parents. This language is so complex that any idea can be communicated including ideas that run contrary to instinct like "don't take candy from strangers". Most instincts are replaced by learning. As humans age almost all behavior of most types are determined by learning. People may have a predisposiution to wake up early or go to bed late. Some need more sleep, some less. But most people can adapt to the demands placed on them by jobs or situations. Perhaps there is evidence saying hydrogen atoms are all identical. No one has ever succeeded in separating by size, weight, or any other characteristic so maybe the math is legitimate. But the fact remains that if there were any experiments or logic that rule out my interpretation of evolution then I'd be happy to change my opinion. Of course I can be wrong even if all of my arguments really were right. Evolution theory sprang up based on solid evidence and logic but I still believe it is wrong. "Survival of the fittest" is not the best explanation for the cause of the change in any species in most instances. It certainly plays at least a small role in the death or survival of many individuals but most of these deaths have more important and relevant considerations than "fitness". But more importantly, change in species occurs at bottlenecks and not because the less fit fail. Bottlenecks are caused by nature eliminating individuals with specific behaviors.

Science is observation and experiment. It is my contention that you can add logic to observation and experiment to make a different kind of science. There's no reason this science must be less valid than traditional science since it still has experiment as a check to keep it tied to reality and it has logic as a check as well. There must be many dozens of parameters in which atoms can vary. It's not my contention that they vary merely that if they don't then they might be the only things in nature that don't vary. It's also rather surprising that we can know so little about atoms yet know they are all exactly identical. I'm not saying they aren't since this is outside my main argument here anyway, I'm merely saying it's surprising there's a math proof they are identical at this point in time. If you train a rat to run a maze it gets better and better. Instinct and genes gets it through even before experience takes over. You can just tell a human being how to run a maze. ALL things change. ALL species change. Humans are a species and they change. Change in humans is not the exact same causations as change in other species. Behavior is the cause of most change and human behavior is based on beliefs rather than genes and instinct.

I should never have introduced another argument into this but it seemed right at the time. While I don't doubt what you're saying I very seriously doubt that we can possibly know that all atoms are perfectly identical on all parameters while we don't really understand basic things about them. Perhaps they are much better understood than when I was in school. "In other individual animals and life forms divergence of behavior from genetic causations will break down with experience and learning. ... In the "adult" most behavior is primarily the result of experience and knowledge ... Individual structure and genetics still play a primary and pivotal role in aging and preferences but moment to moment behavior approaches being strictly based on visceral knowledge ...But the key point here is that genetics are central to even behavior and genetics are expressed as higher probabilities of specific behavior ...This won't change throughout their lifetimes ... The genes which express as a preference to daisies are highly complex and affect much more of the animal than simply which food it prefers." It is simply observation and logic that animals behave based on experience. Cats that have never been trained to mouse by their mothers rarely have much of any hunting ability. Cats instinctly hunt but without experience they don't do much of it. Animals are sent away from the nest and many are required to find a zone to live or be killed. It's impossible for every eventuality to be predicted by their genes so every experience they survive adds to their knowledge and ability to adapt to their enviroment. An animal doesn't choose a course of study or ponder the means to acquire wisdom so its growth is largely the result of the endocrine system and other physical changes driven by genetics and by experience. Animals lack the ability to consider most abstractions or to extrapolate great deals of knowledge but mostly they lack complex language to acquire vast amounts of information from previous generations. This means that by definition most of their knowledge is visceral; they know what they know in their bones. Their knowledge of the world after adolescence is based almost solely on experience and memory. "Instinct" can only be overridden by knowledge. Since much of their behavior is still based on instinct, genetics still comes to the fore since genetics are the basis of instinct. This all adds up to mean that animal behavior is mostly determined by genetics. It's very very different in humans because humans acquire language and its perspective. They then acquire through language huge amounts of information which is organized as "beliefs". Experience plays a minor role in most human behavior except as habit drives much of it. Beliefs born(e) of language drives almost all behavior. But humans are no different when it comes to change in species because this is driven primarily by behavior and it doesn't matter whether that behavior is caused by belief or experience. "Wrong" behavior is eliminated and "right" behavior is rewarded. Everyone will want to jump to the belief that this is meant religiously or something. Far from it. The behavior being selected is normally trivial and has nothing really to do with "morals" directly. Indeed, some aspect of being "moral" could be the catalyst that results in death and something that is considered "sinful" could be what protects survivors. But it has little or nothing to do in most cases with "fitness". "Fitness" might protect a few of those with the wrong behavior and "unfitness" might cause a few with the right behavior to die but generally the survivors are in most ways no more fit than those who die. Generally humans should be omitted when concerning evolution because we are the odd man out due to our ability to not even notice our instincts and to act along various parameters that have a relationship with survival characteristics. All the same considerations apply but our behavior is more complex due to more complexity in our beliefs. The odds of some behavior being intimately linked to our genes is much lower in humans along with the far more diverse behavior. The same rules apply but it's far more difficult to see. The interplay between various genes and their expression is, I believe, the direction that the current science is already headed. I'm merely proposing that the interplay between these genes is determinative of nature of the animal as well and is closely related to behavior.

I don't agree with the links. A few are over my head but this isn't the problem. The problem is I disagree with their terms and perspectives. I'm surprised what I'm posting isn't being challenged more. You're talking about disease in populations and I'm talking about healthy individuals. A wheezing rabbit is more likely to be chased down! But the shape of the alveoli of its lungs probably has no direct bearing on whether it's wheezing or not. It might have some bearing on the likelyhood of acquiring disease but this is exactly the sort of "unfitness" that tends to be bred out of a species leaving all the rest equally "fit" but not equally likely to be killed in a near extinction. The shape of the alveoli are as individual as fingerprints. To date I doubt humans have ever been selected on the basis of their fingerprints.

Is this really the state of the art in biology?! How can enviroment shape the alveoli in utero? Certainly if some abnormality or disease exists it's possible that such structure can be affected but these things are simply defined genetically and enviroment has virtually no role whatsoever. Indeed, thios same should apply very much to all human structure though more subtle structure like the map of the eye might be more dependent on enviroment. Even after birth the growth of the organism and the order and resultant patterns are defined primarily genetically. In humans this will break down after the acquisition of language but providing the individual has proper nutrition most of the development is set at conception. In other individual animals and life forms divergence of behavior from genetic causations will break down with experience and learning. The rabbit predisposed to eat daisies might skip those growing in direct sunlight because of previous experience. In the "adult" most behavior is primarily the result of experience and knowledge. Individual structure and genetics still play a primary and pivotal role in aging and preferences but moment to moment behavior approaches being strictly based on visceral knowledge. But the key point here is that genetics are central to even behavior and genetics are expressed as higher probabilities of specific behavior. A rabbit predisposed to eat daisies at conception is far more likely to be found in a field of daisies than its brother predisposed to daffodils. This won't change throughout their lifetimes. When something comes along to selectively kill rabbiyts that eat daffodils one rabbit has a high probility of dying and the other a high probility of surviving. There simply is nothing to do with being "fit" or more suited to the enviroment. Daisy eaters survive prefentially to others. The genes which express as a preference to daisies are highly complex and affect much more of the animal than simply which food it prefers. They might affect anything from shape of the nose to the chemistry which digests food. It might affect the size of the tail or the speed the animal hops. "Fit" simply means nothing to nature. It means nothing to God. And it means nothing to the probilities of survival. It is simply a concept that people observe when they see a "rabbit" get eaten. Obviously to all observers if the rabbit had been faster it wouldn't have been caught so we imagine it's less fit than the one that got away. But the reality is simply the cheetah was hunting in the daffodils rather than the daisies. It might have survived if it had been faster or more alert but rabbits are rabbits. All individual rabbits are genetically rabbits and they each are vigilant and fast. Daisy eaters are probably no faster than their brothers but if only the daisy eaters survive a near extinction than their off spring might be much faster or much slower than "rabbits". Species change and they change because they are selected for behavior just as man tames the animals. Genes define behavior and behavior defines survival. Nature defines nurture and nurture defines nature. I'm a little surprised you would dismiss the contention that no two atoms are identical while we know so little about the individual atoms. Of course the math works out in chemical reactiuons since with such an enormous sample of atoms there will be an "average" and the differences bewtween atoms is necesaarily small from our perspective. We can't really separate atoms by any parameter at the current time but then we don't understand the electromagnetic, strong, weak, and gravitational forces and their interactions and natures. Under these conditions and considering the small size of atoms and their potential differences how are we to separate or study individiual atoms? Whose to say that if you have ten too many atoms of an element in aa chemical reaction that every single atom has the exact same probability of being combined as every other atom to an infinity of decimal points. Logically this is impossible because no two things in nature which we can observe are identical. Why would atoms and quarks all be identical? "Guesses" are part of scientific metaphysics. They go by many names from logic to hypothesis, and from intuition to studied experimental results. More than anything it is guesses that lifted man from the caves and is preventing his return. Guesses in the absense of logic, observation, and/ or experiment mean nothing. Here's a little tidbit that I find interesting. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/junk-dna-from-million-year-old-viruses-actually-have-vital-role-in-human-intelligence-study/ This is exactly the kind of thing that shows how supremely complicated nature really is. Chemistry and physics are mere child's play compared to genetics and its interplay with behavior. Math is a quantified logic that works well to understand experiment and theory but it has no bearing on nature. Things derived from math appear to be true and theory is true but nature is not responsible to make math work. It is the way of nature only because it follows logic and uses numbers as a self check for logic. You can not simply count rabbits or hydrogen atoms and learn their natures.

Back when I believed the cause of an individual and his behavior could be broken down into "nature vs nurture" I came down heavily on the side of nature. Now I believe it is a false dichotomy that doesn't even apply to humans but is irrelevant with non-human individuals. It only seems to apply to humans because we act on our beliefs so what we are taught is a primary component of our behavior. Animals act on their knowledge which is largely dependent on the means they acquire it which are usually related most closely to experience and genetics.