Crazy things Creationists have said

[Astronuc]

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

. . . .

HHGG

As for the meaning -

"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body.

The goal is to skid in broadside; tires smoking, body all dented, leaking fluids and fuel gauge on empty, thoroughly used up and worn out, and loudly proclaiming - Holy ****! What a Ride!"

Anonymous

Zaphod's First Principle (short version): "The basic business of life is to have a wonderfully good time."

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was never to buy his own drinks. He wasn't sure if that counted as an ethic, but you have to go with what you've got.

- DNA - HHGG

A portable version - http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/dna.html


"Always have an exit strategy - no matter where or when you are!"

"Don't think it can't happen to you".

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.


Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
from "Last Chance to See"

 

[Aether]

well, I guess what I'm saying, is that if 'the computer' went back, say to 65 million years at it's 'starting point', the 'computer simulation' would probably say that a variant of the dinosaur would become dominate again---if 'it' had to pick the "one" best variation.

To accurately model the history of life on Earth we typically wouldn't allow the simulation to continue far down evolutionary paths that weren't consistent with everything else that we already knew about the history of the earth. We would still be free to play "what if" scenarios with the simulation if we wanted to, but we couldn't claim that those represented the actual history of life on the Earth without corroborating evidence.

 

[zoobyshoe]

We could interpolate between A and B for every known living species all the way back to the prokaryotes, and then the genomes of long-extinct species like the dinosaurs could be inferred from a forward propagating simulation if relic DNA isn't found for them. We could get this far in the next fifty years.

You could find the genome for anything currently alive, but how would you find it for anything extinct such that you could have an A to use in your extrapolation. What, for instance, would you do in the case of Man? What are you going to declare to be our closest known predecessor, and how would you find its genome?

 

[Aether]

You could find the genome for anything currently alive, but how would you find it for anything extinct such that you could have an A to use in your extrapolation. What, for instance, would you do in the case of Man? What are you going to declare to be our closest known predecessor, and how would you find its genome?

This has already been done:

In its paper, the Rhesus Macaque Genome Sequence and Analysis Consortium...compared the genome sequences of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) with that of human (Homo sapiens) and chimp (Pan troglodytes), the primate most closely related to humans.

http://www.genome.gov/25520551

Obviously there were many now extinct species between Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, and interpolation between these two known genomes would be the best way that I can think of to see them all again.

 

[rewebster]

This has already been done: http://www.genome.gov/25520551

Obviously there were many now extinct species between Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, and interpolation between these two known genomes would be the best way that I can think of to see them all again.

"OK---We need a volunteer---anyone? ...over there!--YOU--there..in the peanut gallery!--GREAT-FINALLY, we had a voluteer for some gene therapy"

 

[zoobyshoe]

This has already been done: http://www.genome.gov/25520551

Obviously there were many now extinct species between Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, ...

Your wording or something is confusing me here. It sounds like your saying we evolved from pan troglodytes (chimps), and it's possible to deduce what now-extinct variations happened in between, how we got from chimp to man. This is confusing me.

 

[Aether]

Your wording or something is confusing me here. It sounds like your saying we evolved from pan troglodytes (chimps), and it's possible to deduce what now-extinct variations happened in between, how we got from chimp to man. This is confusing me.

That is what I inferred from the article, but you are correct that it's more complicated than that. Pan troglodytes split from the line that leads directly to humans about five million years ago so a direct interpolation wouldn't be exactly right.

What I gather from other sources is that human DNA only contains about 30-100MB of incompressible information (Ray Kurzweil), and that "human DNA is 98.4 percent identical to the DNA of chimpanzees" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution). I would assume that the vast majority of candidate genomes that could be generated by interpolating between these two species would be strongly maladaptive, and based on the ones that weren't (and by considering the genomes of other closely related species) I think that we could probably work our way back to a close approximation of their common ancestor. However, I do not know what the ultimate outcome of that process will be.

 

[rewebster]

There were a few blurbs on TV (in the last month or so) on how even just different types of food can change the DNA signature with genetically identical siblings even at different stages of life.

 

[Aether]

There were a few blurbs on TV (in the last month or so) on how even just different types of food can change the DNA signature with genetically identical siblings even at different stages of life.

Please try and post a link to an online article that describes this claim in more detail.

 

[rewebster]

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:G2pO78cm-agJ:www.the-scientist.com/2007/5/1/71/1/+dna+food+twins&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=20&gl=us


http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=Epigenetic+food&btnG=Search


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics