Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

Why bother giving you data? You only insist that the data is either irrelevant, does not support whatever theory it in reality does, etc.

You consistently display an unparrlelled arrogance (well, maybe a few others are more arrogant, but not around here). You really are disruptive.

scigirl

Vanderzyden,

Note this part of the article, which you did not bold:
Ok, now why in the world would an eye start to develop?? If God created this fish, as it is today, why would this fish need, or have, the genetic program to start making an eye in the first place? Think of all the energy that is wasted in first making the eye, then degrading the eye. If you were going to create a fish that lived in darkness, wouldn't you just leave out all eye stuff?

Ok on to your critique:
I agree - and unfortunately I can't access the article right this minute. I can get it at school on monday however.


Yes that's correct - they start developing the eye, then they stop developing it, due to apoptosis of the cells. Why? Why would this fish need apoptosis of the cells? If this fish were created by a designer, who wanted it to live in darkness, why even start the program then abort it, which wastes energy?

Instead, it looks like the blind fish evolved from a seeing-fish - and slowly over time lost the ability to fully create an eye. Remember - evolution is constrained by what is already there, and it is difficult for genes to just completely disappear. Instead, they become modified over time to create new body plans.

Huh? I don't know enough about computer programming to really understand what you are talking about.

How about we talk about the actual system, and not computers?

What do we have here: A blind fish that, given the right conditions, can create a functioning eye. What does this mean? The program for the eye is already there in the blind fish.

Now, why is it there?
1) A creator who likes his creations to waste energy on replicating genes, and making tissues, that are subsequently degraded,
or
2) An evolutionary "leftover" because this fish evolved from a fish with an eye program.


But WHY is there an optic cup!!! Why?

scigirl

Camaban

Tell me.

Wouldn't it (evolutionary speaking) be better for a useless eye to be covered?

I mean, a useless eye is still a pretty fragile and sensitive thing to be left open and unprotected. a mutation that covered it up would be a survival advantage.

Albion

How come Vanderzyden gets a free subscription to Science Online when real scientists have to pay for it?

Albion

The abstract does look contradictory; the text, however, doesn't.

By the way, Vanderzyden, I hope you obtained permission from the AAAS and Dr Jeffery before copying that entire Science article over here.

[ October 13, 2002: Message edited by: Albion ]</p>

lpetrich

(on the eyes of blind cave fish; scigirl on the point of an eye that starts to grow but quickly stops...)

Instead, it looks like the blind fish evolved from a seeing-fish - and slowly over time lost the ability to fully create an eye. Remember - evolution is constrained by what is already there, and it is difficult for genes to just completely disappear. Instead, they become modified over time to create new body plans.

As to "software code stubs", these are usually placeholders for absent code, such as later code to be added or code that had to be removed.

An example is when Netscape open-sourced its web-browser code. Because it was proprietary, Netscape's programmers removed Sun's Java implementation. But they had to made their browser code compilable, and do so without a large amount of rewriting, so they made all the calls to that Java implementation do nothing, until some other Java handlers could be put in.

So the Java-invocation code remained a vestigial feature for a while; this expedient was adopted because programmers are far from being omnipotent or omniscient.

And I don't know what VZ means by "disabled connectors", but I'm guessing that this is something like not using all the wires of some standard sort of connector. This is an appropriate design expedient, because it's generally much cheaper and quicker to use off-the-shelf connectors than to design new ones.

lpetrich

The computer world contains several examples of imperfect and defective designs perpetuated over the decades; I'll give some examples:

The programming language Fortran (much like C/C++, Java, etc.) had long had variable names with only 6 characters. This had made a good fit into the architecture of some IBM computers from the late 1950's, but it proved to be a needless hindrance.

Both Apple and Microsoft had serious problems implementing multitasking with their respective operating systems, because both DOS and the MacOS were originally designed to be single-tasking, with one program active at a time. This simplifies a lot of OS design, because one does not have to worry about one program interrupting another, which can be serious for shared data or doing I/O. Imagine two programs both trying to read from or write to the same disk.

That problem arises from the ideal kind of multitasking: preemptive multitasking. In it, the operating-system kernel (the most fundamental part) interrupts active programs, letting others have their chance to run. This greatly simplfies application-level programming, because there is no need to force a program to be well-behaved. However, that causes complications at the OS level; in the disk example, it is necessary to insure that only one program at a time gets to use the disk; if one is already using it, then another that wants to use it must wait its turn.

The kludge that both Apple and Microsoft have employed is cooperative multitasking. In it, a program must relinquish control in order to allow another one a chance to run. This makes it much less necessary to rewrite those parts of the OS originally designed for single-tasking, because cooperative multitasking means that a program loses control only at certain "safe" times. Thus, a program gets control of a disk until it is finished doing some disk I/O, after which it is safe to let another program have the disk.

Cooperative multitasking has the disadvantage that a CPU hog can shut out all the other active programs; with preemptive multitasking, no program will be allowed to hog the CPU unless it is given a high priority.

So Apple decided on cooperative multitasking for the MacOS in the late 1980's, and Microsoft did likewise with Windows 3.x in the early 1990's.

However, both Apple and Microsoft have also done new OS starts -- MacOS X and Windows NT/2000/XP (95/98/ME are kludges almost too horrible to mention). And both of them implement preemptive multitasking.

And both of them implement backwards compatibility by running their old OSes in virtualized fashion, something that often works very well.

Apple has also been careful to maintain backwards compatibility in other ways. MacOS X is essentially updated NeXTStep -- which was essentially a Unix flavor with a nice GUI. Meaning that numerous Unix and NeXT apps can be rebuilt for MacOS X with little or no rewriting. Apple has even done something similar with the old MacOS, making it possible to rebuild them so that they will run as "real" OSX apps, rather than inside of an OS in an OS.

[ October 13, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

pz

There is so much in Vanderzyden's "analysis" of that paper that is ignorant, wrong, or distorted. The paper is not at all contradictory; it is a well-established fact that formation of the complete eye requires reciprocal induction. The optic vesicle emits a signal that induces the differentiation of the superficial epidermis into a lens, and the maturing lens then emits a signal to induce further development of the eye cup.

His whines about how he doesn't understand this "signal" business is just obtuse ignorance. Signalling in development is a well-studied, well-understood phenomenon, and has been known since Spemann in the 1930s. There are defined, operational procedures for identifying inductive interactions, and furthermore, in this particular case, we know what the inductive signals are: Pax6, Sox2, and Foxe3 are the molecules that induce the lens, and the lens feeds back to the eye cup with BMP7.

The implication that the covering of the eye socket with a flap of skin is an indication of conscious design is just jaw-droppingly stupid. He read the paper, but didn't understand it. What was shown in that work is that the mutation in the blind animals was a loss of competence in the epidermal ectoderm. That is, the skin has lost either the receptor for one of the inductive signals, or has lost some element of the signal transduction cascade, and is therefore no longer capable of responding to signals from the eye cup. Since the lens forms from tissue that would otherwise form skin, it is not surprising that if the trigger to convert skin into lens can't be read, skin stays as skin.

Now, watch: Vanderzyden is going to turn his own ignorance, incompetence, and incomprehension of what more knowledgeable people have written into accusations of dishonesty and deception. He has that perfect blend of stupidity and unwarranted arrogance that will allow him to do that with no shame at all.

pz

There is an error in the abstract. The second sentence is incorrect, where it says, "The surface fish lens stimulates growth and development after transplantation into the cave fish optic cup, restoring optic tissues lost during cave fish evolution. Conversely, eye growth and development are retarded following transplantation of a surface fish lens into a cave fish optic cup or lens extirpation."

It should read, "Conversely, eye growth and development are retarded following transplantation of a cave fish lens into a surface fish optic cup or lens extirpation." The experimenters did reciprocal transplantations to determine that the defect in induction was autonomous to the prospective lens tissue.

Coragyps

VZ asks:
[code] Touchy, are you? </pre>[/quote]

No, not really. Just tired of your near neutron-star density. There is absolutely no point in you bringing up "tentativeness" again after we used up a whole thread on how that is the customary way in which scientific papers are written.

You are a troll, Vanderzyden, and not a very skillful one at that. Go back under your bridge, and wait for a large billygoat.