Correcting Misconceptions About My ID Theory

[peter2...@gmail.com]

The following huge misconception was posted two days ago on the OP of
"What happened to TO".

"Nyikos did try to reconcile the Top Six with directed panspermia, and ended up destroying the notion of space aliens and replacing them with god like beings that could be responsible for the Big Bang and fine tuning, and the huge time span between events."

In reality, my ID theory includes six different hypotheses through
that time span, and may come to include more. Except for three
hypotheses on directed panspermia (DP), they are all fully compatible
with, and independent of, each other. This applies, of course, to the
two examples [four, to be precise] given in the part that I have quoted.

The three DP hypotheses that I have fleshed out so far give widely
different biochemical properties to the hypothesized "space aliens"
of ca. 3.5 billion years ago [1]. The amount of intelligent design
they would have put in the prokaryotes they sent to earth is
inversely proportional to the degree to which their biochemistry
differs from ours.

Two other interventions are due to "space aliens" in the more
conventional sense, i.e. physical visitors to earth [2]. The two hypotheses
have one species designing sexually reproducing eukaryotes
from asexual ones, modifying them to undergo meiosis. The other
species would have visited close to the Cambrian explosion, over
a gigayear later, and hence they would have been extremely
unlikely to have descended from the earlier species. The chances
that they were descended from the panspermists are almost nil.

As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.

In contrast, the "space aliens" were approximately of our level of intelligence,
but advanced in technology from us by about a century for the ones
with the least amount of necessary design, to perhaps a millennium
for those with the most. The panspermists evolved on planets which were very
earthlike for the "least design" species and perhaps unlike ours
for the "most design" species.

[1] To keep them easily separate, I use names for them: Xordaxians, Golians, and Throomians.

[2] Their suns would have come closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri; the
Oort clouds of the two suns might have collided on their fringes.

I will have more to say about all this in future posts to this thread.
It's time to leave my office for home before the rush hour becomes
too intense.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 6/5/23 1:01 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> The following huge misconception was posted two days ago on the OP of
> "What happened to TO".
>
> "Nyikos did try to reconcile the Top Six with directed panspermia, and ended up destroying the notion of space aliens and replacing them with god like beings that could be responsible for the Big Bang and fine tuning, and the huge time span between events."
>
> In reality, my ID theory includes six different hypotheses through
> that time span, and may come to include more. Except for three
> hypotheses on directed panspermia (DP), they are all fully compatible
> with, and independent of, each other. This applies, of course, to the
> two examples [four, to be precise] given in the part that I have quoted.
>
> The three DP hypotheses that I have fleshed out so far give widely
> different biochemical properties to the hypothesized "space aliens"
> of ca. 3.5 billion years ago [1]. The amount of intelligent design
> they would have put in the prokaryotes they sent to earth is
> inversely proportional to the degree to which their biochemistry
> differs from ours.
>
> Two other interventions are due to "space aliens" in the more
> conventional sense, i.e. physical visitors to earth [2]. The two hypotheses
> have one species designing sexually reproducing eukaryotes
> from asexual ones, modifying them to undergo meiosis. The other
> species would have visited close to the Cambrian explosion, over
> a gigayear later, and hence they would have been extremely
> unlikely to have descended from the earlier species. The chances
> that they were descended from the panspermists are almost nil.

How would it happen that these multiple, independent interventions would
all fit into the same tree of life? One intervention is farfetched
enough, but multiplying it by three would seem to stretch credulity to
the breaking.

> As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
> of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
> universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
> inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
> span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.

Why would that universe have to be grander, and what would "grander"
mean? If our universe is supposed to be fine-tuned for life, wouldn't a
grander one be even more fine-tuned and in fact destroy the hypothesis
of fine-tuning for our universe? If there is a life-bearing universe
with quite different parameters from our own, that would argue against
the uniqueness of the parameters we have. It might even suggest that
there could be great numbers of other suitable parameter sets.

> In contrast, the "space aliens" were approximately of our level of intelligence,
> but advanced in technology from us by about a century for the ones
> with the least amount of necessary design, to perhaps a millennium
> for those with the most. The panspermists evolved on planets which were very
> earthlike for the "least design" species and perhaps unlike ours
> for the "most design" species.
>
> [1] To keep them easily separate, I use names for them: Xordaxians, Golians, and Throomians.

Bad names, as they are not evocative of the hypotheses. You would be
better to pick new ones that relate to the scenarios.

> [2] Their suns would have come closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri; the
> Oort clouds of the two suns might have collided on their fringes.

Do you have any idea how often this sort of close encounter to our solar
system would have happened? And are you abandoning the idea that these
people seeded other systems too?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, June 5, 2023 at 4:05:43 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> The following huge misconception was posted two days ago on the OP of
> "What happened to TO".
>
> "Nyikos did try to reconcile the Top Six with directed panspermia, and ended up destroying the notion of space aliens and replacing them with god like beings that could be responsible for the Big Bang and fine tuning, and the huge time span between events."
>
> In reality, my ID theory includes six different hypotheses through
> that time span, and may come to include more.

Correction: seven. The "godlike beings" are in two incompatible hypotheses,
the Deist and the Theist. I had the Deist in mind, and momentarily forgot about the Theist.

>Except for three
> hypotheses on directed panspermia (DP), they are all fully compatible
> with, and independent of, each other.

This is true of the Deist together with the five that do not go beyond our
level of intelligence and potential to progress in technology.

On the other hand, the Theist is compatible with those five,
but is not independent of them. It all depends on the amount
of intervention in OOL and evolution that one postulates
about the Designer of our fine tuning and the Big Bang.

The Deist hypothesis assumes no intervention at all.
In fact, our universe could have been one in a long line
of experiments, with many more to come, each one drawing
on the lessons from the earlier experiments.

The ones before ours are in the spirit of Philo's comments
in Hume's _Dialogues_Concerning_Natural_Religion_,
"You do not know how many worlds were botched and bungled
ere this one came to light." [Quoted from memory.]

> This applies, of course, to the
> two examples [four, to be precise] given in the part that I have quoted.
>
> The three DP hypotheses that I have fleshed out so far give widely
> different biochemical properties to the hypothesized "space aliens"
> of ca. 3.5 billion years ago [1]. The amount of intelligent design
> they would have put in the prokaryotes they sent to earth is
> inversely proportional to the degree to which their biochemistry
> differs from ours.

[...]

> As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
> of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
> universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
> inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
> span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.

[...]

The Theist hypothesis is that either the Designer, or an "avatar"
that was sent into our universe by it, and in a special kind of communication
with it, intervened in a yet-to-be discussed range of interventions
into OOL and evolution, not necessarily only on earth.

This is compatible with Biblical Christianity, with the "avatar"
being the Logos that had already "emptied itself" somewhat
at the beginning of the universe and did a further emptying
when "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."

> [1] To keep them easily separate, I use names for them: Xordaxians, Golians, and Throomians.

This is in least-to-most order of how similar their biochemistry was to ours, and in inverse
order of the amount of designing hypothesized for them.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.

This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.
I have posted many times about them before, but I think few people
are aware of the last three as being unavoidably in competition with each other
as well as with the other two.

(1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
(2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.
(3) The Xordaxian directed panspermia (DP) hypothesis.
(4) The Golian DP hypothesis.
(5) The Throomian DP hypothesis.

These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).

The hypothesized physical differences between them makes their roles incompatible.
They involve some knowledge of biochemistry, and to keep this post reasonably short,
I will postpone a description of the Golians and the Throomians to my next post.

As for the Xordaxians (3), they sent microorganisms, most likely prokaryotes ("bacteria")
that had evolved naturally on their planet, and would be identifiable as such today,
but they would have done some genetic engineering on them.

As one of the developers of the DP hypothesis put it:

The senders could well have developed wholly new strains of
microorganisms, specially designed to cope with prebiotic
conditions, though whether it would have been better to try to
combine all the desirable properties within one single type
of organism or to send many different organisms is not
completely clear.
--Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_
Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 137

This is what the Xordaxian ID would have consisted of. The engineering could have
included organelles like the bacterial flagellum, and if the Xordaxian hypothesis
turns out to be supported more than the others, it would also give some
new support to Behe's hypothesis that the flagellum is the result of ID.

How could this be tested against (1) and (2)? The latter has gained
a lot of popularity from a decade-old hypothesis that earth life originated on Mars
and was brought to earth by meteorites:

https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html

If evidence of life is found on Mars and it is determined that it is essentially
like earth life, that would support (2) but would also favor a modification of (3)
to where the microorganisms were sent to Mars rather than earth by Xordaxians.
(1) would be less likely because it takes much more violent asteroid impacts
to give escape velocity from earth than from Mars.

On the other hand, if the evidence were to indicate the existence of life on Mars
that is radically different from "life as we know it" and at least as complex as bacteria,
that would falsify (3) and be very significant support for (1).
Whether it would falsify (4) and (5) depends on how very different
the life is from what we know on earth.

Finally, if there is no evidence of life found anywhere else on our
solar system, at any time since its formation, that would put somewhat
of a damper on (1) and be (admittedly very weak) evidence for (3).

Further testing would have to wait for what is found (probably far beyond
our lifetimes) on exoplanets.


But, after all, "testable" and "falsifiable" always go with an implicit "in principle."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

On 6/8/23 5:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
> here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
> the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.
>
> This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
> competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.
> I have posted many times about them before, but I think few people
> are aware of the last three as being unavoidably in competition with each other
> as well as with the other two.
>
> (1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
> (2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
> life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.
> (3) The Xordaxian directed panspermia (DP) hypothesis.
> (4) The Golian DP hypothesis.
> (5) The Throomian DP hypothesis.

I'd like to add my ID hypothesis to the list. I'll call it "failed
migration": In this hypothesis, an intelligent civilization realizes
that its current world will become uninhabitable in a few thousand to
hundreds of thousands of years, so they plan ahead. They find other
planets which *might* be able to support them, and send life forms to
them with the intent of terraforming them. Meanwhile, they build one
generation ship (or perhaps more, headed for different planets), with
the idea that the long time it will take for them to reach the new
planet will give the seeded life a chance to make the environment at
least a little more friendly to them. In the case of Earth, the new
life was seeded successfully, but something else went wrong and the
generation ship never arrived.

(And I'll echo the criticism that your names are uninformative. I have
no idea how 3, 4, and 5 differ.)

It would also support hypothesis (1b): that abiogenesis occurred once on
Mars, and life spread from there to Earth.

> On the other hand, if the evidence were to indicate the existence of life on Mars
> that is radically different from "life as we know it" and at least as complex as bacteria,
> that would falsify (3) and be very significant support for (1).
> Whether it would falsify (4) and (5) depends on how very different
> the life is from what we know on earth.
>
> Finally, if there is no evidence of life found anywhere else on our
> solar system, at any time since its formation, that would put somewhat
> of a damper on (1) and be (admittedly very weak) evidence for (3).

No, it would simply be evidence that abiogenesis requires conditions not
found anywhere else in the solar system.

> Further testing would have to wait for what is found (probably far beyond
> our lifetimes) on exoplanets.
>
> But, after all, "testable" and "falsifiable" always go with an implicit "in principle."

Another possible bit of evidence would be artifacts from the ETs. If
they used scatter seeding, some of the seed capsules may still be
preserved on the Moon or other moons or asteroids. Failure to find any
such artifacts would be (admittedly very weak) evidence against (3).

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[John Harshman]

I know for a fact that the "B" Ark successfully landed here.

And that would be more parsimonious than Peter's modification of (3).

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 8:25:47 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
> here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
> the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.
>
> This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
> competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.
> I have posted many times about them before, but I think few people
> are aware of the last three as being unavoidably in competition with each other
> as well as with the other two.

The following, then, are mutually incompatible hypotheses for the origin of life (OOL) on earth:

> (1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
> (2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
> life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.
> (3) The Xordaxian directed panspermia (DP) hypothesis.
> (4) The Golian DP hypothesis.
> (5) The Throomian DP hypothesis.

The last three are incompatible with each other because they give very different
starting points for the design that produced the microorganisms that were sent to earth.

> These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
> while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
> our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
> a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).
>
> The hypothesized physical differences between them makes their roles incompatible.
> They involve some knowledge of biochemistry, and to keep this post reasonably short,
> I will postpone a description of the Golians and the Throomians to my next post.

This is that "next post," and I'll begin with a partial, incomplete description: the species
described in (3) and (4) both used protein enzymes to do the bulk of the work of their cells, just like in our cells.
On the other hand Throomians (5) lacked protein enzmyes. The work that went on in
their cells was done by RNA enzymes, known as ribozymes.

We have many huge ribozymes known as ribosomes in almost all our cells [red blood cells may be an exception].
They are part of the mechanism for producing new protein molecules from amino acids -- but this
is getting a little ahead of ourselves. What's most relevant here is that we have only a handful
of other kinds of ribozymes occurring naturally in our bodies, whereas they were the *only* enzymes
the Throomians had in their bodies.

This gives (5) a huge relative advantage over (3) and (4) in their competition with alternative (1).
I have often compared the origin of life as we know it, according to alternative (1) as a 100-floor skyscraper
with the simplest free-living prokaryotes (bacteria) on the top floor.

On the other hand, the analogues of bacteria on the planet Throom
had genomes of RNA and DNA and ribozymes (including ribosomes) for
producing structural proteins (much simpler than protein enzymes).
This puts them somewhere between the 50th and 70th floors depending
on how advanced their overall genomes were. Earth OOL,
believed in by almost everyone here to conform to alternative (1),
had to go through a similar stage according to the conventional wisdom.

The science of OOL has an enormous obstacle to overcome here: the "protein
takeover," replacing almost all ribozymes with protein enzymes that do the same work.
So we are still far from the 100th floor, with no idea of how the "protein takeover"
could have occurred in the mere 500 million years or less allotted for it on earth.

The Throomian hypothesis circumvents all this: it makes the Throomians responsible
for producing this protein takeover step by step in their labs. It was a huge
undertaking, probably spanning the equivalent of centuries or millennia in
the pace at which they lived their lives. But it was child's play compared to
what alternative (1) demands: no intelligent intervention whatsoever.

Next: the Golian hypothesis and further testability of the five alternatives.
Tomorrow. It's time to call it quits for today.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

QUOTE OF THE DAY

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available
to us now, could only state that in some sense, the
origin of life seems at the moment to be almost a miracle,
so many are the conditions which would have had to have
been satisfied to get it going.
--Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_,
Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 88

[John Harshman]

On 6/8/23 5:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

You will have to explain why the absence of life elsewhere is evidence
for (3). It might be evidence that life is not common on planets very
unlike earth, but all I see that's relevant is the implication that the
Golgafringans (or whoever) probably, if they existed, have come from an
earthlike planet. Then again, it would also be evidence that life is
most likely on earthlike planets, and Earth is an earthlike planet. How
does that make the Vogon (or whatever) hypothesis more likely?

What, if found on exoplanets, would support or detract from the Arisian
(or whatever) hypothesis?

> But, after all, "testable" and "falsifiable" always go with an implicit "in principle."

But you have to agree that "in actuality" would be better.

[John Harshman]

Not sure why this is a problem. If life on the planet Mongo already
makes proteins, how is it not easy to go from there to protein enzymes?
And if one protein can replace another in the same function (which
happens many times in the known history life), then why can't a protein
replace a ribozyme?

> The Throomian hypothesis circumvents all this: it makes the Throomians responsible
> for producing this protein takeover step by step in their labs. It was a huge
> undertaking, probably spanning the equivalent of centuries or millennia in
> the pace at which they lived their lives. But it was child's play compared to
> what alternative (1) demands: no intelligent intervention whatsoever.

Why would they do this? If the idea was to seed a planet with life
capable of evolving intelligence, why mess with success? Natural
evolution with ribozymes instead of protein enzymes produced the
Barsoomians, after all.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 9:55:47 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 6/8/23 5:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
> > here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
> > the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.
> >
> > This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
> > competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.
> > I have posted many times about them before, but I think few people
> > are aware of the last three as being unavoidably in competition with each other
> > as well as with the other two.

By the way, I didn't add "The Theistic `godlike being' that fine-tuned the constants of
our universe, also started some started life on earth and/or Mars..."
because I can't think of any way to test it against the five I list below.

> > (1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
> > (2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
> > life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.
> > (3) The Xordaxian directed panspermia (DP) hypothesis.
> > (4) The Golian DP hypothesis.
> > (5) The Throomian DP hypothesis.


> I'd like to add my ID hypothesis to the list. I'll call it "failed
> migration": In this hypothesis, an intelligent civilization realizes
> that its current world will become uninhabitable in a few thousand to
> hundreds of thousands of years, so they plan ahead. They find other
> planets which *might* be able to support them, and send life forms to
> them with the intent of terraforming them.

This just seems like giving a *motivation* for the Xordaxian hypothesis.
It is very different from the motivation that Crick and Orgel
gave for it, namely that after a long, futile search for probable precursors of life [1]
on exoplanets (from their POV), they decided that they were probably
alone in the galaxy and perhaps the whole universe. And since they
decided that being alive and able to experience and know so much
is better than the alternative of nonexistence, they decided to spread
life far and wide.

> Meanwhile, they build one
> generation ship (or perhaps more, headed for different planets), with
> the idea that the long time it will take for them to reach the new
> planet will give the seeded life a chance to make the environment at
> least a little more friendly to them.

You mean, many-generation ships [known colloquially as "space arks"].
It's unlikely that they will find planets within less than 30 light-years
that are suitable for terraforming in under 1000 years. Even using
the kind of fusion reactors envisioned in Project Daedalus,
the most they can hope for is 10% light speed (c), so if their lives
are only as long as ours, you are looking at a few dozen generations.

> In the case of Earth, the new
> life was seeded successfully, but something else went wrong and the
> generation ship never arrived.

Earth had no atmospheric oxygen at the beginning of the project,
and if subsequent developments were anything like the actual
course of earth history, the colonists would have had to live
in the kind of conditions that the astronauts on Mars will have
to contend with. [The somewhat misnamed film, "The Martian,"
gives us lots of exposure to that sort of thing.]

I think the population would have "imploded": who wants
to bring up children in such an environment?

>
> (And I'll echo the criticism that your names are uninformative. I have
> no idea how 3, 4, and 5 differ.)

They are nicknames for keeping the hypotheses separate.
By now, you should have had some inkling of how 5 is different from
3 and 4. As for the Golians (4), the difference between them and (3)
is that their proteins had only 4 different amino acids instead of
the 20+ that our proteins have.

In biochemical terms, their genetic code had codons for only
4 different amino acids. Also they had only one tRNA
molecule for each of those codons. Do you understand what I mean by this?

> > These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
> > while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
> > our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
> > a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).

Now you have some idea of what those degrees of design were. I've given it
for (3): genetic engineering that it may only take us 50 years to master;
for (4), extensive retooling of the genome to produce RNA molecules whose triplets
code for an extra 16+ amino acids, and 16+ tRNA molecules to carry the amino acids.
Most difficult of all: 16+ enzymes known as "synthetases" to match the right amino
acid to the right tRNA with amazingly near-perfect fidelity. Still with me so far?

The Throomians (5) would probably have had to do all that without any blueprints
for the *protein* synthetases -- or even one measly protein enzyme -- to guide them.
Most likely, the project would have grown out of nanotechnology to produce
novel structural proteins for improving the length and quality of life for
themselves -- but first for their animals and for non-animals before them.


<snip of old text, not commented on by you>

> > How could this be tested against (1) and (2)? The latter has gained
> > a lot of popularity from a decade-old hypothesis that earth life originated on Mars
> > and was brought to earth by meteorites:
> >
> > https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html
> >
> > If evidence of life is found on Mars and it is determined that it is essentially
> > like earth life, that would support (2) but would also favor a modification of (3)
> > to where the microorganisms were sent to Mars rather than earth by Xordaxians.
> > (1) would be less likely because it takes much more violent asteroid impacts
> > to give escape velocity from earth than from Mars.

> It would also support hypothesis (1b): that abiogenesis occurred once on
> Mars, and life spread from there to Earth.

No, it is (2), unless you want to rename (1) as (1a), and corresponding
modifications of (3) as (1c), of (4) as (1d) and of (5) as (1e).

But you see, I specifically wrote
"hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth*" [see far above]

So I only listed *immediate* origins of life on earth. As you probably know,
critics of DP keep saying, "that only kicks the can down the road,"
and my own answer to that is that I am of the opinion that:

(A) intelligent life on our level arose naturally SOMEWHERE in our universe,
as in alternative (1), and our universe is an unimaginably small
part of a multiverse, where anything that can happen, does happen;
and
(B) the big question is whether (B1) that "somewhere" was earth, or
(B2) some exoplanet in our galaxy, which originated some number of gigayears before
the solar system was formed.

If (B), then we have to think about the odds that we are only one
of several advanced organisms in the galaxy, to try and get
an estimate of whether (B2) is more or less likely than (1).

> > On the other hand, if the evidence were to indicate the existence of life on Mars
> > that is radically different from "life as we know it" and at least as complex as bacteria,
> > that would falsify (3) and be very significant support for (1).
> > Whether it would falsify (4) and (5) depends on how very different
> > the life is from what we know on earth.
> >
> > Finally, if there is no evidence of life found anywhere else on our
> > solar system, at any time since its formation, that would put somewhat
> > of a damper on (1) and be (admittedly very weak) evidence for (3).

> No,

Yes: you are *adding* something to what I wrote, that is fully compatible with
both (1) and (3).

> it would simply be evidence that abiogenesis requires conditions not
> found anywhere else in the solar system.

Such "conditions" as we see now did not have exist 3.5 gigayears ago.
Early conditions on Mars were very different from those now. The largest
canyon by far in the whole solar system is testimony to that.

> > Further testing would have to wait for what is found (probably far beyond
> > our lifetimes) on exoplanets.
> >
> > But, after all, "testable" and "falsifiable" always go with an implicit "in principle."

> Another possible bit of evidence would be artifacts from the ETs. If
> they used scatter seeding, some of the seed capsules may still be
> preserved on the Moon or other moons or asteroids. Failure to find any
> such artifacts would be (admittedly very weak) evidence against (3).

Vanishingly small evidence against (3). With 3.5 gigayears having elapsed,
what chance is there of finding such artifacts anywhere?

Just think of all the craters of our moon that occurred subsequent to that.
One of the biggest, Tycho, is estimated to be just a little over 100 myo.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_(lunar_crater)

At full moon you can see wide streaks of ejecta (debris) in binoculars.
One reaches out to the other side of the moon the *long* way.
Any artifacts surviving direct hits would be buried under many layers of dust.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 9:55:47 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:

> On 6/8/23 5:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

I have two things to add to what I wrote in my first (long!) reply to you, Mark.
The first one was a slight oversight, nothing to do with you, but it reminded me
of a widespread misconception: it is often claimed that I *believe* in directed panspermia (DP).
In reality, my assessment of its probability has fluctuated wildly between 0.1 and 0.9
since I first got interested in DP. Right now it is around 0.3.

It's close to calling it quits for the weekend, but explaining this will have a high priority on Monday.

> > (1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
> > (2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
> > life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.

<snip of lots of text to get to relevant part>

> > The latter has gained
> > a lot of popularity from a decade-old hypothesis that earth life originated on Mars
> > and was brought to earth by meteorites:
> >
> > https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html
> >
> > If evidence of life is found on Mars and it is determined that it is essentially
> > like earth life, that would support (2) but would also favor a modification of (3)
> > to where the microorganisms were sent to Mars rather than earth by Xordaxians.
> > (1) would be less likely because it takes much more violent asteroid impacts
> > to give escape velocity from earth than from Mars.

Moreover, ejecta from earth in the direction of Mars also have to contend with
the gravitational pull of the sun, whereas ejecta from Mars are helped towards
earth by the same pull. This further favors (2) over (1), and if conditions
on Mars were equally conducive to abiogenesis 3.5 gigayears ago, I'd give
(2) an actual edge over (1) probability-wise. So, going with the above figures,
it would be roughly 0.32 for (1) and 0.37 for (2).


<big snip of things addressed in the long first reply>

I also addressed the following, but now I have another
angle on it.

> Another possible bit of evidence would be artifacts from the ETs. If
> they used scatter seeding, some of the seed capsules may still be
> preserved on the Moon or other moons or asteroids.

"seed" could be misleading: we are dealing with prokaryotes being sent,
not plant seeds. I take it that by "seed capsules" you mean containers
of archae and/or eubacteria.

I believe that if we find artifacts, they would be more recent, having to
do with visits talked about in my OP:

"Two other interventions are due to "space aliens" in the more

conventional sense, i.e. physical visitors to earth [...]. The two hypotheses

have one species designing sexually reproducing eukaryotes
from asexual ones, modifying them to undergo meiosis. The other
species would have visited close to the Cambrian explosion, over
a gigayear later, and hence they would have been extremely
unlikely to have descended from the earlier species."

It makes a great deal of sense for the visitors to establish a
base on the moon, where all but a few would stay, and also on Mars
if some essential resources were hard to get on the moon.
Their low gravity would make transportation far easier
and more economical.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

True. But motivation is an essential part of design, and if we're
calling this a design hypothesis, we need to talk about motivation.

> It is very different from the motivation that Crick and Orgel
> gave for it, namely that after a long, futile search for probable precursors of life [1]
> on exoplanets (from their POV), they decided that they were probably
> alone in the galaxy and perhaps the whole universe. And since they
> decided that being alive and able to experience and know so much
> is better than the alternative of nonexistence, they decided to spread
> life far and wide.

Yeah. Being alone doesn't provide a reason for wanting to spread life
without adding an ad hoc hypothesis that being alone makes one want to
spread life. And "because they wanted to" never struck me as much of a
motivation. If you posit that they did something, that they wanted to
do it is pretty much of a given.

>> Meanwhile, they build one
>> generation ship (or perhaps more, headed for different planets), with
>> the idea that the long time it will take for them to reach the new
>> planet will give the seeded life a chance to make the environment at
>> least a little more friendly to them.
>
> You mean, many-generation ships [known colloquially as "space arks"].

Don't you read science fiction? "Generation ship" is the common term
for a ship that takes multiple generations to reach its destination.
See the Wikipedia "Generation ship" article.

>> In the case of Earth, the new
>> life was seeded successfully, but something else went wrong and the
>> generation ship never arrived.
>
> Earth had no atmospheric oxygen at the beginning of the project,
> and if subsequent developments were anything like the actual
> course of earth history, the colonists would have had to live
> in the kind of conditions that the astronauts on Mars will have
> to contend with. [The somewhat misnamed film, "The Martian,"
> gives us lots of exposure to that sort of thing.]
>
> I think the population would have "imploded": who wants
> to bring up children in such an environment?

Yes, that is probably the strongest criticism of my scenario (aside from
its untestability). One possible counterargument is that the exo-race's
planning was more long-term, that they seeded the Earth (and other
planets?) millions of years before their need to depart, and thus even
longer before their intended arrival.

>> (And I'll echo the criticism that your names are uninformative. I have
>> no idea how 3, 4, and 5 differ.)
>
> They are nicknames for keeping the hypotheses separate.
> By now, you should have had some inkling of how 5 is different from
> 3 and 4. As for the Golians (4), the difference between them and (3)
> is that their proteins had only 4 different amino acids instead of
> the 20+ that our proteins have.
>
> In biochemical terms, their genetic code had codons for only
> 4 different amino acids. Also they had only one tRNA
> molecule for each of those codons. Do you understand what I mean by this?
>
>>> These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
>>> while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
>>> our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
>>> a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).
>
>
> Now you have some idea of what those degrees of design were. I've given it
> for (3): genetic engineering that it may only take us 50 years to master;
> for (4), extensive retooling of the genome to produce RNA molecules whose triplets
> code for an extra 16+ amino acids, and 16+ tRNA molecules to carry the amino acids.
> Most difficult of all: 16+ enzymes known as "synthetases" to match the right amino
> acid to the right tRNA with amazingly near-perfect fidelity. Still with me so far?

I think so. But I don't understand the relevance of the distinctions to
panspermia as a scientific hypothesis, as opposed to a science fiction
story.

>
>>> How could this be tested against (1) and (2)? The latter has gained
>>> a lot of popularity from a decade-old hypothesis that earth life originated on Mars
>>> and was brought to earth by meteorites:
>>>
>>> https://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html
>>>
>>> If evidence of life is found on Mars and it is determined that it is essentially
>>> like earth life, that would support (2) but would also favor a modification of (3)
>>> to where the microorganisms were sent to Mars rather than earth by Xordaxians.
>>> (1) would be less likely because it takes much more violent asteroid impacts
>>> to give escape velocity from earth than from Mars.
>
>> It would also support hypothesis (1b): that abiogenesis occurred once on
>> Mars, and life spread from there to Earth.
>
> No, it is (2), unless you want to rename (1) as (1a), and corresponding
> modifications of (3) as (1c), of (4) as (1d) and of (5) as (1e).

I see a huge difference between the hypothesis that life began on Mars
and drifted to Earth, vs. that life began in another star system and
drifted to Earth. They deserve different numbers.

> So I only listed *immediate* origins of life on earth. As you probably know,
> critics of DP keep saying, "that only kicks the can down the road,"
> and my own answer to that is that I am of the opinion that:
>
> (A) intelligent life on our level arose naturally SOMEWHERE in our universe,
> as in alternative (1), and our universe is an unimaginably small
> part of a multiverse, where anything that can happen, does happen;
> and
> (B) the big question is whether (B1) that "somewhere" was earth, or
> (B2) some exoplanet in our galaxy, which originated some number of gigayears before
> the solar system was formed.
>
> If (B), then we have to think about the odds that we are only one
> of several advanced organisms in the galaxy, to try and get
> an estimate of whether (B2) is more or less likely than (1).

But I almost never see you attempt realistic estimates of those
probabilities.

>>> On the other hand, if the evidence were to indicate the existence of life on Mars
>>> that is radically different from "life as we know it" and at least as complex as bacteria,
>>> that would falsify (3) and be very significant support for (1).
>>> Whether it would falsify (4) and (5) depends on how very different
>>> the life is from what we know on earth.
>>>
>>> Finally, if there is no evidence of life found anywhere else on our
>>> solar system, at any time since its formation, that would put somewhat
>>> of a damper on (1) and be (admittedly very weak) evidence for (3).
>
>> No,
>
> Yes: you are *adding* something to what I wrote, that is fully compatible with
> both (1) and (3).

Agreed. I am adding an essential point that you skipped over.

>> it would simply be evidence that abiogenesis requires conditions not
>> found anywhere else in the solar system.
>
> Such "conditions" as we see now did not have exist 3.5 gigayears ago.
> Early conditions on Mars were very different from those now. The largest
> canyon by far in the whole solar system is testimony to that.

Irrelevant. Every major body of the Solar System (planets and moons
with Earth-surface-temperature or below fluids) has always had different
conditions from each other major body.

>>> Further testing would have to wait for what is found (probably far beyond
>>> our lifetimes) on exoplanets.
>>>
>>> But, after all, "testable" and "falsifiable" always go with an implicit "in principle."
>
>> Another possible bit of evidence would be artifacts from the ETs. If
>> they used scatter seeding, some of the seed capsules may still be
>> preserved on the Moon or other moons or asteroids. Failure to find any
>> such artifacts would be (admittedly very weak) evidence against (3).
>
> Vanishingly small evidence against (3). With 3.5 gigayears having elapsed,
> what chance is there of finding such artifacts anywhere?

Very weak, like I said. But nonzero. If capsules were scattered
widely, there is a chance that they could have survived on a non-scarred
part of the Moon (much of the cratering could have occurred before the
panspermia arrived) or another planet's minor moon or asteroid.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Yes, but it will probably be impossible to narrow the motivation for DP down to
one, and we'll only be able to talk about the pros and cons of each.

> > It is very different from the motivation that Crick and Orgel
> > gave for it, namely that after a long, futile search for probable precursors of life [1]
> > on exoplanets (from their POV), they decided that they were probably
> > alone in the galaxy and perhaps the whole universe. And since they
> > decided that being alive and able to experience and know so much
> > is better than the alternative of nonexistence, they decided to spread
> > life far and wide.

I forgot to give the "footnote" earlier. Here it is.
[1] "probable precursors" means more than pools of amino acids
and nucleotides; it requires a good bit of organization.

> Yeah. Being alone doesn't provide a reason for wanting to spread life
> without adding an ad hoc hypothesis that being alone makes one want to
> spread life.

Well, I gave a reason above. They knew that their sun would be gone
in a single-digit number of gigayears, maybe only megayears, and a universe
devoid of life for at least 50 gigayears of hospitable conditions [2]
must have seemed like a terrible waste [3].

[2] This entailed several generations of stars to come and go,
before too much of the hydrogen got replaced by heavier elements.

[3] modeled after the slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste."


<big snip of things to be discussed later>

> >>> If evidence of life is found on Mars and it is determined that it is essentially
> >>> like earth life, that would support (2) but would also favor a modification of (3)
> >>> to where the microorganisms were sent to Mars rather than earth by Xordaxians.
> >>> (1) would be less likely because it takes much more violent asteroid impacts
> >>> to give escape velocity from earth than from Mars.
> >
> >> It would also support hypothesis (1b): that abiogenesis occurred once on
> >> Mars, and life spread from there to Earth.
> >
> > No, it is (2), unless you want to rename (1) as (1a), and corresponding
> > modifications of (3) as (1c), of (4) as (1d) and of (5) as (1e).

> I see a huge difference between the hypothesis that life began on Mars
> and drifted to Earth, vs. that life began in another star system and
> drifted to Earth. They deserve different numbers.

True, but the problem is that when you bring in the *ultimate* origin
of life on earth, you are running up against the miserable state
of the theory of OOL at the present time. OTOH it should be
reasonably easy to choose whether the life that was common
to earth and Mars eons ago was first on earth or first on Mars.
[Assuming, of course, that we do find out that there was Mars life
essentially like our own at one time.]

> > So I only listed *immediate* origins of life on earth. As you probably know,
> > critics of DP keep saying, "that only kicks the can down the road,"
> > and my own answer to that is that I am of the opinion that:
> >
> > (A) intelligent life on our level arose naturally SOMEWHERE in our universe,
> > as in alternative (1), and our universe is an unimaginably small
> > part of a multiverse, where anything that can happen, does happen;

I wrote (A) this way because of the daunting question of whether
intelligent life is a once-in-a-universe fluke or very easy to arrive at
for a planet as favorable to it as early earth. To get some
inkling of how difficult that question is, look at how hard
it is just to get to the level of bacteria. I spent a lot of time
this morning with a long-delayed reply to Mr. Tiib on that topic here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/khZM_6plMSc/m/8_XfJu26AQAJ
Re: Clueless

> > and
> > (B) the big question is whether (B1) that "somewhere" was earth, or

(B1.1) somewhere in our solar system, or

> > (B2) some exoplanet in our galaxy, which originated some number of gigayears before
> > the solar system was formed.
> >
> > If (B), then we have to think about the odds that we are only one
> > of several advanced organisms in the galaxy, to try and get
> > an estimate of whether (B2) is more or less likely than (1).

Remainder deleted, to be replied to either this evening or tomorrow.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Burkhard]

I'm a bit late to the party, and may not have reconstructed all the arguments correctly, but to me this seems not that much of an issue. We have quite a number of real-life examples I'd say, the penal colonies that the European powers built, from (what was eventually become) the US and Australia to Devil's Island. A small contingent of soldiers to prepare the ground, then the convicts. And wherever these were of both sexes, they'd sooner or later have children, regardless the terrible environments, high mortality etc etc. So if you assume the settlers were not there by their own free will, that argument I think looses much of its force - those who ultimately send them may not have cared less

Peter's criticism of your scenario also I'd say assumes that the settlers have a say in whether they procreate, and also that this is an important decisions for them. That is a very mammalian world view, where investment in the next generation is high. But we don't have to assume this of course. Maybe they automatically clone themselves at a given age, and in large numbers (so they don't particularly care about any individual offspring), or simply lay thousands of eggs that re fertilised when a male sneezes at them, and then develop without any further contact with their parents etc etc. The opportunities are endless, even when we just look at life on earth

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Hi, Burk,

I would be interested in your view of whether my ID theory conforms to
your idea of what a theory is and how best to treat it. I'm surprised you
picked this side issue, since you kept repeating, without having read
much about it, that I "have no theory of ID." You ought to try and catch
up with what I've said about testability so far.

> I'm a bit late to the party, and may not have reconstructed all the arguments correctly, but to me this seems not that much of an issue. We have quite a number of real-life examples I'd say, the penal colonies that the European powers built, from (what was eventually become) the US and Australia to Devil's Island. A small contingent of soldiers to prepare the ground, then the convicts.

It looks to me like your deutsch society, with its draconian prohibition of home schooling,
is influencing your take on this. I wonder how many other holdovers from the Nazi
era are still to be found in Germany.

And wherever these were of both sexes, they'd sooner or later have children, regardless the terrible environments, high mortality etc etc. So if you assume the settlers were not there by their own free will, that argument I think looses much of its force - those who ultimately send them may not have cared less
>
> Peter's criticism of your scenario also I'd say assumes that the settlers have a say in whether they procreate, and also that this is an important decisions for them. That is a very mammalian world view, where investment in the next generation is high. But we don't have to assume this of course.

The technology needed for panspermia requires more than what you envision below. A colonization of a remote planet, even more.

> Maybe they automatically clone themselves at a given age, and in large numbers (so they don't particularly care about any individual offspring),

Evolution to species even on the primitive vertebrate level seems impossible unless there is intense
exchange of genetic material. The "gold standard" here is meiosis, but the complex conjugation
of ciliates [Paramecium, etc.] might also be adequate.

> or simply lay thousands of eggs that re fertilised when a male sneezes at them, and then develop without any further contact with their parents etc etc. The opportunities are endless, even when we just look at life on earth

This reminds me of a classic science fiction novel where this kind of indifference to one's
offspring is the norm among an intelligent species. A human is asked to care for one of them.
For some reason I no longer recall -- I read the book about half a century ago and recall neither
author nor title -- it is decided to perform a rite of exorcism on the home planet, which explodes.

But back to some sober evolutionary science.

Intelligent life on earth developed through a long evolution in which offspring are given extended
care by an individual who invests an enormous amount of time in the offspring. If non-avian dinosaurs
had not become extinct, there might have been intelligent egg-layers right about now, but
those eggs would be guarded by individuals, and the hatchlings cared for by other individuals
in the same small community.

The preceding paragraph, and the one before the digression to science fiction,
are tangentially relevant to my next post to this thread, accounting for the time
I've lavished on your post.


<snip for focus>

> > >>> How could [DP, directed panspermia, be tested against (1) and (2)? The latter has gained

The "almost never" used by Mark below had a big exception back in 2013.

> > But I almost never see you attempt realistic estimates of those
> > probabilities.

That is because of some vandalistic behavior by several t.o. regulars
in 2016 that aborted my FAQ before it got to that part.

I left the following in because it is highly relevant to faslifiability
and, more generally, testability. These are essentially indispensable
features of scientific theories, although some far-out ideas
of theoretical physics are currently given a pass.

> > >>> On the other hand, if the evidence were to indicate the existence of life on Mars
> > >>> that is radically different from "life as we know it" and at least as complex as bacteria,
> > >>> that would falsify (3) and be very significant support for (1).
> > >>> Whether it would falsify (4) and (5) depends on how very different
> > >>> the life is from what we know on earth.
> > >>>
> > >>> Finally, if there is no evidence of life found anywhere else on our
> > >>> solar system, at any time since its formation, that would put somewhat

> > >>> of a damper on (1) and be (admittedly very weak) evidence for [DP].

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Burkhard]

Not quite Petey. I keep saying that there is no scientific theory of ID, mainly in the discussion on Behe whom you bring up frequently. So I'm talking about the officially published, "mainstream" ID, not necessarily each and every crank who posts something on a newsgroup or social media, which would be impossible to monitor anyway.

And I also said before, in our discussion on Daubert, that something like your DP could, in theory, be the type of committed secular theory that the law requires. So I'd say (and did indeed say before) that you get at least considerably nearer towards something like a theory of ID than Behe, Dembski, Minnich etc. So full points for making an effort, the problem is more that the outcome is rather shite (technical term), as your exchange with Mark on this thread rather amply shows. That is, it is really just SF, and the only criterion to chose between variants of the same SF idea is aesthetic appeal and what type of stories one prefers

You ought to try and catch
> up with what I've said about testability so far.

Nothing new, really - and btw I gave n extended reply to this in your Madagaskar post - you know the one that you dug up from weeks ago, requested me to answer, but then lost any interest in it. "Testability in principle" is the absolute minimum a theory needs, essentially it just means it isn't a tautology. When Popper changed his view from one that required actual experiments that could falsify a theory to one that only requires "in principle" falsifiability, he makes this quite clear - and that was in response to (or rather full retreat from) the criticism that Lakatos, Kuhn and generally the next generation of epistemologist had made of this approach, protecting it against refutation but also making it empty.

So as a principle, it is under-demanding, at best a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to be called scientific. The next step (so e.g. Laudan or Lakatos) would be to demonstrate that the theory leads to new and interesting insights, ideas, observations or theoretical concepts, that it does something. This is typically, but not necessarily, achieved by testing and evaluating competing hypothesis against each other If this is not possible, then the proto-theory is sterile and quickly dies an unlamented death.

> > I'm a bit late to the party, and may not have reconstructed all the arguments correctly, but to me this seems not that much of an issue. We have quite a number of real-life examples I'd say, the penal colonies that the European powers built, from (what was eventually become) the US and Australia to Devil's Island. A small contingent of soldiers to prepare the ground, then the convicts.
> It looks to me like your deutsch society, with its draconian prohibition of home schooling,
> is influencing your take on this. I wonder how many other holdovers from the Nazi
> era are still to be found in Germany.

I charitably assume that you were very drunk or under the influence of narcotics when writing this, so will ignore it.

> >And wherever these were of both sexes, they'd sooner or later have children, regardless the terrible environments, high mortality etc etc. So if you assume the settlers were not there by their own free will, that argument I think looses much of its force - those who ultimately send them may not have cared less
> >
> > Peter's criticism of your scenario also I'd say assumes that the settlers have a say in whether they procreate, and also that this is an important decisions for them. That is a very mammalian world view, where investment in the next generation is high. But we don't have to assume this of course.
> The technology needed for panspermia requires more than what you envision below. A colonization of a remote planet, even more.

no idea what point you ty to make here either.

> > Maybe they automatically clone themselves at a given age, and in large numbers (so they don't particularly care about any individual offspring),
> Evolution to species even on the primitive vertebrate level seems impossible unless there is intense
> exchange of genetic material. The "gold standard" here is meiosis, but the complex conjugation
> of ciliates [Paramecium, etc.] might also be adequate.

And you base this on what? The fact that here on earth, and with earth conditions, evolution came up with what we call sexual reproduction, and that this also lead to vertebrates, which again contingently produced the species we assign intelligence to? Is there any reason whatsoever why evolution on an entirely different planet, with entirely different environmental conditions and quite possible also a radically different starting point should replicate this history? I'd say even on earth, we observe invertebrate (though admittedly sexually reproducing) species that have at least proto-forms of intelligent behaviour, once we don't attribute this of individuals but of swarms and similar collectives, such as ants and bees. Another favourite from SF of course (Starship trooper" e.g.) but i see no evidence why on another planet, swarm intelligences like this should not be the dominant life form.

> > or simply lay thousands of eggs that re fertilised when a male sneezes at them, and then develop without any further contact with their parents etc etc. The opportunities are endless, even when we just look at life on earth
> This reminds me of a classic science fiction novel where this kind of indifference to one's
> offspring is the norm among an intelligent species. A human is asked to care for one of them.
> For some reason I no longer recall -- I read the book about half a century ago and recall neither
> author nor title -- it is decided to perform a rite of exorcism on the home planet, which explodes.
>
> But back to some sober evolutionary science.

You mean back from SF stories you don't like to those you do like - where through an amazing feast of parallel evolution, in. a galaxy far far away, a civilisation evolved where everyone thinks, feels, and quite possibly even looks just like an elderly male professor on planet earth, from mid 20t century US?

>
> Intelligent life on earth developed through a long evolution in which offspring are given extended
> care by an individual who invests an enormous amount of time in the offspring. If non-avian dinosaurs
> had not become extinct, there might have been intelligent egg-layers right about now, but
> those eggs would be guarded by individuals, and the hatchlings cared for by other individuals
> in the same small community.

Depends entirely I'd say on the number of eggs.

>
> The preceding paragraph, and the one before the digression to science fiction,
> are tangentially relevant to my next post to this thread, accounting for the time
> I've lavished on your post.

If you spend more than 2 min on your answer, I'd be worried for you, it should not have taken any longer, given the content or lack thereof - and it would have been improved had you spend even less.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I am piggybacking on a reply I did to Mark Isaak in which I came
to realize that a more fruitful discussion would result if we
modify the alternatives for the beginning of life *on earth* as follows.

(1^+) Life arose somewhere in our solar system from prebiotic
beginnings, without intelligent input.

(2^-) Life arose naturally in an extrasolar system and was brought to
our solar system, probably by comets or meteorites. [This is the undirected panspermia of
Arrhenius and modified by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe.]

(3^+) directed panspermia (DP), wherein a technological species
sent probes carrying hardy organisms (probably microorganisms,
and very likely prokaryotes) to our solar system ca. 3.5 gigayears ago.

In this third alternative, the "senders" arose on a planet where life began
eons before our solar system was formed.

The advantage is that, when talking about any of these three
alternatives, we can very fruitfully discuss whether the planet on which
life was first found in our solar system was Mars or earth.
If it was Mars, there is a remote chance that we will find out in our lifetimes
whether it was a different life form or essentially identical to earth life.
If the latter, then in case (1^+) it was almost certainly brought
to earth by meteorites.


As I told Mark, my confidence in the correctness of DP has fluctuated
wildly as I came across new ideas and data. The two main influences were:

(I) The "Rare Earth" hypothesis, which includes a large number of different
fortuitous circumstances of earth [1] which go beyond the ones I was
looking at earlier [2] , and are supposedly essential for evolution of intelligent
life on earth in the time frame it took for us to evolve. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis

(II) The issue of whether we are the second generation [the first being the panspermists]
of technologically advanced beings, or the third; both are feasible, and a fourth is not ruled out.

[1] Two of them are critiqued below.

[2] These are a planet similar to the prebiotic earth, in the "Goldilocks zone" of its primary sun,
a G or K class star on the main sequence, away from the galactic center.


Paradoxically, (I) works against DP, despite the Crick-Orgel motivation that assumes
that intelligent species besides the panspermists are so rare that it was a very
distinct possibility that they were the only intelligent species in the whole universe.

The reason it works against DP is that it makes planets suitable for panspermia
a lot more difficult to find and more distant from the panspermists. It makes
the odds of evolution to intelligent life so great that they would have to search
much more of the galaxy and take millions of years to have a reasonable chance of success.


When I first read about the Rare Earth hypothesis, it literally decimated my
estimate of the probability for us being the result of DP, but since then, it only
lowers it to half of what it was at the beginning in 1996. This is because of
criticisms of the Rare Earth hypothesis, some of which came well after 1996.
See below for further details.


Influence (II) favors the DP hypothesis on the whole; it is reasonable to assume
that more than one intelligent life form resulted from the work of the first panspermists.
And if, for example, those panspermists lived not ca. 3.5 gigayears ago but 7 or more
gigayears ago, then we would be part of the third (and possibly the fourth) generation;
and we would have at least twice the probability [3] of being the result of DP as if
we could only be in the second generation.

[3] This assumes that the second-generation probability is less than .3 and takes into
account the probability of more than just 2 successes.


The "more ancient panspermist" hypothesis received what looks like a big boost
from the data coming back from the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope]:

"The astronomers are coming out with their first papers soon. But they have already told me that these very early galaxies that we have seen so far are much, much bigger than anybody had anticipated. And rather than being made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, they have a lot of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen -- heavier elements that we didn't expect to see. So one of the big surprises is that whatever is going on in the early universe, it's happening much quicker than we had thought."
-- Michael Menzel, lead systems engineer of JWST, in an interview with "Columbia" magazine editor Alton Pelowski, published in the April 2023 edition, with the title "Mission to the Origins of the Universe," pp. 12 -- 17.


There are many criticisms of the Rare Earth hypothesis in Wikipedia [see link above].
One takes aim at the following "fortutitous circumstance":

"the advantage of one or more gas giant guardians like Jupiter and possibly a large natural satellite to shield the planet from frequent impact events; "

This includes the circumstance of the "Jupiter-like guardian" having a nearly circular orbit
far enough away from the planet of the panspermists so as not to perturb its [also low eccentricity] orbit.
However, even this "advantage" seems more like a disadvantage:

"A study by Horner and Jones (2008) using computer simulation found that while the total effect on all orbital bodies within the Solar System is unclear, Jupiter has caused more impacts on Earth than it has prevented.[85] Lexell's Comet, a 1770 near miss that passed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history, was known to be caused by the gravitational influence of Jupiter.[86] ."

Another feature of the Rare Earth hypothesis is the following:

"If the Earth had no Moon, the ocean tides resulting solely from the Sun's gravity would be only half that of the lunar tides. A large satellite gives rise to tidal pools, which may be essential for the formation of complex life, though this is far from certain.[39]
A large satellite also increases the likelihood of plate tectonics through the effect of tidal forces on the planet's crust.[citation needed]"

However, equally large tides and tidal forces could be generated by a satellite as small as 1% of the mass of the moon
at 1/10th of the distance, still far enough to have an orbit that could last for 4 billion years.


With (I) and (II) I have shown that my Intelligent Design hypotheses have a very desirable feature
of a true theory: they bring together very diverse data and hypotheses which are incorporated into the theory itself.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>

> Hi, Burk,

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
use or appreciate. Your usage is an insult. Why you chose
to use it in the first place is an open unanswered question.
In response to your insulting usage, Burkhard has taken
to calling you "Petey".

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you might be just clueless
about being offensive. If so, it all seems so needless.
You could briefly respond to this post saying that you
didn't realize it, that you missed the earlier posts, and that
you apologize, and didn't mean to be offensive. That
might not wipe the slate clean, but it would seem to be
a proper move.

[Mark Isaak]

Keep in mind, though, that earlier civilizations would have less
(perhaps zero) access to heavier elements such as iron. That might
affect development of intelligence and, especially, technology.

I generally agree with your comments on Rare Earth. My problem with
that hypothesis is that it is driven by paucity of relevant data
combined with basic human innumeracy concerning probability estimates.
Some people who deal with the hypothesis do a good job of avoiding those
pitfalls, but many more don't.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

John, perhaps you are wondering why I haven't responded
to a single post of yours up to now, while having a civil conversation with Mark
last week. The reason is simple. Mark gave a lot of thought
to what I had written, and his points and questions followed naturally from it.

Yours, on the other hand, had no such relevance. In fact, if I had
tried to directly address any of your comments and questions,
that would have been tantamount to hijacking my own thread.

However, with the post I did about an hour ago today, I've hit all the main points
I had intended, and now some of your questions are quite appropriate to deal with.

Quite simply: every one of them only envisions altering existing individuals
of various species in a way that leaves them alive and able to pass on
their genes to their descendants.

Also, "independent" in this context includes the possibility that some of them
never occurred. And in fact, I have a much smaller guess as to the probability
of there being meiosis-modifiers than I do of DP, and still less to the Cambrian
explosion types.

And still less to the Theistic hypothesis, whose interventions I envision to
be of the sort I described for the others. The following intervention,
speculated about by a fellow agnostic of mine, is about as drastic as they come.

``Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue,
night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery,
the careful finger of God. The increase was not much.
It was two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the
end of the Snout's small brain. The cerebral hemispheres
had appeared.''
--Loren Eiseley, _The Immense Journey_, Vintage Books,
Alfred A. Knopf, inc. and Random House, inc., 1957, p. 52

> One intervention is farfetched
> enough, but multiplying it by three would seem to stretch credulity to
> the breaking.

Your two cents' worth, give or take a couple of cents, is duly noted.

> > As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
> > of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
> > universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
> > inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
> > span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.

> Why would that universe have to be grander, and what would "grander"
> mean?

I've given you some idea of their powers many times. Perhaps
the following IP of a thread which I hope to revive before long,
will stimulate your memory:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0/m/1p6NjO4TAgAJ
Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
Apr 12, 2023, 10:35:19 PM

If you can somehow bring yourself to read the three other posts
I did to that thread, they might also help you, as well as bring
you up to speed when I do revive that thread [probably only late July].

Of course, if you would rather keep shooting from the hip like you've
been doing all through this thread, I won't try to discourage you,
but you may suffer similar delays to the one you've experienced here.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I've deleted the rest of your post, but will be getting around to most of it
before I get around to replying to Burkhard's second post to this thread,
because a direct reply to it would still constitute a thread-hijack at this point.

[John Harshman]

On 6/13/23 8:02 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> John, perhaps you are wondering why I haven't responded
> to a single post of yours up to now, while having a civil conversation with Mark
> last week. The reason is simple. Mark gave a lot of thought
> to what I had written, and his points and questions followed naturally from it.
>
> Yours, on the other hand, had no such relevance. In fact, if I had
> tried to directly address any of your comments and questions,
> that would have been tantamount to hijacking my own thread.

Charming. Now, why haven't you responded to my post on Hössjer & Gauger,
even though I bumped you twice?

Where would this alteration have occurred? How would the second and/or
third independent species have access to the organisms created by the
first species? Are you talking about them visiting Earth?

> Also, "independent" in this context includes the possibility that some of them
> never occurred. And in fact, I have a much smaller guess as to the probability
> of there being meiosis-modifiers than I do of DP, and still less to the Cambrian
> explosion types.

That's not what "independent" means. So bad communication on your part.
And that scenario just devolves into the previous one, of a single
intervention to introduce prokaryotes.

> And still less to the Theistic hypothesis, whose interventions I envision to
> be of the sort I described for the others. The following intervention,
> speculated about by a fellow agnostic of mine, is about as drastic as they come.
>
> ``Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue,
> night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery,
> the careful finger of God. The increase was not much.
> It was two bubbles, two thin-walled little balloons at the
> end of the Snout's small brain. The cerebral hemispheres
> had appeared.''
> --Loren Eiseley, _The Immense Journey_, Vintage Books,
> Alfred A. Knopf, inc. and Random House, inc., 1957, p. 52

You need to stop using the Eiseley quote. It contributes nothing, and
it's a silly, likely throwaway notion.

>> One intervention is farfetched
>> enough, but multiplying it by three would seem to stretch credulity to
>> the breaking.
>
> Your two cents' worth, give or take a couple of cents, is duly noted.

You disagree? Is not the joint probability of three unlikely,
independent events ridiculously low even based on your estimates?

>>> As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
>>> of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
>>> universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
>>> inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
>>> span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.
>
>> Why would that universe have to be grander, and what would "grander"
>> mean?
>
> I've given you some idea of their powers many times.

Not responsive. I was asking about the universe, not the gods.

> Perhaps
> the following IP of a thread which I hope to revive before long,
> will stimulate your memory:
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0/m/1p6NjO4TAgAJ
> Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
> Apr 12, 2023, 10:35:19 PM
>
> If you can somehow bring yourself to read the three other posts
> I did to that thread, they might also help you, as well as bring
> you up to speed when I do revive that thread [probably only late July].
>
> Of course, if you would rather keep shooting from the hip like you've
> been doing all through this thread, I won't try to discourage you,
> but you may suffer similar delays to the one you've experienced here.

Gratuitous insults don't really improve the discussion. Can you help
yourself?

As for the thread you reference, there isn't much there, really. Gravity
a million times less powerful? If that makes a better universe for life,
then ours isn't fine-tuned, and one wonders why the godlike beings
didn't tweak our universe when they made it so as to be more like
theirs. I also think you're missing a lot of the features of said
universe. Would this hypothetical huge planet even manage to form? Where
would it get the necessary heavy elements in such quantities? Would it
have any sort of active geology? Would stars even form, or work once
they did? Would a gravitational collapse reach the necessary pressure
for fusion to begin?

> PS I've deleted the rest of your post, but will be getting around to most of it
> before I get around to replying to Burkhard's second post to this thread,
> because a direct reply to it would still constitute a thread-hijack at this point.

I think you're ignoring on-topic objections to your ideas. Not sure why
or how you manage to characterize "hijacking".

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 07:16:00 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

That pales into insignificance after his obnoxious suggestion about
"holdovers" from Nazi Germany. Burkhard, in an excess of charity,
decided to dismiss it as a result of either alcohol or narcotics. I
don't think it is either of those, it was down to Peter's exceptional
level of pig ignorance which he displays at regular intervals.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This is the second reply I'm making to this older post of yours, Mark.
I'll reply to your post of today some time tomorrow.

On Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 11:10:49 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 6/9/23 8:47 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 9:55:47 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 6/8/23 5:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
> >>> here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
> >>> the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.
> >>>
> >>> This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
> >>> competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.

<snip of things discussed in first reply>

> >> Meanwhile, they build one
> >> generation ship (or perhaps more, headed for different planets), with
> >> the idea that the long time it will take for them to reach the new
> >> planet will give the seeded life a chance to make the environment at
> >> least a little more friendly to them.
> >
> > You mean, many-generation ships [known colloquially as "space arks"].


> Don't you read science fiction?

I read a great deal of it before I was married, but that was almost four decades ago,
and I have no time now for reading the novels that overwhelmingly dominate
the local libraries. I get the impression that the market for anthologies of shorter
works has just about dried up. Also, I haven't seen any science fiction magazines in quite some time.

I mainly go back and read old favorites now. My favorite science fiction short story
[novelette? novella? I forget the definitions] of all time is Poul Anderson's "Epilogue."
The characterizations are among the best I've seen anywhere, and it does not
have any villains -- only unfortunate misunderstandings -- yet the action is as riveting as any I've seen.

And just a few hours ago, it occurred to me to have given an unforgettable
description of one kind of "life as we do not know it" -- metal based and not carbon based.
And it had evolved naturally to include small plantlike organisms a few centimeters high,
but also intelligent creatures much bigger than humans. Metal girders made that easy.

> "Generation ship" is the common term
> for a ship that takes multiple generations to reach its destination.
> See the Wikipedia "Generation ship" article.

Thanks, will do. I'm pressed for time: I need to start getting ready
for a research seminar in UNC-Charlotte and a two-day trip commencing
tomorrow around noon. So this will be my last post this evening,
and I don't expect to do more than one or two tomorrow morning.

> >> In the case of Earth, the new
> >> life was seeded successfully, but something else went wrong and the
> >> generation ship never arrived.
> >
> > Earth had no atmospheric oxygen at the beginning of the project,
> > and if subsequent developments were anything like the actual
> > course of earth history, the colonists would have had to live
> > in the kind of conditions that the astronauts on Mars will have
> > to contend with. [The somewhat misnamed film, "The Martian,"
> > gives us lots of exposure to that sort of thing.]

The humans in "Epilogue" had to remain in their space suits the whole time:
there was no free oxygen on the planet at all. [If you remember the
story, this is for others who have not, and I'm avoiding too much in the way of spoilers.]

> >
> > I think the population would have "imploded": who wants
> > to bring up children in such an environment?

> Yes, that is probably the strongest criticism of my scenario (aside from
> its untestability). One possible counterargument is that the exo-race's
> planning was more long-term, that they seeded the Earth (and other
> planets?) millions of years before their need to depart, and thus even
> longer before their intended arrival.

Metal-based creatures like those in "Epilogue" might have had the role of the
colonizers in your scenario, and with the proper choice of their analogues
of lower organisms to send ahead, mere millions of years might be
enough for the planet to be transformed to a hospitable form.

This idea could connect up to DP of earth life in a number of ways.
The original panspermists might have created both intelligent, metal-based
creatures and the smaller life forms to nourish them. There are some
visionary AI types who think we are already on the verge of creating AI creatures
like them. As for the myriad kinds of lower life forms, they might turn out to be the
best route to "von Neumann machines."

This was different from the origins of the creatures of "Epilogue," but that's unimportant.
It's also unimportant that "Epilogue" is science fiction.
In fact, von Neumann machines were taken seriously by some leading scientists,
not just the genius after whom they are named. The point is that the connection from science
fiction to science can be pretty strong at times.

> >> (And I'll echo the criticism that your names are uninformative. I have
> >> no idea how 3, 4, and 5 differ.)

And now we have (6): "life as we don't know it" designed our carbon-based
life forms and sent some primitive forms (most likely prokaryotes) to earth.

I haven't the foggiest idea whether a biosphere like the one depicted
in "Epilogue" is possible, but at least we don't have a complete blank
sheet about (6).

> > They are nicknames for keeping the hypotheses separate.
> > By now, you should have had some inkling of how 5 is different from
> > 3 and 4. As for the Golians (4), the difference between them and (3)
> > is that their proteins had only 4 different amino acids instead of
> > the 20+ that our proteins have.
> >
> > In biochemical terms, their genetic code had codons for only
> > 4 different amino acids. Also they had only one tRNA
> > molecule for each of those codons. Do you understand what I mean by this?
> >
> >>> These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
> >>> while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
> >>> our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
> >>> a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).
> >
> >
> > Now you have some idea of what those degrees of design were. I've given it
> > for (3): genetic engineering that it may only take us 50 years to master;
> > for (4), extensive retooling of the genome to produce RNA molecules whose triplets
> > code for an extra 16+ amino acids, and 16+ tRNA molecules to carry the amino acids.
> > Most difficult of all: 16+ enzymes known as "synthetases" to match the right amino
> > acid to the right tRNA with amazingly near-perfect fidelity. Still with me so far?

> I think so. But I don't understand the relevance of the distinctions to
> panspermia as a scientific hypothesis, as opposed to a science fiction
> story.

The actions of the panspermists, once the speculative details of their biological
makeup is behind us, are within our scientific abilities already; only the matter
of us *producing* the technology is still in the (hopefully near) future.

It is what we would find if we started instrumentally exploring the earth-like planets that
is different from one DP hypothesis to another, that is where the falsifiability
(or not) of each one comes in. That is science, not science fiction.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS before the week is over, I'll try to explain the details behind that closing paragraph.
Got to quit now. Duty calls.

[Lawyer Daggett]

I concede I erred in giving him the benefit of the doubt.
He's simply a determined reprobate with delusions of virtue.

[John Harshman]

So you seem to have forgotten much of what you read 40 years ago. The
generation ship has been a popular trope ever since (if I recall)
Methuselah's Children. Possibly earlier.

> I mainly go back and read old favorites now. My favorite science
fiction short story
> [novelette? novella? I forget the definitions] of all time is Poul
Anderson's "Epilogue."
> The characterizations are among the best I've seen anywhere, and it
does not
> have any villains -- only unfortunate misunderstandings -- yet the
action is as riveting as any I've seen.

I suppose you like it because intelligent life evolves from designed
"organisms"? On Earth, though.

I don't think that's true. According to your scenario, the panspermists
only spread to systems that were close to them (I believe you referred
to intersecting Oort clouds) 3.5 billion years ago. There's unlikely to
have been more than one of these during the lifetime of their project,
and even if there were several they're unlikely to be anywhere near us
now. So the chances of us being able to draw any coinclusions about
panspermists from any nearby systems is approximately nil.

[Burkhard]

well, I guess some people can get cranky when their belief in space aliens is challenged - at least on TO it can't get as bad as this

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/cormac-mccarthys-ex-wife-pulled-gun-out-her-vagina-while-arguing-about-aliens/356822/

:o)

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:38:04 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard
<b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:

Life imitates art?

<https://youtu.be/dQrrqf-YamA?t=191>



--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Ernest Major]

On 13/06/2023 15:16, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>
>> Hi, Burk,
>
> I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
> somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
> out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
> use or appreciate. Your usage is an insult. Why you chose
> to use it in the first place is an open unanswered question.
> In response to your insulting usage, Burkhard has taken
> to calling you "Petey".

In British English "berk" is a slur. To my knowledge "Burk" is
homophonous. While wiktionary doesn't have "burk" as an alternative
spelling, the Collegiate Dictionary sat by my computer not only has it
as an alternative, but has it as the primary spelling. The dictionary
gives the meaning as "a stupid person, a fool", but I don't think that
captures the full negative connotations - it's more Trump than Gump.

Etymologically it's related to the C-word, but that is often not known
to the user.

>
> Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you might be just clueless
> about being offensive. If so, it all seems so needless.
> You could briefly respond to this post saying that you
> didn't realize it, that you missed the earlier posts, and that
> you apologize, and didn't mean to be offensive. That
> might not wipe the slate clean, but it would seem to be
> a proper move.
>

--
alias Ernest Major

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:40:06 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 7:05:05 PM UTC+2, Martin Harran wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 07:16:00 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
> > <j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05?PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > >>
> > >
> > >> Hi, Burk,
> > >
> > >I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
> > >somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
> > >out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
> > >use or appreciate.

I did indeed miss all those posts, and I used it because
I thought I had seen others use that abbreviation.
To me it seemed to be the same linguistic practice as
calling me "Pete" instead of "Peter". And if you ask, jillery
[who has done a reply to the same post to which I am replying]
could tell you why she used to call me "the peter."

> > > Your usage is an insult. Why you chose
> > >to use it in the first place is an open unanswered question.
> > >In response to your insulting usage, Burkhard has taken
> > >to calling you "Petey".
> > >
> > >Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you might be just clueless
> > >about being offensive. If so, it all seems so needless.
> > >You could briefly respond to this post saying that you
> > >didn't realize it, that you missed the earlier posts, and that
> > >you apologize, and didn't mean to be offensive. That
> > >might not wipe the slate clean, but it would seem to be
> > >a proper move.

> > That pales into insignificance after his obnoxious suggestion about
> > "holdovers" from Nazi Germany.

Martin Harran might be interested in knowing that the following report
came from the Catholic News Agency a while back:

The German law against home-schooling was passed under the Nazi government in 1938. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the law in a September 2006 ruling.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/27980/german-raid-on-home-schooling-family-draws-condemnation

> > Burkhard, in an excess of charity,
> > decided to dismiss it as a result of either alcohol or narcotics. I
> > don't think it is either of those, it was down to Peter's exceptional
> > level of pig ignorance which he displays at regular intervals.

> well, I guess some people can get cranky when their belief in space aliens is challenged

It was due to your claim about mammalian prejudice leading to a belief that
individuals of other intelligent species would most likely have offspring that they
intensely care about. It's got nothing to do with "space aliens."

In fact, now that we are on the subject of slurs, don't you think it a slur to use that term for species
that SETI is very interested in finding out about?

>- at least on TO it can't get as bad as this
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/cormac-mccarthys-ex-wife-pulled-gun-out-her-vagina-while-arguing-about-aliens/356822/
>
> :o)

Burkhard, I acknowledge your take on this and am sorry for any
affront you felt on account of my abbreviation.

More importantly, I apologize for assuming that you knew that home schooling
is illegal in Germany, and thinking that this affected your own attitude towards
the intelligent beings of exoplanets, if any.

Wikipedia has a very comprehensive entry about what restrictions there are in place in various countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics
It specifically says in its introduction that:

"Some countries have highly regulated homeschooling programs as an extension of the compulsory school system; few others, such as Germany,[1] have outlawed it entirely."

[1] is an old (2003) article, but if the law has been changed at all, I would expect that
Germans would make sure that the information was changed.

The entry has multiple issues, given upfront, but I don't think overlooking a major
change in German law is one of them.


Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.

[erik simpson]

Careful. Public media shouldn't generally be taken at face value.

[erik simpson]

Another of the many definitions of "burk" is "to suffocate, strangle".

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 07:53:21 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com>:

>Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.
>

Mine too. I believe that it could *not* be produced today.
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Lawyer Daggett]

Home schoolers are overwhelmingly assholes.
On May 28th I heard from my sister that my best friend's sister passed
away from cancer. She was with her at the end. She's like that. She was
a teacher, but also worked as a coordinator with the school districts
home schooling administration. In this, she was like her eldest brother,
he had spent 15 years administering supervision of a homeschooling
program, this in the Sierra foothills.

The first problem with homeschoolers is that they tend to be fundamentalist
christians that want to avoid things like evolution being taught in schools.
Mind, it isn't so much evolution, it's "modern ideas". They want to shelter
their children from reality. Worse yet, there's a tendency for abuse to
exist within the families that keep their kids out of public schools. It's
best not to go into the details.

It isn't that every family that opts for home schooling is evil, but some
are. It's a refuge for dysfunctional families. It further cultivates dysfunction.
Public schooling cultivates socialization, most importantly in children
whose parents would otherwise tend to isolate them.

At a purely academic level, I can understand home schooling. I had
the grand opportunity to home school my grandkids during Covid.
I think it went well for them, time will tell. The eldest went from
being behind his class to being near the top. The youngest is
now being considered "gifted". I'm mostly happy that he's learning
two languages. But as important as anything is that they are in
public school and being socialized. The most important thing
I taught them is that they should learn to befriend others who
need friends. They understand that. This makes them good
people. This is part of public schooling and implies why home
schooling is a bad thing.

[erik simpson]

There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind. I'm sure
there are others.

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:27:12 -0700 (PDT), the following

appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com>:

> There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
>among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind. I'm sure
>there are others.
>

Yep, and much else, from trademarks to sports team names,
all to suit "modern sensibilities".

[Burkhard]

Two things on this. No, the current German law was not passed under the Nazi Government, nor is there strictly speaking a "German" law against home schooling - under Art 7 of the German Constitution, education is a devolved issue, so each Land has its own laws, though all of them make attendance in schools mandatory. For Hessen e.g. that would be the Hessiche Schulgesetz from 1992 (since then amended 5 time, most recently in 2022) This in turn was based on a law from 1953, so 8 years after the Nazis. The Nazis too had a law that mandated schooling, true - but so had the Weimar Republic from 1919. Weimar even elevated this to a constitutional principle, in Artikel 145 of the Weimarer Verfassung. The Nazis if anything limited the scope of that law, excluding (unsurprisingly) children with a broad range of disabilities.

And the 1919 law in turn merely consolidated for all of Germany legal provisions that had been adopted by most of the pre-unification states, who had kept their provisions also after 1870. The oldest such law goes back to 1524 and yes, the person who first proposed them has a link to the Nazis - a certain Martin Luther. but there is really no connection between his antisemitism and attitude to the disabled, and his proposal to have a system of mandatory state education. Some of the most advanced states picked it up quickly, including Strasburg and the Palatine. The Palatine was the first country in the world, in 1592, that introduced a general duty for boys and girls to attend school. Prussia followed suit in 1717 through the "Principia regulativa", they quickly increased school participation from less than 30% to over 60%, and after a more rigorous enforcement regime came in in 1815 to 80% - much higher than anywhere else in Europe.

So only deceitful propagandists call this a "Nazi Law"

Over the next century, those states within Germany that has a general duty of school attendance consistently outperformed the others in terms of educational achievement, wealth and health, which is why the Weimar constitution extended it to all of Germany.

Resistance came mainly from rural areas, where children were working on the field, or hired our to the landed gentry for herding cattle and similar work - the "Swabian children" (Hütekinder) could be hired on markets right until 1916 - when the above law extended school attendance duties across all of Germany, and also included foreign children. Making it mandatory to send them to school , and enforce his if needed, was the way to give the local schoolteachers the backing of the state that they needed to ensure children received an education.

And that gets us to the second point - as you noted the ECHR found this approach in compliance with the European convention of human rights. With other words, eight independent judges, almost all from countries that do not have a general duty to attend school as Germany does, nonetheless concluded that the balancing between the right of the child and the right of the parents that Germany does is within the parameters of Human Rights law. As the school day in Germany is from 8.00-13.00, parents have ample opportunity to also teach their children what they want, they just can't isolate them from the rest of society, and form "parallel societies" where children mix, if at all, only with those who already think and believe like they do - as the (archconservative) Bavarian education minister from the Christian Social Union out it, this is a fundamental principle of a democratic society.

One can of course argue if in the 21th century, we still need as rigorous a law as in the 19th or even early 20th century. These days the state has alternative channels to check for the wellbeing of children, has in principle the infrastructure and resources to check if homeschooled children achieve the required educational levels, and counter extremism that they may encounter at home. But then again, we are also a much more mobile and heterogenous society, and the danger that children fall through the safety net are much higher now.

> > > Burkhard, in an excess of charity,
> > > decided to dismiss it as a result of either alcohol or narcotics. I
> > > don't think it is either of those, it was down to Peter's exceptional
> > > level of pig ignorance which he displays at regular intervals.
>
> > well, I guess some people can get cranky when their belief in space aliens is challenged
> It was due to your claim about mammalian prejudice leading to a belief that
> individuals of other intelligent species would most likely have offspring that they
> intensely care about. It's got nothing to do with "space aliens."

Sure was,. Your claim was that a civilisation from another planet would implode if transplanted to a hostile environment, because their concern for their offspring would prevent them from procreating. I pointed out that this assumes a very specific attitude to their offspring which we have no reason to think is true,

In particular I pointed at evidence

a) that even with humans who do care about their offspring, we have historical examples of forced colonisation where far from imploding, supplying the penal colony with females was part of the strategy to make them more profitable in the long run through production of children, despite the intentionally terrible circumstances with high loss of life.

b) that even when only looking at life as we know it, there are lots of species for this this would not an issue at all as they evolved in a way that makes care for their offspring irrelevant.

So we have no reason to believe that a generation ship from another galaxy that landed on early earth would have its membership "imploding". They may or may not, but even if we only look on earth there are ample counterexamples, and with a culture that evolved in an entirely different environment, there is no reason to think their procreation dive is anything like that of humans.

>
> In fact, now that we are on the subject of slurs, don't you think it a slur to use that term for species
> that SETI is very interested in finding out about?

Not sure why this would be a slur - did you ask them if they feel offended by the term? That would be the only evidence that counts, really. And in that case, I have proposed in the past to follow judge Kavanaugh and call them "noncitizens from outer space" or "undocumented extraterrestrials" (Mohawk Industries v Carpenter) . But you did not like these either if I recall.

> >- at least on TO it can't get as bad as this
> >
> > https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/cormac-mccarthys-ex-wife-pulled-gun-out-her-vagina-while-arguing-about-aliens/356822/
> >
> > :o)
> Burkhard, I acknowledge your take on this and am sorry for any
> affront you felt on account of my abbreviation.

That's OK, and thanks

>
> More importantly, I apologize for assuming that you knew that home schooling
> is illegal in Germany, and thinking that this affected your own attitude towards
> the intelligent beings of exoplanets, if any.

Of course I know that home schooling is illegal in Germany. And because I know this, I also know that the insinuation that this is a Nazi law is utter rubbish, a cheap and disgusting lie. (as discussed above) .

The next step of your post though went beyond the mere ignorant into the utterly bizarre, which made me suspect use of recreational drugs. I gave you a couple of easily verifiable historical facts that show that even with humans, colonies to not implode just because of terrible living conditions. - In case you really are not aware of these things, I'd recommend Deborah Oxley's Convict maids: The forced migration of women to Australia, or Casella's. "'Doing trade': A sexual economy of nineteenth-century Australian female convict prisons.". You then insinuated that I know these things because of me being schooled in a system based on a Nazi law. Now there is no possible universe in which that makes any sense whatsoever, not even on its own terms. You were essentially arguing that homeschooling protects children from the ugly historical truth. And that even though these are historical facts, I should not bring them up to show one of your SF claims is not grounded in fact? I mean, really?

[Mark Isaak]

> Another of the many definitions of "burk" is "to suffocate, strangle".

I believe you are thinking of "burke", which I had thought meant to
suffocate by putting pressure on the chest (after a criminal named Burke
who did this), but on checking around online seems to have a more
generalized meaning of suffocation without leaving a mark.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

The details got snipped at the end, but readers can find them two posts back:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/eBpGygILdmc/m/ij-cHSULAgAJ
Re: Correcting Misconceptions About My ID Theory
Jun 13, 2023, 10:10:05 AM

> >
> > Influence (II) favors the DP hypothesis on the whole; it is reasonable to assume
> > that more than one intelligent life form resulted from the work of the first panspermists.
> > And if, for example, those panspermists lived not ca. 3.5 gigayears ago but 7 or more
> > gigayears ago, then we would be part of the third (and possibly the fourth) generation;
> > and we would have at least twice the probability [3] of being the result of DP as if
> > we could only be in the second generation.
> >
> > [3] This assumes that the second-generation probability is less than .3 and takes into
> > account the probability of more than just 2 successes.
> >
> >
> > The "more ancient panspermist" hypothesis received what looks like a big boost
> > from the data coming back from the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope]:
> >
> > "The astronomers are coming out with their first papers soon. But they have already told me that these very early galaxies that we have seen so far are much, much bigger than anybody had anticipated. And rather than being made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, they have a lot of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen -- heavier elements that we didn't expect to see. So one of the big surprises is that whatever is going on in the early universe, it's happening much quicker than we had thought."
> > -- Michael Menzel, lead systems engineer of JWST, in an interview with "Columbia" magazine editor Alton Pelowski, published in the April 2023 edition, with the title "Mission to the Origins of the Universe," pp. 12 -- 17.


> Keep in mind, though, that earlier civilizations would have less
> (perhaps zero) access to heavier elements such as iron.

Not zero. There were many times more supergiants back then than there are now;
this is not a new discovery. They carry fusion all the way to iron, and they have huge
iron cores when their lives end in supernovae, where the elements beyond iron are produced.

Smaller stars, yet much bigger than earth's sun, produce elements beyond the ones
named by Menzel, including silicon. I'm posting from a Charlotte hotel and I don't remember the
details. I do remember, however, that a thousand or more generations of supergiants can
occur within a gigayear, so their relative scarcity even back then was compensated to a big degree
in their frequency of occurrence.

> That might affect development of intelligence and, especially, technology.

We'll have to wait a while before the actual tally of elements and their
frequencies are calculated and published, before we can make educated
guesses about the degree of this influence.

>
> I generally agree with your comments on Rare Earth. My problem with
> that hypothesis is that it is driven by paucity of relevant data
> combined with basic human innumeracy concerning probability estimates.
> Some people who deal with the hypothesis do a good job of avoiding those
> pitfalls, but many more don't.

Educated guesses are a good starting point, though, and it is not only fun
to make them, but they also give us somewhere to anchor our thoughts.

Note how I talked about (I) and (II) not in terms of absolute numbers, but in terms of
their relative effect on earlier guesses. Once our guesses are anchored, they have
a long chain allowing them to move in a controlled fashion. At times we
may even decide to weigh anchor and move to another anchorage.


I might go deeper into this next week, but now
I have to get back to preparing for tomorrow's seminar.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 14:36:23 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard
<b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:

>On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:00:06?PM UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:40:06?AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

I wouldn't quite describe the Catholic News Agency, cited by Peter, as
deceitful propagandists but they are certainly pointed in that
direction. They are part of EWTN who in recent years have moved more
and more into the hardline, traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church
and are notorious for their thinly veiled attacks on Pope Francis and
his "liberal" views leading to the Pope speaking out about them in the
harshest terms:

<quote>
Pope Francis remarked, "There is, for example, a large Catholic
television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill
of the pope." He said: "I personally deserve attacks and insults
because I am a sinner, but the church does not deserve them. They are
the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them."
</quote>
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/09/21/pope-francis-ewtn-critics-241472

>
>Over the next century, those states within Germany that has a general duty of school attendance consistently outperformed the others in terms of educational achievement, wealth and health, which is why the Weimar constitution extended it to all of Germany.
>
>Resistance came mainly from rural areas, where children were working on the field, or hired our to the landed gentry for herding cattle and similar work - the "Swabian children" (Hütekinder) could be hired on markets right until 1916 - when the above law extended school attendance duties across all of Germany, and also included foreign children. Making it mandatory to send them to school , and enforce his if needed, was the way to give the local schoolteachers the backing of the state that they needed to ensure children received an education.
>
>And that gets us to the second point - as you noted the ECHR found this approach in compliance with the European convention of human rights. With other words, eight independent judges, almost all from countries that do not have a general duty to attend school as Germany does, nonetheless concluded that the balancing between the right of the child and the right of the parents that Germany does is within the parameters of Human Rights law. As the school day in Germany is from 8.00-13.00, parents have ample opportunity to also teach their children what they want, they just can't isolate them from the rest of society, and form "parallel societies" where children mix, if at all, only with those who already think and believe like they do - as the (archconservative) Bavarian education minister from the Christian Social Union out it, this is a fundamental principle of a democratic society.

So once again, Peter was talking through his ass - nosurprise there.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2023-06-14 11:37:20 +0000, Ernest Major said:

> On 13/06/2023 15:16, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>> On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>
>>> Hi, Burk,
>>
>> I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
>> somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
>> out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
>> use or appreciate. Your usage is an insult. Why you chose
>> to use it in the first place is an open unanswered question.
>> In response to your insulting usage, Burkhard has taken
>> to calling you "Petey".
>
> In British English "berk" is a slur. To my knowledge "Burk" is
> homophonous. While wiktionary doesn't have "burk" as an alternative
> spelling, the Collegiate Dictionary sat by my computer not only has it
> as an alternative, but has it as the primary spelling. The dictionary
> gives the meaning as "a stupid person, a fool", but I don't think that
> captures the full negative connotations - it's more Trump than Gump.
>
> Etymologically it's related to the C-word, but that is often not known
> to the user.

It's rhyming slang: "Berkeley Hunt", with Berkeley pronounced like the
city in California, not like the bishop or the town in Gloucestershire.



--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2023-06-14 15:27:12 +0000, erik simpson said:

>>> Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.> >
>> Mine too. I believe that it could *not* be produced today.> >> -->> Bob
>> C.>> "The most exciting phrase to hear in science,> the one that
>> heralds new discoveries, is not> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'">> -
>> Isaac Asimov
> There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
> among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind.
> I'm sure
> there are others.

Crocodile Dundee (which I saw on television last night) leaps to mine.
Not very woke.

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 9:55:07 AM UTC+2, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2023-06-14 15:27:12 +0000, erik simpson said:
>
> >>> Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.> >
> >> Mine too. I believe that it could *not* be produced today.> >> -->> Bob
> >> C.>> "The most exciting phrase to hear in science,> the one that
> >> heralds new discoveries, is not> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'">> -
> >> Isaac Asimov
> > There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
> > among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind.
> > I'm sure
> > there are others.
> Crocodile Dundee (which I saw on television last night)

ah, moi aussi! (Je suis à Grenoble en ce moment, à l' institute Innovac)

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 09:51:15 -0700, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>

Since you mention it, both the "woke" and the alleged anti-woke get
their "sensibilities" in a twist. It just depends on the topic. While
you sneer at removing disparaging labels of underrepresented and
underprivileged groups, the anti-woke get all upset about having to
wear masks and getting vaccinated; not exactly equivalent issues.

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 05:55:27 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:40:06?AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

>> On Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 7:05:05?PM UTC+2, Martin Harran wrote:
>> > On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 07:16:00 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
>> > <j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05?PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > >>
>> > >
>> > >> Hi, Burk,
>> > >
>> > >I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
>> > >somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
>> > >out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
>> > >use or appreciate.
>
>I did indeed miss all those posts, and I used it because
>I thought I had seen others use that abbreviation.
>To me it seemed to be the same linguistic practice as
>calling me "Pete" instead of "Peter". And if you ask, jillery
>[who has done a reply to the same post to which I am replying]
>could tell you why she used to call me "the peter."

jillery's behavior doesn't inform your behavior. But since you
mention "the peter" (do you deny that you're the only peter regularly
posting to T.O.?), that opens the door to mentioning your regular
abuse of jillery's "anonymous" nym.

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2023-06-15 08:21:22 +0000, Burkhard said:

> On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 9:55:07 AM UTC+2, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2023-06-14 15:27:12 +0000, erik simpson said:>> >>> Great! One of my
>> all-time favorite movies.> >> >> Mine too. I believe that it could
>> *not* be produced today.> >> -->> Bob> >> C.>> "The most exciting
>> phrase to hear in science,> the one that> >> heralds new discoveries,
>> is not> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'">> -> >> Isaac Asimov> > There
>> are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there,
>> mosty> > among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps
>> to mind.> > I'm sure> > there are others.
>> Crocodile Dundee (which I saw on television last night)
>
> ah, moi aussi! (Je suis à Grenoble en ce moment, à l' institute Innovac)

Ah. Maybe you can explain something. In Australian slang a Sheila is a
girl. When the term came up in the French dialogue I'm pretty sure she
said something like "Je sais que je ne suis qu'une Géraldine" but I've
never heard that in real life. Did I hear it right?

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 2:05:08 PM UTC+2, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2023-06-15 08:21:22 +0000, Burkhard said:
>
> > On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 9:55:07 AM UTC+2, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> >> On 2023-06-14 15:27:12 +0000, erik simpson said:>> >>> Great! One of my
> >> all-time favorite movies.> >> >> Mine too. I believe that it could
> >> *not* be produced today.> >> -->> Bob> >> C.>> "The most exciting
> >> phrase to hear in science,> the one that> >> heralds new discoveries,
> >> is not> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'">> -> >> Isaac Asimov> > There
> >> are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there,
> >> mosty> > among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps
> >> to mind.> > I'm sure> > there are others.
> >> Crocodile Dundee (which I saw on television last night)
> >
> > ah, moi aussi! (Je suis à Grenoble en ce moment, à l' institute Innovac)
> Ah. Maybe you can explain something. In Australian slang a Sheila is a
> girl. When the term came up in the French dialogue I'm pretty sure she
> said something like "Je sais que je ne suis qu'une Géraldine" but I've
> never heard that in real life. Did I hear it right?
> >

My guess would be you are much more embedded in French culture than I am, I just try to keep the auld alliance alive :o) You heard right, I checked the transcript, but I too never heard that term used anywhere else. The source here mentions it, but without explanation either: https://lepetitjournal.com/perth/actualites/films-quelques-incontournables-sur-laustralie-35335

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Thanks. Our former neighbours had one daughter, called Géraldine. They
now have one daughter-in-law, called Géraldine. Quite a coincidence,
for a name that is not very common. It would be different if they were
both called Marie-Laure, for example.

As for the Auld Alliance, I had a friend and colleague (now deceased),
who was an academic at Edinburgh. He was awarded an honorary degree by
the University of Bordeaux, and I went to the ceremony. In his
presentation he went on and on about the friendly relations between
Scotland and France. I was surprised he didn't wear a kilt for the
occasion. He was no more Scottish than you (I think), however: born in
Rumania to Austro-Hungarian parents; German speaker; Hungarian name;
educated in Northern Ireland; English wife.

--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 04:55:53 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by jillery <69jp...@gmail.com>:

Thank you for your opinion.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Ernest Major <{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On 13/06/2023 15:16, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>> On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>
>>> Hi, Burk,
>>
>> I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
>> somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
>> out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
>> use or appreciate. Your usage is an insult. Why you chose
>> to use it in the first place is an open unanswered question.
>> In response to your insulting usage, Burkhard has taken
>> to calling you "Petey".
>
> In British English "berk" is a slur. To my knowledge "Burk" is
> homophonous. While wiktionary doesn't have "burk" as an alternative
> spelling, the Collegiate Dictionary sat by my computer not only has it
> as an alternative, but has it as the primary spelling. The dictionary
> gives the meaning as "a stupid person, a fool", but I don't think that
> captures the full negative connotations - it's more Trump than Gump.
>
> Etymologically it's related to the C-word, but that is often not known
> to the user.
>

I had used Burk before as a shortening. Never realized it could be
insulting. My M-W app has Burkean as follower of Edmund, the urconservative
who was the counterpole to French Revolution sympathizer Paine.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 9:55:07 AM UTC+2, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> On 2023-06-14 15:27:12 +0000, erik simpson said:
>>
>>>>> Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.> >
>>>> Mine too. I believe that it could *not* be produced today.> >> -->> Bob
>>>> C.>> "The most exciting phrase to hear in science,> the one that
>>>> heralds new discoveries, is not> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'">> -
>>>> Isaac Asimov
>>> There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
>>> among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind.
>>> I'm sure
>>> there are others.
>> Crocodile Dundee (which I saw on television last night)
>
>
> ah, moi aussi! (Je suis à Grenoble en ce moment, à l' institute Innovac)
>
> leaps to mine.

André the Giant was said to have been from Grenoble.

[*Hemidactylus*]

>>>>>> <https://youtu.be/dQrrqf-YamA?t 1>

>>>>>>
>>>>> Great! One of my all-time favorite movies.
>>>>>
>>>> Mine too. I believe that it could *not* be produced today.
>>>>>
>>> There are lots of great movies that would raise eyebrows here and there, mosty
>>> among those considering themselve "woke". Pulp Fiction leaps to mind. I'm sure
>>> there are others.
>>>
>> Yep, and much else, from trademarks to sports team names,
>> all to suit "modern sensibilities".
>
>
> Since you mention it, both the "woke" and the alleged anti-woke get
> their "sensibilities" in a twist. It just depends on the topic. While
> you sneer at removing disparaging labels of underrepresented and
> underprivileged groups, the anti-woke get all upset about having to
> wear masks and getting vaccinated; not exactly equivalent issues.
>

Now they’re mad at Bud Light, Chic-Fil-A, Cracker Barrel, Garth Brooks, …
anyone who fails the ideological purity test.

Here’s a current list:
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/200-things-fox-news-has-labeled-woke

Woke has become nothing more than a cheapened Desantis campaign slogan. It
has too many referents to mean anything.

[Burkhard]

yes, but mistakenly so - something one of his US promoters had used early on in his career, for reasons unknown. He really was from the Seine et Marne region in central France, around 60km from Paris

[broger...@gmail.com]

Yeah, I don't get these "modern sensibilities." One moment you're just trying to eliminate any mention of LGBT people from libraries and schools, and the next moment the woke mob wants to cancel your ass.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 15, 2023 at 12:45:08 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Since you mention it, both the "woke" and the alleged anti-woke get
> > their "sensibilities" in a twist. It just depends on the topic. While
> > you sneer at removing disparaging labels of underrepresented and
> > underprivileged groups, the anti-woke get all upset about having to
> > wear masks and getting vaccinated; not exactly equivalent issues.
> >
> Now they’re mad at Bud Light, Chic-Fil-A, Cracker Barrel, Garth Brooks, …
> anyone who fails the ideological purity test.
>
> Here’s a current list:
> https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/200-things-fox-news-has-labeled-woke
>
> Woke has become nothing more than a cheapened Desantis campaign slogan. It
> has too many referents to mean anything.

Tell that to women athletes who lose out on trophies, scholarships, etc. in competitions
where trans women (biological males whose official gender is female) got them.
Also to students who get a grade of 0 (zero) out of 100 on any essay where they dare to use the term
"biological male" for a trans woman.

See here for the latter phenomenon:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-lot-to-handle-cincinnati-professor-at-center-of-biological-women-tiktok-controversy-speaks-out/ar-AA1cyqrY?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=ff7133fa767c4952b683fa5ef309fc93&ei=11

[Despite the title, Tik Tok is not what the uproar is about.]

Meanwhile we (and that includes me) are greatly concerned about the ignorance of students about biology
due to shortage of education about evolution. Natural selection entails reproduction between XX and XY
individuals in mammals, also ZZ and WZ in birds. [Full disclosure: I had to look up the latter
to make sure it wasn't WW and WZ. I did remember that the heterozygote is the female in birds,
the opposite of the way it is in mammals.]

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Today's seminar in Charlotte really got me going again on a joint paper
with two set theorists. Two weeks from now we will be ready to see whether
it is time to "cash in our chips" and not try for more theorems in addition
to the sweeping ones we already have.

This is way past my usual bedtime, so I'm skipping over one set of questions for now.


On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 10:25:48 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 6/8/23 7:04 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 8:25:47 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> I've been occupied on other threads these last three days, but now I return
> >> here to post on another misconception, much more widespread than
> >> the one I talk about in the OP: it is the one that claims that ID theory is not testable.
> >>
> >> This may be true of some published examples, but it is demonstrably false where five
> >> competing hypotheses of the origin of life [OOL] *on* *earth* are concerned.
> >> I have posted many times about them before, but I think few people
> >> are aware of the last three as being unavoidably in competition with each other
> >> as well as with the other two.
> >
> > The following, then, are mutually incompatible hypotheses for the origin of life (OOL) on earth:
> >
> >> (1) [by far the most popular] It took place on earth from beginning to end.
> >> (2) Undirected panspermia (e.g. that of Arrhenius, refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe):
> >> life originating on other planets and brought to earth by comets or meteorites.
> >> (3) The Xordaxian directed panspermia (DP) hypothesis.
> >> (4) The Golian DP hypothesis.
> >> (5) The Throomian DP hypothesis.
> >
> > The last three are incompatible with each other because they give very different
> > starting points for the design that produced the microorganisms that were sent to earth.
> >
> >> These are all purely naturalistic. The first two assume no intelligent design at all,
> >> while (3) to (5) assume increasing degrees of design by naturally evolved beings on about
> >> our own level of intelligence, on exoplanets at a time when our solar system was less than
> >> a gigayear old (ca. 3.5 gigayears ago, to pick a nice round number).
> >>
> >> The hypothesized physical differences between them makes their roles incompatible.
> >> They involve some knowledge of biochemistry, and to keep this post reasonably short,
> >> I will postpone a description of the Golians and the Throomians to my next post.
> >
> > This is that "next post," and I'll begin with a partial, incomplete description: the species
> > described in (3) and (4) both used protein enzymes to do the bulk of the work of their cells, just like in our cells.
> > On the other hand Throomians (5) lacked protein enzmyes. The work that went on in
> > their cells was done by RNA enzymes, known as ribozymes.
> >
> > We have many huge ribozymes known as ribosomes in almost all our cells [red blood cells may be an exception].
> > They are part of the mechanism for producing new protein molecules from amino acids -- but this
> > is getting a little ahead of ourselves. What's most relevant here is that we have only a handful
> > of other kinds of ribozymes occurring naturally in our bodies, whereas they were the *only* enzymes
> > the Throomians had in their bodies.
> >
> > This gives (5) a huge relative advantage over (3) and (4) in their competition with alternative (1).
> > I have often compared the origin of life as we know it, according to alternative (1) as a 100-floor skyscraper
> > with the simplest free-living prokaryotes (bacteria) on the top floor.
> >
> > On the other hand, the analogues of bacteria on the planet Throom
> > had genomes of RNA and DNA and ribozymes (including ribosomes) for
> > producing structural proteins (much simpler than protein enzymes).
> > This puts them somewhere between the 50th and 70th floors depending
> > on how advanced their overall genomes were. Earth OOL,
> > believed in by almost everyone here to conform to alternative (1),
> > had to go through a similar stage according to the conventional wisdom.
> >
> > The science of OOL has an enormous obstacle to overcome here: the "protein
> > takeover," replacing almost all ribozymes with protein enzymes that do the same work.
> > So we are still far from the 100th floor, with no idea of how the "protein takeover"
> > could have occurred in the mere 500 million years or less allotted for it on earth.


<snip alluded to above>


> > The Throomian hypothesis circumvents all this: it makes the Throomians responsible
> > for producing this protein takeover step by step in their labs. It was a huge
> > undertaking, probably spanning the equivalent of centuries or millennia in
> > the pace at which they lived their lives. But it was child's play compared to
> > what alternative (1) demands: no intelligent intervention whatsoever.

> Why would they do this? If the idea was to seed a planet with life
> capable of evolving intelligence, why mess with success?


The simplest reason in some ways harks back to my choice for the term "Throomian."
It was inspired by the Thrymans of Poul Anderson's "We Claim These Stars."
They used ammonia instead of water as their universal solvent, and
IIRC they had a metabolism like that of archae known as methanogens.

They may have ascertained that on "rocky" or "terrestrial" planets, water solubility
and photosynthesis would be the best key to a successful biosphere.
IIRC proteins are less vulnerable to water than RNA, and hardy enzymes
may be needed to survive a multi-myriad-year long voyage.


Even if we assume that the Throomians evolved on an earth-like planet,
there are a number of possible reasons, and earth's own alleged
abiogenesis should be a good guide to finding some of them: WHY did
protein enzymes so nearly completely supplant ribozymes, unless
they had some qualities that make them far superior?

What do you suppose those might be? Greater fidelity, more resistant
to degradation, much smaller size to do the same work?

That last one could even stimulate your science fiction loving imagination.
Think of Theodore Sturgeon's short story "Microcosmic God,"
but with an upbeat compromise solution for all concerned.

Amnesty, and a nice pension in exchange for the contents
of his lab, with the more primitive ones sent to a far distant planetary system
where the Throomians had no hope of going. Using only primitive
organisms would give them enough eons before evolution produced
technologically advanced protein-based organisms capable of
becoming a threat to any (vastly!) distant descendants of theirs.

I gave you a science fiction plot to stimulate your interest,
but more prosaic events could have resulted in the same
ultimate outcome. Also different motivations might have
come into play, from Crick and Orgel's altruistic motives
to the terraforming ideas of Mark Isaak.


> evolution with ribozymes instead of protein enzymes produced the
> Barsoomians, after all.

Where on earth did you dig up this wild anachronism? Edgar Rice Burroughs,
creator of Barsoom, died in 1950. Ribozymes...well, read the following:

"In 1967, Carl Woese, Francis Crick, and Leslie Orgel were the first to suggest that RNA could act as a catalyst. This idea was based upon the discovery that RNA can form complex secondary structures.[7] These ribozymes were found in the intron of an RNA transcript, which removed itself from the transcript, as well as in the RNA component of the RNase P complex, which is involved in the maturation of pre-tRNAs. In 1989, Thomas R. Cech and Sidney Altman shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their "discovery of catalytic properties of RNA".[8] The term ribozyme was first introduced by Kelly Kruger et al. in a paper published in Cell in 1982.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme

Nor will ribosomes save you. They were only discovered in the mid-1950's, and it took
a while longer to learn about their indispensable role in the workings of the cell took .


<snip for focus>

> > QUOTE OF THE DAY
> >
> > An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available
> > to us now, could only state that in some sense, the
> > origin of life seems at the moment to be almost a miracle,
> > so many are the conditions which would have had to have
> > been satisfied to get it going.
> > --Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_,
> > Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 88


This was this book that introduced me to directed panspermia.
I wonder whether anyone else in talk.origins has ever read it
from cover to cover. I, for one, am still impressed
by the the simple yet effective way Crick introduced and developed the theory.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

You realize that you are piling fantasy upon fantasy, right? So now your
planet-seeders don't even come from a terrestrial planet? Maybe a cold
gas giant? If so, how would they even know the rest of the universe
existed, much less be able to escape its gravity? And why, if they
seeded planets, would they not find one more like their own, again
building on success? And now the life they created has a completely
different basis, down to the basic solvent, from theirs? They must have
been wizards in the biology department.

> Even if we assume that the Throomians evolved on an earth-like planet,
> there are a number of possible reasons, and earth's own alleged
> abiogenesis should be a good guide to finding some of them: WHY did
> protein enzymes so nearly completely supplant ribozymes, unless
> they had some qualities that make them far superior?

That evades my question. Their sort of life produced them. Why go with a
completely untested, alien version rather than the tested one?

> What do you suppose those might be? Greater fidelity, more resistant
> to degradation, much smaller size to do the same work?
>
> That last one could even stimulate your science fiction loving imagination.
> Think of Theodore Sturgeon's short story "Microcosmic God,"
> but with an upbeat compromise solution for all concerned.
>
> Amnesty, and a nice pension in exchange for the contents
> of his lab, with the more primitive ones sent to a far distant planetary system
> where the Throomians had no hope of going. Using only primitive
> organisms would give them enough eons before evolution produced
> technologically advanced protein-based organisms capable of
> becoming a threat to any (vastly!) distant descendants of theirs.
>
> I gave you a science fiction plot to stimulate your interest,
> but more prosaic events could have resulted in the same
> ultimate outcome. Also different motivations might have
> come into play, from Crick and Orgel's altruistic motives
> to the terraforming ideas of Mark Isaak.

What more prosaic events, particularly?

>> evolution with ribozymes instead of protein enzymes produced the
>> Barsoomians, after all.
>
> Where on earth did you dig up this wild anachronism? Edgar Rice Burroughs,
> creator of Barsoom, died in 1950. Ribozymes...well, read the following:

I'm satirizing your assignment of random names to your hypotheses. As
has been mentioned, something more explanatory would improve things.

> "In 1967, Carl Woese, Francis Crick, and Leslie Orgel were the first to suggest that RNA could act as a catalyst. This idea was based upon the discovery that RNA can form complex secondary structures.[7] These ribozymes were found in the intron of an RNA transcript, which removed itself from the transcript, as well as in the RNA component of the RNase P complex, which is involved in the maturation of pre-tRNAs. In 1989, Thomas R. Cech and Sidney Altman shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their "discovery of catalytic properties of RNA".[8] The term ribozyme was first introduced by Kelly Kruger et al. in a paper published in Cell in 1982.[1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme

Why was I supposed to read that? Is there some kind of relevant point?
If so, what?

> Nor will ribosomes save you. They were only discovered in the mid-1950's, and it took
> a while longer to learn about their indispensable role in the workings of the cell took .

Still looking for a point. You have certainly managed to confuse me as
to its nature.

> <snip for focus>
>
>>> QUOTE OF THE DAY
>>>
>>> An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available
>>> to us now, could only state that in some sense, the
>>> origin of life seems at the moment to be almost a miracle,
>>> so many are the conditions which would have had to have
>>> been satisfied to get it going.
>>> --Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_,
>>> Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 88
>
>
> This was this book that introduced me to directed panspermia.
> I wonder whether anyone else in talk.origins has ever read it
> from cover to cover. I, for one, am still impressed
> by the the simple yet effective way Crick introduced and developed the theory.

I haven't. Is it relevant to this discussion?

[jillery]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 09:13:27 -0700, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>

In similar spirit, thank you for yours.

[jillery]

Since you mention FOX, let's not forget Tucker Carlson's woke reaction
to M&M spokescartoons' shoes, while at the same time accusing M&M of
being woke, a classic PeeWee Peterism in real life.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Now, the jeers about me "believing in space aliens"
are joined by someone who uses a word that
is traditionally used to distinguish two genres:
fantasy and science fiction.

> You realize that you are piling fantasy upon fantasy, right?

No. Poul Anderson also wrote one of the best introductions
to the possiblilites for extraterrestrial life, _Is_There_Life_on_Other_Worlds_.
Among other things, he introduced the terms "superterrestrial" and
"sub-Jovian" for planets, and his depiction of life on a superterrestrial
made me wish that our solar system had one of them.
He described possible alternatives for solvents (like hydrogen fluoride)
instead of water and respiratory alternatives instead of oxygen
(hydrogen in one direction and fluorine in the other) and remarked
that fluorine is a rare element in our cosmos, making it unlikely.

Someone like me, with a scientific bent of mind from an early age,
thinks in terms of a wide range of possible alternatives for all kinds of things.
But I am careful about how there is scientific backing for the ones
about which I think seriously.

> So now your
> planet-seeders don't even come from a terrestrial planet?

Your choice of words ignores that I have thought for three decades now about
three alternatives for what you call "planet-seeders," and now I am
exploring the range of possibilities for their makeup.


CONTINUED in next reply, after some other posts that I make after I get
home from Charlotte.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

U. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Burkhard]

Nothing wrong with fantasies and wold speculation, if they are done well I'd say, in the history of science they often act as intuition pumps. Not convinced that these are done well, mind.

But what makes it surely remarkable is that on another thread, he cites approvingly Behe citing Newton's "Nonetheless, as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton’s phrase, *hypothes[e]s non fingo.*

As I said I very much prefer interesting speculations over Behe's hot air, but it requires quite a bit of internal disconnect to hold these two views simultaneously. Here, hypotheses are not just formed, they are mass produced, sprayed with glitter, wrapped in gift wrap, and then a HUGE ribbon wrapped around them saying in gold lettering: I'm a hypothesis, take that, reality" :o)

[John Harshman]

So out of that whole post of mine, you concentrate not on any substance
but on scientific virtue signalling. Been a long time since I read
Anderson's book, and I don't remember that much of it. Now, what you
have thought for three decades, and even how you have been bent from an
early age, are not all that relevant to what I was responding to, which
is what you are saying here and now.

[*Hemidactylus*]

People harbor morally panicked concerns about sports related trivialities
when a fundamental human right like abortion is being stolen away by
activist justices and religiously deluded legislators. Antiwokeness masks
what is really going on…the rise of Christian nationalism.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I'd take that even further and say that the rise of Christian nationalism is just a way for the super rich to get a sufficient fraction of the population behind them that they can get tax cuts for the wealthy slipped in alongside the moral panic about lazy people looking for handouts, an evil LGBT agenda, cancel culture, and all the rest.

[Ernest Major]

On 16/06/2023 04:25, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Meanwhile we (and that includes me) are greatly concerned about the ignorance of students about biology
> due to shortage of education about evolution. Natural selection entails reproduction between XX and XY
> individuals in mammals, also ZZ and WZ in birds. [Full disclosure: I had to look up the latter
> to make sure it wasn't WW and WZ. I did remember that the heterozygote is the female in birds,
> the opposite of the way it is in mammals.]

Are you aware that there are over a dozen mammal species which don't
have a strict XX/XY determination system? As sex determination won't
have been studied in all mammal species this will be likely to be an
underestimate - I'd guesstimate that between 0.5% and 1.0% of mammal
species are exceptions to the rule.

Are you aware that around 0.1% of fertile human males don't have XY
karyotypes? (The number of fertile human females who don't have XX
karyotypes appears to be an order of magnitude later.) I expect
comparable rates apply to many other mammal species.

--
alias Ernest Major

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Thanks for letting us know how you look at things directly impacting
individual women through the wrong end of a telescope.

The idea of a trans "woman" well over 6 feet tall who makes no effort
to hide "her" penis in the locker room is just fine with you, isn't it?
The women who are made acutely uncomfortable should just
"get over it," eh? And they should just suck it up when the trans "woman"
beats them hands down in competitions, eh?

> when a fundamental human right like abortion is being stolen away by
> activist justices and religiously deluded legislators.

Yeah, the 20-week developing humans torn limb from limb without benefit
of anesthesia are only of concern to "religiously deluded" people,
in The World According to Scott "Hemidactylus" Chase.

Mind you, I am not happy about our "heartbeat" law, since I think Portugal's
law starting at 10 weeks LMP is a great compromise. But neither am I
happy to see my state being made an abortion mecca due to laws only
limiting abortion access after the 20th week.

And that is due to "activist" judges who ruled the heartbeat law unconstitutional
on the anachronistic "right to privacy" RvW grounds that had been
rejected in Casey v. Planned Parenthood in 1992.

Activist judges are just fine with you when they conform to YOUR agenda.

>Antiwokeness masks
> what is really going on…the rise of Christian nationalism.

Nationalism is perfectly OK with you as long as the nation
is sufficiently "woke". You do a pretty good start at showing
what that entails.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It's nice to see a direct reply by you to a post of mine again, Ernest.
The immediately preceding one was three years or more ago, wasn't it?

On Friday, June 16, 2023 at 3:10:10 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 16/06/2023 04:25, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Meanwhile we (and that includes me) are greatly concerned about the ignorance of students about biology
> > due to shortage of education about evolution. Natural selection entails reproduction between XX and XY
> > individuals in mammals, also ZZ and WZ in birds. [Full disclosure: I had to look up the latter
> > to make sure it wasn't WW and WZ. I did remember that the heterozygote is the female in birds,
> > the opposite of the way it is in mammals.]

> Are you aware that there are over a dozen mammal species which don't
> have a strict XX/XY determination system?

No, I am not. I do know that it was thought for decades that
platypuses had a XX/XO determination system, but then it was
discovered that there was a chromosome that functioned like a Y.

Could you name a couple of the verified ones for me?
Preferably different from the exceptions listed below, which include
the human XO.

> As sex determination won't
> have been studied in all mammal species this will be likely to be an
> underestimate - I'd guesstimate that between 0.5% and 1.0% of mammal
> species are exceptions to the rule.
>
> Are you aware that around 0.1% of fertile human males don't have XY
> karyotypes?

Yes, those would be XYY and perhaps XXY, no? I admit I was
oversimplifying by putting only the two relevant chromosomes.
As long as human males are identified by possession of a Y chromosome,
I'm not overly concerned.

> (The number of fertile human females who don't have XX
> karyotypes appears to be an order of magnitude later.)

This includes Turner Syndrome, the human XO case.
I didn't know any were fertile until I looked it up just now.
I guessed that XXX women are fertile long ago, b.t.w.

> I expect
> comparable rates apply to many other mammal species.

Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 5:40:07 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:00:06 PM UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 3:40:06 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

> > > On Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 7:05:05 PM UTC+2, Martin Harran wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 07:16:00 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
> > > > <j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > >On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 5:55:05?PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > >>
> > > > >
> > > > >> Hi, Burk,
> > > > >
> > > > >I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that
> > > > >somehow you managed to miss the posts that pointed
> > > > >out that "Burk" is a diminutive that Burkhard does not
> > > > >use or appreciate.

> > I did indeed miss all those posts, and I used it because
> > I thought I had seen others use that abbreviation.
> > To me it seemed to be the same linguistic practice as
> > calling me "Pete" instead of "Peter". And if you ask, jillery
> > [who has done a reply to the same post to which I am replying]
> > could tell you why she used to call me "the peter."

Of course, jillery knew better than to tell you without being asked.
I'm sure you would have noticed the use of the lower case in
"the peter," which jillery consistently used over several years,
and seen through her disingenuous "reason" that she wrote in reply to me.


<snip for focus>


> > Martin Harran might be interested in knowing that the following report
> > came from the Catholic News Agency a while back:
> >
> > The German law against home-schooling was passed under the Nazi government in 1938. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the law in a September 2006 ruling.
> > https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/27980/german-raid-on-home-schooling-family-draws-condemnation

Did you look at the linked article, Burkhard?

> Two things on this. No, the current German law was not passed under the Nazi Government, nor is there strictly speaking a "German" law against home schooling - under Art 7 of the German Constitution, education is a devolved issue, so each Land has its own laws, though all of them make attendance in schools mandatory. For Hessen e.g. that would be the Hessiche Schulgesetz from 1992 (since then amended 5 time, most recently in 2022) This in turn was based on a law from 1953, so 8 years after the Nazis. The Nazis too had a law that mandated schooling, true - but so had the Weimar Republic from 1919. Weimar even elevated this to a constitutional principle, in Artikel 145 of the Weimarer Verfassung. The Nazis if anything limited the scope of that law, excluding (unsurprisingly) children with a broad range of disabilities.

In your headlong rush to post some condescending remarks about me, you overlooked
the utterly elementary distinction between compulsory schooling and a ban on home schooling.
Here is how one article described it:

"Though homeschooling declined with the passing of mandatory schooling laws in 1918 and the subsequent rebranding of the country as the Weimar Republic, homeschooling was still legal and practiced particularly by the upper class until 1938, when a new political party was in full control of German affairs: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known infamously as the Nazis [2]. "
https://thinkingwest.com/2020/06/22/nazi-ban-homeschooling/

The 1938 law made the new ban very clear:

"The Nazis outlawed homeschooling upon implementation of the Reichsschulpflichtgesetz (Law on Compulsory Education in the German Reich) in the very first section, which translates to the following [3]:

1. Compulsory general education. In the German Reich there is compulsory education. It secures the education and instruction of German youth in the spirit of National Socialism. It is subject to all children and adolescents of German nationality who are domiciled or habitually resident in the country. Compulsory education must be fulfilled by attending a German school. Exceptions are decided by the school inspectorate.

The first two Reichsschulpflichtgesetz’s signees are household names: Hitler and Göring.
-- [*ibid.*]

Note the words "spirit of National Socialism" in what is euphemistically called
"education and instruction" [read: indoctrination]. It is contrary to fundamental
Christian values. The spirit of "Herrenvolk" v. "Untermenschen" is antithetical
to the spirit of Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan and his actual dealings
with Samaritans.

<snip for focus>

> So only deceitful propagandists call this a "Nazi Law"

The preamble is no longer valid, but the law can allow lots of governmental
abuses. See my replies to Hemidactylus today and yesterday, and
compare them to Biden's campaign to enable biological males to compete
in women's sports nationwide. "Trans is the civil rights issue of our time,"
Biden said a while back. What's the situation in Germany?

Also, how severe are laws against "hate speech" and "Holocaust denial"?

> Over the next century, those states within Germany that has a general duty of school attendance consistently outperformed the others in terms of educational achievement, wealth and health, which is why the Weimar constitution extended it to all of Germany.

A fair comparison would include information about the children
of home schoolers.

> Resistance came mainly from rural areas, where children were working on the field, or hired our to the landed gentry for herding cattle and similar work - the "Swabian children" (Hütekinder) could be hired on markets right until 1916 - when the above law extended school attendance duties across all of Germany, and also included foreign children. Making it mandatory to send them to school , and enforce his if needed, was the way to give the local schoolteachers the backing of the state that they needed to ensure children received an education.

This is reminiscent of how, around 1960, Amish parents did not want children to
have to be schooled in subjects that go beyond the elementary level.

This is an entirely different issue from the one of whether home schooled
children fare in comparison to their public school counterparts on the same subjects.
South Carolina has one of the worst records in standardised testing.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later. Duty calls.


Peter Nyikos

[Ernest Major]

On 16/06/2023 21:14, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> It's nice to see a direct reply by you to a post of mine again, Ernest.
> The immediately preceding one was three years or more ago, wasn't it?
>
> On Friday, June 16, 2023 at 3:10:10 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
>> On 16/06/2023 04:25, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> Meanwhile we (and that includes me) are greatly concerned about the ignorance of students about biology
>>> due to shortage of education about evolution. Natural selection entails reproduction between XX and XY
>>> individuals in mammals, also ZZ and WZ in birds. [Full disclosure: I had to look up the latter
>>> to make sure it wasn't WW and WZ. I did remember that the heterozygote is the female in birds,
>>> the opposite of the way it is in mammals.]
>
>> Are you aware that there are over a dozen mammal species which don't
>> have a strict XX/XY determination system?
>
> No, I am not. I do know that it was thought for decades that
> platypuses had a XX/XO determination system, but then it was
> discovered that there was a chromosome that functioned like a Y.
>
> Could you name a couple of the verified ones for me?
> Preferably different from the exceptions listed below, which include
> the human XO.

I recalled that the platypus has 5 pairs of sex chromosomes, which don't
assorted independently at meiosis (at least in the male). The web tells
me that the other 4 monotreme species share the same system.

The web also reminded me about an uncertain number of species of the red
muntjac complex, which have an 0/Y system. Up to 6 species are
recognised; I found statements of the karyotype for 3. Muntiacus
vaginalis has 6 chromosomes in females and 7 in male; Muntiacus muntjak
8 chromosomes in females and 9 in males. Muntiacus crinifons also has 8
and 9, but its range is separated from Muntiacus muntiacus by that of
Muntiacus vaginalis, so one might suspect it of being a good species.

The other instance that an initial enquiry told me about was Mus
(Nannomys) minutoides, which has an XX/XX*/XY system. There seems to be
something odd about Mus (Nannomys) triton as well, but I didn't run into
any elaboration on a cursory search.

In Myopus schisticolor, Dicrostonyx torquatus and 6 or more species (out
of 16) of the genus Akodon a considerable proportion of females have XY
chromosomes (over 50% in some samples).

One source says that Microtus oregoni has X0/XY system. That is
different from Turner's Syndrome in humans; in this species an X0 female
would be normal, healthy and fertile. Another source says that females
are X0/XX mosaics and males XY/OY mosaics. (Mammalian genetic regulation
is dosage sensitive, so generally one X chromosome is inactivated in
each cell; it wouldn't be surprising to find lineages which go a step
further and throw one away early in development. OTOH, OY cells are
surprising, and I'd look more closely at such a claim.)

Tokudaia osimensis, Tokudaia tokunoshimensis and Ellobius lutescens are
X0/X0. Ellobius tancrei, Ellobius talpinus and Ellobius alaicus are XX/XX.

I looked up the hypotetraploid Tympanoctomys barrerae, but that turns
out to just be a normal XX/XY, the additional sex chromosomes being
among those lost.

>
>> As sex determination won't
>> have been studied in all mammal species this will be likely to be an
>> underestimate - I'd guesstimate that between 0.5% and 1.0% of mammal
>> species are exceptions to the rule.
>>
>> Are you aware that around 0.1% of fertile human males don't have XY
>> karyotypes?
>
> Yes, those would be XYY and perhaps XXY, no? I admit I was
> oversimplifying by putting only the two relevant chromosomes.

XXY are sterile (as are XYYY and XYYYY).

> As long as human males are identified by possession of a Y chromosome,
> I'm not overly concerned.

If you take the estimates reported by Wikipedia, there would be several
hundred XX males in the US. XY females are considerably more numerous.

Your concern may be alleviated by the knowledge that no fertile XX male
has yet been identified. On the other hand any fertile individuals are
more likely to be overlooked.

>
>
>> (The number of fertile human females who don't have XX
>> karyotypes appears to be an order of magnitude later.)

"later" here is a mistype for "lower"

>
> This includes Turner Syndrome, the human XO case.
> I didn't know any were fertile until I looked it up just now.
> I guessed that XXX women are fertile long ago, b.t.w.
>

You guessed wrong. When I looked it up I found that only a minority of
XXX woman are fertile.

>
>> I expect
>> comparable rates apply to many other mammal species.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

--
alias Ernest Major

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I finally get around to posting my second (and final) reply to the very first follow-up to my OP.

On Monday, June 5, 2023 at 6:10:44 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 6/5/23 1:01 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > The following huge misconception was posted two days ago on the OP of
> > "What happened to TO".
> >
> > "Nyikos did try to reconcile the Top Six with directed panspermia, and ended up destroying the notion of space aliens and replacing them with god like beings that could be responsible for the Big Bang and fine tuning, and the huge time span between events."
> >
> > In reality, my ID theory includes six different hypotheses through
> > that time span, and may come to include more. Except for three
> > hypotheses on directed panspermia (DP), they are all fully compatible
> > with, and independent of, each other. This applies, of course, to the
> > two examples [four, to be precise] given in the part that I have quoted.
> >
> > The three DP hypotheses that I have fleshed out so far give widely
> > different biochemical properties to the hypothesized "space aliens"
> > of ca. 3.5 billion years ago [1]. The amount of intelligent design
> > they would have put in the prokaryotes they sent to earth is
> > inversely proportional to the degree to which their biochemistry
> > differs from ours.
> >
> > Two other interventions are due to "space aliens" in the more
> > conventional sense, i.e. physical visitors to earth [2]. The two hypotheses
> > have one species designing sexually reproducing eukaryotes
> > from asexual ones, modifying them to undergo meiosis. The other
> > species would have visited close to the Cambrian explosion, over
> > a gigayear later, and hence they would have been extremely
> > unlikely to have descended from the earlier species. The chances
> > that they were descended from the panspermists are almost nil.

<snip of things dealt with in first reply, six days ago>


> > As for the "godlike creatures", they were totally unlike the "space aliens"
> > of the above hypotheses. The former arose in a far grander and older
> > universe than ours, and their abilities are probably out of reach for
> > inhabitants of our universe: they would have evolved after a time
> > span many times the expected life span of our galaxies.

<small snip for same reason as the first>


> If our universe is supposed to be fine-tuned for life,

Not perfectly fine-tuned. Did you take a look at the post I linked
for you in my first reply? One of the most important constants,
the ratio of gravitational attraction to that of a proton for an electron,
would be adversely effected if the ratio were *greater*, but the renowned
astronomer Martin Rees remarked how a grander universe could result
if it were *smaller*. Incidentally, the ratio is amazingly small as it stands, 10^(-36).

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0/m/1p6NjO4TAgAJ
Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
Apr 12, 2023, 10:35:19 PM


> wouldn't a
> grander one be even more fine-tuned and in fact destroy the hypothesis
> of fine-tuning for our universe?

You are still thinking in terms of absolutes. The fine-tuning
is there in six different constants expounded on by Rees, and all the others
are strongly restricted in both directions.


> If there is a life-bearing universe
> with quite different parameters from our own, that would argue against
> the uniqueness of the parameters we have.

It is atheists who try to argue for uniqueness. ID theorists are content
with super-astronomical odds against our ca. 13.8 gigayear old universe being
the only one in all of reality, which is your favorite hypothesis.


> It might even suggest that
> there could be great numbers of other suitable parameter sets.

Indeed. Ours, I believe, conforms to the principle of mediocrity
as far as universes that are hospitable to life are concerned.
It's just that this hospitability is astounding in ANY form.

But then, this also makes the job of a "back door designer"
of our universe a lot easier than the one you have in mind,
with your idea of "absolutely the best fine-tuning."


> > In contrast, the "space aliens" were approximately of our level of intelligence,
> > but advanced in technology from us by about a century for the ones
> > with the least amount of necessary design, to perhaps a millennium
> > for those with the most. The panspermists evolved on planets which were very
> > earthlike for the "least design" species and perhaps unlike ours
> > for the "most design" species.
> >
> > [1] To keep them easily separate, I use names for them: Xordaxians, Golians, and Throomians.
> Bad names, as they are not evocative of the hypotheses. You would be
> better to pick new ones that relate to the scenarios.

Here is Rhodes, now jump: pick names that aren't way too long and boring.

Keep in mind that "Xordaxian" was chosen by Howard Hershey, who
you seem to think was a much better man than I am.


> > [2] Their suns would have come closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri; the
> > Oort clouds of the two suns might have collided on their fringes.

> Do you have any idea how often this sort of close encounter to our solar
> system would have happened?

The principle of mediocrity says that there were MANY stars in
the last two gigayears that came closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri is now.
Some probably came within 1 light year of Sol.


> And are you abandoning the idea that these
> people seeded other systems too?

Footnote [2] has to do with "space aliens" in the sense
of visitors to earth. Nothing to do with the panspermists.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 16, 2023 at 6:10:08 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 16/06/2023 21:14, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > It's nice to see a direct reply by you to a post of mine again, Ernest.
> > The immediately preceding one was three years or more ago, wasn't it?
> >
> > On Friday, June 16, 2023 at 3:10:10 PM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:

> >> Are you aware that there are over a dozen mammal species which don't
> >> have a strict XX/XY determination system?
> >
> > No, I am not. I do know that it was thought for decades that
> > platypuses had a XX/XO determination system, but then it was
> > discovered that there was a chromosome that functioned like a Y.
> >
> > Could you name a couple of the verified ones for me?
> > Preferably different from the exceptions listed below, which include
> > the human XO.

> I recalled that the platypus has 5 pairs of sex chromosomes, which don't
> assorted independently at meiosis (at least in the male). The web tells
> me that the other 4 monotreme species share the same system.
>
> The web also reminded me about an uncertain number of species of the red
> muntjac complex, which have an 0/Y system.

That's remarkable! In humans, if there is no functioning X chromosome in the
zygote, IIRC the result is a hydatidiform mole, nothing like a human embryo at all.
How can muntjacs be so different?

> Up to 6 species are
> recognised; I found statements of the karyotype for 3. Muntiacus
> vaginalis has 6 chromosomes in females and 7 in male; Muntiacus muntjak
> 8 chromosomes in females and 9 in males. Muntiacus crinifons also has 8
> and 9, but its range is separated from Muntiacus muntiacus by that of
> Muntiacus vaginalis, so one might suspect it of being a good species.
>
> The other instance that an initial enquiry told me about was Mus
> (Nannomys) minutoides, which has an XX/XX*/XY system. There seems to be
> something odd about Mus (Nannomys) triton as well, but I didn't run into
> any elaboration on a cursory search.

What does XX* signify?

>
> In Myopus schisticolor, Dicrostonyx torquatus and 6 or more species (out
> of 16) of the genus Akodon a considerable proportion of females have XY
> chromosomes (over 50% in some samples).
>
> One source says that Microtus oregoni has X0/XY system. That is
> different from Turner's Syndrome in humans; in this species an X0 female
> would be normal, healthy and fertile. Another source says that females
> are X0/XX mosaics and males XY/OY mosaics. (Mammalian genetic regulation
> is dosage sensitive, so generally one X chromosome is inactivated in each cell;

Yes, I've known about Barr bodies for years, but I have a question pertaining to them below.

> it wouldn't be surprising to find lineages which go a step
> further and throw one away early in development. OTOH, OY cells are
> surprising, and I'd look more closely at such a claim.)
>
> Tokudaia osimensis, Tokudaia tokunoshimensis and Ellobius lutescens are
> X0/X0. Ellobius tancrei, Ellobius talpinus and Ellobius alaicus are XX/XX.
>
> I looked up the hypotetraploid Tympanoctomys barrerae, but that turns
> out to just be a normal XX/XY, the additional sex chromosomes being
> among those lost.
> >
> >> As sex determination won't
> >> have been studied in all mammal species this will be likely to be an
> >> underestimate - I'd guesstimate that between 0.5% and 1.0% of mammal
> >> species are exceptions to the rule.
> >>
> >> Are you aware that around 0.1% of fertile human males don't have XY
> >> karyotypes?
> >
> > Yes, those would be XYY and perhaps XXY, no? I admit I was
> > oversimplifying by putting only the two relevant chromosomes.

> XXY are sterile (as are XYYY and XYYYY).

As to the first, would it be because the formation of Barr bodies
is disrupted by the Y chromosome? But what's the matter with the other two?

> > As long as human males are identified by possession of a Y chromosome,
> > I'm not overly concerned.

> If you take the estimates reported by Wikipedia, there would be several
> hundred XX males in the US. XY females are considerably more numerous.

This is a real gray area! I looked the XX males up and it seems that some
genes for testes migrated over to the X during meiosis.

> Your concern may be alleviated by the knowledge that no fertile XX male
> has yet been identified. On the other hand any fertile individuals are
> more likely to be overlooked.

I am always amenable to intelligent correction, and it may be a while before
I am clear on what counts and what does not. Yes, it is plausible that
an XX male could go through life without knowing that there is
anything unusual about him.

> >
> >> (The number of fertile human females who don't have XX
> >> karyotypes appears to be an order of magnitude later.)
> "later" here is a mistype for "lower"

Lower than the number of fertile non-XY males? XYY accounts
for most of the difference, doesn't it?

> >
> > This includes Turner Syndrome, the human XO case.
> > I didn't know any were fertile until I looked it up just now.
> > I guessed that XXX women are fertile long ago, b.t.w.
> >
> You guessed wrong. When I looked it up I found that only a minority of
> XXX woman are fertile.

VERY interesting! I have some questions about this, but
this post has already gotten quite long, so I'll leave them
for a separate post, which I'll be doing either today or tomorrow.


Human teratology is a big stumbling block for creationists,
so I don't mind discussing these things here, even though they
are only marginally relevant to my ID theory.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 6/20/23 5:37 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> That's remarkable! In humans, if there is no functioning X chromosome in the
> zygote, IIRC the result is a hydatidiform mole, nothing like a human embryo at all.
> How can muntjacs be so different?

No problem. It's just that the X chromosome has been fused to an autosome.

[John Harshman]

But why not? Why would this hypothetical, absurdly powerful fine-tuner,
make the second-best or third-best universe rather than the best?

> Did you take a look at the post I linked
> for you in my first reply? One of the most important constants,
> the ratio of gravitational attraction to that of a proton for an electron,
> would be adversely effected if the ratio were *greater*, but the renowned
> astronomer Martin Rees remarked how a grander universe could result
> if it were *smaller*. Incidentally, the ratio is amazingly small as it stands, 10^(-36).
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/QflrDHqlDD0/m/1p6NjO4TAgAJ
> Designer of Our Universe by the Back Door?
> Apr 12, 2023, 10:35:19 PM

So why not make that grander universe, if you're in that business?

>> wouldn't a
>> grander one be even more fine-tuned and in fact destroy the hypothesis
>> of fine-tuning for our universe?
>
> You are still thinking in terms of absolutes. The fine-tuning
> is there in six different constants expounded on by Rees, and all the others
> are strongly restricted in both directions.

I'm not at the moment attacking the idea of fine-tuning. I'm attacking
your scenario. Why is the fine-tuning not the best available
fine-tuning? Why this lesser universe rather than the grander one?

>> If there is a life-bearing universe
>> with quite different parameters from our own, that would argue against
>> the uniqueness of the parameters we have.
>
> It is atheists who try to argue for uniqueness. ID theorists are content
> with super-astronomical odds against our ca. 13.8 gigayear old universe being
> the only one in all of reality, which is your favorite hypothesis.

This isn't about atheism, and your introduction is not relevant to the
topic. Nor do I see any affinity between ID and the multiverse. If
anything, it's the opposite, as a multiverse eliminates the need for
fine-tuning. If our universe is one in a million, and there are a
billion universes, there's no need for any fine-tuner at all.

>> It might even suggest that
>> there could be great numbers of other suitable parameter sets.
>
> Indeed. Ours, I believe, conforms to the principle of mediocrity
> as far as universes that are hospitable to life are concerned.
> It's just that this hospitability is astounding in ANY form.

Only if there's only one universe. (And of course only if all the
objections to fine-tuning are false, but that's another topic.)

> But then, this also makes the job of a "back door designer"
> of our universe a lot easier than the one you have in mind,
> with your idea of "absolutely the best fine-tuning."

Why does that job need to be made easier? Doesn't that diminish the
abilities of your designer?

>>> In contrast, the "space aliens" were approximately of our level of intelligence,
>>> but advanced in technology from us by about a century for the ones
>>> with the least amount of necessary design, to perhaps a millennium
>>> for those with the most. The panspermists evolved on planets which were very
>>> earthlike for the "least design" species and perhaps unlike ours
>>> for the "most design" species.
>>>
>>> [1] To keep them easily separate, I use names for them: Xordaxians, Golians, and Throomians.
>> Bad names, as they are not evocative of the hypotheses. You would be
>> better to pick new ones that relate to the scenarios.
>
> Here is Rhodes, now jump: pick names that aren't way too long and boring.
>
> Keep in mind that "Xordaxian" was chosen by Howard Hershey, who
> you seem to think was a much better man than I am.

Why should I care who made up the name? And I've already forgotten what
scenarios the names are applied to.

>>> [2] Their suns would have come closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri; the
>>> Oort clouds of the two suns might have collided on their fringes.
>
>> Do you have any idea how often this sort of close encounter to our solar
>> system would have happened?
>
> The principle of mediocrity says that there were MANY stars in
> the last two gigayears that came closer to Sol than Alpha Centauri is now.
> Some probably came within 1 light year of Sol.

>> And are you abandoning the idea that these
>> people seeded other systems too?
>
> Footnote [2] has to do with "space aliens" in the sense
> of visitors to earth. Nothing to do with the panspermists.

Oh, my mistake.

[Burkhard]

On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 11:55:05 PM UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 11:55:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > On Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 5:10:49 PM UTC+2, Mark Isaak wrote:
<snip>

> > I'm a bit late to the party, and may not have reconstructed all the arguments correctly, but to me this seems not that much of an issue. We have quite a number of real-life examples I'd say, the penal colonies that the European powers built, from (what was eventually become) the US and Australia to Devil's Island. A small contingent of soldiers to prepare the ground, then the convicts.
> It looks to me like your deutsch society, with its draconian prohibition of home schooling,
> is influencing your take on this. I wonder how many other holdovers from the Nazi
> era are still to be found in Germany.

A few, though they get fewer and fewer. One example for instance is the criminalisation of abortion - the Nazis changed the Misdemeanour Law from 1929 to a criminal offense with severe punishment including the death penalty. The resulting Art 218 went through a couple of reforms, the latest in 1995, but the "in principle" illegality is still closer to the law of the Nazi era than the preceding Weimarer republic in some respects.

Another long-term leftover that we only got rid of comparatively recently was criminalisation of homosexuality, where the Nazis increased both punishment and enforcement in Art 175, and abolished also the much more permissive regional legislation in Laendern such as Bavaria. This was partly revoked in 1969, with full decriminalisation in 1995 (in the West, the GDR abolished both the abortion and the homosexuality laws much earlier)

So here we'd have unlike your example two actual Nazi laws that remained in force when I was still at school - which just shows that some of us at least are able to move beyond any bigotry that was rampant during our formative years. So there's hope... at least for some of us