> A person can easily have a hard time believing that "humans evolved from ooze", yet still be able to easily comprehend and work with genetic algorthms.

And yet, to comprehend genetic algorithms, you also have to comprehend the enormous difference in the probability of finding any given fitness solution that a genetic algorithm represents, as compared with random chance. Additionally, if you genuinely understand the topic, it gives you insights into the natural operation of evolution that you might otherwise have lacked.

Oh, and, it should really make you wonder why DNA is present in organisms from single celled creatures all the way up to us, if you were otherwise predisposed to find God in your gaps de jour...

> The fact that evolution works does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a creator.

It does, however, obviate the need for a creator as the immediate progenitor of Man.

This meme is retarded, tired and sexist.

Thatcher wasn't such a great example.

There are complex systems wherein small changes to X trigger large changes to Y. Why is that so hard to understand?

The fact that it's currently illegal, criminalises behaviour which for the most part is completely harmless to the consumer and the people around her. So, *why* exactly does it need to be a criminal act in the first place?

I think the word we're looking for is *troll*.

You don't really need anyone else to have a fulfilling dialog in which the truths of your core beliefs are elucidated, do you?

Why do you bother even posting here?

> I see that time and time again, but don't recall anyone actually saying Macs

Funny, I had people telling me that all the time when I worked in a user-support role, to the degree that they regarded me as misinformed, deranged and/or stupid if I hinted that Macs were even theoretically vulnerable to malware.

To be fair, my personally experience *does* shadow yours, but with some changes:

'I don't recall anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature actually saying that Macs couldn't get a virus'

Um, isn't 0.19... equivalent to 0.2?

Mod parent up to 11.

I think it depends on your hardware, as ever. Pangolin installed and ran flawlessly on my two (different) laptops. The older one was an upgrade from 11.10. I also run Windows 64 for games, and for the record, it's as solid as a rock. I have no particular axe to grind with regard to this position.

I grinned like a wolf when I stole my copy.

Would you, Quintus?

Assume that the Many Worlds interpretation is true. In this case, what's to stop our Sun from being a superflare star, flaring on average every seventy five years or so? This would mean that our world and everything we know of the benign nature of the local stellar environment is just an artifact of our survival along an extremely low-probability path of the tree of all possibilities describing the existence of the earth in some approximately life-friendly form.

In effect, we're living in an instance. Reality isn't quite so friendly, taken as a whole.