That's the core of our disagreement. You are redefining the history of the human species as being purely biological. That's patently wrong. Knowledge, civilization, communication between individuals shape the evolution of humanity more than biology, to the point where some refer to this well known effect as "the end of evolution". It's like computers: the nature of my laptop is defined more by the fact that it runs MacOSX than by the fact that it has a Core i7 inside. To wit: not so long ago, my Mac laptop had a PowerPC in it, it still was a Mac. And surely you would not debate that man and woman are biologically different.

To be clear : in my mind, "Adam" was probably born non-human. Then he groked something, updated his software, became human and spread this virus around him, starting with "Eve". And that process repeated itself multiple times, for multiple things that we associate to being human: bipedalism, use of fire, speech, self-awareness, burying the dead, religion, art, etc. In that sense, there may have been multiple Adams. But I'm pretty sure very few of these key evolutionary steps were biological or genetic in nature. And I'm pretty sure that in all cases, Adam was alone for a while, then they were two.

The Bible, assuming it's actually the point of view of God, tells us that one specific event was more essential than the rest in defining us as human. It was the end of innocence, the precise moment when someone first realized that he was responsible for his own actions. That makes sense, even if you are a scientist. So, even with all our scientific knowledge, I don't see Genesis as a strong argument against religion. On the contrary, I find the choice of what defines us as human really subtle and interesting. I find the storytelling really great for a text that old (compare it to other creation myths, you might see my point, I posted another comment here on this topic). And I find the philosophy disturbingly advanced for its time.

By the way, there is another similarly advanced insight in the Bible: "I am that I am". The insight is this. If you trace where something comes from, you can trace it to some other event, and then again and again. From there, there are a few logical options, e.g. :

1. a cyclic causal chain of events (i.e. A caused B that caused C that caused A), something that creates so many logical problems and occurs so infrequently in nature that we typically eliminate it as a possibility.

2. a chain of events with an unexplained end-point (e.g. the Big Bang in cosmology: we don't have an answer at this point to "what caused the Big Bang", though some theorists are pushing this limit, e.g. bubble multiverses, but we'll be back in the same situation).

3. a chain of events with an self-explaining end-point, e.g. "I am that I am", "I exist without a cause".

So when I read that "I am that I am" is the name of God, and when I think that this was written eons ago, I'm just puzzled. Either the guy who wrote that was über-smart, or he was über-lucky, or He was in the know.

You keep repeating this like a creed. For you, it is an act of faith, and you seem convinced that just repeating that like a broken record will make it more true. But since that "fact" is the core of the discussion, that's precisely what you need to prove.

I claim that this "fact"of yours is patently false, because it is so easily falsified with myriads of counter examples. There was a time where a single person on Earth knew relativity, and then he taught others and relativity became part of humanity.There was a time where a single person on Earth knew how to do fire, and then he taught others and fire became part of humanity. There was a time when a single person on Earth knew how to send an e-mail, and then he taught others and e-mail became part of humanity. There was a first blue rose. And so on.

On the other hand, I cannot think of a single part of our human heritage that appeared all over the place at once. Whether it's physical like skin color or cultural like cave painting, we always observe a starting point followed by contamination.

So what is there really behind your statement that there were never two human beings on the planet? The fact that proto-humans lived in tribes? The fact that the hypothetical first human had to mate with non-humans, and was therefore not so different from them? Or the fact that you don't know how to define "human" precisely enough to be able to pinpoint that first human?

It's not the Catholic church, it's the Bible, so it's all Muslims, all Jews, all Christians including non-Catholic.

I, not the church, claimed in this thread that based on modern science, we know the first human was drawn from a group of proto-humans, and then taught the second human to be human (because what makes us human is largely social and not genetic). And I find it reasonable to believe that the second "human" in this transmission chain was the mate of the first one. I am not sure that this hypothesis is true, but it's definitely the most plausible scientific hypothesis that I can derive from the theory of evolution and observation of knowledge transmission. It's not derived from the Bible, however, it does match the account in the Bible relatively well.

If you want to claim that there were always multiple humans, you need to blur the definition of human. With a blurred definition, you blur the boundary in space and time. With a crisp definition, the first human becomes unique. The Bible chose a crisp definition, the knowledge of good and evil.

Again, you seem to think that by repeating and SHOUTING your creed, you will make it more credible.

But no, the Catholic church does not require literal interpretation of Genesis, on the contrary.

And no, the existence of a first human is not false, if we define humanity based on any kind of knowledge or sapience, as I tried to demonstrate time and time again. It is highly likely to be true because all our experience with science, knowledge, genetics or epidemics is that there is always a "patient zero". At that point, I am tempted myself to say that is't my own point that zooms past you, and I'm very sorry that I can't get it across. If there are "patient zero" or "inventor zero" for everything we know, then logically there has to be a "human zero". Claiming that we "know" otherwise in all caps is not going to address this argument.

You are completely misinterpreting what I wrote. Just because I said that one single individual passed fire to the entire human race does not imply that there was a single individual at that time, only that a single individual was historically "the first one" to pass fire along up to today. Just like a single individual was historically the inventor of e-mail, despite the fact that tens of people were probably capable of inventing e-mail at the time. There just was one who happened to be first. Not ten or one thousand.

Genesis explains what makes us human, and that is being conscious of our actions. Being conscious also makes us responsible. With consciousness (humanity) comes responsability (sin). If you let a chimp drive a car, and the car hits and kills someone, is the car responsible? Is the chimp responsible? No, you are. In my opinion, this is the reason why Genesis links the first man and the first sin.

In short, it's logically backwards compared to your reasoning. It is not "there was a single hominid and we all descend from that single hominid, and by a mere and truly bizarre coincidence, that single hominid also was a sinner, and bam, we inherited that." That, indeed, doesn't make sense. Instead, the idea is: "the first person in history to be given the capability to reach the knowledge of good and evil was by definition the first true human. And that individual was in all likelihood just like us, just as unable to resist temptation and to stick to pure good as we all are, so as he passed knowledge of good and evil along (the famous fruit), he passed both humanity and sin along."

Was this a single person? I think so. The population in 1905 was much higher than in prehistoric times, yet there was a single Einstein, and he's at the root of all subsequent relativity knowledge (even if folks like Poincarre could have shared practically the same knowledge, they just didn't.) I don't see any logical reason to believe it was any different for the knowledge of good and evil.

No, that is not my argument. What I'm saying is that if you plot the times when each of the ancestors of dolphins living today entered the sea, you get a huge number of events, but one of these events was the very first one. And in all likelihood, it is unique.

Similarly, if you had a time machine and could plot all cases where a human ever lit a fire on earth and where that information was not lost in the following generations, there would be one of these events that would be the first one.

Let me give a more recent example. You can pinpoint the first time someone sent an e-mail. In that specific case, the knowledge was never lost after that, and when/where it happened has not yet be forgotten. So even if the number of emails today is amazing, even if email technology was reinvented multiple times since then, even if just like for dolphins vs. non-dolphins, it's hard to draw a line between e-mail-capable computers and computers that couldn't do e-mail, there still was a first e-mail, and there still was a single computer sending that first e-mail.

Yet another example : for each child, learning how to speak takes a long time, but each dad remembers a "first word". And that first word turns a non-speaking child into a speaking child.

So I do not believe that the passage you quote condemns the scenario, on the contrary. It says we have all reasons to believe that there was a first sin. It says something more important, which is humanity and sin coincided.

Honestly, I'm really sorry to hear that stuff like that happens! It's a real shame.

There's a contradiction in the terms. To me, that sentence sounds like "Linux kernel hackers refused to share Linux source code with me because I had a Mac at home." Of course, it's possible that one particular guy who happens to be a Linux kernel hacker took a stupid stance one day, but that stance is nonetheless in direct contradiction with fundamental Linux values, namely that everybody can access the source code.

Similarly, "thou shalt not kill" means you can't be a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Christian and make a death threat. You can call yourself a Linux kernel hacker and refuse to share source code changes. In both cases, you are going nowhere.

Why do you see a contradiction? If I say "when the ancestors of dolphins returned to sea, there must have been one animal, among all ancestors of all dolphins today, that was the first one to return to the water," do you find this logically shocking? What if I say: "of all our ancestors, one of them lit the very first fire, and we then passed the knowledge from generation to generation"? Maybe fire was invented at multiple locations, maybe it was invented then lost, then invented again. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a single event that we can call "first fire" that we can use to illustrate what fire is.

Sin assumes a certain dose of humanity, enough mental agility to have both an understanding that you are doing something wrong and a will to do it anyway. That's what the text you quoted calls being a "true man". Just like for fire, it's only logical to think that, among all our ancestors, there was one who committed the very first sin. And just like the first fire can be used to reason about fire for all humanity (as in "we believe that from the very first fire, fire has been used to provide heat, cook food and as a defense against wildlife"), the very first sin has a very strong explanatory power (as in "we believe that from the very first sin, sin has caused us to lie, deceive, put the blame on others, attempt to hide what we did...")

It doesn't matter a bit. To Christians, the Bible is the word of God, trying to teach a thing or two about love, not killing one another, and so on.

To make an analogy, the fact that at age 3, you thought Santa Claus to be a literal account is not all that matters, what matters is whether your parents loved you and whether you had a good time watching "Santa Claus" at the mall. It would be a gross misunderstanding of parenthood to claim that since you believed at age 3 there was a Santa Claus, a) your parents lied to you and were evil people, or b) they had to believe it themselves. Unfortunately, the position you expressed demonstrates a similar misunderstanding.

On the other hand, there's no mental gymnastic involved at all in realizing that your parents knew more than you did, and that you understood what they told you only years after they did. Just the same, there's no mental gymnastic involved in believing that the word of God may contain truths that we only understand much later.

To Christians, the reference for understanding the Bible is Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ said both that the Old Testament was true (e.g. Matthew 5:17-20) and that it was insufficient (e.g. Mark 10:5). From that point on, humanity has been supposed to talk to God directly ("Our Father, ...", a prayer taught by Jesus Christ).

That last point is the key. To many Christians, faith is not a third-party account, it's a first-person relationship with God, today. A reasoning such as "The Bible is wrong, therefore God does not exist" is, to a first-person Christian, similar to a reasoning about the non-existence of Santa Claus implying that parents don't love their kids or (worse yet) that they don't exist. Such a reasoning may seem super-solid to you, but to a Christian, it is incredibly weak, shallow and unconvincing, irrespective of your intelligence and of the proofs you accumulate of errors in the Bible.

You can take the Bible as the word of God without considering it as being a literal truth. It's educational material. I'm not the one saying this, Jesus did several times, for instance Mark 10:5 (see http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%2010:4-9&version=ASV):

If your dad told you that the square of something is always positive when you were 3, and then told you that the square of i is -1 when you were 6, then (putting aside the fact that you are a math genius) do you believe that he was wrong the first time? Or that you need to stretch his interpretation based on your newly acquired knowledge? I don't think so. Rather, you think that he adapted his wording based on your capabilities.

For the Bible, I think it's not a stretch to claim that Genesis, for example, is about as good a description of how the world evolved that anybody could give to the tribes who lived 2000BC. Actually, put in context, it's remarkably good at identifying the key inflection points, in particular when you consider that "day" in that context is not a precise duration, you could say "period".

First, earth has no shape, it's not yet formed, it's just stuff floating around. Then light, sun and stars. Then planets form, only then is there a "sky". Then dry land and seas separate (Wikipedia says "Over time, such cosmic bombardments ceased, allowing the planet to cool and form a solid crust. Water that was brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and the oceans took shape.", not that different). Then vegetation (and there's no obvious reason at all for people at the time to infer that vegetation would appear first). Then the moon and the stars. It's the one big anachronistic description in the list, but I've always wondered if it was possible to see stars or the moon in the sky before vegetation cleared the atmosphere. Then living creatures, animals, but in two periods: fish, birds and insects first (period of the dinosaurs), then a second "day" with stock animals (mammals). And finally man.

So overall, this creation myth is pretty good in terms of teaching power, at least compared to various other myths of the same era, see here for a few examples: http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.

Which, of course, is binding to Christians... Sigh.

Well, to prove just how idiotic this reasoning is, I've decided to apply it the other way round. Do you trust Linus Torvalds? Surely most Slashdot readers do. So there's a good chance you do too. Yet, dear VeniceBeach, a literal interpretation of Linus Torvalds own words is totally incompatible with biology, the Apple App Store, or basic economy. It's even incompatible with Slashdot! Don't believe me? I have proof: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/linus_torvalds.html.

> Software is like sex
Burn biologists! They claim that sex is about reproduction!

> Any program is only as good as it is useful.
Burn the guy who wrote Bubble Wrap for the iPhone!

> Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Burn the car dealer who refused to sell me one thousand cars for the price of one!

> Microsoft isn't evil
Burn Slashdot!

Need I go on? Or can you accept the idea that Christians don't have to take the Bible literally? There's a fraction of ultra-bigots in the US who are ready to take everything in the Bible literally, save for "thou shalt not kill" when it applies to a deer or restricts their right to bear arms. I demand that Christians (or Americans, for that matter) not be judged by this standard.

Equating any Christian to this stereotype is as insulting to the majority of Christians as equating all Linux kernel hacker to a lowly -1 Slashdot troll.

If I understand correctly, the idea is that a simulation would put some observable limits on, say, the energy of particles.

For some reason, this reminds me of another interesting thought exercise, but going backwards. Patrick Demichel is looking for the first of all Skewes' numbers. He devised a method which results, roughly, in "1.397162914×10^316 is the first Skewes' number, or there's not enough energy in the Universe find the actual value." See http://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/the-number-you-cant-compute. I see that he kept working on it since then, I wonder if that statement (dating back 2008) still holds...

3D visualization of GeoRSS earthquakes database available here.

We created a Gitorious project to share sample code. The first sample shows the location of earthquakes in real-time.

You are right I guess. I'll take that into account for my next Slashdot submission :-)

Let's try making something like that together. Here's one way to do it:

1) Create a small web server somewhere that returns the stuff you are interested it, for example in CSV format. Say you get lines with X,Y,Z,"label".

2) Read that web server with Tao Presentations, using code that looks like this:

Of course, your server could also send color, or a sphere diameter, so you could have something like:

If you don't want to access the network to get your data, you can also read that from a local file. For example, you can have a Perl script that munches your input data and writes it to a given local file. Then, your Tao Presentations document does something similar to the above, but with load_csv instead of get_url_csv.

You could obviously send data in other formats and parse it with regexps (XML and JSON are coming soon, hopefully). But at the moment, CSV is by far the fastest way to read relatively big amounts of data for Tao Presentations. In this 3D star map example, we use that very technique to show about 15000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, and it runs smoothly on a modern laptop.