The Tularosa Basin Downwinders came to protest the 70th anniversary tour? Yet The Downwinders' aim is to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb? Seems like an anniversary tour is a perfect opportunity for that. Why protest people who had nothing to do with the testing, and only have historic interest? Should we protest Civil War reenactors? I sympathize with their plight and don't approve of government misdeeds, but the Downwinders shame themselves.

Thanks to your idiotic government, you, the world's foremost connoisseurs of fine timepieces, will be denied the right to own the most revolutionary timepiece in history. Fortunately, you have the means to change the government's mind. By law, each of your men between 20 and 30 years old has received military training and is required to maintain a military-grade automatic weapon at the ready in their homes...

Look how many TONS OF OXYGEN are consumed on human exercise. Exercise that gets you nowhere, generates not one miliwatt of consumable power, and throws off MEGAWATTS of heat that undoubtedly contributes to global warming. We need regulation and we need it now! Close all gyms, tax eliptical machines and treadmills. Do it for the children!

Neither is food or shelter. We have the right to _pursue_ these things. Nobody is required to guarantee them to us.

I actually do work with genetic and evolutionary algorithms, since routing on the Internet is a variant of the NP-hard Traveling Salesman Problem. But EAs are only inspired by Darwinian evolution, and just one aspect of evolutionary theory: natural selection. EAs perform their automated selection function in an ideal environment, where there is no loss of information, no friction, and no entropy. The selection function, however, is the crux of EA, and it must be devised by an intelligent programmer. EA selection algorithms do not "evolve" on their own.

In the end, nothing in EA proves anything about evolution, or vice-versa. The experimental realms are totally different.

A much more interesting application of biology to CS is DNA itself, as an information store, and protein construction as programmable machines. No evolution is involved, but the complexities of DNA has given great insight into practical massive computation methods. In particular, a novel proof of concept for solving an NP- hard path problem was devised by computer scientist Leonard Adleman, who employed the massive parallelism of polymerase chain reaction to simultaneously evaluate all possible paths. The final answer was literally spun out of the computation reaction with a centrifuge. This launched the field of DNA Computing.

I didn't say it was false. I said it is not science. Like many religions, it may be true. But its adherents must take that on faith. Science can't *yet* prove evolution, just as it cannot *yet* prove God. The two beliefs are on an equal footing, philosophically. Yet evos keep trying to say "it's settled science". Anyone is allowed to call bogus on that position. It is the evos' duty to prove their assertion.

DNA is software. It's my field.

Reread the sentence.

One doesn't have to be "smart enough" to expect scientists to follow the scientific method and good experimental design. Any person of average intelligence can be trained in the methods of critiquing a given experimental design. That's all I'm doing: pointing out the flaws in this experiment in particular, and evolution in general. Scientists that claim "it's too hard for lay people. You must trust us," are simply wrong.

I'd be interested in seeing some of the useful predictions of evolution that you mention. Most "predictions" of evolution start with current observations, and add "just so" stories describing how evolution could account for those observations.

However, evolution is full of failed predictions, starting with Darwin himself. Some of Darwin's failed predictions include:

. The failure of evolutionary biology to provide detailed evolutionary explanations for the origin of complex biochemical features;

. The failure of the fossil record to provide the millions of intermediate forms Darwin predicted;

. The failure of molecular biology to provide evidence for universal common descent;

. The failure of genetics and chemistry to explain the origin of the genetic code;

. The failure of developmental biology to explain why vertebrate embryos diverge from the beginning of development.

But these failings are usually dismissed by evolutionists as "just a theory needing some fine tuning." They should be considered falsifications of the theory. But evolutionists have long since given up admitting any observation that would falsify their theory. Other scientific disciplines are required to state falsifiers up front.

As I've said elsewhere, that's not science. It's religion.

The scientific method starts from a hypothesis making predictions, which are then tested by experiments, leading to conclusions about the hypothesis. But evolution's hypothesis are not testable. The problem is that we know of NO mechanism for abiogenesis. There are zero possibilities so far, because the theory can not be tested.

Consider the theory that DNA contains information for cellular construction. Based on previously collected data, Pauling, Crick, and Watson hypothesized that DNA had a helical structure. From this hypothesis and the mathematics of the helix transform, they predicted that DNA's X-ray diffraction pattern would be X-shaped. Rosalind Franklin then crystallized pure DNA and took an X-ray diffraction image. The results showed the predicted X-shape. When Watson saw the detailed diffraction pattern, he immediately recognized it as a helix. He and Crick then produced a physical model of DNA based on this result and known molecular interactions.

The quantum criticality researchers hypothesized that selected chemicals presumed to be a primordial mixture, placed in a specific energetic environment, will spontaneously combine to create amino acids, components of DNA. But the researchers had no prior data that their primordial mixture is correct. So the best they can hope for, whatever their predictions and experimental methods, is to demonstrate that amino acids can be created by the careful arrangement of selected chemicals. They cannot say this happened in nature, and thus can draw no conclusions supporting evolution.

Yet people are trumpeting that something has been discovered about the actual origin of life .Nothing of the sort has occurred. It's all a sideshow, an intellectually dishonest presentation. The researchers may have been sincere, but their conclusions are not remotely warranted by the design of their experiment, which at its outset is not based on previously collected data.

That's not science. It's an "activity".

On the contrary, evolution's ability to explain the evidence is dramatically diminishing as new evidence appears. New discoveries reveal previously-unknown complexities for which evolution has no processes. In fact, it's becoming increasingly apparent that evolution is not a scientific theory at all, because its proponents admit to no falsifiability. What would disprove evolution? Nothing! That's religion, not science.

The idea that belief in God somehow interferes with scientific discovery is unfounded. Most scientists, until recent history, believed in God without conflict, and made great discoveries without seeing any inconsistency. Mendel, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Planck and many others handily disprove the idea that belief in God and science are mutually exclusive. Many living scientists today are happy to explain why they believe in God and don't see any conflict

So your statement "It doesn't mean we should just say "God does it", and be done." is actually true for both atheists and theists: we don't stop seeking truth because we believe in God, any more than atheist stops seeking truth because they have no reason for living.

But Bruce never proved his hypothesis. He did not empirical studies. He analyzed no rigorous data. He made it up.

Yet another religion :)

I don't have to explain anything. I only have to point out that the theory of evolution isn't explaining anything either. Both are matters of faith.

And I haven't stopped asking questions. I am only questioning that evolution is a viable explanation. The atheist's position that "it must be, because we reject any alternative explanation" is not science, it's religion. The agnostic's position that "God may exist but I don't that he does, so I rule that out" is also not science, because it excludes a possible explanation without justification.

Evolutionists want to claim their theory is "settled science". It's not. It's not even a testable theory. That makes it dogma.

As an engineer and computer scientist, I can tell you that there will always be mysteries to understand, and to which the scientific method can be applied. But the mystery of the origin of life has, so far, resisted that method. In fact, we are getting further from a satisfactory materialistic explanation all the time. When cells were considered simple blobs of jelly, the complexity of life was barely conceivable as deriving from evolution. When DNA was discovered, and the existence of multiple digitally-encoded databases and programmed machines (my field) became apparent, the complexity was overwhelming for evolutionists. Epigentics -- the mathematical layering of information streams in DNA -- is completely unexplainable through evolution.

Atheists want to preclude the existence of God, as a prerequisite to the scientific method. But science is failing to explain the origin of life, and it's failing harder as time passes.