Is this a record for longest time to dupe?

I think you just proved that slashdot is a religion, too. I think you need to reassess what your definition of religion is.

shit I mean there could be motherfucking MAGNETS in there gotta watch out

Stupid scientists... always doing more research!

The dating problems you propose don't matter. Relative dating from fossils still prove that these are older than previous body fossils. Even though, yes, the first link is trash, as is the /. summary, the science itself is peer reviewed.



Also, while it is difficult to properly date rocks, there are several whole fucking fields of experts that are dedicated to that and do a pretty good job. Both of the problems you call our attention to are things that the experts 1. know about 2. take care of in their day to day business.

What are you smoking? Source pls?

Almost every Proterozoic fossil is questionable. With the exception of the Ediacaran fauna, some Acritarchs, and some layered stromatalites, what you find in the Proterozoic are sorta vague, nebulous shapes. Same thing here. This doesn't mean the scientists is suspect; just that their results should be seen as evidence, not definitive proof.

The discovered "sponge" is not the same species as those found later; they are a new discovery, that hadn't been noticed before because they look different than we were expecting. We already had strong evidence that animal life survived the snowball conditions; molecular clocks provided that. And, there is debate about whether Snowball earth was a hard or soft freeze, which have not been resolved. The hard freeze theory does not have sufficient evidence backing it to have won that discussion--- but this doesn't even give evidence for one or the other.

The write up is the stone cold worst.

And yeah, one way to falsify evolution would be to find entirely too large and complex fossils in a much early time then expected; like, say, a rabbit when you were 100 million years before the evolution of any land animals at all.

In comparison, this discovery is of something we have expected to find in that exact time period, but hadn't previously; and apparently, it was because what we were looking at looked a little different then what we were expecting. This fills a gap where we suspected that this exact kind of thing existed. Really cool. If they had found a bunny in these strata, instead of simple multicellular life, that would be a different story altogether.

No, no, not at all.

The write up is terrible and misleading. This discovery does not falsify any of evolutionary theory; paleontologists have long suspected that the evolution of animals predated the record of hard parts. This discovery is actually well in line with that, and matches up neatly with the molecular data.

You're incredibly wrong. Go re read what PZ says, and what Kurtzweil says. Kurtweil says that we can get to the end of system by looking at the information contained in the genome.

You don't have to be able simulate electrons in a transistor to get that to work, but you do need to know how the system works. You can shortcut the electron simulation if you can describe the system.

PZ points out very, very clearly that we do NOT know how protein systems work and interact. The existence of Fold it, the protein folding game is testament to that problem. You are certainly correct that the presumptive brain model will not directly simulate the proteins, and PZ never says it does. But the problem is that we don't KNOW how to simulate them.

PZ says:

Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil's calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain.

First up is RHEB (Ras Homolog Enriched in Brain). It's a small protein, only 184 amino acids, which Kurzweil pretends can be reduced to about 12 bytes of code in his simulation. Here's the short description.

MTOR (FRAP1; 601231) integrates protein translation with cellular nutrient status and growth signals through its participation in 2 biochemically and functionally distinct protein complexes, MTORC1 and MTORC2. MTORC1 is sensitive to rapamycin and signals downstream to activate protein translation, whereas MTORC2 is resistant to rapamycin and signals upstream to activate AKT (see 164730). The GTPase RHEB is a proximal activator of MTORC1 and translation initiation. It has the opposite effect on MTORC2, producing inhibition of the upstream AKT pathway (Mavrakis et al., 2008).

Got that? You can't understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No. It had to be worked out operationally, by doing experiments to modulate one protein and measure what happened to others. If you read deeper into the description, you discover that the overall effect of RHEB is to modulate cell proliferation in a tightly controlled quantitative way. You aren't going to be able to simulate a whole brain until you know precisely and in complete detail exactly how this one protein works.

PZ basically spent his entire article saying that we don't understand how the biologic equivalent of electrons in a semi conductor work, and it's really, really tough to figure out. Transistors are simple. Proteins are not. The amount of computational power that can be put into simulating a single protein is staggering. And until you work out shortcuts for each protein in the system, you can't just jump to your proposed end game. That's the point.

This is a way less damaging way of revenge than most things you could do to someone you don't like for 35 bucks. It's not classy, it's not good, but it's not that awful, either.