Darwinian Poetry: From Bad to Verse 274
For those who say design cannot take place through the process of selection, behold:
Darwinian Poetry.
Cull the prosaic or nonsensical snippets of text, reinforce the rest, and, slowly... genius? Guess we'll find out. Yes, the poems actually
have sex.
poetry generated by... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is obvious that even the code for this evolution would have to be evolved, and program that would do this evolution could be breed too, etc, etc, up to some pretty simple program that will start it all.
This is the missing key: When you evolve programs, they must include both the code that produces results, and code that evaluates thos
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:2, Informative)
Sexual Reproduction is the proccess by which a cell splits WITHOUT copying its contents. The half cell then meets another half cell, which fuse to form a new cell with a brand new genetic code which contains a 50-50 mix of each former cell.
This method is used to perfection in multicellular organisms. Each ha
copying contents (Score:3, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, we have plenty of sex. It is the, um, partner thing that we need to work on.
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:5, Funny)
With a Partner: Check
During the period since I started reading Slashdot: No Check
I guess he has a point.
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:4, Funny)
We've mastered the singleplayer levels and done the campaign over and over (and over). Now we want to try out this multiplayer thing we keep hearing about.
Disclaimer: That was blatantly ripped from a User Friendly [userfriendly.org] comic. Sadly, their search engine doesn't seem to be working quite as well as the Penny-Arcade one.
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:3, Funny)
Girls are great,they just takes a little while to download, that's all.
Slashdot fucks me all the time (Score:2, Funny)
Re:poetry generated by... (Score:5, Funny)
Nevermind, we rarely have experience in any area, but we still comment on them. After all, it's the way of the Slashdot.
no waiting for 2050 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:no waiting for 2050 (Score:2, Interesting)
Go ahead and read it...It looks just like the garbage I had to read and write in college...
Then hit the reload/refresh button.
More useless machine driven garbage.
As an added bonus, If you are in college and you need to impress that good looking Literature TA...then print off a copy. She'll never know.
Re:no waiting for 2050 (Score:2)
Sick of it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sick of it (Score:3, Funny)
In case you aren't, here are some ways to get laid:
Oh wait -- that last one probably won't work.
In anticipation of /. effect (Score:3, Informative)
Welcome to Darwinian Poetry! The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Huh?
Ok, here's the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our "poems"), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the "bad" ones and breeding the "good" ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.
The cool part is that YOU are the arbiter of what constitutes "good" and "bad" poetry. Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That's ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn't matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy.
Once you choose a poem, your vote will be recorded and two more poems will appear. Keep doing this for as long as you like, and definitely come back frequently.
Over time the poems picked by you, and I hope by thousands of other people, will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge. It could take a while. Weeks...months...I don't know. It all depends on how many people participate, and how often.
Keep coming back, for (I hope) the population will evolve steadily, so each day could bring increasingly interesting poems.
That's it. Just click on the "Get Started" link below to dive right in. Or click the "Get Report" link to find out what the current highest rated poem is, as well as to see other statistics.
THE HOW IT WORKS PAGE:
How it Works
"Many poems were butchered in the making of this site."
The Darwinian Poetry software relies primarily on a mechanism called "crossover", similar to the process that operates on chromosomes in biological evolution, except that here the basic genetic units are words rather than nucleic acids. When the program sees that there is room in the population for new poems (because some unfit poems were...um...culled from the herd) it randomly chooses two surviving poems to serve as parents. These two poems are then crossed over, producing two new offspring.
Here is an example to illustrate. These are two poems that I just grabbed off a test version of the site (color coded for convenience):
forest storefront semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him sufficing lysolecithin
of from when esurience they
rest timely wounded the perpend
If these two poems were chosen for breeding, the first thing the program would do is decide how many "snip" points to use. Currently this number ranges between one and five. Let's say 2 came up randomly. Now each poem gets randomly cut in two places. Note that this is different than biological crossover in that the cut points vary between the parents. Whereas real chromosomes need to maintain a constant length, our poems will evolve in length as well as content.
forest storefront SNIP! semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not SNIP! of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him SNIP! sufficing lysolecithin
of from when esurience SNIP! they
rest timely wounded the perpend
Now the software performs the crossover operation resulting in two new poems:
forest storefront suffcing lysolecithin
of from when esurience of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not they
rest timely wounded the perpend
That's
Vogon poetry (Score:5, Funny)
O freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me...
Re:In anticipation of /. effect (Score:2, Insightful)
Nature "cheats" too (Score:2)
me get sex.
A Slashdot Haiku (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A Slashdot Haiku (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot
Read of poems having sex
While still I get none
Not bad. Now lets take another one:
While reading bad stuff
thought about the creative:
Was a waste of time.
Ok, that isn't good, but let's through them in the sack and see what pops out...
While reading slashdot
Read about creative sex
While still I waste none.
My head hurts now.
Re:A Slashdot Haiku (Score:2)
Who tried to get poems to have sex
He generated 'em random,
mutated and culled them,
But then we went and slashdotted his competer
Anybody got a mate for a lonely limerick?
Having actulay played with it (Score:4, Insightful)
Another advantage is that no teacher could ever ask;
What was the authors motivation in writing this particular poem?
I hate that Question
Re: Having actulay played with it (Score:3, Funny)
> Another advantage is that no teacher could ever ask; What was the authors motivation in writing this particular poem?
Yeah, but I bet I could have written an essay that answered it!
Everything I know about bullshitting I learned in English class. I once got an A on a pop quiz essay about a poem I hadn't even read; I just extrapolated from the title.
If they taught more literature classes in business school then those MBAs would be a lot better at explaining their scandals away, and maybe not get cart
Re:Having actulay played with it (Score:2)
Well that took 5 minutes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Well that took 5 minutes (Score:2)
Re: Well that took 5 minutes (Score:5, Funny)
> The front page is still functioning, but the applet is down for the count.
Sadly, the poetry evolved to the point where it attracted a predator's attention, and now it's gone extinct.
This is why I'm against broadcasting our presence to the stars.
Re:Well that took 5 minutes (Score:2, Interesting)
System Requirements
None. Well, a computer and a browser. Any browser. Netscape, IE, Safari, Opera, whatever. It could be NCSA Mosaic on a 386, GistIt on your Blackberry, or Lynx on a VT100 terminal. (Or, as I've just been informed by a reader, WAP on your cell phone.) Pure HTML, baby. Javascript is for sissies and posers.
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Darwinian server (Score:5, Funny)
Call me a cynic, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of having people vote on which poems are best is a good one, though. Maybe the same principle could be applied to other computer-generated word stuff.
Re:Call me a cynic, but... (Score:2)
That's exactly the idea. 99.99% of whatever comes out will be pure shite, but as time goes on, the theory is that the content of some will improve.
It's why it's called "Darwinian". Random mutations producing almost total garbage, but rarely producing something worthwhile, which is allowed to survive.
I think it's an interesting experiment, actually.
A major facet of evolutionary programming... (Score:4, Interesting)
...is that you have to have faith in a stochastic process.
Now, I haven't looked at their code, so I don't know what the selection fitness criteria are. Obviously humans play a part in selection for survival; selection for reproduction seems to be completely random -- and that's okay.
But, assuming that the selction mechanism isn't completely asswacked, I feel sure that some "good" poetry will be eventually produced. ("Good" in the eyes of the same people who made the selection choices, of course. If you never vote, you have no place to complain.) Why do I feel this?
Because I have faith in evolutionary programming. It's remarkably good at solving problems with a nonlinear fitness landscape. Finicky local minima, discontinuous fitness evaluation -- all that nasty stuff that kills traditional problem-optimization algorithms, and tends to show up in all the "interesting" problems -- genetic approaches are all over that stuff. It isn't completely random, of course, and that's the saving grace. That's the part that we have faith in.
Yes, as you say, two good poems interchanged at random snip points will statistically be likely to become bad poems. But bad poems die. (Again, assuming the selection mechanism isn't horked over by a sixth-grader who votes for anything containing the word "boobies" no matter how poor the poetry.) And there will be lots and lots of poems. Most of them will be bad. They die, and over time, eventually, statistically, the good ones gain an edge.
Monkeys Can do it too! (Score:2)
Re:Monkeys Can do it too! (Score:2, Funny)
This is how we elect politicians... (Score:2, Insightful)
Main differences (Score:2)
When democracy is direct and frequent it tends to work pretty well (eg Slashdot moderation).
When it is infrequent (vote every X years) and/or indirect (you vote for someone, who then represents you when voting) it becomes less effective.
As far as the best leaders not getting to the top the problem isn't democracy, the problem is that there isn't enough democracy.
So.... (Score:4, Funny)
Genetic Algorithm Poetry? or just Dadaism? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dadaism [bergen.org] "A western European artistic and literary movement (1916-23) that sought the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms."
Here is an example Dadaist poem [bergen.org] -
People who can't develop a taste
for the primeval
but rather wrangle in this world
and in their noseless faces
daily brush and paint and lacquer
three abundant heraldic
stylized moustaches
one above another.
Now, let's find something in between, jwz has just done that - DADADO [jwz.org]..
DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.
---
"Related Links" (Score:3, Funny)
Not much to do with Darwin... (Score:4, Insightful)
To qoute; The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Darwinism is all to do with natural selection, while this is un-natural selection. It's about breeding poems, nothing more. That aside, I must say I find the idea interesting, and the end result can't be worse than what a lot of modern poets spew out (these days, it seems like "art" is defined as what the selfproclaimed artist manages to sell).
For a true darwinistic approach thought, it ought to be possible do analyze a heapload of poems written by humans, derive a handfull of rules as to what defines a 'good' poem (lenght, avrage lenght of words etc etc etc) and write a program that 'culls the herd' strickly on basis of those rules, ie: the 50% of the population which come closest to fullfilling the rules (best adapted to their enviromant) are allowed to breed and give rise to the next geneartion, at which point the process repeats.
No, no, no. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No, no, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
But it isn't natural selection if the selection is made by a sentinent beeing. By your logic, you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
My statement stands. Evolution is unguided by intelligence, breeding is guided. Thus, this page of poems has nothing to do with evolution, and all to do with breeding. Off cou
I disagree. (Score:2)
In this case the criteria for selection are not defined. Intelligence may play a part in an individual selection but the environment the poems live in is not directed by any one intelligence.
Re:I disagree. (Score:2)
It is precisely this confusion of `no one intelligence' with `no intelligence at all' that (IIUARC) gave rise to Darwinism in the first place, though...
Sexual selection (Score:3, Interesting)
Lately it is becoming clear that sexual selection is playing a much greater part than previously thought. In fact, Darwin himself had this in his work, but was largely ignored later, probably because it was about sex.
It is logical. To have children, you must both survive AND reproduce. In the second part of this, the largest influence in your success is in the hands (or better say minds) of the opposite sex. The human instance of your opposite sex does have intelligence (although it often doe
Re:Sexual selection (Score:2)
Re:I disagree. (Score:2)
Re:No, no, no. (Score:2)
Re:No, no, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
How many wolves have you ever come across? Okay, how about chihuahuas?
So, who's to say the wolf is fitter?
The way I see it, the gene in ancient proto-dogs that said 'when a human being takes you in and feeds you, and occasionally asks you to have sex with another
A sample... (Score:2, Informative)
--David
Darwinian Poetry
Code as Art [codeasart.com]:Poetry [codeasart.com]:Darwinian Poetry [codeasart.com]
Generations (Avg)4.502 Total Number of Poems6969 Top Ranked Poems#2496 where ghost sleuth with lingo
of the long with helicopt bodies
where eyes tore devilish covered
#4951 your vic
Re:A sample... (Score:2, Funny)
helmets stood not
That has to be the best one.
I'm sure plenty of people here can relate.
Prose (Score:5, Funny)
I like it!
Could somebody please add this to the
Oh, wait...
Sex!! (Score:2, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Or not at all.
Like an infinite number of monkeys... (Score:2)
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I see two possible designs: One is to evolve many simple, deterministic algorithms which produce one poem when run. This is most similar to what Darwinian Poetry does, evolving individual poems. The other approach is to evolve a smaller population of algorithms with access to an entrophy source, which produces many different poems. I think the latter approach would lead to machines with a basic, ingrained understanding of what makes a good poem.
So what I'd do is make virtual machine, neural network, or cellular automata, with access to a random number generator, which somehow outputs indexes into a word list. Each time the page reloads, two machines from the population would be run, and their output presented, and the user would select the best one.
Unless the algorithm allows for the individuals to understand what they write, it's little more than a bunch of random paragraphs moderated by a bunch of random people. Hmm.
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ogden nash from the grave (Score:2)
he surely would have lost his wits.. then retired to a whinery
Monkeys, typewriters and probability ... (Score:2)
Probability is a deceptive thing, because although a million monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare, it's just a theoretical probability which is different to an actual likelyhood.
This is the nature of "np-hard" problems (as I believe they're called) - you can't beat the odds.
Re:Monkeys, typewriters and probability ... (Score:2)
Okay, I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd respond instead. The only value in any theory is in its ability to model reality.
In this case you seem to be basing your understanding of probability on a trite statement (a million monkeys...). The number of possible English strings as long as Shakespea
Mama, my job has been automated! (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps one day we will be able to meet, my machine opponent and I, for a final match. Yes, the machine has sex, and I have not, but I have drugs, and that is a lot. The crowd will decide: is poetry the expression of my purely human soul, or just (as I always suspected before my teacher beat the idea out of me) a jumble of pretty words?
Reminds me of... (Score:2)
Um... is this really properly darwinian? (Score:2)
Then, once your poetry generating algorithm was perfected, you could have all the poetry that you want.
/. effect (Score:2, Interesting)
*snip from website*
Well, it's happened: I've been Slashdotted. Which I suppose is good news. But the poor little 600 mhz pentium under my desk hosting Darwinian Poetry can't handle the strain. Connectivity may be bad until the Slashdot crowd backs off. Sorry.
I'm a Creationist poet. (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot poetry (Score:3, Funny)
in the colos of the night,
What immortal ping of DDOS
could crash thy fearful RAID array?
A happy Vogon, am I. Sorry, Blake [tuffydog.com].
Re:Slashdot poetry (Score:3, Funny)
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee logon & bid thee hack.
By the watercooler & o'er the back;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing bought online;
Gave thee such a tender type,
Making all bloggers gripe:
Little User who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
*round of applause for headline* (Score:2)
magnifique!
\a
darwinism? (Score:2, Funny)
Two words: Stanislaus Lem (Score:2)
Re:Two words: Stanislaus Lem (Score:3, Funny)
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
King Phillip Came Over For Great Spaghetti (Score:2)
Since the site is slashdotted, I don't know, but it seems to me the experiment is doomed unless poems are constrained to mate with nearly identical poems. Otherwise you're likely to do the equivalent of mating cats with yeast.
In fact, I expect that to work you'd have to start with a limited number of something like "bacterial poems" and allow them to acquire complexity through mutation and mating. H
Well, of course this will work. (Score:4, Insightful)
What this study does NOT address:
Irreducible complexity. We already have the groups of words. Well, where did they come from? How do we get the group of words in the first place? We can't do selection on the words until we have the words, so, how do we get the words?
Intelligent design. Intelligence (namely the humans running the model) is determining what we start with and is determining what the desired results (what constitutes acceptable survival),
Cost of mutation. There is no attempt to factor in mutational "drag" if you will. All mutations are either considered neutral, or beneficial. The reality is, most mutations are HARMFUL. Any mutation which does not directly improve the organism, will almost certainly harm the organism, greatly increasing its chance of death. If the mutation rate is too high, the species will die out (known as Haldane's dilemna).
Informational Loss. Nearly all mutations result in a LOSS of information, in this case, the elimination of a word. Once the word is gone, how will it ever come back?
So, this little exercise is nothing more than a cute gimmick that blind adherents to evolution as the source of all life will point to, smile, and say: See you idiot creationists, one more thing to prove your stupid, unthinking mindset wrong.
But the reality is, it won't prove or demonstrate anything other than the time-tested truism that trial and error will eventually get you what you want.
Darwin, goddess, or philistine? (Score:5, Informative)
Initially, the snippets remind me of unedited "l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e" [princeton.edu] poetry from the late '80s, but I suspect they'll be verging towards formal and stylistic standards like R.Frost or ee cummings, since that's what people got in school (and usually remember). I don't have faith that this will wind up with anything like the avant-garde direction that the newness of the generation technique suggests is possible.
There's a good tradition of last century's poets experimenting with generation techniques. Bryan Gyson and William Burroughs played with cutups, and someone's even automated the process with TextBlender Pro [fourthworld.com] (disclaimer: haven't tried this one). I had a gas with this idea, and once had a month off so sequestered myself with a typewriter (yeah I'm getting old) and source texts by Buckminster Fuller, Nietzche, Attar, and some histories of WW2, in order to generate some centos [reference.com] for fun and non-profit (never published, needless to say).
William Carlos Williams claimed [upenn.edu] that poetry is a word machine:
- To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
Anyway, the Darwinian P. reports indicate that the process has a long way to go. So what will literary critics (before their descent into hell) claim about the validity and category of these poems? Is it just one more disintegration of the canon that comes with the post-post-modern post mortem? Will the poems stand the test of seven layers of meaning? O machine, wax!Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
Erasmus was a poet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, prior to the whole "theory of evolution" thing catching on, the Darwin family already had a claim to fame. Erasmus Darwin, Chuck's father (or was it grandfather?) was a moderately successful poet. A lot of his stuff is reportedly pretty lewd too. So I guess this stuff is just coming full-circle in a weird sort of way.
-Lux
Re:Hmm, Darwin Fish evolve... (Score:2)
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers/processes are quite capable of producing works we percieve as art.
RE: Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Wrong (Score:2)
Re: Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll believe it once a poem comes out adequately describing the computational condition.
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Re:It's not poetry (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading a few years ago about a pogram that was written to randomly write music in the style of certain composers (in this case, Bach and Mozart). Then as an experiment, they held a concert for music scholars. This concert had three pieces played: a very obscure piece by Bach (which is easy to find, since his repetiore has well over 1000), a piece written by someone in the style of Bach, and a piece generated by this program in the style of Bach. Then they were asked to guess which piece was the one composed by Bach....and as I'm sure you guessed, the computer generated one was the winner.
If I can find a link, I will post it, but this was a few years ago.
It's a noble experiment, I think, and not something that should be immediatly shunned just because it wasn't written by humans.
Re:It's not poetry (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a noble experiment, I think, and not something that should be immediatly shunned just because it wasn't written by humans.
Oh, but it was written by humans! Just not directly. A human had to take the time, and develop some sort of algorithm for determining what comprises a "Bach" piece of literature.
Humans then had to encode this - had to develop the intimate understanding of what it means to be "Bach" and then write the software that conforms to this vague, entirely subjective concept of "Bach".
The program, once written, wasn't acting on its own. It's clearly acting in accordance with explicit and careful instruction on the part of the programmer(s) who put it together.
Just because we can make a machine that can do X, that machines do X and aren't somehow human - they are as human as their creator.
David Cope's EMI Program (Score:3, Informative)
You can find examples of Cope/EMI compositions in MIDI and PDF format here [ucsc.edu].
Cope has written extensively about EMI in Computers and Musical Style [areditions.com] and Experiments in Musical Intelligence [areditions.com]. In the second volume, he includes a "mini" version of EMI called Sara, which is written in LISP and will run on a Mac. You can also find the source here [ucsc.edu].
Sara works by reassembling works of a composer to form new works. Basic
Re:It's not poetry (Score:2, Informative)
So of course it's not the same as "Natural Selection," but it's still pretty evolution-like.
And at any rate, it is fastly approaching coherence, and I think it IS art. Before it got slashdotted, I saw grammar, and stuff sort of made coherent sense, in a moody surreal sort of way.
Re:Two Comments from the Creator (Score:5, Funny)
Your's not to make reply,
Your's not to reason why,
Your's but to crash and die:
Into the valley of delete
Rode the six hundred submissions.
Alas, poor server! I knew him, Mutantninja: a CPU
of Intelish host, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne clients on his backbone a thousand times; and now, how
abused on my internet it is!
Re:java (Score:2)
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Evolution is a religion. It is a set of beliefs.
I believe the sun will rise tomorrow just about the same time it rose today; is that also a religion?
> Most evolutionists say things like "we have reason to believe", or "we believe that foo is x years old". It is still called a "theory", not a proven fact or scientific Law. Actually it is mathematically improbable even.
Actually, if you put imperfect replicators in a rich environment evolution is almost a certainty.
> Just like the early church, the evolution religion changes its views on matters of "fact" and change the timeline and tree of life to fit in with their new findings.
That's a Prime Directive for science: if your model doesn't fit the facts, you have to keep the facts and change the model. That's how science makes progress.
> Those who don't adhere to the beliefs are excommunications and sometimes attacked and discredited. Just ask any creationist with a Ph.D.
That's not excommunication, that's "bullshit walks". Creationists are welcome to submit their articles to the same peer review process that real scientists are. How many do you know of that do so, and what were the reviewers' comments on the rejection notices?
Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of kooks.
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a scientist. The reason I have a problem with the idea of "Intelligent Design" is that it doesn't have predictive power. Science is all about explaining what's going on in the universe - and th
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:2)
> > By referring to people who believe one thing as "real scientists" you have just excomunicated them, yourself. This is precisely what he means. Papers referring to intelligent design are mocked in peer review because they do not think of such as "real science." You have just given an excellent case in point.
> I'm a scientist. The reason I have a problem with the idea of "Intelligent Design" is that it doesn't have predictive power. Science is all about explaining what's going on in the univer
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then what is the difference between science, religion and philosophy?
The difference, in my opinion, is that in science you can measure what we can see in the universe and prove theories wrong. The only explaining power of science is in the theories which may be created by any means from intuition to coin tossing. The scientific part is predicting data from the theory and then measure some real data and see if the theory stands th
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:2)
> > I believe the sun will rise tomorrow just about the same time it rose today; is that also a religion?
> No, that is one belief that is assumed based on experience. It does not break a scientific law whereas evolution breaks the scientific law that each produces its own kind.
That's not a scientific law; that's the Neolithic belief enshrined in Genesis. The actual science pertaining to reproduction is - you guessed it! - evolution.
BTW, it's really funny to see evolution deniers try to reject
Re:Putting down creation? Evolution is a religion. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now the idea of science as religion is not new. In fact, there is a nice bit about it in Contact [force9.co.uk] by Carl Sagan, in which the religious guy tells the atheist that she believes in science and does a cool experiment with a Foucault pendulum [si.edu].
The difference between science and religi