I read them for humor not content.

the quote marks are insulted to be so close to a word combination meaning refuse pump

It gets worse than that

much, much worse.

they made TWO sequels to explain away anything you thought was cool in the first one.

tell that to Georgia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Poland.

I'm sorry to hear you consider yourself retarded.

while i appreciate your attempt, it is unfortunately ill-adapted. The problem is that there's a fundamental dis-analogy between the two cases.

In the first case, "electron microscope" is a phrase that has only one usage and meaning. It does not have multiple possible understandings.

In the second case, this is apparently not so. "evolve", "food", and "genome" have a standard meaning which refer to a process in biology, sustenance for animals and plants, and the bearer of genetic material in the form of DNA/RNA and methylation.

the usage you are making of these terms is not this. If I want to use the term "Iron Condor" to refer to a mountain range near where I live, I should not go about publishing popular press articles as if I am referring to the same thing that others refer to.

as a second example, if I write a visual basic program and call it SQL, then publish an article about how I improved SQL 500%. I should really explain that I am not talking about the database language.

that's exactly what I am asking of the article.

I feel you're not putting your critical thinking cap on here. Your analogy was utterly disanalogous.

afraid not. that's not what food means. food provides sustenance for animals. these ain't animals and don't need the "food." we'll start with an easy link: here. I'll leave reading it as an exercise. if you want to use food in another meaning, please mark it as such.

That was actually helpful.

I see your point about the usefulness and prevalence of these analogies.

I just still question how well they fit the biological model.

but i do appreciate your efforts to help me see.

how so?

the one is clearly a construction that we can fully comprehend because we generated it.

the other has yet to be shown to be merely a construction (whether or not it can ever be shown as such).

maybe to make it more clearly, robots do not survive on the basis of said "food" so it's not the same as our "food" even if both deserve the quotes.

the further difficulty with your claim is that you state "Only in the same sense that you are a figment of your own imagination". But then it seems that we need to endow the robot with imagination before it can really have the same sense.

You seem to be confused... The very thing that is unclear is the aptness of the analogy, and the very fault of the article is to perpetuate it without justifying.

unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.

I would have that this would be obvious

the entire failing is that it's not clear that the simplified model in any way duplicates the more complicated model.

oddly, when you simplify something, you often bludgeon the very thing that makes it what it is. What has made genetics so interesting is that the pathways of inheritance and gene expression are more complicated than each model we devise.

So without knowledge of the senses in which this is reflective of a "genome" to call it so is misleading.

see above. The opacity is the validity of the comparison not the use of the comparison.

Believe it or not, the article makes no mention of this and does not indicate how the randomization was effected.

oddly that failing is precisely what i questioned to begin with ... believe it or not.

...

in summary, while you have marshaled an interesting array of wikipedia articles, the original article in question remains a piece of hype-mongering.

it has in no way connected itself to any of what you have stated.

instead, it has merely used (or possibly abused) the terms of biology to describe what might otherwise be a rather boring high school science fair experiment.

it sounds like you are now accepting that the article is misleading.

You're agreeing that the terms are not what a normal reader would construe them to mean.

if the experiment wants to show anything, the methodology has to be more transparent so that we can know whether to consider its "genome" as really a genome or are something more banal.

if the semi-random is really just someone going through and changing parameters in a config file (or using a script to do it), then it's not really random at all.

here's a url that helps make sense of the difference: same site [wikipedia.org]

oh, so you're saying we just make up new meanings for old terms and act like their the same! oh now i get it! see that's the problem. the robots do not deceive; they do not see food. the article is a misconstrual of what is happening.