Evolution is a basic, biological process

Probably for the same reason that a dictionary is unintelligble unless it's in alphabetical order.

What's problematic about it? Surely you can see the survival/reproductive benefit of having a mind?

The process seems completely clear to me, I guess. Given the continuum of mind that we find in nature, from the brightest human minds, to the dumbest human dolts, to the surprising mental faculty of our cousin apes, to the complex behavior from the simple neurology of insects, I see nothing problematic about the gradual development of mind, nor any fundamental quality of the human mind that is not also possessed, to some degree, in other species.It's honestly not that puzzling to me, and I wonder why it would be to you.

I'm sorry, you don't seem to understand. "What are minds" and "what is the evolutionary origin of mind" aren't the same question. The evolutionary origin of mind seems very simple to me. What, exactly, is a mind? Fuck if I know.

We don't know what gravity is, but we're able to calculate it's effects with amazing accuracy.What something is and where it comes from are two separate questions. But we're getting off topic.

Well, that's what science is like. What, you thought scientists just sat around agreeing with each other? Hell no! There's careers to be made!

What do you think happened to everything that didn't need to survive? When you say that, what do you mean, exactly? How would you know if it's "still" a bacteria or not?Did it ever occur to you that the words we apply to certain species are just words, and that they don't describe any kind of inherent specific essence or something that an organism possesses?What makes a dog a dog? The fact that it is decended from dogs, not some kind of inherent dog-ness. And it might very well become a new kind of organism, one never before seen, yet still remain a dog. All those things are new information. In a word, yes. Is "appear" a different word than "parapet"? Don't those two words contain different "information"?Does that cease to be the case when I tell you that those words are anagrams; that is, when I mix up the letters of one, I get the other? If all I have is "appear", and then I duplicate and mix the dupe up and get "appear" and "parapet", don't I have information that I didn't have before? Because the genetic sequences that result are novel, and the proteins they generate may be novel, too.It's like you're asking "can letters be put together to form words? If they can, how do they do so?" Don't you see what a meaningless question this is?

Well, now, wait a minute. You've consistently criticized evolution for cleaving so closely to materialism and refusing to even entertain the possibility of the supernatural; now you say that evolution makes uncalled-for assumptions?Which is it? It can't be both ways.

God dammit.I'm terrible with anagrams, so I wiki'd "anagrams" and used the first example that appeared. Here's what I saw:

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Anagrams is a anagram board game which is played with tiles from another word game, such as Scrabble or Upwords. At the beginning, all tiles are turned face-down. During the game, players take turns flipping tiles face up on the table.
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Creating Words

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When a player sees a word of four or more letters among the tiles face-up in the middle, this player says the word and puts the tiles for this word in front of him/her. A player cannot create a word which is already on the table.
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Stealing Words

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You can steal a word from another player by mixing all the tiles of one opponent's word with one or more in the middle, forming another word. Mere pluralization is never permitted, however, and sometimes players stipulate that the new word has to change the root of the old one. (example: APPEAR to PARAPET is fine; APPEAR or REAPPEAR is not.)

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You can modify your own words, subject to the same rule, to prevent others from stealing them first.

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You cannot steal a word by creating a word that is already on the table.

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I was quick and careless. Here are some better examples of anagrams:

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Desperation = A rope ends it.

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The Morse code = Here come dots.

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"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." = "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies: our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."

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and

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Anagrams = Ars Magna (latin for "Great Art")

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On the other hand, the "appear = parapet" translation may suck as a straight-up anagram, but it's much more like the actual process of mutation, which includes not just changes in the order of base pairs, but the addition of new base pairs as well.

I've never been to a university in the US where assistant and associate professors didn't have at the bare minimum Masters degrees in their field, or where associate professor was not a tenured position.We're not just hiring janitors and calling them "assistant professors" around here. Those are ranks, a seniority structure that begins at assistant and rises through full professor, possibly terminating at something like "professor emeritus" or other ranks. No, it's pretty much restricted to permanent or semi-permanent faculty engaged in teaching or research, with proper accredation in their fields. In other words it means the same thing as it does in your country.

I don't know that they make the same hiring decisions now as they did in the past; my dad is a full professor and division chair at the University of Minnesota in Morris (regarded as one of the country's finest public liberal arts colleges); he holds no more than master's degrees in (I think) broadcasting, costuming, and technical theatre. He's pretty sure that they wouldn't have hired him today, but when he was hired lo these many years ago, there weren't too many people with Ph.D's in his fields.I'm sure that at least a few of the professors at Gustavus Adolphus College did not possess doctorates in their field, but I can't think of any full professors offhand.Given the intense committment and study it takes to even recieve a masters, I don't see this as indiscriminate. While any given field may be flooded with Ph.D's nowadays, this hasn't always been the case in many fields.

Well, I don't know. I'm not exactly an expert on the state of American higher learning, nor the career ladders of American faculty. I'm only familiar with two small liberal arts schools in Minnesota, who typically don't have enough faculty to necessitate the surfeit of hair-splitting titles you describe.All I know is, there's at least one university in America where a full professor can chair his department with nothing greater than a masters degree, and that that institution is highly rated as a liberal arts institution, and the model of other colleges in the state for a number of programs directly overseen by that professor, and that that professor is my dad.Take from it what you will.

Maybe I'm not communicating effectively here, but I do understand what you're saying, and I'm trying to say that while "professor" may refer to one specific level of faculty in the UK; to my limited knowledge in the US, it applies to only three different levels technically, though perhaps to more people colloquially, in the way that marching band leaders (and soccer coaches, I think?) are traditionally called "professor" or ministers are traditionally called "doctor".I understand we're not talking about an academic pissing contest (at least, that's not what I'm talking about with you), but rather, the exclusivity of terms.On the other hand I am having a pissing contest with Percy, which I will probably lose. I am, after all, usually full of shit. This message has been edited by crashfrog, 01-10-2005 16:13 AM

If you figured this out all by yourself, then you're to be commended for your percipacity. I do mean that in all seriousness. That's a remarkably insightful realization.On the other hand if you believe this to be a depature from the "mainstream" evolutionary/biological thinking, then you're misinformed. To my knowledge evolutionists don't propose that environmental pressures stimulate or create certain mutations, but rather, environmental pressures select from pre-existing mutations, exactly as you propose. (Though it is believed that certain kinds of environmental stress in certain organisms can stimulate increased mutation rates in general.)What I guess I mean to say is that you're so right, we've known this for a while. I'm not sure where you got the idea that mainstream biology believed anything else. I commend you for your percipacity, again. Why not? Remember that evolution is mutation and selection; we know that mutation occurs constantly, so any time mutations are being selected for or against by environmental stresses, that's evolution.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 01-11-2005 00:06 AM

Right. Which is evolution. Both of those things are evolution, because evolution is simply changing allele frequencies. Yes, we literally are. The process you described is called "natural selection", which is one of the two components that change allele frequencies. We know how they came to be, because we know how bacteria reproduce, and so we know where their alleles have to come from. Thse two variants came from random mutation, which is the other half of evolution.Random mutation + natural selection = evolution. When we see a hostile environmental factor selection among alleles, and allele frequency changing as a result, we're literally observing evolution.