I've noticed this among other autistics/non-autistics..Why?

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By that definition, yes we see evolution happen. I just like to use the term evolution minimally, since it is such a broad subject. I prefer the term "genetic variation" to "microevolution" since microevolution seems to imply the appearance of information that didn't previously exist anywhere else, or positive mutations, which don't really happen, The beneficial loss or neutral change in alleles does, such as minor neutral changes in viruses that make them unrecognisable to the immune system, or the loss of sight for fish living in caves. These changes are helpful, but downhill in terms of information. The original functions/genetic instructions can only be regained via breeding with those that have not lost them.

I am not sure what you mean by “new information”, nor by “positive mutations”.

A change that makes a virus less recognisable to the immune system of their host species, is not neutral.


I really do not know what you are saying with this information business. Can you be specific about what this information is and why it can only change neutrally or by beneficial loss? Where do you think this information stuff is lost to and why do you think it matters?

If an allele is in the gene pool then it is not lost. Generally, you cannot acquire someone elses alleles by breeding with them.

There is not one Jesus, but there are 3 Jesii (or however, you want to say it). There is the historical Jesus, who exists outside of our scriptures and imagination, and who was a man who led a Jewish cult premised upon his strong relation to the divine. Then there is the scriptural Jesus, who was a man who performed miracles and who was divinely related to God and fulfilled various supposed prophecies. Then there is the theological Jesus, who is the Jesus Christians each like to pray to, the Jesus who says that they believe the right things. Now, the issue is always whether or not these 3 Jesii are the same 1 Jesus. However, it must be recognized as true that these 3 Jesii are not necessarily the same. Some would argue that these 3 are also very different, as the members of the Jesus seminar would by saying that historical jesus is different than scriptural Jesus, and the variations in faith would suggest that an individual's theological jesus may not be the same as scriptural Jesus.


Well, actually I really think he means that Christianity does not make sense when looking at the workings of reality or even make internal sense. This, by the understandings that most people use in order to assess the world, is not a matter of fear at trying the Christian life, but rather a matter of intellectual dispute.


Interestingly you do not think that intellectual reasons have much to do with the matter. There are only a few ways I can see for you to make this claim:

1) You think that individuals believe whatever they believe for non-intellectual reasons. This is a defensible hypothesis, but one that few people adopt, certainly not one they adopt if they are not some form of agnostic or skeptic.
2) You think that people only reject Christianity for non-intellectual reasons, but that they still can adopt it for intellectual reasons. This approach is somewhat lopsided, particularly given the existence of liberal Christianities that try to modernize Christianity to just about any set of facts, and the existence of scholars who claim that the facts were a source of deconversion for them.
3) You just think that the people who you have been responding to on this forum are non-intellectuals. This is perhaps defensible, but does not seem likely as I doubt anyone here is stupid.


Well, church going is positively related to valuing torture as a policy, I would imagine that they would then have to be meaner than the average person. In addition, Christians, even if not necessarily meaner, certainly seem narrower than other people, and often explicitly center themselves around unproven dogmas which they hold to... well.... religiously. And this can lead to a perception of meanness if these doctrines are mean doctrines in some form or fashion, which many atheists see them as being given inclusions of genocide, hell, and even theologies derived from this which end up seeming twisted as well.


Well, given Deuteronomy 28:16-68, we end up wondering what this love means, as there are about 2 pages worth of curses. This seems a questionable passage in the face of a "loving God". In addition, the existence of hell also is a matter of great question, with some philosophers even thinking that the existence of hell is incompatible with a loving God.


Well, to what are we to ascribe these actions? After all, if there is a Holy Spirit transforming Christians, then why are they still so unregenerate that they still go around doing this? Why is it so that they have done this for centuries, as seen with the actions in the Catholic church and preachings of men such as Jonathan Edwards.

Certainly we are to judge trees by their fruit, and test everything and hold to what is good. Scripture itself claims so with in the Gospels for the former, and 1 Thessalonians 5 for the latter. However, if Christianity itself does not live up to it's scripture, then how can it be true?

I refer to specified complexity. At some point evolution-wise there would be no genetic sequence of information for limbs, for example.

Physicist Paul Davies says:

‘We now know that the secret of life lies not with the chemical ingredients as such, but with the logical structure and organisational arrangement of the molecules. … Like a supercomputer, life is an information processing system. … It is the software of the living cell that is the real mystery, not the hardware.’ But where did it come from? Davies framed the question this way: ‘How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software? … Nobody knows … ‘.

Davies, P., Life force, New Scientist 163(2204):27–30, 18 September 1999.

Since the information for a limb requires a highly specific arrangement if molecules, it therefore requires a process to arrange it. Mutations are the reason most often given , as they re-arrange the "coding" in DNA, however, this process is random, making it immensely unlikely to create anything of use. Even in little steps, and with natural selection in effect, the sequence would be too corrupt to carry on to the next generation (ie. death or infertility) way before organised into anything of use. Natural selection isn't a proper explanation either, being the removal of unfit variations, not the creation of fit ones.



Sorry, I meant neutral in terms of the functionality of the virus. Sort of like jumbling up the logo on an aircraft, which doesn't effect its flight. It makes it "unrecognisable", but adds no function.



Can an allele be bred out over time? (honest question, I may have been too simplistic) I heard about a case where forest flies (adapted to the wet environment) were bred in an increasingly dry environment over many generations, and died out because there was no genetic information for coping in a dry environment left (or at least, it had become inaccessible).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU[/youtube]

Would you believe in terms of probability your statement is a little nonsensical?

Our bodies are a mass of cells. By the very virtue of that, we have a shape, a form, a structure. Its not that we beat odds in getting limbs, but rather that we have a shape, and limbs are a factor of that shape.

We could have had any form. And we'd still be wondering how we came to have that form. The name and meaning we assign to parts of our body are a trait of the human mind and commonality. Its a little bit like when you see two knots in a tree and think it looks like eyes.

That isnt to say our bodies have no meaning. That isnt true. What I mean is that our bodies just are.

Imagine if you had a bucket of multicolored sand and you spread it out thin on a cement pad. Looking close with a magnifying glass, you saw four black grains of sand all in a row, touching.

Probably somewhere else in that pile of sand are other groups of four black grains. Or five, six, maybe more. Its not random, and its not by design. Black sand is either hematite or magnetite, and magnetite is very mildly magnetic, so its unsurprising that it might self organize in groups such as strands.

And thats the beauty of chemistry too. Its not random... molecules are self organizing. Just like little grains of magnetic sand.

I doubt this is actually a biologically coherent concept.


Very probably at points in evolution there did not exist any organism whose DNA generated limbs. This is not an insurmountable barrier to the theory, but rather consistent with it.

The text by this physicist you quote is irrelevant to the statement proceeding it. It’s also largely irrelevant to this discussion which is about evolution (the process by which variation in life form occurs), whereas the text you quoted is about how life might or could arise, which is an entirely different matter.


We can be very certain that a large number of different combinations of DNA can produce outcomes that we would not even notice as different without significant investigation. Then there is the huge scope of “entirely functionally adequate” variations that we would notice easily, but deem ordinary difference. Given the huge array of right answers in regard to any one useful thing, the chances of hitting them are significantly higher than seems to be taken into account by you.

See the above explanation regarding the array of right answers

A single point mutation (change by deletion, insertion or substitution of a single DNA molecule), can generate selection relevant advantage, and be perpetuated in greater proportions than other alternative alleles. There is nothing stopping this from happening, nothing whatsoever.

It certainly is true that some variants are simply not viable. This is why spontaneous abortion in very early pregnancy is so very common. Variations can also be non lethal but reduce fitness. But nothing whatsoever prevents the effects of mutations that are random, from being advantageous.


Whatever you meant, the fact is that the kind of change you first described does happen, that is to say variations in DNA that are adaptive and enhance reproductive fitness.

If better adapted alternatives out compete it, an allele can cease to be “polymorphic” for a gene pool (in other words no longer present at levels above that which could be accounted for through spontaneous mutation).

It is however entirely wrong to state that “information” is only lost or changes if this is what you mean by lost. The most usual means by which an allele would be “bred out” would be the appearance of a novel allele in the gene pool, that effected a significant reproductive advantage in organisms characterized by it.

This really does not indicate anything untoward for the theory of evolution, nor for the plausibility of limbs evolving.

Please correct me if I have this wrong, but it seems as though you believe that if when something was needed nothing sufficiently useful to overcoming a specific problem was generated, then it would be less likely that something useful might arise in other contexts.

If so, I point out respectfully that this is not clear logic. Mutations are random. Think of the useful ones as being like finding money on the ground. While this might not happen often, the fact that it did not happen just when you were short of money, is not proof it never happens. In fact, the chances that you will find exactly 20cents on the ground, just when you are exactly 20cents short on bus fare, are much lower than the chances that you will not find 20cents when you exactly 20cents short on bus fare, and much lower than you finding 20cents when you are not exactly 20cents short on anything.

Finding 20cents does not happen every day for most people, but it does happen. Finding exactly that much when it is exactly what you need, rather than a nice bonus, is very unlikely. Much less so than finding it when you do not need, but can still use it.

ive been a pagan for about a year now maybe 2.

i really like the rule of 3 which states that anything you put into this earth good or bad energy will hit you 3 fold.

Say for example i call someone a cow, they might call me something even worse.

Or i lend someone a £5 note, they might put me up for the night if im stranded with them.

i was raised catholic most of my life and attended catholic schools for the past 7 years. i started off simply questioning random things: why can't women preach, what stories are real and which ones allegorical, why does God want our money (tithing), etc. i then decided to learn about other branches of christianity besides catholicism. i even attended sermons at jerry falwell's church while visiting my baptist friends in virginia. then my sophomore year some of my friends got into wicca. i started to look into it, was interested, but decided it wasn't the right decision for me.
by my junior year, my life had taken on a strange twist. i had been praying daily since i was about 14 and wanted God to help me overcome this rough patch. the thing is, when i started praying, i was very afraid of the Lord because i had only heard fire & brimstone stuff. as i began to question religion, i became less afraid of God and more trusting of him. then during my senior year i purchased a book on women's pagan spirituality out of curiosity because i wanted to look into religions that gave women more power. i loved the book and it was not derogatory to christians. i felt a need to apologize to the Lady for ignoring her and downplaying her role in my life. so now i'm not following a religion per se, but i believe that all have some element of truth.
please don't think i'm anti-christian/catholic. i'm not. i still believe Jesus is God incarnate but i believe Mary is Goddess incarnate, a little weird, but many pagan legends have stories about a mother goddess giving birth to god incarnate. even though my beliefs are unconventional, i still respect my catholic roots and appreciate where my journey led me thus far. i wish everyone the best on their own spiritual or non-spiritual path.

I consider myself more of a general theist - may lean toward Judao-Christian form in its more gnostic aspects but that's about the only area that I have any hard of fast lines set up. My answer to the OP on this; you see the same break-away from dogmatic living in all sectors of society these days. You also have such a reality set up where, objectively at least, if one is not to take the bible on faith, atheism, deism, theism, all hold equal credibility on their own terms - mainly only deviating in credibility based on the individual person and the mechanics that they feel are at play in the structure of reality.

The understanding that I'm coming to about God is this; if there is such a being that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, all-powerful, and be the totality of intelligence - it would be logically impossible for that being to be as petty, superficial, or circumstantial as the old testimate would suggest (I believe there were logical reasons as to why it was written that way but I'll get back to that later). Paths in life, realities in life are myriad, very few people could have exactly the same perspective and so much of that is built from neurology, genetics, experiences, we as human beings are fundamentally collections of stresses (driving factors) and limitations - those shape us, and quite often when people realize that they can't turn to God for happiness here they'll turn to alternative religions. I don't even think the alternative religions are even about hiding from reality as much as people trying to find something that, yes, feels right to them - ie. works intuitively the way their emotions/minds are shaped - and I've heard many religious thinkers even say even from the Judao-Christian world, if being a Christian doesn't work for you but worshipping Zeus or being a Zoroastrian, or being an atheist for that matter, can help you to be a better parent, mentor, citizen, fundamentally make you more emotionally healthy and more functional - you should do it. If the question comes up about the later of "But don't you care about your own salvation or the way, the truth, and the light?" - the very fact that such a question could be broached against altruistic action points out why it can't be taken that literally, as it would seem very odd for the Judao-Christian God, at least for those who treated him in the semi-deist sense as the source of all light, love, truth, etc., to be the sort of being to bring that kind of ultimatum.

As for the goth bit though, that goes more to lifestyle and I can speak as someone who was a long-time raver, still probably listens to a lot of music that many old-fashion types would consider to be about as corrupted as you can get without lyrics (really I just see it as a return to classical composition's complexity from a new bend). There are a great many personality types that, as the world works - they aren't honored, they aren't catored to. Subcultures happen because people have a need to find people who are into what they're into, either in music production to milk better ideas out of sound and make exactly what they want to to the best of their ability or, in the case of nonmusicians or nonartists, people who just want acceptance and would prefer to be with people who they can be seen for who they really are - in the positive senses - rather than having to strain and toil with covering up how their minds and emotions work for the sake of appearing normal. People have only so much energy to go around, we also are nowhere close to being infinitely maleable - I think almost any aspie can relate to this, if we could have just thrown down our differences and been NT versions of our best selves, there's no reason why we wouldn't have done it. That's just it though, given our limitations we have the driven desire to seek happiness, mainly in that without it we can't be effective, can't be emotionally healthy, can't be at our best - even more than just a 'feely' thing - unhappiness is extremely expensive on a person's overall health and someone's ability to be in good enough physical/mental shape to be able to have something to give back to the world around them.

A God with infinite intelligence would have to understand this far better than we ever could, ie. the ways our realites are shaped by forces beyond our own control. Through my own catholic upbringing and even more in conversation with some of my nondenominational neighbors I know that the take of Christianity in its organized sense is often "Well, plenty of good people go to hell for not making the right choices" - I think that's just the best answer that they can summon for themselves and I think that also comes from the fact that untill the last hundred years or so, authoritarian structure was likely needed on a lot of levels just to deal with the problems that abounded in the world, therefor regardless of what the truth was - people needed to oversteer the answers in the direction of "You do what we say is right - or - you go to hell". I can't help but think any other way about it, that it was needed far more socio-economically to give structure and was meant to really be more an added governance on the living where law enforcement didn't have guns, where anyone who was too badass for their own good could easily take whatever they wanted. Social liberalism in an environment like that would have easily spelled disaster. Many of the worst things done in human history and even recent history have also been executed into action by people who believed they were doing good. Because of that its very difficult to staple truth down to any particular group or blanket ideology. This is also why people are so systems/structure obsessed these days, we're in the phase of things where we believe that obsession with structure, statistics, management, and analysis can solve all problems (the enlightenment bringing itself to logical conclusion) - looking at the enlightenment, the way that came into being, Voltaire coming up against the Jesuits and counter-reformationists, the way reason is even falling apart - I'd have to say that the great number of atheists in the world today has to likely also be God's will and as being of his will it would be insane of him to hold their being here against them. Atheists afterall, those who are thought out about their philosophies, bring great questions to the table that were frankly needed to humble the strident believers who had oversimplified views of reality and who were exerting it on the world around them - not meaning harm but ultimately bringing it nonetheless.

Every event in human history, every turning toward God, from God, what I think would be a new form in the coming centuries of coming back to God, its all just give and take in the learning process of humanity and society. Knowledge and understanding through accumulation of history has great birth pains, we saw that in the thousands of years before us, we saw a world unimagineably harsh by our standards even two or three centuries ago, our world still has its problems and we're still trying to improve our knowledge. In that sense I can't imagine how the whole diversity of everything from goths to pagans is that far out there. Reality is incredibly broad, vast, deep, that tends to be one of my biggest criticisms of, not all atheists, but the 10% perhaps who act like religious evangelicals. I know that was probably a rather long-winded lecture but, when you try to put things like the topics that you'd brought up with the original post into perspective, you can't help but discuss the baselines of reality and the overall shape and structure of things to reference back to the dynamics that bring these sorts of things forward.

I have always been attracted to things science. Some people can accept things purely by faith. I cannot unless there is some logic behind it. As for things like Wicca or occultism:

The definition of magick: The art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with the will (i.e. make things happen) using methods not understood by Western Science.
When I mean magick I am talking about the magic like you would find in Wicca or groups such as the Golden Dawn.

I've rationalized this arguement before, let's see if I can get it out right.

People need certain answers and understanding. One in specific is the purpose of life, and what it is. Yet, no one can agree as to what that answer is. Simply because, there isn't a purpose. Life is meaningless.

Everything that lives dies, and yet those that live with the burdon of concienceness cannot reconcile with this inevitable truth. They seek some form of immortality, or assurance of purpose, of reason. Yet, there is none readily available. All things die, everything is temporary. Even the memories of those whom come to know of you will disapear, as those you know are all destined to die as well. And so on, death and meaningless death after another until in some distant future the enirety of our race is gone. And in more time any trace of our existance is utterly wiped from the cosmos.

If one takes the time to look far enough forward, everything becomes bleak. And if someone comes to this conclusion or one similar, either by this train of thoughts or by another. They suffer a terrible fate. Life becomes empty and hallow, and without pupose.

And if this person cared of the spiritual wellbeing of his fellows, he would just make something up, anything. Some wrong, and silly. And tell the masses of his wonderful new understanding, that there is some greater purpose, that there is meaning.

Regardless of what it is.

And this is why there is religion.