physorg.com — The scientists have for the first time charted remote parts of the Universe, showing that the distribution of galaxies has considerably evolved with time, depending on the galaxies' immediate surroundings. This surprising discovery poses new challenges for theories of the formation and evolution of galaxies.
Dec 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
anon48654Dec 7, 2006
Well, nothing is independant from its surroundings so it shouldn't be a surprise that a galaxy's development is influenced by its environment. Why they'd decide to call this Darwinian I have no idea. I could just as easily say a rock is darwinian because it responds to water by moving and eroding.
sscrowDec 7, 2006
The Answer to "Why is there something instead of nothing." is quite simple. Since you can;t truly comprehend Nonexistence Of everything or anything, you assume that there is, in some form or another, some sort of existence. For instance, you can say its completely silent and back. That would indicate there was sound, and light to compare it to. When in true nonexistence, you would not be able to describe it. As a matter of fact. I don;t even know if nonexistence is the opposite of existing.
sbricknerDec 7, 2006
"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is a basis for being a theist?That completely puts the cart before the horse. We look around and we say "hey look - stuff". And then "I wonder how that got there."Some of our early hypotheses included magical beings ("gods") who somehow wished all this "stuff" into being. As time went on and we figured out how more and more of the stuff worked, we realized that those gods just weren't cutting it anymore as an explanation of how the stuff got there. So we changed the stories, and called the old ones "myths".As time goes on, the people who are really interested in figuring out how all the stuff works saw more and more cases where the "god" explanation had to be adjusted, and most of them have now decided that it really doesn't explain *anything*, and it never did. It was, at best, a useful shorthand - a placeholder for a "real" explanation, when they found one.Along the way, these truth seekers (or "scientists", as they're commonly called) realized that among the many ways to acquire knowledge, there was only one that was consistently reliable - "reason". The other ways led to patently false conclusions at least as often as not (if not more so).Meanwhile, there were many other people who realized they could take advantage of the false beliefs created by the god stories. They created large and powerful political organizations to do this. Usually, they put together some documents and claim them to have been received directly from the gods. They insist that these documents be given a degree of credibility far above any others - they even go so far as to decry the very possiblity of questioning the authenticity of the documents as causing the disfavor of the gods.Often, the leaders of these organizations listen to, and understand the best explanations the scientists have for how everything really works, but they realize that if people stop believing in the god stories, their organizations would stop having the advantages they currently enjoy. So they work very hard to convince people that the real explanations aren't "real". That they've been intentionally created by the scientists for the sole purpose of leading people away from the (non-existent) gods.They manage to carry along not just the majority of the poor, undereducated, or unintelligent masses, but even a few of the intelligent and educated - occasionally even a scientist falls prey to their games. They use these people to bolster confidence in their claims against the people who are actually trying to understand how things really work. Often so many of the well-meaning dupes join these organizations and unwittingly participate in the con game. So many do that it's often difficult to discern where true belief ends and cynical confidence hucksterism begins - remember, it's not always the anointed king who's in charge - sometimes it's the evil adviser who's really running things behind the scenes.They invent complicated arguments, which their uneducated victims aren't prepared to understand, to make their self-serving lies seem as if they have the weight of reasoned understanding. They call the scientists names and paint them as evil.Now - maybe all of this is just a cynical take on religion from my athiestic point of view. But it fits the facts at least as well as the "accepted" interpretation, and if you're among the dupes, then ''of course'' you'd think I was just trying to convince you to believe in "false gods". The difference is that athiesm doesn't actually ask you to believe anything that is at odds with evidence - religion, on the other hand, requires it. Where science says "we're not sure, but here's our most plausible explanation", religion says "stop asking that question, or you'll be sorry".
sbricknerDec 7, 2006
Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem really just says that there are some formal statements that cannot be proved within the formal system. That doesn't mean that the system "thinks" they're false. It means the system isn't "big" enough to say.Goedel says that there are statements you can't prove to be either true or false. But this really means (from the definition of proof) that if you assume the statement is true, you can't find any contradictions that weren't there before you assumed it. And the same is so if you assume it to be false. Therefore, you can immediately invent two new formal systems that extend your old one. One assumes the proposition true and one assumes it false. In both of the new systems you'll now be able to prove new things, but all the old things the old system said were false are still false and the old things it said were true are still true. The new systems are "conservative" extensions of the old one.The farther reaching consequence of Goedel's theorem is that these two new systems are still incomplete - some of the things unprovable in the old system are still unprovable in the new.But none of that suggests that axiomatic systems aren't the "right" formulation. It just means there's no end to the scientific endeavor.The real problem is that all of the ''other'' candidates for "paths to truth" just plain suck. Take "revealed truth", so loved by theism. You're always left with the problem of telling the difference between "hearing the voice of god", and plain old "hearing voices". The former (if it really exists) is presumably reliable, but you can't tell it from the latter, which is notoriously unreliable - those "voices" usually tell you what you want to hear, not what's true. And you're left having to fall back on reason (those formal systems) to see what's "true" - basically by seeing if your revealed truth is consistent with the known axioms.In any case, accepting truth from non-rational sources requires a considerable amount of work. The reason we use formal frameworks as much as possible is that they ''don't'' lead us astray like the others. So even if we do manage to catch a glimpse of "revelation" that's inconsistent with the formal systems, we have to figure out how to incorporate it into the formal system to get any real use out of it. Otherwise, we're just religious whackos.
spartan777Dec 7, 2006
no, it doesn't, sony still tries to pull that swg crap over us.
arobichaDec 7, 2006
I don't think anybody who doesn't know about the basic concepts of structure formation in cosmology should be arguing that this is or isn't the case. There are similarities in structure formation and Darwinian evolution, but they are not interchangeable. I think it would be best to just agree that there are some rules which dictate the requirements for complexity, but the actual mechanics of these complex structures is greatly unknown. It may be that some algorithm will arrive later on down the road which reduces to the rules of Natural Selection and Structure formation; but let me tell you... we describe structure formation using mathematics and physical concepts of fluids, n-particle systems, etc; and since cells are ridiculously complicated, I will NOT be anywhere near the moron who gets the bright idea to solve the MANY-particle Schrodinger equation for a cell.Anyone with enough sense to see that Biology is not all physics will be smart enough to know that evolution and natural selection are not mathematical. The basic rule is that if there is a REASON a given structure will fail, then it WILL fail on average. Small statistical fluctuations may exist momentarily; but in general, a structure (be it biological or galactic) will only exist if the conditions governing it's existence are all met and maintained.
starmanjonesDec 9, 2006
the title is meant to provoke the creationists. darwinist had no opinions on it.
magicjavaDec 11, 2006
The proper term is "development", not "evolution". Galaxies don't evolve, they develop. And hats off to all the Diggers who caught this.My other pet peve with astrophysics is when they call something heated to thousands of degrees a "gas". It's not a gas, it's a plasma. Plasma is a different state of mater than gas and has unique properties that gas does not have.