E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 23:16 (5309 days ago) @ David Turell

http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=7508
> >
> >I'm surprised that you didn't attack the line that said "We can optimize for generic components because we can design intelligently." THAT's what I figured you'd jump on.
> 
> This is a better one to jump on: 
> "But it also means the operating system is more vulnerable to breakdowns because even simple updates to a generic routine can be very disruptive," Gerstein said. To compensate, these generic components have to be continually fine-tuned by designers.""
> 
> But not the designed living brain. It takes care of itself without disruption.Do you ever suppose we will ever catch up?-Maybe you just got a little lazy in language here, but AFAIK there's no conclusive evidence that the brain was designed... complexity doesn't automatically guarantee that something was designed. -I haven't had a good round in awhile, so lets have some fun...-When we look at something like the economy, what we see is a massive collection of individual transactions that can easily be compared to a biological system. (Biologists borrow all the time from economists and vice versa.) However, no one can really say much about the economy outside of the fact that:-1. It trends upwards in time. This is analogous to evolution: no one can deny that there's been a trend towards more complex organisms. And everyone knows that life suffers from "recessions" from time to time. -2. Each of the individual actions in an economy are typically taken for an individual's personal gain. Each action within an organism and in an environment are also modeled in that way. -However, there is no *goal* of the economy. No one started out 10k years ago and said, "I want this to trend upwards." It just happened that way. It was undirected towards its upward trend--and for the most part it remains so.-Similarly in this analogy--there's no goal for life. At its lowest level it has been and will remain to be--an amorphous series of actions that individual cells carry out to maintain their existence. The collective actions of each cell contributes to the overall complexity we see manifested, i.e. our "butterfly effect" that we've touched on a couple of times. -More or less what I'm getting at is that both life and an economy have immense complexity that arose from the actions of many individuals--and in the case of the economy we have no discrete beginning: and by that I mean no teleological cause. Each transaction was (and is) a means to its own end.-Does this make more sense on why I state that I see no teleology to life, no empirical claim to a creator, or why I'm willing to accept the answer "That there is no answer?"

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"