In article <473df64c@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > You were talking about evolution, to start with, tho. We know there are
 
> > theories that aren't complete. We know there are unanswered questions i
n 
> > every scientific theory. But most stuff tends to be refinements of what
 
> > we already know in realms we couldn't measure before. Even quantum and
 
> > relativity didn't overthrow newtonian physics - we still use that to 
> > shoot space probes.
> 
>   The problem is that while most knowledgeable people are not claiming
> that the theory of relativity is the absolute truth, many are nevertheles
s
> saying that the theory of evolution is the absolute truth. Granted, in
> many cases it's the laymen who know little about the actual physics who
> throw claims like "the theory of evolution has been proven to be true",
> especially in heated discussions against creationists, but you can see
> claims along those lines from more knowledgeable people too.
> 
Really? I must congregate at better places then, because the closest 
*anyone* comes to saying that is saying, "It is generally true.", which 
isn't much different than saying, "Newtonian physics is 'generally 
true'." Sure, they may sound more assertive than that, but only in the 
face of people that refuse to accept that "any" if it is true.

>   For example Phil Plait is a professional astronomer, and you can
> constantly find that kind of attitude in his blog. He doesn't believe
> that evolution is true, he *knows* that evolution is true. It's a fact.
> When reading his blog on this subject it quickly becomes clear that to
> him evolution is exactly the same type of fact as gravity or the existenc
e
> of the Sun. It's quite clear that to him it's not a theory at all, but a
> proven law of nature.
> 
Umm. We have "professional engineers" and the like, who babble a lot 
about how evolution isn't possible too. The consensus we have come up 
with is that there a several fields whose members you should ***never*** 
ask for an opinion on Evolution, they are Engineering, and Astrophysics, 
and Computer Science in that order. The reason is that the later isn't 
first on the list is that "some" computer science people deal with 
genetic algorithms, so have a fracking clue what they are talking about 
(though we had one a while back that used them for military development 
who I am sure isn't any more, since *someone* seems to have made them 
work, but he claimed they didn't, never mind that nearly every advanced 
multi-target tracking system in use now has them...) Seriously though, 
the things all of these people have in common is that they general deal 
with *hard* equations, clear cause and effect and precise measures. 
Biology is imprecise, the rules are only known in a general sense, so 
things don't always happen as expected all the time, there are no 
crystal clear equations to explain things you don't know the function of 
yet and even precise measures are munged up by the fact that you can 
often use 5-6 different DNA patterns to produce the same protein. This 
unhinges people in those fields and they tend to either figure that it 
works, so it must work like **their** field, or worse, they learn 
something about it, figure out that it doesn't, and start babbling about 
how it *can't* work.

The inability of most people in non-bio fields to get it bothers 
everyone that does understand any of it, or come up with the right 
answer for the right reasons (let alone the right answer at all). So, 
you are in good company for being "bothered" by it. However, I would be 
way more impressed if you could point to someone in a relevant field 
that made such a claim, and wasn't someone *known* for being unhinged by 
their peers.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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