Fundamentalist chat room highlights

I suspect this is making the rounds, but I was infected via C. Stross, so here it is. Many laugh-out-loud moments.* And some depressingly tragic moments as well.** A small taste:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

I want to say something witty about the last two sentences in this quote, but its comic timing is so exquisite that I cannot add anything to it.

As with many of the quotes, one wonders whether the person writing it is actually satirizing fundamentalism. But part of the fun, I suppose, is observing that fundamentalist speech and satire of fundamentalist speech are indistinguishable.

* I mean literally. Not: "It actually only made me sort of smile silently but I will describe this activity as 'laughing out loud' for dramatic effect". I am sitting here on this Sunday morning making loud noises of hilarity. Down with the metaphorical "lol".

** Of course, the tragedy and humor often go together.

The Secret Inner Computational Lives of Plants

I have maintained for a long time that the intelligence of plants is severely underappreciated. This is, among other things, why I am not a vegetarian --- I don't see much moral difference between using cows for food and using wheat for food. A stalk of wheat may have "consciousness" that is more alien to us than that of a cow, but it may be no less worthy of consideration.

Well, progress is being made on this front. Three-Toed Sloth points to a recent paper by D. Peak, J. D. West, S. M. Messinger, and K. A. Mott with this fascinating abstract:

It has been suggested that some biological processes are equivalent to computation, but quantitative evidence for that view is weak. Plants must solve the problem of adjusting stomatal apertures to allow sufficient CO2 uptake for photosynthesis while preventing excessive water loss. Under some conditions, stomatal apertures become synchronized into patches that exhibit richly complicated dynamics, similar to behaviors found in cellular automata that perform computational tasks. Using sequences of chlorophyll fluorescence images from leaves of Xanthium strumarium L. (cocklebur), we quantified spatial and temporal correlations in stomatal dynamics. Our values are statistically indistinguishable from those of the same correlations found in the dynamics of automata that compute. These results are consistent with the proposition that a plant solves its optimal gas exchange problem through an emergent, distributed computation performed by its leaves.

I, for one, welcome our new photosynthetic overlords.