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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Shielding spacecraft against cosmic radiation
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2024 15:39:56 +1100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 16/03/2024 2:04 am, John Larkin wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:42:50 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Fri, 15 Mar 2024 02:35:27 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jl@997PotHill.com> wrote in <eb58vidh7uivropd4lb3tjbf5iam87cid2@4ax.com>:
>>> On Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:28:39 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>wrote:
>>>> On a sunny day (Thu, 14 Mar 2024 10:38:47 -0700) it happened john larkin <jl@650pot.com> wrote in <s3d6vi95gfrbs6omoula55soaktalpggru@4ax.com>:
>>>>> On Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:46:07 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>> On a sunny day (Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:13:31 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jl@997PotHill.com> wrote in <in46vipa7a3eb6q7au6alobve5vfmv5jso@4ax.com>:
>>>>>>> On Thu, 14 Mar 2024 06:13:43 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On a sunny day (Wed, 13 Mar 2024 03:54:24 -0700) it happened John Larkin <jl@997PotHill.com> wrote in <ae13viptr1sskaqq1h2ru1j9i85sdecfrd@4ax.com>:
>>>>>>>>> On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 07:09:47 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On a sunny day (Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:18:18 -0700) it happened john larkin
>>>>>>>>>> <jl@650pot.com> wrote in <34h1vihp32geb2olkcscfksbr8k0bdgdmu@4ax.com>:
>>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, 12 Mar 2024 06:22:55 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid wrote:

<snip>

> Blind faith hand-waving about random mutation and selection is mystic.

It would be, if that was what had been going on. John Larkin is too 
pig-ignorant to be a ware of the decades of work that went into 
establishing that random mutations do happen, and that the mutations 
that do produce an improvement in the next generation do experience 
positive selection.

Covid-19 has been giving us an object lesson in this behavior for the 
past couple of years, but John hasn't noticed.

> Conjecturing about an actual, unlikely but plausible, origin of life
> is not.

If you are as pig-ignorant about the subject as John Larkin is, his 
speculations don't rate as mysticism - contentless rabbiting on is the 
technical term.

> One big problem with accounting for DNA life is that an entire class
> of possible mechanisms is sneered at because considering them invokes
> the fear of drifting even slightly towards religion, and we can't
> allow that. 

It's more that invoking a creator is pulling a rabbit from a hat, and 
avoiding thinking about where the creator came from

> You do that, mocking anything that you think might drift
> in that direction. Dawkins said that he was a capital-A Atheist first,
> and everything else flowed from that.

But in fact he is a biologist first, and his aversion to intelligent 
design is mainly based on the sloppy thinking it embodies.

> He was capital-B Boring too, as compulsive believers tend to be.

John Larkin doesn't understand much, and finds stuff he doesn't 
understand boring. He's much too vain to admit that he's pig-ignorant, 
even to himself.

Lot's of people don't find the book boring.

"Tim Radford, writing in The Guardian, noted that despite Dawkins's 
"combative secular humanism", he had written "a patient, often beautiful 
book... that begins in a generous mood and sustains its generosity to 
the end." 30 years on, people still read the book, Radford argues, 
because it is "one of the best books ever to address, patiently and 
persuasively, the question that has baffled bishops and disconcerted 
dissenters alike: how did nature achieve its astonishing complexity and 
variety?"".

It is still in print after thirty years. Boring books do tend to go out 
of print.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney