All species are transitional

Got to go. Talk to you later.

Though this is more properly reproductive failure than isolation (unless you consider failure to be total isolation), one unfortunate, novel cause is pollution: pesticides and endocrine disruptors are impacting birds and aquatic vertebrates alike. I saw some popular coverage of this a few weeks ago; I'll see if I can come up with a link later.Perhaps natural (botanical) endocrine disruptors or other naturally occuring substances could biochemically change reproductive behavior in one part of a species' habitat range but not another. If the species had complex reproductive behavior, the loss of a single behavioral component (say singing remains but tail display lost) might begin to isolate that population. Or maybe a hyperpredator on the margin of a range starts wolfing down every cock who crows too loudly--a few nerdish cocks might survive and pass on their lives of quiet desperation Failure to respond to reproductive stimuli, failure to respond appropriately to threat, gonadal development failure--the soup of complex compounds we have made of the earth is beginning to show up in unexpected ways.I have always felt uncomfortable about evaluations of toxicity performed on isolated compounds: sure, 1 part per brazillion demonstrates no toxicity, but what if we put that compound into a body/ecosystem that already contains a thousand other pollutants?Anyway, that's an off-topic pet peeve...

Brad, I have become convinced that you are not human.You are an algorithm which produces pseudo-intelligent messages by regurgitating texts from a limited pool in a semi-random way.Here's your challenge: prove me wrong. Consider it your own personal Turing test.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 12-Oct-2005 08:46 AM

I don't see any traits in this specimen which suggest that there was an intelligent designer.

the (a)specimen

By predication I am not as limited as B. Russel's yard long was short. It is sad you should come to that conclusion. Perhaps you are trying to "mergesort" my posts. Try to see that Waddington's "canalization" actually spreads beyond any Freudian projectionisms no matter the circle of perceptrons you might have applied. How should I know. Here are the rest of the pages I selected for you. There are more but I thought these the most relevant.

It is unlikely that there exists a better way to express how I personally felt about Brad's posts. Well, there's also the alternative that I (we?) are just too dumb, lol.

Thank you. I liked it myself, it has all the necessary elements, doesn't it? Definitely "we". In my optimistic years I've dabbled endlessly and to no avail to make some sort of start with an AI.And now here's this brilliant but unknown programmer from Ithaca, just deploying his Brad 1.0It's just not fair.

The most human-like response I've noted is the memorable phrase, "I don't chat."But that in itself hardly seems enough.

That's funny, I'd interpret that in the opposite direction: maybe it's a pre-programmed response to avoid giving the game away. I think we'll have to wait for at least Brad 2.7.0.1 before an add-on ("BradChat"?) can be downloaded. Only after we've visited http://www.brad.com to register ourselves as Brad users, of course.

Some time ago I set myself the foolish task of going through one of Brad's lengthy posts and pouring over them until I understood the gist, after which I would submit a concise, pithy summary for the benefit of all.But it was too much for me; I gave up the project.I now realize that I had set myself a too ambitous task. What we should do is take a brief passage--say, one sentence--and study it together. For all we know, these outpourings may contain some profound statement about the meaning of life, about which I am rather anxious.So let's make a start. How about this: Any ideas what it might mean?This message has been edited by robinrohan, 10-12-2005 11:33 AM

http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/santiago/RUSSELL.htmBertrand Russell talks about how, even in the greatest truth of thruths, a yard is still 3 feet. Something like that.Predication could simply mean language, as Russell is a famous philosopher of language, or it could be referencing the fact that Russell is a famous logician.Looks to me that Brad is just making a comment about Para's complaints about his language. He's not limiting himself to some standard language, because standard ways just come up short.I defy anyone to come up with a better explanation than that

Ben, that was brilliant. Just goes to show us that Brad is making sense in a sort of private langauge of his own.And apparently, we have inadvertently stumbled upon a basic McFallian dictum.

Someone needs to stop by Brad's place and fix his comma key. And quote key as well. Half the battle is identifying the parts of the sentence and what quotes he's using figuratively. He does it a LOT.Compare with

Just my two cents worth.In my score, Brad passes the Turing test with flying colors.We might have trouble understanding Brad. But it is clear that Brad understands us. And no AI system has ever been able to achieve that.