Evolution? How?

I saw an article a number of months ago in which the Elefant was mentioned as an example of "Incomplete design" While it was effective at first, the allies quickly learned how to deal with it. They would triangulate it with 3 tanks. While it was busy ytrying to turn and engage. It would get destroyed,

That was an effective tactic against the beast, whether employed by 3 tanks or 3 emplaced anti-tank guns ... however, it was effective chiefly when the Elefant was operated outside its design/purpose parameters. It never was intended as an offensive "point" weapon, which role it frequently saw, but rather as a defensive, ambush weapon, in which role it excelled. Its job was to destroy tanks, blunting attacks, not to be a tank, leading attacks.

I see that they put in a "bass reflex" hole in the back, I suppose that was a design consideration. These are the same people who now give us the Porsche Cayenne.

That "bass reflex hole" was a heavy armored double hatch, accommodating crew access, vehicle provisioning and maintenance, and spent-casing ejection (through a small coaxial hatch within the larger hatch).

and it gave great bass tone for hip hop music while on an uberland sturmgegangen

I've been on one of them.Once.

Not to mention a large part of the Christian argument against abortion.
P

I read that the Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, was so successful in North Africa because he lured British armor with a small contingent of fast tanks fired on British camps and sped away into the desert. The British tanks gave chase only to fallinto a trap of emplaced anti-tank guns buried in the sand with only the barrels showing. It was Montgomery who understood this tactic and was successful in driving the Desert Fox out of Africa.

Set:

All right I got it wrong as I was recalling what I learned as a teenager.

There is still life and animated life....

And yes, as a "Christian", I do believe sincerely in choice but definitely not abortion needlessly as a form of contraceptive...

I think couples who have more than a few abortions should be listed with pedophiles on the net...

But I do not believe (due to the Bible) a fetus is a living soul until it can autonomously breathe on it's own...

When you take your "last breath" you are a dead soul... just as a fetus is a dead soul until it takes it's first breath...

I define "breath" as through the nostrils and lungs and not through the placenta and osmosis...

Stem cells breathe also through osmosis... as do plants or "still life"...

Nothing prevents a scientist from holding any religious belief, nor does anything prevent a scientist from holding no religious belief. Science however, precludes magic and mystery as answers - it simply and by definition is unscientific to postulate same. As for Hoyle's "junkyard", that merely demonstrates he had a better grasp of astronomy than of chemistry. On the thought of Hoyle's grasp of astronomy, BTW, he held onto his own "Steady State Universe" theory long after the scientific and academic communities had determined it was a flawed concept. A staunch opponent of the "Big Bang" theory, now accepted to be the most plausible explanation of the observed phenomena, Hoyle actually coined the term "Big Bang". Sorta sad, really, that he'll forever be remembered for something he didn't want to accept.

You seem to both revere Hoyle and revel where he disagrees with something you cannot know...

I believe Hoyle was being sensible and to deny a creator is being not only foolish but self righteous...

Science cannot really "believe" this universe came from absolutely nothing without leaving behind their own sense of basic logic...

Thus they become less scientific by speculating about something that is unknown to them.

To look at existence and to say it came from nothing is not only against all scientific reason including abstract science but it is simply stupid...

I may have made an error, that cells and plants breathe by diffusion and not osmosis...

I should have looked it up rather than relied on my own "failing" memory...

While Rex is babbling his typical irrelevant nonsense, i'll take this opportunity to comment on further excursions in to what may sometimes pass for history at these fora.

The technique of luring opposing armor into ambushes employing the highly effective PAK-50 may or may not have been devised by Rommel, or by troops under his command. It is not to be considered to have been decisive, as it is a defensive tactic, and Rommel was certainly not enabled to drive deeply into Egypt as a result of the successful application of defensive tactics.

Two factors had the greatest impact on the success of Axis operations in North Africa--air power and sea power. For most of the period concerned, the Italians had air superiority in the central Med, as well as surface superiority in the sea lanes. Bardia, Benghazi and Tobruk were crucial in the drive to the east because they were the ports through which the Italians would supply the army there, which was after all, on a manpower basis, a majority Italian army. The Italians soldiers had little confidence in their own officers, and the quality of their armored equipment was so damned poor that they referred to their main battle tank as a self-propelled coffin. But the tanks primarily used by the English--the Valentine and Matilda, and later the Chruchill--were only slighly superior, and only effective because superior amor plating gave the crews a chance to run away when confronted by the German Pzkfw's, whose 37 mm gun with APCR ammunition could make minced meat of them.

However, the Italians fought very well under the command of the Germans, in whom they had more confidence than they had in their own officers. Rommel's offensive in North Africa was a "see-saw" affair, first driving as far a Tobruk, then sent reeling back by Wavell's counteroffensive, then surging back to take Tobruk and to overrun Lybia and push on into Egypt. One could make a chart of Axis success on the battlefield and match it almost perfectly to a chart of the same type showing the ability of the Italian navy to deliver supplies to Cyrenaica.

Because of a most "unhistoric" contempt for all things both Italian and military, most people do not know that the Italian Navy in 1940 was modern and professional to such a degree that the Royal Navy was unwilling (quite sensibly given it's other global responsibilities) to challenge for mastery of the central Med. The Royal Navy's most effective weapon in that sea campaign was its submarine service, which gets very little attention. In 1940, the Royal Navy launched a daring daylight air raid against the main Italian naval base at Taranto (in the "instep" of the Italian "boot"). Although reliant upon the slow, clumsy open cockpit, two-seater torpedo planes of the Royal Navy Air Service, it was nevertheless stunningly effective, and spooked the Italians badly enough to effectively reduce their operations, including anti-submarine warfare, and the lack of ASW coverage severely reduced the flow of supplies to Lybia--which was a crucial part of the success of Wavell's counteroffensive. Rommel had begun the campaign with the 5th Light Infantry, to which armored units were added. When a reliable flow of supplies was reestablished, the 5th Light was re-equipped, and re-designated the 21st Panzer, become the famous "Afrika Korps" armored spearhead which allowed him to erase his earlier failure and finally take Tobruk, preperatory to his invasion of Egypt.

(Both the Americans and the Japanese made a very careful study of the Royal Navy's torpedo bomber attack on the Italians at Taranto. The Americans concluded that the extremely shallow basin at Pearl Harbor would prevent the use of torpedos there. The Japanese, whose "Long Lance" torpedo was the very best then available in the world, got busy on the problem of using torpedos in forty meters of water--aerial launched torpedos at that era usually required one hundred meters of water for effective operation. While Genda and Fuchida got busy on operational planning and crew training, Imperial Navy artificers worked on and solved the problem of using torpedos in the shallow basin at Pearl Harbor.)

The crucial question, however, was air superiority. The main reason the Royal Navy could not challenge the Italians outright in a massive surface battle was the inability to estalish or even contest air superiority with the Italians. The Italian Navy and Air Force, unlike their army, had not crisis of confidence in their officers or equipment, and bombed Malta with impunity, and hunted Royal Navy submarines by day and by night. Rommel could make the Italian infantry successful--after all, their light infantry weapons were among the best in the world, and their mutual-support tactical doctrine the equal of any then in use--but he could not do anything about either control of the air or of the sea. The Royal Navy spent more than a year attempting to establish an effective air force on Malta, but it was not until a few months before the El Alamein campaign that they finally succeeded.

In The Rommel Papers (edited by B.H. Liddel-Hart and Frau Rommel), Rommel states that Montgomery kept a dozen bombers in the air over the campaign ground of El Alamein on a "round-the-clock" basis. That seems hardly much of a threat by later standards, but as neither the Germans nor the Italians were in a position to contest them, they were supremely effective. Rommels Germans and Italians fought bitterly for every inch of ground, but were obliged in the end to walk out, because nothing could move on the roads. The Allies, particularly the Aussies and the New Zealanders paid one hell of a butchers bill in Montgomery's idiotic frontal assaults on the well-designed German and Italian positions, but the Axis were forced to withdraw because of aerial bombardment and the inability to supply their troops in their forward positions.

Based upon his experiences in North Africa, Rommel decided that to defend Normandy--which he correctly identified as the Allied landing site based on Allied bombing patterns--it would be necessary to have the armored forces immediately behind the beaches, and to drive the Allies back into the sea before they could establish themselves. OKH and Rommel's theater commander, von Ruhnstedt (sp?) disagreed, and withheld armored forces in the interior of France, looking for a great armored battle in the center of France to destroy the Allied armies. It never happended. Eisenhower invaded with inferior forces, and was on paper at least, outnumbered by German forces all through 1944--but superior forces don't help if they can't get a ride to the dance.

Rommel's assessment for Normandy was based upon an accurate prediction of Allied air superiority. In Egypt, Montgomery had put a dozen bombers in the air once each hour, "24/7"--which means fewer than 300 sorties per day (a sortie is one plane flying one mission--a plane could fly more than one sortie per day). Over the invasion beaches and the rest of the Cotentin Penninsula on D-Day alone, the Royal Air Force and the Eighth and Ninth U.S. Army Air Forces flew nearly 15,000 sorties--more than twice as many sorties each hour on that single day than Montgomery had managed in twenty-four hours in Egypt. Rommel's plan was predicated upon the assumption that the Allies would win if German forces were obliged to make an approach march, which they were, because the Allied air superiority would make that approach march a near impossibility, and any force arriving would be a shambles. Rommel's old Afrika Korps division, the 21st Panzer, was strung out on a road leading southeast out of Caen on the day of the invasion. The leading elements just barely managed to make it to a ridge overlooking the English and Canadian beaches on the first day--and were shot to hell in the process. The elements of the division which were about 25 kilometers away required three days to reach Caen. The Sixth Falschirmjeager (sp?--paratroop) Brigade in Brittany was 60 kilometers away from the Cotentin Penninsula--and it took them a week to arrive at the battlefield, because they could only move in the brief summer nights of June, 1944. Rommel was proven absolutely correct about the air power equation, which i am certain was no comfort to him in the few weeks he had left to live.

The campaign in North Africa was won and lost on and under the sea, and in the air. Rommel knew this, and his own papers are the evidence. Montgomery was a commander perfectly prepared to fight, down to the smallest detail, the First World War. As a commander in the mobile and technologically sophisticated Second World War, he was a disaster on an unprecedent scale for any commander whose "side" eventually wins. I entertain for Bernard Law Montgomery a lower opinion than i do for any other commander who ever reached such a high level of responsibility. If you think Patton was hard on Montgomery, read what Matthew Ridgeway had to say about him--Ridgeway eventually resigned command of his airborne corps rather than to continue to serve under Rommel.

It's always really cool to look at all the neat tanks, and Panzer Abwehr Kannon and other military-type stuff. It is also misleading. Looking at a bigger picture will tell you other factors are far more decisive. The Germans in Normandy used to say that a Tiger tank could take out ten Shermans before the Amis (the Americans) could get the Tiger--and they also said that the Amis always have at least 11. The Germans produced a few thousand Tiger and Panther tanks--the Americans produced more than 50,000 Shermans, and the Soviets produced more than 70,000 of their first-class T-series tanks.

The Germans in Normandy had another saying--if you see a black plane, it's the Tommies; if you see a white plane, it's the Amis; if you don't see any plane at all, it's the Luftwaffe. North Africa and Normandy were both won through control of the sea and control of the air.

Rommel was a genuine genius, in my never humble opinion. Montgomery was a hack raised disasterously past the level of his competence, and his incompetence cost the Allies the lives of thousands and thousands of troops squandered on the altar of his "phase lines" and "staggered echelon attacks."

Fred Hoyle and his collaborators had one fact misunderstood in the junkyard manifesto. Molecules have an affinity to bind to each other based upon ionic or covalent forces. In just right conditions they can copolymerize and , in the presence of other chemicals can change properties without any outside interference. All the need is
"as suitable concentration, and a gradient to steer them by"
Common ion effects or sorption kinetics or surface chemistry reactions are well understood (they are actually LAWS governed by simple equations ) Hoyles analogy would lose its mening if we were to add.
" Take a field full of 747 parts, let them rust into piles of metal oxides, let it rain on this mess and generate enough surface reactions and wed have a whole new soup. Add enough tropsch products from thunderstorms in a CO2 /Hydrogen environment and wed soon have self replicating molecules.

Hi Farmerman,

Don't the same tendencies that you postulate could have built up self replicating molecules also have the tendency to tear them down?

If you put DNA or RNA into a chemical environment such as you postulate, does it remain stable or is it chemically degenerated and dismantled?

rl

yep, its what they do with their lives that we remember them

your getting ahead here, we hadnt even mentioned RNA yet. There were other coding chemicals that began as cyclohexane based polyaromatics began to bind and have surface chem reactions and sorption kinetics.

FM you constantly bring the beginning back to evolution seemingly oblivious as to how the physical world even came to exist...

It is not that I do not believe in evolution (as a Christian) but evolution is only one gear in the clock... and who did wind the spring, in the beginning?

Bingo. Point, set, game and match.