Can You Copy the Cat?

I miss Basement Cat. Can you make a copy? We have pictures and even a video or two for reference. Oh, you need more to work with. What about if you make a copy using a living cat for reference, will that work? 

Where are you going? I do not appreciate that look you gave me! What does it take to make a copy, anyhow? Let's back up a mite. Since believers in universal common descent insist that every living thing is the product of time, chance, random processes, mutations, and accidents. Shouldn't be to hard to do a cat from scratch (heh, she scratched me in rough play a few times!), you just have to get the parts.

What, they're not available at the bit chain retail store or even on those big internet retailers? I could let you off the hook and say you don't have to build the entire feline machine, what with fast reflexes, sensitive olfactory apparatus, radar ears, inquisitive nature, and all that. Could you copy a cat then?

Well of course not! Even if you tried, your result would be cat-astrophic. As we saw yesterday, cells are extremely complex, and we know that living things are even more complex. Cells, cats, dogs, plants, people — it takes a passel of faith to believe in evolution.

It takes far less time to copy than it does to create, and far less thought.  For instance, you can copy the sheet music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on a copy machine in a few minutes, and never even know about inverted Cmaj7 chords.  Being able to create it, however, would take years of training and practice, thought and inspiration.

You can copy a video of a movie in minutes, but it takes years of training and months of filming for actors, directors, writers, producers, stuntmen and cinematographers to film the movie.

So there is a giant leap between copying and creating.

There is also a major leap between inability to copy and copying.

To copy Tolstoy’s War and Peace you must have the ability to read and write, ability to make paper, a printing press, ink, typesetters and printers.  A stone age tribe in South America could not copy War and Peace, or any other book.

So what does this say about our inability to copy a cat? Our best scientists can’t even copy a potato. This is embarrassing.

You can read the rest at "Kitty Copying and Evolution". I miss Basement Cat.