Gene expression: Is Natural Selection a tautology?
backspace
> In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
> The details vary - some authors define fitness by the absolute number of offspring, some by reference to the population average, and so on -
And who are they?
> but roughly speaking, the fittest organism (or gene) is the one with the greatest number of offspring.
You have represented an idea "greatest number of offspring" with the
symbol fitness - why did you do this and who told you to do this,
because I certainly didn't. Did Darwin maybe?
> It may therefore be said that the �reproduction of the fittest� is a tautology: the fittest individuals necessarily have the most offspring, because that is how fitness is defined.
That depends who defined what when and where, who represented whatever
idea with the symbol "fitness" ?
> This is apparently regarded by Creationists as some kind of knockout blow for the theory of
> evolution by natural selection.
What theory?
> Oddly enough, they also argue that natural selection is inadequate, impossible, and so on, which would be absurd if they really believed it was a tautology.
Natural selection isn't even a sentence, it has no meaning, who has
said that what idea defined by whom is inadequate for what?
> But the point I want to emphasise is that even if we define fitness by reference to reproductive success
Who is this "we" now? I haven't defined fitness as being anything, it
means nothing, it is just a symbol.
> (which is convenient, but not essential, in population genetics),
Who considers what essential in the differential equations describing
pop.genetics, certainly not Darwin he didn't know about genes and
could do differential equations , the idea that he symbolically
represented with "natural selection" had nothing to do with genes -
what idea are you referring to?
> this in no way implies that the theory of evolution by natural selection (TENS) is a tautology.
Well, who knows, that theory where by whom isn't a tautology. This
term "theory of evolution" Darwin used only twice in his book , are
you referring to the ideas he encoded with the term. As in the ideas,
because the idea is separate from the symbol string.
> TENS involves at least the following seven empirical facts or generalisations:
Maybe they do, but according to whom are they facts? Are they not
perhaps truisms. ?
> 1. Individual organisms differ in reproductive success.
Which depends on what idea and who has this idea being symbolically
represented with the symbol RS.
> This is not a tautology: it is an empirical matter of fact.
Ofcourse it isn't a tautology, it is a cluster of symbols that is
supposed to symbolically represent and idea: Only ideas can be
tautological, symbols like rocks and trees can't be tautological.
> 2. Differences in reproductive success are associated with phenotypic traits.
Who has associated what with they symbol "phenotypic" - who says so?
> Traits associated with superior reproductive success (in a given environment, etc.) may be described as adaptive.
Linux isn't adapted to its environment and neither is a tiger, Linux
and Tigers viewed as abstract representations of an algorithm in
somebodies mind are already described by their attributes.
> It is not a tautology that adaptive traits exist.
Depends who says adaptive traits and what concept they are projecting
in terms of what I have written above.
> It would be logically possible that differences in reproductive success are merely a matter of chance.
Depends who says RS and what concept he has in mind.
> In this case there would be no way of predicting whether a trait would increase in frequency from one generation to the next. After a
> succession of many generations, purely by chance, some traits might increase or decrease in frequency, but this would be genetic drift, not
> natural selection.
Some decrease, some don' t - what happens , happens.
> 3. Some adaptive traits are heritable.
Who says so, what is the concept being projected with "adaptive".
> They tend to be reproduced by genetic inheritance, even over many generations.
Truism, every act of reproduction involves genes.
> This is not a tautology.
Of course not , it is a truism.
> It would be logically possible that offspring did not share their parents� adaptive traits, or that these would disappear after a few
> generations.
Some share traits , some don't - what happens, happens.
> 5. Some mutations increase adaptiveness. This is not a tautology.
Which depends who says "adaptiveness" and how he solved the transition
matrix that maps polypeptice space into frog-space.
> 6. There is no inbuilt limit to the amount of cumulative genetic change. This is not a tautology.
Correct, at first it was a truism, the way you state it , it becomes a
truism.
> 7. Perhaps most important of all, mutations have no tendency to occur in directions favourable to adaptive traits. It is often said (and I
> have recently said it myself) that mutation is random with respect to adaptativeness, but this can be misleading.
Who says adaptiveness?
>I conclude that while population genetics may contain some tautological statements (as John
Maynard Smith once remarked, any theory involving >two lines of
algebra will contain tautologies),
Any theory contains axiomatic premises or logical validity's such as A
or not-A.
> the theory of evolution by natural selection is by no means a tautology, and rumours of its death > are, as usual, greatly exaggerated.
Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
the symbol NS?
Ron O
What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
is not a fact of nature. Just go out and demonstrate that the studies
docmenting the natural selection are wrong. You can't do that by
crying about definitions. You can try to define away the data, but
what good would that do you? Shouldn't you use the definitions that
actually work and represent something meaningful? You could just try
to understand what the scientists are saying, instead of making up
your own definitions or using the wrong one out of several examples
given in the dictionary.
Who cares if natural selection can be described as a tautology, when
natural selection isn't always true for every case of changing allele
frequencies and we have methods to determine if selection happened or
not? Look up Neutral Theory. Check out the comparative genomics
papers that are coming out. Natural selection isn't the only thing
that is claimed to account for the differences within and between
species. Have you ever heard of genetic drift or founder effects? So
what are you trying to do? Really, what does it mean when science can
determine when natural selection was not responsible for some allele
frequency change? Kind of ruins the standard dishonest creationist
tautology ploly, right? Even the standard dishonest creationist
tautology ploy can't get around the fact that natural selection is a
fact of nature. It does happen, and is happening right now in
existing populations. You can't change that fact by arguing about
definitions.
Ron Okimoto
Vend
> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
whether something is reasonable and correct?
Maybe it's an effect of your fundamentalist religious education.
Organized religion is based on authority:
Do what Jesus said, not because it is good, but because Jesus "proved"
to be a god by doing magic tricks.
backspace
> One clue. �It doesn't matter.
>
> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> is not a fact of nature.
> �Just go out and demonstrate that the studies
> docmenting the natural selection are wrong. �
What has been documented?
> You can't do that by
> crying about definitions. �You can try to define away the data, but
> what good would that do you? �
What data?
> Shouldn't you use the definitions that
> actually work and represent something meaningful?
Which definition by whom?
�You could just try
> to understand what the scientists are saying, instead of making up
Who are they?
> Who cares if natural selection can be described as a tautology, when
> natural selection isn't always true for every case of changing allele
> frequencies and we have methods to determine if selection happened or
> not? �
Selection happened or not - who did the selecting?
Look up Neutral Theory. �Check out the comparative genomics
> papers that are coming out. �Natural selection isn't the only thing
> that is claimed to account for the differences within and between
> species. �
Neither can one disprove that you have a pink unicorn hiding in your
garden. Does x + y = z ?
> Have you ever heard of genetic drift or founder effects?
did darwin know about it, if not why are you using his term then?
> �So
> what are you trying to do?
trying to figure out to which person you are referring to with what
idea he encoded using NS.
>�Really, what does it mean when science can
> determine when natural selection was not responsible for some allele
> frequency change?
Mr.science doesn't determine anything, who has determined what- who is
this person
�Kind of ruins the standard dishonest creationist
> tautology ploly, right? �Even the standard dishonest creationist
> tautology ploy can't get around the fact that natural selection is a
> fact of nature.
What exactly is a fact?
> �It does happen, and is happening right now in
> existing populations. �
What is happening?
backspace
> On 1 Mar, 13:26, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> > Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>
> Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
> whether something is reasonable and correct?
Because every scientific theory is always formally defined -somebody
always says so. With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
mechanistic descriptions.
Burkhard
Louann Miller
def08f...@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com:
(a series of inane questions [presumably riffing off his current words-
have-no-meaning meme] in response to a clear, data-rich post by Ron O which
did not contain the word 'scam')
Backster sounds a bit concussed.
chris thompson
> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
Look at the very next sentence for more information.
> > The details vary - some authors define fitness by the absolute number of offspring, some by reference to the population average, and so on -
>
> And who are they?
Why don't you go to the library, check out a pile of book on
population genetics, and find out for yourself? You've been asking
this question for years now- it's stupid and boring and pointless. If
you won't do your homework, why should anyone do it for you?
> > but roughly speaking, the fittest organism (or gene) is the one with the greatest number of offspring.
>
> You have represented an idea "greatest number of offspring" with the
> symbol fitness - why did you do this and who told you to do this,
> because I certainly didn't. Did Darwin maybe?
Is your memory so bad that you cannot recall what the second sentence
said, by the time you finish reading the third sentence?
> > It may therefore be said that the reproduction of the fittest is a tautology: the fittest individuals necessarily have the most offspring, because that is how fitness is defined.
>
> That depends who defined what when and where, who represented whatever
> idea with the symbol "fitness" ?
No it doesn't depend on that. Why would you think so? It's merely a
property of definitions.
> > This is apparently regarded by Creationists as some kind of knockout blow for the theory of
> > evolution by natural selection.
>
> What theory?
You have descended into utter banality.
snip
Chris
Erwin Moller
> On Mar 1, 2:59 pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
>> One clue. It doesn't matter.
>>
>> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
>> is not a fact of nature.
> What is a natural selection ?
"a" natural selection?
We are not counting them. One natural selection here, another natural
selection there.
It is a concept, not a material thing.
Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
basic book on the subject?
>
>> Just go out and demonstrate that the studies
>> docmenting the natural selection are wrong.
> What has been documented?
.........
Again, try the local library.
You don't need recent papers, most of the last 100 years will do.
>
>> You can't do that by
>> crying about definitions. You can try to define away the data, but
>> what good would that do you?
> What data?
Is that your lazy way of saying that you think there is no data that
helps build the case for natural selection being real?
It is hard to follow you, since you write extremely short responses.
>
>
>> Shouldn't you use the definitions that
>> actually work and represent something meaningful?
> Which definition by whom?
Yawn.
>
> You could just try
>> to understand what the scientists are saying, instead of making up
> Who are they?
>
I don't know.
Who are 'they'?
>> Who cares if natural selection can be described as a tautology, when
>> natural selection isn't always true for every case of changing allele
>> frequencies and we have methods to determine if selection happened or
>> not?
> Selection happened or not - who did the selecting?
>
You still don't have the first clue, do you?
--> library <--
Stop asking stupid questions in here and try to get a basic idea about
natural selection first.
You are a timewaster like this.
>
> Look up Neutral Theory. Check out the comparative genomics
>> papers that are coming out. Natural selection isn't the only thing
>> that is claimed to account for the differences within and between
>> species.
>
> Neither can one disprove that you have a pink unicorn hiding in your
> garden. Does x + y = z ?
Is there something you want to tell?
Try to be more clear please.
>
>> Have you ever heard of genetic drift or founder effects?
> did darwin know about it, if not why are you using his term then?
>
Get this into your thick skull: No modern biologist cares what Darwin
thought. That is only interesting from a historical point of view.
The relation a biologist has to Darwin doesn't equal the relation a
religious guy has to his imaginairy God.
>> So
>> what are you trying to do?
> trying to figure out to which person you are referring to with what
> idea he encoded using NS.
Brrt Oppppt Trraaaazzz Bruk burk!
>
>> Really, what does it mean when science can
>> determine when natural selection was not responsible for some allele
>> frequency change?
> Mr.science doesn't determine anything, who has determined what- who is
> this person
See my last remark.
You stopped making sense.
>
> Kind of ruins the standard dishonest creationist
>> tautology ploly, right? Even the standard dishonest creationist
>> tautology ploy can't get around the fact that natural selection is a
>> fact of nature.
> What exactly is a fact?
>
>> It does happen, and is happening right now in
>> existing populations.
> What is happening?
>
>
>
Backspace, a free tip: Write down what it is you are thinking excactly.
This is silly.
Erwin Moller
--
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
-- C.A.R. Hoare
Vend
> On Mar 1, 3:41 pm, Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>
> > On 1 Mar, 13:26, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > > > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> > > Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>
> > Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
> > whether something is reasonable and correct?
>
> Because every scientific theory is always formally defined -somebody
> always says so.
I don't think so.
> With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> mechanistic descriptions.
For instance?
Erwin Moller
> On Mar 1, 3:41 pm, Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>> On 1 Mar, 13:26, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>>>> In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>>> Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>> Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
>> whether something is reasonable and correct?
>
> Because every scientific theory is always formally defined -somebody
> always says so.
You don't get it.
Most scientific theories evolve (sorry for that word, I know it triggers
your hate-sensors).
So, in science it is totally unimportant who said what excactly when.
What matter is which ideas have evidence to support it.
Of course, as in all social environments, some people's words will have
more impact than other people's words.
So an authority on subject X will surely get attention when (s)he claims
something unexpected.
But the fact it is an authority doesn't give the abovementioned
unexpected claim any more credibility. Only evidence can do that.
Please drop your facination with authority.
It is mentally unhealthy.
> With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> mechanistic descriptions.
What does that mean excactly?
What are 'well reasoned mechanistic descriptions' excactly?
(I can give that my own interpretation, but since you care so much about
words instead of meaning, I think I better ask you.)
Kermit
> On Mar 1, 3:41 pm, Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>
> > On 1 Mar, 13:26, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > > > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> > > Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>
> > Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
> > whether something is reasonable and correct?
>
> Because every scientific theory is always formally defined
What do you mean by "formally"? Every scientific theory is defined,
but I don't know that it's more formal than anything else. Can you
cite where this is claimed by the scientific community?
> -somebody always says so.
Please give an example of a scientist who says this.
> With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> mechanistic descriptions.
What do you mean by "mechanistic"? If you mean something like
"lacking thought or feeling", then yes, you are correct. If you mean "
explained in terms of physical forces", we don't always (or even
usually) explain it in those terms; natural selection and other
processes of evolution happen on a higher level of organization of
physical processes than simple physics. It will be used at times to
discuss energy usage, strength of muscles and bones, etc., but physics
is a poor tool for describing mating behavior and adaptations in diet.
Kermit
Kermit
Was it Arendt who said "Evil is banal"?
Deliberately embracing ignorance, and actively fighting to spread it,
may not seem as horrendous as a serial killer, but in the end the anti-
science activists may cause more grief.
Kermit
Kermit
backspace
> What do you mean by "formally"? Every scientific theory is defined,
> but I don't know that it's more formal than anything else. Can you
> cite where this is claimed by the scientific community?
Ok, then show me on wikipedia what is the formal definition of the
modern
synthesis or Neo-Darwinism as it was called . On the MS page, you will
note that they never actually get around to defining what is the MS in
terms of the transition matrix that transforms chemicals into humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis
"There is no canonical definition of neo-Darwinism, and surprisingly
few writers on the subject seem to consider it necessary to spell out
precisely what it is that they are discussing. This is especially
curious in view of the controversy which dogs the theory, for one
might have thought that a first step towards resolving the dispute
over its status would be to decide upon a generally acceptable
definition over it. ... Of course, the lack of firm definition does,
as we shall see, make the theory much easier to defend." P.T. Saunders
& M.W. Ho, "Is Neo-Darwinism Falsifiable? - And Does It Matter?",
Nature and System (1982) 4:179-196, p. 179.
> > With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> > mechanistic descriptions.
> What do you mean by "mechanistic"? �If you mean something like
> "lacking thought or feeling", then yes, you are correct. If you mean "
> explained in terms of physical forces", we don't always (or even
> usually) explain it in those terms; natural selection and other
> processes of evolution happen on a higher level of organization of
> physical processes than simple physics.
What is a natural selection? Who has encoded for what concept using
the term.
> It will be used at times to
> discuss energy usage, strength of muscles and bones, etc.,
By whom, and what is the concept that he is invoking with NS.
backspace
> >> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> >> is not a fact of nature.
> > What is a natural selection ?
> Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
> basic book on the subject?
Ok, here is the concept as defined by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
"...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
reproduce become more common in a population over successive
generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
There is just a slight problem: Who says so? No citation is given,
nobody knows who wrote that on Wikipedia. There is no meaning without
intent, the quote is a collection of symbols, they have no meaning:
They mean nothing. They can only represent symbolically an idea: What
idea and by whom?
Ray Martinez
> http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>
> > The details vary - some authors define fitness by the absolute number of offspring, some by reference to the population average, and so on -
>
> And who are they?
>
> > �but roughly speaking, the fittest organism (or gene) is the one with the greatest number of offspring.
>
> You have represented an idea "greatest number of offspring" with the
> symbol fitness - why did you do this and who told you to do this,
> because I certainly didn't. Did Darwin maybe?
>
> > generations.
>
> Some share traits , some don't - what happens, happens.
>
> > 5. Some mutations increase adaptiveness. This is not a tautology.
>
> Which depends who says "adaptiveness" and how he solved the transition
> matrix that maps polypeptice space into frog-space.
>
> > 6. There is no inbuilt limit to the amount of cumulative genetic change. This is not a tautology.
>
> Correct, at first it was a truism, the way you state it , it becomes a
> truism.
>
> > 7. Perhaps most important of all, mutations have no tendency to occur in directions favourable to adaptive traits. It is often said (and I
> > have recently said it myself) that mutation is random with respect to adaptativeness, but this can be misleading.
>
> Who says adaptiveness?
>
> >I conclude that while population genetics may contain some tautological statements (as John
>
> Maynard Smith once remarked, any theory involving >two lines of
> algebra will contain tautologies),
>
> Any theory contains axiomatic premises or logical validity's such as A
> or not-A.
>
> > the theory of evolution by natural selection is by no means a tautology, and rumours of its death > are, as usual, greatly exaggerated.
>
> Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
> are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
> reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
> the symbol NS?
The author of the link provided no definitions because he or she
assumes a certain amount of facts in order to get to the reason-for-
being or point of their essay. Definitions, of course, are very
important. But the whole point of this particular essay is to
establish that natural selection is a list of facts. The implication
being, in turn, that this list of facts, in conjunction with random
mutation, acts as a creative force. Excluding random mutation,
everything is supported except the implication that the facts act as a
creative force. That part is assumed based on the facts. In short, the
essay is defending a just-so story.
Ray
aganunitsi
Fine, I said it. I made up the whole damn thing. My theory of
evolution via natural selection is all mine. Now that you know who
said it, disprove the validity of it.
Kermit
> On Mar 1, 5:29�pm, Kermit <unrestrained_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What do you mean by "formally"? Every scientific theory is defined,
> > but I don't know that it's more formal than anything else. Can you
> > cite where this is claimed by the scientific community?
>
> Ok, then show me on wikipedia what is the formal definition of the
> modern synthesis or Neo-Darwinism as it was called .
If you look closely, you'll see that *you were the one who made this
claim. IANAS, bu ti am related to several, and know others, and I
don't remember any reference to any formal definition of a theory. You
seem to be saying that you have no justification for that claim.
> On the MS page, you will
> note that they never actually get around to defining what is the MS in
> terms of the transition matrix that transforms chemicals into humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis
I would think that an encyclopedia article on the subject - even a
short one - would give you a pretty good idea what it is.
>
> "There is no canonical definition of neo-Darwinism,
Correct. Science has no canon.
> and surprisingly
> few writers on the subject seem to consider it necessary to spell out
> precisely what it is that they are discussing.
Yes. If one is not writing an introductory textbook, why should one
redefine fundamental concepts in the field?
> This is especially
> curious in view of the controversy which dogs the theory, for one
> might have thought that a first step towards resolving the dispute
> over its status
In science, the status of a theory is determined by how well it fits
the data, and how detailed and correct its predictions are.
> would be to decide upon a generally acceptable
> definition over it.
If it's a new concept, the writers of the first paper (or sometimes
book) will define what they mean by it in that paper. After that, if
others find the concept useful, they will probably continue to use
the word. As more is learned, the meaning of the word may change
considerably.
> ... Of course, the lack of firm definition does,
> as we shall see, make the theory much easier to defend." P.T. Saunders
> & M.W. Ho, "Is Neo-Darwinism Falsifiable? - And Does It Matter?",
> Nature and System (1982) 4:179-196, p. 179.
Oh, nonsense.
How well the theory explains the data is what counts.
Your desperate and obsessive word play is:
1. Childish.
2. Bad linguistics.
3. Does nothing to make the data go away.
You and I are literally cousins to earthworms. Too bad if you don't
like it.
>
> > > With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> > > mechanistic descriptions.
> > What do you mean by "mechanistic"? �If you mean something like
> > "lacking thought or feeling", then yes, you are correct. If you mean "
> > explained in terms of physical forces", we don't always (or even
> > usually) explain it in those terms; natural selection and other
> > processes of evolution happen on a higher level of organization of
> > physical processes than simple physics.
>
> What is a natural selection? Who has encoded for what concept using
> the term.
Natural selection is not measured in integers. Your determined
ignorance only makes you incommunicative, not a threat to science.
Nobody "encodes" language as a deliberate act. Nobody is responsible
for certain words in common usage, except perhaps weights and
measures.
>
> > It will be used at times to
> > discuss energy usage, strength of muscles and bones, etc.,
>
> By whom, and what is the concept that he is invoking with NS.
There is no "he". We have explained how NS is used by the scientific
community.
I know that you think babbling without saying anything is miraculous,
but it is not.
The miracle recorded in your holy book called "speaking in tongues"
was a description of the apostles *talking to people, not babbling
incoherently. Philosophy should be used to facilitate clear thinking
and communication, not prevent them. Linguistics should be used to
study how people talk, not used as an excuse to say nothing.
Kermit
backspace
> > Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
> > are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
> > reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
> > the symbol NS?
> The author of the link provided no definitions because he or she
> assumes a certain amount of facts in order to get to the reason-for-
> being or point of their essay. Definitions, of course, are very
> important. But the whole point of this particular essay is to
> establish that natural selection is a list of facts. The implication
> being, in turn, that this list of facts, in conjunction with random
> mutation, acts as a creative force. Excluding random mutation,
> everything is supported except the implication that the facts act as a
> creative force. That part is assumed based on the facts. In short, the
> essay is defending a just-so story.
>
> Ray
I broadly agree but note that "random mutation" has to do with genetic
changes, something Darwin knew nothing about. My focus is on how the
term NS was used in the context of 1859, their reference frame with
their knowledge....... which had nothing to do with genes.
Genes and "random mutations" is important to discuss in our context
but the most important concept is realizing that NS has no meaning, it
was and remains merely the symbolic rerpresentation of an idea. That
idea in 1859 wasn't genes but something else: The reformulation or
reintroduction, co-option , embedding of Aristotle, Democritus,
Heraclitus and Empedocles ideas which in turn are based on Sumerian
and Babilonian pagan religions which had battle for survival theme
between fire and water, Gods and and seamonsters etc..... which today
is the battle between the Alleles.
Thus overly fixation on "random mutation" especially from Dembski,
the ID crowd is really doing damage to the understanding the
underlying Pagan myths we are dealing with.
RAM
> On Mar 1, 4:58 pm, Erwin Moller
>
> > >> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > >> is not a fact of nature.
> > > What is a natural selection ?
> > Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
> > basic book on the subject?
>
> Ok, here is the concept as defined by
> �http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> "...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
> that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
> reproduce become more common in a population over successive
> generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
>
> There is just a slight problem:
There is no slight problem. You just want to avoid empirical reality
like most religious dogmatist.
> Who says so?
Would you believe it if God came and told you evolution is an
empirical reality and biology is on the right track to understanding
human evolution?
> �No citation is given,
God doesn't give citations why do you believe in a human text called
the Bible?
How do you know what the real meaning is of Mark 16:16-18?
Is that why you are so confused?
> nobody knows who wrote that on Wikipedia.
Nobody knows who wrote most of the Bible either.
> �There is no meaning without
> intent,
So! Your intent in engaging in linguistic nihilism when dealing with
evolution is to destroy meaning. Who would have guessed!
> the quote is a collection of symbols,
So is the Bible.
> they have no meaning:
Niether does Revelations and much of the Bible! Genesis is full of
contradictory information. Genesis is almost meaningless except as a
basis for fundamentalist to distort empirical reality.
> They mean nothing.
Niether does the Bible unless you have the intent to create a
constructed symbolic social reality.
> They can only represent symbolically an idea: What
> idea and by whom?
Biblical interpretations are always suspect. They evolve with each
new fundamentalists generation and they often drop the truth (a
dysfunctional empirical allele for fundamentalist). Mark 16:16-18!
I await with complete confidence your usual meaningless reply.
chris thompson
Well duh. Go get a book or a pile of journal articles, dipwad. Then
you can see exactly who said what, how it was said, and why. What
makes you think the world revolves around Wikipedia? No one I know
considers Wikipedia a first-line source for science.
Chris
Steven L.
"backspace" <steph...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:5caa3602-3a88-4d85...@33g2000yqj.googlegroups.com:
> On Mar 1, 5:29�pm, Kermit <unrestrained_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > What do you mean by "formally"? Every scientific theory is defined,
> > but I don't know that it's more formal than anything else. Can you
> > cite where this is claimed by the scientific community?
>
> Ok, then show me on wikipedia what is the formal definition of the
> modern
> synthesis or Neo-Darwinism as it was called . On the MS page, you will
> note that they never actually get around to defining what is the MS in
> terms of the transition matrix that transforms chemicals into humans.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis
That's because chemicals do NOT "get transformed into humans" by any
deterministic process. There is no a priori reason why we humans should
exist at all.
A better analogy would come from probability theory: A *Markov tree*,
in which at any time there are a number of possible outcomes, each with
a certain probability of occurrence. And that the product of all the
probabilities along one branch of the tree gives the probability of
occurrence for that leaf event.
In the case of the evolution of species, at any time there are a vast
number of possible futures, so the branching factor of the decision tree
is very large. We happen to exist at the far end of one of those
possibilities.
Evolution is a stochastic and probabilistic process. No evolutionary
step is guaranteed. (Heck, if that bolide hadn't smashed into the Earth
65 million years ago, mammals might never have evolved a tool-using
species.) Perhaps that might help you to understand the evolutionary
synthesis better.
> By whom, and what is the concept that he is invoking with NS.
You're right about one thing:
We haven't yet decided whether mathematics is invented by us or
discovered by us. This includes the aforementioned laws of probability.
-- Steven L.
Eric Root
>
> > >> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > >> is not a fact of nature.
> > > What is a natural selection ?
> > Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
> > basic book on the subject?
>
> Ok, here is the concept as defined by
> �http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> "...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
> that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
> reproduce become more common in a population over successive
> generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
>
> There is just a slight problem:
Nope, not a problem. Who says so is entirely irrelevant.
(snip lie)
Eric Root
Grandbank
You know, someone who writes a paragraph like this and assumes that
*it will convey meaning has a long way to climb before they even reach
sophomoric.
KP
Eric Root
>
> > What do you mean by "formally"? Every scientific theory is defined,
> > but I don't know that it's more formal than anything else. Can you
> > cite where this is claimed by the scientific community?
>
> Ok, then show me on wikipedia what is the formal definition of the
> modern
> synthesis or Neo-Darwinism as it was called .
Not important.
(snip baloney)
Eric Root
haiku jones
> On Mar 1, 4:58 pm, Erwin Moller
>
> > >> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > >> is not a fact of nature.
> > > What is a natural selection ?
> > Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
> > basic book on the subject?
>
> Ok, here is the concept as defined by
> �http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> "...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
> that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
> reproduce become more common in a population over successive
> generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
>
> There is just a slight problem: Who says so? �No citation is given,
> nobody knows who wrote that on Wikipedia. �There is no meaning without
> intent,
> the quote is a collection of symbols,
Huh? What? Are you trying to tell us something?
> they have no meaning:
What? What? C'mon man, focus! Making random
grunting sounds like that; we can't help you.
> They mean nothing.
Somebody help me here? I'm just getting a string of
meaningless sounds. Anyone else?
> They can only represent symbolically an idea: What
> idea and by whom?
Little Timmy's fallen down the well again?
Haiku Jones
Iain
>Is Natural Selection a tautology?
It's not a tautology because there's no verb.
It's just a noun phrase, the name of a phenomenon.
Case closed.
As I've already told you this before, why did you reopen it?
--Iain
hersheyh
NS is neither a 'force' nor 'creative'. It is an adaptive mechanism.
That is, it is a multigenerational process that modifies an organism
to its particular environmental niche and, to the extent that
sufficient variation from, ultimately, random mutation is present,
tracks changes in the environmental niche by generating each
generation to better fit the environment its parents faced.
Adaptation is no more 'creative' than the path that a river takes is
'creative'. The path a river takes is largely an adaptation to the
geologic environment it faces. [Except when the river produces
meanders, which is pure chance drift...which, not coincidentally, also
occurs to the genomes of organisms over time.]
> Excluding random mutation,
Are you really claiming that mutation is not random wrt need? Ever
hear of Luria and Delbruck?
> everything is supported except the implication that the facts act as a
> creative force.
NS acts as an adaptive mechanism, not (except metaphorically) a
Kermit
> On Mar 1, 9:28 pm, Ray Martinez <pyramid...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > > Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
> > > are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
> > > reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
> > > the symbol NS?
> > The author of the link provided no definitions because he or she
> > assumes a certain amount of facts in order to get to the reason-for-
> > being or point of their essay. Definitions, of course, are very
> > important. But the whole point of this particular essay is to
> > establish that natural selection is a list of facts. The implication
> > being, in turn, that this list of facts, in conjunction with random
> > mutation, acts as a creative force. Excluding random mutation,
> > everything is supported except the implication that the facts act as a
> > creative force. That part is assumed based on the facts. In short, the
> > essay is defending a just-so story.
>
> > Ray
>
> I broadly agree but note that "random mutation" has to do with genetic
> changes, something Darwin knew nothing about. My focus is on how the
> term NS was used in the context of 1859, their reference frame with
> their knowledge....... which had nothing to do with genes.
In 64 AD, the city of Rome burned. It had nothing to do with
combustion of carbon and a few other combustibles, I suppose, because
nobody then knew modern chemistry.
>
> Genes and "random mutations" is important to discuss in our context
> but the most important concept is realizing that NS has no meaning, it
> was and remains merely the symbolic rerpresentation of an idea.
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!
It ...has no meaning,
but ...it is the symbolic representation of an idea.
Hahahhahahaha!
> That
> idea in 1859 wasn't genes but something else: The reformulation or
> reintroduction, co-option , embedding of Aristotle, Democritus,
> Heraclitus and Empedocles ideas which in turn are based on Sumerian
> and Babilonian pagan religions which had battle for survival theme
> between fire and water, Gods and and seamonsters etc.....
It doesn't matter where some of the roots of the ideas come from, it
only matters what they mean to the current user.
> which today is the battle between the Alleles.
No, this is a model that describes reality. Perhaps that is what
confuses you.
>
> Thus overly fixation on "random mutation" especially from Dembski,
> the ID crowd is really doing damage to the understanding the
> underlying Pagan myths we are dealing with.
Dembski (though an idiot) is still intelligent enough to understand
where the danger to his religion lies; it is in the nature of reality
and the model that successfully explains it. You are determined, as is
Ray in his own way, to remain an outlier even among your fellow
Creationists.
Kermit
marks...@yahoo.com
K, quick lesson on wiki stuff. On that page click the HISTORY tab .
That shows you who edited the page and the diffs will let you find
which author added what parts. The 69 references and the further
reading links should find you the original sources.
If you challange a statement then edit it and add a {{fact}} tag . It
should not take long for someone to add a ref for it.
David Hare-Scott
Recalling his posts over the last few months he seems to go through an
iterative process of re-processing his material. He is adds in references
that have cropped up in his reading, he then edits the result discarding the
parts that are less relevant (to him) and re-posts what is left. Next
month the same again based on this month. So his pet ideas about 'words
have no meaning' and 'natural selection is a tautology' persist in a
constantly mutating framework. To me the tract is getting progressively
less comprehensible and his responses are getting more robotic.
I wonder if his real life is spiralling down too. It would be sad. A
number of people who I have met who have such disordered thinking have gone
on to schizophrenia.
David
Eric Root
Indeed. That it is the symbolic representation of an idea shows that
it has meaning. That he said what he did is the symbolic
representation of the idea that he is a moron.
Eric Root
No, sentences and phrases can be tautologies, but physical phenomena
can't be; "natural selection" might be tautology but natural
selection is a natural phenomenon.
Eric Root
Eric Root
> On Mar 1, 3:41 pm, Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>
>
> > >http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
> > > > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
> > > Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>
> > whether something is reasonable and correct?
>
> always says so. With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
> mechanistic descriptions.
But "who" isn't important, nor could it be. Who said it has nothing
to do with its truth and accuracy, and thus is not relevant to
origins. Thus, you should darken the door of some linguistic or maybe
even postmodern forum, since nothing you do here has any relevance to
origins.
Eric Root
Eric Root
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mar 1, 4:58�pm, Erwin Moller
>> >> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
>> >> is not a fact of nature.
>> > What is a natural selection ?
>
>> Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
>> basic book on the subject?
>
>Ok, here is the concept as defined by
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
>"...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
>that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
>reproduce become more common in a population over successive
>generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
>
>There is just a slight problem: Who says so? No citation is given,
irrelevant. such an argument is limitless. 'who said' is irrelevant.
what IS relevant to science is 'is the idea testable'
and, yes, evolution is.
creationism? meaningless. 2000 years of failure
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>
>> In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>
>Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
who cares?
>
>> The details vary - some authors define fitness by the absolute number of offspring, some by reference to the population average, and so on -
>
>And who are they?
who cares?
>
>
>
>> the theory of evolution by natural selection is by no means a tautology, and rumours of its death > are, as usual, greatly exaggerated.
>
>Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
>are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
>reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
>the symbol NS?
he keeps recycling the same stuff. it's irrelevant. natural selection
can not be a tautology because evolution has multiple mechanisms and
they can be lab tested.
thus the definition of tautology does not hold and all his creationist
babbling means nothing
of course, he believes he speaks in tongues and pretends THAT has
meaning...as well as he objects to the idea that he is different than
his parents.
he knows nothing of language or of science
he's a good creationist
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mar 1, 3:41�pm, Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>> On 1 Mar, 13:26, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
>>
>> > > In population genetics, fitness is usually defined by reference to reproductive success.
>>
>> > Who defined it, who said reproductive success?
>>
>> Why are you so concerned about who said something rather than the
>> whether something is reasonable and correct?
>
>Because every scientific theory is always formally defined -somebody
>always says so. With evolution , we aren't dealing with well reasoned
>mechanistic descriptions.
theories are cumulative. even einstein's theory of relativity has been
modified, refined and extended.
so your view is incorrect.
and yes, to those of us who are scientists, evolution is well
reasoned, defined and testable
your wizard of oz religion, however, isnt
Ron O
> On Mar 1, 2:59�pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:> One clue. �It doesn't matter.
>
> > What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > is not a fact of nature.
>
> What is a natural selection ?
total loser.
Ron Okimoto
SNIP:
backspace
> >> the theory of evolution by natural selection is by no means a tautology, and rumours of its death > are, as usual, greatly exaggerated.
> >Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
> >are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
> >reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
> >the symbol NS?
> he keeps recycling the same stuff. it's irrelevant. natural selection
> can not be a tautology because evolution has multiple mechanisms and
> they can be lab tested.
What are these mechanism , what falsification test have been devised
to test these mechanisms. ?
backspace
What idea exactly is testable. Matter can neither be created or
destroyed, did the universe make itself or was it made. What test can
one devise to show how matter didn't make itself. How did a rock turn
into DNA , fish and then a monkey. If monkeys turned into humans then
how did rocks turn into DNA.
backspace
> On Mar 1, 8:31锟絘m, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 1, 2:59锟絧m, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:> One clue. 锟絀t doesn't matter.
>
> > > What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > > is not a fact of nature.
>
> > What is a natural selection ?
>
> total loser.
>
> Ron Okimoto
> SNIP:
See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
class. Everybody must work, study and respond under the assumption
that NS isn't grammatical gargoyle from a linguistic point of view and
from a pragmatics angle that somewhere somebody somehow defined the
idea that he is representing with NS. Because NS like, dog, cat and
green has no meaning it can only symbolically represent and idea. The
symbols can change like "quark" means a specific type of cheese in
Germany, but not the idea the user was projecting.
But the very first time you say "natural , natural we are all going to
get naturaled" the Lord Jesus picks up his erasure and pulls the book
of Life closer. The angles tense, they clench their teeth...... will
this Xtian again say "natural" ....? The second time you say "natural
selection" Christ lifts up his hand. The third time ..... you have
denied your Lord, you are banished .....
You must decide between your career , high paying job and your soul.
When little Johnny gives his heart to Jesus at age 7, ask him first
"What do you want to become?" A doctor he says! Sorry Johnny ,.....
at some point in time you will have to say "natural" - , nobody can
get any biological qualification without saying "natural". What
naturaled?
backspace
> K, quick lesson on wiki stuff. On that page click the HISTORY tab .
> That shows you who edited the page and the diffs will let you find
> which author added what parts. The 69 references and the further
> reading links should find you the original sources.
> If you challange a statement then edit it and add a {{fact}} tag . It
> should not take long for someone to add a ref for it.
And if we finally track him down we find out he actually died and is
now a skeleton in front of his PC. He actually had a completely
different version, had a heart attack gave the cat a fright which
jumped on CTRL+V + Enter and "poof" that sentence appeared on
Wikipedia. The problem is that the dead author never had the intent!
He didn't really want to write that it was something he was trying to
rebut.
You see it my job to track down who wrote what, if you write something
then you must give me the citation. Cite the book, the page, the
person the means of deduction, the chain of reasoning: Who says the
favorable becomes common?
Well thus says Aristotle , from who Darwin lifted his concept as he
wrote "...... we can see here the principle of natural selection
shadowed forth......" Darwin took Aristotle's , Empedocles idea and
reformulated it, maintaining the same tautological essence and then
symbolically represented the idea with the symbol string NS. Because
NS, like green and cat has no meaning not now , not ever.
Open the a Journal of biological mathematics and note how NS is used
together with differential equations. But Darwin couldn't do math,
thus the same term is used but it can't possibly be the same concept.
Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
different idea.
Iain
Reproduction, and everyone already agrees it exists.
--Iain
Sapient Fridge
<sec...@nospam.com> writes
I don't think he's heading that way, schizophrenics tend to ramble using
word association to jump from subject to subject with only tenuous links
between them (see Timothy Sutter's posts for an example).
Backspace thinks he's managed to disprove science through semantics and
just stubbornly posts set responses. If he were brighter he'd replace
himself with a bot and go and do something more interesting with his
life.
--
sapient_...@spamsights.org ICQ #17887309 * Save the net *
Grok: http://spam.abuse.net http://www.cauce.org * nuke a spammer *
Find: http://www.samspade.org http://www.netdemon.net * today *
Kill: http://mail-abuse.com http://au.sorbs.net http://spamhaus.org
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 12:46 am, marks542...@yahoo.com wrote:
>> K, quick lesson on wiki stuff. On that page click the HISTORY tab .
>> That shows you who edited the page and the diffs will let you find
>> which author added what parts. The 69 references and the further
>> reading links should find you the original sources. If you
>> challange a statement then edit it and add a {{fact}} tag . It
>> should not take long for someone to add a ref for it.
>
> And if we finally track him down we find out he actually died and is
> now a skeleton in front of his PC. He actually had a completely
> different version, had a heart attack gave the cat a fright which
> jumped on CTRL+V + Enter and "poof" that sentence appeared on
> Wikipedia. The problem is that the dead author never had the intent!
> He didn't really want to write that it was something he was trying
> to rebut.
>
Which of course holds true just the same for Aristotle. Maybe he never
meant what you claim he did. Or the writers of the New Testament of
course, maybe they were just having a laugh <hey, let's make up a
_really_ weird religion for the kid's holiday camp at the Synagogue>
> You see it my job to track down who wrote what, if you write
> something then you must give me the citation. Cite the book, the
> page, the person the means of deduction, the chain of reasoning: Who
> says the favorable becomes common?
>
> Well thus says Aristotle ,
How do you know? Maybe he meant simply "violets are blue" and out
understanding of ancient Greek is faulty.
from who Darwin lifted his concept as he
> wrote "...... we can see here the principle of natural selection
> shadowed forth......" Darwin took Aristotle's , Empedocles idea and
> reformulated it, maintaining the same tautological essence and then
> symbolically represented the idea with the symbol string NS.
How do you I know? They might just have tried a new to if handwriting in
the texts we have from them, and never meant the content you ascribe to it
Because
> NS, like green and cat has no meaning not now , not ever.
>
The words have the meaning competent speakers of a language community
ascribe to it, and in most cases refer to objects outside language. Your
theory of linguistics is a misunderstood, inconsistent and garbled
version of speaker intent that no researcher in the field woudl consider
even for a split second.
Try as a beginners pack something like H. P.Grice "Utterer's Meaning,
Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning Foundations of Language, Vol. 4,
No. 3 (Aug., 1968), pp. 225-24
And then _please_ get _any_ standard textbook of biology and look up
Natural selection etc, because that is really all that it needs to
understand what the concepts mean.
> Open the a Journal of biological mathematics and note how NS is used
> together with differential equations. But Darwin couldn't do math,
> thus the same term is used but it can't possibly be the same concept.
>
>
It sure can. Concepts, like species, evolve. Every day for instance, new
human beings are born, this means that the extension of the concept
"human" increases every day - yet the concept remains the same and
communication remains possible.
Every day I change some of my properties, yet people are still capable
to talk about me.
We can also incrementally add to word meaning and improve our
understanding. If you learn a new language , your initial understanding
of a new concept will be more different from that of a native speaker
than when you get more proficient. Nonetheless, it is the same concept.
And if I tell my friends that my house has two bedroom and later that it
also has a both, then they do not suddenly have a new concept of my
house with a different meaning, just a more refined one.
Your inability to grasp the working of language is not an
argumentagainst re theory of evolution.
> Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
> symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
> different idea.
>
So what? Misunderstandings are always possible,. that is why language
has lots of redundancies build in, most importantly our ability to use
contextual information and also the ability to ask questions. Two
biologists (or any other scientists, or indeed people for that matter)
may have slightly different associations with a certain concept. As long
as they communicate efficiently, that does not matter a but. Once it
comes to parts of their theories where the difference matters, they will
soon find out and ask each other to give a more explicit definition of
that aspect of the term.
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 2:30 am, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
>> On Mar 1, 8:31 am, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mar 1, 2:59 pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:> One clue. It doesn't matter.
>>>> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
>>>> is not a fact of nature.
>>> What is a natural selection ?
>> total loser.
>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>> SNIP:
>
> See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> class.
Fair enough. You probably stated on your admission form that your
English is good enough to follow the course, and that was a basis for
your admission. If you use the made up word "naturaled" the third time,
this shows you were lying
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 1:52 am, bpuharic <w...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, 1 Mar 2010 10:08:41 -0800 (PST), backspace
>>
>>
>>
>> <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mar 1, 4:58 pm, Erwin Moller
>>>>>> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
>>>>>> is not a fact of nature.
>>>>> What is a natural selection ?
>>>> Why don't you go to your local library (not church library) and get a
>>>> basic book on the subject?
>>> Ok, here is the concept as defined by
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
>>> "...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
>>> that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
>>> reproduce become more common in a population over successive
>>> generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
>>> There is just a slight problem: Who says so? No citation is given,
>> irrelevant. such an argument is limitless. 'who said' is irrelevant.
>> what IS relevant to science is 'is the idea testable'
>
> What idea exactly is testable.
As far as NS is concerned, that different traits in a species
influence reproductive success in a given environment. You test is by
counting offspring, or if you want to be more sophisticated, gene
distributions.
Matter can neither be created or
> destroyed, did the universe make itself or was it made.
Has nothing to do with either NS or the theory of evolution
What test can
> one devise to show how matter didn't make itself.
Proving a negative is indeed impossible, good then that nobody tries
How did a rock turn
> into DNA ,
It didn't.
fish and then a monkey. If monkeys turned into humans then
> how did rocks turn into DNA.
It didn't
>
Burkhard
(3), 1999, pp. 980-984, for starters
Bruce Stephens
[...]
> See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> class.
Or, more likely, he'd laugh and ask what the hell I think I'm saying.
[...]
backspace
wrote:
> In message <hmhhgv$p7...@news.albasani.net>, David Hare-Scott> >> backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote in
> >> news:699a7372-a5c9-4a30-9492-
> >> def08fc61...@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com:
>
> >> (a series of inane questions [presumably riffing off his current
> >> words- have-no-meaning meme] in response to a clear, data-rich post
> >> by Ron O which did not contain the word 'scam')
>
> >> Backster sounds a bit concussed.
>
> >Recalling his posts over the last few months he seems to go through an
> >iterative process of re-processing his material. �He is adds in references
> >that have cropped up in his reading, he then edits the result discarding the
> >parts that are less relevant (to him) and re-posts what is left. � Next
> >month the same again based on this month. �So his pet ideas about 'words
> >have no meaning' and 'natural selection is a tautology' persist in a
> >constantly mutating framework. �To me the tract is getting progressively
> >less comprehensible and his responses are getting more robotic.
>
> >I wonder if his real life is spiralling down too. �It would be sad. �A
> >number of people who I have met who have such disordered thinking have gone
> >on to schizophrenia.
>
> I don't think he's heading that way, schizophrenics tend to ramble using
> word association to jump from subject to subject with only tenuous links
> between them (see Timothy Sutter's posts for an example).
>
> Backspace thinks he's managed to disprove science through semantics and
> just stubbornly posts set responses. �If he were brighter he'd replace
> himself with a bot and go and do something more interesting with his
You can turn this around and let me observe that the neo-paganists and
Aristotelians are the true bots, over and over they say "natural
selection everything gets naturaled". Just like the inquisition
torture priests, it is not me who is being a bot but the Empedoclian
pagans cloaking themselves with different terms and forcing their
tautological thinking on everybody.
backspace
> >>> "...........Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits
> >>> that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully
> >>> reproduce become more common in a population over successive
> >>> generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.............."
> >>> There is just a slight problem: Who says so? �No citation is given,
> >> irrelevant. such an argument is limitless. 'who said' is irrelevant.
> >> what IS relevant to science is 'is the idea testable'
> > What idea exactly is testable.
> � As far as NS is concerned, that different traits in a species
> influence reproductive success in a given environment. You test is by
> counting offspring, or if you want to be more sophisticated, gene
> distributions.
Who says so?
backspace
> Your inability to grasp the working of language is not an
> argumentagainst re theory of evolution.
In your own words, state the formally defined theory of Evolution ,
just like Newton's inverse square law is formally defined: What
exactly is the ToE?
> > Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
> > symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
> > different idea.
>
> So what? Misunderstandings are always possible,. that is why language
> has lots of redundancies build in, most importantly our ability to use
> contextual information and also the ability to ask questions. Two
> biologists (or any other scientists, or indeed people for that matter)
> may have slightly different associations with a certain concept. As long
> as they communicate efficiently, that does not matter a but.
It matters exactly, one mistake in 100million lines of Toyota code and
drive by wire becomes drive by death.
Burkhard
David Hare-Scott
This theme of torture and victimisation has come up before. Why do you
think you are being persecuted by evolutionists? In what way do they force
their thinking on you? What would happen if they succeeded?
David
Garamond Lethe
If there is any chance whatsoever that your communication could be
misunderstood, please refrain from doing so. After all, your text might
be corrupted in transit and we would read "Please saw off my limbs with
a butter knife!" or something equally gristly. Better to be content with
no communication at all than for you to attempt clear --- but not perfectly
clear --- communication.
backspace
> This theme of torture and victimisation has come up before. 锟絎hy do you
> think you are being persecuted by evolutionists? 锟絀n what way do they force
> their thinking on you? 锟絎hat would happen if they succeeded?
Anybody who dares question what the symbolic representation of
'natural selection' is in the various contexts is dead academically,
career over, toast. Even Chomsky is so terrified that he uses 'natural
selection' in his papers and not because he seemingly insane. Both
Chomsky and Fodor detest the term 'natural selection' for different
reasons than I perhaps, they both realize it is grammatical gargoyle.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
time......."
Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
favorability measured?
Ron O
> On Mar 2, 2:30 am, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 1, 8:31 am, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Mar 1, 2:59 pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:> One clue. It doesn't matter.
>
> > > > What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > > > is not a fact of nature.
>
> > > What is a natural selection ?
>
> > total loser.
>
> > Ron Okimoto
> > SNIP:
>
> See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> class. Everybody must work, study and respond under the assumption
> that NS isn't grammatical gargoyle from a linguistic point of view and
> from a pragmatics angle that somewhere somebody somehow defined the
> idea that he is representing with NS. Because NS like, dog, cat and
> green has no meaning it can only symbolically represent and idea. The
> symbols can change like "quark" means a specific type of cheese in
> Germany, but not the idea the user was projecting.
Imagine that some idiot was disrupting the class by going on and on
about some stupid and worthless topic. It goes on for days and days.
I've never had that happen, but if it did I would ask the counciling
center to look into the poor kid and try to get them some help. If it
kept up, I would likely have to try to get the disruptive and mentally
incompetent student removed from the class just so that the other
students would have a chance to learn something.
What did you do in the post that I called you a loser for? Can't you
learn anything? Just be honest. What possible good would giving you
definitions do? You are so out of it, you just dismiss them as being
meaningless. What you have to do is put forward your definitions.
Other people will correct your misconceptions and then you move on
after you learn something. Just try that instead of acting like a
total fool. Of course you can just go into more denial and act like
you have learned nothing, but that would be par for the course.
SNIP:
Ron Okimoto
backspace
Who are you interpreting?
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 10:42�am, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Your inability to grasp the working of language is not an
> > argumentagainst re theory of evolution.
>
> In your own words, state the formally defined theory of Evolution ,
> just like Newton's inverse square law is formally defined: What
> exactly is the ToE?
Why should I believe that my answer would have any other effect than
the other 10 times I gave it, or the hundreds of times others did.
Garamond gave you a very nice formal version.
>
> > > Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
> > > symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
> > > different idea.
>
> > So what? Misunderstandings are always possible,. that is why language
> > has lots of redundancies build in, most importantly our ability to use
> > contextual information and also the ability to ask questions. Two
> > biologists (or any other scientists, or indeed people for that matter)
> > may have slightly different associations with a certain concept. As long
> > as they communicate efficiently, that does not matter a but.
>
> It matters exactly, one mistake in 100million lines of Toyota code and
> drive by wire becomes drive by death.
Good then that we are not computers, don't you think? Despite your non-
standard use of words and grammar, people are able to get at least
some of your ideas some of the time. Human language is amazingly
robust (and that's one of the reasons why computational natural
language processing is difficult).
Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 1:19 pm, "David Hare-Scott" <sec...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> > This theme of torture and victimisation has come up before. Why do you
> > think you are being persecuted by evolutionists? In what way do they force
> > their thinking on you? What would happen if they succeeded?
>
> Anybody who dares question what the symbolic representation of
> 'natural selection' is in the various contexts is dead academically,
> career over, toast. Even Chomsky is so terrified that he uses 'natural
> selection' in his papers and not �because he seemingly insane. Both
> Chomsky and Fodor detest the term 'natural selection' for different
> reasons than I perhaps, they both realize it is grammatical gargoyle.
>
> http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> time......."
>
> Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> favorability measured?
Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
Burkhard
Nature
backspace
> >http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> > ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> > mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> > which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> > time......."
> > Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> > favorability measured?
> Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it
doesn't explain why they became more common, it says the same thing
twice. "more common" and "favorable" alludes to the same fact - it is
a rhetorical tautology.
The negative part of the tautology is Gould telling us the dinosaurs
are dead because
they were extinction prone, which is usually what the ID and YEC
latches on to.
backspace
> Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
> mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
> complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
> lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
A toyota engineer using Ethernet to signal from one CPU to another
can't invent his own pet definition of what Ethernet symbolically
represents, by arbitrarily using the spec for ATM protocol. With the
word "selection" we had a sort of an unwritten rule or law if wish
that what we mean by this, what we are encoding is a decision.
Suddenly this is no more the case, we are dealing with a form of new-
speak and is thus in the same mess as we would be if Honeywell decides
that a byte isn't 8 bits anymore but whatever they want to make it
mean: Which they obviously can do. But then no CPU would be able to
understand their CPU instructions.
Why I ask must "selection" be used if nobody made a "decision" , how
does nature make decisions? And if you strip away all the naturals and
selections, alleles, memes, phenotypes, genotypes etc. we wind up the
Empedoclian tautological core: The favorable one became common, those
not favorable didn't like the dinosaurs who died because they were
"extinction prone" - ala Gould.
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 2:59 pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > >http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> > > ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> > > mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> > > which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> > > time......."
> > > Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> > > favorability measured?
> > Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
>
> Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it
> doesn't explain why they became more common, it says the same thing
> twice. "more common" and "favorable" alludes to the same fact - it is
> a rhetorical tautology.
No they don't. "More common" and "favourable" are by no means
synonymous, look up any dictionary you want, or consult wordnet. Nor
are they hypernyms, sister terms, derivationally related or in any
other similar semantic relation.
"More common" is easily determined by counting stuff. "Favourable" in
most context isn't. Juvenile crime is becoming more common in the west
of Scotland, nobody claims it is more favourable. You need to go out
into the world, take measurements and make experiments to see if
something that is more favourable is also getting more common, that is
not a question that can be decided though linguistic analysis.
> The negative part of the tautology is Gould telling us the dinosaurs
> are dead because
> they were extinction prone, which is usually what the ID and YEC
> latches on to.
Then they should read what Gould actually said. There are several
specific theories, all testable, why dinosaurs became extinct
backspace
> > See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> > University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> > naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> > class. Everybody must work, study and respond under the assumption
> > that NS isn't grammatical gargoyle from a linguistic point of view and
> > from a pragmatics angle that somewhere somebody somehow defined the
> > idea that he is representing with NS. Because NS like, dog, cat and
> > green has no meaning it can only symbolically represent and idea. The
> > symbols can change like "quark" means a specific type of cheese in
> > Germany, but not the idea the user was projecting.
> Imagine that some idiot was disrupting the class by going on and on
> about some stupid and worthless topic.
The problem is that medical students, Xtians, YEC have to do a course
in your Empedoclian tautological thinking where they have to say: The
dinosaurs died because they were "extinction prone" and therefore
there is no God. Or as Aristotle put it "....... we are result of
accident because those that were constituted weren't perishable and
those non constituted were perishable...."
The neo-Aristotelians is forcing everybody to think like them ,
polluting the sciences from biology, cosmology, physics to math ,
religion ,politics everything with their pagan battle for survival
myths.
Kermit
> On Mar 2, 2:19�pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > > See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> > > University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> > > naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> > > class. Everybody must work, study and respond under the assumption
> > > that NS isn't grammatical gargoyle from a linguistic point of view and
> > > from a pragmatics angle that somewhere somebody somehow defined the
> > > idea that he is representing with NS. Because NS like, dog, cat and
> > > green has no meaning it can only symbolically represent and idea. The
> > > symbols can change like "quark" means a specific type of cheese in
> > > Germany, but not the idea the user was projecting.
> > Imagine that some idiot was disrupting the class by going on and on
> > about some stupid and worthless topic.
>
> The problem is that medical students, Xtians, YEC have to do a course
> in your Empedoclian tautological thinking where they have to say:
Very good! Now you finally start to make claims about reality that can
be evaluated. Let's see what they are:
> The dinosaurs died because they were "extinction prone"
No, actually they were very well adapted. They weren't "extinction
prone" at all, and evolutionary scientists don't say anything like
that. The non-avian dinosaurs and other organisms which went extinct
simply couldn't handle the sudden and dramatic changes brought about
by the meteorite strike. If the changes had been different - say , a
sudden drop in temperature - then a different assortment of organisms
would have gone extinct.
> and therefore there is no God.
No, scientists don't think illogically. The conclusion above does not
follow from any observations in geology or biology. Science has much
to say about the literal interpretations of some myths (for instance,
the belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old), but it
says nothing about things the results of which cannot be directly
observed, such as gods, souls, or aliens in other solar systems.
Many scientists are theists; good science has been done by Muslims,
Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, and others. There are several Evangelical
Christians doing good paleontology. They would be puzzled by your
assertions that science concludes there are no gods.
> Or as Aristotle put it "....... we are result of
> accident because those that were constituted weren't perishable and
> those non constituted were perishable...."
Who cares what Aristotle said, except historians of philosophy?
>
> The neo-Aristotelians is forcing everybody to think like them ,
> polluting the sciences from biology, cosmology, physics to math ,
> religion ,politics everything with their pagan battle for survival
> myths.
Actually, scientists are just telling you what they have discovered of
the nature of reality so far. They do not do politics or religion qua
scientists. It's your problem, not theirs, if you don't like the
nature of reality.
See how much better dialog goes when you stop claiming that all your
words are nonsense? We can get down to brass tacks, so to speak.
Kermit
hersheyh
> On Mar 2, 9:24 am, Sapient Fridge <use_reply_addr...@spamsights.org>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > In message <hmhhgv$p7...@news.albasani.net>, David Hare-Scott
> > <sec...@nospam.com> writes
>
> > >Louann Miller wrote:
> > >> backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote in
> > >> news:699a7372-a5c9-4a30-9492-
> > >> def08fc61...@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com:
>
> > >> (a series of inane questions [presumably riffing off his current
> > >> words- have-no-meaning meme] in response to a clear, data-rich post
> > >> by Ron O which did not contain the word 'scam')
>
> > >> Backster sounds a bit concussed.
>
> > >Recalling his posts over the last few months he seems to go through an
> > >iterative process of re-processing his material. He is adds in references
> > >that have cropped up in his reading, he then edits the result discarding the
> > >parts that are less relevant (to him) and re-posts what is left. Next
> > >month the same again based on this month. So his pet ideas about 'words
> > >have no meaning' and 'natural selection is a tautology' persist in a
> > >constantly mutating framework. To me the tract is getting progressively
> > >less comprehensible and his responses are getting more robotic.
As backspace has pointed out, for words to transmit the *ideas* that
they stand for, one must have an observer *capable* of understanding
the words. A lecture on natural selection in Russian would be
meaningless gibberish to me. Backspace has demonstrated that it is
impossible for him to understand what the words "natural selection"
means and that he has no interest in understanding the underlying
concept (at least in modern English, a language he pretends to know).
That makes him not only as ignorant as a rock but as ignorant as an
uninterested rock.
>
> > >I wonder if his real life is spiralling down too. It would be sad. A
> > >number of people who I have met who have such disordered thinking have gone
> > >on to schizophrenia.
>
> > I don't think he's heading that way, schizophrenics tend to ramble using
> > word association to jump from subject to subject with only tenuous links
> > between them (see Timothy Sutter's posts for an example).
>
> > Backspace thinks he's managed to disprove science through semantics and
> > just stubbornly posts set responses. If he were brighter he'd replace
> > himself with a bot and go and do something more interesting with his
>
> You can turn this around and let me observe that the neo-paganists and
> Aristotelians are the true bots, over and over they say "natural
> selection everything gets naturaled".
Evidence to point. I have *never* read any discussion of "natural
selection" (*except* the ignorant ramblings of backspace) where even
the non-experts on t.o. say that natural selection means that
everything gets naturaled. It doesn't even make gramatical sense
(natural is obviously a modifying adjective rather than a verb)! This
is clear evidence that backspace is the dumb rock of an impossibly
stupid observer who ignores the ideas being transmitted by others and
simply replaces them with nonsense of his own delusional mind. Again,
as he points out, to transmit ideas with words, one must have an
*observer* capable of understanding the words. Backspace has
repeatedly demonstrated that he is not such an observer.
> Just like the inquisition
> torture priests,
In the Inquisition, it was the priests who were doing the torturing.
The heretics and pagans were on the receiving end. But given
backspace's proclivity with language, he would not recognize
waterboarding as torture, nor the rack, nor the auto-da-fe, nor...
> it is not me who is being a bot but the Empedoclian
> pagans cloaking themselves with different terms and forcing their
> tautological thinking on everybody.
No. We are trying to explain a non-tautologous idea. You are putting
your fingers in your ears and yelling "La, la, la, la. I can't hear
you." at the top of your lungs. The problem is at the end where the
observer is, not the end with the instructors.
Garamond Lethe
<snip>
> Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
> mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
> complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
> lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
We also know, a priori, that encoding such programs is wasteful: any
program can transformed into an equivalent program that uses at least
one fewer instruction.
Combining these two ideas, we arrive at the obvious conclusion that
any program can be reduced to a single instruction, and that this
single instruction will be wrong....
Kermit
I googled
testing "differential reproductive success"
and got over 218,000 hits
Here's the first three:
http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/93/6/389
"The Effect of Differential Reproductive Success on Population Genetic
Structure: Correlations of Life History With Matrilines in Humpback
Whales of the Gulf of Maine"
http://www.springerlink.com/content/46773k506g62h114/
"Polymix breeding with paternity analysis in Populus : a test for
differential reproductive success (DRS) among pollen donors"
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3809149
"Differential Reproductive Success of Ospreys in New Jersey"
You could have done this, but perhaps it never occurred to you because
you look for vindication by searching obtuse philosophers and
linguists, rather than people who actually study nature. Your problems
are with reality, but you can't refute the world around us, so you
frantically wave your hands in distraction techniques. This is sad.
Kermit
Garamond Lethe
>> Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
>> mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
>> complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
>> lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
>
> A toyota engineer using Ethernet to signal from one CPU to another
> can't invent his own pet definition of what Ethernet symbolically
> represents,
Why not?
> by arbitrarily using the spec for ATM protocol.
I don't see a problem with this.
> With the
> word "selection" we had a sort of an unwritten rule or law if wish
> that what we mean by this, what we are encoding is a decision.
I don't see a problem with this, either.
> Suddenly this is no more the case, we are dealing with a form of new-
> speak and is thus in the same mess as we would be if Honeywell decides
> that a byte isn't 8 bits anymore but whatever they want to make it
> mean:
"Historically, a byte was the number of bits (typically 6, 7, 8, or 9)
used to encode a character of text in a computer... The size of a byte
is typically hardware dependent..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
> Which they obviously can do.
Yup.
> But then no CPU would be able to
> understand their CPU instructions.
That's currently the case, yes. (SSEn instructions don't tend to
work well on processors that implement SSE(n-1) instructions, for
example.)
> Why I ask must "selection" be used if nobody made a "decision"
Several people have made decisions, both about selection and byte size.
> , how
> does nature make decisions?
Chemistry, mostly.
> And if you strip away all the naturals and
> selections, alleles, memes, phenotypes, genotypes etc. we wind up the
> Empedoclian tautological core: The favorable one became common, those
> not favorable didn't like the dinosaurs who died because they were
> "extinction prone" - ala Gould.
So?
Burkhard
> On Mar 2, 2:58�pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
> > mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
> > complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
> > lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
>
> A toyota engineer using Ethernet to signal from one CPU to another
> can't invent his own pet definition of what Ethernet symbolically
> represents, by arbitrarily using the spec for ATM protocol. �With the
> word "selection" we had a sort of an unwritten rule or law if wish
> that what we mean by this, what we are encoding is a decision.
>
> Suddenly this is no more the case, we are dealing with a form of new-
> speak and is thus in the same mess as we would be if Honeywell decides
> that a byte isn't 8 bits anymore but whatever they want to make it
> mean: Which they obviously can do. But then no CPU would be able to
> understand their CPU instructions.
And the human ability to understand language is different from the
protocols of a computer. your point?
>
> Why I ask must "selection" be used if nobody made a "decision" , how
> does nature make decisions?
It doesn't.
And if you strip away all the naturals and
> selections, alleles, memes, phenotypes, genotypes etc. �we wind up the
> Empedoclian tautological core:
If you strip away all the empirical content, then you end up wit
little left. That is true. So don't
The favorable one became common, those
> not favorable didn't
Which still isn't a tautology, no matter how often you make this false
claim.
Steven L.
"sapient_...@spamsights.org" <sapient_...@spamsights.org>
wrote in message news:JX19W0EC...@spamsights.org:
> In message <hmhhgv$p7l$1...@news.albasani.net>, David Hare-Scott
> <sec...@nospam.com> writes
> >Louann Miller wrote:
> >> backspace <steph...@gmail.com> wrote in
> >> news:699a7372-a5c9-4a30-9492-
> >> def08f...@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com:
> >>
> >> (a series of inane questions [presumably riffing off his current
> >> words- have-no-meaning meme] in response to a clear, data-rich post
> >> by Ron O which did not contain the word 'scam')
> >>
> >> Backster sounds a bit concussed.
> >
> >Recalling his posts over the last few months he seems to go through an
> >iterative process of re-processing his material. He is adds in references
> >that have cropped up in his reading, he then edits the result discarding the
> >parts that are less relevant (to him) and re-posts what is left. Next
> >month the same again based on this month. So his pet ideas about 'words
> >have no meaning' and 'natural selection is a tautology' persist in a
> >constantly mutating framework. To me the tract is getting progressively
> >less comprehensible and his responses are getting more robotic.
> >
> >I wonder if his real life is spiralling down too. It would be sad. A
> >number of people who I have met who have such disordered thinking have gone
> >on to schizophrenia.
>
> I don't think he's heading that way, schizophrenics tend to ramble using
> word association to jump from subject to subject with only tenuous links
> between them (see Timothy Sutter's posts for an example).
>
> Backspace thinks he's managed to disprove science through semantics and
> just stubbornly posts set responses
People like him don't think that evolution is science. They think it's
philosophy.
And yes, some philosophical questions can be shown to be meaningless
through careful linguistic analysis.
But as Ron O. pointed out, the experimentally verified reality just
won't go away, despite all the semantic analysis.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
"backspace" <steph...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:c18e5557-6ce3-43c0...@o3g2000yqb.googlegroups.com:
> On Mar 2, 2:59�pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> > >http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> > > ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> > > mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> > > which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> > > time......."
>
> > > Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> > > favorability measured?
>
> > Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
>
> Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it
> doesn't explain why they became more common, it says the same thing
> twice. "more common" and "favorable" alludes to the same fact - it is
> a rhetorical tautology.
Not at all.
Consider the dinosaurs.
Their fitness was determined by their size, their upright posture, their
ferocity, their adaptability to many environments.
But along came this meteorite, see, and boom! No more dinosaurs.
That was an accident--a cosmic accident.
Now it's obvious that the dinosaurs' fitness for the environment that
they inhabited, had nothing to do with their ability to survive a
meteorite strike. That was a matter of bad luck. The traits that made
them dominate the planet for so long--size, ferocity, upright
posture--didn't save them from the meteorite strike (and perhaps their
great size made them more vulnerable).
So "favorable" and "more common" are NOT a tautology about
survival--because bad luck can always intervene.
You must admit that RANDOM factors are not tautological.
You need to learn something about probability theory. Evolution is a
stochastic process. The fact that a species has certain favorable
traits does NOT mean it will necessarily survive. It may go extinct
someday anyway.
It's not a tautology to claim that "Phil Ivey [one of the world's
greatest poker players to date] is more likely to win the next poker
game he plays." Because poker is a game of chance. He might still lose
due to bad luck--a weak hand, or [heaven forbid] a sudden massive heart
attack.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
> Open the a Journal of biological mathematics and note how NS is used
> together with differential equations. But Darwin couldn't do math,
> thus the same term is used but it can't possibly be the same concept.
> Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
> symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
> different idea.
So why aren't you spending as much time claiming that quantum mechanics
is meaningless?
Why this single-minded focus on Natural Selection?
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
> Why I ask must "selection" be used if nobody made a "decision" , how
> does nature make decisions?
By the laws of probability, something you just refuse to accept.
We live in a stochastic Universe. Futures are not predetermined.
When someone wins a state Lottery, no one made a "decision" to make that
person the winner.
The dinosaurs were NOT "extinction prone" at all. They were successful
for 160 million years in all kinds of climates.
They died because of a freak accident--a million to one shot--of a
bolide strike on the Earth.
If that meteorite had taken a trajectory only 100,000 km different--a
tiny amount in astronomical terms--it would have missed the Earth. And
the dinosaurs might very well still be here--and you and I would not be
here.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
"backspace" <steph...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:0f57a728-f87e-4836...@d2g2000yqa.googlegroups.com:
> On Mar 2, 2:30�am, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
> > On Mar 1, 8:31�am, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Mar 1, 2:59�pm, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:> One clue. �It doesn't matter.
> >
> > > > What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural selection
> > > > is not a fact of nature.
> >
> > > What is a natural selection ?
> >
> > total loser.
> >
> > Ron Okimoto
> > SNIP:
>
> See what is going on in this forum. Now imagine you are a student at a
> University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> class.
Thank goodness.
It would be a shame if someone like you would continually disrupt
science classes with nonsense, and deprive sincere students of the
education *they paid for*.
We've been very patient with you here.
We've tried to explain to you why you're wrong.
You're just ignoring all the arguments you don't like.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
"backspace" <steph...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:37183768-89c1-4aae...@b30g2000yqd.googlegroups.com:
The scientific record is clear: "Accidents" do happen.
Plate tectonics, volcanic activity, climatic changes, even meteorite
impacts can have major disruptive effects on life here on Earth.
The dinosaurs went extinct because a meteorite some 10 km in diameter
smashed into the Earth and disrupted the food chains. That was an
ACCIDENT. A random factor.
Otherwise there would likely be dinosaurs walking right where your home
is built right now.
Do you understand that?
-- Steven L.
-- Steven L.
Ray Martinez
> "backspace" <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
Surely you don't mean to imply that you are unaware of the importance
and irreplaceableness of natural selection ("On The Origin Of Species
By Means Of Natural Selection" 1859; "The Genetical Theory Of Natural
Selection" 1930; etc.etc.)?
Ray
Mike Lyle
> On Mar 2, 2:30 am, Ron O <rokim...@cox.net> wrote:
>> On Mar 1, 8:31 am, backspace <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> doesn't matter.
>>
>>>> What would matter is if you could demonstrate that natural
>>>> selection is not a fact of nature.
>>
>>> What is a natural selection ?
>>
>> total loser.
>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>> SNIP:
>
> University , the third time you ask your profesorial overlord "what
> naturaled and who did the selecting" , he will throw you out of the
> class. Everybody must work, study and respond under the assumption
> that NS isn't grammatical gargoyle from a linguistic point of view and
> from a pragmatics angle that somewhere somebody somehow defined the
> idea that he is representing with NS. Because NS like, dog, cat and
> green has no meaning it can only symbolically represent and idea. The
> symbols can change like "quark" means a specific type of cheese in
> Germany, but not the idea the user was projecting.
>
> get naturaled" the Lord Jesus picks up his erasure and pulls the book
> of Life closer. The angles tense, they clench their teeth...... will
> this Xtian again say "natural" ....? The second time you say "natural
> selection" Christ lifts up his hand. The third time ..... you have
> denied your Lord, you are banished .....
>
> You must decide between your career , high paying job and your soul.
> When little Johnny gives his heart to Jesus at age 7, ask him first
> "What do you want to become?" A doctor he says! Sorry Johnny ,.....
> at some point in time you will have to say "natural" - , nobody can
> get any biological qualification without saying "natural". What
> naturaled?
Stephanus, why don't you print out that message and show it to the
Minister at your church? You could mention that nobody in this newsgroup
seems to get the point, however often you repeat it, and ask him what he
thinks you should do.
--
Mike.
Ray Martinez
Your point here is deadly----like an assassins bullet. In response,
evolutionist rebuttal is collective evasion caused by the inability to
address.
Fantastic job, Stephan.
Ray
Ray Martinez
> On Mar 1, 9:28�pm, Ray Martinez <pyramid...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > > Which depends to which theory as formulated by which individual you
> > > are referring to, were you talking Darwin, about his idea,concept ,
> > > reference frame, hopes and dreams which symbolically represented with
> > > the symbol NS?
> > The author of the link provided no definitions because he or she
> > assumes a certain amount of facts in order to get to the reason-for-
> > being or point of their essay. Definitions, of course, are very
> > important. But the whole point of this particular essay is to
> > establish that natural selection is a list of facts. The implication
> > being, in turn, that this list of facts, in conjunction with random
> > mutation, acts as a creative force. Excluding random mutation,
> > everything is supported except the implication that the facts act as a
> > creative force. That part is assumed based on the facts. In short, the
> > essay is defending a just-so story.
>
> > Ray
>
> I broadly agree but note that "random mutation" has to do with genetic
> changes, something Darwin knew nothing about. My focus is on how the
> term NS was used in the context of 1859, their reference frame with
> their knowledge....... which had nothing to do with genes.
>
> Genes and "random mutations" is important to discuss in our context
> but the most important concept is realizing that NS has no meaning, it
> was and remains merely the symbolic rerpresentation of an idea. That
> idea in 1859 wasn't genes but something else: The reformulation or
> reintroduction, co-option , embedding of Aristotle, Democritus,
> Heraclitus and Empedocles ideas which in turn are based on Sumerian
> and Babilonian pagan religions which had battle for survival theme
> between fire and water, Gods and and seamonsters etc..... which today
> is the battle between the Alleles.
>
> Thus overly fixation on "random mutation" especially from Dembski,
> the ID crowd is really doing damage to the understanding the
> underlying Pagan myths we are dealing with.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Can you provide a link or two showing this damage by Dembski and his
crowd?
Much appreciated.
Ray
Kermit
Doesn't look like it. Why do you infer that he meant to imply that?
backspace claims to have linguistic problems with evolutionary
science, yet he ignores applying his linguistic claims to other
sciences like QM, or even his own questions. Clearly he has a special
interest in the ToE, and is being disingenuous.
I suspect, like you, he rejects it because he doesn't like the
results, rather than on evidential, scientific, logical, or linguistic
issues. But really, only he can answer that, and only then if he is
honest with himself.
Kermit
Ray Martinez
> "backspace" <stephan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> - Show quoted text -
As used by you, the adjectives "accident" and "random" are required
**explanations** ; the same is based on the starting assumptions of
your paradigm (Naturalism): they are not supported by the phenomena.
Ray
archie dux
When kooks collide...
archie
Ray Martinez
> On Mar 2, 10:40�am, Ray Martinez <pyramid...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[SNIP....]
>
> backspace claims to have linguistic problems with evolutionary
> science, yet he ignores applying his linguistic claims to other
> sciences like QM, [SNIP....]
We have not ignored; discussion is only fruitful when narrow in scope.
He is staying on-topic of both Group and thread.
> Clearly he has a special
> interest in the ToE, and is being disingenuous.
>
Staying on-topic is not disingenuous.
> I suspect, like you, he rejects it because he doesn't like the
> results, rather than on evidential, scientific, logical, or linguistic
> issues. But really, only he can answer that, and only then if he is
> honest with himself.
>
> Kermit- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
He is hightlighting a certain area of crippling fault. Your complaint
presupposes agreement by saying "what about so and so" or "thus and
such."
Ray
Kermit
I'd say he was highlighting a contrived, imaginary, and irrelevant
fault, but otherwise I accept your post.
Kermit
Christopher Denney
> On Mar 2, 2:59 pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > >http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> > > ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> > > mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> > > which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> > > time......."
> > > Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> > > favorability measured?
> > Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
>
> Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it
> doesn't explain why they became more common, it says the same thing
> twice. "more common" and "favorable" alludes to the same fact - it is
> a rhetorical tautology.
Actually becoming more common only implies favorable if one accepts
the mechanism of Natural Selection.
Unless you accept that a set of genes better equipped to survive a
given environment tend to net more offspring (i.e. become more common)
then favorable and becoming more common are unrelated.
You seem to be taking natural selection as self evident, just
objecting to the letter arrangements used to label it by the rest of
us.
Christopher Denney
> On Mar 2, 12:46�am, marks542...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> > K, quick lesson on wiki stuff. On that page click the HISTORY tab .
> > That shows you who edited the page and the diffs will let you find
> > which author added what parts. The 69 references and the further
> > reading links should find you the original sources.
> > If you challange a statement then edit it and add a {{fact}} tag . It
> > should not take long for someone to add a ref for it.
>
> And if we finally track him down we find out he actually died and is
> now a skeleton in front of his PC. He actually had a completely
> different version, had a heart attack gave the cat a fright which
> jumped on CTRL+V + Enter and "poof" that sentence appeared on
> Wikipedia. The problem is that the dead author never had the intent!
> He didn't really want to write that it was something he was trying to
> rebut.
>
> You see it my job to track down who wrote what, if you write something
> then you must give me the citation. Cite the book, the page, the
> person the means of deduction, the chain of reasoning: �Who says the
> favorable becomes common?
>
> Well thus says Aristotle , from who Darwin lifted his concept as he
> wrote "...... we can see here the principle of natural selection
> shadowed forth......" �Darwin took Aristotle's , Empedocles idea and
> reformulated it, maintaining the same tautological essence and then
> symbolically represented the idea with the symbol string NS. Because
> NS, like green and cat has no meaning not now , not ever.
[snip]
_Meaningless_, i don't think so.
Just because we don't have any green cats, doesn't mean the phrase has
no meaning.
Anyone who knows English knows exactly what you mean if you say "green
cat" depending on context it can mean several things.
aganunitsi
wrote:
Becoming more common, after one generation, doesn't even imply
favorable. Becoming more common could be a step along the road to
extinction. The production of nuclear weapons by nations is becoming
more common. Does that mean "has a huge nuclear arsenal" is a
favorable trait for nations? Nope, because the future may hold
extinction due to the proliferation of that trait.
Future extinction is always an option. The proliferation of a trait
does not define it as favorable.
Christopher Denney
> On Mar 2, 10:42�am, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Your inability to grasp the working of language is not an
> > argumentagainst re theory of evolution.
>
> In your own words, state the formally defined theory of Evolution ,
> just like Newton's inverse square law is formally defined: What
> exactly is the ToE?
>
> > > Just like "quark" in Germany is a cheese and in another context
> > > symbolically represents a concept in quantum mechanics: Same symbol
> > > different idea.
>
> > has lots of redundancies build in, most importantly our ability to use
> > contextual information and also the ability to ask questions. Two
> > biologists (or any other scientists, or indeed people for that matter)
> > may have slightly different associations with a certain concept. As long
> > as they communicate efficiently, that does not matter a but.
>
> It matters exactly, one mistake in 100million lines of Toyota code and
> drive by wire becomes drive by death.
Lol, you think there's only one error in their code. hahahahahahahah
It's possible that one very specific error could cause a death, but
ALL non-trivial computer programs have errors in them.
Most problems caused by electronic or programming issues are not
instantly fatal, at least in released products, the rest have various
levels of severity.
Also among the systems you have differing level of importance.
A severe problem with the tire sensor might be of less importance than
a mild problem with the drive train.
hersheyh
> On Mar 2, 2:58�pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Anyway, your statement is also factually wrong. It needs to be a
> > mistake at the right place. We _know_, a priori, that any sufficiently
> > complex computer program will have bugs (big problem for contract
> > lawyers, at one point) They work, sufficiently well, nonetheless.
>
> A toyota engineer using Ethernet to signal from one CPU to another
> can't invent his own pet definition of what Ethernet symbolically
> represents, by arbitrarily using the spec for ATM protocol. �With the
> word "selection" we had a sort of an unwritten rule or law if wish
> that what we mean by this, what we are encoding is a decision.
>
> Suddenly this is no more the case, we are dealing with a form of new-
> speak and is thus in the same mess as we would be if Honeywell decides
> that a byte isn't 8 bits anymore but whatever they want to make it
> mean: Which they obviously can do. But then no CPU would be able to
> understand their CPU instructions.
>
To use the word 'selection' properly in English does not require any
*body* to make a "decision". After all, English speakers can and do
say that a sieve "selects" for and retains those objects that do not
fit through its holes. An organism's environment acts like a sieve
and "selects" for those variants of organisms better able to extract
energy and survival with emphasis on the ability to reproduce. It
does so without making any decisions.
> how does nature make decisions?
Again, the proper English use of the word 'selection' does not require
*anything* to make decisions (intelligent or otherwise). All it
requires is the capacity to discriminate. A magnet can 'select' iron
from a mixture of iron and aluminum. And do so without making any
decision at all (intelligent or otherwise).
> And if you strip away all the naturals and
> selections, alleles, memes, phenotypes, genotypes etc. �we wind up the
> Empedoclian tautological core: The favorable one became common, those
> not favorable didn't like the dinosaurs who died because they were
> "extinction prone" - ala Gould.
More evidence that the problem lies not in those using the words, but
in the capacity of this particular observer to understand them. In
'selection', as it is used in biology, favorable is defined by
relative position (in a given environment) on a metric of reproductive
success -- the relationship is direct rather than inverse. Moreover,
in order for something to be called *selection* (positive or negative)
it must have an effect significantly different from "no selection",
the situation where there is neutral drift. So merely being the most
common trait does not necessarily mean that that particular trait was
*selected* for. It must also not merely be due to neutral drift; that
is, there must be some sort of environmental causation that makes it
more fit than whatever variant it is being compared to.
But backspace has been told this again and again. The problem lies
not in the message but in the observer.
David Hare-Scott
> On Mar 2, 1:19 pm, "David Hare-Scott" <sec...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> This theme of torture and victimisation has come up before. Why do
>> you think you are being persecuted by evolutionists? In what way do
>> they force their thinking on you? What would happen if they
>> succeeded?
>
> Anybody who dares question what the symbolic representation of
> 'natural selection' is in the various contexts is dead academically,
> career over, toast. Even Chomsky is so terrified that he uses 'natural
> selection' in his papers and not because he seemingly insane. Both
> Chomsky and Fodor detest the term 'natural selection' for different
> reasons than I perhaps, they both realize it is grammatical gargoyle.
>
> http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
> ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
> mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
> which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
> time......."
>
> Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
> favorability measured?
\
Why do you consistently think that science is conducted by playing word
games? Your monomania is so tiresome.
David
Ray Martinez
>
> - Show quoted text -
You have misunderstood. The choice of words used by Darwinists to
communicate major claims testifies against the veracity of their
claims. We are pointing these facts out while wondering why Darwinists
cannot see and understand these facts?
Our entire point is in support of another point: that acceptance of
evolution actually causes brain damage. This is why Darwinists have no
awareness of their silly and egregious errors.
Ray
hersheyh
Word games are all that they have. That, and being brain-dead
fundamentalists, they think words have magic powers.
hersheyh
Such as? Which *words* have the magical property of testifying
against which major claims? Words can be imprecise descriptors. They
can have different meanings when used in different contexts.They can
have different meanings over time. [Even, as in the word 'gift'
coming to mean something quite different than their original
meaning.] But "testifying" is not one of their traits. "Words" get
assigned to ideas, objects, or concepts. You may or may not like the
use of a particular word, but that usage doesn't affect the concept
being described. Words simply do not have that power.
> We are pointing these facts out while wondering why Darwinists
> cannot see and understand these facts?
What "facts" have you pointed out and actually understood? I have
seen you misuse a word (creationist) that only means that that person
has a religious belief that a supernatural agent is *involved in* an
observed natural process as if it meant that the supernatural agent
had to do this exactly the way you claim He did and anyone who accepts
other mechanisms than yours is not a creationist. Yet you do not
define 'creationist' in the narrow way of your *real* belief (anyone
who doesn't belief exactly like you is a lying atheist, even if they
claim that they are Christians). Your bigotry and hate comes shining
through.
> Our entire point is in support of another point: that acceptance of
> evolution actually causes brain damage.
You have provided absolutely no evidence to support this claim. Which
part of the brain is damaged by scientific knowledge? Exactly how is
this physical damage visualized?
Mike Lyle
>
>> Our entire point is in support of another point: that acceptance of
>> evolution actually causes brain damage.
>
> You have provided absolutely no evidence to support this claim. Which
> part of the brain is damaged by scientific knowledge? Exactly how is
> this physical damage visualized?
Ask any brain surgeon: he'll confirm it. And the medical literature is
full of evidence for it. And what proves it is that you're just too
brain-damaged to do your own research: if your cerebellum was still in
one piece, you'd be able to see why Ray is right. You'd even understand
Backspace's postings. Sheesh! (Or, as people are now saying in Britain,
"Simples! Squeak!")
--
Mike.
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mar 2, 1:19�pm, "David Hare-Scott" <sec...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> This theme of torture and victimisation has come up before. �Why do you
>> think you are being persecuted by evolutionists? �In what way do they force
>> their thinking on you? �What would happen if they succeeded?
>
>Anybody who dares question what the symbolic representation of
>'natural selection' is in the various contexts is dead academically,
>career over, toast.
?? proof? care to tell us why you're so paranoid?
>
>Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
>favorability measured?
you can measure the rates of change of mutations in labs, when
populations are challenged by environmental stressors. that's an
experiment.
i know you abhor experiments, tending, instead, to rely on abitrary
authority. but we scientists prefer experiments.
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mar 2, 2:59�pm, Burkhard <b.scha...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> >http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/more_skepticism_of_natural_sel.php
>> > ".....The differences that make us human are more likely due to
>> > mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into
>> > which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through
>> > time......."
>
>> > Other than noting the mutations were accumulated how was their
>> > favorability measured?
>
>> Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable?
>
>Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it
>doesn't explain why they became more common, it says the same thing
>twice. "more common" and "favorable" alludes to the same fact - it is
>a rhetorical tautology.
you keep saying this even though it's been shown to be wrong
care to tell us why you can't handle the role of experimentation in
science?
is it because your view is that experiments are wrong if they show
your view of religion is fatally flawed?
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>You can turn this around and let me observe that the neo-paganists and
>Aristotelians are the true bots, over and over they say "natural
>selection everything gets naturaled". Just like the inquisition
>torture priests, it is not me who is being a bot but the Empedoclian
>pagans cloaking themselves with different terms and forcing their
>tautological thinking on everybody.
i think backspace has never defined why he thinks evolution is a
tautology.
he's too busy speaking in tongues
bpuharic
<steph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Why I ask must "selection" be used if nobody made a "decision" , how
>does nature make decisions? And if you strip away all the naturals and
>selections, alleles, memes, phenotypes, genotypes etc. we wind up the
>Empedoclian tautological core
did he really say this?
it's like saying that, if you strip forces, atoms, quantum mechanics
and relativity from physics, there's nothing left.
go figure.