A Telling Comment by Stephen Jay Gould, and a Deficiency in the FAQ Archive.

[Peter Nyikos]

The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50

The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:

our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
functional intermediates in many cases

...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
mystery of the origins of:
(1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
(2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
(3) bats [3]
and I could name many more examples.

[1] If mitosis came first, there is a total dearth in our
imagination between intermediates to meiosis; and the dearth
is even greater when contemplating the stretch between
bacterial chromosomes and those involved in either mitosis or meiosis.

[2] a dearth of imagination where intermediaries between little "protocells"
and "life as we know it" are concerned.

[3] The following reply to Richard Norman [whom I miss very much]
speaks strongly to the obstacles to imagining a transition of the
sort of which Gould speaks.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/1dCpIxt3B3A/src4n19hnkMJ
Message-ID: <ba6cec42-369d-41b1...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: The UD ? The Unintelligent Designer
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT)

Nothing has emerged in the half decade since this post to feed our imagination
of how bats *could* have arisen from analogues of gliders like "flying" squirrels
or "flying" lemurs.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>
> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>
> The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
> Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
>
> our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
> functional intermediates in many cases
>
> ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
> number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
> mystery of the origins of:
> (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
> (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
> (3) bats [3]
> and I could name many more examples.

I don't think Gould was thinking of anything molecular, so 1 and 2 are
probably not relevant to the quote. Perhaps you could substitute a few
of your "many more".

> [1] If mitosis came first, there is a total dearth in our
> imagination between intermediates to meiosis; and the dearth
> is even greater when contemplating the stretch between
> bacterial chromosomes and those involved in either mitosis or meiosis.

My imagine, certainly. But have you investigated the literature? Here's
the first result that popped up for me:

https://www.genetics.org/content/181/1/3

> [2] a dearth of imagination where intermediaries between little "protocells"
> and "life as we know it" are concerned.

My imagination, certainly. But again, have you investigated the literature?

> [3] The following reply to Richard Norman [whom I miss very much]
> speaks strongly to the obstacles to imagining a transition of the
> sort of which Gould speaks.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/1dCpIxt3B3A/src4n19hnkMJ
> Message-ID: <ba6cec42-369d-41b1...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Re: The UD ? The Unintelligent Designer
> Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
>
> Nothing has emerged in the half decade since this post to feed our imagination
> of how bats *could* have arisen from analogues of gliders like "flying" squirrels
> or "flying" lemurs.

I ask again whether you have looked. When you say "nothing has emerged",
how complete a search does that represent?

[Glenn]

On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 2:55:17 PM UTC-7, John Harshman wrote:
> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
> >
> > "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
> >
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
> >
> > The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
> > Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
> >
> > our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
> > functional intermediates in many cases
> >
> > ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
> > number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
> > mystery of the origins of:
> > (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
> > (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
> > (3) bats [3]
> > and I could name many more examples.
>
> I don't think Gould was thinking of anything molecular, so 1 and 2 are
> probably not relevant to the quote.

Maybe the Panda's Thumb is up your arse.

[erik simpson]

I'm sure you and Peter can resolve these deficiencies.

[Lawyer Daggett]

Please establish a rational basis for thinking the the imagination of a
human from 1000 years ago should have been significant respective to
examples of 1, 2 or 3 above. Preemptively, you can't.

The rather obvious continuation is, why should a scientist of the last
50 years priveledged to being transformatively better enabled to offer a
definitive answer to these questions? When did humanity pass the threshold
of being expected to have an obvious and conclusive explanation to account
for evolutionary history?

Can you recognize this superficially obvious absurdity in your premise?

[Glenn]

What deficiencies? Use your imagination.

[Glenn]

Whoosh!

[Lawyer Daggett]

I think the suggestion was that you use your thumb.

[erik simpson]

I have a much beter imagination than that. Not sure about Glenn's.

[Lawyer Daggett]

Wow. You heard it. I thought it went too far over your head. If only you understood it.

Oh, we could go back and forth on this as you make pretense at not understanding.
Let me help. Science does not assert to have a conclusive analysis that proves
that 1, 2, and 3 have a completely documented historical pathway of natural
origins. It has never asserted that. Rather, it asserts that there may well be
a naturalistic pathway to account for these things.

And now you will continue to misconstrue and misrepresent this truth.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
> >
> > "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
> >
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
> >
> > The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
> > Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
> >
> > our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
> > functional intermediates in many cases
> >
> > ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
> > number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
> > mystery of the origins of:
> > (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
> > (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
> > (3) bats [3]
> > and I could name many more examples.
>
> I don't think Gould was thinking of anything molecular, so 1 and 2 are
> probably not relevant to the quote.

Typical *ad hominem* fallacy noted.

> Perhaps you could substitute a few
> of your "many more".

Gould's quote stands on its own merits, and if there is a life after death
anything like what C.S. Lewis depicted in _The Great Divorce_, I'm sure
Gould would like the way I used his quote, if he has attained "solidity".

I have extended it to a context where he was probably an amateur
[as am I, but I have the benefit of the advances in science since he made that quote]
but which is very apropos of his wording.

>
> > [1] If mitosis came first, there is a total dearth in our
> > imagination between intermediates to meiosis; and the dearth
> > is even greater when contemplating the stretch between
> > bacterial chromosomes and those involved in either mitosis or meiosis.
>
> My imagine, certainly. But have you investigated the literature? Here's
> the first result that popped up for me:
>
> https://www.genetics.org/content/181/1/3

Did you read it? It was written right about the time the following
appeared in a leading biology textbook in an interview with one
of the co-authors:

What we don't understand at all is how the chromosomes of a homologous
pair find each other. That pairing is unique to meiosis: it doesn't
happen in mitosis. The two strands of DNA
[in each of the sister chromatids of each homolog -- PN]
don't come apart, so although the homologous chromosomes have very
similar DNA sequences, it's not base-pairing that brings the homologous
chromosomes together. Given the relatively gigantic volume of the nucleus
and the huge mass of chromatin in the eukaryotic cell, how do the right
chromosomes find each other? That's the number one mystery about
meiosis.
-- 2008 edition of Biology, 8th ed. (Campbell, Reece et al) where MIT Professor
Terry L. Orr-Weaver is interviewed by Reece on pp. 246-7.

The following bland comment from your cited article is typical of
the hundreds of essays [about 50 of which were thrust at Behe
in the Dover trial] which purport to explain the origins of biological
phenomena but do not attempt to deliver:

We first present the reasons for thinking that the initial step involved a
key innovation, that of extensive homolog pairing (synapsis),

I've done a search of all uses of "synapsis" in the article, and none of
them shows any awareness of the mystery described above. In fact it's
mostly along the lines of "synapsis is great, isn't it?"

Try again.

> > [2] a dearth of imagination where intermediaries between little "protocells"
> > and "life as we know it" are concerned.
>
> My imagination, certainly. But again, have you investigated the literature?

You ought to ask Bill Rogers and others, who rhapsodize about progress
FROM amino acids and nucleotides and lipid vesicles TOWARDS an "urcell"
that is at most 1 percent of the size of a bacterial cell and about
as far along the way to one. [4] They talk confidently about the ability of
future science to bridge the gap in (2) like typical political animals,
while ignoring everything I write about the gap.

Rogers even had the chutzpah to allege that MarkE, the only other person
who gives a hoot about (2), is probably unintersted in OOL because he
won't read even MORE about the progress towards that elusive protocell.


[4] To read about an urcell, look in Ian Musgrave's amateurish FAQ:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

Musgrave had no idea of the titanic biochemical obstacles bedeviling 99% of the way,
about which I have posted plenty, and so he hid behind words:

replicating polymers ---> hypercycle ---> protobiont ---> bacteria

and cluelessly talked about "small increase" in ways that are only a
marginal improvement on jonathan's drivel:

Note that the real theory has a number of small steps, and in fact I've left out some steps (especially between the hypercycle-protobiont stage) for simplicity. Each step is associated with a small increase in organisation and complexity, and the chemicals slowly climb towards organism-hood, rather than making one big leap [4, 10, 15, 28].

Go ahead, look at those four references and see whether they overcame the
Catch-22 obstacle known as "the protein takeover" in the latter part of the way
to bacteria. I'll give you a head start: [4], Woese's classic "The universal
ancestor," isn't playing that game.

> > [3] The following reply to Richard Norman [whom I miss very much]
> > speaks strongly to the obstacles to imagining a transition of the
> > sort of which Gould speaks.
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/1dCpIxt3B3A/src4n19hnkMJ
> > Message-ID: <ba6cec42-369d-41b1...@googlegroups.com>
> > Subject: Re: The UD ? The Unintelligent Designer
> > Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
> >
> > Nothing has emerged in the half decade since this post to feed our imagination
> > of how bats *could* have arisen from analogues of gliders like "flying" squirrels
> > or "flying" lemurs.
>
> I ask again whether you have looked. When you say "nothing has emerged",
> how complete a search does that represent?

I've looked at a recent online article under the aegis of the Smithsonian,
and it completely avoids talking about dearth of imagination while
talking about the "mystery" of bat evolution purely in terms of the absence of
intermediates in the fossil record.

I wrote a long, documented comment about the dearth, but it seems that no
one is minding the fort, because it was still awaiting moderation a month
later, along with another long comment I did a few days later.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/

[John Harshman]

On 9/24/20 5:22 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>>>
>>> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>>>
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>>>
>>> The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
>>> Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
>>>
>>> our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
>>> functional intermediates in many cases
>>>
>>> ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
>>> number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
>>> mystery of the origins of:
>>> (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
>>> (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
>>> (3) bats [3]
>>> and I could name many more examples.
>>
>> I don't think Gould was thinking of anything molecular, so 1 and 2 are
>> probably not relevant to the quote.
>
> Typical *ad hominem* fallacy noted.

Beg pardon? Whatever does that have to do with *ad hominem*?

>> Perhaps you could substitute a few
>> of your "many more".
>
> Gould's quote stands on its own merits, and if there is a life after death
> anything like what C.S. Lewis depicted in _The Great Divorce_, I'm sure
> Gould would like the way I used his quote, if he has attained "solidity".

Appeal to hypothetical heavenly dead people is not a great form of argument.

> I have extended it to a context where he was probably an amateur
> [as am I, but I have the benefit of the advances in science since he made that quote]
> but which is very apropos of his wording.

Yes, and I'm suggesting that you shouldn't extend it to a context he
didn't intend.

>>> [1] If mitosis came first, there is a total dearth in our
>>> imagination between intermediates to meiosis; and the dearth
>>> is even greater when contemplating the stretch between
>>> bacterial chromosomes and those involved in either mitosis or meiosis.
>>
>> My imagine, certainly. But have you investigated the literature? Here's
>> the first result that popped up for me:
>>
>> https://www.genetics.org/content/181/1/3
>
> Did you read it?

I admit that I haven't yet. Did you?

> It was written right about the time the following
> appeared in a leading biology textbook in an interview with one
> of the co-authors:
>
> What we don't understand at all is how the chromosomes of a homologous
> pair find each other. That pairing is unique to meiosis: it doesn't
> happen in mitosis. The two strands of DNA
> [in each of the sister chromatids of each homolog -- PN]
> don't come apart, so although the homologous chromosomes have very
> similar DNA sequences, it's not base-pairing that brings the homologous
> chromosomes together. Given the relatively gigantic volume of the nucleus
> and the huge mass of chromatin in the eukaryotic cell, how do the right
> chromosomes find each other? That's the number one mystery about
> meiosis.
> -- 2008 edition of Biology, 8th ed. (Campbell, Reece et al) where MIT Professor
> Terry L. Orr-Weaver is interviewed by Reece on pp. 246-7.

Why should we care what an undergraduate biology text has to say? Why
not go by what a review in the technical literature has to say?

> The following bland comment from your cited article is typical of
> the hundreds of essays [about 50 of which were thrust at Behe
> in the Dover trial] which purport to explain the origins of biological
> phenomena but do not attempt to deliver:
>
> We first present the reasons for thinking that the initial step involved a
> key innovation, that of extensive homolog pairing (synapsis),
>
> I've done a search of all uses of "synapsis" in the article, and none of
> them shows any awareness of the mystery described above. In fact it's
> mostly along the lines of "synapsis is great, isn't it?"
>
> Try again.

I'm assuming based on this that you haven't actually read the article
either. And I further assume that you didn't do even as much literature
search as I did seconds before posting. Do you think you ought to look?

>>> [2] a dearth of imagination where intermediaries between little "protocells"
>>> and "life as we know it" are concerned.
>>
>> My imagination, certainly. But again, have you investigated the literature?
>
> You ought to ask Bill Rogers and others, who rhapsodize about progress
> FROM amino acids and nucleotides and lipid vesicles TOWARDS an "urcell"
> that is at most 1 percent of the size of a bacterial cell and about
> as far along the way to one. [4] They talk confidently about the ability of
> future science to bridge the gap in (2) like typical political animals,
> while ignoring everything I write about the gap.
>
> Rogers even had the chutzpah to allege that MarkE, the only other person
> who gives a hoot about (2), is probably unintersted in OOL because he
> won't read even MORE about the progress towards that elusive protocell.

Didn't answer my question. Have you investigated the literature?

> [4] To read about an urcell, look in Ian Musgrave's amateurish FAQ:
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
>
> Musgrave had no idea of the titanic biochemical obstacles bedeviling 99% of the way,
> about which I have posted plenty, and so he hid behind words:
>
> replicating polymers ---> hypercycle ---> protobiont ---> bacteria
>
> and cluelessly talked about "small increase" in ways that are only a
> marginal improvement on jonathan's drivel:
>
> Note that the real theory has a number of small steps, and in fact I've left out some steps (especially between the hypercycle-protobiont stage) for simplicity. Each step is associated with a small increase in organisation and complexity, and the chemicals slowly climb towards organism-hood, rather than making one big leap [4, 10, 15, 28].
>
> Go ahead, look at those four references and see whether they overcame the
> Catch-22 obstacle known as "the protein takeover" in the latter part of the way
> to bacteria. I'll give you a head start: [4], Woese's classic "The universal
> ancestor," isn't playing that game.

Did you look at those references?

>>> [3] The following reply to Richard Norman [whom I miss very much]
>>> speaks strongly to the obstacles to imagining a transition of the
>>> sort of which Gould speaks.
>>>
>>> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/1dCpIxt3B3A/src4n19hnkMJ
>>> Message-ID: <ba6cec42-369d-41b1...@googlegroups.com>
>>> Subject: Re: The UD ? The Unintelligent Designer
>>> Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
>>>
>>> Nothing has emerged in the half decade since this post to feed our imagination
>>> of how bats *could* have arisen from analogues of gliders like "flying" squirrels
>>> or "flying" lemurs.
>>
>> I ask again whether you have looked. When you say "nothing has emerged",
>> how complete a search does that represent?
>
> I've looked at a recent online article under the aegis of the Smithsonian,
> and it completely avoids talking about dearth of imagination while
> talking about the "mystery" of bat evolution purely in terms of the absence of
> intermediates in the fossil record.

So, once more, you haven't looked. You have access to a university
library and all its online subscriptions. Have you looked?

> I wrote a long, documented comment about the dearth, but it seems that no
> one is minding the fort, because it was still awaiting moderation a month
> later, along with another long comment I did a few days later.

I notice that a lot of institutional blogs aren't really into comments.

[Ernest Major]

The weird thing is that Peter would have us believe that he thinks Glenn
is on the side of the angels.

--
alias Ernest Major

[*Hemidactylus*]

Perhaps Glenn is a useful idiot?

[jillery]

My impression is Peter prefers the avenging angel kind.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 09:11:51 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by *Hemidactylus*
<ecph...@allspamis.invalid>:

"Useful"?
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[*Hemidactylus*]

Eye of the beholder. Not to us, no.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:16:03 -0500, the following appeared

Point...

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, September 25, 2020 at 5:15:18 AM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 24/09/2020 23:43, erik simpson wrote:
> > On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 3:40:18 PM UTC-7, Glenn wrote:
> >> On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 2:55:17 PM UTC-7, John Harshman wrote:
> >>> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:

On second thought, I was too harsh on "Lilith" here: the rest of
what she wrote was very good, but the oversight I describe below
was definitely a minus:

> >>>>
> >>>> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
> >>>>
> >>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
> >>>>
> >>>> The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
> >>>> Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
> >>>>
> >>>> our inability, even in our imagination, to construct
> >>>> functional intermediates in many cases
> >>>>
> >>>> ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
> >>>> number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
> >>>> mystery of the origins of:
> >>>> (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
> >>>> (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
> >>>> (3) bats [3]
> >>>> and I could name many more examples.
> >>>
> >>> I don't think Gould was thinking of anything molecular, so 1 and 2 are
> >>> probably not relevant to the quote.
> >>
> >> Maybe the Panda's Thumb is up your arse.
> >
> > I'm sure you and Peter can resolve these deficiencies.
> >
>
> The weird thing is that Peter would have us believe that he thinks Glenn
> is on the side of the angels.

The weird thing is that you are totally wrong.

I think you are so used to Glenn being treated like a pariah, with
Hemidactylus and jillery and a number of others all but dehumanizing him,
that you no longer can recognize a disinterested but guarded civil
discourse with him.

I don't even treat him as kindly as I treated you for many years. You seemed
more mature than Glenn, and you were always careful (IIRC) to maintain
neutrality between the people in adversarial relationship with me.

And so, I treated you with the same deference that I've treated
Oo Tiib, for example. He's rather down on Christianity, but I
certainly don't hold that against him. I've never seen him do
anything dishonest or hypocritical, and I would never insult such a person.

The same with you, until you struck a very sour note last year.
You made an unprovoked attack on me in my disputes with Steve Carlip.
When I asked you what your basis was for your insults, you ran away.

I treated it like an aberration, and went on being polite to you,
and even praised you to Daud Deden, saying kudos to him for engaging
two of the best people in talk.origins -- yourself and Andre Isaak.


Unfortunately, it's been one sour note after another from you this year,
the latest being the off-the-wall comment you've made in the post to which I am replying.

But enough about you; what about Glenn? I've frequently criticized him
for "backing the wrong horse" in disputes involving Bill -- the one
with freon in his email address. Also, I've been very much neutral in disputes
between Glenn and Oo Tiib, but Tiib seems to have had the better ideas.
And so I take more interest in discussing things with Tiib when it's
a matter of choosing between him and Glenn.


I'll have some choice words for some of the other people on this thread,
a few today and more next week. But you deserve special treatment,
because I still have little reason to think of you as being either dishonest
or hypocritical. Strong biases towards some people and against others
is about all that is clear so far.


Peter Nyikos

PS This oft-repeated saying of mine applies to both you and Glenn:
I suffer fools gladly, knaves with difficulty or not at all.

[Lawyer Daggett]

It's all about you, at least according to you.

[jillery]

Liar [1]. Glenn dehumanizes himself. You would know this if you had
any idea what you're talking about. That is another thing you and
Glenn share.


[1] The peter persona's explicitly written definition of "lie":
***********************
<7eeaa862-e4bb-4617...@googlegroups.com>
On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 17:54:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyik...@gmail.com> wrote:

I classify as a lie any statement that the utterer has absolutely no
reason to think is true, but is done to intensely denigrate the person
about whom it is uttered.
************************

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, September 25, 2020 at 6:00:18 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote to
alias Ernest Major:

> PS This oft-repeated saying of mine applies to both you and Glenn:
> I suffer fools gladly, knaves with difficulty or not at all.

I should add that I don't think of either of you as fools; you've both
done some foolish things -- but then, so have I.

Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

Post the full quote.

[John Harshman]

Why? Gould doesn't offer any example other than bird wings. There is no
example of our inability to imagine any intermediates. I recall that
elsewhere he offered brachiopods as an example, which could not exist
without shells, so the entire brachiopod body plan must have emerged
simultaneously with their presence in the fossil record. I see problems
with that idea, and it's only one example that Gould doesn't explicitly
tie in to the quote. More context isn't going to change or illuminate
things except to show that Gould was flirting with saltationism.

[erik simpson]

As I guess you've seen by now,

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/MW5Bgsn7fWU/A4HNydKhCQAJ

it seems that Hemi ("Perhaps Glenn is a useful idiot?") may be right.

[Peter Nyikos]

You are indulging in a mindless use of formulaic polemical repartee.

Obviously, what Ernest Major wrote was all about me.
The main point of my response was to show how baseles it was.
Part of the reason I wrote so much was to impress upon any
reader how childishly one-dimensional the use of "the side of the angels" is.

All this went WHOOSH! over your head, just like the entire
topic of this thread did.

> at least according to you.

Do you ever bother to think before including such inane bilge in your posts?


Peter Nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

Mirrors. How do they work?

[Glenn]

A topic according to you going over your head.

[Peter Nyikos]

> Mirrors. How do they work?

That was another big point: I was holding a mirror up to alias Ernest Major,
so that he can see what I know of his general attitude. It's tremendously
different from what I know of that of John Harshman, who welcomed you to talk.origins, and yourself.


For you, mirrors evidently work like they did for the "God" character
in the play, "Steambath" -- he couldn't stand to look at himself in them.

Only one difference: in both the play that I saw in Chicago in 1973
or 1974, and in the movie of the same name that I saw on TV a year
or two later, the "God" character went into histrionics accompanied
by cringing, face-hiding, etc.

You, on the other hand, are indulging in an unimaginative version
of a piece of mindless repartee whose original, "I know you are, but what am I?"
is widely associated with Pee Wee Herman.

[Actually, it goes back to when I was a kid, aged 6 in 1952, and
possibly a good long further back. Back then it was just indulged in
by kids, AFAIK.]

Perhaps, by now, you've seen more original and subtle versions
that jillery and John Harshman have been using for years now.


But if so, why did you use such a hackneyed version?


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

Have you also seen the two replies that I have done to Daggett? See especially
my second one. Your role model Harshman behaved even more like the "God"
character in "Steambath" for many years, than did Daggett.

You may be struck by the staggering contrast between the "mirror" I
held up to Ernest Major in the post you've linked, and the last one
I held up to Harshman on Friday. The contrast is due to the staggering
difference between the negative evidence I have about Ernest, and about John.


You, on the other hand, don't bother with evidence: you feel perfectly
happy about posting wretched "opinions" like the following:

> it seems that Hemi ("Perhaps Glenn is a useful idiot?") may be right.

You may remember how I "held a mirror up to you"
about a scam you had been perpetrating for over a year, and the aftermath.
You were spared the embarrassment of responding at all by Robert Camp, Mark Isaak,
and Hemidactylus, all of whom behaved like useful idiots of yours.

As a bonus, Hemidactylus also behaved like a useful idiot of Robert Camp's,
who had made a complete monkey of himself in the way he behaved
like your useful idiot.

You disappeared from the thread even before this performance of theirs began.

Are you smug in the expectation of others playing the same
role towards you again, now that I've held up another mirror to you?


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

My impression is the peter persona rarely passes one by without
admiring the view.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
https://www.avg.com

[jillery]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2020 16:48:12 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Perhaps, by now, you've seen more original and subtle versions
>that jillery and John Harshman have been using for years now.

Liar [1]

[1] The peter persona's explicitly written definition of "lie":
***********************
<7eeaa862-e4bb-4617...@googlegroups.com>
On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 17:54:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyik...@gmail.com> wrote:

I classify as a lie any statement that the utterer has absolutely no
reason to think is true, but is done to intensely denigrate the person
about whom it is uttered.
************************

[erik simpson]

Well, someone has to admire the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics. He can't get no respect here. Of course, he isn't professing any mathematics here
either.

[Glenn]

Why do you refer to me as a "him"? Isn't that a form of dehumanizing to you?

[*Hemidactylus*]

The junior carpenter bee is boring.

[erik simpson]

And the frass piles are piling up everywhere.

[Peter Nyikos]

Glenn is understating things here. The person posting under the
byline "jillery" committed self-dehumanizing by posting mechanical
lies that cannot pass the Turing test.

What's more, there may not have been a single use of "Liar.[1]" that passed the Turing test. And I'd estimate that there have been at least
a hundred of them by now.

> >
> The junior carpenter bee is boring.

Glenn certainly wasn't boring when you flew into a rage over
me saying that I had seen more evidence that your beloved Ron O
was insane than that Glenn is insane.

You shoved something Glenn had said to you in my face and demanded,
Jacobin-fashion, that I denounce Glenn for what he had said. I hadn't
even seen his inane comment before you shoved it into my face.

When I merely made factual statements about what Glenn had said,
you went into a rampage of what a "monster" I am for not doing
something that even the threat of USA-style waterboarding might not
make you do for your beloved Ron O. [And maybe not even for your
Turing-test-challenged on-and-off ally who posted the above under
the "jillery" byline.]


Your rampage didn't end until you crossed a Rubicon by libeling
me with having approved of Glenn's inane comment. Later you tried
to make light of the whole incident by calling it a "misunderstanding"
and trying to make out that I was guilty of misunderstanding you.

Now, it seems you are trying to walk back ALL the claims you made
about Glenn by calling him "boring". And in the process you
are smearing me with calling him my "useful idiot."


Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame?


Peter Nyikos

PS You re-crossed that Rubicon and have been staying on the safe
side ever since. Dare I hope that you will never cross that
Rubicon again?

[jillery]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 06:01:14 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" claims

"Maybe the Panda's Thumb is up your arse."

demonstrates understanding:

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" claims it
demonstrates understanding to post mechanical lies that cannot pass
the Turing test about the person posting under the byline "jillery".

>What's more, there may not have been a single use of "Liar.[1]" that passed the Turing test. And I'd estimate that there have been at least
>a hundred of them by now.

Liar[1].

>> The junior carpenter bee is boring.
>
>Glenn certainly wasn't boring when you flew into a rage over
>me saying that I had seen more evidence that your beloved Ron O
>was insane than that Glenn is insane.
>
>You shoved something Glenn had said to you in my face and demanded,
>Jacobin-fashion, that I denounce Glenn for what he had said. I hadn't
>even seen his inane comment before you shoved it into my face.
>
>When I merely made factual statements about what Glenn had said,
>you went into a rampage of what a "monster" I am for not doing
>something that even the threat of USA-style waterboarding might not
>make you do for your beloved Ron O. [And maybe not even for your
>Turing-test-challenged on-and-off ally who posted the above under
>the "jillery" byline.]
>
>
>Your rampage didn't end until you crossed a Rubicon by libeling
>me with having approved of Glenn's inane comment. Later you tried
>to make light of the whole incident by calling it a "misunderstanding"
>and trying to make out that I was guilty of misunderstanding you.
>
>Now, it seems you are trying to walk back ALL the claims you made
>about Glenn by calling him "boring". And in the process you
>are smearing me with calling him my "useful idiot."
>
>
>Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame?

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" should ask that
question of His Royal Highness.

>Peter Nyikos
>
>PS You re-crossed that Rubicon and have been staying on the safe
>side ever since. Dare I hope that you will never cross that
>Rubicon again?

[*Hemidactylus*]

Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[snip]

>
> Now, it seems you are trying to walk back ALL the claims you made
> about Glenn by calling him "boring". And in the process you
> are smearing me with calling him my "useful idiot."
>

I think you misunderstand what boring means in context of carpenter bees
producing frass. Now there is more left on the floor that the senior bee is
boring.

In your tunneling of the rafters have you managed to stumble upon a defense
of objective morality discoverable out there? Evaluations such as
right-wrong or good-bad surely cannot carry the same sort of claim to
validity as true-false. The carpenter bee produces frass is factual. Frass
is bad is evaluative as is the assertion the act of frass production is
wrong. YMMV.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Sawdust is useful for cleaning up vomit. Lemonade from lemons I suppose.

[erik simpson]

Another "whoosh" moment. And yet more frass.

[Glenn]

Why do you say "His" and not "Her" or "They" or "Hem" or "Hir"?

[Peter Nyikos]

Glenn might have known that this would just encourage you to keep
on dehumanizing him (and me), Hemi:

> >> The junior carpenter bee is boring.

> > And the frass piles are piling up everywhere.

Not everywhere, but if your kind hadn't succeeded in making such
a cesspool out of talk.origins, there'd be a pile in the trousers [1]
of Erik Simpson [who posted the above], yourself, and one or two others I could name.

[1] In the case of your fellow dehumanizer, the most appropriate
word is one of which 'e is inordinately fond -- so fond that 'e
loves to put it into all caps: KNAPPIES.

> Sawdust is useful for cleaning up vomit. Lemonade from lemons I suppose.

So you vomited over the recounting of your hateful behavior, eh? [2]

There's an easy remedy. Stop dehumanizing Glenn. And stop behaving like Ron O's useful idiot.

[There was a recent incident where you acted like a useful idiot
to both Ron O and your fellow dehumanizer. But I won't go into details
unless you persist in flippant talk about events impacting your
reputation
in a way that would be intensely negative in a normal forum.]


[2] You posted this piece of offal two hours after I had lowered the boom on you.


Good day, sirrah.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

More frass. More boring.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 10:10:17 AM UTC-4,
one of the persons [possibly the only person] posting

Liar. [1]


<snip of Pee Wee Hermainsms by an obvious troll, along with other text posted by a fellow dehumanizer>


[1] I never made that claim, not even indirectly by claiming
that Glenn does not EVER dehumanize himself. The obvious troll is
is therefore guilty of lying even without my having to invoke a slight modification of a traditional definition of "lie" [2]
to which I also subscribe:

> ***********************
> <7eeaa862-e4bb-4617...@googlegroups.com>
> On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 17:54:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> <nyik...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I classify as a lie any statement that the utterer has absolutely no
> reason to think is true, but is done to intensely denigrate the person
> about whom it is uttered.
> ************************

[2] The traditional definition to which I am referring is this:

3 lie, noun

1. A statement made with intent to deceive, which the utterer
knows to be false.

However, far looser uses than mine are bandied about by someone
who falls back on this traditional definition when unequivocally accused of lying.
The following "definitions from his private dictionary"
show how he seems to invite such accusations at times:


3 lying, verb

2. [2011] A word describing an action by John Harshman that the utterer calls deceitful or dishonest or insincere.
<In other words, you are accusing me of ~ -- JH>

3. [2020] A word describing an action by John Harshman about
which the utterer expresses a strong belief that the action is deceitful or dishonest or insincere.
<Ah, another accusation of ~. They just whiz by. -- JH>

The quote in 3. was made right after the following exchange:

JH:
You seem to be using "pseudoscience" as a generalized epithet
to apply to anything you don't like,

PN:
"seem to" is almost surely insincere....



Peter Nyikos

[Glenn]

Have you considered that attempting to identify, politicize or correct every dehumanizing, dishonest or deceitful thing others say, serves their purpose and goals?

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 10:15:17 AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> [snip]
> >
> > Now, it seems you are trying to walk back ALL the claims you made
> > about Glenn by calling him "boring". And in the process you
> > are smearing me with calling him my "useful idiot."
> >
> I think you misunderstand what boring means in context of carpenter bees
> producing frass.

Do try to explain what I may have misunderstood.

Of course, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming
that you really think I misunderstood. If you do not really think that, then of course you will not honor this request of mine.

> Now there is more left on the floor that the senior bee is
> boring.

You seem quite confident that you have a goodly number of people who can be counted on
to act as though you have right [see below] on your side.

And I fear that talk.origins has deteriorated to the point where your confidence is well placed.

>
> In your tunneling of the rafters have you managed to stumble upon a defense
> of objective morality discoverable out there?

In your flippant nose-thumbing, it would seem that you have stumbled upon
a defense of a variety of objective morality:
might makes right.

If you have sufficient might on your side, that is all the defense you need
to justify anything you decide to say or do.

> Evaluations such as
> right-wrong or good-bad surely cannot carry the same sort of claim to
> validity as true-false.

If might makes right, all it takes to make an actual evaluation is
to find out who has might on his/her side.

Note well: this applies to the microcosm of our society that is very nearly sealed off
from the rest of society. So such evaluations are quite possible in principle.
In fact, the only thing stopping anyone is the huge amount of data one might have to collect.

But someone might have sufficient imagination to find a non-random way of finding the right data.

The analogy with abiogenesis should be obvious to anyone who cares about on-topic discussion.

Are you one of those who do?



Peter Nyikos

PS I've left your inane closing sentences unsnipped below.
The first uses an irrelevant definition of "carpenter bee" -- the usual one.
The second and third are equivocations.

[jillery]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 18:01:49 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>Have you considered that attempting to identify, politicize or correct every dehumanizing, dishonest or deceitful thing others say, serves their purpose and goals?

Since you mention it, what you describe above almost always proves the
point of others.

However, have you considered that if the person posting under the
byline "Peter Nyikos" didn't do what you describe above, he would have
almost nothing to post?

[jillery]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 17:39:39 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" claims jillery is a
liar, using one of his characteristic tu quoque Pee Wee Hermanisms.
But if he was not claiming as jillery stated, then there is utterly no
basis for his current claim about jillery, which makes his previous
claim, *by his own posted definition*, a lie, which makes his current
claim a lie.

><snip of Pee Wee Hermainsms by an obvious troll, along with other text posted by a fellow dehumanizer>

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" included more
mindless and dehumanizing spam, so jillery follows the precedent he
provided. The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" never
learns.

[jillery]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 15:07:00 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

The person posting under the byline "Peter Nyikos" continues to make a
cesspool of T.O., and by so doing dehumanizes himself.

>> >> The junior carpenter bee is boring.
>
>> > And the frass piles are piling up everywhere.
>
>Not everywhere, but if your kind hadn't succeeded in making such
>a cesspool out of talk.origins, there'd be a pile in the trousers [1]
>of Erik Simpson [who posted the above], yourself, and one or two others I could name.
>
>[1] In the case of your fellow dehumanizer, the most appropriate
>word is one of which 'e is inordinately fond -- so fond that 'e
>loves to put it into all caps: KNAPPIES.
>
>
>> Sawdust is useful for cleaning up vomit. Lemonade from lemons I suppose.
>
>So you vomited over the recounting of your hateful behavior, eh? [2]
>
>There's an easy remedy. Stop dehumanizing Glenn. And stop behaving like Ron O's useful idiot.
>
>[There was a recent incident where you acted like a useful idiot
>to both Ron O and your fellow dehumanizer. But I won't go into details
>unless you persist in flippant talk about events impacting your
>reputation
>in a way that would be intensely negative in a normal forum.]

There is no instance where the person posting under the
byline "Peter Nyikos" ever let anything stop him posting anything
intensely negative. That is just one of the ways he made T.O. a
cesspool.

>[2] You posted this piece of offal two hours after I had lowered the boom on you.
>
>
>Good day, sirrah.

Promises, promises.

[Glenn]

The equivocations of a pun, punneded.

[*Hemidactylus*]

The frass piles up as master and apprentice continue to fail in endeavors
to communicate anything worth reading by third parties. A couple carpenter
bees might find boring wood supporting the roof of a community building
important to them because that’s what they do (akin to scorpion and frog).
The community might think otherwise as the roof nears collapse.

[Glenn]

You are boring.

[*Hemidactylus*]

You don’t even know what boring means though you continue as the apprentice
to produce wood shavings. Your master is oblivious too. No surprise there.
I would hope you both could redeem yourselves.

[Glenn]

Of course you do!

[Peter Nyikos]

I think it is obvious to everyone, especially the one doing the post below, that the post below is pure trolling. I therefore decline to feed the troll any further than I have done with these two sentences and my electronic signature.

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 10:35:17 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com> wrote:
> > On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 6:50:17 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >> On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 10:15:17 AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> >>> Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>> [snip]
> >>>>
> >>>> Now, it seems you are trying to walk back ALL the claims you made
> >>>> about Glenn by calling him "boring". And in the process you
> >>>> are smearing me with calling him my "useful idiot."
> >>>>
> >>> I think you misunderstand what boring means in context of carpenter bees
> >>> producing frass.
> >>
> >> Do try to explain what I may have misunderstood.
> >>
> >> Of course, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming
> >> that you really think I misunderstood. If you do not really think that,
> >> then of course you will not honor this request of mine.

As expected, Hemi, you did not honor the request. However one interprets the
double entendre "boring," it DOES read like an effort to walk back everything negative that you wrote on that rampage of a few years ago.

The above sentence marks your latest departure from reality. Glenn is less
of an apprentice of mine than any person on my list below is an apprentice of any other member.

I called your long-running bluff about wanting to discuss objective morality by giving you
the only form of morality that makes sense in societies like talk.origins and, arguably,
the world taken as a whole, in the present state.

In the isolated context of talk.origins, it even harmonizes with Bentham's attempt to
define objective morality: the greatest good for the greatest number.


The objective standard of "might makes right" is a great good
for at least 16 talk.origins participants I could name,
including of course yourself, and I challenge you
to find a sufficient number of people to counterbalance it.

> A couple carpenter
> bees might find boring wood supporting the roof of a community building

The community building shelters the 16 people I have in mind up there,
along with everyone who fails to challenge them and is as mainstream an "evolutionist" as I am.

> important to them because that’s what they do (akin to scorpion and frog).
> The community might think otherwise as the roof nears collapse.

It is completely secure from the collapse of the roof as long as the 16 exercise the vast privileges
that the objective morality of "might makes right" puts at their disposal.


And a number of them, including yourself, are doing a superlative job of exercising them on this thread.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>

> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50

I note that the ostensible subject of this thread has been entirely
abandoned by its creator.

[jillery]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 09:42:29 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I think it is obvious to everyone, especially the one doing the post below, that the post below is pure trolling. I therefore decline to feed the troll any further than I have done with these two sentences and my electronic signature.

Liar [1]. Your trolling disqualifies you from complaining about
alleged trolling by others. Tu quoque back atcha, asshole.

[1] The peter persona's explicitly written definition of "lie":

***********************
<7eeaa862-e4bb-4617...@googlegroups.com>
On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 17:54:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyik...@gmail.com> wrote:

I classify as a lie any statement that the utterer has absolutely no
reason to think is true, but is done to intensely denigrate the person
about whom it is uttered.
************************

[Peter Nyikos]

Another mindlessly formulaic piece of repartee.

As I told the person for whom you are momentarily acting as a useful idiot:

However one interprets the double entendre "boring,"
it DOES read like an effort to walk back everything negative
that you wrote on that rampage of a few years ago.

But hey, perhaps the two of you together might come up with
a rational argument as to why the meaning you have in mind
cannot be interpreted in that way.

However, for that, you would need to educate yourself on what that rampage
was all about, and you don't give a damn about such things, do you?


> And yet more frass.

Here, you are taking advantage of the privileges that the objective morality
of "might makes right" puts at your disposal. [Yes, you are one of the 16 I told
Hemidactylus about in the same post from which the above is taken.]


Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

The Creator has a very short attention span these days...

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 2:05:17 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:

To reiterate: I was hasty in my judgment of "Lilith". Except for the oversight
about the "inability, even in our imagination", hers was quite a good analysis
of the ideas behind the following comment:

> > "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
> >
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>
> I note that the ostensible subject of this thread has been entirely
> abandoned by its creator.

That's because the first two replies to me on this thread, both by yourself,
were thinly disguised efforts to sabotage the thread. You served notice
that you weren't the least bit interested in discussing the three examples
I gave, nor the actual subject itself.

The hint was crystal clear to a goodly number of people, who followed your lead,
but without even a token effort to address the "ostensible" topic.

I don't relish the idea of spitting into a hurricane, so I decided to
make lemonade of all the lemons your buddies were producing. The best lemonade
was the latest: the discovery, thanks to Hemidactylus,
that "might makes right" is actually a form of objective morality --
THE objective morality for the state to which talk.origins has sunk.


And now for something on-topic.

"might makes right" is just as much "objective morality"
as "phylogenetic classification" is "objective classification."


How do you like them apples?


Peter Nyikos
NEW VIRTUAL FOUR LINE .SIG
Though mostly accusatory, this post has a scientific component,
and is relevant to paleontology, which is essential to what talk.origins was set up for.

[Lawyer Daggett]

As the second to reply to you, I note that you never directly responded back.
My retort remains: why do you assert that the imagination of humans to some
specific points is significant? Why? They theory of evolution was never based
upon an assertion of a comprehensive ability to account for the totality of
natural history with detailed accounts of everything.

Do you not understand this? That's hard to believe.

No, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of an ability to
broadly account for the arise of forms splendid and varied without the
necessity of design intervention.

The vast gray landscape between an understanding of biology that required
a creator to make each and every organism, specifically, as fit for purpose, upon
a grand design --- and a world where it appears that species can evolve according
to some basic principles (even if we don't have specific detailed accounts for
every transition) is readily apparent. How much of the transitions of a natural
origin we have adequate imagination to account for is an open question.

However, the mere fact that we could account for some was of incredible
significance. Indeed, the imposition of an apparent requirement that we
(the broad scientific community == we) are required to have imagined all
of the transitions required for a naturalistic origins of life if pure artifice.

You have not responded to this point that it is pure artifice. You have not defended
the idea that we should for some reason be wise enough, or knowledgeable enough,
to account for everything about the natural history. Perhaps you have not done so
because you recognize that it is an absurdity from the get go.

These holes in our knowledge are rightly recognized an opportunities. Casting them
as flaws requires presumptions that I doubt you can defend. So far, you haven't even
attempted to defend the notion that we ought to have robust scenarios in mind,
much less robustly evidenced scenarios, for all aspects of natural history.

Perhaps you avoid the discussion because you know it could devolve into an
evisceration of 'god of the gaps' defenses of things beyond naturalistic evolution.
Perhaps you don't want to be pegged down to the illogic of "yes, you can explain
natural origins of that, but what about this1, or this2, or this3?

[John Harshman]

On 10/1/20 1:28 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 2:05:17 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 9/24/20 2:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>
> To reiterate: I was hasty in my judgment of "Lilith". Except for the oversight
> about the "inability, even in our imagination", hers was quite a good analysis
> of the ideas behind the following comment:
>
>>> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>>>
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>>
>> I note that the ostensible subject of this thread has been entirely
>> abandoned by its creator.
>
> That's because the first two replies to me on this thread, both by yourself,
> were thinly disguised efforts to sabotage the thread.

Let me know when you post something on-topic. I have previously
suggested putting "on-topic" in the title.

[Jonathan]

On 9/24/2020 5:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>

> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>

The solution to speciation is here, if anyone would
bother to read it.


Emergence Taxonomy
https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf


Problem is, emergence isn't just a new tool for
understanding evolution, using the concept requires
an entirely new scientific method.

Where effect-then-cause is our causation, where
the emergent output feeds back to the parts
and gives the system the ability to evolve
and create.

But that would require an open mind, one willing
to forget what you've learned for now, and start
over from scratch.

Of course, eventually the objective methods
return, but in their proper place.

Objective methods are for simple systems.
Emergence is for complex systems.

Natural systems ARE NEVER SIMPLE, THEY ARE
ALWAYS COMPLEX.

One of these days that simple fact of nature
will sink in around here, and the need for
the new scientific method I describe will
become obvious and glaring.

Until then, nature, questions like speciation and
creation, will remain a complete mystery.

Maybe your grand kids will have to explain it to you
someday, pity. It's so much wasted time when the
grand answers are already here.

Jonathan


s

> The really remarkable part of the comment is a part that the commenter,
> Deanne (Lilith) Taylor, completely ignored:
>

> our inability, even in our imagination, to construct

> functional intermediates in many cases
>
> ...especially, "even in our imagination" This applies to a huge
> number of examples. I've posted extensively on the
> mystery of the origins of:
> (1) meiosis and mitosis [1];
> (2) the simplest free-living prokaryotes [2]
> (3) bats [3]
> and I could name many more examples.
>

> [1] If mitosis came first, there is a total dearth in our
> imagination between intermediates to meiosis; and the dearth
> is even greater when contemplating the stretch between
> bacterial chromosomes and those involved in either mitosis or meiosis.
>
> [2] a dearth of imagination where intermediaries between little "protocells"
> and "life as we know it" are concerned.
>
> [3] The following reply to Richard Norman [whom I miss very much]
> speaks strongly to the obstacles to imagining a transition of the
> sort of which Gould speaks.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/1dCpIxt3B3A/src4n19hnkMJ
> Message-ID: <ba6cec42-369d-41b1...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Re: The UD ? The Unintelligent Designer
> Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT)
>
> Nothing has emerged in the half decade since this post to feed our imagination
> of how bats *could* have arisen from analogues of gliders like "flying" squirrels
> or "flying" lemurs.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> University of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
>


--
https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 14:08:14 -0700, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by John Harshman
<jhar...@pacbell.net>:

Ooh, that's *harsh*, man (NPI).

But as the similar saying goes, is it harsh *enough*?
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[John Harshman]

On 10/1/20 3:25 PM, Jonathan wrote:
> On 9/24/2020 5:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly
>> handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>>
>>   "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between
>> major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
>> imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has
>> been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of
>> evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of
>> evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>>
>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>>
>
>
>
> The solution to speciation is here, if anyone would
> bother to read it.
>
>
> Emergence Taxonomy
> https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf

I looked. It says nothing about speciation, and it only mentions species
once. Perhaps you meant something else? Or perhaps you just looked at
the title?

Oh. It's you.

[Peter Nyikos]

If I got the order wrong, I apologize.

> I note that you never directly responded back.

That's because you never directly addressed the topic of the thread.
You went into a weird digression into the imagination of people
1000 years ago, before abandoning all effort to even talk about
imagination.

If the people of 1000 years ago had had access to the data that
we have in our hands, their imaginations might have been superior
to those of "expert" scientists of today. This is because they wouldn't
have had to struggle with the demands of grantsmanship and a
"publish or perish" system which rewards narrow focus on excruciatingly
specialized topics.

Still, I don't think they would have fared much better than the people
of today as far as the three big mysteries I mentioned. The data isn't there.

> My retort remains: why do you assert that the imagination of humans to some
> specific points is significant?

Simply put: it helps to assuage the hunger of humans to understand
the world we live in. It could be that we are the only creatures
in the universe with a capacity to understand not just physics, but
the biology of the world in which they find themselves.

The mysteries I mentioned may forever remain mysteries unless people
exercise their imagination as to the steps that could have bridged
the three gaps I mentioned. One of them is an enormous, uncharted
terrain of obstacles on the way to the origin of life as we know it,
and the other is a Himalayan obstacle on the way to
the origin of metazoans, fungi, and plants.

No wonder you hid behind generalities that gave no hint whatsoever
about these "specific" topics.

The case of bats is insignificant in comparison, but it is instructive. You seem to think
that the fossil record HAS to yield up intermediate forms from shrew-like
ancestors that weren't even gliders to forms barely distinguishable
from modern bats.

But it was the selfsame Stephen Jay Gould who laid the foundation
for the claim that such fossils may never be found. And unless they
are found, the imagination of people 1000 years from now may be no
better at coming up with fully defensible POSSIBLE intermediates than
we are today.

Take a look at the discussion of this riddle here:

https://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2011/03/05/visualising-protobats

After the second post, by Noni Mausa, people went off on completely
irrelevant tangents until I belatedly brought the discussion back
to the theme of viable intermediates.

A drawback of the above webpage is that it no longer includes the intermediates
of which Noni Mausa and I (and the few other participants who were still around)
wrote. IIRC the following will take you to the most important ones:
https://tinyurl.com/y8s3ekkx

> Why? They theory of evolution was never based
> upon an assertion of a comprehensive ability to account for the totality of
> natural history with detailed accounts of everything.

With such a polemical straw man, you seem to be covering up for everyone
who has the naive idea that "the theory of evolution" is about the
incredibly varied and versatile earth biota being completely explained by
what I call "Darwin of the Gaps":

It's natural selection, y'know. The mutants that were/did/could ____
had a survival advantage over those that weren't/didn't/couldn't,
and so those are the ones that we see today.

This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable explanation for each
and every biological phenomenon.

This in turn is not far from "Don't Care of the Gaps":

I don't care HOW or WHY they evolved or by what intermediate stages they
MIGHT have evolved. They evolved. End of story.

>
> Do you not understand this? That's hard to believe.

It IS hard to believe a figment of your imagination.

>
> No, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of an ability to
> broadly account for the arise of forms splendid and varied without the
> necessity of design intervention.

You are hiding behind generalities and equivocations like "predicated
on the [hoped-for?] existence" and "broadly account for".

But that's to be expected from someone who brags about decades of coaching
people for the artificial, highly constrained debates of forensic leagues,
where points are scored more for style than for soundly reasoned arguments.

Plato's dialogues were vastly superior to them. Usenet had the potential for
highly intelligent people of different viewpoints coming up with even
better gems of wisdom. But all hope of that kind of thing emerging
from a forum like talk.origins, dominated since close to its beginning
by people sabotaging that kind of discussion, is forlorn.


The concluding reply to this post will pick up here, soon after I
see that this one has appeared.


Peter Nyikos
VIRTUAL FOUR LINE .SIG
This post has a far-ranging biological and evolutionary component,
and is highly relevant for some of the most important topics for which talk.origins was set up.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 5:05:17 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

> The vast gray landscape between an understanding of biology that required
> a creator to make each and every organism, specifically, as fit for purpose,

How many straw men do you propose to set up before talking in a spirit
of adult give-and-take? [It didn't happen in this post of yours.]

> upon a grand design --- and a world where it appears that species can evolve according
> to some basic principles (even if we don't have specific detailed accounts for
> every transition)

"species"!!! Try "phyla," and explain how the great majority of fossilizable
phyla evolved in less than 40 million years and almost none in the
remaining 500+ million years.

> is readily apparent. How much of the transitions of a natural
> origin we have adequate imagination to account for is an open question.
>
> However, the mere fact that we could account for some was of incredible
> significance. Indeed, the imposition of an apparent requirement that we
> (the broad scientific community == we) are required to have imagined all
> of the transitions required for a naturalistic origins of life if pure artifice.

Again I ask: how many straw men...[continue as above]

>
> You have not responded to this point that it is pure artifice. You have not defended
> the idea that we should for some reason be wise enough, or knowledgeable enough,
> to account for everything about the natural history. Perhaps you have not done so
> because you recognize that it is an absurdity from the get go.
>
> These holes in our knowledge are rightly recognized an opportunities.

...to do something no one in talk.origins seems to want to take advantage of.

>Casting them
> as flaws requires presumptions that I doubt you can defend. So far, you haven't even
> attempted to defend the notion that we ought to have robust scenarios in mind,
> much less robustly evidenced scenarios, for all aspects of natural history.

I'm afraid the unbroken stream of straw men
will continue far beyond this one post.

> Perhaps you avoid the discussion because you know it could devolve into an
> evisceration of 'god of the gaps' defenses of things beyond naturalistic evolution.
> Perhaps you don't want to be pegged down to the illogic of "yes, you can explain
> natural origins of that, but what about this1, or this2, or this3?

Straw men of evolution, revolt! You have nothing to lose but the
babbling of a man who can't think beyond you.


In a more serious vein: have you been conned by phony "suspicions"
of people like John Harshman that I am a closet creationist? If ever
a debate opponent of mine barks up the wrong tree worse than you have here,
I have yet to encounter them.


I'll say one thing for you, though: your way of sabotaging intelligent
discussion about Gould's quote is more imaginative than that of Harshman.

But that mostly applies to this second part. Up to where I ended the first
reply to you, you were sufficiently imaginative in a not-too-terrible way
that you stimulated me to say things that Harshman's
mean-spirited sabotage kept me from mentioning. This was due to a disgust
born of almost a whole decade in talk.origins of Harshman trying
to control and manipulate the trajectory of threads that I began.


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

The tinyurl for protobat wings may need some guidance.

On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 8:55:18 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> The case of bats is insignificant in comparison, but it is instructive. You seem to think
> that the fossil record HAS to yield up intermediate forms from shrew-like
> ancestors that weren't even gliders to forms barely distinguishable
> from modern bats.
>
> But it was the selfsame Stephen Jay Gould who laid the foundation
> for the claim that such fossils may never be found. And unless they
> are found, the imagination of people 1000 years from now may be no
> better at coming up with fully defensible POSSIBLE intermediates than
> we are today.
>
> Take a look at the discussion of this riddle here:
>
> https://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2011/03/05/visualising-protobats
>
> After the second post, by Noni Mausa, people went off on completely
> irrelevant tangents until I belatedly brought the discussion back
> to the theme of viable intermediates.
>
> A drawback of the above webpage is that it no longer includes the intermediates
> of which Noni Mausa and I (and the few other participants who were still around)
> wrote. IIRC the following will take you to the most important ones:
> https://tinyurl.com/y8s3ekkx

Not the two most prominent, color pictures; those only take you to
stage A. For the other hypothetical intermediate stages B, C, and D, scroll down to a small gray picture.
Click to enlarge.

The gray picture directly below that one was another picture that
appeared in the original version of the tetrapodzoology blog. That one
was subjected to critical scrutiny by myself at the end of the blog.
Briefly put, those claws are curved the wrong way. They'd have about as
much trouble climbing down a tree as cats, and would have to climb up
trees backwards.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

Let me know when you stop indulging in blatant dishonesty about things
you make unmarked snips of.

Predicably, Bob Casasnova, who has me killfiled, was conned by your
unmarked snip.

I bet you are delighted over what a useful idiot you have in him.

What method will you use to continue to keep Bob in ignorance about
the following repost of your unmarked snip, and subsequent explanation,
I wonder:

And now for something on-topic.

"might makes right" is just as much "objective morality"
as "phylogenetic classification" is "objective classification."


How do you like them apples?

Your ONLY reason for promoting the pseudo-scientific ban on paraphyletic taxa
is that clades are "objective" in a strained way that paraphyletic taxa are not.

Also, "might makes right" is objective, as I explained to Hemidactylus,
in a way that "murder is morally wrong" is not.

This is not a perfect analogy, but to use a standard formula, it's a distinction
without a difference.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
U. of South Carolina

http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

Sorry, not on-topic enough just to mention a couple of on-topic words.

[jillery]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 11:39:37 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

"Might makes right" is what the powerful say to the powerless to
rationalize their abuse. It's as objective as "it's true because I
say so" and other self-serving polemics, and so are the antithesis of
objective morality.

Your comments above are self-serving in a different way. Instead, you
whine the words of self-proclaimed martyrs, who insist the mockery of
others proves their righteousness. It's true they laughed at
Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers.
But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 20:09:24 -0700, the following appeared in

talk.origins, posted by John Harshman
<jhar...@pacbell.net>:

Since he's appointed himself the resident t.o polymath as a
replacement for DocDoc (else why is he arguing with a
professional about terminology in that professional's own
field?), "on-topic" would seem to be irrelevant. To a
polymath, *everything* is probably on-topic by definition.

He's beginning to sound like our local refrigerant, with his
objections to various technical things because laymen don't
understand them.

[Peter Nyikos]

You aren't sorry at all, are you?

I was too rushed for time to mention this yesterday, but your unmarked snip
hid a lot more. It was both a case of snip-n-deceive [1]
and snip-n-domineer. And you are already doubling down on the domineering.

Here is the very next sentence that you hid from your loyal useful idiot
[indeed, all people who read your posts but not mine]:

You served notice that you weren't the least bit interested in
discussing the three examples I gave, nor the actual subject itself.

And now you've made it clear that by "on topic" you mean the subject of the OP,
not just any old topic that is relevant to the purposes for which talk.origins
was set up.


You are playing the same destructive, hypocritical game you played in the thread,
TOWARDS A SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF MACROEVOLUTION. For the longest time you
contributed NOTHING on-topic to it. Your first week or so was spent
hounding me not to let anyone hijack my thread -- when your hounding itself
was sabotaging the thread.

Then you hijacked it big-time by attacking me for boycotting your net.sidekick
Erik Simpson and your net-pit-bull Oxyaena. It was only towards the end that
you finally made one contribution to the topic of the OP itself.

What's more, you never criticized anyone else for posting off topic. And you
are batting 0.000 again on this thread in showing how much you are bothered
by the fact that everyone else (well, almost everyone else)is posting off topic
even in the more expansive talk.origins-oriented meaning of the term.


But then, all this hypocrisy counts as being virtuous in the might-makes-right
system of absolute morality to which you subscribe, doesn't it?


[1] I learned the expression "snip-n-snark" from your useful idiot Bob Casanova.
Since he lives by that same system of absolute morality here in t.o., he eschewed the
term "snip-n-deceive", probably because it might have awakened some thoughts
in readers of the types of morality that is associated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
tradition.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

Yes, that's what "on topic" means, presumably to everyone. Not you?

> You are playing the same destructive, hypocritical game you played in the thread,
> TOWARDS A SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF MACROEVOLUTION. For the longest time you
> contributed NOTHING on-topic to it. Your first week or so was spent
> hounding me not to let anyone hijack my thread -- when your hounding itself
> was sabotaging the thread.
>
> Then you hijacked it big-time by attacking me for boycotting your net.sidekick
> Erik Simpson and your net-pit-bull Oxyaena. It was only towards the end that
> you finally made one contribution to the topic of the OP itself.
>
> What's more, you never criticized anyone else for posting off topic. And you
> are batting 0.000 again on this thread in showing how much you are bothered
> by the fact that everyone else (well, almost everyone else)is posting off topic
> even in the more expansive talk.origins-oriented meaning of the term.
>
>
> But then, all this hypocrisy counts as being virtuous in the might-makes-right
> system of absolute morality to which you subscribe, doesn't it?
>
>
> [1] I learned the expression "snip-n-snark" from your useful idiot Bob Casanova.
> Since he lives by that same system of absolute morality here in t.o., he eschewed the
> term "snip-n-deceive", probably because it might have awakened some thoughts
> in readers of the types of morality that is associated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
> tradition.

I'm leaving your rants in, just so you don't accuse me of evil snipping.
I probably won't respond to anything off-topic (in the usual sense) in
this thread in the future, which means I probably never will respond.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 6:30:17 PM UTC-4, Jonathan wrote:
> On 9/24/2020 5:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
> >
> > "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
> >
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
> >
>
>
>
> The solution to speciation is here, if anyone would
> bother to read it.

First Daggett, and now you, are fixated on speciation. How about
explaining the emergence of the majority of fossilizable animal PHYLA
in just 10 million years, and then only ONE more in the next 520 million years?

But that's "off-topic" according to someone who is very happy about the
off-topic posting going on here, including his own.

But he does have a point. So here is a much tougher assignment: tell
us what you expect the science of emergent properties to reveal in the way
of viable intermediates between shrew-like animals and fully winged bats.

If that's too trivial for you to bother with, take a look at the two
tremendous riddles that you ignored along with this one after you signed off.


Speaking of which: how is it that DIG was so merciful as to not only
release you from his ban, but also to let you post under your old name?

>
> Emergence Taxonomy
> https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf

There is no biological taxonomy here, only the "taxonomy" of emergence
that any intelligent person could have figured out for himself.

>
> Problem is, emergence isn't just a new tool for
> understanding evolution, using the concept requires
> an entirely new scientific method.

What's wrong with Darwin's explanation of speciation?

>
> Where effect-then-cause is our causation, where
> the emergent output feeds back to the parts
> and gives the system the ability to evolve
> and create.
>
> But that would require an open mind, one willing
> to forget what you've learned for now, and start
> over from scratch.
>
> Of course, eventually the objective methods
> return, but in their proper place.
>
> Objective methods are for simple systems.
> Emergence is for complex systems.
>
> Natural systems ARE NEVER SIMPLE, THEY ARE
> ALWAYS COMPLEX.
>
> One of these days that simple fact of nature
> will sink in around here, and the need for
> the new scientific method I describe will
> become obvious and glaring.
>
> Until then, nature, questions like speciation and
> creation, will remain a complete mystery.
>
> Maybe your grand kids will have to explain it to you
> someday, pity. It's so much wasted time when the
> grand answers are already here.
>
> Jonathan

The "grand answers" of speciation. How anticlimactic can you get?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

U. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

I don't presume to read the minds of others.
I've always used the more expansive concept of "any old topic..."[see above].
There's precious little of that going on in most threads. Like this one,
thanks to you.

> > You are playing the same destructive, hypocritical game you played in the thread,
> > TOWARDS A SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF MACROEVOLUTION. For the longest time you
> > contributed NOTHING on-topic to it. Your first week or so was spent
> > hounding me not to let anyone hijack my thread -- when your hounding itself
> > was sabotaging the thread.
> >
> > Then you hijacked it big-time by attacking me for boycotting your net.sidekick
> > Erik Simpson and your net-pit-bull Oxyaena. It was only towards the end that
> > you finally made one contribution to the topic of the OP itself.
> >
> > What's more, you never criticized anyone else for posting off topic. And you
> > are batting 0.000 again on this thread in showing how much you are bothered
> > by the fact that everyone else (well, almost everyone else)is posting off topic
> > even in the more expansive talk.origins-oriented meaning of the term.
> >
> >
> > But then, all this hypocrisy counts as being virtuous in the might-makes-right
> > system of absolute morality to which you subscribe, doesn't it?
> >
> >
> > [1] I learned the expression "snip-n-snark" from your useful idiot Bob Casanova.
> > Since he lives by that same system of absolute morality here in t.o., he eschewed the
> > term "snip-n-deceive", probably because it might have awakened some thoughts
> > in readers of the types of morality that is associated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
> > tradition.
>
> I'm leaving your rants in, just so you don't accuse me of evil snipping.
> I probably won't respond to anything off-topic (in the usual sense) in
> this thread in the future, which means I probably never will respond.

I'm disobeying your "order":

Let me know when you post something on-topic.

I'll just let you find out for yourself when and whether I do that.
You wouldn't respond with anything on-topic anyway, judging from your track
record on this thread.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 10/2/20 3:37 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> First Daggett, and now you, are fixated on speciation. How about
> explaining the emergence of the majority of fossilizable animal PHYLA
> in just 10 million years, and then only ONE more in the next 520 million years?

There are a number of theories on this. First, what do you mean by
"fossilizable"? All phyla are fossilizable, but some are more likely
than others, and some haven't shown up at all in the record, so far. It
appears by the clues you provide that you refer to phyla with at least
some members having mineralized skeletons; presumably your "ONE more" is
Bryozoa. So you're really, apparently, referring to the evolution of
mineralized skeletons, which is quite different from the evolution of
the phyla. There are a few other phyla than Bryozoa that show up in the
record after the Cambrian; they're just absurdly rare, like Nematoda.

So why mineralized skeletons? One theory is that it's a response to the
evolution of the first macropredators, i.e. the first organisms preying
on the sorts of large organisms that got those mineralized skeletons.
Further, there are several theories about what sparked predator
evolution. Another theory is a change in the chemistry of the sea.

Also, if you're referring to the evolution of mineralization, that
happened several times in different groups of cnidarians, at least one
of those after the Cambrian. Should that count?

So why so few after the Cambrian? Not clear, though it may be that all
the groups that could best have responded to predation by growing shells
already did so at that time, and other groups stuck with other solutions.

You understand that there's no point in talking to Jonathan about any of
this, right? He's a big picture guy, and he'll just shout "Emergence" or
some such buzzword.

[erik simpson]

And the Chez Watts keep comming!

[*Hemidactylus*]

erik simpson <eastsi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And the Chez Watts keep comming!
>
>> I don't presume to read the minds of others.
>

Yeah that was a zinger.

[Glenn]

It would be if you were the source.

[Glenn]

On Friday, October 2, 2020 at 5:05:18 PM UTC-7, erik simpson wrote:
> And the Chez Watts keep comming!
>
> > I don't presume to read the minds of others.

Apparently you presume Peter does presume to read the minds of others.

Apparently you presume to read Peter's mind.

Is this Chez Watt?

[*Hemidactylus*]

Hey somebody’s yapping heelsnipper dug under the fence and is running loose
in the neighborhood.

[Peter Nyikos]

Hemidactylus has fallen silent, and as on the earlier thread where
he was badgering me to discuss objective morality, he is letting jillery
get him (and his would-be releaser Simpson) off the hook, now that his bluff
has been called.

Problem is, jillery will have a much tougher time getting the two of them off
the hook than she had with just getting Hemi off the hook back then.

It's much more than that. It is an objective system of morality where
earlier attempts to convince people of the existence of an objective
system failed:

1. The Judeo-Christian efforts have not only failed to come up with
convincing arguments, many of the ones professing the respective religions
have flouted the moral system they were trying to promote. And this
includes religious leaders at the very top, like many medieval Popes,
and several archbishops of our time who not only condoned pedophile priests,
but committed similar crimes themselves.

2. Plato made, via his role model Socrates, a strong effort to promote
an objective system of morality, but his most concerted effort, in the dialogue
"Gorgias," foundered in the face of a counter by Callicles, who lacked
power but nevertheless promoted a "might makes right" morality. In the end,
Plato actually had to fall back on the hypothesis that unjust people are
punished in an afterlife while the just are rewarded.

To you, jillery, that should sounds suspiciously like the Judeo-Christian
substitute of God for a rational system of absolute morality. And you
know that is a very poor substitute.


I could go on to tell how Kant's Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham's
"greatest good for the greatest number" fail just as surely to establish
an objective morality. And I will, if you would like me to do so,
but I'll save that for another day.

> It's as objective as "it's true because I
> say so" and other self-serving polemics, and so are the antithesis of
> objective morality.

If you really think so, why do you deny the existence of objective morality?
Or am I confusing your stance with that of Oxyaena?

Anyway, you seem to miss the point of the word "objective." I use it to
mean "amenable to scientific methodology." Especially in a forum like
talk.origins, so nearly sealed off from the outside world, it is not difficult
to see which set of people holds the balance of power. It also wasn't difficult
to see in the Soviet Union, and it isn't difficult to see in North Korea today. And the ones in power have done an impressive job of imposing their idea of "right"
on the others, don't you think?

Sociology, which people in the "hard sciences" tend to look
down on, nevertheless has developed the methodology to determine such things
about as accurately as biologists can determine phylogenetic trees.

And psychologists, using tools of behaviorism developed about a century
ago, can probably glean from the behavior of individuals like Stalin,
the hereditary absolute monarch of North Korea, and various members
of the dominant clique in talk.origins, what kinds of behaviors they
could indulge in. By that I mean, what kinds of things they feel comfortable
treating as "right" based on the amount of "might" they believe they have.

That of course depends in part of the loyalty of their henchmen and henchwomen.
Caligula, for instance, overestimated his might and his last attempts to
make his ways "right" failed because his henchmen, the Praetorian Guard,
got fed up with him.


What other system of morality could claim to be empirically verifiable?
If such verifiability isn't objectivity, I'd like to know why not.

>
> Your comments above are self-serving in a different way.

Don't be ridiculous. I am so powerless here, it's a wonder Hemidactylus
settles for such namby-pamby "exercising of right" as "boring carpeter bee."

Perhaps he is over-reacting to the cold reception Harshman gave him
many years ago, when he berated John Harshman for keeping me posting to
talk.origins by discussing scientific subjects with me. But it appears,
from the behavior of Harshman on this thread, that he may be amenable
to such a suggestion now.

IOW, whereas Hemi formerly lacked the might to convince Harshman that
he was advocating right action, he might find that it takes much
less might now to convince Harshman.

> Instead, you
> whine the words of self-proclaimed martyrs, who insist the mockery of
> others proves their righteousness.

You obviously don't know that, at the age of 23, I squarely faced the possibility
that there is no heaven, but there IS hell, and that it is run like the Soviet
slave labor camps, with the common criminals lording it over the
dissidents whose only crime was to speak out against the injustices
they saw committed by the powerful.

And my conclusion then has remained with me ever since. It is twofold.

1. If I tried to live like the ruthless who earn such cushy places in hell,
I'd be a Johnny-come-lately to that kind of behavior, and would probably
come to no good end in this world and just be swept into the dustbin of
those who never aspired to such positions.

2. Surveying the people I really admired, I saw Socrates, drinking the
poisoned hemlock, for trying to teach people how to reason well;
and Jesus, crucified for his condemnation of the scribes and pharisees
and other religious leaders of his day.

And I figured that if these people were among the damned, why then I would be
in damned good company.

> It's true they laughed at
> Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers.
> But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

You are babbling at random. Perhaps you should persuade Hemidactylus
to try and argue objective morality with me. He at least has read
an impressive assortment of philosophical thought.


Peter Nyikos

[Glenn]

You and Erik are the qualified heelsnipping dogs here.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hemidactylus has fallen silent, and as on the earlier thread where
> he was badgering me to discuss objective morality, he is letting jillery
> get him (and his would-be releaser Simpson) off the hook, now that his bluff
> has been called.
>
> Problem is, jillery will have a much tougher time getting the two of them off
> the hook than she had with just getting Hemi off the hook back then.
>

“I don't presume to read the minds of others.”

Much of Judaism in the Mosaic scripting was silly micromanagement and OCD
tedium about tabernacles and burning animals in sacrifice. Other stuff was
downright harmful to ingroup and outgroup members. Many of the 10
commandments were God being jealous.

> And this
> includes religious leaders at the very top, like many medieval Popes,
> and several archbishops of our time who not only condoned pedophile priests,
> but committed similar crimes themselves.
>
> 2. Plato made, via his role model Socrates, a strong effort to promote
> an objective system of morality, but his most concerted effort, in the dialogue
> "Gorgias," foundered in the face of a counter by Callicles, who lacked
> power but nevertheless promoted a "might makes right" morality. In the end,
> Plato actually had to fall back on the hypothesis that unjust people are
> punished in an afterlife while the just are rewarded.
>

Well there was the elf on the shelf argument that comes from the lack of a
panopticon in the invisible man precursor. But there is also the
realization command morality is an oxymoron and the gods are expendable.

>
> To you, jillery, that should sounds suspiciously like the Judeo-Christian
> substitute of God for a rational system of absolute morality. And you
> know that is a very poor substitute.
>

Huh?

>
> I could go on to tell how Kant's Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham's
> "greatest good for the greatest number" fail just as surely to establish
> an objective morality. And I will, if you would like me to do so,
> but I'll save that for another day.
>

Why stop there? Ross explodes the categorical imperative in that promises
are but a prima facie duty that can be superseded by other considerations
such as preventing harm.

Kohlberg followed Piaget’s lead into an ontogenetic stage theory where
consequentialism and deontology had a post-conventional ring taken up by
Habermas in his discursive ethics where people converse toward an
intersubjective consensus that takes all perspectives and individual
effects into consideration to the extent possible.

Yet knowing what ethical stances exist in the sense of collective
intentional ontology is NOT a justification for the stances taken thus not
objective morality.

>
>> It's as objective as "it's true because I
>> say so" and other self-serving polemics, and so are the antithesis of
>> objective morality.
>
> If you really think so, why do you deny the existence of objective morality?
> Or am I confusing your stance with that of Oxyaena?
>
> Anyway, you seem to miss the point of the word "objective." I use it to
> mean "amenable to scientific methodology."

Pure scientistic claptrap. Science can provide food for thought but not by
itself provide justification for moral decisions. Largely different
magisteria though religion is not a necessary constituent.

You can use social science to survey stances on moral issues taken within
societies or compare moral systems across societies in a nonjudgmental way
but it won’t tell you what to value, what is good or what is right.

> Especially in a forum like
> talk.origins, so nearly sealed off from the outside world, it is not difficult
> to see which set of people holds the balance of power.

Ok Foucault. Habermas would argue for ideal fora in the public sphere or
lifeworlds in the Enlightenment era before power and money got involved in
the commodification of discourse. That is true power. Backwaters such as
talk.origins don’t rate on that scale. Nothing is preventing you from
presenting your viewpoint here except your own inability to avoid
interpersonal squabble and your love of playing the local constable in a
frontier justice fantasy play.

> It also wasn't difficult
> to see in the Soviet Union, and it isn't difficult to see in North Korea
> today. And the ones in power have done an impressive job of imposing their idea of "right"
> on the others, don't you think?
>

So Stalin and the Kim dynasty are relevant here? Hyperbolize much? Are we
marching you off to the gulag or reeducation camp?

>
> Sociology, which people in the "hard sciences" tend to look
> down on, nevertheless has developed the methodology to determine such things
> about as accurately as biologists can determine phylogenetic trees.
>

Sociology cannot on its own provide moral justification. It can approach
components of moral systems as social facts having collective
intentionality sensu Searle.

>
> And psychologists, using tools of behaviorism developed about a century
> ago, can probably glean from the behavior of individuals like Stalin,
> the hereditary absolute monarch of North Korea, and various members
> of the dominant clique in talk.origins, what kinds of behaviors they
> could indulge in.

Remedial set theory for you:

https://youtu.be/rsRjQDrDnY8

https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/One_of_These_Things

> By that I mean, what kinds of things they feel comfortable
> treating as "right" based on the amount of "might" they believe they have.
>

Ok you’ve flogged that horse enough already. Sheer uninformative polemic.

>
> That of course depends in part of the loyalty of their henchmen and henchwomen.
> Caligula, for instance, overestimated his might and his last attempts to
> make his ways "right" failed because his henchmen, the Praetorian Guard,
> got fed up with him.
>

Might makes right is hardly a moral system. Expedience, instrumentality,
prudence, morality...

>
> What other system of morality could claim to be empirically verifiable?
> If such verifiability isn't objectivity, I'd like to know why not.
>

I think you may be conflating objective study of moral systems with their
intersubjective justifications. It’s similar to conflating epistemic
objective study of human behavior with ontologically subjective qualia.

>
>>
>> Your comments above are self-serving in a different way.
>
> Don't be ridiculous. I am so powerless here, it's a wonder Hemidactylus
> settles for such namby-pamby "exercising of right" as "boring carpeter bee."
>

Humor impairment duly noted.

>
> Perhaps he is over-reacting to the cold reception Harshman gave him
> many years ago,

“I don't presume to read the minds of others.”

> when he berated John Harshman for keeping me posting to
> talk.origins by discussing scientific subjects with me. But it appears,
> from the behavior of Harshman on this thread, that he may be amenable
> to such a suggestion now.
>
> IOW, whereas Hemi formerly lacked the might to convince Harshman that
> he was advocating right action, he might find that it takes much
> less might now to convince Harshman.
>

“I don't presume to read the minds of others.”

>
>> Instead, you
>> whine the words of self-proclaimed martyrs, who insist the mockery of
>> others proves their righteousness.
>
> You obviously don't know that, at the age of 23, I squarely faced the possibility
> that there is no heaven, but there IS hell, and that it is run like the Soviet
> slave labor camps, with the common criminals lording it over the
> dissidents whose only crime was to speak out against the injustices
> they saw committed by the powerful.
>
> And my conclusion then has remained with me ever since. It is twofold.
>
> 1. If I tried to live like the ruthless who earn such cushy places in hell,
> I'd be a Johnny-come-lately to that kind of behavior, and would probably
> come to no good end in this world and just be swept into the dustbin of
> those who never aspired to such positions.
>
> 2. Surveying the people I really admired, I saw Socrates, drinking the
> poisoned hemlock, for trying to teach people how to reason well;
> and Jesus, crucified for his condemnation of the scribes and pharisees
> and other religious leaders of his day.
>
> And I figured that if these people were among the damned, why then I would be
> in damned good company.
>

Didn’t Machiavelli think of hell for the companionship in a similar manner?

>
>> It's true they laughed at
>> Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers.
>> But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
>
> You are babbling at random. Perhaps you should persuade Hemidactylus
> to try and argue objective morality with me. He at least has read
> an impressive assortment of philosophical thought.
>

I thought you had some conditionality involving me evaluating Ron O which
served as an escape hatch for you.

[jillery]

On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 17:30:55 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

There is no presumption here. The peter persona's posts regularly
include instances of him pretending to read minds. You would know
this if you had any idea what you're talking about. But you don't and
are proud of it.

[jillery]

On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 18:03:01 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:


<snip obfuscating noise>


How ironic, that in this very thread, and barely over 24 hours ago,
you called me a troll and declared that you won't feed me any further.
And now you're back to trolling me. Can you say "Tu quoque"? I
didn't think so.

>On Friday, October 2, 2020 at 3:25:17 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 11:39:37 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 1:45:18 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

<snip for focus>

I spit out your foul mindless words you put in my mouth. You don't
speak for me.

>I could go on to tell how Kant's Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham's
>"greatest good for the greatest number" fail just as surely to establish
>an objective morality. And I will, if you would like me to do so,
>but I'll save that for another day.

I have no doubt you will spam your comments about objective morality
in many more topics which have absolutely nothing to do with objective
morality.

>> It's as objective as "it's true because I
>> say so" and other self-serving polemics, and so are the antithesis of
>> objective morality.
>
>If you really think so, why do you deny the existence of objective morality?
>Or am I confusing your stance with that of Oxyaena?

Liar [1]. You continue to post your stupid lies even after I correct
you, as I did here in direct reply to one of your posts:
**********************
Message-ID: <rhnfjehmrg3scbj92...@4ax.com>
On Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:32:44 -0400, jillery <69jp...@gmail.com>
wrote:
************************

Of course, you conveniently never replied to that post. I suppose you
will now pretend you never saw it, and you will now complain that the
above doesn't specify the post well enough for you.

>Anyway, you seem to miss the point of the word "objective." I use it to
>mean "amenable to scientific methodology."

"might makes right" is not amenable to scientific methodology. Who do
you think you're fooling?

>Especially in a forum like
>talk.origins, so nearly sealed off from the outside world, it is not difficult
>to see which set of people holds the balance of power. It also wasn't difficult
>to see in the Soviet Union, and it isn't difficult to see in North Korea today. And the ones in power have done an impressive job of imposing their idea of "right"
>on the others, don't you think?
>
>Sociology, which people in the "hard sciences" tend to look
>down on, nevertheless has developed the methodology to determine such things
>about as accurately as biologists can determine phylogenetic trees.
>
>And psychologists, using tools of behaviorism developed about a century
>ago, can probably glean from the behavior of individuals like Stalin,
>the hereditary absolute monarch of North Korea, and various members
>of the dominant clique in talk.origins, what kinds of behaviors they
>could indulge in. By that I mean, what kinds of things they feel comfortable
>treating as "right" based on the amount of "might" they believe they have.
>
>That of course depends in part of the loyalty of their henchmen and henchwomen.
>Caligula, for instance, overestimated his might and his last attempts to
>make his ways "right" failed because his henchmen, the Praetorian Guard,
>got fed up with him.
>
>
>What other system of morality could claim to be empirically verifiable?
>If such verifiability isn't objectivity, I'd like to know why not.

Since you asked, my understanding is most systems of morality claim to
be empirically verifiable. Making baseless claims is easy, you do it
all the time. The hard part is backing up those claims, which you
almost never do.


>> Your comments above are self-serving in a different way. Instead, you

>> whine the words of self-proclaimed martyrs, who insist the mockery of
>> others proves their righteousness.
>

>Don't be ridiculous. I am so powerless here, it's a wonder Hemidactylus
>settles for such namby-pamby "exercising of right" as "boring carpeter bee."

Given all the spam and Big Lies and obfuscating noise you have posted
for so long, it makes sense only if you have something really nasty
that you hold over DIG's head. Either way, you have at least as much
power as anybody else, to reply to whomever you see fit in whatever
way you see fit. What happens is, you scream and stomp your feet when
others exercise their power to do the same in reply to you, just as
you did when you accused me of trolling.

>Perhaps he is over-reacting to the cold reception Harshman gave him
>many years ago, when he berated John Harshman for keeping me posting to
>talk.origins by discussing scientific subjects with me. But it appears,
>from the behavior of Harshman on this thread, that he may be amenable
>to such a suggestion now.
>
>IOW, whereas Hemi formerly lacked the might to convince Harshman that
>he was advocating right action, he might find that it takes much
>less might now to convince Harshman.
>

>You obviously don't know that, at the age of 23, I squarely faced the possibility
>that there is no heaven, but there IS hell, and that it is run like the Soviet
>slave labor camps, with the common criminals lording it over the
>dissidents whose only crime was to speak out against the injustices
>they saw committed by the powerful.
>
>And my conclusion then has remained with me ever since. It is twofold.
>
>1. If I tried to live like the ruthless who earn such cushy places in hell,
>I'd be a Johnny-come-lately to that kind of behavior, and would probably
>come to no good end in this world and just be swept into the dustbin of
>those who never aspired to such positions.
>
>2. Surveying the people I really admired, I saw Socrates, drinking the
>poisoned hemlock, for trying to teach people how to reason well;
>and Jesus, crucified for his condemnation of the scribes and pharisees
>and other religious leaders of his day.
>
>And I figured that if these people were among the damned, why then I would be
>in damned good company.
>
>
>
>> It's true they laughed at
>> Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers.
>> But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
>
>You are babbling at random.

Tu quoque back atcha, Bozo.

>Perhaps you should persuade Hemidactylus
>to try and argue objective morality with me. He at least has read
>an impressive assortment of philosophical thought.

My impression is Hemidactylus has enough sense to recognize your
understanding of 'objective morality' has nothing whatever to do with
objective morality, and you have no interest in actually discussing
the topic, just like most of the other topics you spam. But I could
be wrong.

[1] Your explicitly written definition of "lie":
***********************
<7eeaa862-e4bb-4617...@googlegroups.com>
On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 17:54:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyik...@gmail.com> wrote:

I classify as a lie any statement that the utterer has absolutely no
reason to think is true, but is done to intensely denigrate the person
about whom it is uttered.
************************

[erik simpson]

PN sez:
"Who cares about mere insults? I considered them to be mindless substitutes
for countering searing indictments, many backed up with evidence
as strong as the one I have on you having lied about an alleged opinion of yours."

Can you explain an accusation that someone is "lying about their alleged
opinion" without involving mind reading? When Peter hurls insults are they to
be understood as mindless reactions to searing indictments from his legions
of enemies? (Asking for a friend.)

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 22:06:14 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com>:

I suspect these two (PN and GS) are zorgling each others'
grobs...

[*Hemidactylus*]

Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 22:06:14 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
> <eastsi...@gmail.com>:
>
>> On Friday, October 2, 2020 at 5:35:17 PM UTC-7, Glenn wrote:
>>> On Friday, October 2, 2020 at 5:05:18 PM UTC-7, erik simpson wrote:
>>>> And the Chez Watts keep comming!
>>>>
>>>>> I don't presume to read the minds of others.
>>>
>>> Apparently you presume Peter does presume to read the minds of others.
>>>
>>> Apparently you presume to read Peter's mind.
>>>
>>> Is this Chez Watt?
>>
>> PN sez:
>> "Who cares about mere insults? I considered them to be mindless substitutes
>> for countering searing indictments, many backed up with evidence
>> as strong as the one I have on you having lied about an alleged opinion of yours."
>>
>> Can you explain an accusation that someone is "lying about their alleged
>> opinion" without involving mind reading? When Peter hurls insults are they to
>> be understood as mindless reactions to searing indictments from his legions
>> of enemies? (Asking for a friend.)
>
> I suspect these two (PN and GS) are zorgling each others'
> grobs...

That sounds kinky.

[Jonathan]

On 10/1/2020 8:13 PM, John Harshman wrote:
> On 10/1/20 3:25 PM, Jonathan wrote:

>> On 9/24/2020 5:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was
>>> amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>>>

>>>   "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between
>>> major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in
>>> our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases,
>>> has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of
>>> evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of
>>> evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>>>
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>>>
>>
>>
>>

>> The solution to speciation is here, if anyone would
>> bother to read it.
>>
>>

>> Emergence Taxonomy
>> https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf
>
> I looked. It says nothing about speciation, and it only mentions species
> once. Perhaps you meant something else? Or perhaps you just looked at
> the title?
>
> Oh. It's you.
>


Ya know, the ability to read and comprehend what is written
is a basic aspect of any worthwhile opinion.

The FIRST PARAGRAPH READS...


"The emergence of order and organization in
systems composed of many autonomous entities
or agents is a very fundamental process.
The process of emergence deals with the
fundamental question: “how does an
entity come into existence?”"


THE FIRST PARAGRAPH!!!

Let me repeat it just in case you didn't
read past the first word.



“how does an entity come into existence?”"



Can you tell me what the above sentence is
expressing?

Yet you didn't even read the paper, but feel qualified
to give an opinion on the concept the paper
introduces.

That's just ignorance at an astonishing level.
A child of twelve of below average intelligence
could do better.

Christ this is embarrassing to witness.


















--
https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1

[*Hemidactylus*]

Does almighty emergence solve the sorites problem of population
differentiation interpreted as speciation? If so explain how.

[Jonathan]

On 10/2/2020 6:37 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> On Thursday, October 1, 2020 at 6:30:17 PM UTC-4, Jonathan wrote:
>> On 9/24/2020 5:34 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> The following remarkable comment by Stephen Jay Gould was amateurishly handled in the Archive of Talk.Origins:
>>>
>>> "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, p. 127)
>>>
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html#quote50
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The solution to speciation is here, if anyone would
>> bother to read it.
>
> First Daggett, and now you, are fixated on speciation. How about
> explaining the emergence of the majority of fossilizable animal PHYLA
> in just 10 million years, and then only ONE more in the next 520 million years?
>

This is high school stuff...


Cambrian Explosion and Population Growth

"The Cambrian explosion may be no more than the consequence
of exponential growth in diversity and complexity, followed
by a leveling off of diversity as niches are filled.

Why is chaos important for our discussion of the Cambrian
explosion? Well, once populations increase to levels near
the carrying capacity, the population numbers are especially
subject to strange and unpredictable oscillations. To the
extent that we can apply the ideas on population changes
to speciation and adaptive radiation, we might expect that
periodic extinctions or bursts of speciation, as in the
model of punctuated equilibrium, might occur just as the
result of simple interactions between individuals and
groups and not necessarily the result of external forces"

http://www.bio.miami.edu/tom/courses/bil160/bil160goods/15_cambrian.html

> But that's "off-topic" according to someone who is very happy about the
> off-topic posting going on here, including his own.
>
> But he does have a point. So here is a much tougher assignment: tell
> us what you expect the science of emergent properties to reveal in the way
> of viable intermediates between shrew-like animals and fully winged bats.
>

Strong emergence explains why there isn't intermediates
between species, evolution makes the jump all at once.
As this nice paper about the brain and consciousness
discusses.



Conflicting Emergences. Weak vs. strong emergence for the
modelling of brain function

Abstract

The concept of “emergence” has become commonplace in the modelling
of complex systems, both natural and man-made; a functional
property” emerges” from a system when it cannot be readily
explained by the properties of the system’s sub-units.

A bewildering array of adaptive and sophisticated behaviours
can be observed from large ensembles of elementary agents
such as ant colonies, bird flocks or by the interactions
of elementary material units such as molecules or weather
elements. Ultimately, emergence has been adopted as the
ontological support of a number of attempts to model
brain function.


Emergence

Emergence is a contemporary concept with a long history in
evolutionary science (for a detailed narrative see Peter
Corning ‘s essay (Corning, 2002)). The concept of emergence
was first introduced by the physiologist George H. Lewes
in his book Problems of Life and Mind (Lewes, 1879, pp. 412) “

… The emergent is unlike its components in so far as these
are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum
or their difference…”.

Through this definition, it was possible to form a framework
that is generally able to make sense of widely observed *leaps*
in the complexity of nature (Mill, 1874) – particularly in the
formation of complex objects from relatively simple elementary
parts.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6581535/

> If that's too trivial for you to bother with, take a look at the two
> tremendous riddles that you ignored along with this one after you signed off.
>
>
> Speaking of which: how is it that DIG was so merciful as to not only
> release you from his ban, but also to let you post under your old name?
>

He banned me, at last count, five times. Yet...

That should tell you something, he'll ban me again
and I don't care. I'll come and go as I please.

This ng is rather stale and the minds here are not
open to new ideas. So why should I care?

>>
>> Emergence Taxonomy
>> https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf
>
> There is no biological taxonomy here, only the "taxonomy" of emergence
> that any intelligent person could have figured out for himself.
>

And? Emergence explains all of creation.
Biological creation too.

You seem to have difficulty separating a purely
theoretical or abstract concept from special
cases.

>>
>> Problem is, emergence isn't just a new tool for
>> understanding evolution, using the concept requires
>> an entirely new scientific method.
>
> What's wrong with Darwin's explanation of speciation?
>

It put's forth several different mechanisms for
speciation. It DOES NOT provide a single theoretical
explanation for all speciation events.

Emergence does!

Darwinian evolution in general is NOT wrong, complexity
science has placed it in ...abstract form, so evolution
can be applied universally.

'Darwinian evolution' is a special case only of a
process of evolution that is universal to all things.
Not just life!

The universe, life and mind.

Doesn't that interest you? I mean honestly, complexity
science is Darwin on steroids. It posits the Darwinian
evolution we all know and love applies to EVERYTHING.

And the beauty of placing Darwin in abstract terms is
two fold.

First it's abstract forms means we can compare entirely
different types of evolving systems to each other.

We can compare how a solar system, an idea and a society
evolves to each other using a COMMON SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE.

And more importantly that universal application means
we can see WHAT ALL EVOLVING SYSTEMS HAVE IN COMMON.

And I'm telling you emergence is what they all have
in common wrt their creation and evolution.

--
https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1

[Mark Isaak]

On 10/2/20 7:23 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...]

>> And I figured that if these people were among the damned, why then I would be
>> in damned good company.
>>
> Didn’t Machiavelli think of hell for the companionship in a similar manner?

I thought that sentiment came from Mark Twain. Turns out it goes back
further than that (to 1621), but not as far back as Machiavelli.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/19/heaven-for-climate/

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum."
- Hugh of St. Victor

[erik simpson]

Personnaly, I want to go where the dogs go.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:50:00 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by *Hemidactylus*
<ecph...@allspamis.invalid>:

Doesn't it? ("Zeepsday" by Gordon Dickson)

[*Hemidactylus*]

Mark Isaak <eciton@curiousta/xyz/xonomy.net> wrote:
> On 10/2/20 7:23 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> Peter Nyikos <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> And I figured that if these people were among the damned, why then I would be
>>> in damned good company.
>>>
>> Didn’t Machiavelli think of hell for the companionship in a similar manner?
>
> I thought that sentiment came from Mark Twain. Turns out it goes back
> further than that (to 1621), but not as far back as Machiavelli.
>
> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/19/heaven-for-climate/
>

Disputed according to wikiquote but:

“When Machiavelli came to the end of his life, he had a vision shortly
before giving up the ghost. He saw a small company of poor scoundrels, all
in rags, ill-favoured, famished, and, in short, in as bad plight as
possible. He was told that these were the inhabitants of paradise, of whom
it is written, Beati pauperes, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.[1]
After they withdrew, innumerable serious and majestic personages appeared,
who seemed to be sitting in a senate-house and dealing with the most
important affairs of state. Among them he saw Plato, Aristotle, Seneca,
Plutarch, Tacitus, and others of similar character; but he was told at the
same time that those venerable personages, notwithstanding their
appearance, were the damned, and the souls rejected by heaven, for
Sapientia huius saeculi, inimica est Dei.[2]. After this, he was asked to
which of the groups he would choose to belong; he answered that he would
much rather be in Hell with those great geniuses, to converse with them
about affairs of state, than be condemned to the company of the verminous
scoundrels that he had first been shown.”

Or: “The "Dream" is commonly condensed into a more pithy form, such as "I
desire to go to hell, and not to heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy
the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter are only
beggars, monks, hermits, and apostles".”

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niccolò_Machiavelli

[Mark Isaak]

Interesting that the date in which Machiavelli's "Dream" was published
(1629) is only a few years after the first published "Hell for company"
citation found by Quoteinvestigator (1621). Makes me wonder whether
they arose from a common zeitgeist.