|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Genesis "kinds" may be Nested Hierarchies. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
|
"Everybody knows that organisms get better as they evolve. They get more advanced, more modern, and less primitive. And everybody knows, according to Dan McShea (who has written a paper called Complexity and Evolution: What Everybody Knows), that organisms get more complex as they evolve. From the first cell that coalesced in the primordial soup to the magnificent intricacies of Homo sapiens, the evolution of life--as everyone knows--has been one long drive toward greater complexity. The only trouble with what everyone knows, says McShea, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, is that there is no evidence it’s true." - Onward and Upward?, discovermagazine.com, June 1993. Too bad you always slept through English composition class. If you had stayed awake, you would have been able to understand that article. You quoted the beginning of the article, not its conclusions. This article is structured to demonstrate that certain false and mistaken ideas and assumptions are wrong and the evidence shows what's really happening. That structure places the presentation of those false assumptions at the beginning of the article. If you had any clue how one would compose an article, then that should have been immediately apparent to you. Instead, you end up not being able to understand what the article says. Another clue should have been the phrase, "Everybody knows". Well, everybody knows that when you start a sentence with "everybody knows" then you are talking about commonly held false assumptions and miscomprehensions. IOW, what "everybody knows" is wrong. That is what that article is about, which you would have known had you bothered to read the rest of the article. Or had you never even looked at the article, but instead fished that misquote out of a creationist quotemining site? You stupid idiot! Never ever trust what a creationist tells you! Creationists are nothing but liars and deceivers.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
On the subject of being multilingual, I came across a few YouTube videos (there are many more!):
How Does Language Change Your Brain?.This one gets into physical changes to the brain, mainly an actual increase in size of certain regions of the brain. Related to that was an article from the magazine, Science '80, in which researchers mapped out which parts of the brain process different kinds of sounds (ie, speech, music, natural noise) and compared their results between native speakers of Japanese and native speakers of European languages -- ie, which type of language your brain grew up on. What they found was that the brains of the two groups map very differently from each other. That was regardless of whether the person was of Japanese or European ancestry; the language the subjects grew up on was the only variable that made a difference. How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We ThinkMy fellow German students were of the conceit that language shapes how we think. We could feel that subjectively and could tell subjectively that thinking in different languages just felt different. I even had the experience of working out a construction problem non-verbally and then tripping over my own tongue describing my answer because, although I was using English words, the structure of what I was saying was German and didn't work in English. Supporting that conceit was what a psychologist (a neighbor's sister) told me about how she had to learn Spanish in order to work with patients who were native speakers of Spanish even though they were fluent in English. The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli, TEDTalkThis one describes different kinds of bilingualism, such the differences between learning the second language as a very young child, as an older child, and as an adult. Things Bilingual People DoThis one is mostly for fun, though polyglots should be able to relate to the things it brings up. For example, I've seen a guy get skewered for using German to talk about a girl without knowing that she could understand every word he was saying. Similarly, I have laughed before the rest of the movie audience because I didn't have to wait for the translation -- eg, in "A Bridge Too Far" when the German colonel (Max Schell) offers the defeated British general (Anthony Hopkins) some chocolate (Hopkins refuses, so Schell explains that it's from the British resupply drops into the drop zone the Germans had overrun). I can also relate to disagreeing with a movie's subtitles. Also, I cannot watch those videos which give the "Downfall" scene of Hitler's hissy fit entirely new subtitles so that he's livid over other things such as the ending of "Watchmen" was changed or that Star Trekiscovery (STD) is yet another prequel that will completely mess up canon -- I can hear that the subtitles have nothing to do with what Hitler is actually saying and I just can't take it. There are many more such videos. There are also videos which discuss how polyglots tend to have different personalities when they're speaking in different languages. Some say that they're an introvert in one language and an extrovert in another. For example, one TEDTalk by a mathematician on how German helped him with poetry mentioned that while he is very shy in English and always hems and haws and beats around the bush, he is very direct in German mainly because he doesn't know enough German to be able to hem or haw or beat around the bush. As for myself, I feel like I assume different basic attitudes, such as doing the Gallic shrug when I'm thinking in French.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
My understanding of what a nested hierarchy is is probably lacking. I like to think of the world's languages as nested hierarchies. God created different languages during the "Tower of Bable" incident (as you know) and they are distinct from each other. For example, German is distinct from Mandarin. While the diagramming of the descent of languages within language families tends to may appear similar, they do not form nested hierarchies as exist in biology. A feature of the nested hierarchies of species is that the branchings that form remain distinct from the other parallel branchings, whereas that is not what happens in languages. To illustrate that, here is an excerpt from the tree diagram of the Indo-European language family as posted on Wikipedia at Indo-European languages: Grouping (follow the link for a much more complete tree):
quote:What we see here are two major places where the analogy with nested hierarchies completely falls apart. In nested hierarchies, the species branching off into their own clades become increasingly reproductively isolated. At first it's because they're geographically isolated from each other or that they have become sexually isolated such that they don't recognize each other as potential mates. The potential for hybrids is there early after the branching off, but eventually they become too different genetically so that they are physically unable to produce offspring. At that point, you simply cannot have clades merging into each other. Look at that reduced tree of the Indo-European language family (one of about 14 different language families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families). Under West Germanic, we see Old High German splitting off into Central German and Upper German, both of which then merge to form Standard German. That is not what you would expect to see in a nested hierarchy; once separate clades have established themselves, they remain separate. English is even worse. English falls under West Germanic along the Anglo-Frisian divide. But then it merges with Norman French, which is from the Italic family, an entirely different "clade" from the Germanic. Even though English retains most of the Germanic grammatical structure, its vocabulary has become overwhelmingly French (only about 25% is from Old English), plus it has adopted some grammatical elements from French (eg, plural endings, "C'est moi!" (tonic) as opposed to "Das bin ich!" (nominative case) ). Analogies can be useful to a degree, but you must be very careful to not try to carry them too far.
God created different languages during the "Tower of Bable" incident (as you know) and they are distinct from each other. For example, German is distinct from Mandarin. No, they are not distinct from each other in the sense of nested hierarchies. Regardless of how distantly related they may be, two languages could somehow mix and merge into something different. In that respect, very different species (eg, from different families) cannot and hence are truly distinct from each other. Your attempt at an analogy fails. However, your reference to "Tower of Bable" (S/B Babel) could open up an interesting discussion, assuming that you are not as abysmally ignorant of languages as you are of evolution and punctuated equilibrium. From my earliest exposure to creationism (circa 1970), I've been hearing about a linguistical argument, but have never seen a proper form of it. Mainly they'd point to the "decline and simplification of languages" as evidence for the Fall, that nothing improves or becomes more complex, but rather deteriorates over time -- AKA their misunderstanding of thermodynamics and entropy. A classic example I was given circa 1970 was how you could say something in Latin with just a few words that requires a lot of words in English (yes, the people presenting that argument did not know what they were talking about). Of course, that ignores the fact that Latin placed much more of the work on the listener who had to interpret what the speaker was saying, whereas in English the work has shifted to the speaker to choose the exact nuances of meaning that he wishes to convey. Similarly, a strongly inflected language tends to have very loose rules for word order whereas a non-inflected language tends to have very strict rules for word order since that's what must now convey the same amount of meaning. As I said, I haven't come across a proper form of a creationist linguistics argument.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dredge Member (Idle past 102 days) Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
JonF writes: The fact that life can be arranged in a nested hierarchy is an observation. Don't be silly. It's not an "observation". It's an atheist fable which got its inspiration from a science-fiction novel written by Charles Darwin. Darwin, in turn, got the inspiration for his novel while under the influence of a large dose of the hallucinogen, mescaline, when he was in South America.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dredge Member (Idle past 102 days) Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
How does a playpus fit into a nested hierarchy?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Well, you've lied to us and you have repeatedly demonstrated your abysmal ignorance as well as your inability to read a popular science article and understand the most basic things that it said.
So please explain to us just why anything you post should be of any merit at all.
It's an atheist fable ... Again with that idiotic false equivalence of science and atheism! I've asked you about that before and you avoided it completely. So then it's obviously and blatantly complete bullshit. So then every single time you try to bring that up we will know beyond a doubt that you are just trying to pull some truly idiotic bullshit. If you have any actual reason to equate science with atheism, then do please present it for discussion. I didn't think so.{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984) Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML) Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles) Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32) It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.Steven Colbert on NPR
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pressie Member Posts: 2103 From: Pretoria, SA Joined: |
Thanks Dwise. That was a very interesting post.
It will take some time to watch those videos. Looking forward to it. My home language (Afrikaans) was derived from a west European language. I also took Setswana language courses and use that language often; the sentence structures are so different from west European languages that I felt it was impossible to ever learn such a language. At least the western alphabet is used which makes it easier. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to learn languages such as Japanese or Cantonese! Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9512 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Dredge writes: Don't be silly. It's not an "observation". It's an atheist fable which got its inspiration from a science-fiction novel written by Charles Darwin. You continue to display total ignorance of the system you criticise, nested hierarchies where established a hundred years before Darwin by a Lutherian Christian, Carl Linnaeus. The Earth's creation is the glory of God, as seen from the works of Nature by Man alone. The study of nature would reveal the Divine Order of God's creation, and it was the naturalist's task to construct a 'natural classification' that would reveal this Order in the universe."
quote: The thing about science is that because it's founded on observation and experiment, it can be reproduced and confirmed by anyone with a wiil to do it. You can do it yourself with taxonomy - go outside find a beetle and pickup a biological 'identification key' and see how well it works. Of course, you won't. What you'll do is continue reading crap on creationist web sites, not really understanding it, then re-posting it here as one liners and not respond to the real information you're given in reply. This means that you'll just repeat your lies in another month as though nothing has happened. Carry on, you're doing a great job of discrediting your religion, it's totally dishonest.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona "Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pressie Member Posts: 2103 From: Pretoria, SA Joined: |
This one was funny to me.
Dredge writes: Really? It sure is an observation. We can observe that a Platypus is a mammal. Tits and those head bones. Mammalia. And the DNA sequencing. Mammalia. ...It's not an "observation"... Edited by Pressie, : No reason given. Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
jar Member (Idle past 422 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Once again reality shows you are simply wrong. While it's possible, barely possible, that you are really just ignorant that is becoming increasingly unlikely.
Both the Fact of Evolution as well as the fact that the Theory of Evolution is the only explanation that has ever been presented or tested are both supported by the majority of the recognized Christian faiths. Only the Christian Cult of Ignorance & Dishonesty deny those two facts.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 196 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Don't be silly. It's not an "observation". It's an atheist fable which got its inspiration from a science-fiction novel written by Charles Darwin
Can I have some of what you are smoking? No doubt I'm late to the party, but Carolus Linnaeus first published the nested hierarchy (without calling it that) in 1736.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RAZD Member (Idle past 1433 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
How does a playpus fit into a nested hierarchy? quote: Also:
quote: So I can expand the monotreme branch as follows:
Mammaliformes quote: Note: " mammary glands with nipples (derived from apocrine or sebaceous glands);" and viviparity (live birth) Or as Ogden Nash Wrote: The PlatypusI like the duck-billed platypus Because it is anomalous. I like the way it raises its family Partly birdly, partly mammaly. I like its independent attitude. Let no one call it a duck-billed platitude. Note that this is two different sources that give the same information. One very easy to find if you want to learn instead of troll. Enjoy Edited by RAZD, : graphics Edited by RAZD, : ogden Edited by RAZD, : optional arrangementby our ability to understand Rebel☮American☆Zen☯Deist ... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share. Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 196 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Classifying the Platypus
quote:
Fossilworks: Ornithorhynchidae
:
quote: quote: Anonymous, quoted by Mark Twain
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
|
I have studied Japanese on my own. Very different sentence structure. They don't even have adjectives, but rather verbs (ie, not "green" but rather "is green", ignoring the fact that green and blue are the same color, just different shades), such that attaching attributive adjectives requires using clauses.
Other than that and Hebrew, all my language learning has been Indo-European (or as we learned in German linguistics classes, Indo-Germanisch). Some of the videos I watched talk about Australian languages in which there's no such thing as left or right, but rather all references to direction are absolute (north, south, east, west). Another point that was made was that as a polyglot hears incoming words, he processes them in parallel in each of the languages he knows. That makes for a much more active brain.
At least the western alphabet is used which makes it easier.
I've actually found that learning a new alphabet is the easiest part. Of course, I never could learn Arabic writing on my own. Funny story. My first lessons in Hebrew were at a fundamentalist church during the "Jesus Freak" movement circa 1970. We were learning the alphabet via flash cards. Somebody walked in and joined us, then returned the next week or the second lesson. However, he had only seen the letters up-side-down, so he couldn't recognize them in the second lesson and so had to relearn them.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Taq Member Posts: 10084 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
|
Dredge writes: How does a playpus fit into a nested hierarchy? They have a mixture of features shared by placental mammals and reptiles which is what we would expect if mammals evolved from earlier reptiles. That puts their branch right at the base of the mammal tree. They have a cloaca, lay leathery eggs, and have legs that splay out from their torso like reptiles. They have three middle ear bones, fur, and mammary glands like more derived mammals. They fit perfectly in the expected nested hierarchy. Edited by Taq, : No reason given.
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024