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Author | Topic: Genesis "kinds" may be Nested Hierarchies. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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The idea that at a particular moment in time a god created languages which are "distinct from each other" and yet form a nested hierarchy betrays a deep, deep misunderstanding. I'd wager that he's a monoglot who has no clue that his own language, English, violates the idea of nested hierarchy in many ways.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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and the creationist refrain: but the offspring will always be dogs. Along with their false claim that evolution requires dogs giving birth to cats or vice versa, when such an event would actually disprove evolution. A pet project is to collect quotations which constitute really stupid things that creationists say. Such as "but THEY'RE STILL MOTHS!!!!!", "so then, WHY ARE THERE STILL MONKEYS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?", "but IT'S ONLY A THEORY!!!!!!!"
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Monoglot is a new English word I learned (I'm multilingual and it really must be hard to only be able to understand and speak one language). Also being multilingual, I cannot imagine a mind so impoverished by knowing only one language. Like I cannot imagine how a person who doesn't understand anything about basic science would think. However, most monoglots don't even know one language. I used to be active on a programming forum where we would answer questions from both native and non-native English speakers. Even when their grasp of English was minimal, the non-native members were able to write complete sentences and use the right words -- their word order could be a bit odd (English word order is rather complicated) and occasionally they'd choose the wrong word from their dictionary (eg, a Portuguese programmer asked how to use "lights" in multi-processing; he had meant "semaphores", but his dictionary told him that "semforo" meant "traffic light" AKA "light"). On the other hand, the writing of native speakers was usually unintelligible as they couldn't put a sentence together and always used wrong spellings -- eg, we wasted a lot of time trying figure out what statistical method a "Barber poll" was when it turned out he meant "barber pole". One of my German textbooks quoted Lessing as saying, "Man kennt die eigene Sprache nicht, bis man eine fremde lernt." ("You don't know your own language until you have learned a foreign one.") That is so true. I learned so much more about English in two years of high school German than I ever could have in all 12 years of English. To a monoglot, grammar would be a meaningless waste of time learning something that people don't even use and which isn't what people say anyway (eg, the current common error of saying "with you and I"). But to one who has studied another language, grammar is the structure of a language and the key to understanding how it works and how to use it. And if you have a sense of humor, then having other languages at your disposal gives you that much more to play with. And that's not counting the jokes that span multiple languages.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
IOW, you have absolutely nothing to say.
I could agree to that.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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This gets us into the whole issue of science popularization, especially since creationists love to quote-mine out of that genre.
The text below is from Wikipedia's article, Popular science:
quote:o the forms of popular science, I would like to add museums and, unfortunately, primary- and secondary-grade textbooks. The reconstruction that Porky was denouncing in Message 1 was undoubtedly intended for a museum display (or perhaps for a TV production), as several participants pointed out to him and which he doesn't seem to have ever acknowledged. So while the tone of the scientific literature is appropriately tentative, both explicitly and implicitly, the tone of a science popularization can appear more certain and more final. In a presentation he gave in 1983, Fred Edwords cited that as one of the problems with science education, that it tends to present the material as "here are the conclusions of science, take them or leave them" when instead it should present the reasons for those conclusions and demonstrate why they are valid.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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"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.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 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.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 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.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 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
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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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.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
It's funny but the egg in reproduction is pretty common among all reptiles and mammals ... AKA, amniota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote):
quote: Can you hear the creationists yelling? "But they're still AMNIOTES!!!!!!"
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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I started studying "creation science" in 1981, but it wasn't until a few years later that I was able to discuss any of it with a creationist. That was Charles whom I mention in my 1990 essay, Why I Oppose Creation Science (or, How I got to Here from There). He was a fundamentalist Christian but he had earned a BS Biology. He described Duane Gish of the ICR as his hero. I saw him again years later. He was still a Christian, but he was completely disgusted by the gross dishonesty of creationists and wanted nothing to do with them.
In his objections to evolution, he included the evolution of wings. Now, wings are modified forelimbs, but in his "objection" he had wings being additional limbs such that the end result would be like the popular image of angels with legs, arms, and wings. I questioned that on the spot and he realized his mistake. So, yeah, I do not doubt that Dredge would make the same mistake. The difference is that he is so dishonest that he will continue to bluff in order to push his wrong ideas.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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What I mean is, wings are not "modified forelimbs" anymore than Tooth fairies are modified butterflies. And yet avian wings are forelimbs (insect wings are something quite different). Evolution works mostly by modifying something that's already there. The others have already shown you that avian wings are indeed modified forelimbs. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but tooth fairies do not exist. Neither do flying pigs. And please do not force me to inform you about Santa Claus.
And do you realise that in order for a lizard to fly, ... Whatever do lizards have to do with flying? Nobody thinks that birds evolved from lizards! Except for you and one other creationist. Where did you get that idea from? What is your source? It would help me for my research. And yet again, please, please, please learn something! You keep insisting on arguing from blithering abysmal ignorance. You can never win any argument that way. All you will succeed in doing is to make yourself and your god look stupid and ridiculous. Break that vicious cycle you've locked yourself into. Learn something!
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2
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Looks like time again to tell my tale about Michael Denton, which I last did in Message 3 of Creationists STILL Think that Evolution is a Ladder. As you will recall, Denton was an MD in Australia who became the darling of creationists because of his anti-evolution book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. The feedback his book got taught him how ignorant he had been about evolution -- out of curiosity, is such ignorance a national trait?
Well, here it is again:
quote: Like watching a dog chase its own tail and actually catch it (whereupon he just stands there, tail in mouth, not knowing what to do), it can be fun to watch an opponent to an interpretation arrive at that interpretation entirely on his own and then try to explain it away like Denton did. We witnessed the same thing when Faith was using the "feline kind" to argue against macroevolution and instead she proved it on her own, but then frantically started redefining all of creation to make it go away. Though the case of Michael Denton does demonstrate how the branching tree interpretation fits the data so well.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5951 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
In comparison, countless creationist claims and hoaxes that were literally refuted completely several decades ago are still being taught as Gospel to new converts.
Science wants to get at the truth, so it tests its results and corrects the inevitable mistakes as quickly as possible. Creationism just wants to deceive everybody into converting to its own false theology, so it tests nothing and retains its mistakes and hoaxes for eternity. That tells us everything we need to know about creationism and its associated religion.
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