All species are transitional

This is an interesting remark. It set me thinking about yet another permutation of Brad, us, AI, and 'understanding'. I asked myself: would an AI understand Brad?To find out, I did an experiment.I searched for online chatbots on the internet and looked for the first one I didn't have to buy before I could try it. It was called Ella. I fed it one of Brad's sentences and pressed enter.Here's the result. This may look funny, but it's also an astonishingly apt assessment of the situation.

Indeed, it is.

Yeah, you are correct. I was not thrifty. I suppose I left the sentence somewhere after the second word and thinking of language in general I did not want to restrict my comment only to Russel's history of logic so my mental process was already moving by the time I was supposed to have used my keys correctly and I did not do due dilligence.Maybe instead of trying an AI on me, all anyone needs do is ask, "What would Ben have said?"This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 10-12-2005 05:23 PM

Thanks for the attention Para. Perhaps other such warm fuzzies could go into the
http://EvC Forum: All about Brad McFall. -->EvC Forum: All about Brad McFall.
? I do understand better what you mean now. Indeed I pray for the day we can have on the down low "all my thoughts all the time" but at last, this is still, not possible. Whatever I do in the chat-room is only going to be gossip. I really do not "chat" when it comes to the serious business of e\/c. That is the only characteristic I might posses that not all other posters might or might not share here. We all have access to the same information. There is no "game" to 'give away'. I chat with the same seriousness. Orang and the other Oman got a joke off on me in the Chat Room. Here however time is always on the side of seriousness. Of course if anyone has the same thought I have then brad2.0 materializes without me. You see that Ben could "read" me. That is all I can hype for, I hope.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 10-12-2005 05:28 PM

Oh great! So now we have to download Ben as well, and run everything you say through his subroutines? (Only joking Brad, only joking. In fact, I think what you said is both very humorous and poignant. I should take it to heart to try harder to understand you, like Ben did.) Fine. You've passed your Turing test. Now, let's get this thread back on track. That's true, but let's not disseminate it all at once and through every post, shall we? Let's not jump all over the place, from Kant to Gladyshev, and from Russel to your problems with Cornell. Let's stay focussed, one step at the time. I appreciate that. I've said it before, Brad, I think you have a lot to offer to this forum, but we shouldn't be having such difficulty unpacking your presents. Or needing an interpreter like Ben.Let's carry on.

It is a death blow. I am currently writing a paper that will prove how. When it is up I will post the link. IOW, an assertion of incompleteness somehow negates the actual evidence = the absurdity of Darwinism parading as science. Why can't you be loyal to the evidence and accept the verdict of the strata ? Answer: because of an a priori agenda that has decided evolution must be true regardless because Genesis is not an option = atheist philosophy operating under the protective disguise of "neutral objective science". Does this sweetheart standard apply to Palestine and Sinai and Egypt when the Bible is the focus ?Obvious double standard.But the three locations mentioned above corroborate the Bible when we ignore minimalist dating and groundless Egyptian chronology. A necessary conclusion based on the hindsight of the fossil record showing no intermediacy. You only reached your conclusion by including it in the premise.Reality remains: no evidence of connection and relationship between the species exist. Macroevolution is assumed based on the needs of the anti-Genesis worldviews.The fossil record is the ultimate time lapse photographic event. It is not sentient deliberately concealing the crucial evidence your theory rides upon. Logically, the lack of this evidence means your theory is falsified. The fact that your theory is thriving exhibits the power of faith.Ray

I don't understand how you arrive at this conclusion. Do you think that all animals should fossilize? What portion do you think should? Under what circumstances?
Do you have an explanation for the pattern in the fossils we do have? Perhaps you should define what "showing "intermediacy"" would look like and what "intermediacy" is?
Then you could show the details of the logic that you think is being followed to produce the circular reasoning you think is there.

Herepton,You have devoted more than half of your post responding to the first paragraph of my opening post. But, as you can see if you read my post a bit further, the point I made is a bit different from what I mentioned in that first paragraph. I am quite willing to talk about the questions raised by it, but not on this thread. But haven't you read the rest of my post? Can you not recognize a form of writing where the conclusion is first presented and then supported with a detailed argument? Where is your comment on my thought experiment? Your reality must be different from mine, because in my reality there is ample evidence of connection and relatedness, from molecular genetics, from comparative anatomy and comparative embryology, from the geological record, and from biogeography.Macroevolution is the logical conclusion of the molecular mechanism of heredity. And why you assume that anybody would need an anti-Genesis worldview is totally beyond me. I will admit that I need a worldview, if only for my own intellectual satisfaction. But I derive it from knowledge and understanding, not from being against one particular creation myth. The fact that your groping for a worldview leads you to take Genesis literally can only mean that you lack the necessary knowledge and understanding of modern science. I think in this paragraph, each sentence merits it own answer. The ultimate? Hardly. Genetic, anatomic and embryological comparison of different species gives us an equally, if not more detailed picture of the progression of evolution. No one is concealing anything, that's not how science works. And if by "crucial evidence your theory rides upon" you mean the fossil record, then I can only repeat what's been said countless times before: the fossil record is not the cornerstone of the theory of evolution. In Darwin's time, the fossil record was nothing compared to what we have now, and if Darwin had based his theory solely on the fossil record of his time, we would probably not be calling it "Darwinism", let alone that we would call the modern scientific outlook on evolution "Neo-Darwinism". Your grasp of logic is painfully scant. A theory can only be falsified by positive evidence against it. If lack of evidence could falsify things, the idea of God would have been abandoned long ago. Let's keep one thing clear. Your side has the monopoly on faith, and we evolutionists have reason. Call me old fashioned, but that's how I see it.Could you now please address the real point of this thread?This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 13-Oct-2005 12:11 PM

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"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Richard Dawkins

Please, oh please, oh please, put all of your efforts into finishing this paper. This, I have to see.

I have a better theory on Brad. I have read several threads on several forums where the writing style by particular posters is similar to Brad's. They always remind me of the this site http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ It spews out apparently meaningful gibberish.
Could there be a type of poster that uses such a text generator to reply to people's posts?I was pointed to the above web site from a book by Sagan, Gould or Dawkins, I can't quite remember who, but I think the point was that some people people use this "Post Modernist" style to obfuscate their text to confuse thier readers into thinking they are intellectuals.

But is this sentient deliberately planting the evidence that we do see, just to test our faith?

Reminds me of the Sokal affair:Sokal affair - Wikipedia

It is true that I realized that post-modernism opens up the possibility of taking apart biological discussions in ways that people might not have dared to do before, but honestly what appears to only appear to you is simply the results of using modern technology not literary criticism. I went to college just when the ability to cut and paste became possible. I found the freedom of writing it gave not worth giving up.I do not think that any gibberish program could consitently learn as I have since I began posting to the internet about 5 years ago. It might convey a "feeling" as Para showed above but then why do we really need "emoticoms" etc and three finger letters like LOL to communicate on the internet. That is only done because people are not as comfortable about letting the wikepedia thing happen to their writings. This is not a prob for a poet but it is for those say at Cornell who use language writing style to hide intellectualism (good style = poor scholarship), ie the other way around than you expressed it.The Sokal affair is an interesting comparison and this had been asked about me on EVC before as well.
EvC Forum: intelligent design, right and wrongAll of that is water under the bridge since there NOW,as opposed to when I had dispute over what statistics to use in the 80s at Cornell, are tests of causal structure FROM correlational relationships possible. For me that makes reading Wright even easier.As to the issue of "transitional" it seems to me that there might NOT be transitionals as expected in the popular notion of the "fossil record" even though there would be synthetic intermediates not the property of any one individual. I am somewhat confident, after years of thinking it over, this is simply the Lyell legacy of use of the word "missing link".I do know that the state of biology could not get past the ice age, really. The very first question I asked any one at Cornell was, "How can I figure out if the one map turtle head I saw that popped up over the surface of the Deleware River was indigenous to the area or not(I was not able to net the critter)?" I was told to ask the Indians rather than the Permian horizon. I wanted the turtle biology to tell me not the Delaware Indian Garbage Dump. No one knew how to get this answer for me and no one at Harvard knew how to answer Croizat with the same question.That IS the "missing" link. It is not missing. It might not exist or current biology must do Croizat's method. Nelson and Platnick decided that Sokal's science was not enough
EvC Forum: Homochirality question
The rest was just the "joke".That is not gibberish but in reality I was simply a bit ahead of time. You decide. I think we should be looking in the dead margins not the living genera. This does not mean that "stasis is data" is necessarily properly named by 'punctuated equilbrium'. I am guessing now, but I think when Gould said that "neo-Darwinism was effectively dead" he simply had something like my figure below the Malthus quote in mind|_____________individualone____________|
|--birth margin--|-------LIFE-----|--death margin--| }species A
xxxx|_____________individual two__________________|http://EvC Forum: God and the human mind -->EvC Forum: God and the human mindbut I had had
x|_____________individualone____________|
|--birth margin--|-------LIFE------|--death margin--| }species A
xxxx|_________individual two______________|
Now who is going to recognize the difference this time?
I think that is the difference between Gould and Dawkins, but who am I?This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 10-17-2005 07:30 AM

Parasomnium, I think that I get what you are getting at in this thread, not that I think that it helps us evos much. The creationists will just pick holes as usual, especially where there is a difference of opinion on what transitional means, taking JustinC's and Chiropteras differing opinions for example. I tend to agree that all species are transitional as you say, but tend towards Chiroptera's opinion of what transitional means, therefore the qualification that JustinC brings up about extinct species is not valid, extinct species can still be seen as transitional in analogous form. As has been stated, it is impossible to prove that any fossil species is a direct ancestor or descendant of any other fossil species, all we can hope to do is infer that they are because various stages of development are seen in similar species at different times, and especially if these fossils are seen in close proximity in the fossil record, e.g. within the same beds of rock but in different strata.
To a creationist this is just not good enough proof, as has been pointed out so many times before in this type of argument.
Maybe what we need is 2 distinct terms for the meanings of transitional one for the direct lineage meaning and the other for the analogous meaning, maybe "direct-transitional" and "anal-transitional", or should the second one have the first meaning, maybe its not such a good term, (hearing sniggers from the back of the room )
To qualify what we mean by direct transitional I would suggest using the term chronospieces which is well defined as "a species which is reproductively isolated from its relatives by existing in a different time period" (Wiki), thus suggesting a direct lineage.In conclusion I would have to say that all individuals can be seen to be transitional between one species and another (not that all individuals survive to produce offspring that actualy become another species). These individuals, if they survive to produce offspring that actualy become another species, that are therefore in a direct lineage, can be called chronospecies, with respect to thier descendant species. Also some species can be seen to be transitional between higher taxa an an analogous way, or perhaps using a better biological term, in an homologous way (so maybe the above term should be "homo-transitional, hears more sniggers from the back of the room )BTW Brad - there's no such thing as the "missing link" as soon as it's found it's no longer missing therefore disappears in a puff of logic (apologies to Douglas Adams).This message has been edited by halucigenia, 17-10-2005 09:37 AM

Well there IS, such a term with meaning IF indeed Lyell moved the goal posts without getting under Agassiz's berg.Special Creationisms are not simply phase transitions if they exist.I know Malthus said there are "no indications" but as Aggasiz asked does not the difference of opinion really show that physicalists really do not know what the relations of organic and inorganic life ARE than that the life came from non-life??If viruses ARE not simply consumers of bacteria but humans are then the whole story of biological change need not be your defensive position.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 10-17-2005 07:35 AM