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Author Topic:   Mendel innocent, Darwin guilty
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 1 of 18 (11007)
06-05-2002 11:09 AM


Darwinists are notorious for not providing formal versions of their theory. For this reason up until 20 years ago physicists and chemists, people of the socalled hard-sciences, looked down on Darwinism as a soft-science, employing magical terminology such as Natural Selection, and the struggle for survival, and intuitive terms like that. Unfortunately physicists and chemists have changed their attitudes in recent years, but this is not because Darwinism has become more clear, but because physicists and chemists have also had to make their science "softer", because of problems they ran into.
Often Darwinists say that the reason that there is no formal treatment of the theory is because Darwin wrote in the 19th century. But, some time has passed since then in which a formal treatment could have been made, and besides Gregor Mendel, who published round about the same time as Darwin, was able to write a decent formal treatment of his theory, so there really is no excuse for lack of formalcy.
Because I like formalcy in science, it is grating for me to see a prozawriter like Fischer accuse a formalist like Mendel of fudging his data. Fischer used some statistical argument to "prove" Mendel fudged his data, and then argued that this fudging was the reason that Darwinists did not accept Mendel's theories for up to 40 years. Accusing Mendel of lying helped much in getting the modern synthesis accepted, but Fischer's accusations and arguments are doubtful at best.
First of all, people that have repeated Mendel's experiment have observed highly similar results like Mendel recorded. Fischer's theoretical accusation does not stand up to observation. Second it's not reasonable to accuse Mendel of deliberately fudging, when it is possible he could have simply made mistakes. That happens all the time in science, unthinkingly classifying data by your preconception of what it should be, in stead of what you observe. Third, even if Mendel had deliberately fudged his data, that still does not reasonably explain up to 40 years of denial from Darwinists. According to Darwinists the data was "too" perfect (the data Mendel was supposed to have fudged to fit his theories didn't actually perfectly fit his theory), and this supposedly made their fragile minds go blank with incomprehension at Mendel's findings.
Mendel's texts today are held up by Darwinists as an example of how not to do science, as a warning not to falsify your data else it might be ignored. What would be more reasonable is to hold up Mendel's theory as a warning to biologists that they have to learn basic math, else they might ignore something like the foundation for genetics again for up to 40 years. That Mendel's theories were ever forgotten is a myth. Mendellists and Darwinists debated continuously, but Darwinists simply continuously dismissed the observation of mathematically proportional variation untill they found a way to fit it in with the theory of Natural Selection.
So I think Mendel cannot reasonably be accused of fudging his data, but I think a much more reasonable case can be made for accusing Darwin of fudging his work. Before publishing "The origin of species" Darwin and Wallace published what should have been a formal treatment of the theory of Natural Selection to a science journal. Darwinists have said that this paper was ignored because the creationists played the work down. But upon reading the paper I think there may be another reason why it was ignored. The paper which should have contained the formal treatment of Natural Selection which I am questing for, is a hopeless mess of contorted wordcontraptions that fail to make sense. Darwinists never reference this mess, so not only creationists ignored it, but Darwinists ignore the basic sciencepaper as well.
But why should it be such a mess, when Darwin's "Origin of Species" was already finished? The definition of the theory of Natural Selection is contained in a single paragraph in Darwin's book, on page 25 or something, so it is not too large for a science paper. There is much to be said about this definition, it has many problems. It has been damaging to science and even society at large that Darwin didn't make any serious attempt to formalize or systemize this definition in a science paper. I think it's reasonable to assume that Darwin deliberately messed up the science paper, to 1. get rid of Wallace, 2. protect the emotive value of his theory by not conforming to standards of formalcy.
Darwin only published when Wallace was going to publish something similar, so his motivation for publishing was for himself to get the credit and not Wallace. Also, I'm pretty sure you can't get away with positing something like a natural force of goodness in a science paper, but you can get away with it in pop-science proza.
"Natural Selection acts by and for the good of each being, and therefore each corpereal and mental endowment will tend to progress towards perfection."
Darwin's fudging of the sciencepaper, is the reason why there is no formal theory now. There are some halfhearted attempts, but really nothing that comes close to being a uniformly interpreted theory. After complaining about the lack of formalcy, some time ago a Darwinist offered me a mathematical formulation of Natural Selection. In discussing the theory with him and other biologists before that, I was assured that the variants do not have to influence each other's reproductive success for the theory to apply. But then he produced a set of 9 equations which neccessarily lead to competition in every single last case of it's application. Upon asking about the apparent change of opinion on the subject of Natural Selection neccessitating competition, he said that only the equations 5, 6 and 7 that he produced fall under Natural Selection theory. It nowhere said Natural Selection was limited to these 3 equations in the paper itself, it only said at the heading "Mathematical treatment of the theory of Natural Selection". For the rest of it, the mathematics provided could not deal with mutually enhanced reproductionrates of variants, or any change in the total number in the population, because that number was set as a constant (the carryingcapacity of the environment constant) So I think his mathematical version of Natural Selection doesn't apply generally throughout Nature.
Can any Darwinist-Creationist, or Darwinist-evolutionist reference me a formal treatment of the mechanism of Natural Selection (defined as for an individual to reproduce or not to reproduce)?
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by Joe Meert, posted 06-05-2002 12:28 PM Syamsu has replied
 Message 4 by Percy, posted 06-05-2002 1:21 PM Syamsu has replied
 Message 5 by Percy, posted 06-05-2002 1:49 PM Syamsu has not replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 3 of 18 (11011)
06-05-2002 1:09 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by Joe Meert
06-05-2002 12:28 PM


My alternative theory basicly consists of rewording "the mechanism of Natural Selection" (for an individual to reproduce, or fail to reproduce), to "general theory of reproduction". There exists no formal treatment either of the mechanism of Natural Selection, or of the general theory of reproduction as far as I know.
Your reply is needlessly defensive since I am only asking what is normal to ask of any science theory. A formal treatment would not neccesarily all be mathematical, but would also focus on naming different events and defining the names in terms of the theory. Like encroachment would mean for one organism to have an increased chance of reproduction at the cost of the chance of reproduction of another creature. Making an extensive list of all theoretically possible events that can follow after a mutation occurs, would make it clear that competition is just one of several possibilities that can follow from mutation.
Also, saying that I like formalcy doesn't mean that I'm any good at producing it.
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Joe Meert, posted 06-05-2002 12:28 PM Joe Meert has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 15 by Dr_Tazimus_maximus, posted 06-26-2002 8:23 PM Syamsu has replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 6 of 18 (11017)
06-05-2002 2:04 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by Percy
06-05-2002 1:21 PM



Since Darwinists do not agree with you that there is no formal treatment of the theory, they would not be attempting to justify something they don't believe to be the case. What led you to this belief?
The fact that Darwinists do not reference this formal treatment when asked for.

Because I like formalcy in science, it is grating for me to see a prozawriter like Fischer accuse a formalist like Mendel of fudging his data. Fischer used some statistical argument to "prove" Mendel fudged his data,...
I don't know what a "prozawriter" is, but it doesn't sound like a compliment. Anyway, given Fisher's large number of publications he was probably a pretty good writer, and he was a statistician of the first rank,

but he didn't claim to have proved "fudging", he only raised questions as to whether Mendel had been honest in reporting his data. The debate continues somewhat today, but the consensus of science has been, and still is, that problems with Mendel's data were both inadvertent and inconsequential.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that Darwinists made an awful fuss about nothing for no reason, when they had lots of political motivation to make a fuss. (wiping away the embarassment of not accepting the basics of genetics for up to 40 years is clear motivation) I have had Mendel's work presented to me as a teaching example of faulty science.

Fisher couldn't possibly have argued this, since he only introduced the possibility of fudging in 1936. Prior to Fisher's statistical arguments there was no suspicion of fudged data, and by the time he published his suspicions in 1936, Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics had already been combined, through the efforts of the population geneticists, into the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, usually referred to today as the Modern Synthesis."
There is a difference between someone making a synthesis, and having the synthesis be accepted.


"Natural Selection acts by and for the good of each being, and therefore each corpereal and mental endowment will tend to progress towards perfection."
This sentence does not appear in the on-line copy of the paper. What is the source of your quote?

The origin of species, not the paper.


I don't know why the principle of natural selection is such a problem in your eyes. Perhaps you're trying to build it up to be more than it is. All it says is that the environment will exert survival pressures on organisms, providing reproductive advantages to those best suited. I think you've said as much yourself.
Elsewhere you said that differential reproductive success is as a synonym for competition, where other biologists say that competition is not even required to occur for differential reproductive success to apply. You can't say that there is no problem here.
Please reference me a formal treatment of the mechanism of Natural Selection.
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4 by Percy, posted 06-05-2002 1:21 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 7 by Percy, posted 06-05-2002 2:44 PM Syamsu has replied
 Message 8 by Brad McFall, posted 06-05-2002 3:25 PM Syamsu has not replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 9 of 18 (11047)
06-05-2002 11:12 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Percy
06-05-2002 2:44 PM



Please reference me a formal treatment of the mechanism of Natural Selection.

You seem pretty well read already, so I'm going to skip a couple steps and assume that no matter what reference you're provided you'll deny it contains the requested information. Why don't we just discuss why the definitions of natural selection you've been provided are inadequate?
But this is off topic for this thread. You were already discussing natural selection in another thread, so we should pick up the discussion there.

It's questionable that the mechanism of Natural Selection is science when there is no formal treatment of it, that's why I posted it in the forum "Is it science?". I explained what I am looking for in this thread already. A formalized systematic overview of looking at individuals in terms of reproducing or failing to reproduce, in every theoretically possible category of events. If you know some book that sets out to do this, then I probably haven't read it. I mean it's not that Darwinists try and fail to make something like that, as far as I know they haven't tried it.
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 7 by Percy, posted 06-05-2002 2:44 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 10 by Percy, posted 06-06-2002 9:29 AM Syamsu has replied
 Message 12 by Brad McFall, posted 06-06-2002 1:20 PM Syamsu has replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 11 of 18 (11082)
06-06-2002 11:40 AM
Reply to: Message 10 by Percy
06-06-2002 9:29 AM


Of course there wouldn't need to be an enumuration to the extent of classifying each and every last trait there is in the world, but biologists should have the basic tools to describe the traits in terms of their reproduction, when the traits are of interest.
Defining terms like selection, encroachment, divergence, going into a new environment etc. in terms of reproduction is essential for uniformity of descriptions, and the integrity of the system of knowledge, where otherwise there will neccessarily be much confusion. I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 10 by Percy, posted 06-06-2002 9:29 AM Percy has not replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 13 of 18 (11559)
06-14-2002 1:57 AM
Reply to: Message 12 by Brad McFall
06-06-2002 1:20 PM


I don't see any problem in enumeration.
Possible relations of a unit of selection to an environmental factor.
+ increase in chance of reproduction
- decrease in chance of reproduction
0 neutral
Possible ways in which organisms can relate to each other on the event of their reproduction.
+/- encroachment
+/+ mutual benefit
-/- mutual loss
+/0 etc.
-/0
0/0
Darwinists would always tend to conjecture the first, since many definitions of Natural Selection only apply to the first. (not the definition of differential reproductive success, but other definitions, like the definition of Natural Selection as encroachment of one variant on an other variant until extinction)
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 12 by Brad McFall, posted 06-06-2002 1:20 PM Brad McFall has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 14 by Brad McFall, posted 06-26-2002 1:19 PM Syamsu has not replied

  
Syamsu 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5589 days)
Posts: 1914
From: amsterdam
Joined: 05-19-2002


Message 16 of 18 (12271)
06-27-2002 5:07 AM
Reply to: Message 15 by Dr_Tazimus_maximus
06-26-2002 8:23 PM


As far as I know, fitness only refers to reproductive success/rate. Since it's convenient and generally true to assume stasis (it generally all ends up the same after some time), I thought that in stead of reproductive rate it was better to talk about reproductive chance. That way the number of offspring can more easily be considered a trait, I think. Besides if not reproductive chance, I would still insist on a theory of reproductive success, over a theory of differential reproductive success, for basicly the same reasons as I've set out before.
regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

This message is a reply to:
 Message 15 by Dr_Tazimus_maximus, posted 06-26-2002 8:23 PM Dr_Tazimus_maximus has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 18 by Brad McFall, posted 07-02-2002 4:44 PM Syamsu has not replied

  
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