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Author | Topic: Criticizing neo-Darwinism | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5850 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
Vacuum formed by extinction event, the highest rate of speciation in the foram record ... because "empty niches" were being filled. Enjoy.
I am not sure this example elucidates process of origin of new Orders. As far as I can judge forams belong to one Order and what they observed was speciation within the Order. One of the best critic of darwinism on my opinion who summarized antidarwinian thoughts is John Davison and he did so in his Manifesto. He expressed also this interesting view elsewhere:
quote: It struck me many times when reading about new mammalian Orders that they arouse no one know how and why and no one know exactly from what ancestors. Darwinists anyway agree that mammalian Orders arouse "abruptly". They use "adaptive radiation" or Yucatan meteorite catastrophy & empty niches or some tectonic events or other hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. Maybe it would be better to reconsider it again, because maybe "missing link" never existed as John Davison claimed and mammalian Orders aroused de novo, call it miracle. Quotation of John Davison:
quote: Also the following abstract fully support notion that mammalian Orders arouse abruptly and no one know how and why:
quote: Geology, vol. 31, Issue 12, p.1097 Publication Date: 12/2003
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
MartinV writes: One of the best critic of darwinism on my opinion who summarized antidarwinian thoughts is John Davison and he did so in his Manifesto. He expressed also this interesting view elsewhere:
quote: Evolution proposes these niches were filled by the observed processes of descent with modification and natural selection. What processes do you believe filled these niches, what is the evidence for them, and have they ever been observed? You see, John Davison fails to convince anyone because he's unable to muster any evidence supporting his views. We don't accept an evolutionary framework because it's the one that appeals to us most. We accept it because it's the one best supported by the evidence. What evidence is it that causes you to believe that fully formed life can just pop into existence? It isn't evidence that persuades you, of course, but lack of evidence. Wherever the paleontological record is incomplete, ambiguous or blank, creationists step in and write whatever particular ideas they feel are most compatible with their religious beliefs.
Maybe it would be better to reconsider it again, because maybe "missing link" never existed as John Davison claimed and mammalian Orders aroused de novo, call it miracle. Unable to develop a rational answer, ancient man looked at lightning and said "God", and in the same way creationists now look at gaps in the paleontological record and puzzling microbiological processes and proclaim "God". This isn't science but surrender of the intellect to the unknown. In order to get their ideas into science classrooms, creationists usually make every effort to characterize their views as true science, and faux paus such as miracles and other "rabbit out of hat" solutions to scientific puzzles work against these efforts since they're an admission that the views aren't scientific at all. Resort to miracles is simply an admission that you have no scientific evidence, and therefore no scientific view. In fact, if you continue pursuing miraculous intervention as a solution, then you should be taking your arguments to the religious forums. The science forums are for discussion of views that have a scientific foundation, except for the [forum=-11] forum, where arguments can be advanced challenging ideas like naturalism and so forth. --Percy
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1426 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
I am not sure this example elucidates process of origin of new Orders. New "orders" always started as new species with little to remark them from sibling species. That is the way branching structures grow -- at the ends of the existing branches. What you don't seem to get (among several aspects of evolution and biology, etc.) is that "orders" are really a figment of human thinking and nothing more. They are a product of a dated way of thinking of the world. Lineaus pre-dates Darwin's theory after all. Enjoy. compare Fiocruz Genome and fight Muscular Dystrophy with Team EvC! (click) we are limited in our ability to understand by our ability to understand RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist ... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share.
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MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5850 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
We accept it because it's the one best supported by the evidence. What evidence is it that causes you to believe that fully formed life can just pop into existence?
Neither you have the evidence that opposite happened. At least I have never heard about an experiment showing how ancient fish transformed by natural selection into homo sapiens.
Unable to develop a rational answer, ancient man looked at lightning and said "God", and in the same way creationists now look at gaps in the paleontological record and puzzling microbiological processes and proclaim "God". This isn't science but surrender of the intellect to the unknown.
Yet that doesn't mean if somebody at those ancient time claimed that lightning arose via chance (random mutation) he had more scientific view, don't you think?
In fact, if you continue pursuing miraculous intervention as a solution, then you should be taking your arguments to the religious forums. The science forums are for discussion of views that have a scientific foundation, except for the Is It Science? forum, where arguments can be advanced challenging ideas like naturalism and so forth.
The name of this forum is Evolution versus creation. So I don't see reason why not to discuss here exactly such issues. Btw. I am not convinced - as well as Karl Popper once - that darwinism is science.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
MartinV writes: Percy writes: We accept it because it's the one best supported by the evidence. What evidence is it that causes you to believe that fully formed life can just pop into existence? Neither you have the evidence that opposite happened. I don't think this is what you really meant to say. Obviously there is evidence, you've been using the fossil record as evidence yourself. What you're talking about is the interpretation of the evidence. When geological scientists of the past looked at the fossil record, Louis Agassiz was a famous example, they saw a record of sudden extinction and sudden creation. They concluded that a number of creation events must have taken place. Your views sound very similar to theirs. However, two significant things occurred that rebutted such thinking, at least in scientific circles. First, as the fossil record became more and more complete it became clear that more and more gaps in the fossil record were being filled. More and more of what appeared at first to be sudden creation gradually fell into a framework of relatedness to pre-existing life. The other significant event was the discovery of genetics, which formed the basis of heredity and provided a mechanism for change in species over time, the very process that Darwin introduced in Origin of Species without even knowing the mechanism behind it. So today we understand the processes behind of evolutionary change, and projecting those mechanisms back onto an increasingly complete fossil record reveals a remarkable consistency with evolutionary theory. Novel fossils are discovered all the time, and never has anything been discovered that doesn't fit into an evolutionary framework. If God truly has been periodically popping creatures into existence fully formed, then he does so in a way fully compatible with evolution. Biological innovations never migrate between separate lineages, something God could certainly do. Why would God create an innovation for sharp eyesight for the hawk and not also give it to the lion? Evolution says this couldn't happen, of course, but God could make it happen. Yet somehow, things like this of innovations crossing lineage boundaries are never found. An even more severe problem for you is that there is no scientific evidence for the main actor in your scenario, God, and no evidence of what his powers actually are or how he actually operates. So that's why it's accurate for me to say that the evidence supports evolutionary theory and provides no support at all for a God-based approach.
At least I have never heard about an experiment showing how ancient fish transformed by natural selection into homo sapiens. I'm not sure how to reply to this. Are you poking fun at evolution, or do you really not know that evolution believes fish are immensely distant evolutionary cousins of humans. The split between fish and land life took place some 300-400 million years ago.
Yet that doesn't mean if somebody at those ancient time claimed that lightning arose via chance (random mutation) he had more scientific view, don't you think? Combined with your previous paragraph, I'm beginning to wonder if we're having a serious conversation here.
The name of this forum is Evolution versus creation. So I don't see reason why not to discuss here exactly such issues. This forum exists because creationists want treatments of evolution reduced and treatments of creationist views added in public school science classrooms. In order to accomplish this goal, creationists have made significant efforts over a number of decades to convince the public that their views are scientific. To this end they removed God from creationism, called it creation science, and tried to pass laws requiring its inclusion in public school science curriculums. These efforts were struck down by the courts, and so creationists tried to distance themselves even further from Biblical accounts with Intelligent Design, which makes no claims about the intelligent agent and which makes no claims based upon the Bible. So this site exists to examine the claim that creationism is science. If you simply want to concede that it isn't science and that it is just Christian beliefs from the Bible, that's fine by me. --Percy
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MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5850 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
First, as the fossil record became more and more complete it became clear that more and more gaps in the fossil record were being filled. More and more of what appeared at first to be sudden creation gradually fell into a framework of relatedness to pre-existing life.
But the reality is little different. It was Darwin's idea that evolutionary process is gradual. Fossil records should only prove the idea (like all mimics should have "survival advantage" in case of darwinian idea of mimicry. In darwinism there is always postulated first idea and reality should accomodate aftewards.). It is also not very correct that gaps in the fossil record were being filled. If it was correct than Eldredge and Gould wouldn't conceive "punctuated equilibrium" hypothesis. I take it for granted (from Gould's Pandas thumb book as well) that many new organisms showed up in geological columns abruptly.
Novel fossils are discovered all the time, and never has anything been discovered that doesn't fit into an evolutionary framework.
And never could be. Any hypotheticaly weird organism that would appear would fit into darwinian schema. See platypus. Have darwinists any problem with such curious creature? Not at all. If there are striking similarities between skulls of unrelated sabretooth speciesin South America there is omnipotent explanation - Natural selection shaped it so.
Why would God create an innovation for sharp eyesight for the hawk and not also give it to the lion?
But obviously Natural selection has no problem endow hawk with sharp eyesight and bats with sonars.
Are you poking fun at evolution, or do you really not know that evolution believes fish are immensely distant evolutionary cousins of humans. The split between fish and land life took place some 300-400 million years ago.
But according darwinism the common ancestor of homo sapiens and nowadays carp is an ancient fish, isn't it?
So this site exists to examine the claim that creationism is science. If you simply want to concede that it isn't science and that it is just Christian beliefs from the Bible, that's fine by me.
My point is mainly that (neo)darwinism is wrong. That there is concept claiming that Natural selection is no way evolutionary force and that Natural selection as well as sexual selection only maintain status quo of extant species removing extremities. It is very bald assumption of darwinism that from some observation showing small changes (like change of beaks length in finches) we can extrapolate that homo sapiens evolved from ancient fish via similar changes. Edited by MartinV, : sabretooth added
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
MartinV writes: First, as the fossil record became more and more complete it became clear that more and more gaps in the fossil record were being filled. More and more of what appeared at first to be sudden creation gradually fell into a framework of relatedness to pre-existing life. But the reality is little different. It was Darwin's idea that evolutionary process is gradual. Actually, the reality is just as I've described it. Evolution is a gradual process of accumulated change. We observe it all the time. Every time a cell divides a small number of errors are created. It is the accumulated errors over long time periods combined by their pruning by natural selection that is evolution. Projecting this process backwards in time is consistent with the fossil record. Understanding this is fundamental to understanding evolution. If you don't believe that almost every reproductive events contains errors, if you don't believe that evolution as we understand it from the evidence in our possession does not allow sudden leaps, if you don't believe natural selection eliminates unfavorable changes, then you just don't understand evolution, and in that case it's no wonder that you continue to criticize evolution for things it doesn't say. Notice I didn’t say that evolution explains the episodic and incomplete nature of the fossil record, which has nothing to do with evolution. It is due to the unpredictable nature of fossilization. Almost all deceased animals very quickly end up as food for other life, even their bones, and anything left quickly succumbs to weathering and decay. Very few deceased creatures are the victims of a lucky accident (for paleontologists) that buries them quickly and preserves their bones, and sometimes but very rarely even some soft tissue, for millions of years. This is why a walk in the forest doesn’t find you climbing over huge piles of bones everywhere from decades, centuries and millennia ago. Fossilization is also a process confined primarily to lowland regions, and to lake, sea and ocean floors, because these are areas of net deposition of sediments. These are the regions where the products of erosion from upland regions are deposited. Fossilization almost never happens in upland regions, and for this reason the fossil record of life of upland creatures is almost entirely absent. You can no more conclude from the fossil record that upland creatures didn’t exist until a few thousand years ago than you can conclude that the sudden appearance of a creature in the fossil record means that the creature was suddenly created. Reconstructing evolutionary history from the fossil record is like trying to reconstruct a film of a parade from a bunch of randomly collected still photographs taken by onlookers. To conclude that the giant Snoopy balloon just popped into existence simply because in one picture he’s not there and in the next he is would not be a mistake anyone would make, and in the same way one can not assume that the sudden appearance of a creature in the fossil record is anything more than the record of a chance event that preserved a creature of this particular species for the first time. Sudden creation is a false conclusion that can only be reached if you falsely believe the fossil record is complete.
It is also not very correct that gaps in the fossil record were being filled. This isn't true, either. Fossils of previously unknown species are being discovered all the time. While there is the occasional find of something uniquely new such as a species on a previously unknown twig or branch, for the most part most new fossil species fall into an area intermediate between already known species.
If it was correct than Eldredge and Gould wouldn't conceive "punctuated equilibrium" hypothesis. I take it for granted (from Gould's Pandas thumb book as well) that many new organisms showed up in geological columns abruptly. And if you were anywhere near correct then Eldredge and Gould would agree with you, but they don't, so let me briefly explain why. There's a lot of details you're missing about the theory of punctuated equilibria, but the pertinent one here is that Eldredge and Gould did not conclude that the evidence supported sudden creation. Punctuated equilibria posits that species can experience long periods of relative stasis given a stable environment, such as was the case with triceratops for millions and millions of years in the western United States, but that environmental change combined with small population size could cause relatively rapid speciation in just some 10's of thousands of years, perhaps even less in some cases. 10,000 years is a very, very long time, but on geological time scales it is but an instant. The likelihood of individuals of a small species population in a narrow geographic region being preserved in such a short time period is small, and even smaller is the likelihood that any such fossils would happen to be discovered by paleontologists. So the view that Eldredge and Gould viewed the fossil record as evidence of sudden creation is incorrect. They only viewed it as evidence that relative stasis punctuated with occasional rapid change was more common than believed at the time.
Novel fossils are discovered all the time, and never has anything been discovered that doesn't fit into an evolutionary framework. And never could be. Any hypotheticaly weird organism that would appear would fit into darwinian schema. No, this would again be incorrect. For example, many creatures from mythology, if fossils of them were found, would disprove evolution, not support it. Winged horses, minotaurs, centaurs, griffins, the discovery of the fossils of any of these would be very strong evidence against evolution. That's why it is such strong evidence for evolution that no fossil has ever been discovered that did not fit into an evolutionary framework.
See platypus. Have darwinists any problem with such curious creature? Monotremes like the platypus are strong supporting evidence for evolution because they are intermediate between the reptilian ancestors of mammals and marsupial mammals. The very name monotreme refers to an anatomical peculiarity found in reptiles that the monotremes share. Now if we found an intermediate between mammals and birds living on some faraway island, that would not fit into an evolutionary framework and would be strong evidence against evolution. But we've never found such a thing.
Why would God create an innovation for sharp eyesight for the hawk and not also give it to the lion? But obviously Natural selection has no problem endow hawk with sharp eyesight and bats with sonars. You've missed the whole point, which had nothing to do with different innovations in different creatures. The point was that God could provide a particular new innovation to any creatures that could make use of it, but for some reason he never did so. When complex eyes first appeared (eyes with focal ability and light intensity control), God could have given them to all creatures immediately, but he didn't. Unrelated lineages had to develop their own version of complex eyes gradually over millions of years. The appearance of complex eyes in any lineage only occurred after a long period of evolution, instead of suddenly appearing in all lineages everywhere simultaneously.
But according darwinism the common ancestor of homo sapiens and nowadays carp is an ancient fish, isn't it? Yes, of course, but what you originally said was, "At least I have never heard about an experiment showing how ancient fish transformed by natural selection into homo sapiens." Do you really believe that knowledge derives solely from designed experiments? Observation, data gathering, reconstruction, analysis, correlative studies, etc., all these play a major role in science, particularly sciences like cosmology and evolution.
My point is mainly that (neo)darwinism is wrong. That there is concept claiming that Natural selection is no way evolutionary force and that Natural selection as well as sexual selection only maintain status quo of extant species removing extremities. Yes, I know what your point is. And the problem with your point is that you have no evidence supporting you. In order to make your point you must show how the processes we understand so well today of replication with change combined with selection forces cannot produce the change observed in the fossil record. What makes evolution a science is that it is a theory consistent with the evidence, thsu giving it great explanatory and predictive power. If God were truly the creative force then we could expect to find literally anything in the fossil record, but we never do. Everything we find is consistent with evolution.
It is very bald assumption of darwinism that from some observation showing small changes (like change of beaks length in finches) we can extrapolate that homo sapiens evolved from ancient fish via similar changes. You could just as ridiculously claim that it is a bald assumption that a glass falling by changing its position incrementally every microsecond will continue all the way to the floor. Once a finch species' beak has changed in size to become larger, what is to prevent evolutionary forces from causing a change to become larger yet again? Creationists denial of change but inability to present any mechanism preventing change is why their views never become accepted within scientific circles. And that's why creationists take their case not to scientists but to the lay public, which already believes in past lives, Bigfoot, UFOs, talking to the dead and Scientology, and so has no trouble believing anything creationists care to tell them. --Percy
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
My point is mainly that (neo)darwinism is wrong. That there is concept claiming that Natural selection is no way evolutionary force and that Natural selection as well as sexual selection only maintain status quo of extant species removing extremities. You are almost right. Natural selection is a process which drives a population towards an evolutionarily stable state, where it then hovers in an equilibrium. However, if a part of that population moves into a different environment or if the environment changes (a new predator or volcanic island etc) then the fitness landscape for that sub-population will be different than the fitness landscape of the parent population. Therefore, the evolutionarily stable strategy for the sub-population differs from the parent population. Since natural selection drives a population towards the evolutionarily stable state (by trimming those extremities away), the sub population will evolve in a different 'direction' than the parent. Such processes occurring time and again lead to further and further divergence from the original equilibrium point. This is how punctuated equilibrium is essentially looked at - times when the fitness landscape remains largely constant outnumber the times when changes occur. Thus we see a history of mostly equilibrium punctuated by relatively shorter periods of change. It would be foolish to think fitness landscapes do not change - and every time one does natural selection will either trim the excesses away so that extinction occurs, or the survivors will be closer to the equilibrium as will their children (and the extremities here will be trimmed so the next generation either doesn't happen or is closer to the equilibrium).
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
I think I found out how Gould misused Nietzsche. I finally understood that Gould wanted to invoke Nietzche so that he could have a different and supposed by him better thought than J. Huxley. My grandfather always said that if someone thought they could get by with minimal activity under a high status quo they were wrong. Waddington earlier marked out the problem with Neo-D as one with only one common environment. The problem OF INTERPRETATION (and Percy’s etc . ) seems to be as when you as an organism, can react back and change the environment itself.
Below is the general outline of a page I am working on on “vicariant time”, it may help to explain some of Percy’s comments.
quote:The trick is to find away to disagree with Bertrand Russell while he thinks that Frege showed logically that Kant was wrong about 7+5 =12 *BEING* synthetic but agree with him to a logic of contradiction that Cantor shewed Kant’s “antinomies of infinity” to be disposed of. This has to do with traits being either semophorants, holomorphs or OTUs(operational taxanomic units)WHILE WE STILL DO NOT HAVE computer programs able to extract synthetic hierarchic information on evolutionary individuals in a post-NE0-Darwinian biology. Philosophers at Cornell simply say that the synthetic a priori does not exist. They charge this interpretation against transcendental idealism they experience differently.
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MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5850 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
The trick is to find away to disagree with Bertrand Russell while he thinks that Frege showed logically that Kant was wrong about 7+5 =12 *BEING* synthetic but agree with him to a logic of contradiction that Cantor shewed Kant’s “antinomies of infinity” to be disposed of.
I quoted this sentence becuase it reminded me that Bertrand Russel made a cute observation about approach to the animal behavior research by Germans and Americans. I dare say that his observation could be extrapolated to Evolution itself (instincts and mimicry evolved by "random mutation" discussed elsewhere is very good example) considering the fact that German evolutionary thinking after WWII waned and Universities influenced by long German influence adopted neodarwinism (with some prominent exceptions like Portmann, Schindewolf, Neubauer...)
quote: This "inner consciousness" reminds me so to "die Innerlichkeit" or "internal factors" that neodarwinism dismissed complelety. Edited by MartinV, : No reason given.
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5054 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
I suppose that is not an idle comparison.
Coming from the opposite side that 7 + 5 = 12 IS synthetic, Peter Suber(Page not found : Earlham College) deals with an Einstein quote(in footnote 7) , “Kant’s ”erroneous opinion’ of the character of mathematics was “difficult to avoid in his time,” that is, prior to the development of non-Euclidean geometries.” I think I have been able to apprehend what Albert meant here. It is only in the context of having to read the many posts on EvC that attempt prop up atheism combined with my own reading of Kant that has not left this German’s quote as the thinking chimp. When it comes to America well, Emlen of Cornell was quoted to have said( in The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds by John K. Terres), “Behavior is more than organic expression, it is the means by which an animal maintains its relation with the environment, the vital link between the living organism and the surrounding world in which it evolved and of which it is a part. Simulus and response are the basic attributes of environment and organism respectively in this relationship.”
Neither the thinking German nor the moving American is ours however. Waddington had said, “Systems in Neo-Darwinist evolution must find some way of reconciling two rather conflicting requirements: (a) they must have a method of storing genetic information in a form which is sufficiently unresponsive to environmental influences to be reliable, and (b) they must interact the environment sufficiently to feel the effects of environmentally-directed natural selection. Any system which incorporated both these requirements into a single substance, which acted both as memory-store and environment reacter, would almost certainly have to exhibit Larmarckian effects in which the environment could produce changes in the content of the stored genetic information." (page 39, in Population Biology and Evolution edited by Richard Lewontin) But the words from “form” to “content” show that Waddington was influence like Super by the idea that Kant gave two ways to analysis (grammar and contradiction). This is not so. The “information” is stored at best in “a shape” or figure, NOT a form. Waddington said this because he is trying to say something about phenotypes. If we already accept what THEY (phenotypes) are, one can think more about what “time” Einstein meant by moving about in Cantor’s discontinuous space but continuously until one reaches a limit by thinking and then not thinking, but which is not necessarily “erroneous” today, the opinion becoming more a state of bio-theory than a theory of epistemology. Thus it is only if contradiction were NOT included that one would have “content” changed. This is missed by saying that 7+5=12 is not synthetic but is deduced as classes of classes. This can be more easily understood if one rejects the difference of genotype and phenotype outright. This also explains why Gould had insisted on reading and accepting Mayr’s history as one of a transition from Lamarckianism to Darwinism. Lamarck’s words however betray a slightly different story if one accepts that Einstein was only referring to Kant’s method rather than his elements. Genes change everything, well, that is my opinion. I dont find Kant's reasoning obscure. I found Emlen's reference to "organic expression" to be such. Edited by Brad McFall, : missing ""
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MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5850 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
The New England Journal of Medicine published an article how Oscar the Cat predicts death. The case is interesting, because if true the science is obviously unable to explain it. It is similar to migration etc. where the science is groping as well. Sheldrake supposes some unknown abilities in animals. According Sheldrake we all know about such things from our neigbourhood - at least we have heard about such cases, but the science doesn't pay attention to them.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/328 ---- I intented to send it at "Instincts - evolution or better answer?" but I put it here by mistake. Edited by MartinV, : No reason given.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Hi Martin,
You're citing an opinion piece, not a scientific article, and it has nothing to do with evolution anyway. You might want to try introducing this in one of the [forum=-11] threads. --Percy
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Elmer Member (Idle past 5925 days) Posts: 82 Joined: |
Long ago, long before I joined the evc bb, nwr started this thread, thusly--
quote: This has since become a semi-dead thread, and 'nwr' has become inactive. I would like to revive it, if I may, with my take on the issue.There is, of course, no requirement that anybody respond to my points, but I personally require that any responses that are directed at me be civil, courteous, and informative [i.e., more than vacuous gainsaying or falsified opinion repeated as if repetition would make it fact], else I'll simply ignore them. Indeed, I will follow my usual practice wrt to 'trolls' and 'flamers', and simply refuse to so much to read any subsequent posts with their monikers on them. There are already several in this forums who have earned this distinction in another thread. I will not read or respond to their stuff in this thread either, although I'm sure that at least some will post their characteristic replies to just about anything I say. Of course, others are free to respond to them, but if, in doing so, these others refer to me in insulting and disparaging ways, then I will ignore any further posts that they subsequently address to me. To repeat what 'nwr' said, this thread is about critiqueing 'neo-darwinian theory', [more accurately 'fisherism' than 'darwinism'], something usually labelled 'the modern synthesis', or "RM+NS", or just plain, 'darwinism', and which was laid out by 'parasomnium [who is also listed as 'inactive'], above. Yes, modern evolutionary biology has advanced far beyond this 'neo-darwinian' stage, but the issue is not all modern evolutionary concepts, hypotheses, and understandings, but only those entailed by the forementioned hypotheseis, ['darwinism', also known as 'selectionism'], as defined by parasomnium. My critique of the notion that 'parasomnium' finds "plausible" begins with his statement, " hereditary information randomly changes, which is a fact". There are two main 'sins of omission' in that statement. The fist is, that by failing to mention it, he implies that there are no 'no-random', i.e., intentional and systematic, teleological changes in genetic information. But that is not necessarily the case, and it is very important to any theory of evolutionary causation. I would assume that he did failed to mention non-random, non-accidental, organism-directed genetic information change, not through carelessness, but because he assumed that no such thing exists, at least insofaras neo-darwinian 'theory' is concerned. He also failed to take note that when speaking of changing information within a system, [such as a genome or organism], that information can be changed in any one of three ways--1/brand new information can be added to the total. 2/ old information can be totally lost, and 3/old information can be damaged and rendered partial and incomplete. Moreover, by making the cause of any of these changes a random, anomalous, irregulat, and unpredictably accidental one, he implies that change 1/ and change 3/ are identical; which is illogical, since less can never be more. He then adds--"the environment can only sustain the better adapted, which is also a fact", but isn't. Not unless you play games with the words 'environment' and 'adapted', making them so general and all-encompssing as to become nebulous, meaningless and absurd. At which point his statement becomes the vacuous tautology that those that the enviroment sustains are the better adapted, and vice-versa. Which is perfectly "plausible", but silly. And rendered even sillier, unfortunately, by the inane ( but accidental, I'm sure) redundancy of the entire phrase, "if the environment can only sustain the better adapted, which is also a fact, then the environment can only sustain the better adapted, which is also a fact". And finally, he says, "A long cumulation of these changes naturally leads to extremely well adapted, very complex structures." I belive that when he says, "naturally", he intends, "mechanically, deterministically", since that is the customary sense in which Materialists, Mechanists, Physicalists, Naturalists, and Positivists [i.e., Darwinists], use that word. But the notion that a series of accidental genetic changes confronted by a meaningless tautology is the cause and explanation for, "extremely well adapted, very complex structures", is at best dubious. It does not strike me as the least bit plausible. More later.
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Admin Director Posts: 13018 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 1.9 |
Hi Elmer,
You've posted like this before:
Elmer writes: There is, of course, no requirement that anybody respond to my points, but I personally require that any responses that are directed at me be civil, courteous, and informative [i.e., more than vacuous gainsaying or falsified opinion repeated as if repetition would make it fact], else I'll simply ignore them. As I already informed you at least a couple times previously, ignoring posts causes problems of its own. If you believe some who respond to you are violating the Forum Guidelines then you should raise these issues in the General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures 13.0 thread and allow the moderators to do their job. Since you continue to issue these preemptive "If I don't like your tone I'll ignore you" warnings while ignoring my requests that you not do so, I'm suspending you for 24 hours.
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