Why creationist definitions of evolution are wrong, terribly wrong.

But it should not be included in their definition.Yes, we know that you object to the proposition that evolution has wrought large-scale changes. But that does not make the fact that it has done so part of the definition of evolution. That is merely a historical fact about what evolution has brought about.Let me offer you an analogy. If you believed that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a plane instead of a ship, then the fact that he did go by ship would not (and should not) by mere virtue of your objection to that fact, become part of the definition of the word "ship" --- the definition would not become "A vessel of considerable size for deep-water navigation which Columbus crossed the Atlantic in", just so that you could have the dubious luxury of saying "I don't believe in ships" instead of "I don't believe that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a ship".Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

And Columbus couldn't have gotten from Europe to America without a ship. Yes, just like I'd say that it's a fact that Columbus got from Europe to America by ship. But you are missing my point. Please present the "empirical testable reproducable experiments" that show that Columbus sailed to America.Otherwise it is an assumption.

Really? If I were to follow that rule most of my posts would read like this:"Duh ... evolution GOOD ... you wrong".Then I'd hit the creationist over the head with a club fashioned from the femur of a mammoth.

Yes, yes, you said. But this doesn't entitle you to rewrite the English language. More pertinently, it does not give you the ability to rewrite the English language.Let me give you another analogy.Suppose you denied that the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg. Suppose that you were passionately convinced that it was sunk by evil magic pixies.Well, it's a free country. You can say that if you want.Now, suppose that you were so obsessive about this subject that the only time you ever refer to icebergs is to loudly deny that they sunk the Titanic. Well, it's a free country, and you can be as monomanaical as you please.But suppose it occurred to you that, since you personally only ever refer to icebergs to deny that one sunk the Titanic, you could make your ravings on this subject shorter by redefining the word "iceberg" so that henceforth it should mean: "A massive floating body of ice broken away from a glacier which sunk the Titanic".Then instead of saying: "I don't believe that an iceberg sunk the Titanic", you could save a second or two by saying: "I don't believe in icebergs".But you can't do that. Yes, it's still a free country, but you cannot rewrite the English language for your own convenience, because you simply can't. You may --- there's no law against it, just as there's no law against levitating. But you can't, because it's impossible. You can't change the English language. You can't make "cat" mean "dog" even if you really really want to.In the same way, you can't change the meaning of the word "evolution". Yes, it would make your sentences shorter and easier to type if you could redefine the word "evolution" so that it meant whatever it is that you want to deny, but you can't. It is simply not possible for you to change the meanings of words. "Evolution" means evolution. It does not, and never will, mean "the particular facts about evolution which some guy on some discussion forum on the Internet who calls himself ICANT wants to deny".Now, the really stupid thing about all this is that creationists already have a term meaning: "the facts about evolution which I personally don't believe". They call it "macro-evolution". Of course, since the meaning of the term depends on the personal beliefs of the creationist using it, there is a certain amount of ambiguity about the term. Nonetheless, if you were to say: "I don't believe in macro-evolution", we should all understand you as meaning: "I don't believe in the facts about evolution that I don't believe in", and we could take it from there.

You got that from one of my recent posts, didn't you? I should say that that in itself isn't a terribly good example of a transition as such, because in the picture (though not in the fossil record) there's such an enormous gap between Archaeopteryx and the modern bird. That's the whole point of the picture --- it's to show that Archaeopteryx is much more like a non-avian dinosaur than it is like any modern bird.It's actually a cut-down version of this picture, which shows one more intermediate form. But there are lots more. Any picture showing the whole range of dinosaur-to-bird intermediates just wouldn't fit on the screen of a computer.Anyway, my point is that you probably shouldn't use my picture as an example of a transition, because although it is a transition (dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, modern bird) that's not what the picture is trying to show. There are much better pictures that would illustrate your point.

Could I have some links and references please?Thank you.

But see my responses to ICANT in this thread. The mere fact that you want to deny some things about evolution but not others does not give you the right, nor the ability, to redefine the word "evolution" to mean just the things you want to deny. Not everyone, just creationists.Try "common descent" or "universal common ancestry". Or ... well, it depends on what in particular you want to deny. Perhaps you want to deny speciation, as well. In which case you could say: "I deny speciation". Or maybe you accept speciation, but deny that evolution can produce an increase in that elusive quality, "complexity". In which case you could say "I deny that that evolution can produce an increase in complexity".Or you could pretend that you don't know any other way to express what it is that you want to deny except by calling it "evolution", and you could pretend that everyone else is joining you in pretending that this word doesn't exist. But this is precisely what one can't do. When a creationist says: "I don't believe in evolution", then I understand him as meaning: "I don't believe in those particular facts about evolution that I wish to deny". But I don't know what those particular facts are, because not all creationists wish to deny the same thing. You are sadly mistaken. It's not an "all-time favorite argument". It's not, in fact, an argument. It's a boring, tedious bit of explication which we have to go through time after time. The reason it comes up so often is not that we like it, but because of the near-universal pig-ignorance of creationists with respect to the very vocabulary of the subject they want to debate. Psychologists refer to this as "projection". We have given you definitions on which we and the textbooks agree. Now you could discuss the issues or you could waste your time and ours by complaining that those evil evolutionists insist on speaking the English language.We want to talk about the relevant facts of biogeography and morphology and embryology and genetics and so on, but you guys seem to want to avoid getting this far by falling down at the very first hurdle --- simply grasping the vocabulary of the subject under discussion.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If you really don't understand him, and you really don't, why not ask him what he means instead of making some crazy nonsense up in your head and attributing your drivel to him?Or you could ask me, so long as you do it politely. I understood his point. It wasn't hard. Indeed, it was so simple that it would take an ordinary person some mental effort to manage not to understand him --- but perhaps to you it comes naturally. Evolution has to be explained by evolutionary processes. The processes that explain it are necessarily evolutionary. By definition.The word "duh" springs to mind. You ever noticed how scientists --- actual scientists, not the imaginary ones who apparently inhabit your head --- have this overwhelming tendency to explain evolution through evolutionary processes? And indeed to explain chemistry in terms of chemical processes and in general to explain real things in terms of real processes? Rather than being a bunch of dogmatic creationists trying to smother reality in bullshit?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

The goal of the theory of evolution is to explain the facts of evolution. And almost everything that we learn about evolution can be used to explain, or more precisely to prove, the most glaringly obvious fact about evolution, namely common descent. Wow, that must blow for you.But there it is. And it does. Once again, you have my sympathy.But what can I say? It's as though you wrote: "The idea that Saturn has rings is fully accepted by most of the scientific world, or seen as a fact, so all that remains is the question of how. And the study of gravity fills in those missing details."Well, so it does. Is that a reason to deny the rings of Saturn or the theory of gravity? If that was true, then why is it that all the people who do in fact have an "evolutionary worldview" keep on telling you that these are two distinct concepts? And why is it that all the people who keep saying that they're inseparable turn out to be creationists?Think that over for a few seconds, and maybe you'll figure it out. No, Arphy. The quote shows that creationists, who do not have an "evolutionary worldview" insist that the two things can't be separated. Because it is a quote from creationists.Meanwhile an evolutionist started this whole darn thread just to say that that quote was a complete misrepresentation of evolution.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

The goal of evolutionary biology is to find out all the facts about evolution and explain them. Or at least as many as possible.But this is barely relevant to the definition of evolution. Well that's wrong in two ways. First, it conflates evolution, the theory of evolution, and evolutionary biology.Secondly, that is not what the suggested mechanisms were suggested for, nor the only thing that they are used to explain.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

And according to secular natural history it DID rain in Las Vegas this Thursday, but that is not part of the definition of "rain". He's saying that your made-up definition of evolution does not help us to do that. What he calls the "creationist "daffynition"". The actual theory of evolution does allow us to understand these things, but what creationists want evolution to mean doesn't.Presumably this is why they do it. They invent their own theory of evolution which any biologist can tell them is wrong. Then they pretend that this is the theory of evolution. Then they proudly proclaim that it's wrong.Yes, the theory of evolution that creationists have invented is as wrong as everything else that creationists have made up. But this has nothing to do with the merits of the actual theory of evolution, does it?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, if they're all the same to you, then why not just agree that from now on you'll use the same definition as everyone else? Why insist on saying something that everyone else thinks is wrong when you could say something that everyone else thinks is right, if to you it makes no difference which you say? It's a feature of natural history, to be sure. But it is not part of the definition of evolution. It's not even part of the definition of natural history, any more than the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is part of the definition of history. I don't think they did. I think the first sentence in that section was the actual definition, and the rest was commentary.And I think they said: "Evolution helps us to understand the history of life", because this is true. Do you, a creationist, think that this statement is so true that it ought to be included in the very definition of evolution?And are you, a creationist, so certain that the history of life includes the evolution of "higher" organisms from simpler ones that this would then implicitly be part of the definition of evolution?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I don't know, and, as this has nothing to do with the definition of evolution, I am, at present, not particularly interested.

But I'm not sure that "the population in general" is as stupid and ignorant as you make out.I'm fairly sure that if I said to the average man: "Mosquitoes evolved resistance to DDT", then he'd grasp what I meant, and not get all stupid in the head and start thinking that this process of evolution must have started with a unicellular organism.I think you overestimate the ability of creationists to deceive people. Yes, you have had spectacular successes in making people foolish and ignorant, but I think a majority of them still have some sort of grasp on what evolution means.And even if you could fool most of the people all of the time, I don't see why that should change the vocabulary used by biologists. If you managed to trick a majority of people into thinking that the word "atom" meant "a purple aardvark playing the bassoon", then should chemists agree that that is in fact what the word "atom" really means?And if they did, which they wouldn't, then the result of this would not be that they'd admit that all these years they've been talking about nothing but mauve aardvark bassoonists. No, they'd say: "Sure, you have that word to play with. We'll think up a new word to mean what we used to mean by atom".And the same thing is true of the word "evolution". If biologists allowed creationists to redefine the technical term evolution (and they won't) then the very next thing biologists would do is invent a brand-new word to talk about the thing that they want to talk about. "Flarpdidarp", perhaps. And then we'd hear biologists talking about how mosquitoes flarpidarped resistance to DDT by flarpdidarpish mechanisms, in accordance with the Theory of Flarpdidarp, as has been proved by flarpdidarpist biologists.At which point creationists would have to start telling halfwitted lies about what the word "flarpdidarp" meant. And this would be no victory for you, because you'd have to start again from scratch. You have at least managed to create a certain amount of confusion in the public mind as to what "evolution" means. Congratulations. Do you want to have to start all over by talking nonsense about what "flarpdidarp" means?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : Edited because I mis-spelled "flarpdidarp".

Because they swore a solemn oath to be wrong about everything.