Biological classification vs 'Kind'

Hi, Mr Jack. Can you provide a reference?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, CS.Let me put in another way: since "kind" is defined to include which ancestors one descended from, evolving a new "kind" would imply evolving such that one is no longer descended from one's ancestors.If one does not evolve such that one is no longer descended from one's ancestors, then, by definition, no new "kind" has been created.So, "macroevolution" is north of the North Pole.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Paul ----- Extreme? I don’t think it’s extreme. Either way we go with this, we’re looking at a creationist saying something really weird.----- Agreed.----- Disagreed.Okay, well, I don’t disagree personally, but it’s obvious that creationists don’t think normal reproduction can result in all the evolutionary changes that science proposes. That’s pretty much the basis of all their arguments against evolution.So, if macro-evolutionary changes have happened, then, says the creationist, they didn’t happen by normal reproduction.Hence, my violation of descent concept, which I admit was very poorly explained and very poorly worded (ironically so, given the rest of the content of the message in which I introduced the idea).For instance, picture dinosaurs macro-evolving into birds by a process that isn’t normal reproduction. It would seem, to a creationist, like some Frankenstein process of gradually attaching bird parts in place of dinosaur parts, until, eventually, the organism accumulates so many Frankenstein bird parts, its descent would be more appropriately tied to the source of the Frankenstein bird parts than to the dinosaur.Clearly, this would have to constitute some sort of violation of the descent clause.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Paul. I was under the impression that we were debating the internal consistency of the creationist position, not talking about how their arguments relate to evolutionary arguments.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Paul. But, it's even harder to see how we can assume that creationists accept everything we accept about evolutionary theory. We can't just bring up all the tenets of evolutionary theory and expect that creationists will put them all into their model of the universe: something has to be different, otherwise, how are they not evolutionists?To me, it seems pretty obvious that what they think is different is that "macroevolution" (however they choose to define it) does not happen the same way "microevolution" happens. They think that macro breaks the rules somehow: otherwise, they wouldn’t be arguing that it can’t happen*. *This, of course, assumes that creationism is a logic-based enterprise, rather than the faith-based apologetics that it generally is, but I’m willing to grant them this for the sake of argument.All indications are that they think "microevolution" happens through normal, hereditary descent; and "macroevolution" (however they define it) happens through magic.Furthermore, given that Christian theological history includes a god being born to a human, I don’t think the idea that their position includes my "breaking the rules of descent" concept is really that far-fetched.Edited by Bluejay, : Reworded last sentence.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Paul. This sounds like you're talking about the internal consistency of the creationist position.But, you just told me that you're not talking about the internal consistency of the creationist position.Now, I'm very confused.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Bob.Welcome to EvC! With this comment, I think you're just asking somebody to throw out a list of "recent" things that have been shown to outperform things that humans have accepted and used for as far back in history as we can determine. For instance, guns, cars and calculators easily outperform spears, chariots and abacuses, respectively.Why is it that, even when faced with hordes of evidence of modern things outperforming ancient things, and very little, if any, evidence of the opposite, creationists and IDists still insist on rejecting the notion that modern theories can outperform ancient theories? You don't really have to respond to this: I realize that you're swamped with opponents already.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Paul. Oh, is that the game we’re going to play?I’m not impressed with your ability to retrospectively diagnose a subtle semantic discrepancy as your own clever sleight of hand.----- Yes, I noticed that you wrote this.Then, I noticed that you wrote this to Straggler: Contradiction = inconsistency.You told Bluejay that you are arguing that the creationist position is internally consistent.
You told Straggler you are arguing that the creationist position is internally inconsistent.
Bluejay’s brain imploded (cf. Chewbacca defense).
You said Bluejay wasn't reading carefully enough.Perhaps you thought, when I wrote the creationist position, I was referring to the harmony between the definitions of macroevolution and kinds?Context should have ruled this out for you: I was responding to your comment that my version of creationism is disharmonious with various tenets of evolutionary theory (which, I maintain, it obviously must be if it considers itself to be a separate idea from evolutionary theory).It confused me that you kept bringing up how creationist viewpoints violate various elements of evolutionary theory, and your persistence on that issue led me to suspect that your entire argument might be stemming from a different angle than what I thought it was.So, I wanted to clear that up before I continued with anything else.But, then, your response to that was clearly coming from outside of the context of the question, which I thought I had specified clearly enough.So, from my perspective, you seem to be the one who isn’t reading with adequate care.----- Have you ever watched Star Trek: Enterprise (pathetic show that it is)? There was an episode in which the linguistics officer had to communicate with an alien in the alien’s language in order to save the Enterprise from destruction. Meanwhile, this highly-advanced alien was just sitting there on his massively superior technology, making no effort to learn human language, apparently oblivious to the fact that people from other species don’t necessarily speak his language, and waiting for her to rectify the problem.This is how I feel in this discussion.You make no attempts to clarify anything: you simply make interpretive assumptions, ignore context, and respond with a series of terse half-statements, then say my inability to understand what you’re saying is my fault because I am not reading carefully enough.You have made no effort at all to ensure that this sort of miscommunication is not happening, and have simply dismissed any possibility that any change in your behavior is required to fix it. The onus is always on me to adjust to you and your cryptic debate tactics.No care on my part will ever be adequate to make a conversation with you into anything but an exercise in futility drenched in insults to my intelligence.So, unless you miraculously acknowledge that changing your behavior is also a viable solution to our miscommunication, I've lost my interest in beating my head against this wall.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.