LOki
The Yaweh of Mischief
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You're right I didn't.
I know I don't have to with your application of the meaningless "'just so' story" appendix to everything "Darwinist."
Creationists
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I know I don't have to with your application of the meaningless "'just so' story" appendix to everything "Darwinist."
I see nothing in your creationist babbling to refute evolutionary science. The best you can offer is silly spam. Speaking of the moon, why not explain to us your understanding of allah splitting the moon.
What you cannot refute is the fact of our continuing exploration and understanding of both human, animal and plant evolution is growing and improving. BTW, It is fascinating to notice that creationists make much of the way our understanding of our own ancestry has been adjusted over time to accommodate new fossil evidence. And yet they never seem to notice that if creationism were true, there shouldn't be any of that fossil evidence to require accommodation.
[Note: this is where your stupor intensifies as you sit, slack-jawed and dumbfounded]
Once again the creationist is going to be obligated to do a lot of speculative special pleadings to account for the anomalies...
the anomalies that the evidence-supported paradigm of evolution demonstrably, comfortably, and logically explains.
UltimateReality
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Guess the jokes on you fruitjuice. By they way, what happened to your "angry black man" avatar?
http://www.usmessageboard.com/religion-and-ethics/190358-creationists-298.html#post5445945
http://www.usmessageboard.com/religion-and-ethics/190358-creationists-300.html#post5467744
http://www.usmessageboard.com/religion-and-ethics/190358-creationists-317.html#post5509431
http://www.usmessageboard.com/religion-and-ethics/190358-creationists-316.html#post5508749
http://www.usmessageboard.com/religion-and-ethics/190358-creationists-315.html#post5507181
"You have totally failed to grasp the concept. Darwin and Lyell both said if we want to understand the distant past, we don't come up with some wacky explanation, we look at what is happening in the present. You really are making it more difficult that it is. In the present, the only source we find for digital code is an intelligent agent, that is, in the case of the binary code, a human is the designer. Therefore, the only known source for digital code in the present is an intelligent agent. Using Darwin's and Lyell's methodology, we can conclude that the digital code in dna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_numeral_system ) must have had an intelligent source. Unlike Creationism, ID does not get into theological discussions or postulations about who the intelligent source of dna is, only that the best explanation based on the present is that DNA had an intelligent source, and is not from some random process. In the present, we find NO random processes producing functional, digital code and information storage and retrieval systems. We don't see V8 engines or circuit boards self assembling in nature. Therefore, what basis do we have to assume that the micro machines in the cell self-assembled. The answer is a resounding NONE!!! To throw out ID is to throw out the very basis of Darwinism, studying the present to understand the past. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
From Wiki:
"A binary code is a way of representing text or computer processor instructions by the use of the binary number system's two-binary digits 0 and 1. This is accomplished by assigning a bit string to each particular symbol or instruction. For example, a binary string of eight binary digits (bits) can represent any of 256 possible values and can therefore correspond to a variety of different symbols, letters or instructions.
In computing and telecommunication, binary codes are used for any of a variety of methods of encoding data, such as character strings, into bit strings. Those methods may be fixed-width or variable-width. In a fixed-width binary code, each letter, digit, or other character, is represented by a bit string of the same length; that bit string, interpreted as a binary number, is usually displayed in code tables in octal, decimal or hexadecimal notation. There are many character sets and many character encodings for them."
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UltimateReality
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UltimateReality
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Because there isn't one. You aren't fooling anyone foolish man.
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UltimateReality
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Were you bounced on your head as a baby? I have only said it 500 times that I am of the Judeo-Christian persuasion.
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You seriously don't know your gods.
LOki
The Yaweh of Mischief
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Yes. We've seen this. In fact, we've all seen literally hundreds of special-pleading, question-begging, appeals to ignorance just like this "digital code" you persist in peddling--only many of those others didn't add equivocation to the list of their fallacious strategies.
Not that there's any chance at all that you're going to link rather than rationalize some excuse for not linking--Please link to this evidence you posted that is NOT a special-pleading, question-begging, appeals to ignorance.
UltimateReality
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I see. Because in your twisted version of reality, if you haven't looked for it, then it doesn't exist. The whole theory of evolution and natural selection rests on the concept of fitness. Yet, like most of Darwinism, the concept is vague at best, and certainly not up to REAL scientific standards.
To see the frailty of the fitness concept most clearly, just look at actual attempts to explain why a given trait renders an animal more (or less) fit in its environment. For example, many biologists have commented on the giraffeÂ’s long neck. A prominent theory, from Darwin on, has been that, in times of drought, a longer neck enabled the giraffe to browse nearer the tops of trees, beyond the reach of other animals. So any heritable changes leading to a longer neck were favored by natural selection, rendering the animal more fit and better able to survive during drought.
It sounds eminently reasonable, as such "just so" stories usually do. Problems arise only when we try to find evidence favoring this hypothesis over others. Craig Holdrege has summarized what he and others have found, including this: First, taller, longer-necked giraffes, being also heavier than their shorter ancestors, require more food, which counters the advantage of height. Second, the many browsing and grazing antelope species did not go extinct during droughts, “so even without growing taller the giraffe ancestor could have competed on even terms for those lower leaves.” Third, male giraffes are up to a meter taller than females. If the males would be disadvantaged by an inability to reach higher branches of the trees, why are not the females and young disadvantaged? Fourth, it turns out that females often feed “at belly height or below.” And in well-studied populations of east Africa, giraffes often feed at or below shoulder level during the dry season, while the rainy season sees them feeding from the higher branches — a seasonal pattern the exact opposite of the one suggested by the above hypothesis.[18]
Another problem with the usual sort of fitness theorizing becomes evident when you consider the unity of the organism and the multifunctionality of its parts. Holdrege remarks of the elephant that it “stands sometimes on its back legs and extends its trunk to reach high limbs — but no one thinks that the elephant developed its trunk as a result of selection pressures to reach higher food.” The trunk develops within a complex, multifaceted, interwoven unity. It “belongs” to that unity, not to a single isolated function. The effort to analyze out of this unity a particular trait and assign it a separate causal fitness is always artificial. This is certainly true of the giraffe, whose long neck not only allows feeding from high branches, but also raises the head to where the animal has the protection of a large field of view (the giraffe’s vision is much more developed than its sense of smell), serves as an “arm” for the use of the head as a “club” in battles between males, and plays a vital role as a kind of pendulum enabling the animal’s graceful galloping movement across the African plain.
UltimateReality
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Along with his anecdote about the wolf, Bethell argued that evolutionary theory based on natural selection (survival of the fittest) is vacuous: it states that, first, evolution can be explained by the fact that, on the whole, only the fitter organisms survive and achieve reproductive success; and second, what makes an organism fit is the fact that it survives and successfully reproduces. This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce. [Begging the Question-see response below]
If we have no practical way to sum up and assess the fitness or adaptive value of the traits of an organism apart from measurements of survival rates (evolutionary success), then on what basis can we use the idea of survival of the fittest (natural selection) to explain evolutionary success — as opposed to using it merely as a blank check for freely inventing explanations of the sort commonly derided as “just-so stories.”
More than a decade later, Beatty remarked that “the precise meaning of ‘fitness’ has yet to be settled, in spite of the fact — or perhaps because of the fact — that the term is so central to evolutionary thought.”[29] This is, if anything, even more emphatically true today. The concept remains troubled, as it has been from the very beginning, with little agreement on how to make it a workable part of evolutionary theory. Indeed, the “consensus view,” as Roberta L. Millstein and Robert A. Skipper, Jr., write in The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, is that “biologists and philosophers have yet to provide an adequate interpretation of fitness.”[30] And Lewontin, together with University of Missouri philosopher André Ariew, expresses the conviction that “no concept in evolutionary biology has been more confusing” than that of fitness.[31] Yet the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection hinges, in its “status ... as empirical science,” upon a reasonable understanding of what fitness means.[32]
This is a stunning place to find ourselves, given the confident pronouncements we heard issuing from Dennett and Dawkins at the outset of our investigation. Not only do we have great difficulty locating meaningless chance in the context of the actual life of organisms; it now turns out that the one outcome with respect to which randomness of mutation is supposed to obtain — namely, the organism’s fitness — cannot be given any definite or agreed-upon meaning, let alone one that is testable. How then did anyone ever arrive at the conclusion that mutations are random in relation to fitness? There certainly has never been any empirical demonstration of the conclusion, and it is difficult even to conceive the possibility of such a demonstration.
In any case, it is startling to realize that the entire brief for demoting human beings, and organisms in general, to meaningless scraps of molecular machinery — a demotion that fuels the long-running science-religion wars and that, as “shocking” revelation, supposedly stands on a par with Copernicus’s heliocentric proposal — rests on the vague conjunction of two scarcely creditable concepts: the randomness of mutations and the fitness of organisms. And, strangely, this shocking revelation has been sold to us in the context of a descriptive biological literature that, from the molecular level on up, remains almost nothing but a documentation of the meaningfully organized, goal-directed stories of living creatures.
This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?” A faith that fills the ever-shrinking gaps in our knowledge of the organism with a potent meaninglessness capable of transforming everything else into an illusion is a faith that could benefit from some minimal grounding. Otherwise, we can hardly avoid suspecting that the importance of randomness in the minds of the faithful is due to its being the only presumed scrap of a weapon in a compulsive struggle to deny all the obvious meaning of our lives.
The New Atlantis » Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness
This is the point where Hollie launches her Ad Hollimen attacks, since she is incapable of launching a logical argument in rebuttal to some of the juicier points in this article.
If we have no practical way to sum up and assess the fitness or adaptive value of the traits of an organism apart from measurements of survival rates (evolutionary success), then on what basis can we use the idea of survival of the fittest (natural selection) to explain evolutionary success — as opposed to using it merely as a blank check for freely inventing explanations of the sort commonly derided as “just-so stories.”
More than a decade later, Beatty remarked that “the precise meaning of ‘fitness’ has yet to be settled, in spite of the fact — or perhaps because of the fact — that the term is so central to evolutionary thought.”[29] This is, if anything, even more emphatically true today. The concept remains troubled, as it has been from the very beginning, with little agreement on how to make it a workable part of evolutionary theory. Indeed, the “consensus view,” as Roberta L. Millstein and Robert A. Skipper, Jr., write in The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, is that “biologists and philosophers have yet to provide an adequate interpretation of fitness.”[30] And Lewontin, together with University of Missouri philosopher André Ariew, expresses the conviction that “no concept in evolutionary biology has been more confusing” than that of fitness.[31] Yet the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection hinges, in its “status ... as empirical science,” upon a reasonable understanding of what fitness means.[32]
This is a stunning place to find ourselves, given the confident pronouncements we heard issuing from Dennett and Dawkins at the outset of our investigation. Not only do we have great difficulty locating meaningless chance in the context of the actual life of organisms; it now turns out that the one outcome with respect to which randomness of mutation is supposed to obtain — namely, the organism’s fitness — cannot be given any definite or agreed-upon meaning, let alone one that is testable. How then did anyone ever arrive at the conclusion that mutations are random in relation to fitness? There certainly has never been any empirical demonstration of the conclusion, and it is difficult even to conceive the possibility of such a demonstration.
In any case, it is startling to realize that the entire brief for demoting human beings, and organisms in general, to meaningless scraps of molecular machinery — a demotion that fuels the long-running science-religion wars and that, as “shocking” revelation, supposedly stands on a par with Copernicus’s heliocentric proposal — rests on the vague conjunction of two scarcely creditable concepts: the randomness of mutations and the fitness of organisms. And, strangely, this shocking revelation has been sold to us in the context of a descriptive biological literature that, from the molecular level on up, remains almost nothing but a documentation of the meaningfully organized, goal-directed stories of living creatures.
This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?” A faith that fills the ever-shrinking gaps in our knowledge of the organism with a potent meaninglessness capable of transforming everything else into an illusion is a faith that could benefit from some minimal grounding. Otherwise, we can hardly avoid suspecting that the importance of randomness in the minds of the faithful is due to its being the only presumed scrap of a weapon in a compulsive struggle to deny all the obvious meaning of our lives.
The New Atlantis » Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness
This is the point where Hollie launches her Ad Hollimen attacks, since she is incapable of launching a logical argument in rebuttal to some of the juicier points in this article.
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UltimateReality
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Guess we can add this link to your repertoire in addition to Thesaurus.com: Fallacies*[Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
The other folks may not have an understanding of fallacies, but I can read. Please tell me what part of the Meyer argument is begging the question???
Begging the Question
A form of circular reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion. Normally, the point of good reasoning is to start out at one place and end up somewhere new, namely having reached the goal of increasing the degree of reasonable belief in the conclusion. The point is to make progress, but in cases of begging the question there is no progress.
Example:
“Women have rights,” said the Bullfighters Association president. “But women shouldn’t fight bulls because a bullfighter is and should be a man.”
The president is saying basically that women shouldn’t fight bulls because women shouldn’t fight bulls. This reasoning isn’t making any progress.
I will go back and bold the actual use of the fallacy in the article I posted above.
So let me get this straight, you're saying dna is not a quaternary digital code???
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UltimateReality
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Special Pleading
Special pleading is a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesnÂ’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.
Example:
Everyone has a duty to help the police do their job, no matter who the suspect is. That is why we must support investigations into corruption in the police department. No person is above the law. Of course, if the police come knocking on my door to ask about my neighbors and the robberies in our building, I know nothing. IÂ’m not about to rat on anybody.
In our example, the principle of helping the police is applied to investigations of police officers but not to oneÂ’s neighbors.
Loki, please cite the specific example in my post that corresponds to your accusation.
Special pleading is a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesnÂ’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.
Example:
Everyone has a duty to help the police do their job, no matter who the suspect is. That is why we must support investigations into corruption in the police department. No person is above the law. Of course, if the police come knocking on my door to ask about my neighbors and the robberies in our building, I know nothing. IÂ’m not about to rat on anybody.
In our example, the principle of helping the police is applied to investigations of police officers but not to oneÂ’s neighbors.
Loki, please cite the specific example in my post that corresponds to your accusation.
LOki
The Yaweh of Mischief
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You can't just limit "fitness" to reaching food for the purposes of "debunking" evolution, only to expound--in the same ******* post no less!--upon all the other ways a trait may contribute to an organism's fitness.
Your "just so" caricature of natural selection is nothing but a strawman argument posited to discredit evolution as if doing so would prove your creationism--just as predicted.
UltimateReality
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Appeal to Ignorance
The fallacy of appeal to ignorance comes in two forms: (1) Not knowing that a certain statement is true is taken to be a proof that it is false. (2) Not knowing that a statement is false is taken to be a proof that it is true. The fallacy occurs in cases where absence of evidence is not good enough evidence of absence. The fallacy uses an unjustified attempt to shift the burden of proof. The fallacy is also called “Argument from Ignorance.”
Example:
Nobody has ever proved to me thereÂ’s a God, so I know there is no God.
Funny you should throw this one around, because Darwinian theory does this ALL THE TIME.
The fallacy of appeal to ignorance comes in two forms: (1) Not knowing that a certain statement is true is taken to be a proof that it is false. (2) Not knowing that a statement is false is taken to be a proof that it is true. The fallacy occurs in cases where absence of evidence is not good enough evidence of absence. The fallacy uses an unjustified attempt to shift the burden of proof. The fallacy is also called “Argument from Ignorance.”
Example:
Nobody has ever proved to me thereÂ’s a God, so I know there is no God.
Funny you should throw this one around, because Darwinian theory does this ALL THE TIME.
UltimateReality
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Wow, your reading comprehension sucks too. The point in espousing the other traits was to provide examples of how NOT cut and dry Darwinists make the concept of fitness out to be. Hey "Mr. I can throw Fallacies around to pretend I'm smart", please denote what part of this argument is a strawman? Which specific claims about evolutionary thought in the article are not actual claims of Darwinists? If you want to throw out fallacy accusations, be prepared to back them up.
I'm under no obligation to "refute" your endless cutting and pasting. You and the other creationist have similar habits. You cut and paste volumes of material from fundie creationist websites (material and concepts you don't understand), and then expect others to "refute" that material.
It's not surprising that you failed to address my earlier posts because that would have required you to actually defend your creationist fantasies.
Speaking of "Ad Hollimen" attacks, I note that your best efforts amount not to cutting and pasting but juvenile name-calling.
Actually, Darwinian theory does no such thing. Evolutionary theory makes no appeals to designer gods. Because you're unable to understand the topic you're hoping to denigrate, that makes you a poor candidate for entering these discussions.
Not in connection with the fundie creationist tag you're hoping to assign to it.
I believe you and the other fundie had tried earlier to add the label "digital machines" to DNA code. Those terms are lifted from creationist ministries.
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