Youwerecreated
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Is that the best you've got ?
Creationists
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Is that the best you've got ?
Youwerecreated
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I guess I need drugs to understand your thinking.
Youwerecreated
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Like I said in your dreams.
No. In reality. The reality you find impossible to separate from superstition and mysticism.
In every instance that I have seen from the fundie element, creationist "rebuttals" are shown to be a litany of fallacious reasoning, describing impossible mechanics, tossing away and dismissing rock-hard (yes, that was a pun) evidence, offering falsified and edited bible verses and making non-comparable comparisons, until finally when reason pushes them into a corner where their unsupported and unsupportable claims are utterly dismantled, they escape into "the gods did it" safety net or become sarcastic. And with the lack of evidence and falsified claims, they still expect creationism to be accepted as "science".
What is the point of this? I've yet to see a creationist actually challenge the evolutionary perspective with verifiable evidence of the supernatural. They can't, and the reason is simple: creationist claims are nothing more than religious dogma. Creationists can't answer even the simplest questions surrounding existence without resorting to supernaturalism or "quoting" bible verses. No one is denying creationist entitlements to a partisan religious belief, but it's a religious belief, nothing more. Trying to force a religious belief into a scientific paradigm is foolish and time-wasting.
This thread clearly shows there's no real discussion to be made on the part of creationists. What is always striking about the creationist position is that there is never any true effort put forth to demonstrate gods. The entirety of the creationist position amounts to desperate attempts to discredit science with the presumption that a discredited science somehow magically proves supernaturalism.
newpolitics
vegan atheist indy
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[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn_EPW17Fdc&feature=relmfu]Why I am no longer a Creationist - Part 1: Genus Homo - YouTube[/ame]
I realize that posting this an argument ad populum, and doesn't verify evolution just because someone, somewhere switched to being a non-creationist, so you can spare telling me that.
However, the same can not be said of this next video by the same person, who demonstrates an understanding of evolution. I know that posting videos is not the best argumentation form, and may not be particularly convincing, but I thought it was worth a shot.
I realize that posting this an argument ad populum, and doesn't verify evolution just because someone, somewhere switched to being a non-creationist, so you can spare telling me that.
However, the same can not be said of this next video by the same person, who demonstrates an understanding of evolution. I know that posting videos is not the best argumentation form, and may not be particularly convincing, but I thought it was worth a shot.
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UltimateReality
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Cute video's. However, at the risk of you falling into the "Creationist trap" the narrator in the video alludes to, i.e., not looking for evidence, perhaps you should check out the opposing viewpoint if you are serious about wanting to be fully informed. You can start here:
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Science-Human-Origins-Ann-Gauger/dp/193659904X/ref=pd_sim_b_18]Science and Human Origins: Ann Gauger,Douglas Axe,Casey Luskin: 9781936599042: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]
UltimateReality
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Back home now and I can actually type normally to break down the argument Loki can't seem to grasp:
From Wiki: "The central concept of natural selection is the evolutionary fitness of an organism.[94] Fitness is measured by an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, which determines the size of its genetic contribution to the next generation.[94] However, fitness is not the same as the total number of offspring: instead fitness is indicated by the proportion of subsequent generations that carry an organism's genes.[95] For example, if an organism could survive well and reproduce rapidly, but its offspring were all too small and weak to survive, this organism would make little genetic contribution to future generations and would thus have low fitness.[94]"
From Wiki: "Fitness (often denoted w in population genetics models) is a central idea in evolutionary theory. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, it describes the ability to both survive and reproduce, and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by an average individual of the specified genotype or phenotype. If differences between alleles of a given gene affect fitness, then the frequencies of the alleles will change over generations; the alleles with higher fitness become more common. This process is called natural selection."
So the central question becomes: How do we determine scientifically which members of the species were fit, and passed their genes on, and which ones were not? The answer to that question is clearly stated above. As evolutionary "scientist", we merely study which genes or traits are most common in a given species, and by those results, we can determine that the specific species in the previous generation that was most fit, and must have contributed those genes. And here we arrive at what Loki can't seem to comprehend, that is, we observe an organism and we conclude, this organism must be the result of natural selection, and its predecessor must have been the most fit, otherwise, it wouldn't be here. But isn't fitness a central concept of natural selection? Have we proven this or is it still a theory? The very core of evolutionary theory rests on natural selection. I'm not sure why Loki can't get this: this modern definition of fitness attempts its proof by assuming it is true. Mr. Fallacy, aka, Loki, should recognize this as begging the question. We conclude that the fittest species pass along their dna because if they weren't fit, they wouldn't pass on their dna. Said another way... the types of organisms that survive and reproduce are the types of organisms that survive and reproduce. How many more ways can I say it? Your links prove the very thing you deny. But the end result is exactly what I posted pages back:
"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, sometimes known by its Latin name petitio principii (meaning assuming the initial point), is a logical fallacy in which the writer or speaker assumes the statement under examination to be true. In other words, begging the question involves using a premise to support itself. If the premise is questionable, then the argument is bad.
So Loki, that brings me to my next question: Is it true (or STRAWMAN) that evolutionary theory teaches man came from a single cell ancestor. Let's see what Darwin himself said:
"[W]ould it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?"
"Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."
So we are led to believe that a single cell, with natural selection acting on random variations through a large number of subsequent generations, produced a man? Are you saying this is a strawman?
And if it isn't a strawman, we are told this process succeeded, because the organisms that weren't fit, didn't have reproductive success. Then we are given some bird examples and some moth examples that show a single trait change, i.e., length of beak in the case of the bird and color in the case of the month, and we're told these changes happened, because the other organisms that didn't have these changes didn't survive. However, the punch line to both stories is that the original trait that supposedly didn't contribute to reproductive success in the specific environment, reappeared when the rains came back or the pollution went away. We are given a "just so" story about the color of the moths contributing to their survival. Can you please link me to a study where a scientific sample was taken and birds were actually observed eating more of one color moth? Or did we simply notice more black moths and make up a neat story of why they survived, having never ruled out other causes for why black moths or white moths might flourish?
And finally, we are asked to believe that based on these typically lame examples, that this "selection" of better equipped species, (or can I even say that anymore??) or more successful reproductive species, that this has produced the amazing complexity of life we see around us. We are supposed to believe that this process gave rise to the chemically complex process of blood clotting or for that matter, human consciousness?
What has the theory of evolution proven? Absolutely NOTHING.
It basically tells us that the surviving organisms survived because their ancestors were good at reproducing successfully. Where is is the explanation for more complex species arising from less complex species? Or would you argue that an Ecoli is just as complex as a species that can make music and send one of its members to the moon? Based on this simplistic explanation for fitness, how do we arrive at the human eyeball? And why do we still have single cell organisms billions of years later? Why were some with slight genetic changes able to reproduce successfully enough to produce a human over millions of generations, but others remained virtually unchanged for billions of years, also successfully reproducing like crazy. Is E coli more fit that a man or vice versa? Under your new, modern definition of fitness, the answer is a resounding NO! So if man is no more fit than E coli, how did we ever get from a microbe to a man? How did the soup become the soup nazi? Before you whine, STRAWMAN!! STRAWMAN! I am not falling for your semantics tricks. I am not making the claim that man's ancestor is E coli. I am merely drawing an example for argumentative purposes, which in your ignorance you fail to grasp, or you resort to playing word games. No, evolution does not teach that humans came from mice or amoeba's, or elephants came from lizards, but in principle, this is what it claims. The TOE claims that Humans could have come from an "amoeba-LIKE" organism, or an amoeba like organism could be a distant ancestor. So I'm not falling for your black and white explanation denials, for the fact of the matter is, the TOE makes some preposterous generalized claims, but then says, but we really don't know the actual players.
From Wiki: "The last universal ancestor (LUA), also called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), or the cenancestor, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[1] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all current life on Earth. The LUA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[2][3]
Charles Darwin proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species, saying, "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."
From Wiki: "The central concept of natural selection is the evolutionary fitness of an organism.[94] Fitness is measured by an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, which determines the size of its genetic contribution to the next generation.[94] However, fitness is not the same as the total number of offspring: instead fitness is indicated by the proportion of subsequent generations that carry an organism's genes.[95] For example, if an organism could survive well and reproduce rapidly, but its offspring were all too small and weak to survive, this organism would make little genetic contribution to future generations and would thus have low fitness.[94]"
From Wiki: "Fitness (often denoted w in population genetics models) is a central idea in evolutionary theory. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, it describes the ability to both survive and reproduce, and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by an average individual of the specified genotype or phenotype. If differences between alleles of a given gene affect fitness, then the frequencies of the alleles will change over generations; the alleles with higher fitness become more common. This process is called natural selection."
So the central question becomes: How do we determine scientifically which members of the species were fit, and passed their genes on, and which ones were not? The answer to that question is clearly stated above. As evolutionary "scientist", we merely study which genes or traits are most common in a given species, and by those results, we can determine that the specific species in the previous generation that was most fit, and must have contributed those genes. And here we arrive at what Loki can't seem to comprehend, that is, we observe an organism and we conclude, this organism must be the result of natural selection, and its predecessor must have been the most fit, otherwise, it wouldn't be here. But isn't fitness a central concept of natural selection? Have we proven this or is it still a theory? The very core of evolutionary theory rests on natural selection. I'm not sure why Loki can't get this: this modern definition of fitness attempts its proof by assuming it is true. Mr. Fallacy, aka, Loki, should recognize this as begging the question. We conclude that the fittest species pass along their dna because if they weren't fit, they wouldn't pass on their dna. Said another way... the types of organisms that survive and reproduce are the types of organisms that survive and reproduce. How many more ways can I say it? Your links prove the very thing you deny. But the end result is exactly what I posted pages back:
"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, sometimes known by its Latin name petitio principii (meaning assuming the initial point), is a logical fallacy in which the writer or speaker assumes the statement under examination to be true. In other words, begging the question involves using a premise to support itself. If the premise is questionable, then the argument is bad.
So Loki, that brings me to my next question: Is it true (or STRAWMAN) that evolutionary theory teaches man came from a single cell ancestor. Let's see what Darwin himself said:
"[W]ould it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?"
"Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."
So we are led to believe that a single cell, with natural selection acting on random variations through a large number of subsequent generations, produced a man? Are you saying this is a strawman?
And if it isn't a strawman, we are told this process succeeded, because the organisms that weren't fit, didn't have reproductive success. Then we are given some bird examples and some moth examples that show a single trait change, i.e., length of beak in the case of the bird and color in the case of the month, and we're told these changes happened, because the other organisms that didn't have these changes didn't survive. However, the punch line to both stories is that the original trait that supposedly didn't contribute to reproductive success in the specific environment, reappeared when the rains came back or the pollution went away. We are given a "just so" story about the color of the moths contributing to their survival. Can you please link me to a study where a scientific sample was taken and birds were actually observed eating more of one color moth? Or did we simply notice more black moths and make up a neat story of why they survived, having never ruled out other causes for why black moths or white moths might flourish?
And finally, we are asked to believe that based on these typically lame examples, that this "selection" of better equipped species, (or can I even say that anymore??) or more successful reproductive species, that this has produced the amazing complexity of life we see around us. We are supposed to believe that this process gave rise to the chemically complex process of blood clotting or for that matter, human consciousness?
What has the theory of evolution proven? Absolutely NOTHING.
It basically tells us that the surviving organisms survived because their ancestors were good at reproducing successfully. Where is is the explanation for more complex species arising from less complex species? Or would you argue that an Ecoli is just as complex as a species that can make music and send one of its members to the moon? Based on this simplistic explanation for fitness, how do we arrive at the human eyeball? And why do we still have single cell organisms billions of years later? Why were some with slight genetic changes able to reproduce successfully enough to produce a human over millions of generations, but others remained virtually unchanged for billions of years, also successfully reproducing like crazy. Is E coli more fit that a man or vice versa? Under your new, modern definition of fitness, the answer is a resounding NO! So if man is no more fit than E coli, how did we ever get from a microbe to a man? How did the soup become the soup nazi? Before you whine, STRAWMAN!! STRAWMAN! I am not falling for your semantics tricks. I am not making the claim that man's ancestor is E coli. I am merely drawing an example for argumentative purposes, which in your ignorance you fail to grasp, or you resort to playing word games. No, evolution does not teach that humans came from mice or amoeba's, or elephants came from lizards, but in principle, this is what it claims. The TOE claims that Humans could have come from an "amoeba-LIKE" organism, or an amoeba like organism could be a distant ancestor. So I'm not falling for your black and white explanation denials, for the fact of the matter is, the TOE makes some preposterous generalized claims, but then says, but we really don't know the actual players.
From Wiki: "The last universal ancestor (LUA), also called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), or the cenancestor, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[1] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all current life on Earth. The LUA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[2][3]
Charles Darwin proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species, saying, "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."
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UltimateReality
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Loki posted up this stupid and asinine example:
"There is no principle of the actual theory of evolution that says, "if [a trait does] not offer some reproductive advantage, that trait would not survive."
Example: You have skin, I have skin, all humans have skin--having skin offers no reproductive advantage. This is because if we all have this "advantage" it CANNOT be considered an advantage (over other humans who all have skin); it fails to meet the definition of advantage. So, based upon this principle of the version of evolution (that you invented for the purpose of disproving actual evolution), skin--which does not offer reproductive advantage (for some humans over other humans)--should not be present. Yet it is!"
Before you speak for the theory of evolution, I think you should ponder your statement above. It is the negative of the positive statement, traits that offer reproductive advantage will be more common in subsequent generations of a species. However, evolution tells us at some point, the traits that dominate will result in a new species. Back your skin example up a few million generations and then we could make up a "just so" story that humans have skin, because the ones without skin didn't survive. Answer me the question, what if one of the humans above is born without skin??? Will he have the reproductive advantage? We know all random mutations can do is give or take away right? Eventually the skinless humans were out bred by the humans with skin. Skin had to offer an advantage or humans wouldn't have it (Tautological argument) But in your stupid example above, you have not made this clarification. In fact, your Neo-Darwinistic definition of Fitness no longer requires any of your just so stories. It just is because it is.
All your bogus example above does is prove how silly the TOE really is. It really can't tell us anything can it? According to your flawed logic above, it can provide any hypothesis for the complex life we see around us. Because this is what you just said:
Traits that don't offer reproductive advantage can survive and remain unchanged in a species. Traits that do offer reproductive advantage can survive and remain in a species. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go back to all the fossil evidence and dna evidence and tell us which ones are which.
"There is no principle of the actual theory of evolution that says, "if [a trait does] not offer some reproductive advantage, that trait would not survive."
Example: You have skin, I have skin, all humans have skin--having skin offers no reproductive advantage. This is because if we all have this "advantage" it CANNOT be considered an advantage (over other humans who all have skin); it fails to meet the definition of advantage. So, based upon this principle of the version of evolution (that you invented for the purpose of disproving actual evolution), skin--which does not offer reproductive advantage (for some humans over other humans)--should not be present. Yet it is!"
Before you speak for the theory of evolution, I think you should ponder your statement above. It is the negative of the positive statement, traits that offer reproductive advantage will be more common in subsequent generations of a species. However, evolution tells us at some point, the traits that dominate will result in a new species. Back your skin example up a few million generations and then we could make up a "just so" story that humans have skin, because the ones without skin didn't survive. Answer me the question, what if one of the humans above is born without skin??? Will he have the reproductive advantage? We know all random mutations can do is give or take away right? Eventually the skinless humans were out bred by the humans with skin. Skin had to offer an advantage or humans wouldn't have it (Tautological argument) But in your stupid example above, you have not made this clarification. In fact, your Neo-Darwinistic definition of Fitness no longer requires any of your just so stories. It just is because it is.
All your bogus example above does is prove how silly the TOE really is. It really can't tell us anything can it? According to your flawed logic above, it can provide any hypothesis for the complex life we see around us. Because this is what you just said:
Traits that don't offer reproductive advantage can survive and remain unchanged in a species. Traits that do offer reproductive advantage can survive and remain in a species. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go back to all the fossil evidence and dna evidence and tell us which ones are which.
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UltimateReality
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Loki (is that plural for little Lokee's?)
Let's look at your "link in lieu of cut and paste" from your atheist, canned-response website you somehow think proves your point:
Claim CA500:
Natural selection, or "survival of the fittest," is tautologous (i.e., uses circular reasoning) because it says that the fittest individuals leave the most offspring, but it defines the fittest individuals as those that leave the most offspring.
UR: Whuh? This is what Loki quoted from Wiki: Modern evolutionary theory defines fitness not by how long an organism lives, but by how successful it is at reproducing. If an organism lives half as long as others of its species, but has twice as many offspring surviving to adulthood, its genes will become more common in the adult population of the next generation.
This also from Wiki: However, this does not imply that natural selection is always directional and results in adaptive evolution; natural selection often results in the maintenance of the status quo by eliminating less fit variants. Now with Loki's definition from the same article: Natural Selection often results in maintenance of the status quo by eliminating animals that don't reproduce offspring that make it to adulthood as successfully as others???? WHuh? What does that even mean? Sounds tautological to me!!!
From Wiki: "Overall, the combined effect of all selection pressures at various levels determines the overall fitness of an individual, and hence the outcome of natural selection." Once again, let's fill in Loki's definition. Overall, the combined effect of all selection pressures at various levels determines the overall ability of an organism to pass its genes to the next adult generation, and hence the outcome of natural selection. What the?
Response:
"Survival of the fittest" is a poor way to think about evolution. Darwin himself did not use the phrase in the first edition of Origin of Species. What Darwin said is that heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. This is not circular or tautologous. It is a prediction that can be, and has been, experimentally verified (Weiner 1994).
The phrase cannot be a tautology if it is not trivially true. Yet there have been theories proposing that the fittest individuals perish:
Alpheus Hyatt proposed that lineages, like individuals, inevitably go through stages of youth, maturity, old age, and death. Towards the end of this cycle, the fittest individuals are more likely to perish than others (Hyatt 1866; Lefalophodon n.d.).
The theory of orthogenesis says that certain trends, once started, kept progressing even though they become detrimental and lead to extinction. For example, it was held that Irish elks, which had enormous antlers, died out because the size increase became too much to support.
The "fittest" individuals could be considered those that are ideally suited to a particular environment. Such ideal adaptation, however, comes at the cost of being more poorly adapted to other environments. If the environment changes, the fittest individuals from it will no longer be well adapted to any environment, and the less fit but more widely adapted organisms will survive. [What the Freak does this even mean? I read, sometimes organisms better suited to the environment don't survive because their environment changes and then the ones that shouldn't be there because they aren't suite to the environment become suited to the new environment. WTfreak? Huh? Can't we come up with something better than this for the FACT of evolution????? UR]
The fittest, to Darwin, were not those which survived, but those which could be expected to survive on the basis of their traits. For example, wild dogs selectively prey on impalas which are weaker according to bone marrow index (Pole et al. 2003). With that definition, survival of the fittest is not a tautology. [Yeah but this is no longer what Neo-Dariwinism says. They gave up on "just so" stories of might be's and could be's and just settled on "natural selection keeps the traits of the species that are the best reproducers of adult offspring. But in light of this over simplified natural selection, how do we get from the point a to b it claims?] Similarly, survival can be defined not in terms of the individual's life span, but in terms of leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation. Defined thus, survival of the fittest becomes more or less what Darwin said, and is not a tautology. [No it doesn't!!!]
Did everyone just read what I just read? Didn't this guy just say it is not tautological because it is not tautological??? HA! This comment you posted above, Einstein, says we really don't have a way of determining which animals are most fit other than the fact that they survive more. There is no rhyme or reason to be applied to fitness because sometimes the biggest and strongest aren't the ones that survive. Yet we are asked to believe this process without a point, evolution, is responsible for the complexity we see all around us. We aren't talking about horizontal adaptive change. We are talking about a human being coming from a single-celled ancestor. So what does this response above tell us about that process that supposedly occurred over billions of years? I will tell you what this response says. We don't know how it did it we just know it did it because it did it.
We have been told all along that natural selection causes species to evolve by keeping traits that are an accidental "improvement" (random mutation) and that is how humans came from apes, who came from blank, who came from blank and so on and so forth. [I am assuming that one would consider the eyeball an improvement over light sensitive cells] So now we're told the theory really doesn't even have a way to determine what is an improvement and what isn't. All we can really say now is that we got here because our ancestors had traits which were good/bad, offered improvement/no improvement, that help them have more offspring than other animals that didn't have the traits which were good/bad, offered improvement/no improvement.
And finally, the FACT of evolution totally breaks down with this little Wiki gem: Re: "survival of the fittest": "Although the phrase is still often used by non-biologists, modern biologists avoid it because it is tautological if "fittest" is read to mean "functionally superior" and is applied to individuals rather than considered as an averaged quantity over populations.
How can this be? Is this saying we have opposable thumbs, NOT because they are functionally superior, but because the dudes with opposable thumbs donated more genes to the next generation than their non-opposed thumb buddies? Are eyeballs not functionally superior to light sensitive cells? Are we saying the animals with eyeballs didn't survive because their eyes were functionally superior to their light sensitive counterparts, but that the animals with eyeballs were more fit only because they contributed more genes to the next generation. Man this evolution thing seems totally confused.
Under this model, an asexual animal that could run extremely fast while simultaneously managing a 45 second gestation period of 1,000 offspring in a single litter, would be the logical evolutionary outcome. If reproductive success is the only measure, humans, with their one or two offspring litter and 9 month gestation period would seem the illogical outcome of such a process.
Darwin said it. I believe it. That settles it!
Let's look at your "link in lieu of cut and paste" from your atheist, canned-response website you somehow think proves your point:
Claim CA500:
Natural selection, or "survival of the fittest," is tautologous (i.e., uses circular reasoning) because it says that the fittest individuals leave the most offspring, but it defines the fittest individuals as those that leave the most offspring.
UR: Whuh? This is what Loki quoted from Wiki: Modern evolutionary theory defines fitness not by how long an organism lives, but by how successful it is at reproducing. If an organism lives half as long as others of its species, but has twice as many offspring surviving to adulthood, its genes will become more common in the adult population of the next generation.
This also from Wiki: However, this does not imply that natural selection is always directional and results in adaptive evolution; natural selection often results in the maintenance of the status quo by eliminating less fit variants. Now with Loki's definition from the same article: Natural Selection often results in maintenance of the status quo by eliminating animals that don't reproduce offspring that make it to adulthood as successfully as others???? WHuh? What does that even mean? Sounds tautological to me!!!
From Wiki: "Overall, the combined effect of all selection pressures at various levels determines the overall fitness of an individual, and hence the outcome of natural selection." Once again, let's fill in Loki's definition. Overall, the combined effect of all selection pressures at various levels determines the overall ability of an organism to pass its genes to the next adult generation, and hence the outcome of natural selection. What the?
Response:
"Survival of the fittest" is a poor way to think about evolution. Darwin himself did not use the phrase in the first edition of Origin of Species. What Darwin said is that heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. This is not circular or tautologous. It is a prediction that can be, and has been, experimentally verified (Weiner 1994).
The phrase cannot be a tautology if it is not trivially true. Yet there have been theories proposing that the fittest individuals perish:
Alpheus Hyatt proposed that lineages, like individuals, inevitably go through stages of youth, maturity, old age, and death. Towards the end of this cycle, the fittest individuals are more likely to perish than others (Hyatt 1866; Lefalophodon n.d.).
The theory of orthogenesis says that certain trends, once started, kept progressing even though they become detrimental and lead to extinction. For example, it was held that Irish elks, which had enormous antlers, died out because the size increase became too much to support.
The "fittest" individuals could be considered those that are ideally suited to a particular environment. Such ideal adaptation, however, comes at the cost of being more poorly adapted to other environments. If the environment changes, the fittest individuals from it will no longer be well adapted to any environment, and the less fit but more widely adapted organisms will survive. [What the Freak does this even mean? I read, sometimes organisms better suited to the environment don't survive because their environment changes and then the ones that shouldn't be there because they aren't suite to the environment become suited to the new environment. WTfreak? Huh? Can't we come up with something better than this for the FACT of evolution????? UR]
The fittest, to Darwin, were not those which survived, but those which could be expected to survive on the basis of their traits. For example, wild dogs selectively prey on impalas which are weaker according to bone marrow index (Pole et al. 2003). With that definition, survival of the fittest is not a tautology. [Yeah but this is no longer what Neo-Dariwinism says. They gave up on "just so" stories of might be's and could be's and just settled on "natural selection keeps the traits of the species that are the best reproducers of adult offspring. But in light of this over simplified natural selection, how do we get from the point a to b it claims?] Similarly, survival can be defined not in terms of the individual's life span, but in terms of leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation. Defined thus, survival of the fittest becomes more or less what Darwin said, and is not a tautology. [No it doesn't!!!]
Did everyone just read what I just read? Didn't this guy just say it is not tautological because it is not tautological??? HA! This comment you posted above, Einstein, says we really don't have a way of determining which animals are most fit other than the fact that they survive more. There is no rhyme or reason to be applied to fitness because sometimes the biggest and strongest aren't the ones that survive. Yet we are asked to believe this process without a point, evolution, is responsible for the complexity we see all around us. We aren't talking about horizontal adaptive change. We are talking about a human being coming from a single-celled ancestor. So what does this response above tell us about that process that supposedly occurred over billions of years? I will tell you what this response says. We don't know how it did it we just know it did it because it did it.
We have been told all along that natural selection causes species to evolve by keeping traits that are an accidental "improvement" (random mutation) and that is how humans came from apes, who came from blank, who came from blank and so on and so forth. [I am assuming that one would consider the eyeball an improvement over light sensitive cells] So now we're told the theory really doesn't even have a way to determine what is an improvement and what isn't. All we can really say now is that we got here because our ancestors had traits which were good/bad, offered improvement/no improvement, that help them have more offspring than other animals that didn't have the traits which were good/bad, offered improvement/no improvement.
And finally, the FACT of evolution totally breaks down with this little Wiki gem: Re: "survival of the fittest": "Although the phrase is still often used by non-biologists, modern biologists avoid it because it is tautological if "fittest" is read to mean "functionally superior" and is applied to individuals rather than considered as an averaged quantity over populations.
How can this be? Is this saying we have opposable thumbs, NOT because they are functionally superior, but because the dudes with opposable thumbs donated more genes to the next generation than their non-opposed thumb buddies? Are eyeballs not functionally superior to light sensitive cells? Are we saying the animals with eyeballs didn't survive because their eyes were functionally superior to their light sensitive counterparts, but that the animals with eyeballs were more fit only because they contributed more genes to the next generation. Man this evolution thing seems totally confused.
Under this model, an asexual animal that could run extremely fast while simultaneously managing a 45 second gestation period of 1,000 offspring in a single litter, would be the logical evolutionary outcome. If reproductive success is the only measure, humans, with their one or two offspring litter and 9 month gestation period would seem the illogical outcome of such a process.
Darwin said it. I believe it. That settles it!
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Sorry loki but your skin example is bogus. Black folks skin is better for resisting the sun's rays, so not all skin is the same. Please try again.
The fundie Christian movement faces many hurdles. Among those issues is a lack of credibility. Following string after string of humiliating defeats in the courts for failing to introduce Christian theology into the school system, the movement has become more reactionary, less coherent and more delusional.
There has become a standard roll call of Christian fundamentalist preachers who are trotted out by the Christian creationist ministries. The vast majority of these fundamentalist Christians appear prominently in news and media where they only discredit the very christian fundamentalism they are preaching.
Encyclopedia of American Loons: Search results for luskin
#246: Casey Luskin
a.k.a. the Baghdad Bob of creationism
Casey Luskin is a lawyer (and not a scientist, although he seems to be a little confused about what such credentials do or don't mean) and one of the primary spokespeople for the Discovery Institute. Mr. Luskin obtained a Bachelor of Science and a Masters Degree in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, and has as a lawyer published “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover”, and “Alternative Viewpoints about Biological Origins as Taught in Public Schools” (published in the Journal of Church and State). His work illustrates well the actual goal of the Discovery Institute –to get religion, in the form of intelligent design creationism, into public school curricula (not to do any actual scientific research).
Luskin is by far most notorious for his ability to distort scientific evidence to suggest conclusions completely opposite to what the evidence suggests (and curiously always to fit his preconceived notions of what it ought to show), such as here. An even better example of the distortions and quote mining (to put it mildly) he usually reverts to is perhaps this one (or this one). And if you are feeling particularly sadistic, you can watch Luskin getting completely eviscerated here.
The problem with Luskin and his ilk is that they're ignorant of a topic about which they believe they're experts (see The Dunning-Kruger Effect). Luskin appears to believe he’s an expert with absolute confidence and pride,but to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the fields in question his failings are miserably obvious (see also this). In fact, his misunderstandings of science –and his lack of awareness of his own lack of understanding –often reach epic proportions.
Luskin is also interestingly paranoid,going so far as to claim that published articles on evolution contain “veiled threats” against the creationists and that Nature, for instance, has launched a propaganda war on creationism. Of course, science itself is a threat to creationism; what Luskin fails to grasp is the fact that science is concerned with evidence, not argument and polemics. By failing to see the difference (and furthermore failing to distinguish criticism from personal attacks) he comes to equate scientific evidence against his dogmatic beliefs with personal attacks from the scientists who have discovered the evidence (for more on Luskin’s lack of understanding of how science works, see this).
A good assignment in an introductory critical thinking class is to identify some of the mistakes Luskin makes here (I have used it myself).
Diagnosis: Staggeringly cranky illustration of where Dunning-Kruger, confirmation bias and complete lack of understanding of science can lead you. He is very productive and vociferous, and must be considered rather dangerous to a rationality-based, modern civilization.
Encyclopedia of American Loons: #140: Ann Gauger
#140: Ann Gauger
Gauger has a PhD in zoology and is a signatory of Discovery Institute’s 2005 petition “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”. She’s currently associated with the Discovery affiliated creationist think-tank the Biologic Institute whose goal is to perform real research on ID and which has yet to produce a single publication supporting ID creationism despite big budgets and numerous employed “scientists”.
A rather infamous incident occurred when Gauger reported on her work at the Wistar Retrospective Symposium, 2007, in Boston, Massachusetts. She discussed “leaky growth” in microbial colonies at high densities, leading to horizontal transfer of genetic information, and announced that under such conditions she had actually found a novel variant that seemed to lead to enhanced colony growth. Gunther Wagner, a real scientist, asked the obvious question: “So, a beneficial mutation happened right in your lab?” at which point the moderator halted questioning - Gauger has earlier argued that any evolutionary change is non-adaptive.
Diagnosis: Surely intelligent, but caught up in a system of self-reassuring but misguided views on how reality hangs together. The Biologic Institute is supposed to provided creationism with a sheen of scientific legitimacy, and although its existence may carry some influence on general perception of creationism (then again, probably not), it has failed to fool scientists or scholars in general (apart from Robin Collins).
Youwerecreated
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- Nov 29, 2010
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Judges are not scientists,the science they do have is very basic. They have been brainwashed for many years as most students.
I could care less what the courts think after all they support the law to murder babies. Our society are turning their backs on God and eventually will pay a price you might be seeing that as we speak.
So instead of thinking well the courts support our views why don't you give evidence that supports your view rather then conjecture as evidence.
Youwerecreated
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It's obvious you would disagree with the consistent decisions of the court system regarding your insistence that Christian theology be inserted into the public school. What you refuse to acknowledge is that based upon the evidence presented before the courts, creationism is nothing more than Christian theology under an assumed name.
What you find galling is that the courts are upholding and confirming basic principles that are a foundation of the constitution: separation of church and state. Religious zealots would, of course, prefer to suspend parts of the constitution that limit their ability to force their religion on others. Fortunately, the court decisions have represented the workable mechanism that was framed by the founding fathers.
I can't tell you how pleased I am that I have a constitution that protects me from Christian Taliban.
UltimateReality
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- Jan 13, 2012
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Ad Hollieman is back!!!!
UltimateReality
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- Jan 13, 2012
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Do you see the error of your silly logic here? You are bagging on Casey Luskin, stating he is a lawyer and has no business discussing matters of science, but in the same breath you claim another lawyer, a judge, has every right to decide matters of science. Which is it Rugged ManHands?
Where did you attend college?
And your juvenile banter is as pointless as usual.
As expected, the Christian creationists should not be expected to understand the process here. The judge made a decision based on evidence presented before the court.
I suppose it would be best to explain these things to fundies in short sentences of gawd friendly monosyllables.
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