is death the cause of evolution

@martinies,

martinies wrote:

No fbm I was thinking of the statistics of religion so many cant be wrong.

You summed up the ad populum fallacy very concisely.

http://skepdic.com/adpopulum.html

Quote:

ad populum fallacy

The ad populum fallacy is the appeal to the popularity of a claim as a reason for accepting it.

The number of people who believe a claim is irrelevant to its truth. Fifty million people can be wrong. In fact, millions of people have been wrong about many things: that the Earth is flat and motionless, for example, and that the stars are lights shining through holes in the sky.

The ad populum fallacy is also referred to as the bandwagon fallacy, the appeal to the mob, the democratic fallacy, and the appeal to popularity.

The ad populum fallacy is seductive because it appeals to our desire to belong and to conform, to our desire for security and safety. It is a common appeal in advertising and politics. A clever manipulator of the masses will try to seduce those who blithely assume that the majority is always right. Also seduced by this appeal will be the insecure, who may be made to feel guilty if they oppose the majority or feel strong by joining forces with large numbers of other uncritical thinkers.

Examples of ad populum appeals:

“TRY NEW, IMPROVED [fill in the blank with the name of any one of innumerable commercial products]. EVERYBODY’s USING IT!

“Gods must exist, since every culture has some sort of belief in a higher being.”
...

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@FBM,

Yes what you are saying is very true but in the case of religion or philosophy of religion I think its more the case of god being and actual part of each individual. So the unmoving part of nature is part of the individual. The only way that could be true is if the brain in locality sources consciouness from nonlocality as in spooky action. So we would have a sizelike local brain inside timespace sourcing its consciousness from a limitless nonlocality of consciousness. Much like a bumper car at the funfair sourcing its power from above.

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@martinies,

Sorry, but that's incomprehensible, too. Is there no way you could link me to some source of information about work being done on this by professionals?

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@FBM,

Daoism holagrams utube.

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@martinies,

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb192/DinahFyre/ddpan.gif

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I was going to post this yesterday evening, but our ISP crapped out:

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You have to come up with a better reason to believe what you're saying than simply "because i say so." The fundamental principle of natural selection is that those life forms which have the best reproductive opportunity will have the best chance to pass on their genome, and therefore, to evolve. It's not just that you don't give any good reason to believe what you're claiming, it's that you have an uphill battle to overcome the all too obvious superiority of the concept of natural selection through enhanced reproductive opportunity is the mechanism of evolution. You not only present no evidence, you don't even present a logical reason to believe what you're saying.

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Olive Tree, as usual, has no clue what he's talking about. Survival of the fittest refers to species, not invidivuals. Survival is the the measure of an individual's fitness. But surviving passes nothing on--evolution occurs when the individual survives, and successfully re[rpdices/ Death does not cause evolution. If you want to make the claim, and expect it be taken seriously, you'll need to present some evidence--there is abundant evidence for the mechanism i've described above. You haven't even provided a plausible argumet.

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@Setanta,

Sentanta the evedents for death acting for the change of life forms is in rock strata all over the world. The dinosaurs died out to extinction they did not live them selves in to extinction.

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@martinies,

Well, at least you made an attempt at reasoning, albeit a paltry one. That's as though you said there are squirrels in all parks, therefore, parks are caused by squirrels. You are presenting specious reasoning, because none of it makes any mention of what it is about death which is an agent for evolutionary change.

Plants and animals which successfully reproduce and pass on their unmodified genome die, and their offspring die. Plants and animals which successfully reproduce and pass on their modified genome to their offspring die, and their offspring die--and that passing-on of a modified genome leads to evolutionary change. Plants and animals which do not successfully reproduce die. You're not saying anything. It's as though you were to say that breathing were the leading cause of death.

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@Setanta,

Death is indistinguishable across time. So what im saying is this indistinguishable is the stationary constant acting on life forms to change them . Or if you like death is the constant in time

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@martinies,

The phrase "death is indistinguishable across time" is meaningless. It is indistinguishable from what? How does death change life forms, in an evolutionary sense? As i've already pointed out, plants and animals which do not evolve also die.

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@Setanta,

The observer is death the constant.

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@martinies,

I don't understand much of what you write. But it seems obvious to me that death is just the other side of the coin of life. You cannot have life without its opposite or its end. And the word 'death', without the possibility of life, has no meaning. Therefore death is part of a system (life - repruduction - death) that can evolve.

If there was no such thing as death, all animals of each species would quickly fill up their ecological space, rendering reproduction unecessary and thus stopping or slowing evolution. The old must decay and die in order to make room for the new. It's a simple question of logistics.

My 2 cents anyway.

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@Olivier5,

Yes that is what im saying death is the agent of another nonmoving timeless dimension acting on and changing our created three dimensional forms . Life cannnot act on its self it life needs death imposing its self on the event to get the required change in form .

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@martinies,

"Nonmoving timeless dimension", huh?

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@Olivier5,

Yes the nonmoving mover and changer of things. Its what your consciousness is part of.

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@martinies,

I'm not into mysticism.

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@Olivier5,

Yep well evolution can be looked at two ways and one of them ways is the mystic way of looking at it. oly5. Death stops life and gives life its essentially neutrality in terms of the event. God is the neutral and nonmoving createrof the universe and the creature's that inhabit it.

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@martinies,

Whatever rocks your cradle.

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@martinies,

Evolution is driven by three factors, Reproduction, Variation and Selection. Death really has nothing to do with it.

It seems like you are desperately trying to find some cosmic significance to death, and there just isn't any.

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@martinies,

martinies wrote:

Yes the nonmoving mover and changer of things. Its what your consciousness is part of.

http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/

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is death the cause of evolution

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