Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

Absolutions are getting more and more pricey these days.

T
Keep the change.
O

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TKO-

The problem is that the human race seems to have a need for an explanation and until such time as the scientists provide one which it can understand and live with it is susceptible to supernatural ones of one sort or another. Then it is down to rhetoric and fitting it to society's uses or the uses of a dominant class in any particular environment. Desert, steppes, lowland etc.

Some would say that to deny this need is unnatural for a being with intelligence. They would say, I think, that it is neurotic or that the person in denial is putting it to use.

The scientific search for an explanation of life affirms the need for one. The rigidity of the position that there is no non-material explanation might even hinder the search.

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rl

Quote:

Penciling in 'Parents pass their traits to their offspring' in among Darwin's 'Four Postulates' is an exercise in pretension and desperation.

. Hardly , these are almost the exact words that the Dear old Boy uses in his first edition (as seen from Morse Peckhams "Variorum"). As it does play out, Darwins theory (all of it so elegantly simple, was remarked on by Huxley by saying "why didnt I think of that")
Presenting historical facts is hardly an exercise in pretension and desperation. Maybe you dont like the simplicity stated therein, but lets not get testy :wink:

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remember, Darwins belief in performing a yeomans service centered around hisown deep feelings of inadequacy when Joseph Hooker accused him of needing to seek the firsthand knowledge of taxonomy so as to be fluent in the mechanistics of ther traits he stated were "heritable"

He attempted to rectify this with
1 a 7 years worth of personal study into the arcane anatomy/taxonomy of barnacles (of which he used but few paragraphs of detail in "The Origin")

2 He also spent a few decades quest in producing heritable, desiriable traits in fancy pigeons.

Darwin didnt sit at some keyboard and armchair some "pseudo knowledge" into print. He dug his evidence out from many genera of organisms(both natural and man induced) and from data gleaned freom many correspondents in distant place names on the planet earth.

He earned his bones the hard way and I blieve that youre just too far from the distinctions of his theory to understand the elegant interplay of its simple components.

I recently gave my example of how Einstein intuited E-Mc** from the simple Force and mass times acceleration equation, the basis of which was long known from Newton. Do we criticize Einstein as a plagiarizer too?

Sometimes its how a case is built up from simple facts that is the important thing.

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It is as if the only possible motives Darwin had are the ones you ascribe to him.

But there's nothing new in what you said fm. We all know what a simple theory it is- hence it's elegance. Elegance is a superfluous word.

What % of the species extant and fossilised did Darwin study? And Russell says somewhere that experiments with animals are conditioned by the predispositions of the experimenter and Darwin's predisposition was one conditioned by his privileged place in society and the views of Victorian industrialists who he, as to be expected, confirmed to be behaving according to Divine creation and thus not morally reprehensibly.
Workers and their children being much less well treated than the domestic pets of that class. The Wedgwood money being a large factor in his life.

I see you didn't find my previous post interesting enough to comment on.
At least not yet. Are you dodging it?

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spendius wrote:

TKO-

The problem is that the human race seems to have a need for an explanation and until such time as the scientists provide one which it can understand and live with it is susceptible to supernatural ones of one sort or another. Then it is down to rhetoric and fitting it to society's uses or the uses of a dominant class in any particular environment. Desert, steppes, lowland etc.

Some would say that to deny this need is unnatural for a being with intelligence. They would say, I think, that it is neurotic or that the person in denial is putting it to use.

The scientific search for an explanation of life affirms the need for one. The rigidity of the position that there is no non-material explanation might even hinder the search.

You haven't described any problem for mankind, only a problem for religion.

You seem to believe that science is no more than a new form a mythology and rhetoric.

This idea is propagana at it's most pathetic.
K
O

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spendi said

Quote:

And Russell says somewhere that experiments with animals are conditioned by the predispositions of the experimenter and Darwin's predisposition was one conditioned by his privileged place in society and the views of Victorian industrialists who he, as to be expected, confirmed to be behaving according to Divine creation and thus not morally reprehensibly.

You got these "spendi" coprolites from Darwins experiments with dead barnacles and pigeon breeding?

Laughing

AS Dr Craighead also learned, you dont interface with a mother grizzly bear to inject your self into a study. (Otherwise youll wind up as jingle bells in bear scat)

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TKO wrote-

Quote:

You haven't described any problem for mankind, only a problem for religion.

I didn't describe anything. Or try to. I simply said that the overwhelming evidence suggests that humans seem to feel that some explanation is needed for where they came from and where they are going and who and what they are now.

I never said I needed any explanations. I started life when my old man knocked my mum's shopping bags askew in the swing doors of the Metrepole in Blackpool and apologised profusely.

The theologians had arranged to have planning permission granted to the owners of the land on which the Metrepole was built for that very purpose.

It's hard to imagine how such things happened during prohibition or in Tehran. One supposes they resort to requisitions of one sort or another in circumstances as dire as that.

I used to love Yogi Bear. Pure intellectualism.

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spendius wrote:

I didn't describe anything. Or try to. I simply said that the overwhelming evidence suggests that humans seem to feel that some explanation is needed for where they came from and where they are going and who and what they are now.

That's why you have creation myths. Every tribe, including the ancient Jews, had one. What do you think Genesis is?

Quote:

It is in the nature of humans to wonder about the unknown and search for answers. At the foundation of nearly every culture is a creation myth that explains how the wonders of the earth came to be. These myths have an immense influence on people's frame of reference. They influence the way people think about the world and their place in relation to their surroundings. Despite being separated by numerous geographical barriers many cultures have developed creation myths with the same basic elements.

http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths.html

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And you need an explanation for that too.

It's infantile to just assert that they are, and were, all barmy. Pram stuff.

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Quote:

I simply said that the overwhelming evidence suggests that humans seem to feel that some explanation is needed for where they came from and where they are going and who and what they are now.

And said another way, it brings back memories of my grandfathers comments on his
comrades. Hed say often that "All my friends are dropping dead"

The difference today is that we can now say why.

Most often, We create the technology, then we apply it. All that we have in fossils started out as mere quarry pickings from cement and gravel pits. Our great great grand engineers were building a road and from their gravel pit they found "Homo deluvii testis" Good enough for the !7th century Germans, but, later, as we discovered how to predict where we could find similar quality cement rock, we applied science and found more "Homey..." Then we needed to revise the stories because evidence doesnt support first conclusions.

Evidence does clearly show that we created Gods and religious ritual somewhere about 25 to 30000 years ago (This was based upon a critical observation of how the dead were treated before and after that rough timeline)
Myths of origins and gods were developed and (most importantly for good crowd control) we needed devils
"Gods arent necessary to maintain order in a civilization but devils are" --I forget who said that

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maporsche wrote:

real life wrote:
Evolution requires a critter to produce a critter that cannot interbreed with his contemporaries (i.e. members of the 'old species').

If he is the first of a 'new species' , what is he gonna breed with?

And if he can still breed with the 'old species', then he is not a 'new species', is he? Hummmm?

Again, you're being dishonest here.

I hope your god will understand why you're choosing to sin over and over.

maporsche,

What are you talking about?

Evolution REQUIRES that at some point(whether it takes 1 or 18000 generations makes no difference) that species X must be able to produce something that is not species X and cannot breed with species X .

Do you deny this?

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Quote:

Do you deny this?

Now, since youve already stipulated to selective interbreeding Cant you understand that there may be a multivariation of naturally derived traits that define a whole slew of new sub- species, each one with maybe 40 or 50 traits in common.They could all be nicely interbreeding until time or the environment weed out the intermediates. Here weve got new functions from old structures and, in enough time, weve got entirely new gene compliments.

I know theres a lot for you to disagree with, Im sure youll give it a go.

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farmerman wrote:

Quote:
Do you deny this?
Now, since youve already stipulated to selective interbreeding Cant you understand that there may be a multivariation of naturally derived traits that define a whole slew of new sub- species, each one with maybe 40 or 50 traits in common.They could all be nicely interbreeding until time or the environment weed out the intermediates. Here weve got new functions from old structures and, in enough time, weve got entirely new gene compliments.

I know theres a lot for you to disagree with, Im sure youll give it a go.

Where's the new species' in your scenario? They all interbreed.

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((thud))

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real life wrote:

maporsche wrote:
real life wrote:
Evolution requires a critter to produce a critter that cannot interbreed with his contemporaries (i.e. members of the 'old species').

If he is the first of a 'new species' , what is he gonna breed with?

And if he can still breed with the 'old species', then he is not a 'new species', is he? Hummmm?

Again, you're being dishonest here.

I hope your god will understand why you're choosing to sin over and over.

maporsche,

What are you talking about?

Evolution REQUIRES that at some point(whether it takes 1 or 18000 generations makes no difference) that species X must be able to produce something that is not species X and cannot breed with species X .

Do you deny this?

Not as long as you're willing to admit that it could take millions of generations to get from X to non-X.

What you said though did not leave in the possibility of millions of generations.

And you're still confused about how evolution works.

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real life wrote:

farmerman wrote:
Quote:
Do you deny this?
Now, since youve already stipulated to selective interbreeding Cant you understand that there may be a multivariation of naturally derived traits that define a whole slew of new sub- species, each one with maybe 40 or 50 traits in common.They could all be nicely interbreeding until time or the environment weed out the intermediates. Here weve got new functions from old structures and, in enough time, weve got entirely new gene compliments.

I know theres a lot for you to disagree with, Im sure youll give it a go.

Where's the new species' in your scenario? They all interbreed.

What he said was if you had species Xa and they could interbreed with sub-species Xb and a new subspecies branched off of Xb called Xc but Xc couldn't breed with Xa, if Xb died off you'd be left with Xa and Xc who couldn't interbreed.

Xb is the intermediate species FM was referring too.

And obviously, this is a very simplistic example.

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maporsche wrote:

real life wrote:
farmerman wrote:
Quote:
Do you deny this?
Now, since youve already stipulated to selective interbreeding Cant you understand that there may be a multivariation of naturally derived traits that define a whole slew of new sub- species, each one with maybe 40 or 50 traits in common.They could all be nicely interbreeding until time or the environment weed out the intermediates. Here weve got new functions from old structures and, in enough time, weve got entirely new gene compliments.

I know theres a lot for you to disagree with, Im sure youll give it a go.

Where's the new species' in your scenario? They all interbreed.

What he said was if you had species Xa and they could interbreed with sub-species Xb and a new subspecies branched off of Xb called Xc but Xc couldn't breed with Xa, if Xb died off you'd be left with Xa and Xc who couldn't interbreed.

Xb is the intermediate species FM was referring too.

And obviously, this is a very simplistic example.

No, what he said was they were ALL interbreeding.

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real life wrote:

No, what he said was they were ALL interbreeding.

I read his post wrong, what I'm referring to is different than what FM is talking about.

So, what's wrong with my scenerio RL? Doesn't that show how species could develop, yet still allow for interbreeding?

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no RL, maporsche read it quite correctly, you are the one stuck in second. Note I said subspecies and then had a bunch disappear and leave only new species. And this is but one of a hundred ways we can exemplify the chnge in allometry of organisms in time, space, environment , and /or gene complimet.

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Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

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