I think I know where you are going with this, but before I make any assumptions, I need to ask you, where do you think God came from?
Since God is an omnipotent being, who cares. He is eternal thus has always been. Christians go by faith that God exists. They don't need answers.
Quote from Tuss »
Molecules and stuff came from simpler atoms coalescing into stars and baking for a while.
Where and what created the 'simpler atoms'?
Quote from Mr. Stuff »
As to where water and oceans come from: The first generation of elements were formed in stars.
Formed in stars, eh? Where did the stars come from? Without trying to sound like a broken record I'm sure you see what I'm getting at.
Quote from Mr. Stuff »
As for abiogenesis, watch this video for how it might have happened (and might still be happening).
As of this post I've not watched it yet. But I will. Just a fyi.
Quote from Mr. Stuff »
but at this point the best option is just to say "We don't know yet".
I know this wasn't directed at me, but if that is the answer then why are people, that believe a God created everything (ie creationists), so crazy? They at least have an answer. (Note-I know you didn't say such a thing, just making a statement.)
The creationist can use the same answer to everything unexplainable. I don't know, but I'll ask God when I see him.
I know this wasn't directed at me, but if that is the answer then why are people, that believe a God created everything (ie creationists), so crazy? They at least have an answer. (Note-I know you didn't say such a thing, just making a statement.)
[hater mode]Because those who say 'we don't know for sure' are the honest ones[/hater mode]
Really, science is an ongoing project, and every discovery brings up thousands of questions. It isn't weird we have no perfect knowledge of events that have happened over 15 billion years ago.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
Nevik, let me put this forth to you: Why do you accept the idea that God has no first maker but not the idea that the universe has no first maker?
Let me put this forth to you. Someone here mentioned that creationists had no brain and only one person called him out on that. While others actually jumped on the bandwagon that they do not have brains.
So for all your logic, reason, and science you still cannot explain something to me. You go by faith, that it just happened, or its just there, or we don't know yet. Similar to what a creationist does/says. How are you smarter or more capable of having a brain if you cannot prove a damn thing either?
*note* My use of your, yours, and you are generally generic unless stated.
So for all your logic, reason, and science you still cannot explain something to me. You go by faith, that it just happened, or its just there, or we don't know yet. Similar to what a creationist does/says. How are you smarter or more capable of having a brain if you cannot prove a damn thing either?
That doesn't answer my question. What makes you fine with the idea that God has no creator but not fine with the idea that the universe has no creator? It seems like an unneeded link in the chain.
Whether or not I can explain the origins of the universe is irrelevant to my question.
@Nevik Ecir
Better yet, along with the other video, watch this one if you're still having trouble with the "where did everything come from" thing. It's a well-done visual history of the universe, and makes things very easy to grasp. After the big bang, it's all physics and chemisty.
Also, water is a compound, not an element, so water didn't form in stars. Hydrogen and Oxygen both formed in stars.
I'm afraid you're going to have to explain how scientists have faith in something when they answer "I don't know". "I don't know" is the correct answer, not just a meaningless vagary; or rather, I should say, "Nobody knows" is the correct answer. You don't know either, and shouldn't claim to know. You are absolutely wrong for claiming to know something when you can't back it up with any evidence whatsoever. You are just as wrong as I would be if I went around telling whoever would listen that the world would end in two months, and when asked how I knew, said "Well, there's a non-zero chance of it, so that means we should act like it's going to happen, right?"
And, sad as it is to say, you just demonstrated your own unwillingness to participate in a real debate with the line "Christians go by faith; they don't need answers." That statement sums up a lot of the anti-intellectual mentality that exists in religion-land: "I don't care if you're right or not, if you have evidence or not; I want to believe what I believe so I just will anyway" followed by jamming fingers in one's ears. Faith is something to be ashamed of, not proud of. It just means you've been brainwashed into not wanting or not caring about evidence for something. You require evidence for every other thing in your life before believing it. Religion should be no exception.
Whoa, dude, seriously. That's a whole lotta words and not a whole lotta sense.
Have you ever tried to catch a baseball? You notice how sometimes you miss? That's what happens sometimes when cells divide; due to purely physical processes, they make a mistake: a stray particle of something gets stuck in the wrong place, there's not quite enough of a certain chemical for something to bond correctly... you get the idea. Under perfect conditions, sure, a cell would replicate perfectly every time, but do perfect conditions exist anywhere?
Secondly, a tendency to make mistakes in reproduction (mutation) is actually selected for. If an animal becomes perfect at reproducing, never changing its genetic code (imagine an asexually reproducing species doing this), one virus could come along and wipe out the whole population. The reason that the "errors" stick around and pass along their genes to offspring that are bad at making perfect copies of themselves is precisely because perfect reproduction breeds in weakness. If your species is to survive as a species, it needs to be able to withstand a stray virus or two. Or rather, I should say, those populations who weren't diverse enough to withstand errant virii all died off, and only the animals with more 'diverse' genes (read: bad at making perfect copies of themselves) were left.
I don't think I really even need to respond to that "survival of the fittest" stuff other than to say, far from any kind of religious doctrine, it's an observation of what happens in nature, much like saying "leaves are green" or "wolves hunt in packs". Seriously, there was some full-out crazy in there.
What I don't like about the theory of survival of the fittest is that it is a religious doctrine, designed merely with the intention of rejecting Christianity, which taught, "Does this obey a strict, continuous order? No? If not, then it must be obedient to strict, continuous randomness." Yes, this teaching became dichotomous in its application, but the theory of survival of the fittest has failed to resolve this dichotomy comprehensively. The arbitrary judgment continues presently.
These claims aren't even close to justified. You might as well be spinning an Illuminati tale here.
The scientists conveniently saw what they wanted to see in evolution. Their amended teaching became, "Does this obey a strict, continuous order? No? If not, then randomness must be involved somewhere, although possibly not everywhere."
This is the third or fourth time I've said this on this thread to you: randomness is not a necessary prerequisite of natural selection. If scientists were just fabricating a theoretical framework with which to attack "order", don't you think they could have done a better job of it?
The social implications of the theory of survival of the fittest are that fitness ought to be the only important thing in life (queue Bugs Bunny eating a carrot). We view the creation of material wealth as equivalent to fitness, so we pursue wealth-creation stubbornly, considering disgrace, disrespect, and deceit as justified in pursuit of the creation of wealth and increased fitness. It is this way not because it has to be, not because it is organic, but because it was designed to be; our culture desired to do away with reciprocity but somehow retain our sense of entitlement to rights and ownership.
Evolution has no bearing on social morality whatsoever, except perhaps explanatory. Those who thought it did were called "social Darwinists", and are very much out of fashion.
After WWII and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the subsequent generation of Americans decided to abandon all informal expressions of Christian principles and reciprocity, in favor of the theory of survival of the fittest.
This hypothesis makes testable predictions, which do not match up with reality. If what you say is true, the moral outrage at finance companies, the disgrace of Mark Sanford, the War on Terror, none of these things would have happened.
Anyway, the fact that it is possible for a cell to endure a gamma photon and continue to replicate reliably, shows that, while a cell may not be structured according to a strict order, there is a semblance of structure; structure is not totally absent in the cell. The structure of the cell is flexible, yet it is guided. It is customizable.
From which it does not follow that survival of the fittest is self-serving bull. Your "customization" - what actual biologists call "mutation" - leads to population variation, which in combination with nonrandom predation leads to evolutionation. This is "survival of the fittest". And we can watch it happen - hell, we can make it happen. It's more than a principle of biology; it's a principle of logic.
Perhaps the cell cannot predict what conditions it shall encounter in its future, but the cell is so well-prepared that predictions may be unnecessary for it.
Since the cell does not perceive the limitless order of hard determinism, the cell can neither perceive randomness which is wholly the consequence of a flaw in application of hard determinism from a finite perspective.
The cell cannot "predict" or "perceive" anything at all. Please start thinking about your word choice, rather than reaching for the most pretentious vocabulary you have at hand. Or if you must use words idiosyncratically, at least preface your remarks with an explanation of why you're doing so and what you mean by them.
The cell does not differentiate between quantitative and qualitative states, because, to the cell, all changes in state are qualitative: the cell merely redistributes space among matter. There is no intention that this redistribution be made in a strict, particular manner; merely what is necessary is that it suffice to allow the endurance of the life of the cell. And the cell never overreacts to a change in quality by seeing it as a change in quantity- that's something only humans do because of our use of logic.
I honestly have no idea what this paragraph is supposed to mean, or where it's intended to go.
I must concede that the allocation of energy is not goal-oriented, if the definition of "goal-oriented" requires that there be an agreed-upon goal at each step of the process, as in an assembly line. The manner in which cells allocate energy is done generally, rather than specifically, at each step, such that no particular step is necessarily aware of the ultimate goal of the process, nor even that it is participating in any process. Each step merely sends energy in a general direction, but there happen to be so many steps that are so near to one another, that the next step happens to recept it with acute redundancy. This redundancy would be coincidental in one dimension, but in three dimensions and with time, the proximity and promptness become reliable because of the overlap in boundaries of resonance.
The arrangement present at each scale remains as improvisational as possible, so that each arrangement on the scales smaller than it may remain flexible. No arrangement at any scale is intentionally obligated strictly to be functional, since such an obligation would necessarily compromise the customization of smaller arrangements, under certain circumstances.
There is no consciousness particular to a cell independent of this improvised arrangement. However, this mere arrangement of the cell, although it is improvised at every scale, is sufficient, in its combination of redundancy and directionality, to allow responses from any event at any larger scale to be felt distinctively at every smaller scale; meaning that "whatever is coming from beneath the scales" may express itself in a manner such that the cell acts as a proxy for it.
Now, if it is not functionality, explain synchronicity among cells for whom a feedback loop is observably absent? Is it all coincidence then? No. Timers. While together, timers in each cell are wound to go off simultaneously after the cells separate. Timers may be sensitive to changes in external conditions or to other timers. Timers are generated as the results of previous timers, all tracing back to a single honed coincidence as per the theory of evolution.
Again, none of this says anything about the validity of "survival of the fittest".
In summary, I do not believe that the cell is functional. It's improvisational, and developed to this level of apparent intricacy through a gentle guidance of coincidence in effort to maintain existing life...
Let me translate this into real English: the fittest cells survived.
It is insufficient to attribute survival solely to fitness, when predation merely influences what the cell can do, but falls short of determining what the cell must do.
Sure. There's lots of unfortunate things that can befall fit cells, and unfit cells can get lucky. But natural selection acts like a thumb on the balance over the course of thousands of generations; it's a statistical phenomenon, not a causal one.
The scientists sought to redefine order. They did not seek to abandon order; order is everything that is important to them. In the minds of scientists, order must exist to some extent.
What I want to see is this: people focusing their strengths to improve the weaknesses in our culture. I want people to stop focusing their strengths simply to improve the strengths that already exist, while ignoring the weaknesses as "naturally" inevitable.
Ask a racist what he wants to see, and he'll say "black people who know their place". But what he actually wants to see is black people behaving badly, because that confirms his skewed worldview.
If natural selection does not make a claim about causation, then the history of evolution could be explained just as well without natural selection...
No, it couldn't. Evolution itself is a statistical process, a slow change in the occurrence of various genes in a population. The one statistical process explains the other; we could even call it "causation" in the broader Aristotelian sense. But neither natural selection nor evolution are the sort of actual, physical force that "causes" things in the modern sense.
The fact is that the theory of natural selection makes, at least in connotation, a loose claim about causation: if you can meet the threshold of mechanical functionality, then you shall be successful in the survival of your genes. Guaranteed.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? I've already made this point: Natural selection makes no guarantees whatsoever. There's no "threshold of mechanical functionality". There's only that which survives and all the rest. Natural selection is simply a theory which points out that that which survives probably does so because it's fitter at surviving. Sometimes fit things die, and sometimes unfit things live. But in the long run, the fit things tend to win out.
Life is simply a matter of finding this threshold and then meeting it, by any means necessary. And most children in America are presently raised to follow that example.
Do you have a shred of evidence to back up this claim?
Can anybody explain to me what WhoeverUsesBirdsReapsGame is saying, in English? Or in French if you'd like, but I should be able to follow if you translate to actual English.
My (nogooddruggie) brother in law had peyote highs where he was talking more sense than this.
Seriously, I don't want to flame, I just have no clue how I'm supposed to answer to that wall of disjointed words and concepts. I understand the words individually but together they mean nothing.
Can anybody explain to me what WhoeverUsesBirdsReapsGame is saying, in English? Or in French if you'd like, but I should be able to follow if you translate to actual English.
My (nogooddruggie) brother in law had peyote highs where he was talking more sense than this.
Seriously, I don't want to flame, I just have no clue how I'm supposed to answer to that wall of disjointed words and concepts. I understand the words individually but together they mean nothing.
He seems to be rambling a bit but more or less he's debunking the main point of survival of the fittest and natural selection claiming their popularity is due more or less to human nature's need to have everything fit into place.
He says a couple of other points like its all an effort to replace religion as a common rally point for a society. Instead of your way being most rightgeous its now obviously the best way to live.
They're is more but I'm not really sure why he mentions it, it kinda supports his point but cynically I think its mostly to fit in more expansive vocabulary in attempt to establish a sort of credibility. (you know alot of large words, therefore you must be smart. This style of supporting an argument is taught in some college english, persuasive speech classes)
Its mostly semantics though natural selection and survivial of the fittest most definatly influence at a macro level. They're is a reason spiders don't grow to be 3 stories high, a reason why some organisms still haven't abandoned their single cell state, and reasons to why multicellur organism develope.
He's talking about using "survival of the fittest" as a political/religious doctrine, when the only people that use it that way (in the way he's suggesting it's used) live in his imagination. It's a description of nature, and if you inject "what is good for humans" into it (like Hitler, one could argue), then that's totally your own creation, and has nothing to do it as a theory that describes nature.
What he's doing is like saying "Since gravity was discovered, why have all these people started jumping off bridges? Everyone lives by the rule of gravity these days. Gravity encourages people to live without caring for their fellow man, and with disregard for their own lives."
@WUBRG (nifty, I didn't realize your name included the color wheel):
"The theory of evolution" is a set of rules that we use to describe what happens in nature. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong, good or bad, or anything else. It simply describes what happens, in the same way that gravity says "things are attracted to each other". People generally do not want to help people because those in need have inferior genetics; if you think so, you're delusional. They want to help people because they care about other humans, and have an inborn desire to care about other humans, because that trait helped us form cohesive groups in the past, ones that survived instead of dying out. Notice how evolution describes why we feel the way we do, not how we *should* feel. Evolution does not suggest what anyone should or should not do. The only power it offers in a social setting is explanative, not suggestive.
Changes in a parent's genes can be inherited to its progeny due to heredity.
A parent's genetic makeup does not change. Individuals do not acquire new genetic characteristics during their lifetime. Sexual reproduction causes a recombination of genes (half from each parent into the new individual) and some mutations occur in gametes also because of transcription errors, but once you are born your genetic is fixed (that's how DNA testing works).
Before genes were identified as the repository of hereditary characteristics, there was an hypothesis that change occured during an individual's lifetime (LaMarkism) which was also the hypothesis that Lysenko under Stalin's USSR used as the basis of his agricultural experiments (which were all failures). But neo-Darwinism has studied genes enough since then to know that this is not what occurs.
To be more precise, mutations/copying errors do occur also in some cellular splitting within an individual during its lifetime but these cells either get destroyed fast by the immunitary system or multiply too fast for it to take care of the problem and become known as *cancer*.
But what obligates the DNA polymerase to try to remain consistent in its replication of DNA?
DNA does not have a conscience or a goal. It does not 'try' anything. DNA gets copied because this is what it does, chemically, like hydrogen burns with oxygen and gives out water, then may split back into hydrogen and oxygen given energy. The vast majority of times hydrogen and oxygen combines as H2O. Sometimes they combine as H2O2. Same with DNA, on a more complex scale.
If the fittest organism died, wouldn't all the rest of life have to have died, by definition of "fittest"?
Someone already told you this was a probabilities thing. If the best hand on the last hand was a 90/10 favorite, does it follow that it necessarily won by definition of 'best'?
On the contrary; random mutation suggests that spiders could grow to be three feet tall,
If I create a game where we randomly add blocks on top of each other, does it follow that randomness suggests that any possible structure could arise? No. Most of them would fall. Some of these structures *could* be theoretically stable and have the possibility of existing if they were designed, but not have a way of evolving from the set of random additions possible + gravity (i.e. 'natural selection').
and that unicellular life remains unicellular without reason.
The persistance of unicellular life is basically a demonstration of how random mutations are. Most unicellulars did not mutate to become multicellulars, because most unicellulars (by virtue of no sexual reproduction) reproduce their genetic makeup more or less perfectly (without mutations). They were still fit enough to multiply and in fact be the dominant form of life on this planet (if you were to weight every unicellular and compare to the total weight of all multicellulars, the unicellulars win hands down).
While measurement of physical force is objective, measurement of utility is subjective. Unless a goal is present, utility does not exist. Alleles cannot anticipate their own deaths, therefore they cannot measure utility.
Alleles don't need to measure utility. The real world does it for them, by culling the alleles that are not useful.
Welfare programs, explicitly for assistance to "disabled" people, have been formally established by governments on every continent on Earth, except Antarctica.
People on welfare don't have inferior genes.
Talk about ethnocentrism. Let me guess, anyone who doesn't want to participate in cohesive groups, must be less fit to survive, correct?
This is a complete non sequitur.
If I understand that statement correctly: natural selection has led to the existence of humanity. But, because of selection pressures and limited resources on Earth, humanity has the right, nay, the responsibility, to progress from the natural course of evolution, and become self-sacrificing conformists, based on the advice of scientists.
More non-sequitur.
What humans decide to do is not outside the 'natural course of evolution'. We're part of evolution. What we do is part of it too.
Why is humanity initially removed from the rest of nature, so that there is a special term "human nature"?
There is also 'chimpanzee nature' and 'oak tree nature' (and so on) but as humans we are usually naturally less interested in those.
But a simpler explanation that can explain everything consistently has been produced: life is meant to guard a pathway around a space from the micro scale to the macro scale, because something below the micro scale wants to express itself through life.
ANNNNND I'm back in complete befuddlement about what the heck you're talking about.
Isn't it, in fact, the persistence of a trait that makes us come to classify it as "adaptive"?
Not really. An adaptive trait is one that increases the probability of the organism's survival (and reproduction). Maladaptive traits can defy the odds for various reasons and persist; this does not make them adaptive.
Changes in a parent's genes can be inherited to its progeny due to heredity. But what obligates the DNA polymerase to try to remain consistent in its replication of DNA? The fact that it remains consistent is the cause of persistence of traits. Therefore, to suggest that, in addition, it is the effect of natural selection that this occurs consistently, seems to necessitate circular reasoning, doesn't it?
There's nothing circular (in the logical sense) about feedback effects; they happen all over the place in nature. Nature is the ultimate test of your reasoning; what actually happens cannot be illogical, so if you think it is, you need to think again. In this case, I think your problem lies in insisting that natural selection must be either a "cause" or "effect" of this feedback phenomenon, when (as I've already said) it is neither. Genes that can replicate themselves faithfully will produce copies that can likewise replicate themselves faithfully. Genes that can't, won't. The result is the persistence of the faithful replicators, and the disappearance of all the rest. Natural selection is not the cause of this population shift, or the effect of it - natural selection is the population shift.
It is necessary that the persistence of adaptive traits, called natural selection, be, to some extent, coincidental to both survival and relative abundance of organisms. Though natural occurrences might exert some influence on the existence of a particular gene from time to time, that would not mean that such a gene could not be re-created elsewhere, in conditions under which it could persist longer.
If the fittest organism died, wouldn't all the rest of life have to have died, by definition of "fittest"?
Only if you childishly decide to interpret "fittest" as singular, and you also continue to insist that the "survival" has to discriminate completely, despite my numerous explanations that it doesn't.
Is "the long run" defined arbitrarily by the length of time in which persistence of a particular genetic trait or species endures?
No, "the long run" is defined as a large number of trials (i.e. generations), enough for the statistical "noise" to cancel out. I say fit things tend to win out in the long run in the same way I would say that the casino tends to take your money in the long run: just as the games have rules such that the odds of your winning are less than the odds of the house winning, so too do lifeforms have traits such that the odds of those with certain traits surviving is less than the odds of those with other traits surviving. We label species "fit" or "unfit" based on their odds, but they would live or die just the same no matter what we called them.
It's all revisionist history, circular logic, and relativism.
The long run is the threshold. The message is simple:
By any means necessary, identify the window of time in which you need to fake it. Once you've identified the length of that window of time, success or failure becomes a simple matter of endurance, which any human can do because we're the best fit because we say so.
Your evidence that we base our society on the principle of natural selection is... the government intervening in the selective process of business failure? You might as well say that we adhere to natural selection by artificially keeping the weak and sickly alive.
"I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection."
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
While measurement of physical force is objective, measurement of utility is subjective. Unless a goal is present, utility does not exist.
In the evolutionary context, the "goal" is survival and reproduction, and "utility" is increased odds of doing such.
Welfare programs, explicitly for assistance to "disabled" people, have been formally established by governments on every continent on Earth, except Antarctica.
And, again, this is evidence that we morally adhere to natural selection?
Let me guess, anyone who doesn't want to participate in cohesive groups, must be less fit to survive, correct?
The existence of human social behavior would seem to indicate so, yes. Not conclusively, because (again) evolution is a statistical process, but with a very high probability. And it's not very hard to think of the potential survival benefits of social behavior, which adds still more weight to the notion.
If I understand that statement correctly: natural selection has led to the existence of humanity. But, because of selection pressures and limited resources on Earth, humanity has the right, nay, the responsibility, to progress from the natural course of evolution, and become self-sacrificing conformists, based on the advice of scientists.
Why is humanity initially removed from the rest of nature, so that there is a special term "human nature"?
Because we're different than other parts of nature, and so have different qualities. These qualities are sometimes referred to as a "nature", but it would be a dangerous mistake to equivocate between that usage and "nature" as the whole of the universe. We can speak of the "nature" of a dog, of a tree, or even of a black hole; this doesn't remove them from the rest of nature.
I am neither a conspiracy theorist nor a drug addict. I am calling it like I see it, and I remain open to the possibility that natural selection may have a significant effect on evolution that is beyond my understanding. But a simpler explanation that can explain everything consistently has been produced: life is meant to guard a pathway around a space from the micro scale to the macro scale, because something below the micro scale wants to express itself through life.
How is diving headfirst into uncertainty, mystical thinking, and homunculus problems a "simpler explanation"? Evolution explains why life seems to have purpose, what that purpose is, and how it can come about from the purposeless workings of the universe. Your ramblings have done none of these things.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
On the contrary; random mutation suggests that spiders could grow to be three feet tall, and that unicellular life remains unicellular without reason.
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I'm going have to knock you here. Of course they could but they do not BECAUSE the natural selection over time dictates that their current sizes are best for enviroment and function. A 3-foot spider will not be able to breathe properly with book lungs and its exoskeleton would be more fragile in porportion to the small spiders causing its own set of problems.
Your argument of "what of the fittest organism?" is simply debunked by the fact that a fittest organism doesn't exist. Organisms fill niches and the constant variables that lead to different life forms is caused by the gradual evolution into new found (or previously filled) niches in the food chain. The rise of mammels is probaly the perfect example of the latter.
Everything can only adapt so much and in order to gain something must be lost, humans gain adapability in lieu of physical prowness, the multicellur organisms are overall more fragile than single cell organisms but the benifit lies in being able to exploit a completly different ecosystem.
BLINKING SPIRIT- Spiders used to be 3-feet tall give or take, its an easy mutation for the arachnid as they don't have a limit to growth anyway so techcnically you don't even need a genetically differant spider, just enough food. (Of course within reason)
The problem is that they don't survive well much past the size of the Golaith on earth, technically if we put a decently healthy Golaith on a satillite with low gravity and extremly rich oxygen content it'll be able to grow to around that size.
BLINKING SPIRIT- Spiders used to be 3-feet tall give or take, its an easy mutation for the arachnid as they don't have a limit to growth anyway so techcnically you don't even need a genetically differant spider, just enough food. (Of course within reason)
The problem is that they don't survive well much past the size of the Golaith on earth, technically if we put a decently healthy Golaith on a satillite with low gravity and extremly rich oxygen content it'll be able to grow to around that size.
I thought technically those do exist, although they happen to live underwater and we refer to them as King Crabs, with lungs adapted for low oxygen saturation?
Phylum, etc. are far from my forte however - and don't care enough to call the bro-in-law to bring me up to speed however.
I thought technically those do exist, although they happen to live underwater and we refer to them as King Crabs, with lungs adapted for low oxygen saturation?
Phylum, etc. are far from my forte however - and don't care enough to call the bro-in-law to bring me up to speed however.
There are differances and spiders have been adapted to deal with relitively low oxegen saturation as well but do to the addaptation they can only get so big otherwise the lungs would not be able to keep up.
Crustacians and arachnids are both arthopods so they're about as similar as we are to dogs. (ex we share mostly the same organ system to dogs, 4 limbs, 2 eyes, 2 ears etc.) (They share exoskeleton, segmented limbs, etc)
There are some scary big crabs
The largest crab has a 15 inch body with a 13 ft legspan and is ironically the japanese spider crab.
I don't think people confuse anything here--I think you just use the term "evolution" more narrowly than they/I do ("they" being the people you are talking about), or place stricter bounds on what is to be included in the general theory. There is no doubt that biologists think that those sorts of issues are evolutionary, so it seems perfectly reasonable for me to include them.
Evolution is strictly about the change in populations of organisms over time. This is what Darwin's body of work was dedicated to. This is what scientists interpret the theory to mean when they talk about it. Simple as that.
That evolution may be involved in the actual origin of species is possible, but not integral to evolution itself meaning there is no "contentious" aspect to evolution as it's commonly understand unless you're using it in the broadest sense, in which case we can talk about psychology, astronomy, technology, and plenty of other subjects .
Did Godel1 mention the origin of life? C'mon guys. He said "origin of species", which is coincidentally the title of Darwin's book, and to claim that it's only "tangentially" related to evolution is ridiculous. The theory of the origin of species is just taking the fact of observed evolution and working backwards. We had the theory of evolution (and OoS) before we documented the fact of it anyway; documentation of the fact (of evolution) is very recent. The evidence has been building for a long time, and the theory has become more and more specific over time due to new information; but the essence of it has remained the same for a long time, and it's fair to say that extending evolution backward in time is part of the overall theory.
Godel was clearly referencing the origin of biological life on earth. In which case, it absolutely is tangentially related to evolution.
It's possible scientists may discover a phenomenon related to biological origins that adds to our understanding of evolution, but it's not a portion of the theory itself in the way that genetic drift, gene duplication, or natural selection are.
Its because colloquially, when someone asks you "do you believe evolution is true" what they are really asking (despite terminological inaccuracies) is "Do you believe evolutionary theory is the correct theory for describing the origins of life and the origins of species".
Impressively wrong.
For reasons described above. Nobody interprets the question "do you believe evolution is true" to imply theories about the origins of life" except people that simply don't understand it. You're demonstrating exactly why people often don't accept it as a scientific fact: because they simply don't know enough about it and/or have misinformed ideas about what evolution actually is.
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For reasons described above. Nobody interprets the question "do you believe evolution is true" to imply theories about the origins of life" except people that simply don't understand it. You're demonstrating exactly why people often don't accept it as a scientific fact: because they simply don't know enough about it and/or have misinformed ideas about what evolution actually is.
It's not wrong at all. Go out on the street and ask 100 random people if they believe evolution is true, and then ask them what they thought you were asking. I guarantee you that over 50 of them will give you something about the origins of life.
You're answer there belies an impressive lack of knowledge of what the word "colloquially" means. You're saying "but I actually meant X which is what the words definition is". I'm saying "Yes I understand that. But even though you meant X, the people answering the question heard Y, and answered Y"
If someone on the street asked me if I believed evolution was true I would assume they meant to ask "do you believe evolution is the explanation for the origin of life" -- because thats what they usually mean when they ask that.
Go out on the street and ask 100 random people if they believe evolution is true, and then ask them what they thought you were asking. I guarantee you that over 50 of them will give you something about the origins of life.
Argumentum ad populum. (Argument from popularity). Verging on the unofficial fallacy, argumentum ad moron, meaning argument from what some random schmoe who doesn't know crap would think.
Argumentum ad populum. (Argument from popularity). Verging on the unofficial fallacy, argumentum ad moron, meaning argument from what some random schmoe who doesn't know crap would think.
Huh? I was discussing what the "colloquial" definition and understanding of the question would be. In other words, I was arguing about what some random schmo who doesn't know crap would think.
I mean you are just so intent to say I'm wrong here, that you didn't even bother to read what we were arguing over.
Also, I was unaware that I was attempting to make a logical proof... you know, those things that are the only time when logical fallacies are applicable...
Edit: Also, Topper could you address this part of my original post as well:
"Its a simple matter of thats what most people think the question is asking so thats what they address. I mean you yourself thought thats what it was asking otherwise your jab at creationists makes absolutely no sense in context."
Additionally something I was thinking about earlier - is that the entire premise of the thread was posed in a rather biased way.
I'm personally not a creationist and I consider the entire premise to be a bit far-fetched, but "creationist" and "evolutionist" are not necessarily mutually exclusive as the thread's direction would seem to imply.
Creationism only applies to the "starting point" there's nothing in creationism that contradicts that starting point being because of the intervention of a deity and then from there evolution took over.
Especially since keep in mind one of the primary cruxes to evolution is presenting a path of evolution, and at last check there's still a few links missing in the chain of human evolution that creationism applies to. (although in recent years we've found some ancestors that are even closer than before we've still not found the absolute missing link - although if I remember the Nova correctly, it's likely the species that was the great-grandparent of the "Missing Link")
Now this isn't to say SOME creationists completely deny evolution - but they're in a drastic minority I would imagine - I would imagine MOST creationists just debate how human kind and/or the "Big Bang" started depending on the variant - not that evolution doesn't occur in the improvement and variation of species.
Honestly every mention of creationism in this thread by those attacking it has been filled with a large amount of over the top strawmanning that is hardly accurate.
It's one thing to disagree with a philosophy or school of thought (like I personally do with creationism) but at least represent it appropriately and state the points where the philosophies compare and contrast.
@Vaclav: Are you from the U.S.? We have a museum in K.Y. which depicts humans living alongside dinosaurs. There's a triceratops statue with a saddle that you can take a picture with. 'Banana Man' Ray Comfort and his partner in crime Kirk 'Crocoduck' Cameron recently put out an edition of "Origin of Species" with an intro written by them, calling Darwin a racist and linking him to Hitler, and distributed it to top American universities.
So, that position is out there, unfortunately, and it does need combating. I personally know at least six different young earth creationists (more than just know of; either friends or relatives).
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Since God is an omnipotent being, who cares. He is eternal thus has always been. Christians go by faith that God exists. They don't need answers.
Where and what created the 'simpler atoms'?
Formed in stars, eh? Where did the stars come from? Without trying to sound like a broken record I'm sure you see what I'm getting at.
As of this post I've not watched it yet. But I will. Just a fyi.
I know this wasn't directed at me, but if that is the answer then why are people, that believe a God created everything (ie creationists), so crazy? They at least have an answer. (Note-I know you didn't say such a thing, just making a statement.)
The creationist can use the same answer to everything unexplainable. I don't know, but I'll ask God when I see him.
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[hater mode]Because those who say 'we don't know for sure' are the honest ones[/hater mode]
Really, science is an ongoing project, and every discovery brings up thousands of questions. It isn't weird we have no perfect knowledge of events that have happened over 15 billion years ago.
Let me put this forth to you. Someone here mentioned that creationists had no brain and only one person called him out on that. While others actually jumped on the bandwagon that they do not have brains.
So for all your logic, reason, and science you still cannot explain something to me. You go by faith, that it just happened, or its just there, or we don't know yet. Similar to what a creationist does/says. How are you smarter or more capable of having a brain if you cannot prove a damn thing either?
*note* My use of your, yours, and you are generally generic unless stated.
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That doesn't answer my question. What makes you fine with the idea that God has no creator but not fine with the idea that the universe has no creator? It seems like an unneeded link in the chain.
Whether or not I can explain the origins of the universe is irrelevant to my question.
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Better yet, along with the other video, watch this one if you're still having trouble with the "where did everything come from" thing. It's a well-done visual history of the universe, and makes things very easy to grasp. After the big bang, it's all physics and chemisty.
Also, water is a compound, not an element, so water didn't form in stars. Hydrogen and Oxygen both formed in stars.
I'm afraid you're going to have to explain how scientists have faith in something when they answer "I don't know". "I don't know" is the correct answer, not just a meaningless vagary; or rather, I should say, "Nobody knows" is the correct answer. You don't know either, and shouldn't claim to know. You are absolutely wrong for claiming to know something when you can't back it up with any evidence whatsoever. You are just as wrong as I would be if I went around telling whoever would listen that the world would end in two months, and when asked how I knew, said "Well, there's a non-zero chance of it, so that means we should act like it's going to happen, right?"
And, sad as it is to say, you just demonstrated your own unwillingness to participate in a real debate with the line "Christians go by faith; they don't need answers." That statement sums up a lot of the anti-intellectual mentality that exists in religion-land: "I don't care if you're right or not, if you have evidence or not; I want to believe what I believe so I just will anyway" followed by jamming fingers in one's ears. Faith is something to be ashamed of, not proud of. It just means you've been brainwashed into not wanting or not caring about evidence for something. You require evidence for every other thing in your life before believing it. Religion should be no exception.
Even if he did he would have to watch both of them 24/7 as they grow up to make sure that there was no swap up to their current living conditions.
Have you ever tried to catch a baseball? You notice how sometimes you miss? That's what happens sometimes when cells divide; due to purely physical processes, they make a mistake: a stray particle of something gets stuck in the wrong place, there's not quite enough of a certain chemical for something to bond correctly... you get the idea. Under perfect conditions, sure, a cell would replicate perfectly every time, but do perfect conditions exist anywhere?
Secondly, a tendency to make mistakes in reproduction (mutation) is actually selected for. If an animal becomes perfect at reproducing, never changing its genetic code (imagine an asexually reproducing species doing this), one virus could come along and wipe out the whole population. The reason that the "errors" stick around and pass along their genes to offspring that are bad at making perfect copies of themselves is precisely because perfect reproduction breeds in weakness. If your species is to survive as a species, it needs to be able to withstand a stray virus or two. Or rather, I should say, those populations who weren't diverse enough to withstand errant virii all died off, and only the animals with more 'diverse' genes (read: bad at making perfect copies of themselves) were left.
I don't think I really even need to respond to that "survival of the fittest" stuff other than to say, far from any kind of religious doctrine, it's an observation of what happens in nature, much like saying "leaves are green" or "wolves hunt in packs". Seriously, there was some full-out crazy in there.
These claims aren't even close to justified. You might as well be spinning an Illuminati tale here.
This is the third or fourth time I've said this on this thread to you: randomness is not a necessary prerequisite of natural selection. If scientists were just fabricating a theoretical framework with which to attack "order", don't you think they could have done a better job of it?
Consider the implications of this principle as they apply to yourself. Please.
Evolution has no bearing on social morality whatsoever, except perhaps explanatory. Those who thought it did were called "social Darwinists", and are very much out of fashion.
This hypothesis makes testable predictions, which do not match up with reality. If what you say is true, the moral outrage at finance companies, the disgrace of Mark Sanford, the War on Terror, none of these things would have happened.
Which is why we don't use it as a moral structure, surprise surprise.
From which it does not follow that survival of the fittest is self-serving bull. Your "customization" - what actual biologists call "mutation" - leads to population variation, which in combination with nonrandom predation leads to evolutionation. This is "survival of the fittest". And we can watch it happen - hell, we can make it happen. It's more than a principle of biology; it's a principle of logic.
The cell cannot "predict" or "perceive" anything at all. Please start thinking about your word choice, rather than reaching for the most pretentious vocabulary you have at hand. Or if you must use words idiosyncratically, at least preface your remarks with an explanation of why you're doing so and what you mean by them.
I honestly have no idea what this paragraph is supposed to mean, or where it's intended to go.
Again, none of this says anything about the validity of "survival of the fittest".
Let me translate this into real English: the fittest cells survived.
Again again, the source of the fitness variation is irrelevant.
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Sure. There's lots of unfortunate things that can befall fit cells, and unfit cells can get lucky. But natural selection acts like a thumb on the balance over the course of thousands of generations; it's a statistical phenomenon, not a causal one.
When the former happens, the latter eventually comes about.
Illuminati tales again.
Ask a racist what he wants to see, and he'll say "black people who know their place". But what he actually wants to see is black people behaving badly, because that confirms his skewed worldview.
Does the knowledge that a rose was grown in dung at all compromise its beauty and sweetness?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
No, it couldn't. Evolution itself is a statistical process, a slow change in the occurrence of various genes in a population. The one statistical process explains the other; we could even call it "causation" in the broader Aristotelian sense. But neither natural selection nor evolution are the sort of actual, physical force that "causes" things in the modern sense.
Absolutely not. Why on earth would you think that?
Are you being deliberately obtuse? I've already made this point: Natural selection makes no guarantees whatsoever. There's no "threshold of mechanical functionality". There's only that which survives and all the rest. Natural selection is simply a theory which points out that that which survives probably does so because it's fitter at surviving. Sometimes fit things die, and sometimes unfit things live. But in the long run, the fit things tend to win out.
Do you have a shred of evidence to back up this claim?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
My (nogooddruggie) brother in law had peyote highs where he was talking more sense than this.
Seriously, I don't want to flame, I just have no clue how I'm supposed to answer to that wall of disjointed words and concepts. I understand the words individually but together they mean nothing.
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He seems to be rambling a bit but more or less he's debunking the main point of survival of the fittest and natural selection claiming their popularity is due more or less to human nature's need to have everything fit into place.
He says a couple of other points like its all an effort to replace religion as a common rally point for a society. Instead of your way being most rightgeous its now obviously the best way to live.
They're is more but I'm not really sure why he mentions it, it kinda supports his point but cynically I think its mostly to fit in more expansive vocabulary in attempt to establish a sort of credibility. (you know alot of large words, therefore you must be smart. This style of supporting an argument is taught in some college english, persuasive speech classes)
Its mostly semantics though natural selection and survivial of the fittest most definatly influence at a macro level. They're is a reason spiders don't grow to be 3 stories high, a reason why some organisms still haven't abandoned their single cell state, and reasons to why multicellur organism develope.
What he's doing is like saying "Since gravity was discovered, why have all these people started jumping off bridges? Everyone lives by the rule of gravity these days. Gravity encourages people to live without caring for their fellow man, and with disregard for their own lives."
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"The theory of evolution" is a set of rules that we use to describe what happens in nature. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong, good or bad, or anything else. It simply describes what happens, in the same way that gravity says "things are attracted to each other". People generally do not want to help people because those in need have inferior genetics; if you think so, you're delusional. They want to help people because they care about other humans, and have an inborn desire to care about other humans, because that trait helped us form cohesive groups in the past, ones that survived instead of dying out. Notice how evolution describes why we feel the way we do, not how we *should* feel. Evolution does not suggest what anyone should or should not do. The only power it offers in a social setting is explanative, not suggestive.
A parent's genetic makeup does not change. Individuals do not acquire new genetic characteristics during their lifetime. Sexual reproduction causes a recombination of genes (half from each parent into the new individual) and some mutations occur in gametes also because of transcription errors, but once you are born your genetic is fixed (that's how DNA testing works).
Before genes were identified as the repository of hereditary characteristics, there was an hypothesis that change occured during an individual's lifetime (LaMarkism) which was also the hypothesis that Lysenko under Stalin's USSR used as the basis of his agricultural experiments (which were all failures). But neo-Darwinism has studied genes enough since then to know that this is not what occurs.
To be more precise, mutations/copying errors do occur also in some cellular splitting within an individual during its lifetime but these cells either get destroyed fast by the immunitary system or multiply too fast for it to take care of the problem and become known as *cancer*.
DNA does not have a conscience or a goal. It does not 'try' anything. DNA gets copied because this is what it does, chemically, like hydrogen burns with oxygen and gives out water, then may split back into hydrogen and oxygen given energy. The vast majority of times hydrogen and oxygen combines as H2O. Sometimes they combine as H2O2. Same with DNA, on a more complex scale.
Someone already told you this was a probabilities thing. If the best hand on the last hand was a 90/10 favorite, does it follow that it necessarily won by definition of 'best'?
If I create a game where we randomly add blocks on top of each other, does it follow that randomness suggests that any possible structure could arise? No. Most of them would fall. Some of these structures *could* be theoretically stable and have the possibility of existing if they were designed, but not have a way of evolving from the set of random additions possible + gravity (i.e. 'natural selection').
The persistance of unicellular life is basically a demonstration of how random mutations are. Most unicellulars did not mutate to become multicellulars, because most unicellulars (by virtue of no sexual reproduction) reproduce their genetic makeup more or less perfectly (without mutations). They were still fit enough to multiply and in fact be the dominant form of life on this planet (if you were to weight every unicellular and compare to the total weight of all multicellulars, the unicellulars win hands down).
Alleles don't need to measure utility. The real world does it for them, by culling the alleles that are not useful.
People on welfare don't have inferior genes.
This is a complete non sequitur.
More non-sequitur.
What humans decide to do is not outside the 'natural course of evolution'. We're part of evolution. What we do is part of it too.
There is also 'chimpanzee nature' and 'oak tree nature' (and so on) but as humans we are usually naturally less interested in those.
ANNNNND I'm back in complete befuddlement about what the heck you're talking about.
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How?
I've already said that this is possible; you were the one insisting that the unfit have to always die for natural selection to be true.
Not really. An adaptive trait is one that increases the probability of the organism's survival (and reproduction). Maladaptive traits can defy the odds for various reasons and persist; this does not make them adaptive.
There's nothing circular (in the logical sense) about feedback effects; they happen all over the place in nature. Nature is the ultimate test of your reasoning; what actually happens cannot be illogical, so if you think it is, you need to think again. In this case, I think your problem lies in insisting that natural selection must be either a "cause" or "effect" of this feedback phenomenon, when (as I've already said) it is neither. Genes that can replicate themselves faithfully will produce copies that can likewise replicate themselves faithfully. Genes that can't, won't. The result is the persistence of the faithful replicators, and the disappearance of all the rest. Natural selection is not the cause of this population shift, or the effect of it - natural selection is the population shift.
So what?
Only if you childishly decide to interpret "fittest" as singular, and you also continue to insist that the "survival" has to discriminate completely, despite my numerous explanations that it doesn't.
No, "the long run" is defined as a large number of trials (i.e. generations), enough for the statistical "noise" to cancel out. I say fit things tend to win out in the long run in the same way I would say that the casino tends to take your money in the long run: just as the games have rules such that the odds of your winning are less than the odds of the house winning, so too do lifeforms have traits such that the odds of those with certain traits surviving is less than the odds of those with other traits surviving. We label species "fit" or "unfit" based on their odds, but they would live or die just the same no matter what we called them.
Begging the question. Absurdly so.
Your evidence that we base our society on the principle of natural selection is... the government intervening in the selective process of business failure? You might as well say that we adhere to natural selection by artificially keeping the weak and sickly alive.
Um... how?
In the evolutionary context, the "goal" is survival and reproduction, and "utility" is increased odds of doing such.
They don't need to measure it for it to take its effect. A rock can't measure the force of a sledgehammer, either, but it splits just the same.
And, again, this is evidence that we morally adhere to natural selection?
The existence of human social behavior would seem to indicate so, yes. Not conclusively, because (again) evolution is a statistical process, but with a very high probability. And it's not very hard to think of the potential survival benefits of social behavior, which adds still more weight to the notion.
That's not even close to what he said.
Because we're different than other parts of nature, and so have different qualities. These qualities are sometimes referred to as a "nature", but it would be a dangerous mistake to equivocate between that usage and "nature" as the whole of the universe. We can speak of the "nature" of a dog, of a tree, or even of a black hole; this doesn't remove them from the rest of nature.
How is diving headfirst into uncertainty, mystical thinking, and homunculus problems a "simpler explanation"? Evolution explains why life seems to have purpose, what that purpose is, and how it can come about from the purposeless workings of the universe. Your ramblings have done none of these things.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'm going have to knock you here. Of course they could but they do not BECAUSE the natural selection over time dictates that their current sizes are best for enviroment and function. A 3-foot spider will not be able to breathe properly with book lungs and its exoskeleton would be more fragile in porportion to the small spiders causing its own set of problems.
Your argument of "what of the fittest organism?" is simply debunked by the fact that a fittest organism doesn't exist. Organisms fill niches and the constant variables that lead to different life forms is caused by the gradual evolution into new found (or previously filled) niches in the food chain. The rise of mammels is probaly the perfect example of the latter.
Everything can only adapt so much and in order to gain something must be lost, humans gain adapability in lieu of physical prowness, the multicellur organisms are overall more fragile than single cell organisms but the benifit lies in being able to exploit a completly different ecosystem.
BLINKING SPIRIT- Spiders used to be 3-feet tall give or take, its an easy mutation for the arachnid as they don't have a limit to growth anyway so techcnically you don't even need a genetically differant spider, just enough food. (Of course within reason)
The problem is that they don't survive well much past the size of the Golaith on earth, technically if we put a decently healthy Golaith on a satillite with low gravity and extremly rich oxygen content it'll be able to grow to around that size.
I thought technically those do exist, although they happen to live underwater and we refer to them as King Crabs, with lungs adapted for low oxygen saturation?
Phylum, etc. are far from my forte however - and don't care enough to call the bro-in-law to bring me up to speed however.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
There are differances and spiders have been adapted to deal with relitively low oxegen saturation as well but do to the addaptation they can only get so big otherwise the lungs would not be able to keep up.
Crustacians and arachnids are both arthopods so they're about as similar as we are to dogs. (ex we share mostly the same organ system to dogs, 4 limbs, 2 eyes, 2 ears etc.) (They share exoskeleton, segmented limbs, etc)
There are some scary big crabs
The largest crab has a 15 inch body with a 13 ft legspan and is ironically the japanese spider crab.
Evolution is strictly about the change in populations of organisms over time. This is what Darwin's body of work was dedicated to. This is what scientists interpret the theory to mean when they talk about it. Simple as that.
That evolution may be involved in the actual origin of species is possible, but not integral to evolution itself meaning there is no "contentious" aspect to evolution as it's commonly understand unless you're using it in the broadest sense, in which case we can talk about psychology, astronomy, technology, and plenty of other subjects .
Godel was clearly referencing the origin of biological life on earth. In which case, it absolutely is tangentially related to evolution.
It's possible scientists may discover a phenomenon related to biological origins that adds to our understanding of evolution, but it's not a portion of the theory itself in the way that genetic drift, gene duplication, or natural selection are.
Impressively wrong.
For reasons described above. Nobody interprets the question "do you believe evolution is true" to imply theories about the origins of life" except people that simply don't understand it. You're demonstrating exactly why people often don't accept it as a scientific fact: because they simply don't know enough about it and/or have misinformed ideas about what evolution actually is.
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It's not wrong at all. Go out on the street and ask 100 random people if they believe evolution is true, and then ask them what they thought you were asking. I guarantee you that over 50 of them will give you something about the origins of life.
You're answer there belies an impressive lack of knowledge of what the word "colloquially" means. You're saying "but I actually meant X which is what the words definition is". I'm saying "Yes I understand that. But even though you meant X, the people answering the question heard Y, and answered Y"
If someone on the street asked me if I believed evolution was true I would assume they meant to ask "do you believe evolution is the explanation for the origin of life" -- because thats what they usually mean when they ask that.
Argumentum ad populum. (Argument from popularity). Verging on the unofficial fallacy, argumentum ad moron, meaning argument from what some random schmoe who doesn't know crap would think.
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Huh? I was discussing what the "colloquial" definition and understanding of the question would be. In other words, I was arguing about what some random schmo who doesn't know crap would think.
I mean you are just so intent to say I'm wrong here, that you didn't even bother to read what we were arguing over.
Also, I was unaware that I was attempting to make a logical proof... you know, those things that are the only time when logical fallacies are applicable...
Edit: Also, Topper could you address this part of my original post as well:
"Its a simple matter of thats what most people think the question is asking so thats what they address. I mean you yourself thought thats what it was asking otherwise your jab at creationists makes absolutely no sense in context."
Specifically the bolded part. Thanks.
I'm personally not a creationist and I consider the entire premise to be a bit far-fetched, but "creationist" and "evolutionist" are not necessarily mutually exclusive as the thread's direction would seem to imply.
Creationism only applies to the "starting point" there's nothing in creationism that contradicts that starting point being because of the intervention of a deity and then from there evolution took over.
Especially since keep in mind one of the primary cruxes to evolution is presenting a path of evolution, and at last check there's still a few links missing in the chain of human evolution that creationism applies to. (although in recent years we've found some ancestors that are even closer than before we've still not found the absolute missing link - although if I remember the Nova correctly, it's likely the species that was the great-grandparent of the "Missing Link")
Now this isn't to say SOME creationists completely deny evolution - but they're in a drastic minority I would imagine - I would imagine MOST creationists just debate how human kind and/or the "Big Bang" started depending on the variant - not that evolution doesn't occur in the improvement and variation of species.
Honestly every mention of creationism in this thread by those attacking it has been filled with a large amount of over the top strawmanning that is hardly accurate.
It's one thing to disagree with a philosophy or school of thought (like I personally do with creationism) but at least represent it appropriately and state the points where the philosophies compare and contrast.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
So, that position is out there, unfortunately, and it does need combating. I personally know at least six different young earth creationists (more than just know of; either friends or relatives).