Re: In the News: 'Expelled' Exposes Plight of Darwin Doubters

backspace <sawireless2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:5c4bbed1-610e-49d4-ac58-9727933185c5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

[snip]

All I am trying to show is that when people talk about "evolution"
each has his own pet theory. And I motivate for this by referring to
this thread: Mujin, Armstrong , Richard, Harshman all disagree on key
issues and this is because nothing is defined.

Identify questions and the various answers you think substantially
disagree. I have seen no disagreement on key issues, though of course I
don't read every article in talk.origins. I would be willing to bet that
your perception of disagreement on key issues derives entirely from your
failure, for one reason or another, to actually understand what is being
said. Why do I think this?

1. You routinely tie yourself up in knots over trivialities while ignoring
or dismissing the actual point. Thus I think you have probably not
correctly identified the "key issues."

2. Your obsession with the minutia of semantics has led you on several
occasions to misinterpret others. Odds are *very* good that you have
created the illusion of disagreement by attributing false significance to
word choice.

3. Your sometimes wildly inappropriate word choices, your non sequitur
responses to others, and your seeming inability to see the answer you want
printed in black and white in posts or in wikipedia articles you claim
don't answer the question - all of this points to a serious problem with
reading comprehension. You have said before that English is not your
first language, and I think that is where the problem lies. I am not
trying to be cruel or insulting when I say it - I sincerely believe that
much of your confusion and misunderstanding would be cured if you brushed
up on grammar etc and brought yourself to a higher level of reading
comprehension in English.

Nobody is telling us
where their ideas has been established.

Why do we need to? This has been explained to you before, but I will try
one last time. Although scientific literature usually has many, many
citations, don't confuse scientists' use of citations with the practice of
quoting bible verses. The two are not the same at all. Scientists use
citations for only two reasons:

1. to acknowledge that an idea originated with someone else (IOW they are
acknowledging the "copyright" if you will of the scientist who gave them
the information) or to demonstrate that others share the writer's thinking
on the subject.

2. as a short hand, so that they can refer the reader to long, detailed
arguments published elsewhere rather than going through them again - if
scientists had to present the logic behind *every* statement *every* time,
scientific papers would rapidly become so long and convoluted they would be
completely useless for reporting new discoveries.

Notice that neither of these reasons has anything to do with establishing
authority.

In the practice of science, it is not important who said what. What is
important is whether what is said hangs together logically, and whether it
is consistent with the evidence available. Your obsession with knowing who
said what seems bizarre to us because, while we want to give credit where
credit is due, we don't think it's particularly important where an idea
came from so long as it matches the physical evidence and it is logically
consistent.


This Uncle Darwin ruse is just to prevent people from realizing that
everybody invents his own ideas and then mystically by some sort of
semantic magic attributes statements such as "random mutations" which
surfaced in 1910 to Uncle Darwin who was long dead by then.

This strange conspiracy is entirely in your imagination. Yes, Darwin was
among the first to make the argument for the process of evolution as a
mechanism that could produce new species. As such, he is usually
acknowledged as the founder of evolutionary biology. No, no one thinks -
or even says - that he somehow magically added new ideas to his theory
decades after his death. In fact, the only people who ever claim this are
creationists, and as far as I can see you only say it so that you can avoid
looking at the logic of the modern theory and the evidence that supports
it. Sadly, this leaves you with nothing but semantic quibbling to work
with.

This is
lying, it is deception and deceitful dishonesty.

Your inability or unwillingness to understand us doesn't make what we say
lies.

And the reason is
that materialism is what this whole "Darwin" ruse is about protecting.
What the materialists are trying to do is to cover up their
substantial differences in how they interpret the dead bones and
genes.

Oh please. This is the most pathetic version of the "materialists are out
to get us" conspiracy theory I have ever seen.

Scientists of any field, not only evolutionary biology, employ a
methodological materialism simply because scientific methods can't tell us
anything about the immaterial. Using a methodological materialism implies
nothing at all about religious or spiritual beliefs of scientists. Many,
many scientists have strong religious/spiritual beliefs. They simply
accept the fact the domain to which these beliefs apply and the domain to
which scientific methods apply are entirely separate. The Bible can tell
us nothing about gravity; Newton's law of gravitation can tell us nothing
about morality.

[snip]

A few questions:

These questions have been answered for you before, but you appear to lack
the ability or the inclination to understand the answers.

a) Are genes a language or not - if not motivate?

2 points:
1. Your use of the word "motivate" is incorrect and nonsensical in this
sentence. Look it up again.

2. No, genes are not literally a language by reasonable definitions of
language. The words and grammatical structure are arbitrary - which is to
say they have no necessary connection to the meaning they produce, we
simply agree that "dog" refers to a certain kind of four legged mammal by
convention. The properties of DNA, on the other hand, are a consequence of
the DNA's physical structure. Nucleotide sequences perform the functions
they do because that is their nature. The relationship is not at all
arbitrary. However, the *metaphor* of DNA as a language or code is
sometimes useful in explaining certain aspects of the way DNA sometimes
behaves. It is critical, however, that you make clear that this is a
metaphor because DNA is *not* a language, and attributing too many
language-like properties to it can result in confusion and false
conclusions.

b) Does NS explain everything - if not what doesn't it explain?

Natural selection can only explain strictly biological features of
organisms. It may play a part in non biological features, but an
explanation that relies only on natural selection will necessarily be
incomplete. For example, natural selection can explain the emergence of
the language faculty in humans because that's really a biological function,
but it can't explain the specific features of a given language because
that's a non-biological phenomenon. Likewise, natural selection can
explain how the specific biological features of "being in love" arose and
how they benefit the organism, but natural selection by itself cannot
explain why you fall in love with a specific individual.

c) All apes are mammals by Dr.Harhmans logic humans are apes why are
we therefore not whales since they are also mammals?

All berries are fruits. All blueberries are berries. Why are blueberries
not a kind of pear, since they are also fruits?

If you can answer my question, you will also have answered your own
question.

d) Why are there still monkeys if we transformed from a monkey and not
a "common ancestor" which we all agree is just a weasel term. Please
try and answer me without being sarcastic - I really don't know and
want the answer.

No, we don't agree that "common ancestor" is a weasel term.

"Why are there still X if A evolved from X" is a common question from
creationists, but it really doesn't make any sense to me. It's like asking
"Why does British English still exist if American English came from British
English?" I can only conclude that the people who say this really don't
understand the logic of what is being said.

Yes, it is certainly possible for an entire population to change over the
course of generations so that the original species is gone, replaced by an
entirely new one. But that is not what we usually see happening. Often
what happens is this:

The species gets split into two groups by geography. This split should be
such that the two groups can't interbreed. Over the course of a large
number of generations, small differences accumulate. After a time, the
accumulated differences are so great that when you compare the two groups
again, it is clear that they are now two different species.

There are basically two ways this can happen:

Some event occurs, such as the movement of a river's course or the growth
of some feature like a forest, desert or glacier, which splits the species'
range into two unconnected parts.

or

As the population increases, some members of the species begin taking
advantage of a neighbouring environment or a new food source. The group
that stays in the original environment will of course keep accumulating
small differences over generations, as will the group in the new
environment. But here's where things get interesting: for those who stayed
behind the same features are still optimal for survival in that
environment, so while there will be changes, they will probably revolve
around the same optimal type we started with. For those who moved into a
new environment, however, a new set of features are optimal for survival,
so differences that favour survival in that environment will tend to become
more common. The end result is one group back in the home territory that
pretty much looks the same as it always did, though perhaps with some minor
changes, and one group in the new territory that has similarities to the
original group, but with modifications that seem optimized for the new
territory.

So here's how that explanation applies to the question "If humans came from
monkeys, why are there still monkeys?":

At some time in the past, a population of monkeys was split into two
groups. One group remained in its original environment, and so remains
relatively unchanged. Another group moves into a new environment where
different characteristics are important for survival. Over time, the
second group becomes more and more different from the original monkeys
until finally we have a new species, the ancestor of modern humans.

--
Bon nou mujin sei gan dan

.

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