Re: Dana Tweedy: error or ignorance?

Ray Martinez wrote:
On May 1, 1:11 pm, "Dana Tweedy" <reddfr...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Ray Martinez" <pyramid...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:2662f117-8033-43a6-b299-cdc26edf745e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On May 1, 12:31 am, Ernest Major <{$t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

snip

[But that is exactly what Major has said too. Dana cannot possibly be
this thick. He is deliberately misrepresenting by nit picking, to be
kind about it. Dana cannot admit that he was and is wrong.]
You're being an idiot. You claimed that natural selection changed an
individual.
[Ad hoc, Ernest knows this is a basic claim, he is not serious.
It's quite likely Ernest is serious. This is not a 'basic claim' of
evolution, which has already been explained to you.

>NS

does not change an entire population, which is what Ernest is "saying"
by implication.]
What Ernest is saying is that natural selection causes changes *in* the
population, not in the indvidual.



That is what evolution claims: NS modifies an organism, then the
modified organism breeds passing the modification into the population.
The next generation inherits the modification (= gradualism).
Again, Ray, that's wrong. Natural selection does not modify an organism.
It modifies the gene frequency in the population over many generations.
Natural selection cannot change the genes of the individual, only of the
gene pool over time.

This has been explained to you many times. Why do you keep
misunderstanding this simple matter?


Because it is not simple - that's why.

Today I was, in the course of writing my paper, searching my
electronic files of rough drafts written well over a year ago. I was
searching for something completely unrelated to the issue here, but
low and behold, there it was: I had written (in my own words of
course) exactly what you have been saying about natural selection. As
soon as I saw it I said to myself "Dana is right."

I then sank low in my chair attempting to figure out how I had come to
forget that which I already knew. I then began a search of my sources
to confirm. Since I am going after Darwin

See below [1].

I started entering key words
like "modification."

Charles Darwin:

"As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive,
favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification;
it can act only by very short and slow steps" (1859:471).

I misunderstood this passage.

[snip]

The last sentence (detached) from the first excerpt, and this last
quote by Darwin, explain my misunderstanding - perfectly. I had also
thought natural selection caused the variation or modification,
instead of preserving it in a species.

But initially, according to what I had written in my electronic file
dated 3-24-07, I was NOT beguiled by this misunderstanding. But like I
said, for some reason, like many others, as referenced above through
Robert Young, I fell back into this misunderstanding.

Dana, for what it is worth: I was wrong, you were correct; please
accept my apology.

That was good of you, Ray.

Of course, it would have been better if you hadn't spent most of last month accusing all the "lay evolutionists" in this group of being stupid and/or dishonest. This would be at least one point where what this group says and what scholars publish coincide, so perhaps that accusation can be interred, also?

What I would value even more than your apology (if I were Dana) would be a little more reluctance on your part to assume you know better than everybody else. You were wrong on the process of natural selection (how long that will postpone your paper I shudder to think), you were wrong about the eels, and the classification of bats, and you, like all fallible humans, will be wrong about other things in the future.

I will continue to defer to your unrivalled knowledge of the theology of Gene Scott.


Ray


[1] Why are you going after Darwin? The man hasn't contributed to science in a century. Origin of Species is now a historical curiosity, not a scientific paper. You may as well argue that rockets don't work because they're not mentioned in Principia Mathematica.

SNIP....

PS: I retained the topic title only so those who have been reading
these exchanges would not lose track of it.

RM
The other RM

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