Re: What is the concept of fitness ?

"On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 09:18:35 -0700 (PDT), in article
<f776363b-3da7-4541-b8a4-8612c705152b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Inez
stated..."

On Jul 1, 3:45 am, backspace <sawireless2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 11:55 pm, Bob Casanova <nos...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

For a truism to be false, some things that
are incontestible - in this case that favourable traits become more
widely distributed in subsequent generations - have to be false, and
nobody says they are.
Other than noting the traits become more widely distributed how was
their favoribility measured ?
Other than noting that questions such as this one indicate
you have the mental acuity of a bag of rocks, how is your
idiocy measured?

Why is it so difficult to spot the tautology by Wilkins ?

The bigger question, and the one that you continually avoid, is why
you think that evolution being tautological somehow invalidates it.
Tautologies are *true.* So if evolution is a tautology, it is true.

"The old 'it's a tautology' trick."

Long ago, someone once suggested that Newton's laws of
motion were tautologies. How does one measure force?
By the amount of acceleration that it produces in a
given mass. How does one measure mass? By the amount
of acceleration that it undergoes with a given force.

Tautologies can be useful. Something as obvious as the
"Pigeonhole principle". From the Wikipedia article:

"Although the pigeonhole principle may seem to be intuitive,
it can be used to demonstrate possibly unexpected results.
For example, there must be at least two people in London
with the same number of hairs on their heads. Demonstration:
a typical head of hair has around 150,000 hairs. It is
reasonable to assume that no one has more than 1,000,000
hairs on their head (m = 1 million holes). There are more
than 1,000,000 people in London (n is bigger than 1 million
objects). If we assign a pigeonhole for each number of hairs
on a head, and assign people to the pigeonhole with their
number of hairs on it, there must be at least two people with
the same number of hairs on their heads."


Lets go
through this slowly. He says that there were traits that became
common. Sure, the question is why did they become more common. He says
because they were "favorable" , well obviously because if they weren't
favorable they wouldn't have become common!

But the creationist line is that species are at stasis and do not
change, so apparently this isn't so obvious to everyone.

Telling us that traits
became common implicitly implies that they had to be favorable, how
could they possibly not be favorable? Telling us that because traits
are common therefore they are favorable doesn't tell us independently
the actual reason they became more common. This needs to be derived
elsewhere. Why did polar bears became more common in the arctic ?
Because they had "favorable" traits, well obviously otherwise they
would be dead now wouldn't they.

You are overly fixated on the concept of "favorable." The focus of
the ToE is on change over time, not the exact degree of "favorability"
of traits that become common in a population. The important thing is
that certain traits become common and other's do not, which is what
leads to an overall change in populations. If all traits were equally
common there would be no overall change. As Mr. Thompson noted in
another post, there are other mechanisms of evolution than Natural
Selection, and not all traits that spread in a population are
favorable.



--
---Tom S.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
attributed to Josh Billings

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: What is the concept of fitness ?
    ... Tautologies are *true.* So if evolution is a tautology, ... the question is why did they become more common. ... the ToE is on change over time, not the exact degree of "favorability" ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: What is the concept of fitness ?
    ... Tautologies are *true.*  So if evolution is a tautology, ... the question is why did they become more common. ... has ever seen a species evolve. ... the ToE is on change over time, not the exact degree of "favorability" ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Gene expression: Is Natural Selection a tautology?
    ... mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into ... favorability measured? ... Why woudl another measurement be necessary or desirable? ... Those that became more common implies they were "favorable" but it ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Aristotle and his tautological influence
    ... "....Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that ... reproduce become more common in a population over successive ... of kids by not comprehending that this tautology was ad-hocly ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Wikipedia trashes the Tautology article.
    ... Dr. Wilkins has stated that a tautology is not the same thing as ... Every circular argument is a tautology, ... unfavorable traits become less common. ... more common are a synonymous play on words ...
    (talk.origins)