Re: What natural selection can't do, passages from OoS - Fnord

backspace wrote:
On Jun 24, 8:40 am, "David Hare-Scott" <sec...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The words that Darwin used in the 19th century have zero relationship ....

Why does Allan Orr basically tell us the same thing:
Scientific American Jan.2009 p.33
"...Natural selection then screens them: the rigors of the environment
reduce the frequency of "bad"(relatively unsuitable) variants and
increase the frequency of "good"(relatively suitable) ones......."

This proposition cannot be disputed, hence is a fallacy. There is no
way to disprove what Orr said.

I'd say it can easily be proven false - for instance if no change in the respective frequencies were observed


=== Rephrase to strip out NS ===
"...Ninja Turtle results in the environment reducing the frequency of
the baddies and increase the frequency of the goodies......."


Orr goes on to say:
"... ..... the argument for natural selection is that its logic seems
valid for any level of biological entity - from gene to
species....".
What he fails to understand is that Aristotle's original tautology can
be applied to anything. The bad computer was discarded and the good
Intel processor used. Which cannot be disputed

sure can. Management might make a mistake and the bad computer is kept

but it doesn't tell us
why the bad computer was "bad".

You are confusing the general argument scheme with the domain specific application of that scheme. _Because_ of the general scheme: "the good are kept, the bad are discarded" you are then able to formulate theories what made the specific computer good or bad. You can for instance hypothesise: "the speed of the processor made the computer good" .You can then test this specific application of the general scheme, e.g. by varying the parameters and see if the faster one is also chosen if the other chip is more reliable.

If no such hypothesis ever passes these tests, you will eventually also abandon the general argumentation scheme for lack of explanatory value. Not because it is a tautology, but because none of its instantiations was empirically validated.





Those that were good increased and those that were bad decreased!
Darwin says essentially the same thing in the passages given: The
favorable ones survived , the bad ones died. Or Aristotle: Those
constituted weren't perishable, while those not constituted perished.
It is the same Greek tautology dragged into the 21 century.

FNORD, fnord , fnording ....


.

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