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To: Stultis
"Any entity which possessed all of these necessary characteristics would inevitably be a biological organism. Therefore evolutionary theory presupposes the existence of biological organisms."

No, that's just supposition on your part. All of those conditions are possible in an inanimate environment (e.g. software programs), for one thing, and for another, you've basically made them all up since they aren't itemized in any peer-reviewed paper on ToE, anyway.

319 posted on 10/02/2006 7:53:23 PM PDT by Southack (Media Bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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To: Southack
No, that's just supposition on your part.

What you want to call them is irrelevant. All scientific theories (and science in general) have presuppositions, or suppositions, or initial conditions, or givens, or again, whatever you want to call them.

If you try to claim of ANY scientific theory that it doesn't have such initial conditions or "suppositions" then you're either being naive or dishonest.

All of those conditions are possible in an inanimate environment (e.g. software programs), for one thing

Well, yeah, but this is an exceedingly trivial observation in that certainly one can simulate anything with a computer program. However computer programs don't normally, as part of their inherent nature, reproduce, vary, die, etc.

you've basically made them all up since they aren't itemized in any peer-reviewed paper on ToE, anyway

I didn't "make them up". Although there was little in the way of a peer review system in place at the time, Darwin himself summarized the initial conditions I listed in the conclusion to The Origin:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

336 posted on 10/03/2006 9:33:47 AM PDT by Stultis
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To: Southack; Stultis
... and for another, you've basically made them all up since they aren't itemized in any peer-reviewed paper on ToE, anyway.

How do you know this?

350 posted on 10/03/2006 3:11:59 PM PDT by Virginia-American (Don't bring a comic book to an encyclopedia fight)
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