Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Why? Prove it.
You didn't get an answer to this one, I note. I'd like to see one too, because on its face it seems transparently false and mindboggingly ignorant.
I can probably name a dozen creationists who, based on your post, will rush out and buy dozens of copies, to be given to all their friends.
GoodseedHomeSchool. Or something like that.
Huh? Do you even understand the Theory of Evolution? Speciation is not an either-or thing. It is a continuum. Ring species illustrate this quite well.
Not if being multicellular gave them an edge in the survival game.
"But how could the existence of distinct species be justified by a theory [evolution] that proclaimed ceaseless change as the most fundamental fact of nature? .... Actually, the existence of distinct species was quite consistent with creationist tenets of a pre-Darwinian era."
Madame, this is what is referred to as "quote mining." Quote mining refers to dishonestly taking a quote out of context to give the impression the author is saying something he wasn't. While I could not find the above quote verbatim after a Google search except on three creationist sites (which indicates the quote has been doctored, too), I did find a similar quote from Gould on the Quote Mine Project page:
[Transitional forms do not exist and the evidence fits creation better than evolution]
"This notion of species as 'natural kinds' fits splendidly with creationist tenets of a pre-Darwinian age. Louis Agassiz, even argued that species are God's individual thoughts, made incarnate so that we might perceive both His majesty and His message. Species, Agassiz wrote, are "instituted by Divine Intelligence as the categories of His mode of thinking. But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature?" - (Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'A quahog is a quahog', Natural History vol LXXXVIII(7), August-September, 1979, pg. 18)
Representative quote miners: The Evolution of a Creationist: Ch. 4, "Missing Links" Are Missing, Stephen E. Jones: Creation/Evolution Quotes: Creation #2: Evidence, and Evolution Is Dead: Divisions In The Organic World
[Editor's note: A more accessible citation for this article is: Gould, Stephen Jay 1980. "A Quahog is a Quahog", The Panda's Thumb. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., pp. 204-13.]
This one is interesting because the dishonesty of the quote mine was exposed at least as far back as 1984 in an article, "Scientific Creationism: The Art of Distortion" by Laurie R. Godfrey that appeared in Science and Creationism (Ashley Montagu, ed. 1984. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 167-81). That was, in turn, a revision of an earlier article, "The Flood of Antievolution" that had appeared in Natural History, vol. 90, no. 6, pp. 4-10. Specifically, Godfrey addressed the use of this quote (along with David Raup's widely mined "120 years after Darwin" quote) by creationist Gary Parker in "Creation, Selection, and Variation," that appeared in the Institute for Creation Research's newsletter, Acts & Facts in 1980 and which is still available.
To better understand Gould's intent, here are the first two paragraphs of the article:
Thomas Henry Huxley once defined science as "organized common sense." Other contemporaries, including the great geologist Charles Lyell, urged an opposing view -- science, they said, must probe behind appearance, often to combat the "obvious" interpretation of phenomena.
I cannot offer any general rules for the resolution of conflicts between common sense and the dictates of a favored theory. Each camp has won its battles and received its lumps. But I do want to tell a story of common sense triumphant -- an interesting story because the theory that seemed to oppose ordinary observation is also correct, for it is the theory of evolution itself. The error that brought evolution into conflict with common sense lies in a false implication commonly drawn from evolutionary theory, not with the theory itself.
Thus, Gould made it plain from the outset that he was discussing something that he does not see as a difficulty in either the theory of evolution or the evidence for it. Immediately after this opening comes the section the quote is mined from:
Common sense dictates that the world of familiar, macroscopic organisms presents itself to us in "packages" called species, All bird watchers and butterfly netters know that they can divide the specimens of any local area into discrete units blessed with those Latin binomials that befuddle the uninitiated. ...
This notion of species as "natural kinds" fit splendidly with creationist tenets of a pre-Darwinian age. Louis Agassiz even argued that species are God's individual thoughts, made incarnate so that we might perceive both His majesty and His message. Species, Agassiz wrote, are "instituted by the Divine Intelligence as the categories of his mode of thinking."
But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature? Both Darwin and Lamarck struggled with this question and did not resolve it to their satisfaction. Both denied to the species any status as a natural kind.
Darwin lamented: "We shall have to treat species as ... merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species." Lamarck complained: "In vain do naturalists consume their time in describing new species, in seizing upon every nuance and slight peculiarity to enlarge the immense list of described species.''
Gould then discusses two traditional responses to this seeming dilemma: 1) that the "world of ceaseless flux alters so slowly that configurations of the moment may be treated as static" (i.e. that evolutionary change, though constant, is so slow that species appear to be separate and distinct to ephemeral creatures as ourselves); or 2) to deny (as J.B.S. Haldane did) the reality of species in any context. To these arguments, Gould replies:
Yet common sense continues to proclaim that, with few exceptions, species can be clearly identified in local areas of our modern world. Most biologists, although they may deny the reality of species through geologic time, do affirm their status for the modern moment. As Ernst Mayr, our leading student of species and speciation, writes: "Species are the product of evolution and not of the human mind." Mayr argues that species are "real" units in nature as a result both of their history and the current interaction among their members.
It is clear from this that Gould is not saying, as the creationists would have it, that creationism better explains the evidence. While the "common sense" notion that species are real "natural kinds" is well suited to creationism, there are at least three possible resolutions of the apparent (but not substantial) difficulty with evolutionary theory that arises when it is viewed as requiring constant change. Gould declares himself to be "a partisan of Mayr's view" and proceeds to spend the next five-plus pages discussing non-Western folk taxonomies in support of that position.
When Gould returns to the issue, he states:
But are these Linnaean species, recognized by independent cultures, merely temporary configurations of the moment, mere way stations on evolutionary lineages in continual flux? I argue ... that, contrary to popular belief, evolution does not work this way, and that species have a "reality" through time to match their distinctness at a moment. An average species of fossil invertebrates lives five to ten million years (terrestrial vertebrates have shorter average durations). During this time, they rarely change in any fundamental way. They become extinct, without issue, looking much as they did when they first appeared. ...
Species are stable entities with very brief periods of fuzziness at their origin (although not at their demise because most species disappear cleanly without changing into anything else). As Edmund Burke said in another context: "Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable."
In short, this is nothing more than Gould expounding on the implications of Punctuated Equilibria for what we should expect to see in the fossil record. To Gould, Mayr's view has the advantage of corresponding with the "common sense" view as to the reality of species, at least after an initial period of fuzziness, while speciation is underway. Of course, creationists are free to quibble with any or all of those resolutions to the issue, as long as they present them fairly. But to use Gould's words, intended merely to set up an apparent dilemma as an introduction to his discourse about the evidence for a particular solution (out of several possibilities) without mentioning those solutions or even their existence, is quote mining at its worst.
Gould closed his article with:
Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species are the units of nature's morphology.
All this and more was noted by Godfrey in her article 20 years ago:
Gould's article is also about problems with Darwinian gradualism. It takes to task those biologists and anthropologists who argue that species boundaries are artifacts of the human capacity to classify, and construct artificial divisions. Gould argues, as Ernst Mayr did years before, that species are real biological entities, but he does not suggest that they are genealogically unrelated to one another or that they cannot give rise to new species.
Gould and his colleagues are widely cited by creationists in their effort to establish that the fossil record documents "no transitions." To creationists this is taken to mean that there are no evolutionary links between "created kinds." But Gould, Eldredge and Stanley are talking about the failure of the fossil record to document fine-scale transitions between pairs of species, and its dramatic documentation of rapid evolutionary bursts involving multiple speciation events -- so-called adaptive radiations. They are not talking about any failure of the fossil record to document the existence of intermediate forms (to the contrary, there are so many intermediates for many well-preserved taxa that it is notoriously difficult to identify true ancestors even when the fossil record is very complete). Nor are Gould, Eldredge, and Stanley talking about any failure of the fossil record to document large-scale trends, which do exist, however jerky they may be. Furthermore, fine-scale transitions are not absent from the fossil record but are merely underrepresented. Eldredge, Gould. and Stanley reason that this is the unsurprising consequence of known mechanisms of speciation. Additionally, certain ecological conditions may favor speciation and rapid evolution, so new taxa may appear abruptly in the fossil record in association with adaptive radiation. Since creationists acknowledge that fine-scale transitions (including those resulting in reproductive isolation) exist and since the fossil record clearly documents large-scale "transitions," it would seem that the creationists have no case. Indeed. they do not. Their case is an artifact of misrepresentation to the lay public of exactly what the fossil record fails to document.
All of this points to the shallowness of creationist use of quotes. In scholarly work, the use of quotations is intended to show an understanding of the relevant literature and is, in effect, a representation on the part of the person using the quote that she or he is intimately familiar with the author's work and positions. Not only are the people using this quote unfamiliar with the article it came from or Gould's work in general, they are even unfamiliar with the literature on the creationism/evolution conflict. Either that . . . or they are just being dishonest.
- John (catshark) Pieret
The first rule of arguing against evolution is not to believe "quotes from evolutionists" taken from creationist websites. These quotes are invariably false and when that falsity is pointed out, the poster looks to be either dishonest or a fool. Secondly, one must remember that science is not determined by dueling quotes, unlike theological debates based upon Scripture.
While I do not expect a reply or a retraction from you in regards to the false quote above, please note that since creationists have been using this tactic for more than three decades, a ready library of refutations to these falsehoods exists on the internet. You might try vetting your quotes before using them from now on.
How very clever of you, especially the way you worded the question. Indeed, disorder will increase in the system as a whole, BUT order can increase locally (i.e., in part of the system).
Uh.... is THIS a Michael Jackson thread???
Indeed you have...........
I wonder why??
John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. "
17. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
18. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.
47. "As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.
48. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day.
18. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
19. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
1. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,
2. because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.
When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.
11. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.
12. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
13. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.
Retract this slur, it's false and you know it. I have never "refused to reply".
possibly because they are considered not within the provenance of one's science.
Actually, I've not responded to most of your posts because they are sophomoricaly bombastic, others (e.g. RWP) have done a good job of pointing out most of your errors and fallacies (matters not whether you understand the refutations), and because your response to my post concerning your laughable "exponential growth" argument made it pretty clear that you are either unwilling or unable to understand explanations when they are presented to you.
In short, there are more worthwhile ways I could be spending my limited time.
Ich earlier coredumped lots of links to self-organizing systems,
Those who actually want to learn about the subject will read them and further their education. Those who don't will will find excuses not to.
but did not respond to my analysis of that
See above.
along with point 3 on entropy either. As for my throwaway points in 4, he gave me a government-school analysis of limiting factors and then stopped.
This is a gross misrepresentation of my reply to you. Question: Is this through your lack of understanding, or through your dishonesty? (And then you wonder why I don't bother with most of your posts?)
Like I said I'm doing this for the audience.
Yes, I figured that out a while back. I'm not here to help you perform. I'm here to help those who wish to gain understanding do so. I'm of the opinion that you're not among them.
And I never denied basic obvious, well-documented facts like local entropy decrease in open systems or variability of population growth.
...and then you went RIGHT BACK to your assertions that your flawed "models" (which simplistically LEAVE OUT such factors) are correct enough that they can be seen as "problems" for evolution.
This is ludicrous. Is vastly oversimplifying a model until it becomes grossly incorrect, *then* drawing smug conlusions from it with an attitude of "I've proven something!", in some sort of Creationist Guidebook? Because it seems to be one of their favorite tactics when they're trying to pretend to be "scientific".
"Look, I used math, the answer *must* be irrefutable!", they invariably say...
I repeat what I wrote earlier: Only an idiot would think that an exponential growth curve with a *CONSTANT* growth rate would be in ANY way a valid model of what the human population (or *ANY* population) would actually do over *huge* spans of time (like centuries or millennia, as in your stupid example).
Your model was childishly wrong, and I pointed that out to you. Deal with it. The "conclusions" you subsequently tried to draw from it were thus unsupportable. Deal with it.
The fact that you are now persisting in trying to imply that your population model hasn't been exposed as a sham, and is somehow still useful or valid in any way, makes it entirely clear that you are either too dishonest to admit your error, or too dense to understand it. Neither option inspires confidence.
Rather, when they were brought up, I pointed out the insufficiency of these facts for denying design implications.
Horse crap. No one was trying to "deny design implications", they were pointing out why your attempts to "disprove" some aspect of evolution were "insufficient" in themselves.
Right Wing Professor is emerging as the evo champion, since he's actually making original, intelligent replies.
And good for him. He has more patience with you than I do. I consider you pretty much a complete waste of time. He's still willing to spend time trying to educate you out of your stubborn misconceptions in some manner. I wish him all the luck in the world.
Commonsense (which is on the ascendant against peer-review)
I certainly *hope* not. Peer review is all about providing checks and balances on the pitfalls inherent in trying to use just "common sense" in understanding the universe.
But feel free to start a "Journal of Common-Sense", which accepts submission without peer-review, and see how much useful (or correct) science it produces.
says that the sun increases order on the earth not because of its massive heat but because of the orderly photosynthesis unique to the earth.
Once again, I see that the creationists are having trouble distinguishing between the concepts of "entropy", "order", "information", and "complexity". They are *NOT* the same, but creationists seem to like to use them interchangeably, leading to all sorts of "fall on their face" fallacies. Hint: This is the fundamental reason why the creationist "argument" attempting to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics in order to "disprove" evolution is completely flawed. The SLoT applies to *entropy*. Evolution applies to *information*. The Second Law of Thermodynamics makes *no* restrictions on whether *information* is "allowed" to increase, decrease, or whatever. So the creationists really need to give it a rest.
Once again, some scientists rely on, no, leech on orderliness to get their work done, can spot order in the complex specified ink in the journal, but not in the plant the journal describes,
Oh, puh-leaze... Scientists can (and do) certainly recognize the information, order, and complexity in plants. It's just that unlike the misconceptions of creationists, the scientists know that there are natural means by which those properties can and do arise. There is *no* such thing as a "law of no natural information, order, or complexity increase". On the contrary, it is known (to all but creationists, apparently) that those things can and *do* increase under natural conditions (and also decrease under natural conditions).
ID is about the definition of order as CSI.
No, actually, it isn't. ID is about "I know 'design' when I see it". CSI is one of the arguments they try to use (poorly) to try to formalize their subjective opinion.
Heat entropy has been around long enough that scientists can measure it.
There are laws of "heat entropy" because heat actually behaves by such "rules".
Information entropy is just as real a phenomenon, but there are gut reasons to prevent, no, call nonexistent its publication, and vindication of the legitimate theories of millennia of true scientists before them.
Complete horse manure. There are no laws of "information entropy" because information does *not* behave by the "entropy-like" rules the creationists incorrectly presume it does. Creationists' notions of how information "must" behave are, quite simply, wrong.
The following propositions now seem self-evident.
Translation: You believe them.
They're certainly not "self-evident" in the usual sense, which is "something all will agree on", or "something trivial to demonstrate as true", or the dictionary definition of "evident in itself without proof or demonstration".
I will happily and pompously declare premature victory
Of course you will. That's another thing that seems to be a populat chapter in the Creationist's Handbook...
and hope to respond to further challenges to them.
I'm sure you do.
• A theory is fairly defined as an extant physical model of the universe.
Hopelessly muddled, and far too restrictive. For example, theories usually deal with some class of phenomena -- they do not attempt to "model the universe" as a whole. Try something along the lines of: "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena".
• The universe is, by this definition, also a theory unto itself.
Complete horsecrap, even by your own definition. A theory is a conceptual model, which has explanatory and predictive power. The universe itself is neither a conceptual model nor does it explain or predict itself.
• Theories are, by this definition, fair subjects of science or knowledge.
*That* one I can agree with.
• Nothing can be posited about the unknowable, not even its existence or nonexistence.
Hell, anything can be "posited" about anything. What have you been smoking?
• Entropy cannot decrease in any timeslice of the universe itself.
If you mean as measured across the universe as a whole, you're probably right. If you mean in any particular localized portion of it, you are incorrect.
The next things people want to know about are: 1) Why is information entropy isomorphic to heat entropy (1038)?
It isn't.
2) Minor questions of WildTurkey about my equation cite (1044).
Don't care.
3) The speed of light (1062).
My money's on Einstein.
I can probably name a dozen creationists who, based on your post, will rush out and buy dozens of copies, to be given to all their friends.
That wouldn't surprise me in the least. I've gotten the distinct impression that a lot of creationists "reason" thusly: "Anything an evolutionist says is false. Therefore, if they say that some source is wrong, the source must actually be trustworthy".
Energy..
Time...
entrophy...
DNA.....
genes...
I just want to know how the air intake hole moved from the face to the back in whales, dophins, porpoises, etc.
You know, you might want to consider which vibrational-rotational states the reactants and products in the reaction are in as well ;-)
...just as the light energy from the sun is eventually radiated to space and attains a very low temperature. So the laser decreases the entropy of the condensate, just as the sun decreases the entropy of living systems.
Hmm, how about survival long enough to reproduce within the context of local conditions? Of course, if the environment changes (globally or locally) that may suddenly change the criteria for fitness, right?
Do you think selection just eliminates individuals at random?
Yes, it can, as there are multiple dangers out there for organisms--e.g. the newly born/hatched of 'most' species ;-) have not yet evolved resistance to teeth or digestive juices of their predators. That's why these things happen "on average" isn't it?
To quote an earlier post of mine on an unknown thread, what if there is a squirrel that has the 1.0 edition of new, improved paws for climbing faster to evade predators, but it never passes on its genes for such because it ran under the tires of my car before mating? Such an event would have an effect on the observed rate of adaptation... :-)
Don't think that was quite fair, RWP--the question did say "ensure" and "can" ; and your hyperlink contains an example of energy (ordinary light) that decreases order by increasing heat. The use of the word 'can' in the question allowed for the possibility that entropy increase or decrease depending on the circumstances.
OTOH the reply (second sentence above) was a flat NO, so you were right to make the distinction.
Cheers!
I absolutely believe this, Elsie. My point was it's not for me to make judgments which belong to God alone.
After her dismal failure on entropy yesterday, she has promised to go get a book and then she will learn us some science.
No. Poster #1 submitted the article which contained a discussion of God. Then said to leave God out of it. No way.
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