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To: JasonC
Um, no, we are not making a statement about individual birds. After the oil spill, dead oil-soaked birds did not rise from the grave. Other birds came to the area. The new birds might well have been of different species from the old ones, or a different mix. They certainly were not the old bird individually. They remain "birds". Before spill, birds are present, after spill birds are present. The presence of the class is robust to the disturbance caused by the spill.

BS. Individual birds were killed. Individual birds returned. Individual eagles were rendered sterile by DDT.

The resiliency seen empirically (which is the attribute shared with the object of the comparison i.e. the point of similarity to resilient rats) applies to the class, and not to its individual members. People kill rats all the time. They employ traps, poisons, cats, etc. These readily kill individual rats. Where there is any food for them, however, rats will soon be found again. Resilience of a class, in a familiar way. Thus an apt simile for the point she wished to make.

There is nothing about the resiliency of a class of rats or birds that is not completely determined by the properties of the individual birds or rats. You're desperately handwaving. You can only reduce a population of eagles by acting on the individual birds.

As for your silly examples, the attribute predicated does not belong to the class (or in your discrete case, the set) of which it is predicated, that is all.

You have shown nothing about the example that is an attribute of the class as opposed to an attribute of individuals. Your silly example of sodium chloride is a case where both the sodium metal and the chlorine molecules are transformed chemically in order to make the salt. Birds are not transformed into something different by being several.

As for your silly examples, the attribute predicated does not belong to the class (or in your discrete case, the set) of which it is predicated, that is all.

Nonsense. You have totally failed to demonstrate why, if I kill 90 out of a 100 individual birds, I will do anything else than reduce the size of the class by 90%. It won't be reduced by 90.1%. It won't be reduced by 89.9%. There is absolutely nothing in the properties of the collective, with respect to survival, that is not a simple sum of the survival of the individual birds.

Now answer the questions.

You are not free to pretend she said eagles are rats when she neither said nor implied any such thing.

Eagles are birds. Birds are like rats, according to Coulter. Therefore eagles are like rats, according to Coulter. Deal with it.

349 posted on 06/08/2006 3:21:33 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor (...I'm dancin' right there with you, Iraqis.)
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To: Right Wing Professor
"There is absolutely nothing in the properties of the collective, with respect to survival, that is not a simple sum of the survival of the individual birds."

A more biologically ignorant statement it is hard to conceive. Reduce the population of cod by half without changing any of its capacity determining variables, and you double the external resources per remaining cod. Their growth rate will therefore increase, compared to what it would have been. There are automatic restoring forces in biological niches. Equilibrium populations are set by balancing rates and approach from either direction on "S" curves. The forces acting temporarily on the population number and those acting on its equilibrium level are distinct. You might as readily say that power terms don't set equilibrium temperatures.

The salt example is a fallacy of composition, whereas you commit the fallacy of division. The reason neither work is the same - composition, classes, or wholes are not their members, but are distinct from them, and may introduce or change any attribute by their relation. The set of integers is not an integer, the attributes of infantry divisions are not the attributes of privates, etc. You are one of the only people in the world who does not know this, you are hopelessly wrong about it, and you have been given ample instruction to correct the mistake.

The rest is the weakness of pride.

350 posted on 06/08/2006 3:47:33 PM PDT by JasonC
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