If one of you would be so kind as to break down “quantizing the continuum for me it would be most appreciated. You guys have brought some variation of this up on multiple occasions, but for some reason I’m still not getting it. Thanks so much. All the best—GGG
PS What happened to our most beloved physicist? He sounds like a VERY interesting character!
As far as I know, Physicist is still an active Freeper but hasn't posted here since last December. He is truly a brilliant scientist who spent of lot of time educating Freepers who really wanted to know things and was never haughty or rude or mean. I miss him.
The new logical fallacy of quantizing the continuum says that the quantization is a fallacy per se. Picking a number such as $100,000.00 to differentiate between a rich and non-rich man is a logical fallacy.
By extension, picking a point on the theoretical tree of life when a dinosaur became a bird is also a logical fallacy.
What I found so amusing with this new logical fallacy is that the "origin of species" itself would fall because of it: every species is a quantization of the theoretical continuum, the tree of life rising up from a common ancestor.
Of course they didn't mean it this way and came back on later threads with such things as the color spectrum showing the range of green, etc.
But the amusement factor is still there. After all, the geologic record does not contain empirically testable remains of every creature that ever lived. It is a quantization by definition.
And that is a key point we were explicating on betty boop's recent thread about micro v macro evolution.
To put it another way, micro-evolution can be shown by laboratory tests where "the absence of evidence is evidence of absence." But it is an overstatement to project those findings to explain the paleontologist's discovery in a dig where "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Or to put it yet another way, there are no laboratory tests which can falsify an alternative explanation for what the paleontologist sees, e.g. Special Creation, Alien Seeding.