Posted on 11/16/2009 6:19:30 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
Ah, now we move into the world of adaptation. Shame on you for using the word evolution in this. The animal remains a dog, there is no form change from dog to frog.
The genes for all our domestic dogs were in fact bred for over time, we ADAPTED them to our wishes. We did not breed them from dogs into hogs. Neither did we start with weasels.
Just a ‘small mutation’ is posited, yet, it has been observed, ad nauseum, that mutations observed in wild or domestic animals are almost invariably detrimental in nature OR result in no changes at all. The information necessary to adapt to our wishes was and is there.
I can see you're just going to run further and further away from your original statement. Nobody mentioned frogs. You said,
A wolf into a chihuahua is possible because both are dogs. The genes for all the secialized forsm are present in the original, just bred for over the years. Specialization like that actually REMOVES genetic information from the animal.I've been asking where all those genes, or all that information, was stored. You have no answer. Instead you try to turn the question back on me (and I answered it) or start talking about weasels and hogs. Face it, you asserted something you can't back up except by repetition.
Here you go:
“Evolution within the family Bovidae (cow, sheep, and antelope) is characterized by global immigrations, adaptive radiations, and mass extinctions which, in concert, gave rise to the 49 extant genera and more than 140 species known today (Wells 1957 ; Vrba 1985 ; Kingdon 1989 ; Nowak 1999 ). The majority of these species are endemic to the African continent, and the complex evolution of the group was molded by a wide variety of mechanisms and natural events, including temperature adaptation, feeding ecology, vegetation physiognomy, rifting, and climatic fluctuations (Kingdon 1989 ). The oldest bovid fossils are attributable to the subfamily Bovinae and are known from France and sub-Saharan Africa, where the group evidently first appeared approximately 23 MYA (Vrba 1985 ; Kingdon 1989 ).”
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/18/7/1220
Could you please explain why we find no trilobites above the Permian strata, and why we find no dinosaurs above the creataceous strata, or no mammals in the Cambrian strata?
Here that, metmom?
No need to extrapolate. I think I made my preference quite clear.
Can you explain why, between those strata that there are no intermediate forms? Wheres all that ‘evolving’ happening?
Cold Water, what is your purpose here? I expect to see ‘divisiveness’ such as this posted on other sites (Say for instance, DU, where they are more than happy to foolishly say there is no God).
But that's what evos do best. They can't help themselves. It's the only way they can find to make the jump from variation within species to *macroevolution*.
It's just kind of a knee jerk reaction with them.
And I, too, oh so violently agree with you on this point!
Different arguments have different presuppositions. In fact, one needs presuppositions, in order to develop an argument — any argument. The problem isn't with presuppositions per se; it is that oh so often, the presuppositions are concealed.
Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley, puts it this way:
“Our logic cannot supply its own beginning. Logic is merely a way of reasoning correctly from premises to conclusions. The premises must come from elsewhere. Rationalism is inherently self-defeating, because the rationalist must pretend to derive his first premises by logical reasoning, which always rests on other premises. Empiricism faces the same dilemma when it becomes a total system because the empiricist always needs to know more than he can observe. Premise-evading philosophies like logical positivism or scientific materialism last only until the dilemma becomes too evident to be concealed, and then they wither. That is why the guardians of such systems when under pressure often become fanatics who try to impose authoritarian control. Forbidding examination of the premises is the only way they can continue to rule.... My problem is not with presuppositions as such, but with concealed presuppositions, which come disguised as facts.” — Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions — Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, InterVarsity Press, (2002) p.89.Just a little tidbit to ruminate on, if you are so inclined!
Thank you oh so much for writing, Natural Law!
It's essentially an application of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, is it not?
Oh my, dear r9etb, but it seems to me that like minds travel in the same gutter! So to speak. For soon after I wrote my last, I started thinking about Ayn Rand's Objectivist doctrine. Then I find you are thinking about it, too!
What has always troubled me about Objectivism is that it can say so many truthful things about human individuals; yet it somehow misses, or by-passes the larger point: the relations naturally obtaining between the individual and society.
My thinking about this question is largely informed by Plato's insights into the basic structure of reality. To put it into a nutshell, Man (the Microcosm) is the Cosmos "writ small." (I.e., the total recapitulation of the universe on smaller scale.) But human societies are Man "writ large." (I.e., no human society can be better than the "basic (or average?) human stock" of which it is composed. No positive law can remedy defects of this kind.)
The Greeks recognized as well as the later Christians did that man is inherently a social animal. To speak of him as an isolated little universe of "individual rights" — as the Objectivists seem to do — is to mischaracterize human nature from the get-go.
All I can say is "Thank God for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem!" For if we didn't have it, we'd have to live in a "black-or-white" universe — a "yes" or "no" universe; a "'true" vs. "false" universe. In short, a universe eminently suitable for digitizing into machine applications, but which cannot even begin to capture the full range and diversity of human moral and intellectual experience....
Gödel showed that Aristotle's "two-valued" system of logic is insufficient to account for the reality experienced by human beings. We do not live in a clockwork, mechanistic universe in which there is any such thing as "certainty." Contemporary physics tells us that. Rather the idea of undecidability (or incompleteness) denotes the refutation of the idea of certainty, which can only be obtained under "black-or-white" conditions under observation at a particular discrete moment in time.
Which then in many cases is blown up into "universal generalizations."
But human existence is more than "discrete moments in time." Certainly human nature is not. Or so it seems to me....
Thank you ever so much for writing, r9etb! It's good to hear from you.
What has always troubled me about Objectivism is that it can say so many truthful things about human individuals; yet it somehow misses, or by-passes the larger point: the relations naturally obtaining between the individual and society.
IMO, the reason for this difficulty probably arises from Rand's personal motivations for defining Objectivism, which I have to attribute to Rand's atheism. I really believe that she started with an visceral (and thus irrational) animus against the idea of God; and was thereafter engaged in attempting to deal with the appalling moral consequences of God's disappearance.
She says some truthful things about human individuals, but I believe those truths are borrowed from Judeo-Christian principles. As I've put it elsewhere, I think she wanted the last 6 Commandments without having to deal with the problems of the first 4 -- and she wanted them to be as objectively true without God, as they are with Him.
Rand wasn't stupid ... she understood the implications of stating that a moral principle is objectively true. For one thing, it would have to take the form of a law of nature, somewhat like gravity. As such, it could not really apply to relationships in a direct sense; it had to apply to individuals as individuals.
Relationships between people necessarily become secondary under such a system, and that shows in Rand's fictional writing. There is no "love," for example, except insofar as the parties are in accord as to their individual attainment of Rand's enlightened state. Real love is, of course, far more complex than that.
My favorite example of this disconnect is found elsewhere, in Rand's famous statement that "Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others." There's a lot of truth in that, so long as you don't take it too far. But as an "objective" truth it does not survive contact with something as obvious and natural as parenthood!
Now ... what does that say about the topic of this thread? Well, I think it goes back to what you started off saying: there are always presuppositions, whether it's about the nature of "objective" moral principles, or about the origin of life.
The first task in any debate of this nature, is to uncover the concealed presuppositions that underlie both sides. It's amazing what happens when one starts picking away at that... For example, I used to be quite a Rand fan, until I started looking at her presuppositions -- to my very great surprise, it eventually led to me becoming a Christian!
I would venture to state that none of us is free of concealed presuppositions, many of which have little to do with the specific topic at hand. Much of our argumentation is built around them, and I think we often don't understand why certain lines of thought perturb us so much. I've learned (however imperfectly) that such reactions are generally worth investigating. I've found that to be true, both in my personal life and also in my technical/professional life. It's true in science, as well.
When it comes to the topic of intelligent intervention in the development of biological origins, I think a great deal of the heat on both sides of the debate actually arises from a set of concealed presuppositions about God. Thus we are subjected to much silliness from those on the Creationist side, who appear to fear that evolution and God are mutually exclusive; and we have on the other side a set of materialist assumptions that often seems to have roots in atheism, rather than science (e.g., Mr. Dawkins' works).
Relationships between people necessarily become secondary under such a system, and that shows in Rand's fictional writing. There is no "love," for example, except insofar as the parties are in accord as to their individual attainment of Rand's enlightened state. Real love is, of course, far more complex than that.
What a breath-takingly beautiful essay/post, my friend! But I'll only focus on the above italics here, for now.
For openers, it seems to me Rand's idea of love pretty much reduces to narcissism.
Check this out:
Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) gave credit to Aristotle for his intellectual discourses on the topic of virtue but said that he did not go far enough in his consideration of the topic for he was not able to move the reader beyond the mere position of knowledge to that of love. After reading Aristotle, he admits his knowledge of virtue has increased:I'm guilty of adding the bolds here....
“...but mind and will remain the same as they were, and I myself remain the same. It is one thing to know, another to love; one thing to understand, another to will. He teaches what virtue is, I do not deny that; but his lesson lacks the words that sting and set afire and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice, or, at any rate, does not have enough of such power.” — Timothy B. Lewis, "Virtue & Morality: Freedom’s Prerequisites," Meridian Magazine, 2004.
Beautiful, beautiful essay/post, r9etb! Thank you so very much! Much food for thought there....
(sound of pin dropping....) Well.... yes. That is exactly right. And once again you've supplied exactly and succinctly what I was trying to put into words.
And I think, really, that this form of narcissism increasingly pervades much of public discourse -- be it political, religious, moral, or scientific. And perhaps especially so in that large area of public life where they all intersect.
Look at the headline of this thread, for example: Preadaptation: A Blow to Irreducible Complexity?
That's a headline that ensures, not a debate or discussion, but rather a contest -- one in which there must be winners and losers. The goal is not so much to move ourselves closer to the truth, but rather to "be right."
What's missing is humility, which is a prerequisite for love or civil public discourse. Humility does not preclude passion; what it does, though, is allow us to recognize when our passion is misguided. Narcissism, on the other hand, claims that our passion is never misguided, because it is our passion.
Nice attempt at misdirection and avoidance, but we are not going to play that game.
Since you failed to even address my question to you it is safe to assume that you have no answer.
Without an answer you have just proved that you do not understand the evolutionary theory.
Generally speaking, it does seem that way, doesn’t it...
Exactly. We see this all the time nowadays, even here at Freerepublic.
In short, it's not about truth; it's about winning a debate. On purely rational grounds — or at least that is what is alleged. Since such a line of argument generally depends on humility being recognized as irrational, humility — a great Christian virtue — ceases to be a relevant consideration: It's just the legacy of a dead myth.... Get over it! And win, win, win!
Yet as you note, humility is a prerequisite for love and of civil public discourse. As you wrote, "Humility does not preclude passion; what it does, though, is allow us to recognize when our passion is misguided." Yes; definitely. Also it is what is required of us in acknowledgement of the respect and dignity we owe to other persons.
A narcissist's love is an extremely debased form of self-love. Or so it seems to me. Self-love is quite natural, one might even say instinctive. But the self-love of a Christian is more than that, for it serves as the standard by which he deals with his neighbors: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." However much you love yourself, love your neighbor that much, too.
I think you pretty much nailed it here, r9etb: "Narcissism, on the other hand, claims that our passion is never misguided, because it is our passion."
In short, we love ourselves, we love our own passion, so much so that there is no room for anything else in our interior world. And by the way, such a person would be the one most likely to say: Don't ever disagree with me, or you'll see just how passionate I can get!
So much for civil public discourse nowadays!
I'm only just "poking around the edges" of this problem. My sense of Ms. Rand is that she was a profoundly alienated person. She saw enemies everywhere.... Plus I have to tell you (FWIW) that Dagny Taggart is probably the most unappealing fictional character I have ever encountered. And if I am not mistaken, Dagny is the alter-ego of Ayn Rand.
Well now that I've got that off my chest — LOLOL!
Thank you ever so much, dear r9etb, for yet another riveting essay/post!
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