Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
I assume that this post will be pulled and AG will be required to login again, seeing as how this sentence is clearly attributing motives (to tarnish someone) to other posters.
Everyone: discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal.
Now to me the appropriate thing to do in this situation is say, "Oops, I was mistaken, I misattributed those words," not go on saying, "Well, he might have said it, and I think he ought to have said it." What might have happened or should have happened doesn't really have bearing on what actually happened, and what actually happened is what's important.
Alamo-Girl, the words above written by you "read my mind" and ascribes motives to me. Is this not against the rules?
It's important to us because some advocates of creationism/intelligent design have developed the unfortunate habit of taking quotes out of context or fabricating them entirely. As people of goodwill, with a commitment to reason, fairness, and the truth, it is incumbent upon all of us to strive for accuracy.
Once again for clarity – I cannot say and I doubt any mortal other than Darwin himself could ever have said that he didn’t say a particular phrase, i.e. that “life can only come from life.”
These are weasel words. They do not clarify; they muddy the waters. When discussing historical figures, we generally rely on the written record. Is it acceptable to make up quotations that we believe an author should have said? No, this is not an example of good scholarship.
To correct someone who has made a factual error is not to characterize them as a liar. The proper course of action for all people of goodwill, with a committment to reason, fairness, and the truth is to say, "I stand corrected" not to hem, haw, and make excuses.
To quote Gloria Steinem:
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
It's additionally important to us because in science you can't say that someone did something when you actually just wish they had or think they might of, because that kind of thing gets you fired and gets your papers retracted by the publisher. :-P
They caught Scooter! That's the truth that matters.
I'm just amazed that the hemming and hawing has gone on for the better part of a week.
I don't know or care what other people's motives are.
I am more interested in correcting the misunderstandings surrounding Darwin and Yockey than I am in punishing a simple misquote. What I'm trying to correct is the reasoning that lead to the misquote.
As I see it there is a fatally flawed syllogism involved.
1. Common descent requires that each generation be the offspring of a previous generation.
2. Therefore there could not be a first generation.
Something is simply wrong with this. I can't quite figure out how it could be uttered, so I can't classify it.
But for the record, Darwin proposed two possible scenarios for the origin of the first generation: one involved a deity, and the second involved a "warm pond" and chemicals. Both are life from non-life. I am not aware of any school of thought holding that life is an infinite regress.
At the risk of assigning motives, I have to speculate that the "warm pond" conjecture is the one most objected to by evolution critics. But Darwin was quite clear that the origin of life problem is unrelated to the question of how life behaves once it exists. Either conjecture is consistent with common descent.
Here's something Darwin definitely did say about one (or two) of his premises (bold is from me):
I must here premise that, according to the view ordinarily received [PH here: I think he means creationism], the myriads of organisms, which have during past and present times peopled this world, have been created by so many distinct acts of creation. It is impossible to reason concerning the will of the Creator, and therefore, according to this view, we can see no cause why or why not the individual organism should have been created on any fixed scheme. That all the organisms of this world have been produced on a scheme is certain from their general affinities; and if this scheme can be shown to be the same with that which would result from allied organic beings descending from common stocks, it becomes highly improbable that they have been separately created by individual acts of the will of a Creator. For as well might it be said that, although the planets move in courses conformably to the law of gravity, yet we ought to attribute the course of each planet to the individual act of the will of the Creator. It is in every case more conformable with what we know of the government of this earth, that the Creator should have imposed only general laws. ...Source: The foundations of the Origin of Species: Two essays written in 1842 and 1844 by Charles Darwin.
There is also a misunderstanding concerning common descent. Some people think it is synonymous with evolution.
Evolution is a dynamic process describing the mechanism by which populations change over time.
It is also used to refer to the observed fact of common descent. This becomes a problem in heated debates, and this is why I try to use the phrase "common descent" when referring to the historical aspect of evolution. Common descent is a conclusion drawn from hundreds of years of observation and analysis, but it is not the same thing as the process.
The process of evolution could take place regardless of how many independent lineages might exist.
I think it's the unspoken assumptions. These are that little change will have occurred from one generation to another far removed generation, and that all generations must be "alive" in a sense that is not properly defined and reasoned.
Additionally it actually goes against the "first mover" argument for the existence for God, which argued that something had to have started things because the universe could not go infinitely back in time, but must have had a beginning. How can this be used to argue for the existence of God and then the opposite used to argue for the impossibility of abiogenesis?
Are there other possibilities? The idea of "conditions" may also be considered separate from the origin event. (Like bringing two people together before they can fall in love) Such conditions assume the cooperation of homogeneous and heterogeneous causes
This appears to be a variation of Occam's razor.
It is also the first of Newton's rules for conducting research.
Really? which is Which, and why?
Because there ought to be a difference between the two scenarios, unless they are identical.
Science doesn't deal in oughts. Which is which?
By the way, speaking of oughts, what are your thoughts from the perspective of philosophy, of the two slit experiment?
Reasoning from first principles, should physical objects be capable of being in more than one place at the same time? Should physical objects be able to take multiple, simultaneous paths from one point to another? should physical objects be able to move from one place to another without traversing the intervening space?
In one scenario, the logical conclusion is that principles of life always existed because the characteristics of biotic life are caused by prebiotic life. The causes are homogeneous and the nomenclature of life/nonlife is merely practical. (Even in a world consisting exclusively of uniform homogeneous natural causes there is differentiation; everything is not everything). This view suggests that a laboratory in the future will generate life from nonliving matter, or that such an even will be discovered outside of the laboratory. We can say that the transition from nonlife to life is not time-specific and has unrestrictive application. Life is a function of nonlife. This leads to a very difficult problem: why does the fossil record suggest a beginning which suggests that life had an absolute beginning. The easy answer is, because conditions were not favorable. I think this question pushes the search in a new direction.
If this scenario is rejected because matter does not hold the causative agent for generating living matter, that means there is a heterogeneous causative agent which would at least have to be immaterial.
I think we'd probably need to clarify our definitions likewise. You seem to imagine a kind of breath of life that is needed for life to exist. I would say that this isn't a separate force or quality, but that "life" is an emergent property from complex chemical systems. So I suppose that would fall under your definition of "homogeneity," although I'm not sure why you use that term. However, I doubt we'll ever be cooking up new life forms based upon different chemical systems in the lab just because the number of possible routes that need to be sampled are so humongous that this could not be done in a reasonable time span. I can definitely imagine that we will eventually be inventing new genes to produce new enzymes with novel functions, although I doubt we'll ever have any "from scratch" custom organisms larger than unicellular.
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