PatrickHenry: The increasingly evident fact that there are no clear-cut quanta (isolated species), but everything, past and present, forms a continuum, is what common descent is all about.
Ichneumon: No, because they're samples along the continuum of morphological change, and not being presented as discrete entities. In fact, it's the anti-evolutionists who commit the fallacy of quantizing the continuum, by trying to assert that these transitionals are all "separate" creatures, and that there exist no further links between them.
No, I don't believe we do apply it inconsistently. On the contrary, I think you've misunderstood the sort of fallacy that tortoise is calling "the fallacy of quantizing the continuum".
He was speaking specifically of the kind of fallacy that is often called "black-and-white thinking", "all-or-nothing thinking", "either/or fallacy", or "false dichotomy". However, those terms all describe a general class of fallacious analysis, and it seems to me that tortoise chose a new name to cover just a *specific* type of this fallacy which seems to come up a lot in science/anti-science discussions.
The specific type he wanted to address was when a property which exists along a continuum is erroneously treated as if there is (or should be) a sharp line between different states, or that the two (or more) states are entirely disjoint. This is the type immortalized literally in the name "black-and-white thinking" -- when someone insists on partitioning all cases as either "black" or "white", when the issue actually exists across a continuum of white on one end, black on the other, and various shades of gray in between.
In the thread in which he introduced that name, he was pointing out that betty boop's comment about the "obvious" difference between living and nonliving things overlooked the fact that there are things which rest in a gray area (like viruses), and that in the rise of life-as-we-know-it from inorganic beginnings, there would have been several stages where both the terms "living" and "nonliving" would be strained in varying degrees if applied. "Life" as we now know it has *several* properties (replication, metabolism, interaction with its environment, energy storage, autonomy, and more), but a system which has only some (but not all) of those properties (*and* in varying degrees) would not entirely accurately be described as either "living" *or* "nonliving". This was tortoise's point.
I'm not going to rehash whether I think this was a fair critique of betty boop's post or not (dead horse), I'm just clarifying which kind of fallacy he was describing, so that I can address your current charge that PatrickHenry and I somehow "apply it inconsistently".
And I disagree with part of your summary:
IOW, the fallacy would say that it is impossible to define a point in the continuum at which life exists and thus abiogenesis is idle speculation.I agree with the first half (that it would be a fallacy to define a *particular* point in the continuum at which "life" suddenly exists where it had not at all existed a moment before), but I disagree with the second half, concerning whether this would mean that "abiogenesis is idle speculation". I don't believe that was tortoise's point at all. In fact, I think it might be the exact opposite: By trying to "see" a sharp dividing line between "life" and "nonlife", one would have trouble understanding abiogenesis, because one would be looking for a "poof" moment when life "suddenly" arose from "nonlife". But this expectation would be mistaken, since abiogenesis would be the *gradual* emergence of life-as-we-know it by the slow one-at-a-time accumulation of the *many* processes which, all together, make up the complex system that we are familiar with under the label of "life". Between a chemical "soup" and even the simplest modern single-celled organism would be many stages in the "gray area" between "nonlife" and today's "life" as we are used to seeing it. Only by understanding that there *is* (or if you prefer, "would be") a continuum of nonlife/life is one able to begin to grasp the concepts of abiogenesis in a meaningful way.
To the contrary of your assertion, Ichneumon, a “sample” is in fact a discrete fossil, a quantization of the continuum, like a lizard or a snake, for instance.
First, pointing to a discrete spot on a continuum (or even labeling it for convenience) is NOT the same as "quantizing" the continuum. It in no way attempts to conceptually BREAK UP the continuum into DISJOINT, conceptually erroneous "blocks", which is the sort of fallacious quantizing that tortoise was speaking of.
Let's use a rainbow (or light spectrum/continuum, to be more technical) as an example.
Example #1, discrete samples from the continuum: "The light at this point in the rainbow has a wavelength of 660nm, and is red. The orange light over here has a wavelength of 620nm."
Example #2, quantizing the continuum: "This band is red, and this band next to it is orange." ("Um, you've drawn the line between them in the middle of an orangey-red color, and there's some of that in both your "red" and your "orange" bands, plus how did you choose that particular spot to divide it at, since the red smoothly transitions into orange all in between?") "No, dammit, this band is all *red*, and this band is all *orange*!"
Example #1 picks out discrete spots in the continuum for demonstration purposes, but doesn't misrepresent (or misunderstand) the continuum nature of the rainbow as a whole. Example #2 does, in exactly the way tortoise was describing -- by attempting to shoe-horn all portions of the continuum into ill-fitting conceptual "boxes" which are inappropriate ways to handle values that vary across a continuum and have, in reality, no sharp boundaries, only changing gradations.
It's like the difference between these two images:
The first accurately captures the "blurring" of one color into another. The second misrepresents the rainbow as having mono-colored "bands" which suddenly "shift" to another color at a sharp boundary.
But there is no quantizable beginning for snakiness, as Physicist explains here.
I never said that there was. I wasn't trying to quantize evolutionary change. And pointing to discrete points on the continuum is not quantizing it.
The key presumption of the theory of evolution, as PatrickHenry has said, is that a continuum exists.
It's not a "presumption", it's very strongly supported by the evidence. The paradigm of a continuum of living forms over time is the *conclusion*, not the premise.
Everything in the theory depends on it being a continuum and yet the evidence for the theory is quantization of that presumed continuum.
I think you're misunderstanding the term "quantization" as tortoise was using it.
IOW, if the evidence for a continuum is the quantization of it
It isn't.
and the quantization of a continuum is a fallacy per se
Not per se, although it's quite often an error (and tortoise was speaking of the *fallacious* use of it) -- just as invoking ad hominem in an argument is usually done in a fallacious way, despite the fact that it can be used appropriately (as when a source's reliability is legitimately called into question).
then ipso facto evolution is false.
Your premises are flawed, therefore your conclusion does not follow.
Whereupon hearing that, abiogenesis immediately vanished into thin air. It was shocking at the time, but looking back on it now it makes sense – because if there is no definition of life, there can be no theory of life from non-life. Abiogenesis could not exist. Perhaps that is why nobody seemed to mourn him – it’s like he never existed at all, even to the bodyguards.
I know you're trying to be humorous, but this really misrepresents the argument. The point isn't that there is "no definition of life", the point is that any definition which excludes the existence of gray areas, or which purports to be able to draw a clear objective line between life and nonlife for all conceivable cases, is a false and misleading one.
They said the same fallacy of quantizing a continuum would apply to species – that there is no clear point in time in the geological record when a lizard begins and a snake begins.
Correct. It's like asking for the "clear point" where the rainbow's "red" ends and "orange" begins. One *transitions* into the other. Failing to acknowledge, recognize, or understand this leads to incorrect analysis and conclusions -- and similar fallacies occur when people attempt to understand biology in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, without a good grasp of the fact that *transitions* can't be accurately conceptualized with "either/or" logic. Just as it's a nonsensical question to ask where in the rainbow red "first" appears, it's a logical error to ask when the "first" mammal was born, or to think of a reptile "suddenly" giving birth to a mammal. The change occurred *gradually*, across *many* generations, from a very "lizardlike" form, eventually to a "lizardish with vaguely mammalian features" form, to eventually something that people might consider "mostly mammal", and sometime down the road (but with no clear "aha" dividing line) to something we'd consider "fully mammalian" (like, say, a wolf). This same error is repeated endlessly on these threads by people who ask to see "an ape giving birth to a human". That's not how evolution happens, and it's fallacious to try to quantize an evolutionary continuum in that way, into an "either all ape or all human" way of thinking about it.
IOW, if there is no beginning to a limb then there can be no connection – and evolution himself existed not because limbs existed, but because he is the connection between the limbs, the theory of the origin of species, i.e. common ancestry
Again, this is a misrepresentation of the point.
Outside the window, the evolution haters were celebrating, they had made big signs declaring that evolution can’t be a science if it based on a fallacy, the fallacy of quantizing the continuum.
Again, this is incorrect.
The physician called this substance a statistical distribution within the continuum and used the example of a bell curve wherein there may be a range of points in which a more obscure difference (such as between a snake and lizard) might be observed in a continuum.
Yawn. Satirizing the evidence doesn't make it go away.
IOW, the distribution itself was derived from data points each of which is a fallacy of quantizing the continuum.
No, it isn't, as I've pointed out above. An observed data point is in no way the kind of "disjointing" that tortoise was describing as a fallacy.
Also, I’m sure there will be attempts to revive him. Or because under the fallacy of quantizing the continuum there is no distinction between life and death,
Yet again, this is a misrepresentation of the point.
The point is not that "there is no distinction between life and death", the point is that any definition which treats them as entirely disjoint sets -- or declares that the gray area can safely be ignored -- is going to be incorrect. Similarly, even though there are shades of gray in between which people need to take into account, that's not the same as arguing that "there is no distinction between black and white".
But for those of us who still see a distinction between life and death, he is most assuredly dead.
There is "a distinction", of course, but the boundary between is far more complex than most people realize.
Now, could you please explain why you allege that PatrickHenry and I, specifically, have some sort of double-standard on this issue? Please use specific examples from my posts, if you can.