Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
There's another aspect to this fallacy, or maybe it's a closely-related fallacy, and I'm working on what to call it. It's similar to a newly-named fallacy we were discussing a week or so ago -- quantizing the continuum. Tortoise named it. But the fallacy I'm now thinking of is almost the opposite -- wrongly assigning the characteristics of the entire continuum to an individual quantum. In this case, the supposed "odds" against some action happening.
I mentioned this (without trying to name it) a couple of days ago in a now-dormant thread, when someone trotted out, for the zillionth time, the business of "figuring the odds" against evolution. I said this:
The biggest problem with these computations that take all the mutations that ever happened and then whomp up some kind of factorial result by stringing together all the generations is simply that ... each generation is mathematically on its own!Whatever accumulated mutations you may have hanging around in your gonads, that's the initial state as far as your offspring are concerned. Either a mutation will happen or it won't, and all the generations before you, going right back to the proverbial pond scum, are irrelevant in "computing the odds."
Source: post 81.
How about: "incorporation of the continuum"?
I'm math impaired, but it sounds like a variation the coin toss fallacy. You've had five heads in a row. What are the odds of tossing heads again? I think the central misunderstanding is the assumption that we had to get here from there. We are here, but it wasn't foreseen. I think the inventors of ID know this and are consciously and deliberately perpetrating a fraud. What are the odds?
Do you want me to post the stuff in between the verses as well?
I sure can, if that'll help your understanding any.
The line I like best, from JURASSIC PARK, was when they were in the tree and the girl (IIRC) asks, "Can I pet him?"
And the fellow replies, "Sure; he's a vegetarian."
HMmmm...
You say this after your homepage is concerned with what appears to be numerology?
HMmmm... indeed.
You sure can. Would it help you? I doubt it would help your understanding. You've already shown your hand lil' pumpkin. You've got nothing. Not even a pair.
They are just random occurances of "537" competing for survival. Which will survive?
It's often an error to assume that malice is necessary when stupidity is sufficient.
I'm also wondering if I misread the intent of your post. I assumed that you were a evo mockimg creo's. You may be more in the middle. Jumped too quick to a conclusion, perhaps.
Yes, it's close to the The Gambler's Fallacy. That involves assuming that the results of an ongoing streak will have some influence on the next coin toss. It's very close. But hey ... let me have my moment in the cyber sun.
The biggest problem with these computations that take all the mutations that ever happened and then whomp up some kind of factorial result by stringing together all the generations is simply that ... each generation is mathematically on its own!
If I am reading you correctly, you're talking about Climbing Mount Improbable, to use Dawkins' colorful (or would it be colourful??) expression.
I've referred to it in the past as the "second-floor frog fallacy" The creationists' argument is the equivalent of saying that frogs could never get to the second floor of a building, as it is twelve feet above the first floor. They say, "no frog can jump twelve feet into the air, so there can be no frogs on the second floor." This ignores, of course, the staircase...
That's a good one, and it's in the same general area of fallacies, but not quite the same as "incorporating the continuum." Here's another example of -- ahem! -- my fallacy: you cut the cards, and then start dealing them out, one at a time. The resulting array has the awesome probability of one in 52 factorial, which is, more or less, one in 8.06581752 × 1067. However, as to any one card's chances, the odds are nowhere near as great.
Plants take their nutrients (mostly) from the soil. No need to move. As for propagation of the species, you can hardly beat a million "seeds" thrown into the wind for travel! Heck, the plants even get the "birds and the bees" to help with the sex thing!
Why is there sex? Very energy ineffecient, and there's others ways of mixing DNA type stuff.
The sex drive is unknown to you?
And on the other side of that coin: Why are some living things still sexless. Why haven't sexual forms in that niche predominated?
That's evolution. Everything finds its place! Duh ...
I really love it when "people" post these type of questions as herald them as major obstacles to evolution. What it really means is they slept through their high school biology classes.
Why cant you and the other assorted evolution supporting folk just admit that you have no more concrete proof of evolution than the ID people do for their beliefs?
You wont because you don't have the honesty to admit that theory is not fact and a belief in such amounts to nothing more than a faith in something you choose to believe in.
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