[Right Wing Professor]

After all the theory of a continuum of life is based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record).

That's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantizing a continuum means. Quantizing the continuum is where you draw an imaginary line where reality has no lines. But a fossil is a real entity. Life is a succession of discrete entities - discrete genomes, discrete beings.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

I said: After all the theory of a continuum of life is based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record).

You said: That's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantizing a continuum means. Quantizing the continuum is where you draw an imaginary line where reality has no lines. But a fossil is a real entity. Life is a succession of discrete entities - discrete genomes, discrete beings.

We have been down this road rather exhaustively on the Plato thread and your comments don't comport with those made by other esteemed Freepers, excerpted below from post 663:

tortoise: The underlying fallacy in reasoning here is a common variant of the classic False Dichotomy which we will call Quantizing The Continuum.

Physicist: Well done. I've noticed this before (but not named it) when it comes to speciation. As a population evolves (and leaves traces in the fossil record), we arbitrarily label the individual fossils with different species names. We define species, however, by the ability to produce viable offspring. (We can't test that, of course, but no matter: it's certain that any creature would be unable to interbreed with a distant enough ancestor.)

The problem is that if every individual left a fossil, there would always come a point where a taxonomist would have to change species names between a parent and a child, but by any reasonable definition of species they have to be the same species.

(I could give examples from particle physics, too, but they're more abstruse.)

Our notation often forces us into your fallacy (sorry, to name a thing is to own it). The ignorant then proceed to read more significance into the names (and their attendant problems) than into the ideas.

I will stand back and let you guys hammer it out, though I would appreciate being pinged.

The counsel of tortoise and Physicist taken together reads to me exactly the way I expressed it: the theory of evolution is a continuum (tree of life) based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record).

IOW, a fossil is "real" quantization in the geologic record. To use the comic book metaphor from a previous post, by viewing the accumulated quantized evidence like little stick men drawn on pages in a comic book - when the pages are fanned the stickman seems to move and change and another continuum seems to emerge, a divergence or tree of life.