Posted on 02/20/2003 2:30:45 PM PST by Junior
Yeah, I'll go along with that. I suspect it'll probably hold up until just after the nuclear holocaust and the apes take over the planet. Unfortuantely, you has still failed to provide support your statement "Humans are not primates."
Great question! Heuristic, in and of itself, it---along with your other post on this matter--- provides also insight into your outlook. One conclusion I'm drawing is that your course at Berkeley was not focused on the life sciences, correct?
Just a guess, let me know if I'm wrong.
At any rate, this question is frequently asked of biologists, etc., etc., and many of them do succumb to an easier social grace by indulging public expectations by trying to ascribe an "advantage" of a particular fossilized feather. Such speculation is required for the job as a scientist, but the popularization of the pursuits of scientists has left some unexamined misperceptions. Speciation is not about a particular advantage, it is about reproductive success. The term, "advantage" was originally used, in evoution-discourse, to describe (pontificate,actually) to the media the "purpose" of, say homeothermia in Dinosaurs, any number of the daily scientific discoveries which caught the reporters' eyes.
I think you really want to see how all these "adaptive advantages" result in a rapidly evolving evolution.
"They don't." (Julian Huxley,1963)
The heart of speciation is akin to that of a new ship: will it float? The test is empirical in the extreme. Reproductive failure dooms the putative species. It is for this, that there is only one rigid definition of speciation: Reproductive isolation and success.
My question about advantage pertained to natural selection. If you don't have "advantage," you don't have natural selection.
That doesn't mean that you don't have evolution, nor does the absence of natural selection in the speciation of this weed mean that it never happens. I was just clarifying what the mechanism for this particular case of evolutionary speciation actually was, and wasn't.
What caught my attention was the dismay you indicated over the notion that hybrids might not be able to breed with their parental generation ("What's the advantage in that?" I think you said.)
Darwin's racism is the basis of evolutionary theory. The idea that some species are simpler, less fit and less worthy than others. You cannot take the racism out of evolution.
For someone so touchingly devoted to that assertion, you sure seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble supporting it.
Well, evolutionists have been looking for the missing link between men and apes and were forced to give it up because there was none. Now they say there is a link between man and primates and they have also not found any. In fact, they keep pushing the supposed link back further and further each year, we are back to 10 million years now and some even say 20 million years. It is he who makes the original claim that has to give evidence for it and you the evolutionists do not have any. How much time do you guys need to back up your assertions which you claim everyone is an idiot for not believing even though you do not have an ounce of evidence for them????????????
No, Darwin was showing joy at the destruction and obliteration of the Turkish race. Something similar to the feelings that Hitler must have had towards the destruction of the Jews.
Acutally there is no 'how' to evolution. They have been looking for it for 150 years and the best they have come up with is 'natural selection' and the 'struggle for life'. Problem is that natural selection destroys, it does not create and there is no Malthusian 'struggle for life'. Species are very adaptable and can make do quite well in different circumstances and with varied amounts of nutrition.
We know with a fair degree of certainty one thing about libraries that we do not know with any certainty at all about ecosystems - libraries are designed by intelligent agents. Different premises, different argument, different conclusions.
Perhaps they ought to borrow the methods of the botanists. Split the territory into managable sub-units - the "shelf" would seem to be a natural unit of division in a library - and assign an observer to each subunit. Each observer records the books currently on each shelf, and then records the appearance of every new book over a period of several years. Compare final lists, eliminate duplicates, and there's your master list.
Or perhaps - a thesis I tend to prefer - it's just a faulty analogy to begin with. In addition to intelligent agents designing and administering libraries, librarians have a host of external agents that they must deal with, who are constantly removing, replacing, destroying, and losing the books in their care, whether legitimately, as when they check them out and return them, or illegitimately, as when they steal them. This is not a set of influences that botanists have to worry about - the life cycles of wild plants are not subject to the whims of any known intelligent agent, unlike the life cycle of a book in a library.
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