Theory of Evolution

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by bearer_of_truth, Sep 9, 2016.

  1. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Please don't.
    You've quite sufficiently demonstrated that you subscribe to woo and have little idea of what you're talking about.
     
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  3. Mysticlling Registered Member

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    Thanks for helping me to focus on the details; I'll get back soon.
     
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  5. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Scientists published climate research under fake names. Then they were caught
    [Major publisher retracts 43 scientific papers amid wider fake peer-review scandal]
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/5cef75...def40c75/ss_scientists-published-climate.html
    Sorry to see that, The credibility becomes tarnished.
     
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  7. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    No, there isn't.
    What there is, however, is a number of people claiming that his is the case.
    Including one half-wit who suggests that we should dismiss all laboratory (i.e. controlled) experiments (on the grounds tht such experiments don't support his belief) and accept anecdote as fact.

    And if it's not then you have no argument. IF is not a basis for such claims as you are making. (BTW ghost in the machine doesn't mean what you apparently think it does).

    See above with regard to the initial premise. And... WHICH second law? Newton's? Thermodynamics? What makes you think it's "opposite" to that law?

    [quote• A greater intelligence ‘teaches’ the less intelligent in a ‘classroom’ with a ‘student score’ for feedback so this intelligence/s can determine which classroom is most appropriate.[/quote]
    The consequence of this is that all intelligences will therefore "catch up" - at which point there's further growth. Are are you positing an infinity of"higher intelligences"?
    By the way: intelligence isn't learning.

    Or where the "lower intelligence" works at finding out for itself without any previously written record. And "Akashic records" are unmitigated bullsh*t. Unless you can show that they actually exist[1] it's pointless bringing them into a discussion.

    Do you mean a virtual reality as a teaching/ learning environment (i.e. replacing the classroom)? If not then you're probably talking nonsense.
    People don't evolve. Species do.

    Unless someone applies their intelligence to learn for themselves. (One of the ways that's done is called "science": you may have heard of it).

    Please provide a link to ANY Lancet study that even postulates "higher realities".
    After all we have this from a Lancet article on NDEs: "And yet, neurophysiological processes must play some part in NDE. Similar experiences can be induced through..." and " There are still a lot of mysteries to solve, but one has not to talk about paranormal, supernatural or pseudoscience to look for scientific answers on the intriguing relation between consciousness and memories with the brain." I wonder if you could explain why, if NDEs are such as you claim fewer than 1 in 5 people who were once "dead" report them?

    Some of us do.

    Nope.

    1 Which you can't because Blavatsky, Sinnet and Leadbetter were nutcases (and at least one of them was a fraud).
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2016
  8. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    This is exactly that sort of thing that makes me identify Christians with dishonesty. You are being extremely dishonest.
     
  9. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry, you don't know me . It is not hard for me to admit if I act dishonestly. The other thing is If I believe in something , I will defend my position , I will not be persuaded by someone using the word science as a banner to persuade me . example see post # 123, I have seen many of those . You have to keep in mind. Science is here for millions of years Man study science , means what have been and the behavior of natural living organisms and molecular interaction.
     
  10. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    And yet "Sorry, you don't know me " is no such admission.

    Why do you even bother posting your belief (or anything pertaining to it) on a science site when you should be fully aware that science contradicts or outright refutes many of the claims in the Bible?

    And now you're being dishonest again - on at least two counts.
    1) Your example shows that some people were dishonest, not science itself. And you're failing to recognise that such fraudulence was caught by the process of science.
    2) You're using a limited number of cases of falsehood to dismiss the whole of science while - at the same time - ignoring or glossing over the falsehoods (that have been shown to be so) in the Bible because you believe it. You're applying a double (and deceitful) standard.

    What?
    Science is (depending on how it's defined) is anywhere between 200 and 2000 years old.

    And your point here is... what?
     
  11. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    I do not need to know you to see your blatant dishonesty. Perhaps you do not know yourself. I know you well enough to see that you have a cartoon understanding of religion and a worse understanding of science. However, you do not let your obvious ignorance stand in the way of insulting the work of people who actuall take the time to learn a little about both. You would determine how people are allowed to act without actually taking the time to find out anything about their lives or about the world they live in.

    Humans study science, but you clearly do not. You take a few examples of fraud and apply that with a broad brush to all of science without any understanding of context. The fraud you pointed to were not long-standing articles that had undergone extensive review and use.
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I wasn't trying to discredit the Bible. I just don't think that it contains any useful information about the origin of life or about its history subsequent to that origin. What Genesis gives us is a mythical story about the origin of life, actually two of them spliced together, stories that were crafted out of existing Mesopotamian mythology and the Hebrews' own unique theology, to illustrate various proto-philosophical ideas that the early Hebrews thought important. Most obviously, the fact (so they believed) of everything's dependence on their god for its existence. The two versions of the order of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 probably represent two different strands of early tradition that were still both considered authoritative when the Hebrew Bible was finally compiled. The fact that the redactors of Genesis included both orders of creation, despite their clearly being contradictory, suggests that they weren't interpreting their own myths in the highly literalistic way that today's fundamentalists do. They probably saw both stories as stories, stories that communicated what they believed were important truths about how different parts of creation were related to one another and perhaps something about their relative importance.

    That may be true for the Romans, but the Greeks predate the Hebrews. The Mycenean (bronze age) Greeks were already flourishing in the 2'd millenium BCE, before the Hebrews adopted Yahweh as their god, conquered Canaan or established their kingdom. The Myceneans were literate in an early form of Greek, written in a script (linear B) derived from the bronze age Cretan script (linear A).

    But that's just an historical aside that's not really relevant to the point I was making. The point I was making is that Genesis doesn't contain anything remotely like a theory of biological evolution. It contains a mythological order of creation which is something quite different. And there's the fact that neither version of the ancient Hebrews' order of creation resembles the history of life on Earth as currently understood.

    My point was that while the ancient Greeks and Romans didn't really have a more accurate idea of the history of life on Earth than the Hebrews (they believed that giants and mythological creatures like griffins had once existed and even thought that they could demonstrate it with the giant bones they found) they did get close to the idea that the life we see today is the product of natural selection in which species less able to survive had already gone extinct. One of the things that makes the Greco-Roman approach (or at least the approach favored by the Epicureans, many other ideas circulated as well in ancient times) more "scientific" than the Hebrews' approach, was that the Greco-Roman version was far more naturalistic. Its explanatory principles were chance and natural selection, not divine creation.

    It's still a long ways from Darwin, since the ancient theories weren't theories of the origin of new species at all. They imagined that all possible anatomies had come together originally by chance in some fanciful origin of life event, and then natural selection simply weeded out and eliminated forms unfit for survival. So for them, the history of life was a history of the reduction in the number of species.

    But given that students in the early 19th century still received classical educations and were required to read Lucretius, one can see where some of the impetus of Darwin and Wallace's thinking may have came from. They just imagined that all of the diversity of life didn't appear all at once originally and then was trimmed back by natural selection, but imagined instead that variation occurred continually throughout the history of life as did natural selection. That new idea revolutionized the natural selection idea and made it possible to imagine how new species could appear to fill new ecological niches. The history of life became the history of the appearance of new species.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2016
  13. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    In fairness, this thread was originally begun in the Religion forum. While the original thread-starter seemed incoherent to me, the intent was clearly to start a creationism vs evolution discussion.

    Then one of the moderators, for some inexplicable reason, moved the thread to the Biology and Genetics forum. Which effectively excludes any discussion of the original thread topic.

    Instead of issuing reprimands for continuing to discuss the original topic in one of the science fora, perhaps the thread should be moved back where it originated.
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Are you really demanding we ignore part of the Bible? If so, fair enough. I demand you ignore Genesis 1 because I have decided it's incorrect.
    I studied it for four years and he's pretty much spot-on.
    Great! It's always a plus if you can admit you're wrong about something. I look forward to seeing you do so.
    If you will not be persuaded by science, you might want to reconsider posting on a science forum, and find a Christian religious forum instead.
     
  15. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    No. It was intended to disparage evolution without engaging with it intellectually. The OP was certainly happy to revisit dated creationist talking points about evolution, but did not seek to evaluate any idea other than a cartoonish misunderstanding of evolution. Only the inferred motive was religion (or possibly visions). Posts #94 and #95 were the last posts made on the Religion forum in a comprehensive reply to the OP's posts and there was no reason to leave the thread there.

    Indeed, even if someone wanted to create a thread claiming a creation model was the best way of explaining historical biological information then it belongs in the biology forum.

    The religion forum would best be use if someone wanted to debate the theological whys behind one or more creation stories, in my opinion.
     
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  16. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Sure, why not?

    I may or may not understand timojin's point, but he seems to be arguing that the order of creation in Genesis 1 represents some kind of proto-evolutionary account. Not Genesis 2 or any other Bible passage. Genesis 1.

    I disagree with timojin about that, for reasons given in posts 111 and 129. But I have no problem with timojin expressing that kind of idea and don't want to insult him for doing it. It's an interesting topic of discussion.
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, I have no problem with people doing that. I _do_ have a problem with people insisting that one portion of the Bible is absolutely inerrant, while another part can be safely ignored. That's not a self-consistent belief.

    However, if he wants to approach it from the perspective that any part of the Bible might be in error, that makes a lot more sense.
     
  18. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    But a rational discussion might want to consider where the first creation story ends. If the discussion were a religious one, we might want to talk about the lessons taught in the first and second creation stories. But since the literal content of the two stories are at odds with one another, and with biological history and cosmology, there is no a priori reason to suspect either is a reliable factual account. Evaluation of evidence is part and parcel of rational discussion, and if timojin wishes to evade that burden, then he is proselytizing, speaking without listening, regardless of which forum is being used.

    But that's off-topic for this thread, which is about the misunderstandings of evolution that bearer_of_truth wanted correction on.
     
  19. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Genesis 2:3?

    I agree that might have been how the ancient Hebrews read them, more as teaching-stories than as literal historical accounts. That raises the difficult question of how the ancients understood their own myths. Literally? Figuratively? It's still an area of active academic dispute.

    True. But I'm not sure that's the point.

    I think that it's indisputable that the 'days' of Genesis 1 are an evolutionary account of a minimal sort. 'Evolution' basically means 'change over time'. (As in the evolution of a physical system.) It needn't mean 'biological evolution' and certainly not 'evolution by natural selection'. (Stars evolve along the 'main sequence'.) If there was an observer other than God observing the Earth as the 'days' passed and the Genesis 1 creation proceeded, things would definitely have been changing as time passed.

    Of course there is nothing unique about that. Pretty much all of the ancient cosmogonies involved a sequential series of events. And the Genesis 1 account is anything but naturalistic, so it violates science's methodological naturalism. The evolution of the early Earth system in Genesis 1 isn't the result of physical principles immanent in its own nature, but the result of creative supernatural actions coming from outside.

    That's why I pointed out that the Greeks seem to have pioneered the idea of a naturalistic account that employed the concepts of chance and natural selection. But it still isn't the same account that Darwin and Wallace proposed, and it isn't the account that evolutionary biology embraces today.

    I don't think that the interesting questions here are the questions of the literal truth of the various accounts. What's of most interest from an intellectual history perspective is how diverse cultures construct their accounts and how they go about trying to explain things.

    The Greeks don't seem to have really had any better grasp of the history of life than the ancient Hebrews did. Their evidence was flawed and lacking too. (Giants? Monsters?) That isn't the point. The point isn't the details of their history of life, it's how they constructed it, what kind of explanatory strategies they employed.

    I think that this has the makings of being a very good thread, if it can avoid atheist knee-jerking and focus on the more interesting stuff. What is evolution? How did the ancients go about explaining the world around them? How did they understand the diversity of life and the relationship of mankind to other lifeforms? When are their unfamiliar styles of exposition and explanation scientific (or at least proto-scientific?) And ultimately, what is the historical relation between the ancient accounts and the kind of scientific thinking we engage in today?

    Which is why I continue to think that the thread should be returned to 'religion' or perhaps to 'philosophy'. If it remains in 'Biology and Genetics', people have to be willing to explore the deep conceptual roots of those subjects.

    I think that Bearer of Truth's "questions" were rhetorical. He was trying to make an argument against biological evolution of humans from apes or ape-like ancestors, however lame his argument was. (It was basically just an argument-from-incredulity.) He didn't want correction, he wanted to correct us.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2016
  20. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Then you agree with me that we cannot read the whole of the first story without including part of chapter two. This particular chapter mark has no basis in the narrative.

    You are saying that the God of Genesis 1:1-2:3 did nothing to demonstrate mastery over time's arrow, which I think we can all agree on. And that you feel free to interpret "evolution" as simply "change over time" and not necessarily the biological senses of "change of populations over time" or "a scientific theory of the predictable elements of change of populations over time" even including the antique sense of "change of a biological individual over time" which is typically defined as "development" today. The latter is straying far from where the OP positioned this thread.

    I disagree. It violated science's methodological empiricism, which renders it as a model of history which cannot be meaningfully communicated on the merits of factual observation. It has zero explanatory power to the layout of the fossil record and such biological change in populations which have happened in human history. It's not a communicable framework for making precise predictions. If it has a domain of applicability, that lies strictly in the past. It's a story. One might as well take "Hansel and Gretel" as a textbook for behavior of Black Forest witches in the Middle Ages.


    If it has a domain of applicability, that lies strictly in the past. Based on methodological empiricism, it is indistinguishable from a made-up story with no bearing on actual, as opposed to claimed, facts.

    That is a thread for human cultures or religion forums, but this is a thread about "The Theory of Evolution." If you want to create a new thread on some other sub-forum, you are welcome to pick some other title and try and establish the parameters of the discussion.

    It was an ignorant argument-from-incredulity. FAQs written both by scientists and co-coreligionist advocates explicitly call out the deep misunderstanding inherit in such a question.
     
  21. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    On a scale of 0 to 10, how inexplicable is it?

    Which was what? Please be specific and show your work with appropriate citations.
     
  22. Mysticlling Registered Member

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    Thanks for the feed back it has been very helpful. Oddly enough it hasn't really changed the picture in my mind it's mostly made me realize my words are extremely crude. All I can say is that the stress in the wire cage trying to hold the 1000's of white crows that don't fit the present sci paradigm is presently beyond the elastic limit.
    I.e. mind before matter.
     
  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Science thrives on what it can't explain yet.
     

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