Evolution and complexity

Why would you want to single me out since everyone's telling you the same thing? But you did claim it was standard terminology. You chastised people for not understanding what you were talking about.A quick websearch reveals that you're talking about the work of Stephen Toulmin, where he suggests a nomenclature for logical analysis that includes the divisions 'claim', 'evidence' and 'warrant.' My guess is that your book is attempting to unsuccessfully apply Toulmin's nomenclature and analysis.You can find a description of Toulmin's work at the Wikipedia entry for Stephen Toulmin. In the introduction it says that he sought "to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments."In other words, his work hasn't been found useful in scientific discussions, and both you and your book's attempts to do so only result in confusion. You're allowing yourself to be unduly influenced by the writings of someone with a poor grasp of both Toulmin argumentation and its appropriate areas of application. You can find the Socrates example of a logical argument at literally thousands of websites. If you check a few out you'll see that none use the term "warrant."But that's not what's important. Let's say for the sake of argument that you're dead right and Toulmin argumentation is precisely what's required here. Unfortunately for you, you've wondered into a bizarro world where no one is familiar with Toulmin argumentation. If you want to be understood you'll have to adjust your terminology.--Percy

And, you know, thank God that it isn't. I occured to me the other day how little confidence people have in the judicial system - often specifically because of stringent evidence rules that exclude some crucial, probative piece of evidence on some legal technicality, leading to a conviction everyone knows is obviously false.Because, in the courtroom, confidence in evidence is essentially a bivalent quantity - either we have confidence in that piece of evidence, or we do not, in which case it is excluded from consideration. In science we can approach confidence in a much more continuous way, where evidence can be considered with the weight our confidence in its validity gives it. Oddly enough, science's looser requirements in our confidence of the validity evidence is what leads to the conclusions of science being much more accurate than the conclusions of the courtroom.

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Why would you want to single me out since everyone's telling you the same thing?

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Sorry Percy, it was not my intention to single you out.Everyone? There was another poster who mentioned another book with this usage in it...Something "edge". Anyhow, I don't think the few people who have posted are a statistically signifigant sampling even for this site, much less the population as a whole. Now if you are using the (10-20) members I see regularly posting as a basis for your wording, then fine. I don't expect every one of you to know every usage of every word ... That's why we have dictionaries. I do, however, expect others to use qualifying terms when I include them.

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I never said the book's usage was standard terminology, that's your phrasing. I don't think the everyday man or woman on the street even knows many logic terms.

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But you did claim it was standard terminology. You chastised people for not understanding what you were talking about.

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"Standard" like other words may have different meanings depending on context. Notice how I qualified my usage (man or woman on the street). A hand full of people not bein familiar with a usage, does not neccessarily mean that usage is wrong, arcane, obcure, etc..

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A quick websearch reveals that you're talking about the work of Stephen Toulmin,...

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And a quick websearch of Darwin (for example) will not tell you a lot about current evolutionary theory or how widespread any of the newer variations is, now will it?I found it being used in a variety of fields including formal debate(what I thought this was, at least in the science forums),business,law,philosophy,and others. If you want to see current usage, I think it best not to limit one's search terms.

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My guess is that your book is attempting too unsuccessfully apply Toulmin's nomenclature and analysis.

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It's not my book. I already gave my opinion of the books arguments. That does not automatically make every deinition they use incorrect or wrong. I'm not in the habit of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" as it were.

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But that's not what's important. Let's say for the sake of argument that you're dead right and Toulmin argumentation is precisely what's required here. Unfortunately for you, you've wondered into a bizarro world where no one is familiar with Toulmin argumentation. If you want to be understood you'll have to adjust your terminology.

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Been there tried that. I asked for anyone to print out/copy/paste the part they thought was a warrant. Even if you use the word justify for warrant, that should have been clear enough.

Wait, what? Why would you think we have formal debates here?That's not at all what scientific discourse is like, and for good reason. That's not "adjusting your terminology"; that's demanding the rest of us follow suit. I don't see any justification for doing so, and I repeat - complaining about a lack of "warrant" when such a thing is not required is nitpicky and contrary to a spirit of rigorous debate.

"Everyone" only refers to the participants in this thread, of course. Examples would be Crash in Message 56, Chiroptera concurring in Message 57, jar in Message 70 and dwise1 in Message 64It was more than "a handful of people not being familiar" with your use of "warrant" - no one could figure out what you were on about.Your usage is not only unfamiliar to the "man or woman on the street", it's unfamiliar to scientific discourse. As I explained, the terminology is part of Toulmin analysis, a specialized approach suitable for fields like rhetoric. You won't find it anywhere else. As I suggested before, check out as many of the thousands of sites using the Socrates example as you like and see how many use the term "warrant" to explain it. You tried using terminology that other people understand and it didn't work as well for you as what's happening now? You enjoy general derision at your inability to express yourself clearly? Except that you weren't clear, and that's because you don't have a clear understanding of Toulmin analysis, nor does your book, and no one else here is familiar with it. A lack of understanding is reflected in both you and your book's usage of the word "warrant". Just contrast you and your book's usage of it with the clear exposition of it at Wikipedia. You even referred to my explanatory analogy as a "warrant", which is how we ended up discussing this instead of the topic.I can only repeat what I've already said. If you'd like to be understood so that discussion can focus on the topic instead of on your odd word usage, then speak plainly using common definitions. When you require unfamiliar terminology, then introduce the term and define it.--Percy

Selective pressures can cause change if the net pressure to change is positive or negative (data).Selective pressures can be equal and opposite at which point they effectively cancel each other out. (warrant)As change occurs, the strength of opposing selective pressures can increase (warrant)Conclusion: Change can continue occurring until the strength of the opposing selective pressures become equal and opposite. At this point the net pressure to change is neither positive nor negative so change does not occur. When change does not occur it is called stasis. Removing, changing or adding a selective pressure could lead to the net pressure being nonzero and thus lead to change. No - but evolution isn't about ideal genomes, it's about populations moving towards an evolutionarily stable state. Populations probably never achieve a perfectly evolutionarily stable state but from generation to generation they jump around this state and the average is the evolutionarily stable state. It doesn't help that in the real world what the stable state actually is changes with each generation either. However, the stable state itself can find itself quite stable, hovering around an average as it were. And so we end up with a multidimensional model of population change.We call this hovering about 'stasis' since no generally observable change is happening when considered over many generations. Look at a jungle or dense forest. There is a clear pressure towards driving trees to be tall - they need the sunlight and other trees might block some of that. However, there is a pressure against being too tall. Being too tall gives rise to stability issues, and nutrient transport issues. The taller a tree, the less stable and the more difficult it is to get nutrients from the ground to the topmost. The advantage of getting all the sunlight a tree needs is pitted against the disadvantage of getting nutrients and being upright. Eventually the disadvantage of getting taller will outweigh the advantage of getting taller and this stabilises things.If a population of trees is a too tall on average the next generation will be less tall. If too short, the next generation will be taller. There may well be an evolutionarily stable state of some tall trees and some short trees. The iterated prisonner's dilemma can give some more insight into ESS (examine the Monte Carlo conclusions) Evolution is hereditary change in a population over generations. Natural selection is a mechanism that gives rise to change that is adaptive. If we could remove natural selection we would not have adaptation but we would still have evolution. Since it is not possible to remove natural selection - evolution and adaptation go hand in hand of course. Evolution is not synonymous with adaptation however...more adaptation is the result of evolution because of natural selection.

That "hand full" [sic] just happens to be everybody else who's involved in this discussion. That's 100% of your audience. If nobody could understand what you were saying, then that is hardly insignificant. And if you knew what you were saying, then you should have been able to paraphrase it in a manner that would have better communicated that meaning, rather than continuing to parrot the exact same obscure verbiage that nobody could understand -- we have often observed creationists insisting on using the same obscure verbiage repeatedly and have recognized that as a sign that they are merely repeating something that they had read or heard and had not actually understood.Now, it happens at times when I'm dancing that I will try to lead something that my partner could not follow. If I were playing the role of SimonSays, then I would castigate her for being unable to dance. And if no woman at that dance could follow my lead, then I would castigate them all for it.Instead, what I do is to try to figure out what it was about my lead that didn't work. And, assuming that her frame feels like she should be able to follow (believe me, you can feel a dancer's level very quickly), I will try that move again only this time I would modify my lead in order to make it clearer to her what I intend. In other words, if it didn't work then I will modify my approach in an attempt to get it to work.Or as my Lindy instructor has said during class (in which we regularly rotate partners): "Remember that some of you are having problems with this, so you'll have problems with some partners and not with others. But, if you're having problems with all your partners, then that means that you're the problem!"If you again need for me to explain this analogy to you several times in great detail, please let me know.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

I don't know if Simonsays will return, so I'll post a couple thoughts deriving from the recent experience with Simonsays, and also with IamJoseph.Good writing is simple and easy to understand, but there's a general perception among laypeople that scientific writing is the opposite. This probably stems from exposure to unintelligible scientific writing, but the unintelligibility stems from their own unfamiliarity and hopefully not from unnecessary complexity or terminology in the prose.Some of those who bring this misperception here seem to believe that everyday words and modes of expressions aren't appropriate here, that it is necessary to use complex terminology and phraseology to communicate an air of authoritative knowledge and fluency. Some very old timers here might remember TrueCreation's early attempts at participation where he would try to shoehorn the most complex terminology he could into his messages, often with hilarious results (TrueCreation began participating while still a young teen - he quickly improved).What we should really try to do is use the most understandable terminology possible to communicate what we mean. Depending upon topic, this may require specialized terminology, but if a common word will do then we should use it. In other words, eschew obfuscation, er, I mean, be clear. --Percy