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Author | Topic: Who Owns the Standard Definition of Evolution | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
sensei Member (Idle past 201 days) Posts: 482 Joined: |
Taq: Yes, that was what you said. If it was not, then your argument was pointless. Even so, your changed "statement" that the proven theory beyond doubt, is the preferred theory, is not even useful.If a theory is proven beyond doubt, why even compare to other theories and deciding which is more preferred? But that was not what you said. You said it was the preferred theory, because you think it makes good or better predictions. You cannot even follow along with your own line of reasoning.
Taq: Exactly, branching off still makes it one tree as a whole. And that does not prove common ancestry with the alien species. So if any general rule holds, it is that hierachical tree does not always mean common ancestry.You can continue making up rules and apply them inconsistently, only where it fits your narrative. And then call it evidence beyond reasonable doubt. But those rules don't hold in general.
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Percy Member Posts: 22941 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
sensei in Message 691 writes: Taq: Yes, that was what you said. If it was not, then your argument was pointless. Quoting Taq's exact words from when he first stated it in Message 674:
Taq in Message 674 writes: The theory proven beyond a reasonable doubt is the preferred theory. While the exact words may vary each time he says it, I haven't noticed Taq saying anything different. I think somehow you got it backwards in your mind and didn't verify your recollection.
Even so, your changed "statement" that the proven theory beyond doubt, is the preferred theory, is not even useful. "Proven" is just a casual shorthand way of saying, "Supported by a great deal of evidence." All accepted theories, including the theory of evolution, fulfill this criteria. Theories can't actually be certain or proven in any mathematical sense because of the principle of tentativity.
If a theory is proven beyond doubt, why even compare to other theories and deciding which is more preferred? As mentioned a couple times now, tentativity is an important concept in science. Nothing is certain in science. All theory is open to change or even rejection in light of new information or improved insight.
But that was not what you said. You said it was the preferred theory, because you think it makes good or better predictions. Making successful predictions is the second criteria Taq listed. Being supported by the evidence, or to put it another way, placing the evidence into a rational interpretive framework, was the first. Here are Taq's exact words from Message 679:
Taq in Message 679 writes:
Moving on:
You cannot even follow along with your own line of reasoning. I think it's clear that you're either making up things Taq never said, or you just don't understand the information Taq has provided.
Taq: Exactly, branching off still makes it one tree as a whole. And that does not prove common ancestry with the alien species. You've lost the plot. Taq was responding to the possibility that life on Earth was seeded from space, in which case of course it's one tree. That's implicit in what Taq said.
So if any general rule holds, it is that hierachical tree does not always mean common ancestry. You left out the word "nested." A nested hierarchical tree. And you're right, a nested hierarchy does not conclusively prove common ancestry. For example, an omniscient creator could create all life with all the evidence of common ancestry included, even though there was not any actual common ancestry. But for natural processes, only evolution can produce a nested hierarchy
You can continue making up rules and apply them inconsistently, only where it fits your narrative. And then call it evidence beyond reasonable doubt. But those rules don't hold in general. No one's making up any rules. If you reread the posts carefully enough to make sure you understand what's being said then you'll be able to see that. --Percy
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Taq Member Posts: 10299 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
sensei writes: Yes, that was what you said. If it was not, then your argument was pointless. What I was trying to do is show you how theories are assessed. For example: Theory A makes very specific predictions. Theory B can accommodate any possible observation. In this case, Theory A is the preferred theory. In the case of the theory of evolution and common design, the theory of evolution makes a very specific prediction which is a nested hierarchy. Common design does not. Common design can accommodate any and all combinations of features and DNA sequences. On its face, the theory of evolution is already ahead. This is before we even look at the evidence. Your response to this basic explanation of assessing theories was to say that I had downgraded evolution from proven (beyond a reasonable doubt) to just the preferred theory. This is a complete mischaracterization.
If a theory is proven beyond doubt, why even compare to other theories and deciding which is more preferred? Because that is what ID/creationists are asking us to do. We are explaining why common design doesn't measure up to the theory of evolution, both from a theoretical basis (makes better predictions) and from an evidentiary basis (proven beyond a reasonable doubt). This was all hashed out 140 years ago:
quote: Exactly, branching off still makes it one tree as a whole. And that does not prove common ancestry with the alien species. It would be strong evidence for common ancestry. As mentioned by Percy, panspermia is a thing. It could also be that aliens seeded our planet with life by bringing in a microorganism from their planet, or seeded both planets.
You can continue making up rules and apply them inconsistently, only where it fits your narrative. And then call it evidence beyond reasonable doubt. But those rules don't hold in general.
They are applied consistently. I also find it rather telling that you use imagined evidence against the theory. Why not look at the evidence that actually exists?
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9489 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: Member Rating: 6.2 |
I think somehow you got it backwards in your mind and didn't verify your recollection.
Or sensei is a liar and/or a troll.What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts "God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness. If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up, why would you have to lie?
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Taq Member Posts: 10299 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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Theodoric writes: Or sensei is a liar and/or a troll. I tend to think that this type of behavior in general is a mixture of cognitive dissonance and conditioning from ID/creationist literature. ID/creationism is almost entirely rhetoric and semantics. This is why we see them arguing over the semantics of how theories are described instead of actually addressing the data. In fact, they will use imaginary evidence as a rhetorical device, as seen in this very thread. ID/creationist literature is all about how words are defined, so that is what they are conditioned to do. For example, they will argue incessantly that DNA is designed because they have defined DNA as a code. What they won't do is reference actual DNA sequence data. What we have is two groups with different purposes. Science is trying to explain the data using the scientific method. ID/creationism is trying to justify their religious beliefs using rhetoric and semantics.
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popoi Junior Member Posts: 4 Joined: |
sensei writes in Message 685:
If you are consistent in your reasoning, you would not doubt that you are related to the aliens in this case. If you do have doubts for whatever reason, then you gonna have to admit that your whole reasoning that leads to believing in common ancestry, is shaky at best. And that the hierarchical tree itself does not prove common ancestry at all. The reasoning was never "If it fits in a hierarchical tree it was produced by common ancestry". Obviously we can put a lot of things in a tree that don't even have ancestors much less a single one, and you could already do it with life since it's a subcategory of matter. The reasoning is that if the diversity of life was produced by a series of populations diverging and changing, we would expect all of life to fit in a nested hierarchy defined mostly by those points of divergence. But there are also a lot of specific features we would expect that tree to have that wouldn't be present in one you could make about galaxies or cars or whatever non-living thing. So to go back to the previous question:
sensei writes in Message 685: But let me ask you this. Suppose we find extraterrestrial life. And we analyze life on Earth and the lifeforms we found from other planet(s). And we find that single celled lifeforms on other planets have similarities with those on Earth. Then we could fit all into a single hierarchical tree, could we not? That depends on the nature of the similarities. We could classify both sets as life by virtue of the alien set also satisfying the definition of "life", but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will share the sort of things in common that are predicted by common descent and found in all Earth-based life. Different theories would have different predictions at that point. Panspermia would predict those similarities since it does propose that both sets of life actually do have a common origin. Multiple origins wouldn't, and would probably propose a level of classification below "Life" to encompass the products of each of those multiple origins and the characteristics that apply within that group but not to the other. The functional design theory might predict some degree of similarity but wouldn't necessarily expect it to fall in to a single tree, which would be a fresh opportunity for that explanation to predict anything with any kind of specificity.
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Taq Member Posts: 10299 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
popoi writes: The reasoning is that if the diversity of life was produced by a series of populations diverging and changing, we would expect all of life to fit in a nested hierarchy defined mostly by those points of divergence. But there are also a lot of specific features we would expect that tree to have that wouldn't be present in one you could make about galaxies or cars or whatever non-living thing. You can force any group of items into a tree. The big question is how good is the fit. For scientists, it needs to have a number on it in order to be science. This is why scientists constructed several methods for objectively measuring how well a data set fit a tree-like structure. As it turns out, complex life gets a much higher score than random distributions of characters, as we would expect to see if common ancestry is true. The other question we could ask is what we would expect to see if common design is true. The answer is anything. There is absolutely no reason why we would expect to see tree-like structures in the data if common design is true. We would just as likely expect a species to have fur and three middle ear bones as we would a species with feathers and three middle ear bones.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 6076 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Part of creationist "basic created kinds" nonsense is to identify species as being in the same "basic created kind" depending on whether they can form hybrids. Doesn't matter what kind of hybrid -- fertile, infertile (eg, mules), or limited-fertililty (eg, ligers) -- ; if they can form a hybrid then they're of the same kind.
Yesterday, I just learned about human-hamster hybrids, AKA humsters:
quote: So then, according to creationists, does that make us members of the "basic created hamster kind"? Or of the larger "basic rodent kind"?
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Percy Member Posts: 22941 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 7.0 |
An article in today's Washington Post invites us to Meet the surprisingly complex ancestor of all life on Earth. The article does not appear to be behind a paywall. The original paper appearted in Nature: The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system
What's new is the possibility that early life became complex much than earlier currently thought, that LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) occurred around 4.2 billion years ago. This is a surprisingly early date because most assume that the bombardment of Earth by asteroids and comets between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years would have sterilized the planet. What's not new is LUCA itself. Whoever and whenever it was, there is a very widespread consensus that there was a single LUCA. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Add subtitle to message.
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The Barbarian Member Posts: 32 From: Dallas, TX US Joined: |
Biologists use "change in allele frequency in a population" or words to that effect.
Evolution is defined as a change in the genetic composition of a population over successive generations.Evolution Definition and Examples - Biology Online Dictionary
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Linda Grasso Junior Member Posts: 2 Joined: |
Just weighing in here: The definition of ALL words have already been defined. Society, which is in the hands of Satan, has taken the bait to re-define words such as "Evil", and "Good", and "Love". It is not for everyone, unfortunately tares are among us. ty
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Taq Member Posts: 10299 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
The Barbarian writes:
Biologists use "change in allele frequency in a population" or words to that effect. "Descent with modification" was the definition Darwin used, and it still works as a good general description. Allele frequencies incorporates a modern understanding of genetics
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Taq Member Posts: 10299 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Percy writes: What's new is the possibility that early life became complex much than earlier currently thought, that LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) occurred around 4.2 billion years ago. This is a surprisingly early date because most assume that the bombardment of Earth by asteroids and comets between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years would have sterilized the planet. If abiogenesis did occur 4.2 billion years ago it also indicates that simple life should be somewhat common in the universe (i.e. where there is a rocky planet with liquid water). David Kipping put out a paper just a couple of years ago that looked at the chances of abiogenesis being easy or rare. In 2020, his analysis had a 2.8 times higher chance for easy abiogenesis over rare based on a much later date for abiogenesis. However, one of Kipping's latest videos on his Cool Worlds youtube channel reanalyzes the odds with this new data, and the chances are now statistically significant at 13.8 to 1 in favor of easy abiogenesis.
Edited by Admin, : Embed YouTube video.
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