Is Syamsu a creationist or an evolutionist?

I still haven't quite figured this one out. I have asked him directly but he hasn't deigned to reply. Certainly some of his topic titles would suggest so, i.e. 'cut variation= cut racism and atheism', but he seems quite happy to bring up the connection of creationist ideas of immuntability of species as a rationale for racism as well.Perhaps it is simply that his approach is so elliptical that it is impossible to tell what direction he is coming from, he often says that it is noe evolution he is talking about but natural selection and the Darwinian language of 'common judgementalism'.

Yes, that is about as clear as you usually get, anyone other than Syamsu have any idea what this actually means?

Don't mock doing laundry, that stuffs just piles up you know, I blame personal hygiene, think how much less washing you would need to do if you only wore 2 pairs of socks a week.

How can you breed for fat tongues when there is no variation amongst kittens?

So you still think the most relevant area for a debate of the relationship between modern-evolutionary theory and morality/racism is a trial that took place 80 years ago?

I have more commonly seen the lack of a nazi A-bomb represented as being due to Heisenberg's doubts about its feasability, this has been portayed variously as a lack of scientific understanding or as a subterfuge to undermine the programme.

It may well be true that the fundamental issues in evolution Vs creation haven't change dsubstantially, certainly IC arguments are as near as possible to the original watch argument of Paley, but the preponderance of evidence and the specifics of evolutionary theory have changed substantially. And one of the traditional fundamental issues of the debate has not been endemic racism in evolutionary theory, although it is now because today racism is such a handy aspersion to cast on an opponent to throw him instantly on the defensive. Amoral behaviour propagated by undermining God's law perhaps was a traditional issue, but not racism.

In case anyone forgot or missed it the Hagen piece is here .Syamsu's use of heritability is fine here, the problem is his interpretation. The aricle states that 'genes that confer a reproductive advantage generally go to fixation.', what Syamsu ignores is the fact that not all alleles confer a reproductive advantage over their counterparts.The article finishes

quote:

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Aside from the simple, geographically specific adaptations noted above, or genetic diseases (which also consist of one or a few genes), what kinds of traits are heritable? In general, traits that are not under selection can have substantial heritable components, because if they were under positive or negative selection, the genes underlying those traits would go to fixation or be eliminated (respectively), eliminating the heritability; it is this fact that implies that if the trait in question is highly heritable, then it is probably not an adaptation. This is not to say, however, that there no aspect of a complex adaptation can be heritable. Although vision is not heritable, if a particular visual performance parameter were measured precisely enough, a small degree of heritability in that parameter could no doubt be detected. These minor differences would usually be genetic noise, however, not adaptive differences.

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Which shows several specific situations in which genes would not have a heritability of zero.

No-one is saying that adaptive mutations aren't rare Syamsu, it may well be that looking at a population in a stable environment over tens of generations would indeed show effective stasis. The point is that evolution is not proposed to occur over simply tens of generations. As long as you cannot deny the small proportion of beneficial mutations that may arise you cannot discount variation.Your cut-down form of 'natural selection' is fine for studying the reproductive dynamics of a specific population, which you consider a key element 'basic biology', but is next to useless for studying evolution.

How can you corrupt the relationships between spouses by proposing future criteria for choosing a mate. I would suggest that there are a number of criteria considerably more laudable than the traditional ones of money, physical attractiveness, political/social advantage or projected fertility. Quite where a catholic priest gets off on criticising interference in spouse choice is a fair question considering the traditional catholic views against 'mixed marriage', i.e. marriage of a catholic to a non-catholic. Once again you ignore the fact that the measure of fitness is almost entirely contingent on the environment. The 'best' in one environment is not the 'best' in all, I sincerely doubt you could find many evolutionary biologists nowadays who would agree that caucasians are 'the highest type of all', as the statment you so objected to in the Scopes textbook put it. The measure of fitness is not the establishment of a moral absoloute but a measure of how well adapted an organism is to its specific environment.All men being equal does not mean that all men must be the same.If you think that people don't want to categorise peoples value based on goodness then you are inhabiting a fantasy world. Have you never seen the sort of villification levelled at people who commit certain crimes or sometimes just fail to meat certain expectations of a society. If people 'throughout time' have been so concerned with equality why is there still so much homophobia, racism and sexism rampant in the world today, don't try and tell me that its because of Darwinism.People, yourself included, seem perfectly happy to judge things which are better or worse, all you seem to be objecting to is that the criteria significant for natural selection are not the ones you would choose.[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 09-23-2003]

Of course it is judgemental in that a judgement is being made, in the sense of "The faculty of judging; ability to form an opinion; that function of the mind whereby it arrives at a notion of anything; the critical faculty; discernment.", one of the thirteen definitions of judgement in the Oxford english dictionary.I could quite happily criticise Darwin till the cows come home, I don't consider him a sacrosanct figure to revere, similarly there are many aspects of evolutionary theory which could only benefit from rigorous testing and critical evaluation. Your theory, that the fact that darwinism shares terms with the 'language of common judgementalism' therefore prejudices people who believe in a darwinian form of evolution towards racism and being more judgemental is not only not one of those critical evaluations which might be beneficial but hinges on so many assumptions and what you admit are simple guesses on your part as to be worthless.You have not presented a shred of evidence that Darwinism engenders judgementalism, your whole argument seems to be post hoc ergo propter hoc, all racism and judgmentalism after the publication of Darwin's theories can be ascribed to Darwin's theories. Judgementalism is a big temptation for people, and it always has been, it didn't suddenly become easier once Darwin had published, it has always been a popular pastime of humanity to pass judgement upon one another.Thank you for the edit to add yet more wild guesses and unfounded assertions, when are you going to realise that these on their own are never fgoing to constitute an argument. Only if they were stupid enough to conflate fitness in terms of NS with morality. A lot of people use a contingent notion of morality otherwise why would it be alright to kill someone in self defence. The problem with moral absoloutes is where you derive them from.

Good luck with that Syamsu, I'd hate to have to do the stats on a study like that. Who are you going to use for your control group? Christian fundamentalists? Atheist anti-darwinians? Solipsists?

Even if Syamsu isn't comparing the camouflaged and non-camouflaged populations he is still making comparisons. He compares the reproductive success of the non-camouflaged population in an environment with and without the camouflaged sub-population, this comparison must have been made otherwise how would he know that the presence of the camouflaged population acts as a negative selective pressure? Perhaps it was simply another guess.

So despite having measured the same thing in two distinct populations you are going to not compare them? How? Are you going to get one lab to measure one and another lab the other and never ask either for the results? As soon as you have the data for both of those populations you have a comparison. You have data measuring both by the same standard, using that standard is in and of itself enough to establish a comparison, whether you mentally acknowledge it or not. Are you also going to not compare the reproductive rate before and after the introduction of the predator.What use are any of these data in isolation? You can't draw any conclusion about the effects of predation without comparing at least the before and after introduction figures for one population.[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 09-24-2003]

Could you give attributions and quotes to back up those points Syamsu?The point of the comparison is that it allows you to compare things. As you find it useful to compare the reproductive success of identical populations in differing environments so is it useful to compare the success of differing populations, usually only minimally differing ones at that, in identical environments. The context in which it is useful is that of evolution. If you don't believe that evolution occurs then there would be an understandable rationale for your dislike of natural selection. Not in isolation, looking at one particular clonal population of a bacteria will not tell you how to wipe out all variants of that bacteria, if it did then we would not have our current problems with antibiotic resistant forms. To understand something 'generally' it is surely better to compare a large number of examples, otherwise how can you generalise?If comparison of similar populations in different environments is fine does that mean it is OK for me to be prejudiced against people from France?Your analogy with income effects was ridiculous, please show me a study where such measurements were not subsequently used as the basis for comparison. Comparison is not implicit because you are a socialist it is implicit because without comparing the figures you can't say anything meaningful about the effects of the policy.What do you do with your data once it is collected, what you seem to dislike is data-analysis, without which the data themselves are meaningless.