Questioning The Evolutionary Process

100 ways? Yes, you'll probably still have a dog. But if you selectively breed for non-dogginess, and do it for enough successive generations, eventually you'll wind up with something that may be able to produce offspring with its brothers and sisters but not with other dogs. That's speciation and there's no reason to deny it exists other than religious conviction.Why do you think housecats are so similar to lions and tigers? (After all, they're still cats, but just try breeding a male housecat with a lioness.) Did God say, "I think I'll create a whole bunch of stuff that's really similar because I'm too lazy to think of novel creatures"?Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.

Hang on there, Nem.We need to get Elmer over the "mutation" hump first.He doesn't seem willing to admit that a random, spontaneous mutation can contribute to an organism's survival.We'll deal with the question of "species" after we get Elmer up to speed.

Well, except when they stop being microbes and become parts of a multicellular organism:Slime Mould and the Transition to MulticellularitySpecies platonism - the idea that members of a species, despite their individual differences, share a fixed "essence" that cannot be altered - has been a discredited notion in biology for 200 years, NJ. When you can tell me why a dog is a dog, and not something else, you'll be on the way to refuting your own argument. The simple truth of the matter is that we can and do observe organisms crossing that species boundary on a regular basis.

But this experiment was done. Reptiles were bred with reptiles 100 jillion different ways. Now for some perverse reason you want to call some of them dogs.Somewhere around 60 million years ago (give or take a bunch) something weasel like bred a bunch of different ways. Some of those weasels you call dogs and some you call cats but they are still weasels. Of course, what you might call a weasel wasn't actually a weasel either.If you preform the same experiment with current dogs eventually you will get a lot of very, very different things but by taxonomic rules you have to keep calling them all dogs. Some might be small herbivores, some the size of rhinos but you would (if I understand the rules correctly ) still have to call them dogs.

I have some objections to the speciation claim. Wouldn't something like allopatric speciation really just be variations due to isolation, genetic drift, etc, thus culminating in sub-species?If you think about it from the perspective of binomial nomenclature, a "species" is just as ambiguous as what the Bible refers to as a "kind." And the definitions for species pretty much models that of the subordinate category of subspecie.I suppose it cannot be said in linear terms, as in, being unable to quantify the amount of changes necessary to bring one category either higher or lower. But what the then is the defining principles between the two? Is it sexual (in)compatibility, morphological (dis)similarities, or population splits? Because they are both feline. There are some anatomical problems with that. No need to get graphic, but it sounds quite uncomfortable. Huh? Can you expound, please?

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

The differences between species - or "kinds" if you prefer - is also "just variation." What does that mean?

No. Why not? Because nature abhors a vacuum, for example, and the English language abhors attempts to pretend that words have fixed, literal meanings. There appears to be a rule in Elmerish, your personal language, that selection must be conscious, but there is no such rule in English.You can argue against me and the O. E. D. if you want to on another thread, but this one's about science.So far, it seems that your objections to the Theory of Evolution (the biology based one) seem to be about language use. There's no science in anything you've said in this thread. You seem to have the odd idea that maths shouldn't be used in science.Are we to take it that this is a position of neo-Lamarckism? Lamarck was all in favour of using numbers in science, so shouldn't you use someone else's name?And what is the evidence for neo-Lamarckism?

It looks to me that your are actually hankering after gods. What do you mean by "universally acting force" in biology?Evolution is a dynamic systematic process. Furthermore, what is the problem with it working through a series of molecular accidents?A series of accidents can produce something wonderful. If you ran a coin-tossing tournament with 1024 contestants, you would wind up with someone who had tossed 10 heads in a row. (I hope I have remembered the details of this right; it is from a book, but I forget which one).Here is Darwin's summary statement, reformatted to suit the age of the sound-bite. What part of this do you find yourself able to dispute? (please show your work)

Hi crashfrog--The other darwinian participants in this thread all seem to be having 'bad hair days', and I'm not about to respond to posts that are nothing more than adolescent, 'in your face', attitude. But so far you are still acting like a well-mannered adult, so I'll try one more post.

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No more than "size of population" is a mathematical abstraction.

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Actually, 'size of population', stated as such, is an abstraction, albeit not a mathematical one. But never mind. It is the darwinian concept of 'fitness' that we were discussing, in particular your definition of that concept---"Fitness is a measure of increase in gene frequency. Therefore it's a dimensionless ratio of the frequency of a specific allele as represented among all a population's alleles at that given locus."Anything that is, as you put it, "dimensionless" is not concrete, and so far as I know, anything that is not concrete, is abstract.

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Fitness is merely another way to say "differential reproduction", it's just a way to describe what is obvious from observation

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If that is all that it is, then I really have to wonder why it is not simply stated that way? Why did neo-darwinists call 'differential reproduction', 'fitness', when 'fitness', empirically stated, refers to the overall relationship between a certain something and a certain set of circumstances, but "differential reproduction", arithmetically stated, refers solely to a quantitive comparison of outputs? I really wish they hadn't, because all they did was to create equivocation and confusion.

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- some individuals have physical advantages over their peers that result in greater reproductive success.

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Yes, but what does that have to do with evolution?

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It's not any more an abstraction than molarity is an abstraction.

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I had to look up 'molarity'. And again, 'molarity', as a concept, is an abstraction. And the units used to measure the degree of molarity in various solutions are also abstractions. But when those units are used to delimit and describe a particular solution, they describe a concrete phenomenon, and thus make an empirical statement. The same goes for such statements as 'three-legged dog', '4 chambered heart', '1 gallon bucket', etc.But this does not seem to apply to 'fitness', at least not in your definition, because there does not seem to be any concrete object involved. I mean, a "dimensionless ratio of frequency" between concrete objects (say, 'alleles', if 'alleles' are concrete objects?) is not a concrete object, in se, but an arithmetical abstraction. Now, can 'fitness', as defined, be made concrete, and so, empirical, when used to describe particular cases, as in, "Paul is 1" shorter than Joe", or "Mary has 3 more children than Jane has"? Probably, but these are simple statements of facts, and how any general rule or universal principle wrt evolution can be inferred from these facts is beyond me.

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Fitness has never been defined as you define it.

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Simply not true. "Fitness" was for hundreds of years, and in fact still is, defined exactly as I define it. It was this definition that was the original sense in which both Darwin and Spencer, and the others, used the word. The neo-darwinian sense of the word is a johnny-come-lately. Something added after the coming of gene-theory in the 20th century. As pointed out, it is a very special sense of the word that, since it in no way resembles the original sense of the word, causes much equivocation, confusion, and this confusion lends itself to sophistry and manipulation. The same criticism applies to 'selection'.

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Your understanding of evolution, if we can even call it "understanding" when you don't understand it at all, isn't archaic or supplanted; it's idiosyncratic.

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Whoops, now you're starting with the personal insults.Bye.

EvC Forum is moderated. If you have are having a problem then it is suggested that you post to the General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures 13.0 thread rather than taking problems into your own hands. Simply ignoring responses has a tendency to cause people to just up the volume.EvC Forum also has a set of Forum Guidelines, and referring to other thread participants as adolescent and ill-mannered and so forth is discouraged by rule 10, which attempts to encourage civility in discussion. Again, you should take any moderation issues to the moderation thread linked to above.--Percy

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Crashfrog: Your understanding of evolution, if we can even call it "understanding" when you don't understand it at all, isn't archaic or supplanted; it's idiosyncratic.

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Crashfrog is not insulting you personally. Judging from your posts here, his assessment of your understanding of evolution is reasonable.I suspect that it's much easier to tell yourself that you are an intellectual adult amongst insulting adolescents than it is to present scientific evidence for this mysterious thing called neo-Lamarckism. Prove me wrong.

That's not true. For instance, molar ratio is a dimensionless ratio, as well. Anything given in, say, "parts per million" or "percent by weight" is a dimensionless ratio, but there's nothing abstract about it. Well, I just did state it that way. What are you asking, exactly? When individuals have differential reproductive success as a result of heritable physical advantages (which we know now are genetic), that is evolution. No, it's not. It's the measurement of exactly how many molecules of a substance are in a solution.If you're counting the molecules, how can that be abstract? That's no more abstract than, say, seeing that there are ten apples in front of me. That's about as concrete a measurement as it gets. The individual and the individual's genes are the concrete objects involved. Are you saying that individuals exist? Your source? No, I'm not. You'll know when I want to insult you. Nonetheless I'm not especially impressed with your insistence on internet self-martyrdom. If you're going run off with hurt feelings at every mention of the fact that you are wrong, because you are misinformed about this subject, who on Earth do you expect to be left to talk to?Man up, Elmer. You haven't been insulted. You've simply been shown to be wrong. It happens; it even happens to me. (Quite often.) If being wrong hurts your little fee-fees, then I suggest you grow a thicker skin before you run headlong into reality and really. hurt yourself.Edited by Admin, : Fix italic dBCode.

I'm not seeing the profundity. What makes this organism any different than a virus which needs a host? My question is what is a species? It seems ambiguous, especially when juxtaposed to a subspecie. Apparently I'm not alone in the regard.This reminds me of an argument I had awhile back about artificial intelligence. The OP stated that artificial intelligence is actual intelligence. I asked him what intelligence constitutes. He couldn't answer it intelligently.What then is the difference between specie and subspecie? It seems that they are based on capricious and not well-defined principles.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

That's all speculation based on circumstantial evidence. You couldn't know that empirically because it requires the observation and testing of subjects. Its theoretical. Could it be true? Certainly.Think of it this way: If you have an animal with a similar genome, similar morphology, similar everything, it would be easy to speculate that one comes from the other. But that's totally subjective, unless they both share genetic mistakes. Because at some point, two animals will share more similarities than another when comparing them. That in no way proves they were related to one another. Something like that, yes.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

I've explained why you're wrong on another thread. You may feel the need to be wrong in parallel, but I'm content to be right just once. 'Cos that's all it takes.