Darwin's Illusion

[Dan From Smithville]

I understand. I've enjoyed watching multiple bad behavior compilations - "Karens" on airplanes, in airports, in fast food and convenience stores. They're like car wrecks one can't turn away from.

Sometimes I find value in seeing others carry something to the extreme. And they are just entertaining.

Also, the videos with the guy who glitters porch pirates (search parameters: "glitters porch pirates"):

One of my favs. I enjoy them not only for the outcome, but for the thought, detail and work that go into setting them up. NASA quality engineering.

And the IT whizzes who exact revenge on scammers:

Spoiler

And, Patty Mayo's bail bondsmen videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEYLdM2bdhmw-TS3c0TjFNw

These I'll have to check out. So much for my morning.

Sure it does, and nothing else does that.

So you describe the competition to generate life in terms of death even though nothing need be killed for a gene to ascend to prominence in a gene pool. Potential mates don't need to be dead to be rejected. Pick a living but sterile one and the outcome is the same.

I wrote, "We call the winners the fittest however they won." It's not an argument or a claim. It's a definition. The claim in the context of biology is that natural selection applied to genetic variation in living populations over generations results in biological evolution. That's what winning means in this context and how it manifests.

I can only guess that this is more corrections to erroneous claims.

All I can say is it often seems like a pseudo-reality created in a vacuum without benefit of the study of science, the evidence or the reasoning applied.

 

[cladking]

Sure it does, and nothing else does that.

So the state of a baby who is going to be highly fertile affects its number of offspring?

So you describe the competition to generate life in terms of death even though nothing need be killed for a gene to ascend to prominence in a gene pool.

It is Darwin saying that the weak don't survive which leaves only the strong to reproduce.

I believe all individuals are equally fit and equally capable of producing offspring: That life is about cooperation much more than competition. Both "cooperation" and "competition" are abstractions that don't exist in the real world and are merely handy ways to communicate ideas. Nature doesn't ponder abstractions and merely does as she pleases in the most economical and least wasteful way. Killing off individuals to gradually change the species is not efficient. Creation of unfit individual as a food source is not efficient.

Pick a living but sterile one and the outcome is the same.

A sparrow can't tell if a potential mate is sterile or not. She merely picks one in apparent good health and takes her chances.

I wrote, "We call the winners the fittest however they won." It's not an argument or a claim. It's a definition.

It's a circular argument that ignores the traits of the winners and losers as well as the consciousness of every individual. More importantly it ignores the simple fact that all observed change in all species is always sudden and occurs at bottlenecks.

 

[chris baron]

Natural does not mean random. A rock does not randomly fall up a hill. In the same sense chemical reactions are not random. To the ignorant they may appear to be that way, but that is clearly not the case if one studies them.

"natural processes" the god of the gaps. it's obvious that there is deliberate creative intent behind existence. the reason why people want to avoid this truth is because they have a guilty conscience.

 

[Subduction Zone]

"natural processes" the god of the gaps. it's obvious that there is deliberate creative intent behind existence. the reason why people want to avoid this truth is because they have a guilty conscience.

Don't be silly. Natural processes can be observed, tested, and confirmed. You don't know what God of the gaps is. And you seem to think that evolution is a way of denying God. That is amazing ignorance since the number of theists, probably mostly Christians, that accept it is far greater than those that do not.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

So the state of a baby who is going to be highly fertile affects its number of offspring?

I'm not sure what that means, but its genetic and culturally acquired assets and liabilities will determine how much it modifies allelic frequencies in its population's gene pool over one generation.

I believe all individuals are equally fit and equally capable of producing offspring

That is incorrect. Some are involuntarily infertile and some have had surgery to become infertile. Some die before they reach puberty. Some repulse potential mates and can't reproduce except artificially or forcibly.

Both "cooperation" and "competition" are abstractions that don't exist in the real world

All conscious experience is abstracted. Consciousness is about something. Sometimes it's about something outside of the brain and mind, that is, it is consciousness of sensory content as well as an understanding of its implications. Other times, there is no external referent, and we are referring to imagination. Thus, we have ideas about what's out there acquired via the senses and ideas that we generate de novo such as dreams and abstract art (creativity, imagination).

It's a circular argument

No, it's not, and I already explained why. If you'd like to address that response and explain why you disagree with it, then we have something to discuss, but you merely repeating refuted claims is a waste of time for us both. As I've explained before, EVERY debate ends with the last plausible, unrebutted claim. You made a plausible claim, and I refuted it. It is no longer plausible unless you can defend it from that rebuttal, and you can't if I am correct.

 

[cladking]

You made a plausible claim, and I refuted it.

I'm sure I refuted your refutation and you merely considered it Implausible so didn't even respond.

Such is the power of belief.

Just because we see something or experience something it doesn't mean it's real. Science changes one funeral at a time because we don't share beliefs and experience.

If every expert didn't share models and experiment then they would never all be wrong. History has always shown they are all wrong. They are wrong now and they will be wrong in fifty years when homo omnisciencis knows a million times as much. Of course this depends on our not destroying ourselves first as it appears we might.

As soon as you demand "plausible" you are merely employing your beliefs. Anything I say that doesn't involve the assumption that consciousness is irrelevant to change in species or that life can be reduced to abstractions it becomes "implausible" and you believe you won the argument. Then others will lecture about the definitions of words like "survival of the fittest" and "metaphysics".

Darwin's assumptions were wrong but most are still firmly in place and constitute the basis of every plausible argument.

 

[cladking]

That is incorrect. Some are involuntarily infertile and some have had surgery to become infertile.

It is the nature of reality for things to go wrong. There are an infinite number of ways for things to go wrong even without the incompetent hand of man. Some individuals are virtually born solely for food or fertilizer or despite good health are still infertile. Such is life. Problems can be genetic or acquired. This is the nature of life. Lame rabbits usually don't survive for long and most wheat is grown to be eaten without ever reproducing.

There are an infinite number of causes for everything. The odds of any specific event unfolding is zero but if you toss a coin a million times every single possible outcome is exactly equally likely including all heads. Reality unfold despite its impossibility just as you can cross a room despite Zeno's paradox.

Your perspective, assumptions, and conclusions are all part and parcel of the exact same thing.

Individuals affect species without reproducing because all things affect all other things and because it really doesn't matter whether the beaver who invented dams had twenty off spring or zero. The bee that invented dancing probably had no offspring.

It's not only Darwin's bad assumptions you share but his poor perspective and definitions. It's almost the same paradigm today as it was when Darwin invented it.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It's not only Darwin's bad assumptions you share but his poor perspective and definitions.

The theory is correct beyond reasonable doubt. It unifies mountains of data from a multitude of sources, accurately makes predictions about what can and cannot be found in nature, provides a rational mechanism for evolution consistent with the known actions of nature, accounts for both the commonality of all life as well as biodiversity, and has had practical applications that have improved the human condition in areas like medicine and agriculture.

Just because we see something or experience something it doesn't mean it's real.

If an experience is reproducible and generates ideas that allow one to predict future outcomes, that meets my definition of true, correct, fact, knowledge, real, and actual.

"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance. From an anonymous author:

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.

"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything."​

 

[cladking]

The theory is correct beyond reasonable doubt. It unifies mountains of data from a multitude of sources, accurately makes predictions about what can and cannot be found in nature, provides a rational mechanism for evolution consistent with the known actions of nature, accounts for both the commonality of all life as well as biodiversity, and has had practical applications that have improved the human condition in areas like medicine and agriculture.

As I have repeatedly said: Reality is logic incarnate. ANY logical system applied to the study of reality will have concordances to reality. It is simply natural but this doesn't mean that Evolution is accurate or that landing a man on the moon proves we know all about gravity.

I simply don't know how to say this any more simply. Humans know almost nothing but millions of times what we knew even a century ago. And still science changes one funeral at a time.

The problem with Evolution is that nothing about living things, living systems, or life itself can be reduced to experiment (at this time) so our knowledge is an illusion. It is an illusion based on Darwin's assumptions. It has many concordances with real life because so much of it is derived logically and some even from "experiment". It dovetails with evidence so it seems to be right. It is an illusion just as Darwin's beliefs were illusions.

A baby doesn't learn about gravity in order to walk. Egyptians built pyramids with no modern knowledge whatsoever. They lacked hypothesis and experiment. They lacked abstractions as surely as a dancing bee.

 

[The Hammer]

As I implied, it's a waste of time for me to read indepth verbiage about such imaginings.

So you're scared. Makes sense. I was scared of the Bible too til I read it and realized it was a Myth like any other.

 

[cladking]

Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results.

I'm a pragmatist myself but things that work don't imply or confer knowledge. One doesn't need to know why something works in order to repeat it. Conversely things can be done in highly indirect ways if the mechanisms are understood. A butterfly in China can't know it's creating a hurricane but an individual can change conditions such that the causes are wholly unseen and unpredictable.

 

[The Hammer]

As I have repeatedly said: Reality is logic incarnate. ANY logical system applied to the study of reality will have concordances to reality. It is simply natural but this doesn't mean that Evolution is accurate or that landing a man on the moon proves we know all about gravity.

A baby doesn't learn about gravity in order to walk. Egyptians built pyramids with no modern knowledge whatsoever. They lacked hypothesis and experiment. They lacked abstractions as surely as a dancing bee.

We have never lacked hypothesis and experimentation.

That it literally just trial and error. We've been doing that since time immemorial.

Reality is not logical either. Logic explains a lot of things but not all. The ToE is not speculating, it's been proven the world over from scientists in most countries.

 

[The Hammer]

As I have repeatedly said: Reality is logic incarnate. ANY logical system applied to the study of reality will have concordances to reality. It is simply natural but this doesn't mean that Evolution is accurate or that landing a man on the moon proves we know all about gravity.

A baby doesn't learn about gravity in order to walk. Egyptians built pyramids with no modern knowledge whatsoever. They lacked hypothesis and experiment. They lacked abstractions as surely as a dancing bee.

We have never lacked hypothesis and experimentation.

That it literally just trial and error. We've been doing that since time immemorial.

Reality is not logical either. Logic explains a lot of things but not all. The ToE is not speculating, it's been proven the world over from scientists in most countries.

 

[cladking]

"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything."

If this is directed at me all I can say is our beliefs on these subjects are essentially identical. The main difference is that I know I am very ignorant and everyone seems to think they already have every answer. Then they say things that simply aren't true. No matter how many times you prove their beliefs are untrue or highly suspect because of bad definitions they maintain these beliefs.

To me real "truth" can not be stated in our language because every utterance can be parsed in an infinite number of ways. But if you define your terms and use logic reflective of experiment you can approximate truth. This "truth" is still dependent on perspective and axioms. "Truth" can be expressed in Bee because reality is experienced in terms of the nature of bees. Reality, perspective, and language all factor out leaving only Truth (as experienced by bees).

Reductionists want to factor out reality itself leaving only experiment but this provides a warped picture of what is. This might be fine in chemistry or math but it doesn't work where life (free will) is concerned. It doesn't work where evidence is scanty. It doesn't work where beliefs are more readily visible than data. It doesn't work when there is no experiment to keep from going off kilter. Thought is great to extend knowledge one step beyond experiment and knowledge but the farther we wander ahead the more prone we are to becoming lost and disoriented.

Darwin wandered far beyond drawings of finches and observations of turtles. He led science beyond what was known into a mirage that did not and does not exist.

 

[cladking]

That it literally just trial and error. We've been doing that since time immemorial.

I neither believe highly complex behavior can result from trial and error nor that there is any evidence any complex behavior in any species resulted from trial and error.

People just want to believe that only science provides knowledge and understanding so when they see it from lesser species like ancient Egyptians or bees it can be dismissed as "trial and error" or "instinct". Simple behavior can result from trial and error.

 

[Little Dragon]

And God said "let there be evolution by natural section" and there was evolution by natural selection.

Maybe.

 

[The Hammer]

People just want to believe that only science provides knowledge and understanding so when they see it from lesser species like ancient Egyptians or bees it can be dismissed as "trial and error" or "instinct". Simple behavior can result from trial and error.

I'm just gonna stop you right there. The ancient Egyptians were a lesser species?
No one believes that, at least no scientist, anthropologist or any other person who studies Egypt.

Science IS trial and error so I'm not sure why your saying otherwise...

 

[Little Dragon]

Science IS trial and error so I'm not sure why your saying otherwise...

It's trial and error, with gadgets and measuring tapes.

 

[The Hammer]

It's trial and error, with gadgets and measuring tapes.

I should specify trial and error is one of the testing processes behind which science operates.

"Trial and Error is the elementary process in Science by which knowledge is acquired."

 

[Little Dragon]

I should specify trial and error is one of the testing processes behind which science operates.

"Trial and Error is the elementary process in Science by which knowledge is acquired."

The sword of inquiry, cutting down the shadows of ignorance.