irregardless, that's just supposably unarguable.
I'm 100% uncertain of what that means.
Anyone want to have some fun with this?
- Thread starter Silver
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Short answer: We can't. However, we can look at the evidence and make a reasonable decision. We also can't be 100% sure that the Easter Bunny is a myth by your reasoning.
(Dennett talks about this kind of reasoning in one of his books. He likens it to playing intellectual tennis with a person who removes the net before he takes a shot, and then puts it up before you can return it...I think he was being too kind. I think it's more like playing checkers with a child who moves the pieces wherever he wants to without regard for the rules of the game, but expects you to follow them.)
No one is saying we are completely sure it wasn't god. What we are saying is that we are completely sure that we can't scientifically say it was god. And, you are completely right, absence of evidence doesn't mean god isn't there, but it does mean that we can't say it is there. The plain fact of the matter is that evolution makes no claims about god at all, whether god is there or not. That Brownback claims evolution discounts god shows that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'd also agree with you that we don't have the tools to measure god, nor does it appear we ever will, which is why god is not a scientific concept and why evolution doesn't deal with god.
So, you are accussing Einstein of a god of the gaps fallacy when you don't even know what he was talking about? That's lame, especially because you happen to hold to that god of the gaps.
WTF are you going on about? How does naming a process make those assumptions? In the case of evolution, naming a process means that we have observed it and have a name for it, nothing more. And who the hell is saying that evolution gets at "truth" or "reality" in the case that you seem to be using it. It's the Creationists who try to impart these things onto science.
You're right that I was not clear. My objection isn't specifically to naming a process, but to the arrogant conception that we're discovering processes at all. Evolution is not a process, in and of itself. It's a label we post-apply to random, chaotic reality in an effort to make it comprehensible. A process implies a top-down design, a beginning and an end, and a path or recurring cycle. We create the idea of evolution in our heads through inductive reasoning, while all we can know concretely is the fact that things that survive pass on their genetic traits.
In a way, science does indeed replace religion, for many people, as a way to answer larger questions of order and meaning...something that the (eggrandized) 'process of evolution' provides us.
But I don't think science is really very good at providing these things to us. It's great at building bridges and airplanes, growing food, making useful materials, etc...concrete things for which I'm infinitely grateful. But many of the larger the abstracts we create in our own heads from the empirical evidence available to us are not what we'd like them to be. There's a lot that's hidden from us, and we'll never comprehend. Chaotic reality is far too complicated. Simple behaviors and facts, those we can readily understand, give rise to things we can't simply can't predict, and we have a similar tendency/ability to overlay ourselves on history and create 'causes' which exist only in hindsight. But there are an infinite number of causes for any one period of time we choose to define (only in our own minds) as an individual event.
I've read a lot of what you post here, OMFG, and I don't think you and I (or Silver) will ever agree on this stuff, because I tend to focus on what I believe are the ridiculously finite limits of our knowledge and laugh at our scientific pretentions to solve bigger problems, like where we've come from and where we're going. Many much smarter people than I don't think the way I do, and they create more useful things than I ever will, so I'm not hostile to people who think in the Enlightenment scientific model.
I suppose it's all because I just read "The Black Swan" and it stirred up all my old college-aged philosophical angst. Some stuff the book says really resonates with me...(certainly not all of it, mind you) I reacted much the same way Taleb does when my economics professor presented me with the Utilitarian-based models of human behavior used in economics...I also spent a lot of time in my philosophy of history classes reading Hayden White and trying to escape the counterfactual model of history and false ideas of causality.
That didn't clear up anything at all, did it?
How, in this respect, is evolution different from any other explanatory scientific theory? Just because evolutionary theory does not lead to definite material, utilitarian gains for us, how does our theorizing about the phenomenon differ from our theories on a multitude of other topics?
If I'm reading you right, I think you're saying that evolutionary theory provides people with the idea that we are meant to be here, that the somehow the universe had us in mind and we are the pinnacle of life.
Now, I would agree that there are lots of people who think that way, but I also need to point out that if you understand evolutionary theory that way, you don't understand evolutionary theory at all.
I'm not sure we'll know the answers. I hope we will. What pisses me off to no end is someone who pulls out writings from a 2000 year old desert tribe and presumes to tell me that he knows more than the whole of human scientific knowledge. (I should disclose that I'm an optimist, and I think that if we can manage to not make the planet uninhabitable over the next 200 years we'll be much better off. Too many people in the past have said "That's impossible!" only to be proven wrong to make me feel comfortable with that position. Also, I should note that my views have changed at lot over the last 10 years. 10 years ago I wrote a paper (that I got a very good grade on) claiming that strong AI was impossible, computers could never be conscious, and that Searle's Chinese room made more sense than anything Dennett had ever written. I wish I could get that paper back and quote it in a thread like this...I'm sure I'd be pretty brutal.)
Actually, if you believe in science, it is proven that we will never have a complete understanding of anything. Study Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to understand why.
And here comes the net down again. Because, after all, that's not what Brownback is arguing. He has a complete understanding. It was God! Voila!
(Odd again that you would take a theorem that applies to formal mathematics and make the blanket statement that we will never have a complete understanding of anything. Very postmodern of you...)
Godel's Incompleteness theorem doesn't just apply to Mathematics, it applies to any formal system. But, since modern science uses mathematics as it's basis, it applies both directly and indirectly, you can't have completeness if your base is incomplete.
I also wasn't mentioning this in the context of what Brownback said, but yes, it would also apply that religion will never have all the answers as well.
OK, we can disagree, but I hope it's not due to a misunderstanding of what science is. Science is not a study of "why" we are here. Science is the study of the world around us, and to that end it really is rather utilitarian. That we can make computers and airplanes, etc. speaks to that quite well IMO.
Also, you should note that evolution is indeed a process. It is the process by which nature induces random mutations, then selects for those that help survival. True, that is not always the case, as a squirrel that has the best genes in the world could get hit by a car before reproducing, but that's why evolution is said to work on populations, not individuals.
Evolution isn't utilitarian? Next time you need some antibiotics, rethink your statement please.JRogers said:
The only place we differ is the definition of process. To my thinking, process implies design and/or purpose, neither of which 'evolution' has. 'Evolution' is a neat (and useful) way for us to discuss what we think has happened over our world's biological history, which has been entirely chaotic, arising from several simple and recurring events.
Dictionary.com half agrees with me and half with you. (although the definitions, not being exclusive, pretty much agree with you, I suppose...)
1. a systematic series of actions directed to some end: to devise a process for homogenizing milk.
2. a continuous action, operation, or series of changes taking place in a definite manner: the process of decay.
I don't object to the verbage of 2., per se, but I don't like the way people think we've 'discovered' a 'process' of evolution. We've simply given a blanket name to chaos.
In another thought (partially arising from an observation in The Watchmen, isn't it odd that life is directly contradictory to our 'law' of thermodynamics indicating ever-increasing entropy? Should that actually be our definition of 'life?'
MD
Or ask any fruit fly with trendy red eyes.
That reads as if you believe that there is only one degree of chaos... completely random and unpredictable. You know that viewed at the correct altitude there can be order even in chaotic systems. Are you comfortable with asserting that there are observable patterns or order to evolution, rather than using the word "process?" Is the issue that "process" implies a beginning/end or defined progression?
Evolution implies no design or plan, so in that we agree. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn't understand evolution.
But we did "discover" it, didn't we?
Sorry, but nothing violates the second law of thermodynamics, and this is not a problem for evolution.
one thing that h.c. creationists fail to grasp is that the seven day theory they believe in, doesn't mean seven days like we know them now.
seven days is a relative time frame.
and for those that shrug off evolution by saying that they see no immediate evidence of it.
all you have to do is look around at humans and see the physical change in appearance, now that our eating habits have been altered due to fast food and a sedintary life style that most lead.
evolution at it's best. right before your very eyes.
seven days is a relative time frame.
and for those that shrug off evolution by saying that they see no immediate evidence of it.
all you have to do is look around at humans and see the physical change in appearance, now that our eating habits have been altered due to fast food and a sedintary life style that most lead.
evolution at it's best. right before your very eyes.
True.
I've known for years that "god the father" really means "jeffrey the omnipotent groundhog"
DARE YOU SMITE ME!!!!????
Being fat is not evolution, evolution is a genetic level system. Being fat is just being fat.
but it's a result of the enviroment that surrounds them too.
they evolve from being a physically active being that was prevalent just a generation or so ago.
to a drive through and sit down and do nothing lifestyle.
(a choice indeed. but one that comes from a quickly decreasing choice of opitons for those that don't make the effort to not fall victim to it.)
an evolving product of an evolving enviroment.
we can throw the industrial revolution into all of this as well.
speeding up the process at a rapid rate.
they evolve from being a physically active being that was prevalent just a generation or so ago.
to a drive through and sit down and do nothing lifestyle.
(a choice indeed. but one that comes from a quickly decreasing choice of opitons for those that don't make the effort to not fall victim to it.)
an evolving product of an evolving enviroment.
we can throw the industrial revolution into all of this as well.
speeding up the process at a rapid rate.
omfg....I just fell out of my chair...True.
I've known for years that "god the father" really means "jeffrey the omnipotent groundhog"
DARE YOU SMITE ME!!!!????
There is no way that genetic evolution in the last 20 years has caused the obesity rates to skyrocket. You can blame that on genes that are 50,000-100,000 years old, at least.
Changes in lifestyle are not the same as genetic changes.
However, humans are much taller and have larger feet than they did just 100 years ago.
I think that can also be related to nutrition. I know a few people with Crohns disease and they are pretty small folks despite having taller parents, they are short because they couldn't get all the nutrients they needed when growing up. Of course there is also the argument that we are absorbing all the hormones and steroids we give to the animals we eat. My nephew just turned two and could probably buy beer without getting ID'd if he could stop drooling and making choo choo sounds.
Or the virtual opening of the flood gates to the gene pool by way of mass transit.
then explain diabetes, cancers, autisms etc....
(and actually obesity is becoming more of a genetic situation.)
all products of the environment that continues to evolve.
whether its a natural process, or us phuquing everything out of its natural progression.
lifestyles changes lead to genetic changes.
when whatever it was that crawled up out of the water, shed it's gills for lungs and scraped its flippers for feet..........etc.....
that sure wasn't a lifestyle choice now, was it ??
You think those are new phenomena?
That's funny.
Because that's exactly what happened. Just like that.
That brings to mind a new pick-up line that you can use at scientific conventions...
"Hey baby, want to go mutate the genetic code?"
No, they don't.
What you're describing is known as Lamarckian evolution. Lifestyle changes do not lead to DNA changes.
...well they can and do, but not exactly like is being suggested. If for instance the human lifestyle required us to walk 50 miles a day in search of food, and the weak and hereditarily obese began to die off, over time human form would begin to reflect something more adaptive to that. If humans became so sedentary that fat, flabby jabba the hut type females began choosing only fat, flabby jabba the hut type males...and at the same time skinny athletic types began mating only with those like themselves...you could begin to see some sympatric speciation.
Well, yeah. Autism didn't exist until Rainman, duh.
D-d-d-d-definately K-k-k-kmart...
My brother did marry some Indian chick. Who knows what kind of crazy genes there are over there. I'm just glad the kid didn't have eight arms or an elephant head.
But he'd be a great juggler.....
That's a statement that I am uncomfortable with. You may not have meant to but you have implied (to my ears) a purpose. The use of the word nature implies an abstract that has direction - inducing, selecting add to that.
Mutations are random, which mutations survive is down to circumstance, luck and the results of cause and effect.
It is more a chain of events than a process.
Tell him to get a gun instead, then he can simply hold up the liquor store if they refuse to serve him.