Natural Selection Is Circular Logic

[St. Helens]

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[mark kennedy]

Sounds like a recipe for another scienctific breakthrough.

Stop, the sarcasm is blinding me. Scientific methodology has long been focused on natural phenomena, Darwinian natural selection isn" t all bad and has some merit as philosophy, what kills me about evolutionists is they don't realize that.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Darwin thought it was the eye. He found it absurd that one could think it arose naturally.

He didn't.
This is frequently used dishonest quote mine by creationists from the Origin of Species.

Here's what they dishonestly quote all the time:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

And they pretend as if it stops there. But immediatly after, he actually goes on to explain how this is only how it SEEMS, but NOT how it IS.

Here's the full relevant text:
On the Origin of Species: Chapter VI, The eye

 

[mark kennedy]

He didn't.
This is frequently used dishonest quote mine by creationists from the Origin of Species.

Here's what they dishonestly quote all the time:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

And they pretend as if it stops there. But immediatly after, he actually goes on to explain how this is only how it SEEMS, but NOT how it IS.

Here's the full relevant text:
On the Origin of Species: Chapter VI, The eye

Darwin actually struggled with a few things, thats what I like about him. He had lost a daughter he dearly loved, probably because he married his cousin and she had a compromised immune system.

He thought any organ that could be described as not coming from natural selection, slight successive increments could unwravel his theory. He was right, its the human brain evolving from ape but you would have to appreciate the difference for that to hit home.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Darwin actually struggled with a few things, thats what I like about him. He had lost a daughter he dearly loved, probably because he married his cousin and she had a compromised immune system.

He thought any organ that could be described as not coming from natural selection, slight successive increments could unwravel his theory. He was right, its the human brain evolving from ape but you would have to appreciate the difference for that to hit home.

I sense an argument from incredulity in the making.

 

[mark kennedy]

I sense an argument from incredulity in the making.

On the contrary, Darwin had suffered terrible loss at the time of the publication of On the Origin of Species. He was in a running dialogue with Asa Grey, a resident philosopher at Cambridge. Darwinism was later developed by Herbert Spencer who developed the social darwinism we have come to associate with survival of the fittest. Earnst Mayr would eventually develop Darwinism into the Modern Synthesis, a unified theory of Biology based on the work of Darwin and Mendel. It had a new twist by then, genetic statistics.

I have nothing to be incredulous about, I know natural selection for what it is. It's been my experience that those who attack creationists ruthlessly, never bother to study the body of work they pretend to defend. I always know when they are out of ammunition, there's nothing left but pedantic one liners. You got there early.

 

[Tayla]

Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

Natural selection says that genes are only passed on if the organism survives and reproduces, thereby passing on its genes. It's all about passing on genes, not on fitness, nor on survival.

 

[HitchSlap]

Natural selection says that genes are only passed on if the organism survives and reproduces, thereby passing on its genes. It's all about passing on genes, not on fitness, nor on survival.

Lol

Correct, only fit organisms survive and reproduce.

 

[AV1611VET]

Correct, only fit organisms survive and reproduce.

Will mother nature allow eight people to repopulate the earth after a population bottleneck that also destroys all flora?

 

[HitchSlap]

Will mother nature allow eight people to repopulate the earth after a population bottleneck that also destroys all flora?

I’ve heard it said. Now if there was only some way we could determine this.

 

[AV1611VET]

I’ve heard it said. Now if there was only some way we could determine this.

I said will mother nature allow it.

 

[mark kennedy]

Natural selection says that genes are only passed on if the organism survives and reproduces, thereby passing on its genes. It's all about passing on genes, not on fitness, nor on survival.

In Darwin's day no one had seen a gene, or a chromosome for that matter. They came to call them alleles, which were minipulated in fruit flies and bacteria for the most part. They didn't know how protien coding genes worked until the unvieling of the DNA double helix model in 1953.

Darwinian natural selection was originally called that because he was comparing it to artificial selection. The idea is the selection of choice traits, hybrids. The bane of hortoculture he famously said, wss infertility, it still is by the way. Even if there is a favorable trait there is a high selective cost, selective constraint has to be reduced, there are bottlenecks needed for the founder effect to take hold.this shrinks the gene pool which the problem with all inbreading. Thats why a population that has less then 100 members is considered to be doomed to extinction.

Natural selection lis ittle more then terminology, it's not really a thing with substance or a clearly defined effect. It's really just an a priori assumption of universal common descent. It's a philosophy of natural history and taxonomy, it's not a thing, or a phenomenon, it's a worldview.

 

[HitchSlap]

I said will mother nature allow it.

You'll have to ask her.

 

[AV1611VET]

You'll have to ask her.

No ambassadors around to speak for her?

 

[HitchSlap]

No ambassadors around to speak for her?

Speaks for itself, don't you think?

 

[AV1611VET]

Speaks for itself, don't you think?

Evidently not.

I asked you, and you asked me to ask her myself.

I suspect the answer is NO, but you don't want to admit it; knowing that I'll play the MIRACLE card.

But I could be wrong.

 

[HitchSlap]

Evidently not.

I asked you, and you asked me to ask her myself.

I suspect the answer is NO, but you don't want to admit it; knowing that I'll play the MIRACLE card.

But I could be wrong.

Appealing to magic gets us nowhere.

 

[TLK Valentine]

Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

Define "fittest," please?

 

[AV1611VET]

Define "fittest," please?

I did.

"Those who survive."

 

[TLK Valentine]

I did.

"Those who survive."

"Those who are best adapted to their current environment" takes away a good deal of the apparent circularity.

Just saying -- if you use more accurate terms, you become less confused.