Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
User ID: 1525
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
16d ago
First of all:
God protects all animals and won't allow any of them to suffer
You mean something like this?
When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.
That is a quote from Darwin btw. Besides neither St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas believed that animals do not suffer. That counterexample of yours is nothing but a strawman.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying...
You seem to understand it well enough to judge it as nonsensical. Or don't you understand what "nonsensical" means either? In any case, it doesn't get much clearer than this: The theory of Natural Selection is a tautology. For the rest all I can say is: ¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
Erratum: Somebody did predict antimicrobial resistance.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
18d ago
I'm aware of Mark Fisher's work, and I am aware that Darwin wasn't the one responsible for what you call "realist inevitability". I'll admit I have a personal bias against Darwinism, so I'll confess I don't really have a long-term strategy here. I just smelt blood and attacked the perceived weakness. The fact that Darwinists make all sorts of bold claims about nature and human behavior makes them more atractive targets.
The correct response to genetic realism, should always be to find new ways to grant our ideals control over our genetics.
I don't know about that but I do know what Gómez Dávila says: "With pessimism and a sense of humor, it's impossible to be wrong or bored."
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
18d ago
Well, if I know that red is not green I can predict that if something is red, it won't be green. But this prediction is no enlightenment at all.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
18d ago
You seem to be saying...
I'm not. Why don't you focus on what I actually said? I won't respond to the "then everything is a tautology" claim because I've already done so several times on these comments, even on this very thread if I recall correctly.
Newton says...
No he does not.
It does seem that you are complaining about...
Key word: Seem. I'm only stating that there's no counterexample to a tautology. Because I'm trying to explain that the theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
So that is how it differs from Darwin's explanation.
Yes, St. Augustine is not the same as Darwin. But in practical terms, Divine Selection and Natural selection have the same explanatory value. That is, none at all.
And yes, the Wikipedia article says that Flemming "predicted" antimicrobial resistance, but he "predicted" it in 1945, that is, 17 years after he discovered antibiotics. And he "predicted" it because he already observed the resistance in his laboratory. So no, he didn't "predict" it, he discovered it.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
18d ago
Alright, so: Those who survive, survive, and therefore can reproduce. Because those who don't survive are less likely to reproduce. You don't solve a tautology by adding another. Surviving is a sine qua non condition to reproducing, the dead don't reproduce. So no, as I understand there's no set of rules that would allow the dead to breed, unless we change the meaning of "dead" to "alive".
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
18d ago
Well, if you read the source I quoted you'd know that Augustine's doctrine of rationes seminales allowed Thomas Aquinas to move away from the essentialist position that made extinction metaphysically impossible. So yes, extinction is indeed implied.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
22d ago
How can you start from (only) a tautology and reach a non-tautological explanation?
Don't ask me but that's how it works. A=A is the root of all logic, so is all of logic a tautology? Maybe, from a certain point of view. All human knowledge is basically translating obvious statements into a systematic set of relations that allows us to communicate more precisely and build upon the observations of others. Math is the best example here, it basically explains nothing, but allows us to understand the world. Darwin's tautology on the other hand doesn't say anything beyond itself. The fact that all living beings survive should not be the explanation to evolution, but the starting point of any biological science.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
22d ago
My argument is that Natural Selection is tautological, so it does not add any new knowledge. It doesn't matter if it's "systemized" or not.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
22d ago
Darwin's argument: Those who survive, survive.
Survivor bias: The logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
One of them is a tautology, the other one isn't. Hint: It's not the survivor bias.
As I've said before, ultimately all knowledge is tautological, but this is because of the limitations of language. Darwin's tautology is not necesary, it's a logic mistake. One thing is to accept the limitations of human knowledge and do what you can with what you've got, and another is to be proud of your own limitations as if they were achievements.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
22d ago
And what is "the mechanism of selection"?
This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection
But
This statement is true but it’s useless as an explanation because it doesn’t give any information other than what is implied by its terms. Darwin’s critics accuse him of crafting a tautological statement because in his definition “favourable” or “beneficial” traits are defined as those that are preserved, and traits that are preserved are of course those that are favourable or beneficial.
So yes, Darwin did say that "traits that are benefitial are preserved", or in other words "those who survive, survive". Therefore, it is a tautology.
Your complaint seems to be that whenever...
No it isn't. My complaint is what I said it is, it's in the title of the post. As I said in another comment, if you wanna say that Darwin's theory is true and correct then go right ahead, but it is also trivial and useless.
And did you read the quote I cited? Here it is again:
The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, allowed Augustine to argue that species emerged sequentially in historical time rather than all at once.
In other words, Augustine argued that God selected some species to be born at specific points in time. This of course means that some other species where chosen to disappear in the same manner.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
23d ago
Before Darwin people made all sorts of predictions about population growth and the proliferation of benetial traits. They learned, for instance, that after a flood certain species of plants were more plentiful. They then copied this process to create agriculture, etc.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
23d ago
Yes of course, if you turn my initial tautological statement into something completely different that's no longer tautological then yes, it's not a tautology anymore, but it's also not my initial statement.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
23d ago
I think you still don't understand what a tautology is. All evidence in the known universe points at the fact that every red car is not green. Is that statement true and correct? Well yes, if that's what you wanna call it why not. But it's also dumb and useless, unless you want to use it as an example in a logic lecture. There's this common trend on this thread, where people mention Newton for the dullest of examples. For the hundreth time no, Newton did not discover that things fall down when you drop them. But Newton is a good example of a scientific theory that is not tautologic, so you can look that up.
You also seem to have quite a childish idea of religion, where religion = dumb. I guess it's because you like Richard Dawkins, or as I like to call him, Dick Dorkins. No, people didn't believe that praying was a solution to everything, the Angelic Doctor didn't wrote his Summa Theologica exploring the relation between faith and reason just to conclude that reason = big bad. I mean, there have been people who believed that but they still exist today, so being dumb has nothing to do with being religious. Furthermore, there are plenty of biologists and scientists who are religious, I'd say that most have been. For instance, Mendel was a catholic monk, but did he just sit down and pray waiting for the tastiest peas known to man to magically appear? Absolutely not, he went and invented genetics, the absolute madman.
And yes of course, I do have sources for that. It's not a polemic claim at all, there's nothing incompatible between the idea of evolution and creationism. For instance:
If the origin of species was attributed to divine action, the temporal emergence of these species was not necessarily instantaneous. Such a doctrine was the basis of Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430) theory of the original creation of primordial seeds (rationes seminales) of each species at an original moment in time, but with the emergence of species in historical time a possibility (Augustine, VI.13.23–25, [GL, 175–76]). This theory of a temporalized creation, put forth explicitly in detail in his treatise The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, allowed Augustine to argue that species emerged sequentially in historical time rather than all at once.
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-before-darwin/#MediRevi
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
23d ago
You made two claims:
It’s not a tautology when viewed from a human scale perspective of time.
I rebutted this.
it is obvious that natural selection happens. There is no logical alternative, you cannot not accept it.
This is literally what I said, you are siding with me here. This is the definition of tautology, a claim that is true in every possible interpretation. Unless you meant to say that the only logical thing to do is accept Darwin's theory, on which case I'd say that's not the case at all. Even no explanation at all is better than a tautological explanation.
So which one is the "thrust" of your comment?
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
23d ago
I mean, if you are going to mix up taxology and taxidermy at least be a good sport about it. The difference is not trivial, and there's a minimum of knowledge required to understand the history of biology. You don't have to believe me, go ahead and check Wikipedia again, it clearly says taxonomy. You can also look up the definition of it while you are at it. Taxidermy is only mentioned once on Linnaeus' page, and it's only a reference to a trip bro took to Hamburg where he was shown the taxidermied remains of a seven-headed hydra by the mayor of the town. Wild stuff.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
Lol, that's cute. You meant to say TAXONOMY not taxidermy. Of course neither Linnaeus nor Aristotle spoke about evolution or natural selection, I never said they did. I said they knew about the branching tree of life, because that's what taxonomy is. But don't worry, there are also a bunch of people who spoke about the evolution of species before Darwin. Would you like me to list them? And just so you know, Aristotle was a huge nerd and spent his free time studying and collecting mussels in the Mediterranean.
And yes, I'm only criticizing Darwin for his theory of Natural Selection.
You know, there's really no proof that we don't live in the whacky god-controlled universe, so the discussion is not over. I'm noy saying Darwin had an economic agenda, but the implications of his theory are economic. That's why I said that there were conscious and unconscious consequences for Darwin's theory.
You say:
Creatures survive because they can reproduce and survive in the environments where they live.
And why is that? Well, because of Natural Selection of course! Now change Natural Selection for "God", and how does that change anything? If this is a popularity contest then yes, Darwin is winning by a landslide. But Darwin wasn't arguing against the idea of a watchmaker God, that was Dorkins. Darwin was agnostic, and never meant to refute the idea of God. I honestly don't care about winning any debates here, who cares if I'm right and some XIXth century fella was wrong.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
Well of course you don't need to read Newton for that, but you still have to study his law of universal gravity to understand gravity. So Newton is still relevant to physics, even if many of his laws have been revised. Natural Selection, on the other hand, is useless, and we only keep the words. You see, there's this thing when two different things can be true at the same time, just like when I say that there are things that are predictable and things that aren't. You really seem to struggle with this concept.
I don't impose any arbitrary threshold of validity. I use Darwin's. And Darwin didn't say "my theory can predict the evolution of species in x amount of years". He claimed he could explain the origin of ALL species. So how did I arrive to the threshold of validity I use to put Darwin's theory to the test? Well, from Darwin of course!
And if I never claimed to be the King of Science, science is too full of nerds to be of any use to me.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
Fleming mentioned that AFTER bacteria started becoming resistant to antibiotics, which had already happened by 1945. Not to the scale it happens now, but enough to be observed. Again, not a prediction.
Before Darwin people thought God was nature, and they belived He perfomed his own "selection" of living beings. How does this differ from Darwin's explanation? You'd say that God is an intelligent subject and nature isn't, but in any case God's intelligence is unintelligible to humans, so in practical terms is the same. People didn't think everything propsers equally.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
We could also predict the change in coat lenght without the theory of natural selection...
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
Darwin didn't make this distinction between different time perspectives, but even then Darwin's explanation would be: They didn't survive because they don't exist anymore. It doesn't matter what time perspective you use, this holds true in every possible scenario.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
It may be an emergent effect but it is a tautologic. Like, every red car being red could also be understood as an "emergent effect", but why would you?
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
The predictions argument has already been addresed multiple times elsewhere, so I won't respond to it. But c'mon, "our domain knowledge of animals tells us that eyes are generally very useful things"?? Really? You don't say.
You say that mankind was humilliated by Darwin but I would claim the opposite is true. Before Darwin humans had a secondary place in the universe, they were created by something bigger and more powerful. After Darwin humankind has no rivals, and they supposedly hold the secret to explain all possible life in the universe. If anything, humans are more proudful and entitled now that ever before.
And you are wrong about the idea of exponential grows in subexponential resources being known before. Before Malthus people lacked the mathematical models necessary to understand the behavior of populations. One thing is making an empiric observation and another is describing a common pattern in all populations. There's also the idea, quite characteristic of the modern age, that mathematics alone explains the growth of populations. This led to some strange conclusions, like that war is good because it quells an overgrowth population. Once more, Darwin's work just expanded upon this idea.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
24d ago
My mistake, you are right. The Soviets didn't look for the differences between the bourgeois and the working class in the genes, but they did had a notion of HBD and strived to create a New Soviet Man through a sort of eugenics.
The ape-man scandal was indeed before Stalin consolidated power.
I recently made a post about Darwin related to this. Since there are many definitions of "human being", people usually refer to biology as the "objective" definition, but Darwinian biology can only define mankind by the mere fact that it survives. Insofar as being alive means not being dead, human dignity relies on the conservation of the means by which existence is preserved. The problem is that existence itself becomes condition not only necessary, but sufficient, to human dignity. This is where the prejudice of caring about the welfare of human beings qua human beings comes from. From this perspective human life is sacred, but only the objective share of human life, that which relies on nourishment, breathing, reproduction and defecation - all things that human beings can control. To paint a rather gross picture, this is like changing the definition of "human being" to "poop-making machine", and then congratulating ourselves with big parades to celebrate that we've solved the human mistery by inventing a more efficient way to ingest food and excrete it. Your conclusion is absolutely on point: This not only does not solve anything, it also clouds our vision and that of the future generations from the heart of the problem.
The divinization of mere life has also an impact at a social level, and I believe this was the aim from the beginning. The objective of utilitarism was to be a foundation for law that was objective and did not depend on religion or tradition. A universal law everyone could agree with, and if any disagreements did arise then a simple calculation would suffice to solve it. This allowed the State to take complete control over the life of its citizens. In ancient times there was a divine randonmess to life: Death, disease, famine, love, they were all regarded as private affairs over which the State did not directly intervene. But through the divinization of mere life, the State could take over the management of health, food, marriage, funerary services, etc. Every aspect of objective existence has come under scrutiny of the State in order tu secure the existence of its subjects, and as the subjects need to be alive regardless of their personal convictions or beliefs, they need the State. So when a person decides to invest is his dog rather than in a random person, they can justify their behavior by stating the fact that they pay taxes, which is precisely the fee an individual pays to guarantee the common good. So if you need help, if you suffer ill-fortune and look for a loving neighbor, ask the State. But on the other hand, the State is -supposedly- justified to intervene over the existence of any individual in order to secure the common good. The modern State is a devilish trap: The more it fulfills your needs the more you give up your freedom, until there's nothing but mindless, soulless satsifaction.
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