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.
1mo ago
You know, when people started using antibiotics they didn't really predict that bacteria would become resistant to it. And they had Darwin's theory by that time. But now that resistant bacteria exists, you tell me that's proof of Natural Selection? You see how it works? No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation, because it is no explanation at all. If bacteria hadn't become resistant then you would tell me that it lacked the traits for its survival, and so on. That's not a prediction, that's hindsight.
As I've said, there are things that are random (as far as we know) in nature and things that aren't. Natural Selection explains all, which means it explains nothing because it cannot meaningfuly distinguish randon and non random events. Right now you would predict that if a human being ingests arsenic they would die, but what if this human had a benefitial trait that made him inmune to arsenic? Natural Selection cannot discriminate what outcome is more likely, you'd have to look at genetics and physiology, none of which have any need for the theory of Natural Selection.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
Yes, that was not obvious but that wasn't Darwin's discovery either. There were plenty of people who studied natural history and arrived to that conclusion, and there were plenty of explanations for it as well, Lamarckism being perhaps the most notorious. Darwin was indeed very good at natural history and provided very thorough evidence for evolution. But this has nothing to do with Natural Selection. The theory of Natural Selection tries to explain evolution by stating that the least fit will die and the fittest will thrive. But what does fitness mean if not the ability to thrive, the lack of which causes death? And is it not obvious that those who thrive are more likely to pass on their genes than those who die? Species change, of that there is no doubt. But are we really supposed to be content by saying that those species who survive are alive and reproduce, while those that went extinct don't reproduce anymore?
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
Other thinkers had some good ideas, Darwin did as well but this is not one of them.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
And what theory requires Natural Selection to be tested? Natural Selection only provides a language that biologists like to use (adaptation, benefitial traits, evolutionary pressures, etc) but nothing new, we had those concepts before Darwin. What it does provide is a framework for the naturalization economic prejudices. You say that we rarely talk about the pure logic of evolution. Doesn't this make this "logic" irrelevant?
But you didn't explain why Natural Selection can be false. Please elaborate on that.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
You are correct, there are many tautologies that are not trivial. But Darwin's is, regardless of how many people use them, because they only use them as a historic relic (biologists) or to create nonsensical theories (evolutionary psychologists). All human knowledge is ultimately tautologic but it still beats no knowledge at all. Natural Selection is tautologic and it does not beat no explanation at all.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
No one had put together the theory of natural selection before because we had to wait for Malthus to publish his Essay On The Principle Of Population. We also had to wait for industrialization and secularism to come up with the idea that nature is bound by economic principles. As I said, Natural Selection explains nothing, the concept of Struggle for Existence is what made Darwin popular and different from other biologists.
Regarding your other statement, 4. would just be 1. with extra steps. And yes, people did make predictions about nature, they did it all the time. In fact, agriculture is based on the observation that certain conditions produced changes in the species that were benefitial for humans. You'd be surprised how "modern" some ancient thinkers were.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
Natural Selection is no basis to make such predictions, because it can only predict that what already exists will likely continue to exist, unless it doesn't exist anymore on which case it will cease to exist. Of course, if you take a shark out of the water it will die, we can predict that 100%. But do we need Darwin for that? And you know what, even if the shark didn't die, that would still "prove" natural selection...
What predictions we can make don't need Natural Selection, and those we can't make aren't explained by Natural Selection either.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
I really don't care about spreading my ideas, I wouldn't be in some obscure internet forum if that were the case. I just want to know what other people think, and most struggle to grap the concept of tautology and how it applies to natural selection. I don't see why I'd stop using the term since it is exactly what I mean and there's no better term to express what that. The fact that most people struggle with this goes to show how and why Darwin is so popular in spite of being tautologic, and that's not a fault in my argument. Unless I'm wrong, on which case I'd like to be corrected but that can only happen if I use the correct words to express exactly what I think.
I don't care to come up with an undeniable argument, because people will believe what they want regardless. Look at Richard Dawkins for instance. He stated that even if he saw Jesus Christ descending from a cloud and speaking directly to him, he'd still be an atheist and he would think that there's probably something wrong with his own sanity. There's no such thing as an undeniable argument, and whoever is not convinced by simple evidence won't be conviced at all, no matter how sophisticated the evidence is. I think we can only aspire to invite people to see what we have to say, and those who want to listen will listen and those who don't, won't. We can only convince other people to believe things they already believed in the first place, or things that are vulgar and commonplace.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
That's nothing new, Heraclitus already claimed that order can emerge out of chaos, and Thomas Aquinas solved the problem for Christianity. This is not Darwin's contribution. As I said, what he contributed was the idea that nature is bound by economic laws, which confirms the prejudices of our times. And he did so by proposing a tautologic explanation that explains nothing at all.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
Well, they may evolve heavy fur or they may go extinct, we can't predict that. Otherwise it would be lamarckism, not darwinism. Unless we could control the environment's conditions, on which case it wouldn't be natural selection but human selection. The tautology is that if dogs survive is because they had traits that allowed him to survive, and if they didn't survive then they didn't have them. So basically no matter the circumstances, Natural Selection is true because it does not explain anything.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
5000 years ago people knew that short haired cats had short haired offspring. Entire empires and civilizations were created out of the concept of inheritance. What people lacked was the theory of genes, but Darwin lacked that as well. Darwin does not explain at all why detrimental traits are passed down, if we were to prove then Darwin's theory would be false. But we cannot prove that things that don't exist are preserved. If something exists then it is 1. Benefitial, 2. Bening, or 3. Extinted/In process of disappearing.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
I mean, yes, but I can't share your conclusion. There's no depth to a tautology. In every conceivable universe everything that has 2 legs doesn't have 3 legs. Do you consider this deep? It is no explanation at all. Truths that are universally true are usually just truisms.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo ago
What do you mean by self filter? I believe I've only claimed that Darwin's theory is a tautology. For the rest, depends on what you mean by "fine". Should we burn Darwin's books? I guess not. Should we continue believing that the theory of Natural Selection has any explanatory value? Definitely not.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1yr ago
God, yes. That tweet feels like a breath of fresh air among all the "go to therapy" posts.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1yr ago
But psychology does just that. They take the tools that work and implement them to solve problems. So, they know how to fix problems. What they don't know, is how to understand this problems. As it usually happens with everything, psychology has both good and bad things. The problem is that what good psychology does, is waaay overrated.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo ago
We could also predict the change in coat lenght without the theory of natural selection...
It's funny because nowhere in the book does Darwin explain what a species is or how is it originated, but more to the point, Carl Linnaeus would like an amicable word with you, because you seem to ignore the fact that a century before Darwin people were already talking about "A branching Tree of Life". Hell, even Aristotle understood the concept and studied the "Tree of life" of the isle of Lesbos. I won't bother to prove that the rest wasn't new either. What was new, and I'm getting tired of repeating it, is the idea that nature was bound by XIXth century England's economic principles. Why are different species everywhere? I actually don't know, but I do know that Natural Selection explains nothing, because it only says that diverse species exist and copy-pasted species don't. But in fact both exist, and that also proves Natural Selection right. This is both obvious and useless, because it provides no new knowledge. The fact that you ignore history doesn't mean that what's obvious now wasn't obvious before. England's XIXth century ideas weren't obvious, and England's navy, without which Darwin wouldn't have been able to gather evidence from all around the world, was not useless either.
For the rest, when other people and I say that Natural Selection is an inherent trait of life, we mean to say that it is so only in possible universes. This is of course an arbitrary limitation because we don't actually know for sure what's ultimately possible and impossible, but such arbitrary limits are necessary to have any sort of meaningful conversation, since I can make up an universe where up means down and down means soup and nothing makes sense and you would understand nothing of what I'm saying. So of course you can make up an universe in your mind where Darwinism isn't tautological, but that doesn't prove anything.
And you know, you could take any biology book and change "Natural Selection" by "God" and nothing would change, the meaning of the text would remain the same. The difference being that Natural Selection is a tautology, while God is simply unknowable. Both explain nothing but one is more clever than the other.
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