d(x^2)/dx does not equal 2x either. Nor is d(x*x)/dx equivilent to d(x)/dx * x + x *d(x)/dx, despite the mumbo jumbo about the derivitave of this times that. You are supposed to perform the same operations on both sides of the equation so that your work is transparent.
I think I’m being whooshed again, but in case I’m not…
Here is the formula for d(x^n)/dx.
d(x^n)/dx = n * x^(n-1)
if n = 2, d(x^2)/dx = 2 * x^(2-1) = 2x.
In the case of the “proof” 1=2, I did do the same operation on both sides of the equation: I took the derivative with respect to x.
You are correct that I didn’t apply the chain rule correctly. The chain rule is:
d(f(u))/dx = f’(u) * d(u)/dx
d(x^2)/dx = 2x * d (x)/dx = 2x * 1.
Actually, it is. (f+g)’ = f’ + g’, where f and g are both functions of the same variable.
I see the problem now.
d(x*x)/dx is short hand for saying “the derivative of x squared with respect to x”. It isn’t saying d times (x times x) divided by (d times x).
I apologize for the confusion. Now I know why you think I didn’t do the same thing on both sides of the equation. I should have clarified the notation I was using.
I’m going to use
n=x
sum (f(n))
n=1
To mean the sum of f(n) from n = 1 to n = x.
It is not necessarily true that:
n=x n=x
d( sum (f(n)) ) = sum (d(f(x))
n=1 n=1
This is the flaw in the “proof” of 1=2 I provided. I’ll post a cite if it becomes necessary.
But it doesn’t. When I do simple substitutions with digits, it doesn’t check out. For example:
d=5
x=4
n=3
5(4^3)/54 = (564)/(5*4) = 64/4 = 16.
3 * 4^(3-1) = 3 * 4^2 = 3 * 16 = 48.
Whatever that page your linking to is about (I never studied calculus), the d(x^n)/dx = n*x^(n-1) thing is obviously not true for any d, x, and n. It’s not an algebraic rule, but one which depends on constant values for one or more of the variables.
I apologize again. In the post above, d( ) is meant to be d( )/dx. In other words, on the left I’m taking the differential of the sum, and on the left I’m taking the sum of the differentials.
While this is true if the sum is not over x, in other words it is from n = 1 to some constant, it is not true if the sum is over x, i.e. n = 1 to n = x.
Never mind, you already said these are not algebraic equations.
cricetus-
Please read post 164 again. You cannot simply dismiss my points simply because you don’t understand them. Your statement about “I never studied calculus” speaks volumes about how you handle information you don’t understand.
See, this is exactly the point I was making. I made a point that doesn’t fit into your world of understanding. You have a premise, d(x^n)/dx != n*x^(n-1). Instead of trying to understand my premise, you ignored it, out of hand, and instead kept pointing to your own ideas and calling my ideas false. Hell, I even gave you a reputable cite to back up my claims.
I can’t thank you enough for making my point clearer than anything thing I could have posted. I owe you, man. I really, really do.
My inability to do calculus doesn’t prove your point anymore than Dio’s inability to do carbon dating or whatever. You have been thoroughly refuted in your argument that because a given individual doesn’t have all the facts for evolution under his or her belt, there is a mote of “faith” in their belief in evolution. If you’ve proved that some individuals don’t know everything, then that’s all you’ve proved, and you’ve not only moved the goal posts, you’ve changed sports in the middle of the game. Your original point is still completely refuted and unsupported.
I have not learned calculus this evening. You feel now qualified to judge “how I handle information I don’t understand”? I dealt thoughtfully with your confusing, mistake-ridden, and poorly explained mathematical mumbo jumbo, and now you claim I “ignored it, out of hand.” What, then, were my last several posts trying to make sense of it?
I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t know the meaning of any of the formulas you just posted, but I can’t prove it. THAT, sir, I will take on faith.
FYI, algebraic manipulations of derivatives.
In particular: the derivative of x^n = n*x^(n-1)
Already been there. It’s not learnable in an evening. It made my head hurt.
Still, better than watching the Twins lose to the stinkin’ Tigers.
I guess you’ll just have to accept it on faith. 
May I suggest that people starting using the {sup} tags, i.e. superscript?
For example: X{sup}2{/sup} turns into X[sup]2[/sup] when the curly brackets are changed to square ones. At the very least, it’ll make this scintillating segue into Calc 101 easier to read.
Keep talking, cricetus, because with every one of your posts you are doing nothing but making my point clearer and clearer.
You said you dealt thoughtfully with my “confusing, mistake-ridden, and poorly explained mathematical mumbo jumbo”. As proof that you dealt thoughtfully with it, you posted
Clearly meaning you didn’t understand the page and didn’t bother to ask for any explanation about it. That doesn’t look very thoughtful to me. You didn’t consider it for even 1/2 an hour. You dismissed it because of your limited knowledge. And then in your last post to me, you call it all mumbo-jumbo and jump to the conclusion I don’t know the meaning of any of it.
All this, and I haven’t even touched on the fact that you called it “confusing, mistake-ridden, and poorly explained”. And you feel qualified to judge the calculus I’ve posted based on what? Your wealth of experience in dealing the calculus?
Do you not realize this is exactly my point. You have your stance, and you see before you an argument that you can’t make sense of. At this point, you can ignore it (which you are doing), try to understand it and conclude it is wrong, or realize that your stance is wrong and change your stance. You feel completely justified in ignoring my argument and claiming I’m clueless about 1st week calculus because of your biases towards me and your previous experiences.
Please, keep posting. Quite frankly finding a vehicle to demonstrate my OP in real time like this is more than I could have ever hoped.
You admitted yourself that your calculus posts were confusing and badly explained.
Is it your position that if calculus cannot be learned in an evening that it cannot be learned at all and must be taken on faith?
If calculus can be learned at all over any length of time, then it doesn’t have to be taken on faith. You have still failed miserably to cite anything in science which [i[must** be taken on faith.
And you still don’t get it that it’s not necessary even to acknowledge the existence of creationism, much less refute it, in order to know that evolution is true. In order to grasp this better, it may be helpful if you substitute a hypothesis about magic elves in the eighth dimension for creationism. There are an infinite number of purely hypothetical, fanciful or magical ideas for the origin of biological species on earth which provide the same amount of data as creationism does. It is not necessary to refute or even acknowledge any of them because we already know thay evolution is true.
Moreover, it is not necessary to know every aspect of evolutionary science to know - not trust or “have faith” but to personally verify- that the theory is true. The confirmation of the theory does not rely on the totality of every last bit of physical evidence but upon the understanding of a relatively few basic principles.
I apologized for my confusion in understanding his complaint. I assumed a guy who was arguing against calculus would know the first thing about calculus. It took me a minute to realize he was arguing out his ass.
Can you point out where I said it was badly explained?
I said I should have clarified my notation better. You have been whooshed. My notation is standard calculus notation. I was insulting him for being ignorant about simple calculus.
My position is that cricetus will never learn calculus.
Diogenes, I can only assume you never read post 158.
Clearly, there are an infinite number of possibly explanations for the existence of life on Earth as we know it. If each and every one of them is mutually exclusive of evolution, then yes, each and every one of them must be refuted. Should any of them be shown to be valid, then we have a contradiction that must be resolved. Fortunately, of the infinite possibilities, there is but 1 that seems to withstand scrutiny: Evolution. Should another come along which withstands equal scrutiny and which shows a fatal flaw in evolution, evolution will be discarded.
You can simply dismiss all other possibilities because you are firmly placed in your stance that 1=1. Like cricetus, you have a belief (his was thinking the math was wrong, yours is thinking evolution is irrefutable) and you are going to stick to that belief regardless of what else is brought before you. Like cricetus, if something which you don’t understand comes along it doesn’t matter, because you are right and nothing else matters. You egotistically believe that evolution is so simple that understanding just a few principles is all it takes. It takes a lot more than that. If it were truly that simple it would have been proffered long, long ago.
cricetus was presented with a fact he couldn’t comprehend and which flew in the face of what he understood to be true. In order to legitimately refute the fact I gave him, he would need a college level calculus class which we both know he won’t undertake. Certainly not for the sake of trying to understand this argument. He took the truth of his stance and the falsity of my stance “on faith”, meaning he didn’t try to verify it. He didn’t undersand it, he knew he didn’t understand it, but he still dismissed it. You do the exact same thing every time you refuse to given even a modicum of thought to any argument against evolution.
You said this:
You apologized for being confusing and for not explaining your notation. You seem to believe that your ability to cut paste equations from another website has scored you some sort of coup. It has not. You have still failed to make your point.
I can post in Latin or Classical Greek if I want to (and I don’t mean that hypothetically, I’ve actually studied those languages). I can then mock your “ignorance” when you don’t understand it. Will I have therefore made myself a victor in the debate?
The only position which would support your thesis is if it is impossible for Cricetus to learn calculus. This is a perfect example of the point you keep missing so spectacularly.
This is a ridiculous staement. Once evolution is proved. It’s over. No alternatives need apply. If it is known that X=1, then no argument that X=4 needs to be looked at or refuted.
It is impossible - not unlikely but impossible for any of them to be shown to be valid because we already know that evolution is true. The question has already been answered. We already know what X is. There is no possibility of an alternative answer.
There are not an infinite number of other possibilities. There are exactly zero other possibilities. There are an infinite number of false hypotheses which one could conjecturem but we know that it’s impossible for any of them to be true because we already know that evolution is true.
It is a fact that evolution is irrefutable. It is not a belief, it is a proven fact. If you think it’s refutable, refute it.
Excuse me, but nothing you have posted is remotely a refutation of evolution, nor has any of it been a necessary component to knowing that evolutionary theory is true, nor has any of it been anything which must be taken on faith.
Ahh…the “egotistical” evolutionists…your creationism is showing.
Why should those principles have been offered long ago? You haven’t asked for them and have insisted throughout this thread that you don’t want to debate evolution. Are you now changing your mind? Would you like a short list of reasonably verifiable principles which would be sufficient to prove evolution?
Oh baloney. He was presented with amathematical equation in a notation that he hasn’t studied. That doesn’t mean it “flew in the face” of anything.
In order for your point to be valid it would have to be impossible for him to learn the calculus and you didn’t refute anything anyway.
Because it was nothing but a cheap trick and a distraction. I’ll go back to my Latin analogy. Posting in a language someone doesn’t understand doesn’t prove that person is wrong.
I would also dismiss, sight unseen, any argument at all that my car is made out of cheese, and for the same reason, but I’d love to see an argument against evolution. You haven’t presented any. The closest youve come is admitting that you were stumped by some unspecified Grand Canyon flood argument. I guess you also brought up the moon dust canard . If you have anything else, bring it on.
Which has fuck-all to do with evolution. So what if he doesn’t understand calculus? Most people don’t, including you per the error you made about the derivative of the sum being equal to the sum of the derivative (which you, incorrectly, claimed was not true). I notice that you never acknowledged that error, by the way.
This is getting tedious. It is quite clear now that you are indeed making a backhanded attempt to legitimize creationism. No one is buying that argument here, so you might try to peddle your wares on some other message board.
Really
X=Y+1.
If I tell you that under specific conditions Y = 0 then we can prove that X = 1 for those conditions. But if I tell you that Y can equal any positive integer then we can prove that X = 1 but we can equally prove that X = 4 under some circumstances.
And that is g_under_p’s point as far as I understand it. If there are an infinite number of possible values of X that are mutually exclusive with 4 then before we can declare that X = 4 we have to investigate and refute every other possible answer. Only by that process of elimination can we declare that X = 4 rather than declaring that X can equal 4.
And that is precisely how science works. At present we can only declare that the complexity of life can be explained by evolution. We can’t declare that it can’t be explained by mutually exclusive alternatives. Science can never provide such an answer.
I’m assuming that you are arguing here for a hypothetical world where we already know that evolution is true. Because in the real world we don’t now and can’t know that it’s true. Evolution is a scientific hypothesis, we can only ever know that it isn’t false, we can never know that it is true.
And that is exactly like X=Y+1. We can know that X = 4 is not false, but we can never know that it is true. It always remains possible that X could be an infinite number of other answers.
Huh?!??!
Firstly, there are no facts in science. There are theories with varying degrees of evidential support. You now are making the same mistake that creationists make by claiming that something is science is fact. That’s absolute nonsense.
Secondly, of course evolution is refutable. If it were not refutable it could not be scientific. The very essence of science is that any hypothesis be subject to some practical means by which it can be proven to be false or erroneous. And of course anything that can be proven to be false or erroneous is refutable. Refutable and falsifiable are, for most purposes, synonymous. To suggest that evolution isn’t refutable is to suggest that it isn’t falsifiable, and thus not a scientific hypothesis.
It doesn’t mean that evolution has been falsified, however it does mean that it must be refutable
It does not mean that evolution has been refuted, however it does mean that it must be refutable.
To say that any scientific theory is notable to be proven to be false or erroneous is to say that it is not scientific.
This is a blatant use of the logical fallacy known as equivocation. You have just used the term ‘refute” in two totally different ways. In one case you use it as a stand alone meaning “to prove false”, in the next you use it in conjunction with “able”, indicating potentiality.
I can point out how logically and grammatically invalid that is quite simply.
Diogenes believes that any scientific theory has to be falsifiable.
Diogenes believes that evolution is a scientific theory.
Therefore Diogenes believes that evolution is falsifiable.
OK Diogenes, time to turn the tables on you: If you think it’s falsifiable, falsify it.
Of course you can’t falsify the theory of evolution. That is precisely why evolution is accepted scientific theory, because it hasn’t been falsified. But we all agree that it is falsifiable.
Diogenes believes that a person over the age of 18 is marriageable. SO go on, and marry them.
Diogenes believes that the war on terrorism is winnable. So go on, and win it.
And so on. The argument is nonsense. Something can be***able without having ever been ***ed. That is true whether the *** is falsify or refute or win or marry.
Diogenes I usually enjoy your posts, but you really should tone down the use of these erroneous absolutes and use of logical fallacies when debating les knowledgeable creationists. Evolution as a theory is more than strong enough to support itself on a message board without resulting to such dishonesty.