Gee, are all sacred writings open to gentle sarcasm?
Don’t mean I’m going to break the habit of a lifetime, you know! Not gonna let myself be bullied by no one. And this started in Mindless and Pointless. I had a sneaking suspicion when I first came across this thread that that wily old fox Simmons had created some sort of Trojan Horse. Now my hunch has been confirmed. No, as a Popperian (God, you guys are gonna be loving this), I think I prefer to say it’s been corroborated.
Come on, be honest - you love it.
Okay, just for you, a bit of theory. We need to recognise (following Hayek, MacIntyre et al) the rationality of tradition and even the rationality of passions and emotions (especially mine, of course).
I also hold that some of the arguments used in the evolutionary debate might be logically compelling but nonetheless lack plausible premises.
Others have chipped in with their candidates. What are yours?
Not at all anything below the surface. I really wanted to get some info on Darwin’s Finch and in fact some was shaken loose.
I notice that you are no longer all alone. lekatt is on your side.
Of course, not. The sacred writings of the Scientologists are open to savage sarcasm, devastating literary criticism, and open dismissal with a considerable dose of guffawing accompanied by much snickering and a few titters.
Careful, Tomn!
Crimes against Ron are punishable throughout several planes of existance.
:dubious:
And how do you think I feel about this latest development?!
Most of the creationists turn out to be loonies…
Not everyone can combine intellectual rigour with devastating critique.
A nervous one of those just ran through the audience.
Grabbing women’s breasts.
Evolution doesn’t have a direction or momentum. It would be silly to try to predict the future.
So far as I can tell, other posters have been “predicting” the present. That, or they’re being silly.
Can you clarify what you mean by “predicting the present”?
Certainly some popluations are more likely to speciate than others, but asking which ones are on the verge of speciation tends to imply that there is some “momentum” in place that is carrying populations toward speciation. But populations split and reunite all the time, and speciation at any given time is never certain. Many people misunderstand evolution, thinking that species are on some predetermined journey “up the evolutionsary ladder”, and I think speculation about specific instances of speciations does more harm than good since it reinforces that erroneous belief.
Not really, but I was referring to the type of process noted by:
Perhaps “speculating on the present” or “guessing” (my personal favourite word for these kind of things) would do better.
Now then you’re going to upset some of these folks. They love to think that they terrify people who don’t agree with them with their knowledge and reading. (Even perhaps with their thinking, but, on the other hand, perhaps not.)
My own reaction is much along the lines of former British Socialist MP Denis Healey, who responded to an attack by the rather moist Conservative MP Geoffey Howe by saying that he felt as if he had been savaged by a dead sheep.
Still, it helps to sharpen the wits of those blessed with self-reflection and a little of that most important of all knowledges, self-knowledge!
You’re a linguist are you not?
What language is English going to turn into? Has it stopped evolving? It’s exactly the same now as it was when I was a kid. When’s it going to change? What other languages are going to change and what will they become? When will they be finished?
Predicting biological evolution is no different.
Also, evolutionary theory has never failed a prediction and has never relied on “guesses.”
Well, when I see an article by E-sabbath published in *Nature * concerning the inevitable evolution of the sea lion into a whale-like species, then I’ll be concerned. Until then, I’d say it’s an erroneous statement made on a message board. Hardly unique.
Apples and oranges, Dio, I would say. Language change should not be compared with animal and plant change. For one thing, there are precious few language changes that happen without human agency (strangely enough, lower middle class (i.e. aspiring) women typically drive such change in the UK). Evolution is very different.
And thanks for reminding me. I must finish the revisions to my thesis by mid-June, so log out I must for the rest of the afternoon, much as I am loathe to.
John, speculation can not be in error. It may be wrong, though. One can speculate as to the apparent direction of a trend in any creature’s life.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gould_leviathan.html
This is not the precise article I’m thinking of, but it does track the history of the whale, and note that the sea lion is currently apparently in a similar state to an early stage of the transition of the whale.
This gives no special validity to my thoughts, but the whale pictures are interesting.
Since nobody seemed to notice my post about ring species on the last page, I’ll mention them again - ring species allow us to observe speciation is progress (not that I’m arguing they represent the only method by which it can occur) - right now, under our very noses, herring gulls are evolving into black-backed gulls, or vice versa, or rather more correctly, they have both descended from a common ancestor. We are able to know this because the intermediates, (or rather, their descendants) are all still alive and well - nobody disputes that herring and black-backed gulls are different species, and yet there exists a continuum of intermediate forms, spread across a geographic range that encircles the globe, changing a little bit every step of the way until it comes back to the same place -where the changes add up to a significant difference between the two - plenty enough to make a different species.
No speculation, presumption or interpretation required, no separation from the evidence by time or chance - it’s all there to see, right now, plain as day.
Whales are such successful buggers (except where they run into Japs and Vikings) that one cannot be surprised that they’d be a kind of unconscious, ateleological model for sealions. This thread is finally getting somewhere.
But we’ve already got whales and sealions: they are both “evolutionarily successful” in that they exist right now in large numbers. Over generations, the present form of the sealion might be replaced by some other forms: if one is more “whale-like” that still doesn’t imply a direction from “sealion to whale”. The prediction is not “sealion to whale” but “sealion to variations on a sealion, whatever they are” - let’s see if that comes true, shall we?