Humans share a common ancestor with apes, and, if I’m not mistaken, we are actually classified as great apes. So in that sense, we haven’t only evolved from apes, we are apes.
Well, it’s a common colloquialism to say that technology has “evolved” from preceding technology. Computers have “evolved” from the room-sized low-processing-capacity machines of the 50s to machines today that are much faster and fit on a desk. The “evolution” here is that once you build the machine, you can improve upon it, then improve upon the improvements, and so on.
Scientific knowledge evolves from prior knowledge, too. Pharmaceuticals, medical science, quantum physics, whatever.
To that extent, yeah, I can see that the automobile “evolved” from the horse-drawn carriage, in the sense that they needed to have the carriage to first have the idea of wheeled transport, before they could conceive of and set about making self-powered wheeled transport. Without the original idea (wheeled transport), there was nothing to make improvements upon. You can iterate it farther back, too… you can’t conceive of wheeled transport without first coming up with the wheel.
Though this probably isn’t the sense in which “evolved” was meant, in this case.
It’s true. Saying that man evolved from the ape is indeed like saying the automobile evolved from the horse-drawn carriage. It’s also like saying the colour green evolved from armadillos, and bananas evolved from simultaneous linear equations in three unknowns.
Complete nonsense, but they are all statements of the form “X evolved from Y”, so they are similar in that sense.
The automobile did not evolve from the horse drawn carriage. Horse drawn carriages had a designer. Automobiles had a designer and were made to fulfil a specific need.
That’s true, but irrelevant. Cars were invented by Carl Benz strapping an engine and some wheels onto a wooden frame. He made a conscious decision to do this, with the intention of producing a self powered vehicle.
No one looked at a monkey and decided that chopping off the tail and enlarging the brain would be a neat thing to do.
Comparing monkeys -> to men and horse drawn carriages -> cars is a neat analogy, but a very superficial one. The underlying differences are just too profound.
Why is it complete nonsense? As far as I’m aware, there’s some debate as to whether or not the last common ancestors before the Pan/Homo split are to be considered apes proper, but that’s a bit of an academic issue to me, as there’s always a degree of arbitrariness to taxonomy. I mean, we’re (great) apes now, and our closest relatives are, as well, so it’s not that much of a stretch to call our last common ancestor one, too.
And as for cars and horse carriages, while it’s true that there’s no direct evolution of the actual machines, their concepts certainly share an evolutionary relation, evolution in this case understood as a copying of information upon which a selection algorithm works, though I’m not sure if the concept of the car is the direct descendant, it’s probably more of a sidebranch of ‘auto-mobile’ vehicles.
So in that sense, you could say that the car is descendent of horse drawn carriages, but this merely highlights that it’s not really a question of ‘faulty’ vs. ‘correct’ logic, but more of the assumptions implicit in concepts in non-formal language.
There’s no faulty logic here since it’s just a single statement. To find a logical fault, I would need to know more about the argument this statement is involved in. How does he justify the statement? What conclusions does he draw from it?
Horse-drawn carriages and automobiles don’t reproduce. That seems like a really significant difference to me.
Obviously automobiles didn’t evolve - they lack an inherent quality of beings that Darwin-or anybody- agrees is necessary for evolution.
So of course it’s faulty logic. If you say ‘beings that have chlorophyll turn sunlight into storable energy,’ and I say, ‘oh yeah? cars don’t have chlorophyll - and they don’t turn sunlight into energy!’ I doubt anybody would be impressed.
If you’re just using it as an general analogy it is OK, but there are better analogies.
Let’s look at it like this.
Transportation:
Man said
Wheel --> Moves things easier --> Next step --> Carry things
Cart --> Carry things easier --> Next step --> Easier for men
Cart and horse --> Easy for man but horse dependent --> Next step --> Free from animal
Train --> Easy for man but not individual --> Next step --> individual train
Tram --> Easy for one man but must go with track --> Next step – No track train
Car --> Freedom to go, no animal with own mind, gas dependent --> next step --> Gas free
As you can see using evolution in the broadest sense of the word meaning the “next step” it is OK. Now I know that isn’t REALLY evolution, but it is how people use the word evolution, wether it’s right or not.
Now you could say that man is a better form or the next step after a chimp. I am sure a lot of chimps would disagree with you. And I realize man did not evolve from chimps or gorillas or monkeys.
And this is the problem people have with trying to understand evolution, that evolution doesn’t do what’s BEST it does what works for the animal to reproduce.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea so long as it doesn’t hinder reproduction too much. Best example of this is the throat where the air and food passages overlap. That’s a horrible design flaw. But instead of redesigning it, evolution came up with a coping mechanism called a “cough.” Which isn’t always effective but it doesn’t hinder reproduction very much.
So I would say using the OP analogy it’s OK if you’re talking to a general public with limited knowledge of evolution, but if you say it to anyone who’s studied science they will call you out on it quickly.
Exactly. It’s not “logic” at all; rather, it’s a similie/analogy. And a faulty one at that.
The purpose of an analogy is to take two seemingly different things, put aside the irrelevant differences, and compare them according to their similarities. In this case, what is being compared? Or, more to the point, why is the comparison being made?
If the point is to support the ID position (as I suspect), then any formulation (AFAICT) of a proper logical argument derived from the analogy’s semantics will be faulty in that it has to beg the question to reach its conclusion.
It’s just an incorrect statement, not an example of a faulty logic per se. There are many reason’s why the statement is incorrect and some of them have been explained above. Faulty logic, in the classical sense, is a different thing from being incorrect.
