universal values?

[phildwyer]

Dogmatic Materialism
February/ March 1997 Boston Review

Excellent citation, worth quoting at greater length:

"Protecting materialism is what Darwinism is mainly about, and protecting Darwinism is what evolutionary biology is mainly about. Knowing this is the key to understanding such specific issues as: (1) why a gifted popularizer like Richard Dawkins is far more influential than the scientists who criticize his simplistic genetic reductionism; (2) why Dawkins-style neo-Darwinism continues to rule the field despite its empirical weaknesses; (3) why the reviews of Behe's book by intelligent scientists like Allen Orr and Jerry Coyne are so irrational; and (4) why the Darwinists are engaged in a culture war over their religious claims."

How much longer do you reckon the Darwinists can hang on for? I'd say not much more than 20 years.

 

[Knotted]

Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True, is well worth reading.

 

[dilute micro]

Dogmatic Materialism
February/ March 1997 Boston Review

DM removed [micromutationism] from the quote?

Johnson, Philip - Darwin On Trial

No it's on p60. I didn't remove anything from it, sorry. The quote is as it is.

Apparently it comes from Eldredge's book Time Frames.

 

[dilute micro]

Johnson completely misrepresents Eldredge. There's a suprise.

Now I need to get to bed.

No that's not a 'misrepresentation'. You just don't understand what you're reading.

Eldredge is talking about either going with the usual darwinian gradualist grain or stating the evidence for what it looks like.

^that's the issue. Not what choice Eldredge made between the two.

 

[Knotted]

No he's not.

 

[Knotted]

Take your time to read the full quote with an open mind.

 

[dilute micro]

See I told you it was about saltationism not stasis. You fool.

Right, that's a curious quote. I'll look it up.

You did? Well threads can record what people say so please show me.

So now I'm an idiot, moron and a fool - and still you're struggling with trying to understand both darwinian evolution and pe.

 

[Knotted]

Nah, can't be arsed. Anyway it's clear that your little quote mine on stasis didn't go anywhere. Just like your little thing about peripatric speciation. Now it's about saltation. Round and round we go.

 

[dilute micro]

Nah, can't be arsed. Anyway it's clear that your little quote mine on stasis didn't go anywhere. Just like your little thing about peripatric speciation. Now it's about saltation. Round and round we go.

You're the easiest person I've ever discussed this stuff with.

So those quotes on p10 of this thread still bother you? Look, IMR claimed that transitional fossils were 'abundant' and provided a quote of Gould to back it up. Gould was talking in context of the creation-evolution debate and lied in order to convince his audience (as he explained the basics). The quotes I gave show that when he's talking with his peers either at a lecture, or through literature, he says the opposite. Other paleontologists have said the same thing as well. I even gave Raul's quotes too. There are more. Wake up knotted.

Here go back and read the quotes -

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10927514&viewfull=1#post10927514

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10927609&viewfull=1#post10927609

There just aren't many transitional fossils found.

 

[Knotted]

You're the easiest person I've ever discussed this stuff with.

So those quotes on p10 of this thread still bother you? Look, IMR claimed that transitional fossils were 'abundant' and provided a quote of Gould to back it up. Gould was talking in context of the creation-evolution debate and lied in order to convince his audience (as he explained the basics). The quotes I gave show that when he's talking with his peers either at a lecture, or through literature, he says the opposite. Other paleontologists have said the same thing as well. I even gave Raul's quotes too. There are more. Wake up knotted.

Here go back and read the quotes -

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10927514&viewfull=1#post10927514

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10927609&viewfull=1#post10927609

There just aren't many transitional fossils found.

This has been dealt with already. Do you want me to repeat?

 

[Knotted]

I see you've abandoned this saltation argument now. Shall we do that one again tommorrow after we've done the peripatric and the stasis arguments again today?

 

[Knotted]

By the way, phil who has actually read a bit of Gould and has understood him to some extent understands where Gould considers himself to be non-neo Darwinian. This is the question of species sorting and random catastrophes. You'll find that most of the Gould quotes attacking the neo-darwinian synthesis and "ultra darwinism" revolve around this sort of question. The rest revolve around Kimura's neutral theory and gradualism+adaptionism+selectionism as ideologies.

edit: To spell it out. Punctuated equilibrium is not the only thing Gould was concerned about. It wasn't pe that made him distance himself from neo-darwinism. Indeed Eldredge as we have seen continues to see himself as a neo-darwinian and presents pe as neo-darwinian theory.

 

[Knotted]

See this:


That's what Phillip Johnson believes that is.

 

[dilute micro]

This has been dealt with already. Do you want me to repeat?

Knotted, you're not repeating ANYTHING. You have a feeble grasp of the subject matter.

You don't understand pe or what Darwin's theory says and so you don't understand how pe differs from it. You run off to find something written about this stuff and return rattling off what someone has said but not understanding what they've said.

As I told you - pe when it was first introduced was recognized as not darwinian because it isn't. Then in order to not be relegated to the "lunatic fringe" as Eldredge called it, they had to come up with a way to make it seem acceptably darwinian. They did this by playing a trick. You just simply zoom in onto the pe species and imagine its evolution to be gradualistic as in Darwin's terms. But it's not. It's "rapid" speciation and, according to Gould, absent from the fossil record because it's so rapid. Well "rapid" as compared to what knotted? You see Gould and Eldredge make an argument against something they later claim doesn't exist. In fact pe was authored because Darwin's theory doesn't account for the lack of transitional fossils. If Darwin's theory had accounted for it then no need for pe.

 

[Knotted]

As I told you - pe when it was first introduced was recognized as not darwinian because it isn't.

I quoted the original 1972 paper. You called it hard sell. Remember? Could you at least keep your story straight?

 

[Knotted]

OK I tell a lie. This is the first paper on punctuated equilibrium. Last one to find the devastating critique of darwinism is a loser!

 

[dilute micro]

I quoted the original 1972 paper. You called it hard sell. Remember? Could you at least keep your story straight?

...by other scientists, knotted. Just because someone writes a paper doesn't mean it's going to go over well.

 

[Knotted]

What was their complaint? Who were they?

 

[kyser_soze]

Excellent citation, worth quoting at greater length:

"Protecting materialism is what Darwinism is mainly about, and protecting Darwinism is what evolutionary biology is mainly about. Knowing this is the key to understanding such specific issues as: (1) why a gifted popularizer like Richard Dawkins is far more influential than the scientists who criticize his simplistic genetic reductionism; (2) why Dawkins-style neo-Darwinism continues to rule the field despite its empirical weaknesses; (3) why the reviews of Behe's book by intelligent scientists like Allen Orr and Jerry Coyne are so irrational; and (4) why the Darwinists are engaged in a culture war over their religious claims."

How much longer do you reckon the Darwinists can hang on for? I'd say not much more than 20 years.

Yup, definitely worth quoting at greater length, that piece:

In short, the Darwinists have plunged heavily into the religion business, making claims that go far beyond their evidence. Douglas Futuyma's textbook proudly aligns Darwinism with the other atheistic pseudosciences that bemused the twentieth century. He writes,

Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism--of much of science, in short--that has since been the stage of most Western thought.2

That's accurate, but Marxism and Freudianism have already gone into the trash can of intellectual history. Darwinism survives for now, but its bluff is being called.

How much longer do you think the Marxists can hold on for? I'd say not much more than 20 years.

 

[phildwyer]

How much longer do you think the Marxists can hold on for? I'd say not much more than 20 years.

Materialist Marxism, to which that piece was referring, has already been obsolete for 20 years. Do try to keep up.

 

[Knotted]

What about materialist/non-materialist darwinism?

You do get religious evolutionists, you know. I mentioned Simon Conway Morris earlier. There's also Father George Coyne - the ex-Vatican astronomer. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

 

[Knotted]

They did this by playing a trick. You just simply zoom in onto the pe species and imagine its evolution to be gradualistic as in Darwin's terms. But it's not. It's "rapid" speciation and, according to Gould, absent from the fossil record because it's so rapid. Well "rapid" as compared to what knotted? You see Gould and Eldredge make an argument against something they later claim doesn't exist.

Can anybody make sense of this? I fear my inability to comprehend dm's incoherence will be taken for an inability to comprehend punctuated equilibrium.

In fact pe was authored because Darwin's theory doesn't account for the lack of transitional fossils. If Darwin's theory had accounted for it then no need for pe.

Re-read this:

What Darwin predicted and what Darwin's theory predict are two different things of course.

An example from a different field:
Newton's theory of gravitation does predicts certain anomalies in the orbit of Uranus given the existence of Neptune. Newton never predicted the existence of Neptune, therefore he never predicted the anomalies in the orbit of Uranus. Does this mean Newton's theory of gravity has been completely falsified, or does it mean that Neptune exists?

What a theory predicts is dependent on what assumptions you make. If for example you are assuming that most speciation is sympatric then Darwin's theory might make different predictions than if you assume that most speciation is allopatric or peripatric.

Make sense?

 

[Knotted]

...by other scientists, knotted. Just because someone writes a paper doesn't mean it's going to go over well.

OK let me see if I can work out what you are trying to say. You are saying that Eldredge and Gould did not know that what they were saying was anti-darwinian. However other (unnamed) scientists did and punctuated equilibrium was therefore rejected and Eldredge and Gould had to find a way by cunningly disguising the fact that it was not anti-darwinian. Punctuated equilibrium is generally accepted now. So they managed to trick the scientific community. What trick did they use? They cunningly talked about different timescales. Just like they did in their first paper.

But there's a hole in my bucket.

 

[Knotted]

Then in order to not be relegated to the "lunatic fringe" as Eldredge called it,

I don't suppose you could quote that one in full for me?

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

What about materialist/non-materialist darwinism?

You do get religious evolutionists, you know. I mentioned Simon Conway Morris earlier. There's also Father George Coyne - the ex-Vatican astronomer. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

There's also been people like Al Jahiz - and of course my usernamesake. That was centuries ago, but there are more religious evolutionists about than tends to realised.

 

[IMR]

R. A. Fisher was a High Anglican, and Theodor Dobzhansky was a devout Christian.

Robert Trivers said in his Darwin@LSE lecture in the '90s that he had some spiritual leanings or sympathies.

W. D. Hamilton was an atheist but remarked that the Baha'i faith was appealing, on the grounds that it seemed 'gentle'. Ironic considering Hamilton once said that if he and a group of people were stranded on an island, he'd strangle the first deformed baby born to the island community.

iirc a poll of scientists in the US found biologists to be the most atheistic group.

 

[Knotted]

If you believe in an intelligently designing god and that this god creates designs which are empirically recognisable as intelligent designs, then you have to ask by what criteria are designs examples of "design". The only real answer is to make an analogy with human engineering design as Paley did. The tinkerer god is an anthropomorphic god.

A lot of religious people would reject that.

 

[gorski]

That all depends on what we mean by "materialism", of course...

It would be worth stating it, otherwise potentially it's all very futile...

 

[dilute micro]

Can anybody make sense of this? I fear my inability to comprehend dm's incoherence will be taken for an inability to comprehend punctuated equilibrium.



Re-read this:

I don't doubt you can't make sense of it. It would take a deeper understanding of pe.

I think you're just going to "darwinist pe defense" sites and copying what they say...I guess.

Btw, knotted, the type of speciation doesn't matter when you still don't have transitionals. If some species did go off and become another species than their parent line it happened way faster ("rapid" as Gould said) than is predicted by Darwin. But it's not just an animal, or plant's sudden appearance in the fossil record it's also their sudden disappearance that is undarwinian. You falling for "different timescales" by witch to judge a pe species and ignore their parent species is laughable but makes sense.

 

[Knotted]

I don't doubt you can't make sense of it. It would take a deeper understanding of pe.

Stuck record.

I think you're just going to "darwinist pe defense" sites and copying what they say...I guess.

Well you know for a fact that I have been quoting directly from the leading scientists involved in the question.

You on the other hand have been scurrying off to creationist websites to chuck a load of quote mines at me.

Look up "projection".

Btw, knotted, the type of speciation doesn't matter when you still don't have transitionals. If some species did go off and become another species than their parent line it happened way faster ("rapid" as Gould said) than is predicted by Darwin. But it's not just an animal, or plant's sudden appearance in the fossil record it's also their sudden disappearance that is undarwinian. You falling for "different timescales" by witch to judge a pe species and ignore their parent species is laughable but makes sense.

I've dealt with this already.

Read it this time:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/classictexts/mayr.pdf

Note that's blackwell publishing. Its not some spooky anti-creationist website.

edit: By the way, pay attention to the point about typostrophic variation and compare to that Eldredge quote about saltation you dredged up.