gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Indeed. The "fittest" turned out to be small hairy animals living in holes with flexible diets.
Darwin knew all the dinosaurs were extinct - did he anguish over how long it took ?
Why Did Darwinism Emerge?
- Thread starter phildwyer
- Start date
Indeed. The "fittest" turned out to be small hairy animals living in holes with flexible diets.
Darwin knew all the dinosaurs were extinct - did he anguish over how long it took ?
alsoknownas
some bloke
An extinction event is not a 'cause' of evolution. The only cause of evolution (change of form), is genetic mutation, and it's effects are always gradual.
To illustrate this - after the K-T extinction event many species suddenly died out. But that doesn't contradict Darwin - individuals, and even species usually die fairly suddenly. What would have contradicted Darwin would have been if the species had suddenly all grown wings, or longer beaks, or started to manufacture iPads. But they didn't. Just like at any other time in history these changes continued to occur gradually.
TruXta
tired
I wasn´t raised a JW. But you read whatever you read.
TruXta
tired
For my sins I have a BA in religious studies (as in the history, theory, anthropology etc of religions). Also gradualism is not central to "Darwinism".
Mumbles274
running from law and the press and the parents
This thread seems to me a pefect example of how the phrase 'fuck of dwyer' evolved
I think you should stick to the self-pitying whinging self-obsessed self-regarding crap that you post everywhere else non-stop all the time without any respite whatsoever. You seem to enjoy that so much more.
Dude, how could a comet impact have happened over tens of thousands of years?
Yes it is. That's why punk-ek caused such outrage when it was first formulated--and still does among the more reactionary Darwinists.
Fair enough. I probably shouldn't have brought it up anyway.
Well you have put your finger on the crux of my disagreement with Darwinism. It has to do with the nature of causality itself.
Darwinists are methodologically committed to locating causality at the smallest possible level. In fact this micrological approach is the definitive characteristic of Darwinism. For Darwin himself, the smallest possible level was that of the individual organism. Today, Darwinists like to locate causality at a yet more micrological level--that of genes.
But throughout the history of Darwinism, the basic assumption remains the same: events are best explained by looking at the smallest possible causal elements.
I take the opposite view. I think explanations are at their fullest and most convincing at the largest possible level. So I would say that the final cause of evolution is the collision of distant galaxies that produced the comet that smashed into the earth that made the dinosaurs extinct.
Part of the problem is the conceptual poverty of the English language. We only have one word for "cause," whereas classical Greek had at least four. So we are basically unequipped to make the fine distinctions between various kinds of causality that questions such as evolution demand.
But I don't really want to get into a philosophical discussion about causality here. For the purpose of this thread, I just want to note that Darwin's method is borrowed wholesale from Adam Smith. Smith thought the actions of individuals was the key to understanding what he called the "economy."
Obviously no socialist or anti-capitalist of any kind can endorse that assumption. And yet they seem happy enough to endorse the very same assumption when it occurs in biology. I suspect the reason is that few of them have much knowledge of biology. Either that or they are so paranoid about appearing metaphysical that they miss this vital contradiction in their thought.
And make no mistake, this contradiction is indeed vital. I would go so far as to say that it explains the failure of the Western Socialist project tout court. If I can bothered I will return later on to explain why.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
I believe you can get medication for this sort of thing.
You ought to know eh?
You seem to me a perfect example of a pathetic inadequate sort of a person.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Absolutely. I'm very much an empiricist when it comes to practical things.
Not being a scientist, when it comes to stuff like evolutionary theory, I weigh up the available data and theories and take my pick - I certainly don't worry if there's any convergence with liberal economic theory. (I half-attempted, and predictably failed a social science foundation course).
I vaguely remember Adam Smith and Marx, but who was that French guy whose followers had to zip up each other's clothing on a daily basis ? (I don't think Alan de Botton covered that on his TV programme)
Hitler was a vegetarian apparently.
/Godwin's
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Off the top of my head: Impact kicks dust into air, sunlight blocked, ice forms, albedo raised, temperatures fall, "mini ice age" ensues, large animals can't adapt fast enough.
There isn't much evidence to support that story, but it's one that could happen on the 10,000 year scale. 10,000 years is still sudden in evolutionary terms, though. The response to the K-T event can be called "rapid" in evolutionary terms, but still many orders of magnitude slower compared to the rapidity of the event itself. It took tens of millions of years for the mammals to expand into all the environmental niches previously filled by the dinosaurs.
Darwin did not think that mass, sudden, extinctions happened. The fossil record was not yet well known and plate tectonics was unheard of. But modern evolutionary theory is full of sudden extinctions. Natural disasters and climate change have the power to wipe out species much faster than they are able to adapt to the change - no matter if that change is on the scale of 1, 10, or 1,000 years. Adaption is slow and gradual. The environment can change rapidly.
What's getting humans into trouble is that we adapt faster than the environment. We have (momentarily) escaped evolutionary pressure.
It's not really a matter of "convergence." I'd argue that Darwin and Smith are representatives of the very same mode of thought, just applied to what we regard as different "areas."
I think the root of the problem, and the reason why people miss the above, is precisely this false, arbitrary and historically very recent division of ideas into discrete "areas."
As for not being a scientist, don't let that worry you. Scientists bank on just that kind of deference from laymen. You're just as capable of forming an opinion as they are--more so in fact, since you have no professional interests at stake.
Pish, humans per se have never been subject to evolutionary pressure. As you know, evolution works too slowly for it to take effect over mere millennia. Whatever forces are driving us towards our own destruction, evolution ain't one of them.
Yes, and many Darwinists fought tooth and nail to avoid admitting such events (this is one reason why the term "Darwinist" is useful imo). Advocates of punk-ek faced a long, hard struggle to get their ideas accepted, and they are fiercely disputed to this day. For good reason: they are incompatible with Darwin's own gradualism, which is central to his entire theory.
I know that advocates of punk-ek still consider themselves followers of Darwin. But there must come a point where the departures from his theory are so many and so profound they will have to abandon that claim. My argument is that this point was reached thirty years ago, and that only fear of giving succor to creationists has prevented evolutionists from admitting that fact.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
So why does any of this matter now ?
Is this "biased" evolutionary theory being used now to justify the very worst kind of liberal economics ?
How ironic that the key players on the Right are often fundamentalist religionists who are trying to get all kinds of bollocks taught in school as science.
Is this "biased" evolutionary theory being used now to justify the very worst kind of liberal economics ?
How ironic that the key players on the Right are often fundamentalist religionists who are trying to get all kinds of bollocks taught in school as science.
Yes, and evolutionary causality is a two-way, dialectical process, involving an interaction between environmental changes and adaptation to them. We agree on that. But Darwin didn't, he conceived it as a one-way or "monocausal" process, driven entirely by adaptation.
Hence he was able to claim that individual organisms were the motor of evolutionary change. Dawkins makes the same claim about genes: he views the actions even of organisms as determined in the last analysis by genetic factors.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
It's not a religion. There are no "followers". All truth does not flow from one man, long dead. Current evolutionary theory is the sum of all the work of all evolutionary scientists. Yes, large alterations to the theory are recent, but that is the case for all science. 200 years seperate Newton and Einstein, yet in the last 100 years physics has come 10x as far.
There are no "Darwinists". You have your little pet theory and are bending the rest of the world to create some sort of justification for it. This is what's known as *bad academic - no cookie*. Your attempts at the opening premise are so obviously twisted and self-serving, that you will find it impossible to get anyone to follow you down the road to your theory. Your methods stink.
There are no "Darwinists". You have your little pet theory and are bending the rest of the world to create some sort of justification for it. This is what's known as *bad academic - no cookie*. Your attempts at the opening premise are so obviously twisted and self-serving, that you will find it impossible to get anyone to follow you down the road to your theory. Your methods stink.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Care to cite any evidence ?
Is Greenspan a "Darwinist", or just an incompetent idiot sitting on top of a huge Ponzi scheme that he wasn't even running or directly profiting from. ?
Oh yes there are. Indeed there are also Darwinist fundamentalists and ultra-Darwinists.
I'm flattered (seriously) that you think I've invented such terms, but alas I cannot claim that honor. Google them if you don't believe me.
Dawkins is the best example of an ultra-Darwinist. But this is well-established and thus a job for Google not me.
Me too. A bientot...
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