Over at The New Atlantis Stephen L. Talbott has a great discussion of the vacuity of the idea of “fitness” as used in Darwinian theory. As we all know, Darwinian theory “predicts” that the “fittest” organisms will survive and leave more offspring. And what makes an organism “fit” under the theory? Why, the fact that it survived and left offspring. There is an obvious circularity here:
This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce.
Darwinists counter the tautology charge by attempting to demonstrate that there are independent criteria (so-called “engineering criteria”) that explain reproductive success. For example, if a wolf runs faster, it will be more fit, and therefore the trait that gives the wolf the extra speed (longer legs perhaps) explains its fitness, not merely the fact that it did survive and reproduce.
However, the appeal to engineering criteria in the abstract does not by itself get us very far. As philosopher Ronald Brady reminded us when discussing this dispute in an essay entitled “Dogma and Doubt,” what matters for judging a proposed scientific explanation is not only the specification of non-tautological criteria for testing it, but also our ability to apply the test meaningfully. If we have no practical way to sum up and assess the fitness or adaptive value of the traits of an organism apart from measurements of survival rates (evolutionary success), then on what basis can we use the idea of survival of the fittest (natural selection) to explain evolutionary success — as opposed to using it merely as a blank check for freely inventing explanations of the sort commonly derided as “just-so stories.”
Here is the key sentence:
If we have no practical way to sum up and assess the fitness or adaptive value of the traits of an organism apart from measurements of survival rates . . .
What are you talking about Barry. Isn’t it obvious that a trait like the longer legs that help our wolf run faster will necessarily be beneficial in terms of fitness? Actually, no, it is not obvious. Ask any engineer and he will tell you there are always tradeoffs associated with engineering decisions. You want a faster car? Make it lighter. Is it a “better” car? Well, if by “better” you mean “faster,” of course it is. But if by “better” you mean “safer” maybe not, because a lighter car might not be as structurally sound as a heavier car. The same is true for engineering traits in animals. Talbott quotes two of the most famous Darwinists in history:
George Gaylord Simpson opined that ‘the fallibility of personal judgment as to the adaptive value of particular characters, most especially when these occur in animals quite unlike any now living, is notorious.” And in 1975, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that no biologist ‘can judge reliably which ‘characters’ are useful, neutral, or harmful in a given species.’
Talbott continues:
One evident reason for this pessimism is that we cannot isolate traits — or the mutations producing them — as if they were independent causal elements. Organism-environment relations present us with so much complexity, so many possible parameters to track, that, apart from obviously disabling cases, there is no way to pronounce on the significance of a mutation for an organism, let alone for a population or for the future of the species.
None other than the famous Richard Lewontin (he of the “divine foot in the door” quotation) has illustrated the point:
A zebra having longer leg bones that enable it to run faster than other zebras will leave more offspring only if escape from predators is really the problem to be solved, if a slightly greater speed will really decrease the chance of being taken and if longer leg bones do not interfere with some other limiting physiological process. Lions may prey chiefly on old or injured zebras likely in any case to die soon, and it is not even clear that it is speed that limits the ability of lions to catch zebras. Greater speed may cost the zebra something in feeding efficiency, and if food rather than predation is limiting, a net selective disadvantage might result from solving the wrong problem. Finally, a longer bone might break more easily, or require greater developmental resources and metabolic energy to produce and maintain, or change the efficiency of the contraction of the attached muscles.
In summary, because all engineering decisions involve tradeoffs, there is no way to tell whether a particular engineering trait, in isolation, caused an organism to be more fit. And this drives us back to where we started. The only way to measure “fitness” is by reproductive success, which is obviously tautological if “fitness” is defined as “reproductively successful.”
Mr. Arrington, you may appreciate this piece of trivia:
Also of note, a fatal flaw, perhaps THE MAIN fatal flaw of many fatal flaws, in ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, is this,,,
,,,if evolution were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only ‘life’ that would be around would be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most mutational firepower, since only they would be the fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution rules and only the ‘fittest’ are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here:
Richard Dawkins interview with a ‘Darwinian’ physician goes off track – video
Excerpt: “I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [for amazement] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly — a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves — that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we’re stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?”
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....62031.html
i.e. Since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful reproduction ever be realistically ‘selected’ for? Any other function besides reproduction, such as sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successfully reproducing, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded as so much excess baggage since it would, sooner or later, slow down successful reproduction.
And this principle of ‘discarding excess baggage’ in order to gain a reproductive advantage is exactly what we find in our empirical evidence:
Force causes acceleration.
How do we measure force? By measuring acceleration.
Does it follow that Newton’s laws are vacuous?
If “survival of the fittest” were merely descriptive, you might have a point. But it is methodological. It tells biologists what to study. It gives meaning to “fitness”.
Further to this point, as was drawn out by Gould and Eldredge, as well as by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, we can’t even be certain in any given case what trait was the target of selection. What we might think was the target of selection could simply by what Gould referred to as an Evolutionary “spandrel”; some trait that got carried along as a by-product of a different trait that was the actual target of selection. Furthermore, the trait that actually gets selected for might not even be the result of a genetic change at all. It could be that the targeted trait is the result of an epigenetic change and other genetic changes in the organism benefit by being carried along for the ride.
It seems that this kinda leaves us in a place where the only thing we can really say with any certainty about why Evolutionary history proceeded as it allegedly did is that stuff happened, and some things survived while others didn’t, allowing us to predict pretty much anything that is consistent with that description, which is pretty much anything at all.
Neil, fittest = survival and vice versa. That is not the case with force and acceleration. Not a tautology there.
In summary, because all engineering decisions involve tradeoffs, there is no way to tell whether a particular engineering trait, in isolation, caused an organism to be more fit. And this drives us back to where we started. The only way to measure “fitness” is by reproductive success, which is obviously tautological if “fitness” is defined as “reproductively successful.”
Why do you think this is a problem?
And do you have an example to support this
Darwinists counter the tautology charge by attempting to demonstrate that there are independent criteria (so-called “engineering criteria”) …
Perhaps people do this, but I’ve never run into it…
Neil,
From F = ma how do you reach the conclusion that force causes acceleration?
E = mc^2
Does energy cause mass?
And on and on we could go.
Neil makes a good point
If “survival of the fittest” were merely descriptive, you might have a point. But it is methodological. It tells biologists what to study. It gives meaning to “fitness”.
To which I’d add the importnat thing to grasp is that evolutionary biolgists are interested in variance in fitness, and the degree with which that variance is down to variance in heritable traits.
I’m not a biologist, so I don’t know what method(s) are identified by the concept “survival of the fittest”. It sounds like it is missing a key phrase. The “survival of the fittest” for fill in the blank.
In my understanding of the OP it is the inability to identify those blanks that is partly the problem. The example given was whether or not the Zebra needed more speed (e.g. “survival of the fittest for high velocity”). Further compounding the problem is an inability to isolate specific traits as being the cause of the continued survival of the Zebra.
@wd400 #7
The problem is, as per what I mentioned about Gould/Eldredge and Fodor/Piattelli-Palmarini, it doesn’t tell biologists what to study. They cannot use it to determine that they should study Trait A in Organism X because that trait in that organism is what was selected for survival. The nature of phenotypic diversity from genetic change is that phenotypes don’t come in tidy, discrete boxes. They are often package deals, where multiple traits get carried along at the same time and it’s impossible to know what the actual target of selection was in any given case. The result is that the concept of Natural Selection flings the door wide open for endless numbers of just-so stories, but it provides no real guide to scientists as to what traits to study for what reasons.
that’s true of some traits some times.
Which is why evolutionary biologists had to invent quantatative genetics… in the 1920s…you should look into it
Neil at 2 claims
To which C.S. Lewis would reply,,
Or perhaps Lewis would have replied to Neil with this humorous quote:
In other words, the law of Gravity does not have causal adequacy, or ‘agency’, within itself. Law is not a ‘mechanism’ that has ever ’caused’ anything to happen in the universe but is merely a description of a regularity within the universe. The early Christian founders of modern science understood this distinction between description and causal agency quite well,,,
Perhaps the most famous confusion of description of a regularity and causal agency was this following quote by Hawking:
As to the ancient first mover argument of Aquinas, the double slit experiment is excellent in illustrating that the ‘unmoved mover’ argument is valid.
In the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video that meshes perfectly with the ‘first mover argument’::
If that was not enough to get Dr. Zeilinger’s point across, at the 4:12 minute mark in this following video,,,
Professor Zeilinger states,,,
Supplemental quote:
Verse and Music:
To be clear, when I said “that’s true of some traits sometimes” I was only agreeing that there isn’t always a simple map between genotype and phenotype, not signing on to other claims in that comment
The idea that speed is an obvious selective advantage, and not an after the fact observations that some animals are fast, is clearly refuted by the fact that some animals are incredibly slow- like a python.
Every animal has a way that they survive, and so saying that there is an objective, engineering way to determine “fitness” is of course silly, because any feature an animal has is the features which made it survive. Why didn’t python evolve to have the speed of a cheetah? I guess slowness is a survival benefit.
Just ask an Oak tree why does it need speed.
As a YEC’er, I’m happy to admit that Natural Selection, survival of the fittest, is a perfectly valid observation of the world. After all, some animals survive, and some go extinct.
The article above is also a perfectly valid observation – the definition of fittest is far too complex to predict (think…weather forecasting). We only know after the fact which animals were the fittest, at which point the evolutionist gleefully comes up with a just-so story about why (e.g. their beaks were longer when the nuts were harder, the black ones blended in with the soot better, etc.) that may, or may not, be why they survive while other animals didn’t. To make it more confusing, minute and random changes in environment can quickly change which animals are the new fittest.
For the purposes of ID, of course, the larger point is that natural selection is a true tautology that provides no value or support for Evolution, because it can only remove species from the gene pool, not add new ones – making it compatible with all theories, not just Evolution. Ah, well.
Mung@6 noted
LOL, Mung. Actually, energy also squares the speed of light!
Actually, the creative evolutionary biologists that wd400 mentioned could argue that since at the beginning of the big bang, there was only energy but now we have mass, therefore energy *musta evolved* into mass (change over time) by natural selection, since only the “fittest” energy musta survived to propagate. 😉
-Q
drc466,
Agreed with most of what you said, however you did mistakenly attribute the origin of new species to natural selection. The correct attribution would mutations (point, frameshift, chromosomal), horizontal gene transfer, genetic recombination, etc. I doubt most YECers would balk at the notion that the fox genus (vulpes) is a perfectly good example of natural forces creating new fox species.
WD @ 5.
The more interesting question, WD, is why you think it is not a problem. The defining idea of the Darwinism in which you believe so fervently is a mere tautology. Here is a principle of tautologies that you should ponder. All tautologies are analytic propositions. They are necessarily true. That cannot not be true. It follows that they cannot in principle be falsified. Hence, they are not scientific propositions.
But “Survival of the fittest” is not the defining idea of the Darwinism.
WD @ 19. I always get somewhat flummoxed when someone says something so flagrantly wrong. I think to myself, is it really possible they are that stupid/ignorant. Or are they just jerking my chain. Either way, the prospects for a fruitful discussion are dim. Good night.
“Evolutionists proclaim that Darwin’s theory is a scientific solution of biological adaptation. This chapter will show their claim to science is mistaken. Natural selection is actually defined many different ways. The theory has many formulations, each with its own downfall. The illusion that ‘natural selection is science’ is created by shifting between the formulations to meet any objection.”
– Walter James ReMine
Well, it’s staggering to me that anyone could spend years arguing about evolution and end up thinking “Survival of the fittest” was a central idea in “Darwinism”, rather than a slightly silly slogan.
Here’s Doug Futyma, literally the textbook orthodox Darwinian, pointing out some of the problems with the term:
http://biology.ufl.edu/courses.....ection.pdf
@wd400 #10
Was that directed at me?
You do realize that Gould and Eldredge were noting these problems I mention as being major issues in the 1970’s and 80’s, right? And Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini addressed them as still being major issues in 2011, judging the concept of selection-for to be vacuous.
From What Darwin Got Wrong (pg 136):
After pointing out that there are not actually any laws of adaptation, they conclude (pg 138):
My point here is not that the vacuity of the concept of Natural Selection automatically proves Evolutionary tales are a false historical narrative, but that claims that Natural Selection provides some kind of a causal theory of macroevolution are empty in spite of their widespread popularity.
@Barry #20, re: wd400 #19
Perhaps I should have finished my quote from comment #23:
“Survival of the Fittest” is a widely-used (though some may claim not absolutely accurate) shorthand reference to the mechanism of Natural Selection. Nonetheless, the criticisms of Natural Selection as being an empty concept don’t rely on the specific wording of the shorthand but on the specifics of the concept itself.
For those that haven’t chucked their toys:
If there is a central idea in Darwinism it is not “Survival of the fittest”, it’s non-random reproductive success of hertible variants. That’s what allows adaptation to work, and to compound on earlier generations of adaptation and it does not contain a tautology.
HeKS,
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are playing silly philosophical games, I really can’t see anything of substance in the quoted passage.
Evolutionary biology, and natural selection in particular, is a productive scientific field that allows us to propose and test ideas. When you see a huge region of low genetic diversity around the lactose tolerance allele in dairying cultures you know slection has acted, not matter what Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini might think.
Even most Creationists accept that there is a differential rate of survival and reproduction within populations and that as a result populations can change and adapt to changing environments. The concept of “fitness” is no different there, often called micro-evolution, than it is among those that believe in universal common descent.
That “the fit survive” is not the theory of evolution. Natural Selection isn’t a theory of who survives, it’s a theory of what occurs as a result that some individuals have a better chance of surviving (or more accurately, breeding) than others.
The statement that “some individuals have a better chance of surviving than others” – is not a tautology. The statement that “over time the characteristics of a population will change depending on who survives” – is also not a tautology. These are the base of Darwinism.
“Survival of the fittest” is obviously a tautology. But defining those that survive and breed the “fit” is not “vacous”, it’s a definition. Again, the concept is no different than with those that believe that natural selection is involved with micro-evolution.
@wd400 #25
I was quoting part of their conclusion, showing that the issues I mentioned are not considered to have been resolved in the 1920’s. I don’t really feel like typing the book out so if you want the full substance of their argument you can always go pick it up.
In the interim, there was a pretty straightforward review at ENV that might be useful.
And BTW, just taking a look at the review reminded me that I misspoke when I attributed the “spandrel” designation to Gould and Eldredge. It was actually Gould and Lewontin.
wd400 wrote
LOL! Love it! “That’s not a gun, it’s a non-reciprocating, single-stroke internal combustion engine. Caution: the piston can come loose.”
Non-random says it all. Take that out and what’s left?
-Q
-Q
-Q 😉
This is exactly the case in almost all examples that are proffered.
To be sure, I think it is logically possible to identify independent criteria that could give us a non-tautological assessment of fitness. But it is significantly more tricky than most people realize, and in the vast majority of cases, the “survival of the fittest” operates as a useless tautology.
Actually, it is generally worse than useless. It gives the false impression of having provided us with some useful information, an answer to the mystery of a particular organism’s survival. However, in nearly all cases invoking “survival of the fittest” simply masks our ignorance of the real underlying processes in question.
And, I would add in response to those who think that “reproductive success” (or some similar wording) is a way out of the tautology — no it isn’t. It suffers the same exact problems as the more general “survival of the fittest” formulation.
At the risk of tooting one’s own horn, these may be of interest:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090906123249/http://www.evolutiondebate.info/A%20Good%20Tautology%20is%20Hard%20to%20Avoid.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20080723214029/http://www.evolutiondebate.info/ThoughtsonNS.pdf
This older thread of Barry’s might also be worth reviewing (the exchange with Box’s thoughtful comments and questions) as it relates to natural selection and the concept of fitness (starting with comment 73), and in particular comment 81:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-486594
Eric,
Yea, I love it, wd400 is saying that inserting the phrase “reproductive success” instead of the word “fittest” takes the tautology out of the argument.
So those that survive are now not the fittest, they are the ones that survive.
Now I am really confused about the awesome powers of natural selection to create things, if the concept of natural selection is simply those that survive survive. That’s what created all the magical life on earth? Its not that the BEST ones survived, its that the ones that survived survived.
Its true, those that survived survived.
No phoodoo, I am not saying that.
I’m saying the non-random survival of heritable variants makes populations adapt to their environment.
It’s not simply that survivors survive, but those individuals that are best adapted to their environment survive, and so over time lineages become better adapted.
Barry seems to think the fact it’s hard to predict what variants will be fit is a problem for evolutionary biology, I don’t know why he thinks that.
WD400
So what about survival of the sickest?
http://www.psychologytoday.com.....he-sickest
They have not adapted best to their environment yet they survived and had offspring!
As to
The fact that engineering decisions involve ‘tradeoffs’ is admitted here:
The problem of ‘engineering tradeoffs’ is more clearly illustrated here:
In the preceding article, although he compared life to an internal combustion engine to get his point across, the problem of constraints due to ‘engineering tradeoffs’ is actually, due to the unfathomed integrated complexity being dealt with in life, orders of magnitude worse in life than it is in man-made machines, especially during embryological development:
Supplemental quote:
Verse and Music:
wd400:
That’s the propaganda anyway.
It is whatever doesn’t die and that can be any of a number of traits. It is NOT whatever is best adapted. It is whatever is good enough.
Biological fitness is an after-the-fact assessment.
It is non-random in a meaningless way. Non-random in this sense just means not every individual has the same probability of being eliminated.
Neil Rickert:
What a load of crap. What is this alleged “methodology”? Neil never says.
Look, whatever is good enough survives. And fitness wrt biology is still an after-the-fact assessment.
wd400:
When it comes to natural selection, Doug Futuyma lies.
wd400,
You just reiterated that it is “It’s not simply that survivors survive, but those individuals that are best adapted to their environment survive.” Those are your exact words, not mine.
So what does best adapted mean? Does it not mean those that survive? If that is not the criteria, what is?
I think you are confused if you are saying that Barry thinks it is a problem for evolutionary theory that its hard to predict which which variants will be fit. The problem is that the definition of being most fit is survival! Hence, Survival of the Fittest!!
Do you think it was creationists who made up the term?
Pray tell, what else could “best adapted” (your words) mean, if it doesn’t mean those that survive?
Barry:
To be fair it is said that it is NOT tautological because those who leave more offspring tend to have a trait or traits that allowed them to do so. And it is due to that trait or traits that reproductive success would then be based on.
However no one can say what that trait or traits are. It is all after-the-fact assessment A faster wolf is useless if it is weak, or has poor eyesight or poor hearing, etc.
Joe,
I think you give the theory too much credit. A faster wolf is only useful if that is the trait it has. If a shrub is not fast, apparently that is equally useful. There is no more useful or less useful.
If it is useful for a fish at the bottom of the ocean to be blind, then this is what is useful, blindness.
There is no other criteria for stating what is useful.
wd400 @34:
No. It is pretty much randomness all the way down. How did the particular particle interact with the copying mechanism to cause a mutation? How did that particular mutation end up interacting in the organism to produce an effect? What result did that have in that particular organism, as opposed to another? How did that particular mutation get spread in the population? What environmental factor happened to come along after the mutation that resulted in it making a difference? Which organism happened to be on a high rock when the flood came, or under protection when the hail fell, or hidden from sight when the predator arrived? And on and on. Everything that goes on within a lineage to get an organism to where it is today; everything that went on in the predator’s lineage to get them where they are today; all the vagaries and hazards of nature. It is essentially randomness all the way down.
Natural selection is not any kind of force. It is simply an after the fact label attached to the results of processes that are seldom understood, rarely identified, and that (as a practical matter) are essentially random. Natural selection doesn’t impart any “non-random” directionality to evolution. It is simply a label attached to the outcome, and attaching a label to the result of what is essentially a random process does not make the process non-random.
And how, pray tell, do we know that a particular organism was “best adapted to its environment”? Because it survived.
Look, if someone wants to use the two words “natural selection” as a shorthand way to avoid having to say: “Organisms are more likely to survive if they happen to be in a lineage that happens to have conferred a (generally unidentified) mutation that (in some typically unknown way) happened to provide a characteristic that happened to be helpful in the particular environment in which they happened to be living at the time, as compared to other organisms that were less lucky.” — If someone wants to use “natural selection” as a shorthand expression so that they don’t have to say all that, then fine.
The problem arises, as it does so frequently, when natural selection is put forward as an explanation for an organism’s survival. In that case it almost always falls back on survivability as the (often unspoken) definition. In that case it is a useless tautology. Worse, it gives people the false impression that some kind of “scientific” explanation has been proffered, when it is really just a confession of ignorance about the real underlying processes.
Think of it this way:
If we can identify, with particularity, what actually caused an organism to survive — the specific trait, particular molecular machines, identifiable proteins and DNA sequences, the particular environmental factors, predation, weather, flood, drought, and so on — if we can identify precisely what caused the “differential survival” in the population, then we can talk about the real, physical, concrete, underlying, specific cause just fine, thank you very much, without ever invoking the label of “natural selection”.
It is only when we don’t know what the actual forces and causes were at work that “natural selection” need be invoked. Unfortunately, in that case, it functions as little more than an observation that those that survived, survived.
Joe @41:
There is an important nuance here.
We need to keep in mind that “leaving more offspring” is not the criterion. Having more offspring is relevant only if those offspring happen to survive their early life and happen to get to reproductive age and happen to actually reproduce. So it is not leaving more offspring itself, but “reproductive success” in the sense of growing the population over time that matters.
And what causes the population to have this reproductive success? Initial reproduction, to be sure, but also whatever traits happen to aid that particular organism at that particular time in the environment it happens to be in with the predators that happen to be on the scene, and if it happens to avoid disease, floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts, freezing weather, and all the various vagaries and hazards of nature that happen to come along — in other words if the organism happens to survive.
Again, as I mentioned @43, in those extremely rare cases when we know what actually caused the differential survival, we can point to the actual cause without ever invoking a label of “natural selection” to help explain the process. And in those cases in which we don’t know what actually caused the differential survival, attaching a label of “natural selection” does not help us get any closer to an explanation. Indeed, more often than not it obscures.
This is the key:
The label “natural selection” can operate properly in the English language as a shorthand convenience term to describe the various random processes and vagaries and hazards of nature that, somehow, resulted in the differential survival of a particular population of organisms. In contrast, when the term is put forward as an explanation for that survival, our internal logic alarm should ring loudly and, if we look closely, we will nearly always see that the so-called explanation of natural selection is operating as a tautology, incorporating as its premise the very conclusion it is trying to reach.
I remember reading once that fitness/adaptation/non-randomness confers only about a 3% advantage, and that luck plays a much larger role.
Like when one of my classmates in Junior High put a shrimpy little male lab mouse in the female cage by mistake. We discovered the mistake the next morning, but almost all the females later turned out to be pregnant.
-Q
Does Neil only manage to find time to post moronic statements at UD, but none to defend them.
If F=ma is true, then it is also true that ma=F.
Using Neil’s logic, acceleration causes force, or maybe it’s mass that causes force, or perhaps force causes mass. We’ll just forget all about the role of mass in all this, thank you very much.
But that leads us to the logical absurdity that force causes acceleration and that acceleration causes force (and that mass is irrelevant).
Perhaps mathematicians ought to avoid Newtonian physics.
wd400:
How does “survival of the fittest” give meaning to “fitness”?
wd400:
To speak of “variance in fitness” is to presumably say something meaningful about fitness. Given that you agree with Neil, the meaning of fitness is based upon “survival of the fittest.”
The question of the vacuity of fitness has not been resolved.
“But that leads us to the logical absurdity that force causes acceleration and that acceleration causes force”
Lol. Absurdity? If I hit a baseball (force) it accelerates. No? In you car, when you accelerate, don’t you feel a force pushing you back into your seat?
You’ve brilliantly undermined and parodied Barry’s original post (I suspect without meaning to, but beware the ban hammer…the court jester here, may strike a nerve).
Of course, any discussion could easily parody the OP. Why MUST scientists use “general relativity” as shorthand, instead of the parameters they explicitly measure?
And for goodness sakes, how can spacetime tell matter how to move while matter tells spacetime how to curve. What a silly tautology these definitions make!
REC:
If you hit a (massless) baseball with what? An imaginary (massless) bat? What if you miss? They magically have no mass?
“If you hit a (massless) baseball with what? An imaginary (massless) bat? What if you miss? They magically have no mass?”
Are you arguing against classic physics, in support of your parody of Barry? Well Played!
But maybe you could firm this up a bit.
In physics, massless particles aren’t imaginary (photons, and neutrinos (almost). I wouldn’t consider them magic. And indeed, if I miss, no force is imparted on the object.
Also, a massless bat would impart ~0 force on the ball.
WD @ 7
WD @ 22:
So when Neil uses the phrase “survival of the fittest” he makes a good point, because the phrase gives meaning to fitness. But when Barry uses the phrase, it is just a silly slogan. Pathetic.
Darwinism offers emotionally appealing slogans and stories to the materialist/atheist/naturalist, nothing more. None of that has anything to do with conducting science.
Natural selection may not be a tautology (debatable) but it is definitely useless as it doesn’t do anything beyond eliminating the few who couldn’t cut it. It does not make organisms better adapted.
Natural selection is not a mechanism of design. It cannot bring about the appearance of design. Natural selection is just one way of changing allele frequencies within a population. And it isn’t the most prevalent way at doing that rather simple task.
REC:
So?
The Harlem Globetrotters are more fit than their opponents because they always win. And we can measure this fitness and use it to scientifically predict that the Harlem Globetrotters will never lose. Therefore, fitness is a scientific concept and not tautological.
It follows, of course, that “natural selection” is scientific and not tautological.
“Natural selection is not a mechanism of design.”
Nobody has said otherwise. It simply allows some phenotypes to out survive others. But in doing so, it locks some lineages into a basic morphology that is very difficult to break out of. There are very few vertebrates that do not have four limbs. Mammals are stuck with lungs (at least for the foreseeable future).
It doesn’t mean that these won’t change, just that the road would be longer.
LoL!@ tintinnid- The whole purpose of natural selection was to provide a mechanism for design without a designer. Perhaps you should read “On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection”. Heck just google “natural selection design without a designer”.
BTW natural selection can’t account for vertebrates nor mammals.
Joe. I have. Natural selection does not create design because there is no design. What it does is limit (or delay) the direction in which changes can take place. If you have lungs, your son is not going to return to the use of gills. Only god can do that. Has he?
tintinnid, you have what? Darwin’s whole point was that natural selection could produce the design observed in living organisms. So obviously you haven’t read his book nor google the phrase I gave you.
And how do you know that only god could produce a son of humans that has gills? Didn’t you watch “Water World”?
Natural selection is insignificant. It doesn’t do anything beyond changing allele frequencies. It cannot get a eukaryote from populations of prokaryotes- that is a given.
tintinnid:
Natural selection cannot account for the diversity of life regardless if you think there is no design. Strange that Darwin went through great pains to formulate a designer mimic to explain the design of living organisms. Why do you think he did that?
How do you get design without a designer? Darwin was obviously a mental midget. It is no surprise that we now have a latter mental midget (tintinid) arguing that there is no design. It’s the new normal among the dirt worshippers. It’s not even shocking anymore.
PS. You’re wasting your time, Joe, although I realize that you’re just having fun with the moron.
How do you get design without a designer? Apparently by denying the design exists…
tintinnid
Are you going to respond the questions a few folks asked you in the thread pointed to by the following link?
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-519640