What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

No, it's not ironic to demand that people "get their heads out of their science books", it's just arrogantly foolish.

It would be ironic if she really understood the relationship between different species and was making a faulty argument to parody people who abuse science.

Our reading for this third Sunday of Advent:

“There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection”

Excerpt From: Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition.” Oxford University Press, 2006. iBooks.

This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/kNkmU.l

I'm glad he doesn't over generalize. I'd hate to think I'm going to have to read 500 pages of this nonsense.

Humans play chess. Mushrooms don't. Well, I play like a mushroom, but most people don't. This is purely objective. Humans have higher cognitive function than mushrooms. But it's not objective to Dawkins. I'm sure as I read on he'll clarify this, just like he clarified his use of "selfish" 'simply by coming up with a novel definition of it.

The man is pure genius.

If you wanted to understand the real world in an objective manner, obviously the most expert sources would be the very best, but the posts by scientifically educated people here would be vastly superior to absolutely anything written in ancient history.

Mushrooms would have an excellent case for superiority by pointing out that they don't waste time playing chess. 

But to be serious, "superiority" is a vague term. Dawkins uses it in the sense of fitness. Humans do not have superiority in that sense. In one sense we are merely equals: those species that survive. In terms of resilience, micro-organisms surely win, partly because they have had a lot more generations to become so. There is far, far more chance of human beings becoming extinct than microbes doing so.

Of course, there are many other notions of superiority where humans win. One is in driving other mammals and other species of large organism into extinction, where we have no equal.

Enthymeme: An incomplete syllogism; adopting the form of a syllogism but neglecting the major premise.

Major proposition: unstated.

Minor proposition: all living beings share a common ancestry.

Conclusion: there is no objective basis to elevate one species over another.

Um, what is the major premise here?

He takes a statement that might be true (common ancestry) and leaps to a conclusion that on the face of it is risible.

There probable aren't one out a hundred of his readers who can call him on enthymeme use because they don't know what it is and wouldn't care if they did.

@ Elroch - man has no choice. If our genes direct us to drive other species to extinction, who are you to complain about it? It's a natural process. We are just animals, after all.

(#500) ....the hominids that adapted to living on the ground specialised to a separate niche many millions of years ago, adapting to walking upright on the ground and then adapting further in other ways.

When someone tries to tell me what happened millions of years ago (ahhh....'cuz they were there ?....ahhh....hello ?), especially about a species we know very-very little about ?....well, I really begin to wonder about that someone. Oh !....I almost forgot - it's a Scientific Fact....Sorry........ 

....and off the thread's topic ? I believe there's a someone here that believes (very strongly - I might add) in the Big Bang Theory. Well, have you left room for a possible non-BB Universe that doesn't need stuff like dark matter/energy & if light decays ?....just curious. And IDK about you, but I don't believe everything I read.

I mean, were you there too ? All those years ago ? In your little aeroplane ? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the motion of what you saw back then, but it was more like the motion of you.

All I'm asking is for ordinary ppl to not be too quick to make conclusions about certain events when they weren't even there. Fair enuf ?

Well, let's first consider the evidence without drawing conclusions.

There are many fossil hominids which are distinct from modern humans and apes. The timeline of these fossils indicates several trends in anatomy over several million years. These are scientific facts.

The first is mostly in the older part of the fossil record, and indicates a gradual adaptation to walking upright. This is based on the hard evidence of the shape and size of different bones (eg pelvis, spinal column, femur).

The second is more concentrated in the more recent part of the fossil record, and indicates a progression in brain size and development of the parts of the brain special to humans (based on the shape of the inside of the skull).

These are the intermediate, transitional fossils that are well-explained by evolution. And it is a quite easy and reliable inference from the anatomy that from early on, these hominids were not living in trees and therefore not competing with chimpanzees: they were not built for it.

Biologists who study all of the living species are well-qualified to understand such issues, and biophysical calculations an be used as well, but I'd say the ideas are not difficult to understand for the average person who would watch a natural history documentary (I am closer to that than to a knowledgeable expert).

Your statement is as foolish as saying "who am I to avoid walking off a cliff when the law of gravity compels me to fall"?

The foolishness is based on interpreting scientific knowledge (which comprises facts about how the natural world behaves) with the pontification of ancient texts (for example, the correct way to execute adulterers).

There is no SHOULD or OUGHT in science. None at all.

There is only IS, WAS, DOES.

Comprende?

Elroch - your post is incoherent. The selfish gene (I'm allowing for metaphorical use, although there are all sorts of problems with it) is either a law/physical principle, or it's just Dawkins poop. If it is physical principle, it can be no sooner violated than gravity. I can't refuse to fall off that cliff just because I'm enlightened by science, can I?

@gopher-the-throat, that was straight out my daughter's high school studies, and she's learning disabled. You'd think our atheist friends had never heard it before.

hapless_fool, you really should be able to understand that your error is in your inference from the almost tautologous fundamental theory of evolution (as applied to genes, in Dawkins' sense) to a completely unjustified conclusion. Your reasoning is like saying:

• People are made of subatomic particles
• Subatomic particles obey the laws of quantum mechanics
• Therefore people cannot build a house.

Let's get this out of the way now. Does Dawkins have any major positions that the atheists here think are wrong or at least a bit misguided, or do you take as gospel the sum and substance of all he has written? I don't want you apologizing for him everytime I post a howler of his. 

In what way? I think your example is total nonsense. In fact, only a reductionist would think of it.

We as physical beings follow physical laws. Is "the selfish gene" a physical law? If not, what is it exactly? 

Hard facts are much more interesting that such discussions, because they are fixed and general. I don't think Dawkins is of any great significance morally speaking. His misguided attitude to aborting Down's syndrome babies was a "SHOULD" statement which indicated his personal view. Its insubstantial nature is indicated by the fact that he retracted the statement later, or at least clarified its scope. Moreover, you should be able to tell by that word "should" that it was not a scientific statement.

I just reread my last five posts and I did not use the word "should" once, I think, including my Dawkins quotes. What are you talking about?

If Dawkins stayed in his lab (which apparently hasn't been visited by him in over 30 years) the world would be a better place, but it is precisely that he is out there telling us what we SHOULD believe in questions of metaphysics and theology that gets him and his conspecifics in trouble. 

The enthymeme works like this, and you atheists must have used this at least 500 times on these threads:

Major premise: unstated. 

Minor premise: we share a common ancestry with all living things. 

Therefore: God does not exist, and anyone who believes in God is an idiot. 

Would you do me the honor of providing the major premise?

Well, more precisely, it was a nonsense inference, inspired by your nonsense inference. The first two statements are true, the last is false (again exactly as in your own post, where you drew a conclusion that was false from a true pretext).

The selfish gene concept is really a special case of the behaviour of stochastic systems involving slightly imperfect replication of information (i.e. the mathematical theory that describes biological evolution, chemical evolution and even digital evolution in a computer program, at the species level and at the level of the gene). This stuff can be (and is) studied both in information theory and in computational evolution.

The useful thing about the gene-centric view is that the extra precision and detail leads to many successful predictions that are scattered throughout the book. It is able to successfully deal with asexual reproduction, sexual reproduction and the variants of the latter than lead to distinctive behaviour (see the material on social insects and how that is related the different way gender relates to genetics). It successfully models viruses and horizontal transfer and even parasitic DNA. None of these things is explained by species-centric or organism-centric viewpoints.

It is a more fundamental viewpoint than that of the 19th century, but adds to it rather than superceding it.

This is an implicit "should" statement -  you indicate I shouldn't complain.

You (for example) may be incapable of avoiding driving species to extinction, but I (for example) may be capable of campaigning and acting to prevent that. You say I shouldn't do that, for no justifiable reason.

The distinction indicates that this is not a behaviour that is implied by human genetics.

You dodged the question and fled to stochastics, which no one here knows anything about. 

Is it safe to say that I will be enlightened if I keep reading The Selfish Gene, or are you going to pull a bait-and-swtich on me as tell me, after I wade through his bilious bloviation, that Dawkins is a bit dated and there are oh such better writers that he?

And your analogy makes no sense whatsoever, and it does not refute my enthymeme point. 

Anyway, I'm going out to celebrate my daughter's birthday by watching The Mockingjay. I'll get back with you later. 

Ha! An undergraduate attempts to discredit Dr. Tomkins work. Get outta here Mind Walk! 😋 BTW. he showed that the MSY chimp/human chromosome comparison is only 43% similar, not the 70% that evolutionists gave it!

Not only that but he actually biased the parameters to give optimal results for evolutionists. Evolutionists cherry pick and fudge to get the results they want, and then get egg on face! DNA similarity between chimps/humans is actually less than 70%.

Even the great primate evolutionist Todd Preuss agrees with Tomkins work! 😛

No, it is not a "should statement" except in the sense that "a rock should fall to the earth if I throw it" is a "should statement". It's either a physical principle, or it isn't. Which is it?

You're not on your game. You might have deflected it by saying something like, "We follow mathematical principles, after all, and human behavior is best described by the Chaos Theory, which allows that extremely small differences in variables produce large differences in effects."

I wouldn't believe you, but I wouldn't be able to refute you quickly as your a mathemetician and I'm not, so I'd concede the point and dismiss it as irrelevent, which it probably is. 

Does Dawkins incorporate Chaos Theory into his work, or am I going to have to wade through his crap only to be told that he's considered a bit of a relic these days?

I'm willing to read your stuff but I don't have infinite time. If Dawkins' The Selfish Gene isn't the bee's knees, then level with me now.