Posted: Jan 15, 2019 6:04 am
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:By contrast, the subject matter of evolution doesn’t support predictions at all.
Actually, you're completely wrong about that, but the deep lack of scientific sophistication into which you substitute your preference for playing with words is going to make it difficult to discuss the point with you. Relationships of genomes of various organisms from different phyla on down to families and genera are predictable emerging from the classification schemes that preceded molecular genetics. I don't expect you to discuss this rationally. Nevertheless, your error is amply pointed out to you by Fenrir.
If you resent the authority of people with scientific training, by all means go your own way in ignorance and write stories and poetry to entertain your vanities.
I don’t think I have given you grounds for assuming I don’t have “scientific training” myself. I have a four year engineering degree from a top university in my country and an MSc from another. Apart from my industry experience, I had 26 years full time university teaching experience. In the coming semester I have contracts to deliver courses at two universities. While officially retired I have done language edits on many journal articles and theses from PhD level down in a wide range of Science and engineering areas. So although there are surely a number of posters here with better science education than mine, I’m in the mix.
Cito di Pense wrote:[Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not about choice. It’s about outcomes of struggle or competition.
Your error here is to inject your teleology into the term 'competition', which in biological terms is not literally a game with rules that someone designed to serve the game play; you project your own sensibilities into concepts of 'winners' and 'losers'. Again, you're just flattering your own vanities. This is particularly true of your view of human beings, and your judgements assume (and perhaps even require) that human beings are special in some way, even though you may recognize that our species is subject to extinction exactly as any other. Perhaps your view is that the universe is going to be disappointed if we 'fail' the competition to survive. The jury's still out, N.B., and there's no sense in which humans have won more than one round of a very long 'competition'. The biosphere and the food chain can break down almost completely, as it did at the close of the Permian, and humans had nothing to do with that. Everybody has to eat, and humans will eat just about anything, including each other, when times get tough.
You are rambling there, Cito.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:I argued that “[the] appearance of new functionality can be called ‘creation’ and creativity is a property in the first instance, of large biomes.”
You never argue anything, but you're hell on wheels flattering your own vanity. You make lots of assertions though, for example, that "the appearance of new functionality can be called 'creation'". Call it 'creation' if you like, because your priority is for creation, and so you are fashioning your assertions to serve your pre-determined conclusion.
I gave an example of new functionality, as the human capacity for speech. Creation is the appearance of something new.
Cito di Pense wrote: You believe you're doing something different, but you still have all your work ahead of you to set up the appearance of new functionality as the product of an unfolding design process.
I tried to explain before, that that the word “design” is freighted with an unhelpful assumptions.
Cito di Pense wrote: As an avowed Christian, you're beholden in your beliefs to a creator, despite your discomfiture that naming your creator is an 'impiety'.
There’s no “despite”.
Cito di Pense wrote: The whole problem with proselytizing this point of view to me and others who enjoin your assertions in this thread is that a person cannot force himself to believe what you do simply because you claim you have 'argued' for it. That's a strategy fit for selling to a bunch of hayseeds. You lack respect for your audience, but you've made that much very clear.
How much respect are you showing to me Cito? Where have I indulged in ad hominem? Let’s just stick to discussion of the phenomena.