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The silence of the evolved; Discussion about the discussion about evolution
Topic Started: Sep 3 2013, 08:46 PM (964 Views)
No Robots

Has anyone else noticed that prominent evolutionists have become a little quiet of late?
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lupus Aries
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Yes I have Not particularly... but what are you suggesting?
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Da Magician
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Perhaps they are exhausted...

creationism lacking validity is not a sufficient motive to believe an incoherent narrative...
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Edited by Da Magician, Sep 3 2013, 09:01 PM.
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No Robots

They're not used to playing defense.
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Da Magician
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From whom No Robots? or better yet, from which IDEAS?
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Edited by Da Magician, Sep 3 2013, 09:45 PM.
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No Robots

I was expecting this question, so I had at the ready a reference: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

I really don't know what kind of impact No Robots is having. At least I'm on the right side.

It really does come down to ideas. Evolutionists do not see their doctrines as ideas, but as Truth. That's the problem.


Edited by No Robots, Sep 4 2013, 04:17 AM.
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Da Magician
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Quote:
 
It really does come down to ideas. Evolutionists do not see their doctrines as ideas, but as Truth. That's the problem.


Certainly: As an heterodox-evolutionist myself :che: I have suffered the punishment;
as you are aware from our long mutual experience in this type of discussions.

Now, I was just conversing on another forum about how contemporary science was based on the Materialist-Eliminative Delusion. There a friend remarked:
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"I am friends and family with quite a few working scientists and other academics and not one of them is the sort of yahoo that I argue with on message boards. Actually, science education is very good at curing simple atheism in my experience.

Only a few people still really imagine that materialism in the physicalist sense has any future. The 18th century position has been superceded by the relativistic position which within its own framework denies physical reality and allows that the models just work.
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Which goes with your current statements.
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 3 2013, 10:52 PM.
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No Robots

I know. Sigh. We're just trying to bring a little light into the cave, I guess.
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Da Magician
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Did you fix the link?
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Da Magician
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:dali: Now let's continue with our discussion which I left blanc months ago...

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I will organize my notes and come back...
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Da Magician
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No Robots dixit:
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After your latest comments on Hegel, particularly with regard to gradualism, I went back over the relevant sections of his Philosophy of Nature. This time, I really gave it a close reading, rather than just looking for "gotcha" quotations. For the first time, I came to have an inkling of the power of his thought. I'm new to this, but let me try it out. Let's just say that man is the expression of the essence of the ape. This is the result not of descent, but of nature creating conditions that give rise to successive forms, just like the tissues of the body develop only in proper sequence.


To which I answered:
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I am not understanding anything about your point concerning Hegel. Tissue are the way they are because of descent ....

Are you still positing that living creatures are like crystals that arise out of matter and not from other living creatures?


To which No Robots answered:
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Think about the embryo. It starts from an undifferentiated cell mass. There is a firm, determinate process of differentiation. When one group of stem cells starts to differentiate itself, this triggers a different kind of differentiation in other stem cells. Thus there is no descent from one differentiated tissue to another. And, yes, this is like crystallization, where crystals do not descend from each other, but rather take on different forms depending on the ambient circumstances.


To which I answered:
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I see part of your point, but that undifferentiated mass does descend from a previous entity having the same genetic composition, not from any other type.


To which No Robots answered:
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Here comes the tricky part. When an amoeba divides by mitosis, we do not say that the two resulting amoebae descend from the originating amoeba. Similarly, we do not refer to reproduction of unicellar organisms by meiosis as descent. Now, reproduction by multicellular organisms is simply an elaboration of either mitosis or meiosis. In this sense, it is completely erroneous to refer to one’s descent from one’s parents. Reproduction is a function of the genus as a whole, and has nothing to do with the proximate parents, other than that these serve as convenient hosts and transmission instruments for germ cells. If we are consistent, we have to say that the genus as a whole is a single organism. It is only culturally that I am the son of Barry and Cheryl: in strictly biological terms, I am the son of Man, as is everyone else.


To which I answered:
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Yes, but that operates in one scale, in another scale there is in fact descent. The amoeba does descent from the previous generation, the amoeba is indeed the same organism. both statements are true. However, you still haven't answered my question.


To which No Robots answered:

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My view is that all life-forms originate from protoplasmic material that functions like stem-cells in the individual. This means that there is no descent from life-form to life-form. Rather, the full potential of each life-form is already present in its earliest monocellular form. There is no means for one life-form to descend from another, just as there is no means for one type of body tissue to descend from another. From the earliest moment of differentiation, the life-form can only produce variants of itself. What this means is that each life-form evolves not to produce something other than itself, but to produce a development of itself. Thus man is originally monocellular, and over time acquires an ever more complex body. In my view, ontogeny recapitulates phenogeny, ie. the development of the embryo summarizes the development of the genus.


To which I answered:

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I still don't see how that contradicts evolutionary concepts or descent itself in term of genetics. Don't answer until I get the time to tell you where I agree with what you are saying.


So, here we are, and I shall soon be telling you where I agree.... so that you can continue...
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Mona
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Mona is *here* darlings;
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What is this *conversation* I see?
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I can see it is not some *deranged* creationism, but some *other* altogether *different* objection to DARWINISM •
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Tell me, No Robots, dear: What is your *general* position?
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For I am most *against* the notion that *science* can be *dogma* and am *open* to new *conceptions*.
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Da Magician
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:dali: No Robots, here is my response:

I do see your point about the parents being hosts: Indeed, Darwinism (in an ironic contradiction) invalidates the classical notion of 'descent' - but such would be a property however of Lamarckism. Even mutations in the genome are not (according to standard theory), something ascribed 'to the parent'; it is something 'of the genome'. So, we would be seeing:

...0...0...0...0...0...0...0...

Where 0 is the individual, and ... the line of biological continuum

So, there is indeed an unbroken line of descent, but the organisms are receptacles that survive or not, contributing nothing else (a notion I disagree with).

Where I am having trouble, is:

1. Your negation that this is 'evolution'.

2. Your negation that this is, being continuity, a type of 'descent'. That is, the genome does descent from the genome.


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Da Magician
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No Robot dixit:

Quote:
 
My view is that all life-forms originate from protoplasmic material that functions like stem-cells in the individual. This means that there is no descent from life-form to life-form. Rather, the full potential of each life-form is already present in its earliest monocellular form. There is no means for one life-form to descend from another, just as there is no means for one type of body tissue to descend from another. From the earliest moment of differentiation, the life-form can only produce variants of itself. What this means is that each life-form evolves not to produce something other than itself, but to produce a development of itself. Thus man is originally monocellular, and over time acquires an ever more complex body.


There is something particularly powerful here: I am thinking in posting it in TalkRational, to see what the 'experts' say.... later....

:happy:
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 4 2013, 04:44 AM.
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No Robots

I restored the link to the book I refer to in earlier post: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel.

Thanks for showing interest, Mona. This is a continuation of a discussion that has been going on for some years.

Biology, like all science, is based on a system of classification. Classification is an abstraction, a scientific fiction that allows us to understand the phenomena that we encounter. Classification consists of a general abstract concept, a genus; and its various concrete expressions, its species. The distinction between genus and species is relative, based on our level of interest. For example we may at one level of granularity say that all birds are one genus, and all the various bird forms that we encounter are species of that genus. At a finer lever of granularity we might say that penguins are a genus, and that all the various penguin forms are the species of that genus.

Descent is purely an intra-generic matter. A genus can only produce exemplars of itself, because that is the very definition of a genus ie, an abstract principle that represents an aggregate of specific phenomena. Genera are sealed off from each other. A parent can only produce offspring that belong to the same genus as itself. Descent is a matter of parent and offspring within a genus. Even within a genus, it is not the case that each individual is descended from each other individual. Rather, within a genus all individuals can trace their descent back to the same single primordial individual.

To abandon this idea of the genus as an isolate, as absolutely distinct from all other genera, is to lose our ability to understand the properties of the genus. It would be like saying that all we have to know about helium is that it is the result of the fusion of two hydrogen atoms. We know that it is true that the fusion of two hydrogen atoms produces helium, but that does not tell us anything about the actual properties of helium itself. To understand the properties of helium, we have no need to know about its "descent" from hydrogen. This is all the more true of biota. It is true in some senses even within genera. I mean, it hardly tells me who you are just to know your parents' names, does it?

The obsession with descent is at the heart of a great many scientific problems. Certainly science is all about cause and effect, but biology has created in place of cause and effect a fantasy of descent. It may be that cause and effect relationships in biology are just so complex that people want to retreat into a simple explanatory system based on their folk experience of parent and offspring.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 4 2013, 12:52 PM.
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Mona
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Thank-you, dear, *No Robots* for your -exposition- • • Now;
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Are you *suggesting* that 'geniuses' don't arise from other 'geniuses' ?
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Tell me, according to your *idea* where from 'geniuses' arise?
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No Robots

Hi Mona:

Why do you bring up the subject of genius? Is it because the word genius is similar to the word genus?

Constantin Brunner lays the foundation for a doctrine of genius in his book Unser Christus, oder das Wesen des Genies [Our Christ, or the Essence of Genius], which has been translated with the title Our Christ: The Revolt of the Mystical Genius. Brunner maintains that genius is produced by way of exception, that it only appears in civilization, that there is creative genius and reproductive genius, that geniuses constitute a distinct species of human, and that there must come into being a community of genius.
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Da Magician
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:dali: Indeed, that is likewise my question: Where-from genuses arise, if not from other genuses??
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 4 2013, 03:17 PM.
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Da Magician
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She must have misspelled 'genuses' No Robots...
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 4 2013, 03:16 PM.
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Da Magician
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:dali: Regardless, it is an excellent error on Mona's part:

My own idea of evolution has much to do with 'genius';

I consider that significant evolutionary steps arise from a moment of 'geniality';

The inherent imaginative capacity within the living entity/s conceive of some new form of interaction with the environment and manifest it in future generations.


Edited by Da Magician, Sep 4 2013, 03:22 PM.
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No Robots

The different genera arise independently from protoplasm.
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No Robots

Da Magician
Sep 4 2013, 03:21 PM
My own idea of evolution has much to do with 'genius';

I consider that significant evolutionary steps arise from a moment of 'geniality';

The inherent imaginative capacity within the living entity/s conceive of some new form of interaction with the environment and manifest it in future generations.


I agree with this, with the proviso that it is the genius of the genus that produces new expressions of itself in response to new conditions.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 4 2013, 03:33 PM.
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Da Magician
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But why wouldn't the 'genius' of the -genus- lead eventually to the 'geniality' of conceiving a new -genus-?

Life itself is a - genus - and thus the various - genuses - are its species;

thus, within your own conception if follows.
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 4 2013, 03:42 PM.
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Da Magician
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No Robots
Sep 4 2013, 03:26 PM
The different genera arise independently from protoplasm.
But that protoplasm is carried in a continuous line: And, once errato-mutogenic "Darwinism" is rejected in favour of geniutic-evolution (= Neo-Lamarckism), then there is such a thing as 'descent' since the experience of the individual eventually effect the progeny.
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Mona
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Darlings; I am *delighted* that my - error - has advanced the conversation towards its 'goal'.
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Perhaps, the *random* genetic mutations have a similar effect/purpose in *evolution* -
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Edited by Mona, Sep 4 2013, 03:50 PM.
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No Robots

Da Magician
Sep 4 2013, 03:41 PM


But why wouldn't the 'genius' of the -genus- lead eventually to the 'geniality' of conceiving a new -genus-?


It is the nature of genius to remain itself, not to become something else.

Quote:
 
Life itself is a - genus - and thus the various - genuses - are its species;

thus, within your own conception if follows.


Quite so. That is the lowest level of granularity. It has nothing at all to do with descent other than that all life-forms originated from the same source, ie. protoplasm.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 4 2013, 04:12 PM.
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No Robots

Quote:
 
But that protoplasm is carried in a continuous line:


Certainly. Or rather, it is carried separately in each of the genera that it produces.

Quote:
 
And, once errato-mutogenic "Darwinism" is rejected in favour of geniutic-evolution (= Neo-Lamarckism), then there is such a thing as 'descent' since the experience of the individual eventually effect the progeny.


Changes from generation to generation simply create variants of the genus. They never lead to new genera. To hold otherwise is to abandon the idea of genus altogether.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 4 2013, 04:11 PM.
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Mona
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No Robots
Sep 4 2013, 03:58 PM

It is the nature of genius to remain itself, not to become something else.

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I don't *understand* this, dear: Why do you *posit* it is something *else* -
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Is it not but a variation of the same *genus* which is *life* ?
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Edited by Mona, Sep 4 2013, 04:25 PM.
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Da Magician
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No Robots
Sep 4 2013, 04:03 PM
Quote:
 
But that protoplasm is carried in a continuous line:


Certainly. Or rather, it is carried separately in each of the genera that it produces.

Quote:
 
And, once errato-mutogenic "Darwinism" is rejected in favour of geniutic-evolution (= Neo-Lamarckism), then there is such a thing as 'descent' since the experience of the individual eventually effect the progeny.


Changes from generation to generation simply create variants of the genus. They never lead to new genera. To hold otherwise is to abandon the idea of genus altogether.
I don't agree: Genus/Genera are descriptions of sets of biological entities

- Genus varying to produce 'species' - is equivalent to - Live varying to produce 'genera'.

There is no abandonment of the idea of 'genus': It is understood as a particular manifestation of life.

A genus leading to another genus follows from the idea of 'genius'.

One genus remains, from it derives another; the derivative does not invalidate the originator, which continues.

You are using Aristotelean categorical thinking instead of the more advanced Heraclitean flux thinking.
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Mona
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Dear *Magician*: Yes, such is *likewise* my *interpretation*.
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Life is the 'genus', using our friend's terminology.
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And thus the academic 'genera' are to it as *species*.
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But, the *notions* of - hylozoism - and - pansychism - advance the notion towards other *scales* - •
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No Robots

Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it is what it is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.--Heraclitus (emphasis added)
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Da Magician
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Indeed: That doesn't invalidate one thing flowing into another; nor one thing changing into another.

As Heraclitus said: You can never step into the same river twice; except you can....
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No Robots

Let us say that we have before us an omelette and a soufflé. We examine them and discover that they have a great many similarities, right down to their fundamental chemical constituents. Now, let us imagine that these egg dishes are capable of propagating themselves, and with variations. Would it not be tempting to conjecture that one might be the descendant of the other, rather than that they diverged at the primordial point of the cracking of the egg?
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Da Magician
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:dali: But that is not a contention:

Point is, that both derive from the egg, but, they all propagate by egg, likewise.

And the egg of the omelet at some point diverges and hence comes the lineage of the Spanish Tortilla....
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Mona
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Dear 'No Robots';
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I just don't get your *point*:
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Why do *you* insist on *fixation* - why not "flow":
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I liked the mentioning of *Heraclitus*, Magician: -
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Wasn't he about *contradictions* being equivalent-? Or *something* related-?
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I wonder - No Robots - are you *willing* to contemplate that the *idea* -
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- that what you see as *fixed* is indeed fixed but also *flows* - ?
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............................................ :aud: •• 8 •
Edited by Mona, Sep 4 2013, 10:08 PM.
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No Robots

Da Magician:

Once germ cells have differentiated into the genera, they are no longer able to produce anything but specimens of the same genus into which they are locked.

Mona:

Science is about delineating patterns, ie. relatively fixed points, within the flux. In the flux of sub-atomic particles, we delineate relatively fixed points that we call the elements. In biology, the relatively fixed points are the genera.
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Da Magician
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Well, they don't produce anything other than new versions of themselves, with minute variations.

There comes a point when such variations, impede admixture with 'sister' populations.

There comes a further point when comparing with the ancestral population, and parallel populations, that they look as something different, and behave different.

Thus they are classified as different 'genera'.

They never produced anything other than themselves.

'Genera' is a classification applied to an observation, not a 'thing in itself'.
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Edited by Da Magician, Sep 5 2013, 03:46 PM.
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No Robots

Da Magician
Sep 5 2013, 03:46 PM
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'Genera' is a classification applied to an observation, not a 'thing in itself'.

A biological genus is a thing in itself every bit as much as a chemical element, no?
Edited by No Robots, Sep 5 2013, 03:57 PM.
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Da Magician
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Interesting position: Both are classifications applied to observations;

chemical elements are not observed to reproduce.

biological systems are observed to reproduce and to vary minutely transgenerationally.

Edited by Da Magician, Sep 5 2013, 05:42 PM.
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No Robots

DNA is a self-propagating configuration of chemical elements, no?
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Da Magician
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yes, and each propagation introduces changes into the configuration,
which lead towards new configurations
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lupus Aries
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I am not understanding your point No Robots; why do you see 'genera' as fixed?
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No Robots

DNA is in fact very stable.
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No Robots

lupus Aries
Sep 5 2013, 08:11 PM
I am not understanding your point No Robots; why do you see 'genera' as fixed?
For the same reason that I see 'elements' as fixed.
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Da Magician
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Well, that doesn't impede variations and reshuffling, plus I was thinking in terms of the whole genome; such is seen to have transgenerational variation.
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Da Magician
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genera are very different phenomena than elements
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No Robots

Hydrogen, the simplest material isolate, can only be transformed into helium when it is put under the most extreme conditions in the universe. How much less likely is it that something as complex as a multi-cellular life form will transform itself, gradually or not, into something else?
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Da Magician
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Biological entities never transforms into something else, that is what you are missing.

Their form varies slightly across generations; they never cease being 'the same'.

Only by comparison with distant lineages is the difference is observed.

Yet, the difference is of a variation of form, not of 'being'.

Edited by Da Magician, Sep 5 2013, 08:27 PM.
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No Robots

At the coarsest level of resolution, all forms are variants of life itself. However, we do make distinctions between forms, and thus posit genera. The theory of evolution then posits that the genera descend from each other. My own view is that the genera are primordial, that their descent can be traced back only to life itself, and not to other genera. This view is far more simple, elegant, robust and useful than the theory of evolution.
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Da Magician
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I don't think it is: Life transforming seems more elegant, robust, useful... (simplicity is an irrelevancy).

The problem with evolution is not 'evolution' - it is the current mechanical, erratic --> lifeless <-- theory.

Life explained in lifeless terms.... such can not be sustained save by a metaphysical faith in DEATH;

Physicalism... Materialism..... Purposelessness...

When that what we know to be true and requires no faith is LIFE and MIND and PURPOSE...




Edited by Da Magician, Sep 5 2013, 09:13 PM.
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No Robots

Da Magician
Sep 5 2013, 09:11 PM
The problem with evolution is not 'evolution' - it is the current mechanical --> lifeless <-- theory.

Life explained in lifeless terms.... such can not be sustained save by a metaphysical faith in DEATH;

Physicalism... Materialism...

When that what we know to be true and requires no faith is LIFE and MIND...




I agree.

The essence of life is desire to live, to preserve oneself. That means remaining what one is. To suggest that a genus produces something other than itself is to deny the primal impulse of life.
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fleamailman
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("...I think that in our day an age, we're still too primitive to come up with a theory that will clinch it, instead we will have to wait till we know far more about many more things then..." mentioned the goblin, adding "...why, because looking a the history of science, it's like the toppling of ivory towers each time, simply we hold the truth to be like this until some new science comes along where we then hold the truth to be otherwise now, where my guess is that today's theories will be equally obsolete tomorrow are yesterday's theories are today, not that this should ever stop us from trying, just it should stop us claiming theory for fact...")
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Da Magician
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No Robots
Sep 5 2013, 09:15 PM

To suggest that a genus produces something other than itself is to deny the primal impulse of life.
That is what you are not getting: It never produces something other than itself...

It is a variant of itself, not another 'self'...
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Da Magician
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fleamailman
Sep 5 2013, 09:21 PM
(".. because looking a the history of science, it's like the toppling of ivory towers each time, simply we hold the truth to be like this until some new science comes along where we then hold the truth to be otherwise now, where my guess is that today's theories will be equally obsolete tomorrow are yesterday's theories are today, not that this should ever stop us from trying, just it should stop us claiming theory for fact...")
Indeed....
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 5 2013, 09:44 PM.
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No Robots

Do you hold, then, that the reptile is a variant of the amphibian which is a variant of the fish, just as the dachshund is a variant of the dog which is a variant of the wolf?
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Da Magician
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All are variants of life. The mammal and the reptile and the amphibian and the fish all are vertebrate variants, and this a chordate variant etc.

The dachshund is a dog variant, not a variant of the dog, which is wolf variant, not a variant of the wolf, which is a carnivora variant, which is a mammalian variant, not a variant of the mammal.

All are varieties of the same phenomena.
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No Robots

So is the dog descended from the wolf?
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Mona
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*Seems* to me, dear, that a *dog* and a *wolf* both descend from a *wolf*.
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Edited by Mona, Sep 7 2013, 11:04 PM.
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No Robots

So, Mona, in your view, from what does the wolf descend? Only from the wolf itself? Did the wolf arise from protoplasm directly, without descent from any other form?
Edited by No Robots, Sep 8 2013, 01:56 PM.
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lupus Aries
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Let me interrupt:

That we call an animal today Wolf, but its ancestor Tomarctus, doesn't mean they are different things, but the same thing that has varied somewhat across the generations. So we see a fish as different than a wolf, but they are the same thing that changed from a common ancestor across generations. Or to use your protoplasm thingy: The progeny of the protoplasm diverged in to two lines, one which now produces wolfy and the other fishy. But both come from the same protoplasmic ancestor.


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lupus Aries
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http://annwyn.info/wolf/wolf23.html

This might help. Found it in a random search.
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Da Magician
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I agree with Lupus (apt name for this conversation).

Fish and wolf are the same thing, so is bird... and tree.

They are varieties of ---> VITA <--- •

That No Robots, is your 'genus'.
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Da Magician
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Note: When discussing evolution and teleology, the interpretation has been that it implies a preconceived 'master plan', the universe and life evolving towards a (divine) goal. This interpretation misses the point: The goal is the egoic tendency of expression (beingness), not a specific manner in which this would manifest: thus cosmic evolution and the development of fundamental particles and elements, and their behaviour which we call know, 'laws of physics', was due to particular existential goals of whatever it is the universe derives from in origin, addressed through 'inherent imagination', this being the motor of 'creation'; biological entities follow this primordial goal; they exist within the given, their goal is perpetuation - within this given they have the capacity to project new solutions to achieve the goal, which slowly and transgenerationally build up into the creation of new characteristics, in which they are aided by the given experiment which is mutation and drift; this provide insights into being which are then slowly guided... teleology is a creative force which operates then in multiple levels, and by necessity implies conflict between the teleology of different levels and entities.
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Da Magician
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Quote:
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson had a spiritual vision explaining how the process of evolution was leading life inevitably in the direction of consciousness, and he did not separate human consciousness and activity from that process. Through his essay called ”Nature” he makes comments like, “We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural.” And more to the point he claims that “we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the house.”

Whatever it is that Emerson sees as the guiding will and intelligence that is guiding the process of evolution he sees it as not being separate from the will and intelligence that human beings utilize when we act. In affect he is already stating, again in 1844 long before evolutionary spiritual thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Rudolf Steiner. He was developing a theory of conscious evolution.

Emerson’s optimism about the ultimate role that humanity could play in the natural order of things seemed to know no bounds. At the present time Emerson felt that we are far from the ultimate majesty and perfection of nature and so due to our “dullness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us.” Emerson believed that humankind in its perfect state will be the crowning achievement of the natural process of evolution not a sullied bi-product.


http://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2010/05/17/the-conscious-evolution-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-part-2/
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No Robots

Man does not see other life-forms as whole, complete and perfect in themselves, just as man is whole, complete and perfect in himself. That is the essence of man’s sickness.
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Da Magician
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There is an evolutionary force that Emerson imagines in his vision of universal development and he sees this guiding force reflected in the human mind. The human being then becomes both the creator and the created. The discoverer and the originator of the things discovered because “the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men.”

This paradoxical creator/created aspect of human nature is expressed by Emerson when he claims that “This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head… Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets…Common sense knows its own, and…The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and Black, (all great thinkers) is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.”

The great scientific discoveries of Emerson’s time represent for him not humanity discovering the secrets of some nature outside. These discoveries are humanity rediscovering the laws that it had created in a form prior to becoming human. This same sentiment would be reflected two centuries later when Andrew Cohen asks, “When we ask the question “Who am I?” from the perspective of cosmic evolution, the answer comes back: “I am the universe becoming aware of itself in human form.”

Emerson in his evolutionary vision is anticipating the evolutionary philosophy that will be developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey decades later. Perhaps Emerson’s comes close to expressing the later Pragmatism when he says, “We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.”
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Da Magician
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No Robots
Sep 9 2013, 03:37 PM
Man does not see other life-forms as whole, complete and perfect in themselves, just as man is whole, complete and perfect in himself. That is the essence of man’s sickness.
I do not understand what you mean; humans are not 'complete and perfect' in ourselves; we are part of a system that has both positive and negative forces and are ourselves, psychologically, a system that is variegated and fragmented and include self contradicting tendencies; I don't see a sickness, I see a system that includes self contradiction in order to be able to choose which behaviour is appropriate to a situation.

Thus, no perfection, but no sickness, in terms of what is inherent to the human condition, but fragmentation as a tool.
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Da Magician
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Emerson quotes:

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
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No Robots

Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.--"Nature" / Emerson
Edited by No Robots, Sep 9 2013, 05:44 PM.
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Da Magician
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Emerson (The Over-Soul)
 
The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed. ..."

Edited by Da Magician, Sep 10 2013, 05:31 PM.
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No Robots

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, "if you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its living, — is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal cell makes itself; — then, what it wants. Every creature, — wren or dragon, — shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is self-direction, and absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom, — life in the direct ratio of its amount.--"Fate"
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Da Magician
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I see you are understanding evolution now...
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No Robots

Hey, if every evolutionist was like you and Emerson, I'd be proud to call myself an evolutionist, too.
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No Robots

Here is an important quotation:

Swedenborg perceived the central life of each object and saw the change of appearance as it passed before different eyes. He does not seem to have seen with equal clearness the necessity of progression or onwardness in each creature. Metamorphosis is the law of the Universe. All forms are fluent, and as the bird alights on the bough and pauses for rest, then plunges into the air again on its way, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form,' but pass into a new form, as if by touching the earth again in burial, to acquire new energy. A wise man Is not deceived by the pause: he knows that it is momentary: he already foresees the new departure, and departure after departure, in long series. Dull people think they have traced the matter far enough if they have reached the history of one of these temporary forms, which they describe as fixed and final.--Journals / Emerson

My position is that each life-form is capable of tremendous change in appearance over time while still remaining just what it is. We see this in nature all the time with individuals: the egg, the caterpillar, the pupae and the butterfly are all the same individual. Likewise, I identify with all my selves over time. Why don’t we say the same about man as a whole, that when mankind first appeared it was in a strictly unicellular form, and that over time his bodily form became more and more complex?
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No Robots

The earth had fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no book in which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would say that as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible object,- animal, rock, river, air,- nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language to tell another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would absorb all faculties: that each man would ask of all objects what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless picture-language? Yet whether it be that these things will not be intellectually learned, or that many centuries must elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a soul,- there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of things.--"Swedenborg; or, the mystic" / Emerson
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Xanax
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I think figs is converting you, No Robots!
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No Robots

I was just being polite, Xanax. Fortunately, guys like you keep me from ever actually self-identifying as an evolutionist. :)
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Da Magician
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No Robots
Sep 10 2013, 08:07 PM
Here is an important quotation:

Swedenborg perceived the central life of each object and saw the change of appearance as it passed before different eyes. He does not seem to have seen with equal clearness the necessity of progression or onwardness in each creature. Metamorphosis is the law of the Universe. All forms are fluent, and as the bird alights on the bough and pauses for rest, then plunges into the air again on its way, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form,' but pass into a new form, as if by touching the earth again in burial, to acquire new energy. A wise man Is not deceived by the pause: he knows that it is momentary: he already foresees the new departure, and departure after departure, in long series. Dull people think they have traced the matter far enough if they have reached the history of one of these temporary forms, which they describe as fixed and final.--Journals / Emerson

My position is that each life-form is capable of tremendous change in appearance over time while still remaining just what it is. We see this in nature all the time with individuals: the egg, the caterpillar, the pupae and the butterfly are all the same individual. Likewise, I identify with all my selves over time. Why don’t we say the same about man as a whole, that when mankind first appeared it was in a strictly unicellular form, and that over time his bodily form became more and more complex?
1. Interestingly, that quotation argues against your position; read again:
Quote:
 
All forms are fluent, and as the bird alights on the bough and pauses for rest, then plunges into the air again on its way, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form,' but pass into a new form, as if by touching the earth again in burial, to acquire new energy. A wise man Is not deceived by the pause: he knows that it is momentary:


2. You are missing the point: Mankind is a form of life; and so are the others. The 'unit' is life, not the 'genus' or 'species' which are simply the 'pauses'.
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*
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 11 2013, 06:57 PM.
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No Robots

I quoted that passage knowing that it might be construed as contrary to my own position. I did so because I feel that what is needed is a full and frank discussion, rather than playing "gotcha." I really want to know where Emerson stood. It seems to me that he stood on the razor's edge on this question. And perhaps it is precisely that razor's edge that must serve as neutral ground. If you are uninterested in neutral grand and frank exchange, then I will be compelled to count Emerson as essentially anti-evolutionist, regardless of the occasional unfortunate turn of phrase.

I agree with you on the subject of pauses. All I'm saying is that each of these pauses is a representation of the whole of reality.
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No Robots

Both Joseph Beach and Laura Walls, however, see Emersonian doctrine as falling far short of Darwinism. "The more he learns of natural history," Beach writes, "the more certain he is that it is all a projection of the mind, an expression of the inherent moral purpose of the universe which is found in the human spirit." Emerson was so disposed to see the laws of nature as intrinsically ethical that he took for granted that ethical concepts were embedded in "the intellectual system of the universe. he never glimpsed the idea that ethical concepts may be themselves the product of evolution [emphasis added]." Laura Walls, in a new essay on Emerson and Victorian science, sums him up as "a transcendental idealist, not a transcendental realist, willing from the start to concede, even celebrate, the role of the mind in making experience possible."19 And given the practical orientation of his morality, in the final analysis she characterizes him as a pragmatist who never really understood the Darwin "who deposed Providence and enthroned chance as the governing power of the universe. This was the lesson of natural selection, the engine that drove evolution and Darwin's real innovation." Emerson saw order where Darwin saw happenstance. But Emerson's order was not the fiat lux! of an external Providence that directed the universe. Zeus and his Christian avatars, after all, were dead. Rather, for him it was the internal rationality of the constituent elements of the universe itself.--"Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson's Evolutionary Existentialism" / Richard Geldard
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Da Magician
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Well, Emerson like myself, was an 'Evolutionist' but not a 'Darwinist'. The 'over-soul', the inherent consciousness of the Universe, created and was itself likewise re-created which each 'pause' each 're-formation' of the lifestream, which begins, not with 'biology' but with the 'pre-biological' animas (which we call 'fundamental particles' and 'electrons' and 'atoms'...). We are that 'lifestream' and thus we rose from a previous self, and now we are 'humans', but likewise we are moving towards the 'next step', which would still be 'us', the 'lifestream', but in a new 'reformulation'. Omnia Animata...

This evolution is both 'guided' and 'erratic': It is guided because it responds to a 'forming-will', it is unguided in that there is not one, but many 'forming-wills'; the Universe has given rise to countless 'lifestreams' within the single 'lifestream'; the World is a whole made up of multiple fragments, and these operate both in harmony and disharmony.
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 11 2013, 09:07 PM.
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Da Magician
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Likewise, each 'forming-will' is itself a fragmented entity, with multiple possibilities. It is not a predestined course which life follows; it is a will searching for expression which constantly recreates the courses.
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No Robots

The configurations of Nature are more than a symbol, they are the gesticular expression of Nature's inner life.--quotation from Stallo in Emerson's Journal.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 11 2013, 10:16 PM.
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Xanax
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Hey figs; all you write looks very nice and all, but how do you explain then the known evolutionary mechanisms of random mutations in respect to fitness and drift? They appear to invalidate your 'theory'.
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lupus Aries
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Yes, xanax, that's what I would like to know also.
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Da Magician
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Those mechanisms would be understood as 1) part of the experimental process; 2) errors that lead to unexpected benefits

An inherent teleology doesn't imply a perfect foreknowledge, or an accurate planning, nor the complete dominance over the system.

It means a capacity to regulate the system towards adaptive goals.

This regulation can be erred or prove insufficient.

It is comparable to human design processes; these are not 'perfect' but tentative solutions that give specific results and lead to certain achievements, but likewise can create new problems. They also carry much 'unnecessary' cultural baggage.

The point is; if human design capacity exists, it is an absurdity to posit that such is solely a human development and not an inherent aspect of reality.
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*
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No Robots

My hope, dear figs, is that we can fight back to back with Emerson between us against the scientoid barbarians. We can resolve the differences between us later, or perhaps they will merely evaporate once we have triumphed over our common foes. Anyway, you should have a look at Emerson's "Poetry and imagination" where you will find many gems:

The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago, arrested and progressive development, indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms, gave the poetic key to Natural Science, of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz and Owen and Darwin in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits,—a hint whose power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.

The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but dryest fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, and his result is like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk, articulate, vertebrate, up to man; as if the whole animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind.

...

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolated it,—which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet gives us the eminent experiences only,—a god stepping from peak to peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain.
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Mona
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*
.
Dear *No Robots*, have you ever heard of *Evo-Devo*;
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I don't think they *isolate* mollusks -
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....................... :aud:
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No Robots

Hi Mona.

Evo-devo is a welcome development, recognizing as it does that genera can modify their appearance over time while remaining what they are.

A mollusk has properties that make it distinct from other life-forms, no? Otherwise, why would we call it by a unique name at all?
Edited by No Robots, Sep 12 2013, 08:27 PM.
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Mona
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*
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That's not my *point*, darling.
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Are you aware of the mechanism of *lateral transfer*-?
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*
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Da Magician
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bacon
 
Aristotle affords the most eminent instance of the first; for he corrupted natural philosophy by logic: thus, he formed the world of categories, assigned to the human soul, the noblest of substances, a genus determined by words of secondary operation, treated of density and rarity (by which bodies occupy a greater or lesser space) by the frigid distinctions of action and power, asserted that there was a peculiar and proper motion in all bodies, and that if they shared in any other motion, it was owing to an external moving cause, and imposed innumerable arbitrary distinctions upon the nature of things; being everywhere more anxious as to definitions in teaching, and the accuracy of the wording of his propositions, than the internal truth of things. And this is best shown by a comparison of his philosophy with the others of greatest repute among the Greeks. For the similar parts of Anaxagoras, the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus, the heaven and earth of Parmenides, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the resolution of bodies into the common nature of fire, and their condensation, according to Heraclitus, exhibit some sprinkling of natural philosophy, the nature of things, and experiment, whilst Aristotle's physics are mere logical terms, and he remodelled the same subject in his metaphysics under a more imposing title, and more as a realist than a nominalist. Nor is much stress to be laid on his frequent recourse to experiment in his books on animals, his problems, and other treatises; for he had already decided, without having properly consulted experience as the basis or his decisions and axioms, and after having so decided, he drags experiment along, as a captive constrained to accommodate herself to his decisions; so that he is even more to be blamed than his modern followers, (of the scholastic school,) who have deserted her altogether.
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No Robots

Remarkably, Bacon borrows from Aristotle the species/ genus structure: it is when one confirms the determination of species, that genus is invented.--"Bacon's method of science" / Michel Malherbe. In Cambridge Companion to Bacon, p. 95.
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lupus Aries
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What's your point N.R.? Genus is a standard term in evolutionary biology.
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No Robots

Hi lupus Aries.

From the perspective of panpsychism, the genus is the designation for a distinct thought-realm:

Each genus is thinking its world image, hence, has a world, of a specific kind, according to the specificity of its organization, according to its morphological structure and its care for life, according to the biological center of its interests and relations. An infinite diversity--how divergent from our kind of thinking the Arthropoda with their exoskeleton, chitin coat of mail, which, so far as we know, can experience only few outer stimuli, and, much less yet are experiencing those sessile animals with rigid cellulose sheathing, or the encapsulated endoparasites. However, we might and must assume that each animal possesses its awareness of the world and not simply a consciousness of its own particularity.—“The Attributes” / Constantin Brunner.

The species belonging to a genus are variants that share in the same essential thought-realm.

I would just add by way of illustration that, while I love your handle, it is of course an absurdity, because we do not place sheep in the wolf genus: the appearance and behavior of wolves and sheep lead us to conclude that their thought-realms are entirely distinct from each other.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 16 2013, 03:58 PM.
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Da Magician
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That's unproblematic in evolutionary terms, since genera are variants that share in the same essential thought-realm of life.

life, genera, species... a flow of evolving thoughts, manners and shapes...
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 16 2013, 04:51 PM.
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No Robots

Science requires stable entities. The classic example is the atomic theory, in which a constructive fiction, the idea of the indivisible particle, provides the necessary theoretical construct for scientific investigation of the physical universe. Subatomic physics makes apparent that the indivisible particle is indeed a fiction, a mere means to delineate some operable isolate in the universal flux.

In biology, it is the genus that serves the function of constructive fiction that establishes stable entities for investigation. Certainly, the genera are flexible, creations of the human mind, human interests, human perceptions:

It goes without saying that the concepts "genus" and "species" are in flux, considered from another point of interest than our actual one. Every species may be divided into subspecies, whereat the species becomes the genus, each subspecies becomes a genus again when divided into sub-sub-species for which then the subspecies constitutes the genus; and so without end, according to the marks of differentiation under consideration,-so that there cannot be said to exist either the lowest species, or the lowest genus, genus infimum.—“The Attributes” / Constantin Brunner.

Once we decide, though, to demarcate a genus, we have to understand it as infinite, whole, universal, essential, general, primordial, a thought-form, an attribute of substance, sub specie aeternitas.
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Da Magician
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Science has no requirement but to describe the mechanics of experience
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No Robots

[T]he difficulty in reconciling idea and experience [is] most troublesome in scientific research. An idea is independent of space and time, while scientific research is limited to space and time. Hence simultaneous and successive elements, which are always separate from the viewpoint of experience, are intimately fused in the idea. In the realm of the idea, we are compelled to think of a natural effect as being simultaneous and at once successive, which seems to translate us to a state of mind akin to insanity. Reason is unable to accept in unison what the senses show it to be separate, and thus the conflict between the perceptual and ideational remains forever unsolved.--Goethe. Quoted in Goethe as a scientist / Rudolf Magnus, p. 72.
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Da Magician
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Science creates models - ideas - to explain experience.
Edited by Da Magician, Sep 16 2013, 09:35 PM.
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No Robots

Exactly. And in biology, it is the concept of the genus, ie. of the life-form as idea, that is the basis for our models.
Edited by No Robots, Sep 16 2013, 10:14 PM.
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