You shouldn't discount it and say everything is directed by pure chance.
What is pure chance, anyway? There must be a goal to get a purely random distribution. Particles don't have random distributions; there is something deciding what puts them in one state or another. Somewhere there is a goal.
Teleonomy is closely related to concepts of emergence, complexity theory,[13] and self-organizing systems.[14] It has extended beneath biology to be applied in the context of chemistry.[15][16] Some philosophers of biology resist the term and still employ "teleology" when analyzing biological function[17] and the language used to describe it,[18] while others endorse it.[19]
There is some conscious selection, some goal, that individuals of a species are exercising when they reproduce or choose whom to reproduce with. A bird might be wrong when choosing a mate based on colors, colors may not indicate the best traits for survival. The birds make choices, based on their own internally-defined goals, which may or may not agree with what you think they should choose based on your criteria of how evolution progresses.
Ask the Fukushima residents about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.
The evidence for a tsunami on the scale that occurred was not extraordinary, so the reasoning went that such an extraordinary event would not occur.
Yet once the event happened, the probability that it happened went to 1.
The reasoning behind "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is basically saying that your priors are so close to 1 almost no evidence will change your mind. See Cromwell's Rule...
Why do so many birds have such varied and bright feathers?
One teleological explanation is that birds are influencing their own genes. Birds decide which feathers and colors they want to have. They set a goal and evolution follows.
There are still infinite hypotheses that would account for Jane's absence of evidence not being evidence of absence. Bob, the original claimant, could be cleaning up the gorilla poop. Or the gorilla poop could be in a park and easily confused for dog poop. Jane can only report her results and give her opinion; but that's all it is, scientifically, her opinion on the absence. There are infinite possibilities that her absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There is no evidence that gravitons exist; yet that is not taken as evidence of absence by physicists.
There was no evidence that the Higgs Boson existed for 40 years; that was not taken as evidence of absence.
Basically the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence is an opinion, not science. As the saying goes opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and it stinks.
Evolution largely hoards hindsight, as variations unwittingly make "predictions" about structures and functions which could successfully cope with the future, and which participate in a process of natural selection that culls the unfit, leaving the fit to the next generation. Information accumulates about functions and structures that are successful, exploiting feedback from the environment via the selection of fitter coalitions of structures and functions. Robert Rosen has described these features as an anticipatory system which builds an internal model based on past and possible future states.
Teleology is more than wishful philosophy; as Haldane noted, it's essential to biology. The wishfulness comes in trying to deny teleology.
Did Jane forget to look in the zoo? The gorilla could be "loose" in the zoo, out of its cage. Therefore the gorilla is "loose in the city."
96% of the universe is unexplained by physics. Yet we make claims of absolute certainty based on the 4% we can see. There is a lot of evidence that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Aristotle never saw an artery that had blood in it, therefore the absence of evidence of blood proved to him that arteries carried air.
How can you argue with Aristotle's 100% evidence of absence?
Too many assumptions. The absence of gorilla sightings assumes the gorilla is in a place people can see it, that people will report sightings truthfully, that Jane questioned everyone.
Your example ignores the Aristarchus problem. Your measurements might not be sensitive enough.
Thus absence of evidence is very plausibly not evidence of absence.
"Consider the following statement: 'The Wood Thrush migrates in the fall into warmer countries in order to escape the inclemency of the weather and the food shortages of the northern climates'. If we replace the words 'in order to' by 'and thereby', we leave the important question unanswered as to why the Wood Thrush migrates. The teleonomic form of the statement implies that the goal-directed migratory activity is governed by a program. By omitting this important message the translated sentence is greatly impoverished as far as information content is concerned, without gaining in causal strength." Mayr (1974)
Corporations = evil. Wall street regulates Congress. Solution: public money creation, distributed directly to individuals in the form of a basic income.
So, eating meat allowed us to develop brains that were big enough, but not too big? And because we figured out how to eat other proteins now, and don't need to grow our brains any more, we can dispense with eating meat, but you don't because, you're not smart enough? That's the argument?
You're a whacko, a liar, and a murderer. You should do a lot more drugs. You're calling me stupid, but you're too stupid to see that your own arguments are a good reason why you shouldn't eat meat even if your biology allows it. You sling ad homs, so I'm gong to indulge too. You're an incompetent murdering drug-addled idiot. You discount Jainism because of its low numbers, ignoring the fact that they purposefully don't overbreed, and have survived many persecutions, by Muslims for example, that drove out the weaker Buddhists from India.
I'm not even reading the rest of your drivel. If you want, just exchange ad homs. That seems to be the level of discourse you really want to be at.
Why didn't we get their bigger brains then? If big brains are so great?
I was born in India so I kind of know it too. Indian vegetarianism goes back to the beginning of recorded history. Jains have been vegetarian from the start, and their religion probably goes back at least 5000 years.
Pandas are an example of how biology does not dictate eating. Given a choice, pandas prefer bamboo. But they have the biology of a carnivore. Thus your statement that humans were designed to eat meat or however you put it is irrelevant.
Your ad hom about me being drunk, in addition to being false, is symptomatic of the type of bad faith argumentation tactics meat-eaters use because of the corruption of thought the murder of animals inevitabley leads to. Stick to crack, it's better for your brain than eating meat.
"he spent time and money training his slaves up and then freed them. But training is expensive and time consuming, and they breed very quickly."
According to wikipedia, Jefferson freed about 5 slaves, not including Sally Hemings. He died with 130 slaves. He inherited close to 200. So he sold more slaves than he bred.
"However, the value of his property (land and slaves) was increasingly offset by his growing debts, which made it very difficult to free his slaves and thereby lose them as assets.[5]" (from the wiki page linked to above)
Jefferson was wrong to own slaves. He was aware of counterarguments to his own views:
On Bill Maher's show last night they did a bit with Old White Person Bernie Sanders saying: "Not only do Black Lives Matter, they're all that matter. Die, whitey, die."
"Being wrong in the same way as many people around you is not being an inhuman monster, but simply a weakness of most humans."
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the way humans currently treat animals is inhume and monstrous. It's the way the vast majority behave; but it's still absolutely wrong. This is clear to me and will be clear to future generations.
The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?
[...]
Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious [30] experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes,
Another aspect to Jefferson that I don't like. He was right on some things, wrong on others. He was wrong on opposition to Hamilton's economic program. I like Vidal's portrayal of Jefferson in the novel "Burr". Jefferson comes across as silly, vain, foppish, politically astute; basically, a douche.
I, for one, do not want to ignore his great accomplishments. But as the original post which provoked the protests I was responding to said, he was "well-rounded" in ways that included morally reprehensible conduct.
Slashdot Mirror
You shouldn't discount it and say everything is directed by pure chance.
What is pure chance, anyway? There must be a goal to get a purely random distribution. Particles don't have random distributions; there is something deciding what puts them in one state or another. Somewhere there is a goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is some conscious selection, some goal, that individuals of a species are exercising when they reproduce or choose whom to reproduce with. A bird might be wrong when choosing a mate based on colors, colors may not indicate the best traits for survival. The birds make choices, based on their own internally-defined goals, which may or may not agree with what you think they should choose based on your criteria of how evolution progresses.
Try and make species without some kind of goal in your simulation.
Ask the Fukushima residents about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.
The evidence for a tsunami on the scale that occurred was not extraordinary, so the reasoning went that such an extraordinary event would not occur.
Yet once the event happened, the probability that it happened went to 1.
The reasoning behind "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is basically saying that your priors are so close to 1 almost no evidence will change your mind. See Cromwell's Rule...
Why do so many birds have such varied and bright feathers?
One teleological explanation is that birds are influencing their own genes. Birds decide which feathers and colors they want to have. They set a goal and evolution follows.
There are still infinite hypotheses that would account for Jane's absence of evidence not being evidence of absence. Bob, the original claimant, could be cleaning up the gorilla poop. Or the gorilla poop could be in a park and easily confused for dog poop. Jane can only report her results and give her opinion; but that's all it is, scientifically, her opinion on the absence. There are infinite possibilities that her absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There is no evidence that gravitons exist; yet that is not taken as evidence of absence by physicists.
There was no evidence that the Higgs Boson existed for 40 years; that was not taken as evidence of absence.
Basically the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence is an opinion, not science. As the saying goes opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and it stinks.
Why isn't it causation? Mutations can be seen as models of the future, predictions.
From wikipedia:
Teleology is more than wishful philosophy; as Haldane noted, it's essential to biology. The wishfulness comes in trying to deny teleology.
Did Jane forget to look in the zoo? The gorilla could be "loose" in the zoo, out of its cage. Therefore the gorilla is "loose in the city."
96% of the universe is unexplained by physics. Yet we make claims of absolute certainty based on the 4% we can see. There is a lot of evidence that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Aristotle never saw an artery that had blood in it, therefore the absence of evidence of blood proved to him that arteries carried air.
How can you argue with Aristotle's 100% evidence of absence?
Too many assumptions. The absence of gorilla sightings assumes the gorilla is in a place people can see it, that people will report sightings truthfully, that Jane questioned everyone.
Your example ignores the Aristarchus problem. Your measurements might not be sensitive enough.
Thus absence of evidence is very plausibly not evidence of absence.
But there is direction to evolution.
See for example https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/tea...
"it's not random and undirected, a requirement for evolution."
Counterpoint, by J. B. S. Haldane:
"Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public."
Someone could have noticed something unexpected, theoretically unpredicted, and then they built or adapted detectors to investigate further.
Sharia law forbids interest too, so they should get loans for free.
Corporations = evil. Wall street regulates Congress. Solution: public money creation, distributed directly to individuals in the form of a basic income.
Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lea...
So, eating meat allowed us to develop brains that were big enough, but not too big? And because we figured out how to eat other proteins now, and don't need to grow our brains any more, we can dispense with eating meat, but you don't because, you're not smart enough? That's the argument?
You're a whacko, a liar, and a murderer. You should do a lot more drugs. You're calling me stupid, but you're too stupid to see that your own arguments are a good reason why you shouldn't eat meat even if your biology allows it. You sling ad homs, so I'm gong to indulge too. You're an incompetent murdering drug-addled idiot. You discount Jainism because of its low numbers, ignoring the fact that they purposefully don't overbreed, and have survived many persecutions, by Muslims for example, that drove out the weaker Buddhists from India.
I'm not even reading the rest of your drivel. If you want, just exchange ad homs. That seems to be the level of discourse you really want to be at.
Fucking retard.
Why didn't we get their bigger brains then? If big brains are so great?
I was born in India so I kind of know it too. Indian vegetarianism goes back to the beginning of recorded history. Jains have been vegetarian from the start, and their religion probably goes back at least 5000 years.
Pandas are an example of how biology does not dictate eating. Given a choice, pandas prefer bamboo. But they have the biology of a carnivore. Thus your statement that humans were designed to eat meat or however you put it is irrelevant.
Your ad hom about me being drunk, in addition to being false, is symptomatic of the type of bad faith argumentation tactics meat-eaters use because of the corruption of thought the murder of animals inevitabley leads to. Stick to crack, it's better for your brain than eating meat.
"he spent time and money training his slaves up and then freed them. But training is expensive and time consuming, and they breed very quickly."
According to wikipedia, Jefferson freed about 5 slaves, not including Sally Hemings. He died with 130 slaves. He inherited close to 200. So he sold more slaves than he bred.
"However, the value of his property (land and slaves) was increasingly offset by his growing debts, which made it very difficult to free his slaves and thereby lose them as assets.[5]" (from the wiki page linked to above)
Jefferson was wrong to own slaves. He was aware of counterarguments to his own views:
Jefferson was incompetent in his scientific views on blacks.
"it is a natural instinct to eat nommy dead animal flesh. In fact, doing so is what gave you your big brain."
How come Neanderthals had bigger brains, but are now gone?
How come in India vegetarianism took root very early on?
Why do pandas choose to eat bamboo instead of the meat their carnivorous digestive tract was designed for?
" It's the morning after and we're all playing 'Spot the drunken fruitcake.'"
Put down the crackpipe.
On Bill Maher's show last night they did a bit with Old White Person Bernie Sanders saying: "Not only do Black Lives Matter, they're all that matter. Die, whitey, die."
"Being wrong in the same way as many people around you is not being an inhuman monster, but simply a weakness of most humans."
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the way humans currently treat animals is inhume and monstrous. It's the way the vast majority behave; but it's still absolutely wrong. This is clear to me and will be clear to future generations.
"By the way, it's worth reading up a bit on Jefferson."
Yeah, I have. Consider Notes on the State of Virginia, by Jefferson:
Another aspect to Jefferson that I don't like. He was right on some things, wrong on others. He was wrong on opposition to Hamilton's economic program. I like Vidal's portrayal of Jefferson in the novel "Burr". Jefferson comes across as silly, vain, foppish, politically astute; basically, a douche.
I, for one, do not want to ignore his great accomplishments. But as the original post which provoked the protests I was responding to said, he was "well-rounded" in ways that included morally reprehensible conduct.