"None of that "public" debate on the definition of the term is reflected in elementary biology textbooks, is it,"
Of course it is. Defining and explaining the biological species concept, which is the primary definition of species used in biology, and the problems it and any definition of species has is common in almost every textbook I've read.
"And despite the problem, biologists continue to publish new findings that use the term, choosing whichever aspect of the definition that fit their purpose."
Bull. This simply doesn't happen. Most biologists use the term as defined by the biological species concept, with full understanding of its limitations (i.e. no bright lines, doesn't help with asexual organisms, etc.). The idea that genetic interbreedability should be the sole definition of species is simply baseless and just as unworkable as any other. Whether populations mate in the wild is a perfectly good point to pick on a fuzzy spectrum, and it's a point biologists have discussed, used, and talked about for decades.
"No, the fact is that so-called scientists are using whichever definition is most convenient for their purpose at the time. That is what annoys me."
But since that's not actually what's happening, the real problem here is that you are confused about what is going on.
"Personally, I think we should stick with the old definition."
First of all, that wasn't the "old definition." You were simply misinformed, or misunderstood. Unless you are around 80 years old, the biological species concept (i.e. populations that do not interbreed) has been around longer than you've been alive. Second of all, your definition is rife with so many problems that it's unworkable anyway, as has been pointed out to you many times.
Nope. That's not even true among primates (who are amongst the most intolerant of different chromosome numbers), and it's definately not true in general. While it can certainly signal some major genetic differences that might lead to incompatibility, it doesn't demonstrate them.
Heck, there are many human beings walking around right now, today, with varying numbers of chromosomes, and they are not necessarily sterile. How this all works is immensely complicated (since there become tons of different combinations of the chromosomes that can be created, some non-viable, some viable, some viable but sterile, etc.)
The Declaration of Indepedence is something widely corraborated by known first person sources and in a million other little ways as part of a large network of self-confirming evidence. The events in the gospels are not corroborated at all, and none of the claimed historical sources do anything more than repeat the claims of the gospels and early Christians long long after the movement began (Josephus says little more than that there was a Jesus person, while Tacitus basically describes what Christians believe, not any of the details of Jesus' life). To even begin to compare them is to lack completely any sense of proportion. No doubt you've been misled by some apologia or another.
It's almost certain, though by no means is there any direct evidence of it, that a person known as Jesus lived and was the leader of a group of believers, and likely died at the hands of the Romans, like many many leaders of upstart movements before and after him. But other than that, details are fairly murky. And the historicity of some event described in the gospel hardly confirms as flat history the more extreme claims of the story, from a virgin birth to a ressurection anymore than the existence of Paris proves that Dan Brown's wild fantasies are historical.
Not only do we lack contemporary historical evidence of the gospel stories, but many of the events they describe simply cry out for an explanation as to WHY there is no mention of them anywhere in the known histories of the time. One of the gospels claims, for instance, that when Jesus died, many saints broke out of their tombs and wandered around Jerusalem appearing to people. This seems like a pretty amazing event, yet it's just a tossoff footnote in the gospels with no followup, explanation, or resolution (Did they eventually vanish? Go back to their families? Go back to their tombs?), and it isn't mentioned anywhere in any history of anything at the time, despite being a remarkable event (the broken, perhaps robbed, graves alone would be a major event worth commenting on!) Like many elements of the gospel stories, it's something tossed in to impress, not something a simply recorded or documented historical event.
It isn't misleading at all. Discussions about the difficulty in defining species has been going on for some time now, very publically. You can't use the term variety because you aren't dealing with simple varieties. You are dealing with separate and distinct populations that can and only interbreed under some very artificial and rare circumstances, and then not always reliably. Furthermore, you're dealing with things that have been classed as species since before evolutionary biology even existed.
There are attempts being made to create new terminology: look at cladistics (which basically just uses numbers instead of names). But getting everyone to adopt the same system isn't easy: not because of some grand conspiracy, but simply because of habit, difference of opinion on the right way to do it, and so forth.
But what "pretense" are you suggesting anyone is trying to maintain by calling a new type of butterfly (that doesn't interbreed with other parent species) a species? What's wrong or misleading about it?
Sorry, but this term never had much meaning in terms of science. Science demands that you be specific and precise. "After their own kind" is like a kindergardner-level of understanding of biology.
"Speciation is not determined by the organisms' willingness to interbreed but by whether or not a cross-breed between them can be genetically viable."
The problem is, there is no hard and fast line for what this means either. Often species that we thought could never be genetically viable when bred together turn out to be under certain conditions. Abalone sperm, for instance, causes rapid speciation because of the way it acts as a sort of passcode lock/key system that's always changing. But there's no underlying genetic incompatibility once the sperm gets through the lock. We can artificially get the sperm in... so do they count as a separate species or not? We always thought that camels and llamas couldn't interbreed.... but then they did after an extensive crossbreeding experiment with tons and tons of failures. We STILL don't even know for sure whether chimps and humans can interbreed or not (and we won't be trying to find out anytime soon). There is no hard and fast line as to what "genetically viable" means. Some hybrids are fertile only with other hybrids. Some are fertile only with one type of parent, some the other. Some are only sometimes fertile. Some are very often sterile, but in rare cases fertile.
Why is it so complicated? Because that's just the nature of evolutionary biology: there are no easy categorical solutions.
"So, do they correct their books? Do they revise the texts? No."
You are a liar. Even the most elementary textbooks DO try to address all these complications, and they DO discuss quite extensively why the term "species" is very hard to nail down to a single common meaning. There is no universal definition of species. Heck, plenty of animals are ASEXUAL. How the heck does your supposed definition apply to THEM? Do you really think scientists COVER UP all of this information?
"i don't mean to start any arguments on evolution or anything, i know that i will believe what i will, just as anyone else is going to believe what they will, and that nobody will know who's right until death."
i.e. "since I know that my view isn't supported by the evidence and yours is, I'm going to declare that all evidence is useless and no one can know anything, it's all just belief and I don't want to play a game I know I will lose."
Not unlike knocking over the chessboard once your queen has been captured.
Fact is, new genetic variations crop up all the time. We aren't just shuffling existing genes (if that were true, if there were only some finite store of functional genes, then gene pools would become less and less diverse over time as certain genes became rare and died out and were never replaced with new ones). Instead, we see just the opposite over time: genetic diversity increasing. If anything, natural selection slows down, but usualy cannot stop, the normal rates of genetic change and diversification.
I'm not sure what your point is. Biologists are the very FIRST people to admit that species is a very hard thing to nail down (there are even bigger problems that I haven't even touched upon that deal with transitions through time). You can't "reject the vauge definition of species" I talk about. It is one of the accepted definitions, and definitions are a matter of usage, not opinion.
Egotism has nothing to do with it. The reason species concepts are sloppy is because trying to give concrete names to ever shifting and moving targets is always ill-suited to the job, and yet is necessary because human beings need named classifications and simplifications to process information quickly.
Understanding why and how species is a very complicated concept is one of the key insights to understanding what evolution is and how it works.
Well, okay, but if you read your post, it certainly seems like you are listing authors, not books, so I don't feel too bad for misunderstanding you, and many others seem to have read it the same way. Suffice to say, there isn't any particularly good reason to think that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses (unreliable or no) or are solid historical records.
"Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic. -- GilDodgen"
(Replying to GilDodgen, not the poster)... Or common values like honesty, or decency, or all the other things that the merry band over at uncommon descent routinely break. DaveScot has been caught self-contrdicting, lying, and trolling so many times that it's impossible to keep track of anymore (and he almost never corrects himself), and yet Dembski still keeps the guy around. Deeply embarrasing, but the company kept is telling.
Back on point, the basic failure of Gil's understanding in this case is confusing learning more about the particulars of a specific lineage with learning about the overall picture of evolutionary change. The two are not the same, and we can learn lots and lots of totally new things about one thing without it necessarily doing much more than being yet another in an already overwhelming landslide of reinforcements of the basic idea.
It actually makes a lot more sense once you understand the basic principles of cladistic morphology, which means that collections of physical traits are always found grouped in the same patterns that are as much dead giveaways to where on the overall tree of life they fit as fingerprints or DNA.
Creationists often scoff at the idea that you could indentify a creature just by its tooth, but the fact is, most forms of life DO have extremely unique teeth, apes in particular. There is nothing in all of the animal kingdom that is shaped quite like an ape molar: it has a distinctive pattern of grooves and points. All apes have them, and only apes have them. So if you find one, you can be pretty sure that you have hold of an ape molar, unless some sort of fraud or very particular damage has been done to it.
... but MUCH MUCH more robust than Darwin ever expected it to be. Too many people seem to think that evolution rests almost purely on fossils. And yet, the theory could function pretty much just as well even if there were almost no fossils at all. Darwin himself didn't use the fossil record all that much in his theory: he didn't have the sort of clear pattern of universal common descent that we have in the fossil record that we have to day, and he never expected to have it. Instead, he referenced fossils only insofar as they showed that life in previous eras was very different from life today, and that extinction is common throughout the history of life on earth.
"of course, any EVIDENCE that contradicts their view is shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public. sicence at its best, no?"
I'd say that chances are MUCH MUCH higher that you simply don't know what you are talking about.
Take this case. You seem to think that a debate over whether Archaeopteryx is a DIRECT ancestor of modern birds or not is the same thing as a debate over whether birds evolved at all. Archaeopteryx is clearly descended from dinosaurs, and it clearly has features that are otherwise unique to modern birds. Whether or not it had descendants that came to be the lines of modern birds is interesting, but it doesn't bear on the question of whether Archaeopteryx is on the branch of the tree that leads to birds. Most of the evidence we have suggests that it is.
The article you cite is was indeed a fringe view, but hardly one that was "shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public." It was discussed pretty extensively, and in light of new evidence and better arguments (which, of course, this profile article doesn't mention ANY of), didn't gain much ground. More fossils were discovered that made the finding of feathers in other dino lines definitive and undeniable. Your article, by the way, is almost 10 years old.
There is no such thing as an "atheist" worldview, except in an abstract sense. There is only a theist worldview, and then some people who do not share it, all of whom have their own worldviews which need not necessarily have any relation to each other.
Are you kidding? The idea that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were written by the disciples is not only a minority position in historical scholarship, but it's extra-biblical to boot. None of the documents themselves in their original forms actually made any such claims: they were attached by psuedonymous tradition. Most of the generally approximated dates of the texts are around 20 to 40 years after the death of Christ at the earliest, and if you believe internal evidence, the earliest Gospel, Mark, was likely written at least after the destruction of the Temple in the 70s.
The only person in the NT we are dead sure wrote the texts ascribed to him is Paul, and he never witnessed anything personally other than his own vision. It's also telling that while he is the unqualified earliest texts in the NT, he never mentions any of the key details the Gospels would later claim were at the forefront of Jesus' life story and ministry, other than the basic idea that he died and was raised. While this could be coincidence, it's especially odd given that there are many times when such references would greatly strengthen Paul's arguments... but instead he turns to analysis of Scripture rather than the teachings of Jesus.
Uh, no. Just because the theory of gravity doesn't explain electromagentism doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is flawed because it doesn't explain the origins of life. The origins of life are definately outside of evolution, because evolution requires a number of pre-existing features, one of which IS life.
The problem is even more fundamental than that. EVERY living species on the planet that will have descendants, and every fossil that represents a line that did not then go extinct is "transitional." Every single last one. And in fact, when we're talking about transitional fossils, we can even include the ones that had NO descendants, because the transitions we are looking for are actually much broader groups, not specific species. For instance, the parent mentions archy. Now the reason SCIENTISTS don't might say that archy isn't transitional is actually very different from what your average layperson or creationist understands. To the scientists, the idea that archy is related to both dinosaurs and modern birds isn't even an open question. Whether or not it is transitional, however, is more a debate about whether it is a DIRECT ancestor of modern birds.
But as far as proving evolution, archy demonstrates exactly the sort of transitional form that evolution predicts. Even if archy died out without leaving any future descendants, the fact remains that it has features unique to both dinosaurs and modern birds, which means that it is a branch of the line of dinos that led to modern birds.
The problem is that species is really only a very vaguely useful term. The line between "will not/cannot" breed with each other (and usually "in the wild" is added to this) is very very fuzzy, and there are many stages of compatibility in between, from sterile offspring, to rarely viable offspring, to rarely fertile offspring, and so on. Often species that will not breed in the wild under normal conditions will if conditions (or light levels, for instance) change.
"The butterflies COULD breed with each other, the scientists just don't think they will try."
As i noted, not reproducing without human intervention IS a barrier for defining speciation. That's why spinner dolphins and false killer whales are considered different species, even though wolphins exist in captivity. Chiclids, for instance, will only mate with certain colored fellow chiclids, but if you alter the light conditions so that they cannot make out the distinctions, then they will mate.
And so on.
One thing that I often find strange is that given the wide wide range of diversity amongst animals that are all of the same species (say, domestic dogs), people find it so hard to believe that speciation can happen, especially given that many genetically incompatible species are far far more similar to each other than dogs are morphologically. Two populations becoming genetically incompatible is really not much different from how they become visually different: it's just that the genetic changes in question happen to be working on more core reproductive elements rather than outward looks.
Well, and the story was published in a book some many many years ago. Maybe if I write a story about an anecdote from Grapes of Wrath I could get published on slashdot!
"Since I didn't say that, you have your own strawman arguement. I didn't say it was the same, I said it sets up a precedent, which it does. And since you bring up the distiction between intelligence levels vs intelligence capacity, you illustrate my point nicely, as down syndrome people would usually be considered to have a much different capacity for intelligence."
First you say that I am arguing against a straw man, and then you basically repeat what I said you were saying. Classic!
"It is not about saying "If you want to do stem cell research you also want to kill disabled people", it's saying that if you get a decision to allow ebryonic stem cell research based on a particular line of reasoning, that line of reasoning can then be used (precendent, remember) in other decisions."
Not when that line of reasoning is a caricature, not the actual reasoning. You simply can't get from the idea that capacity to think or feel at all, or to have ever done so, is a necessary pre-requisite for rights to executing down syndrome kids. You just can't.
"It is not dishonest, it is demonstably true that people reason this way, for example, Peter Singer who indeed does have the opinion that it is ok to kill disabled children. "
While I don't agree with all of Singer's positions, I think it is pathetic how people misrepresent them in this way. It basically boils down to lying about his arguments, or pulling musing points made in a long philosophical digression with quite different conclusions out of context. If you wanted to demonstrate that you aren't attacking straw men, you just failed again. Too bad there isn't a contest for people who fail the most. Though if there was, I'm sure you'd somehow manage to fail at it.
"My claim is that religions everywhere present the idea that morality is absolute. That's what I was saying."
That's not what you said. You defined a very particular sort of divine command concept of morality that is highly controversial, even among the world's religions.
"...Unless that being in question is by definition absolute inauthority and not capricious in nature."
The first condition makes no sense (it adds nothing to the argument: you can't make things right and wrong by "authority" and still have them BE right and wrong: they are simply in line with or not line with commands at that point) and the second sense is an appeal that contradicts the divine command. If divine command is the source of morality, then you cannot place a restriction on it that it will not be capricious in nature. Who are you to judge what is or is not capricous? And the very assumption that such a being should be belies a belief in some sort of higher standard by which to judge the behavior of the being.
"Assuming a being with absolute authority, the idea of that being also being the determiner of absolute morality is not a far stretch at all. This is the claim of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian faiths."
No, it is the claim of some of the sects of various faiths in that tradition, not all. Regardless, its logically incoherent.
"They will also not convince anyone who chooses not to beleive them. Without appeal to an absolute authority and in absense of a moral calculus that can prove out the moral claim, the only morality is consensual."
With an appeal to morality, they are just as consensual. That's the issue with authority. It's meaningless as a means TO morality where there is none. If a person does not have the values necessary for common axioms of moral principles, if they are without emotion, morality is meaningless to them regardless of the existence of god or not. All the god can add are threats. It cannot add value. Values are not abstractions, they are things held or not held by particular beings.
"Actually, linguisitically that isn't precisely true. What it means is the God is a superset of Good. The terms become uni-directionally synonymous."... rendering them effectively meaningless. To call God good, in such a system is simply to repeat youself. But in terms of moral content, it is entirely empty. Good is synonymous with whatever God does, and therefore there is nothing laudable in anything God does: nothing that God rises to achieves or perfects. All there is is power, nothing more.
"Jesus claimed to be the Messiah prophesied in the Jewish texts for thousands of years. It's easy to have faith that something will happen, it's quite another to have faith that something prophecied did happen. It was an extraordinary claim."
It wasn't merely extraordinary: it was in direct contradiction to Judiac Scripture, a failure of nearly every test of prophecy and behavior that the Jews had.
"As for the theological changes Jesus suggested to Judiasm, those changes were already underway in other parts of the jewish world. Those changes are by-and-large a part of modern Judaism. The general trend of jewish morality was one that saw the people of Isreal move from barbarism and its commensurate morality (revenge served cold) to moral enlightenment (from only an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek)."
This analysis relies on an incredibly simplified and lacking understanding of Judaic law and history. The only truly unique idea Jesus brought was the idea of eternal torment for unbelief (possibly one of the most immoral and evil doctrines ever imagined by anyone), and his followers created concepts like original sin that stodd in direct contradiction to Scripture and Judaism. The development of Jewish morality simply does not track well at all with Christianity, and the development of its theology simply does not and did not support the claims of early Christians, or later ones.
I don't buy it, sorry. At some point, in such cases, numbers always outweigh personal biases. But with zygotes, they never do, because even to zygote-rights advocates, their own arguments have no real pratical force: they are abstract and largely exist to help butress other positions (like the abortion of fetuses).
"The absolute morality you are talking about requires an absolute authority."
This seems almost exactly, 100% wrong. IF morality is simply the declaration of an absolutely powerful being, then morality is almost by definition meaningless and empty. The being cannot be good (since that would beg the question), and there is no moral force to its commands: they are simply commands. If you don't follow them, you can be punished, perhaps absolutely, but there is no moral content to any of these events.
"this is the claim of religions everywhere."
Again, don't purport to speak for religions everywhere. Many many theologians reject moral command theology in favor of the idea that morals are simple eternal principles basic to the ability to feel and have value, and that what God does is illuminate them for us, not create them. God is subject to them as well, which is precisely why we can judge God good and perfect: because He is the only being who can actually live up to them fully.
"In absence of such a granting authority, we are left with relative morality. That is to say, without some authority to draw the universal line you may dislike murder, but that doesn't make it wrong for me (illegal, but not morally wrong)."
Again, the concept of "absolute authority" is self contradictory when it comes to universal morality. The whole point of morality is that it applies in the abstract: that it is universal to all beings regardless of who they are. Therefore arguments to authority inherently break the whole idea. If what is good and what is bad is merely the decision of a particular sort of being, then they are not really universal at all: they are merely conditional. Nor are they abstractable: they are situational and relative.
"There is no way to start with copmpassion and empathy and derive a universal ethic that has any meaning outside of the context of the person or people who derived it. I'm not saying this is an invalid method for determining morality (it's essentially morality by consensus) but it is not the method I use and it is not universal, it's consensual morality."
It's not merely morality by consensus, because it involves logically working out the implications of the values of certain sorts of beings. If its contextual, it's always contextual TO THOSE BEINGS who have values in the first place. Principles against killing may not apply to rocks, but then there is no reason to. Principles that require a value for life may not convince a sociopath, but then again we never expected them to do so.
"It's not popular, and I understand why, but I tend to side with the camp that says Good is Good becuase God said Good is Good."
How can you side with a position that is linguistically meaningless? That's like saying that you believe in a square circle. You can't both define a term in reference to something and then claim to be saying anything by applying that term back to the original thing. If good is defined by God, then there is no way God could not be good, and hence the term "good" has no real meaning at all. You've taken the schoolyard "oh, yeah, well, MY God is, like, infinity times cooler than thous!" to the point where you've eradicated the very meaning you wanted to ascribe to the being.
If God could say that rape is good, and that would be good, what is "good." Nothing at all.
This of course is why so few Jews bought into Christianity. The idea that god would turn around and change morality, from suddenly declaring things that were abominations to be ok, to endorsing human sacrifice and so on, to them the message of Jesus wasn't much different than someone today saying that adultery was really ok after all as long as you did it with your eyes closed.
Everything on both sides is "human" by some definition, and both things on either immediate side are not human by some definitions.
You are trying to cheat and make an argument purely by relying on particular definitions. The true test is whether your argument holds up when deprived of shortcuts and special definitions. Can you make a DIRECT moral case that a zyogte should not be killed, based purely off what it is? Or not? We can do so for other sorts of humans, without cheating and simply declaring that all humans should not be killed... for some unexplained, unexamined reason (thus bypassing any real moral discussion entirely). We can actually just explain the reason instead. Can you do the same with a zygote?
Just because there is no point at which a pile of sand becomes a dune when we are adding grain by grain, doesn't mean that we can't correctly and unambiguously say that some given pile is a pile, and not dune.
You can argue all you want about when the brain is active enough. But before the brain even EXISTS, I don't see how there can be any argument. We don't need a magical moment (and conception isn't it either: it's both just one step on a causal chain that's longer in both directions, and also isn't necessary for life at all since we can now artificially trick egg cells into doubling their genes and reproducing directly without any conception at all).
Conception is a chemical/genetic process where one living things mixes its DNA with another. There isn't a tiny person that emerges at this point. We still have just a cell with DNA carrying out some of the instructions that are found in all human DNA but normally switched off.
Slashdot Mirror
"None of that "public" debate on the definition of the term is reflected in elementary biology textbooks, is it,"
Of course it is. Defining and explaining the biological species concept, which is the primary definition of species used in biology, and the problems it and any definition of species has is common in almost every textbook I've read.
"And despite the problem, biologists continue to publish new findings that use the term, choosing whichever aspect of the definition that fit their purpose."
Bull. This simply doesn't happen. Most biologists use the term as defined by the biological species concept, with full understanding of its limitations (i.e. no bright lines, doesn't help with asexual organisms, etc.). The idea that genetic interbreedability should be the sole definition of species is simply baseless and just as unworkable as any other. Whether populations mate in the wild is a perfectly good point to pick on a fuzzy spectrum, and it's a point biologists have discussed, used, and talked about for decades.
"No, the fact is that so-called scientists are using whichever definition is most convenient for their purpose at the time. That is what annoys me."
But since that's not actually what's happening, the real problem here is that you are confused about what is going on.
"Personally, I think we should stick with the old definition."
First of all, that wasn't the "old definition." You were simply misinformed, or misunderstood. Unless you are around 80 years old, the biological species concept (i.e. populations that do not interbreed) has been around longer than you've been alive. Second of all, your definition is rife with so many problems that it's unworkable anyway, as has been pointed out to you many times.
Nope. That's not even true among primates (who are amongst the most intolerant of different chromosome numbers), and it's definately not true in general. While it can certainly signal some major genetic differences that might lead to incompatibility, it doesn't demonstrate them.
Heck, there are many human beings walking around right now, today, with varying numbers of chromosomes, and they are not necessarily sterile. How this all works is immensely complicated (since there become tons of different combinations of the chromosomes that can be created, some non-viable, some viable, some viable but sterile, etc.)
The Declaration of Indepedence is something widely corraborated by known first person sources and in a million other little ways as part of a large network of self-confirming evidence. The events in the gospels are not corroborated at all, and none of the claimed historical sources do anything more than repeat the claims of the gospels and early Christians long long after the movement began (Josephus says little more than that there was a Jesus person, while Tacitus basically describes what Christians believe, not any of the details of Jesus' life). To even begin to compare them is to lack completely any sense of proportion. No doubt you've been misled by some apologia or another.
It's almost certain, though by no means is there any direct evidence of it, that a person known as Jesus lived and was the leader of a group of believers, and likely died at the hands of the Romans, like many many leaders of upstart movements before and after him. But other than that, details are fairly murky. And the historicity of some event described in the gospel hardly confirms as flat history the more extreme claims of the story, from a virgin birth to a ressurection anymore than the existence of Paris proves that Dan Brown's wild fantasies are historical.
Not only do we lack contemporary historical evidence of the gospel stories, but many of the events they describe simply cry out for an explanation as to WHY there is no mention of them anywhere in the known histories of the time. One of the gospels claims, for instance, that when Jesus died, many saints broke out of their tombs and wandered around Jerusalem appearing to people. This seems like a pretty amazing event, yet it's just a tossoff footnote in the gospels with no followup, explanation, or resolution (Did they eventually vanish? Go back to their families? Go back to their tombs?), and it isn't mentioned anywhere in any history of anything at the time, despite being a remarkable event (the broken, perhaps robbed, graves alone would be a major event worth commenting on!) Like many elements of the gospel stories, it's something tossed in to impress, not something a simply recorded or documented historical event.
It isn't misleading at all. Discussions about the difficulty in defining species has been going on for some time now, very publically. You can't use the term variety because you aren't dealing with simple varieties. You are dealing with separate and distinct populations that can and only interbreed under some very artificial and rare circumstances, and then not always reliably. Furthermore, you're dealing with things that have been classed as species since before evolutionary biology even existed.
There are attempts being made to create new terminology: look at cladistics (which basically just uses numbers instead of names). But getting everyone to adopt the same system isn't easy: not because of some grand conspiracy, but simply because of habit, difference of opinion on the right way to do it, and so forth.
But what "pretense" are you suggesting anyone is trying to maintain by calling a new type of butterfly (that doesn't interbreed with other parent species) a species? What's wrong or misleading about it?
"after their own kind."
Sorry, but this term never had much meaning in terms of science. Science demands that you be specific and precise. "After their own kind" is like a kindergardner-level of understanding of biology.
"Speciation is not determined by the organisms' willingness to interbreed but by whether or not a cross-breed between them can be genetically viable."
The problem is, there is no hard and fast line for what this means either. Often species that we thought could never be genetically viable when bred together turn out to be under certain conditions. Abalone sperm, for instance, causes rapid speciation because of the way it acts as a sort of passcode lock/key system that's always changing. But there's no underlying genetic incompatibility once the sperm gets through the lock. We can artificially get the sperm in... so do they count as a separate species or not? We always thought that camels and llamas couldn't interbreed.... but then they did after an extensive crossbreeding experiment with tons and tons of failures. We STILL don't even know for sure whether chimps and humans can interbreed or not (and we won't be trying to find out anytime soon). There is no hard and fast line as to what "genetically viable" means. Some hybrids are fertile only with other hybrids. Some are fertile only with one type of parent, some the other. Some are only sometimes fertile. Some are very often sterile, but in rare cases fertile.
Why is it so complicated? Because that's just the nature of evolutionary biology: there are no easy categorical solutions.
"So, do they correct their books? Do they revise the texts? No."
You are a liar. Even the most elementary textbooks DO try to address all these complications, and they DO discuss quite extensively why the term "species" is very hard to nail down to a single common meaning. There is no universal definition of species. Heck, plenty of animals are ASEXUAL. How the heck does your supposed definition apply to THEM? Do you really think scientists COVER UP all of this information?
"i don't mean to start any arguments on evolution or anything, i know that i will believe what i will, just as anyone else is going to believe what they will, and that nobody will know who's right until death."
i.e. "since I know that my view isn't supported by the evidence and yours is, I'm going to declare that all evidence is useless and no one can know anything, it's all just belief and I don't want to play a game I know I will lose."
Not unlike knocking over the chessboard once your queen has been captured.
Fact is, new genetic variations crop up all the time. We aren't just shuffling existing genes (if that were true, if there were only some finite store of functional genes, then gene pools would become less and less diverse over time as certain genes became rare and died out and were never replaced with new ones). Instead, we see just the opposite over time: genetic diversity increasing. If anything, natural selection slows down, but usualy cannot stop, the normal rates of genetic change and diversification.
I'm not sure what your point is. Biologists are the very FIRST people to admit that species is a very hard thing to nail down (there are even bigger problems that I haven't even touched upon that deal with transitions through time). You can't "reject the vauge definition of species" I talk about. It is one of the accepted definitions, and definitions are a matter of usage, not opinion.
Egotism has nothing to do with it. The reason species concepts are sloppy is because trying to give concrete names to ever shifting and moving targets is always ill-suited to the job, and yet is necessary because human beings need named classifications and simplifications to process information quickly.
Understanding why and how species is a very complicated concept is one of the key insights to understanding what evolution is and how it works.
Well, okay, but if you read your post, it certainly seems like you are listing authors, not books, so I don't feel too bad for misunderstanding you, and many others seem to have read it the same way. Suffice to say, there isn't any particularly good reason to think that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses (unreliable or no) or are solid historical records.
"Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic. -- GilDodgen"
(Replying to GilDodgen, not the poster)... Or common values like honesty, or decency, or all the other things that the merry band over at uncommon descent routinely break. DaveScot has been caught self-contrdicting, lying, and trolling so many times that it's impossible to keep track of anymore (and he almost never corrects himself), and yet Dembski still keeps the guy around. Deeply embarrasing, but the company kept is telling.
Back on point, the basic failure of Gil's understanding in this case is confusing learning more about the particulars of a specific lineage with learning about the overall picture of evolutionary change. The two are not the same, and we can learn lots and lots of totally new things about one thing without it necessarily doing much more than being yet another in an already overwhelming landslide of reinforcements of the basic idea.
It actually makes a lot more sense once you understand the basic principles of cladistic morphology, which means that collections of physical traits are always found grouped in the same patterns that are as much dead giveaways to where on the overall tree of life they fit as fingerprints or DNA.
Creationists often scoff at the idea that you could indentify a creature just by its tooth, but the fact is, most forms of life DO have extremely unique teeth, apes in particular. There is nothing in all of the animal kingdom that is shaped quite like an ape molar: it has a distinctive pattern of grooves and points. All apes have them, and only apes have them. So if you find one, you can be pretty sure that you have hold of an ape molar, unless some sort of fraud or very particular damage has been done to it.
... but MUCH MUCH more robust than Darwin ever expected it to be. Too many people seem to think that evolution rests almost purely on fossils. And yet, the theory could function pretty much just as well even if there were almost no fossils at all. Darwin himself didn't use the fossil record all that much in his theory: he didn't have the sort of clear pattern of universal common descent that we have in the fossil record that we have to day, and he never expected to have it. Instead, he referenced fossils only insofar as they showed that life in previous eras was very different from life today, and that extinction is common throughout the history of life on earth.
"of course, any EVIDENCE that contradicts their view is shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public. sicence at its best, no?"
I'd say that chances are MUCH MUCH higher that you simply don't know what you are talking about.
Take this case. You seem to think that a debate over whether Archaeopteryx is a DIRECT ancestor of modern birds or not is the same thing as a debate over whether birds evolved at all. Archaeopteryx is clearly descended from dinosaurs, and it clearly has features that are otherwise unique to modern birds. Whether or not it had descendants that came to be the lines of modern birds is interesting, but it doesn't bear on the question of whether Archaeopteryx is on the branch of the tree that leads to birds. Most of the evidence we have suggests that it is.
The article you cite is was indeed a fringe view, but hardly one that was "shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public." It was discussed pretty extensively, and in light of new evidence and better arguments (which, of course, this profile article doesn't mention ANY of), didn't gain much ground. More fossils were discovered that made the finding of feathers in other dino lines definitive and undeniable. Your article, by the way, is almost 10 years old.
There is no such thing as an "atheist" worldview, except in an abstract sense. There is only a theist worldview, and then some people who do not share it, all of whom have their own worldviews which need not necessarily have any relation to each other.
Are you kidding? The idea that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were written by the disciples is not only a minority position in historical scholarship, but it's extra-biblical to boot. None of the documents themselves in their original forms actually made any such claims: they were attached by psuedonymous tradition. Most of the generally approximated dates of the texts are around 20 to 40 years after the death of Christ at the earliest, and if you believe internal evidence, the earliest Gospel, Mark, was likely written at least after the destruction of the Temple in the 70s.
The only person in the NT we are dead sure wrote the texts ascribed to him is Paul, and he never witnessed anything personally other than his own vision. It's also telling that while he is the unqualified earliest texts in the NT, he never mentions any of the key details the Gospels would later claim were at the forefront of Jesus' life story and ministry, other than the basic idea that he died and was raised. While this could be coincidence, it's especially odd given that there are many times when such references would greatly strengthen Paul's arguments... but instead he turns to analysis of Scripture rather than the teachings of Jesus.
Uh, no. Just because the theory of gravity doesn't explain electromagentism doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is flawed because it doesn't explain the origins of life. The origins of life are definately outside of evolution, because evolution requires a number of pre-existing features, one of which IS life.
The problem is even more fundamental than that. EVERY living species on the planet that will have descendants, and every fossil that represents a line that did not then go extinct is "transitional." Every single last one. And in fact, when we're talking about transitional fossils, we can even include the ones that had NO descendants, because the transitions we are looking for are actually much broader groups, not specific species. For instance, the parent mentions archy. Now the reason SCIENTISTS don't might say that archy isn't transitional is actually very different from what your average layperson or creationist understands. To the scientists, the idea that archy is related to both dinosaurs and modern birds isn't even an open question. Whether or not it is transitional, however, is more a debate about whether it is a DIRECT ancestor of modern birds.
But as far as proving evolution, archy demonstrates exactly the sort of transitional form that evolution predicts. Even if archy died out without leaving any future descendants, the fact remains that it has features unique to both dinosaurs and modern birds, which means that it is a branch of the line of dinos that led to modern birds.
The problem is that species is really only a very vaguely useful term. The line between "will not/cannot" breed with each other (and usually "in the wild" is added to this) is very very fuzzy, and there are many stages of compatibility in between, from sterile offspring, to rarely viable offspring, to rarely fertile offspring, and so on. Often species that will not breed in the wild under normal conditions will if conditions (or light levels, for instance) change.
"The butterflies COULD breed with each other, the scientists just don't think they will try."
As i noted, not reproducing without human intervention IS a barrier for defining speciation. That's why spinner dolphins and false killer whales are considered different species, even though wolphins exist in captivity. Chiclids, for instance, will only mate with certain colored fellow chiclids, but if you alter the light conditions so that they cannot make out the distinctions, then they will mate.
And so on.
One thing that I often find strange is that given the wide wide range of diversity amongst animals that are all of the same species (say, domestic dogs), people find it so hard to believe that speciation can happen, especially given that many genetically incompatible species are far far more similar to each other than dogs are morphologically. Two populations becoming genetically incompatible is really not much different from how they become visually different: it's just that the genetic changes in question happen to be working on more core reproductive elements rather than outward looks.
Well, and the story was published in a book some many many years ago. Maybe if I write a story about an anecdote from Grapes of Wrath I could get published on slashdot!
"Since I didn't say that, you have your own strawman arguement. I didn't say it was the same, I said it sets up a precedent, which it does. And since you bring up the distiction between intelligence levels vs intelligence capacity, you illustrate my point nicely, as down syndrome people would usually be considered to have a much different capacity for intelligence."
First you say that I am arguing against a straw man, and then you basically repeat what I said you were saying. Classic!
"It is not about saying "If you want to do stem cell research you also want to kill disabled people", it's saying that if you get a decision to allow ebryonic stem cell research based on a particular line of reasoning, that line of reasoning can then be used (precendent, remember) in other decisions."
Not when that line of reasoning is a caricature, not the actual reasoning. You simply can't get from the idea that capacity to think or feel at all, or to have ever done so, is a necessary pre-requisite for rights to executing down syndrome kids. You just can't.
"It is not dishonest, it is demonstably true that people reason this way, for example, Peter Singer who indeed does have the opinion that it is ok to kill disabled children. "
While I don't agree with all of Singer's positions, I think it is pathetic how people misrepresent them in this way. It basically boils down to lying about his arguments, or pulling musing points made in a long philosophical digression with quite different conclusions out of context. If you wanted to demonstrate that you aren't attacking straw men, you just failed again. Too bad there isn't a contest for people who fail the most. Though if there was, I'm sure you'd somehow manage to fail at it.
"My claim is that religions everywhere present the idea that morality is absolute. That's what I was saying."
... rendering them effectively meaningless. To call God good, in such a system is simply to repeat youself. But in terms of moral content, it is entirely empty. Good is synonymous with whatever God does, and therefore there is nothing laudable in anything God does: nothing that God rises to achieves or perfects. All there is is power, nothing more.
That's not what you said. You defined a very particular sort of divine command concept of morality that is highly controversial, even among the world's religions.
"...Unless that being in question is by definition absolute inauthority and not capricious in nature."
The first condition makes no sense (it adds nothing to the argument: you can't make things right and wrong by "authority" and still have them BE right and wrong: they are simply in line with or not line with commands at that point) and the second sense is an appeal that contradicts the divine command. If divine command is the source of morality, then you cannot place a restriction on it that it will not be capricious in nature. Who are you to judge what is or is not capricous? And the very assumption that such a being should be belies a belief in some sort of higher standard by which to judge the behavior of the being.
"Assuming a being with absolute authority, the idea of that being also being the determiner of absolute morality is not a far stretch at all. This is the claim of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian faiths."
No, it is the claim of some of the sects of various faiths in that tradition, not all. Regardless, its logically incoherent.
"They will also not convince anyone who chooses not to beleive them. Without appeal to an absolute authority and in absense of a moral calculus that can prove out the moral claim, the only morality is consensual."
With an appeal to morality, they are just as consensual. That's the issue with authority. It's meaningless as a means TO morality where there is none. If a person does not have the values necessary for common axioms of moral principles, if they are without emotion, morality is meaningless to them regardless of the existence of god or not. All the god can add are threats. It cannot add value. Values are not abstractions, they are things held or not held by particular beings.
"Actually, linguisitically that isn't precisely true. What it means is the God is a superset of Good. The terms become uni-directionally synonymous."
"Jesus claimed to be the Messiah prophesied in the Jewish texts for thousands of years. It's easy to have faith that something will happen, it's quite another to have faith that something prophecied did happen. It was an extraordinary claim."
It wasn't merely extraordinary: it was in direct contradiction to Judiac Scripture, a failure of nearly every test of prophecy and behavior that the Jews had.
"As for the theological changes Jesus suggested to Judiasm, those changes were already underway in other parts of the jewish world. Those changes are by-and-large a part of modern Judaism. The general trend of jewish morality was one that saw the people of Isreal move from barbarism and its commensurate morality (revenge served cold) to moral enlightenment (from only an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek)."
This analysis relies on an incredibly simplified and lacking understanding of Judaic law and history. The only truly unique idea Jesus brought was the idea of eternal torment for unbelief (possibly one of the most immoral and evil doctrines ever imagined by anyone), and his followers created concepts like original sin that stodd in direct contradiction to Scripture and Judaism. The development of Jewish morality simply does not track well at all with Christianity, and the development of its theology simply does not and did not support the claims of early Christians, or later ones.
I don't buy it, sorry. At some point, in such cases, numbers always outweigh personal biases. But with zygotes, they never do, because even to zygote-rights advocates, their own arguments have no real pratical force: they are abstract and largely exist to help butress other positions (like the abortion of fetuses).
"The absolute morality you are talking about requires an absolute authority."
This seems almost exactly, 100% wrong. IF morality is simply the declaration of an absolutely powerful being, then morality is almost by definition meaningless and empty. The being cannot be good (since that would beg the question), and there is no moral force to its commands: they are simply commands. If you don't follow them, you can be punished, perhaps absolutely, but there is no moral content to any of these events.
"this is the claim of religions everywhere."
Again, don't purport to speak for religions everywhere. Many many theologians reject moral command theology in favor of the idea that morals are simple eternal principles basic to the ability to feel and have value, and that what God does is illuminate them for us, not create them. God is subject to them as well, which is precisely why we can judge God good and perfect: because He is the only being who can actually live up to them fully.
"In absence of such a granting authority, we are left with relative morality. That is to say, without some authority to draw the universal line you may dislike murder, but that doesn't make it wrong for me (illegal, but not morally wrong)."
Again, the concept of "absolute authority" is self contradictory when it comes to universal morality. The whole point of morality is that it applies in the abstract: that it is universal to all beings regardless of who they are. Therefore arguments to authority inherently break the whole idea. If what is good and what is bad is merely the decision of a particular sort of being, then they are not really universal at all: they are merely conditional. Nor are they abstractable: they are situational and relative.
"There is no way to start with copmpassion and empathy and derive a universal ethic that has any meaning outside of the context of the person or people who derived it. I'm not saying this is an invalid method for determining morality (it's essentially morality by consensus) but it is not the method I use and it is not universal, it's consensual morality."
It's not merely morality by consensus, because it involves logically working out the implications of the values of certain sorts of beings. If its contextual, it's always contextual TO THOSE BEINGS who have values in the first place. Principles against killing may not apply to rocks, but then there is no reason to. Principles that require a value for life may not convince a sociopath, but then again we never expected them to do so.
"It's not popular, and I understand why, but I tend to side with the camp that says Good is Good becuase God said Good is Good."
How can you side with a position that is linguistically meaningless? That's like saying that you believe in a square circle. You can't both define a term in reference to something and then claim to be saying anything by applying that term back to the original thing. If good is defined by God, then there is no way God could not be good, and hence the term "good" has no real meaning at all. You've taken the schoolyard "oh, yeah, well, MY God is, like, infinity times cooler than thous!" to the point where you've eradicated the very meaning you wanted to ascribe to the being.
If God could say that rape is good, and that would be good, what is "good." Nothing at all.
This of course is why so few Jews bought into Christianity. The idea that god would turn around and change morality, from suddenly declaring things that were abominations to be ok, to endorsing human sacrifice and so on, to them the message of Jesus wasn't much different than someone today saying that adultery was really ok after all as long as you did it with your eyes closed.
Everything on both sides is "human" by some definition, and both things on either immediate side are not human by some definitions.
You are trying to cheat and make an argument purely by relying on particular definitions. The true test is whether your argument holds up when deprived of shortcuts and special definitions. Can you make a DIRECT moral case that a zyogte should not be killed, based purely off what it is? Or not? We can do so for other sorts of humans, without cheating and simply declaring that all humans should not be killed... for some unexplained, unexamined reason (thus bypassing any real moral discussion entirely). We can actually just explain the reason instead. Can you do the same with a zygote?
Just because there is no point at which a pile of sand becomes a dune when we are adding grain by grain, doesn't mean that we can't correctly and unambiguously say that some given pile is a pile, and not dune.
You can argue all you want about when the brain is active enough. But before the brain even EXISTS, I don't see how there can be any argument. We don't need a magical moment (and conception isn't it either: it's both just one step on a causal chain that's longer in both directions, and also isn't necessary for life at all since we can now artificially trick egg cells into doubling their genes and reproducing directly without any conception at all).
Conception is a chemical/genetic process where one living things mixes its DNA with another. There isn't a tiny person that emerges at this point. We still have just a cell with DNA carrying out some of the instructions that are found in all human DNA but normally switched off.