User talk:Invisible Flying Mangoes

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Field of Gurs[edit]

Thanks very much for your translation assistance and support at SPATRA!! I completely agree with you that a name change/move is in order; I just translated the Spanish title literally before really reading the text. (Lesson learned on the wisdom of that! ;-)) I'd love to collaborate with you on the rest of the translation. -Fsotrain₀₉ 13:54, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Intelligent Design[edit]

Hey, first could you send me an email sometime and let me know whats going on? Also, FYI Aaron is going to be up at Har Charmon in about 3 months hopefully. Now as to the quote:

"The question 'why has the trend of evolution been upwards?' is not in the least explained by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. That doctrine explains only why some kinds of organisms, having emerged, manage to survive. If survival were the only goal, however, then the very emergence of living things would be inexplicable: life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value, since the art of persistence is to be dead. What we unhesitatingly call the higher organisms, furthermore, are even less capable of survival than lower ones: otters, whales, and humans are transient species compared with viruses, bacteria, and even beetles. The problem <fnord> OK, so there's no Wikipedia article here, per se </fnord> set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organism with such deficient survival power ever evolved. One answer would be the rejection of the 'evolutionist fallacy', which assumes that fitness for sruvival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life. The point is that the evloutionary process is driven by some criterion other than mere survival, this criterion being 'increase in satisfaction', that is, increase in the realization of intrinsic value. The existence of this criterion provides another reason to regard our world as created by a divine power."

The quote is from a book by David Ray Griffen, a contemporary exponent of 'process philosophy' and 'naturalistic theism'.

I'll attempt to go through this sentence by sentence.

"The question 'why has the trend of evolution been upwards?' is not in the least explained by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest." First, I disagree in general with the term "upwards." Evolution has no direction. A bacteria is as evolved as you are I, a sophisticated organism optimized for filling a niche. (I also object to the term "doctrine" but that is more of a side issue). Now for a minute defining "upwards" to mean in the direction of large multi-cellular, differentiated life with the highest organisms being vertebrates, then this is simply false. Most biomass on this planet is non-vertebrate and a substantial fraction (I don't know the precise number but I think a majority) of biomass is in microscopic lifeforms. In some sense then evolution has focused on the small "lower" organisms, and the rest of us are casts offs from the more succesful organisms, eeking out our niches.
"If survival were the only goal, however, then the very emergence of living things would be inexplicable: life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value, since the art of persistence is to be dead." In fact, evolution makes no claims about how life started, that is a separate domain, that of abiogenesis. But note that once life gets a decent foothold, in whatever way, empirical evidence and basic evolutionary ideas suggest that life will be hard to eradicate.
"What we unhesitatingly call the higher organisms, furthermore, are even less capable of survival than lower ones: otters, whales, and humans are transient species compared with viruses, bacteria, and even beetles." Most of what was mentioned in regard to sentence one applies here although I'm not sure what he means by transience in this context. Does he mean transience as species or as groups or as individuals? Individuals seems not to make much sense nor species so I think he means as groups. In which case it is misleading to compare bacteria (a domain or possibly kingdom) to beetles (an order) to whales (a subgrouping of order Cetacea to otters (a subfamily or a group within a family) to humans (a single species).
"The problem <fnord> OK, so there's no Wikipedia article here, per se </fnord> set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organism with such deficient survival power ever evolved." Ok, this sentence seems longer than it is and I can't figure out why. More seriously, I don't know what he means by "survival power" or how he intends to compare levels of survival power and I really don't know what he intends to compare survival power between grossly different sized groups (there may be more context where he defines these terms, but I don't have it). By any reasonable definition of "survival power" or vague notion of it evolution will not in fact have a problem with such species evolving. All evolution will do in that context is make individuals spread out into available niches that are "nearby" to their current niches. He also seems to view evolution as almost looking ahead and making species evolve with the aim in mind of having more "survival power." However, evolution has no look ahead capability, no oracular element and not even an ounce of farsight. Selection occurs always at time t.
"One answer would be the rejection of the 'evolutionist fallacy', which assumes that fitness for sruvival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life." I think he is confusing a number of things here but without more context I can't tell. He seems to be confusing the naturalistic fallacy with evolution and then somehow asserting that it somehow makes a statement back to how evolution behaves.
" The point is that the evloutionary process is driven by some criterion other than mere survival, this criterion being 'increase in satisfaction', that is, increase in the realization of intrinsic value." This has a strong WTF element to it. First, he seems to be confusing "survival" in the coloquial sense with survival in the evolutionary sense of leaving fertile offspring. Second, I have no idea where even if we accepted everything he claimed above that there would a) have to be another factor at work and b) that that factor would be a push to 'increase in satisfaction' (an alien tinkerer would seem to be a far more plausible explanation even if one took this all for granted). Nor do I understand what he means by "increase in the realization of intrinsic value" but the same comments as for "increase in satisfaction" apply to it.
"The existence of this criterion provides another reason to regard our world as created by a divine power." This is a complete non-sequitor from what he has here. Even if there were some unknown mechanism pushing evolution towards "higher" organisms and that this push could not be explained by existing notions of evolution therefore we immediately assume G-d did it? For some reason people find this sort of argument plausible for biological matters when they would reject it for any other area. If a toilet won't stop flushing and the plumber can't figure out how to fix it do we immediately take it as evidence of divine intervention? Or if we don't understand the orbit of a star do we assume that it is being pushed by invisible angels? This is the worst sort of God-of-the-gaps argument.

In summary I am unimpressed if not outright dissapointed in the above. My general impression of process philosophy has been somewhat positive (although I find the notion of a divine tinkerer theologically abhorrent). I'm not very familiar with "naturalistic theism" (which sounds sort of like theistic evolution but not quite) but this reads pretty close to some of the more annoying sorts of ID and creationist arguments. In fact, variants of this argument are common enough that I wouldn't be surprised to have a listing in the |Index to Creationist Claims (hmm, I can't find an obvious entry that addresses this specific point, I'll look in more detail later and maybe drop a note to Mark that it might need an entry). I hope that clarifies matters. JoshuaZ 01:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just copied this from my talk page to here - my reply that I left a week ago, not sure if you read it. - Sam 06:13, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for letting me know, and for the suggestion! I think you are absolutely right, and I breezed right by an important distinction. I dont really have the time today to fix the mistake, but please correct it yourself. Perhaps both you and I could go through the rest of the article and collaborate like this? - Sam 18:51, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

in fact, after reading over it quickly, maybe just changing the sentence to say "ought", instead of "should always", and then make the necessary distinction... - Sam 20:14, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Chinese armies in the Second Sino-Japanese War[edit]

Thank you: [1]. Rintrah 10:44, 2 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sops and frumenty for all![edit]

At long last, the long-overdue nomination of medieval cuisine as an FAC is under way. You are invited to grab your fill of potage, quince pie, a subtlety worthy of a pope, and all the beer you can drink! Oh, and don't forget to make a few comments while you're digging in...

Peter ^Isotalo 21:22, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi[edit]

Thanks for the comments (: response. ——Martin^phi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 07:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]