ps418

We waited 2 weeks for that? Better head back to the old drawing board with the chromosome challenge!

Vibr8gKiwi

Be nice. The guy has tried to make a response. He needs time to discover all the facts are on one side of the discussion, and the other side has nothing but distortions. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to another theist who suddenly decides that evolution doesn't conflict with his religion after all.

Doubting Didymus

I knew you were going to say that.

I hope you are not going to make a habit of posting these in every thread about evolution. I know that your toungue is firmly in your cheek, but are you not concerned that arguments as vacuous as this are actually considered workable by creationists?

Still, it deserves a quick response: 1) It is not satisfactory to simply dismiss the most important question raised by this argument, which is: if humans are so important to god, why are we so very very similar to apes? Just calling it 'forever unknowable' is cheap and cowardly.

2) The argument is only applicable if evidence can be found that humans were ever created separately from apes. Parsimony suggests that the common descent explanation trumps the creation explanation (fewer unknowns), given only that there has been enough time. Therefore this argument is really only an implied 'default', should creationists ever successfully prove that evolution has not had enough time.

Again, I am well aware that you are not serious, but as these arguments are taken directly from real creationist ones, they need responses lest they be taken seriously.

Vanderzyden

I know this reply is off-topic, but I want to indicate that my respect for what you've said here.

1. In response to your first point, I would say that we share some common ground in what you see as the most important issue here. It seems to me that the most important question could be stated more broadly: How could God take a particular interest in Man and not make it blantant obvious? But of course that is an entirely separate topic.

2. I'm not sure it's correct to say that there are fewer unknowns in the naturalist position (i.e. common descent). Again, I would raise the example of philosophy of the mind/cognitive science. The mind--as distinct from the brain--is largely unknown by empirical means, and yet each human is aware of his/her mind and other minds. The claim of fewer unknowns depends heavily upon what one considers to be valid knowledge. Furthermore, we must always remember to consider the presuppositions that each side brings to the argument.

Vanderzyden

Nat

Wow - way to stay away from the sustantive replies to your post that showed rather convincingly your poor understanding of modern biology (that no beneficial mutations line was a laugh), your dishonest use of out-of-context and irrelevant quotes, and your piss poor understanding of the original argument.

Doubting Didymus

Actually I think it has a definite bearing on this topic. Humans are extremely similar in both morphology and genetics to apes, and similar is greater or lesser degrees to most other mammals. If god created us as a very special species, we would expect to be very different from other animals.

You do not fairly represent my application of parsimony. I use parsimony in a specific case, responding to geotheo. Geotheo and I both admit that the structure of the human chromosome is definitely two smaller fused chromosomes as evidenced by the telomeres in the centre, and centromeres at quarterly spacings. His hypothetical explanation is that the fusion occured recently, post creation. My explanation (the currently accepted scientific explanation) is that it happened a long time ago, after the ancestral split from apes.

The more parsimonious explanation in this specific case is that the fusion occured a long time ago, and not recently. (because placing the event at a recent date raises more unanswered questions than it solves, such as how the mutation spread to the entire population in such a short time). No presupposition of naturalism plays a part in this evaluation of parsimony, as BOTH explanations are naturalistic ones.

This is completely unrelated to any of the previous topics, but...

It is quite possible to deduce that the mind is completely dependant on the brain. Simple observations of damaged brains show that there is a direct corrolation between affects on the brain and affects on the mind. How do you explain this if the mind is a separate entity? This is what is meant by parsimony: A parsimonious explanation explains more than a less parsimonious one. In this case: we can suggest that the mind is a function of the brain, and it explains a lot. We can also suggest that the mind is independant of the brain, but that does not explain why changes in the brain so effects the mind. It does not explain why we can directly measure physical changes in the brain as a result of changes in emotions and thought patterns.

Your claim that the mind is largely unknown by empirical means is true so far, but this does not suggest that alternative means somehow understand more about the mind that science does. Saying 'we get our mind from god' does not explain how the mind works, what it does, or what it is for. I really may as well say 'we get our mind from aardvarks' and it is just as good an explanation.

I hope to have shown that I was not using parsimony as a broad brush attack on everything except naturalism, but what you consider valid knowledge should be consistent. What I mean by this, is that if you want to believe in god without empirical evidence, you MUST have a reason why you don't believe in invisible magic aardvarks without empirical evidence. Your descriptions of valid knowledge in previous posts strongly suggest to me that we should consider more than 'just' actual evidence, when framing our veiws. I am not yet certain that I know what else you want me to consider.

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Doubting Didymus ]</p>

lpetrich

Vanderzyden, why haven't you analyzed my comments?

Like how macroevolution is useful for understanding genomes?

Or how the vertebrate and arthropod internal-organ arrangements are homologous -- if one flips one of them over?

Common descent is completely consistent with certain forms of theism:

A god who guides evolution.
A god who watches evolution without getting involved.
A god who is the process of evolution or some superset of it.

O VZ, think out of whatever theological box that you enjoy inhabiting.

I wonder if VZ has ever considered the conundrum of whether or not other people have minds, because by his argument, there is only one truly knowable mind: one's own. We do NOT have direct experience of other people's minds, unless someone has convincingly demonstrated mental telepathy.

It seems that he's claiming that the emergence of our species has required the insertion of some special mind-stuff into our ancestors.

However, the mind-stuff hypothesis, better known as mind-body dualism, is unsupported, and the evidence firmly points in the direction of a physicalist theory of mind.

Many mind functions are strongly correlated with brain functions. This can be followed with real-time brain-function monitoring and by analyzing the effects of brain injuries.

Certain substances can affect the mind.

Loss of blood to the brain can induce unconsciousness.

Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative disease of the brain, has aptly been called "the death of the mind before the death of the body" -- a slow death over several years. Alzheimer's patients gradually lose their mental faculties, until they become incapacitated.

Many animals have minds, even if they are often very primitive by human standards. But some seem almost human in some respects, like chimpanzees, the closest species to ours as determined by anatomical and gene-sequence evidence.

Each reader of this message is reading it with the help of a machine with an artificial mind, even if a rather primitive one: a computer. And mind-stuff is not on the list of ingredients of any computer chip, as far as I know.

Like yours, O VZ?

lpetrich

Not to mention every other living thing on this planet! Here are groups of organisms, arranged in degree of similarity to our species:

Chimpanzees
Gorillas
Orangutans
Lesser apes
Old World monkeys
New World monkeys
Prosimians
Other eutherians
Marsupials, monotremes
Mammal-like reptiles
Other amniotes (reptiles, dinosaurs, birds)
Amphibians
Lobe-finned fish
Ray-finned fish
Sharks and rays and the like
Jawless fish
Amphioxus
Sea squirts
Echinoderms, hemichordates
Protostomes (arthropods, annelids, mollusks, etc.)
Cnidarians, ctenophores
Sea sponges
Choanoflagellates
Fungi
Other eukaryotes (other protists, algae, plants)
Prokaryotes (bacteria)
Viruses (not sure where these would fall)

Doubting Didymus

A little phylocentric, don't you think?

Doubting Didymus

I would have to disagree here, I think consiousness is what most people think of as 'mind', and there is none of that in a computer. However, there also seems to be none of it in a plant or a bacterium, either. It seems likely that things with no brains are operating entirely on direct stimulus response mechanisms, and do not have thoughts. In my opinion this constitutes further evidence that the mind is a function of the brain.