- Affirming the Consequent is a logical fallacy that takes a known true statement [if P then Q] and invalidly concludes its converse [if Q then P]:
- If Bill Gates owns Fort Knox, then Bill Gates is rich. Bill Gates is rich. Therefore, Bill Gates owns Fort Knox. False!
- If an animal is a dog, then it has four legs. My cat has four legs. Therefore, my cat is a dog. False!
- If it’s raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet. Therefore it’s raining. False! It could be raining or it could be something else. The “therefore” claim is false.
- How does ‘Affirming the consequent’ apply to evolution? We have not observed “evolution”. No one has, and no one will, despite the effort (see LTEE). What was observed is Resemblance, the Birth Mechanism, Variability and Adaptability. Neither of these (even combined) can logically be extrapolated to “evolution”, namely the hypothesized transmutation of one type of organism into another. Proofs of “evolution” always take the form: If “evolution” is true, then XYZ is true. XYZ is true. Therefore “evolution” is true. This is a classical Affirming the Consequent logical fallacy.
- Let’s see some concrete examples of “proof of evolution” fallacies:
- If “evolution” is true, some fossils are ancestors of and therefore resemble existing organisms. Fossils resemble one another and existing organisms. Therefore “evolution” is true. This argument fails because there will always be some resemblance between two or more entities (even chairs and cats have four legs in general). Also, a fossil can always be from an unrelated branch of the “tree of life” which circularly presupposes “evolution” anyway.
- If “evolution” is true, organisms are genetically similar. Organisms are genetically similar. Therefore “evolution” is true. This argument is false because other hypotheses such as common design account for genetic similarities just as well.
- If “evolution” is true, one might expect common embryology. Similar organisms have similar embryology. Therefore “evolution” is true. This fails because embryology is expected to match genetics and morphology, hence the previous counterargument applies.
- If “evolution” is true, one might expect vestigial organs. What looks like vestigial organs can be observed. Therefore “evolution” is true. This fails because what if those organs are useful rather that “vestigial”? And why would “evolution” not do away with “vestigial” organs as soon as they become useless? In sum, why can’t these organs have another reason or origin than “evolution”?
- If “evolution” is true, one expects adaptability such as antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is observed. Therefore “evolution” is true. This fails because adaptabilities such as antibiotic resistance are compatible with other hypotheses, not just “evolution”. In addition, antibiotic resistance is ubiquitous, limited, reversible, and never observed to result in organism transmutation aka “evolution”.
- How can “proofs of evolution” avoid the ‘Affirming the Consequent’ logical fallacy? Direct confirmation of “evolution” is unlikely as shown by the LTEE study. Alternatively, an observation that is true for “evolution” and only for “evolution” might also work. In other words, what’s missing from all the examples above is a true statement of the kind: “only if evolution is true, then XYZ”. Of course, excluding all alternatives to “evolution” is an impossible task therefore, given that Intelligent Design is the main rival, proponents of “evolution” need only add a true statement of the kind: “if Intelligent Design is true, then XYZ is not true” to turn their invalid arguments into valid ones. But even this lower bar cannot be met by “evolution” proponents, thus making all “proofs of evolution” invalid.
- Isn’t then all science ‘Affirming the Consequent’? For example, “if Newtonian physics is true, a ball thrown at angle Theta and speed V will land D meters away. The experiment is carried out, and we find that the ball landed distance D away. Therefor physics is true.” No! This is not a fallacy because it meets the “if and only if” requirement and is limited to “everything else equal” cases. Rockets do not disprove this claim because everything else is not equal between them and thrown inactive projectiles. In addition, no one claims a single experiment confirms all Newtonian Mechanics the way “proofs of evolution” are presented. In this case, multiple combinations of Angles and Speed result in the same Distance without violating Newtonian Mechanics because this experiment proves only portions of the theory.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
https://www.amazon.com/Biblical-Wisdom-Literature-Joseph-Koterski/dp/1598035258
The problem is that no one can define what these kinds are nor define any objective criteria for determining which species belong to a kind.
The genomes of one generation are not entangled with the genomes of the previous generation. That’s a bunch of woo. The mere act of copying DNA collapses any quantum entanglement.
That’s not what I said…
But if double helix is held together by quantum entanglement, any change to the quantum state of one part of it would instantaneously affect the other entangled with it part…
So, when Behe observed and reported the simultaneous effects of one mutation on another part of the genome, quantum entanglement is the most logical explanation of this phenomenon… Unfortunately, this could mean that quantum information, rather than the classical information in the amino-acid sequence, is responsible for the evolutionary changes observed due to mutations…
Lol
Are you referring to quantum superposition or the collapse of the wave function, perhaps? 😉
So…. what degree of variation would justify calling something a new kind?
Haha, I doubt the title of that article applies to you, because modern scientists are certainly not wrong as often as YOU think.
The bible doesn’t specify that…but a new body plan is a possible indicator, such as a new organ…
If you have a bacterium that uses a flagellum to swim, but you delete the gene for it and it evolves a paddle, that could constitute a new body plan in my view…
Different bases on the same DNA molecule are not entangled, much less bases on different DNA molecules. I think you need to read up on quantum entanglement.
What report is this?
All vertebrates have a shared body plan, so does this mean that all vertebrates are in the same kind? We can find fish with all of the same organs found in humans, from lungs to kidneys, so does this mean we are all in the same kind?
We know feral animals revert. The chihuahua might not survive and in this case the rest of the dog population still reverts. And dogs are still canis lupus no matter if chihuahua or great dane.
Good thread. Its coming back that claims for evolution evidence could only be after the fact results. so evolution is not observed. its a guess to explain after the fact facts.
Therefore its all abot what imagination people have/don;t have to explain things.
indeed there just is no biological evidence for evolution. zippo.
its all lines of reasoning.
I’d like to continue this conversation but it is obvious you don’t understand the fundamental steps of entanglement, not to mention how the double helix is held by it and how mitosis is controlled by quantum processes…
Yup! Especially the 5 pound land walking mammal and the 50 ton whale…
They are clearly of the same kind… of nonsense…
You misunderstand. This is not about Gates nor about ownership of Fort Knox. It is about logic. Why would you argue with me about a known logical fallacy??? Go argue with Wikipedia (their example) and many others.
Don’t think I searched too hard. It was the first or second link. In fact, everything “evolution” related returns the same logical fallacy… which you can’t even grasp.
Your “explanations” are not necessary and do not dispute my statement.
On eColi I merely make a PREDICTION. This is your (Lenski’s, etc) chance to prove me wrong.
Understand that this particular OP deals only with this particular logic fallacy.
I trust you know there’s much more where that came from: nonlin.org
And you were part of many, many discussions right here on work that utterly demolishes “evolution”:
Some probably would not..
The chihuahua could be artificially inseminated but I doubt it would fully revert into a wolf… even coywolves become a distinct variant and the continues interbreeding doesn’t guarantee it will fully revert into a wolf…
But, my point is that creationists need to be reasonable about how many kinds of animals could fit on the Noah’s Ark, and how many variations of animals scientists have identified within kinds… Dog kind alone has 500 plus variants, whether they can revert back to wolf or not, it doesn’t change this fact…
How is antibiotic resistance different than the immune response? Other than pro-vs-eukaryota? Are you aware that your immune system employs [let’s call them] random mutations?
No. That’s just Einstein’s mental model. And there are too many unknowns behind that.
Huh? The scientific method compares alternative hypotheses and rejects one in favor of the others. What alternative hypotheses to “evolution” have you SERIOUSLY considered?
The scientific method also rejects PROVEN false hypotheses like these:
Gradualism fails – http://nonlin.org/gradualism/
Natural selection fails – http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
Divergence of character fails – http://nonlin.org/evotest/
Speciation fails – http://nonlin.org/speciation-problems/
DNA “essence of life” fails – http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/
Randomness fails – http://nonlin.org/random-abuse/
Abiogenesis fails – http://nonlin.org/warmpond/
Science against Religion fails – http://nonlin.org/philosophy-religion-and-science/
etc., etc.
And let’s test it again and make sure it fails again and again: http://nonlin.org/evotest/
Where do you see I reject “evolution” based on “variability reverts”?
Read AGAIN:
“What was observed is Resemblance, the Birth Mechanism, Variability and Adaptability. Neither of these (even combined) can logically be extrapolated to “evolution”, namely the hypothesized transmutation of one type of organism into another.”
Seriously?!?
Call them “species” and you have EXACTLY the same problem. Then you admit Darwin wrote a religious book to compete with the Bible?
Of course, they can predict something and then test to verify. And no, “predicting” the finding of some fossil of some resemblance doesn’t count. Try predicting the future, not the past.
So you’re talking about keeping the chihuahua isolated? That’s not what I said. Release all dogs and then see what happens.
I don’t see why they can’t get from dog back to wolf if they were originally wolves turned into dogs. And remember, not all need survive. When the more extreme ones die out, the reversion is much faster.
In the wild there are many variants of the same general body plan. Let alone that we’re all variants.
Because the purpose behind the act of creation of kinds was an inherent predisposition to variation within kinds so that we wouldn’t get bored looking at dogs that all looked the same…
People can be creationists and still believe the bible is a compilation of allegorical tales, based on centuries of knowledge. Believing in an actual Noah’s Ark, or a theoretical idea based on Noah’s ark story, the fundamental point behind it is still the same. Lots of kinds, lots of variations within those kinds, and no change from one kind to a new kind.
Why have people seemed to have known this truth for such a long time, that’s the more interesting thing in my book. Maybe one day we will get a new kind, then the evolutionists can all jump with glee…still waiting, waiting, waiting….how many centuries?
Nonlin.org,
I agree, everything seems to revert. That fact, along with the ridiculous idea of “convergent evolution” making nearly exactly the same thing twice, should be enough to make evolutionists slap their head, but somehow they seem to be impervious to actual skepticism.
Seems the problem is more for the evolutionists than the creationist. If you want to call micro-evolution, just smaller steps of macro-evolution, then you have to start calling every living human a new species. In fact everything on earth is a separate species, and all are examples of evolutionary change, because nothing is the same.
Only people keep being people and bacteria keep being bacteria, so your theory doesn’t seem to really do much explaining.
What’s left if this is true?
Anything one could imagine in the history of life and the universe could be true…
God created everything, in a sense, by setting up the laws of nature, so that life had no choice but create itself…
Or God created Adam and Eve, in a sense, by setting up the laws of nature so that monkeys had choice but evolve into humans and pick up the immortal souls on the way…
But, if there is a scientific explanation for the origins of all humans and animals that could fit into the ark, then other things described in the bible gain more historical and scientific accuracy…
Determinism
Bingo. As you said, a lovely mix of confusion and hubris.
Demolishionism
Really?
It is your argument, if life is an inevitable consequence of a certain set of laws.
Or even the transmutation of a protein from one major family to a protein in another major protein family.
This is even visually obvious comparing the architecture of Collagen Proteins to Zinc Finger proteins.
Compare the Collagen protein architecture (below):
[contrast the Collagen architecture] to a typical KRAB zinc finger architecture. LTEE doesn’t solve this problem, neither do supposed examples of speciation! By golly, even the Darwinists here agree all proteins didn’t descend from a common ancestor, yet fail to explain how the indpendent lineages poofed onto the scene.
I do understand. But your argument seems to be that biologists are dismissing a plausible alternative explanation, which is ID. Unless you convince them (us) that ID does, in fact, provide a valid alternative explanation, it is pointless to argue they are committing this fallacy: You are just preaching to the choir.
Provided that the phenotypic differences are heritable, and that the ancestral wolf traits are adaptive. Wait, there is a word for this process. What was it again? Tip of my tongue.
Devolution…
I don’t really understand what you are trying to say here, but why does one need an ark, for the science of creationism to be a better explanation of life. I am pretty sure one doesn’t.
There is a metaphorical ark, and so forth that seems to be a pretty good theory-there is only kinds, and the kinds never seem to cross over into a new kind. Since we never see any cross over ever happening, or any new forms arising, I guess the metaphorical ark is still a good one.
How does coming up with a name for it bail out the evolutionist?
Subterfuge?
No, going from wolf to dog was devolution. This is the other way around.
How does avoiding the term “evolution by natural selection” help the creationist, when he is clearly describing the very same process?
All of your prior “posts” have been thoroughly demolished, your unawareness notwithstanding. You’re unable to understand the simplest of points, you’re just too stupid, which makes any discussion with you a waste of time.
This comes from someone who believes in a fantasy being who built the entire universe, yet could not think of making us better, rather than “apply” a stupid “remedy” where he sacrifices himself to apease himself and “forgive” us/a-few-of-us for the sins “He” built us to commit in the first place. That’s actual skepticism!
I know because that was experimentally determined(see paper below). And it occurred in ~1819.
Van’t Hof AE, Campagne P, Rigden DJ, Yung CJ, Lingley J, Quail MA, Hall N, Darby AC, Saccheri IJ. The industrial melanism mutation in British peppered moths is a transposable element. Nature. 2016 Jun 2;534(7605):102-5. doi: 10.1038/nature17951. PDF.
Textbook oxymoron. Variation IS change.
But we already knew that. Nobody here was ever under any illusions that showing evidence to you was going to convince you. That’s just not how you think.
Your arguments are becoming increasingly nonsensical, remarkably though that is as one would have thought there must be some upper limit.
LTEE doesn’t solve this problem? What problem? Who the fuck says it does? No, speciation also isn’t purported to be an explanation for pariticular protein sequences.
And then you go on to state that “Darwinists” agree proteins don’t all descent from some common ancestral protein, but let’s be clear here they don’t “agree with you”, they have explained this to you.
It’s not like you came up with this conclusion and then “Darwinists” were forced to agree with you.
Rather, you came here a few years ago like a typical clueless creationist and argued the lack of detectable homology between different protein families somehow constituted evidence against common descent, at which point the “Darwinists” had to explain to you nobody thinks all proteins share a common protein ancestor.
Then what happened next is difficult to parse because rather than you dropping your already incredibly fatuous argument, you seem to have suffered some sort of cognitive short-circuit and are now blathering about this as if it’s some sort of argument for independent creationism. Despite you apparently agreeing with the “Darwinists” that proteins don’t all share a common protein ancestor.
You complain that “Darwinists” don’t explain where novel proteins then come from, but that’s of course demonstrably false as that has been explained on this very website countless times. Both compartive genetic and experimental evidence for how this happens is accumulating all the time. For example, it could evolve from non-coding DNA. Take this recent paper on de novo peptides with beneficial antibiotic functions:
https://mbio.asm.org/content/10/3/e00837-19
Knopp M, Gudmundsdottir JS, Nilsson T, König F, Warsi O, Rajer F, Ädelroth P,
Andersson DI. De Novo Emergence of Peptides That Confer Antibiotic Resistance. MBio. 2019 Jun 4;10(3). pii: e00837-19. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00837-19.
As aquaticus stated, all vertebrates have the same organs, and the same body plan, so you need to come up with a better definition of “kind”.
It’s a shame that the bible, being the amazing source of scientific knowledge that it is (sarcasm), is not helping you.
I am not the one who lacks understanding. I understand it just fine. As soon as one particle of the entangled pair comes in contact with another atom or molecule it collapses the entanglement. You don’t seem to understand this. Quantum computers have to chill their qubits to near absolute zero and shield them from outside interference. It’s pretty obvious that his can’t happen inside of a cell.
The problem of defining what a kind is belongs to the people who use the term, which would be creationists. You should also check up on the definition of species for sexually reproducing organisms. Just a hint, it has to do with mating.
Since creationists have no objective criteria for determining which species belong to a kind, then we can safely ignore their claims about kinds. It is just a made up and arbitrary term.
Are you saying that you have no evidence to back this up, just your intuition?
Those variants are due to mutations.
They all have the same body plan. Are you now saying that kinds are determined by body weight? Does this mean the chihuahua and great dane are different kinds because they have very different body mass?
Dingos are feral dogs, and yet they aren’t wolves. How do you explain this?
Unfortunately, unlike quantum computers, life systems don’t need to be cooled to 0 temperature to maintain quantum entanglement…
Only sheer dumb luck knows how they do it… 😉
Quantum effects observed in photosynthesis
Date:
May 21, 2018
Source:
University of Groningen
Summary:
“Molecules that are involved in photosynthesis exhibit the same quantum effects as non-living matter, concludes an international team of scientists. This is the first time that quantum mechanical behavior was proven to exist in biological systems that are involved in photosynthesis. The interpretation of these quantum effects in photosynthesis may help in the development of nature-inspired light-harvesting devices.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521131756.htm