- 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
I have no doubt that your average professional educator is unprepared for a professional bullshitter.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it happen.
Did you present valid explanations or just jawboned?
Not how it works.
It’s a fallacy only if someone makes that claim. Who do you know that makes that crazy claim?
Oh dear.
You failed to notice that the inverse of the converse (a.k.a. the contrapositive) is logically equivalent to the original — it is NOT a fallacy — in the comment thread of an OP that you wrote about the fallacy of affirming the consequent.
That’s gotta leave a mark.
Dear Sal,
I care not one iota what credentials Entropy has, nor what credentials you have, nor how many Laureates went to your school [wtf?].
I conclude that Entropy knows what he is talking about because, well, because he displays knowledge and understanding of the subject matter.
You, OTOH, continually try to sound erudite, all the while making schoolboy blunders. I am embarrassed for you.
You also have an unfortunate habit of transparently attempting to re-write history to paint yourself in a favorable light. I do however enjoy your habit of alternating between “I ignore X, Y and Z, because they are so ignorant and have nothing to teach me” and “I would like to thank X, Y and Z for their valuable assistance in helping me hone my creationist arguments.”
You have a tell, by the way: you switch to the latter whenever you realize that you have had your ass handed to you.
Usually, you don’t even realize, so it is a useful tell.
Corneel,
Have you looked under the rug yet?
OMagain, quoting Sal:
That reminds me of how Sal got caught dissing Joe Felsenstein behind his back after sucking up to him at TSZ.
Nonlin, in the OP:
That’s incorrect. For given values of θ and V, there are multiple theories that predict the ball will land D meters away (ignoring air resistance). Your “if and only if” requirement is not met.
Jesus fucking christ, that was pathetic, Sal
Sorry, but I don’t see the “big problem”. Whales and seals derive from terrestial ancestors. Why would those ancestors be required to dive as well as their distant descendants?
Seals and whales have amazing adaptations, sure. But you seem to be missing the point that the adaptations you listed were required because they use lungs for breathing. If newborn whales are at risk of drowning because they lack the ability to breathe underwater, as you claim, isn’t that a dead giveaway that they derive from terrestrial ancestors?
So for how many tens of thousands of years were they pathetic divers? Presumably there were lots of pathetic flyers, pathetic hunters, pathetic nest builders, pathetic camouflaged creatures, I mean they all must have stunk at some point. Maybe they just survived because everyone else stunk.
Since evolution is a constant game, how many animals can you name now, that are pathetic at their chosen lifestyles?
I guess humans.
You may be the first IDist to figure this out. Congratulations! That or you are doing sarcasm wrong…
Well, humans are doing better than the baiji and the sea cows.
So says the guy who claims, regarding entropy:
Howler.
For the reader’s benefit, here is a textbook example of calculating Entropy:
http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/211-sp06/class-engines/class25_secondlaw.html
Contrast what DNA_Jock says:
With this equation from a sophomore level thermodynamics textbook example from the link above:
You have no choice but to believe that…even if it sounds ridiculous and you have no proof the adaptations evolved… As a biologist, you have to pretend all is well even though the fundamental evolutionary step of prokaryotic cell to eukaryotic can’t be replicated…
In LTEE bacteria can’t evolve beyond bacteria and the collapsing of lungs and the storage system of oxygen in muscles in whales and seals remains to be an enigma… and yet, it must have evolved because doubting it means the end of belief system…
“Chosen lifestyles” is a weird term. Any particular lifestyle usually comes with situational challenges. Wildebeest will some times have to cross a river in search of food or mates, a situation in which they will be very vulnerable to crocodiles.
Even so, they don’t have to be or start out “pathetic” at it whatever the hell that even means. They have to be good enough to allow and aid survival and reproduction obviously. If they literally never caught prey or found food in the water before becoming fully aquatic then there would have been no selective pressure to cause transgenerational population change. But we don’t have to think they were ever really “pathetic” divers. Many semi aquatic mammals make excellent divers and semi-aquatic hunters. Otters, beavers, seals, walruses, polar bears and so on all show remarkable aquatic proficiency despite not being fully aquatic mammals.
And if only to add injury to insult, DNA_Jock has the handle “DNA_Jock” as if he’s some sort of expert on DNA. Well, maybe he was in his prime, but he’s certainly not justified to claim stupid stuff like:
I mean, look at this paper that measure dQ of DNA at certain temperatures and estimates of entropy change:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8968604
Btw, does DNA_jock know what a calorimeter does. Uh, it measures dQ. Does DNA_jock know what at thermometer does? Uh, it measures T. With the two measurements, one can compute entropy. Have you learned that yet DNA “jock”.
There, hope you actually learned something for a change.
From the abstract:
Hmm, let’s look at this.
H = Enthalpy = U + pV
U = internal energy (“heat” energy to be colloquial, U includes activation energies, ionization energies, mixing energies, vaporization energies, chemical bond energies, etc. )
p= pressure
V = volume
If no change in pV
then delta-H = delta-U = delta-Q = dQ (for simplicity of isothermal processes)
The change delta-Q in the abstract is:
Hcal = 6.7 kcal/mol (bp) = dQ
Temperature = T = 75.5 C = (273.15) + 75.5 = 348.65 deg K
dS = dQ/T = 6.7 kcal/mol (bp) / 348.65 K = 19.23 cal/deg.mol (bp)
which looks a lot like the what was reported in the abstract as
Scal = 19.3 cal/deg.mol (bp)
Despite this the JOCK (or so he claims) insists:
Howler.
Sal,
Please stop spamming this thread. Or at least learn the difference between ΔS and dS, so you stop embarrassing yourself.
If you like, we could return to your Granville Sewell thread. It was a classic.
Ok. I’ll spam my own thread.
Nonlin hope you enjoyed seeing DNA_ “jock” get taken to the woodshed.
Here are the latest comments there with some notation cleaned up:
and
Someone got a spankin’, yowsa.
Maybe if they’re pathetic at something, that’s not really their “chosen” lifestyle at all. Didn’t that occur to you? really? Looking at the timeline of the whale evolution, it’s easy to see how their ancestors started as perfectly functional land dwellers, and progressively adapted to a marine habitat
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124873-these-fish-are-evolving-right-now-to-become-land-dwellers/
Do you mean like quoting from articles that you thought supported your position, but actually supported ours and thus shooting yourself in the foot? Like that?
Or like continuing talking about a non-issue like the “no PUCA” as if it was a matter of opinion, rather than a matter of understanding, because you don’t understand the most basic biochemistry and molecular biology?
Or like missing time and again explanations that would have been understood by someone in high school about ectopic recombination?
Or rejecting ectopic recombination because that’s not how telomeres expand?
Or like rejecting ectopic recombination because, though it solved the “problem” you were “presenting,” it didn’t explain Huntington’s disease?
Or telling me that the tandem duplications in Huntington’s are due to slippage, as if I hadn’t told you exactly that the day before?
Or like mistaking post-translational modifications for the primary structure of collagen?
Or presuming titles even though you lack the most basic understanding that should accompany those supposed titles?
Or asking for my titles as if that would compensate for your lack of understanding?
Or the fact that you cannot understand things within their context and thus make huge deals of things you actually didn’t understand?
Or the fact that you don’t understand what the problem is with anything of what I’m listing here?
A howler like those?
Now that Salvador is talking about howlers, I found DNA_Jock’s comment. The one Salvador keeps “quoting.” As I suspected, Salvador is embarrassing himself because he did not understand DNA_Jock’s point. Why didn’t he? Because Salvador doesn’t understand that context is important. Why doesn’t Salvador understand that context is important? Because Salvador’s unable to follow context. By the time Salvador reads a sentence, he has already forgotten the previous one.
Howler indeed. Only one where’s Salvador who shoots himself in the foot, time and again, across many comments for good measure, because poor Salvador is an incompetent fool.
Rumraket,
But Jock agrees they WERE all pathetic at one time. If so many animals are now near perfect for their environment, where has all the imperfection gone?
What are you talking about?
Who makes that crazy statement:
“If “evolution” is not true, organisms would not show consilient patterns of similarities and differences”?
Not me.
But if you did as part of the “if and only if” escape clause, AND THEN ACTUALLY PROVE THIS, you would indeed have a logical argument. So go ahead and prove it if you can.
Cheap sophistry is all you got?
This is typical Darwinian bluffing, phoodoo…
One of the really good things about my work is that I have access to the online library of endless number of diagnostic pictures, such as X-ray, MRI, CT, Nuclear Medicine of both humans and animals…
If one of the trillions of the diagnostic pictures taken every year all over the world showed anything resembling an evolving organ, or a bone, believe me, it would be published in all newspapers in the world and it would be showed on t.v. for years to come…
The facts are actually the opposite…
The diagnostic pictures are taken mainly to reveal the abnormalities in organs and bones caused by mutations and the impotence of natural selection; the very mechanism that supposedly turned a 5 pound land walking mammal into a 50 ton whale, with all the unexplained phenomena, such as the ability to collapse the lungs and store the oxygen in the muscles instead…
Don’t forget though, that according to population genetics all 10 billion species on the earth are evolving and transitioning from one species to another…
If this is true, how come no diagnostic imaging technologist has ever noticed any such evolutionary change and no radiologist has ever dictated a report: the organ is evolving; transitioning to a different, better one. The patient should not worry about it because there is nothing we can do about the fast and furious evolutionary processes…
Read the whole thing:
“…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.”
Nonlin,
I’ve already read the whole thing. None of your qualifiers help you.
The “if and only if” requirement is not met. It should be obvious that there are other possible theories besides Newtonian mechanics that predict a landing distance of D when the angle and speed are θ and V, respectively.
Many animals are near perfect? Why is there imperfection left, I wonder?
You’ve dealt marvelously with the first sentence. Well done, But actually I was more curious about your response to the ensuing part:
But where are all the animals that aren’t near perfect (I don’t know what perfect means to you, unless you mean immortal), where are the really bad ones waiting for their adaptations to kick in?
If the first cows that decided to become aquatic were so bad at it, why did they continue?
dazz,
I like your hippo evolution model, splendid. 55 Million years ago there were hippos. Then…still hippos.
Amazing that evolution. And modeling sure is fun.
Why did the designer create some aquatic animals that cannot breathe underwater and some that do?
I would think the really bad ones are dead! As for perfection: J-Mac was kind enough to provide the example of the aquatic mammals, that need to surface every so often to breathe. It’s not difficult to see that most organisms are well adapted, yet limited by various constraints.
Usually the reason is ecological opportunity.
I note that, like J-Mac, you fail to respond to my questions. But I actually am interested in your take on things, so here goes again: There are clearly imperfections, cruelty and inefficiency in nature, don’t you agree? If you do, don’t you also agree that those fit rather more comfortably in evolutionary theory than in the design framework?
Everywhere, just take the God-goggles off. How good are penguins at flying, or running around on land? How about walruses, do they make excellent terrestrial sprinters? Sea turtles? Mudskippers? Seals? Polar bears? Frogs? Salamanders? Multiple different species of lizards and snakes with varying degrees of vestigial legs?
Basically look at any organism that lives in or near an ecological transitional zone and you will see some degree of adaptive compromise anywhere on the spectrum from almost fully adapted to water to fully adapted to land. And as either capacity increases, the other invariably decreases.
These guys? Clearly they can move on land, but they are nowhere near perfect.
Just open your fucking eyes and be willing to see and understand instead of your lalalallalala I can’t see or hear anything that has to do with evolution.
Dingos aren’t wolves. They are feral dogs, and yet they have not reverted to wolves. This disproves your entire thesis.
Like what other possible theory?
Keep in mind:
1. “everything else equal”,
2. “no one claims a single experiment confirms all Newtonian Mechanics the way “proofs of evolution” are presented”
3. “this experiment proves only portions of the theory”
More importantly, do you understand why ALL “proofs of evolution” are logical fallacies? Can you come up with one that isn’t a fallacy?
You’re asking the wrong person. Ask your Designer.
Anyway, do you agree “proofs of evolution” are logical fallacies? If not, why not?
Huh? Did I say they’re ‘wolves’ or ‘canis lupus’? Read again. There’s no requirement for all canis lupus to be identical, just as different human groups are not identical.
Meanwhile, would you acknowledge that “proofs of evolution” are ALL fallacies? If not, can you cite one that isn’t?
So is “not perfect” another “proof of evolution”. How is that not a logical fallacy like all others discussed here? Just curious, when will you acknowledge that all “proofs of evolution” are fallacies?
Nonlin,
Your inability (or unwillingness, or both) to grasp and respond to your opponents’ arguments makes you a boring interlocutor.
Please say something interesting, responsive or insightful so that I’ll have a reason to continue engaging with you.
You’re asking insight from someone who declared that it’s absolutely impossible to test an assumption. I’ll let you chew on that one.
Rum’s comment was not meant as “proof”. It was a response to phoodoo’s point that since the ancestors of extant organisms were already adapted to their habitat, it doesn’t make sense that the species further evolved. Rumraket merely pointed out that there will always remain other habitats to which a species has not adapted, and species do change to those novel habitats occasionally.
@Nonlin
I have to agree with keiths: you are not making the most of this discussion, because you are not paying attention to what others are telling you.
Your “fallacy” argument already received potent criticism from Kantian Naturalist in the beginning of the thread, and you have not properly addressed it yet: The argumentative structure in evolutionary biology does not usually rely on deductive logic, but more often uses inference to the best explanation, which does compete alternative explanations: it just turns out that alternative theories fail at giving satisfactory explanations. For example, Design theory that assumes an infallible and omnipotent Designer does rather poorly in explaining the presence of lungs in aquatic mammals. Since you have dodged that issue I assume that you agree.
No, among other things because science doesn’t deal with proof. As you have been informed now like twenty times. Is there some possible future where this elementary fact is capable of finding rest in your evacuated skull?
The way you stated it I would go so far as to say fails to amount to an argument. As such it can’t even commit a fallacy.
But you could at least try to pay attention to the foregoing exchange between phoodoo, myself, and others. Phoodoo (correctly) reasons that if certain evolutionary transitions were to have occurred, there must have at some point been species that were less adapted to their circumstance than they later became. So he asks(again I would say reasonably), where are those species that show “lesser” levels of adaptations?, should they not still exist if species are still evolving and transitioning between different enviroments? Yes, they should, and they do exist, and I gave examples and emplored him to be willing to consider that they in fact do, he just needs to open his eyes.
Now you come along and ask whether this is “proof” of evolution. No, it’s not “proof”, and it’s not supposed to be a proof. It is not that the existence of various degrees of adaptation in different species logically can only ever entail the truth of evolution. Nobody says or thinks this is the case.
Rather, such transitional stages in species adaptations nevertheless make better sense on evolution than they do on certain hypotheses of intelligent design. To pick the example given above by Corneel, what purpose is served by having semi-aquatic mammals that have lungs that need to come to the surface and breathe and give birth on dry land? Even if these species have some balancing or stabilizing effect in a larger ecosystem or food-chain (they eat particular species of fish and so help to keep that population “in check”), there’s no reason why they’d need to be semi-aquatic and live partially on land.
When will you go to a doctor to have the shit-in-place-of-a-brain in your skull replaced with cognitively-capable tissue?
You claimed that they would revert to wolves. They didn’t. Your thesis is disproved.
They can’t. The damage to the many genes is beyond repair even for the omnipotent natural selection…
I got so overwhelmed with your flood of evidence for the amazing adaptations that I had to go out and get some air… lol
Don’t waste my time…see you!
And, apparently, your designer.