A perennial topic. The organisms we see cluster around specific, distinct types. We can identify an individual as belonging to that type because it has the distinctive characteristics of that type. We know what the characteristics are because we see a lot of such individuals.
To the some Creationists, those types represent essential, immutable forms, perhaps with some post-Ark latitude, and a bit of variation around the ‘norm’. It is as if those forms were cast from a mould, with small manufacturing defects. The mould is eternal, unchanging.
To the Evolutionist, those types are simply the current form of a changing lineage. Lineages can branch and diverge leading to an increase in the total numbers, offset by extinction. The branching process is somewhat extended in time, so species are not only malleable but somewhat blurry around the inception of a bifurcation. Intraspecific variation does not become interspecific variation overnight.
The Creationist demands to know how one type can ‘become’ another – how one unchanging essence can become another unchanging essence. The Evolutionist answers that their conception of ‘species’ is awry – one type becomes another, or two, gradually, changing like minimalist music. The type ‘floats on the breath of the population’, as Dr Johnson said of the unwritten Erse language. The Creationist responds that this is begging the question – defining species in evolutionary terms is an attempt to prove evolution by definition.
Nonetheless, if you are talking of evolution, your species concept needs to take account of it. An essentialist conception is no use in an evolutionary framework. There is, in my opinion, no non-arbitrary means of distinguishing species from other taxonomic ranks while interbreeding (and hence gene flow) is possible. This is the limit of the Biological Species Concept – a biospecies is the set of all the individuals which can create viable fertile offspring with at least one other member of the set. This can frequently be far too broad – maples separated for 20 million years can interbreed, and fertile hybrids between morphologically distinct types, even those assigned to different genera, are common. It is also difficult practically to assess whether the sets are ‘really’ separate yet. At the extreme, a single introgression among billions of incompatible pairings would indicate incomplete speciation, to a BSC pedant.
Creationists claim an objective means (as they do in other arenas …) but take them out in the field and I suspect their hypothetical methodology would fail them. If we base it on ‘morphology’, just how does one rank characters objectively? A wing-bar, beak colour, gregarious, particular mating dance, blue eggs, prefers shrimps … how many characters, which ones are more important, and by how much?
I would take as an example the Spotted sandpiper and Common sandpiper. These are held to be an example of parapatric speciation – they occupy different but contacting ranges, and within those ranges, for reasons unknown, gene flow in a single ancestral species between the ranges gradually diminished. Potential causes include a temporary ‘firebreak’ where no individuals penetrated, dichotomous mate preference, or ecological specialisation. Now, again for reasons not entirely obvious, they do not penetrate each others’ ranges except in narrow contact zones. At these zones, hybrids frequently occur. So on the BSC, speciation is not complete (indeed, the Common also interbreeds with sandpipers of a different genus, so on the BSC they join in too). But they are clear morphological species. Are they Platonic? Were they both on the Ark?
Could you quote where you think I said that? I do not recognise your paraphrase as written.
That seems a very odd example to take, and, it strikes me, supports the continuum model better than the archetype one.
If we give a child a pile of polygons and circles to sort (as some rather odd kind of intelligence test) we deliberately design those shapes so that there is a clear discontinuity between the polygons and the circles – we make sure, for instance, that the minimum length of the straight edges of the polygons is very much longer than any straight-line portion of the circumference of our circles.
In other words we do not give them exemplars from nature. Were we to give them instead a bunch of small rocks, and ask them to sort them into “smooth pebbles” and “rough rocks”, an intelligent child would quite rightly want to point out that some items were intermediate.
So your example is circular – if you give someone items from two discrete categories, an “intelligent” person will readily sort them into categories. If the items are from a continuum, albeit a bimodal one, there will be some borderline cases.
The classic example is colours. When a child “knows her colours” she can sort brightly coloured tiles into “red”, “blue” and “yellow” and “green” – and possibly “purple”, and “orange”. But give her flame, turquoise, magenta, mint, lime colours and she will demand that you let her order the tiles in a spectral continuum, rather than force her to choose whether the flame tile goes in the red or orange bin, or the lime goes with green or yellow.
Even where nature has joints, they tend to be cusps rather than clear divisions – zoom in close enough and what appears to be a discontinuity is revealed as a continuum. Which is why several angels can dance on the point of a pin.
OK, I think I see what fifth was referring to.
Yes, I stand by what I said, and what Allan has clarified: there is no 1:1 mapping between a stretch of DNA and a phenotypic feature.
And with a phenotypic feature as complex as intelligence, the mapping is nothing like 1:1. It’s not even 1:1 for a penis.
It’s fine. However could I suggest that you add comments that explain what each piece is doing, and especially what the “magic” numbers represent? As deriving the intent from the code can be problematic, especially for new programmers. For example,
count=frameCount%(freshSplit.length-40);
Why 40?
If the “teacher” sorts the stones into smooth and rough then their are no borderline cases. A “student” might have difficulty categorizing depending on the situation but there always is a right and wrong answer.
The goal is always is to “think the teachers thoughts” after her.
That is exactly the issue
In this test the lime goes into either the green or yellow bin and any student who is worth her crayons can with feedback figure out which one is the correct one.
For the student to demand that the colors be placed in a continuum won’t score any points in this particular exam
peace
Because 40 points fits well in the box. There is no reason it couldn’t be 32 or 60. It’s a different length entirely in excell,
The point is you need to only see a portion of the moving lines at any one time. You are looking for “the form” of the line and you don’t want to be able memorize the individual digits of the string.
peace
huh?
So what the teacher says defines the categories?
How does that help your case? You seem to be saying, yes, things like on a continuum, but there are correct “joints” that are defined by some authoritative source, regardless of the fact that there A:B is no different than B:C?
I agree however that is not quite what I was trying to get at
Do you think there is a finite number of genomes that could be labeled “human”? Do you think these could be listed before the fact?
IOW
Could we produce a catalog of all potential human genomes and use it to categorize who is in the “human species club” and who is not?
peace
Then I must have been a terrible teacher. For I always wanted the students to have their own independent thoughts, while perhaps considering the same kind of problem.
In the case of distinguishing shapes, I would want students to be able to make their own distinctions rather than just mimic my distinctions.
exactly!!!!!!!
recall my definition of species
species- A group of living organisms exemplifying a particular Platonic Form in the mind of God.
peace
There are times when creative independent thinking is to be encouraged but if little Johnny is unable to tell the difference between a circle and a square it might not mean he is a genius artist in waiting.
Seriously though
If little Johnny has a different distinction than you and you find it to be interesting and compelling you have become the student and Johnny is the teacher. That can be cool as well
peace
But the divisions between which could just as arguably be placed in a different place, right?
God made red and yellow, and there is some divinely ordered division at some (unknown and unknowable) frequency change between the two that divides the oranges that are Platonically red, from the oranges that are Platonically yellow in the mind of God?
Why does this even make any sense to you?
Well labels are conventions, but no, I don’t think there could be a point, for example in our future lineage, where we could say that THIS child is human buth THAT child is not.
Nor even that THIS child is homo sapiens sapiens sapiens, and THAT child is merely homo sapiens sapiens.
No I might think that they should be placed in another place but there is only one correct answer, What is in God’s mind.
Who said anything about unknown and unknowable? They are known by God and knowable by us.
That is what revelation is all about.
peace
I actually missed this sentence. I find this a most extraordinary (and depressing) sentence. I teach, and it is NOT my goal that the students should think my thoughts after me. Ideally, I’d like them to anticipate where I’m going, understand where I’m coming from, and reach their own conclusions.
Unfortunately a lot of the time they simply write it down.
Then we agree against Allen Miller. Welcome to the darkside 😉
peace
Once little Johnny has demonstrated that he can distinguish a square from a circle. He is free to create a new category of shape of his own liking. But he just can’t begin by tossing all the shapes in the air and calling them Fred.
Well I suppose he could but he would fail the exam
peace
And surely you don’t think that an “exam” is the goal of education?
I remember when I was at primary school, in Scotland, being told that while Scotland had a smaller area than England, it had a longer coastline. Being a curious child, I asked: but how do they measure it? Tide in or tide out? And do they put the tape round every limpet?
I got short shrift, but it stayed with me, and eventually learned about fractals and realised that I had actually been on to something.
So if Johnny says that the circle is also a polygon, it’s just that the angles and sides are two small to say, he has a point.
According to you, he doesn’t – the circle is not a polygon, not because it doesn’t have a very large number of sides (it almost certainly does) but because she has declared it to be.
What kind of education is that? And what kind of god is it that builds a world full of continua but requires us label them as discrete categories?
I don’t think I am disagreeing with Allan.
How is the difference between red and yellow knowable by us? What method would you use to determine the frequency at which red becomes yellow?
Education is not the subject of this thread “categorization” is. When it comes to categorization conformance to the standard should be the goal.
peace
We could talk about this one for days. It is a big part of what is going on with my tool/game. It’s fun to think about
Before we begin do you agree that God could revel this information to us if he choose to?
peace
Allan Miller said:
quote:
There is only a finite number of genotypes that would form anything anyone would consider ‘human’.
end quote:
Do you agree with this or not?
peace
Before we begin, do you agree that I’m right?
About what? the definition of God?
peace
Well, tbh, I’m not exactly sure what Allan meant. But if he meant: there will come a point in our lineage when organisms born thereafter won’t be what we’d call “human” then I’ probably disagree, but I suspect it’s a nomenclature issue rather than a philosophical one. Cladistically, all our descendants will, by definition, be human, even if some can fly.
But if some of them don’t have our capacity for abstract thought, we might want to withhold the adjective at least in the sense of denoting something specific about our current phenotype.
fifthmonarchyman,
It’s Allan. And no, Neither Elizabeth nor I agrees with you. It’s not me that’s saying the sets are dichotomous but the division non-arbitrary, it’s you.
Do we share a common ancestor with chimps? Let’s call it a Chimpman. Was there a point in the lineage leading from
A) Chimpman to Chimp
B) Chimpman to Human
when we (or God) could say that THIS child is Chimpman but THAT child is not? No, we simply name fuzzy-bordered regions of the continuum (this is of course chronospecies, which is a different species concept again). But you are saying that there is a ‘perfect’ scheme in the mind of God that can resolve the fuzzy boundary. In which case, there must be a single point at which one flips.
You are rather proving my point. There is a continuum, and there comes a point in the shading where dichotomous classification leads to such issue – a step in classification which does not correspond to a similar-sized step in the sequence being compartmentalised. In God’s mind as much as in ours. If God has in mind just 3 ‘Essential’ forms: Chimpman, Human and Chimp (say), there must be two such points in the continuums. If you think God subdivides the continuums still further, the same issue still applies at that scale. But I don’t see why God needs to subdivide a continuum at all. It’s not like he’s constrained in the number of facts he can retain at once.
Elizabeth,
I meant that, if we envisage those shelves in the ‘Library of Babel’ – all strings of any length – which are genome-length strings of ACTG, there is a finite number of strings corresponding to viable organisms. As many of those strings correspond to the genomes of individual horses, worms, dandelions etc, there must be a finite subset of that finite set of strings which is left to label ‘human’. Of course, at the boundaries, it becomes fuzzy. But still finite.
Still, eventually we probably would start to name humans as something else. We do looking back, so why not looking forward? But not in a single generation.
Elizabeth,
As nicely exemplified by this text:
ETA: A larger version is available here.
Neil Rickert,
You’ll never get and keep a congregation with that kind of open minded approach.
You seem to be asking that people start off agreeing your premise is right which can only lead to the acceptance of your subsequent claim.
And as “revelation” can be “scientists doing science” then that is still god revealing the truth of the matter.
So you get to win either way. What is the first purple word in the block of text in Patrick’s post? You are saying God knows, even if you or I don’t. So woop-de-do.
Before we begin, do you agree that I’m right about all my claims about God and revelation and all associated statements I’ve made?
That help clarify any fmm?
At the risk of derailing the discussion, this is exactly the issue I have with theist claims that they have OBJECTIVE morality and we don’t. What is the use, I ask, of there being a God who knows the absolute moral value of every action if we still have to use our native moral understanding to figure it out? Even for those theists who claim “it’s all in the bible” (and IDists, generally, don’t) – why choose the bible and not some other scriptural source? And why the Wee Wee Free interpretation and not the Wee Wee Wee Free? “Objectivity”, whether of moral or species categories, is of no uses to man nor beast if we don’t actually have access to those boundaries by any means other than the same ol’ figuring out as atheists use.
I think this discussion points to very different ideas about knowledge and learning.
The conservative, particularly the religious conservative, sees knowledge as coming from an authority and sees learning as memorizing what the authority asserts. So the teacher is required to be some kind of authority. Fifth’s claim that knowledge requires revelation (from a presumed ultimate authority) seems to be based on that view.
The progressive view is that learning comes from within, and that the child is an independent acquirer of knowledge. The teacher’s role is seen as motivating the child and as setting a general direction. But the child must actively construct ways of looking at and understanding the world.
Neil Rickert,
Well put. The discussion also seems fueled by the fundamentalist need for a “correct”, unchanging answer and those who are comfortable with, or at least recognize the need for, provisional knowledge that is open to being changed when new evidence becomes available.
Then we are in agreement.
This is the Y axis that I sometimes talk about.
The further up the axis we go the more information is required to make the categorization. We can easily see the difference between red and green but the difference between yellow and green requires a little more effort. And if we want to tell the difference between yellow and chartreuse even more effort and information is required
Linnaeus stopped at species but we could continue to subdivide all the way to individual if we choose to. The point is not the resolution that we are choose to look at but the fact that categorization is possible at all.
This is not about what God needs to do but what he can do
He does not need to subdivide but he can subdivide.
peace
Everything does not have to be about you,
We are talking forms in the mind of God and an atemporal being does not look forward or back he lives in an eternal now.
peace
That is like saying
“What is the point of there being a finite universe if I have to use my native understanding to discoverer that fact?”.
Can God reveal stuff to you directly? Can God choose to use your “native moral understanding” as the means to reveal stuff to you.
peace
I think it would be extremely dangerous for me to assume that anything I think I know is a direct revelation from God.
And that people who do think that are indeed dangerous.
Both sides agree that our understanding should change as new evidence becomes available.
I would say that as it does we are moving closer to truth.
You If I understand you correctly would say there is not real truth to move toward? We are just drifting along in a sea of opinion.
peace
Is dangerous stuff impossible for God?
Who said anything about thinking something is direct revelation anyway?
I only asked if it was possible that God could work like that.
peace
So maybe “native moral understanding” is not such a useless way for God to reveal stuff after all.
peace
Why bother to ask?
Given a god who can do anything, can that god do x? Why, yes it can do x.
Rather then ask others to answer questions about your particular god why don’t you answer some? For example, what can’t your particular god do? How do you know?
Heads you win, tails you win.
Does the devil reveal stuff fmm? How can we tell the difference between that and gods revelation?
You know the thing about maps right, the stuff represented in them does not actually know we call those things particular names.
How come It always seems Like I’m answering your questions?
God is omnipotent he can do anything that is logically possible.
I know that because that is what omnipotent means.
peace
We have been over this multiple times. Do you really want to have another bible study?
quote:
We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
(1Jn 4:6)
end quote:
peace
Possibly not. But in that case there isn’t a moral case for theism.
I don’t much like “cases for theism”.
I don’t need to prove that God exists. You already know God exists
peace
It often seems that “omnipotent” is just a misspelling of “impotent”.
No, I don’t.