Timeline of tautologies

The Prehistoric Traditions

 * The lonians.
 * Thales (624-548),
 * Anaximander (611-547),
 * Anaximenes (588-524),
 * Diogenes (440- ).


 * The Pythagoreans. (580-430.)


 * The Eleatics.
 * Xenophanes (576- 480)
 * Parmenides (544- ).


 * Physicists.


 * Heraclitus (535-475)
 * Empedocles-(495-435BC) "...Those animals perished immediately, for they were not fitted to live, and only those random coalitions of elements which were fittest to live survived, and continue to survive today...." http://www.hypatia-lovers.com/AncientGreeks/Section12.html. He also spoke of the love hate relationship between atoms.
 * Anaxagoras, (500-428)
 * ZenofElea(460 B.C) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_of_Elea
 * LeuCippus(500 B.C) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippus, teacher of DemoCritus.
 * Democritus(450 B.C) - "...Those in harmony maintained themselves, while the unfit disappear... "
 * Socrates (470-399)
 * Plato (427- 347), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides_(dialogue).
 * Aristotle(384-322BC) - "....Things appropriately constituted were preserved and things not appropriately constituted perished...." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.html


 * The Peripatetics, or post-Aristotelian school


 * Theophrastus
 * Preaxagoras
 * Herophilus
 * Erasistratus.


 * The Stoics

EpiCurus (341- 270 B.C.). "...only those capable of life and reproduction have been preserved..." The conclusion that Epicurus came to "chance" was arbitrary, his argumentation scheme was a rhetorical tautology, meaning any conclusion would be a non-sequitur. Such was the deceptive brilliance of the ancient Greek tautological philosphy, which today is perpetuated but with slightly different conclusions by different world views as per Naming Conventions. The apologetics movement from YEC to ID the last 150 years focused largely on the impossibility of genes arising by chance. They missed the point that the argumentation scheme was fallacious. If Epicurus had come to the conclusion that the universe is the result of divine intervention he would be correct from a YEC view point but his argumentation scheme would still be wrong. You could come to the correct conclusion using an incorrect argumentation scheme. Epicurus came to the wrong conclusion from a wrong argumentation scheme, with the main fallacy being his and Aristotle's rhetorical tautological3 reasoning.

LuCretius(50 BC) - "...combats the notion that the constitution of nature has been ... determined by Intelligent Design. The inter-action of the atoms throughout infinite time rendered all manner of combinations possible. Of these the fit ones persisted, while the unfit ones disappeared...." interpreted 1874 by JohnTyndall.

It seems that 1874 was the first usage of "Intelligent Design". Note how they combatted its notion: What happens, happens and therefore there is no God. The fit ones persisted, those fit didn't persist is a logical validity in one context, but both a truism and rhetorical tautology in another. The fallacy is that "There is no God" doesn't follow logically from "what happens, happens", it is a non-sequitur.

MarcusAurelius - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodes_Atticus
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Tyana (70 A.D)


 * The Sceptics


 * B. I. Eclecticism. Galen (131-201 A.D.).


 * Augustine(400AD)

1348, it received distinct expression. ....osborn p.22

17th century orthodox Catholic provost of Digne, Gassendi contemporary and friend of Hobbes and Malmesbury,...p.22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gassendi or http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pierre_Gassendi. His best known intellectual project attempted to reconcile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism (EpiCurus), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity.

PierreMaupertuis 1759 - "....There is some mechanism out there by which individuals survived, they had an internal FITNESS and those that perished didn't...". Fitness was a different symbol for the Arsitotle concept of "internal sponteinity", the symbols changed but not the concept.

Georges Buffon 1770 - Darwin plagiarised vast sections of his work,he was proficient in French; reformulating the ideas of these naturalists, associating it with the term "Natural means of selection" he lifted from Matthews.

JamesHutton 1794- "...Those not adapted will perish, while those adapted for the circumstances, will be best adapted. ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Reinhold_Treviranus (1830) Coined SoF, Spencer lifted it from him.

DR. W. C. WELLS, in 1813, then by

St. Hilaire the elder

PatrickMatthews 1831- "...Those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, fall without reproducing, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind...."

MalThus 1838 - "...favourable variations would be ...preserved, and unfavourable ones ... destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work" (Charles Darwin, Autobio:120)....".

RobertChambers - 1844 with his VesTiges of the Natural History of Creation: "....Let us suppose that the conditions ....have been favourable for the development .... of the lower sentiments, ....the result will necessarily be a mean type of brain.....". He made heavy use of Dr. Fletcher's Rudiments of Physiology embryos argument. Back then the embryonic argument was the corner stone of transmutationism. But they selectively picked those stages which looked the most similar at each individual different stages of development. At the same stage of development the embryos don't look the same.

Naudin, in 1852.

Herbert Spencer - 1854 "...those out of equilibrium die, while those in equilibrium will survive..." which is Aristotle reformulated. We deduce: Equilibrium <=> Fitness or Spontaneous generation(fitness) <=> Equilibrium.

Tremaux - 1850

Darwin OoS: 1860 - "...This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection...." and "..I have called this principle, by which each slight variation(a), if useful, is preserved, by the term of natural selection..."

HenryFairfieldOsborn(1898) From the Greeks to Darwin... " ... all the faulty ...disappeared, and that those that survived.... had the power of .....perpetuating themselves....."

KarlMarx Did a thesis on EpiCurus and DemoCritus.

RichardDawkins "...The changes that survive are accumulated ..." or to rephrase "...The changes that are selected gets accumulated..." or "...The changes that are preserved gets accumulated.." as per EpiCurus

John Harshman "......But the ones that successfully reproduced best are those with the advantageous traits.......And that's natural selection. ..." from AcloselookAtNaturalSelection and "....the stronger has a better chance of passing their genes on....". Stronger and "better chance" alludes to the same fact.

HoWard1: "...The theory of evolution is ... taking advantage of novel accidents (to pre-existing material) that have some current utility...." 'taking advantage' and 'some current utility' alludes to the same fact, making it a Truthiness-Tautology. It is somewhere between a necessary truth, truism and rhetorical tautology, bordering closer to a rhetorical tautology.

JohnWilkins "...those that worked better were retained, that's selection in biology..." or to rephrase ".......those that worked better were retained, that's survival in biology..." or ".......those that worked better were preserved, that's preservation in biology..." as per EpiCurus. And ".....Natural selection in modern science is a feedback process...." http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html. But back in 1863 "modern science" with NS was "...absolute empire of accident..." , we have the same symbol used for different ideas. Which is like imagine we coin a universal term "wooden plate", use it in every essay, news article and journal paper, where one has to deduce form the context whether the term has any relevance(PhilipSkell) and what is the actual idea being represented. Wilkins referred to himself as a "selectionist" in an audio podcast, but the word was also used in 1922 by John Burroughs to symbolically represent the concept of "chance". Back then a "selectionist" was somebody who believed that Evolution1 happened by chance. Read the JohnWilkins entry to get his view on how ".... ordinary language isn't suitable to discuss biology....". He uses the same semantics but what he means differs. The Aristotelians use words such as "selection" knowing that what they mean by that isn't the usual meaning from 2000 years ago in Latin: To make a teleological decision2. Their usage of semantics must be viewed in terms of their take on Naming Conventions. "Natural Selection" the term was the means of embedding Aristotelian tautological thinking in our culture. "Natural selection" the term isn't a tautology and neither is square circles - only ideas can be tautological.