GeoffPragmatics

http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/6b0e8115f3403f97/d572bc1db581f114?#d572bc1db581f114

backspace wrote: >> I guess you can say it is redundant, though this isn't obvious. >> Thus, its inclusion, though redundant, is necessary. Furthermore, >> indicating it is non-random sets it apart from the underlying >> mutations and genetic drift which are decidedly random.

> The problem is your making English undefined.

No, the problem is you adding unnecessary rigidity to a language that I understand quite fine. I am not making English undefined. Far from it. I am interpreting the use of a certain word, "selection", as literal or metaphorical.

> I don't know what it is > that materialists are trying

Your ignorance is hardly anyone's problem other than your own.

> to say with "selection" other than merely pointing out that given your > premises the word is not available to you as Dernavich explained on > http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2001/dernavich1.html

He makes the same mistake you do: "We are comfortable with 'natural selection' as a phrase, because it conjures up images of Mother Nature, or some cosmic Gepetto tinkering with his toys. As a technical term, it is a misleading oxymoron."

It's only misleading to anyone who is predisposed to Intelligent Design or creation. Evolutionists understand that it is merely a metaphor which contrasts the selection by humans for desireable traits in domesticated plants and animals with the how genomes succeed or fail in interspecific and intraspecific competition in nature.

>>> Would would you agree that the synonym or non-random is directed?

>> Would you agree that the sentence above is poorly worded?

> Yes, I would agree let me try again: > Woland, would you agree that the synonym for non-random is directed?

No.