TauTology

Conclusion
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 * ... In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, Natural Selection1863 is a false term; .... - Charles Darwin, Quotations on Natural selection.

When the oxymoron Natural Selection purposeless purpose isn't used as a metaphor (Preferential decision) or as contracted shorthand for PatrickMatthew's - acquisition of new attributes via the natural means of competitive selection,scrutinization ,survival, accumulation, preservation-cultivation - (what Darwin actually meant with nsHenryFairfieldOsborn ); its usage in a sentence turns the sentence into a Meaningless sentence. This is in terms of the Pattern or design dichotomy and the book Tautological Oxymorons(John D. Brey) world view.

The slow gradual, acquisition of new attributes enactedno design sense via the naturalunintentional means of competitive selection, survival, accumulation,scrutinization preservation or cultivationErasmus Darwin is a reformulation of Democritus Doctrine of AtomsHenryFairfieldOsborn, using different terminology, as shown by Henry Osborn in his book From the Greeks to Darwin- http://www.archive.org/details/fromgreekstodarw00osborich.


 * Argument in progress - Aristotle would have phrased it as ... the spontaneous(sudden) acquisition of new attributes using limbs,eyes,shoulders lying around on the ground(Empedocles) via the natural(purposeless) means of spontaneous selection.... (This is Pending, will edit Aristotle later to provide citations. Aristotle understood that any functional system would be IC, or have D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Composite Integrity or Irreducible Functionality, as seen from his comments on the formation of teeth; thus Aristotle's emphasis was spontaneous generation(selection) while Darwin was gradual acquisition enacted via competitive preservation,selection of parts  incrementally that had to work, keeping the creature alive and not so much spontaneous generation. One could say Aristotle was more Punk-eek and Darwin gradual. This confuses the issues, because it deals with a perception of scale and not the mechanismlife1, if we assume the premise that creatures acquired new attributes whether instantaneously as IC would demand or gradually.)

CharlesKingsley and many other authors such as Duke of Argyle understood Natural Selection to be used as a Metaphor and not literally, as time progressed and history revisionismJohnWilkins crept in authors began to use ns literally resulting in oxymoronic Meaningless sentences, which is worse than a tautology3. All sorts of confusion has been created from Ken Ham, Dawkins to Dembski. The most striking example is the strange delusion of explaining or refuting genes as a cybernetic abstraction in terms of the grammatical gargoyleDernavichInfidels Natural Selection: Darwin didn't know about genes and like the definition of Life1 could not have solved a problem he couldn't define in terms of materialist premises. Quantum theory differs from Phlogiston theory, imagine the havoc it would create if every theorem in physics were called Phlogiston theory, yet this is the type of situation biology? is in, largely because the actual mechanism responsible for the mathematical constructs expressed physically in the gait of mammals(Biomimetics), insects etc. isn't defined: Life1 itself.

Artificial selection was lifted from Erasmus Darwin's Artificial Cultivation from Zoonomia - (Samuel Butler) a. AC/AS could be seen as the metaphor for: intended means of competitive selection,cultivation or preservation of desired traits.(this needs further citations - Tautology Notes). As a semantic construct and term Natural Selection is an oxymoron and not a tautology, because Only sentences can be tautologies.

Elliot Sober and JohnWilkins equivocates between tautologies1 in propositional logic and rhetorical tautologies(which I defined on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_%28rhetoric%29 as arguments formulated in such a way that the truth of the proposition is guaranteed by using terms that self-referentially refer to the same fact and cannot be disputed irrespective of their length or complexity).

Physics equations aren't tautologies(neither rhetorical or logical tautologies(Tautological assertions)), but the Wikipedia Epicureans have allowed my opening paragraph defining a rhetorical tautology3 to remain, yet removed this argument from the main page. Let it therefore be known that they think that physics equations are tautologies, which would make one question their intellectual fortitude in this and other matters of logic.

Black darkness is a pleonasm. In a sentence : ...Black darkness covered the land..; it turns the sentence into a Tautological expression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_%28rhetoric%29 article confuses a rhetorical tautology with tautological expressions(pleonams) which is used for a stylistic, poetic effect and not intended to guarantee the truth of the proposition. In the immortal words of Darwin himself(Oos): ... the truth of the propositions cannot be disputed..., hence his 'one long argument' isn't Popper falsifiable and allowed him to come to any arbitrary non-sequitur conclusion; which in Darwin's case was random chance. The chance arbitrary conclusion was eventually falsified, but not his preservation of favorable attributes via the natural means of competitive selection(Matthew). This is a key issue that Ken Ham, Richard and the Discovery institute fails to comprehend or don't want to comprehend since it allows them to sell books surrounding the controversy. Phillip Johnson stated that there is nothing to discuss if an argument reduces to an empty tautology3.


 * Popper stated that the conventionalist changes the definitions when challenged on his theory. An example of this are the Wikipedia Atomist's arbitrary revisions to the main http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection article. Yearlong definitions from 2007,2009 etc. suddenly changed dramatically around 2011. A wiki entry here will be made later see http://www.evolutioncreationism.info/the-arbitrary-wikipedia-revisions-to-the-natural-selection-article. Walter Remine stated .... trying to nail down a definition of Natural Selection is like trying to pin down a flee in an urinal... and .... tautologies3 are at their most dangerous when they go unnoticed, we must therefore plug in the definitions of the terms to unmask them ..... Compare http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Natural_selection to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection. See Wikipedia Natural Selection and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection

A logical tautology(Tautological assertions is a statement which is true by its logical structure: A or not-A and must be so by necessity and assumed to prevent an infinite regress(Godel's incompleteness theorem). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_%28rhetoric%29 states .... A rhetorical tautology should not be confused with a tautology in propositional logic, since the inherent meanings and subsequent conclusions in rhetorical and logical tautologies are very different.....

An argument has a premise and conclusion, when a contested premise is being assumed in the conclusion it is circular reasoning. Such an argument might in addition contain rhetorical tautological phrases - guaranteeing the truth of the propositions -, which must be separated from the any possible begging the question because rhetorical tautologies(not logical tautologies) and circular reasoning are not the same thing - http://www.fallacyfiles.org/begquest.html

In a mathematical proof such as - p1=>p2=>p3=>p4 - each stage of px has to assume the previous premise, if such previous premise isn't disputed. Thus a fallacious circular reasoning in an argument such as the Common Ancestor is when a premise is being assumed by one side of the argument, while the other side disputes the premise.

It therefore isn't a fallacy to assume the premise in the conclusion, it is only a fallacy to assume a disputed premise in a conclusion when all relevant observers don't agree on such premise - circular reasoning.

For example Adaptation is merely being assumed by the ID and atheist side, the very issue under dispute.

Darwin,Owen, PatrickMatthew's premise(Atomism-premise) were that the attributes as expressed by organisms were acquired via the natural means of competitive selection (a mechanism), resulting in the adaptation of the organisms to their environment or condition of existence. Formulating the premise raises the questions:
 * by what mechanism did such acquisition of attributes take place.
 * What existed before Life1 itself existed.
 * What is Life1 and how does it relate to such mechanism.

In the Atomism-premise debate there is a tendency to separate any potential mechanism from the definition of Life1 itself. Life1 itself isn't defined in terms of materialist premises, hence any discussion about a mechanism isn't possible.

From the YEC premise that no attributes were acquired but created 6000 years ago, they are merely expressed, the question as to a mechanism that would result in acquisition of new attributes that would result in new species isn't raised. Begging the question means a conclusion is stated without stating the premise raising the question means a question is raised derived from a clearly formulated, agreed on  premise - Logical fallacies.

A paragraph,essay or book constituting an argument about the origin of species has a premise(EpiCurus-premise or YEC-premise) and a conclusion. The mechanism that enables an organism to express its attributes will be dependent on the premise. See Only sentences can be tautologies, Stanford tautologies, Ken Ham and Polar bear not adapted to anything.

The Adaptation(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation) premise is that the present attributes didn't previously exist in the ancestors but were acquired through Democritus Atomic competitiveness like mechanism restated by PatrickMatthew as natural means of competitive selection. Democritus premise was that atoms existed for eternity, meaning that he didn't have to explain where atoms came from in the first place.

Natural as Darwin used it should be seen as the metaphor(EpiCurus, Pierre Flourens) for unintended,chance,random - Charles Hodge. Note that in Preferential decision, natural was used as the metaphor for an intended decision(pattern with a purpose). Any term can be used as a metaphor to represent an idea in the Pattern or design or pattern without a purpose/ pattern with a purpose sense. With Erasmus Darwin's Artificial Cultivation, the selection of desirable traits was a pattern with a purpose. Erasmus AC is the channeling of repeating patterns.

With PatrickMatthew's natural(unintended) means of competitive selection the intended description was of a pattern without a purpose. The mistake made by Matthew was that the proposition was formulated in such a way that it could not be disputed, hence it was Popper unfalsifiable and actually a reformulation of Democritus Doctrine of Atoms - Tautology Notes, HenryFairfieldOsborn. Atomism is derived from the struggle theme found in ancient near eastern myths in which the cosmos emerged from a struggle between a god and a great sea monster, the god representing order and the sea monster representing chaos - OriginOfSpeciesAsMyth.

The struggle theme is Popper unfalsifiable because if the sea monster out competed the god, we would be told the same story. With the struggle theme our thinking entered an infinite regress(Tautology Culture) and theists were unable to point out the Logical fallacies before Popper and the concept of a Meaningless sentence from Chomsky. Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle, Lucretius, EpiCurus etc. incorporated the mythology with creatures competing against one another.

Darwin perpetuated the error with his natural selection which he used to avoid giving credit to Matthew.

Dembski, Ken Ham, RichardDawkins Behe etc. are formulating Meaningless sentences such as ... Natural Selection reduces information, it does not increase information .... by using the oxymoron ns non-metaphorically. Information is a pattern with a purpose that represents something other than itself - Gitt, Pattern or design. (Add in section about how they also provide the Epicureans with a falsifiable construct, the whole point of this wiki is that EpiCurus, Aristotle ideas which Darwin restated aren't falsifiable)

Most researchers today insert a few odd jabs of Natural Selection in their journal papers after it has been written in order to get it published. According to PhilipSkell had they instead used Roger Rabbit, fruitcake or Aztec Cosmology, the core ideas would still be clear. The wordy terms evolution,selection add no clarity.

Natural Selection is a term and specifically not a sentence and thus as a term it can't be a tautology: Only sentences can be tautologies. As a term it can be used in a sentence with such saying the same thing twice. In most cases natural selection is an arbitrary piece of grammatical gargoyle(DernavichInfidels) tacked onto a tautological sentence with the author unable to specify whether he uses the term metaphorically or not.

The term Ns was also used as the metaphor for the phrase SoF - http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Wallace_Letter_to_Darwin_on_natural_selection. Because ns is a term, Wallace was free to use it as a metaphor for SoF or anything else. Darwin's ideas were expressed using the term NS in terms of the Pattern or design contrast. The Wikipedia Epicureans reject this dichotomy, yet are using the same terminology as they revise history, interpreting in history in their world view and not the Pattern or design world view of a Victorian reader in 1859. JohnWilkins implied at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/precursors/precursnatsel.html that Darwin used Survival of the Fittest as the metaphor for Natural Selection which is incorrect.

Phrases and sentences can't be used as metaphor for terms, only terms can be used as metaphors for phrases and sentences, because ideas can only be fully communicated without ambiguity with sentences. Dictionaries provides us with a roadmap of how terms are used, they document the literal meaning mostly and not metaphorical usage of words. Selection in a dictionary means to make a decision, when used metaphorically it need not have such meaning. This means that a sentence like .....  by the process of natural selection no new information arose .... isn't even wrong until the wielder of the terms defines his terminology.

What precisely is meant today with ns by various authors isn't clear (Tautology Journals). The mistake made by YEC, materialist and ID is to assign an actual meaning to a term: no term nor sentence has an actual meaning - Sentences have no meaning.

Words have no real affinity with thoughts. Wittgenstein came to see language as an irreducibly complex living grammar that enables us to represent our thoughts with words, but such words can never be tied to a thought because it would lead to an infinite regression of metaphors. George Pieczenik discovered palindromic sequences in genes, exhibiting grammar like rules - David Berlinski.

Terms and sentences we use today were forged before the Age of Enlightenment to express the Pattern or design world view, which today is rejected. This leads to conflicting interpretations of observations(Peppered Moth Pattern or Design). Our observations are interpreted within a paradigm that either accepts or rejects Pattern or design dichotomy.

RichardDawkins stated in one of his books(get citation) that we must not assume that a pattern with a purpose and pattern without a purpose(Pattern or design) are our only options. This raises the question: what must we then assume and what about that which we assume will we never be able to prove as shown by Godel's incompleteness theorem? Rhetorical tautologies is one way of inducing infinite regression. Dawkins, rejecting the Pattern or design dichotomy and leaving the issue open ended risks inducing Infinite regression.

Pattern or design
John D. Brey, in his book Tautological Oxymorons proposes that all language functions on the negative tension generated by Platonic primary binary contrasts - contrasts between Pattern or design,Encoding - Decoding ,random/non-random,  cause-effect, infinite-finite, transcendency /temporality , subject and object, signifier and signified , thesis and anti-thesis. Western philosophy functions on the Platonic interplay between the finite and infinite.

It is this dichotomy that the materialist Epicureans reject, bastardizing syntax in an attempt to provide a third option. Non-random in particular is a victim of this Newspeak, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-random redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness.

The Pattern or design dichotomy was established by the Lord Jesus himself 6000 years ago. In Genesis one he spoke the contrasts between nothing and something, light/darkness, water/dryness into existence. We understand darkness as the absence of light, randomness as the absence of order and a pattern with a purpose as the absence of a pattern without a purpose. For something to be decoded, it had to be encoded: there is no third option. With our sense of feeling or touch we intuitively comprehend that dryness is the absence of water, any other option would be a sign of irrationality.

Taking Godel's incompleteness theorem and Tarski's theorem together it was derived that there will always have to be something we must assume, something we cannot prove but know to be true: this prevents our thinking from entering an infinite regress. If we can only accept proven facts, then this very sentence can't be accepted because it isn't a proven fact. The Lord Jesus said I am Truth, Tarski showed that Truth itself can't be defined, it leads to a contradiction. Christ also said I am Life1. If God the Father of our Lord Jesus could be reduced to a falsifiable construct or Truth itself could be derived from base axioms, He wouldn't be God. Had Tarski been able to define Truth itself, he would have defined the essence of Jesus Christ himself, nullifying his claim to be God. Since God himself called those things that be not as though they were, even He had to assume something, for which His only evidence was faith. He thus established the mathematical laws with this apriori truth as discovered by Godel. Godel is the reason why particle CERN research won't reveal ultimate reality, something the public doesn't know.

''Always ask any proponent of a world view: what do you assume to be true, but will never be able to prove? ''

With materialism design is ruled out apriori and chance is impossible, given the complexity of the cells, the proteome phase-space is too large ( ~2^400 ), too fragile ( E0~kt ) and too nucleation-dependent (hydrophobic core) to ever produce stable organisms, let-alone allow them to dissimulate - Bio-evolution lacks both a dynamic and an object.

Materialists cannot define Life1 and tries to use a term - 'selection' - as some sort of universal mechanism(analogous to d/dx is a universal operator), which is just as implausible as a single differential equation explaining all of physics - David Berlinski. Selection's bio-speak synonym 'fitness' has the same problem: if the ancestors of pigs had wheels mounted on ball bearings, instead of trotters, on what scale of porcine-fitness would they be ?

Any theory of evolution would have to explain the transition matrix that maps the proteome space into frog space. Mathematical equations have no physical location, it is an invisible language that maps poly-peptide space into walking humans, who in turn implements neural network algorithms enabling walking without being conscious about it. The algorithms in the Japanese walking robot have no physical location, they can be represented but not actually constituted dimensionally.

Thus the materialists(Mind or Matter), invoke a third option and use volitional type language from an era where terms like design, natural, cause,effect,pattern were used in a context of a dichotomous divide between a pattern without a purpose and a pattern with a purpose(design). JohnWilkins who rejects this dichotomy stated that ...our language with its innate volition is unsuitable for discussing concepts in biology..... Nietzschze wrote that  ... we shall not be rid of God until we are rid of grammar ..... The materialists becomes Tautological Oxymorons exemplified by the oxymoron natural selection, selling a bastardized form of communication, we have mulling the planet Orwelian speakers,their thinking locked in an infinite regress(who made God?) uttering words devoid of meaning - Logical fallacies. Our universities are places where the tautologification of minds take place - Stanford tautologies.

The question Who made God? , can be generalized to: Why does a phenomena defined as possessing a property, not have that property? This question is irrational. To avoid infinite regress(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_regress) we designate the best' explanation as itself not needing an explanation. If the universe has an explanation, then the best explanation is the Lord God Jesus Christ.

Dembski and Behe's ID movement rejects Genesis  1 with its binary opposites, allowing the materialists to merge their insights into a Humpty Dumpty semantic wormhole of Meaningless sentences and appeal to Abstract authority(Mr.science and Mr.ID don't exist, hence can't say anything) as seen in the Massimo , Jonathan Wells debate - Evolution debates. Gould's NOMA is an appeal to abstract authority and the concept he lifted from the writings of Marx.

What is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpose ? If materialism is correct and matter is all there is then the distinction between random/non-random or purpose/non-purpose are illusions, meaning that the very sentence itself could be an illusion. Materialism is thus self-defeating and materialists place themselves outside of the Godelian Wall that hems in all of logic: we must assume something we will never be able to prove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection states that ".....in natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass.....". Is sieve being used in the Pattern or design sense? Since the materialists reject the 5500 year language tradition(non-random as semantic opposite of random) before the Age of Enlightenment ,the question is meaningless to them - Pierre Flourens (Huxley notes)

Irreducible Functionality
By rejecting this binary opposite, Epicureans(evolutionists as they call themselves) become unable to see a mousetrap, flagellum or car as the indissoluble association between complexity, functionality and redundancy. It is a concept that D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson identified, he called it Composite Integrity. Gifford LerAures 1908 stated only the whole constituted organism in their typical order or arrangement owes its specificity to Aristotle's Entelechy". John Hunter around the same time would have disagreed in much the same way that Kenneth Miller disagrees with Behe. D'Arcy Thompson quoted Alexander Pope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Martinus_Scriblerus) - 1750 - that the whole is not the sum of the parts. See Irreducible Functionality
 * Logical flaws in the origins debate moved to Logical fallacies

This is the point
Chomsky in 1953 showed that it is possible to construct grammatically correct but meaningless sentences -Colorless green.

Patrick Matthew coined the terms natural means of selection and natural competitive selection, by which he meant the natural means of competitive selection. His ideas were both grammatically correct and meaningful, but still tautological. Matthew's(1831) and JamesHutton(1792)'s ideas were a formulation of De Rerum Natura, MalThus. Darwin credited MalThus as the inspiration for his theories. (MalThus came after JamesHutton)

Darwin lifted Matthew's ideas and contracted natural competitive selection to Natural Selection, formulating grammatically correct but meaningless sentences. This made it even more difficult to spot the underlying tautological idea construction, which in turn was a reformulation of Democritus Atomism.

Darwin himself struggled with Natural Selection this and thus preferred natural preservation to try and deal with his meaningless sentence construction. What Hutton and Matthew's wrote, were trivially true banalities: obviously the strong survive and weak die, but this doesn't explain where the weak and strong came from in the first place nor the actual reason for survival. JamesHutton and PatricMatthew reformulated Democritus, who believed the universe had no beginning. Democritus atomism therefore doesn't need to explain where the competing atoms came from in the first place.

The story of Gods/seamonsters, animals, atoms or alleles competing against each other in a game of *natural competitive selection* to see who would dominate are as old as the myths of Thor, Yin/Yang, Osiris itself. Each generation retold the myth and codified for it using various terms. Prof. Owen called it Doctrine of Derivation. Around 1852 it seems the volitional terms 'evolution' was used to codify for the mythology.

James Hutton 1792 formulated the concepts in a treatise he wrote spanning 2000 pages, recently discovered at Edinburgh University where he was a graduate. Hutton didn't magically conjure up his ideas in a vacuum, it was in print and each author reformulated the mythology, many give credit and cite sources, many like Darwin give credit but not enough. In effect Darwin rewrote the ideas of others verbatim.

Note how the section below from Hutton is the same essential variation as that by Matthew's.

JamesHutton:
 * .....This wisdom of nature, in the seminal variation of organised bodies, is now the object of our contemplation, with a view to see that the acknowledged variation, however small a thing in general it may appear, is truly calculated for the preservation of things, in all that perfection with which they had been, in the bounty of nature, first designed. Now, this will be evident, when we consider, that if an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that ... those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while ... those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race....

PatrickMatthew:
 * .....We can get the gist of Matthew’s ideas from the following passage quoted from On Naval Timbers by Wallace: As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better-suited-to-circumstance individuals who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater powers of occupancy than any other kind: the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurely destroyed. This principle is in constant action: it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support: in such immense waste of primary and youthful life these only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind of reproduction....

Darwin's version in OoS:
 * ....It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapses of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were......

Darwin restated for meaningful paragraph:
 * ...It may be said that by a natural competitive selection process the good is preserved and the bad rejected for the domination of an ecological niche......

This is both grammatically correct and meaningful, distilling the Popper unfalsifiable essence of Hutton, Matthew , Democritus, Lucretius , MalThus - Milton Wain collection of pre Darwin authors and Darwin's Predecessors. Note Gilson's commentary on Darwin's usage of good/bad - Gilson From Aristotle to Darwin.

Selection in natural competitive selection process can be replaced with preservation or survival(HenryFairfieldOsborn).

The catholic mass was an attempt to fuse Christian principles with Aristotle's metaphysics, Aquinas incorporated Aristotle's belief in spontaneous generation.

Hegel, Kant, Eduard Zeller, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:19th-century_philosophers etc. either incorporated Aristotle's tautologies or failed to notice it in their commentaries. Reading Aristotle without a grasp of Popper falsifiability, poisons the mind, embalming it in a lithium of tautological banalities.

Only with the concept of Popper falsifiability did the logical fallacious reasoning of Heraclitus, Aristotle become clear. Hegel, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche and others before Popper incorporation of Aristotle's ideas suffered from the same unfalsifiability. By the time academia understood the brilliance of Popper, it was to late.

The mythology has led to our scientific establishment confusing cause with effect. Nothing that is in existence(horses, rocks, pots,cars,robots,birds etc.) are adapted to its environment or condition of existence, it only expresses its attribution description. Water doesn't cause corn to grow and corn isn't adapted to its environment(condition of existence), it only expresses its attributes. Water is but a needed element that must be there, before the corn gene gives the 'grow' instruction. Princeton University mathematicians derived complex equations to describe the movement of insects in a project where engineers build machines based on the research. In the same way that dense partial differential equations existed first and described the Japanese walking robot, the abstract math equations existed first in the mind of Jesus Christ before he said: Let there be insects. Neither the walking robot nor cockroach are adapted to their environment(condition of existence), they only express their attributes, which are invisible math equations that have no physical location.

Sentences have no meaning, they symbolically represent only an idea
moved to Sentences have no meaning

Tautology

 * Tautologies are most dangerous when they are unobvious and escape our detection. In such cases we must unmask the tautology by plugging in the definitions of the words. - Walter Remine

The origins debate the last 6000 years have contained a logical flaw in the structure of the arguments. From YEC, Blyth, Neo-Platonism, Gandalf the tribal wizard(3000 BC), Epicurus, Democritus, Aquinas and Marcel_Schützenberger etc. This flaw prevents us from comprehending the arguments for and against Irreducible Functionality, saturated with the phrase NS1Naming Conventions, functioning as some sort of universal mechanism or operator, trying to immitate d/dx in mathematics. - Bio evolution lacks both a dynamic and an object

A tautology1,2,3,x is the semantic label for saying the same thing twice. All the different types of tautologies, validity's and pleonasms reside under the rubric of semantic tautology. Under this heading we have:

necessary truths, axioms or logical validity's - Tautology1. They can't be verified but neither refuted because they are axiomatic logical assertions.

An expression (as opposed to an assertion) is considered tautologicalx if it contains redundant information. For example, "to return back again" is tautological2(pleonasm) because the sense of "back again" is already fully contained within the word "return", and so is redundant but not necessarily fallacious.

Logical validity's should be viewed as "promissory notes", taken by faith a shadowing of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

Ultimately everything we do or say in religion, science, engineering and politics are based on a "promissory note". There is in no such thing as an empirical "scientific" reality only a reality of faith which is the evidence of things not seen, the firm conviction that our existence based on a promise has ultimate meaning.

Our entire system of being, condition of existence hopes and dreams are based on assumptions, promissory notes, than can't be verified but neither refuted. How do we therefore know what the Truth is? Tarski showed with Semantic theory of truth that any attempt at deriving Truth itself from logic leads to a contradiction. 'Empirical reality' is another synonym for truth. More on this from http://raherrmann.com, Prof. Herrmann Ph.D in math US Naval Academy.(He is a YEC who believes that Dembski's ID is Restricted Design theory). What http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tautology.html refers to as logical tautologies can be more accurately defined as logical validity's, the only evidence for their valid nature is faith. The symbolic mathematical expression of these validity's by themselves aren't fallacies, they are not rhetorical tautologies.

Tautological expressions or what http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com refers to as non-tautological propositions - Tautology2 - http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2010/01/when-is-a-tautology-not-a-tautology.html. A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm (Pleonasm) is in reality a tautological2 expression and specifically not a manifestation of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)3.

A Tautological2 expression or Pleonasm2 aids in achieving a specific linguistic effect, be it social, poetic, or literary. In particular, pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetition — it can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand. Such Pleonasms can be found in the book of Psalms.

Is the contention that "free gift2" is a tautology1,2 or 3? true? . To assert that such a phrase always says the same thing twice is to miss-frame the particular premise of a user. For example: A man's gift of a dinner and a movie to his date may be a "gift2" but it sometimes comes bundled with expectations. But, if the recipient of the free dinner asks first "if I go with you, are you expecting anything?" and gets the answer "no", then it's accurate to say the invitee got a "free gift" of dinner. It is incorrect that no gift can ever have non-free implications attached to it.

Another example is "suddenly, without warning". If two armies oppose each other in the field and one commander sends the opposition a warning message as follows "I instruct you to retreat or I will attack", any subsequent attack, sudden or otherwise, was warned. "Sudden" means "happening or coming unexpectedly". But students of military history have noted; via effective deception, any attack can be seen as "sudden", even if fair warning was previously given.

A rhetorical tautology3 is a truism, masquerading as a logical validity from which a conclusion is drawn that doesn't follow logically(non-sequitur).

Rhetorical tautologies3 which are fallacious forms of deriving conclusion which are non-sequiturs - Tautology3. To which idea is being referred to must be derived from the context and can't be separated from the Pragmatics of the individual encoding his intent to signal receiver. Conclusions as to what it means to formulate the same concept twice will generally emminate from whomever is arbitrating the proper parsing of the words at issue. An element of interpersonal power-dynamics can infuse itself into definitional debates. The editor can label something a tautology(or not a tautology) so as to better dismiss the opposition's position if it conflicts with his world view. Saying the same thing twice takes on varying nuances either fallacious, logically valid or poetic:

Rhetorical tautologies3 or tautological3 propositions are fallacious. Tautological2 expressions used for its stylistic effect in language verbosity, poetry and language redundancy aren't fallacious. Logical validity such as A or not A. It is a generic tautology not a fallacious rhetorical tautology.

Axioms are tautological assertions
Moved to Axioms are Tautological assertions

Natural selection, preservation, survival aren't tautologies
An argument is said to be a rhetorical tautology if it cannot be false, such as: "Those that were favorable became common and those not favored become less common". This tautology is usually encoded for with the symbol 'natural selection', an arbitrary choice of words. Note that "natural selection, preservation, survival or accumulation" isn't a tautology, it's not even a sentence. Any of these terms can be used in the pattern or design sense.

Only the idea NS1 symbolically represented by Darwin could be a tautology. Natural selection, preservation, survival or accumulation itself as a symbol has no meaning, like a hammer has no intent to strike by itself. Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend that he regrets using NS in OoS, he prefered natural preservation due to the volitional overtones of selection(who did the selecting?).

NS Darwin got from PatrickMatthew's natural means of selectoin by which was meant natural means of preservation. The favorable ones were naturally preserved(selected), while the unfavorable ones weren't preserved(selected, accumulated,chosen etc.). This was a tautological idea that extends back to Empedocles, Sumerian and Babylonian religions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_mythology, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian

With NS1 Darwin, in addition, meant 'natural internal spontaneity', 'spontaneous generation' and 'natural fitness' an extension or reformulation of Aristotle's constituted internal spontaneity or internal fitness. See PierreMaupertuis for his usage of fitness. He most probably used it in the context of 'spontaneous generation' - 1759. (will need citations for this view)

'Natural preservation' was Darwin's preferred term to convey a concept like a mammoth being 'naturally preserved' or 'naturally accumulated' in ice, there was no intent or volition but a chance preservation(pattern sense) process. Fitness and selection were used interchangeably to refer to this concept of 'natural preservation' with the premise of 'spontaneous generation'(falsified by Pasteur). See JohnTyndall(1872 around, Belfast address).

Charles Hodge descrbied the concept in the knowledge context of 1874 that was understood with NS1(Naming Conventions) by listing the five pages where Darwin made clear what he meant with NS1 or natural preservation(the Aristotle section I added as well). In our knowledge context(genes, information theory) usage of NS should be NS2,3,4,5 etc, due to the fact that the modern day Epicureans re-use the symbol. They are in a state of confused cognitive shock with the object 'selection', they don't grasp that 'selection'(pattern sense) was only the non-preferred term for 'preservation'(pattern sense), with the whatever word Darwin could have used as a proxy for 'chance' as understood in 1874. Darwin could have used 'natural accumulation' as in the mammoths were 'naturally frozen' or 'naturally preserved'(accumulated), Pattern or design. In the context of 1863(CharlesKingsley) preservation, accumulation and selection are objects all referring to the same blind, chance concept.

When using 'natural selection' in the context of 1874 we must use 'natural means of preservation', natural preservation or natural accumulation as a proxy for the MalThus idea that Darwin extended and expounded upon in OoS. That is, if we are referring to Darwin's ideas. Today the same symbol NS is used but not necessarily the same chance idea, which is why subscripts must be added to the object NS to avoid confusion.

Darwin plagiarized extensively the works of Buffon, Wells(1813), Prof. Owen('Doctrine of Derivation' became Theory of Evolution) etc. ToE was first used by Herbert Spencer(Darwin's Predecessors) in Leader Magazine 1852. Only in the third edition of OoS did Darwin use ToE without crediting Spencer or Owen. He took the same essential ideas formulated by preceding authors, restating it under the semantic object natural selection, a term used over 300 times when type setting was done by hand. His 'breakthrough' was in stripping Owen's Doctrine of Derivation of all remnants of theism, turning it into a CharlesKingsley(1863) 'absolute empire of accident' idea.

It will be shown in this wiki that Owen, Wells, James Hutton, Empedocles, Aristotle etc. formulated a RT(rhetorical tautology) narrative which allows one to come to any arbitrary conclusion(blind chance, divine intervention), since the structure of the argument is formulated in such a way, that it cannot be disputed, making any conclusion no matter how correct it might be a non-sequitur.

Fast forward to 2011 and one will notice that the same tautological concepts are formulated by Allan Orr(Scientific American), Dawkins etc. but their conclusion differs from Darwin. They insist that evolution doesn't happen by chance. (they mean that our world is one of trillions of possibilities, which as Berlinsnki pointed out is the RetrospectiveSpecification fallacy). Because we are dealing with a tautological structural flaw in our culture, politics etc. the secular high priests(Nytimes, Economist etc.) are able to change their stories as new discoveries are made. This is why the AAAS was effortlessly able to modify their story that evolution is a chance process(1991) to non-random(whatever they mean by this) one today. A hidden tautological flaw allows one to come to any non-sequitur conclusion.

Nobody has ever refuted nor verified Darwin, because his tautological constructs can be definition not be refuted or verified. Failure to grasp this has allowed a 'refuting evolution' or 'confirming evolution' cottage industry to arise: Ken Ham, Dembski, Behe, Dawkins etc.

Tautology identification
Some arguments are disguised tautologies formulated such that it could be called Truthiness-Tautology, it is formulated so that it cannot be disputed, somewhere between a truism and tautology or a blending of a logical necessity, necessary truth, truism and rhetorical tautology - http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Talk/talk.origins/2009-11/msg08925.html

Double Tautology: http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/5947cbc2f3ae0a31/bbe4039c06b01a69 "... a concept irrefutable under all and any conditions, patterns or designs..."

StrawTology: An attempt to at introducing false observational information relating to a tautological description of a phenomena in order to extract an argument which seemingly explained the observation from tautological implications. (Will update in due time, see this - http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/557a525aebe1bddb# - thread for where it was discussed.)

QuesTology is an unanswerable question: "If the tree was made by God, who made God?" is a "Questology", it is formulated in such a way that it can't be answered making any conclusion from it a non-sequitur: God could either exist or he couldn't. It is a variation of "Could God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?" Prof. Herrmann addresses this question at http://www.serve.com/herrmann/omni.htm: ".....A language, as we know it, if improperly applied along with classical logic can lead to meaningless statements when meaningful phrases are employed......". The implication by a user of the sentence who's world view is Atheism is that because the question can't be answered that therefore there is no God. If on the other hand a Theist were to ask the same question with his world view it would imply the existence of God because only he could answer such a question. The question and the fact that his creation(from either world view) could come up with such a question means there must be a supreme intelligence knowing everything and everything there is to know. To answer the question we with our limited knowledge would need to know everything. Imagine seeing a card-house and then concluding it wasn't designed because we don't know who designed the person that designed it and who in turn designed him in an infinite regress. It is tantamount to saying "because we don't know everything, we thus know nothing". "Questologies" are the twin-brother of "Rhetorical Tautologies", used to make an argumentation narrative indisputable making any conclusion from such a non-sequitur. [''Note: I am not exactly sure about the logic in this paragraph, it could be erroneous, this subject needs further research. http://www.serve.com/herrmann/omni.htm would be in a better position to make sense of this issue. Please edit the discussion page with relative links to resolve this issue.'']

The following block-quote was lifted from a tautology article by TdTone(Doubting Thomas on Darwin's Tautology) and ID/Creationist author and found its way into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_%28rhetoric%29.


 * A rhetorical tautology is defined as a series of statements that comprise an argument, whereby the statements are constructed in such a way that the truth of the propositions are guaranteed or that the truth of the propositions cannot be disputed by defining a term in terms of another self referentially: It says the same thing twice or repeats the same concept using words or terms in the synonymous sense, even though the words might not be semantically equivalent. Tautologies are a matte of pragmatics, not semantics. [Semantics are agreed upon codes between signal sender and receiver, they in themselves don't convey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics. Only a conscious agent can have pragmatics, intent or an idea. Only ideas have meaning symbols like "natural selection" don't]. The argument is formulated in such a way that it cannot be refuted. A story in the New York Times isn't confirmed by reading it twice and neither is a world view confirmed by expressing it multiple ways. Consequently the statement conveys no useful information regardless of its length or complexity making it Unfalsifiable. It is formulating a description in a way that masquerades as an explanation when the real reason for the phenomena cannot be independently derived.

In the Usenet thread Darwin's principle of divergence - Tautology the full article was copied from TdTone. His take on the natural selection(NS1) is generally correct but he failed to notice key tautological sections in his essay.

The statement "If you can't find something (that you lost), you are not looking in the right place" is tautological. It is true and can't be disputed, but conveys no useful information. As a physical example, to play a game of darts where the dart board was full of bulls-eyes could be called a "tautological" game. The player would not lose. Any argument containing a tautology is flawed and must be considered a LogicalFallacy and conclusions or world views derived from such as non-sequiturs. The world view very well might be correct but doesn't follow logically from the argumentation scheme employed.

At http://bit.ly/dW8w6D Darwin wrote: ".. and every individual with the slightest blemish or in any degree inferior may be freely rejected..." The statement contains no useful information because being blemished implies that it would be rejected but this doesn't explain why it was blemished, what caused the blemish. spi

Physics equations aren't tautologies
moved to Physics equations aren't tautologies

Aristotle's influence on Aquinas
Darwin wrote: OoS "...Passing over allusions to the subject in the classical writers (Aristotle, in his "Physicae Auscultationes" (lib.2, cap.8, s.2), after remarking that rain does not fall in order to make the corn grow, any more than it falls to spoil the farmer's corn when threshed out of doors, applies the same argument to organisation; and adds (as translated by Mr. Clair Grece, who first pointed out the passage to me),

So what hinders the different parts (of the body) from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished and still perish.

We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle, is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teeth.), the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon. But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of species, I need not here enter on details......."

Note what Aristotle wrote: '......but it was the result of accident.......'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquinas had a belief in "spontaneous generation" which he got from the works of Aristotle. The specific passage that must have influenced Aquinas was also cited by Darwin: "...... having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity .....". Elsewhere in this document it is shown that the passage by Aristotle was a type Tautology3 or rhetorical tautology - the conclusion "result of accident" and "spontaneous generation" were non-sequiturs. Darwin saw in the passage the "...for shadowing of natural selection ..." as he put it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism#cite_note-sep-thomas-19 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomism

PierreMaupertuis gave a different word for internal spontaneity or spontaneous generation: fitness. In the context of 1874 when John Tyndall said NS1 and/or fitness as in SoF he was referring to spontaneous generation, which in turn referred to Democritus Atomism. Today other authors could mean something different with the same word.

The same mistake Aquinas made is perpetuated today with scholars trying to reconcile Aristotle's tautological3 narratives with modern information theoretic concepts. Philosophers like Dennet have been peddling Epicurean tautological3 thinking under different terms. The ancient ideas of Lucretius are the same today: there is nothing new under the sun. In the Bible it is written: "...... the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord ...." Not a single rhetorical tautology3 can be found in scripture, only pleonasms or tautological2 expressions,used for poetic purposes.

".. All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind...." this is probably the only sensible thing that Aristotle has written. We can see it with university professors who have to say "selection-for" and "selection-about" instead of design and pattern because "selection(survival,accumulation,preservation)" has no meaning. They are being paid to have their minds degraded by the Empedoclean pagans in the US federal government.

Popper on natural selection
Popper had a knack for seemingly agreeing with somebody but then really saying the person's theory is unfalsifiable as in his famous "recanting" that natural selection is a tautology3 (Naming Conventions) and metaphysical research program. What he really did was throw the Aristotelians3 a bone to shut-up and leave an old man alone, they couldn't grasp what he was saying, it went over their heads... Popper didn't really "recant". (If an experiment falsifies your position you amend your position - not "recant")

Tautologies from Aristotle, Empedocles, James Hutton and Henry F. Osborn
moved to Timeline of tautologies

Tautologies through the ages
moved to Timeline of tautologies

Tautological thinking in our culture
From Empedocles to JohnWilkins it is the same banality: The good(algorithm, see monster,allele) - (survived,preserved, selected) the bad(algorithm, monster, gene) perished and therefore whatever my world view(theism, atheism, deism, pantheism, whatever it might be) is correct, which is a non-sequitur. PatrickMatthews claimed credit for "inventing the principle of natural selection" and so did Darwin. None of them invented anything, they labeled their reformulated Empedoclian and Aristotelian fallacy "Natural selection" which could be rephrased as "Natural survival" or "Natural Preservation" as per (EpiCurus).

The theists like Blyth, Ken Ham and GilDoDgen posting on http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/jerry-fodor-natural-selection-has-gone-bust/#comment-142129 tend to latch on the negative part of the tautology "...unfavourable ones ... destroyed..." and therefore God still exists. While the atheists latches onto the positive part "..favourable variations would be ...preserved..." form which they deduce that there is no God. Both conclusions from either side derives a world view which is a non-sequitur: Whether God exists or not must be deduced by some other means, the MalThusian argument(derived from DemoCritus and Aristotle) is a tautology, a logical fallacy. Natural selection the term, was but an arbitrary phrase coined to symbolically represent, formulate and narrate observations in the world in a tautological3 black/white dichotomy manner.

Natural selection was the grammatical gargoyle that enabled the re-introduction of Aristotelianism and Empedoclianism into our culture, science, religion and politics. Selection(selectus Latin), adaptation, evolution(EvolVere, unrolling action - Latin), "descent with modification" etc. were all words used in the strong volitional sense by theists for thousands of years. By an act of strategic language deceit Aristotle's concept of "...result of accident...." or chance was associated with these words. It was an exploitation of English, a language that allows for much ambiguity. For example "...the assembly was favored1 by accident...." or ".... he favored2 that particular layout..." , favored like selection and any other word can be used in the Pattern or design sense. EvolVere was used to communicate the volitional intent of reaching a goal by unrolling something. See Naming Conventions for favored1(pattern) and favored2(design).


 * (Aristotle, in his "Physicae Auscultationes" (lib.2, cap.8, s.2) OoS:".............So what hinders the different parts (of the body) from having this merely accidental relation in nature? as the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food; since they were not made for the sake of this, but it was the result of accident. And in like manner as to other parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished and still perish.........."

(JamesHutton said essentially the same thing but left out the result of accident part due to his Deistic world view, if Aristotle had said that we weren't the result of accident but divine intervention, this conclusion would also be a non-sequitur, a point which Blythe, Ken Ham, GilDoDgen, DavidBerlinski and others in their attempt at accommodating Aristotle's indisputable proposition misses.).

PatrickMatthews in all probability got his tautology3 from Hutton and Darwin lifted "natural means of selection" from Matthew while reading his book on the Beagle which was required reading - (http://probaway.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/darwins-questionable-priority-over-thomas-matthew/)

Aristotle's passage reduces to: Things appropriately constituted were preserved and things not appropriately constituted perished. Or in other words: The good ones lived, the bad ones died, which explains everything. Appropriately constituted and preserved are a synonymous play with dissimilar words that alludes to the same fact but it doesn't independently derive the actual reason something was preserved. To identify the tautology take any of the synonymous dissimilar terms and formulate a question:
 * Other than noting it was preserved how was its constitutability measured?
 * Other than noting it wasn't constituted how was its perishability measured?

Wasn't constituted and perishable says the same thing twice, making Aristotle's argument watertight, explaining everything , it cannot be refuted and is thus a LogicalFallacy. His tautology reduces to: The good(atom,idea,gene,allele,phenotype) lived(selected, survived,preserved) while the the bad(animal,atom,gene,idea) one died, able to explain anything past, present and future. This is why the 'no new genetic information' issue by Ken Ham can't refute what Darwin wrote. It is rooted in ancient mythology, the battle between Gods and Seemonsters, Zeus, Apollo, Mars God of war etc. which became the battle between good and bad atoms from the Atomists(600BC), which today is formulated by Dawkins as: ".....the good (gene,allele,phenotype) survived, the bad (gene,allele,phenotype) died...." in the light of OriginOfSpeciesAsMyth - http://lostborders.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/the-origin-of-species-as-myth. The mythology is extended to anything in existence,matter abstract ideas, and as new discoveries are made through the ages, the myth is retold by the secular priesthood and incorporated by the religious priesthood. Reproductive Success, genotype,fitness, and phenotype etc. are semantic and stylistic ruses that enables the myth to be retold by the Neo-Empedoclians within our reference frame of genes as a CyberneticAbstraction. If a cow was meant to produce beer instead of milk would it still be a success? For who is what a success - see DernavichInfidels on this issue.

After quoting Aristotle, Darwin went on to say: "...... we can see here the principle of NaturalSelection shadowed forth....". The question is how did Darwin solve the problem of genes as a CyberneticAbstraction if he couldn't define the problem? This question must be extended back to Aristotle and the answer is that Aristotle explained everything: past, present and future, thus nothing. Furthermore Aristotle's premise that everything was the result of accident means that everything he said ultimately is the result of accident, including the very paragraph itself, why then should we believe a word he said?

Aristotle formulated a rhetorical tautology in order to convince that the apparent design in the universe was a result of accident. He allowed no means for his world view to be Falsifiable, thus his conclusion based on proposition which cannot be refuted was a Non_sequitur_(logic) Non sequitur (logic). The world view might have been correct but not as a result of logical deduction. His tautological formulation is open ended allowing one to come to any conclusion because it reduces to: What happens, happens and therefore atheism,theism,random, non-random or whatever the user of the tautology wishes to be the as the correct world view. This is why the modern day Aristotelians formulates the same tautological core as Darwin but come to a different(evolution doesn't happen by chance) conclusion then the conclusion drawn by CharlesKingsley(1864), JohnBurroughs(1918) of "evolution happens by chance". HenryFairfieldOsborn in 1898 in his book "From the Greeks to Darwin" also interpreted evolution as happening by chance but changed his mind by 1922 after being influenced by Waagen.

Note that HenryFairfieldOsborn never defined what exactly he meant with "evolution not happening by chance". Was it "directed" then, we don't know because English isn't like Greek: Any word can be made mean anything by a user in any context. A person for example might say "non-random" but not mean by this that it was "directed", what then is meant can't be deduced because there are only two options: Patterns or designs, volition or non-volition.

These tautologies and battle-between-atoms-and-organisms myth was originally from Empedocles 600B.C, reformulated and expanded through the centuries by Aristotle, Democritus, EpiCurus,....Darwin right up to our modern era by JohnWilkins, Dawkins etc who all basically said the same thing: The good live, the bad die. But from such a banality each propogates different world views, Deism, Atheism, Pantheism and Theism. None of them realized that their world view didn't logically follow from the Empedocles tautology. It was't really Darwin that was responsible for the Hitler and Stalin but Empedocles, it seems.

CharlesKingsley, 1863 in a letter dated 1863 to FrederickMaurice he interpreted Oos as: ".. Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact. The one or two who hold out against Darwin are forced to try all sorts of subterfuges as to fact or else by invoking the tedium theologium.... The state of the scientific mind; they find that now they have got rid of an interfering God - a master magician as I call it -- they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident and a living, immanent, ever-working God..."

Thus chance(accident) and Design(God) were the dichotomy's world view, the defining paradigm of that era. NS1 was used in this context - Pattern or design and Peppered Moth Pattern or Design.

Charles Hodge, 1874, natural selection represented: "...Natural selection1, unguided, submitted to the laws of a pure mechanism, and exclusively determined by accidents, seems to me, under another name, the chance proclaimed by Epicurus, equally barren, equally incomprehensible......". Note how this idea differs from the Dawkins non-random natural selection3 usage. What both Hodge, Blyth, Dawkins, Ken Ham and Dembski seem to miss was that the "result of accident" part was an arbitrary non-sequitur. Divine intervention would also be a non-sequitur. The error that Epicurus, Lucretius, Empedocles and Aristotle made , was in the immortal words of Darwin himself: ".... the truth of the propositions cannot be disputed...." ,they formulated their arguments in such a way that they were unfalsifiable. Since then Blyth, Gill Dodgen and even Berlinski it seems have battled to "refute" their arguments , something which in principle can't be done.

By trying to force some sort of actual meaning into the semantic gargoyle "natural selection" the confusion has deepened. Aquinas was so overwhelmed by Aristotle's tautological3 prose that he tried to reconcile it with Catholic doctrine. (It is especially saddening that Berlinski refuses a head on assault of "natural selection", but if he does so and exposes the tautology3 it is a proxy for, how would he then sell books and what would he mock and make fun off and hold endless conferences, speeches, radio shows ect? The love of money is the root of all evil. Of all the scholars in the ID,YEC movement, Berlinski is one of the few who understand that nothing got naturaled: We are only dealing with Aristotle reformulated and resymboled. )

Hodge didn't know about genes and information theory, modern rebuttals of Darwin focus on information theory, something darwin didn't know about. Instead one must try and rebut darwin using the knowledge of that time era to try and understand what made darwin so convincing in 1870.

JohnBurroughs ,1922 in his book The Last Harvest(1922) interpreted Darwin as: "....Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to stagger any number of selectionists...."

HenryFairfieldOsborn wrote New York Times 1922, 5 Aug. "....Waagen's observations that species do not originate by chance as Darwin had once supposed, but through a continues and well ordered process has since been confirmed, has since been confirmed by an overwhelming volume of testimony, so that we are now able to assemble and place in order line after line of animals in their true evolutionary succession, extending, in the case of what I have called the edition de luxe of the horses , over millions of years. ..... Evolution takes the place with the gravitation law of Newton.." I am not sure, but can't recall Osborn using "natural selection" in the entire NYtimes article probably because of the strong association it had with chance during that time.

Natural selection as oxymoron
moved to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Purposeless_purpose

Talk Origins Tautology article
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA500.html "...."Survival of the fittest" is a poor way to think about evolution. Darwin himself did not use the phrase in the first edition of Origin of Species. What Darwin said is that heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. This is not circular or tautologous. It is a prediction that can be, and has been, experimentally verified (Weiner 1994)....."

Weiner is incorrect, Darwin never said differential reproductive success.

''It was coined by JohnTyndall 1871, he meant the incremental differential increases in attributes. ''

By saying that Darwin didn't use SoF in the first three editions, they leave out that Darwin referred to Spencer as one of the greatest thinkers in history.

Another statement floating around the Internet ether is " .... evolution takes place in populations not individuals..." The first question is who says so? What technical concept does this represent because a population is a collection of individuals.

Identify tautology
Identify the terms in a sentence or passage used in the pragmatics synonymous sense. Take any of these terms or words and reformulate the sentence as a question in terms of the other word. This will show whether the terms or words says the same thing twice. There is a difference between dictionary semantic synonyms and pragmatics synonyms because no word or sentence has a meaning: Only ideas have meaning.

A dictionary captures a certain idea in a context.. See http://www.evolvingthoughs.net for a blog post on this by Wilkins.

Circular reasoning isn't a tautology
moved to Logical fallacies.

Creation.com and tautology
Moved to Creation.com and tautology

Darwin's 'Theory of Evolution' - what theory?
moved to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Theory_of_evolution

Buffon in a time machine to present age
Osborn on Buffon and Darwin in "... Letter to Semper, Life and Letters, Vol. III., p. 160. " .... I have read Buffon : whole pages are laughably like mine. It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one's views in another man's words. . . . Nevertheless, there is a fundamental distinction between Buffon's views and mine. He does not sup- pose that each cell or atom of tissue throws off a little bud. ..."
 * Life and Letters, Vol. III., p. 44.

"...Among Darwin's last words upon the factors of Evolution are those in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species (1880, p. 424). In the modification of species he refers as causes, successively to his own, to Lamarck's, and to Buffon's factor in the following clear language: "This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts ; and in an un- important manner that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously."

Bring Buffon in a time machine to a museum of mainframes, IBM, PC, ZX Specturm and Commodore computers with the small computers stacked at the bottom (ZX Spectrum) and larger ones on top. Buffon then starts cataloging the wires,keypads and stuff trying to find correlations between how the ZX spectrum "evolved" into a modern PC, based on his assumption of progression being stacked in layers and assuming that larger means more complex. (The dinosaurs are closer to the surface as they were sorted that way in the Great Flood). He would be missing the point, the computer are symbolic representations an idea that existed in somebodies mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

The same way Aristotelians are making a mistake with creatures implementing PID loops in carbon instead of copper. They symbolically represent an idea in somebodies mind, the algorithm existed before the animal existed. The Schrodinger equation existed before atoms existed(nobody know whether the atomic particles are actual objects). Osborn for example derived "Horse sequences" which today are discarded, in the same way Buffon would find capacitors in the ZX spectrum and in the IBM mainframe assuming the mainframe "evolved" form the ZX. So we have paleontologist cataloging dead bones trying to deduce how one creature evolved into another, begging the question: We don't know whether a single fossil is the ancestor of anybody. Buffon wouldn't know whether a single capacitor "evolved" into a range of better capacitors in the computers higher up the rack, he would merely assume his premise in his conclusion.

Instead each fossil should be viewed as a creature that had IOF - irreducible optimized functionality (Irreducible Functionality). Flying birds of prey's bone like structures optimized their functionality, it wasn't some derived structure from ancestors.

From Commodore to a PC we have the implementation of an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine. The idea came first then its symbolic representation. With frogs, horses, chickens , humans in whom is the breath of life" we have the symbolic representation of an idea:  Life itself.

Buffon would then catalog the soft rubber keys of the ZX spectrum and finding the IBM mainframe stacked meters above with hard keys infer that through a battle for survival between the keyboards the IBM keyboard "evolved" from the soft keys. Just like biologists today he would be missing the point that animal movement and appendages are the symbolic manifestation of the underlying PID and IPC(Inverted pendulum control) algorithm. One animal didn't evolve from another, they are but different representations of the same universal underlying algorithms, ideas, Life, Truth and Language. This Language transcends space time and matter, knows everything and everything there is to know as he spoke the universe into existence 6000 years ago.

Tigers, elephants and humans in whom is the breath of life, symbolically represent an abstract idea that can't be reduced to matter: Life itself. The question is What is Life? How would we visualize Life as an abstract transcendent idea in the same way that the Turing machine idea isn't a physical location. The concept of a Turing machine transcend the universe itself, the concept isn't bound by space and time.

Nobody has ever seen an electron they are described in term of dense language of partial differential equations. The electron isn't a physical object but a language like abstraction, that exists, expresses and is held together by Language itself: The language of math. View an Atom as a Partial differential language equation and then view a metal table consisting of iron atoms as the symbolic representation in physical space of this invisible, unseen Language space.

Natural selection and Phlogiston theory
moved to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Natural_Selection

Wikipedia's Fitness article uses John Tyndall's interpetation of Democritus
moved to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Survival_of_the_Fittest

What does Fitness mean?
moved to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Survival_of_the_Fittest

Nature selects - pattern or design ?
"Nature selects" means just like quark, fitness and reproductive success nothing, it has no meaning. This insight into sentences as symbols allows one to use the symbol string "nature selects" to convey any idea in the pattern or design sense. One person would indeed mean that the Gaia selection cosmic force selects or makes a decision while the wikipedia Aristotelians disagree.

Many neo-Aristotelians(calling themselves evolutionists) insist that "nature selects" doesn't mean a conscious being making selections. But since "nature selects" doesn't mean anything what they intend is that they are not representing the idea of a conscious being making decisions. They are invoking the HumptyDumpty principle which is just as mentally ill as invoking the HumptyDumpty principle to redefine Ethernet as fixed packet widths: Why are they doing this? Since you can do with a symbol anything you want, invent any protocol you desire, they are free to invoke the HumptyDumpty principle but at the risk of mental illness. A hammer itself has no intention to strike, it can be used to drive a nail but can also be used as a paper weight, likewise "natural selection" itself has no intention, it can only be used to convey an idea.

Entering HumptyDumpty space won't be allowed on the IEEE standards committee for Ethernet and neither should it be allowed when making formal definitions in biology space. [The idea represented with Biology leads to even more ambiguity than with selection]


 * http://www.tutorvista.com/content/biology/biology-iii/organic-evolution/organic-evolution-theories.php "...Darwin believed that nature selects only those individuals, which have favourable variations and thereby have competitive advantage over others. This process is known as natural selection...."

The idea behind the sentence is a rhetorical tautology, favourable implies they will have an advantage but doesn't explain why it is so. The premise behind it is the false dichotomy from Democritus with the good and bad atoms fighting one another to dominate atomic space. The idea Darwin had though with "nature selects" was in the pattern and not design sense. The issue is what did Darwin actually believe, he said "nature selects" but by this didn't mean some entity selecting, which is why he should never have used selection. In a letter he wrote he stated that he should have used "preservation". Preservation like accumulation and selection can be used in the pattern or design sense. The words isn't the issue but the idea.

Is a tautology true by definition?
* http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/4828cd8302a35bfa/d5d1bc415669f3d8 * http://www.evolutiondebate.info/ThoughtsonNS.pdf

Quote:This is an amazing argument, but I have seen it in more than one place (including an indirect nod by Howard Hershey in the last section below) so it must be making the rounds. Apparently Patella believes that in order for there to be tautology problem natural selection must argue that the fitter ³always² survive."

Wilkins wrote: Well yes. That's rather what "tautology" means - it can never not be true. If it can be false at any point then it is simply not a tautology, no matter what one might think of the claim as a statistical likelihood.

Both Wilkins and Patella didn't discern between a tautological expression, proposition and logical validity. "A or not-A" can't every be false, it is a logical validity. But the sentenc "A or not-A and therefore a monkey gave birth to a human" is a rhetorical tautology, the conclusion is a non-sequitur.

Survival of the fittest in certain context is a type Tautology1 or logical validity. They way Spencer and Darwin used it, it became a rhetorical Tautology3 because their premise descent from a Common Ancestor was a non-sequitur. In a sports match expressing SoF to impress on the fact that the athlete won the race is a Tautology2 expression and not fallacious. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics with SoF is the issue, because SoF has no meaning itself.

Is a tautology defined as something which is true by definition or something which is a necessary truth? This depends what is meant with "tautology", no word has a single true meaning as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics. There are a range of concepts for which one word will not suffice particularly in the English language, Greek in contrast has single words with a single meaning such as Agape. A rhetorical tautology involves a deceitful attempt at persuasion by coming to a conclusion which is a non-sequitur. Tautological expressions are used in poetry and informal speech. The logical validity A or Not-A could also be a rhetorical tautology or tautological proposition if used in a different context such as:A or Not-A and therefore a monkey gave birth to a human(Non_sequitur_(logic)).

It depends on the context in which terms and words are used by signal sender and how signal receiver decodes it. In computer generated theorem verification the idea is to avoid logical tautologies such as X=X since this is not the result to be obtained. The result would be logically valid but unintended and thus a Logical Tautology( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)) If X=X is generated it is assumed that the set theorist wasn't trying to deceitfully convince others of his world view, hence logical tautology and not rhetorical tautology. Obviously A or Not-A but when tutoring entry level set theory A or Not-A might not be so obvious and the logical validity of A or Not-A needs to be grasped as a low level concept. A or Not-A in one context says the same thing twice in order to convince of a world view which is a Non_sequitur. In another context affirms it as a logical validity for its pedagogical use and in another context is a logical validity but not intended(logical tautology).

JohnWilkins confuses these subtleties by defining a tautology:".... something which is defined as being true by definition..." due to his particular world view and his realization that SurvivalOfTheFittest by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Reinhold_Treviranus, Buffon and Spencer was a tautological proposition. See JohnWilkins for his post on this issue. There are threads by Wilkins on Usenet talk.origins dealing with the http://www.talkorigins.org tautology article that he wrote where he stated that the article is out of date, and needs to be rewritten. Quantum physics, mathematics etc. or what is considered as the hard sciences are formulated in such a way that the Empedoclian world view is embraced.

A or Not-A and what happens, happens are true by definition but what is the context in which it is used or the Pragmatics? The issue isn't the semantic definition of a word but the multiple concepts that can be communicated with words such as for example "random,selection, accumulation etc.", which elsewhere in this document is shown to be able to be used in both the volitional and non-volitional sense. There are five Greek words for love: Agape, Phile, Eros. Agape is used in the New Testament to describe God's love for man.

In English the context or Pragmatics with the word "love" determines what is meant by signal sender to signal receiver. The Neo-Aristotelians, -Neo-Empedoclians (not Evolutionists, a word coined by Darwin in OoS) are exploiting the English language to hide what they mean by words such as selection(who did the selecting?), modification(who did the modifying) accumulation, evolution etc: What will be , will be. Their Premise is the RetrospectiveSpecification fallacy: A widely held premise is the multi-universe theory,out of billions of possible universes we were the one that happened to be in existence, but the sample space is actually two: Either we exist or we don't.


 * A or Not-A, and therefore a monkey gave birth to a human(Non_sequitur) - Rhetorical tautology' or fallacious. 
 * A or Not-A, in an entry level class on algebra stated for its pedagogical use - Logical validity and not fallacious.
 * X=X, in computer theorem verification, but unintended result - Logical tautology and not fallacious.
 * X=X, Jokingly said by one set theorist to another - Tautological expression and not fallacious.
 * (A or Not-A), Random paper picked up in the street what does it mean? It depends on who said X = X - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics. And the same goes for natural selection which like You have a green light has no single true meaning.
 * 4=3, random paper picked up in the street means what? Without knowing who wrote it isn't even wrong.
 * Hidden tautology or Truthiness-tautology - Fallacious.

Wikipedia's Neo-Empedoclians
The subtleties and nuances of what it means to say the same thing twice can't be separated from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics, the context, time era, background knowledge and assumptions of the user. The editors of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric) don't incorporate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics with it due to their Aristotelian, Empedoclian and Epicurian world view. This world view of atoms fighting on another with the best atom surviving have been retold for modern man as the battle between organisms, resulting in an unfalsisfiable tale because if the dingbat won instead of the wombat we would be told the same story.

Original the tale was the battle between the Gods and see-monsters, narrated by the tribal wizard 5000 years ago to village peasants, in return he got free food and didn't have to do back break work. The myth was modified by Empedocles, Aristotle, Atomists, Democritus and Lucretius etc.. as the battle between the atoms to explain the origin of the universe due to their atheistic world view. If atoms became established because the "good" atom outwitted the "bad" atom then the story can't be falsified because if it was the other way around we would be told the same thing. The fact that atoms do exist means thus that one of the atoms had to "win the fight" so to speak but this doesn't allow for a third option and presents a FalseDichotomy. JamesHutton(1794), Darwin, Wells(1813), PatrickMatthews(1836) extended the Lucretius myth by having the "good" animal outwit the bad, not knowing about genes. Our modern day secular priests extended the myth by having the "good" Allele or gene outwit the "bad" allele, as can be seen with the book "The Selfish Gene" by dawkins, which is incorrect because genes are a CyberneticAbstraction. It really is bringing a cowboys-and-indians fight for survival fantasy world into science, where imagine that the existence of cowboys is explained by telling a tale of how they killed all the Indians, which raises the question where did the Indians and Cowboys come from in the first place.

Genotype, phenotype,allele,evolution,selection,group selection,punk-eek,gradualism and specifically the terms fitness and reproductive success with its battle for survival overtones are the word terms that enables the narration of the underlying mythology, it doesn't explain the transition matrix that maps polypeptide space into frog space for example: There is no math because these terms aren't meant to provide a mechanistic description but as a means for the Neo-Aristotelians to perpetuate the Lucretius world view in their universities and science. They are intermixed with mathematical equations but are superfluous to the actual descriptions. For example the term "fitness landscape" might just as well have been called "Conan banana landscape" or fitness coefficient mathematical variables was arbitrarily called that in population genetics but has no bearing on comprehending the actual differential equations explaining inheritance.

Which version of natural selection with what concept?
Selection was the synonym for "survival" and Darwin's writings was interpreted as such by Osborn in 1898 - EpiCurus. Wilkins wrote: "...The core of the criticism against natural selection is that it is a logical tautology, which amounts to it being an a priori truth (which most philosophers now consider a problematic notion at best, anyway)...."

The problem with this sentence is Wilkins never defines to which concept exactly he is referring to as used by which person. Only a person can have a concept, PatrickMatthews the originator of the term "natural means of selection" had a very specific concept. The term "natural selection" like the term "Ninja Turtles" isn't a concept but a the semantic means of encoding the Pragmatics that a specific user has. A Ninja turtle could be a ninja putting on a turtle suite or a turtle putting on a ninja suite,it all depends on who uses the semantics. We are for example told that evolution "happens in populations but not individuals", the only thing we are not told is who established it and whether it is established at all. All scientific theories are always formally established.

From the Greeks to Darwin by Henry Osborn
p.246 "...The idea of Evolution, rooted in the cosmic evo- lution and ' movement ' of Heraclitus and Aristotle, has passed to the progressive development and succession of life seen in Empedocles, Aristotle, Bruno, Descartes, Goethe, and in the more concrete mutability of species ' of Bacon, Leibnitz, Buffon, Lamarck, and St. Hilaire.

The direct transition from the inorganic to the organic is seen to have had a host of friends, nearly to the present time, including, besides all the Greeks, Lucretius, Augustine, Maillet, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Treviranus, Oken, and Chambers- Then we have seen the difficulty of ' origin ' removed one step back by the ' pre-existent germs ' of Anaxa- goras, revived by Maillet, Robinet, Diderot, and Bonnet. Again, the rudiments of the monistic idea of the psychic properties of all matter, foreshadowed by Empedocles, are seen revived by Maupertuis and Diderot. The difficulty of origin has been avoided by the assumption of primordial minute masses, which we have seen developed from the ' soft germ ' of Aristotle, to the 'vesicles' and 'filaments' of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Oken, and finally into our primordial protoplasm.

To the inquiry : Where did life first appear ? we find the answer, ' in the sea,' given by Thales, Anaximander, and Maillet; 'between sea and land,' is the answer of Anaximenes, Diogenes, Democritus, and Oken; 'from the earth,' is the solitary reply of Lucretius. Now we are too wise to answer it. For the succession of life we have followed the ' ascend- ing scale ' of Aristotle, Bruno, Leibnitz, and others, until Buffon realized its inadequacy, and Lamarck substituted the simile of the branching tree. Of man as the summit of the scale, and still in process of becoming more perfect in his endowments, we learn from Empedocles, Aristotle, Robinet, Diderot, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Treviranus....|

'''THE SELECTIONISTS. '''

"....The modern theory of Natural Selection was ex- pressed first by DR. W. C. WELLS, in 1813, then by St. Hilaire the elder, then by Matthew, in 1831, and finally, with considerably less clearness, if at all, by Naudin, in 1852. Darwin gives us references to the two English writers. That of Wells is the first statement of the theory of the survival, not simply of fittest organisms, as understood by previous writers, such as Buffon and Treviranus, but of or- ganisms surviving because of their possession of favourable variations in single characters. Wells' paper, read before the Royal Society in 1813, was entitled, " An Account of a White Female, part of whose Skin resembles that of a Negro " ; it was not published until iSiS. 1 He here recognizes the principle of Natural Selection, as applied to the races of men, and to the explanation of the origin of single characters....."

TAutology part
"....That of Wells is the first statement of the theory of the survival, not simply of fittest organisms, as understood by previous writers, such as Buffon and Treviranus, but of organisms surviving because of their possession of favourable variations in single characters....|

rephrase
The theory of the survival, is organisms surviving because of favorable variations.

rephrase
"...Those that survived had favorable variations...." Obviously or they would be dead.

Tautological expressions and propositions
The tautological expression (an unmarried bachelor) contains a redundant word ("unmarried"), but has meaning and can be used to form a meaningful proposition, e.g. "John is an unmarried bachelor". This proposition is not a rhetorical tautology because the intent isn't to deceive. It could be considered as unnecessarily language verbosity. The tautological proposition (all bachelors are unmarried) stated in a class on formal logic theory on the other hand, gives us no information that is not already contained in the definition of the word "bachelor". The Pragmatics or context with 'unmarried bachelor' by the user would determine whether it is a proposition,expression, logical validity, or language verbosity. In an academic setting such as a journal propositions are put forward in an attempt at deriving an independent explanation for an observation. Tautologies in such a setting would be a tautological proposition and unacceptable. Tautological expressions used in an informal setting such as a sports event with its associated colloquial speech is acceptable because of the Pragmatics] with it. The dividing line between a tautological proposition and expression is [[Pragmatics.

Example of a tautological proposition

 * The geological record features episodes of high dying, during which extinction-prone groups are more likely to disappear, leaving extinction-resistant groups as life's legacy. S.J. Gould &amp; N. Eldredge, "Punctuated equilibrium comes of age", Nature (1993) 366:223-7, p. 225.

Gould formulated the proposition so that it cannot be disputed: "..certain groups were extinction prone because they disappeared.." But the real reason for their extinction needs be derived independently elsewhere. Nothing is explained by stating that because they were extinction prone they died, their death implies that they were extinction prone. Extinction and disappear or death are a synonymous play with words that alludes to the same fact but masquerades as an explanation. It is derived from Aristotle and EpiCurus philosophy: The good (robot,gene rabbit etc) lived while the bad one died or in other words: What happens happens.
 * How was this "extinction-proneness" measured, except by noting that the groups disappeared?
 * How was their disapearability measured except by noting that they were "extinction-prone"?

Talk origins
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-meritt/evolution.html According to the Talk.Origins Archive, sharks haven't changed because they "are excellently adapted to their particular niche in their environment." Does anyone know how this "excellent adaptation" was measured (apart from observing that sharks haven't changed, that is)?

Irish Elk
Mayr, trying to explain why things like the giant antlers of the "Irish Elk" and the canines of saber-toothed tigers aren't problematic for Darwinism: quote: "All these features would seem, at first sight, to be highly deleterious, and it was claimed that natural selection could not possibly have favored or even tolerated their evolution. However, the studies of Rensch, Simpson, Gould, and various other paleontologists have demonstrated that the species that had these "excessive" characters always flourished for considerable periods of time when these characters clearly were of selective advantage and that their ultimate extinction coincided with a climatic or broad faunal change which simultaneously led to the extinction of nummerous other species without such `excessive' characters." E. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist, (Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 250. Ques:These species "flourished", so their structures must have been favored after all?

Wikipedia natural selection Nov.2009 revision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection "....Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution...."
 * rephrase:The process by which.... traits that make it more likely for an organism to .... reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution...."
 * rephrase:The ... traits that make it more likely for an organism to .... reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution...."
 * rephrase:The ... traits that .....enables .... reproduction become more common in a population................ It is a key mechanism of evolution...."
 * rephrase:The traits that enables reproduction, become more common.

"Enables" and "more common" are a play with words that alludes to the same fact: It says the same thing twice. The "truth of the proposition cannot be disputed"(Darwin's exact words), there is no way to falsify or test this. How could it possibly be incorrect. We are told that certain traits became more common. But why did they become more common?
 * Ans: Because the traits were enabling. But obviously the traits were "enabling" or they wouldn't have become more common now would they? It is the same tautological essence form OoS where Darwin explained that the dinosaurs went extinct because they were "less improved"- which is an irrefutable proposition.

http://creationmuseum.org/ AIG is adding to the confusion by not comprehending that this tautology was ad-hocly associated with "natural means of selection" from PatrickMatthews, an arbitrary choice of words. Darwin, Aristotle, EpiCurus, EmpeDocles, JamesHutton and Patrick Matthews tautology, if labeled Ninja Turtles wouldn't make a turtle putting on a ninja suite a tautology. No sentence or term has a single true meaning. Only an argument containing a motive from some individual can be a tautology, such an argument might contain the term NaturalSelection, Roger rabbit or Wizard of Oz. http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/arguments-we-dont-use have removed the section that "natural selection is a tautology" shouldn't be used. Many in the academic world from JerryFodor to others realize that there is serious issues with this term and the concepts associated with it.

Wikipedia's natural selection opening paragraph

 * Dec 2008 to Dec2007 revision of natural selection on Wikipedia main article

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_selection&oldid=259585753 "....Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction of genotypes...." But no citation is given of any modern or ancient works, nor do we know who was the author and what is his world view, background knowledge or Pragmatics and who he was interpreting. If Darwin was interpreted how did Darwin explain something he didn't know about: Genes? What was this Wikipedia contributor's view on the question of: WhatIsLife - http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/the_meaning_of_life.php?page=all The meaning of Life? For all we know a cat could have walked over a keyboard.

Where did matter come from ?
Neo-Aristotelians would say that "evolution" doesn't deal with this, which is an appeal to AbstractAuthority: Mr.Evoluton, Mr.Science and Mr.Religion don't exist, they don't say anything neither do they inhabit separate domains a mistake Gould makes with his NOMA(concept lifted from the writings of KarlMarx). Only a conscious being can say something or not deal with something, be religious or materialistic. The Neo-Empedoclians don't wish to deal with the question because the of the notion that their spiritual leader had about "atoms fighting each other". Empedoclian tautological thinking infused into our science, culture religion and politics. The entire premise of our society at large pivots on a battle-for-survival myth formulated in such a way that it cannot be disputed(Darwin's term). The mythology was arbitrarily associated with selection, adaptation, words given the atheistic premises of most isn't available to them as per DernavichInfidels

Saying the same thing twice
- merged with opening section

Darwin on propositions which cannot be disputed
http://www.omgili.com/newsgroups/alt/talk/creationism/955c938b-640c-4383-a32c-b6b9398fb7e1o40g2000prngooglegroupscom.html There are key passages where Darwin reformulated PatrickMatthews, JamesHutton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Julien_d%27Omalius_d%27Halloy, EpiCurus, Democritus, Spencer and Aristotle labeling their concept natural selection and makes his argument irrefutable or Unfalsifiable by using the phrase propositions which cannot be disputed. d'Halloy's concept with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_with_modification in 1848 was labeled natural selection by Darwin.


 * OoS For if each part is liable to individual variations at all ages, and the variations tend to be inherited at a corresponding or earlier age--propositions which cannot be disputed--then the instincts and structure of the young could be slowly modified as surely as those of the adult; and both cases must stand or fall together with the whole theory of natural selection.


 * OoS".......... That many and serious objections may be advanced against the theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection, I do not deny. I have endeavoured to give to them their full force. Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, that all parts of the organisation and instincts offer, at least individual differences--that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct--and, lastly, that gradations in the state of perfection of each organ may have existed, each good of its kind.  The truth of these propositions cannot, I think, be disputed. ........."

The words preservation, profitable, perfection, perfected and good are a synonymous play with words that alludes to same fact as shown by reducing the passage it to its core proposition which cannot be disputed: Species are engaged in a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of those profitable structures that allowed them to survive.


 * OoS:".........IF under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of life, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variations had ever occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same manner as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, or the [survival of the fittest], I have called Natural Selection. It leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life, and consequently, in most cases, to what must be regarded as an advance in organisation....."


 * Question: Other than noting the offspring survived how was their fitness or suitability(Spencer's word) measured?

Darwin's definitions of Natural Selection
His usage of natural selection or natural preservation(his preferred term) must be viewed in the light of Fitness and its meaning in 1800's. "...I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate ...."

"...This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection...."

"...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)...., interpreting MalThus".


 * How did Darwin measure the variations usefulness other than noting they were preserved?
 * How did Darwin measure the variations preservability other than noting they were useful?
 * The idea symbolically represented with "preservebility" and "usefullness" is the same at the Pragmatics level. They aren't semantic dictionary synonyms but the ideas they represent self-referentially refers to one another, it says the same thing twice. It alludes to the same concept, making the concept the sentence symbolically represents a tautology. Natural selection for example isn't a tautology, it isn't even a sentence but a cluster of two symbols that like a round and square rock means nothing.

Darwin on the preservation of individuals
"....All these results, as we shall more fully see in the next chapter, follow from the struggle for life. Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring..."

Which reduces to: Variations that are profitable will result in the preservation of such individuals. "profitable" and "preservation" alludes to the same fact guaranteeing the truth of the proposition. It reflects Aristotle and EpiCurus, Democritus underlying philosophy : What happens, happens.

Natural selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Natural_selection/Archive_8 Natural selection is the process by which individual organisms with favorable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with unfavorable traits.

Question: Other than noting that the traits survived how was their favorability measured? more likely and favorable alludes to the same fact guaranteeing the truth of the proposition and is thus fallacious. The tautology also assumes the underlying premise, thus begging the question: It is assumed that all species today are descendant from other species, this is the very issue that must be proven. See this thread for further clarity by author NoShellSwill on Google groups - http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/ac52c73b1fc53deb/8a86863346c98d5d?#8a86863346c98d5d

The term natural selection Darwin lifted from PatrickMatthew natural means of selection. The concept with NS though was from JamesHutton in 1794 and can be traced back all the way to Aristotle and EpiCurus. No word or sentence has a single true meaning or concept. SoF for example is either a tautological proposition or expression depending on who says SoF, just like "Beer is Beer" has an intention, either fallacious or poetic depending on who uttered the phrase, as this http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/1114725461.shtml. SoF and Beer-is-Beer etc. doesn't have a single true meaning. JamesHutton(1794), PatrickMatthews, Wallace,HerbertSpencer, Darwin and others reformulated Aristotle and EpiCurus original tautology in many different ways. The grammatical gargoyle natural selectionwas the term coined to associated this tautology with by Darwin.


 * talk archive revision of Natural selection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Natural_selection/Archive_8 Natural selection is the process by which individual organisms with favorable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with unfavorable traits.


 * Dec 2008 to Dec2007 revision of natural selection on Wikipedia main article

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_selection&oldid=259585753 "....Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction of genotypes...."


 * Sept 2009 revision

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection Sept 2009 "...Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution...."

Neither of these revisions cite any pages in Darwin's OoS, who wrote these paragraphs ? The 2008 one had "Genes", which Darwin and Aristotle didn't know about. Why was genes removed in the 2009 revision, it is like imagine somebody removes the word "Newton" in a revision of the gravity article.

Lucretius
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A12&pageseq=1 "...p.7,8 Lucretius" The mechanical shock of the atoms being in his view the all-sufficient cause of things, he combats the notion that the constitution of nature has been in any way 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. Not after sage deliberation did the atoms station themselves in their right places, nor..."

"...p.22 During the Middle Ages the doctrine of atoms had to all appearance vanished from discussion. In all probability it held its ground among sober-minded and thoughtful men, though neither the church nor the world was prepared to hear of it with tolerance. Once, in the year 1348, it received distinct expression. But retraction by compulsion immediately followed, and, thus discouraged, it slumbered till the seventeenth century, when it was revived by a contemporary and friend of Hobbes and Malmesbury, the orthodox Catholic provost of Digne, Gassendi. But before stating his relation to the Epicurean doctrine, it will be well to say a few words on the effect..."

Right up to our present day with "alleles" fighting it out amongst themselves: http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/deac2432776866c6/b7fce5490e4d08d6#b7fce5490e4d08d6 WilliamMorse wrote 2 July 2009: "....Let me try to illustrate my thinking. The importance of a rate of increase would be if we had two alleles competing to become fixed in a population. Both of them are superior to the current predominant allele, and the one with the greatest rate of increase is the one that will become the new predominant allele. I don't think this describes any common real world scenario...."

Democritus
From JohnTyndall - http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A12&pageseq=1 He is said to have discovered and educated ProtaGoras the sophist, being struck as much by the manner in which he, being a hewer of wood, tied up his faggots as by the sagacity of his conversation. DemoCritus returned poor from his travels, was supported by his brother, and at length wrote his great work entitled DiaKosmos which he read publicly before the people of his native town. He was honoured by his countrymen in various ways, and died serenely at a great age.

The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his uncompromising antagonism to those who deduced the phenomena of nature from the caprices of the gods. They are briefly these:


 * . From nothing comes nothing. Nothing that existscan be destroyed. All changes are due to the combination and separation of molecules.


 * . Nothing happens by chance. Every occurrence has its cause from which it follows by necessity.


 * . The only existing things are the atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion.


 * . The atoms are infinite in number and infinitely various in form; they strike together, and the lateral motions and whirlings which thus arise are the beginnings of worlds.


 * . The varieties of all things depend upon the varieties of their atoms, in number, size, and aggregation.


 * . The soul consists of fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. These are the most mobile of all. They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their motions the phenomena of life arise.

The first five propositions are a fair general statement of the atomic philosophy, as now held. As regards the sixth, Democritus made his fine smooth atoms do duty for the nervous system, whose functions were then unknown. The atoms of Democritus are individually without sensation; they combine in obedience to mechanical laws; and not only organic forms, but the phenomena of sensation and thought are the result of their combination.

That great enigma, 'the exquisite adaptation of one part of an organism to another part, and to the conditions of life, more especially the construction of the human body, Democritus made no attempt to solve.

Empedocles, a man of more fiery and poetic nature, introduced the notion of love and hate among the atoms to account for, their combination and separation. Noticing this gap in the doctrine of Democritus, he struck in with the penetrating thought, linked, however, with some wild speculation, that it lay in the very nature of those combinations which were suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with their environment) to maintain themselves, while unfit combinations, having no proper habitat, must rapidly disappear. Thus more than 2,000 years ago the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest,' which in our day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such extraordinary significance, had received at all events partial enunciation.3..."


 * rephrase "...Democritus struck with the penetrating thought ..... that it lay in the very nature of those combinations which were ...... in harmony with their environment... to maintain themselves, while unfit combinations disappear. Thus more than 2,000 years ago the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest,'......... has been raised to significance...."


 * rephrase "...Democritus struck with the penetrating thought ..... that those in harmony with their environment maintained themselves, while the unfit combinations disappear. Thus more than 2,000 years ago the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest was has been raised to significance.

...."


 * rephrase for tautological essence "...Those in harmony maintained themselves, while the unfit disappear.  This proposition cannot be disputed hence is a logical fallacy. It reflects Aristotle philosophy : What happens, happens. See Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity - http://www.amazon.com/Creationism-Critics-Antiquity-Classical-Lectures/dp/0520260066/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228971065&sr=1-1...."

Is survival of the fittest a tautology ?
Spencer got SurvivalOfTheFittest from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Reinhold_Treviranus, Buffon. Depends on who says SoF and in what context with what background knowledge and Pragmatics since a term only means what an individual intends it to mean. Try and contact Herbert Spencer and ask him two questions:
 * Other than noting the species survived how was their fitness or suitability measured?
 * Other than noting they were suitable how was their survivability measured? 

Spencer sold over a million books, OoS was read by a person in 1860 with Spencer's ideas, today Spencer is hardly ever mentioned. From his writing with fitness he meant suitable, he was widely sited during the 19th century. As Darwin wrote:"..natural selection or survival of the fittest which is a better expression....." which to a read back then meant: "....survival of the most suitable is a better expression....." Today nobody knows what is meant with the word "fitness", what concept is being conveyed isn't clear. "Fitness" isn't a concept, but a means for signal sender to encode his particular concept within in his reference frame a 150 years after Spencer.

Natural Selection or Natural Preservation ?
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/tree/browse_frm/thread/557a525aebe1bddb/65e7f5e644080d89?rnum=91&_done=%2Fgroup%2Ftalk.origins%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2F557a525aebe1bddb%3F#doc_14e8bfadb9bedff0

Howard when you say "...planetary attraction follows an inverse square law..." you aren't formulating a new theory but interpreting an existing theory. In every single established theory following a process where the formulator provided a description that at very least was well reasoned(not science - nobody knows what that word means), we know who this person was - without exception.

What many do today such as Wilkins is inventing their own theories, whole new conceptualizations but are to modest to announce that they have brand new idea because of the possible peer pressure or non-favorable reception, especially by those who would decide on tenure positions. Wilkins said of Dawkins "....if you read his books you are guaranteed to get it wrong...." which didn't go down very well with Myers, leading to Wilkins leaving Scienceblogs. Both Dawkins and Wilkins says "selection", but as a single word it is a proxy for conflicting viewpoints when used by either user: They are not neccessarily talking about the same thing. All language, sentences, phrases and words either conveys the concept of a patter or a design and a clear cut distinction between these two. The sentence "Outside was formed a selection of rocks" means what? Without knowing who says so we can't infer whether "selection" is used in the pattern or design sense. If a tornado hit a mountain it would be a "pattern", but if John selected the rocks it would be a "design". Not being able to distinguish between patterns or designs indicates a mental illness (Tautological Oxymorons). Elsewhere you wrote: "... design is subset of pattern...." , you specifically left the "a" out. is a different way of saying order is subset of disorder.

What one needs to get clarity about what you are writing Howard, are you interpreting various authors or are you actually formulating your own theory? Lets presume you are interpreting Darwin who wrote to Wallace that he made a mistake with his choice of "selection" because it anthromorphosizes nature and he should have used "preservation" to formulate the concepts surrounding the Malthusian struggle for existence. (The struggle for existence is a False Dichotomy and unfalsifiable, it doesn't explain how complex chemical reactions results in control algorithms or whether the algorithms are even dependent of the chemical processes or the transition matrix that maps polypeptide space into frog-space.)

Thus lets replace every instance of "selection" by "preservation" because that was the intent of Darwin. Perhaps you would say that you are not dealing with Darwin, but who then? No conclusion can then be inferred because we wouldn't know to what concept you would be referring to. It could for example be a brand new theory that you personally crafted but haven't shared yet. A reader reading Dawkins on how Darwin was the greatest scientist that ever lived, who has deeply immersed himself in Dawkins view might then come to an erroneous conclusion when reading your post.

The insistance on knowing whose concept with "selection" we are referring to isn't unreasonable or meant to be disingenious, but rooted in a Biblical world view where who said what when and where defines the force of the sentence. Note that I said "sentence" not "word", with "selection,preservation,survival,random" we are dealing with a word, a tool or device , a mechanism or means for communicating whatever concept the wielder of the tool wishes it to be: No single true pattern or design can be associated with it. Even the word "random" when used in a sentence can actually be used by the user to communicate design or intent. For example when you do a probability sample by "selecting at random" any marble from either of ten bags filled with marbles, there was an intentional decision being made at random not a completely "random" occurence. Which is why the English language is such huge fun, it can be used to say one thing but mean something completely different. "By the process of selection this organism evolved" - Selection what? Or as one professor wrote on his bio:"....I study selection...." - What selection? Wilkins says he is in the "Selectionist camp", but if we read Darwin this should be "I am in the Preservationist camp"..... depends though if Wilkins is interpreting himself or another person or Darwin we can't come to any conclusion as to his work: It isn't even wrong.

Elsewhere Wilkins wrote that the distinction between AS and NS is incorrect it should just be selection(whatever this is supposed to mean). Lets combine this view with what some unknown author on Wikipedia with his yet to be defined concept with NS between 2007 and 2008 wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_selection&oldid=259585753 "....Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction of genotypes...." wrote with what Darwin wrote that he meant "natural preservation" and replace "natural selection" with just "preservation":

rephrased wikipedia quote: '''Preservation is the process by which favorable.... traits become more common .... and unfavorable ....traits become less common....'''

rephrase again: '''Preservation is the process by which favorable.... traits become more preserved .... and unfavorable ....traits become less preserved....'''

How must we interpret this in terms of Darwin, Wilkins and some unknown author. Was "preservation" used in the pattern or design sense and what would this mean in terms of Howards "....design is subset of pattern....", which is another way of saying order is subset of disorder.

principle of divergence
To answer the question: What is the principle of Divergence or more specific the difference between the concept Darwin had with it and the concept he had with Theory of Evolution? None: ToNS, ToE, selection, divergence, Survival of the most suitable (Spencer)...., etc..... were all different word fillers for the same tautological essence from PatrickMatthews: Those that didn't reproduce were less perfect while those that did reproduce were more perfect or what is adapted is adapted from JamesHutton, Which Darwin restated as "....The preservation of individuals, which were favorable, and the destruction of those which weren't favorable......" , labeling it ToE which he also called Theory of Natural selection 36 times, which was that the dinosaurs died because there were less improved.

With the error continuing here at Harvard http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/wrangham-we-are-what-we-eat-and-what-we-cook/ ",,,Wrangham says. “We are biologically adapted to cook food. It’s part of who we are and affects us in every way you can imagine: biologically, anatomically, socially...” How did Wrangham deduce that were are adapted to cook food other than noting we do cook food? He might as well have said a rock is adapted at being a rock.

What is the theory of evolution?
What is the difference between the concepts encoded with the word "evolution" or "evolvere"(Latin) and the term "Theory of evolution" and who is encoding for such a concept from what knowledge base? On Wikipedia "Theory of evolution" redirects to the page marked Evolution: Why? Who is the person that decided that the concept Darwin encoded for with the word couplet "Theory of evolution", used only twice in OoS can't have a separate page nor be allowed to be quoted in the main article of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution. There are multiple concepts from many authors (punk-eek, gradualism) who are encoding for different ideas with the word "evolution". Why isn't there a separate entry dealing with the concept Darwin had with the term "Theory of gradual evolution" or "Theory of evolution". Gould's PunkEek concept with "theory of evolution" differs from Darwin's concept with "Theory of gradual evolution", used only once. Darwin objected to "evolution" the word because back then it meant God was involved, "evolution" appears only a few times in the book.

http://www.harunyahya.com/books/darwinism/atlas_creation/atlas_creation_01.php doesn't say what exactly is the ToE, what he is refuting isn't clear.

Natural selection as successful algorithm from patent filings
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6266654.html - Patent5824312Selection
 * "....Natural selection is the most successful algorithm known for the generation of solutions to problems. Some philosophers of science characterize the algorithm in quite general terms--the differential reproduction of randomly generated successful variations--and assert that it is the only solution-generating algorithm there can be....."

"...the differential reproduction of randomly generated successful variations-...". Which rephrased reduces to: Successful variations replicate. "replicate" and "successful" alludes to the same fact, it says the same thing twice. Natural selection, differential, randomly are word fillers obscuring the underlying Aristotelian tautological fallacy.

If natural selection is blind, why isn't it stupid?
Kenneth Miller said in his Youtube video concerning IC that :"..... natural selection is blind......" But if NaturalSelection is blind then why isn't it stupid? Only a conscious being can be blind and stupid, the OxyMoron NaturalSelection allows a duel meaning to be intended by a user. If NaturalSelection is conscious then what is a NaturalSelection? Is it a being, a monster with a tail and long teeth on which is written NaturalSelection, what precisely is Kenneth Miller trying to communicate. Did he use "blind" as a metaphor and if so why are metaphors even being used because they are a means to cloud a concept if the user doesn't know what he is trying to say. Miller is wielding the term Natural Selection as some sort of universal mechanism which would make it just as implausible as a single differential equation explaining all of physics, depending though on what he defines as a Natural selection.

Notes on Darwin
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=dawkins_29_2 Dawkins wrote "...Less obnoxious but still intellectually unhelpful is the loose and uncritical way in which amateur biologists apply selection at inappropriate levels in the hierarchy of life. “Survival of the fittest species, extinction of poorly adapted species” sounds superficially like true natural selection, but the apparent resemblance is positively misleading. As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them....."
 * Darwin never said "reproductive success", "random mutations", "differential survival" or "differential reproduction.


 * He said chance was an "...incorrect expression...." after using "chance" throughout his book to mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness as interpreted by CharlesKingsley, Osborn and Burroughs.
 * RM surfaced in the journals around 1910, after Darwin died.
 * In a letter to Asa Gray he noted how he deduced the principle of "Descent with modification" between 1840 and 1850, but it was a paper by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Julien_d%27Omalius_d%27Halloy in 1848 form which he got the term. The term DWM darwin labeled Natural Selection. Halloy was a catholic theist.
 * Why does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_with_modification redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution ?
 * Read http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/the_meaning_of_life.php?page=all The meaning of Life

Ken Ham and the EU "believe" in natural selection
Both Ken Ham and the EU believe in natural selection. Are they talking about the same thing?

Links
http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/Natural-Selection-is-Recursive_6572.html

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Natural_selection


 * Episcopal church tautology
 * William Lane Craig
 * Speed of light
 * Ken Ham
 * Stevedoetsch
 * John Jones
 * Differential reproductive success
 * Tom Campbell
 * Theology
 * Aristotle
 * Ernst Mayr
 * Bacterial resistance Resistance is an effect, not a cause. There is a cause effect inversion.
 * Skeptic za org
 * Simon Blackburn
 * Samuel Butler
 * Pandasthumb
 * Henry Morris
 * self-organization
 * Wallace Letter to Darwin on natural selection
 * preferential decision
 * Biomimetics
 * D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson Pending   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Arcy_Wentworth_Thompson
 * Newspeak
 * Creationwiki
 * AristotleTautological, Tautology Journals , Tautology Usenet, Tautology Blogs , Tautology Notes
 * Tautology Culture
 * Memes1
 * Ian Pollster Usenet
 * Species Concept
 * Robot1 analogy
 * Tautology Equivocation, Gravity Past, Tautology Afrikaans Wikipedia
 * About dot com, Chris Colby , Stephen Meyer , Jeffery Shallit
 * Colorless green
 * Bio-evolution lacks both a dynamic and an object
 * Sean Pitman
 * PZ Myers
 * Phillip Johnson
 * William R. Greg
 * Darwin's Predecessors
 * Irreducible Functionality Complexity is ambigious.
 * Paul Janet Professor back in 1870
 * Popper
 * Maverick Philosopher
 * Aristotle Metaphysics
 * Milton Wain collection of pre Darwin authors
 * Wikipedia Selection article
 * Naming Conventions Back to the future or forward to the past.
 * David Skjaerlund Traces back Evolutionx to ancient Egyptian, Babylonian or Sumerian religions.
 * http://www.wireclub.com/Forums/ViewTopic.aspx?ParentId=834264&ForumId=647371 Democritus and materialism
 * http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2010/01/it-is-what-it-is.html
 * http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/browse_frm/thread/3ad8e23dc2d07d34/03e43d55c1ec3faa#03e43d55c1ec3faa
 * http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/
 * http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/09nsel06.htm Tautology and circular reasoning. Note that a tautology isn't the same thing as circular reasoning.
 * http://rightwingnews.com/2010/02/the-best-quotes-from-jonah-goldbergs-liberal-fascism/ The meanings and concepts with liberal were different a 100 years ago then today
 * http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/functional-hierarchy Will comment on the natural selection usage later
 * Charles Hodge 1874 What is Darwinism?
 * Automated Selection
 * Peppered Moth Pattern or Design Detection and selection can be used in either pattern or design sense
 * http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Natural_selection
 * Andrew Dickson White 1898 A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom.
 * http://conservapedia.com/Natural_selection They equivocate between validities and falsifiable propositions. No scientific theory like Newtons inverse square law is ever a fact. Only logical unfalsifiable assertions are facts because we say they are.


 * http://asktheatheist.rationalresponders.com/topic/perry_marshall begs the question and ns tautology mangling as usual.
 * Eduard Zeller Stoics, Epicureans

Allan Orr

 * http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Orr.html
 * http://www.bostonreview.net/BR21.5/orr.html
 * http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/orr.htm Dennett replies
 * http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=testing-natural-selection
 * http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/dennetts-strange-idea-is-a-bad-idea-for-recognizing-biological-function/

Later
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/ce69aa80b40c883d/b9305c130c6383c3?q=#b9305c130c6383c3 Tautologification of society. At university students are forced to provide a rhetorical tautological narrative of the world. Refusal to do so will lead to dismissal and failed grades. It allows the MIT, Harvard Epicureans to mold and shape their students world view, forcing them to come to conclusions which might be true but are non-sequiturs. There are no YEC at Harvard, a true Xtian will be expelled and one that graduates there will have his name removed from the book of Life by the Lord Jesus. We are in the same situation with the Epicureans 2000 years ago, they don't mind us going to church as long as we also engage in rhetorical tautological and truism thinking on Monday, using the phrase NS1.

During Roman times Xtians were burned alive by the Epicureans, our milksop laws prevent them from doing this to us today. But their tautological stranglehold over society and culture have become so strong that they excert powerful economic sanction against us. The early Christians paid with their lives back then, why should our fate as YEC be any different(economic ruin, losing your job, impossible to do biology courses)?

http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/PoE/pe04hist.html Epicurus

http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof92.htm Creationism and its critics in Antiquity

http://www.hanrott.com/epicureanism/epicureanhistory.php Epicureanism after Epicurus

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932236473/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk

http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2010/04/darwin-and-his-defenders.html Analogy with presidential elections

Talk origins tautology section
http://www.talkorigins.org/sandbox/kwork/Ver4_tautology.html

http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/1bd8a311d0211e87/9a2ecf1859da52dd?#9a2ecf1859da52dd

http://www.archive.org/stream/defenceofsincere00fulk/defenceofsincere00fulk_djvu.txt Vain repetition, tautology 1582 A.D. Cambridge press or

http://www.archive.org/details/defenceofsincere00fulk

Notes on Natural selection as used by authors

 * WhatIsTheTheoryOfNaturalSelection
 * Steven E. Jones Extensive notes on circular reasoning, natural selection etc.
 * AristotlePragmatics, AcPragmatics , BushMen, AntonioLima , AltenBerg16

ArunRajPragmatics, AnaxiMander , AlexanderVargas , AnswersGenesis
 * Ian Inkster
 * AndrewArensburger, DagYoPragmatics, ChristopherDenneyPragmatics , CharlesBirch , CoryAlbrecht
 * BecauseOfConvention, BeeSource , BenkeShet , BabylonDictionary ,BaronBodissey