I was just watching a video about Russia’s economic woes and the use of a certain term reminded me how insistent some members are about using the common meanings of words instead of the meanings appropriate to a specific topic. What I heard was this, that Russia has more liquid gold than anyone wants.
The use of “liquid” here is not the common one; the speaker was not saying that Russia has some large mass of molten gold. Insisting on the common definition here just makes the point ridiculous.
Which is why we need to use terms as they are defined in whatever field is being discussed – it not only allows for accurate communication, it is also honest.
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If a word has been deliberately repurposed or meaning changed there should be a good reason why. The English language is diverse enough for the appropriate word to be found without changing an established meaning. The net result is deception, whether deliberate of not, because only those in the know have the alternate meaning.
It becomes more complicated if the meaning of a word appears to have changed in recent years.
The word Gay has changed its meaning, but that is due more to culture than convenience. Perhaps homosexual has certain overtones that people wanted to avoid.
It does see that much of the contention around here is rooted more in linguistics than knowledge or other understanding.
However, having to be hyper-precise and inclusive can be both tiresome and almost impossible
Richard
The word “theory” certainly comes to mind in this context…
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You aren’t getting the point. Words don’t have single objective meanings. They have uses in contexts and different discourse communities use words differently in different contexts without any “change” of meaning taking place. In linguistics “tone” is a suprasegmental feature of a syllable nucleus that can create minimal pairs or impart grammatical content. In a household with teenagers or menopausal wives “tone” is the part of communication that tells dads/husbands they have done something deemed annoying. In shopping for stringed instruments, tone is the quality, projection, and balance of the music produced by the specific wood used. Nobody “changed the meaning of tone” in any of these cases, people can use the same word appropriately to communicate different things in different contexts.
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I am sorry, but in the case of “random” that does not apply.
When I was taught evolution random meant chance. It was at the heart of the theory. The whole point was that there was no guidance or direction. The deviations did not appear on command. Marsupials were a different direction unique to Australasia, not a transient for mammals (i,e, not because that final set of deviations did not occur there). This whole notion that random could mean anything else in science just did not exist. So it has changed, apparently.
Richard
…and anyone with access to a dictionary and/or the internet …
Awareness that a word has another technical definition is knowledge and understanding.
But this really shouldn’t be an issue. There are very few terms[1] that don’t have multiple meanings,[2] so context awareness is an unavoidable necessity.
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You are generalising (using derision)
I repeat
If random now means something other than chance then it has been changed.
Richard
‘Random’ in genetics meant the same in the 1970s that it does now:
“Secondly, modern synthesis authors took these processes to be `chancy’ in the sense that they were random with respect to fitness (e.g. Haldane, 1930; Dobzhansky, 1970). That is - mutation and recombination do not occur in response to any adaptive benefit they may incur.
…
Haldane, J. B. S. (1930). A mathematical theory of natural and artificial
selection.(Part VI, Isolation.).
Dobzhansky, T. (1970). Genetics of the evolutionary process.”[1]
The meaning of ‘random’ has not changed since the 1930s.
Sources of Evolutionary Contingency: Chance Variation and Genetic Drift (T.Y. William Wong) ↩︎
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A couple of other minor points:
- there is nothing in current evolutionary theory that suggests that ‘deviations’ appear on command.
- marsupials are not unique to Australasia; South American marsupials have been known for centuries.
- Marsupials are not considered a transient for mammals. Modern marsupials are definitely not considered a transient for mammals, and never have been. The most definitive reference seems to be GG Simpsons’s 1945 “The principles of classification and a classification of mammals”, which shows marsupials (Metatheria) and placentals (Eutheria) at the same taxonomic level, rather than placentals being nested within marsupials.
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If one knows the terms, then yes.
But if the community is open to people who have no real background in science - people who I wish were here more - who have genuine questions and concerns about the relationship between their faith and science, it must be expected that they are out of their depth and don’t know the technical terms or “right” vocabularly.
If the community is going to have any real value besides an echo chamber, or the local pub, then this kind of rule defeats it.
I have never said that there was.
However, even predictable would cause a problem, not that Nature is capable of predicting anything.
Knit picking as usual.
Depends who you talk to. Clearly it was not my idea, so it had to come from this forum, probably before you graced it ( I have been here quite a while)
One of the variations in the theory is precisely that, with the Platypus also featuring as a transient rather than a proverbial dead end. The fact is that the exact ancestry is yet to be finalised, although the route for birds seems to have be settled upon. (vaguely)
You will be telling me the sky isn’t blue next.
(There isn’t a tongue in cheek emoji here)
Richard
The definition of transitional species includes dead ends.
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Apparently my one-word unneologistic reply was considered insufficiently gracious. Or possibly insufficiently obscure, even though it overflew.
To retry, or not to retry - that is the question.
Well, I did.
Unsuccessfully.
Google informs me that “unneologistic” has been used at least once previously, in (appropriately!) a comment on a review of Finnegan’s Wake.
Some people never learn.
I would appreciate it if you two would ignore each other and stick to discussing things of substance as opposed to nits, knits, and any and all forms of picking. I’m just going to delete posts that do not further an intelligent conversation in any way. You have made cat-fighting into a spectator sport here and it is beneath both of your characters and intelects, no matter how much it might relieve your boredom. The internet is a big and interesting place, find something more constructive to do with your minds.
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If they aren’t dead ends, would they still be considered transitional?
Flightless feathered dinosaurs are considered transitional between featherless dinosaurs and birds.
But if flightless feathered dinosaurs had survived the K-T mass extinction event and were still around today, but flying feathered dinosaurs hadn’t, would they still be considered transitional?
They would still be transitional in a technical sense, but with the species they transitioned to having gone extinct first, it’s not exactly a likely example.
Rather like saying that crocodilians are transitional between archosaurs and Geosaurus. Technically true, but not very helpful.
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Species with a mixture of ancestral and derived features in the direct line of descent would also be transitional. The important part here is the mixture of features.
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Recasting the question:
If they aren’t dead ends because they lead to numerous extant species that are do not have the features of species to which they are technically transitional, would they still be considered transitional?
Or, more simply, would anyone describe an extant species as being transitional between two species that are both long extinct? I don’t think the question would arise.
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I don’t see why not. The only difficulty would be the amount of information you can get from a transitional species. If you are trying to understand what the direct line of descent looked like then you would want species that are as close to that line of descent as possible. For example, if monotremes were extant but both reptiles and placental/marsupial mammals had gone extinct* they would still be transitional between those fossil species. However, extant monotremes would still carry a lot of derived features that emerged after those lineages split off from one another and may have also lost features found in the common ancestor. This would make it difficult to reconstruct what the common ancestor looked like with a lot of detail.
*just ignore the fact that this would mean humans were extinct 
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Agreed, but I still don’t expect anyone to use alligators as an example of a transitional.
As with almost everything, some examples illustrate a concept better than others.