It is these rules that constitute the mechanics of science, evolutionary biology included. It is these rules that set the standard for what is empirical and what is not.
To insist that genetic comparisons are not empirical, are merely “a hypothesis at best” is to insist that either (a) genetic comparisons do not follow the rules, or (b) the rules do not place a sufficient constraint on the conclusions that are drawn from those comparisons.
If you want to establish that this is indeed the case, you must explain how the rules are not being followed, or justify your claim that they are not sufficient to place any constraints on your conclusions.
Otherwise you’re just hand-waving.
It is indeed. Clearly, because I am not @St.Roymond and I am not Martin Luther, it is a privileged expression that I am not allowed to use. This being the case, I’m going to have to think of more creative ways of expressing myself.
It’s really hard to apply evolutionary principles to a single anecdotal case of an alpha male being away from the pack for an extended period. Wolves are complex animals, and there may have been some circumstance that caused an alpha to be away for a time. And why wouldn’t the alpha think that the new pups were his, as he is the alpha? He may not bother with the intricacy of gestation periods and time away .
The fact that the alpha was away from the group isn’t against evolutionary principles but the idea that this was done “voluntarily” to let the subordinates breed, and then the alpha “willingly and knowingly” invested his own effort into raising their offspring is what is against natural selection.
But, yes, I was going to suggest an interpretation along the lines of what you suggested (assuming the story was not purely made up), i.e., that the alpha was unexpectedly detained away from the group for some reason, and a subordinate took advantage of the brief time window to mate with a female (cuckold the alpha male). Then, the alpha may have returned and raised the offspring, unaware they were not his.
Animals have developed many paternity-guarding behaviours but these are not always 100% effective. But to suggest that a male willingly gives paternity to a rival male and then takes care of the rival’s offspring is sort of like suggesting that someone’s discovered a perpetual motion machine
I work with it (generally indirectly) on most days: it affects how I identify forms in one layer that are intermediate in form between those in layers below and layers above. It makes no difference to any of what I would consider to be significant parts of my theology.
considering what I said earlier, it is to be expected that God gave us a reality that allows us to understand how his reality works. To believe that the bible tells us that God made mud pie humans might be suitable for the understanding of the illiterate and the children listening to the story, but intellectuals should be able to figure that it is a way to tell the story of creation in a way that is fathomable to everyone.
The question is why one would reject evolution as God’s way to propagate biological life and develop it to the stage of human complexity? Ask yourself why you would insist on God doing a “manual creation”.
A lot of people do consider evolution incompatible with God based on it including the concept of physical death which they believe did not exist prior to the fall, thus disproving the bible. That however only reveals a poor understanding of the bible, in particular in the light of the crucifixion at which point it should become clear that God expects us to lay down our physical life for the benefit of others as the ultimate act of love. The death mentioned in the fall is not the physical death which is irrelevant to life but the spiritual one, One dies as a consequence of loosing eternal life, that which is with God, by rejecting his authority by defining oneself in ones own self and physical body. If one thinks back to puberty one should recognise the symptoms - rejecting the moral authority of ones parents by defining ones own. It goes together with the awareness of sexual shame, so one should recognise the poetic description of puberty in the fall.
So you can see, I have a different understanding of life and death, in part from my work on viability. biological life in a nutshell is the ability to control the movement of energy of matter by “will” or instructions, so in bacteria you can terminate life by either destroying the information, e.g. scramble the nucleic acid, or by destroying the cell membrane, thus the ability of the bacterium to partition energy.
Once we understand the concept of life to be that action of will upon matter or energy, the prayer for thy will to be done takes on a different meaning, e.g. to let God live through us and thus in the end to identify with his will. Thus my saying:
To live forever
is the art
to learn to live
in Jesus heart
Whatever animals the piece was about hunted as a pack and raised offspring as a pack, the alpha didn’t do all the work.
As for “no evolutionary benefit” and “one’s increased reproduction”, the two are not the same: one refers to the pack and the species, the other to an individual. Individual success is not the same as pack or species success.
The fact that the alpha doesn’t do all the work in the group is irrelevant (as I indicated above, subordinates may stay and contribute to a group for various reasons including Kin Selection). Natural selection operates based on individual fitness --there is no evidence for “group selection” or “species selection”, i.e., there is no evidence that an individual ever voluntarily refrains from its own reproduction solely to benefit the group or the species.
Hey, it’s not my Latin, I just borrowed it from Martin Luther who used to in response to bad theology.
This is why in 100- and 200-level science courses over half our grade on lab work and papers was based on following the rules: if we didn’t follow the rules it matter no one bit if our conclusion were correct, and when our conclusions were not correct, if we’d at least followed the rules our grades were above average.
There’s always Hebrew “הֶבֶל”, the word rendered as “vanity” in Ecclesiastes, or “הֶבֶל הֲבָלִים֙”, “vanity of vanities”, i.e. a wisp of vapor, something meaningless – “hevel havelim” in Latin letters.
That’s contrary to the biology courses I took in my university days; in fact we got a bit tired of reading material that showed how cooperation and group behavior are extremely important.
Did you read what I wrote above? Cooperation certainly is prevalent in groups, but there is always a net benefit to both actors. It is never “altruistic” in the sense of an individual voluntarily giving up its own fitness for the sake of a rival.
(I’ve taught animal behaviour for 25 years at the undergrad and graduate levels at university and have published over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic so I think I’m pretty up to date on current theory on this…).
Yes yu like that criteria. You cannot challenge the God science outsied its domain Sceience is a law unto itself. (It has its own ruels)
And even if it breaks them they are still immutable.because science is imutable. You cannot challenege science or scentists.
I did. But I am only disputing the level of certainty and the taxonomy of status. I am not criticising the scientists. They are only working within the framework they have. Chances are theya re not as dogmatic as their representatives here who are so eager to defend them that they cannot see a valid critique even if it whacks the in the face.
Check out Dr. Steve Schaffner, @glipsnort himself. There is way more than a chance he understands your ‘critique’, such as it is. Is he one of your dogmatic representatives?
it is hard to get it out of some peoples mind that natural selection is the epiphany of individual selfishness. Just wonder how this works for a spider species were the male is used as a source of nutritional supply post copulation.
Truth rules, but many lay people do not know enough about the science to ‘critique’ it with any degree of relevancy. Incredulity and presumption play outsized roles in their arguments. The analogy to godless meteorology really is apropos.
Not sure what you’re asking? But the “selfish” principle still holds for such a male spider because the nutrients he donates to the female by letting her eat his body post-copulation go towards improving the survival of his own offspring (via the formation of more and higher quality eggs in her body). Spider males of such species only mate once and they do not have paternal care, so once he has deposited his sperm, the only way for him to enhance the propagation of his genes any further is by donating the nutrition contained in his body tissues to his offspring. Thus, this suicidal behaviour is favoured by natural selection.
Now… if you had spider males throwing themselves into the jaws of females that they hadn’t copulated with…that would be truly altruistic and something not explainable by natural selection.
More precisely, it couldn’t be explained by natural selection for that trait – it could be a by-product of selection for some other trait. So selection for sacrificial behavior toward females that males have mated with could sometimes incidentally result in the same behavior when it’s not beneficial.
Yes, I agree, that sometimes a “detrimental” trait can be selected because it is genetically linked to a different trait that is beneficial (i.e., pleiotropic genes), and thus it rides along with that other trait. But in that case, the net effect of the two traits still has to have a positive effect on the overall fitness of the organism for it to be selected, i.e. ultimately its still related to the capacity of the individual to “selfishly” reproduce.
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