If you define exception as something that is known to exist, rather than including hypothetical cases, then indeed impossibilities would not qualify as exceptions. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to say that an even prime number greater than two would be an exception to the rule that there are no even prime numbers greater than two, but that is simply a matter of how one defines terms.
However, saying that something is an impossibility and therefore can’t happen does carry risk of circularity. Outside of mathematics, it is quite difficult to say that something is absolutely impossible. Quantum mechanics emphasizes that highly unlikely things do occur sometimes, for example. Of course, it is reasonable to be skeptical of claims of unlikely things. But the Bible claims that the miracles are indeed unlikely things; it does not claim that people are resurrected all the time, for example, but rather credits them to an exceptional work of God. And certainly a deity like the one described in the Bible would be able to do such.
I’ve never read Dawkins, but I think it extremely likely that he, too, thinks fitness relates to the unit of selection in its environment. What’s different about considering the gene as the unit of selection, as he did, is that the gene’s environment includes the organism in which it resides.
Darwin made extremely clear that by natural selection he meant a process that makes an organism fit into its environment.
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.
That depends on what you mean by the environment. If you mean climate and the plants that grow in a region, evolutionary change can happen quite nicely with the environment as a constant. I’ll go back to the cheetah and springbok again: as the slower springbok are caught and killed by the cheetahs, the average speed of springbok rises; in turn, the slower cheetahs will be edged out by the faster ones; as the cheetahs grow faster generation by generation, the new slower springbok will get caught. This feeds a cycle where both cheetahs and springbok steadily become faster.
If at some point a physiological maximum is reached, it will be something else that makes some springbok get caught, and something else that allows the cheetahs to catch them.
Why do people believe things that are clearly not true? Why do people who are rational in most things believe that evolution is a lie? I would day that it is because they allow their Ideology to control their minds.
Dawkins, like Darwin, does not accept the reality of GOD, therefore he does not believe that the universe is rational. Random is not rational. I hope we are all in agreement with that. Since the mutation of genes is random, Dawkins readily accepted the concept that evolution was based on the positive mutation of genes, but not the view that evolution is based on adapting to the environment, which s rational…
It seems you consistently misuse the word ‘rational’. There is nothing illogical about the concept of randomness and ‘random’ is impersonal so it cannot possess the attribute of rationality, of being able to use reason.
You are right in saying there is nothing illogical about the concept of randomness, but random means the opposite of rational, which means that something is predictable. Random means unpredictable. This why it is true that if random “order” is not rational.
Rational does not mean something is predictable, and likewise random does not mean unpredictable. Those are misuses of the words. Random does not mean the opposite of rational. And we make statistical predictions based on randomness all the time. We may not be able to predict the results of a given individual coin toss (although it’s extremely unlikely it will end standing on its edge ), but you certainly should believe we can make predictions about them in general! Casinos make a lot money on the predictability of randomness.
…landing on an edge is possible. (Research suggests that when the coin is allowed to fall onto a hard surface, the chance of this happening is in the order of 1 in 6000 tosses.)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. After all–
First, random only ‘means’ unpredictable in individual instances, not in the aggregate.
Second, even individual random acts can be predictable in that they fall within known parameters.
Hmm . . . in high school advanced math class we had fourteen of us and we each did a thousand tosses onto desks with barriers around the edges, and we never got one that landed on an edge – or at least one that did and stayed. I wonder what part elasticity plays in this?
I’m not sure I get your point, Richard. It is as if you’re saying that words can’t have more than one meaning based on context and usage.
Teenagers know this implicitly. When I was a teenager cool didn’t always mean halfway between hot and cold. Neither did wicked mean evil or morally wrong.
Meanings change when used in a technical context. In Aristotoltean philosophy, a cause is not simply something that gives rise to an action. In Maths the root is not the way a plant gains water and nutrients.
I’m not a scientist, but I won’t be surprised to learn that random in science, can mean something other than its standard, colloquial usage.
Dictionaries record a selection of current usages; they do not enforce them. Then there’s the knotty subject of where the meaning of a word even comes from… (clue: isn’t the dictionary).
We are getting bogged down in technicalities. There is also the problem of converstaions overlapping several threads.
To be sure, I was hoping to find a more inclusive definition of random, but it did not appear on the first few pages of searching.
Within the context of this conversation. Evolution is being classed as not random because it includes natural selection. That is an oversimplification. it might even be massaging the details to fit your beliefs (with all the dishonesty that may or may not include). The fact is that, by tradition at least, Evolutionary deviations are random in the sense of the word given.
Natural Selection may not be random but it is reactive not proactive. It cannot dictate when or how a deviation will occur.
There are those here who seem to think that random means under God’s control. That would deny the meaning of random as given. It also changes evolutionary theory beyond what science declares.
A specific deviation is advantageous at any one point so it becomes inevitable that it will be found, no matter how “random” the changes are.
Natural selection dictates what is advantageous so it will eliminate any randomness in finding it.
This might be analogous to trying to crack a digital lock. The combination exists so eventually, if you throw enough combinations at it you will eventually find it.
We are also back to the room full of monkeys hitting keys on a typewriter eventually writing Shakespeare. It will, given time, beat the odds and evolution has millions of years to play with.
The conclusion to this argument is that humanity is the ultimate adaptation so evolution would (did ) eventually find it.
(And God, being eternally patient would wait for it to happen)
There are, of course, easier ways of doing it, but it is theoretically possible.
(Ignoring Ireducible systems of course) Whether it is actually plausible is another matter
(The result dos not necessarily confirm the methodology)
Not at all. Are God’s providential interventions in the lives of his children accessible for examination by science? No? Do they still happen? Absolutely. What sets them apart from ‘random’ events? Not how they happen, but because of their self-evident meaning and correlation to the individuals. Meaning and purpose are legitimately inferred, but no natural laws need be broken. Were any natural laws broken when Jesus calmed the storm on Galilee? No. A man in a boat said something. The weather changed.
Likewise evolution. ‘Random’ events can cause meaningful changes because God is sovereign and nothing escapes his purview.
No one is claiming any such thing, and I don’t know where you are getting these ideas – and none of the logical options for where they are coming from are complimentary, so I’m not going to state them save one: at best, this appears to be dishonest.
Even with ten billion monkeys there is not enough time between now and the heat death of the universe for them to eventually write Shakespeare.
. . . unless there is an algorithm in place that selects for not just actual words but grammar and meaning, or actually has the works of Shakespeare to consult as a template. https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00533.x
This is supposed to be about science and faith, and the statement above is neither, it is speculative metaphysics. The moment you say “evolution” then the concept “ultimate adaptation” becomes meaningless.
), but you certainly should believe we can make predictions about them in general! Casinos make a lot money on the predictability of randomness.
