Nicely and succinctly stated.
Why people manufacture conflict when there is none baffles me – and I’ve gotten worn out trying to get that across to people who do so.
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I don’t understand you at all
I give you what you want and you can’t even see it.
At least you now know what a complex system is.
Richard
That did not ‘give him what he wanted’ so there’s nothing to see.
Where does evolution propose that humanity is the ultimate adaptation?!
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Nonsense is NOT what I want.
What I want is for you to recognize that your grasp of science is at least thirty years out of date so you’ll step up and learn something from people here who are in fact up-to-date, which is something I’ve enjoyed doing, and that you would set aside humanistic tendencies to judge God and twist the scriptures and instead do some real learning about the text itself.
A billion monkeys pecking randomly at keyboards do not comprise a complex system – or are you saying that Shakespeare is a complex system? The latter is interesting, though I’m not sure if we understand enough about the human brain to call the Bard and his writing “complex”, or if there are enough variables to qualify.
Both St… Raymond and Dale say that we cannot predict individual random events, but we can use statistics to make predictions about a large number of these events. The problem is they seem to conclude that the later predictability cancels out the former unpredictability when it does not.
The question is determinism. If inheritance is based on the simple union of the genes of male and female, then all the offspring would be the same. Instead, inheritance is the result of a random, complex process, where only identical twins are genetically the same.
If random events are real and truly unpredictable, then the universe is not predetermined by GOD or anything else. That why the concept of random as unpredictability is important.
Now if this offends you, I am sorry. Words are human creations. They sometimes do not express in their dictionary definitions exactly what you want them to mean, but you do the best you can with what you have.
Purpose and predictability are related also, but are not the same…
.
As I have tried to say, natural selection, if meaningful, is not random, but if it is Survival of the Fittest is a tautology and meaningless, it is random and not rational.
I do not follow your logic. How does a definition make or destroy a system?
m and not rational.
You are thinking about Survival of the Fittest, not adaption to the environment. Climate change came before the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals.
Your talent for ignoring correction is impressive. One more time: survival of the fittest means the survival of those best adapted to their environment.
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Of course it does not, nor do we conclude so. Flip a coin one hundred times. You cannot predict any individual result, and the fact that we can predict that the results will be close to 50:50 (I won’t complicate it with σ) does not ‘cancel out the former unpredictability’ nor did we say anything close to that. So where did you get that idea? Not from us!
I don’t think I will concern myself to respond to the rest except to be glad that you appear not to be confusing rational with purposeful anymore.
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When I brought this important fact to the attention of the BioLogos community, I hoped that it would generate some positive discussion. I was mistaken. Same old, same old.
For the umpteenth time:
(Do you really think you’re telling the professional scientists here something you know that they don’t understand?)
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One more time, survival of the fittest is the passing on one’s genes to one’s offspring as the result of competition for scarce resources. True or false?
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Cleary the scientists at the National Geographic Society are not telling themselves something that they do not understand, so there must be another cause. One is that the science may have changed. That is a possibility is it not? Science, including the Origin of the Species, is not cast in stone.
Survival of the Fittest is defined as I have defined it. It is not a binary choice, please explain. I have always been told that it was.
If Adaption to the Environment were the same as Survival of the Fittest, that would be simpler, but the evidence of the extinction of the dinosaurs proves otherwise. I think that the National Geographic Society .went with the science as it saw it…
There’s nothing more to say that hasn’t been said here forty-seven times.
One more try.
False, false, false and still false.
It has to do with
Two different mountain climbers, two different mountains. One survives their environment, the other does not. Why? Oh, they are not competing for scarce resources, are they. Does it matter for this argument why one survived and one did not? No. What matters is that it refutes you completely, because they were not competing for resources.
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It’s not so much trying to refute you as to try to get you to understand. If you do not like the mountain climbers, make it two goldfish, each in separate bowls. Or two octopuses, each in separate ocean bays. It’s the environment for each that matters, because they are not competing against each other.
If they were in the same environment – the same mountain, the same bowl or or the same bay, then yes, then the individual’s survival may, emphasize may, but not necessarily have something to do with competition for scarce resources, but that is only because resources are part of the environment.
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Please, how are the climbers evolving? They are not’
What you refuse to admit is the concept of Survival lof the Fittest as Malthus conceived it and Darwin developed it has a definite intellectual content. Malthus said it was a struggle for sparce resources and Darwin said it depended on transmission of one’s genes. That is what Survival is about. That is NOT what Adaption is about. Therefore Survival is not Adaption.
One survives to pass along mutations in his DNA to his progeny and the other does not, that’s how. In a sense you are correct – ‘they’, plural, are not evolving because only one survives. And if you don’t like mountain climbers, try goldfish. Or octopuses.
I will not bother to address anything else since I/we have not managed to correct your thinking in this most basic regard. 
Clams in the sand of a bay, in two different channels. They aren’t in competition because they are not capable of relocating to chase down richer resources.
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Climbers do not evolve because they are not a species.
Many species are not evolving, that is changing;. because they are
in balance with their environment.
Those who perish after they have had offspring are fit.
This is where Natural selection or survival of the fittest breaks down. If there are no pressures then the creature will survive, properly adapted or not. If there is no competition, the creature will survive, adapted or not. It might even thrive.
Not all of nature is in competition… All it needs is to survive at all.
Then along comes a desease (or maybe a meteor) that wipes out the strongest creatures. The resulting void is filled by whatever is next closest to perfection and suddenly evolution has taken an unexpected but dramatic turn. Godly intervention? Or just another random factor. (sorry, we are not allowed random factors)
Richarrd