Hi CTD

LOL interesting, I still have the original post Russ T wrote on my computer, I cut and pasted what he said into Word to write my reply on Friday our time before he added the ‘clarifications’ and posted back my response after the changes he made yet three days later. Why is it that we mortals can’t change posts so far after the fact?

Still I can’t see that the changes rescue the point Russ was trying to make. It’s still false to suggest, as he has, that beneficial mutations must all occur in the correct order without detrimental mutations in between. One mutation at a time is enough as natural selection does not wait, as Russ T has suggested, in the wings for the 11th hour but functions at each and every step in between. The beneficial mutations will be kept in each generation and the detrimental one’s will be removed in each generation. That was my original point against what Russ T said and nothing he has changed, not even the smiley, changes that fatal flaw in his claim.

You published a circular definition and got caught.

Show me the circularity CTD. Evolution does not equal change, evolution is about mutation, natural selection and differential reproductive success which shapes creatures from generation to generation. Those are all changes but they are changes that are bounded by rules that ToE explains in great detail. As I said to Russ T earlier you can’t consider yourself to have examined a car if all you have done is looked at the breaks. No more can you consider yourself to have examined evolution if all you do is look at change. There’s so much more to it, so much in fact that it is clearly a fallacy to claim that evolution = change as much as it is a fallacy to say that car = breaks.

Given that RT clarified what he said, and even included a happy smiley, I guess you took this as adding a taunting insult (the smiley) to the grievous injury (clarification) done against your cause.

LOL yes that was an interesting point, four days after writing the post and three days after I read it, pasted it into my word processor and composed most of my reply to it Russ T changed his post. The smiley was a cute touch though I agree! ?

Like all trendy evopeddlers, you offer 'evolution = change' one minute, and the next you put down anyone foolish enough to accept this. A fair reward, IMO.

LOL me trendy ROTFLMAO!!!!!!

Evolution = change is in fact the correct definition of evolution for non biological systems. In biological systems the closest you get to this simplistic view is that “evolution is the observed change from generation to generation of heritable traits within a species”. Now that’s talking about the observed fact of evolution for indeed that has been observed so to suggest, as Russ’s words could be interpreted to, that it’s absurd simply contradicts the evidence so I gave him the benefit of the doubt for the first time in that post and assumed he was not contradicting the evidence so blatantly and that he was referring to the theory of evolution not the observed fact of it. If he was talking about the theory of evolution then we’re back to the car problem, it is simply but profoundly wrong to say that the theory of evolution = change in the same sense that it is wrong to say that car = breaks. So which is it CTD, is Russ T wrong because he meant changes from generation to generation in a species was impossible even though this has been observed or is he wrong because he meant the theory of evolution = change.

Oh? How can my procedure fail? It does not rely on being an authority, being an expert, or any such. It relies on that most scientific of procedures: observation.

Observation is good, but it’s only the first step in science. Theories attempt to explain observations, as we work to understand what is actually going on, that’s their value. Now ToE conforms to the observed facts of the world around though CTDvolution does not and you make a very good case against it but what really is the point of that? Is that your aim, to build straw men and cut them down? Sorry I always thought you actually wanted to address the scientific theory of evolution and were just having trouble grasping what it was and what it said. Maybe I was mistaken.

In Reason

Russell