(September 29, 2017 at 8:17 pm)bennyboy Wrote: My view is that evolution is a statistical descriptive term, not an actual process. Members of the set of "Human" drop and get added, and the sum DNA must shift this way and that; to me, evolution isn't "happening," and cannot be said to be a process.
Let's say you were driving a spaceship, and as you passed between galaxies, you had different readings of the materials within scanner range of your ship. You could say that the composition is "changing," but is it? Yes, in a relative sense, no in an absolute sense: because none of the things you are measuring are in a state of flux.
Or if you take a core sample from the Earth, you can say how the mineral composition "changes" as you go deeper and deeper. But it isn't, really, because it's your perspective that changes, not the actual thing.
Evolution is much like this-- we are taking completely new samples, and comparing them to previous samples. The change is perceptual.
But I think in the end the thing you and I are now talking about that is the semantics of "thing." It seems you think a thing is whatever a person chooses to imagine. If I start talking about "all red Smarties," then that is now a thing. Okay, we can say all genes, or all human genes, are a thing in that sense. But I'd still say that thing isn't undergoing a process. Each time the membership of that set changes, we have a new thing: Red-Smarties-Set-1, Red-Smarties-Set-2, and so on, and that what we are really talking about is a meta-thing: Smarties-ness or whatever. That is a metaphorical God-of-Red-Smarties, much like the Archetypal Man I mentioned in the OP.
In short, a species doesn't "adapt," it just gets replaced by a new set of members of the species which are better adapted.
No.
It's amazing 'science' always seems to 'find' whatever it is funded for, and never the oppsite. Drich.
