My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

[_William Schryver]

EAllusion:

… natural selection is a tautology - an argument that even the young earth creationist organization AIG cautions its followers is too stupid to use …

Actually, I argue—correctly, I might add—that the notion that the “fittest” survive is a tautology. It clearly is. The simple fact is that those survive who reproduce best, irrespective of their non-reproductive traits.

Furthermore, I went to the AIG website you referenced (your link itself was not valid) and was not able to find any caution issued about this argument. Perhaps you were mistaken? Or perhaps you would like to contest the argument yourself? How would you rebut the argument? How is “survival of the fittest” not a tautology?

People with degrees in biology?

No. People who otherwise appear to be discriminating of evidence.

Darwinist ideology, in my judgment, requires the exercise of much more faith than does Mormonism. Most distinctively, it employs the practice of shunning to a more effective degree than any other religion with which I am familiar.

[_karl61]

I saw this "no blood" theory in the LDS dictionary in my 4 in 1. It was kind of weird and that is why I remembered it. I had to go back and find out where it was written.

But this isn't really that weird for Faith.

And a real issue was when Joseph Fielding Smith and James R. Talmages son were sparring over the age of the earth.

[_Sethbag]

Humans derive from a fork in the evolutionary road where old world monkeys and apes split. We're from the ape side of things. The species around that ancestral fork are kinda monkey-like, but I don't think convention has them being called monkeys.

A convention of Southern Baptists does.

[_AlmaBound]

But this isn't really that weird for Faith.

Precisely. Once you set the hook that claims are verifiable by the faith of the recipient, despite any and all evidence to the contrary, you can say whatever you want.

Applicable, of course, to any faith-based religion, and not unique to Mormonism. I guess it just depends on the level you are willing to go with your acceptance of absurdities.

[_Sethbag]

...blood formed in their bodies...

This is one of my favorite parts. Even if a person (be he or she an LDS Christian or otherwise) can somehow reconcile the creation story with evolution, either metaphorically, "gap theory" or through some other means, blood forming in their bodies at the point mentioned is an anomaly unique to Mormonism.

The trouble, of course, is this pretty much amounts to an argument that devolves into "the stuff you believe is weirder than the stuff I believe."

With apologies, though I've become doubtful that my posts are ever read here anyway.

I agree with you that the "no blood in their bodies" thing is pretty far-fetched, especially in light of evolution and the fact that things have lived and died on Earth for over a billion years.

Apparently there are Mormons who have no trouble with the Prophets, Seers, and Revelators just making stuff up like this and teaching it to the rest of the church as truth from God. Then they are proven wrong, and for some reason that doesn't seem to phase true believers - at all. Excuses are made, inconvenient facts are rationalized, and they drive on.

[_karl61]

one could ask how could one eat of the fruit if there was no blood in the person. Is everyone wrong who thinks it was an apple. Was it a fruitful thought? Was it thinking for themselves? Was it done in another time and dimension and language?

[_Sethbag]

That there might have been bones of a few keepers and dino heardsmen, of what ever primate variety that may be, squished about to twist the tits of latter-day Science, cool that. He foreknew that the great big heads would hate him and so he also provided the resource to convict them in their villany.

So, God first creates smart people, and then sets them up to fail by providing what looks like ironclad evidence that leads them away from belief in him, when in reality he just set things up to fool them, and covered up his tracks.

What a dick.

[_Sethbag]

Adam and Eve's resurrected and glorified bodies were placed into the Garden. They were only tethered by adding the dust of this earth so that they could not hie to Kolob at their wim. This dust also took away their memory.

This dust wasn't lysergic acid diethylamide by any chance, was it?

[_The Dude]

How would you rebut the argument? How is “survival of the fittest” not a tautology?

I would rebut the argument by pointing out that "survival of the fittest" is a very poor summation of the theory of evolution that was only borrowed by Darwin in the fifth edition of Origin of the Species. It is such a dumbed-down metaphor that it isn't even worth defending. Ridicule it all you want, if that's the very best you can do.

[_EAllusion]

Furthermore, I went to the AIG website you referenced (your link itself was not valid) and was not able to find any caution issued about this argument.

My link was broken. It appears that they recently edited this out of their list. More accurately, they rewrote their list. That's a shame, as that used to be a handy. Looks like it's back on the table for them. Ahh creationists.

This was the old exact link:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-ans ... #tautology

You can find it referenced on their own website here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/isd/veith.asp

That demonstrates its previous existence.

It's frequently referenced and occasionally quoted on other peoples' websites. Before erasing it entirely, they also appear to have toned down their criticism of this in a rewrite that I also was unaware of. Would you like me to use those secondhand quotes?

How would you rebut the argument? How is “survival of the fittest” not a tautology?

That was explained to you on the thread I linked:

I think there might be a misunderstanding of what natural selection entails and what that quip is intended to comunicate.

Survivial of the fittest refers to the idea that organismal forms that are more likey to survive and reproduce viable offspring in a given environment will be more likely to propagate through time. What makes something "fit" isn't the simply that it survives, but that it has traits that are conducive to survival.

Let's take a mundane example from human design to help understand this.

Suppose we build a bunch of bridges over a river and I say, "I predict the fit bridges will survive." Am I simply tautologically stating that the bridges that survive will be the ones I call fit? You might think that, but if this were an analogy to natural selection, the answer is no. What I'd be saying is that those bridges with the best design to last are the ones most likely to stick around. Fitness is disposition of a bridge's structure. I don't know too much about engineering bridges, but we could discuss what makes for fit bridges and not. We'd call them "good designs" vs "bad designs"

Likewise, organisms are fit to the extent that their traits confer on them the tendency to survive and reproduce in a given environment. So being dark colored is a trait that increases fitness if this happens to camouflage you from predators. A (relatively) fit creature isn't neccessarily going to be the survivor, but it has traits that will make it statistically more likely to survive. Ergo, survival of the fittest - and more importantly the concept of "fitness" - is not a tautology.

Make sense?

If you'd like a similar explanation:

Consider the formula: May the best man win. It seems harmless, but the creationist now points out that we determine which team is best by seeing which wins. If that is what it means to be "best," then the expressed wish seems to reduce to "May the team that wins be the team that wins." It is thus vacuous dogma, objects the creationist, to subsequently explain who won in terms of one team's being "better" than the other. However, we sports fans are not fooled into abandoning the game by such arguments. Of course we do determine which is the best team by looking at its record of wins, and we would certainly explain why it won the trophy by noting its superior record over its rivals. But we understand that this is not the end of the story...even though we do judge on the basis of record, we do not doubt that it is the physical traits of a team, its superior characteristics and playing ability, that make it better than the others. Understanding this, we also understand that it is possible that the best team might not win...This parallels the distinction that biologists make between evolution by natural selection and evolution by natural drift, and the mere fact that we recognize such distinctions is by itself sufficient to show that the tautology objection does not hold in either sports or evolutionary theory. (Pennock 1999:101)

Pennock is pointing out what Mills and Beatty (1979:11) explicitly state: that the fitness of an organism is best described in terms of the organism's propensity to leave offspring, not in terms of its actual reproductive success, which can be affected by pure happenstance. To put it simply, a moose with all of the "right" genes can still get clocked on the head by a meteorite before it gets lucky, while its sickly neighbor goes on to sow its seed far and wide. Since propensities do not automatically translate into actual reproductive success, the idea of fitness, and the natural selection of the fittest, cannot be tautologous.

(ii) To its credit, the young-earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis advises against using this argument.
References

S. K. Mills and J. H. Beatty. 1979. The propensity interpretation of fitness. In Sober 1994:3-23.

R. T. Pennock. 1999. Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

E. Sober (ed.). 1994. Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

http://www.vuletic.com/hume/cefec/4-23.html