Tonight, we've got a special Conservapedia Quiz for you. This will test your ability to correctly identify the wingnut wackaloon nonsense given a range of choices. The quiz consists of one question, the answer to which may be found at the Conservapedia entry for Natural Selection.
According to Conservapedia, which of the following best describes "Natural Selection"?
(a) Natural selection will automatically take place in any system which follows a certain set of rules.
(b) Natural selection is a tautology because it follows from its definition.
(c) Natural selection has no observable consequences that anyone has ever tested against an alternate theory
(d) a and b
(e) a, b, and c.
The answer can be found below the fold. Before clicking through, jot your answer down on a piece of paper. No cheating!
The correct answer is e (a, b, and c). Here's the relevant quote:
Natural selection will automatically take place in any system which follows a certain set of rules. These rules are:
1) There must be a set of individuals.
2) These individuals must reproduce somehow.
3) The probability or rate of reproduction must be somehow dependent on a heritable trait of the individual (where a heritable trait is one that is more likely to be present in an individual's offspring than it is in the general population).
In any such system, individuals whose traits allow them to reproduce more effectively will soon come to dominate the population.
Natural selection has been called a tautology because it follows from its definition, and because it has no observable consequences by itself that anyone has ever tested against an alternate theory.
Did you get it right the first time?
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No. I thought b as I assumed there would be some measure of coherence in their definitions. Foolish me!
I still get a chuckle every time I see their 'frog' page. Which reminds me, I need to check if Voltaire invented the voltage meter.
Yes. I was going to guess b (because they like the word "tautology") and c (because of the words "test" and "alternate theory). Since there was no option for b & c, I went with the "all of the above" answer. Is that cheating?
I went with (e). After all, with a name like Conservapedia, it's got to be incoherent. :)
Yeah, I did.
Try not to telegraph your answers next time.
a) by itself actually looks roughly correct to me (modulo some awkward wording in rule 3). They just should have stopped there. (Or am I missing something?)
I picked (f): (e) plus anything else the Conservapædia wingnuts misrepresent or just make up.
Picking (e) was easy ... simply chose the stupidest available response. This is Conservapedia, after all.
I would have thought that a creationist would choose (b) and (c) but not (a).
I realize that anyone who chooses (b) ought to choose (a), but only if someone were interested in consistency, which excludes creationists.
And then, (c) mentions "alternate theory", which makes sense only for alternate theories to natural selection (there being no known alternative to evolution, and creationists thinking that evolution is a theory ...). I understand that creationists would be unaware of the many tests of alternatives to natural selection, such as neutral drift.
So I'd would say that a real creationist would say that none of the answers is right.
But then, to say that would require a bit of "thinking outside of the box", so the more conventional response would be to restrict oneself to one of the "forced choices".
Therefore, (e) it must be.
There are certain words and expressions that occur in creationist idiocy that tell me "it's not worth having a conversation with this loon." One of them is "tautology."
According to Eliot Sober's Philosophy of Biology, natural selection can't be a tautology, because only a proposition can be a tautology, and a tautology is a proposition that is true by virtue of the logical elements of the proposition.
All gootsnorks are either brimbly or not brimbly is a tautology. The fact that neither "gootsnorks" nor "brimbly" means anything is irrelevant.
Natural selection is not, by itself, a proposition, but we certainly can come up with a proposition based on natural selection and see if it is a tautology. For instance, IIRC, Sober suggests this one: "All living creatures are the descendents of ancestors which were better adapted to their circumstances than other organisms and were able by virtue of their superior adaptation to pass on their features to their offspring."
That statement may or may not be a very good summary of natural selection, but the degree to which it is true is certainly not a consequence merely of the logical terms of the sentence.
Anyway, too bad Conservapedia didn't throw in thermodynamics too, just to increase the lunacy.
I'm curious as to how an individual can "come to dominate" a population (numerically). Perhaps this confusion sheds some light on Conservapedia's problem with evolution. It's rather obviously not a tautology if you realise it's the traits that increase reproductive success that come to dominate the population.
Richard Simmons @ #1
I still get a chuckle every time I see their 'frog' page.
Wow, I just checked it out, and it is pretty funny.
According to atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins, the joints of the Lesser Spotted Weasel Frog continue to present a challenge to the Theory of Evolution insofar as their origin cannot be explained by gradual degrees.
Wow, way to completely misunderstand Dawkins' point with the (as far as I can tell) entirely fictitious example!
That's right up there with the Banana as the atheist's nightmares! Those horrible, horrible nightmares with the bananas and the lesser spotted weasel frogs ...