As far as a particular gene/genome is concerned, the source of the selective pressure is of no consequence: it is the same heritable variation/selecti...
This insistence on everything being natural is a self-inflicted semantic confusion. The point being made is silly: everything is natural, because natu...
If you step back far enough then everything is like everything else and you are staring at one featureless mass. As you note yourself it's no use insi...
No, you still don't understand Darwin's argument - maybe if you actually read the book where he introduces his terms, you would see where he was comin...
The business of science is to come up with theories, and the best theories win more peer approval. What is the "best" theory? Ideally - one that has t...
It is not the function of scientific terminology to cater to your narrow ideological agenda (such as avoiding any hint of setting humans apart from na...
Even more to the point, Darwin opens the presentation of his new theory in On the Origin of Species with a chapter on selective breeding, which had be...
"Ordered." Rational and real numbers can be ordered, just in the way that you describe - indeed, that is how they are usually ordered. But they cannot...
Here is are a couple of hints: 1. A number in decimal notation can be written as d_0 + 10d_1 + 10^2d_2 + ..., where d_0, d_1, d_2, ... are digits. 2. ...
Good question (and excuse me for not quoting the rest - I believe the following will suffice to address the substance of your post). So to recap, what...
OK, let's go with ships then. According to some speculative calculations in quantum cosmology (cf. Many Worlds in One by Garriga and Vilenkin) not onl...
Define "in principle." If you were living on an island with no seafaring vessel, anything beyond the horizon would be unobservable in principle for yo...
The things that we have actually observed, in the loosest sense of the word, are a tiny (if not infinitesimal!) fraction of the things that we believe...
One can read your problem statement as "What is the probability of a 65 year old male of Czech ancestry winning the lottery?" Given that there is at l...
I think you are mixing two unrelated issues. Time travel is not the same as reversing the arrow of time: as you correctly point out, fundamental physi...
These myopic references to the "Y2K scare" are a pet peeve of mine. If people didn't get hysterical about it and didn't spend hundreds of billions of ...
Pedagogically, that's just about the worst approach I can think of for convincing an evolution skeptic (within the bounds of civility). Not to mention...
That may be so, but Darwin's metaphysical commitments are of interest to Darwin's biographers; they matter little to modern biology and its philosophi...
General Relativity is a deterministic theory (with some caveats), and GR is our best account of gravity. But GR is not a theory of everything - it is ...
I would google something like this or this or this. Many resources for beginners there, from one-pagers to short courses. On the other hand, I would b...
There are tons of resources available, from short and entertaining to rigorous and comprehensive. The Internet, the book and multimedia market, the ed...
You must be pretty new to the Internet, or more generally, to interactions with people, if you think that you can "explain evolution to a skeptic." No...
He's been banned several times on this forum and the old one. IIRC his previous incarnation here was "tom". I thought then that he'd reached the limit...
A "physical property" is, first of all, a theoretical concept. Different theories posit or imply different physical properties. So in one sense, one c...
I don't understand your question. Again, motion is change (specifically, of position, or more generally, of any property) over time. How is this a pro...
We directly perceive motion with our senses in our subjective present (obviously), but we conceptualize motion as change over time, which can happen i...
When presentists posit a passage of time, what they mean (or at least what some of them mean) is that the present time is an objective fact. Time flow...
Presentism is commonly thought to be incompatible with the relativity of simultaneity - a fundamental implication of Special Relativity. It does not d...
Because it is talking about "the flow of time, or passage through space-time," rather than motion. There is no difference in dynamics between eternali...
Yes, this is why the ZFC set theory - which since its introduction as a replacement for the naive set theory in the early 20th century has become a st...
What do you mean "they rewind"? The idea of time travel is that someone (or something) is moving in time (at a different than normal rate), while ever...
I know about industry sponsorships and grants, but those are mostly relevant to graduate and faculty research projects. The college gets a cut, but mo...
Well, it depends on what you are planning to do. You know that old joke about scientists, mathematicians and philosophers? From the point of view of t...
I think it's important to remember that the motivation, the main selling point of presentism is this inescapable subjective perception of being in tim...
Depends on whether you are talking about undergraduate or graduate education. A question about the "quality of education" in general would make more s...
What do you mean? Thinking a bit more about this, if now is an objective fact on presentism, and the Time Traveler is transported some ways into the p...
According to you, time doesn't pass at all, according to presentism. That can't be right. And I don't mean that in the sense that presentism can't be ...
Exactly. So, presentism doesn't exclude all time travel. I don't see why presentism as such should be inimical to other kinds of time travel, proceedi...
It's not circular, just because the word 'determines' occurs in the definition. You can easily rewrite the definition without that word. No, some is n...
No, I specifically said that it is fixed by "the state of the universe, together with the laws of nature" and contrasted that with what you are saying...
Determinism is the thesis that the state of the universe at any given time, together with the laws of nature, fixes (determines) the states of the uni...
See, we can say what it means for a sentence (for example) to be inconsistent. I don't think it is possible to say what it means for an object or a st...
As @"MindForged" already told you, you are misusing the term "validity." A valid conclusion is a conclusion that is reached by following (some) rules ...
Scientific impossibility is logical impossibility in the following sense: If it is the case that I am sitting at a table, then it is logically impossi...
States if affairs or physical objects cannot be either coherent or incoherent. It is beliefs, mental maps, or what have you, that can have such a qual...
Comments