begging question: evolution

Sunil said:

Folks, I am not writing this post in support of creationists.

Lately, I read in a book titled "Informal logic" in which the authors quotes that some people in
evolution camp are using "begging question".

For example, they classify things based on the premiss to be proved; and predictions based on
these classifications are used for argumentation. Tha author of the Informal logic, Walton, has
given the newly founded society within evolutionary camp to avoid this kinda taxonomy.

Any idea?

Sounds like the dispute between process and pattern cladism. Cladism calssifies on the basis of
shared characters that are different from the nearest relatives of two or more groups. Process
cladism treats this resulting classification as a tree of the history of life. Pattern cladists
argue that the cladistic classification must be independent of history, because they are what tests
the historical reconstructions.

However, it might actually be a reference to the rejection of the older form of classification on
the basis of adaptive zones, or grades, because the histories produced this way were based on a
prior assumption that these grades existed, and of course this was only known because some groups
(such as humans) were previously marked out as special because of their grade of organisation. This
goes way back, to the 18thC. Cladists call this "gradism", and it was promoted heavily by 20thC
evolutionary biologists like Simpson, Mayr and Julian Huxley.
--
John Wilkins wilkins.id.au For long you live and high you fly, and smiles you'll give and tears
you'll cry and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be

"Sunil" <[email hidden]> wrote in message

Quoted message said:

Lately, I read in a book titled "Informal logic" in which the authors quotes that some people in
evolution camp are using "begging question".

Most evolutionists are empirical scientists and have no training in formal logic nor in philosophy.
It is not surprising if there are technical weaknesses in many of their arguments. This doesn't mean
that no professional philosophers also believe in evolution.

Quoted message said:

For example, they classify things based on the premiss to be proved; and predictions based on
these classifications are used for argumentation. Tha author of the Informal logic, Walton, has
given the newly founded society within evolutionary camp to avoid this kinda taxonomy.

Linnaeus, who invented binomial classification, lived before Darwin. However, yes, there is an
element of circularity in most of science. Ideally the process is observation, hypothesis,
experiment, result, conclusion, but in practise the experiments are often difficult to perform and
cannot be fitted into the sequence on demand. In evolution, it is not easy to devise repeatable
experiments. We cannot go back in a time machine to bring back dinosaur samples. However we can show
that dinosaur fossils, found by chance, all fit into strata that the geologists regard as being over
70 million years old. Of course, the geologists are partly using the fossils to date the rocks,
hence some circularity. However "circularity" doesn't mean "any conclusion could have been drawn".
For instance, if fossils were randomly distributed through rock strata, then geologists wouldn't be
able to build up a picture of rock dates from fossils at all, and biologists would probably conclude
that species come and go rather than developing and eventually going extinct. Finally, fossils are
only one method geologists use to date rocks. Radioactive isotope levels and other techniques are
also used. Science forms a series of overlapping models with a reasonable degree of mutual
consistency.

"Malcolm" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<bl4vcg$2aq5

Quoted message said:

However "circularity" doesn't mean "any conclusion could have been drawn". For instance, if
fossils were randomly distributed through rock strata, then geologists wouldn't be able to build
up a picture of rock dates from fossils at all, and biologists would probably conclude that
species come and go rather than developing and eventually going extinct.

Circularity does mean that the argument is weaker than the proponents' saying; however this is not
fallacy. Science is after all a world of strong/weak hypotheses.

Thanks John Wilkins for the reference to cladism.