Yeah, I got that. I was not asking about how an analogy fails, rather I was just asking if an analogy, by definition, isn’t slightly paradoxical because, when it meets its own definition (being similar but not the same as something), it is said to have failed as such.
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I wouldn’t call a simple quirk of the language paradoxical. But that’s just me. Any analogy necessarily fails at being an identity.
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Not my field, and as I’ve said my interest in talking to you has declined considerably.
Mmm, no. Developmental biology is developmental biology. It isn’t evolutionary biology, and shouldn’t be called evolutionary biology, just developmental biology.
There’s a happy marriage of the fields actually. Called evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo-Devo for short. Which is chiefly concerned with investigating and explaining how developmental processes evolved, and how developmental processes and their constraints in turn shape the outcomes of evolutionary biology. You can read a layman’s introduction here: Evo-devo - Understanding Evolution
I still find evolutionary biology, the biology of history and origins, more interesting than developmental biology. I find developmental biology interesting enough in it’s own right, but LESS interesting than evolutionary biology. And I find Evo-Devo interesting somewhere in the middle between evolutionary and developmental biology.
Now that we have taken turns stating our opinions about what is the most interesting to us, what’s next?
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Essentially, because interactions with you have been unpleasant.
It’s not all that vague. It doesn’t apply to development (though it did a couple hundred hears ago; language changes). As used since the mid-19th Century, “evolution” refers to long-term, heritable changes in lineages, which once we learned about genetics turned into changes in allele frequencies in populations. The latter isn’t completely satisfying, but it will do as a first pass. Anyway, developmental biology is not evolutionary biology, though they do intersect. Centrioles would be cell biology, again not evolutionary biology, though again they do intersect. I’m an evolutionary biologist, specifically as my tag line is supposed to say (but doesn’t) an avian molecular phylogeneticist. You may not find that interesting, but I do.
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Well wow! Just wow!
That was hilarious.
You attempted a take down of @John_Harshman . You failed. But you were very successful in your unintended take down of @pawas
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Please, would you mind quoting the text where I wrote “evolutionary biology” ?
Thanks.
You wrote this:
Z2A is developmental biology, not evolutionary biology. It does not make sense to refer to it as “evolution” per se, though there certainly are some analogies to draw.
Where did I write “evolutionary biology”?
Where did I call Z2A or Z2E “evolutionary biology”?
Can you quote it, please?
Thanks
Can you please quote the part where I claimed you used the term “evolutionary biology”?
Can you explain how arguing that you find the question of origins of certain biological entities uninteresting, or a waste of time, is NOT implicitly stating your opinion about evolutionary biology?
You don’t have to be using the actual term to be effectively talking about the field. Do you have some sort of psychological aversion to using the term EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY?
You wrote early in this thread:
However, I don’t understand why so many people spend so much time discussing how the observed biological systems came to be.
Then later you write:
See, as far as I understand it, the word “evolution” seems very vague, because it applies to different things.
(…)
The most amazing evolution I’m aware of occurs all the time in many places around us and scientists can observe it, study it, learn about it and write interesting papers for the rest of us to read. This mind-boggling evolution that is happening all the time could be associated with the inverted alphabet (Z to A).(…) Zygote to Adult development. That’s a fascinating evolution.
But you have now been informed that you are incorrectly using the word evolution as it is used in the field of biology. The particular field of biology you find interesting (the “Z to A” thing) actually has a name and it isn’t evolutionary biology, nor “Z2A biology”. It’s called developmental biology. If you speak to a biologist and you use the word evolution, they are going to think you are talking about the biology of origins.
You don’t have to thank me, it is my sincere pleasure.
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Looks like you don’t understand how dictionaries work. Unless otherwise stated, they don’t dictate(prescribe) the definitions of words (contrary to popular misconception), they record how words are used in colloquial speech for a given language.
As such, dictionaries also change over time, not because the people who maintain the dictionaries come up with the definitions, but because they record how people who speak the language employ and define the words they use.
Merriam-Webster is primarily a general, as opposed to a specialized dictionary, too. It records (it does not prescribe) the usage of words in colloquial speech among laymen. In this thread you have been informed how specialists in the relevant fields of biology understand the words ‘development’ and ‘evolution’ as NOT being synonymous.
Any questions?
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They fail as analogies too.
Right. Which by definition are supposed to not be identities… so there is an irony that exists.
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That only counts as your personal opinion, which is worth as much as that. Not more.
The term “evolution” has a general meaning that applies in the case of development. Your opinion can’t change that, no matter how disappointing that is to you. The zygote develops (i.e. evolves) to a much more complex system.
Does a kernel evolve into a cornstalk?
You wrote "shouldn’t be called evolutionary biology". Where did you see “developmental biology” called “evolutionary biology” within my posts?
Can you show that text?
First we had a huge thread based on ID-Creationist equivocation with the definition of “code”.
Then we had a huge thread based on ID-Creationist equivocation with the definition of “motor”.
Now we have a thread based based on equivocation with the definition of “evolution”.
Anyone see the pattern?
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I think I get the pattern… It’s like a timeline… the first sentence was in the distant past, the second one is in the recent past, and the third is in the present! Did I win??
Seriously, it was a nightmare.
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It creates quite a bit of frustration among scientists. This sort of definitional arguing is not how science progresses. We have debates about terminology all the time, but always light of how utterly different biology is from our ordinary understanding of the world. It is just strange to have people arguing that analogies are equalities, and to be so fundamentally resistant to understanding the actual biological system in question.
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