Quote:
Originally Posted by Hektore
The only thing that makes it possible to draw lines between species are the gaps in the record. If we had a complete record speciation lines would be impossible to draw. Well, not impossible or hazy but completely arbitrary and meaningless. There won't be any speciation 'event' to draw a line at. Every individual progeny that has surviving descendants will have been sufficiently like it's parents to interbreed with the same population (and therefore be considered the same species). If it wasn't, then whom did it breed with? The point at which we have a complete record (or nearly complete) is the point at which we're obliged to stop drawing lines, not draw them arbitrarily.
|
I really don't want to derail completely, so I promise I'll stop after this. I just thought I ought to address this.
There's an old joke that goes something like this:
An old man approaches an attractive young woman in a bar. "My dear," he says, "could I ask you a hypothetical question?"
"Sure," she replies.
And so the old man asks his question: "Would you have sexual relations with a man for ten million dollars?"
The young lady thinks hard before nodding and saying "yes, I think I would."
"Great!" exclaims the old man, "here's twenty bucks. Let's go out back and you can suck my dick."
The woman is aghast. "Just what type of girl do you think I am?" She stammers.
"My dear," says the old man, "we've already established what type of girl you are. Now we're just haggling on price."
...
The point of this yarn is to illustrate an aspect of thinking that's relevant. The young lady (and presumably the listener) was shocked at the old man's proposition because she's not a whore; this despite having just answered that yes, she would have sex for a sufficiently large amount of money. To the girl's way of thinking (be it right or wrong), having sex for an exorbitant amount of money is not prostitution -- in other words, a whore is really a woman who has sex for too little money. The precise amount that delineates the two, however, is arbitrary and meaningless.
What I'm getting at is that there can easily be drawn a line. Yes, interbreeding with the prior generation is always possible -- however, if we can point to an ancestor of the chicken that is demonstrably not a chicken, then we know that somewhere in between there has to be a divide between chicken and unchicken. The line is necessarily arbitrary, but it's also going to be there at some point, and anything prior to that generation is prechicken. All the gaps do is allow us to be vague about it.
Yeah, it is completely arbitrary. No, there's not a lot of physical basis for it. This is true of a surprising number of things in the world, where not everything lines up into tidy little categories.
So long as we can agree that there is an ancestor of the chicken that is not a chicken, and that the modern day chicken is a chicken, then all we're doing is haggling on price.
...
Idyllic, please don't misunderstand me. I intentionally misinterpreted your post because it was amusing to me to do so -- you posted a hyperbolic statement and I decided to take it literally.
I am not trying to 'convert' you to atheism. As I'm not an atheist myself, it would be a bizarre thing for me to do.