Delta1212

Defend conversationally or defend legally? Because everyone is entitled to a legal defense regardless of what they are accused of.

The method by which deleterious dominant traits get weeded out of the gene pool is the death of everyone that carries them because they're always expressed and the trait is deleterious.

Actually, my last post was drifting down a tangent to my point, and didn't answer your question. What is "poorly defined" is "free will." Regardless of whether free will actually exists, can you come up with a way that free will works where choices do not follow a chain of causation? It doesn't even have to be purely mechanical. We can pretend souls exist or that the mind is non-material or whatever you want. In all scenarios, I make the choices I do because of a combination of my life experiences and my personality. The opposite of determinism is not "free will" it is acausal randomness. If my choices are random, then can I really be said to be making them? If one of the inputs in making a choice is me, my personality and personal history, then I think that's more to do with free will than the alternative even if there was only ever one choice that I, as a person in that situation, was going to make. If I am the sum total of all of my parts and my consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that arises as a result of all of the processes that are going on in my brain, then if the decision is made by the brain which then generates the conscious awareness of that decision in the conscious mind that it creates for itself, how is that not "me" making a decision? Unless we're getting super restrictive about what counts as "me" in which case I've never kicked a ball. My foot did. People like the idea that they could have chosen anything and they think that determinism restricts their options to only one choice that they never could have avoided and so runs counter to free will. But you can ultimately make one choice, and for every choice, you do have the full array of options before you. And then you process them, weigh those options and make the choice you were always going to make because it's the one that you, as a specific individual in that specific situation, think is best. There is no world where you have free will without some kind of deterministic process driving the choices unless you handwave it as just "free will that doesn't require any determinism" without explaining how that would even work.

Where does the thought come from?

Personally, I think the whole dichotomy between free will and determinism is a bit silly and mostly comes down to poorly defined terms. I can't think of a good definition of free will that doesn't have some degree of determinism baked in as a prerequisite.

Then the dominant gene would likely be quickly weeded out of the gene pool because every carrier of it would be made less fit. Constrasted a recessive phenotype that is less fit, where someone with a single copy of the gene generally does not negatively impact the fitness of the carrier and as such those genes tend to persist in populations in low levels because there isn't a strong enough selection pressure against them to weed them out entirely. At no point will a recessive gene switch to being a dominant one or vice versa just because it is selectively advantageous or disadvantageous. That will affect the rate at which the genes appear in the gene pool, but not whether they are dominant or recessive.

"Natural causes" isn't really its own thing. Everyone dies of something. Some of those things can be prevented or fixed before they cause death, but few fixes are perfect and the more things that break down, the more likely that the next thing to break will wind up killing you either before it can be fixed or because it can't be fixed at all.

But probably not actually into humans. At most maybe something vaguely human-like, but even that may not be the case. Humanity as it exists seems more like a semi-random fluke than a niche that needed filling. If it were, you'd expect that something like us in behavior if not exactly in form would have cropped up at some point outside of our own immediate and quite recent line, but there's no evidence of it. It's entirely possible that we're the happy accident of just the right selection pressures combined with some very lucky mutations in a genome that had the capacity for them, and that anything else in the same environment wouldn't have gone the same way we did. There's no simple set selection pressures for which advanced intelligence is a trivial solution, the way that certain features of aquatic animals converge towards similar streamlined shapes or the way body coverings like für and feathers or extended skinflaps like big thin ears are responses to thermoregulagion. Because our sample size is effectively one, we don't really have a good handle on how likely or unlikely human-like intelligence really is to evolve, but the fact that the world seemingly went for billions of years without advanced tool users evolving on the scale of humanity makes me think that if the Earth had gone down a slightly different path, tha the chances of it evolving in a similar way at approximately the same time that it did in this "timeline" are pretty slim.

Yeah, I thought there were some nice surprises in the speeches, frankly.

A lot of the same people who are criticizing this also criticized him for numerous other things he's said in the past. Until people start pulling endorsements, it's all meaningless. Right now, it's the same "What he said was abhorrent, but I still support his candidacy as the Republican nominee" routine we've been through at least five or six times now since the campaign officially started.

I think you are overestimating how much of an effect this is going to have.

So, essentially, everyone has about the same chance of being shot once the police have stopped them, but the police are more likely to stop someone who is black, meaning that the net result is still that a black person is more likely to be shot by police than a white person. It's just that it's because the police are less likely to bother the white person to begin with.

I think he was referring to the generalized "object" definition of body rather than the human body.

Hypocrisy would be calling someone else out for something you do yourself. Denying that you do something while blatantly doing it is just called lying.

I don't think it works like that.

That seems rather like a bread and circuses band-aid for some much deeper problems. Some of them cultural and others the result of legitimate economic and social grievances. Just because someone is wrong about how to fix a problem, or even what precisely the problem is, does not mean that there isn't actually a problem that needs fixing. The problem that people are facing is not boredom. There are serious economic and social issues that are burying a lot of people in this country, especially regionally, and a lot of what we're seeing is the result of people casting around looking for both a source and solution to the problem that is simple enough that they can take some action against it and hope to have a chance of doing something about it. In most cases, they are wrong about both the problem and the solution, but in part that is the result of a lot of weight and complexity in the underlying root issues being so difficult to effectively tackle that even trying to understand how to go about it can make the whole effort feel hopeless. There have been a lot of changes in the country over the last 20-30 years. Socially, I think they are mostly, but not universally, for the better. Economically, I think they've largely been for the worse. Adapting to change is stressful even when it is positive. When there are a lot of negatives thrown into the mix, it makes it harder for many people to accept positive or neutral changes that they might have been more open to if they were otherwise feeling secure in their positions in society.

Instead of "but I like them" what about "They're alive and there is no good reason to euthanize them"?

Art of the Deal was ghost written. He didn't write it himself. It's entirely possible he hasn't even read the whole thing himself.

Yeah, that was my thought, too. This isn't really a fallacy. It's just ironic.

It's measuring distance travelled through time. That's actually a fairly good metaphor. Clocks are odometers of time, and metronomes are rulers of time. Counting mile markers is approximately the same as using an odometer, so it works if you're talking about measuring elapsed time.

Nobody ever wants to go to the doctor. It's still important to do so.

The only really discrete units in evolutionary biology are specific genes and individual organisms. Unfortunately, we don't have much of any direct data on the gene pool of historical populations, and the sheer number of organisms involved over time is both much larger than we can handle and also missing a huge chunk of the total population. So we categorize by things like species that group together organisms according to various criteria. But those categories are fuzzy at best. They exist only for convenience of study and discussion. Treating them as if they have any fundamental reality beyond that is liable to make for sloppy thinking and gross misunderstanding.

And? The universe also has the ability to create solar flares and mud. Would a universe without mud be a waste of time? Is the fact that the universe has the ability to create mud also a golden rule of physics?

If there were no consciousness in the universe, whose time would be wasted?

Hitler spent hours meticulously rehearsing every word and gesture in his speeches with an eye towards making them look spontaneous. Trump actually does seem to do most of hid speaking off the cuff and appears to think preparation is for losers. This is one of the few areas that I am actually glad that Trump isn't like Hitler.