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Aristotle on the Origin of Life

rrobs

Well-Known Member
By conflating abiogenesis with evolution and assuming the quote of Aristotle is science. It isn't by any modern definition which is the definition to use. After all what tests did Aristotle use to demonstrate Fire, Water, Earth and Air before making the claim?
Good point. The definition to use in the year 4,000 will be the one to use in that year. It might be as different from our current definition as our current definition is different from Aristotle's definition.

I don't know exactly what tests Aristotle did, but I'm confident they were considered valid at the time, just as we consider out tests valid today. What the standard will be in 2,000 years is anybody's guess, but it'll probably be a lot different.
 

cladking

Well-Known Member
Nah I was just covering a scale comparison change to the OP. Keeping in mind that the atomic system covers many things we take for granted. Combustion engines for example. We would need a whole new system that explains why even the most basic actions occur.

There has been major change such as QM which augmented the atomic system as an underlying level of reality. I expect changes like that in the near future. The scifi nerd in me screams to expect more but is tempered.

We REALLY don't see science the same way. You're not at all wrong but you do equate scientific understanding with reality. This is just the way everyone thinks and it's exceedingly difficult for me to communicate the concept that there is another (probably many other) ways to understand scientific results and theory. Even the action of an internal combustion engine is impossibly complex. We design it specifically to operate in narrow parameters, like keeping the pistons inside the cylinders, but all of reality including the tides imparted by Alpha Centauri still operate on every part of the device.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
I don't know exactly what tests Aristotle did, but I'm confident they were considered valid at the time, just as we consider out tests valid today. What the standard will be in 2,000 years is anybody's guess, but it'll probably be a lot different.

Aristotle was a philosopher, not a scientist. He was a skilled observer in biology, but his physics was completely wrong in almost every major point.

He did NOT test his ideas using actual observations in a systematic way. One reason is that the ancient Greeks had a fundamental distrust in the senses and a disregard for practical, as opposed to theoretical discussion.

It is difficult to find a systematic scientists that gave proposals *and then tested them* until 1600AD. One possible example was Al Haytham's work in optics. Ptolemy actually did quite well considering he didn't have any optical equipment past the human eye,

So, do I think the science of 4000AD will be different than ours? Yes, of course.

Do I think it will say that planets do not orbit the sun? No, I do not.

Do I think it will say that DNA is NOT the primary source of genetic information? No, I do not.

And do I think that they will say that species are static? No, I do not.

I *do* expect many of the details to change, though. For example, I expect to see much more information about the *mechanisms* of evolution: how to measure and classify various sorts of selection pressure and being able to predict, at least to some extent, how things will change over time. Sort of a stochastic dynamical system.

Do I expect that the basic Big Bang scenario will be overthrown? No. But I would not at all be surprised if it becomes a fairly small part of a much larger perspective. Sort of like what happened with our understanding of the solar system when we discovered the existence of our galaxy and others.

And, of course, to some extent we can't even guess what direction things will go. What will be the burning scientific debate? No idea. What problems will they find themselves addressing? No idea. What *branches* of knowledge will be most active? No idea.

I'd bet the situation will be sort of like bringing one of the first agriculturalists to today to see a farm. The basic of planting seeds to get crops is still there, but there is *so* much more going on.
 

cladking

Well-Known Member
Do I think it will say that planets do not orbit the sun? No, I do not.

In order to accommodate Chaos Theory I foresee a great deal more math in everything but nowhere more than in prediction. While some things like orbits will still correspond a lot to Newtonian physics I would expect upheavals in every branch of science that involves consciousness and at sufficiently small scale this would even affect orbits (though I doubt this would be relevant in any instance).

"Consciousness" is the elephant always in the room full of blind men who are trying to describe reality. We study and take apart everything except the elephant because dismemberment ends the process.
 

Native

Free Natural Philosopher & Comparative Mythologist
Aristotle was a philosopher, not a scientist. He was a skilled observer in biology, but his physics was completely wrong in almost every major point.
Oh well, so was Newton, quote:
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") From - Isaac Newton - Wikipedia

Newton used his natural philosophy skills to imagine gravity by watching an apple falling to the ground. A very nice observation - which he later on simply superimposed to the over-Earthly celestial realms and his "laws of universal celestial motions" - which wasn´t universal at all.

Natural Philosophy was just the precursor for Natural Science which have spread out in many scientific fields in where natural philosophical thinking unfortunately mostly is lost.
One reason is that the ancient Greeks had a fundamental distrust in the senses and a disregard for practical, as opposed to theoretical discussion.
STILL Greek natural philosophers discovered and sensed the atom without any technical instruments.
Do I expect that the basic Big Bang scenario will be overthrown? No.
Well I do. There is nothing "basic" with the idea of everything being created from a Big Bang singularity. Unless one believe in a miraculous God of course :)
 
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Native

Free Natural Philosopher & Comparative Mythologist
While some things like orbits will still correspond a lot to Newtonian physics . . .
The orbital motions of planets in the Solar System isn´t "Newtonian physics". Newton simply put mathematical equations to already known planetary motions and called these equations for "gravitational laws of celestial motions" - which was physically wrong on the galactic scales in where our Solar System is an integrated orbital motion. So his mathematical equation really fails in both areas.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
The orbital motions of planets in the Solar System isn´t "Newtonian physics". Newton simply put mathematical equations to already known planetary motions and called these equations for "gravitational laws of celestial motions" - which was physically wrong on the galactic scales in where our Solar System is an integrated orbital motion. So his mathematical equation really fails in both areas.


This is wrong. Newtonian physics was able to explain the deviations from the previously described Keplerian orbits by using the gravitational influence of the other planets.

This is NOT simply fitting into previous known motions.
 

Yazata

Active Member
Aristotle was a philosopher, not a scientist. He was a skilled observer in biology, but his physics was completely wrong in almost every major point. He did NOT test his ideas using actual observations in a systematic way.

I'm not convinced that's true. It's clear that he observed things as you yourself note. He seems to have performed anatomical dissections. He opened up fertilized bird's eggs at various points to examine the fetal development within. So why should we believe that he had no hypotheses/expectations at the time he performed those observations about what he might find when he did? Humans being what they are, it's reasonable to think that he probably did. Put another way, I'm not convinced that the 'observation'/'experiment' distinction is as clear as we might like.

One reason is that the ancient Greeks had a fundamental distrust in the senses and a disregard for practical, as opposed to theoretical discussion.

That's was probably true in my opinion, but it's just a speculative historical hypothesis that itself would be hard to test. We don't really know what actual progression of steps and procedures the Hellenistic natural scientists like Aristotle and Archimedes, and the members of the Hippocratic medical tradition along with them actually used. All we have today is texts that they, their students, their later followers, their opponents or the doxographers wrote. And more often, we just have small fragments of those texts that later authors quoted, typically out-of-context statements of conclusions. So the way their ideas are presented might be as much a matter of chance and rhetorical convention as it was an indication of how their thought developed and how they actually arrived at their conclusions. The history of ideas is by its very nature highly speculative.

So, do I think the science of 4000AD will be different than ours? Yes, of course.

The question that interests me is how much of our present day science will be retained in the future, and how much will be replaced with something different.

Do I think it will say that planets do not orbit the sun? No, I do not.

We've seen the definition of 'planet' change in recent years, witness astronomers' callous abandonment of sad, forsaken Pluto (with a huge heart on its side crying out 'Please love me!')

Do I think it will say that DNA is NOT the primary source of genetic information? No, I do not.

And do I think that they will say that species are static? No, I do not.

I'm inclined to agree. But it's necessary to note that how 'species' is defined remains controversial. The word is used differently by different biologists and in different areas of biology.

Species concept - Wikipedia

I *do* expect many of the details to change, though.

I think that science is most stable over time at the level of observations. The ancients, medievals, and ourselves probably all would agree that fire is hot, gives off light, requires suitable fuels and so on. Where we differ is the conceptual scheme in which we try to understand what fire is. Is it an element in its own right? Is it the release of some hypothetical 'phlogiston'? Or is it a rapid oxidative exothermic chemical chain reaction?

For example, I expect to see much more information about the *mechanisms* of evolution: how to measure and classify various sorts of selection pressure and being able to predict, at least to some extent, how things will change over time. Sort of a stochastic dynamical system.

Yes. Very likely.

Do I expect that the basic Big Bang scenario will be overthrown? No.

I'm less confident of that one. I expect that the raw data of cosmological red shifts to still be acknowledged in the future. But future thinkers might be less prone than we are to interpret it as expansion of the universe or to extrapolate backwards to a singularity.

In other words, I expect the future to still recognize that our basic observations are good, but the future might understand those observations differently, in terms of different larger explanatory schemes.

But I would not at all be surprised if it becomes a fairly small part of a much larger perspective. Sort of like what happened with our understanding of the solar system when we discovered the existence of our galaxy and others.

Yes, I expect that too. But things like multiverse theories will be awfully hard to test, so they might never rise above being speculative hypotheses.

And, of course, to some extent we can't even guess what direction things will go. What will be the burning scientific debate? No idea. What problems will they find themselves addressing? No idea. What *branches* of knowledge will be most active? No idea.

Agree entirely.

I'd bet the situation will be sort of like bringing one of the first agriculturalists to today to see a farm. The basic of planting seeds to get crops is still there, but there is *so* much more going on.

Yes. What agriculturalists are doing today takes place in a very different conceptual context than that possessed by the very first farmers.
 
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cladking

Well-Known Member
I'm inclined to agree. But it's necessary to note that how 'species' is defined remains controversial. The word is used differently by different biologists and in different areas of biology.

Thanks.

"No term is more difficult to define than "species," and on no point are zoologists more divided than as to what should be understood by this word." Nicholson (1872).[54]

"Of late, the futility of attempts to find a universally valid criterion for distinguishing species has come to be fairly generally, if reluctantly, recognized" Dobzhansky (1937).[13]

"The concept of a species is a concession to our linguistic habits and neurological mechanisms" Haldane (1956).[46]

"An important aspect of any species definition whether in neontology or palaeontology is that any statement that particular individuals (or fragmentary specimens) belong to a certain species is an hypothesis (not a fact)" Bonde (1977).[55]

"The species problem is the long-standing failure of biologists to agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word 'species'." Hey (2001).[49]

"First, the species problem is not primarily an empirical one, but it is rather fraught with philosophical questions that require — but cannot be settled by — empirical evidence." Pigliucci (2003).[17]

"We show that although discrete phenotypic clusters exist in most [plant] genera (> 80%), the correspondence of taxonomic species to these clusters is poor (< 60%) and no different between plants and animals. ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, plant species are more likely than animal species to represent reproductively independent lineages." Rieseberg et al. (2006).[56]

This is simply an effect of reductionism. Some things can't be taken apart but more importantly nothing can ever fit into a nice neat taxonomy because of the nature of modern language to define things in words. So long as every word has an infinite number of meanings nothing can be reduced to mere words and taxonomies. We can't remove consciousness from observation because this is the nature of observers and the way we think.

Science is great but it may well have reached about the end of its tether. Without rules there is no science and we've reached the point that the observer is too much bigger than the observation. There are ways to address this problem but the solution is NOT ever finer categories or more precise definitions. The observer must be factored out and we can't do this without a better understanding of ourselves and the language by which we are programmed.
 

cladking

Well-Known Member
The orbital motions of planets in the Solar System isn´t "Newtonian physics". Newton simply put mathematical equations to already known planetary motions and called these equations for "gravitational laws of celestial motions" - which was physically wrong on the galactic scales in where our Solar System is an integrated orbital motion. So his mathematical equation really fails in both areas.

I merely meant that there is a great deal of correlation between any modern theoretical orbit and the same orbit described by newtonian physics. Newtonian physics is more than adequate to describe orbits for current practical purposes.

There are going to be all sorts of problems going forward with scales. Things that are true on one scale will not be on far larger or smaller scales. Some of the reasons for this will be discovered just as we've already discovered reasons for some such differences.
 

dfnj

Well-Known Member
According to Aristotle, "Life in the first instance, is formed by the inherent energy of the primary elements such as: Earth, Water, Air and Fire which molds and organizes inert matter into living things."Some examples of this idea are fireflies developed from the morning dew, bedbugs and lice developed from the slime of wells and mice along with some higher animals came from moist soil. Aristotle also felt that humans first appeared on Earth in the form of a worm." Age of Life on Earth - The Physics Factbook

I wonder if another two thousand years of research will lead to a conclusion that makes our current theory of evolution just as ridiculous. Can't say for sure, but if history is any guide, I'd say the chances are most excellent that such will be the case.

The difference is in one case it was mostly conjecture. In the case of evolution there's abounding evidence that it is true. Anyone who has ever studied evolution, including myself, will find it very difficult to conclude it is not science fact. The evidence is just too compelling with regards to the way different species specialize and cross-breed.

Regardless, any time a theist brings up the topic of evolution I can't help but think he or she is pretending to believe in God. Some people's faith in God is just so weak they are easily offended by anyone claiming a different dogma over their own.

Let's settle this once and for all. If you are theist, just stop caring about evolution. Evolution simply does not matter. You need to strengthen your faith and burn the following deep into your heart. Our omnipotent God is all-powerful. Omnipotent means without limitations. Our omnipotent God is not bounded by the laws of physics or the laws of logic. Our omnipotent God can create the Universe in ANY amount of time. Not only can our omnipotent God create the Universe in any amount of time He can also include all the fake fossil and carbon dating evidence. Stop assuming our God is a lesser God bounded by physical evidence. There is no evidence evolutionist are going to present that will change the fact our omnipotent God has no limitations to what He is capable of doing. So stop insulting God with your claims about evolution being "ridiculous". God is certainly powerful enough to create the Universe with evidence of evolution. Stop insulting God!

Now why would God create a Universe with fake evidence of evolution. It's very simple. God's proving ground for faith is perfect in its construction.
 

dfnj

Well-Known Member
There is also a huge difference between observing gravity and observing evolution. Not having seen an actual mutation from one genus to another

Liger-e1517989668779.jpg


Does a Liger count?

Liger - Wikipedia
 

Native

Free Natural Philosopher & Comparative Mythologist
This is wrong. Newtonian physics was able to explain the deviations from the previously described Keplerian orbits by using the gravitational influence of the other planets.

This is NOT simply fitting into previous known motions.
I didn´t question Newtons calculations of planetary motion but his very idea of celestial motion caused by "gravity".

Taking an unseen (and the weakest) "force", which no one can explain physically to describe planetary motions, isn´t physics but guessworks. When this idea ("law") furthermore demands another unseen force of "dark matter" in galaxies, it is wild speculations on the border line of meta-physics.

Just think of it: We actually have 2 different kinds of orbital motions in our galaxy, but just 1 "gravitational" suggestion/theory of how this can be. This needs to be explained and this can only be explained by including the formation of the Solar System into the formation and motion in the Milky Way.

I replied earlier that:
Oh well, so was Newton, quote:
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") From - Isaac Newton - Wikipedia
As a natural philosopher Newton (and all other scientists) could have gained natural cosmological knowledge from studying the best of ancient Stories of Creation, but then he/they became a speculative mathematician :)
 
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Native

Free Natural Philosopher & Comparative Mythologist
I merely meant that there is a great deal of correlation between any modern theoretical orbit and the same orbit described by newtonian physics. Newtonian physics is more than adequate to describe orbits for current practical purposes.
I follow you. But there´s a great scientific difference between describing something and explaining something and yes, Newtons calculations are used in launching of spacecrafts, but this isn´t physics but mere geometric calculations.

As I said to Polymath257 above:
Taking an unseen (and the weakest) "force", which no one can explain physically to describe planetary motions, isn´t physics but guessworks. When this idea ("law") furthermore demands another unseen force of "dark matter" in galaxies, it is wild speculations on the border line of meta-physics.
 

tas8831

Well-Known Member
According to Aristotle, "Life in the first instance, is formed by the inherent energy of the primary elements such as: Earth, Water, Air and Fire which molds and organizes inert matter into living things."Some examples of this idea are fireflies developed from the morning dew, bedbugs and lice developed from the slime of wells and mice along with some higher animals came from moist soil. Aristotle also felt that humans first appeared on Earth in the form of a worm." Age of Life on Earth - The Physics Factbook

I wonder if another two thousand years of research will lead to a conclusion that makes our current theory of evolution just as ridiculous. Can't say for sure, but if history is any guide, I'd say the chances are most excellent that such will be the case.
Well, Genesis has been shown to be utterly ridiculous, so...

Then again, evolution actually has lots of EVIDENCE in its favor, while religious "explanations" for reality-based events are not explanations.
 

Shad

Veteran Member
We REALLY don't see science the same way. You're not at all wrong but you do equate scientific understanding with reality.

I think you are reading more into my post than what is contained in said post.


This is just the way everyone thinks and it's exceedingly difficult for me to communicate the concept that there is another (probably many other) ways to understand scientific results and theory.

You haven't even tried.

Even the action of an internal combustion engine is impossibly complex.

Ergo "take for granted"

We design it specifically to operate in narrow parameters, like keeping the pistons inside the cylinders, but all of reality including the tides imparted by Alpha Centauri still operate on every part of the device.

Babble missing the point.
 

rrobs

Well-Known Member
The difference is in one case it was mostly conjecture. In the case of evolution there's abounding evidence that it is true. Anyone who has ever studied evolution, including myself, will find it very difficult to conclude it is not science fact. The evidence is just too compelling with regards to the way different species specialize and cross-breed.

Regardless, any time a theist brings up the topic of evolution I can't help but think he or she is pretending to believe in God. Some people's faith in God is just so weak they are easily offended by anyone claiming a different dogma over their own.

Let's settle this once and for all. If you are theist, just stop caring about evolution. Evolution simply does not matter. You need to strengthen your faith and burn the following deep into your heart. Our omnipotent God is all-powerful. Omnipotent means without limitations. Our omnipotent God is not bounded by the laws of physics or the laws of logic. Our omnipotent God can create the Universe in ANY amount of time. Not only can our omnipotent God create the Universe in any amount of time He can also include all the fake fossil and carbon dating evidence. Stop assuming our God is a lesser God bounded by physical evidence. There is no evidence evolutionist are going to present that will change the fact our omnipotent God has no limitations to what He is capable of doing. So stop insulting God with your claims about evolution being "ridiculous". God is certainly powerful enough to create the Universe with evidence of evolution. Stop insulting God!

Now why would God create a Universe with fake evidence of evolution. It's very simple. God's proving ground for faith is perfect in its construction.
What's with all the creationist stuff? Totally off topic.
 

rrobs

Well-Known Member
Well, Genesis has been shown to be utterly ridiculous, so...

Then again, evolution actually has lots of EVIDENCE in its favor, while religious "explanations" for reality-based events are not explanations.
Genesis is off topic.
 
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