You might say that, and the only thing remaining would be to back it.

Let's start with me simply noting that I comprehend the natural quite well, eh, I'll go ahead and say better than you, and leaving you to show otherwise. That will require some actual content or an actual argument.

You see, I'm not one of those pushing the "religion versus science" false dichotomy who hope to damage religion and only end up damaging science. A frequent occurrence of people overextending their arguments with bias-driven pseudoscience being presented in the name of science.

No, it's simply false to say that the market is a determinant of value, or that the 5 dollars is value you have "created".

Simple math, helpful to encouraging deriving totally erroneous conclusions.

In reality, the creator of the bike, created the value. That is spread out over a great number of historical engineers and scientists, credited and uncredited. You've simply profited by moving the value around.

If you want a more formal statement of this, in fact the middleman's profit is not derived from "the market", but rather a differential in knowledge of the perfect market. If in fact, another person would sell an equivalent bike at a $1 profit, the "value" could equally be said to be $1, rather than $5. That's because your notion of anecdotal market exchanges determining the value is entirely wrong--those values are in fact determined largely by taking advantage of people's ignorance of the market.

If someone takes a job at $10000/year for which the actual perfect market value would be $50000/year, doing identical work, it does not mean that the former person's work is in fact only worth $10000/year, it means he is being taken advantage of by someone with a broader knowledge of the market. And that knowledge does not create value. The guy doing the work is creating it. And executives know this clearly, and it is their primary source of income. As it is for the entirety of the financial sector. Income, not value creation, which is absent from their involvement in the situation.

So, you agree in principle with directed evolution, in that you directly say man is one cause of it?

I imagine there's one, and only one, source of design you categorically reject. I wonder what that would be...

I don't understand. Both directed evolution and ID are plausible positions. After you claim they are not, even when you invoke the conclusions of lawyers whose scientific credentials are assured by wearing a black robe and sitting on an impressive raised platform, it will remain exactly as plausible as it in fact is.

Complexity is evidence. You'll claim it is not, that will be your interpretation of the evidence and not in any way affect the reality it is evidence. That such complexity could -also- be explained in another way, again, in no way alters it from being evidence of my stance. It merely becomes evidence for more than one stance.

Anyway, I've posted peer-reviewed evidence for a "director" before, but that isn't really necessary as you have no compelling basis, nor even any reasonable basis to conclude, that no biological design has happened over those billions of non-observable years.

I am not trolling. If I stopped, you just get eliminated by evolution and you become completely and permanently irrelevant. According to you yourself. Hopefully that will make you feel less tired.

Don't blame me that your position has no possible derivable benefit, and mine does, and that according to you yourself, what your opinion may be could not possibly be of any even theoretical value. Kudos on "STFU" as an airtight scientific and philosphical argument, though.

In response to your other comments on divergence and speciation, you should know that diverged groups can be the same species. When populations separate they then adapt to their environment as well as drifting genetically. It is this difference, the distance between the groups in terms of DNA, that is the divergence. In general we consider something a different species if it is mostly unwilling to interbreed or sufficiently inefficient at producing fertile offspring that gene transfer is suppressed (both is unnecessary) but it takes a fair amount of genetic distance for this to happen, so the point of divergence is before the point of separation into separate species. Because this change happens at a roughly constant rate we can with care estimate the time in the past when two groups separated by calculating from the divergence (but this is not the speciation point which is why they specifically use "diverged" as a word).All of these are much more messy in reality than we might like, for example even as groups become more genetically distinct there can still be occasional genetic exchange due to interbreeding, and the species/sub-species line is blurred but despite the noise the data is still good for an approximate answer.

I do think I should say to this as well, that it seems you are correcting my notion that the criteria is rather vague with "You idiot! It's way vaguer even than that!"

I stand corrected... I think.

The same is true of felines and then again for domestic cats. We label according to a process which over time broadens what a category means but can never fully rewrite its origin or skip across groups. Thus the features that can be in these groups and subgroups are fixed for us to discover, not just pulled out of a hat.

Okay, but the category you cannot rewrite is also just as arbitrary, and pulled out of a hat.

You complying with them is, to all appearances, simply dogma and a mandate never to correct yourself, even if scientifically required, lest you "rock the boat" of your predecessor's arbitrary names and categories.

Of course no animals break this pattern. You've made it so by fiat, such that anything you add unfalsifiably fits the categorization system that was, to be frank, made up. Because your methodology is constructed to ensure that.

I am hopeful that cladistics will provide an objective methodology here that is sorely needed, but outside of that, what are you saying that contradicts my notion that this is all an arbitrary construct of your own (well, rather, "biology scientist clubhouse") creation?

So... you've got nothing. Got it.

The person making the original statement as a statement of science, exactly as I've said. My statements as to what I am "happy" about, like my preferences in music, are neither offered as scientific claims nor need be addressed within that domain.

If you're using "make" as a term for earning money through wages, then most rich people "make" money. They may also make more money by investing money wisely, whether it be stocks, starting businesses, etc... If you think that rich people "get their hands on" money by just stealing it from the poor, you're delusional.

As delusional as imagining I said something I didn't, as you just did? But no, gaining from the creation of value, such as the financial sector does, is not creation of value. If you want to make an argument that it facilitates it, fine, and appropriate relevance (and compensation) for this could be discussed.

Can a scientist/engineer/lawyer organize and run a huge company composed of lawyers, engineers, and scientists?

Yes. One requires extensive knowledge and by definition the ability to manifest value-add directly by that knowledge, that knowledge being the core relevant thing to a company doing it. The part distinctive to the executive role requires a $50 filing of Articles of Incorporation and pre-existing access to wealth or "contacts" for it. There's no question here that in terms of -ability-, the people with the skills can do that, the reverse is definitely not necessarily true. If we are discussion CEO's whose income is validated -insofar as- they are acting as one of the other categories, that is not contrary to my premise. Mostly, however, the market is determined simply by inequality of opportunity, and the business structures derived directly from that--having little to do with any kind of "meritocracy" principles you seem to be alluding to.

Yes, saying a CEO's income is validly creation of value -insofar as- their work is as one of these, is not something I'm arguing against.

Yes... maybe my viewpoint of directed evolution makes me more attuned to certain aspects of such a statement.

I certainly agree that evolutionary processes are generally speaking most directly responsible for biological differentiation, but I'm unwilling to make the inference from that of "often, therefore always" and statements like the one quoted seem to border on pseudoscience in how broad, unspecific, and untestable they are. I personally think that science is best served by making scientific statements, rather than an overstatement based on presuppositions, even if the person doing so is a scientist.

But yes, fully agreed that humans and chimps are very different. And I'm happy to have a metaphysical differentiator to be able say that, where science alone has no differentiator at all. Not having one takes us to a rather... interesting... ethical space.

Fair enough, but as was already noted, speciation is not definitively determinable by ability to reproduce.

It's a pretty core problem with the term, scientifically, actually.

So, I was taking "divergence" in a broader sense, which also doesn't seem to work for the statement.

Still, I see nowhere that I insulted anyone. I addressed a particular sentence, which has multiple levels of lack of clarity. That's all.

So, you seem to be agreeing with me more than disagreeing. The categories are not clear and distinctive, which I went ahead and called "arbitrary", because that's what they are.

So back to the quoted sentence...

"...mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago."

I still have no idea what actual information this is supposed to convey. Or is it more of a "rah rah, evolution!" reaction thing?

Pavlovian conditioning hasn't worked on me for a long time. Maybe that's my problem.

Oh, yes, forgot the other likely result. Summary downmodding. Thanks for the reminder of Slashdot tradition.

...mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago.

It'd be nice if my field's conclusions could be this broad...

Between this range and the fact that every reproduction is a "divergence", and so the baseline here seems to be divergence from one arbitrary cluster of characteristics given a latin name, and another arbitrary cluster of characteristics given a different latin name...

What does this even mean?

Yes, I know. I'll be shortly told I'm too dumb to understand, instead of an explanation. Fair enough, stipulated. Now go ahead and inform me of stuff.