A Quick Study of Tautologies (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 03:29 (4883 days ago)

As I was cleaning the catbox for the trip... I was thinking about David's agreement that Natural Selection was a tautology.-For a more formal treatment on why it isn't, we'll have to wait until I get back. -But in the meantime, food for thought: Are all tautologies inherently unreasonable? A tautology that is trivially true is... guess what, the foundation of mathematics itself!-Euclid's first four postulates:
1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.-2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.-3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.-4. All right angles are congruent.-Actually, TalkOrigins just supplied me with the refutation I need:-"The real significance of this argument is not the argument itself, but that it was taken seriously by any professional philosophers at all. 'Fitness' to Darwin meant not those that survive, but those that could be expected to survive because of their adaptations and functional efficiency, when compared to others in the population. This is not a tautology, or, if it is, then so is the Newtonian equation F=ma"-Have a great weekend guys & gal. (Someday we'll get more ladies on here!)

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"