Well, if a philosopher says it, it must be true, because he defines a term his own way and it doesn’t conform.

This is all the argument of a compulsive labeler someone who says, "Your area must meet my expectations." You obviously need very black-and-white terminology to trust a discipline, but the disciplines don’t really care. Life does not conform to your wishes, and neither does the science associated with it.

And the magical thinking that goes into the idea that somehow there is a "life force" is pretty pitiful. It’s not even anti-science, it’s pure nonsense.

You really need at least some understanding of biology before you have any legitimacy to criticize it, and from the parroting of crackpot straight-from-ignorance concepts you do repeatedly, you’re not even close.

Gamila,
It’s just like if you look at at a wall that has been painted. What color is it? Is it yellow or yellow-yellow green or is it a shade or a tint of yellow or yellow green. Perhaps it is a degree darker than true yellow, is it caused from black or is it in part a neutral of yellow and violet? Or is it yet another brown–another neutral from green and red?

The point is that if someone says it is yellow it is an estimation and it orients what we see with what we say–basic understanding of the world around us. I think you are splitting hairs on this issue.

Folks, it’s foolish to try to reason with someone who cannot reason. Gamila, under different names, has been repeatedly banned from other forums for doing what he/she/it does here, where moderation is lax. If you don’t feed it, it will go away.

Right, right, don’t feed the trolls, I should know better.

Gamilia,

Take it from someone who loves science but does not agree with the evolution thing. Your not going to persuade anyone by being inflammatory. Even if you have a completely valid point, you will not be received and you will appear to be a nut.

I do agree that biology can tell us what life does and can tell us how it works but that it can not tell us what the life force is. But your topic is "Biology is not science." Science is knowledge, based on observation, experimentation, and research so in that sense you are making an inflammatory, controversial statement. And you are wasting your time typing because no one is going to take you serious.

Maybe you could have titled it "What is life force?" Let people give their point of view and chill out. We are grown and have gray matter also.

Let’s recall that we gave attributes of life (growth, reproduction, etc.) and that these characteristics are difinite to say that an organism is living. Now,

It is us (humans) who also gave the definition isn’t it? We are consious in our own and that makes us capable of distinguishing the objects with self-sustaining processes; It is us who identify if a thing is indeed living and so we come up to two categories: living things and non-living things. Animals can also do the same but they can’t verbalize or make it in black and white.

In biology, it clearly defined the basis for having life: the chemical and cellular nature of all the living things. However, as what I see here is that, studying further life in micro level will still lead us to the chemical nature. That the complexity of life is explained by the properties and behavior of the different biochemicals that made us.

It seems hardly for the most of us to accept the researched facts that life was just explained by such particles. It is just a matter of where you would put yourself, you believe or not, or you accept it but you have other principles greater than it, and there would enter your philosophy and spirituality.

Okay, let’s try going back to the basics and go to the old, philosophical ways.

To put it simply, everybody could give a definition for what life is. The definitions you mentioned earlier were just some of the few possibly generated by scientists or non-science people from whatever evidences they had or what made them witnesses of something.

Personally, life for me is a lot of mystery and this mystery is out of the boundary of what sicence could prove, whether it’s a fact or theory. From one of the definitions you cited earlier,

There’s no doubt that they challenged mystery. Fairly enough, their perseverance is remarkable, we have lots of something to think on but would it be worthy taking the time or trouble to think and make an argument for?

We don’t know exactly what an atom or a quark is either – does that mean physics and chemistry aren’t science?

Nobody has witnessed firsthand the subsurface forces that account for all of our rocks except extrusive volcanics and sediments. Does this mean Geology is not a science?

Finally:

Biology = study of life

If we knew the exact definition of life, would we need biology?

Yep gamila i couldn’t agree with you more, since we don’t know what quarks or leptons are, since we can’t classify your photon, since we don’t understand fully the complexities of the universe we should just step back and go work at the deli – and then we can learn magic and everyone will be happy!! – I mean, whats the point of this thing people call knowledge after all? Why try to find out these little flaws that you speak of? – Yep science is just silly…

Have you ever seen a raccoon gamila? You have? Well there’s no way to tell if that’s what it was. Have you ever seen a giraffe gamila? Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t because a giraffe is a species so you can’t tell what it was. I really hate to be sarcastic gamila but if I use your reasoning then I don’t know if I’m a human (homo sapien) because that’s meaninglessness. Why don’t you try something else that’s more helpful or informative.

Hi Colin. Remember me? We’ve met before. I see you have found another forum to pollute. I came across this forum quite by accident but quickly recognised you. Same old stuff, I see.

A note to the members of this forum: Colin (aka gamila) has been doing this sort of thing for years. He invariably gets banned, then moves on. You’re just the latest. The guy’s not stupid, just not quite all there, if you get my meaning. You’re certainly free to continue with these "discussions" if:

1) you’re stupid
2) not quite all there
3) have nothing better to do
4) am having fun

Back to you Colin: I’ll be posting this message in all the threads you have started just to make sure that everyone knows what they are dealing with.

Till we meet again.

Gavin

And what, gamila, is a science?

Have you ever seen a chair gamila? What is it?
This is the problem species. Words, as well as species are a convenient way to carry an idea, but there is more to any individual chair than to the generic concept of chair. So species are a convenient concept, but not really necessary, as bacteriologists know, and getting rid of species to replace the concept with something based on more objective characters (read about OTU) is not going to rock or change anything in the basis of the theory of natural selection.

No, he is talking about change in a population which we choose to define as speciation. As canalon has pointed out, "species" is a term that we created and we are free to define and redefine it as we see fit.

All those people with philosopher degrees have to make money some how…

Life is an entity which can self replicate and is generally thought to be made of organic materials.

Using this principle, life is definable.

I agree that physicists and chemists explain patterns and label them in a structured manner, but to say that something is something only means that something is defined to be understood in our minds. Another system for understanding the same patterns could be developed by a different race which would contradict some of ours but still explain the phenomena.

Biology is defining a set of rules to govern observed phenomena which we characterize as living.

Gamila I think you will find that there is a lot of redundancy and confusing terminology in biology but we do know what a living entity is, just like what a molecule is.

What is energy?
What is matter?
What is the universe?

They are all definitions which fit our current level of understanding of the phenomena observed by human characteristic senses in the environment at this point in time.

We can define what ANYTHING is since it is we who observe it, nothing is the same to any entity as it is to the other, only the senses which relate to that entity and the structures which can be built from the correlation of multiple similar observing entities such as a human population. eg. a dog views the universe differently to us.

You want to use the lack of ability of prehistoric understanding to properly classify their science, in terms of todays perspective. They did not know everything we know today when they classified their terminology, therefore there will be variations to the popular accepted definition which causes this ambiguity.
But to say that Biology is not a science is only an argument based on a lack of concise definition in some parts, not because it is undefinable and is not absolute.

EDIT

I think what you are trying to say is that life is based on the laws of chemistry and physics therefore it is not a real science.

Well obviously, since chemistry and physics aren’t real sciences, either! 😉

Gamila, what exactly do you consider to be a real science?

You know we’ll be going to start at number one again here. I just read some such as "physics, chemistry, etc. –are not sciences either. He/She (gamila) always believe that they are not sciences either. Where could we go from here if for him/her all the sciences we know are not sciences for him/her.

Okay, what makes science a science? if science is a systematized body of knowledge, based on facts, observations and experimentation, what makes it to be called as *science* then? Therefore if anything is not systematized and based on different facts etc., should we still consider it as science?

Maybe gamila wanted to point out the limitations of science and its branches. That’s what I think here .:wink:

If I were to accept your definition, then I’d be happy to admit that Biology [b]is not[/b] science.

Quid est veritas?

Yes and No… The truth as it is often the case is much more complicated than that. And as always nice catch-phrases are wrong.

so NO, because, the scientific method has been established to provide a way to evaluate the confidence, the degree of truth that a proposition carry. But it is a dynamic process that can and should be constantly evaluated in the face of the available evidence. And by that I mean reliable fact based evidence whose collection method is also available so that the degree of confidence can be evaluated. So science do not try to say what is the truth, but strive to provide the best fit of a model to the available evidence.

However, and that is the sad part of it, a general lack of understanding and of science literacy combined with generally poor science reporting has the consequence (plus the increasing complexity of the matter at hand) that many people takes bits of science without understanding them and do not or cannot evaluate the degree of certainty attached to said result. In this respect you could be right that in many cases there is a wrong use of science.

And to finish on a more personal note: But to show flaws in a scientific theory, it is required that the whistle blower understand what (s)he is talking about. We can see, particularly in this forum, a lot of people who have no clue about what they are talking about trying to destroy scientific theory that are well established and that are laying on solid foundations using hypotheses that they pulled out of their asses and fact that they do not understand. If it wasn’t so exhaustingly repetitive, it would be funny. I remind everyone that in the Kuhnian theory of the paradigm shifts, the shift are usually not caused by an outsider, but by someone who after understanding the current paradigm is able to test its limits and challenge it on those bases.

I’m sorry gamila, but when I see the exact phrasing of scientific definitions being picked apart, when they originated from wikipedia, I can’t help but be skeptical of your claims.

Tell me what is tennis, without describing what actions the sport entails? or any activity?
You want an answer such that describes life without verbs or actions. Life is a name given to entities which follow certain characteristic actions. You are saying because they "do" instead of "are" means that it is not defined.
If you think about it every single piece of existence that we know of is characteristic of its actions. We know that electrons like to move towards positive charges, but why they do it is unanswerable other than they just do.
Even if everything came down to energy we would still describe energy as "something which does this or that", that really is our limit of understanding with our senses.

Science is testing this understanding of our environment, "what happens when I do this?" and when we find a pattern occurring we describe the pattern in another language, mathematics or english, and use that logic to construct theories.
The science is not wrong, it may need a bit of terminology polish up soon, which is expected but it is by no means redundant.

You’re exactly right, gamila. There is no scientific method. The earth is flat.

g stands for goat.

Has more relevance than some arguments that i have heard on this topic so-far. Shame on us all.

There is a scientific method, even if it is quite an idealization of the reality. And I do not see Kuhn disagreeing with the existence of the scientific method. I haven’t read Feyerabend’s though, so won’t comment on that.
But maybe you would not mind providing clear (and concise) explanation on how those 2 philosophers deny the existence of the scientific method. I would be curious. Really.

But I the mean time, maybe you could also try to respond to the main thrust of my message…

GAMILA just learned to type on his keyboard when he found these forums.

GAMILA: is philosophy a science? is political science a science? is science a science?

LETS EXTRAPOLATE:
if Isaac Newton and Galileo observed the same star on the same day fifty years apart, then were they really on the same earth?
How could you begin to deny that which has been brought upon us by our great savior
and this reminds me of my favorite bible verse

Ezekiel 23:19-20
Yet she increased her prostitution, remembering the days of her youth when she engaged in prostitution in the land of Egypt. She lusted after their genitals – as large as those of donkeys, and their seminal emission was as strong as that of stallions.

WHOAH! funky

Well, if a philosopher says it, it must be true, because he defines a term his own way and it doesn’t conform.

This is all the argument of a compulsive labeler someone who says, "Your area must meet my expectations." You obviously need very black-and-white terminology to trust a discipline, but the disciplines don’t really care. Life does not conform to your wishes, and neither does the science associated with it.

And the magical thinking that goes into the idea that somehow there is a "life force" is pretty pitiful. It’s not even anti-science, it’s pure nonsense.
Which is the best cabbage soup diet? They all seem a little different

Well said. Good to see yet another David on the forums :). What is it with biology and the name David…?

Gamila, I must say that you have mastered the art of rhetoric, you should be a politician as you write a lot but say very little. Under the guise of fancy speak with such terms as circular(Which you over use), you try to dazzle us with with BS rather than any real content.

I am amazed at the large amounts of text that you have written and yet, you have failed to make any clear point, nor have you offered any insights worthy of thought. I suspect your post are some strange fixation that you have in creating conflict, and for what reason I do not know. Maybe you are somewhat passive aggressive and release your anger on forums as you feel safe in the comforts of internet anonymity.

For whatever the reason may be, allow me to suggest that you grow a pair and try to get along with your peers, otherwise I suggest you allow yourself to ferment in anger in that cubicle of yours as others try to make the world a better place.

It is your choice, join the team or just blow steam and eventually evaporate into your abysmal pit of nothingness.

The human race is a group effort and loners usually end up … well alone.

One more thing, Your constant overuse of the abbreviation i.e. is irritating to say the least, try not being so lazy and use real words instead, and perhaps look up e.g. as you often misuse the abbreviation i.e..

How wonderful.

Now, let’s get back to work people.

I like your user name. You a baseball fan? 😀