Word Magic, Definitional Abracadabra is how evolutionism wins the Micro/Macro-evolution Debate

This is HILARIOUS. Oh Crashie, you've outdone yourself. Post of the Month material here.

Creationist ICANT (whose posts I have to admit to not being able to follow much of the time, and I think he and I disagree on some major points as well, but I've lost track) has been hitting the theme of microevolution as the limit of evolution pretty well lately in my opinion, emphasizing how inability to interbreed is an arbitrary definition of Species, with some good examples from his own experience with animals. He's been holding up tenaciously (he doesn't lose his temper the way I do, forgive me Lord), against the evos for some time at EvC.

So here's crashfrog showing how evolutionists think , and it ain't pretty:

[ICANT} You can call it anything you want to call it. But if you start with two mice and a billion years later you got trillions of mice and billions of them can not breed with each other because of changes or habits you still got trillions of mice, whether they can breed with each other or not.

[crash] Right. And again - macroevolution is not the prediction that mice will ever stop being mice; it's that the group called "mice" will come to refer to more and more different species.

"Ape" referred, once, to only a single species. Now it refers to dozens, including hominids like us. "Hominid" once referred to a single species; now, it refers to dozens, including Homo hablis, Homo neandertalis, and Homo sapiens.

Do you understand, yet? Mice will still be mice, apes will still be apes, tetrapods will still be tetrapods, birds will still be birds - yet, macroevolution will still be occurring, species will still be changing, and new species will still be emerging from old ones. Mice will never turn into birds - but evolution doesn't say that they ever did.

Do you understand that?

So what he's doing here is trying to pull the rug out from under all attempts to make the point ICANT has been making by simply redefining his point out of the contest. Definitional abracadabra. WORD MAGIC. I dunno, what's the very best analogy? Shell and pea game maybe?

Oh yes macroevolution IS exactly what he says it is not: ...macroevolution is not the prediction that mice will ever stop being mice. It most certainly IS, Crash, and that should be the definition of macroevolution.

What crash is saying amounts to total denial that the Theory of Evolution says all living things came from OTHER living things with OTHER NAMES. We don't dispute that microeveolution occurs, many varieties of the same species, some of which cannot interbreed with one another, which is ICANT's point. But MACROevolution begins where the NAMES CHANGE. Come ON crash, this is word games you are playing here. Or really it's Evolutionism that's playing the word games. You are FORCING your view of things on us this way rather than making a rational case for it.

We know the difference between a mouse and a marmot, between a lizard and a bird, crash, AND SO DO YOU! The words clearly designate an objective reality that all recognize, so don't tell us about 5000 species of mice or lizards when the question at hand is whether the processes of variation could ever produce something that we would no longer CALL by the name of its originating species, something we'd no longer call a mouse or a lizard. THAT's WHAT THE QUESTION IS, CRASH, AND YOU KNOW IT.

We even concede the term "species" to you all, and why not? since all those words are synonyms -- Kind, Species, Class, Variety, etc. Clarity depends on having a fixed meaning for their specific uses but unfortunately Evolutionism has co-opted the terms to their own meanings, which they designate as Correct of course, leaving Creationists to make awkward convoluted efforts to distinguish one meaning from another, which evos can then pounce on with their trimphalist denunciations. We try to use the terms to convey the reality we have in mind and it's hard under the best of circumstances to be clear in that effort, but you and your evo friends seem to want to go out of your way to be as unclear as possible. There is no honest effort at debate here. Or, to be fairer than is warranted, at the very least you are so completely bamboozled by your own paradigm you can't think any other way and won't give the benefit of the doubt to so many who are trying to make the opposite case, just because it doesn't fit into your terminological and conceptual system. Of course it doesn't, it is a DIFFERENT MODEL COMPLETELY from evolution's. PARADIGM conflict, Crash.

Yes, WORD MAGIC. That's most of what Evolutionism is and Crashie has demonstrated it here. The Geology wing labels the strata in ways guaranteed to mystify anyone just starting out trying to understand some of these things, and more knowledgeable people as well who memorize it all as if it meant something. The labels serve only to obscure the reality the inquirer is looking for. What we have is slabs of rock but since they've been given fancy names to designate them as Time Periods it's very hard even to remember that they are just slabs of rock. This bit of word magic prevails despite the fact that over the decades since these labels came into fashion their boundaries have been pushed around quite a bit, mostly back and back -- as if nobody has a clue what they're talking about, which they don't.

Then the Biology wing pulls this kind of trick described by crashfrog. And the Paleontology wing does it by making sure the latest fossil discovery is carefully defined by supposed age and supposed evolutionary lineage so you can't get a clear picture of exactly what it is they found, thus begging the very question creationists are trying to address, co-opting the facts for the ToE, making it as hard as possible to think outside their carefully constructed theoretical box.

Yeah, shell and pea game, you can't lose if you keep shifting the definitions -- surreptitiously moving the pea from one shell to another. If you get all the definitions completely blurred together in the service of Evolution eventually we won't be able to think at all and we'll all just nod and smile and lockstep along with whatever you say.

===============

Postscript: The thread continues:

[ICANT] At no time did the piney-woods-rooter cease to be the same creature that I started with.

Well, it's not the same creature you started with. The creature you started with, presumably, died long ago, and the piney-woods rooters you have now are his descendants.

And, again - if "piney-woods rooter", as a term, can now encompass two species where before it encompassed one, why can't that be happening in nature? Why can't that have happened in the past?

Why can't "mammal", for instance, at one time have encompassed only a single kind of creature, and then over time come to have encompassed a large number of related creatures?

At least you need to begin to become aware of something you are just blithely skipping over here, Crashfrog, which is that there is a real problem with thinking you can prove evolution by definitional changes.

Consider this: Children are all different from their parents and from each other in describable ways. Are they separate species from their parents?

This is what you are implying when you say that the descendants of wild hogs selected by ICANT are a different species because they weigh much more than their ancestors, which he described here in Message 136 :

I am a farm raised person who has taken wild hogs we called piney-woods rooters that could survive on little food and water who weighed less than a hundred pounds. Through selective, breeding produced animals that weighed over 700 pounds that could survive on small amounts of food and water.

Where are you going to draw the line? Or are you going to refuse to draw one at all, and make every individual human or ape or horse into a separate species? Perhaps you want to eliminate the entire concept of Species altogether so that we'll have no names for anything any more and can go back to living in caves.

I know, you draw the line at inability to interbreed any more. But again, sorry, I've already shown that that one is just as arbitrary and meaningless. "Species" always meant creatures with different names. That's what it meant in Darwin's day and up until recently, at least until all this definitional hooha started taking over.

Let's stick to that definition. We'll have macroevolution when ALL SANE PEOPLE AGREE to call ICANT's new hog something other than a hog or a pig, not until. Meanwhile the changes within a species that lead to differentiating a new population from an old population, including inability to interbreed, are still only microevolution. Otherwise the debate is meaningless, words mean nothing, and we might as well all check into the loony bin.

============
Yet later:
And now Dr. Adequate chimes in.

[ICANT] I don't see how the big stallion and the little mare in my avatar can breed and produce an offspring.

They are both classified as horses.

So where is the difference other than size?

[Dr. A] The difference other than the very obvious difference? Well, if they can't breed, the other difference is species.

WRONG! You've just shown your adherence to the definitional destruction of truth, the Word Magic corruption of Reality, to mystification, to obfuscation. It's only macroevolution because you say it is, not because it is.

====================
Friday note:
Can't believe I left out the usual word on what the real reality actually IS. It's the fact that all new "species" that are highly specialized -- of mice, of hogs, of horses -- OUGHT to have the ability to further "evolve" into new varieties and "species" IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE, but the FACT is that in order to get such variations or "species" their genetic potentials must be REDUCED as those for their peculiar characteristics are refined and elaborated. It's what MUST happen when you (or Nature) isolate a small number from the greater population in order to develop a new variety, and you MUST reduce the numbers to get such new species so there's no way to avoid the genetic reduction. It does not happen any other way. I've made this point over and over and over. You can't get from any new highly "evolved" or specialized species to further species, whether this is brought about by domestic breeding or by the various forms of selection and isolation that operate in the wild, and that is the end of Evolution right there.

Ta-DA!!!
====================

Yeah, you CAN wait around until Judgment Day if you MUST to find this out if you don't want to acknowledge it now.