Is a food tag really necessary in a food forum?

[comma]

Global warming makes sense to me because I can observe pollution being pumped into the air constantly, and I can understand that the wide-scale burning of things generates heat. I'm open there to the distant possibility that it could be wrong for some reason I don't understand, but I'm willing to accept it.

You just showed me you have little understanding of global warming. It's not getting hot because we're burning things and fire is hot. Please read about greenhouse gases.

Also, you seem to think that an appeal to ignorance has something to do with the common lexical meaning of ignorance, which it doesn't? Maybe I'll give you a free pass there, since I could be misinterpreting what you're saying. Appeal to ignorance means that I believe something to be true because you can't prove it false, or that I believe something to be false because you can't prove it true.

No, I used the term to correctly refer to the logical fallacy it describes. You were attempting to shift the burden of proof to me despite the fact that you were the one making claims with no proof behind them. You were doing this by arguing that we couldn't possibly have any knowledge of when teosinte was cultivated or how long it took maize to evolve or when. That's an appeal to ignorance, especially because we do actually have that knowledge and you're proving unwilling to read or understand it.

When you say "the fiction I invented" you're saying it's a fiction because you already believe it's a fiction, rather than by providing actual evidence that it's fiction. That's called circular logic.

No, it's just refusing to allow you to use an appeal to ignorance. By your "logic," you could prove to me that God exists by the mere fact that I can't prove he doesn't.

Anyway, TristramShandy has made a wonderful, logical case for the anthropogenic evolution of maize, for which I'd see no reason you could deny on rational grounds. In your post edit, you ignore his main point: the logical evidence that man turned teosinte into a nutritive plant is simply the fact that a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive. What's wrong with that logic?

[TristramShandy]

Global Warming isn't caused by the production of heat energy but by its retention. The sun produces significantly more heat energy than human civilization. Human civilization has merely created an environment that retains more of that energy much to our disadvantage.

You don't seem to understand the argumentum ad auctoritatem. An appeal to authority is not fallacious when it is done by presenting their arguments and evidence, otherwise it would be plainly ridiculous to become an expert in a field. However, we obviously have better results in the Sciences from Scientists than from Non-Scientists.

The fallacy of the Argument from Authority is that an Authority is not necessarily correct about deductive reasoning even if they're more likely to be correct. However, no one made that argument and so your sloppy attempts at criticising it have all been in vain. No one has said that the Authorities we're discussing are necessarily correct because they are Authorities. We have said that they are correct because they have demonstrated by tested methods the truth of their model, however. Models can always be improved, but we do know a great many things we didn't used to know and this didn't come about from people who were not Authorities.

[Spuuky]

You're right guys, greenhouse gases definitely aren't created by burning things, like, say, oil in combustion engines. I was definitely referring to fire being hot when I said "burning."

Regarding your incredibly asinine and borderline-offensively-stupid God Exists paragraph, no. I can't prove God exists by asking you to prove that he doesn't. That isn't even remotely close to what I said. It's exactly the OPPOSITE of what I said. What I essentially said is "if you can't prove God doesn't exist, THE POSSIBILITY THAT HE EXISTS EXISTS." Not that he does, or that there's even reason to believe that does, or that it in any way impacts the possibility that he does. Simply that if you can't prove he doesn't exist, then ... you can't prove he doesn't exist. Nothing more. As it applies to this discussion, if you can't prove that Teosinte naturally mutated, the POSSIBILITY exists that it did. If you can prove that it didn't naturally mutate, great, you eliminated that possibility. I haven't seen sufficient evidence of that to persuade me. That's all I'm claiming. I'm still open to the possibility that you are correct. You're saying it's proven that it didn't - I don't agree, based on the evidence presented to me. I'm not saying "I don't agree with you, so the opposite is true." I'm saying "I don't think your evidence is sufficient, so I don't know. As a random related addendum, here's another possibility which also may be true or untrue."

The logical evidence that man turned teosinte into a nutritive plant is simply the fact that a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive. What's wrong with that logic?

Other than the vast array of nutritive plants in nature?

[comma]

You're right guys, greenhouse gases definitely aren't created by burning things, like, say, oil in combustion engines. I was definitely referring to fire being hot when I said "burning."

Well, you did say:

I can understand that the wide-scale burning of things generates heat

Which is not the cause of global warming. You're saying there that humans contribute to global warming by generating heat, which is demonstrably false.

As for the rest, I can tell by the capital letters that you are starting to get annoyed, so I will leave us with that. It's been a pleasure.

[TristramShandy]

The logical evidence that man turned teosinte into a nutritive plant is simply the fact that a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive. What's wrong with that logic?

Other than the vast array of nutritive plants in nature?

That's the point. There isn't a vast array of nutritive plants in nature. We cultivated them. Most plants as they appeared before cultivation were only very minimally nutritive. Some things we eat today were cultivated from plants that provided less energy than the energy it took to consume them.

Because of this, human beings like any other animal had to spend almost all of their waking existence finding food. The advent of cultivation is the advent of civilization. It wasn't until we were able to create highly nutritive foods and produce them at a satisfactory scale that we were able to devote time to other pursuits.

[Spuuky]

It does generate heat. That it does so in a roundabout way it irrelevant to the point and just a semantic nitpick.

[Spuuky]

The logical evidence that man turned teosinte into a nutritive plant is simply the fact that a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive. What's wrong with that logic?

Other than the vast array of nutritive plants in nature?

That's the point. There isn't a vast array of nutritive plants in nature. We cultivated them. Most plants as they appeared before cultivation were only very minimally nutritive. Some things we eat today were cultivated from plants that provided less energy than the energy it took to consume them.

Because of this, human beings like any other animal had to spend almost all of their waking existence finding food. The advent of cultivation is the advent of civilization. It wasn't until we were able to create highly nutritive foods and produce them at a satisfactory scale that we were able to devote time to other pursuits.

So you are saying that all nutritive plants in nature are solely the result of human intervention? The lineage of all wild fruit, berries, figs, nuts, tubers, etc, is solely because people made them have nutritional value via cultivation?

If you're making the claim that no plants ever had nutritive value, then I don't see how that's possible.

[TristramShandy]

The logical evidence that man turned teosinte into a nutritive plant is simply the fact that a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive. What's wrong with that logic?

Other than the vast array of nutritive plants in nature?

That's the point. There isn't a vast array of nutritive plants in nature. We cultivated them. Most plants as they appeared before cultivation were only very minimally nutritive. Some things we eat today were cultivated from plants that provided less energy than the energy it took to consume them.

Because of this, human beings like any other animal had to spend almost all of their waking existence finding food. The advent of cultivation is the advent of civilization. It wasn't until we were able to create highly nutritive foods and produce them at a satisfactory scale that we were able to devote time to other pursuits.

So you are saying that all nutritive plants in nature are solely the result of human intervention? The lineage of all wild fruit, berries, figs, nuts, tubers, etc, is solely because people made them have nutritional value via cultivation?

If you're making the claim that no plants ever had nutritive value, then I don't see how that's possible.

No, I said that naturally occurring plants were only very minimally nutritive. They provided enough nutrition to support nomadic humans if they foraged for it all day, and only sometimes as people more often starved to death. However, this was an obviously inferior quality of life to what we have now.

[Spuuky]

Saying that ancient plants are less nutritious than modern plants is a far different claim than this one in ways that are relevant to this discussion:

a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive.

[Rantz]

who cares about corn enough to write even one paragraph, what's going on in this thread

[Jiro]

This thread went from me complaining about the fact that my cereal looked like animal poop into this what the hell

[Quindiana Jones]

This might be the first time a spam thread turned into an EoEO thread. It's normally the other way around.

[comma]

Saying that ancient plants are less nutritious than modern plants is a far different claim than this one in ways that are relevant to this discussion:

a plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive.

A plant in nature has no reason to be nutritive enough to sustain a population of animals/humans. Surely you realize that every time you eat a fruit, vegetable, berry, nut, etc., you are precluding a potential plant. To say that plants naturally just evolved to feed us is not only ridiculously optimistic but also a huge insult to our ancestors thousands of years ago who developed agriculture.

[Spuuky]

Sigh. I can't continue this discussion if you're going to keep attributing things to me that I did not say. Of course plants were artificially selected for a long time to reach the point they are at now, and, as I've said several times, I never said otherwise. Basically my ONLY claim is this: "I personally find it unlikely (but not impossible) that the plants that have since been artificially selected didn't originally have some nutritional value."

[comma]

Okay, and my response is that it's funny you find it unlikely when it's been proven, and never refuted, by experts.

End of discussion? *extends hand for shake*