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Popper himself failed to notice his own tautological claims of logic surrounding the oxymoron Natural Selection.

  • Empedocles-(600BC) "...Those animals perished immediately, for they were not fitted to live, and only those random coalitions of elements which were fittest to live survived, and continue to survive today...."
  • Aristotle(500BC) - "....Things appropriately constituted were preserved and things not appropriately constituted perished...."
  • Democritus - "...Those in harmony maintained themselves, while the unfit disappear... "

A Pleonasm allows for an opposite sense to be implied in a sentence - Tautological expressions, which differs from Tautological assertions or logical validity - claims which must be true by logical necessity, not falsifiable under any conditions. Physics equations aren't true by logical necessity but falsifiable due to experimental observation.

Oxymoron is the opposite of pleonasm. Pleonasms aren't tautologies, Only sentences can be tautologies. Pleonasm has the intuitive sense of saying the same thing twice but doesn't guarantee the truth of the proposition like a rhetorical tautology does. Meaning that a RT explains everything under all conditions. An oxymoron has the sense of being contradictory but isn't, only a premise represented with a sentence can be non-explanatory under all conditions. Rhetorical tautologies guarantee the truth of the proposition, where the expectation was for a falsifiable construct. Logical tautologies guarantee the the truth of the proposition and is expected to do so by logical necessity. John Wilkins series of articles dealing with the tautology problem equivocated between these two concepts by not defining what he means with tautology. The term tautology itself doesn't differentiate between the concepts.

Biologists can't define the universal mechanism it claims to study, it opted to equivocate between claims of logic and mechanism, much like John Wilkins equivocated between Tautological assertions, propositions and Tautological expressions.

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