Posted on 09/16/2008 1:11:04 PM PDT by js1138
The 21st century is plagued by wild speculation and fantasies dressed up in graphs and tables and diagrams to look like independently verifiable fact. For example, Muslim lobbyists are currently pouring millions of pounds into producing bogus "atlases of creation", lavishly decorated with photographs and charts "proving" that every living species was created at the same time.
This material is currently being delivered free of charge to schools all over Europe. If it emanated from fundamentalist Christian America, I suspect it would be dumped in the wastepaper basket. But schools are more wary of offending the views of Muslim or Hindu pupils - and then along comes a useful idiot such as Prof Reiss to suggest that it's OK to examine this "worldview" in science classes.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Bottom line on macro-evolution:
1) we didn’t see it
2) because we weren’t there
3) It’s not happening today
The same kind of reasoning that determines parenthood by DNA testing also produces a nested hierarchy of descent for living things. A nested hierarchy that matches the fossil record, and predicts where to look for fossils like Tiktaalik.
For a hundred and fifty years, evolution has suggested counterintuitive things, such as hundreds of millions of years as the minimum age of the earth — things not supported by the physics of Darwin’s time, but which have been confirmed by geology and physics.
A hundred and fifty years of forensic conformation is enough to support a claim of fact beyond reasonable doubt. Far more time and evidence than needed to send an accused felon to execution.
There is also no scientific support for the idea that there was a universal flood some few thousand years ago and that all terrestrial animals evolved from common descent from these creatures deposited on Mt Ararat (long way for that poor armadillo to swim!).
Which, of course, is far less than is required for definite proof.
It's still not science.
Certainly. Intervention by an unspecified entity having unspecified capabilities and limitations, acting at unspecified times and places, producing unspecified results for unspecified reasons.
That'll work.
But you have to consider it, because it can't be falsified.
I think you are a bit confused about what science is and what science does.
Name any non-trivial assertion in science that is definitely proved.
Science doesn't consider vacuous propositions. If your proposition leads to some kind of research, such as looking for a specific class of fossil at a specific location in specific strata, it might be interesting.
Or if it suggested some kind of laboratory experiment, such as adaptation to alternate food sources in bacteria, it might be interesting.
To a high degree of repeatability:
1) special relativity
2) laboratory experiments involving physics, chemistry on short time scales.
3) observations of biological systems on human time scales
4) astronomical phenomena based on observations and the application of gravitational theory.
Processes that possess components of chaotic behavior might fall outside our ability to predict outcomes.
Processes that require large amounts of time that fall outside the limits of observation.
There are many discoveries yet to be made in Physics, such as dark matter, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence that could modify our knowledge of boundaries of the Universe.
The existence of intelligent agents other than on Earth can be considered vacuous because we currently don't have the means to search effectively for it. Humans, of course, are intelligent agents in their own right, and by the postulates of evolution, intelligent multicellular beings should exist in the Universe. How long they last as such is another matter.
I speculate however that if a quantitative theory of evolution was ever established that predicted humans should arise 400 billion years after the first one celled organism rather than 4 billion years, one would have to at least add the intelligent agent hypothesis to the mix.
I'm not current on the research, but as far as I know, there is no quantitative theory that predicts the time scale from microscopic to human life.
If something in Science was “proved” then it would be dogma and unfalsifiable. Anything that is unfalsifiable is not Science. Science must always allow for the possibility of evidence that would overturn the theory, or a refinement of the theory that would better explain the evidence or predict results.
My reading has encountered examples where adaptation to environments by bacteria might not depend on fortuitous mutations at the time, but of unexpressed DNA already in the organism's chromosomes that is activated under conditions of stress. You could say that evolution put the DNA for different environments in "cold storage" until such time as it was needed, or that DNA knows to archive these fragments for future use, or that natural selection favors those organisms that store this DNA, and the ability to pull it off the shelf when needed.
Usually, however, a laboratory experiment and its controls eliminate the chance that outside agents have an effect on the experiment and that a scientist could repeat the same experiment subject to the controlled environment thousands or millions of times. If variations in the results occur, there is a limited number of factors to be examined to explain the variations.
Biological evolution on Earth, on the other hand is not a controlled experiment, and has far more factors and degrees of freedom, than say, historical geology and tectonic plate theory.
Relativity is obviously incomplete, because it cannot be reconciled with quantum mechanics.
Your other statements are too nebulous to be considered theories.
Your reading is simply wrong.
The data gathered by these experiments have gone a long way towards supporting the theory that evolution takes place due to natural selection of genetic variation.
In fact a typical experiment in evolution is much more controlled than either geology or plate tech-tonics.
When the experimental conditions are described and the experiment is repeatable, and the theory is applicable to the conditions as stated and the results always fall within experimental error, and explained if not, I would say that as good as we can get in any science.
Even in pure mathematics there is no guarentee of completeness (Wikipedia):
"Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, perhaps the single most celebrated result in mathematical logic, states that:
Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. "
My point is that there are degrees of proof in Science, and physical theories addressed by repeatable laboratory experiments are useful and valid in circumscribed conditions. Theories that attempt to describe the history of life on Earth are incomplete composites of laboratory theory, and are extrapolative, and should be assigned less of a confidence rating.
You misunderstand how experiments in evolution are conducted, and misunderstand the results.
Evolution is about heritable changes in the genetic code. Always has been. The most recent experiments on E.coli make this clear.
Could you please elaborate on your assertion?
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