Following the Evidence vs. Framing Science: Stephen Meyer and Chris Mooney, Monday on Medved

Evolution News & Views ^ | November 13, 2009 | Robert Crowther

[GodGunsGuts]

Following the Evidence vs. Framing Science: Stephen Meyer and Chris Mooney, Monday on Medved

Monday, Nov. 16th, Stephen Meyer and Chris Mooney will be on The Michael Medved Show (second hour, 1pm PT/4pm ET). Mooney is a diehard Darwin defender that various Fellows here at the CSC have debated in the past, and he's someone we've reported about over the years. His view of science is elitist and arrogant, and he has recommended such things as suppressing dissenting views from the media, to spinning science in such a way as to manipulate public opinion. He considers anyone who disagrees with him to be ignorant about science. It will be interesting to see how he does with Meyer, a Cambridge PhD who clearly disagrees with Mooney on ... well, practically everything.

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[OldNavyVet]

“Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.” Thomas Gray

[count-your-change]

Readers really should follow the links for sense of the article. there they would find this telling comment by Darwinism Enthusiast, Jerry Coyne:

“…if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.”

No wonder the Darwinists feel the need to “frame the argument” so questions about the usefulness of attempting to apply evolutionary theory to science do not arise.

[GodGunsGuts]

LOL...I just posted it as an FYI, and didn’t bother to click the embedded links. Good find!

[Mudtiger]

” there they would find this telling comment by Darwinism Enthusiast, Jerry Coyne:
“…if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.””

An honest assessment, I believe. Evolutionary theory is so elastic it can stretch to explain anything from the past, even though it cannot demonstrate many of its claims. It cannot predict anything in the future (except that things will be change). A convenient omni-theory that is of little if any practical scientific use. It does however, have major implications for societal norms and mores and that is why there is so much strong opinions about it.

[count-your-change]

One only needs to consider the major inventions and discoveries in the modern world and whether Darwinism in any way contributed to them to understand Darwinisms utter uselessness.
An example: The steam turbine which has allowed the efficient production of electricity and motive engines.

Farm equipment, which made the production of food highly efficient.

But pursuing Darwin's hokum has provided jobs for numerous paleontologists and their book publishers.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[goodusername]

I think it was Carl Sagan that once advised astronomers that when seeking funding for research in astronomy or cosmology to just be honest and say that, for the most part, it serves no practical purpose. Attempting to argue the practical benefits of looking at galaxies 10 billion light years away or to launch satellites to determine the growth rate of the universe or to count the moons of Saturn will mostly look silly and be a losing proposition. And so just be honest and say that the reason to fund such projects is because it’s important to many people for reasons that have nothing to do with practicality.
It enriches the lives of those who have a curiosity of what the universe is like and seek knowledge; just as many people’s lives are enriched by art, or music, or sports. Something doesn’t necessarily have to have a practical purpose to be important to people.
Actually, most scientific theories probably have no practical benefits. It’s only recently that relativity has had practical benefits (GPS satellites for instance), but such things are more the exception than the rule.

I would agree that the vast majority of evolutionary theory has no practical use whatsoever. That’s quite a different statement that saying that a theory has no predictive power, however. Evolution has amazing predictive power in biogeography, taxonomy, embryology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and paleontology (so much so that Creationists commonly charge that scientists much be fudging the results). This is of course why so much of the scientific world jumped on the evolution bandwagon after Origin. And evolution isn’t so elastic that it could explain any hypothetical discovery – it would not be able to explain the discovery of Precambrian rabbit fossils (to borrow Haldane’s example).

[Mudtiger]

“And evolution isn’t so elastic that it could explain any hypothetical discovery – it would not be able to explain the discovery of Precambrian rabbit fossils (to borrow Haldane’s example).”

I suspect it would just throw out the data point...

What has evolution predicted that was in the future at time of the prediction? It is massaged, stretched, molded, etc. to predict things that have already happened. Much like Nostradamus. What future discoveries/applications does evolution predict in the areas of biogeography, taxonomy, embryology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and paleontology?

Think I'll go with Coyne on this one in his moment of clarity and truth.

[count-your-change]

Yes, I'd like to have my life enriched by music and art and a nice telescope. I'll be sending you the bill.

Please include enough to finance my search for preCambrian rabbit fossils. I don't expect to find any but the search will enrich many lives.

[Ira_Louvin]

Here you go:

“Darwin demonstrated that many orchid flowers had evolved elaborate structures by natural selection in order to facilitate cross-pollination. He suggested that orchids and their insect pollinators evolved by interacting with one another over many generations, a process referred to as coevolution.

One particular example illustrates Darwin’s powerful insight. He studied dried specimens of Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid native to Madagascar. The white flower of this orchid has a foot-long (30 cm) tubular spur with a small drop of nectar at its base. Darwin claimed that this orchid had been pollinated by a moth with a foot-long tongue. He noted, however, that his statement “has been ridiculed by some entomologists.” And indeed, around the turn of the century, a Madagascan moth with a one-foot-long tongue was discovered. Apparently, the moth’s tongue uncoils to sip the nectar of A. sesquipedale as it cross-pollinates the flowers. “

http://science.jrank.org/pages/5389/Pollination-History-pollination-studies.html

[goodusername]

“I suspect it would just throw out the data point...”

—Umm, no, I don’t think a paleontologist would throw out what’s perhaps the most exciting discovery in the history of paleontology.

“What has evolution predicted that was in the future at time of the prediction? It is massaged, stretched, molded, etc. to predict things that have already happened. Much like Nostradamus. What future discoveries/applications does evolution predict in the areas of biogeography, taxonomy, embryology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and paleontology?”

—It has accurately the pattern of the millions of fossils found since the publication of Origin (evolution predicts a parallelism between the taxonomic tree and paleontology since there’s a correlation between the taxonomic tree and the evolutionary tree). It has even aided in finding specific fossils: The people who found Ardi were looking in that area at that specific geologic layer expecting to find something similar to Ardi. It was largely biogeography of modern organisms that Darwin saw on his “five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life” that convinced Darwin of evolution. Biogeography even correlates to paleontology and geology: The paleontological life forms of Africa and South America are very similar before the break-up and diverge from that point – as expected. Using evolution and taxonomy and comparative anatomy it was long predicted that feathered dinos would be found – and it’s also predicted that feathered mammals will never be found, either alive today or in the fossil record. Feathered mammals, along with Precambrian rabbits, is something evolution would not be able to explain.

“Think I’ll go with Coyne on this one in his moment of clarity and truth.”

—I’m in full agreement with Coyne as well. Coyne is talking about “practical or commercial benefits” of evolution, stuff that impacts our daily lives. Evolution probably isn’t going to help us make better steam turbines or farm equipment (to use count-your-change’s examples) or to make better vaccines (to use Coyne’s example). But that’s a very different than saying that evolution doesn’t have predictive power or can’t be falsified. You seem to be conflating the two. In fact, Coyne wrote a book (although I haven’t read it) specifically detailing evolution’s predictive power called “Why Evolution is True”. To quote a review: “Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, presents an overwhelming case for evolution. Ranging from biogeography to geology, from anatomy to genetics, and from molecular biology to physiology, he demonstrates that evolutionary theory makes predictions that are consistently borne out by the data—basic requirements for a scientific theory to be valid.”

[Mudtiger]

“One particular example illustrates Darwin’s powerful insight. He studied dried specimens of Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid native to Madagascar. The white flower of this orchid has a foot-long (30 cm) tubular spur with a small drop of nectar at its base. Darwin claimed that this orchid had been pollinated by a moth with a foot-long tongue. He noted, however, that his statement “has been ridiculed by some entomologists.” And indeed, around the turn of the century, a Madagascan moth with a one-foot-long tongue was discovered. Apparently, the moth’s tongue uncoils to sip the nectar of A. sesquipedale as it cross-pollinates the flowers. “

Evidence is evidence. It’s all in how you interpret it. An orchid with a foot-long spur would, if created, need a creature with a foot-long tongue to be created as well. And there it is. Support for creationism? Does creationism have predictive power?

[Ira_Louvin]

No it does not, since it relies on supernatural explanations. That falls outside of the realm of the scientific method.

[count-your-change]

Trees are simply a means of classification according o whatever the criteria of the classifier. I can classify pencils with truck axles but it does mean one is a relative of the other.

Where does Gansus fit into the predictions since it is said to be the ancestor of all living birds today?

As for Incomplete Ardi, a mix of bones from who know how many animals, most everything about the construct was a surprise as this NatGeo article says in part:

“Jamie Shreeve
Science editor, National Geographic magazine
October 1, 2009
Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings........
If White and his team are right that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the “savanna hypothesis”—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment.”

If Ardi can be explained as limping around looking for males with little teeth surely a rabbit out of the perCambrian hat ought to be simple.

[goodusername]

“Trees are simply a means of classification according o whatever the criteria of the classifier.”

—Classifying objects into a tree-like topology only works if the objects being classified match certain criteria. First, each object has to be similar to other objects in the tree. Also, there can be no ‘gaps’ in the topology, otherwise at best you’d end up with multiple trees; as Linnaeus put it “Natura non facit saltum”. Also, (this is the hardest part to explain), there are specific patterns in *how* things are related and how traits (at least complex ones) are distributed. Feathers appear somewhere within the groups of dinos – and thus *some* dinos can have feathers and since birds came from this group, they can have feathers. But only them. Mammals, amphibians, etc cannot have feathers. It would be like if you were painting a tree, and you begin painting a particular branch blue, and you have a rule that you can paint branches coming from that branch blue (and branches from those branches blue, etc) but you are not allowed to paint any branches blue unconnected to those branches.
The only way to produce a system with these qualities is where you have objects that reproduce, can mutate slightly, and bifurcate, all the way back to a common ancestor.

Actually, Linnaeus, not understanding why his system worked so well on living things, did try it in other areas – such as classifying rocks – but, of course, it didn’t work anywhere else.

There is one other case where this system of classification sorta works reasonably well – in classifying languages. As with living things, each language is made up of separate populations, each of which change slowly in their own way over time and eventually can become separate languages. (Old English came from a group of people who spoke old German who traveled to England). The reason it only sorta works is because with languages, you can have a lot of amalgamation (middle English is mostly a combination of old German and French – and thus it’s sort of a funny looking tree with loops. Actually, in the bacterial world, a lot of evolution is similar to how languages evolve).

“As for Incomplete Ardi, a mix of bones from who know how many animals, most everything about the construct was a surprise as this NatGeo article says in part”

—From the bones’ distribution (and the fact that there are no duplicates), it’s pretty clear that the bones came from a single creature. What they were looking for was a hominid bi-ped more primitive than Lucy which could give better insight into the development of bipedalism, which is what they found. The surprise was that it wasn’t more chimpanzee-like, but there’s no rule saying it had to be chimpanzee-like.