Posted on 11/11/2005 9:27:07 PM PST by MplsSteve
It was once believed that the universe existed as a smattering of bodies each contained in one of many concentric spheres (Ptolemy). Gallileo debunked this. People once embraced the "great chain of being." Likewise, evolution itself has undergone startling changes since the late 1700's (yes, late 1700's, not 1859; Darwin plagiarized much of his theory from his uncle Erasmus). At some point, very likely on the subcytological, evolution itself (which is studied pretty much exclusively with the anatomical level) will be fully debunked. The branches of science formed around this wrong theory, however, will perpetuate it no matter how false because their livlihoods depend on it.
Actually, he stated it perfectly, unless you want to start arguing the difference between 'higher being' and the 'intelligence' that cause these mysterious processes to occur.
And it's an odd coincidence that the people pushing the ID crap are all tied to some religious group or other.
The question of who or what this intelligence is, is not essential to ID theory.
You honestly believe that? 'We think some mysterious entity caused the creation of complex life on Earth (even though we have no physical evidence for this belief). But we aren't really interested in what that entity was - giant robots, evil aliens, Norse Gods, it's all the same to us!'
Yeah, right.
What exactly did I say:
Whether those factors include divine intervention, or an extraterrestrial "ark", or something else entirely, is pure speculation.Are you saying the above statement is pure speculation?
Fine. For "origin of life" substitute "origin of the many different types of life".
Gravitational theory is a theory about how things work today can be experimentally tested. Likewise atomic theory and germ theory. These theories are useful for (1) predicting what can happen, and (2) predicting what one may be able to do to cause desired things to happen. If evolutionary theory were purely applied to present and forward-going studies, there would be no objection to it.
The problem is that evolutionary theory is being applied to the past, when there are severe limits as to how well any scientific theory can be applied in that direction. To be sure, sometimes things are pretty obvious (e.g. if the floor of a buildng contains some materials, and the ceiling seems to have holes in the approximate shape of those materials, one could usually conclude that gravity caused the materials to fall from the ceiling onto the floor). In many cases, though, trying to ascertain the past by examining the present is fraught with uncertainty. For example, one might try to guess how the earth came to have its moon where it is (meteor strike, meteor capture, or whatever) but there's no way of absolutely proving any particular theory to be correct.
Can you offer any non-trivial examples where "retrograde science" (trying to predict the past) is considered infallible?
People pushing the evolution "crap" are tied to a religious philosophy as well: secular humanism. I think your use of the word "crap" is pretty illustrative: you feel threatened by God, which implies ultimate accountability, and that is really what this is all about.
No. How about origin of species?
The only thing evolution adresses is how species differentiate.
Im sorry but that's wrong. Evolution is subject to experimentation and being potentially disprovable. Every fossil unearthed tests the theory and could potentially disprove it. Every genome sequenced is a test. Every organism studied is a test. It is empirical science.
I will address only the biggest error in your post...that evolution is studied primarily at the anatomic level.
Modern evolutionary study is primarily at the molecular level.
Everything that you listed shows what has happened not why or how. The reason why new species, let alone phyla, arise is unrepeatable and beyond observation. Every organism studied is an observation, not a test. Evolution is not an empirical science.
And even if such a result could be proven experimentally, that would not prove that vertibrates were produced from invertebrates by the same means as was used in the experiment.
To use an archaeological analogy, there are various theories as to how the pyramids were built. The supporters of some of these theories have attempted to produce blocks similar to those in the pyramids, using materials that would have been available at the time the pyramids were constructed. Some of these supporters, from what I understand, have succeeded pretty well.
Nonetheless, the most these people can really hope to do is show that the pyramids could have been constructed via the method they suggest. They can not prove that the pyramids were in fact constructed that way.
Part of the essence of science is that specific conditions can be deliberately created and tested. The ability to deliberately create the test conditions is essential in science, because it provides the only sure means of separating out cause and effect.
Suppose I through a bunch of different stones, marbles, and other such objects into a jar and shake it; some of the items settle out to the bottom. Mere examination of what pieces do or do not settle out would not suffice to ascertain what causes some items to sink deeper than others. One might be able to make some informed guesses, but to really show what properties have what effect, it would be necessary to run the experiment with items that were identical except for specific chosen properties. Mere observation could lead to erroneous results if, e.g., smaller items happened to be generally either denser or lighter than larger ones (and odds are pretty good they'd be one or the other).
Further, there's another problem with trying to 'predict the past': the fact that something could have come about via a certain mechanism doesn't mean that it actually did. People doing forensic studies on things that fail often have this problem. Even in closed systems, it's often not possible to tell with certainty how a particular bad situation came about. And in open systems, it's generally impossible. Given that the known universe is an open system, it's not really possible to identify all the major factors that affected events millions of years ago.
Point well taken.
Math and science are tools of the devil. The earth is flat, and the sun revolves around the earth. Any other opinion is heresy.
...One might be able to make some informed guesses, but to really show what properties have what effect, it would be necessary to run the experiment with items that were identical except for specific chosen properties. Mere observation could lead to erroneous results if, e.g., smaller items happened to be generally either denser or lighter than larger ones (and odds are pretty good they'd be one or the other). ...
Yes, but another way to eliminate such sampling error is to take many samples from as different contexts as possible.
A good example is in radiometric dating. Any single rock sample could indeed be subjected to water, heat, etc. during the years it's been in the ground, and that contamination could throw off the implied dates. But when you take several samples, from different areas, and examine different radioactive elements for their decay ratios, you can distinguish between contaminated results and valid ones. Because different chemical elements will react to water or heat or other stresses differently, and samples from the next hill over were probably subjected to different levels of stresses than the first hill. This is why the common creationist criticism of radiometric dating fails.
So, sure, paleontology is, pedantically speaking, an indirect science, in that they aren't able to do a medical exam of the living ancient animals like they can with live animals. But at some point a big enough pile of circumstantial evidence is just as good as a collection of direct evidence. Heck, even in your example of directly shaking the stones, you have error & imprecision & sampling error, so direct evidence isn't logically privileged either.
That leaves open the problem, though, that it's possible for there to be unknown factors which affect the items being observed. For example, in the shaker example, suppose that the small spheres were magnetized iron. They could easily throw off the results of the experiment. Such risk factors would be avoided if the experiment was done with manufactured spheres.
A good example is in radiometric dating. Any single rock sample could indeed be subjected to water, heat, etc. during the years it's been in the ground, and that contamination could throw off the implied dates. But when you take several samples, from different areas, and examine different radioactive elements for their decay ratios, you can distinguish between contaminated results and valid ones. Because different chemical elements will react to water or heat or other stresses differently, and samples from the next hill over were probably subjected to different levels of stresses than the first hill. This is why the common creationist criticism of radiometric dating fails.
Radioactive dating relies upon certain things being reasonably constant. If two specimens which seem to have been exposed to the same environmental conditions, both when alive and after death, have comparable C14 readings, then it is likely both speciments are of comparable age. But figuring out what that age is can be tricky.
What reputable scientists generally go, from what I understand, is try to quantify the unknowns and then say that a particular sample appears to be somewhere between X and Y years old. For many types of paleontological research, things like date measurements don't need to be entirely accurate, and so accepting a certain amount of "slop" is fine.
The problem with evolutionary "science" is that certain parts of it are very sensitive to initial conditions, and thus the types of measurement slop which don't pose a problem with paleontology pose a big problem with evolution. Certain precise things would have had to have happened for new species to be created in the fashion evolutionists claim, and the only "evidence" that such things did happen in the manner required is the existence of the new species.
So, sure, paleontology is, pedantically speaking, an indirect science, in that they aren't able to do a medical exam of the living ancient animals like they can with live animals. But at some point a big enough pile of circumstantial evidence is just as good as a collection of direct evidence. Heck, even in your example of directly shaking the stones, you have error & imprecision & sampling error, so direct evidence isn't logically privileged either.
Certain parts of paleontology start bordering on the realm of silliness, because they represent theories which even if they "work", would not constitute the only possible explanation fot eh observed evidence.
As for the "shaking stones", part of the essense of science is repeatability. Even if I have some experimental error when I do the stone-shake, different people repeating the experiment with their own manufactured spheres would not be likely to have the exact same errors I did.
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=16-0738201960-0A. We're discussing what should be taught in biology classes. These are popular science books. Do you have any evidence that high school biology textbooks claim that evolution proves anything about the origin of life?
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0198504934-7
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0471317004-10
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-0743212622-4
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0520233913-0Just a handful of links to your religious writings. Who is lying about evilution theology having nothing to do with origins of life again?
B. I have read The Spark of Life. They do try to make the case for some kind of pre-biotic selection, or chemical evolution, happening before the first fully-living cell existed. The book is an enjoyable read, with a lot of background on the history of the development of the different theories about the origin of life & the characters involved. But again - darwinian evolution cannot get started until you have some kind of self-contained entity that can sustain its own replication. In other words, evolution cannot apply to anything that happens before such a self-replicating entity exists!
But you're implicitly agreeing with my point. Why are these other manufactured spheres important? Because they came from a different context! They're more likely to be made of different materials, and if so the sampling error of the small spheres being magnetized is eliminated. Having more sets of stones, taken from yet different contexts, would help even more. Exactly the same kinds of controls exist in radiometric dating.
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