Why Do You Keep Boring Us with Darwinism?

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 5/19/08 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

I’ve written several columns about my skepticism regarding Darwinism. Each time I do I receive snooty comments attesting to my stupidity and my ignorance. The Darwinists never seem to want to discuss any of the points I have tried to make, just to ridicule the very thought that there may be some kind of guiding intelligence behind the structures, the amounts of information, the complexities, the fine balance and the mysteries of life and our universe.

If anything is subject to ridicule, it is the answer that the world’s leading proponent and defender of Darwinian dogma, Richard Dawkins, gave to Ben Stein when Stein asked him about the origin of life.

[Tramonto]

The discovery institute has exposed allot of frauds and misinformation that Darwinists present as proof. You better just chant ‘creationist’ over and over again so you can block out the facts.

BTW, what in that link I posted is religion or untrue?

[Coyoteman]

I admire your zeal for evolution and your adherence to the presupposition that science has proved evolution.

Science does not "prove" anything. A scientific theory is simply the best current explanation for observed phenomena.

You seem to have a good education in the theory and appear to be able to quote it like scripture.

Half of my training during six years of grad school was in that subject.

I was wondering though has science proved reality yet?

Talk to the philosophy folks. They're down the hall and to the left.

Can science tell for certain that God who is supernatural does not exist?

Science deals with natural phenomena.

You got me on that one about fakes. But not next time, I will be sure to read a little closer as you appear to like to trick up others with word games to prove your point.

No "gotcha" intended. It is just that there really are very few fakes in the history of evolutionary studies. The claim was simply exaggerated. Now, I'll admit that there have been mistakes, but most scientists absolutely hate mistakes, and do their absolute best not to make them.

Because you are committed to a belief that everything can be explained by naturalistic causes has hardened your mind to any other explanation.

Science works on the assumption of methodological naturalism. Others can work on any assumptions they choose, and if they get repeatable and documentable results then science will be shown to be wrong. The problem is, there are an estimated 4,300 world religions, many to most with contradictory claims. And many of those claims can be shown to be incorrect by science.

I am OK with your degrading those who have grow up being taught evolution and later discovering from reading (which by the way much of your education came from reading in fields that you never touched an experiment or observed yet you took and still do as fact this information because educated men and women said it was so) that there is another explanation for the visible evidence before our eyes.

No degrading intended, but when someone tries to convince me of something like, for example, the global flood at about 4,500 years ago then the evidence of my own eyes and decades of archaeological research says they are wrong. It doesn't matter how much they believe, the evidence is just not there.

It could be construed as arrogant to say that what is read in a creationist site as useless information. I would bet that many of the people that write for those sites are scientist themselves or got information from them.

One of the fields I study is radiocarbon dating. I have found that the creationist websites flat out lie about that field. They endlessly repeat errors from other creationist websites and books, and neither know nor care that they are making simple, dumb mistakes.

These creationist sites will pick up anything in their zeal to discredit evolution, but they don't know enough to find the errors of their arguments. That's why I can't take them seriously.

[freespirited]

You've lost me. I see nothing in that passage that advocates anything like the coercive intervention of forced eugenics. He does suggest that it would be a good idea for certain people to voluntarily refrain from marriage. He does not say that the government should coerce such.

I'd be grateful if the anti-Darwin folks around here would tell the whole story. From Chapter 5 of Descent:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind ...

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Science does not "prove" anything.

Ok, science cannot prove that we can fly faster than sound. Science cannot prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. Science cannot prove that gold atoms are heavier than nickel atoms. Science cannot prove there is a cabbage in my fridge.

Good. So Darwinism is not proved (and is unprovable), according to you. That's what the other poster was saying. But, why not tell him the whole story about what you believe? That there is no truth in science either?

Half of my training during six years of grad school was in that subject.

So you ended up with half a degree in evolution?

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

You've lost me.

Why are you lost? You posted something about Darwin's attitude toward human reproduction. I posted the context of it for the benefit of those who may be interested in Darwin's attitude toward reproduction, birth-control, etc. What's confusing you?

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, is the underpinning of modern biology. It is unclear to me why you feel necessary to link it to... Soviet Communism

Haldane, the co-formulator of the Modern Synthesis, was a useful idiot for Stalin and a shill for Lysenko. Maybe that's why.

[freespirited]

You lost me because your post was non-responsive to mine.

I had been talking about compulsory eugenics. What you posted did not show that Darwin favored such a policy. To the contrary, he opposed it, as demonstrated by the section of quoted material in bold italics in my answer to you.

[freespirited]

Again, it is lost on me what Haldane’s idiotic political views (which you have not really described fairly) have to do with whether the scientific evidence supports evolutionary theory.

IIRC, he did eventually become an opponent of the Soviet regime.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Again, it is lost on me what Haldane’s idiotic political views... have to do...

You asked: "It is unclear to me why you feel necessary to link [the Modern Synthesis] to... Soviet Communism" and I gave you a reason why someone would link it to Soviet communism. It's not a very difficult comment to understand.

IIRC, he did eventually become an opponent of the Soviet regime.

Haldane died loyal to Stalin.

[antiRepublicrat]

I’ll take the Marxist Pearson for example. His writings on the subject directly contradict the Darwin quote I gave. “History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.” Sounds nothing like Darwin’s moral and sympathetic society.

Human superiority in the animal kingdom has never been about our physical fitness, which is obvious when you look at any other large predator species. Intelligence alone doesn’t matter among human societies because that does not enable a society that has strength not only in numbers, but in cohesiveness. The intelligent only society might sit back while their neighbors are picked off one by one because they don’t care about the fate of their neighbors. The cohesive, compassionate society will retaliate en masse for the wrongs done to even the least capable member of that society. In return, every person knows that the rest of the society will protect him, and he will be loyal to ther others.

You can see this in the battle against abortion. The compassionate among us fight for those least capable (unborn babies). I think you would agree that ending abortion would make us a stronger society as opposed to the current state, or the incredibly weak abortion-as-birth-control society of the USSR. Darwin was right.

[antiRepublicrat]

Ok, science cannot prove that we can fly faster than sound. Science cannot prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. Science cannot prove that gold atoms are heavier than nickel atoms.

Those are covered by aerodynamic theory (related to fluid and gas dynamics), heliocentric theory and atomic theory respectively. Your cabbage is not a scientific issue, unless you don't know when it got in there and it could therefore possibly be Schrödinger's Cabbage in reference to whether it's gone bad. Quantum Cabbage.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Those are covered by aerodynamic theory (related to fluid and gas dynamics), heliocentric theory and atomic theory respectively.

1. We can fly faster than sound.
2. The Earth revolves around the Sun.
3. Gold atoms are heavier than nickel atoms.
4. There is a cabbage in my fridge.

Are 1 to 4 provable by science or not?

[antiRepublicrat]

Are 1 to 4 provable by science or not?

1-3 are considered facts, and those facts are used by science in the framework of theories. That evolution happened is also considered a fact, one that IDers and evolutionists agree on. OTOH, scientists used to not think 1 & 2 were true, and there was a long time when atomic theory (the very existence of your gold and nickel atoms) was widely disputed. Cabbage in your fridge is an observation by you, but I would need independent verification.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

1-3 are considered facts, and those facts are used by science in the framework of theories.

Do you recognize experimental science as a science? Are 1-3 provable by science or not?

Cabbage in your fridge is an observation by you, but I would need independent verification.

So is 4 provable by science or not?

[antiRepublicrat]

Do you recognize experimental science as a science? Are 1-3 provable by science or not?

There is still this problem with "provable." In science the place you most hear about proofs is in math. We used to think the Earth was the center of everything, and our experiments "proved" it. The facts as we saw them fit the theory. But it turned out to be wrong. For a hundred years we thought the existence of phlogiston was a fact, as all observation confirmed it, but not anymore. What we thought were facts weren't.

#1 in this sense has nothing to do with science. We broke the sound barrier. That the event has happened thousands of times is simple history. #2 and #3 are measurement according to our current scientific knowledge. Given that we've been to space, #2 is unlikely to ever be disproven. But for #3, there's still some strange stuff going on at the atomic level that we don't know about. Maybe one day our definitions will change with new knowledge and we wouldn't call a gold atom heavier than a nickel atom.

So is 4 provable by science or not?

#4 is not a scientific matter. Look in your fridge if you want to know.

[Coyoteman]

Here are some definitions which may help:

Proof: Except for math and geometry, there is little that is actually proved. Even well-established scientific theories can't be conclusively proved, because--at least in principle--a counter-example might be discovered. Scientific theories are always accepted provisionally, and are regarded as reliable only because they are supported (not proved) by the verifiable facts they purport to explain and by the predictions which they successfully make. All scientific theories are subject to revision (or even rejection) if new data are discovered which necessitates this.

Proof: A term from logic and mathematics describing an argument from premise to conclusion using strictly logical principles. In mathematics, theorems or propositions are established by logical arguments from a set of axioms, the process of establishing a theorem being called a proof.

The colloquial meaning of "proof" causes lots of problems in physics discussion and is best avoided. Since mathematics is such an important part of physics, the mathematician's meaning of proof should be the only one we use. Also, we often ask students in upper level courses to do proofs of certain theorems of mathematical physics, and we are not asking for experimental demonstration!

So, in a laboratory report, we should not say "We proved Newton's law" Rather say, "Today we demonstrated (or verified) the validity of Newton's law in the particular case of..." Source.

Truth: This is a word best avoided entirely in physics [and science] except when placed in quotes, or with careful qualification. Its colloquial use has so many shades of meaning from ‘it seems to be correct’ to the absolute truths claimed by religion, that it’s use causes nothing but misunderstanding. Someone once said "Science seeks proximate (approximate) truths." Others speak of provisional or tentative truths. Certainly science claims no final or absolute truths. Source.

[alstewartfan]

Beautifully said, Manfred! Sadly, even many conservatives beieve the “evolution” fairy tale. Bob

[Manfred the Wonder Dawg]

Thanks for your kind words.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

There is still this problem with "provable."

Normal people have been using the word 'prove' for a long time in natural ways. 'To prove' means 'to demonstrate the truth of something'. A normal person, whose brain isn't clouded by Popperism or what have you, will simply say 1-4 are empirically provable, hence provable by science. The problem is not with the words 'prove' or 'provable'. The problem is with you.

By examining posts 115, 113, and 111, your problem can be diagnosed. What you are doing is introducing two presuppositions about 'provable' in the form of extra clauses, so that 'P is provable if P can be demonstrated to be true' becomes...

A) P is provable if P can be demonstrated to be true without any possibility of error or mistake.

Now, I'm sure you can see that A reduces science and mathematics to irrational soup. For in this sense, it is not even possible to prove anything in mathematics, because there is always the possibility you are simply mistaken about your proof. In fact, there have been cases of erroneous proofs standing for decades - such as the original erroneous proof of the four color theorem. But no mathematician would say we cannot prove the four color theorem because we were once mistaken about it in the past.

The other variation on this theme which you make recourse to (#113) is this:

B) P is provable if P can be demonstrated to be true to Q, where Q is some person.

With a suitable choice of Q (say, an 8 year old), this too, reduces science and mathematics to irrational nescience. Now that we are aware of A and B, we can approach the rest of your post.

We used to think the Earth was the center of everything, and our experiments "proved" it. The facts as we saw them fit the theory. But it turned out to be wrong.

Here you are appealing to A. But the question is 'can science prove that the Earth goes around the Sun'. The fact that people were previously wrong about it makes no difference. We expect that science can settle this and correct prior errors, no? That the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around was first demonstrated by stellar parallax measurements, a long time after Galileo. So of course 2 is provable by science, and the fact that everyone was in error before makes not a shred of difference to the observations of stellar parallaxes.

#1 in this sense has nothing to do with science.

The most direct way to demonstrate 1 is to build and aircraft and fly it faster than sound. But you say this isn't even science. Did the Bell X-1 prove that it is possible to fly faster than sound or not? As long as you maintain A and variations like it, you will have trouble with simple, obvious questions like these. It should raise a red flag in your mind that something has gone horribly wrong somewhere--that somewhere along the line, you have adopted the tenets of irrationalism.

#4 is not a scientific matter. Look in your fridge if you want to know.

This is most peculiar. I can easily prove that there is a cabbage in my fridge by opening the door and looking. A simple empirical result. But you are unwilling to say that science can do what I just did. In fact, you say that science is powerless to even address this question. So, science cannot even address whether or not there is a cabbage in my fridge, but at the same time, it can tell me all about my ape-like ancestors and so on. Do these incongruences alarm you? Do you feel any cognitive dissonance about this?

[curiosity]

They were complete frauds and are still being used as ‘proof’ of evolution in modern text books.

Your information is out of date. Just about all text books published within the last few years have dumped Haeckel's drawings and now use either photographs or accurate drawings.