Replies

"Feel free to prove you're not one of them."

OK. I'll try. Hopefully I will not mess it up since I know you and several hundred of your closest friends will quickly straighten me out. But, without any quick googling to hide my ignorance, here I go...

Evolution is the theory that proposes that living things originated over the history of the earth by gradual changes from simpler life forms.

The current version of this theory goes beyond saying that animal / human life adapts to the environment, and claims that there is incontrovertible evidence of speciation, and further that all animal / human life has a common ancestry.

Feel free to correct my misunderstanding of your views.

Your definition of science, "a systematic investigation of nature", is inadequate. True. Science INVOLVES this, but what else?

Science requires us to observe, test, explain natural phenomena. And what else?

Before we do any of these things we need a hypothesis. This involve FAITH and creativity. Maybe you will find a word you like better than "faith". But this is a simple fact. By creativity, I am referring to the intuition that leads someone like Darwin to the conjecture of "might these life forms be derived from a common source?" (Or perhaps someone else thought of this before Darwin. That's not my point.)

For every hypothesis, there must be one or more axioms which are ASSUMED to be true. Sometimes a theory is "true" within the boundaries set by its axioms, but it is not true in reality because the axiom is false.

For example, Euclidean geometry is "true" within the context of mathematical calculations. However, Euclidean geometry does not accurately represent the real world. It only approximates the real world.

" There are people called 'scientists' who work at science full time as a profession. They tend to know more than do you and I about their areas of expertise."

First, you define a scientist according to profession and the amount of time they spend at it. You also ASSUME I am not one. How do you know if you are speaking to a physics professor or a doctor or a chemist or a material science specialist researching breakthrough developments in nanotechnology?

What about armchair scientists? Or, as far as your definition of what makes a scientist, exactly how much expertise and specialization does it take to qualify?

These loose, working definitions and standards underscore my earlier proposition that you are defining science by what fits your needs. Your quickness to assume something without knowing all the facts also reflects tremendously on your objectivity on this issue.

OK. Maybe you have discussed evolution with 8,000 creationists, and found they were all lacking in a basic understanding of science. So, maybe it was fair to assume the next one you talk to will be the same. Just don't get stuck in that rut, or you'll be as guilty of dogmatism as the ones you are debating.

Since you recognize that there are other worthy subjects than science, what makes evolution more related to the learning category of physics, for instance, than some other, like world history?

I despise evolution being categorized with a true science like physics. Here's why. With physics we can use empirical data to validate or invalidate a theory. We can test a mathematical proof. We can used CONTROLLED experiments. Evolution (as a basis for the origins of species and of man in particular) is full of so much conjecture that cannot be adequately tested.

If someone could really work backward from the scientific data available today and prove definitively that all life came from the same source, and describe the manner in which life evolved from the earlier sources, that person could also predict the future with similar accuracy.

This is the OPPOSITE of controlled experimentation. There are so many variables that the conclusions become nonsensical.

" Only science should be taught in science class."

So if a science teacher wanted to perform TESTS on human subjects like the Nazi's, you would not object because only science should be taught? It would be inappropriate to introduce ethics or morality into it, right? Or maybe we should leave out the history of how we have certain scientific achievements, because that belongs in the history class, correct? And throw out spelling since that should remain in the grammar class.

No. Learning is an integrated process. It will not hurt children to simply inform them that many people do not agree with the validity of evolutionary theory. It will hurt them to misrepresent science as being equivalent to dogma which does not allow for any revision in its findings or challenges to its premises.

Let's get down to brass tax. What I really want to ask is, "How do you think a person can KNOW anything?"

Feel free to correct my misunderstanding of your views.

Your version describes consequences but leaves out meat and mechanism. Here's my own attempt to capture the essentials of classical Darwinism:

The life we see on Earth is the result of common descent diversifying through variation and natural selection.

The keywords, at any rate, are common descent (which you got), and "variation and natural selection" (the mechanism of diversification, which you omitted.)

But you did far better than most of your brethren do, mostly because it's important for strawmanning purposes to not get it so they don't. Miss the basics, and you're free to misunderstand higher-level properties of evolution, things like:

Populations evolve. One particular dinosaur does not suddenly one day lay an egg and hatch out a bird.
Ancestor species are allowed to stay around even if somewhere a descendant species is evolving away from them. The world is a big place and there can be room for both.
Evolutionary changes are gradual, even in latter-day theories like punctuated equilibrium. A fruit fly will not become a mouse in one experimenter's lifetime.

Your definition of science, "a systematic investigation of nature", is inadequate.

I was defining science, I wasn't writing a description of the scientific method.

For every hypothesis, there must be one or more axioms which are ASSUMED to be true.

You're just wiggling back toward hard facts being anything you want them to be because you want to ASSUME true what science keeps finding is untrue. The Earth is not young, sorry. Species do not appear to be separately created in discrete events, sorry.

OK. Maybe you have discussed evolution with 8,000 creationists, and found they were all lacking in a basic understanding of science. So, maybe it was fair to assume the next one you talk to will be the same. Just don't get stuck in that rut, or you'll be as guilty of dogmatism as the ones you are debating.

Try samping 8,000 in a row from a population, getting the same resulte 8,000 times, and not expecting the next one is another one.

I despise evolution being categorized with a true science like physics.

I'm sure you do, but you have a religious horror of evolution. You could have truncated the sentence after three words and it would still have been true. That colors your judgment on the matter.

Let's get down to brass tax.

Those would be tacks. (I know, I know! I'm as bad as anyone.)

What I really want to ask is, "How do you think a person can KNOW anything?"

By not chucking the accumulated efforts of science out the window, but rather learning some of it. If you look about you, we're not huddling in smoke-filled caves roasting bison cuts on a stick. Science converges upon an increasingly accurate description of nature and it works. To keep it up, though, to keep pushing the envelope, we have to accurately digest what the previous generation is trying to hand off to us.