Posted on 06/15/2003 10:36:08 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to "closed systems". Living forms are capable of reducing entropy within them simply because they are "open systems" and can thus export entropy to their environment. No circularity, no magic.
Of course not. We are still far from a full understanding of biological structure and function, something that is beyond the limits of evolutionary theory, let alone the larger questions that are implied by what we do know.
On Yockey, are your complaints in reference to his book "Information Theory and Molecular Biology" or something else? The second edition is due out next February.
Ah! A true statement. Of coursre, the Biblical account of Creation is wrong, but everyone knows this already.
Selection as causation -- no problem with that concept! Still, I suspect that only that which is "selectable" is, er, "causable." Perfect randomness appears to be somehow constrained. In a way, it is constraint -- what Aristotle called limit -- that gives things their "shape," or "whatness," for however long that "shape" may persist. "Shaped things" may evolve -- but it seems to me, only within certain tolerances. Thinking thusly, you can probably see why I would have a problem accepting the doctrine of abiogenesis -- that life "evolved" from non-life, that consciousness could have evolved from, not the unconscious, but the nonconscious. The "mystery principle" that could bridge such an unliklihood seems not to have been found yet. I suspect it's not there to be found....
Perhaps the dramatically burgeoning number of details and their seeming complexity may arise, to some degree, because people expect perfect randomness, where randomness in actuality is constrained in some fashion? Perhaps if people would understand that, a reduction in details and their apparent complexity would follow? Natural law seems to have a strong affinity with simplicity and elegance; when this is lacking, perhaps we ought to speculate that we haven't found our "fugitive" law yet, that the simplest, irreducibly fundamental, most comprehensive explanation for the phenomena we see all around us eludes us still....
The odd thought occasionally strikes me: Perhaps from a vantage point outside our own dimensional time/space, what looks to us like perfect chaos views as perfect order....
Which gets us into physical laws -- which constrain. But constrain -- for what purpose? And if there is purpose -- what is the goal, the end in view? And who's end is it anyway?
Thanks for chatting with me, js1138, and indulging me in my little speculations.
WRT your question, I consider myself nothing of importance.
This is not Popper's position. He held that observations can disprove (or undermine) a theory, but that they cannot prove a theory. Scientists will gain increased confidence in a theory that has survived many attempts at "falsification" (the term Popper used) but such confidence building results can never eliminate the possibility (or even, in any strict, calculable sense, effect the probability) that the theory in question may fail some future test. In short Popper held that there was no valid method of "verification" with respect to scientific theories.
You seem to have in mind what is often called a "crucial experiment". This is a test in which two or more competing theories make clearly different and incompatible predictions about the outcome of some experiment or observation. Assuming a number of things -- e.g. that the predictions are correctly deduced from each theory, that there are no false premises in the (inevitable) extra-theoretical assumptions implicated in these deductions, and similarly that the experimental results do not include any unrecognized artifacts -- then, yes, at least one theory (and maybe more than one!) will be "falsified," but this does not mean that the other (unfalsified) theory has been decided to be "true". It just means it has survived a test where it might have been falsified.
Obviously, you've never been to a scientific conference. It's no different in the "historical" sciences than in any other field. There are always plenty of colleagues ready and eager to ripe your theory to shreds.
Uh, not really. It may be the study of biology, or a theory to try to explain biology, but it is most definitely NOT biology.
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