Posted on 12/17/2009 3:15:42 PM PST by ezfindit
Hey Bob...
My point stands....
Conjectures, guesses and postulations are not science.
What worldview you start with determines what conjectures, guesses and postulations you come up with. The same is true in my worldview.
Science has to do with the observable present, not the unobservable past.
Evolution and Creation are both faith-based propositions. Creation Scientists look at the same evidence as Evolutionists and come to far different conclusions.
The origin of life can not be divorced from the theory of evolution.....it would be a theory without a beginning. As such, there are only two ways that life could have begun....a supernatural act of creation or on it’s own. Science, since Darwin, has eliminated the Supernatural before ever looking at the evidence. Having done that, what other conclusions could they come to?
A point too often missed in discussion.
In fact, I would assume that Darwin's concentration was on the effects of selection pressures after sexual reproduction had become a routine part of biological processes on Earth.
What the processes were before that remain virtually anybody's guess. Which is why Miller's experiment is useful. If nothing else, like Edison's research, it may tell us what didn't work to bring about life's origin.
Your point about the handedness of life's molecules is a valid one, but it also indicates that the opportunity for these molecules to get together and dance may have occurred even earlier in the time sequence than Miller and Urey had seemed to suggest.
If development in space is what gives amino acids their lopsidedness, then a method of surviving atmospheric entry must also be theirs.
Researchers and advocates are often challenged to reproduce such events in a test tube or laboratory. Well, no one has equipped a laboratory anywhere with more pots and pools and warm dusty corners than primordial Earth provided a few billion years ago! And it was in operation for a very long time! Moving continents apart by a few centimeters a year is nothing compared to coaxing molecules into becoming a junkyard umbrella.
Is it too much to ask that people actually know and understand the difference between evolution and abiogenesis before them wanting their opinion on the subject to be taken seriously?
Even more importantly, it's the questions you ask, and the work you do to find a plausible explanation, that makes for very interesting scientific research, or for interesting but unrewarding backroom discussions.
Why do so many animals have four limbs? That was at the forefront of the research done into animals that lived in the time when this development came about.
And it was the question that you asked that drove them, too. How did limbs evolve? Why did limbs evolve?
Those were your questions. I merely pointed you to some research that was attempting to speculate on the answers.
An interesting hypothesis. It would be cool if there was some scientific way to test it.
Yep. Paleontology has got to be the most boring work this side of hard labor in a prison work gang. Rock, hammer ... rock, hammer ... rock, hammer ...
The issue is not the difference between evolution and abiogenesis. The issue is that the hidden claim is that evolution is result from abiogenesis. Problem is there is NO evidence ever discovered, uncovered, replicated, or created to demonstrate there ever was such a thing as abiogenesis. But it remains the foundation that gave birth to the TOE.
But IS it too much to ask that someone actually know and understand the difference between evolution and abiogenesis before them wanting their opinion on the subject taken seriously?
Apparently so.
Are you saying that abiogenesis did not happen?
I suspect that the title is really a reference to the popular perception of the Miller-Urey experiment, which derives from the media coverage at the time, plus the treatment of the same in education ever since then.
You will admit that whenever the media get involved, science, or anything else resembling rational analysis, is the first casualty in the scramble for ratings. Same old same old....
Imagine what it would be like to do that your whole life and never find any really significant discovery. I guess one may be tempted to rationalize an exciting back story for what they do find. Making the the detachment necessary to look for evidence falsifying such notions very difficult.
You've shoved the goalposts. NicknamedBob certainly did, in his reply, directly and relevantly respond to -- and refute -- your assertion. You claimed it flatly impossible for legs to exist in a purely aquatic creature because there was no way they could be adaptive:
Why would a fish that is adapting to a water environment grow legs and walk out on land?Natural Selection, by definition, would select the legs out of the process because there would be no survival advantage in a water environment.
NicknamedBob gave you both a fully aquatic creature that did have actual legs, down to digits (Acanthostega) and an environment conducive to such an adaptation (the shallow, swampy, vegetation choked waters which living Acanthostega appear to have inhabited).
Now, to catch up with your goalposts...
Is any of this actual science? Does any of it meet the scientific method....observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable?
NicknamedBob already did a fine job answering this. Science does indeed combine speculation with fact. Scientists formulate questions, conjectures, hypotheses and theories, and then test those against observed fact.
I'll just add that the particular case of Acanthostega (and similar fully aquatic tetrapods) illustrates that such conjectures are falsifiable. Because, in fact, you had it backwards, at least as to the older evolutionary speculations. Most evolutionists did not initially presume that fish first grew legs in the water and then walked out on land.
The predominant view used to be that the first fish to start spending time on land, i.e. ancestral tetrapods, did so with far more primitive limbs, little more than modified fins. The general idea was of a proto-amphibian with limbs somewhat more robust than, but otherwise similar to, those of lobe-finned fishes. Only after these creatures began spending time out of the water would they have started to develop full legs with digits.
This view was falsified when Acanthostega and his kin were discovered. These fossils made it clear that fish had developed full limbs, and thus become tetrapods, before they moved onto land. Precisely because they were behaving like scientists and responding to contradictory facts, evolutionists had to change their view about the evolutionary sequence of events.
Right. And, in exactly the same sense, facts, experiments and observations are not science.
OTOH, conjectures, guesses and postulations consequentially connected to facts, experiments and observations, are science.
Both the speculating and the testing are necessary. It's not science without both.
What worldview you start with determines what conjectures, guesses and postulations you come up with.
Maybe so. Maybe not. But the most important point is that this is strictly irrelevant.
The process whereby, or the basis upon which, you construct a scientific hypothesis, literally does not matter. Sure, as a practical matter, some ways will tend to work well and others not so much, but the point is the validity of a hypothesis is completely independent of how or why you formulated it.
The only things that matter are if your hypothesis or theory is structured in a scientific fashion (avoids ad hoc explanation, is consistent with known facts, is testable by yet unknown facts, differs in crucial implications from alternative explanations, etc) and how it fares on testing against observation.
Science has to do with the observable present, not the unobservable past.
This distinction is likewise artificial and irrelevant. Again, the only thing that matters is that your theory or hypothesis is well constructed and has testable implications. Whether those implications relate ultimately to events presently occurring, or to events that occurred long ago, doesn't matter, at least as to whether or not your conjecture and it's testing constitute science.
First bear in mind that almost nothing is really ever "directly" observed. In the strictest, most literal truth, it's not just the past that is "unobservable," but also the present. For instance, I believe it is only in the last decade or two that scientists were able to actually image an atom. Does this mean that all prior atomic theory has to be thrown out as based on the unobservable? Of course not.
Or consider chemistry. Even if you can, very occasionally, with great difficulty, and under very special circumstances, in some sense "see" an atom, chemical reactions are a different matter. They occur FAR too quickly and are FAR too dynamic to ever directly image and observe. And yet, without ever having witnessed a single, solitary chemical reaction, but only by observing their putative (i.e. "guessed at") effects and consequences, we have been able to construct the entire science of chemistry over only a few hundred years.
But since chemistry is about chemical reactions, and chemical reactions are always unobserved, you would be telling us that chemistry is not science.
Secondly, just because some events natural science is interested in occurred in the past -- it's not as if they occurred in some different universe. Since they occurred in this universe, under the same natural laws that presently govern it, those events are liable to have consequences that are observable in the present. Or, rather, our theories about their causes are liable to have consequences as to facts that are presently observable.
So, in short, it's not the events themselves, about which you theorize, which have to be observable. They almost never are. It's the consequences of your theory which must be observable.
Have to wait for the weekend.
Ahem, (cue swelling background guitar music, adopt Darryl Worley voice), actually, it sounds like Life to me. It ain't no fantasy ...
(Clears throat, /Darryl Worley voice) Ah, yes, anyway. Sure it would be tempting to fake a significant find, and garner all the prestige and accolades that had previously been so elusive. But man that's hard to do.
If you think you're a skeptical observer, that's nothing compared to the scrutiny that a scientific review gets. It's not the press that has to be convinced; we all know of their clueless gullibility. It is one's peers that have to be convinced. They're a tough crowd. Look at the treatment of Pons and Fleischman over their claims of "cold fusion".
You can't just make stuff up, even if you're tempted to do so. That's probably harder than the science.
“My point is that the title betrays the utter ignorance of the author. Stanley Millers experiment showed an interesting fact, that several amino acids can form spontaneously. Nothing junk about it, and nothing about evolution either. So the title “Junk Science Exposed in Evolutionary Theory” is not supported by the article.”
Learn to read, man. The “junk science” claim refers to the textbooks:
“Millions of high school and college biology textbooks teach that research scientist Stanley Miller, in the 1950’s, showed how life could have arisen by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
My point is that “how life could have arisen” is not part of evolutionary theory. Neither is Miller's experiment “junk science”. If the textbooks actually read as ‘reported’ then yes, the textbooks are making a rather grandiose claim on scant evidence; but it is NOT “junk science” but “bad textbook writing”, and it has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.
But I guess it IS too much to ask that people actually KNOW about a subject before they write about it. The author of this is either completely ignorant, or engaged in propaganda to those who he assumes (correctly) don't know much about science - his target audience, creationists.
The claims for Miller’s experiment are not just “rather grandiose.” They are just plain bogus. And, according to the article, these claims appear widely in science textbooks. That *is* junk science being perpetrated on future scientists, and THAT is what should alarm you — NOT some semantic quibble about what is or is not “evolutionary science” or “junk science.”
Do you have any idea how hard it is to refrain from calling pedantic fools like you what you are?
Guess that's why all archeological finds will always be accredited to evolution. If it just might be a missing link, the skepticism is quite a bit lower than something challenging evolution. And the missing link will get you fame...until they eventually find it was a fraud, but even a valid challenge to evolution will get you mocked and derided.
The peer review process is not the scientific method in action. Its dogma in action. Science is about trying to falsify the leading theory. The scientific review is all to often about protecting it. Its easiest to see this nonsense in the "climate change" community now a days.
That's my understanding, too. Just speculation on his part.
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