These remarks deserve deep consideration, dearest sister in Christ!
It seems exDemMom rephrased Popper's statement, quote: "Popper stated that all theories must withstand attempts at falsification," when he didn't say that at all. What he said (in effect) was: "keep on trying to falsify your theories; the more they can survive falsification tests, the more confidence we can have that our theories are correct, thus reliable."
This is precisely what the historical sciences, most notably including Darwinist theory, refuse to do. They don't try to falsify their theory. Rather, they select evidence on the basis of what can validate their theory and ignore all the rest — anything to uphold the "just-so story," even though it is increasingly difficult to do that.
You gave Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory as an example of an attempt to circumvent what the fossil record shows (or rather doesn't show). Gould was evidently well aware that contemporary paleontologists were not so much discovering evidence of evolutionary "change" as evidence of stasis — lack of change in species over vast periods of time. (So much for Darwinian "gradualism.")
No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. — Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996Yet as Gould explained:
Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome... brings terrible distress.... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as "no data." If they don't change, it's not evolution so you don't talk about it. — Stephen Jay Gould, Lecture at Hobart and William Smith College, 1980And that takes care of that!
Dearest sister in Christ, you mentioned "a temporal nonlocality of cells achieving maintenance and repair before the need." Which smacks of a non-local final cause at work. Of course, all consideration of "final cause" has been banished from science ever since Sir Francis Bacon first propounded the Scientific Method.... Final causes always speak to purposes and goals that the other three causes (formal, material, efficient) "serve."
Though systematically "banished" from science, I do not know how it is possible to explain biological function without respect to the purpose the function serves. And this would be a final cause.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your superb, fascinating essay/post! And thank you for the link to Pattee — his observations are well worth our deep consideration.
( ^8 }
It is amusing to watch certain scientists fall all over themselves avoiding the word function because the word itself suggests final cause. I suspect they consider biological function, like mind, to be an epiphenomenon - a secondary phenomenon which cannot cause anything to happen.
Rosen points to this failing in his book "Life Itself" - and clearly illustrates the mathematical model required for life cannot ignore final cause.
Thank you so very much for sharing all your insights and for those important quotes concerning Gould and "punctuated equilibrium."
My paraphrasing was an accurate assessment of the Popper quote that was posted earlier. Being able to rephrase an idea in one's own words is the best demonstration one can make of one's comprehension of the idea. The corollary that once falsified, a theory is no longer a theory, is implicit. Still, as far as I can tell, the only reason for throwing around this particular Popper quote is to introduce by inferrence the notion that the Theory of Evolution is untested and untestable, without actually having to present evidence to support that notion (because such evidence does not exist).
This is precisely what the historical sciences, most notably including Darwinist theory, refuse to do. They don't try to falsify their theory. Rather, they select evidence on the basis of what can validate their theory and ignore all the rest — anything to uphold the "just-so story," even though it is increasingly difficult to do that.
Once again, you brought up this false dichotomy between "historical" disciplines (biology) and "real-time" disciplines (physics). If, in fact, biologists do not try to falsify their theory, it should be trivial to find evidence of that. Just look in PubMed (www.pubmed.org) and find some research articles that illustrate that we do not try to falsify our theories. Show your evidence here, with appropriate quotes and links back to the original articles, and explain how they fail to include tests designed to falsify incorrect theories, and what those tests should have been.
I see Stephen Jay Gould quoted a lot here. No doubt he's rolling in his grave right now, seeing his work which was essential to helping to refine the ToE, taken out of context to try to show that he didn't think evolution occurred. Selectively quoting people to make it look like they're proving exactly the opposite of what they thought is actually quite a common meme when it comes to anti-science movements; it is not surprising to see that meme pop up here.