Real_Trouble
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quote:
Is the suggestion here that the theory of evolution is not falsifiable? Or that competing theories had better be? I'd just like to be clear on your point.
My comment is that any theory must be presented in a manner in which it is falsifiable and testable. That would include the theory of evolution, any competing theories, and anything that is going to be called a theory in general, actually.
See my post above where I comment that evolution, in my view, is largely supported but that there are some areas where I feel people are reaching. However, my background is in mathematics and, to some extent, physics, so I would also suggest my standard of proof may be higher than that of most biologists. I am also a skeptic by nature, so that contributes.
I am not suggesting there is any other theory which I believe to have better support that competes with evolution.
quote:
Don't you think this is overstated a bit? It would seem as if something like inquiry into the ecological role of long-extinct species would have to be ruled out of Science, given the difficulty of finding experimental subjects. Do you agree?
Furthermore, isn't a good deal of perfectly well-established science done not experimentally but by means of various sorts of surveys? Shouldn't the scope of your own criteria encompass this?
Is the study of Math science, for you? The study of Logic?
I don't think I'm overstating the point at all.
For instance, inquiring about long-extinct species is a perfectly valid avenue of investigation, and can be done in a rigorous way. There is plenty of evidence regarding many things which are totally extinct (such as a wide variety of overgrown, ornery reptiles known as dinosaurs), yet are well supported and obviously existed at some point in the past. We even conduct experiments regarding them; not all experiments are performed in a lab. There have been testable predictions made about dinosaurs (where to find remains, what the shape would be, what sort of ecosystems could have supported them in correlation with geological evidence from the appropriate time periods, and so on), and they have provided quite a bit of supporting evidence.
However, I do doubt quite a bit in the way of survey science, and I'm always skeptical of research until I see something supported through repeated, independent testing and with a multiplicity of approaches whenever possible. Quite bluntly, I think we give a free pass to too many things that have not been tested thoroughly. There is a paper I often reference on this topic which is extremely good, if you have something of a technical background, in fact:
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&ct=1&SESSID=d437c7550dc4f274a4b2e23a40e2f255
That is specific to medicine, but the point holds well in other disciplines. It turns out that, upon further testing, a large majority of research studies are false!
I believe my skepticism and insistence on strong evidence to be well-founded.
My point here is also not to argue for an alternative - there really isn't one with any degree of solid evidence behind it. My point is merely that we are not willing to say "we don't know yet and we need more evidence" often enough. Sometimes, in fact, we don't know.
That's not a positive argument for anything else, though. It's an argument to do more research and keep whittling away, not an argument to insert something even less supported as an alternative.
I believe that if this debate was more focused on what science really is and how it is conducted, there would be no debate at all. This is what happened at Dover, actually, and I believe the outcome speaks for itself.
< Message edited by Real_Trouble -- 4/20/2008 3:28:59 PM >
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