You’ve come here claiming that evolution is pseudo science, but your claims look like they are based on wild exaggerations of the claims of actual evolutionary science. The sort of thing we expect from closed minds that don’t want to learn.
I’ve tried to respond openly and honestly to your various assertions and questions, but each step of the way you have tried to apply all sorts of logical fallacies. You’ve exaggerated my claims, extrapolated them to extremes, you’ve appealed to undeclared authorities, you’ve ignored inconvenient parts of my assertions. There’s probably more, but I think you get my point.
Some people here see this behaviour, and respond with ridicule. I’ve tried to do better than that, but you are very resistant to new understanding, safely walled behind all that reactive denial so that your cherished beliefs will not be challenged.
Change is hard.
I recommend some serious introspection on your part, and then go read some serious actual research on evolution. Look at the real evidence. It is overwhelming, and just a Google search away.
Then come back and have another chat. You will still be welcome.
I just happen to know the “Evolution” blurb very well indeed having been soaked in it practically since birth and having studied science (including physics and biology) at tertiary level back in the 70’s. In fact, I was quite a vigorous proponent of the ideology until my continued and deepening interest in science and philosophy pulled me up with a jerk. I was about 27 yo when I began to realise that the ideology is not connected to basic reality.
I am also becoming increasingly familiar with Google censorship. Anything not very convenient to the prevailing “politically correct” ideology is buried so that a casual search will not reveal it.
All the popular and mindlessly assumed “reasons” for “Evolution” that I have countered with easily verifiable commonsense and scientific observations you have dismissed or ignored for no reason but that it’s not convenient to the official party ideology.
I didn’t come down in the last shower, boys. The official party line is wrong and I have a long history of not being very susceptible to cajoling or bullying. You will continue your ideologically incestuous back-slapping in spite of any commonsense, or logic, or science. In that you are perfectly politically normal party hacks. “Useful idiots”, as Lenin is reported to have described his party hacks. Incidentally, “Evolution” is the justification claimed by all recent wannabe tyrants from Karl Marx to George Soros and his little lackey the Malicious Turdful.
Do enjoy your 30 pieces of fame, fellas. The Monster has a habit of eating its own progeny.
Lol love the Soros and politically correct references. It’s like its all a one world order conspiracy.
On the plus side we can hope (and pray) evolution is wrong. If that is the case, there is no need for Basic Income and people like me will not be cheering and putting up posters like this:
This just doesn’t add up.
You claim to have studied biology, but make ridiculous claims about evolution, like the thing you said about breeding sheep into elephants. Nobody who seriously studied biology, even in the 70’s could possibly think it says things like that. It’s just nonsense.
So, what’s your deal?
I’m starting to agree with @edeity that you must have some hidden agenda.
Here is a clever clot who can’t even draw on his own pragmatic observations to seek intelligent answers. Apparently he has more recently promised to stop kicking this Sacred Cow… not because he found credible answers but because he was “lent on” by some influential power.
OK, well that was kind of excruciating to read, but I read it all the way through nevertheless.
It seems like Fred Reed’s biggest problem is really just that some scientists studying are perhaps speaking a little too authoritatively in detailed areas where there is still significant uncertainty, and that they are protective of their work (probably because they care and like to keep funding to continue their striving for knowledge).
Let me explain why I think Fred’s position is unreasonable.
Firstly, it seems to exhibit a dreadful misunderstanding of the philosophy of science - how science works, and what it’s for.
Science, explanations and predictability
Science is NOT about proving things. If you want proofs, go do maths instead.
That may seem like an odd assertion, but it is correct.
Science is about EXPLANATIONS, and continuous efforts to DISPROVE them.
Potential explanations may be put forth (hypothesis) and then we try to shoot them down with evidence.
In straightforward physical sciences where we can observe and measure things fairly directly, like the F=M*A sort of case, we can simply measure things a lot of times, controlling for outside influences, and thereby improve our confidence that force really is the product of mass and acceleration. If course, one day we discover that at high velocities, from some frames of reference, it doesn’t get the expected results and we have to go back for a more sophisticated explanation (relativity) and things get more complicated.
Science in a messy complicated arena
In a convenient philosophical convergence, the value of good explanations as well as the efforts to shoot them down, both require that the explanations have the characteristic of making predictions.
i.e. if A is correct, then B must also be true.
This rather marvellously allows us to extend our confidence in relation to explanations that we can only evaluate indirectly. If you like maths, then Bayes Theorum succinctly explains this premise.
In English: the probability of A given B, is equal to the probability of B given A times the probability of A divided by the probability of B.
In application, you can start off with your best guess at how likely your explanation is … P(A) … consider your prediction of how true B must be given your explanation A … P(B|A) (or probability of B given A), and then go measure how often B turns out to be true … P(B). The result … P(A|B) is how likely you should now consider your explanation A really is given its prediction of B and your measurements of B in the real world.
Yuk, that sounds complicated, but more succinctly in English, you can start off with an arbitrary level of belief in your existing explanation (A) even when you can’t measure it directly, but if it is predictive (as all good explanations are), then you can go measure its predictions instead. When you do that, Bayes Theorem explains how to continually adjust your belief in A, in the face of new evidence about B.
In practice, you’ll never get to 100% probability, but you will converge towards 100% for correct explanations and towards 0% for incorrect explanations. If it survives all tests of all predictions for a long time, confidence builds.
This capability is particularly important when striving for knowledge of big messy complicated things like life and evolution where we don’t get the opportunity to just pop back in time a few billion years to go hunt down the special moment where the first self replicating proto-lifeform emerged. It should be no surprise at all that we’re trying out a lot of educated guesses (explanations) around the origins of life.
Trying out a lot of explanations IS the process. Here’s a nice summary of the efforts on that front:
On giraffe’s
Although Fred Reed claims not to be a creationist, he offers no other explanation.
He just alludes to something without every saying what it is.
BTW, his aside into giraffe necks was just weird. They definitely have longer rather than more vertebrae. Just go look at a skeleton. They have seven, just like humans and most other mammals, but theirs are longer.
For a really brilliant example of something that was clearly not designed or orderly, take a look at this dissection of a giraffe, showing its laryngeal nerve running from its brain, all the way down its neck, around an artery of the heart, and then all the way back up again, to control the larynges up near the head where it started.
and all that leads to the real problem with Creationism.
Scientists are anti-creationism, because …
It’s not an explanation at all. It’s a lack of explanation.
It makes no predictions, so it’s not testable.
As a consequence, it requires faith, zealotry and closed minds to maintain.
The god of the gaps
The lack of explanation for every specific thing throughout the history of life on earth, does not represent an argument against evolution. It represents an incomplete and ongoing study. Pointing to every gap doesn’t make evolution wrong
Evolution as an explanation is widely supported because it makes so many predictions that have been tested and found to be true.
Uh huh! So you want to redefine science to include your pet ideological assumptions. But, really, let’s define science as a system of enquiry.
All science is composed of sub-disciplines under the great umbrella of philosophy; the great desire for knowledge and understanding of reality. A physicist can gain a PhD… which means “Doctor of Philosophy”. Philo-sophy etymologically means “the love of wisdom”; that is, the desire for, and to spend oneself to get, the right answer. Of course, the law of non-contradiction always applies. The “answer” cannot be “right” if it is self-contradictory or contradictory of certainly known premises.
The application of this logical procedure leads directly to what’s known as a “scientific method” which starts with an observation, proceeds to possible explanations (hypotheses) to be tested with logical congruity to certainly known facts, observation and experiment. Any real contradiction to any of which renders the hypothesis a “dud” or failure.
Soothsaying (predictions) is not integral to any scientific method but may be a prelude to new questions via deductions or induction. It is not a “post hoc” “proof” of an assumption.
Most basic scientific method is:
Observation; something is seen to happen
Question; why or how is this so?
Hypothesis; maybe it’s because… (an idea to be tested with logic and experiment)
Theory; if an hypothesis passes all the tests it becomes a very likely explanation
Law; if it can be proved by logic and experiment that there are no, and can be no, exceptions it’s a Law.
What we have in the “Evolution” paradigm is the assumption that it’s a Law and all observations are “massaged” to comply.
Every mathemagician knows that he can get any desired answer by “tweaking” the inputs.
That’s not my definition. Many other philosophers of science have expressed this before me.
I don’t disagree with your 5 point list of the scientific method, but I expanded on point 3.
Hypotheses and theories are required to provide explanatory value, or else they are pointless.
That’s it. No other redefinition required.
“Soothsaying” - what a crock of shit.
Predictions as I described them are logical deductions from the explanation inherent in a hypothesis or theory.
Things like “If the seasons are caused by the earth being tilted on its axis relative to the sun, then we can predict that the seasons will be different in the upper and lower hemispheres.” Test than, and Oh yes, so they are. That helps us build confidence in the axial tilt theory of seasons, but if it turned out not to be true, then we’d have to scrap that explanation.
Well, we know that evolution as a process works. Once you lay it out like an algorithm, it becomes bleeding obvious that it works and may apply to many circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that it must be the only process involved, though I note a complete lack of any alternative useful explanations from yourself.
What would you test about an hypothesis, if not it’s predictions?
Positive results just improve confidence in the explanation a little, but repeatable negative results invalidate the explanation and advance our knowledge.
So naturally, we want to test the prediction that we think are most likely to be disproved.
Personally I found it a good bonding experience. We all got to chip in together, see what the enemy looks like etc. Just because someone is a Libertarian does not mean they always have shared views of what rationality or logic or science are.
