That’s an intertesting take on the scientific method, isn’t it? … a theory that relies on evidence that doesn’t exist?
I don’t see anything wrong with not having an explanation. Mystery is a part of most religions.
You may want to check out this article:
https://biologos.org/articles/testing-common-ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of evidence demonstrating how natural processes produced the biodiversity we see today. Another quick example is the difference in sequence conservation between exons and introns. We see the fingerprints of natural processes all over genomes.
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Darwin already addressed this more than 150 years ago.
“Only a small portion of the world has been geologically explored. Only organic beings of certain classes can be preserved in a fossil condition, at least in any great number. Widely ranging species vary most, and varieties are often at first local, – both causes rendering the discovery of intermediate links less likely. Local varieties will not spread into other and distant regions until they are considerably modified and improved; and when they do spread, if discovered in a geological formation, they will appear as if suddenly created there, and will be simply classed as new species.”–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”
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Thank you for putting this in your own words. Appreciated.
Kinda sorta agree, but it is not always so straightforward. The history of physics has been often led by hypothesis and theorizing which, at the time, could only be tested in principle and not practice. The Higgs particle is a case in point. Those were still scientific ideas, even the ones which ultimately failed.
Chemistry is not the only discipline in the entirety of science. There is the impression among creationists that if one does not set up an experiment with flasks and test tubes like determining if the elements are irreducible, it is not true science. Hypothesis testing can certainly be broader than that.
For instance, the leading hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs is the Chicxulub impact. This hypothesis has had to compete with other ideas involving volcanism and disease, not necessarily mutually exclusive, in the scientific community. There are ways to test this hypothesis, the most obvious being that one would expect to find dinosaur remains below markers for this event, and none above. That turns out to be the case. It is a reality and not just a story that all of the tens of thousands of dinosaur fossils found are below the KT boundary. That is a genuine scientific test which does not involve a lab bench.
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I’ve never read or listened to Ken Ham and I know nothing about his followers here.
Ah, the Armstrongites … WCG and “The Plain Truth”? I was involved with one of its off-shoots sects for a while.
I’m not SDA, but Roman Catholic.
What is 'strine?
I’ve never read “Oscar and Lucinda”, but I’m almost certain that I would lack the intellectual sophistication to appreciate such a work.
Okay. Thanks for that.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
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I don’t get it. How is it criticizing Darwin to point out what he said himself about the Cambrian explosion?
Possible explanations of the Cambrian explosion are quite numerous. One prominent one is an increase in the levels of atmospheric oxygen. But before reading about that one I could have give several myself. Any introduction of a new means of introducing controlled variation into the genome will result in an acceleration of evolutionary adaptation. One way this could have happened across many species simultaneously is a virus or micro-organism which alters DNA, a possible source of horizontal gene transfer among other things, which we now know played a more significant role in evolution that we previously thought.
Unlike religion, unanswered questions is not an embarrassment to science because it has the tools to investigate the answers to questions. True it doesn’t have the one-size fit all answers of abracadabra, Goddidit, and woo woo mystery – but it doesn’t need them.
Theistic evolution is a scientific explanation of the Scriptures. Not having the final explanation in question is like a novel that’s missing the final chapter.
… except that after 150 years of further fossil discoveries, saltations still exist (so I’m told).
Richard Beck described scientific theory recently in his blog:
“Scientists collect data/observations and look for connections among them. Scientists make hypotheses and these hypotheses aggregate to create a theory. The goal of a theory is to account for and explain all the relevant data in a way that is comprehensive, consistent, and parsimonious. By parsimony I mean that the theory is simple and compact. And by comprehensive we mean that the theory explains all of, or most of, the data and observations on hand. Of course, there are always loose ends, anomalous data points that can’t be explained or shoehorned into the theory. Regardless, the goal of a scientific theory is to have a simple explanation that explains a whole lot of data with as little contradiction as possible.”
from https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/
That seems to be a good description of what goes on., We see in crime shows how we know someone is the culprit but cannot make a conviction due to destruction of evidence. But their guilt is consistent with everything we do know.
It seems that proponents and opponents of evolution tend to think of it as a force rather than as an abstract idea of how the data all fits together. It is not like gravity,but is more like the theory of relativity, explaining the distortion of time and space by mass.
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I take your point. Thanks for explaining to me those aspects from other forms of science.
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Interesting.
What empirical evidence is there that increased levels of atmospheric oxygen produce new phyla, as are evident in the Cambrian explosion?
Ken Ham’s an Oz with a huge US following. Go figure. Proves my point…
Aye, WCG, PT. United?
RC! Armstrong was rabidly anti.
Sorry, the apostrophe is superfluous.
And that sentence belies your sophistication. The True History of the Kelly Gang is a challenge as it is one continuous sentence. A remarkable feat.
So, you a cradle RC?
And I am brutal but fair, and intrigued at your ignoring the elephant in the room.
The fact that these new phyla require oxygen in order to live is quite sufficient.
When you compare nonzero evidence of any scientific hypothesis to the zero evidence of theological rhetoric, the ratio is infinite. As long as you continue to put up religion as something akin to science you will only succeed in supporting the atheist agenda to cast religion into the role of primitive science. Better to accept the role of religion in supporting the need for subjective participation in living ones life, rather than playing this losing game of competing with the objective observations of science.
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Couldn’t agree more.
There are times when people approach science like it is a life philosophy that is supposed to have an answer to everything. That’s not what science is. One of the most exciting things about science is the simple phrase, “I don’t know”. At the heart of science is the humble acceptance of our ignorance, and a passion for methodically filling those holes in our knowledge.
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Told by whom?
How do you look at a fossil and determine that the species was the result of a saltation event?
It is worth mentioning that phyla do not exist in nature. Phyla are a human invention that we use to categorize groups of species. The only taxonomic level that actually exists in nature is species. If we were to back in time and categorize life as it was then we would classify the first species of each phyla as just a new species, perhaps a new genus. The only reason these species are now considered the ancestors of an entire phyla is because of the amount of time that has passed and the success of their descendants.
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There are a few that come to mind as one that have an obvious explanation. One is the sinistral species of Busycon (whatever Petuch, Hollister, and the like have said about generic assignment). The flip in coiling direction is known to be a very rare (usually) mutation in most snails. A few groups are normally sinistral (e.g. Planorbidae, Physidae, and Triphorinae), and a few random species elsewhere are consistently sinistral. The main point is that sinistral individuals can only mate with other sinistral individuals. Hence, as soon as a population appears, it could be considered a separate species (assuming that sinistrality is rare). Eventually, they may diverge noticeably from their dextral counterparts.
Another set of cases are groups that have so few fossil occurrences that trying to draw any hard conclusions about when they appear is impossible. Examples include Tjaernoeia (of which the only known fossil is sitting in a vial in my collection), and the family Cornirostridae (which have virtually always been put in other groups). It helps if the organisms’ remains are very similar to those of other groups, and are also tiny. [let me clarify-the largest specimens known of those two groups are about 2.5 mm across]
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