come on…folks…try to think outside the box. It’s totally easy to test Darwin’s theory. Just go to an island where there are things in additon to finches flitting about. Say…woodpeckers…nuthatches…etc. and see how much morphological diversity those little finches maintain. You won’t find much change because the woodpeckers and nuthatches etc. will certainly out compete those finches.
Falsification of Darwin’s claim probably has not been attempted yet.
Generally speaking, I’m in agreement with you. It’s very easy to design a test that could falsify Speciation by Mutation and Natural Selection! (< Notice I intentionally didn’t use the word Evolution).
But I think there has been LOTS of efforts to find Darwin’s hypotheses (multiple!) false. And when one or two of them appear to do so, they end up proving something new we didn’t know about Evolution!
I’m not trying so say evolution is true or false…or that someone should try to falsify it. Its critical to any scientific construction that it be “falsifiable”. A thought experiment might suffice…such as the one I proposed. If you can’t even figure out a way to falsify a hypothesis…it’s not going to pass muster as science because it is non-testable. Art is an example. I don’t know how to test it’s quality…for instance. Music is another thing whose characteristics do not lend itself to being falsifiable. A wrong note or a wrong color…well…says who? I’ve heard some interesting things come out of musical “wrongness”. In the case of Darwin’s observation on finches…I say it’s scientific because it IS falsifiable. Some things…are not easy to falsify for one reason or another…medicine is tricky, for instance, because you can’t really experiment on people for lots of reasons. Evolution is kind of like medicine that way. I merely explained how the theory of evolution is sufficiently falsifiable to be scientific. Maybe we should simply say the idea must be coherent enough to be reversible.
Speciation is what taxonomists do to separate fossils into groups. There is no connotation of mutation or natural selection. It is entirely Artificial. That’s one good everyday example of how species originate that is entirely outside the genetics box. When I took paleontology I was always troubled by how much change was allowed before you got into another species. It seemed totally arbitrary…until I learned how to use stratigraphy and sedimentation to “read” the rocks AND the fossils. Now I see that speciation in the fossil field is merely a tool.
@stjohnso, Nevertheless, the Creationists are fond of saying our “tool” of Speciation is the dividing line between truth and fiction.
But I do think it would be helpful to be able to say to a Creationist:
“The Concept of Speciation is a guide, a tool, when investigating different life forms in different ecosystems, times and places. There is no FDA label on any creature that says this is a Species or this is a Kind.”
Thanks for the insight !!!
Recall Darwin’s whole point was that apparently finches are not forever.
Falsification of Darwin’s claim would be that finches don’t change if they face specialized competition.
Has anyone done such a study, specifically on finches…specifically in isolated areas where variables can be defined and controlled.
I suspect that if there were such a study it would be acclaimed as proof of something. That would be an acid test of Darwin’s work. Other attempts to test Darwin’s work are less direct and less compelling.
Anyone out there game?
In the Endangered Species Act, the focus is on the niche rather than the species. If you save the niche…you save the species. Kind of weird way of evolutionary thinking. But…essentially the point is…which is more important, the hole or the dirt from it…the niche or the species. That is the “imaginary component of speciation”.
There is a parallel in the electronics world…the electron and it’s “hole”. No holes…then there are electron sparks… Same with evolution…gotta consider both.
A species is a bit like a crystal. They are all the same until you find out there are pseudomorphs, inclusions etc…and worse…that there are elemental substitutions you can only guess at. For example…calcite is all curvey if there is lots of magnesium in the lattice. Same with species. The concept of a species is as good as the concept of say…a diamond. Very useful…until you try and substitute. Then not all diamonds are diamonds…some are ok and some are not ok. So, setting a species up as protected entity seems ok until you wind up with spotted owls…striped owls…etc. Some are OK and some are not. Hmm…who has become the creationist now?
Apologies…I don’t think I’m being succinct.
Somehow I think the blind watchmaker evolution needs a little help from that venerable field of chemistry…thermodynamics. Anyone who has suffered through it might find interesting connections. Could it be that there are some useful issues to include that are now hard to conceptualize much less quantify. Recall the oxcart theory of motion…there was no way to measure friction at the time so it was ignored. Newton’s ideas of motion were set up all outside the concept of friction. Then using his ideas…friction was then “invented”. Since then the Oxcart theory has gone extinct.
Let’s try it…complexity…that would be entropy. What else…OOPS…can’t think of any. Well entropy is has this god like thing about it. There is also something called negentropy…I think that would be “order”. Hum…don’t we need something. There’s gibbs free energy…heat of formation…heat capacity…temperature…calories…lots of stuff. I’ll bet that in the field of information theory there are ways to handle the blind watchmaker issues that now not only seem vaguely qualifiable…entirely untestable and not particularly quantifiable.
OK…there’s this thermo/world thing called the “universe”…whether it be open or closed. In thermo it’s called an open system or closed system. Any creative folks out there who want to hack out a rough outline? I tried once…I invented something called an “info-el”. It was like a “pixel”. But I got stuck. I was using maps at the time and trying to quantify the amount of information it contained. I knew the scale of the map mattered and the curvyness of the lines mattered but I was stumped. In the blind watchmaker we see hacking on the complexity issue but there is something missing…something big and vague…something like friction.
Maybe my so called “info-el” is definable as the radius of the smallest area defined on the map. So…how do we get to the blind watchmaker issue…well…the eye maps out the world…right? So…Dawkins spends time on eyeballs…lots of time. Can anyone make sense of the arguments he puts forth.
Freezingly yours…Steve in Galena
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