Re: Evolution and Observation Gap


"Jack Crenshaw" <jcrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:AdSZf.1551$BS2.1260@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tracy P. Hamilton wrote:
Jack Crenshaw wrote:

Richard Forrest wrote:

Jack Crenshaw wrote:


There is a huge body of scientific knowledge supporting the Theory of
Evolution. It includes everything from biochemistry to genetics to biology
to ecology to paleontology to geology. Let us know when you have some
contradictory evidence.



You are making a serious mistake when you try to defend a historical
science like Evolution by equating it with a hard science like physics.


You are seriously confused about the nature of science if you make such
a distinction.

Yeah, right. Now you're going to educate me about science?


Evolutionary science is no more or less an "historical"
science than is physics. We can observe evolutionary events happening
in the present. In evolutionary theory as in physics, inferences about
events which happened in the past (and in the case of physics in a far
more distant past than that covered by evolutionary theory) by
observation and experiment in the present.

Haven't you forgotten something? It's true that, in ASTROphysics we
infer what may have happened in the far distance past, by observing
nature today. In ASTROphysics we can do that, because Nature obligingly
gave us a finite speed of light. The events we observe in ASTROphysics
may have happened long ago, but we are observing them _TODAY_.
Directly, not by inference.

Of course, in most branches of physics the topic never even comes up.
As nearly as we can tell, the nature of an electron hasn't changed since
there were first electrons.


That is why I think there should be no problem with a scientist
accepting
evolution, at least for most of the history of life. After all, the
DNA, RNA, protein
based biochemistry would have been the same. Before then, the picture
is
not clear.

The behavior of physics in other parts of our universe (which we have
not observed)
is justified by the physical theories we have discovered here. It is
not
just assuming things, but the theories themselves that tell us we may
do
this. For example, conservation of linear momentum, which we have
observed here
on Earth many times, MUST (if true) lead to translational invariance
for the
laws of physics (Noether's theorem).

That said, the dating timeline of life on earth and the universe is
also on
very solid ground, being based on theories from direct observation.

What do you think the history of life on earth was? Continuous
creation?


It's a commonly used practice, but also one that is logically, if not
intellectually, bankrupt.



What is "intellectually bankrupt" is the assertion that such a
distinction can be made and has any relevance to the validity of the
evolutionary sciences as science.

I don't believe I mentioned "the validity of the evolutionary sciences
as science" at all, at least not directly. I was talking about a
philosophically dishonest argument, not about the ToE.


You have yet to show that "in the past" is some sort of limitation on
biology.

[snip]


So I guess that you will now withdraw your claim that the evolutionary
science are not real sciences, or demonstrate that each one of those
800,000 links is irrelevant to your assertion that the evolutionary
sciences do not make predictions, and do not use mathematics.

Nice try. It's easy to post URL's, especially when you get them from
ther web sites. How about answering my question. What do you predict
will be the next new species? What changes to existing species?


Can you predict turbulent flow? You even have an equation for that!

Just because a theory doesn't do what YOU require of it, doesn't mean
it is not a theory. I think a physicist should be able to tell me
where an
electron is and its momentum.

[snip]

Tracy P. Hamilton

Huh?

Jack

I think TPH is saying that a scientific theory isn't invalidated because of
the demands that ignoramuses make of it. Your challenge to biologists
to "predict ... the next new species" doesn't invalidate the ToE any more
than TPH's challenge to physicists to specify simultaneously the position
and momentum of electrons invalidates QED.

Deadrat

.

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