evolution discussion with faith

Faith, I am going to ask one question per post.The first question is:Do you accept that scientists develop and test theory as their main expertise?

bump.Faith, I'd really appreciate a reply, since I wasn't able to ask you this question in the other thread.

I don't know. Perhaps you could be more specific.

I'll try to be more specific.Do you accept that, regardless of what specific field of study and expertise a given scientist concentrates on at any given time, he or she must first be at least competent in developing theoretical frameworks to explain the data that they observe, and further testing those theoretical frameworks (explanations)?

I have no idea, Schraf, I'm not a scientist. Seems to me to be necessary but I don't know how education in science is structured, how the priorities are stacked. You'd have to tell me.

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I have no idea, Schraf, I'm not a scientist.

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But doesn't it make sense to you that the job of any scientist, no matter what they study, is to do science, i.e develop explanitory frameworks to explain their emperical observations, and then test them?

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Seems to me to be necessary but I don't know how education in science is structured, how the priorities are stacked. You'd have to tell me.

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Let me tell you, then.Developing explanitory frameworks to organize emperical observations, and testing them, is the meat of what all scientists do, regardless of what particular part of nature they study.Do you accept that this is what scientists do, first and foremost, regardless of what type of science they do?

I guess I have to take your word for it, don't I? It's a pretty abstract statement though. Could you give an example of how this is done in daily scientific work?

With your permissions, ladies, I could illustrate this with an example from what I do when I'm not foolin' around on forums like this....

You have my permission.

First, let me try to explain this in a bit more detail, then I'll give an example.Scientists, in doing science, generate explanations of stuff that happens in nature. These explanations must have testable consequences.Then they test those explanations using various methods, depending upon the field, which are designed to find out if the consequences the scientists thought would be the case are really the case.Since there are usually several competing explanations in a given field for a particular thing that happens in nature, scientists also try to find other explanations that are different from what they think is the most likely one for why this thing happens.Given multiple explanations, it is important to determine what are the different testable consequences of each explanation.Example:
Do cigarettes cause lung cancer?This idea arose to explain the rise in lung cancer rates over the twentieth century.Testable consequence: The group of people who smoke cigarettes should have higher rates of lung cancer than the group of people who don't smoke.Test: Surveys and records indicate higher lung cancer rates among smokers.Possible Alternate Explanation:
Cigarette smokers tend to live in cities, where air pollution is higher.Different prediction:
Among rural populations, lung cancer should be equally common among smokers and non-smokers.(So, then one could do surveys that look at just this question, and so on and so on...)This is a pretty simple example. It doesn't require sophisticated tools or complicated laboratories full of weird equipment. But this sort of analysis is what science is, it's what scientists do. The specifics of how the testing takes place will change depending on the field of study.Now, scientists may do other things: write textbooks, give talks, teach, branch out into philosophy, have religious (or anti-religious) views, take out patents, etc.But none of these makes a person a scientist. The analysis and testing of explanations is what makes a person a scientist. To get a PhD in a scientific field, one must demonstrate that they can carry out a line of research that analyzes and tests an explanation (or explanations).Do you understand, and do you accept that this is what scientists do? I don't want you to just take my word for it. I'd be happy for any of the professional scientists on this board to chime in, and I could provide additional links/resources.

Hey I understand that kind of research quite well. Thanks for giving an example, and it would be very helpful to have more, so let's have Coragyps give his (hers?) too.

His.Very pedestrian stuff, sometimes, but I think a decent illustration.I'm in the oilfield chemicals business. One very common practice used to get more oil out of the ground quicker is called acidizing: you pump a couple of thousand gallons of hydrochloric acid down a well to dissolve some of the (limestone) rock down there and provide easier paths for the oil in that rock to the well and thus to surface and finally our gas tanks.It was noticed quite a few years ago that this process works better in some areas than in others: in the Panhandle of Texas, for example, you can usually pump acid with almost no additives into a well and get improved flow of nice, clean oil. Down here in the Permian Basin, you can pump the same acid and frequently decrease production as well as getting big globs of stuff called "sludge" that looks sort of like licorice pudding might look if it existed. In parts of Canada, you can completely plug up wells by acidizing them with just plain acid.Hypothesis #1, arrived at as recently as 1990 (!) out here, was that acid is somehow reacting with crude oul to make this pasty crud. Lab tests using clean crude and additive-free acid failed to support H#1, though: I can mix up reagent-grade acid and crude from the San Andres formation from Howard County, TX, and they'll separate right out cleanly, with no glop formed.Hypothesis #2 followed. It was, "maybe we're dissolving enough rust out of the pipe as we pump this acid to change things a bit...." Lab tests confirmed this: if I dissolve some rust into my acid before I mix it with that same oil from Howard Co., I'll get sludge that looks like the stuff that comes out of those wells over there after an acid job! A little more lab work showed that only the ferric form of iron - that in the +3 valence state - caused sludge to form. Ferrous, or +2 state, iron, didn't cause a problem.Hypothesis #3 followed: we can't get all the iron out of the acid, 'cause it's already 3000 feet down the pipe headed toward that reservoir. But if we could come up with something that we could put in the acid that would change all the +3 iron to +2 iron, would it stop sludge from forming? {Five years of Edisonian trying of stuff and hard work was inserted here before a chemical mixture that 1) did so 2) was affordable and 3) was practical to use in acid was developed.} A godawful-nasty smelling mixture was indeed found that did prevent sludge in lab tests, and then in field jobs. (I eat steak occasionally because of my part in developing this product. The owner of our company eats it even more often.)Real simple in principle: guess at something, test out your guess, try again if it fails. Repeat. There are oils, uncommonly here but common in California, for one place, that don't fit the "ferric-iron-is-the-baddie" hypothesis. Clean acid alone is enough to make them sludge, and completely different additives are needed to fix their problems. The Panhandle oils I mentioned don't sludge at all, iron or not. But for most Permian Basin oils, additives like the one we have fix the problem.

Nice little story of science at work. Thanks.

Cor, do you suppose you'd be such a rich man now if our chemical models about the structure of atoms, and in particular their electrical interactions, weren't basically accurate?If the modern conception of the atom - if, indeed, there were not even such things as atoms - wasn't basically right, would you have been able to find the proper additive? Would you have been successful if atomic theory were just wishful thinking, or a model that everybody agreed to simply cram the data into, as Faith has accused evolution of being?I submit that you'd be a poor man indeed if atomic theory was simply something that you had to submit to, and conceal instances where it simply didn't work, and act like everything was just fine. I submit that the simple fact that biologists too are able to employ their theories to achieve real accomplishment is proof that the theory of evolution is not just wishful thinking but an accurate model of the development of life on Earth.

Of course science is dependent upon previous discoveries in science. I love to read stories like this too. In fact I'd like to hear a lot more of them before we turn to Schraf's main topic here. But if you must introduce it, then you can't just rest on abstractions, you must give examples that demonstrate that the ToE has any practical application in science.