I would like to start this thread unorthodoxly. I hereby nominate
Message 99 to be one of the greatest posts of 2009.
In the thread
Help in teaching 11-12 Year olds (RE (Religious Education) in the UK), an interesting subtopic emerged. It has been thrashed about a lot, and Peg has brought it up often. Creationists often attempt to undermine abiogenesis research in an attempt to show evolution as a theory without a solid foundation.
Evolutionists counter that by suggesting the two ideas are logically distinct from one another - you could have evolution happen after a special creation event or alien seeding or time travelling scientist creating a handy closed time loop or what have you) and you could have a natural origin of life without subsequent evolution.
As Peg has said in
Message 42:
Peg writes:
the{y} are not disctinct {sic} because logically, you cannot have evolution without first having origins
So what do we do?
I say that the scientific method, by its very nature, must start with investigating separate phenomena, unifying them later. I will highlight this point by prefacing my argument with a poem.
WHAT SCIENCE SAYS TO TRUTH
As is the mainland to the sea,
Thou art to me;
Thou standest stable, while against thy feet
I beat, I beat!
Yet from thy cliffs so sheer, so tall,
Sands crumble and fall;
And golden grains of thee my tides each day
Carry away.
--William Watson
Newton
I need not labour on the history here. Newton discovered certain laws of motion. Before Newton there were two planes: the earthly and the heavenly. Each plane required different models to discuss. On earth we had to work to get things to happen. In the heavens, the heavenly bodies never slowed, except for a handful which did some interesting things.
Newton's work allowed us to talk about the motion of the planets in the same terms as we talk about the motion of a plough.
It turns out, from Newton's work, that the thing that causes the planets to move the way they do is the same thing that causes apples to fall off trees! This is a mind blowing concept, taken for granted by us now.
Before Newton, it wasn't that we knew nothing about motion, stellar or earthly. But Newton unified the two fields and this is typically seen as a good thing.
Electricity
We have known something of electricity as a species for a long time. We really started getting to grips with describing it starting with William Gilbert in the 17th Century. ‘rsted and Ampre independently showed there was a relationship between electricity and magnetism centuries later. And then of course, Maxwell came along and gave us a unification of optics, electricity and magnetism in one set of equations.
cavediver's post discusses some part of the quest for a grand unification in physics so that all physical things can be described in one consistent framework. I think he would agree, as would just about any other physicist: when it comes, it isn't likely to overturn everything we already knew...just explain how it ties together.
The Grand Theory of Life
The physics history gives us a lesson: Theories are grown gradually by building knowledge. Seemingly independent branches come together and this is a good thing. But the knowledge of those branches isn't erased by the unification! The descriptions of the motions of the planets were not false just because Newton described them using a set of equations that also explains falling apples! Nor were Galileo's descriptions about the way apples behave suddenly wrong.
There is no reason to think that finding the Grand Theory of Life will prove what we know about evolution false. If we find out that simple earth life was specially created by some agent, it would still be true that Chimpanzees are related to Humans, and the explanation as to how that could be would still hold.
That we do not have a Unified Theory for the History of All Life on Earth is not in any way evidence that evolution is on shaky grounds. Science proceeds by growing knowledge and spotting patterns and connecting dots and slowly, slowly seeing the bigger picture. We don't need the bigger picture to be confident of some parts of it - if we did there would be no way to proceed at all and science would be useless! And when it comes to life, most of the picture is its evolution.
Is it Science?
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2