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Author | Topic: The Nature of Scientific Inquiry; Is Evolution Science? | |||||||||||||||||||
sfs Member (Idle past 2553 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
quote:I know you're trying to avoid condemning scientists here, but it just doesn't wash. If biologists (and geologists and astronomers) have been blundering ahead for generations, never noticing that the basic framework they're using is completely wrong, then yes, they are dunderheads. Or I should say "we", since I'm one of them. quote:Science does not care whether an event is in the past or not. All it cares is whether you can formulate hypotheses and test them. Evolution (and geology and astronomy) formulates testable hypotheses. Things like, if humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, then we should see the following when we compare their genes. Scientists continue to accept and use evolution because it works. It permits them to generate hypotheses that they can test, and that confirm the basic soundness of the theory. It also serves as a foundation for understanding lots of other phenomena. Scientists will continue to use evolution as long as it works and as long as there is no other alternative. And make no mistake, there is no other alternative: creationist theories can't remotely begin to explain the range of data that scientists encounter. Few creationists even bother trying.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2553 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
quote:As has already been pointed out, this is wrong. Some events don't leave any trace behind, but lots of events do. If you visit a dormant volcano, observe the cooled lava flows and see the remains of thousands of trees, all broken and lying pointing away from the crater and covered in ash, you have a pretty good idea that the volcano erupted at some point in the past don't you? That's all science does when it comes to past events: look at the traces left behind and infer what happened. quote:To be blunt, you are like someone coming up to a bunch of electricians and telling them that they only think electricity flows through wires -- really, it's water that's goes through wires, and they only think electricity is involved because they all assume it and aren't concerned about the theory itself. The electricians would, rightly, think that the person was nuts. Scientists really would have noticed if their most basic theory was completely wrong. quote:Excellent. We're in agreement on this basic point. But, contrary to your statement elsewhere, this is exactly the same kind of reasoning that is applied to any other part of evolutionary biology. Some ideas can be tested with great precision, some with less. Some can't be tested at all, and can never be more than speculation. The parts that science has reached conclusions about all fall into the testable category, however. quote:Huh? Radiometric dating, at least in its more sophisticated forms, depends on knowing how physics works, and doesn't depend at all on having some sample whose date you know. As we DNA, we have the isotopes, and we know the processes that are involved in radioactive decay, so we can make valid inferences about how long the rock has been accumulating decay products. quote:It's a web of interrelated observations. Some are fairly simple to understand, some aren't. Let me look around to see if I have any old posts on the subject. quote:I don't think that's a fair characterization. My comments come from my professional experience with genetic data; I've seen the utility of evolution in practice. I've tried (for years) to think of ways of getting them to fit a YEC scenario, and I can't come up with one. Your comments, on the other hand, are something you came up with based on no first-hand experience with science, aren't they? [more later -- gotta get some work done here]
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sfs Member (Idle past 2553 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
quote:The equivalent claim is that the Bible is not a religious book -- it's actually a cookbook. And that priests and theologians for the past 2000 years have not noticed this fact because of their specialization and presuppositions.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2553 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
quote:No, that's not true. There are a number of steps physicists can take (and have taken) to determine whether radioactive decay rates change. First, you can understand why decay takes place, i.e. develop a good nuclear theory, and then predict based on the theory how decay rates would change for various conditions. Physicists have done that. Based on their theories, they predict that most decay rates would change not at all in any kind of environment relevant to dating rocks (e.g. we don't have to ask what would happen to decay rates at the center of a supernova or in a neutron star -- the fact that the rocks are sitting in an intact Earth sets constraints on what conditions they might have experienced). One kind of decay (electron capture) can change slightly as pressure increases, but this would involve no more than a small correction factor, and does not apply to most dating techniques. Second, they can test their predictions: measure decay rates under increasing pressure, for example, or at different temperatures. The predictions turn out to be quite accurate. Third, they can test lots of other predictions made based on the same nuclear theory. The same theory predicts, for example, how stars behave, and how nuclei interact when you slam them together in accelerators. Again, the theory appears to be quite sound. (Lots of details can't be calculated from existing theory; that's why physicists do experiments. But none of the uncertainty, and none of the experimental results, has given any hint that the basic conclusions about the constancy of decay rates are wrong.) Fourth, they can use astronomy to see if nuclear reactions behaved differently in the past. Looking at stars that are different distances away, for example, shows that nuclear reactions (which power stars) behaved identically over a vast range of times, from a few years to many millions of years. (This is because light takes a long time to reach us from distant stars, so the light we're seeing now was produced millions or billions of years ago.) Fifth, they can compare different dating methods for the same samples. It's hard to imagine any mechanism for decay rates to change, but it's much harder to imagine a mechanism that would have only the effect of speeding up all known decay rates (and without introducing any new unstable isotopes). Different dating techniques give consistent answers in the vast majority of cases. Sixth, they can look at specific events that occurred in the past. Specifically, they can study the Oklo reactor, which was a natural fission reactor that occurred in uranium ore deposits in what is now Gabon a couple of billion years ago (according to conventional dating, that is). The particular mix of reactor products produced turns out to be a very sensitive test of whether nuclear reactions have changed at all since the reactor operated, and the conclusion is that they haven't. You see, physicists don't just assume that physics, and decay rates, haven't changed. They have investigated the possibility of change as an interesting scientific hypothesis, and have used a variety of techniques to set very stringent limits on how much change can have occurred. There's an entire little subfield of physics that tests things like this.
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