SCIENCE: -- "observational science" vs "historical science" vs ... science.

Faith's point was that the paper acknowledged that other people held biology in lower regard as a science. Of course she took the point as being supportive of her efforts to dismiss all geology that is not Genesis friendly. Inductive reasoning is because such reasoning is the only available strategy. We have to live with both the strength and weaknesses of such reasoning, the primary weakness being that nothing generalization is ever proven and no conclusion is inescapable.

Except, of course, when it comes to her own conclusions. She thinks she can test the past but we cannot.Just to be clear, when you talk about induction, are you talking about inductive reasoning? It is of course the case that such reasoning produces tentative results, but then when, in science, do we not use inductive reasoning. There is no other alternative.ABE:I meant that science must use inductive reasoning. I'm recovering from a day of looking through legal briefs. Sorry about that.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I agree. If we really want to find some posts on the internet to debate, Faith isn't the person I would suggest.Ken Ham, for example, also makes a distinction between experimental and observational science. He doesn't do any better a job than Faith is doing. But at least Ham gets lots of mainstream press, so there might be some reason to care what he says.Faith is incoherent. Maybe if Ken Ham and the others on the internet are too. But we already know the nature of Faith's zealotry. I'm not interested in what she posts on her block because I know it is stuff she does not have the tubes to post here.

duplicate removed.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I tried that argument a couple of times. In particular I pointed out that the formation of the Grand Canyon formation was neither witnessed nor described in the Bible. I got no response either. Define "statistically analyzed" because I don't believe the term applies to geology. In particular, aging considerations alone are enough to settle the question of whether the GC was formed in a single year, and certainly the measured ages of GC layers are something subject to statistical analysis.Geology is not just looking at rocks and making stuff up.ABE:Should have said that I believe geology is subject to statistical analysis. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I don't think ranking those three is all that challenging. I'd put the order (most confident to least) as proton charge, earth age, and universe age. It would not be that great a challenge to our understanding of the universe if its estimated age were say only 13.7 or 13.5 billion years rather than 13.8.I doubt that our estimate for the age of the earth is off by 100 million years, but would that be an earth shattering revolution?As far as their effect on science is concerned, if the charge on a proton was different in any significant way from the 1e, the effect on physics and chemistry would be substantial. On the other hand, some minor tweaks to theory might make the universe between 12-15 billion years old. I still don't know what "statistical assessments" is supposed to mean. But statistics is a tool used in verifying hypotheses. Scientists don't reach conclusions regarding the preponderance of the evidence without using statistics. Edited by NoNukes, : Change 1 to 1eEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Surely you understand that those ages have error bars that you are not bothering to report? Where do you think those error bars come from?

As do many qualitative results. Is drug A a safe and efficacious treatment for disease B? Does this DNA test result rule out convict B as the perpetrator? Is this drainage system sufficient for this municipality?

No, it isn't the distinction a science minded person might use. But I am still surprised that the creationists posting here who want to distinguish between the sciences don't pick on it more as it seems to allow better separation over what they are willing to accept and what they must reject. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

In the case of the estimate of the age of the universe, the error is based on the precision to which we can measure the parameters required to extrapolate to a universe of zero size using General Relativity.If we look at a scientific paper on the issue, we will see that not only are the error bars included, but also included is a label telling us what model the age corresponds to.Now you are correct that there is no percentage attached to tell us whether the particular model is correct, but the error bars are a confidence interval for our determination of the age of the particular model. Of course the lay press gets a hold of the number and reports it as the age of the universe. The confidence interval expresses the idea that we feel it unlikely that refinement of the input parameters will result in a change larger than the confidence interval for the particular model. But we know exactly what GR predicts given the inputs and the assumed beginning of the universe. Not of the general idea that the universe is old, no.I still have no idea what HBD meant. I hope he'll explain. But it is a bit risky to assign an interpretation that makes him clearly wrong without some clarification. In particular, the idea that we can assign probabilities to whether a particular model is correct is wrong. That concept would not even apply to the idea that the standard model is correct.As for the DNA determination not involving statistics, that seems a bit strange to me given the use of x-ray diffraction, but I simply don't know enough to comment more fully.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

It is true that the confidence factors alone might not do that in every case.However scatter plots of things that are supposed to be linear but which show a relatively low correlation factor might well suggest a low confidence in the underlying theory. A theory that predicts a specific value which we can only measure very approximately would provide low confidence whereas a value that matches precisely a known value would provide greater confidence. As an example, the ability of GR to accurately predict the perihelion anomaly of mercury provides much more confidence in GR than if the theory could only predict the order of magnitude of the anomaly.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Okay Percy. You've piqued my interest enough for me to get off my lazy butt.I'm reading this while I struggle with an opengles issue, so I cannot focus as intently as I'd like. I'll comment in more detail on the paper when I can spend devote some time to the issue, which will probably go beyond reading the paper. I have some time tomorrow,What I can say about the paper is that most of the analysis supporting the authors' conclusions is not actually present in this paper. I would expect that the material in the Diffraction by Helices section alludes to a statistical analysis of data. The section describes what a diffraction by a double helix ought to look like, and surely something other than a subjective comparison "looks like a match to me" was used to compare the expected data with the pattern that was obtained from experiment.Maybe not, but those are my thoughts for now. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

If you've provided such an example it seems to be well hidden. Whoa, Percy. Let's instead follow the discussion in the paper you referenced. Unless you are telling me that looking at slides are the sum total of Franklin's work, they are not all that helpful. Statistics often is simple math. You are sure there was no use of best fit lines or anything similar? No evaluation of any distinctions between predicted and expected results? Pitch just looked at and considered constant with no analysis? I don't understand how you reach your conclusion about analysis that is at best, only outlined or hinted at in the paper.Further, I'd add that Crick and Watson's work relied heavily on the data collected and analyzed of Rosalind Franklin, something also given no mention in the paper.You may be right, but I'm not yet convinced. It turns out that Einstein should have been convinced.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I believe that such examples are hard to come by. Surely the consensus is what we are talking about. I thought you had acknowledged that confidence can be persuasive and were in the case of General Relativity. The question of whether or not statistics was used is not subjective, and the question of whether their findings were accepted without the use of statistics is not confined to the four corners of that paper which, in my opinion does not resolve the issue either way.And on the one hand to tell me to forget the paper and then concluding with this gem is laughable.

Sigh.I did not reject the 'possibility' that statistics was absent. Is that what my saying 'perhaps you are right' a couple of times sounds like to you? I said that there was reason to believe statistics were used to be found in the paper and that the issue went beyond whether or not statistics were explicitly presented in the paper.Given that acceptance of Watson, et. al work is the sole example you gave in support of your position regarding quantitative results, I think requesting you to make that argument was reasonable.Ah, well. So be it.