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Author Topic:   Creationists: Why is Evolution Bad Science?
Son Goku
Inactive Member


Message 156 of 283 (292420)
03-05-2006 3:12 PM
Reply to: Message 150 by crashfrog
03-02-2006 10:55 PM


Eh,...
It is apples and oranges, though. None of the other theories are really science - they describe abstractions of the universe, not the universe itself. Biology - evolution - is really the only "true" science.
I might be misinterpreting what you've said, but could you justify what exactly makes General Relativity or Electromagnetism not a science?
Or what makes evolution the only true science?
This message has been edited by Son Goku, 03-05-2006 03:13 PM
This message has been edited by Son Goku, 03-05-2006 03:15 PM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 150 by crashfrog, posted 03-02-2006 10:55 PM crashfrog has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 159 by crashfrog, posted 03-05-2006 6:08 PM Son Goku has replied

  
Son Goku
Inactive Member


Message 160 of 283 (292512)
03-05-2006 6:45 PM
Reply to: Message 159 by crashfrog
03-05-2006 6:08 PM


Re: Eh,...
The thing about biology, and I may have trouble getting this across, is that you can't ignore the weird little corner-case phenomena like you can in physics and chemistry. In biology you can guarantee that you're going to find an organism that relies on that corner-case. The simplest model that can encapsulate evolution is as complicated as the real-world itself, which is why biology doesn't lend itself to concise little mathematical laws like in physics or chemistry.
I see what you mean. One can't form a theory of the "evolution of the elephant" independently of its surroundings or the evolution of other animals in its ecosystem.
Biological theories can't ignore the "noise" around the phenomena.
All I would say is that when the theories of physics ignore phenomena it's for good reason. For instance the quantum nature of the gravitational field is completely unimportant at our scale.
For instance the effect of gravity barely alters Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism.
I think both subjects have their cutoff point.
Wouldn't a biologist ignore the internal chemistry of a viron that lived near the habitat of an elephant when studying the elephant's evolution. You wouldn't run a chemical simulation of the elephant down to the atomic scale.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 159 by crashfrog, posted 03-05-2006 6:08 PM crashfrog has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 161 by crashfrog, posted 03-05-2006 6:52 PM Son Goku has replied

  
Son Goku
Inactive Member


Message 162 of 283 (292604)
03-06-2006 5:25 AM
Reply to: Message 161 by crashfrog
03-05-2006 6:52 PM


Re: Eh,...
Similarly, physics would ignore something based on how influential it is to the things its modelling.
Gravity often isn't included in electromagnetism because it's practically unnoticeable. For most electrodynamics it's 10^40 times weaker than the EM field.
It would be equivalent to taking into account a pathogen that existed in the Cretaceous when describing the lifestyle of a lynx.
The thing is I could include them all at once if I wanted to. I could literally formulate the Standard model in curved spacetime, which would be able to handle any physical phenomena we've ever observed.
We just don't do this because we don't have to.
I think fundamentally they are the same, it's just that biology has to include more noise on average than physics does.
Almost all of modern physics includes "corner-cases", heck that’s all Quantum Chromodynamics is. To solve anything in it, you have to include all cases.
Anyway, I'm probably going off-topic.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 161 by crashfrog, posted 03-05-2006 6:52 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
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