quote:
As for something being categorized as theory and fact and existing only in peoples' minds, I'm sure you can think of examples of this from your own knowledge of history, right(?): erroneous ideas that became established beliefs (theory/fact), but that were later found to be erroneous (existing only in peoples' minds from the earlier time). That was all I meant.
And they were found out as such by scientists, through the scientific method. Take the phlogiston theory (disproven by mass measurements of burning objects), or the theory that the sun's energy was from gravitational collapse (contradictory evidence was given by radioisotope dating and abnormal measurements, and finally a method that works (fusion) was discovered).
Here, you're arguing against something that is not at the forefront of a new science; it is virtually universally accepted, apart from a few hundred people (if you assume that there are 10 times as many who remain silent as the ones who are vocal, a few thousand), among the world's millions of biologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, etc. While refinements to theories that have lasted for a long time do occur (for example, Newtonian phyiscs to relativistic physics), to survive to the present day requires that an incredibly huge amount of evidence need to be better reconciled by an alternativee theory.
Such a replacement theory for evolution has not been postulated. Not only have most creationist publications been based on bad (often deliberately bad) and outdated information (check the dates on papers referenced by, say, the ICR), but their reports often contradict each other. For example, for years creationists pushed that the world is young because there is too little helium in zircons. Now they've been circulating a paper postulating that the world is young because there is too much helium in zircons. There is no theory, just a mishmash of bad information that not only contradicts itself, but the very book it is supposed to be defending. They typically do it by abusing areas of research that haven't received much study (or hadn't at the date of publication) or are problems that have huge, complex calculations behind them (such as helium retention rates in zircon crystals at different temperatures and pressures, the propagation of oscillations through the sun, Earth's dynamo, etc). At the same time, they ignore the copious amounts of data gathered in the past several hundreds of years by millions of people, instead looking for their god in the next gap.
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I don't think that mutations are very good vehicles to look to in order to explain the development of life. Is the net result of mutations, improvement and expansion of genetic possibilities?
No. The net result of mutations *and* selection (and often other factors) is "improvement" (which is only relative in a given context, and contexts change across this planet and through time) of genetic possibilities.
Read, for example, about
Galapagos. Mutation alone would not have created the artwork. Mutation *and* selection created it.
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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."
[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-01-2003]
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