freediver wrote on Dec 12^th, 2008 at 11:00am:


Fine. Let's forget about the premise of falsification.

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The scientific method is defined as a logical process: In essence, it goes something like this - in order to answer a specific question about the natural world, you must first construct a hypothesis based on previous research that has been validated. You must then test that hypothesis to determine whether it is true or false. If it is true, then it becomes part of the building blocks of science - It's not totally absolute perhaps but it always remains a working hypothesis that can be knocked down at any time based on new information (data). If the hypothesis is false, then it's back to the drawing board. You can either modify the hypothesis and retest, or forget it and try something new.

There . I just defined it. Do you have a problem with that?

You can imagine it as a loose framework. Peer Review is like the guy who comes around with a spanner to tighten it up.

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They actually have something in common. Both of them cooked the books by fabricating data, but Newton was very lucky. Time proved him to be right, but didn't have accurate enough equipment to confirm this particular theory.

freediver wrote on Dec 12^th, 2008 at 10:26am:


How convenient.

freediver wrote on Dec 12^th, 2008 at 10:26am:


Oh, well I'm convinced. And Idi Amin called himself a war hero.

freediver wrote on Dec 12^th, 2008 at 11:53am:


I was talking about his theory that heat is transmitted to a greater extent in the Infrared segment of the spectrum.

'Slight revision' is usually a myth based on the difficulty in comprehending both paradigms at once. The old paradigm is re-expressed within the constructs of the new paradigm, but that can only ever be a misrepresentation.

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Depends entirely on your field of study. Even where that is the case, this does not contradict my view:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/evolution/what-is-experiment.html

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Please stop misusing the term strawman. You cannot misrepresent your own argument. Also, the fact that all theories will inevitably be proven wrong is not in any way a basis for my central argument about evolution.

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That doesn't make it wrong. Most scientists will acknowledge this too, especially if they understand the philosophical or historical context of their work.

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In any branch of science, you will find that all of it has undergone that sort of transofrmation, except for the current theories. This has usually happened several times over.

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That does not devalue them. This is the source of their value - the inevitability that our flawed and limited understanding of the universe will be exposed rather than hidden.

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50 Years is not a long time.

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This is completely wrong, and the scientific community acknowledges this. As Thomas Kuhn, the most respected philosopher of science, pointed out, the expansion around the edges of science continues until it reaches the edge of the current theory's usefulness. Then, when confronted with evidence that is irreconcilable with the current paradigm, the whole thing gets tossed out. This happens at every level and can go right down to the fundamentals. The closer a field of study is to the scientific method, the more fundamental the inevitable change. This is why both physics and chemistry have been repetedly turned on their head, whereas psychology for example just gets more confused.

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And beyond. Do you think science has only been around for 50 years or something?

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Yes but it is only one of about half a dozen active paradigms in psychology.

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Boservation alone is not sufficient. If you define science that way, you let in all sort of clearly unscientific mumbo jumbo.

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That's one problem, but it is more fundamental than that. Even if you could evolution would still not be falsifiable, because failure to observe something is never proof that it does not happen. Evolution never predicts how things will unfold. It can only be used to explain it after the fact. Science is so powerful exactly because it excludes that sort of theory. That's what falsifiability is all about. It does not mean being able to dream up a scenario where you stumble across evidence that changes your mind.

Good post Ziggy, and welcome. You make some good points, and you expanded on some of the points I made.

Of course we could falsify evolution by finding evidence that mutations can not be accumulated or that the fossil record shows no change.  We can observe numerous instances of  evolution that have occurred within the last few hundred years.

A good example is that of industrial melanism, where animals living in close proximity to Industrial processes develop darker pigmentation in response to the changing environment for camouflage purposes. We can observe that this process has taken place. In the absence of such changes, we could conceivably falsify evolution.

I don't particularly like the original title of this thread, so I changed it to something more appropriate. A small minority of religions espouse creationism, especially Young Earth creationism.

It's definitely not a question of Religion versus Science. Plenty of scientists are religious, and plenty of religious people accept evolutionary theory.