I don’t need perfect rigidity, just realistic.
I have asked this before, but explain how you will accelerate the contents on the box in space, the same as on earth. You seem to be going back and forth from saying that you are applying different acceleration rates to different things and that just the frame of reference does that. Show me the math, show me a model that would do that. Describe a system that would work this way.
From what I have read by those who ought to know what they’re talking about, yes.
But that leaves me wondering about the following question: How would we know the difference between something that natural selection couldn’t have come up with, and something that we just can’t figure out yet how it could have come up with?
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s any way to know.
In all honestly, they don’t care. The point is not to actually better understand the universe, but to wedge religion into schools and government.
The position is basically, if we don’t fully understand something, right this minute, it must have been God.
They may not, but I do. Isn’t it a fair question?
It is, and that is why science is not a closed system. Newton could not come with a reason that things fell down, so he did what he could and created a set of rules describing how they fall. Einstein came up with a theory that explains some cases Newton’s rules didn’t and the search for the final answer goes on. Science looks for answers that serve a purpose right now, but leaves the door wide open for better answers later.
Random comment on other comments:
If one hand is empty and the other hand is full, the fullness of one hand (evolution) does not prove the emptiness of the other (God.) One thing I’m seeing in this thread is the argument that the flaws in evolution prove the existence of God, but that just doesn’t work. Outside of the perceived gaps in evolution, is there any proof of god?
Well, my answer to this question would be to frame it another way. The easiest way to show that something didn’t develop through natural selection is to determine how it did develop, and prove that.
I don’t think we can answer the question “are there things that couldn’t have developed through Natural Selection”–because we have to prove a negative–that there’s no possible way natural selection could ever develop a certain structure.
On the other hand, it’s easy to show that something didn’t develop through natural selection–by showing how it did develop. For example, there is reliable evidence that demonstrates that the development from Musa balbisiana - Wikipedia to Banana - Wikipedia had nothing to do with natural selection–it was domesticated by people–very much artificial selection.
Could a Banana have ever been naturally selected from its original form into its present state? Who knows? Does that change the fact that we know how the domestication took place, and it wasn’t natural selection? Nope.
This is classic science–how do you disprove theory X? You develop better theory Y, which explains the experimental results/physical evidence in a way theory X cannot. The key is not any evidence against X–it’s the evidence for Y.
Technically, Einstein has “disproved” Newton’s second law in its basic form (F=MA), through his theory of special relativity–since F=MA does not accurately predict the behavior of a body travelling close to the speed of light, and Special Relativity does, using the formula F=dp/dt (where p is momentum calculated by a formula incorporating invariant mass–and you have to expand out the differential for it to be useful) (the SR formula can be seen as a more complex way of expressing Newton’s Second Law–so I 'm hesitant to say it’s really “disproven”–rather that the formula Newton gave us is not accurate in certain situations).
To tie it back to your question–F=MA is easier to evaluate than natural selection is, because you can do an experiment in minutes, not years or centuries. However, the real discovery wasn’t that Einstein postulated a situation in which Newton’s second law, in its traditional formulation, didn’t give accurate results–that, on its own, doesn’t answer the question of whether Einstein corrected Newton, or showed that a completely different framework was correct. What proves a different framework is correct is developing that framework, and finding the evidence that the NEW theory is correct. Finding things theory A can’t explain shows it is incomplete–and nothing more (especially, it says little about its validity in explaining things theory A can predict). What does rebut theory A is the evidence that Theory B is correct.
This happened later, with general relativity, which brought special relativity and Newton’s law of gravitation into one framework. The important thing to note is that astronomers had known since at least the nineteenth century that Newton’s law of gravity didn’t fully explain all their observations. The key to setting it aside was not that–but it was the discovery of something that did explain both the things newton’s equations could, and the things they could not.
… That got a lot longer than I thought, for what was a simple point–that it does make sense to ask what one theory can’t explain–but that figuring out whether the correct answer is a refinement of the previous theory or a whole new one, (which is the question you’re asking)–doesn’t get answered by looking at the gaps, whether they’re big or small–(for example, F=MA is correct outside of very extreme situations)–it has to do with the evidence in support of the new theory.
So I think your question is fair , but not particularly useful (since no theory explains everything–as I point out, there are things the theory of gravity can’t predict)—the better question is whether there is support for the proposed alternative theory that does explain the things the previous theory cannot.
I forgot about angular momentum.
If it involves the spin of the earth, than that doesn’t count.
What test could you do that could tell the difference from say, the "gravity’ felt from being in a spaceship under acceleration, and say, standing a fixed distance from a mass large enough to impart the same force?
A gravity field follows the inverse square law. If you measured the acceleration at the top and bottom of the elevator in a gravity field you get a lower result at the top than the bottom. Under constant acceleration in space they would be the same.
I ask again: please take the hijack about acceleration to another thread. Thanks.
You would ascertain the limits of what natural selection could develop and then show something that had developed outside of those limits. For example, if a magician puts a rabbit inside a box, closes it, waves a wand over it, and then opens the box to reveal a pigeon, we can assert with some certainty that the pigeon did not develop from the rabbit via natural selection, due to the currently-understood limits of what natural selection can do.
What distinguishes this from a “god of the gaps” argument is twofold - in the evolution debates the precise limits of evolution are not currently understood by the person making the argument, and the ‘gaps’ being argued for are not clearly outside the limits of what persons who understand evolution believe it can do. So what you get is one person saying “It’s impossible due to this problem”, and the people who actually know about the theory blowing them off because they disagree that the proposed problem is really a problem. There are theoretically possible situations that could arise that all would agree evolution cannot explain - but the rather sparse nature of the fossil record makes it unlikely that such scenarios would be found if they haven’t already.
Well, yes. But to take that a little further–after the magician did his trick, we’d want to know if the pigeon developed from the rabbit at all, or (perish the thought) if the pigeon was in a hidden compartment in the box. To do that is absolutely an application of evolutionary theory–to use, for example, DNA testing, to demonstrate that that the pigeon and the rabbit were unrelated as we now understand how genes are transferred.
What’s the easiest way to figure out that the rabbit turned into the pigeon by (“actual,” not just trickery) magic? Understand how magic works–and show that that was what caused the change.
The problem with your proposal is the first part is nearly impossible–beyond the problem that most people debating the issue don’t fully comprehend evolution, defining what natural selection or evolution can do in the way you would need to is (at least now) practically impossible.
For one thing, there is an ongoing, and vibrant scientific debate about evolutionary biology–not challenges to the theory of evolution, but questions of what evolved from what, or experiments trying to understand it better, and refining our understanding of zoology and evolutionary biology.
In other words, scientists are still discovering more and more about how evolution has functioned–which is why Thudlow boink asked his question–to figure out if we can know what evolution can’t do. There certainly are answers to that–but we may not now know what they are today.
This is why I would argue that the question one must answer to show that some change was beyond the realm of natural selection, is how that change did happen, if not natural selection–not to try to prove the negative.
There would not be much drive to find an alternative to natural selection until we find an unexplained case that seems to disagree with that theory. If every known case is perfectly explained by a theory, it does not “prove” the theory, but it means the theory is as useful as can be right now.
If we start finding fully developed, complex creatures with no genetic relation to any creature previously discovered, we either need to find new data or adapt the theory. Without that, all we are doing is filling in gaps and refining details.
It doesn’t.
There were follow-up posts that described the test I had in mind. If the hypothetical elevator car was on Earth and, say, a thousand miles wide, an object dropped at one end will not follow a parallel path to an object dropped at the other, simply because each falls toward the center of gravity of the Earth itself. If the car is instead accelerating through space, the paths will indeed be parallel.
The only difference between this and an elevator car of normal dimensions is the sensitivity of the equipment necessary to detect this difference.