I agree, except that I would say they are never proved true, no matter for how much time. But they may be proved false. In fact, an hypothesis is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable.
I think my meaning would have been clearer if I had written “Physical theories are not ‘proved for all time’ but are always subject to modification or discarding as new data come in.”
Okay. I can agree with that.
Idonno. I guess I just like the simplicity and elegence of the “evolution” theory. No mumbo-jumbo. No supernatural. The universe works the way it does because that’s the only way it could work. Everything is the results of millions or billions of years of natural selection. Stuff that works is kept. Stuff that doesn’t is discarded. What could be a more “intelligent” designer than millions or billions of itterations of natural selection?
However, so far Abiogenesis is not even a Theory is still a hypothesis, as the various tests designed for it have ultimately failed. Thus although Abiogenesis is a scientific idea, it has not been shown to be any more right than ID.
This is why some seintists are saying “sure, I guess ID could be possible, since Abiogenesis doesn’t seen to be provable” or even “I am going to accept ID for the ‘spark of life’ until they can prove Abiogenesis”. These sorts of statements, both of which I could agree with- have been taken out of context by the Anti-evolution crackpots to show that more & more mainstream scientists are ‘abandoning Darwinism and accepting God". Nothing of the sort. Evolution is now a tested, testable, proven & accepted part of Science. Even if God did create the "first spark’ it wouldn’t disprove Evolution or “Darwinism” in the slightest, as Evolution starts with the simplist form of life, which them evoloves. Evolution does not tell us, or even help tell us- how the spark of life got there in the first place. It just says how that first spark moved on to become the Great Blue whale.
It’s not that I “beleive” in ID, it’s just that I know that so far Abiogenesis has failed as a scientific Theory, and thus I am willing to entertain some other ideas.
Okay, but…
That all sounds like mumbo-jumbo.
The problem with that (from the point of view of many) is that it is counterintuitive; when we look at a complex tool, we recognize that it took a lot of effort and deliberate thought to make it. The idea that nature (with a lower case “n”) could carve away at a collection of proteins until it resembles, say, Kathy Ireland, seems inconceiveable.
This is the same sort of reasoning that causes people to belive that “The President” (or Al Greenspan, or whomever) should “fix” the economy, as if it is a nuclear reactor with control rods and coolant plumbing. Game theory and statistics are not part of our inate instinctual hardcoding.
Stranger
Some of it makes some sense.
The analogy between learning and evolution is strong. True, “Stuff that works is kept. Stuff that doesn’t is discarded” implies a keeper or discarder, where there may be no such. Better to say what works, stays, what doesn’t, disappears. But then, it can be argued that the individual mind is an illusion, as well. You may find my comments mumbo-jumbo as well.
For the record, your second box is not my words.
Well which seems more likely? Some magical being no one can see, hear, feel, or even comprehend said “hey! Lets make some animals!” OR a bunch of proteins just happened to form to create life?
Sure, it may be a one in a trillion chance of the second one, but if you have trillions of molecules of protein on billions of planets over billions of years it doesn’t seem that implausible.
False dilemma. Besides, you really can’t comprehend life, or even define it for that matter.
It isn’t implausable anyway. There is nothing physically preventing you from walking through a wall. It’s all just a matter of probability. Literally.
Unfortunately, such an explaination doesn’t feed into the natural human desire to attiribute all actions to some deliberate cause. It’s understandable–to acknowledge otherwise leads to an erosion of justice, a deliberate and protective cause and effect–but it causes us to base our intuitive assements upon our immediate experience, and that experience tells us that proteins don’t just bunch together and spontaneously make a dog or an elephant.
Of course, evolution doesn’t postulate an elephant directly from a pool of primoral goo; it starts from self-replicating protolife (which arose by some abiogenetic event unknown and probably unknowable in its specifics), and as the replicating proteins became more and more successful (due to their increasing complexity and adaptibility) came to be what we consider alive; an organism that can consume resources, produce energy, and beget like offspring, in absence of any other controlling entity. From there, it expands outward (not “upward”–nods to Darwin’s Finch for not letting that misstatement pass unnoted in a recent thread) to simple bacteria, eukaryotes, clams, dinosaurs, Milton Burle, and (most dubiously) toy dogs, all of which populate the Earth and expand and compete with each other in their own way.
But we don’t see this process take place; evolution on the scale of multicellular organisms occurs at a generational pace, and most of us barely have the patience for a half-hour sitcom. But you can see evolution occur, and validate the mechanisms of natural selection (or, as Charles Darwin preferred “descent with modification”) by taking a collection of blue-green alge which are optimized to the peak wavelenght of sunlight and watch them evolve under illumination with a different peak frequency in a controlled environment. No manipulative intellect is required for the organisms to undergo modification; by sampling the specimen at given intervals you can see that alge that are best adapted to sunlight start to depopulate, while alge that are a little off (toward the provided peak) grow in number, and as time goes on, alge continue to outside of the distribution of a natural population and start showing characteristic utilization that doesn’t appear in nature. This is “simple” game theory; simple in concept, though, in any more complicated case (as anyone who has studied game theory in detail knows) fiendishly complex to actually calculate.
But it certainly isn’t intuitive, which is why people often place far more emphasis upon anecdotal evidence than statistical analysis. (It doesn’t help that often, the results of a statistical assessment are misrepresented, giving rise to Mark Twain’s famous quote about statisticians. But regardless, the method is valid and if properly applied, offers evidence far more conclusive than the next door neighbor’s sister’s husband’s second cousin’s claim to have been spontaneously healed of cancer by a naturopath.)
Without going though the “truth tables”, most people will make a sub-optimum choice when faced with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and almost everyone, including high IQ MIT graduates and PhDs in physics, gets the Monty Hall problem wrong on first pass. We’re (well, some people) are pretty good at making intuitive assessments in human interactions (i.e. “people skills” like determining someone’s honesty) but not very good at all at applying those same techniques to the physical world, and especially in cases that are outside of normal experience and training.
Natural selection’s claim is based upon a single, simple fundamental mechanism; (beneficial characteristics–phenotypes–which allow an organism to more efficiently use resources, fight off competition, and adapt to changes in environment cause an organism to reproduce more prolifically than organisms less able to do the above. It is as fundamental–and falsifiable–as the claim that gravity makes masses attract each other, and we’ve yet to see a persuasive case where this is contradicted.
Intelligent Design’s biggest bugaboo is the fact that, indeed, many organisms aren’t very intelligently designed; they may be efficient in their individual characteristics given their lineage, but taken as a gestalt many organisms are really rather poorly laid out. The human animal, for instance, has any number of less than optimal characteristics that work well enough to do the job (and do it better than our ancestors) but not how you’d put things together if you were an omnipotent designer.
Stranger
That is [thread=299054]not true[/thread].
Stranger
You’re right in the same way that you’d be right if you said the sun doesn’t rise, but the earth rotates. It isn’t really walking through a wall, but rather suddenly finding yourself on the other side of a wall. Same same.
If you are thinking of the electron tunneling phenomenon, it doesn’t work for huge numbers of coupled atoms.
It hurts my brain only slightly less than trying to figure how the thingy (was it a singularity?) that blew up during the big band and resulting in the creation of the universe. I think contemplating the nature of the pre-universe will cause headaches period.
The more I learn the more I find myself asking, “and how the fuck was that created?” And it just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
Anyway you slice it everyone has to admit the creation of the universe, and the subsequent creation of life on earth, is something that is both strange and amazing. And it gets even more so when you realize the conditions needed to create life on the level of complexity that exist today.
Life the universe and everything as we know it is very improbable thing to have happened.
I can’t help but to fell grateful…even if there is nothing listening.
But it might. The problem with dogmatic quantum physics is that when you close one door, two others open.
From my reading of your cite, the paper deals with individual atoms which are quantum entities, not with a system of coupled atoms bound up in molecules which are assembled into visible, physical things. It is incontestable that an electron can tunnel from me to elsewhere and maybe a whole atom. But a human is not a quantum entity.
A human isn’t a cell either, but he can die of cancer. What is to prevent all the quanta that comprise you from individually tunneling spontaneously?
Inconceivably long odds?