I’m having a (friendly!) debate with a pal over this. He says the theory was not scientific, as it made no testable nor falsifiable predictions. He acknowledges that it is a fairly good (if naive) explanation of the process of combustion, but he says that the definitions of the terms – phlogiston is what is consumed in combustion; whatever is not consumed is not phlogiston – were circular, and thus not useful or functional in a scientific sense.
My opinion is that it was scientific, and did make specific falsifiable predictions – which is exactly why it was falsified.
(It wasn’t until people could burn fuel in sealed chambers, and weigh all of the combustion products, with very fine precision, before they realized that the process added weight to the fuel, rather than reduced it. Phlogiston wasn’t falsified, because it is very hard to “weigh smoke.”)
So…am I right? Or is my pal right? Or is it “more complex than that?” I thought about asking this in General Questions, since I think there is a yes/no answer, but I thought it belonged here, instead, because it gets a little messy, involving the definition of science, and some meta-issues about theories, etc.
I’d say the fact that it was, ultimately, testable renders it definitely scientific ex post facto, but I also agree with you that it was also scientific at heart - remembering that the strict falsificationist view of scientific method is
a) not the only one even today
and
b) wasn’t current at the time.
Yes, the phlogiston model was a fairly coherent description of the way something was thought to be, which had consistent properties that should have been, and were, testable.
So it was scientific, although perhaps not deliberately. We shouldn’t conflate ‘scientific’ with ‘valid’, however (people do).
Scientific? Yes. And a pretty good first approximation, given the limits of observation at the time.
“Scientific” does not automatically mean “correct” but it does mean “testable.” The specific tests might not be physically possible at the time, but that does not make the theory any less scientific.
Well, at least emotionally, I feel gratified, as the responses to date echo my own beliefs on the matter. The Phlogiston theory was scientific, as we understand the term today. It was also wrong…but that’s okay! Quite a few advances in human knowledge have come from people being wrong!
I’m very fond of what Brecht said in his Life of Galileo: “The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” Science advances by saying, “Oops! Door number one led to a contradiction. Hurray! We now know that the truth is not to be found behind it!”
MrDibble: you’re right, the definition of science was different in the 17th century than it is today, but my friend was using today’s definition. It isn’t exactly fair; it’s like asking if Aristotle was a “racist.” By today’s definition, yes, but civilization was very, very different in those times…
I see it as the way science should work. Somebody comes up with an idea that fits the available data or at least most of it. We go on using the theory. Eventually more data becomes available and we discard it because it doesn’t fit the data.
Testable? Not all our knowledge is testable. I am not completely convinced about evolution, but will not throw it out for lack of testability. How about isolating some colonies of fruit flies and seeing if we eventually get populations no longer able to interbreed? Failing to wouldn’t disprove it, but success would be damaging to inteligent design.
Phlogiston had its own section in my school chemistry textbook for precisely this reason - not because it had any merit as an idea, but it’s a textbook(ha!) example of how to do science.
This has been done, and evidence of speciation has been found in drosophila melanogaster originally of common gene pool subject to isolated environments. I’m sure other species of short-lived creatures have been studied as well.
In order to be convinced, I invite you to actually study evolutionary biology - the sheer amount of data already collected is overwhelming. It happens; it’s the details that we are still working on, but not knowing them today doesn’t mean they cannot be known tomorrow, just as we went from figuring out how to start a fire in the first place to explaining it with phlogiston to fully understanding combustion. Someone saying they aren’t convinced evolution happens is a little like saying they aren’t convinced fire exists.
Even before Darwin, the matter was pretty much clear that “kinds” of animals turned into other “kinds.” Lamarck’s explanation wasn’t stupid or foolish, only comparable to Phlogiston in being descriptive but, ultimately, untrue.
(My cousin saw the illustration of a Kzinti skeleton in a science fiction book, and exploded, “That’s evolution! I don’t believe in that!” The concept entirely eluded her. She also is convinced, to this day – X-Rays notwithstanding – that women have only eleven ribs on the left side.)
But even by today’s standards, strict Popperian Falsification is only *one *Scientific Method. It’s not the whole of the art, as it were. Or, in other words, Feyerabendwas right
But evolution is both easily testable and easily falsifiable.
Subject a population to a stressor that kills only organisms with a specific trait. A simple way to do this would be to kill the individuals of a certain colour, for example
If evolution is correct we would expect the number of individuals with that trait over subsequent generations, and we would expect an decrease in the frequency of genes associated with that trait.
Evolution tested and open to falsification in one simple experiment.
For a variation on that, my brother for years had somehow also gotten the impression that women had one less pair of ribs, although he didn’t think that “proved” the Bible was true (he’s an atheist as well). He just assumed that was the basis of the ribs-and-Eve myth.
The fact that Lamark and a few others believed this did not mean that it was “perfectly clear” in the sense that most knowledgeable and open minded biologists believed that one species could change into another. They did not. Heck, even Darwin did not believe it until the implications of what he had seen in the Galapagos finally hit him, at which point he embarked on a intensive search for a viable account of how such a thing could possibly happen.
Well, yes, but Lamarck’s theory does not actually even attempt to explain the phenomenon that principally concerned Darwin. Lamarck does not provide an explanation of speciation. He still thought that each species was separately created. He just thought each began as a primitive form of life, and over time evolved into something more complex. (Currently existing primitive or simple species, he believed, were created relatively recently.)
I am puzzled as to why your cousin should have thought that an illustration of a Kzinti skeleton would imply evolution. (It’s been a long time, but IIRC, the Kzinti were intelligent, tiger-like aliens.) Even the Creation Museum shows models of dinosaurs; I don’t know if they have dinosaur skeletons, but I can’t see why they wouldn’t.
And, the fact that a theory is wrong doesn’t mean it becomes worthless if it has some use as a model.
Example: Newtonian Mechanics is false. Relativity shows that velocities are not purely additive but have strange effects at .99 C. Newtonian Mechanics is, however, a great model that gives answers that are well within the tolerance of building cars or rifles. I think that accepted error in current manufacturing is greater than the error introduced by using Newtonian Mechanics (a simpler model) rather than building that car using Relativity.
Because Kziniti don’t exist, so the only way they could exist is through evolution, which is, duh, bad. And creationists know there were dinosaurs because we find their skeletons. They all died in the flood though. You have to remember that ‘creation science’ is very complicated.
ETA:** Chronos**, it’s ‘creation science’. You forgot to apply the Principle of Female Inferiority
Dinosaurs were also all vegetarian before the Fall of Man. I recall coming upon a creationist site with an earnest discussion as to how T-Rexes survived on vegetation with those teeth.
