Yes, but it doesn’t make that claim. That claim would be contingent. That’s why for both ID and NS, any specific claim can be tested.
What’s “metaphysical” about natural selection? What’s not falsifiable about it?
Natural selection can be proven to exist, irreducible complexity cannot.
I agree completely with John Mace’s OP. Bush is an uneducated, ignorant clod when it comes to evolution, but we already knew that and don’t expect anything better. For a newspaper article to get so many things wrong and to editorialize the story by calling abiogenesis a “creation” event is journalistically inexcusable.
NS has been confirmed as a genuine phenomenon, IC has not.
Evolution is not technically dependant on Natural Selection anyway. Any sorting mechanism will do. NS is just the most common one.
Simple answer really…
Since the churches apparantly want equal time in publicly funded science classes, then revoke their tax exempt status.
Then, all in the name of fairness of course, all Sunday School time at the christian churches is to be shared with seminars of guest scientists and researchers discussing evolution, biology, chemistry, astronomy, health (presented by Planned Parenthood staffers), philosophy and logic.
All in the interest of fairness for all points of view of course.
OK, anyone who wants to is welcome to eradicate my ignorance here. What, if anything, is there to a theory of ‘intelligent design’ that takes more than about 30 seconds to explain to even the most dense among us? What useful research, if any, could be performed to demonstrate intelligent design works as a concept? What is the nature of any possible scientific advance, of any type, that could occur as a result of the study of intelligent design?
I’m trying to figure out how anyone could fill out more than, say, a few minutes of classroom time discussing intelligent design as a scientific subject, and I’m just not seeing it.
Now, as a philosophical topic, I could see some interest in intelligent design, but since the whole subject seems to boil own to ‘God made life, and God is unknowable, so life is unknowable’, even there it seems a bit of a dead end. So what am I missing?
Not metaphysical in the sense of “not physical”, but metaphysical in the sense of an existential theory — a noncontigent modality.
Let me give you an example. Suppose I make the claim, “It is possible that it is raining outside.” In order to determine whether my claim is falsifiable, you first have to determine whether I mean an epistemic possibility or a metaphysical possibility. In other words, do I mean “For all I know, it could be raining outside.”? Or do I mean, “It is possible, given that rain exists, for it to rain outside.”? The latter is a metaphysical claim, and is not testable. The former is an epistemic claim, and is testable — e.g., look out the window.
I already explained that. There is no way to show that all other mechanisms are impossible. Now, if you want to claim that natural selection is one possible mechanism of evolution, then we can test that by observing the fossil record and comparing it to what we know of the geological and ecological systems in which the fossils are found. But the same is true of any contingent, epistemic claim for ID.
That’s not just false; it’s ridiculous.
And, for the record, falsified. See, for example, this link.
Regarding the OP, if Bush would just shut up and listen to his own science advisor, he’d look a lot less stupid:
But ID could be one too. It is also possible that evolution works by Greek gods slinging evolution particles at each other through a hidden dimension.
Exactly. Good example.
Let me put it another way. We can prove that Natural Selection has happened. We cannot prove that IC has happened. IC is a pure hypothetical with nothing observable to support it and nothing observable to even necessitate it as a hypothesis.
What ID proponents really want is for science teachers to have to spend a significant amount of classroom time listing off “Things the Theory of Evolution Has Not Explained,” not in the context of things that haven’t been explained yet, but rather things which supposedly cannot be explained. They simply want to undermine students’ confidence in the the Theory of Evolution.
If they could, they’d be trying to force science teachers to teach Young Earth Creationism, but the courts have ruled that out because YEC is so blatantly unscientific. So they’ve come up with something they think is more plausibly scientific, but still undermines Darwinism.
As Orbifold has just pointed out, that is not the case. ID predicts evolutionary dead-ends. As these alleged dead-ends are put forth, they may be examined. And in fact, they have.
Actually, if that were all they were trying to do, I wouldn’t oppose it. I think it’s an important part of teaching science to confront candidly the subjects that science hasn’t successfully explained. I wouldn’t want such failures glossed over for fear of “undermining confidence” in the science.
The trouble is that ID’ers want not just to talk about the imperfections in evolutionary theory, but to tack onto it an alleged alternative explanation that has no scientific support.
I don’t think you’re getting me. I’m not saying invidual claims for Irreducible Complexity aren’t falsifiable, I’m just saying that no genuine instance of it has ever been shown to exist. There are no authentic examples of IC known to science. There ARE authentic examples of NS.
Not true. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution via the mechanism of Natural Selection was named in response to is experiences in conversations with breeders and farmers. He used the visible variations possible with Artificial Selection as his jumping off point to show that if humans could do so much in so many years, imagine what nature could do in millions or billions of years.
Besides, natural selection is a mechanism that tests the variations in allele frequency, caused by random mutations, to see which are fitter. It doesn’t cause the variations, it simply determines which variation survives long enough to propagate through a population.
No, Lib, that’s string theory. Sheesh.
Basically, the “theory” is that at least some features of biotic systems are so complex that random mutation, genetic drift, and natural selection (the truncated description of the Neo-Darwinian playing field) are insufficient to explain the fact they exist. Such “irreducible complexity” is evidence of deliberate design, attributed to some unnamed intelligence (which could include God, aliens, faeries, whatever).
Part of the problem is that ID makes really no positive claims and hence supplies no predictable outcomes. It exists, presently, only to negate the possibility that Neo-Darwinian Evolution is sufficient for whatever it happens to be that the ID “theorists” focus their attention on. When it comes to the origins of life, ID isn’t even addressing the claims of Darwinists, since they aren’t directly concerned with the origins of life.
Imagine the statement “The origins of life required a designer, because life cannot have arisen by chance”. Theories don’t just organize and explain what you already know (or think you know). They also supply a framework of principles, informed by the available data, that, in addition to providing a plausible explanation for what is observed, allows one to form reasonable predictive hypotheses about what has not yet been observed, hypotheses that can, in principle, at least, be tested (and hence falsified). ID does nothing of the sort. What does the statement “life required a designer” tell me about phenomena I might observe in the future? What testable hypotheses can I base on that statement? The answers, so far as I know, is nothing and none, respectively. ID, simply put, is not science.
With ID, in its present form, you won’t succeed, because it’s not possible. You could say that if you try hard you might find some things about life (besides the fact that it exists at all, which isn’t really a Darwinian concept) that evolutionists have not (yet) been able to explain using current theory, but that says nothing about ID per se.
As far as I know, you’re not missing anything. The bizarre thing about ID “theorists” is they’re propents of their own demise. Since they say nothing interesting about life beyond what one could assume from a creationist standpoint, they’re completely useless as disciplinarians. As all they can say is “you failed; God did it” (they coyly object to be pinned down as a particular sort of theistic creationist, but that’s just politics, not intelletcual honesty or integrity at work), providing absulutely no description or explanation of how, what one can do with that information except gawk at it, nor what might come next in this creationist framework. They tell us precisely nothing more than a component of society already thinks it knows based on faith, and hence provide science with absolutely nothing of utility to guide its future progress. It’s a complete dead end, potentially to the point that it’s a dead end for science in general, if one wishes to argue God is behind everything, ultimately.
And, regardless of how long it takes to teach a falsehood, falsehoods shouldn’t be taught in the classroom.
Well, of course not, but then IDers aren’t attempting to undermining students’ confidence in science. They have, indeed, attempted to take on the mantle of science themselves, and they are distorting science to attack evolution. The telling point is that they aren’t campaigning for similar examination of faults of other scientific theories. They don’t go around saying “General Relativity is only a theory, and students should be able to decide for themselves whether gravity is a consequence of the warping of spacetime,” or “Quantum mechanics is only a theory, and they shouldn’t teach it as though it were a fact.”
By demanding that criticism of evolution, and only evolution, in the classroom, IDers want to give students the impression that it is a particularly vulnerable or controversial scientific theory.
Sure, teach students about problems with evolution–and QM, GR, the Standard Model . . . Learning how all theories are incomplete and how they are all being tested, revised and improved upon should, I hope, strengthen students’ confidence in the scientific method and put the evolution “controversy” in context.
I suppose it’s worth saying at some point that while Neo-Darwinian Evolution, being concerned with the evolution of living things is, by definition, not a theory of the origins of life, at least some of its basic principles are entirely applicable to that area of scientific speculation and investigation. Even a quick perusal of the RNA World hypothesis reveals that pre-biotic molecules had to mutate and evolve by natural selection to give rise to a repertoire of heritable catalytic functions of ever-increasing complexity, up until one presumably finds the first forms of cellular life. It’s possible (even randomly assembled) polymers of RNA, which has the ability to both store genetic information and catalyze reactions on its own (functions that in cellular life are handled by DNA and, to a great extent, proteins, respectively, in cellular life) provided, if not the ur-pre-biotic system, at least an early intermediate. It’s possible to evolve model systems to test at least the plausibility of this hypothesis in vitro, and natural selection is revealed to be so basic as to act on any system in which mutation and replication can occur, be it living or not.