Though as an aside, I wonder how long it will take the hardcore Darwinists to realize in greater numbers that a chain of cause and effect, if traced back to its beginning, must eventually have a prime mover, an uncaused cause?
Even if you could somehow prove that the beginning wasn't a massive but happy accident, you would still have zero proof that the "uncaused cause" had anything to do with a personal god. And anyway, why can your "uncaused cause" not need a cause but everything else does? You can't have a logical argument when you're willing to break your own rules to justify your beliefs.
DNA contains lots and lots of highly organized information that doesn't just happen
No one said DNA just happened; they say that small chemical changes from simpler molecules happened over millions or billions of years that led to DNA. Your alternative is that some sort of highly intelligent, powerful being just happened. That does not solve your logic problem.
Too many hardcore Darwin supporters aren't familiar with these ideas
We're not "Darwin supporters," we're people who can look at scientific evidence and form conclusions that don't require magical thinking. Darwin isn't right because he was Darwin, he was merely the most recognizable person involved in elucidating those ideas. Religion argues from authority, not science.
It affects people who aren't there by promoting faith above knowledge. For any random individual, I really don't care if they choose to be ignorant, but apparently ignorance loves company as much as misery. These folks want to impose their beliefs on others via laws and school boards. If they want to curl up in bed at night thinking happy thoughts about their religion I don't care, but I care very much what laws they want to pass and what subjects they want to suppress in our schools. Every time they get an official outlet for their nonsense they get more bold. So it is in the best interest of those who advocate education, freedom and separation of church and state to speak out against them when possible.
Let me start by saying thank you for an intellectually interesting conversation that doesn't involve name calling, finger pointing or ranting. I have a tendency toward snark, don't take it too personally:)
I propose that the conjectured lines of descent would simply be rejuggled, as has happened many times in the past.
Sure. Because we continue to learn new things about relationships between living and dead creatures. But it IS possible that you could find something that simply could not be explained away. We haven't yet. But it could happen. There could be data out there waiting to be found that cannot be accommodated by the theory. You could find that rabbits are genetically almost identical to some new species of lizard and that would blow the theory out of the water.
I really do think I can essentially prove this to be not a route to falsification...
It sounds like your complaint here is that the theory so well describes the world that there is room in it to accommodate previously unknown data without breaking the model. Similar to the anthropic principle which you are not persuaded by... a scientific theory must account for all data and be contradicted by none. The fact that it has been honed over the years with new data without breaking is an indication of how good it is as a scientific theory, not somehow invalidating it by your notion of un-falsifiability.
The model will accept any improbability whatsoever, by definition.
No, not any. Like I said, you could find that horses are more closely related to whales than donkeys and that would be a huge problem. Or that the genes have no similarities at all and that would be a huge problem. You are apparently put off by the notion that small rearrangements in our knowledge about the so called tree of life can be accommodated by the theory without it breaking. That is its strength not its weakness. But, I maintain very strongly, that there are findings that could break it. It IS falsifiable, but it is also flexible and not dependent on us being absolutely correct in what is related to what and how closely. We can learn new things about how closely chipmunks are related to squirrels without breaking the idea that they ARE related and that if you go back far enough you can find the great-great-x grandparent of them both. However, if you went back and somehow figured out they were actually descended from crocodiles rather than primitive rodents you would have falsified the theory.
I conclude from the fact I only find surviving things where things have survived, and don't find surviving things where they couldn't possibly survive, that my model is equally thorough and accurate as evolution. Correct?
Your model is accurate sure, but not thorough. The theory of evolution goes much further than that. It says not only that they are currently living in places they can live but that they had ancestors. And that those ancestors may have had other offshoots which would share genetic/physiologic similarities with other "cousins" as it were. Before the study of genetics existed, you could use the theory of evolution by natural selection to predict that mammals should have things in common with each other, and that the more similar the mammal the more similar the genes should be. This seems obvious now, with our growing understanding of genetics but it wouldn't have been so in the early days of the theory. It was a prediction that would NOT have had to be true if species didn't evolve from more primitive species via mutations in their genetic code. This was a falsifiable prediction stemming from the theory that was borne out once we learned to to read the genetic code.
You can also predict from the theory that creatures that look similar aren't always as closely related as they seem. Because we've said that natural selection is important you would actually predict that differ
Ok, here goes, some testable findings which could falsify the theory of evolution by natural selection. Let's do a quick review on the theory itself, shall we? That species change over time, evolving and differentiating from common ancestors (due to natural selection in the most relevant statements). So let's look at just a few of the areas where findings could support or falsify the theory.
1) Genetics
Since we are proposing that all species evolved and differentiated from common ancestors, we should find that those who split off more recently have more genes in common than those who split off further in the past. So an experiment where we compare the genes of horses, donkeys and whales would be a test. If evolution is correct, horses and donkeys share a more recent common ancestor (both being hoofed land mammals etc) and you have to go back quite a ways to find the common ancestor with the whale. So, we should find that horse and donkey DNA has way more in common with each other than with whales. If instead we found that there were no similarities at all between any of the DNA we would have a problem because these are all mammals and share things like placental pregnancy which you'd expect to be reflected in the genes. If they all have identical DNA that'd be a problem. If horses had more in common with whales than donkeys that'd be a problem. So, genetics gives us a good way to test our theory on shared ancestors. If DNA mapping turned up something unexpected - it would have to be explained or it would cause a lot of trouble for the overall theory.
2) Physiology
Since we are proposing natural selection as the filter through which life must pass, we would expect to find organisms that have adaptations to their environment. If we find a tree dwelling species we expect to find something about the critter that makes it suited to that environment. Any or all of prehensile tails, gripping feet, long limbs for grasping branches etc. If we found an animal in an environment where it had no adaptations - a fish out of water let's say - then we'd have some explaining to do.
3) Paleontology
Since we've said organisms evolve from common ancestors, we would expect to see "transitional fossils" showing a progression. Now we know from the rarity of fossilization that we're not going to find a smooth transition for every species ever, but if we never found any that would be a problem. Or if we found say a modern horse fossil preserved from 2 billion years ago. We should expect to see things like we do in whale fossils which show a progression of the nose opening from forward to atop the head as whale evolved for their life at sea. Fossil evidence could be found which seriously compromises the theory.
Any of these areas provide plenty of opportunities to falsify the predictions of the theory of evolution. I still don't understand your statement about it being the same as reproduction. Reproduction if we define it the same as being generating a new being from the DNA of one or more existing ones, simply provides the means through which evolution can occur. Mutations occur because DNA doesn't replicate flawlessly, even in species which have asexual reproduction. From there it's up to you whether you've decided that those mutations can't add up to big changes without help. I think what we see in the world argues against anything resembling a directed evolution with intelligence behind it. But scientifically you can't tell the difference between natural process and a supernatural process that does the same thing.
To address your written complaint though, I think I've provided a several areas of study where the predictions arising from the theory of evolution could be falsified.
The anthropic principle is not nonsense. It makes perfect sense. In any case, there is still ongoing research into the origin of the universe and whether this was the only sort of "rule set" that could have generated a universe etc. I make no claims to know more than the current experimental evidence. But you shouldn't either.
I think the scale of the universe and the time involved are what exceed most people's imagination. It's not like winning the lottery 5 times in a row. It's like playing the lottery billions of times every day and winning 5 times out of all those tries. Not even time existed in the nothingness from which our universe is thought to have sprung. There is no way of knowing how many failed/aborted "big bangs" happened before it was just right to expand into our universe. There is no way of knowing how many puddles of ooze existed on how many planets in countless galaxies across the universe. With so many "lottery tickets" in play, why should it be more than pure chance that there was a winner? In fact with so many puddles on so many planets in so many galaxies, it's hard to imagine there is no other life in the universe.
The theory of evolution by natural selection makes many predictions any one of which could have been found inaccurate therefor casting doubt on the theory or even invalidating it completely. It predicts genetic findings, fossil findings, physiological findings... and each of these has been borne out.
I am genuinely at a loss about what your misunderstanding is with the whole thing. I can only assume that you've decided for other reasons that you want a reason to be able to dismiss it or doubt it or whatever.
Evolution is enabled by reproduction due to the way DNA works. They are not the same thing. If you want to find falsifiability in the theory of evolution then I guess you really don't understand it because there is plenty there that could have been found wrong. We could have found that chimpanzees share almost no genetic code with us rather than something over 99%. We could have found that species around the world that live in similar environments never have similar physiology, but that hasn't happened either. We could have found no transitional fossils and observed no changes even over our own lifetimes in species with fast life cycles.
I really think the the problem is that you want to be able to falsify something that isn't false. There is so much evidence for evolution by natural selection that the only real alternative is that some causal agent is doing things exactly the way natural selection would have. That is about as useful an idea as that we were all created from nothing 5 minutes ago with memories of civilizations implanted in our brains.
Fine tuned planet? Fine tuned solar system? Oh please. That's like the puddle claiming the hole was meant exactly for him because of how well it fits. We could not have evolved into a world that wouldn't support us. And there is no reason to believe there was only one try.
Things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve and human embryos having a stage with tails or vestigial limbs in ancient species of snakes would all be a very strange design if one could create each species independently with an "intelligent design." These things make perfect sense under the theory of evolution however.
Simply deciding to go up the tree higher, or being forced to in order to find more leaves won't change the foot pads of the animal. They could all decide to move up the tree, but those who won the genetic lottery and had feet that enabled them to survive better in the higher branches had more offspring. As the pressure continues to stay higher in the trees, the gene pool gets a higher and higher percentage of lizards that are born better adapted to survive there. The mutation that caused some of them to have feet that happened to work better higher in the trees didn't matter much until the population was forced there by pressure from below. That pressure makes the mutation more than just a neutral variation in the genome.
No, evolution never says you end up with an optimal solution. Every change that happens is the result of totally random mutation. Sometimes that mutation makes the individual more suited to the environment, but never is it claimed that the optimal result has been or will be obtained.
However, in comparison, if you want to posit any kind of being with enough knowledge and power to control the genetics of millions of species, I'd expect something better than what could be explained by totally random mutation.
If your causal figure can't do any better than random mutation can, then what's the point? Why posit a causal figure who doesn't get a result that can't be arrived at without it?
You don't prove the lack of something. You prove the existence of something. If you want to posit a designer when the observed facts don't require one, then it's on you to prove your claim.
Evolution is the change of species over time. This has been observed and really shouldn't be up for questioning. You could try to construct an argument that evolution hasn't been happening due to natural selection but rather due to the hand of your favorite causal figure. That would be hard to disprove but also would not be within the realm of science. There is no necessity for a causal figure. Natural selection applied over countless mutations in countless individuals over billions of years can account for what is observed.
If your worldview requires that you insert a causal figure then so be it. It can't be disproven that your causal figure isn't doing exactly what nature might have done.
But, most folks would say that if you want to posit a super-natural force, you want to be able to claim that it is necessary because what is observed isn't explainable without it.
Evolution happens because genes mutate. How often this happens depends on many things. How any mutation affects the organism also depends on many things. Applying environmental pressure merely serves to highlight the differences in survivability of any given mutation.
For example there is a mutation in a certain Italian population that changes the expression of the HDL molecule. This mutation makes the bearers more resistant to cholesterol related heart disease. Reference: wikipedia. In our current environment of low exercise and heavy eating, it isn't hard to see that this is a positive adaptation. The mutation that leads to people having 6 toes by contrast probably wouldn't be considered good or bad unless the environment changed and everyone with 6 toes was considered defective and removed from the population.
So, no, species don't suddenly change because of pressure. You can't alter how many mutations occur in a generation or how that mutation will affect the survivability of the organism. But you can observe that over many generations (short or long depending on the species), the changes that helped the organism survive its particular environment could lead to it producing more offspring. As each generation possessing this mutation continues to produce more offspring than those of the population who don't have it, the mutation becomes enriched. The heavier the environmental pressure, the more difference the enhanced survivability makes. The more difference, the greater enrichment of the mutation in the population until perhaps it becomes dominant or even complete.
Thus, the species has changed.
Had the mutation never happened, the species could have died out. Or it could have gone on without being that little bit better adapted to its environment. Or some other mutation could have happened with more or less dramatic effect.
All of this is explained in the theory of evolution. If you understand the theory, everything it describes and why, then you'd have no argument. It isn't invalidated by any given species failing to adapt. It isn't invalidated by "bad" mutations or slow change or fast change or no change (for any given genetic line over any given time period). It is well understood that mutations don't always (or even often) happen in a way that enhances survival, especially in a limited time frame (like dinosaurs needing to adapt to changes from a meteoroid impact overnight).
When you understand what is actually claimed and described by the theory of evolution, you'll quit complaining about it not being falsifiable and start accepting that it just isn't false. It could be disproven by any number of things, except none of those things are actually found. It really is just a description of what is found in the world around us. No magic, no extraordinary leaps of faith.
Genes can mutate. Those mutations can be neutral, better or worse for the survival (or sexual attractiveness) of the affected individual. Depending on how environmental pressure changes the breeding success of the individual, the change can die out, thrive, or just become a variation in the genome of the species. Enough of these mutations accumulating over time causes the species to change. THAT is evolution.
Evolution is the change of species over time. We know that species change over time and coined a word to describe that. There is so much evidence for evolution (physiological, genetic, archeological, direct observation, etc.) that the only possible reason to not believe it happens is that at some point you adopted a dogma that requires you to dismiss it. Scientifically it is one of the best proven theories of all time.
It is "falsifiable" in the only scientifically meaningful way in that it is possible to imagine experimental findings that would show that species haven't changed over time. The theory doesn't state that change happens to all species at any particular pace. It simply describes the actual findings from the world around us which is that life has changed over time. It is falsifiable, but isn't false.
The problem with the dogmatic worldview that requires its adherents to dismiss evolution is that it is simply wrong. Evolution does happen, has happened, is happening. The one and only reason to not accept this fact is dogma. All of the stupid "gotchas" creationists spout off are simply advertisements of their own ignorance of both the theory of evolution and the science that supports it.
So, yes, if change happens fast or slow or just because, it is evolution. Because all evolution means is change of species over time. That's the definition. If reproduction occurred over countless generations of all species throughout time and nothing ever changed, then that'd be your falsification.
It is my hope that as more people feel comfortable "coming out" as atheist that we'll manage to form more communities. The difficulty of course is that while people of any certain religion have at least that in common, atheists are a diverse group and getting enough atheists together that share some common interest is difficult. On the other hand, nothing prevents atheists and religious folks from forming communities of sorts around other interests that they share as long as religion can be left out of it.
I ask the same as ebola is spread through bodily fluids but yet medical people where full suit outfits with masks.
Medical people have far more than casual contact with patients. This is not a disconnect in the messaging at all. Medical personnel can expect to come into contact with bodily fluids regularly and must protect themselves accordingly.
I'd say the number of comments on this article proves that it is of interest to geeks. Do you think geeks should be uninterested in the goings on in the world?
The black death appears to still be considered a possibility for how the mutation got enriched in the population. Another possibility is smallpox. And according to what I've read, it's more like 15% European heritage have one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation which provides limited resistance and 1% got two copies and have strong resistance but not complete immunity since some forms of the virus use other attachment points.
Actually, if what I remember is correct, people with that mutation mentioned are unable to get AIDS. Their T-cells lack the receptor that the virus attaches to. This was discovered a while back when certain people never got AIDS despite engaging in all the same risky behavior that caused people around them to get sick in droves. Apparently the mutation was enriched in Europeans because it also provided protection against the plague.
Now that is making a definition of science that satisfies your desire to be able to throw it out the window when talking about certain issues. You not NOT have to replicate everything from the beginning to understand it. Lawrence Krauss did not handwave + bullshit, however you do when you decide to define your deity in a way that doesn't require you to back it up. Actual result compared to expected result covers what I said just fine. You expect the big bang to have produced microwave background radiation and sure enough it's there and measurable. That is expected and actual results. I don't know who gave you the idea that something has to be done from scratch rather than from devising experiments based on hypotheses, but you're wrong and so are they. You've decided to believe it works that way so that you can dismiss all science related to things you'd rather think of as unprovable by science and therefore leaving a nice gap for your god to fit into.
You define god as eternal so you don't have to explain it. You can define whatever you want when you don't have to hold yourself to any standard of proof. I don't understand how anyone can be more comfortable with the idea that a vast powerful consciousness can exist without any explanation at all than that an observable dumb universe can.
No one says the energy of the physical universe has always existed. I could try to paraphrase from memory the Lawrence Krauss lecture but I'd get too much wrong and you'd only think that was proof that the whole theory was wrong. Watch his lecture on how the universe came from nothing and he explains the measurable evidence as well as the mathematical proofs.
Science doesn't require you to repeat the creation of the universe in order to study how it happened. Physicists make hypotheses about how it could have happened and then predictions based on those hypotheses. If the predictions turn out to be true then the hypothesis can't be ruled out. If enough predictions end up being true, then the idea starts to become accepted as fact unless something new is discovered to invalidate or modify it. Watch the lecture to hear about some of those predictions and the experimental evidence that backs them up.
It is a misconception of science that it can't make any progress without replicating everything from scratch. *Something* has to be experimentally verifiable, but it is valid to verify what the current state of the universe should look like given various ideas about how and when it started. For example, the microwave background radiation is predicted by the big bang and is measurable. That in itself doesn't make the big bang an absolute truth, but as the evidence piles on, it does make it more and more likely that something like the big bang is true.
I have a degree in chemistry and I guarantee you that I have quite a good understanding of the scientific method. I wish you did too. Sometimes you have to look past what your dogma tells you the world must be and see what it is.
Money requires relationships. People have to trust that the money will mean something and be usable by them to get other things that they need. It evolved out of the barter system where you had to directly provide the things someone else needed in order to get stuff from them. Members of a society trust that the established currency will work.
So you can name dozens of people who don't live by caring about others. There are what? almost 8 billion people on the planet? I think that argues my point more than yours. If we all broke the rules, it wouldn't work for anyone. There would be no benefit to cheating if everyone drove in the HOV lane, it'd be just as backed up as the rest.
The greedy and corrupt maintain power by giving everyone else just enough to keep them complacent. They are still by far the minority of humanity.
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Though as an aside, I wonder how long it will take the hardcore Darwinists to realize in greater numbers that a chain of cause and effect, if traced back to its beginning, must eventually have a prime mover, an uncaused cause?
Even if you could somehow prove that the beginning wasn't a massive but happy accident, you would still have zero proof that the "uncaused cause" had anything to do with a personal god. And anyway, why can your "uncaused cause" not need a cause but everything else does? You can't have a logical argument when you're willing to break your own rules to justify your beliefs.
DNA contains lots and lots of highly organized information that doesn't just happen
No one said DNA just happened; they say that small chemical changes from simpler molecules happened over millions or billions of years that led to DNA. Your alternative is that some sort of highly intelligent, powerful being just happened. That does not solve your logic problem.
Too many hardcore Darwin supporters aren't familiar with these ideas
We're not "Darwin supporters," we're people who can look at scientific evidence and form conclusions that don't require magical thinking. Darwin isn't right because he was Darwin, he was merely the most recognizable person involved in elucidating those ideas. Religion argues from authority, not science.
It affects people who aren't there by promoting faith above knowledge. For any random individual, I really don't care if they choose to be ignorant, but apparently ignorance loves company as much as misery. These folks want to impose their beliefs on others via laws and school boards. If they want to curl up in bed at night thinking happy thoughts about their religion I don't care, but I care very much what laws they want to pass and what subjects they want to suppress in our schools. Every time they get an official outlet for their nonsense they get more bold. So it is in the best interest of those who advocate education, freedom and separation of church and state to speak out against them when possible.
Many of them couldn't evolve fast enough and simply died. Others became birds.
I propose that the conjectured lines of descent would simply be rejuggled, as has happened many times in the past.
Sure. Because we continue to learn new things about relationships between living and dead creatures. But it IS possible that you could find something that simply could not be explained away. We haven't yet. But it could happen. There could be data out there waiting to be found that cannot be accommodated by the theory. You could find that rabbits are genetically almost identical to some new species of lizard and that would blow the theory out of the water.
I really do think I can essentially prove this to be not a route to falsification...
It sounds like your complaint here is that the theory so well describes the world that there is room in it to accommodate previously unknown data without breaking the model. Similar to the anthropic principle which you are not persuaded by... a scientific theory must account for all data and be contradicted by none. The fact that it has been honed over the years with new data without breaking is an indication of how good it is as a scientific theory, not somehow invalidating it by your notion of un-falsifiability.
The model will accept any improbability whatsoever, by definition.
No, not any. Like I said, you could find that horses are more closely related to whales than donkeys and that would be a huge problem. Or that the genes have no similarities at all and that would be a huge problem. You are apparently put off by the notion that small rearrangements in our knowledge about the so called tree of life can be accommodated by the theory without it breaking. That is its strength not its weakness. But, I maintain very strongly, that there are findings that could break it. It IS falsifiable, but it is also flexible and not dependent on us being absolutely correct in what is related to what and how closely. We can learn new things about how closely chipmunks are related to squirrels without breaking the idea that they ARE related and that if you go back far enough you can find the great-great-x grandparent of them both. However, if you went back and somehow figured out they were actually descended from crocodiles rather than primitive rodents you would have falsified the theory.
I conclude from the fact I only find surviving things where things have survived, and don't find surviving things where they couldn't possibly survive, that my model is equally thorough and accurate as evolution. Correct?
Your model is accurate sure, but not thorough. The theory of evolution goes much further than that. It says not only that they are currently living in places they can live but that they had ancestors. And that those ancestors may have had other offshoots which would share genetic/physiologic similarities with other "cousins" as it were. Before the study of genetics existed, you could use the theory of evolution by natural selection to predict that mammals should have things in common with each other, and that the more similar the mammal the more similar the genes should be. This seems obvious now, with our growing understanding of genetics but it wouldn't have been so in the early days of the theory. It was a prediction that would NOT have had to be true if species didn't evolve from more primitive species via mutations in their genetic code. This was a falsifiable prediction stemming from the theory that was borne out once we learned to to read the genetic code.
You can also predict from the theory that creatures that look similar aren't always as closely related as they seem. Because we've said that natural selection is important you would actually predict that differ
Ok, here goes, some testable findings which could falsify the theory of evolution by natural selection. Let's do a quick review on the theory itself, shall we? That species change over time, evolving and differentiating from common ancestors (due to natural selection in the most relevant statements). So let's look at just a few of the areas where findings could support or falsify the theory.
1) Genetics
Since we are proposing that all species evolved and differentiated from common ancestors, we should find that those who split off more recently have more genes in common than those who split off further in the past. So an experiment where we compare the genes of horses, donkeys and whales would be a test. If evolution is correct, horses and donkeys share a more recent common ancestor (both being hoofed land mammals etc) and you have to go back quite a ways to find the common ancestor with the whale. So, we should find that horse and donkey DNA has way more in common with each other than with whales. If instead we found that there were no similarities at all between any of the DNA we would have a problem because these are all mammals and share things like placental pregnancy which you'd expect to be reflected in the genes. If they all have identical DNA that'd be a problem. If horses had more in common with whales than donkeys that'd be a problem. So, genetics gives us a good way to test our theory on shared ancestors. If DNA mapping turned up something unexpected - it would have to be explained or it would cause a lot of trouble for the overall theory.
2) Physiology
Since we are proposing natural selection as the filter through which life must pass, we would expect to find organisms that have adaptations to their environment. If we find a tree dwelling species we expect to find something about the critter that makes it suited to that environment. Any or all of prehensile tails, gripping feet, long limbs for grasping branches etc. If we found an animal in an environment where it had no adaptations - a fish out of water let's say - then we'd have some explaining to do.
3) Paleontology
Since we've said organisms evolve from common ancestors, we would expect to see "transitional fossils" showing a progression. Now we know from the rarity of fossilization that we're not going to find a smooth transition for every species ever, but if we never found any that would be a problem. Or if we found say a modern horse fossil preserved from 2 billion years ago. We should expect to see things like we do in whale fossils which show a progression of the nose opening from forward to atop the head as whale evolved for their life at sea. Fossil evidence could be found which seriously compromises the theory.
Any of these areas provide plenty of opportunities to falsify the predictions of the theory of evolution. I still don't understand your statement about it being the same as reproduction. Reproduction if we define it the same as being generating a new being from the DNA of one or more existing ones, simply provides the means through which evolution can occur. Mutations occur because DNA doesn't replicate flawlessly, even in species which have asexual reproduction. From there it's up to you whether you've decided that those mutations can't add up to big changes without help. I think what we see in the world argues against anything resembling a directed evolution with intelligence behind it. But scientifically you can't tell the difference between natural process and a supernatural process that does the same thing.
To address your written complaint though, I think I've provided a several areas of study where the predictions arising from the theory of evolution could be falsified.
The anthropic principle is not nonsense. It makes perfect sense. In any case, there is still ongoing research into the origin of the universe and whether this was the only sort of "rule set" that could have generated a universe etc. I make no claims to know more than the current experimental evidence. But you shouldn't either.
I think the scale of the universe and the time involved are what exceed most people's imagination. It's not like winning the lottery 5 times in a row. It's like playing the lottery billions of times every day and winning 5 times out of all those tries. Not even time existed in the nothingness from which our universe is thought to have sprung. There is no way of knowing how many failed/aborted "big bangs" happened before it was just right to expand into our universe. There is no way of knowing how many puddles of ooze existed on how many planets in countless galaxies across the universe. With so many "lottery tickets" in play, why should it be more than pure chance that there was a winner? In fact with so many puddles on so many planets in so many galaxies, it's hard to imagine there is no other life in the universe.
The theory of evolution by natural selection makes many predictions any one of which could have been found inaccurate therefor casting doubt on the theory or even invalidating it completely. It predicts genetic findings, fossil findings, physiological findings... and each of these has been borne out.
I am genuinely at a loss about what your misunderstanding is with the whole thing. I can only assume that you've decided for other reasons that you want a reason to be able to dismiss it or doubt it or whatever.
Evolution is enabled by reproduction due to the way DNA works. They are not the same thing. If you want to find falsifiability in the theory of evolution then I guess you really don't understand it because there is plenty there that could have been found wrong. We could have found that chimpanzees share almost no genetic code with us rather than something over 99%. We could have found that species around the world that live in similar environments never have similar physiology, but that hasn't happened either. We could have found no transitional fossils and observed no changes even over our own lifetimes in species with fast life cycles.
I really think the the problem is that you want to be able to falsify something that isn't false. There is so much evidence for evolution by natural selection that the only real alternative is that some causal agent is doing things exactly the way natural selection would have. That is about as useful an idea as that we were all created from nothing 5 minutes ago with memories of civilizations implanted in our brains.
Fine tuned planet? Fine tuned solar system? Oh please. That's like the puddle claiming the hole was meant exactly for him because of how well it fits. We could not have evolved into a world that wouldn't support us. And there is no reason to believe there was only one try.
Things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve and human embryos having a stage with tails or vestigial limbs in ancient species of snakes would all be a very strange design if one could create each species independently with an "intelligent design." These things make perfect sense under the theory of evolution however.
Simply deciding to go up the tree higher, or being forced to in order to find more leaves won't change the foot pads of the animal. They could all decide to move up the tree, but those who won the genetic lottery and had feet that enabled them to survive better in the higher branches had more offspring. As the pressure continues to stay higher in the trees, the gene pool gets a higher and higher percentage of lizards that are born better adapted to survive there. The mutation that caused some of them to have feet that happened to work better higher in the trees didn't matter much until the population was forced there by pressure from below. That pressure makes the mutation more than just a neutral variation in the genome.
No, evolution never says you end up with an optimal solution. Every change that happens is the result of totally random mutation. Sometimes that mutation makes the individual more suited to the environment, but never is it claimed that the optimal result has been or will be obtained.
However, in comparison, if you want to posit any kind of being with enough knowledge and power to control the genetics of millions of species, I'd expect something better than what could be explained by totally random mutation.
If your causal figure can't do any better than random mutation can, then what's the point? Why posit a causal figure who doesn't get a result that can't be arrived at without it?
You don't prove the lack of something. You prove the existence of something. If you want to posit a designer when the observed facts don't require one, then it's on you to prove your claim.
Evolution is the change of species over time. This has been observed and really shouldn't be up for questioning. You could try to construct an argument that evolution hasn't been happening due to natural selection but rather due to the hand of your favorite causal figure. That would be hard to disprove but also would not be within the realm of science. There is no necessity for a causal figure. Natural selection applied over countless mutations in countless individuals over billions of years can account for what is observed.
If your worldview requires that you insert a causal figure then so be it. It can't be disproven that your causal figure isn't doing exactly what nature might have done.
But, most folks would say that if you want to posit a super-natural force, you want to be able to claim that it is necessary because what is observed isn't explainable without it.
Evolution happens because genes mutate. How often this happens depends on many things. How any mutation affects the organism also depends on many things. Applying environmental pressure merely serves to highlight the differences in survivability of any given mutation.
For example there is a mutation in a certain Italian population that changes the expression of the HDL molecule. This mutation makes the bearers more resistant to cholesterol related heart disease. Reference: wikipedia. In our current environment of low exercise and heavy eating, it isn't hard to see that this is a positive adaptation. The mutation that leads to people having 6 toes by contrast probably wouldn't be considered good or bad unless the environment changed and everyone with 6 toes was considered defective and removed from the population.
So, no, species don't suddenly change because of pressure. You can't alter how many mutations occur in a generation or how that mutation will affect the survivability of the organism. But you can observe that over many generations (short or long depending on the species), the changes that helped the organism survive its particular environment could lead to it producing more offspring. As each generation possessing this mutation continues to produce more offspring than those of the population who don't have it, the mutation becomes enriched. The heavier the environmental pressure, the more difference the enhanced survivability makes. The more difference, the greater enrichment of the mutation in the population until perhaps it becomes dominant or even complete.
Thus, the species has changed.
Had the mutation never happened, the species could have died out. Or it could have gone on without being that little bit better adapted to its environment. Or some other mutation could have happened with more or less dramatic effect.
All of this is explained in the theory of evolution. If you understand the theory, everything it describes and why, then you'd have no argument. It isn't invalidated by any given species failing to adapt. It isn't invalidated by "bad" mutations or slow change or fast change or no change (for any given genetic line over any given time period). It is well understood that mutations don't always (or even often) happen in a way that enhances survival, especially in a limited time frame (like dinosaurs needing to adapt to changes from a meteoroid impact overnight).
When you understand what is actually claimed and described by the theory of evolution, you'll quit complaining about it not being falsifiable and start accepting that it just isn't false. It could be disproven by any number of things, except none of those things are actually found. It really is just a description of what is found in the world around us. No magic, no extraordinary leaps of faith.
Genes can mutate. Those mutations can be neutral, better or worse for the survival (or sexual attractiveness) of the affected individual. Depending on how environmental pressure changes the breeding success of the individual, the change can die out, thrive, or just become a variation in the genome of the species. Enough of these mutations accumulating over time causes the species to change. THAT is evolution.
Evolution is the change of species over time. We know that species change over time and coined a word to describe that. There is so much evidence for evolution (physiological, genetic, archeological, direct observation, etc.) that the only possible reason to not believe it happens is that at some point you adopted a dogma that requires you to dismiss it. Scientifically it is one of the best proven theories of all time.
It is "falsifiable" in the only scientifically meaningful way in that it is possible to imagine experimental findings that would show that species haven't changed over time. The theory doesn't state that change happens to all species at any particular pace. It simply describes the actual findings from the world around us which is that life has changed over time. It is falsifiable, but isn't false.
The problem with the dogmatic worldview that requires its adherents to dismiss evolution is that it is simply wrong. Evolution does happen, has happened, is happening. The one and only reason to not accept this fact is dogma. All of the stupid "gotchas" creationists spout off are simply advertisements of their own ignorance of both the theory of evolution and the science that supports it.
So, yes, if change happens fast or slow or just because, it is evolution. Because all evolution means is change of species over time. That's the definition. If reproduction occurred over countless generations of all species throughout time and nothing ever changed, then that'd be your falsification.
I think they mean exactly what the grandparent thinks they mean and they just worded it to fool people who aren't thinking critically.
True enough I suppose. "Communities" are now internet forums and Facebook, sadly. Maybe I should take up laughing yoga :)
It is my hope that as more people feel comfortable "coming out" as atheist that we'll manage to form more communities. The difficulty of course is that while people of any certain religion have at least that in common, atheists are a diverse group and getting enough atheists together that share some common interest is difficult. On the other hand, nothing prevents atheists and religious folks from forming communities of sorts around other interests that they share as long as religion can be left out of it.
I ask the same as ebola is spread through bodily fluids but yet medical people where full suit outfits with masks.
Medical people have far more than casual contact with patients. This is not a disconnect in the messaging at all. Medical personnel can expect to come into contact with bodily fluids regularly and must protect themselves accordingly.
I'd say the number of comments on this article proves that it is of interest to geeks. Do you think geeks should be uninterested in the goings on in the world?
The black death appears to still be considered a possibility for how the mutation got enriched in the population. Another possibility is smallpox. And according to what I've read, it's more like 15% European heritage have one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation which provides limited resistance and 1% got two copies and have strong resistance but not complete immunity since some forms of the virus use other attachment points.
citation: http://www.nature.com/scitable...
Actually, if what I remember is correct, people with that mutation mentioned are unable to get AIDS. Their T-cells lack the receptor that the virus attaches to. This was discovered a while back when certain people never got AIDS despite engaging in all the same risky behavior that caused people around them to get sick in droves. Apparently the mutation was enriched in Europeans because it also provided protection against the plague.
Now that is making a definition of science that satisfies your desire to be able to throw it out the window when talking about certain issues. You not NOT have to replicate everything from the beginning to understand it. Lawrence Krauss did not handwave + bullshit, however you do when you decide to define your deity in a way that doesn't require you to back it up. Actual result compared to expected result covers what I said just fine. You expect the big bang to have produced microwave background radiation and sure enough it's there and measurable. That is expected and actual results. I don't know who gave you the idea that something has to be done from scratch rather than from devising experiments based on hypotheses, but you're wrong and so are they. You've decided to believe it works that way so that you can dismiss all science related to things you'd rather think of as unprovable by science and therefore leaving a nice gap for your god to fit into.
You are deliberately avoiding my point.
You define god as eternal so you don't have to explain it. You can define whatever you want when you don't have to hold yourself to any standard of proof. I don't understand how anyone can be more comfortable with the idea that a vast powerful consciousness can exist without any explanation at all than that an observable dumb universe can.
No one says the energy of the physical universe has always existed. I could try to paraphrase from memory the Lawrence Krauss lecture but I'd get too much wrong and you'd only think that was proof that the whole theory was wrong. Watch his lecture on how the universe came from nothing and he explains the measurable evidence as well as the mathematical proofs.
Science doesn't require you to repeat the creation of the universe in order to study how it happened. Physicists make hypotheses about how it could have happened and then predictions based on those hypotheses. If the predictions turn out to be true then the hypothesis can't be ruled out. If enough predictions end up being true, then the idea starts to become accepted as fact unless something new is discovered to invalidate or modify it. Watch the lecture to hear about some of those predictions and the experimental evidence that backs them up.
It is a misconception of science that it can't make any progress without replicating everything from scratch. *Something* has to be experimentally verifiable, but it is valid to verify what the current state of the universe should look like given various ideas about how and when it started. For example, the microwave background radiation is predicted by the big bang and is measurable. That in itself doesn't make the big bang an absolute truth, but as the evidence piles on, it does make it more and more likely that something like the big bang is true.
I have a degree in chemistry and I guarantee you that I have quite a good understanding of the scientific method. I wish you did too. Sometimes you have to look past what your dogma tells you the world must be and see what it is.
Money requires relationships. People have to trust that the money will mean something and be usable by them to get other things that they need. It evolved out of the barter system where you had to directly provide the things someone else needed in order to get stuff from them. Members of a society trust that the established currency will work.
So you can name dozens of people who don't live by caring about others. There are what? almost 8 billion people on the planet? I think that argues my point more than yours. If we all broke the rules, it wouldn't work for anyone. There would be no benefit to cheating if everyone drove in the HOV lane, it'd be just as backed up as the rest.
The greedy and corrupt maintain power by giving everyone else just enough to keep them complacent. They are still by far the minority of humanity.