On 26/01/2009, at 7:38 AM, [email protected] wrote: > >> Empirical observations of patterns occurring within a limited scope >> can >> shed no light on the state of things outside that scope. > > If you really believe that, then you would throw most of evolutionary > theory out, beause we've only been making good scientific > measurements over > a very limited scope of time, say the last 150-200 years.
Given that it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin this year, and that built on a couple of decades of research by Darwin... Most of evolutionary theory was built in the last 100 years, once the mechanism of heredity was worked out and the statistical tools were developed to actually test Darwin's ideas. You would not throw out "most of evolutionary theory" at all, by your criterion. Really, it's amazing how much of what most people think they know about biological science, particularly evolutionary biology, is completely wrong. Fossil record, for example. It's nice that the fossil record is there and is so detailed, but it's entirely superfluous to evolutionary theory. There are nice overlaps, but evolutionary theory explains the fossil record, not the other way round. (Most of the great discoveries of dinosaurs, marine reptiles etc were in the late 1800s, again after the publication of Origin). If we had no fossil record at all, it would have made virtually no difference to the development of evolutionary theory, and yet evolution by natural selection is one of the best supported scientific theories - if it was going to have serious weaknesses it would have failed long before now. Evolution underpins the whole of biology. Nothing makes sense without it, and every single time we ask "what would this looks like if evolution were true", that's what we find. And Natural Selection is the one of the most elegant ideas in science, right up there with elliptical orbits and laws of motion. But despite that, it's viewed as a soft science, or worse, a trivially easy one. Being able to recite the soundbyte "survival of the fittest" and mumble something about variation of hereditary characters doesn't mean that one understands the implications. That's why it's a degree level subject, it's why I spent 4 years doing very little else (British degrees being much more focused than US ones, f'rex). One simply can't get to the same level of understanding if you're not living and breathing it. This is why I tend to stay out of physics discussions, 'cause I know how little I know, and reading A Brief History Of Time doesn't make me an expert. Charlie. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
