On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The key mechanism of the W&L theory is defined in a way to make it very >> hard or impossible to verify. > > > As I said, I cannot judge the situation, but if that is the case, it is not > falsifiable and therefore not a valid theory. It also sounds like what I > call a "perverse theory" meaning one that does not help. Such theories -- or > hypotheses -- do not advance our knowledge, even when they are true. That > sounds contradictory, so let me illustrate it with a well known example: > > Because it is difficult to imagine how life might have arisen on earth, it > has been suggested that life did not originate here, but that it was brought > here by intelligent aliens in spaceships, from another star. > > The problem with this is that it does not solve the problem. It only moves > the problem to another planet. Life had to originate somewhere by natural > processes. Any life brought here by aliens would presumably be similar to > their own biology, which must have arisen naturally somewhere, at some point > in the past. Even if we found irrefutable proof that this event occurred -- > such a fossilized spaceship -- we would still be faced with the original > question: How does life originate in nature? > > Perverse theories upset people because instead of shedding light on the > subject, they confuse the issue. > > - Jed >
Jed, evidence of fossilized spaceship would be profound. Of course it wouldn't solve the problem of how life originates, but it would radically change the direction of the research! The meta problem of how best to solve a given problem is almost as important as a the given problem. Harry
