questfortruth
Well-Known Member
Look up articles in Wikipedia "Y-Chromosomal Adam", "Mitochondrial Eve".
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Is Darwinism still fact after Science 02 Jan 1998: Vol. 279, Issue 5347, pp. 28-29?
- Thread starter questfortruth
- Start date
PruePhillip
Well-Known Member
You might like to read the other comments on my post.
It's all pure science - not my opinion but that of the
scientific literature.
questfortruth
Well-Known Member
There is a historical case about Einstein. After his publication of the logical
debunkment of Sir Newton's absolute space and absolute time, too many scientists
were not accepting his debunkment. Therefore, the unexplainable feeling of
scepticism has severely slowed down the ``train'' of science for as long as
17 years (and the greatest Theory of Relativity has not been renowned by a
Nobel Prize)! Described suffering of Prof. Einstein indicates, that
``scientific scepticism'' is nothing more than a negative emotion. But science could be
conducted in positive way rather than negative. How exactly? If the mind of the reader
would see that the logic of the paper seems not to be violated, the mind would trust this
conclusion and accept the paper.
see e.g. ``Genius Channel: Albert Einstein Part 1: The Biography'', YouTube, 2017
questfortruth
Well-Known Member
PruePhillip
Well-Known Member
Quote - "And proof is that which convinces"
That's a seriously weird statement, as weird as General Relativity actually.
Proof is proof - conviction is conviction.
It's interesting that once a guy is considered a genius the science around him/her
SLOWS DOWN. Einstein was against Quantum and its randomness. Shechtman
was called a "quasi scientist" by Linus Pauling. Until that generation of Nobel
laureates is gone progress is slow - people don't change their minds, they just
die.
Samantha Rinne
Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Uncontested usefulness does not equal fact.
Btw, gravity can hardly claim to be a fact either. What with those you whippersnappers and their hot air balloons and hang-gliders and their parachutes and solar-powered planes it seems pretty easy to defy gravity, actually. A fact, is something so pervasive that people can't simply shrug it off once new technology comes out. We call such things "guidelines."
As to Mr Darwin, his theories, ummmm...
SparkNotes: Evolution and Darwin: Introduction
Imagine if I came up with a theory, and I wanted to make a name for myself by telling people exactly how it worked, even if I had no actual proof. For this argument, we're going to use crows and say that crows eat dead things because this is how their bodies are designed (verifiable) and because they are insane (not verifiable, at least not without a separate experiment). That is to say, the later statement is a pet theory.
Let's look Darwin tripped around the world (must be nice, getting that sort of funding) studying various species. At the time, this was already a theory going around (known as transmutation), so it wasn't like he suddenly came up with something new and profound. He started as a creationist but eventually decided to prove His first mistake is thinking as many of you do that there is an either/or between religious belief and the ability of creatures to gradually adapt to their environment. As it was, Etienne Geoffroy and Baptiste Lamarck also had theories of evolution, but this guy basically takes over and creates the official orthodoxy about this. But are these theories correct?
Well, before that, let's talk about other theories of evolution. Lamarck's theory is that species evolve through acquired characteristics, that is to say that generations of blacksmiths in turn become blacksmiths, or creatures that need to reach high branches develop long necks. He also believed that evolution can "erode" and that animals can lose advantages they no longer need. Every biology class basically makes this sound as stupid as possible, so that it can be discredited, but we'll take a look at it later, and I'll show you that it is in fact true. Also we have Etienne Geoffroy, who was essentially a deist, and believed that evolution was part of unity of organism design, essentially a central plan, and that environment causes a direct induction of organic change (as opposed to a change of habits as Lamarck believed). I will show that this is also true.
Darwin set sail from England and went to the Galapagos, where he saw several species of mockingbirds on nearby islands with slightly different characteristics. Now, Darwin explains this away as "natural selection" but this creates a sense of competition that is not in fact in evidence in nature. Rather, the species evolved because of which island they were on. We can split hairs about whether they changed as a result of their choice (making this an acquired characteristic) or because of environment (proving Geoffroy's theory of environmental adaptation), but I'll tell you what it wasn't. Natural selection.
In fact, Darwinism has been put into use in society, with disastrous results. Think of Adolf Hitler, or aborting babies because they have deformity. "Survival of the fittest" is a psychotic mindset, and a false path of evolution. Let's put natural selection into plain English. "Bees and ants and wolves survive because they are stronger or faster than other wolves." Ummm, actually, no nature uses cooperation not competition to ensure survival. Wolves form packs. Bees form hives. Ants form hills. They work together to survive. Suppose we were to only decide that people who were physically strong were fit enough to reproduce. In about five generations, inbred jocks would basically stagnate all society, and humans would be be stuck with big apes as males and sexy hairless females without exception. Except this is not actually how society works. People come in all shapes and sizes. Conclusion? Natural selection doesn't work. Nor can genetics actually predict body type. In fact, it has been so bad at predicting things like hair loss (which was supposedly inborn) that a new system known as epigenetics had to be developed.
In fact, if we are to look at two different factors of genetics, along with epigenetics, we still find no clear evidence for natural selection, but we find that epigenetics is in fact Lamarck's theory (if you exercise, your genes literally fix themselves, while a smoker develops lung cancer, due to acquired characteristics based on decisions, and your body literally develops to facilitate your childhood activities). The two factors I can think of the characteristics of sweat and skin color. You may cry racism, but the fact of the matter is that people in the Middle East, lower parts of India, Africa, and the natives of Australia are dark skinned and able to sweat easily. On the other hand, the colder the climate you get the lighter the skin color has developed and in extreme cold climates, the body retains moisture (2% of British people and like 90% of Koreans don't sweat, proving they are gods of the fashion world). I suspect, the closer you get to near-arctic regions (Eskimos and Scandinavians for instance), the more this is the case.
For added measure, we have moles. Most of these are blind or nearly blind. This is due to environment factors (dark caves do not require vision, but they need other senses) but it is also an example of what Lamarck called evolutionary erosion. Sorry Darwin, nobody would agree that blind moles are the fittest creatures of their group.
Shad
Veteran Member
You proved no references undermining evolution from a source having any authority. You merely quote-mined (your source is know for this) and didn't read anything from the citation itself then linked an artcile quote-mining the same source again.
questfortruth
Well-Known Member
There is such thing as Presumption of Innocence. It applies to everyone, even chronic sinners.
Theories need not be and are not necessarily facts or factual. They absolutely can be facts or factual, however. It is at least as incorrect or inaccurate to assert sweepingly that "theory is not fact" as it is to conflate "fact" with some theory that is as close to anything we might wish to call "fact" as we could hope short of something in mathematics or logics or any such closed discourse universe in which facts can be assured by assumption.
Agreed!
It's a mythical beast that can be readily slain by creationist swords instead of confronting actual evolutionary biology and related fields. It's the equivalent of claiming that classical mechanics is fundamentally wrong by combing through Newton's writings for conceptual incongruities and other flaws. One wonders why creationists don't go so far as to claim that genetics prove wrong both "Darwinism" and Darwin himself to (as if he were still representing some singular intellectual movement underlying the whole of evolutionary science). Reading these types of arguments, it seems too often as though somehow all of modern biology and a good many other fields are resting crucially on what Darwin wrote over a century ago, and hoping they can continue to sweep whatever problems has confronted "Darwinism" under the rug. Too often the actual evidence touted to show "Darwinism" is wrong comes from evolutionary biology, but as it is "Darwinism" that is the target, somehow citing evidence from evolutionary biology is fine so long as it can be used against whatever "Darwinism" is supposed to be.
I think the point that is trying to be made is one that comes mostly from extreme positions in the philosophy of science building on the early to mid twentieth century post-positivism critiques, such as the Duhem-Quine thesis, Kuhnian paradigms, and in general the fact that it is theory that provides the framwork within which hypotheses are generated, how they can be tested, and the interpretation of the results. Heisenberg tells us that, during a conversation in which Einstein criticized him for thinking that physical theories could include observables, that at the time he had tried to defend his approach as being exactly the same kind as Einstein himself had used to develop relativity. Einstein responded that perhaps he had once thought this way ("Vielleicht habe ich diese Art von Philosophie benützt") but it was it was nonetheless still nonsense ("aber sie ist trotzdem Unsinn"). You cannot test or build a theory independently of theory, but rather "in reality it is exactly the other way round. Only theory decides what can be observed" ("Denn ist es ja in Wirklichkeit genau umgekehrt. Erst die Theorie entscheidet darüber, was man beobachten kann").
But just because you can't objectively test a theory doesn't mean that there do not exist methods and ways to circumvent the theory-laden nature of scientific inquiry. Classic examples of within-theory challenges include e.g., the damage done to behaviorism by the groundbreaking work of behaviorist E. C. Tolman and collaborators, in which (contra behaviorist doctrine) rats were shown to learn independently of conditioning stimuli and to represent information in some kind of spatial map. Other examples abound. So one should not take to extremes the idea that empirical tests are necessarily generated and interpreted from a theoretical framework. While true, scientific methods provide a slew of ways in which this testing can challenge the framework itself and provide new growth and insight independently. Not everything need be somehow a kind of normal science in which all evidence can only go towards supporting a particular theory until the discontinuities and contradictory evidence has grown so extensively that a new paradigm overthrows the old. Actually, if real Kuhnian paradigm shifts ever happen, they do so quite rarely.
This is almost never true. Even in classic cases from scientific history given in textbook science, the so-called "hypotheses" that were tested in trumped up examples to illustrate the mother of all pedagogical mistakes (the myth of The Scientific Method found in pre-college and some college textbooks despite concerted efforts by organizations such as the AAAS and NAS to eradicate it), there were theories underlying the hypotheses that are not discussed.
"Hypotheses don’t come out of thin air, and neither do the experiments performed to test them." ("How hypotheses and experimental design rely on theory")
exchemist
Veteran Member
Yes, if by Darwinism you mean evolution by mutation and natural selection, we now know that what happens includes that but also other processes as well. One of the mechanisms I find most interesting is the activation of pieces of genetic code, seemingly triggered by environmental circumstance. I read a fascinating article explaining that the repeated evolution of the eye in different phyla (e.g. the compound eyes of arthropods, the eyes of molluscs and the eyes of vertebrates or chordates) all draw on the same, deeply embedded and ancient genetic code, even though the structure of the resulting eyes is quite different. So this is not a random mutation but an activation of a genetic program that was there all long, dormant, as it were, until needed.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
1. by "darwinism", I'll assume you mean the theory of evolution. The theory is not a fact, it's a theory. A theory is a body of knowledge, an explanatory model of a set of facts from reality within a well defined scope. There are facts of biology and evolution, which are explained in the model of the theory of evolution. Just like the fact of gravity is explain the gravitational theory (einstein's relativity). Theories never become facts. They are different things. Facts are just pieces of data. Theories are testable explanations of said data.
2. the theory of evolution is unaffected by the above article.
3 "In the references above is put in doubt the 100 000 years old Adam. Thus, all ToE is put in doubt, if such major aspect is put in doubt."
That is HILARIOUS. And absurdly wrong, off course.
PruePhillip
Well-Known Member
Were we having this debate about the blindness of science and how you could lose
tenure or profession for speaking out of orthodoxy? I gave the Shechtnam quasi-
crystal example? Well 20 years ago if you spoke out about Lamarkism you could find
yourself out of a job. Now this neo-Lamarkism is all the rage. Not sure if this has
anything to do with your interesting example - but it does underscore that life, and
the universe in general, is super weird.
You have probably heard of the mutli-dimensional universe, 13 dimensions or whatever.
Today I listened to a Youtube on a two dimensional universe - the hologram universe.
exchemist
Veteran Member
I don't believe you would have been out of a job for mentioning Larmarckism, if you did so on the basis of hard data and were appropriately tentative in your reference to it. What would probably - quite rightly - have put you out of a job would be repeated recitations of Lamarckism the way he originally characterised it, without data to justify your revisiting of it.
The idea that mentioning discredited theories gets people sacked is a myth, put about by cranks. What gets them sacked is bad science, or aggressive attacks on the consensus without sufficient foundation.
You obviously don't understand science. In science, everything is always in doubt, and all the conclusions of science can't be protected from a counterexample we may find tomorrow, or never find. In other words, science is constantly skeptical, constantly testing to see whether its conclusions can be falsified, and so on.
It would be extremely healthy for religions to proceed on the same basis, but that idea apparently doesn't appeal to them.
At the present time, the fact that evolution occurs is unchallenged. Even the creationists have started admitting that 'microevolution' happens, which they didn't do twenty years ago. The ways in which it happens have been the subject of ongoing investigation ever since Darwin's book, and continues today. That means the present version of the theory of evolution is much more developed, tested and retested than it was ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago.
It's also worth noting that all the changes to the theory of evolution have come from science itself. The creationists, despite regarding it as their sworn enemy, have never once put even the tiniest scientific scratch on it. Not one.
You're not serious, citing a report from a Creationist site on a matter of science, are you? The ICR are the exact same guys who declare that one of their tenets is ─
The Bible,[...] is the divinely-inspired revelation of the Creator to man. Its unique, plenary, verbal inspiration guarantees that these writings, as originally and miraculously given, are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.
That means that if they actually read their bibles, they'd be asserting, as the bible asserts, that the earth IS flat, IS fixed immovably, Is at the center of the cosmos with the sun and stars going round it, the sky IS a hard dome you can walk on, the stars ARE attached to it close together, and if they come loose they'll all fall to earth ─ and similar nonsense on and on.
And they add as another tenet ─
The Biblical record of primeval earth history in Genesis 1-11 is fully historical and perspicuous, including the creation and fall of man, the curse on the creation and its subjection to the bondage of decay, the promised Redeemer, the worldwide cataclysmic deluge in the days of Noah, the post-diluvian renewal of man's commission to subdue the earth (now augmented by the institution of human government) and the origin of nations and languages at the tower of Babel.
That's antiscience, chosen ignorance, wilful blindness, out loud and proud.
questfortruth
Well-Known Member
Science is not in doubt at all, because holds Presumption of Innocence: till there is no debunkment published, the theory is considered as true.
How in the Darwin's Evolution to distinguish the very first person from a monkey, if a person descended from it? But they somehow distinguished, see "Y-Chromosomal Adam", "Mitochondrial Eve" on Wikipedia.
Lamarckism proves the existence of human races perfectly...
How climate and environment are the main thing influencing living beings' looks.
After all...the extreme beauty of tropical birds colors can only be explained by climate and sunlight.
Not by scientists. As Prof. Brian Cox put it, a law of physics is a statement about physics that hasn't been falsified.
Whereas when it comes to making accurate statements about reality, you can see from those tenets I quoted above that creationists don't even try to do that.
In evolution terms, our species is Homo sapiens from about 200-250,000 years ago, which is part of the genus Homo from about 2.4m years ago, which is part of the subfamily Homininae from about 4-5m years ago ... which is part of the order Primates, about 65m years ago, and so on back. Changes take time, and tend to happen in bursts.
That's a conclusion based on present knowledge, and using nicknames from the bible. You'll note that this Adam and this Eve lived many thousands of years apart, and meanwhile their tribes of proto-humans continued and multiplied around them. They both sit squarely within the theory of evolution, which is how they were discovered / calculated by evolution scientists.
tas8831
Well-Known Member
Troll much?