From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Sat Nov 13 2004 - 05:16:10 GMT
Hi Scott,
On 12 Nov 2004 at 18:28, Scott Roberts wrote:
> msh says:
> Scientific conclusiveness? Of course not. There's nothing
> conclusive about the existence of quarks. Does this mean quantum
> mechanics shouldn't be taught in a physics class?
[Scott:] Bad choice of word on my part, perhaps, but I don't know a
better one offhand. No, nothing is conclusive, but some things are
more evident than others. In quantum mechanics, anyone with the money
can do the requisite experiments and get the same results. That's not
true with the theory that chance and natural selection are sufficient
to show how lizards turned into birds, etc.
msh says:
See below...
> msh said:
> The question is, which of the two hypotheses is scientifically
> viable? We see scientific evidence of the workings of chance
> mutations and natural selection every day.
[Scott:] We have never seen them create new species.
msh says:
See below...
> There is so MUCH evidence for chance and natural selection as the
> mechanism of evolution that it is difficult to understand why
anyone
> would deny it. But maybe that's where one's "philosophical [or
> religious] disposition" comes in.
[Scott:] Where is it? What laboratory recorded the development of a
new species whose mechanisms were solely chance and natural
selection? How could one even tell that only chance is involved?
msh says:
See below...
> msh says:
> Well, maybe. But his most devastating argument remains in tact,
> regardless. Setting aside the fact that our observations of the
> evolution of life reveals a messy process that is not all that
> orderly, is what we humans "perceive" to be order in the universe
> sufficient to prove the existence of a universal designer? When
> someone rolls five dice and they come up sixes, is this evidence
> that the dice are loaded?
[Scott:] If it happens a million times in a row, yes.
msh says:
Ah, but species latch-up DOESN'T occur a million times in a row, not
even once in a thousand thousand million failures. What we see in
the neo-natal ward are the failures, because in our little life-spans
the odds are that we won't catch even one mutation leading toward a
successful new species. And even if we happened to stumble upon a
successful mutation, who's to say we'd even recognize it for what it
is? We'd see a freak with webbed fingers and really feathery thick
hair on his arms and write him off as just that, a freak, not the
first step toward a species of flying hominids.
No, I'm afraid the ID folks fail to grasp the expanse of cosmological
time and the mind-numbing complexity of matter, trying to contain
both within their little probability calculations.
> msh said:
> As for the so-called probability calculations upon which ID hangs
> its hat, they seem to me to ignore important scientific background
> information, resulting in much lower probability estimates than
are
> fairly warranted. But I'll go into this more in a later post,
where
> I'll take a look at one of these probability filters.
[Scott:] To show that neo-Darwinism is scientific, you have to know
what the probabilities are, and that they are plausible.
msh says:
This is simply not true. All we need for scientific plausibility is
logical inference from fact. We observe mutations, most of which are
negative and die out. But we can EASILY imagine mutations that are
positive and lead to, in time, a species latch-up: the fish with a
fin that can grip the ground; and later, add a set of mutant gills
that don't do well pulling oxygen from water but work fine in
extremely humid air.
There is nothing unscientific about this line of thought. In fact, I
would say that this is the essence of scientific hypothesis.
Best,
msh
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