This month’s quote is by Cornelius Hunter, followed by a few brief thoughts on falsifiability in science. Let me know what you think:
Quote of the Month: Cornelius Hunter on the Unfalsifiability of Evolution
25 Replies to “Design Disquisitions: Quote of the Month-Cornelius Hunter on the Unfalsifiability of Evolution”
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Difficult to falsify is not the same as unfalsifiable.
The discovery of the fossilized remains of a modern rabbit in Pre-Cambrian rocks would certainly give pause for thought even if, on its own, it might not be sufficient to discredit the theory.
Darwin, well aware his theory required a mechanism of inheritance, proposed microscopic particles called gemmules as part of his theory of pangenesis. Francis Galton conducted a series of blood transfusion experiments on differently pigmented rabbits to test the theory. He found no evidence to support pangenesis. Darwin’s theory of evolution languished until Mendel’s work on inheritance was discovered.
As Darwin predicted in Origin:
And if the resolution of the geological record is so coarse-grained that the culmination of a development period of ten million years counts as a sudden appearance then where is the problem?
See above.
There are “clever mechanisms” we know of now in biology whose detailed evolutionary history is still unknown. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one. And, as always, anyone who believes they have a better explanation is encouraged to bring it forward.
How is this a problem exactly?
It is still mysterious in some ways. That’s why it’s still a thriving field of research And there are mechanisms. Wells and others may have pooh-poohed them but if they weren’t observed then the theory would be in big trouble and we all know you would be shouting it from the rooftops.
If you think that is what evolution is about then you don’t understand it. Adaptation, in this context, is the process by which species, through random but nonetheless fortuitous mutations, finds themselves better fitted to survive and reproduce in a given environment than their competitors. No foresight is involved or required.
Or the theory needs to undergo modification if it is to survive and flourish in a changing data environment. That is part of the normal process of science.
What major failure prediction failures did you have in mind?
Joseph LeConte, in his book “Evolution” acknowledges that
evolution is an “axiom,” ie, is unfalsifiable:
https://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/03/evolution_is_an/
I think evolution is ripe for falsifying, it’s just that every science associated with this theory rigorously upholds and supports it. Areas such as biogeography show how like species are related, how distribution is evolutionarily predictable. The new area of study, molecular biology, strongly supports evolution to the point where we know why great apes have 48 pairs of chromosomes, and we have a mere 46 (One of those chromosomes was shown to have rejoined somewhere in our past.) Fossils, a wealth of evidence and always growing.
This latter also keeps a thriving industry of creationists desperately trying to explain away the latest transitional discoveries. Any fossil found in the wrong layers would give pause.
On going rigorous experimentation shows the predictive nature of evolution as shown by Lenski and many others.
Hunter, like Wells, Axe, and Dembski before, can only dumbly quibble from the edges, contributing quickly forgettable titles, and weird acronyms; that is not science.
@Seversky, does it have to be a rabbit? What if we found a Precambrian mouse, or a frog? If it could be something other than a rabbit what is the criteria for deciding if it is a suitable substitute?
@rvb8, what did Lenski predict? Certainly not Cit+.
btw, great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, 48 in total; humans have 23 pairs. I’m sure that’s what you meant to say.
How does the prevertebrate-vertebrate information jump support evolution? How exactly does the generation of 1.7 million bits of unique new human-conserved functional information support evolution?
No Darwinian has been able to come up with an explanation, but if you can do better, RVB8, then please explain it here.
Materialistic evolution has been falsified on all levels. It doesn’t make sense at all.
To name but a few:
– Evolution cannot explain its starting point — OOL
– It has no mechanism — natural selection is not-creative.
– Organisms don’t exist — there are just fermions and bosons.
– There is no reason at all for the continued existence of the conglomerations of fermons and bosons which present us with the illusion of organisms.
– There is no will to survive because there are no organisms.
– The fossil record is riddled with gaps.
– The molecular ‘history’ contains astounding information jumps.
– Explanations from the level of DNA cannot explain form and (more general) unity at higher levels.
– Rationality, freedom and personhood cannot, in principle, be explained from the level of blind particles bumping into each other.
– ….
In short, materialistic evolution does not make sense at all. Everything about it is utterly wrong.
Maybe that’s the strength of the theory.
Origenes @ 7: Well done.
rvb8 and the other zealously committed (religious?) a/mats continue to engage in wishful thinking rather than empirical science. Just sprinkle a little fairy dust in the air and evolution magically happens. Comical.
You claim it’s falsifiable, then offer a very specific example of something that still fails your criteria. “If there should be a teacup in orbit about the Earth, that still wouldn’t disprove my theory. But it would give one pause”. Surely. I guess we just have to take your word on this?
Mechanisms? Well, surely, there are mechanisms aplenty in biology that produce variation. Windows has a registry that can grow to gigabytes and it’s pretty much parameterizations for variation in instances of programs; yet I’m pretty sure there was a dude or a lady behind every little piece of it. What you have to show is that you have a set that precedes biological function that can sufficiently account for the biological function in whole. Trying to discern the build history of a piece of software from the output is….methodologically unsound.
Scientists believe what they want to believe and that is fine with me as long as they do not abuse the public trust… If other people begin to believe something because some scientists have decided to spread their beliefs in order to deceive other people who have no scientific knowledge, that is a criminal case because there is an intent…
Unfortunately, bankers get away with it so do the shit-pushing scientist, which includes Darwinists… This pisses me off and makes me reconsider who is in charge of this crazy world…
aarceng @5,
yes, thank you. That is what I meant to say.
J-Mac,
people ‘believe’ all manner of nonsenses, and genrally, most of the time, it is the scientists that correct these fetishes.
Do these scientists err? Many times, and yet their contribution to our understanding of the world and universe leaves the pastors, priests, shamans, and even Platos, in their wake; this is simply a fact. Our past was dark and dirty, our present is unpleasant but clearer, our future bright, or not.
In any case, at least we won’t be propitiating some weird sun god to get there. Or any other god hopefully.
Granville Sewell @ 2
On the other hand, a rather more recent philosopher of science Karl Popper, having previously expressed reservations about evolution as a scientific theory, wrote:
aarceng @ 4
No, it doesn’t have to be a rabbit. We can imagine the fossilized skeletal remains of a modern human – homo sapiens – being discovered in Pre-Cambrian rocks, hundreds of millions of years before the appearance of even the earliest pre-hominids from which modern humans are plausibly descended. How could it be explained?
The question is really about whether we accept naïve falsificationism as a sufficient test of a theory. Is a single anomaly sufficient to discredit one which is still well-supported by other evidence?
Origenes @ 7
It never claimed to be an OOL explanation so no failure there.
Natural selection can “create” a population of dark-colored moths from light-colored originals or bacteria that can eat the waste products of nylon manufacture that did not exist before.
Fallacy of causal reductionism.
Depends on what you mean by “continued existence”. In terms of geological time we are very short-lived “conglomerations” indeed. What sort of a reason is needed other than natural laws?
There is clearly a will to survive in humans and some other animals but it is not needed for evolution to happen. Lenski’s bacteria have no observable will to survive in a citrate-rich environment but some do regardless.
Yes, it is. Doesn’t mean there is a Creator/Intelligent Designer hiding in them.
Just another “gaps” argument.
We don’t have such an explanation yet. That’s not the same as there can’t be one. We don’t know that at all.
Fallacy of causal reductionism again.
Materialistic evolution is certainly far from perfect but it makes way more sense and is a better fit to the data than any of the alternatives.
LocalMinimum @ 9
No, you don’t have to take my word for anything at all. But you could check out “naïve falsificationism” and see if you think a single anomalous observation is sufficient to overturn an otherwise well-founded theory.
Computers or indeed any human technology are a poor analogy for evolution. Adaptive evolution could not happen without random mutations yet random changes that have unpredictable effects are, for the most part, the last thing software and hardware designers want popping up in their designs.
Well, you stated that it was falsifiable, then you disqualified the one example you gave. It really sets up this imprecise, feeling filled consideration of the idea. “I’ll give up on it once I’m no longer comfortable with it and/or no longer desire it”, is how it seems. I mean, evolution is pretty much built on failed predictions. Vestigial organs, per the original sense, i.e. “junk organs”, was a pretty massive prediction; but its failure isn’t even discounted, it’s practically ignored. We are in the process of overturning “junk DNA”; yet, even while evolutionists fight for every last inch of progress against it, they are already poised to eject it. The fossil record is what we always go back to, which is itself built on hypotheses based on choice correlations which are made under the assumption of evolution being an operational thing. There is no forward mathematical model driving the need for this thing to happen, only empirical models assuming it has.
Computers are an excellent analogy for biology. Biology is, in essence, a self 3D printing polymer program. I don’t know what you mean precisely by “adaptive evolution”, but the variation we see is clearly, at least in part, not simply “random mutation”, but parameterizations and even feedback mechanisms. Is this not a primary element of the emerging field of epigenetics? While random mutation is certainly an issue, entropy is an unavoidable aspect of chemistry, and biology seems very robustly built against it. Who’s to say, until we know better, at least, that mutation isn’t employed in a designed variation mechanism that makes use of “fall through” functionality; i.e. the mechanism is “stacked” such that specific errors in copying simply open another feature? While we still don’t know yet much of how variation actually works, to insist that chemical noise is the means of the origin of these mechanisms is simply begging the question.
Vestigal organs,(whale hips??? junk DNA (experiments on fruit flys, and mice determine large sections of DNA can be removed with the animal not harmed), are very good evidences for evolution. As are many other science fields. And computers are a poor analogy for evolution.
Why? Well, we have redundent parts that we don’t need, tonsils, we do well without a gallbladder, appendix etc. Take out some designed wiring, chips, batteries,or other computer hardware, and see how well your laptop functions.Human design is easy to detect, we tend to build things functional and economic. Whoever knocked the human body together was a cowboy.
Random mutations give the animal an opportunity, if the mutation is advantageous; darker pigmentation in the polluted environment of the Peppered moth for example.
And that is also the beauty of evolution, it is such a simple idea that the likes of T.H. Huxley were left wondering why they never thought of it. Of course Darwin did not originate evolution, many others for thousands of years had noted the inter-related nature of life; Darwin merely codified it, gave it parameters and a mechanism, and explained it to the world. ID, has done none of these things.
And whereas evolution remains robust, and the evidence supporting it continues to grow, ID has hit a dry patch.
Evolution “remains robust” only to those already committed to the a/mat philosophical worldview. It’s best days are long gone. Finished.
By the way, still no penny drop here.
Seversky @ 14
Okay, evolution offers no explanation of life, and, as such, it is not about the “origin of species.”
No,
selectionelimination does no such thing. Elimination only acts on what already exists.Materialism is the embracement of the fallacy of causal reductionism.
Materialism is the claim that true unitary existence is only to be found at the micro-level. Materialism is the claim that all of reality consists of impersonal indivisible fundamental elements —fermions and bosons— which are the source of all true causation. Materialism wants to inform us that a thing at the macro-level which presents itself as one indivisible thing in fact is not. ‘All oneness at the macro-level is an illusion’ is the ‘great insight’ of materialism.
S.L.Tallbot: “The mystery in all this does not lie primarily in isolated “mechanisms” of interaction; the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Fine, but this will to survive cannot be explained from the level of fermions and bosons.
If the gaps are real, and they are real, then that is exactly what it means.
Indeed.
It is a matter of principle. One cannot explain the coherency of a story from the level of letters. Letters simply don’t write stories. Not only is the case that we don’t have such an explanation “yet” — it simply cannot be done.
Again, materialism is the claim that true unitary existence is only to be found at the micro-level. Materialism is the claim that all of reality consists of impersonal indivisible fundamental elements —fermions and bosons— which are the source of all true causation.
These fermions and bosons don’t have what it takes to produce rationality, freedom and personhood.
You must be mistaken, because, according to materialism, there cannot be such a thing as a theory about things that makes sense. Alexander Rosenberg:
Origenes @ 19: Excellent work. The following is a simple but brilliant observation. Darwin even got the title wrong!
“Okay, evolution offers no explanation of life, and, as such, it is not about the ‘origin of species.’”
@ your no 6, Origenes :
Silence came the stern reply from rvb8 !
@ your no 16, Seversky.
‘We don’t have such an explanation yet. That’s not the same as there can’t be one. We don’t know that at all.’ – Sevvy.
LOL material of the first water, Sev !
Seversky, we didn’t know until comparatively recently that the moon isn’t made of green cheese. Nobody could deny the possibility..
Indeed, an Australian traveling salesman once claimed that to me in all seriousness. Though the Aussies tell their jokes in a very dead-pan manner. Are you Australian ?
RVB8:
Whale hips are clearly not junk organs. With respect to the fruit fly genome, again, we don’t know what’s in use for a particular instance and what is used for variation. Removing the genetic variation potential of a creature could still allow for a limited phenotypical set to continue. Again, working with software, there are many conditionally useful (but still quite useful) pieces and sections you can remove in a piece of code and get away with it. In any case, we don’t know what that large section does, so claiming it as junk is an appeal to ignorance.
You folks keep insisting software is a bad analogy, as if the naked assertion repeated enough will somehow produce a fact. Can you actually explain why?
All the parts you list are, again, useful organs. They just happen not to be directly necessary for staying alive. There are plenty of things I can remove from a computer and have it still function. If I remove all but one bank of memory, it will still operate. USB ports, serial ports, parallel ports, fans (leave one and keep the air conditioning up), DVD drives (which could even be considered a proper junk organ!), the case, the CMOS assuming I’m in a hardware configuration compatible with the default BIOS settings, the video card, the math coprocessor, etc., etc. I could even remove the hard drive if I had a DVD drive with a boot disk (my childhood computer only had a 5.25″ floppy, no hard drive).
Origenes @ 19: Brilliant. Especially the Rosenberg quote (which is worth repeating below):
“What we need is a clump of matter … that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.
Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe—including, of course, all the neurons in your brain—that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter. So, when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong.” — Alexander Rosenberg, ‘The Atheist’s Guide To Reality’, Ch. 10
Atheism has absolutely nothing to offer…except maybe despair and hopelessness.
Exactly!