janc@uofm-cv.UUCP (Jan Wolter) (03/02/84)
[A response to A. Ray Miller's note on creationism & falsification]
Bill Jefferys asked for evolutionists to point out possible falsifications
of evolution, and vice versa. Naturally it is impossible to propose any
experiment that will 100% convince everybody of anything. If I built a
time machine and took you back to see homo sapiens appearing from a puff
of smoke, you could still argue the past I showed you is not the real one.
Science never really proves anything, it merely trys to formulate theorys
which agree with most evidence. The continued existance of "Flat Earthers"
goes to show that people believe what they like, and tend to interpret
evidence as they chose. Certainly it is useful to consider experiments
which would throw doubt on our current views, but generally it takes an
awful lot of experiments pointing in the same direction to convince me
of something. A few curiousities may be just that.
Ray Miller says,
A fine idea, with Bill being the only evolutionist brave enough
to do that.
Well, at least one other evolutionist did. I suggested that finding
humans (or any other current earth animal species) on another planet
would tend to make me doubt that the evolutionist have their story
together. (Though I might be more tempted by a Von Daniken style
explaination that a Creationist one unless there was fossil evidence
on that world similar to that on earth). While I'm at it, finding
an animal on this planet that did not appear to be related to any others
would force me to similar doubts.
Bill's suggested test was evidence of men and dinosaurs living
contemporaneously. Given such evidence in 3 separate notes by me,
others on the net responded with things like: well, little green
men from Ork might have trotted around barefoot and then split for
65M years (ala Eric Von Daniken). Silly of course, but it
demonstrates that evolution is so plastic that it can always be
twisted to squirm out of any potential falsification procedures.
If your evidence is those funny dents in the mud among the dinosaur bones,
you've got to be kidding. Even if they look a lot like human foot prints,
you've got to admit that that's an incredibly thin thread to hang your
theory on. Especially when *no* bones of *any* mammel more sophisticated
than an opossum has been found contemporary with any dinosaur. This is
what Bill asked for, and you sure didn't deliver that. Any one who proposes
Orkens to explain this is, I agree, even nuttier than a creationist. I
can name lots of ways to make dents in the mud, and lots of ways rocks might
come to look like they were shaped into tools, that don't force me to
explain where all those skeletons went. Considering the absence of other
evidence my response has to be, "Since there is no solid evidence that there
were no humans at the time of the dinosaurs, those dents in the mud can't be
human footprints."
And what predictive value does it have for the future? Due to the
random mechanism for change, very little, if any. No predictions
can be made as to the direction, rate, limits, etc. of future evolution.
It all depends upon the toss of the dice.
If evolution is random, then what I believe in must not be evolution. I
thought the key to the evolutionary theory was that random change is given
direction by natural selection. The random variation is the raw material
for evolution, but evolution is not random. Evolution depends on
environmental pressures which favor some variations over others, thus
giving rise to changes in the species. I can predict that if I go out
and kill all brown-eyed people, and keep doing it for a long time, eventually
brown-eyed births will be very rare. This is a prediction based on
evolutionary theory. If I knew more about the genetics of eye color, I
could probably estimate how long it will take to bring brown-eyed births
below 1%. It's true that I can't predict what the human race will look
like one billion years from now, but that's mainly because I don't know
what the environmental pressures will be. You call a die toss random,
although Newtonian Mechanics provides all the tools I need to predict how
it will land, given I know how it was thrown, which way the wind was blowing,
what the surface it landed on was, and all sorts of other things. Practically
we can't do this, but that doesn't mean Newtonian Mechanics has no predictive
value.
But to put creationism to the test even more: creation, unlike
evolution, says that some things won't happen (and thus opens
itself to falsification).
Evolution says a lot of things won't happen. After all it says things do
happen, which implies that other things don't. Where did you get the idea
that evolution is simply the claim that things happen at random? You may
demand that I study a lot of books on Creationism before I tell you it is
wrong. I'll be less strict. Just get the general idea of what evolutionary
theory is about into your head before you tell me it is wrong.
Creationists claim that there are limits in variability to viable
organisms. Thus to falsify the claim, simply demonstrate said
transitions in the past (through fossils) or in the present.
Please be more specific. What kind of fossil would demonstrate "said
transistions". (I will address the variablity problem in another note).
Jan Wolter
University of Michigan