RE: Scientific theory

High energy physicists attempt to probe the high temperatures and densities supposed to occur in the very early universe by building high energy accelerators. This would give us an idea of the physics that took place early in the Big Bang. What are the analogous experiments that biologists can do that would convince us of the supposition of the historical biologists that "evolution is a fact."

Moorad

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From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of Randy Isaac
Sent: Tue 12/7/2004 10:01 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Scientific theory

"I am no defender of string theory, but I must say that contrary to evolutionary theory, string theory can be cast into a precise mathematical formalism that may or may not describe nature. Witness the mathematical work of Bernhard Riemann, who posed the problem of how to define an n-dimensional space and ended up giving definition of what today is called a Riemannian space, so important to general relativity. The same may be one day with string theory. Evolutionary theory supposes species/species transitions that will forever escape experimental verification.
 
Moorad"
 
Mathematical formalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for a theory to be "scientific" in the sense of describing physical reality. "may one day be testable..." is no match for a theory with a very large number of testable observations. Rather than "...will forever escape experimental verification," I believe you really mean "past species transitions will never be repeated or observed from beginning to end." which is quite different from being testable.
 
Randy
Received on Tue Dec 7 22:16:20 2004