RE: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences

Asking predictions from an evolutionary biologist is like asking the telling of the future from a fortuneteller. Neither of them knows how to do that. It is like looking in a magical crystal ball. The reason is that one is dealing here with history and not with science.

Moorad
________________________________
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Gregory Arago [gregoryarago@yahoo.ca]
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 5:17 PM
To: Cameron Wybrow; asa
Subject: Re: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences

Just a short response to the following:

Cameron wrote: "If economics is a causal science, like physics and chemistry, surely it should be able to predict such things, and economists should be willing to put their professional necks on the line and risk a false prediction. / I find that evolutionary biologists are very much like economists."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/nobel_by_association_beautiful_mind_non_existent_prize

It might be interesting to consider the different possibility that natural-physical sciences focus on 'causes' while human-social sciences focus on 'effects.' In such a scenario, it makes sense for economics to appear and 'explain' disasters after the fact.

Of course, such a perspective natural-physical sciences focus on causes, human-social sciences focus on effects is a more far-reaching claim than that...

Gregory

________________________________
From: Cameron Wybrow <wybrowc@sympatico.ca>
To: asa <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 1:46:36 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences

1. On the contrary, Bernie! If you studied electrical engineering
technology, you studied a good deal of completely reliable physics. I
imagine that you can explain how my doorbell or fan or computer works far
more clearly than a Darwinian can explain the evolution of the eye or the
lung.

2. I wish evolutionists would be more rigorous, too (said without sarcasm).

3. As for the rest, your answer does not address my objections. I'm not
asking for new data (in place of old data). I'm asking for genuine
predictions -- statements of what will happen *in the future* -- based on an
understanding of natural laws and processes.

Have you ever noticed, Bernie, that whenever there is an economic disaster
of any kind, many confident economists suddenly pop up on TV with learned
explanations of why the disaster occurred? And have you ever wondered why,
with such a profound scientific knowledge of the causes of this disastrous
event, so few of them *predicted* it? If economics is a causal science,
like physics and chemistry, surely it should be able to predict such things,
and economists should be willing to put their professional necks on the line
and risk a false prediction.

I find that evolutionary biologists are very much like economists. They are
great (cough!) at explaining, after the fact, why a certain fish developed a
certain kind of fin and a certain colour and a certain shape of teeth, but
if you give an evolutionary biologist a well-understood modern ecosystem,
and ask him what a very well-known rodent, whose physiology and habits are
an open book to zoologists and whose genome has been entirely sequenced,
will, if released into this ecosystem, evolve into ten thousand years from
now, the evolutionary biologist won't have a clue. You might as well ask
him who will win the Super Bowl in the year 12,009. His predictive accuracy
will be about the same in both cases.

The difficulty is that, unlike the engineer, the physicist, the chemist,
etc., the evolutionary biologist has nothing like "natural laws" to base his
predictions on. He doesn't even understand (not fully, anyway) all the
causes of mutations; he can't predict which mutations will happen, and which
will never happen; he has no way of knowing whether or not the mutations
will occur in a selectively advantageous sequence; he doesn't know what 90%
of the DNA is the genome is for; he can't predict future environments and
hence future selective advantages; he doesn't know how many mutations it
requires to turn creature A into creature B, or to create organ X from
scratch; etc. In short, he has no "science" of the sort that has given us
cars, televisions, medicines, plastics, refrigeration, space travel, etc.
He's a Monday morning quarterback.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dehler, Bernie" <bernie.dehler@intel.com<mailto:bernie.dehler@intel.com>>
To: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 2:36 PM
Subject: RE: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences

> Cameron said:
> " Instead of preaching to ninth-grade science students that evolutionary
> theory is on a part with the achievement of Newton (which is so gross an
> exaggeration as to border on lying, and is clearly indicative of little
> brother's jealousy of big brother), evolutionary theorists could *openly
> admit* to the high school students that their science is quite different
> from chemistry and physics and cannot (as yet, anyway) meet their rigorous
> requirements. They could admit that it is an "after the fact" kind of
> science, rather than a predictive science (predictive *in the engineer's
> sense*, I mean; not in the weak sense that we would expect fossils like
> Tiktaalik, but in the strong sense that it can tell us what rabbits placed
> in the Amazon jungle will evolve into a hundred thousand years from now,
> as astronomers can tell us where Mars will be a hundred thousand years
> from now)."
>
> I also suppose computer scientists, for the same reason, should admit that
> their science "cannot (as yet, anyway) meet their rigorous requirements".
>
> I also have a Bachelor's of Science degree in Electrical Engineering
> Technology (BSEET). I suppose that also can't meet "the rigorous
> requirements."
>
> I wish evolutionists would be more rigorous so they wouldn't be charged as
> such (said with sarcasm).
>
> Cameron said:
> "They could admit that it is an "after the fact" kind of science"
>
> Isn't all data gathering "after the fact?"
>
> Case 1: Genomic studies- comparing DNA code across genomes of different
> animals. It is new data (recently discovered), but it was created long
> ago.
>
> Case 2: Mixing two chemicals and noting a reaction. It is new data and
> newly created, but after it happened, it is just historical data, like
> genomic data. Younger data, but still history, and useful for others to
> learn so they don't have to waste time reproducing (we can spend time
> building upon the data instead).
>
> ...Bernie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu>] On
> Behalf Of Cameron Wybrow
> Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 6:18 PM
> To: asa
> Subject: Re: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences
>
> David:
>
> You wrote:
>
>> Linnaeus wasn't committed to the fixity of species. Anyone can see
>> that man and primates have a lot in common, but there's nothing a
>> priori outside of evolution that says they ought to be chemically
>> similar as well.
>
> I did not say that Linnaeus was "committed to the fixity of species". I
> did, however, imply that Linnaeus did not advocate an
> evolutionary view or base his biological thinking on such a view. If I am
> incorrect in this belief, please supply me with direct evidence that
> Linnaeus supported or advocated macroevolutionary views and that they
> affected the way he approached biological questions.
>
> I did not say that "a priori" similar species ought to be chemically
> similar. I said that if species are similar in a lot of ways there is a
> good chance that they are biochemically similar as well. I granted fully
> that this might not be the case, that the inference was only one of
> probability, based on experience and common sense.
>
> In any case, as I made clear, Darwinian evolutionists cannot be sure that
> the two evolutionarily related species
> will be biochemically similar, either, so they have no advantage over the
> "common sense" approach in the pheromone-similarity-hunt that we were
> discussing.
>
>> No, similarity in shape only tells us that they probably have
>> similarities in aspects related to their shape. Oranges and tennis
>> balls are rather similar in shape but differ substantially in
>> chemistry, texture, etc.
>
> I spoke not of oranges and tennis balls but of oranges and tangerines.
> You
> know that I do not suppose that oranges
> and tennis balls are "alike" simply because they are round. Give me
> credit
> for enough brains to distinguish the living from the non-living, please.
> (And by the way, tangerines are not spherical in shape, as oranges and
> tennis balls are. I was not in fact using shape but a whole range of
> other
> characteristics to infer that tangerines and oranges are "relatives".)
>
> Further, it was *you* who said in your last post that morphology (absent
> knowledge of the genome) is still the main factor driving evolutionary
> classification. And you *also* said that in the case of the fruit flies,
> evolutionary classification would be useful in predicting the
> biochemistry.
> So your argument implies that in many cases predictions about biochemistry
> would in fact be ultimately based on morphology. Now you are saying that
> morphology is unreliable as a guide to probable biochemistry? So then the
> evolutionary biologists would be making an unreliable guess about the
> pheromones? Then why do you think evolutionary biology would be so useful
> in such a case? Your logic escapes me.
>
>> Unfortunately for this approach, there are a whole lot of fruit flies
>> that look a lot alike, and some that look really weird that are more
>> closely related to some ordinary-looking ones than many pairs of
>> ordinary looking ones. It turns out that the standard lab Drosophilia
>> is not as closely related to the actualy type of Drosophilia as are
>> all the weird Hawaiian ones, for example.
>
> So, tell us: since we are talking, ex hypothesi, about a fruit fly
> species
> for which we *don't* have detailed biochemical or genetic data, and since
> bodily form can't adequately distinguish the various fruit flies for
> evolutionary purposes, how on earth did you determine that our unknown
> fruit
> fly invader, X, was evolutionarily more closely related to weird-looking
> type A
> fruit fly than to the more visually similar type B fruit fly?
> Evolutionary
> classification must be based on *something*, and we've just ruled out
> genomics, biochemistry and morphology in this particular case. And fruit
> flies have no bones to be preserved, so the fossil record will be of no
> help. So tell me how your evolutionary biologists could have classified
> this new invasive fruit fly well enough to know what its evolutionary
> "close
> relatives" would be. I sense smoke and mirrors here.
>
>> But to know what the gene does and how it's supposed to work,
>> evolutionary data may be quite handy. In turn, this will help tell us
>> how to deal with the underlying genetic problem. Of course, the first
>> task is stopping the cancer, which depends on medical knowledge
>> (although discovering a cancer drug in species X should prompt study
>> of its close relatives to see if there are related useful compounds).
>> Cancer itself is something of an evolutionary situation, in which the
>> cancerous cells are evolving ways to dodge the body's controls while
>> the body tries to respond. Remembering that the cancer (or any
>> pathogen or parasite) is continually evolving is an important part of
>> maintaining medically relevant treatments. Cf. the Doonesbury cartoon
>> where the doctor asks the creationist patient whether he wants the
>> original drug or the ones that are effective against the strains that
>> have evolved resistance to the first drug.
>
> This paragraph equivocates on the meaning of "evolutionary situation".
> What
> you are calling evolutionary here is microevolution, which everybody
> grants.
> That cancer cells "evolve" in the way you are describing is
> non-contentious.
> And I grant your practical point, i.e., that doctors have to take into
> account the shifting behaviour of the cancer cells in their diagnosis and
> treatment. But that does not mean that they have to believe, e.g., that
> mammals evolved from reptiles via Darwinian means. It means only that
> they
> must grasp the genomics and biochemistry of cancer cells.
>
> And by the way, creationists are not so dumb as you make out. They
> understand perfectly well the fact of drug resistance. I am no
> creationist
> (in the narrow sense that you mean), but I give the "creationists" more
> credit for brains than the Doonesbury cartoonist does. The Doonesbury
> cartoon would be funny only for those who accept a caricature of
> creationist
> thinking. Are you aware of Dr. C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon
> General? I imagine that Dr.
> Koop knew a thing or two about drug resistance, probably a great deal more
> than most evolutionary biologists know about it, and he was a creationist.
>
>> In trying to prevent recurrence, we need to know what the flawed gene
>> is supposed to do. Just suppressing the gene and seeing what the
>> effect is on the patient is not a good idea. Rather, we can look at
>> related organisms to figure out what the function of the gene is,
>> where it came from, etc. This will help us know how to target the
>> negative effects of the gene without compromising any useful function.
>>
>> Another good example of medically relevant evolutionary information
>> comes from Toxoplasma (a protist parasite usually caught from cats,
>> can cause severe problems for developing babies but otherwise not much
>> obvious impact on humans). It turns out to be more closely related to
>> plants than to animals, which may help in developing drugs that will
>> target it but not affect us (or cats).
>
> In both these examples, you avoid specifying how we determine(d) what was
> "closely related". How did you determine, for example, that the parasite
> was "more closely related" to plants than animals, without employing
> genomic
> or biochemical data (which is forbidden by your original claim in the
> fruit
> fly case), and if morphological data is not reliable?
>
> What you need to show me is that evolutionary classification gives some
> predictive power *that is not directly derivable from the criteria you
> used
> to do the classifying in the first place*. I claim (though I am willing
> to
> change my view if evidence is provided) that ultimately evolutionary
> classification in itself has little or no predictive power, but depends on
> other comparisons (morphological, genomic, physiological, etc.), which in
> themselves do have predictive power. In a word, evolutionary
> classification
> is an interpretive gloss of little or no technological value.
>
>> Empirical biological knowledge, or any other empirical
>> knowledge, is quite useful, but having theory to guide generalization
>> of that knowledge is also useful. My grandfather worked for
>> Westinghouse and generally had a low opinion of the merits of the
>> engineers unless they actually talked with the people doing the
>> factory work to get empirical feedback. Nevertheless, their
>> engineering training was not devoid of use.
>
> I agree with you about the need for theory in engineering. But in
> engineering, the theory is directly relevant to diagnosis and practical
> solutions. Biochemistry is like engineering as well. That is why
> biochemistry is so useful to medicine. More generally, for a science to
> have technological applications, it must be able to predict *future*
> events.
> But evolutionary biology is more like the "science" of economics, which
> can
> always explain *everything* -- but curiously, usually only after the fact.
> If my life were in danger, I would no sooner entrust my medical treatment
> to
> Jerry Coyne or Allen Orr or Ernst Mayr than I would to John Kenneth
> Galbraith or Milton Friedman. I would far sooner entrust it to a skilled
> YEC biochemist. In fact, I would sooner entrust it to a chemical engineer
> who'd boned up for a few weeks on human physiology, because the engineer
> has
> a far more disciplined conception of mechanism and process and in general
> of
> cause-and-effect relationships than evolutionary biologists do.
>
>> No, there's also all the people who claim that it promotes atheism,
>> excuses immorality, or otherwise misuse evolution to promote social
>> and moral agendas; the people who make bogus claims to debunk
>> evolution; poor presentation of evolution in textbooks and classes
>> (better fact checking would generally make textbooks worth a little
>> closer to the exorbiant prices charged!) and the many factors that
>> contribute to a generally poor grasp of science among the general
>> public such as the cultural promotion of making up one's own "truth";
>> various industries attacking science because it can cut into their
>> profits by highlighting the dangers of their products, pollution, or
>> practices; laziness; public school teaching emphasis on politically
>> correct (whatever the relevant bureaucracy perceives as deirable, not
>> only the current U.S. political left's correctness) agendas rather
>> than on learning information, etc.
>
> I agree with your complaints about many of these things. However, the
> hard
> fact is that none of these things seems to apply to electrical theory,
> Newtonian physics, etc., etc. The general public accepts 95% of the
> science
> which is taught in high schools without reservation. And while I grant
> that
> religion plays a role in resistance to evolutionary theory, the truth is
> that physics and chemistry teachers are simply much better at answering
> questions -- and I'm talking about scientific questions, not theological
> questions -- to the satisfaction of students than biology teachers are (at
> least, when the biology teachers are teaching Darwinian evolution).
> Darwinian explanations are always looser, less precise, with very little
> quantification (how many mutations would it take? how many years would it
> take? -- the biology teacher doesn't have the slightest idea), and the
> proposed mechanisms are of a broad, vague, non-specific kind ("drift",
> "mutation", "natural selection"), making them extremely elastic, and thus,
> when combined, capable of explaining virtually any possible outcome (X,
> the
> direct opposite of X, and every outcome in between), so that the theory
> seems oddly slippery.
>
> One thing that might help would be for evolutionary biologists to stop
> crowing about how great their theory is, and put in caveats showing
> intellectual humility and caution. Instead of preaching to ninth-grade
> science students that evolutionary theory is on a part with the
> achievement
> of Newton (which is so gross an exaggeration as to border on lying, and is
> clearly indicative of little brother's jealousy of big brother),
> evolutionary theorists could *openly admit* to the high school students
> that
> their science is quite different from chemistry and physics and cannot (as
> yet, anyway) meet their rigorous requirements. They could admit that it
> is
> an "after the fact" kind of science, rather than a predictive science
> (predictive *in the engineer's sense*, I mean; not in the weak sense that
> we
> would expect fossils like Tiktaalik, but in the strong sense that it can
> tell us what rabbits placed in the Amazon jungle will evolve into a
> hundred
> thousand years from now, as astronomers can tell us where Mars will be a
> hundred thousand years from now). They could also honestly admit that
> they
> have no proof that merely stochastic mechanisms are sufficient to generate
> what we observe, and that their data and their understanding of the
> mechanisms of evolution are so spotty that they cannot rule out the
> possibility that intelligent causes may have been necessary to direct the
> evolutionary process. If Darwinian theory were taught in that humble,
> tentative, open-ended way, it would cause much less offense among the
> religious, and much of the battle in the high schools could be avoided.
>
> Cameron.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Campbell" <pleuronaia@gmail.com<mailto:pleuronaia@gmail.com>>
> To: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2009 1:39 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences
>
>
>>> "We can be confident, based on evolution, that primates are the best
>>> place
>>> to look for something chemically as well as physically similar to us".
>>>
>>> We could be equally confident without evolution. Aristotle and Linnaeus
>>> were both capable of seeing that primates and man had a lot in common.
>>
>> Linnaeus wasn't committed to the fixity of species. Anyone can see
>> that man and primates have a lot in common, but there's nothing a
>> priori outside of evolution that says they ought to be chemically
>> similar as well.
>>
>>> In other words, if two organisms are a lot alike morphologically, they
>>> are
>>> probably close evolutionary relatives. And from that we can deduce that
>>> they will be alike in other ways as well. But we hardly need the middle
>>> step (about being evolutionary relatives) to infer that tigers and
>>> lions,
>>> moose and elk, oranges and tangerines will probably be alike in ways
>>> other
>>> than their shape.
>>
>> No, similarity in shape only tells us that they probably have
>> similarities in aspects related to their shape. Oranges and tennis
>> balls are rather similar in shape but differ substantially in
>> chemistry, texture, etc.
>>
>>
>>> Regarding the liver example, I prefaced it by "if (let's say)". Given
>>> the
>>> premise, the logic was impeccable. If the premise was faulty, then
>>> delete
>>> the example; I could come up with thousands more. And the point was
>>> equally
>>> made in my example of the broken bone, which apparently is not
>>> objectionable
>>> to you. So if you understand the point, why quibble over one of two
>>> examples?
>>
>> Problems with the other example were already pointed out. (Another
>> problem with it is the fact that knowing what caused the accident that
>> led to the broken bone would be useful in trying to prevent similar
>> accidents.). The logic of inference from the example to the dismissal
>> of evolution is faulty. Of course, if you circumscribe a problem to
>> specifically deal with one particular practical issue, and take all
>> relevant inferences from general principles as given, you don't need
>> to refer back to the general principles that led to the relevant
>> inferences. But that does not prove the irrelevance of the general
>> principles. A baseball player trying to hit a ball does not have to
>> consider atomic theory, or even to know the laws of motion, but those
>> underlie what he is doing. If he wants to hit the ball harder, he can
>> experiment and find an empirical approach, or he can save time by
>> doing the physics and determining how to maximize the energy
>> transferred to the ball.
>>
>>> The point is that medical applications of biology proceed from empirical
>>> knowledge of how the creature's organs and systems work. That is, they
>>> proceed from physiology, anatomy, developmental biology, genetics, etc.
>>> If we know that gene number X5B97 (I'm making that up, because I don't
>>> know the labelling system for identifying individual genes) causes such
>>> and such a kind of cancer, then whether that gene evolved in the
>>> Mesozoic
>>> or the Cenozoic, whether it was originally transferred to human beings
>>> by
>>> a virus, or whatever, is all irrelevant. Wherever it came from, it's now
>>> a permanent fixture in the patient's genome, and it's killing the
>>> patient, and either we can treat the cancer or we cannot. If we cannot,
>>> the patient dies. If we can, the patient may live. And no physician is
>>> going to phone up Allen Orr or Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins in order
>>> to
>>> get evolutionary advice on how to treat the cancer, if it's treatable.
>>> They're going to read up on it in specialized !
>>
>> texts in physiology, biochemistry, oncology, etc., written by people who
>> actually know something about the day-to-day functioning of human bodies.
>> They will save the patient, if they do, by thinking like engineers or
>> auto
>> mechanics, not by thinking like evolutionary theorists.<
>>
>> But to know what the gene does and how it's supposed to work,
>> evolutionary data may be quite handy. In turn, this will help tell us
>> how to deal with the underlying genetic problem. Of course, the first
>> task is stopping the cancer, which depends on medical knowledge
>> (although discovering a cancer drug in species X should prompt study
>> of its close relatives to see if there are related useful compounds).
>> Cancer itself is something of an evolutionary situation, in which the
>> cancerous cells are evolving ways to dodge the body's controls while
>> the body tries to respond. Remembering that the cancer (or any
>> pathogen or parasite) is continually evolving is an important part of
>> maintaining medically relevant treatments. Cf. the Doonesbury cartoon
>> where the doctor asks the creationist patient whether he wants the
>> original drug or the ones that are effective against the strains that
>> have evolved resistance to the first drug.
>>
>> In trying to prevent recurrence, we need to know what the flawed gene
>> is supposed to do. Just suppressing the gene and seeing what the
>> effect is on the patient is not a good idea. Rather, we can look at
>> related organisms to figure out what the function of the gene is,
>> where it came from, etc. This will help us know how to target the
>> negative effects of the gene without compromising any useful function.
>>
>> Another good example of medically relevant evolutionary information
>> comes from Toxoplasma (a protist parasite usually caught from cats,
>> can cause severe problems for developing babies but otherwise not much
>> obvious impact on humans). It turns out to be more closely related to
>> plants than to animals, which may help in developing drugs that will
>> target it but not affect us (or cats).
>>
>> Another area where evolutionary data are very relevant is in
>> conservation. What's the best common model species to study or
>> experiment on for comparison with a rare species? Is this population
>> all that different or not? What populations are safe to mix for
>> captive breeding? For example, the dusky seaside sparrow was a rare
>> subspecies in Florida. The last few males were captured and breeding
>> was attempted with a similar-looking subspecies, but not successfully.
>> Molecular studies later showed that despite similar feather colors,
>> the chosen other subspecies was not very closely related to the dusky
>> and was not a good choice.
>>
>> Yet another area is in the use of evolutionary algorithms or in vitro
>> evolution to develop some end result/product of practical interest.
>>
>>> I'm sorry, David, but your case for the practical uses of evolutionary
>>> theory is weak. Nothing you've said in multiple posts convinces me that
>>> a
>>> Ph.D. in evolutionary biology has any advantage, when it comes to
>>> practical
>>> applications, over an intelligent generalist with empirical biological
>>> knowledge and plain old common sense.
>>
>> It depends very much on the definition of "practical applications."
>> Furthermore, this does not disprove practicality of evolutionary
>> knowledge. Does a PhD in evolutionary biology have an advantage over
>> someone with the same background except for the evolutionary
>> knowledge? Empirical biological knowledge, or any other empirical
>> knowledge, is quite useful, but having theory to guide generalization
>> of that knowledge is also useful. My grandfather worked for
>> Westinghouse and generally had a low opinion of the merits of the
>> engineers unless they actually talked with the people doing the
>> factory work to get empirical feedback. Nevertheless, their
>> engineering training was not devoid of use.
>>
>>> I myself would have tried a morphologically similar fruit fly in the
>>> search for the right pheromone to
>>> save the crops, and evolutionary theory would never have entered my
>>> head.
>>
>> Unfortunately for this approach, there are a whole lot of fruit flies
>> that look a lot alike, and some that look really weird that are more
>> closely related to some ordinary-looking ones than many pairs of
>> ordinary looking ones. It turns out that the standard lab Drosophilia
>> is not as closely related to the actualy type of Drosophilia as are
>> all the weird Hawaiian ones, for example.
>>
>>> And I've already said that I don't think evolutionary biology needs
>>> practical applications to justify itself, any more than Newton needed to
>>> send up a satellite in 1695 to justify his theory of celestial
>>> mechanics.
>>> My
>>> point is merely that nobody expects evolutionary theory to be practical,
>>> any
>>> more than they expect the Big Bang theory to be practical, so Darwinians
>>> are
>>> wasting their breath trying to sell it to the public on that basis.
>>
>> A claim of practical relevance is, of course, a valuable selling point
>> and so it is likely to be overemphasized. On the other hand, tying
>> something into practical applications helps someone see that it is of
>> relevance, and so it is a legitimate pedagogical tool.
>>
>>> They have to try to sell it to the public on the basis that it is true,
>>> i.e., that it accurately describes what happened in the past upon this
>>> planet. And the way to do that is to *provide the detailed, stepwise,
>>> genetic mechanisms which can explain the origin of major organs and
>>> systems and body plans*.<
>>
>> That's one way, though certainly not the only way. As pointed out
>> previously, this is at best beyond present technology and quite
>> probably humanly impossible to give in every detail with 100%
>> certainty. However, what we do have are lots of data from
>> paleontology, comparative biology, genetics, molecular biology,
>> biogeography, etc. that match what is expected from evolutionary
>> models.
>>
>>> Until they can do this, they have only themselves to blame for the fact
>>> that half of the American public finds the theory incredible.<
>>
>> No, there's also all the people who claim that it promotes atheism,
>> excuses immorality, or otherwise misuse evolution to promote social
>> and moral agendas; the people who make bogus claims to debunk
>> evolution; poor presentation of evolution in textbooks and classes
>> (better fact checking would generally make textbooks worth a little
>> closer to the exorbiant prices charged!) and the many factors that
>> contribute to a generally poor grasp of science among the general
>> public such as the cultural promotion of making up one's own "truth";
>> various industries attacking science because it can cut into their
>> profits by highlighting the dangers of their products, pollution, or
>> practices; laziness; public school teaching emphasis on politically
>> correct (whatever the relevant bureaucracy perceives as deirable, not
>> only the current U.S. political left's correctness) agendas rather
>> than on learning information, etc.
>>
>> --
>> Dr. David Campbell
>> 425 Scientific Collections
>> University of Alabama
>> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>>
>>
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Received on Fri Aug 14 21:51:15 2009