No, I am making the claim that it is considered less reliable and that is true. All that being said I know it is less reliable because of my experience in industry. The scientific method will beat intuition every time. This is why we almost lost the economic war to Japan until we adopted the scientific method in industry.
I also think that experimental vs. non-experimental has very little to do with the reliability of evolutionary biology, and that the broad conclusions of evolutionary biology are extremely well supported.
I respectfully disagree with you. All that being said I think you have made the best case for common descent I have seen by anyone. What we are missing is the mechanism we can model.
No, thatâs not the issue. The issue being discussed here is whether evolutionary biology is a âsoftâ science, whatever the fork that even means. Even worse is itâs not at all clear what the âsoftnessâ or not of evolutionary biology would imply.
But itâs of course transparently obvious what Sal thinks it means. What he wants it to mean.
The claim is being advanced that evolutionary biology is a soft science because someone (who believes the entirety of physical reality is lying to us about itâs age and how it works) has taken the words of an evolutionary biologist out of itâs intended context and desired them to imply that therefore evolutionary biology is a âbadâ science.
The whole shtick being advanced here is that we should think evolution is false because itâs somehow lower in some sort of scientific pecking order. âSofterâ sciences, it is being implied, are âfalserâ or more unreliable sciences.
The only thing we need to point out here is that no matter how evolutionary biology sorts in the pecking order of science, that doesnât make it false or itâs conclusions unsupported or implausible.
Whatever the status of biology, you still have all your work ahead of you.
Also, there are plenty of both experiments and models in evolutionary biology, contrary to the exceedingly fatuous and ignorant assertions made earlier.
Is Young Earth Creationism a âsoftâ science? No. Itâs not a science at all. Itâs a granite-hard non-science. Perhaps the hardest, most unscientific of all the pseudoscientific pretenders in existence. No other field of pseudoscientific pretenders have so thoroughly managed to corrupt the intellectual foundations of itâs central mission.
The falsity of Young Earth Creationism, and the dishonesty and incompetent behavior of itâs pseudo-scientific practitioners is so thorough, total, and complete, that it is not recognized as a science by even a single reputable scientific organization on the entire planet.
Young Earth Creationism is not a science to such an extend that the behavior and arguments of Young Earth Creationists are some times used as instructive examples, if not outright insults and slurs among proper scientists engaged in debates, as the quintessential example of how NOT to behave as a good scientist.
âTheyâre acting like creationistsâ is the common example heard if you really want to rile people up and accuse them of extremely ideologically biased and badly motivated, anti-scientific behavior.
Your implication that historical science is just intuition is another claim that reveals your lack of understanding of science. You know nothing about evolutionary biology and you know nothing of the practice of science. You should stop making these pronouncements.
Bill, clearly we can have very good evidence that some event transpired without having seen it occur ourselves.
Take a super simple example like footprints in sand, or tire tracks on a dirt road. We donât have to have seen anyone walk or drive there to have very good reason to think that is what happened to produce those tracks. We are making an inference about something having happened without having actually seen it, and without doing an experiment.
This idea that science must be about direct experimental observation is a very bad excuse for rejecting particular claims that conflict with your beliefs. And itâs made all the worse because you are holding to this standard hypocritically. You have plenty of other beliefs that are not supported by direct experimental demonstration.
One-third of the engineers at MIT now work on biological problems, according to Graham C. Walker, MIT biology professor.
That trend is well in place for the simple reason that to understand the operation of biological machines is to do reverse engineering.
One of my professors of neuroscience was a PhD electrical engineer, not a traditional biologist. He was hired to do biology research because he was an Electrical Engineer. Here is a reason why:
That would be YEC Cornelius Hunter and YEC Rob Stadler. Hunter is a well known Creationist proponent and member of the Discovery Institute. Stadler is member of the Midwest Creation Fellowship whose web page describes them as:
Midwest Creation Fellowship is a Christian nonprofit educational organization. We exist to encourage fellow Christians by showing that the Genesis account of creation and the subsequent world-wide flood are in harmony with the vast majority of evidence from history and science.
Neither have earned any respect at all in any fields concerning evolutionary biology. Their personal opinions on the subject and $4.50 will get you a latte at Starbuckâs.
What more do you think it entails? Have you ever read a single paper in the evolutionary biology literature, including the ones I have given you? Did you look in the methods sections? Do you in fact know a single thing about how evolutionary biology is actually done?
There are certainly experiments done in evolutionary biology. That is not what this discussion is about. Itâs about the claims where there is no direct experiment behind it or data that you can analyze and attribute a statistical confidence factor to the specific claim made.
Almost all papers assume universal common descent is true. What foundation is this built upon? Itâs a better explanation than special creation and science has come to consensus on it.
You realize that the second part of that sentence is not related to the first part, right? Of course thereâs data you can analyze in evolutionary biology. But most of it isnât experimental data. I must conclude that you have never read any of the literature on the subject.
More evidence that you have never read any of the literature. Most papers are unrelated to universal common descent. Stop making claims about a subject you have never looked at.
If heâs not then heâs hiding it pretty well. Heâs posted dozens if not hundreds of the bog-standard YEC arguments against evolution on his Darwinâs God Blogspot in the last decade. Thereâs also his famous debacle as a Creation expert witness where he claimed modern wolves and extinct marsupial thylacines were the same animal. YEC or OEC heâs certainly a Biblical Creationist through and through with zero cachet in evolutionary biology.
This whole thread is just an attempt to put lipstick on Ken Hamâs pig; Hamâs imaginary distinction between âhistoricalâ science and âoperationalâ science. Or as Ham himself says,
Thatâs your universal answer to avoid thinking. I could support it, I suppose by taking a random sample of papers in some database of scientific literature. But you can probably think for yourself. For how many topics in evolutionary biology is universal common descent a necessary prior assumption? Only those that draw some inference from the entire tree of all life. How many of those have you seen?
Now, do you claim that you have ever read a paper in the evolutionary biology literature? If so, what was it?
I am talking about concluding common ancestry from the best fit of the data. Both of your papers do this. This is based on UCD as a working hypothesis.
Was your conclusion of loss of flight based on common ancestry as a working assumption?
YEC or OEC heâs certainly a Biblical Creationist through and through with zero cachet in evolutionary biology.