It was not the original question. Soft science does not mean not science. It means that there are shaky claims associated with the theory.
No. Just no.
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this is the example you choose to demonstrate that cancer research is a âharderâ science than evolutionary biology or astronomy?
Nice job of shooting yourself in the foot.
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Itâs an ambiguous term. Nobody knows what it means. You have claimed that evolutionary biology is intuition, and that the scientific method will beat it every time. Sounds to me like itâs not science, since science uses the scientific method but evolutionary biology, you imply, does not. There are other places. I accept that you donât have full control over what you say and may have misspoken.
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Let us note also that Billâs idea of research involves no actual research, as the term is understood in science.
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This phrase makes me laugh very hard. No need to read any further. Cornelius Hunter quoting an engineer. Well, who can argue with that?
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Not just an engineer: a respected one.
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Thanks for the paper.
Over the follow-up period, there were 341 deaths from cancer: 154 among participants who took vitamin D (1.1%) and 187 among those who took the placebo (1.4%). Although this difference was not statistically significant, the difference in cancer deaths between the groups started to widen over time, the researchers reported.
There is really nothing at this point to discuss. You donât have an objective test for common descent and there is no model that shows how long functional sequences are generated.
On the subject of simple adaptions we agree. On the subject of common descent independent of mechanism we agree common descent cannot be ruled out.
You still havenât read the thread about crocodylians, have you?
Of course there is. There are several models, some of which have been discussed here.
Thatâs a much weaker conclusion than the data support. Why are you unwilling to go any further? Can we agree that all crocodylians are united by common descent? All ratites? If not, why not?
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Sigh.
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On what objective criteria would I make this conclusion. Avoiding youâre continued insults if I donât agree with you.
Until you have a way to demarcate failure from success you donât have a test.
All you have to do is read the papers and notice the various statistical tests therein. Please do so.
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Sigh.
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I believe your tests can eliminate random sequence generation as a cause.
Is there a level of homoplasy (your scale 0 to 1) where you would lose confidence in common descent as an explanation?
Ah, youâre talking about consistency index. Consistency index is not a test of common descent. Go read the papers.
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Why not?
I thought we discussed that it was. What did I miss?
You have already been given that objective test: computational phylogenetics. You can objectively measure the phylogenetic signal in a tree, and see if it is statistically significant. The null hypothesis is a random distribution of characters.
What you mean to say is there is no model you will accept. We do have a model. Itâs called evolution.
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