Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Don_Mc

@Mercer

I think there’s a misunderstanding here.

I’m saying that science provides far better explanations than retrospective ones–the arguments that ID pseudoscientists who don’t produce new data fill whole books with.

Yes, there is some misunderstanding going on here.

The fact that I agreed with Massimo Pigliucci (or Charles Darwin, or @John_Harshman or @sfmatheson) rather than you about the importance of explanation in science…

We weren’t disagreeing about the importance of explanation. We were disagreeing about the importance of arguments.

The misunderstanding is yours.

@Don_Mc

Okay, so when you said earlier that “science isn’t advanced by arguments,” you meant only arguments by ID pseudoscientists who don’t produce new data (and thus presumably far better explanations)?

You have quite a talent for the straw man. I mean that testing hypotheses is the center of science.

@Don_Mc

If so, I think for consistency’s sake you should also mention the arguments of historians, forensic pathologists, paleontologists and others who devise hypotheses regarding past events based largely, if not entirely, on previously existing data.

I don’t see why, because all of those people, unlike you, routinely test the hypotheses they devise.

We see this dull creationist trope all the time. The hypothesis has to predict something you don’t currently know, not necessarily something that happens in the future. IOW, if I clone and sequence a new gene, common descent predicts where it will be when we construct a tree based solely on sequence differences. It’s still a prediction, even if the events that produced the differences happened millions of years ago.

The quotes from your book emphasize that trope, especially this one:

@Don_Mc

“Arguably…, creationism and Evolution are strictly neither testable scientific theories nor documented historical events, but more like untestable theories of prehistorical events” (p. 59).

Putting aside your failure to understand that evolution is a phenomenon and evolutionary theory pertains to the mechanisms underlying it, in what way is evolutionary theory not testable?

@Don_Mc

…yet conspicuously failing to test a relevant hypothesis to support your explanation.

That’s some impressive word salad! Hypotheses are a subset of explanations. Hypotheses and explanations are supported by evidence. One tests a hypothesis to attempt to falsify it, not to “support an explanation.”

Let’s see if you can grasp hypothesis testing as well as the third-graders I have taught:

1. Joe hypothesizes that his dog understands English words.
2. Jim hypothesizes that Joe’s dog understands intonation, not actual words.

Note that Joe and Jim have no need to make any arguments or publish books; if they are being scientific, they shouldn’t be investing any ego in their hypotheses anyway–they can both figure out how they could be falsified.

Can you see how both hypotheses can be tested at once? Third-graders can.