So you would say that Isaac Newton’s law of gravity was 100% worthless because he didn’t provide a mechanistic explanation for action at a distance? That’s a pretty reckless statement, isn’t it?
Physics operates at the level of defining the fundamental laws of nature. IOW, it provides the basic rules and principles by which mechanisms operate. It is the job of other disciplines such as biology, geology and chemistry to determine how these laws operate within the material world to explain particular phenomena. So your analogy is inapt.
@Giltil, while I think @Faizal_Ali was not particularly diplomatic, your particular example is maybe not the best.
If you look at Newton’s Laws of Motion:
- an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force
- F = ma
- when one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, which takes the mathematical form:
F =G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}
one could notice (as you pointed out) is that none provide a mechanism, they are just straightforward observations or relationships. That’s what (often) differentiates a theory from a law in science.
In broad, not consistent because it’s science and we never do anything consistently, strokes here is what I tell my freshman science students:
- Models: conceptual/mathematical analogy
- Theories: tested hypotheses & models
- Laws: well-tested description of observed phenomena
- unlike facts, laws are broadly applicable
- unlike theories, laws don’t give a mechanism
Here’s a good figure from Wikipedia:
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Yet your YEC creationism is exactly that – an assumption that all organisms had the same builder. And you base that assumption on ancient stories.
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Yes.
And, yet, it the situation is such that we can demonstrate it to be true with just a few, simple axiomatic assumptions:
Independent observations can be made.
Logic works.
That is it.
I am not an expert in the field, but it seems to me that not all philosophers of sciences ( Paul Feyerabend for example) would agree that a scientific theory absolutely requires a mechanism. Am I wrong here?
Hi Jordan
I think you are making the same mistake that I was. You are conflating the process of making the artifact with the process of designing it. Tim described a small piece of the semiconductor manufacturing process.
While the design rules had to take this into account the bigger issue is the arrangement of the lines and the transistor arrays. This is what we call the microprocessor architecture.
Yes, ID is a limited claim and that is its weakness. As it claims a mechanism (mind) I think it is best described as a limited scientific claim however all scientific claims are limited some just more than others.
You see this in the same way I do. What the model does not show us is if there is independent origin events. It assumes a single tree. When I am asked if tigers and lions share a common ancestor I have no objective way to make this decision. My decision is just based on intuition.
Are you claiming proteins have transistors and were designed by humans? Biological life is nothing like human integrated circuit design OR manufacture.
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No, you’re not wrong at all. I tried to make that clear in my preface to what I teach my students. There isn’t any universal science standards body that defines the terms and methodologies across the sciences. What I said was just a fairly common way for people to think about laws and theories.
My point was 2-fold.
- Using physical laws as an example of theories without mechanisms is probably not the best example.
- That if ID folks want to put forward a scientific theory they should be ready to give a mechanism and not just an observation or assertion. Scientists will expect both a description of what happened, but also how it it happened.
If the scientists are open minded they won’t expect unreasonable detail for the mechanism or for you to even necessarily defend it, that can come later. What they need is something to differentiate between other proposed theories.
What scientists do really well is take competing models and break them down into component parts and compare them to the data to see which of the models is closest to reality. If I could summarize what science is that’s pretty close, in my opinion.
So, when people put out a theory without mechanism or anything to “grab on to” with their tools, they can’t do science and eventually they will say that the theory isn’t science.
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No Bill it doesn’t ASSUME a single tree. A single tree is an empirical observation for which the most parsimonious explanation is common ancestry. You keep getting that wrong no matter how many times it is explained to you.
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No, I am claiming both have purposefully arranged parts.
You just can’t demonstrate it with biological life. You’re just guessing again.
In what case would the model deliver a tree with more than one starting point?
Bill we’re talking about empirically observed reality here and now. The genetic data we have now shows a tree going back to a single starting point. Deal with reality, not your fantasized ID world.
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It won’t. The model doesn’t deliver trees. It evaluates trees. We pick the tree that best fits the data. If it fits the data uniquely, much better than other trees, that’s evidence for common descent. You could (and this is occasionally done) evaluate two or more unconnected trees for the same taxa, using the same model. That’s what Theobald 2010 did. Do you remember?
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Yes, and his analysis uses random change as the null. This is the point that @Paul_Nelson has been making.
What you are observing is not random but you are claiming a mechanism that is random with respect to changing sequences.
The two non random mechanisms being discussed are reproduction and mind.
I think that science should be first defined by its purpose before being defined by some methodology. In that sense, science is above all a quest for truth about the natural world.
It follows that the following questions are legitimate scientific questions, right?
- is an intelligent cause responsable for some aspects of the natural world?
- are there reliable signs of intelligence in the natural world?
ID theorists argue that they have found such signs of intelligence. Now, would it be wrong to say that ID theory is precisely about « signs of intelligence »?
Actually, I will respectfully disagree, for two reasons:
- That gives science too much power. I firmly believe there are truths about the natural world that are found outside of science. Is nature beautiful? How did the universe get here? Why is the universe so consistent and uniform in it’s laws?
- Science is fundamentally a human endeavor and those who do science care a lot more about how science is done. If your hypothesis isn’t testable or falsifiable, if you don’t engage with empirical data or make predictions, if you don’t participate in peer-review, it’s just not science.
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Neither Darwin nor Newton participated in peer-review.