Registration is one solid solution, the other being the captcha. A captcha is an image containing numbers or letters which must be retyped in a corresponding entry field. Because it is an image and not text, bots typically cannot recognize the text and it usually foils their attempts to post comment spam (although it does not help against trackback spam).

It means more work for commenters but is definitely less intrusive than registration. Registration works too; it does have the benefit of creating a community of readers/commenters along with the disadvantage of disuading the casual commenter.

"More work for commenters" to type in a string of letters, maybe. But lots less work than erasing hundreds of emails.

Anything you need to do is fine with me.

I am in favor of Capcha if it works. I am in favor of requiring registration if it works (it can't be automated, though. People will just automate the registration process to spam).

One other alternative I have seen used is to take the Post button away and just leave the preview button. Then the user types his/her comment and clicks Preview. They see the preview and from there they can press Post.

I'm sure someone will figure out a way to make spam bots get around 'Forced Preview', but it might work for a while and is probably the least intrusive mode. (Plus it should help cut down on mispellings.)

What I am trying to do here (in this discussion) is to "teach science".

I do not mean "teach biochemistry" (although we seem to cover more and more of it) nor teach any any specific science but to "teach science" in the sense "teach what it is that scientiets do".

Most people get some history, some math and some literature in their education but they don't really learn what scientist do as an intellecutal activity.

As I said, Science is a way to reason that is not natural, that is usually misunderstood by people who don't do it for a career but which is unexcelled at the only thing it tries to do: learn what the universe is and how it works.

I have no intent to convincing people who don't believe in evolution that evolution happened (or that the universe is 12.5 billion years old or that quantum indeterminacy is real). I won't convince them because the reasons they have for not believing in science are theological or philosophical and science, a different way to approach things, has nothing really to say about their religion or philiosophy.

But it would be nice if those who struggle through all these posts at least see how the reasoning works.

Of what Q posted there his definition of "Scientific Method" and the difference between that and what a philosopher or mathematician does is the type of reasoning I am talking about.

In the main discussion people seem to think that science is only able to investigate things someone can do over and over ("if I heat ice to 2 degrees C does it melt") not something that happened in the past ("Was there ever a glacier covering Minneapolis? Say during the last Ice Age")

Science is a way to reason. Yes, you can use science to try to figure out if something happened in the past. Even to figure out something that can only happen once. The Big Bang can happen only once (per universe. By definition) but you still can use science to test if it did happen.

You could do this in lots of ways (every one join in). But you can't say "I see that there are lots of small lakes in Minnesota. And I will theorize that small lakes were scraped out by glaciers. Now I will look at Minnesota, see lots of small lakes, and say "See - proof there were glaciers!"

That reasoning is circular.

The reasoning I gave for the Alvarez theory about an asteroid killing the dinosaurs off was different. The Alvarez, pere et fils, said _if_ you looked in the rocks (no one had yet) you would find elements associated with asteroids (iridium) and _if_ you then looked at where the iridium was relative to the dinosaur fossils, all the dinosaur fossils would be _below_ the iridium.

So they made a prediction as to what people would find in the rocks. Had anyone found a bunch of dinosaur fossils above the irdium the Alvarez hypothesis would have been junked.

Everyone see the difference? One theory (the small lakes idea) uses the data you were already looking at when you saw the correlation, then looks again at the same data to see if the correlation was still there.

The other (the fossils relative to the level of iridium) predicts something no one had looked for yet and, indeed, predicted correctly what was found (and the Alvarez theory didn't _prove_ the asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but showed a way people could prove the asteroid did _not_ kill the dinosaurs.)

Drew,

I understand the difference. I had never thought of it before, but I understand it. But that is still not what I would consider science. The Alvarez theory sounds really great. But it doesn't hold nearly as much water as gravity. No one saw the asteroid when it hit. No one saw the dinosaurs. Not only that, but no one has ever seen an asteroid do what Alvarez claims it did at any other time either(to the best of my knowledge). There may be a ton of evidence to support the theory, but there is no empirical data.

What if I have a theory that says the dinosaurs were nuked by aliens and that the bomb left a layer of iridium over the fossils? I go out and find iridium above all the fossils, and bam, great new science, huh? Now we could easily disprove that theory by showing that aliens don't use nukes that leave iridium behind, or that aliens don't exist, or something equally absurd.

But that doesn't seem like science does it? Tell me what's different between that and what Alvarez did.

When I was in school my professor loved to talk about cold fusion and how it was a perfect example of bad science. But what happened afterward was a perfect example of good science. After those two guys, I forget their names, claimed to have discovered cold fusion everyone else went to their own labs and tried to recreate it. No one could. Theory debunked.

Now if these guys had said that they had conducted cold fusion thirty years prior, and that they couldn't recall the conditions of the experiment then we would all be relegated to dealing with their claims like we deal with Alvarez's. We could theorize and speculate all we wanted, but we could never disprove their claim unless we disproved something ridiculous, like say that atoms didn't exist.

But just because atoms really do exist doesn't mean that cold fusion does. Doesn't that make sense? Can't you acknowledge the difference between something like gravity and something like evolution?

To Luke mostly:

Luke said “What if I have a theory that says the dinosaurs were nuked by aliens and that the bomb left a layer of iridium over the fossils?”

Actually let me give you a better example. Because I might be able to point at some feature in that layer of rock you would find if an asteroid strike occurred but would not find if a nuclear weapon went off. Why not just postulate that aliens caused the asteroid strike? That they pushed an asteroid out of orbit and into the earth?

I wouldn’t postulate alien intervention because of Occam’s razor ("you don’t needlessly multiply extra agents to explain what happened"). The problem with the alien nuclear weapon idea is that you can explain _anything_ by postulating a sufficiently powerful intelligent being, rather than the natural results of the laws by which the universe operates all the time.

Your idea is “unfruitful”. Science doesn’t choose to needlessly multiply outside agents, and by sticking to its rules science “works” (it succeeds at figuring out the laws by which the universe works). The proof it works are the difference between the world in 1500 and the world in 2004.

Luke said “that is still not what I would consider science” and “there is no empirical data”

But that is what scientists consider science. I am unclear what you mean by “no empiric data.” The iridium, its location in the rock and the location of the fossils in the rock are data. And the little glass and fuzed quartz droplets are data. How does my reading of a thermometer to see what the temperature of the solution was after that chemical reaction occured differ from my looking in a rock to see whether the fossil is above or below the iridium? Both are looking at the universe to see if the universe did what I predicted it would do.

Hmm, is this what bothers you: In the thermometer case _I_ caused the chemical reaction. In the fossil case I didn't cause the event. (But in both cases I look to see if it occured).

There are lots of features of the universe that scientists look at without causing the feature to appear. Stars (no human ever made one), lava flows, continental drift.

And your favorite, gravity. We didn't actually make gravity. We are just observing its activities "in the wild" as it were.

Re cold fusion:

Yes, sometimes science gets things wrong. More often it gets things inaccurate/incomplete. But science continues to measure itself against something (the universe or more accurately the things we measure/test/observe in the universe) and slowly makes progress learning about the universe. There is often a Two-Steps-Forward-One-Step-Back dance (the development of our knowledge of the structure of the atom had a lot of wrong ideas. For example for a while they thought electrons were _inside_ the atom and the nucleus (well, what they thought of as what we think of as the nucleus) was the whole shebang. Then they found the nucleus only occupied a small volume relative to the volume of the atom as a whole. Quelle Surprise!.

But progress was made and our knowledge of the structure of the atom has advanced.

Luke Said “Can't you acknowledge the difference between something like gravity and something like evolution?”

Tell me a difference. Both are ideas/hypotheses/theories. Both have data that support them. Both have been revised/fine tuned over the years as we have gathered more data.

You might say “Gravity is physical science, evolution is life science” but actually both are just the working of the few natural laws in practice (There are, so far as we know, only 5 really basic forces in the universe. The motion of galaxies and the mutation of DNA bases both are the results of those same forces).

No, I don’t see a difference in the sort of reasoning one uses as a physicist or a biologist. They use the same thought processes (with data about different objects).

Why do you believe gravity affects the motion of planets and galaxies?

To Luke, and to the other people who agree with Luke but aren’t being as thoughtful and verbal in expressing their opinions (hint hint-start chiming in people).

I gather you do believe in gravity.

There are 5 basic forces in this universe, at the present stage of development of this universe. (The forces have "changed phase" (mutate) over the history of this universe and might mutate again. But don't worry. If they do you will be dead (and matter as you know it will no longer exist) at the speed of light. They changed repeatedly during the first few minutes after the big bang but haven't changed "recently" (last 12.5 billion years). Those forces are in order from top to bottom:

Dark Vacuum Energy
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force

Not all of those operate at all scales of size/distance.

The Strong and Weak Nuclear forces operate only over very short distances (ie inside the nucleus of an atom). They do not have any effect on what happens over larger distances. For purposes of that last sentence the diameter of a water molecule from side to side is a “large distance”.

Gravity and Electromagnetism operate over medium sized distances and on medium sized objects. The reason they are familiar to you is that you are a medium sized object. So is the sun for purpose of this paragraph.

The Dark Vacuum Energy operates only over very vast distances. “Very Vast” means that over “small” distances like the diameter of this galaxy you can’t detect it having any effect.

I bring all that up to point out that showing a force explains a phenomenon/observation at one scale does not necessarily mean the force explains a phenomenon/observation at very different distance/size scale.

So Luke goes into the lab and makes a long vertical glass cylinder, makes a vacuum in the cylinder, drops a steel ball bearing inside the cylinder and measures how if falls and convinces himself by repeated experiments that “gravity” is a valid hypothesis. He might even then go up to the international space station and test two 10 kg lead balls and measure very accurately the attractive force between them at varying distances.

Then Luke looks at:

Jupiter orbiting the sun
A binary star pair orbiting each other at a distance of 3 Light Years
Two galaxies orbiting each other at a distance of 3 million light years.

And you conclude (I am assuming you conclude, tell me if I am wrong) that gravity is the reason those are orbiting at the speed and distance you observe.

Why do you conclude that? You will have (being careful) predicted from your measurements in the lab how the motion of Jupiter, the binary stars and the two galaxies should move based on your theory and calculating for those much larger distances and masses. But you will also have observed the motion of Jupiter, the binary star pair and the two galaxies to make sure the theory still is holding.

You have never actually made two galaxies and (repeatedly) put them near each other, given them a little shove, and seen how they move in an experiment you constructed yourself from top to bottom. You are observing things that were already happening before you started the experiment to make sure the hypothesis about gravity still holds at that scale of mass and distance.

And if you go to extremely huge distances (billions of light years) or extremely tiny distances (inside the nucleus of an atom of oxygen) you will find matter following very different rules.

So I think (if you reflect on it a bit) you will see your acceptance of gravity is based in part on observations of the universe as you find it, not just on specific configurations of the universe you set up in the lab.

Drew stated I don’t see a difference in the sort of reasoning one uses as a physicist or a biologist. They use the same thought processes (with data about different objects).

I know you don't see a difference. But, in yet another rare glimpse of Left Wing Drew, that is because you have a higher opinion of human nature than I. I work with "hard" scientists on a weekly basis and other social scientists on a daily basis. I rank the theories of human behavior as much less probable than the theory of gravity, but as much more probable than theories that represent what Luke dubbed "scientific history". I see how scientists think. However, I am loathe to just use personal examples, which is why I recommended you read Kuhn. Kuhn spent his career studying scientists and the history of science. Kuhn's main finding, with which my personal experience strongly supports, was that scientists rarely allow a discover (or many discoveries) to falsify their pet theories. They will keep changing it, or dismissing other evidence as irrelevant or non-scientific until the day they die. It is the younger scientists who have no attachments to the old theories who study the new theories.

Let me give you a personal example. In one of your comments to Lucy, you stated. Tell me some test, something you and I can both observe that will be "A" if the earth is 1 million years old but "B" if the earth is 4 billion years old. If you can come up with that test, and if we all observe A then the Old Earth theory goes the way of the heliocentric universe and your view is the new working hypothesis.

According to both Kuhn and my own observations about human nature, this is wistful thinking. Such behavior depends upon human beings acting in a logical, reasonable, and selfless manner. It rarely happens. The minute someone points out some tests (or discovers some data that disagrees with the original theory), human nature will assert itself. The champions of the old guard will either dismiss the evidence ("their methodology was sloppy" or "that's not science even if they did follow the scientific method"), state their theory has some holes in it, but it is still the best theory around so we'll keep it until something better comes up (while marshalling all their forces to attack any theories that may start rivaling it), or simply say that upon further review, the new evidence actually makes their old theory stronger, the old theory just needed some revising. This latter tactic, known to politicians as the "big lie", is only used when it is impossible to dismiss the new evidence.

Gould is a textbook case of this last category. Gould's theory of punctured equilibrium was completely data-driven. Darwin's theory predicted a slow change. The fossil record did not support this. This evidence could no longer be ignored, biologists had been doing so for over a century and their claims that eventually someone would find evidence were looking weaker every decade. Knowing the data in advance, Gould came up with the punctured equilibrium theory. This is a prime example of human nature, and scientists are just as human as everyone else.

Let's try another example. I know you are unfamiliar with many of the newer scientific theories (as judged by your stated unawareness of terms and theories that have become more prevalent over the last two decades). Early next week (hopefully Monday), I'll start the next post on our larger thread, one about the age of the earth and the universe. I'll anticipate the results and predict that we'll be able to come up with scientific arguments that should falsify both the old earth and new earth theories. Human nature being human nature, it will not. Both sides will go on thinking they are being scientific and that members debating the other side are allowing their own biases to cloud their thinking.

This is why I agree with Luke about some fields being much more reliable than others. The more easily a theory can be tested, the less room there is for human rationalization and subjectivity. The more difficult it is to test (and disprove) a theory, the less reliable the theory because of both the difficulties in testing and because of human nature.

Drew,

Forgive me for not being as clear as I should have. As far as Alvarez's experiment, it was a great example of what I would consider science. Make a hypothesis and test it. And then let everyone else test it. The issue I have with Alvarez, as I understand him from your postings, is that he then concluded that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. If his hypothesis was that iridium would be on top of all the dinosaur fossils, then that is a reasonable hypothesis which can be tested. If his hypothesis was that the asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, then finding iridium above their bones is not sufficient evidence to support that claim. I think you said yourself that some noted scientists think that the dinosaurs were already dead by that point.

That is the point I am trying to make. Just becuase there is iridium above the bones doesn't mean that the asteroid killed them. There is no way to observe the dinosaurs dying. Contrast that with gravity. Like you said, I can observe it with my own eyes, or my own instrumentation. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not I caused the phenomenon I am observing, only that I can observe it. Who observed the dinosaurs dying? Who observed evolution? Who observed gravity? Me and you and everyone else. That is the difference.

I think what you are defending is what they would call circumstantial evidence on Law and Order. I don't watch Law and Order and I'm not an attorney, so correct me if I'm wrong. That would be in contrast to whatever the name for that is, I'll call it hard evidence.

For instance, lots of people think that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. No one saw him do it. But there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he did: he had a rifle, he was in a position to do it, he shot a cop right afterward. But there are still many people who think that it was someone else. Why? Because no one observed it. Contrast that with Jack Ruby killing Oswald. No one doubts that he did it. That's because we've all seen the video, hard evidence. There is no doubt, or at least very little doubt. Oswald killing JFK is like evolution. There may be evidence, but it is nowhere near as compelling as the evidence for Ruby killing Oswald, or gravity.

It doesn't have anything to do with biologists or physicists. Good science would be like a biologist hypothesizing that kangaroos have pouches. He finds a kangaroo, and observes a pouch. I want to verify this and I go and observe a kangaroo too and voila, hard evidence, good science. C'est magnifique, non? On the contrary, a physicist could hypothesize that the universe was created via a big bang. I want to verify this so I, what? Look at some circumstantial evidence, something that suggests a big bang but is not an actual observation of it. It may be very convincing, I may have to be well educated to understand it, but it is still mediocre science.

You are undoubtedly better educated than I am, and probably smarter too. But please don't keep introducing all these above our head discoveries and hypotheses. It is not necessary, and it only obfuscates the question. That is why it is so hard to ever address this issue because everyone gets lost in the jargon.

I've never seen a better explanation of why fisticuffs is called the "sweet science".

On the other hand, I just happened upon the assertion, sorting magazines a couple of hours ago, that Jack Ruby actually killed a man named Alek James Hidell, and that Oswald is in a secure hiding place. Oddly, every expose of The Truth about the Kennedy assasination offers a different selection of evidence, and comes to a different conclusion.

And by the way, Occam's razor is not science, that's philosophy. You can't say "This Universe actually does not care if you find evolution hard to believe. Evolution happens to be how this particular universe works, however, which is the only question on the table. This Universe also does not care if you find quantum indeterminancy hard to believe (evolution is nothing compared to quantum indeterminancy). Me, I would not have chosen quantum mechanics as the basic (probably only) building block on which to construct a universe. But I wasn't asked," and then discard theories because they are hard, or harder, to believe.

The First Time I Went to England

That last post by Q reminded me of something. The first time I went to England (I am from the United States).

The first time I went to England I had lots of problems. I assumed I spoke the same language as the Brits. Tread lightly here. I say "science" and he says "data-driven" and we don't have any idea what the other guy is talking about.

As usual my overheated brain sees 12 or 15 different things to say. I will try not to say all of them at once.

1) Q mentioned Social Scientists. I don’t know anything about Social Scientists. I think everyone who has struggled through all 32K of this thread understands what I mean by “reasoning using the scientific method (hypothesis/test hypothesis/revise hypothesis/test revise hypothesis). Do Social Scientists do that? I haven’t a clue. I gather there are different sorts of social scientists (sociology, anthropology, uh, other stuff) and they may not all do the same thing with their minds.

I do know the word “Science” on the door of the department has nothing to do with that. Political Science doesn’t use scientific method. It is that other, older, broader definition of “science” Q gave: knowledge. Computer Science doesn’t use scientific method. It is a first cousin of philosophy and mathematics and sort of a distillation of logic. Science it is not.

Psychology I know a little about (my daughter in law is about to get her PhD in psychology and we discuss it a little. And I know a little about it from my own training. It does try to sort out human behaviour and “the mind” (different from “the brain” that a biologist studies). Psychology strikes me as a science in its first, early stages before it has really sorted things out. Psychologists do try to use the hypothesis/test algorithm but they are (as an analogy to physics) not at the level Einstein understood gravity and not at the level Newton understood gravity but maybe at the level Galileo understood gravity. (I am being kind. I have a daughter-in-law in the field). This isn’t a failing on their part. One has to start somewhere (physics is about 350 years ahead of them) and “gravity” is probably easier to map out than “the mind”

Re Kuhn (and Lucy) and do scientists really change their minds:

Do you know about the Dark Vacuum Energy? Physicists didn’t either in 2002. Now they do. New data. They changed their position (on a dime). (Dark Vacuum Energy is basically anti-gravity. It is a force that _repels_ two masses whereas gravity attracts them. Actually (like gravity) it is a property of space-time, not of mass. But we found it this calendar year, as I recall, so there it is. Now everyone has to deal with it.

The “champions of the old guard” will try to refute the Young Turks data. (Take the “Dinosaurs are warm blooded” squabble.) Good. They should. You can’t just waltz in here and tell me dinosaurs were warm blooded. I will fight you every inch of the way, be really critical and make you actually prove it.

But then we will agree and move on.

There aren’t a lot of physicists left that believe in Newtonian, as opposed to Einsteinian mechanics anymore. Yes, some of the old curmudgeons had to die, but that conservativism serves a purpose. You need to be flexible, but not too flexible.

But Science (different from philosophy or religion or lots of other ways to reason) does have an ultimate arbiter: What really happens in the real universe.

Lastly (re Q) on “data driven”:
He tells me this is “one of the newer scientific theories” and I still have never heard of it. I am pretty current in physics, astrophysics, biology, biochemistry and paleontology. Never heard of it.

I am trying to think of an area of science that _isn’t_ data driven.

Newton didn’t hypothesize his view of gravity from first principles (like mathematicians do) then see if it held up. He already knew and was trying to explain the motion of planets and the motion of bodies (like a brick) near the earth. Einstein didn’t hypothesize General Relativity. He used a branch of mathematics somebody else had thought up previously (tensor calculus) and saw that gave a nice explanation to a perplexing observation (that the apparent speed of light is the same for you and I even if I am traveling parallel to the beam of light at 90% light speed) but he didn’t just muse on General Relativity, he was trying to explain a troubling observation (data).

(Newton, by the way, did the opposite. Newton invented a new area of math - calculus - to explain the observation. Einstein applied an already developed, but little used area of math).

I guess the Alvarez theory is sort of hypothetical. But that was based on data too (what causes 98% of all the species on earth to suddenly vanish at irregular intervals every few hundred million years?)

I await Monday’s post from Q.

Meantime I want to do some scientific reasoning here with the audience (to be continued)

There are some other qualities of scientists, if you are interested.

a) they assume things can be understood. Not all kinds of reasoning make that assumption. I am Catholic. Catholics believe there are things (what God is like “internally” when not dealing with our universe) that are completely beyond human understanding. (I agree). But regarding this universe I assume I can understand it because to do otherwise is “not frutitful”.

b) scientists, when stumped by a large problem they cannot see how to solve, turn instead to a smaller problem they do think they can solve. They assume that by solving a lot of small problems they will eventually make progress and see how to solve the big problem.

So I want to discuss why it is that Luke (and maybe Q and maybe others) see some marked division in kinds of science or data or experiments I don’t see.

I would ask you all to _not_ deal with evolution nor with biology for the moment. I am trying to isolate what the gap between my understanding and yours is, and I suspect it may be “living stuff” vs “inanimate stuff” but first I want to work out some questions about what an experiment is and historic data.

I suspect (other than the belief that animate matter has one set of rules, inanimate matter another set of rules) there is either a difference between me and Luke regarding

a) the kind of data one gets if one sets up an experiment in the lab and the kind one gets if one observes nature “in the wild”.

b) the kind of data one gets from looking at what _did_ happen in this universe in the past vs the kind one gets by doing a prospective experiment.

Does Luke, Q or anyone else see either of those as the problem?

There are experiments one sets up in the lab (“in vitro” literally “in glass, in the test tube as it were) and observes in nature as one finds it (“in vivo” literally “in life”).

There are a couple of reasons scientists gather data “in the wild”.

1) There are data one just can’t get in the lab. The thing you want to measure is too big, too hot, too dangerous for example. You may not be able to see the effect with something smaller than a galaxy (a galaxy isn’t large enough to detect the Dark Vacuum Energy. You need to look at about 3/4 of the visible universe to see it).

You could, in theory, study supernovae by making them and setting them off. To survive the experiment you want to set it off some distance from you (another galaxy is about the right distance. Say 1 million light years). Now that _is_ possible (make a huge star, set it up that it will go supernova when you push a button (the button dumps a lot more hydrogen into the star), push the button and look in your spectrophotometer.

Since you want to be 1 million light years away, it will take 1 million years for the signal from your button to set off the supernova. And another 1 million years for the light to get to your spectrophotometer. 2 million years all told (much shorter and you are dead, not published). Do you have any idea how long it will take you to get tenure if each experiment takes 2 million years?

But that _is_ possible.

There are experiments that just are not possible (if you and the universe intend to be around to see the answer).

Remember I mentioned that this universe has changed phase (changed its physical laws) a few times. That was in the first second (millisecond). What was the universe like then, when gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces were just one force?

That happened when the energy (uh, temperature) of the universe was really high. So you could try to duplicate that in a supercollider. If you _should_ succeed in achieving sufficient energy something bad will happen (in the physicist sense of “bad” These guys regard thermonuclear bombs and supernovae as “interesting”). The universe will have a phase change. It will extend in all directions at the speed of light. Behind the wave-front of that phase change a) people will be dead b) atoms won’t exist c) even electrons, neutrons and protons won’t exist (the rules of physics will be wrong). Basically you will destroy this entire universe.

Physicists are building a really powerful collider (“cyclotron”) at CERN. It is so large it is part in France and part in Switzerland. It is intended to make energies closer to the Big Bang than what we currently can make, so we can learn more about the Big Bang.

Being sane, the physicists first calculated the energies to make sure they wouldn’t be so large as to cause a phase change. Because otherwise when they pushed the on button the universe as we know it would disappear.

But CERN is safe and under construction. They will likely do the math again before building the next generation after that.

(Sidebar on parnoia:
There are billions of stars on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 100 million light years from earth. If, anywhere on the surface of that sphere, any physicist built a collider that is too powerful and didn’t do the math first, and he turned it on 100 million year, 5 minutes ago the universe is toast. And the wave front will be here in 5 minutes, to tear your subatomic particles to pieces. But you can’t see it coming because it is coming towards you at lightspeed.

Have a nice day)

So you _cannot_ test in the lab the energies of the first microsecond of the universe (and have the universe survive).

So physicists look at “fossils” (their term): Things left over from that microsecond. Strange particles that are still flying around. The large scale structure (how the galaxies and voids between galaxies are distributed), the cosmic background microwave radiation (the left over heat) and the smoothness of distribution of that heat in space.

Those are the only data they can collect.

2) In Vivo vs In Vitro.

Remember what I said about the genesis of elements (Hydrogen to Oxygen to Iron). We know that _can_ happen in the lab. But is that how is _did_ happen in the evolution of the universe?

Biologists spend a lot of time worrying about this. Just because you can break this carbohydrate down into that sugar by this specific chemical reaction in a test tube doesn’t mean that a red blood cell in your spleen uses that particular reaction instead of some other reaction.

So you need to look in the real live sauvage universe to see if it does in the wild what you can do in the test tube.

Those are two reasons scientists collect data in ways other than laboratory bench experiments.

(Going way back)

Does the collection of historic data or the collection of data “from the wild” bother anyone that such data invalidate the scientific method?

Q said "Gould's theory of punctured equilibrium was completely data-driven. Darwin's theory predicted a slow change. The fossil record did not support this."

No. There is slow change. All the time. That explains those beaks on the finches in the Galapagos. And the small horse to medium horse to large horse (losing toes gradually in the process).

Gould is talking about the mega changes when 98% of all species vanish in the blink of an eye. After those happen (in a world full of opportunity and with no competition anymore for "large plains grazer" or "shoreline scavenger" there is a burst to fill all those open niches from some unlikely survivor.

Luke stated:

It doesn't have anything to do with biologists or physicists. Good science would be like a biologist hypothesizing that kangaroos have pouches. He finds a kangaroo, and observes a pouch. I want to verify this and I go and observe a kangaroo too and voila, hard evidence, good science. C'est magnifique, non? On the contrary, a physicist could hypothesize that the universe was created via a big bang. I want to verify this so I, what? Look at some circumstantial evidence, something that suggests a big bang but is not an actual observation of it. It may be very convincing, I may have to be well educated to understand it, but it is still mediocre science.

Exactly. If something is not observable, testable, and repeatable, it is mediocre science at best. That is not to say we should not try to understand the past, but it is foolish to give any theories about origins science (another word for Luke's historical science) the same credence we give operational science.

Drew had a question about social scientists.

Q mentioned Social Scientists. I don’t know anything about Social Scientists. I think everyone who has struggled through all 32K of this thread understands what I mean by “reasoning using the scientific method (hypothesis/test hypothesis/revise hypothesis/test revise hypothesis). Do Social Scientists do that? I haven’t a clue. I gather there are different sorts of social scientists (sociology, anthropology, uh, other stuff) and they may not all do the same thing with their minds.

OK, another sidebar. We have a lot of those at our roundtable, especially on this megathread :-)

In academics, most scientists (social and otherwise) have very little background on the philosophy of science. It is not until a person pursues their doctorate that they actually spend more than a week on the subject. And even then, it depends upon the department and the school. Until I became interested in obtaining my Ph.D., I didn't realize that various schools have their own philosophies about how to research. It is important to this discussion because some schools strongly stress the scientific method (such as the research university I attended) and some do not. The two camps also argue quite a bit with each other. For example, those who do not give much emphasis to the scientific method argue that ever since Hume pointed out that the modern science depends upon two major assumptions (causality and induction) which are unproven articles of faith amongst scientists, science is no more accurate than other methods of research. These post-modern schools of thought depend more upon qualitative studies instead of quantitative studies. There are relatively few post-modern folk in the hard science community - at least those who admit it, I place many macro-evolutionists in this camp ;-) - but there are many amongst those who study societies and individuals. Those who use the scientific method to study societies and people are social scientists. I consider myself one of these. This is nothing new – social scientists have come up with many theories of human behavior and continually test them. Many end up on the ash heap of history, but others seem to work quite well (especially in the aggregate; it is much, much easier to predict how a mass of people will behave verses predicting the behavior of an individual).

This background is why I rank some "hard science" theories, such as the theory of gravity, as much higher than "social science" theories. However, both "hard science" and "social science" theories are operational science, they may be repeatedly observed and tested. This is why I give even social science theories much more validity than I give origins science (aka Luke's scientific history).

YAY! Posts not spam!

Re the Luke/Kangaroo/Pouch thing:

No. Dead wrong. Here is how it works:

I hypothesize a kangaroo has a pouch for some reason (no eggs and babies born too small to survive in the world (both of those are true).

You go find a kangaroo, test if the kangaroo has a pouch, find it does NOT have a pouch (we are talking female kangaroos here obviously).

You have _disproved_ my theory.

See the difference?

Re repeatable:

The experiment (a way to look at a kangaroo or a way to look at an early star for iron in the spectrum) is something that is repeatable in that any scientist (trained and with the right equipment) can also see the pouch.

If some other person can't also look at the star, or the kangaroo, _that_ is not reproducible.

More in a bit.

I want to do something "as an experiment" (Scientists think you can break a large, insoluble problem into small soluble problems. At least that is their operating assumption).

I want to talk (for the moment) not about life/evolution. I don't want to talk about the Big Bang.

I want to disect out the "can science tell what happened in the past" idea and deal with that thing I said about evolution of the elements (Hydrogen to Oxygen/Carbon/midweight elements then to Iron etc).

To recapitulate: This sequence is compatible with lab (cyclotron/accelerator) data and this is compatible with our general picture of the atom. But we would like to know (even if this is a possible way to get iron atoms) if this is actually the way this universe got its iron atoms. So we look for historic data too (in the spectra of old, middle aged (second generation) and new (third generation like the sun) stars to see which elements are in the spectra.

Those are repeatable experiments (anyone with a telescope (a big enough telescope) and a spectrophotometer can look at the spectral lines too). It is not "make a star, set off a supernova in the lab, look at the showere of elements" experiment though. And that (making your own supernova) wouldn't answer that question I asked about the history of this particular universe.

Do Luke, Quixote and others see that as "mediocre science" and if so, why?

I will get to the causality thing Q brought up eventually. It is a big subject because it has to do with time (how fast does it move and does it only go in one direction and does it go at the same speed for everyone) and probability.

There is a _lot_ of background before we can understand each other there.

I want to disect out the "experiment about what happened in the past" problem explained in my immediate prior post first (as if "immediately prior" has any meaning to the photons coming out of your computer screen . . . )

Hehehehe. So the plan is to send all the Democratic Senators out of the country?

"Why is he saying 'out of the country when the UN is headquartered in New York?"

Because there is a petition drive to get the UN headquarters thrown out of the US. I favor Darfur, but I would accept Port-au-Prince, Haiti as an alternative.

http://www.moveamericaforward.com/?Page=Petition

That would almost be better than chocolate! I don't care if he's a Republican or Democrat, but he IS Jewish. Personally, I think all our representatives to the UN should be Jewish. No, I'm not advocating this as a punishment to American Jews but rather a constant reminder to the UN that we find their anti-semitic policies appalling.

To Lucy:

Do you recall the days of Apartheid? The US sent a black ambassador to Union of South Africa [G]

That was a nice one too!

I'd be surprised if it were any other way. Afterall, soon there will be adults that never experienced life before the SciFi channel. Or the moon landing. Or Hallmark making StarTrek Christmas ornaments.

Well, I've been alive through most of the era of space exploration (I was born between the Zond 2 and Ranger 8 missions).

I've come to think of Darwin's theories as very useful for micro-evolutionary trend analysis but seriously flawed for macro-evolution.

When I was younger, I was disappointed in religion, because it didn't provide "all the answers."

As I get older, I'm coming to the conclusion that, maybe, science should try to provide answers and religion should provide questions.

I'm still a bit leery of any doctrine which requires "blind" faith, but whether divine intervention or extraterrestrial "seeding" is to blame, I'm more and more convinced that there is more out there than just us.

Of course, a far enough evolved civilization would be indistinguishable from the ancients' version of Gods in any event.

Basically, I just want to know who to blame! ;)

I think there's a fundamental flaw in attributing life on Earth to aliens. Where did the aliens come from? If abiogenesis is impossible on Earth, then why would you think it more likely on another planet?

Furthermore, one of the primary ideas of ID is that complex specified information (CSI) can only be produced by an existing intelligence. If you follow that proposal to its logical conclusion then the intelligence must have originally come from outside our known universe.

What is this "as more and more scientists abandon Darwin"? First I have heard of it.

Small sidebar on Darwinism: Darwinism is, like quantum mechanics and general relativity an idea that is pretty simple at its core, non-intuitive, talked about by a lot of people who are not talking about what the real theory says and profound, correct and changed massively our view of the universe.

The one "change" in Darwinism is that Darwin himself thought in terms of slow gradual change. That isn't right. We now know the change is occasional and fast ("punctuated equilibrium". You stay in one state for a long time, then suddenly (so fast the record in the rocks sees it as almost immediate) go to another equilibrium. That is an embellishment, not a refutation of what Darwin originally said, though.

Hmm, most people who talk about Darwinism are really talking about Lamarkism (Lamark said that the giraffes stretched their necks so their children had longer necks. Like saying that if you do a lot of weight lifting your children will be born with bigger muscles. Darwin actually said 1) the variability is random (no trend to longer or shorter neck). That was a huge intelectual breakthrough BTW. Before Darwin people defined a species (the red winged warbler for example) by a single platonic ideal in a museum collection. After Darwin people defined a species by collecting a lot of red-winged warblers to show what spread there was to the species. That is a very different view of the word "species"

2) It is the selection that is non-random (long neck lives long enough to have more kids). This is what Jacques Monod called "chance and necessity" which is a nice way to put it. Is that what you are talking about?

Species come to predominate by "compound interest".

K=K1*T^N. If one N is bigger than another N, the formula with the larger value for N gives a larger value for K as T becomes large.

None of this has anything to do with either God nor aliens. It is just arithmetic.

Many good comments on this thread. Here are a few more thoughts in response to some of them.

If abiogenesis is impossible on Earth, then why would you think it more likely on another planet?

I don't. I agree with your logic. However, Crick was a smart man and his theory was that while the evidence clearly refuted Darwinism (or macro-evolution) on earth, the theory was still viable. Thus it "must" have happened somewhere else in the universe.

What is this "as more and more scientists abandon Darwin"? First I have heard of it.

Ever read Kuhn? Must reading for any discussions about how scientists think. One of the things he pointed out was that most scientists rarely change their mind when a theory is being abandoned. A few key senior guys might, but in many cases none of the older scientists will move on to other theories. Instead, the younger guys – who may or may not be more flexible, but definitely have the advantages of being more motivated (they still have to earn their reputations) and having less baggage (they haven't spent a career refining the old theory) – spend time on new theories. The old theory doesn't go away until 1) the new theory is strong enough to better explain things and 2) the old farts die off.

Item 1 explains why Darwinism is still around – despite all the problems with the theory (which I'll briefly discuss later), it is the best naturalistic theory that biologists have been able to muster. According to Kuhn, a bad theory, no matter how flawed, will stick around in the absence of a better theory.

It is also difficult to falsify Darwinism since biologists keep it a moving target. As you mentioned, Darwin predicted change was very, very slow. The fossil record does not support this, so his theory was wrong. However, the biologists just changed the theory and created the idea of punctuated equilibrium to keep the idea of evolution alive in the face of what they were actually finding. Intelligent Design actually better fits the fossil record (in your words the rocks sees it as almost immediate) than supporting Darwinism.

However, the reason why I think (along with many other scientists) that Darwinism is on the way out is that the younger scientists (mostly molecular biologists such as http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=UH0kBpSAs9&isbn=0684834936&itm=1 ">Michael Behe) don't believe in Darwinism. Macro-evolution made theoretical sense when people thought cells were relatively simple and that a tiny tweak here or there could result in a fully functional new organ. If you want the details, buy his book (or one of the many like it, but Behe is a good writer). If you want a layman's view, I suggest Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson. Philips is an attorney who shreds the claims of Darwinists in a clear and funny fashion. No matter what our beliefs about Darwin are, the main point is that I see more and more young scientists rejecting Darwinism. If this trend continues, as I predict, Darwinism will be on the ash heap of history when the older scientists die off.

BTW, a few years ago I was surprised to learn that Darwin plagiarized the idea of natural selection from Edward Blyth, a creationist. Now this fact somehow escaped all my biology texts…

Trying to deal with this in small bites:

"You are cheating because Darwinism is a moving target. And besides, it is just a theory."

Here is how science works. It is _not_ a way most people approach the world. But it is important to understand because it changed the world enormously (and still is) after about 40,000 years of trying to deal with the universe with a different set of intellectual tools.

Most people approach the world by "tradition" by which I mean "I did this before and it worked so I will keep doing it that way." As an example of tradition: Every time the tribe cooks a pig we all get sick. But if we sit around the fire and chant the names of all our ancestors, and all the hunts they were on (which takes about 2 hours) while the pig cooks, then none of us gets sick." That will work. Over and over. What is obviously happening is by doing all that chanting you are cooking the pig long enough so the microorganisms in the pig get killed. And you don't know why it worked, but you don't have to know why it works. It does and "tradition" in the sense of doing things you have done before with success is the second best way we have come up with to get along.

About 1500-1600 A.D. the western Europeans came up with a different way to do things. The ancients (the Greeks and Romans for example) were very bright and knew a lot, ie they were excellent at observing and reasoning. For example they knew the earth was a sphere and they knew the dimensions of the earth to within about 3%. But they didn't use science.

"Science" works like this. You come up with an idea of what will happen. Then you test the idea. The idea comes _before_ the testing. See how that differs from "tradition"? You do this by thinking up some action you can take that would turn out "A" if the theory is actually how things work but "B" if the theory is wrong. You do the test. If "B" occurs you scrap the theory and think of some other theory. If "A" occurs you are a bit more confident. Not certain (see below) but more confident. You then think up some other test ("C" if the theory is true, "D" if not) and test that. You keep doing this as long as none of the data conflict with the theory.

Some important points:

1) You _never_ prove a theory. You can't prove a theory. All you can do is _disprove_ a theory. Do you see why? If the theory does not fit one of the observations I have made, it is wrong. But if it fits every observation I have made that doesn't mean there is not some other observation I have not made which will show it wrong.

Let's take gravity. Newton came up with a theory of gravity. It was brilliant and it fit all the observations anyone made from the falling of an apple to the motion of the planets circling the sun. So everyone used Newton's theory. And it worked and they did all sorts of useful things they could not have done without knowing ahead of time where things would land when you tossed them into the air. They discovered planets for example. They could see the outer planets orbits were not following the predicted paths, they used the theory, it said "There must be another planet, further out, perturbing the orbit" and the theory told them where in the sky that further-out planet had to be, and they looked there very closely and lo! There it was (twice - that planet had one further out still, perturbing it).

But then the instruments got better and they found Newton's Law of Gravitation did not work perfectly. Mercury kept getting out of place. So they came up with a new theory, an embellishment/improvement built on Newtons (Eistein's law of gravitation which allows for warping space near the mass of the sun) and now they have a theory that is better.

Newton's theory is still good enough for most purposes. And people still use if for most purposes. It is simpler to calculate and the errors are tiny for anything you do on earth with normal sized objects. You have to deal with enormous velocities, masses and distances before you start to see the errors creep in. Then you switch to Einstein's theory.

Einstein's theory is not proven. We are still testing it. If we should find some odd condition (near absolute zero right close to the event horizon of a black hole? Who knows?) in which it does not hold, we will have to come up with a new theory to cover those circumstances.

Note that this "New Theory of Gravity" will have to cover all the old observations too. Einstein's theory covers all of the normal-speed normal-mass observations just fine.

2) The whole point of "science" is that it is predicitve. It tells you (ahead of time) what the observation will be when you run the experiment. Science, as opposed to tradition in the odd way I defined tradition above, lets you progress enormously faster in figuring out what will happen. Tradtition (in my sense of the word) keeps you safe standing where you are. Science lets you move out into unexplored areas of the swamp. That is why knowledge exploded starting in the 1600s. Science is the reason you have a cell phone, can feed 6 billion people on the world, didn't die of measles at age 2 years and live in a world where people can exchange ideas over the Internet.

3) You test against the universe. You don't just speculate. And the testing against the universe bit means there is an arbiter (the universe) making sure "your science" and "everybody else's science" is "the right science.

In religion or philosophy you can have one idea and I can have another. You can say you find inner peace while saying "Om" in the lotus position and there is nothing I can say or think or do to contradict that. If that gives you inner peace, fine. That is your inner peace. In science if you say "I think gravity makes things fall up, not down" we have a way to tell if you are right and all the rest of us are wrong. We will come to an agreement because there is a way to test. Note that you (who think before the experiment that apples fall up) will not only agree with me, after the experiment. You will agree with the universe too. That's important. Your cell phone actually works, it isn't just a philosophical cell phone that gives you an inner sense of connectedness with other people who carry the cell-phone talisman with them.

Science is good at telling you whether A or B will happen in the real, physical universe if event X occurs. Nothing else is anywhere close to telling us that. If you want evidence for that, look at the rate of accretion of knowledge of the universe before 1600 and after 1600.

Science does nothing _other_ than tell us what will occur in the physical universe if event X occurs. You can say "My eastern philosophy is superior to science because it enlightens me regarding the oneness of beingness" and all I can say is "that isn't what it is trying to do". You can say "But I choose to believe that the apple falls up and who are you to say I am wrong' and my answer is "The apple doesn't fall up."

Now on to what Darwin's Theory says and what Punctuated Equilibrium says (think of Newtonian and Einsteinian laws of motion) in a future post.

OK, Two more things. (I keep needing to set more background before getting to the "More and more young biologists reject Darwinism" statement”

Solipsism, Berkleyism, Christian Science and the Pranskter God:

I don't believe in any of them. Solipsism is a philosophical idea which says that the only thing in existence is my own mind. Even _your_ mind doesn't exist, let alone the physical universe. You can't disprove Solipsism. Berkeleyism (named after the philosopher, not the city in California. The California city is actually named after the philosopher) is similar. Christian Science (as I understand it) says that all our souls exist but there is no physical universe. That is why they don't believe in medical care. One of my college roomates was a Christian Scientist. (He was also a linemen on our NCAA college football team which is relevant to the following story.) I would ask him over dinner (this is a true story):

"So what if you got gangrene in one leg and frostbite in the other and both legs fell off and you couldn't walk. Would you admit then you hadn't any legs?”

"No. All that would prove is that, because I am not a perfect enough Christian Scientist I thought I didn't have legs and wasn't walking.”

"So what if I take this thing that seems to me, a non-Christian Scientist, to be a fork and stick it into the back of that thing that seems to be your hand?”

"I would seem (because you are not a perfect Christian Scientist) to break your arm. But your arm would really be broken, even though it would seem to hurt.”

That (real) conversation pretty much sums up my view of the "inner truth/no objective universe" crowd. It is impossible to prove the universe is out there, because they can always say "I am choosing not to look." But actually they do believe it exists. You will note the Eastern Philosophy crowd actually do come in out of what seems to be rain.

The "God the Prankster" people are a little similar. If I say "The sun is 4 billion years old and the evidence is a) the rate of fusing hydrogen to helium and b) the amount of helium in the sun are the amount it would take 4 billion years to make (I know, there is the background H2 from the Big Bang but you get the idea). They answer: "God made the sun 4004 years ago (or at 10 AM this morning) and he put that amount of helium in the sun to test our faith.”

With that sort of reasoning too we are not going to have any meeting of minds. Anything observed in the universe doesn't refute belief for the first crowd (the Berkeleyians) because they claim I am not really observing anything and doesn't refute anything for the second crowd (God the Prankster people) because they say "God made it just like that.”

For me there is an actual universe out there, external to my mind. And I assume it operates under non-capricious rules for two reasons:

a) If it doesn't, there is no point in thinking about anything

b) And my cell phone works. I.e. the point of view that there is a universe and you can predict some things about it (the quantum mechanics of the chips in your cell phone for example) actually get you someplace.

There are those who don't accept "get you some place" as having any meaning. The inner-peace Eastern philosophy crowd for example (see my last post). I am not one of them.

When he says "Darwinism" I get the impression the Admiral is not talking about Evolution (see my post on Darwin which is coming, honest) but may be talking about the divide between inorganic matter (a mix of Methane and Ethane gas) and living matter (a bacteria).

I would caution the Admiral that using religious reasoning to answer a science question is dangerous.

For example "can a mix of chemicals similar to those in the cometary halo make DNA in the laboratory" or "Can naked DNA molecules come to have a lipid bilayer isolating them from the surrounding chemical soup" (actually the sequence was probably lipid bilayer first then surface reactions and reactions in the pocket isolated by the bilayer for reasons of concentrating and isolating the right chemicals but that is a side issue). That is a science question. If you say "No, because God has revealed to me it can't happen" you are at risk of finding out actually it does happen.

That happened for "the earth is the center of the universe", the sun is the center of the universe" and, uh, Darwinian evolution.

Another question is "What about the soul?" That is a religious question.

Darwin discusses evolution of species including man. He doesn't say anything abou the soul. Drawing conclusions about religious matters based on scientific evidence is as likely to put egg on your face as drawing conclusions about scientific matters from religious beliefs.

As an aside, and the Admiral and I have discussed this before, I don't have any expectation that "the soul" is uniquely human. We may find other species on other planets that seem to have civilizations, relgions and moral codes. There are even some other species on earth that may have "religions" (I think).

Neanderthals are not our species. We did not evolve from them. They are not our ancestors (as far as recent data shows). They and we are cousins, but we are not their descendants. Neanderthals had ceremonial burial (flowers and hunting trophies and animal heads in the grave.). Sounds to me like they were pretty smart, and may well have done those burials because they were concerned about an after life. Did Neanderthals have souls? Who knows?

Koko (the gorilla) is sophisticated enough to know she has an emotional state and that her emotional state will possibly be different in the future. She was grieving (her pet died) and she said with her sign language she was "not ready to stop grieving yet" (the "yet" is the boggling word she used. If gorillas mourn the dead and know their emotional state from an outtside viewpoit do gorillas have souls? Who knows.

But I do know you can't answer the Neanderthal soul question with science. Nor the Life from Inaminate matter question with religion. Every time somebody tries that, they wind up looking silly.

Now maybe I can discuss Darwin.

Evolution according to Darwin

As I said, Jacques Monod’s description “L’hasard (random unpredictable chance occurrence) et la necessite (the inevitable sequela of that chance event) is a pretty good description.

1) Random event.

In olden days people thought of species as a single ideal. The Platonic Ideal Fox for example. A species is a collection of individuals who can breed with each other. There is a range that includes “horse” (Apaloosa, Arabian, Morgan). There are things that are not horse (cow) and things that are close (zebra, burro). “Burro” is right at the edge of being a different species from “horse”. A burrow and a horse can breed and have offspring (a mule or a jenny depending on whether the horse is the daddy or the mommy). But that offspring is almost always sterile.

But two horses have offspring that differ a little. Randomly. This one has slightly longer legs and that one slightly shorter.

There is no trend to this point. No push for taller horses. Just random wobble around a mean.

2) The Sequela

However of those offspring one (the tallest maybe) will have an edge in living long enough to have progeny. It has longer legs and runs faster. The difference is only slight but it is, say, 1% more likely to reach reproductive age than the horses that were shorter.

This “taller” thing is a random event parent to child, but NOT a random event child to grandchild. What I mean is that (we now know the molecular mechanism. Darwin didn’t) the parents randomly shake the dice cup and give “A” or “B” of each of their #11 chromosomes to the progeny. That progeny now has the B version of the #11 chromosome from the daddy and the A version of the #6 chromosome. And the A chromosome the daddy gives may not happen to be exactly the same as the A chromosome in the rest of the daddy.

(Sidebar: For example, in Queen Victoria there was a mutation in one of her chromosomes. She (but none of her forebearers) had the hemophilia gene. See below).

This mix of chromosomes the new taller horse has result in a taller mix of that horse’s progeny (thereafter). Actually they result in a mix for the grand-child horses too, but that random mix is now around a slightly higher mean.

(Sidebar: Once Vickie had that mutation it was also in her offspring down through the crowned heads of Europe. Until Lenin shot them but that is not the point here).

So there is a random spread, but not all of that spread are equally represented in subsequent generations.

Gradually (actually over surprisingly few generations) the “horse” changes and after a while the “horse” is lots taller than it was, even a million years before.

That’s basically the Darwin theory. Darwin thought this was going on all the time. It is. Darwin thought that was why there were horses, almost horses (burros) and not horses anymore (zebras). It is.

He missed one important detail of what shaped the world, though. Everything wasn’t always all that slow and gradual.

See next post.

Evolution according to Gould

You probably think Stephen Jay Gould is some guy who wrote books and a magazine column. Actually he is a pretty important figure in our understanding of why the world is the way it is. His idea is “punctuated equilibrium” and here is how it works.

There were all these dinosaurs. There were graze-on-the-plains dinosaurs and there were hunt-the-grazers dinosaurs. And they were all happy grazing and slowly evolving better teeth and longer necks and all that.

They were _not_ gradually replaced by mammals (who likewise eventually radiated into large plains grazers (horses) and things that ate plains grazers (big cats).

There was a Great Dying (a mega catastrophe during which almost everything on earth died.) For the dinosaurs that was an asteroid strike that changed the climate. Other things can cause a massive change, though. The change in the poles (they are “unusual” at the moment in that, in a planet whose surface is mostly water one pole is over land and the other pole in a shallow landlocked sea so we have polar ice caps and ice ages. That is rare for the history of the earth long term. It has happened several times, but usually it is much warmer). Almost every organism on earth died. Most species were wiped out completely because the living conditions changes so much the traits you all had evolved no longer were much use.

Randomly some other trait, never selected for in the past because in the past there were not ice caps or dust in the stratosphere or whatever the new situation is, were all that mattered and some unlikely critters (mammals in the current case) suddenly found all the competition was gone.

So the mammals, seeing all those wonderful job openings (Large Plains Grazer and Large Plains Grazer Eater) filled in the open positions.

Some things to remember:

1) Evolution goes on all the time. That is why you have organisms (“superbugs” in hospitals) that are resistant to all known antibiotics for example. This really truly happens and is going on around you all the time. Most of it (like continental drift) happens so slowly that short-lived humans have trouble measuring it. Some of it (the evolution of Methicillin resistant Staphloccoccus Aureus) happens fast enough to witness because the generation time of Staph Aureus is only about an hour. But it is always going on.

The bugs have a random resistance to Penicillin (or whatever). Those with more resistance have daughter-bugs. Those that don't, die. In a bit, the only daughter-bugs left are ones that can survive in the Penicillin-filled world we all now live in.

2) The Big Changes are episodic and catastrophic. There have been a number of them. The Dinosaur Killer asteroid wasn’t even the biggest. Those huge depopulations are what really shape the world, by opening up all those “opportunities” for the few survivors.

3) There is NO trend in any of this. There is no “steady progress” and no “higher organisms appearing.” There is no reason to say a stegosaurus is a “lower” plains grazer than a rhinoceros. There is no reason to say a velociraptor is “lower” predator than a lion.

Everybody (almost) dies. Some random trait that was of no use until that asteroid put 1/3 of the mass of the oceans into the atmosphere as steam suddenly becomes the only criterion for lasting out the next hundred years. Whoever is left can now become an efficient plains grazer because all that grass is there and nobody is eating it.

4) This is real. As real as the quantum effect that makes the chip in your computer work that lets you see these words on your monitor.

As real as the drug resistant bacteria that is killing somebody in the hospital down the street. That micooganism really did evolve to be resistant to methicillin. It wasn’t there 20 years ago and now it is. If you don’t believe me ask that person infected with the bug tomorrow. When they are dead.

Now we finally have enough ground-work laid that I can ask the question I have been wanting to ask.

Remember I said that Science (in the way I defined it) has the important attribute that Science predicts what the universe is going to do if you do “X”.

Let’s deal with a specific practical problem. Not with Evolution as Just a Theory but with whether we want to use that theory to help us choose our course of action.

For the purposes of this problem I am going to assume:

a) We all agree that bacteria exist.

b) We all agree some bacteria are resistant to antibiotics.

(if anyone doesn't believe both a and b raise your hand)

c) Some of us think that evolution is why these bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. (To rehash the last post, some of the daughter-bugs a while ago, randomly, were a little more resistant. By multiplying in an environment where the antibiotic was around those few, mutant bugs became the predominant strain and then from those semi-resistant bugs some of their daughters were even more resistant until we wound up with SuperBug that can grow in the presence of any concentration of any known antibiotic (or at least in the presence of any concentration that won’t kill the human host faster than it kills SuperBug).

d) Some of us (the ones who don’t accept Darwin’s theory) think God created some bacteria to be resistant to antibiotics. Just as he created all the other differences we observe between all the other species (Another side note: If you think that, you have to also think God is doing that all the time. He didn’t create all these species way back when, but is continuing to create new species. For example I can take a vial of bacteria that have NO bugs in there that are resistant to penicillin and do that grow-in-presence-of-low-dose-penicillin experiment described under “c” and the penicillin resistant bugs that were not there initially appear.)

This doctor is standing in front of a patient. He thinks the patient has a bacteria “Whosis Coughus” and that Whosis Coughus is sensitive to Penicillin. But it may be he is wrong and the patient might, instead or in addition, have Buggus Baddus, which needs a different antibiotic.

So the doctor has to choose.

If you believe in evolution then the doctor should give Penicillin. That is likely to help this patient and avoids the bad effect for the community at large that using a broad spectrum antibiotic will result in the evolution of mutant organisms that will harm other people (a lot) later.

If you believe that God created penicillin resistant bacteria and that evolution is a cock-eyed theory then the doctor should give a broad spectrum anti-biotic because that will treat the patient just fine if he has Whosis Coughus and will also cover the possible but less likely case where this patient actually has Buggus Baddus, And there is no downside for the community as a whole in the future because evolution doesn’t actually happen.

So tell me, which do each of you advise the doctor to use - Penicillin or the broad spectrum antibiotic?

Whew Drew! Over 4,000 words to do a little graduate school science review and to miss my main point ;-) This is almost a mirror image to my response to your economics question (where it took me a while to get at your main concern – if I ever did; I'm awaiting feedback there).

Since you spent much time on your background, let me, more concisely, highlight where I agree and disagree.

I would caution the Admiral that using religious reasoning to answer a science question is dangerous.

I am not using any religious arguments whatsoever nor was I the one to bring up souls – they are irrelevant to my point. I did mention a creationist, I thought you'd enjoy the irony of Darwin plagiarizing Blyth to make a naturalist argument. However, the fact Darwin was an intellectual thief has nothing to do with my objections to his theory. I (and many others) reject Darwinism because modern science is showing how untenable Darwinism really is. (Be patient – when you finish this response, including where I define Darwinism as I should have done from the beginning, you'll find us closer than you now believe).

Yes, the scientific method (which I'll distinguish from science since science means many different things to many different people) is one of the most effective tools for learning that man has. Whether you lean toward Popperian or Bayesian views of science, both have points in common. The hallmark of the scientific method is replication. If you cannot perform an experiment (and allow other scientists to replicate the experiment), you are not using the scientific method. The scientific method has been responsible for dramatic progress where it has been applied, but, by definition, it cannot be applied to events that cannot be readily tested and retested. This is why it is laughable to compare Darwin’s theory to the theory of gravity. The theory of gravity leads to many experiments that can test itself and these experiments can be replicated by other scientists. This also explains why some fields of science show rapid progress and others do not. I think we are mostly in agreement on this and I also agree that one of the other hallmarks of science is that you can use it to predict outcomes (which are then tested via the scientific method).

Solipsism, Berkleyism, Christian Science and the Pranskter God

As you have defined them, I do not agree with these concepts either. If you need a label, you may consider me a scientific realist. I'm not a naturalist (one who disbelieves in all things supernatural or outside our universe), but I am a realist (one who believes the universe exists even if humans weren't around to perceive it).

You mentioned the obvious truism that you cannot prove a theory, only disprove failed ones. Gould (and many others) disproved Darwin's original theory, but tried to save the overall concept. More on this in a minute. You said When he [meaning myself] says "Darwinism" I get the impression the Admiral is not talking about Evolution... but may be talking about the divide between inorganic matter (a mix of Methane and Ethane gas) and living matter (a bacteria). No, while that is very tough problem for naturalists, that is not what I meant. When I say Darwinism, I mean those who believe in macro-evolution. This may clear up a lot (and could have saved you hundreds of words about micro-evolution).

Let me define terms. The definition of species is a group whose members may interbreed. Micro-evolution is variation within a species. I do not know of a single scientist who finds micro-evolution controversial. The only real controversy is whether or not random mutation and natural selection simply reinforce and eliminate traits that are already in the genome or if they create new information.

On the other hand, macro-evolution, the creation of new species, is very controversial. This is what more and more scientists, mostly driven by molecular biologists, are rejecting. And this is where people like Johnson skewer biologists who make broad claims about macro-evolution but only show evidence for micro-evolution. Having had many discussions with you, I know you won't make that error in logic now that I've better defined the terms.

Now that I've hopefully made my original point clearer, do you want input on your micro-evolution question?

See comments inline below:
Q> Whew Drew! Over 4,000 words
Drew> Yeah. I was trying to keep it brief [G]

Q> because modern science is showing how untenable Darwinism really is. (Be patient
Drew> OK, I am being patient :-)

Q> If you cannot perform an experiment (and allow other scientists to replicate the experiment), you are not using the scientific method.
Drew> I am suspicious of what you are going to say, but I am still being patient. (Patient is not one of my big strengths).

Q> This is why it is laughable to compare Darwin’s theory to the theory of gravity.
Drew> Uh, what is the difference? But I am still being patient.

Q> Gould (and many others) disproved Darwin's original theory, but tried to save the overall concept.
Drew> Well, no. Gould didn’t say Darwin’s theory was wrong. He said it only covered some cases. That was why I chose Newton/Einstein example.
Darwin explains why there are different species of finches in the Galapagos and why the horse got longer legs and became faster. Gould explains why dinosaurs disappeared entirely so finches and horses could have a chance to populate the earth.

Q> When I say Darwinism, I mean those who believe in macro-evolution. This may clear up a lot (and could have saved you hundreds of words about micro-evolution).
Drew>Until just then I had never heard of either macroevolution or microevolution. Nor have I ever met any biologist who uses either term. I do understand what you are saying. But I don’t see any distinction between the two (they have the same molecular mechanism). But to discuss that I need to make sure we are on the same wavelength about a few other things.

Q> Now that I've hopefully made my original point clearer, do you want input on your micro-evolution question?

Drew>No, I am more interested in:

a) Do you think that because paleontology deals with the past it is not a science. I.e. you can’t come up with a theory, then test it against new data? That is what I suspected back there. More on that depending on if you say yes or no.

Sidebar: The important thing here is making the prediction, _then_ getting the new data. You can’t look at the old data and make the theory based on that old data, and say the theory fits the old data which you already had. That isn’t predictive. But the data can be something that happened a long time ago, just so you didn't have it before you made the theory. You can think there was a Big Bang, predict that if there was a Big Bang something would have happened (something you hadn’t looked at before), then build a device to look for that thing and see if it did or did not occur (12 billion years ago). And other scientists can build a similar device and see if they can see that too.

b) Species: Do you think new species appear ever, or that all the species have always been there? (Discussion goes different ways depending on which. I think new species appear during the course of time). Or do you think there is a continuous creation going on in which God is constantly making new species?

c) Extinction (related to b above). Do you think that is a biological process or something divine.

d) Do you think we are wasting bandwidth and creating Mass Internet Boredom? We can take this to Email if you like.

I wonder what would happen if I successively bred strains of staphylococcus such that some were vancomycin resistant? If I succeeded, would that prove evolution, sans supernatural intervention, to your satisfaction?

J
Who might find publishing a little difficult in these circumstances...

50 years from now the big metaphysical question will be the same as it was 50 years ago: why is there something instead of nothing.

Sadly, I think the physical physicists will still be stymied by the nature of the strong atomic force: what holds the nucleus of an atom together so tightly?

Time, I forgot time:

The last thing I would need to know (from Q) is about time. Here is my view:

This universe began about 12.5 Billion years ago. The sun and solar system are about 4 billion years old (the sun is a third generation star. That will be important if we get around to that point. The atoms that make up the sun (and you) were in two previous stars). Life has been on earth for about 3.5 billion years.

Is that about your time scale? I don't care if you think life has been on earth for 3.0 billion, not 3.5 billion but if you think the real number is around 100,000 there is another huge chasm we will both fall in if we discuss this.

(And there is Vancomycin resistant Staph Aureus)

A Paleontology Theory:

Here is a good example of a "good" (testable) theory in the field of paleontology.

Luis Alvarez (a physicist) and his son, Walter (a geologist), thought that maybe what caused some of the great dyings, and particularly the one that killed off the dinosaurs was an asteroid hitting the earth.

The details were the asteroid kicked a lot of dust into the upper atmosphere, it got colder and darker and most of the plants died, then most of the animals. We are talking a Big Explosion here as physicists use the word Big. Not like a 100 megaton bomb. Huge. The crater is about 350-400 miles across (we now know where it hit, in the Gulf of Mexico but I digress).

Since I have already digressed let me do a sidebar on strata so we will all know how I am using some words. I thin