Protesters at MNF Game

[FireChan]

 

No, they actually don't. I referred to actual, observed instances of speciation or locations where it's been observed. And if they aren't indicative of "ooze-to-humans" macroevolution...that might have something to do with the difference of an observational baseline of some 50-70 years when compared to half a billion years. Pick a short enough time basis, and genetic drift doesn't occur, either.

 

Regarding reproducibility...it's not being able to reproduce a study that counts, it's being able to reproduce a test. I've explained this before...all a scientific theory is, is a model that describes and predicts the observable world. The quality of the theory is measured by the accuracy of how well it describes the observable world. "Reproducability" refers to the ability of a scientific theory to repeatedly give the same result for a repeated test. The key point here being: "test" is not necessarily an active process by which you design and execute a study. A "test" may very well be an exercise of passive data gathering an analysis to compare your model to the real world. For example, you don't have to drop an apple to test gravity. You can observe the moon's path through the sky, and from that and some spherical trigonometry test the theory of gravity. Likewise, you don't have to observe a species evolving. You can observe the current genetics of related species, and by analyzing genetic drift determine roughly when they shared a common ancestor. That's reproducible in that anyone with the same data can execute the same test, and get a result (presumably one that's the same or similar to the original, else it probably shouldn't have been published. It's also one of the reasons climate change is such a hash - testability has been superseded by "consensus," and when the science is tested it much of it turns out to be ****.)

 

And the concept of "species," from an evolutionary point of view, should be questioned, in my opinion. "Species" is a taxonomical definition. It's used to support evolutionary theory, but largely as a convenience. A large part of the public "controversy" surrounding evolution has to do with the confusion caused by treating evolution speciation as punctuated, rather than continuous. That's not a flaw of evolution, it's a flaw of taxonomy, and not exclusive to biology (any discipline that requires discrete classification of a continuum of results has a "lumpers vs. splitters" debate. I can think of three examples from astronomy: stellar classification, planetary classification - e.g. Pluto, and exoplanet classification - which hasn't become a controversy yet, but it will.)

 

Now the obvious rebuttal to the above paragraph is that the evolutionary record doesn't show a continuum of species ("no transitional fossils.") There's three problems with that rebuttal: 1) it's unanswerable. If you claim that fossil B did not evolve from fossil A because there's no transitional fossil, and later fossil C is discovered, you claim that there's no transitional fossil between fossil A and C, and fossil C and B. That's makes it not a rebuttal, but Xeno's paradox. 2) it's wrong. There are recorded transitional fossils. 3) It confuses "completeness" with falsity. Better theories are more complete, but a theory is not false for being incomplete, nor true for being complete. And only a fool would claim that the fossil record is complete - people claim that we should see "billions and billions" of transitional fossils if evolution is true, conveniently ignoring the fact that we shouldn't see billions and billions of any fossils, transitional or not, since fossilization is a rare and inconsistent process subject to geological dynamics (in fact, if we did see "billions and billions" of fossils, that would arguably disprove evolution by throwing a major wrench into tectonic theory and the age of the earth - the planet would either have to be very static, or too young for evolution to happen, to see that sort of fossil record.)

 

And getting back to your original statement, that's why your original statement that "denying evolution isn't like denying gravity" is incorrect. As scientific theories go, they're of roughly equivalent quality: both accurately describe and predict the observable world in a manner that is testable, repeatable, and falsifiable. And they're both significantly incomplete (yes, gravity is an incomplete theory. Woefully so, in fact. It's incompatible with quantum theory, which means we can't apply it to the vast majority of physical interactions we observe.)

Fair enough on the tests.

 

I actually wasn't going to bring up the transitional fossils, as I do know that fossilization itself is such a rare process. And I knew I sorta shot myself in the foot early when I brought up the theory of gravity, because even with my rudimentary quantum physics knowledge, I know that gravity/general relativity is screwed up. Isn't it theorized that the there are gravitons(?) or something like that, but they aren't really real particles, and something to do with Planck?

 

My overarching point in regards to speciation and macroevolution was that you have these folks who are either not well-versed in taxonomy nor evolutionary studies. Which is why some of them are not believers. They say things like, we've never seen a monkey turn into a human, or something along those lines. They are the ones who see speciation as a punctuation. They are the ones who claim we can't know what has or will happen over half a billion years. It has nothing to do with their deductive reasoning, moreso their ignorance, of which I've seen hundreds of men of science also fall victim.

[Nanker]

Evolution explained: