On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 12:09:31PM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > Caliann the Elf <calianng_graves at yahoo.com> writes: > > However, I might point out that evolution is STILL a "theory" and > > that it has NOT been "proven" to scientist's satisfaction. Once it > > HAS been "proven", it will no longer be put forth in scientific > > circles as the "theory". David's right about this being wrong. 'theory' in common use -- "I have a theory" -- is 'hypothesis' to a scientist. A model which generates hypotheses which can be tested and potentially disproved, but were not disproved when the experiments were done, can ascend to the status of theory. Like the theory of quantum mechanics, or of special and general relativity... For evolution it's a bit more complicated. I'd say the fossil record is a fact -- you can go look at fossils. "Species have evolved over time" is a very simple interpretation of that fact; not quite a fact itself, since we can't directly observe what was happening, but the alternative is something along the lines of "God made an Earth with fake fossils to fool us". Then "evolution by natural selection" is a theory proposing a mechanism by which evolution could happen. Natural selection itself is more of a piece of logic or mathematics, or an algorithm: a population which satisfies certain conditions (which real life does) will change according to natural selection. The real theory is that the evolution evident in the fossil record can be explained entirely by natural selection. > cases where it's adequately precise, the way Newtonian mechanics does, > even though we *know* it's wrong in general. > > It's confusing, because "law" *used to* be used in science to describe > simple relationships -- Boyle's Law, for example (gas pressure). (Cue Or Newton's Laws. Which I think are still valid -- conservation of momentum, check; action and reaction, check; F = ma, check. > > Hhhmmm, in that, let me put forth that scientists have still not > > been able to reproduce "life" in tests which the enviroment is > > consistent with those of ancient Earth. They have been able to > > reproduce "life" in those tests, but they have had to remove said > > "life" from the enviroment so that it wasn't destroyed. I don't think they've gotten that far, actually, just of generating basic molecules. > So? The current theories are that it took probably billions of years > over the entire surface of the planet to do that. Even if the Not quite. I think the current "earliest signs of life" are 3.5 or 3.8 billion years ago. Considering it probably took a few hundred million years for the planet to cool off, 3.8 billion years is considered obscenely early. It seems as if life showed up almost as soon as it possibly could. But then we have to remember that on this time scale a million years is undetectable. If it took a million years over the surface of the planet to generate life, that'd be perfectly consistent with the evidence, and still a lot more exploration of chemical state-space than we could manage in our labs. > > In this, many scientists believe in evolution based on "faith", not > > "fact", as it has not been reproducable in even it's simplist forms > > AS OF YET. > > Anybody who's done selective breeding has reproduced evolution in it's > simplest form. Plus European fruit flies which migrated to California have undergone evolution of wing lengths just in the past 20 years. There's a simple numerical relationship between latitude and wing length[1], it seems, and the introduced populations have matched the relationship found in established populations in Europe. The interesting thing is that the details of the changes don't exactly match the ones in Europe -- it's not just activating a pre-set latitude program, but evolving differently to achieve the same gross result. [1] Unclear exactly why. Reading the articles it seems like wing size is a correlate for total fly size, and the more southern flies are larger. Something about temperature, maybe. Around the time the fly result was announced there was also a paper on parallel evolution of stickleback fish populations in some lakes over the past 12,000 years, but I won't try summarizing that here. I think researchers in the Galapagos have seen changes in the local finchoids since Darwin's time. > > A religion twisted out of recognition from the original. I think > > the offshot would be considered a "cult", not a "religion". > > However, tentatively, agreed. > > So far as I can tell, the islamists and much of the body of mainstream > Islam both recognize this nasty, virulent, form as valid Islam. The I've lost the original reference. I'll note that the Taliban was considered over the top by Iran, say, and recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and some small Arab state. But "mainstream Islam" is a bit murky. If we look at who's in charge of Mecca -- the Saudis -- we see a nasty, virulent, form of Islam. But Iran, which most Americans probably associate with "Islamic fundamentalism", lets women be doctors and serve in Parliament, never mind vote. Plus Iran has a Parliament. It gets vetoed by the clerics, but it gets to say things in public which need vetoing. And then there's Turkey. And pre-Enlightenment Christian countries were generally as nasty as modern Islamic countries. Not sure what my point is here, but there should be one somewhere. > discussion, and even that it's *possible*. As others have observed, > we seem to have been having this large fast discussion about > deeply-held and strongly-felt opinions very largely without real > nastiness, which has made it great fun. Yeah. On the Bujold list I'd have shut up in a tenth as many message. Not so much actual nastiness as a personal sense that discussion couldn't go any further without getting nasty. Or maybe I just feel more outnumbered there. -xx- Damien X-)