Posted by rpcman on April 26, 1998 at 17:45:28:
In Reply to: Law vs. Theory posted by Walker on April 25, 1998 at 22:55:59:
: I disagree. If a theory is to be proved by experimentation, the experiment must make some prediction. In a sense, the future must be foretold.
Here is an experiment for you. Take a nice sized random sample of a species of your choice. Find a trait in a minority of the species (1% to be exact) that gives those individuals a 5% advantage in survival/reproduction. I predict (with a great deal of confidence) that in 100 generations 56% of the population will exhibit this trait. Go ahead, try it. Let me know how it goes.
If this doesn't equal 'evolution' into separate species in your book then do the experiment twice in two different settings evolving them for different fitness. You may have to wait a few hundred of your lifetimes but you'll get the results.
: I didn’t name any unknown species.
I'm not talking about unknown species. I'm talking about unknown facts. We may not know exactly what gives a certain species fitness, how many in the species have this trait, what other factors are involved, etc. If we know these things we can predict VERY accurately just how a species will evolve. The 'problem' with Darwinian natural selection isn't the theory, the fact that it takes a long time to gain clear observations, or anything else of this nature. The problem is that we don't know all the parameters precisely. When we do (in artifical situations mostly) the predictions are very accurate and consistent.
: Evolution is useful for explaining the diversity of species and homogeneity of species. But it just doesn’t cut it for making predictions (unlike Astronomy and other sciences). The problem is NOT that evolution lacks ample supporting evidence. The problem is that the interaction of evolutionary forces are just too complex to quantify and considerable time is required to observe them. This makes experimentation ever so difficult when compared to say, Newton’s laws.
Exactly! However the theory is still experimentally verifiable when the environment is controlled and the parameters are known. Asking for a recreation of history (in evolving humans from other primates) is a silly experiment to propose. It is far more impossible to recreate such a timely experiment (6 million years+) which had so many variables the first go around. Recreating the civil war with the same, now dead, people would be easier. We don't need to do so for the theory to still be valid.
: Evolution is called a theory, not a law and that is an important distinction. When the day comes when evolutionary theory is complete perhaps we will have solutions to problems like the mutating, anti-biotic resistant bacteria. Perhaps we will no longer hear, "We can put a man on the moon but we can’t cure the common cold"
What it is generally called is irrelavant to the precise predictions it makes when the details are known.
: But where are the predictions?
Come up with the facts and the predictions are simple computations.
: That is, who predicted the peppered moth would change color before it was observed?
Does your doctor predict you will not get the flu when he gives you a vaccine for it? If not, then you are wasting your money. Predictions are made all the time with bugs and pesticides *before the fact* and the results are very accurate.
: And why weren’t other life forms observed changing color that lived in that environment.
Who says there weren't? Have you looked? Moths are an easy example because they reproduce so fast and are easily tagged for future recapture.
: I have asked several times for a repeatable, predictable experiment; this would be proof.
Try the experiment above as many times as you like.
: My only beef is your statement "Evolution is just a theory is laughable"
It is as evolution has been observed countless times. Also, the people who make this claim think that scientific theory is a mere untested, unobserved hypothesis. We both know that a scientific theory is far more than this.
: Keep up the good work.
And keep asking the questions and actively looking for the answers.
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