HappyFunBall

i was talking to some fundie today (ick), and among other things he went into this rant about how evolution isn't science because it's not reproducable, meaning we can't repeat a 4 billion year or so process.. and that using "indirect evidence" is not a reasonable scientific alternative..

so anyway, what are your thoughts on this? what exactly makes a theory scientific?

also, i'm not sure if this should be in this forum or evolution/creation, it's kind of a mix of both

Tim Thompson

Science is one of those words that everybody uses, and nobody understands. It is commonly associated with concepts of "predictability" and "reproducibility". But most people severely misunderstand how those words actually apply, specifically, to the scientific enterprise.

Everybody seems to think that you have to "reproduce" something, in order to study it "scientifically". But that is simply not true, and the creationists statement that "indirect evidence" is not a reasonable scientific alternative, is dead wrong.

The essence of science is the process of inference from observation. Based on those inferences, we then create some kind of test to see if the inference is valid. The result of that test is what we "predict", when we talk about science & predictability. But the value of predictabilty is overrated. Only polished theories really need to give us consistently & reliably correct "predictions", but a lot of failed predictions go by the way before an hypothesis becomes a polished theory.

Meanwhile, it is the test, and not the phenomenon which must be "reproducible". And all that really means is that somebody else has to be able to do exactly what the tester did, just to make sure the tester didn't do something wrong (accidently or deliberately).

If the creationist's notion of "reproducible" were actually imposed on science, 90% of what we now call "science" would vanish. All of astronomy, astrophysics & cosmology certainly fail that test (unless you think there is room in the back yard for an 860,000 mile wide nuclear furnace to play with). Most of solid earth geophysics would be out, since all of our knowledge of the Earth's interior is indirect.

A theory is "scientific", so long as it meets the criterion that it is derived by inference from observation.

HappyFunBall

thanks, i think what he was trying to say was that, well since we can't observe macroevolution, we can't make any inferences about it (and that it's not true).. blah.

SanDiegoAtheist

Yes, that's the usual misconception.

Fortunately, we CAN (and have) observed what creationists call 'microevolution', and extrapolate from that logically to what creationists call 'macroevolution' - simply because all macroevolution requires is a great deal of microevolutionary steps taken one by one. Given that microevolution IS observed, and macro is simply lots of micro, it is up to the opponents of evolution to demonstrate some sort of 'barrier' between micro and macro evolution.

To a biologist, it's just evolution - because no such barrier has ever been shown to exist.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Jesse

SanDiegoAthiest:
Fortunately, we CAN (and have) observed what creationists call 'microevolution', and extrapolate from that logically to what creationists call 'macroevolution' - simply because all macroevolution requires is a great deal of microevolutionary steps taken one by one. Given that microevolution IS observed, and macro is simply lots of micro, it is up to the opponents of evolution to demonstrate some sort of 'barrier' between micro and macro evolution.

I would actually disagree that this is sufficient--if the only evidence we had was microevolution, I think the evidence for macroevolution would be as weak as the creationists say it is. Fossil evidence, genetic evidence, the nested hierarchy of traits, etc., are what put the theory of common descent on such firm ground. Although macroevolution is not reproducible per se, that's not the critical issue--what's more important is that the hypothesis of common descent leads to all kinds of very specific predictions about what we should find when we investigate the fossil record, patterns of shared genes and traits, and so on. Prediction and testing are what makes a theory scientific, not necessarily literal reproducibility of the event the theory is concerned with (otherwise all sciences dealing with history would have to go--geology, cosmology, astrophysics, etc.)

To see some of the different lines of evidence for macroevolution, check out this excellent talk.origins FAQ:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

Straight Hate

And just what practice did your counterpart believe was superior to a method that has yielded thousands of tangible results and a green light for further progression?

Perhaps I should apologize, but I just cannot deal in specifics when the very foundation of the issue is so flawed.

HappyFunBall

i didn't ask him what his alternative was, i was just wondering, in retrospect what makes a theory scientific

beausoleil

Whole philosophy departments have funded themselves for years on this question. The problem as I see it being that we already have an idea of what things are scientific and what aren't. This makes it difficult to formulate a definition of science that exactly reproduces the division between science and non-science that we already employ. Science
as practised has been pretty successful, and there has been a huge diversity in the way things have been done. Imposing a tight definition seems to me more likely to hamper future progress than help it.

Personally, I mistrust the exercise. People think highly of science (loose definition), other people want to precisely define it so that they can label something unscientific (tight definition) and hope that it will lose credibility because of confusion between the loose and tight defintions.

I'm quite happy with a vague definition, something like 'science tends to involve the formulating of general principles and testing them against observations'. There are enough reasons to criticise most of the things in question without the political move of labelling them unscientific.

Oolon Colluphid

It’s quite simple really. As I read somewhere, we can know that WWII did happen without being able to watch Poland being invaded, or asking Hitler why he did it. We cannot observe past events, but we can observe the effects of past events and processes, and make testable inferences about them. The events should leave traces of themselves, and we can look for these traces to confirm or refute hypotheses.

In short, science is about testing hypotheses, and repeatability is just one form of testing, available in some circumstances. If repeatability were the only criterion, one would have to throw out much of cosmology and geology as unscientific too... which is of course what cretinists do.

Cheers, DT

Quetzal

These discussion crop up occasionally. There's an interesting thread happening over on evcforum.net on this subject. Here's a link.