Malachi256

Nial, I can watch a child grow from the age of 5 to 15 and understand the process of growth for the child in that 10 year span.

However, if I extrapolate forward (growth+ more time) to say that the child will be 100 feet tall by the time they are 300 years old, obviously I will be mistaken...

Likewise, if I say that 20 years ago the child was microscopic, or was actually a burrowing animal or something, obviously that is mistaken as well.


We know that the child has growth limits (most easily seen as growth plates/bone structure) as well as a birth event that brought the child into the world (hence the age designation of 5 and 15 in the first place).


Macro is a court case because your belief in the theory I presented that Macro=Micro+Time (or Micro*Time...) is based on uniformitarian assumptions - what you see now is what's been going on all along.

Godless Dave

But uniformitarianism with regard to biological processes is NOT an assumption. It was before it was tested, but the evidence has been examined and a conclusion of uniformitarianism has been reached.

Godless Dave

Now you're comparing one specific instance in one specific place in time (Nicole Simpson's murder) with an effect that is happenning everywhere on earth all the time. Obviously one is going to be easier to determine than the other. But, if you were to approach them scientifically, I can see no qualitative difference in the way you would go about determining them.

Your ability to determine them both might not be the same, but your method is.

Malachi256

You sound like a fundy heh

I didn't think uniformitarianism could become a fact, I thought it was always going to be a paradigm, an assumption, "The present is the key to the past."

MortalWombat

Not really, because "guilt" and "innocence" are legal terms, not scientific ones. What you as a scientist are determining is if the DNA that you are given (as taken from a crime scene) matches OJ's DNA.

NialScorva

I would agree with you if you added the caveat that we have photographs of that child at 20, 30, 40, and 65 as part of the fossil record.

The fossil record is what allows us to say that similar changes occur over larger periods of time. The uniformitarian assumptions aren't just assumptions, they are tested regularly by asking "if things continue to operate this way, then what would we expect to see at a certain point in the past". Every discovery of a new fossil is a test of that assumption, an experiment validating that it will look like other fossils that we've found that are slightly younger or older.

Malachi256

"Now you're comparing one specific instance in one specific place in time (Nicole Simpson's murder) with an effect that is happenning everywhere on earth all the time. Obviously one is going to be easier to determine than the other. But, if you were to approach them scientifically, I can see no qualitative difference in the way you would go about determining them.

Your ability to determine them both might not be the same, but your method is."


Well, I guess that's part of my point.

The murder either happened or it didn't. You can observe OJ, the crime scene, the witnesses, and make predictions about what you'll find as you look for evidence. You can then find various pieces of evidence and come to a conclusion.

Nonetheless, whatever you do, you will always be interpretting evidence about something that has already occured and will never occur again. Clearly there is huge disagreement about the truth of the event of OJ killing Nicole, even with the various evidences. The more evidence you gather, perhaps the more likely observers will be to come to the same conclusion... however, you can never test the repeatability of it.

Gravity, however, is easy. We can talk all we want about how this big crater in the ground was caused by this rock falling from the sky, and based on my calculations of the crater's size and the rock fragments, it must've been influenced by a force I'll call gravity which caused it to accelerate down at 9.8 m/(s*s).

In order to test my theory, I can then drop another object, and measure it. I can then drop objects of different mass, shape, and under different environmental conditions.

We cannot, however, reproduced the exact circumstances of the OJ/Nicole crime scene, and test to see whether or not we observe OJ performing the murder again.

Macroevolution would be just as easily provable as scientific fact if we could somehow bend our current biological/physical relationship with time. If I could see into the future, I could design an experiment. Or, if I could see into the past, I could just see what really happened... just like a person could go back in time and just watch the OJ situation unfold.

Since we cannot, we are limited to a court case situation. We can amass evidence, and with enough evidence can conclude things "beyond a reasonable doubt," but I still think that is significantly different from observing individual events of a modelled process, like gravity, happen over and over again.

It is because of "beyond a reasonable doubt" that sites like this exist, because people are still debating about the evidences.

Malachi256

" would agree with you if you added the caveat that we have photographs of that child at 20, 30, 40, and 65 as part of the fossil record.

The fossil record is what allows us to say that similar changes occur over larger periods of time. The uniformitarian assumptions aren't just assumptions, they are tested regularly by asking "if things continue to operate this way, then what would we expect to see at a certain point in the past". Every discovery of a new fossil is a test of that assumption, an experiment validating that it will look like other fossils that we've found that are slightly younger or older."


No, an experiment would be to say that, based on our current model, Organisms X will end up as organism Y in Z amount of time.

You are gathering additional evidence, but to call each additional piece of evidence a scientific experiment is, to me, fallacious.

Perhaps I need to modify my concept of the scientific method, but I really treat anything in the past in this way... whether it's a scientist telling me that I evolved due to macroevolutionary processes based on said evidence, or whether it's my pastor telling me that some person was miraculously healed before the doctors could operate on him... both fall into the category of "show me the evidence," not, "let me observe and test this process."

edit: although obviously you could design a scientific experiment to test for the occurence of healing miracles, but that's not the point...

NialScorva

In a way, though, it is a forward looking test rather than a backwards looking test, and it is repeatable to an extent. It would go something like this:

Pick an area and strata where fossils have been found in the past.
Hypotheses: Younger and older strata will contain fossils that look similar to the previously found fossils, but in different ways.

Or, you can reverse it... given a fossil of age A and a similar but different fossil of age C where A > C, look in the same area for a fossil of age B that shares features of both A and C, and A > B > C.

You can repeat both of these experiments many times, until you've dug up the entire planet, of course. If I don't trust your measurement of gravity, I can do it myself. If you don't trust my fossils, you can go look for more. The former is certainly *much* easier than the latter, but that doesn't effect the repeatability or validity of terming it an experiment.

Malachi256

I still disagree

There are gaps in the fossil record (due to its very nature, no one disagrees with this) and there are (edit: is?) not an unlimited number of fossils.


However, I can test gravity all I want. It won't run out.


You are still amassing evidence that we need to interpret because it is still evidence of a past process, while gravity is something that we can all actively observe till we're blue in the face.