Skeptical

Vander, based on your response in the chromosome thread, I have a very simple question that can be answered with either a yes or a no:

Is there any evidence under any circumstances that you can imagine that would convince you personally that evolutionary theories were true? Ignore for the moment whether you think we currently have such evidence, I'm only interested in whether you think there could _ever_ be evidence that would convince you personally.

A simple yes or no will do. Please do not post quotes from anyone else, talk about "ways of knowing", etc. Please don't post something off topic, I'd like to keep this question laser focused on this single question.

If you choose to answer, I would like to ask one follow up question.

Vanderzyden

Yes, of course!

(You may recall that we started down this path in a recent thread, "The Utility of Evolution: What Good is it?")

Skeptical

Thanks for the quick response. My follow up question is:

Can you please describe in as much detail as you can what this evidence would look like. Things like what disciplines we would need information from (biology, geology, etc) and what those specific findings would be would be great. If there are other non-science displines you think we would need information from, feel free to share that as well. I'm really trying to understand what evidence would convince you, so please add as much detail as you like.

Vanderzyden

Yes, that's another fair question.

It would be great to have evidence that EXPLAINS:

-- incredible complexity arising from utter simplicity
-- a mechanism by which new species are generated
-- how mind comes from non-mind

But wait! Critics require more than just claims of evidence. Context and resiliency are also necessary. Any evidence must be:

-- uncontrived
-- compelling (accompanied by sound argument)
-- explained in the simplest terms possible (e.g., no handwaving technospeak)
-- logically consistent
-- unfalsified by other evidence
-- able to withstand critique from non-scientific disciplines, such as philosophy

That should be a good start, eh?

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Vanderzyden ]</p>

Doubting Didymus

One or two BIG problems right away:

1) about mind coming from no mind.

We have not been able to fully explain how the human mind works yet. This should not detract from evolutionary theory, until we DO know more about the mind.

The only thing about the mind that evolution could not explain would be if the mind was found to be irreducibly complex. Who knows? maybe it will be, but NO-ONE knows enough about the mind to say this yet.

In short, you should not require evolution to explain how the mind came into being, any more than you should require physics to comletely explain the fundamental structure of space before you accept gravity as a theory. There are things we dont know yet. So what?

2) That evolutionary theory should stand up to philosophical critique.

This is impossible for any theory, philosopy, or any other kind of knowledge. There is always a philosophy somewhere that contradicts something else.

Postmodernism, for example, often claims that science is not a reliable way of knowing about the world. All experimental results are discounted, and frequently the very existence of the universe is denied by some philosophies. How can any theory be devised that agrees with all philosophies?

Even the theory that nothing can be known is discounted by the philosophy that things can be known. The theory that things can be known is dicounted by the philosophy that nothing can be known.

Please demonstrate any single idea that has ever been entertained by any human in the history of time that would stand up to all philosophies.

Or do you not mean all philosophies?, perhaps you mean one, or a few philosophies? Why, they wouldn't happen to be YOUR favourite philosophies would they?

Automaton

Why, mutations on a population of that "simplicity" in an evironment, and subsequent selection of it. Mathematical models have been done of this. See <a href="http://www.isd.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/" target="_blank">Tierra</a> where massively complex ecosystems have evolved in a computer simulation starting from a very simple starting program. Given enough randomness, some of that randomness will eventually exhibit usefulness, or even complexity. (Million monkeys on a million typewriters as an analogy.) Selection maintains that within the context of a reproducing population and an environment, the useful (often complex as well) will be amplified, leaving you eventually with a population of only usefulness. Further randomness applied to this will result in optimization and further complexity.

And by the way, depending on what you mean by complexity, natural processes will arive at complexity even without randomness and selection. Take for example an aqueous solution of randomly moving molecules of NH3 and CH2O result in this:

Microevolution, plus microevolution, plus micro-... You get the picture. Often this can even happen from 0one single mutation such as polyploidy in plants which is one of the driving forces behind plant speciation, or even just simple genetic drift can do it, if left logn enough.
Evolution of natural neural networks. A simulation of this process is being used to create nearly-aware 3 billion or so neuron networks. It's only a few steps away until genetic algorithms allow us to evolve human-level minds or beyond.
Often the "simplest terms possible" require at least some knowledge of the technical jargon. It's useless explaining chromosome fusion to someone who doesn't know what a chromosome is, for example.
You mean, from religion?

{edited to fix link}

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: scigirl ]</p>

Skeptical

Ok, but that's my question. What would this evidence look like in your opinion? I think we have some explanations and examples of how complexity can arise from simplicity, but you apparently don't find the evidence we have convincing. Is there a particular field of science that could supply evidence that would convince you, or is it more of a philosophical argument that your looking for?

I think the evidence we have for this is pretty convincing, but if it is not, what more evidence do you think we need. Is evidence from biology enough, or do you think we need information from other areas?

This question is really only relevant if one assumes that the mind is something separate from the brain. There is a signifiant number of Psychologists that think that the mind is only how we perceive what the brain does. They may or may not be correct, but there is a significant amount of evidence that the mind relies entirely on the brain. Kill portions of the brain, the mind follows. Poke the brain in certain areas, you elicit corresponding changes in the mind. We can "see" changes in the mind in areas of brain activity. It's an area of ongoing research and I think everyone would honestly state that there is much that we don't know about this subject.

However, I don't see how this is directly related to the question of whether evolutionary theories are true or not. One could always posit that evolutionary theories are true, but that at some point a "creator" stepped in and created a mind in humans after they had physically evolved to a certain point. (if you simply could not accept that mind could come from "only" matter)

Ok, are there specific pieces of evidence that you think are "contrived"? If so, please state your evidence for this. (please don't post speculations, only actual evidence)

This would seem to be exactly the question. What is compelling to one person may not be compelling to another. What I'm looking for is your personal threshold.

This is part of the difficulty. If you explain a complex discipline in simple terms, your bound to leave a lot of specifics out. If the person your explaining it to hinges on every word trying to find a flaw, they're bound to find one since your speaking by necessity in generalities to simplify things. I am not a physicist, but I know enough about quantum mechanics to know that to fully understand it you need a deep mathematical background. If you try to explain QM in depth to someone without this background, you'll quickly loose them. If you try to explain it in general terms, you must leave a lot of detail out. I don't really see how this problem is particular to evolutionary theories, and in any case I don't see an elegant way around it. Some things just aren't simple and trying to simplify them just confuses the issue.

Not everything can be explained in simple terms if you want to be accurate. If I asked you to tell me where you lived in one sentence, you could give me your address. If I asked you for step by step directions on how to get to your house from a remote part of gnome alaska in one sentence, you could tell me "get on the highway", but your leaving out a lot of detail. If you then start telling me about specific highways and turns, it would be silly for me to start telling you to quit using highway numbers and keep it simple for me.

So far as I know, evolutionary theories meet this criteria. If they don't, please state the specific areas you think are not consistent.

If you mean scientific evidence, I think evolutionary theories meet this criteria as well. If you mean non-scientific evidence, that's another question. Perhaps you can clarify what sorts of evidence you mean.

Ahhh, I think we have come to the heart of it. This criteria is, in my opinion, an impossible hurdle to overcome. Let's apply it to, for example, chemistry. There were at one time, and may still be, people who believed in alchemy which by nearly any definition is non-scientific. Alchemy makes claims that clearly violate basic principles of chemistry. By your criteria, chemistry should not be believed _unless one uses scientific principles to determine is truth_.

That is, the only way that you can say that chemistry is superior to alchemy is by pointing to scientific experiements and methods. If one says up front that non-scientific methods and principles "count", you have already eliminated any and all methods by which one can make a determination as to whether a discipline is true or not! One could always say that really lead will turn into gold, its just that it can't happen under scientific conditions and I just "know its true". I can produce bars of gold that I say were once lead. How do we know it didn't happen? If I claim absolute knowledge that it did, what methods could be used to invalidate my belief?

To take another example, many people currently believe in astrology. Astrology makes lots of predictions that invalidate the fields of astronomy and physics. By your criteria, astronomy and physics are invalidated _unless we appeal to scientific methods_. There are no non-scientific methods that allow us to conclude that physics and astronomy are true and astrology false.

My point is that if you take as a starting point that science must answer to non-scientific disciplines , you are admitting in principle that the scientific discipline in question can never be shown to be true, which is why I asked the first question in this thread. If we assert that there are non-sensory ways of knowing, which I think is what has underlined a lot of your posts, then anything at all in the field of science can be invalidated. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology and even mathematics have no foundation if not based on what we know through our senses and a shared view of objective reality. If we allow non-scientific evidence into the equation, it will always trump scientific evidence because we have no method other than science for determining the truth or falsehood of such claims. If I claim 2+2=5 and that I "know" this through some non-sensory means, how can you invalidate it? You cannot, and this is exactly the hurdle created by the criteria you posit. It is a road to inevitable solipsism.

If you really think that science must be culpable to non-scientific disciplines, then I think you need to revise your original answer as there will never be enough evidence to override what you "know in your heart" through some non-sensory means. Or am I wrong?

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Skeptical ]</p>

monkenstick

re: speciation


that one is very interesting, theres also this one;

(I hope its okay to post abstracts, it is isn't it?)

scigirl

Of course! You can also post the hyperlink if you think it's necessary. Just make sure to give the author and journal the credit.

scigirl

Albion

This is the entire creationist position in a nutshell, isn't it? Science, and for some reason evolution in particular, is based on a destructive philosophy (ontological naturalism, because we all know that methodological naturalism is just a smoke screen), and so of course it'll always be the subject of critique from philosophy. If evolution were scientifically invalidated tomorrow and replaced by another natural process, all the same philosophical critiques would be turned on that theory, whatever it was, as long as it depended on natural processes. It's science in general that's the problem; evolution is just the high-profile aspect that the "naturalism-is-BAAAD" people latch onto.