For be it from us to drag a Harvard doctoral candidate like Brother Murtaugh down to our level, but does not the near immutability of the genome have obvious implications for Darwinists?

Near only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades. To get cancer requires multiple specific unlucky mutations to happen within a single cell within a lifetime or less. Evolution, to the extent it requries mutatation at all, only requires one at at time.

Yeah, near-immutability explains why chimpanzee DNA looks so much like human DNA, whereas the DNA of other species like mice is more obviously divergent.

Mike, Earl:
Stop clouding the issue with facts.

I believe that the thrust of our animus (were we to agree with the last paragraph) should be aimed at fighting the "junk-scietist/trial lawyer/victimization lobby" axis of extortion -- whose "cancer-phobia" chapters are hugely feed on hyped chemicals=mutations=cancer theories. Darwinism, by comparison, is a far subtler theory, whose broader-reaching tenets (as Suggested above, and surely by Harry) have not been laid out to be so easily disproved -- or proved.

MG:

In fact, can not ever be disproved.

Um, I think the implication is that large-scale evolutionary change (ie: requiring mutations rather than using existing genes in different proportions) will happen very slowly. Sounds like just what a Darwinian would tell you to expect...

But I find your "can't be disproved" statement thought-provoking. That's the usual criticism of "creationism:" it's not science because it can't be falsified.

OJ:
Wrong.

Shortly after Origin of Species, having lost sight of Mendel, no one knew how distinct characteristics were inherited. Absent that mechanism, Evolution wouldn't work.

Later, after discovering DNA, scientists hypothesized 30,000 genetic mutations were required to separate humans from chimps. If true, evolution would have been disproved because of the time involved. In the event, 30,000 is two orders of magnitude too large, meaning there has been plenty of time for the observed changes to happen.

Those are two examples that would have stopped Evolution dead in its tracks. There are plenty more out there. That Evolution hasn't yet been disproved doesn't mean it can't be.

Jeff:

Yes, I well recall that period durting which Darwinism was discarded because of the 30,000 mutation requirement. What's that? Credulity didn't even pause?

Mr. Weidner:

The Darwinists here have disavowed every professional--Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, etc.--so we've been reduced to Ernst Mayr as our definitional Darwinist. But even he concedes that Darwinism is not science but history and intrinsically undisprovable:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/009588.html

What Mayr actually says is that a new and different kind of philosophical approach is required, what he calls "population thinking."

If you are unwilling to accept that -- and I believe neo-Platonists will have a very hard time doing that, so I wait with great anticipation Peter's take once he has finished Mayr -- then, indeed, you cannot accept the argument.

Of course, a neo-Platonist rejecting an argument as "unscientific" is pretty funny.

As for cancer (or more desirable changes), the relevant mutation or suite of mutations does not have to happen within one lifetime. Genomes accumulate huge stores of mutations, which are expressed differently in different individuals, which means that some reproduce more than others.

That's why we have sex.

And losers.

As for Murtaugh's find, this seems not too different from Bruce Ames's strictures on carcinogenicity, which he has been publicizing for close on two decades now.

There's a name for science that's based on new philosophical thinking rather than on science: philosophy. That your Darwinism is a Philosophy rather than a Science bothers us not one whit, so long as you can accept that it's the case.

There's a name for science that's based on new philosophical thinking rather than on science: philosophy. That your Darwinism is a Philosophy rather than a Science bothers us not one whit, so long as you can accept that it's the case.

Darwinism isn't philosophy alone; it can be refuted, and at times has looked like it was. There was indeed a period of 30 years where natural selection was discounted as a mechanism of evolution because people didn't see how it could work genetically, and that deprecation of Darwinism only ended when Mendelian genetics was rediscovered and shown to be consistent with natural selection. There was also a famous 'disproof' of Darwinism by Lord Kelvin on the grounds that the sun couldn't have been burning by chemical means long enough for evolution to have happened. In the end, of course, it was the physicist Kelvin who lost the argument to the biologist Darwin -- because suns burn on nuclear fire (unknown in Kelvin's time) rather than chemical fire, and e=mc^2 can keep them going for billions of years rather than mere milleniums.

Many observations can be imagined that would strain Darwinism to the breaking point. For instance, if humans had a different genetic code from chimpanzees, that'd pretty effectively refute the idea that human evolved from ape-like primates and that chimps are the living species most closely related to us. What's instead been observed is that, if you systematically compare genomic DNA sequences between organisms, mammals look more similar to humans than do other vertebrates such as fish, and chimps are so similar to humans that it is actually hard to identify significant differences between chimp and human chromosomal DNA sequences.

I could go on at great length about this; but I'd pretty much have to write a textbook on evolution from memory to do the whole case for Darwinian evolution justice. And at the end of it, I doubt I'd change anybody's mind. But evolution is definitely a science and not just a philosophy, for the same reasons that astronomy is.

"And as for the conceit that too much knowledge should incline a man to atheism, and that the ignorance of second causes should make a more devout dependence upon God, which is the first cause; first, it is good to ask the question which Job asked of his friends: 'Will you lie for God, as one man will lie for another, to gratify him?' For certain it is that God worketh nothing in Nature but by second causes; and if they would have it otherwise believed, it is mere imposture, as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the Author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie." --Francis Bacon

Erich:
Excellent.

OJ:
If you had read "Of Moths and Men," the book about how bird predation of peppered moths was debunked as a mechanism of natural selection, you would have known how Evolutionary Theory was virtually discarded around the turn of the century--Erich captured that perfectly.

The fact remains that every potential disproof of Darwinism has ultimately turned out to substantiate it.

Does that prove Evolution? No. But it does mean that Evolution is subject to disproof, but so far it has not been.

Jeff:

You believed the peppered moth bit until you read here it was a hoax--it's still taught to kids.

Ernst Mayr himself acknowledges that it can not be proven, so of course it can't be disproved. It's a faith, not a science. But it's your faith and if you need it then all to the good that you have it.

You haven't read Mayr's whole argument, have you?

Actually, what Orrin and the others are saying is that although Darwinism is subject to the same kinds of disproof as any other science, and despite the fact that religionists have invested huge resources for 150 years to disprove it, they've never laid a glove on it.

That makes it a very robust theory.

Kelvin is famous for his goof about the sun's ultimate age, but he made lots of firm statements like that, all based on his firm Christian belief in creation (he wrote a whole book about it) that turned out to be wrong. A cautionary tale.

Here's an experiment: take genetic material and bombard it with mutagenic carcinogens and see if it mutates.

OJ:
Actually, I hadn't given the peppered moth a thought since HS Biology until I read about it here.

Additionally, the bird predation of peppered moths was a theory thought true until the unintentional shortcomings of the experimental procedures were discovered. It was not a hoax, it was a mistake. There is a clear difference there. And despite mistaking the cause of industrial melanism among moths, melanism ebbed and flowed with industrial pollution. So the populations did in fact change, but no one knows the cause.

You are completely wrong in saying that because something cannot be proved means it also can't be disproved. I gave you two clear examples, Harry another, of just how disproof could have happened. And there are many more.

But it didn't. Despite the concerted efforts of many people with an ideological axe to grind. As Harry said, that makes it a very robust theory.

Jeff:

So the peppered moth example, which you say was discreditted long ago, was taught to you whjen your mind was in its formative stages even though it was a hoax?

(Try reading the book again--the results were in fact tinkered with.)

And, despite your endless assertions that evolution-level adaptation won't happen before our eyes--in order to explain that it has never happened--you think it significant that these moths varied in color? Which is it--should evolutionary change occur from generation to generation or every 75,000 years?

OJ:
It was discredited in the late-80s, long after I left HS. It was not a hoax--that could only have been true if the proponents of the theory knew it to be wrong, and purposefully tried to pass it off as true.

On the contrary, they were so convinced of its truth that they were blind to their own experimental foibles.

I read the book carefully--they did in fact reject discordant information in the light of their preconceived notions, mistaking it as noise. Is that good science? No. Is it a hoax? Absolutely not. It would be nice if you used a term appropriate to the case at hand. "Hoax" is not it.

Besides, only the proposed mechanism was discredited. The fact of the melanism itself was not.

It isn't my assertions that are in question here, but your shifting notion of what constitutes proof of evolution. At one time you insist on seeing "meaningful speciation" (whatever that is), now you talk about "evolution-level adaptation" (whatever that is).

A significant characteristic of a population of moths changed significantly over a fairly short time without any apparent deus ex machina, but strongly correlated with changes in the environment. What would you call it?

Whales clearly descended, as shown by a comprehensive set of fossils, from land dwelling mammals, without any apparent deus ex machina. What would you call it?

That understanding life might require an entire new philosophy does not take it out of the realm of science.

Physics had to do the same, going from a pure reductionist approach before Planck to a statistical and relativistic approach. Although a few sociologists contend that it stopped being a science, few others do.

You have to take the world as you find it. We find it full of non-missing links, like dwarf rhinoceroses on isolated islands or lions and tigers, still able to easily interbreed when brought into contact by Seigfried and Roy but obviously diverging in the wild.

Every step in the long process of speciation is observable right now, but you have to be willing to look. If you take the approach of the astronomer who didn't have to look to see that the moons of Jupiter were not there, you will not have to confront the evidence.

It's a philosophical stance, but that ain't science.

Darwin's theory may be disprovable while not falsifiable. The structure of the theory is problematic not the idea of evolution. It is scientifically questionable AS A THEORY, since it can not be proven or falsified as presented by Darwin. The fossil evidence, for example, may only be used to support the theory, a lack of evidence cannot disprove it, thus it is not falsifiable and is problematic as originally presented regarding the origin of species.

Jeff:

It's natural selection. Birds ate the moths they could see. They stayed moths though.

Harry:

The difference being that evidence forced the change in how physics viewed the world, while Darwinism has forced a change in how the evidence is viewed. The latter isn't science but philosophy.

" ", that's just flat wrong. Fossil evidence could easily disprove Darwinism, and the antievolutionists say so, too, as they gleefully presented the Paluxy fossils as evidence.

Turns out, of course, Paluxy was a hoax, and the antievolutionists were very easily taken in, which suggests something about their current enthusiasm for ID.

Every time a fossil is picked up, it potentially disproves Darwinism.

In fact, this potential is never realized. That does not prove Darwinism, but it is suggestive.

Harry:

You're confusing Evolution with Darwinism. Every fossil confirms evolution, none so far confirm Darwin.

Wow! I guess Karl Popper has no idea what he's talking about. I go with Harry!

BTW, the Paluxy fossils haven't been proven to be anything other than fossils. Unless "proven" has multiple meanings.

Popper, at least, does not talk about how to prove scientific theories, and you do. So, in fact, you don't go with Popper.

The Paluxy human footprints have been proven to be modern hoaxes. The dinosaur footprints are genuine.

The gullibility of the antidarwinists was also genuine.

Popper speaks about the formulation of scientific theories which are falsifiable and easily tested. The confusion caused by the 19th century's misinterpretation of what scientific theory actually was had led to the adaptation of Marx's theories as the scietific key to the secrets of history. Academics and intellectuals of the time had attached meaning to Marxism which would be more at home in a religious cult than the community of rational, scientific materialists. Popper's interest was not in proving theoretical positions but in stating them in a plain, concise and testable format, otherwise they cannot be considered scientific with all of the implied precision and certainty.

Like those of Marx, many of the proponents of Darwin have an emotional stake in the theories which is innapropriate for the disinterested scientist. Why the emotional attachment?

Ernst Mayr explains the emotional attachment quite honestly:

"There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. When Hull claimed that "the Darwinians did not totally agree with each other, even over essentials", he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed. Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories..." (One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought)

oj-

So, it's kind of a religious thing?

Tom:

All the other Darwinists are so foolish that even Harry and Jeff disavow them, so we've agreed to use Mayr as our house Darwinist. Happily, he makes no bones about the fact that it's a faith and not a science.

They rejected creationism because they could not shoehorn it into the evidence.

I never found this a problem, because I was raised Catholic and so believed God was all-powerful. Creationism was (and still is) beyond evidence.

Only if you start asking God to make sense does a problem arise. William McNeill has a page about this in "The Shape of European History" which I'll quote when I get back to the office, where I left my book last night.

I get around all this because I don't ask God to make sense, but I do ask the evidence to cohere.

Darwinism is marvelously coherent. Far more so than physics as a whole, although subsets of physics (like theory of heat) are as coherent as Darwinism.

Coherence has no probative value, but incoherence ought to be considered a flaw in any allegedly scientific theory.

" " lost me. None of that was in the Popper I read, and Darwin did not endorse Marx, so I don't know where Karl came in.

In exactly the same way belief in plate tectonics is religious.

Harry:

really? The making such perfect sense seems one of the best arguments against Darwinism--its complete undisptrovability.

Ptolemaic cosmology was coherent, too, which didn't make it right. But if it hadn't been coherent, it wouldn't have had such a long run.

Just because you cannot disprove Darwinism does not mean no one could. But no one has.

It's been under attack, so that speaks well for it.

Harry:

A theory which holds that whatever survives was better able to survive can never be disproven. It is a truism.

That is a tautology all right, but it isn't an accurate statement of the theory, so irrelevant.

Here's what McNeill had to say:

"The very success with which Roman Catholics of the 16th century carried through their effort to chart the entire universe and define man's place in it created an authoritative doctrine which collided unyieldingly with new data and new ideas at the beginning of the 17th c. The completeness of the moral-intellectual systems of truth, generated both by baroque Catholicism and by official Ottoman Islam had paradoxical results. Authoritative and releatively unambiguous answers to all important questions were what men wanted and what these systems provided so convincingly. Herein lay their strength, an essential aspect of their appeal to troubled minds. But on the principle that a chain of reasoning, like a chain of iron, is no stronger than its weakest link, completeness also created radical weakness. Dissent on any point automatically called the authority of the entire belief system into question. After all, the same authorities and the same procedures for determining truth guaranteed each and every doctrine and prescribed behavior. Hence since theological experts declared that the sun went around the earth, evidence and arguments to the contrary, no matter how persuasive, had to be denied, as Galileo discovered to his distress in 1616 and again in 1632."

MORE

McNeill continues:

"Under such circumstances, a wise and prudent man refrained from expressing doubts, even to himself, and instead sought out a niche, ready prepared within the system of belief and conduct, where he could be reasonably comfortable. Thus heirs of such rich and coherent intellectual traditions, whether Moslem or Christian, usually persuaded themselves that intellectual conformity and reverent respect for established truths was morally right and necessary. Broadly educated, intelligent and sensitive individuals, who under other circumstances might have taken the lead in developing new ideas, were exactly those who comprehended best the delicate interdependence of the entire belief structure, and who were therefore most eager to defend it against narrow, irreverent specialists like Galileo. Moreover, Galileo's novel and heretical opinions were based on physical and astronomical observations which, depending as they did on faulty and imperfect human senses, were intrinsically liable to error. Careful deduction from first principles seemed logically far more secure; all the more when such deductions supported (or at least harmonized with) sacred religious truths."

Pascal's Wager, though McNeill does not call it that. And the bettors lost.

Harry:

Except that the more we find out the more apparent it becomes that it is a geocentric Universe.

Harry:
That is an excellent quote. What book is that from?

OJ:
That statement could only be true if one abuses the meaning of "geocentric" beyond all recognition.

Jeff:

As Harry says of Darwinism, it doesn't much matter whether it's true or not, only that it represents a change in our philosophy, in how we consider evidence. Similarly, the shift from a geocentric universe only really mattered as philosophy and as such has been the source of much evil, in its diminishing of Man.

He did? I must have missed that.

"Similarly, the shift from a geocentric universe only really mattered as philosophy..."

Well, that, plus hoping to have spacecraft reach their destinations, and having any coherent understanding of the universe.

But that's the point, geocentrism better explains the Universe.

Harry-

Popper's "Logic of Scientific Discovery", pretty much confirms everthing said above regarding the structure and methodology behind truly scientic theory. Darwinism may or may not be true, but it is scientifically problematic. Creationism need not even be discussed.

I believe, and think I am correct, that Popper became atrracted to the philosophy of science due to the misuse of science and the consequences such abuse would have for the "open society" he cherished, throughout the 19th century. Marx, Darwin and Freud could be considered the poster boys fot this misunderstanding of the scientific method and the damage it did to society and it's institutions.

McNeill quotation from "The Shape of European History," 1976.

Funny you should say that, " ". Lots of people consider Popper some kind of Nazi. I don't. I find his thoughts sometimes obscure, but the testing idea is clear enough.

Marx and Freud were inductionists and therefore accepted as "scientific" in the 19th century and early 20th c., when philosophers were still under the spell of Bacon.

Actual scientists, who were thin on the ground in those days, did not behave like Baconians, whether they claimed to or not. Certainly by the time of Planck, working scientists had little use for formalist philosophers. Popper was one of the few who ever drew their respect again.

Darwin was a deductionist. In fact, setting aside his ideas on species, the greatest field biologist who ever lived.

Wallace came to the same conclusions, and in his writings it is easier to see the deductive steps he took to get to natural selection.

Barzun infected a lot of undergraduates with his book about Darwin, Marx and Freud, but he was a mere litterateur and unqualified to tackle the subject.

Except that the point that Barzun captures is that all three merely propounded narratives about how we might view the world. Their achievements were primarily literary, not scientific.

Freud's were wholly literary. His group used to psychoanalyze fictional characters.

Marx was a genuine investigator but failed to show that his findings were generalizable.

Darwin was a true scientist. One of the checks on whether modern biology is, in fact, an accuragte reflection of reality is to see how well it matches with intense but unsophisticated judgments.

Here Mayr comes to my rescue again. He was originally an ornithologist and spent several years on a taxonomy of the birds of, I think it was, Vanuatu. He came up with 398 species. Interestingly, the natives distinguished 397 species. Their one that Mayr defined as two was characterized by him only by internal morphologies.

Thus we are led to believe that "species" is a natural and not some artificial construct.

If the mere existence of species proves Darwinism, why doesn't the existence of classes prove Marxism?

OJ:
Please define geocentrism, then explain how it better describes the universe.

Natural selection explains the change process for many systems, not just Natural History. And all the systems it explains share a few critical features. Additionally, natural selection is a useful concept for solving problems that are otherwise essentially unsolvable.

Therefore, unlike Marxism, it is useful, it has wide applicability and produces useful results.

Jeff:

From everything we observe it seems more and more apparent that the Earth lies at the center of the Universe, is in fact the point of the Universe. Any philosophy that seeks to refute this is inevitably anti-human.

Marxism too is useful, widely applicable and produces useful results, as does Freudianism. All three are beutiful literary contructs--counter-myths.

OJ:
You better be more clear on what you mean by the word "center" when you conclude the Earth is the center of the universe, because if used in a geometric sense, it is completely wrong. As for concluding we are the point of the universe is to make a wholly unsubstantiated conclusion based on an equally unsubstantiated assumption: Who says the Universe has a point?

What widely applicable and useful results does Marxism continue to provide, presuming it ever provided any?

Geometric? We invented geometry too.

It's an effective means of analyzing human society and offers a blueprint for an ideal society. It doesn't work of course, but neither does Darwinism. The point is that both are beautiful intellectual constructs.

Invented or discovered?

Darwinism does in fact work--it is indispensable to complex network design, for instance.

It solves that problem far better than Intelligent Design can.

BTW--you dodged the questions: what do you mean by "center"? How do you conclude the Universe has a point?