Coming from a scientist . . . :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
;)
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Coming from a scientist . . . :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
;)
Of course the scientific point of view is that we will only entertain those possibilities that can be disproven which significantly narrows the field; creationism and alien intervention will not be among the candidates.
Yes :( And after 38 years, I have barely gotten into the C's. Right now, I am worshipping the great God Cabbage who giveth us the winds.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
I can be a very entertaining chap at times...Quote:
are you entertaining them all?
Don't forget to add quantum mechanics, and string theory to that list. As well as anything else that applies under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle . . . .Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
I’m afraid I don’t understand your point. Surely you are not saying that quantum mechanics is strictly a matter of faith and therefore can not be examined by the scientific community? These are certainly well postulated hypotheses that lend themselves to proper examination. They can be disproven and people try all the time, but so far have failed.Quote:
Don't forget to add quantum mechanics, and string theory to that list. As well as anything else that applies under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle . . . .
The theories of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle have been around for a while and there is plenty of evidence that they are close to correct. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is an example of a device that would never have been developed without knowledge of quantum mechanic principles.
There is a clear distinction between religion and science. Religion cannot be disproved so cannot be considered by science, the postulates of quantum mechanics can be.
Science cannot answer the question of whether there is a supreme being directing the evolution of the universe, but can observe that evolution and develop theories that will successfully predict the future of that evolution.
I really don’t understand your objections to science. I’m speculating that you have a faith in something (religious or otherwise) and feel frustrated that it is not taken as seriously matters of science are by many.
Yes, I've done a little more reading around qm and I agree, now, that some of the principles can be proved/observed by experimentation.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
This is quite true.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
YupQuote:
Originally Posted by moeur
Who said I objected to science? Compared to a layman with a similarly uneducated background I think I have quite a good grasp on what it is that science is, and where it has come from.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
For instance, the scientific method (something we've already discussed elsewhere) was developed by Muslim scholars way way before the birth of Christ; they dismissed it because of inconsistent results (around 4th Cent BC) and the growth of Ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle, of course, was completely wrong: he was a natural philosopher who believed that anything could be described and verified through pure thought - that there was no need for experimentation. Once the pan-European Catholic Church decreed that Aristotle was correct then that was the model of the universe supported by the church, the Pope, and ultimately (I presume) God.
Now, in school, I was taught that Galileo was the first person to revive the current scientific methodology thinking. He was indeed a patron of it, and was the first to grasp it's merits, and appy such a methodology to all of his work. But the guy who 're-discovered' it was a little known chap called William Gilbert of Colchester. In his book,De Magnete, he distances himself from Aristotle by being the first person to clearly set out, in print, the testing of hypotheses by rigorous experimentation. As it happens, even the name electricity was coined by Gilbert when he discovered the first electric field: rubbing two pieces of amber together (as the Greeks discovered) attracts more things than just iron and other metals; the Greek for amber is elektron
Until very recently, I, as well as my physics teacher, was under the impression that it was Galileo. A 'fact' I took on faith, not on reasoning, nor argument. How many other things are there being 'taught' that are muddled, incomplete, or plainly wrong.
Everything that I was taught I accepted on faith. So did you, and so did and does every other student in the world. It is perhaps fortunate that there are vastly less poor teachers, than there are good ones.
Anthropological faith, and science are not as divisible as you like to make out. The simple fact that the scientific revolution (mostly) occured in England was because England, through it's protestantisms, allowed free scientific and academic thought, and publication. The Catholic Church, of course, did not. There is a case for saying that the scientific revolution got underway as a direct result of the creation of the Church Of England, and Anglicism.
I presume that you believe that only 400 years down the line we are now more 'enlightened' and not subject to the whims of human vagueries. I think that view is wrong (and I can't independently verify it, either)
Now we've got that out of the way, let's have a conversation about designing experiments to verfiy string theory, shall we?
Thank you for the History lesson :thumb: (really)
If you are saying that everything in life is to some degree a matter of faith, then I have to agree.
For instance, I have faith that the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. You could have the opposite faith, but then I have a much high chance of being correct because of the preponderance of evidence that my theory is correct. The odds are so much in my favor that most would assume that I am “correct”. But it doesn't really matter since my theory can be used to successfully predict the future positions of planets and smaller objects in our solar system. Perhaps yours does too, but then it would be much a more complicated theory I think.
There are scientific theories that don’t benefit from such a high level of confidence and the relatively new string theory is one such. Right now it is a plausible theory that fits observed data, but is far from being complete. Eventually it will make a prediction that has not been observed and the scientific community will attempt to observe the prediction. I personally don’t know much about string theory perhaps NoteMe does.
I still think that you harbor some hostility toward either science or the scientific community, perhaps you were frightened by a man in a white coat as a child ;)
It's hard not to detect a modicum of sarcasm, here . . . .;)Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
That's exactly what I believe, and for me, includes the discovery of knowledge and truth - of which science is the main proponent.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
I, too, believe that the Earth orbits the sun.:)Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
The less confidence there is, surely - by definition, the more faith one has to have!Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
Nicely sidestepped. I picked string theory because it's extremely difficult (if not impossible with today's technology) to prove by experimentation. I'm sure you're right that one day it will be demonstrated one way or the other, but at this stage it's holds the same stage as a believing in a creator.Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
Nah. Just like a good argument and scientists are the most fun to play with . . . .;)Quote:
Originally Posted by moeur
I am Chatholic. I Have never believed in god. I dont believe in religion. Yet i influenced by Wicca and Budhism
I haven't heard of any theory successfully predicting how a creature would evolve. Do you have a source? (not meant as a challenge - I'd be genuinely interested)Quote:
Science cannot answer the question of whether there is a supreme being directing the evolution of the universe, but can observe that evolution and develop theories that will successfully predict the future of that evolution.
There were no Muslim scholars before the birth of christ, Muhammed was born in the 600's ;) . I suspect you're right that the scientific method being older though and I agree with the point you're making. We take a huge amount of information (not just scientific) to be true without going back and questioning it. How many people were taught that the ancients thought the world was flat and revolved around the sun? That's not correct, they'd mapped the paths of the closer planets and had even measured the worlds circumference. Mind you, Columbus apparently thought the world was pear shaped (erm, actually maybe that was a prediction rather than a belief :) )Quote:
the scientific method (something we've already discussed elsewhere) was developed by Muslim scholars way way before the birth of Christ
It is called the theory of evolution: natural selection.Quote:
I haven't heard of any theory successfully predicting how a creature would evolve.
But that's never been used to predict how a creature was going to evolve. It simply attempts to explain how creatures have evolved. The past/future tense is a pretty important distinction.
And how they will continue to evolve.Quote:
It simply attempts to explain how creatures have evolved.
We know the mechanisms behind evolution. We will never be able to predict the evolutionary course of a particular entity since that course depends on future events and we will never be able to predict the future.
Even figuring out the course of evolution in fairly simple programs is exceedingly difficult. In many cases, we can determine what endpoint we expect to reach, and if we don't reach it we can go back and try to figure out why we didn't. This is how you would test a GA (swap one little > for a <, and boy do you get some weird results). However, if you are then going to use the GA to work on a difficult problem, you have no way of knowing where it will go. After all, if you know the answer, why ask the question?Quote:
haven't heard of any theory successfully predicting how a creature would evolve. Do you have a source? (not meant as a challenge - I'd be genuinely interested)
Currently, I have a program that evolves predictive equations. I can feed in known data with a known relationship, but only as a test. When I set it to work on a real-world problem, if it finds a relationship, I can't be certain that the relationship it found is meaningful. Furthermore, if no good relationship is found, is that because no relationship exists, was the input incorrect, or is there a bug in the program? The testing can be a real nightmare. I'm learning some general rules as to what types of solutions this program will have trouble with, and some things that may apply to evolution in general, but if I were to be asked, "What relationship will this program find?" I don't think I will ever be able to predict that.
Yes, but one of the sticks that the science lobby often uses to beat the faith lobby with goes something like: Scientific observation allows me to make predictions which can subsequently be proven to be true. In fact, this is at the heart of all of science's useful applications. If someone had managed to do something similar with evolution it would go a long way toward blowing the creationism and intelligent creation theories out of the water. As it is, any of these three theories can be tweaked and adjusted to explain away the observations that have already been made.
I was surprised by your original assertion that we could "develop theories that will successfully predict the future of that evolution" but not entirely unbeliveing. Perhaps with some simple organisms under strictly controlled conditions we might be able to do exactly that. I'd be fascinated to see the results of such an experiment. :)
I said that? When? What was I talking about?Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
One of the problems with evolution is that we use it in everyday speech. For instance, we could say that this thread has evolved, but that would not be quite the same evolution that we are talking about in any particular post. This confuses the heck out of things.
Figuring out what the result of future evolution will be may not be impossible, but I think it currently is beyond our abilities. While the mechanism is simple, the path is chaotic, and unpredictable.
Therefore, we may never be able to predict the result of future evolution (even in a controlled setting). However, that's not really what science requires.
You state:
This doesn't mean that we have to be able to predict the outcome of a chaotic process. That can be demonstrated to be impossible, and there are many types of problems that fall into that category. However, there are predictions that can be made about the state of a chaotic system at a later date, and these can be verified.Quote:
Scientific observation allows me to make predictions which can subsequently be proven to be true.
For instance, in my evolutionary program, I am trying to evolve an equation that will match a certain line. This could be done easily by simply drawing it. However, if I were to simply draw it, I could predict ahead of time that the line would appear. True, but trivial. The point of the program is that I set up an evolutionary engine, and I am predicting that the evolutionary engine will be able to draw the line.
If evolution were a truly random process, the chances of that line being drawn can be measured, and they are VERY small. In fact, for some of the tests, the chance that iteration X will produce a matching line is so small that I don't know the name of the number. Something like 1 in a gazillion. Therefore, if the evolutionary engine does produce the line by iteration X, and does so every time, then I can say that evolution is non-random. Unfortunately, if I were to give the engine a new set of numbers, where the relationship is unknown, I can not say what final line will result, all I can say is that the result will be non-random.
Thus I can predict the nature of the process, but not the result of the process. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we would know the result before we asked the question, which makes the question a little pointless.
In the light of current observations, evolutionary theory (of which I've written software etc etc) is of a somewhat peculiar stance.
Emergence seems, perhaps only to me, to be the best explanation of what it is that does on.
I was addressing Moeur rather than you, Shaggy. I took his statement from earlier in this thread to mean that the results of evolution had been predicted and then turned out as predicted, which seemed surprising but not unbelievable. If it had been done I'd have loved to see the results.Quote:
I said that? When? What was I talking about?
I agree. But, assuming evolution is one of those problems (which is probably debatable) and in the context of a debate on whether creationsim or evolution is true, doesn't that mean that the scientific method can never offer a firm answer - because it's results can never be fully tested?Quote:
This doesn't mean that we have to be able to predict the outcome of a chaotic process. That can be demonstrated to be impossible, and there are many types of problems that fall into that category.
My point was that saying (and I'm not sure you have), 'this is the theory and all the observed results tally with it' isn't really enough to espouse evolution over creationism because they can both do that. So can intelligent design and so can the spaghetti monster.
What's the difference? I'd have thought emergence was a part of evolutionary theory but I might be missunderstanding your meaning.Quote:
In the light of current observations, evolutionary theory (of which I've written software etc etc) is of a somewhat peculiar stance.
Emergence seems, perhaps only to me, to be the best explanation of what it is that does on.
Oh good, I didn't say that.
I suspect that there are a large pool of things that we can demonstrate for several 'canned' situations, but can never prove for the general case. Whether evolution works, can be proven, but only as long as we accept that whatever result we get is 'working'. My program will evolve a relationship between variables and an output. However, that effectively means that there is a complex correlation, and correlation is NOT causation, even if it is complex. I can never prove the causality of the relationship that evolution found. However, I CAN prove that evolution found a relationship.
So what does that mean about evolution? Well, it means that a system can evolve towards a given endpoint. I think that's about all we can say in the natural world, but I feel that that is all we NEED to say. If we can show that evolution is capable of solving a certain problem, so long as it is solvable; and we can show that evolution WILL solve the problem so long as it has the means, then we can say for any system that is capable of evolving: Here is the result so far. We know this is a soltution to some problem, what was the problem? Frankly, I don't think we have a good answer for that last question.
By the way, in Biology, this is called "The ghost of competitions past." People discuss the current relationships within a community, and try to figure out why they arose, but nobody can prove it one way or the other.
What, exactly, is it that you didn't say?Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker